Persianate Pasts National Presents Persi

Iranian Studies, Volume 55, Number 3, July 2022
CONTENTS
Special Issue: Persianate Pasts; National Presents: Persian

Literary and Cultural Production in the Twentieth Century
EDITORIAL NOTE
SUSSAN SIAVOSHI Editor’s Note 603
GUEST EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION

ARIA FANI AND Persianate Pasts; National Presents:
KEVIN L. SCHWARTZ Persian Literary and Cultural Production
in the Twentieth Century 605
ARTICLES
ALEXANDER JABBARI From Persianate Cosmopolis to
Persianate Modernity: Translating from
Urdu to Persian in Twentieth-Century
Iran and Afghanistan 611
SAMUEL HODGKIN Soviet Persian Anthologies:
Transnational, Multinational,
International 631
THOMAS LOY The Guide to Knowledge: The Journal
Rahbar-i Dānish and Its Role in Creating a
Soviet Tajik Literature (1927–1932) 653
ARIA FANI Disciplining Persian Literature in
Twentieth-Century Afghanistan 675
MEJGAN MASSOUMI Soundwaves of Dissent: Resistance
Through Persianate Cultural Production
in Afghanistan 697
SOURCES UNCOVERED
GREGORY MAXWELL BRUCE Persian Studies in India and the Colonial
Universities, 1857–1947 719
SHERVIN MALEKZADEH Forlorn Arabs and Flying Americans:
National Identity in the Early Childhood
Curriculum of Postrevolutionary Iran,
1979–2009 741
MOHSEN MOHAMMADI Marche Triomphale: A Forgotten Musical
Tract in Qajar-European Encounters 765
ARCHIVAL REPORT
CLAIRE ROOSIEN Not By Archives Alone: The “Revolution”
in Soviet Central Asian Literary Studies 777
AFTERWORD
REBECCA RUTH GOULD Afterword to Persianate Pasts, National
Presents: Persian Literary and Cultural
Production in the Twentieth Century 787
ARTICLE
RAHMAN VEISI HASAR AND Transcendence between Expression and
KIANOOSH REZANIA Secrecy: A Critical Cognitive Perspective
on the Metaphorical Discourse of Yā rsā n
Religion 791
REVIEWS
ANURAG ADVANI Supriya Gandhi, The Emperor Who Never
Was: Dara Shukoh in Mughal India 813
BEHZAD BORHAN Mana Kia, Persianate Selves: Memories of
Place and Origin before Nationalism 815
MATTHEW C. SMITH Kevin L. Schwartz, Remapping Persian
Literary History, 1700–1900 817
KEVIN L. SCHWARTZ Arash Khazeni, The City and the
Wilderness: Indo-Persian Encounters in
Southeast Asia 820
JÜRGEN PAUL James Pickett, Polymaths of Islam: Power
and Networks of Knowledge in Central Asia 822
SAMUEL THROPE Afshin Marashi, Exile and the Nation: The
Parsi Community of India and the Making of
Modern Iran 824
SHORT REVIEWS
NOOH MONAVVARY Meysam Safarchi, Tejārisāzi va
masrafgarāyi: tahavvol-e fazā va farhang-e
shahri dar Tehran 826
GHOLAMREZA GHAFFARI Fatemeh Javaheri, Tahlili naqqādāneh az
peymāyeshhāy-e melli dar Iran 827
AFSHIN MATIN-ASGARI Anonymous, Az Goruh-e Setareh ta
Sazman-e Vahdat-e Komunisti: Rahi
be Raha’i 827
MILAD ODABAEI Abdolhossein Azarang, Tārikh-e tarjomeh
dar Iran: as dowrān-e bāstān tā pāyān-e asr-
e Qajar 828
SHERVIN FARRIDNEJAD Goštāsb, Farzāne. Āẕar Kayvān:
zendegināme, ās̱ ār-o ʿaqāyed 829
ASSEF ASHRAF Gholam-Hosayn Zargarinezhad, Andisheh
va Siyasat dar Iran-e Qajar 830
REVIEW ESSAY
FAIZ AHMED The Ottoman Empire and the Modern
Hajj: Converging Histories from Central
Asia to the Indian Ocean 831
Iranian Studies (2022), 55, 603
doi:10.1017/irn.2022.50
E D I TO R I A L N OT E
Editor’s Note
I am pleased to introduce the special topic of “Persianate Pasts; National Presents: Persian
Literary and Cultural Production in the Twentieth Century” in this issue.
Has the twentieth century rise of nation-states in the Persianate cosmopolis made the
transregional Persianate world analytically irrelevant? Or do Persianate pasts endure in
different ways in the modern period? The studies featured in the issue foreground
the uneven and complex nature of this historical transition and locate the lingering presence
of the Persianate in twentieth-century Afghanistan, Iran, India, the Soviet East, and the
Caucasus. They neither take the nation-state as a teleological outcome, nor do they roman-
ticize the premodern Persianate as an overarching system from Bosnia to Bengal. Ultimately,
these contributions demonstrate how the Persianate was reconfigured in new guises both
nationally and trans-nationally. It is our hope that this special topic opens windows for
further inquiries into all subfields of Persianate studies including music, ethics, law, and
beyond.
In this issue we also introduce a series of short reviews of books written in Persian and
anticipate extending this feature to include books written in other non-European and
regional languages. We will encourage more authors who are based in Iran and neighboring
countries to contribute to such reviews, and hope that this would be a first step toward
expanding publishing opportunities in the journal for scholars from the region.
Sussan Siavoshi
Editor-in-Chief, Iranian Studies
Cite this article: Siavoshi S (2022). Editor’s Note. Iranian Studies 55, 603–603. https://doi.org/10.1017/irn.2022.50
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Iranian Studies
Iranian Studies (2022), 55, 605–609
doi:10.1017/irn.2022.31
I N T RO D U C T IO N
Persianate Pasts; National Presents: Persian Literary and

Cultural Production in the Twentieth Century1
Aria Fani and Kevin L. Schwartz

Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization, University of Washington, Seattle, USA and
Oriental Institute, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic
Email: [email protected]
(Received 21 April 2022; accepted 21 April 2022)
Persianate pasts die hard. Despite the birth of nation-states, advent of colonialism, rise of
national literatures, and emergence of new global technologies, the Persianate connections
defining the texts, idioms, and vocabularies that bound together large swaths of Islamic
Eurasia throughout the early-modern period continued to shape and inflect cultural and
literary production in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If the sixteenth to
eighteenth centuries established the high-water mark of Persianate transregionalism, then
the following two centuries were defined not so much by the undoing of this world in
toto, but by its redeployment, reimagining, and regeneration in new cultural guises and
(trans)national contexts. Exchanges across borders and languages helped to articulate new
meanings for Persian texts. Educational practices in British India and journalistic ones in
Central Asia provided venues for Persianate norms to be preserved, contested, and
consecrated. The internationalism of the Soviet East created a new avenue for dynamic
conversations about the nature of Persianate heritage and traditions. While new national
practices and political ecologies were taking shape across Afghanistan, the Caucasus, Iran,
and Central and South Asia, refashionings of Persianate pasts persisted. It is an exploration
of such refashionings and the people who participated in them that form the contents of this
special issue.
Conceptualizations of the Persianate world continue to generate vigorous discussion. The
term is utilized broadly to refer to modes of sociability, textual genres, circulation, reception,
and ethical and aesthetic norms that formed the connective tissue of a transregional
premodern cosmopolis. There also exists in the field a more restrictive understanding: the
Persianate as an analytic category only concerns the generative interplay between the
Persian language and Chaghatai, Urdu, Punjabi, Pashto, and many others. While the articles
of this special issue focus on the Persian language alone—and thus more closely cohere to an
understanding of the Persianate as a transregional cosmopolis—the presence of other lan-
guages, such as Pashto, Uzbek, Russian, and Urdu, resonate in the articles’ backgrounds. It
is a stark reminder of the ways in which the bounded nature of Persian as a national lan-
guage in the twentieth century was necessarily generated through contact with these others.
It is little surprise that the endurance of Persianate norms should remain an overlooked
phenomenon in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Persianate turn in Iranian
1
We are grateful to Cameron Cross who carefully shepherded this cluster through the peer review process and
significantly strengthened it through his own editorial insights. We thank Sussan Siavoshi for her support and intel-
lectual engagement from start to finish. We appreciate Assef Ashraf’s editorial assistance with the book reviews. Last
but not least, our deep gratitude goes to all the blind reviewers of Iranian Studies and our interlocutors: Ali Gheissari,
Samuel Hodgkin, Alexander Jabbari, and James Pickett.
606 Aria Fani and Kevin L. Schwartz
Studies and other related fields is still relatively new, and its methodological parameters and
value continue to be explored, debated, and refined.2 These debates are rightly focused on
premodern periods. Even recent monographs employing a Persianate paradigm to address
transregional phenomena up to the mid-nineteenth century, several of which are reviewed
in the pages of this special issue, do so by discussing the Persianate world on its own terms,
that is, preceding the emergence of the nation-state and invested in the world still defined
by the Ottomans (c. 1299–1922), Timurids (1370–1857), and Safavids (1501–1722).3 But what
of the worlds that succeed them? As Kaveh Hemmat noted in a recent essay in Iranian Studies,
when we pass from historiography of the early modern world to that of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, the nation state of Iran seems to simply appear in place of the
gunpowder empires or Persian cosmopolis. We may instead ask how the Persianate
world functioned as a context or matrix within which the Iranian nation state was gen-
erated—as we would say of the global enlightenment and the modern nation-state
system.4
Part of the problem stems from the reality that Persianate political structures, modes of soci-
ability, and hegemonic cultural forms were indeed threatened, and in many cases super-
seded, by the political, social, and cultural order of nation-states. This fact has made it
difficult to avoid teleological narratives that see the former’s replacement by the latter as
unfolding in an ineluctable and linear fashion. As Mana Kia and Afshin Marashi noted in
an essay entitled “After the Persianate,” “the conventional, spatial and temporal partitions
that have prevented critical transregional and transtemporal historical readings of the
Persianate are products of intellectual genealogies rooted in mid-twentieth-century area
studies paradigms, as well as the self-referential political ontologies of emergent nation-
states.”5 Thus far, what has most captivated scholars in Iranian and Persian Studies has
been the formation of the nation-state and its attendant features as a process that constricts
phenomena into nationally prescribed cantons of territory, language, ethnicity, and litera-
ture. Analyses have typically placed an overwhelming emphasis on how “post-Persianate”
societies relied on engagement with Western models and concepts to redefine themselves
in national terms over the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Such a determinative
framework, reliant on the apotheosis of the nation-state on the one hand, and East-West
engagements on the other, overlooks the crucial role and enduring resonances of
Persianate heritage and traditions outliving the environments in which they first took shape.
By “Persianate heritage and traditions,” we are referring primarily to the texts and tex-
tual practices that connected peoples and places across the Persianate cosmopolis by way of
embedded literary and cultural structures, found in the classification of poets in the bio-
graphical anthology (tazkirah) genre, conventions of the lyric (ghazal), courtly patronage
for litterateurs, the organization and construction of poetic societies (mushāʿirah), and social
relationships and bonds (student-teacher, patron-client, etc.).6 It was these conventions and
structures, among others, that established and guided literary authority, production, and cir-
culation in pre-modern times.7 But by the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries,
while Persianate literary and cultural production continued to engage intellectuals, scholars,
2
Green, The Persianate World; Amanat and Ashraf, The Persianate World; Ahmed, What Is Islam?; and Eaton, India in
the Persianate Age.
3
Schwartz, Remapping Persian Literary History; Khazeni, The City and the Wilderness; and Pickett, Polymaths of Islam.
4
Hemmat, “Completing the Persianate Turn,” 641–642.
5
Kia and Marashi, After the Persianate, 380.
6
Kia, Persianate Selves; Losensky, Welcoming Fighani; Sharma, Mughal Arcadia; Kinra, Writing Self, Writing Empire;
Tabor, “Heartless Acts”; Schwartz, Remapping Persian Literary History; Maria Szuppe, “A Glorious Past and an
Outstanding Present”; and Dudney, India in the Persian World of Letters.
7
Analyzing the resonances of other Persianate fields, such as politics and ethics, would be just as important, but
such is beyond the purview of this special issue.
Iranian Studies 607
and poets on a cross-regional basis, the structures guiding its authority and the mediums
shaping its dissemination and reception began to radically change.
New mediums, made possible in part by emergent global technologies and contact with
Europe, became major sites of lively discussions about the nature, place, and value of
Persianate heritage and traditions. Periodicals, literary histories, encyclopedias, radio,
tape cassettes, anthologies, and educational textbooks all served as nodes for social net-
works, civic associations, and scholarly circles to define the relevance and marketability
of Persianate pasts in the modern world. The outcomes of these discussions would diverge
based on the particularities of newly formed local imaginaries and take on the characteris-
tics and flavor of new national, regional, and international configurations: a Persianate past
as debated in a Tashkent journal compared to one appearing in an Afghan encyclopedia
would not mirror one another precisely.
But despite these divergences, the processes and trajectories undertaken across the
Persianate sphere of memorializing and engaging aspects of a shared transregional past
were not entirely discordant. The need to formalize a classical canon, historicize national
literatures, systematize aesthetics, and cultivate poetic authorities according to local circum-
stances and national desiderata became paramount undertakings for actors invested in
Persian cultural and literary production in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centu-
ries. In fact, in many instances, intellectuals from Tehran to Kabul to Dushanbe forged meth-
odologies that were mutually intelligible.8 As the contributions in this special issue make
clear, from the Caucasus to South Asia, Persianate pasts were being reassigned in endeavors
that proved every bit as consequential and pressing as contending with new European intel-
lectual currents and political entanglements.
The first four articles in this special issue focus on the last decades of the nineteenth and
earliest decades of the twentieth centuries. In “From Persianate Cosmopolis to Persianate
Modernity,” Alexander Jabbari analyzes how early twentieth-century Afghan and Iranian
scholars mediated the scholarly authority of the towering figure of Shibli Nuʿmani
(d. 1914) through translation from Urdu to Persian in order to produce literary histories
anchored in their local contexts. In “Soviet Persian Anthologies,” Samuel Hodgkin shows
how Soviet Eastern literary anthologies of the interwar period balanced the drive to delimit
the Persianate tradition along national lines against the unique opportunities that tradition
presented for Eastern internationalism. In “The ‘Guide to Knowledge,’” Thomas Loy also
takes aim at developments in Soviet Central Asia by addressing the brief yet generative
period of Tajik literary production in the 1920s and 1930s, when the notion of good poetry
was being hotly debated, contested, and shaped in the pages of the Persian-language peri-
odical Rahbar-i Dānish.
In “Disciplining Persian Literature in Twentieth-century Afghanistan,” Aria Fani analyzes
the politically fraught and discursively unstable process by which Afghan scholars system-
atized Persian aesthetics and literary style into a new informational medium, the encyclope-
dia, in the 1940s and 1950s. The last article turns its attention to the latter half of the
twentieth century. In “Soundwaves of Dissent: Resistance Through Persianate Cultural
Production in Afghanistan,” Mejgan Massoumi explores how the emergence of radio and
sound recording technology in the 1960s and 1970s helped to project Persianate poetic
authority and express dissent amid changing social and political dynamics.
The “Sources Uncovered” section offers critical considerations of empirical evidence that
has remained marginal to the field of Persian and Iranian Studies or has otherwise been
poorly understood. In “Marche Triomphale: A Forgotten Musical Tract in Qajar-European
Encounters,” Mohsen Mohammadi reassesses the history of European-style military bands
in Iran through the discovery and analysis of a unique archival source. In “Persian Studies
in India and the Colonial Universities, 1857–1947,” Gregory Maxwell Bruce sheds light on
8
Fani, “Becoming Literature,” chapter four; Green, “New Histories for the Age of Speed”; and Gould, “Dissidence
from a Distance.”
608 Aria Fani and Kevin L. Schwartz
the pedagogical role of Persian in twentieth-century India. Bruce’s uncovering of curricula

related to the teaching of Persian in colonial India should dismiss any doubt about the after-
life of this language well into the twentieth century in South Asia. In “Forlorn Arabs and
Flying Americans: National Identity in the Early Childhood Curriculum of
Postrevolutionary Iran, 1979–2009,” Shervin Malekzadeh’s close engagement with educa-
tional materials of the Islamic Republic of Iran reveals that traces of a Persianate civiliza-
tional ethos do not feature in representations of Iranian culture, history, and identity in
the instruction of primary school students; instead the main focus of these materials is to
define Iran’s place in the world vis-à-vis Arabs and Westerners. In spite of the fact that
only a lingering presence of the Persianate remains in the Islamic Republic’s primary school
curricula, studies of this nature remain crucial to investigating the venues, conditions, and
timeframes during which the Persianate evaporates from view.
Finally, Claire Roosien’s “Not By Archives Alone”—an archival report from Russia and
Uzbekistan—reminds us that so much of Persianate literary history has yet to be investi-
gated, debated, and written. In her afterword, Rebecca Gould critically reflects on the rele-
vance of the Persianate as a category of analysis in an era of emerging and intersecting
nationalisms. She calls on the field to “redefine the Persian in light of the Persianate, inscrib-
ing a plurality of identities and even languages into the term itself, and returning to the
original meaning of the term.”
To think beyond the diffusionist model of West-led modernization and the totalizing
framework of the nation-state, we must also refrain from reifying or centralizing the
Persianate by attending to its contestations and diverse instantiations.9 Aijaz Ahmad, reflect-
ing on Indian nationalists’ adoption of Said’s Orientalism, wrote that a historicist accounting
of “the relationship between the Brahminical and the Islamic High textualities, the
Orientalist knowledges of these textualities, and their modern reproductions in Western
as well as non-Western countries” would require “the most incisive of operations, the
most delicate of dialectics, to disaggregate these densities.”10 The articles in this special
issue each undertake this task with attention to the specific convergences involved in
their particular case studies, and the result is not only a series of conclusions with national,
regional, or transregional significance, but also a repertory of methods. The case of Persian
language and literature is a crucial one for the cultural history of the nineteenth and twen-
tieth centuries, and in accordance with Ahmad’s suggestion, we hope that our examination
of this case suggests some ways to work through other such inquiries with incisiveness and
delicacy.
References
Abedinifard, Mostafa, Omid Azadibougar, and Amirhossein Vafa, eds. Persian Literature as World Literature. Literatures
as World Literature Series. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021.
Ahmad, Aijaz. “Between Orientalism and Historicism: Anthropological Knowledge of India,” Studies in History 7, no. 1
(1991): 144–145.
Ahmed, Shahab A. What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015.
Amanat, Abbas and Assef Ashraf, eds. The Persianate World: Rethinking a Shared Sphere. Iran Studies 18. Leiden: Brill,
2018.
Dudney, Arthur. India in the Persian World of Letters: Ḳhān-i Ārzū among the Eighteenth-Century Philologists. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2022.
Eaton, Richard M. India in the Persianate Age: 1000-1765. Oakland: University of California Press, 2019.
Fani, Aria. “Becoming Literature: The Formation of Adabiyāt as an Academic Discipline in Iran and Afghanistan
(1895–1945).” PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2019.
9
This is in keeping with Amirhossein Vafa, Omid Azadibougar, and Mostafa Abedinifard’s caution that “the suc-
cessful transplantation of Persian Literature into World Literature could also lead to intensified nationalism” and
amnesia about the linguistic and cultural diversity of Persianate societies. “Introduction: Decolonizing a
Peripheral Literature,” 19.
10
Ahmad, “Between Orientalism and Historicism.”
Iranian Studies 609
Gould, Rebecca. “Dissidence from a Distance: Iranian Politics as Viewed from Colonial Daghestan.” In The Persianate
World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca, edited by Nile Green, 259–277. Oakland: University of California
Press, 2019.
Green, Nile, ed. The Persianate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca. Oakland: University of California Press,
2019.
Green, Nile. “New Histories for the Age of Speed: The Archaeological–Architectural Past in Interwar Afghanistan and
Iran.” Iranian Studies 54, no. 3–4 (2021): 349–397.
Hemmat, Kaveh. “Completing the Persianate Turn.” Iranian Studies 54, no. 3–4 (2021): 633–646.
Khazeni, Arash. The City and the Wilderness: Indo-Persian Encounters in Southeast Asia. Oakland: University of California,
2020.
Kia, Mana. Persianate Selves: Memories of Place and Origin Before Nationalism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020.
Kia, Mana and Afshin Marashi. “After the Persianate.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 36,
no. 3 (2016): 379–383.
Kinra, Rajeev. Writing Self, Writing Empire: Chandar Bhan Brahman and the Cultural World of the Indo-Persian State
Secretary. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015.
Losensky, Paul. Welcoming Fighani. Imitation and Poetic Individuality in the Safavid-Mughal Ghazal. Bibliotheca Iranica:
Literature Series 5. Costa Mesa: Mazda, 1998.
Pickett, James. Polymaths of Islam: Power and Networks of Knowledge in Central. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020.
Schwartz, Kevin. Remapping Persian Literary History: Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020.
Sharma, Sunil. Mughal Arcadia Persian Literature in an Indian Court. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017.
Szuppe, Maria. “A Glorious Past and an Outstanding Present: Writing a Collection of Biographies in Late Persianate
Central Asia.” In The Rhetoric of Biography: Narrating Lives in Persianate Societies, edited by L. Marlow, 41–88. Boston:
ILEX Foundation, 2011.
Tabor, Nathan Lee Marsh. “Heartless Acts: Literary Competition and Multilingual Association at a Graveside
Gathering in Eighteenth-Century Delhi.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 39, no. 1
(2019): 82–95.
Cite this article: Fani A, Schwartz KL (2022). Persianate Pasts; National Presents: Persian Literary and Cultural
Production in the Twentieth Century. Iranian Studies 55, 605–609. https://doi.org/10.1017/irn.2022.31
doi:10.1017/irn.2022.21
A RT I C L E
From Persianate Cosmopolis to Persianate Modernity:

