ĀʾĀ, pen name of Mirz Ḥabib-Allh Širzi (b. Shiraz, 29 Šaʿbn 1223/20 October 1808; d. Rayy, 5 Šaʿbn/3 May 1270/1854; Figure 1), one of the most prominent poets of the Qajar era and a well-known practitioner of the Literary Return (bzgašt-e adabi) style. A panegyrist who served many patrons, Qʾni was celebrated for the lyricism and melodiousness of his verses, but also heavily criticized for their lack of substance and exaggerated praise of unworthy patrons.
LIFE
Qʾni was the son of a minor poet from Shiraz, Mirz Moḥammad ʿAli “Golšan.” His father’s death, when Qʾni was only eleven, caused the family to descend into such poverty that “of the luxuries of the world I had nothing except a straw mat and a loaf of bread” (Āryanpur, I, p. 93). Forced to fend for himself and having shown an early talent for poetry, he took his education into his own hands and entered a madrasa in Shiraz. There, by eulogizing the governor of in a few poems, Qʾni obtained a stipend sufficient for his basic wants. As he wrote later, “I applied myself so much to my studies that in two years I surpassed my peers to such an extent that everyone who witnessed my progress was amazed; and although I was ugly, I became beautiful in their eyes” (Āryanpur, I, p. 94). The poet’s self-consciousness about his appearance, particularly his pockmarked face, was evidently much on his mind, for it is mentioned frequently in his poems (Maḥjub, p. 34).
Study in a number of fields and service to an ever more prominent series of patrons were to characterize the remainder of the poet’s professional life. Over the next few years, Qʾni delved into mathematics, prosody, and different branches of Islamic sciences while in Shiraz and Isfahan. He also continued to compose poetry and wrote commentaries on the 徱s of ḴqԾ and Anvari. In 1823, he came under the protection of the prince Ḥasan-ʿAli Mirz Šojʿ-al-Salṭana, a son of Fatḥ-ʿAli Shah, who had of late come to Shiraz. The prince rendered him many kindnesses, and when Šojʿ-al-Salṭana was appointed to the governorship of Khorasan at the end of the same year, he took the young poet with him. Another account of the poet’s biography has Qʾni and Šojʿ-al-Salṭana meeting in Khorasan rather than Shiraz. However, as the poet himself remembered the meeting occurring in Shiraz, a meeting in Shiraz seems the likelier scenario. Qʾni settled in Mashhad, where he delved more deeply into the study of poetry and, finding “his luck strong, his purse fat, his riches many, his silver and gold enlarged, and his dirhams and dinars multiplied from ones to thousands,” he spent a great deal of money collecting the 徱s of the classical masters. It was during this period that the poet changed his pen name from Ḥabib to Qʾni in honor of the prince’s son, Okoty-Qʾn (Āryanpur, I, p. 94).
Qʾni accompanied the prince to Yazd and Kerman and also traveled to Ҿ, Mzandarn, and Azerbaijan, although the dates and circumstances of these journeys are unclear. At some point, apparently after losing his former patron, who had fallen out of favor with the king after making an unauthorized attack upon Yazd from Kerman, Qʾni gained access to the court of Fatḥ-ʿAli Shah, where he received a pension and the title “Spiritual Leader of the Poets” (Mojtahed- al-Šoʿar). After that monarch’s death, Qʾni joined the circle of poets in Tehran who celebrated the 1834 enthronement of Moḥammad Shah, receiving the title “Ḥassn of the Persians” (Ḥa--ʿᲹ, an allusion to Ḥassn b. Ṯbet, popularly regarded as the poet laureate of the Prophet Mohammad) from the new king. When Moḥammad Shah embarked on his 1837 Herat campaign against the Afghans, Qʾni was among his retinue. But the poet fell ill when the king’s cavalcade arrived at ṭm, and he received permission to return to Tehran. He later commemorated the campaign in a long 粹ṣi岹 (Āryanpur, I, p. 95).
