Iran - Andrew Burke [50]
Rock & Rap
Iran’s rock and rap scene is mainly underground but an ever-growing number of bands and musicians are finding a Persian way to rock. Groups such as O-Hum set the scene with ‘Persian rock’, a mix of familiar and Iranian instruments and the poetic lyrics of Hafez. The result is like ’90s grunge rock with an Iranian flavour; download free tracks at www.iranian.com. Other popular rock acts include Barad, Meera, The Technicolor Dream and Hypernova. Home-grown rap is popular, with lyrics in Farsi extolling the joys of sex and drugs as in the West. Not surprisingly, the authorities don’t approve but millions of young Iranians do. Zed Bazi has the biggest following.
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Farsi (Persian) has changed less since the 10th century than English since Shakespeare’s day.
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LITERATURE
Iran is a nation of poets and overwhelmingly the most important form of writing is poetry. Familiarity with famous poets and their works is universal: ask almost any man on the street and he will quote you lines from Hafez or Rumi. The big-name writers are all primarily poets, eg Omar Khayyam, Sa’di and, above all, Ferdosi (see The Great Iranian Poets, Click here). Many Iranians write poetry themselves and the Sufi form, poems addressed to the divine beloved, are still popular.
While writers have long been persecuted in Iran, their numbers increased dramatically during the Khatami years, particularly women novelists who regularly topped best-seller lists. But writers haven’t fared so well under the conservative Ahmadinejad government. All books must be approved by government censors before publication and thousands of new and old works have been banned; from Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code to all works by Sadeq Hedayat, one of Iran’s most famous pre-revolutionary novelists.
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Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood is Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical graphic novel about growing up through the revolution and the formation of the Islamic Republic. It’s compelling, funny and, ultimately, heart-rendingly sad. The movie version, Persepolis, was released late 2007.
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Poetry
While no-one knows the exact date of origin of the Avesta, the first-known example of Persian literature, it is known that various forms of Persian poetry developed around the 9th century AD. Typical were the masnavi, with its unique rhyming couplets, and the ruba’i, similar to the quatrain (a poem of four lines). Poems of more than 100 nonrhyming couplets, known as qasideh, were first popularised by Rudaki who flourished under the Samanid ruler Nasr II (913–43).
These styles later developed into long and detailed ‘epic poems’, the first of which was Ferdosi’s Shahnamah, (see Ferdosi, Click here). Many epic poems celebrated the glories of the old Persia before whichever foreigners had most recently invaded and occupied the country. The last truly great ‘epic poem’, Zafarnamah, by Hamdollah Mostowfi, covered the history of Islam from the birth of Mohammed to the early 14th century.
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THE GREAT IRANIAN POETS
Iranians venerate their great poets, who are often credited with preserving the Persian language and culture during times of occupation. Streets, squares, hotels and chaykhanehs (teahouses) are named after famous poets, several of whom have large mausoleums. Ferdosi and Omar Khayyam are buried in huge (separate) gardens near Mashhad, and Sa’di Click here and Hafez have mausoleum complexes in Shiraz; all are popular pilgrimage sites.
Ferdosi
Hakim Abulqasim Ferdosi, first and foremost of all Iranian poets, was born in about AD 940 near Tus. He was famous for developing the ruba’i (quatrain) style of ‘epic’ historic poems. He is most famous for the Shahnamah (Book of Kings), which he started when he was 40 and finished some 30 years later. When completed, this truly epic poem included almost 60,000 couplets. However, the