Beholding Beauty: Saʿdi of Shiraz and the Aesthetics of Desire in Medieval Persian Poetry: 41 (Brill Studies in Middle Eastern Literatures)

Product Information

With a focus on the region’s pre-Colombian body painting practices and elaborate adornments, the volume unravels the deeper meaning and functions behind these beauty rites and the plants intrinsic to their use. Please also list any non-financial associations or interests (personal, professional, political, institutional, religious or other) that a reasonable reader would want to know about in relation to the submitted work.

For librarians and administrators, your personal account also provides access to institutional account management. Thus, when rightly guided, our soul’s thirst for beauty serves a transcendent purpose: it leads us to a deeper knowledge of God. Domenico Ingenito speaks about the ecstatic poetry of Saʿdi, a 13th-century Persian literary master overlooked for far too long. The beloved of Sa’di is not a metaphor and certainly not a metaphor for God, neither it is an autobiographical confession about a love affair. The apostle Paul alluded to this in 2 Corinthians 3:18 when he wrote, “We all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory.To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. While I was awestruck by the beauty of such grand places such as the Sistene Chapel and Santiago de Compostela, I also found myself drawn to the simple churches seen in Portugal. While we often speak of the true, the good, and the beautiful forming the contours of the good life, beauty has all too often played second fiddle in our theological imagination, greatly impoverishing the rightful worship of God in our daily lives. Ingenito’s reconstruction of Saʿdī’s sacred homoeroticism, his exploration of vital affinities between literature and philosophy and theorization of lyric performativity—these interventions break ample new ground within Saʿdī scholarship and Persian studies, and will be generative for Islamic studies scholars, medievalists, and literary scholars and comparatists far and wide.

They are meant to lead us to Him, whose beauty is so vast that it fills the universe and our souls along with it.

If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Dropbox account. Domenico Ingenito’s Beholding Beauty is a dense, comprehensive study of how Sa‘di explores these three themes, their intellectual origins and their legacy. Saʿdi of Shiraz and the Aesthetics of Desire in Medieval Persian Poetry, published in Brill Studies in Middle Eastern Literatures.

David Chaffetz is the author of Three Asian Divas: Women, Art and Culture in Shiraz, Delhi and Yangzhou (Abbreviated Press, November 2019).Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoy­evsky wrote that “beauty is the battlefield where both God and Satan contend for the hearts of men. Another person might find a dog beautiful but her friend might be scared of it and thus see it as ugly. One of those, which he has taught all of us, is to help the less fortunate in whatever way possible. Watching my aunt and cousin do this hopeful ritual made the statue one of the most beautiful things I saw in Europe, even though it was small and worn down. To save this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.