Ehsan Yarshater illumined the wealth, diversity and influence of Iranian studies during a lifetime of scholarly effort, and he ensured that his exaltation of Iranian culture would be widely recognized and preserved by founding two major intellectual enterprises, the Encyclopaedia Iranica and the multi-volume series A History of Persian Literature. Neither of these projects could possibly be completed during his lifetime. Entries in the comprehensive Encyclopaedia Iranica reached the letter K at the time of his death and only six volumes of the planned twenty volumes of A History of Persian Literature have now been published, with three additional volumes forthcoming in 2019. When these two monumental projects are eventually finished they will constitute a remarkable legacy and a compelling realization of Ehsan Yarshater’s vision, as well as a testament to the cultural stature of Iranian civilization. This most recent volume to appear in the series of Persian literature monographs is titled Persian Literature from Outside Iran, the Indian Subcontinent, Anatolia, Central Asia and in Judeo Persian (hereafter HPL-IX). While the title is not nearly as sonorous as Persian verse, it accurately reflects the editor John R. Perry’s goal of illuminating the diverse environments and evolving histories of Persian language and literature beyond—and within—the Iranian plateau.

As John Perry notes in his introduction, this volume discusses the production of Persian literature outside Iran—and Judeo-Persian within—from the ninth to the eighteenth century, a period when the language functioned as the lingua franca of the eastern Islamic world. With the exception of Keith Hitchin’s essay on Tajik literature and V. B. Moreen’s article on Judeo-Persian, this volume concerns the history of Persian literature in territories where the majority of the inhabitants were neither Iranian nor native speakers of Persian. This includes India, where the population spoke multiple Indo-European and Dravidian languages, Anatolia and Central Asia, where Turkic language speakers had become dominant during the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries, and Afghanistan, where some of the population spoke Persian and Turkish, but in the east and the true Afghan homelands most were native speakers of the ancient Indo-European language Pushtu.Footnote ¹ The introduction, use and eventual decline of Persian literature in these diverse regions constitute a complex and fascinating case of regional linguistic evolution.

It is particularly intriguing that the language generally classified as “New Persian,” that is Persian written in a modified Arabic script and incorporating much Arabic vocabulary, developed only in the ninth century and did not originate in Fars, but in Khurâsân, one of the historic centers of Iranian civilization, and Māwarānnahr, the easternmost region of Iranian settlement since Achaemenid times.Footnote ² These were both evidently areas of increased Iranian settlement from the seventh century CE, as Iranians fled eastwards from Arab conquests. The first well-known New Persian poets wrote their verse at the court of the Sāmānids (819–999) in the late ninth century. A self-consciously Iranian lineage, whose rulers at one time extended their control to as far as the Ferghānah Valley and to eastern Pakistan, the Sāmānids were descendants of an Iranian dihqān or landed family, and their presence in Māwarānnahr testifies to Iranian settlement in the Central Asian region. Powerfully conscious of their Iranian identity, the dynasty resuscitated Persian language and literature during this era that Vladimir Minorsky once elegantly identified as the “Persian Intermezzo,” the period between the ninth-century revival of Persian literature and the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when Mongol armies ravaged both Khurâsân and Mâwarânnahr.Footnote ³ Sāmānid poets, most notably Rûdakî and Ferdowsi, exemplified this process. The Sāmānid-sponsored renaissance of Iranian culture is especially remarkable considering it occurred in an area and period when Turkic tribes, the Qarakhānids and Oghuz, had overrun much of Māwarānnahr—even raiding in the immediate area of Bukhârâ, the Sāmānid capital. These tribes flooded the region with a Turkic-speaking population that gradually led to a decline in the use of the Iranian language Soghdian, as well as New Persian. Only in the Yaghnabi/Yaghnobi region of eastern Tajikistan does a Soghdian-derived language survive, while Tajik, a variety of New Persian, has retained its currency only among the predominantly Iranian population of the mountainous, isolated Tajikistan region. As the Encyclopeadia Iranica describes the linguistic situation:

It would be more accurate to say that New Persian initially developed not only in Khurâsân but in contiguous areas outside the modern boundaries of the Iranian state in Māwarānnahr, Afghanistan and South Asia, as evidenced by the example of the Sāmānids and their ghulām offshoots, the Ghaznavids—the eventual eastern Afghan base of Ferdowsi and other Persian-speaking poets and intellectuals such as al-Bîrûni. In any event, this new Islamic Persian, not Sanskrit or any South Asian tongue, became the practical and prestigious administrative and literary language of Muslims, who invaded India, and of the Seljuqs and their allied Oghuz tribes, who, as largely illiterate Muslims, adopted this available Islamic language as they moved into Persian-speaking regions in Khurâsân and beyond, where Iranian, Persian-speaking administrators such as Nizām al-Mulk, previously Ghaznavid subjects, awaited them. Persian continued to prosper in South Asia as the language of the relatively small predominantly Turkic ruling class and their Turkic, Iranian and other Muslim subjects in the Delhi Sultanate and subsequent Timurid-Mughal empire. This represented partly a continuation of the Persianate culture of the Ghaznavids, partly the consequence of Iranian migration into India both before and after the Mongol invasions, and partly a consequence of the prestige of Iranian imperial traditions, which many literati understood from translations of late Sasanid texts and more immediately Ferdowsi’s great verse epic the Shāhnāmeh.

