Kamal Khujandi

Kamal al-Din Mas'ud al-Khujandi, known as Shaykh Kamal or Kamal Khujandi, was a Persian poet and Sufi born at Khujand in Transoxiana about 720 AH / 1320 CE. He established his reputation in his hometown and across Transoxiana as both a poet and a Sufi shaikh, though the biographical sources are silent about his literary and spiritual mentors. He then left Khujand for good — Dawlatshah attributes the departure to a pilgrimage to Mecca, another account to flight from an unwelcome arranged marriage — and eventually settled in Tabriz.¹²

At Tabriz he asked Sultan Husayn Jalayirid for a Sufi lodge away from the city centre, and the khanqah built for him in the Waliankuh district became the base of his literary and spiritual activities between about 1374 and 1382; the Persian biography adds that he lived in the khanqah the sultan had built for him. When Toqtamish Khan of the Golden Horde conquered Tabriz in the winter of 787/1385, Kamal was carried off to Saray on the Volga at the khan's wife's request and lived there four years. Back in Tabriz, his disciples collected his divan, almost entirely ghazals, some 980 poems.¹²

A contemporary of Hafez, he is counted among the great romantic poets of the 14th century; the modern Iranian novelist Sadegh Hedayat and his family are said to trace their ancestry to him. The sources put his death anywhere from 792/1390 (Dawlatshah) to 807/1404 (Gazorgahi); the year 803/1400-01 given by Jami and Khwandamir, confirmed by contemporary chronograms and generally accepted by modern scholars, is the one the record follows — he died at Tabriz and was buried at his retreat in Waliankuh, where his tomb still stands in the Tomb of Two Kamals beside Kamal al-Din Behzad's.¹³

On his Sufism the evidence is of the man himself: Iranica calls him a Sufi shaikh who ran a khanqah and whose divan his disciples collected, and the Persian tradition counts him among the 'arifan; but no source names an order for him — no Naqshbandi, Khalwati or other affiliation is attested — and none names a school of law, so the record documents his Sufism itself and invents no affiliation.¹²