Intertexts and Authorial Voice

The verse interludes in historical chronicles are a useful comparand to the Khatāynāmeh. Soundings of historical chronicles show variety and clear intentionality in their authors’ approaches. For example, in the first volume of the Habib al-Seyar, which discusses the creation and pre-history of humanity, the verses cited are generally from canonical authors such as Ferdowsi and Nezāmi, whereas in the fourth and last volume, which discusses recent events and contemporary personalities, the verse citations are never from such canonical authors—they may be Khvāndamir’s own. Other histories, such as Sharaf al-Din ᶜAli Yazdi’s Zafarnāmeh, the Tārikh-e Pasandideh (an abridgment of Yazdi’s Zafarnāmeh), and Fazlollāh Ruzbehān Khonji Esfahāni’s Tārikh-e ᶜAlam-Ārā-ye Amini, have many verses that seem to be largely the authors’ own compositions. A survey of verse citations in enshā manuals would also be of value. The Enshā-ye ᶜAlām-ārā, a Nurbakhshi epistolary manual produced in Isfahan during the reign of Shah Tahmasb (r. 1524‒76), mostly contains verses by the author or his contemporaries, but also includes citations of Hāfez, Anvari, Khayyām, Rumi, Nezāmi, and occasionally Jāmi, and two folios that conclude the extant manuscript contain verses by “various poets including Shāh Neᶜmat-Allāh Vali, Showkat Bokhārā’i, and Imam ᶜAli b. Abu Tāleb.”Footnote ¹⁵

While the epic poetry of Nezāmi and Ferdowsi was often cited in chronicles, Khatāyi tended to cite gnostic poetry: most of his citations are from a few masnavis that address a collection of basic doctrinal, spiritual, or ethical questions. Shabestari’s Golshan-e Rāz was ostensibly written for Sufi novices and used as a handbook.Footnote ¹⁶ The Kanz al-Haqāyeq, which he cites more than any other text (25‒6, 28, 79, 101, 112, 120, 123), is written in very simple language and combines an “Islamic catechism” with a series of chapters on the End Time.Footnote ¹⁷ The Kanz has content similar to fotovvatnāmeh’s; its chapters include “praise of God,” praise of Muhammad, “praise of commander of the faithful, ᶜAli,” “on the truth of Islam, truth, purity, prayer, almsgiving, fasting, pilgrimage, the world and its meaning, several sections on the lower soul (nafs), Satan and Moses’ debate with him, “the world as prison for the believer,” heaven and hell, the Dajjāl (Antichrist), several sections on the Mahdi, the “balance” (mizān), the Resurrection (qiyām-e qiyāmat), “the path” (sirat), “the gathering” (nashr) (an eschatological Qur’anic term), and “evil deeds” (jazā-ye ᶜamal).Footnote ¹⁸ ᶜAttār’s Elāhināmeh is a much longer work, didactic in a similar way, organized within a frame tale of six princes who each tell their father the one thing in the world they most want; the father then explains why each of these things is unnecessary.Footnote ¹⁹ Other intertexts include ᶜAttār’s Manteq al-Tayr (44, 46), Rumi’s Mathnavi (45), a ghazal of Salmān Sāvaji attributed to ᶜErāqi (88), and Amir Khosrow’s Daryā-ye Abrār (87), as well as unattributed couplets scattered throughout the text. Khatāyi’s other citations and his own verses are also, as a rule, of an ᶜerfāni (gnostic) and didactic character. His citations of these texts are well-tailored to their contexts and often convey precise meanings. So, he must have had a substantial knowledge of gnostic literature.Footnote ²⁰

This knowledge is consistent with his having modest origins. As a merchant, he probably attended primary school and may also have attended poetic gatherings at mosques or Sufi lodges. He was, like many contemporaries, aware of courtly and academic culture.Footnote ²¹ By the fifteenth century, what could be called “courtly” Persian poetry had “spread throughout all the urban classes of society, from wealthy merchants to lowly craftsmen,” and a number of poets came from non-elite backgrounds.Footnote ²² Limited formal education would have exposed him to some akhlāq and advice literature, such as the Qābusnāmeh. He likely also witnessed storytelling (qesseh-khvāni), which was not only a source of entertainment, but a vector for political propaganda including Shāh Esmāᶜil’s poetry.Footnote ²³

His choice of citations thus aligns him with Sufi gnosticism (ᶜerfān) and with fotovvat—which is both a discourse of ethics that cut across lines of social class, and a tradition of urban mobilization that served as the public face of SufismFootnote ²⁴—and together with his relatively simple, even awkward syntax, renders his authorial voice pointedly un-courtly and un-erudite, connecting him to critics of Ottoman imperiality. At the same time, the Akbarian theories—especially the concept of the Axis Mundi (qotb)—expressed by Shabestari, and in the Kanz,Footnote ²⁵ justified and were associated with ideologies of messianic kingship that had originated with figures such as Mohammad Nurbakhsh, whose intellectual influence extended through Lāhiji, the most famous commentator on Shabestari, and via Nurbakhshi disciple Hosām al-Din ᶜAli to his son, Edris Bedlisi, court historian of Selim I.Footnote ²⁶ Such Akbarian theories would soon become cornerstones of Ottoman imperial ideology, symbolized by the “Noᶜmānian Tree” attributed to Ibn ᶜArabī—literally enshrined by Selim through renovation of his tomb after the conquest of Damascus.Footnote ²⁷ Messianic kingship, as exemplified some decades later by Akbar I, exalted the saint-king as having a personal, intuitive connection to the divine—tantamount to divine status—that transcended sectarian divisions.Footnote ²⁸

