Two Interpretive Postures and Two Kinds of Friendship in Mughal Commentaries on Sa‘dī's Gulistān

Abstract

AbstractThis essay makes a case for the centrality of premodern Persian literary criticism to understanding Islamic virtue ethics as a world tradition of civility. It argues that this body of criticism took the form of two distinct if overlapping interpretive postures, the charismatic-allegorical and the humanist-philological, and that these two postures assumed and furthered two forms of friendship: a vertical form of Sufi hierarchy and a horizontal form of humanist-philological tutelage. Pointing to the centrality of both kinds of friendship to the urban settings in which Islamic virtue ethics has situated itself, it then sets forth how these presupposed models of friendship conditioned literary commentary by considering representative passages from three Mughal commentaries on Sa‘dī's canonical The Rose Garden of 1258. It closes by expanding on its opening remarks on the relations between metaliterary discourse and virtue, speculating on the ethical limits of this body of Persian literary criticism in relation to the modern practice of critique.