SOURCE: "The Poet's Heart: A Polyfunctional Object in the Poetic System of the Ghazal," in Intoxication, Earthly and Heavenly: Seven Studies on the Poet Hafiz of Shiraz, edited by Michael Glunz and J. Christoph Burgel, Peter Lang, Inc., 1991, pp. 53-68.

[In the following essay, Glunz explores the many metaphorical meanings and functions Hafiz derives from the word "heart."]

Introductory remarks

When we look at the frequency-list of lexical items in Hafiz' divan¹ we find that the item 'dil' (heart) ranks 19^th in a field of 4810 items and is far ahead of any other noun. This alone would justify an inquiry into the special function or functions the heart fulfills in the type of poetry that has reached its perfection in the Diwan-i Hafiz, i.e. the ghazal.

For the purpose of our inquiry it would be enough to take examples from Hafiz only. I have, however, included examples taken from other poets writing either in Persian or Ottoman or Chaghatay Turkish. By doing so I wanted to illustrate my thesis that the ghazal in post-mongol Persian literature and in the literatures derived from it, is much more than just an outward form into which individual poets cast their own thoughts and feelings; it forms a whole system of poetic expression, it establishes a close-meshed network of interrelations, and it determines to a very large extent the kind of thoughts and feelings that can be conveyed through the medium of lyric poetry.

The poetic system of the ghazal can, in my opinion, be regarded as a superset of a number of subsets distributed on different hierarchical levels, with the individual poet's work on the lowest level, the abstract—or prototype—ghazal on the highest, and the Persian, Turkish, or Urdu ghazal or the ghazal of different periods and geographical regions on intermediate levels. There is a high degree of compatibility between these subsystems that allows us to take the ghazal poetry of post-mongol times on the whole as a macro-text into which individual poems and lines of poetry (bayts) are embedded.

1 The heart has two qualities that allow for its integration into the world view of medieval Islamic mysticism: on the one hand, it is a vessel, and on the other, it is regarded as the center of the human body. As a physical vessel it contains what is most precious for the body—its lifeblood. In analogy to the heart as a physical organ, mystical doctrine postulates a spiritual organ located at the core of man's spiritual being and containing the most precious content of all—the Self, Reality, the Godhead. The ultimate goal of the mystic path, therefore, lies not in the outside world but within man's own being, it is what is enclosed in the heart.

In a famous verse, Hafiz uses the image of the mythical Cup of Djamshid to express this notion:

Over years the heart demanded the Cup of Djamshid from us; what it possessed itself it demanded from a stranger.²

Another Persian poet, Khiyali of Bukhara, says:

As long as those who tread the path have not arrived at the sanctuary of the heart, they have not reached one station in the valley of the ultimate goal.³

Technically speaking, the poet in this line uses the figure mura 'at un-nazir; he does so by choosing the words 'haram' (sanctuary), 'manzil' (station), and 'wadi' (valley) from the vocabulary of the Islamic pilgrimage. But he also links the poetic element "heart" to the concept of the hadjdj which itself is used as an image for the mystic quest.

The analogy of the heart and the Kaaba is quite evident: the Kaaba is usually called "The House of God" and the heart can be said to be a vessel for the Deity. As an often cited hadith qudsi goes:

My heaven and my earth contain me not, but the heart of my faithful servant contains me.⁴

Islamic mystics, especially the school of Ibn 'Arabi, have established a fairly elaborate network of correspondences between the heart, the Kaaba, and various other elements of their mystical and cosmological doctrines. For the purpose of the present inquiry, however, there is no need to go deeper into that. We only have to note that the close connection between "heart" and "Kaaba" has made the expression 'ka 'ba-i dil' one of the stock-metaphors of Persian, Turkish, and Indian poets.

