The Near East in the Mind of America.

2. Emerson and the Persians.

Islam. The word comes from a root in Arabic meaning to make peace with someone; and this basic meaning somewhat softens the noun, which means, Submission. A Moslem (or Muslim- for some reason this Arabic vocalization is considered less expressive of prejudice than the other spelling in English, which simply comes from Persian) is one who has made his peace with God by submitting to Him, an act consisting in the declaration that there is no god but the one God, called in Arabic Allah ("the God"), and Mohammed is His messenger. The advent of the latter, with the simple and clear truth meant at last to unite all mankind, is seen by Moslems as an act of kindness. Since not everyone embraced the new faith in the seventh century, those considered People of the Book, possessing a written sacred text considered to be authentic revelation, were granted toleration as second-class subjects allowed a measure of local self-government, under Islamic rule; polytheists and idolaters were not. And all who refused the offer of Islam were, in refusing what was considered to be a gracious gift, guilty of kufr, "ingratitude"; a kafir is not so much an infidel as an ingrate. But the word as pronounced in Turkish, gyavur, was always a humiliating insult and the reminder of inferior status.

In a few sentences I have gone from the description of a rarefied monotheism to the hard facts of political policy: that is because Mohammed's followers conquered so much land, so quickly- within a century they were the masters of nearly all the dry land in the temperate zone of the ancient world between China and the shores of the Atlantic- that imperial management came with the beginnings of the faith and was thus inseparable from its earliest forms. Moreover, the Qur'an prescribes an entire way of life, with rules touching upon every conceivable activity. It is a religion, like Judaism and unlike Christianity, where works are as important as faith, maybe more so. And having declared his servitude to God, man is obliged to live in a manner acceptable to Him- that is, according to the strictures of Islamic law, shari'a.

As conquered Persia gradually lost its Zoroastrian faith and the rule of Byzantium melted away from Syria and eastern Anatolia, Armenian Christians found themselves alone in a new way, as an island in an Islamic sea. Different minorities accommodated themselves in different ways: the Persians kept culture, language, and land, but abandoned religion; the Syrian Christians maintained religion and, to a much lesser degree, language, but abandoned all sense of a distinct nationhood; the Jews, already spread across the known world in a Diaspora and accustomed to a cosmopolitan existence, relinquished nearly every marker of identity save religion itself, gaining social and physical mobility enabling them to participate vitally in Islamic society. It was a successful choice: nothing remotely approaching the barbarity of the European Holocaust ever overtook the Jews of the Near East. The Armenians, by contrast, kept every parameter of identity: religion, language, identification with a distinct country, and the memory of political independence and the resolve to recover it. This ensured survival, at least till the new Turkish nationalism of the modern era conceived of Armenia as an existential threat and invented genocide. It also meant that the Armenians were sealed off almost entirely from any enduring foreign influences, at least till some connection might be established with Western Christendom: there were no Armenian-speaking, non-Armenian minorities of any consequence, ever. Armenian Christianity developed without reference to Islam. Spiritual trends in the Church, such as the Cilician revival at the time of St. Nerses the Graceful, followed the great mystic St. Gregory of Narek, who lived in the tenth century at the time of the birth of Byzantine Hesychasm; and Gregory of Tat'ev, late in the fourteenth century, practiced a scholasticism that owed much to Aquinas, and almost nothing to Islamic scholastic philosophy.

But just as there were dissident currents, both cultic and philosophical, that run hidden beneath the edifice of Christendom, emerging in different periods, often merging, but then freely diverging again, there are such in Islam as well, freedom and diversity within the outward monolith. It is inevitable that this should have become the case: the Moslems conquered the Egypt of the alchemists and the Poimandres, the Iran of Zarathushtra and Mani, even parts of Buddhist and Hindu India. Moslems translated Hermetic and magical literature into Arabic and produced their own. There were philosophical schools that taught materialism, or fatalism- both attitudes only with difficulty compatible with the literal Qur'an. Closer to the mainstream, but still at variance with the strictest monotheism, according to which there is an unbridgeable gulf between Creator and creation, there were the Moslem Neoplatonists, who postulated a connected, great chain of all being in which divinity suffuses all that exists, save only in diminishing degree in proportion to materiality. I have spoken earlier of the Mithraic fraternities, small groups who enacted rites of esoteric initiation and cultivated an ethic of proud liberty and mutual help. In mediaeval Islam there are survivals of these in the young men's associations called futuwwa, and in the conventicles of Shi'a sectarians and Kurdish tribesmen: the Ali-ilahis (who divinized, as Christ-like, the Prophet's cousin Ali), the Kurdish Yazidis (who, among other things, revere Satan as the greatest penitent- much as some Moslem mystics do) and Ahl-e Haqq ("People of the Truth") and Yaresan. In Spain, Sicily, the Balkans, and other places, Christians and Moslems not only fought, they also met and talked. It was not all Crusades, not all jihads.

