Persian Prose Volume V: A History of Persian Literature, Vol V 9780755617821, 9781845119065

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CONTRIBUTORS Mehran Afshari studied at Tehran University, and his M.A. thesis, a critical edition of Âdâb al-tariq (related to the Sufi Qalandariyya order), was published in Tehran in 2015. He is a contributor and an academic member of the board of the Islamic Encyclopaedia Foundation, Tehran, and a visiting professor at several institutions in Tehran. His publications include over a hundred research articles and books on fotovvat (chivalry) and Persian folk literature, including: Haft lashkar: tumâr-e jâme’-e naqqâlân (Seven armies: a comprehensive story tellers’ scroll), co-edited with Mehdi Madâyeni (Tehran, 1998); Chahârdah resâle dar bâb-e fotovvat va asnâf (Fourteen treatises about chivalry and guilds), co-edited with Mehdi Madâyeni (Tehran, 2002); an edition of Fotovvatnâme-hâ va rasâ’el-e Khâksâriyye: si resâle (Khâksâri chivalry manuals and tracts: 30 treatises) (Tehran, 2003); Qesse-ye HoseynKord-e Shabestari bar asâs-e ravâyat-e nâshenâkhte-ye mowsum be Hoseyn-nâme (The story of Hoseyn-Kord-e Shabestari on the basis of the anonymous redaction entitled ‘Hoseyn-nâme’), coedited with Iraj Afshar (Tehran, 2006). Sonja Brentjes is a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), Berlin. She received her Ph.D. in 1977 from the Technical University, Dresden; her M.A. in Near Eastern Studies in 1982 from the Martin Luther University, Halle/ Saale; her Dr. sc. from the Karl Marx University, Leipzig; and her Habilitation in 1992 from the University of Leipzig. She has taught and has conducted research at universities and institutes in the German Democratic Republic, the Federal Republic of Germany, France, the United States, the United Kingdom, Pakistan, and Spain. Since 2012, she has been conducting research at the MPIWG. Her initial topic was the history of modern mathematics, but since xiii

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the 1990s she has focused primarily on Islamicate societies in the period between the 8th and the 17th centuries on a broad range of subjects in the history of science and cross-cultural encounters. Her publications include “Mathematical Commentaries in Arabic and Persian—Purposes, Forms, and Styles,” Historia Mathematica 47 (2019); Teaching and Learning the Sciences in Islamicate Societies, 800-1700 (Turnhout, 2018); “Visualization and Material Cultures of the Heavens in Eurasia and North Africa” in S. Schmidtke, ed., Near and Middle Eastern Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, 1935-2018 (Piscataway, N.J. 2018); “Safavid Art, Science, and Courtly Education in the Seventeenth Century” in Nathan Sidoli and Glen Van Brummelen, eds., From Alexandria, Through Baghdad: Surveys and Studies in the Ancient Greek and Medieval Islamic Mathematical Sciences in Honor of J. L. Berggren (Heidelberg 2014); Elio Brancaforte and Sonja Brentjes, eds., “From Rhubarb to Rubies: European Travels to Safavid Iran (15501700)” and “The Lands of the Sophi: Iran in Early Modern European Maps (1550-1700),” Harvard Library Bulletin 23/1-2 (2012); and “The Mathematical Sciences in the Safavid Empire: Questions and Perspectives” in Denis Hermann and Fabrizio Speziale, eds., Muslim Cultures in the Indo-Iranian World during the Early-Modern and Modern Periods (Berlin, 2010). Bert G. Fragner studied Oriental and Islamic Studies at the universities of Vienna and Tehran and received his Ph.D. in 1970 (Vienna). From 1970 to 1985, he was assistant professor at the University of Freiburg. He passed his Habilitation in 1977 (a study of Persian memoir-writing in the 19th century). He was Professor of Iranian Studies at the Free University of Berlin (1985-89) and at the University of Bamberg (1989-2003), where he established a new department for Iranian studies. From 2003 to 2009, he was founding director of the Institute of Iranian Studies at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, retiring in 2010. His research encompasses the cultural, economic, and social history of Iran, Afghanistan, and Central Asia from the late Middle Ages to the 20th century, and various aspects of cultural studies concerning these areas. His numerous articles and texts include Die ‘Persophonie’: Regionalität, Identität und Sprachkontakt xiv

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in der Geschichte Asiens (Berlin and Halle, 1999; a Persian translation, Fârsi-zabâni, was published in Tehran, and a Russian translation in 2018); Persische Memoirenliteratur als Quelle zur neueren Geschichte Irans (Wiesbaden 1979; tr. into Persian as Khâterât-nevisi-ye Irâniyân, Tehran, 1998); Geschichte der Stadt Hamadan und ihrer Umgebung in den ersten sechs Jahrhunderten der Hiğra (Vienna, 1972), and Repertorium persischer Herrscherurkunden (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1980); and the chapter on “Social and Economic Conditions” in CHIr, vol. VI. Ali Gheissari is Professor of History at the University of San Diego. He studied Law and Political Science at Tehran University and History at St. Antony’s College, Oxford. He has written extensively in Persian and English on the intellectual history of modern Iran and on modern philosophy and social theory. He has edited the following books: Fruits of Gardens (Fawāka al-Basātin), a philosophical miscellany in Arabic and Persian in late Qajar Iran, c. 1914, by Hâjj Mirzâ Mohammad Tehrâni (ed. and intr., Qom, 2019); Journal of Despotism (Majalla-ye Estebdâd), a complete set of a satirical periodical during Iran’s Constitutional period, 1907–8 (ed. and intr., Tehran, 2019); Illuminationist Texts and Textual Studies: Essays in Memory of Hossein Ziai (eds., Leiden, 2017); Contemporary Iran: Economy, Society, Politics (ed., Oxford and New York, 2009); Tabriz and Rasht in the Iranian Constitutional Revolution, by Hâjj Mohammad-Taqi Jurâbchi (ed. and intr., Tehran, 2008). He has authored the following books: Democracy in Iran: History and the Quest for Liberty (coauthor, Oxford and New York, 2006, 2009); Iranian Intellectuals in the Twentieth Century (Austin, 1998, 2008); Persian translation of Immanuel Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Ethics (co-tr., Tehran, 1991, new edition, 2015); Manfred Frings et al., Max Scheler and Phenomenology (tr., Tehran, 2015); The Concept of Time in Kant and Other Essays (Tehran, 2018). He is a consulting editor and contributor to the Encyclopaedia Iranica; and is on the Editorial Board of Iran Studies book series (published by Brill, Leiden). He is also the Editor-in-Chief of Iranian Studies; and serves on the Board of Directors of the Persian Heritage Foundation. His current research is on aspects of legal and constitutional history of modern Iran. xv

