Imami Haravi

Imami-yi Hiravi, Razi al-Din Abu 'Abdillah Muhammad ibn Abu Bakr ibn 'Uthman Hiravi  (d. 1287), a poet of renown, with the nom de plume Imami, flourishing in early Ilkhanid times. A poet and scholar hailing from Herat, he composed panegyrics for the rulers of Kart. A contemporary of Sa'id and Majd al-Din Hamgar, he later settled in Kerman for a while and eulogized Qarakhita'i sultans and their local rulers. He associated with Shams al-Din Muhammad Taziguy, Shams al-Din Muhammad Sahib Divan's agent, in Yazd. Imami was well versed in Arabic language and literature as well as intellectual and narrational sciences such that numerous contemporaries of his compared him with Sa'di. He was well-known in composing qasidas in the 'Iraqi style. He settled in Isfahan in his last years and died in the village of Linjan. He was one of the distinguished poets flourishing in the thirteenth century who preserved, in his qasidas, the style of poets hailing from the east, even their poetical themes, compounds, and idioms. Reflecting the taste of his contemporaries, he at times composed mystical poetry and in Sufism he was a disciple of Sultan Awliya' Zayn al-Din Pir-i Hind. His works include his Divan, containing panegyrics addressed to sultans, rulers, and viziers in Herat, Kerman, and Isfahan, running to 2,000 couplets composed in the genres of ghazal, qasida, quatrain, qit'a, tarji'-band, and tarkib-band. He also wrote an Arabic commentary on the Ba'iyya Qasida by Dhu al-Rumma, the well-known Arab poet.

Asar-afarinan (1, 294); Tarikh-i Adabiyyat dar Iran (3, 546-557); Da'irat al-Ma'arif-i Buzurg-i Islami (10, 177-178).