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GAYŌMART (Gayūmarṯ, Kayūmarṯ; Mid. Pers. Gayōmart/d, Av. gaya marətan “mortal life,” Man. Gehmurd; Ar. Jayūmart), the sixth of the heptad in Mazdean myth of creation, the protoplast of man, and the first king in Iranian mythical history. The particulars of Gayōmart’s life and death are given somehow differently in Middle…

GAYSĀTA, the name of a town in Khotanese documents in the A. F. R. Hoernle, Mark Aurel Stein, Sven Hedin, and N. F. Petrovsky collections (mostly either in the locative singular form gayseta “in Gaysāta” or as a secondary adjective gaysātaja “of Gaysāta”). Some of the documents in which this…

GAZ, common term in Persian for several species of the genera Tamarix (desert trees) and Astragalus (spiny shrubs of gavan); also the name of a confection made with the sweet exudate (gaz-angobīn) produced on Astragalus. This article deals only with the exudate found on A. adscendens Boiss. and Haussk. and…

GAZ (or Jaz), a town in the province of Isfahan, of the šahrestān of Barḵᵛār and Mayma, situated 18 km north of the city of Isfahan at an altitude of 1,578 m above sea level; it has a population of 17,874 (Markaz-e āmār-e Īrān, Āmār-gīrī, p. 7; idem, Naqša [1];…

GAZACA. See GANZAK.

ḠAZAL, the most important Persian lyric, adopted also by literatures influenced by the classical Persian tradition, in particular Turkish and Urdu poetry. i. History. ii. Characteristics and Conventions.  

ḠAZAL i. HISTORY The word ḡazal (غزل) is of Arabic origin. The basic meaning of its root is “spinning.” At a very early stage, the figurative sense of “having amorous talks with women, flirting” must have led to the association with erotic poetry. In Arabic the word can be used to…

ḠAZAL ii. CHARACTERISTICS AND CONVENTIONS The origins of the Persian ḡazal (ghazal, غزل), its development in the course of time and its formal features have been described in detail in ḠAZAL i. by Professor J. T. P. de Bruijn. This entry concentrates on the typical characteristics of the ḡazal and…

ḠAZĀLĪ MAŠHADĪ (b. Mašhad, 933/1526-27, d. Ahmadabad, Gujarat, 27 Rajab 980/3 December 1572), poet laureate in Persian (malek-al-šoʿarāʾ) at the court of the Mughal emperor Akbar (q.v.). Nothing is known about his family background, even his real name is unknown. His birthdate is known from a reference in one of…

  ḠAZĀLĪ, ABŪ ḤĀMED MOḤAMMAD, b. Moḥammad Ṭūsī (450-505/1058-1111), one of the greatest systematic Persian thinkers of medieval Islam and a prolific Sunni author on the religious sciences (Islamic law, philosophy, theology, and mysticism) in Saljuq times. i. Biography. ii. The Eḥyāʾ ʿolum al-dīn. iii. The Kīmīā-ye saʿādat. See KĪMĪĀ-YE SAʿĀDAT. iv. Minor Persian works. v. As…

ḠAZĀLĪ, ABŪ ḤĀMED MOḤAMMAD i. BIOGRAPHY A man of Persian descent, Ḡazālī (variant name Ḡazzālī; Med. Latin form, Algazel; honorific title, Ḥojjat-al-Eslām”The Proof of Islam”), was born at Ṭūs in Khorasan in 450/1058 and grew up as an orphan together with his younger brother Aḥmad Ḡazālī (d. 520/1126; q.v.). After…

ḠAZĀLĪ ii. The Eḥyāʾ ʿolum al-dīn. iii. The Kīmīā-ye saʿādat.   ii. THE EḤYĀʾ ʿOLŪM AL-DĪN Rightly regarded as the greatest work of Abū Ḥāmed Ḡazālī (450-505/1058-1111), Eḥyāʾ ʿolūm al-dīn was written after his abandonment of his professorship in Baghdad in 488/1095, while he was devoting himself to the study…

ḠAZĀLĪ iii.THE KĪMĪA-YE SAʿĀDAT. See KĪMĪĀ-YE SAʿĀDAT. iv. MINOR PERSIAN WORKS In addition to the Kīmīā-ye saʿādat, his most important book in Persian, Ḡazālī wrote a number of shorter works in Persian, which for the most part either reiterate or elaborate on the contents of the Kīmīā. Written after his…