essay meaning in persian

Hayyim, Sulayman. New Persian-English dictionary, complete and modern, designed to give the English meanings of over 50,000 words, terms, idioms, and proverbs in the Persian language, as well as the transliteration of the words in English characters. Together with a sufficient treatment of all the grammatical features of the Persian Language. [Teheran, Librairie-imprimerie Béroukhim] 1934-1936.

Copyright © 1934 by Librarie-imprimerie Béroukhim. No part of this material in the dictionary may be stored, transmitted, retransmitted, lent, or reproduced in any form or medium without the permission of Mr. Darioush Haim.

New Persian-English dictionary  includes Perso-Arabic and roman alphabets. The option for exclusively searching entry words only encompasses the Perso-Arabic words. The roman transliteration of entry words is not consistently available for entries and so is not searchable.

Scanned pages from the printed dictionary are linked from page views.

The data conversion and presentation of this dictionary was sponsored by the University of Chicago with support from the U.S. Department of Education.

Data for this dictionary was most recently updated in November 2021.

Academic Writing for Academic Persian: A Synthesis of Recent Research

• First Online: 18 September 2021

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• Chiew Hong Ng 10 &
• Yin Ling Cheung 10  

Part of the book series: Language Policy ((LAPO,volume 25))

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Besides enhancing Persian academic reading, in an English only research world, Persian academic stakeholders have to master English and/or Persian academic writing to disseminate findings globally to members of different disciplinary communities through Persian and English language as a lingua franca. This chapter uses the method of qualitative meta-synthesis of 40 empirical studies specifically on academic writing in Persian in refereed journals, book chapters, and conference proceedings published during the period of 2005–2020. An inductive approach to thematic analysis synthesizes (a) the theoretical models for researching Academic Persian in academic writing and (b) the similarities and differences between academic writers from Persian and English for different disciplines. Theoretically and pedagogically, the findings from the comparisons and the systematic content analysis following Sandelowski et al. (Res Nurs Health 20:365–371. https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1098-240X(199708)20:4<365::AID-NUR9>3.0.CO;2-E , 1997) contribute to our understanding of styles and genres specific to academic writing for Academic Persian, in terms of theoretical models for research as well as conventions or expectations of different disciplines in academic writing for Academic Persian.

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Ng, C.H., Cheung, Y.L. (2021). Academic Writing for Academic Persian: A Synthesis of Recent Research. In: Aghdassi, A. (eds) Perspectives on Academic Persian. Language Policy, vol 25. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75610-9_10

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World history

Course: world history   >   unit 2.

• Ancient Persia
• Cyrus the Great and the Achaemenid Empire

The Rise of Persia

• Zoroastrianism
• The Achaemenid Empire
• State-building: The Persian Empire

• The Achaemenid Persian Empire first expanded under the leadership of Cyrus the Great, who utilized a strategy of religious and cultural toleration to maintain order.
• Darius the Great further expanded the empire and introduced reforms such as standard currency and satraps—provincial governors—to rule over smaller regions of the empire on his behalf.
• The increased wealth and power of the empire allowed Darius to construct a brand new capital city, called Persepolis.
• The Achaemenid Empire fell when it was conquered by Alexander the Great.

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Persian Introductions: “My Name is” in Persian and More

As we know from ancient times, human beings have always tried to find a way of communicating with each other. They found out that the key to communication is a language with which to share and express their thoughts and transfer their emotions. Persian is one of the oldest languages spoken by mankind.

Persian is a pluricentric language categorized in the Indo-European family with a 7500-year history. The subgroups of the Persian language are Gilaki, Mazanderani, Kurdish, Talysh, and Balochi.

In Persian language-learning, how to introduce yourself (such as “My name is,” in Persian) is one of the most essential pieces of knowledge you can gain. This, along with other introductions, is important to know if you’re going to travel to a Persian-speaking country, such as Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, or Uzbekistan.

Are you ready to learn how you can introduce yourself in Persian? Then let’s get started!

Table of Contents

• Steps of Self-Introduction in Persian
• Nationality
• Major/ Profession
• Interests and Hobbies
• Cultural Tips
• Conclusion: How PersianPod101.com Can Help You Master Persian

1. Steps of Self-Introduction in Persian

As you learn to introduce yourself in Persian, grammar knowledge is a must.

Persian grammar has formal and informal forms.

The formal/written form, called کتابی ( Ketaabi ) in Persian, is used in books, newspapers, magazines, poems, TV news, and formal speeches. The colloquial/spoken form, called محاوره ای ( mohaavere-i ) is used for everyday conversations.

It’s very important in Iranian culture to know when you need to speak formally or informally, and this depends on the situations and people you face every day.

Now let’s move on to the different ways you can introduce yourself in basic Persian.

2. Greetings

Imagine you’re in a Persian-speaking country and want to start a conversation with a stranger and introduce yourself in Persian words. Just like in any language, the first word you might say is “Hello,” which in Persian is سلام ( salaam ).

In Persian culture, before you introduce yourself in Persian, phrases like this are commonly used:

• “Hello, how are you?” is سلام، حال شما چطور است؟ ( salaam, haale shomaa chetor ast? ) in Persian, which is formal. To say the colloquial form, you only need to change ast meaning “is” to e : سلام، حال شما چطوره؟ ( salaam, haale shomaa chetore? ).

In addition, you can start the conversation with:

• “Hello, nice to meet you,” which is سلام، از ملاقات با شما خوشوقتم ( salaam, az molaaqaat baa shomaa khoshvaqtam ). Its colloquial form is: سلام، از ملاقاتت خوشوقتم ( salaam, az molaaqaatet khoshvaqtam ).

The most basic structure for “My name is” in Persian language is as follows:

• My name is ____. اسم من ____ است. esme man ____ ast.

After greetings , it’s time to start introducing yourself in Persian by saying your name, right? This is very simple. You only need to remember this formula, and replace your name with the blank: اسم من ____ است ( esme man ____ ast ).

Now let’s see how you can say “My name is Sarah” in Persian with the example below:

اسم من سارا است ( esme man saaraa ast .)

After saying your name, you might want to talk about your age. However, in Iran, it’s not common for women to tell their age to men during a conversation, and the secret behind this is that there’s a belief women never get old. But for men, it’s more common to talk about age.

Before stating your age, you’ll need to learn the numbers in Persian , too.

The formula for stating your age in Persian is:

• من _______سال سن دارم man _____ saal sen daaram

You only need to add your age in the blank space. For example, if you’re twenty-five years old and you want to say it in Persian, this is how:

• I am twenty-five years old. من بیست و پنج سال سن دارم. man bist-o-panj saal sen daaram.

• I am forty years old. من چهل سال سن دارم man chehel saal sen daaram.

5. Nationality

After introducing yourself by name, you can talk about your nationality and the country you’re from. In this case, you need to learn the name of countries in Persian . To talk about this, you can simply use one of the forms below:

• I’m from ___. من اهل ______ هستم Man ahle (Your country) hastam.

For example, “I’m from France,” would be: من اهل فرانسه هستم ( man ahle Faraanse hastam .).

• I’m ___ [nationality]. من ______ هستم man (your nationality) hastam.

For example, to say “I’m German,”: من آلمانی هستم. ( man almani hastam. ).

Another example:

• I’m Iranian. من+ایرانی+ هستم: “من ایرانی هستم. man Iraani hastam.

