Mahasti's Shahrashoob, the Safe Haven of Protest

Shahrashoobs composed by Mahasti are considered as protests against eulogists and megalomaniac rulers who lived in a class-based society in which panegyrics had a certain status and the importance of rulers depended on court eulogists. This paper aims to identify the encrypted signs of this ironic act within implications of her poetry. As far as Persian culture and literature is concerned, women’s solutions have always resolved many obstacles and problems or they have illuminated the situations. These feminine behaviors are presented in Persian tales and Mahasti used them in her romantic poetry to show a reaction toward the eulogy. Regarding this fact, it can be said that her act has been a kind of illumination that changed the style of Persian poetry for a long time. Mahasti tried to protest against her contemporary poets who were praising the ruling class, thus, attempted to describe the lowest social strata. She put these two heterogeneous phenomena against each other and metaphorically directed her protest against eulogists and rulers and disparaged the eulogy. In the present article, in has been attempted to illustrate the manner and quality of such a feminine reaction and protest.