Classical prose

In the classical tradition the concept of "literature" was almost synonymous with poetry. Prose was used for utilitarian purposes, particularly in scholarship, religion, and the affairs of government. In all these domains the Persian language was in competition with the more prestigious Arabic. In theology, science, and literary scholarship, Persian works were mostly popularized versions of more sophisticated works in Arabic, but this does not always mean that the former are of lesser interest. The Kīmiya-yi saʿādat (after 1096; The Alchemy of Happiness) by the theologian and mystic al-Ghazālī, for instance, is one such work: it is a condensed version of the author’s own work in Arabic on Islamic ethics, the Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn (The Revival of Religious Sciences). Written in a lively conversational Persian, Kīmiya-yi saʿādat offers a coherent overview of Muslim ethics in an accessible form. Much later, during the 17th century, Muḥammad Bāqir Majlisī wrote a series of books in Persian on the popular beliefs of Iranian Shiʿis; these books were also composed to parallel his learned works in Arabic.

Persian prose contains a treasure of narratives. In books belonging to the mirror for princes genre, for instance, the demonstration of proper political practice by means of anecdotes was usually more important than theoretical expositions. Their authors were mostly officials and courtiers, such as the great 11th-century statesman Niẓām al-Mulk, who wrote his Siyāsat-nāmeh (The Book of Government) for the Seljuq sultan, and ʿUnṣur al-Maʿālī Kay Kāʾūs, an 11th-century prince of a deposed dynasty serving the Ghaznavids, who wrote the Qābūs-nāmeh (“The Book of Qābūs”). The Chahār maqāleh (“Four Discourses”) by Niẓāmī ʿArūẕī focuses not on the ruler himself but on four important functionaries at court: the secretary, the poet, the doctor, and the astrologer. Fables could be equally useful in illustrating maxims of the ethics of kingship. A 12th-century Persian adaptation of the Kalīlah wa Dimnah by Naṣr Allāh Munshī as well as other texts based on frame stories and borrowed from India, such as the Sindbad-nāmeh (“Book of Sindbad”; see Seven Wise Masters) and the Bakhtiyār-nāmeh (“Book of Bakhtiyār”), represent a branch of the same genre. Another Persian prose genre is the chivalrous novel; Dārāb-nāmeh (“Book of Dārāb”) by Abū Ṭāhir Ṭarsūsī and Kitāb-i Samak-i ʿAyyār (“Book of Samak the Knight-Errant”) by Farāmurz Khudādād ibn ʿAbd Allāh Kātib al-Arrajānī were written in the 12th century in a simple style and served as a continuation of the heroic epic on a more popular level.

Most writers of these works were members of the state bureaucracy. From the 12th century onward, their flowery style became a model of prestigious Persian prose, not only in official compositions but also in other genres. This manner of writing was characterized by an excessive use of learned Arabic words and redundant phrases, and it was given a poetic tone by the introduction of rhymed prose (sajʿ) and the insertion of lines of verse. This stilted style was noticeable especially in historiography, which produced an abundance of works beginning in the Mongol period (see below The Mongol and Timurid period). There is a marked difference between the bombastic style of these later historians and the direct but elegant prose of Bayhaqī, an 11th-century official of the Ghaznavids, whose work became a model even to modern Persian writers.

The mystics of Persia left a particularly rich heritage of prose writings that is not less important than their achievements in poetry. Moreover, they created works across a great variety of prose genres, several of which were unknown in Arabic literature. These include volumes of letters to adepts, collections of conversations by important sheikhs, mystical commentaries on the Qurʾān, and treatises on Sufi topics. Especially remarkable are works on the theory of love composed in an epigrammatic style. The oldest and most celebrated example is the 12th-century Sawāniḥ ("Flashes [of the Mind]"), an essay on the psychology of mystical and secular love by Aḥmad al-Ghazālī (a brother of the theologian al-Ghazālī), whose subtle, epigrammatical style was imitated in the 15th century by Jāmī in his Lawaʾiḥ ("Flashes [of Light]"), a treatise on Sufism. Suhrawardī, a highly original 12th-century thinker in the traditions of both Aristotelian philosophy and Islamic mysticism, wrote a number of short allegorical texts in Persian prose. Many Sufi hagiographies describe either the life of a single mystical master or, as the collections assembled by ʿAṭṭār (in Tadhkirat al-awliyāʾ [“Memoirs of the Saints”]) and Jāmī (in Nafaḥāt al-uns [“Breezes of Intimacy”]) do, the tradition of Sufism as a whole.

