Sholeh A. Quinn. Persian Historiography across Empires: The Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals.

Abstract

Persianate studies is a nascent field that has revised national histories, moving from a focus on Persian as a lingua franca to instead think about the Persianate as an ethics, aesthetics, and poetics of being (adab) with transnational resonance. The concept of “the Persianate” gained salience with Marshall Hodgson’s The Venture of Islam (1975), a seminal history in which he wrote Islamic civilizations into world history and into the core curriculum of the University of Chicago. Beyond a critique of Eurocentrism in the academy, Hodgson argued for the multiplicity of Islams and their generative impact, the Persianate being one cultural system that shaped an ethos through the medium of verbal and visual production in the Persian idiom. The field has evolved to focus on an early genealogy for the longue durée history of the emergence of modernity, thus entering a dialogue with early modern studies. The “early modern” in Europe has been associated with a new centering of society, with urbanization and the spread of print literacy, mobility, and the disciplining of the body. The significance of these dynamics for Persianate societies has created a vibrant conversation across geographies. Whether moving the dialogue eastward to Isfahan and Delhi or westward to Istanbul, Persianate historiography has explored early modern sensibilities that forged social collectives and shaped the habitus of cities like Isfahan, Istanbul, and Delhi. This historiography has delved into the tension between textual and material evidence to recover new ways of seeing, desiring, reading, and writing the early modern Persianate that dynamically divulges dimensions of the social, cultural, and religious spheres of urban life.