The Necessity of Re-Editing Mojir al-Din Baylaqani’s Divan (Collection Works)

Mojir al-Din Baylaqani (d. 586 AH) is a renowned poet of the 6th century and a prominent figure of the Arranian school in Persian poetry. He is renowned for his deceptively simple yet fluent verses compared to his contemporaries. The only existing edition of his Divan (collected works) was prepared by Mohammad Abadi Bavail as a doctoral dissertation in 1974 under the supervision of Mehdi Mohaghegh, Mazaher Mosaffa, and Ahmad Mahdavi Damghani and was subsequently published in Tabriz in 1979. While this pioneering edition holds historical value, subsequent reviews have revealed its deficiencies. The recent discovery of new manuscript sources that were unavailable to the previous editor presents an opportunity for a revised, more comprehensive edition. This study, undertaken through a critical re-editing of Mojir al-Din's Divan based on over 30 manuscript copies and employing a descriptive-analytical methodology using library resources, aimed to highlight the shortcomings of the existing edition. The significance of poets from Arran Region in the Persian literary canon, coupled with the necessity of a deeper scholarly engagement with Mojir al-Din's poems, underscored the importance of this research. The overall conclusion pointed to the inadequacies of the previous edition and the pressing need for its re-editing. According to the findings, the primary deficiencies of the prior edition included the erroneous attribution of other poets' works to Mojir al-Din, omission of some of his poems, inconsistencies in the transcription of certain poems, misreadings, incorrect selections, and inadequate or inaccurate annotations.