BABA TAHIR ORYAN OF HAMADAN

Biography

Baba Tahir is known as one of the most revered and respectable early poets in Iranian literature. Most of his life is clouded in mystery. He was born and lived in Hamadan,[5] the capital city of the Hamedan Province in Iran. He was known by the name of Baba Taher-e Oryan (The Naked), which suggests that he may have been a wandering dervish. Legend tells that the poet, an illiterate woodcutter, attended lectures at a religious school, where he was not welcomed by his fellow-students. The dates of his birth and death are unknown. One source indicates that he died in 1019. If this is accurate, it would make Baba Tahir a contemporary of Ferdowsi and Pour Sina (Avicenna) and an immediate precursor of Omar Khayyam. Another source reports that he lived between 1000 and 1055, which is most unlikely. Reliable research notes speculate that Baba Tahir lived for seventy-five years. Rahat al-sodur of Ravandi (completed 603/1206), describes a meeting between Baba Tahir, and the Saljuq conqueror Togrel (pp. 98–99). According to L. P. Elwell-Sutton: He could be described as the first great poet of Sufi love in Persian literature. In the last two decades his do-baytis have often been put to music.

Khajoo Kermani

Khajoo Kermani

khajoo kermani (Khwaju Kermani) was a famous Persian poet and Sufi mystic born in Kerman in 1290. He was associated with the Persian sufi master Sheykh Abu Esshagh Kazeruni, the founder of the Morshediyyeh order. He is also know as Nakhlband.tamp in shiraz

Abdul Rahman Jami

Abdul Rahman Jami

Nur ad-Din Abd ar-Rahman Jami (Persian: نورالدین عبدالرحمن جامی) (August 18, 1414 – November 19, 1492) was one of the greatest Persian poets in the 15th century and one of the last great Sufi poets.

Biography

Jami was born in a village near Jam, then Khorasan, now located in Ghor Province of Afghanistan, but a few years after his birth, his family migrated to the cultural city of Herat where he was able to study Peripateticism, mathematics, Arabic literature, natural sciences, and Islamic philosophy at the Nizamiyyah University of Herat.

Roudaki

Roudaki or his full name is Abdollah Jafar Ibn Mohammad the founder of Perso-Tajik literature. Roudaki was born in 858 CE in the Pandj-Rodak village near Pandjikent, a settlement between Samarkand and Bokhara (in Transoxiana, central Asia). From early childhood, he began writing verses, was fond of playing the lute (chang in Persian), and had a beautiful voice. He was one of the first poets to use the newly devised Persian alphabet, a transcription of the Pahlavi language using Arabic letters. 

Hakim Abol Qasem Ferdowsi Tousi

Ferdowsi was born in Khorasan in a village near Tous, in 935 CE His great epic The Shahnameh (The Epic of Kings), to which he devoted most of his adult life, was originally composed for the Samanid princes of Khorasan, who were the chief instigators of the revival of Persian cultural traditions after the Arab conquest of the seventh century. During Ferdowsi's lifetime this dynasty was conquered by the Ghaznavid Turks, and there are various stories in medieval texts describing the lack of interest shown by the new ruler of Khorasan, Mahmoud of Ghaznavi, in Ferdowsi and his lifework. Ferdowsi is said to have died around 1020 CE in poverty and embittered by royal neglect, though confident of his and his poem's ultimate fame. 

Omar Khayyam

Omar Khayyam lived between 1044 and 1123 CE and his full name was Ghiyath al-Din Abul Fateh Omar Ibn Ibrahim Khayyam. Omar Khayyam was an outstanding mathematician and astronomer. He was also well known as a poet, philosopher, and physician. In the "History of Western Philosophy", Bertrand Russell remarks that Omar Khayyam was the only man known to him who was both a poet and a mathematician. Omar Khayyam reformed the solar calendar in 1079 CE. His work on Algebra was highly valued throughout Europe in the Middle Ages.Apart from being a scientist, Khayyam was also a well-known poet. In this capacity, he has become more popularly known in the Western world since 1839, when Edward Fitzgerald published an English translation of his 'Rubaiyat' (quatrains). This has since become one of the most popular classics of world literature. It should be appreciated that it is practically impossible to exactly translate any literary work into another language, what to talk of poetry, especially when it involves mystical and philosophical messages of deep complexity. Despite this, the popularity of the translation of Rubaiyat would indicate the wealth of his rich thought. 

Saadi Shirazi, Sheikh Mosleh al-Din

Saadi Shirazi, Sheikh Mosleh al-Din

Saadi was born in Shiraz around 1200. He died in Shiraz around 1292. He lost his father in early childhood. With the help of his uncle, Saadi completed his early education in Shiraz. Later he was sent to study in Baghdad at the renowned Nezamiyeh College, where he acquired the traditional learning of Islam. 

The unsettled conditions following the Mongol invasion of Persia led him to wander abroad through Anatolia, Syria, Egypt, and Iraq. He also refers in his work to travels in India and Central Asia.

Hafez Shirazi, Khajeh Shamseddin Mohammad

Hafez Shirazi, Khajeh Shamseddin Mohammad

(Hafezieh (the tomb of Hafez

Khajeh Shamseddin Mohammad Hafez Shirazi was born 1319 CE in Shiraz in South-Central Iran. 

In his childhood he had memorized the Koran by listening to his father's recitations of it, therefore he gained the title of Hafez (a title given to those who had memorized the Koran by heart. It is claimed that Hafez had done this in fourteen different ways). He also had memorized many of the works of his hero, Saadi, as wells as Attar, Rumi and Nizami. 

A Brief History of Persian Literature

The Persian Language

The Old Persian of the Achaemenian Empire, preserved in a number of cuneiform inscriptions, was an Indo-European tongue with close affinities with Sanskrit and Avestan (the language of the Zoroastrian sacred texts). After the fall of the Achaemenians the ancient tongue developed, in the province of Pars, into Middle Persian or Pahlavi (a name derived from Parthavi - that is, Parthian). Pahlavi was used throughout the Sassanian period, though little now remains of what must once have been a considerable literature. About a hundred Pahlavi texts survive, mostly on religion and all in prose. Pahlavi collections of romances, however, provided much of the material for Ferdowsi's Shahnameh.