A History of Style and a Style of History: The Hermeneutic of Tarz in Persian Literary Criticism

Abstract

This article considers style in Persian literary history and its critical rhetorical and hermeneutical roles for poets and critics in the medieval and Safavid-Mughal eras. It explores how tarz (manner) emerged as a hermeneutical term in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and achieved a central position in sukhansanjī (evaluating speech) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This account of tarz—grounded in its historicity and multivalent implications—offers new insights into language for early modern Persian literary history, which is often periodized as sabk-i hindī (Indian style) or tāza-gūyī (fresh-speaking). Through a close reading of Safavid-Mughal tazkiras (literary compendiums), this contribution examines tarz as an operating concept deployed by a number of prominent tazkira writers. Finally, the article concludes by discussing this legacy's impact on twentieth-century scholarship.

میان اهل سخن امتیاز من صائب

همین بس است که با طرز آشنا شده ام

Oh Sāʾib! To be distinguished among the poets

It was enough that I have become acquainted with style

Most scholars have recognized the early twentieth century as a watershed moment in the historiography of Persian literature, when modern literary studies were institutionalized and key authoritative works were produced. One of the most foundational works of twentieth-century literary criticism is Tārīkh-i Tatavvur-i Nasr-i Fārsī, also known as Sabkshināsī (Stylistics), written by Muhammad Taqī Bahār (d. 1951). For decades, several generations of scholars have studied Bahār's Sabkshināsī and placed it at the center of Persian literary historiography, mostly focusing on its periodization and nationalist orientation.¹ By reading Bahār's Sabkshināsī from this perspective, there is a tendency to describe his idea of style (sabk) primarily as a modern concept imported from Western scholarship. For example, Shamsur Rahman Faruqi considers Bahār's understanding of style as foreign to premodern Persian literary history. Even though he acknowledges the existence of stylistic terms such as shīva (method), tarz (manner), tawr (route), and tarīq (way) in the language of premodern critics such as Amīr Khusraw (d. 725/1325), he argues that they are disconnected from how style (or sabk) is used in modern Persian literary history.² Similarly, Muhammad Jaʿfar Mahjūb claims that “there has been no discussion of style in Iran until our era, and the critics of poetry and prose did not examine the stylistic features of a poet or writer.”³ Although Mahjūb recognizes that poets were aware of the notion of style through limited usage of tarz and shīva, he argues that their understanding of these stylistic terms was entirely irrelevant to the way modern scholars conceptualize style.⁴

Recent scholarship has begun to challenge this view. As Alexander Jabbari argues, Bahār's work (together with that of other Iranian, Indian, and European scholars) was engaged in reworking premodern and early modern materials. His work allows us to see Bahār's continuity with literary criticism developments that preceded him.⁵ A deeper examination of style in premodern works will allow us to better understand Bahār's notion of sabk and the early modern and modern literary historiography it drew from and contributed to. As a departure from Faruqi's and Mahjūb's claims that style is an entirely modern concept that has no place in pre-twentieth-century historiography, I argue that style, although highly capacious and fluid, is central to the way early modern critics understood their own literary tradition. By working through the various discussions of style found in some key tazkiras (literary compendiums) and divans (poetic collections), we can better understand the early modern literary critics on their own terms and use their insights to develop a more nuanced vocabulary for the study of the literary history of that period.

Several scholars have already made important contributions to this work. Increased attention has been given to understanding the notion of Safavid-Mughal literary style—also known as the Indian style (sabk-i hindī)—and its trademarks in early modern Persian literary history.⁶ Some of these scholars have examined the Safavid-Mughal literary corpora, including tazkiras and divans, to learn how early modern critics and poets conceptualized Persian literary history.⁷ Despite these extensive contributions, the analysis of tarz as an evolving stylistic term and its hermeneutical functions throughout the Persian literary tradition remains an ongoing project. The aim of this article is to identify the historical moment that tarz emerged as a key concept in Persian literary historiography and to demonstrate some of its nuanced usages in Safavid-Mughal literary historiography. My ultimate objective is to show how the stylistic frameworks used by Safavid-Mughal critics and poets afford us a more nuanced and granular account of the early modern period.

We need to take into consideration that the notion of style is capacious, similar to other slippery terms that have various meanings and implications. In this article, I use “style” in the same sense as the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, which describes style as the method by which a writer carries meaning, tone, and emotion in their writing and the “common features that identify the works of particular places, times, groups, or schools.”⁸ Despite many discrete usages of the term tarz in the early modern Persian literary context, these two basic implications of style are recognizable. The concept of style is not limited to a single word; premodern scholars used closely related concepts such as shīva, tarz, tarīq, and tawr to discuss Persian poetry. From the fourteenth century onward, however, there was an interesting development: tarz became more frequently used in rhetorical manuals and tazkiras, eventually becoming the standard term used for the discussion of Persian literary history.

Early Implications of Style, and an Introduction of the Subject

There is a history of the concept of style before its efflorescence in the Safavid-Mughal era that sheds light on how we might understand this notion in the early modern context. The earliest references to the notion of style, using terms such as shīva, tarz, and tarīq, date back to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a time when the lands of ʿIrāq-i ʿajam (western Iran) and Āzarbāyjān had emerged as a new center for the patronage of Persian poetry, in competition with the tradition's homeland of Khurāsān and Transoxiana to the east. Two of the major poets of this period, Khāqānī Shirvānī (d. 595/1190) and Nizāmī Ganjavī (d. 607/1209), who both came from the same cultural zone in Āzarbāyjān, left commentary on the novelty of their style. In the following lines, Khāqānī emphasizes the newness and supremacy of his style and distinguishes it from that of his predecessors, saying: “I am the king of poetry and prose in Khurāsān and ʿIrāq (ʿIrāq-i ʿajam) • that I have, every word, brought to the educated people for their evaluation / the just call me master, for in content and in language • I have brought forth a new style, not an old one” (pādishāh-i nazm-u nasr-am dar Khurāsān-u ʿIrāq • ki ahl-i dānish rā zi har lafz imtihān āvarda-am / munsifān ustād dānand-am ki dar maʿnī-u lafz • shīva-yi tāza na rasm-i bāstān āvarda-am).⁹ By drawing a dichotomy between fresh and ancient (tāza and bāstān), Khāqānī not only endorses the novelty of his poetic style and the way in which it deviates from literary precedent, but also reveals his historical awareness of the development of Persian poetry.

