By PATRICIA COHENPublished: August 12, 2011Ralph Ellison wrote for 40 years without finishing his novel “Juneteenth.” Antoni Gaudí labored 43 years on the Sagrada Família basilica in Barcelona, but construction continues today. And in the annals of grand quixotica, Ehsan Yarshater also deserves a prominent chapter.
Category: Biography
Jawaharlal Nehru
He Said:“Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but […]
Biography of Cyrus the Great, founder of the Persian Empire
Cyrus the Great, founder of the Persian Empire, He united the majority of the ancient Middle East into a single state extending from India to the Mediterranean Sea.
His Eminence Hajj Sultan Husain Tabandah, Reza Ali Shah
During his childhood, he began reading and writing; later on he learned the rudiments of Arabic and Persian literature. Then he studied the literary and “transmitted (naqli) sciences” with his honorable father, and other local teachers.
Abū Hamīd bin Abū Bakr Ibrāhīm Attar of Nishabur
BiographyInformation about Attar’s life is rare. He is mentioned by only two of his contemporaries, `Awfi and Tusi. However, all sources confirm that he was from Nishapur, a major city of medieval Khorasan (now located in the northeast of Iran), and according to Awfi, he was a poet of the Seljuq period.
Baba Taher Oryan
Baba Taher Oryan, (var. Baba Tahir, in Persian: بابا طاهر) was an 11th century Persian poet and mystic. Baba Taher is known as one of the most revered and respectable early poets in Iranian literature. Most of his life is clouded in mystery. He probably lived in Hamadan, the capital city of the Hamedan […]
Junayd of Baghdad
Junayd of Baghdad was one of the most famous of the early Persian Muslim mystics, or Sufis, of Islam and is a central figure in the golden chain of many Sufi orders.
Hakim Abol-Ghasem Ferdowsi Tousi
Ferdowsi was born in Khorasan in a village near Toos, in 940. His great epic the Shahnameh, to which he devoted most of his adult life, was originally composed for the Samanid princes of Khorasan, who were the chief instigators of the Tomb of Ferdowsi in Toos, Iran, Near Mashhad revival of Persian cultural […]
Hafiz Shirazi
“Open my grave when I am dead, and thou shalt see a cloud of smoke rising out from it; then shalt thou know that the fire still burns in my dead heart — yea, it has set my very winding-sheet alight.”
Mirza Kuchak Khan Jangali
Mīrzā Kūchak Khān (میرزا كوچک خان)(common alternative spellings Kouchek, Koochek, Kuchak, Kuchek, Kouchak, Koochak) (1880 – December 2, 1921) was a revolutionary and guerilla of the early twentieth century in Iran.