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, 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 …

, Mad̲j̲d al-Dīn Abu ’l-Ḥasan , a Persian poet of the second half of the 4th/10th century. In some later sources his kunya is given as Abū Isḥāḳ, but the form given above can be found already in an early source like the Čahār makāla . The Dumyat al-ḳaṣr by al-Bāk̲h̲arzī contains a reference to the “solitary ascetic” ( al-mud̲j̲tahid al-muḳīm bi-nafsihi ) Abu ’l-Ḥasan ʿAlī b. Muḥammad al-Kisāʾī of Marw who might very well be identical with this poet (cf. A. Ates, giriş to his edition of Kitāb Tarcumān al-balāġa , 97 f.). The pen name Kisāʾī would, according to ʿAw…

(p.), the Indian style, is the third term of a classification of Persian literature into three stylistic periods. The other terms, sabk-i Ḵh̲urāsānī (initially also called sabk-i Turkistānī ) and sabk-i ʿIrāḳī , refer respectively to the eastern and the western parts of mediaeval Persia. The assumption underlying this geographical terminology is that the shifts of the centre of literary activity from one area to another, which took place repeatedly since the 4th/10th century, were paralleled by a stylisti…

(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…

, 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…

, Mad̲j̲dūd b. Ādam al-G̲h̲aznawī, Persian poet. In early sources already the kunya Abu ’l-Mad̲j̲d is sometimes added to his name. As a pen name he used Sanāʾī, only rarely Mad̲j̲dūd or Mad̲j̲dūd Sanaʾī. The former name could have been derived from Sanāʾ al-Milla, one of the laḳabs of the G̲h̲aznawid sultan Masʿūd III, but the poet’s actual relationship to this ruler is unclear, because no panegyrics directly addressed to him by Sanāʾī have been preserved. As a matter of fact, no reliable biographical data outside the p…

(a.), poetry. 1. In Arabic. (a) The pre-modern period. It is the supreme ornament of Arab culture and its most authentically representative form of discourse. The ideas articulated by poetry and the emotional resonances which it conveys earn it, even in the present day, where numerous new literary forms are in competition with it, the approval of scholars and the populace alike. Despite the phonetic resemblance, s̲h̲iʿr is totally unconnected with the Hebrew s̲h̲īr , the ʿayn is a “hard” consonant which persists in the roots common to the two langu…

, Abu ’l-Ḥasan ʿAlī b. Aḥmad , Persian mystic who died on the 10th Muḥarram 425/5th December 1033 at the age of 73. The nisba refers to the village of K̲h̲araḳān situated in the mountains to the north of Bisṭām on the road to Astarābād (modern Gurgān). There are several variants for the vocalisation of this place-name even in the early sources for the life of this mystic. This confusion may very well be the result of the existence of other place names with the same consonant outline, such as K̲h̲a…

(A.), a term in rhetoric, means "trope" and, more generally, the use of a word ¶ deviating from its original meaning and use, its opposite being ḥaḳīḳa ("veritative expression"). In Arabic literature. The different modes of expression labelled as mad̲j̲āz by the Arabic theorists were divided into twelve categories by Fak̲h̲r al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606/1210) without, however, following a consistent system of criteria (cf. al-Suyūṭī, Muzhir , ed. Cairo 1282, i, 171). A more refined and detailed version of this classifying system was put forward by al-Suyūṭī (d. 911/1505) ( Itḳān …