Persian’s survival in South Asia depended on Indo-Muslim political dominance and its influenced waned with the deterioration of Timurid-Mughal power in the eighteenth century, by which time it had long since given birth to a highly Persianized Urdu, the “language of the camp”—or more accurately the hybrid language of the broader Indo-Muslim population later known to the British as Hindustani. Persian’s survival as a national language in Afghanistan is partly a factor of Safavid and Timurid-Mughal political control of the region until the eighteenth century, partly also a factor of the existence of Persian-speaking populations in the Khurâsân provinces of western Afghanistan, the Hazârahs in the central mountainous regions and Persian-speaking nomads such as the Aimak tribes and, finally, very much a factor of the impoverished, tribal fragmentation of the Pushtu-speaking population, which did not develop sufficient centralized political power whose rulers might have patronized the growth of Pushtu as a court and administrative language. In Iran Persian survived partly as a factor of the existence of a substantial Persian-speaking Iranian population, as well as the Seljuq absorption of Persianate culture as the largely illiterate Oghuz tribes moved through the Iranian cultural portal of Khurâsân. The Seljuqs of Rum or Anatolia, like their cousins in Iran, utilized Persian as their state language and poets such as Rûmi thrived within their boundaries, but ultimately the lack of a substantial Iranian population and the growth of the massive Oghuz tribal diaspora throughout the region meant that most member of the Turkic population did not encounter a substantial population of Persian speakers or experience a dominant Persianate culture. In western Anatolia particularly the Oghuz adopted Turkish as their Islamic language, most notably in the Karamanid and Ottoman states in far western Anatolia, whose distance from Iranian influences is reflected in the fact that no Karamanid rulers took Persian names or titles, as had occurred among the Ghaznavids and Iranian Seljuqs. In Māwarānnahr,Footnote ⁵ Turks had also become the dominant population well before the fifteenth century, when Bâbur, the future founder of the Timurid-Mughal empire, reported that all the population of his Timurid appanage of Andijân in the Ferghānah Valley spoke Turki, his language also, in which he wrote his great autobiography.Footnote ⁶ By Bâbur’s adolescence Turki had developed a classical literary tradition, most notably in the person of Mîr ʿAlî Shîr Navāʾi (d. 1501) coincidentally a resident of Khurâsân in Timurid Herat, one of the centers of New Persian. In Māwarānnahr, though, unlike western Anatolia, Persian retained far more currency. It became the administrative and literary language of the predominantly Turkic Uzbeks, and continued to function as the prestigious literary language for centuries, despite Navāʾi’s argument that Turki was the far superior language.Footnote ⁷

This volume testifies to the range and depth of Persian literature in South Asia, with studies that occupy slightly more than half of the book. These include three introductory essays on Indo-Persian verse by Alyssa Gabby, who describes the initial foundation of centers for Indo-Persian court poetry, Persian literature under the Ghaznavids and provides brief studies of three Delhi Sultanate-era poets: Amîr Khosrow, Hasan Sejzi and Badr Châchi. Her contribution represents the only sustained discussion of Indo-Persian verse in this volume, which is later to be the exclusive subject of volume 8 of this series. Readers would expect to find important examples of Indo-Persian verse in any volume devoted to Persian literature in the subcontinent, but what makes this volume exceptional are a series of articles on related subjects: “Teaching Persian in South Asia” by Tariq Rahman, “The Persian Language Sciences” by John R. Perry, “Persian Historiography in India” by Blaine Auer, “Persian Literature of the Parsis” by Jamsheed K. Choksy, “Ismaili literature in Persian in Central and South Asia” by A. G. Rawân Farhâdi, “Persian Medical Literature” by Fabrizio Speziale and a final essay on “Inscriptions and Art Historical Literature” by Yves Porter.

Readers ought to be aware of two aspects of this volume. First, this is not a book primarily devoted to Delhi-Sultanate-era Indo-Persian literature, for only Alyssa Gabby discusses Indo-Persian verse at length and she restricts her essay to the pre-Timurid-Mughal era. Others range widely over the Indo-Persian literary landscape and several deal with much later periods. Second, all of the authors ignore the Persian literature of South India. The lack of attention given to the south is a common feature of Indo-Muslim scholarship, but literary and historical Indo-Persian literature was also written in the south, which was briefly, and very late, part of the Timurid-Mughal empire. These include many published Persian sources on the Carnatic, such as Burhân Ibn Hasan’s Tûzak-i Wālājāhi and multiple Persian manuscripts, such as the Gulshan-i Sa’ādat, which are housed in the Madras Oriental Manuscripts Library.Footnote ⁸ One of the most unusual Persian texts from Madras is the Ruqa‘ât-i Wālājāhi, a collection of two years of Persian correspondence between representatives of the East India Company and the reigning Nawab of Arcot Muhammad ‘Alî Wālājāhi in the late eighteenth century.Footnote ⁹ Incidentally, the Madras Oriental Manuscripts Library holds one of several Indian manuscript collections that include or are devoted exclusively to Indo-Persian works, whose holdings might possibly form an appendix of a later volume in this series. As a footnote, it is important to note that South Indian Persian literature was an east coast or Coromandel Coast phenomenon. Neither Persian nor Urdu was used in southwestern India, where Dravidian languages, such as Malayalam, held sway, and local Muslims, if they were connected to the larger Islamic world, knew Arabic or spoke a local patois, as they did in Kerala, where Arabi-Malayalam can still be heard in popular songs.

Alyssa Gabbay’s introductory essay and thoughtful introduction to the foundation of Persian as the elite language first raises important questions about “colonialism,” “syncretism,” “authenticity” or “purity” of the adoption and spread of Persian. In particular she questions what culture or bias Indo-Persian writers exhibited in their writings. Thus in illustrating the verse for the Ghaznavid and Delhi Sultanate periods, Gabbay describes the insularity of poets such as Abu’l-Faraj Runi (d. ca. 1107), who exemplified many of the early Persian poets’ bias in ignoring the culture or environment in which they wrote, and she describes how the well-known Mas’ud Sa’d-e Salmān thought India had to be made over in Iran’s image, even while writing nostalgically about his hometown of Lahore. She then focuses on two important poets of Delhi, Amîr Khôsrow and Hasan-e Sejzi. In this context it is worth noting that one later Indo-Persian poet, the well-connected Ashraf Māzandarāni (ca. 1620–1704), exhibited what may be the most complete catalogue of’ conflicted feelings that an Iranian poet expressed for his Iranian home and adopted Indian homeland. Implicitly identifying himself as one of the “destitute Iranians” whose “indigence” led him to migrate to India where “gold is scattered like stars in the night sky,” he expressed contradictory feelings for the country where he prospered, but whose culture he found to be a poor copy of the original—that is Iran. Like some of these earlier writers who found employment in wealthy India, he felt, as he said, “mournful in his exile.”Footnote ¹⁰

