Nizami Ganjavi

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Speaker 13 Hello, Nizami Ganjibi,

Speaker 13 is considered to be one of the greatest romantic poets in Persian literature.

Speaker 13 He was born in the city of Ganja in what is now Azerbaijan, but his popularity soon spread throughout the Persian Empire and beyond.

Speaker 13 Nizam is best known for his Hamsa, a set of five epic poems that contain a famous retelling of the tragic love story of King Hosro and the Christian princess Shirin.

Speaker 13 But he didn't only write romances. His poetry also displays a dazzling knowledge of philosophy, astronomy, botany, and the life of Alexander the Great.

Speaker 13 With me to discuss Nizami Ganjabi are Christine van Ruhmbeke, Professor of Persian Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge, Nargas Farzad, Senior Lecturer in Persian Studies at SOAS, University of London, and Dominic Perbes Brookshaw, Professor of Persian Literature and Iranian Culture at the University of Oxford.

Speaker 13 Dominic, who was Nizami Ganjabi and what do we know about his early days?

Speaker 16 As with most medieval Persian poets, it's very difficult to say with any accuracy how their life was, certainly before they became famous.

Speaker 23 So with almost all medieval Persian poets, there is quite a lot of hagiography.

Speaker 14 There's quite a lot of writing that happens centuries after they've died, that looks back and sees them in a light that, of course, is full of praise, but isn't necessarily full of much accuracy.

Speaker 28 The things that we do know, as you said, he was born in Ganje, which nowadays is in Azerbaijan, and he wrote these really important poems, a number of them, for local rulers, whether they were in Ganje, whether they were in Baku, or whether they were in Maraure, which is in northwestern Iran nowadays.

Speaker 26 So he wrote within the Caucasus, he wrote for local elites,

Speaker 20 and at the time that he wrote, those local elites were powerful in their own right within their own area but they were linked into one of the great empires of the time

Speaker 14 in his case the late 12th century the Seljuks

Speaker 5 and he had contacts with the Seljuk elite but he was very much a poet writing in the Caucasus and in northwestern Iran as we know it today are we talking about a poet who connected different cultures through his work

Speaker 18 so it's the Caucasus so you have a a very mixed ethnic and linguistic environment.

Speaker 14 You have quite a lot of Christians as well as of course Muslims and that is reflected I think in the way that he wrote.

Speaker 22 He had characters and developed characters that were Christian such as Shireen.

Speaker 23 He really developed into an elite Christian woman.

Speaker 16 And he was writing at a time in that place where a form of Turkish had become important.

Speaker 14 But of course he's writing in the elite literary language of his sphere, which is New Persian.

Speaker 5 And because he's writing in New Persian, he's very quickly picked up and he is read and his works start to be copied and circulate in what was the Persophone world.

Speaker 20 So all the way through modern-day Iran, into Afghanistan, into Central Asia, and into India as well, and then westwards into Anatolia.

Speaker 23 So if you became a famous poet in the medieval times as a Persian poet, you could have,

Speaker 14 in the way that they thought of the world, a kind of global success.

Speaker 13 Thank you. Nagas.
His work is known as the Hamza or Quintet, as we've heard. What does the collection include?

Speaker 12 So the Hamse, also known in Persian as Panj Gyanj, the quintet, the five treasures, consists of five mega epics.

Speaker 12 The first one, Mahzanul Asror, is a spiritual epic known as the Treasury or the Book of Secrets and this is followed by three magnificent romantic epics.

Speaker 12 So in the chronological order is Khosro Shirin, the romance of the pre-Islamic Sasanian monarch Khosro and Armenian princess, followed by Lelio Majnun, the famous story known throughout the region, but he's put it into verse for the first time in Persian.

Speaker 12 Then comes Haft Pekar, the seven beauties or the seven domes, again based on a pre-Islamic life and adventures of a monarch, and finally by Eskandar Nome, the book of Alexander itself divided in two sections, Sharaf Nome, the book of honor, and followed by Irbal Nome, the book of fortune.

Speaker 13 It might be rather surprising to some people to see Alexander the Great included in this collection.

Speaker 12 Well, you know,

Speaker 12 for some reason, the region, not just the Persian-speaking world, but the Arab world too, were mesmerized by Alexander to the extent that

Speaker 12 not only Iranians did not loathe him, for obviously everyone knows that he invaded Iran and ultimately win these Greek-Persian wars, but finally they had the Greeks had the upper hand and he supposedly destroyed Persepolis.

Speaker 12 But regardless of that, he is a mythical figure. He is next to, in Nizami's final chapter of his Eskandar Nome, he's almost a prophet.
He's seeking the fountain of life.

Speaker 12 And there are many, many, many epics of Iskandar

Speaker 12 throughout the medieval time in Persian poetry.

Speaker 13 Christine, what was the connection between poetry and the court at this time, and how did he fit in?

