The Poetics of Spiritual Instruction by Austin O’Malley explores Persian sufi didacticism in the works of Farid al-Din ʿAttar (d. ca. 1221) from a reader-based perspective. Despite his important place in the history of Persian literature, ʿAttar has been the subject of only a handful of scholarly studies. The originality of The Poetics of Spiritual Instruction, however, goes beyond a careful examination of the corpus of an understudied poet. Its innovation lies in its focus on the structure of ʿAttar’s works, their rhetorical features, and in O’Malley’s reader-based theoretical approach. Contrary to most scholarly studies that focus on concepts and tropes used in sufi didactic poetry, O’Malley’s focus on the way ʿAttar’s readers were guided to interact with his poems highlights the interactive character of sufi didacticism and explains the ways in which didactic poetry can bridge orality and textuality. By imagining readers as an audience present in a homiletic assembly and helping them to “insert themselves into a soteriological drama and ascend to an otherwise inaccessible realm,” ʿAttar’s poems make sufi teachings accessible to his readers, through what we as modern teachers and scholars call “experiential learning” (p. 207).
An impressive aspect of this study is its well-balanced theoretical approach. Throughout the entire book, O’Malley remains engaged with Euro-American theorists such as Louise Rosenblatt, Wolfgang Iser, Walter Ong, and J. L. Austin for his reader-based approach. This, however, does not come at the expense of his engagement with medieval Muslim theorists. In Chapter 4, for instance, O’Malley provides a detailed discussion about the conventions of preaching and medieval literary debates about these conventions. Similarly, Chapter 6 engages with Islamic theories about dream and dream interpretation. O’Malley skillfully bases his arguments on all these theories, while also delivering his arguments in a clear and concise way. His use of tables that effectively summarize the narrative of ʿAttar’s long masnavis (e.g., tables 4.1, 4.2, and 6.1) makes his arguments more accessible to readers who may not have read these lengthy poems in their entirety. Additionally, the author’s engagement with both Persian and Arabic primary literary, philosophical, and religious sources—evident throughout the chapters, detailed endnotes, and bibliography—renders this study a rich source of information for scholars of Persian literature and Islamic mysticism.
The Poetics of Spiritual Instruction is incisively organized. The book has two main sections. The first section includes three chapters and provides background information about ʿAttar’s place in Persian literary sufism and his persona as reflected in his writings. Chapter 1 discusses the genre of didactic masnavis and some of its main characteristics, including poets’ alternation between allegorical anecdotes and exhortations. Here the author effectively explains how this alternation creates a power imbalance between poets and their readers, resembling the power imbalance that exists between preachers and their audience. This assertion of authority, as O’Malley successfully argues, is required for guiding readers toward intended spiritual goals. Chapter 2 focuses on ʿAttar’s role in popularizing sufism by making the tenets of sufism more accessible to non-elite audiences, and by treating texts as opportunities to “contemplate” and “experience” sufi teachings. Chapter 3 explores the idea of speech as medicine for the soul, which is embedded in ʿAttar’s pen name (i.e., the druggist). The author convincingly argues that ʿAttar’s view of spiritual health—an intellectual and physical matter—is what facilitates his treatment of didactic poetry as a site for embodied learning experience, contemplation, and ultimate healing.
What is perhaps missing in this section, particularly in Chapter 1, is a more in-depth engagement with the Qurʾan and scholarly debates about its rhetorical features. The author does briefly discuss the Qurʾan in different parts of the book, but a more systematic discussion of the Qurʾan’s homiletic techniques could better foreground some of the main discussions of this study. Many Muslim authors and preachers modeled the structure and rhetorical features of their works after the Qurʾan. As an example, the aforementioned alternation between allegories and exhortations, rebuking of the audience-readers, and the aforementioned power imbalance between authors of didact texts and their readers, which manifest in ʿAttar’s works, are also rhetorical features of the Qurʾan. Similarly, citing select episodes of the lives of prophets as a way to lead the audience toward a particular moral or spiritual lesson (as O’Malley demonstrates in Chapter 5 by citing the story of Joseph) is a prominent technique used in the Qurʾan.
