Diwan al-Shi‘r al-Farsi (al-juz’ al-awwal, al-qarn al-rabi‘ – al-tasi‘) by Muhammad Sadiq Muhammad (al-Karbasi) (review)

Muhammad Sadiq Muhammad al-Karbasi is the Founding Director of the Hussaini Centre for Research, a registered charity in London and the author of this voluminous Arabic encyclopaedia dedicated to Imam al-Husayn, with seventy-seven volumes printed and over six hundred volumes anticipated in total. This assiduous compiler has dedicated his life to incorporating and categorising copious materials published in numerous works, all devoted the unparalleled personality of al-Husayn ibn ‘Ali (A).

The Hussaini Encyclopedia is a historic, timely, and very ambitious project that exemplifies a movement; the study of al-Husayn is being recognized as a heritage owing to its impact on all events thereafter particularly in recent times, drawing many cultures together. Thus it has established itself as a trans-illuminative, trans-national, trans-historical and a trans-disciplinary study of the personality of al-Husayn. This encyclopaedia is not intended to be an academic approach to a dedicated theme with al-Karbasi as the editor-in-chief of a group of experts on a range of topics, but rather a dedicated endeavour of an individual with assistance from group of researchers, poets, men-of-letters, and journalists. However this immense project has resulted in not just a mere collection of summaries on various research areas useful for believers seeking re-affirmation but noticeably a significant tool for researchers particularly outside the Middle East working on this field.

The entries of this impressive collection represent an enormous amount of hard work and a significant contribution on a range of very important aspects of al-Husayn’s life such as his biography, his thought, his conduct, the social circle of personalities around him, various dimensions of his uprising, and countless other related subjects. Other volumes discuss topics including al-Husayn in the Qur’an, al-Husayn in the Sunnah, his biography, his prayers, al-Husayn and Islamic legislation, and this history of his shrine. Nevertheless the bulk of the Hussaini Encyclopedia, in fact over a third of its volumes, focuses on poetry and literature across a range of languages.

Prior to this volume, there is a volume providing an introduction to Persian poetry and the various stages of its development. That is devoted to the following: folk etymology of the term ‘Farsi’; the Indo-European family of languages; the Old Persian alphabet; the Middle Persian (Pahlavi) alphabet; Dari/Modern Persian; the Modern Persian alphabet; Indian, Turkish, English, French, and Arabic loan words in Persian; Persian dialects; Persian inflection and derivation; Persian literature and poetry; examples from Old Persian and Avestan; Persian poetry and poets in the Islamic era (a chapter is devoted to each century); Persian blank verse and its features; religious poetry and the schools of Persian poetry (such as Khurasani, Iraqi and Hindi); Persian phonological developments; and the Persian prosody and metrical system. There are also indices. The introductory volume is a good companion to the diwan of Persian poetry, making a unique contribution particularly for Arabic readers unfamiliar with Persian and European languages. However no mention is made of the various poetic forms, such as the qasidah, ghazal, qit‘ah, or mathnavi, and the contents seem to be essentially based on Dhabih Alllah Safa’s Tarikh-i Adabiyyat dar Iran (6 vols., 1332–1362 ah (solar)/1953–1983) and Ganj-i Sukhan (3 vols., 1339 ah (solar)/1960), Sa‘id Nafisi’s Tarikh-i Nazm va Nathr (2 vols., 1344 ah (solar)/1965), and also Parviz Asadi’s Farhang-i Danish va Hunar (1377 ah (solar)/1998). A more comprehensive revision based on countless other sources available in Persian would be needed to cover the wide ranging aspects of Persian language in order to make this a worthy complement to the Hussaini...