The Qalandar King: Early Development of the Qalandariyyāt and Saljuq Conceptions of Kingship in Amir Moʿezzi's Panegyric for Sharafshāh Jaʿfari

Abstract Historical treatments of the “rogue lyrics” (qalandariyyāt) of medieval Persian poetry typically identify their origin in the Sufi poetry of Bābā Tāher, Abu Saʿid, and Sanāʾi and portray them as a poetic instantiation of the intellectual and antinomian critiques of the formalistic modes of piety practiced in the increasingly powerful institutionalized Sufi orders. However, the qalandari panegyrics of the Saljuq court poets Borhāni and Amir Moʿezzi—arguably the earliest datable examples of this poetry—analyzed in this article complicate this narrative. They utilize the heterotopic poetics of the qalandariyyāt not to subvert or critique, but rather to augment the sociopolitical authority of the ruler of Qazvin, constructing a new and distinctly Saljuq model of Islamic kingship, a Qalandar King.

The classic image of a qalandar in the Persian Sufi imaginary is that of an antinomian rogue. In their eponymous "rogue lyrics" (qalandariyyāt), most famously of Sanāʾi (d. 1131), ʿAttār (d. 1221), and ʿErāqi (d. 1289), the qalandars and their closely related band of social reprobates-the qallāsh (rascal), rend (libertine), owbāsh (ruffian), haunter of the winehouse (kharābāti), roguish man of wiles (ʿayyār), etc.-are portrayed as disruptive forces who flout normative modes of piety, the rule of Islamic law (shariʿa), and the protocols of social comportment (adab). Although these rogue figures certainly drink copious amounts of wine and are continuously falling in love like the poetic personae in the closely related genres of the ghazaliyyāt (amatory poetry) and khamriyyāt (wine odes), the qalandariyyāt are concerned to a far greater degree with the celebration of transgression and antinomianism: the flagrant inversion of socioreligious hierarchies, the mocking of sacred symbols of religious authority, and the dispatching of anything-even their own selves-that blocks the path of love (rāh-e ʿeshq) to their illicit beloved, who is often of a non-Islamic origin. 1 The qalandariyyāt, in short, present the reader with a poetic world that is the nemesis and very antithesis of the Islamic social order. It is what we might call an Islamic heterotopia or carnival in the sense that its imaginal world is a liminal space where antinomian figures invert normal socioreligious hierarchies and mock normative culture. 2 Or, at least, this is the image provided by the qalandariyyāt.
The question of the actual social function and cultural politics of this carnivalesque poetry is more complex. On one hand, there were various historical antinomian and libertine groups who are believed to have lived aspects of the qalandari topoi, and it is possible that this poetry drew inspiration from these historical groups to some degree. 3 Abu Hafs ʿUmar al-Suhrawardi (d. 1234), for example, says in his oft-cited early-thirteenth-century account of the differences between the qalandars and malāmatis (blame-seekers) in the ʿAwārif al-Maʿārif, that the modus operandi of the qalandars was the "destr [uction] of customs and discard [ing] of the protocols of social interaction and engagement." 4 This brief summary of historical qalandar activity equally well encapsulates the main thrust of the qalandar poetic persona, and the convergence between these two would seem to mark this poetry with a socially subversive air, even if only by topical association. 5 On the other hand, as numerous scholars have pointed out, the qalandariyyāt cannot be read literally as representative of the behaviors of its poets or admirers. 6 There is no indication in Sanāʾi's or ʿAttār's hagiographies that they engaged in anything even remotely approximating the antinomian behavior of the qalandar figures in their poetry. Even in the case of ʿErāqi, who purportedly joined a wandering qalandar band after he fell in love with a beautiful young qalandar (male) youth, he ultimately becomes a leading spiritual 2 I use the terms "heterotopia" and "carnival" here only in a general descriptive sense and in the hope of bringing this poetry into the broader conversations that have built up around these terms. Foucault uses heterotopia to refer to "counter-sites" or liminal spaces where deviant, subversive, and carnivalesque behavior and "heteroclite" objects can be contained and safely displayed. In heterotopic spaces, normal relations are typically "contested and inverted." For more on this term, see Foucault,"Of Other Spaces,[24][25][26][27]and Defert,"Foucault,Space,and the Architects,. The term "carnival" has its origins in Bakhtin's work on the premodern carnivals of Europe, but it is now widely used in cultural studies to refer to spaces (real or imaginary) and cultural products that focus broadly on the transgression, inversion, and parody of social norms, hierarchies, and elite culture. See Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World; and Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 6-26. 