TY - JOUR AU - Cross, Cameron PY - 2016/06/30 Y2 - 2024/03/28 TI - The Many Colors of Love in Niẓāmī's 'Haft Paykar:' Beyond the Spectrum JF - Interfaces: A Journal of Medieval European Literatures JA - Interfaces VL - IS - 2 SE - Individual Articles DO - 10.13130/interfaces-7663 UR - https://riviste.unimi.it/interfaces/article/view/7663 SP - 52-96 AB - <span><span>This article is a study of the many 'colors' of love in Niẓāmī Ganjavī's <em>Haft paykar</em> (<em>The Seven Figures</em>), with special attention paid to the (evidently) dichotomous poles of white (purity) and black (concupiscence). The argument is divided into four sections: after introducing the <em>Haft paykar</em> and summarizing some of the scholarship that has been done to crack the code of its color symbolism, I survey these thematic poles as they occur in several landmark medical, philosophical, and poetic texts of Islamic tradition. This provides the basis for an in-depth discussion of the Stories of the Black and White Domes in the <em>Haft paykar</em>, where I observe how the two episodes, when read from this context, seem to support a linear progression from 'black' love to 'white,' with the latter presumably marking the point of apotheosis. In the final section, however, I consider how the stories resist such a straightforward reading, and indeed recursively feed into each other in such a way to suggest that neither color of love can fully exist or function without the other. I propose that the contrast of white and black in the <em>Haft paykar</em> is not sufficiently read as a static dichotomy of symbols; it rather evokes a dynamic interplay of light and shadow that hints at a reality beyond the sum of its parts, a pre-prismatic totality of which all colors of love are merely those refractions visible to the naked eye.</span></span> ER -