{"title":"A Persian Captive’s Guide to Khiva: Esmāʿil Mir-Panja’s Satirical Recollections","authors":"J. Eden","doi":"10.1163/18747167-12341301","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18747167-12341301","url":null,"abstract":"Travel literature flourished in the Qajar period, as reports rich in political, geographical, and ethnographic detail were officially commissioned from Iranian diplomats and officers who went abroad. Many of these accounts concerned Central Asia and some historians have argued that they served to project Iranian dominance over the region. Others have argued quite the opposite: that these accounts served to articulate cultural and political borders between Central Asia and Iran. In this paper, I will introduce a new source and an alternative approach. Focusing on the little-known travelogue of Esmāʿil Mir-Panja, an Iranian officer who spent ten years as a captive in Khiva, I will show not only how this travelogue served the interests of the Qajar state, but also how it functioned as a subversive work of satire and an incisive critique of the shah to whom it was dedicated. In other words, I will emphasize the agency of the author as well as the aims of his patrons.","PeriodicalId":41983,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Persianate Studies","volume":"9 1","pages":"205-227"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2016-10-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/18747167-12341301","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"64838970","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Seeing Like a Khanate: On Archives, Cultures of Documentation, and Nineteenth-Century Kh v ārazm","authors":"P. Sartori","doi":"10.1163/18747167-12341302","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18747167-12341302","url":null,"abstract":"While students of imperial and colonial history began long ago to investigate the culture of documentation that informed the production, disposition and concealment of texts in archives, little has been done to understand how chancery practices and record-keeping activities in the modern Perso-Islamicate world relate to forms of governance. Material coming from the Khivan archives lends itself to provide for a corrective to this situation. By examining reports penned by leaders of mosque communities and reflecting on local archival practices, I address in this paper the following questions: Why did the Qongrats create and run an archive? What were the goals that the Qongrats wanted to achieve by developing and sustaining a project of documentation? I think these are pressing questions for anyone who sets out to make sense of trends of textualization in nineteenth-century Central Asia (and beyond) without succumbing to the somewhat facile narrative of modernization.","PeriodicalId":41983,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Persianate Studies","volume":"9 1","pages":"228-257"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2016-10-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/18747167-12341302","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"64839103","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sabk-e Hendi and the Crisis of Authority in Eighteenth-Century Indo-Persian Poetics","authors":"A. Dudney","doi":"10.1163/18747167-12341294","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18747167-12341294","url":null,"abstract":"This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Brill via https://doi.org/10.1163/18747167-12341294","PeriodicalId":41983,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Persianate Studies","volume":"9 1","pages":"60-82"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2016-06-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/18747167-12341294","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"64838475","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Local Lives of a Transregional Poet: ʿAbd al-Qāder Bidel and the Writing of Persianate Literary History","authors":"Kevin L. Schwartz","doi":"10.1163/18747167-12341295","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18747167-12341295","url":null,"abstract":"This article focuses on the different ways in which the personality and poetry of the Indian-born poet ʿAbd al-Qāder Bidel (d. 1721) has been interpreted and deployed in a variety of contexts across the Persianate sphere of West, Central, and South Asia, particularly in the nineteenth century. By highlighting different interpretations of Bidel as an obscurantist poet, agent of change, progressive voice, unabashed innovator, and canonic master, I present a more complicated historiography of the poet than the way he is typically presented in Persian literary history. An exploration of the ways in which different peoples and places in the Persianate world have interpreted Bidel reveals a larger complex historiography, which identifies transregional similarities among West, Central, and South Asia and contributes towards a more integrative literary history of the Persianate world.","PeriodicalId":41983,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Persianate Studies","volume":"9 1","pages":"83-106"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2016-06-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/18747167-12341295","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"64838591","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mughal Horoscopes as Propaganda","authors":"S. Popp","doi":"10.1163/18747167-12341293","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18747167-12341293","url":null,"abstract":"Not only in Europe but also in India, kings and emperors used astrology as a ‘scientific proof’ for their claims to power. As it still was regarded as a science, it could provide useful justification for a king’s great destiny, even though horoscopes are so complex that almost every fact can be ‘found’ in them by a clever combination of their data. Though doubts about astrology existed, the Mughal emperors used astrology extensively. Two of them, Akbar (1556-1605) and his grandson Shāh Jahān (1628-1658), included horoscopes in the introductions of their official chronicles. Both wanted to prove that they were the renovator of Islam in the second Islamic millennium. Akbar had this done in defiance of religion, Shāh Jahān in compliance, but both with a definitive effort to twist the information from the heavens in a way that suited them. Both used horoscopes to explain the tenets of their reign as a