Though the Islamic world experienced no commercial or industrial revolution, no secularizing Renaissance, and no Enlightenment, though in these respects any effort to support Islam in a confrontational stance against a secular West must be regarded as reactionary, as retrograde; at the same time one must resist the temptation to regard Islamic civilization as monolithic, as homogeneous. That is how Islamists would actually have it and are trying to make it- and the academic apologists for political Islam perversely, and destructively, refuse to see this. One particular aspect of Islamic culture must claim our attention now, because it claimed Ralph Waldo Emerson's. Along with German idealism, and a good dose of Indian philosophy, this anti-Magisterial Islam, if I may borrow a designation of the two sorts of American Protestantism, exerted a profound influence upon his thoughts, and his feelings. With Emerson one must mention both, and also emphasize that in him thought and feeling are perhaps more strongly married than in other men.

The dissident Islam I have in mind is Sufism. The word sufi itself is of uncertain etymology; and either of the two most common explanations is equally telling. The first, which most scholars in the West accept, is from suf, meaning "wool". Part of the asceticism of the patron saint of Christian mystics, John the Baptist, was the wearing of an uncomfortable woollen garment to mortify the flesh. He has been associated with the Jewish monastic-mystical order of the Second Temple period, the Essenes. It would not be hard to trace the roots of Sufism to the practices and doctrines of Christian mystics, who shunned and railed against the hypocrisies of society, fought their own egotism by inviting contempt upon themselves, and sought closeness to God through an almost erotic devotion. Some dwelt in isolation as hermits, rather as Thoreau was to do on the shore of Walden pond; others wandered about; and others still lived together, variously organized in communities harking back to the old Essene common life of Qumran, and forward to monasticism and, more remotely, to the commune and the phalanstery. The centers of early Christian mysticism were Upper Egypt and the desert west of the Nile Delta, the mountains of Judaea in Israel, and northern Syria- to reshape an image, a kind of Infertile Crescent upon the Near East, and one also at the heart of the dar al-Islam, the lands under the Moslem crescent emblem. The Sufis followed these practices, lived in these places, and organized themselves in these ways. The woollen shirt became a pashmina khirqa, and the leopard-pelt and coconut-shell begging bowl of the Hindu and Buddhist mendicant became additions to the Sufi's accoutrement; but it would be special pleading to argue for any great originality in the basic forms of Islamic mysticism: it is an honest heir with a good pedigree.

The second derivation of the word is from saf, "pure". This is the one many Sufis prefer and scholars reject. It is therefore worthy of our sympathetic attention. To pursue the theme of purity, one recalls that a Gnostic religion, Manichaeism, was widespread in the late antique Near East. The Manichaeans divided their followers into two groups: the Elect, celibate leaders of the community who wore white, were regarded as pure, and who were at death not to suffer the fate of reincarnation; and their followers, called Auditors, who formed the procreating, working laity. Manichaeism left its impress upon Paulicianism, a Christian heresy of mediaeval Byzanium and Armenia; and Paulicians in turn influenced the Tondrakites, a more locally Armenian sect. Armenian sectarians were exiled to the Balkans, and a form of their belief is reflected, again, in the local Bogomil heresy. The latter makes its way west, and we find its resurgence in the religion and culture of the Cathars, whose name means "pure", from Greek katharos. Not very surprisingly, the Cathars were organized along much the same lines as their ancient Manichaean forebears. To be pure by rejecting in a radical way the world's evils and resolving to be free of the hypocrisies that convention accretes about ourselves like a shell or crust, to pierce that crust and recover the true light within, to live in that radical resolution, to be apart. Saf, katharos, Puritan.

