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Sa'di's Somnatiyah

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Th. Emil Homerin
Th. Emil Homerin*
Affiliation:
The Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, The University of Chicago
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Extract

[Sa'di] made the pilgrimage numerous times on foot, and he entered the temple at Somnāth and smashed their great idol.

- Jāmī, Nafaḥāt al-uns.

Sa'di's (d. 691/1292) encounter with the idol of Somnāth is among the most popular stories of his Būstān and frequently mentioned in biographies of him. Jāmī apparently believed the account, as have a number of scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, who nevertheless have expressed reservations and doubts regarding certain elements of the story, particularly Sa'di's “confused” allusions to different religious traditions. In E. G. Browne's words:

It is astonishing how little even well-educated Muslims know about other religions. Sa'di, for all his wide reading and extensive travels, cannot tell a story about a Hindoo idol-temple without mixing up with it references to Zoroastrian and even Christian observances.

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Articles
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Iranian Studies , Volume 16 , Issue 1-2 , Spring Winter 1983, pp. 31 - 50
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 1983

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References

Notes

I want to thank Dr. John Perry for proofreading the original draft and for offering valuable criticism and corrections, and I am especially grateful to Dr. Heshmat Moayyad, under whose advise and encouragement this paper was written.

1. Jāmī (1414-1492), Nafaḥāt al-uns min ḥaẓarāt al-quds, ed. Tauḥīdī-Pūr, Mahdī (Tehran: Kitāb Furūsh-i Sa'di, 1336/1957), pp. 600–601.Google Scholar A number of modern scholars have also confused Sa'di's adventure at Somnāth with that of Maḥmūd of Ghazna; Maḥmūd, not Sa'di, smashed an idol. E.g., Rypka, J., “Poets and Prose Writers of The Last Saljuq and Mongol Periods,” in The Cambridge History of Iran, ed. Boyle, J. A., 5 vols. (Cambridge: The University Press, 1968), 5:595Google Scholar (hereafter cited as “Poets”), and Ṣadr al-Dīn Maḥallātī Shīrāzī, Maktab-i ᶜirfān-i Saᶜdī (Shiraz: Dānishgāh-i Pahlavī, 1346/1967), Vol. 1, p. 52.Google Scholar

2. Among the best accounts and chronologies of Sa'di's life is ᶜAbbās Iqbāl, “Zamān-i tavallud va-avā'il-i zindagānā-yi Saᶜdī,” in Saᶜdī-nāmah, Muḥammad ᶜAlī Furūghī, et al. (Tehran: Chāp-ī Khūdkār, 1316/1937), pp. 627–645Google Scholar; many of Iqbāl's conclusions can be found in Boyle, J. A., “The Chronology of Saᶜdī's Years of Travel,” in Islamwissenshaftliche Abhandlungen: Fritz Meir, ed. Gramlich, Richard (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlug GmbH, 1974), pp. 1–8.Google Scholar Also see: Arberry, A. J., Classical Persian Literature (London: Allen & Unwin Co., 1958), pp. 186–213Google Scholar; Browne, E. G., A Literary History of Persia, 4 vols. (Cambridge: The University Press, 1956), 2:525–539Google Scholar; Kramers, J. and Haig, T. W., “Saᶜdī,” in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 1st ed. (Leiden: E. J. Brill & Co.), 4 vols., 4:36–39Google Scholar, and Massé, Henri Essai sur le poete Saadī (Paris: P. Geuthner, 1919).Google Scholar

3. Browne, 2:529-530. Also see: Ross, E. D., Saᶜdī: Gulistān or Flower Garden (London: W. Scott Co., 1890), p. 12Google Scholar, and Akhtar, Ahmedmian, “Saᶜdī's Visit to Somnāth,” in Islamic Culture, 8 (1934), pp. 212–221.Google Scholar Akhtar goes to great lengths to document factual parallels for each detail of the story. Concerning the mixing of religious terms, also see Muḥammad Muᶜīn, Mazdyasnā va-ta'thīriān dar adabīyāt-i Parsī (Tehran: Publications de l'université de Teheran, No. 9, 1326/1948), pp. 486–490Google Scholar (hereafter cited as Mazdyasnā), and below p. 10.

