Monday, February 26, 2007

Sufi and a Fever

I feel terrible, I have such a bad cold, I ache everywhere and I have the chills as well as a fever, I think. I drank Neo Citran this morning and slept till 1:00 PM, so I'd feel better later on to sit and do my work, but I had to go out on a couple of errands, and I think I shouldn't have, because it was snowing and cold outside and now my cold is worse.
I have this huge paper that worries me a lot, it's due the beginning of April, and I know I have a month for it, but since I know myself to be an incorrigible procrastinator, I have to start really early, even though I think I'm quite late already. The rest of my classmates are half-done I assume, and my paper requires a great deal of work, because I mainly have to rely on and consult primary sources.
Here is my topic: the words Sufi and Sufism have been used too liberally to describe a huge category (span) of esoterically-inclined mystics, although other words different than Sufi can be ascribed to these mystics such as 'arif, 'ashiq, dervish, sheikh and others (mental note: you are doing some work here, clearing out for yourself what your thesis is, since I still don't know).
I have to sort through Rumi's Mathnawi and Hafiz's diwan and some other Persian poets and find words that describe Sufis and then see which word the poet has used to describe what kind of a mystic, and then look at the translations of these works and see what the translator has understood from that word, and whether it is similar to the meaning of the Persian poet.
The problem is I don't have enough secondary sources on this topic, I still haven't been able to find a book dealing with this issue, although I've found scattered references in the many books that I already have.
I'm going back to class tomorrow and my very-smarty-pants classmate is having his presentation tomorrow, I'll see what he's done by now, which I'm certain, is a lot.

No comments: