NAVA'I, 'ALI SHIR

born 1441, Herat, Timurid Afghanistan died Jan. 3, 1501, Herat in full Mir 'ali Shir Nava'i, Nava'i also spelled Neva'i Turkish poet and scholar who was the greatest representative of Chagatai Turkish literature (written in an eastern Turkic dialect). Born into an aristocratic military family, he studied in Herat and in Meshed. After his school companion, the sultan Husayn Bayqarah, succeeded to the throne of Herat, Nava'i held a number of offices at court. He was also a member of the Naqshbandi dervish order, and under his master, the renowned Persian poet Jami, he read and studied the works of the great mystics. As a philanthropist, he was responsible for much construction in the city. His other interests included miniature painting, music, architecture, and calligraphy. Nava'i devoted the latter part of his life to poetry and scholarship, writing first in Persian and then in Chagatai. He left four great divans, or collections of poems, belonging to different phases of his life. He also wrote five romances based on conventional themes in Islamic literature, such as his famous rendition of the well-known story of Farhad and Shirin, in 12,000 lines. Among his main prose works are the Muhakamat al-lugatayn (The Trial of the Two Languages), a comparison of Turkish and Persian; the Majalis an-nafais (Sances of the Exquisite), containing much autobiographical information and facts about the lives of Turkish poets; and Mizan al-awzan (The Measure of Metres), a treatise on Turkish prosody. Nava'i's mastery of the eastern Turkic Chagatai language was such that it came to be known as the language of Nava'i.