General Introduction to Persian Literature

J.T.P. Bruijn, J.T.P. Bruijn

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780857736505
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Literatura de Oriente Medio

Persian literature is the jewel in the crown of Persian culture. It has profoundly influenced the literatures of Ottoman Turkey, Muslim India and Turkic Central Asia and been a source of inspiration for Goethe, Emerson, Matthew Arnold and Jorge Luis Borges among others. Yet Persian literature has never received the attention it truly deserves."A History of Persian Literature" answers this need and offers a new, comprehensive and detailed history of its subject. This 18-volume, authoritative survey reflects the stature and significance of Persian literature as the single most important accomplishment of the Iranian experience. It includes extensive, revealing examples with contributions by prominent scholars who bring a fresh critical approach to bear on this important topic.The first volume offers an indispensable entree to Persian literature's long and rich history, examining themes and subjects that are common to many fields of Persian literary study. This invaluable introduction to the subject heralds a definitive and ground-breaking new series.

CHAPTER 1

CLASSICAL PERSIAN LITERATURE AS A TRADITION

J. T. P. DE BRUIJN

1. Preliminary Remarks

A literary tradition is much more than a group of texts that happen to be written in the same language. The term denotes a collective concept, a cultural phenomenon in its own right with important links to the context in which it manifests itself. Writers and poets who participate in a tradition of this kind create their works, either consciously or unconsciously, according to a set of artistic norms. These rules, governing matters of form as well as content, were laid down by preceding generations and are passed on to future generations as long as the tradition remains in force. The structure of literary conventions is safeguarded by certain standards of criticism that help to establish artistic values and by a canon of the most eminent representatives of the tradition.

Being a public matter, literary activities also are informed by the possibilities and constraints of the prevailing social and economic conditions. The extra-literary context not only affects the production and reception of literary texts, but also their distribution. Eventually, it determines the status of the writers, the poets and their art in society. As chronology is an essential element in the definition of a tradition, the historical perspective is to be considered as well. Just as historical changes affect all sectors of society, they also influence the position of the literary artist. The study of the intrinsic and the contextual conditions of a literary tradition in their proper diachronic perspective should be the fundamental objective of any history of literature.

In the present volume the outlines of Persian literature as a tradition are drawn in order to provide a frame of reference for the discussion of individual works and genres in the volumes to follow in this series. The first chapter briefly examines a few preliminary aspects mainly pertaining to the proper demarcation of our subject, and to some of its contextual features.

In common usage classical Persian literature refers to the literary tradition that emerged in the third Islamic century (9^th century CE) simultaneously with the renaissance of the Persian language as a literary medium. For more than a millennium it continued to exist as a living and extremely productive “tradition” (in the most appropriate sense of the term), which held unrivalled sway over all activities at the level of polite literature. Its normative strength was apparent also in the literatures of other Muslim nations who were not persophone, but were strongly influenced by the Persian literary tradition, in particular the Turks of Central Asia and Anatolia and the Muslim peoples of the Indian Subcontinent. Even non-Muslim denominations—notably the Jews and the Zoroastrians—faithfully followed the classical rules when they dealt in Persian poetry with subjects belonging to their own religious traditions. The hegemony of the normative system of classical Persian literature was broken only in the 20^th century, when a modern Persian literature emerged, a quite different tradition influenced strongly by Western models. The focus in this volume will be Persian literature in its classical form and as a written tradition. For a discussion of the general features of pre-Islamic and modern literatures as well as of forms of oral literature in the Iranian linguistic area the reader should turn to the volumes of this series that are specifically devoted to these subjects.

If the term “normative system” is a valid characterization, this implies that the Persian literary tradition is not just a construct of modern scholarship but that it was already an entity in the minds of its participants. There is a problem here, however: the concept of “literature” has no equivalent in the terminology used by traditional Persian scholars. The word adabiyyât, which denotes “literature” in modern Persian usage, is a neologism coined by Turkish modernists in the 19^th century and subsequently adopted by other languages of the world of Islam.¹ Traditionally, the notion of embellished speech was essentially linked to poetry, for which a proper appellation was currently used, and even when it could be applied to prose works, it was because the style of these texts had certain poetic qualities, for instance by the insertion of rhythmic and rhyming phrases (saj’) or of short poems. The Golestân (Rose garden) by Sa’di (d. 1292) is the most celebrated example of the poeticizing of the classical Persian prose style, which set a standard for the centuries that followed. The same emphasis on poetry is also noticeable in Persian literary scholarship.

The system so tenaciously adhered to until quite recently was not a creatio ex nihilo. The first Persian writers and poets were very conscious that they continued the Arabic literary tradition, which by the end of the 9^th century had already reached its mature growth, including sophisticated philological methods and authoritative works of literary criticism.² However, even if full credit is given to this Arabic legacy, it is still an astonishing fact that those elements in the Persian tradition that eventually became its most distinctive features were already present at a very early date. The fundamental system of literary conventions seems to have been established quite soon and to have acquired a firm grip on the actual writing of Persian poetry. It appears, for instance, that the prosodic rules followed by the first Persian poets were not very different from those employed by later generations. The convention of writing “responses” (javâbs) or “similitudes” (nazires), i.e., compositions emulating successful works by preceding authors, helped to provide the tradition with strong coherence and gave classical Persian literature its conservative outlook in which very little seems to have changed for more than a millennium.

