Sultan Ahmad Jalayer, the last Jalayerid king, was unceremoniously beheaded in 813 AH. He has left behind a huge corpus of verse that is roughly equal to the production of Jalyerid court poet, and Sultan Ahmad's own tutor, Salman Savaji, and twice the volume of the poetry of another of his contemporaries Hafez. Clearly we are confronted with a remarkable situation, once we remember that this colossal volume of poetry is produced by a prince who is as often on the run (particularly from the “decisive” and relentlessly ferocious Timur), as he is at “rest” in his winter and summer capitals of Baghdad and Tabriz. How do we account for this “urge to poesy”? Why would a prince often on the run compose poetry, and so much of it?
Generally speaking, two answers are possible: the urge to poesy (1) as the vehicle and accouterment of the prince's escape from the harsh and insecure circumstances of his reign, perhaps as a sign of decadence; or, on the contrary (2) as a genuine expression of his need to give an account of himself inside the dominant discursive formation of his time. Although my findings are tentative at the moment, I can say with reasonable assurance that the final answer is the latter: sovereignty becomes an issue for the sovereign inside the amatory and Sufistic discourses of the 8th century, once the sovereign, being educated as he is by the poet, is socialized into and submits to the spirit of his age. He becomes a reluctant sovereign.
This study will allow us to enter into an analysis of the relationship between poetry and sovereignty in a way that our usual understandings of the social and political function of court poetry do not, for here poetry is not addressed to the sovereign/patron but rather issued by him. What ultimately appears to be the case is this: The king is not, as often assumed, a pure manifestation of the will to power and domination, but appears to genuinely yearn for the kind of “anxiety” that alone affords “authenticity” according to the dominant discourses of the age. This would permit us to revisit the controversial thesis put forth by the likes of Mirza Agha Khan Kermani, and Ahmad Kasravi: Persian poetry subverts, rather than buttressing, sovereignty.