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Paul Losensky (Ph.D. University of Chicago, 1993) is Professor in the Department of Central Eurasian Studies and the Department of Comparative Literature at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he teaches Persian language and literature, comparative studies of Western and Middle Eastern literatures, and translation studies. His research focuses on Persian literary historiography, biographical writing, and Persian poetry of the 16th and 17th centuries. His publications include Welcoming Fighāni: Imitation and Poetic Individuality in the Safavid-Mughal Ghazal (Costa Mesa, Calif., 1998), Farid ad-Din ‘Attār’s Memorial of God’s Friends: Lives and Sayings of Sufis (New York, 2009), and In the Bazaar of Love: Selected Poetry of Amir Khusrau (New York and New Delhi, 2013; tr. with Sunil Sharma). He has authored numerous articles on Persian literature for journals such as Iranian Studies and is a frequent contributor to the Encyclopaedia of Islam and the Encyclopaedia Iranica. He is a former fellow at the National Humanities Center and currently serves as chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at Indiana University. Louise Marlow, Professor of Religion at Wellesley College, received her undergraduate degree from Cambridge University and her Ph.D. from Princeton University. She is the author of Counsel for Kings: Wisdom and Politics in Tenth-Century Iran (Edinburgh, 2016) and Hierarchy and Egalitarianism in Islamic Thought (Cambridge, 1997). She is also the editor of The Rhetoric of Biography: Narrating Lives in Persianate Societies (Boston and Washington, D.C., 2011), Dreaming across Boundaries: The Interpretation of Dreams in Islamic Lands (Boston and Washington, D.C., 2008), and, with Beatrice Gruendler, Writers and Rulers: Perspectives on Their Relationships from Abbasid to Safavid Times (Wiesbaden, 2004). Colin Mitchell is a specialist of medieval and early-modern Iran and Persianate culture, with interests in court politics, religion, diplomatics, and literature. He graduated from the University of Toronto in 2002 and held a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Cornell University (2002-3) before permanently joining the xvi

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Department of History at Dalhousie University in 2003. Since then, he has published a number of books and articles on various aspects of pre-modern Iranian history. Currently, he is working on a history of princes and succession politics in the medieval Islamic world, ranging from Anatolia to South Asia. Iraj Parsinejad studied at the University of Tehran, completing his B.A. in Persian Literature and M.A. in Linguistics. He has studied as a post-graduate student at Wolfson College, Oxford (197478). He was appointed as a visiting professor at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies in 1985 and subsequently as a full-time faculty member, serving for 17 years. His main field of research is literary criticism in Iran. His book A History of Literary Criticism in Iran, 1866-1951 (Bethesda, Md., 2003) is a comprehensive study of the works of modern intellectuals in Iran. He is also the author of a series of monographs on leading figures in the field of contemporary literary criticism in Iran from Akhundzadeh to Shafi’i Kadkani. Francis Richard was keeper in charge of Persian manuscripts in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Paris) from 1974 to 2003, director of the Islamic Art Department at the Louvre Museum (2003-2006), scientific director of the Bibliothèque universitaire des langues et civilisations (BULAC) library (Paris) and director of the French Institute in Central Asia (IFEAC) from 2010 to 2012, now retired. He has published catalogues of the Persian manuscripts in the Bibliothèque nationale (Paris, 1989 and Rome, 2013), exhibition catalogues (Splendeurs persanes, Paris, 1997), as well as several monographs (including Raphael du Mans, Paris, 1995; Le livre persan, Paris, 2003) and articles. His research is focused on Persian manuscripts and codicology, Persian miniature painting, relations between Europe and the Middle East, and the history of collections. Bo Utas is Professor Emeritus of Iranian Studies at Uppsala University, Sweden. He received his PhD in Iranian languages from Upp­ sala University in 1973 and was appointed as a professor there in 1988. His research covers many aspects of Middle and New Iranian xvii

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languages, especially varieties of Persian, and literary, religious, and historical topics connected with the use of those languages. He specializes in Persian manuscripts, Sufi texts, and Persian metrics. Publications range from his dissertation Tarîq ut-Tahqîq: A Critical Edition, with a History of the Text and Commentary (Lund, 1973) to the book The Virgin and Her Lover: Fragments of an Ancient Greek Novel and a Persian Epic Poem (Leiden, 2003). Recently his collected papers on Persian literature were reprinted in a volume entitled Manuscript, Text and Literature: Collected Essays on Middle and New Persian Texts (Beiträge zur Iranistik 29, Wiesbaden, 2008), and his linguistic papers in From Old to New Persian (Beiträge zur Iranistik 38, Wiesbaden, 2013). His most recent publication is an edition of the mathnavi Mesbâh al-arvâh (as The Lantern of Spirits, Beiträge zur Iranistik 44, Wiesbaden, 2019). Ziva Vesel graduated in Persian (second language Arabic) in 1974 from the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (INaLCO), Paris. She received her MA (in Persian literature) in 1976 and her doctorate (on Persian encyclopedism) in 1983 at the Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris III. As a member of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Paris, from 1983 to 2013, she specialized in the history of science and scientific literature in Persian in relation to its Arabic models (10th-19th centuries), working in particular on manuscripts. She made regular missions of research to Iran, including a two years residence (198688) at the Institut Français de Recherche en Iran (IFRI), Tehran. She organized three congresses (with published proceedings). She also directed and edited a collaborative study of scientific illustrations in manuscripts (Ziva Vesel, Sergei Tourkin, and Yves Porter, eds., with the collaboration of Francis Richard and Farid Ghasemloo, Images of Islamic Science: Illustrated Manuscripts from the Iranian World, Tehran, 2009). Her publications include studies on a range of topics: Les encyclopédies persanes: Essai de typologie et de classification des sciences (Paris, 1986), tr. into Persian; “Les encyclopédies persanes: culture scientifique en langue vernaculaire” in C. de Callataÿ and B. van den Abeele, eds., Une lumière venue d’ailleurs: Héritages et ouvertures dans les encyclopédies d’Orient et d’Occident au xviii

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Moyen Age (Turnhout 2009); “Les figures astrologiques dans les textes persans” in Iván Szanto, ed., From Asl to Zâ’id: Essays in Honour of Eva M. Jeremiás (Piliscsaba, 2015); “Le Sirr al-maktûm de Fakhr al-dîn Râzî (606 H/1210) face à la Ghâyat al-Hakîm” in Jean-Patrice Boudet, Anna Caiozzo, and Nicolas Weill-Parot, eds., Images et magie: “Picatrix” entre Orient et Occident, Paris, 2011); “Textes et lieux: L’apport des dynasties mineures de l’Iran oriental à l’histoire des sciences” in Francis Richard and Maria Szuppe, eds., Écrit et culture en Asie centrale et dans le monde turco-iranien, XeXIXe siècles/Writing and Culture in Central Asia and the TurkoIranian World, 10th-19th Centuries (Paris, 2009).

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INTRODUCTION Bo Utas This volume of A History of Persian Literature treats works written in prose. A number of other volumes in this series of publications are also concerned with Persian prose. Thus Volume X (published in 2012) treats Persian Historiography and the forthcoming Volume IV on Religious and Mystical Literature will also have much to say on works in prose. Other published volumes in this series also partially address works written in prose, namely Volume IX: Persian Prose from Outside Iran, and Volume XI: Literature of the early Twentieth Century. There are also projected volumes in the series such as Volume XIII: Modern Fiction and Drama, which will doubtless have far more to say on the development of modern Persian prose. Inevitably therefore, there will be some overlap with the presentations found in the ten chapters of this book in other volumes in the series. Here, we aim to survey and underline the literary characteristics of Persian works in prose written through one thousand years. In the Persian context, the concepts “literature” and “literary” are far from clear, hardly from a modern Iranian point-of-view and definitely not from a Classical Persian point-of-view. The modern European concept of “literature” has clearly been copied into the modern Persian term adabiyyât, a collective plural of the adjective adabi, in its turn a derivation of the Classical Arabic (and Persian) adab “politeness, urbanity, good-breeding, refined education, etiquette, etc.” Adab was thus used in Classical Persian for phenomena that may be covered by our modern term “literature,” but it also included numerous things that we would not think of as “literature.” In the earliest Classical Persian usage, it was interchangeable xxi

