We are pleased to announce the schedule for the 2019 Great Lakes Adiban Workshop, hosted by Indiana University Bloomington! The workshop is free and open to all. You can download the flyer here, and scroll further down to read the schedule and paper abstracts. Sponsored by the College Arts & Humanities Institute; the Department of Comparative Literature; the Islamic Studies Program; the Dhar India Studies Program; Renaissance Studies; the Medieval Studies Institute; Near Eastern Languages and Cultures; and Central Eurasian Studies at IU.

Time: September 28–29 2019, 9:00am–5:00pm
Location: College Art and Humanities Institute, 1211 E. Atwater Ave / Bloomington, IN 47401

Program Schedule

Saturday, Sept. 28

Writing the City (9:15–10:30)

  • Arlen Wiesenthal (U of Chicago) / Wayward Itinerancies of an Emperor in Disguise: Writing Ruler and Metropolis in Ottoman Accounts of Sultan Murad IV’s (r. 1623-40) Sojourns through Istanbul
  • Shahla Farghadani (U of Michigan, Ann Arbor) / From the Garden to the Bathhouse: Love, Desire, and Urban Space in Early Modern Isfahan

Early Mughal Poetics (10:45–12:00)

  • Namrata B. Kanchan (U of Texas, Austin) / The Woman Behind the Veil of Paint: A Re-examination of the Sixteenth-Century Ta‘rīf-i Ḥusain Shāh from the Deccan Sultanate of Ahmadnagar
  • Ayelet Kotler (U of Chicago) / Intertextuality and Appropriation in Masīḥ’s Persian Rāmāyana

Lunch (12:00–1:30)

Mirrors of the Soul: Geography, Ethnicity, Alterity (1:30–3:00)

  • Kaveh Hemmat (Benedictine U) / Climes of the Soul: Race, Geography, and Interiority in Persian Epics
  • Rama Alhabian (Cornell U) / Alterity and Difference in Three Maqāmahs by al-Ḥarīrī
  • Alexandra Hoffmann (U of Chicago) / The Monster Within: Sexuality in Iranshah b. Abi Khayr’s Kūshnāmeh

Para-national Literatures (3:30–4:45)

  • Alexander Jabbari (University of Minnesota) / Origin Myths: Imagining the Beginnings of Islamicate Languages
  • Aqsa Ijaz (McGill U) / Indo Persian Romance(s): Reflections on the Two 19th Century Versions of Qissah-i Gul-i Bakāwlī

Sunday, Sept. 29

The Sliding Scales of Huwa-manity (9:15–10:30)

  • Sam Lasman (U of Chicago) / Snakemen: The Anthropomorphic Dragons of Persian Epic
  • Samantha Pellegrino (U of Chicago) / Gender, Magic, and Ontology in the Sirat Sayf bin Dhi Yazan

Metapoesis and Canonization (10:45–12:00)

  • Shaahin Pishbin (U of Chicago) / The Inimitable Amīr Khusraw? Khusraw’s “Poetic Poetry” (shiʿr-i shāʿirānah) and his Influence on Safavid-Mughal Persian Poetics
  • Abdul Manan Bhat (U of Pennsylvania) / Metapoesis in Urdu poetry: The Case of Firāq Gorakhpuri

Lunch (12:00–1:30)

Literary Selves and Subjects (1:30–3:00)

  • Jennifer Tobkin (George Washington U) / Muḥammad ibn Dāwūd al-Iṣfahānī and His Poetic Alter Ego the Man of Our Times
  • Allison Kanner-Botan (U of Chicago) / Laylā/ī’s Critiques
  • David Kanbergs (NYU) / Was it Something I Said?: The Origins and Intentions of Abū l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī’s Risālat al-Ghufrān

Wrap-up (3:30–4:45)

Paper Abstracts

(arranged alphabetically by presenter)

Rama Alhabian (Cornell U) / Alterity and Difference in Three Maqāmahs by al-Ḥarīrī

