Sober in Mecca, Drunk in Byzantium: Antinomian Space in the Poetry of ʿAṭṭār

Abstract

AbstractThis paper investigates premodern conceptions of spaces of otherness, particularly within the context of Persian Sufi poetry. Abbasid-era travel literature describing monasteries, as well as real hostilities between Muslims and Christians, gave symbolic dimensions to spaces of antinomian activity in thirteenth-century eastern Iran. Making use of Edward Soja’s thirdspace, as well as Jorge Luis Borges’s the Aleph, this paper pays particular attention to the pseudo-hagiographical narrative of the “Shaykh of Ṣanʿān” in the poem Manṭiq al-Ṭayr (Speech of the Birds). In this account by the Persian poet Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār (d. 1221), Byzantium contrasts with the Kaʿba in Mecca, just as the wine-house, the Christian church, and the ruins contrast with normative spaces wherein expectations of decorum can lead to ostentatious and insincere modes of worship. By creating magical spaces of infidelity, spaces devoid of piety, ʿAṭṭār conveys themes of losing oneself to a carnal and ultimately divine Other.