In 1843 or 1844, the poet returned to his hometown of Shiraz, apparently with the intent of settling there permanently. At first he enjoyed peace and tranquility, and found the leisure to add English to the other languages with which he was already conversant. But gradually a group of the city’s poets turned against him, and after the sympathetic ruler of the city, Ṣḥeb-e Eḵtiyr, was replaced by Moʿtamed-al-Dawla Manučehr Khan Gorji, who had little feeling for poetry and delayed paying his salary, Qʾni saw no recourse but to return to Tehran. His return to the capital in 1846 coincided with the death of his friend, the poet Veṣl-e Širzi. He later satirized the people of in a ṭʿa; (see below). He again won the friendship of powerful members of the court in Tehran, including the prince ʿAli-Qoli-Mirz Eʿteżd-al-Salṭana, a great lover of poetry; Mahd-e ʿOly, mother of Nṣer-al-Din, the crown prince; as well as the crown prince himself. After Nṣer-al-Din was enthroned in 1848, he appointed Qʾni poet laureate. As official court poet, he was charged with composing topical panegyrics for ceremonial occasions (qaṣʾed-e salm; Rypka, p. 329).
His tenure was both short and rocky. The poet ran afoul of Mirz Taqi Khan Amir-e Kabir, Nṣer al-Din’s reform-minded chief minister. In 1849 the latter reduced Qʾni’s salary and may even have threatened him with bastinado (Karimi-Hakkak, p. 23). The punishment apparently occurred after Qʾni recited a poem praising the newly appointed chief minister and criticizing his predecessor, Ḥji Mirz Āqsi, upon whom he had previously bestowed the most adulatory of titles, including perfect man (ensn-e kmel), the lord of two worlds (ḵʷja-ye du jahn), the manifestation of divine essence (maẓhar-e ḏt-e bri), and the deliverer of the Creator’s bounty to the people (rasnanda-ye fayż-e ḵleq be maḵluq). It seems that Amir-e Kabir, who in any case had little liking for poetry, took umbrage at the poet’s infidelity toward his former patron (Ādamiyat, p. 322). Family disputes, financial woes, melancholy, over-indulgence in alcohol as well as, apparently, opium had a disastrous effect on the poet’s health, and he fell seriously ill in 1854. His friend Eʿteżd-al-Salṭana, who witnessed him in the throes of his penultimate illness, reported that the hallucinating poet addressed invisible figures in Persian, Arabic, Turkish, French, and English. He recovered, but not for long (Maḥjub, p. 35). At the final gathering attended by Qʾni, held to celebrate the birthday of ʿAli b. Abi Ṭaleb, the poet recited a 粹ṣi岹 containing the following verse: “I see the joy of life in death of the body; destroy me with wine ...” (Maḥjub, p. 35). Listeners rightly worried that the poet was foreshadowing his own imminent passing. After falling ill again, Qʾni died in 1854 and was buried in Rayy near the tomb of the twelfth century Qur’anic exegete &ܴ;-dzٳḥ (Maḥjub, p. 35).
Qʾni married twice, both times with disastrous results. His son, Mirz Moḥammad Ḥasan “Smni,” also became a court poet, and his poems are often inserted in his father’s 徱. Qʾni evidently had several other children as well, for in one ṭʿa he calls himself the provider for fourteen family members; and elsewhere, as many as thirty (Maḥjub, p. 9). The turbulence of his home life shows forth vividly in a long letter of supplication written to Nṣer-al-Din Shah. In it, Qʾni implores the king for financial help and heaps execration upon his wives and mothers-in-law, who, he says, have stripped him of all possessions. The letter, which stands as a superb example of his prose, is quoted in full by Moḥammad-Jaʿfar Maḥjub in his introduction to Qʾni’s 徱 (pp. 10-11).
Qʾni was remembered by friends as pleasure-loving, possessed of a prodigious memory, and so generous in distributing the vast sums of money that came into his hands that he was himself often left impoverished. He was also a great devotee of wine, and many of his poems are thought to have been composed in a state of drunkenness. Nevertheless, despite this inclination (or perhaps partly thanks to it), he was so prompt and proficient in composition that stories of his devising long and highly accomplished 粹ṣi岹s on the fly are legion (Maḥjub, pp. 33, 36-37, n. 2). Indeed, his enormous poetic output, given the brevity of his life and the melancholy that frequently afflicted him, is nothing short of astonishing.
