Abolqasem Lahouti

Born Abolqasem Elhami on 12 October 1887 to a cobbler father who wrote religious poetry, he took the pen name Lahouti, served as a gendarmerie officer, was sentenced to death at Qom, fled to Turkey, and returned to join Mohammad Khiabani at Tabriz. After a second rising there in 1922 was crushed, he crossed into the Soviet Union and never returned to Iran. ¹²

Settling at Dushanbe in 1925, he became the founding figure of Soviet Tajik poetry, wrote the lyrics of the Tajik SSR anthem, founded theatre and opera in Tajikistan, served as its minister of culture, and rose to vice-chairman of the Soviet Writers' Union under Maxim Gorky. He died at Moscow on 16 March 1957 and was buried in Novodevichy Cemetery. ³²

His affiliation is recorded as unknown. No source read names a religion or school for Lahouti himself: the Persian infobox leaves its religion field blank and lists Marxism as his school of thought, a political ideology; his father was a follower of the Ni'matullahi Sufi order and his mother a follower of the Yarsan faith, which is his parents' background, not his attestation; and Iranica's account of his poetry moving away from religion and urging readers to denounce it is the advocacy of his writings, not a documented profession of personal unbelief. ³²⁴

This entry is built from the cited source records in the museum's source registry (data/source/). Facts are stated only as the cited sources give them; where a source is silent, the entry is silent.