Persian Works Research Articles

AN EPISODE FROM THE BIOGRAPHY OF THE SUFI SHEIKH MAJD AD-DIN AL-BAGHDADI AND THE KHWAREZMIAN RULER TERKEN-HATUN

Sheikh Majd ad-Din al-Baghdadi was a prominent figure of the Kubrawiya Sufi order, and possessed not only religious authority, but also certain political influence. Amidst the rapid strengthening of Khwarezm, which by the beginning of the 13th century becomes the largest political formation in the Islamic East, Majd ad-Din al-Baghdadi gets close to Terken-Khatun, the mother of the Khwarezmshah ‘Ala’ al-Din Muhammad. Given the struggle between the court groups that unfolded in Khwarezm on the eve of the Mongol invasion, the alliance between the Sufi sheikh and Terken-Khatun was regarded a threat. As a result, the ruler of Khwarezm accused Majd ad-Din al-Baghdadi of romantic relations with the mother of Khwarezmshah, and ordered the sheikh to be executed. The contemporaries of this event considered the Mongol invasion and the fall of Khwarezm as retribution of ‘Ala’ ad-Din Muhammad for this act. The present paper does not aim to analyze the entire biography of Majd ad-Din al-Baghdadi, but pays special attention to the circumstances of his death and its description in medieval Arab-Persian historical sources. It is worth noting that a detailed account of it is mentioned in an anonymous Persian work of the 14th century, which has not yet been published fully, but only in separate fragments of its original text. In this paper we attempt not only to analyze the account of an anonymous author, but also to compare it with the information from other Arabic-Persian historical works. The existing views on this issue in the framework of Russian and foreign historiography, both in relation to the anonymous Persian historical work of the 14th century, and the information contained in it regarding the biography of the Sufi sheikh Majd ad-Din al-Baghdadi are also taken into account. The article may attract attention of our colleagues to this written monument, which undoubtedly needs to be published fully.

Telif-Tercüme Kavramı Bağlamında Vâhidî’nin Saâdetnâme’si Üzerine Düşünceler

In the “Sebeb-i Telif”, or “Reason for Writing” sections of works in the Turkish canon of classical literature, authors’ declarations that the work is original or translated can mislead researchers. Accurate conclusions related to the literature emerge better when the author’s ways of constructing the work and the content of the work are examined, rather than their own statements of originality. Saadetname, by the 16th-century writer Vahidi, seems to be original, according to Vahidi’s declaration. However, as a result of research, it has been revealed that Saadetname is an “original-translated” work. Twenty chapters of Saadetname have been translated from a Persian work, Pend-i Piran, the author of which is unknown. With Vahidi’s original contributions, the original form of the work was changed by adding introductions and conclusions, verse pieces and 98 additional stories. In this study, after briefly outlining Vahidi’s work and life, the terms “original” and “translation” are examined in the light of the sources and translation strategy of Saadetname. We explain how it came into the form of “original-translation”, with reference to examples from the work. 

Fahreddîn er-Râzî’nin Câmi‘u’l-‘Ulûm’unda Tefsir İlmi

İslam düşüncesinde ilim tasnifine yönelik birçok çalışma yapılmıştır. Bu çalışmalar farklı tarz ve üslupları barındırabilmektedir. Bunlardan biri numuneler/örnekler olarak ifade edebileceğimiz enmûzec/unmûzec türü eserlerdir. Meseleler merkezinde oluşturulan enmûzeclerin erken dönem örneklerinden biri de Fahreddîn er-Râzî’ye ait Ḥadâiḳu’l-envâr fî haḳāiḳi’l-esrâr veya meşhur ismiyle Câmi‘u’l-‘ulûm adlı Farsça eserdir. Müellif bu eserde naklî ve aklî ilimler şeklinde toplam altmış ilmi incelemiştir. Biz bu makalede eserin sekizinci ilmi olan tefsir ilmini inceleyeceğiz. Râzî, tefsir ilmini açık-kapalı meseleler ve imtihan şeklinde üç kısımda ele almıştır. Her bir kısımda üç mesele olmak üzere toplam dokuz meseleyi konu edinmiştir. Buna göre açık meseleler başlığında besmele, hurûf-ı mukatta‘a ve elif ifadesinin hemze’ye karşılık gelmesini incelemiştir. Kapalı meseleler kısmında bir takım müşkilleri barındırdığını düşündüğü Tâhâ sûresi 63. âyet, el-A‘râf sûresi 190. âyet ve el-Ahzâb sûresi 37. âyete dair problemleri ve bunlara dair cevapları işlemiştir. Son olarak imtihan kısmında âyet merkezli üç soru sorup cevaplarını vermiştir.

