Asiri Isfahani (Jalal)

Asir-i Isfahani or Shahristani, Mirza Jalal (1620-1657), son of Mirza Mu'min Shahristani Isfahani, a poet flourishing in the Safavid era, with the nom de plume of Asir (‘Prisoner’), a contemporary of Shah 'Abbas I (1587-1628), Shah Safi (ca. 1628-1642) and Shah 'Abbas II (ca. 1642-1666), and one of the founders of the Indian genre of Persian poetry. His family were noted sayyids, of a lineage stemming from the family of the Prophet, hailing from Shahristanak, a village in the vicinity of Isfahan. He was on a par with Mirza Sa'ib, his distinguished contemporary from that city. Having spent his youth studying sciences and literature and spending time in the company of artists, he soon made a name for himself as a poet. He married Malik Nisa Baygum, a daughter of Shah 'Abbas I. He embarked on his poetical career in the prime of his life, studying, as he himself recounts, for a time with the noted poet Fasihi, who left Herat in the entourage of Shah ‘Abbas for the capital Isfahan, where Asir must have studied with him. Nonetheless, his sincere devotion to Sa'ib seems at times to have  overshadowed his pupilship of Fasihi. Sa'ib paid Asir the honor of making repeated mention of "studying Mirza Jalal's poetry" and selecting verses by the latter in his anthology of other poets' works. Asir's literary and artistic interests and his attachment to royalty made his home a circle of poets and belletrists. Naziri makes mention of him in his Divan. Asir has also been praised by poets like Kalim Kashani. Although Asir makes references to his advanced years, such may be dismissed as poetical expressions of his feelings, since his biographers have recorded that he was quite young when he died. The majority of biographers have recorded 1639 as his birth date, which is consistent with a chronogram in his poetry reflecting the corresponding Islamic year of 1049. Asir is a pioneer of the Indian genre of Persian poetry. His themes are so heightened by rich imagery that some biographers have called him the ’founder of imaginative imagery’. Although Asir and Sa'ib were contemporaries and followed the same school, Asir's has a characteristic approach very much his own. He is remarkably skillful in the concretization of abstract ideas and the creation of metaphorical compounds. Though he never went to India, his poetry gained a great following there, as exponents of the new Indian style based on his precedence from the early 17^th century on. While his poetry has features, such as complex riddles, characterizing the Indian genre, many of his ghazals form a bridge into that from the Iraqi genre in which his work was fostered. Where most of the poets of the Indian genre go from theme to theme in each verse of their ghazals, Asir’s are distinguished by a consistency of subject matter from beginning to end Certain of his biographers note a wide divergence of quality in his poems. Amongst his many extant  but less distinguished qasidas are eulogies of the Prophet and of the 12 Infallible Imams beloved of the Shi’ites. There are also panegyrics addressed to Shah Safi, the progenitor of the Safavid dynasty. His Divan appeared in Lucknow and Cawnpore in 1878 and 1898 respectively, a selection the poems of which were published by Habibullah Bigunah under the title of Diwan-i Asir-i Shahristani in Mashhad in 1969. Commentaries on his Divan include that of Mu'jiz-i Kabuli and Mahtab-i Ra'i, entitled Gulshan-i ma'ani, including the commentary by Muhammad Munir, who has added more material. An anonymous commentary is also extant.

Asar-afarinan (1, 525); Tarikh-i adabiyat dar Iran (5, 1212-1223).