6. Major/ Profession

As you learn to introduce yourself in Persian, vocabulary becomes essential as you delve deeper into a conversation. When it comes to business meetings, introducing your profession is important for further communications. For talking about your job, first of all, you need to learn the name of jobs in Persian . From there, you only have to follow this formula:

• I am a ___ [profession]. من ______ هستم. man ______ hastam.

For example, if you’re a dentist, in Persian it would be like:

• I am a dentist. من دندانپزشک هستم. man dandaanpezeshk hastam.

Or if you’re a lawyer:

• I am a lawyer. من وکیل هستم. man vakil hastam.

The family is one of the most important elements of Iranian culture , and that’s why after introducing yourself, it’s very important to know how to talk about your family and introduce them in Persian.

Also, you might need to know numbers in Persian when talking about your siblings or children.

You can learn some of the most common sentences about family in the table below:

8. Interests and Hobbies

In Iranian culture, it’s not very common to talk about interests and hobbies during the first conversation. But you can talk about them after the first meeting. In order to talk about your interests and hobbies, you only need to remember the Persian formula of this sentence:

• One of my hobbies is (your hobby).: یکی از سرگرمی های من ______است yeki az sargarmihaaye man ___ __ ast.

For example, if your hobby is shopping, you can use this sentence as follows:

• One of my hobbies is shopping. یکی از سرگرمی های من خرید کردن است. Yeki az sargarmihaaye man kharid kardan ast.

If you have pets and would like to talk about them, then you need to know the names of different animals in Persian. Here are a few:

• Cat: گربه ( gorbe )
• Dog: سگ ( sag )
• Mouse: موش ( moosh )
• Bird: پرنده ( parande )
• Parrot: طوطی ( tooti )
• Hamster: همستر ( hamester )
• Rabbit: خرگوش (khargoosh)
• Fish: ماهی ( maahi )
• Tortoise: لاک پشت ( laak posht )

To tell someone what type of pet you have, you can use the sentence:

• I have a (your pet). من یک ______ دارم man yek ______ daaram.

Replace the blank part with your pet name.

For example:

• I have a cat. من یک گربه دارم. man yek gorbe daaram.

10. Cultural Tips

Persians are incredibly nice and hospitable people. In Persian culture, it’s common to shake hands and/or give a hug when introducing yourself. To say “Nice to meet you,” you can use these 3 forms:

1. az didane shomaa khoshvaqtam . (formal) 2. az didanet khoshvaqtam . (casual) 3. khoshvaqtam . (short form)

But don’t forget that it’s not common to shake hands with the opposite gender in Persian culture because of Islamic beliefs. You should only shake hands with the opposite gender if he/she voluntarily raises his/her hand.

Another point that you have to remember is that during conversations, you always need to speak as highly as possible to your interlocutors. This means that during a formal speech, you call your interlocutors with آقا ( aaqaa ) meaning “Mr.” or خانم ( khaanom ) meaning “Mrs./Ms.” This goes after their name, and is used with plural verbs and pronouns.

Further, during a colloquial speech, when you want to call the person you’re talking with, you can add جان ( jaan ), or in casual form جون ( joon ), at the end of his/her name. This word means “dear” in Persian.

• Dear Ali علی جان=علی+جان Ali jaan
• علی جون Ali joon

The latter example is the casual form.

When you want to talk about yourself, you have to be as humble as possible. Instead of using the 1st person pronoun “I” which is من ( man ), you have to call yourself بنده ( bande ), which literally means “slave.” Another option is to use اینجانب ( injaaneb ), which means “this side” in formal speech.

11. Conclusion: How PersianPod101.com Can Help You Master Persian

Do you feel ready to introduce yourself in Persian? Or is there something you’re still struggling with? Let us know in the comments!

If you want to learn Persian fast, you need to find native Persian-speaking friends; Persians are incredibly nice and will be a great help in learning the language quickly. The first step to really mastering Persian is to be in a Persian-speaking society, either physically or through social media, to communicate with Persian people. But don’t forget that the most important factor in learning any language is daily practice.

Other ways you can learn include listening to podcasts, watching Persian series and movies, and reading Persian books or newspapers. Don’t forget that we’re in the 21st century, a time when our lives have become easier due to technological advancements. There are a lot of materials for learning Persian out there, like mobile applications, ebooks, and websites.

You can join PersianPod101.com right now and start your free trial today. You can improve your Persian language skills with our teachers, and use our free resources to practice your grammar and vocabulary.

We hope you learned a lot of practical self-introduction sentences in Persian, and that this article helps you start talking like a native Persian. Best wishes!

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By the Darvazeh Ghazvin Gate, Tehran, late 19th century. Photo by Antoin Sevreguin and courtesy the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford

After the mother tongues

Cultural exchange between iran and india led to the creation of literary histories that inspired modern nationalism.

by Alexander Jabbari   + BIO

Cultural exchange is often assumed to be progressive, but it has neither an inherent politics nor an inevitable outcome. As nationalism rises across the globe, many see ‘cultural exchange’ as the antidote to nationalist xenophobia. Such exchange was, in fact, an integral part of the emergence of national literatures, cultures and identities in Iran and South Asia. Rather than resulting in greater cosmopolitanism, Indo-Iranian exchange fostered modern nationalism.

Today, Persian is the national language of Iran. Although it has a long history there, its national status and close association with the country depend on events in the 19th century. As the Russian Empire swallowed up swathes of Iranian territory in the 1810s and ’20s, and the sclerotic Qajar dynasty ruling Iran proved incapable of resistance, Iranian nationalism emerged to challenge both foreign imperialism and local despotism.

Photograph of the Shah Mosque, Persia, in the late 19th century. Courtesy the V&A Museum, London

By the end of the 19th century, Iranian intellectuals were transforming Persian from the lingua franca of a centreless Persianate world spanning much of Asia into the language of national identity in the nation-state of Iran. Nationalist modernisers made reforming the Persian language a central project, whether they were democratic revolutionaries of the Constitutional Revolution (1905-11) or the authoritarian shahs of the Pahlavi dynasty (1925-79). Drawing on modern literary histories of Persian written by both Iranians and Indians, they refashioned Persian into a national language, and Persian literature into national heritage, positioning Iran as the proprietor of the Persianate tradition.

The Persian language we know today was born out of interaction with Arabic and Islam. Its precursors parsig and dari – now identified together as ‘Middle Persian’ – had been used by Zoroastrian priests and by the Sasanians, the Iranian dynasty that fell to the 7th-century Arab-Islamic conquest of Iran. Within a couple of centuries after the rise of Islam, the Persian language took on a new identity. It developed a new Arabic-derived script; large amounts of Arabic loanwords; a literature heavily indebted to Arabic forms, metres and imagery; and a new name, farsi , also influenced by Arabic. (The word farsi reflects, in part, the Arabic pronunciation of the earlier parsig. ) Linguists call this Arabised form of the language ‘New Persian’. In the 9th century, Muslim empires began patronising New Persian as a vehicle for Islam, and spread it to the Indian subcontinent.

Modern literary histories offered a different narrative of Persian. Twentieth-century Iranian nationalists sought to distinguish the Persian language from Arabic. For them, the language was part of a continuous Iranian civilisation stretching back to the Achaemenids (the dynasty that ruled c 700- 330 BCE), encompassing the ‘Old Persian’ of the Achaemenid inscriptions, the ‘Middle Persian’ of the Sasanian court ( c 225- 650 CE), and the ‘New Persian’ that followed the rise of Islam and endured to the present day. Iranian nationalists like the great literary historian Muhammad-Taqi Bahar (1886-1951) emphasised the continuity of Persian over time, uninterrupted by Islam – and, by extension, Arabic – which they saw as belonging to a distinct civilisation.