The dynamic between old and new suggests a sense of continuity between the historical past and the present through the notion of style. We can explore the nature of this dynamic further in another line of Khāqānī's poetry: “I have a unique and new style • while ʿUnsurī holds the ancient style / he wrote neither philosophy, nor homily, nor asceticism • for ʿUnsurī did not even know a letter of those [fields]” (marā shīva-yi khāss-u tāzast-u dāsht • hamān shīva-yi bāstān ʿUnsurī / na tahqīq guft-u na vaʿz-u na zuhd • ki harfī nadānist az ān ʿUnsurī).¹⁰ ʿUnsurī Balkhī (d. 431/1039) was a leading Persian poet who served as the poet laureate (malik al-shuʿarāʾ) at the court of Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna (r. 389–421/998–1030). He was a model in writing the qasida (ode) in Khurāsān, and was noted, praised, and imitated by several poets.¹¹ Khāqānī uses ʿUnsurī as a foil, challenging him and claiming his place as an authority on poetry. By maintaining the binary between fresh and ancient, self and other, Khāqānī not only positions himself as an established poet within Persian literary history, but also claims superiority over his predecessors through his innovative style. He inserts himself as a pivotal poet in the development of Persian poetry and the new ʿUnsurī of his age. Becoming a poetic model in the premodern era required multiple competencies, including creativity and stylistic innovation, while at the same time competing with established masters of a particular genre.

Furthermore, along these lines, Khāqānī allows us to access his denotation of shīva by differentiating his poetry from that of ʿUnsurī. It seems that for Khāqānī, shīva refers to three things: possible functions of poetry (didactic, homiletic, or philosophical), possible topics for poems, and possible sources of images, figurative language, etc.¹² All these implications point toward Khāqānī making the distinction between the old qasida of the Ghaznavid court and the “fresh” poetry that engages with these new topics and themes. This transformation offers new materials outside of the court for poets’ imagery, language, and rhetoric, and fashions new topics and themes in different poetic forms.

Similarly, Khāqānī's counterpart Nizāmī attempted to fashion himself as the initiator of a new style in writing masnavī.¹³ For example, in Makhzan al-Asrār, he marks authenticity and newness as the two main features of his poetic thoughts and style, saying “I brought forth a fresh magic • cast a figure from a new mold . . . / the style is strange [but] don't ignore it • if you embrace it, it won't be strange / for this liberated poetry, full of the garden's image • is not like a lamp with borrowed kindler” (shuʿbada-yī tāza barangīkhtam • haykalī az qālib-i naw rīkhtam . . . / shīva gharīb ast mashaw nāmujīb • gar binavāzīsh nabāshad gharīb / kīn sukhan-i rasta pur az naqsh-i bāgh • ʿāriyat afrūz nashud chun chirāgh).¹⁴ By setting his fresh and distinctive style against the models of his forerunners, particularly Sanāʾī in his Hadīqat al-Haqīqat, Nizāmī places himself in competition with the past and uses his style and originality to prove his superiority.¹⁵ This example shows Nizāmī's awareness of his rupture of tradition, and he apparently anticipated that his poetry might be difficult to grasp or even unappealing to his readers, who had been educated and influenced by previous canonic poets and works. Accordingly, he promoted his alien and novel style to persuade readers to accept his poetry. Lastly, because Nizāmī was active in narrative poetry, the originality of his poetic ideas was more critical than it was for a poet like Khāqānī. This originality suggests that the notions of freshness and strangeness, as two important premodern stylistic features, might have had different implications for innovative poets.

These are the first indications of the idea of freshness in poetry (tāzagī), articulated through the lens of style, that developed and became a critical part of Persian literary historiography. They indicate the extent to which the audience played a significant role in a poet's literary career. Interestingly, both poets are not only trying to “sell” their crafts to the patrons of the present, but also to contemporary and future poets.¹⁶ In their struggle for dominance within a particular genre, these innovative poets had to use their poetry to announce their intervention and, in that way, attract a greater audience. For example, Khāqānī directly addresses the community of poets as he emphasizes his new style and seeks admission into their ranks: “This is a strange style that I have fashioned • it is appropriate for the poets to consider my poetry as a model” (hast tarīq-ī gharīb īnki man āvarda-am • ahl-i sukhan rā sazad gufta-yi man pīshvā).¹⁷ All these examples show that Nizāmī and Khāqānī conceive of their contributions to poetry and their historical legacy in terms of style, albeit that style for Nizāmī means something different than it does for Khāqānī. Each attempts to secure his own legacy by persuading future poets to imitate him, thus making the poetic style and manner of writing recognizable and the poetry universal. For Khāqānī and Nizāmī, style emerges as a self-aware breakthrough from previous generations, as they declare that as poets, they are not situating themselves within the existing poetic field but can only be understood outside of its terms.

It is suggestive that although poets of the medieval period showed a kind of self-consciousness of the notion of style, it was absent from rhetorical manuals. Conspicuously, the recognized rhetoricians such as Muhammad b. ʿUmar Radūyānī (d. 514/1120), Rashīd Vatvāt (d. 578/1182), and Shams-i Qays Rāzī (d. 627/1230) did not discuss style and focused primarily on poets’ characteristic use of particular rhetorical devices and their approaches to meter and rhyme. For instance, in his explanation of husn-i takhallus,¹⁸ Rashīd Vatvāt referred to Kamālī's innovative treatment of this poetic device and asserted that “I believe that no one amongst the Arabs and Persians has created such an excellent takhallus (disengagement), and this is novel in Kamālī's works” (va iʿtiqād-i man ān ast ki dar ʿArab va ʿAjam hīch kas bih az īn takhallus nakarda ast va īn az kārhā-yi Kamālī badīʿ ast).¹⁹ As we see, Vatvāt made an evaluative statement recognizing Kamālī's innovative approach to a particular literary device and situated him in the broader literary field, but did not refer to his style. In other words, medieval critics like Vatvāt were more concerned with rhetorical than stylistic innovation.

