The Power We Pretend Not To See - 3

Cross-posted from Learning To Love The Questions. Read Parts 1 & 2

The idea of love at first sight has always struck me as a scam. It’s possible, of course, for two people to feel an immediate and intense connection that can go well beyond the physical, but the happily-ever-after we’ve mythologized as the inevitable result of that connection sets up expectations that the often heart-breaking work of building a real and enduring “ever after” simply cannot fulfill. I have similar reservations about stories in which love-at-first-sight remains unrequited. Granted, these narratives can be emotionally compelling, but they all-too-often idealize the ostensibly untainted purity of purpose that fidelity to unrequited love requires, to the extent that the messiness of being in relationship with another human being can seem the weaker choice. Severus Snape’s character arc in the Harry Potter series is a recent example. The fact that Lily Potter does not return Snape’s love is not only insufficient reason for him to seek the love of another; it also becomes the prod to a lifelong commitment that results in him sacrificing his own life in order to save her son.

Within the Sufi framework I’ve been exploring in this series, Snape’s story would be read as a cautionary version of the parable of the moth and the candle, in which his willingness to self-immolate in the flame of his all-too-human love is revealed as a poor substitute for the ecstasy of achieving ultimate union with God. In The Conference of The Birds, the book that I discussed in Parts 1 & 2, Farid al-Din Attar tells a story analogous to Snape’s about Sheikh Sam’an, a holy man, “the first man of his time,” who falls in unrequited love with an entrancingly beautiful Christian girl. Unlike Snape, however, who surrenders himself to earthly desire and dies for it, Sam’an is able to leave his hunger for the merely human behind and continue on his path to true enlightenment.

At the heart of Sam’an’s story are the depths of humiliation to which he is willing to subject himself in order to win the Christian girl’s love, up to and including his complete disavowal of Islam. In the end, though, after the intercession of the Prophet Mohammed, Sam’an is able to reclaim his commitment to Islam and resume his journey on the mystical path. I have compressed the narrative quite a bit here, but the overall point is that Sam’an is only able to grasp the limited and spiritually impoverished nature of his desire for another human being because he allows himself to suffer the full measure of humiliation that surrendering himself to unrequited desire in the first place made inevitable. I’m not interested in debating either the interior validity of the experience the story of Sheikh Sam’an is supposed to illuminate or the value of pursuing it. What seems beyond debate to me, however, is that Sam’an conflates desire and love in the same way my mentor did—see the introduction to Part 2 of this series—when he defined as love the erection he would have in his wife’s presence despite how deeply unhappy he was in his marriage and the fact that he really did want a divorce.

My mentor didn’t tell me what it was about his wife that aroused him in contradiction to his emotional reality, but Attar’s description of the Christian girl makes clear that Sam’an’s heart was captured—and I’ve chosen that word carefully—by her beauty.

The man about whose heart her ringlets curled
Became a Christian and renounced the world;
The man who saw her lips and knew defeat
Embraced the earth before her bonny feet;
…
The pupils of her eyes grew wide and smiled,
And countless souls were glad to be beguiled;
The face beneath her curls glowed like soft fire;
Her honeyed lips provoked the world’s desire;
…
Her chin was dimpled with a silver well
In which a thousand drowning Josephs fell;
…
One hair converted hundreds; how could he
Resist that idol’s face shown openly?

These lines frame the Christian girl’s beauty as a kind of unconscious weapon for her faith, one that compelled men to pursue her, even to the extent of becoming Christian, like Sam’an did, whether she expressed a desire for them to do so or not. I recognize that, for Attar, the girl’s beauty was a vehicle for exteriorizing Sam’an’s inner struggle—that, in other words, it does not function in the story as beauty for its own sake—but I was struck nonetheless by the degree to which Attar’s description of that beauty resembled how some of the men Timothy Beneke interviewed for his book, Men on Rape: What They Have to Say about Sexual Violence, characterized the impact women’s beauty had on them. Here, for example, is part of what “Jay” said:

A lot of times a woman knows that she’s looking really good and she’ll use that and flaunt it, and it makes me feel like she’s laughing at me and I feel degraded. I also feel dehumanized, because when I’m being teased I just turn off, I cease to be human…I don’t like the feeling that I’m supposed to stand there and take it, and not be able to hug her or kiss her; so I just turn off my emotions. It’s a feeling of humiliation…If I were actually desperate enough to rape somebody, it would be from wanting the person, but also it would be a very spiteful thing, just being able to say, “I have power over you and I can do anything I want with you,” because really I feel that they have power over me just by their presence. Just the fact that they can come up to me and just melt me and make me feel like a dummy makes me want revenge. (20–21, italics in the original)

There are, of course, obvious differences between Jay and Sam’an, stemming mostly from the fact that Jay is an actual human being, while Sam’an is a character in a story carefully constructed to represent an idealized template of one stage in a mystical seeker’s spiritual growth. For example, while Jay implicitly endorses rape as a valid, emotionally-driven response to the way a woman’s beauty can make a man feel “degraded,” nothing in Attar’s narrative even hints at that kind of logic. Instead, Attar has Sam’an submerge himself in an ever deepening pool of degradation, keeping the contour of that arc closely aligned with the spiritual agenda of the story as a whole. This difference, however, does not erase the fact that each man, Jay and Attar/Sam’an, conceives of female beauty as a weapon that women use against men, consciously or not. More to the point, since it is unlikely that Attar invented this metaphor out of whole cloth—there are too many examples throughout Persian literature for that to have been the case—the metaphor’s existence in his culture at least begs the question of whether actual men in Attar’s time might have had responses to female beauty that were closer to Jay’s than Sam’an’s.

