Jami

Nur al-Din Abd al-Rahman Jami (1414–1492 CE / 817–898 AH) was a Persian poet, scholar and Sufi mystic active in the Timurid city of Herat, in the region of Khurasan. He is widely regarded by later tradition and modern critics as the last great master of the classical Persian poetic canon. He was born in 1414 in or near Khargird, a village in the district of Jam (in present-day eastern Iran / western Afghanistan), from which he later took his pen name "Jami." His father is reported to have migrated from Dasht, near Isfahan.

While he was still a child his family moved to Herat, where he received a rigorous education in the religious sciences, Arabic, logic, philosophy and mathematics; he also studied for a time in Samarkand, then a leading centre of learning. He took up the Sufi path within the Naqshbandi (also called Khwajagani) order, becoming a disciple of the shaykh Sa'd al-Din Kashghari; the biographical tradition also reports his esteem for the celebrated Naqshbandi master Khwaja Ubayd Allah Ahrar.

Jami wrote prolifically in both verse and prose. His best-known work is the Haft Awrang ("Seven Thrones"), a set of seven long poems including "Yusuf and Zulaykha." In law he is generally described as a Sunni; the precise madhhab attributed to him (commonly given as Hanafi) is not securely fixed in the sources. He enjoyed the patronage of the Timurid ruler Husayn Bayqara and the statesman-poet Ali-Shir Nava'i. He died in Herat in 1492 and was buried there.