3 There is no extant nonliterary evidence of qalandars as a historical group before the thirteenth century. There are, however, other types of antinomian groups active prior to the thirteenth century. On the historical qalandars and other antinomian groups in the premodern Islamic world, see Karamustafa, God's Unruly Friends; Karamustafa, "Antinomian Sufis"; Karamustafa, Sufism, 155-66; Algar, "Impostors, Antinomians and Pseudo-Sufis"; Shafiʿi-Kadkani, Qalandariyyeh dar tārikh; Ridgeon, "Reading Sufi History through Ādāb"; Ridgeon, "Short Back and Sides"; Ridgeon, "Shaggy or Shaved?"; Papas, Mystiques et vagabonds; Watenpaugh, "Deviant Dervishes"; and Digby, "Qalandars and Related Groups." 4 Al-Suhrawardi, ʿAwārif al-maʿārif, 89. Al-Suhrawardi's account is one of the most important early sources for all major treatments of the qalandars. See, for example, Meier, Abū Saʿīd-i Abū l-Hayr, 496-97; Shafiʿi-Kadkani, Qalandariyyeh dar tārikh, 137-39; Karamustafa, God's Unruly Friends, 34-36; de Bruijn, "The Qalandariyyāt in Persian Mystical Poetry," 76; de Bruijn,Persian Sufi Poetry,[73][74]Dahlén,"The Holy Fool in Medieval Islam," 64; and Ridgeon, "Reading Sufi History through Ādāb," 390-92. 5 Bürgel seems to go the furthest in reading this association literally, remarking that "in the course of Islamic history mystical movementsmore than once became avehicle for social revolution. . . . Words like 'scoundrel' and 'rogue' were then no longer empty sounds, but were filled with dangerous reality. In the poetry of Sanaʾi, the qalandar and rend are in the company of types one would tend to associate with social unrest such as the ʿaiyyār, the qallāsh, and the owbash, meaning rake, scoundrel, robber." See Bürgel, "The Pious Rogue," 46. Feuillebois-Pierunek also remarks that "for his contemporaries, his [Sanāʾi's] poetry unquestionably has a scandalous flavor" (Pour ses contemporains, sa poésie a incontestablement une saveur de scandale; "Le Qalandar," 125). However, see footnote 10 for more on the complex relationship between purported transgressive or carnivalesque poetry and sociopolitical power. 6 Lewisohn, "Sufi Symbolism in the Persian Hermeneutic Tradition"; Lewisohn, "Prolegomenon to the Study of Hafiz," 31-55; de Bruijn,Persian Sufi Poetry,[74][75]de Bruijn,"The Qalandariyyāt in Persian Mystical Poetry," 85-86; Dahlén, "The Holy Fool in Medieval Islam," 75. There are scholars, however, who do seem to read this poetry as reflective of actual practice, such as Papas, in "Son of His Mother," 423-24. Dahlén and de Bruijn interestingly do make a qualified exception for ʿErāqi due to the story of his conversion to the qalandari path in his hagiography. Although de Bruijn rejects a biographical reading of the qalandari poetry of Sanāʾi and ʿAttār, he cautiously suggests that there may be a "relationship between letters and life" in the case of ʿErāqi (Persian Sufi Poetry, 75). Dahlén similarly thinks some of ʿErāqi's poems are "direct reflections of [his] antinomian practice," although most are not ("The Holy Fool in Medieval Islam," [74][75]. figure in a mainstream Sufi order, the Suhrawardiyya. 7 His hagiography testifies to the fact that he remained somewhat controversial for his unabashed "gazing upon beautiful faces" (shāhed-bāzi) and proclivity to fall in love with handsome young men wherever he went. However, he remained within the bounds of normative Sufi views on these practices and certainly did not live the life of an antinomian qalandar. 8 Sanāʾi, ʿAttār, and ʿErāqi's simultaneous association with mainstream varieties of Sufism and qalandari poetry may, as Ahmet T. Karamustafa has suggested, be evidence that the qalandariyyāt began as a self-critical Sufi poetic response to the increasingly powerful institutional Sufi orders and their formalistic modes of spiritual piety-in short, a poetic version of the theoretical critiques of the same issues by leading Sufis such as Qoshayri and Hojviri in this period. 9 Qalandari poetry's origin may indeed be tied up with this broader intellectual reaction against institutional Sufism, but its carnivalesque poetic space came to play several-and not necessarily subversive-roles in the Sufi tradition down to the modern period. 10 For many Sufis, it became a poetic idiom that was capable of embodying in an imaginal manner the most radical of all human experiences-the experience of divine love and union-in an admittedly limited textual form. 11 For the proponents of the Sufi hermeneutic tradition, it became a mine for esoteric knowledge about the secrets of divine realities. 12 For poets, the qalandariyyāt operated as a heterotopic counter-genre to religious-homiletic (zohdiyyāt/mowʿezeh) and royal panegyric poetry. 13 And these roles were not mutually exclusive.
