Bilawhar wa Buyūdhasf /
:
Bilawhar and Būdhāsaf are the main characters of an ancient Arabic work called Bilawhar wa-Būdhāsaf , a text whose core narrative derived from the biography of Gautama Buddha, the founder of Buddhism. The original Sanskrit text on which it was based was translated into Middle Persian and from there into Arabic, besides Old Turkish and New Persian. It is from this lost ancient Arabic translation that later versions, adaptations or summaries derive, whether in Arabic, Persian, Georgian, Hebrew, or Greek. The Persian work published in this volume is Niẓām Tabrīzī's (fl. late 8th/14th cent.) summary of an anonymous Persian translation of an equally anonymous Arabic commentary on Bilawhar wa-Būdhasaf , both lost. As such, it provides new material for further study into the history of transmission of this text, both from a philological point of view and as a complex narrative issuing from a progressive intermixture of elements from different times and cultures.
:
1 online resource. :
9789004402966
9789646781702
Dīwān-i Hātif-i Iṣfahānī /
:
Persian poetry of the pre-modern era is divided into three successive styles, each belonging to a different period: Khurāsānī, ʿIrāqī and Hindī. The Hindī style is called such because in Safavid times, during which it developed, poets no longer enjoyed the shah's patronage so that many of them went to India, where Persian poetry had flourished since Ghaznavid times (11th-12th century CE). The Hindī style is often regarded as a lesser style, but has the merit of having put a halt to the decline that Persian poetry was suffering from at the time and also, by its accessible language and subject matter, of having brought poetry within reach of the ordinary man. The poetry of Hātif Iṣfahānī (d. 1198/1783) published here was written in the latter half of the 12th/18th century, at the beginning of the neo-classical period of return ( bāzgasht ) to the poetical styles of the pre-Safavid era.
:
1 online resource. :
9789004407244
9786002031167
Rāhnamā-yi dastnivishthā-yi Mānavi-yi Tūrfān (ravish shināsi-yi vīrāyish va bāz sāzī) /
:
After its foundation by Mani in the third century CE, Manicheism spread quickly from Iran through the ancient world, from North Africa to Europe and from Central Asia to China. Mani wrote seven works, six in Syriac and one in Middle Persian. The spread of Manicheism led to the emergence of Manichean writings in a number of other languages, and also of texts in criticism or description of this religion by non-Manichean authors in some of these same languages, among them Greek, Latin, Coptic, Arabic, Soghdian, and Chinese. From among the archeological findings involving Manichean texts, one of the most exciting ones was the discovery, in the early nineteen hundreds, of many Manichean fragments in Turfan, in Xinjiang province, China. These are in Middle Persian, Parthian, Soghdian and Manichean New Persian, besides material in Uygur, Bactrian and Kuchean. The present work is a Persian manual for the interpretation, reconstruction and edition of these Turfan texts.
:
1 online resource. :
9789004408074
9786002031372
Iskandar-nāma, bakhsh-i Khatā /
:
The Persian Iskandar-nāma or Alexander romance is a collection of mostly legendary stories about Alexander the Great, whose core narrative goes back to a Greek account of his life and accomplishments, written between the third century BCE and the first century CE. In the Persian tradition, the work distinguishes itself from its Greek model in that Alexander is described as half-Persian and half-Greek, and also in that he is often identified with the prophet Dhu ʼl-Qarnayn mentioned in the Qurʾān, besides the introduction of all manner of local motifs and elements. There exist various versions of this romance in Persian, both in poetry and in prose, the oldest ones dating from the 4th/11th (Firdawsī, Shāh-nāma ) and 6th/12th (Ṭarsūsī, Dārāb-nāma ) centuries, respectively. The present work is one of seven chapters of a popular prose version in story-teller fashion dating from the Safavid era in which earlier, traditional themes are often overshadowed by elements introduced for entertainment.
