The gaping, early-modern-shaped hole in Persian literary historiography is not the chasm it once was, but much work remains needed to do justice to an era that saw Persian’s influence reach its apogee as a language of politics and high culture. Thankfully, in recent decades scholarly tides have crept from making qualified reassessments of key Safavid-Mughal literary figures toward a more whole-hearted critical engagement with the colorful and vibrant republic of Persian letters that thrived between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.First published in 2000 (1379), Mahmood Futūḥī’s monograph, Naqd-i Khayāl: Barrasī-i Dīdgāhʹhā-yi Naqd-i Adabī Dar Sabk-i Hindī [A Criticism of the Imaginary: A Study of Perspectives of Literary Criticism on the Indian Style], marks an enormous contribution to the scholarship on early modern Persian literary culture, as well as an important addition to research on Persian literary criticism (another understudied field). Focusing on the years 900–1200 AH (1521–1786 CE), Futūḥī’s stated purpose is to “search for criticism and literary critical thoughts in Persian texts of the Safavid age” (16). In doing so, he makes a compelling methodological argument for “criticology” (naqd shināsī), which is to say, the systematic study of emic critical voices to better understand the aesthetics of their day. “Critics,” he writes, “as the most well-informed and educated consumers of art, have always been well-disposed to express the aesthetic qualities of their time” (15). This stands in contrast to much scholarship on the so-called Indian style of Persian poetry, which has tended toward the inverse approach: studying individual, important poets, in order to make wider claims about the period and its literary aesthetics.To this end, Futūḥī examines a wide range of sources from which he extracts certain critical principles underpinning the Indian style. These include treatises on rhetoric and prosody, poems themselves, letters, and perhaps most profitably, tadhkiras (“biographical compendia of poets”). This latter genre flourished and expanded during the early modern period, with the composition of more and more tadhkiras, and their contents, in Futūḥī’s view, exhibiting a sharper critical edge than their forebears (17). As his book was published nearly twenty years ago, Futūḥī did not have at his disposal many of the critically edited tadhkiras now available to scholars for the first time outside of manuscript and lithograph form. Futūḥī’s work therefore deserves credit for highlighting the importance of this genre to (Iranian) publishers and historians of Persian literature, especially given the renaissance in tadhkira studies witnessed in recent years.Futūḥī divides his book into six chapters. The first chapter (“The Preferences and Ideas of Literary Society,” 21–82) highlights the major inclinations and phenomena of literary society in this period, as distinguished from other epochs. He enumerates six features, evidenced by early modern critical discourse: an enthusiasm for interpreting poetry (ta’vīl girā’ī-i shiʿr) and debating its meaning; the deep contemplation of poetry and abstruse composition; the penchant for composing enigmas and the dearth of fables and mythical compositions; the composition and organization of literary communities.Unlike previous eras, in which Persian poetry was largely a product of courtly and Sufi communities, poetry went mainstream during the early modern period, entering the bazaar and the coffeehouse. Supporting these claims with reference to the tadhkiras of Sām Mīrzā (1550), Ṭāhir Naṣrābādī (1672–73), and Vālih Dāghistānī (1747–49), for Futūḥī the assimilation of the middle classes into the realm of poetic composition imbued the literary language with a new kind of everyday realism and freshness (64, 78). Futūḥī’s account of the Indian style’s evolution encourages us to see its cerebralism and embrace of complexity as, in part, an elitist response to the democratization of poetic production. Though reticent to make value judgments, the author does echo common scholarly assertions that the religion-centered curricula of Safavid schools curtailed the intellectual resources of even educated poets, as compared to earlier eras (72).The second chapter concerns “The Predominant Issues of