On contemporaryism and anti-contemporarysim: The quarrel between literary past and present in Tadhkira-Al-Shoara and Majales-Al-Nafayes

Biographies have been a medium to reflect literary thoughts and ideas. Biographers have presented their ideas and sometimes reacted to their opponents through writing biographies. Therefore, it is expected that two contemporary biographers hold different and even opposite views on the literature of their time. Some of these biographers have defended the literature of their time and have written to confirm and consolidate it, though they have sometimes hardly criticized it. The late ninth century AH - coinciding with the last years of the Timurid government - was a historic turning point in the struggle between defending the literary past and present. In the present paper, we showed that Tadhkira-Al-Shoara and Majales-Al-Nafayes, as two biographies of the aforementioned period, were written to answer the question of “how do you see the literary situation of your time?” to which they provided different answers. Specifically, the present study showed that Tadhkira-Al-Shoara and Majales-Al-Nafayes are two literary works that, despite being written in a common temporal and spatial boundary, are dominated by two different and opposing attitudes towards their contemporary literature. One is written in defense of the currents and literary thoughts of its day, and the other stands against the literature of its day.