:
1 online resource. :
9789004404717
9789648700121
Sindbādnāma /
:
To most people Sindbad is the iconic hero of a collection of medieval tales about the adventurous travels of a sailor named Sindbad, known from the Arabian Nights . Composed of seven stories, the collection is all about the importance of personal initiative, courage, and perseverance to overcome potentially disastrous situations and always come out on top. But apart from Sindbad the sailor, there is another collection of stories around another Sindbad, less known to the modern western reader. This collection turns around a young prince who is exonerated from the false accusation of plotting against his father, the king, thanks to the wisdom and foresight of his tutor, a sage named Sindbad. The stories go back to a Middle Persian archetype, which was-besides Abān Lāḥiqī's (d. ca. 200/815) Arabic version-rendered into New Persian several times. From among these, Ẓahīrī Samarqandī's (6th/12th cent.) adaptation, here edited anew, is the only one to have survived.
:
1 online resource. :
9789004402973
9789646781726
Badāyiʿ-i mulaḥ : Nawhā-yi namakīn /
:
In the history of Arabic literature, the term adab ('custom', 'norm of conduct') applies typically to works providing a particular kind of moral and intellectual education. Aimed at a specific urban class whose values they reflected, these works offered a useful stock of relevant quotations to be used in social discourse. Among the adab works, the poetic anthology was extremely popular. These anthologies could take on different forms, depending on whether they were organised around a set of themes, a collection of motifs, a series of comparisons, a selection of geographical places, and so on. The poetic anthology published in the present volume was written in Khwārazm in 595/1199. As the title ' Marvels of Witticism ' suggests, its author, the linguist Qāsim b. al-Ḥusayn al-Khwārazmī (d. 617/1220), wanted to highlight the beauty of the repartee in different thematic contexts. The Persian translation accompanying the text was probably made by someone other than al-Khwārazmī himself.
:
1 online resource. :
9789004402768
9789646781603
The Eight Books : A Complete English Translation /
:
The Eight Books: A Complete English Translation is the first complete translation of the collected poems of Sohrab Sepehri (1928-1980), a major Iranian modernist poet and painter and yet under-translated into English. The introduction takes up Sepehri's famously difficult if languidly beautiful style to explain it as a series of appropriations of global modernisms in poetry and painting. It offers close readings of how Sepehri's modernism follows and breaks with the jagged rhythms of Nima Yushij (d.1960), Iran's inaugural modernist poet. In keeping with this modernist framing, the translations replicate Sepehri's rhymes where possible, his fluctuations between formal and colloquial registers, his syntactic distortions, and his embeddings of governmental and other jargons. It also includes Sepehri's autobiography.
:
1 online resource :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004472389
9789004472372
Jangnāma-yi Kishm wa Jarūnnāma /
:
For over a hundred years, between 1507 and 1622, the island of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf was in the hands of the Portuguese. It was only under Shāh ʿAbbās I that the Safavids were able to recapture Hormuz and the neighbouring island of Qishm, under the leadership of general Imām Qulī Khān and with the unexpected help of some forces of the British East India Company that happened to be in the area at the time. The two epic poems from the 11th/17th century published in this volume, one by an otherwise unknown 'Qadrī' and the other by an anonymous author, deal with the recapture of Qishm and Hormuz under Imām Qulī Khān. While not of high literary quality, the poems show some interesting local and historical features, especially the longer one on Hormuz whose author had a great admiration of Imām Qulī Khān, whom he appears to have known personally.
:
1 online resource. :
9789004404663
9789648700046
Dīwān-i ashʿār-i Fahmī Astarābādī /
:
This is a collection of poems, mostly ghazals, by the otherwise little-known 10th/16th century poet Fahmī Astarābādī. All that the available sources tell us about him is that he was talented and intelligent, that (as a young man?) he went to India, that he earned a living in business, and that he died in Delhi. Thanks to the research of the editor of his divan, we now know somewhat more. First, that Fahmī spent a certain time in the entourage of Rustam Rūzafzūn (d. 917/1511), ruler of Mazandaran and that he also wrote poetry in praise of some of the other members of that family; that he lived in Yazd for two years and lost his fortune there, returning broke to Mazandaran; that he travelled to Najaf, Mecca and Mashhad; and that he was in India when Sultan Bābur died in 937/1530. Alive in 948/1541, is not known when or where he passed away.
