Seminars, Conferences and Public Lectures "The Oral Poetry of the Ismailis of Tajik Badakhshan"
One of the main genres of sung poetry in Tajik Badakhshan is maddoh, performed by so-called maddoh-khwans, who perform religious poetry as an Ismaili ritual on various occasions. This maddoh is built up by different texts of poetry, which are linked together in performance. The texts are almost exclusively in (Tajik) Persian.
The majority of the Badakhshanis are speakers of Pamir languages, but many of them are bilingual and speak Tajik Persian or Russian in addition to their native language. Well-known names may be heard in the poems, being the pen names or takhallus of classical Persian poets. Especially the pen names of Jalal al-Din Rumi (Shams-i Tabrizi) and Nasir Khusraw occur quite often at the end of ghazals. Ghazals form the main type of text sung in this tradition, besides quatrains and longer genres of poetry, such as the qasida. The main themes of the poetry in maddoh are mystical love and praise of the important figures of Badakhshani Ismailism. Maddoh has an educational purpose: the audience is summoned to heed the advice and the admonitions given in maddoh.
A remarkable example of maddoh is a qasida of 32 lines attributed to Nasir Khusraw, in which Safavid shahs are portrayed as warriors and temporary saviours in the turmoil of the approaching apocalypse. In my paper I would like to focus on this poem, thereby illustrating the nature of the oral tradition in Tajik Badakhshan.
Author
Dr. Gabrielle Van den Berg
Born in Leiden, Gabrielle van den Berg studied Persian language and literature at the University of Leiden from 1985 to 1991, of which one year was spent at Lenin University in Dushanbe. In 1991, Dr van den Berg graduated with her thesis on the classical Persian qasidas of the Ghaznavid poet Farrukhi Sistani. In 1992, she obtained a research-teaching post at the University of Leiden in order to write her PhD thesis on the sung poetry of the Ismailis of Badakhshan, for which extensive fieldwork was carried out in the region. After defending her thesis in 1997, she worked as a lecturer in Persian at the University of Leiden until October 1998 when she was appointed E G Browne Lecturer in Persian at the University of Cambridge, which is a position she will hold until October 2001. Currently she is working for the Institute on a project entitled Living Traditions of the Ismaili World: The Case of Tajik Badakhshan.