Gabbay’s discussion of Amir Khôsrow and Hasan-e Sejzi appropriately emphasizes the remarkable range and influence of Khôsrow and both his and Sejzi’s devotion to and involvement with the Chishti Sufi Nezâm al-Din Owliyā. A scholar who has written an appreciative study of Khosrow, she conveys the complexity and seeming contradictions in his verse in which Khosrow simultaneously praises the conquests of his Delhi Sultanate patrons but also expresses deeply emotional praise for his native Indian homeland that contrasts with the conflicted verse of émigré writers such as Salman or Māzandarāni. As she shows, Sejzi echoes his “Indianness” less comprehensively but effectively in a poem modeled on Nizami’s Layla and Majnun, but featuring instead two doomed Hindu lovers that “exemplifies the Indianizing of Persian literary culture.”Footnote ¹¹ Khosrow and Sejzi were both also disciples of Nezâm al-din Owliyā, whom Sejzi memorialized in his engaging malfuzat-like memorial to the Chishti saint, the Favā’ed al-fo’ād. Gabbay appropriately concludes her study of these two writers by stressing that they have exerted literary influence far beyond India’s borders in both Iran and Central Asia. Bâbur offers an early sixteenth-century anecdote testifying to Khôsrow’s fame. In his autobiography he reports that his father, ruling from Akhsı in the bucolic Ferghānah Valley in the late fifteenth century, knew Khosrow’s works, which had also been praised by sophisticated literati of Timurid Herat in the fifteenth century. Indeed Khosrow enjoyed an international literary reputation in the eastern Islamic world unmatched by any other Indo-Persian poet—from any era.

Following Gabbay’s essay are two closely related chapters: Tariq Rahman’s “Teaching of Persian in South Asia” and John R. Perry’s, “The Persian Language Sciences in India.” Regarding the teaching of Persian and speaking as an individual who arrived in India following formal language study with Lambton’s Persian Grammar, I can testify to the continued presence, even in Madras/Chennai, of munshis, who could teach foreigners Persian and who, in my case at least, insisted that I read passages from Saʿdi’s Gulistan before we could turn to examine eighteenth-century Indo-Persian manuscripts—one of which included the mysterious Indo-European term “matchbox.”Footnote ¹² In Madras one text in a Persian college course also used excerpts from Morier’s Haji Baba of Isfahan. Later in Madras I was able to purchase a copy of Sir William Jones’ Grammar of the Persian Language and a small volume printed in Ahmedabad, Gujarat in 1966 titled Muntakhabāt-i Nasr o Nazm-i Fārsi, “Selections in Persian” used for the Pre-university Arts Examination of 1967, 1968 and 1969. This book includes selections from the Siāsat Nāmah of Nizām al-Mulk, the Bahāristān of Jāmî, the Ruba‘iyat of ‘Umar Khayyam and selections from the works of Sa‘di.

Rahman makes a number of valuable observations in his article, including the role of madrasas as institutes of education, where Hindus could learn Persian, citing as an example Chandra Bhān Brahman, the subject of a recent biography by Rajeev Kinra.Footnote ¹³ He also reminds readers that Persian literature was not theological but poetic, and much of it explicitly or implicitly Sufi, but nonetheless goes on to argue that Persian education inculcated a whole set of Muslim cultural values. As he notes, the prestige of Persian persisted well into the British era. The College of Fort William in Calcutta founded in 1800 was perhaps the important institution for teaching the language to British officers. Others learned it from munshis, and this included (Sir) John Malcolm, a subaltern in Madras, East India Company officer official, ambassador to the Qajar court in Tehran, governor of Bombay and finally the author of a massive History of Persia in 1815, dedicated to the Duke of Wellington.Footnote ¹⁴ Rahman also points out that many well-educated Timurid-Mughal women also learned Persian, most notably Awrangzeb’s talented daughter Zêb al-Nesā Begum and Jahān-ārā, the daughter of Shāh Jahān.

John Perry follows Rahman’s essay with a study of New Persian farhangs or Persian dictionaries and he observes that during a nearly 700-year period of Sultanate and Mughal rulers “India was the leading center for the development of Persian lexicography,” beginning, interestingly, with Fakhr al-Dîn Mobārakshāh Qavvâs Ghaznavi in 1300, which was published in Tehran in 1974. Perry points out that Persian lexicography greatly benefited from the influx of Iranian literati during Akbar’s rule (1556–1605), some of whom prepared farhangs commissioned by the Mughal court as part of their effort to purify Indo-Persian. He also points out that in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries all Persian farhangs cited some vocabulary from Ferdowsi’s Shāhnāmeh. He goes on to discuss the grammar and usage, including interesting comments of the controversy of este’māl-e-Hend, or Indian usage, observing how “two principal features distinguished Indo-Persian idiom from the “standard: of Iran (corresponding exactly to the features that in later generations have distinguished Indian English from British English).”Footnote ¹⁵ He concludes with a brief survey of later Indian lexicographers, including the work of Têk Chand Bahār (d. 1766), whom he characterizes as “one of the most brilliant minds and most popular lexicographers in this galaxy [of late Indian scholars.”Footnote ¹⁶

Following these chapters on literature, education and language, Blaine Auer has written an essay on 800 years of Indo-Persian historical writing. He does not begin with Persian language works of the Ghaznavid era, but it is worth mentioning here the unique work by the eleventh-century Abu’l Fazl Bayhaqi, the Tārikh-i Bayhaqi. Bayhaqi wrote what is arguably the finest Persian history of this New Persian era, perhaps the single most accomplished historical work of an Iranian scholar, a critical, personally informed and balanced historical account of the early Ghaznavid era.Footnote ¹⁷ It is fair to say, I believe, that no later Persian language history in Iran or India, with the exception of Rashid al-Din’s universal history, equaled the critical scholarship and literary polish of Bayhaqi’s work.