But certain elements of Khatāyi’s message are inconsistent with his authorial voice. A major site of contention around the turn of the tenth/sixteenth century especially relevant to the content of the Khatāynāmeh were Ottoman policies of fiscal and political centralization. Late in his reign, Mehmed confiscated waqf revenues from, and otherwise marginalized the descendants of dervishes who had played an important part in the frontier warfare (ghazā) through which the early Ottoman polity was built; by the late ninth/fifteenth century, these dervishes were being supplanted by madrasa-trained ulama.Footnote ²⁹ Dervishes’ views are reflected in anonymous historical texts that portrayed Ottoman rulers as abandoning the simplicity and purity of the early ghāzi days for the corrupt, sophisticated practices of Persian ulama. A common motif in such texts was the figure of Solomon.Footnote ³⁰ His building an idolatrous temple for his beloved Belqis, among other features of his legend, made references to him an implicit indictment of Ottoman imperial ambitions. Such critiques continued to shape the contours of debate over Ottoman policies in the tenth/sixteenth century. Policies that strengthened the central government were cast as tyrannical. For Khatāyi to speak (deliberately or not) in such an un-erudite, gnosticism-inflected voice, comparing Chinese imperial authority to Solomon, Jamshid, and even Shaddād, while acclaiming the authority of Chinese law over the emperors, was thus to speak with the voice of critics of Ottoman policies of bureaucratization and centralization. At the same time, he praised Chinese fiscal and political centralization that in the Ottoman context were targets of criticism (75‒97).

Book of China as Apocalyptic Treasure

Khatāyi’s deployment of the Kanz al-Haqāyeq as the portal text for his own book corresponds rather neatly to Kenneth Burke’s theory of rhetoric as identification—as striving to “identify” rhetor with audience, to make them “consubstantial.”Footnote ³¹ The preface of the Khatāynāmeh consists in large part of lengthy citations of the Kanz, in positions in Khatāyi’s text that exactly match their places in the original text. So, the first line of the Khatāynāmeh quotes the Qur’an, and introduces the Kanz as the work of Mahmud Shabestari. Following the first line are the second through sixth couplets of the Kanz, which praise God. These are followed by additional couplets from the section in praise of Muhammad. Later citations of the Kanz are generally, though not without exception, presented in the same order that they occur in the original text, as if Khatāyi were leafing through the Kanz while he wrote. While the Elāhināmeh lacks a clearly defined mid-point, the two long citations from that text are also positioned roughly corresponding to their original locations—near the middle and near the end. The Khatāynāmeh begins:

Since this citation comprises the second through sixth out of sixteen couplets of the Kanz, the two texts are largely consubstantial up to this point, differing by only one line. After skipping eight lines in which Puryā-ye Vali expresses that he is uninterested in “the misguided man,”Footnote ³⁵ Khatāyi picks up again at the beginning of the section on praise of Muhammad. Here, the last four (of eleven) couplets do not correspond to published versions of the Kanz and may represent a different version.

Khatāyi’s text then merges with the Kanz again, a citation that concludes with a different, dialectical formulation of the relationship between haqiqat, tariqat, and sharᶜiat:

Khatāyi has thus identified his own book with the Kanz, but has excluded the disavowal of interest in the affairs of “the misguided man,” something which Khatāyi pointedly is interested in—as the political culture of China is portrayed as disconnected from divine guidance.

After encomia to Selim and Süleyman (the latter likely added by a copyist)Footnote ³⁶ (26‒7), the last lengthy verse citation in the preface is again from the Kanz, and praises humanity in very strong, universal terms. The verse’s narrative is about the legendary grail of Jamshid (jām-e jam), a cup the mythic ruler Jamshid could gaze into and see anything he wanted; this grail was an important Sufi symbol.Footnote ³⁷ For Khatāyi’s near-contemporary ᶜAbd al-Rahmān Jāmi (d. 898/1492) and for other Sufis, these themes were closely related to the Akbarian notion of the “Fully Human” or “Perfect Man” (ensān-e kāmel).Footnote ³⁸ The grail is discussed by various experts and revealed to be “nothing other than a knowing soul (nafs-e dānā)” (28). The verse continues: “When a person (ensān) brightens their dark soul / it immediately reveals the horizons. When a person is perfected in their soul / (s)he encompasses all existents (shavad bar koll-e mowjudāt shāmel).”Footnote ³⁹ Khatāyi’s citation carries this humanism even further than the original text. He concludes thus: “The sons of Adam are a very noble lot / noble and subtle and fine.” The next line of the Kanz, which he omits, differentiates the “sons of Adam” from “[just] any base person” (har khasisi); Khatāyi’s citation is thus even more strongly universalistic than the original text.Footnote ⁴⁰ In the “conservative” translation, the last line in his citation is omitted, reversing his modification by repeating the same move.Footnote ⁴¹ Khatāyi’s emphasis on Adam here, and especially his claim that the Chinese are descended from Cain (144, 169)—which implicitly emphasizes Adam as the origin of universal human virtue—may have been seen as resembling Horufi and Noqtavi doctrines, which gave great importance to Adam.Footnote ⁴² Horufi thought circulated throughout the Persianate world and was especially embraced by the Bektaşi dervish order that coalesced in the early tenth/sixteenth century, and was closely associated with the Janissaries.Footnote ⁴³

