Theodore S Beers

This article explores the phenomenon of familiarity with Persian among Arabic literati of the early modern period, with a focus on the eleventh/seventeenth century. It has long been recognized, in a general sense, that some scholars from the Ottoman Arab world had knowledge of Persian literature. Only recently have we seen the beginnings of detailed research on this topic. In the current article, the works of four authors are examined with an eye toward their discussion of things Persian or Iranian: Muḥammad Amīn al-Muḥibbī (d. 1111/1699), Shihāb al-Dīn al-Khafājī (d. 1069/1659), Ḥasan al-Būrīnī (d. 1024/1615), and ‘Abd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī (d. 1143/1731). We find that, although familiarity with Persian was far from unheard-of in Arabic literary circles, the degree of interest varied widely. At one extreme is al-Muḥibbī, who goes out of his way to share samples of the work of prominent Persian poets that he has translated into Arabic. Closer to the opposite end of the spectrum is al-Khafājī, of whom it is not obvious whether he could read Persian. The remaining authors fall somewhere in between. One insight that becomes clearer through this study is that Ottoman Damascus was a place in which Persian could be learned. There were enough migrants and visitors from the Persianate realm, and sufficient circulation of texts, that a scholar like al-Būrīnī could attain fluency without traveling.

In this short article, I draw attention to the discussion of poets from Iran (al-‘Ajam) in two Arabic biographical anthologies of the eleventh/seventeenth century: the Sulāfat al-‘aṣr of Ibn Ma‘ṣūm (d. 1120/1709) and the Nafḥat al-rayḥāna of Muḥammad Amīn al-Muḥibbī (d. 1111/1699). The latter text not only addresses the careers of noteworthy Persian poets, but it also presents samples of their work that al-Muḥibbī has translated into Arabic verse. In the case of the poet Ṣā’ib Tabrīzī (d. ca. 1087/1676), at least one of al-Muḥibbī's translations can be traced to the original Persian. This reveals a specific instance of cross-cultural literary appreciation in the Ottoman-Safavid-Mughal period.

This article reviews an old debate in Persian literary history surrounding the judgment of early modern poetry and, in particular, the legacy of the Safavid dynasty, and argues that a few of the questions over which scholars once disagreed have not been resolved to the extent that might be suspected. The general narrative that prevailed for most of the twentieth century, in which Persian lyric poetry of the early modern era was criticized as decadent and the Safavids were denounced for having abandoned their traditional duty to promote arts and letters, is now rightly considered obsolete. As the field has developed a more mature approach to these issues, however, the question of patronage at the Safavid court has been set aside more than it has been settled. We still have not reached a comprehensive understanding of the transformations that took place in Persian literary culture from the tenth/sixteenth century onward. The migration of scores of Iranian poets to Mughal India is recognized as a key development, but the impact of the contemporary situation in Safavid lands—including, perhaps, a relative lack of patronage—merits reconsideration.

In this article, I describe a source which represents by far our earliest documentation of the career and poetry of Ṣāʾib Tabrīzī (d. ca. 1087/1676), and which has gone largely unaddressed in scholarship. It occurs in a still-unpublished biographical dictionary (taẕkirah) of poets entitled Khayr al-bayān, written by Malik Shāh Ḥusayn Sīstānī and known to survive in several manuscripts. The oldest, and possibly the only complete copy, is MS Or. 3397 at the British Library. Shāh Ḥusayn wrote this taẕkirah between 1017/1608–9 and 1036/1627; the section containing the notice on Ṣāʾib was added in 1035/1625–6. Significantly, Or. 3397 was copied in 1041/1631 by a scribe named Muḥammad Mīrak b. Khwājah Mīr Farāhī. This means that the text of the passage on Ṣāʾib dates to shortly after his emigration to Kabul (thence to India) in 1034/1624–5, while our manuscript dates to shortly before he left Kashmir to return to Iran in 1042/1632.

The source thus falls entirely within the period of young Ṣāʾib’s seven-year adventure on the Indian Subcontinent, and represents a rare vignette of the beginning of an illustrious career. Since it is important that we treat taẕkirahs as valuable and multifaceted works in their own right, this article begins with an overview of the Khayr al-bayān (which has seen little use by researchers thus far) and basic information about its author. I then describe the material on Ṣāʾib in detail, including several important features of the manuscript itself. Finally, I review the implications of the text for Ṣāʾib’s biography, with particular regard to the origin of one of his nicknames, “Mustaʿidd Khān.” The source also has bearing on the study of his work, since eleven of his poems, quoted in the Khayr al-bayān, may now be dated to the earliest part of his career. This all comes at a time of growing academic and popular interest in Ṣāʾib, who is increasingly recognized as one of the preeminent ghazal poets of the classical tradition. To assist the reader in following the more detail-oriented parts of this article, I append photographs of the relevant pages in Or. 3397.

This paper focuses on Vahshi Bāfqi (d. 991/1583), especially on the sources for the study of his biography and works. The various editions of his collected poems are assessed. Next, all of the known early sources on Vahshi’s biography are presented, including a very important one that has not been published or cited before. Laying out all of these sources allows us to construct a more authoritative biography of the poet than has appeared to date. On a broader level, we learn that the careers and works of poets of Vahshi’s era are best understood in connection to one another. The tremendous growth of the tazkera genre in the Safavid-Mughal period makes possible this kind of research, focused on interconnectivity and cosmopolitanism in literary culture. In fact, the sources not only permit such an approach; they demand it. The paper ends with a series of recommendations for future research on Vahshi, his contemporaries, and the tazkeras themselves.

This recently published monograph by Abolfazl Khatibi represents an important contribution to one of the oldest debates in Persian literary history, and indeed to the textual criticism of the Shāhnāmah. The full title of the work (which is in Persian) is “Āyā Firdawsī Maḥmūd-i Ghaznavī rā hajv guft? Hajv’nāmah-i mansūb bih Firdawsī: Bar’rasī-yi taḥlīlī, taṣḥīḥ-i intiqādī, va sharḥ-i bayt’hā.”