It is not the place here to discuss the development of the...

It is not the place here to discuss the development of the whole genre of marthiya and taziya poetry in the Persian and Indo-Persian world, or in the popular Turkish tradition. But it is interesting to cast a glance at some verses in the Eastern Islamic tradition which express predominantly the Sunni poets' concern with the fate of Husayn, and echo, at the same time, the tendency of the Sufis to see in him a model of the suffering which is so central for the growth of the soul.

The name of Husayn appears several times in the work of the first great Sufi poet of Iran, Sana'i (d. 1131). Here, the name of the martyred hero can be found now and then in connection with bravery and selflessness, and Sana'i sees him as the prototype of the shahid, higher and more important than all the other shahids who are and have been in the world: Your religion is your Husayn, greed and wish are your pigs and dogs You kill the one, thirsty, and nourish the other two. [Divan, p.

655] This means that man has sunk to such a lowly state that he thinks only of his selfish purposes and wishes and does everything to fondle the material aspects of his life, while his religion, the spiritual side of his life, is left without nourishment, withering away, just like Husayn and the martyrs of Karbala' were killed after nobody had cared to give them water in the desert.

This powerful idea is echoed in other verses, both in the Divan and in the Hadiqat al-Haqiqa; but one has to be careful in one's assessment of the long praise of Husayn and the description of Karbala' as found in the Hadiqa, as they are apparently absent from the oldest manuscripts of the work, and may have been inserted at some later point. This, however, does not concern us here.

For the name of the hero, Husayn, is found in one of the central poems of Sana'is Divan, in which the poet describes in grand images the development of man and the long periods of suffering which are required for the growth of everything that aspires to perfection. It is here that he sees in the 'street of religion' those martyrs who were dead and are alive, those killed by the sword like Husayn, those murdered by poison like Hasan (Divan 485).

The tendency to see Husayn as the model of martyrdom and bravery continues, of course, in the poetry written after Sana'i by Persian and Turkish mystics, and of special interest is one line in the Divan of 'Attar (nr.