The second and main part of the book comprises Chapters 4–7. These chapters delve into ʿAttar’s masnavis and examine the ways in which their frame tales, anecdotes, and ʿAttar’s exhortations amidst the anecdotes interact with each other to create a powerful device for the poet to facilitate his readers’ close interaction with his poems. Chapters 4 and 5 focus on ʿAttar’s Mantiq al-Tayr (The Conference of the Birds), mostly its frame tale, and ʿAttar’s use of medieval Islamic preaching conventions in his magnum opus. A significant intervention in these two chapters is O’Malley’s novel reading of Mantiq al-Tayr, not just as an allegorical narrative describing the Sufi path but rather a journey that chiefly aims to help readers learn about their souls’ “sinful exile” from their origin, that is, God (p. 184). O’Malley provides this reading by closely examining the homiletic aspect of the hoopoe’s dialogues with the birds in the frame tale and the layers of “nested allegories” cited in Mantiq al-Tayr (p. 179). A major contribution of these chapters is O’Malley’s argument, in Chapter 5, about ʿAttar’s use of “reclusively nested acts of reading” (p. 181). Toward the end of Mantiq al-Tayr, the birds are invited to read a scrap of paper (ruqʿa) that contains an episode of the story of Joseph, in which Joseph’s brothers receive the receipt that they wrote while selling Joseph. As Joseph’s brothers are confronted with their sin through the act of reading, the birds are encouraged to mimic the experience of Joseph’s brothers by reading the paper handed to them and by learning about their own sinful act of selling their souls to worldly desires. This chain of nested acts of reading functions as a powerful literary device, which encourages ʿAttar’s readers to “reenact” the birds’ experience by learning their own spiritual lesson—that is, their original proximity to God and their ensuing distance from Him. Reading, as O’Malley brilliantly argues, becomes therefore a “ritual performance in which the reader not only interprets, but enacts” and this is precisely what blurs the boundary between orality and textuality in ʿAttar’s didactic masnavis (p. 190).
Chapter 6 and 7 further support the main arguments of the book. Chapter 6 explores the content and structure of Musibat Nama. Here O’Malley elucidates how reading the forty chapters of the poem acts as a ritual reminiscent of the forty-day Sufi retreat (chilla). The experience of chilla is highly intertwined with the description of the protagonist’s spiritual ascent in forty stages. In this vein, the act of reading becomes equivalent of going on a forty-day retreat and experiencing a spiritual ascent.
The only possibly missing opportunity in Chapter 6 is a more thorough engagement with the scholarly context of Musibat Nama. This would require the author to provide a few examples that could further highlight the Neoplatonic philosophical undertone of ʿAttar’s work. The author mentions a few works including Ibn Sina’s Miʿraj Nama, Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy bin Yaqzan, and Sanaʾi’s Sayr al-ʿIbad as examples of earlier literary works that explore an upward and inward spiritual journey. While these works are written in a heavily scholastic language, a comparison between their structure with ʿAttar’s Musibat Nama demonstrates that the latter has a far more detailed and elaborate structure. While all the aforementioned works describe a spiritual journey with fewer stages, the wayfarer in Musibat Nama goes through forty stages and speaks to forty beings. Some of these beings, such as the pen and the tablet, are often conflated with Neoplatonic hypostases—that is, the Universal Intellect and the Universal Soul, respectively—in earlier Islamic sufi and philosophical writings, including the works of Sanaʾi. However, they occupy their own separate space in the wayfarer’s journey in Musibat Nama. Was ʿAttar engaging with a continuously expanding corpus of Islamic Neoplatonic writings in his work? If so, providing a few examples of ʿAttar’s engagement with leading philosophical debates of his time in the narrative of Musibat Nama could further support O’Malley’s argument about ʿAttar’s role in making sufi teachings accessible to his audience, since tailoring this highly sophisticated and scholastic material for a non-elite audience could be more challenging. That said, this does not undermine the value and the soundness of O’Malley’s arguments in this remarkable chapter.
In Chapter 7, the author focuses on shorter anecdotes nested in the framing narratives of ʿAttar’s works and explains how unexpected moments and shocking twists in these shorter narratives act as moments through which readers can learn Sufi ethical lessons that often call for more challenging actions than just adhering to surface-level piety.
The Poetics of Spiritual Instruction provides a framework for the study of sufi didactic texts. O’Malley’s focus on the question of audience in the study of ʿAttar’s sufi didactic poems and his treatment of reading as “enacting” is a major step toward furthering scholarly discussions about literature and performativity. With its novel approach to the intricate relationships between author, text, and readers in ʿAttar’s corpus, the book proves itself to be an invaluable contribution to the fields of Persian literature and Islamic mysticism.