4. E.g., Kramers, 2:37; Arberry, pp. 190-194, and below.

5. Rypka in History of Iranian Literature, ed. Jahn, Karl (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Co., 1968), p. 250Google Scholar (hereafter cited as History). Rypka, on the basis of this story, asserts that Sa'di could not have gone to India, but that confuses the issue. That this adventure is only a tall tale does not allow us to conclude that Sa'di never went to India. See, Rypka, “Poets,” p. 595.

6. Levy, Reuben, Stories from The Būstān of Shaykh Saᶜdī (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1928?), p. xiv.Google Scholar

7. Wickens, G. M., The Gulistān or Rose Garden of Saᶜdī, introduction to Rehatsek's translation (London: Allen & Unwin, 1964), pp. 42–43Google Scholar (hereafter cited as Gulistān). Also see below pp. 5-6.

8. Wickens, Morals Pointed and Tales Adorned: The Būstān of Saᶜdī (Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 1974), p. xxiGoogle Scholar (hereafter cited as Bustān).

9. Yūsufī, Ghulām Ḥusayn, “Jahān-i maṭlūb-i Saᶜdī dar Būstān,” in Maqālātī dar bārah-'i zindagī va shiᶜr-i Saᶜdī, ed. Rastgār, Manṣūr (Shiraz: Shūra'i Intishārāt-i Dānishgāh-i Pahlavī, 1973), p. 425.Google Scholar

10. Boyle, pp. 6-7. Also see, Ansari, Ḥasan N., “Did Shaikh Sadi Visit India,” in the Journal of the Bihar Research Society, 59 (1973), pp. 173–186.Google Scholar

11. Rypka, “Poets,” p. 599, and History, p. 250. See also, Wickens, Būstān, pp. xx-xxi, and Arberry, pp. 195-196.

12. Rypka, History, pp. 86-89.

13. Wickens, Būstān, pp. xx-xxi.

14. Ḥarīrī, Fāris Ibrāhīmī, Maqāmah-navīsī dar adabīyāt-i Farsī (Tehran: Chāpkhānah-i Dānishgāh-i Tihrān, 1346/1967), pp. 146ff.Google Scholar For a comparison of various elements among these three authors see pp. 157-161. Also see Browne, 2:346-349 on Ḥamīdī.

15. Ibrāhīmī Ḥarīrī, pp. 401-446, esp. 429-430.

16. The meter of the Būstān is mutaqārib, about which see, Rypka, “Poets,” p. 599.

17. In his translation Ansari gives “lovers” yārān instead of “kings,” “rajahs,” rayān, based on Muḥammad ᶜAlī Furūghī's edition, Kullīyāt-i Saᶜdī (Tehran: Intishārāt-i Jāvīdan, 1342/1963), pp. 385–389.Google Scholar

18. Chigil--A city in Turkistan north of Samarqand, used to refer to Turcmen in general. See: Ḥudūd al-ᶜĀlām, trans. Minorsky, V. (London: Luzac & Co., 1937), pp. 98-99, 297-300.Google Scholar

19. This translation is based on the Persian edition of the Būstān by Nūr-Allāh Īrānparast (Tehran: Dānish Saᶜdī, 1352/1973), pp. 345-354. This story has been translated many times, and I have consulted a number of versions, including Wickens, Būstān, pp. 214-219.

20. Ibrāhīmī Ḥarīrī, p. 408. For a tale known to be fictitious, yet narrated by Sa'di in the first person, see Boyle, pp. 1, 4-5, who analyzes the chronology of Sa'di's account of events in Kāshghar in the year Sulṭan Muḥammad Khwārazm-Shāh made peace with Khitā. This story is in the fifth chapter of the Gulistān.

21. Beeston, A. F. L., “The Genesis of the Maqāmāt Genre,” in Journal of Arabic Literature, 2 (1971), pp. 1–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Al-Hamadhānī's narrator is ᶜIsā ibn Hishām and his hero Abū al-Fatḥ al-Iskandarī; for al-Ḥarīrī, it is al-Ḥārith ibn Hammām and Abū Zayd.

22. Ibrāhīmī Ḥarīrī, pp. 157-158, 408.

23. Arberry, pp. 195-196.

24. Wickens, Būstān, p. xxi, and Levy, p. xviii.

25. See Wickens, Būstān, p. xxiii. A good example of this use of the place name in a maqāmah is al-Ḥarīrī's Dimashqīyah whose story involves the pilgrimage to Mecca; the ḥajj caravans traditionally set out from Damascus. See al-Ḥarīrī, Maqāmāt (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir lil-Ṭibāᶜah waal-Nashr, 1965), pp. 101-111.