A very successful form of Persian prose, the tadhkirah, was an amalgam of biography and anthology. The oldest work of this kind still extant is ʿAwfī’s 13th-century Lubāb al-albāb (“The Quintessence of the Hearts”). In the late 15th century Dawlatshāh composed his Tadhkirat al-shuʿarāʾ ("Memoirs of the Poets"), from which title was derived the appellation for this genre of poetical biography. It flourished until the 19th century in all countries where Persian letters were cultivated. The tadhkirahs constitute a rich, though not always reliable, source of knowledge about the lives of the Persian poets.

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After the emergence of Persian literature, the most important works on literary theory continued to be written in Arabic, though not seldom the authors were Iranians. The influence of Arabic terminology, ideas, and descriptive conventions remained very strong until the 20th century. The most comprehensive textbook of Persian poetics was composed by Shams-i Qays (Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn Qays Rāzī) in the 1220s.

The Mongol and Timurid period

About 1220 the Mongols, led by Chinggis Khan, devastated Iran, especially in the east, where they destroyed several cities. Thirty years later a Mongol state was established in Iran by Chinggis Khan’s grandson Hülegü. Before the end of the 13th century, the Il-Khans, as the new rulers were called (see Il-Khanid dynasty), had become Muslims and had assimilated Persian civilization, mainly as a result of their officials, most of whom were Iranians. Tabrīz, the capital of the Mongols, became a cultural centre where old traditions were safeguarded but innovations were also attempted. An important development during this period was the opening of contacts with China, which had also been incorporated into the Mongol empire. Chinese artists came to Tabrīz and contributed significantly to the development of miniature painting as a major artistic tradition in Iran. The works most frequently illustrated were Ferdowsī’s Shāh-nāmeh and Neẓāmī’s Khamseh.

At the same time, the Mongols’ Iranian officials developed Persian historiography. An important achievement was the Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh ("The Collection of Chronicles"), written by Rashīd al-Dīn, who became a vizier of the Il-Khans in 1298. This is a general history not only of Islam but also of other civilizations known to the author.

Saʿdī and Ḥāfeẓ

The rule of the Mongols in Iran came to an end in 1335. Timur, in a series of destructive campaigns, attempted later in the 14th century to restore their empire. His efforts produced a unified state that did not last long, and in the 15th century political power in the region again became fragmented. The descendants of Timur, known as the Timurids, resided mainly in Samarkand (now in Uzbekistan) and Herāt (now in Afghanistan) and from there exerted control over Iran’s eastern regions, while other rulers reigned over the remaining parts of Iran. This situation favoured the flowering of literature and the arts. One of the provincial cities in Iran that became important as a cultural centre was Shīrāz in the southern province of Fārs. Writers, poets, and painters were able to find shelter with the local dynasties there; these dynasties had, in fact, been offering protection since the Mongol raids of the 13th century.

About 1258, the year Hülegü’s hordes sacked Baghdad and murdered the last Abbasid caliph, the poet Saʿdī returned to his native Shīrāz after a series of long journeys through the Middle East. As a present to the city, he claimed, he brought with him the masnawi Būstān (The Orchard), the most brilliant specimen of Persian didactic poetry. Directly afterward he wrote, in prose, the Gulistān (The Rose Garden), which treated the same moralistic themes as in The Orchard but in a more playful manner. With the latter work Saʿdī won his reputation as one of the greatest Persian writers not only in the Middle East but also in Europe, where the The Rose Garden was introduced as early as the 17th century. To Iranians he is moreover a master of the ghazal; indeed, it is often claimed that he established the classical form of the Persian ghazal. Numerous lines from his poetry and the The Rose Garden have become proverbs in Persian. One of the first to follow Saʿdī’s lyrical style was Amīr Khosrow, through whom Persian poetry became established on the Indian subcontinent.

With the 14th-century poet Ḥāfeẓ, who wrote hardly any other poems than ghazals, the development of this genre reached its zenith. Although he was undoubtedly dependent on the work of older poets, Ḥāfeẓ succeeded in combining the elements handed down to him by tradition in a strikingly new manner. The most remarkable features of his ghazals are the kaleidoscopic shifts of imagery and motives within a single poem. It often seems as if the individual lines stand largely on their own, and the internal unity of the ghazals and their themes are difficult to determine. This has given rise to many variant readings, including different line ordering, that exist even in the oldest manuscripts of his divan. Modern Western critics have tried to identify rules that govern the internal coherence of a typical ghazal by Ḥāfeẓ.

