Amīr Khusraw is one of the most famous poets from the Indian Subcontinent. A court poet of the Delhi Sultanate–one of the most important Islamic empires during the thirteenth century, Khusraw was at once a poet, Sufi, literary critic, linguaphile, and connoisseur of music. Khusraw played a central role in developing Indo-Persian aesthetics and poetics, laying the foundation for a distinct Indo-Persian literary heritage that remains alive in contemporary South Asia. Khusraw was deeply well versed in various Islamic intellectual sciences such as Islamic theology (kalām), logic (manṭiq), rhetoric/literary criticism (‘ilm al-balāgha), Qur’ān, and Hadīth, as well as Arabic and Persian literary canon. This allowed him to not only creatively deploy from the literary and religious tradition(s) preceding him but also to synthesize them. Responding the the inimitability of the Qur’ān debate (Iʿjāz al-Qur’ān) that explores the relationship between poetry and the Qur’ān, Khusraw penned a theoretical treatise titled Dībāchāh-i dīvān-i Ghurrat al-kamāl (Preface to the Full Moon of Perfection) that creatively deploys tools from literary criticism (balāghā) and argues for poetry to be a source of wisdom (ḥikmah).
As Lara Harb and Alexander Key pointed out, earlier literary theorists and thinkers viewed poetry as fabricating the truth, merely provoking emotions or causing or shifting mental images. Within twelfth-century literary criticism, writers such as Rashid al-din Vatvāt (d.1182) Niẓāmī Aruzī Samarqandī (d.1161), and Shams al-Dīn Qais al-Rāzi rendered īhām (ambiguity) as creating doubt and falsehood. Departing from earlier conceptions of poetry that asserted poetry merely “evokes emotions,” “uses symbolic language to appeal to masses,” or uses imagination (khayāl) to “rearrange mental contents,” or “merely heightens or lessens emotions,” Khusraw argues that poetry is the best vessel for expressing knowledge. In literary criticism, rhetorical tools such as ambiguity were seen as ornaments that cause doubt and mislead.
Comparing ambiguity (īhām) to a mirror, Khusraw claimed that while ordinary mirrors only show one face [of the person standing in front of it], īhām is like a mirror that shows seven true and luminous meanings at once, like seven faces in a mirror, with each image radiant, bright, and graspable by readers of certain temperaments and training. As Muzaffar Alam points out, Khusraw’s intervention lies in the fact that it not only points towards the existence of those multiple levels of meaning but stresses the fact that they exist simultaneously and are all true (durust). Alam writes, “the newness of Khusrau’s īhām lay in the suggestion that a poet could use a word, or a combination of words, in as many senses as he wished, and that all these could be simultaneously intended direct, equally true (durust), logical and sensible”. Khusrau rejected the idea that īham meant deception; for Khusrau, the meanings in poetry are all discernible and radiant, clearer and brighter than a mirror. The reader only has to concentrate, think on, and think around the verse. While a trained reader may choose a certain meaning in a given context, yet ambiguity forces the reader to reckon that there is more than one possible way of reading and interpreting a word, phrase, couplet, or text.
Khusraw’s notion of ambiguity is deeply embedded in Qur’ānic hermeneutics. While Khusraw is cautious in not reducing the whole of Qur’ān to poetry, Khusraw highlights that Qur’ānic speech is poetic and contains the knowledge of poetry. Due to this, he claims that denying poetry is akin to denying the Qur’ān. Furthermore, Khusraw responded to the Inimitability of the Qur’ān Debate (Iʿjāz al-Qur’ān) debate, which probed the relation between Qur’ān and poetry because Qur’ān’s miraculous nature was understood to be its unmatchable literary quality. Rather than offering literary arguments to prove the inimitability of the Qur’an–as previous theologians such as al-Rummānī (d. 384/994), al-Bāqillānī (d. 403/1013), or littérateurs such as Abū Hilāl al-ʿAskarī (d. ca. 400/1010) and Ibn Rashīq al-Qayrawānī (d. 456/1064) had done–Khusraw uses the inimitability of the Qur’ān to offer a defense of poetry. Following Jurjānī, Khusraw probed the overlaps between Qur’ān and poetry and discussed the literary qualities of poetry in greater detail.
Furthermore, Khusraw argues that just as Qur’ān contains ambiguity– present in its words, syntax, and ambiguous/metaphorical verses (mutashābihāt)–and yet serves as a source of wisdom, similarly, poetry that contains ambiguity serves as a source of knowledge and guidance. Therefore, rather than being sources of deception, Khusraw argues for poetry and its rhetorical tools, such as ambiguity, to be sources of knowledge and wisdom (ḥikmah). I argue that in addition to offering wisdom through its content, poetry offers wisdom through its form. Forcing the reader/listener to become part of the interpretive process cultivates a distinct mode of knowing. Through rhetorical tools such as ambiguity, metaphor, and imagery, it offers wisdom by cultivating a “poetic” perception or a vision of synthesis that attunes the reader to witness interrelatedness between seemingly disparate phenomena.
Ambiguity as a rhetorical tool is significant for Khusraw as a source of knowledge as it offers a wide semantic range and multiple interpretive possibilities. Furthermore, it trains the reader/listener to deem multiple possible meanings simultaneously true. In addition to offering wisdom through its form and content, ambiguity offers ḥikmah through its performative aspect. Among the multitude of meanings that are simultaneously true, it allows the reader/listener to choose a particular meaning in a given context. Khusraw draws this from scriptural hermeneutics as ḥikmah, in one sense, is not merely understanding Qur’ānic injunctions or the words of poetry but rather the ability to apply that richness of meaning of various contexts, keeping in view the time, place, and other such considerations in mind.
By training the reader/listener to hold multiple truths simultaneously and apply them contextually, poetic ambiguity cultivates a form of wisdom that resists authoritarian and reductive interpretations. His work not only reaffirms poetry’s epistemic value but also challenges contemporary assumptions about knowledge, meaning, and interpretation in an age of digital acceleration.
Amīr Khusraw is one of the most famous poets from the Indian Subcontinent. A court poet of the Delhi Sultanate–one of the most important Islamic empires during the thirteenth century, Khusraw was at once a poet, Sufi, literary critic, linguaphile, and connoisseur of music. Khusraw played a central role in developing Indo-Persian aesthetics and poetics, laying the foundation for a distinct Indo-Persian literary heritage that remains alive in contemporary South Asia. Khusraw was deeply well versed in various Islamic intellectual sciences. This allowed him to not only creatively deploy from the literary and religious tradition(s) preceding him but also to synthesize them. Responding the the inimitability of the Qur’ān debate that explores the relationship between poetry and the Qur’ān, Khusraw penned a theoretical treatise titled Preface to the Full Moon of Perfection that creatively deploys tools from literary criticism and argues for poetry to be a source of wisdom.