Anvari

Awhad al-Din Mohammad ibn Mohammad Anvari, known simply as Anvari, was a Persian poet of the twelfth century, writing when the courts of Khorasan and Transoxiana were flourishing centres of literary Persian. He was born around 1126 near Abivard, in what is now Turkmenistan, and died in Balkh, in present-day Afghanistan, in 1189. He is remembered both as a skilled court poet and as a sharp, often difficult satirist.

He studied science and literature at a college in Tus, and became known as much for his astronomy as for his verse. He took the pen name Anvari, which he claimed others had given him. Around 1135 he entered the service of the Seljuk sultan Ahmad Sanjar and accompanied him on several military campaigns. During the siege of the fortress of Hazarasp, around 1147, he traded insults in verse with the poet Rashid al-Din Vatvat, who served a rival court, the two sending their lines back and forth attached to arrows.

When Sanjar was taken prisoner by the Oghuz tribes around 1153, Anvari wrote a qasida to the khan of Samarkand asking for his release. That poem, known as Tears of Khorasan, is his most celebrated work and the longest piece in his collected poems. The rest of his output includes praise poems, satires and shorter lyrics, and his language is often dense and hard to follow, so even early readers felt they needed commentaries.

His satires brought trouble. A mocking text about the people of Balkh, the Kar-nama, was wrongly attributed to him, and the resulting public anger forced him to parade through the city with a woman's veil over his head. After Sanjar's death he continued to receive patronage from some of Sanjar's successors, though apparently not as generously as he wished. According to one anecdote, a prediction of disasters after a planetary conjunction around 1186 proved wrong, and he lost the ruler's favour, spending his last years in seclusion.

His legacy rests on a few pillars: the lament for Khorasan was rendered into English verse in 1789 and admired in the West, and his work is still read as an example of the court poetry of twelfth-century Persia.