Another question often raised is whether Ḥāfeẓ’s poems speak of mystical or of earthly love. In the past the former position was taken by most commentators in the Middle East, although modern literary scholars in Iran have pointed to Ḥāfeẓ’s undeniable ties with the court of Shīrāz and have emphasized the secular aspects of his art. Both interpretative possibilities have their supporters among Western critics. Ḥāfeẓ’s frequent references to behaviour that includes indulgence in wine drinking and flirtation with young cupbearers are sometimes taken as a direct reflection of his participation in the conviviality of the court of Shīrāz. There is also a streak of sharp sarcasm in his poetry that is aimed at the representatives of respectable religious life; not only are pious scholars, Islamic judges, preachers, and the guardians of public morality his targets, but so too are the ascetic Sufis. The persona of the antinomian qalandar, who figured two centuries earlier in the ghazals of Sanāʾī, appears again in the poems of Ḥāfeẓ, usually under the appellation of rind. The poet’s own attitudes are subsumed by the abstract term rindī (“vagabondry”); some have ascribed to Ḥāfeẓ the stance of a rebel to the social order. However, because antinomianism was also a prominent strain in medieval Persian mysticism, an alternative reading of these motives—as the expression of a total rejection of worldly values—cannot be excluded.

The Safavids and the introduction of Shiʿism

About 1500 the history of Iran took a new turn that had great consequences both politically and culturally. It was then that the Safavids were able to found a unified state in Iran. They also introduced the beliefs of the Twelver (Ithnā ʿAsharī) sect of Shiʿi Islam as a national religion that replaced the predominantly Sunni Islam to which most Iranians had adhered since the time of the Arab conquest. Initially, the Safavid shahs continued the tradition of artistic patronage established by previous dynasties. Architecture and miniature painting flourished as never before. In literature the conventions of court poetry lived on, but no great works were produced.

The only poet whose name could be mentioned next to the older masters is Ṣāʾib of Tabrīz, who specialized in writing ghazals during the 17th century. At the beginning of his career, Ṣāʾib had spent some years at Indian courts. By the time he had returned to Iran and settled in Eṣfahān, his poetry showed the influence of new tendencies referred to as the “Indian style.” The most important of this style’s features was a much freer use of imagery: poets such as Ṣāʾib disregarded the rule of “harmony of images” that had always been kept in Persian poetry, a rule that decreed that the poet should never bring together images belonging to incompatible spheres and that, within the context of one or more lines, the poet should use only those images accepted as harmonious by tradition. Actually, this style had first appeared in Iran about the end of the 15th century, the ghazal poet Bābā Fighānī being often mentioned as an early exemplar, but it became much more pronounced in Persian poetry written in India. From the late 16th century onward many poets left Iran, disappointed by the lack of patronage under the Safavids, to try their fortune at the Indian courts. A largely independent Indo-Persian tradition came into being that survived into modern times. The Indian style in its most extreme form is exemplified by the poetry of Bīdil, but even later the Indo-Persian tradition produced such major 19th- and 20th-century figures as Mīrzā Asadullāh Khān Ghālib and Sir Muḥammad Iqbāl.

In Iran a reaction to the loosening of stylistic norms came about in the later half of the 18th century. Standards of good poetry were sought in the works of the earliest poets who had practiced the unadulterated style of Khorāsān. A neoclassical ideal of poetry continued to dominate Persian literature until the 20th century.

After the introduction of Shiʿism in Iran under the Safavids, writers and poets turned their attention increasingly to Shiʿi topics. The central subject was the martyrdom of the 12 imams—the descendants of the Prophet Muhammad and the leaders of the Twelver Shiʿi community after the Prophet’s death—and in particular the death of the third imam, al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī, who in 680 was killed at the Battle of Karbala in what is today Iraq. This event was evoked in a poem of 12 stanzas written during the 16th century by Muḥtasham. For generations this poem has been used in commemorations of Ḥusayn’s death. The ritual function, so important to Shiʿi literature, gave birth to the only form of drama known in the Persian classical tradition: the taʿziyyah, a word that originally meant “consolation” and was applied to various forms of religious mourning. Since the 19th century the word taʿziyyah has referred in particular to passion plays performed by lay actors enacting the sufferings of the 12 Shiʿi imams. The plays mainly centre on the fate of the holy martyrs at the Battle of Karbalāʾ, which was of fundamental significance to the concept of Shiʿi martyrdom. The performance of taʿziyyahs reached its height in the period of the Qājār dynasty (1796–1925), but the plays experienced a revival at the turn of the 21st century.