Study of love in Nezami’s Khosrow va Shirin on the basis of perspectives of Giddens, Danino and Evans

This study aims to investigate the Khosrow va Shirin story of Nezami about love, according to Giddens, Danino and Merry Evans’s views. The main issue here is to answer this question: to what extent can concepts and features of love in Western theories be adapted to a variety of love in Khosrow va Shirin story of Nezami? Giddens divides the evolution of the concept of love in the West into three categories based on the history of love: 1.Passionate love 2.Romantic love 3.Fluid love. Danino also considers love as a kind of a symbiosis of the libido and emotional attraction. Evans, too, distinguishes between two types of love i.e. commercial love and romantic love. Nezami Ganjavi has intertwined several stories revolving around love in Khosrow va Shirin where different kinds of love can be divided into six categories: 1.The love of the lover to the beloved 2.The love of the beloved to the lover 3.one-sided love 4.advantaged and political love 5.capricious and vengeful love 6.forbidden love and morbid fascination. With reflecting on the intertwined story and short stories of Khosrow va Shirin, Shirin's love to Khosrow and vice versa is a kind of passionate love from Giddens' point of view, that is a real and mystical love.  From Evans's point of view, the love of Farhad for Shirin, is a one-sided and romantic love and the love of Maryam and Khosrow is of the political expediency and dealing type of love. The two other types are not only mixed with lust and sin, but also doomed to lead to death.  
 
Kewords: love, Khosrow va Shirin, Giddens, Evans, Danino
 

1.     Introduction

In Persian literature, especially in Persian poetry, at least three types of love can be distinguished from one another: first, according to Rumi, colored loves i.e. love on the basis of appearances and erotic attractions; second, romantic loves which are based on spiritual compatibility and proportion; and the third one is the true love i.e. “the love relationship between man and God which has been mentioned in the Quran, too; it is the human ‘life’ relationship of a man who has reached the end of spiritual progress and enjoys presence of the beloved in the theosophical togetherness” (Navia, 1994: 271). Theosophical love, in other terms, “is the center of gravity of the universe which swallows all previous stages of progress, patience, cultivation, fear, and hope” (Shimel, 2010: 271). Therefore, it can be said that: “the position of love is the highest level of passing from one’s self, the absence of senses, and reaching the spiritual world” (Ibn Dabagh, 2000: 115).
1.1.Statement of the problem and the main question of the study
Love has been the main basis of most theosophical and lyrical works, so much so that it has been placed in the works of great poets such as Sanaee, Attar, Rumi, Sadi and Hafiz, etc. and also in the works of Sufis such as Serri Saghati, Junaid Baghdadi, Abul-Hassan Nouri, Hallaj, Ein-ul-Quzat, etc. Also in the recent years, a lot of surveys have been carried out about love in Nezami’s Khamseh as well as in his other works.
Our question in this study is that: to what extent is the theme of love in the story of Khosrow va Shirin compatible with the perspectives and viewpoints of individuals like Giddens, Danino and Mary Evans?
1.2.Methodology
In this survey, considering its objective and the stated question in the abstract, the concept of love in the story of Khosrow va Shirin, from the perspective of western theorists, was studied with descriptive-analytical method by note-taking from books and articles so that the compatibility level of these theories with the theme of love in this story could be determined.
1.3.Literature
About love and about Nezami’s Khamseh, different books, articles and thesis papers have been written with different perspectives, either in Iran or in Azerbaijan, some of which will be introduced in this article. Maryam Shaban Zadeh (2010), in an article titled ‘Sweet worry; a study on the theosophical proposition of Nezami Ganjavi’ in the Research Journal of Lyrical Literature, year 8, no. 14, pp. 73-94, takes a theosophical look at the fictional structure of Khosrow va Shirin. Nemat-ullah Iran Zadeh and Marzieh Atashi Pour (2011) in an article titled ‘Fictional sketch of Khosrow va Shirin and Leili va Majnun by focusing on the Eastern narrative in the Research Journal of Lyrical Literature, year 9, no. 17, pp. 5-35, have studied the sketch of the story according to the Eastern narrative’. Muhammad Amir Mashhadi and Eshagh Mir Baluch Zaee (2013) in an article titled ‘The element of conflict in Nezami’s poetry collection of Khosrow va Shirin’ in the Research Journal of Lyrical Literature, year 11, no. 21, pp. 163-180, studied the conflicts of the story. Samira Bameshki and Fatemeh Razavi (2014) in an article titled ‘Comparison of Nezami’s Khosrow va Shirin with Hatafi’s Shirin va Khosrow with structuralist narratology attitude’, in the Research Journal of Lyrical Literature, year 11, no. 23, pp. 67-88 analyzed these two stories on the basis of Genette’s ideas. Muhammad Amir Mashhadi, Abdul Ali Oveisi and Razieh Beh Abadi (2015) in an article titled ‘Comparison of the narrative trends in the two poetry collections named Khosrow va Shirin by Nami Esfahani and Nezami Ganjavi’ in the Research Journal of Lyrical Literature, year 13, no. 24, pp. 249-266, studied similarities and differences of these two works from qualitative and quantitative perspectives. As it is apparent from the survey samples, the target perspectives of this study have not been subjected to research.
1.4.Conclusion
Study of Nezami’s Khosrow va Shirin and the formed romantic relationships around its fictional characters shows that love between Khosrow and Shirin, by passing of time and after bitter events, turns from a lusty sensation into a perfected theosophical love which Giddens calls as a sensational love with a theosophical ending and leading to God. In the meantime of narrating perfection of love in Khosrow va Shirin, several mini stories appear with bubble-like and transitional loves; each one of them represents one type of unfinished love. For example, in the love of Khosrow to Shekar, lack of two important and basic principles of commitment and intimacy in its system, considerably challenges its structure and places it within Danino’s category of ‘commercial love’. Apart from that, Khosrow’s imperfect love to Maryam, daughter of the Roman Emperor, is only a love out of commitment without enough load of sensation which has been based on political expedients, like many other kings do. Another form, the disastrous love of Shiroyeh to Shirin is basically lustful and melancholic so much so that it brings down structural and conceptual basics of love system; it is not in a form to be called current love. Eventually, the one-sided love of Farhad to Shirin is presented which can hardly be placed in the above categories. Perhaps, it can be regarded as Ivans’ romantic love of the 18^th century whose minimum result is a transcendence of the lover. At the end, it has to be said that in this story, more love is placed on the basis of Giddens’ theory. Although romantic love is common in all three theories and elements of romantic love can be accorded with the story, it is only the love of Shiroyeh that can be placed in none of the categories of these theorists, and only some parts of the current love can be attributed to it.