The reflection of Mahmoud's love to Ayaz in Persian stories

The story of Sultan Mahmoud Ghaznavi’s love to his Turkish servant has a historical reality in addition to its mythical aspect. Its historical reality has totally changed since the sixth century onwards. And prominent figures like Ahmad Ghazali, Ein-ol-Qozzat Hamadani, Attar Neishaboori and Mowlavi have benefitted from it to express mystical concepts. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, the story of Mahmoud’s love to Ayaz received the attention of some poets and a couple of poem collections were written under the same name. This story has been the theme for many Persian speaking poets and writers and has greatly influenced creation of meaning and images by both mystic and non-mystic poets. In this paper, short stories and long poems have been searched in the literary works and while finding the history of each, they were compared with a similar story. To do so, seventy short stories in Persian prose and poems are brought up the oldest of which are from Qaboosnameh and Sanaei’s Hadiqheh. Along with the popularity of writing Manzume in the tenth and eleventh century, there were eight independent Manzumes of which the mystical epic of Mahmoud and Ayaz by Zolali Khansari is the most important and detailed.