Baharistan wa rasa?il-i Jami

Regarded by many as the last great mystical poet of medieval Persia, ?Abd al-Rahman Jami (d. 898/1492) spent the greater part of his life in Herat. As a student, he excelled in every subject he engaged in and appeared destined for an academic career. But then, in his early thirties, he went through a spiritual crisis that ended in his joining the Herat branch of the mystical Naqshbandiyya order, led by the charismatic Sa?d al-Din Kashghari (d. 860/1456). A protege of three successive Timurid rulers in Herat, Jami's wide network of friendships and relations extended from spiritual and literary circles through the political to the academic. With 39.000 lines of verse and over 30 prose works to his name, Jami's literary production is quite overwhelming. The present volume contains his Baharistan, in imitation of Sa?di's (d.691/1291-92) work on morals Gulistan, as well as a number of other texts, treating of music, poetry and mysticism.