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with farhang (on which the Arabic concept adab seems to have been coined). In early New Persian (i. e., the Persian language after the rise of Islam) usage, farhang was still strongly colored by the pre-Islamic (Sasanian) concept of frahang, a word used for “good education” in general, including the “liberal arts” as well as practical skills, such as riding, polo, chess, and backgammon. In later (New) Persian usage, the meaning of farhang was gradually confined to “dictionary” and generalized to “culture.” The changes that this word has undergone through the centuries are indicative of a general difficulty in a diachronic study like this. All terms that belong to the nebulous sphere of “literature” have continually—and considerably—changed their frames of reference during the more than eleven centuries of Persian usage. Thus, another central word found in early Classical Persian texts for something that would aptly suit our idea of “literature” is sokhan, not in its strict sense of “word,” but in this context the “word” par excellence, i. e., the pregnant, elevated, elaborated “word” (sokhan-e ârâste). This could be one key to the formulation of an historically neutral definition of “literature,” namely texts written in an embellished language. An additional component would be narrativity, with the one not being a prerequisite for the other.1 The presentations found in this volume will try to address this kind of “literariness” in various ways. With the advent of Islam, the political and cultural situation in Iran changed gradually and, in the end, dramatically, but at the same time age-old Iranian cultural forms and structures lived on in new guises. This is first of all seen in the linguistic development. Already in the 8 th century ce, we find the beginnings of a new Muslim Iranian high language, first known as Dari (i. e. “court language”) and later as Persian, also called New Persian to distinguish it from Old and Middle Persian. This new language was based on Sasanian Middle Persian but was written using the Arabic alphabet. It adopted a growing number of Arabic loan-words, so many, in 1

See Bo Utas, “ ‘Genres’ in Persian Literature, 900–1900,” in Gunilla Lindberg-­Wada, ed., Literary History: Towards a Global Perspective, Vol. II: Literary Genres: An Intercultural Approach (Berlin, 2006), pp. 199–206.

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fact, that by the 13 th century almost 50 % of the vocabulary was of Arabic origin, corresponding to some 20 % of the actual word occurrences in ordinary texts. Among educated people, a bi-lingual use of Arabic and Persian became common, often supplemented by bi- and multi-lingualism in practical and oral contexts. Already before the advent of Islam, the Iranian area was ethnically mixed, but from the 9 th century onwards a new element entered the scene, namely nomadic and semi-nomadic Turkic groups that became militarily and politically dominant from the 11 th century onwards. With them an Arabic-Persian-Turkic tri-lingual system was established with Arabic for religious and legal concerns, Persian for administrative and literary matters, and Turkish for military nomenclature. At the same time Persian gained importance far beyond the borders of Iran, becoming a favored literary medium in India, Central Asia, and Anatolia. Since time immemorial, the literary heritage of Iran had mainly been transmitted orally. This goes not only for songs, poetry, epics, and narratives, but also for religious texts. Only chronicles and administrative-economic texts were regularly put to writing. But under the new political circumstances, previously oral genres started to be written down in the new language. This process was accelerated by a veritable revolution in Iranian written culture: the introduction of the art of paper-making. After the battle of Talas in 751, the victorious Muslim army brought a number of Chinese prisoners of war to Samarqand. These prisoners introduced the technique of paper-making to the Muslim world. From Samarqand, which remained a center for paper-making for centuries, the art spread westwards, and a paper manufacturing workshop was already established in Baghdad by 795. Up to then, the lack of readily available writing materials had greatly hampered the codification of texts. The use of paper opened the doors to a remarkable development that led to the shaping of a veritable Muslim script world. Within a few centuries a widespread “manuscript culture” was established: Written texts were made available at an unprecedented scale, and manuscripts were often produced as genuine pieces of art with much emphasis on calligraphy, illustrations (“miniatures”), and xxiii

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exquisite bindings.2 From the 10 th century onwards there must have been a rapid increase in the production of Persian manuscripts. However, this remains conjectural, since very little of early Persian writing has been preserved. Persian manuscripts from the time before the Mongol invasion in the middle of the 13 th century are quite rare. The oldest sizeable manuscript of a Persian text that we have to-day is a pharmacopœa copied in 1056. This culture of hand-written manuscripts continued through centuries and survived until the advent of book-printing, which was quite late in reaching Iran. Although the reform-minded Qajar crown prince Abbâs Mirzâ established a printing press in Tabriz in 1812, there were still problems and obstacles. The cursive way of writing the Arabic-Persian script was found less suitable for typographic print, and therefore lithographic techniques remained the preferred option as late as the first decade of the 20 th century. Moreover, lithographs of Persian works were to a great extent produced in colonial India and brought from there to Iran. On the whole, lithographed books, printed from texts written by hand on stone, differed very little from traditional manuscripts. The most important difference was that they could be produced in many copies and sold at much lower costs, thus reaching a broader circle of readers. * * * After the Arab conquest and the dominance of a new religion and the establishment of a new political order, centered from 751 on the caliphate in Baghdad, cultural institutions changed radically in Iranian lands. The Zoroastrian system of religious education was gradually replaced by Islamic schools (madrasas), although the 9 th–10 th centuries still saw a flourishing production of Zoroastrian books in the Middle Persian language (Pahlavi). Apart from education in the religious schools, the upper classes continued a system of private teaching in their homes, which also could include their 2

See Johannes Pedersen, Den arabiske Bog (Copenhagen, 1946), tr.. Geoffrey French as The Arabic Book (Princeton, 1984); Jonathan Bloom, Paper before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World (New Haven, 2001).

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daughters. This must have meant a considerable female participation in literary culture, but owing to the secluded role of women in the public domain there are few traces of this. The system of private education played an important role in the revival of Iranian-based culture that started in the local courts of Eastern Iran under new leaders who carved out a relative semi-independence from the caliphate in the 9 th and 10 th centuries. This is the milieu in which the New Persian literature was born. The most important of the early East-Iranian dynasties, the Samanids (864– 1000), had Persian replace Arabic as administrative language and was instrumental in having books written in it. At their courts in Samarqand and Bukhara, poets, officials, historians, theologians, and scientists were encouraged to perform, compose, and write in Persian. Thus, the Samanid grand vizier Bal’ami summarized the famous Arabic World History (Ta’rikh ar-rosol va’l-moluk, “Annals of the Prophets and the Kings”) of Tabari in Persian, with some additions here and there, and a special commission made a somewhat free Persian adaptation of Tabari’s commentary (Tafsir) on the Qur’an. The patronage of learning and literature was continued and extended at the courts of the following Ghaznavid (999–1157) and Saljuq (1038–1105) dynasties. In this way, the Persian language was consciously developed both as an administrative and a literary medium in a wide array of genres: epics, lyrics, historiography, epistolography, wisdom literature, and prose tracts on a wide array of subjects. At the turn of the first millennium ce, most of the genres, both in prose and verse, that make up Persian Classical literature had crystallized. Through the strong Arabic presence in and around the Persian language, those textual categories were to a great extent identical in the two languages. As a rule, the genres first developed in Arabic through the combined efforts of Arabs, Iranians of various linguistic background, and other nations and ethnic groups who took part in building the great Islamic cultural synthesis—not least through intense translation activities. Here “Islamic” is somewhat misleading, since Jews, Christians (especially Syrians/Aramaeans), Zoroastrians, and Buddhists also made considerable contributions. Then, during the 10 th century, these Arabic genres were Persianized one by one. xxv