:
Poems. :
1 online resource. :
9789004405608
9789648700930
Rubāʿiyyāt-i Ḥakīm Khayyām /
:
The rubāʿī or quatrain is a short Persian poem in a special metre with a rhyme suitable to its form. Its use is not bound to any specific field, there being philosophical, satirical, romantic, lyrical and other types of quatrain. In the past, it was believed that the rubāʿī was a special form of the hazaj metre of Arabic poetry. Meanwhile, it has been established that it is in fact Iranian, its origin being the pre-Islamic tarānah or song for feasting and wine. In the West the quatrain was rendered immortal through the work of ʿUmar al-Khayyām (d. ca. 517/1123). A native of Nishapur, he was a respected mathematician and astronomer, as well as a recognized expert in poetry. Many of the quatrains ascribed to him are, however, spurious. This volume contains a reprint of Yār Aḥmad Rashīdī's selection (dated 867/1460), first published in 1953, followed by two other works in Persian, also by Khayyām.
:
Includes facsimile text originally published in Istanbul, 1953. :
1 online resource. :
9789004404885
9789648700374
Mathnāwi-yi Shīrīn u Farhād /
:
In the history of Persian literature, one finds quite a number of works by famous authors which later served as a model for similar works by other writers. By way of example one could mention Firdawsī's (d. 411/1020) Shāh-nāma and Niẓāmī's (d. 608/1209) Iskandar-nāma , Saʿdī's (d. 691/1291-92) Gulistān and Jāmī's (d. 898/1492) Bahāristān , or Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār's (d. 618/1221) Manṭiq al-ṭayr and Mīr ʿAlī Shīr Navāʾī's (d. 906/1501) Lisān al-ṭayr . In the case of the mathnawī contained in the present volume, it was Niẓāmī's Khusraw u Shīrīn which served as the model for Shīrīn u Farhād , a romantic epos by the otherwise unknown 9th/15th-century poet Salīmī Jarūnī. A native of Hormuz (formerly Jarūn), he dedicated his poem in 880/1475 to the local sultan of his days, Salgharshāh. Its language is unpretentious and the native ambiance is sometimes palpable. Its heros are pure of heart, and a mystical thread runs throughout the poem.
:
1 online resource. :
9789004402805
9789646781634
Dīwān-i Ishrāq /
:
In early Islamic philosophy, poetry was regarded as a means to transmit the eternal truths of philosophy to the masses and to move them to virtuous conduct by the use of poetical syllogisms. We find this theory for the first time in the works of Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī (d. 339/950). In another application, poetry was used as a didactic tool in the philosophical curriculum, like Avicenna's (d. 428/1037) Urjūza fi ʼl-manṭiq or, much later, Mullā Hādī Sabzavārī's (d. 1289/1873) Manẓūma on logic and philosophy. Finally, there are the many poems which, while philosophical in spirit, were not written to be learned by heart by others but rather from personal motives. Here we can mention some of the Persian poetry ascribed to Avicenna or the philosophical poetry of Nāṣir Khusraw (d. 481/1088). The poems in this collection by Mīr Dāmād (d. 1040/1631), a prominent member of the Isfahan School in philosophy, belong to this latter category.