While Khatāyi attributes authorship of the Kanz to Shabestari, it was in fact most likely written by Pahlavān Mahmud Puryā-ye Vali (d. 722/1322‒23), a wrestler-turned-saint celebrated in fotovvat circles. Fotovvat, a tradition of spiritual chivalry and urban mobilization that was prevalent throughout the Persianate world, was historically connected with Sufism and ghazā. Footnote ⁴⁴ The Kanz is attributed to Pahlavān Mahmud in the Kashf al-Zonun and in the Majāles al-ᶜOshshāq, a history of saints and kings produced in late ninth/fifteenth-century Herat which devotes a sizeable chapter to him.Footnote ⁴⁵ Several manuscripts of the Kanz attribute it to ᶜAttār; the attribution to Shabestari occurs in other manuscripts and in later print and lithograph editions.Footnote ⁴⁶ Pahlavān Mahmud was not an obscure figure, but details of his biography are nebulous. The Rawzāt al-Jenān implicitly identifies him as a Malāmati.Footnote ⁴⁷ Mausoleums of Pahlavān Mahmud now exist in Khiva and Khuy—a city which Khatāyi likely passed through on his way from Tabriz to Istanbul.Footnote ⁴⁸ If the gravesite in Khuy was a Safavid-era fabrication, that act nonetheless suggests he had been famous for some time.

To attribute the Kanz to Shabestari was not to dissociate it from fotovvat which, in the understanding of major Sufi figures in this period, functioned as the popular face of Sufism.Footnote ⁴⁹ Though the Kanz was not explicitly labelled a fotovvatnāmeh, its contents resembled Sufi fotovvatnāmehs, which provided an analysis of fotovvat doctrine as a facet of Sufism, and discussed virtues such as generosity and modesty.Footnote ⁵⁰ Fotovvat addressed city-dwellers of all social classes, but especially concerned practitioners of trades. The early tenth/sixteenth-century Fotovvatnāmeh-ye Soltāni, attributed to the prolific intellectual, Hosayn Vāᶜez-e Kāshefi, addressed a seemingly exhaustive range of urban professions including street performers.Footnote ⁵¹ Many briefer fotovvatnāmehs addressed practitioners of one particular trade.Footnote ⁵² Vāᶜez-e Kāshefi, and others articulated the spiritual genealogy of different trades, tracing their rituals and techniques back to Adam through Seth—bearer of divine deputyship and thus antithesis of Cain.Footnote ⁵³ The Kanz’s association with the figure of Pahlavān Mahmud would further ensure that readers associated it with fotovvat regardless of Khatāyi’s intent—not to mention that the verses he cites evoke clash and struggle: “the shariᶜat a solid redoubt, the tariqat an entry into it,” “haqiqat … like a fire between flint and steel.” This theme, though common in Sufi writings, is redolent of the venerable connection of Sufism with ghazā and fotovvat.

Fotovvat functioned as a political discourse in Khatāyi’s time, as Shāh Esmāᶜil would call on “heroes and braves” (akhi) to support him.Footnote ⁵⁴ The political role of such organizations in the eighth/fourteenth century, when Akhis and craftsmen known as Sarbedārs helped found a short-lived polity, and a group of craftsmen (Akhijuk) attained power in Tabriz for a brief period of three years—not to mention the authority of Akhis in Anatolia attested by Ibn Battuta—likewise persisted in historical memory.Footnote ⁵⁵ Fotovvat could thus be associated with self-directed mobilization of urban populations, whom official ideologies would rather see as passive subjects.Footnote ⁵⁶

