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(the most probable interpretation of the consonants mhsty , for which other forms, like Mahistī, Mahsitī or Mihistī, have been proposed as well; cf. Meier, 43 ff.) a Persian female poet whose historical personality is difficult to ascertain. She must have lived at some time between the early 5th/11th and the middle of the 6th/12th century. The earliest sources situate her alternatively in the environment of Maḥmūd of G̲h̲azna, of the Sald̲j̲ūḳ Sultan Sand̲j̲ar, or of a legendary king of Gand̲j̲a in Ād̲h̲arbāyd̲j̲ān. The qualification dabīr or dabīra is often …

, or Nūr al-Dīn Muḥammad al-S̲h̲āhd̲j̲ahānābādī, a traditionist and historiographer of Mug̲h̲al India who flourished in the 11th/17th century. The nickname “al Turk al-Buk̲h̲ārī” points to his origin from Central Asia. As a poet he adopted the pen name “Mas̲h̲riḳī”. He was the son of the scholar ʿAbd al-Ḥaḳḳ [ q.v.] al-Dihlawī, a well-known s̲h̲ayk̲h̲ of the Ḳādiriyya order. Nūr al-Ḥaḳḳ succeeded his father as a religious teacher and was appointed a judge at Agra under S̲h̲āh D̲j̲ahān. His death at Dihlī occurred in 1073/1662. In Zubdat al-tawārīk̲h̲ , Nūr al-Ḥaḳḳ enlarged the Tārīk̲h̲-…

, a dynasty which ruled in Persia as “sovereigns 907-1135/1501-1722, as fainéants 1142-8/1729-36, and thereafter, existed as pretenders to the throne up to 1186/1773. I. Dynastic, political and military history. The establishment of the Ṣafawid state in 907/1501 by S̲h̲āh Ismāʿīl I [ q.v.] (initially ruler of Ād̲h̲arbāyd̲j̲ān only) marks an important turning-point in Persian history. In the first place, the Ṣafawids restored Persian sovereignty over the whole of the area traditionally regarded as the heartlands of Persia for the first ti…

(p.). a Persian word, derived as an adjective from the common Iranian root nāman- , “name”. Already in Middle Persian the form nāmag can be ¶ found also as a substantive referring to an inscription, a letter or a book. In the orthography of Pahlavī, the word could be written either phonemically, as n’mk’, or by means of any of two heterographs: S̲H̲M-k’, which was based on the Semitic word for “name”, and MGLT’, i.e. the Aramaic m e gill e ta , “scroll” (cf. L. Koehler and W. Baumgartner, Lexicon in Veteris Testamenti libros , Leiden 1953, 1091). It occurs also in co…

, (or S̲h̲abustarī , according to modern Azeri writers) S̲h̲ayk̲h̲ Saʿd al-Dīn, Persian mystic and writer. He was born at S̲h̲abistar, a small town near the north-eastern shore of Lake Urmiya. The date of his birth is unknown, but would have to be fixed about 686/1287-8 if the report that he died at the age of 33 (mentioned in an inscription on a tombstone erected on his grave in the 19th century) is accepted. He is said to have led the life of a prominent religious scholar at Tabrīz. Travels to Egypt, Syria and the Ḥid̲j̲āz are mentioned in the introduction to the Saʿādat-nāma …

i.—Geography The geological background: The alignments of Iran’s principal topographie features, represented by the Kūhhā-yi Alburz and the Zagros Chain, are west to east and north-west to south-east, respectively. In broad context, the Alburz is a continuation of the European Alpine structures, while the Zagros chain has been linked through Cyprus with the Dinaric Alps (Fisher, 1956). The structure of the mountain rim of the country has been influenced strongly by tectonic movements which have n…

(p.), a word applied in Persian with a contemptuous connotation to “a knave, a rogue, a drunkard” or “a debauchee”; in the terminology of poets and mystics it acquired the positive meaning of “one whose exterior is liable to censure, but who at heart is sound” (Steingass, s.v., after the Burhān-i ḳāṭiʿ ). The etymology of rind is unclear. It is not an Arabic loanword, in spite of the existence of the broken plural runūd , a learned form used next to the regular Persian plural rindān . The abstract noun rindī denotes the characteristic behaviour of a person thus qualified. Mediaeval historians r…

