the Gulistan, or “Rose-garden.” However, both have found comparatively few imitations—the former in the Dastūrnāma, Sa’dī. or “Book of Exemplars,” of Nizārī of Kohistān (d. 1320; 720 A.H.), in the Dah Bāb, or “Ten Letters,” of Kātibī (d. 1434, 838 A.H.), and in the Gulzār, or “Rose-bower,” of Hairatī (murdered 1554; 961 A.H.); the latter in Muʽīn-uddīn Juwainī’s Nigāristān, or “Picture-gallery” (1335; 735 A.H.) and Jāmī’s Bahāristān, or “Spring-garden” (1487; 892 A.H.); whereas an innumerable host of purely Ṣūfīc compositions followed in the wake of Sanā’ī’s, ʽAṭṭar’s and Jelāl ud-dīn Rumī’s mathnawīs. It will Further Ṣūfīc Works. suffice to name a few of the most conspicuous. The Lamaʽāt, or “Sparks,” of ʽIrāḳī (d. between 1287 and 1309; 686 and 709 A.H.), the Zād-ulmusāfirīn, or “Store of the Wayfarers,” by Husainī (d. 1318, 718 A.H.), the Gulshan-i-Rāz, or “Rose-bed of Mystery,” by Maḥmūd Shabistarī (d. 1320; 720 A.H.), the Jām-i-Jam, or “Cup of Jamshīd,” by Auḥadi (d. 1338; 738 A.H.), the Anīs-ul ʽArifīn, or “Friend of the Mystics,” by Ḳāsim (Qāsim)-i-Anwār (d. 1434; 837 A.H.), and others; ʽAṣṣār’s Mihr u Mushtarī, or “Sun and Jupiter” (1376, 778 A.H.), ʽĀrifī’s Gūi u Chaugān, or “The Ball and the Bat” (1438; 842 A.H.), Ḥusn u Dil, or “Beauty and Heart,” by Fattāhī of Nīshāpūr (d. 1448; 852 A.H.), Shamʽ u Parwāna, or “The Candle and the Moth,” by Ahlī of Shīrāz (1489; 894 A.H.), Shāh u Gadā, or “King and Dervish,” by Hilālī (put to death 1532; 939 A.H.), Bahā-ud-dīn ʽAmilī’s (d. 1621; 1030 A.H.) Nān u Halwā, or “Bread and Sweets,” Shīr u Shakar, or “Milk and Sugar” and many more.
During all these periods of literary activity, lyric poetry, pure and simple, had by no means been neglected; almost all the renowned poets since the time of Rūdagī had sung in endless strains the pleasures of love and wine, the beauties of nature, and the almighty power of the Creator; but it was left to the incomparable genius of Ḥāfiż (d. 1389; 791 A.H.; Lyric Poetry. see Ḥāfiż) to give to the world the most perfect models of lyric composition, and the lines he had laid down were more or less strictly followed by all the ghazal-writers of the 9th and 10th centuries of the Hegira—by Salmān of Sāwa (d. about 1377; 779 A.H.), who excelled besides in Ghazal-writers. ḳaṣīda and mathnawī; Kamāl Khujandī (d. 1400; 803 A.H.), Ḥāfiż’s friend, and protégé of Sultan Ḥosain (1374–1382 A.D.), Mahommed Shīrīn Maghribī (d. at Tabrīz in 1406; 809 A.H.), an intimate friend of Kamāl; Niʽmat-ullāh Walī (d. 1431; 834 A.H.), the founder of a special religious order; Ḳāsim-i-Anwār (see above); Amīr Shāhī (d. 1453; 857 A.H.), of the princely family of the Sarbadārs of Sabzewār; Bannā’ī (d. 1512; 918 A.H.), who also wrote a romantic poem, Bahrām u Bihrūz; Bābā Fighāni of Shirāz (d. 1519; 925 A.H.), usually called the “Little Hāfiż”; Nargisī (d. 1531; 938 A.H.); Lisānī (d. 1534; 941 A.H.), who himself was imitated by Damīrī of Iṣfahān, Muḥtasham Kāshī and Waḥshī Bāfikī (all three d1ed in the last decade of the 10th century of the Hegira); Ahlī of Shīrāz (d. 1535; 942 A.H.), author of the Siḥr-i-Ḥalāl, or “Lawful Witchcraft,” which, like Kātībī’s (d. 1434, 838 A.H.) Majmaʽ-ulbaḥrain, of the “Confluence of the Two Seas,” can be read in two different metres, Nauʽī (d. 1610; 1019 A.H.), who wrote the charming romance of a Hindu princess who burned herself in Akbar’s reign with her deceased husband on the funeral pile, called Sūz u Gudāz, or “Burning and Melting,” &c. Among the immediate predecessors of Ḥāfiż in the 8th century of the Hegira, in which also Ibn Yamīn, the great ḳiṭʽa-writer,[1] flourished, the highest fame was gained by the two poets of Delhi, Amīr Ḥasan and Amīr Khosrau. The latter, who died in 1325 (725 A.H.), two years before his friend Ḥasan, occupies the foremost place among all the Persian poets of India by the richness of his imagination, his graphic style, and the historical interest attached to his writings. Five extensive dīwāns testify to his versatility in all branches of lyric poetry, and nine large mathnawīs to his mastership in the epic line. Four of the latter are poetical accounts of the reigns of the emperors of Delhi, ʽAlā-uddīn Khiljī (1296–1316), his predecessor Feroz Shāh and his successor Kuṭb-uddīn Mubārek Shah—the Miftāh-ulfutūh, or “Key of Victories,” the Kirān-ussaʽdain, or “The