In Our Time - Nizami Ganjavi

Episode Date: January 2, 2025

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the greatest romantic poets in Persian literature. Nizami Ganjavi (c1141–1209) is was born in the city of Ganja in what is now Azerbaijan and his popularity soon spread throughout the Persian-speaking lands and beyond. Nizami is best known for his Khamsa, a set of five epic poems that contains a famous retelling of the tragic love story of King Khosrow II (c570-628) and the Christian princess Shirin (unknown-628) and the legend of Layla and Majnun. Not only did he write romances: his poetry also displays a dazzling knowledge of philosophy, astronomy, botany and the life of Alexander the Great.With Christine van Ruymbeke Professor of Persian Literature and Culture at the University of CambridgeNarguess Farzad Senior Lecturer in Persian Studies at SOAS, University of LondonAndDominic Parviz Brookshaw Professor of Persian Literature and Iranian Culture at the University of OxfordProducer: Simon TillotsonReading list:Laurence Binyon, The Poems of Nizami (The Studio Limited, 1928)Barbara Brend, Treasures of Herat: Two Manuscripts of the Khamsah of Nizami in the British Library (Gingko, 2020)Barbara Brend, The Emperor Akbar’s Khamsa of Nizami (British Library, 1995)J-C. Burgel and C. van Ruymbeke, A Key to the Treasure of the Hakim: Artistic and Humanistic Aspects of Nizami Ganjavi’s Khamsa (Leiden University Press, 2011)Nizami Ganjavi (trans. P.J. Chelkowski), Mirror of the Invisible World: Tales from the Khamseh of Nizami (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1975)Nizami Ganjavi (trans. Dick Davis), Layli and Majnun (Penguin Books, 2021)Nizami Ganjavi (trans. Rudolf Gelpke), The Story of Layla and Majnun (first published 1966: Omega Publications, 1997)Nizami Ganjavi (trans. Rudolf Gelpke), The Story of the Seven Princesses (Bruno Cassirer Ltd, 1976)Nizami Ganjavi (trans. Julie Scott Meisami, The Haft Paykar: A Medieval Persian Romance (Oxford University Press, 1995)Nizami Ganjavi (trans. Colin Turner), Layla and Majnun (Blake Publishing, 1997) Dominic Parviz Brookshaw, Hafiz and His Contemporaries: Poetry, Performance and Patronage in Fourteenth-Century Iran (Bloomsbury, 2019)Julie Scott Meisami, Medieval Persian Court Poetry (Princeton University Press, 2014)Asghar Seyed-Gohrab, Layli and Majnun: Love, Madness and Mystic Longing in Nizami’s Epic Romance (Brill, 2003)Kamran Talattof, Jerome W. Clinton, and K. Allin Luther, The Poetry of Nizami Ganjavi: Knowledge, Love, and Rhetoric (Palgrave, 2000)C. van Ruymbeke, Science and Poetry in Medieval Persia: The Botany of Nizami's Khamsa (Cambridge University Press, 2007) In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. This is in our time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this edition, you can find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoyed the programme. Hello, Nizami Ganjabi, 1141 to 1209,

is considered to be one of the greatest romantic poets in Persian literature. He was born in the city of Ganja, in what is now Azerbaijan, but his popularity soon spread throughout the Persian Empire and beyond. Nizam is best known for his Hamza, a set of five epic poems that contain a famous retelling of the tragic love story of King Hosro and the Christian princess Shiren.

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. With me to discuss Nizami Ganjubi, are Christine Van Runewecker, Professor of Persian Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge. Nagas Fazad, Senior Lecturer in Persian Studies at Soas University of London. And Dominic Pabby's Brookshaw, Professor of Persian Literature and Iranian Culture at the University of Oxford. Dominic, who was Zahming, Punjabi, and what do we know about his early days?

