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The Persianate World
The Persianate World
The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca
Edited by
Nile Green
Suggested citation: Green, Nile (ed.). The Persianate World: The Frontiers of a
Eurasian Lingua Franca. Oakland: University of California Press, 2019.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/luminos.64
27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Dedicated to the memory of
Marshall G. S. Hodgson (1922–68)
on the fiftieth anniversary of his death
C onte nts
Glossary 317
List of Contributors 319
Index 323
Illustrati ons
MAPS
F IG U R E S
For Persian, Arabic, and Chaghatai Turkish, the chapters in this volume adopt
a slightly modified version of the transliteration scheme of the International
Journal of Middle East Studies, simplified without recourse to macrons and un-
derdots, though preserving the ‘ayn. For the sake of consistency, for both Arabic
and Persian w has been used, rather than both w and v, to designate waw/vav.
Chapter 1 similarly follows IJMES guidelines in using modern Turkish orthography
to transliterate names, source materials, and terms from Ottoman Turkish, along-
side IJMES Persian transliteration for the names of Persian texts and their authors.
Two reasons influenced the decision not to use the now widespread “Persian”
system adopted by such journals as Iranian Studies and the Journal of Persianate
Studies. Firstly, the anachronistic implications of adopting modern Iranian vo-
calization of Farsi. Secondly, the consequent overriding of variations of Persian
pronunciation in various other regions of Eurasia. While the standardized system
adopted here does likely better reflect Central and South Asian pronunciations
of Persian, it is no universal panacea, and it raises issues of its own. The guiding
attitude has ultimately been a pragmatic one to render words recognizable to spe-
cialists while avoiding the more blatant assumptions of Iranian normativity and
centrality regarding the broader Eurasian history of the Persian language.
Through their coverage of Ming and Qing China, chapters 3 and 6 use the
Hanyu Pinyin system for their romanization of Chinese words.
Preface and Ac knowled g emen ts
In the half century since Marshall Hodgson coined the term “Persianate” for his
three-volume work The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civi-
lization, his neologism has been widely adopted by scholars of the Middle East,
Central and South Asia, and even further afield. In studies of the medieval and
early modern eras, and increasingly beyond, the term has become something
of a leitmotif. Yet despite the general embrace of Hodgson’s vocabulary—and
the expansion, even reification, of his original “Persianate zone” into a “Persian-
ate world”—there has been very little attempt to further define and delineate the
concept, still less to test the hypothesis that lay hidden in this terminology. The
validity of what we might call the “Persianate hypothesis”—of the long-term dom-
inance qua influence of Persian over the other languages and cultures of the east-
ern Islamic world—has been widely taken for granted. Indeed, in an increasingly
celebratory literature that has championed the “cosmopolitan” profile of Persian
literature and Persianate culture at large, questions that concern cultural hege-
mony, let alone the role of Persian in the implementation of imperial power, have
largely been sidelined. Altogether, this makes for poor history, because it avoids
key questions of process: of how Persian gained its hegemonic “Persianate” status;
how it subsequently maintained it for so many centuries; how (and indeed wheth-
er) it did so differently in the various regions where the language was used; and,
crucially, how and in what forms Persian came to stamp its “Persianate” profile
onto other languages and literatures.
To address these basic questions of the Persianate as process requires that
Persian be examined in its various relational profiles; that is, in relation to those
other languages and literatures now routinely categorized as “Persianate.” That is,
in order to examine the expansion, continuance, and eventual contraction of Per-
sian’s influence over various peoples and their own languages it is necessary to
study Persian in direct relation to those sundry other languages. Hodgson coined
the term “Persianate” precisely to point to these procedures of linguistic and wider
xiii
xiv Preface and Acknowledgements
cultural contact. Yet despite this, few studies have developed the relational and
comparative approach required to scrutinize Persian’s struggle for hegemony, even
for plain and harmless “influence,” over Eurasia’s other linguistic and literary cul-
tures. It is here that the present volume makes its intervention by drawing together
linguistic and area-based expertise to document the multiplicity of interactions
that created and maintained the much-vaunted “Persianate world” that stretched
unevenly from the Balkans to Bengal, or even China. The methodology brought to
bear in this volume’s twelve case-study chapters is therefore a comparatist one of
tracing how Persian related to its various linguistic interlocutors, whether literary
Chinese or vernacular Turkic. For neither the Persianate as process, nor the Per-
sianate world it created, can be understood through Persian sources alone.