Gada'i, for example, who lived in the 15^th century in Central Asia and wrote in Chaghatay Turkish, says:

The Kaaba of my heart has been ruined by the plundering of your eyes; this kind of cruel injustice has never come from the hand of any infidel.⁵

He combines both the language of erotic poetry and the vocabulary of religion. Read as a line of love poetry the verse says: "My heart has been destroyed by the coquetry of your charming eyes; your behaviour towards me is most cruel." A mystical reading of the verse, on the other hand, would have to take into account that the word "eyes," too, has a corresponding element in the system of mystical doctrine which is, however, not mentioned here. If we look it up in one of the glossaries of mystical symbolism, we find:

Eraqi [i.e. Fakhr ud-Din-i 'Iraqi, d. 1289] states that the eye "is said to express the mystery of the Divine Vision" … Since the Divine Vision does things that are beyond our comprehension and the scope of our understanding, we are ruined by the eyes of the Beloved …⁶

Thus, a mystical interpretation of the verse would be: "The vessel of my real Self has been destroyed by the Divine Vision; Thou art indeed a powerful and cruel God."

The poet achieves a high degree of complexity in his poetic utterance by combining elements from different levels of language as well as from different conceptual systems. Apart from the two readings of this verse mentioned above—each of them integrating a number of semantic elements into a coherent structure—we find the previously mentioned figure 'mura 'at un-nazir' ("heart," "eyes," "hand") and the antithesis of "Islam" (represented by the Kaaba) vs. "heathendom."

Sayf-i Farghani, a poet of the 13^th century who had emigrated from Transoxania to Anatolia, uses the metaphor "Kaaba of the heart" in another way. He builds a dual structure contrasting the inner world of mystical experience, represented by the hearts of the mystical lovers, with the outside world of Islamic beliefs and observances, represented by the two cities of the Prophet of Islam, Mecca and Medina. The term "Kaaba" serves as a means to bridge the gap between the two domains.

Know that in the two worlds [i.e. our world and the hereafter] the Kaaba of the hearts of the lovers prides itself with [possession of] the Friend, like the Two Holy Cities with the Elected One [i.e. Muhammad].⁷

The dual metaphor "Kaaba of the heart" is not the only way of linking the heart to the hadjdj. Nedim (1681 - 1730), the famous poet of the "Tulip Age" of Ottoman culture, says:

Amongst (or: in the middle of) the pilgrims toward His quarter the heart is coming along like the lamp of the caravan, burning with desire.⁸

The heart has a somewhat ambiguous position in this verse: on the one hand it appears to be personified as one of the pilgrims that are drawn toward the Friend by their spiritual desire, and on the other hand it is compared to a burning lamp. We will have to explore both aspects.

Starting with the comparison between the heart and a lamp, we can consult 'Abd ar-Razzaq al-Qashani's glossary of mystical terms and find under the heading "heart":

The heart is a pure luminous essence.9

The author then draws our attention to the simile in sura 24,35 of the Koran which reads:

God is the Light of the heavens and the earth; the likeness of His Light is as a niche wherein is a lamp (the lamp in a glass, the glass as it were a glittering star) kindled from a Blessed Tree, an olive that is neither of the East nor of the West whose oil wellnigh would shine, even if no fire touched it; Light upon Light … ¹⁰

Khayali Bey (d. 1556), another Ottoman poet, uses "lamp" as a metaphor for "heart" and alludes to the same Koranic text; he does not mention the hadjdj, however. In a ghazal that describes the beauty of the beloved and the devotion of the lover, he says:

The more the tears of my eye flow the more intense is the burning within the heart, it seems as if the tears of my eyes were the oil of that lamp.¹¹

The poet establishes a causal nexus—which is empirically not tenable—between the shedding of tears and the burning of desire in the lover's heart by mapping the relationship between the elements "oil," "fire" (represented by "burning") and "lamp" to the elements "tears" and "heart" (containing "desire").

With "lamp" and "oil," however, the Verse of Light (Koran 24,35) is alluded to and thus the erotic level of meaning is linked to the mystical.

In a line by Qabuli, a Persian poet who was attached to the court of the Ottoman sultan Mehmet the Conqueror, this linkage is more obvious:

The blood of my liver burns in my heart like oil in a glass, for never would the lamp have brightness without oil.¹²

While Khayali Bey uses 'chiragh' and 'yagh' to denote "lamp" and "oil," Qabuli takes two of his words directly from the Koran: he uses 'zudjadj' for "glass" and 'siradj' for "lamp"; for "oil," on the other hand, he has the Persian 'rawghan'.

Qabuli's statement would make sense even if we were unaware of its reference to the Koran; we could just take it as a line of love poetry saying: pain (for which the blood of the liver stands metonymically) is the oil that makes the light of love shine brightly in the heart of the lover. By taking into account the sub-text provided by a mystical interpretation of Koran 24,35, we will not change its meaning, but rather deepen it and arrive at the insight that the heart of the mystical lover is the place where human suffering is transformed into the shining light of Divine love.

