Persianate Societies

A Károli Gáspár Református Egyetem eszme-, vallás-és kultúrtörténeti folyóirata HISTORY, POETRY AND LANGUAGE IN ANCIENT AND MODERN IRAN IRÁN A ZOROASZTRIÁNIZMUSTÓL A JELENKORIG: TÖRTÉNELEM, KÖLTÉSZET, NYELVÉSZET The editors would like to thank Dr Miklós Sárközy for his invaluable contribution to preparing the present issue. A szerkesztők ezúton mondanak köszönönetet Sárközy Miklósnak a kötet összeállításában nyújtott segítségéért

The Central Asian city of Shahrisabz has long been a historical footnote, widely regarded as an unruly “province in rebellion” plaguing its more powerful overlords in Bukhara during the seventeenth through late nineteenth centuries. In fact, it was an autonomous city-state in its own right, and the mechanisms through which it has been written into submission in the historiography reveal much about historical methodology and premodern logics of sovereignty. To recover Shahrisabz’s story, this article pursues a non-hegemonic reading of hegemonic Persian writing (a strategy more frequently applied to colonial sources) and pieces together scattered textual fragments composed in the city itself. In doing so, it illustrates the ways in which variegated forms of symbolic submission and coercive power intersected to create complexes not easily mappable to modern binaries. Seemingly contradictory forms of sovereignty routinely coexisted within a single polity, and greater specificity is necessary to capture a kaleidoscope of permutations. Thus source methodology and sovereignty stand as two conceptual domains intrinsically intertwined, with insights into the latter possible only with careful attention to the former.

This article examines the architectural form and potential functions of two royal buildings: the Sher Mandal and the Guldasta pavilion. An octagonal tower located in the Purana Qilʿa in Delhi, the Sher Mandal was in all likelihood the library (kitāb-khāna) built by the Mughal emperor Humayun (r. 1530-56). Erected during the reign of the Safavid ruler Shah ʿAbbas I (r. 1587-1629), the now-vanished Guldasta pavilion was located south of the palace complex in Isfahan, Iran, and can be studied through drawings and photographs. A close examination of the formal structure of these two buildings reveals that they belong to a distinct type of polygonal pavilion that first emerged in the late fifteenth century in the works of architecture sponsored by the Timurid dynasty (c. 1370-1405). Moreover, this comparative study opens up new venues for investigating the physical setting of the royal kitāb-khāna in Persianate contexts.