requirement of the age. In the case of Shāh Jahān, we even find personal sentiments and changes over time, comparing an earlier and a slightly later horoscope.","PeriodicalId":41983,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Persianate Studies","volume":"9 1","pages":"45-59"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2016-06-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/18747167-12341293","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"64838392","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Minorities and Foreigners in a Provincial Iranian City: Bahāʾis in the Russian Consulate of Isfahan in 1903","authors":"S. Sadeghian","doi":"10.1163/18747167-12341297","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18747167-12341297","url":null,"abstract":"This article is about the struggles of a persecuted confessional minority in Qajar Iran. It shows that the massacre of the Bahāʾis in Isfahan in 1903 was representative of the ongoing power struggles in the city. Previous scholarship that has briefly explored these events has relied primarily on a handful of British diplomatic sources. Drawing on unexplored documents in British and Iranian archives, this article provides crucial details about the social dynamics on the ground and stresses the role of key actors involved in this episode in Iranian history. In the process, the article puts together the socio-economic contexts of the events in Isfahan, explains why the Bahāʾis sought foreign protection, and analyzes the attitudes of powerful local actors such as Zell al-Soltān and Āqā Najafi.","PeriodicalId":41983,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Persianate Studies","volume":"9 1","pages":"107-132"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2016-06-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/18747167-12341297","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"64838726","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Wearing the Belt of Oppression: Khāqāni’s Christian Qasida and the Prison Poetry of Medieval Shirvān","authors":"R. Gould","doi":"10.1163/18747167-12341296","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18747167-12341296","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines how the Persian prison poem ( habsiyāt ) incorporated Islamic legal norms for governing non-Muslim peoples into its poetics. By tracing how Khāqāni of Shirvān (d. 1199) brought the aesthetics of incarceration to bear on Islamic legal regulations pertaining to non-Muslim communities ( ahl al-zemma ), I offer a new perspective on the politics of poetry in Persian culture. As I delineate the intertextual references to legal stipulations ( shorut ) pertaining to non-Muslims that suffuse Khāqāni’s Christian qasida , I demonstrate how the Persian poetics of incarceration coalesced into a powerful internal critique of Islamic law.","PeriodicalId":41983,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Persianate Studies","volume":"9 1","pages":"19-44"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2016-06-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/18747167-12341296","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"64838679","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Unity of the Persianate World under Turko-Mongolian Domination and Divergent Development of Imperial Autocracies in the Sixteenth Century","authors":"S. Arjomand","doi":"10.1163/18747167-12341292","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18747167-12341292","url":null,"abstract":"The promotion of the Persianate normative model of imperial kingship was the major ecumenical contribution of the Persian bureaucrats who served the Saljuq and Mongol rulers of Iran and Anatolia in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to state-building. The phenomenal growth of popular Sufism in Timurid Iran and early Ottoman Anatolia had a highly paradoxical impact on the legitimacy of kingship, making its conception increasingly autocratic. Both in the Ottoman and the Safavid successor empires, the disintegrative tendency of nomadic patrimonial empires was countered by variants of Persianate imperial monarchy. It is argued that the decisive event in sundering the ecumenical unity of the Persianate world was not the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, but the Mahdist revolution of the Safavid sheykhoghlu , Shah Esmāʿil, half a century later. The parting of ways stemmed from the variant of mystically enhanced autocracy adopted in the two cases—one with orthodox, Sunni, and the other with heterodox, Shiʿite inflection. The latter model became the Safavid model of autocracy under Shah Esmāʿil, and was quickly adopted by the Timurids after their conquest of India in 1526.","PeriodicalId":41983,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Persianate Studies","volume":"9 1","pages":"1-18"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2016-06-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/18747167-12341292","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"64838257","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction: The Safavids in Global Perspective","authors":"R. Matthee","doi":"10.1163/18747167-12341283","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18747167-12341283","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41983,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Persianate Studies","volume":"8 1","pages":"123-126"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2015-11-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/18747167-12341283","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"64837884","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Did Shah ʿAbbās I Have a Mediterranean Policy","authors":"José Francisco Cutillas-Ferrer","doi":"10.1163/18747167-12341285","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18747167-12341285","url":null,"abstract":"This paper was funded as part of a Project Fellowship, “Busqueda de documentacion de la Monarquia Hispanica y la Persia Safavi en los siglos XVI-XVII,” ACIE13-01, at the University of Alicante.","PeriodicalId":41983,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Persianate Studies","volume":"41 1","pages":"254-275"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2015-11-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1163/18747167-12341285","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"64838087","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}