Then, what are we to make of this strong form of intertextuality, or consubstantiality resulting from Khatāyi’s unusual use of a portal text? First, this formal device has a striking resemblance to the belief in metempsychosis or transmigration of souls (tanāsokh, which literally means transcription), a belief common to ghuluww (“exaggerated”) Shi’ism. Metempsychosis per se was rejected by most Muslims; however if we take tanāsokh as the far end of a spectrum of beliefs, related ideas appear to have been relatively common around the turn of the tenth/sixteenth century, as attested in the poetry of Shāh Esmāᶜil, Horufi texts, and accounts of Noqtavis, as well as among other messianic movements.Footnote ⁵⁷ Horufi texts including a fragment of the Jāvedānnāmeh of Fazlallāh Astarābādi articulates a doctrine of metempsychosis defined in terms of apperception (edrākāt), shapes (ashkāl, sg. shakl), and marks (noqush, sg. naqsh).Footnote ⁵⁸ Mir-Kasimov suggests that these last two terms may refer to the bodily form of the next birth; naqsh is a key word that we will encounter in verse citations below. While none of the above-mentioned groups describe their beliefs as tanāsokh or transcription, Horufi texts nonetheless explain the concept using terms related to writing (shakl, naqsh), and for both Horufis and Noqtavis, as well as earlier Shi’is, it was specifically the Hidden Imam or perfectly enlightened individual who would be reincarnated. I would suggest that the relevant phenomenon here is not so much a specific doctrine of metempsychosis passed on between self-contained sects, as it was a broader doxa, that past forms can in some sense be reconstituted. Such a doxa would ground both Khatāyi’s transcription of the Kanz as a meaningful, symbolic act, and the belief that a figure like Shāh Esmāᶜil, or for that matter Süleyman I, could possess the same essence as Alexander or the original Solomon. For Khatāyi, an eternal form (naqsh-e jāvedān) is achieved not by an enlightened soul, but by the bureaucratic state.

Second, the term kanz signifies apocalyptic treasure, so to make the Khatāynāmeh consubstantial with the Kanz al-Haqāyeq was to claim that status for his own book—an identification of his text with the Kanz and related intertexts. The Khatāynāmeh is organized according to categories used in some akhlāq (“practical ethics,” i.e. statecraft and political theory) literature—most notably the Qābusnāmeh.Footnote ⁵⁹ Akhlāq presented a public transcript of the court and political elites, justifying their political practices with philosophical reasoning and tradition. Fotovvat presented a public counter-transcript of ordinary subjects, articulating a code of ethics applicable to all social classes, and legitimizing their diverse trades and professions with a spiritual genealogy that connects them to figures of sacred history, such as ᶜAli or Seth. The Khatāynāmeh is thus identified with a discourse of socio-political ethics that was, at the very least, not confined to elite classes.

Yet there is a dramatic arc over the course of the text: a gradual transition from this public transcript of piety and wonder to a hidden transcript of raison d’état, culminating in the conclusion. There, he declares that the Chinese are descended from Cain, and depicts their inexorable territorial expansion into the land of the rustic Mongols (qalmāq). The implicit parallel between the Mongols and the Anatolian ghāzis is made explicit when he notes that these are the only two places he has seen people eat jerked meat (qadid), a food associated with the Prophet, connoting rustic simplicity((171). This mythic genealogy confirms what Khatāyi has suggested throughout the text. The Chinese qānun is the invention of an essentially ordinary people, not a chosen people, and not connected to the divine deputyship (khelāfat) invested in Seth; and yet it is still in some sense salvific, protecting China from the Deluge, civil wars, and other calamities. The consubstantiality of the Khatāynāmeh and its intertexts identifies the author as in essence a member of the public, a political outsider, and authorizes him to advance his own religio-political ideas based on what he has seen in China. The remainder of this paper will follow the development of his ideas through his use of verse citations over the course of the book.

After the series of verse citations in the preface ends, Khatāyi states the following:

The quatrain is, depending on whether a given manuscript has “ze-sā'elat” or “resālet,” a plea for the patron (i.e. the Ottoman sultan and court) to be generous to the author, calling on the reader to read the text carefully, or an exhortation by the author to himself and, perhaps, intermediaries in the court (his readers being the ones who now hold the “missive/mission of the Khān of China”) not to misrepresent the truth to please others. The discrepancy between the manuscripts suggests that the meaning of the quatrain was confusing to readers, and perhaps not of great interest. It is also possible that the ambiguity was perceived as intentional—a paranomasia (tajnis). This ambiguity would conflate the sultan, author, and readers, resonating with his theory of bureaucracy, expressed in a citation of ᶜAttār discussed below.

This whole passage, particularly the quatrain, situates the text in the conceptual framework of the Golshan-e Rāz of Mahmud Shabestari.Footnote ⁶¹ The terms locus (markaz) and mohit (“the realm” or “encompassing”) refer to the revolution of the heavens around a point, thus implying a pole (qotb).Footnote ⁶² So, for readers sufficiently familiar with the Golshan, this refers to the qotb, and thus the insān-e kāmel (“Fully Human” or “Perfect Man”). Surat is a common term in gnostic writings and in Persian poetry more generally, signifying form, in the sense of that which belongs to the phenomenal world (molk, or God’s dominion) as opposed to meaning or essence (maᶜni)—so it refers especially to the material world as encountered through the senses. Surat as face, form, or image can also refer to idols, which were associated with beauty and also with China. Khatt means line, or the down of the face; also writing or a document—Khatāyi makes abundant use the phrase “issue documents” (khatt nevisa(n)d) describing the activity of the Chinese bureaucracy, from palace to prisons to postal stations((51‒9, 77‒110). In the Golshan, khatt takes on a more specific meaning: the contemplation of multiplicity within Unity,Footnote ⁶³ and also the closest degree of proximity to the face of the Beloved.Footnote ⁶⁴ Thus it would be a shame to reject or turn away from what the author reveals about China, no matter how strange, shocking, or “misguided” it may seem.

