The Standard Narrative on the Early Development of the Qalandariyyāt

The earliest traces of qalandari poetry in Persian literature are purported to be a number of quatrains (robāʿiyyāt, do-beyti, tarāneh) that are attributed to Bābā Tāher-e ʿOryān (d. likely first half or middle of eleventh century), Abu Saʿid Abu al-Kheyr (d. 1049), and Sheykh Yusof ʿĀmeri (active mid-to-late eleventh century, or at most early twelfth century).Footnote ¹⁷ As one can see in the texts below, many of the prototypical features of longer qalandariyyāt poetry are clearly present in these short poems. “Rascality” (qallāshi) and “loverhood” (ʿāsheqi) are elevated to the status of the highest virtues for the qalandar to aspire to, and they are set in direct opposition to the “Qur'anic recitation” (qorrāʾi, literally, “being a Qur'anic reciter”) and “ascetic piety” (zāhedi) celebrated by normative Islam. Indeed, for the wine-drinking and music-playing “adherents of unity” in the “quarter of the winehouse” (kharābāt) all earthly constructs lack meaning: home, family life, and even the essential theological binaries of heaven/hell and sin/obedience are meaningless, much less purely physical or metaphorical ones such as the sun/moon and whiteness/blackness.

Do-beyti of Bābā Tāher-e ʿOryān:

Robāʿi of Abu Saʿid Abu al-Kheyr:

Tarāneh of Abu Saʿid Abu al-Kheyr:

Robāʿi of Yusof ʿĀmeri:

These quatrains may indicate the existence of qalandari topoi in Persian poetry since the early to mid-eleventh century. But there are serious questions about the attribution of these poems to the aforementioned poets, and thus their dating too.Footnote ²³

What is known for certain, however, is that beginning in the late eleventh century and twelfth centuries we begin to see a growing number of qalandar-inspired poems by poets as diverse as Borhāni, Amir Moʿezzi, Sanāʾi, Khayyām (d. 1131), Khāqāni (d. ca. 1186–99), and Anvari (d. 1189–90).Footnote ²⁴ With the exception of Khayyām, the qalandari poems composed by these poets are not quatrains, but rather ghazals and qasidehs. Sanaʾi's divān, by far, has the largest number of such poems. Indeed, some of the earliest manuscripts of the divān, which are organized into thematic divisions, include one section explicitly labeled as qalandariyyāt, providing us a unique window into what this thematic genre term meant in the first few centuries following Sanāʾi.Footnote ²⁵

The qalandari poems in Sanāʾi's divān are a diverse bunch. More attention has been devoted to the famous shorter monothematic examples of qalandari poetry in these sections.Footnote ²⁶ These are the poems that generally come to mind when the term qalandariyyāt is employed, and it is this tradition of monothematic qalandari poems that ʿAttār and ʿErāqi largely follow. But there are a variety of different types of polythematic poems in the qalandariyyāt sections of these manuscripts as well.Footnote ²⁷ The bulk of these poems fall into an expansive category that we might call “rogue homilies.”Footnote ²⁸ They share a common polythematic construction and a tendency toward what we might call an expository or didactic poetic mode in their treatment of more theoretical topics such as the “reasons” for the winehouse, the meaning of roguery (qallāshi), the connection between love and kofr (infidelity), etc., as de Bruijn has argued.Footnote ²⁹ Interestingly, Sanāʾi also has a small number of qalandari praise poems for minor patrons and the Prophet Muhammad (naʿt), which use qalandari themes in varying degrees in key places throughout the poems to praise the patron or the prophet and reimagine them as something akin to the lord of the qalandars or a roguish lover.Footnote ³⁰ These examples show the usage of qalandari topoi in praise poetry to be wider than Borhāni and Amir Moʿezzi, but this subtype is not Sanāʾi's primary area of focus, nor are these poems substantially similar to the classic polythematic panegyrics of Borhāni or Amir Moʿezzi that will be discussed later.Footnote ³¹

Sanāʾi's qalandariyyāt clearly represent an already well-developed generic tradition, which suggests that the qalandariyyāt must have their origins at least in the mid-eleventh century, if the process of generic development was rapid, and potentially even earlier, if the process proceeded at a slower pace. This approximate dating does mesh well with the assignment of the qalandari quatrains above to the early-mid eleventh century, but without clearing up the attribution issues surrounding these poems this congruence remains only suggestive.

There is, however, a problem with this standard narrative of the history and development of the qalandariyyāt. It ignores or at best pays only passing lip service to two of the earliest specimens of qalandari poetry: the fourteen-line poetic fragment attributed to Borhāni and the polythematic panegyric with a qalandari introit (nasib) composed by his son, Amir Moʿezzi. Given the uncertainty around the dating of the quatrains, these poems are arguably the earliest (approximately) datable evidence we have for qalandari poetry. This fact alone would seem to warrant a central place for these poems in any discussions of qalandariyyāt, but this has not been the case in scholarship on this genre. At the minimum, these qalandari royal panegyric poems represent a “road not taken” in the subsequent history of the qalandariyyāt and a productive complication for the neat Sufi-centered genesis narrative. Equally significant, they also challenge some of our assumptions about the social function of this carnivalesque poetry in medieval Persian culture.

Classical Panegyric Qasidehs with Qalandari Introits: Fake Qalandariyyāt, Royal Jokes, or Attempts to Forge a New Ideal of Islamic Kingship?

Almost no poetry of Borhāni remains extant. There are only fragments preserved in later sources, most of which are just a few select lines, and their attributions to him are not completely certain. The only sample of a significant size is the aforementioned qalandari poem that Mohammad Badr-e Jājarmi (fl. early to mid-fourteenth century) includes in a section entitled “dar ashʿār-e moqaffā” of his Moʾnes al-Ahrār. This poem is almost certainly a qalandari introit of a no longer extant panegyric.Footnote ³² The mention of a mamduh in its final line and the similarities between it and the classic polythematic panegyric with a qalandari introit composed by Borhāni's son, Amir Moʿezzi, for the same patron makes it unlikely that these verses were intended as a standalone poem. Rather, the combined evidence points to the likelihood that these two poems represent a type of panegyric preferred by this patron.