Translating from Urdu to Persian in Twentieth-Century
Iran and Afghanistan
Alexander Jabbari
Farzaneh Family Assistant Professor of Persian Language and Literature, Department of International
and Area Studies, University of Oklahoma, Oklahoma, USA
(Received 8 June 2021; revised 1 March 2022; accepted 11 March 2022)
Abstract
This article examines twentieth-century Persian translations of Urdu-language works about Persian lit-
erature, focusing on two different Persian translations of an influential Urdu-language work on Persian
literary history, Shiʿr al-ʿAjam (Poetry of the Persians), by Shibli Nuʿmani. The article offers a close, com-
parative reading of the Afghan and Iranian translations of Shiʿr al-ʿAjam in order to understand why two
Persian translations of this voluminous text were published within such a short time period. These
translations reveal how Indians, Afghans, and Iranians were invested in the same Persianate heritage,
yet the emergence of a “Persianate modernity” undergirded by a cultural logic of nationalism rather
than cosmopolitanism, along with Iran’s and Afghanistan’s differing relationships to India and Urdu,
produced distinct approaches to translation.
Keywords: Persian literature; Urdu; Iran; Afghanistan; translation; Persianate; nationalism; adab
Introduction
Iran, Afghanistan, and South Asia have deep historic ties, and connections between them
remain more salient in the modern period than is commonly understood. Over the past
two decades, a new wave of scholarship has begun to break down the disciplinary divide
between Iranian studies and South Asian studies, as scholars have paid increasing attention
to modern Indo-Iranian connections in what some have recently termed the “Persianate
turn.”1 Some have focused on exchange between Iranians and Indian Zoroastrians
(Parsis).2 Others have located the roots of Iranian nationalism and modernization projects
in India.3 These scholars laid important ground and successfully challenged nationalist par-
adigms that had long defined Iranian studies. However, by engaging only with
Persian-language sources at the expense of Urdu materials, they have ignored the important
role of South Asian Muslims in modern Iranian intellectual and literary trends, failing to rec-
ognize bilateral exchange between Persian and Urdu rather than unilateral “influence.”4 This
1
Khazeni, The City and the Wilderness, 3; Hemmat, “Completing the Persianate Turn.”
2
Ringer, Pious Citizens; Grigor, “Persian Architectural Revivals”; Marashi, Exile and the Nation.
3
Tavakoli-Targhi, Refashioning Iran; Marashi, Nationalizing Iran.
4
This parallels earlier trends in comparative scholarship on India and the Malay Archipelago, in which cultural
transmission was seen as unidirectionally originating in India; see Ricci, Islam Translated, 11.
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Iranian Studies. This is an Open
Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/
4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
612 Alexander Jabbari
topic has been even more neglected in South Asian studies. Though Islamic religious net-
works connecting Iran and South Asia have been the subject of serious scholarly research,
literary and intellectual connections between the two have been comparatively overlooked.5
Most recently, innovative monographs have sought to bring together Iranian studies and
South Asian studies.6 They make valuable contributions, but as these books rely exclusively
on Persian-language sources, they have the same blind spot for Urdu as the existing Iranian
studies scholarship. Yet Urdu-language scholarship played an important role for the emer-
gence of national literature and literary history in Iran and Afghanistan.
Historically, Persian was hugely influential on Urdu in ways similar to the impact of
Arabic on New Persian; Urdu borrowed its script and a large proportion of its vocabulary
from Persian, while Persian literature also offered Urdu important literary forms and a rep-
ertoire of imagery and references.7 In the modern period, there has been a significant
amount of translation from Persian into Urdu. As Urdu and other “vernacular” languages
took the place that Persian had once held as a language of letters in South Asia, institutions
like Fort William College in Calcutta and organizations like the Anjuman-i Taraqqi-yi Urdu
(Association for the Progress of Urdu) across India (and, later, Pakistan) attempted to
bring the Persian literary corpus into Urdu through translation.8 While translations from
Urdu into Persian have historically been less common, some have nevertheless had an out-
sized impact and are worthy of study. Iranians’ engagement with English dominates the field
of Persian translation studies, but the impact of Urdu on Persian has received scant atten-
tion.9 Indian influences on Iranian languages and literatures are mostly acknowledged in
studies of late antiquity, such as the translations of the Panchatrantra from Sanskrit into
Middle Persian in the Sasanian period,10 or a relatively limited number of Middle Persian
loans from Sanskrit. Scholarship in South Asian studies has also increasingly addressed
the Mughal-era translations from Indic languages like Sanskrit and Braj into Persian,11 but
twentieth-century translations from Urdu into Persian belong to different circumstances,
different epistemological conditions, and reflect a different understanding of translation.
Whereas early modern translations were often patronized by the courts, the twentieth-
century translations were produced under the aegis of modern educational institutions.
Scholars of Afghanistan have paid closer attention to the influence of Urdu on modern
Afghan culture, and there is no question that Urdu has historically played a more salient
role for Afghans than for Iranians.12 Knowledge of the language is much more widespread
in Afghanistan than in Iran. Prominent Afghan political figures like the poet and foreign
minister Mahmud Tarzi (1865–1933) were conversant in Urdu, and Afghans often learned
Urdu through living in India or economic and educational exchange with the country.13
Yet this difference between Iran and Afghanistan may also have to do with the different
character of official nationalism in the two countries. The prominent role of Pashtun nation-
alism in forming the modern Afghan state and the fact that Pashtun nationalists imagined
themselves as a single people living on both sides of the Durand Line in Afghanistan and
British India (now Pakistan) cannot be ignored. While the Baluch people were similarly
divided between Iran and British India (today’s Pakistan), they have played no such role
5
Green, Bombay Islam; Fuchs, In a Pure Muslim Land.
6
Kia, Persianate Selves; Schwartz, Remapping Persian Literary History.
7
Matthews, “Urdu”; Shackle, “Persian Elements.”
8
On the Anjuman-i Taraqqi-yi Urdu, see Amstutz, “Finding a Home for Urdu.”
9
There are also few studies specifically addressing translation in the other direction, from Persian to Urdu. See
Bailey, History of Urdu Literature, 80–82; and Kavusi-Nizhad and Islami, “Barrasi-yi Pishinah-yi Tarjumah.”
10
Riedel, “Kalila wa Demna.”
11
Truschke, Culture of Encounters; Ernst, “Muslim Studies of Hinduism”; Sarma and Zamani, “On the Persian
Translation of Bhāskara’s Līlāvatī.”
12
Green, “Trans-border Traffic”; Katib Hazarah, Kabul Under Siege, 11.
13
Faiz, Afghanistan Rising, 97.
Iranian Studies 613
in Iranian nationalism; unlike the Pashtuns of Afghanistan, in Iran the Baluch have been
marginalized, sidelined by Persian-speakers.
This article closely examines Persian translations of Urdu-language works about Persian
literature as a means of considering the less-studied side of the exchange between Urdu and
Persian. In particular, it focuses on translations of an influential Urdu-language work on
Persian literary history, Shiʿr al-ʿAjam (Poetry of the Persians), by Shibli Nuʿmani. Bridging
the gap between the tazkirah tradition and modern methodologies of literary historiography,
Shiʿr al-ʿAjam was an important work for literary modernity in India, Afghanistan, and Iran.
The text was translated into Persian on two separate occasions: first by a group of Afghans in
the 1920s and then again by an Iranian translator between the 1930s and 1950s. What was
the significance of this text for twentieth-century Persian readers? What role did it play
in burgeoning projects of producing national literary histories in Iran and Afghanistan?
Why were two Persian translations of such a voluminous text produced within such a
short span of time? This article’s close and comparative reading of the Afghan and
Iranian translations of Shibli’s Shiʿr al-ʿAjam offers an entry point into these questions.
Analysis of the translations reveals how twentieth-century Indians, Afghans, and Iranians
were all invested in the same literary heritage: the poetry of the premodern Persianate
world. Persian had been an important language of learning (among other functions) across
much of Eurasia, linking societies together in a Persianate cosmopolis through a shared
idiom and texts and common aesthetic, social, and political forms. The term “cosmopolis”
need not suggest an idealized zone free of hierarchies, as scholars like Nile Green rightly
warn against romanticizing the Persianate past.14 But the Persianate was cosmopolitan in
the sense that Persian learning was not the purview of one religious or ethnic community,
but rather the common language of varied groups, allowing for connections across a highly
diverse Kulturkreis without a single geographic core or center.15
As the cultural logics underpinning the Persianate shifted in the nineteenth century,
modernity and nationalism did not simply bring an end to Persianate affiliations as is
often claimed.16 Instead, such historical ties endured—now strengthened by new physical
infrastructure like drivable roads linking India, Afghanistan, and Iran—and even played a
crucial role in generating national identities and national heritage.17 Modernizers reworked
the Persianate textual tradition, producing a Persianate modernity which drew on the con-
nections that the earlier cosmopolis had engendered.18 Yet, simultaneously, this Persianate
modernity sought to cover its tracks, erasing the traces of its cosmopolitan connections so as
to present an image of national heritage that appeared to be sui generis, independent, self-
contained.19 In other words, what I term “Persianate modernity” is the form the Persianate
takes after the transformations of the nineteenth century. It is the connected framework left
over from the bygone cosmopolis that enables intellectuals from Iran, Afghanistan, and India
to learn from each other in their modernizing projects, and to rework the literary texts of
the earlier tradition into national heritage.
In the 1920s, Afghan translators produced what can be understood as a “cosmopolitan
Persianate” translation: closely in line with the Urdu original, in a context of porous borders
between Persian and Urdu, for an audience that defined itself as much in religious terms as
14
Green, “Frontiers of the Persianate World,” 2.
15
Eaton, “The Persian Cosmopolis.”
16
For examples of such claims, see Arjomand, “From the Editor,” 3; and Spooner, “Epilogue,” 303. I draw from
Fredric Jameson’s understanding of a “dominant cultural logic” as “the force field in which very different types
of cultural impulses…must make their way” (Jameson, Postmodernism, 6).
17
On this infrastructure, see Green, “New Histories”; and Koyagi, “Drivers across the Desert.”
18
As Eric Lewis Beverley suggests, cosmopolitan languages like Persian “provided templates whose elements
could be disaggregated and recombined into new systems” (Beverley, “Documenting the World,” 1051–52).
19
Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi describes a similar dynamic in which the contributions of Persianate native infor-
mants were erased from European Orientalism’s self-narrative, producing what he terms a “genesis amnesia”
(Tavakoli-Targhi, Refashioning Iran, 18–34). He also first coined “Persianate modernity” (ibid., 9, et passim).
national ones. The later Iranian translation is instead a “Persianate modern” translation,
severing the text from its Indo-Persianate, Muslim context and more freely remaking it
for a national, Iranian audience. The Afghan translation is a text within the expansive,
fluid boundaries of the adab tradition, while the Iranian translation belongs to the discipline
of discrete, nationally bounded literature. After analyzing these two translations, this article
concludes by surveying some of the other noteworthy translations of Urdu texts into
Persian.
Shibli’s Poetry of the Persians between Adab and “Literature”

By the end of the nineteenth century, Urdu had become a major vehicle for Islamic modern-
ist thought, not only in South Asia but globally, including both Iran and Afghanistan. The
Indian Muslim reformer Abu al-Aʿla Maududi, for example, influenced Islamist political
thinkers everywhere from Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb in Egypt to the Taliban move-
ment in the Afghan-Pakistani borderlands and Ruhollah Khomeini in Iran.20 While the global
reach of Urdu and Indo-Muslim political and religious thought has been the subject of ample
scholarly attention, the literary impact of Urdu has been neglected. Scholarship on these
international connections reflects an artificial division, treating literature as a separate
sphere from politics and religion. The latter two are recognized as international, ecumeni-
cally influencing and receiving influence from as far afield as South Asia, Lebanon, Egypt,
and beyond, whereas literature appears as if it were a hermetically sealed domain within
national borders. This division may in part stem from the way the sources describe them-
selves: while Iran’s Islamic revolutionaries made no secret of their internationalism, hoping
to spread the revolution beyond the borders of Iran, its literary scholars were by and large
nationalists who saw Iran as having a proprietary claim to Persian literature.21 Yet as recent
scholarship has demonstrated, the project of modernizing and canonizing Persian literature
was also an international one, participating in exchanges across (and beyond) the Persianate
sphere, despite any pretentions to the contrary from the nationalist litterateurs.22
Shibli Nuʿmani (1857–1914) was a key figure in Islamic modernist thought in South Asia,
as well as in the project of modernizing the Persianate literary heritage. An Islamic scholar,
reformer, and educator from Azamgarh in northern India, his life’s work was to develop
Islamic education in India—and ultimately develop an approach to Islam—that could be com-
patible with colonial modernity, engaging with European historiographic methodologies in
order to revitalize the Islamic tradition. Shibli’s Shiʿr al-ʿAjam (Poetry of the Persians) is a mon-
umental work on Persian poetry, spanning five volumes totaling over 1,500 pages, written in
Urdu and published between 1908 and 1918. The first three volumes outline periods of
Persian poetry and are structured according to the traditional tazkirah format, organized
around biographical entries on the major poets of each period and selections of their poetry.
The final two volumes, however, move entirely beyond the biographical anthology format
and offer literary history and criticism of a kind that cannot be found in the tazkirah
20
Green, Global Islam, 82; Fuchs, “A Direct Flight to Revolution.” Despite their sectarian differences, Maududi and
Khomeini shared a vision of a modern Islamic state. The two had met and discussed political ideas in Mecca in 1963
(Nasr, The Vanguard, 154, 253n29), and prior to Khomeini’s return to Iran in 1979, his emissaries visited Maududi in
Pakistan (Wink, “The Islamization of Pakistan,” 45; Chaman, Meri Yadgar Mulaqaten, 48–53 [cited in Rieck, The Shias of
Pakistan, 434–35n246]). The extent of Maududi’s influence on Khomeini is debated. Saïd Amir Arjomand contends
that “Khomeini’s idea of Islamic government…does not betray any influence of the ideological innovations of
Mawdudi,” but nevertheless concedes that Maududi was read widely (in Arabic and Persian translation) by
Khomeini’s followers, and significantly influenced the slogans and language of the 1979 Revolution (Arjomand,
The Turban for the Crown, 97, 104–5).
21
Historian Joan Wallach Scott warns against taking the terms used and claims made by historical sources at face
value, lest the scholar become “an unwitting party to the politics of another age” (Scott, Gender and the Politics of
History, 137–38).
22
Hodgkin, “Classical Persian Canons”; Schwartz, Remapping Persian Literary History.
Iranian Studies 615
genre. Synthesizing Islamic historiographical methods with the techniques of European

Orientalist scholarship, Shibli provides an account of Persian poetry guided by a continuous,
progressive sense of time. Rather than merely discussing individual poets, each discretely
bound within separate biographical entries as in traditional tazkirahs, in the fourth and
fifth volumes of Shiʿr al-ʿAjam Shibli discusses poetic movements which build on literary
and historical developments that precede them.
This text, which drew on a wide range of Persian tazkirahs and dīvāns from Iran and South
Asia alike, played a vital role in the transition from tazkirah (a premodern genre of biograph-
ical anthology) to modern literary history,23 and became a central textbook for the teaching
of Persian literature in India. It later also found its way into the Persian literature curriculum
in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Pakistan. The Iranian literary scholar Saʿid Nafisi (1895–
1966) called it “the first book by a wise and forward-thinking man to analyze [tajziyah va
tahlīl] Persian adab,” expressing his surprise that though Shibli wrote his book in “one of
the third-rate cities of India” (az shahr-hā-yi darajah-yi sivvum-i hind), it “paved the path of
inquiry [taḥqīq] for those who wanted guidance,” to such an extent that Edward Granville
Browne (1862–1926), “one of the famous Orientalists of his time,” relied time and again
on Shibli’s work.24
Shibli’s Shiʿr al-ʿAjam illustrates the difficulty in imposing clear divisions between Urdu
and Persian, tazkirah and literary history, literary heritage and national community, secular
culture and religious knowledge, as adab generally elided such neat distinctions. While the
term is often translated as “belles lettres,” adab is a more expansive concept not limited
to the strictly literary; it also encompasses moral behavior, perhaps better understood as
something akin to “habitus.” The Iranian litterateur Muhammad-Husayn Furughi “Zukaʾ
al-Mulk” (1839–1907) explained adab as
knowing the limits and extent of everything…adab…means dānish [knowledge]…but in

the terminology of the literati [udabā] of the age, the science of adab [ʿilm-i adab] is
knowledge of poetry and prose, which they call “oratory” [sukhan-sanjī] in Persian,
and whoever possesses this knowledge is an orator, or adīb in Arabic. The meaning
of adabiyyāt is those forms of speech [sukhan] that teach knowledge and help a person
to recognize divine favor and attain the light of clear-sightedness and the luster of
awareness.25
Thus knowledge informing proper social behavior (adab) is cultivated through the mastery of
the literary forms (also adab) in which it finds its expression; Mana Kia has usefully defined
adab as “proper form,” which captures both the aesthetic-literary and social-ethical dimen-
sions of the concept.26 From the nineteenth century on, the meaning of adab began to shift
from belles lettres and “cultivated knowledge as well as character, conduct, and manners”;
the term came to signify “literature” in a modern, narrowly defined sense: secular, finite,
one part of a “world republic of letters.”27
23
Jabbari, “The Making of Modernity.” On the transition from tazkirah to literary history, see also Mufti, Forget
English!, 131–44; and Grewal, “Urdu through Its Others,” 88–130.
24
Fakhr-i Daʿi, Shiʿr al-ʿAjam, 3: hā-vāv. In his review of Edward Browne’s A Literary History of Persia,
Muhammad-Taqi Bahar describes Shibli as the first person outside of Iran to write a critical, scholarly history of
Iranian literature (Bahar va Adab, 1:340–42). For Browne’s engagement with Shibli, see Browne, Literary History of
Persia, 3:108, 261, 265–80, 286–98, 541; 4:163–65, 241–70, 299. In addition to his reception in Iran and Afghanistan,
Shibli features in the Tajik educational textbook Adabiyoti Tojik (Toirov et al., Adabiyoti Tojik, 81).
25
Furughi, ʿIlm-i Badiʿ, 23. On this text, see Fani, “Iran’s Literary Becoming.”
26
Kia, “Adab as Ethics of Literary Form,” 282, 288; Kia, Persianate Selves, 199–200; on adab, see also Metcalf, Moral
Conduct and Authority; Ahmed, What Is Islam?, 380–81; and Mayeur-Jaouen, “Introduction.”
27
Allan, In the Shadow of World Literature, 6; Mufti, Forget English!, 80; Krämer, “Religion, Culture, and the Secular,”
60–61; Casanova, The World Republic of Letters; Hallaq, “Adab e) Modern Usage.”
Yet to understand premodern adab as secular literature, as many now do, is to miss much
about its historical function. Adab encompassed pious odes in praise of the Prophet as well as
satires lampooning the faithful and flouting religious strictures; it cannot be accurately
described as either secular or religious. As Thomas Bauer reminds us, the secular/religious
binary is of little use for understanding much of the Islamicate world. In Europe, modern
“secular” domains like literature or law took on distinct disciplinary identities only after
achieving independence from the control of the church—the sphere of religion. But in the
Islamicate world, in the absence of any such centralized church, “religion” constituted itself
differently within each domain, according to the norms of that field. This is not to suggest
that every aspect of Islamicate societies was primarily concerned with religious matters, but
rather that religion did not constitute a separate sphere of its own.28 Kia has articulated a
definition of the Persianate with Islam and Persian adab at its core, refining Shahab
Ahmed’s work which also considered Islam as a centrally constitutive element of the
Persianate.29 Adab was “the public culture of the Persianate ecumene,” as Brian Spooner
describes it, and I argue that just as the Persianate endured well into the twentieth century
and beyond—much later than conventionally thought—so did adab.30 Kia’s formulation,
understanding the “Persianate” and the “Islamic” as aporetically linked through adab, is
most useful for making sense of how an Islamic scholar like Shibli approached Persian
poetry, and how he was first received by his Afghan translators.
Shibli understood Persian poetry not as secular literature but as adab. Rather than a sec-
ular enterprise, adab was “part of knowledge (ʿilm)” as Astrid Meier aptly put it.31 As such,
adab was within Shibli’s purview as an Islamic scholar (ʿālim).32 Moreover, the very notion of
world literature—a world system of discretely bounded, mutually interchangeable national
literatures—is absent in Shibli’s Shiʿr al-ʿAjam. For Shibli, Persian(ate) poetry was not one
national literature among others but a world unto itself, a cosmopolis not divided by nation-
states but united by Islam; it was the poetry of ʿajam, a category inclusive of many peoples.33
Nor was Persian a completely discrete literature, but rather one with porous boundaries sep-
arating it from Arabic and Urdu.34 Shibli’s mission was similarly not a secular one. He con-
sidered Persian poetry to play a religious role in Muslim education in the subcontinent:
literary adab was the basis for moral cultivation. Shiʿr al-ʿAjam was written for use in
Muslim educational institutions like the Nadwatul Ulama seminary; for Shibli, the era of
Persian poetry begins with Islam, and any (Middle) Persian verse that predates Islam does
28
Bauer, Culture of Ambiguity, 129–35.
29
Kia, Persianate Selves, 9, 13–15; Ahmed, What Is Islam?, 83–85. Though Ahmed rejected the term “Persianate” in
favor of a “Balkans-to-Bengal complex” in order to decenter the Persian language, Kia contends that such a complex
“depends on the transregional reach of the Persian language.” It was not Turkic, after all, but Persian learning that
the Balkans and Bengal had in common. James Pickett similarly offers a lucid definition of the Persianate, charac-
terized by its relationship to a Persian literary canon and to Islam. Pickett, Polymaths of Islam, 22–29.
30
Spooner, “Epilogue,” 302–3; Kia and Marashi, “After the Persianate.” For a fascinating engagement with
Indo-Muslim adab in the early twentieth century, see Mian, “Surviving Desire.”
31
This quote comes from Meier’s study of one of Shibli’s intellectual influences, the Hanafi scholar Ibn ʿAbidin.
Meier, “Adab and Scholarship,” 95.
32
Adab was crucial for religious scholars, to the extent that Bauer describes the “adabization of the ulama” as
early as the Saljuq period. Bauer, “Mamluk Literature,” 108–11.
33
On Indian conceptions of ʿajam including Shibli’s understanding of the term, see Sharma, “Redrawing the
Boundaries,” 57–60.
34
Pickett’s description of the relationship between languages in Central Asia offers a fitting model for our under-
standing of Persian, Arabic, and Urdu. Drawing from Sheldon Pollock’s notion of cosmopolis (Pollock, “Cosmopolitan
and Vernacular”; Pollock, Language of the Gods, 10–30), Pickett describes Persian as simultaneously a vernacular of the
Arabic cosmopolis, and a cosmopolis unto itself, of which Turkic is a vernacular, using the metaphor of Russian nest-
ing dolls to explain how each system can both contain and be contained (Pickett, Polymaths of Islam, 26–34). We might
understand Urdu in similar terms to Pickett’s discussion of Turkic, as a vernacular of the Persian cosmopolis. The
vernaculars drew much from the cosmopolis while contributing less to it, but the borders of such a hierarchy were
nevertheless occasionally permeated.
Iranian Studies 617
not constitute poetry but merely rhymed prose.35 He gave a particularly Islamic framework
to his Shiʿr al-ʿAjam, counting Persian literature among the Islamic sciences and defining its
territory according to the lands upon which Islam, a “cloud of munificence,” rained.36
While Shibli’s project can hardly be described as secular, it was certainly modern,37 and
displays cross-pollination between the Islamic mode of reading associated with adab and
what Edward Said would later describe as a humanistic practice of “secular criticism,” crit-
icism that is “skeptical, secular, reflectively open to its own failings.”38 The fourth and fifth
volumes of Shiʿr al-ʿAjam exemplify the humanistic project of historicism as they approach
Persian poetry not as timeless but rather as a specifically historical entity. Shibli articulates
his understanding of humanistic scholarship clearly in another text, his travelogue to Egypt
and the Ottoman Empire. After visiting Cairo’s renowned center of Islamic learning, the
al-Azhar seminary, Shibli expresses his disappointment with Azharite scholarship: “several
of the shaykhs and disciples of Azhar are thought to be accomplished masters in their sub-
jects…but the entire foundation of their accomplishment rests on the memorization of minu-
tiae, in which there is not even a suspicion of critical research [tahqīq] and innovative
thinking [ijtihād].”39 What Shibli wants, then, is “secular criticism,” but squarely within a
committed Islamic framework, not a secular one—a model that would upset Said’s neat
binary between humanistic skepticism and religious dogmatism. Shibli’s Shiʿr al-ʿAjam is a
critical, historicist approach to an object—Persian poetry—conceived of in Islamic terms.
It is therefore in many ways a hybrid, liminal text, complicating neat binaries between reli-
gious and secular, traditional and modern genres, tazkirah and literary history, adab and lit-
erature. Accordingly, the translation history of Shiʿr al-ʿAjam straddles these divisions as well.
A Tale of Two Translations

Shiʿr al-ʿAjam was translated into Persian on two separate occasions: first in Afghanistan, then
in Iran. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the Afghan state put Persian literature
in the service of its modernizing policies and efforts to craft an Afghan national identity.40
Under Amanullah Khan (r. 1919–26), new, modern schools were founded with Persian liter-
acy at the heart of the curriculum, and in 1921 the Afghan Ministry of Education was estab-
lished.41 Crucially, the ministry drew on an Urdu-language text, Shiʿr al-ʿAjam, for its Persian
curriculum. The first translation of Shiʿr al-ʿAjam was commissioned by the Afghan Ministry
of Education and published in Kabul and Lahore between 1925 and 1927 by a series of Afghan
translators including Mansur Ansari and Burhan al-Din Khan Kushkaki (clerics trained in
Islamic law), Fayz Muhammad Khan (Afghanistan’s foreign minister), Shir Muhammad
Khan, Sardar Gul, and Sarvar Guya Iʿtimadi (adviser to the Ministry of Education). For the
sake of brevity, this team-translation is henceforth referred to as “the Afghan translation.”
These translators would all go on to become members of the literary society Anjuman-i
Adabi-yi Kabul (Literary Association of Kabul), inaugurated by Muhammad Nadir Shah
(r. 1929–33) in 1931.42 As part of its nation-building efforts, the state established additional
35
Shibli, Shiʿr al-ʿAjam, 4:114.
36
Ibid., 1:1, 2:1.
37
For an analysis of Shibli’s thought in terms of Islamic modernism, see Murad, Intellectual Modernism of Shibli
Nuʿmāni. For his modernizing innovations in Shiʿr al-ʿAjam, such as his distinctly modern sensibilities around homo-
erotic poetry, see Jabbari, “The Making of Modernity.”
38
Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, 26. Michael Allan similarly contrasted the mode of reading embedded in
premodern adab, “a practice of reading based on memorization, embodiment, and recitation in Qur’anic schools,”
with literary reading, a “practice based on reflection, critique, and judgment” (Allan, In the Shadow of World Literature, 3).
39
Shibli, Turkey, Egypt, and Syria, 183; Shibli, Safarnamah, 185.
40
Green, “Afghan Literature between Diaspora and Nation,” 13–16.
41
On the modernizing educational reforms of this period, see Baiza, Education in Afghanistan, 67–93.
42
On the Literary Association of Kabul, see Ahmadi, “Kabul Literary Society”; and Fani, “Becoming Literature,”
82–86.
literary and cultural institutions in the 1930s and 1940s like the Literary Association of Herat,
the Faculty of Letters at Kabul University, and journals like Kabul and Aryana. The translation
of Shiʿr al-ʿAjam later served as both an important source of information and a historio-
graphic model for Afghan scholars developing a modern approach to Persian literature.43
Yet the translation, carried out in the 1920s, precedes much of the nation-building to
come later in the century, and the translation practices in many ways reflect an older,
cosmopolitan Persianate approach to language and literary heritage. In this adabī approach,
the relationship between Persian and Urdu is capacious, with relatively fluid boundaries sep-
arating them, and the role of the translator(s) is obscured. These practices differ from the
nationalist projects that would be undertaken later in the century.44
The volumes of the Afghan translation lack any preface or introduction to situate the text,
simply presenting Shiʿr al-ʿAjam as it is, without explanation. The translation itself is
extremely faithful, cleaving closely to the original, even reproducing its mistakes. For exam-
ple, Shibli gives the wrong year of death for Yaʿqub-i Lays, and this error is repeated in the
Afghan translation. Another example of this noteworthy faithfulness is where Shibli occa-
sionally uses an English word in Urdu, such as karīkṭar “character.” In the original Urdu
text, the English word is written according to Urdu orthography, using the letter ‫( ﭦ‬the ret-
roflex [ṭ]) as is common in Urdu for representing the English consonant “t” (Fig. 1).45
In the Afghan translation, even the Urdu spelling of an English word is precisely repro-
duced, despite the letter used being absent from conventional Persian orthography (Fig. 2).46
This suggests fluid boundaries between Urdu and Persian. Elements such as Urdu-specific
letters or English loanwords nativized in Urdu can appear in the Persian text. The only place
where the Afghan translators’ voice can be heard is in the occasional footnote: sequestered
away from the text by a line and usually signed with an individual translator’s name.47
The manner in which the Afghan translators dealt with Shibli’s citations of Urdu verse
further illustrates the fluid boundaries between the two languages. Shibli frequently quotes
from Urdu poets like Mir Anis (1803–74), Mir Taqi Mir (1725–1810), Mir Zamir (1775–1855),
and Mirza Dabir (1803–75) in order to demonstrate points about poetics. For example, Shibli
quotes from Mir Anis in his discussion of poetic intemperance (bē-iʿtidālī). The Afghan trans-
lation maintains the quotation (accurately reproducing the Urdu spelling, including unique
Urdu characters such as the undotted nasal nūn and the retroflex ṛā) and following discus-
sion exactly. The translators added Persian interlinear translation in a smaller hand between
the lines of Urdu poetry.48 In another case, an Urdu couplet by Mirza Dabir is quoted in the
original, followed by Persian explanation rather than interlinear translation.49 The relation-
ship between Persian and Urdu in Shibli’s text—maintained in the Afghan translation—
exemplifies what Nile Green termed “Persian plus,” with Persian as a central but not sole
language of the Persianate.50 The presumed Afghan reader is still part of a Persianate
43
Fani, “Disciplining Persian Literature.”
44
Senzil Nawid demonstrates how Afghan historiography took on a distinctly national character beginning under
the rule of Muhammad Nadir Shah in the 1930s. See Nawid, “Writing National History.”
45
In fact, this Urdu spelling convention had only recently become more or less standardized, replacing the earlier
convention of writing the retroflex with four dots as ‫ٿ‬. Ambiguity persisted in Urdu orthography well into the
twentieth century. While Pashto also features retroflex consonants, it does not represent them using this convention;
it differentiates them from their non-retroflex equivalents with a unique “ring” ( panḍak) character, as in ‫[ ټ‬ṭ].
46
This is not necessarily always true of Persian texts from South Asia, however. For example, Ghiyas al-Din
Rampuri’s Ghiyas al-Lughat dictionary, written in Persian and published in Lucknow ca. 1847, includes a map
where local placenames like ḍhākah “Dhaka” and paṭnah “Patna” are written with the same Urdu-style retroflex char-
acters. I thank Sameer ud Dowla Khan for noticing this and Vaibhav Kaul for sharing the reference.
47
For example, see Afghan translation, 1:15, where two footnotes are signed with “Ansari,” or 5:32 where the foot-
note is signed “mutarjim Ansari,” in order to distinguish these notes from Shibli’s own footnotes.
48
Afghan translation, 4:74–75; cf. Shibli, Shiʿr al-ʿAjam, 4:55.
49
Afghan translation 4:76; cf. Shibli, Shiʿr al-ʿAjam, 4:56.
50
Green, “Frontiers of the Persianate World,” 8. Shahab Ahmed argues similarly for a “Balkans-to-Bengal com-
plex” in which Persian is only one important language alongside others. Ahmed, What Is Islam?, 83–84.
Fig. 1 - Colour online, B/W in print Iranian Studies 619
Figure 1. [The English loanword “character” (karı̄ kṭ ar) as spelled in the Urdu text.]
Fig. 2 - Colour online, B/W in print
Figure 2. [The Afghan translation reproduces karı̄ kṭ ar using the original Urdu orthography.]
cosmopolis; they may prefer to read in Persian but nevertheless have some familiarity with
Urdu as well.
Slightly more is known about the circumstances of the second translation of Shiʿr al-ʿAjam
into Persian, and its translator, the Iranian Sayyid Muhammad-Taqi Daʿi al-Islam “Fakhr-i
Daʿi” Gilani (b. 1260 HS/1881–82 CE in Tamijan, Gilan, d. 1343 HS/1964 CE in Tehran).
Fakhr-i Daʿi was a political reformist and constitutionalist, as well as a Shiʿi mujtahid (reli-
gious jurist), having studied with Akhund Muhammad-Kazim Khurasani (1839–1911) and
Ayatollah Shaykh ʿAbdullah Mazandarani (1840–1912) in Najaf. Unusually for religious schol-
ars at the time, Khurasani and Mazandarani supported institutions which taught Persian lit-
erature, patronizing not only Islamic seminaries but also Iranian societies like the Anjuman-i
Ukhuvvat-i Iraniyan (Society of Iranian Brotherhood) in Najaf.51 In 1910, Fakhr-i Daʿi was dis-
patched by his teachers from Iraq to India for research and missionary work.52 He depicted
Bombay as one of India’s prettiest and most populous cities, a “garden” (bāgh) of different
religions and sects. Among these sects are what he calls the “Aryans” (āriyā, probably
51
Farzaneh, The Iranian Constitutional Revolution, 126–27; Hermann, “Akhund Khurasani”; Yaghmaʾi, “Iraq xii.
Persian Schools in Iraq.”
52
Fakhr-i Daʿi, Shiʿr al-ʿAjam, 1: alif.
referring to the Arya Samaj, a Hindu proselytizing movement), which he compares to

