The Kind Of Courage These Times Call For

All men and women are to each other 
the limbs of a single body, each of us drawn 
from life’s shimmering essence, God’s perfect pearl; 
and when this life we share wounds one of us, 
all share the hurt as if it were our own. 
You, who will not feel another’s pain, 
no longer deserve to be called human.

Written by the 13th century Persian poet Saadi of Shiraz, these lines—this version is mine, based on Edward Rehatsek’s 19th century translation—are woven into the carpet pictured above, a gift to the United Nations from the Islamic Republic of Iran, given in 2005 in honor of the UN’s “Dialogue Among Civilizations” initiative, which was the brainchild of then-Iranian President Mohammad Khatami. The verses appear in the reddish circles in this section of the carpet:

Generally referred to in Persian using the first two words of the first line, “Bani Adam,” which mean “the sons of Adam,” this declaration of universal humanity was also quoted in part by former President Barack Obama in his 2010 Norooz message to Iran, which he delivered in the context of the then-ongoing Green Movement protests against the contested election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The murdered young woman to whom Obama refers was named Neda Agha Soltan. According to witnesses, she was shot and killed during a June 2009 protest by a member of the Basij, Iran’s paramilitary organization.

There are ironies, both obvious and rich, in the uses to which these two nations, the United States and Iran, put Saadi’s words. First, the Islamic Republic, a notorious violator of human rights, presumed to claim the humanism of the Bani Adam lines as its message to the world; and, second, a president of the United States, in speaking to Iran, presumed to use those same lines to claim the moral high ground when we have been meddling in that country’s internal affairs for decades. I point these ironies out, however, not to open up a debate about US-Iran relations, or a discussion of either nation’s flaws and past behaviors, which are many. Rather, I want to talk about the fact that both the Islamic Republic and the president of the United States took Saadi’s lines out of the context in which they originally appear, where they function not as a standalone poem, but rather as the concluding lines of a cautionary tale from Saadi’s Golestan for rulers who abuse their power.

§§§

The work for which Saadi is best known in the West, Golestan, the title means Rose Garden, is what we today would call a hybrid text, mixing prose and poetry, as well as a kind of rhyming prose that it is difficult to translate into English, to my ear anyway, without making the poet sound like Ogden Nash.¹ In 1634, when the diplomat André du Ryer called Saadi a “prince of Turkish and Persian poets” on the title page of his partial French translation of Golestan—the first time a literary work from the Muslim world was brought into a European vernacular—he did so because he saw in Saadi’s work a set of values that he recognized as compatible with the humanistic ones emerging from the European Enlightenment.‌

The Bani Adam lines end the tenth story in the first chapter of Golestan, which is called “Padeshahan” or “Kings,” though that title is often translated into English as something like “On The Conduct Of Kings,” because it concerns itself with the question of what it means to be a good and just ruler. Here is the full text of the story:

An Arab king who was notorious for his cruelty came on a pilgrimage to the cathedral mosque of Damascus, where he offered the following prayer, clearly seeking God’s assistance in a matter of some urgency:

“The darvish, poor, owning nothing, the man 
whose money buys him anything he wants, 
here, on this floor, enslaved, we are equals. 
Nonetheless, the man who has the most 
comes before You bearing the greater need.”²

When the king was done praying, he noticed me immersed in
my own prayers at the head of the prophet Yahia’s tomb.³ The monarch turned to me, “I know that God favors you darvishes because you are passionate in your worship and honest in the way you live your lives. I fear a powerful enemy, but if you add your prayers to mine, I am sure that God will protect me for your sake.”

“Have mercy on the weak among your own people,” I replied, “and no one will be able to defeat you.”

To break each of a poor man’s ten fingers 
just because you have the strength offends God. 
Show compassion to those who fall before you, 
and others will extend their hands when you are down. 
The man who plants bad seed hallucinates 
if he expects sweet fruit at harvest time. 
Take the cotton from your ears! Give 
your people justice before justice finds you. 
All men and women are to each other 
the limbs of a single body, each of us drawn 
from life’s shimmering essence, God’s perfect pearl; 
and when this life we share wounds one of us, 
all share the hurt as if it were our own. 
You, who will not feel another’s pain, 
no longer deserve to be called human.