1. 1 Each day that I am in the dilapidated winehouse,

   I yearn/flirt/boast (hami nāzam) like Moses in his private prayers.

2. 2 Each day that I pass in drunkenness

   Blessed are those days and hours for me!

3. 3 It is better that I make myself selfless

   and not recite the Qurʾān or perform acts of asceticism and obedience.

4. 4 Since I am freeing myself of the fetters of wisdom,

   I will rest from the threats of worship.

5. 5 Moses commands the Torah for me

   since I showed such regard for the pharaoh.Footnote ³⁴

6. 6 You may say to me: “How long will you remain in disguise?”

   But what does a haunter of the dilapidated winehouse know except disguises?

7. 7 Sometimes I prostrate and do my prayers before the beloved;

   other times I am in front of the singer paying my respects and offering

   greetings.

8. 8 Sometimes I say: “O cupbearer, grab a goblet!”

   Other times I say: “O minstrel, give us a ghazal!”

9. 9 Sometimes I drink wine until I am so wasted

   that I cry out from my home to the heavens!

10. 10 Father dedicated me to vats of wine.

    Mother set me firm on the path to the winehouse.

11. 11 I am a free and reckless man,

    I boast in the ranks of the rascals!

12. 12 Since you think that I am just a man full of foolish words,

    alas!—don't even say hello to me, sir.

13. 13 Why should I speak of these wild tales of the winehouse?

    [You think:] I do not know anything except satire and wild tales.

    [Or, “Do I not know anything else apart from joking and nonsense?”]Footnote ³⁵

14. 14 I speak of a king of Jaʿfari origin—

    a lord beneficent and good in essence.Footnote ³⁶

The poem opens with the symbol that is most closely associated with qalandariyyāt poetry generally—i.e., the “dilapidated winehouse” (kharābāt)—which functions as a mock-court of sorts,Footnote ³⁷ fully equipped with its own cupbearers (sāqi) and minstrels (line 8).Footnote ³⁸ In this heterotopic space it is “drunkenness,” self-dissolution, music, and roguery that are “blessed” and “boast[ed]” of, whereas Qurʾānic recitation, “worship,” “acts of asceticism and obedience,” and “wisdom” are rejected (lines 2–4, 8–11). Throughout the poem the poet repeatedly inverts normative Islamic customs and symbols (e.g., prayer before the beloved and singer, ritual parental dedication to wine and the “path to the winehouse”; lines 7, 10) and concludes in a mock-fakhr (boast), declaiming that he is in the “ranks of the rascals” (line 11). The content of the poem reflects the hallmarks of an early qalandari poem.

There are, however, two issues with this poem that need to be addressed. The first revolves around questions about the authenticity of its attribution to Borhāni. Jājarmi attributes this poem to Borhāni three centuries after he would have composed it, which means its attribution to him is by no means certain. Several scholars also have pointed out that a very similar poem is attributed to Sanāʾi.Footnote ³⁹ The two poems are nearly identical, with only minor wording differences in a few lines and an additional three lines present in Borhāni's poem that are not in Sanāʾi's. The Sanāʾi version of this poem is attributed to him in the early Ketāb-khāneh-ye Melli-ye Malek (MiM) 5468 manuscript (as reproduced in the Modarres-e Razavi edition of his divān), and it is explicitly labeled there as belonging to MiM's qalandariyyāt section.Footnote ⁴⁰ However, several scholars have argued that the evidence points more strongly to Borhāni as the original author of these verses, which may have either been (a) misattributed to Sanāʾi at an early point or, (b) adopted and slightly revised by him. There are three pieces of evidence for this argument:Footnote ⁴¹

1. 1) The “king of Jaʿfari origin” mentioned in the last line of the poem attributed to Borhāni in the Moʾnes al-Ahrār is likely a reference to the same patron as the patron of Amir Moʿezzi's later qalandari panegyric, Fakhr al-Maʿāli Abu ʿAli Sharafshāh Jaʿfari (or, perhaps, one of the previous Jaʿfari rulers).Footnote ⁴² Little is known about Sharafshāh Jaʿfari and his rule in Qazvin, except that he came from a powerful family who claimed descent from Jaʿfar ben Abi Tāleb and served as the governors of Qazvin from approximately 1033 to Sharafshāh's death in 1091–92.Footnote ⁴³ Strengthening the identification of this “king of Jaʿfari origin” in Borhāni's poem as Sharafshāh also is the fact that the use of the “-āt” rhyme in both of their poems would facilitate the incorporation of Sharafshāh Jaʿfari's title zu al-saʿādāt into the poem—a title that is mentioned both in Amir Moʿezzi's poem below and Mostowfi's Tārikh-e Gozideh.Footnote ⁴⁴

2. 2) There are similarities between the poems of Borhāni and Amir Moʿezzi at the level of themes, wording, and rhyme, except that Amir Moʿezzi adds the radif “ast” to the “-āt” rhyme.

3. 3) Sanāʾi's version of this poem is not in the early Kabul Museum manuscript of Sanāʾi's divān.

Regardless of whether this poem is originally from the pen of Sanāʾi or Borhāni, the fact that it was attributed to both figures at an early date makes it part of their poetic legacy to some extent. In the case of Sanāʾi this attribution is not surprising. As previously discussed, he is the first major poet who produced a substantial collection of qalandariyyāt. However, the attribution of this qalandari poem to Borhāni raises some interesting questions for the earliest history of the qalandariyyāt. Namely, does this poem—a qalandari introit of a panegyric qasideh—represent another early path of development for qalandari poetry that does not seem to have become widespread? Jājarmi, writing in the mid-fourteenth century, apparently found this combination plausible enough to include the poem with an attribution to Borhāni in his anthology. This attribution may not have been surprising to Jājarmi if he knew of other such early qalandari panegyrics by Borhāni or other courtly panegyric poets that are no longer extant.Footnote ⁴⁵ Although admittedly we have veered into the realm of speculation here, it is worth at least posing the question of whether the subsequent Sufi dominance of the qalandariyyāt genre could have produced a documentary lacuna—an editorial amnesia of sorts—in the historical record for other early types of qalandari poetry. Fallen from favor and out of sync with the poetic times, these early non-Sufi experiments with qalandari poetry may not been preserved as well as other more in-demand types of poetry.

