Daily Dose of Mir Taqi Mir

Today one's daily dose of poetry is from Mir Taqi Mir (1, 7:8) and particularly appropriate for the weekend:
 

شیخ جو ہے مسجد میں ننگا رات کو تھا میخانے میں 

جبہ  خرقہ  کرتا   ٹوپی مستی میں انعام کیا

The shaykh naked in the mosque [last] night was in the tavern

[His] cloak, patched robe, shirt, and hat he gifted in intoxication

An evocative and amusing shi'r of Mir's if there ever was one. Pritchett's translation and commentary may be found here. What I particularly like about it is that Mir gives just enough detail to know what transpired, but leaves enough ambiguity to come up with your own scenario (how did the shaykh find himself in the mosque, who stumbled upon him, was he passed out, who did he gift his apparel to).

Excerpted from Satyanarayana Hedge, who offers a more erudite reading than me:

śaiḵẖ jo hai masjid meñ nañgā rāt ko thā maiḵẖāney meñ
jubbah ḵẖirqah kurtā ṭopī mastī meñ in‘ām kiyā

The śaiḵẖ in the mosque
was last night
naked in the Tavern
Cloak, robe, dress, cap
distributed
in
Ecstasy

The ḵẖudā-e suḵẖan’s verbal dexterity “feints” the lector’s eye and the auditor’s ear, so to speak, to miscognize this distich as follows:

śaiḵẖ jo hai masjid meñ nañgā
rāt ko thā maiḵẖāney meñ
jubbah ḵẖirqah kurtā ṭopī
mastī meñ in‘ām kiyā

The śaiḵẖ
naked in the mosque
was last night
in the Tavern
Cloak, robe, dress, cap
distributed
in
Ecstasy

I’ll beg to submit that it’s perhaps possible to read a subtle “syntactic knot”, a t‘aqīd-e lafẓī here, if this distich is “split” in this manner:

śaiḵẖ jo hai masjid meñ
nañgā rāt ko thā maiḵẖāney meñ
jubbah ḵẖirqah kurtā ṭopī
mastī meñ in‘ām kiyā

This is an extremely unorthodox, unusal, subtle sautī īhām, a “phonic polysemy”, unattested and unidentified in the Perso-Arabic-Urdu manuals of balāġhat. There are, however, some qarīnah, “lexemic cues” to posit īhām here: śaiḵẖ, ḵẖirqah, mastī rāt and in‘ām. ḵẖirqah is itself bisemic, meaning both “ragged, patched garment” as well as “dress of a devotee or religious mendicant”. mastī is both “intoxication” and especially “ecstasy”: “in a frenzy or stupor, fearful, excited,” from O.Fr. estaise “ecstasy, rapture,” from L.L. extasis, from Gk. ekstasis “entrancement, astonishment; any displacement,” in NT “a trance,” from existanai “displace, put out of place,” also “drive out of one's mind” (existanai phrenon), from ek “out”+ histanai “to place, cause to stand,” from PIE root *sta- “to stand”.mastī here might perhaps be “semantically blown up” to signify the wajd of the Ṣūfī sam‘a, the mystical rapture (Ḥāl) of the anagogic hearing of Music. The Ciśtiyyah Ṣūfīs connect the melismatic entity of sam‘a with the Qur‘ānic topos, the maẓmūn of the Primeval Covenant, the roz-e alast, here signified by rāt. The rent garments of the rapturous mystic are distributed among the attendees, being redolent with the spiritual fragrance of Ecstasy.

The allusion (talmīh) here, is perhaps to the central, sempiternal, (Islamic/ṣūfistic) meta-Historical Mythic (and also Linguistic) moment of the ancient Covenant between Allah and humankind in Pre-Eternity, when Allah asks the yet-uncreated, potential souls/essences of humankind hear and obey (audire and respondere) -“alastu bi-Rabbikum”-“Am I not your Lord?” and receives their unanimous response “balā!”, “Certainly!”: [...] (Sūrā al-‘A’rāf, Qur‘ān 7.172)

Reading śaiḵẖ jo hai masjid meñ nañgā/ rāt ko thā maiḵẖāney meñ will entail positing that the śaiḵẖ was naked in the mosque, which reading in my humble opinion, is discordant. This distich’s isotopy, to my mind, is perhaps best read in the anagogical mode of coincidentia oppositorum, the Naqśbandiyyah ṣūfi topos of khalwat dar anjuman, “solitude in the multitude” (). The śaiḵẖ (here, the Ṣūfī śaiḵẖ) who appears seemingly seḥw “sober” in the “mosque” is in reality intoxicated (sukr) in Rapturous Ecstasy in the mode of the malāmatiyyah and the rindiyyah.