“A Noose of Light”: A Brief Biography of J.T.P. de Bruijn

Summary

Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night

Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:

And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught

The Sultan's Turret in a Noose of Light.

(Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, Translated by Edward FitzGerald, 1st edition 1859)

Introduction

This book consists of a collection of articles on various aspects of Persian culture written by my mentor, J.T.P. de Bruijn. Readers will soon see why, towards the end of 1989, I became captivated by his scholarship and stayed in Leiden as his student. I first became acquainted with his work as a student of English language and literature at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. I spent most of my time on the library's tenth floor, reading books on medieval English literature, but from time to time I consulted a small row of books, about one and half metres long, devoted to Persian culture. In one of these I found the article on qalamkār (“the craft of woodblock-printing on cotton tablecloths”) by Hans de Bruijn. I was so impressed that I decided to meet the author at Leiden University. I called the secretary, Mrs Van Die, and made an appointment for a Friday afternoon. De Bruijn's office was somewhat dim, with all the light coming from the sun outside. He welcomed me with a smile and a curious, reserved, but amicable look. In those days the majority of Iranians in the Netherlands were refugees and politically involved. Later I learned that he had thought I was one of the politically engaged refugees who wanted to make him participate in a faction of Iranian politics.

He invited me to sit on a chair around a square table occupying half the small room. I did not know whether to look politely at him, as it is a Dutch custom to look one's interlocutor in the eyes, or at the Persian books on the shelves, or at a large quantity of disorganised papers with Persian texts lying on the table. A half-page text emerging from a Persian typewriter on his desk caught my eye.