The Many Colors of Love in Niẓāmī's 'Haft Paykar:' Beyond the Spectrum

Abstract

This article is a study of the many 'colors' of love in Niẓāmī Ganjavī's Haft paykar ( The Seven Figures ), with special attention paid to the (evidently) dichotomous poles of white (purity) and black (concupiscence). The argument is divided into four sections: after introducing the Haft paykar and summarizing some of the scholarship that has been done to crack the code of its color symbolism, I survey these thematic poles as they occur in several landmark medical, philosophical, and poetic texts of Islamic tradition. This provides the basis for an in-depth discussion of the Stories of the Black and White Domes in the Haft paykar , where I observe how the two episodes, when read from this context, seem to support a linear progression from 'black' love to 'white,' with the latter presumably marking the point of apotheosis. In the final section, however, I consider how the stories resist such a straightforward reading, and indeed recursively feed into each other in such a way to suggest that neither color of love can fully exist or function without the other. I propose that the contrast of white and black in the Haft paykar is not sufficiently read as a static dichotomy of symbols; it rather evokes a dynamic interplay of light and shadow that hints at a reality beyond the sum of its parts, a pre-prismatic totality of which all colors of love are merely those refractions visible to the naked eye.