Bahar’s civilisational paradigm, predicated on the notion of linguistic integrity and the association of a people with its language, came from European philology. His efforts to show Iranian continuity before and after the rise of Islam were a nationalist project, shaped by European Orientalism, especially its new philological knowledge of ancient Iranian languages. These 19th-century European philologists, and Bahar and many others who learned from their work, grouped Persian with the Indo-European family of languages distinct from Semitic languages like Arabic. Rather than considering New Persian as a mixed language with Arabic elements, they built a narrative that emphasised the independence and continuity of Persian over the course of centuries. In doing so, they followed a paradigm established by 19th-century Germanic linguists whose scholarship classified ‘Old English’ (what had been known as the Anglo-Saxon language) and ‘Middle English’ as precursors to modern English.

B ahar and other 19th-century Iranian nationalists were not the only ones interested in the history of the Persian language and literature. Indian Muslims were also concerned with the Persianate literary heritage. Persian had been a language of power and learning in South Asia since the 11th century – and they had as much of a claim to it as did Iranians.

A tree-lined street in Shiraz, Iran, c 1895-1900. Photo by Antoin Sevruguin. Courtesy the V&A Museum, London

The relationship between Persian and a local language of South Asia that would later be called Urdu mirrored the earlier relationship between Arabic and Persian. The elements that would constitute Urdu’s identity as a language were largely borrowed from Persian. Chief among them is the Perso-Arabic script in which Urdu is written, as opposed to the Devanagari script that would come to be associated with Hindi. Urdu also has tens of thousands of Persian loanwords, like dost (friend) and dil (heart), including Persian words of Arabic origin, like zarūrat (necessity). Moreover, Urdu’s linguistic identity was connected to literature in Perso-Arabic forms like the ghazal , an amorous form of lyric poetry.

South Asian Muslim literary historians constructed a very different kind of history of Urdu than the Iranians had of Persian. Contrary to the Iranian story of continuity before and after the coming of Islam, South Asians emphasised rupture and hybridity as key to Urdu’s origins. According to this telling, Urdu began with the arrival of Muslim empires in the Indian subcontinent in the 11th and 12th centuries. Though the language had been used by people of various religions, from the 19th century onwards South Asians increasingly saw Urdu as the language of North Indian Muslims, in contrast to Hindi, associated with Hindus. Rather than conceiving of their language in terms of distinction from others, Indian Muslims embraced hybridity. Many still regard Urdu as inherently a mélange of languages: an Indic element (often described as Hindi) as well as Persian, Arabic and Turkish. The inclusion of Turkish in Urdu’s linguistic pedigree is especially notable.

Iranian nationalists aligned themselves with the new I ndo-European philology

The name of the language ‘ urdu ’ comes from a Turkic word for ‘camp’, and the English word ‘horde’ shares its Turkic etymology. Aside from this word, however, Turkic elements in Urdu are few and far between. One study found about 100 Turkic words, most of them obscure, out of 54,000 in a major Urdu dictionary. For comparison, English has about as many loanwords from Japanese (like ‘tycoon’ and ‘tsunami’).

Claiming that Urdu was a mix that included Turkish allowed Indian Muslims to claim a genealogy that connected them, in a way, to the Ottoman Empire at a time when many Muslims longed for a powerful caliphate to counter the weakness they felt living under British rule.

For modern Indian Muslims, treating ‘Arabic’ as a separate contributor to Urdu from ‘Persian’ was another important part of giving Urdu a proper Muslim pedigree, a connection to ‘Muslim lands’ like the Arab world. In fact, Urdu’s many Arabic loanwords were borrowed through Persian, and they still bore the traces of Persian pronunciation and spelling. Thus, words like zarūrat (necessity) – ultimately from Arabic ḍarūra , but borrowed into Urdu from Persian zarūrat – came to be conceived of as constituting the ‘Arabic element’ in Urdu. To make another comparison with English, this is a little like insisting that the English word ‘ramen’ (from Japanese rāmen ) should be considered a Chinese rather than Japanese loanword into English, since the Japanese word ultimately derives from the Mandarin lāmiàn .

Just as Indian Muslims were claiming Turkish, Arabic and Persian as the Islamic progenitors of Urdu in the 19th and early 20th centuries, these same languages were being adopted as vehicles for secular nationalist projects in the countries where they were spoken. So these two historical narratives – Persian discreteness and Urdu hybridity – took place at the same time and are contradictory, reflecting different relationships to Orientalist forms of knowledge about language.

Iranian nationalists aligned themselves with the new Indo-European philology, reading national history through linguistics. So, like the European linguists who established an evolutionary approach to language, the Iranians emphasised continuity, in this case with the pre-Islamic period and a linear development from Old to Middle to New Persian. British colonialism and Hindu nationalism made a narrative of enduring linguistic history unavailable to Indian Muslims. The British identified Sanskrit as the classical heritage of the Hindus, whereas they associated Muslims with Arabic and Persian textual heritage that came to the subcontinent from the Middle East and Central Asia. As such, they situated Hindi, and the Hindus, as the inheritors of Sanskrit, heirs to an enduring and indigenous ‘Aryan’ civilisation, and positioned Urdu-speaking Muslims as foreigners, outsiders to India.

A s early as the 1850s, scholars proposed that the ancestors of the first Sanskrit speakers had come to India from elsewhere. More recently, genetic evidence has helped establish a scholarly consensus around the migration of this community from Central Asia to India. Nonetheless, the idea of ‘indigenous’ Hindus and ‘foreign’ Muslims proved much more difficult to dislodge. The notion of irreconcilable difference between these Hindus and Muslims contributed to the 1947 partition of British India into the independent nations of India and Pakistan: the greatest mass migration in human history, leaving a million or more dead and 15 million displaced.

The Iranian nationalists’ narrative of Persian indigeneity was similarly ethnocentric. It became the cornerstone of the 20th-century Pahlavi dynasty’s ideology, which marginalised Iran’s minorities such as the Arabs. Identification with ‘Aryanism’ remains common to this day in Iran.

A family group gathered around a kursi table in Iran, c 1895-1900. Photo by Antoin Sevruguin. Courtesy the V&A Museum, London

All of this is to show that modern nationalist narratives about language departed radically from how Iranians and Indians had for centuries before conceived of language, of themselves, and of their relationship to Persian. From about 900 to 1900, Persian had been a cosmopolitan lingua franca, a common idiom of learning and statecraft across much of the eastern Islamic world, from the Balkans to China. Rigid hierarchies, among them age, gender, social status and class, stratified Persianate societies. They were cosmopolitan, however, in the sense that ethnicity and language did not form the basis of hierarchies; there were no special privileges reserved for native Persian speakers. Indeed, before the 19th century, no such concept of ‘native speaker’ or ‘mother tongue’ existed, and having a Persian education was much more significant than speaking Persian at home. There had been no geographic core or centre to the Persianate world. If anything, it could be argued that its heart lay in India, where various dynasties like the Mughals patronised the language, outpacing even Iran in Persian literary production.

