From Pious Journeys to the Critique of Sovereignty: Khaqani Shirvani’s Persianate Poetics of Pilgrimage

Abstract

Like most world literatures, the Islamic world generated many different types of travel writing. While the trope of the Islamic pilgrimage (/:lajj) is well known, the impact of the imagery and concept of travel on poetic production from the Islamic world, particularly in Persian, has not merited the same scrutiny. Countering this tradition of neglect, this chapter introduces one of the most important and yet !east-studied Persian travel narratives to an interdisciplinary readership: the Gift from the Two Jraqs (Tuhfat al'Jraqayn), composed in the middle of the twelfth century by the Persian poet Khaqani Shirwani. I examine this work's contribution to world literature and global poetics by documenting its deployment of key tropes from a longer tradition of thinking about mobility within Persian and Islamic poetics. Of particular interest is Khaqani's method of transforming the ri/:1/a, a discourse known for celebrating migration as a pious act, into a means of critiquing sovereign power. Keywor ds: travel, ri/:1/a, journey, Persian poetry, medieval Islam, sovereignty, poetic critique "BECAUSE TRAVEL BROUGHT them, through suffering, into learning as a way of life," writes Houari Touati in his recent intellectual history of travel in the medieval Islamic world, "Muslims saw [travel] as a figure for metamorphosis, coupled with the experience of pain."3 The medieval Islamic understanding of travel as a stage of selftransformation, a horizon of new experience, and a harbinger of a new epistemology has many parallels in world history. The conceptual and practical centrality of travel 1 I would like to thank Elizabeth Gould for her editorial support. 2 This publication has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under ERC-2017-STG Grant Agreement No 759346. l Houa · T . .c . n ouatl, Islam et voyage au Moyen Age: histoire et anthropologie d'une pratH(UC lettree (Pans: Seuil, 2000), 2.