As with most medieval Persian poets, it's very difficult to say with any accuracy how their life was, before they became famous. So with almost all medieval Persian poets, there is quite a lot of hagiography. 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. The things that we do know, as you said, he was born in Ganjir, which nowadays is in Azerbaijan. And he wrote these really important. poems, a number of them for local rulers, whether they were in Ganges, whether they were in Baku, or whether they were in Maraqa, which is in northwestern Iran nowadays. So he wrote within

the Caucasus, he wrote for local elites. 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, in his case, the late 12th century, the Seljuks, 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? So it's the Caucasus, so you have a very mixed ethnic and linguistic environment. You have a very mixed, ethnic and linguistic environment.

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. He had characters and developed characters that were Christians such as Shirin. He really developed it into an elite Christian woman

and he was writing at a time in that place where a form of Turkish had become important but of course he's writing in the elite literary language of his sphere, which is New Persian. And because he's writing in New Persian, he's very quickly picked up and he is read and his work start to be copied and circulate in what was the Persephone world. So all the way through modern day Iran into Afghanistan, into Central Asia,

and into India as well, and then westwards into Anatolia. So if you became a famous poet in the medieval times as a Persian poet, you could have, in the way that they thought of the world, a kind of global success. Thank you. Now, I guess his work is known as the Hamza or Quintet as we've heard. What does the collection include? So the Hamse, also known in Persian as Pange-Gand, the Quintet, the Five Treasures, consists of five mega epics. 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. So in the chronological order, it's Chosro-Sirin, the romance of the pre-Islamic Sasanian monarch, Khosro and Armenian princess, followed by Lelyo Magnoon, the famous story known throughout the region, but he's put it into verse for the first time in Persian. Then comes Haft Peiqar, the seven beauties or the seven domes, again based on a pre-Islamic life and adventures of a monarch, and finally by Eskander Namé, the book of Alexander itself divided in two sections, Sharaf Name, the book of honour, and followed by Iqbal Name, the book of fortune.

It might be rather surprising to some people to say Alexander the Great included in this collection. Well, you know, for some reason, the region, not just the Persian-speaking world, but the Arab world too, were mesmerized by Alexander to the extent that not only Iranians did not loathe him for, obviously everyone knows that he invaded Iran and ultimately in these Greek-Persian wars, wars, but finally the Greeks had the upper hand and he supposedly destroyed Persepolis. But regardless

of that, he is a mythical figure. He is next to, in his army's final chapter of his Skander Nomeh, he's almost a prophet. He's seeking the fountain of life. And there are many, many, many epics of Iskandar

throughout the medieval time in Persian poetry. Christine, what was the connection between poetry and the court at this time, and how did he fit in? 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, 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. And they would fight. They would have 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. So this was a very important decision and a very important position for these poets. Less lucky poets had to scramble throughout their lives in the hope of getting commissions and maybe such a position as well. 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. 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. They come to him with a plan, so he must have been well known during his lifetime, and keeping in mind how what considerable knowledge and education, the poetry of Nazami, is reflecting. It means access to libraries, extremely high information networks. So we can wonder whether maybe he was actually born in an important family, but we don't know. 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.

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. If the buyer of pearls is as blind as an oyster, one should not sell anything to such a despicable individual. According to me, the buyer should be a jewel connoisseur who meanwhile also scatters jewels without count. Thank you. He made great use of Masjabi style.

I think that's how you pronounce it. What was that style? Can I give me an example? So the Masnavi, I'll have to go into some hardcore theory here. This is poetry. So a verse is speech expressed according to a meter, that is, the words are assembled following a set pattern of long, over long, and short syllables. For example, short, long, long, short, long, short, long, short long, short long, that is a meter, the epic meter. This rhythm is what the shahnamet, the 60,000 verses of the shahna may have been built upon. 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, 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. For long narratives, the poets will choose preferably, and that is what Nazami did, the Masnavi form. 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. He just needs to have two words rhyming at the time. Some meters will be preferred for certain genres of topics. We have the epic meter, but Nazami is also using typically romance meters, which he's using in Hosru and Shireen, for example. Thank you very much. Dominic, let's take a look then, closer look,