Many Christian dissident sects preached, and on occasion practiced, an extreme form of asceticism including abstention from sex. The rationale was simple: the animalistic drags man earthwards; the spiritual frees him. So many Sufis likewise were severely abstemious. However according to another view, conventional morality of any sort was itself a trap devised by the evil forces that imprison us, who present themselves and their laws, including those regarding sexual behavior, as good. But since we are in essence luminous beings alien to this world, what presents itself here as good is often the opposite; so part of the process whereby one frees himself is to transgress against those very laws, and to indulge to the fullest one's appetites. Through this antinomian behavior one separates oneself from all convention and its hypocrisy, and confronts the real. That way lies ethical nihilism; but in a more moderate and bearable form, antinomian dissidence can be linked to the doctrine of love, the very one whereby Christ sought to distinguish his own teachings from what Christian liked to present as the severe legalism of the Old Testament. So we find antinomian Sufis who violate the Qur'anic prohibition against wine, for instance, and extol a divine intoxication that is sometimes metaphorical, sometimes literal. They also forge a path towards reunification with God through love, employing explicitly sexual imagery of possession, rapture, and union and describing the longed-for beloved as a person. This anthropomorphism of a God whom Islam insists is absolutely transcendent, sails very close to heresy indeed.

This latter sort of Sufism, the less ascetic and sober variety, lends itself well to poetry, given the essential emotional and aesthetic, rather than rational and analytical, character of a poem; and Sufism is especially well suited to Persian poetry, since minstrelsy and lyric had been central to Iranian culture before the advent of Islam and the Iranian poetic art came fully equipped with the extravagant imagery and thematics the Sufis would require. The Parthians had called their bards gosans, whence Armenian gusan; and these artists had sung of romance between man and woman, of love, and of epic heroism. Often the colloquy between lover and beloved was expressed through the metaphor of rose and nightingale; and if there is one conduit through which some of Islamic spiritual culture did reach the Armenians, it is precisely in the common parlance of poetry. Mediaeval Armenian poets describe Christ as the rose and St. John the Baptist as the nightingale- his cry in the desert transmuted into the birdsong of a scented evening in spring. The image of divine intoxication goes back to Old Testament sources, in Christian tradition, and there is no intervening prohibition that might lend to it a frisson of the transgressive, of an image begging to be either a metaphor, or the violation of some oppressive law in the striving for the undifferentiated reality of love beyond all laws, or both. But for the Iranian mystics in particular, the beauty of the rose garden (one recalls that our word Paradise is a loan from ancient Iranian pairi-daeza-, a "walled garden"), the nocturnal gathering in the wine-shop of the aged Zoroastrian proprietor (a figure of primordial wisdom, the pir-e moghan, "Magian elder"), delightful draughts of the wine of Shiraz, and the embrace of the Beloved, were both literal strategies to break the dam-e tazvir, the "trap of hypocrisy" of conventional morality, and metaphors for the stages of mystical striving, awakening, ascent, and ecstasy. In a society where the state punished blasphemy with severity, the poet always had recourse to the defense that whatever he said was not literal, but a metaphor. The very ambiguity of literalism and metaphor itself aided readers of Sufi poems to shatter within themselves the shackles of convention and expectation, of the ordinary, through the lightning-bolt of surprise and even perplexity. All these images, and a great deal of the language of Sufi poetry in many countries, are culturally specific to Iran.

Persia was by far the most sophisticated civilization to fall under Moslem rule. It had for over a millennium been a world empire, and its cultural importance for a religion that had come out of a largely illiterate milieu of desert nomads, that of the Arabs, can scarcely be overestimated. The way of life of Zoroastrian Iran had been rich in all the arts, liberal in its appreciation of every human pleasure, and generous in its estimation of the individual's free capacity to suffuse his soul with the divine light of Ahura Mazda's revelation. A great many of these cultural features characterize Armenia, a country whose orientation had been mostly towards Iran; and Armenian Christian culture, with its vigorous arts and optimistic emphasis on the image of light, may reflect some of what Iran would have been, had it taken a Christian, rather than a Moslem, road. However the Iranians, in molding the culture of Sufism, in determining the character and expression of the Sufi tariqa, the Way, preserved what was most truly their own, when in so many other respects the dual identity of Persian and Moslem is so much an irreconcilable contradiction, so tragic a source of cultural, social, political, spiritual schizophrenia.