Speaker 11 Well, I would say that in medieval and pre-modern times, for any artistic enterprise, patronage was not an option, it was the key. It was absolutely indispensable.

Speaker 11 And only a happy few poets had a position, gained a position at court. How did you get one? Well, they had to fight like tigers to get one.
How did they fight? They would fight, they would have

Speaker 11 poetry contests, they would prove that they were able to present the best poems, the best lines, and the prince, the patrons, the rulers, were extremely interested in poetry and they were really deciding on a person for his artistic excellence, but also what he was saying, how he was saying it.

Speaker 11 So this was a very important decision and a very important position for these poets.

Speaker 11 Less lucky poets had to scramble throughout their lives in the hope of getting commissions and maybe such a position as well.

Speaker 11 Now, for Nazami, as we have said, apparently he had no court position at all. Does that mean that he was scrambling? We have no real proof of that.

Speaker 11 What is certain is that he is writing for court, for very sophisticated audiences, but he receives specific commissions from rulers for each of his narratives.

Speaker 11 They come to him with a plan, so he must have been well known during his lifetime. And keeping in mind

Speaker 11 what considerable knowledge and education the poetry of Nazami is reflecting, it means access to libraries, extremely high information networks.

Speaker 11 So we can wonder whether maybe he was actually born in an important family, but we don't know.

Speaker 11 In fact, he shows he's really fastidious in his tastes for selecting patrons, and I will just say a few lines that he has written about that.

Speaker 11 So he says I am looking for an intelligent audience, the type that will not damage the fame of the jeweller'. So he's using the metaphor of the pearl for poetry and of a jeweller for the poet.

Speaker 11 If the buyer of pearls is as blind as an oyster, one should not sell anything to such a despicable individual.

Speaker 11 According to me, the buyer should be a jewel connoisseur who, meanwhile, also scatters jewels without count.

Speaker 30 Thank you.

Speaker 13 He made great use of Masjavi style, I think that's how you pronounce it. What was that style? Can you give me an example?

Speaker 11 So, the Masnavi, I'll have to go into some hardcore theory here. This is poetry.

Speaker 11 So, a verse is speech expressed according to a meter, that is, the words are assembled following a set pattern of long, overlong, and short syllables.

Speaker 11 For example, short, long, long, short, long, long, short, long, long, short, long, that is a meter, the epic meter.

Speaker 11 This rhythm is what the Shahanameh, the 60,000 verses of the Shahanameh have been built upon.

Speaker 11 Next, every verse is divided into two half-verses. And third, there is a rhyme which is particularly important.
It occurs at the end of each verse, or also it can occur at the end of each half-verse,

Speaker 11 in which case we call this an internal rhyme. And finally, there are specific forms of poems, often chosen in relation to the contents of the poems.

Speaker 11 For long narratives, the poets will choose preferably, and that is what Nazami did, the masnavi form.

Speaker 11 And that is sometimes a form that carries on for thousands of verses because it has only an internal rhyme which changes at every line. So the poet can go on and on.

Speaker 11 He just needs to have two words rhyming at a time. Some meters will be preferred for certain genres of topics.

Speaker 11 We have the epic meter, but Nezami is also using typically romance meters, which he's using in Hosru and Shirin, for example.

Speaker 13 Thank you very much, Dominic. Let's take a look then, a closer look, at his retelling of the love story of Hosro and Shirin.
First of all, what is this legend and what's its source?

Speaker 17 So, the key source for Nezami was the really important Book of Kings, the Shahnameh, that is completed at the beginning of the 11th century.

Speaker 7 And what Nezami does in relation to the story of the very late Sasanian, so late pre-Islamic king Khosro II, is that he takes a part of the Shahnameh story about Khosro that does talk about Khosro and a wife called Shirin.

Speaker 37 But it's a very short part of the Khosro story, and he then extracts that and amplifies it and develops it into this full narrative in which he either develops characters that are kind of alluded to in the Shah Nameh, or he adds characters and he takes us, in terms of the narrative, down paths that perhaps Ferdosi and the myths and the legends that Ferdossi drew on didn't really take the reader down.

Speaker 18 Nezami is the master of making really quite intricate, complex stories out of quite limited source material.

Speaker 13 Can you tell us the outline of the story?

Speaker 35 It's a very complex story.

Speaker 14 I mean the really important thing about Khosra and Shireen, in my opinion, there are two really important things.

Speaker 20 One is, and this comes up again and again in the way that Nezami writes about kings, and we see it also in the Shahnau Meh of Ferdo Si, is that kings are particularly when they are young, they are rash, they are immature, they need to develop their humanity, they need to develop justice, they need to be empathetic, they need to reflect on their mistakes and learn from them.

Speaker 21 And that's certainly what Khusro is and what Khusro does through the story.

Speaker 18 So, that's the really important thing about Khusra and the kings that crop up in these romances.

Speaker 19 What Shirin does, and what almost all of the female characters do in Nezami's tellings is that they help to guide and educate their male counterpart.

