Events

Please join us for our next installment of CMEIS’ 25-26 Annual Lecture Series Telling Iran: Histories, Heroines, and Horizons. Dr. Cyrus Ali Zargar will discuss “Knowing Otherwise: Love as Epistemology in the Poetics of ʿAttar” at 5:30PM on 2/12 in room 4003 of the FedEx Global Education Center.

The poet Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār lived during an age when debates about the nature of knowledge preoccupied Islamic intellectual elites. On one hand, philosophers and rational theologians had captured the attention of many because of what often seemed to be indisputable proofs. On the other hand, the significance of the revealed tradition loomed large in devotional circles—especially in eastern Iran, from which ʿAṭṭār hailed. ʿAṭṭār offered more than a solution. He reconsidered the depths of the problem, by drawing from a legacy of moral reflection. By re-centering the transformation of the self as the most fundamental issue in religious learning, ʿAṭṭār was able to advocate for a sort of knowledge familiar to those who embraced the sayings and writings of Sufi saints: love. Love was not a way of knowing, but rather a way of being—one that undid and transcended other ways of engaging with the world. As such, love was a solution to the problem of knowledge that lay entirely outside the field of knowledge. Love, and the virtue of humility that invariably accompanied it, was for ʿAṭṭār the only feasible solution to the intellectual crisis of his day.

Cyrus Ali Zargar, Ph.D. is the Endowed Al-Ghazali Distinguished Professor in Islamic Studies at the University of Central Florida. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in Near Eastern Studies in 2008. Dr. Zargar’s research interests include Classical Sufism, Islamic Philosophy, Arabic and Persian Sufi Literature, and Ethics in Literature and Film.