:
Poems :
1 online resource. :
9789004404762
9789648700190
Sām-nāma /
:
In Persian literary history, Firdawsī's (d. 411/1020) Shāh-nāma , the famous masnavi composed in celebration of the history of the kings and dynasties of Persia, is the archetypal epic poem. After the Shāh-nāma , many other epic poems saw the light, among them Asadī Ṭūsī's Garshāsp-nāma (dated 458/1066) and Īrānshāh b. Abi ʼl-Khayr's Bahman-nāma (dated 501/1107-08), but also Shīʿī adaptations celebrating the wondrous exploits of ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib and the beginnings of Shīʿism, such as Rabīʿ's ʿAlī-nāma (dated 482/1089) or Ibn Ḥusām's Khawarān-nāma (completed in 830/1427). The present masnavi is an example of an epic poem in the form of a romance, turning around the love of Sām, the grandfather of Rustam, for the daughter of the emperor of China. Previously ascribed to the 8th/14th-century poet Khwāju-yi Kirmānī, it has now been established that it is a product of later Persian folklore, blending parts of Kirmānī's Humāy u Humāyūn with elements from other tales and romances.
:
1 online resource. :
9789004406247
9786002030498
ʿAlī-nāma : Manẓūma-ī kuhan (facsimile) /
:
Until the discovery of the Persian ʿAlī-nāma , Ibn Ḥusām's Khawarān-nāma (completed in 830/1427) was believed to be the oldest Persian epic poem involving the often wondrous exploits of ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib and the beginnings of Shīʿism. The Khawarān-nāma takes its inspiration from Firdawsī's Shāh-nāma (completed in 400/1010), but then adapted to fit the Shīʿī theme, with ʿAlī and his companions often taking the place of Rustam and other heroes. With this facsimile edition of the ʿAlī-nāma we now have access to a much older poem on this subject. Composed by someone using the alias of Rabīʿ, it was completed in 482/1089 in Khurāsān, most probably in or near the town of Sabzawār, just seventy years after the completion of Firdawsī's Shāh-nāma . The text is important because long before others, it acknowledges the heroes of the Shāh-nāma , some of whom were actually written into the script.
:
1 online resource. :
9789004405127
9789648700732
Farhang-i Jāmiʿ al-lughāt : Farhang-i manẓūm /
:
The history of Arabic and Persian lexicography is long and extremely varied. But no matter what dictionary one is looking at, it is always organized in a certain way and always has a certain level of detail. Thus, some of the early Arabic dictionaries centered around one or more particular themes, such as insects or weapons. Other dictionaries, and this the majority, brought together any word material, irrespective of subject or theme. Besides, some dictionaries offered a lot of material in explanation of some term while others offered less. And then, some dictionaries contained explanations or samples in verse rather than prose. Examples of the latter in Persian are Ibrāhīm Qawām Fārūqī's Sharafnāma-yi Manyarī (877/1472) and the Lughat-i Furs by the poet Abū Naṣr Asadī Ṭūsī (d. 465/1072). The dictionary edited here for the very first time stands in this same tradition. Composed in the 10th/16th century, in contains 1600 entries in Persian and Arabic.
:
Versified dictionary (in Persian) containing Persian terms and their Arabic equivalents. :
1 online resource. :
9789004405820
9786002030191
Māhtāb-i Shām-i Sharq : Guzāra wa guzīna-yi andisha shinasī-yi Iqbāl /
:
A lawyer by profession and an Urdu and Persian poet by vocation, Muḥammad Iqbāl (1877-1938) is the spiritual father of Pakistan. Born in Sialkot, he received his pre-college education in his hometown, after which he went to study in Lahore. In 1905, after several years of teaching (Arabic, English and philosophy) in Lahore, he travelled to Cambridge to study philosophy and law. Two years later, he went to Heidelberg, where he received his PhD in 1907 with a thesis entitled The Development of Metaphysics in Persia . He then returned to Lahore, working as a lawyer for most of his life. From around 1910 onwards, Iqbāl's poetry and prose works show an increased commitment to the cause of Islam and its political and societal ramifications, culminating in his idea of an Islamic state in northern India, the future Pakistan. The articles published in this volume all highlight different aspects of Iqbāl's life, work, and thought.