The examples we have examined so far show clearly that the semantic value of "heart" depends not only on the immediate context of the expression, verse, or poem it is found in, but also on various sub-texts provided by the semantic system of mystical doctrine ('irfan).

Seen from the point of view of semiotics, "heart" is a sign and as such belongs to a system of signs—or "semion-symbol system" to use a concept first introduced by Floyd Merell.

While it is very difficult, and in many cases even impossible, to connect elements of the semion-symbol system of ghazal poetry to external referents in the "world of objects, acts, and events,"¹³ it is quite easy to find referents in other semion-symbol systems. There are three such systems that are commonly used as systems of reference for ghazal poetry, namely mysticism ('irfan), love, and power/authority.¹⁴ Apart from topical references that may or may not be there in a given line of a ghazal, the meaning of the line in question, and probably that of the whole ghazal it is part of, is to a greater or lesser degree determined by one, two, or all of the three systems of reference. By providing sub-texts suitable for a broad variety of poetical utterances these systems of reference play an important role in the organization of the macro-text of ghazal poetry, and in the establishment of intertextual relationships.

The importance of mysticism as a system of reference for a single line and at the same time for the whole poem becomes obvious in an example taken from the divan of Na'ili-i qadim (d. 1666), the most prominent figure of the "Indian style" in Ottoman poetry. The opening line of ghazal 177 reads:

The heart who is an/the infidel in the monastery of 'alast' has gazed upon your beauty and become a worshipper of faces/outward appearances/icons.¹⁵

An erotic-anachreontic reading of this text would yield the meaning: the (personified) heart that rejects the formal prescripts of the Islamic religion and is a regular visitor of the Christian monastery—where among others wine is served or sold—has fallen in love at the sight of your (i.e. a boy's or girl's) beauty and is now devoted to the worship of your beatiful face. The word 'alast', however, leaves no doubt that we have to look for a mystical sub-text and and revise our first reading of the verse. The sub-text this word alludes to has at its core Koran 7,172:

And when thy Lord took from the Children of Adam, from their loins, their seed, and made them testify against themselves [saying], 'Am I not your Lord?' They said, 'Yes, we testify'—lest you should say on the Day of Resurrection, 'As for us, we were heedless of this,"¹⁶ …

God's question "Am I not your Lord?" (a-lastu birabbikum?) and the answer "Yes, we testify!" is known in Islamic mysticism as "the covenant of alast." The "monastery of alast" then has to be the place where that covenant was made and the "infidel" the person who rejected it. The consequence of his rejection is that he does not embrace monotheism but remains a worshipper of idols or icons (which are likely to be found in any Greek monastery).

But, if we take the person referred to by the "you" in "your beauty" as being God, then how can God's beauty be the cause for remaining a worshipper of idols? The answer to this may be found in a text that deals on one level of its meaning with the relationship between absolute or Divine beauty and its reflection in the created world. This text is Djami's mathnawi Yusuf u Zulaikha. In Djami's version of the story, Zulaykha, the allegory of the human soul, falls in love with Yusuf, the allegory of Divine beauty. Her infatuation with Yusuf, however, keeps her for a very long time from converting to monotheism until, after a period of intense suffering, towards the end of her life she smashes her idol—a statue made of stone—and prays to the one and only God, whereupon she finally attains union with her beloved.

Zulaikha's inability to proceed from the reflection of God's beauty in the phenomenal world, to the true origin of all beauty, keeps her entangled in this world with all its deceptions, disappointments, and sufferings. The same thing happens to the heart in the opening line of Naili's ghazal. And in the same ghazal the poet says:

In this place of attachment [to earthly things] which is full of snares, the royal falcon of [our spiritual] existence remains tied by the legs in spite of his hope for release.¹⁷

To close this part of our inquiry I would like to quote Halûk Ipekten's characterization of Na'ili's poetry, since to my mind, it is also valid for many—but not all!—of the other ghazal poets:

"… for a great number of his verses it is impossible to find a meaning at first sight; only after having been explained in terms of mystical thinking do they make sense."¹⁸

2 As a system of signs, ghazal poetry is defined not only by its relationships to the outside world or other systems of signs its elements and structures might refer to, but also, and even more so, by its internal organization. The ghazal is a world of its own, governed by the laws of language and poetical imagination. Seen from the viewpoint of logic, poetical statements are in many, if not most, cases neither valid, nor consistent, nor sound; a statement like the line by Qabuli cited above is, when taken as a non-poetic statement, sheer nonsense, or, if judged morally, a lie.