It is not until the fourteenth century that there is a turning point, at which time style becomes a crucial concept in rhetorical manuals. The critical figure in this movement was the fourteenth-century rhetorician, Sayf-i Jām-i Hiravī, who laid out a concrete theory of style using the specific term tarz and consequently shed new light on the conceptualization of style. He used tarz in a precise stylistic sense and explicitly differentiated it from other categories, such as “kinds” (anvāʿ), which were largely form-based, and “intentions” (maqāsid), which were theme-based.²⁰ According to Sayf-i Jām, “style literally refers to shape and appearance; but in the terminology of the rhetoricians, it is that thing by which [the poet] specifies a [particular] genre from among the genres of poetry, using a form from among the [various] forms of poetic descriptions” (tarz az rūy-i lughat, hayʾat va shikl ast va dar istilāh-i īn tāyifa ānast ki maqsadī rā az maqāsid-i nazm dar nawʿī az anvāʿ-i awsāf-i nazm makhsūs gardānīda bāshad).²¹ Based on this definition, Sayf-i Jām suggested ten poetic styles and identified each with an individual master poet who served as a model for a specific genre. Two examples of his tarz categories were the “romantic” (ʿāshiqāna) style, which contained “soundness and elegance” (salāmat va zawq) and was associated with the poet Saʿdī, and the “philosophical” (hakīmāna), which was considered Sanāʾī's style, containing exhortation and advice supported by proverbs and similes.²² Although Sayf-i Jām's intervention played a vital role in the history of the reconceptualization of tarz within the rhetorical tradition, his usage of tarz was not representative of the later tradition, as embodied by early modern tazkira writers. The following sections analyze the new approach to tarz in the tazkira tradition and how its hermeneutical principles played a critical role in Safavid-Mughal literary texts.

The Construction of Literary History and Stylistics in the Tazkira Tradition

In the previous pages, I have suggested that early conceptualizations of style in poetry give us a sense of how poets talked about themselves as individuals. In this way, their discussions of style were only occasional rather than representative of a broader movement. The systematic use of tarz as a part of literary history appeared first in the post-Mongol rhetorical manuals before later developing in the tazkira tradition, particularly in the Safavid-Mughal period. The emergence of the poetic tazkira genre opened a new space for literary scholars to practically analyze and discuss the concept of tarz in an extensive and integrated way. Unlike rhetorical texts, which only included the names of a few master poets and their selected poetry, the tazkira tradition established itself as a genre that created a textual community for poets of varying skill sets. The collection of poets’ biographies and selected poetry in a single text created space for critics to evaluate poets’ poetry in a more comprehensive way. In that way, the tazkira tradition facilitated the development of the concept of tarz and its role in literary history.

Like other long-standing literary genres, tazkira writing underwent many changes over time in response to various sociohistorical and political factors. In the earliest tazkiras, including ʿAwfī's Lubāb al-Albāb and Dawlatshāh Samarqandī's Tazkirat al-Shuʿarā, the authors took a biographical approach, describing selected poets’ lives and their literary careers. In such an approach, the earliest anthologists displayed their critical viewpoints in an implicit rather than explicit way. From the sixteenth century onward, we see a new approach to the tazkira genre, in which writers paid more attention to analysis of the poetry and poets’ styles.²³ Accordingly, in contrast to earlier anthologists such as Muhammad ʿAwfī (d. 640/1242), who alluded to style using a range of terms such as ʿazab (sweet), matbūʿ (pleasant), fasīh (eloquent), and nāzuk (delicate), Safavid-Mughal literary scholars tried to provide more critical insights.²⁴ In their examination of poetic style, these critics developed a way of writing literary history that was not limited to rhetorical and philological issues but considered the individual style of master poets and their followers as the main focus of their analysis. In this way, they adopted the framework that we saw earlier in the poetry of Khāqānī and Nizāmī, in which certain poets established themselves as masters to be emulated, imitated, and superseded. These early modern scholars tried to crystallize and critically develop the nebulous idea of tarz that had first been fashioned by Khāqānī and Nizāmī. Subsequently, the elaboration of tarz emerged in the tazkira corpus, with authors deploying such terms as tarz-i khāss (distinct style), tarz-i tāza (new style), shīva-yi qudamā (ancient style), tatabbuʿ-i tarz (following a style), maʿnī-yi bīgāna (strange meaning), and lafz-i gharīb (bizarre word).

It is critical to note that, in the early modern tazkira tradition, the term tarz and its synonyms carried multiple implications for the analysis of poetry in general, rather than just individual poetic styles. For example, tarz was used to distinguish between what modern scholarship generally refers to as forms: the ghazal (a short poem with a specific meter and fixed rhyme order, usually with a love theme), the qasida (ode), the rubāʿī (quatrain), and others. There were kinds of tarz associated with specific stylistic approaches within the ghazal, such as tarz-i vuqūʿ (realistic style) or tarz-i vāsūkht; with individual poets such as the tarz of Sāʾib and the tarz of Asīr; or with geographical regions, such as tarz-i ʿIrāq or tarz-i Kashmīr.²⁵ Sometimes tazkira writers defined tarz in association with noticeable frequent uses of a certain rhetorical element such as tarz-i īhām (ambiguity) or tarz-i ighrāq (exaggeration or hyperbole). For instance, in his discussion of Sanāyī Mashhadī's poetry, Ārzū says, “he has cultivated an exaggerated style” (hamān tarīq-i ighrāq rā varzīda ast).²⁶ By highlighting Mashhadī's tarīq-i ighrāq, Ārzū identifies its frequency in Mashhadī's poetry as a core feature of his poetic style. In that sense, it expands beyond considerations of rhetoric to encompass discussions of an entire approach to writing poetry. Tarz appears in several theoretically nuanced ways, although always in relationship to the underlying consideration of style in one way or another.

