Al-Ghazali and his Interpreters: The Case of the Emperor Aurangzeb

Abstract

The integration of South Asia into a Persianate world or “Persianate cosmopolis” has proven to be a particularly popular framing of the study of South Asian history. In Venture of Islam, Marshall Hodgson describes the Persianate as follows: The rise of Persian had more than purely literary consequences: it served to carry a new overall cultural orientation within Islamdom. Henceforth, while Arabic held its own as the primary language of the religious disciplines and even, largely, of natural science and philosophy, Persian became, in an increasingly large part of Islamdom, the language of polite culture; it even invaded the realm of scholarship with increasing effect. It was to form the chief model for the rise of still other languages to the literary level … Most of the more local languages of high culture that later emerged among Muslims likewise depended upon Persian wholly or in part for their prime literary inspiration. We may call all these cultural traditions, carried in Persian or reflecting Persian inspiration, “Persianate” by extension.Much of the subsequent theorization and conceptualization of the “Persianate” owes a significant debt to Hodgson's framing. Scholars have emphasized different aspects of the “Persianate,” with some choosing to frame it as a cultural milieu and others as a linguistically connected region. Here, “Persianate cosmopolis” refers to a geographical area whose major cultural foundation are the stories, ideas, and motifs expressed in New Persian literature. The circulation of such New Persian texts has supplied the primary content of the “Persianate cosmopolis.”