Category: Poets and Poetry

Farid al-Din Attar Nishapuri He lived at a time when Sufism was widely practiced and the problems of metaphysics were the subject of active speculation. He lived almost 100 years and was killed by the Mongol invaders. His tomb is located in Nishapur, Iran. Various anecdotes have been told about Attar's death, including being captured by a Mongol. One day, a man came and offered a thousand silver coins to buy the goods of the Mongol. Attar told the Mongolian not to sell them at said price because it was not adequate. The Mongol accepted Attar's words and did not sell them. Later, another man came and offered him a bag of straw. Attar advised the Mongol to sell them because that's what they were worth. The Mongol soldier got angry and killed Attar to teach the people a lesson. Attar is one of the most mystical poets of Iran, whose work was nothing more than the philosophical inspiration of Rumi and many other mystical poets of Iran. Mevlana Rumi regarded Attar as the spirit. Attar's name comes from his profession. In fact, his father had an herbal shop and Attar was not only a doctor but also a poet. He accepted many patients a day in his store, where he prescribed herbal extracts and natural medicines that he studied alone in the store. Attar wrote 114 works, the same number of surahs from the holy book of the Qur'an. About 30 of his works are preserved. Of the many works attributed to him, "The Language of Birds" is the most famous. Constructed according to an articulated dialogic structure that takes up the philosophical epistles of various ancient authors (Avicenna, Al Ghazali). Rather, the work is a wisdom book in which the allegory of the birds' voyage shows, and sometimes

Simin Behbahani Simin, an Iranian poet and writer, was born on June 20, 1927 in Tehran to literary parents. His father, Abbas Khalili, was a newspaper writer and editor, and his mother, Fakhr Ozma Arghun, was a teacher, writer and newspaper editor, as well as a gifted poet. Simin earned the nickname "Lioness of Iran" for expressing her strong opposition to oppression and violence in more than 600 poems. Before her birth, his father was temporarily exiled for activities perceived as a threat to the government. Her parents reunited two years later, but eventually divorced, and Simin stayed with her mother, a poet who encouraged her to write. She published her first poem at age 14. Simin briefly trained as a midwife, but was expelled from the program after being falsely accused of writing a press article critical of the school. His dismissal was probably due to his association with the communist Tudeh party. Simin married shortly thereafter and took her husband's last name, Behbahani. While raising his family, he studied law at the University of Tehran. After divorcing her first husband, she remarried (1969) and graduated in Law. However, instead of pursuing a legal career, she found work as a high school teacher. Simin Behbahani used Nima Yushich's “Char Pareh” style and later switched to ghazal, a free poetic style similar to the western sonnet. He contributed to the historical development of the ghazal by adding theatrical themes, everyday events and conversations to this poetic style. Simin Behbahani expanded the variety of traditional Persian verses and wrote the most important works of Persian literature of the 20th century. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1997, received the Human Rights Watch-Hellman / Hammet Fellowship in 1998, and in 1999 the Carl von Ossietzky Medal for her