"The Classical Persian Ghazal and Rumi in the Oral Poetry of the Ismailis of Tajik Badakhshan"
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 .
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.
