Nazar ila'l-murd

Princely Youth and Dervish
Reza Abbasi, ca. 1625; Isfahan, Iran;
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

The meditation known in Arabic as Naẓar ila'l-murd (Arabic: النظر إلى المرد‎), "contemplation of the beardless", and in Persian Shahed-bāzī, (Persian: شاهدبازی), "witness play", is a Sufi practice of spiritual realization recorded since the earliest years of Islam. It is seen as an act of worship, held to realise the absolute beauty that is God through the relative beauty of the human form that is the divine image. In its best-known form it simply consists of gazing upon a beautiful boy.

Peter Lamborn Wilson (a.k.a. Hakim Bey) explains this as the use of "imaginal yoga" to transmute erotic desire into spiritual consciousness.^[1] Its exponents quote the saying of the prophet Mohammed; "God is beautiful and loves beauty", as well as the Platonic love of the Symposium.

Chaste love

Naẓar 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 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."^[2]

Richard Francis Burton, 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."^[3]

Physical love

Not all followed the teachings strictly to the letter. On being challenged by Rabiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya (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."^[4]

Criticism

Conservative Islamic theologians condemned the custom of contemplating the beauty of 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!"^[5]

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."^[6] 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.^[7]

Examples

Youth conversing with suitors
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, an anthology of seven allegorical 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 [friend?], to choose that man who sees beyond the mere physical and expresses a love for his inner qualities. Alternatively, the verse could be about choosing a friend, for the word used in Jami's poem is "dosti" -friendship, rather than "aashiqi" or Love. In either case the love would be platonic.^[8] 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."

See also

• Ghilman
• Bacha Bazi
• Köçek
• Tellak

Notes

1. ^ Peter Lamborn Wilson, "CONTEMPLATION OF THE UNBEARDED: The Rubaiyyat of Awhadoddin Kermani" in Paidika V.3-4 p.13 (1995): "Love imagery in Persian Sufi poetry usually flows from this mystical, symbolic appreciation of love's spiritual power. In some works, however, the imagery refers also to specific practices, code named 'naẓar ila'l-murd' or 'contemplation of the unbearded,' namely, the unbearded boy."
2. ^ Encyclopedia Iranica
3. ^ Richard F. Burton, Arabian Nights, "Terminal Essay" (Part D)
4. ^ Quoted from as-Sulāmī, Early Sufi Women = Dhikr an-niswa al-muta 'abbidat as-sufiyyat, translated by Rkia E. Cornell, Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae, 1999, pp. 78-79.)
5. ^ "Needless to say, although the poets of the Witness Game followed the letter of the Shariʿa and its sexual code, their dangerous game of Sublimation was condemned as rank heresy by such as Ibn Taymiyya, who complained, `They kiss a slave boy and claim to have seen God!' However orthodox (or not) the sufis might have been in their private lives, their poetry has given much aid and comfort to `real heretics' like the Ismailis, who would of course take quite literally such lines as Iraqi's: Forget the Kaaba: The vintner's gates are open!" Peter Lamborn Wilson, THE ANTI-CALIPH: Ibn 'Arabi, Inner Wisdom, and the Heretic Tradition [1]
6. ^ Wilson (1995), op.cit, p.21
7. ^ Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe, Islamic Homosexualities; New York University Press, 1997; p.111
8. ^ Smithsonian Institution, manuscript page