he must do four things to win her trust—burn the Qor’an, drink wine, seal up faith’s eye , and bow down to images. The shaykh hesitates, but agrees, and is invited in, takes wine and gets drunk:
He drank, oblivion overwhelmed his soul.
Wine mingled with his love—her laughter seemed
To challenge him to take the bliss he dreamed.
He agrees to everything the girl demands, but it is not enough—she wants gold and silver, and he is poor. Eventually she takes pity on him. She will overlook the gold and silver—if he will look after some pigs for a year as a swineherd. He agrees.
From this extreme point, the story takes a more conventional turn, as was necessary if the book was not to be banned and destroyed. A vision of the Prophet intervenes, the shaykh returns to the faith, the girl repents her treatment of the shaykh, becomes a Muslim, and dies. But this cannot draw the sting of the first part of the story, and its message: that conventional piety is not enough, that it may in fact lead down the wrong path, and that the peeling away of conventional trappings and the loss of self in love is the only way to attain a higher spirituality. As Attar wrote at the beginning, when he introduced the story:
When neither Blasphemy nor faith remain,
The body and the Self have both been slain;
Then the fierce fortitude the Way will ask
Is yours, and you are worthy of our task.
Begin the journey without fear; be calm;
Forget what is and what is not Islam…
Taken as a whole, the story appears ambiguous, but it contains a startling challenge to the religious conventions of the time. 37
Attar, the apostle of love, died at some point in the 1220s; massacred along with most of the population of Nishapur when the Mongols invaded Khorasan and Persia. The Mongol invasions were an unparalleled cataclysm for the lands of Iran. Where the Arabs and Turks had been relatively familiar and restrained conquerors, the Mongols were both alien and wantonly cruel, on a massive scale.
The Seljuk Empire had been split toward the end of the twelfth century by the rise of a subject tribe from Khwarezm, whose leaders established themselves as the rulers of the eastern part of the empire as the Khwarezmshahs. In the early years of the thirteenth century the ruling Khwarezmshah, Sultan Mohammad, became dimly aware that a new power was rising in the steppe lands beyond Transoxiana. There were impossible rumours that the Chinese empire had been conquered (the reports were true). There may have been some attempts at diplomatic contact, but these were bungled, and some Mongol merchants and ambassadors were killed. The Mongols were not, as used sometimes to be thought, just a ravening mob of uncivilised, semi-human killers. Their armies were tightly-controlled, organised and disciplined, ruthlessly efficient; not wantonly destructive. 38 But their ultimate foundation was the prestige of their warlord, Genghis Khan, and an insult could not be overlooked. What came next in Transoxiana and Khorasan was particularly dreadful because of this vengeful purpose. There followed a series of Mongol invasions, aimed initially at punishing Sultan Mohammad (who, veering from tragedy toward comedy, fled westward to Ray, pursued by a Mongol flying column, and then north until he died on an island off the Caspian coast) but later developing into conquest and occupation. What this meant for the hapless Iranians can be illustrated by what happened at Merv, after the Mongols had already conquered and destroyed the cities of Transoxiana:
… on the next day, 25 February 1221, the Mongols arrived before the gates of Merv. Tolui in person [the son of Genghiz Khan], with an escort of five hundred horsemen, rode the whole distance around the walls, and for six days the Mongols continued to inspect the defences, reaching the conclusion that they were in good repair and would withstand a lengthy siege. On the seventh day the Mongols launched a general assault. The townspeople
He drank, oblivion overwhelmed his soul.
Wine mingled with his love—her laughter seemed
To challenge him to take the bliss he dreamed.
He agrees to everything the girl demands, but it is not enough—she wants gold and silver, and he is poor. Eventually she takes pity on him. She will overlook the gold and silver—if he will look after some pigs for a year as a swineherd. He agrees.
From this extreme point, the story takes a more conventional turn, as was necessary if the book was not to be banned and destroyed. A vision of the Prophet intervenes, the shaykh returns to the faith, the girl repents her treatment of the shaykh, becomes a Muslim, and dies. But this cannot draw the sting of the first part of the story, and its message: that conventional piety is not enough, that it may in fact lead down the wrong path, and that the peeling away of conventional trappings and the loss of self in love is the only way to attain a higher spirituality. As Attar wrote at the beginning, when he introduced the story:
When neither Blasphemy nor faith remain,
The body and the Self have both been slain;
Then the fierce fortitude the Way will ask
Is yours, and you are worthy of our task.
Begin the journey without fear; be calm;
Forget what is and what is not Islam…
Taken as a whole, the story appears ambiguous, but it contains a startling challenge to the religious conventions of the time. 37
Attar, the apostle of love, died at some point in the 1220s; massacred along with most of the population of Nishapur when the Mongols invaded Khorasan and Persia. The Mongol invasions were an unparalleled cataclysm for the lands of Iran. Where the Arabs and Turks had been relatively familiar and restrained conquerors, the Mongols were both alien and wantonly cruel, on a massive scale.
The Seljuk Empire had been split toward the end of the twelfth century by the rise of a subject tribe from Khwarezm, whose leaders established themselves as the rulers of the eastern part of the empire as the Khwarezmshahs. In the early years of the thirteenth century the ruling Khwarezmshah, Sultan Mohammad, became dimly aware that a new power was rising in the steppe lands beyond Transoxiana. There were impossible rumours that the Chinese empire had been conquered (the reports were true). There may have been some attempts at diplomatic contact, but these were bungled, and some Mongol merchants and ambassadors were killed. The Mongols were not, as used sometimes to be thought, just a ravening mob of uncivilised, semi-human killers. Their armies were tightly-controlled, organised and disciplined, ruthlessly efficient; not wantonly destructive. 38 But their ultimate foundation was the prestige of their warlord, Genghis Khan, and an insult could not be overlooked. What came next in Transoxiana and Khorasan was particularly dreadful because of this vengeful purpose. There followed a series of Mongol invasions, aimed initially at punishing Sultan Mohammad (who, veering from tragedy toward comedy, fled westward to Ray, pursued by a Mongol flying column, and then north until he died on an island off the Caspian coast) but later developing into conquest and occupation. What this meant for the hapless Iranians can be illustrated by what happened at Merv, after the Mongols had already conquered and destroyed the cities of Transoxiana:
… on the next day, 25 February 1221, the Mongols arrived before the gates of Merv. Tolui in person [the son of Genghiz Khan], with an escort of five hundred horsemen, rode the whole distance around the walls, and for six days the Mongols continued to inspect the defences, reaching the conclusion that they were in good repair and would withstand a lengthy siege. On the seventh day the Mongols launched a general assault. The townspeople
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