Gender Inversion in Oriental Islamic Literature: The Female Voice in Poetry by Male Writers from the Muslim World.
Poetry from Islamic traditions, whether secular or religious, often exhibits the phenomenon of gender transference in the use of voice, the male assuming a woman's voice to address the beloved and the woman oftenadopting the male voice. The practice is widely observed in poetry and song composed and/or sung by poets and singers from areas where Islam was, or remains dominant, from the middle-east to the Indian sub-continent and from medieval Spain through Northern Africa, Turkey and Iran embracing a huge variety of linguistic and cultural traditions. It is thus a vast subject that awaits serious and particularized study. For the present, however, I will be focusing on the phenomenon, in a limited way, in poetry writtenby menwithin a few illustrative Islamic traditions, the Indo-Iranian, with some reference to practices and concepts originating in Muslim Spain, and offer some generalized propositions for further study. This paper surveys, among other matters, the social and religious cultures that produce thisphenomenon and examines the implications of such a strategy or literary device.Approaching the subject from a variety oftheoretical perspectives,historical, religious, secular love tradition,conventions of sufi thought and expression, it attempts to appraise the phenomenonin the light of womanist and feminist approaches to see if indeedit is one that participates in the abbreviation of the rights of women by appropriating their voices or performs, concomitantly or alternatively, other functions such assubverting, and thus challenging, the prevalent mores of gender disparity, privileging the sensibility and capacity acquired by women under the rigor of patriarchal intemperance, and reflecting a more fluid sense of gender thatoffers a different viewof understandingthe notions of masculine and feminine inthe dynamics of interdependence and interfusionthat producesa ceaselessly fascinatingmutual shaping and reshaping.
The forms of poetry prevalent in the Arabic and Indo-Iranian traditions include nazm, ghazal (rhymed couplets not necessarily connected in theme but following the same rhyme—qafia-radeef, throughout), kafi (short devotional poem), qita (a short poem within or independent of a ghazal), rubai (quatrain), qawwali (based on “qaul”, a famous saying, generally from Hadith, having its origin in 9th c. Baghdad—“qawwals” are those who recite the qauls), qasida (poem of praise in rhymed couplets), sufi (also known as sufiana kalam—literally mystical speech), marsiya (elegy, generally in commemoration of Imam Husain’s martyrdom at Kerbala), and the masnavi (narrative poem in rhymed couplets). Those peculiar to the Indo-Iranian culture include bol (sayings, proverbs), doha (rhymed couplets), geet (song of love, devotion, or pain of separation), thumri (a semi-classical song genre in the woman’s voice), dadra ( )—ghazal, qawwali, and sufiana kalam, however, being far more popular here than in any other part of the Islamic world today. Often the gender of the poetic voice in many of these forms is either female or indeterminate. However, any of the following permutations or combinations may manifest themselves:
i) Use of indeterminate gender for both poetic persona and addressee (beloved);
ii) Use of indeterminate gender for either poetic persona or addressee, but not for both;
iii) Male persona addressing a female beloved;
iv) Female persona addressing a male beloved;
v) Male persona addressing a male beloved;
vi) Female persona addressing a female beloved;
vii) Male persona addressing an adolescent beloved, male or female, but generally male;
viii) Female addressing an adolescent beloved, male or female.
It may be interesting to note that all the permutations deal with an exploration of the emotion of love in all its gendered possibilities. This is partly determined by the nature of the poetic forms culturally available to the poet. It could be argued that all poetry, being in some way a manifestation or unfolding of Divine attributes, is ultimately about love, but most of the forms noted above are constituted specifically as social, cultural, or religious performatives of this emotion.
Shamsur Rahman Faruqi in an enlightening article, “Coventions of Love, Love of Conventions: Urdu Love Poetry in the Eighteenth Century,” approaches the subject at a slant. “One of the recurrent themes in the eighteenth-century Urdu ghazal is the poet’s self-denigration as a ‘writer of elegies,’ and not of poems proper,” he writes, and quotes from Qudrat ullah, Mirza Mazhar Jan e Janan, Mir Taqi Mir, and Mushafi in support:
Nothing falls from the lips of Qudrat
But lamentation. He’s no poet
But an elegist for his own heart.
