In the thirteenth century, the mountainous peninsula between the Aegean Sea in the west and the Tarsus Mountains in the east, today called Anatolia, became a periphery to the Mongol behemoth that established its four political centers adjacent to the Eurasian steppe in western Iran, on the north Caspian coast, in Transoxiana, and in northern China. Scholars such as Patricia Blessing and Andrew Peacock have recently shown that this western frontier region was culturally contiguous to the Ilkhanid Mongol realm (ca. 1258–1335) in Iran to its east, and thus should not be considered in isolation.
Nonetheless, Michael Pifer's study of Mongol-era Anatolian literature seeks to define the internal cultural dynamics of this region. He argues that “medieval” Rum (that is, Rome, the premodern term for Anatolia) shared a unique set of historical conditions; a receding Byzantine political and cultural imprint as well as centuries on the Abbasid Arab frontier created the circumstances for three remarkable events which bring together this poetry-focused study. These events were the crafting of several didactic literary masterpieces in Persian, the birth of a distinct variant of literary Turkish, and the substitution of the classical Armenian grabar for the fresh vernacular register of Middle Armenian.
Pifer's deft execution of this work makes it so that one scarcely feels the need to question the physical bounds of its inquiry. His ultimate goal is to deliver a “more integrative mapping of Anatolian literary history” (4), which he does by following a selection of poets across the peninsula to craft a series of interrelated arguments which together make important headway in bridging the civilizational divides that have long partitioned study of the region.
The book's seven chapters make a number of useful scholarly interventions, each of which could nearly fill an entire monograph. Pifer begins by convincingly positioning the work of Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī in the multilingual and multireligious context of an Islamizing Anatolia and arguing that the poet's writing and philosophy owed much to the historical setting of Konya in which it was produced. He then shows how Rūmī's son, Sulṭān Valad, integrated non-Persian voices into his work to craft spiritually didactic material for his followers. Next, the author analyzes the work of the Turkish poets Gülşehrī and Āşık Pāşā to demonstrate how western Turkish literature became a unique vessel for the transmission of spiritual knowledge (thus going beyond the emerging consensus in the field that early Anatolian Turkish literature was not merely derivative of Persian models). In the final chapters of the book, Pifer offers a much-needed treatment of the Armenian poets Frik and Kostandin Erznkats'i's engagement with Persian and Arabic literary models, demonstrating how Christian audiences were actively engaged in Islamicate meaning-making and interpretation. These interventions all contribute to the persistent theme of borrowing, adaptation, and rendering the foreign intelligible that echoes across the pages of this study.
Pifer's group of poet protagonists offers us two competing visions of the past: in one, Armenian, Turkish, and Persian poets borrowed unreservedly from one another in a continuous dialogue. Pifer describes this world in terms of “affinity,” “shared sensibilities,” and the “kindred voices” of the title. Indeed, a monolingual approach to the shared oeuvre of these writers would suffer from severe limitations, as Pifer's fruitful examinations of Sulṭān Valad's Greek verses and a Persian couplet of Frik demonstrate.
But the author also puts forth a second, more divided vision of Anatolia, characterized by the relentless tribalism of religious affiliation. This approach characterizes the famed ecumenicism of Rūmī as an exaggeration of contemporary liberal minds overeager to find tolerance in the past, and considers the “shared sensibilities” and literary forms of Anatolian poets a flourish behind which lie incompatible communal loyalties. The author, for instance, shows how Frik made liberal use of Persian vocabulary and literary forms to deliver a spiritual message to Christians premised on the preservation of this community (162–69).
Pifer's exploration of the role of literature in society reconciles these two visions, and may constitute a more valuable scholarly contribution than the specific arguments that he makes from chapter to chapter. His overarching contention is that poetry offered an interpretative framework for the world which not only created meaning but also served as a guide for navigating cultural and religious differences (193). The composition of poetry was an act of knowledge production (a fact well-established in literary studies) that also rendered a particular episteme legible in a different linguistic and religious context. Poetry thus served as a channel for establishing relationships even across potentially perilous chasms of cultural difference.
According to Pifer, poetry derived these special powers predominantly from one feature: sound. Sound is like language, he writes, because it is produced and understood communally (46). When the fourteenth-century poet Gülşehrī penned a Turkish adaptation of the Persian classic Manṭiq al-ṭayr (The Speech of the Birds) in its typical masnavī form, it was no case of slavish imitation or mimicry. His composition must be understood in an oral context as an act of sound-creation that elevated Turkish to a medium of spiritual revelation with its own unique sonic characteristics. The human voice is the dynamic realm that activates this transformative mechanism, often accompanied by music.
On occasion, some of the book's arguments are not well-substantiated or rest on speculation. Pifer's suggestion that Frik deliberately characterized fate (falak) as evenhanded to obliquely critique his Muslim contemporaries, is mainly an exercise in conjecture (168). Similarly, the author's exploration of the concept of the foreigner (gharīb) to suggest a shared culture in Rum relies on a small number of disparate examples and does not demonstrate much beyond the common use of some terms and concepts across Anatolian languages (106–13). Such guesswork is infrequent and hardly a major defect.
Pifer uses the sources with agility and digs into them frequently. Conveniently, he brings plenty of original verse material into the text, usually written in Armenian or Persian script rather than in clunky transliteration, and accompanies this material with the due translations. Perhaps as impressive as his navigation of the primary sources is his engagement with the secondary literature in a number of disparate fields, most obviously those of Armenian, Persian, and Turkish literature. He is conversant further afield in Ottoman, Abbasid, and Byzantine studies. Scholars from all of these fields will find this work useful, as will Seljuq and Ilkhanid historians. Those with an interest in popular culture and performance in premodern Anatolia will especially benefit from this study.
It is difficult to say that this book is about anything other than Mongol-era Anatolia. We can assume that the input of the editor or other practical considerations led to the sleepier and more Eurocentric “medieval” in the subtitle. Perhaps, though, the Mongol specifier would have been misleading, as the study devotes little space to the broader Eurasian context despite provoking questions in this regard. How, for instance, did Mongol power affect the spread and character of Persian literature in Anatolia? Why was literary Turkish emerging in the region at approximately the same time as the composition of Qipchaq and Uyghur Turkish texts in the neighboring realms of Mamluk Egypt and the Golden Horde? These questions may be best explored in other studies, although one would like to hear the author's thoughts on the matter.
Pifer's appraisal of a great thirteenth-century Armenian poet summarizes his understanding of the opposing visions of the past that characterize the book: “to understand Kostandin [Erzinkats'i] as a poet, we would do well to place him in dialogue with his contemporaries—and not only Armenians” (174). That Pifer succeeds in doing so is a great feat in itself. He convincingly demonstrates how Anatolian poets used communal and linguistic differences to express their ideas, and thus created works in which contact and even union with the foreign were a persistent theme. Paradoxically, they even used this contact with the foreign to keep their own communal boundaries intact, a fact the author does not attempt to downplay.
The literary and historical fields need more juxtapositions such as those offered in this book, and scholars should be trained to skillfully cross civilizational boundaries more often. Only then can they more fully tackle the burning question of what shared cultures are and were, and their relevance to our world today. Pifer's work is a stimulating and valuable example of what such work looks like.
