Nez¯am¯ı was born in Ganja, the capital of Arran, an
area of Transcaucasian Azerbaijan. His father was
from Qom in Iran and might have been a civil servant,
while his mother is believed to have been the
daughter of a Kurdish chieftain. Nez¯am¯ı was orphaned
early, brought up by his uncle, and married
three times. In Nez¯am¯ı ’s day, Ganja was a center of
literary activity, and poets there enjoyed the patronage
of provincial governors, receiving upkeep and
distribution of their poetry. Persian poets of that
time,Nez¯am¯ı in particular,were well versed in many
subjects such as languages, mathematics, astrology,
astronomy,Muslim law, philosophy, and history.
Nez¯am¯ı was a classical Persian poet who wrote
on the themes of women, love, and science. His
style of poetry is lyrical and sensuous, made especially
alive by intense imagery and complicated
symbolism. He is best known for five long lyrical
works: Khamse, or The Five Treasures (1173, also
known as The Quintuplet), a collection of five long
poems in which he expresses his views on a number
of cultural and aesthetic issues; Khosrow and
Sh¯ır¯ın (1181), a collection of lyric poems about the
pure love shared by the title characters; Layli and
Majnun (1188), a romance about the extremes of
passion and forbidden love; Haft Paykar, or Seven
Beauties (1197), a romance told by the character
Bahram V Gur, modeled after the ruler who led the
Sassanian Empire from 421 to 439; and Iskandar-
Nama (1201), a poem about Alexander the Great.
The themes in Nez¯am¯ı ’s writing involve problems
of self-knowledge, the problem of identity,
and the difficulty of the protagonist’s interpretation
of his role as a lover. Nez¯am¯ı stresses the romantic atmosphere, exploiting the pathos of his
stories. He expresses his ideas of love from the
standpoint of a society that tried to strictly control
the effects of love and marriage. For example,
in the nearly 4,000 stanzas of his most famous
poem, Layli and Majnun, Nez¯am¯ı vividly portrays
both love’s destructive force and one lover’s willingness
to become victim to love’s excesses. He
thus creates a love story and an allegory.
The two main characters of Layli and Majnun
are cousins who fall madly in love, Majnun to the
point of obsession.When Majnun makes a public
display of his sentiment, he damages Layli’s honor
and incurs her father’s disfavor. Layli’s father forbids
the marriage, and Majnun responds with a
public display of grief, ripping his clothes and crying
Layli’s name. Majnun’s father takes him to
Mecca in an attempt to heal him, but Majnun’s
madness is simply confirmed when he proclaims,
“A love as steadfast as this, let it increase a hundred
fold.”
Majnun becomes alienated from society, starts
wandering naked in the desert, and finally, in a last
show of madness, rejects Layli, who has been faithfully
waiting for him. She does not match the
image of her that Majnun had been carrying in his
head and heart, so he cannot love the real Layli.
She dies of grief as a result of his rejection.
Layli and Majnun and Nez¯am¯ı ’s other works reflect
his intellectual background.He used literature
as a means through which he could challenge current
societal conventions, and he beautifully depicts
his ethical viewpoints of love, science, and
women in poems that reveal his prodigious creative
talent.
English Versions of Works by Nez¯am¯ı
The Haft Paykar: A Medieval Persian Romance. Translated
by Julie S.Meisami. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1995.
Lailãi and Majnuän: A Poem from the Original Persian
of Nizami. Translated by James Atkinson. New
Delhi: Asian Publication Services, 2001.
Layla and Majnun. Translated by Colin Turner. London:
Blake Publishing, 1997.
Story of the Seven Princesses. Translated by G. Hill.
Edited by R. Gelpke. Mystic, Conn.: Verry,
Lawrence, Inc., 1976.
Works about Nez¯am¯ı
Binyon, Laurence. The Poems of Nizami, Described by
Laurence Binyon. London: The Studio Limited,
1928.
Meisami, Julie S. Medieval Persian Court Poetry.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987.
Talattof, Kamran, K. Allin Luther, and Jerome W.
Clinton, eds. The Poetry of Nizami Ganjavi:
Knowledge, Love, and Rhetoric. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2001.