Persian Ghazals in White Sheep Tabriz: The Amatory Poetry of Two Āq Qoyūnlū Statesmen from Sāva

This paper explores religion and politics in late medieval Iran through its analysis of Persian lyric poetry, or ghazāls, attributed to two statesmen: Qāżī Ṣafī al-Dīn b. Shukr Allāh ʿĪsā Sāvajī (d. 896/1491), and his cousin, Shaikh Najm al-Dīn Masʿūd Sāvajī (d. ca. 898/1493), who, at the behest of their sulṭān, Abū al-Muzaffar Yaʿqūb b. Ūzūn Ḥasan (d. 896/1490), held key administrative positions in the Āq Qoyūnlū confederate empire. In so doing, the study departs from existing scholarship on the pre-modern Persian ghazal—the tendency of which has been to regard the ghazal as unreflective of its author and times—and considers the poetic form as a possible source for history. More specifically, the paper determines the extent to which the ghazals of Qāżī ʿĪsā and Najm al-Dīn—all of which are contained in manuscripts held at Kungliga biblioteket and Österreicheische Nationalbibliothek—affirm or contradict information about the Sāvajī statesmen, as well as Yaʿqūb b. Ūzūn Ḥasan, in traditional historical sources, like chronicles, decrees, and letters of correspondence; it also highlights the mystical content of the poems in order to determine the degree to which Sufism manifested itself in the Sāvajīs—and by extension, the Āq Qoyūnlū royal court. As a result, the paper proves significant due to the fact that (other than Paul Losensky) modern specialists of classical Persian literature have ignored ghazals composed in the ninth/fifteenth century, focusing instead on earlier ghazal-writers, namely Rūdākī (d. 329/940), Sanāʾī (d. 525/1130), Rūmī (d. 672/1273), Saʿdī (d. ca. 691/1292), and Ḥāfiẓ (d. 792/1390). Lastly, the paper considers the poetry and official duties of the Sāvajīs in relation to their Timurid counterpart, Mīr ʿAlī Shīr Navāʾī (d. 906/1501), whose rapport with Sulṭān-Ḥusain Bāyqarā (d. 911/1506), it will be proven, resembled that of Najm al-Dīn and Yaʿqūb b. Ūzūn Ḥasan.