arya tabibzadeh

Miʿyār al-ʾAšʿār al-Šamsiyyah, An Unpublished Treatise on Persian Prosody This note introduces Miʿyār al-ʾAšʿār al-Šamsiyyah, an unpublished treatise on Persian prosody by Ḥusām al-Dīn al-Ḫu'ī (c. 13th CE). Some fascinating features of this work are discussed here, such as the use of a circle identical to that of Abolhassan Nadjafi, which has been presumed to be unique to modern Persian prosody, and the scansion of meters by means of musical elements (or Atānīn).

Two Controversial Phrases in Dīwān of Ḫāqānī Širvānī
This note discusses briefly two controversial phrases in two odes by Ḫāqānī Širvānī (c.a. 12th century), namely "ḫaṭṭ-e tarsā" 'Christian script' and "setāre-bastan" 'to set a curtain' (or alternatively, "setār-bastan" 'to play Setār (a musical instrument)'. Firstly I discuss the phrase "Christian Script"; this phrase has traditionally been defined as "an alphabet used by Christians",  the precise concept it denotes however, has been disputed among the modern scholars. Thus, various alphabets such as Greek, Latin, Armenian and Syriac have been suggested as the possible answers. I discuss the shortcomings of these suggestions and argue that the "Christian Script" denotes the Georgian alphabet. Finally, I discuss the phrase "Setāre-bastan". Challenging the common reading of the phrase as "setār-bastan" 'playing Setār' I argue that the accurate reading is "setāre-bastan" meaning 'to set a curtain'.

Zoroastrian history and tradition and Zoroastrian Persian texts, the first two volumes of the collection 'Zoroastrian tradition in the Islamic era' , aim to study the history and textual traditions of the Persian Zoroastrian community, during the Islamic era. The volumes deal with issues such as the Zoroastrians' migrations patterns and their settlement centers, the hirbadistans i.e. associations that undertook duties including the composition of the religious texts as well as setting the Zoroastrian jurisprudence. The present two volumes provide their readers with a comprehensive list of the Iranian Zoroastrians' written texts during the Islamic era of Persia, with excellent analyses of the texts.

There is a line of poetry in one of the tales of Sa'di's Gulistan causing much discussion “I am neither mounted on a camel, nor like a mule under a load. I am no lord of a vassal, neither the slave of any king. I have no concern about either the present or the past. I draw my breathe feely, and pass my life in comfort.” (Gladwin, 1865: 183,184). In Persian classical prosody, the lines of each verse must have similar meters, but in this verse, there is no such similarity between the lines. In this paper, different emendations of this verse have been mentioned and various views on the meter of this verse have been discussed. It is argued that the verse is composed according to the rules of Arabic prosody.

There are some Arabic couplets in Sa’di’s Golestân logically composed according to Arabic prosody, but nearly all Persian emendators have wrongly edited them based on Persian prosody; this wrong method has caused some mistakes in their emendations. There are not however such mistakes in two Arabic translations as well as in one Turkish commentary of Golestân simply because these Arabic couplets are emendated correctly based on Arabic prosody rules. In this paper the correct editions of the couplets and also the wrong editions are introduced and classified.