Speaker 19 So, they are educators, they are admonishers, they are women who have more kind of intellectual but also definitely emotional maturity.

Speaker 13 Can I turn to you, Agas, to develop the way he deals with women in a completely different way, as I understand it, and it happened before? Absolutely.

Speaker 12 He's quite unique in the depiction of his female characters, and the most magnificent of them is Shireen. All these women are literate.

Speaker 12 There are a whole host of correspondence, the letters that Shireen and Khosru exchange, for example. She is a fantastic rider, a hunter, knows all that she needs to know about music.

Speaker 12 She sort of patrons a musician at the court. But it is, you know, they are real grown-up women.
Of course, the stories like, you know, equivalents of Romeo and Juliet are there a

Speaker 12 But Shireen in the story of Khosro Shireen is the epitome of a woman who knows her limitations, but also is aware of her own strengths. She does not compromise morally.

Speaker 12 She does not compromise on the principles of the life of the elite. And Nezami absolutely adores her in this story.
He often says that he poured his love into the creation of the character of Shireen.

Speaker 12 And some people say that it's because this was at a time when his own beloved first wife had died. But this actually carries through in all his other epics, that these women are so real.

Speaker 12 One can associate them with the true characteristics of a formidable female hero.

Speaker 20 There's even more to say here.

Speaker 13 Christine, would you like to add to this?

Speaker 11 I can, yes, because Chosu and Shireen is such a delightful piece. Nazami, when he's writing, Khosrou and Shireen is really at a full mature glory.

Speaker 11 He's in full mastery of his literary and poetical toolbox. And he's composing high art, but he's also incredibly entertaining and he's also sharpening our wits.
He has very high expectations of

Speaker 11 his readers.

Speaker 11 And what I particularly love is that this is a poet who plays with his readers, who teases and challenges them at every turn, and it's very important for me, an author with a wonderful sense of humour, and I would like to give two examples, if I may.

Speaker 11 Please do. In Khosru and Shireen, Nazami uses what we now call defamiliarization.

Speaker 11 So as Dominique Antonarge said, he he uses an episode from an older book, The Shahnameh, which tells of a story of an infamous actually love story between between a besotted Sasanian king and an ambitious Harim girl.

Speaker 11 It leads to a huge sordid scandal that rocks Iranian monarchy. The grandees are boycotting the council of the king.

Speaker 11 They cannot accept for the king to marry a lowly woman. And what will they do with the children born from this marriage?

Speaker 11 The grandees basically tell him: if this Shireen was the last woman left on earth, still an Iranian king must not marry her.

Speaker 11 This is not what you should be doing. The king doesn't listen, marries her, and it will lead eventually to the end of the Sasanian dynasty.
Now, this is in the older story.

Speaker 11 Anaunazami comes and he says in his introduction that his narrative is going to be about Eshkbazi.

Speaker 11 love games. And he chooses, in order to do that, this particular scandalous couple.

Speaker 11 And he surprises all his readers because he's transforming this rather wicked female character of the Shireen of the Shahnameh into that radiant princess, as Narges said, an ideal wife.

Speaker 11 Personally, if I may say, I'm quite upset at Shireen because she's so perfect that I frankly hate her sometimes because I think

Speaker 11 I can't compete with such a,

Speaker 11 how could a normal person compete with such perfection? But so

Speaker 11 that is his his technique, which is humorous in itself, but he's also presenting throughout the masnavi of Khosru and Shireen really funny episodes.

Speaker 11 So the young princess, Shireen, falls in love with a picture of Prince Khosro, and she will stick to that love

Speaker 11 throughout all sorts of misery that this young prince and later king is taking her through. He's not worthy of her pure soul.

Speaker 11 He tries to seduce her and failing this, he marries a courtesan, and then he comes back to her and he asks Shireen to forgive him she does that and eventually they marry but at the end of the wedding banquet the king is so drunk that Shireen is going to put her old wet nurse in bed with him and we're not quite sure that he notices that rather than to live through a rotten wedding

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Speaker 32 I would like to read just a few short lines, but in these lines, which are from the Haftpei Care, so one of his later works, Nezami does something that he does again and again, which is praise the art of writing poetry, praises poets.

Speaker 18 He says elsewhere that poets are like the nightingales of the throne of God.

Speaker 21 And here he praises poetry itself.

Speaker 14 Sochani ku choru he be ebast kho zene ganj khone gebast

Speaker 28 geseye na shenide de udonad nameye na nebeshte uchonad.

Speaker 19 Bengar as herche o farid khodoi, toazu jo sochan chemonad bejoi.

Speaker 18 Yod gori, kaz odamizaudast, Sochanast Andiger Hambodast,

Speaker 19 which in translation of Juli Mesami is discourse or poetry, is like to a flawless soul, the keys to unseen treasure holds.

Speaker 31 It knows the story yet unheard and reads the yet unwritten word.

