ʿAMĀRA B. MOḤAMMAD (or AḤMAD or MAḤMŪD) MARVAZĪ, ABŪ MANṢŪR, Persian poet of the late Samanid/early Ghaznavid periods. Most scholars have read his name as ʿAmmāra, but ʿAwfī (Lobāb, p. 262) clearly read it with a single mīm. We possess no information concerning ʿAmāra’s life; that he lived until at least 395/1005 can be inferred from the fact that he wrote an elegy for Amir Abū Ebrāhīm Esmāʿīl b. Nūḥ b. Manṣūr Sāmānī (d. 395/1005), panegyrized Sultan Maḥmūd Ḡaznavī (r. 387-421/997-1030) in a qeṭʿa, and was dead in the time of Shaikh Abu Saʿīd b. Abi’l-Ḵayr (d. 440/1048-49). Moḥammad b. ʿAlī b. Moḥammad Šabānkāra refers in his Maǰmaʿ al-ansāb to a poet named ʿAmāra who never left his birthplace of Marv and who panegyrized Maḥmūd of Ḡazna. ʿAmāra’s few surviving poems display clear thought and beauty of language. The qeṭʿa he wrote in elegy of Abū Ebrāhīm Esmāʿīl is almost unparalleled (H. Forūzānfar, Soḵan va soḵanvarān, Tehran, 1350 Š./1971, p. 42). Citations from many of his poems in the Loḡat-e fors and other dictionaries bear witness to his fame in the 5th/11th and 6th/12th centuries.
Bibliography:
Moḥammad b. Monawwar, Asrār al-tawḥīd, ed.
Ḏ. Ṣafā, Tehran, 1332 Š./1953, p. 280.
ʿAwfī, Lobāb (Tehran), pp. 262-63.
Maǰmaʿ al-foṣaḥāʾ, pp. 66-67.
S. Nafīsī, Aḥwāl o ašʿār-e Rūdakī III, Tehran, 1319 Š./1940, pp. 1187f.
Ṣafā, Adabīyāt I, pp. 452-55.
Ḵayyāmpūr, Soḵanvarān, p. 407.
(J. Matīnī)
Originally Published: December 15, 1989
Last Updated: August 2, 2011
This article is available in print.
Vol. I, Fasc. 9, pp. 924-925
J. Matīnī, “ʿAMĀRA MARVAZĪ,” Encyclopædia Iranica, I/9, pp. 924-925, available online at http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/amara-b (accessed on 30 December 2012).
