Kamran Djam Annual Lecture 2015: Nizâmî’s Brides of the Seven Climes

"Nizâmî’s Brides of the Seven Climes" was the second Kamran Djam Annual Lecture of 2015, it was given by Michael Barry (Princeton University) on 3rd February 2015 at the Centre for Iranian Studies, London Middle East Institute, SOAS, University of London.

The tales told by King Bahrâm's seven brides follow each other in a dizzying succession of enchanted adventures drawing upon Zoroastrian and Manichaean and Indian and even Classical Greek lore - many corresponding to the popular stories of the Thousand and One Nights but fraught here with spiritual meaning enhanced by magnificent Persian poetry - featuring giant birds, lusty harem intrigues, terrible desert journeys, brazen-walled castles defended by armed automats, goblins and she-vampires, magic trees whose leaves cure blindness and the falling sickness, and lovely Paradise-houris. King Bahrâm enters the first or black dome to hear the first tale of the Lady of India on the first day of winter, proceeds the next day to the golden-yellow dome of the Lady of Byzantium, and so spends what seems like a magic week under each successive dome to listen to each princess's story, while the ruler himself dons every evening a different coloured robe tinged with the hue of each bride's star and day. But the poet, much like Shakespeare, resorts to dramatic "double time." For King Bahrâm only emerges from his magic garden of the seven domes a full seven years later, on the first day of spring: mystically transformed and endowed with universal wisdom by the seven stages of his spiritual instruction, which the poet's prelude reveals to have been actually an internalized symbolic re-enactment, and meditation, of an imaginary journey through the seven heavenly spheres, as seen by the Prophet Muhammad himself in his visionary ascent: in guidance of all souls. The poet himself reveals why he chose his pen-name, Nizâmî - the numerical value of whose Arabic letters add up precisely to One Thousand and One: "only step within Nizâmî's name, and find therein One Thousand Names, and One: dar nâm-i Nizâmî gar nihî gâm / bînî `adad-i hezâr-ô yek nâm." No book of tales was more admired by later rulers from Turkey to India who commissioned sumptuous manuscripts thereof, regularly ordering depictions of themselves as the poem's King Bahrâm.

Dr Michael Barry was born in 1948 in New York City but raised in France with long stays in Afghanistan as a guest of Afghan family friends, whence lifelong interest in the languages, literatures, arts and spiritual traditions of Persianate civilization as well as Italian and Iberian cultures – he holds higher degrees in all these subjects from Princeton, Cambridge, McGill (Montreal) and l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) – although he interrupted his academic career to serve as humanitarian coordinator in war-torn Afghanistan for the International Federation for Human Rights, for Médecins du Monde, then for the United Nations, between 1979 and 2002. He now teaches Sufism, Classical Persian Literature, medieval Spanish history, medieval Indo-Iranian history, and modern Afghan history, in Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies. Dr Barry has published extensively in both his writing languages, English and French, on a wide variety of subjects ranging from fifteenth-century Portuguese travels in the Indian Ocean to a prize-winning essay on Nizâmî to a lauded biography of the Afghan commander Massoud; he holds twelve literary prizes from France, the United States and Iran, as well as a major French award for investigative journalism and a US award for excellence in teaching. His latest publication, `Attâr’s Canticle of the Birds, Illustrated Through Persian and Eastern Islamic Art (with Leili Anvar for the French version of the poem and Dick Davis for the poem’s English rendition), was awarded the highest distinction for art history from the French Académie des Beaux-Arts (part of the Académie Française) in 2013, and Iran’s World Book Award on Persian Civilization in 2014. As Consultative Chairman of the New York Metropolitan Museum’s Department of Islamic Art in 2005-2008, he advised the re-organization of the Museum’s current galleries of arts of the Arab lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and Later South Asia.