The classical maqāmahs by al-Hamadhānī and al-Ḥarīrī have recently received renewed interest by scholars of Arabic literature, who either focus on the maqāmahs’ reception, circulation and consumption in the classical medieval period, or on the afterlife of the genre in the modern period as well its role in the development of modern Arabic narrative form. This interest emerges as scholars have become aware of the potentialities of the genre to speak beyond the linguistic prodigy of its tricksters, narrators, and ultimately authors. Considered for long merely as an ornate literary endeavor, the maqāmah has been viewed as secondary and epiphenomenal to other literary and writerly practices of its time. For example, scholar and literary critic Abdelfattah Kilito argues that the spaces both trickster and narrator navigate in the maqāmah offer no radical forms of difference, because the maqāmah authors spoke the same language of conservative Muslim geographers at the time, who confined their gaze to the world of Islam. As such, the range of difference and alterity both trickster and narrator experience evinces unproblematic modes of encounter, since the geographical realms traveled in maqāmah are “familiar” and hence are experientially “safe.”

Without rejecting Kilito’s thesis totally, I argue that al-Ḥarīrī’s maqāmahs do engage with difference and alterity in a way that reminds us of the hetero-lingual composition of the Islamic empire in the twelfth century. To do so, I examine three maqāmahs in al-Ḥarīrī’s collection, namely, “of Merāghah,” “of Ahwāz,” and “of Samarkand.” Set in various locales where linguistic difference or ʿujmah (linguistic difference) is predominant, these maqāmahs feature different patterns and degrees of “variegation,” i.e. tarqīsh and tanqīṭ, in the Arabic alphabet. This feature, I argue, functions as a palimpsest upon which the historical contact of Arabic (therefore Arabs) with other linguistic identities and communities is inscribed.

Shahla Farghadani (U of Michigan, Ann Arbor) / From the Garden to the Bathhouse: Love, Desire, and Urban Space in Early Modern Isfahan

Shahrāshūb, a Persian poetic genre from the Safavid period, gives us primary, first-hand material about different aspects of urban life, society and social relations in early modern Iran. One aspect of early modern Iran we observe through this genre is sexuality and its relationship to physical spaces. For example, in the bathhouse we see erotic desire unfold in a particular way that is outside the more conventional sphere, where eros and love are experienced; therefore, I read the shahrāshūb at the intersection of poetry, the language of eroticism, and quotidian social interactions within the city of Isfahan. Such an integrative reading enables us to see not only how poetry can be representative of the city or the social structure, but of individuals as well. Thus, I explore how the Shahrāshūb employs a certain kind of language that approximates quotidian interactions, which then provides insight into how everyday interaction unfolded in early modern Iran. I will examine how the specific genre of the shahrāshūb depicts social relations as they unfolded in a particular space, and how place impacts the way sexuality is represented by i’jāz love or erotic interactions.

In this paper, I examine In Praise of Isfahan (dar ta’rīf-i Isfahān) by Mullā I’jāz-i Hirāti, a poet in the late Safavid period. In In Praise of Isfahan, I’jāz creates a new aesthetic of masculinity through the shahrāshūb genre—a genre that allows him to connect specific individuals with specific places and occupations and thereby create a map of the city through eros. Unlike other shahrāshūbs in which the poet directly addresses the beloved, I’jāz in the description of his desire for youth does not directly address his beloved and instead focuses on the aesthetics of their body. It seems that his description of youths is more related to his erotic desire for them rather than for the ideals of love. This desire is contextually shaped according to space, the physical site in which it occurs.

Kaveh Hemmat (Benedictine U) / Climes of the Soul: Race, Geography, and Interiority in Persian Epics