If the classical tradition had been really so rigid and impervious to change as it appears from the robustness of its basic set of prosodic rules, the writing of its history would not be a very challenging project. However, when one takes a closer look at the actual production of literary works, their rich variety of forms and content soon becomes apparent. The question to be asked is not, therefore, whether or not significant variations can be found within the tradition, but how patterns of development can be discerned enabling the historian of literature to trace the general lines in the story of a tradition’s life. Several suggestions have been made for the periodization of Persian literature. Some were based on external factors such as the dynastic history of Persia—considering the undeniable fact that Persian literature has had close links with the courts during most of its history—or an underlying social and economic development to which changes on the level of literature were supposedly reducible.³

The most interesting, and undoubtedly the most successful, of these attempts at a classification of Persian literature is the theory of the three “styles” (sabks). This theory has the great advantage that it did not originate in the more or less abstract reflections of modern scholarship, but in the concerns of practicing poets who endeavored to come to terms with different tendencies within their own tradition. Although the available evidence is scarce, it likely emerged towards the end of the 19^th century in discussions of the best examples to be followed in poetry that were going on in Mashhad among a circle of poets and literati. The most prominent among them was Sabuhi, the poet laureate (malek al-sho’arâ) at the court of the Qajar governor of Khorasan and at the shrine of the Imam Ali al-Rezâ. These ideas were publicized especially through the writings of Sabuhi’s son, Mohammad-Taqi Bahâr (1886–1951), one of the founders of modern literary scholarship in Persia as well as an outstanding poet in the neo-classical style.⁴ The geographical terminology is a distinctive feature of this theory as a whole. It has its justification in the political and cultural history of Persia in as far as it indicates important shifts in the centers of power and patronage in Persian culture. The disadvantages are, first, that it fails to encompass all the historical developments that fall within a period; second, that its chronology is imprecise; and third, that it does not specify any literary characteristics of the period. For our present purpose, the theory of the three styles provides a convenient framework for a birds-eye view of the history of the classical tradition.

The earliest stage was, according to this theory, the period of the style of Khorasan (sabk-e Khorâsâni), which is also known as the style of Turkestan (sabk-e Torkestâni).⁵ It was thus named because the earliest courts where Persian poetry was written were those of semi-independent rulers in the eastern provinces of the Abbasid Caliphate: the Taherids of Nishapur, the Saffarids of Sistan and above all of the Samanids of Central-Asian Bukhara. Together the flowering of these emirates in the east fell between the middle of the 9^th and the end of the 10^th centuries. About the year 1000 the center of political gravity moved to the area of Ghazne, in present day eastern Afghanistan. Here the Ghaznavids, the first Turkish dynasty to come to power in the Persian lands, energetically continued the patronage of Persian poets and writers. They were also the first to bring the Persian literary tradition to India, to Lahore, the residence of the Ghaznavid governors of the Punjab. In Central Asia the Samanids were succeeded by the Turkish Qarakhanids who continued to support Persian court poetry. The end of this period is not easy to determine. It could be argued that it lasted until the downfall of the Ghaznavids and their successors, the Ghurids, in the second half of the 12^th century, but at that time Persian literature had already begun its extension to the western regions from which the next period derived its name.

An event of great historical significance had occurred in the middle of the 11^th century when the Saljuq Turks invaded Persia from Central Asia. As a result, the west and the east of Persia were reunified, not only politically but also culturally. About the same time the use of the Persian language in literature gradually started to gain terrain in the center, including Ray (at that time an important city, the ruins of which lie near Tehran, the present capital of Persia) and Isfahan, the Caspian provinces, and especially the northwestern province of Azerbaijan. In terms of the stylistic theory that we are discussing here this signified the development of a new literary style, “the style of Iraq” (sabk-e Erâqi), i.e., the style which developed in “Persian Iraq” (Erâq-e Ajam), the medieval appellation for what in ancient times was known as Media, or western Persia. If we accept the year 1100 as a rough dating of the first signs of stylistic change, the period of the style of Iraq spans over four centuries.

Geographically, the entire area where Persian was spoken became involved. The reputation of “the city of poets” which Shiraz in the southern province of Fârs gained, dates from the 13^th to 14^th centuries. Even places outside Persia, such as Baghdad and Anatolian Konya in the west as well as the Sultanate of Delhi in the east, were included in this stylistic period. Politically, it encompasses upheavals of great historical impact, of which the rise and disintegration of the Saljuq sultanate and its successor states, the Mongol conquest, the reign of the Timurids, and finally the coming into power of the Safavids were the most important. The religious landscape of Persia was also altered drastically, first by the expansion of Sufism and then, after 1500, by the forced establishment of Twelver Shi’ism as the state religion by the Safavids.

In the early decades of the 16^th century the Timurid prince Bâbor, who was well familiar with Persian literary tradition, fled from Central Asia to India, where he became the founder of the Mughal dynasty. One of the things Bâbor carried with him was the tradition of patronage by his ancestors, who had liberally favored both literature and the visual arts. For several centuries Persian literature had already been cultivated in the Subcontinent. It had flourished in particular during the period of the Sultans of Delhi, when the great Indo-Persian poet Amir Khosrow of Delhi (1253–1325) enjoyed their patronage. The establishment of a vast Muslim empire by the Mughals, which eventually encompassed the greater part of the Subcontinent, gave a new and strong impetus to Persianized culture in India. Islamic courts in many different regions grew into important centers where Persian was used and Persian lette...