Iranian World Research Articles

СОТРУДНИЧЕСТВО РЕСПУБЛИКИ ТАДЖИКИСТАН В РАМКАХ ИРАНОЯЗЫЧНОГО АЛЬЯНСА "АФГАНИСТАН–ИРАН–ТАДЖИКИСТАН"

The article provides the formation and development analysis of the Iranian cultural and economic alliance “Tajikistan–Afghanistan–Iran”, considers its current condition in the context of geopolitical changes. First of all, the author focuses on research of the nature of joint communication and energy projects of those three states, while trying to assess their interaction potential. The article pays specific attention to the Afghan factor’s influence on the integration processes in the Iranian world. The author, in accordance with the research results, comes to the conclusion that Tajikistan’s relations with the Iranianspeaking states, which are close culturally and geographically, harmoniously fit into the concept of its multi-vector foreign policy. Moreover, the convergence with Iran and Afghanistan arising not only from the civilizational togetherness of the three states, but also by pragmatic considerations: in particular, the fact, that Tajikistan required the transit potential of neighboring states to implement its communication strategy, and the creation of the Afghan-Pakistani, AfghanIranian-South Asian, Caspian-Iranian-South Asian corridors was considered as interesting not only from the economic point of view, but also had a deep humanitarian meaning. The author states that the emergence of an Iranianspeaking geopolitical field in Central Asia made it possible for Tajikistan not just to acquire the additional resource for development, but to make a breakthrough beyond the closed post-Soviet borders into the Islamic world. Moreover, the author emphasizes that such interaction contributes to the restoration of the region geopolitical integrity and the modernization of Central Asian countries, and can lead to the establishment of the new important pole of development in a polycentric world in the future.

‘Ganymede and the Eagle’: Representations of Spiritual Ascent in the Greater Iranian World from Late Antiquity to the Medieval Period

‘Ganymede and the Eagle’: Representations of Spiritual Ascent in the Greater Iranian World from Late Antiquity to the Medieval Period

"Idem aliter", czyli o dwóch opisach dyplomatycznej podróży do Persji w poezji późnego antyku (Claud. Cons. Stil.. I 51–68; Sid. Carm. II 75–88)

Two Latin poets of late antiquity, Claudian and Sidonius Apollinaris, included in their verse panegyrics short descriptions of diplomatic journey to Persia. The first mentioned the mission of Stilicho himself in “Panegyric on the consulate of Stilicho” (400 AD), whereas the latter described the mission of Procopius, father of the honorand in the “Panegyric on the consulate of Anthemius” (468 AD). Since Sidonius was in many ways imitator of Claudian, these pieces show a great deal of similarity both in content and form (especially in wording). However, closer scrutiny enables us to discover some differences in the treatment of Oriental topics as well as in general attitude to the praised heroes. Such an analysis allows us an insight into the image of Iranian world created in the Roman poetry as well as the question of sources used by late Latin poets. This paper can be also treated as a small contribution to the discussion on Sidonius’ imitation of Claudian poetry.

Extraterritoriality, Nationality, and Empire in the Persianate World, 1890-1940

Abstract Extraterritoriality and nationality were crucial to the legal landscape of the Late Persianate world and relations between Iran and British India. Extraterritoriality not only protected British subjects from Persian prosecution but also afforded the British Empire the means to rule Indians in lands beyond the Raj. Iran’s opposition to extraterritoriality led to laws that expanded Iranian nationality to include many Indians living in Iran and the Iranian diaspora living in India—who often navigated these rules as it best suited their interests. These developments reveal the significance of imperialism and state building to the emergence of modern international law and the fate of the Persianate world.