They shared space in shrines and seminaries, and worked and socialised in the same circles

Like Russian imperialism in Iran, British colonial rule in India precipitated deep social and political change. Before the 19th century, no one thought of Persian or Urdu as exclusively associated with any particular religious group. But British colonial rule brought with it the association between a people and a language and helped establish Urdu as the language of Muslim patrimony in northern India. Initially, the British East India Company had continued the centuries-long practice of patronising Persian, but in the 1830s the logic of modern nationalism increasingly tied Persian to Iran, disqualifying it as a ‘local’ language for northern India. After the failed anticolonial revolt of 1857, the British feared they had lost touch with ‘ordinary’ Indians. This reinforced the shift away from British rule through the written Persian tradition, coming to favour instead languages they deemed ‘vernacular’, grounded in everyday life in India, such as Urdu.

Such staggering losses of power and territory to European empires in the 19th century provoked much soul-searching among Muslim intellectuals in Iran and India. A few embraced partial or total Westernisation, seeing the Persianate tradition as dead weight preventing them from surviving the onslaught of European power. The Iranian Sayyid Hasan Taqizadah (1878-1970), for example, called for abandoning Persian’s Arabic-based script in favour of the Latin alphabet. Other modernisers, like the Indian Muslim scholar Shibli Nuʿmani (1857-1914), took a more nuanced position. They believed that tradition had to be reformed in order to survive the conditions of modernity, but that they could also draw on that heritage as a resource in the process of modernisation. This kind of middle-ground approach prevailed in Iran and India, where intellectuals sought to develop modern, national cultures.

Importantly, Iranian and Indian reformers shared both a Persianate literary tradition and the condition of colonial subjugation. Together, this modern experience of colonialism and a literary heritage in common provided the basis for a shared Indo-Iranian project of modernisation. Muslim intellectuals – and their work and ideas – circulated between Iran and India in the first half of the 20th century, building on enduring cosmopolitan networks of Persianate exchange. Urdu-speaking intellectuals in northern India were typically literate in Persian and were attuned to developments in Iran. Key works were translated from Urdu to Persian and vice versa. The transmission of knowledge between the two languages was not only literary. Iranians and Indians travelled between the two countries, aided by new technologies like the steamship, and physical infrastructure like drivable roads connecting the countries. They shared space in shrines and seminaries, and worked and socialised in the same circles. Multilingual travellers acted as vernacular translators, spreading ideas learned during these international encounters to other interlocutors.

A river and bridge, Rasht, northern Iran c 1895-1900. Photo by Antoin Sevruguin. Courtesy the V&A Museum, London

Composing literary history was a key project for reconciling modernity with tradition, a way to manage the contradictions between the old works of literature and culture which they revered as national heritage and the new values held by modernisers. Amorous poetry posed one such contradiction. Homoerotic and sometimes bawdy poetry made up much of the classical Persian canon. Beloved poetic masters like Rumi and Saʿdi wrote ghazal s and other poems celebrating, in frank, unabashed lyrical form the love of young men. But Indian Muslim reformers, influenced by a kind of ersatz Victorianism exported by the British to India, valued chastity and disparaged homoeroticism.

In his Urdu-language history of Persian poetry, Nuʿmani pathologised homoerotic practices, discussing them as a disease to be diagnosed and treated. This new literary prudery was shared by Iranians as well. Bahar, for example, knew no Urdu, but learned of developments in South Asian Muslim thought (like the work of Nuʿmani) through conversations with friends like Daʿi al-Islam Isfahani (an Iranian who knew Urdu) and ʿAbd al-Hamid ʿIrfani (an Indian-cum-Pakistani who knew Persian). In his literary history, Bahar gave a very similar, pathologising account of the origins of homoeroticism to Nuʿmani’s. Overall, when dealing with lascivious poetry, Iranian and Indian literary historians shared consistently puritan conventions.

A t the end of the 19th century and the first several decades of the 20th, Persian literary history emerged out of scholarly exchange between Iranians (Bahar, for example) and Indian Muslims (Nuʿmani, for example) writing in Persian and Urdu. Intellectuals in both countries drew on the same Persian literary tradition – and on each other – in seeking local models for modern writing. For example, they took up an 11th-century Persian epic poem, Abu al-Qasim Firdawsi’s Shahnamah or ‘Book of Kings’, as a source for a modern historical method. Considering the Shahnamah to be history was nothing new, but what they meant by ‘history’ was novel. Indian and Iranian modernisers praised the Shahnamah for its historical accuracy and precision – new historiographic values that differed from premodern historians’ emphasis on rhetoric and style. The historians of Firdawsi’s time were less concerned with the facts of history themselves than with the moral meaning to be made of that information.

Literary historians saw their task as narrating the story of a people, the history of a nation, through the history of its literature, which they understood as the recorded history of the language. As such, writing literary history was a nationalist endeavour. Modern literary historians made use of other medieval sources towards this end, reworking traditional biographical anthologies of poets into linear narratives of the development of Persian poetry.

The anthologies ( tazkirah ) treated each poet separately through independently bounded entries. But modernisers sought to offer a story of national progress through the history of language and literature. While the tazkirah s remained their major sources of information, they structured their modern literary histories with a new sense of linear, progressive time. This made it possible to treat all of Persian literature – including material in pre-Islamic languages like Middle Persian – as a single, continuous whole. This, too, was a collaborative endeavour. Nuʿmani’s Urdu-language Poetry of the Persians was one of the first texts to pioneer a model of literary history by introducing Orientalist philology, a linear sense of time, and modern historiographic methodology to the traditional tazkirah format. It would go on to influence Iranian litterateurs such as Bahar, as well as European Orientalists like E G Browne.

Culture is an empty vessel that can be attached to all kinds of political projects

There was a great irony to this cosmopolitan exchange between Iranians and Indians, however. The literary histories it produced helped to consolidate a nationalist logic that associated Persian language and literature almost exclusively with Iran. Iranians, taking on a modern national identity, laid claim to Persian as their patrimony. Indian Muslims also conceived of Persian as part of their heritage, yet Iran took centre-stage even in Indian accounts of Persian literature. This is ironic, considering how India produced more Persian literature than did Iran at some points in history. Even as Urdu became a vehicle for the Persianate tradition in India, Indian Muslims did not challenge the nationalist logic linking Persian to Iran. Instead, many embraced it, even tying Indian Muslims’ linguistic identity to Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East. In so doing, they wound up writing themselves out of the history of Persian literature – and out of belonging to India.

Iranians’ and Indian Muslims’ different relationships to European philology explain why the two conceived of their languages in such contrary ways. This divergence reveals the historical contingency of the two narratives. It was not inevitable that Iranian nationalism would adopt the philological model of linguistic continuity, which is made clear by comparison with Indian Muslims’ conception of Urdu as a mixed language.

This history leads to several conclusions.

First, what appears today as national culture – unique and discretely bounded – is the product of exchange with others from beyond the borders of the nation-state. This is certainly true of modern Iran. Nationalism, and what I call ‘Persianate modernity’, is the veneer that hides the very conditions of cosmopolitan cooperation and exchange that generated national culture in the first place. This suggests something about culture: it has no inherent politics, no predetermined trajectory.

Culture is an empty vessel that can be attached to all kinds of political projects. Cross-cultural exchange similarly can serve reactionary ends just as well as progressive ones. At the turn of the 20th century, exchange between Iranians and Indians served to alienate Indians from the history of Persian literature. More recently, the idea of Indian Muslims’ cosmopolitan origins has marked them as outsiders to India – a narrative adopted by India’s prime minister Narendra Modi and other Hindu nationalists to help marginalise and disenfranchise millions of Indian Muslims.