In addition to developing this comparatist method for unpacking the processes
implicit in the term “Persianate,” this book takes seriously, if critically, the very no-
tion of a “Persianate world.” Perusing much scholarship, readers might be forgiven
for mistaking this term as another way of saying “India and Iran,” perhaps with a
quiet nod to Afghanistan. But however rich their literary heritage, those few re-
gions are insufficient to comprise a “world” in any meaningful sense, particularly a
world located amid the continuously intersecting geographies of Eurasia. For this
reason, the present volume seeks to de-provincialize the Persianate world from
its familiarly Indo-Iranian moorings by making a more robust case for a “world”
that encompassed the greater part of the Eurasian continent. The Persianate World
therefore brings into conversation scholars working on Persian texts that circulat-
ed as far apart as China and Britain—the far axes of the Eurasian continent—with
researchers of Persian’s more familiar homes in India and Iran. The introduction
and subsequent chapters reach from western Europe and the Balkans through the
Volga-Ural region to Siberia, thence down to China, with a limited outreach to
Southeast Asia before making a fuller arc back into the Indian subcontinent, and
thence to the wide and varied territories of Central Asia, the Caucasus, and, of
course, Iran.
This terminal placement of Iran is deliberate, because to situate Iran at the pe-
rennial “center” of a Persianate world is not merely an expression of methodologi-
cal nationalism. It is also a plain anachronism that negates the historicity of the
Persianate world in all its capacity for dynamism, multiplicity and evolution. As
the introduction to this volume makes clear, there is no doubting the importance
of parts of Iran (and no less of parts of today’s Afghanistan and Uzbekistan) to the
early history of written Persian, and to the literary and bureaucratic forms with
which the language became associated there. But to recognize this is emphatically
not the same as situating either Iran or even a more capacious “Khurasan” at the
perpetual center of the Persianate past. To do so would be to render the Persianate
world no more than a magnified “greater Iran,” or alternatively a “greater India,”
as it can sometimes seem. To avoid perpetuating this mischaracterization, and to
make a more credible case for the existence of something deserving the heuristic
Preface and Acknowledgements xv
title of “world,” the following chapters consider Iran as only one contributing
region of the Persianate world. In a work of world history, this decentering of Iran
is justified for two further reasons. Firstly, because in different periods and regions,
Iran was not necessarily regarded as the primary point of reference for Persian. For
the many Muslims who dwelt from the Volga basin up to Siberia and down into
Eastern Turkistan, it was Transoxiana (specifically Bukhara) that was long seen as
the fons et origo of Persian learning. Similarly, Timurid Herat and Samarqand were
the most influential Persianate role models of the elites of the Ottoman and argu-
ably also Mughal empires. Secondly, the decentering of Iran is also justified by
this volume’s main focus on the Timurid period onwards, on the centuries during
which a multiplicity of Persian literary traditions and hubs of Persianate culture
came to dilute the sweet clarion call of Shiraz.
It is in the hope of promoting this more mutable and protean picture of the
Persianate world that this book’s adopts the rubric of “frontiers.” As various world
historians have shown, to use the model of frontiers is to suggest spaces of cultural
métissage, of the linguistic fusions and literary syntheses inherent in Hodgson’s
foundational conception of the Persianate. And finally, to speak of a world of fron-
tiers in the plural is expressly not to speak of a world with a “center” in the singular.
It is the making and unmaking of this more pluralistic and permutable Persianate
world that the following pages seek to explore.
ف
The Persianate World is the outcome of a lengthy research and conference project
funded by the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library and the UCLA Center
for 17th- & 18th-Century Studies. Additional funding was supplied by the UCLA
Program on Central Asia and the Irving and Jean Stone Chair in Social Sciences.
