Farid al-Din Attar: A Reading Journal 4

When I was a teenager and thought I wanted to be a rabbi, I took great comfort in the fact that the god of the Jewish people did not have a body. It was, of course, confusing to me that we nonetheless referred to this god as “he” or “our king” or even as “our father,” as in the prayer “Avinu Malkeinu” (Our Father, Our King), which Jews recite every year on Rosh HaShana and Yom Kippur. I wanted so very much to believe in that god, however, and to be good in “his” eyes, that I accepted without question the explanation I was given: that these references to God’s maleness were just metaphors of convenience, that, in fact, the Jewish god had neither sex nor gender, which was one of the things that made “him”–it did seem wrong to say “it”– so much better than the gods of polytheistic traditions.

Whether or not a bodiless, omniscient, omnipotent, and therefore completely transcendent god is indeed “better” than other kinds of gods, whatever “better” might mean, is no longer clear to me, and it’s been a long time since I was naive enough to believe any metaphor can ever be, simply, “of convenience,” but back then that explanation made sense to me. Or, more accurately, it allowed me not to think too carefully about the question of God’s gender and to focus instead on the hope a genderless god seemed to hold out: that if I followed “his” rules, I could live my life in a way that rendered pretty much irrelevant the masculinity at which I felt myself to be so miserably failing. Most especially, I thought, in the eyes of a genderless god, sex would be just sex, for both procreation and pleasure, but without all the unnecessary baggage that questions of gender forced it to carry.

To put it plainly, I was afraid of sex, of my own sexuality. As I’ve written many times before, I was sexually abused by two different men at two different times during my teens, once quite violently. One of the things that experience made it very difficult for me to deal with was the expectation that, because I was the man, I had to be the one to make the first move in sexual situations. Since the only kind of “first move” I knew was the kind that my abusers had used with me, whenever I thought about initiating sex with someone, the only thing I could imagine myself doing was something like what those men had done, and that was the last thing I wanted to do. If God was indeed genderless, it seemed to me, then perhaps the sex he’d given me, that he’d commanded me to have—because both reproduction and sex-for-pleasure (to satisfy one’s wife) are religious obligations for men in orthodox Judaism—might also be genderless, in the sense that it didn’t matter who made the first move, among other things. Perhaps the life this genderless god wanted me to lead would lead me to a different way of being male and sexual than those men had shown me.

I was, of course, wrong about a lot of that thinking, and, to be honest, I haven’t thought about my struggle with the question of God’s gender in a very long time, but reading Attar’s The Conference of the Birds has brought it back to me, not just because the gender of Attar’s god is so unambiguously male, but because the path to oneness with that god is unambiguously male as well. Not that there aren’t sufi women, and even women whom the sufis revere as saints, but of those women Attar says, in his Memories of God’s Friends: Lives and Sayings of Sufis, speaking specifically of perhaps the best known female saint, Raba-ye Adaviya, “When a woman is a man on the path of the Lord most high, she cannot be called woman.” In Elahi Nameh, the book of Attar’s that I am currently translating, the first story is about such a woman, and I will write about that story another time. What I am interested in now is how Attar talks about the relationship between men and the masculine nature of the sufi path. Here, for example, is a story from The Conference of the Birds in which the connection between a sufi’s manhood and his spiritual commitment is used to shame two sufis who just don’t measure up:

One day two dressed as wandering sufis came
Before the courts to lodge a legal claim.
The judge took them aside. “This can’t be right
For sufis to provoke a legal fight,”
He said. “You wear the robes of resignation,
So what have you to do with litigation?
If you’re the men to pay a lawyer’s fee,
Off with your sufi clothes immediately!
And if you’re sufis as at first I thought,
It’s ignorance the brings you to this court.
I’m just a judge, unversed in your affair,
But I’m ashamed to see the clothes you wear;
You should wear women’s veils–that would be less
Dishonest than your present holy dress.” (94)

These two sufis, by bringing their differences to court, have demonstrated their investment in the material world, in standards of right and wrong that sufis are supposed to aspire to transcend. In the judge’s estimation, this feminizes them, and so he tells them it would be better to hide their maleness behind women’s clothing than to use the clothing of “high heroic maleness,” their sufi robes, to hide the lack of manliness their presence in court represents. For Attar, in other words, to be a man is to be a man of God. Anything else is, at one and the same time, a betrayal of both manhood and the divine. Yet it is not only insufficiently committed sufis who fail to live up to the standards of this spiritual masculinity. Attar’s hoopoe also tells the following story about Shebli, an important Sufi master:

