Khwaja Kirmani

Khwaja Kirmani's full name is recorded as Kamal al-Din Abu'l-Ata Mahmud ibn 'Ali ibn Mahmud Murshidi, and he was born in Kerman. His birth year is most often given as 1290, though the Smithsonian's Freer|Sackler manuscript record cites 1281, and no source resolves the discrepancy with certainty. No school, degree, or named teacher is documented for him. Biographical sources instead describe a traditional education pursued through travel: he is said to have traveled on foot from Kerman to Tabriz, Isfahan, Baghdad, Damascus, and Jerusalem in search of knowledge.

He rose to prominence as a court panegyrist under the Ilkhanid Sultan Abu-Sa'id, who reigned from 1317 to 1335. His works include a Divan and the Khamsa, a set of five masnavis that includes the romance Humay u Humayun and the Sufi-inspired Kamalnama, Rawdat al-anwar, and Gawharnama.

Kirmani's exact date and place of death are not settled in the scholarly record. Encyclopaedia Iranica and a specialist academic study by T. Fitzherbert date his death to 1352 (753 AH), a dating this profile follows as the most academically supported; the Smithsonian's Freer|Sackler manuscript record allows for either 1352 or 1361, while the Golha Project gives 1349. No source consulted for this profile could confirm a specific place of death or burial site.

Within his own era, Kirmani's standing was substantial: he served as a leading panegyrist at the Ilkhanid court. Modern scholarly attention has centered less on him as a critical subject than on the manuscripts his texts generated. The British Library's 1396 Baghdad copy of his Khamsa, Add MS 18113, is treated in scholarship as an important early example of Jalayirid book painting, and later Khamsa and Humay u Humayun manuscripts and folios are regularly discussed in histories of fourteenth and fifteenth century Persian painting. No verbatim assessment from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile, so none is quoted here.

There is no catalogue raisonne, gallery, or estate representing Khwaja Kirmani, and none should be expected for a poet who died nearly seven centuries ago. What circulates in institutions and, occasionally, at auction are later illustrated copies of his texts, produced by Jalayirid and Timurid court workshops and generally attributed to anonymous calligraphers and painters rather than to Kirmani himself. A Timurid, mid-fifteenth-century Khamsa copied for Muhammad Shah Bahadur has appeared in a Christie's Art of the Islamic and Indian Worlds sale listing, but no confirmed public sale price, date, or buyer could be verified for it, or for any other lot bearing his name. As of 2026-07-11, no all-time auction record for this artist could be established.

This is not a conventional living or recently deceased artist market, and it should not be read as one. Kirmani himself produced no paintings; the illustrated manuscripts and folios that carry his name were made by later, largely anonymous court workshop painters and calligraphers working from his texts, and their attribution rests on institutional cataloguing, at the Smithsonian, the British Library, and the Austrian National Library among others, rather than on any authentication protocol built around the poet himself. No verified public auction price for a work carrying his name could be confirmed as of the date of this profile, so any manuscript or folio offered under his name should be evaluated on its own attribution, condition, and provenance rather than on a broader artist market that does not exist in the modern sense.