Ideology and Resistance in the Poetry of Naser-e Khosrow

The purpose of this paper is to use the critical approach known as the critique of ideology to explore the ideological world of Naser-e Khosrow’s writing. The critique of ideology in literary texts aspires towards offering a concrete understanding of the text by identifying its socio–political functions. Locating literature in the dynamic interaction between the dominant political order and social discourse practices, the typical practitioner of this approach seeks to find those aspects of the text which reveal and reproduce the limits of dominant political structure.
The issue of ideology in Persian classical literature has been one of the least researched and most distorted areas of study on Iran because the terms ‘ideology’ and ‘political structure’ have been treated with vulgar and biased interpretations. In Naser-e Khosrow’s case, ideology usually refers to his Ismaili doctrines or his philosophical ideas. From this common viewpoint, ideology is a set of specific beliefs without any political or critical references. My intention, therefore, is to offer a new socio-political perspective from which classical Persian literature in general, and Naser-e Khosrow’s works, in particular, can be studied. To this end I will use the theory of ideology in cultural materialism, which highlights ideology as a negative force, to analyse the socio-political function of Naser-e Khosrow’s qasā'id. I will explore, in particular, how ethical and epistemological statements in Naser-e Khosrow’s poetry produced under the cultural dominance of Ghaznavid rule function at a contradictory level in which they challenge the dominant political power, while, at the end, remaining within the domain of the ideological givens and implicitly promoting the ‘arbitrary’ and ‘despotic’ structure of his society. To analyse the reasons for such an operation, the paper also explores the oppositional doctrine of early Ismailia to demonstrate how his poetry challenges the Qaznavids’ rule and their political coalition with the Caliphs of Baghdad. My key subjects to investigate such functions include (1) the necessity of ‘SOKHAN’ (utterance) and DAANESH (poetry as ‘knowledge’), (2) KONESH (practice), (3) FALAK (unkind firmament and passing universe) and (4) BAATEN (hidden meaning).Analysing the social and political functions of these concepts in Naser-e Khosrow poetry, I conclude that discursive resistance in the poems of Naser-e Khosrow is articulated within the realm of ideology but it is not powerful enough epistemologically and socially to break away from the ideological elements which legitimise the arbitrary political power.