Translating Obligations: Tamassuk and Fārigh-khaṭṭī in the Indo-Persian World

Abstract A necessarily widespread feature of language practice in the Persianate world was the need for translation of speech and text, with a range of lexical and semantic challenges involved in taking meaning from one language to another. This article focusses on legal translation, with its highly functional aims, by following the career of a pair of Indo-Persian legal forms known as tamassuk and fārigh-khaṭṭī, used for recording obligation and requital respectively. Tracing their reincarnations from Persian into Marathi, Hindi and Bengali, this article reveals several forms of boundary-crossing: doctrinal, jurisdictional, political and linguistic. In doing so, it explores the legal mindscapes in the early modern Indo-Persian world, spilling from the late Mughal into the colonial, and shows how multilingualism functioned within specific parts of the Persianate cosmopolis.

Transacting Business through/for Others in Early Colonial Western India: The Text, Context, and Meaning of a Mukhtār-nāma of 1821

Abstract In the Persianate world, a mukhtār-nāma (deed of representation or a power of attorney) was a legal instrument that enabled people to transact business through a representative or agent (mukhtār or wakīl). This is a study of one such document written in Surat in 1821. It analyses the document for its socio-cultural, legal, and commercial significance as well as to explore the transition in the adjudication of commercial disputes and civil cases from Mughal to East India Company courts. It shows that there was a strong tradition of documenting business transactions in early modern South Asia and that such practices have continued into the colonial and postcolonial periods.

Transacting Politics in the Maratha Empire: An Agreement between Friends, 1795

Abstract Diplomacy was a principal site of linguistic and cultural exchange in the early modern Persianate world. Focusing on the karārnāmā or agreement, this paper explores how a repertoire of Marathi and Persian documentary genres, binding formulae, and graphic procedures enabled legal, commercial, and diplomatic transactions in eighteenth-century western India. The exchange of written agreements facilitated interstate relations as well as profit-sharing contractual arrangements between individuals. Despite their centrality to interactions between European and South Asian polities, these instruments met with limited success in establishing rights to property under the legal regime of the East India Company-state and instead acquired new functions in colonial revenue administration.

Introduction: The Persianate Bazaar

Abstract The collection of essays in this volume examines forms of business documentation in the late Persianate world and the Indian Ocean, between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. Looking upon business in its broadest sense, the themes range from property disputes within families to inter-polity and inter-imperial deals, all of which is captured within the notion of the bazaar. Presenting documents and documentary forms written in Persian, but also the associated languages of Arabic, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi and Rajasthani, the articles collectively enrich the idea of the Persianate, delineating its specific dispensations within regional contexts, and also its boundaries and limitations. This is also a contribution to the study of Persographia, in this case Persianate rather than just Persian writing. The articles study specific language combinations, lexical elements and usages that came to be deployed in different areas and the legal cultures they provide evidence for.

The Persianate World. Rethinking a Shared Sphere, edited by Abbas Amanat and Assef Ashraf

The Persianate World. Rethinking a Shared Sphere, edited by Abbas Amanat and Assef Ashraf

Writing Self, Writing Empire: Chandar Bhan Brahman and the Cultural World of the Indo-Persian State Secretary

Writing Self, Writing Empire: Chandar Bhan Brahman and the Cultural World of the Indo-Persian State Secretary

Judeo-Persian Tobit and G. B. Vecchietti: Exile and Writing between Florence and the Persianate World

Judeo-Persian Tobit and G. B. Vecchietti: Exile and Writing between Florence and the Persianate World

From Soil to Domes: Vernacular Architecture and Construction Techniques in Esfahak, South Khurasan

ABSTRACT This article examines construction techniques of earthen vernacular architecture, with a particular focus on traditional construction processes of mud brick vaults and domes in contemporary Iran. The village of Esfahak, in South Khurasan, is selected as a case study due to its unique historical circumstances, traditional buildings and construction methods, and recent restoration activities carried out by villagers. The village was damaged by an earthquake in 1978 and abandoned for 30 years until a group of Esfahakis decided to restore their ruined earthen houses. This marked the start of an intergenerational exchange that allowed young villagers to train alongside old masters in a process of rediscovery of long-time abandoned construction techniques. The old village has been reconnected to the lives of current residents, while the reconstructed buildings continue to bear witness to the millennial knowledge and skills of erecting vaults and domes from the plateau’s arid soil. This article is based on fieldwork research on building sites and interviews with craftsmen in Esfahak, combined with a review of existing literature on traditional and historical construction techniques in the Persian world.

