ḠAŻĀʾERĪ RĀZĪ (ḠAŻĀYERĪ RĀZĪ), ABŪ ZAYD MOḤAMMAD, b. ʿAlī, Persian poet of the early 5th/11th century. His nesba identifies him as a native of Ray. His pen-name occurs in the early sources, in verse and prose, both as Ḡażāʾerī and Ḡażārī. Neẓāmī ʿArūżī lists him among the poets of the Buyids (q.v.; Čahār maqāla, text, p. 45); if this is true, then he is likely to have served the last Buyid rulers in Ray before the Ghaznavid conquest of that city in 420/1029. He has left us with only one complete poem, a long ode (qaṣīda) in praise of the Ghaznavid Sultan Maḥmūd (388-421/998-1030), which, according to a Ghaznavid poet of the next generation, Masʿūd-e Saʿd-e Salmān, Ḡażāʾerī sent from Ray to Ḡazna and for which he received a reward of 1,000 dinars. Maḥmūd’s poet laureate, ʿOnṣorī, penned a reply with the same rhyme and meter, a devastating lampoon of the rival poet’s talents. The 8th/13th-century anthologist Moḥammad Jājarmī included Ḡażāʾerī’s ode in his Moʾnes al-aḥrār (II, pp. 463-67) and the texts both of Ḡażāʾerī’s poem and of ʿOnṣorī’s response were included by the Safavid literary critic Taqī-al-Dīn Kāšānī in the fairly small selection of ʿOnṣorī’s poems in his anthology Ḵolāṣat al-ašʿār (fols. 45b-47a). All the printed editions and, as it seems, all surviving manuscripts of ʿOnṣorī’s collected poems are derived from Taqī’s book (see Storey and de Blois, V, pp. 605-7); Ḡażāʾerī’s ode and ʿOnṣorī’s response can be found now in Dabīrsīāqī’s edition of the dīvān of ʿOnṣorī (pp. 161-75). The same two poems, and a third, supposedly Ḡażāʾerī’s reply to ʿOnṣorī, again with the same rhyme and meter, were printed by the 19th-century scholar Reżāqolī Khan Hedāyat in his Majmaʿ al-foṣaḥā (ed. Moṣaffā, II, pp. 921-29), but as long as the third poem has not been traced to earlier sources its authenticity remains doubtful. It is also reprinted in ʿOnṣorī’s Dīvān (pp. 176-79).
A fair number of fragments of Ḡażāʾerī’s other poems are quoted in early anthologies and other books, beginning with a single verse cited in an Arabic work of his contemporary Abū Rayḥān Bīrūnī. Some of the fragments show the author’s Shi’ite sympathies. Hedāyat’s statement that he died in 426/1034-35 has no authority.
Bibliography:
Ātaškada, pp. 1098-1101.
ʿAwfī, Lobāb II, pp. 59-60.
Abū Rayḥān Bīrūnī, Ketāb al-jamāher fi maʿrefat al-jawāher, ed. Krenkow, Hyderabad 1355/1936-37, p. 80.
Čahār maqāla, ed. Qazvīnī, comm. pp. 142-43.
M. Dabīrsīāqī, Ḡażāyerī wa ašʿār-e ū, Tehran 1334 Š./1955.
Dawlatšāh, ed. Browne, pp. 33-35. Haft eqlīm III, pp. 19-21.
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Idem, “Čand nokta-ye tāza rājeʿ be šāʿer-e mašhūr-e Ḡażāyerī Rāzī,” Āmūzeš o parvareš 9/10, 1318 Š./1930, pp. 17-22.
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ʿOnṣorī, Dīvān, ed. M. Dabīrsīāqī, Tehran 1342 Š./ 1963.
Rādūyānī, Tarjomān al-balāḡa, ed. A. Ateş, Istanbul, 1949, pp. 96-97 (editor’s note).
Ṣafā, Adabīyāt I, pp. 570-75. Šams-al-Dīn Rāzī, Moʿjam, passim.
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Taqī-al-Dīn Moḥammad Kāšānī, Ḵolāṣat al-ašʿārwa zobdat al-afkār, MS London, British Library, Or. 3506.
(François de Blois)
Originally Published: December 15, 2000
Last Updated: February 3, 2012
This article is available in print.
Vol. X, Fasc. 4, p. 354