This paper explores Persian epics’ use of physical and cultural geography as a means of representing or even simulating conditions of the soul. In the Garshasbnameh, Kushnameh, and Nezami’s Alexander romance, the title characters fight and/or explore their way through similar sequences of major world regions (keshvar), based on the Iranian geographical schema of the seven keshvars. Regions—of particular interest here are Africa, India, and China—are consistently assigned particular sets of characteristics or associations in different epics, but more interestingly, also seem to fulfill similar structural functions in the epics. In all three of these epics, Africa functions as a proving ground in which the hero is confronted with his monstrous antithesis in an encounter which establishes and defines his character and initiates a series of further journeys and battles that constitute the central plot of the epic (in the case of the Kushnameh, the second half of the epic). Serving a related function, India in the Garshasbnameh and the forests of China in the Kushnameh are spaces which become mapped, each in its own way, onto the interior—the soul—of the title character. Garshasb internalizes the wisdom that is bestowed upon him as an inheritance in his formative travels through India, in his encounters with “Brahmins” living in remote places and testaments inscribed on the tombs of ancient heroes, and his witnessing of diverse wonders and marvels. For Kush, on the other hand, the forests of China where he is raised are a place of obscurity and constant threat. This sense of menace and confinement also follows the hero of the first part of the epic, Kush’s foster father Abetin, after Kush betrays him, until Abetin escapes by ascending a mountain. I argue that the dramatic atmosphere of the forest—characterized by suspense and constant tension—simulates the condition of Kush’s soul, trapped as it is in his monstrous body and liberated near the very end of the epic. Finally, China is situated at the dramatic and structural climax of both the Garshasbnameh and the first half of the Epic of Kush, the ultimate alien presence that the hero either confronts (Garshasb) or is absorbed in (Kush and Abetin). The consistent way in which these epics use geography to think about the souls of their protagonists is noteworthy as an important set of literary devices for medieval writers and as a reflection of the geographical imaginary.

Alexandra Hoffmann (U of Chicago) / The Monster Within: Sexuality in Iranshah b. Abi Khayr’s Kūshnāmeh

Iranshah b. Abi Khayr’s Kushnameh, written 1108-11 CE and surviving in a single manuscript, is set in the same timeframe as the Pishdadian Shahnameh. This epic deals with the family of the evil snake-king Zahhak and their conflict with the house of Jamshid. It recounts the story of the quite unusual character of Kush-e pilgush (Kush, the elephant-eared), son of Zahhak’s brother and a woman from the pilgush tribe. Born with elephant ears and tusks, Kush grows up believing that he is bound by his monstrous appearance to do evil, until he finds God at the hands of a pir who surgically removes his elephant ears and tusks.

This paper examines Kush-e pilgush through the lens of monster studies. As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Dana Oswald, and others have shown, monsters are depositories of various human fears, especially with respect to sexuality. Through a close-reading of this text I explore the ways in which Kush-e pilgush navigates a middle ground between humanity and monstrosity. Passages on his elephantine body and deviant sexual behavior emphasize his monstrosity, while the fact that he capable of being ‘saved’ through bodily transformation into a ‘normal’ form speaks to his underlying humanity.

Apart from the physical dimension of Kush’s monstrosity, this paper explores Kush’s sexuality as an allegory of the unrestrained carnal soul (nafs). Drawing on ethical treatises such as Ibn Miskawayh’s Tahdhib al-akhlaq, I argue that the Kushnameh presents Kush’s sexuality in the terms of an unrestrained nafs. If we thus pursue an allegorical reading of the text, Kush becomes human at the end of the narrative because he subdues his base desires. The Kushnameh is therefore a valuable text through which to test assumptions already explored in European Medievalist scholarship regarding the essentialism of monstrous bodies; at the same time, it provides an opportunity for a reading of literary monstrosity through the lens of Islamicate ethical thought.

Aqsa Ijaz (McGill U) / Indo Persian Romance(s): Reflections on the Two 19th Century Versions of Qissah-i Gul-i Bakāwlī

This paper is interested in exploring the Indo-Persian romance tradition (dastān/qissah) and its afterlife during the colonial rule in India. By focusing on one of the most popular romances of its time, namely Qissah-i Gul-i Bakāwlī, I am interested in analyzing the two Urdu versions of the Qissah (Nihal Chand’s Mazhāb-i ʿIshq and Daya Shankar Nasim’s Gulzār-i Nasīm) through closely engaging with the Persian original, written by Izzatullah Bengali.

With the advent of Fort William College in 1800 in Calcutta several of these romances including Bakawli were translated from Persian to Urdu at the behest of orientalists like John Borthwick Gilchrist and were circulated even more into Indian popular culture. The Qissah-i Gul-i Bakāwlī, like the more well-known, Dastān-i Amīr Hamzah, was translated into Urdu in 1803 by Nihal Chand Lahori, a munshi at Fort William College, Calcutta. Romances were being translated into Urdu-Hindi at the College for various purposes, including the training of British officers who were to serve in India. The translation-historical study of romance tradition in general, and Gul-i Bakāwlī in particular, present exciting possibilities for the study of how the imperial project of colonization shaped translation as a discursive practice and impacted the vernacular literary imagination of 19th century British India. This translation process of pre-colonial literary genres such as the qissah in first half of the 19th century offers a significant gap to be studied in the context of Indo-Persian literature, which I try to address in my close reading of the two versions of Gul-i Bakāwlī.

