Almighty Shahrashub types and the oldest Vocational Shahrashub

One type of Persian poetry, which was used as an amusement and rather unknown, is “Shahrashub”. Lexically, “Shahrashub” means a person who excites the people by his/ her beauty and, but in literary terms, it refers to the poems in which the poet praises or criticizes the city, people, and courtiers, or describes the artisans, their jobs and crafts. This kind of poetry divided into two categories, i.e. vocational and urban, has much benefit sociologically, due to including technical words and terms, as well as historically, politically, economically, and socially. Also, the vocational ones have educational features. Those written for describing jobs are stanza and quatrain, and those praising or criticizing a city are often in the form of elegy or couplet.
“Shahrashub” can be found in Urdu, Arabic, and Turkish as well as Persian. However, in answering from what nation it is originated, it should be noted that professor Gibb, in his book “Turkish History of Literature” named this type of poetry as one of the Osmanians’ inventions, but Edward Brown, unlike unaware of Masud Sa’d’s Shahrashubs in the 5th century, doubted about Gibb’s assumption. Regarding the Urdu poets, the author of “Khorasani Style in Persian Poem” affected by “Arguments” by Seyed Abdollah attributes the first Shahrashub to the Lahuri poet in India; however, providing some earlier documents and reasons, the author of “Shahrashub in Persian Poem” rejected Mahjub’s claim and knows it undoubtedly as one of the Iranians’ inventions.
The literature shows the first Shahrashubs by Masud Sa’d in Persian; Muhammad Ja’far Mahjub published an article titled “Shahrashub” in the book “Week”, in 1963, and attributed the oldest Shahrashub to Masud Sa’d. After that, Golchin Ma’ani in his book “Shahrashub in Persian” (1966) introduced Masud Sa’d as the inventor of this style. After them, other researchers and writers studying the works by Mahjub and Golchin named Masud Sa’d as the oldest poets composing Shahrashub; some of them are mentioned here based on the chronology: (Dehkhoda: Shahrashub), (Masaheb: Shahrashub), “Silent Mountain” (Nourian, 1985: 6), “Literary Genres” (Shamisa, 1990: 229), the article “A Review on Shahrashub by Lesani Shirazi” (Shahrestani, 1997: 5), “Persian Poem Types” (Rastgarfasaee, 2001: 227), the article “The Value and Significance of Shahrashub” (Keshavarz Ghasemi, 2007: 37), the article “Shahrashub” (Nosrati Siahmezgi, 2007: 28), “Literary Fun in Persian Poem” (Daneshpajuh, 2001: 317), the article “Six Shahrashub Recovered from the 10th Century” (Fazeli, Jahad: 2009: 120), and in the last article seen by the writers, there can be found no change in the previous assumptions (Dadabayov, 2012: 80).
Studying the Shahrashubs by Masud Sa’d, the writers of this article proved that there existed a background on composing Shahrashub by other poets; in other words, composing 92 stanzas in the form of a novel genre was not …… and we could not know Masud Sa’d as the inventor of this genre since several years before him, some like Ksaee Maruzi wrote some stanza describing professions: florist, launderer, drawer, and poets (Riyahi, 1996: 79, 87, and 88). Even Rudaki, prior to Kasaee wrote a quatrain describing the businesspeople (Nafisi, 2003: 516). Also, there is a quatrain by Abu Abdollah Muhammad Ibne Musa Faralavi, a contemporary poet to Rudaki, whose one verse is available (Lazar, 1982: 45). Moreover, many research resources studying Shahrashub forms, or Mahasti Ganjei’s poems mentioned him as the first quatrain-writer in this field, which is rejected in this article due to mentioned evidence.