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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2025
The senses are an arena in which poets display their poetic virtuosity by contriving new metaphors, imagery, and similes, sometimes combining several senses in one couplet to achieve the highest effect. Persian mystics and philosophers pay much attention to the workings of the senses. Intellectual responses to the senses have engendered controversial debates from an early period in Persian culture. Many Islamic jurists ban listening to music as it may excite emotions, leading to dancing and transgressive behavior. Polemical treatises on this subject abound in Persian intellectual history. These jurists have also been interested in behaviors of sight, condemning the Sufi practice of gazing at a beardless youth to commune with God. The ritual of musical devotion is among the Sufi practices which are entirely based on senses. Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207-1273) is the embodiment of Sufi dance, and so one would think that he is very much in favor of the senses. Studying Rumi's oeuvre, however, it is astonishing how he opts against senses. There are a few passages in his work in which he praises individual senses; however the majority of references actually denounce the senses. The passages in which he elaborates upon the importance of the senses mostly refer to the scent of the beloved. In this chapter I concentrate on Rumi's explication of the senses, how he perceives the senses, how each of the senses works, and why he emphasizes, time and again, that the senses should be eliminated to arrive at a spiritual aspiration.
The Workings of the Senses
Medieval Persian philosophers and mystics had developed a detailed theory of senses often based on medical knowledge of the time. They distin guished between five external and five internal senses and elaborated on the interrelationship between them. The external senses are touch (lams), taste (zowq), smell (shamm), hearing (sam’), and sight (basar), while the internal senses are as follows:
1. Sensus communis (Hess-e mushtarak), the fusing of information from external senses into an object or a percept.
2. The faculty of ‘retentive imagination’ (khayal), which is the repository of all the forms integrated by the sensus communis.
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