This elaboration of the term tarz took place in the seventeenth century, a time in which both the tazkira tradition and the vocabulary of literary analysis gained a great deal of sophistication. This transition can be traced to literary figures such as Taqī al-Dīn Kāshī (d. 1016/1607), Taqī al-Dīn Muhammad Awhadī Balyānī (d. 1050/1640), Mīrzā Tāhir Nasrābādī (d. 1089/1678), and others. Taqī Awhadī's massive tazkira, entitled ʿArafāt al-ʿĀshiqīn va ʿArasāt al- ʿĀrifīn, composed around 1613 to 1615 in Agra, played a key role in the development of the tazkira tradition and became a major source for later literary scholars.²⁷ Awhadī was able to combine both biographical and critical approaches in his writing, providing detailed information about the poets (particularly his contemporaries) and a critical description of their poetic styles. With this approach, he established a new method of doing literary history that inspired a new generation of literary critics in the eighteenth century, including Khān Ārzū, Vālih Dāghistānī, and Āzād Bilgrāmī, all of whom represented themselves more as critics than biographers. They shifted away from a mere recognition of poets’ style and drew into debate new questions about poetic style and literary history, such as who originated the ghazal, or who innovated a specific poetic style. For this reason, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries should be regarded as a turning point in Persian literary historiography.

A Turning Point: From Awhadī to Ārzū in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

In an influential intervention, Awhadī draws an implicit link between temporality and poetic style and uses it as the overarching structure of his tazkira. In that sense, he uses the conventional temporal divisions of ancients (mutaqaddimīn) and moderns (mutaʾakhkhirīn), while also fashioning a novel category of poets, the medievals (mutavassitīn), to create his own chronology of poets and styles. It is significant that no other tazkira writer before Awhadī introduced a concept like mutavassitīn. This is a different temporal framework from what is commonly used in the Western academy for literary periodization, which draws on European models, but nonetheless we see a certain kind of shared logic in dividing the history of Persian poetry into three parts, reminiscent of Renaissance writers like Petrarch beginning to conceive the idea of a “middle age” that separated them from the ancients. Based on the information provided in ʿArafāt al-ʿĀshiqīn, roughly speaking the ancients (mutaqaddimīn) were poets who lived before 1300, the medievals (mutavassitīn) were post-Mongol poets who lived between 1300 and 1525, and the moderns (mutaʾakhkhirīn) included poets who lived after 1525.²⁸

By this arrangement, Awhadī not only painted a vivid picture of the trajectory of Persian poetry but also established grounds for the identification of poems that conformed to a certain conventional style, language, and rhetorical features that were popular in a specific literary period. According to Awhadī, there was a vast difference between the styles of the ancients, the medievals, and the moderns, and there was no excuse for misattribution of poems.²⁹ For example, in his entries on Badīʿī Tabrīzī, Awhadī wrote “some consider him as one of the medievals (mutavassitīn), which is mostly correct . . . because the style of this ghazal suggests so.”³⁰ We see that Awhadī's primary framework was a temporal one in which the main characteristics of poets could be understood according to their place on the timeline.

Nonetheless, when it comes to his observations of how poetic style changed across time, Awhadī brought a greater degree of nuance to Persian literary history through the consideration of the geography of patronage. He located the origins of Persian poetry in Khurāsān (northeastern Iran), then explained that its first major stylistic change took place when it began to be patronized in Ghazna.³¹ According to Awhadī, “when poetry returned from Ghazna to Khurāsān, it achieved its apogee there, and when it shifted to ʿIrāq, the poets from there became the emblem of Persian poetry.”³² What he meant by this was that Persian poetry followed its centers of patronage. With the rise of the Ghaznavids, he identified a stylistic change when it moved to Ghazna and then identified another change when it moved to Khurāsān and ʿIrāq, which corresponded with the Saljuqids and Salghurids. Interestingly, he did not talk about the dynasties themselves, but his model maps onto those dynastic changes, even if he was not explicit about it. For Awhadī, poetry was the major actor that moves across places, not people. Accordingly, Khurāsān, Ghazna, and ʿIrāq are the three major literary sites that had played a pivotal role in the development of Persian poetry up to his lifetime. By using geography as a basis for understanding the history of Persian poetry, Awhadī decisively associated the evolution of style to the sociocultural contexts that gave rise to different ways of writing.

Sirāj al-Dīn ʿAlī Khān Ārzū (d. 1169/1756) was one of those eighteenth-century critics who was deeply influenced by Awhadī, but who also distinguished himself from Awhadī in key ways.³³ Ārzū engaged with Awhadī's scholarly discourse regarding the historical development of Persian poetry from a different perspective. In contrast to Awhadī, who tied Persian poetry and its stylistic development to particular geographies, Ārzū attempted to understand it through the study of a few pioneering individuals. In that sense, he based his historiography of poetry on two foundations: poetic style and the chronological order of master poets. To illustrate, Ārzū wrote that Rūdakī (d. 330/941) was the first poet whose poetry was recorded and preserved in the Islamic era. Then, in the eleventh century, poetry entered a new stage in stylistic evolution with Sanāʾī and continued until the rise of new poets such as Nizāmī, Khāqānī, Anvarī, and Kamāl Ismāʿīl brought a “new change” in poetry.³⁴ From the thirteenth century on, Persian poetry experienced subsequent changes with the emergence of new literary models developed by poets such as Saʿdī (d. 690/1291), Amīr Khusraw Dihlavī (d. 725/1325), Hāfiz (d. 792/1390), Jāmī (d. 898/1492), Bābā Fighānī (d. 925/1519), Sāʿib (d. 1086/1676), and others.