Speaker 19 Look round, of all that God has made, what else save discourse or poetry does not fade?

Speaker 47 The sole memorial of mankind is discourse.

Speaker 29 All the rest is wind.

Speaker 43 And here Nezami is doing what he does at the beginning of all of these great stories that he tells, which is to praise his art, in part to attract patronage, but also to say that what I am presenting here is the most elevated of the arts.

Speaker 13 Is it important that the collections are set in a pre-Islamic world?

Speaker 41 I think it is very important.

Speaker 19 I think it's very important in relation to the female characters that we've talked about.

Speaker 23 So Shireen in particular, as we have said, is a character that can be developed into a really strong character, in part I think because it's pre-Islamic, but also because she's a Christian.

Speaker 25 And that gives a little bit more space to Nezami to create a woman, at least of his time, in the 12th century, who is very kind of bold and powerful.

Speaker 25 It's not really until the Mongol period, which comes after Nizami, and the immediate post-Mongol period, that we get women who are much more involved in political life in the Iranian world.

Speaker 14 But he's writing that in a period before.

Speaker 21 In the Haftpeikaj, he also uses Sasanian, so pre-Islamic history and folklore in order to create stories.

Speaker 14 And one of the stories that he creates is interestingly about a slave girl rather than by an elite woman.

Speaker 18 And again,

Speaker 18 I think because it's in a pre-Islamic context, Nizami is slightly freed in the way he talks about that slave girl.

Speaker 21 And the really key thing about her, in the Shahna Mehr, she is called Azadehr, which means in that context, a woman who's too free with her speech.

Speaker 25 He develops her into a woman who tests the king.

Speaker 19 But the thing that is testing about her is the way she speaks to the king, the way she speaks truth to power.

Speaker 27 And I think because it's a pre-Islamic context, he's able to do that in a much freer way than he would with a Muslim or Islamic context.

Speaker 38 Thank you.

Speaker 13 I guess, can you respond to that? But also, I'd like to get more poetry

Speaker 13 and this is a good chance to do it.

Speaker 12 To do that. Well, this wonderful epic of King Khosro and Princess Shireen begins with these opening lines.
Nezomi says,

Speaker 12 He asks the divine to help him, the poetic voice, to do justice to the epic he's about to compose.

Speaker 12 And he says, Arusiro ke parvardam bejonash, moborak rui gardon dar jahonash, bechashme shochirin kon jamolas, kechud barnomeshirinastfolas.

Speaker 12 And he says, This bride that I have developed by pouring my heart and soul into, please, O divine, make her her luminous in the world. I almost give her longevity through my poetry.

Speaker 12 And make the king to be mesmerized, besotted by her beauty, for his own fortune is absolutely based on her presence.

Speaker 12 And in this story, Shirin is really that anchor that keeps this really wayward, this rather

Speaker 12 predatory monarch on the straight and the narrow. And she knows that one thing that will hold him interested is the fact that she will not be with him until they are married.

Speaker 12 And one amazing feature of this story is that he has many occasions.

Speaker 12 I mean, he has had so many wives and there have been wives who've been bartered, for example, by the emperor of Greece, you know, the Rome, Eastern Rome as it is, as part of peace treaties.

Speaker 12 he has to marry this rival king's daughter and so on and so forth. But whenever it comes to Shireen, no means no.

Speaker 12 And this love, which was preordained when he was a young man, he was promised this woman in a dream.

Speaker 12 And it's sort of really, the story runs throughout until they're eventually married, not as young people. They are by this stage.
He must be in his 40s and she's probably late 30s.

Speaker 12 And she is his moral compass. And this runs throughout the poem till its absolutely heartbreaking, tragic end.

Speaker 13 Christine, can we turn on to the story of Leila and Majnun? What's the story here and what's Nizami's aim?

Speaker 11 Yeah, Leila Majnoun is in a sense also a study of love. But this time Nizami portrays the difficulty, the heartbreak, the misery maybe of disincarnate love.

Speaker 11 So he's not enthusiastic at first when he receives the commission to gather loose legends and to create the story of this couple of young star-crossed Arabic couple.

Speaker 11 He's a bit out of his comfort zone, which is the luxury and the glory of the Sasanian Empire.

Speaker 11 So here the story of these two lovers is influenced by what is called Udhri love, the Arabic tradition of non-physical, non-carnal love, that is somehow similar to the courtly love that the Crusaders brought back on their way home.

Speaker 11 So the young boy is thwarted in his young love. The father of Leyli does not want to give his daughter to him.
He runs away into the desert and he becomes a hermit. He lives with animals.

Speaker 11 He becomes a Majnun, a madman, and a poet. And we see that he now brings misery to every character in the story.

Speaker 11 He cries a lot and his sad verses are carried by the desert breeze, the caravans to Leili who also cries a lot. She's now married against her will to a man whom she will not allow to touch her.

