Concept

The Sultan as the Seeing Eye of the Macrocosm in Jami's Royal Panegyric (Section 10)

In Section 10 of Jami's Yusuf o Zuleykha (within the Haft Awrang), Jami opens the panegyric with a Neoplatonic image of the cosmos as a single determinate person (shakhs-i mu'ayyan) whose eye is humankind and whose seeing pupil (ayn-i basira) is Sultan Husayn. Through this microcosm-macrocosm metaphor the poet casts the sovereign as the organ through which the whole world attains sight and power, the light by which the eye of creation is made bright. The praise then likens the ruler to Yusuf in beauty and grace and affirms his inherited nobility with the formula karim ibn al-karim ibn al-karim (noble, son of the noble, son of the noble), grounding royal legitimacy in both a cosmic function and hereditary virtue. This distinguishes the section from Jami's other panegyrics, which build legitimacy on the shadow-of-God trope (Section 5) or on indirect historical exemplars (Section 38).

0

1

Updated 2026-07-19

Contributors are:

Who are from:

References


Tags

Humanities

Literature

Persian Literature Prerequisite Course