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Inscribing the Eternal into the Everyday: Voice in Bedil’s Ruqa⁠ʿāt


Can we read ʿAbd al-Qādir Bedil’s (1644–1720) oeuvre in ways that socialize it against his own pervasive Sufi posture of ascetic distance from everyday social exchanges? What kind of selfhood comes into view if we do so? Of all the genres Bedil wrote in, his correspondence best allows us such a socialization. This essay explores Bedil’s epistolary voice in terms of a tension between the trans-mundane ghazal metaphors he uses in his letters and the mundane specificities of each epistolary situation. It puts this voice into relation with prior models of Persian epistolography (inshā), with Arabic-Persian literary theories of wonder in Bedil’s milieu and with models of Sufi wit, reflecting on what his appropriations of these genres allowed him in each case. It concludes by reflecting on how Bedil’s voice might be understood in the wider contexts of non-European practices of civility and the order of mimesis it assumes.