The larger sense emerging from this configuration of polysemic terms, and from other verses in the preface, is an empiricist interpretation of Oneness of Being and theories of the Fully Human. The word surat signifies phenomenality or superficiality—forms which both conceal and provide access to inner meanings (maᶜāni).Footnote ⁶⁵ Other words that signify “face”—rokh and (especially) vajh—have loftier meanings, even indicating the divine essence itself.Footnote ⁶⁶ Khatāyi thus emphasizes the proximity of the divine essence to the phenomenal world, and the importance of knowing and investigating the material world; to know China (as artificial civilization) is to know the Fully Human.

This ethos of empiricism is reinforced by the earlier omission of the lines from the Kanz disavowing interest in “the misguided man” mentioned above, and by a later verse written by Khatāyi himself that mirrors a citation of ᶜAttār. In this pair of verses, near the end of chapter 2 “On their various religions,” Khatāyi describes different creeds—philosophy (hekmat), juristic imitation (taqlid), idolatry—and castigates each for claiming to be the sole path to truth. This verse is appended to the beginning of ᶜAttār’s verse lauding the different possible approaches to truth((49‒50). Khatāyi’s verse, part of a chapter that exalts religious tolerance, reaffirms his goal of mapping out the lower realm of error.

The above-mentioned terms were part of a discourse rooted in Ibn ᶜArabī’s thought that had wide currency among Khatāyi’s contemporaries in Anatolia and Iran, and in the Persianate world more generally, both inside and outside of official ideologies, from leading intellectuals of the Ottoman and Safavid domains to groups such as the Bektaşis and Bayrami-Melamis. Lāhiji, commentator on the Golshan, understood the doctrines of the Fully Human in terms of man-as-microcosm, and interprets a passage which states that the universe has its own individual character, just as human beings do, indicating the ubiquity of the Fully Human throughout creation.Footnote ⁶⁷ The Kanz connects the nafs to the “world-spirit” or “most great spirit,” and also, as seen above, employs the concept of world-as-text (ketāb-e ᶜālam, “book of the world”).Footnote ⁶⁸ This term grounds the Akbarian theories of the qotb and valāyat in writing (khatt) as the privileged medium connecting God with the phenomenal world, and further evokes the role of occult sciences in ideologies of sacral or millennial kingship prevalent throughout the Islamic world during the tenth/sixteenth century.Footnote ⁶⁹ Selim and Suleyman’s extensive deployment of astrology, geomancy, and the science of letters as part of their imperial project shows us that sultan’s sainthood was not invested merely in the royal body and soul, but was actualized through the agency of experts.Footnote ⁷⁰ Shabestari’s Golshan also held great importance for the Bayrami-Melamis, who interpreted vahdat-e vojud in a strongly pantheistic way, and claimed the status of qotb for their own members—a claim which threatened imperial authority.Footnote ⁷¹ Akbarian theories of the Oneness of Being and the Fully Human thus marked out the field of social action—a contest over the means and sites of sainthood—within which Khatāyi’s description of China was to operate.

Although the terms markaz, mohit, and surat are not repeated throughout the text, the intellectual framework invoked here is connected to that of the Kanz through its mis-attribution to Shabestari, and thus reinforced by Kanz citations throughout the text. Khatāyi’s mediation of these Akbarian concepts through this intertext that was even more accessible than the Golshan, because written in a more pedestrian register, advertised the accessibility of this body of thought to semi- and sub-elite social strata. His use of such an authorial voice, and language evocative of fotovvat and thus historical memory of popular mobilization, resonates with perhaps the most shocking political implication of his description of Chinese governance: that the real rulers were the personnel of the state, rather than the emperor.

A Millenarian Theory of Bureaucracy

In an account of the Tumu Crisis, an event which, in point of fact, was the political crisis that shifted the balance of power in the Chinese court in favor of the civil officials and away from the emperors,Footnote ⁷² Khatāyi repeats (with small discrepancies) highly polysemic verses that had recently been inscribed on the ruins of Persepolis by an Aq Qoyunlu scion, and thus identifies the Chinese civil officials as, in essence, the true Solomon of the realm.Footnote ⁷³ The two Persepolis verses are followed by a citation from Abu Saᶜid b. Abu’l-Khayr that inveighs against putting reliance on the material world, but omits a line that compares doing so to building one’s house on a flood-plain—Khatāyi is dead serious about China’s immunity to the Deluge((70‒71). According to Chinese sources, the events of the Tumu Crisis are as follows: a Chinese emperor undertook an ill-conceived expedition against the Mongol ruler Esen Tayisi, and was captured. Esen married the emperor to his daughter and demanded that he be returned to his throne; the court, having placed a new emperor on the throne, replied to Esen that it was the altars of earth and grain that were important, and not individual emperors. In Khatāyi’s account, the civil officials refuse Esen’s demand, remove the newly enthroned emperor from the scene by telling him of a splendid garden in the palace, in which they trap him by propping the throne against the door and sealing it with molten lead—making a hole to pass him plates of food. The first Persepolis verse then rhetorically asks who has seen the design (naqsh) on Solomon’s seal; the second reads: “Seek not Solomon’s dominion (molk), it’s all hot air (havā) / The kingdom’s there, where now is Solomon?”(70). This verse is one of the few omitted from the “conservative” translation.Footnote ⁷⁴ The bureaucrats here are analogous to Solomon, the qānun to Solomon’s seal and its design (naqsh), and the emperor to demons that Solomon imprisoned under seals of lead.Footnote ⁷⁵