Although all of these foregoing approaches to the poetics and cultural politics of qalandari poetry are part of the larger story of its history and development, they do not seriously engage with arguably two of the most important pieces of historical literary evidence : the qalandari poems by the father and son Saljuq court poets Borhāni (d.1072-73) and Amir Moʿezzi (d. ca. 1125-27). 14 These poems are among the earliest extant qalandariyyāt, 7 This story occurs in the anonymous hagiography of ʿErāqi, which appears as an introduction in early manuscripts of his divān and became the basis for much of his subsequent hagiographic tradition. See "Moqaddemeh-ye divān." Jāmi's account of ʿErāqi's life in Nafahāt al-ons (599-602) is almost identical. There are reasons, however, to question the accuracy of ʿErāqi's hagiographic account. For a more detailed discussion of ʿErāqi's hagiography, see Miller, "Embodying the Beloved"; Miller, "'Ocean of the Persians'"; Shafiʿi-Kadkani, Qalandariyyeh dar tārikh, 263, 320-23; Safā, Tārikh-e adabiyyāt dar Irān, vol. 3, 1:567-76; Chittick, "ʿErāqī, Fakr-al-Dīn Ebrāhīm"; Massé, "ʿIrāḳi"; Mohtasham (Khozāʾi), "Moqaddemeh-ye mosahheh"; and Zargar, Sufi Aesthetics, 105-12. 8 On ʿErāqi's practice of shāhed-bāzi, see Miller, "Embodying the Beloved." 9 Karamustafa, Sufism, 165-66. 10 "Carnivalesque" or "transgressive" literature can be a subversive or conservative force in a social system (at times seemingly both at once) depending on the historical circumstances and is always at risk of being co-opted, as we will see below. For exploration of the complex interpretative issues involved in understanding this type of literature's political implications, see Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression; Noorani, "Heterotopia and the Wine Poem in Early Islamic Culture"; and Yaghoobi, Subjectivity in ʿAṭṭār, Persian Sufism, and European Mysticism. Co-option not only happens to carnivalesque literature; it also happens to actual antinomian movements. See Watenpaugh,"Deviant Dervishes,552,555. For a modern treatment of the qalandar figure, see Bürgel's study of how Muhammad Iqbal employs the rogue figure in "The Pious Rogue." 11 I am developing the idea of poetry and specifically poetic imagery as "imaginal embodiments" in my current book project, Affected by God: Embodied Poetics and Somatic Epistemology in Medieval Persian Sufi Literature, and I discuss some qalandari poetry there. 12 For representative overviews of this approach to carnivalesque Sufi poetry, see Feuillebois-Pierunek, A la croisée des voies célestes; Lewisohn, "Sufi Symbolism in the Persian Hermeneutic Tradition"; Lewisohn, "Prolegomenon to the Study of Hafiz"; Feuillebois-Pierunek, "Le Qalandar"; Esots, "The Image of Qalandar in the Dīvān-i Shams"; Dahlén, "The Holy Fool in Medieval Islam"; Zargar, Sufi Aesthetics; and Pourjavady, "Rendi-ye Hāfez (1)" and "Rendi-ye Hāfez (2)." 13 Miller, "Poetics of the Sufi Carnival." 14 Most of the studies cited in the preceding footnotes skip over Borhāni and Amir Moʿezzi's poems in favor of discussing the more traditional Sufi qalandari poets and poems. A few other scholars mention them in passing, but none discuss these poems in depth, especially with regard to their importance for the study of the qalandariyyāt. See Eqbāl, Moqaddemeh, x; Moʿin, "Borhāni va qasideh-ye u"; Qanbari, "Moqaddemeh," XII-XIII n3; de Bruijn, "The Qalandariyyāt in Persian Mystical Poetry," 81; Tetley, The Ghaznavid and Seljuk Turks, 92-94; de Bruijn, "The Qaside after the Fall of the Ghaznavids," 107-8. There are two exceptions to this general rule, which will be discussed and they are not authored by poets usually classified as "Sufi poets," which complicates the typical Sufi-centered origin and development narrative of qalandari poetry. 