The Similarities Between Our Time and the Sixth Century AH
Aydin Areta

The sixth century is a century in which jurists and theologians rise to prominence. Art is humiliated, and as philosophy and mysticism lose their strength, culture takes refuge in poetry. The century witnesses the appearance of major poets such as Attar of Nishapur, Sana’i, Nizami, Anvari, and Khaqani, yet what we hear in the work of these great poets is a painful complaint about an age in which, as Anvari is rendered here as saying, robes sat upon the shoulders of the base while halters hung around the necks of the free. Sana’i, too, describes the period as an age in which buffoons and the ignoble rise to fame. It is a time in which the base gain power and buffoons gain standing and recognition—a complaint that we too can read in our own age with the same historical note of sorrow and let it turn our eyes into seas.