A Rereading of the Concept of Taqiyyah in the Poetry of Sanai Ghaznavi and Seyyed Sharif Razi

Taqiyyah was used in the Shiite religion amongst the Shiite Imams (AS), scholars, and the poets of the early Islamic centuries in the Middle Ages in order to achieve the transcendental goals or to preserve their lives in the face of an adverse ruler or hostile public opinion against Shi’ism. Strangulation, poverty, and anti-Shi’ism can also be regarded as some influential factors in practicing Taqiyyah in relationships between people and their government and , since both poets,Sanai Ghaznavi and Seyyed Sharif Razi, regardless of their spatial limitations, lived at a specific period of time, they used Taqiyyah, considering their social, political, and family circumstances. By using descriptive-analytical method, in a comparative study, this paper is an attempt to analyze the concept of Taqiyyah in the poetry of Sanai Ghaznavi, as a Persian Shi’ite poet, and that of Seyyed Razi, as an Arab Shi’ite poet. The two poets were contemporaries; however, they have used Taqiyyah as a means to defend Shi'a ideals and to achieve their goals in their works, in a different way: Seyyed Razi was an Alawite political poet, and, therefore, he used Taqiyyah in his poetry as a tool to achieve the highest political and religious power in Shi’ism, which is the establishment of an Alawite government by himself. Sanai Ghaznavi, on the other hand, taking into consideration the social common sense, the government, and the strangulation of the Shi’ites as a result of Shi’a-phobia, used Taqiyyah in order to explain the Imamat of the Imams (AS).