The king in this tale is a familiar type, a politician who tries to cloak himself in the legitimizing veneer of religious piety. Indeed, you can hear an echo of his request in Donald Trump’s recent ruminations about whether or not he will get into heaven. At the same time, though, the king is not unaware of the irony in his situation. Despite the fact that he is “the man who has the most,” the fact that he fears for his life means he is the one “bearing the greater need.”

Tellingly, the darvish’s initial response is political, not religious or even remotely spiritual. Only after he makes clear that the king has himself and no one else to blame for his situation does the darvish move on to those famous final lines, which, in context, are not the abstract declaration of universal, God-given humanity that the Islamic Republic and Barack Obama used them as. Rather, they are a direct attack on the legitimacy of a ruler whose cruelty has lost him the loyalty and support of his people.

It’s tempting to read this story as a call for what we mean today when we talk about social justice and human rights, but that would be anachronistic. Both Saadi’s fictional darvish and Saadi himself lived under monarchical rule and it is unlikely that either would have supported, say, Barack Obama’s call for free and fair elections in Iran or the notion, to take another example, that justice is something arrived at through a process designed to protect the rights of the people rather than through the wisdom and benevolence of the king.

Not that you can’t or shouldn’t read the story in light of today’s world, but I think it is far more interesting, especially in light of today’s world, to read the story for what it says about the courage given to the darvish by Saadi and the courage Saadi himself showed in writing the story in the first place. Saadi wrote Golestan for a royal patron. If that patron chose to see the story as a critique that somehow posed a threat to his rule, he could easily have had Saadi exiled or put to death. The risk Saadi took with this story, in other words, was very real, and the potential consequences devastating, which makes it even more remarkable that you can find in Golestan story after story that we today would describe as speaking truth to power in the starkest and most unapologetic terms.

§§§

Even a cursory reading of both Golestan and Bustan, Saadi’s other didactic work, will leave no doubt that the poet’s faith, heavily inflected by Sufi mysticism, was the source of that courage. The historian Marshall G. S. Hodgson, in volume one of The Venture of Islam, offered an explanation for how mystical practice, which we tend to think of as separate from politics, could lead someone to the political position at the heart of Saadi’s story. Pointing out that “the ground of mystical life…is a striving for clarity and sincerity,” Hodgson suggested that when “inhibiting fears fall away and one no longer feels the need to put up pretences and defences [sic] against any sort of truth [about oneself]…it is possible…for a more universal perspective on life at large to be felt.” When those moments grow into “more intense levels of awareness [and] take ecstatic forms,” he goes on, that experience will likely “carry with it the moral standpoint of universality.”

Poets are not mystics, at least not simply by virtue of being poets. Nonetheless, I think there is a kinship between what Hodgson says about the “clarity and sincerity” that for mystics opens up the possibility of oneness with their god and what Sam Hamill says in his essay “The Necessity To Speak” about writing poems in the first person: “The true poet gives up the self. The I of my poem is not me. It is the first person impersonal, it is permission for you to enter the experience which we name Poem.”

Personally, I have no use for the binary set up by the idea of “the true poet”—what, then, is “the false poet?”—and I would prefer to call “the first person impersonal” an invitation rather than permission, but everything else Hamill says in that quote rings true for me, both as someone who reads poetry for the kind of experience Hamill alludes to and as someone who tries to write poems offering that kind of experience to others. More to my point here, though, when you take Saadi’s Bani Adam lines out of context, despite the beauty and nobility of the sentiment they express, they no longer embody that kind of experience, or at least they don’t for me, because they have been uprooted from the lived life of the character who speaks them.

Read in context, on the other hand, because Saadi has given me first both the king’s fear and the arrogant self-centeredness of his request, I am able to feel fully the courage it took for the darvish to respond the way he did. Neither the Islamic Republic nor Barack Obama required that kind of courage to quote Saadi’s lines, but that kind of courage—the kind it took Saadi to write the lines in the first place—is precisely the courage we are called to by the very difficult times in which we now live, not poets in particular, but poets no differently than anybody else.

Cross-posted on Learning To Love The Questions.

1. Nonetheless, the scholar A. J. Arberry had a go at it in Kings and Beggars: The First Two Chapters of Sa’di’s Gulistan. Also don’t be confused by the fact that there are different English spellings of Persian names and words. They arise because there is no standardized system of transliteration.  ↩︎
2. A darvish is a sufi mendicant.  ↩︎
3. John the Baptist  ↩︎