Sanai

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Hakim Abul-Majd Majdūd ibn Ādam Sanā'ī (Persian: حکیم ابوالمجد مجدود ‌بن آدم سنایی‎ ) was a Persian Sufi poet who lived in Ghazna, in what is now Afghanistan during the 11th century and the 12th century. He probably died around 1150.

Rumi acknowledged Sanai as one of his inspirations. Sanai's best known work is The Walled Garden of Truth or the The Hadiqat-ul Haqiqah (حدیقه الحقیقه و شریعه الطریقه). Some of his lyrics survive.

He was connected with the court of Bahram-shah who ruled 1118-1152. It is said that once when accompanying Bahramshah on a military expedition to India, Sanai met the Sufi teacher Lai-khur. Sanai quit Bahramshah's service as a court poet even though he was promised wealth and the king's daughter in marriage if he remained.

[edit] Poetry

His work reflects the Sufi concern with awakening:

Man Asleep

While mankind remains mere baggage in the world
It will be swept along, as in a boat, asleep.
What can they see in sleep?
What real merit or punishment can there be?

Also, he mocks the pederastic practices of his time, embodied in the doings of the Khvaja of Herat, who takes his catamite into the mosque for a quick tryst:

Not finding shelter he became perturbed,
The mosque, he reasoned, would be undisturbed.

But he is discovered by a devout man, who, in his blame, echoes a traditional attack on same-sex relations:

"These sinful ways of yours," —that was his shout—
Have ruined all the crops and caused the drought!

Sanai drives the irony home by having the devout man, after the Khvaja makes his embarrassed escape, mount the boy and complete the act.

From the Garden of Truth and Path to Enlightenment (tr. Paul Sprachman)

Hakim Sanai Ghaznavi was perhaps the earliest visualiser of a Pan-Islamic Union in the Muslim world divided in bitterness and bloodshed between the Sunni and Shia sects, where the unfortunate and unimportant misunderstandings and rival tradtions of these two sects are forgone to build a united Islamic world. A couplet from his Diwan reads:- Ai keh na shanasi khafi ra az jali hushiyar bash! Ai giraftar e Abu Bakar o Ali hushiyar bash! (O! He that can not read fine print from the bold, beware! O! He that is engrossed in Abu Bakar and Ali, beware!) It is indeed unfortunate that the rift in Sunnis and Shias continues till date and the wisdom of this great thinker, philosopher and poet of 12th century from Afghanistan has remained unheeded!

[edit] References used

E.G. Browne. Literary History of Persia. (Four volumes, 2,256 pages, and twenty-five years in the writing). 1998. ISBN 0-7007-0406-X
Jan Rypka, History of Iranian Literature. Reidel Publishing Company. 1968 OCLC 460598. ISBN 90-277-0143-1
Bo Utas, A Persian Sufi Poem: Vocabulary and terminology. Scandinavian Institute of asian Studies Monograph Series, Curzon Press, 1977. OCLC 4705360