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V. F. Minorsky and C. J. Edmonds Correspondence (1928-1965)
Series:
Iran Studies, Volume: 26
This volume is an annotated correspondence, of nearly forty years, between two prominent Orientalists. The letters cover a range of topics related to the Zagros Mountains, its peoples, their history, culture, and languages. They also offer a glimpse into the personal lives and careers of the two scholars, give valuable insights on the development of the field of Kurdish Studies, and to an extent outline the contours of what the two referred to as Zagrology.
V. F. Minorsky and C. J. Edmonds Correspondence (1928-1965)
Series:
Iran Studies, Volume: 26
This volume is an annotated correspondence, of nearly forty years, between two prominent Orientalists. The letters cover a range of topics related to the Zagros Mountains, its peoples, their history, culture, and languages. They also offer a glimpse into the personal lives and careers of the two scholars, give valuable insights on the development of the field of Kurdish Studies, and to an extent outline the contours of what the two referred to as Zagrology.
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Abstract
Across the Persianate regions of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Eurasia, the discourse of modernization had a deep, perhaps even dominant aesthetic dimension. Apparently disparate anxieties about oriental indolence, homosexuality and unmanliness, flattery and unmeaning speech, and submission to despots all may be understood as elements of a coherent critique of a single literary mode: taghazzul. Insofar as ghazal was a “royal genre” (Ireneusz Opacki), it provided the formal-aesthetic framing for numerous literary and speech genres, and thus for the social and political order. In case studies from across the Persianate zone, this article considers how writers’ refusal of taghazzul, or its excision from their texts, became a recognizable gesture of disaffiliation from the Persianate. In the resulting reordering of the literary field, taghazzul took on new functions in relation to the Western category of lyric.
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This article considers how sound—especially Persian phonology, but also music—and gender came together in articulating an Iranian national identity distinct from the Persianate past. Through analysis of the film The Lor Girl as well as close readings of poetry from the first half of the twentieth century by Nasīm-i Shumāl, Parvīz Khaṭībī, and poet-laureate Muḥammad-Taqī Bahār, the article demonstrates how an erotic attachment to language was fostered, in which the very phonology of Persian became the object of desire. Pharyngeal consonants became markers of Arab male sexual deviancy against which a feminized Iranian nation was to be protected. This eroticized discourse of language also contributed to establishing the Tehrani dialect as the Iranian national standard. The article considers how nationalism and modernity impacted the Iranian soundscape, as well as the impact of developments in Iran on Persian and Urdu in South Asia.
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The first fully-fledged documentary about the annual Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca was produced in 1928 when the Dutch filmmaker George Krugers (1890–1964) accompanied Muslim pilgrims from the Netherlands East Indies to the Arabian Peninsula. In the late 1920s, when the film project was carried out, an increasing number of Muslims from the archipelago embarked on the hajj journey, which was closely supervised and administered by Dutch colonial institutions. To uncover the “colonial gaze” engrained in the film, this article addresses the filming circumstances, the documentary’s visual content, its intended audiences, and the reception of the moving images in the Netherlands. It draws on Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, foregrounding the social, political, and technological agents and networks that undergird Krugers’ pioneering film project about the hajj.
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This article examines a large calligraphic panel from Morocco preserved in the Harvard Art Museums (2016.206). The artwork features stylized representations of Mecca and Medina alongside Prophet Muhammad’s sandals and a selection of religious texts praising the prophet. This composition is characteristic of Islamic devotional imagery, highlighting artistic transfer from Moroccan illustrated copies of the Dalāʾil al-Khayrāt by the ninth/fifteenth-century Sufi mystic al-Ǧazūlī. This article aims to contextualize the production of this specific panel artwork within the Wazzāniyya Sufi Brotherhood in Morocco. It also presents how the expression of religious devotion through symbolic images reflects a mediation between the believer and Islamic holy sites and relics of the prophet.
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The two most prestigious and technically challenging types of ceramic decoration used in the Islamic world during the sixth–seventh/twelfth–thirteenth centuries were mīnāʾī and lustre. By far the rarest type of mediaeval ceramic wares are the pieces featuring both types of overglaze decoration on the same vessel. This article examines the corpus of twenty-two sherds, including repaired and several previously unpublished examples. They are studied together to show the two main types of wares and their connection to other categories of mīnāʾī ware.
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Three documents from Fatimid Egypt, ʿAbbasid Mesopotamia, and Taifa Toledo – dated between the fourth–sixth/tenth–twelfth centuries – describe the practice of decorating audience halls with gold-threaded furnishing textiles. By identifying fragments believed to be described in these texts, it is proposed that these vibrant interiors were an aesthetic and ceremonial phenomenon of the period. The colour potential of such fabrics, often emphasised in poetry, appears to have encouraged their use, given the symbolic significance associated with the palace and the caliph-imam as vessels and emitters of divine light.
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This article seeks to demonstrate that a believed Seljuq hat from Iran is in fact a Fatimid hat from Egypt. For the first time, it uses an analysis of the paper documents that used to line this once splendid samite piece and asks about the archival logic of their reuse. Beyond this narrow question of origin, the analysis illustrates a methodological challenge for textile historians who often have to operate without additional documentary material and sufficient information on provenance. Finally, an attempt is made to contextualize what appears to have been a tradition of sartorial representation when limited textual and pictorial sources have survived.