Protestant Christians and describes as anti-Muslim fanatics.53 Notably, given the city’s
diverse sectarian milieu, Fakhr-i Daʿi does not describe his mission as promoting Shiʿism,
but merely a defense of an undifferentiated “Islam” against its detractors. He complained
that Iranians in Bombay, despite their great numbers and wealth, did nothing to defend
Islam against the onslaught of missionaries and Islamophobes—other than his similarly
named friend Sayyid Muhammad-ʿAli Daʿi al-Islam Larijani (1878–1951). Larijani promoted
Islam along with Persian language and literature, and founded the newspaper and anjuman
(association) Daʿvat al-Islam (The Call of Islam). Larijani later went to the Deccan to teach
Persian at the Nizam College in Hyderabad, and for this reason Fakhr-i Daʿi had been sent
to take Larijani’s place in Bombay.54
In India, Fakhr-i Daʿi writes, he “faced a new world…in which [he] felt [he] could not con-
tinue living according to the old ways [uslūb-i kuhan].” He therefore threw himself into the
study of two languages which served as vehicles for modernity in the subcontinent: English
and Urdu. Fakhr-i Daʿi’s arrival in Bombay coincided with Shibli’s visit to the city.55 By
chance, the two found lodging in adjacent, connecting rooms. Fakhr-i Daʿi was impressed
with Shibli’s stature, dress, and knowledge, and given their shared mission to modernize
and protect Islam and Islamicate heritage it is no surprise that the two men became fast
friends. They met often and spent a great deal of time in close conversation together.
Later, Fakhr-i Daʿi tired of Bombay’s polluted air and the difficulty of life in the city. He
moved to Indore, some 600 kilometers away in central India, where he taught Persian lan-
guage and literature at Indore College. Ultimately, Fakhr-i Daʿi grew exasperated with his
working conditions there as well. He was obliged to teach in English, an onerous task
which required preparing his lectures in advance; Fakhr-i Daʿi claims that between research,
teaching, and preparing the next day’s lectures, he worked twenty hours a day. Despite his
proficiency in reading—he eventually translated several books from English into Persian—his
spoken skills in English were evidently poorer. After eight years in India, Fakhr-i Daʿi
returned to Iran, and in Tehran he set about translating several of Shibli’s works into
Persian. He published the first volume of his translation of Shibli’s Shiʿr al-ʿAjam in 1935.
Why did Fakhr-i Daʿi choose to re-translate this massive work, spanning 1,500 pages,
when it had already been translated into Persian just a decade earlier in Afghanistan?
Saʿid Nafisi offers three explanations in his 1955 introduction to Fakhr-i Daʿi’s translation.
Two are straightforwardly material: he mentions that copies of the book itself were not read-
ily available, and also describes the uneven printing (chāp-i nāhamvār) of the Afghan trans-
lation as unappealing.56 The scarcity of the Afghan translation in Iran certainly could have
been a factor. Ronit Ricci observed in a different context that “the motives for translation
and those for composing or for copying an existing text” were often identical: both were
methods of keeping a text in circulation.57 By “uneven printing” Nafisi may have been refer-
ring to the first edition of the Afghan translation, which was lithographed, but the original
manuscript from which the lithograph was created had been penned in a clear and well-
spaced hand, not at all difficult to read.58 By the time Fakhr-i Daʿi published his new
53
The Arya Samaj was founded in Bombay in 1875. See Jones, Socio-religious Reform Movements, 192–99. On com-
petition between missionary societies and religious groups in fin de siècle Bombay, see Green, Bombay Islam, 24–48.
54
On Larijani, see Ayvazi, “Mahnamah[-yi] al-Islam”; Marashi, “Print Culture and Its Publics,” 99.
55
Shibli, Savanih-i Mawlavi Rumi, vāv. Fakhr-i Daʿi may have remembered this detail incorrectly; according to
Gregory Maxwell Bruce, Shibli was unlikely to have been in Bombay in 1910, but did visit the city in the summer
of 1911. I thank Bruce for these details.
56
Fakhr-i Daʿi, Shiʿr al-ʿAjam, 3: hā-dāl.
57
Ricci, Islam Translated, 42. The different context Ricci analyzes (the Malay Archipelago between the sixteenth
and twentieth centuries) should be considered, but her argument seems broadly applicable beyond that context.
58
There is nevertheless some merit to the idea of differences between the Afghan lithograph and the later
Iranian translation. The lithograph followed Afghan orthographic conventions (shared with Urdu and
Indo-Persian), such as a consistent distinction between the yāʾ-i muḥaqqaqah [‫ ]ی‬and the yāʾ-i mardūdah [‫]ے‬. The
Iranian Studies 621
translation, the Afghan translation had begun to be serialized in print (with movable type) in
the journal Kabul.59
Nafisi’s more telling justification for this new translation was his claim that Iranians did
not find the Afghan translation suitable (sāzgār) because it was not in the kind of Persian
language with which they were familiar. This declaration—that the Persian used in the
Afghan translation was too different—is even more difficult to defend. The written standard
of Persian has been highly conservative in both Iran and Afghanistan, and in the first half of
the twentieth century there was little divergence in the literary language written in the two
countries. For the most part, the language used in the two translations was remarkably sim-
ilar, and where they did differ, the choice of vocabulary in the Afghan translation would
have been familiar enough for an Iranian reader.
A rare example of lexical divergence between the two translations can be seen in the way
English vocabulary was rendered, like the word “character” discussed above. As we have
seen, the Afghans preserved the English loan, even retaining in Persian the Urdu orthogra-
phy with which the English word had been spelled. The Iranian translation renders this word
into Persian as ṣifāt-i mukhtaṣṣah (“particular qualities”). But differences in translating the
occasional English word aside, the language used in the two translations was otherwise
very close. For example, consider this line from the Urdu original and its two Persian trans-
lations:
īrān kī khāk funūn-i laṭīfah kī qābiliyyat men ̣ bhī sab se mumtāz thī, aur bi-l-khuṣūṣ shāʿirī uskā
khamīr thā (Urdu)
The land of Iran was also the most distinguished in its suitability for the fine arts, and espe-
cially [bi-l-khuṣūṣ] poetry was its nature [lit. “leaven,” khamīr].
khāk-i īrān qābiliyyat-i funūn-i laṭīfah az hamah fāyiqtar dāsht, ʿalá-l-khuṣūṣ shāʿirī rawshan būdah
(Persian, Afghan translation)
The land of Iran had a suitability for the fine arts superior to all, especially [ʿalá-l-khuṣūṣ]
poetry had been clear.
khāk-i īrān hamīshah dar tarbiyyat-i hunar va ṣanāyiʿ-i ẓarīfah mumtāz az hamah khuṣūṣan shāʿirī
kih gharīzah-yi vay būd (Persian, Iranian translation)
The land of Iran was always distinguished from all in training [the] art[s], especially
[khuṣūṣan] poetry which was its nature [gharīzah].
In closely comparing the translations, the most obvious differences are seemingly arbitrary
choices, like the different words used for “especially,” both of which differ from the
original.60 Although the Afghan and Iranian translations are worded slightly differently,
they display the same noteworthy linguistic features, such as using the Arabic feminine
adjective (tāʾ marbūṭah) to agree with broken plurals ( funūn-i laṭīfah; ṣanāyiʿ-i ẓarīfah) or
the use of the word shāʿirī (poetry), as deployed in the original Urdu, rather than the
more common shiʿr. Rather than linguistic discrepancies in translation, as we might have
expected to find, what can be generally observed instead in the two translations are diver-
gences in framing and in the text’s relationship to the original Urdu, the products of two
different contexts: 1920s Afghanistan, still part of a Persianate cosmopolis, and 1940s Iran,
at the height of state-led nationalism and Persianate modernity.
former, also called the choṭī ye in Urdu, denotes the maʿrūf vowel [ī] whereas the latter, known as baṛī ye in Urdu,
denotes the majhūl vowel [ē]. In western Persian dialects, these vowels merged together as [ī] between the thirteenth
and sixteenth centuries (Perry, “Origin and Development,” 67), whereas in the east (including Afghanistan and
India) the two sounds remain separate even today.
59
See, for example, Sarvar Guya’s translation in Kabul 4, no. 9 (Isfand 1313/February–March 1935).
60
This word in particular cannot represent differences in Afghan and Iranian Persian, as the Iranian translator
Fakhr-i Daʿi himself uses ʿalá-l-khusūs elsewhere (Shibli, Savanih-i Mawlavi Rumi, zā).
The Afghans’ approach to translation was grounded in traditional Persianate sensibilities.

The association of language and literature with nation and territory, still only incipient
in the 1920s, had to compete with an earlier, cosmopolitan Persianate framework in
which the boundaries between languages could occasionally be traversed or even muddled,
as in the Afghan translation’s retention of nativized English loans in Urdu, or its treatment of
Shibli’s quotations from Urdu poetry. More importantly, in the Persianate framework adab
was not considered to be the property of any one people. The author Shibli’s position as
an Indian writing about Persian poetry was hardly unusual in such a framework and required
no explanation; thus, the Afghan translators could efface themselves almost entirely from
their translation, rendering their presence in the text nearly invisible. Islam was a crucial
element in the burgeoning Afghan identity of the early twentieth century, and so Shibli’s
conceptualization of Persian literature within bounds defined by Islam rather than nation
made sense.61 He began the book with a traditional Sunni prayer: “prayers and blessings
be upon the Prophet Muhammad and all his family and Companions,” which is dutifully
reproduced in the Afghan translation.
While the Afghans in the 1920s approached Persian poetry in terms of adab, for the
Iranian translator Fakhr-i Daʿi in the mid-twentieth century Persian poetry was national
literature (adabiyyāt), and he was uniquely positioned to translate it.62 As a Shiʿi missionary
and mujtahid, a religious jurist with the authority to issue legal opinions, Fakhr-i Daʿi omitted
the text’s initial Sunni prayer. Endowed with a mujtahid’s confidence to respond and produce
and the authority of an Iranian who believed he was engaging with his own national liter-
ature, Fakhr-i Daʿi considered his translation something of a revised edition. He was unsat-
isfied with problems in his copy of the Urdu original (the lithographed edition had many
copyist’s errors), and set out to correct the text, a considerable task which involved consult-
ing dīvāns and tazkirahs in several libraries.63 Fakhr-i Daʿi approached the text authorita-
tively, going beyond recension to confidently excise, add, and even change the original
where he saw fit. For example, as mentioned above, Shibli gave the wrong date of death
for Yaʿqub-i Lays and the Afghan translators reproduced it; Fakhr-i Daʿi silently changed
the date to the correct one, not in a footnote, but in the text itself. He did not limit himself
to correcting minor factual details like this one. Consider the following passage and its trans-
lations, on the Samanid court and the poet Rudaki (860–940). The original Urdu texts reads:
is vaqt tak jo kuch hu’ā vuh shāʿirī kī abjad thī laikin khāndān-i sāmāniyyah ne dafʿatan is zamīn ko
āsmān banā diyā, rudakī jo fārsī shāʿirī kā abu-l-ābāʾ samjhā jātā hai usī darbār kā dast parvar thā
heretofore whatever had happened was only the elementary stage of poetry, but the Samanid
court suddenly turned this ground into sky [e.g. elevated it to great heights]. Rudaki, who is
considered the Father of all Fathers of Persian poetry, was brought up in their court.64
The Afghan translation is highly literal:

az īn pīsh chīzīkih guftah shudah abjad-i shāʿirī būd laikin khāndān-i sāmāniyyah dafʿatan īn zamīn
rā āsmān sākht, rūdakī kih ādam-i shāʿirī-yi fārsī ast dast parvardah-[ y]i hamīn khāndān ast
heretofore that which had been composed was only the elementary stage of poetry, but the
Samanid court suddenly turned this ground into sky. Rudaki, who is the Adam of Persian
poetry, was brought up by this very court.65
61
Tarzi, “Islam, Shari‘a, and State Building,” 142–43. For the way later Afghan litterateurs laid claim to the
Persian literary heritage, contesting Iranian nationalist claims to the same, see Ahmadi, “Exclusionary Poetics.”
Ultimately, Shiʿr al-ʿAjam would be used in service of a shared discourse of literary nationalism in both
Afghanistan and Iran.
62
On this transformation from adab into adabiyyāt, and the differences between them, see Fani, “Becoming
Literature,” 13–44.
63
Fakhr-i Daʿi, Shiʿr al-ʿAjam, 1: kāf.
64
Ibid., 21.
65
Afghan translation, 1:33.
Iranian Studies 623
Fakhr-i Daʿi’s translation takes significant liberties with the text:

khāndān-i sāmānī avval khāndānī ast kih dar tarvīj-i zabān-i fārsī qadam-hā-yi vasīʿī bar dāshtah va
adabiyyāt-i īrān rā kih tā ānvaqt ghayr az nām chīz-i dīgarī nabūd dar andak zamānī bast va taw-
saʿah dādah ba-awj-i kamāl rasānīd. rūdakī kih vayrā pidar-i shiʿr mīdānand dast parvardah-yi
darbār-i sāmānī būdah ast.
The Samanid court was the first court to take extensive steps toward the propagation of
the Persian language. In a short time they expanded the literature of Iran, which until that
time was not more than a name, and brought it to its peak. Rudaki, who is considered the
Father of Poetry, was brought up in the Samanid court.66
Fakhr-i Daʿi has changed the text to fit his own view of the Samanids and of Rudaki’s great-
ness. It is noteworthy as well that he elevates Rudaki from the father of Persian poetry, as
Shibli described him, to the father of poetry in general.
Furthermore, Fakhr-i Daʿi dispenses with Shibli’s quotations of Urdu verse, which the
Afghan translators had carefully reproduced and translated. He excises these passages
entirely, without exception; sometimes this requires omitting as much as half a page.
Fakhr-i Daʿi does not indicate that anything has been abridged nor otherwise offer an
explanation.67 The only reference to an Urdu poet that survives in his translation is
when Shibli describes the Safavid poet Vali Dasht-i Bayazi as the Persian equivalent to
Urdu’s Mir Taqi Mir.68 In another instance, Shibli depicts the New Persian language as
emerging out of Persian’s encounter with Arabic: “Gradually, as Persian and Arabic
mixed, like Urdu a new language was born.” While the Afghan translators rendered this
accurately into Persian, Fakhr-i Daʿi omitted the words “like Urdu” in his translation.69
Undoubtedly, this choice to remove Shibli’s engagement with Urdu is partly informed
by the Iranian audience for this translation, who, unlike the Afghans, cannot be expected
to be familiar with the language. More significantly, in Fakhr-i Daʿi’s translation, Urdu
does not belong to the same Persianate cosmopolis as Persian does, sharing the same lit-
erary heritage of Persian adab; instead, Urdu has been left outside the national boundaries
of Iranian literary history.
Fakhr-i Daʿi’s authoritative approach can also be seen in his introductions. Unlike the
Afghans, who present the text without introduction, Fakhr-i Daʿi offers one or two introduc-
tions for each of the text’s five volumes, helping familiarize Iranian readers with Shibli. In
his introduction written after the second printing of his translation, Fakhr-i Daʿi says “the
greatest reward for an artist [hunarmand] is the pleasure that they take in their own suc-
cess…now…your humble servant [in tuhīdast] is most pleased and satisfied.”70 Despite refer-
ring to himself humbly, Fakhr-i Daʿi has indirectly depicted himself not as a translator, but
an artist. Describing how he has carefully studied the text of the original and revised and
corrected it, he goes on to imply that the author himself, Shibli, saw the translation as an
improvement on the mistakes and shortcomings present in the original. Fakhr-i Daʿi explic-
itly dedicates “this book” to his compatriots. For Fakhr-i Daʿi to be dedicating the book—and
not just his translation—implies a sense of ownership, that it is his to dedicate in the first
place. Considering the powerful Iranian state’s investment in claiming Persian adab as
national heritage, at a time when nationalism and the nation-state model had achieved
66
Fakhr-i Daʿi, Shiʿr al-ʿAjam, 1:21.
67
See, for example, Fakhr-i Daʿi, Shiʿr al-ʿAjam, 4:39–40, 52, 67, 69, 196.
68
Shibli, Shiʿr al-ʿAjam, 5:67; Fakhr-i Daʿi, Shiʿr al-ʿAjam, 5:65. Mir Taqi Mir was one of the most esteemed Urdu
poets, renowned for his ghazals and marsiyahs.
69
Shibli, Shiʿr al-ʿAjam, 1:16, emphasis added (“raftah raftah fārsī ʿarabī makhlūṭ ho kar urdū kī ṭarḥ ek jadīd zabān
paidā ho gaʾī, aur vuh gūyā khāṣṣ islāmī zabān thī”); cf. Afghan translation, 1:27 (“fārsī ba-ʿarabī makhlūṭ gashtah misl-i
zabān-i urdū yak lisān-i naw ba-vujūd āmad va īn fārsī gūyā zabān-i islāmī būdah”) and Fakhr-i Daʿi, Shiʿr al-ʿAjam,
1:18 (“fārsī raftah raftah makhlūṭ ba-ʿarabī shudah va gūʾī hamān, zabān-i khāṣṣ-i islāmī gardīd”).
70
Fakhr-i Daʿi, Shiʿr al-ʿAjam, 1: bā.
hegemony, his confidence is understandable.71 Fakhr-i Daʿi’s translation exemplifies