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As regards prose writing, the scribes or secretaries of the chanceries of governors and rulers played a crucial role. One of the founders of Arabic secretarial style was the Persian Zoroastrian convert to Islam known in Arabic as Abd-Allâh Ebn-al-Moqaffa’ (his Persian name was Rōzbeh son of Dādōē), who was executed in Baghdad in 756 at the age of 36. He was not only a master of fine Arabic style and epistolography (so called enshâ’) but also as a translator of numerous works from Middle Persian (Pahlavi) into Arabic. Through his versions of earlier, indigenous as well as foreign historical and literary works (like Khwadây-nâmag and Kalile va Demne, cf. below) and his own ethical and didactic tracts (like the mirror for princes al-Adab al-kabîr), he introduced an enlarged conception of the traditional Arabic adab as “fine culture, etiquette, belles-lettres,” so that it also encompassed the cultural heritage of Greece/Byzantium, Iran, and India. From his time adab became the very essence of high Abbasid culture. When, some two centuries later, a new class of Persian secretaries appeared, they adopted this secretarial culture of epistolography and adab in their Iranian contexts, making it a cornerstone of the rising Persian literature. The adab tradition introduced a strong emphasis on fine style, a care for precise choice of words, expressions, and metaphors. In this, prose writing was also greatly influenced by poetry. Verses, in Arabic as well as in Persian, were frequently quoted, and some genres had a predilection for a kind of rhythmic or so-called “rhyming prose” (saj’) that moved prose composition closer to poetry. Elaborate language and rhetorical embellishment were seen as mighty instruments for changing the order of this world and reaching out for the next—celestial—world. * * * The development of epistolography, or enshâ’, is thus a central category of written Persian texts. Its background in early Arabic theory and practice and the ensuing Persian development is elaborated by Colin Mitchell in Chapter 1, which he starts by pointing out that “Epistolography occupied a profound epistemological space during a time of significant change in the medieval Persianate xxvi

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world.” His exposé shows the importance of Arabic models for the development enshâ’ (as well as of most written forms of Persian prose) including the application of rhetorical devices (balâghat). He demonstrates that elaborate language was a prerequisite of epistolography, thus presenting an argument for regarding enshâ’ as “literature.”3 This chapter also demonstrates the quickly growing influence of various forms of Sufism on all kinds of literary activity. In his survey, Mitchell limits his presentation to the so-called medieval period, i. e., 1000–1500, though clearly secretarial activities of the kind described flourished for many centuries after. A strong didactical element can be detected in Iranian literatures since pre-Islamic times. Good counsel, practical advice, and ethical instruction found expression already in Middle Persian texts that influenced early Islamic literature, not least in Arabic. This genre, or rather cluster of genres, is characterized both by a stress on the efficiency of elaborate language and the use of illustrative stories. In her chapter on “Advice Literature,” Louise Marlow takes up “four types of literary expression in which the advisory objective has featured most conspicuously.” These types are described as moralizing sentences (sententiae), collections of narratives and stories, mirrors for princes, and treatises on ethics. In her introduction, she describes how this “ethical sensibility and a concern with moral instruction feature prominently in large portions of the Pahlavi (Middle Persian) and New Persian literary corpora,” and how the Middle Persian heritage initially influenced authors writing in Arabic who were instrumental in shaping genres that were then adopted by Persian. In the four following sections, she demonstrates how a rich production of didactical and ethical works mix philosophy with biography, anecdotes, and illustrative examples. A new element was brought into the rich heritage of advice literature with the rapid growth of Sufism from the 11 th century onwards. Marlow emphasizes “the emergence and spread of the khânaqâh, as well as the development of a theory and language of Sufism, both in Arabic … and Persian …” 3

Cf. Jürgen Paul, “Enšāʾ”. EIr VIII, pp. 455–57.

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Chapter 3 treats what may be called “expository and analytical discourse,” i. e., a variety of texts generally referred to with designations such as resâle, maqâle and, in a narrower sense, ketâb. In his presentation, Ali Gheissari notes that the scope of this type of text is vast, “both in terms of the variety of its subject matter and also in terms of the range of genres that it has used throughout different periods of its long history.” Again, the dependence on Arabic models, the use of rhetorical devices, elaborate language, and illustrative anecdotes and stories are brought out. A full section is devoted to “Mystical and Meditative Prose,” treating the writings of Sufi masters like Hojviri, Ansâri, and Ahmad Ghazâli. This chapter finally treats “modern variations of prose, such as political tracts, with new characteristics and complexities of their own.” Scientific works are obviously the most diverse category of texts treated in this volume and may in fact be regarded as lying outside the domain of literature, but Ziva Vesel, in collaboration with Sonja Brentjes, demonstrates through their references and examples the importance of a “literary” conception in their production. According to the medieval classifications learned literature is divided into “traditional sciences” (olum-e naqli) and “intellectual/rational sciences” (olum-e aqli). The traditional sciences, which are mainly represented by linguistic, literary, religious, and historical studies, are described in other chapters of this volume. The rational sciences, which were inherited from Sasanian, Greek, Indian, and Syriac traditions of the pre-Islamic period, transmitted, among other things, Aristotelian philosophy. Chapter 4 takes examples from a broad array of what is called “expository discourse in science”: namely encyclopedias, cosmographies, mathematical sciences (arithmetic, algebra, astronomy, astrology), natural philosophy/physical sciences (meteorology, mineralogy, botany, zoology, geography), medicine (medical encyclopedias, anatomy, pharmacology), and agriculture. In these fields, the Iranian world produced texts in Arabic as well as in Persian, the latter from the very beginning of the New Persian written language in the 10 th century. They provide ample examples of what can be called the Arabic-Persian “commensality,” first mainly Arabic works translated into Persian but from the 13 th century onwards also the other way around. A care for a “literary” xxviii

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style characterizes much of this output, and in some instances the full literary arsenal is employed, especially in the introductions to various texts, where we can find short poems, Qur’anic verses, and anecdotes. A writer like Mostowfi (14 th century) even introduced his own Arabic and Persian poems. A short chapter (5), written by Francis Richard, is devoted to works on calligraphy. This serves as an introduction to the magnificent Persian manuscript culture that developed after the art of paper-making was introduced as well as to its importance for the production, spread and reception of Persian literature. As Richard puts it, “to write is an art but also a science,” and some treatises establish the rules of this science while some also have literary or esoteric aims of their own, at times also showing an influence of Sufism. In the beginning, Arabic tracts on calligraphy, not least Qur’anic, served as models, and later on Persian works produced in India gained special importance. Written in prose as well as in verse, works on calligraphy may also treat other aspects of the arts of the book such as ink, paper-making, gilding, and book-binding.4 The style of these works can be quite literary, including biographical anecdotes and poetic quotations in Arabic as well as Persian. The “literariness” of Persian historiography has been much discussed, and views on this subject have been quite varied.5 With regard to the uncertainty about how to define “literature” in an historical Iranian context, this is quite natural. Bert Fragner’s Chapter 6 on historiography starts with a discussion of the various arguments for and against a literary reading of Persian historical texts. Twentieth-century Iranian critics and commentators, with Malekal-Sho’arâ Bahâr as the leading example, maintained that chronicles should be seen as literary works by specialists in literature and as historical sources by historians. European scholars like Bertold 4

5

See Najib Mâyel-Haravi, Ketâb-ârâyi dar tamaddon-e Eslâmi: majmu’e-ye rasâ’el dar zamine-ye khōshnevisi, morakkab-sâzi, kâghaz-geri, tadhhib va tajlid; be-enżemâm-e farhang-e vâzhegân-e neẓâm-e ketâb-ârâyi (Mashhad, 1993). See, among others, Julie Scott Meisami, “History as Literature” in Charles Melville (ed.), Persian Historiography (= HPL X; London and New York, 2012), pp. 1–55; and “History as Literature,” IrSt 33/1–2 (2000), pp. 15–30.