Nor is ‘indigeneity’ inherently progressive, a fact also illustrated by India’s Hindu nationalists. They now describe themselves as an indigenous population besieged by Muslim allochthones, ie foreign intruders. Indeed, we find the language of indigeneity taken up by ethno-nationalists elsewhere in the contemporary world – from the European Right, claiming to defend its indigenous culture against foreign refugees, to Jewish supremacists in Israel, who insist on their own indigenous roots in the land.

The solutions to the ills of nationalism, therefore, cannot be found in abstractions like culture or distinctions like ‘indigenous’ vs ‘settler’. Rather than forging connections based on a shared past, we must imagine together a shared future.

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Persian Poets and Literature

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Persian literature is usually dated to the Behistun Inscription of Darius I (the Great, r. 522-486 BCE) at c. 522 BCE. It is generally understood that a significant body of work was created by Persian writers between that time and c. 330 BCE when Alexander the Great destroyed the library at Persepolis when he set fire to the city .

Many scholars, therefore, claim there is no “Persian Literature ” prior to the Sassanian Empire (224-651) or date its beginnings to c. 750 with the rise of the Abbasid Dynasty whose poets preserved ancient tales from pre-Islamic Iran. Those who date Persian literature to the Sassanian Period cite the reign of Shapur I (240-270) as its inception as he encouraged literacy by having the Avesta , previously an oral text, committed to writing .

Although “literature” is commonly understood to refer to works of the imagination, Persian literature includes scripture, medical treatises, histories, and many other kinds of writings. A religious text like the Avesta, included below, might not be defined as “literature” in another culture but is regarded as such in Persian literature owing to its literary style and lyricism.

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Dictionary English - Persian

Translations from dictionary english - persian, definitions, grammar.

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Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

The achaemenid persian empire (550–330 b.c.).

Fluted bowl

Vessel terminating in the forepart of a fantastic leonine creature

Relief: two servants bearing food and drink

Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art , The Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 2004

The Achaemenid Persian empire was the largest that the ancient world had seen, extending from Anatolia and Egypt across western Asia to northern India and Central Asia. Its formation began in 550 B.C., when King Astyages of Media, who dominated much of Iran and eastern Anatolia (Turkey), was defeated by his southern neighbor Cyrus II (“the Great”), king of Persia (r. 559–530 B.C.). This upset the balance of power in the Near East. The Lydians of western Anatolia under King Croesus took advantage of the fall of Media to push east and clashed with Persian forces. The Lydian army withdrew for the winter but the Persians advanced to the Lydian capital at Sardis , which fell after a two-week siege. The Lydians had been allied with the Babylonians and Egyptians and Cyrus now had to confront these major powers. The Babylonian empire controlled Mesopotamia and the eastern Mediterranean. In 539 B.C., Persian forces defeated the Babylonian army at the site of Opis, east of the Tigris. Cyrus entered Babylon and presented himself as a traditional Mesopotamian monarch, restoring temples and releasing political prisoners. The one western power that remained unconquered in Cyrus’ lightning campaigns was Egypt. It was left to his son Cambyses to rout the Egyptian forces in the eastern Nile Delta in 525 B.C. After a ten-day siege, Egypt’s ancient capital Memphis fell to the Persians.

A crisis at court forced Cambyses to return to Persia but he died en route and Darius I (“the Great”) emerged as king (r. 522–486 B.C.), claiming in his inscriptions that a certain “Achaemenes” was his ancestor. Under Darius the empire was stabilized, with roads for communication and a system of governors (satraps) established. He added northwestern India to the Achaemenid realm and initiated two major building projects: the construction of royal buildings at Susa and the creation of the new dynastic center of Persepolis , the buildings of which were decorated by Darius and his successors with stone reliefs and carvings. These show tributaries from different parts of the empire processing toward the enthroned king or conveying the king’s throne. The impression is of a harmonious empire supported by its numerous peoples. Darius also consolidated Persia’s western conquests in the Aegean. However, in 498 B.C., the eastern Greek Ionian cities, supported in part by Athens, revolted. It took the Persians four years to crush the rebellion, although an attack against mainland Greece was repulsed at Marathon in 490 B.C.

Darius’ son Xerxes (r. 486–465 B.C.) attempted to force the mainland Greeks to acknowledge Persian power, but Sparta and Athens refused to give way. Xerxes led his sea and land forces against Greece in 480 B.C., defeating the Spartans at the battle of Thermopylae and sacking Athens. However, the Greeks won a victory against the Persian navy in the straits of Salamis in 479 B.C. It is possible that at this point a serious revolt broke out in the strategically crucial province of Babylonia. Xerxes quickly left Greece and successfully crushed the Babylonian rebellion. However, the Persian army he left behind was defeated by the Greeks at the Battle of Plataea in 479 B.C.

Much of our evidence for Persian history is dependent on contemporary Greek sources and later classical writers, whose main focus is the relations between Persia and the Greek states, as well as tales of Persian court intrigues, moral decadence, and unrestrained luxury. From these we learn that Xerxes was assassinated and was succeeded by one of his sons, who took the name Artaxerxes I (r. 465–424 B.C). During his reign, revolts in Egypt were crushed and garrisons established in the Levant. The empire remained largely intact under Darius II (r. 423–405 B.C), but Egypt claimed independence during the reign of Artaxerxes II (r. 405–359 B.C). Although Artaxerxes II had the longest reign of all the Persian kings, we know very little about him. Writing in the early second century A.D., Plutarch describes him as a sympathetic ruler and courageous warrior. With his successor, Artaxerxes III (r. 358–338 B.C), Egypt was reconquered, but the king was assassinated and his son was crowned as Artaxerxes IV (r. 338–336 B.C.). He, too, was murdered and replaced by Darius III (r. 336–330 B.C.), a second cousin, who faced the armies of Alexander III of Macedon (“the Great”) . Ultimately Darius III was murdered by one of his own generals, and Alexander claimed the Persian empire. However, the fact that Alexander had to fight every inch of the way, taking every province by force, demonstrates the extraordinary solidarity of the Persian empire and that, despite the repeated court intrigues, it was certainly not in a state of decay.

Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art. “The Achaemenid Persian Empire (550–330 B.C.).” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/acha/hd_acha.htm (October 2004)

Further Reading

Briant, Pierre. From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire. Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2002.

Wiesehöfer, Josef. Ancient Persia: From 550 BC to 650 AD . London: I.B. Tauris, 1996.