With this approach, Ārzū minimized the issues of movement, location, and patronage, focusing instead purely on poets and their craft. Additionally, he paid more attention to poetry than the historical biography of poets. Instead of arranging his tazkira by date, Ārzū did it by the alphabetical order of the poets’ pen names (takhallus).³⁵ In this way, he created a literary community of poets as the producers of poetry, regardless of their association with a specific time and place. Turning poets into a list of names based only on objective criteria (alphabetic order) led to significant shifts in information retrieval and in divorcing the poet from his social settings. Furthermore, using pen names rather than real names for the purpose of alphabetization suggests that Ārzū was moving from the tabaqāt (biographical compendium) approach to a type of tazkira writing that was mostly concerned with the craft of the poet, the poetry.³⁶ We can conclude that the changes Ārzū brought to the model he inherited from Awhadī allowed him to create a space for a deeper exploration of tarz and literary analysis, and to assert tarz as the criteria for distinguishing poetry. Consequently, the usage of stylistic terms such as tarz, shīva, and tarīq was significantly more frequent than in other tazkiras.

This transition should be seen as a result of the shared understanding of literary history of the Safavid-Mughal scholars and their contributions to the field, not as an individual innovation. Ārzū was an influential eighteenth-century literary critic whose works and ideas were effective examples of the development of literary history in that era; his interventions in the development of Persian literary history were the result of his contribution to ongoing debates about poetic style and genre.³⁷ He not only engaged with and reflected on a broader tradition of scholarship in circulation, but also drew a genealogy of tarz, which he saw as going back a hundred years to the work of Awhadī. Many of Ārzū's colleagues, such as Vālih Dāghistānī (d. 1170/1756) and Āzād Bilgrāmī (d. 1200/1786), engaged in similar methods and used particular approaches to understanding the literary history that originated during that period and that today remains understudied. Given the importance of the shared approach of these actors, the following section uses their style-based methods to explore how they tackled questions current in their time, including the origins of the ghazal and the notion of sabk-i hindī (Indian style).

Historicizing the Ghazal (Style-Based, Not Form-Based)

One of the most interesting perspectives we can draw from this approach is an account of the ghazal that differs from what we see in modern scholarship. The ghazal is a poetic form that is defined as a short poem, tied together with a specific meter and fixed rhyme order, and usually with a theme of love. Shams-i Qays-i Rāzī writes that the ghazal literally means “speaking of women, description of making love to them, and the desire for their friendship,” adding that “most innovative poets (shuʿarā-yi mufliq) define the ghazal as a depiction of the beloved's beauty and the description of characteristics of love and lovemaking.”³⁸ However, as Franklin Lewis and other scholars have observed, the ghazal developed over time from a specific genre to a more capacious form that could address multiple topics such as mysticism, philosophy, sociopolitical thoughts, and others.³⁹

The ghazal became a predominant genre in the post-Mongol era and achieved its apogee during the Safavid-Mughal period. The popularity of the ghazal in that era stimulated an ongoing conversation among literary critics about the origin and development of the genre.⁴⁰ The broad hermeneutical functions of tarz allowed Safavid-Mughal scholars to represent the ghazal in terms of what modern scholars might call the genre of the ghazal, and to analyze the distinctive stylistic features of a poet, region, and school. These critics used tarz to write the history of the ghazal and at the same time make elaborate stylistic changes within that history. The questions of what the ghazal is and where it came from are still questions of debate among contemporary scholars. In recent decades, Iranian and Western scholars such as Sīrūs Shamīsā, Saʿīd Hamīdīyān, and Franklin Lewis have tried to answer this question through their attention to formal features such as the use of the pen name (takhallus), the length of verses, and the radīf (refrain). They agree that Sanāʾī is the initiator of the ghazal as a fixed form. For example, Hamīdīyān argues that Sanāʾī is the first poet who viewed the ghazal as an “important and extensible form” and in that sense was able to compose the real ghazal and promote it in the history of Persian poetry.⁴¹ Similarly, Lewis considers Sanāʾī a poet who established himself as the “father of the ghazal” by composing a “large number of ghazals” and including his pen name (takhallus) in his poetry for the first time.⁴²

It is striking that, contrary to the modern account, early modern tazkira writers excluded Sanāʾī, and other distinguished poets such as ʿAttār and Mawlānā Rūmī, from the history of the ghazal and began instead with Saʿdī. Dāghistānī, who conclusively acknowledges Saʿdī as the initiator of the ghazal, tries to shed some light on this. He maintains that there were some ghazals in the divans of a few poets before Saʿdī, “but their ghazals are in the manner of qasīda, which [they] abbreviated and named ghazal, while ghazal-writing has a distinct and diverse style that is not at all similar to writing qasīda” (ghazal gūyī rā turuq-i ʿalā hidda mukassara ast ki mutlaq mushābihat bi qasīda nadārad).⁴³ Dāghistānī's comment suggests that, for him and his colleagues, although the medieval ghazal might appear as a separate genre by form, in its performance and context it was still strongly linked to the world of qasida. We do not see figures such as Sanāʾī, ʿAttār, and Mawlānā Rūmī included in the history of the ghazal tradition because these scholars’ understanding of ghazal is based on the style that Saʿdī pioneered, and not necessarily on features like pen name, the number of verses, and so on.

The idea of Saʿdī as the creator of the ghazal emerged in the fifteenth-century Timurid era when the genre became popular and established itself as a dominant genre in Persian literature. Jāmī, the Timurid poet-scholar, for example, claims that “Saʿdī is the model of the ghazal writers and no one has practiced the way of the ghazal (tarīq-i ghazal) before him or more than him (pīsh az vay va bīsh az vay).”⁴⁴ Most Safavid-Mughal literary critics such as Awhadī, Ārzū, Dāghistānī, Āzād Bilgrāmī, ʿAlī Ibrāhīm Khān Khalīl (d. 1208/1793), and later Muhammad Qudrat Khān Gūpāmūy (d. 1281/1864), followed Jāmī's assertion and identified Saʿdī as the initiator (mukhtariʿ) of both the ghazal (tarz-i ghazal) and the “new style” (tarz-i tāza).⁴⁵ For these style-minded literati, Saʿdī was the inventor of the ghazal because he mastered it stylistically and, like Khāqānī and Nizāmī, became the model for later poets to follow. For example, in his historiography of tarz-i ghazal, Ārzū describes Amīr Khusraw as a pupil of Saʿdī's style and believes that “all of the recent poets like Bābā Fighānī and others have merely picked the gleanings from Saʿdī's harvest.”⁴⁶ Ārzū and his colleagues’ analysis of the history of the ghazal shows that they have a concrete notion of what constituted it, which was predicated on models established by Saʿdī. These scholars’ interpretation of the ghazal, distinct from more recent scholarship, allows us to consider the rise and history of the ghazal from a different angle, with insight into how poets and critics understood their own history within a networked lineage of masters and disciples, one that followed in many respects the same master-disciple relationship that organized many walks of life in the medieval and early modern Islamic world, from scholars, to artisans, to Sufis and saints.

