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Rabe'a Balkhi (Persian: رابعه بلخی), also called as Rabi'ah bint Kaab Quzdari or Ghozdary (in Persian: رابعه قزداری) , or just as Rabe'ah was most likely the first poetess in the History of Persian Poetry. She was born and died in Balkh, a city today in northern Afghanistan. The exact dates of her birth and death are unknown. But some evidences indicate she lived during the same period that Rudaki, the Father of Persian Poetry, was a court poet to Nasr II of Samanid (914-943).
Her name and biography appear in Jami's Nafahat-ol-Uns, Attar's Mathnaviyat and Aufi's Lubab ul-Albab. She was one of the first Afghan/Persian poets who wrote in modern Persian (Dari). Her father, Kaab, was a governor; when Kaab died, his son Haares, brother of Rabe’eh, became the governor. Haares had a Turkish slave named Baktash, with whom Rabe’eh was secretly in love. At a court party, Haares heard Rabe’eh's secret from Rudaki. He imprisoned Baktash in a well, cut the jugular vein of Rabe’eh and imprisoned her in a bathroom. She wrote her final poems with her blood on the wall of the bathroom until she died. Baktash escaped the well, and as soon as got the news about Rabe’eh, he went to the governor’s office and assassinated Haares. He then committed suicide.
Click here [1] to view a part of Rabe'eh's poem as translated from Persian into English by Manouchehr Saadat Noury. Her love affair with the slave Baktāsh inspired poet Reza Qolikhan Hedayat (a poet of the Qajar era ) to compose his Gulistan Eram or Baktash Nameh.
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Persian literature |
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Classical |
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900s–1000s
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1000s–1100s
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1100s–1200s
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1200–1300s
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1300s–1400s
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1400s–1500s
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Ubayd Zakani · Salman Sawaji · Jāmī · Kamal Khujandi · Ahli Shirzi (1454–1535) · Fuzûlî (1483–1556) · Baba Faghani Shirzani
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1500s–1600s
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1600s–1700s
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1700s–1800s
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Neshat Esfahani · Forughi Bistami (1798–1857) · Mahmud Saba Kashani (1813–1893)
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| Contemporary Persian and Classical Persian are the same language, but writers since 1900 are classified as contemporary. The above lists include poets mostly of Iranic background but also some of Indic, Turkic and Slavic backgrounds. At one time, Persian was a common cultural language of much of the non-Arabic Islamic world. |
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