The second issue with the Borhāni poem is the way it—and by extension his son Amir Moʿezzi's poem—has been treated in the secondary scholarship on the qalandariyyāt. As mentioned above, most accounts pass over them with only a cursory mention or none at all. Equally problematic, however, is that the two works that do engage with them as poems do so in ways that misunderstand them or delegitimize their importance for the study of the qalandariyyāt. The shorter of the two treatments of Borhāni's poem occurs in G. E. Tetley's work that examines poetry as a source for the study of Ghaznavid and Saljuq history. In one of his chapters on Amir Moʿezzi's poetry, he briefly discusses these two poems. In both cases he is rather unsure how to read them. He first suggests, citing ʿOwfi, that since Borhāni was apparently well known for “jokes” (latāʾef), this poem may just be that and nothing more. He then entertains the idea that perhaps this poem was inspired by the malāmatiyyeh ethos (which is often posited as a possible conceptual inspiration for qalandari poetry as well).Footnote ⁴⁶ But, he then reverses course on this tentative suggestion and says it also is possible that the poem was a satire aimed at the malāmatiyyeh. Footnote ⁴⁷

There appears to be some internal textual support for the idea that Borhāni's poem is either satirical or frivolous in intent. Borhāni does say in the penultimate line: “Why should I speak of these wild tales of the winehouse? / [You think:] I do not know anything except satire and wild tales.” (Alternatively, this hemistich also perhaps could be translated as “Do I not know anything apart from joking and nonsense?”) Tetley reads this as suggesting that Borhāni may be admitting that the preceding qalandari nasib is just “satire” or “wild tales of the winehouse” with no necessary connection to the panegyric that follows it. I think this reading, however, is incorrect. Rather, I would argue that when we read lines 12–14 together their function as a transition and link between the qalandari nasib and the main panegyric section emerges. They seem to be saying that “you audience members may think that my [Borhani's] words in this qalandari nasib are nothing but the satirical or frivolous forms of speech that I am associated with, but actually they are important because in this poem ‘I [will] speak of a king of Jaʿfari origin.’” An implied “No!” could even be appended to the translation of line 14, further highlighting Borhāni's rejection of the application of the label of satire and “wild tales” to his nasib.Footnote ⁴⁸ In this rejection he implies that there is a connection he is going to make clearer (as Amir Moʿezzi does in the analogous place in his poem discussed below) between the qalandari nasib and the following panegyric section and, thus, between the qalandari world and the world of the “king of Jaʿfari origin.” The fact that, as I will show below, Amir Moʿezzi's similar poem for the same patron is definitively not a satire on the malāmatiyyeh or just “wild tales” also militates against these interpretations put forward by Tetley. However, if in the unlikely event it was intended as a mock-qalandariyyāt introit, this itself would be tremendously interesting because it would indicate that the qalandariyyāt genre had reached such a point of widespread popularity and development by this early period that mock-qalandariyyāt were already being produced.

Tetley does not speculate on the intent of Amir Moʿezzi's poem specifically, but in a concluding paragraph that comments on both poems together he expands upon another possibility that he mentions in passing when introducing Borhāni's poem in the beginning of this section. Specifically, he refers to these poems as “qalandari,” “antinomian,” and having “overtones of Sufism,” but at the same time distances himself from these terms. Borhāni's poem appears to be qalandari poetry, but it is “many years before Sanāʾi introduced the genre into Persian poetry.” The poems may have “antinomian elements and overtones of Sufism,” but this type of qalandari Sufi poetry would be “most unusual [for] this period” because it would only “become familiar in the mystical poetry of the next two centuries.”Footnote ⁴⁹ The question the reader is left asking—which is not answered—is: can these poems be Sufi/qalandari/antinomian or not? In the end, the reader is left with a wide series of possibilities and no resolution. These poems could be qalandari/Sufi/malāmati works, jokes, or satiric takes on malāmatiyyeh—mock-qalandariyyāt of sorts.

The approach of Mohammad Reza Shafiʿi-Kadkani to these poems shares some similarities with Tetley's. Although in his characteristically erudite manner he engages with the poems at a deeper level than Tetley, he also seeks to distance them from what he terms “true qalandari poetry.” He argues that the poems of Borhāni and Amir Moʿezzi both contain a “jumble” (dar ham rikhtegi) or an “admixture” (dar ham āmizi) of symbols from the “paradigms of the dilapidated winehouse (kharābāt) and the mosque”—by which I believe he means the poetic symbols that are typically associated roughly with qalandariyyāt and religious-homiletic (zohdiyyāt/mowʿezeh) poetry. This confusion shows that these poets, as Shafiʿi-Kadkani says when commenting on Borhāni's introit, “did not have direct experience with qalandari poetry, but rather took advantage of the existing tradition of qalandari poetry and composed an introit (tashbibi) in this style and praised his patron.” These poems, in other words, are both faux qalandariyyāt because, as he concludes, “the dignity (shaʾn) of the poets of true qalandari poetry is above panegyric poetry.”Footnote ⁵⁰ This final statement is quite revealing. For Shafiʿi-Kadkani, qalandari poetry is in its essence incapable of stooping to the level of panegyric poetry. Ergo, these panegyrics with qalandari introits cannot be regarded as “true” early examples of qalandari poetry. This is an ideological position about what types of poetry can and cannot be “true” qalandari poetry, and it is not surprising that Shafiʿi-Kadkani takes this position, for he sees qalandariyyeh as an “ideology,” as the subtitle of his Qalandariyyeh dar tārikh book (degardisi-hā-ye yek ideʾolozhi), announces.

I also am unconvinced by his argument that the symbols used in these poems confuse the conventional symbolic registers of qalandariyyāt and religious-homiletic poetry. There are a few symbols and images that may differ slightly from their standard usage in later qalandariyyāt, but none egregiously so. Moreover, slight differences, or even, as Shafiʿi-Kadkani believes, inconsistencies, between these early qalandariyyāt and later ones should not necessarily be surprising in any case. They were written at the very earliest stages of the development of qalandari poetry, when the tradition was likely the most flexible and still solidifying its conventional stock of imagery and symbols. No poetic tradition, at any point, especially in its formative stages, should be expected to be wholly internally consistent.

