Paper abstract:

Nizami provides collective humanity a resplendent path for progress and material development in balance with moral rectitude and spiritual transcendence—his Khamsa, the 5 epics, from the twelfth century have become an enduring beacon – they arrive from an ethnic and cultural past and resonate with normative values and aspirations of our contemporary existence in East and West, North and South.

Writing in the expansive socio-cultural linguistic convention of Persian, “the sage for humanity” Nizami Ganjavi (1140-1202/1209) endures as a major literary icon in Iran and Azerbaijan, together with Persianized regions of Afghanistan, Kurdish terrain, Tajikistan, and Farsi inspired Indian-Islamic literature. In Iran, Nizami is connected to multitude of sages and intellectuals, scholars and literary savants who embellished global civilization with erudition in Farsi as the dominant language for several centuries. In Azerbaijan, with the terrain of his birth in Gangja, he is celebrated with intensive national pride. Admired thereby as symbol for progress and development, education and learning, art and aesthetics, fine conventions and precepts – coins, stamps, libraries, bridges, schools, roads, museums, institutions of higher learning, and much more, serve to disburse the nationalistic pride for this epitome of knowledge and erudition.

In the celebrated 5 epics, with creative genius, Nizami skillfully combines humor and pathos, mirth and acuity, pleasure and erudition – juxtaposing profound deliberations within idioms of facile and elegant discourse. Dissemination of wisdom was enhanced via popular and widespread narratives to channel salient perspectives. Centuries later, Jami stated that “although most of Nizami's work on the surface appear to be romance, in reality they are a mask for the essential truths and for the explanation of divine knowledge.” Popular romance accounts of Khusraw and Shirin, Layla and Majnun, Haft Paykar, together with the didactic narratives of Makhzan al-asrar and Iskandar-nama provide a light entertaining colloquial style and clarity of diction for transmission of empyrean sagacity.

In this paper, 6 examples demonstrate the encasement of wisdom in frames of romance and heroism, mirth and pleasure-- thus entwining colloquial enunciation with sagacity. In our contemporary world, we would do well to temper and balance the quotient of entertainment with the normative ethics and lofty values of a time past, as yet available to direct pathways of our luminous humanistic potential. As our entertainment industry becomes increasingly dissipated —the possibility of tempering our leisure with the stated objectives of rectitude becomes a distinctive paradigm to emulate.