Speaker 11 Majinoun's father dies of grief. Le Li's husband dies in torment.
Leili herself dies and Majinoun prostrated on her tomb also dies. And Nizami describes all this misery in really wonderful verses.

Speaker 11 He creates an incredibly intense story. It's deeply moving and it's infinitely sad and disturbing.
It's almost as if he denounces mystic love, or at the very least, he's not recommending it.

Speaker 13 How was this received?

Speaker 12 This poetry is mostly performed.

Speaker 12 There are reciters at court and it's really for an

Speaker 12 elite audience. There would be on different occasions, banquets or significant days, festivals, where the poet himself would usually recite it, but not always.

Speaker 12 There would be musicians, minstrels, professional singers, if you like.

Speaker 12 So predominantly, unlike modern days where we sit and quietly read our poems, perhaps on the underground, in this period, this is very much a public performance with the added drama and you know leisurely they would have hours where they will sit and listen to this.

Speaker 12 And when you see this structure of masnavi that Christine described, there are repetition, the lines are repeated because it's quite hard to remember what had gone before.

Speaker 12 And of course, later on these books were reproduced in the shape of these magnificent manuscripts and gradually they were perhaps read more rather than performed.

Speaker 12 But in this period it's predominantly recited at public occasions, but not necessarily every member of public.

Speaker 13 Does his work have a moral message that this is how you should lead a better life?

Speaker 12 Absolutely, undoubtedly. It's very much didactic composition.

Speaker 12 But he does bring in his own frustrations.

Speaker 12 So for example, Lelio Majin, I think it took him something like four months to compose because he wasn't really that enamored with this old tale, the tale that's been known in Mesopotamia for a long time.

Speaker 12 But other works like Hos Rushirin, I think, took over 10 years. But throughout, the themes that recur are the impermanence of life.
You know, things you do not cling on to what you have today.

Speaker 12 Greed, arrogance, lack of loyalty, lack of appreciations and adherence to this order of hierarchy, monarch, his son, divine authority, the soldiers.

Speaker 12 But greed is very much the most despicable of vices, if you like, but totally a work of wisdom, works of ethics for life.

Speaker 13 Thank you. Dominic, can we explore in a little more detail what we've already touched on?

Speaker 13 How his treatment of women is, it seems to me from what I've read, dramatically different from those who preceded him.

Speaker 26 I think it was.

Speaker 21 The thing that is really interesting for me as someone who works more on lyric poetry than narrative is that lyric poetry, so the short poems in Persian, the Ghazal or the longer odes at court, the panegyric ghasides,

Speaker 32 they are filled with erotic content, but the erotic content there is normally the celebration of young male beauty by an older male.

Speaker 28 It's male homoerotic.

Speaker 18 And females don't really feature in lyric poetry in Persian.

Speaker 32 It's in the narrative poetry that you get these celebrations of female beauty and power.

Speaker 35 What happens with Nez Amin is that he then becomes so popular that he is imitated by later poets.

Speaker 22 And the two poets that are really important in imitating him are Amir Khosro in Delhi and Jami who is basically in what is now Afghanistan.

Speaker 31 And they write imitations and add to the stories that he has done in his quintet.

Speaker 41 And again, they have really powerful female characters.

Speaker 36 It's in the Mongol period and the immediate post-Mongol, so the 13th century and the 14th century and going forward, that women, elite women, start to become really powerful in political life.

Speaker 31 And so someone like Nezami kind of came slightly before that, but the others that imitated him, they had examples of powerful Muslim women who were rulers, who were influential.

Speaker 19 And so their poems that they sometimes even also wrote for these women, but their poems spoke to these powerful political women that they could see before them.

Speaker 12 One of the most famous scenes in Khosro-Shireen is when Shireen, who has also seen a portrait of Khosro and is smitten and encouraged by some courtiers, decides to gallop her way from modern-day Armenia to western Iran to meet this Khosra, to find him.

Speaker 12 And of course what we mustn't also forget in Nizami is the depiction and presence of animals. You know, the horses,

Speaker 12 they are just amazing, the steeds that he introduces and develops. So she has the world's most beautiful, fastest horse, Shabdiz.

Speaker 12 So up she gets on this horse and gallops for about 11 and 12 days to come to Iran, to Khosru's court, to see if he's really as beautiful and handsome as his portrait.

Speaker 12 And she's exhausted and she decides to stop. She comes across this pond and decides to cool off.

Speaker 12 And what is unprecedented, there we have in every detail, she takes off all her clothes, puts on this little diaphanous sarong, if you like, and cools herself in this pond.

Speaker 12 And the descriptions of this beauty, this is unheard of. And as Dominic said earlier, this could only be developed in a pre-Islamic setting.

Speaker 12 Because imagine this episode being performed and recited in a court with all the levels of society there. And what is extraordinary, Khosru, meanwhile, he has the same idea.