at his retelling of the love story of Hosero and Shiren. First of all, what is this legend and what's its source? So the key source for Nizami was the really important book of kings, the Shahnama that is completed at the beginning of the 11th century. And what Nizami does in relation to the story of the very late Sasanian, so late pre-Islamic king, Khosro the second, is that he takes a part of the Shah Nama'er story about Khosro that does talk about Khosro and a wife called Shihir. But it's a very short part of the Khosro's 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 Shahna Mare, or he adds characters. And he takes us, in terms of the narrative, down paths that perhaps, you know, Ferdozi and the myths and the legends that Ferdozi drew on didn't really take the reader down. Nezami is the master of making really quite intricate, complex stories out of quite limited source material. Can you tell us the outline of the story?

It's a very complex story. I mean, the really important thing about Khosrein Shire and Shireen, in my opinion, that There are two really important things. One is, and this comes up again and again in the way that Nesami writes about kings, and we see it also in the Shahna Mea of Ferdosi, 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. And that's certainly what Hosro is and what Hosro does, does through the story. So that's a really important thing about

Husra and the kings that crop up in these romances. What Shirin does and what almost all of the female characters do in Nesami's tellings is that they help to guide and educate their male counterpart. So they are educators, they are admonishers, they are women who have more kind of intellectual but also definitely emotional maturity. Can I turn to you, I guess, to develop the way he deals with women in a completely different ways. I understand it than it happened before.

He is quite unique in the depiction of his female characters, and the most magnificent of them is Shirin. All these women are literate. There are a whole host of correspondence, the letters that Shirin and Hosru exchange, for example. She is a fantastic rider, a hunter, knows all that she needs to know about music. 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 plenty.

But Shirin, in the story of Khosro-Sherin, is the epitome of a woman who knows her limitations. but also is aware of her own strengths. She does not compromise morally. She does not compromise on the principles of the life of the elite. And Nazami absolutely adores her in this story. He often says that he poured his love into the creation of the character of Shirin. And some people say that it's because this was at the 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. One can associate them with the true characteristics of a formidable female hero. There's even more to say here. Christine, would you like to add to this? I can, yes, because Khosur and Shireen is such a delightful piece. Nazami, when he's writing, Khosur and Shireen, is really at a full, mature glory. He's in full, full months. three 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 his readers.

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 humor. and I would like to give two examples if I may. Please do. In Khosro and Shirin, Nazami, uses what we now call defamiliarization. So as Dominic and Narges said, he uses an episode from an older book, the Shahnamet, which tells of a story of an infamous, actually, love story

between a besotted Sasanian king and an ambitious Harim girl. It leads to a huge, sordid scandal that rocks Iranian monarchy. The grandees are boycotting the council of the king. They cannot accept for the king to marry a lowly woman and what will they do with the children born from this marriage? The grandees basically tell him, if this Shirin was the last woman left on earth, still an Iranian king must not marry her.

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. And now Nazami comes, and he says in his introduction that his narrative is going to be about Eshq Basie, love games. And he chooses, in order to do that, this particular scandalous couple.

And he surprises all his readers, because he's transforming this rather wicked female character of the Shirin of the Shahname into that radiant princess, as Narges said, an ideal wife. 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 I can't compete with such a, how could a normal person compete with such perfection? But so that is his technique which is humorous in its sense. but he's also presenting throughout the Masnavi of Ghosru and Shireen really funny episodes. So the young princess Shirin falls in love with the picture of Prince Rosro and she will stick to that love

throughout all sorts of misery that this young prince and later king is staking her through. He's not worthy of her pure soul. He tries to seduce her and failing this he marries a cortisin and then he comes back to her and he asks Shirin to forgive him, she does that, and eventually they marry. But at the end of the wedding banquet, the king is so drunk that Shirin is going to put her old wetners in bed with him. And we're not quite sure that he notices that, rather than to live through a rotten wedding night. I would like to read just a few short lines. but in these lines which are from the Haft Pei-Kar, 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. He says elsewhere that poets are like the 19-gales of the throne of God. And here he praises poetry itself. Sochani-ku-chur-ruhe be a-bast, chasen-gange-chhanie-qabest. Which in Nassanid, N'amay non-nibhished,

O'u Khaned. Bengar, as herchee Afarid Chodai, ta as o'jus' ch'as'n't be jay. Yad-gari, that's a-ad-as-soddast, son-dhanyar, Hamabad is.