After citing guides to major collections Auer provides a series of excellent summaries of major Persian language historians of the Sultanate, Mughal and British eras, with excursions into works produced in Kalpi and Gujarat and in the wealthy Deccan sultanates. He identifies the Iranian or Persianate references of many Sultanate authors, beginning with standard Islamic allusions to examples of Sasanian justice, such as Fahkr al-Din Modabber, whose 1206 work the Sharjare-ye ansāb is regarded as the first Sultanate history. Fakhr al-Din’s history is an account of the reign of the Ghurid ruler Mohammad b. Sām and has the character of a nasîhat nāmeh, extolling Iranian models, as well as a chronicle. Fakhr al-Din is doubly notable because in his work Ta‘rikh-i Fakhru’d-Din Mubārakshāh and writing in Persian he included a section on the superiority of the Turks, Turkish princes and the Turkish language, an essay on Turkistan, descriptions of the Oghuz and the Jewish Khazars, a specimen of a quatrain in Turkish, descriptions of the Soghdian and Uighur alphabets and a list of Turkish tribes, including the Afshar, the Oghuz Qizilbash tribe whose leader Nāder Shâh Afshār succeeded the Safavids and invaded India in the eighteenth century.Footnote ¹⁸

It is impossible to summarize Auer’s ambitious survey of Indo-Persian historians, the most notable of whom in the Sultanate era was the courtier and qādi Juzjāni (b. 1193), who wrote the most extensive historical account of the early Sultanate era and even provided an account of the Mongol execution of the last ‘Abbasid caliph in 1258, the prolific author of verse histories Amir Khôsrow Dehlâvî (d. 1325) and Dehlavi’s contemporary Zîyā al-Dîn Barani. Amir Khosrow was the most famous and in literary terms, the most accomplished historian and, as Auer notes, he was the “first author in India, writing in Persian, to make a significant contribution to the genre of historical narratives in verse.”Footnote ¹⁹ His series of historical mathnavis include the Qerān al-sadeyn, “The Conjunction of Two Auspicious Stars,” the remarkable “tour de force” Noh Sepehr or “Nine Heavens” and his stylistically unique Khazā’en al-fotuh or “Treasury of Victories.”Footnote ²⁰ His contemporary, the courtier Zîyā al-Dîn Barani (d. 1357), is generally thought of as the preeminent narrative and didactic historian of the Sultanate era. As Auer notes, Baranî was a reflective scholar, who discussed the worth of history as a discipline. Baranî, who was careful to cite works that he used, lists both Arabic/Islamic titles and a diverse collection of Persian works, including translations of Sasanid-era texts as well as those of earlier Sultanate authors. Baranî, who considered history to have a didactic purpose, wrote one of the most important Sultanate histories, informed by his intimate knowledge of state affairs, the Tārikh-e Firuzshāhi, but in terms of the Iranian influence, his work of political theory the Fatāwā-i Jahāndāri is in many ways far more interesting.

The Fatâwa is the embittered complaint of a displaced nadim lamenting that Delhi sultans were far more concerned with their income than their religion. Baranî denounces Sultanate rulers in general, reporting that they not only allowed “infidels and polytheists” to thrive but that these men actually “were pleased with the fact that infidels, Polytheists, idol worshippers and cow dung worshippers build houses like palaces, wear clothes of brocade and ride Arab horses caparisoned with gold and silver ornaments.”Footnote ²¹ Barani felt that in the decayed, post-Caliphate circumstances of his time sultans had no choice but to act like pre-Islamic Iranian emperors. He cited Iranian examples to justify the appointment highborn individuals, such as himself. With Baranî we get a depressed and dismissed courtier professing a political version of Ashraf Māzandarānî’s artfully expressed sense of dismay with India. Auer alludes to Barani’s own characterization of his work as didactic, and it is also important to recall that the insightful English historian Peter Hardy wrote an important study of Barani’s work, which included comments on several Sultanate historians, in which he discussed the rhetorical nature of Barani’s didactic historical texts and critiqued the idea that his work or that of others could be accepted as factual accounts of events.Footnote ²²

Auer usefully surveys some of the Persian language histories produced at regional Indo-Muslim courts. He rightly emphasizes the number written in wealthy Gujarat, which emerged as an independent sultanate following Temür’s invasion and destruction of the Delhi Sultanate in 1398. Some of these works, such as the Mirat-i Sikandari, have been translated into English.Footnote ²³ Equally important and numerous were Persian language works produced at the Deccan courts, such as the Bahmanids (1347–1527), in central India. One of the earliest of these works was Esāmi’s Fotuh al-salātin, a poetical work modeled on Ferdowsi’s Shāhnāmeh, another of the many signs of the currency of this text in India and one in which Mahmud of Ghazna is cited as the “epitome of Persian kingship.”Footnote ²⁴ When the Russian Anafasy Nikitin visited the Bahmânî sultanate in the 1470s he wrote, referring to this sultanate, “the rulers and nobles in the land of India are all Khorasanians.”Footnote ²⁵ Other histories were produced at the Ahmednagar, Bijâpûr and Golconda courts, where Iranians and Persian cultural influence was strong. “Fereshta” (1572–1623) is perhaps the most famous of the Persian language historians at these courts for his Golshan-e Ebrāhimi, which began with Mahmud of Ghazna but is particularly important because of its thorough coverage of the history of the Deccan sultanates. Iranians and Persianate culture were especially pronounced in the Bijâpûr sultanate (1489–1686), whose rulers were Shi’as.

With the Mughal conquest of Hindustan in 1526 the Persian influence in north India grew even stronger than it had been under the Delhi sultans and in this context it is worth emphasizing the importance of D. N. Marshall’s survey of Mughal literature for an understanding of the range of topics that Persian-language scholars produced in these centuries.Footnote ²⁶ As a Central Asian Turk Bâbur, the founder of the dynasty spoke and wrote Turki, later classified as Chaghatai Turkish, as his native tongue, but, like so many of his literate contemporaries, he also knew Persian and wrote some endearingly bad adolescent verse in that language. His descendants retained some knowledge of Turki, but they did not support its literature. Instead Persian quickly became the dominant administrative and literary language of the dynasty, its officials and the broader Muslim literati. During the reign of Babur’s grandson, the emperor Akbar (1556–1605), Persian became ascendant. Two members of the dynasty produced idiosyncratic Persian language memoirs: the first in the late sixteenth century by Bâbur’s daughter, Golbadan Begam (c. 1523–1603), and the second by the emperor Jahangir (r. 1605–27). Babur’s cousin, Mirzā Mohammad Heydar Dughlat, also wrote an important history of the Mongols and a memoir of his own life with Bâbur and his son Homāyun. Then, from the Akbar’s time through the reign of his grandson Shah Jahan Persian-language historical writing proliferated, highlighted by the monumental narrative and administrative work of Akbar’s confident and official Abu’l Fazl, who wrote the three-volume Akbar-nāmeh. Auer ably surveys the most important examples of the blizzard of Persian-language historical texts that culminated with the illustrated works of Mughal imperial grandeur produced under Shâh Jahān, who carefully supervised their production. Persian-language historical writing continued to be produced during the early years of British rule, but Persian gradually gave way to Urdu and English after English became the East India Company’s official language in 1837.

