Khaqani

Afzal al-Dīn Badīl ibn ʿAlī ibn ʿOthmān (Persian: افضل‌الدّین بدیل بن علی بن عثمان), commonly known as Khāqānī (Persian: خاقانی, IPA: [xɒːɣɒːˈniː], c. 1120 – c. 1199), was a major Persian poet and prose-writer. He was born in Transcaucasia in the historical region known as Shirvan, where he served as an ode-writer to the Shirvanshahs. His fame most securely rests upon the qasidas collected in his Divān, and his autobiographical travelogue Tohfat al-ʿErāqayn. He is also notable for his contributions to the genre of habsiyāt ("prison poetry").

Khaqani was born into the family of a carpenter in Shirvan, on the border of the Persianate world. His mother was originally a slave-girl of Nestorian Christian faith who had converted to Islam. According to Khaqani, she was a descendant of "the great Philippus", which some scholars such as Minorsky (1945) have interpreted as meaning Marcus Julius Philippus, the third-century Roman emperor. Khaqani lost his father at an early age and was brought up by his uncle, Kāfi-al-Din ʿOmar, a physician. Later in life, Khaqani wrote a poem in his praise, in which he used the similarity of his uncle's name and that of Omar Khayyam to compare their virtues.

Khaqani may have been a child prodigy, since several of his poems can be dated to his early youth, indicating that he had become the eulogist of Manuchihr III at an early age. In his early youth, Khaqani wrote under the pen name Haqaiʿqi ("Seeker"). The Shirvanshahs bore the title Khaqan, from which he later derived the pen name, Khaqani ("regal"). Some traditional stories describe him as being the pupil and son-in-law of the famed poet Abu'l-Ala Ganjavi, however, this is not corroborated by Khaqani's own writings.

Khaqani in his youth decided to embark on a pilgrimage to Mecca, against the wishes of his ruler and patron. In his first attempt to depart Shirvan, he was captured by Manuchihr's henchmen in the nearby Beylagan. Charged with being insubordinate, he was imprisoned for a period of 5 or 7 months in an ancient fortress in Shabaran, near Darband. Khaqani was condemned to a number of subsequent imprisonments, until in 1156-7 he succeeded in escaping and setting out on a lengthy expedition through the Middle East. His travels gave him material for his famous work Tohfat al-ʿErāqayn (A Gift from the Two Iraqs; in reference to western Iran ('Persian Iraq') and Mesopotamia ('Arabic Iraq'). He also composed his famous qasida The Portals at Madāʾen, in which the contemplation of Taq-i Kisra (the ruins of the Sassanid Palace near Ctesiphon), according to Beelaert (2010) "elicits a warning about the transience of royal courts."

Upon his return, Khaqani was immediately detained by Manuchihr's successor Akhsitan I. To memorialize his incarceration in verse, Khaqani composed his most powerful anti-feudal poems in a genre that will later become known as habsiyāt (prison poetry). In total, five of his poems describe his ordeal in prison. One of the poems, widely known as the "Christian" qasida, is considered by Gould (2016) to be "one of his boldest acts of literary rebellion". Minorsky (1945) identified Andronicus Comnenus as the patron to whom Khaqani addressed this poem.

Between 1173–1175, Khaqani composed odes in honor of the Shirvan victory over the Russians, in which he reports the locations and details of the operations, including the destruction of 73 Russian ships. His personal life at this time was filled with tragedy. He suffered several family bereavements, including the death of his first wife, and his young son, Rashid-al-Din. Khaqani composed elegies lamenting their deaths. About the same time, Khaqani went on a second pilgrimage, after which he retired from court life to settle at Tabriz. According to accounts of him in various biographical works on poets, the date of his death ranges from 1186 to 1199. According to the gravestone in Tabriz, Khaqani died in Shawwal 595, corresponding to July 1199.

Khaqani's Divān contains qasidas (both panegyrics and non-panegyric odes), tarjiʿāt (strophic poems), ghazals (profane love poems), and rubaʿis (quatrains). His other famous work, Tohfat al-ʿErāqayn, originally titled Khatm al-gharāʾeb ("Curious Rarities"), is written in couplet form (mathnawi) and is over three thousand verses long. This book serves as an autobiography and also presents his impressions of the Middle East. Beelaert notes that, although the work is a mathnawi, it exhibits more affinities with his other qasidas. His surviving prose works include the prose introduction to the aforementioned mathnawi, and approximately sixty letters attributed to him.

Khaqani lived within a partly Christian milieu, and according to Beelaert, he was "a product of the culturally complex milieu of the Caucasus." He established friendly contact with Byzantine, Armenian and Georgian royalty. His poetry is sometimes profused with Christian imagery and symbols, and according to Lewis (2009), he "imbues his Christian images with a positive aura and an insider's knowledge of Christianity."