[SUFISM IN PERSIAN ART.] A CRITIC, writing of Persia and
her influence upon Islamic art, recently suggested that " few of us know anything about Sufism." He went on to express his gratitude to Edward Fitzgerald that most of us have been introduced, at least, to its atmosphere. About our ignorance. of Sufism he was right ; about Edward Fitzgerald entirely wrong. The popularity of Omar Khayyam in England has con.: tributed nothing whatever to introduce the ideas of the Sufis to the cultured public whose interest in Persia's Golden Age has this year been vastly stimulated.
Thanks to Fitzgerald, Omar Khayyam enjoys a celebrity in the West to which he never attained in his native land. There he is revered as a mathematician and astronomer who was also a minor poet. Nor was he a Sufi. Whereas the Sufi poets often hid the unorthodoxy of their mystical ideas under the language of the free-thinker and materialist, denoting the love of God by " wine " and His manifestations by " curls," Omar Khayyam was rejected by Sufis of his time as a genuine agnostic. When he said " wine," his contemporaries were convinced he meant it.
So much for Omar Khayyam. Sufism is another matter. It might well be described as the passion for beauty. Persian art, from the eleventh to the sixteenth century, is the fruit of a mystical religion. Where that religion came from, no one knows. The first Persian treatise on Sufism, written in the eleventh century, is uncertain as to the origin of the word, and its beginnings are lost in the mists of time. Grafted on the wild stock of Islam, it produced the Mystic Rose, " whose message is, like the perfume of the rose, for all the world : and whose philosophy of synthesis is the essence of the wisdom of the ages, so old that it runs the hazard of neglect."
Sufism burst upon the dour orthodoxy of the Moslem priests in Persia much as the Spirit of the Renaissance burst upon the Christianity of the Middle Ages. Through it, in Persia, as through the Renaissance in Italy, the national spirit came to flower ; a period in the dark earth and then fulfilment in the sun.
The artists themselves were not necessarily mystics, Their work breathes the spirit of the time, without which inspiration would have been lacking. Nor yet was Raphael a mystic, although the purity of his Madonnas and the calm depths of .his frescoes testify to the enlightened thinking of his age.
The creed of the Sufis is simple enough. Their backs were not turned to the wine of this world ; but, when they spoke of drinking, as often as not they referred to intoxication from an Olympian vintage of their own imagining. Material- ism alone never gave birth to art. In Sufism the central theme is still the One God of the Koran, but, in the Persian rose-garden, wondrously transformed. He has become beauty incarnate, striving through human eyes to feel the beauty of Himself. " Mark me, like the tulip, with Thine Own streaks ! " says the Sufi.
Beyond that there is a further stage—intoxication with the only real Being, involving loss of consciousness of self. Yet there is no pain in the loss, since that Being is the only, state of Reality. It is Beauty, Colour, Joy beyond compare. What a creed for the artist !
"His Beauty everywhere doth show itself,
And through the forms of earthly beauties shines."
So Jami sang in his I tisuf u Zuleykhd, and the rich colours of his verses fascinate us still.
MUMTAZ ARMSTRONG
(Editor of The Sufi Quarterly).
Previous page