The following articles on “Persian Literature of the Parsis … ” and “Ismaili Literature in Persian in Central and South Asia” discuss the literature and culture of two persecuted minority communities with which I am largely unfamiliar, apart from casual friendships. Other readers equally unfamiliar with Parsi and Indian Ismaili culture may respond as appreciatively as I did in valuing these contributions as primers on significant but poorly understood traditions. In this way I found J. M. Choksy’s essay on Parsi literature to be not simply a survey of Parsi literature but also an elegant, revelatory introduction to the Indian Parsi community. He notes: “Original compositions by Parsis include both poetry and prose covering semi-historical, religious, and folk topics.”Footnote ²⁷ Choksy demonstrates how these texts, which date to the fifteenth century and later, illustrate Parsi religious duties, rituals and their mytho-historical memory of their Iranian homeland, which he has described in his many publications. He also explains the particular circumstances of Parsi linguistic history, many of whose members first adopted Gujerati, the language of their predominantly western Indian homeland. Then, as the British took control of the area in the mid-nineteenth century, Parsis adapted to these new circumstances by adopting British customs and the English language, as they became an increasingly secular community. He points out that by 1931 more than half of the Parsi community regarded English as their primary language. This was in contrast to north Indian Muslims who adopted highly Persianized Urdu as their mother tongue, even if they learned English for practical and professional reasons. In all of this it is important to note that for Parsis the Shāhnāmeh represented an integral aspect of Parsi culture, rather than just a foundational literary text, a source of aphorisms or an evocation of Iranian imperial traditions. Recitations of the text and “staging of dramatic performances where Persian and Gujarati passages were interwoven were popular … until the middle of the nineteenth century.”Footnote ²⁸

Farhad Daftary, the director of the Institute of Ismaili Studies, more briefly discusses the history of the Ismaili community, some of whose Persian-speaking members settled very early in their history in Afghanistan, Central Asia, the Sind and the Deccan. His description of the Indian Ismaili community forms only a small portion of an article in which Daftary describes the theology and history of the Ismaili sect within the Islamic world and more particularly in Iran. There Nāser-e Khosrow (b. 1004), “theologian, philosopher and a renowned poet in Persian,” was the towering Ismaili intellectual, “the last major proponent of the so-called Iranian Ismaili school of philosophical theology.”Footnote ²⁹ It was in Iran, of course, where a hostile Islamic environment led “the Nezāri Ismailis to produce “military commanders rather than theologians,” including Hasan-e Sabbāh (d. 1124) the ruler of Alamut, proponent of assassination and victim of the Mongols. It was also in Iran that Ismailis disguised themselves as Sufis and came to treasure the great mystic poets of Iran as their co-religionists. Nonetheless, with the advent of the Safavids Iranian Ismailis became persecuted anew and one of their leaders, Shah Taher Hosayni (d. ca. 1549), fled to India to avoid execution and settled in the Deccan, where he became a leader of the small preexisting Ismaili community. Daftary describes some Persian-language Ismaili literature from the later history of that community, which was driven from Qajar Iran and settled in Bombay in 1848 led by the Aga Khan I. These include the autobiography of the Aga Khan and a number of religious treatises in Persian, thereby preserving the “Persian literary tradition of Ismailism—a tradition dating back one millennium to the writings of Naser-e Khosrow and Hasan-e Sabbāh.”Footnote ³⁰

Daftary’s contribution is followed by two other articles on Indo-Persian literature: Fabrizio Speziale on “Persian Medical Literature” and Yves Porter on “Inscriptions and Art-Historical Writing.” Speziale’s fine, lucid essay is especially stimulating, as it is not just confined to listing Persian-language medical texts on the Avicennan Graeco-Islamic medical tradition, but also describes a number of Persian works composed on Indian/Sanskritic medicine. As he points out, “The production of Persian texts on Indian medicine and sciences must be regarded among the great cross-cultural enterprises realized in the scientific cultures of both the Muslim world and South Asia.”Footnote ³¹ His essay covers several aspects of Indo-Persian medical texts. These include Indo-Persian works on the Avicennian tradition, Yunāni tebb, written by Iranian emigrants, indigenous South Asian Muslims or even Hindus and Persian texts dealing with indigenous Sanskritic ayurvedic medicine, which concentrated initially on useful Indian drugs. He points out that the Iranian Shi’i writers of medical texts were prominent during the pre-Timurid-Mughal era in the Deccan sultanates, most notably in Shi’i Bijâpûr and then later in Timurid-Mughal India, at whose court Iranian physicians gathered. One such individual, Yusof b. Mohammad “Yusofi” of Herat, was Babur and Humayun’s court physician. He wrote a number of medical works, including a summary of Avicenna’s work on pulse analysis and the 1530 treatise Qasidah dar hifz-sihhat on hygiene, dedicated to Bâbur, who died that year following a series of illnesses in the previous few years.Footnote ³² In the nineteenth century Indo-Persian medical literature, like Indo-Persian verse, gradually ceased to be written, as Urdu became the language of Avicennian medical literature.