It’s a whole age
Since Mazhar has been pouring
His lamentations into meter,
And yet in the beloved’s mind,
He doesn’t speak like a poet.
Don’t describe me as a poet, Oh Mir,
I collected the numerous griefs and sorrows
And made up a Divan.
I am not really a poet, Oh Mushafi,
I am an elegy reciter;
I recite the soz, and make
The lovers weep.
Faruqi goes on to say: “Poetry thus was basically a quest for themes, and love was just another theme, not an event in the poet’s real life; only that in the ghazal, love was the most important theme. And the core function of love was to soften the heart, to make it receptive to more pain, which ultimately made the human heart a site for the Divine Light to be reflected upon and into it. Pain, and things that caused pain, had a positive value. The lover’s place was to suffer; the beloved’s function was to inflict suffering. This was a sufistic formulation,” Faruqi adds, “but was regularly taken by the ghazal poet to be true for the ghazal universe.” The persona, thus, in the ghazal (and this carries on to other forms as well, as we shall see) is that of “the only true lover: all the rest are false, and given to havas (lust), rather than shauq (desire), or ishq (love).” As far as the diurnal world is concerned, then, success in love would signify only an utter failure since it would not relieve the lover of his ego. Only death can bring that about, but not death by one’s own hand. And not an easy death either. The highest aspiration would be to suffer constantly at the hands of the beloved, to experience anguish at the indifference, fickleness, injustice, and unfairness, even animosity and enmity of the beloved, but not to give up loving, for all these states still keep a connection with the lover alive.
Koi meray dil sey puchhay, tere teer e neem kash ko
Ye khalish kahan sey hoti jo jigar key par hota
Let someone ask my heart, your slow-released arrow
Would not have given this exquisite pain, if it had shot right through
Qata kejay nan taaluq ham sey
Kuch nahin hai to adawat he sahee
Don’t sever the connection with me
If nothing, I have at least your enmity
But the poetic persona is not just an abject nobody. Others may consider the lover mad, but, as Ghalib notes in this memorable couplet, it is this madness of the lover that has given fame to the beloved.
Ishq mujh ko nahin wahshat hi sahee
Meri wahshat teri shuhrat he sahee
Alright, it may not be love, but madness in me
But, consider, it is my madness that gives you fame
It is the “other” who is less than fully devoted, out for temporary and temporal satisfactions—the friend who has betrayed the lover to get intimate the beloved, the advisor who always cautions against extremes, the censor who threatens with the weight of social custom, the preacher who has nothing but banal advice that puts you to sleep, the priest who represents religious disapproval, the formerly trusted messenger who now struts about flaunting his own connection with the beloved, or person of consequence before whose privilege and power the lover has neither status nor value, on all of whom the beloved may bestow its charms and favors, but whose love is mere lust, whose passion is mere pastime. The lover has nothing but contempt for them, though there is a secret envy at their proximity to the beloved. As Shamsur Rahman Faruqi notes, “The world of the ghazal is one world where the Outsider is the Hero, where non-conformism is the creed, and where prosperity is poverty.”
Such conventions of cruelty of the beloved did not originate in the Indian subcontinent. They appear to have a long history in Muslim culture going back at least to the time of Muslim rule in Spain from about the 8th c to the 12th—and thereafter, until the end of the 14th when it was confined to the kingdom of Granada. Ibn Hazm, who lived in the period of the destruction of the Ummayad court in Cordoba, wrote a celebrated thesis on love called The Ring of the Dove. It was widely read in his time and was seen by subsequent generations as a classic manual of courtly love. In it he writes, “Humiliation before the beloved is the natural character of a courteous man,” and advises that “A slave girl was the most favoured object of affection for a courtly lover” (252). “The lover was exalted and refined by abasing himself and by suffering the agonies of unrequited love, ” says Robert Irwin (Night and Horses And the Desert). Irwin goes on to add, “In his approach to the ennobling power of love, even when—especially when—the object of that love was unworthy of it, he was following the path of that arbiter of taste in the Abbasid period, Ibn Washsha. Some of the figures Ibn Hazm wrote about, such as the reproacher, the spy and the trusted confidant, had routinely featured in Arabic love poetry for centuries.” Ibn Hazm believed that “true love is a spiritual approbation, a fusion of souls,” and in this Neoplatonic idea one may see the seed of the approach to love as evidenced in the Muslim Urdu poetry of the Indian subcontinent.