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Spuler, Jean Sauvaget, and Bernard Lewis have rather seen Persian historiography as dependent on Arabic chronicle writing, with Tabari’s fundamental Arabic World History (already mentioned) as the foremost model. However, already the Persian version of this work compiled by Bal’ami betrays an Iranian approach to the writing of history, telling stories rather than producing strictly verified annals. The early, anonymous Mojmal al-tavârikh va’l-qesas (Compilation of Histories and Stories), indicates this in its very title with the introduction of the plural of qesse, i. e. “story” or “tale.” This follows an age-old Iranian predilection for the use of stories for entertainment as well as didactic purposes. This should not be mistaken for a preference for what we nowadays call “fiction” before “facts.” History was certainly concerned with telling what had truly happened. Another important model for Persian historiography is Ferdowsi’s Shâh-nâme. Particularly from the Mongol period onwards, this so-called “national epic” had an immense influence on the very conception of Iranian history and the manner of narrating it in both verse and prose. The preoccupation with style, that is to write in a fecund language, using all possibilities of balâghat (rhetoric), was also present from the very beginning, however with a tendency of using ornate language growing through the centuries, something that has been called the “literarization” of Persian historiography. Biographical writing appears in many shapes in Persian literature but more specifically in the genres known as tadhkere and manâqeb. As described by Paul Losensky in chapter 7, the manâqeb are mainly concerned with the life of a single individual, a descendant of the Prophet, a Sufi sheikh, or the like, often akin to hagiography. The tadhkere, on the other hand, does not deal with single individuals but includes biographical notices of a great number of persons (even thousands) belonging to particular social or professional classes. The close relation with both historiography and the genres known as resâle and maqâle is evident. Like those, both the tadhkere and the manâqeb start from Arabic models, more precisely the tabaqât (‘generations’) and the sire (life of the Prophet), but quickly develop Persian characteristics of their own. In both, the lives, sayings, and miracles of Sufis form an important part. In xxx

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the manâqeb, words uttered or written and miracles performed by the saints become more important than biographical details about their lives. From a literary point-of-view, the tadhkeres devoted to poets are of particular interest. According to Losensky, they “draw together their lives and works into a collective vision and history of the literary art” and through ample quotations of poetry they often come close to anthologies. Occasionally, female participation, too, attracts attention, as in an appendix to Jâmi’s Nafahât ol-ons on “women poets” (zanân-e âref) and special biographical compendiums on women poets by Fakhri-Haravi and Akhundzâde. Stylistically, both tadhkere and the manâqeb may be characterized by the same care of refined language as the other classical prose genres, including internal rhymes, use of rhetoric devices, poetical quotations in both Persian and Arabic, etc.—although at times in a more colloquial style, thus betraying oral origins. The age-old Iranian predilection for storytelling has already been mentioned. This was combined with a strong tradition of both entertainment and education/good advice. In Chapter 8, entitled “Stories and Tales: Entertainment as Literature,” Mehran Afshari treats the exceedingly rich repertoire of stories and tales referred to as dâstân, qesse, revâyat, and hekâyat. Iranian story-telling is basically an oral tradition, which creates problems for an historical account. The exact nature of the stories that circulated in the 10 th century is, of course, unknown to us, but numerous cycles of stories have been recorded and taken down in writing during later centuries, probably beginning in the 12 th and 13 th centuries. These written versions may be of various kinds, some copied from written sources, some taken down by ‘speed-writers’ from oral performances. The role of Arabic contacts is rather uncertain. Arabic orators of a type similar to the Iranian naqqâls are known already from the 8 th century, and some elements in the presentation of stories (e. g. starting a story with ammâ and use of rhyming epithets) point towards early mutual influences. The wide-spread Alexander romance is also found in both Arabic and Persian versions, although the Persian versions always stress the relation with (legendary) Achaemenid history and the narrative cycles on Dârâb (i. e. Darius) and his alleged son Firuz-shâh. Even if the stories are xxxi

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told mainly as entertainment, they may also have elements of religious propaganda, since Safavid times predominantly Shi’ite. The style of these stories shifts between quite literary ways of expression to colloquial uses of language. Qur’anic verses, sayings of the Prophet, embellishing verses, and rhyming prose appear regularly. Drawing on the rich store of animal fables and adding all kinds of supernatural and fantastic beings, stories may seem to be created as fiction, but were probably generally not seen as such. The various forms of popular stories, anecdotes and exempla described by Mehran Afshari in Chapter 9 are mainly oral, but when looked upon in an historical perspective they have to be studied in the form of written records. They are known with many names, such as mow’eze (sermon), nokte (epigram), eshâre (allusion), latife (amusing anecdote), nazire (example), and tamthil (proverb), but also with the general terms hekâyat and qesse (also treated in Chapter 8). They can aim at both entertainment and instruction, in the latter case often used by preachers in mosques and Sufis in their convents (khânaqâhs), sharing characteristics with the longer stories mentioned earlier. This kind of popular story-telling is known from Arabic sources already from the first centuries of Islam but is recorded in Persian from the 13 th century onwards. Again, this testifies to a close relationship between Arabic and Persian culture, especially in the religious sphere. A special form of popular anecdotes, found both in Arabic and Persian, consists of licentious stories and facetiae meant to be enjoyed as frivolous entertainment, at times also with satirical aims. There are many kinds of popular stories, all being told in a simple colloquial language well adapted to the audience to which they are told, but when taken down in writing more ornate language sneaks in. From the 19 th century, winds of change start to blow in the Persian literary world. Chapter 10, written by Iraj Parsinejad, paints the picture of pre-modern and modern Persian prose writing and how thousand-years-old genres and writing conventions undergo rapid change. With this, the use of ornate language and rhetorics loses its central role in the creation of literary texts, and new types of prose texts are included in what starts to be regarded as “literature” (adabiyyât) in a modern sense. The close relation with Arabic xxxii

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literature is eroded, and new genres are introduced under the influence of western models. The character of the written language itself comes under debate, and there is a strong urge to purify and purge the Persian language from Arabic. At the same time, there is a tendency to bring the written language closer to spoken varieties—from which Arabic elements are not so easily purged. In summary, this volume describes the “literary aspects” of a wide array of Persian prose genres as expressed in the use of elaborated language and rhetoric devices together with a strong element of narrativity with didactic and/or entertaining intentions. It also demonstrates clearly, with the aid of direct references to a variety of texts, the interdependence between Persian and Arabic forms of literature and their combined role in the great Islamic cultural synthesis. Much of this literature is steeped in religion, that is, various forms of Islamic discourse and specifically in Islamic mysticism (Sufism). The Persian language itself is shown to be a mighty edifice, a cultural heritage that still weighs heavily on the shoulders of modern generations.

Bibliography Bloom, Jonathan. Paper before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World. New Haven, 2001. Mâyel-Haravi, Najib. Ketâb-ârâyi dar tamaddon-e Eslâmi: majmuʿe-ye rasâ’el dar zamine-ye khōshnevisi, morakkab-sâzi, kâghaz-geri, tadhhib va tajlid; be-enżemâm-e farhang-e vâzhegân-e neẓâm-e ketâbârâyi. Mashhad, 1993. Meisami, Julie Scott. “History as Literature.” IrSt 33/1–2 (2000), pp. 15–30. —. “History as Literature.” In Charles Melville, ed., Persian Historio­ graphy (= HPL X), London and New York, 2012, pp. 1–55. Paul, Jürgen. “Enshā’.” In EIr, VIII, pp. 455–57. Pedersen, Johannes. Den arabiske Bog. Copenhagen, 1946. Tr. G ­ eoffrey French, with intro. by Robert Hillenbrand, as The Arabic Book. Prince­ton, 1984. Utas, Bo. “‘Genres’ in Persian Literature, 900–1900.” In Gunilla Lindberg-­ Wada, ed., Literary History: Towards a Global Perspective, Vol. II: Literary Genres: An Intercultural Approach, Berlin, 2006, pp. 199–206.