Our analysis should, however, not stop there. In order to describe the internal organization of ghazal poetry as a system, we have to examine the rules that make statements poetically valid, consistent, and sound, even if they appear to be nonsensical in terms of ordinary reason. One of the basic rules of poetical logic—as opposed to normal logic—allows statements of the type "A is B" to be true in cases where A and B only have one thing in common, but are neither the same nor does B include A (as in "a lion is an animal").

Of the different ways this equation can be formulated in the ghazal we will consider two, with "heart" in the place of A. The first way is the explicit statement "the heart is B" or the corresponding i afat-construct 'B-i dil'. This equation allows the poet to introduce A ("heart") into a context where it would not occur normally and to combine elements in ways not admissible or trivial under normal circumstances. How would we, for instance, combine "heart," "sugar," and "air" in a normal sentence? We could, maybe, say: "My heart rejoices when I throw sugar into the air." This and most of the other sentences we could form would be rather trival, if not ridiculous. But, speaking as a poet, Hafiz can say:

Hold my heart (A) in esteem! For this is the fly (B) that flies to the sugar. Ever since it has begun to soar in the air of (or: long for) you [who are sweet as sugar] it has the charisma of [the mythical bird] Huma.¹⁹

By embedding "heart" into a new and unusual context, the poet's imagination transforms what is normally considered to be a part of man's physical or spiritual organism into a new and different entity. The semantic category this new entity belongs to, is determined by the semantic value of B. As the scope of this paper does not allow an enumeration of all the occurences of such categories in ghazal poetry, I will select only a few in order to demonstrate this process of transformation.

In the line by Hafiz we just quoted, B belongs to the category of animate beings that have wings and can fly. In another poem Hafiz says:

How could I unfold my wings in the air of union when the bird (B) of my heart (A) has lost its feathers in the nest of separation.²⁰

Birds such as the nightingale²¹ or the falcon²² are most probably equated with the heart because birds are traditional and very old symbols for the human soul.

Among the categories of inanimate objects, there is the category of vessels, comprising elements such as cups, glasses, bottles, houses etc., which is chosen for obvious reasons (cf. part 1 of this paper). A category closely related to this is the category of objects with a flat and polished surface such as a slate of marble or a mirror. In the system of 'irfan, the mirror is a symbol for man's ability to reflect the Divine Beauty and as such it is very often identified with the mirror of Alexander and is akin to the Cup of Djamshid.²³

Even if the body would turn into ashes, the secrets of your tresses would remain hidden in the mirror (B) of the heart (A) like the luster [of its polished surface].²⁴

A quite different category is that of topographical structures such as landscapes, the sea, or a city:

The affliction you cause me (lit.: your affliction) is a palm-tree that grows anew whenever I, who have no heart, pluck it out of the river-bank (B) of the heart (A).²⁵

Does it appear as strange when we become upset by our continuous sighing? With the strength of the wind (lit.: breath) the deep sea (B) of the heart (A) becomes wildly agitated.²⁶

In order to burn my existence, love has thrown fire into the city (B) of the heart (A).²⁷

It is not quite clear why the category of topographical structures is selected; a probable reason could be that the concept of physical space is used as a metaphor for inner (i.e. psychological or spiritual) space associated with the heart.

Such metaphors put "heart" into contexts where it does not occur in normal language—or we could also say: where it does not belong to—; their effect is to objectify the heart, to separate it from the human body and the person that owns it. The heart as an object of the world of the ghazal enjoys great autonomy. As a result of the process of personification, it is transformed into an independent figure, one of the actors on the stage of the ghazal's drama.

Personification can be achieved by using the equation "A is B," with the heart as A and a human being as B, as is the case in Na'ili 177, 1. In most cases, however, this equation is not made explicitly by saying "the heart is B" or by using the expression 'B-i dil,' but implicitly.