As Derrida charged, Plato’s famous declaration of speech’s superiority to writing would seem to have resonated with inheritor cultures similarly transitioning from orality to literacy, and especially the Islamicate; despite the explosion of writerly culture from the 8th century onward, Arabic scholarship continued to evince a categorical, if increasingly rhetorical, mistrust of writing. In the 14th century, however, as the age of encyclopedism dawned throughout the Islamicate heartlands, the superiority of writing to speech was formally and definitively asserted by Arabic and Persian encyclopedists, including most prominently Ibn al-Akfānī (d. 1348) of Mamluk Egypt and Shams al-Dīn Āmulī (d. 1352) of Ilkhanid Iran. It is hardly coincidental in this connection that the same century also witnessed the burgeoning popularity among scholarly and ruling elites of lettrism (ʿilm al-ḥurūf), kabbalah’s coeval cognate—the occult science that posited the cosmos itself as a text to be read, even rewritten. Synthesizing these literary and occult-scientific currents, in the early 15th century a circle of Muslim neopythagoreanizing lettrists—chief among them Ibn Turka of Isfahan (d. 1432)—developed the first formal metaphysics of writing.
    This article analyzes Ibn Turka’s unprecedented valorization of writing over speech in terms both epistemological and ontological, as well as the sociocultural ramifications of this move throughout the post-Mongol Persianate world. Letter-number, he argued, is a form of light eternally emanated from the One; hence vision, that faculty of light, must be the sense most universal; hence visible text must be the form of the One most manifest. In support of this thesis, he synthesized the Avicennan-Ṭūsian doctrine of the transcendental modulation of being (tashkīk al-wujūd) with its illuminationist upgrade, the transcendental modulation of light (tashkīk al-nūr), to produce his signature doctrine of tashkīk al-ḥarf: letters of light as uncreated, all-creative matrix of the cosmos, gradually descending from the One in extramental, mental, spoken and finally written form. Far from being a peculiar intellectual rabbit trail of no enduring significance, I argue that Ibn Turka’s lettrist metaphysics of light was embraced by subsequent thinkers in Iran as the most effective means of conceptualizing and celebrating Islamicate writerly culture; these include the famed philosophers Jalāl al-Dīn Davānī (d. 1502) and Mīr Dāmād (d. 1630), founder of the so-called school of Isfahan. Nor was its influence limited to Aqquyunlu-Safavid philosophical circles; I further argue that Ibn Turka’s system informed the explosion of Persianate book culture more generally, and by extension Persianate visual culture, from the early Timurid period onward. A telling example in this context is the emergence of the album preface as a new genre of art history-theory in early Safavid Iran, a phenomenon that has been well feted and studied by art historians; but they have wholly elided high lettrism as the genre’s most immediate philosophical context. This principle may be extended to the Persian cosmopolis as a whole: two of the most seminal discourses on writing developed in the Ottoman and Mughal contexts, by Taşköprüzāde (d. 1561) and Abū l-Fażl ʿAllāmī (d. 1602) respectively, are demonstrably Ibn Turkian.
    Like Derrida was to do half a millennium later, in sum, early modern Muslim lettrists inverted Plato’s speech-writing hierarchy; unlike Derrida, for whom writing can have no ontological edge, they put forward a profoundly humanistic neopythagorean ontogrammatology as core of the philosophia perennis—and that so trenchantly that it served to shape Islamicate intellectual and aesthetic culture alike for centuries. The modern ideologues of East-West rupture notwithstanding, moreover, I propose this cosmology as a major node of Islamo-Christianate cultural continuity even to the present.

The imperial ideologies developed in the post-Mongol Persianate world represent both a break with Islamic precedent and a realization of the millenarian universalism inherent in Islam itself.  Early modern Muslim dynasts—styling themselves saint-philosopher-kings, millennial sovereigns and divine cosmocrators—combined Chinggisid, Persian and Islamic symbols of religiopolitical legitimacy in their quest for world domination, emblematized by Alexander the Great, Chinggis Khan and Amir Temür.  During this profoundly messianic era, sultans and saints thus competed for sacral power (walaya); securing access to this power became a driving concern of ruling and scholarly elites, whether by way of sufism, occultism or Alidism, and often eclectic combinations of all three.  The present chapter surveys these new strategies of religiopolitical legitimation pursued between the 14th-17th centuries by the Timurid, Aqquyunlu, Safavid, Uzbek, Mughal and Ottoman Empires, constituent members of the vast Persian cosmopolis stretching from the Balkans and Anatolia in the west to China and India in the east.

Disgusted with ISIS, some Kurds turned away from Islam following the fall of Mosul in 2014. Many became atheists, while others sought comfort in Zoroastrianism. Zoroastrianism, according to converts, was the “original” religion of the Kurds before they embraced Islam. In 2015, two Zoroastrian centers opened in Sulaimani, both of which are recognized by the Kurdish Regional Government in northern Iraq. Notably, neither has tried to recreate Zoroastrianism the way it is currently and has been historically practiced in Iran and South Asia. Instead, they have created their own versions of Zoroastrianism, which is nationalist, postmodern, and liberal. Kurdish Zoroastrians argue that the reason Kurds are “backward” is Islam. They seek to rectify the present situation through a Kurdish “authenticated” and “original” form of Zoroastrianism. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at these two centers, the present article examines this new religious movement in Sulaimani, an important city in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq. It analyses the rise and distinctiveness of Kurdish Zoroastrianism looking at how Zoroastrian Kurds articulate their views on Islam, women’s rights, human rights, and Kurdish independence.