Overall, I would argue, these introits read as typical qalandari poetry, and Sanāʾi, or a very early editor of his divān, apparently thought so as well. As we learned above, this poem was either appropriated and slightly adapted by Sanāʾi himself or was misattributed to him by one of the earliest manuscript editors of his divān and placed in his manuscript's qalandariyyāt section. The symbolic disjuncture that Shafiʿi-Kadkani argues exists between Borhāni and Amir Moʿezzi's poems and “true qalandari poetry” is not as obvious as is assumed in his dismissal of these poems as inauthentic qalandari poetry, and he does not argue the point beyond a passing assertion about the incompatibility of a few images (e.g., monājāt and kharābāt, masti and mobārak) in Borhāni's poem.

Through a close reading of Amir Moʿezzi's poem in the following section, I will argue against Tetley and Shafiʿi-Kadkani's readings of these poems. They are not, in my reading, satires, jokes, “wild tales,” fake qalandari Sufi poetry, or bumbling attempts to take advantage of a new poetic trend. They are strategically engaging the young qalandari poetic world and its Sufi context with the goal of marshaling the cultural and symbolic capital associated with “qalandar-iness” to do something quite serious: to provide a new model of Islamic kingship to legitimize the rule of the Saljuq's governor of Qazvin, Sharafshāh Jaʿfari. Even if the possibility is left open that Borhāni's poem—due to its truncated nature—may not be participating in this same poetic fashioning of a new model of roguish kingship, Amir Moʿezzi's poem leaves no doubt on this score.

“Among the Impossibilities”: Amir Moʿezzi's Qalandar King

The genre of royal panegyric poetry has been used since early Islamic history to celebrate and project power in the broadest sociological sense of this term. It propagates Islamicate cultural hegemony in the sense that its notion of power goes beyond the limits of the individual sociopolitical power of the figure being praised (mamduh) in the poem itself to include the cultural and religious values that are so crucial for ordering and disciplining society. In this way, the goal of Islamic panegyric poetry is not only—or even primarily—the glorification of the mamduh, but also the maintenance and legitimation of the entire Islamic sociopolitical order of which the mamduh is a titular head.Footnote ⁵¹

Given the qalandariyyāt's relentless assault on seemingly all normative Islamic values, one can be forgiven for wondering what role a qalandari introit could play in a traditional royal panegyric poem. The modi operandi of their poetic worlds seem utterly incompatible. However, this conflict is more apparent than real. To argue that the poetic worlds of the qalandariyyāt and royal panegyric parodically invert one another does not mean that these thematic domains are hermetically separate fields that can never operate in conjunction with each other to achieve certain poetic effects.

In the classical (polythematic) bi- or tripartite panegyric qasideh, the coexistence of disparate thematic units is the norm. Royal panegyrics often treat amatory, nature, or anacreontic themes in their introit (nasib) before transitioning to eulogic themes (madh) in the remainder of the poem. Whereas some scholars have seen the juxtaposition of radically disparate thematic concerns as a sign of the atomistic nature of Persian and Arabic poems, more recent literary studies have convincingly demonstrated that the introit (nasib) is integrally linked with the subsequent thematic section(s)—what some scholars have labeled its strophe and antistrophe respectively—in quite complex, even if not immediately obvious, ways. At times a qasideh's strophe and antistrophe function in an antithetical relationship with one another; other times they operate in a parallel manner. Sometimes the beloved of the strophe is to be contrasted with the mamduh of the antistrophe; in other cases the opposition or similarity in the imagery of the two sections is intended to illustrate a point about the mamduh or the political situation. The different possible types of relationships between the strophe and the antistrophe are numerous, but in all cases both sections play a crucial role in the way the poem as a whole constructs meaning not despite but because of their thematic differences.Footnote ⁵² This understanding of the qasideh as a poetic whole with interdependent thematic components means that we cannot reduce the wholistic meaning of the poem to the apparent meaning of any one section of the poem on its own. We need to adopt an interpretative mode of analysis that moves “beyond the section” (to critically adapt van Gelder's title) to an “inter-sectional” approach.Footnote ⁵³

The panegyric qasideh of Amir Moʿezzi for Sharafshāh Jaʿfari is a particularly interesting example in this regard. In this poem Amir Moʿezzi constructs a complex parallel relation between the seemingly antithetical poetic worlds of the qalandari strophe and the panegyric antistrophe in which he eulogizes Sharafshāh Jaʿfari in terms drawn from royal panegyric poetry. It both presents an interesting case study of strophe-antistrophe interrelation and, more importantly for the present study, points to other potential roles that qalandari poetry may have played in the Persian poetic system outside of its role as a carnivalesque counter-genre to religious-homiletic and royal panegyric poetry.Footnote ⁵⁴

1. 1 If the abode of the dissimulators is the dilapidated winehouse (kharābāt),

   amongst the haunters of the winehouse there are disguises for me.

2. 2 Throughout the city all of the lovers are wasted,

   perhaps my beloved idol is in the dilapidated winehouse today!

3. 3 Don't go after asceticism (zohd)—get wasted and become a haunter of the

   winehouse!

   For in life, all prosperity [lit. building up] comes from

   drunkenness/destruction.

4. 4 Bring that pharaonic cup and place it in my hands!

   For it is the appointed day of Moses and the appointed time.

5. 5 I will not toss aside my wine drinking implements because

   I am still engaged in the middle of love's battlefield.

6. 6 Any place that is a dwelling for the people of love

   is not a place for the issues of scrolls and spiritual conceits.

7. 7 Between the lover and the beloved there is an inner meaning

   that fails wherever there are words.

8. 8 I am that person who is always prostrated in prayer before love—

   my existence becomes great with this type of worship.

9. 9 Any ode that arose amorously in love

   is like “the seven oft-recited verses” and heavenly greetings for me.

10. 10 There is no regard for me from love for even an hour,

    though from my heart and very soul there is regard for love.

11. 11 In my youthful days I became a prisoner of love—

    From whom should I seek this position that is among the impossibilities?

12. 12 I am continually going to the court of that lord

    who is master of kings and king of descendants of the prophet.