15 As I will show here through a close reading of these poems, they use qalandari poetry in a different way: not to attack or criticize any institution, but rather to buttress the sociopolitical order and the legitimacy of their patron, the ruler of Qazvin, Sharafshāh Jaʿfari. They see being associated with the qalandari world as a virtue and foundational part of a new model of Islamic kingship, the Qalandar King, whose political authority is legitimized through his deep connection to the spiritual realm of the "dervishes"-a pattern that connects these poems to broader developments in the construction of Saljuq imperial legitimacy as well. 16 These poems represent a different perspective on the cultural position and function of the early qalandariyyāt while also demonstrating its considerable generic flexibility and a more variegated path of historical development.
The Standard Narrative on the Early Development of the Qalandariyyā t 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). 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. I am that libertine whose name is qalandar/whose place is the qalandar-18 I have no home, no family, no monastery (langar) in this world. When day comes I wander around your quarter, When night comes I place my head on bricks. 19 further below. For an overview of the life and poetry of Borhāni and Amir Moʿezzi, see: de Bruijn, "The Qaside after the Fall of the Ghaznavids," 107-23; Meisami,"Muʿizzī";and Safā,vol. 2, For a discussion of the generic boundaries of the qalandariyyāt, please see Miller, "Genre in Classical Persian Poetry." 16 Karamustafa,God's Unruly Friends,[32][33]Qalandariyyeh dar tārikh,[39][40]263,296. 18 Shafiʿi-Kadkani argues that the term qalandar in its earliest uses refers to a place, not an individual figure, and only later becomes an individual figure (slightly before or in the period of Rumi and ʿErāqi). See Qalandariyyeh dar tārikh,[37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45] There are several versions of the text of this do-beyti. I have blended them together in the translation above. The Persian text provided above is primarily based on the Dastgerdi version (ʿOryān, Divān-e Bābā Tāher-e ʿOryān, 9). Shafiʿi-Kadkani also points to two other versions of the first line (Qalandariyyeh dar tārikh, 39, 263, 336). One version is very close to the Dastgerdi version, but he lists jāyam as an alternative reading for nāmam in the initial hemistich of the first line. He notes too that in the earliest source of Bābā Tāher's poetry, collection 2546 in the Museum of Konya, the first line reads as follows: 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. 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), andAnvari (d. 1189-90). 24 With the exception of Khayyām, the qalandari poems composed 20 Ebn Monavvar, Asrār al-towhid, 1:329. 21 Ibid., 1: 73. 22 Quoted in ʿAyn al-Qozāt Hamadāni ("Tamihidāt," 228). 23 The exact dating of Yusof ʿĀmeri is unknown. Shafiʿi-Kadkani says he wrote in the fifth/eleventh century, and he cannot have composed this poem any later than the beginning of the twelfth century because ʿAyn al-Qozāt Hamadāni cites it in his Tamhidāt. The attribution of these quatrains to Abu Saʿid and Bābā Tāher is uncertain, as Shafiʿi-Kadkani, Karamustafa, and de Bruijn point out. But, in the case of the Abu Saʿid poems at least, they are mentioned in the Asrar al-towhid, meaning that they cannot date later than the mid-twelfth century. See Shafiʿi-Kadani, Qalandariyyeh dar tārikh, 39-40, 263, 296; Karamustafa, God's Unruly Friends, 32-33; and de Bruijn,Persian Sufi Poetry,[13][14][15][16][17][18]. On the contested question of whether Abu Saʿid himself composed any poems, see a summary of these views in O'Malley, "From Blessed Lips," 10. 24 Shafiʿi-Kadani, Qalandariyyeh dar tārikh, 107-8, 141; de Bruijn, "Anvari and the Ghazal," 23-27. For a discussion of Sanāʾi's qalandariyyāt see Miller, "Poetics of the Sufi Carnival." On Khayyām's purported qalandari quatrains (with the usual caveats about lack of certainty regarding the attribution of these poems to Khayyām), see Bürgel, "The Pious Rogue," 44. In addition to the qalandariyyāt by Anvari discussed in de Bruijn's work cited here, see also Anvari, Divān-e Anvari, 859; and Khāqāni Shervāni, Divān-e Khāqāni Shervāni, 629, 643. 