As a founder of the ghazal and due to the acknowledged quality of his poetry, Saʿdī's image was constructed in the tazkira tradition as a legendary and divine figure; even the title “prophet of speech” (payghambar-i sukhan) was granted to him. In this respect, Saʿdī's life, character, and literary activities have been tied to various stories in which the figure of Khizr plays an important role. In the Islamicate tradition, Khizr is a prophet and an immortal guide, the only human being who has access to the fountain of life, a legendary spring of immortality and sainthood. By drawing this comparison, these narratives attempted to associate Saʿdī and his poetry with immortality in one sense or another. For instance, in his description of Saʿdī's biography, Ārzū connected him to several saints, saying “he had been serving water for some time in Jerusalem; he had met Khizr (peace be upon him) repeatedly, and was a devotee to Shaykh Shahāb al-Dīn Suhravardī.”⁴⁷ Similarly, Dāghistānī attempts to understand Saʿdī's literary achievement in a spiritual and mystical way, saying, “He [Saʿdī] was a companion of the prophet Khizr, and it is known that Khizr threw his saliva in the mouth of the Shaykh. Thus, all of his knowledge and eloquence (shīrīn zabānī) is because of Khizr's blessed company and saliva.”⁴⁸

By this observation, Dāghistānī and Ārzū represent Saʿdī as a divine poet whose status as the first role model for the ghazal was granted to him through the blessing of Khizr and other Sufi saints. In addition, they describe the ghazal as a sacred poetic genre and acknowledge Saʿdī's ghazals as exemplars of divine words and the water of life. These narratives situate Saʿdī as the poet who delivered God's message in a sacred genre. Jāmī writes the following lines of poetry to highlight Saʿdi's eternal status as related to the ghazal: “There are three prophets in poetry • though ‘there is no prophet after me’ / for the masnavī, qasīda, and ghazal • Firdawsī, Anvarī, and Saʿdī” (dar shiʿr si kas payāmbarān-and • har chand ki lā nabīyya baʿdī / awsāf-u qasīda-u ghazal rā • Firdawsī-u Anvarī-u Saʿdī).⁴⁹ With these verses, Jāmī not only identifies these three poets as prophets, but also brings Persian poetry into the same domain of revelation.⁵⁰ He uses the rhetorical device known as laff va nashr (rolling and unrolling) to imply the sequence of divinity of these poets and speak to a kind of theology of genres as well.⁵¹ In the Islamic tradition, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad succeeded each other, and each perfected the previous one's revelation: these three poets do the same in the realm of Persian poetry. These verses place the ghazal at the apex of poetry, having a special relationship with prophecy and sainthood, and place Saʿdī in the role of the perfecter of poetry, analogous to the role Muhammad plays in the perfection of religion. Lastly, what we see here is the recognition that the ghazal, which formally is not much different from some of Sanāʾī's, ʿAttār's, and others’ verses, is stylistically distinct, creating a gap between those poets and what Saʿdī does. The recognition of “the” ghazal in Saʿdī's work revolves around Saʿdī's particular style, a style that elevates speech to the level of the divine and gets close to eternal truth.

This perspective illustrates a way of writing literary history that corresponds closely with ways of writing sacred history, in which the community of poets is organized around a select group of game-changing “prophets” or “saints” who are by definition among the “elect,” and whom very few can hope to supersede. Early modern scholars tried to explain the ranking of literary models in ghazal-writing by linking them to Sufi saints who possessed different levels of divine authority. In this way, they fashioned the ghazal as a genre deeply tied to the divine realm, in distinct contrast to the temporal setting of the qasida and its association with the court and praise of its patron. At the same time, they recognized a few master poets as permanent models for the ghazal, whose status would remain unachievable to other poets. In his account of Amīr Khusraw Dihlavī, Jāmī shows how Amīr Khusraw attempted to meet Khizr in the way that Saʿdī had, but when he got there and begged him to throw his blessed saliva on his mouth, Khizr said, “Saʿdī has already won this grace,” and it would not be repeated.⁵² Through this narrative, Jāmī identifies Saʿdī as the main guardian of the ghazal, who was able to produce the real ghazal through his connection with the divine.⁵³

Safavid-Mughal scholars did not place all ghazal writers within the same rank. Instead, they divided poets into two main categories: innovative poets who served as role models, and imitators who followed the style set by those models. For these critics, the ghazal had not experienced meaningful change between the time of Saʿdī as the initiator of the tradition and the emergence of Hāfiz. According to Ārzū and his colleagues, the ghazal after Saʿdī became a prominent genre in the fourteenth century; poets like Khawājū, Amīr Khusraw, Khwājah Hasan Dihlavī, and Salmān Sāvajī merely followed in Saʿdī's path without any significant changes until Hāfiz, who, according to Ārzū, refashioned the technique (tajdīd-i fann) by “giving new meaning and popularity to the wine-house of words.”⁵⁴ Ārzū's observation indicates that Hāfiz's contribution to the ghazal should be considered part of a progression of the tradition and not a dramatic change.

For Ārzū, the revolutionary stylistic change in the ghazal happened in the fifteenth century. He identifies Bābā Fighānī as the focal point of that transformation. Ārzū conclusively uses the phrase “the page turned and the goblet broke” (ān varaq bargasht va ān qadah beshkast) to address the radical change that arose from Fighānī's new style.⁵⁵ Thereafter, Fighānī served as a model for many poets, including ʿUrfī Shirazi, Shahīdī Qumī, and others, until the rise of Sāʾib and Asīr, who delivered new changes for the genre in the Safavid era.⁵⁶ Ārzū's comment reflects the development of the ghazal tradition as a continuous chain of master-disciple relationships, or innovators and imitators, in which several poets, connected to each other through their imitation of a specific poet, fashioned their own community.