Implicit personification can be achieved in two different ways: either by referring to the heart in the 2^nd person or in the 3^rd. Where the heart is referred to in the 2^nd person, we usually find the vocative 'ay dil' or 'dila' (oh, heart!), as for instance in:

The path of love is filled with turmoil and trouble, oh heart, anyone who proceeds on this road in a hurry will fall down!²⁸

As the receiver of the message sent by the speaker (the lyrical I) of the ghazal, the heart occupies the place that is normally attributed to the listener. The listener on the other hand assumes the role of an audience that follows the dialogues of a play. In an example such as the following, also taken from Hafiz, we can very well imagine a stage where the main actor turns away from the person he has been speaking to and addresses the audience:

The crazy heart has stopped listening to good advice, maybe I should put it in chains [made] from the tips of [the beloved's] curls.²⁹

The role the speaker usually plays is that of a man well versed in the art of love and knowing all its secrets and dangers, or a wise man detached from all its troubles and turmoils, whereas the heart appears as a person driven by his desires, defying reason and well-meant advice, unaware of or indifferent to mortal danger. In the drama of love the heart most often ends up a captive in the "dungeon of the beloved's dimple," entagled in his black curls, or exiled in the "China of his tresses" (chin-i zulf-i U).³⁰ The speaker warns it, not to set out on the dangerous path of love, but the heart does not pay heed and runs away. That is why the lover (the original owner of the heart) in the ghazal calls himself "heartless" or "the man without a heart" (bidil).

While the "heartless" lover has to exist as a being deprived of one of its vital organs, the heart—as an independent and autonomous inhabitant of the world of the ghazal—has won a body and organs of its own. This transformation of the heart into an imaginary entity—be it a pseudo-human figure, an animal, a plant, or some inanimate object—ss one of the numerous transformational processes that are essential to the creation of a ghazal's inner world. What is true or false in that world cannot be determined by the laws of common logic but by the rules of poetry alone. Once transformed by application of the formula 'A (in our case: the heart) is B', A acquires all the properties of B and whatever holds true for B, does so for A as well. Thus, if B is a human person and if it is true that a human person has eyes, hands, feet, a liver etc., it is poetically valid to speak of "the eyes/hands/feet/liver … of the heart" and there is no need to look for anything in the outside world to which an expression such as "the liver of the heart" might refer.

3 The semantic structure of the poetic system of the ghazal is—by its very nature as a structure—determined by its syntagmatic and paradigmatic relationships. In order to create a line of ghazal poetry we have to select elements from certain repertories (in the paradigmatic dimension) and combine them (in the syntagmatic dimension) in a well-formed statement.

The global repertory from which selections can be made is not a simple list or set of elements, but rather a complex structure. Its elements are divided into a number of sub-repertories and a great variety of categories, and linked to other elements on different levels and in different parts of the whole.

Certain elements are linked together to form—more or less independent and complete—fields of meaning. We can call these frames. There is, for example the frame 'bazm' (banquet) with its actors (host, guests, cup-bearer, musicians, dancers etc.), food (meat, sweetmeats, fruit), drink (wine), utensils (musical instruments such as the lute, the drum, the flute etc., the censer and incense, bottles with rose-water …), and emotional content (joy, gaiety). Or the frame "garden" with flowers (rose, lily, violet, narcissus …), birds (nightingale, crow), winds (morning wind, zephyr, storm), seasons (spring, autumn, and winter; rarely summer), the gardener, and so on.

For a line of ghazal poetry to be successful it sometimes is enough just to take one of these frames out of the repertory and combine its elements in a way that fits the metre of the poem and produces a pleasant melody of speech.

In most cases, however, elements of a given frame are combined with elements that do not belong to that frame, by way of metaphorical embedding.

In the following line by Manuchihri the main elements of the "banquet"-frame are simply enumerated:

At the banquet (A) of free men you need three things and not more: wine (B), the rebab (C) and roast meat (D).³¹

Helaki, an Ottoman poet of the 10^th/16^th century, takes this line and combines it with the "torments of love"- frame:

My tears(B') are the wine (B) and my crying (C') the rebab (C) and the liver (D') is the roast meat (D); at the banquet of grief (A') this kind of joy and pleasure (A) is enough for me.³²

The "torment of love"-frame is composed of the categories "pain" (suffering, despair), "cause of pain" (love, separation), "organs afflicted by pain" (body, breast, eyes, heart, liver), and "effects of pain" (wounds, sighs, tears, blood).

