Nazar ill'al-murd
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Reza Abbasi, ca. 1625; Isfahan, Iran;
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
As a Sufi practice of spiritual realization and union with the godhead, the meditation known in Arabic as Nazar ill'al-murd (Arabic: نزار الى المرد), "contemplation of the beardless," or Shahed-bazi, "witness play" in Persian has been practiced from the earliest years of Islam. It is seen as an act of worship intended to help one ascend to the absolute beauty that is God through the relative beauty that is a boy. Modern Sufi thought asserts that this contemplation uses imaginal yoga to transmute erotic desire into spiritual consciousness.
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[edit] Chaste love
Nazar was a principal expression of a male love that, according to the teachings, was not to be consummated physically.
Zangi discussed the legitimacy of love for a male beloved saying, "And it is said that when God . . . wants to honor a worshiper with the robe of true love and put the real crown of love on his head, He will make him fall in earthly love ('ishq) so that he would learn the ways of being a lover . . . and passes from the raw stage of desiring attention to the ripeness of (spiritual) supplication." [1]
Richard Francis Burton, in his "Terminal Essay" (Part D) to the Arabian Nights claims that Easterners value the love of boys above the love of women, using Persian terminology in which the moth and the bulbul (nightingale) represent the lover, and the taper and the rose represent the boy and the girl, respectively. According to him, "Devotion of the moth to the taper is purer and more fervent than the Bulbul's love for the Rose."
[edit] Physical love
Not all followed the teachings strictly to the letter. On being challenged by Rabi’a al-‘Adawiyya (c.717-801) of Basrah (Sufi woman saint who first set forth the doctrine of mystical love), upon noticing him kissing a boy, for appreciating the beauty of boys above that of God, the ascetic Sufi Rabah al-Qaysi retorted that, "On the contrary, this is a mercy that God Most High has put into the hearts of his slaves."
[edit] Criticism
Conservative Islamic theologians condemned the custom of contemplating the beauty of young boys. Their suspicions may have been justified, as some dervishes boasted of enjoying far more than "glances", or even kisses. Nazar was denounced as rank heresy by such as Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328), who complained, "They kiss a slave boy and claim to have seen God!" The real danger to conventional religion, as Peter Lamborn Wilson asserts, was not so much the mixing of sodomy with worship, but "the claim that human beings can realize themselves in love more perfectly than in religious practices." Despite opposition from the clerics, the practice has survived in Islamic countries until only recent years, according to Murray and Roscoe in their work on Islamic homosexualities.
[edit] Examples
Miniature illustration from the Haft Awrang of Jami, in the story A Father Advises his Son About Love.
In an illuminated manuscript of Sufi poet Abdul-Rahman Jami's (1414-1492) Haft Awrang (see manuscript), an anthology of seven alegorical poems on wisdom and love, there is a calligraphed verse in the section titled A Father Advises his Son About Love (in which a father instructs his son, when choosing a worthy male lover, to chose that man who sees beyond the mere physical and expresses a love for his inner qualities). The verse exemplifies one Sufi way of turning love into wisdom:
I have written on the wall and door of every house
About the grief of my love for you.
That you might pass by one day
And read the state of my condition.
In my heart I had his face before me.
With this face before me, I saw what I had in my heart.
A recurrent topic of Sufi homoerotic lore is the tale of Mahmud of Ghazni and his boy slave Ayaz. Many poets have treated the subject, among whom Attar who included eight stories about them in his Elahi-nama alone. One of them shows how love elevates the beloved:
One day sultan Mahmud asks Ayaz, his famous beloved, whether he knows a king greater and more powerful than he. Ayaz answers, "Yes, I am a greater king than you." When the king asks for proof, he says, "Because even though you are king, your heart rules you, and this slave is the king of your heart."