Alexander Jabbari (University of Minnesota) / Origin Myths: Imagining the Beginnings of Islamicate Languages

This paper, drawn from the first chapter of my book project, explores how the literati in the 19th and early 20th centuries narrated the origins of Persian and Urdu languages and literary traditions. I challenge the nationalist narratives around these traditions which remain dominant today. Tracing the transformation of the term vatan from ‘birthplace’ to ‘homeland’ in the two languages, and making use of tazkirahs, literary histories, grammars, dictionaries, and poetry, I analyze fundamental differences in nationalist thought in Iran and India. Iranian nationalists articulated a vision of linear language history, emphasizing continuity with pre-Islamic precursors to modern Persian which the addition of an Arabic element did not fundamentally change. I argue, pace the nationalist narrative, that New Persian as we know it was defined and even constituted by its encounter with Arabic. On the other hand, Indian Muslims offered a contrary account of Urdu’s origins, emphasizing rupture with the pre-Islamic past and the constitutive role of Persian, Arabic, and Turkish in forming Urdu. Analyzing Urdu dictionaries, I demonstrate how this account is grounded in communal ideology rather than linguistic reality, and unpack the work that both the Iranian and Indian origin myths do, respectively. Finally, I turn my attention to the gendered dimension of these origin myths, in particular the way Iranian nationalists feminized Persian (to be defended against a masculine Arabic Other), through a close reading of two poems that circulated in 1940s Tehran.

David Kanbergs (NYU) / Was it Something I Said?: The Origins and Intentions of Abū l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī’s Risālat al-Ghufrān

Written in response to a long, rambling and less-than-coherent letter from ʿAlī ibn Manṣūr ibn al-Qāriḥ, Abū l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī’s Risālat al-Ghufrān (Epistle of Forgiveness) is both a scathing mockery of an unimportant adīb and a deft and unprecedented flight of literary imagination. This rich and enigmatic work continues to challenge scholars of Arabic literature. My paper addresses two topics that have remained largely unexplored in scholarly literature on the Risāla: First, although scholars have discussed several texts that may have inspired al-Maʿarrī to compose such a lengthy, imaginative and extraordinary response, to my knowledge no scholarship to date addresses the question of what in Ibn al-Qāriḥ’s letter itself may have sparked al-Maʿarrī to imagine his interlocutor’s adventures in the afterlife. I contend that there are several elements in Ibn al-Qāriḥ’s original letter that, when taken together, may have inspired al-Maʿarrī to depict Ibn al-Qāriḥ’s exploits in the afterlife: chiefly the theme of repentance and a perhaps inadvertent linguistic echo of the isrāʾ and miʿrāj. Second, I address the tendency in scholarship to view the two volumes of the Risāla as separate from each other. While it is true that on first glance the imaginative eschatological narrative that constitutes the first volume of al-Maʿarrī’s Risāla has little to do with Ibn al-Qāriḥ’s original epistle, or with the second volume’s more systematic discussion of Ibn al-Qāriḥ’s letter, I demonstrate that the two volumes are a clearly unified whole, one that is at all times in direct conversation with Ibn al-Qāriḥ’s letter and that deftly manipulates a great number of themes that first appear therein to craft a complex yet unequivocally negative response to what al-Maʿarrī plainly views as an offensive letter from an unpleasant person. Taken together, the two aims of this paper suggest that we need not look beyond Ibn al-Qāriḥ’s epistle to find the inspiration for and intentions of al-Maʿarrī’s singular Risāla.