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CHAPTER 1 A MEDIEVAL NEXUS: LOCATING ENSHÂ’ AND ITS ONTOLOGY IN THE PERSIANATE INTELLECTUAL TRADITION, 1000–1500 Colin Mitchell Epistolography occupied a profound epistemological space during a time of significant change in the medieval Persianate world. The New Persian renaissance, beginning in the east under the Samanids and the Ghaznavids, was a slow, amalgamative process whereby regimented traditions in Arabic prose and poetry were absorbed and re-articulated by Iranian polylingual and polymathic literati. While Persian poetry enjoyed fluorescence thanks to Ferdowsi, Nezâmi, and Anvari, the prose tradition was equally enlivened thanks in part to the popularity of genres like mirrors-for-princes, fables, and court chronicles. This literary boom was in no small way a reflection of the dominant role played by the families of the Persian “bureaucrat-scholars” who, since the days of the Barmakids in Abbasid Baghdad, had maneuvered themselves as the principal producers and patrons of poetry and prose in the Persianate lands from the 11 th to 17 th centuries.1 It is the fluid multi-valency of the New Persian renaissance, with its genesis crystallizing squarely in the Arabic literary world but with articulation by Persian poets, adibs, and viziers working in Turkic-controlled courtly spaces, that makes the science of epistolography (elm‑e enshâ’) difficult to 1

For a good overview, see Maaike van Berkel, “The People of the Pen: Self-Perceptions of Status and Role in the Administration of Empires and Polities,” in M. Van Berkel and J. Duindam, eds., Prince, Pen, and Sword: Eurasian Perspectives (Leiden, 2018), pp. 384–451.

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define, let alone categorize and standardize with any sense of confidence. Not only did 11 th–12 th century contemporaries disagree as to the essence and manifestation of prose enshâ’, they varied widely on what could be reasonably included in a collection of model letters, decrees, administrative documents and so on. Modern studies of medieval Persian enshâ’ material has—to date—largely approached this variability with relatively blunt tools; if not roundly dismissed by historians for its lack of concrete historical data and surplus prolixity, enshâ’ prose is largely overlooked in literary studies on account of its relative lack of structure when compared to the intense formatting and mnemonic appeal of poetic genres like qasides, mathnavis, robâ’is, etc. If the heterogeneity of enshâ’ was in of itself noted by medieval Persianate contemporaries, it has been overtly reduced and simplified in modern scholarship; the time for a re-opening and meaningful discussion of how enshâ’ was understood is long overdue. To simply label enshâ’ as “letter-writing” is a gross oversimplification. Moreover, to approach a collection of enshâ’ as simply a repository of historical documents ignores the complicated discourses and debates, which were shaping the premodern world of literati and administrators. How, then, can we bring some semblance of coherence to this complex problem? Some scholars have sought answers by exploring a single textual source, and on the basis of that particular enshâ’ work, extrapolate across time and space to offer a normative rationale for premodern epistolography. To some extent, this is how Riazul Islam approached the issue, relying on Mahmud Gâvân’s 15 th-century Manâzer al-enshâ’ (Perspectives of Enshâ’);2 Heribert Horst, on the other hand, culled a number of enshâ’ works and used titular and administrative references to assemble a picture of bureaucracy in the 11 th–12 th-­century Persianate world,3 as did Heribert Busse for the 16 th century.4 Other 2 3 4

Riazul Islam, A Calendar of Documents on Indo-Persian Relations (1500– 1750), Vol. I, (Karachi, 1971). Heribert Horst, Die Staatsverwaltung der Grosselǧūqen und Ḫōrazmšāhs (1038–1231) (Wiesbaden, 1964). Heribert Busse, Untersuchungen zum islamischen Kanzleiwesen an Hand turkmenischer und safawidischer Urkunden (Cairo, 1959).

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collections are modern, and while helpful, the specific documents profiled in these edited works are combed from older enshâ’ manuals with little in the way of context.5 To be sure, scholars are interested in editing such well-noted enshâ’ works by specific authors on their own terms, and we are grateful for their efforts but nonetheless we cannot help but notice an absence of any larger context for these sources and the genre from which they emerge.6 While more holistic efforts have been offered by H. R. Roemer and Jürgen Paul, these are helpful, but all-too-brief, encyclopedic treatments trying to shape and define a literary Leviathan which intersects a multitude of textual traditions: poetry, rhetoric, prosody, philosophy, scriptural exegesis, history, and so on.7 Interest in Arabic enshâ’ in a larger historical sense was seen recently with Adrian Gully’s The Culture of Letter-Writing in Premodern Islamic Society,8 but 5

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Jahângir Qâ’em-Maqâmi. ed., Yaksad va panjâh sanad‑e târikhi (Tehran, 1969); Abd-al-Hoseyn Navâ’i, ed., Asnâd va mokâtabât‑e siyâsi-ye Irân (Tehran, 1981); Sayyed Ali-Mo’ayyed Thâbeti, ed., Asnâd va nâmehâ-ye târikhi (Tehran, 1967): Dhabih Thâbetiyân, Asnâd va nâme-hâ-ye târikhi-ye dowre-ye Safaviyye (Tehran, 1965); Abd-al-Hoseyn Navâ’i, ed., Asnâd va mokâtabât‑e târikhi-ye Irân az Timur tâ Shâh Esmâ’il (Tehran, 1962); Mehmet Sefik Keçik, Briefe und Ur­kunden aus der Kanzlei Uzun Hasans: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte Ost-Anatoliens im 15. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1976). Abd-al-Hoseyn Navâ’i has also edited several volumes of correspondence from the reigns of specific Safavid rulers in the 16 th and 17 th centuries. In recent years, a number of enshâ’ works have been edited and published, such as Rasul Ja’fariyân’s edition of Monsha’ât‑e Soleymâni (Tehran, 2009); Nosrat-Allâh Foruhar’s edition of Qâzi Hoseyn b. Mo’in-al-Din Meybodi’s Monsha’ât‑e Meybodi (Tehran, 1998); Ma’sumeh Ma’dankan’s edition of Mahmud Gâvân (Sadr‑e Jahân)’s Manâzer al-enshâ’ (Tehran, 2002); Sayyid Ali Rezavi-Bahâbâdi’s edition of Mohammad b. Abd-al-Khâleq Meyhani’s Dastur‑e dabiri (Yazd, 1996); and Mansur Sefatgol and Nobuaki Kondo’s edition of an anonymous collection of early modern correspondence (the manuscript is in St. Petersburg) with the title of Pezhuheshi dar bâre-ye maktubât‑e târikhi-ye fârsi-ye Irân va Mâ-varâ’-al-nahr: Safaviyân, Uzbakân va emârât‑e Bokharâ / Persian Historical Epistles from Iran and Mawara an-nahr: The Safavids, the Uzbeks, and the Mangits (Tokyo, 2006). Hans Robert Roemer, “Inshāʾ,” in EI2 , III pp. 1241–44; Jürgen Paul, “Enšā’” in EIr, VIII, pp. 455–57. Adrian Gully, The Culture of Letter-Writing in Pre-Modern Islamic Society (Edinburgh, 2008).