It is a standard aspect of Persian Sufi poetry, from earliest times, that the great mystical revelation is- or at least verges upon- pantheism. That is to say, the fully realized mystic discovers that what he thought to be his individual ego, his contingent being, is irrelevant or illusory, and vanishes altogether in the great experience of self-extinction, Arabic fana', in the One, in God. This is not to say he ceases to be; rather, he recognizes that which is true in his own being as belonging to transcendent, infinite Being. And since God is not circumscribed by time, space, or state, this realization is at once instantaneous and eternal, specific and cosmic- that is, God always was in everything, and nothing ever was other than in a state of unity. To a mystic, the assertion of God's oneness, Arabic tauhid, can be realized equally as the more esoteric, ecstatic revelation that everything is one, everything is God, within and without. The Sufi saint Abu Mansur al-Hallaj, the grandson of a Zoroastrian, was martyred at Baghdad in 922 for his exclamation, Ana al-Haqq, "I am the Truth!" the latter word being a divine name. What he meant was that his separate self was no longer existent; but the authorities saw it as self-divinization, a blasphemy; and al-Hallaj's approbation of physical love, his constant reference to God as a lover, further scandalized his co-religionists, for whom God is transcendent, never a human. That idea is for Christians. And indeed, the incarnate God of the Sufis is always a handsome, seductive boy in the bloom of adolescence. Persian, which has no grammatical gender, can be ambiguous in this matter, but only up to a point; and it is fair to say Iranian mystical poetry is almost entirely homoerotic.

I have mentioned sexual nonconformism as a salient feature of American visionary rebellion in all periods; so this aspect of Sufism will have of course attracted Melville and Whitman in particular, greatly. This does not stop Iranians from considering the beloved in these poems to be a woman, just as all the named couples of the pre-Islamic romances and epics were heterosexual; and both wine and the youthful beloved have become so completely and purely symbolic in the Iranian poetic imagination by now that Imm Khomeini, who, I need hardly say, disapproved very strongly indeed of both liquor and homosexuality, used these metaphors freely in his own mystical verses- for such poetry is in Iran still a living art. If shari'a, law, is one way to be a Moslem, tariqa, the Sufi "path", is the other. The tariqa seems to have been co-opted by the repressive statist system of political Islam in the modern Islamic Republic of Iran. Sometimes, Law and Path have been in very sharp opposition; at other times they have found reconciliation, where a retreat for a period into the mystical life has been found to be a medicine for the diseases of the soul- but most often the healed sufferer returns thereafter to society. Sometimes, too, the two modes of faith exist in tandem- more in taut contrast than in warm symbiosis, as it seems to me.

In my own experience, this tense co-existence between the magisterial and dissident modes of Islam is best felt, symbolized, by two buildings in two different cities of a South Asian country. During a visit to the port of Karachi in Sind some years ago, I was shown a giant, mushroom-like building surpassing in its soul-crushing dreariness the other thoughtless edifices of that appalling city. This was the Military Mosque, erected by Pakistan's dictator, a general who enforced Islamic shari'a by staging public floggings in sports stadiums. The mosque was coated with more pieces of white onyx, the placard at the entrance boasted, than any other building on earth- and I have no doubt this was the truth, for the effect of it was that it looked for all the world like the public urinal of a vanished race of titans. This is Magisterial Islam. Then there is the other sort of Islam, and another building. In Lahore, a Mughal city of gardens and fountains in the Punjab, there is a modest tomb, its four walls open to the breezes, a green flag fluttering over its dome to signify that, like a Hindu temple, it is alive and breathing. Who lies there? There was a peripatetic Sufi teacher named Hussein; and a Hindu boy, Madho Lal, fell in love with him and became a Moslem, his disciple. Once Madho Lal was sad: the vernal holiday of Vasant had come and he wanted to fly a kite, as Indians do; but this was not an Islamic custom. "It is, now," declared Hussein; and in Lahore the Pakistanis fly kites in the spring, to this day. (So do the people of Kabul, Afghanistan, not far away, after American liberation from the Taliban, who of course forbade it.) When the elder Sufi died, Madho Lal said there was no Madho Lal, only Madho Lal Hussein; and the two are buried together, with that one name. Outside the tomb, men practice eastern wrestling; not far away, you can drink pink Kashmiri tea flavored with cardamom and saffron; and on Thursday evenings at that and similar shrines the qawwals, or bards, sing devotional songs about God and the saints. The faithful, who are forbidden to drink wine, one recalls, compensate by smoking charas- hashish- which, I discovered, they sometimes put in tea whether or not you have requested it. Not half bad.

