Baba Tahir Uryan

Iranian Sufi poet; he is known for his quatrains called dubayti and for his aphorisms entitled al-Kalimat al-qisar. Among the people of Iran he is known more as a Sufi than as a poet; he is also regarded as a saint, and many miracles are ascribed to him.

There is not sufficient information about his life. That the sources sometimes give him the nisba Hamadani and sometimes Luri suggests that he may have been born somewhere between Hamadan and Luristan; indeed, in Khurramabad, between these two places, there is a quarter bearing his name. On the basis of one of his riddle-like quatrains it has been suggested that he was born in 326 (938).

According to a record in Rawandi's Rahat al-sudur, when the Seljuk sultan Tughril Beg came to Hamadan towards 447 (1055), he visited Baba Tahir-i 'Uryan, one of the three shaykhs who had won fame there at the time. The source notes that the reports that he lived in the Daylamite period agree with the fact that the rule in Hamadan of the Kakuyids (1007-1119), regarded as kinsmen of the Daylamites, lasted until 435 (1043-44), and that he was a contemporary of Ibn Sina (d. 428/1037).

That in his poems he often speaks of leading a homeless, vagrant life, of sleeping with a brick for a pillow and of being in constant distress shows that he lived the life of a qalandar; the source states that he must have received the epithet “'Uryan” (the naked) for this reason.

The date of his death is not certain: the heading of the entry gives 447/1055 with a question mark, while Rida Quli Khan records the date 1010 (details under Multiple Perspectives). His grave is in Hamadan.

His Poetry and Sufi Line — Although he was a dialect poet, the dubaytis we have today also bear the features of literary Persian; the source considers it possible that these quatrains were later brought into this form by others. Although there are many dialects in the region between Hamadan and Khurramabad, it is hard to tie the language of his poems to any one of them; it is seen as related to all of them and is thought to be a mixture. In form the quatrains resemble the ruba'i but differ from it in metre: they are in the hazaj-i musaddas-i mahdhuf metre of prosody, whereas the metre of the ruba'i is hazaj-i makfuf-i maqsur; for this reason they are called not ruba'i but dubayti. He used the same metre in his ghazals too. Since only a limited number of his quatrains appear in the biographical anthologies of the XVIII and XIX centuries, he was little known until the first quarter of the XX century; from 1885 onwards the research of orientalists, followed by studies in Iran, increased the number of his quatrains and brought to light, though few, some of his ghazals. Vahid-i Dastgirdi raised the eighty-seven quatrains then known to 296, and the number of ghazals from one to four, and published them under the title Divan-i kamil-i Baba Tahir 'Uryan. In his poems it is hard to distinguish worldly love from divine love; the great majority of his quatrains concern worldly love. According to the source, their greatest feature is that he conveys his feelings and images without any need for exaggeration. Whereas 'Umar Khayyam puts the joy of living in the foreground, Baba Tahir takes the suffering of life as his theme and appears as a pessimistic poet.

His Works — al-Kalimat al-qisar: this work, divided into twenty-three chapters, contains 268 of his aphorisms on mystical subjects such as knowledge, gnosis and inspiration. It is very widespread among the Sufis and many commentaries have been written on it; among them may be mentioned the Arabic commentaries ascribed to 'Ayn al-Qudat al-Hamadani and to an unknown person, and the Arabic and Persian commentaries of Mulla Sultan 'Ali Gunabadi. To these must be added al-Futuhat al-rabbaniyya fi Isharat al-Hamadaniyya, a commentary by Ghani Beg al-'Azizi on an abridged copy of the aphorisms. His poems are gathered in the Divan edition mentioned above.

His Tomb and Complex — His grave lies on a small hill in the Bun-i Bazar quarter in the north of Hamadan.