Additional Essays by Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art

• Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art. “ The Hittites .” (October 2002)
• Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art. “ The Halaf Period (6500–5500 B.C.) .” (October 2003)
• Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art. “ The Ubaid Period (5500–4000 B.C.) .” (October 2003)
• Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art. “ Ur: The Royal Graves .” (October 2003)
• Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art. “ Ur: The Ziggurat .” (October 2002)
• Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art. “ Uruk: The First City .” (October 2003)
• Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art. “ Ebla in the Third Millennium B.C. .” (October 2002)
• Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art. “ Ugarit .” (October 2004)
• Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art. “ Animals in Ancient Near Eastern Art .” (February 2014)
• Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art. “ Urartu .” (October 2004)
• Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art. “ Trade between the Romans and the Empires of Asia .” (October 2000)
• Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art. “ The Parthian Empire (247 B.C.–224 A.D.) .” (originally published October 2000, last updated November 2016)
• Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art. “ Nabataean Kingdom and Petra .” (October 2000)
• Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art. “ Palmyra .” (October 2000)
• Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art. “ Art of the First Cities in the Third Millennium B.C. .” (October 2004)
• Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art. “ The Sasanian Empire (224–651 A.D.) .” (originally published October 2003, last updated April 2016)
• Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art. “ Colossal Temples of the Roman Near East .” (October 2003)
• Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art. “ Assyria, 1365–609 B.C. .” (originally published October 2004, last revised April 2010)
• Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art. “ Lydia and Phrygia .” (October 2004)
• Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art. “ The Akkadian Period (ca. 2350–2150 B.C.) .” (October 2004)
• Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art. “ The Year One .” (October 2004)
• Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art. “ Early Dynastic Sculpture, 2900–2350 B.C. .” (October 2004)
• Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art. “ Early Excavations in Assyria .” (October 2004; updated August 2021)
• Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art. “ Trade Routes between Europe and Asia during Antiquity .” (October 2000)
• Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art. “ Phrygia, Gordion, and King Midas in the Late Eighth Century B.C. .” (October 2004)
• Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art. “ Trade between Arabia and the Empires of Rome and Asia .” (October 2000)
• Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art. “ The Nahal Mishmar Treasure .” (October 2004)
• Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art. “ The Phoenicians (1500–300 B.C.) .” (October 2004)
• Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art. “ The Seleucid Empire (323–64 B.C.) .” (October 2004)

Related Essays

• Egypt in the Late Period (ca. 664–332 B.C.)
• Ernst Emil Herzfeld (1879–1948) in Persepolis
• Lydia and Phrygia
• The Rise of Macedon and the Conquests of Alexander the Great
• Tiraz : Inscribed Textiles from the Early Islamic Period
• Art and Craft in Archaic Sparta
• Art of the Hellenistic Age and the Hellenistic Tradition
• Artists of the Saqqakhana Movement
• Assyria, 1365–609 B.C.
• Classical Cyprus (ca. 480–ca. 310 B.C.)
• Egypt in the Ptolemaic Period
• Geometric and Archaic Cyprus
• Greek Art in the Archaic Period
• Hellenistic and Roman Cyprus
• Hellenistic Jewelry
• The Middle Babylonian / Kassite Period (ca. 1595–1155 B.C.) in Mesopotamia
• Nineteenth-Century Iran: Continuity and Revivalism
• The Parthian Empire (247 B.C.–224 A.D.)
• Phrygia, Gordion, and King Midas in the Late Eighth Century B.C.
• Theseus, Hero of Athens

List of Rulers

• List of Rulers of Mesopotamia
• List of Rulers of Ancient Egypt and Nubia
• List of Rulers of the Ancient Greek World
• Anatolia and the Caucasus (Asia Minor), 1000 B.C.–1 A.D.
• Ancient Greece, 1000 B.C.–1 A.D.
• Central and North Asia, 1000 B.C.–1 A.D.
• The Eastern Mediterranean and Syria, 1000 B.C.–1 A.D.
• Egypt, 1000 B.C.–1 A.D.
• Iran, 1000 B.C.–1 A.D.
• Mesopotamia, 1000 B.C.–1 A.D.
• South Asia, 1000 B.C.–1 A.D.
• 4th Century B.C.
• 5th Century B.C.
• 6th Century B.C.
• Achaemenid Empire
• Anatolia and the Caucasus
• Ancient Egyptian Art
• Ancient Near Eastern Art
• Architectural Element
• Architecture
• Babylonian Art
• Balkan Peninsula
• Central and North Asia
• Eastern Mediterranean
• Greek Literature / Poetry
• Hellenistic Period
• Late Period of Egypt
• North Africa
• Relief Sculpture

A History of Persian Literature

Of all the literary and artistic accomplishments of the Persian civilization in its long history, by far the most significant and outstanding is Persian poetry. The jewels in the crown of Persian cultural achievements are the great classical Persian poets Ferdowsi, Omar Khayyam, Nezami, Rumi, Sa’di and Hafez.

Accordingly, much has been written on these and other great Persian poets, both in Iran and elsewhere. Sir William Jones (1746-1794) and Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall (1774-1856) were among the first scholars in the West to introduce the public to extensive specimens of Persian poetry through their translations and commentaries. The first systematic survey of Persian poetry, however, appeared in 1904 by the German scholar Hermann Ethé in Grundriss der iranischen Philologie II .

A number of pioneering works also appeared in Iran itself in the course of the 20th century. These include Badi’-al-Zaman Foruzanfar’s Sokhan va sokhanvaran ( On Poetry and Poets , 1929-1933), Mohammad-Taqi Bahar’s Sabk-shenasi ( Varieties of Style in Persian Prose ) in three volumes (1942) and a number of monographs on individual poets and writers. The most detailed treatment of the subject in Persian is Dhabih-Allah Safa’s Tarikh-e adabiyyat dar Iran ( Literary History of Iran ) in five volumes and eight parts (1953-1979). It studies Persian poetry and prose in the context of their political, social, religious, and cultural background, from the rise of Islam to the 18th century.

Nevertheless, it cannot be said that Persian literature has received the attention it deserves, and the works of the multitude of poets who have written in Persian in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and, in particular, in the Indian subcontinent and Anatolia, have remained understudied.

A History of Persian Literature contributes to the broadening of the literary, artistic, and intellectual horizons of its readership and brings to the fore the account of an extremely rich literature with a longstanding tradition that differs from Western literature in important ways.

The Significance of Persian Literature

The significance of Persian literature can also be gauged from its impact on some of the major European and American literary figures, such as Goethe, Matthew Arnold, and Emerson, to name only a few. E. M. Forster, the British novelist and critic, had this to say about Persian poetry when discussing English poetry: “Judged by its prose, English literature would not stand in the first rank. It is its poetry that raises it to the level of Greek, Persian or French.” Among the works that discuss the influence of Persian literature in the West, one may mention John D. Yohannan’s Persian Poetry in England and America: A Two Hundred Year History .

Judged by its prose, English literature would not stand in the first rank. It is its poetry that raises it to the level of Greek, Persian or French. – E. M. Forster

The demand for informative sources on Persian literature and the need for readable translations have assumed a new urgency in the context of developments that have taken place since the second half of the 20th century, with the growing interest in world literature in universities and elsewhere. The lone voices of a few perceptive earlier scholars like Sir William Jones, objecting to the kind of cultural parochialism that could see nothing of value beyond a knowledge of the classical literature of Greece and Rome, has now become a most powerful and persuasive chorus, and the dominant trend in most faculties of arts and humanities. In most campuses a far more vigorous attempt is being made to establish undergraduate courses encompassing literatures such as Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Arabic, and Persian.

In short, Persian literature has a great deal to offer to students and general readers. A History of Persian Literature will provide a much-needed resource by offering a comprehensive survey, including the hitherto less-explored facets of this literature in different regions, as well as translations of specimens of both the poetry and the prose along with helpful commentaries. In the process, it will both inform and enlarge this international readership.

Scope and Duration

Of the 20 envisaged volumes of A History of Persian Literature , nine have been published (I, II, III, V, IX, X, XI and XVII, XVIII, 2009-2023). It is proposed to complete the project within 10 years.