Which in translation of Julie Maisami is discourse or poetry, is like to a flawless soul, the keys to unseen treasure holds. It knows the story yet unheard and reads the yet unwritten word. Look round, of all that God has made, what else save discourse or poetry, does not fade. The sole memorial of mankind is discourse. All the rest is wind.

And here, Nazami 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. to attract patronage, but also to say that what I am presenting here is the most elevated of the arts. This is important that the collections are set in a pre-Islamic world? I think it is very important. I think it's very important in relation to the female characters that we've talked about.

So Shirin 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. and that gives a little bit more space to Nazami to create a woman at least of his time in the 12th century who is very kind of bold and powerful. It's not really until the Mongol period,

which comes after Nazami and the immediate post-Mongal period that we get women who are much more involved in political life in the Iranian world. But he's writing that in a period before. In the Haft Pekar, he also uses, so pre-Islamic history and folklore in order to create stories. And one of the stories that he creates is interestingly about a slave girl rather than by an elite woman. And again, I think because it's in a pre-Islamic context, Nazami is slightly freed in the way he talks about that slave girl.

And the really key thing about her in the Shahna-Mer, she is called Azadeh, which means in that context, a woman who's too free with her speech. He develops her into a woman who tests the king, but the thing that is testing about her is the way she speaks to the king, the way she speaks truth to power. 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. Thank you. I guess can you respond to that? But also, I'd like to get more poetry. And this is a good chance to do it. To do that. Well, this wonderful epic of King Chosro and Princess Shirin begins with these opening lines.

Nizami says, Khodawanda, Darry Tofigue, Bokshai. Nizamiro Rahe Taheq bin Maid. He asks the divine to help him the poetic voice to do justice to the epic he's about to compose. And he says, Arousyra, that Pairwardam to

Janash, Mubarak Rue Gerdon in her Jash. Be chash, Shirein'con Jammalash, that's Fahleash. And he says,

This bride that I have developed by pouring my heart and soul into, please, O Divine, make her luminous in the world. I almost give her longevity

through my poetry and make the king to be mesmerized besotted by her beauty for his own fortune is absolutely based on her presence. And in this story, Shirin is really that anchor that keeps this really wayward, this rather 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. And one amazing feature of this story is that he has many occasions. 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 Eastern Rome as it is, as part of peace treaties, he has to marry this rivaled king's daughter and so on and so forth. But whenever it comes to Shirin, no means no. And this love, which was preordained,

when he was a young man, he was promised this woman in a dream. And it's sort of really the story runs throughout until they're eventually married, not as young people there by this stage. He must be in his 40s and she's probably late 30s. And she is his moral compass. And this runs throughout the poem till it's absolutely heartbreaking, tragic end. Christine, can we turn on to the story of Leila and Majlan?

What's the story here and what's Nizami's aim? Yeah, Leila Maginun is, in a sense, also a study of love. But this time, Nazami portrays the difficulty, the heartbreak of the misery maybe, of disincarnate love. 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. He's a bit out of his comfort zone, which is the luxury and the glory of the Sassanian Empire. 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 the way home. So the young boy is thwarted in his young love. The father of Lely does not want to give his daughter to him. He runs away into the desert and he becomes a hermit. He lives with animals. He becomes a madman, a poet. And we see that he now brings misery to every character in the story. He cries a lot

And his sad verses are carried by the desert breeze, the caravans to Lely Who also cries a lot. She's now married against her will to a man To whom she will not allow to touch her. Maginun's father dies of grief. Lely's husband dies in torment. Lely herself dies.