WORKS
Although Qʾni was a prolific writer, only a fraction of his poetry survives, thanks to his lackadaisical attitude toward preserving his works. The 21,000 or 22,000 verses comprising the most complete edition of his 徱 may comprise only one-fifth of his total output; the rest has been lost. Notwithstanding these omissions the work is still celebrated in some circles, and has been published repeatedly in Iran and India. The best editions are those based on the manuscript copy compiled by --ٲɱ, the Qajar prince and litterateur in 1857, four years after the poet’s death, and known as the “Kalhor” manuscript copy after the calligrapher, Mirz Moḥammad Reż Kalhor, who transcribed it (online: see Qʾni, Kolliyt, Figure 2, Figure 3, Figure 4). Along with the many 粹ṣi岹s for which Qʾni is best known, his 徱 also contains Dzṭs, ٲᾱʿ-Ի, ḡas, ṯn, ṭʿas, and robʿis. At least some of the missing poems are likely to have been additional ḡas, since Qʾni reportedly threw many of these poems into the fire one cold winter night after a musician sang a ḡa of ʿ徱 and the drunken poet felt the deficiencies of his own verses in comparison with those of the master (Āryanpur, I, p. 98; Maḥjub, pp. 27-29).
In addition to poetry, Qʾni also wrote several prose works, although, like his poems, many of these have perished. The most famous extant work is Parišn (Distracted and disheveled), a collection of more than 100 stories, poems, and maxims, many of them bawdy or satirical, in prose interspersed with verse. Though the poet states in the introduction that the work was modeled after ʿ徱’s Golestn, and many critics have accepted this assertion as fact, the scholar Natalia Tornesello convincingly demonstrates that the work bears much closer resemblance in both structure and content to the Resla-ye delgoš of ʿObayd-e Zkni, to the point that it repeats some stories almost verbatim (Tornesello, pp. 196-200). Along with mostly cynical counsels to kings and princes, the work presents accounts of the poet’s own life, including descriptions of his father’s death and his sojourn in Khorasan, and it is often mined for autobiographical material. The poet and scholar Moḥammad-Taqi Bahr, in his famous oeuvre on the evolution of Persian prose and stylistics, Sabkšensi, also speaks of treatises by Qʾni on geometry, magic, and divination which were in his personal collection (Bahr, III, p. 333). Qʾni is thought to have written many others which were never published, or whose existence remain unrecorded.
Critical reception. It is difficult to imagine a Persian poet whose writing has sparked as mixed a critical reception as that of Qʾni. The vitriolic attack on him by some near-contemporary critics is in sharp contrast to the enthusiastic praise of others, who placed him within the ranks of the greatest Persian poets. In many ways, these contradictory responses reveal more about the state of literary criticism in Iran in the 19th and early 20th centuries than they do about Qʾni himself. As intellectuals of that period began to assess poetry chiefly according its ability to reflect and affect social reform, Qʾni’s seemingly slavish pandering to corrupt patrons formed a convenient target for their fire (Karimi-Hakkak, p. 32). For example, the politician and litterateur, ʿAli Dašti, vilified the poet for immersing himself “into a cesspool of flattery to the very top of his head” (Prsinežd, p. 35); the playwright and social critic Mirza Fatḥ-ʿAli Āḵundzada called his 徱 “full of … nonsense” (Prsinežd, pp. 33-34, n. 1); and even Yaḥy Āryanpur, in his judicious and balanced account of the poet, points to some of his failings: “[i]n praising the least worthy men of the court, and even servants, he brings into play characteristics that no one had ever applied to them before”; and he accuses him of a lack of compassion toward the people of Iran and their sufferings (Āryanpur, I, p. 99). Critics likewise attacked Qʾni’s inconstancy and fickleness toward his patrons. Edward G. Browne, for example, tartly noted his tendency to “flatter great men while they are in power, and turn around and rend them as soon as they fall into disgrace” (Browne, IV, p. 329). Even when a scholar lauded Qʾni’s fluency in one moment, he disparaged his meagerness of content in the next. Āryanpur, for example, writes that “notwithstanding [Qʾni’s] power of expression and dexterity in description and metaphors and scene-setting, the majority of his 粹ṣi岹s are poor and insignificant with regard to subject matter” (I, p. 97).
Beyond his major sins, critics catalogued a host of minor transgressions. One is repetition: descriptions of wine, beautiful boys, the difficulties of travel, spring, fall, night and day appear in his verses with numbing regularity. As Maḥjub writes, “The beloved is always arriving tired from the road with a dusty face and disheveled hair. He pounds on the door. Qʾni opens it, embraces him warmly, seats him in the festivities, and serves him wine. The beloved then delivers the glad tidings of the arrival of such-and-such a commander or governor” (Maḥjub, p. 43). Another is carelessness, which resulted in errors in grammar, usage, and meter, as well as great inconsistency in the quality of his poetry. The sexual innuendo of many of his poems, as well as the coarseness of his language when speaking about wine-drinking or love-making, also drew disapproval.
