Starting from the 16th century, poets were sometimes not as passionate as in earlier works about their beloveds; instead, they wrote verses threatening to leave their companions and choose a new one. Rejecting the beloved was seen in earlier Persian poetry, but as a sub-genre of ghazal, vasukht, (Rejecting the beloved) became dominant during the Safavid period. Vasukht, which literally means to “burn again”, is written in a vernacular language, and in according to some scholars, is “immoral” and “corrupted”. The scholars usually discuss the immoral and corrupted representation of sexual relationships in vasukht style the result of seeking innovation to produce a literature different from earlier years of Persian poetry. In this paper, I demonstrate that the immorality which the scholars discuss, is due to a system of thought that dealt with gender and sexuality. During the Safavid rule, controlling the men and women’s sexual practices was reinforced. Sever surveillance of sexual practices imposed on both men and women. As a result, the poets found the opportunity to pour out their anger towards the beloved. They did not lament for a beloved irrationally and rejected a complete submission to the beloveds’ will. This gave rise to a more realist image of love relationships, which conveyed sexual scenes more than before.

The idea of a canon of classical poetry has always hovered around Persian literature studies. When the academic field was founded over a century ago, with the works of Ethé and Browne, one unexamined assumption was that there exists a canon of great poets from the course of a millennium—authors whose works are acknowledged as defining the tradition. More recently, scholars such as Shafi‘i-Kadkani and Losensky have challenged this assumption. We now understand, for example, that early scholars like Browne were influenced by an Iranian nationalist perspective on the literary tradition, which led them to downplay the contributions of the Persian poets of Mughal India. But a number of open questions remain, two of which inspire this paper. First, what are we to make of the relatively coherent, and largely unchallenged, canon of poets from the early centuries (ca. 900 CE through at least the death of Hafiz in 1390)? Second, how might we use biographical dictionaries of poets (tazkirahs) as primary sources on canon formation? This paper will focus on the Persian canon as reflected in one unusually transparent text: ‘Abd al-Rahman Jami’s Baharistan (comp. 1487), a wide-ranging work that the poet wrote for the education of his own son. Its seventh chapter is a concise tazkirah—effectively a syllabus for a young member of the Timurid élite to gain familiarity with the great poets of prior centuries. To analyze the Baharistan from this angle, we may take advantage of more developed scholarship on the Western canon. In particular, sociologist John Guillory has used university literature syllabi as sources on the canon’s evolution. This paper will argue that the Baharistan may be leveraged in a similar way. Furthermore, just as Bourdieu’s idea of “cultural capital” has become influential in studies of the Western canon, it may be applied to the Persian tradition. Jami, it will be argued, provides us with a reflection of what Timurid élites considered their inherited canon of Persian poets—a grouping that has largely continued to be accepted up to the present. Defining this canon would give members of the literate classes a shared sense of the body of poetry that they were expected to know, as part of their cultural capital. And this should be a familiar idea, for Thackston and other historians have often remarked upon the importance of a comprehensive education to the Timurids.

The bulk of contemporary scholarship on Mahsati, one of the earliest female poets of New Persian, is found in two books: Fritz Meier’s Die schöne Mahsatī (1963) and Mu‘in ad-Din Mehrābi’s Mahsati-ye ganjeh’i (1994). Each contains a detailed overview of biographical information on the poet, followed by a divān of the poet’s work compiled from a range of 12th- to 19th-century sources. Since these works were published, however, two additional sources containing information on the poet and examples of her work have come to light. The first is the Safineh-ye Tabriz, a manuscript that emerged in the mid-1990s and was published in facsimile form in 2003. The Safineh includes an anthology of quatrains containing 21 poems attributed to Mahsati, at least six of which are previously unattested. A second source, Fakhri Heravi’s Javāher al-‘ajā’eb, appears to have been overlooked by Meier and Mehrābi. This 16th-century work is the first known encyclopedia of female Persian poets, and a short biographical entry on Mahsati is found at the head of the book’s catalogue of poets. My paper examines these new sources for Mahsati and rethinks assumptions about the poet and her impact on the quatrain tradition. I translate the new quatrains in the Safineh and Heravi’s biographical entry on the poet into English, using this material as a jumping-off point to examine unresolved historical issues related to the poet’s life. I demonstrate that biographical sources on Mahsati are informed by two distinct bodies of legend and argue that the poet of the historical record may be an amalgamation of two women whose identities became fused in popular imagination. In addition, I draw on Sunil Sharma’s study of female poets in the Safineh and examine the implications of the fact that a significant number of extant, early quatrains are attributed to women (which is not the case for other forms of classical Persian poetry). These women’s contributions, particularly those of Mahsati, require a new framework for thinking about poetic voice and the persona of the lover in the quatrain and perhaps more broadly.

Contemporary Scholarship has long recognized that Iraj Mirza, in his famous poem Arefnameh, used satire to confront a number of socio-political issues in the Qajar Constitutional era society. However, scholars have rarely engaged with the aspects of Arefnameh’s language which are perceived and often dismissed as crude and vulgar expressions. This paper argues that Arefnameh is a powerful point of resistance against constructed gendered frameworks of “proper” not despite but because of Iraj Mirza’s use of bawdy language. The paper first examines Arefnameh in the context of some additional Constitutional era literature in order to demonstrate that Arefnameh, consistent with the examined literature, reproduces some of the expectations of “proper” Iranian men and women. The familiarity of the gendered norms pulls in the reader; but then, Iraj Mirza’s rich narratives and his unique use of bawdy language completely disrupts the established frameworks of power including that of Islamic religiosity and nationalism. In the past two hundred years, the people of Iran have been subject to the deployment of numerous state-instituted sexual traditions including normative monogamy and heterosexuality in order to regulate and control individuals. Throughout this period, Iran’s Islamic traditionalists did not oppose sexuality; instead, as Foucault stated in regards to Europe, they deployed it as a means to regulate and control individuals. More specifically, sexuality was deployed through what rightly should be considered “invented traditions.” We, as members of the Iranian collectives and as scholars, are still grappling with the “properness” and “improperness” of sexuality in the context of nationalism and what is often presented as an Islamicate culture; for example, whether the Iranian actress, Golshifteh Farahani’s nude photos on the cover of French Magazine Egoïste is a “proper” act for an “Iranian” woman or whether Masih Alinejad’s website “Women’s Stealthy Freedoms”, “Azadi-ye Yavashaki-ye Zanan” is a “real” act of resistance. Arefnameh remains powerfully relevant because it forces us as readers to examine our own perceptions of “proper” and “improper” gendered expectations. The scholarly engagement with Arefnameh, dispels the rigid often internalized regulatory mechanisms and forces us to examine our own notions of “proper” and “improper” in the context of Iran in an ever more interconnected globe.