Events

The King’s Song: Poet Kings in the Islamic East

This talk looks at the political importance of poetic production by kings in the Islamic east in the late medieval period by considering what kings aimed to accomplish through the production of their own divans. Focusing on the Turkic poetry of Burhan al-Din of Sivas (d. 1398), a Sufi and qadi who ruled eastern Anatolia for nearly 18 years, it contextualizes his divan in the convergence of Sufism and political power that marked the post-Mongol Islamic east. This talk will end by looking at how the divans of other kings, chief among them Isma’il I (d. 1524) of the Safavids, responded to and abrogated the poetic choices of Burhan al-Din.