Speaker 12 He's galloping his way to Armenia and he's exhausted and he stops off and goodness, there he sees this vision of this beauty bathing in water and he is decent enough to look away because she suddenly is aware of his presence and just undoes all her braided hair to sort of you know cover herself and in that moment when he shyly looks away her beloved loyal horse is there she leaps on the horse and gallops away so these ideas could only really be set in the pre-Islamic context and don't really happen till much, much, much later.

Speaker 12 It's, you know, this truly is not divine beloved. This is a human, beautiful woman.

Speaker 13 Can we switch a little now, Christine, to his interest in philosophy, science, and the life of Alexander the Great?

Speaker 11 Yes. So Nizami's verses are always full of imagery related to sciences, but also most of his narratives are occasions to illustrate philosophical theories.

Speaker 11 And in the Escander Name, Nazami explains in the Book of Alexander, Nazami explains that he has chosen this particular Alexander character as his central character because his legend makes him an ideal case, he says, for the three persona of the ideal ruler.

Speaker 11 Now that is a theory that was developed by a major philosopher in the tenth century, who is called Farah B,

Speaker 11 who looks back at Plato and Aristotle and integrates that in Islamic philosophy.

Speaker 11 In his Utopia, which is called the virtuous city, he describes the ideal ruler of the ideal state as that extraordinary figure who is a political and military leader, who is also a top philosopher, and who is three, someone who reaches prophethood.

Speaker 11 And now Alexander is an excellent choice because he was a famous conqueror. He was also a pupil of Aristotle, so he must be aware of philosophy.

Speaker 11 And he is identified with a prophet mentioned in the Quran as the double-horned one, the dual carnine.

Speaker 11 Early on in the book of Alexander, we have an intriguing episode, and I will tell you that episode because it illustrates an essential Platonic tenet.

Speaker 11 Do not trust your senses, but use your intelligence to confirm what you see or what you hear. This is the dispute, the monaseri, between the painters of Qin and the painters of Rum.

Speaker 11 So, during a royal banquet, there is a discussion starting on who are the best painters in the world. Is it the Rumis, the Romans, or is it the Chinis, the people from China or Central Asia?

Speaker 11 The king organizes a test. The two teams are gathered in a big room, divided by a curtain.
Each is given carte de blanche to decorate the walls on their side.

Speaker 11 And once they are ready, the king takes place in the middle of the room, and the curtain is removed. And what a surprise, both walls are identical.

Speaker 11 There is no difference at all between the two paintings.

Speaker 11 The vizier, who represents the active intellect, orders to replace the curtain in the middle of the room, and the wall that was painted by the roomies remains the same, while the wall painted by the chinis becomes blank, empty.

Speaker 11 And the vizier now understands that while one team was painting, the other was polishing the wall until it became a mirror, reflecting the opposite wall to perfection.

Speaker 11 And the king was unable to understand that because he trusted his vision, his senses.

Speaker 11 So clearly, Nizami's literary creation of Alexander is really based on this discovery of philosophy and understanding what it is like to be an ideal king.

Speaker 13 Dominic, what's the state of the reading of his poetry in the modern world?

Speaker 32 It's important to understand that New Persian, which is the form of Persian that emerges after the Islamic conquest, so really emerges as a literary language in the 9th and 10th centuries of the Common Era.

Speaker 42 By the time we get to, certainly I would say the beginning of the 11th century, it becomes almost in its literary form in poetry, it almost becomes fixed as a language.

Speaker 47 And so there isn't really, until the middle of the 19th century, end of the 19th century, too much difference, at least in poetry in Persian, between the 10th century and, as I said, the middle of the 19th.

Speaker 19 It's very, very stable.

Speaker 18 And that means that even nowadays, when 20th century, in particular in Iran and Afghanistan, Tajikistan, the Persian-speaking world, the modern Persian-speaking world, if you are literate and educated enough, you can access the medieval poetry of someone like Nezami because it isn't too far from the literary idiom of today.

Speaker 23 If it's taught in schools, and it used to be taught much more in schools in Iran 40, 50 years ago than it is nowadays, but if it's taught in schools, that obviously also helps.

Speaker 23 But Iranians in particular and other Persian speakers are, you know, a language group of people who are very, very close to poetry even today.

Speaker 36 They see so much of their cultural identity in poetry, almost uniquely in the world.

Speaker 25 And so you have these phenomena in the diaspora, especially with students.

Speaker 19 They've done their bachelor's in Iran, they come to study in Europe or North America, and they might be doing engineering, medical sciences, but very often in their universities, they gather together, they organize literary poetry reading groups together, and they sit and they read Nezami and they read Hafez and they read Rumi and they find inspiration for their life through that and they connect together despite political differences very often through high culture of the medieval period.

Speaker 37 It's a fascinating thing.

Speaker 13 Nagas and Christine, briefly you could tell me how has this their poetry permeated other cultures?