Praise of the poet’s works tended to center around the sweetness and lyricism of his language, the wide range of his vocabulary, and his inventiveness. Bahr, who defended him against the charges of servility by observing that currying favor with the powerful was simply the means by which poets earned their keep in that era, spoke of the freshness of Qʾni’s style and regarded him as one of the greatest poets of his time (Bahr, 1958, III, p. 338). Bahr likewise maintained that Qʾni was responsible for the invention of a new style (sabk-e Qʾni) reflecting not only the influence of the Khorasani style, known for its dignity and strength, but also the Erqi style, characterized by its subtlety and use of common expressions—a contention that others vigorously refuted (Āyanpur, I, p. 97).
Today, the question of whether Qʾni founded a new school no longer burns with the same relevance, and the accusation of pandering no longer delivers the same sting. Read without those screens, his oeuvre reveals many notable poems, some memorable for their explicit homoeroticism, others for their stylistic experimentation with diction, and still others for their apparently sincere devotion. One poem noteworthy for its sexual innuendo records Qʾni’s coy refusal of a friend’s advances (Browne, IV, pp. 329-30).
Although best known for his unctuous praise, the poet’s use of invective bristles in a poem written in contempt of the people of , which begins, “Don’t be surprised if I feel a stranger in / For in a string of donkey beads, I’m a pearl” (gar dar diyr-e frs ḡaribam ʿajab madr / k’andar darun-e rešte-ye ḵar mohra gowharam). He complains that no one has invited him to dinner—“so afraid was he that I’d eat a morsel from his table” (az bim-e n gomn ke z’ḵʷn loqma’i ḵʷoram)—and concludes with threats to satirize his oppressors to the king: “I’ll brandish the dagger of the tongue against these few, / and fire will flame out like hell from my throat. / With such a dagger spreading fire on the sky, / you’ll not see me worry about armor!” (z’in čandtan-e goḏašta kešam ḵanjar-e zabn / v’teš kešad zabna ču duzaḵ ze ḥanjaram / b ḵanjari čonn ke kešad šoʿla bar sepehr / parv nabini az zereh o ḵud o meghfaram; cited in Maḥjub, pp. 45-6.) Another ṭʿa punctuating a bawdy story in Parišn satirizes desire thusly: “When a woman falls captive in the trap of lust, / An ass is better, in her eyes, than a peacock. / Likewise, in the eyes of a lustful man / A demon is equivalent to a celestial houri ....” (čun zani dar dm-e šahvat šod asir / ḵar b’čašmaš beh ze ṭvus-e nar ast / hamčonn dar čašm-e šahvat mard r / div b hur-e behešti hambar ast ...) (Qʾni, 1959, p. 25).
Qʾni’s innovative experiments with dialogue also bear mention. One well-known ṭʿa, intended to be humorous, consists of a conversation between a boy and an old man, both afflicted with a stammer (Qʾni, 1957, pp. 971-72). An elegy written for the occasion of ʿAshura describes the death of the Imam Ḥo in a clipped and staccato conversation that effectively conveys the horror of the tragedy: “What rains down? Blood! Who? The Eye! How? Day and Night! Why?/From grief! What grief? The grief of the Monarch of Karbalá!” (brad če? ḵun! ke? dida, česn? ruz o šab, čer?/az ḡam, kodm ḡam? ḡam-e solṭn-e karbal) The elegy continues in like vein, describing the vicious perpetrators of the deed and the woes of those who survived, and observing that neither pagan nor Magian nor Jew nor Hindu nor idolater would be capable of the harshness shown by Muslims to the descendants of the Prophet. It concludes with the poet imploring God for mercy on the Day of Judgment (Browne, IV, pp. 178-81).
Like Ѵḥt&Dz;’s elegy on the same topic (Browne, IV, pp. 172-77), the poem’s emotional intensity is perhaps the reason for its abiding popularity; Annemarie Schimmel, for example, wrote of the lasting impression it made upon her (p. 29). In its plain-spoken rehearsal of answers to a series of rapid-fire questions, the poem stresses the unimaginable horror of the events surrounding Ḥo’s death and the pain and incredulity they occasion; it accurately conveys the “feelings a pious Muslim experiences when thinking of the martyrdom of the Prophet’s beloved grandson at the hands of the Umayyad troops” (Schimmel, p. 29). Its apparent depth of religious fervor, and the innovativeness of its diction, help exonerate Qʾni of charges that he was a mere panderer or imitator.