Religion expressed in the personal, enshrined in the heart, never ossified in form but supple to new expressions of joy, celebrated in poetry and music, its walls open to the wind and light, its sanctuaries breathing with Nature, its devotees at play in the innocent strength of their own muscles, the dead conjoined in an embrace which does not suggest, but trumpets, but radiates, not that what will survive of us is love, but that love survives: tariqa, the way. This Islam cannot be alien to any American. It is familiar as Walt Whitman's odes are, clear and mild as his glance, and free. This is Emerson's Islam, and therefore it is ours and part of us. So, how did he come to it?

Looking back on the world in which he had spent his life, Ralph Waldo Emerson- born in 1803- wrote around 1867, "For Joy and Beauty planted it/ With faerie gardens cheered/ And boding Fancy haunted it/ With men and women weird." The denizens of this enchanted Persian golestan, "rose garden", were the New England Transcendentalists, for whom Unitarianism was not universal enough, who affirmed: The one thing of value in the universe is the active soul. There is a mind common to the Universe, but it is disclosed to every one through his own nature. The aim of life is not to make a fortune but to explore oneself. Man has a physical, rational, and spiritual nature: the latter has an immanent presence in the spiritual world and therefore receives- or is susceptible to receive- direct revelation from God. All of this would have been agreeable to the Hermetist philosopher, the Neoplatonist, the Renaissance humanist, and the Sufi. The first three sorts of sources, as we have seen, find their way to America through the conduits of dissident Protestant sectarianism and Renaissance occultism and alchemy. For the Transcendentalists there are more overt and proximal sources- in the German philosopher Immanuel Kant's idealistic conception, for instance, of innate ideas discovered by the individual mind. Emerson himself noted that they had fallen on the ideas of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Goethe with pleasure and sympathy. Coleridge was himself a translator and interpreter of German philosophical texts, whom Emerson read, whom he travelled to England to see. Goethe had opened up Sufi poetry to the Western reader in his East-West Divan, which strove towards a humanistic fusion of the two great traditions; and his insistence that Bildung, a sort of individual educational program of perpetual, conscious self-cultivation, is the real purpose of life, served as a practical corollary to Kant's imperative. Wordsworth, notably in his "Ode: Intimations of Immortality", re-invented with uncanny precision the sentiment and mythology of the ancient Gnostics, who indeed believed birth to be but a sleep and a forgetting, at the point of which we come, trailing clouds of glory from God, who is our home. And then the world closes about us, a prison house.

The search for inner divinity acquires a tragic majesty, becomes a moral imperative, serves as the key to the apperception of the profound fraternity of mankind itself, and is crucial to liberation, to freedom. Emerson said, "... The individual is the world. This perception is a sword such as was never drawn before." You draw a sword to fight. The sovereignty of the individual signifies, in the political domain, that he is no longer a subject, but a citizen. That is the gift of 1776; and these men and women of New England took it upon themselves to explore what, spiritually, intellectually, culturally, artistically, sexually, being this new kind of creature, a free citizen, meant now, and might mean in potential in future.