26. Al-Bīrūnī, (d. 1048), Tārīkh al-Hind, ed. Sachau, Edward (London: Trubner & Co., 1887), pp. 252–253.Google Scholar Tr. by Sachau in Alberuni's India, abridged ed. by Ainslie Embree (New York: The Norton Library, 1971), pp. 102-105. Concerning Maḥmūd's conquest, see Nāẓim, Muḥammad, The Life and Times of Sultan Maḥmūd of Ghazna (Cambridge: The University Press, 1931), pp. 115–120Google Scholar, 209-224, who also gives the authorities on the expedition; Falsafī, Naṣr Allāh, “Fatḥ-i Somanāt,” in Chand maqālahi tārīkhī va-adabī (Tehran: Dānishgāh-i Tihrān, 1342/1964), pp. 89–140Google Scholar, and Yūsufī, Ghulām Ḥusayn, Farrukhī Sīstānī (Meshed: Kitāb Furūsh-i Bāstān, 1341/1962), pp. 212-214.Google Scholar Also see al-Gardīzī, Zain al-akhbār, ed. Nāẓim, Muḥammad (Berlin: Orientalischer Zeitschriftenverlag Iranschähr, 1928), pp. 86–87Google Scholar; al-Athīr, Ibn, al-Kāmil fī al-tārīkh (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 1965-67), 13 vols., 9:342–346Google Scholar, and Khallikān, Ibn, Wafayāt al-aᶜyān, ed. Iḥsān ᶜAbbās (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 1968-72), 8 vols., 5:178–179.Google Scholar

27. Al-Gardīzī, pp. 86-87.

28. Farrukī, Dīvān, ed. Muḥammad Jabīr Siyāqī (Tehran: Chāp-i Sipihr, 1335/1956), pp. 69-71, 11. 1338ff.

29. Azār was the father of Abraham; Abraham opposed his idolatry. See Qur'ān, sūrah 6:75 and 21:51ff.

30. Farrukhī goes on to conjure an image of the idol quite different from al-Bīrūnī's description:

For the sake of that idol they built a temple with 100,000 images and 100,000 forms.

They used, for the sake of proximity [to it], from every direction sheet upon sheet of gold, like slab of stone, upon that house.

They made a treasury in the temple for the idol; in that treasury were large boxes of jewels.

They bought jewels for it in the cities so much that the jewel buyers were satiated from jewel sellers.

Upon the head of the idol an ornament was placed decorated with ruby and braided with pearls.

They made a helmet of smelted gold for it, like a mountain of fire and the jewel upon it like sparks.

Its tiara and crown were worth a state tax; the least thing was that tiara and crown.

Then they named it Somanāt.

Who has seen a title in which the name was hidden [i.e., Manāt]?

(Dīvān, p. 70, 11. 1346-1353)

Farrukhi mentions some beliefs and rituals involving the idol and then returns to the theme of Maḥmūd's conquest.

…The Lord had decreed that this religion-preserving king should uproot that idol from its place.

With the aim to take it back to Mecca, he uprooted it, and now side by side with us he is carrying it back.

When he destroyed the idol and took its possessions from that temple, with his own hand, he gutted the temple with fire.

The Brahmins whom he saw he decapitated; decapitation is best for those who had turned from guidance.

From the blood of the slaughtered, which ran from the temple to the sea, the water turned red like a tulip and like wild thyme, green.

He killed many of the idolaters and bound many as he had killed and captured from the garrisons of Kitr.

God knows how many people were in that place, all desirous of war and prepared.

Amidst the temple he stood and gripped the sword, like great Rustam in the field on the day of battle.

They were struck on the face and head with Turkish arrows, but no change came over their faces.

They were quick in war but in the end their lives were ended by the Sultan's arrow.

The monarch had two needs in the world: he asked these two as boons from God, the Judge.

One, to destroy the Hindus’ place of pilgrimage, the other, to make the Ḥajj and kiss the stone.

One of those two great goals he achieved, the other with the help of God, the Great, will be fulfilled….

