Mīr ʿAlī-šīr Navāyī’s poetic replies to ghazals composed by Šayḫum Niẓām ad-Dīn Aḥmad ‘Suhaylī’
Mīr ʿAlī-šīr Navāyī’s poetic replies to ghazals composed by Šayḫum Niẓām ad-Dīn Aḥmad ‘Suhaylī’

Summary/Abstract: Though imitation had always been an acknowledged process of poetic creation, and as such it had played an important role in the Persian classical poetic tradition, the popularity of composing poetic replies (javābs) to well-known or otherwise interesting ghazals significantly grew in the 15th century. Many of Mīr ʿAlī-šīr Navāyī’s (d. 1501) Persian ghazals are poetic replies inspired by poets whom he respected. Two of these are javābs written to the ghazals of his contemporary Niẓām ad-Dīn Aḥmad ‘Suhaylī’. Based on unpublished manuscripts of Navāyī’s and Suhaylī’s collections of poems, the present article examines these two imitation ghazals and their models. It can be said that though all the poetic replies of Navāyī preceded by the heading tatabbuʿ-i yār-i ʿazīz are javābs were earlier suggested to have been inspired by ghazals composed by Suhaylī, only two of the model poems were found in the unpublished manuscripts of Suhaylī’s dīvān. The comparative analysis of the model poems and the poetic replies suggests that Navāyī’s javābs were composed to express the author’s respect to his friend whom he considered a talented poet.

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