And Maginorne prostrated on her tomb also dies. And Azami describes all this misery in really wonderful verses. 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. How was this received? This poetry is mostly performed.

There are reciters at court and it's really for elite audience. There would be on different audiences. occasions, banquets, or significant days festivals, where the poet himself would usually would recite it, but not always. There would be musicians, minstrels, professional singers, if you like. 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 while they would sit and listen to this. 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. And of course, later on, these books were reproduced in the shape of this magnificent manuscripts, and gradually they were perhaps read more rather than performed. But in this period, it's predominantly recited at public occasions, but not necessarily every member of public. Does his work up a moral message that this is how you should lead a better life for? Absolutely, undoubtedly. It's very much didactic composition. But he does bring in his own frustration. So, for example, Leilomagin, 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, but other works like Hosur Shulin, I think, took over 10 years. But throughout the themes that recurrents of life, you know, things do not cling on to what you have today. Greed, arrogance, lack of loyalty, lack of appreciations and adherence to. this order of hierarchy, monarch, his son, divine authority, the soldiers. But greed is very much the most despicable of vices, if you like, but totally a work of wisdom, works of ethics for life. Thank you. Dominique, can we explore in a little more detail

what we've already touched on, how his treatment of women is, it seems to me, from what I've read, dramatically different from those who preceded him. I think it was. The thing that is really interesting for me, as someone who works more on lyric poetry, the narrative, is that lyric poetry, so the short poems in Persian, the Ghazal, or the longer odes at court, the panegyric Qasides,

they are filled with erotic content, but the erotic content there is normally the celebration of young male beauty by an, older male. It's male homoerotic. And females don't really feature in lyric poetry in Persian. It's in the narrative poetry that you get these celebrations of female beauty and power. What happens with Nez Amin is that he then becomes so popular that he is imitated by later poets. And the two poets that are really important in imitating him are Amir Khosro in Delhi and Jami, who who is basically in what is now Afghanistan.

And they write imitations and add to the stories that he has done in his quintet. And again, they have really powerful female characters. It's in the Mongol period and the immediate post-Mongols. So the 13th century and the 14th century and going forward, that elite women start to become really powerful in political life. And so someone like Nizami kind of came slightly before that, but the others that imitated him,

had examples of powerful Muslim women who were rulers, who were influential. 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. One of the most famous scenes in Khosro-Sherin 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 Armenia to Western Iran to meet this hosur, to find him. And of course, what we mustn't also forget in Nizami

is the depiction and presence of animals, you know, the horses. They are just amazing, the steeds that he introduces and develops. So she has the world's most beautiful, fastest horse shabdi. So up she gets on this one, horse and gallops for about 11 and 12 days to come to Iran to Hosros Court to see if he's really as beautiful and handsome as his portrait. And she's exhausted and she decides to stop. She comes across this pond and decides to cool off. 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. And the discreet. of this beauty. This is unheard of. And as Dominic said earlier, this could only be developed in a pre-Islamic setting. Because imagine this episode being performed and recited

in a court with all the levels of society there. And what is extraordinary Khosro meanwhile, he has the same idea. 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 until much, much, much later. It's a, you know, this truly is not divine beloved. This is a human, beautiful woman.

Can we switch a little now, Christine, to his interest in philosophy, science, and the life of Alexander, the great. Yes. So Nazami's verses are always, full of imagery related to sciences, but also most of his narratives are occasions to illustrate philosophical theories and

in the Scandar Nomeh 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. Now, that is a theory that was developed

by a major philosopher in the 10th century who's called Farah B, who looks back at Plato and Aristotle and integrates that in Islamic philosophy. 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. 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.

And he's identified with a prophet mentioned in the Quran as the double hornet one, the dual car nine. 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. Do not trust your senses, but use your intelligence to confirm what you see or what you hear.