Namrata B. Kanchan (U of Texas, Austin) / The Woman Behind the Veil of Paint: A Re-examination of the Sixteenth-Century Ta‘rīf-i Ḥusain Shāh from the Deccan Sultanate of Ahmadnagar

This paper examines Nizam Shahi Sultanate poet Aftabi’s (fl. 1560–1580 CE) maṡnavī T‘arīf-i Ḥusain Shāh (c. 1565) dedicated to Ahmednagar’s Sultan Husain Nizam Shah (r. 1553–1565). The manuscript’s poetry is divided into two main parts: the romantic bazmiyah section details the love and marriage of Husain Shah and his queen Humayun Shah (d. 1572?) while the martial razmiyah one describes Husain Shah’s victory over his great rival, Vijayanagar’s Aliya Rama Raya (r. 1542–1565) in the 1565 Battle of Talikota. I analyse this maṡnavī through the prism of tāzah gū’ī and argue that Aftabi innovates thematically by focusing on the topic of marriage. Using the New Historicist approach, a method which examines how literary texts respond to the conditions of the culture that creates it, I demonstrate how marriages held a special significance for Ahmednagar statecraft in this period and how it helps elucidate gender dynamics in Ahmednagar. In addition, I also suggest intertextual links between this maṡnavī and poetry from neighbouring Vijayanagar, a connection previous scholars who have examined this text have overlooked. This paper thus makes interventions in the field of literary studies, cultural history, and gender studies and highlights poetic production from the Deccan, a field woefully understudied in South Asian as well as Persianate studies.

Allison Kanner-Botan (U of Chicago) / Laylā/ī’s Critiques

Scholars such as Julie Meisami and Dick Davis classify Niẓāmī’s (d. 1209) mas̱navīs as medieval romances and thereby categorize them alongside the works of Béroul or Boccacio. While the broad category of romance is useful for comparative projects, it risks overlooking the role of the mas̱navī form as the dominant vehicle of narrative poetics in the medieval Persianate literary landscape. It is through its form, I argue, that Niẓāmī’s Laylī o Majnūn achieved a sense of a unified narrative that strove for fictionalized completion from the perspective of an omniscient narrator. In this paper, I demonstrate the significance of the mas̱navī form in Niẓāmī’s Laylī o Majnūn through the expanded presence of Laylī’s subjectivity from the previous Arabic akhbār tradition. Unlike the earlier Arabic semi-historical accounts on the narrative of Laylā and Majnūn, Niẓāmī’s mas̱navī tells the story from a linear, unified perspective whereby the narrator gains control over narrative time as well as omniscient access to character interiority, which provides the space from which a more complex version of Laylī’s subjectivity emerges.

In this paper, I look to the literary history of Niẓāmī’s Laylī o Majnūn as a tangible way of examining how mas̱navī as a vehicle transformed the way in which Laylī’s subjectivity is depicted. Through an analysis of the Kitāb al-Aghānī and an anonymous twelfth-century compilation attributed to al-Walībī, I show how Laylā’s voice is variantly reported or not depending on the individual narrators of disparate anecdotes. When reported, Laylā’s voice critiques Majnūn’s discourse on love by claiming to be more of an imprisoned lover due to external factors related to her gender. In Niẓāmī’s mas̱navī, Laylī’s critical voice is expanded as she is woven into the unified narrative at multiple points and her stance as an imprisoned lover critiques both societal norms regarding gender as well as the dominant discourse on love in the work espoused by Majnūn. This culminates in a scene of her mourning publicly the death of her husband, wherein, through the omniscient stance of the narrator, she is revealed to be duplicitous as she is “truly” mourning her separation from Majnūn. Drawing from feminist theorists such as Luce Irigaray and Judith Butler, I show how Laylī performs a psychologically complex subjectivity in Niẓāmī’s mas̱navī that critiques medieval Persianate discourses on love and also challenges certain contemporary feminist positions that insist upon the model of a rational, autonomous subject.

Ayelet Kotler (U of Chicago) / Intertextuality and Appropriation in Masīḥ’s Persian Rāmāyana

Vālmīki’s Rāmāyana, the Sanskrit epic that tells of the heroic deeds of Rāma and of his quest to find his wife, Sītā, who was kidnapped by Rāvaṇa, the Rākṣasa king of Lankā, is widely acknowledged in the Sanskrit literary tradition as the first poetic work (kāvya) ever composed in Sanskrit. The epic itself states this in its second chapter, as it tells of the tragic incident in response to which the poet Vālmīki uttered a metered verse, considered to be the first of its kind (Rāmāyana 1.2.14). Later poeticians and commentators in the Sanskrit tradition defined this verse as a kāvya-bīja, a poetic kernel, arguing that it has a meaning beyond itself, and that it symbolically suggests the theme and the dominant aesthetic emotion of the entire epic.

