Veiled Expressions of the Sacred: Ghazal, Genre, and Mystical Experience in Neshāṭī’s Poetry

In seventeenth-century Ottoman Mawlawī shaykh Neshāṭī’s poetry, religious experience is articulated differently depending on genre. His qaṣīdas and mathnawīs use explicit religious language addressing God and sacred figures, while his ghazals employ seemingly profane imagery of wine, love, and the beloved. This contrast reflects a conscious poetic strategy rather than secularization or doctrinal inconsistency. Through motifs such as the mirror, secret (sirr), annihilation (fanāʾ fīʾllāh), and spiritual contraction, Neshāṭī transforms human love into a vehicle for divine experience. The ghazal emerges as especially suited to conveying religious meaning through ambiguity, emotional intensity, and symbolic indirection rather than overt doctrine. Divine encounter is realized through the ghazal’s affective and symbolic potential.

Study at a glance

Abstract

This article examines how religious experience is articulated through genre in the poetry of the seventeenth-century Ottoman Mawlawī shaykh Neshāṭī (d. 1674), focusing on the striking contrast between his ghazals and non-ghazal compositions. While Neshāṭī’s qaṣīdas, mathnawīs and other formal genres employ an explicit and direct religious language—addressing God, the Prophet, sacred figures, and doctrinal themes—his ghazals are dominated by imagery of wine, love, and the beloved, which at first glance appears markedly profane. Rather than reading this contrast as a sign of secularization or doctrinal inconsistency, the article argues that it reflects a conscious poetic strategy shaped by the expressive style of the ghazal. Through a close reading of Neshāṭī’s Dīwān, the study demonstrates that religious meaning in ghazals is not absent but deliberately rendered implicit. Drawing on motifs such as the mirror, secret (sirr), annihilation (fanāʾ fīʾllāh), and states of spiritual contraction, Neshāṭī transforms the language of human love into a vehicle for divine experience. In this context, the ghazal emerges as a genre particularly suited to conveying religious meaning through ambiguity, emotional intensity, and symbolic indirection rather than overt doctrinal exposition. By situating Neshāṭī within both the Mawlawī tradition and the aesthetics of Sabk-i Hindī, this article highlights how genre manifests religious expression in Ottoman poetry. It proposes that divine encounter in Neshāṭī’s work is realized less through explicit theological discourse than through the affective and symbolic potential of the ghazal. In doing so, the study offers a new reading of Neshāṭī’s poetry and contributes to broader discussions on the relationship between literary/lyrical genre, mysticism, and religious experience in Islamic literary traditions.