Nizami Aruzi Samarqandi

From Samarkand to the Ghurid court

His real name was Ahmad ibn Umar ibn Ali; the epithet Aruzi, 'the prosodist', reflects his mastery of Persian metrics. He was born in Samarkand, probably late in the 11th century; his exact dates are unknown, but he was active between 1110 and 1161. Almost everything we know about him comes from his only fully surviving book.

By his own account he was in Samarkand in 1110–1111, collecting stories about Rudaki. In 1112–1113 he met Omar Khayyam at a banquet in Balkh; later he lived in Herat, Nishapur and Tus, where he visited Ferdowsi's tomb and gathered material on the poet. He sought the favour of the Seljuk sultan Sanjar, but spent most of his career — 45 years, he says — in the service of the Ghurids. When the Ghurid ruler Ala al-Din Husayn was defeated by Sanjar in 1152–1153, Nizami went into hiding in Herat for a time.

The Four Discourses

Written around 1156 and dedicated to the Ghurid prince Husam al-Din Ali, the Chahar Maqala describes the four kinds of professionals no ruler can do without: secretaries, poets, astrologers and physicians. Each discourse opens with theory and continues with anecdotes. An aspiring poet, Nizami insists, must first commit to memory twenty thousand couplets by the old masters and ten thousand by the moderns.

The book's lasting value lies in its stories. It is Nizami who tells how Rudaki's verses lured Amir Nasr back to Bukhara, and how Ferdowsi quarrelled with Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni. He also recounts how Khayyam, in Balkh, foretold that his grave would lie where blossoms would rain down on it — and how, years later in Nishapur, Nizami found it at the foot of a garden wall, strewn with petals. The book has been translated into English, Russian, Turkish, French and other languages.