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KĀMRĀN B. SHAH MAḤMUD, Sadōzāy ruler of Herat (r. 1826-42). His career coincided with the waning of Sadōzāy power and the rise of the Moḥammadzāy dynasty in the 1820s. This shift in political configurations was manifested in a prolonged power struggle between Kāmrān’s father, Shah Maḥmud b. Timur Shah (r….

KĀMRĀN MIRZĀ b. Moḥammad Bābor (b. Kabul, ca. 1509; d. Mecca, 1557), second son of the founder of the Mughal empire, Ẓahir-al-Din Moḥammad Bābor and of Golroḵ Begom, and half-brother of the emperor Homāyun. At a young age Kāmrān Mirzā was given control of Kandahar by his father in 1522, and during…

KĀMRĀN MIRZĀ NĀYEB-AL-SALṬANA (b. Tehran, 1856; d. Tehran, 1929; Figure 1), minister of war and commander of the armed forces, and intermittently governor of Tehran and a number of provinces. He was the third surviving son of Nāṣer-al-Din Shah. His mother, Monir-al-Salṭana, was the daughter of the shah’s chief architect,…

ḴAMRIYA (pl. ḵamriyāt), derived from the Arabic ḵamr, wine, technically applied to poems with thematic contents chiefly about wine, wine-making, wine-drinking, and its various other aspects. Background.  In addressing the typology of poetry, Ḥosayn Wāʿeẓ Kāšefi (d. 910/1504-5) defines ḵamriyāt as “poems describing the attributes and states of wine, the…

ḴAMSA OF AMIR ḴOSROW, a quintet of poems in the mathnawi (maṯnawi) form, composed by Amir Ḵosrow as a response to Neẓāmi’s immensely popular panj ganj (Five Treasures). Amir Ḵosrow was the first poet to compose a ḵamsa, initiating a tradition that continued for centuries. Under the patronage of the Delhi Sultanate…

ḴAMSA OF JAMĀLI, a suite of five mathnawis (maṯnawis, poems in couplet form), composed in response to the Ḵamsa by Neẓāmi (1141-1209). This Ḵamsa exists in a unique manuscript in the India Office Library, London (ms. Ethé 1284; cf. Ethé I, cols. 735-36). The titles of the poems are: Toḥfat al-abrār (ff….

ḴAMSA OF NEẒĀMI, the quintet of narrative poems for which Neẓāmi Ganjavi (1141-1209) is universally acclaimed. It contains the didactic poem Maḵzan al-asrār in around 2,260 couplets in sariʿ meter; three epic romances: Ḵosrow o Širin in around 6,500 couplets in hazaj meter, Leyli o Majnun in around 4,600 couplets in hazaj…

ḴAMSA, a tribal confederacy in Fārs province. As Vladimir Minorsky pointed out, the leadership of a tribal confederacy is “either taken by the dominant family of one of the clans, or may be supplied by some enterprising group coming from outside” (Minorsky, p. 391). The Ḵamsa tribal confederacy is a…

KAMSARAKAN, Armenian noble family that was an offshoot of the Kāren Pahlav, one of the seven great houses of Iran claiming Arsacid origin. The Kamsarakans reigned in two princely states, both situated in the region of Ayrarat (Ararat)-Aršarunikʿ, with the old Armenian capital of Eruandašat as their capital and with the…

ḴĀN-E ĀREZU, Serāj-al-din ʿAli (1688-1756), a Persian-language philologist, lexicographer, literary critic and poet from North India. In defending a Persian ḡazal stylistics that originated in the 1500s called “Speaking Anew” (tāza-guyʾi) against detractors, he sought to demonstrate that the trans-temporal and trans-spatial concept and criterion of “linguistic purity” (faṣāḥat) had…

ḴĀNĀ QOBĀDI, Gurāni poet (fl. ca.1700-1759 or 1778) and one of the major members of the school of Gurāni poetry that is said to have been founded by Yusof Yaskā (d. 1636). The development of Gurāni poetry was furthered by the Ardalān dynasty, which carved out a semi-independent state in…

ḴĀNA-YE EDRISIHĀ (The house of the Edrisis,Tehran, 1991; Figure 1), the most acclaimed novel of Ghazaleh ‘Alizadeh, noted novelist and short story writer (Figure 2). It was the recipient of the “Twenty Years of Fiction Writing,” award of the Ministry of Islamic Culture and Guidance in 1999. A novel in…