Tomb of Molana Abdul Rahman Jami

The Tomb of Mawlana Abdul Rahman Jami in the Takht-i Safar quarter of Herat is the burial place of one of the greatest Persian poets and Sufi scholars of the late medieval Islamic world. Nur al-Din Abd al-Rahman Jami (1414-1492) was born in Khargird in Khorasan, was educated in Herat and Samarkand, and spent most of his adult life at the Timurid court of Sultan Husayn Bayqara in Herat — the brilliant late-Timurid capital that was the principal centre of Persian literature, painting, music and Islamic religious learning in the second half of the fifteenth century. Jami is regarded as one of the last great masters of the classical Persian poetic tradition and as the leading Naqshbandi Sufi scholar of his generation, and his works — particularly the Haft Awrang ("Seven Thrones," a collection of seven mathnawi poems) and his prose Lawa'ih ("Flashes of Light") — were widely read across the Persian-speaking world from the Ottoman empire to Mughal India for centuries after his death. His tomb has been a site of literary and religious pilgrimage continuously since his burial in 1492, and the small enclosed garden tomb in the Takht-i Safar quarter on the northern outskirts of old Herat remains one of the most visited cultural sites in the city. The grave is marked by a large rectangular marble slab carved with verses of his poetry.