Persianate modernity. It draws on cosmopolitan connections, translating from Urdu and
relying on an Indian scholar to analyze Persian poetry, but effaces those connections in
translation in order to present Persian literature as the national heritage of Iran.
Additional Translations
The twentieth century witnessed the translation of numerous other texts from Urdu into
Persian in Iran. Some were related to Shibli: Hafiz Mahmud Khan Shirani’s (1880–1946)
Urdu-language Tanqid-i Shiʿr al-ʿAjam-i Shibli Nuʿmani (Critique of Shibli Nuʿmani’s “Poetry of
the Persians”) was translated into Persian.72 Shibli’s protégé Sayyid Sulayman Nadvi (1884–
1953) wrote an Urdu-language travelogue on his travels in Afghanistan, Sayr-i Afghanistan
(1944), which was later translated into Persian by Nazir Ahmad Salami.73 Fakhr-i Daʿi in par-
ticular was a prolific translator from Urdu (and English). His other translations from Urdu
include Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s Tafsir al-Qurʾan (Exegesis of the Qurʾan, 1880–1904), and sev-
eral of Shibli’s works. While in Indore, Fakhr-i Daʿi had read Shibli’s Tarikh-i ʿIlm-i Kalam
(History of Speculative Theology) and proclaimed it a “masterpiece”; he published his transla-
tion of the first volume of the work in Tehran in 1328 HS/1949–50 CE with the publisher
Rangin. Ibn Sina Press published the second volume the following year. It was well received
in Iran, as evidenced by the numerous times it has been referenced and cited in Iranian
works on fiqh.74 Fakhr-i Daʿi also translated Shibli’s Kutubkhanah-yi Iskandariyyah (The
Library of Alexandria, 1892) as well as Savanih-i Mawlana Rum (Biography of Mawlana Rumi,
1892; published in Persian translation in 1953). His translations from English included the
works of Indian Muslims, such as Syed Ameer Ali’s A Short History of the Saracens (1899, trans-
lated as Tarikh-i ʿArab va Islam [History of the Arabs and Islam]), and works about India, like
Claude Fraser de la Fosse’s History of India (1905).75 These translations help demonstrate
that Iranian readers had an appetite for learning about South Asia, and in particular reading
about Indian Muslims, not only Parsis.
Fakhr-i Daʿi also translated the French scholar Gustave Le Bon’s La Civilisation des Arabes
(1884) into Persian by way of Sayyid ʿAli Bilgrami’s Urdu translation (Tamaddun-i ʿArab,
1896). In his preface, Fakhr-i Daʿi remarked on the difficulty of separating the author’s
own notes (ḥāshiyah) from those of the Urdu translator, leading him to end up translating
both. This translation serves as another example of the dynamics of Persianate modernity:
this Urdu translation offered Iranians a useful model for making sense of the premodern past
according to modern methodologies. Fakhr-i Daʿi related how he became acquainted with
European Orientalist scholarship during his time in India, and admired their novel historio-
graphical methods. He saw this book as an important text to translate for its treatment of
Islamic and literary (adabī) topics “in accordance with today’s scientific principles and foun-
dations,” and described his relay translation as a “service to Iranian society” (khidmatī bah
71
Elsewhere, Fakhr-i Daʿi writes of his great joy at participating in the “sacred and auspicious movement” trans-
lating works into “our national language” led by “the glorious leader of the country, His Imperial Majesty [Riza
Shah] Pahlavi.” Le Bon, Tamaddun-i Islam va ʿArab, ch. His massive translation of Sir Percy Sykes’s History of Persia
was another act of patriotic devotion to Iran. Fakhr-i Daʿi explains that the value of this book is in its praise of
the “land of Iran” and the “Iranian spirit of genius,” arguing that it reveals how “the Iranian spirit of genius has
shown its superiority in all issues” (Sykes, Tarikh-i Iran, 2: hijdah).
72
Naqd-i Shiʿr al-ʿAjam-i Shibli Nuʿmani, translated by Shahid Chaudhari and Taufiq Subhani. Tehran: Danishgah-i
Payam-i Nur, 1380 HS/2001–2 CE.
73
Sayr-i Afghanistan: Sih Hamsafar, translated by Nazir Ahmad Salami (Zahidan: Tawhid, 2003). Salami is a prom-
inent Iranian Sunni cleric who represents Sistan and Baluchistan province in Iran’s Assembly of Experts. He is also a
translator, and follower, of Maududi.
74
For example, ʿAbbasi Furdaw’i, Tarikh-i ʿIlm-i Kalam ta Qarn-i Chaharum.
75
For an argument considering English as Persianate, see Jabbari, “Saʿdi’s Gulistan in British India”; for a different
argument about the relationship between English and the Persianate, see Beverley, “Documenting the World.”
Iranian Studies 625
jāmiʿah-yi īrānī).76 With translations like this one, Urdu became a conduit for European texts
and ideas in Persian. While scholarship has long recognized Arabic, Azerbaijani, and
Ottoman Turkish as important intermediaries for European thought in Persian, Urdu’s sim-
ilar role has never been acknowledged.77
Given Afghanistan’s deeper entanglements with South Asia, Afghans were also eager read-
ers of Urdu in translation. Urdu literature, like the poetry of Muhammad Iqbal, was trans-
lated by Afghan translators like ʿAbd al-Hadi Davi.78 Members of the group that had first
translated Shibli’s Shiʿr al-ʿAjam in Afghanistan also translated al-Faruq (1898), Shibli’s biog-
raphy of the caliph ʿUmar, and Tuhfat al-Aman fi Sirat al-Nuʿman (The Gift of Peace, on the
Biography of al-Nuʿman, Kabul, 1303 HS/1924–25 CE, translated by Burhan al-Din Kushkaki),
his biography of Abu Hanifa (originally Sirat al-Nuʿman).79 Works similar to Shibli’s Shiʿr
al-ʿAjam were also translated from Urdu by Afghan translators like Qari ʿAbdullah Khan.
Qari ʿAbdullah Khan (1871–1944) was the Afghan poet-laureate (malik al-shuʿarā) and tutor
to Amir Habibullah Khan and Crown Prince ʿInayatullah Khan Siraj. He also taught at the
elite Habibiyyah high school in Kabul, Afghanistan’s first modern educational institution,
modeled after India’s Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College (later reincorporated as
Aligarh Muslim University, where Shibli had taught for nearly two decades). As such,
Habibiyyah followed the Anglo-Indian curriculum and offered Urdu as an option for the sec-
ond language requirement.80 Qari ʿAbdullah worked with many Indian Muslims, who at one
point made up half of the faculty of Habibiyyah, including the principal of the school, ʿAbd
al-Ghani Khan of Lahore.81 In addition to his position as educator, Qari ʿAbdullah led the
Literary Association of Kabul, other members of which had produced the “Afghan transla-
tion” of Shiʿr al-ʿAjam discussed above. He was also closely familiar with Shibli’s work, having
relied on it as one of the sources for the second-grade Persian literature textbook he com-
piled for the Ministry of Education.82
Qari ʿAbdullah translated Muhammad Husayn Azad’s Sukhandan-i Fars ([On the] Poets of
Persia, 1907) from Urdu into Persian. Azad was an Indian Muslim scholar of Persian and
Urdu, and his work may have influenced Shibli’s prose style. Sukhandan-i Fars comprised
Azad’s lectures on Persian literature and philology. The translation first appeared as a series
of articles in the journal Kabul, and was later published in book form in 1315 HS/1936–37
CE.83 The book is preceded by a brief introduction from “The Association” (anjuman), most
likely the Literary Association of Kabul. This introduction describes Sukhandan-i Fars as a
book on the linguistics ( fiqh al-lughah) and phonology ( fiqh al-ṣawt) of Persian literature,
the first of its kind in the world of Persian letters.84
Later in the twentieth century, as the project of developing a centralized Afghan state
progressed, national literature came to replace the cosmopolitan Persianate adab in
Afghanistan as well. The 1930s were a radical turning point for Afghan nationalist historiog-
raphy, as reflected in Qari ʿAbdullah’s translation practices.85 His translation of Sukhandan-i
76
Le Bon, Tamaddun-i Islam va ʿArab, 2–3. On relay translation, see St. André, “Relay”; for discussion of a Persian
case study of relay translation, see Rouhi, “Darbarah-yi Tarjumah-yi Dun Kishut.”
77
On Persian translations from European languages, and the role of Arabic, Azerbaijani, and Ottoman Turkish as
intermediaries, see Meisami, “Iran”; Salihi, “Tarjumah az Zaban-i Turki-yi ʿUsmani”; and Chelkowski, “Edward
G. Browne’s Turkish Connexion,” 28.
78
See, for example, Davi, Asar-i Urdu-yi Iqbal.
79
For a contemporary review of Shibli’s al-Faruq in an Afghan journal, see Anjuman-i Adabi-yi Kabul, “Taqriz va
Intiqad-i al-Faruq.”
80
Adamec, “Ḥabibiya School.”
81
On Afghan connections with the “Urdusphere,” see Green, “Trans-border Traffic.”
82
Fani, “Becoming Literature,” 35–36.
83
Ibid., 35n95.
84
Unlike fiqh al-lughah, the term fiqh al-ṣawt did not gain much traction in Persian; it was used sparingly, but no
nineteenth- or twentieth-century Persian dictionary records it. Today Persian and Pashto both prefer indigenous
neologisms for “phonology”: āvā-shināsī and vāj-shināsī in Persian and the equivalent ghaģ-pohana in Pashto.
85
Green, “From Persianate Pasts.”
Fars is much freer than either the Afghan or Iranian translations of Shiʿr al-ʿAjam. He took
great liberties in reworking Azad’s colloquial lectures into more laconic prose and excising
details he must have found unnecessary. For example, Azad describes the difficulty of trans-
lating English philological works into Urdu, noting that English scholars master English,
Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and other tongues and base their work upon these languages.86 Qari
ʿAbdullah leaves Hebrew out, perhaps deeming the first three languages sufficient to
make the point.87 As a result of this concision, his Persian translation runs nearly a hundred
pages shorter than the original Urdu. In contrast to the earlier Afghan translators of Shiʿr
al-ʿAjam, who retained Shibli’s English words in their translation, Qari ʿAbdullah rendered
Azad’s likchar (lectures) as khaṭābah, and similarly translated other English words into
Persian. As such, Qari ʿAbdullah’s translation—published during a decade of Afghan state-
driven nation-building—demonstrates a move away from the liminal moment when Shiʿr
al-ʿAjam was first translated, toward a more confident sense of literary authority backed
by the state.
Conclusion
These instances of Urdu-to-Persian translation offer insight into the dynamics associated
with literary and cultural exchange in the first half of the twentieth century. Translating
works on Persian literature from Urdu into Persian was not only an opportunity for trans-
lators to add to the knowledge available about the literary tradition; it could also be an
opportunity for the translators to demonstrate their authority over the subject and stake
a claim to it. This seems to have been the case for Fakhr-i Daʿi Gilani and Qari ʿAbdullah,
translators in a period of nationalist authority and Persianate modernity, whereas in the ear-
lier Afghan group project no individual voice wished to shine through in the translation.
Clearly individual personalities and institutional positions played a role in the differences
in translation, perhaps much more so than any perceived linguistic differences between
Afghan and Iranian Persian.
Important context for these differences is also to be found in the distinct relationships
Afghanistan and Iran had with India. The ruler of Afghanistan, Amir ʿAbd al-Rahman
Khan (r. 1880–1901), had invited Shibli to visit Afghanistan so that the Ministry of
Education could learn more about Shibli’s educational reforms in India.88 While Shibli was
unable to make the trip, his protégé Sayyid Sulayman Nadvi visited. Later Afghan rulers
like Muhammad Nadir Shah, born and educated in the northern Indian city of Dehradun,
spoke Urdu fluently. At his behest, Amir Habibullah (r. 1901–19) visited Muhammadan
Anglo-Oriental College in India.89 There was no such equivalent of the Iranian government
systematically learning from India; by contrast, when the poet Rabindranath Tagore was
invited to Iran from India in 1932, he was lauded but also seen by Iranians as a relic of
the past, a living embodiment of ancient Indo-Iranian shared heritage.90
Iranian national chauvinism may have been an additional factor, with its claims to the
Persian literary heritage made possible by an increasingly powerful state and institutions
such as the University of Tehran. As much as Shibli was praised by Iranian scholars like
Fakhr-i Daʿi, Saʿid Nafisi, Muhammad-Taqi Bahar, and Zayn al-ʿAbidin Muʾtaman, they also
maintained a sense of being the proper heirs to the Persian literary corpus, such that an
Iranian like Fakhr-i Daʿi could confidently correct someone like Shibli; however much the
Iranians respected Shibli’s knowledge, they ultimately saw him as outsider to what they con-
sidered an Iranian tradition. Indeed, Nafisi remarks with wonder that Shibli never set foot in
86
Azad, Sukhandan-i Fars, 12.
87
Azad, Sukhandan-i Fars (trans. Qari ʿAbdullah), 1.
88
Shibli made these reforms after traveling in the Middle East to learn about educational reform there. See Shibli,
Safarnamah, translated as Turkey, Egypt, and Syria: A Travelogue.
89
Baqai, “Relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan,” 212.
90
Marashi, Exile and the Nation, 105.
Iranian Studies 627
Iran.91 Similarly, Nafisi’s characterization of the Afghan translation as different and unfamil-
iar, despite the linguistic similarities demonstrated above, says much about certain early
twentieth-century Iranian assumptions and attitudes toward Afghanistan. The Literary
Association of Kabul, for its part, insisted that there was no such linguistic divergence
between written Afghan and Iranian Persian at the time.92
These two approaches to translation, Persianate or nationalist, may ultimately reflect
where the translators saw themselves, both within their own tradition and in relation to
the tradition from which they translated, but they are also reflections of the translators’
communities and epistemic conditions. As the Afghans translated Shiʿr al-ʿAjam in the
1920s, their community was still defined in Persianate terms, which meaningfully included
other linguistic traditions like Urdu, producing what I term a “cosmopolitan Persianate”
translation. In Iran in later decades, translating for a national community (defined by secular
relationships), reified by a powerful central state, endowed Fakhr-i Daʿi with the authority to
confidently intervene in the text through his nationalist, “Persianate modern” translation.
Acknowledgments. The author would like to express his sincere gratitude to Shir Alon, Gregory Maxwell Bruce,
Cameron Cross, Aria Fani, Shahla Farghadani, Sara Grewal, Kevin L. Schwartz, and the anonymous reviewer for their
generous and valuable feedback on earlier drafts of this article.
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Alexander Jabbari is Farzaneh Family Assistant Professor of Persian Language and Literature the University of
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Cite this article: Jabbari A (2022). From Persianate Cosmopolis to Persianate Modernity: Translating from Urdu to
Persian in Twentieth-Century Iran and Afghanistan. Iranian Studies 55, 611–630. https://doi.org/10.1017/irn.2022.21
doi:10.1017/irn.2021.15
A RT I C L E
Soviet Persian Anthologies: Transnational, Multinational,

International
Samuel Hodgkin
Department of Comparative Literature, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA
[email protected]
Abstract
In scholarship on post-Persianate literary modernity, the emergence of the new institution of literature
is often conflated with the delimitation and reification of national cultures as different manifestations
of a single process. This article examines three anthologies of Persian literature from the interwar
Persophone Soviet Union to reconsider the relationship between state cultural institutions’ procedures
of literary modernization and nationalization. The anthologies mark out the stages by which classical
Persian literature was portioned out to Soviet Eastern nationalities, and in particular the advent of
Tajik literary history, but they also reveal the degree to which national literatures coevolved with
new post-Persianate literary cosmopolitanisms and internationalisms.
Keywords: Ṣadr al-Dīn; ʿAynī (Sadriddin Aini); Azerbaijan; canon; internationalism; Iran; literature;
Soviet Union; Tajikistan
Soviet Persian Anthologies: Transnational, Multinational, International

The elegiac scholarship that chronicles the end of the Persianate cultural ecumene has sit-
uated the transmutation of the Persian verbal arts from adab to adabīyāt—that is, from an
organic system of practices and shared references to a reified object of discourse and
state institution—within the global history of literary nation-building.1 In fact, the advent
of literary modernity, the replacement of adab with literature, and the delimitation and reifi-
cation of national cultures often appear as different manifestations of a single process.2
Recent studies have emphasized that these national canons emerged from conversations
and polemics between intellectuals in Iran, South Asia, and Afghanistan, but even when
the process was international, the product, it seems, was national.3
By all rights, the interwar Soviet East would seem more likely to exemplify this
nationalization-modernization paradigm than to complicate it. After all, in accordance
with Stalin’s theory of the nation, only the “maximal development of national culture”
1
Vejdani, Making History, 145–66; Schwartz, Remapping, 35–72. For the broader comparative literature of a literary
modernity framed by national canon-building, cf. Beecroft, Ecology, 195–242.
2
The literature on the Arabic transition from adab/shiʿr to adabīyāt, by contrast, has consistently assumed an uneven and
ambiguous relationship between literary modernity and nationalization. This is likely because the establishment of bor-
dered, independent states came so much later for most Arabs, and was immediately accompanied by a briefly successful
pan-Arabist political project, so that state literary institutions were always already imbricated in an Arab national project.
Compare to al-Bagdadi, “Registers,” 451–52; Allan, “How Adab Became Literary,” 184–85; and Robyn Creswell’s adaptation of
Pascale Casanova’s concept of “internal translation”: Creswell, “Modernism,” 129–30.
3
Jabbari, “Making of Modernity,” 418–34; Fani, “Becoming Literature.” One partial exception is Marashi, Exile,
97–133.
Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/
4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
632 Samuel Hodgkin
could make possible the transcendence of particular cultures by the culture of international
communism.4 Given the particular significance of literature as a national cultural institution
in Russia,5 it is unsurprising that the construction of new nations required the partition of a
Persianate literary commons into isomorphic national units, whose cultural nationalization
would compensate for the absence of political sovereignty.6 These national literatures
centered on texts in vernaculars, sometimes supplemented by canons in quasi-local prestige
languages that Soviet literary historiography treated as proto-vernaculars (Grabar for modern
Armenian, Chaghatay for Uzbek, classical Mongolian for Buryat, etc.). National literatures of
the Soviet East also included texts composed in regional prestige languages, especially
Persian, by authors who were born or wrote within the borders of particular republics
(since doctrinally, nations had to be autochthonous). Thus, in the symbolic realm, the delim-
itation of nations in Transcaucasia and Transoxania required the partition of national litera-
tures as modular cultural institutions. Debates about which nation could lay claim to
particular classical Persian writers often had high political stakes, and drew combatants
from the top of the political hierarchy, including, in the cases of Ferdawsī and Niẓāmī, Stalin
himself.7 The significance of this delimitation of the Persian literary classics was such that a
literary anthology came to be thought of as the unofficial founding document of the Tajik
SSR, and its anthologist, Ṣadr al-Dīn ʿAynī (1878–1954), as the “father of modern Tajik culture.”8
This narrative of delimitation captures certain aspects of Soviet Eastern literary history,
providing a stark illustration of the relationship that late- and post-Persianate scholars have
identified between modernization and nationalization. Furthermore, the ambiguous status of
the Soviet East, at once semicolonial and postcolonial, underlines the broader structural sim-
ilarities (and indeed causal relationship) between European imperial regimes for the produc-
tion and management of difference and the national cultural projects pursued by their
successor states in the decolonizing world. Lastly, the process of nationalizing the verbal
arts of the transregional Persian cosmopolis involved the same tension in Tajikistan as in
Iran and Afghanistan. There was an imperative for cultural planners to produce a tidy, neatly
contained canon and history by excluding disputed figures and works, but there also was a
temptation to increase national prestige by laying claim to as many well-known figures and
as large a map and timeline as possible.
Because of this tension, the case of Persian language and literature complicates this pic-
ture of Soviet national cultures defined by their delimitation from each other, and suggests
another possible vision of the Soviet multinational literary system. But the exceptional sta-
tus of the Persian in the Soviet Union also tells us something about the distinctive role of the
Persian verbal arts in Eurasia before and during the time of the nation. The mutual exclu-
sivity of canons assumed by the model of national delimitation was sometimes but by no
means always a feature of either post-Persianate or Soviet Eastern national literatures. For
both the post-Persianate sphere and the Soviet East, classical Persian literature was a partic-
ular site of anxiety for cultural nation-builders, consistently drawing ostensibly autarkic
canons into mutual dependency and imbrication. Furthermore, these national literatures
in all instances coevolved with new post-Persianate literary cosmopolitanisms and interna-
tionalisms, although the relationship between national and international was never comfort-
able. In the Soviet East, where each cultural bureaucrat answered to the diktats of both
national and multinational or international organizations, building a national canon that
maximized reach, even at the expense of coherence, was a higher priority than in Turkey,
Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, or India.
4
Maximenkov and Heretz, “Stalin’s Meeting,” 403.
5
Etkind, Internal Colonization, 231–48.
6
Slezkine, “USSR,” 414–52. Subsequent scholarship has placed greater emphasis on the role of local activists in
the creation of these cultural units; cf. Edgar, Tribal Nation; and Hirsch, Empire of Nations.
7
On Stalin’s Niẓāmī speech in 1939 (reported only secondhand), see Tamazishvili, “Iz istorii izucheniia,” 181–82.
On his reference to Firdawsī in 1941, see Stalin, Sochineniia, vol. 18, 212.
8
Bečka, Sadriddin Ayni.
Iranian Studies 633
This article, therefore, examines three Soviet anthologies and chrestomathies of Persian
literature assembled by Transcaucasian and Transoxanian scholars between 1922 and 1940 to
clarify the relationship between the modern institutionalization of a classical Persian liter-
ary canon and its delimitation into national units, showing where these two processes do
and do not coincide. The anthologies adopt different relationships to the literary taẕkirah,
the traditional Persianate genre of literary historiography that combines biographies with
poetic samples, discussed elsewhere in this special issue. Over the three cases, changing con-
ceptions of the function of poetry combine with changing modes of scholarly training to
produce a widening methodological gap between the anthologists and the early modern
taẕkirahs that provide their most important sources.
Because the story of Soviet Persian literature is in large part a story of nationalization, the
three case studies are increasingly national in their representative function: the first is
assembled in 1922 as a textbook for Persian language learners, the second in 1926 as a corpus
for consultation during the creation of a Tajik national language, and the third in 1940 as a
textbook of Tajik literary history. The same arc also may be traced through their places of
composition. The first was produced in Baku, a city that in 1922 had a substantial
Persophone minority, but which was always considered Turkic or Azeri by Soviet national-
ities policy. The second was composed as a resource for the Soviet Union’s only designated
Persophone national territory, the Tajik Autonomous SSR, but it was composed in
Samarkand, a city which in 1926 had a Persophone majority that was excluded from
Tajikistan and remained a minority in the Uzbek SSR. The third was published in 1940 in
Stalinabad (now Dushanbe), the capital of Tajikistan, elevated ten years prior from an
ASSR to the status of a full Soviet republic. The canonical texts of literary nationalization,
as we will see, dealt with the problem of other, overlapping national canons in a variety
of ways, and only sometimes through contestation or clarification of boundaries. As physical
borders hardened, Soviet Eastern literary canons became at once practically bounded and
potentially boundless, linked by a revolutionary Persianate literary commons that remained
informal and tentative.
Overview of Terms: Transnational, Multinational, International

The interwar Soviet Union was at once defined by a political commitment to international-
ism, whose practical import diminished in the increasingly xenophobic 1930s, and by the
bureaucratic fact of the multinational state, which in the same period developed an ideolog-
ical dimension that scholars refer to as multinationalism.9 Both internationalism and multi-
nationalism assume the nation as the protagonist of intercultural solidarity or exchange, and
the promulgation of these ideals heralded the destruction of actually existing transnational-
ism. The Persian cosmopolis before 1917 had been a broad-based phenomenon in which
Persian provided a medium for first- or second-language communication in the population
that circulated among the states of West, Central, and South Asia, including not only elites
but also hundreds of thousands of Iranian migrant laborers in the Baku oilfields, who com-
prised one of the major proletarian communities of the Russian Empire.10 In the same
period, what Nile Green has called “Persographia”—Persian as a language of reading and
writing—was even more widespread than Persophonia, and classical Persian literature lay
at the foundation of most Muslim vernacular poetic canons in Russian Eurasia.11 Soviet
internationalism, as an internationalism of representatives, not only failed to exploit
these sociocultural resources on any large scale, but demolished them, or rather
9
On the shifting contours of interwar Soviet cultural internationalism, see Clark, Moscow; on the cultural inter-
face between the Soviet multinational and international East, see Djagalov, Internationalism.
10
Atabaki, “Disgruntled Guests,” 40–41.
11
Green, Persianate World, 4; the landscape of Persographia’s secondary roles in Central Eurasia is surveyed in
DeWeese, “Persian and Turkic,” 131–155.
634 Samuel Hodgkin
transformed them into a purely symbolic historical basis for fraternal feeling. As a result, a
functioning sociocultural cosmopolis, which had only a limited existence as a concept in the
minds of its participants, was replaced by an ideology of cosmopolitanism with only a limited
existence in the world.12 An elite corps of functionaries, many of them writers and literary
scholars, performed multinational and international friendship in miniature through their
personal friendships and literary exchanges, whereas the previously vast cadres of ordinary
Persophone or Persograph polyglots, who might have been an audience for such exchanges,
ceased to circulate across tightened borders and, in the following generation, almost ceased
to exist with the advent of state schooling in the national language and Russian.
This same principle of an internationalism of representatives also operated in the textual
realm. Whereas adab produces a multilingual corpus of mutually referential texts compre-
hensible to variable subsets of those Persophone polyglots (depending on the regional
sprachbund), the Soviet literary system delimits that corpus and thins it out to a few
major “classical” writers and texts per nation, and it also recombines those classics into a
pantheon of world literature, connected symbolically by the intertextual links between
them. So, for example, the literary friendship of the Persian-language poet Jāmī and the
Persian- and Chaghatay-language poet Navāʾī transforms from a reflection of the multilin-
gual literary culture of Timurid Herat into a synecdoche of the historical friendship between
the Tajiks and Uzbeks.13 Thus, far from erasing the history of the Persianate ecumene from
the historical record or turning it into a basis for national cultural irredentism, as happened
in South Asian and Iranian national historiography, Soviet culture builders and their fellow
travelers in West and South Asia reified this historical commons as the prehistory of the
multinational and international friendship of (likewise reified) peoples.
However, just as the Stalinist institutions substituted a symbolic internationalism of rep-
resentatives for the previous, actually existing Persianate transnationalism, they substituted
a discourse of “the classics” for the vital artistic system to which those classical texts had
long contributed for readers, writers, and reciters of diverse cultural backgrounds, social
strata, and political commitments. In the Western leftist tradition of working-class educa-
tion, the Greco-Roman literary classics had long been regarded as the natural patrimony
of ordinary people, to whom they needed to be restored so that everyone would have the
opportunity to reach their full human potential, whether through public education in clas-
sical languages or comprehensible translations of the classics.14 Notwithstanding the decla-
rations of certain early Soviet avant-gardists that old literature could not serve the new
society, from the beginning it was much more common for Soviet party–affiliated writers
and pedagogues to instruct young proletarian writers to “study the classics,” a dictum
that was raised to the level of official doctrine with the advent of socialist realism in
1932, and came to include not only Russian but world classics.15 But as Persianate literary
classics transformed from potentially feudal or nationalist objects of political suspicion
into the natural heritage of the Eastern working classes over the course of the 1930s, this
transfer of the Western idea of the “classics” disregarded a crucial difference: by contrast
with the inaccessibility of Catullus or even Pushkin to the Russian proletariat and peasantry,
classical Persian poets had always been part of everyday life for ordinary people in most of
Transoxania and parts of Transcaucasia, whether they were literate or not and whether or
not Persian was their home language.
12
James Pickett makes this distinction between a cosmopolis in Sheldon Pollock’s sense of the term and Kantian
ideologies of cosmopolitanism: Pickett, Polymaths, 21. In referring to Soviet and even Stalinist culture as cosmopol-
itan in a comparative, etic sense, despite the fact that this was usually a term of abuse in the Soviet Union, I follow
Katerina Clark’s delineation of the overlapping but distinct phenomena of Soviet internationalism and cosmopoli-
tanism: Clark, Moscow, 4–5.
13
E. E. Bertels, “Abdurakhman Dzhami,” 463–74.
14
Hall and Stead, People’s History.
15
On the history of the concept of the classics in Soviet Russia, see Dubin, Klassika; on this 1932 shift, see
Dobrenko, State Reader, 154–62.
Iranian Studies 635
The Stalinist restoral of the Eastern classics to the Eastern masses, then, was an act of
sublation. According to the logic of the dialectic, it completed the process that had begun
with a massive negation: the reforms of culture, education, language, and script that had,
in combination with the murder of an entire generation of intellectuals for supposed nation-
alism or pan-Islamism, deprived the masses of those same classics. The delimitation of trans-
national adab into national literatures was another kind of sublation, intended to produce a
cultural internationalism that would not be an accident of cultural geography, as the
Persianate had been, but a conscious political solidarity between the peoples of the East.
In accordance with this logic, drives to nationalize culture alternated with campaigns against
any perception of nationalism until the two impulses had combined into a single internal-
ized reflex for critics, writers, and bureaucrats. The result was a set of linked, modular
national canons that individually mediated between national and international, and cumu-
latively reified a conceptual unity of the East.
Baku 1922
Perhaps no single work better illustrates the problematic relationship between Persianate
literary history’s nationalization and its modernization than Namūnah-i adabīyāt-i Īrān
(Sampler of the Literature of Iran), a chrestomathy published in Baku in 1922.16 Since
1905, Baku had been a crucial staging ground for Bolshevik involvement in Iranian revolu-
tionary politics, and from April 1920 to March 1922, as the capital of an independent
Azerbaijan SSR (AzSSR), it had steered its own, quite active policies in support of the simi-
larly short-lived Iran SSR declared by radicals in the northern province of Gilan. But 1922
marked the end of this independent foreign policy, as the AzSSR was incorporated into
the Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic and the Bolshevik leadership in
Moscow began to regularize relations with the government in Tehran.17 Just as Baku became
host to a new wave of defeated Iranian leftists, who joined an already extensive population of
Iranian migrant oil workers, the Persian language and literature instructor Mīrzā Muḥsin
Ibrāhīmī (fl. 1909–1928) published Namūnah-i adabīyāt-i Īrān to serve as a textbook for his
students at the Eastern Faculty of Baku State University.
As Ibrāhīmī explained in the work’s preface, he prepared the anthology because
“I couldn’t find a suitable book from the point of view of contemporary literary history
that I could recommend to students.” Literary history,” as he explains, “has entered the
realm of the sciences and, like natural history, it explains about general laws, that is, it
shows the laws of literature’s growth and development, the means and reasons for its
advancement or decline . . . and demonstrates a nation’s civilizational level and its degree
of essential vitality.” Thus, a modern anthology must not be “content to enumerate a few
fistfuls or nets full of literary masterpieces,” but should “completely examine literary output
from the standpoint of criticism and research.”18 Accordingly, although the volume does
include selections from most of the major belletrists down to Jāmī, it does excerpt some
truly obscure figures and works, particularly in the poetry volume (where a greater diversity
of selections did not require so much space).
Ibrāhīmī’s cited sources give some indication of the basis for his conception of the state of
the field. In addition to numerous lithographed publications of classical works, mostly from
Iran and the subcontinent, he makes extensive use of editions by orientalists, including
16
At the time of the textbook’s publication, the university was referred to as the Baku Darülfünun (using the
Arabic term adopted for the first modern state universities in the Ottoman and Qajar domains), but it would revert
to Baku State University (Bakı Dövlät Universiteti) in 1924.
17
Nejad, “Oilfield.”
18
Ibrāhīmī, Namūnah-i adabīyāt-i Īrān, 6–7. The Azeri language preface expresses this directive in somewhat more
radical terms: scholars “must look attentively not only at literary masterpieces, but, as in civilizational history, at all
literary works as a single picture.” Ibid., 3.
636 Samuel Hodgkin
E. M. Quatremere, E. G. Browne, and V. A. Zhukovskii.19 An opening section, showing an espe-