This imprisonment of an emperor sets the stage for the lengthy verse citation from ᶜAttār’s Elāhināmeh that opens chapter 6 on the palace—looking backwards, the emperor’s imprisonment now becomes a parody of the occultations that end the stories of mythic heroes such as Bahrām Gur and Kaykhosrow. Cited in its entirety by Khatāyi, ᶜAttār’s story is a retelling of the occultation of Kaykhosrow, an episode in the Shāhnāmeh in which that supremely virtuous king abdicates. In ᶜAttār’s telling, he disappears into a cave on a snowy mountaintop, taking the grail of Jamshid with him, to escape the temptations of power that caused Jamshid’s fall. It should be noted that Jamshid was considered analogous to—even conflated with—Solomon, who was invoked both to legitimize and to criticize Ottoman centralization policies.Footnote ⁷⁶ The narrative begins with Kaykhosrow peering into the grail of Jamshid, looking for the grail itself. When he is unable to see the grail, he realizes that he is insignificant and should seek annihilation in God, for “even if our essence were reduced to an atom / that atom would become proud of itself”; “If you want your role (naqsh) to be eternal (jāvedān) / know your death to be life’s completion! If you want an everlasting role (naqsh-e jāvedān) / do so by having no designs/role (naqsh) at all” (76).Footnote ⁷⁷ This use of the terms naqsh and jāvedān is suggestive of Horufi theories of transmigration, noted above. Naqsh can also mean face (surat, vajh), drawing, or idol, which connects this term and the question of the mortality of the sovereign to the Akbarian theory of the Fully Human alluded to in the quatrain discussed above.

Julie Meisami’s observations about Bahrām Gur in Nezāmi’s Haft Paykar are applicable to Kaykhosrow here.Footnote ⁷⁸ Meisami argues that his disappearance into a cave, and subsequent apotheosis, marks the culmination of his personal growth over the course of the epic; and, politically, signifies his transition from “kingship by will” to “kingship by law,” and “lifts Nezāmi’s romance from the status of a versified mirror for princes to that of an eschatological vision of kingship” by associating Bahrām with the Hidden Imam and the Mahdi, “and their precursor the Zoroastrian Saoshyant.”Footnote ⁷⁹ ᶜAttār’s phrase “eternal role” evokes the Zoroastrian mythology of Kaykhosrow in which he is one of a number of “immortal heroes” who have resided in a hidden city since their disappearance, and will re-appear in the End Time to aid the Saoshyant in liberating the world.Footnote ⁸⁰ In the vision of eschatological kingship invoked by Nezāmi and ᶜAttār, just rule results from moral perfection manifested as complete suppression of the king’s individual will, symbolized by confinement and apotheosis in the cave. For Khatāyi, suppression of individual will, and the preservation of an eternal form for the sovereign, is achieved by legally binding the emperor with the qānun, symbolized by the officials’ Solomonic confinement of the emperor in the garden.

Over the course of the chapter, this vision of eschatological kingship is given concrete form. The imperial palace is depicted as a bureaucratic complex staffed by thousands of eunuchs, “respected expert palace women” (79), and officials, through which massive quantities of paper documents (khatt) circulate, presided over by an emperor who cannot waste his time hunting and drinking in Bahrām-like fashion because of explicit rules mandating that emperors who do not appear in court at the appropriate times be deposed (87, 93). The emperor, we are told, passes his days reviewing documents compiled by bureaucrats that summarize cases brought to the court, and decides whether to stamp each one with his seal of approval (78). It is noted later on that fiscal centralization and respect for the qānun deprive amirs of any means of rebellion (86).

Mid-way through the chapter comes another lengthy citation of the Kanz that discusses the Mahdi, based on Ibn ᶜArabī’s chapter on the Mahdi in the Futūhāt:Footnote ⁸¹

The Kanz, channeling Ibn ᶜArabī, turns the promise of Messianic deliverance back to the individual. Ibn ᶜArabī’s chapter discusses the Mahdi’s helpers (wuzarā'). Each individual soul who receives the guidance necessary to manifest the helpers’ spiritual qualities is al-mahdi, and he states: “the (responsibility of) the Imamate extends to absolutely all human beings, and that status applies to every single (human being) insofar as they are Imam.”Footnote ⁸² This verse recalls the occultation of Kaykhosrow that opened the chapter, and the earlier Kanz verse on the grail, which exalted all humankind. Given Khatāyi’s depiction of the palace, these lines could certainly be taken as entreating readers to enlighten themselves by learning about China. However, considering the full context of the citation, it is clear that the enlightenment signified by the terms “Christ-light knowledge,” “Christ-speech,” and “knowledge” granting “eternal life” is an “enlightenment” of the state through the circulation of documents (khatt), which are the sole means of communication between emperor and officials outside the palace (92), through which they manage the domain of China at the tip of the pen (142). The Messianic promise of “the ‘Imamate’ of every soul” is realized in the earthly domain of politics.Footnote ⁸³

