Gendered Conceptions of Cosmic Harmony and the Power of Music in Niẓāmī’s “Haft Paykar”

by Jacomien Prins

Last year, I presented a paper on music, harmony and gender in Niẓāmī’s Haft Paykar at the conference ‘Femininity and Masculinity in Persian Classical Romances’ (Utrecht University, 2024). While I have been fascinated by the way in which Niẓāmī creatively appropriated the famous ancient Greek doctrines of the power of music and the presence of harmony in the cosmos, the fact that intelligent music-making women in his romantic epic poem are almost exclusively reduced to instruments of spiritual growth of the protagonist, King Bahrãm Gür, became a point of contention for me. Inspired by discussions about my paper, in this blog, I investigate the question of how and why Niẓāmī used the ancient Greek ideas of musical ethos and cosmic harmony to shape his views of love, marriage, virtue and wisdom.

The Story of Bahrām Gūr and Fitna, His Lyre-playing Enslaved Girl

In Niẓāmī’s (1140–1202) Haft Paykar (The Seven Beauties), the spiritual journey of its male hero, Bahrām Gūr, through seven planetary spheres inhabited by princesses, covers a symbolic path from earthly love and knowledge associated with the colour black to heavenly love and wisdom associated with the colour white. At first glance, the text reads as a mirror for princes, in which instructions are given to a king for successful governance and behaviour. Julie Scott Meisami characterized the period in which the romance was written as a time in which a new ideal of human nature was formulated, which highlights the importance of self-knowledge and moral virtues (pp. 78-80). These ideals manifest themselves in Bahrām Gūr’s spiritual journey, which is focused on tempering the passions of the soul and spiritual enlightenment. In contrast with earlier Persian writers, Niẓāmī questioned traditional male virtues associated with war, such as courage, which can easily turn into recklessness and cold-bloodedness, and offered female virtues such as temperance and modesty as an alternative for male rulers.

When, at the start of the Haft Paykar, the story of Bahrām Gūr and Fitna begins, the king has already ascended the throne of the kingdom of Persia (pp. 76-81). Fitna is presented in the story as a beautiful lyre-playing slave girl whom Bahrām adores. To stress the fact that her female beauty is not her most important asset, Niẓāmī expands on Fitna’s musical skills: “She played and sang with elegance, and was quick-footed at the dance. When to the lute she joined her song, the birds from air to ground would throng” (pp. 76-77). In addition, with the remark: “the harp [is] her weapon [which with] she struck up tunes” she is presented as an Orpheus-like creature with magical musical powers to enchant both men and animals (p. 77). Rather than a passive object of adoration, Fitna is given power over Bahrām Gūr in order to teach him a lesson about the moral virtue of temperance, which is part of the spiritual path he has to travel. Just as the well-tempered strings of Fitna’s lyre, Bahrām has to temper the strings of his heart to become a wise, loving and just ruler.

A crucial episode in the story is the hunting expedition, to which Bahrām takes Fitna with her lyre on his horse. When he shoots a wild ass, Fitna does not praise his art of using the bow but remains silent. Having noticed this silence, the king asks her how he should shoot the next onager, and Niẓāmī narrates that she then steps out from the restrictive model of female virtues such as being silent and subservient: “The sweet-lipped maid, as was her wont⸺a woman she, and idle-tongued⸺Said, “If you’d kindle praise, then join its hoof to head, with arrow bound” (p. 77). Having completed this difficult task, the king expects a compliment from Fitna, but she answers that she is not impressed because he did not use physical power to execute the task, but it merely resulted from practice. The king takes this as an insult and gets angry, but unlike earlier versions of the story, in which the slave-girl is killed for her lack of female discretion, Bahrām manages to control his “unbridled tongue” and the emotion of injured pride: “For lion-brave warriors do not slay weak women; they’re unequal prey,” which is fully in line with the lesson of temperance he has to learn from the lyre-playing slave girl (p. 78).

But the magical effect of Fitna’s civilizing music does not last long: against all modern rules of ethics and storytelling, Bahrām then asks one of his officers to kill Fitna. But the officer in question does not have the heart to kill her, and hides her in a place, where she is forced to carry every day a calf on her shoulders up a sixty-step staircase in a tower to exercise her physical strength as well as the virtue of obedience. Six years later, she can still carry the ox that has now grown into a mature ox to the top. Because she is still yearning to see her beloved Bahrām again, despite the fact that he wanted to kill her, Fitna asks the officer to invite him to the tower for a feast. Once he arrives, Fitna performs her Herculean feat with veiled face. Bahrām is deeply impressed, but when she fishes for a compliment, he remarks: “This is no power; you’ve practiced this feat long before, and, year on year and bit by bit though constant striving, mastered it. Till now, without apparent stress, you balance in your scales this beast” (p. 85). Again, Fitna is presented here as an Orphic creature who manages to impose her will on the ox, that is, to control an animal associated with the passions of the soul. From her reaction to this remark, the king recognizes her, lifts her veil, embraces her, and begs her forgiveness for his anger and revengefulness. This is followed by a happy end: Bahrām marries Fitna, and they lived: “in love and ease, until a long, long time had passed” (p. 86).