cially clear debt to oriental scholarship, consists of Latin-script Avestan and Pahlavi inscrip-
tions, glossed in New Persian.20 Ibrāhīmī also draws on one previous teaching chrestomathy,
the prerevolutionary Muntakhabāt-i fārsīyah/Obrazchiki persidskoi pismennosti (Selections of
Persian Writing, 1906), edited by Mīrzā ʿAbdullah b. ʿAbd al-Ghaffār Tabrīzī (d. 1927), who
taught at the Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages in Moscow.21 Elements of Namūnah-i
adabīyāt-i Īrān’s organizational scheme seem to be borrowed from Muntakhabāt, most notably
the division of both works into separate chronologically ordered volumes for prose and then
verse. Furthermore, Ibrāhīmī’s program echoes ʿAbd al-Ghaffār’s explanation that in addition
to Firdawsī, Saʿdī, ʿAṭṭār, and Rūmī, “to serve as reference material for a course in the history
of Persian literature, the compiler also took into account secondary poets, and those who are
far from fully known to us,” particularly for the early periods.22
Such continuities highlight the similarity between the imperial functions of pre-1917 ori-
entalism, which trained natives for roles as informants and intermediaries, and the Soviet
indigenization (korenizatsiia) of the professional intelligentsia.23 Baku State University was
an exemplary institution of this translatio studii, founded in 1919 by the leadership of the
short-lived Azerbaijan Democratic Republic to train local doctors, jurists, and scholars.
Both in this brief period of independence and after the establishment of Bolshevik control,
most of the university’s administrators were Russians or other Europeans, and attempts to
replace Russian with Azeri as the primary language of instruction met with limited success
until its closure and reorganization in the early 1930s.24
The orientalists who came to participate in the establishment of the university in the
early 1920s often considered it their task “to nationalize scholarly work itself,” as the prom-
inent linguist Nikolai Marr declared in a 1924 lecture there.25 But in the early stages, the
native intelligentsia-to-be was not always conceived of in national terms, least of all by
its aspiring “Eastern” participants, as may be observed from the more expansive rhetoric
of the 1920 Baku Congress of the Peoples of the East.26 Notably, Ibrāhīmī’s Persian program
was housed within a Department of the East whose distinct status within the Faculty of
History and Philology was set from the first charter of Baku State University.27 Whereas
19
Citations are provided only for the prose volume, which necessarily limits what can be said about Ibrāhīmī’s
sources.
20
Several orientalist histories had previously included pre-Islamic texts as a prelude to New Persian literature,
notably E. G. Browne’s Literary History of Persia from the Earliest Times until Firdawsi. Riżā-Qulī Khān Hidāyat’s
mid-nineteenth-century taẕkirah Majmaʿ al-fuṣaḥāʾ had already discussed pre-Islamic Iranian literature, establishing
the basis for the subsequent historiographical convention “wherein Avestan, Pahlavi, and New Persian literatures
came to be understood as belonging to a singular, ‘Iranian’ trajectory”; Jabbari, “Late Persianate Literary
Culture,” 48.
21
Gaffarov′′ , Obrazchiki persidskoi pismennosti, vol. 2, Poeziia; the Arabic title is Muntakhabāt-i fārsīya; az āsār-i
mu’allifīn-i Īrān az qarn-i chahārum-i Hijrī ilá ayyāmunā hażā.
22
Gaffarov′′ , Obrazchiki persidskoi pismennosti, vol. 1, Proza, iii–iv.
23
Indigenization was the Soviet policy of preferentially hiring members of the titular nationality into each repub-
lic’s mid- to high-level official positions, from shop stewardships and engineering assignments to academic posts, to
reduce the overrepresentation of Russians and other European nationalities in the leadership of “backward” repub-
lics. On continuities from Russian imperial to Soviet oriental studies, see Tolz, Russia’s Own Orient; and
Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, “Imperial Roots,” 29–46. On the Tajik case specifically, see Battis, “Soviet
Orientalism,” 729–45; and Yountchi, “Politics of Scholarship,” 217–40.
24
For the early history of the university (renamed Baku State University in 1924), see Alimirzoev, Azerbaidzhanskii
gosudarstvennyi universitet, 42–119.
25
Tolz, Russia’s Own Orient, 152.
26
As Masha Kirasirova has shown, “the East” functioned as a central geopolitical category for the Bolsheviks.
Kirasirova, “The ‘East,’” 8–9.
27
The act of the Azerbaijan People’s Republic Parliament of September 1, 1919, stipulates “four faculties (Rus.
fakultet, Az. fakültä); History-Philology, with an Eastern department (Rus. vostochnym otdeleniem, Az: Şärq şöbäsi ilə
birlikdə), Science and Mathematics, Law, and Medicine”; “Zakon ob uchrezhdenii v gorode Baku gosudarstvennogo
universiteta,” in Azerbaidzhanskaia Demokraticheskaia Respublika, 98.
Iranian Studies 637
for Russian Bolsheviks the East was a political space of action defined by particular histor-
ically conditioned social features, for their post-Persianate comrades the East was semi-
interchangeable with the Muslim nation, regardless of the speaker’s commitment to religion
or atheism. Ibrāhīmī’s textbook thus instantiates the wider semi-national venture that was
the Baku State University. The book was designed to teach Persian language and literary her-
itage to Azerbaijani citizens, in a city where Persian language remained a common second
language and Persian literature a common touchstone across communal lines, but especially
for Muslims (although decreasingly so). However, it relegated that language to the specialist
sphere of oriental studies within a new state education system. This shift marks the final
departure of Persographia from the primary and secondary schooling of Turks in the
Russian-Soviet domain, a process that had begun with the civic education reform move-
ments of the late imperial period.28 Finally, even though it included literature composed
in Transcaucasia—declaratively so, in the case of the chapter named for the Atabegs of
Azerbaijan—by the book title, it labeled such works the “literature of Iran.”29
Notwithstanding Ibrāhīmī’s quintessentially orientalist conception of the organic devel-
opment of civilizations, typified by his interest in the phenomenology of cultural decline,
the mode of literary history that Namūnah-i adabīyāt-i Īrān instantiates is not simply a ver-
nacularized variant of orientalism, but also draws on other literary-critical projects of its
time. Whereas ʿAbd al-Ghaffār explains his inclusion of noncanonical poets as a regrettable
necessity when the literary record is thin, for Ibrāhīmī it is scientific rigor that demands a
survey of the full corpus of “literary output.” Here we see a rapprochement of literary schol-
arship with the social sciences that has less in common with the old science of philology
than with the late Ottoman positivist criticism of activist-scholars such as Ziya Gökalp
(1876–1924), one likely source for Ibrāhīmī’s articulation of the methodological consensus.30
As we will see, the presence of such a conception of literary history in scholarship from early
1920s Baku suggests a supplementary genealogy for the Soviet sociology of literature, an
approach to literary history that achieved near-dominance at the end of the decade, includ-
ing in the eastern republics.
In drawing on Western scholars for Persian literary history, Ibrāhīmī followed in the
footsteps of Riżā-Qulī Khān Hidāyat (1800–1871; whose Qābūsnāmah edition he cites),
ʿAbd al-Ghaffār, and Shiblī Nuʿmānī (1857–1914), the final volume of whose magisterial
Shiʿr al-ʿajam had been published two years earlier. Unlike Hidāyat and Shiblī, however,
ʿAbd al-Ghaffār and Ibrāhīmī produced works that broke definitively with the conventions
of the taẕkirah: beyond a short preface, each provides no commentary on its literary excerpts,
aside from section titles indicating period or dynasty with Hijri dates, title and author (with
dating of work where possible), meter (for verse), and citation of the source. Although this
adheres to normative standards for a chrestomathy in the modern science of criticism
to which Ibrāhīmī declares his allegiance, it means that his critical commentary on this
literature must have remained unpublished, in the life of his classroom.
But the work’s presumed pedagogical function, “sufficient for elementary, intermediary,
and advanced study of this language,” reveals another aspect of this conception of literary
history.31 Ibrāhīmī’s intention that the process of reading through the book should mark the
stages of a student’s own progress sits uneasily with the work’s chronological arrangement.
As he admits, the Avestan and Pahlavi texts “aren’t necessary for students of language,” and
28
This transition also included changing destinations for Central Eurasian Muslims seeking higher education
from Bukhara to Istanbul and Cairo, and then to Moscow. Bustanov, “Speaking,” 202–3.
29
Ibrāhīmī, Namūnah-i adabīyāt-i Īrān, 58. This is one of the earliest works to identify the Persian canon as the
literature of Iran.
30
Discussions of literary history in the work of Gökalp in particular may be regarded as a precursor of the field of
sociology of literature, albeit conducted in the mode of advocacy rather than positive analysis, and his popularity
among Caucasian Turkophone intellectuals after the 1918 high-water mark of the Ottoman Caucasus campaign
makes him a probable vector. Compare to Gökalp on “aesthetic Turkism,” in Principles of Turkism, 95–98.
31
Ibrāhīmī, Namūnah-i adabīyāt-i Īrān, 7.
638 Samuel Hodgkin
before he begins early New Persian prose with Balʿamī, he includes a few short tales in sim-
ple language, organized nonchronologically. After reading these, language students should
“choose from the rest of the book appropriate for their ability, so that bit by bit, they
gain the ability to understand the whole book.” 32 Even with these accommodations, the
arrangement reveals the connection between language pedagogy and literary history
assumed by the orientalist chrestomathy-teaching tradition. The ontogeny of the individual
language learner—the transformation from a novice into a fluent reader of Persian—is
assumed to recapitulate the phylogeny of a civilization, as a journey from the prehistory
of literary Persian through its historical development carries a student from elementary
to advanced Persian proficiency. In this respect, the ambiguously quasi-national status of
Ibrāhīmī’s “Iranian” literature prefigured the culture-building projects of the Soviet
Eastern republics. Major Soviet Eastern writers were almost all involved in educational pol-
icy and language reform, and relied on a similarly organicist ontogeny-phylogeny model of
the relationship between literacy and literature. Thus the entire field of Uzbek and Tajik
state-sponsored literature moved from maximal stylistic simplicity toward increasing com-
plexity, in its authors’ attempts to draw citizens out of ignorance and into their national
culture.
Namūnah-i adabīyāt-i Īrān also prefigures certain features of the literary textbooks pro-
duced in interwar Iran, in both format and disciplinary framing.33 Given this Soviet text-
book’s presence in the catalogs of libraries in Iran, it is likely that some of the first
generation of Pahlavi-era textbook writers and educational policy makers were aware of
the curriculum of Baku State University as a possible model. At present, though, this remains
a supposition, and this textbook disappeared from the subsequent literary historiography of
Persian in both Iran and the Soviet Union. However, one trace of the work’s influence has
survived, in the most influential of all Soviet Persian literary anthologies.
Samarkand 1926
The Bukharan writer and scholar Ṣadr al-Dīn ʿAynī’s Namūnah-i adabīyāt-i Tājīk (Sampler of
the Literature of the Tajiks, 1926) is rightly regarded as the foundational work of Tajik lit-
erary historiography, and indeed of the Tajik national project.34 The work was originally
commissioned as a literary corpus to guide the Soviet Tajik language reform commission
in its deliberations, but the ideological stakes of ʿAynī’s research immediately rose, given
debates about the status of Persian speakers in the newly founded Uzbek SSR.35
Throughout the early 1920s, many Transoxanian intellectuals argued that Tajiks were
Uzbeks who had been superficially Persianized during the hegemony of Persian culture
and needed to be brought back to their true, Turkic language. Based on this logic, the
Uzbek republican leadership disputed the designation of Tajiks as an ethnically distinct
minority, entitled to their own Persian-language schools and other cultural institutions,
and in part territorialized through the establishment of a Tajik Autonomous SSR in the
east of the Uzbek SSR.36 Against this backdrop, ʿAynī staked a claim for the legitimate
autochthony and longevity of a Tajik nation. In the first sentence of his introduction to
Namūnah, he asserts: “From the first recorded history until today, in the region of
Transoxania and Turkestan, a great people (qawm) has endured, called Tajik or Tazik, and
likewise their language and literature has been widespread.” Far from being imposed by
Persian rulers or introduced by immigrants from Iran, he insists, the Persian literature of
32
Ibid., 29–30.
33
Compare the critique of the taẕkirah mode of literary historiography in Jalāl al-Dīn Humāʾī’s foundational text-
book Tārīkh-i adabīyāt-i Īrān (1929), discussed in Vejdani, Making History, 162–63.
34
Bečka, Sadriddin Ayni, 39; Rzehak, Vom Persischen zum Tadschikischen, 154–64.
35
Bergne, Birth of Tajikistan, 78–79.
36
Large urban populations of Persian speakers remained outside the ASSR’s borders, including ʿAynī himself, who
wrote Namūnah at his home in Samarkand.
Iranian Studies 639
Central Asia proves “the existence in these places of a major people called Tajik, belonging to
the Aryan race.”37
The influence of Namūnah-i adabīyāt-i Tājīk on the eventual consensus narrative of Tajik
national culture is remarkable, considering that, once completed, it was initially deemed
unpublishable by the state publishing organs of the Tajik ASSR. Indeed, after its eventual
publication in Moscow, it became the subject of such widespread attacks in the Central
Asian press that, by 1930, it was removed from circulation and most copies were collected
for destruction, just as Tajikistan embarked upon a new phase as a union-level republic.38
In spite of such a problematic ideological status, this literary anthology played a crucial
role in establishing the scholarly basis for the renegotiation of the status of Persian speakers
in the Soviet nationalities dispensation.
However, scholars have often overstated the degree to which ʿAynī’s Namūnah undertook
to delimit or nationalize a subset of Persian literature as the sole possession of a Tajik nation.
This is in part a legacy of the subsequent consolidation of Tajik national historiography in
the 1930s and, as we will see, especially during and after World War II, a consolidation
whose teleology shadows our reading of earlier periods of Soviet Persian scholarship and
nation-thinking. But it also is the result of this anthology’s internal contradictions: modern
scholars in search of programmatic statements on the Tajik nation are most likely to read
the volume’s preface and introduction, beginning with the declarative statement quoted
above, and they less frequently engage with the story told by ʿAynī’s editorial choices within
the anthology or his shorter critical introductions to particular sections and poets.
Finally, like ʿAynī’s contemporaneous critics, scholars today are most interested in his
treatment of the classical canon down to the Timurid period, which constitutes only 100
of the anthology’s 626 pages and is the only section in which the Tajik national story over-
laps substantially with Iranian and Afghan nationalist historiographies. But ʿAynī’s focus on
later periods should not surprise us: the second and third volumes, covering periods from
the late eighteenth century to the Soviet period, provided more relevant precedents than
Rūdakī for establishing a standardized Persian that reflected the contemporary Central
Asian vernacular. Furthermore, as ʿAynī points out in his introduction, extant
pre-sixteenth-century Central Asian Persian literature was much better represented in
scholarship and in printed editions, whereas although post-Timurid poets “have been col-
lected in commonplace books and taẕkirahs, they aren’t widely known among the general
public because they haven’t been printed.”39
ʿAynī’s Namūnah may be better understood not as a prelude to Tajik national intellectual
history but as a significant episode in Persophone literary historiography as a whole.
Although the work’s reception in Iran, Afghanistan, South Asia, and the former Ottoman
Empire would be belated and limited, ʿAynī’s book was itself the product of ‘his wide reading
and sophisticated engagement with criticism, scholarship, and printed editions from all of
those regions, as well as Western orientalism. Based on frequency of citation, three previous
moments of canonic consolidation were particularly important for the work’s image of
Persian literature down to the sixteenth century: the late Timurids, represented by
Dawlatshāh’s Taẕkirat al-shuʿarāʾ (1487) and Jāmī’s Bahāristān (1487) in Persian, as well as
Navāʾī’s Majālis al-nafāʾis (1491) in Chaghatay; the early Bāzgasht, represented by Āẕar’s
Ātashkadah (1760); and the post-Constitutionalist functional curriculum of Ibrāhīmī’s
Namūnah-i adabīyāt-i Īrān (1922).40 The latter two collections account for respectively 38
37
ʿAynī, Namūnah, 3.
38
Aini, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 6, 118.
39
40
Ibid., 11, 14, 15, 92, 104. Although ʿAynī cites Jāmī in Nawal Kishore’s Lucknow lithograph (likely the 1870 ed.),
when citing Dawlatshāh he uses a manuscript of his taẕkirah held by the Uzbek state, writing in his discussion of the
excerpt, “It is too bad that this work hasn’t yet been published; although it was printed in London in 1900, it hasn’t
circulated to our country. . . (I hope that the government of Uzbekistan, keeping in mind the historical and literary
importance of this book, will have it printed, with properly careful editing)”; ibid., 104–5. ʿAynī cites Ātashkadah as
640 Samuel Hodgkin
percent and 34 percent of citations in ʿAynī’s first volume, so that in precisely the section
where scholars have located ʿAynī’s Tajik nationalist claim to the classics, his debt to
non-Transoxanian narratives of the Persian literary tradition is greatest. To complete our
transregional picture of Persian literary historiography, it need only be added that ʿAynī
cites both Jāmī and Āẕar in editions printed in British India.
ʿAynī’s method and sources can be seen from his entry on the fourteenth-century poet
Badr al-Dīn Muḥammad, who was born in Chach (now Tashkent) but spent his poetic career
in India (pen-name “Badr,” often called Badr-i Chāchī). Following the poet’s name and date
of death, the entry begins by crediting the source of the selections, an 1841 sharḥ (explica-
tion) of Badr’s works by the great lexicographer Muḥammad Ghiyās al-Dīn Rāmpūrī (1785–
1852), printed in India in 1895.41 There follow excerpts from five qasidas (mostly from their
prefatory lyric sections, or nasībs), including footnoted glosses of difficult lines attributed to
the sharḥ and definitions of unusual words given without citation, as well as a ghazal requir-
ing no glosses. The final section is a biography and commentary, which quotes in full the
brief entry on Badr in the Ottoman encyclopedia Ḳamûs-ül a‘lâm (1889–1899), assembled
by the Albanian intellectual Şemseddin Sâmi Bey Frashëri (1850–1904) (in ʿAynī’s Persian
translation), and then part of the introduction of the Indian sharḥ, with ʿAynī’s own addi-
tional deductions about Badr’s life.42 He acknowledges the extreme difficulty of Badr’s
style, noting, “In this collection only his easy poems have been selected.” He has included
Badr’s verse, he explains, to show “that five hundred years before this date, in Tashkent,
which is the heart of Turkistan, such an abstruse Persophone ( fārsī-zabān) poet thrived,
or that poems whose comprehension is dependent on explication, glosses, and acquaintance
with many fields of knowledge could have pleased connoisseurs among the literateurs of
Fārs.” Last, he apologizes that the section is a bit long, “since Badr-i Chāchī’s biography
hadn’t [previously] been written in taẕkirahs.”43
Ghiyās al-Dīn and Sâmi Bey mark out the geographical bounds of ʿAynī’s maximalist com-
munity of Persograph scholars. In their periodicals, Soviet Eastern reformists such as ʿAynī
frequently placed their efforts to modernize language, literature, and habitus in the context of
other state modernization projects within the same zone. We encounter this same geography
in this account of Badr-i Chāchī’s life and works: by contrast with Iranian contemporaries
such as Bahār, ʿAynī is unconcerned with finding boundary demarcations in the space of
Persianate literary composition and reception. ʿAynī could have explained Badr’s difficult
style with reference to the supposed connection, asserted in the Iranian post-Bāzgasht
critical texts that he read, between excessive stylistic complexity and the bad literary
taste of “foreign” Indian readers.44 Instead, both here and in later discussions of what he
calls the Bīdilian style, he focuses on the reception of particular poets rather than regionally
defined movements. Furthermore, he makes Badr’s complexity a mark of the sophistication
of supposedly peripheral Turkistan, indicating its synchronization with tastes in both India
and Iran.
ʿAynī is careful not to identify Badr as a Tajik poet, and indeed, he includes several poets
for whom he clearly wasn’t making such a claim, such as the Timurid ruler Abū al-Qāsim
Bābur Mīrzā, the foundational Chaghatay poet ʿAlī-shīr Navāʾī, and members of the royal
family of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Kokand Khanate. In some instances,
such as the inclusion of Navāʾī but not his friend and contemporary Jāmī (whose Persian
poetry was far more famous and influential), it is clear that the purpose of inclusion is to
insist on the prevalence of Persian poetic production among Central Asians generally,
having been published in Lucknow (ibid., 14), but given his cited publisher and year, it is likely this edition was
printed in Bombay: Āẕar, Ātashkadah.
41
ʿAynī, Namūnah, 66. On Rāmpūrī’s career, see Bruce, “Ḡiāṯ-al-Din Rāmpuri.”
42
Sāmī, Ḳamûs-ül aʿlâm, vol. 2, 1256. On Frashëri and Ḳamûs-ül aʿlâm, see Bilmez, “Shemseddin Sami Frashëri,”
341–71.
43
ʿAynī, Namūnah, 70–72.
44
Iranian and orientalist polemics against the “Indian style” are surveyed in Kinra, “Make It Fresh,” 15–19.
Iranian Studies 641
Turk and Tajik alike. In his entry on the nineteenth-century queen of Kokand, Nādira, a key
figure in the Chaghatay poetic revival, he complains about a 1923 Uzbek publication: “Even
though it provides her biography and Turkic poems, her Persian poems are not
mentioned.”45
Adeeb Khalid is correct to identify ʿAynī’s works of the 1920s as “the first time in history
that the Persian-speaking population of Central Asia had been conceptualized as a transhis-
torical community, a nation in its own right.”46 In this respect, ʿAynī’s geopoetics come into
focus when set alongside the eighteenth-century Iranian Ātashkadah, a taẕkirah from which
ʿAynī drew some of his excerpts. The evident pride that the Ātashkadah takes in the poetic
accomplishments of Iran (relative to Hindustan) has often been read as proto-national but, as
Mana Kia has shown, the work instead places Iran at the center of the Persian poetic world
through a decidedly nonnational delineation of multiple and overlapping geographies of
belonging.47 By contrast with Ātashkadah, Namūnah attempts to carve out an exclusive com-
munity associated with a bounded space, but to do so it eschews any claim to centrality
within the Persophone domain, arguing only for distinctiveness. But the drive to nationalize
Central Asian Persian literary history competes with the work’s other imperatives. Whereas
Turkists of the early 1920s had claimed that all Central Asian culture was really Turkic, even
if sometimes covered by an Arabo-Persian veneer, ʿAynī emphasized the Persian dimension
of all Central Asian culture, and the Persophone component of a literary tradition that, as
he acknowledged, was multilingual. In this respect, the messiness of geography and identity
in Namūnah is not so different from that of Ātashkadah: by reintroducing Persophonia
into regional literary historiography, ʿAynī restored the transregional dimension of
Transoxanian poetry.
This was a corrective to the Turkic chauvinism of early 1920s Transoxanian literary cul-
ture, but it simultaneously rescued the Turkist project of historical recovery just as interest
in the classics became unacceptable in the Uzbek cultural arena. From 1918 to 1920, a
“Chaghatay Conversation” (Chighatāy gurungi) group had formed (with the slogan, “Make
use of the historical and literary heritage”) as a community for sharing research in fields
from lexicography to oral history, from literary criticism to archaeological fieldwork. As
Ingeborg Baldauf has pointed out, from 1924 on, Transoxanian scholars who continued
work in these fields increasingly did so in national or local “bureaus of kraevedenie.”48 The
term refers to a Russian academic discipline, best translated as “regional or local studies”
(its German counterpart is Heimatkunde), that brings together materials from any humanis-
tic, social-scientific, or scientific disciplines relevant to a holistic understanding of a partic-
ular locale or community. In Central Asia it was sometimes used interchangeably with
“uzbekology” or “tajikology” (uzbekovedenie, tadzhikovedenie). The post-Timurid, pre-1905 sec-
tions of ʿAynī’s Namūnah continue the work initiated by the Chaghatay group and codified by
his contemporary local studies scholars, as he recovers minor writers and works from local
and sometimes privately held manuscripts. However, at its most nostalgic, such research
risked accusations of bourgeois nationalism, as had already become clear in 1921 with the
Bolsheviks’ forcible disbandment of the Chaghatay Conversation group. By the Soviet cul-
tural revolution of the late 1920s, the push to “proletarianize” Central Asian culture—that
is, in the absence of an indigenous proletariat, to represent the Central Asian lower clas-
ses—spurred academies to support more folkloristic and ethnomusicological research into
the verbal arts of the masses, and less study of “feudal” classical literature.
The overlap between Uzbek and Tajik state-sponsored kraevedenie work was substantial,
whether regarding objects of study or the administering bodies and participants. In fact,
in the same year as he received the commission to produce Namūnah-i adabīyāt-i tājīk,
45
46
Khalid, Making Uzbekistan, 309.
47
Kia, “Imagining Iran,” 89–112.
48
Baldauf, “Kraevedenie.” On the discipline more generally, see Johnson, St. Petersburg.
642 Samuel Hodgkin
ʿAynī also was commissioned by the Scientific Committee of the Uzbek SSR to produce a vol-
ume entitled Türk adabīyāti namūnalari (Samples of Turkic Literature), although this was ulti-
mately fulfilled by his colleague ʿAbd al-Raʿūf Fiṭrat (1886–1938).49 As ʿAynī explains in his
introduction, he produced Namūnah-i adabīyāt-i tājīk to correct the lack of awareness of Tajik
writers of the Soviet state’s appreciation for “the language and literature of the nations” and
the “value and prestige that they gave to literature generally.” This ignorance, he suggests,
was the result of the Uzbek government’s neglect. As cultural authorities and critics in the
Uzbek state institutions became more hostile to “the classics,” ʿAynī is suggesting, the cul-
tural organs of the Tajik Republic (mostly still headquartered in cities of the Uzbek SSR until
the early 1930s) could fulfill the mandate of Soviet nationalities policy on behalf of
Transoxanian “literature generally.”50
Scholars have generally explained the defection of many former enthusiasts of Chaghatay
to Tajik literature and cultural work as a matter of self-preservation, but I propose that it
also had an element of triage. That is, in political terms, Tajik identity certainly began as
what Khalid has called a “residual category” from the national delimitation, but in cultural
terms, the Tajik national project ultimately became a vessel for those aspects of the
Chaghatay project that no longer had a place in Uzbek public culture in the late 1920s.51
ʿAynī thus set the course for other Transoxanian intellectuals who decided, at a moment
of state hostility to tradition, that the heritage that they wanted to rescue from oblivion
was not specifically Turkic but more broadly classical.52 In this respect, his effort to turn
this residual category into an essential one was a remarkable success.
This semi-national reading of ʿAynī’s Namūnah is in line with his statements on classical
literature during the ensuing language reform debates. Unlike many of his colleagues, he
does not suggest that a specifically Central Asian version of the Persian language can be
found in pre-sixteenth-century literature.53 “A Tajik or an Iranian,” he wrote in 1928, “under-
stands and likes the works of Saʿdī, Ḥāfiẓ, Niẓāmī, and so on to the same degree as the works
of Rūdakī, Kamāl Khujandī . . . and so on. Whatever difficulties a Tajik encounters in under-
standing some words taken from Old Persian [sic: Pahlavi] by Firdawsī, an Iranian will have
too.”54 In the defensive preface that ʿAynī’s Iranian colleague Abū al-Qāsim Lāhūtī (1887–
1957) appended to Namūnah-i adabīyāt-i tājīk to ensure its approval in Moscow, he empha-
sizes this aspect of the work. Describing Central Asia as “the oldest source and wellspring
of Persian literature,” Lāhūtī suggests that today, as in the time of Rūdakī, it is the
Central Asian “Persian writers” such as Fiṭrat, Ẕihnī, and ʿAynī who can resurrect “a dead
literature.” This is both a task of new writing and proper anthological recontextualization
of the classics. “The contemporary literature of the Tajiks,” he explains, “is like a rose garden
that for many years has had no gardener and hasn’t been watered, and needs a lot of
49
Baldauf, “Kraevedenie,” 10.
50
ʿAynī, Namūnah, 3–4.
51
Khalid, Making Uzbekistan, 291–92, 306–7.
52
Following these interwar Turkists on their intellectual journey from rejection to recuperation of classical
Persian literature should remind us of the ways in which the term “Persianate” is inadequate, and may help us
understand the absence of an equivalent emic term. There are costs to an excessive emphasis on the relationship
between this multilingual tradition and the Persian language specifically, a language in which some but not all of its
participants could read and write, and in which some but not all of its rhetorical and generic conventions developed.
53
That argument was made in a puzzling form by the poet and journalist Baḥr al-Dīn ʿAzīzī (1895–1944), who
explained that medieval Persian can be divided already between the “city language,” heir to the “Pahlavi language,”
and the “mountain language,” heir to the “Dari language”—the former implied to be Iranian Farsi, and the second
Tajik. He evinces as evidence couplets from Rūmī’s Mas̱ navī-i maʿnavī and one of Ḥāfiẓ’s ghazals that refer to Pahlavi
and Dari, and takes the two poets as models of two literary languages, nearly mutually incomprehensible (a difficult
conclusion to imagine): “if you put these two divans by ancient poets before you and become acquainted with them,
you will understand well what kind of difficulty to understanding the poet Rūmī presents, having composed his
speech in city language, and how easily comprehensible to the masses Ḥāfiẓ is, having composed his discourse in
mountain language.” ʿAzīzī, “Bah zabān,” 360. See also Zihnī, “Maṣlaḥat-i man,” 436–37.
54
ʿAynī, “Dar aṭrāf-i zabān-i fārsī,” 162.
Iranian Studies 643
arrangement and trimming. I am certain that the honored master has established literary
masses [sic] among the new, earnest Tajik youths, and they will make very firm steps toward
the unity of a literary movement in the Persian language.”55 For Lāhūtī, the distinctness of
the Tajik case offered a vantage point from which to reframe the Persian canon and remake
Persian literature on an international basis. Like the Transoxanian intellectuals who redi-
rected their hopes for the preservation of heritage from Turkophone to Persophone scholar-
ship and literary production, Lāhūtī regarded Tajik literature as a particularizing project
whose results could then be generalized.
In a sense, this conception of national culture is in perfect agreement with Stalin’s fram-
ing of the national question in his speeches and writings of the second half of the 1920s,
which emphasized the dialectical process by which differentiation of more distinct nations
would eventually permit the development of an international socialist culture. ʿAynī’s
wavering image of the Tajik nation in his anthology, both primordial and provisional,
reflects the tensions in that framing. By the early 1940s, however, these tensions were
more or less resolved. In the process, a transhistorical category of Tajik literature was reified
in ways that far exceeded the polemical position of ʿAynī’s Namūnah, whereas “pan-Iranism”
gained wide currency as a term of abuse for orientalists and cosmopolitans like Lāhūtī who
regarded Persian literature as fundamentally nonnational.
Stalinabad 1940
ʿAynī’s inclusion of Persian poetry composed by Turks, and the defection of Chaghatayist
intellectuals to the Tajik cultural sphere, suggested that the ambit of Persian literature
exceeded the Tajik political project. In the late 1920s, one of these defectors, the
Samarkandi critic Naẕr-allāh Bīktāsh (1903–1938), derived from this mismatch a radically
negative conclusion. As he wrote in a manifesto circulated privately in 1930, “after the
advent of Islam, for the entire Muslim East, a court language, the feudal Persian style,
became recognized as universal,” such that “even the language of the Turks’ dynasties
and their courts couldn’t be rid of it.” The historical relationship of the Tajik people to lit-
erary Persian, he argued, must likewise be understood as an alien imposition of “the feudal
language and style of Iran,” and not a basis for a new national literature.56 Bīktāsh’s mani-
festo, together with the contemporaneous pulping of Namūnah-i adabīyāt-i tājīk, marks the
high-water mark of “cultural revolution” in Transoxanian literary criticism. Bīktāsh and
his circle of young radicals, seeking to “proletarianize” Central Asian literature, developed
a trenchant sociological critique of the cultural capital functions of Persianate classics in
education, and turned to folkloristics as an alternative to literary classics as such. In the sec-
ond half of the 1920s, an orientation of literary criticism toward sociology and class analysis
was widespread in the Soviet academy and literary journals, and Bīktāsh’s stance was no
doubt inspired in part by prominent Russian “vulgar sociologist” critics such as Valerian
Pereverzev (1882–1968).57 But, as we have seen, the sociological orientation of late
Ottoman Turkist literary criticism was already part of Ibrāhīmī’s milieu in 1922 Baku, and
the orientation of Chaghatayists toward Istanbul and Baku makes this a likely supplementary
source for Tajik class analysis of literature. By the end of the 1930s, Bīktāsh had perished in
the purges, whereas ʿAynī had survived, and the Tajik literary establishment had definitively
embraced the Persian canon. But the relationship between the Persian canon, the Soviet
Eastern nations, and Iran continued to drive Soviet debates about Persian literary history
throughout the Stalin period.
Between the 1926 anthology that initiated Tajik literary historiography, Namūnah-i
adabīyāt-i tājīk, and the 1940 anthology that cemented a durable consensus narrative,
55
ʿAynī, Namūnah, viii.
56
Bīktāsh, “Dar aṭrāf-i zabān-i tājīkī,” 536–37.
57
Emerson, “Literary Theory,” 76–79, 85–87.
644 Samuel Hodgkin
Namunahoji adabijoti toçik (Samples of Tajik Literature), four distinct episodes in succession
changed the Soviet Eastern literary-critical landscape. First, as we have seen, during the
“cultural revolution” years of the first Five-Year Plan (1928–1932), proletarian writers’ orga-
nizations questioned the relevance of the Persian canon to Tajik national literature. Second,
the establishment of the union-wide Union of Soviet Writers with republic-level affiliates in
1932–1934 delegitimized the proletarian organizations’ attacks on the canon. The formation
of the writers’ union also spurred the institutionalization of modular national literatures
with long, distinct histories and provided a range of institutional opportunities for writers
and literary bureaucrats from different republics to learn from each other’s formulations.58
Third, Soviet participation in the international Firdawsī Millennial Celebration of 1934
inspired a series of jubilee celebrations (1937–1941, then continued after the Second
World War) for prestigious canonical writers who could be connected with particular
Soviet national literatures, which cumulatively heightened the value of classical Persian
poets within the symbolic economy of Soviet literature.59 Fourth, as a result of the second
and third developments, the question of the relationship between the historiography of
Soviet Eastern national literatures, Iran, and the Persian language came to a head in the
polemic over pan-Iranism (at its height 1938–1941, but continuing until 1953).
All of these developments left their mark on the palimpsestic Namunahoji adabijoti toçik,
produced by a committee of young and old writers and critics of diverse backgrounds and
ideological commitments, with an unsigned introduction by the Russian Jewish orientalist
Iosif Braginskii (1905–1989).60 An examination of this anthology will therefore reveal a pic-
ture of Soviet Persian literary historiography, for Transcaucasia as well as Transoxania, at
the moment when it solidified into a consensus narrative, while also suggesting the contin-
gencies and polyphonic aspects of that consensus and its relationship with other visions of
the Persian classics, both national and nonnational. In spite of its title and its emergence
from anti–pan-Iranist polemic, this anthology’s vision of Persian literature strays from its
national or even regional focus to an even greater degree than ʿAynī’s Namūnah. Thus,
although Namunaho may be accurately described as an end product of the transformation
of cosmopolitan Persianate adab into a set of nationally delimited canons, it also shows us
the new international and interregional visions of Persian literature that this delimitation
produced.
Namunaho draws from Namūnah-i adabīyāt-i tājīk many of its choices of authors, much of
its argumentative framing, and its apparatus of non-Soviet sources for texts and scholarly
background. It also owes a deeper structural debt to ʿAynī’s anthology, from its division
between pre-1917 and post-1917 literature to its arrangement of the elements of each
entry. But the gap between 1926 and 1940 is visible on each page, in the anthology’s use
of exclusively Gregorian dates (ʿAynī used Hijri dates for preconquest writers) and Latin
script (in fact, by the time of Namunaho, the Latin script adopted a decade earlier had already
been legally replaced by Cyrillic, but the transition would take several more years to com-
plete). In accommodation of the late-1920s reevaluation of folk culture, it includes sections
on “folklore before the revolution” and “Soviet folklore” (the term was rendered in Latin
script as “folklor”). The volume contains almost no literature produced between 1905 and
1917, reflecting the purge and execution of most of the former Jadids and, even in the
58
The best study of the 1934 Congress from the standpoint of nationalities policy is Kathryn Schild, “Between
Moscow and Baku.” On the generation split in Tajik literature, see Nicholas Seay, “Soviet-Tajik Writing,” 119–35.
59
On the Soviet Firdawsī Jubilee, see Literaturnaia gazeta; and “Tysiacheletnyi iubilei Ferdousi,” 1. The Pushkin
Jubilee has been the subject of intensive scholarly analysis: see Sandler, “The 1937 Pushkin Jubilee,” 193–213. On
other jubilees for national writers, see Allworth, Uzbek Literary Politics, 81–88; and Kaplan, “Art of
Nation-Building.” The Iranian writer Buzurg ʿAlavī described his experience of the Navāʾī Jubilee in Ūzbakhā, 20–54.
On the Iranian Firdawsī commemoration, see Marashi, Nationalizing Iran, 124–32; and Grigor, Building Iran, 46–75.
60
Ajni et al., Namunahoji adabijoti toçik; Ahmed, Haag-Higuchi, and Nölle-Karimi, Modernity and Modernism, intro-
duction by Thomas Loy (where I quote the introduction, the translation is my own). For fuller context on this
anthology, see Samuel Hodgkin, introduction to “Preface to Namūnahā-i Adabiyāt-i Tājīk.”
Iranian Studies 645
case of those who survived, like ʿAynī, the rejection of their pre-Soviet experiments with
indigenous literary modernity. Although the later anthology contains more pages covering
precolonial literature, it is far less concerned with recovering minor poets, sampling only
twenty-three precolonial writers to ʿAynī’s eighty-three, but providing more extensive intro-
ductions to those who are included. In short, it is less of a sourcebook, and more of a solid-
ified curriculum for future teachers in the Tajik state educational system.
Of those twenty-three precolonial writers, only ten had appeared in ʿAynī’s anthology,
five of them canonically significant beyond Central Asia (Rūdakī, Daqīqī, Ibn Sīnā, Niẓāmī
ʿArūżī, and Kamāl Khujandī), and only five from ʿAynī’s vast collection of less famous
local writers. Of the remainder, almost all were canonical writers who occupied prestigious
positions in the orientalist and Iranian nationalist canon of Persian literature. Some of these
had originated or had careers in Khurasan or Transoxania, but had been excluded from
ʿAynī’s collection for one reason or another (Firdawsī, Nāṣir Khusraw, ʿUmar Khayyām,
Jāmī, and Ḥilālī),61 but even more were definitively non–Central Asian, hailing from either
Iran and the Caucasus (Khāqānī, Niẓāmī Ganjavī, Saʿdī, ʿUbayd Zākānī, Ḥāfiẓ) or from
Mughal India (Zīb al-Nisāʾ, Bīdil). Some of these non–Central Asian poets had been men-
tioned in ʿAynī’s anthology without formal inclusion, as in his repeated allusions to Bīdil’s
influence on eighteenth- to early twentieth-century Central Asian literary style. In
Namunahoji adabijoti toçik, however, they were included alongside the Tajiks, albeit without
any claim that they were themselves Tajik (beyond the title of the anthology itself).
In fact, whereas the poets most clearly associated with Central Asia are presented without
ethnic markers, it is the disputed figures for whom ethnic identifiers are provided. Most
Iranian and Transcaucasian poets are explicitly identified as part of “Perso-Tajik”
( fārs-tājīk) literature, whereas Niẓāmī Ganjavī is a “brilliant poet of Azerbaijan.”62 In many
of these cases, special emphasis is placed on the poets’ reception not only in Central
Asian Persian literature, but also in classical “Uzbek,” “Azerbaijani,” and Indo-Persian liter-
ature. In fact, the classical portion of the anthology is everywhere deeply concerned with
premodern and modern reception. That is, the anthology as a whole is teleologically focused
on providing Soviet Tajik readers, unschooled in adab, with a sufficient sense of the literary
tradition that set the conditions for the postclassical and early Soviet Persian literature of
Central Asia. That traditional background, however, is emphatically de-territorialized by
the fārs-tājīk designation and through frequent and unapologetic references to geographies
beyond Central Asia. This hyphenated designation, in various forms (tājīkī-fārsī, fārsī-yi tājīkī),
preserves a certain ambiguity. ʿAynī had used it in his writings of the 1920s to distinguish a
local subset of Persian language and literature, whereas in 1930s polemics, scholars such as
E. E. Bertels (1890–1957) had used it to stake out the internationalist position that was ulti-
mately rejected as pan-Iranism. By the 1940 anthology, the hyphenated amalgamation was
safe again, insofar as it claimed all Persian literature, in a nonexclusive sense, for
Tajikistan.63 But in the postwar revival of anti–pan-Iranism, these hyphenated terms
would be definitively excised from the Tajik critical lexicon.
This is not what we might expect from the end product of Soviet anti–pan-Iranism and
literary nationalization, but in fact Namunaho provides us with an accurate microcosm of
how classical Persian literature would be treated in subsequent Soviet scholarship, curricula,
and public culture, whether in Moscow, in the eastern republics, or in cultural diplomacy
with India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, and Turkey. Very little remains of ʿAynī’s vision of
the anthology as a means of recovering the forgotten local literary past. Instead, in a com-
plete reversal of the late 1920s sociological critics’ radical suspicion of the Persian canon, the
61
The scholar S. Uluǧ-zoda explicitly frames Nāṣir Khusraw’s inclusion as an act of reclamation, rescuing a pro-
gressive poet from his association with Ismaʿilism and the malign, British imperialist influence of the Agha Khan:
Uluǧ-zoda, “Nosir Xisrav,” 44.
62
Ajni et al., Namunahoji adabijoti toçik, 13, 69, 85, 90, 103, 135.
63
Shukurov, Khuroson ast in jo, 167.
646 Samuel Hodgkin
volume’s editors are fully invested in the currency of literary prestige, as defined by the mul-
tinational and international marketplace of cultural capital. Rather than intervening in the
internecine and regional polemics among Transoxanian critics and cultural bureaucrats,
Namunaho curates a literary pantheon with a cache recognizable not only to Turkish or
Indian diplomats, but even to Russian and Western elite readers only casually acquainted
with Persian poetry. Whereas ʿAynī introduces the reader to non-courtly poets to suggest
that classical Persian verse was not an elite phenomenon but an outgrowth of the cultural
life of the people, Namunaho reconfirms the progressive credentials of familiar figures, from
ʿUbayd’s harsh satire of religion and feudalism to Saʿdī’s humanism.64 The dimension of con-
testation with Turkic chauvinism in ʿAynī’s earlier work is likewise entirely absent from
Namunaho, along with the Persian compositions of poets such as Navāʾī and Mashrab,
because for the Tajik literary scholars and cultural bureaucrats who received their training
from Namunaho and the textbooks that followed it, classical literature no longer needed to
prove the existence of an autochthonous Tajik nation.
By 1940, the Tajik SSR was already an institutionalized fact, under no threat of erasure,
and its representatives were in the ascendant. In fact, for much of the post-Stalin period,
Tajik literature and culture would be disproportionately visible in the multinational and
international spheres, because of the institutional clout of two intellectuals of the genera-
tion who rose to prominence during the purges as opponents of pan-Iranism: Bābājān
Ghafūrov (1908–1977) and Mīrzā Tūrsūnzādah (1911–1977).65 Ghafūrov, a historian and cul-
tural bureaucrat, benefited from the shake-up of the Soviet academy during de-Stalinization,
ascending in 1956 to the directorship of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Soviet
Academy of Sciences in Moscow, which he occupied for over twenty years, advocating a max-
imally expansive vision of Tajik history on a union-wide stage. Tūrsūnzādah, a prominent
poet in the Stalin period, became a key figure of thaw internationalism as the long-term
chairman of the Soviet African-Asian Solidarity Committee and published collections of
verse that highlighted the shared heritage of Central and South Asia. As Artemy
Kalinovsky has shown, during the Khrushchev thaw, in the economic and cultural spheres,
Central Asia underwent a process partially analogous to decolonization.66 This shift
cemented the presence of classical Persianate writers in the general secondary and univer-
sity curriculum of the Eastern republics, each now associated with only one nationality, but
some appearing in other republics’ curricula under the rubric of world literature, and in
translation.67 This was far from the delimitation of Persian literature suggested by
Ibrāhīmī’s position at Baku State University in 1922. The situation more closely resembled
the position of Persian classics in the Iranian state school curriculum than in India or
Turkey, where young people only read Persian classics in specialized upper-level courses
or in religious settings outside of formal schooling.
The primary task for representatives outside of Tajikistan, then, was to situate the cul-
tural history of the Tajiks, formally recognized but permanently somewhat obscure, in rela-
tion to a Persian canon that commanded universal familiarity and respect. That is, Tajik
literary representatives did not need to be armed for interethnic disputation within the
region (as in the 1920s) or for contestation of shared heritage with other Persophone nations
(as in the late 1930s). Rather, they needed to establish a field of reference that would be
familiar to their peers in other cultural bureaucracies, whether these were Russian intelli-
gentsia raised to admire Ḥāfiẓ through fin de siècle Symbolist translations or committed
South Asian writers who would appreciate a reference to Amīr Khusraw. As a result,
although postclassical canons and folkloristics continued to differentiate along national
64
Ajni et al., Namunahoji adabijoti toçik, 117, 105.
65
Kirasirova, “‘Sons of Muslims,’” 106–132; Kalinovsky, Laboratory, 43–66.
66
Kalinovsky, Laboratory.
67
On translations of classical Persian poets to other Soviet Persianate languages for a young readership, see
Hodgkin, “Persian Poetry.”
Iranian Studies 647
lines in the Cold War period, national canons of pre-Timurid Persian literature underwent
not a further parting of ways, but a convergence.
Conclusion: From Tajik Nation to Persianate International