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. 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. 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. 27 The bulk of these poems fall into an expansive category that we might call "rogue homilies." 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. 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. 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. 31 25 Several early manuscripts of Sanāʾi's poetry are organized on the basis of thematic genre (madhiyyāt, ghazaliyyāt, qalandariyyāt, zohdiyyāt). The two most important ones are the Ketāb-khāneh-ye Melli-ye Malek (MiM) 5468 and the Kabul Museum 318 (KM) manuscripts. For more on these early manuscripts of Sanāʾi's poetic collections, see: de Bruijn,Of Piety and Poetry,[93][94][95][96][97][98][99][100][101][102][103][104][105][106][107][108]Miller, "Genre in Classical Persian Poetry"; and Ahmad, "Some Original Prose and Poetical Pieces of Hakim Sana'i." The only other medieval Persian work in which the author or manuscript editors have used the term qalandariyyāt in a thematic organization of poems is ʿAttār's Mokhtār-nāmeh, which has a section of robāʿiyyāt labeled "dar khamriyyāt va qalandariyyāt." For more on ʿAttār's qalandariyyāt in the Mokhtār-nāmeh, see Miller, "Genre in Classical Persian Poetry." 26 Lewis discusses and analyzes ten monothematic qalandariyyāt by Sanāʾi in "Reading, Writing and Recitation," 364-68, 559-78. For a discussion of several monothematic qalandariyyāt of Sanāʾi, ʿAttār, and ʿErāqi as well as the subtypes of monothematic types of this genre, see Miller, "Poetics of the Sufi Carnival." 27 For more on the formal diversity of the early qalandariyyāt, see de Bruijn, "The Qalandariyyāt in Persian Mystical Poetry"; Miller, "Genre in Classical Persian Poetry" and "Poetics of the Sufi Carnival." 28 For examples of these poems, see Sanāʾi, Divān-e Hakim Abu al-Majd Majdud ebn Ādam Sanāʾi Ghaznavi,[27][28][32][33][95][96][499][500] de Bruijn, "The Qalandariyyāt in Persian Mystical Poetry," 84-86. I would diverge from de Bruijn's treatment of this subtype on two points. First, I think naʿt (praise of prophet) poems need to be classed as a separate type, as I have done here. And second, in my reading, de Bruijn is a little overzealous in placing poems into this category. There is more diversity in the poems he classifies into this group than his more limited typology allows for. 30 There are four poems that have been identified as qalandari naʿt poems (the first two poems were identified by de Bruijn as naʿt poems and the second two were labeled as such by the editor of the KM manuscript). The four poems are: Sanāʾi, Divān-e Hakim Abu al-Majd Majdud ebn Ādam Sanāʾi Ghaznavi,[23][24] There are two poems that some manuscript editors have identified as short qalandari panegyrics for minor patrons: Ibid., 164-65 (q 94), 339-40 (q 157). There also is a tarkib-band listed as a qalandariyyāt in the KM manuscript, which in Modarres-e Razavi's version (Ibid.) is listed as a panegyric, but not as a qalandariyyāt. The version of this poem in Modarres-e Razavi's edition is much longer, containing eight more stanzas than the KM manuscript. See: Ibid., 717-33; Sanāʾi, Kolliyyāt-e ashʿār-e Hakim Sanāʾi Ghaznavi, ed. Bashir, 524-25. Lastly, there is a short qalandari panegyric attributed to ʿErāqi, but its attribution to him is disputed. See ʿErāqi, Kolliyyāt-e Fakhr al-Din ʿErāqi, 311-14. 31 The use of qalandari imagery to praise patrons as rogue spiritual master-kings and express their political legitimacy in these terms also has interesting parallels with the later use of the sāqi-nāmeh (cupbearer ode) for political purposes. See Losensky, "Vintages of the Sāqī-nāma." 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 Qalandariyyā t, 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. 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 Each day that I am in the dilapidated winehouse, I yearn/flirt/boast (hami nāzam) like Moses in his private prayers.