It was shown above that Khatāyi’s citation of ᶜAttār identified the Chinse qānun with the naqsh, which he may or may not have known was one of Astarābādi’s key terms related to metempsychosis, indicating the form that is reconstituted. If this specific concept is what Khatāyi had in mind, or if readers recognized it, then the qānun is identified with the principle of the Hidden Imām’s cyclical reappearance. While he deploys no explicitly lettrist discourse or abjad numerology, his bureaucratic formulation of enlightenment resonates with both high lettrist and Horufi-Noqtavi theories, and also with a broader ninth/fifteenth-century textual turn, privileging writing over speech.Footnote ⁸⁴ The unique station of the letter as coincidentia oppositorum, a key concept for ninth/fifteenth-century champion of the science of letters, Ibn Turka, is achieved here through its mundane function as medium of bureaucratic communication—it is in the bureaucratic heart of the state that tyranny and justice, Jamshid/Solomon and Shaddād, “Christ-speech” and ignorance, Christ and Antichrist, are unified. While the disembodiedness of this paper-based bureaucracy is rather at odds with Horufi sacralization of the human body, the association between Christ, speech, writing, and the End Time, together with the above-mentioned emphasis on Adam, recalls statements in Fazlallāh Astarābādi’s Jāvedānnāmeh: “The divine word manifested in Adam was also Jesus, for he said, ‘ … I will come back at the end of time in order to reveal the original nature of Adam’s face, which contains the science of the divine Word.’” The same passage states that Jesus the Messiah would alleviate “the divergence of languages.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Khatāyi’s first description of court ceremonial states:

He does not discuss the Chinese writing system—one wonders if he knew that the elementary units of Chinese characters are strokes—that is, lines (khatt). The theme of transcending divisions of language and religion is reminiscent of the concept of universal harmony (solh-e koll) attested in later accounts of Noqtavi thought.Footnote ⁸⁶ The eternal form (naqsh-e jāvedān) from ᶜAttār’s verse, and the Horufi theory of restoration of one’s bodily form (naqsh, shakl) after death, contingent on “perfect knowledge of the innermost meaning of the human form,” are physically manifest in the bureaucratic form of the Chinese state—it is the state whose naqsh, the qānun, is eternal.Footnote ⁸⁷ For Khatāyi, enlightenment and immortality are not individual possibilities, but political ones.

Thus, despite his Messianic imagery, Khatāyi does not promise the divine authority of an autocratic saint-king; he offers, instead, a millenarian theory of bureaucracy. Readers familiar with the Kanz may have recalled a statement about the Resurrection (qiyāmat): “Neither sultan will there be, nor king / no command will there be but the divine.”Footnote ⁸⁸ This apparition of government by officials who must be “an ᶜālem in their own religion” and whose emperor must be the most learned in all sciences (47) thus anticipates the much later development of the anti-autocratic doctrine of the viceregency of the jurisconsults (velāyat-e faqih).

The political message established so clearly in the chapter on the palace bureaucracy warrants attention to some subtler points in passages discussed above. First, the paranomasia in the quatrain “Oh you who concealed … ” creating ambiguity between the ruler, court, public, and author resonates with this theory of the Mahdi. Second, in ᶜAttār’s story, Kaykhosrow looks for the grail in the grail, rather than looking for himself in the grail. Far from kingship encompassing all other professions, the king cannot see his own organ of sight—a king’s organs of sight are, of course, his personnel. And, any reader who thought much about the author’s choice of ᶜAttār would likely recall his more famous work, the Conference of the Birds, and its revelation of the identity of the birds’ king.

A Poetics of Pantheistic Political Theory

Readers attuned to Khatāyi’s more overt message would perceive a specifically political meaning in what are otherwise gnostic-ascetic verses in later chapters. At the end of chapter 9 “on the twelve provinces of China,” which describes their prosperity and in some cases names their export goods, the citation from the Kanz exhorting the reader to look beyond the phenomenal world to its source points not only to God but to good governance as the source of China’s wealth((121‒2). A second long citation of the Elāhināmeh immediately before the conclusion, and shortly after a chapter describing how the qānun makes possible the use of paper money (although in fact the Ming had not issued paper money since a century earlier), tells the story of how Plato produced the elixir that transmuted copper into gold, and thus had so much gold that it became cheap((164‒6). Khatāyi has in mind actual money—the qānun is to paper money as the elixir is to gold. That ᶜAttār advises rejecting the elixir does not obviate the value of what Khatāyi has shown us throughout his book. Here we should recall his earlier suggestions about the scope of his own work: while the Kanz would not discuss “the misguided man” and ᶜAttār’s verse described the multiplicity of paths to God, Khatāyi is mapping out the lower world of error and imperfection. The scope of political writing for Khatāyi is what can be accomplished through the fallible, finite capacity of human actors. Building a prosperous, imperishable state may not by itself bring one face-to-face with the Beloved, but that does n't mean it is not a good idea.