Together, these sources of financial and administrative help made possible the
three international conferences and supplementary seminars that brought to Los
Angeles scholars from France, Russia, Turkey, China, Australia, and the United
States so as to lend initial shape to the essays in this volume. I would therefore
first like to thank the program committee of the Clark Memorial Library and
the UCLA Center for 17th- & 18th-Century Studies for awarding me the William
Andrews Clark endowed chair for 2015–16, which funded the three international
conferences at UCLA. I am especially grateful to the erstwhile Clark Library direc-
tor, Barbara Fuchs, her successor Helen Deutsch, and the staff of the Center for
17th- & 18th-Century Studies, particularly Erich Bollmann, Jeanette LeVere, Kathy
Sanchez, and Candis Snoddy. At the UCLA Program on Central Asia, I would
like to thank Bin Wong, Elizabeth Leicester, Nick Menzies, and Aaron Miller for
their years of support for the Program on Central Asia under my directorship in
2008–16. And I am grateful to Sanjay Subrahmanyam for releasing funds from the
Irving and Jean Stone Endowed Chair to invite several additional speakers. For
enabling my access to the varied materials cited in the introduction, I also thank
xvi Preface and Acknowledgements
the Charles E. Young Research Library at UCLA (especially David Hirsch) and my
graduate student Sohaib Baig, who helped copyedit several of the chapters under
my supervision and created the three maps. I am finally grateful to Eric Schmidt,
my editor at the University of California Press, for his enthusiastic support of the
book project, to Peter Dreyer for his careful copyediting and to Manju Khanna for
preparing the index.
For a variety of reasons, not all of the more than thirty presentations at the
“Frontiers of Persian Learning” conferences and seminars ultimately found a place
in this volume. More than a question of quality, this was ultimately a matter of
trying to ensure an even regional and temporal distribution of contributions to
the book, an agenda that lay somewhat at odds with the far greater abundance of
expertise on the history of Persian in India and Iran. Yet regardless of these ulti-
mately editorial matters, these other presenters and discussants played an essential
role in the intellectual evolution of this book. I am therefore extremely grateful to
Janet Afary, Muzaffar Alam, Ali Anooshahr, Subah Dayal, Walter Hakala, Kevan
Harris, Domenico Ingenito, Arash Khazeni, Mana Kia, Rajeev Kinra, Hajnalka
Kovacs, Paul Losensky, Ryan Perkins, John R. Perry, James Pickett, Ron Sela, Ra-
him Shayegan, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Audrey Truschke, Paul Wormser, and Liu
Yingsheng. I hope that the following pages will provide these and other friends
and colleagues with some small measure of the stimulation and inspiration I have
gained from their work.
Nile Green
Los Angeles, June 2018
Map 1. Sites of Persian use in Persianate Eurasia
Map 2. Persianate Eurasia, northern sector in detail
Map 3. Persianate Eurasia, southern sector in detail
Introduction
The Frontiers of the Persianate World (ca. 800–1900)
Nile Green
D E F I N I N G T H E “P E R SIA NAT E”
By the fifteenth century, having gained written form as a fashionable patois of the
court poets of tenth-century Bukhara, Persian had become a language of gover-
nance or learning in a region that stretched from China to the Balkans, and from
Siberia to southern India.1 As a lingua franca promoted by multi-ethnic and multi-
religious states, and aided further by education and diplomacy, Persian reached the
zenith of its geographical and social reach between the sixteenth and eighteenth
centuries. Then, from the early nineteenth century on, it was undermined by the
rise of new imperial and vernacular languages. By around 1900, the language,
which had once served to connect much of Eurasia, had retreated to Iran and
neighboring pockets of Afghanistan and Central Asia, where it was refashioned
into the national languages of Farsi, Dari, and Tajiki. The period between 1400 and
1900, then, marks an era defined by the maximal expansion then rapid contraction
of one of history’s most important languages of global exchange.