How did Niẓāmī creatively appropriate the ancient Greek doctrine of the ethical power of music to shape this story? At first sight, it is quite remarkable that a king acknowledges his fault and asks the pardon of a female enslaved person. According to Johann Bürgel, in this story, Niẓāmī “has replaced royal brutality and irrevocable fate by successful human endeavor to overcome evil” (p. 174). We can now add that Bahrām’s spiritual growth can be attributed to the magic of music, described in the Haft Paykar as part of Fitna’s “magic’s charms” (p. 83). Niẓāmī adopted the Platonic belief that music can have a lasting positive effect on a person’s character in virtue of the common harmonic nature shared by the world soul, the human soul, and the soul of music.

Niẓāmī presents Bahrām as an example of a passage in the Republic, where Plato argued that: “rhythm and harmony permeate the inner part of the soul more than anything else, affecting it most strongly and bringing it grace, so that if someone is properly educated in music and poetry, it makes him graceful, but if not, then the opposite” (p. 1038). Whereas in the earlier version of the story included in Firdawsī’s Shāhnāma, king Bahrām remained a one-dimensional male stereotype, in Niẓāmī’s version Bahrām’s character is open for the feminizing, harmonizing and civilizing power of Fitna and her lyre. Based also on Bürgel’s research into the influence of Plato’s Republic on Niẓāmī (pp. 26, 29), we may argue that we owe this transformation in part to Niẓāmī’s use of ideas from Plato’s Republic, possibly mediated by sources such as the Brethren of Purity’s (Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ) epistle On Music, who dedicated chapter 16 (pp. 162-172) to the wise sayings of philosophers such as Plato concerning music.

Fitna is given a guiding role in Bahrām’s spiritual development. She is associated with the lyre, which is seen as a symbol of temperance. By elevating Fitna to the level of Orpheus and lowering Bahrām to a fallible human being, Niẓāmī is blurring some of the traditional distinctions between men and women. In the story, the king and the enslaved girl are both depicted as essentially kindhearted and loving humans. The moral is that a good ruler should integrate the female powers associated with the lyre into his character. Just as there is harmony between masculine, feminine and spiritual principles in the cosmos, humans must pursue a spiritual path in life, of which marriage is an integral part.

Princesses, Cosmic Wisdom and the Music of the Spheres

The stereotypical view of an intelligent and musical woman as a midwife of the moral and spiritual birth of a male character presented above is elaborated in further detail in the overall structure of the Haft Paykar. The romance consists of seven tales, in which Bahrām learns different lessons from seven princesses who become his brides. In gratitude for their wisdom, he builds a palace containing seven domes for them, each dedicated to a weekday, governed by the day’s planet and bearing its emblematic colour. There is a vast literature on the deeper meaning of the sevenfold structure: the planets and colours are, for example, associated with different stages of love in Sufi traditions. Complementary to these interpretations originating from the study of Islam traditions, I demonstrate below that the story can also be read as a variation on the Platonic doctrine of cosmic love and harmony. It reads as a journey during which Bahrām is initiated into the music of the spheres, which is associated with a kind of cosmic wisdom that transcends knowledge based on reason and experience. Hence, the main function of the seven princesses in the story is to initiate Bahrām into the secret knowledge of the cosmos; he must follow in the footsteps of Plato and Orpheus, who used this harmonic knowledge to enchant animals and gods alike, and in so doing brought Eurydice back from the underworld.

First, the role of the seven princesses in the story is loosely modelled after the role of the prophetess Diotima in Plato’s Symposium (210a–212b), who teaches Socrates the philosophy of love. Just as Socrates initially confused the idea of love with the idea of the beloved, Bahrām has to learn what true love is. In the first stage of his initiation, love drives him to seek the beauty of the bodies of the seven princesses. But by listening to the seven stories of the seven princesses, he grows in wisdom and starts to look for the spiritual beauty of their souls.

Second, Bahrām’s spiritual journey is inspired by the myth of Er, included in Plato’s Republic (10.614–10.621), in which the heavenly spheres are presented as a model of the Good that can serve as a guide to a better life. When Er travels through the heavens, he reaches a place from where he can see a shaft of rainbow light brighter than any he had seen before. This is the Spindle of Necessity, around which the seven planets revolve: the Moon, the Sun (“the brightest”), Venus Mercury, Mars (“somewhat ruddy”), Jupiter (“the whitest”) and Saturn (pp. 1217-2023). Sirens associated with the different colours inhabit the planets and are causing its inaudible, but alluring music. Together the planets with their female inhabitants form a perfect harmony, which humans on earth should try to understand and imitate in their souls and their lives.

