(see Nizami), sent forth its first tender shoots in the numerous love stories of the Shāhnāma, the most fascinating of which is that of Zāl and Rūdabeh, and developed almost into full bloom in Firdousī’s second great mathnawī Yūsuf u Zalīkhā, which the aged poet wrote after his flight from Ghazni, and dedicated to the reigning caliph of Bagdad, al Qadir billah. It represents the oldest poetical treatment of the Biblical story of Joseph, which has proved so attractive to the epic poets of Persia, among others to ʽAmʽak of Bokhārā (d. 1149), who was the first after Firdousī to write a Yūsuf u Zalīkhā to Jāmī (d. 1492); Maujī Ḳāsim Khān, Humāyūn’s amīr (d. 1571), Nāżim of Herāt (d. 1670), and Shaukat, the governor of Shīrāz under Fath ʽAlī Shāh. Perhaps prior in date to Firdousī’s Yūsuf was his patron ʽUnsurī’s romance, Wāmiḳ u Adhrā, a popular Iranian legend of great antiquity, which had been first written in verse under the Ṭāhirid dynasty. This favourite story was treated again by Fasīhī Jurjānī (5th century of the Hegira), and by many modern poets—as Damīrī, who died under the Ṣafawī shāh Mahommed (1577–1586; 985–994 A.H.), Nāmī, the historiographer of the Zand dynasty, and Ḥosain of Shīrāz under Fatḥ ʽAlī Shāh, the last two flourishing towards the beginning of the present century. Another love story of similar antiquity formed the basis of Fakr-uddīn Asʽad Jorjānī’s Wīs u Rāmīn, which was composed in Iṣfahān about 1048 (440 A.H.)—a poem remarkable not only for its high artistic value but also for its resemblance to Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan und Isolt.
The last-named Persian poet was apparently one of the earliest
eulogists of the Seljūḳs, and it was under this Turkish dynasty
that lyrical romanticism rose to the highest pitch.
What Firdousī and the court-poets of Sultan Maḥmūd
had commenced, what Abū ’l-Faraj Rūnī of Lahore
and Masʽūd b. Saʽd b. Salmān (under Sultan Ibrāhīm, 1059–1099)
Encomiasts
and Satirists.
had successfully continued, reached its perfection in the
famous group of panegyrists who gathered in the first half of the
6th century of the Hegira round the throne of Sultan Sinjar,
and partly also round that of his great antagonist, Atsiz, shāh of
Khwārizm. This group included Adīb Ṣābir, who was drowned
by order of the prince in the Oxus about 1145 (540 A.H.), and his
pupil Jauharī, the goldsmith of Bokhārā; Amīr Muʽizzī, the king
of poets at Sinjar’s court, killed by a stray arrow in 1147 (542 A.H.),
Rashīd Waṭwāṭ (the Swallow) who died in 1182 (578 A.H.),
and left, besides his ḳaṣīdas, a valuable treatise on poetry
(Hadāʽiḳ-essiḥr) and a metrical translation of the sentences of
ʽAlī, ʽAbd-alwāsiʽ Jabalī, who sang at first, like his contemporary
Hasan Ghaznawī (d. 1169; 565 A.H.), the praise of the
Ghaznevid shāh Bahrām, but afterwards bestowed his eulogies
upon Sinjar, the conqueror of Ghazni; and Auḥad-uddīn Anwarī,
the most celebrated ḳaṣīda-writer of the whole Persian literature.
Anwarī (died between 1189 and 1191; 585 and 587 A.H.), who
in early life had pursued scientific studies in the madrasa of Tūṣ,
and who ranked among the foremost astronomers of his time,
owes his renown as much to the inexhaustible store of poetical
similes and epitheta ornantia which he showered upon Sinjar
and other royal and princely personages, as to his cutting sarcasms,
which he was careful to direct, not against individuals,
but against whole classes of society and the cruel wrong worked
by an inexorable fate—thus disregarding the example of
Firdousī, whose attack upon Sultan Mahmūd for having cheated
him out of the reward for his epopee is the oldest and most
finished specimen of personal satire. This legitimate branch of
high art, however, soon degenerated either into the lower forms
of parody and travesty—for which, for instance, a whole
group of Transoxanian writers, Sūzanī of Samarḳand (d. 1174;
569 A.H.) and his contemporaries, Abū ʽAlī Shatranjī of the same
town, Lāmiʽ of Bokhara, and others gained a certain literary
reputation—or into mere comic pieces and jocular poems like
the “Pleasantries” (Hazliyyāt) and the humorous stories of the
“Mouse and Cat” and the “Stone-cutter” (Sangtarash) by
ʽUbaid Zākānī (d. 1370; 772 A.H.). Anwarī’s greatest rival
was Khāḳānī (d. 1199; 595 A.H.), the son of a carpenter in
Shīrvān, and panegyrist of the shāhs of Shīrvān, usually called
the Pindar of the East. To European taste only the shorter
epigrams and the double-rhymed poem Tuḥfatulʽirāḳain, in
which Khāḳāni describes his journey to Mecca and back, give
full satisfaction. Among his numerous contemporaries and
followers may be noticed Mujīr-uddīn Bailaḳānī (d. 1198;
594 A.H.); Żahir Fāryābī (d. 1202; 598 A.H.) and Athīr
Akhsīkatī (d. 1211; 608 A.H.)—all three panegyrists of the
atābegs of Azerbaijan, and especially of Sultan Ḳizil
Arslan—Kamāl-uddīn Iṣfahānī, tortured to death by the Moguls in 1237
(635 A.H.), who sang, like his father Jamāl-uddīn, the praise of
the governors of Iṣfahān, and gained the epithet of the “creator
of fine thoughts” (Khallāḳ-ulmaʽānī); and Saif-uddīn Isfarangī
(d. 1267; 666 A.H.), a favourite of the shāhs of Khwārizm.