2 Each day that I pass in drunkenness Blessed are those days and hours for me! 3 It is better that I make myself selfless and not recite the Qurʾān or perform acts of asceticism and obedience. Mother set me firm on the path to the winehouse.
11 I am a free and reckless man, I boast in the ranks of the rascals! 12 Since you think that I am just a man full of foolish words, alas!-don't even say hello to me, sir.
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?"] 35 14 I speak of a king of Jaʿfari origina lord beneficent and good in essence. 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 34 De Bruijn has discussed the images of Moses and the pharaoh as a symbols of the "uncompromising attitude of the customer of the kharābāt" and human arrogance respectively ("The Qalandariyyāt in Persian Mystical Poetry," 81). 35  of sorts, 37 fully equipped with its own cupbearers (sāqi) and minstrels (line 8). 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. 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. 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: 41 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). 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. 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 37 Although Borhāni does not explicitly refer to the winehouse as a court in this poem, other qalandari poets do so in other poems. See for example Sanāʾi, Divān-e Hakim Abu al-Majd Majdud ebn Ādam Sanāʾi Ghaznavi, ed. Modarres-e Razavi, 74. 38 Although kharābāt is typically translated as "tavern," I have opted to translate it as "dilapidated winehouse" in an effort to convey (even if only indirectly) both the image of a place of illicit drink (i.e., a tavern) and the sense of ruin (which is the literal meaning of the term). 39 Sanāʾi, Divān-e Hakim Abu al-Majd Majdud ebn Ādam Sanāʾi Ghaznavi,[73][74]. 40 For more on the MiM 5468 manuscript, which is believed to date to the twelfth or early thirteenth century, see Modarres-e Razavi, "Moqaddemeh-ye mosahheh," CXLIX-CL; and de Bruijn,Of Piety and Poetry,[93][94][95][98][99] For these arguments, see discussions of attribution of this poem to Sanāʾi or Borhāni in: Eqbāl, Moqaddemeh, x; Moʿin, "Borhāni va qasideh-ye u"; Shafiʿi-Kadkani, Qalandariyeh dar tārikh, 297-99; Tetley, Ghaznavid and Seljuk Turks, 92-93; Qanbari, "Moqaddemeh," XII-XIII n3; and Lewis, "Reading, Writing and Recitation," 137. I am less convinced by the third reason, which is given by Shafiʿi-Kadkani. Although he does not specify which "very old manuscript of Sanāʾi's divān from the 6th century [AH] in the Kabul Museum" he is referring to, I assume he is referencing the Kabul Museum 318 manuscript. The dating of this manuscript to the sixth (twelfth) century has been challenged by de Bruijn, who has argued that it is more likely from the eighth (fourteenth) century. I also have argued that the inconsistencies in this manuscript's thematic groupings may corroborate de Bruijn' 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. 44 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) 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. 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). 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. 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. 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." 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 48 I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for the suggestion of placing an implied "No!" at the beginning of line 14. However, I have interpreted this suggested "No!" in a different way than the reviewer intended. 49 Tetley, The Ghaznavids and the Seljuk Turks, 92-94. qalandari poetry is above panegyric poetry." 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. 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. 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. 53 Islamic rulers in the context of Persian panegyric poetry, see Meisami, Medieval Persian Court Poetry, 43-48; Meisami, "Ghaznavid Panegyrics," 32, 34; Bürgel, "Qasida as Discourse on Power and its Islamization"; Glünz, "Poetic Tradition and Social Change," 184, 188; Sperl and Shackle, "Introduction," 8; Shafiʿi-Kadkani, Mofles-e kimiyā-forush, 83-85, 95ff. Stefan Sperl originally made this argument in the context of Arabic panegyric poetry ("Islamic Kingship and Arabic Panegyric Poetry"; and Mannerism in Arabic Poetry, 9-27, 33-34). 