This essay argues that recent theoretical literature on the archive contains critical insights for studies of Islamic documents, while also pushing to move beyond some of the core assumptions of that same literature. There is no question that the fundamental concerns of an "archival turn" are every bit as relevant to studies of Islamic societies, past and present, as they are to European-dominated ones. Yet investigating Islamic "archives" presents the challenge of coming to terms with a concept-the archive-and an attending set of assumptions and theoretical baggage derived almost exclusively from European history. To address this challenge, we propose that employing the term "cultures of documentation" offers a way of having one's cake and eating it too. In deploying this expression, we signal that there existed multitudes of textual practices and record-keeping activities in the pre-industrial Islamic world, and that it is possible to move away from "archive" as a term without abandoning the core insights and questions of the historical literature built around it.

Pre-publication of Part Eight and Chapter XXII of my forthcoming book “Turkey is Iran and Iran is Turkey – 2500 Years of indivisible Turanian – Iranian Civilization distorted and estranged by Anglo-French Orientalists”; Part Eight (The Distorted Term ‘Persianate’) consists exclusively of Chapter XXII. The book is made of 12 parts and 33 chapters.
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First published on 7th November 2021 here:
https://megalommatis.wordpress.com/the-fake-persianization-of-the-abbasid-caliphate-2/

Since the end of the eighteenth century a key characteristic of Russo-Iranian relations has been the military dimension. Russia’s overall powerful presence in Persia/Iran throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century was underpinned by the activities of Russian military and political intelligence represented mostly by officers specially trained in Oriental studies. Traditionally for this cognitive domain in Russia, many of them were intellectually active, engaging in scholarly activities and later writing their memoirs.
Drawing on the Foucauldian conceptualisation of power/knowledge relations and Sartre’s existential individualism, this paper analyses the private notes of Konstantin Smirnov, Deputy-Head of the Intelligence Unit of the Caucasian Military District Staff and the personal tutor of the future Ahmad Shah Qajar (1907-1914), and the memoirs of Leonid Shebarshin, the PGU-KGB Station-Chief in Iran (1979-1983). Notwithstanding the time gap of almost a century that separates their writings, the observations and reflexions of these two representatives of different Russian intelligence services (the army and political intelligence) of different political systems have much in common. They represent first-hand insights into Russian perceptions of Iranian culture and of Iranians themselves but they also illustrate how the interaction of each of these two men of letters with the Other changed their perceptions of their own people and of the Self. Beyond this analysis the paper also asks to what extent instances of Life Writing such as these two can contribute meaningfully to the source base for writing the history of Russo-Iranian encounters, especially in the case of Shebarshin where the possibility of archival cross-referencing close to zero given the policies of access to the relevant archival material currently in place in Russia.

We are putting together a volume on Persianate Literatures as World Literature. The volume is intended for publication in the “Literatures as World Literature” series of Academic Bloomsbury Publishing (Series Editor: Thomas Oliver Beebee), estimated to be published in 2019. The book will explore the connections between Persianate literary productions and those of the rest of the world; advance comparative studies of Persianate literatures; and/or reread Persianate literatures with respect to globalization, transnationalism, and world citizenry—all with the overarching aim of foregrounding the interdependencies, interrelations, connections, and flows that expand Persian literatures beyond their mere locality and showcase their possible connecting and influencing of other local and translocal narratives. As such, the primary focus of Persianate Literatures as World Literature will be on rereading Persian literary texts and authors in their “worldly” dimensions, situating such readings within—and ideally contributing to—ongoing critical debates on “world literature.” With this all-embracing aim in mind, we would be happy to consider submissions focused on topics including, yet not limited to, the following. (Please see attachment for ful text.)

