ZindeRood: An Ever-Living River of Persian Poetry

The project grew out of a personal experience and a keenly felt need. When our founder, Makhdoom Hassaan Lahori, began formally learning Persian and studying Iqbal’s Persian poetry closely with his teachers, he discovered how difficult it can be for a beginner to read and understand Persian verse with its true cadence, metre, pronunciation, and meaning. He was surprised, and saddened, to find that while excellent recordings of Iqbal’s Urdu poetry were readily available, there was no complete recording of his Persian poetry anywhere in the world, including Iran. Only a small selection of individual poems could be found.

He decided to address that gap through an organised initiative. The first aim was to record all of Iqbal’s Persian poetry. As the work developed, the project widened and new goals took shape. The purpose behind them remained the same: to spare future students of Persian poetry the difficulties he had faced himself.