Validation of the Persian work productivity and activity impairment questionnaire in asthmatic patients

ABSTRACT Background The work productivity and activity impairment (WPAI) questionnaire is a fine linguistic validated tool to measure work productivity and activity impairment. Considering its capability, this study aimed to evaluate the validity of the Persian version of WPAI-AQ in asthmatics. Methods The standard forward-backward process was used to translate the English version of WPAI-AQ into Persian. The convergent validity and responsiveness were evaluated by analyzing the correlations between the Persian WPAI-AQ and the health outcomes, and its longitudinal change score with the change in SGRQ score, respectively. Additionally, the stability was estimated according to test-retest scores. Results There was a significant correlation between the Persian WPAI-AQ related outcomes and symptoms, activities, and impacts of disease (r = 0.41–0.89, p < 0.04). Desirable stability was observed by the test-retest analysis; 0.90 (95%CI: 0.89–0.95) for overall impairment, 0.90 (95%CI: 0.86–0.93) for work time missed, 0.72 (95%CI: 0.54–0.83) for activity impairment; 0.79 (95%CI: 0.71–0.86) for student class time missed, and 0.76 (95%CI: 0.66–0.81) for school impairment. Response to the change scores strongly supported the longitudinal responsiveness of the Persian WPAI-AQ (r = 0.37 to 0.63, p < 0.05). Conclusion The Persian WPAI-AQ is a feasible valid tool to estimate work productivity and activity impairment in Persian-speaking asthmatic patients.

E-Concordance: A Blended Learning Practice for Teaching Oriental Languages &amp; Literature

Concordance is a search tool giving list of all the words along with text in which they are used by an author in a published work Both printed and electric concordances of certain holy books such as Bible, Quran, or renowned literary works like that of Shakespeare’s in English, or of Rumi’s in Persian and Iqbal in Urdu etc. are prepared. Concordance is usually used to get comparatively quicker access to a certain published content to study the literary style of that very author. It is experienced that this tool can be effectively useful to teach language as well. This study is made to assess the effectiveness and challenges of using e-concordance as a research tool to teach oriental languages and literature. This study is limited to the concordances of Allama Iqbal’s poetic works in Persian and Urdu languages only. Both electronic and printed concordances of both the Persian and Urdu poetic works of Allama Iqbal are available. It has been observed that printed concordances are found comparatively more effective in terms of accuracy of results than that of e-concordance. A serious focus is recommended to develop both printed and e-concordances of more and more published classical and modern work.

Анонимное персидское сочинение «Хикаят»: источник по истории Волго-Уралья

Анонимное персидское сочинение «Хикаят»: источник по истории Волго-Уралья

Criticism against Ibn al-Arabī from among Sūfī’s: the Case of ‘Alā’ al-Dawla al-Simnānī

Criticism against Ibn al-Arabī from among Sūfī’s: the Case of ‘Alā’ al-Dawla al-Simnānī