, legendary ruler of Sīstān [ q.v.] and vassal of the Kayānids, the epic kings of Īrān, was, according to al-T̲h̲aʿālibī and Firdawsī, the son of Narīmān, the father of Zāl-Dastān and the grandfather of Rustam [ q.v.]. This pedigree is the outcome of a long development spanning the entire history of the Iranian epic. In the Avesta, Sāma is the name of a clan to which T̲h̲rīta, “the third man who pressed the Haoma”, belonged as well as his sons Urvāk̲h̲s̲h̲aya and Kərəsāspa (Yasna 9. 10). Kərəsāspa (Persian Kars̲h̲āsp or Gars̲h̲āsp)…

, Abu ’l-Ḳāsim Ḥasan Aḥmad, Persian poet at the G̲h̲aznawid court during the early 5th/11th century. The external information about his life is mosdy anecdotal. It is said that he was born at Balk̲h̲, became an orphan at an early age and in his youth earned a living as a merchant. A story, told in some sources, about a robbery during one of his travels was mistakingly associated with him (cf. Storey-de Blois, v/1, 234-5). His career as a poet began under the patronage of the Amīr Abu ’l-Muẓaffar Naṣr (d. 412/1021-2), the military governor ( sipahsālār ) of his brother ¶ Sultan Maḥmūd [ q.v.] in K̲h…

, “the Madman of Laylā”, or Mad̲j̲nūn Banī ʿĀmir, the name given to the hero of a romantic love story, the original form of which could date back as far as the second half of the 1st/7th Century. 1. In Arabic literature This imaginary character (acknowledged as such even by some Arab critics; see Ag̲h̲ānī , ed. Beirut, ii, 6, 11) has been furnished by the ruwāt with an ism and with a complete genealogy; Ḳays b. al-Mulawwaḥ b. Muzāḥim b. Ḳays b. ʿUdas b. Rabīʿa b. D̲j̲aʿda b. Kaʿb b. Rābīʿa b. ʿĀmir b. Ṣaʿṣaʿa, but according to the evidence, …

, Ḥakīm S̲h̲araf al-Dīn Ḥasan, Persian physician and poet of the Ṣafawid period. He was born in 956/1549 (Gulčīn-i Maʿānī) or 966/1558-9 (Ṣafā) at Iṣfahān. His nom-de-plume refers to the medical profession, which was a tradition of his family. He was also a student of speculative mysticism, but he achieved his greatest fame as a poet. His literary work consists of g̲h̲azals and ḳaṣīdas , written respectively in the style of Bābā Fig̲h̲ānī and K̲h̲āḳānī (cf. Rypka, 300), as well as poems in several other forms, including a series of mat̲h̲nawīs . His best known poem is the didactic mat̲h̲nawī …

b. Āḳā K̲h̲ān , Persian anthologist and poet, who is also known by his penname Ād̲h̲ar which he adopted after having used the names Wālih and Nak̲h̲at previously. He was descended from a prominent Turcoman family belonging to the Begdīlī tribe of Syria (Begdīlī-i S̲h̲āmlū) which had joined the Ḳi̊zi̊lbās̲h̲ movement [ q.v.] in the 9th/15th century. Afterwards, the family settled down in Iṣfahān. Many of his relatives served the later Ṣafawids and Nādir S̲h̲āh as administrators and diplomats. Luṭf ʿAlī Beg was born on Saturday 20 Rabīʿ II 1134/7 F…

is in the technical language of Persian and Turkish literature a set of five mat̲h̲nawī poems. The term is used, first of all, to designate the five epic poems of Niẓāmī [ q.v.] of Gand̲j̲a which were composed between ca. 570/1174-5 and 600/1203-4. The set contains one didactic poem Mak̲h̲zan al-asrār , in the metre sarīʿ-i maṭwiyy-i mawḳūf ; three romantic poems: Laylā u Mad̲j̲nūn in the metre hazad̲j̲-i musaddas-i maḳbūḍ-i maḥd̲h̲ūf , K̲h̲usraw u S̲h̲īrīn in the metre hazad̲j̲-i musaddas-i maḥd̲h̲ūf , and Haft Paykar in the metre k̲h̲afīf-i mak̲h̲būn-i maḳsūr ; and the Iskandarnāma …