Yves Porter’s essay, “Inscriptions and Art-Historical Writing,” is primarily devoted to literature on the arts and crafts but it also includes brief allusions to inscriptions dating to the Sultanate and Mughal eras. The two sections on inscriptions are very brief, for while he alludes to the Epigraphia Indica of the Archeological Survey of India he does not mention the Epigraphia Indo-Moslemica, also known as the Arabic and Persian Supplement of the Epigraphia Indica, or such studies as V. S. Bendrey’s careful work, A Study of Muslim Inscriptions.Footnote ³³ Otherwise Porter’s study focuses on historical texts that contain references to arts and crafts or those that deal explicitly and systematically with these subjects. In the first category he cites works such as the Amîr Khosrow Dehlavi’s Qerān al-saʿdeyn (1284), which includes details on paper and book manufacture. He continues by citing the many relevant Mughal sources, beginning with Bâbur’s Turki autobiography, which contains multiple references to “artistic activity,” and then the numerous Persian works that contain information on the arts, such as Abu’ Fazl’s monumental works the Ā’in-e Akbari and Akbar-nāme or the emperor Jahangir’s memoirs—the memoirs, after all, of an aesthete. Porter points out that Shāh Jahān’s buildings were not only the subject of his own historical chronicle but that the Taj Mahal inspired works on geometry and mathematics, such as one written in 1634 by the son of one of the builders, Atā Allah Ostād Ahmed Meʿmār, who also produced a Persian translation of a Sanskrit treatise on algebra, the Bijganit. Porter cites several later works, including the important, comprehensive 1846 treatise by Vājed-‘Ali Khan, the Matlaʿ al-ʿolum va majmaʿ al-fonun. It is worth mentioning that readers who are interested in Indo-Persian writing on the arts may also wish to consult the indices of Marshall’s important bibliography, cited above, the Mughals in India vol. I (1967) and Supplementary Part I (1996).

Following the extensive coverage on India are two entries on the two areas where Persian survived largely as a lingua franca, as its wider usage atrophied in the face of numerous and politically dominant Turkic-speaking populations: Anatolia and the Ottoman realms and Uzbekistan. In Anatolia Persian was introduced as an administrative and literary language during the realm of the Seljuq sultans of Rum, who, like their Iranian cousins, demonstrated the Persianate influence in their dynasty by their evolving dynastic names going from the Oghuz Turki to Muslim to Iranian, beginning with Sultan Kiliç Arslan (1056–92) and effectively concluding with Ala al-Dîn Kayqubād (1220–37) just prior to the Mongol invasions. The earliest historical works in Seljuq Anatolia were written in Persian, which also became the language of administration. Konya also attracted Iranian-speaking literati, most importantly Jalāl-al-Din Rumi (d. 1273). Nonetheless unlike Sultanate and Timurid-Mughal India, where Persian usage originated as an imperial or administrative language of a small number of Turkic rulers and evolved to become the preferred tongue of the literate Indo-Muslim population of northern and central India, in Anatolia Persian drowned in a sea of Islamized Oghuz Turks. In western Anatolia of the Karamanids and Ottomans, Oghuz Turkish evolved to become the administrative and eventually literary language in these regions far removed from substantial Iranian populations.

Sooyong Kim, the author of a recent study of the early Ottoman poet Zati (1471–1546), aptly describes the process by which Persian gradually ceased to be widely used except among a limited literati class, who long preserved their attachment to the language and used it as a literary model even after it long ceased to be widely spoken. He points out that “It is worth mentioning that, for all the states ruled by Turkish dynasties at the time [of the poet]—the Safavids in Iran, the Shaybanids in Central Asia, and the Mughals in India—only the Ottomans made a point of eventually substituting Turkish for Persian as the primary language of court culture.”Footnote ³⁴ Nonetheless, as he carefully documents, following the conquest of Constantinople Ottoman sultans welcomed Iranians to their court and patronized Persian letters throughout the sixteenth century. Mehmed II invited the astronomical scholar ʿAli Qushji of Samarqand to Istanbul (d. 1474) and gave a stipend to Jāmi (d. 1494) after the poet declined to leave Herat. The prestige of Persian letters long survived among Ottoman rulers and in Ottoman literary circles, but increasingly that meant the cultivation of Persian works translated into Turkish. Mehmed III (1595–1605) effectively ended “the period of high Persian influence at the Ottoman court,” but well before this time Turkish had supplanted Persian as the preferred medium of Ottoman court poets.Footnote ³⁵ With the intensification of Ottoman‒Safavid rivalry few Iranians continued arriving in Istanbul, but the stylistic influence of Persian verse continued throughout the seventeenth century, as exemplified by the works of Nef’i (d. 1635) and Nābi (d. 1712), both of whom wrote verse modeled on sabk-e Hendi, the so-called “Indian style” of Sāʾeb of Tabriz (d. 1677).Footnote ³⁶

Ertuğrul Ökten follows Kim’s discussion of Anatolia with an extensive and fascinating survey of “Persian in Central Asia under Uzbek Rule.” As he mentions, Persian had first become a literary language in the region under the patronage of the Sāmānids of Bukhara (819–1005), and long continued to be the “classical language for educated Transoxianians of whatever ethnicity,” even after waves of Turks had entered the region and Chaghatai Turkish had become a prose medium for literature and verse during the late Timurid era—in the persons of Babur and Mîr ‘Alî Shir Navā’i.Footnote ³⁷ Citing the work of the contemporary Uzbek scholar Aftandil Erkinov, he reports that bilingualism in Persian and Turkish was the rule for centuries in the three autonomous centers of literary production, the cities of Bukhara, Khwārazm and Kokand. After first alluding to the existence of the Persian poetical circle of Jāmi and his contemporaries such as Bannāʾi, he cites some of the approximately 150 Persian poets who were active in Khurâsân until the middle of the sixteenth century. He also mentions the presence of 100 poets in Bukhara and forty-five in Samarqand in the first half of the sixteenth century and says that poets in Bukhara modeled themselves on the bilingualism found among writers of the fifteenth-century Herat school, including Sultan Hosayn Bāyqarā (d. 1506), citing many examples of poets who wrote in both languages, favoring the ghazal but also persisting with the riddles or moʿammās so beloved of Timurid writers. As a source for sixteenth-century literary history he cites Motrebi’s Tadhkerat al-shoʿarā (1604), whose author also discussed the technicalities of verse. Interestingly Motrebi, who lived in India from 1626 to 1628, mentions several Central Asian poets who emigrated to India, and the literary wave increased in the late seventeenth century after Bukhara ceased its patronage of court poets. Ökten remarks about this Indian connection that it “must have been” one of the principal causes of the spread of the sabk-e Hendi style to Central Asia, although he notes that many poets there had also been directly influenced by Sāʾeb’s verse. Nonetheless, he cites the case of Emlā of Bukhara (d. 750–1), who emulated the classical sabk-e Iraqi style of the earlier thirteenth through fifteenth centuries.