The path of canon formation marked out by these three anthologies allows us to see not only
the process by which Central Asian Persian literature came to represent the newly nation-
alized Tajik folk before the world, but also the transformation of this nationalized Tajik
canon into an institution of surrogate representation for Persophone peoples everywhere.
Thus, the introduction of Namunahoji adabijoti toçik justifies its inclusion of Iranian poets
by pointing out that “the Tajik common people consider the entirety of this civilizational
heritage to be their own, and they recognize the great writers and poets of this literature
to be their own writers and poets.”68 By the same token, the volume’s epigraph, from
Stalin’s 1925 telegram of congratulations to the new Tajik ASSR, urges the Tajik workers
to “show the entire East that you are the best of your ancestors’ progeny, holding firmly
aloft in your hands the flag of liberation.”69
Although this post-national approach to canon formation owed much to the old Russian
imperial dream that Central Asia might become a bridgehead for domination of the East, it
also prefigured postcolonial internationalism. In 1949, during a revival of anti–pan-Iranist
discourse as part of the all-union anti-cosmopolitan campaign, the future star of Soviet
Persianate internationalism, Tūrsūnzādah, explained the inclusion of Iranian poets in
Tajik literature as a sort of custodianship. The Iranian bourgeois press, he explains, “not
only doesn’t appreciate the classics, but even openly rejects or falsifies them. . . . We, by con-
trast, lovingly and carefully preserve the best in the works of Saʿdī and Ḥāfiẓ.” After the
Iranian revolution, “the Tajik people will return to the Persians ( persam) the legacy of
their poets in its original glory and brilliance.” Tūrsūnzādah preserves the nationalist con-
ceit that literary heritage is a form of property that can only belong to one nation at a time.
However, by combining this fiction of national heritage with a notion of kinship among the
Persophone nations, he derives a non-European variant of orientalist surrogacy that disrupts
the fiction of autochthonous national culture. The Tajik nation, as a young and vigorous rel-
ative, can act as an executor for Iran’s national property until it recovers. In completion of
the cycle initiated by ʿAynī’s coinage of “Tajik-Persian” literature, Tūrsūnzādah declares:
“Then, we saw in this term a means of restoring our indisputable rights to the literary her-
itage, to protect ourselves from the frenzied ‘Iranization’ of our Tajik culture. Now it is obvi-
ous that this term has become obsolete.”70 Lāhūtī, who by this point had been out of official
favor for over a decade, could only complain in an appeal to Stalin that the advocates of this
maximalist Tajik canon had effectively declared, “what’s mine is mine, what’s yours is
mine.”71 Stalin did not reply.
And yet, in a real sense, Iranians of the constitutionalist generation had drafted precisely
the critique of Iran’s inadequate guardianship of its literary heritage that Soviet Central
Asian literary bureaucrats now took up. Furthermore, it was precisely that generation’s
demands for the institutionalization of Persian literature that the Soviet literary system ful-
filled. Lāhūtī himself, in his journalistic writings before his 1922 escape to the Soviet Union
and subsequent transformation into a communist, contrasted Western nations’ “provision of
the necessaries for literature’s advancement” with the situation in Iran, where so many
“great ones’ divans have disappeared and their works remained behind the veil of obliv-
ion.”72 In the Stalin period, the Soviet state’s preservation of Persian manuscripts, its careful
68
Ibid., xiv–xv.
69
Ibid., v.
70
Tursun-zoda, “Protiv kosmopolitizma,” 3.
71
RGASPI f. 558, op. 11, d. 878, doc. 4, 19.
72
Lāhūtī, “Īrān,” 49, 53.
648 Samuel Hodgkin
and lavish printed editions of Persian classics, and its statues and public celebrations of
Persian and Persianate poets were popular talking points in Iranian travelogues of the
Soviet Union.73
As James Pickett has suggested, “The Soviet and Iranian leftist visions of modernity over-
lapped more than they diverged and Iranian intellectuals found ample room to pursue their
cultural reform project.”74 But the appeal of the Stalinist program for cultural memorializa-
tion and monumentalization had an appeal for Iranian intellectuals beyond the political left.
Saʿīd Nafīsī (1895–1966) is the most famous instance of an Iranian scholar and writer who
became an important cultural ambassador precisely because of his distance from Iranian
Communist politics. As secretary of the Pahlavi state-sponsored Iranian Literary Society,
he was invited to speak at the Moscow celebration of the 1934 Firdawsī Jubilee. He later
recalled the experience of that speech:
Until that day I had never heard my own voice through an amplifier. While the first
sentence in Persian came out of my mouth, and my voice reverberated in that huge
space in the presence of all those men and women under the high vault of the theater,
I entered a state that is difficult for me to express. The translator translated my speech
sentence by sentence. Obviously, my speech was about the greatness of Firdawsī’s place
in the world, the importance of his epic in world literature and for relations between
Iran and the peoples of the Soviet Union. Every time I spoke a sentence that excited
[their] sentiments, the sound of the attendees’ applause resounded through that vast
space, and filled me with such rapture, I can’t say.75
The scale of the Stalinist echo chamber, with its institutional capacities for amplification and
translation, offered Iranian nationalists a place in world culture to suit their most chauvin-
istic fantasies. Meanwhile, the element of contestation—the notion that Persian literature
could only belong to the world by not belonging to Iran—remained for the most part a
polemic directed at Soviet insiders, infuriating émigrés such as Lāhūtī more often than for-
eign Iranian visitors.
Well into the period of post-Stalin Cold War internationalism, the second-world cultural
apparatus of literary magazines and conferences would remain a favored megaphone for
Persianate nostalgists from across West and South Asia, as well as from the Soviet East. In
articles in Lotus and speeches at jubilees for poets such as Sayat Nova (1963) and Amīr
Khusraw (1975), they emphasized the multilingual and transregional dimensions of the
Eastern classics, their simultaneous national exemplarity and humanistic universalism.
The relationship between these non-Soviet and Soviet Eastern writers and literary scholars
served the competition and sometimes the shared interests of nations and multinational
states. By the same token, those states’ violent internal and international politics set the
terms for the writers’ and scholars’ mutual engagement. Still, on both the interpersonal
and the institutional level, this was a mutually beneficial conversation that was only some-
times routed through Moscow. The legacy of that conversation was a new framing for a
world literary heritage whose influence would go far beyond the former Persianate world.
Acknowledgments. Earlier forms of this article benefited from the extraordinarily helpful feedback provided by
Franklin Lewis, Holly Shissler, Robert Bird, Eleonory Gilburd, Alexander Jabbari, Mana Kia, and Abdukholiq Nabavi,
and, in its article form, Aria Fani, Kevin Schwartz, Adeeb Khalid, and Cameron Cross. For help in locating and access-
ing the primary sources discussed in this article, I am grateful to June Farris and Marlis Saleh at the University of
Chicago library, Joseph Lenkart at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Robin Dougherty and Anna Arays
at Yale.
73
See Nafīsī, “Safarhā-yi man bih mā-varāʾ Khazar,” 49; and ʿAlavī, Ūzbakhā, 29–30, 33–34.
74
Pickett, “Soviet Civilization,” 817.
75
Nafīsī, “Safarhā-yi man bih mā-varāʾ Khazar,” 48–49.
Iranian Studies 649
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Seay, Nicholas. “Soviet-Tajik Writing Intelligentsia in the Late 1930s.” RUDN Journal of Russian History 19, no. 1 (2020):
119–35.
Shukurov, M. Khuroson ast in jo: ma’naviiat, zabon va ehëi millii tojikon. Dushanbe, Tajikistan: Oli Somon, 1997.
Slezkine, Yuri. “The USSR as Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism.” Slavic
Review 53, no. 2 (1994): 414–52.
Stalin, I. V. Sochineniia. Vol. 18. Tver: Soiuz, 2006.
Tamazishvili, A. O. “Iz istorii izucheniia v SSSR tvorchestva Nizami Giandzhevi: vokrug iubileia—E.E. Bertel’s, I.V.
Stalin i drugie.” In Neizvestnye stranitsy otechetvennogo vostokovedeniia, 2nd ed., edited by V. V. Naumkin and I.
M. Smilianskaia, 173–98. Moscow: Vost. lit., 1997.
Tolz, Vera. Russia’s Own Orient: The Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the Late Imperial and Early Soviet Periods.
Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Tursun-zoda, Mirzo, “Protiv kosmopolitizma i paniranizma,” Literaturnaia gazeta, February 19 1949, 3.
“Tysiacheletnyi iubilei Ferdousi: torzhestvennoe zasedanie v Bol’shom teatre,” Izvestiia, September 21, 1934, 1.
Uluǧ-zoda, S. “Nosir Xisrav.” In Ajni et al., Namunahoji adabijoti toçik.
Vejdani, Farzin. Making History in Iran: Education, Nationalism, and Print Culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2015.
Yountchi, Lisa. “The Politics of Scholarship and the Scholarship of Politics: Imperial, Soviet, and Post-Soviet Scholars
Studying Tajikistan.” In The Heritage of Soviet Oriental Studies, edited by Michael Kemper and Stephan Conermann,
217–40. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2011.
Zihnī. “Maṣlaḥat-i man dar bārah-i zabān.” Rahbar-i dānish 5/6 (1929). In Nabavī, Zaboni tojikī, 436–37.
Samuel Hodgkin is an assistant professor of comparative literature at Yale University. He has published on the
modern verse, theater, and criticism of Iran, Turkey, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. His research engages with the-
ories of representation, translation, and world poetics and with the history of literary institutions. His current book
project, entitled “The Nightingales’ Congress: Poetics of the Persianate International,” shows how the Soviet inter-
nationalist project of world literature emerged from sustained engagement between leftist writers of West and
South Asia and state-sponsored writers of the multinational Soviet East.
Cite this article: Hodgkin S (2022). Soviet Persian Anthologies: Transnational, Multinational, International. Iranian
Studies 55, 631–651. https://doi.org/10.1017/irn.2021.15
doi:10.1017/irn.2022.3
A RT I C L E
The Guide to Knowledge: The Journal Rahbar-i Dā nish and