52 Stefan Sperl was the first to use the terminology of "strophe" and "antistrophe" to discuss the different sections of the Arabic qasideh, arguing that the qasideh is typically structured in a strophe-antistrophe manner, with the nasib and madih sections functioning in an antithetical relationship with one another. The madih section, he maintains, "celebrates the societal values and virtues" associated with the patron (mamduh), which are inverted in the nasib by those associated with the "abandoned (campsite) ruins" (atlāl) and the figure of the beloved. See Sperl, Mannerism in Arabic Poetry, 19-27. Meisami adopts Sperl's terminology, but correctly points out that the relationship between the nasib and madih can be both antithetical and parallel. See Meisami, Medieval Persian Court Poetry, 24-76; and Meisami, Structure and Meaning, 145-89. Gruendler, although concurring with Meisami that nasib and madih can be antithetical or parallel to one another, does argue that "[p]anegyric qasāʾid for caliphs tend to be antithetical in structure. . . . The habīb, protagonist of the nasīb (strophe), and the ruler, protagonist of the madīh (antistrophe), as well as their respective powers (fate and rulership) and their realms (atlāl and state), constitute binary oppositions. As a whole, the qasīda moves from affliction to redemption or from the sensual to the spiritual realm. Both binary structures reveal an inherent logic in the qasīda's separate themes, by ascribing the first part (Sperl's strophe) a functional role as a foil for or a contrast to the second part, concerned with the ruler (Sperl's antistrophe)." She also adds the term "metastrophe" to refer to the concluding "cap" lines. See brief discussion of this below and also Gruendler, Medieval Arabic Praise Poetry, 15, 52-59. Note too that the use of the terms strophe and antistrophe with respect to Persian and Arabic poetry differs in important ways from the classical meaning of these terms in Greek. Last, Tahera  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 countergenre to religious-homiletic and royal panegyric poetry. 54 5 I will not toss aside my wine drinking implements because I am still engaged in the middle of love's battlefield.
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 Between the lover and the beloved there is an inner meaning that fails wherever there are words.
8 I am that person who is always prostrated in prayer before lovemy existence becomes great with this type of worship.
9 Any ode that arose amorously in love is like "the seven oft-recited verses" and heavenly greetings for me.
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 In my youthful days I became a prisoner of love-From whom should I seek this position that is among the impossibilities?
12 I am continually going to the court of that lord who is master of kings and king of descendants of the prophet.
21 You with whom the day of union with is great! You with whom the time of praising is excellent! 22 The orbits are all continually arrayed in accordance with your desire, your will is in accordance with its turning. 26 Your enemy is like the king and his fortune the queenon the chessboard he is checkmated with your queen.
27 The evil-natured jealous one is not evidence against youthe words that I say here are testimonies from me.
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. 56 On the word ‫ﮐ‬ ُ ‫ﻨ‬ ‫ﮕ‬ ُ ‫ﺮ‬ , which I have translated as "dervish," see Shafiʿi-Kadkani, Qalandariyeh dar tārikh, 429 n10. 29 In the assembly of eminences, I maintain that your presence is better than the gardens of paradise.
30 Since the prophet called Qazvin a gate of paradise, know that your presence is a garden among the gardens of paradise. 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 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 The proofs of the excellency of your assembly are the Ka'ba, holy stone, and pilgrimage of the people in need.
34 Every wise person who has good fortune hurries to your assembly from his city and birthplace.
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 If on resurrection day you are the intercessor for people, there will not be fear of resurrection nor punishment for sins. 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 Where a reciter declaims a panegyric about you, all the fluency of the reciter goes to that recitation. 48 Because of your fortune, all poets ask me every question that is among the most difficult of questions.
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 may God-great is his glory-repel from you whatever is connected to misfortunes or calamities.
51 Time is your aid and assistance. God gives you virtue and support. 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. 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-mamduhthe "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; mockqibla/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. 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 59 See Miller, "Poetics of the Sufi Carnival." together of identities for Sharafshāh Jaʿfari that strengthens the link between the carnivalesque strophe and panegyric antistrophe: 14 Abu ʿAli Sharafshāh ebn ʿEzz al-Din who is laudable in his ways like Jaʿfar Barmaki.
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).