Literary Criticism” (83–152) during the period in question, including various efforts toward defining poetry beyond the mere prosodic, and repeated attempts at defending poetry from an Islamic standpoint. In this regard, Futūḥī singles out the eighteenth-century Indian scholar and poet Āzād Bilgrāmī (1704–1786) as arguably making the “greatest effort [among critics] to illustrate the relationship between poetry and Islamic law and the esteemed place of good poetry in religion” (95). (Āzād stands out as one of the most impressive critics and scholars of the era in Futūḥī’s view, and clearly merits more scholarly attention in the Anglophone world.)The chapter goes on to deal with other hot topics of debate among Safavid-Mughal litterateurs: what constitutes plagiarism (Sirqat-i Adabī), the relative importance of form and content (lafẓ vs. maʿnī), and emic critical frameworks of understanding and codifying “style” or ṭarz (complicating and contextualizing modern conceptions of sabk). Most fascinating here is Futūḥī’s exploration of the relationship between ethnicity and literary arguments. While tensions of prestige between Persian poets of Iranian and Indian decent had existed since the medieval period, Futūḥī explains that by 1100 AH / 1688 CE, Iranian literary chauvinism provoked increasingly technical and sophisticated scholarly challenges (136). So present was the question of how ethnicity (or at least one’s mother tongue) related to literary ability that, for Futūḥī, “one can claim that the dynamics and activity of literary criticism in this period, more than anything, were rooted in the issue of race [qawmiyyat] and Iranian and Indian national prejudice [taʿaṣṣub-i millī]” (139).Chapter 3 (153–232) considers the Persian tradition of rhetoric (balāghat) as a key site of literary criticism and an index of changing tastes. Nowhere is this more evident than in shifting attitudes as per metaphor construction. For example, simple similes considered exemplary by early rhetoricians like Rashīd al-Dīn Vaṭvāṭ (d. 1082), such as comparing the night to a lock of hair, had come to be seen as trite (mubtadhal) by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when more original, “fresh” comparisons were considered praiseworthy (161). While this chapter surprisingly omits analysis of some works of the rhetorical tradition particularly pertinent to the Indian style, such as Amīr Khusraw’s Dībācha-yi Ghurrat al-Kamāl (1294) and Iʿjāz-i Khusravī (1319) and Sirāj al-Dīn ʿAlī Khān Ārzū’s ʿAṭiyyah-yi Kubrā va Mawhibat-i ʿUẓmā (early 1740s), seldom considered compositions, such as the Jāmiʿ al-S.anāyiʿ wa al-Awzān1 and Āzād’s Arabic-language opus, Subḥat al-Marjān (1763–64), receive sustained attention. The chapter also makes a valuable contribution in considering the influence of Indic rhetoric on Persian-language scholarship. Mīrzā Khān Fakhr al-Dīn Muḥammad’s Tuḥfat al-Hind, written during the reign of Aurangzib (r. 1658–1707), put the Persian and Sanskrit literary traditions into direct conversation, and Futūḥī sees this cross-fertilization as exerting direct influence on the comparative literary criticism of towering eighteenth-century figures such as Ārzū and Āzād (170). Analyzing the Indic figures of speech discussed in these works, Futūḥī’s approach has the added benefit of concretizing what might be considered “Indian” about the Indian style.In the fourth chapter, titled “Literary Criticism in Tadhkira-Writing: Persian-Tadhkiras of Iran and the Subcontinent” (233–350), Futūḥī reads closely various early modern tadhkiras for what they can tell us about the critical attitudes of their authors and divergences between Iranian and Indian critical opinion. He begins with some general observations about the origins of the genre (taking Muḥammad Awfī’s Lubāb al-Albāb [1221] as the first Persian example) and highlights some necessary cautions scholars must take with these sources (many tadhkira-writers would copy information from earlier sources without verification and tended to be far less discerning in evaluating and including entries on their own friends and contemporaries). The chapter characterizes the critical outlook of famous Safavid-Mughal tadhkiras (Tuḥfa-yi Sāmī, Tadhkira-yi Naṣrābādī, Ātashkada-yi Ādhar, Kalimāt al-Shuʿarā, Mirʾāt al-Khayāl, etc.), as