This is the dispute, the monazere, between the painters of Chin and the painters of Room. So during a royal banquet, there is a discussion starting on who are the best painters in the world. Is it the roomies, the Romans,

or is it the Chinese, the people from China? or Central Asia. The king organizes a test. The two teams are gathered in a big room, divided by a curtain. Each is given carte blanche to decorate the walls on their side, and once they're ready, the king takes place in the middle of the room and the curtain is

removed, and to what a surprise, both walls are identical. There is no difference at all between the two paintings. 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 room remains the same, while the wall painted by the chinus becomes blank, empty. 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. And the king was unable to understand that because he trusted his vision,

his senses. So clearly, Nazami's literary crudely. of Alexander is really based on this discovery of philosophy and understanding what it is like to be an ideal king. Dominic, what's the state of the reading of his poetry in the modern world? It's important to understand the 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. 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.

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 and Persian, between the 10th century and, as I said, the middle of the 19th. It's very, very stable. And that means that even nowadays, when 20th century, in particularly 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 Nizami, because it isn't too far from the literary idiom of today.

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. But Iranians in particular and other Persian speakers are a language group of people who are very, very close to poetry even today. They see so much of their cultural identity in poetry, almost uniquely in the world. And so you have these phenomena in the diaspora, especially with students.

They've done their bachelors in Iran. They come to study in Europe, 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 Nesami, 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. It's a fascinating thing. Nagas and Christine, briefly you could tell me,

how has this, their poetry, permeated other cultures? Leliumajnur re-emerges in so many different iterations in other parts of the region, in South Asia and throughout Middle East. And it was really a standard for how you compose these romantic long narrative poems. A whole range of local poets for centuries to come, even Rumi, even Saudi, they all were influenced by it and they either actually give him credit or mention these characters.

And to this day, you know, when you mentioned about it's modern-day reception, in 2008, the late Abbas Kiorostami, the Persian director, he made this film. It's called Shirin. And just it's really just performing the only female actresses who sit there and sort of have to respond to the narration of this story, for example. So it continues, the role of these women, particularly,

that he has created, are absolute role model saviors for activists now. 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. 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. So as we say normally the kind of Persianate world, which didn't necessarily always use Persian as a literary language

or used it alongside other vernaculars, also then imitates Nazami and his stories. Christine. And I would also, talking about present-day influence of Nazami, I think we have to say something about the way he is seen as the poet in Azerbaijan, which is the region where Nazami actually lived at a time. Now, they have immense pride in Nizami and they call Nizami their national poet. Scholars will be studying Nizami in Persian, but the children, the population, know Nizami in Turkish or Azeri translations, 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 alive. And I could also perhaps mention in 2015, we had the opening ceremony of the European Games in Baku. Well, during the ceremony, they had, they featured Nazami. They had ballet scenes inspired by his masnavies, really bringing Nazami to the notice of the international

crowds and showing the country's admiration for the poet. Well, thank you all very much. Thanks to Nagas Farsat, Christine Van Runebecker, and Dominique Pervis, Brookshaw. Next week, the habitability of planets. 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. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material.

from Melvin and his guests. What would you like to have said you didn't have time to say? I want to promote the power of a language that somehow seems to have survived all the conflicts, all the conquests. 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 Saldjals, 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. 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. And if you recited, the speakers of this language, they could be in modern-day Afghanistan, they could be in Tajikistan, in Iran, they could be in L.A., London, Dubai, wherever Iranians congregate, they will sit, spellbound. They will follow it, maybe not 99%, 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, I have cousins called Khos Roshirin, and we didn't mention the amazing architect, engineer, sculptor Farhod, who appears in Khos Roshirin. There is a third. love interest and

you know just to have so many Iranians or Indians or others called Farhot Khos Roshid the horses if anyone earns a horse now they will call it Shabdi's or Rakhs beforehand we just take

it for granted but this phenomenal language that has somehow come through unscate and in fact happily taken the good features of the conquering cultures and has formed it.