, S̲h̲araf al-Dīn Ḥasan b. Muḥammad, Persian rhetorician and poet, who ¶ flourished in the middle of the 8th/14th century. Very little is known about his life and the few chronological indications that we possess are either imprecise or unreliable. Dawlats̲h̲āh states that he was the poet laureate ( malik al-s̲h̲uʿarāʾ [ q.v.]) of ʿIrāḳ during the reign of the Muẓaffarid S̲h̲āh Manṣūr (reigned 789-95/1387-93), but dedications in his two most important works prove that he attended the court of Sultan Abu ’l-Fatḥ Uways Bahādur or S̲h̲ayk̲h̲ Uways (757-76/1356-74) of the D̲j̲alāyirids [ q.…

, Sayyid (or Mīr) Muḥammad Ḥusayn , a modern Persian poet. He was born about 1905 at Tabrīz as the son of a lawyer, and belonging to a family of sayyid s in the village of K̲h̲us̲h̲gnāb. In his early work he used the pen name Bahd̲j̲at, which he later changed to S̲h̲ahriyār, a name chosen from the Dīwān of Ḥāfiẓ, who was his great model as a writer of g̲h̲azal s. He read medicine at the Dār al-Funūn in Tehran, but left his studies unfinished to become a government clerk in K̲h̲urāsān. After some time he returned to Tehran, where for many years…

(a.), poet. ¶ 1. In the Arab world. A. Pre-Islamic and Umayyad periods. Among those endowed with knowledge and with power in ancient Arabia stands the figure of the s̲h̲āʿir , whose role is often confused with that of the ʿarrāf ( s̲h̲aʿara and ʿarafa having the same semantic value: cf. I. Goldziher, Abhandlungen , i, 3 ff.) and of the kāhin [ q.v.]. They were credited with the same source of inspiration, the d̲j̲inns (Goldziher, Die Ǧinnen der Dichter , in ZDMG, xlv [1891], 685 ff.). However, the s̲h̲āʿir was, originally, the repository of magical rather than divinatory knowledge; …

, the principal hero of the Iranian epic, especially in the version of Firdawsī [ q.v.]. 1. In Iranian legend. Neither his name nor that of his father Zāl occur in the Avesta. In the Yas̲h̲t s, Kərəsāspa (in Persian, Kars̲h̲āsp or Gars̲h̲āsp) is the most important heroic figure. Marquait conjectured that originally “Rustam” was no more than an epithet of Kərəsāspa, which only by chance was not attested in the extant Avestan texts. The exploits later attributed to Rustam would be the result of a blend of the l…

(p.) or S̲h̲ahrās̲h̲ūb (“upsetting the town”), a genre of short love poems on young craftsmen, often related to the bazaars of specific towns. 1. In Persian In Persian literature, the genre is usually referred to under the latter name. E.J.W. Gibb’s contention that the genre was invented by the Turkish poet Mesīḥī [ q.v.] of Edirne ( HOP, ii, 232), was challenged already by E.G. Browne who, pointing to Persian specimens mentioned by the Ṣafawid anthologist Sām Mīrzā [ q.v.], concluded that “though they were probably written later than Masíḥí’s Turkish S̲h̲ahr-angíz …

(a.), anthology, selection of poetry. 1. In Arabic. Mediaeval tradition holds that the oldest anthology of Arabic poems is the small collection of celebrated pre-Islamic ḳaṣīda s variously known as “the seven long poems”, al-Muʿallaḳāt [ q.v.], al-Sumūṭ , etc. It is probably the oldest in conception. The early ʿAbbāsid period saw the compilation of the celebrated Mufaḍḍaliyyāt [ q.v.]. Al-Aṣmaʿī’s anthology of 92 ḳaṣīdas by 71 poets (44 of them D̲j̲āhilī), the Aṣmaʿiyyāt , received relatively little attention from mediaeval writers. A comment in the Fihrist ,…

, S̲h̲ams al-S̲h̲uʿarāʾ Kamāl al-Dīn , Persian poet of the early Ṣafawid period, born ca. 1500 in Kās̲h̲ān. According to the most reliable sources, he died in 996/1587-8; a ¶ less likely dating of his death, given by Abū Ṭālib Iṣfahānī in K̲h̲ulāṣat al-afkār (see Storey i/2, 878), is 1000/1591-2. For some time he was a draper ( bazzāz ) like his father, but he abandoned this trade for the more profitable career of a professional poet. His work was appreciated at the Ṣafawid court at Ḳazwīn. He seems to have continued, however, to l…