Osmanlı Döneminde Farsçadan Türkçeye Tercüme Edilen Bazı Mühim Tasavvufî Eserler

Many scholarly works were translated from Persian into Ottoman Turkish during the Ottoman period. A considerable portion of those books was on Sufism. Some of these Persian works were written in regions where the native language was Turkish such as Asia Minor (Turkey) and Transoxiana (Uzbekistan), while others were written in other countries such as Persia, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and India. These Persian works were appreciated and attracted attention in the Muslim world as well as in the lands where they had been written and thus they were translated into Turkish in Asia Minor. Even though some of these translations were published during the Ottoman period, most of them are maintained in the libraries as manuscripts. In this article, information will be given about the important ones of these translated works and their authors. Many Turkish commentaries were written during the Ottoman Period on Sufi books such as Bostan, Gulistan, Mantiq al-tayr and Pand-i Attar which were written in Persia (Iran). Some of these Turkish commentaries were regarded so valuable that they were later translated into Persian and published. In other words, books which had been translated into Ottoman Turkish and commented upon were later re-translated into Persian and made available to the readers in their own land. In this way, they helped cultural exchange between countries and made significant contributions to Muslim culture. In this article, some of the important Sufi works translated from Persian to Turkish during the Ottoman Period have been gathered. Thus, it aims to help the researchers and those who are interested in the subject. Moreover, the article seeks to answer certain questions such as, a) Which Sufi works were translated into Turkish during the Ottoman period, b) Where (Persia, Central Asia, India etc.) were these translations done? c) What were the reasons for the change of center of the works in question from Persia to Central Asia and India after the 15th century?

Negotiating Female Authorship in Eighteenth-Century India: Gender and Multilingualism in a Persian Text

AbstractIn the last years of the eighteenth century, an Indian woman authored a work in Persian intended for the entertainment and guidance of students of that language. EntitledMiftāḥ-i Qulūb-i Mubtadiyān(‘The Key of the Hearts of Beginners’), the work comprised of stories from vernacular oral traditions as well as extracts from well-known Persian poetic, historical and ethical works. Although the work was translated into English in 1908 by Annette Beveridge, it has received no serious scholarly attention. Drawing upon recent scholarship offering new ways of thinking about India's multilingual literary past, this article examines the intersection of multiple vernacular and generic traditions as translated and manifested inMiftāḥ-i Qulūb al-Mubtadīyān. While vernacular languages followed different, and in relative terms, more limited routes of circulation and exchange in comparison with cosmopolitan languages such as Persian, their paths of movement were no less significant. Through a close reading of this work and its context, this article seeks to understand how Bībī Ḥashmat al-Daula crafted a distinct, cosmopolitan voice for herself through her deployment of both Persianate and regional Indian traditions.

Imperial Talismanic Love: Ibn Turka’s Debate of Feast and Fight (1426) as Philosophical Romance and Lettrist Mirror for Timurid Princes