Likewise, a 粹ṣi岹 written in praise of a messianic figure who has come to renew the world continues to attract attention and commendation. The poem lauds its unnamed subject—identified by Bahais as Sayyed-ʿAli-Moḥammad (d. 1850), known as the Bb (Gabbay, pp. 131-48; Browne, 1891, p. 199)—as “[t]he glorified one of the verses of the eternal Invisible” (mafḵar-e yt-e ḡayb-e sarmadi), who has appeared with “two God-beholding eyes” (du čašm-e ḥaqq negar) and “two pearl-scattering hands” (du dast-e dorr fešn) (cited in Gabbay, pp. 137-41). Like Qʾni’s many poems composed in honor of the family and descendants of the Prophet, this ode evinces an evidently deep and genuine religious sentiment that contrasts sharply with the poet’s frequent irreverence and coarseness.
Bibliography:
Fereydun Ādamiyat, Amir Kabir va Irn, Tehran, 3rd edition, 1969.
Yaḥy Āryanpur, Az Ṣab t Nim, 2 vols., Tehran, 1975.
Moḥammad-Taqi Bahr, Sabkšensi, 3 vols., second edition, Tehran, 1958.
Idem, “Bzgašt-e adabi," in Bahr va adab-e i, ed. M. Golbon, 2 vols., Tehran, 1972, vol. I, pp. 60-66.
ʿAli-Naqi Behruzi, Sada-ye Qʾni, Shiraz, 1954.
Edward Granville Browne, A Literary History of Persia, 4 vols., London, 1902-24.
Idem, ed., A Traveller's Narrative Written to Illustrate the Episode of the Báb, by ʿAbdu’l-Bahá, Cambridge, 1891.
Alyssa Gabbay, “‘In Praise of One of the Deeply Learned ʿUlam’ – A Mysterious Poem by Qjr Court Poet Mīrz Ḥabīb Allh Shīrzī ‘Qʾnī,’” in The Necklace of the Pleiades, ed. Franklin Lewis and Sunil Sharma, Amsterdam, 2007, pp. 131-48.
Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, Recasting Persian Poetry: Scenarios of Poetic Modernity in Iran, Salt Lake City, 1995.
Vĕra Kubíčková, Qnī, Poète Persan du XIXe Siècle, Prague, 1954.
Moḥammad-Jaʿfar Maḥjub, Introduction to Divn-e Ḥakim Qʾni Širzi, Tehran, 1957, pp. 5-59.
Iraj Prsinežd, ʿAli Dašti va naqd-e adabi, Tehran, 2008.
Mirz Ḥabib-Allh Širzi Qʾni, Kolliyt, lithograph of the MS transcribed by Kalhor, available at Szmn-e esnd va Ketbḵna-ye melli, (accessed 25 October 2015).
Idem, Divn-e Ḥakim Qʾni Širzi, ed. Moḥammad-Jaʿfar Maḥjub, Tehran, 1957.
Idem, Parišn, ed. Esmʿil Ašraf, Shiraz, 1959.
Jan Rypka, History of Iranian Literature, in collaboration with Otakar Klima et al., ed. Karl Jahn, Dordrecht, 1968.
Annemarie Schimmel, “Karbal’ and Ḥusayn in Persian and Indo-Muslim Literature,” in Papers from the Imam Ḥusayn Conference, London, July 1984, special issue, Al-Sert 12, 1986, pp. 29-39; available online at (accessed 25 October 2015).
Mirz Ṭher, Ganj-e Šyagn, lith. ed., Tehran, 1855.
Natalia L. Tornesello, “Le Ketb-e Parišn de Qʾni: Ses Sources Probables et la Place de L’Oeuvre dans la Prose Persane Moderne,” Iran: Questions et Connaissances, ed. Maria Szuppe, 3 vols., Paris, 2002, vol. II, pp. 191-201.
(Alyssa Gabbay)
Originally Published: February 22, 2016
Last Updated: February 22, 2016
Cite this entry:Alyssa Gabbay, “ĀʾĀ,” Encyclopædia Iranica, online edition, 2016, available at http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/qaani-poet (accessed on 22 February 2016).