13. 13 The beauty of the world, Fakhr al-Maʿāli, that king

    who is [known as] Zu al-saʿādāt because of his perfection and bliss

14. 14 Abu ʿAli Sharafshāh ebn ʿEzz al-Din

    who is laudable in his ways like Jaʿfar Barmaki.

15. 15 For him, honor is from Jaʿfar and kingship is from the dervishes [i.e., spiritual

    elect],Footnote ⁵⁶

    for he is Jaʿfari in disposition and dervish [spiritual elect] in station

    (maqāmāt).

16. 16 Jaʿfar took the heavens under his wings [i.e., he flew in the heavens]

    because the spiritual resolve of his son is greater than the heavens.

17. 17 They cite the example of the generosity of Jaʿfar Barmaki, and for me

    the example of generosity is Sharafshāh of Jaʿfari stock.

18. 18 O you whose service to him is not sufficient!

    Punishment and revenge will come to you from the wheels of time.

19. 19 O you whose appointed time is at his court!

    His promise is “how far is that which you are promised!” [ref. Qurʾan 23:36]

20. 20 You, o offspring of fortune, are the deliverance of the freeborn,

    eternal fortune converses in private with you.

21. 21 You with whom the day of union with is great!

    You with whom the time of praising is excellent!

22. 22 The orbits are all continually arrayed in accordance with your desire,

    your will is in accordance with its turning.

23. 23 If in the creation of domains, there is the domain of the sky,

    know that the domain of [your] generosity has many domains.

24. 24 How can one give news of your enemy?

    How could I [tell anything about him]? Because he is among the dead [now].

25. 25 [For you,] the land is a game board, and fate and destiny are companions,

    the celestial orbits are like chess and they have been defeated.

26. 26 Your enemy is like the king and his fortune the queen—

    on the chessboard he is checkmated with your queen.

27. 27 The evil-natured jealous one is not evidence against you—

    the words that I say here are testimonies from me.

28. 28 One piece of my evidence is that his oath is sworn

    by the truth of the honor of ʿOzzā and the efficacy [lit. tool/utility] of Lāt.

29. 29 In the assembly of eminences, I maintain

    that your presence is better than the gardens of paradise.

30. 30 Since the prophet called Qazvin a gate of paradise,

    know that your presence is a garden among the gardens of paradise.

31. 31 I swear by your divine royal legitimacy (farr), I will prove

    that serving you is one of the norms and acts of worship.

32. 32 What pleases you is what pleases the prophet, what pleases the prophet

    is what pleases the creator of the throne and that is among the acts of

    obedience.

33. 33 The proofs of the excellency of your assembly are

    the Ka'ba, holy stone, and pilgrimage of the people in need.

34. 34 Every wise person who has good fortune

    hurries to your assembly from his city and birthplace.

35. 35 He is always saying “take the praise” and “bring the gift”; the response from you to “bring” is “take,” the response to “take” is “bring.”

36. 36 If on resurrection day you are the intercessor for people, there will not be fear of resurrection nor punishment for sins.

37. 37 You, o just king, will be the first person who on the day of resurrection meets with Mustafa [Prophet Muhammad].

38. 38 Your character and conduct has been manifested for [all] kings— what place do a Bahman and Nuzar have in the story?

39. 39 All of your ceremonies become the source of gifts. Your mind is the adornment of right guidance [in all its forms].

40. 40 The mementos of kings are taken from your wise opinions and banner. The fine points of treatises are taken from your name and chronicles.

41. 41 Perfection does not increase with the turning of the celestial spheres, [but] your perfection of spiritual fortitude and generosity does.

42. 42 The zodiac sign of your insight and spiritual fortitude were ascendent such that even the highest point of Saturn is below that banner.

43. 43 Where a reciter declaims a panegyric about you, all the fluency of the reciter goes to that recitation.

44. 44 My temptation [i.e., my love] is praising you, o my lord, for praise of you is sufficient enough payment for me.

45. 45 Your praise, o my king, when it is in a noble mind, it is among the tangible things when I express it.

46. 46 Just as your house, o my king, is the praise of kings, my verse in praise of you is the ornament of verses.

47. 47 My wisdom and cultivation of topoi are fresh [lit. virginal]. They are not comparable to other poets.

48. 48 Because of your fortune, all poets ask me every question that is among the most difficult of questions.

49. 49 As long as there are months of Mehr and Tir, and the day of Bahram, and as long as there are months, years, days, and hours,

50. 50 may God—great is his glory—repel from you whatever is connected to misfortunes or calamities.

51. 51 Time is your aid and assistance. God gives you virtue and support.Footnote ⁵⁷

The poem is a tightly constructed, polythematic panegyric in the traditional tripartite structure. There is a clear division between the qalandari introit (nasib; lines 1–11) and the panegyric (lines 13–43) with a short “journey” section (rahil; line 12) providing a transition between these two major parts. If we follow Gruendler's modification of Sperl's strophe-antistrophe framework, the panegyric antistrophe could be said to conclude at line 43 with the “metastrophe” beginning on line 44 and divided as follows: reflexive turn toward poetic persona/poetic craft/poetic boasts (fakhr) in lines 44–48 and a concluding “benediction” (doʿā) in lines 49–51 for the mamduh, Sharafshāh Jaʿfari.Footnote ⁵⁸

Moʿezzi opens the strophe/nasib (lines 1–11) in a mock-fakhr (mock-poetic boast) that serves multiple purposes. It announces Moʿezzi's intention—through the apropos image of Moʿezzi taking on one of the “disguises” of the “haunters of the winehouse” (kharābātiyān)—to adopt the poetic persona of the qalandari poet while also centering the poem on the “dilapidated winehouse” (kharābāt) as the poetic axis of the introit. The introit maintains a strong focus on spatial elements throughout (for reasons that will become clear below). It unfolds in a “city” that is a “dwelling place for the people of love” and in which “all of the lovers are wasted” (lines 2, 6). Here, the poet seeks out his “beloved idol” (negār), the king of this city of love, at his mock-court, the dilapidated winehouse, which is reimagined as the rogue's antiheroic “battlefield” (lines 2, 5). The courtiers of this mock-mamduh—the “dissimulators” (lebāsātiyān) and haunters of the winehouse (kharābātiyān; lines 1–3)—are all social outcasts, even outlaws, and the disreputable activities that they champion (e.g., drinking, trickery), through the qalandari poetic persona of Moʿezzi, make a mockery of normative social behavior and modes of religious piety (e.g., zohd, Sufi tāmāt; lines 3, 5–6). In this reversed world, “prayer before love” becomes their highest form of worship (line 8; mock-qibla/Ka'ba) and love poetry their Qur'an (line 9). The introit/strophe of this poem, in short, reads as a typical qalandari poem.