Shebli would disappear at times; no one
In all Baghdad could guess where he had gone–
At last they found him where the town enjoys
The sexual services of man and boys,
Sitting among the catamites; his eye
Was moist and humid, and his lips bone-dry.
One asked: “What brings you here, to such a place?
Is this where pilgrims come to look for grace?”
He answered: “In the world’s way these you see
Aren’t men or women; so it is with me–
For in the way of Faith I’m neither man
Nor woman, but ambiguous courtesan–
Unmanliness reproaches me, then blame
For my virility fills me with shame.” (93)

Shebli is caught in a spiritual double bind. On the one hand, the “unmanliness” represented by his faults and failures stands as a constant reproach to him as he walks his path towards God; but on the other hand, his virility–meaning his conscious commitment to that path–shames him, since the oneness with God to which he aspires requires that he shed precisely the self-consciousness of that commitment. This predicament gives rise to the question the hoopoe asks next, “How will you solve love’s secret lore if you–/Not man, not woman–glide between the two?” (94). To be on the path to God, in other words, is by definition to make a choice. You’re either on the road or you’re not. If not, then as the judge advises the sufis who came to his court, you are better off being honest and living in the material world, hiding your true, masculine self, behind the veil that world is, while, if you are like Shebli, caught in the double bind that committing to the path inescapably entails, then you have no choice but to surrender. Or, as the hoopoe puts it:

If on its path love forces you to yield,
Then do so gladly, throw away your shield;
Resist and you will die, your soul is dead–
To ward off your defeat bow down your head! (94)

When I read these lines, I had to stop and read them again; and then I read them again. How are they not, I asked myself, a description of spiritual rape? Writing out of a very different religious tradition, John Donne articulates a similar relationship with the divine in “Batter My Heart Three Person’d God:”

Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town to another due,
Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov’d fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

Donne wants desperately to let his god in, but he can’t, and so he asks, demands, really, that his god ravish him. I suppose that fact, i.e. that Donne asks, is what prevents the scenario he describes from being an actual spiritual rape, even though it uses rape as a metaphor. Attar, I think, would have recognized Donne’s dilemma very easily. Indeed, throughout The Conference of the Birds Attar writes about all the ways those who travel the path keep their god out, despite the fact that they want desperately to let him in. Yet, whether or not what Donne and Attar describe qualifies as spiritual rape per se, the idea that it is human nature to resist God, making it necessary for him to violate us so that he can enter us fully—that, in other words, we need to be forced to surrender to him—sounds an awful lot to me like a spiritualized and, especially in Attar’s case, homoeroticized version of rape culture.

Writing that last sentence set all kinds of ideas swirling around in my head. It’s not hard to find the misogyny in the idea that women sometimes need to be forced to surrender themselves to men in order to realize their true, feminine selves; nor is it difficult to see that replacing men in that sentence with God, when God is understood to be male, does not necessarily remove the misogyny; but what does it mean if that same spiritual act is defined not as hateful, but as loving, when God commits it against a man? What are the repercussions for how the men who believe in that god understand themselves spiritually in relation to the divine and ethically, morally, especially when it comes to questions of love, in relation to other human beings? These seem to me important questions to ask.

Cross posted on my blog.

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One Response to Farid al-Din Attar: A Reading Journal 4

  1. 1
    Angiportus says:

    I am squicked by any description of gods or whatever getting to do any blasted painful or scary thing they please with people. As one who was mistreated in several ways by human beings I don’t feel the need to put up with more of it from entities more mysterious. I think this sort of metaphor, if that is what it is, shows a messed-up mindset. I want a more equal relationship where the respect goes both ways.
    That’s just my first impression. Maybe there are folks out there for whom that sadistic-sounding stuff works; it might be kind of analogous to BDSM, which I don’t understand either but won’t condemn. These people are just wired differently from me, and I learned some while back to go off and do my own thing and not fret about it. So maybe the mindset isn’t messed-up after all like I said, but it sure is alien to my Left Hand Path agnostic soul.
    From what I understand, though, BDSM is based on consent, but stuff like what you quote–and certain neopagan paths, the ones that sound more servile even while more ecstatic–might be more problematic. Might. All I know is that what you quoted sure sounded familiar, and not like anything I’d want to happen to me.