By this time, though, poetic production had decreased in the corrupt and oppressive Bukharan khānate, although Persian literature continued to be produced there, while in Khokand and Khwarazm, Uzbek gradually became the dominant literary language. Ökten treats these two centers much more briefly, surveying Persian verse in Kokand from the 1780s to the 1920s and Khwarazm only during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He includes an interesting description of the court literary circle of Kokand, and highlights the existence of “accomplished women poets” in the nineteenth century. He also cites a late nineteenth-century Uzbek writer of Kokand Moqimi (1850–1903), who also wrote Persian verse, who was distinctly influenced by Hafez, Saʿdi, Jāmî and the Indian Bedil. His discussion of Khwarazm, the original home of Turki literature, is limited to a few brief paragraphs and mention of a few nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Persian poets, including Āgāhi (d. 1857), a translator who was, perhaps for that reason, familiar with classical Persian literature.Footnote ³⁸

The next two essays in the volume, Keith Hitchens’ Tajik Literature and R. Fathadi’s and John Perry’s Persian Literature in Modern Afghanistan, both represent major contributions to these subjects. In a very substantial and admirable way they resemble Choksy’s fine contribution on the Parsis. That is, they are writing about regions and Persian literature not among most scholars’ common knowledge of Persianate language and culture. These authors are primarily writing about Persian literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—leaving aside here the question in the Tajik case of how to classify the literature in Evgeny Bertels’ book on ninth-, tenth- and eleventh-century Persian-Tajik literature.Footnote ³⁹ Keith Hitchens, a wide-ranging scholar of Southwest and Central Asian cultures, prefaces his study with a brief discussion of the Tajik situation prior to the 1917 Soviet Revolution, largely focused on Tajik writers in the Bukhara khanate. He discusses their role in the Jadid movement and focuses on the writer Sadriddin ʿAyni (1878–1954), a traditionally educated Persian poet who wrote traditional verse but became socially engaged following the 1905 Russian Revolution.

ʿAyni continued to work for Jadid causes during the First World War and then found himself in a new political and cultural environment after the Soviets created separate Uzbek and Tajik republics. Hitchens traces ʿAyni’s long career, as he became “a leading figure of the initial period of Tajik realist prose” in the 1920s and 1930s, providing a compelling example of the evolution of an entirely traditionally trained writer of classical-style verse into a novelist by the late 1930s. Hitchens then traces the activities of Tajik writers during the Second World War as many turned to anti-Nazi Soviet ideology and produced works thoroughly imbued with Soviet socialist realism. He describes how some Tajik writers even turned to the altogether foreign genre of drama under Soviet influence. In the postwar era, and post-Stalinist era, Tajik writers were able to recover some of their artistic autonomy even while the increasing dominance of Russian language left them exposed to new artistic influences. Writing noticeably less ideological literature than earlier times had demanded, they turned to more realist fiction and in both verse and prose depicted individuals’ psychology and their social situations. Free verse, however controversial, was gradually introduced and in the 1970s authors such as Bozor Sobir (b. 1928) were influenced by Pushkin and foreign writers to create poetry that engaged with complex personal and political concerns, as in the writings of Loiq Sherali (1941–2000). With the Perestroika period of the 1980s poets not only freely expanded on earlier human themes but also responded to the political opening by expressing concern about the fate of the Tajik language, which had suffered under the Soviet insistence on the supremacy of Russian. Altogether readers will come away from the essay with a sense of the tortured evolution of Tajik literature in the most treacherous political circumstances, and Hitchens concludes with an appropriate observation regarding the difficult and ever-shifting social and political terrain in which Tajik writers have had to work.

Afghan writers of Persian literature experienced a less ideologically constrained but still politically tumultuous environment. As described by A. G. Rawan Farhadi and John R. Perry, Persian poetry and prose was the administrative and literary language of the first Afghan state formed by Ahmad Shah Dorrānî in 1747 and it remains one of the official languages of Afghanistan in the twenty-first century, while being reclassified as Dari, “the eighth-century term for New Persian.”Footnote ⁴¹ The Dorrānîs themselves composed Persian in both the classical Iranian style as well as in the sabk-e Hendi of Sā’eb. Bedil (1644–1720), the Indo-Persian mystical/philosophical poet, became especially influential among Afghan writers, while he has never been popular in Iran.

Afghan Persian writers included Sardar Gholām-Muhammad Tarzi (1830–1900), father of the famous Mahmud Tarzi (1866–1935). Mahmud Tarzi became the major Afghan literary and political intellectual of the early twentieth century. Among many other achievements, he “inspired a group of constitutionalist ‘Young Afghans’ on the model of the [Ottoman] Young Turks,”Footnote ⁴² and wrote Persian prose and verse in an influential idiomatic, lucid, unadorned style. The nineteenth-century Afghan Persian poets even included a woman, with the takhallus or penname Makhfi or “Concealed,” who wrote classically styled Persian verse. As the authors demonstrate, until very recently nearly all Afghan Persian poets have written verse that observed traditional ʿaruz or prosodic rules and repeated the same topics and imagery found in the classical Persian poetry of Hafez and Saʿdi. They include fascinating but little-known verse a group of Afghan writers produced in response to the persistent conflict with British India, termed jangnāme-hā, some of which evoked the great Ferdowsi, as did Tarzi in a 1911 poem written in the meter employed by the author of the Shāhnāmeh. Other writers produced prose histories in Persian, beginning with Mahmud al-Hoseyni’s mid-eighteenth-century Tārikh-e Ahmad-Shāhi and continuing in the late nineteenth century with the important work by Mohammad Kāteb Hazāra, the Serāj al-tawārikh, and other works written in traditional narrative style of earlier Persian historical chronicles. Much more recently the writer and government official Ghobār (1897–1978) wrote an innovative study of Ahmad Shah Dorrāni, Ahmad Shāh Bābā-ye Afghān, a work notable for “its plain Persian style and broad use of sources.”Footnote ⁴³ He later wrote a politically radical, ambitious but scholarly history of Afghanistan, infused with democratic and Marxist ideology, which was banned while he was imprisoned.