In this paper, I intend to examine a versified Persian retelling of the epic, Mathnawi-i Rām u Sītā, composed in 1617 by the Indian poet Masīḥ Pānīpatī. More specifically, I will look into the ways in which Masīḥ handles verse 1.2.14 in his Persian retelling, and further ask how he accounts for its status and significance in the Sanskrit commentarial tradition. Although the prefatory chapters of the Sanskrit epic are entirely absent from Masīḥ’s version, as he starts his narrative with Rām’s father and his desire for offspring, Masīḥ alludes to the aforementioned incident in his own prefatory chapters of the mathnawī, but circles around verse 1.2.14 without actually retelling the event. I will show that Masīḥ detaches the event from its concrete place in the narrative, and argue that by turning it into a metaphor, he harnesses its cultural and aesthetic value in such a way as to claim his authorial voice, assert the advantages of composing poetry in and about India, and reframe the story and its poetic value according to Persian poetic conventions.

Sam Lasman (U of Chicago) / Snakemen: The Anthropomorphic Dragons of Persian Epic

The dragon (Persian azhdahā) is among the most defiantly non-anthropomorphic of monsters. Unlike giants, ghouls, or shape-shifting wizards, it does not readily evoke the human in its form or behavior. An ultimate alterity, it exists primarily to be encountered and defeated by the chivalric male hero (such as Fereydun, Rostam, or Bahram Gur), whose victory reaffirms the values of truth and civilization. Most scholarly work on Persian dragons, indebted to broad comparative models of Indo-European mythology, continues to assert this fundamental dichotomy of the chaos serpent and the culture hero. Yet close readings of medieval Persian texts challenge the stark division between reptilian beasts and their conquerors. Similes and metaphors constantly align the murderous work of war with the depredations of snake-like monsters. The word azhdahā itself is closely related to the hybrid figure of Zahhāk, whose body and exploits exist along an uneasy border between the human and the draconic. Fereydun assumes the shape of a dragon to test his sons’ fitness to rule; Rostam, clad in a sea-monster’s skin, fights a dragon fully capable of thought and speech. In the Bahmannāma, a sexually rapacious dragon menaces a feudal princess, while the monstrous central figure of the epic is himself eventually devoured by a justice-serving dragon. In each of these cases, the supposedly clear delineations of human and monster are shattered by texts less interested in repeating ancient myths than in interrogating vital questions of power and nature.

At the same time, the azhdahā is an almost purely historical monster. Unlike other beasts, it can no longer be encountered in Irān-zamin. By relegating the dragon to the past—or, occasionally, a distant east suffused with anteriority—epic narratives reframe the relationship between ancient and contemporary experience. Denied access to the present, the dragon is left to operate on the margins of history. At the same time, through its deep imbrication with origin stories, heroic genealogies, and language itself, the azhdahā asserts a haunting presence that far outlasts its local extinctions. Drawing on the posthuman monster theory of critics such as Patricia MacCormack as well as Mark Fisher’s explorations of weirdness, eeriness, and horror, this paper seeks to reconsider the azhdahā as a crucial site of tension between human, nonhuman, past, and present.

Samantha Pellegrino (U of Chicago) / Gender, Magic, and Ontology in the Sirat Sayf bin Dhi Yazan

The Sirat Sayf Bin Dhi Yazan, an Arabic popular epic put to paper in 14th century Mamluk Cairo, presents an ontological spectrum of human and non-human characters, many of which occupy not simply the poles of this spectrum, but the spaces in between. Notably, human characters who engage in occult practices and possess magical/scientific (here termed occult) capabilities interact with their world in patterns more akin to their non-human counterparts. This is especially true of women in the sira: human women, women who practice the occult sciences, and non-human women demonstrate differing relationships to power and gender over the course of the epic.

