Moshtari-ye Moshtaq Ali Shah

Southeastern Iran


With prominent blue-and-white-tiled roofs dating from the late Qajar period, this attractive mausoleum is the last resting place of several Kerman notables, but it's remembered particularly (and named) for the 18th-century minstrel and dervish Moshtaq Ali Shah.

He was renowned for his flowing hair as well as his singing, and is reputedly responsible for adding the fourth string to the setar (which literally means ‘three strings’). But his mystical Sufi philosophy jarred with local mores and by 1794 he had fallen so far out of favour with the local religious community that he was stoned in the Masjed e-Jameh.


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