(there is no God but God). Yusuf thereby removes the Godhead (his aleph
and his penis) inherent in him as a prophet from the“No,”written in the
“fork.”He thereby enacts the phrase“there is no God but God,”by
avoiding the sexual climax representing divine union. While such an
interpretation seems sacrilegious, within the framework that none of
creation is external to divine will, the avoidance of such a metaphor
would be to hold the letters or sexuality sacred, which would result in
the sin ofshirk. Just as Jami earlier likened Yusuf to a mihrab which
points to the divine, here he reminds the reader that the bodies of both
Yusuf and Zuleikha are literally composed of letters as they exist in text,
both in the Quran and in his poem. The various sins that the reader
witnesses ultimately take place between these letters and their imagina-
tion. The sin never happened–it is the reader’s own imagination that
might fool them into thinking it did.
The association between letters, the human body, and mystical
numbers was elaborated by Fadallah of Astarabad (1339–40), who
interpreted the mystical dimension of the‘extra’ letters that appear
at the beginning of some Quranic suras through the revelation of what
he called“the book of Adam,”who was thefirst to receive the mean-
ings of the letters. The practice Fadallah initiated came to be known as
Hurufism, and was practiced in several Sufisects. Although he was
executed, probably under Timur, his ideasflourished, particularly after
thefifteenth century.^61 A 1454 book by Siraj of Shiraz, who worked in
the Deccan kingdom of Bihar, entitledThe Bounty of the Lovers,about
the spiritual and aesthetic dimensions of calligraphy cites earlier
sourcesasrootingthelinkbetweencalligraphy,theSufitradition of
lovers, and the tradition of ibn Muqla. He relates that one of the
children of the caliph, a pupil of ibn Muqla, returned from a stroll.
When his father asked what he had found, he answered that he had
heard the following verse:
My lover’s teeth are in the form of the [letter]sin,
And his mouth’s shape is like a roundedmim.
Together they spell poison (samm); amazing, by my life!
After I tasted it, there was no doubt.
Finding the poem nonsensical when considered in relation to the then-
prevalent square Kufic script, he consulted with ibn Muqla, who, after
meditating on the matter, invented the rounded forms of Naksh. His
(^61) Mir-Kasimov, 2008.
From Theology to Poetry 243