Agency of the Self and the Uncertain Nature of the Beloved in Persian Love Mysticism: Earthly, Ethereal, Masculine, or Feminine?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It seems that the controversies over the nature of the beloved in classical Persian mystic poetry (also known as Sufi poetry) as an earthly or ethereal phenomenon would never end. Those in favor of the celestial reading of it consider their counterparts to be narrow-minded. The adherents of terrestrial love, though, see mystical readings dogmatic and outdated, prevailed by traditionalists. The topic gets even more complicated when one takes into account the attitudes in the medieval Muslim world toward pederasty, shāhid-bāzī, on the one hand, and the Divine Feminine /Masculine Beloved, on the other hand, and, thus, the gender of this beloved. The present article explores the beloved in Persian classical mystical poetry via five different but related approaches: historical, philosophical, translational and comparative, linguistic and poetic, and, ultimately, developmental. The study concludes that an essentialist reading of the beloved in Persian love mystic poetry would create numerous problems, and that the spirit of Persian classical poetry in this regard is the spirit of uncertainty with a certain purpose: it is the manifestation of the self-poet’s agency, choosing one’s object of desire without explicitly revealing it and, thus, living one’s own life of choice without fearing the threads of religious fundamentalism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.040 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".