If we explore the role of Near Eastern literature and philosophy in Emerson's thinking, two important factors stand out at once. First, this was not a class of exotica with which he toyed for a short time. The very first published entry in his journal, from January 1820, when he was a seventeen-year-old student at Harvard, mentions an Indian ritual that "worshipped God while outraging nature"- presumably an act of extreme asceticism. He first mentions Zoroaster in a letter to his aunt dated June 10th, 1822; and the Zoroastrian scripture, which he calls Zend Avesta, is mentioned in a journal entry of 1872. He had first read it, in Anquetil-Duperron's translation, forty years earlier. That is, Emerson's involvement with Oriental thought was life-long. When Emerson's younger friend, Henry David Thoreau, died in 1862, Emerson received a bequest of some twenty Oriental books from his library- interest in the Near East in those days was much more general to the American intelligentsia than it is now; so although Emerson's long-term interest should be stressed, it was by no means unique.

Second, Emerson applied the category of Near Eastern to ancient philosophy in a very generous, and, I think, often justifiable manner. Like many of his contemporaries, he believed the collection of Hermetic aphorisms called the Chaldaean Oracles to be the work of Zoroaster, though we know now that the name of the Iranian prophet was anciently used to ennoble these writings, as is the case with other pseudepigraphical works. However the false attribution does indicate an early sense that the sentiments in the book were part of a way of seeing the soul that did belong to the cultural climate of what was then the Parthian empire, where Hermetic and Gnostic ideas abounded. Similarly, Emerson accepted the authenticity of two lesser-known works, the Dabistan and Desatir, which are products of a syncretistic, late-mediaeval occultism that resulted from the meeting in the cosmopolitan milieu of Mughal India of Parsi Zoroastrian priests, Sufi poets, and Hindu sages. To dismiss these works as simply not authentically Zoroastrian is to miss their real importance, as documents of men striving together without prejudice to forge anew the expression of a philosophia perennis for their own time from the sum of their experiences- which is what the Hellenistic writers had done in Egypt and Syria, nearly two millennia ago.

Emerson also considered Plato himself to have united in his teaching "the infinitude of the Asiatic soul and the definite, result-loving, surface-seeking [soul of]... Europe," by which he means that Plato combined a mystical spirituality that has connections to the Near East and India with the methods of analytic philosophy- and this insight, made too rarely nowadays, is probably true to a great measure. It was supported by Emerson's misapprehension, though, that the later works of Neoplatonism- of the Syrian Iamblichus and the Egyptian Plotinus and others- are inseparable from the original school of Platonism itself, whereas they represent a quite distinct development, historically and geographically. But again, the insight that Plato's thought tended to these deeply inner and spiritualized expressions, rather than to the pure objectivity we often think of as classical Greek and distinctly Western, was accurate, both as philosophy and as history: Greece and Syria, Greece and Egypt, even to a lesser degree Greece and Iran in the Hellenistic age were part of the same intellectual world. Nor did these Neoplatonists occupy any small place in his mind- Emerson in a poem ranks Plotinus with Shakespeare and Jesus Christ.

Emerson never travelled to the Middle East, unlike Melville or Mark Twain. His sources were all printed: he learnt Neoplatonism through De Grando's Histoire compare des systmes de philosophie; and he knew of Persian poetry through Hammer-Purgstall's German translations: he bought the two-volume Der Diwan von Mohammed Schemsed-din Hafis at Elizabeth Peabody's bookshop, in April 1846. F.I. Carpenter, in his study Emerson and Asia (Harvard, 1930), stresses that he did not so much adopt Persian ideas as remold them to his purposes, or refract them through his own ideas. I would rather suggest that some of what Emerson encountered in the Sufi poems reinforced his intuitions, gave them a cosmic, universalistic scale. Emerson echoed approvingly a Sufi slogan, "This is not a religion, it is religion;" and he believed the sentiments of Sufism, of Asian thought in general, to be a necessary complement to European rationalism, as the female is a necessary partner to the male in the creation of a new child. America is this new child. This conjunction of opposites is a basic concern of his, so much so that he called his own wife "mine Asia". One recalls that Goethe had written a sequel to Mozart's Masonic opera The Magic Flute, in which the couple Tamino and Pamina, under the tutelage of the Mage Sarastro (i.e., Zoroaster), bear a "golden child". (Emerson's wife's real name was Lydian- he had forced her to add the final -n when they married, lest the Massachusetts bumpkins pronounce it as Lydiar. There is sometimes a rather silly pomposity about Emerson. A nice, rounded -r is how one shapes endearments in Mandarin Chinese, but no matter, Mine Asia was Lydian.)