Niẓāmī, who was inspired by Plato’s doctrine of the music of the spheres, and Ptolemy’s reception of it, also believed that the questions of how the world worked and the meaning of life were closely intertwined; in his Haft Paykar, cosmology is deeply intertwined with human ethics and music (HP 10:10-11, 11:46-47; tr. Meisami, resp. at p. 37 and p. 42). Just like Er, Bahrām makes a journey through seven domes, or pavilions, inhabited with seven princesses: from the black dome, which is associated with the planet Saturn to the white one, associated with the planet Venus. The princesses in the Haft Paykar can be compared with the Sirens from Plato’s myth or Er. They are seductive female presences, who tempt humans to transgress the boundaries of their reason and intellect to reach a deeper, more spiritual insight into the cosmos and their own psyche. When Bahrām contemplates the harmonious revolutions of the planets or listens to music, he realizes that they are gifts from heaven: he should imitate their harmonic structure, so that he will remedy the discord that has come into the revolution of his own soul through an unenlightened sinful lifestyle.

The number symbolism used by Niẓāmī is also inspired by the Pythagorean concept of the unity of the feminine, masculine and spiritual. The Pythagoreans associated specific numbers with mystical properties: the number 2 was symbolic of the female (passive) principle, the number 3 of the (active) male principle; they come together in 2 + 3 = 5 as marriage. All even numbers were female, all odd numbers male, including the important number 7. In their view, numbers constitute the harmonic structure of the cosmos. In the red dome, related to the planet Mars, princess Nacarene tells a story which makes Bahrām realize that marriage on earth is an illustration of the harmonious laws of the cosmos (featured image) (Nizami, tr. Meisami, pp. 158-174). In her story, a prince has to solve four riddles, in which numbers play an important role. First, the princess gives the prince 2 pearls, and tells her servant: “go, quickly take these to our guest [Bahrām] and swiftly bring his answer back.” (p. 170). The prince, following the instructions of a wise sage, gives the princess 3 pearls. He then asks for a scale, weighs the pearls, and comes to the conclusions that the weight of his 3 pearls is equal to that of the princess’s 2. This riddle may be interpreted in terms of Pythagorean-Platonic harmonics: the female number 2 is in some way equal to the male number 3: they are in a harmonic proportion of 2:3, which equals the musical interval of a fifth, and are associated with the nuptial number in Plato’s Republic (8.546b).

The story initiates Bahrām in the cosmic law of discordia concors (harmonious discord): just as the harmonious relationships among the planets Mars and Venus are governed by their proportionate speeds of revolution, the relationship between the masculine and the feminine in a human soul as well as between a man and a woman should be an expression of harmonious order.

Conclusion

As a corrective to views in which Niẓāmī is presented as an author with a one-sided positive attitude towards women, or to opposite views, which are both often formulated to substantiate modern views on gender, I hope to have demonstrated in this paper that it is far more interesting to study the complex concept of gender in his work against the backdrop of his cosmological and ethical views and the intellectual traditions that inspired him. In this way, it becomes clear that Niẓāmī used the ancient Greek doctrines of cosmic harmony and musical ethos above all as universal truths about the nature of the cosmos, humanity, and ethics in order to anchor his Haft Paykar in the tradition of the perennial philosophy (philosophia perennis) and to give a deep cosmological and ethical meaning to its male and female protagonists. For this purpose, his ideas about love, gender and harmony are deeply embedded in a kind of metaphysics, in which ideas about complementary feminine and masculine cosmic powers are central. Although many of these ideas about the connection between gender and music are superseded today, Niẓāmī’s heroines have remained a source of inspiration in the East and the West: the female character of princess Nacarene transformed, for example, into the heroine of Giacomo Puccini’s famous opera Turandot and Faramarz Payvar revived the Haft Paykar in his music.

I would like to thank Razieh-Sadat Mousavi for her constructive feedback on my essay, Mohsen Mohammadi for his music advice, and Rajosmita Roy for her help with editing the text.

Jacomien Prins is a Research Fellow at Utrecht University, with a particular interest in the history of music and philosophy. Her main publications include: Echoes of an Invisible World: Marsilio Ficino and Francesco Patrizi on Cosmic Order and Music Theory (Brill, 2014), Sing Aloud Harmonious Spheres: Renaissance Conceptions of Cosmic Harmony (Routledge, 2017), The Routledge Companion to Music, Mind, and Well-being (Routledge, 2018), and The Legacy of Plato’s Timaeus: Cosmology, Music, Medicine, and Architecture from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century (Brill, 2024).

Edited by Rajosmita Roy

Featured image: An illustrated and illuminated leaf from Niẓāmī’s Haft Paykar: King Bahrām in the Red Pavilion Listening to the Story of Princess Nacarene. Persia, Safavid, 16th century, courtesy of Sotheby’s.