Abstract This study presents and intellectual- and literary-historically contextualizes a remarkable but as yet unpublished treatise by Ibn Turka (d.&amp;#x00A0;1432), foremost occult philosopher of Timurid Iran: the Munāẓara-yi bazm u razm. As its title indicates, this ornate Persian work, written in 1426 in Herat for the Timurid prince-calligrapher Bāysunghur (d.&amp;#x00A0;1433), takes the form of a literary debate, a venerable Arabo-Persian genre that exploded in popularity in the post-Mongol period. Yet it triply transgresses the bounds of its genre, and doubly marries Arabic-Mamluk literary and imperial culture to Persian-Timurid. For here Ibn Turka recasts the munāẓara as philosophical romance and the philosophical romance as mirror for princes, imperializing the razm u bazm and sword vs. pen tropes within an expressly lettrist framework, making explicit the logic of the coincidentia oppositorum (majmaʿ al-aḍdād) long implicit in the genre in order to ideologically weaponize it. For the first time in the centuries-old Arabo-Persian munāẓara tradition, that is, wherein such debates were often rhetorically but never theoretically resolved, Ibn Turka marries multiple opposites in a manner clearly meant to be instructive to his Timurid royal patron: he is to perform the role of Emperor Love (sulṭān ʿishq), transcendent of all political-legal dualities, avatar of the divine names the Manifest (al-ẓāhir) and the Occult (al-bāṭin). This lettrist mirror for Timurid princes is thus not simply unprecedented in Persian or indeed Arabic literature, a typical expression of the ornate literary panache and genre-hybridizing proclivities of Mamluk-Timurid-Ottoman scientists of letters, and index of the burgeoning of Ibn ʿArabian-Būnian lettrism in late Mamluk Cairo; it also serves as key to Timurid universalist imperial ideology itself in its formative phase&amp;#x00A0;– and consciously epitomizes the principle of contradiction driving Islamicate civilization as a whole. To show the striking extent to which this munāẓara departs from precedent, I provide a brief overview of the sword vs. pen subset of that genre; I then examine our text’s specific political-philosophical and sociocultural contexts, with attention to Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī’s (d.&amp;#x00A0;1274) Akhlāq-i Nāṣirī and Jalāl al-Dīn Davānī’s (d.&amp;#x00A0;1502) Akhlāq-i Jalālī on the one hand&amp;#x00A0;– which seminal Persian mirrors for princes assert, crucially, the ontological-political primacy of love over justice&amp;#x00A0;– and the Ẓafarnāma of Sharaf al-Dīn Yazdī (d.&amp;#x00A0;1454), Ibn Turka’s student and friend, on the other. In the latter, much-imitated history Amir Temür (r.&amp;#x00A0;1370‒1405) was definitively transformed, on the basis of astrological and lettrist proofs, into the supreme Lord of Conjunction (ṣāḥib-qirān); most notably, there Yazdī theorizes the Muslim world conqueror as historical manifestation of the coincidentia oppositorum&amp;#x00A0;– precisely the project of Ibn Turka in his Debate of Feast and Fight. But these two ideologues of Timurid universal imperialism and leading members of the New Brethren of Purity network only became such in Mamluk Cairo, where lettrism (ʿilm al-ḥurūf) was first sanctified, de-esotericized and adabized; I accordingly invoke the overtly occultist-neopythagoreanizing ethos specific to the Mamluk capital by the late 14th century, especially that propagated at the court of Barqūq (r.&amp;#x00A0;1382‒1399). For it is this Cairene ethos, I argue, that is epitomized by our persophone lettrist’s munāẓara, which it effectively timuridizes. To demonstrate the robustness of this Mamluk-Timurid ideological-literary continuity, I situate the Munāẓara-yi bazm u razm within Ibn Turka’s own oeuvre and imperial ideological program, successively developed for the Timurid rulers Iskandar Sulṭān (r.&amp;#x00A0;1409‒1414), Shāhrukh (r.&amp;#x00A0;1409‒1447) and Ulugh Beg (r.&amp;#x00A0;1409‒1449); marshal three contemporary instances of the sword vs. pen munāẓara, one Timurid and two Mamluk, by the theologian Sayyid Sharīf Jurjānī (d.&amp;#x00A0;1413), the secretary-encyclopedist Aḥmad al-Qalqashandī (d.&amp;#x00A0;1418) and the historian Ibn Khaldūn (d.&amp;#x00A0;1406), respectively; and provide an abridged translation of Ibn Turka’s offering as basis for comparative analysis.

Arabic-speaking manuscript from Sterlibashevo

The article provides a concise description of a collection of texts in Arabic. The copy is preserved in the Ibragimov Institute of Language, Literature and Art of the Tatarstan Academy of Sciences, Kazan, Russian Federation. The copy originates from the Sterlibash district / Bashkortostan. The MS book comprises a collection of works on tajwid (recitation of the Holy Qur’an), Islamic creed and medicine. The aim of the publication is to introduce another hitherto unknown item, since the general descriptions available are far from being satisfactory. The item has entered the collection in 2017 under the shelfmark 7879 and assigned to the collection no. 39. The description offered provides titles of the work, their contents and authorship as well as the summary of the contents. The text in the MS was compared to the printed text of the same works (subject to availability). The cataloguer came to the conclusions as follows: the Tatars based their education on classical Islamic works in Arabic and Persian. The education was modelled after the system used in Central Asia. In the areas located remotely from the centres of education people also had a recourse to the texts, which comprised information, which was different from that from the “orthodox” writings. The Tatar medical writings used both local and classical medical texts.

