Abstract
This paper focuses on the position and the role of ghazals attributed to the classical Persian poet Jalaluddin Rumi (1207-1273) in the oral tradition of the Ismailis of Tajik Badakhshan. Ghazals attributed to Rumi are quite frequent in both maddahkhani, the religious genre par excellence, and ghazalkhani, which denotes the performance of ghazals, usually in combination with quatrains, on a variety of occasions. It appears that the ghazals attributed to Rumi have a range of different backgrounds and often appear in different guises. One of the ghazals attributed to Rumi is treated in detail, that is the ghazal which can be found in Rumi’s Divan-i Shams-i Tabrizi as “‘ashiqi bar man parishanat kunam” (You are in love with me and I will confound you) (Kulliyat-i Shams-i Tabrizi, ed. B Furuzanfar, Tehran 1362, no. 1665), and which appears in Badakhshan in different forms. The full text of the paper will appear shortly in the forthcoming Festschrift for Annette Destree, Emeritus Professor of Persian at the Université Libre, Brussels .