Body of writings in New Persian (also called Modern Persian), the form of the Persian language written since the 9th century in a slightly extended form of the Arabic alphabet and with many Arabic loan words. The literary form of New Persian is known as Farsī in Iran, where it is the country’s official language, and as Darī in Afghanistan.
Everything started when prophet Zarathustra (Zoroaster) disseminated the good news about God and his faith to Him. The oldest texts are the Gāthās, short hymns written in an archaic form of an Old Iranian language called Avestan, named for the Avesta, the holy book of Zoroastrianism. The Iranian languages belong, together with the Indo-Aryan languages of the Indian subcontinent, for one of the oldest branches of the Indo-European linguistic family. There exist documents written in the Old Iranian languages that have survived for nearly three millennia. The only other Old Iranian language found in extant texts is the Old Persian used by the Achaemenian kings for inscriptions in cuneiform writing (6th–4th century BCE).
The conquest of the Achaemenian Empire by Alexander the Great about 330 BCE caused a radical break in Iranian culture. During the new era, which lasted until the Arab conquest of the 7th century CE, Iran was deeply influenced by Hellenism. Greek and Aramaic became the dominant languages.
For almost 500 years, Iranian languages were not used in writing. The oldest preserved documents that use Middle Iranian languages date only from the 3rd century CE. They consist of inscriptions of the Sāsānian kings and religious texts of the Manichaeans, the followers of the gnostic prophet Mani (3rd century CE). The most widely used written language was Middle Persian, better known as Pahlavi, which remained in use with the Zoroastrians into Islamic times. The Sāsānian empire, which at the beginning of the 7th century was still one of the two great powers in the Middle East, crumbled almost instantaneously when the Bedouin invaded Iran. The Caliphate that came to be established was an Islamic state ruled by Arabs, but very soon non-Arabs who had assimilated themselves to the new situation began to participate in the affairs of the Muslim community. The linguistic and literary sciences dealt primarily with the Qurʾān and with the poetry of the pre-Islamic Arabs, both of which provided the norms for classical Arabic and its use in Arabic literature.
In the 10th century they controlled most of eastern Iran and present-day Afghanistan. The Sāmānids belonged to the local Iranian aristocracy and even claimed a pedigree going back to the Sāsānian kings. They promote the literary use of Persian and the survival of Iranian traditions. Balʿamī, one of their officials, adapted in Persian two important works by al-Ṭabarī, a native Persian writing in the early 10th century exclusively in Arabic: a commentary on the Qurʾān and a huge chronicle of Islamic history that included an account of the ancient kings of Iran.
In Classical Poetry, poems that were not written according to the rules of Arabic prosody did not count as serious poetry.The only form not conforming to the rule of monorhyme is the masnawi, or poem in couplets, in which each distich has a separate internal rhyme, which changes with each new distich (aabbcc and so on). In court poetry, the special form of the panegyric is the qaṣīdeh, its length varying between 15 and more than 100 distichs. Ghazals are much shorter poems, usually no more than 7 to 10 distichs. There was a famous poet in persia named Ferdowsī was born in a village on the outskirts of the ancient city of Ṭūs. In the course of the centuries, many legends have been woven around the poet’s name and he became the Father of Persian Literature. The Shāh-nāmeh, finally completed in 1010, was presented to the celebrated sultan Maḥmūd of Ghazna, who by that time had made himself master of Ferdowsī’s homeland, Khorāsān. Information on the relations between poet and patron is largely legendary
Poetry remained a prominent form of literature in Iran through the early 21st century. Following various international trends in poetic expression, many different schools of poetry further developed the modernist principles introduced by Nima Yushij. Of the great classical poets, Omar Khayyam and Ḥāfeẓ in particular survived as respected figures from the past who are today still considered to be relevant to modern poets. The Islamic Republic of Iran, applying criteria of political, religious, and moral correctness, placed severe limits on the free expression of writers and poets, although there were brief periods when government censorship was relaxed. From the 1980s onward, a substantial Persian emigré literature emerged in the United States and Europe.
Sohrab and Rustum by Matthew Arnold
Looking For Your Face by Rumi
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