Across Persianate Culture, Manners Are About Far More than Politeness or Ethics
By Mana Kia
Edited by Sam Haselby
13 October
2020
In Persian,
the word often translated into English as ‘manners’ or ‘etiquette’ is Adab. However, Adab is about far more than politeness or ethics even. It means
proper social and aesthetic form and, across Persianate culture, form conveyed
substance and, by extension, meaning.
Detail
of the Rose Garden of Sa’di, from a manuscript of the Gulistan. Mughal Empire,
c1645. Courtesy Wikipedia
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From the
13th to the mid-19th century, Persian was the language of learning, culture and
power for hundreds of millions of diverse peoples in various empires and
regional polities across Central, South and West Asia. Persian was not the
language of a place called Persia – this place name is used only in European
languages (otherwise, the place is known as Iran), and using it as an adjective
to describe its people obscures the fact that Persian-speakers lived in many
other lands. Increasingly, scholars use ‘Persianate’ as the cultural descriptor
of Persian as a trans-regional lingua franca. For six centuries, Persianate Adab – the proper aesthetic and social
forms – lived in this language through its widely circulated texts, stories,
poetry: the corpus of a basic education. To learn Adab, these particular forms of writing, expression, gesture and
deed, to identify their appropriate moments, and to embody them convincingly,
was to be an accomplished Persian.
The term Adab existed in other, related
languages, including Arabic, Urdu and various forms of Turkish spoken in
Anatolia and Central Asia (Ottoman, Chagatai and Uzbek). But[N1] [N2] what was proper as aesthetic or
social form was specifically constituted within particular language traditions
– for example, generosity might look different in stories in a particular
language, and be called for at differing moments. The educated and less
educated across Eurasia were multilingual in varying ways, and these diverse
traditions permeated each other, with language traditions circulating through
storytellers, preachers, reciters, mendicant-poets and prayer leaders. However,
in the Islamic east, across Anatolia, but especially beyond Baghdad after the
13th century, Persian became the language of new empires, linking these other
traditions and constituting the core of Adab.
The widely
read and influential Gulistan (1258),
or Rose Garden, by the 13th-century poet Sa‘di, for instance, was an exemplar
of beautiful prose writing but also a model of social conduct. From the Balkans
to Bengal, from Southeast Asia to Siberia, the Gulistan was the first Persian
book that children read as part of their elementary education. Throughout
Persianate Asia, it was also studied well into adulthood. Sa‘di’s stories and
style entertained readers, but they also instructed them in Adab. Many could be amused and grasp the
lessons only in limited ways (or not at all). But some could prove themselves
as the possessors of heart (sahibdil, the heart being the seat of
understanding), and grasp the text’s underlying wisdom.
The
Gulistan’s chapters included mostly short prose vignettes or adages, with
poetic verses underscoring their meaning. In the chapter on suhbat (the art of
conversation and companionship; suhbat means both), we read:
Two persons
have toiled in vain and laboured without benefit. One is he who has saved and
not consumed, and the other is he who has learned and not acted.
No matter
how much learning you acquire, if you don’t act, you are ignorant.
Neither
scholar nor sage, he is an animal on whom are a few books.
What
knowledge or awareness does that empty-headed one have? Is he carrying kindling
or notebooks?
For certain
things to come into being, they had to be enacted in the world. Here, for
learning to truly exist, you needed to act according to it, to show it in the
appropriate way. Otherwise, as Sa‘di explains, you were in fact ignorant, and
your learning in vain. Learning didn’t exist separately from its expression.
This was a matter of ontological being, before its moral and aesthetic status.
Adab was acquired through education. Learning
enabled one to practise appropriate behaviours that, in turn, instilled desired
dispositions. At the same time, not everyone could learn, or not to the same
degree.
The
challenge for the reader was to understand who needed education, and when to
recognise that certain people could not learn
The first
vignette in the Gulistan’s chapter on
the effects of education tells of a vizier with a ‘stupid’ son, whom he sends
to a scholar for education. In spite of the scholar’s arduous efforts, the son
remained as he was. The scholar, driven crazy by the attempt, sends the son
back to the father. Sa‘di leaves us with three lines of verse, emphasising the
point that all the effort in the world won’t make education have an effect
‘unless the base is essentially receptive’. The last verse is perhaps one of
the most widely quoted in writing and speech when making the same point, a
synecdoche of the vignette as a whole: ‘If you take Jesus’ ass to Mecca, when
it comes back it will still be an ass.’
By
contrast, the chapter’s next vignettes emphasise the importance of acquiring
learning, especially for particular types of people, such as princes, the
viziers who advise them, government officials and the scholars to whom the
people look for wisdom. The challenge for the reader was to understand who
needed education, and when to recognise that certain people could not learn.
Substance could not always be known from factors such as birth or social
location either. The vizier’s son was unsuited to follow in his father’s
footsteps. This was a system of ethics that recognised people’s substantive differences
– not all were cut out to be viziers.
To show
possession of social Adab, one had to
know what to do and say in any given situation. This required knowing prized
values, their relative relations to one another, and how to respond properly
when positioned between more than one demand. In other words, to be a possessor
of Adab, a Persian had to know when
to strive and when to accept, when to be silent and when to speak – and then
how to speak the right way. Obviously, the Adab
– the conduct and speech appropriate in a given situation – wasn’t always
straightforward, and sometimes the tension was the point. Those who could
negotiate this tension most convincingly were the most admired (pointing to the
always-present audience of other Persians). The terms were widely agreed upon
among a wide swathe of people, from men of letters (such as poets, scholars and
scribes) to men of power in this world (judges, officials, military leaders)
and in the other, unseen world (such as Sufis), though there were frequent
struggles and disagreements over interpretation on everything from politics,
the meaning of history or even what constituted good poetry. Even among
themselves, Sufis disagreed as to the proper path to God, and each path
constituted its own Sufi order.
For
instance, in 18th-century Delhi, the poet Hazin Lahiji, renowned for his public
contempt of the Timurid court, put his fellow migrant, Valih Daghistani, an
imperial servant, in an unenviable spot. Explaining how he negotiated an
ethical course through conflicting obligations (with political ramifications),
Valih remarks:
Though
civility and fairness are essential to the dignity of a Shaykh, he [Hazīn] has
flimsily lampooned all people of this region, from the king and nobles to
everyone else, [and] acts unworthy of the dignity of a Shaykh. However much I
tried to prevent him from this ugly behaviour, it was no use, and even now he
persists. Necessarily, out of regard for loyal service to the king, the
obligations of companionship with the nobles and other sinless acquaintances,
having apologised, I have abandoned relations with that great and learned man,
acting as though I had never seen him.
Here, Valih
justifies himself in a biographical commemoration of Hazin that circulated
widely across India and Iran. While he abandoned the great poet whom he had
patronised, Valih showed himself a Sahibdil, a possessor of understanding, by
convincingly inhabiting the Adab of
ethical service.
Just as Adab could separate two Shia Muslim men,
it could bring others together across lines of difference, both within and
across the great multi-confessional and multi-ethnic empires of the early
modern, eastern Islamic world. It was the hermeneutical ground of meaning
(including morals) through which Persians across regions and religious
communities understood and enacted themselves, and related to other people and
to their social collectives.
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Mana Kiais associate professor of Middle
Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University in New York.
She is the author of Persianate Selves (2020).
Original Headline: Persianate ‘Adab’ involves far more than elegant
manners
Source: The Psyche
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