The poem on the whole, however, is clearly not. It ultimately has another aim. In an astonishing reversal, by line 12 Moʿezzi transitions from the carnivalesque poetic world of the strophe to its thematic antithesis, the royal panegyric, in the poem's antistrophe/metastrophe. Moʿezzi the rogue poet becomes Moʿezzi the court panegyrist—a persona switch made in line 12, performed in lines 13–43, and elaborated upon in the metastrophe, in lines 44–48. The city of love's mock-court of the dilapidated winehouse is suddenly abandoned for the “(royal) court” (dargāh) of Sharafshāh Jaʿfari ensconced within the city gates of Qazvin (lines 5, 12, 19, 30). “Every wise person” (hakim), Moʿezzi tells us, “hurries” to the “assembly” (majles) of this royal court, where Sharafshāh Jaʿfari unstintingly showers gifts on poets who praise him in his “ceremonies” (rosum; lines 34–35, 39). The contrast here between the “wise person[s]” (hakim) who are attracted to the royal court of the antistrophe and the various roguish figures in attendance at the mock-court of the dilapidated winehouse in the strophe is absolute.

The axis of the stylized court of Sharafshāh is not the master of the rogues, the “beloved idol” of the strophe, but rather an idealized Islamic ruler who possesses extraordinary generosity (jud; lines 17, 23, 41), divine royal legitimacy (farr; line 31), proximity to God and the Prophet Mohammad (lines 32, 36–37), justice (lines 37–38), right guidance (hedāyāt; line 39), and spiritual fortitude (hemmat; line 41). Especially noteworthy are a number of specific motifs in the antistrophe/metastrophe that are typically inverted in qalandari poetry. “Fate and destiny,” for example, are Sharafshāh Jaʿfari's “companions” (harif; line 25)—not the fellow haunters of the winehouse—and his “enemy,” portrayed as associated with the pagan goddesses ʿOzzā and Lāt, is “checkmated” (i.e., defeated; lines 24–28) instead of the “self” of the qalandari poet. Similarly, terms such “acts of obedience” (tāʿāt; line 32) and “right guidance” (hedāyāt; line 39) are given a positive valuation by Moʿezzi in the antistrophe, and the Kaʿba, holy stone (hajar), and sacred pilgrimage (hajj) become the “proofs of the excellency of [Sharafshāh Jaʿfari's] assembly” (line 33), rather than objects of mockery, as they do frequently in qalandari poetry.Footnote ⁵⁹

Although it is clear that the poetic worlds of the strophe and antistrophe/metastrophe are inversions of one another at the thematic level, the question remains: How does this thematic inversion function to create the poem's meaning as a poetic whole? That is, how do these disparate and even seemingly mutually exclusive poetic worlds work together in this poem to achieve Moʿezzi's larger goal of praising Sharafshāh Jaʿfari? Analyzing the poem inter-sectionally reveals that Moʿezzi has carefully constructed a complex parallel relationship between the diametrically opposed poetic worlds of the strophe and the antistrophe/metastrophe. The roguish beloved who presides over the mock-court of the dilapidated winehouse and its miscreant courtiers (kharābātiyān, lebāsātiyān) in the strophe is in fact none other than the peerless political ruler he praises in the panegyric antistrophe/metastrophe.

Moʿezzi makes this parallelism clear in lines 11–15. The concluding hemistich of the introit—“From whom should I seek this position that is among the impossibilities?” (line 11)—encourages the audience to look back on the qalandari world of the strophe. It specifically asks them to identify where the “position” of “prisoner of love” can be found. The question seems redundant after reading the qalandari nasib: the prisoners of the beloved idol can, of course, be found in the dilapidated winehouse, the mock-court of the love-ravished city. But Moʿezzi nevertheless answers in the following line, telling his audience that he is headed to such a place now: “the court of that lord / who is master of kings and king of descendants of the prophet” (line 12). This line, functioning as a rahil, is both jarring and highly productive because it fuses the court and the imaginal geography of the “lord,” the “master of kings,” with those of the introit, creating a poetic whole, but a Janus-faced one composed of two radically opposed imaginal courts, courtiers, and associated values. Moʿezzi, perhaps in a bit of poetic foreshadowing, tells the reader that this “position” is “among the impossibilities” (line 11)—such is the dissonance brought about by the suddenly forced union of these two worlds.

In the subsequent line (13), Moʿezzi opens the qasideh's antistrophe by identifying the hitherto nameless mamduh as Sharafshāh Jaʿfari. He continues the listing of his names in the first part of line 14 as well, but in its latter hemistich he begins a complex weaving together of identities for Sharafshāh Jaʿfari that strengthens the link between the carnivalesque strophe and panegyric antistrophe:

1. 14 Abu ʿAli Sharafshāh ebn ʿEzz al-Din who is laudable in his ways like Jaʿfar Barmaki.

2. 15 For him, honor is from Jaʿfar and kingship is from the dervishes [i.e., spiritual elect], for he is Jaʿfari in disposition and dervish [spiritual elect] in station (maqāmāt).

3. 16 Jaʿfar took the heavens under his wings [i.e., he flew in the heavens] because the spiritual resolve of his son is greater than the heavens.

4. 17 They cite the example of the generosity of Jaʿfar Barmaki, and for me the example of generosity is Sharafshāh of Jaʿfari stock.