Khatāyi’s verse citations invert the semiotic relationships of the original poems. Whereas the poet normally uses concrete or familiar symbols to give readers access to esoteric truths, Khatāyi uses familiar gnostic poetry to comment on an unfamiliar material reality; the illocutionary force of citations in context concerns the material reality (molk) that they portray. The meaning of the verses thus regresses to the literal sense of the words: the dominion (molk) of Solomon is not just the world around us (all once ruled by Solomon), it now is there in the form of China—a “Solomonic dominion” (75). The moral of Kaykhosrow’s occultation in the mountain—if you want “an eternal role/form” (naqsh-e jāvedān), then “have no role/form (naqsh) at all” (76)—signifies the elimination of emperors’ political role by means of their confinement within the bureaucratic system. Even the description of the palace bureaucracy is tinged with bathos: the heart of the eternal empire is a bureaucracy staffed by thousands of eunuchs, and whose opposite-unifying power is signified by Jesus and the Antichrist’s donkey. The face of the Fully Human that Khatāyi saw in China was artifice—the fundamentally artificial (in all senses) nature of human perfection, made manifest in the immortal form of the Ming bureaucratic state.

This materialist semiotics is suggestive of pantheism (vahdat-e mowjud) associated with Şeyh Bedreddin and the Bayrami-Melamis, as well as the “anthropocentric materialism” and political millenarianism of the Noqtavis, which sought to bring about a “Utopia free from the concealment of the bātin or the auspices of the hidden or revealed Imam,” bearing in mind that Khatāyi seems to have been wholly uninterested in promises of divinity being realized at the level of individual souls.Footnote ⁸⁹ It is thus noteworthy that the very first citation of the Kanz, which establishes it as the portal text, mirrors Hacı Bayram Veli’s formulation of vahdat-e vojud: “Whoever knows His acts / He found the Attributes / There he found the Essence / You know yourself, you know yourself.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Khatāyi’s citation, in contrast, emphasizes the difficulty of attaining God’s essence and attributes—the implicit solution being to turn to the molk (in both senses) of China. It is also possible he intended to hide Horufi ideas in plain sight by conveying a key term, naqsh, through citations of the Elāhināmeh and the Persepolis verses. His authorial voice is initially cautious and pious, because his message is radical—one reason he may have knowingly mis-attributed the eschatologically oriented Kanz to Shabestari, a more authoritative source than Pahlavān Mahmud. Khatāyi’s masking of Pahlavān Mahmud by “the master of the Rosegarden” might have come across (to those who caught it) as unintentional and thus gauche, but we may also wonder if readers did not perceive this masking, that of Horufi ideas by ᶜAttār’s and others’ verses, and of the Khatāynāmeh by the Kanz, as a set of stylistically related gestures. To perceive such a multiple masking would be to share a secret with the author, to become a co-conspirator through recognition of a fundamental consistency, or consubstantiality these diverse texts, and the arbitrariness of the social positions associated with them.

Khatāyi’s interpretation of gnostic poetry was clearly political and social. One question the present study raises is how typical his interpretations were: to what extent was Oneness of Being already a universalist-egalitarian doctrine? To what extent did millenarian theories of the letter derive their potency from administrative uses of the written word, and vice versa—were they already bureaucratic theories? Was Khatāyi’s use of verse citations determined by how they were conventionally interpreted, or heavily shaped by his circumstances? It is worth noting here a similar argument made about Karl Marx’s Capital: that he organized the first volume according to the levels of hell in Dante’s Divine Comedy—a descent into the inferno of capitalism.Footnote ⁹¹ This reading of Capital against its intertext not only reveals aspects of Marx’s rhetorical strategy, it also throws into relief Capital’s under-appreciated radical-republican political-theoretical dimension. Perhaps Khatāyi, like Marx, intuited that since political theory must succeed as rhetoric, it has its own poetics; that a poet was needed to guide us through the wasteland.

On the other hand, among the evidence that Khatāyi’s interpretations were not unconventional is that he was in tune with the times. His book presciently anticipated future Ottoman political developments: the expansion of the bureaucracy and the changes in the political structure of the empire, which would greatly reduce the real power of the sultans and increase that of jurists and other elements of the Ottoman state, as well as parallel developments in the Safavid and Mughal domains. His identification of the qānun and bureaucracy with the immortal form (naqsh) that transcends individual death, and thus with the Hidden Imam, anticipates Süleyman’s messianic embrace of the qānun in the late 1530s and 1540s.Footnote ⁹² Khatāyi’s China is in certain respects a blueprint for the “second Ottoman Empire” of the eleventh/seventeenth century.Footnote ⁹³ Intriguingly, his emphasis on the universal nobility of “Adam’s tribe,” when put in the context of his favorable account of rule by scholar-bureaucrats and his insight into the Chinese political system, is evocative of the neo-Confucian doctrine of the universal perfectibility of human beings through education. Then, we may also look in the other direction—back in time—to consider how the thought of figures such as ᶜAttār, Fazlallāh Astarābādi, Mahmud Shabestari, and Pahlavān Mahmud was shaped by economic and cultural contact with East Asia. It was, after all, the Kanz al-Haqāyeq that instructed readers, apropos discussion of the Mahdi, to seek the “path of faith” in China.