That the mystical experience of transcendence exists outside of language is axiomatic to those who pursue it. It follows, then, that such experience also exists outside the network of power relations ineluctably embedded in language—outside, in other words, of politics, in the largest possible sense of that term. While part of me has always found this proposition compelling, I’ve never been able to get past the fact that my relationship to the god with whom, or in whom, I would be seeking that transcendence is hierarchical by definition, and if achieving transcendence requires me to accept that hierarchy as its foundation, then how can the transcendence itself not be political as well?

Farid al-Din Attar’s The Conference of the Birds, translated by Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis, is a poetic allegory of Sufi spiritual seeking that, at least in part, attempts to address this question. An assembly of birds sets out in search of the Simorgh and the ultimate transcendence they anticipate awaits them at their journey’s end. The thirty birds who reach that point, however, discover that they themselves are the Simorgh, a revelation that turns on a pun that is impossible in English. In Persian, si morgh means “thirty (si) birds (morgh).” 

There in the Simorgh’s radiant face they saw
Themselves, the Simorgh [thirty birds] of the world—with awe
They gazed, and dared at last to comprehend
They were the Simorgh and the journey’s end. (219) 

The transcendence the birds were seeking, in other words, was within themselves all along. 

At the beginning of this journey, the hoopoe, the bird the other birds choose as their guide, defines the path they must travel as being foundationally the same as a lover’s quest to become one with their beloved. Love itself, in other words, whether for the divine or for another human being, is defined within the way of thinking as the desire for loss of self; and the first thing those who seek transcendence must do is transform the desire that compels them towards another person into desire for oneness with God. Achieving that transformation is difficult, though, since it means giving up a beloved you can see and hear and touch. That difficulty is one reason people resist the mystical path. The nightingale explains its resistance this way:

My love is for the rose; I bow to her;
From her dear presence I could never stir.
If she should disappear the nightingale
Would lose his reason and his song would fail,
And though my grief is one that no bird knows,
One being understands my heart—the rose.
I am so drowned in love that I can find
No thought of my existence in my mind.
Her worship is sufficient life for me;
The quest for her is my reality…
My love is here; the journey you propose
Cannot beguile me from my life—the rose.
It is for me she flowers; what greater bliss
Could life provide me—anywhere—than this?
Her buds are mine; she blossoms in my sight—
How could I leave her for a single night? (36) 

In its response, the hoopoe points out the contradiction in what the nightingale has said, which is that, while it claims to experience love for the rose as a loss of self, it wants at the same to possess the rose for itself: “Her buds are mine; she blossoms in my sight.” The rose, the hoopoe points out, doesn’t blossom for the nightingale, but simply because it is a rose. More to the point, because the blossom will fade, the rose can never be possessed in a way that will fully satisfy the nightingale’s desire. By way of illustration, the hoopoe then tells “The Story of a Dervish and a Princess,” in which a dervish falls in love at first sight with a princess 

…whose grace
Was such that any man who glimpsed her face
Declared himself in love. Like starless dusk
Her dark hair hung, soft-scented like fine musk;
The charm of her slow, humid eyes awoke
The depths of sleeping love, and when she spoke,
No sugar was as sweet as her lips’ sweet;
No rubies with their colour could compete. (37) 

The dervish is as stricken with this princess as the nightingale is with the rose, growing so “wild/With ardent love, with restless misery” that “for seven years he wept continually,” happily choosing to live among the stray dogs outside her gate in order to be near her. Unlike the rose, however, the princess has a station in life, making it both unseemly and shameful for her to have this ragged man attach himself to her.

In response, her “serving-men” conspire to murder the dervish and restore her honor. The princess learns of these plans and warns the dervish, asking how he could possibly have hoped for love between himself “and the daughter of a queen.” He replies: 

…That day when I
First saw your beauty I despaired of life;
Why should I fear the hired assassin’s knife?
A hundred thousand men adore your face;
No power on earth could make me leave this place.
But since your servants want to murder me,
Explain the meaning of this mystery:
Why did you smile at me that day? (37–38) 

So fully does he love the princess, the dervish says, so completely has he given his life over to love of her, that he is perfectly willing to die, since he has already ceased to exist for himself. His final question, however, betrays him. In wanting to know why the princess smiled at him, he reveals his love as a kind of vanity, a desire more to satisfy himself than to lose himself. Within this way of thinking, the princess’ response gives the dervish just what he deserves: 

…”Poor fool,
I smiled from pity, almost ridicule—
Your ignorance provoked that smile.” She spoke,
And vanished like a wisp of strengthless smoke. (38) 

The hoopoe wants with this story to show the nightingale how fruitless it is to depend on carnal love for ultimate fulfillment. To me, however, the error is in thinking that the impulse to self-erasure that the nightingale and the dervish feel so passionately resembles love at all. Not only would we today almost certainly call the dervish’s behavior a kind of stalking, rejecting any attempt to define it as a healthy or even legitimate expression of love, but we would see it unambiguously as an attempt to claim an entirely illusory power over the princess.

The hoopoe’s response, I imagine, would be that this is precisely why the dervish and the nightingale needed to transform and redirect their desire towards oneness with God, since oneness with God, who is all powerful, would require them by definition to surrender completely the illusion that they possessed any real power at all. There’s no way, however, that this kind of surrender is not political. Even if you are a person of perfect faith, even if you believe that your religious tradition is the most just way for the world to be organized and that it holds within it the secret to true transcendence, that belief constitutes acceptance of—all you are doing is assenting to—the politics inherent in your faith.

What bothers me is not that this should be so, but that people pretend it is not so. More on this in my upcoming posts.