Iranian culture absorbs, for example, Eskandar. He's suddenly in the Shah Nome, he actually is half Iranian. Did you know that? And it's just as if, it doesn't matter, he wasn't a baddie. He was just

one of us who'd slightly got a bit separated, but his mother was Iranian, for example. So it's, I always, because I come from this culture, I somehow feel that I underestimate this amazing characteristic of it. Dominic. I wanted to say two things.

One speaks to what Christine was saying about Azerbaijan, the modern nation state and its relationship with Nazami, which is very interesting. And of course, in Iran, there is a kind of mirror relationship with that where the modern nation state of Iran also claims Nazami very much as an Iranian poet. And I think to do both of those. things is really to do an injustice to him and the time in which he lived. 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, always used as a language of high culture. And so he's not really the poet of any nation state. You know, he's the poet of a cultural moment in time. And his legacy is one that, you know, as we've said, spread west and east and was very long-lived. Christine. Well, speaking about the legacy of Nazami's spreading west spreading to us, one famous example, which I think we really need to mention here, is that Puccini's opera Turandotte is based on one of the stories that Nazami tells in his Haft Bekar, in his...

seven beauties. 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, but the beauty of the princess and the challenge bring constant new, hot-headed young men to the slaughter, to the slaughter, absolutely. And now one of them will get through all the challenges. And finally she's asking him for questions, four riddles. And what Nazami does is to make these riddles silent. So it's with objects, metaphoric objects.

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. And finally, the shooter will crack the riddles and marry the princess. Now, the story taken over through Italian translation, and all sorts of passages.

The story that Puccini puts in his opera is really the same thing. He puts that in China rather than in Iran, but basically it's the same thing. And what I think we do not understand when we listen to Puccini's opera and we consider that Turandotte is a Belle Fame Sans Merci, is a cruel woman. No, she's afraid and she wants to test her future husband and only will marry the one who understands what her riddles are about.

And the name of the opera itself, Turan duch, Persian being an Indo-European language, daughter, doctar. And Turan is the Persian word for the Chinese empire, so the daughter of China, the Chinese princess. 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 and of course my two colleagues are at institutions that have

some of the magnificent manuscripts and British Library. They are phenomenally beautiful. It's really been a gift for centuries, a gift to artists to outdo each other as they produce new

copies of these epics. And speaking about these incredible manuscripts, we must realize that it's a hugely expensive thing to commission. 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, the day it was put on that paper nowadays, so many centuries later.

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, at the back of their mind, is the idea to transform this poetry, this oral poetry, into something that is written down that will survive through centuries. making sure that it will survive because it's transformed into such a piece of very expensive arts. 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. We have the manuscript tradition that becomes so important. 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. And so everyone knows these stories. 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 Shirin, or so-and-so was like Maginun, or so-and-so was like Hostro or Farhud or whoever it is, has a kind of shorthand. 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. And so then develops this really interesting interface between epic and romance, the narrative poems, and lyric. You know, it all kind of entwines together. And that lyric poetry, the short stuff, is very much often of, not initially, but later, of a kind of lower socioeconomic form of poetry or a poetry that circulates throughout different classes of society in a way that an elite manuscript couldn't, right? Well, I think that's time to conclude

and our producer Simon Tillerson is about to enter with gifts. Tea? Tea would be great. I'll have tea or coffee? I'll have some tea, I think. Three teas, thank you very much. Black, black. That was great. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson

and it's a BBC Studios audio production. One winter's night in 1974, a crime took place that would obsess the nation. We're still looking for Lucan all over the world. Lord Lucan is said to have killed the family nanny and to have attacked his wife before disappearing. Why has this, of all crimes, captured our imagination? It's partly that the evidence is so murky.

As I try to get to the bottom of the case, my preconceptions are blown apart. I mean, this is a pretty weird stuff to have in a box, isn't it? What on earth is this for? The Lucan Obsession with me, Alex von Tunselman, from BBC Radio 4. Listen now on BBC Sounds.