In The Conference of the Birds, a Sufi allegory which I summarized briefly in Part One of this series, Farid al-Din Attar calls the penultimate stage of enlightenment, the final one the birds must pass through before reaching their goal, “The Valley of Bewilderment.” In this context, however, bewilderment does not signify mere confusion. Rather, it names a stage of spiritual development when the categories the seeker has used to organize and understand the world collapse into a radical uncertainty about who he is within that world, and what he thinks he knows and can know about it. In Attar’s conception, the stage of bewilderment is the point at which the seeker moves beyond an understanding of God as the creator who exists in tension with the world he created and perceives God instead as existing outside that binary formulation, as something that is beyond the capacity of the human imagination even to begin to conceptualize.

The seeker who reaches this stage exists in a state of paradox. On the one hand, because he still lives in the world, he knows it as he has always known it; on the other hand, once he apprehends God’s unknowability, the fabric of what he thinks he knows comes apart at the seams. His goal at this stage of enlightenment is to embody that paradox without attempting to resolve it. Bewilderment, in other words, is experienced not as something that happens toa seeker, but rather as a state of being he enters and internalizes. The story Attar chooses to illustrate this stage of spiritual development is rooted in the erotic. Read according to today’s norms, however, the person at the center of the story—a slave with whom a princess desires a sexual encounter—would be understood, legally and morally, to have been kidnapped and raped or, at the very least, made the victim of a drug-facilitated sexual assault; and the bewilderment he experiences would likely be glossed as a response to that trauma, not as spiritual growth.

“The Story of the Princess Who Loved A Slave” begins with a conventional description of the princess’ beauty:

Her eyebrows were two bows bent back to shoot
The arrows of love’s passionate dispute;
The pointed lashes of her humid eyes
Were thorns strewn in the pathway of the wise[.]

This “weaponry,” however, is not enough to protect the princess from the beauty of a newly arrived slave. The moment she lays eyes on him, she is overcome with desire. She struggles mightily to retain her self-control. She is, after all, a princess and to confess her desire to him directly would be to put her honor at risk in a way that she finds unacceptable. She “read[s] a hundred books on chastity,” but to no avail. In the end, unable to maintain her composure any longer, she tells her slave girls, “If I can’t make my affection plain,/I’ll die, I’ll waste away in secret pain,” and she concludes that she must find a way to have him, while also concealing from him the truth about their encounter.

The slave girls understand this as a command and reassure the princess that they will bring the slave to her in such a way that “he won’t know a thing.” After one of them drugs him, they bring him unconscious to the princess’ bedchamber, where, when he wakes up, he and the princess spend a night of passionate lovemaking. When the lovers are done and he has again fallen asleep, the slave girls bring him back without his knowledge to “his own hard floor,” where, on waking, he is confronted with a paradox. On the one hand, he knows that he and the princess spent the night together—an experience he describes as “bliss vouchsafed to me, to me alone”—but on the other hand, since he does not know how he came to be with her, and since it looks to him as if he never left his own quarters, he can’t be sure if what he knows happened that night actually happened: 

“Was it a dream, or was it true?
Was I drunk or sober? I wish I knew—
The world has never known a state like this,
This paradox beyond analysis,
Which haunts my soul with what I cannot find,
Which makes me speechless speak and seeing blind.
I saw perfection’s image, beauty’s queen,
A vision that no man has ever seen…
But did I see her? What more can I say?
Between this ‘yes’ and ‘no’ I’ve lost my way!”

The slave’s inability to escape the paradox of this experience is Attar’s metaphor for the spiritual bewilderment that is his true subject. In order for that metaphor to work, however, both in literary terms and as a teaching tool, we as readers need to overlook not only the way that slave was deprived of any opportunity to consent meaningfully to the sex the princess wanted to have with him, but also the assumptions about gender that, as long as they remain unquestioned, render the issue of the slave’s consent irrelevant to the spiritual lesson the story is intended to teach.

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Described in terms of its bare plot points, “The Story of the Princess Who Loved A Slave” resembles a story about sexual violence more than one about spiritual growth. First, the slave is drugged and transported against his will and without his knowledge to a place he’s never been. Then, once the drug wears off, he’s confronted by a princess who wants to have sex with him and to whom, once you take their different stations into account, it is unlikely he would have felt free to say no. When he’s fallen asleep after the princess is finished with him, he’s taken back—he doesn’t know how—to his own quarters. Read in light of today’s values, in other words, not only would the slave clearly be seen as a victim of sexual violence, but his inability to construct a coherent narrative to account for his experience would be understood as evidence not of spiritual growth, but of trauma.

It’s possible to argue, of course, that my analysis is ahistorical and anachronistic, that it imposes a contemporary value system on a historical text informed by a very different set of cultural values. Imagine for a moment, though, that the genders in Attar’s story were reversed. That narrative would in some way have to account for the fact that, even back then, sex between a slave woman and a prince would by definition have had an impact on both her self-image and how she was seen by others that the sex the slave in Attar’s story had with the princess would not have had on him as a man. This difference rests on a foundational assumption about male sexuality that persists today in a form that is essentially no different than it was in Attar’s time: that men should always be ready, willing, and able to have sex, regardless of the circumstance.

Within the logic of this assumption, in other words, a man’s consent is assumed as an a priori fact of his gender. Another way of saying this is that men are understood not to have sexual boundaries, which is why Attar’s narrative does not need to concern itself with the social meaning of the sex the slave had with the princess. As long as we remain within this logic, in other words, nothing about that sex would be at all destabilizing for the man. Some form of destabilization is necessary, however, for the story to work as Attar intended, which is why he structured the narrative such that the slave does not know how he came to be in the princess’ room or how he ended up back in his own. Those two plot points may radically undermine the slave’s confidence in what he thinks he knows about what happened to him, but nothing about the story even remotely suggests that the experience undermined his sense of himself as a man.

The slave’s bewilderment can only function as a metaphor for its spiritual counterpart, in other words, only insofar as Attar’s narrative elides the coercion that lies at the heart of its plot, because that elision is what protects and preserves the slave’s gender integrity. If the kidnapping at the beginning were not implicitly understood as necessary for him to access a pleasure he is assumed a priori to want, sex, and if his consent to that sex were not also assumed, then there would be no way for his manhood and masculinity to survive his encounter with the princess intact. He would be reduced within the narrative to the powerless and sexually objectified slave that he was, and his experience of bewilderment would be more than anything else a reflection of that emasculated state.

For Attar, in other words, what makes a man a man, the assumed “natural truth” of embodied male existence, structures how the spiritual experience itself is conceptualized. This does not mean, of course, that transcendence is not real for those men who achieve it, but it does suggest that transcendence as Attar understood it requires gender to remain unchallenged both as a component of personal identity and as the infrastructure that enables sexual inequality within society. It’s ironic, then, that the metaphor he constructed for bewilderment is itself “bewildered” in that it simultaneously reveals and denies both the sexual vulnerability of the male body and the trauma that is inherent in how the princess sexually coerces the slave. I don’t know what’s on the other side of pulling that metaphor apart. What I know is that the metaphor can only continue to function in this way as long as it remains a power we pretend not to see.