These lines revolve around wordplays with the term “dervishes” (kongor; line 15) and the name “Jaʿfar” (lines 14–17), which establish Sharafshāh's political and spiritual bona fides. In quick succession, Moʿezzi likens Sharafshāh's “ways” to Jaʿfar Barmaki (a wealthy and powerful vizier of the ‘Abbasids), claims his sharaf (honor, nobility) “is from Jaʿfar,” suggests that he is the descendent of Jaʿfar, and then returns to praise his generosity as Jaʿfari [Barmaki] “in essence.”Footnote ⁶⁰ But the Jaʿfars mentioned in these lines are not all references to Jaʿfar Barmaki. In lines 15–16 Moʿezzi is referring to Jaʿfar ben Abi Tāleb, from whom the Jaʿfari family claimed descent.Footnote ⁶¹ (He was the cousin of Mohammad and brother of ʿAli and also known as Jaʿfar al-Tayyār because of his “flight” to heaven—hence the flight reference.)Footnote ⁶² The references to Jaʿfar in these lines are quite productive because they fuse together in the figure of Sharafshāh Jaʿfari the political and spiritual capital of both of these important Jaʿfars.

The crucial line, however, for understanding the relationship between the strophe and antistrophe of this poem is line 15. Moʿezzi makes explicit here what he hints at in line 12: namely, Sharafshāh Jaʿfari is the master of the strophe's winehouse and the antistrophe's regal court. He is the beloved idol, the king of the winehouse's world, which places him near to God in the symbolic order of the qalandariyyāt, to be pined after, obeyed, idealized, and appreciated at least as a reflection of God on Earth, if not a godlike figure. But, as the rest of the panegyric makes clear, he also is an Islamic king—although not the traditional idealized political sovereign and protector of the Islamic realm of the classical panegyric.Footnote ⁶³ His kingship (shāhi) is from the dervishes (kongor), for he himself is a “dervish [spiritual elect] in station (maqāmāt)” (line 15). He is to be understood as a new type of idealized Islamic ruler: an Islamic king who combines in one person the virtues of a member of the spiritual elect (qalandar, dervish) and political elite—a Qalandar King.

The qalandari introit in Amir Moʿezzi's poem is thus not frivolous, satirical, or an inept experiment to integrate a new trendy form of poetry into the introit of the royal panegyric. On the contrary, it represents a serious attempt by Amir Moʿezzi—and quite likely his father, Borhāni, too—to harness the emerging spiritual capital associated with qalandari poetry for an innovative socio-poetic project. Even if this particular configuration of the traditional polythematic royal panegyric never gained a wider following, its use in eleventh-century Qazvin has a number of potential implications for the study of both the history of the Saljuq period and the development of the qalandariyyāt.Footnote ⁶⁴

“Kingship . . . from the Dervishes”: Qalandari Kingship and Political Legitimacy in the Saljuq Period

Precisely when Sharafshāh succeeded to the governorship of Qazvin is not known, but if the attribution to Borhāni of the poem discussed above is authentic and the mamduh named in it is indeed Sharafshāh, it would indicate that he must have become governor by at least the early 1070s to have merited a panegyric referring to him as a “king.” At a political level, this chronology puts him well into the period of Qazvin's vassalage to the Saljuq empire. The fact that Amir Moʿezzi and, likely, Borhānī—both of whom were elite poets of the Saljuq court—were solicited to compose panegyrics for him suggests that Sharafshāh looked to the Saljuq court for leadership on not only political matters, but also cultural ones.Footnote ⁶⁵ These two domains, of course, are never truly separate. As noted earlier with respect to royal panegyric poetry in the Islamicate poetic traditions, praise poetry for Islamic rulers seeks to propagate not just the ruler's bare political power but the cultural hegemony of their value system as well. The panegyric qalandari qasidehs for Sharafshāh are no exception to this rule: they seek to praise him in ways that dovetail with the prevailing Saljuq “state ideology,” as Omid Safi terms it in his study of the Saljuqs’ political and cultural “apparatus.”Footnote ⁶⁶

As all newcomers to the realm of elite power politics, the Saljuqs sought to bolster their legitimacy and build their power through a wide variety of ideological and institutional structures. They could not make hereditary claims to kingship, so they sought to justify their newfound political power by portraying themselves as the saviors of the ʿAbbasid caliphate and the defenders of “orthodox” Islam against the various purportedly “heretical” religious groups (e.g., Ismaʿilis) of the Eastern Islamic lands. They also are reported to have built a set of formidable cultural institutions that served as both a tangible testament to their piety and a means for surveillance and propagation of religious and spiritual views amenable to Saljuq rule. The most acclaimed example is the Nizamiyya of Baghdad, but they endowed many other smaller madrasas and Sufi lodges (khānaqāhs) and shrines as well.Footnote ⁶⁷ It is this last point that is most pertinent to the present study—namely, their relationship to Sufism and the role Sufis played in their broader sociopolitical project.

If the existing historical chronicles and Sufi hagiographies are to be trusted, the Saljuqs made an unprecedented effort to incorporate Sufis into the political machinery of their empire from the earliest period of their rule.Footnote ⁶⁸ Generous patronage for the khānaqāhs and shrine complexes of friendly Sufi saints was certainly part of this effort, but according to these works they also sought and received the “blessings” of Sufi saints to bolster their claims to political legitimacy.Footnote ⁶⁹ Numerous “Sufi legitimation” stories purportedly attest to this point. The two most famous ones revolve around the first Saljuq rulers, Tughril (d. 1063) and Chaghri (d. 1060). In the first, the chronicler Rāvandi in his Rāhat al-sodur (c. 1204–5) portrays the enigmatic Sufi saint Bābā Tāher (and two other less well-known Sufi saints) as meeting Tugril in Hamadan in 1055 on his way to conquer Baghdad and, after briefly questioning him, declares “I have put dominion of the world in your hands.”Footnote ⁷⁰ The second is similar to the first in that it is a Sufi saint, this time Abu Saʿid, who is portrayed as the true source of the Saljuqs’ rise to power. This account, recorded in Ebn Monavvar's Asrār al-towhid (c. between 1179 and 1192), says that Tughril and Chaghri came to visit Abu Saʿid before their key battle with the Ghaznavids.Footnote ⁷¹ They pay their respects to the saint, honoring him as one would a king, as Safi points out, and Abu Saʿid then summarily announces that he has granted dominion (molk) over Khorāsān to Chaghri and over ʿIraq to Tughril.Footnote ⁷² Abu Saʿid also was apparently close to Saljuq viziers, in particular Nezām al-Molk, whose rise to power he is portrayed as predicting when Nezām al-Molk was only a child.Footnote ⁷³ Nezām al-Molk was reportedly not only quite open about his relationship with Abu Saʿid, but even credited Abu Saʿid as both foretelling his rise to power and serving as the true source of his success.Footnote ⁷⁴ The close connections between the Saljuq political elite and important Sufi figures continued, according to Sufi sources, until the last sultan of the great Saljuq empire, Sanjar (d. 1157–58).Footnote ⁷⁵ Like his predecessors, he too is portrayed as owing his rule, and his life, to a powerful Sufi saint, Ahmad-e Jām (d. 1141), according to Ghaznavi's Maqāmāt-e Zhandeh Pil (c. 1175).Footnote ⁷⁶