Lastly, for Ārzū and his peers, a poet was not an independent, self-conscious creator of poetic style but rather an actor who became aware of his situation and the energies he shared with the world of poetry in the process of shaping and reshaping it. Therefore, the notion of freshness (tāzagī) and imitation (tatabbuʿ) were not mutually exclusive; rather, they were closely linked. For instance, ʿUrfī Shīrāzī (d. 999/1591) was recognized as one of the followers of Fighānī's style, but, as Awhadī argued, ʿUrfī was able to create a new style in the ghazal, thus establishing himself as a role model for the moderns (mutaʾakhkhirīn) and tāza-gūyān (recent poets).⁵⁷ This contribution created a literary network in which several poets were associated with one another through the master-disciple relationship, moving between imitation and innovation. Accordingly, the notion of freshness (tāzagī) and new style (tarz-i tāza) circulated and evolved among poets from one generation to the next. This takes us to another major question of contemporary scholarship—the concept of “new style” in relation to early modern Persian poetics.

Rethinking Tarz-i Tāza as Emblematic of Safavid-Mughal Poetics

A number of recent scholars have identified both tarz-i tāza (fresh style) and tāza-gūyī (fresh-speaking) as the stylistic characteristic of the early modern period.⁵⁸ Most of these studies are framed against an earlier term, popularized by Bahār, who identified sixteenth- through eighteenth-century poetry as the era of sabk-i hindī or “Indian style.”⁵⁹ Recent scholars have critiqued this term because of its geographical focus and nationalist implications, and instead adopted the idea of tarz-i tāza or tāza-gūyī, which was used in the tazkira tradition.⁶⁰ Although this movement is laudable, it has failed to resolve the problem on two levels. First, replacing one general term like sabk-i hindī with another general term like tarz-i tāza does not resolve the problematic lack of specificity, nor does it represent the diverse characteristics of early modern Persian poetry. It continues to present the Safavid-Mughal period as a homogenous stylistic era of the ghazal tradition. Of course, the poets of that era might have similar approaches to poetry, particularly as related to creating new meaning and images, but this does not mean they followed a single established poetic style. Therefore, I suggest that we use the insights gained from the tazkira tradition to gain a more nuanced vocabulary for describing literary diversity and development in this period.

As I have argued earlier, tarz-i tāza is a literary term used by poets and scholars from the medieval period onward to identify an innovative poetic style that superseded an older, established style. For example, Khāqānī announces his new style in the qasida as distinct from the model set by ‘Unsurī, and Nizāmī sees his new manner of writing masnavī set against that of Sanāʾī. Similarly, Awhadī contrasts Muhtasham-i Kāshānī's new style to Vahshī Bāfqī's, contending that the former made the latter obsolete.⁶¹ This approach reveals a pattern in literary history in which master poets compete against one another, contesting dominance within a certain genre's ever-changing styles. What is significant about the Safavid-Mughal period is that the usage of tarz-i tāza and tāza-gūyī increased substantially in the tazkira tradition of this era. It suggests a rising communal self-consciousness around the importance of style in defining major movements in literary history. However, there are only a few poets that anthologists have identified as the true inventors of new styles: figures such as Fighānī, Asīr, and Sāʾib. Some of these figures established fresh styles that even obtained a name in Persian literary history, such as the tarz-i khayāl, created by Asīr, or the tarz-i tamsīl, fashioned by Sāʾib. The diversity of terms introduced within the conceptual framework of fresh stylistics demonstrates the need to be more nuanced in our understanding of tarz-i tāza, rather than simply using it as a blanket term to discuss all poetry across this vast temporal period, from the Timurids to the Safavids and Mughals.

The Safavid-Mughal scholars did not produce a detailed definition of tarz-i tāza and its implications for each poet. Accordingly, it is difficult to arrive at a comprehensive understanding of this stylistic concept in the tazkira tradition. As I discussed earlier, tarz-i tāza is a broad notion that manifests itself in different ways. In that sense, the early modern critics tended to use the indefinite phrase tarzī tāza (a new style). Even when they used tarz-i tāza as a definite noun, it did not necessarily refer to a singular established school, in the way that we identify Cubism or Expressionism. On its own, tarz can be used in definite and indefinite forms without too much impact. For example, Awhadī uses the definite form on one occasion to describe Vahshī Bāfqī's style with the phrase sāhib-i ravish-i tāza (the possessor of the new style), and uses the indefinite to address Valīdasht-i Bayāzī's poetry with the phrase “in poetry, he is the master of a new style” (dar sukhan sāhib-i tarzī tāza ast).⁶² However, definite and indefinite forms of tarz acquired different meanings when paired with another term, “creation” (ikhtiraʿ). For instance, Awhadī describes ʿUrfī Shīrazī as “the creator (mukhtariʿ) of a new style (tarzī tāza)”; but then Dāghistānī describes Fighānī as “the creator (mukhtariʿ) of the new style (tarz-i tāza).”⁶³ We can conclude from this that, on its own, the difference between “a” and “the” fresh style is minimal; it only becomes critical when, as we see in the latter example, it is connected with the idea of “creation” (ikhtirāʿ). In creating “the” fresh style (in Dāghistānī's words), Fighānī numbers among the rare poets who establish an enduring literary movement in the ghazal, whereas ʿUrfī is notable for bringing a certain “freshness” to the “fresh style.”

The multiple usages of tarz-i tāza and its different applications show that we cannot use it as a single term to describe the various literary movements and developments that took place in this long period.⁶⁴ It also shows that creation (ikhtiraʿ) is an important concept when tracking the stylistic changes in the master-disciple genealogy of ghazal poetry. By paying attention to such distinctions, we can move toward a more precise and historically grounded vocabulary for the analysis of Persian literary history. To demonstrate this, in the following section I discuss two of the most important stylistic schools identified by the tazkira writers in the early modern period, the tarz-i tamsīl and the tarz-i khayāl, which bring out the heterogeneity of tarz-i tāza and foreground the workings of the master-disciple relationship.