As such, this paper explores two sets of human/non-human differentiations made in the Sirat Sayf. The first is between human women engaged in occult sciences and practices, such as the sorceress ‘Aqila, and non-human women, including the jinn ‘Aqisa and ghoul Ghula. The second differentiation is between human women who do not participate in occult practices, including a number of the titular King Sayf’s wives, and the human women who do. It is argued that the engagement of human women with the occult sciences creates a change in their ontological status, granting them an access to power more akin to that of their non-human counterparts and remarkably different from other human women. The result of the presence of this ontological spectrum is an implied spectrum of gendered relationships in the text and a fluidity of social roles: gender, as is the case with humanity, is presented not as a binary system, but as a complex and fluid social phenomenon.

Methodologically, this close reading makes use of intra-text comparisons between the female characters located on different points of a spectrum between human and non-human. This comparative enterprise highlights how the text constructs and reifies categories of gender, humanity, and power along what is termed ‘pivoting axises’ of ontologies. This style of reading demonstrates the interaction and mutual construction of the categories of gender and the occult within the epic, which can produce and support insight into the dynamic imagination of gender in the Mamluk era. Methodological attention is given not only to work on magic and the occult sciences in medieval literature, but also to feminist scholarship regarding identity formation and women in the popular epics, including that of Nadia El-Cheikh, Remke Kruk, and Amanda Steinberg.

Shaahin Pishbin (U of Chicago) / The Inimitable Amīr Khusraw? Khusraw’s “Poetic Poetry” (shiʿr-i shāʿirānah) and his Influence on Safavid-Mughal Persian Poetics

Universally recognized as a canonical and influential poet of the classical period of Persian poetry, Amīr Khusraw of Delhi (d.1325) occupies a uniquely interesting position within the history of Persian literature. Given the widespread aversion in much modern literary historiography to esteem Persian literature written by “Indians” and/or influenced by Indian culture, Khusraw’s inclusion in the classical canon is in and of itself noteworthy. Khusraw’s position in the Persianate imaginary—as the model par excellence of an Indo-Persian poet—became especially important for the vibrant community of litterateurs from and within the subcontinent during the Safavid-Mughal era. Building on the work of recent scholarship, this paper will identify not only how Khusraw’s literary output was widely embraced by poets of the early modern period, but also how his literary ethos and ideas about rhetoric (balāghat) were significantly influential among Safavid-Mughal literary critics, and thus constitute an important element in his canonization.

I will consider aspects of Khusraw’s poetic style and theorization of literature that can be detected—implicitly and explicitly—in the stylistic debates and preferences of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His little-read prose works, such as the monumental Iʿjāz-i Khusravī (‘Khusrawvian Inimitability,’ 1319) and the lengthy preface to the third of his five dīvāns, the Ghurrat al-Kamāl (‘The Perfect New Moon,’ 1294), demonstrate the remarkable breadth and depth of Khusraw’s literary thought and meditations on rhetoric, and even a cursory reading reveals his self-regard as an innovator as much as a master of the tradition. Many of the techniques he theorizes or even claims to have invented—such as īhām (‘amphibology’) and khayāl (‘imagination’)—came to be exceptionally valorized by literary theorists and poets of the early modern period. I will argue that this spirit of creative innovation together with his concept of ‘poetic poetry’ (shiʿr-i shāʿirānah), which stresses the specifically literary dimensions of literary production, served as an important inspiration for champions of the ṭarz-i khayāl, or ‘imaginative style,’ an erudite poetic mode popular in the seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. This paper will explore the extent to which the practice and theorization of the ṭarz-i khayāl by Safavid-Mughal litterateurs can therefore be considered part of the Khusrawvian legacy.

Jennifer Tobkin (George Washington U) / Muḥammad ibn Dāwūd al-Iṣfahānī and His Poetic Alter Ego the Man of Our Times

Muḥammad ibn Dāwūd al-Iṣfahānī (d. 296/909)’s Kitāb al-Zahra, a poetic anthology of which the first fifty chapters form a self-contained survey of motifs (sing. maʿnā) found in Arabic ghazal, has attracted attention from modern scholars mostly because of its status as a pioneering work of literary criticism. In pre-modern times, however, the book’s greatest claim to fame was that its contents included Ibn Dāwūd’s own poems, attributed to the pseudonymous baʿḍ ahl hādhā al-ʿaṣr (a Man of Our Times), and they allegedly describe a real-life relationship of unrequited love for a man. The biographical dictionaries, as well as entertaining adab anthologies that use them as sources, take it as fact that Ibn Dāwūd died as a result of this love, making him one of the most famous “martyrs of love” believed to have died from love for another man.

