Literacy

Wasef Bakhtari

Translated from Farsi by Ahmad Rashid Salim

It’s written on the leaves of the tulip
Don’t pluck the flower
and don’t take this love-caressed child from the mother’s embrace
Alas, the wind
is illiterate.

Wasef Bakhtari (d. 2023) is Afghanistan’s most celebrated and influential modern poet and literary scholar. His scholarship and expertise in classical and modern Persian literature, Islamic intellectual history, philosophy, and world literature even had a reverent, mythical mode due to his phenomenal photographic memory and skills as an orator. Bakhtari spent a portion of his life entangled with the shifts and shatters of politics in Afghanistan – even spending time in jail as a political prisoner. For him, poetry was art as well as commitment. He died in exile as a refugee in California on July 20th,  2023.

Ahmad Rashid Salim, born in Kabul and residing in California, is an author and scholar specializing in the fields of Islamic studies and Persian literature. He is also the founder of Aleff Institute, a premiere online-language acquisition and literature program offering classes that center on the Kabuli dialect of Farsi and mystical poetry.