BESĀṬĪ SAMARQANDĪ, SERĀJ AL-DĪN, Per­sian poet (fl. second half of the 8th/14th and first half of the 9th/15th centuries). Besāṭī grew up and lived in his birthplace, Samarqand; he became a poet under the tutelage of Faḵr-al-Dīn ʿEṣmat Boḵārī (d. 840/1436), whose pen name was Ḥaṣīrī. Early in his career he earned a living weaving straw mats (ḥaṣīrbāfī), whence his initial pen name Ḥaṣīrī, however, on the advice of his mentor Boḵārī, he changed this to Besāṭī. Besāṭī’s patron was Mīrzā Ḵalīl Solṭān (d. 814/1411), the son of Mīrānšāh and grandson of Tīmūr. A manuscript of Besāṭī’s lyrical poems, fragments, quatrains, and verse riddles is kept at the Bibliothèque Nationale. Besāṭī’s contemporaries praise his poetry for its grace; however, because the poet’s literary education was incomplete, one occasionally finds certain weaknesses in his works. ʿAbd-al-Raḥmān Jāmī in his Bahārestān (p. 102) faults him on this very point.