Its Role in Creating a Soviet Tajik Literature (1927–1932)
Thomas Loy
Oriental Institute, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic
[email protected]
Abstract
Despite being in operation for a mere five years, the Soviet-era Tajik (Persian) journal Rahbar-i Dānish
(1927–1932) was a key venue for exploring and debating the merits of Tajik literature in the context
of new ideological and literary trends. Established litterateurs as well as literary newcomers published
examples of their literature and literary criticism in this first Tajik monthly social, educational, and
literary journal. The present article reviews the history of Rahbar-i Dānish and some of its authors to
trace their influence on Tajik literature and literary criticism in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The article
addresses the difficulties of creating a Soviet Tajik literature and scrutinizes the various genres featured
in the literary section of the journal. Finally, it presents the trajectories of two literary newcomers, Jalāl
al-Dīn Ikrām (who later became known as Jalol Ikromi) and Baḥr al-Dīn ʿAzīzī (who died in a Soviet prison
in 1944), whose short stories were most prominent in Rahbar-i Dānish. This article is based on an almost
complete set of the forty-five issues of the journal, published between August 1927 and March 1932.
Keywords: journals; literary criticism; Soviet Central Asia; Tajikistan; Tajik literature
Yes, the cave of the Khoja Soktare cemetery was frightening. Not merely because of its
narrow entrance that led into a deep and dark hole, but more especially because people
said that inside this abysm was the roost of demons, the hiding place of fairy folk and evil
spirits, and the retreat of dragons.1
Despite being in operation for only five years, the Soviet-era Tajik monthly journal Rahbar-i
Dānish (1927–1932) was a key venue for exploring and debating the merits of Tajik literature
in the context of new ideological and literary trends. In this forum, established litterateurs
as well as literary newcomers published examples of their literature and literary criticism.
The journal could count among its contributors Ṣadr al-Dīn ʿAinī, Abū al-Qāsim Lāhūtī, and
many others among the local (and Iranian emigrant) pre-Soviet elite. Almost the entire
younger generation of Tajik writers who later became known as “the Second” or
“Komsomol” generation of Tajik literature took their first literary steps in the pages of
this journal.2 The same applies to literary scholars, who also had their first literary analyses,
reviews, and translations published in Rahbar-i Dānish. Some of them made careers in the
Soviet Union after World War II and attained important positions in the cultural administra-
tion apparatus of Tajikistan. Others, such as Narẕullāh Ḥaidarī “Bīktāsh” and much of the
cohort of Iranian communist refugees, fell victim to the terror of the 1930s, and their
1
ʿAinī, “Aḥmad-i dīvband,” Rahbar-i Dānish, 8/9 (1928), 46.
2
Still valuable as a short introduction to the lives and work of the Komsomol generation are Bečka’s “Tajik
Literature” and “Men of Letters.”
654 Thomas Loy
works and biographies were largely suppressed and deleted from Soviet memory.3 The
debates of this multivocal ensemble and their controversial texts are printed side by side,
and often counterposed to one another, in the forty-five issues of the journal published
between August 1927 and December 1930 in Uzbekistan and from October 1931 to March
1932 in Tajikistan.4 This article reviews the history of Rahbar-i Dānish and some of its authors
to trace their influence on Tajik literature and literary criticism in the late 1920s and early
1930s. During this period, a “Tajik” nation was carved out of the Persianate sphere, and the
Persian language “was divested from a multiethnic, transregional, cosmopolitan high cul-
ture” and Sovietized as “Tajik.”5 After a brief description of the difficulties of creating a
Tajik literature and literary criticism in the Soviet cultural environment, the article focuses
on the journal’s founding and rise to prominence. It then scrutinizes the various genres fea-
tured in the literary section of Rahbar-i Dānish and finally presents two short stories (ḥikāya)
of Ṣadr al-Dīn ʿAinī and the trajectories of two literary newcomers whose prose writings
were most prominent in the journal: Jalāl al-Dīn Ikrām and Baḥr al-Dīn ʿAzīzī.
The Soviet Literary and Cultural Environment in the 1920s and 1930s
In the first two decades of Soviet rule, culture was of constant and major concern to the
political leadership. Literature in particular was considered an essential tool for educating
individuals and nations and turning them into suitable members of Soviet society. Along
its promised “road to Communism . . . written texts assumed enormous importance in the
political life of the country.”6 To translate Soviet ideology and make the Soviet narrative
accessible to the masses, or proletariat, borrowing Kathryn Douglas Schild’s apt phrasing,
“Soviet society didn’t just need new literature, it needed new writers.”7 As if the creation
of different national-language literatures was not a big enough task, especially in the
newly created republics in Central Asia with their rather small pro-Soviet cultural elite,
these new writers also were needed as state workers—in publishing houses, as newspaper
and textbook editors, and as administrators and educators.8
Between 1927 and 1932, the political atmosphere, economic order, and ideological frame-
work in the Soviet Union changed radically. These five years saw Stalin’s victory over his
internal competitors, the declaration of yet another “great transformation,” and the depar-
ture from Lenin’s New Economic Policy and move toward an authoritative command econ-
omy. The forced collectivization and sedentarization campaigns led to famines, armed
resistance, and excessive use of state violence against “enemies” all over Central Asia. In
terms of culture and literature, this revolutionary period saw an aggressive fight against
3
Biographical information on contributors to Rahbar-i Dānish is given where they or their works appear in this
text.
4
While writing this paper I had access to a limited number of issues of Rahbar-i Dānish. In my sample the years
1928 and 1929 were complete (a total of twenty-four issues, seven of which were double issues). From the three
issues published in 1927 I had a full copy of issue 3 (published in November 1927) and half of issue 2 (October
1927). From 1930, four issues (7, 10, 11, and12) out of twelve were missing. Altogether, I had access to a total of
1,025 printed pages—897 of which were in Arab script, with 128 in Latin script. I had no access to the issues of
1931 and 1932 (it is not clear how many issues were published in this period, but there were most probably six;
see note 42). My thanks go to Lutz Rzehak, who in 1993 obtained the copies of Rahbar-i Dānish from the National
Library of Russia in Moscow and shared them with me. Samuel Hodgkin kindly provided the copy of issue 2 of
1927, held at New York Public Library.
5
On the destruction of the Persianate sphere in the Soviet Union, see Pickett, Polymaths, 248–56, quotation 255.
On the process of transforming Persian into Tajik in the first half of the twentieth century, see Rzehak, Vom
Persischen.
6
Clark and Dobrenko, Soviet Culture, xii.
7
Schild, “National Literatures,” 26.
8
Ibid., 57. For Tajikistan, see for example Ṣadr al-Dīn ʿAinī’s anthology of Tajik literature Namūna-i adabīyāt-i tājīk,
which lists only a handful of writers for the post-revolutionary period (1917–1925). On this work and its reception in
Rahbar-i Dānish, see later discussion.
Iranian Studies 655
all signs of backwardness and the first show trials against the “old elites,” who were replaced
by a first cohort of Soviet-educated intellectuals and liquidated step by step.9 The introduc-
tion of a Latin-based alphabet put an end to the centuries-old Perso-Arabic script, estab-
lished a standard pronunciation for Tajik (and other languages in Central Asia), and
helped to produce new Sovietized readers.10
The year 1932 marked a watershed moment in the field of Soviet literature. In April 1932,
the political, ideological, and institutional struggles of the cultural revolution culminated in
a resolution of the Central Committee on “restructuring literary and artistic organizations,”
which aimed at the streamlining of literary voices. It was the prelude to the formation of a
unified Soviet Writers’ Union. The proclamation of socialist realism one month later finally
put an end to the aesthetic and cultural pluralism of the revolutionary 1920s and helped
strengthen direct party control over literary production and its various stakeholders.11
When the First Congress of Soviet Writers was finally held in Baku in 1934, Tajik literature
and literary criticism were still in the identification stage, and a school of professional
writers and criticism was just starting to develop.12
However, there was not much time for development in Stalin’s Soviet Union. By the
mid-1930s, the political climate had become so tense that every Soviet Central Asian intel-
lectual “felt like an acrobat . . . stumbling along a thin tightrope barely keeping his bal-
ance.”13 A little later, this unpredictable and dangerous tightrope act led directly to the
Great Terror of 1937 and 1938. In contrast to the literary scene in neighboring
Uzbekistan, which at the end of the 1930s found itself deprived of its leading figures and
“deprived . . . of the best of its ingenuity and creative potential,” in Tajikistan at least two
literary heavyweights with a pre-Soviet past survived the Stalinist repressions of the late
1930s relatively unscathed.14 Ṣadr al-Dīn ʿAinī and Abū al-Qāsim Lāhūtī were declared
Soviet heroes and became the undisputed icons of Tajik prose (ʿAinī) and poetry (Lāhūtī)
in the post-purge phase, especially after their deaths in 1954 and 1957.15
9
On Soviet Russian literature and literary criticism in this early Stalinist period, see Dobrenko,
“Transformations.” On Tajikistan and accusations against Tajik intellectuals in the late 1920s and early 1930s, see
Rzehak, Vom Persischen, 292–306; and more recently Roberts, “Old Elites,” 319–25, who relies mainly on Jalol
Ikromi’s recollections Yoddoshtho.
10
On the process and effects of the Latinization of Tajik, see Rzehak, Vom Persischen, 222–58.
11
Clark and Dobrenko, Soviet Culture, 3–6. General guidelines for socialist realism were established during the First
Congress of Soviet Writers held in August 1934; ibid., 139–49.
12
On the congress and the two years of preparation, see Schild, “National Literatures.” On the Tajik delegation
and Lāhūtī’s role, see ibid., 105–6. On the long and conflict-ridden process of creating a Tajik Union of Writers, see
Nabiev, Taʿrikh, esp. 24–36.
13
Mordekhay Bachaev, cited in Loy, Bukharan Jews, 47.
14
Baldauf, “Educating the Poets,” 201. In a letter to Abū al-Qāsim Lāhūtī dated November 6, 1937, ʿAinī expressed
great concern about fierce ideological attacks and accusations against him launched in two newspapers in
Uzbekistan; Mukotiba, 34.
15
Ṣadr al-Dīn ʿAinī (1878–1954), the so-called founder of Soviet Tajik prose (Bečka, Sadriddin Ayni, 43), was born in
a village in the oasis of Bukhara. He studied in several madrasas in Bukhara and became part of the local Jadid move-
ment. In the early twentieth century, ʿAinī cofounded a new-method school, wrote textbooks, and contributed arti-
cles to periodicals published in the Emirate of Bukhara and Turkestan. After being arrested and tortured by officials
of the last Emir of Bukhara in 1917, he was moved out of the Emirate and spent the rest of his life in Samarkand. In
1933, he became the first president of the newly established Tajik Union of Writers. In 1951, he was elected the first
president of the Tajik Academy of Sciences. Bečka, Sadriddin Ayni, 29–94; Hitchins, “ʿAynī.”
Abū al-Qāsim Lāhūtī (1887–1957) was born in Kermanshah. In 1922, he led an unsuccessful revolt in Tabriz and
was forced to leave for the newly established Socialist Republic of Azerbaijan. He went on to Moscow in 1923, where
he joined the Communist Party in 1924. In the same year he authored the lyrics for the national anthem of the newly
created Tajik Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic and translated the Soviet national anthem into Persian. In 1926,
his anthology Adabiyāt-i surkh (Red Literature) was published in Moscow and became famous among literates
throughout Central Asia. Hodgkin, “Lāhūtī,” xv–xxii; Holt “Performing,” 217–23.
On the role modeling and mythmaking around ʿAinī since 1935, see Rzehak, Vom Persischen, 307–12. On ʿAinī,
Lāhūtī, and their followers, the so-called Komsomol generation of Tajik writers, see Seay, “Writing Intelligentsia.”
656 Thomas Loy
Yet, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, a period that became known as the formative years
of the Tajik nation and Tajik literature, this outcome was not at all predictable. As in many
other national literatures of the Soviet Union, the Tajik literary landscape was largely
unknown and its literary canon and core cadre of writers remained to be formed.16 When
Stalin sent his first greetings to Dushanbe, the capital of the newly established Tajik
Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR), and “all the working people of Tajikistan” in
March 1925, it was still far from clear who belonged to this Tajik nation and what this new
Tajik language and literature (or culture in general) should look and sound like.17 In the
years to come, cultural and political activists of all kinds participated in making Tajiks
and Tajikistan: politicians, scientists, writers, literary critics, and translators—sometimes
all one and the same person—contributed to this Soviet nation-building project.18 Their
debates were publicly discussed and disseminated in a newly created Tajik press. In
August 1924, the weekly Āvāz-i Tājīk (The Voice of the Tajik) was created for this purpose
in Samarkand. In 1925, it was followed by Tājīkistān-i Surkh (Red Tajikistan) and, two years
later, by Rahbar-i Dānish (The Guide to Knowledge), a multi-thematic monthly “social,
educational, scientific and literary journal” (majala-i ijtimāʿī, tarbiavī, fannī va adabī), as the
subtitle of its masthead aptly put it.19
A Short but Varied History: Rahbar-i Dā nish (1927–1932)