:
1 online resource. :
9789004404755
9789648700145
Burzū-nāma : Bakhsh-i kuhan /
:
Firdawsī's (d. 411/1020) Shāh-nāma , this famous epic poem in celebration of the history of the kings and dynasties of Persia, was not written in a void. Indeed, before him there had been other epic works in Persian, more or less similar to it, by authors otherwise unknown, and now lost: by Masʿūdī Marwazī (before 355/966), by Abu ʼl-Muʾayyad Balkhī (before 352/963), by Abū ʿAlī Balkhī (before 390/1000), and the Shāh-nāma-yi Abū Manṣūrī (346/947). It has been said that Firdawsī may have taken some of his inspiration from this latter work. After Firdawsī, others wrote similar works, in imitation of him: Asadī Ṭūsī's Garshāsp-nāma (completed in 458/1066) and Īrānshāh b. Abi ʼl-Khayr's Bahman-nāma (501/1107-08) are just two examples of this. The present work by Shams al-Dīn Kawsaj (8th/14th century) is another epic poem in Firdawsī's style. The add-on found in some manuscripts, by a later author of lesser talent, is not included here.
:
Poetry. :
1 online resource. :
9789004405028
9789648700626
Dastūr al-kātib fī taʿyīn al-marātib. Volume 1 /
:
From the time that the art of writing was invented, people have been sending letters. This is true of the Sumerians who wrote on clay tablets 5.000 years ago, as it is true today in the information age. But not every letter is the same: a letter to a lover, a friend, or a business relation, each requires a different tone. In the case of official correspondence, the need for a standard is even more pressing than in industry or trade. In the medieval Islamic world with its highly developed bureaucracies, there evolved a special type of textbook in the form of manuals for secretaries. These would include general information on the secreterial trade as well as collections of sample letters. This Persian manual by Shams Munshī was completed in 767/1366 and dedicated to Sultan Uways Jalāyirī of Tabriz (d. 776/1374). Wide in scope and well organized, it was superior to anything written before it. 2 vols; volume 1.
:
1 online resource. :
9789004407329
9786002031273
Arj nama-yi Malik al-Shuʿarāʾ Bahār /
:
Muḥammad Taqī "Malik al-shuʿarāʾ" Bahār (d. 1951) was a poet, a philologist and editor of ancient Persian texts, a publicist, and also a political activist. Born in Mashhad in 1856 and writing poetry since he was seven, he inherited the honorific title of poet laureate of Āstān-i Quds from his father, Malik al-shuʿarāʾ Ṣabūrī, in 1903. Malik al-shuʿarāʾ Bahār was active in the constitutional movement at the beginning of the twentieth century. He published activist poetry, was involved in various reformist newspapers and magazines, and saw the inside of a prison more than once, both in Qajar times and under Reza Shah. The present work is a collection of articles and documents in honour of Malik al-shuʿarāʾ Bahār with a focus on his significance as a philologist. Includes the first edition of his autobiography (in two versions), a bibliography, and a series of articles by various scholars in appreciation of his work as a philologist.
:
1 online resource. :
9789004404830
9789648700244
Dīwān-i Imāmī Hirawī /
:
Abdallāh Imāmī Hirawī was born Herat where he grew up and received his education. Besides being a poet he possessed a wide knowledge in the sciences of his time and was respected for his learning. Like so many intellectuals and literary figures of his day, Imāmī led an itinerant life, moving from court to court, from patron to patron. Leaving Herat before 627/1229-30, we find him praise the Qarākhitāy rulers of Kirman, religious dignitaries and members of the Atabak court of Yazd, and also Bahāʾ al-Dīn Muḥammad (d. 678/1279), the governor of Isfahan, ʿIrāq-i ʿAjam and Yazd. In between literary patrons, Imāmī was also a judge in his hometown of Herat, dying in Isfahan in 686/1287. Praised by the poet laureate of the Atabak rulers of Fārs, Majd al-Dīn Hamgar (d. 686/1287), as being even better than Saʿdī (d. 691/1292), Imāmī's work shows the influence of the Khurāsānī and ʿIrāqī traditions in Persian poetry.
:
1 online resource. :
9789004406520
9786002030993