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to date we have yet to produce any sustained treatments of Persian enshâ’ as a genre with an eye towards its general ontology. The ultimate purpose of this chapter is to present a survey of the epistolographic genre in the medieval Persianate world (1000– 1500). Returning to the earlier question of how this can be accomplished, a solution—at least a partial one—presents itself in the concept of the dibâche, or preface. As many can attest, the foreword, or prolegomenon, to a prose work has been a longstanding feature of systematic writing since Antiquity. Texts of various subjects— philosophy, history, medicine, theology, geography, etc.—were almost invariably prefaced by a short discussion from the author. These prologues were designed, more often than not, as a space and occasion for the author to offer rationalizations and reasons in defense of the larger work; motives and inspirations, as well as praise for the pertinent patrons, were likewise included with regularity. Depending on the nature of the work and the temperament of the author, prefaces could often profile insightful ruminations and reflections on not only the ontology of the work but on the genre itself. Such textual practice in both Arabic and Persian was indubitably influenced by the Greek and Syriac traditions.9 Gerard Genette described such textual space as an example of a “paratext,” which effectively accompanied the main text and facilitated mediation between the author and the reader.10 Julia Rubanovich noted how such prefatory writing was crucial to the reader’s initial conception of the author and reception of the text; as such, a careful reading of a text’s prolegomenon is absolutely critical if we are to understand authorial intentions and self-view.11 Preface study (dibâche-shenâsi) has yet to emerge in any serious way as a discipline of academic study, but singular studies in recent years have elicited energy and excitement; notably, David Roxburgh broadened the theoretical implications of aesthetics in the late medieval 9 The best treatment of this, by far, is Eva Riad, Studies in the Syriac Preface (Uppsala, 1988). 10 Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, tr. J. E. Lewin (Cambridge, 1997). 11 Julia Rubanovich, “Metaphors of Authorship in Medieval Persian Prose: A Preliminary Study,” Middle Eastern Literatures 12/2 (2009), p. 128.

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world in 2000 with his Prefacing the Image: The Writing of Art History in Sixteenth-Century Iran. In the early 1990 s, a collection of dibâches from a number of different medieval works and genres was edited and published by Sayyed Ziyâ-al-Din Sajjâdi, but admittedly there is little there in the form of analysis.12 Likewise, Wheeler Thackston edited and published a number of prefaces to illustrated manuscript albums from the medieval period.13 To date, no such approach has been applied to the diverse and overwhelming world of enshâ’. Moreover, given the fact that enshâ’ manuals often consisted of copied, exemplary missives, it is only within the dibâche itself that we can locate any sustained discussion of the theory and practice of the epistolographic arts. I am not especially concerned with the documents comprising the bulk of an enshâ’ manual or collection, but with how stylists (monshis) and scribes (kâtebs) chose to present this intricate discursive form, and in some cases defend it, to his supporters and detractors. When we consider how much the literary and administrative landscape was pushed and shaped between the 11 th and 15 th centuries, an in-depth, analytical survey of this unique epistemological space and its textual practice in the central Persianate lands is appealing. When we cross-index this with ongoing debates and crises in the literary-cum-philosophical premodern world regarding: a) the relationship between prose and poetry, b) natural writing (matbu’) and artifice (masnu’), c) the science of rhetoric (elm‑e balâghat) with respect to the literary perfection of the revealed Qur’an, d) the extent to which writing (ketâbat) in itself necessitates an orderly, hierarchical society with scribes and rhetoricians in the forefront, and e) the meta-debate regarding language and metaphysics and the philosophical entanglements associated with reason and scripture in the post-Avicennan landscape, we cannot but help to look to the dibâches of enshâ’ texts with wide and hopeful eyes. 12 Sayyed Ziyâ-al-Din Sajjâdi, Dibâche-negâri dar dah qarn: az qarn‑e cha­ hârom tâ qarn‑e chahârdahom (Tehran, 1993). 13 Wheeler Thackston, Album Prefaces and Other Documents on the History of Calligraphers and Painters (Leiden, 2001).

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1. Locating Enshâ’ in the Formative Islamic Period (8 th–11 th Centuries) What has been preserved of epistolographic writing from the premodern Islamic world was first and foremost a discursive practice enjoyed by political and administrative elites. On occasion, compilations of letters (majmu’e-ye monsha’ât) will contain correspondence between friends and family members (ekhvâniyyât), but generally only later specimens survive and the overwhelming bulk of this enshâ’ writing is dedicated to official writings and documents. In this sense, most enshâ’ material speaks to the performative and mechanistic aspects of power: letters between state rulers, letters of appointment, letters of investiture, peace treaties, tax-remittances, petitions, memos of censure and probation, and so on. There is evidence to suggest that epistolographic practices were quickly developed by Mohammad and his community; the normative tradition has no shortage of narratives and episodes regarding letters, registries, diplomatic agreements, etc. which were put into effect during this “golden” era. To what extent these epistolary developments came as a result of the allegedly rich, fully-formed written Arabic language is up for debate, but it seems reasonable to assume that scribal culture was alive and well in these early days, and such scribes—especially those who had served the Sasanians in the Sawâd of Iraq—would have been in high demand as the Arab armies negotiated surrender after surrender. Of course, the later proliferation of written poetic/rhetorical devices—parallelism, vivid imagery, direct address, rhyme, and assonance—were first and foremost oratorical, and much of what would come to shape Arabic literature had its basis in the regimented aspects of the spoken language.14 Indeed, Suzanne Stetkevych has argued in her inspiring article on the Arabo-Islamic transition from orality to literacy that “rhyme, meter, poetic diction, rhetorical figures, and so on are not, in an oral 14 Tahera Qutbuddin, “Khuṭba: The Evolution of Early Arabic Oration,” in B. Gruendler. ed., Classical Arabic Humanities in Their Own Terms: Festschrift for Wolfhart Heinrichs (Leiden, 2008), p. 177.

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context, aesthetic choices, but rather requirements for successful performance, transmission, and preservation.”15 The first formative “scribal text” was produced ca. 132/750 by Abd-al-Hamid Kâteb: the Resâle elâ’l-kottâb (Treatise to the Scribes); interestingly, Abd-al-Hamid (along with Ebn-al-Moqaffa’) had been a disciple of Abu’l-Alâ’ Sâlem, secretary to the Umayyad caliph Heshâm (r. 105–25/724–43), and—according to Ebn-al-Nadim—a translator of Aristotle’s letters to Alexander the Great.16 As Gully points out, there is no reference to the term enshâ’ at these early dates, but Abd-al-Hamid’s Resâle elâ’l-kottâb is generally accepted as a marker for the beginning of an Arabic prose tradition which intersected interest in epistolography and secretarial culture.17 Moreover, it is in this late Umayyad period that the new genre of the resâle (“letter,” “treatise”) emerged which seemed to combine the Greek and Persian heritage of administrative writings with the form, themes, and style of Arabic oratory.18 Ebn-al-Moqaffa’ (d. 139/757) of course wields “unprecedented renown as [a] master of Arabic prose,” and his own contribution to the secretarial arts is generally referred to as the al-Adab alkabir.19 These shifts in priorities coincided with one of the more profound development in late Antiquity, the introduction of paper and paper-making to the Islamic world: From this point forward, the Muslim omma began its journey as a “calligraphic state,” or rather a society which increasingly sought to define itself in terms 15 Suzanne P. Stetkevych, “From Jāhiliyyah to Badîʿ iyyah: Orality, Literacy, and the Transformation of Rhetoric in Arabic Poetry,” Oral Tradition, 25/2 (2010), p. 213. 16 J. D. Latham, “The Beginnings of Arabic Prose Literature: The Epistolary Genre,” in A. F.L Beeston, T. M. Johnstone, R. B. Serjeant, and G. R. Smith, eds., Arabic Literature to the End of the Umayyad Period (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 155–65. 17 Latham, “The Beginnings of Arabic Prose Literature,” p. 165; Gully, The Culture of Letter-Writing, pp. 11–12. 18 Qutbuddin, “Khuṭba,” p. 177. 19 Latham points out that the technical title of this work is Ketâb adab alkabir. J. D. Latham, “Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ and Early ʿAbbasid Prose,” in J. Ashtiany, T. M. Johnstone, J. D. Latham, R. B. Serjeant, and G. R. Smith, eds., ʿAbbasid Belles-Lettres (Cambridge, 1990), p. 57.

