Dah-Namah: Love-Mysticism as a Floating Signifier

The Dah-Namah (Ten-Epistles) is the self-conscious name for a type of amatory poetry typically containing a poetic corresponence consisting of two sets of verse letters wrapped in a framing story, itself in verse. Almost a dozen of these are known, all of which are written in the eighth and nineth centuries (13th /14th). They have been identified, and sporadically written about, for at least the past fifty years, but they have yet receive a comprehensive and analytical treatment that they obviously deserve. When the existing commentary, which is almost invariably in the traditional paraphrasing mode, attempts something that approaches an analysis, it charctrizes each and every one of the members of this genre of poetic production as “mystical allegory representing the affairs of Divine Love.” But if one appraoches them without the pervasive mystical or more accurately mystificatory prejudgement, one immediately and unhesitatingly, notices that they are anything but. In this paper, I assume the perspective a historian of politics and, by placing them in the context of their production, show that far from being devotional poems, they are in fact attempts at framing very real events and situations. This I do with particular attention to “Rūh al-Ãsheghin,” a ten-epistle composed by the Muzaffarid king Shah Shoja, first identified by the late A. Arberry in 1962. By dating this poem to a precise point in the political life of this king, I show that its amatory and mystical look and espousals are in fact not about “Divine Love,” but about the king's love for his country, or as Shah Shoja in a moment of slippage says, “keshvar-khodaii”! Obviously, my argument is based on the idea that the amatory schema in this period, as I have argued elsewhere, constitutes a kind of jargon that is totally transportable to every field of huamn activity, above all politics. In other words, amatory schema functions as a kind of floating (or empty) signifier, first proposed by Claude Lévi-Strauss in 1950.