When the two frames "torment of love" (frame t) and "banquet" (frame b) are combined with each other, the pairing of elements is not rigidly fixed, and any element of t can be paired with any element of b provided they are poetically equivalent.

Strike the lute and play; if there is no aloe-wood, don't complain! Take as my fire (A) love (A'), my heart (B') as the aloe-wood (B), and my body (C') as the censer (C)!³³

Since my liver (D') has been roasted (meat, D) by the fire (A) of separation (A') from that idol, my eye (E') has become a goblet (E) filled with wine (F) from the blood (F') of my heart (no correspon-ding element in this verse).³⁴

The three elements "eye," "heart," and "liver" of frame t are very closely connected because the three of them are vessels containing fluids (water and/or blood). When one of them occurs in a verse, it is highly probable that the two others, or at least one of them will also occur, regardless of any other frames involved.

Do not, like the torrent of tears, run out of the eye, for you have filled my heart with blood, oh you, who are my heart, lungs and liver (djigar-band)!³⁵

It is up to the poet to decide if he wants to use only one frame, or two; or even more of them. 'Amri, for instance, combines the three frames "torment of love," "garden," and "banquet":

Since your eye has thrown fire (A) from the face of the rose (A') into my heart, the nightingale (B') of the heart (B") has been roasted and grilled (meat, B) by pain (A").³⁶

Bidil combines the "torment of love," "banquet," and "craziness" frames; the following rather complicated statement is easier to understand when we are aware of this fact:

When does the bottle (A) cross the cup (B) without the (wine C, substituted by:) blood (C') of the liver (A')? My amazement-stricken eye (A') is the blister (A") of the foot of the heart (B').³⁷

In the second hemistich the heart is personified as a madman who roams the desert and whose feet develop blisters. The blister filled with water and blood resembles the eye of the crazy lover and the eye resembles the bottle filled with wine which is analogous to the blood of the liver. The first hemistich appears to be coherent: whenever the bottle crosses the rim of the cup in order to fill it, wine gushes forth and this wine looks like the blood of the liver flooding the lover's heart. In the second hemistich there is a dissociation between the speaker (the poetical I) and the heart, both of which are characterized as madmen or crazy lovers. What brings them together again is the resemblance between the stuporous eye of the one and the blister of the foot of the other, as well as the formal link of an antithesis between "up" (the eye as a part of the head) and "down" (the foot). What makes the whole verse somehow awkward is the lack of symmetry between the two hemistichs; they seem to be connected only by the analogies between "blister," "eye," and "bottle" on the one hand, and "cup" and "heart" on the other hand.

Conclusion

As an element in the poetic system of the ghazal, "heart" performs different functions on different levels of the text.

On the level of textual reference, it serves as a link between the fundamental domains of reference of the ghazal. The heart, which occupies prominent places in both the psycho-physiology of earthly love and the doctrine of man's spiritual existence, is located at one of the nodes that bind together the conceptual networks of erotic and mystical discourse. At such nodes in the text of the ghazal, transitions from one network to the other could quite easily take place, and in the process of decoding the text, one should always consider the possibility of shifts in the domain of reference or intertextual references.

On another level of the text, on the "stage" where its drama is enacted and stories are told, the heart is separated from the physical body it would belong to; it undergoes various transformations and appears in the form of animate as well as inanimate beings. Its main function on this level, however, is that of an independent actor in the play of love and longing, and in most cases it appears as a double of the poetical I of the poem.³⁸

On a third level of the text, the semantic structure of its individual lines (bayts), the element "heart" can be described as one of the items that are bound together by pre-determined semantic frames. Its functions in the structure of the micro-text of the bayt are dependent on the overall functions of the given frame. In cases where a certain frame is selected from the global repertory to be combined with one or more other frames, its individual items enter into two-, or three-place relations with corresponding items of the other frame(s).

Notes

¹ Daniela Meneghini Correale, The Ghazals of Hafez—Concordance and Vocabulary, Roma: Cultural Institute of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Italy, 1988, p. 847.

² KH 136,1; all translations, unless indicated otherwise, are my own.