Here is a passage from Ibn Hazm that elaborates his view of love: “Let no man say that the patience displayed by the lover when the beloved humiliates him is a sign of pusillanimity: that would be a grave error. We know that the beloved is not to be regarded as a match or an equal to the lover, that the injury inflicted by him on the lover should be repaid in kind. The beloved’s insults and affronts are not such as a man need regard as dishonoring him; the memory of them is not preserved down the ages; neither do they occur in the Courts of the Caliphs and the salons of the great, where endurance of an insult would imply humiliation, and submission would lead to utter contempt” (Ibn e Hazm, The Ring of the Dove, 255)
We see here a quite unusual turn given to the relationship between the lover and the beloved. The beloved before whom the lover abases itself is not equal or superior in worldly status, but far below, laboring under great rigor and disability, the most abject of the abject, being a slave. It is before this lowest of all beings in the social scale that the lover submits itself and binds itself as a slave to the beloved’s every command, suffering all persecution without complaint, and displaying a readiness to accept any humiliation, cruelty, betrayal, or injury that may come his way in the cause of love.
What does all this mean? How can we deconstruct this to discover the encoded intentions and motives behind this abjection of the lover? A minefield of possibilities may exist here, but here are some that come to my mind. At some level, this approach toward love is a challenge to the established social order. A slave, who may have little or no rights in society, is raised to a position, suddenly, that is above all else in this world, be it governor, king, qadi, imam, or caliph. In fact, the passion and singular focus of the love directed toward the slave may be such that it is seen as one with the Ultimate Reality. As in other forms of spiritual quest, consummation is neither desired nor possible in this world, for if it brings the lover in possession of the beloved, a certain parity would be achieved, the lover’s ego would be still intact, and the perfection of love, therefore, beyond its reach. The ideal is for the loving self to be completely absorbed in the beloved. It would require a forgetting of the self to the point of its elimination, in worldly terms, death for the lover, and, therefore, an end to both the experience and consciousness of loving. There would then be just one existence, not two—just the beloved, not the lover and the beloved. As the Punjabi mystical poet Bullhe Shah, assuming the female persona of Heer, says in one of his most famous kafis, Ranjha, Ranjha, kardi nin mein aape Ranjah hoee/Aakho menoon Deedho Ranjha, Heer nan aakho koee (Calling out, Ranjha, Ranjha, I am become Ranjha myself/Call me now Deedho Ranjha, not Heer anyone anymore). This move toward mystical transcendence is at the heart of Ibn Hazm’s concept of love, but it has personal and social consequences as well. The lover who is able to follow to precision this pattern of loving, and the desire would be to keep the consciousness of loving alive, will be seen as none other than a mad man by society. This love is against all reason, all norms of decency, socially constructed structures and sense of identity. It cannot be taken seriously, for if it is, the socio-political order would be challenged and the state’s machinery would come apart. Embedded here, then, apart from the embrace of necessary suffering, is the note of protest and rebellion which otherwise may not have found vent in an order established on the basis of class and power hierarchies, state policy, and religious doctrine. Poets in Islamic lands may have taken advantage of a certain license that those engaged in artistic pursuits may have to challenge the received norms of the times.
“There exists in poetry,” writes Andrew Schelling in his book on Mira Bai, For the Love of the Dark One, “a tradition of outriders or night cadres, of nomads, exiles and rebel songs. Throughout history, within every literate culture, poets belonging to this lineage have emerged to articulate a brave and defiant opposition to unjust distribution of wealth, religious persecution, oppression of women, and aggressive military expoits (98). Gender inversion in poetry by muslim writers and singers may play a similar kind of role in certain societies.