VOLUME TITLES I. General Introduction to Persian Literature (Ed. J.T.P. de Bruijn, 2009) II. Persian Lyric Poetry in the Classical Era, 800-1500: Ghazal, Panegerics and Quatrains (Ed. Ehsan Yarshater, 2019) III. Persian Narrative Poetry in the Classical Era, 800-1500: Romantic and Didactic Genres (Ed. Mohsen Ashtiany, 2023) IV. Heroic Epic: The Shahnameh and Its Legacy V. Persian Prose (Ed. Bo Utas, 2021) VI. Religious and Mystical Literature VII. Persian Poetry, 1500-1900: From the Safavids to the Dawn of the Constitutional Movement VIII. Persian Poetry in the Indian Subcontinent: Divans, Biographical Anthologies and Literary Criticism IX. Persian Literature from Outside Iran: The Indian Subcontinent, Anatolia, Central Asia, and in Judeo-Persian (Ed. John R. Perry, 2018) X. Persian Historiography (Ed. Charles Melville, 2012) XI. Literature of the Early Twentieth Century: From the Constitutional Period to Reza Shah (Ed. Ali-Asghar Seyed-Gohrab, 2015) XII. Modern Persian Poetry, 1940 to the Present: Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan XIII. Modern Fiction and Drama XIV. Biographies of the Poets and Writers of the Classical Period XV. Biographies of the Poets and Writers of the Modern Period; Literary Terms XVI. General Index

COMPANION VOLUMES TO A HISTORY OF PERSIAN LITERATURE XVII. Companion Volume I: The Literature of Pre-Islamic Iran (Ed. Ronald E. Emmerick & Maria Macuch, 2009) XVIII. Companion Volume II: Oral Literature of Iranian Languages: Kurdish, Pashto, Balochi, Ossetic, Persian and Tajik (Ed. Philip G. Kreyenbroek & Ulrich Marzolph, 2010)

ANTHOLOGIES XIX. Anthology I: A Selection of Persian Poems in English Translation XX. Anthology II: A Selection of Persian Prose in English Translation

Friday essay: why traditional Persian music should be known to the world

Doctoral Candidate, Comparative Literature, Religion and History of Philosophy, University of Sydney

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Darius Sepehri does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Weaving through the rooms of my Brisbane childhood home, carried on the languid, humid, sub-tropical air, was the sound of an Iranian tenor singing 800-year old Persian poems of love. I was in primary school, playing cricket in the streets, riding a BMX with the other boys, stuck at home reading during the heavy rains typical of Queensland.

I had an active, exterior life that was lived on Australian terms, suburban, grounded in English, and easy-going. At the same time, thanks to my mother’s listening habits, courtesy of the tapes and CDs she bought back from trips to Iran, my interior life was being invisibly nourished by something radically other, by a soundscape invoking a world beyond the mundane, and an aesthetic dimension rooted in a sense of transcendence and spiritual longing for the Divine.

I was listening to traditional Persian music ( museghi-ye sonnati ). This music is the indigenous music of Iran, although it is also performed and maintained in Persian-speaking countries such as Afghanistan and Tajikistan. It has ancient connections to traditional Indian music, as well as more recent ones to Arabic and Turkish modal music.

It is a world-class art that incorporates not only performance but also the science and theory of music and sound. It is, therefore, a body of knowledge, encoding a way of knowing the world and being. The following track is something of what I might have heard in my childhood:

Playing kamancheh, a bowed spike-fiddle, is Kayhān Kalhor, while the singer is the undisputed master of vocals in Persian music, ostād (meaning “maestro”) Mohammad Reza Shajarian . He is singing in the classical vocal style, āvāz , that is the heart of this music.

A non-metric style placing great creative demands on singers, āvāz is improvised along set melodic lines memorised by heart. Without a fixed beat, the vocalist sings with rhythms resembling speech, but speech heightened to an intensified state. This style bears great similarity to the sean-nos style of Ireland , which is also ornamented and non-rhythmic, although sean-nos is totally unaccompanied, unlike Persian āvāz in which the singer is often accompanied by a single stringed instrument.

A somewhat more unorthodox example of āvāz is the following, sung by Alireza Ghorbāni with a synthesised sound underneath his voice rather than any Persian instrument. It creates a hypnotic effect.

Even listeners unfamiliar with Persian music should be able to hear the intensity in the voices of Ghorbāni and Shajarian. Passion is paramount, but passion refined and sublimated so that longing and desire break through ordinary habituated consciousness to point to something unlimited, such as an overwhelming sense of the beyond.

Beyond media contrived images

The traditional poetry and music of Iran aim to create a threshold space, a zone of mystery; a psycho-emotional terrain of suffering, melancholy, death and loss, but also of authentic joy, ecstasy, and hope.

Iranians have tasted much suffering throughout their history, and are wary of being stripped of their identity. Currently, economic sanctions are being re-applied to Iran’s entire civilian population , depriving millions of ordinary people of medicine and essentials .

Traditional Persian music matters in this context of escalating aggression because it is a rich, creative artform, still living and cherished. It binds Iranians in a shared culture that constitutes the authentic life of the people and the country, as opposed to the contrived image of Iran presented in Western media that begins and ends with politics.

This is a thoroughly soulful music, akin not in form but in soulfulness with artists such as John Coltrane or Van Morrison. In the Persian tradition, music is not only for pleasure, but has a transformative purpose. Sound is meant to effect a change in the listener’s consciousness, to bring them into a spiritual state ( hāl ).

Like other ancient systems, in the Persian tradition the perfection of the formal structures of beautiful music is believed to come from God, as in the Pythagorean phrase, the “music of the spheres.”

Because traditional Persian music has been heavily influenced by Sufism, the mystical aspect of Islam, many rhythmic performances ( tasnif , as opposed to āvāz ) can (distantly) recall the sounds of Sufi musical ceremonies ( sama ), with forceful, trance-inducing rhythms. (For instance in this Rumi performance by Alireza Eftekhari).

Even when slow, traditional Persian music is still passionate and ardent in mood, such as this performance of Rumi by Homayoun Shajarian, son of Mohammad-Reza:

Another link with traditional Celtic music is the grief that runs through Persian music, as can be heard in this instrumental by Kalhor.

Grief and sorrow always work in tandem with joy and ecstasy to create soundscapes that evoke longing and mystery.

Connections with classical poetry

The work of classical poets such as Rumi, Hāfez, Sa’di, Attār, and Omar Khayyām forms the lyrical basis of compositions in traditional Persian music. The rhythmic structure of the music is based on the prosodic system that poetry uses ( aruz ), a cycle of short and long syllables.

Singers must therefore be masters not only at singing but know Persian poetry and its metrical aspects intimately. Skilled vocalists must be able to interpret poems. Lines or phrases can be extended or repeated, or enhanced with vocal ornaments.

Thus, even for a Persian speaker who knows the poems being sung, Persian music can still reveal new interpretations. Here, for example (from 10:00 to 25:00 mins) is another example of Rumi by M.R. Shajarian:

This is a charity concert from 2003 in Bam, Iran, after a horrendous earthquake destroyed the town. Rumi’s poem is renowned among Persian speakers, but here Mohammad-Reza Shajarian sings it with such passion and emotional intensity that it sounds fresh and revelatory.

“Without everyone else it’s possible,” Rumi says, “Without you life is not liveable.”

While such lines are originally drawn from the tradition of non-religious love poems, in Rumi’s poems the address to the beloved becomes mystical, otherworldly. After a tragedy such as the earthquake, these lyrics can take on special urgency in the present.

When people listen to traditional music, they, like the singers, remain still. Audiences are transfixed and transported.

According to Sufi cosmology, all melodious sounds erupt forth from a world of silence. In Sufism, silence is the condition of the innermost chambers of the human heart, its core ( fuad ), which is likened to a throne from which the Divine Presence radiates.

