Fruits of the Gardens: Ethics, Metaphysics, and Textual Pleasures in Late Qajar Iran

Abstract

This article introduces a miscellany notebook in Arabic and Persian, entitled Favāka al-basātin (Fruits of the Gardens), compiled around 1914 in Tehran by Hājj Mirzā Mohammad Tehrāni (d. 1914–21), a learned sugar merchant and bookseller. The notebook covers a broad range of topics on faith, philosophy, and ethics. It frequently draws on the Qurʾan and the Hadith, as well as Stoic proverbs, mostly from the Meditationes (Meditations) of Marcus Aurelius (r. 161–80), which was well received in nineteenth-century Persian advice literature. The text also includes passages from the Thousand and One Nights and sections on modern sciences, such as electricity, gas laws, and liquid dynamics, and a theory of colors explaining the rainbow. The article’s introductory section provides brief biographical background of the compiler of this notebook, the second section presents an overview of its contents, and the final section explores the question of authorial subjectivity and the author-text relationship by putting in perspective the volume’s gradual compilation, its eclectic range of topics, and its fluid structure. Through its diverse reading and writing strategies, this notebook represents an informative and heuristic venue that opens new analytical angles on Iran’s cosmopolitan, multifaceted, and heterogenous intellectual milieu in the late Qajar period.