Rawan Farhadi and Perry devote the final section of their article to a brief account of nationalist historiographical writing and a survey of Afghan prose fictions and literary criticism. A group of politically engaged writers produced works as part of an effort to define an Afghan nationalism. Some examples of their manifesto appeared in the journal Āryānā, and asserted that “the area known as Greater Khurâsân was not part of Irānshahr or Greater Iran, but was politically and culturally, the prototype of present-day Afghanistan.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Apart from describing this politicized genre, the authors preface their survey of Afghan Persian prose fiction and literary criticism with suggestions that the dāstān, tale or saga, and the hekāyat, anecdote or story, can be seen as natural precursors of “modern” (read Europeanized) prose literature. Mohammad Tarzi is mentioned again in this context as someone who introduced translations of European short stories in his journal Serāj al-Akhbār and who, in 1907, published translations of Jules Verne’s novels. The earliest Perso-Afghan novelists actually hailed from British-Indian Punjab, where they were exposed to western literary models. One of the most interesting “modern” Perso-Afghan writers was Sayyed Bahā al-Din Majruh (1928–88), a saiyid who received a western education in France and Germany, where he read Hegel and became interested in Sartre and western existentialism. His four-volume philosophical/political allegory was published just before a Mujahidin faction assassinated him in 1988. Rawan Farhadi and Perry conclude their survey with brief accounts of literature produced in the post-Taliban period, including a Naguib Mahfouz-like work by Akram Osman titled Kucheh-ye mā, “Our Street.”

The final contributor to this collection is V. B. Moreen, the author of several major monographs on Judeo-Persian literature. She begins her essay by returning to the subject of the rise of New Persian, emphasizing that Iranian Jews produced the first known examples of the “new” language. Among the examples of their use of this revived language she cites inscriptions on tombs near Jām, a copper tablet found on the Malabar coast, the site of the ancient Jewish Cochin community, and a legal document from Ahwaz dated to 1020–21. She goes on to describe Judeo-Persian commentaries on biblical literature and a range of translations of Hebrew and Aramaic tafsir texts into Judeo-Persian. Moreen reports that the earliest example of a Judeo-Persian religious text is a translation of the Pentateuch dated to 1319, and writes that in the following centuries scholars produced a wide variety of “biblical books from Prophets, Psalms, Proverbs, Ruth, Job and Song of Songs, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther and Daniel.”Footnote ⁴⁵ As for belles-lettres literature, which was largely poetry, she dates the earliest composition of this verse to the late Mongol lkhanate era that ended in 1336, and discusses a wide variety of transcriptions of classical Persian verse, especially the verse of Saʿdi, Hafez and Jāmi, whose works were transcribed into the Hebrew alphabet. As with other Persian literary traditions discussed in this volume, Ferdowsi’s Shāhnāmeh was also an influential text for Judeo-Persian, and “exerted a powerful influence on all Judeo-Persian epics.”

In discussing Judeo-Persian epic poetry she writes that Mowlānā Shāhin of Shiraz, who wrote in the late Ilkhanate era, was not only the earliest but also the most important writer of Judeo-Persian verse. An author of mathnavis, whose subject was the Pentateuch, Shāhin employed Iranian literary motifs and Iranian heroic traditions in an apparent effort to produce a Ferdowsi-like Judeo-Persian epic. In her view, Shāhin “Iranized” biblical narratives. She concludes her essay with brief introductions to Judeo-Persian religious and lyrical verse, two Judeo-Persian historical chronicles, written by a grandfather and grandson, which cover events in Iran between 1616 and 1662 and 1721 and the most important work of Judeo-Persian philosophy, Yehudah b. El’azar’s Hobot Yehudah, “The Duties of Judah” (1686), which inculcates fundamental Jewish beliefs in a period marked by Safavid persecution and the appearance of the “false Messiah,” Sabbatai Levi (d. 1676) in Istanbul. Finally, Moreen raises the interesting question as to whether Jews knew the Perso-Arabic alphabet. She concludes by hypothesizing that while some scholars read the original Persian texts, most probably knew the literature through transcriptions or oral recitation.

Overall this carefully edited volume introduces readers to a remarkably diverse set of essays on Persian literature, much of which is not widely known to literary and historical scholars of Persian verse and historiography. The essays on the Parsis, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Afghans and Jews are especially welcome introductions to little-known literary traditions and, in varying degrees, to the historical and political environments of their authors. My first question regarding the volume has to do not with the quality of the essays, which is uniformly high, but with their selection and organization. While I sympathize with the problem of organization of such a vast oeuvre, I think it was a mistake to state that the Indian section of the volume deals primarily with prose literature, that another volume on Indo-Persian poetry would follow, but then to introduce a limited essay on Indo-Persian literature in the first chapter. It would have been far more satisfactory to have a single volume devoted to Indo-Persian verse, which might include a chapter on the relation of Indo-Persian language and literature to Urdu. Then a separate volume could be devoted to Indo-Persian prose literature, including not only the Parsis and history, but music, science, Sufism and philosophy. It would have made sense, I believe, to devote a separate volume to Persian literature in Anatolia, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Second, I think that because each essay is separate and distinct unto itself the Introduction needed to do more to explain certain topics to readers. This would include an explanation of the profound literary and political significance of the Shāhnāmeh, which is mentioned as having been noted in five essays. It would also include an explanation of the terms sabk-e Irāqi and sabk-e Hendi, which are alluded to several times but never adequately explained. Who were the sabk-e Irāqi poets and what distinguishes their verse from the Indian style. Who were the later poets such as Sāʾeb of Tabriz and Bedil of India? The mention of these writers in discussions of sabk-e Hendi is confusing, since the section on Indo-Persian verse ends with the fourteenth century well before the style evolved. Finally, the essay on Judeo-Persian literature would probably fit better in an Iranian volume; it seems out of place here—as it does in the title. There is so much wonderful material here, but after reading and rereading the essays I could not avoid feeling that the volume was a somewhat ill-fitted collection rather than a cohesive whole.