³Diwan-i Khiyali-i Bukharayi, ed. 'A. Dawlatabadi, Tabriz: Danishkada-i Adabiyat wa 'Ulum-i Insani, 1973, 200, 1.

⁴ Javad Nurbakhsh, Traditions of the Prophet, New York: Khaniqahi-Nimatullahi Publications, 1981, p. 25.

⁵The Divan of Gada 'i, ed. Janos Eckmann, Blooming-ton: Indiana University; The Hague: Mouton, 1971 (Latin script & facsimile of the MS), 181, 5.

⁶ Javad Nurbakhsh, What the Sufis Say, New York: Khaniqahi-Nimatullahi Publications, 1980, p. 68.

⁷Diwan-i Sayf ud-Din Muhammad-i Farghani, ed. Dhabihullah-i Safa, Tehran: Danishgah, 1962, 55,9.

⁸Nedim Diwani, ed. Khalil Nihad, Istanbul 1919-21 (Arabic script), p. 144, bayt 13.

⁹ Kamal ad-Din 'Abd ar-Razzaq al-Qashani, Istilahat as-sufiya, Cairo: al-Hay'a al-Misriya al-'Amma li-l-Kitab, 1981, p. 145.

¹⁰ Trl. taken from Arberry, The Koran Interpreted, London: Oxford University Press, 1964, pp. 356f.

¹¹Hayâlî Bey Dîvâni, ed. A. Nihat Tarlan, Istanbul: Universite, 1945 (Latin script), p. 190, no. 137,2.

¹²Külliyyât-i Dîvân-i Kabulî, ed. I.H. Ertaylan, Istanbul: Universite, 1948 (Facsimile of the MS), p. 254, bayt 2.

¹³ Floyd Merell, A Semiotic Theory of Texts, Berlin etc.: Mouton de Gruyter, 1985, p. 27.

¹⁴ Cf. Walter C. Andrews, Poetry's Voice, Society's Song—Ottoman Lyric Poetry, Seattle, London: University of Washington Press, 1985, chapters 4-6.

¹⁵Nâ' ilî-i Kadîm Divâni, ed. H. Ipekten, Istanbul: Milli E itim Basimevi, s.d. (Latin script), 177,1.

¹⁶ Arberry, The Koran …, p. 164; Arberry's expression "touching themselves" has been replaced by "against themselves".

¹⁷ Na'ili 177,6.

¹⁸ Halûk pekten, "Gazel erhi Örnekleri II," in: Türk Dili No.s 415-17, 1986, p. 276.

¹⁹ KH 119,4.

²⁰ KH 291,5.

²¹ Eg. Nedim p. 134, bayt 14.

²² Eg. Khiyali 176,1.

²³ Cf. KH 136,1, cited above.

²⁴ Nedim, p. 138, bayt 1.

²⁵ Khiyali 245,3.

²⁶ Na'ili 132,3.

²⁷ Amrî, Dîvan, ed. M. Çavusosslu, Istanbul: Üniversite, 1979 (Latin script), 45,2, 1^st hemistich.

²⁸ KH 216,4.

²⁹ KH 339,2.

³⁰ E.g. KH 187,4; 'chin-i zulf normally means "the folds of the tresses," but the context of the verse requires the reading "China" for 'chin'; the figure is called 'iham' (amphiboly).

³¹Diwan-i Manuchihri-i Damghani, ed. Muhammad-i Dabir-i Siyaqi, p.7.

³² Helâkî, Dîvan, ed. M. Çavu o lu, Istanbul: Üniversite, 1982 (Latin script), 41,2.

³³ KH 252,4.

³⁴ Qabuli p. 265, apu.

³⁵ Khiyali 191,4.

³⁶ 'Amri 44,3.

³⁷Diwan-i Mawlana 'Abd ul-Qadir-i Bidil-i Dihlawi, ed. Kh. Khalili, Kabul: Da Pohanai Wizarat, 1962 (Reprint Tehran: Nashr-i Bayn ul-Milal, 1984, vol. 1, p. 306, bayt 14.

³⁸ Cf. also Michael Glunz, "Dichter und dichterisches 'ich' bei Qabuli," in: XXIV. Deutscher Orientalistentag—Ausgewählte Vortrdäge, Stuttgart: Steiner, pp. 205-210.