In 1858 Emerson wrote his article, "Persian Poetry"; and in 1865 he authored a Preface to the American edition of an English translation of the Golestan of Sa'di. The latter, and even more Hafez, were his favorite Iranian poets, and the work of both is steeped in Sufism. There seems little point in dwelling upon Emerson's grandiloquent generalizations about the East in general. They are egregious, and would only irritate that querulous crew who are ever on the alert for manifestations of "Orientalism", by which they generally mean colonialist put-downs of the Moslem world. My teacher, Prof. Nina Garsoian, periodically cautions me ne draznit' gusei, not to annoy the geese, and for once I'll follow her advice; but only because to list Emerson's pronouncements only on this subject would in any case misrepresent him as a man of prejudice. He was not, and in fact he delivers similar generalizations on almost every subject he touches, never without that brahminical condescenscion that would raise the hackles of a corpse. So I will focus only upon the useful and important points he makes. First, he observes that the Persians and Arabs, who have "great leisure and few books" (he evidently had not perused An-Nadim's Fihrist, an encyclopaedic catalogue of just the items for sale in the author's dad's bookshop, a thousand years ago, and it might be updated somewhat, and where does Emerson get off- but I said I wouldn't do this), are "exquisitely sensible to the pleasures of poetry." This from a man who considered himself, above all else, a poet. Emerson particularly admires Hafez, in whose verses there is mystical insight, particularly into Nature; and he quotes a couplet on the subject. That Nature, in Emerson's view- and he finds that the Iranian reinforces the conviction- is the same as one's true self, and this is the key to another shared belief, in self-reliance, this being not only the truth of one's state but the way to discovery. Since self is all, it shares in the essence of Heaven, and the inspired words of a poet are as much news there as down here. Emerson quotes Hafez on his own work: "The angels in heaven were lately learning his last pieces." For that bold pantheistic courage, Emerson feels the affection of one free and noble mind towards another: he admires Hafez's "intellectual liberty", his ability to perceive that "the whole web of convention is the imbecility of those whom it entangles."

That liberty Hafez expresses in the free partaking of pleasure- in wine, and in love. Emerson cites a verse, "Bring wine; for, in the audience-hall of the soul's independence, what is sentinel or Sultan?" He notes the love Hafez expresses for boys and women and Allah, and declares, "Love is a leveller." There was never so joyful a measure of equality; so it becomes plain why Whitman's vision of democracy cannot be separated from the strong ties of affection that ought to bind Americans together. Emerson cites the poet Ebn Yamin: "Whilst I disdain the populace,/ I find no peer in higher place./ Friend is a word of royal tone,/ Friend is a poem all alone./ Wisdom is like the elephant,/ Lofty and rare inhabitant:/ He dwells in deserts or in courts;/ With hucksters he has no resorts." The Persian Sufis call God yar, "the Friend"- even as their forebear Zarathushtra had done- and describe both spiritual and earthly love with the same Arabic word, 'eshq, a term steeped in overtones of falling in love, of sexual passion. It is from a participle formed of this root that we have the modern Armenian loan-word for a minstrel poet, ashugh, Turkish ashik.

Emerson translated a number of Persian poems into English from the German, re-versifying them; and he also addressed a poem of his own to Sa'di, in which he condemns asceticism and praises the "Sunshine in his heart transferred" that "Lighted each transparent word." Light was to the Sufis a potent image, even as it had been to their Zoroastrian ancestors a central icon. Emerson, who had had a pantheistic experience of that Inner Light of the Quakers that he so deeply appreciated, at Mt. Auburn, Cambridge, in April 1834, would have found in the Persian theme of light another point of contact and affirmation with his own, intuitively achieved, convictions. Here is how he described his experience: "I opened my eyes and let what would pass through them into the soul... I heeded no more what minute or hour... clocks might indicate- I saw only the noble earth on which I was born, with the great star which warms and enlightens it. I saw the clouds... It was Day, that was all Heaven said. The pines glittered with their innumerable green needles in the light and seemed to challenge me to read their riddle. The drab oak leaves of the last year turned their little somersaults and lay still again. And the wind bustled high overhead in the forest top."

