Abd al-Rahman Jami

The Nafahat al-Uns is a biographical dictionary of Sufis, running to several hundred lives, built on an earlier collection in the Herat dialect associated with Abdallah Ansari and greatly extended. Works of this kind look like reference and function like doctrine. Deciding who receives an entry, whose teaching is quoted approvingly, which chains of transmission are traced and which are passed over, is a way of settling what the tradition consists of, and later hagiography in Persian, Turkish and Indian languages leaned on this book heavily enough that its judgements became the received ones.

Jami wrote it from a particular position. He was attached to the Naqshbandi order, in the circle of Ubaydallah Ahrar, whose influence at the Timurid court in Herat was considerable, and Herat in his lifetime was one of the richest centres of Persian letters, painting and manuscript production anywhere. The order he belonged to practised silent recollection rather than vocal, kept its members in ordinary occupations rather than in retreat, and took an active interest in political affairs, and a canon of saints assembled from inside that outlook naturally reflects it. The atlas notes the position rather than treating the book as a neutral register.

Jami wrote commentaries on Ibn Arabi, including on the Bezels of Wisdom, and that is the hinge of his importance. The vocabulary of the school, above all the language of the unity of being in which the world is understood as the self disclosure of a single reality, existed in difficult Arabic prose, and he carried it into Persian, where it entered poetry and from poetry travelled everywhere Persian was read, which by then included the Ottoman lands and northern India.

The verse is where the transfer happened. Yusuf and Zulaikha, in the collection of seven long poems called the Haft Awrang, retells the Quranic story of Joseph and the wife of the Egyptian official as an account of love that begins in an image and is only completed when the lover is emptied of everything else, a reading in which her obsession is not a warning but a stage. The technique of using a human love story to argue a metaphysical position was not new, but the pairing of a first rank poet with a first rank commentator in one person was unusual, and it is why he is conventionally counted the last of the great classical Persian poets and treated as a summary of the tradition rather than an addition to it.

The reach can be measured in libraries. Manuscripts of the Haft Awrang were copied and illustrated for Safavid and Mughal patrons, his works were translated into Ottoman Turkish, and they were being read in Bengal and the Deccan within a century of his death. Yusuf and Zulaikha was retold by later poets in several languages who assumed their audience knew his version. That is why he functions in the atlas as a junction rather than an endpoint, a place where a school of metaphysics, an order of Sufis and a poetic tradition all pass through one man.