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 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." 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. 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.) 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. 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 60 On the Barmakid family, their reputedly extraordinary generosity and power, and their spectacular downfall, see van Bladel, "The Bactrian Background of the Barmakids"; Bosworth, "Abū Ḥafṣ 'Umar al-Kirmānī and the Rise of the Barmakids"; Sadan, "Death of a Princess"; Meisami, "Mas'ūdī on Love and the Fall of the Barmakids"; and Kruk, "A Barmecide Feast." 61  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 courtwere 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. 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." 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. 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. 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 64 Lack of other extant examples makes it difficult to discern whether the poems of Borhāni and Moʿezzi are representatives of what was once a more widespread tradition of panegyric qasideh poetry with qalandari introits or are only isolated examples of a quickly abandoned early development in the use of qalandari topoi. This qalandari panegyric does have certain parallels with later sāqi-nāmehs composed with political aims in mind. But these other examples occur much later and emerge from a different political and poetic scene. See Losensky, "Vintages of the Sāqī-nāma." 65 On Borhāni and Moʿezzi's close relationship with the Saljuq court, see: de Bruijn, "The Qaside after the Fall of the Ghaznavids," 107-23; and Davarpanah, "Moʿezzi Nišāburi." 66 Safi refers to the narratives of legitimacy crafted by the Saljuqs as the "Saljuq state ideology" in The Politics of Knowledge in Premodern Islam. 67 Safi's study, The Politics of Knowledge in Premodern Islam, provides the most in-depth account of the Saljuqs' political and ideological "state apparatus," as he terms it. But see also studies cited in the following footnotes for additional details, in particular Tor's study, "'Sovereign and Pious,'" which argues for a more charitable reading of the historical sources on the sincerity of Saljuq rulers' personal piety. 68 Tor claims that the Saljuqs were actually the first "major rulers" to integrate Sufis into their political machine in a substantial way; the opening qualification in the sentence is my own. See Tor, "Rayy and the Religious History of the Seljūq Period," 395. claims to political legitimacy. 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." 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 and1192), says that Tughril and Chaghri came to visit Abu Saʿid before their key battle with the Ghaznavids. 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. 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. 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. 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). 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). 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 twelfthcentury 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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][15][16][17]. 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.

Conclusion: The Development and Cultural Politics of the Early Qalandariyyā t
Borhāni and Amir Moʿezzi's poems offer us a unique window into the early history of qalandari poetry. These poems, ignored by most histories of the qalandariyyāt and dismissed by others as unimportant, provide insights into the development of both its poetics and its cultural politics. They are evidence of a more complicated origin of carnivalesque poetry in Persia: one that does not begin only with a few robāʿiyyāt (with challenged attributions) and the famous monothematic qalandariyyāt of the Sufi poets Sanāʾi, ʿAttār, and ʿErāqi, but that also includes panegyric court poetry. Given Sanāʾi's admiration of the poetry of Amir Moʿezzi, it is even worth considering whether the qalandari poetics in his much more famous and numerous qalandariyyāt were inspired as much or more by Amir Moʿezzi, the court poet, as the purportedly earlier qalandari quatrains of Bābā Tāher, Abu Saʿid, and others. 83 In terms of the cultural politics of the qalandariyyāt, the use by Borhāni and Amir Moʿezzi of a qalandari introit in a royal panegyric is evidence that regardless of whether or not the qalandariyyāt originally drew inspiration from genuinely antinomian social movements, institutional powers swiftly sought to tap into and co-opt its symbolic power for their own political ends. Usage of qalandari topoi from this early period should warn against any decontextualized or romanticized readings of the heterotopic poetics of the qalandariyyāt as necessarily subversive in a social, religious, or political sense. Despite the antinomian hagiographic stories of qalandari poets such as ʿErāqi or Abu Hafs ʿUmar al-Suhrawardi's oft-cited contention that the qalandars are known for their "destr [uction] of customs and discard[ing] of the protocols of social interaction and engagement," Amir Moʿezzi and Borhāni's poems show that the carnivalesque poetics inspired by these historical antinomians could also be utilized for exactly the opposite purpose: establishing sociopolitical order and legitimacy. 84 In this particular case, Borhāni and Amir Moʿezzi employ the qalandariyyāt's carnivalesque poetics to craft a new model of Islamic kingship that legitimizes its political power (at least partially) through Sufi spiritual authority-an early attestation of a broader sociopolitical trend in the Saljuq period.