Brotherly Discord in Iram Garden: History and the Didacticism of Kamāl al-Dīn Banāʾī’s Bāgh-i iram (or Bahrām u Bihrūz)

This paper demonstrates that Bāgh-i iram, a Persian romance by Kamāl al-Dīn Shīr-ʿAlī Banāʾī (d. 918/1512) of Herat, the narrative of which presents a love triangle involving brother-dynasts—hence its alternative title, Bahrām u Bihrūz—is a work of moral and spiritual advice for Muslim rulers and that its tale of fraternal discord is relevant to Yaʿqūb b. Ūzūn Ḥasan (d. 898/1490), leader of the Āq Qoyūnlū tribal confederation, and his uterine brother, Yūsuf (d. 898/1490). The paper is significant for several reasons: First, other than the 1957 Russian study by Tajik scholar A. M. Mirzoev, the poem, composed by Banāʾī in masnavī format ca. 912/1506, has not been the subject of modern scholarship; second, it contends that the narrative of Bāgh-i iram, specifically its twin-born siblings—one evil (Bahrām), the other virtuous (Bihrūz)—though reminiscent of the creation myth contained in the Gāthās (Yasna 30.3), presents a Perso-Islamic perspective on the duality of the human soul that reflects idealized conceptions of late-medieval Muslim kingship; and third, it asserts that Bāgh-i iram, though completed after the deaths of Yaʿqūb and Yūsuf, implicates the two as inspirations for the poem, a claim exposited in its discussion of Banāʾī and his presence in Āq Qoyūnlū-ruled Tabriz where the poet—a luminary amongst its galaxy of literati—conceivably knew about disharmony in the royal household, as well as Yaʿqūb’s licentiousness. The paper therefore sheds new light onto Banāʾī, who also went by the sobriquet Ḥālī—an important though neglected Timurid-era Persian versifier—through its analysis of his only-surviving romantic couplets, Bāgh-i iram, MS copies of which (used for this study), are held at the British Library and the Bodleian Library. In so doing, it situates the 7,000-line poem within a distinctive sub-category of classical Persian masnavī: that of the didactic allegorical romance—the hermeneutics of which, the paper explains, dictate that such works ultimately function as (spiritual) mirrors for princes.