Persia in the K. Paustovsky’s Artistic Picture of the World

This paper is focused on the main features of perception and visualization of the space of Persia in the artistic picture of the world by Paustovsky, a famous Russian Soviet writer, the linguistic description of the spatial picture of the world which represents a significant research lacuna. As a result of the research 1) representation of the individual model of the Persian space, in which cultural space dominates; 2) Persian toponymic works and its functionality are described; 3) features of the author's visualization of the Iranian space are revealed: which consist in the complexity of spatial characterization; in the use of a wide coloristic range; regular interaction of color and light characteristics; tendency to intensify the reality perception. The main attention is focused on the essential interrelation of coloristic, spatial and temporal characteristics in creating the imagological image of Persia, illustrating the functioning of the color chronotope.

Everlasting Doubt: Uncertainty in Islamic Representations of the Past

Abstract:Utilizing treatments of uncertainty regarding history in four major Arabic and Persian works (Ṭabarī, Bīrūnī, Badāʾūnī, and Abū l-Fażl), this article treats Islam as an ever-changing set of arguments rather than a panoply of beliefs and practices. ‘Islamic history’ is internally varied, without necessary universality or internal cohesion. The Islamic case underscores the methodological point that the interrelationship between religion and history is a multichannel and multidirectional affair whose valences differ in treatments of history of Islam versus that of Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and so on. Each of these histories has its distinctive history as a subject, with attendant fields of possibility and impossibility. An overarching history of religions must then be a vast, ever-expanding matrix not reducible to generalizations except in thematic treatments conceptualized with self-conscious attention to categories of analysis.

Comparison of the Wise and Philosophical Ideas in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh and Nasser Khusraw’s Book of Poems

History of Iran has deep links with Shahnameh and Persian literature. In fact, it is not possible to talk about Iran as a rich culture and disregard Persian literature and brilliant works of Persian literature. According to most scholars in the field of literature and culture, Iranians have been people of wisdom, thought, and philosophy. Ferdowsi and Nasser Khusraw hold a special place in this regard because we are faced with ethical, philosophical, and religious ideas in the works of both poets. Different effects of the Iranian Wisdom are presented in their poems; the effects include ethics, philosophy, logic, medicine, music, determinism and free will, fate, arithmetic and geometry, astronomy etc. Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh and Nasser Khusraw’s Book of Poems are sublime manifestation of ideological and philosophical ideas of Iranians. Apart from the similarities and differences, Ferdowsi and Nasser Khusraw’s poems represent praise of wisdom, God, and human freedom as basic elements in the ontology of Persian culture. Hence, in addition to understanding and explanation of Ferdowsi, Nasser Khusraw’s day and age, and the importance of these two poets in Iran's development of wisdom and philosophical thought, this research tries to describe their similarities and differences in ideological and philosophical subjects.

ʿAṭṭār’s Taḏkirat al-awliyāʾ and Jāmī’s Nafaḥāt al-uns

This article presents two famous collections of the lives of saints: ʿAṭṭār’sTaḏkirat al-awliyāʾand Jāmī’sNafaḥāt al-uns. Every collection of the lives of saints shares the common tradition of Arabic-language works. Indeed, Hujvīrī’sKašf al-maḥjūband Anṣārī’sṬabaqāt al-ṣūfiyyahensured the transition with Sufi literature written in Arabic. However, theTaḏkirat al-awliyāʾis the first truly original work in Persian. ʿAṭṭār and Jāmī sought to make known to their respective communities of belief the words and deeds of spiritual masters, but they did so in two different ways. ʿAṭṭār chose a limited corpus of saints that, in his eyes, represented the primary movements of the first centuries of Sufism. Jāmī instead favoured exhaustiveness, amassing a great number of biographies, especially on the shaykhs of the Naqshbandi order. While Jāmī conveyed the paths of saintliness in accordance with the religious orthodoxy of his order, ʿAṭṭār showed a special attachment to the ecstatic masters. TheTaḏkirat al-awliyāʾandNafaḥāt al-unsthus represent two different ways of commemorating the memory of the spiritual masters who embodied the mystical thought of Islam.

