Victoria Rowe Holbrook

In the long history of Western thought there is a highly significant state of affairs: This is the fact that the range of meaning in Plato’s usage of the Greek term to kalon, which in his dialogue Symposium names the beauty that is goodness as the ultimate object of love, was apportioned across different terms in Latin translation, separating the good from the beautiful. Yet in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish (Ottoman and modern), beauty has been understood in the full Platonic range from at least the time of the Quran to the present day. I will give the example of the 18th century philosophical romance in verse, Beauty and Love (Ḥüsn ü Aşḳ) by the Ottoman poet Şeyḫ Galip (1757– 1799), who became Director of the Galata convent of Mevlana Rumi’s dervish order after writing his work. I will discuss what is at stake in the separation of goodness and beauty, and briefly give a sample from Jacques Lacan’s usages.

This chapter argues that Plato’s Divided Line, expounded in Republic 509d6–511e4, is a likely ancestor of the Islamic Degrees of Being schema (marāṭib al-wujūd). This is also an argument for the relevance of Islamic Platonism to Plato studies. I will show that Line and Schema have at least the following in common: a. Both present four modes of cognition rather than a simple dichotomy between knowledge and belief. b. Both define modes of cognition according to their objects, resulting in four pairs of cognition/object. c. Both are hierarchical in terms of the pairs’ approximation to reality; cognitions and their objects are ranked by their closeness to truth. d. In both, the goal is to provide a programme by which one comes to know what is real. Of course, each of them is more than what they share. The Schema develops and expands the role of imagination in cognition, drawing out ambiguities in Plato’s treatment of images to accommmodate an ontologically distinct realm interrelating the visible and the intelligible.

The way we understand mimesis is fundamental to epistemology, physics, and representation in political life as well as in the arts. Can truth/reality be copied? The most enduring understanding of what truth and reality are has come to us from Plato, who launched an attack on poetry as false representation of the divine. Although a rarely defined Neoplatonism is routinely attributed to the ninth and tenth-century philosophers who wrote in Arabic, I and others have overlooked how much of Plato there is in the whole of Islamicate literature and culture, beginning with the linguistic environment of the Quran. But it is well known that Plato was revered in historical Islamicate societies; Ibn Sina (Avicenna, d. 1037) and many others referred to him as “the divine Plato,” and considered him a prophet in the monotheistic tradition. There is now a small body of work on mimesis and Islam, but here I will look specifically at Platonic topics found in the Quran with regard to mimesis and poetry, and the kind of methodology needed to appreciate them.

[Holbrook's] is one of the keenest and deepest critical minds in the field of Islamic literature. She provides for the reader (scholar and lay persona alike) fascinating insights into the genre, poetic functions, mystical allegory, narrative technique, audience response, etc. Many of her analyses are scintillating.... The Holbrook volume is a landmark in Ottoman literary scholarship. --MESA Bulletin... a major contribution to Ottoman and Turkish literary study--I frankly am at a loss to describe how major.... Dr. Holbrook's book will make its own category and subsequent publication in the field will be judged in relation to it. --Walter G. Andrews, professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization, University of Washington When the Ottoman Turkish Empire was divided into modern states after World War I, in Turkey a change of alphabet and radical linguistic reform aimed to free modern Turkish literature from intellectual ties to the East. Holbrook recuperates Ottoman debates on the existential status of language and social value of art with a poetics of Beauty and Love, the philosophical fairy tale in verse by Seyh Galib. Where does language come from? How does a poet conceive imagery? What rights to interpretive authority does Muslim law accord the individual when God's word is law? Holbrook's lively analysis ranges an intertext of genres in Arabic and Persian as well as Turkish. The romance of separated lovers is a paradigm of journeys that lead beyond discourse. A poet's quest for originality reveals an archaeology of modernism. Holbrook traces the revolutionary polemic and Orientalist philology that de-aestheticized Ottoman poetry, bringing the critique of Orientalismto bear upon the Ottoman center Orientalism suppressed.

I analyze figures and themes of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” evident in chapter thirty-six of the Quran. I argue that the two texts share (1) a neck fetter fixing the head; (2) a spatial organization of barriers before and behind and cover- ing above; (3) a theme of failure to see the truth and assault upon those who tell the truth, and (4) a theme of transcendent reality as a context of meaning. I argue that the Quran displays an inheritance of some Platonic thought in Arabic at least two centuries prior to any known translation of Plato.