by Safoura Nourbakhsh
“In the woman’s view of life, the outer world and the inner world, the words and the actions, the “sensible” and the “transcendental” must inform one another.”
Using Luce Irigaray’s “sensible transcendental” as a conceptual tool, Safoura Nourbakhsh turns to the parable of the Bedouin and his wife in the first book of Rumi’s Masnavi and through a close textual reading speculates on subversive possibilities that arise from such an application. In Rumi’s retelling of the parable she argues that the traditional boundaries between the intellect (transcendental) and the body (sensible) collapse and the woman (representing the body, the nafs, and the material world) eventually emerges as the signifier of the transcendental knowledge or the Truth.
Read the full article in issue 85 SUFI
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