Obviously, since we cannot ask any of those men the way Timothy Beneke was able to ask Jay, there is no way to answer that question with any authority. It is, however, still possible to trace the continuity of the metaphor across time and space by noting some of the expressions we have in English—I’ve taken these from Beneke’s book—that embody our cultural conception of women’s beauty:

• She’s a knockout!
• What a bombshell!
• She’s strikingly beautiful!
• That woman is ravishing!
• She’s really stunning!
• She’s dressed to kill! (20, italics in the original)

Beneke does not say this outright, but the clear implication of his analysis is that the culturally inscribed power women’s beauty has over men—that men like Jay clearly experience as real—is actually power that male dominant culture attributes to women. This attribution has the effect of appearing to absolve men a priori of both responsibility and accountability for maintaining the line between having sexual feelings for a woman and the felt need to be sexual with her in response to her physical beauty. This cultural and rhetorical sleight-of-hand is what makes possible all the ways in which the trope that “she was asking for it” has been successfully used to blame women for men’s sexual violence against them.

A similar sleight-of-hand is at work in the story of Sheikh Sam’an. In much the same way as Jay experiences a woman’s beauty as violating his sense of sexual integrity as a man, Attar’s narrative attributes to the Christian girl’s beauty a power strong enough to violate and invalidate Sam’an’s Muslim identity and spiritual being. Instead of responding as Jay does, however, by shutting his desire down, Sam’an leans into the existential nature of the violation as he experiences it, living out its most extreme consequences, until he emerges on the other side, both restored to his former self and ready to move on to the next stage of spiritual development.

One way of reading Sam’an’s experience is that it makes the sleight-of-hand I’ve been talking about visible. He comes to understand the Christian girl’s power over him as something he attributed to her because of her beauty, not as something that inhered in her as a woman. The point of this realization, however, is not for Sam’an to enter into a healthier relationship with women and his own sexuality, as it might have been for Jay. Rather, Attar’s point is that Sam’an had to experience the existential nature of this violation as a prerequisite of his continued spiritual growth, the trajectory of which is toward the surrender of self in the interests of true enlightenment and away from human relationships, sexual or otherwise.

While the story of Sheikh Sam’an is in this sense clearly a critique of human sexual desire, Attar would never have understood what he wrote as a gendered critique in the way that I have just framed it. According to the Sufis, women too were able to achieve enlightenment, and their path was understood to be essentially no different from that of a man’s. For example, in a story Attar tells in Elahi Nameh (Book of God), one of his other major works of Sufism, a woman falls in love-at-first-sight with a prince, whose beauty, like that of Sam’an’s Christian girl, is described in weaponized terms, and just like the Christian girl, the prince does not return the love of this woman who so passionately loves him. The humiliation the woman suffers is analogous to what Sam’an suffered, but, in the end, she proves willing to go even farther than he did, offering to give life for love as long as the prince is the one who kills her. “If that fair prince is my destroyer,” she says (this translation is mine):

I will in fact be alive forever.
If I am slain by the one I love,
love’s light will raise me high…

The parallel between the two narratives essentially ends there, though, because the woman is portrayed not as a spiritual seeker, but as an exemplar of what it means on a human level to surrender to love so fully that you would be willing to die in order to unite with your beloved. Nonetheless, the inciting incident remains essentially the same as in Sam’an’s story. The prince’s beauty violates the woman’s sense of self and everything else follows from there.

On the surface, in other words, at least in Attar’s work, there seems to be an egalitarian thread running through how Sufism understands sexual desire and spiritual growth. In the story that has come to be known as “The Tale of Marhuma,” however, the first one in Elahi Nameh, you can see how this apparent egalitarianism results from a male dominant sleight-of-hand not so different from the one I described above. In “The Tale of Marhuma,” a woman repeatedly endures the crucible of uninvited male desire—she is nearly raped several times and ends up posing as a man for a time to avoid further attempts—in order to remain faithful to her absent husband. Through that experience—I am, as I did with Sam’an, compressing the narrative—she ends up becoming “a woman whose prayers God answered,” one, in other words, who had achieved enlightenment. That achievement, however, the story makes clear, depended on her ability to transform herself spiritually into a man. The fact that she was a woman, in other words, and that her experience was quintessentially female, excluded her from the experience that Sheikh Sam’an could take for granted as inherently available to him. The sexual politics of male dominance functioned no differently in her story than in the other two stories I’ve been talking about.

The rapes that Marhuma almost experienced—because I think a cultural sense of propriety would have prevented Attar from writing such a story about a woman who’d actually been raped—are the physical embodiment of the metaphorical violations experienced by both Sam’an and the woman in love with the prince. If you take those narratives at face value, though, those violations seem less like actual assaults, literal or metaphorical, than a necessary condition for spiritual growth to take place. That framing—the rhetorical sleight-of-hand that turns penetration and even, given the right context, forced penetration into a good thing in and of itself—is what keeps the path to spiritual enlightenment, at least as defined in Attar’s version of Sufism, firmly anchored in a male defined and male dominant ethos. I have nothing to say about the degree to which that ethos shapes or otherwise informs the interior experience of the enlightenment spiritual seekers pursue. To the degree that mystical teaching of any sort is shaped and informed by that ethos, however, it is important to make visible the way those teachings perpetuate a gendered power structure that both those who teach and those who follow those teachings pretend not to see.