Nizami Ganjavi

Nizami Ganjavi (full name traditionally given as Jamal al-Din Ilyas ibn Yusuf ibn Zaki) was a poet who wrote in Persian and is counted among the supreme masters of the romantic verse-epic. He took his pen-name (takhallus) from his home city, Ganja, in the South Caucasus, then part of the Seljuq world and today in Azerbaijan. Few hard facts about his life survive, because he was not a court poet and does not appear in the chronicles of the dynasties; most of what is reported is inferred from his own poetry or comes from later tradition. He is said to have been orphaned young and raised by a maternal uncle; his mother is described as of Kurdish origin.

His fame rests on five long poems later gathered as the Khamsa ("Quintet") or Panj Ganj ("Five Treasures"): Makhzan al-Asrar (a didactic mystical work), Khusraw and Shirin, Layla and Majnun, Haft Paykar ("The Seven Beauties"), and the Iskandarnama (on Alexander). Though he avoided court life, he dedicated each poem to a regional ruler who offered patronage.

Although Nizami is universally classed by major reference works as a Persian-language poet, his identity has become a subject of modern national debate, with some Azerbaijani sources emphasizing a Turkic heritage; this is a contested modern claim, not a settled historical fact. His birth is usually placed around 1141 (some propose c. 1130), and his death around 1209, though biographers have proposed dates ranging from the 1180s to about 1210.