well as treating lesser known works, such as two Central Asian examples: the Mudhakkir-i Aḥbāb of Sayyid Ḥusayn “Nithārī” (1566–67) and the more generically titled Tadhkirat al-Shuʿarā.of Sulṭān Muḥammad Muṭribī Aṣamm Samarqandī (1604–5). A few major tadhkiras do not receive individual analysis, such as Taqī Kāshī’s Khulāṣat al-Ashʿār (1607) and Taqī Awḥadī’s ʿArafāt al-ʿĀshiqīn (1615).Futūḥī observes clear discrepancies between the tastes of Iranian and Indian tadhkira-writers by the eighteenth century, with Indian writers remaining much more enthusiastic about the “fresh style” (ṭarz-i tāza) than their Iranian counterparts. Positing Vālih Dāghistānī’s tadhkira, the Riyāḍ al-Shuʿarā, as a turning point in Iranian opinion, Futūḥī claims that Indian overenthusiasm for tāza-gūʾī (“Speaking Anew”) was in itself a factor in the style’s decline in Iran (265). Futūḥī’s research also illuminates how the tadhkira genre performed a literary-historical function, with authors discussing their views on the pioneers, precursors, and trajectory of different styles. Dāghistānī, for example, credits Bābā Fighānī with founding the fresh style, Ẓuhūrī with perfecting it, and Jalāl Asīr with taking it too far (263), while Āzād pays tribute to Kamāl al-Dīn Ismāʿīl as an early forerunner to the meaning-laden aesthetic of the Indian style (345).Chapter 5 (351–460) focuses specifically on five of the most important literary critics of the era: Munīr Lāhurī, Shaydā Fatḥpūrī, Ḥazīn Lāhījī, Ārzū, and Āzād. Futūḥī argues that Munīr’s criticism in his Kārnāma marked the first real attempt to resist the hegemony of tāza-gūʾī and advocate for a return to older styles, positioning him as a clear precursor to the sophisticated, philological literary criticism that Ārzū and others developed further in the eighteenth century. Indeed, for Munīr and Ārzū, Shaydā’s style of literary criticism (in the form of invective poems) seemed antiquated and unbecoming of a poet (387). Futūḥī also brings to light several literary quarrels (e.g., between Shaydā and Munīr, Munīr and Ārzū, Ārzū and Ḥazīn) and how, just as poems invited responses, treatises provoked countertreatises. Although some of the content is repeated from elsewhere in the book, it is useful to have the works and thoughts of these early modern literary heavyweights compiled and bring them into a succinct dialogue with one another. The final chapter (461–81) of the book is simply an index of over 700 emic terms of literary criticism that will be valuable to scholars trying to flesh them out further in the future.Naqd-i Khayāl emerged from Futūḥī’s doctoral work at the University of Tehran, where he studied under the supervision of two giants of twentieth-century Iranian scholarship: Abdolhussein Zarinkoob and Mohammad Reza Shafiʿi Kadkani. Written in clear and concise Persian, Futūḥī’s book is detailed and rigorous, laced with anecdotes and curiosities from the sources that breathe life into the erstwhile literary culture under discussion (such as accounts of the poet Ṭālib Āmulī drunkenly passing out the first time he attended Jahangir’s court, or Nāẓirī Nīshāpūrī purchasing the yā of his penname from a lesser known poet with the same nom de plume for 10,000 rupees).Unfortunately, however, Futūḥī’s work illustrates a broader problem of communication between Western and Iranian scholarship. Despite making many similar claims regarding the centrality of Bābā Fighānī to the development of early modern Persian poetry, no mention is made of Paul Losensky’s work in Welcoming Fighani, published just two years earlier. Similarly, even though Futūḥī, perhaps more than anyone else, demonstrates the great variation of style and understandings of style in this period across Iran and India, the validity or usefulness of the term “Indian style” is itself never called into question—an issue discussed at length at Western universities. At the same time, this is a piece of scholarship that deserves far greater engagement by Western specialists of early modern Persian literature.A revised second edition of this book was published under the shorter title “Literary Criticism on the Indian Style” (Naqd-i Adabī dar Sabk-i Hindī) in 2006. Maḥmūd Futūḥī Rūdmaʿjanī is a Professor of Persian Language and Literature at the Ferdowsi University of Mashhad.