Because of this connection with the intelligence and awareness of the heart, many performers of traditional Persian music understand that it must be played through self-forgetting, as beautifully explained here by master Amir Koushkani:

Persian music has roughly twelve modal systems, each known as a dastgah . Each dastgah collects melodic models that are skeletal frameworks upon which performers improvise in the moment. The spiritual aspect of Persian music is made most manifest in this improvisation.

Shajarian has said that the core of traditional music is concentration ( tamarkoz ), by which he means not only the mind but the whole human awareness. It is a mystical and contemplative music.

The highly melodic nature of Persian music also facilitates expressiveness. Unlike Western classical music, there is very sparing use of harmony. This, and the fact that like other world musical traditions it includes microtonal intervals, may make traditional Persian music odd at first listen for Western audiences.

Solo performances are important to traditional Persian music. In a concert, soloists may be accompanied by another instrument with a series of call-and-response type echoes and recapitulations of melodic phrases.

Similarly, here playing the barbat, a Persian variant of the oud, maestro Hossein Behrooznia shows how percussion and plucked string instruments can forge interwoven melodic structures that create hypnotic soundscapes:

Ancient roots

The roots of traditional Persian music go back to ancient pre-Islamic Persian civilisation, with archaeological evidence of arched harps (a harp in the shape of a bow with a sound box at the lower end), having been used in rituals in Iran as early as 3100BC.

Under the pre-Islamic Parthian (247BC-224AD) and Sasanian (224-651AD) kingdoms, in addition to musical performances on Zoroastrian holy days, music was elevated to an aristocratic art at royal courts.

Centuries after the Sasanians, after the Arab invasion of Iran, Sufi metaphysics brought a new spiritual intelligence to Persian music. Spiritual substance is transmitted through rhythm, metaphors and symbolism, melodies, vocal delivery, instrumentation, composition, and even the etiquette and co-ordination of performances.

The main instruments used today go back to ancient Iran. Among others, there is the tār, the six-stringed fretted lute; ney, the vertical reed flute that is important to Rumi’s poetry as a symbol of the human soul crying out in joy or grief; daf, a frame drum important in Sufi ritual; and the setār, a wooden four-stringed lute.

The tār, made of mulberry wood and stretch lambskin, is used to create vibrations that affect the heart and the body’s energies and a central instrument for composition. It is played here by master Hossein Alizadeh and here by master Dariush Talai .

Music, gardens, and beauty

Traditional Persian music not only cross-pollinates with poetry, but with other arts and crafts. At its simplest, this means performing with traditional dress and carpets on stage. In a more symphonic mode of production, an overflow of beauty can be created, such as in this popular and enchanting performance by the group Mahbanu:

They perform in a garden: of course. Iranians love gardens, which have a deeply symbolic and spiritual meaning as a sign or manifestation of Divine splendour. Our word paradise, in fact, comes from the Ancient Persian word, para-daiza , meaning “walled garden”. The walled garden, tended and irrigated, represents in Persian tradition the cultivation of the soul, an inner garden or inner paradise.

The traditional costumes of the band (as with much folk dress around the world) are elegant, colourful, resplendent, yet also modest. The lyrics are tinged with Sufi thought, the poet-lover lamenting the distance of the beloved but proclaiming the sufficiency of staying in unconsumed desire.

As a young boy, I grasped the otherness of Persian music intuitively. I found its timeless spiritual beauty and interiority had no discernible connection with my quotidian, material Australian existence.

Persian music and arts, like other traditional systems, gives a kind of “food” for the soul and spirit that has been destroyed in the West by the dominance of rationalism and capitalism. For 20 years since my boyhood, traditional Persian culture has anchored my identity, healed and replenished my wounded heart, matured my soul, and allowed me to avoid the sense of being without roots in which so many unfortunately find themselves today.

It constitutes a world of beauty and wisdom that is a rich gift to the whole world, standing alongside Irano-Islamic architecture and Iranian garden design .

The problem is the difficulty of sharing this richness with the world. In an age of hypercommunication, why is the beauty of Persian music (or the beauty of traditional arts of many other cultures for that matter) so rarely disseminated? Much of the fault lies with corporate media.

Brilliant women

Mahbanu, who can also be heard here performing a well-known Rumi poem, are mostly female. But readers will very likely not have heard about them, or any of the other rising female musicians and singers of Persian music. According to master-teachers such as Shajarian , there are now often as many female students as male in traditional music schools such as his.

Almost everyone has seen however, through corporate media, the same cliched images of an angry mob of Iranians chanting, soldiers goose-stepping, missile launches, or leaders in rhetorical flight denouncing something. Ordinary Iranian people themselves are almost never heard from directly, and their creativity rarely shown.

The lead singer of the Mahbanu group, Sahar Mohammadi, is a phenomenally talented singer of the āvāz style, as heard here , when she performs in the mournful abu ata mode. She may, indeed, be the best contemporary female vocalist. Yet she is unheard of outside of Iran and small circles of connoisseurs mainly in Europe.

A list of outstanding modern Iranian women poets and musicians requires its own article. Here I will list some of the outstanding singers, very briefly. From an older generation we may mention the master Parisa (discussed below), and Afsaneh Rasaei . Current singers of great talent include, among others, Mahdieh Mohammadkhani , Homa Niknam , Mahileh Moradi , and the mesmerising Sepideh Raissadat .

Finally, one of my favourites is the marvelous Haleh Seifizadeh, whose enchanting singing in a Moscow church suits the space perfectly.

The beloved Shajarian

Tenor Mohammad-Reza Shajarian is by far the most beloved and renowned voice of traditional Persian music. To truly understand his prowess, we can listen to him performing a lyric of the 13th century poet Sa’di:

As heard here, traditional Persian music is at once heavy and serious in its intent, yet expansive and tranquil in its effect. Shajarian begins by singing the word Yār , meaning “beloved”, with an ornamental trill. These trills, called tahrir , are made by rapidly closing the glottis, effectively breaking the notes (the effect is reminiscent of Swiss yodeling).

By singing rapidly and high in the vocal range, a virtuoso display of vocal prowess is created imitating a nightingale , the symbol with whom the poet and singer are most compared in Persian traditional music and poetry. Nightingales symbolise the besotted, suffering, and faithful lover. (For those interested, Homayoun Shajarian, explains the technique in this video ).

As with many singers, the great Parisa, heard here in a wonderful concert from pre-revolutionary Iran, learned her command of tahrir partly from Shajarian. With her voice in particular, the similarity to a nightingale’s trilling is clear.

Nourishing hearts and souls

The majority of Iran’s 80 million population are under 30 years of age . Not all are involved in traditional culture. Some prefer to make hip-hop or heavy-metal, or theatre or cinema. Still, there are many young Iranians expressing themselves through poetry (the country’s most important artform) and traditional music.

National and cultural identity for Iranians is marked by a sense of having a tradition, of being rooted in ancient origins, and of carrying something of great cultural significance from past generations, to be preserved for the future as repository of knowledge and wisdom. This precious thing that is handed down persists while political systems change.

Iran’s traditional music carries messages of beauty, joy, sorrow and love from the heart of the Iranian people to the world. These messages are not simply of a national character, but universally human, albeit inflected by Iranian history and mentality.

This is why traditional Persian music should be known to the world. Ever since its melodies first pierced my room in Brisbane, ever since it began to transport me to places of the spirit years ago, I’ve wondered if it could also perhaps nourish the hearts and souls of some of my fellow Australians, across the gulf of language, history, and time.

• Friday essay
• Iranian women
• Persian culture
• Traditional music

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