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of written text.20 There is no mistaking that the Arab privileging of poetry, oratory (khatâbe), and the inherent promotion of lyrical and rhyming values would come to manifest itself meaningfully in the form of saj’ (rhymed prose).21 Scribal manuals and literary epistolographic texts certainly operated in the same orbit, but significant overlapping did not really take place until later in the Abbasid period. At some point in the early 10 th century, prose writing in the epistolographic form went beyond administrative necessity and would become a noted literary objective for courtiers and scribes. This period is also crucial for the development of Arabic poetry and prose. With the advent of “modern” poets and literati of the Abbasid court—e. g., Abu-Novâs (d. 198/814), Bashshâr b. Bord (d. 167/784)—debate erupted with traditionalists who advocated the poetry of the “ancient” Arabs. This debate was best reified in the work of Abd-Allâh Ebn-al-Mo’tazz (d. 296/908), notably the Ketâb al-badi’. The “new style” promoted by Ebn-al-Mo’tazz was committed to carving out an unprecedented space in the poetic tradition; he identified and highlighted a number of literary devices (este’âre, metaphor; tajnis, paronomasia; tebâq, antithesis; radd a’ jâz al-kalâm alâ’l-sodur, internal repetition; al-madhhab al-kalâmi, dialecticism), which he suggested had been in use by the “ancient” poets but it was only with the Abbasid era that they were developed into an acceptable literary doctrine of sorts.22 It is with the poet/scribe Qodâma b. Ja’far (his disputed death-dates range from 319/932 to 336/948), however, that we find a remarkable confluence between the ongoing debates in Arabic poetry and new literary proclivities within the epistolographic forum. It is in his Ketâb alkharâj va senâ’at al-ketâbe (Book of Land Taxes and the Crafts of Writing) that we find the first consistent use of the term enshâ’ and 20 Jonathan Bloom, Paper before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World (New Haven, 2001), p. 12. The term “calligraphic state” is borrowed from Brinkley Messick’s The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society (Berkeley, 1993). 21 Latham, “The Beginnings of Arabic Prose Literature,” p. 154. 22 K. Abu Deeb, “Literary Criticism,” in J. Ashtiany, T. M. Johnstone, J. D. Latham, R. B. Serjeant, and G. R. Smith, eds., ʿAbbasid Belles Lettres (Cambridge, 1990), p. 347.

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the crystallization of an idea that epistolography was morphing in conjunction with poetry23; the only surviving portions of this work (contained in a unique manuscript in the Köprülü Library), the 5 th to the 8 th manzele, include linguistic usage, literary traditions, and the model titulatures (alqâb) needed for writing official missives.24 Moreover, Qodâma b. Ja’far also produced analytical treatments of the ancient-modern debate as well as treatments of literary devices and phrases with Naqd al-she’r (Poetic Criticism) and Ketâb al-alfâz (Book of Vocables).25 Arabic prose would also be indelibly changed by the philosophical climate of the 9 th–10 th centuries. In a response to the logicians and philosophers of the Mu’tazilite movement, supporters of the inimitability of the Qur’an fell to the task of standardizing and classifying Arabic. What emerged, as the “science of rhetoric” (elm al-balâghe) and the various classes of language that came with it, were forged first and foremost in the kiln of Qur’anic studies. Intriguingly, however, it was also in this period that translators were actively transmitting Aristotelian texts like the Rhetoric; moreover, Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics were appended by translators in the Abbasid era as natural additions to the Organon along with Categories, De Interpretatione, Prior and Posterior Analytics, Topics, and Sophistical Refutations. As Deborah Black helpfully argues, Aristotelian commentators like al-Fârâbi, Ebn-Sinâ, and Ebn-Roshd saw Rhetoric and Poetics essentially through the lens of logical inquiry. In this sense, rhetoric26 and poetry, while admittedly 23 Gully, The Culture of Letter-Writing, pp. 11–12. 24 S. A. Bonebakker, “Ḳudāma b. Djaʿfar al-Kātib al-Baghdādī, Abu’l-Faradj,” in EI2 , V, pp. 318–22. 25 Wolfhart P. Heinrichs, “Rhetoric and Poetics,” in EAL, p. 653. 26 In Aristotelian terms, some philosophers like al-Fârâbi made the distinction that oratory (khatâbe) was a part of rhetoric (balâghe): As Aouad quoted: “La rhetorique (rethorica) est une certaine [faculté] oratoire (oratoria), le rhéteur (rethor) un certain orateur (orator)…langage oratoire n’est pas un discours, ni tout orateur un rhéteur.” See Maroun Aouad, “Balāgha: Rhetorique aristotelicienne (rethorica) et faculté oratoire (oratoria/balāgha) selon les Didascalia in ‘Rethoricam (sic!)’ Aristotelis ex glosa Alpharabii,” in B. Gruendler, ed., Classical Arabic Humanities in Their Own Terms: Festschrift for Wolfhart Heinrichs (Leiden, 2008), p. 41.

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PERSIAN PROSE

different with respect to tools of persuasion, were nonetheless dedicated to the “cornerstones of medieval Arabic epistemology”— conception (tasavvor) and assent (tasdiq)—and were construed as such by contemporaries as part of the “logical arts.”27 As Wolfhart Heinrichs points out, there was a discrete impact of Greek science and philosophy on Arabic literature, and the new interest in rhetoric in terms of persuasion (eqnâ’) and poetry in terms of the evocation of imagination (takh­yil) was at a fundamental level in contraposition to the idea of balâghat as being synonymous with the perfect, inimitable eloquence of the Qur’an.28 As the secretarial class continued to emerge as a relatively powerful constituency during the Abbasid/Buyid periods, there was an increase in the popularity and production of prose works and epistolography. Indeed, a veritable profusion of secretarial and epistolographic works appeared at this time: Abu’l-Fazl Ebn-alAmid’s (d. 360/970) correspondence, Ahmad b. Sahl Balkhi’s (Ebnal-Balkhi; d. 322/934) Fazl senâ’at al-ketâba (Merit of the Crafts of Writing), Ahmad b. Mohammad b. Yusof Esfahâni’s Tabaqât al-khotabâ’ (Ranks of Orators) and Ketâb adab al-kottâb (Book of the Etiquette of Writers), Abu-Bakr Mohammad Suli’s (d. 335/947) Adab al-kottâb (Etiquette of Writers), and Ahmad b. Mohammad al-Nahhâs Mesri’s (d. 337/949) Adab al-kottâb (Etiquette of Writers), to name a few.29 Undoubtedly, there was a tension in literate society in Baghdad and elsewhere regarding the relative worth of secretaries and their perceived promotion of prose writing at the expense of poetry. Scribes with literary pretensions promoted rhymed prose (saj’) and various other devices such as tarsi’ (parallelism), and this general trend of versification in prose elicited strong reactions from traditional poets; moreover, the practice of saj’ was tainted in the eyes of Qur’anic philologists and rhetoricians who 27 Deborah Black, Logic and Aristotle’s ‘Rhetoric’ and ‘Poetics’ in Medieval Arabic Philosophy (Leiden, 1990), p. 14