© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/15700674-12340073 brill.com/me Medieval Jewish, Christian and Muslim Culture Encounters in Confluence and Dialogue Medieval Encounters 26 (2020) 285–320 The Rose of Muḥammad, the Fragrance of Christ: Liminal Poetics in Medieval Anatolia Michael Pifer Lecturer in Armenian Language and Literature, Department of Middle East Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA mpifer@umich.edu Abstract Although scent has played a diminished role in modern Western societies, it communi- cated a wide array of meanings to Muslims, Christians, and Jews in medieval Anatolia. This study examines the ubiquitous presence of fragrance in Persian and Armenian poetry, particularly in the works of Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī (d. 1273), his son Sulṭān Walad (d. 1312), and Kostandin Erznkatsʿi (fl. late thirteenth–early fourteenth cen.), a Christian Armenian poet of Erzincan. For these and other poets, olfaction served as a rich heu- ristic for sensing the divine essence in many contexts: in everyday customs, such as washing with rose water or the preparation of sherbet; in devotional practices, such as burning incense or receiving communion; and finally in the instruction of poetry itself. Keywords Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī ‒ Kostandin Erznkatsʿi ‒ fragrance ‒ comparative literature ‒ Muslim- Christian interaction ‒ Medieval Anatolia ‒ poetics ‒ Persian ‒ Middle Armenian In a Middle Armenian poem by Kostandin Erznkatsʿi (fl. late thirteenth–early fourteenth century), a nightingale gently drops into a luminous, fragrant gar- den, arrayed with newly blossomed flowers.1 The nightingale, or bulbul in me- dieval Persian and Armenian poetry, makes his way to the center of the garden, 1  I would like to thank Cameron Cross and Sergio La Porta for their insightful suggestions on various drafts of this article. I am also grateful to Mahdi Tourage, who helped me to think about the role of gardens and aroma in Persian poetry at a much earlier stage of this project.