By focusing its case-study chapters on these five centuries, The Persianate World
aims to understand the reasons behind both this expansion and contraction of
Persian by identifying what functions the language was able and unable to serve
in the transformative early modern and modern eras of intensifying interactions
across Eurasia. By looking at the various “frontiers” of Persian—in the linguistic,
geographical, and social senses of the term—the following pages chart the limits of
exchange and understanding between the diverse communities brought into con-
tact by this language. In geographical terms, this book moves beyond a static mod-
el of Persian’s linguistic geography to trace the mobility of texts and text producers
as far away as the British Isles and China, as well as the localization of Persian in
Central Asia and India. By focusing on “horizontal” geographical frontiers and
“vertical” social frontiers, on routes and roots, this book seeks to identify the lim-
its—indeed, the breaking points—of Persian’s usefulness as a medium of informa-
tion, understanding, and affinity. If scholars now take for granted the notion that
Persian was a shared lingua franca, it is important to identify more precisely who
shared it, and for what (and indeed whose) purposes they did so. In focusing on
the five centuries that most densely marked both the making and unmaking of one
1
2 Introduction
had in mind. For his Persianate model assumed two things: an Islamic (or at least
culturally “Islamicate”) context in which Persian (and Islam) were in a position
of cultural and political dominance; and, by extension, a geography confined to
what used to be called the eastern Islamic world (or, as Hodgson himself preferred,
the “Persian zone”). By contrast, this volume not only reflects the wider historical
geography of Persian’s usage that reached ultimately from China to Britain. The
studies of language contact presented here also show how Persian interacted with
literary and linguistic cultures that both were and were not under the cultural or
political dominance of Persian or Islam. It is only by questioning the two core
assumptions of Hodgson’s model that we are able to examine the actual work-
ings of scribal literary and sociolinguistic exchange, and in so doing trace the
Persianate as process.
After Hodgson’s momentous venture in rethinking Islamic civilization in
world-historical terms, several other scholars have since the late 1990s proposed
amendments or alternatives to his concept of the “Persianate.” The first was Bert
Fragner, who put forward a model of Persophonie, or “Persophonia,” based on the
regions connected through a shared language, in which the basic conceptual dis-
tinction is between Persian as a “mother tongue” (Muttersprache) and as a “second
language” (Zweitsprache).5 Traced in its evolution over several centuries, this care-
fully demonstrated distinction allowed Fragner to distinguish his wider arena of
Persophonie from Iran and Iranians, both in their earlier manifestations as the
Shu‘ubiyya movement of the ‘Abbasid period and in their later manifestations in
modern Iranian nationalism.6 This basic but key distinction allowed Fragner to
place emphasis on the Asian traditions of multilingualism among which Persian
served as a “transregional contact language” (transregionale Kontaktsprache)
between a variety of different peoples and their own local languages.7
The approach developed in this book accepts Fragner’s emphasis on Persian’s
role as a transregional contact language. Through the aggregation of skills that
collaboration affords, the following chapters subject that sociolinguistic contact to
closer scrutiny. However, The Persianate World differs from Fragner’s implicit em-
phasis on spoken Persian by instead emphasizing the importance of written Per-
sian so as to develop a model of “Persographia” in place of “Persophonia.” For as
shown in more detail below, the scribal practices and manuscript-based exchanges
that expanded and sustained the Persianate world across the length of Eurasia did
not necessarily require the ability to speak Persian.
The approach developed here also differs from Fragner, and Hodgson before
him, in terms of chronology. Fragner closed his conspectus in the late seven-
teenth century, which he saw as marking the “decline” (Niedergang) of Persophonie
through “the emancipation of the Islamized daughter-languages [Tochtersprachen]
from the Persian foundational pattern [Grundmuster],” devoting only five pages
to the language’s subsequent three hundred years of history.8 By contrast, many
of the case studies in this book focus precisely on this neglected period between
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Winter.
Every limb and member of the body is made for some good
purpose.
The eye is made to see with; the ear is made to hear with; the
nose is made to smell with; the mouth is made to eat and speak with.
The feet are made to run and walk with; the hands are made to
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But do you think children’s hands were ever made to strike their
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Did God give you hands to injure or wound any of the creatures
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Nuts to Crack.
“What are you writing such a thundering big hand for, Patrick?”
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lether to her.”
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