Internal Colonialism and the Discipline of Comparative Literature in Iran

Abstract This essay studies the history, current, and future status of the discipline of comparative literature in Iran. It compares the theoretical norms of contemporary comparative literature to the Pre-modern Perso-Islamic notion of “comparison,” which has been theorized in Iran and the Arab World as the Arabic, Islamic, and Iranian schools of comparative literature. The article highlights profound institutional and canonical Perso-Shi’a centrism in Iranian academia, and shows how the discipline of comparative literature has been used as a vehicle for transnationalism of this Perso-Shi’a centrism that has manifested in “Persianate World” in the context of European and North American academia. Marshall Hodgson’s 1960s neologism “Persianate World” has been placed with the paradigm shifts ushered in by the linguistic and cultural turns of the 1970s, the postcolonial scholarship that grew from Edward Said’s Orientalism in the late 1990s, and Sheldon Pollock’s formulation of a ‘Sanskrit cosmopolis’ in the 21st century. The article explains how the Persianate comparatists, under the banner of postcolonial studies, not only erased the experience of the subaltern and internally colonialized non-Persians of Iran in favor of the Middle Eastern states in a binary matrix (Western Imperialism versus a “colonialized” Islamic world), but also represents an unrealistic and exaggerated picture of the discipline to Western readers. The article further maps the conversations within the postcolonial Middle East about “internal colonialism,” as an analytic tool for thinking about operations and interlocking systems of power in the Middle East and abroad, here applied to the discipline of comparative literature for the first time.

Muḥammad Šīrīn Maġribī (d. 810/1408) as a Key Agent in the Transmission of Akbarī Silsilas

Abstract This article aims at reassessing the historical and intellectual standing of Muḥammad Šīrīn Maġribī (d. 810/1408) by demonstrating the key role he played in the transmission of Ibn al-ʿArabī’s (d. 638/1240) chains of spiritual descent. This is, at the same time, an original contribution to the study of Akbarī silsilas. A re-reading of familiar sources, together with a range of previously unknown or unexplored documents, leads to a reassessment of established scholarship on Šīrīn Maġribī which has hitherto seen him primarily as a Sufi poet. The present study provides an enhanced portrait of this figure, shedding light on his intense intellectual activity over and above poetry, and on the significant role he played in contemporary Sufi networks far beyond Tabriz and the Persianate World. In this new light, Maġribī emerges as an eminent and influential agent of Ibn al-ʿArabī’s legacy through the transmission of Akbarī silsilas, the teaching of Ibn al-ʿArabī’s works, and the writing of influential texts that contributed to the diffusion of Akbarī doctrines.

Purity and Polemics: Zoroastrian Women’s Bodies as Sites of Difference and Contestation in Early Islamic Iran

ABSTRACT Zoroastrian menstrual purity laws served as one of the most salient markers of socio-religious distinction during the tumultuous early centuries of Islamic rule in the Iranian world. This article surveys Islamic polemics – particularly by the Muʿtazilah—directed against these Zoroastrian strictures on bodily purity and reads them intertextually, as it were, in conjunction with Pahlavi apologetic texts that defend the sanctity of these millennia-old practices. It is argued that the Zoroastrian scholar-priests were responding directly to the charges levelled against them by their Muslim counterparts, clearly suggesting that both theology and jurisprudence were produced through inter-confessional debate and dialogue, much as we find in the better-studied cases of Christian-Islamic interactions.

