In the highly intertextual eighteenth-century romanceBeauty and Love,
the Ottoman poet Shaykh Galip (1757–1799), leader of the dervish lodge
devoted to Rumi, further explicates the tropes of the Fortress of Form and
the Chinese princess. Creatively honoring existing tropes by rewriting
them, he establishes an ecumenism similar to that in the poem quoted as
epigraph in this book, likening the fortress to a Hindu temple, to the stones
that pre-Islamic Arab tribes used for worshiping the goddess Lat, and to a
church nave. He thus strongly affiliates the image with the idol and the icon
of non-Islamic religions. He then likens the fortress to the palace built by
Zuleikha, Farhad’s carved images of Shirin, and paintings by the famed
artists Mani and Bihzad. Shaykh Galip thus indicates the affiliation
between the worship of the believer and the icon/idol, the rapture of the
lover for his beloved, and the illustration of these as paintings. Nonetheless:
The forms there from matter were disengaged
Presenting themselves uniquely half faced.
His images are simultaneously material and immaterial, somewhere
between dream and image, suspended inbarzakh. In contrast to Rumi’s
tale, where the artist of the princess’s portrait is ambiguous, in Shaykh
Galip’s rendition she is the artist.
The one who had painted all those portraits
Was none but that jeering Chinese princess.
Fantastic like lovers’most cherished dreams
A trick never in this world to be seen.^91
Although as creator of all palatial raiment, the princess could be a meta-
phor for the divine Creator, she is also“jeering,”and thus a mere simula-
crum of the (divine) Beauty which Love, trapped in the Fortress of Forms,
seeks. He burns down the fortress, ignoring the magical treasure left in its
ashes, within which lay the representation of the entire world. Wasting
away with despair, he is saved by Poetry, who leads him to the Land of the
Heart, which he had never really left. However, his journey has purified his
soul, enabling him to discover that he is already one with Beauty: theo-
phany lies in his awareness that their union always already lies within.
Form provides a necessary passage to“the land of non-existent things”
where only Dazzle can lead him past the“curtains of union”with the
divine.^92(^91) Galip, 2005 : 179. (^92) Galip, 2005 : 185.
220 The Transcendent Image