Nasreddin or Nasreddin Hodja (1208–1285) is a character in the folklore of the Muslim world from the Balkans to China, and a hero of humorous short stories and satirical anecdotes. There are frequent statements about his existence in real life and even archaeological evidence in specific places, for example, a tombstone in the city of Akşehir, Turkey. At the moment, there is no confirmed information or serious grounds to talk about the specific date or place of Nasreddin's birth, so the question of the reality of his existence remains open.
The Persians are an Iranian ethnic group who comprise over half of the population of Iran. They share a common cultural system and are native speakers of the Persian language as well as of the languages that are closely related to Persian.
Satire is a genre of the visual, literary, and performing arts, usually in the form of fiction and less frequently non-fiction, in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, often with the intent of exposing or shaming the perceived flaws of individuals, corporations, government, or society itself into improvement. Although satire is usually meant to be humorous, its greater purpose is often constructive social criticism, using wit to draw attention to both particular and wider issues in society.
Persian literature comprises oral compositions and written texts in the Persian language and is one of the world's oldest literatures. It spans over two-and-a-half millennia. Its sources have been within Greater Iran including present-day Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Caucasus, and Turkey, regions of Central Asia, South Asia and the Balkans where the Persian language has historically been either the native or official language. For example, Rumi, one of the best-loved Persian poets, born in Balkh or Wakhsh, wrote in Persian and lived in Konya, at that time the capital of the Seljuks in Anatolia. The Ghaznavids conquered large territories in Central and South Asia and adopted Persian as their court language. There is thus Persian literature from Iran, Mesopotamia, Azerbaijan, the wider Caucasus, Turkey, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Tajikistan and other parts of Central Asia, as well as the Balkans. Not all Persian literature is written in Persian, as some consider works written by ethnic Persians or Iranians in other languages, such as Greek and Arabic, to be included. At the same time, not all literature written in Persian is written by ethnic Persians or Iranians, as Turkic, Caucasian, Indic and Slavic poets and writers have also used the Persian language in the environment of Persianate cultures.
Kioumars Saberi Foumani also known with his pen name Gol-Agha, was an Iranian satirist, writer, and teacher.
Ajam is an Arabic word meaning mute. It generally refers to non-Arabs, including those whose mother tongue is not Arabic. During the Arab conquest of Persia, the term became a racial pejorative. In many languages, including Persian, Turkish, Urdu–Hindi, Azerbaijani, Bengali, Kurdish, Gujarati, Malay, Punjabi, and Swahili, Ajam and Ajami refer to Iran and Iranians respectively.
Azerbaijani literature is written in Azerbaijani, a Turkic language, which is the official state language of the Republic of Azerbaijan, where the North Azerbaijani variety is spoken. It is also natively spoken in Iran, where the South Azerbaijani variety is used, and is particularly spoken in the northwestern historic region of Azerbaijan. Azerbaijani is also spoken in Russia, Georgia and Turkey.
Khwajeh Nizam al-Din Ubayd Allah al-Zakani, better known as Ubayd Zakani, was a Persian poet of the Mongol era, regarded as one of the best satirists in Persian literature. His most famous work is Mush-o Gorbeh, a political satire which attacks religious hypocrisy. Although a highly popular figure in his own time, Ubayd's work received little attention from modern scholars until recently, due to provocative and bawdy texts in the majority of his works. His style of satire has been compared to the French Enlightenment writer Voltaire.
New Persian, also known as Modern Persian is the current stage of the Persian language spoken since the 8th to 9th centuries until now in Greater Iran and surroundings. It is conventionally divided into three stages: Early New Persian, Classical Persian, and Contemporary Persian.
Mirza Alakbar Sabir ; born Alakbar Zeynalabdin oglu Tahirzadeh was an Azerbaijani satirical poet, public figure, philosopher and teacher. He set up a new attitude to classical traditions, rejecting well-trodden ways in poetry.
Iraj Pezeshkzad was an Iranian writer and author of the famous Persian novel Dā'i Jān Napoleon published in the early 1970s.