Speaker 12 Lelio Majnun re-emerges in so many different iterations in other parts of the region, South Asia and throughout the Middle East.

Speaker 12 And it was really a standard for how you compose these romantic long narrative poems.

Speaker 12 A whole range of local poets for centuries to come, even Rumi, even Sa'di, they all were influenced by it and they either actually give him credit or mention these characters.

Speaker 12 And to this day, you know, when you mentioned about its modern-day reception, in 2008, the late Abbos Kiorostami, the Persian director,

Speaker 12 made this film. It's called Shirin.
And it's really just performing. They're only female actresses who sit there and sort of have to respond to the narration of this story, for example.

Speaker 12 So it continues, the role of these women, particularly that he has created are absolute role model saviours for activists now.

Speaker 32 I just want to say that as it spread also in later centuries and was imitated in Persian, it also then gets imitated in related languages.

Speaker 5 So you get versions of these stories told in Ottoman Turkish slightly later, and you get versions in Chakatai, which is a Central Asian Turkic language as well, and then you get them in Hindustani or Urdu in the South Asian Muslim languages and then beyond.

Speaker 27 So as we say, normally the kind of Persianate world, which didn't necessarily always use Persian as a literary language or use it alongside other vernaculars, also then imitates Nizami and his stories.

Speaker 13 Christine.

Speaker 11 And I would also, talking about the present-day influence of Nizami, I think we have to say something about the way he is seen as the poet in Azerbaijan, which is the region where Nizami actually lived at the time.

Speaker 11 Now, they have immense pride in Nizami, and they call Nizami their national poet.

Speaker 11 Scholars will be studying Nizami in Persian but

Speaker 11 the children, the population, know Nizami in Turkish or Azeri translations.

Speaker 11 As is the situation in Iran, students learn it at school, they follow his ethical sayings as role models for their life, so it's really very much a life.

Speaker 11 And I could also perhaps mention in 2015 we had the opening ceremony of the European Games in Baku.

Speaker 11 Well, during the ceremony they had they featured Nizami, they had ballet scenes inspired by his masnavis, really bringing Nizami to the notice of the international crowds and showing the country's admiration for the poet.

Speaker 13 Well, thank you all very much. Thanks to Nargas Farsad, Christine van Ruhmbecker and Dominique Pervis Brookshaw.
Next week, the habitability of planets.

Speaker 13 What would it take for life to emerge away from Earth and to survive and thrive? Where we might find it and what it might look like. Thanks for listening.

Speaker 49 And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

Speaker 13 What would you like to have said you didn't have time to say?

Speaker 12 I want to promote the power of a language that somehow seems to have survived all the conflicts, all the conquests.

Speaker 12 I mean, we've gone from the arrival of a totally new culture, arrival of Islam in Iran, and then we progress, we have the Saljuls, the Turkic tribes coming, then the Mongols who completely flattened this land, not to mention earlier Greeks, but that didn't have so much influence on the language.

Speaker 12 And on in goes. And it's just, you know, we can read this out.
This is a poetry that was written 800 years ago.

Speaker 12 And if you recite it, the speakers of this language, they could be in modern-day Afghanistan, they could be in Tajikistan, in Iran, they could be in LA, London, Dubai, wherever Iranians congregate, they will sit spellbound.

Speaker 12 They will follow it, maybe not 99%,

Speaker 12 not the entirety of it, but they will understand. And I think this is pretty unique.
And the themes, we recognize, you know, the names of this.

Speaker 12 I have cousins called Khosro Shirin, and we didn't mention the amazing architect, engineer, sculptor Farhod,

Speaker 12 who appears in Khosro Shirin. There is a third love interest.

Speaker 12 And

Speaker 12 you know, just to have so many Iranians or Indians or others called Farhod Khosro Shirin, the horses, if anyone owns a horse now, they will call it Shabdiz or Rach beforehand.

Speaker 12 We just take it for granted, but this phenomenal language that has somehow come through unscathed and in fact happily taken the good features of the conquering cultures and has formed it.

Speaker 12 Iranian culture absorbs, for example, Iskandar. He's suddenly in the Shahnameh, he actually is half-Iranian.
Did you know that? And it's just as if, doesn't matter, he wasn't a baddie.

Speaker 12 he was just one of us which slightly got a bit separated but his mother was iranian for example so it's it's i always because i come from this culture i somehow feel that i underestimate this amazing characteristic of it

Speaker 32 i wanted to say two things one um speaks to what Christine was saying about Azerbaijan, the modern nation-state and its relationship with Nazami, which is very interesting.

Speaker 36 And of course, in Iran, there is a kind of mirror relationship with that, where the modern nation-state of Iran also claims Nezami very much as an Iranian poet.

Speaker 18 And I think to do both of those things is really to do an injustice to him and the time in which he lived.

Speaker 36 And, you know, he was connected, as any poet was connected, in this medieval world, in that part of Asia, was connected to a huge area of land where Persian either was both the native language and the literary language, or was used as a language of high culture.