This mysticism of light is enshrined particularly in a form of Sufi esoteric philosophy founded by Shihab al-Din Sohravardi in the twelfth century, which he called 'Eshraq, the dawning of light of the East. It was popular in the circles that produced the late, pseudo-Zoroastrian Dabistan and Dasatir, mentioned earlier. In Armenia, predictably, the same ancient Iranian themes of illuminist mysticism had become an organic part of the country's Christian culture, though a non-Christian remnant of the old Zoroastrian community, the Arewordik', or Children of the Sun, continued to worship the Sun and fire overtly. Within Christian practice, though, St. Gregory of Narek enjoins the celebrant of the Divine Liturgy to recite the first part of his 33rd meditation over and over till he beholds a visible light descending. And there are testimonia, from the scientist Anania of Shirak in the seventh century and the poet Kostandin of Erznka, late in the thirteenth, of initiation and inspiration- essentially, the process of inner self-discovery- arriving in the form of vision of a luminous heavenly being who is either an angel or a higher self. So, Armenia partakes of the same ultimate sources, but in forms distinctly consonant with its own, separate, way.

Personal revelation, Emerson stressed, the conviction of that truth that "God is within us," is the irreducible source (as Robert Richardson Jr. argued eloquently in Emerson: The Mind on Fire) of democratic ideals. "Open innumerable doors," cries Emerson in the poem- to heaven, Allah, floods of good and truth. "Those doors are men." Every man is the Door, every man is infinite, every man contains the wisdom that it is life's work to discover and to employ, so every man is, by nature and by right, and just as he really is, free. Emerson once went to visit his friend Thoreau in jail, and asked him why he was in here, to which Thoreau retorted, Why are you out there? If a man really is all the Transcendentalists, nourished by Persian Sufis, Neoplatonists, and Hermetists, believed him to be, then he is also wholly responsible, for himself and all around him; and if any man is unfree, then the one who is has an absolute duty to remedy that most fundamental of all untruths, all kinds of injustice. Emerson did not entirely shun political activism. His famous sermon at the Divinity School made him persona non grata at Harvard for decades- he was appointed to the Board of Overseers only when his ideas had ceased to have any real bite or potential for social change- and he adumbrated a kind of United Nations, opposed the deportation and death marches of the Cherokee Indians, and supported the abolitionist movement. But the sheer incandescence of that movement, in its opposition to so fundamentally abominable an evil as slavery, the violence that confronted it and the terrorism to which some of its members eventually resorted, swallowed up the energies generated by Transcendentalism and rendered its more quietist tendencies irrelevant. The American idea must become a war against slavery, or die a traitor to itself. No other choice was left, the Union so tainted could not be sustained. One mourns the eclipse of that Emersonian peace, for so much harder an ethos would follow the convulsion of the Civil War. But there is no doubt Zarathushtra would have marched to the strains of the Battle Hymn of the Republic; and it is as likely that, once the guns of 1861-65 were silent, our ability to come together as a nation and to continue our experiment in democracy owed much to the intellect instilled in us by Emerson, a mind luminescent and hospitable to every age and land, and generous as the divinity whose essence it shares. This American mind, as we have seen, partakes of the religious streams from both East and West that are dissident, and antinomian, and liberationist, and inclined to love, that seek bridges and syncretism rather than isolation and dogmatism, and that are, in their essence, remarkably alike. East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet? They already have: we have met the Friend, and He is us.

Before the war, metaphors of combat between man and monster, of death and the demonic on the high seas, revivals of old prophecies of doom, had expressed our national disquiet. So next we must take to the Ocean with Melville and Poe, and meet some very strange characters: Armenian-speaking spirits of vengeance, Wandering Jews out of the land of Ararat, and Antarctic birds squawking the Aramaic of a Persian romance -- the Biblical Book of Daniel.