So Close and Yet Often so Far Away: The History of India as Told by Historians in Iran Around 1500

ABSTRACT Khvandamir’s general history Habib al-Siyar (Beloved of Careers), one of the major historiographical narratives of the Persianate world, was composed for the founder of the Safavid dynasty in Iran, Shah Ismaʿil, in the 1520s. Some years later, the author ideologically reshaped his work at Babur’s Timurid-Mughal court in Agra. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the book was widely copied across the Islamic lands and, judging by the number of extant manuscripts (c. 600), the Habib al-Siyar might be called a premodern bestseller. Interestingly, several chapters dealing with the history of India (Hindustan) were apparently added by the author later on and have not been included in the printed editions. Based on the examination of widely scattered manuscripts, this article examines the textual transmission of these chapters. Furthermore, it explores the question of how Khvandamir integrated information about India into the main narrative and which sources he relied on in order to situate the region within an overarching narrative of Islamic history. This approach gives further insights into the precise quality and quantity of knowledge about the Indian subcontinent available in Iran around 1500, as well as into copying processes of texts in premodern times.

Semiotic hybridization in Persian poetry and Iranian music

Abstract This article demonstrates how Iranian classical music and Persian medieval poetry, taken as separate semiotic systems, form together, in certain contexts, a single hybrid semiotic system with overlapping structural features and shared aesthetic principles. Hjelmslev’s description of connotative semiotic systems serves as a theoretical framework to show the modalities of this hybridization. This phenomenon can be observed through comparative analysis of the interdependence of poetry and music in the Persianate World from a semiotic point of view. On the one hand, the quantitative (chronemic) meter of the Persian classical versification, called ‘aruz, as well as its extraordinarily heavy use of rhyme display a formal structure that evokes that of a musical phrase. On the other hand, the dependence of the structure of the Iranian musical system upon the rhythmic structure of classical poetry suggests a unique character of which few examples exist. This interdependence manifests itself particularly in the mystic (Sufi) poetry of the medieval period, specifically in the work of such renowned poets as Rumi, Sa’di Shirāzi, and Hāfez, who are among the best-known in the West. Examples of their lyric works are examined here to demonstrate occurrences of the collusion between the two semiotic systems.

Texts and Contexts. Ongoing Researches on the Eastern Iranian World (Ninth-Fifteenth C.), edited by Viola Allegranzi and Valentina Laviola

Texts and Contexts. Ongoing Researches on the Eastern Iranian World (Ninth-Fifteenth C.), edited by Viola Allegranzi and Valentina Laviola

From guests of the Imam to unwanted foreigners: the politics of South Asian pilgrimage to Iran in the twentieth century

Until the 1930s, Mashhad, Iran received thousands of pilgrims from South Asia yearly, a central node in the Shiʿi shrine city network spanning the Persianate world. Within decades, South Asian pilgrims had all but disappeared from Iran. This article examines how Reza Shah’s drive to ‘nationalize’ Iran spelled the end for this transregional network, leading to harassment of South Asians, increasingly seen not as ‘guests of the Imam’ but as foreigners tied to British colonialism. These decrees included dress codes that banned turbans and veiling, requiring South Asians to wear distinct national clothing that visually marked them as foreign. As Reza Shah sought to demonstrate Persia’s development as a power on a par with European states, pilgrimage became a battleground for anti-imperialist sentiments – taken out on colonial subjects themselves. South Asians in Mashhad – primarily British Indian but also British Afghans – bore the brunt, including as victims of the Gauharshad Massacre. Modern Iranian nationalism required disentangling Iranians from pre-existing transregional linkages and subsuming local identities rooted in mobility, as in the shrine cities, to a homogenous national identity defined by borders and territory. Those inassimilable to the project of Iranian national sovereignty, like the long-standing South Asian community from Iran, were expelled.

Roving Revolutionaries: Armenians and Connected Revolutions in the Russian, Iranian and Ottoman Worlds, written by Houri Berberian

Roving Revolutionaries: Armenians and Connected Revolutions in the Russian, Iranian and Ottoman Worlds, written by Houri Berberian