Although most scholars readily admit that many of these anecdotes may be of dubious historicity, they are still relied upon as trustworthy indicators of early Saljuq efforts to leverage their relationship with Sufis in their broader political legitimation narratives. There are two potential problems, however, with this position. First, all of these accounts appear in sources written many years after the events they discuss and, second, the earlier twelfth-century sources are all Sufi hagiographic works (which is not to say that they do not contain potentially valuable information, but they do need to be analyzed with this perspective in mind). There are no extant chronicles of early Saljuq history.Footnote ⁷⁷ Rāvandi, writing in the opening years of the thirteenth century, at the end of the great Saljuq empire, is the first non-Sufi to mention any of these Sufi legitimation stories.Footnote ⁷⁸ Putting aside Sufi hagiographic works, the pre-thirteenth-century textual evidence on the relationship between the Saljuq court and Sufi figures is less detailed. Nezāmi-ye ʿAruzi (d. 1161), for example, in the Chahār Maqāleh, relates an anecdote in which Amir Moʿezzi complains that Nezām al-Molk pays little attention to anyone other than Sufis and religious clerics.Footnote ⁷⁹ Ahmad-e Jām also dedicates his Rowzat al-moznebin to Sanjar and purportedly pens letters to him as well—both of which attest to some sort of connection between these figures.Footnote ⁸⁰ But, it is important to underline, these pre-thirteenth-century, non-hagiographic sources do not provide evidence of the integration of the much more elaborate Sufi legitimation narrative found in Rāvandi, Ebn Monavvar, and Ghaznavi's works.Footnote ⁸¹ We can certainly tell from Ebn Monavvar and Ghaznavi's works that by the late twelfth century the image of Saljuq rule as spiritually granted and upheld by the Sufis had become commonplace in the cultural imaginary of Sufi hagiography. It is less certain, however, both how far back these efforts go to link Sufi baraka to the Saljuq legitimation narrative and from whom this narrative originated.

The extant evidence reviewed so far seems to indicate that this narrative was first propagated by the Sufis in their hagiographic works and then only later adopted into historical works, such as Rāvandi. But Borhāni and Amir Moʿezzi's panegyrics for Sharafshāh may complicate this view, providing earlier textual evidence of efforts to legitimate Saljuq political power by harnessing Sufi spiritual capital, even if in a slightly different manner than the stories above. Although we cannot fully know how Borhāni treated the question of Sharafshāh's kingship due to his poem's unfortunate truncation, Amir Moʿezzi, a non-Sufi court poet, clearly attempts to legitimize Sharafshāh's kingship by rooting it in Sufi spiritual power. The poem's fusion of the strophe's world of the qalandari winehouse with Sharafshāh's court, and by extension his entire political domain (lines 11–14), makes this political point implicitly. But, by line 15, Amir Moʿezzi leaves no doubt that we should understand Sharafshāh as a spiritually sanctioned ruler, declaring that his “kingship is from the dervishes” and he is “dervish [spiritual elect] in station (maqāmāt).” He may have “laudable” qualities and “honor” from Jaʿfar Barmaki and Jaʿfar ben Abi Tāleb (Jaʿfar al-Tayyār), but in the end the foundational legitimacy of his rule is provided by the “dervishes” and his elite spiritual station (line 14–17).Footnote ⁸²

This poem's anchoring of Sharafshāh's kingship in Sufi spiritual power mirrors in important ways the more well-known legitimation narratives of Saljuq power found in the works of Rāvandi, Ebn Monavvar, and Ghaznavi. This overlap suggests that two tentative conclusions can be drawn here (tentative only because this is just one text from a local Saljuq court). First, it confirms that political figures within the Saljuq realm were seeking to harness Sufi spiritual power for their legitimation narratives already in the late eleventh century, indicating that Rāvandi, Ebn Monavvar, and Ghaznavi were likely drawing from an earlier tradition linking Saljuq political power to Sufi spiritual capital—not just inventing it in the late twelfth century. Second, since this poem originates in the context of the local Saljuq court of Qazvin, it does not appear that the Sufi legitimation narrative is solely the product of the Sufi hagiographic tradition, even if that tradition greatly embellished some of its more elaborate stories. Rather, Saljuq political elites and Sufi groups likely collaboratively and gradually constructed it over the course of Saljuq rule.

It also is important to point out, however, that Moʿezzi's poem differs from the Sufi legitimatization anecdotes of Rāvandi, Ebn Monavvar, and Ghaznavi in certain ways. These differences may be a reflection of this gradual process of narrative construction or result from the particularities of Sharafshāh's local religiopolitical milieu. The key difference between Moʿezzi's poem and the later Sufi legitimation stories is that Sharafshāh is identified as something of a Sufi figure himself—line 15: “dervish [spiritual elect] in station (maqāmāt)”—not just blessed by Sufis. The emphasis on Sharafshāh's more formal connection to Sufi piety may be the result of panegyric poetry's tendency to present an idealized portrait of the mamduh. But it also could suggest that he participated to some degree in Sufi groups in Qazvin. In either case, Moʿezzi's construction of a new model of Islamic kingship is a testament to the growing political power of Sufism in Qazvin and the broader Saljuq realm in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. It suggests that there was a growing sense that the ideal Islamic king not only needed to be the political defender of the Islamic world and its social order, but also connected to—and perhaps even a master of—the spiritual domains administered by the Sufi saints.