Customer Reviews

Four Sufi Classics: Salaman and Absal/The Niche for Lights/The Way of the Seeker/The Abode of Spring

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book opens a window on several varieties of Sufi literature, and by including the introductions of the early translators Edward Fitzgerald ("Salaman and Absal") and Canon Gairdner ("The Niche for Lights"), it also exposes the expectations and assumptions that have shaped western responses to Sufism over the last two centuries. Fitzgerald's overheated Victorian imagination seeks and finds Oriental exoticism in Jami's poetic allegory, whereas Gairdner's historical and philosophical analysis is baffled by Ghazzali's celebration of intuitive knowledge and mystical experience. By viewing Sufism through the lenses of excessive emotionality and excessive rationality, they reveal most clearly the limitations of their responses.

The limitations of Fitzgerald's Victorian poetic diction in "Salaman and Absal" will be obvious to the contemporary reader -- overly florid with a tendency to vagueness -- but the allegorical significance of the poem nonetheless comes through. Gairdner's prose is clear and precise, and Ghazzali's tract has many surprises, such as his fascinating discussion of symbolism. David Pendlebury's versions of Hakim Sanai's "The Way of the Seeker" and Jami's "The Abode of Spring" have a freshness and immediacy that brings these works to life in a contemporary idiom. (Also recommended: Pendlebury's translation of Hakim Sanai's "The Walled Garden of Truth.")