Conjunction of the Two Lucky Planets,” the Nuh Sipihr, or “Nine Spheres,” and the love-story of Khidrkhān u Duwalrānī. His other Eve mathnawīs formed the first attempt ever made to imitate Niżāmi’s famous Khamsah, or five romantic epopees, and this attempt turned out so well that henceforth almost all epic poets wrote quintuples of a similar description. Khwājū Kirmāni (d. 1352; 753 A.H.) was the next aspirant to Niżāmī’s fame, with five mathnawīs, among which Humāi u Humāyun is the most popular, but he had to yield the palm to ʽAbd-urraḥmān Jāmī (1414–1492; 817–898 A.H.), the Jāmī and Later Poets. last classic poet of Persia, in whose genius were summed up all the best qualities of his great predecessors. Many poets followed in Jāmī’s footsteps, first of all his nephew Hātifī (see above), and either wrote whole khamsahs or imitated at least one or other of Niżamī’s epopees; thus we have a Lailā u Majnūn, for instance, by Maktabī (1490), Hilālī (see above), and Rūḥ-ulamīn (d. 1637). But their efforts could not stop the growing corruption of taste, and it was only at the court of the Mogul emperors, particularly of the great Akbar (1556–1605), who revived Sultan Maḥmūd’s “round table,” that Persian literature still enjoyed some kind of “Indian summer” in poets like Ghazālī of Mashhad or Meshed (d. 1572); ʽUrfī of Shīrāz (d. 1591), who wrote spirited ḳaṣīdas, and, like his contemporaries Waḥshī and Kautharī, a mathnawī, Farhād u Shīrīn; and Faiḍī (d. 1595), the author of the romantic poem, Nal u Daman, who also imparted new life into the rubāʽī. In Persia proper only Zulālī, whose clever romance of “Sulṭan Maḥmūd and his favourite Ayāz” (1592) is widely read in the East, Ṣā’ib (d. 1677), who is commonly called the creator of a new style in lyric poetry, and, among the most modern, Hātif of Iṣfahān, the singer of sweet and tasteful odes (died about 1785), deserve a passing notice.
But we cannot conclude our brief survey of the national literature of Persia without calling attention to the rise of the drama, which has only sprung up in the beginning of the nineteenth century. Like the Greek drama and the mysteries of the European middle ages, it is the offspring of a purely religious ceremony, which for centuries has been performed The Drama. annually during the first ten days of the month Muharram—the recital of mournful lamentations in memory of the tragic fate of the house of the caliph ʽAlī, the hero of the Shīʽitic Persians. Most of these passion-plays deal with the slaughter of ʽAlī’s son Ḥosain and his family in the battle of Kerbelā. But lately this narrow range of dramatic subjects has been considerably widened, Biblical stories and even Christian legends have been brought upon the Persian stage; and there is a fair prospect of a further development of this most interesting and important movement. (See further Drama: Persian.)
In the various departments of general Persian literature not touched upon in the foregoing pages the same wonderful activity has prevailed as in the realm of poetry and fiction, since the first books on history and medicine appeared under the Sāmānids (see above). The most important section is that of historical works, which, although deficient in Historical Works. sound criticism and often spoiled by a highly artificial style, supply us with most valuable materials for our own research. Quite unique in this respect are the numerous histories of India, from the first invasion of Sultan Maḥmūd of Ghazni to the English conquest, and even to the first decades of the present century, most of which have been described and partly translated in the eight volumes of Sir H. M. Elliot’s History of India (1867–1878). Persian writers have given us, besides, an immense variety of universal histories of the world, with many curious and noteworthy data (see, among others, Mīrkhond’s and Khwāndamīr’s works under Mīrkhond); histories of Mahomet and the first caliphs, partly translated from Arabic originals, which have been lost; detailed accounts of all the Persian dynasties, from the Ghaznevids to the still reigning Kajars, of Jenghiz Khān and the Moguls (in Juwainī’s and Waṣṣāf’s elaborate Ta’rīkhs), and
- ↑ A ḳiṭʽa or muḳaṭṭaʽa is a poem containing moral reflections, and differs from the ḳaṣīda and ghazal only by the absence of a maṭlaʽ or initial distich.