When the Man of Our Times poems are read together, outside the context of Kitāb al-Zahra, the Man of Our Times appears as a literary persona with his own character arc and his own predilections and personality traits. The biographers seem to have conflated Ibn Dāwūd the man with the Man of Our Times the fictional character. He is the hero of a ʿudhrī love story and, perhaps more importantly, an exemplar of true friendship. Ibn Dāwūd states in the introduction to Kitāb al-Zahra that he intends the book to be a reliable companion that will instruct its reader in the ways of brotherhood (ikhā’). All of the Man of Our Times poems seem to address the same person, always in grammatically masculine terms; one poem gives the addressee’s name as Muḥammad, but he is more often addressed as “brother.” The way the Man of Our Times feels and behaves toward the Brother matches the attitudes and behavior of which Ibn Dāwūd approves in his comments on other poems in Kitāb al-Zahra.

In the Man of Our Times poems, Ibn Dāwūd employs a variety of tropes and motifs from Arabic ghazal. For example, in a poem that mentions Ghaylān ibn ʿUqba by name, all of nature empathizes with the Man of Our Times’ sadness. In one that paraphrases a line by al-Khansā’, he keeps watch over the stars. Perhaps reflecting the real Ibn Dāwūd’s background as a judge, the Man of Our Times sometimes mentions wine, but always with negative associations.

Arlen Wiesenthal (U of Chicago) / Wayward Itinerancies of an Emperor in Disguise: Writing Ruler and Metropolis in Ottoman Accounts of Sultan Murad IV’s (r. 1623-40) Sojourns through Istanbul

In 1633 Sultan Murad IV (r. 1623–40) and his government initiated a series of prohibitions against the consumption of coffee, tobacco, wine, and boza that were personally enforced by the sultan on incognito tours of Istanbul. At the height of his curfews, lantern laws, and sumptuary regulations, fear of his wrath and his sword incited the Istanbullular to watch their step as they traversed their urban environment. Like a vengeful creature of the night, tales of his brutal dealings with those unlucky enough to chance upon him become a part of the city’s urban lore. Or at least, thus say the seventeenth-century Ottoman commentators on the subject. Much like the activities of the djinn or the stirrings of the plague, rumors of Murad IV’s tours gave pause to those seeking to disobey the normative mores and strictures of the city, yet strengthened the reserve of those for whom the sultan’s violent justice was a cleansing act.

Hence, in order to examine the discursive connection between rulership and urbanity in seventeenth-century Ottoman letters, this paper addresses the ways in which elite, literate Ottomans conceived of “ruler” and “metropolis” through their descriptions of Murad IV’s engagements with Istanbul and its populace during the sultan’s period of mature and active rule (c. 1632–40). Drawing on the pertinent sections from the polymath Katib Çelebi’s (1609-57) Feẕleke (“Compendium [of Histories]”), the writer and traveler Evliya Çelebi’s (c. 1611-83) Seyāḥatnāme (“Book of Travels”), and the imperial court chronicler Mustafa Naima Efendi’s (1665-1715) Ravżat ül-Ḥüseyn fī Ḫulāsat-i aḫbār el-Ḫāfıkeyn (“The Garden of Hüseyin in the Summary of the Chronicles of East and West”), I argue that the available accounts of Murad IV’s prohibitions speak to the subject-sultan relationship in the Ottoman Empire as it was perceived to unfold in urban space. By recounting these events as a part of the history of the House of Osman as they ruled and administered their empire from one of its foremost urban seats, these authors spoke to the nature of the ruler’s personal interactions with the people of the city, at times defining justice and good rulership in terms of urban mobility and pedestrian encounter. Hence, in contrast with previous scholarship, I suggest that we conceive of these “mad Murad tales,” so-to-speak, as part of a larger body of sultanic lore, itself a product of courtly mobility in the empire’s throne cities.