J. T. P. de Bruijn (1931–2023) The bird of Time completes its round

Abstract

Johannes Thomas Pieter de Bruijn was born on 12 July 1931 in Leiden, and died on Monday, 23 January 2023, in Voorhout, the Netherlands. He studied Semitic languages, and Islam and Persian and Turkish as minors, at Leiden University. From 1954 to 1960 he collaborated in the Concordance et Indices de la Tradition Musulmane project, which was published under the auspices of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam. He also contributed to the editing of the English version of Jan Rypka’s History of Iranian Literature, which was published in Dordrecht in 1968. From 1960 to 1963, he was curator of the Middle Eastern department at the Dutch National Museum of Ethnology. In 1964 he joined the staff of Leiden University, where he took the chair of Persian in 1988. He built up a Persian department that included expertise on Shiism and modern Persian literature, and created a documentation center for modern Iran, under the directorship of the late Kamil Banak. De Bruijn will be chiefly known for his erudition on classical Persian poetry, especially religious poetry. His name is linked with that of the great poet Ḥakīm Sanāʾī (d. 1131), as he spent many years of his active scholarship on this epoch-making poet. He wrote a seminal monograph on Sanāʾī’s life and work, entitled Of Piety and Poetry, which has also been