Speaker 41 And so he's not really the poet of any nation-state.

Speaker 27 You know, he's the poet of a cultural moment in time.

Speaker 9 And his legacy is one that, you know, as we've said, spread west and east and was very long-lived.

Speaker 13 Christian.

Speaker 11 Well, speaking about the legacy of Nazami spreading west, spreading to us, one famous example which I think we really need to mention here is that Puccini's opera Turandot is based on one of the stories that Nezami tells in his Haftpekar, in his Seven Beauties.

Speaker 11 In one word, a princess has got to choose a husband to rule next to her, and she sets all sorts of very difficult tests to the suitors. They all die, and their heads are put on the walls of the city.

Speaker 11 But the beauty of the princess and the challenge bring constant new hot-headed young men to

Speaker 11 the slaughter. To the slaughter, absolutely.
And now one of them will get through all the challenges and finally she is asking him for questions, for riddles.

Speaker 11 And what Nazami does is to make these riddles silent. So it's with objects, metaphoric objects.

Speaker 11 The two future, the princess and the suitor are in different rooms, they don't speak to each other, they don't see each other, they don't know each other, they correspond with objects.

Speaker 11 And finally, the suitor will crack the riddles and marry the princess.

Speaker 11 Now, the story taken over through Italian translations and all sorts of passages, the story that Puccini puts in his opera is really the same thing.

Speaker 11 He puts that in China rather than in Iran, but basically, it's the same thing.

Speaker 11 And what I think we do not understand when we listen to Puccini's opera and we consider that Turandotte is a bellefemme sans-merci, is a cruel woman.

Speaker 11 No, she is afraid and she wants to test her future husband, and only will marry the one who understands what her riddles are about.

Speaker 12 And the name of the opera itself, Turan Dochht, Doch, Persian being an Indo-European language, Ducht, Doch daughter, Dochda.

Speaker 12 So, and Turan is a Persian word for the Chinese Empire, so the daughter of China, the Chinese princess.

Speaker 12 Another thing which we cannot ignore are the magnificent manuscripts that exist of these epics of Nazami. I mean, they are spellbinding, and we're so lucky that we can just go online, search for them.

Speaker 12 And of course, my two colleagues are at institutions that have some of the magnificent manuscripts and British Library. They are phenomenally beautiful.

Speaker 12 It's really been a gift for centuries, a gift to artists to outdo each other as they produce new copies of these epics.

Speaker 11 And speaking about these incredible manuscripts, we must realize that it's a hugely expensive thing to commission.

Speaker 11 So the fact that princes throughout history were ready to put on the table a huge amount of money to have a workshop who's working on the most expensive paper, Chinese paper, with the most expensive pigments called lapis lazuli, silver, with the most incredible calligraphers, the quality of the ink, which is still as black as on the day it was put on that paper nowadays, so many centuries later.

Speaker 11 So, to have people who are ready to put so much money just to own a copy of Nazami's work already tells us something about how he was regarded at the time. And it's also, I think,

Speaker 11 at the back of their mind is the idea to transform this poetry, this oral poetry, into something that

Speaker 11 is written down, that will survive through centuries,

Speaker 11 making sure that it will survive because it's transformed into such a piece of very expensive art.

Speaker 18 It's just very interesting how we have that tradition. So, we have all the imitations that happen in different languages and in Persian later.

Speaker 32 We have the manuscript tradition that becomes so important.

Speaker 15 But what also happens is that because these stories become so popular in the Masnavi form, they also then get incorporated later in the 13th, 14th century going forward into lyric poetry.

Speaker 31 And so everyone knows these stories.

Speaker 14 And so when a lyric poet wants to say something about a crazed lover or a really powerful woman or, you know, a either bad or good love relationship, all they have to do is say, so-and-so is like Shining, or so-and-so was like Majnun, or so-and-so was like Hostro or Farhod or whoever it is, as a kind of shorthand.

Speaker 18 And the person listening to a poem that's only nine lines long knows, ah, I know which part of the narrative that is, I know what the poet means.

Speaker 19 And so there then develops this really interesting interface between epic and romance, the narrative poems, and lyric.

Speaker 35 You know, it all kind of entwines together.

Speaker 32 And that lyric poetry, the short stuff, is very much often of,

Speaker 10 not initially, but later, of a kind of lower socio-economic form of poetry or a poetry that circulates throughout different classes of society in a way that an elite manuscript couldn't, right?

Speaker 13 Well, I think that's time to conclude, and our producer, Simon Tillotson, is about to enter with gifts.

Speaker 38 Tea?

Speaker 38 Tea would be great.

Speaker 38 Happy with the water.

Speaker 3 Melvin, do you want tea or coffee?

Speaker 13 I'll have some tea, I think.

Speaker 40 Three teas. Thanks very much.

Speaker 20 Black, black,

Speaker 38 with

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