HETEROTOPIA AND THE WINE POEM IN EARLY ISLAMIC CULTURE

Extract

The 11th-century Andalusian author Ibn Hazm, in his treatise on love entitled Tawq al-Hamama (Ring of the Dove), strikes on a vivid analogy for illustrating the nature of the self and its propensity for wrongdoing: “[t]he righteous man and woman are like a fire concealed within ashes that doesn't burn anyone nearby unless stirred, but the unrighteous are like a blazing fire that burns up everything.” This fire that must be kept tightly enclosed is the lower self, the inner repository of insatiable desire. To release the fire is to allow an immediate and untrammeled gratification of desire that would quickly consume the self and its surroundings. Ibn Hazm's analogy derives from the normative discourse pioneered more than two centuries earlier by Ibn al-Muqaffa (d. 757) and al-Jahiz (d. 868), who, drawing on a variety of sources, developed an account of moral self-integration consonant with the courtly culture of their time. Their account complements the contemporary courtly panegyric poetry, which depicted the caliph and other figures of authority as embodiments of the normative ideal, enjoying and conferring a utopian state of bliss. In the same period, the poet Abu Nuwas (d. c. 814) developed a body of wine poetry that parodies the ideal of self-integration in a way that reveals the symbolic operations at work within it. Abu Nuwas's wine poems take advantage of the apparent contradiction at the heart of normative discourse: the blissful condition of power and pleasure sought by the desiring self can be realized only through moral self-integration, which is the suppression of the desiring self. In other words, one must master one's insatiable desire by adhering to moral norms because this is precisely the way, ultimately, to gratify desire eternally and absolutely. The goal of self-integration, whether conceived of as an ideal psychic state, a utopian community, or a condition in the afterlife, is thus the same boundless conflagration of the sinner pictured by Ibn Hazm, except that it perfects the self instead of destroying it.