literature: primary source documents 641 was also a prolific writer of occasional verse—panegyrics, elegies, and particularly ghazals Amir Khusrau Dihlavi was one of India’s most significant Persian-language poets and wrote panegyrics of the sultans of Delhi His best work, Khamsa (Pentology), heavily influenced by ancient Persian literary tradition, is a collection of five long idylls in masnavi form and deals with broad themes of Islamic literature By the time of Amir Khusrau’s death in 1325, the Abbasid Caliphate had disintegrated The golden age of Islamic literature gave way to regional literatures of Persia, central Asia, India, and North Africa During the first century of the period a number of great works were produced; among them were the Sirat Antar ibn shaddad (The Romance of Antar), the ghazals of Hafez (1325 or 1326–89 or 90), and Alf laylah wa laylah (The Thousand and One Nights) Islamic literature was not confined to the highly sophisticated, erudite, and witty adab literature of the court or the profoundly mystical works of the Sufis; there also arose a wide body of popular literature collected mostly from anonymous sources The Romance of Antar is a widely popular anonymous work in Arabic literature, attributed to many authors, including al-Asmai (ca 740–828), a philologist It is a work of pure romance, idealizing the Arab chivalry of the pre-Islamic era The protagonist is a pre-Islamic poet, Antarah, who glorifies the Arab past of tribal wars and heroic deeds through his poetry and exploits Most probably written and compiled in the 13th century, this work was the first attempt at constructing a national epic of the Arabs and their desert paternity The most prominent poet of this time was Hafez Born in Shiraz of poor parentage, Hafez is considered the greatest lyric poet of Islamic Iran and the foremost writer of ghazal, the form he perfected His pseudonym suggests that he had learned the Koran by heart His works consist almost entirely of about 500 ghazals, or short lyrics, on the conventional themes of love and wine The poems project at once the sweetness of the joys of this world and its shortcomings However, Africa they have traditionally been interpreted as mystical Sufi allegories, but many critics argue that Hafez was not a true Sufi and that the “beloved” of the love poems stands for a human beauty or a princely patron rather than God If there is anything divine, it must be found in the very human dimension of it Hafez’s Divan (collected works) is a symbolic rather than an allegorical expression of human condition, caught between yearning for God and limits of this world The most popular work of Islamic literature during this period, The Thousand and One Nights, is only partly Arab in origin, and the romances woven into it are from all cultures and civilizations of the Islamic world, mainly from Indian sources but translated into Persian as Hazar afsana (A Thousand Tales) and then into Arabic Many of the tales come from India and were later expanded to include tales and anecdotes from Harun ar-Rashid’s (r 786–809) court in Baghdad The collection was further expanded during the Mamluk Period in Egypt to include stories of rogues, tricksters, and tramps, mainly from the lower strata of society Individual stories, such as the Sindbad cycle and the Aladdin narratives, were also added Although it is a frame tale, much like Kalila wa Dumna, snatches of verse are interspersed into the prose narrative, as in many types of Arabic literature, without much relevance There was no standard text of the work until the 15th century The work is written mostly in simple Arabic with significant traces of the colloquial Egyptian Arabic, contrasting starkly with the complicated idiom and style of the acknowledged masters of verse prose of adab literature in classical Arabic See also astronomy; calendars and clocks; drama and theater; education; empires and dynasties; family; festivals; gender structures and roles; government organization; language; migration and population movements; music and musical instruments; natural disasters; occupations; religion and cosmology; sacred sites; social organization; war and conquest; writing • “Why the Bat Flies by Night” (undated) • A bush rat called Oyot was a great friend of Emiong, the bat; they always fed together, but the bat was jealous of the bush rat When the bat cooked the food it was always very good, and the bush rat said, “How is it that when you make the soup it is so tasty?” The bat replied, “I always boil myself in the water, and my flesh is so sweet that the soup is good.” He then told the bush rat that he would show him how it was done; so he got a pot of warm water, which he told (continued)