(Dīvān, p. 71, 11. 1369-1381)

The different depictions of the idol, then, stem from different intentions. Al-Gardīzī and Farrukhī are less interested in recording events than in embellishing Maḥmūd's reputation and establishing his legitimacy to rule. Not only is he the holy warrior completing Muḥammad's task by destroying the last of the three major Arabian idols, but he is also the Turkish sultan, and the Persian heroic ideal, Rustam, and so embodies a number of kingship ideals. Concerning other aspects of Maḥmūd's attempts to gain legitimacy by propaganda see Yūsufī, pp. 214, 221-227. For an earlier Arabic parallel involving the caliph Muᶜtaṣim, see Suzanne Stetkevych, “The ᶜAbbāsid poet interprets history: three qaṣīdahs by Abū Tammām,” in the Journal of Arabic Literature, 10 (1979), pp. 49-64.

31. Browne, 2:347. Concerning stories and legends about Maḥmūd's expedition to Somnāth see Nāẓim, pp. 120-121 and 219-224.

32. See note 29. Sa'di may have had Farrukhī's qaṣīdah in mind when beginning his story. References to famous poems also occurred in maqāmāt, e.g., al-Hamadhānī's opening lines of the Shīrāzīyah which probably refer to ᶜAntara's muᶜallaqah; Maqāmāt, ed. Muḥammad ᶜAbduh, 2nd ed. (Beirut: al-Maṭbaᶜah al-Kāthōlīkīyah, 1924), pp. 176ff, and ᶜAntara, 1. 4.

33. The Pāzand is a commentary on the Zend, a Pahlavi commentary of the Zoroastrian Avesta. See Steingass, p. 230, and Darmesteter, James, The Zend Avesta (New York: The Christian Literature Co., 1898).Google Scholar

34. Sa'di also gives this advice with a similar image in his Gulistān, chapter 1, story #21.

35. For an Arabic example see al-Ḥarīrī's al-Ṭaibīyah, pp. 271-286. Al-Ḥamadhānī and al-Ḥarīrī also moralize at times: e.g., al-Ḥamadhānī's al-Qarīdīyah, p. 13, and al-Ḥarīrī's al-Ramlīyah, pp. 263-270.

36. See note 33.

37. Ibrāhīmī Ḥarīrī, pp. 157 and 402. For an Arabic example see al-Ḥarīrī's al-Iskandarīyah, pp. 76-85, esp. pp. 79-82.

38. See Muḥammad Muᶜīn, A Persian Dictionary (Tehran: Chāp va-Intishārāt-i ‘Amīr Kabīr, 1964), 6 vols., 2:1808.Google Scholar

39. Concerning the ṣuᶜlūk as the anti-hero see Stetkevych, Jaroslav, “The Arabic Lyrical Phenomenon in Context,” in the Journal of Arabic Literature, Vol. 1 (1975), p. 67.Google Scholar

40. A good Arabic example of the play on double meaning is the above-mentioned al-Ṭaibīyah of al-Ḥarīrī.

41. A similar image is used by Sa'di in the last story of chapter one in his Gulistan.

42. The Shāhnāma of Firdawsī, tr. Arthur George Warner and Edmond Warner (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1905-1925), 9 vols., 3:299ff, esp. 309-310.

43. See note 33.

44. The prophet David, according to Islamic tradition, had the ability to make iron soft in order to form mail. See Qur'ān, 34:10-11.

45. See Ibn Athīr, 9:345.

46. Akhtar, pp. 217-218.

47. Muᶜīn, Mazdyasnā, pp. 488-489, lists the causes for the ignorance he believed to be generally present among Muslims, concerning Zoroastrianism in particular. A. Bausani, however, does not think that “ignorance” can account for Sa'di's mixing of terms, owing to Sa'di's educational background and wide experience; see “La Letteratura Neopersiana,” in La Letteratura persiana (Milan: G. C. Sansoni, 1968), pp. 151–153.Google Scholar Wickens, Gulistān, pp. 42-43, points out that Sa'di in one tale (Gulistān, chapter 12, story 32) referred to Jews as “non-men.”

48. E.g., al-Ḥarīrī's al-Bakirīyah, pp. 369-382, esp. p. 382, and al-Ḥamadhānī's al-Ḅasrīyah, pp. 67-72, esp. pp. 7-72.