The Tarz-i Khayāl and the Tarz-i Tamsīl: Two Major Literary Styles in the Safavid-Mughal Era

Mīrzā Jalāl-i Asīr (d. 1049/1639) and Sāʾib-i Tabrīzī (d. 1086/1676) are two distinguished poets whose literary styles became dominant in the Safavid-Mughal era. According to Ārzū, the tarz-i khayāl was fashioned by Asīr and was embraced by a few poets, mostly Indian, such as Nāsir ʿAlī Sirhindī (d. 1108/1696) and Bīdil Dihlavī (d. 1133/1720). The tarz-i Sāʾib (Sāʾib's style), also known as the tarz-i tamsīl, was an innovation of Sāʾib and was followed by most Iranian and Indian poets.⁶⁵ These two poetic styles are well identified in the tazkira tradition, and most scholars, including Dāghistānī, Khushgū, and Ārzū, discuss them in detail.⁶⁶ According to these critics, the tarz-i khayāl differs sharply from the tarz-i tamsīl.⁶⁷ They describe the followers of the former as inclined to deploy bizarre rhetorical and literary devices to impede, interfere with, and hinder their readers’ arrival at meaning. Whereas the followers of the tarz-i tamsīl are devoted to the possibility of clear communication with readers, the practitioners of the tarz-i khayāl are interested in a special aspect of verbal communication called “abstruse meaning” (ghumūzat-i maʿnī) and “refinement of imagination” (nāzukī-yi khayāl) which interferes with these very processes of communication and understanding. In that regard, they expand the distance between the signifier and the signified and make readers pause over what they are reading.⁶⁸

The distinction between these two dominant Safavid-Mughal poetic styles created a conflict among practitioners of each at various levels. According to Ārzū, some of the modern poets (mutaʾakhkhirīn) not only did not practice the tarz-i tamsīl themselves, but also did not like it in others. For example, Irādat Khān-i Vāzih was a poet who, according to Ārzū, disparaged the tarz-i tamsīl, and wrote a masnavī in the tarz-i khayāl such that many of his poems are not comprehensible.⁶⁹ Asīr's poetic style, on the other hand, was neglected by Iranian poets to such an extent that his poetic compendium (divan) was not available in Iran.⁷⁰ To support this, Ārzū refers to Hazīn Lāhījī (d. 1181/1766), who said that “he obtained a copy of Asīr's divan in Isfahan only after much searching and effort.”⁷¹ These examples suggest that different poetic styles gained favor among different communities of poets, scholars, and patrons.

Although in his tazkira, Ārzū creates a community of poets through their pen names regardless of their time and place, he uses ethnic and geographic factors to elaborate the reception of a specific style. He explains the marginalization of Asīr's poetry in Iran through this lens, claiming that the abstractness and ambiguity of his poetry does not agree with Iranians’ literary tastes.⁷² This is in contrast to Indian readers who, according to Dāghistānī and Ārzū, embraced Asīr's poetic style because of its abstraction and enigmatic features.⁷³ Dāghistānī writes: “Some of his [Asīr's] poetry is naked from the clothes of meaning (meaningless); therefore, his divan is extremely popular in Hindustan, because most Indian people are always mirthful out of the agreeable scent of bang⁷⁴ (sarkhush az nashaʾ bang), and the meaningless poems that have been written in drunkenness are perfectly suited with these peoples’ minds and intelligence.”⁷⁵ These passages show how the early modern scholars expanded their understanding of stylistic change from the master-disciple relationship to include the idea of geographical and cultural differences. It might explain why modern scholars like Bahār understand “place and race” as elements of style development.

Finally, the contributions of early modern scholars allow us to understand poetic history and the identification of certain approaches with geographical origin, and not in the ways assumed by the contemporary critics of sabk-i hindī. These elements are important as we move into the nineteenth century, when scholars were beginning to discuss national identities in new ways. Rather than blaming Indians for ruining poetry, as some of its critics have suggested, the sabk-i hindī shows how distinctive styles came to be associated with various regions of the Persianate world.

Conclusion

In this article, I show how the concept of tarz became a dominant hermeneutic principle in the history of premodern Persian poetry, a method of talking about genre, history, poetic style, lineage, and genealogy. I argue that tarz served as a powerful stylistic tool that evolved across centuries and played a pivotal role in the construction of early modern Persian literary history. Although tarz is a capacious and slippery term, the investigation of this term and its diverse implications in the tazkira tradition allow us to understand Safavid-Mughal literary historiographers on their own terms and subsequently develop a more nuanced vocabulary for describing how style was treated by poets and critics in that era. By relying on primary sources in different genres, particularly the tazkira, this article shows the importance of style and the way in which larger investigation into its usage in the premodern era can open new venues of scholarship.

The advancement of tarz produces a framework for understanding Persian poetry, and literary history more broadly, altogether different from modern frameworks, which tend to be grounded in Western assumptions. Ārzū and his colleagues’ discussion of the historiography of the ghazal shows that the invention of a unified Persian literary history does not depend on a specific place or time. What connects different people is the ghazal itself, as it creates a community of poets across time and space. Within this process of ghazal-making, each individual poet has his own subjective engagement and interpretation of the genre, thus creating his own distinctive style. Influential poets used the ghazal as a medium to create their own subjectivity. In the genealogy of the ghazal, Safavid-Mughal scholars investigated influential poets who fashioned certain ways of writing the ghazal that were new to the tradition, and therefore established themselves as literary models.

Safavid-Mughal critics had a sense of how the ghazal was fashioned and developed through the centuries that differs substantially from the literary history that came into vogue in the twentieth century. As one of the main sources of literary stylistics and criticism in the Persianate tradition, the Safavid-Mughal tazkira tradition offers a distinct model for interpreting literary history and brings to light a central concept of Persian literary history that has often been neglected or misinterpreted in modern scholarship.