Fruitful as the 6th and 7th centuries of the Hegira were in panegyrics, they attained an equally high standard in didactic and mystic poetry. The origin of both can again be traced to Firdousī and his time. In the ethical reflections, wise maxims and moral exhortations scattered throughout the Shāhnāma the didactic element is Didactic and Mystic Poetry. plainly visible, and equally plain in it are the traces of that mystical tendency which was soon to pervade almost all the literary productions of Persian genius. But the most characteristic passage of the epopee is the mysterious disappearance of Shāh Kaikhosrau, who suddenly, when at the height of earthly fame and splendour, renounces the world in utter disgust, and, carried away by his fervent longing for an abode of everlasting tranquillity, vanishes for ever from the midst of his companions. The first Persian who employed poetry exclusively for the illustration of Ṣūfīc doctrines was Firdousī’s contemporary, Ṣūfīc Poets. the renowned sheikh Abū Sa’īd b. Abū l-Khair of Mahna in Khorāsān (968–1049, 357–440 A.H.), the founder of that specific form of the rubaʽī which gives the most concise expression to religious and philosophic aphorisms—a form which was further developed by the great freethinker ʽOmar b. Khayyām (q.v.), and Afḍal-uddīn Kiāsh (d. 1307; 707 A.H.). The year of Abū Saʽid’s death is most likely that of the first great didactic mathnawī, the Rūshana’īnāma, or “Book of Enlightenment,” by Nāṣir Khosrau (q.v.), a poem full of sound moral and ethical maxims with slightly mystical tendencies. About twenty-five years later the first theoretical handbook of Ṣūfīsm in Persian was composed by ’Alī b. ’Uthmān al-Jullābī al-Hujwīrī in the Kashf-ulmaḥjūb, or, “Revelation of Hidden Things,” which treats of the various schools of Ṣūfīs, their teachings and observances. A great saint of the same period, Sheikh ʽAbdallāh Anṣārī of Herāt (1006–1089; 396–481 A.H.), assisted in spreading the pantheistic movement by his Munājāt or “Invocations to God,” by several prose tracts, and by an important collection of biographies of eminent Ṣūfīs, based on an older Arabic compilation, and serving in its turn as groundwork for Jāmī’s excellent Nafaḥāt-aluns (completed in 1478; 883 A.H.). He thus paved the way for the publication of one of the earliest textbooks of the whole sect, the Ḥadīḳat-ulḥaḳikat, or “Garden of Truth” (1130; 525 A.H.), by Ḥakīm Sanā’ī of Ghazni, to whom all the later Ṣūfīc poets refer as their unrivalled master in spiritual knowledge. As the most uncompromising Ṣūfīs appear the greatest pantheistic writer of all ages, Jelāl ud-din Rūmī (1207–1273; 604–672 A.H.; see Rūmī), and his scarcely less renowned predecessor Farīd ud-dīn ʽAṭṭar, who was slain by the Moguls at the age of 114 lunar years in 1230 (627 A.H.). This prolific writer, having performed the pilgrimage to Mecca, devoted himself to a stern ascetic life, and to the composition of Ṣūfīc works, partly in prose, as in his valuable “Biography of Eminent Mystic Divines,” but mostly in the form of mathnawīs (upwards of twenty in number), among which the Pandnāma, or “Book of Counsels,” and the Mantiḳ-uṭṭair, or the “Speeches of Birds,” occupy the first rank. In the latter, an allegorical poem, interspersed with moral tales and pious contemplations, the final absorption of the Ṣūfī in the deity is most ingeniously illustrated.
In strong contrast to these advanced Ṣūfīs stands the greatest moral teacher of Persia, Sheikh Saʽdī of Shīrāz (died about 110 lunar years old in 1292; 691 A.H.; see Saʽdī), whose two best known works are the Būstān, or “Fruit-garden,” and
