DUSHANBE, March 18, Asia-Plus — An event to celebrate the 1150th anniversary of a founder of Tajik-Persian classical literature has been held in Germany.
According to Alexander Haizer (phonetically spelled), the head of the German-Tajik Society in Berlin, a scientific conference to discuss works of Abu Abdullo Rudaki was held at the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin at the end of last week.
The event, staged by the Tajik Embassy in Berlin and the German-Tajik Society in cooperation with Museum of Islamic Art, brought together known German orientalists such Manfred Lorenz, Lutz Rzehak and Werner Sunderman as well as researchers from Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Iran.
We will recall that Tajikistan and Iran will jointly celebrate the 1150th birth anniversary of the Abu Abdullo Rudaki (858-941) during a series of programs this year.
The collaboration will be based on an agreement signed between the Academy of Sciences of Tajikistan and Iran”s Cultural Heritage, Tourism and Handicrafts Organization (CHTHO). According to the agreement a series of comprehensive programs including seminars and literary festivals have been arranged to be held in several Iranian cities and in the city of Dushanbe. The line up will begin in September.
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization also plans to commemorate Rudaki through holding projects with the support of Afghanistan, Iran, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan.
Rudaki was the first great literary genius of the modern Persian language who composed poems in “New Persian” comprising the Perso-Arabic alphabet script.
He was born in Rudak (Panjrud), a village in Khorasan, Persia. It is now located in Panjakent, Tajikistan. Most of his biographers assert that he was totally blind, but the accurate knowledge of colors shown in his poems makes this very doubtful. He was court poet to the Samanid ruler Nasr II (914-943) in Bukhara, but he eventually fell out of favor and ended his life in poverty. Of the 1,300,000 verses attributed to him, there remain only 52 elegies, ghazals and quatrains.