…and the golden fish of the Oxus

…and the golden fish of the Oxus

A Comparative Study of Zahhak’s Dual Character in Mythology, History, and Archeological Findings in Iran and Tajikistan

This article provides a comparative study of the mythological narratives of Zahhak in Persian literary works and the only surviving archeological illustrations of Zahhak before the advent of Islam, in Panjeh Kent [Panjakent] Tajikistan (500–600 C.E.). In mythological and historical texts, Zahhak had two features, one as a demon and the other as an oppressive and cruel human. This dualism is the focus of this analysis of the cultural myths and beliefs of the Aryan people. The study provides an interpretation of unique carvings discovered in Tajikistan that represent the battles of Aryans with both of Zahhak’s features in a series of stories. In these illustrations, Zahhak with his dual character tries to destroy the Aryans’ religious unity and beliefs. He was resisted through Aryan unity buttressed by their belief system. The gods Mithra and Soroush and the mythical birds the phoenix or rooster were believed to support and protect the Aryans.

Early Persian Medical Works on Antisyphilitic Mercury Medicines

AbstractIn this chapter, I examine the use of mercury with a special focus on its application as an ingredient in antisyphilitic medicines and therapies in a selection of medieval Persian scientific texts that represent either the earliest or the most influential works of their genre. Works examined include the earliest Persian pharmacological work, written by Abū Manṣūr Muwaffaq between 965 and 975 CE, which mentions mercury as a medicine against skin diseases and “killed mercury” (zībaq-i kušta)Since there is no generally accepted transliteration of Persian, the system of the Swiss library network IDS is used, which is based on the ISO standard. Vowels are transliterated with their premodern values ā, ī, ū, a, i, u (without consideringmaǧhūlvowels ē and ō); in modern pronounciation they are/a/,/i/,/u/,/a/,/e/,/o/respectively.as a poison; a general work on medicine written by Bahāʾ ad-Dawla Rāzī in 1501–2 CE, in which syphilis is described for the first time in Asia; a chapter from theǦāmiʿ al-fawāʾid(c.1511 CE) by Yūsufī, the earliest Persian work in which mercury plays an unmistakenly dominant role in the treatment of syphilis; and finally, the first Persian monograph on syphilis, written by Imād al-Dīn Maḥmūd Shīrāzī in the mid-sixteenth century, which lists recipes the author claims are derived from Chinese and European sources. This article will furthermore provide the first complete translation into a European language of Yūsufi’s chapter on syphilis in theǦāmiʿ al-fawāʾid, together with an edition of the Persian text.

The Art of Translation: An Early Persian Commentary of the Qurʾān

This article presents a description and analysis of a Persian translation and commentary of the Qurʾān, entitledTafsīr-i munīr, by Abū Naṣr al-Ḥaddādī (d. after 400/1009), the earliest exegetical work in Persian whose author can be identified. A manuscript of this multivolume work housed in the Topkapı Palace Museum of Istanbul offers an important historical testament to the calligraphic development of Persian exegetical writing and the manners in which scholars and authorities sought creative ways to visually balance the sacred Arabic text of the Qurʾān with vernacular exegetic material. The manuscript also reveals a good deal about Qurʾānic book art, as well as the development of Persian commentaries and translations, thus offering further insight into the history of the Qurʾān across the frontiers of Central Asia and Khurasan.

Islamic civilization in Abbasid era: A study and criticism

For modern researchers, various books and texts open a gate to the knowledge about ancient consequences of civilizations. Criticism, however, not only unfolds the facts and characteristics of the text body as well as examining the capability of the compiler or translator, it also recognizes different domains from intellectual facilities to the type of writing and translation. Finding the strength and weakness points of the book, “Islamic Civilization in Abbasid Era”, from compilation and translation perspective, the compiler and translator seem to have keenly been motivated to present the consequences of civilization in Abbasid era, an effort in which they could successfully fulfill the aim. The study shows that the strength points are positively more than weaknesses. Having Shariah- based approach, the compiler has been capable to propose the consequences of Islamic civilization from various domains. The translator, in turn, has not only strived to fill a gap in Persian works by selecting such book, he also succeeds to deliver an appropriate material to the students with a very little imperfection in translation.