The book explores the Muslim religious milieu’s role in the transmission of medical knowledge in India. The scholars affiliated to Sufi orders, in particular, played a relevant influence in the establishment in India of both the Avicennian medical tradition of Greek origin (yūnānī ṭibb) as well as the religious medical tradition of Islam, known as Medicine of the prophet (ṭibb-i nabī). As shown in the first part of the book, an important part of the Indo-Persian medical and pharmacological literature produced during the Sultanate (1200-1526) and the Mughal’s ages (1526-1858) was composed by authors who shared close connections with the mystic and religious circles. The Sufis offered also a relevant contribution to the process of adaptation into Persian language of medical and pharmacological knowledge of Indian origin; the one from Sanskrit into Persian being probably the most important process of medical translation realised in the Muslim world during the Early-Modern period.
The second part focuses on the Deccan and the city of Hyderabad. The introductory chapters describe the role of the Sufi-religious class in the medical scene of the Deccan, from the early Bahmanī’s age (1347-1518) and during the Quṭb Shāh’s period (1518-1687) until the phase of the reform and modernisation of yūnānī ṭibb under the Niẓāms (1719-1948). The others chapters describe in details some Sufi shrines of Hyderabad that still nowadays offer various forms of healing assistance and which are very popular among both Muslims and Hindus. The healing rituals of these shrines adapt the symbols of the Sufi saint’s cults and reveal the assimilation of elements of Indian origin, while another chapter is dedicated to the healing dreams that occur to the ailed pilgrims of these shrines. The sources, the doctrines and the methods of the medical art of the Indian Sufis are outlined in the last part of the book.

It is a well-known fact that Indian thought burst on the European philosophical scene following the enthusiasm aroused in Schopenhauer by the first Western translation of the Upaniṣads, published by Anquetil-Duperron at the turn of the 19th century. What is less known is that Anquetil-Duperron had based his Latin rendering on a former Persian translation, completed in 1657 and sponsored by the Mughal prince Muḥammad Dārā Šikōh (1615-1659). The Muslim dynasty of the Mughals, who ruled over much of India from 1526, had already shown remarkable interest and open-mindedness towards Indian knowledge, particularly during the reign of emperor Akbar, but his great-grandson Dārā Šikōh pushed himself even further. A member of the Sufi order of the Qādiriyya and a follower of the doctrines of the great Muslim mystic Ibn ‘Arabī, Dārā Šikōh, through his daily association with Hindu yogis and pundits, reached the conclusion that «there is no difference whatsoever, except verbal, in their way of understanding and realizing the Truth» with respect to the Sufis. In support of his view, in 1655 he wrote The Confluence of the Two Oceans, where he tries to show the close correspondence between the concepts and principles of the Hindu and Muslim spiritual traditions. It was a bold and dangerous stance: a few years later, when his brother Aurangzeb seized the throne and put an end to the long tradition of religious tolerance of the Mughal emperors, the enlightened syncretism of this book cost Dārā Šikōh his head.
This Italian translation of Dārā Šikōh’s treatise – based on a new critical edition of the text – dramatically improves on the existing translations in Western languages, also owing to the comparison of the original Persian text with its Sanskrit rendering. It is further enriched by a long introduction where the editors sketch the fascinating history of the intense cultural exchanges between the Hindu and Muslim worlds.

Lecture presented at University of California, Berkeley, May 3rd, 2016.

This lecture looks at the way the Ayurvedic theory of the tridoṣa is translated and interpreted in Persian treatises on Indian medicine, such as the Dastūr al-aṭibbā of the historian Muḥammad Qāsim Firišta (born ca. 1570) and the Takmila-yi hindī of Šāh Ahl Allāh (d. 1776), the brother of the theologian of Delhi, Šāh Walī Allāh. The epistemic approach of Indian Muslim authors, based on the conceptual categories of the Greco-Arabic scientific thought, do not aim to extend the existing Persian technical lexicon. Muslim authors describe and comment upon the fundamental concepts of Ayurvedic physiological doctrine by limitedly using Sanskrit technical terms. The concept of doṣa is rendered through the Arabic term ḫilṭ and the three substances of the tridoṣa are reduced to the analogous categories of the Greco-Arabic school. This is only apparently a congruous and compatible conversion between the two lexica. The translation of the humoral notions through homologous terms is a delicate hermeneutical action. It generates important ambiguities and dissimilar interpretations among scholars and leads to the redefinition of the conceptual value of some of the terms and the categories involved in the translation.