Bashshār ibn Burd, nicknamed al-Mura'ath, meaning "the wattled", was a Persian poet of the late Umayyad and early Abbasid periods who wrote in Arabic. Bashshar was of Persian ethnicity; his grandfather was taken as a captive to Iraq, but his father was a freedman (mawla) of the Uqayl tribe. Some Arab scholars considered Bashshar the first "modern" poet, and one of the pioneers of badi' in Arabic literature. It is believed that the poet exerted a great influence on the subsequent generation of poets.
Jalil Huseyngulu oghlu Mammadguluzadeh, was an Azerbaijani satirist and writer. He was the founder of Molla Nasraddin, a satirical magazine that would greatly influence the genre in the Middle East and Central Asia.
Molla Nasraddin was an eight-page Azerbaijani satirical periodical published in Tiflis (1906–17), Tabriz and Baku (1922–33). From the second issue of 1931, the magazine was called Allahsyz in the Azerbaijani and occasionally Russian languages. The magazine was "read across the Muslim world from Morocco to East Asia". It was founded by Jalil Mammadguluzadeh (1869–1932) and Omar Faig Nemanzadeh (1872–1937), and named after Nasreddin, the legendary Sufi wise man-cum-fool of the Middle Ages. Columnists wrote articles that "boldly satirized politics, religion, colonialism, Westernization, and modernization, education, and the oppression of women".
Persianization or Persification, is a sociological process of cultural change in which a non-Persian society becomes "Persianate", meaning it either directly adopts or becomes strongly influenced by the Persian language, culture, literature, art, music, and identity as well as other socio-cultural factors. It is a specific form of cultural assimilation that often includes a language shift. The term applies not only to cultures, but also to individuals, as they acclimate to Persian culture and become "Persianized" or "Persified".
Comedy is a genre of fiction that consists of discourses or works intended to be humorous or amusing by inducing laughter, especially in theatre, film, stand-up comedy, television, radio, books, or any other entertainment medium. The term originated in ancient Greece: In Athenian democracy, the public opinion of voters was influenced by political satire performed by comic poets in theaters. The theatrical genre of Greek comedy can be described as a dramatic performance pitting two groups, ages, genders, or societies against each other in an amusing agon or conflict. Northrop Frye depicted these two opposing sides as a "Society of Youth" and a "Society of the Old". A revised view characterizes the essential agon of comedy as a struggle between a relatively powerless youth and the societal conventions posing obstacles to his hopes. In this struggle, the youth then becomes constrained by his lack of social authority, and is left with little choice but to resort to ruses which engender dramatic irony, which provokes laughter.
Salman Mumtaz — Azerbaijani poet, literature historian, bibliographer, and collector of medieval manuscripts. He was a member of the Union of Azerbaijani writers since 1934, a researcher in the 1st category of the literature sector of the Azerbaijani Branch of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, and the director of the Azerbaijani Literature Department of the Azerbaijani National Institute of Scientific Research from 1929 to 1932. Salman Mumtaz was a renowned Azerbaijani literary scholar and poet. He was born in Shaki in 1884. In his efforts to collect, publish and promote the classical literary legacy, he discovered unknown manuscripts of a number of Azerbaijani poets and ashugs. Falling a victim to repressions, he was arrested in 1937 and killed by shooting in 1941 while imprisoned in Oryol.
Towfigh, also known as Tawfiq, was a weekly satirical magazine which was published between 1923 and 1971 in Tehran, Iran, with some interruptions. It was among the critics of the Pahlavi rule.
Hossein Towfigh was a pioneer of Iranian press freedom and Editor-in-Chief of Towfigh Magazine, the most popular satirical weekly publication in Iran that was active for nearly half a century.
Mohammad Ali Afrashiteh was a multifaceted Iranian literary figure, distinguished himself as a storyteller, journalist, satirist, poet, and author. Born as Mohammad Ali Rad Bazghaleh'i (Afrashiteh) to Haj Sheikh Javad Mojtahed Bazghaleh'i in the village of Bazghaleh Sangar, Rasht, he emerged as a trailblazer in Gilaki poetry and a significant contributor to Persian literature, particularly in the realm of social satire.