Although the first Tajik monthly, Rahbar-i Dānish was mainly aimed at informing and guiding
Tajik schoolteachers, right from the start it also was the main platform for writers, poets,
and intellectuals to debate and discuss a new Tajik language and literature. In an editorial
on the occasion of Rahbar-i Dānish’s first anniversary, the journal’s main goals were described
as eliminating the shortcomings of the Tajik education system and supporting the “red
teachers” (muʿallimān-i surkh) in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan in their daily pedagogical work.
In this endeavor, the authors of the editorial assigned a significant educational role to liter-
ature and literary criticism.20 To support the Tajik government in its massive literary cam-
paigns and the formation of a new Soviet Tajik elite, the editors of Rahbar-i Dānish considered
it “absolutely necessary to establish and develop a new Tajik literature.”21 The editorial sug-
gests that this was not easy to implement. Directly addressing intellectuals and teachers
(munavvar al-fikrān va muʿallimān), the editorial asked them, first, to actively participate in
the magazine and, second, to spread its ideas and read from it to those who were not yet
able to do so themselves. Already by its second issue the journal was proclaiming: “Hey
Tajik teacher! The journal Rahbar-i Dānish will teach you all social necessities and guide
you in acquiring all methods of teaching. Never miss buying and reading it.” The masthead
of almost every issue declared in bold type that “every teacher should subscribe to Rahbar-i
Dānish.”22 But the path to knowledge was not straightforward for the journal.
16
On the creation of the Soviet Tajik literary canon, see Samuel Hodgkin’s contribution in this volume, as well as
later discussion in this article.
17
On “the awakening of Tajik national consciousness” as a result, rather than a precondition, of the creation of
the Tajik ASSR in 1924 and its elevation to a Soviet Republic in 1929, see Rzehak, Vom Persischen, 154–68; and Bergne,
Birth of Tajikistan, 75–85. On “Tajik as a residual category,” see Khalid, Making Uzbekistan, 291–315.
18
Finally, this project was defined and institutionalized by a new generation of Soviet-educated Tajik intellectuals
in the post–World War II era; Yountchi, “Politics of Scholarship,”; Kalinovsky, Laboratory, ch. 2, 43–66.
19
For basic information on these periodicals and the meaning of the term tājīk, as it was used from the mid-1920s
in constructions such as “zabān-i tājīk” and “adabiyāt-i tājīk,” see Rzehak, Vom Persischen, 149–57, 180. On Tājīkistān-i
Surkh, see also note 78.
20
“Davām-i yaksāla-i Rahbar-i Dānish,” 1–3.
21
Ibid., 2. Another goal mentioned in this article was to reach out to all Persian-speaking intellectuals (ʿumūm-i
żīāyān-i fārsīzabān), women, and workers in neighboring Afghanistan and Iran.
22
“Ey muʿallim-i tājīk! Majala-i rahbar-i dānish tu-rā darkārhā-yi ijtimāʿī, dar āmūkhtan-i uṣūl-i tartīb va taʿlīm
rahbarī khwāhad kard. Hīj vaqt az giriftan va khwāndan-i ān ghaflat nakun,” Rahbar-i Dānish (hereafter RD) 2 (1927):
14. “Bāyad hīj yak muʿallim ba rahbar-i dānish ābūna shuda namānad,” RD 2 (1927). See for example RD 8/9 (1928): 68.
Iranian Studies 657
In the five years of its existence, the editorial office was based in three different cities:
Samarkand, Tashkent, and Stalinabad. Between 1927 and 1932 the post of editor in chief also
was filled several times. Only the print run (1,500 copies) and the price of the journal (40 tin,
with a discount for subscribers) remained more or less the same throughout these years.
Rahbar-i Dānish was founded in Samarkand. The first issue, published in August 1927, had the
title Dānish-Bīnish (Knowledge and Vision). The second issue, published in October 1927, opened
with Manāfzāda Sābit announcing that henceforth the new title of the journal would be Rahbar-i
Dānish.23 “As the first issue had many weaknesses,” Manāfzāda informed readers, “I was commis-
sioned by the editorial board to shape the journal according to contemporary standards,” and
he convinced the editors to change the layout (shakl), the format (andāza), and the style (nafāsat),
and have the journal printed in Tashkent, where higher quality could be achieved.24
In a letter to Rahbar-i Dānish published in issue 3 (1927), ʿAbd al-Qādir Muḥiddīnūf, then
head of the Council of the People’s Commissars of Tajikistan (prime minister), congratulated
the editors on their progress and assured them of continued and additional financial support
from the Tajik Ministry of Education (naẓārat-i maʿārif).25 However, he stipulated that the
journal must reach Tajik teachers throughout Tajikistan and Uzbekistan and that half of
the running costs be generated through sales. It is unlikely that these operational bench-
marks were ever met.26
This third issue of Rahbar-i Dānish was dedicated to the tenth anniversary of the October
Revolution. Almost all the articles in it celebrated the achievements in politics, culture, and
education made since then, as well as workers, peasants, and women in the entire Orient. A
number of Tajikistan’s successes also were reported in this issue. The establishment of the
journal was seen as one element in a far larger undertaking to create a Tajik culture and
identity in Soviet Central Asia. The members of the newly established Science Council of
the Republic of Tajikistan (shurā-yi ʿilmī-i jumhurī-i Tājīkistān) and the members of the
Latin Committee (ḥayʾat-i alifbā-yi nau) were named.27 These comrades had to cope with
seemingly endless demands and an extreme scarcity of resources. The Science Council’s
plan for the coming year envisioned that in 1928, in addition to the urgently needed text-
books for primary and secondary schools, books on health and hygiene (these also were con-
tinuously important topics in Rahbar-i Dānish) as well as four works of belles lettres
(adabiyāt-i nafīsa) would be published on a total of twenty-three quires (printer’s sheets).28
23
Muḥammad ʿAlī Manāfzāda (1888–1940) was an Iranian communist (born in Tabriz) and is also known by his
pen name “Sābit.” After the defeat of the constitutionalists Manāfzāda fled to Istanbul. In 1913, he continued to Baku
(in 1913) where he wrote for the satirical magazine Molla Näsräddin and other periodicals. In the early 1920s, he
worked for some time as a teacher in Ashgabad. In 1925, he moved to Tashkent and led the first Tajik teachers’ train-
ing college. Manāfzāda contributed extensively to Rahbar-i Dānish and wrote the first review of the journal (pub-
lished in the newspaper Āvāz-i tājīk, September 1927). He was arrested in 1937 and died in a Soviet labor camp.
24
Manāfzāda, “Akhṭār,” 2. On the members of the first editorial board see later discussion.
25
ʿAbd al-Qādir Muḥiddīnūf (1892–1934), whose portrait was published along with his letter, was the son of a
wealthy Bukharan entrepreneur and a leading member of the revolutionary movement in Bukhara. He had joined
the Communist Party in 1919 and held senior positions in the state and party apparatus of Tajikistan in the 1920s.
Muḥiddīnūf contributed several controversial articles to Rahbar-i Dānish. He was arrested in 1933 and shot in June
1934. On his career and biography, see Abdullaev, Historical Dictionary, 291; and, more extensively, Fedtke, “Soviet
Nationalities Policy,” 25–38; finally, see Shakuri, Fitna-i inqilob, 49–55, and note 50.
26
Muḥiddīnūf, “Khāṭirahā-yi majala-i rahbar-i dānish,” 11. In this article Muḥiddīnūf explained his positivity by
saying that “comrade Manāfzāda” had presented him the second, qualitatively improved issue of Rahbar-i Dānish in
Tashkent.
27
The nine members of this Scientific Council (Uyghūr, Fiṭrat, ʿAinī, Manāfzāda, Dhihnī, Kāmelī, Bīktāsh, Jabbārī,
and Saīd Riżā ʿAlīzāda) provided a large number of the articles published in Rahbar-i Dānish in the years 1927 to 1932.
In the fourteen issues of the years 1927 and 1928, more than thirty articles came from these authors, and it is pos-
sible that some of the articles written without author information or with a pseudonym also may be attributed to
them.
28
These twenty-three quires (varaqa-i maṭbuʿ) were part of a total of 600 quires scheduled for Tajikistan in 1928;
RD 3 (1927): 36. Paper shortages were a major concern and an obstacle to the dissemination of literature (not only) in
the first decades of the Soviet Union; Schild, “National Literatures,” 52–53.
658 Thomas Loy
Initially the editorial board (ḥayʾat-i taḥrīriya) of Rahbar-i Dānish consisted of five people
and was based in Samarkand, the capital of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR). The
editors involved were: Muḥammad Mūsavī, Muḥammad Ḥasanī, Uyghūr, Jab(b)ārī, and
Bīktāsh.29 Printing and distribution took place in Tashkent and were supervised by Sābit
Manāfzāda. The spatial separation of these areas of responsibility caused many problems
and delays and finally led to the relocation of the editorial team to Tashkent in May and
June 1928, together with the entire Tajik State Publishing House. On this occasion, the
editorial board was redesigned and Muḥammad Mūsavī was appointed the new single
chief editor (muḥarrir-i masʾūl).30 The move to Tashkent brought another major change in
the appearance of the journal. Beginning with the double issue 8/9 (1928), an extra section
for contributions in Latin script was established.31 Yet it seems that the journal did not
develop in a way that pleased everyone.
In May 1929, Mūsavi was replaced by Lāhūtī as the chief editor of Rahbar-i Dānish. This
change in leadership was explained in the editorial of the double issue 5/6, which appeared
in June 1929 (and was probably written by the new editor in chief). Here, without mention-
ing his name, the shortcomings and omissions of the previous disgraced editor were
enumerated, and an “ideological turn” was announced. Although the first year of Rahbar-i
Dānish was very successful, from the perspective of the new management, “the hopes for
the second year [1929] [had] so far not been fulfilled . . . [since] the magazine could not
keep up with the changes in society.”32 Especially in the field of literature, Lāhūtī saw
major shortcomings. He believed the journal urgently needed a semblance of
Marxist-Leninist informed literary criticism. In the future, he advised, “classic Tajik litera-
ture (adabiyāt-i kīlāsīkī-i tājīkī) must be analyzed and criticized through a Marxist lens, so
that this world-famous literature does not plant its old and contaminated ideology
(mafkūrahā-yi kuhna va pūsīda) in the minds of the younger generation.” Just as problematic
from the new editor’s point of view was the failure of the previous editorial team to bring
forward a new generation of local intellectuals and writers, “which was considered one of
the main goals of the journal.”33 The articles in the central section, “Teaching and
Education” (taʿlīm va tarbīya), of the previous issues of the journal also were viewed critically
in the editorial, because the texts printed there were “of no use for the teachers in the vil-
lages.” The new editors proclaimed that theory of pedagogy and child-rearing should be
29
All of them also were members of the Scientific Council and/or the commission for the new Tajik (Latin) alpha-
bet. All of them fell victim to the Stalinist purges of the 1930s. There are no entries for them in current Soviet and
post-Soviet reference works. The exception is Narẕullāh Ḥaidarī Bīktāsh, on whom there is a monograph written by
Abdulkholiq Nabiev. On Bīktāsh’s biography and career, see Nabiev, Narzullo-i Bektosh, 28–78, and note 56.
30
In the standard Tajik works on the history of journalism, Muḥammad Mūsavī’s name is only mentioned in pass-
ing. We do not know the years of his birth and death. Most probably Mūsavī belonged to a cohort of Iranian com-
munists, like Lāhūtī, Manāfzāda, Kāmilī, and others who found refuge in the Soviet Union and were then sent to
Central Asia to help build up Soviet Tajikistan. Many of them (including Mūsavī, Manāfzāda, and Kāmilī) fell victim
to the purges of the 1930s. On Iranian communists and their tragic faith in the Soviet Union, see Atabaki and
Ravandi-Fadai, Zhertvy vremeni. However, the Iranians who worked for or published in Rahbar-i Dānish are not men-
tioned in this publication.
The relocation of the editorial board, its new address in Tashkent, and the new editor in chief were announced in
RD 7 (1928): 36–37.
31
In this issue the Latin section consisted of six pages. On the last page of the Latin section in this issue there is
information (in Arabic script) that the special print types for the long “ū” and the long “ī” are not yet available and
therefore could not be properly displayed in this edition. For a discussion of the new Latin alphabet for Tajik (which
was largely published in Rahbar-i Dānish) see Rzehak, Vom Persischen, 235–48.
32
This and the following quotations are from the editorial “Rahbar-i Dānish dar rāh-i ijrā kardan-i vaẓīfahā-yi
naubatī-i khūd,” in the May/June 1929 issue.
33
Ibid., 2. The number of national authors writing in Rahbar-i Dānish was considered too small: “Only 20 to 25
percent of the articles stem from local writers (navīsandagān-i maḥallī).” Exceptions were the “Language and
Literature” (qism-i zabān va adabiyāt) section and the “General Section” (qism-i ʿumūmī), which covered politics
and society, where the percentage of local authors was slightly higher. It is not clear if authors with an Iranian back-
ground were seen as locals by the author (who was Iranian himself).
Iranian Studies 659
conveyed, and above all practical help should be provided. Another goal of the new editor
was to offer easily understandable texts (in translation from Russian) to make
Marxist-Leninist ideology more accessible to the mass of Tajik teachers and workers.
Crucially, however, there had never been a reliable distribution system in place to ensure
the journal reached its potential readers. In many rural regions the journal was only irreg-
ularly or not at all available.34 Finally, in a short message published on the title page below
the list of contents announcing the change in management, the “red teachers and writers”
and the “Tajik workers” were asked not to leave the editorial team alone on its new path to
improve the journal and its accessibility.”35
Yet Lāhūtī remained in this leading position for only six months and was responsible for
publishing only seven issues.36 Despite the announcement about imminent changes to the
structure of the journal, the sections remained practically the same during his tenure as edi-
tor and in the following editions.37 The featured authors, frequency of publication, and dis-
tribution problems more or less went unchanged. In December 1929, after a failed attempt to
go to Iran as a representative of the Comintern, Lāhūtī returned to Moscow, where he lived
throughout the 1930s. With his close ties to the Kremlin, he represented and lobbied for
Tajik culture and interests in the Soviet capital.38
Starting with issue 12 (1929), Sīrūs Bahrām took over as “temporary editor in chief”
(muḥarrir-i masʿūl-i muvaqqatī), and he remained in this position until the journal was
moved to Stalinabad, the capital of the Tajik ASSR, at the end of 1930.39 This relocation
from Uzbekistan to Tajikistan had already been announced in a decree issued by the
Central Committee of the Communist Party (Tajikistan) and published in the Latin section
of Rahbar-i Dānish 4/5 (1930). In preparation for this relocation the Tajik Ministry of
Education was instructed to create a building for the printing facilities and set up a special
financial budget for publishing by the end of 1930.40
According to Jalol Ikromi, who was offered a job as the journal’s new executive secretary
(kātib-i masʿul), there was a six-month break before publishing continued in Tajikistan.41 But
34
Ibid., 3.
35
Idāra, “Akhṭār.” The start of the first Five-Year plan was announced by Stalin in October 1928. For a list of
shops (kiāskhā) in Central Asian towns where Rahbar-i Dānish was sold, see RD 9 (1929): 29.
36
He was chief editor for issues 5/6, 7, 8, 9, and 10/11 in 1929.
37
The first section of the journal was always a “General Section” (qism-i ʿumūmī) consisting of political and social
topics, followed by a “Pedagogical Section” (qism-i taʿlīm va tarbiya) and a “Literary Section” (qism-i adabī), sometimes
supplemented by “Literary Investigations” (tadqīqāt-i adabī). Other recurring sections were the “World of Women”
( jahān/dunyā-i zanān), the “Scientific Section” (qism-i fannī/fann va ṣanāʿat), the “Health Section” (qism-i tandurustī),
“Language” (zabān), the “New Alphabet” (alifbā-yi nau), the “Village” (qishlāq), “Regional Geography” (kishvarshināsi),
“Miscellaneous” (khabarhā-yi gunagūn), and correspondence with readers (quttī-i pochta).
38
Lāhūtī had visited Central Asia for the first time in May and June 1925. He held numerous key political posts in
Soviet Central Asia (among others he was head of the national minorities section of the Central Asian Bureau, deputy
commissar (minister) of education of the Tajik ASSR, and secretary of the Samarkand city commissariat). In 1929,
Lāhūtī was based in Moscow but commuted frequently to Tashkent; Hodgkin, “Lāhūtī,” xviii–xx.
39
Sīrūs Bahrām (1885–1981) was born in Lenkoron, Azerbaijan, and received his early education in a local
Russian-language school. He graduated from the Moscow International Institute in 1925 before moving to
Tashkent and later to Dushanbe. He joined the Communist Party in 1926 and held various positions in the educa-
tional sector and in the media in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Sīrūs started writing poetry in 1932 and joined the
Soviet Writers’ Union in 1944. His first collection of poetry did not appear until 1975. He died in Dushanbe.
40
RD 4/5 (1930): 4 (Latin section). To “eliminate illiteracy” and for the “creation of new cadres” further instruc-
tions were for construction and establishment of a central state library and a house of education and the develop-
ment of a plan for the preparation of a new elite group of writers, translators, and pressmen (ibid., 1–5).
41
Jalol Ikromi / Jalāl al-Dīn Ikrām (1909–1997) was born in Bukhara into the family of a judge. His father died in
1924. Ikromi entered the teacher training college in Bukhara. In 1927, he published his first short stories and articles
(as Jalāl al-Dīn Ikrām) in Rahbar-i Dānish. In mid-1931, he moved from Bukhara to Stalinabad and started to work as
an editor for Rahbar-i Dānish. He was arrested in September 1937 but released in December 1938. In 1940 the first
volume of his novel “Shādī” was published. Before his death, Jalol Ikromi published ten novels and many short sto-
ries and plays in Tajikstan. On his early pieces of prose, see later discussion.
660 Thomas Loy
it seems that the disruption lasted even longer. From October 1931 to the end of March 1932,
only six further issues of Rahbar-i Dānish were published.42 Jalāl ad-Dīn Ikrām was assisted in his
daily work by a young graduate from Samarkand. In his memoirs Ikromi recounts the difficult
restart in Stalinabad. According to him, the editorial team consisted of only two persons and
the office was housed in one room, with two chairs, two tables, and two closets. “We did not
even have our own typewriter,” Ikromi recalled. There was no corrector (musaḥḥīḥ), no accoun-
tant (bukhgalter), no secretary (māshinistka), and no typesetter (metrampazh). All contributions
had to be written by hand and were then forwarded to the printer or typed on the typesetter
of one of the other newspapers.43 It is not clear if there was a manuscript ready for the April
edition in 1932, but after the Central Committee’s 23 April resolution “on restructuring literary
and artistic organizations,” no further issue of Rahbar-i Dānish was published.44 After the proc-
lamation of socialist realism as the only possible literary method, no other “guide to knowl-
edge” or multivocal debate about the new Tajik national literature was required. Rahbar-i
Dānish’s short life was over. In March 1932, after forty-six issues and more than 1,000 printed
pages, the journal was discontinued. Responsibilities were redistributed and a few months later
a new literary journal, Barā-yi Adabiyāt-i Sotsiālistī (For a Socialist Literature), continued on the
path that Rahbar-i Dānish had taken, with some of the same staff and using only Latin script.45
Literary Criticism in Rahbar-i Dā nish: Searching for Tajik Literates and Literature
When Manāfzāda took over the lead role on the editorial board of Rahbar-i Dānish in 1927, he
opened the literary section with a programmatic statement about the journal’s new plans for
publishing “revolutionary literature.”46 He invited more submissions from younger writers,
reassuring them that they need not worry about the traditional Persianate gatekeeping
mechanisms for excluding those insufficiently familiar with formal conventions or canonic
models, as they would be evaluated instead “from the standpoint of new technique and con-
temporary literature.” Furthermore, he explicitly invited all readers to participate in the
criticism of the works that were published in Rahbar-i Dānish. In other words, he sought
to democratize critical authority and empower less educated (“proletarian”) readers to
value and express their opinions.47 Manāfzāda (much like the political leadership in
Stalinabad) recognized Rahbar-i Dānish as the ideal platform for the endeavor of creating a
new Tajik literature, and pushed for a new beginning: “The age of imitation, with its worn-
out forms and techniques, has died. Hereafter, new pens and young seekers (nauqalamān va
havaskārān-i javān) must get to work to give birth to a contemporary literature.”48
Yet, the “new pens and young seekers” Manāfzāda referenced here first needed to be con-
vinced to become Tajik writers. Most of them were bilingual and wrote in both Uzbek and
Kātib-i masʿul (executive secretary) was a calque from the Russian otvetstvennii sekretar’. The person in charge of
this position was responsible for managing and controlling the editorial office, strategic development, functioning of
the editorial mechanism, and delivering the journal on time. See Ikromi, Yoddoshtho, 200, 208. Ikromi also mentions
that Muḥammadjān Ḥasanī was announced as the new editor (muḥarrīr) in 1931, but only two persons (Ikrām himself
and Maqsūdī, the literary assistant, or korkun-i adabī) were actually running the journal.
42
Rustamzoda, “Tāʿrīkh-i bāsharaf.”
43
Ikromi, Yoddoshtho, 208–9. Ikromi also describes the poor, cramped housing situation for the small group of
writers and cultural workers in the emerging capital and how this contributed to the ongoing tensions among
them; ibid., 194–207. See also Roberts, “Old Elites,” 292–99, who relies mainly on Ikrāmī’s recollections.
44
On this far-reaching resolution, see also note 11.
45
The first issue of Barā-yi Adabiyāt-i Sotsiālistī appeared in August 1932. The journal was withdrawn from the
Ministry of Education and assigned to the newly founded Tajik Writers’ Union. Two years later it was renamed
Sharq-i Surkh (Red Orient; 1934–1941, 1946–1964). Since 1964, the journal’s title has been Ṣadā-yi Sharq (Voice of
the Orient). In 1936, a new journal for teachers, Barā-yi Maʿārif-i Kāmmunistī (For a Communist Education), was estab-
lished in the Tajik capital.
46
Manāfzāda, “Inqilāb-i adabī,” 19–20.
47
Hodgkin, “Manāfzāda Sābit.”
48
Manāfzāda, “Inqilāb-i adabī,” 20.
Iranian Studies 661
Tajik early on in their careers. Born in the first decade of the twentieth century, they all
came of age in towns belonging to the Uzbek SSR, outside the demarcated Tajik territory—
in Bukhara, Samarkand, Uropteppa, or the Ferghana Valley. And many of them initially iden-
tified and registered as Uzbeks.49 But there were several reasons that members of the younger
generation might opt for a Tajik rather than an Uzbek identity.50 The first was the need for
Tajik writers, journalists, and other Persian-speaking cadres and the many opportunities for
employment and quick promotion connected to it, especially after Tajikistan was declared a
Soviet republic in 1929. A second reason was related to family background. Many of these
“new pens” decided to concentrate on being Tajik based on the fact that they were the
sons of the former religious, scholarly, and economic elite of the Emirate of Bukhara (and
Russian Turkestan), and they and their families were well known in Soviet Uzbekistan.51
But even in distant Stalinabad this family background was a liability: they were openly
addressed as “sons of mullahs” (mullābachahā) or “rich kids” (bāybachahā), and always feared
being exposed and denounced because of the wrong family origins. A clear decision to
become Tajik seemed the only way out, and Tajikistan became a preferred destination for
members of scholarly families fleeing from harassment and repression in Uzbekistan. After
1929, many of them moved to the new Tajik capital where they formed the new intellectual
and cultural elite. However, some could not withstand the pressure and left Stalinabad after
being mocked or threatened there.52
Critical Shortages
During the entirety of its run, literature and literary criticism comprised roughly 10 per-
cent of the content of Rahbar-i Dānish. In some issues these topics were gathered under the
header “Literary Section” (qism-i adabī) and in others under “Literary Investigations”
(tadqīqāt-i adabī). As mentioned, when Lāhūtī took over responsibility he complained
that much more of the latter was needed to achieve the goals of the Rahbar-i Dānish.
Yet, as in the rest of the Soviet Union of the late 1920s and early 1930s, there was “a critical
shortage of critics.” According to Katharina Schild there were several reasons for this
shortage—namely, that “criticism presented bigger political risk than writing, offered
less potential reward than organizational work, and required a higher level of
education.”53
In Central Asia, this shortage of critics was accompanied by a critical shortage of theory. A
clear idea of what a new Tajik literature and literary criticism should look like was missing.
More often than not, “young literary critics made little effort to grasp the essence of the
works they examined,” but instead simply imposed their own tastes on literature.54 Or,
even worse, their criticism turned “into a mouthpiece of the party, and de facto into an
exponent of Stalin’s opinion.”55
49
See Ikromi, Yoddoshtho, 124–28, for Ikromi’s recollection of his early literary experiences, his own first steps in
writing poetry, and his 1927 meeting with ʿAinī, who encouraged him to write in Tajik and convinced him to change
his nationality from Uzbek to Tajik.
50
For some of the older generation (like ʿAbd al-Qādir Muḥiddīnūf and Abbās ʿAlīev) personal rivalries with polit-
ical leaders of the Uzbek SSR also contributed to their commitment to Tajik statehood. Fedtke, “Soviet Nationalities
Policy,” 19–50; Shakuri, Abbos Aliev, 103–39; and Shakuri, Fitna-i inqilob, 3–102.
51
On the trajectories of Central Asian scholarly families, see Dudoignon, “Faction Struggles”; and Pickett,
Polymaths, esp. 196–217.
52
See Ikromi, Yoddoshtho, 170–79, 190–201, and 206–7 for a vivid description of the tense situation in Dushanbe
(Stalinabad)—especially for himself and other “sons of [former] rich men and judges” ( farzandon-i boyho va qoziho;
196), such as Pairau Sulaimānī and his friend Baḥā al-Dīn Ikrām—and how they were recruited for work in Tajikistan.
53
Schild, “National Literatures,” 58.
54
Kleinmichel, “Uzbek Short Story Writer,” 143.
55
Dobrenko, “Transformations,” 49. On literary criticism as a weapon in Uzbekistan, see Baldauf, “Educating the
Poets,” 193–98. According to Katharina Schild, in the 1920s and 1930s, “Soviet literary analysis meant commending
or condemning writers for their ideological soundness”; “National Literatures,” 60.
662 Thomas Loy
Since too few Tajik scholars, critics, and theorists were available, the editorial team of
Rahbar-i Dānish also sought to recruit authors from outside Central Asia. There were good
relationships with Azerbaijan, where some Central Asian intellectuals of the younger gener-
ation had completed study visits at the Eastern Faculty of the Baku Darülfünun in the first
half of the 1920s, among them Narẕullāh Ḥaidarī Bīktāsh and Sharīfjān Husainzāda.56 There
they encountered and became acquainted with the Russian school of literary criticism of
Georgi Plekhanov (1856–1918) and Aleksandr Voronsky (1884–1937) and their notion of his-
torical materialism.57 And it was Bīktāsh who convinced his former teacher and head of the
Persian program in Baku, Mīrzā Muḥsin Ibrāhīmī, to contribute several articles for Rahbar-i
Dānish.58
Half a year after his first call to young writers, Manāfzāda was disappointed with the
results they had achieved. In an article published in early 1928, he vented his anger and
stated that most authors had not yet grasped the meaning of “literary criticism” (tanqīd-i
adabī). “It is completely unknown to most people in Tajikistan, because when they hear
the term tanqīd,” Manāfzāda complained, “they immediately think of personal humiliation
or insults (taḥqīr yā taubīkh).”59 Manāfzāda then harshly criticized some of the poems and
a short story (ḥikāya) recently sent to the editors of Rahbar-i Dānish. In only one of the writ-
ers did he see a promising future for Tajik prose. Manāfzāda praised Jalāl al-Dīn Ikrām for
choosing a contemporary setting for his short story “Shīrīn.” He criticized, however, the
author’s character descriptions and the artificial or unnatural (ghayr-i ṭabīʿī) nature of the
events depicted. In Manāfzāda’s view, “this type of description is usually only found in
ancient and classic fairy tales of the Orient” (īn gūna taṣvīrhārā faqat az afsānahā-yi kuhna
va kīlāsikī-i sharq paydā kardan mumkin ast).60 Therefore, he suggested that Jalāl al-Dīn
Ikrām should instead study the European “naturalists” and “realists” and avoid using too
many “incomprehensible” words from his hometown, Bukhara. He concluded the article
with the advice that the young author should not take the criticism personally or be
offended because “not only novices make mistakes, but they also are to be found in the
works of the masters” (na īn ki dar navishtahā-yi nauqalamān-i havaskār, balki dar asarhā-yi
ustādān ham bisyār khaṭāhā-yi shāyān-i tanqīd dīda mīshavad).61
56
Narẕullāh Ḥaidarī “Bīktāsh” (1900/3–1938) was born in Samarkand and attended a traditional maktab and a
Russian-language school. In the early 1920s, he worked for several journals, authored poems in Uzbek, and partic-
ipated in the influential Chaghatay Conversation Circle (Chaghatay gurungi). Along with others, he also was involved
in founding the newspaper Āvāz-i tājīk (1924–1931). In 1925, he graduated from the Baku university. After his return
to Tashkent, he worked as a lecturer on Tajik literature and joined the Tajik State Publishing House. In 1928, he
joined the editorial board of Rahbar-i Dānish and became a leading member of the newly created scientific research
institute in Dushanbe. Bīktāsh and his writings were denounced repeatedly, and he was arrested in 1929 and 1933.
Although he largely refrained from publishing after his second release, Bīktāsh was arrested again in summer 1937
and died in jail.
Sharīfjān Husainzāda (1907–1988) was born into a merchant family in Kān-i Bādām and attended an
Uzbek-language school in Kokand. In 1926, after graduation from the Baku university, he returned to Uzbekistan,
where he continued his studies and worked as a lecturer. In 1931 and 1932, he taught literature and held several
positions in Dushanbe. In 1933, he returned to Tashkent for postgraduate studies at the Institute of Language
and Literature. He graduated in 1935. Five years later, Husainzāda was appointed head of the Department of
Tajik Language and Literature at the State Pedagogical Institute in Stalinabad. From 1963 until 1984, he served as
head of the Department of Classical Tajik Literature at Tajikistan State University and became one of the most influ-
ential scholars of Tajik literature.
57
Nabiev, Narzullo-i Bektosh, 10–12, 55, and 67–74.
58
Ibrāhīmī’s contributions to Rahbar-i Dānish were “Adabīyāt-i zabān-i pahlavī”; “Tāʿrīkh-i adabīyāt-i Īrān (daura-i
islāmī)”; “Az taʿrīkh-i adabīyāt-i fārs,” which was published as a serial in three subsequent issues of RD in 1928;
“Adabīyāt va ṣanʿat dar proto-marksizm”; and “Masʿala-i alifbā-yi nau.” On Mīrzā Muḥsin Ibrāhīmī and his influen-
tial anthology Namūnah-i adabiyāt-i Īrān (Sampler of the Literature of Iran), which was published in Baku in 1922 and
served as a textbook at the Eastern Faculty of the university, see Samuel Hodgkin’s contribution in this volume.
59
Manāfzāda, “Pārchahā-yi adabī-i mā,” 37.
60
Ibid., 40. On Ikrām’s short story “Shīrīn,” which was published in the same issue, see note 102.
61
Manāfzāda, “Pārchahā-yi adabī-i mā,” 39–40.
Iranian Studies 663
In 1928, this final comment drawing attention to the mistakes of “masters” would easily
be understood as referring to Ṣadr al-Dīn ʿAinī’s anthology of Tajik literature Namūna-i
adabīyāt-i tājīk (Samples of Tajik Literature), which was published in 1926.62 Even before
its publication, ʿAinī’s compilation aroused severe criticism among scholars and Uzbek pol-
iticians.63 A year later, in 1927, the handling of prerevolutionary literature changed in the
Soviet Union, and it was decided that from then on “the publication of poetry from the
era of feudalism can no longer count among our tasks. . . . In the future it has to be refrained
from printing the works of Makhtumqulī as well as collections of ancient poetry from
Uzbekistan, Tajikistan.”64 This course correction was aimed directly at the sampler compiled
by Ṣadr al-Dīn ʿAinī and similar endeavors related to Uzbek literature.65
In December 1929, three years after ʿAinī’s book was published in Moscow, a critical
review article on Namūna-i adabīyāt-i tājīk appeared in Rahbar-i Dānish. The article was signed
by Jalāl al-Dīn Ikrām.66 The critic considered the six-hundred-page anthology, which “con-
sists of forty printer’s sheets and was printed in an edition of 5,000 copies,” to be “a waste of
resources.” Although he acknowledged ʿAinī’s efforts to compile the anthology, Ikrām—in
the typical dialectic approach of the time—sharply attacked ʿAinī and highlighted several
conceptual mistakes and ideological shortcomings in his work. In his view, the anthology
had been compiled without “Marxist methodology” (uṣūl-i markīsīstī) and a proper “theory
of class” (naẓariya-i ṣinfī), lacked a clear intended audience, and arbitrarily selected poems
without necessary explanation. Furthermore, according to the critic, ʿAinī failed to contex-
tualize the “poems of the old poets” (sheʿrhā-i shuʿarā-i qadīm), provided no answer as to why
the old poets wrote the way they did, avoided properly comparing the old poems with con-
temporary ones, and did not positively rate the literary progress since the revolution. As a
result, the anthology benefited only a tiny group of Tajik men of letters (ahl-i sukhan) and
was “useless for its intended audience”—namely, a whole generation of novices
(nauāmūzān) in need of literary instruction. Given these flaws, he reached the conclusion
that ʿAinī’s collection “failed to respond to the current needs of Tajikistan” and, even
worse, “provoked and increased national enmity” (sabab-i ziyād shudan-i dushmanī-i millī
mīshavad), particularly between Tajiks and Uzbeks.67
When literary debates became overly confrontational, the editors of Rahbar-i Dānish also
weighed in and commented on the inconclusive nature or excessiveness of criticism: “We do
not see the Namūna-i adabiyāt-i tājīk as an error-free work without weaknesses, but we also
do not agree with some of the criticisms listed in this article. We will explain our thoughts
on this in detail in a later issue.”68 Yet this did not happen, because a short time later ʿAinī’s
anthology was banned and withdrawn from circulation by the Soviet authorities. In 1930, the
62
On the publication of Namūna-i adabīyāt-i tājīk, see Samuel Hodgkin’s contribution in this volume.
63
Rzehak, Vom Persischen, 163, 298.
64
The eighteenth-century poet Magtymguly Pyragy (in Persian: Makhdūmqulī Farāghī) was stylized as the
Turkmen national poet in the 1920s. In the early 1930s, he was considered a reactionary poet; Edgar, Tribal
Nation, 154–55. Cf Shakuri, Khuroson ast injo, 209.
65
In 1928, ʿAbd al-Raʾūf Fiṭrat had compiled the first volume of O’zbek adabiyati namunalari (Samples of Uzbek
Literature). Besides this volume on medieval Uzbek literature, no further volumes were published.
66
Ikrām, “Naẓare ba ‘Namūna-i adabiyāt-i tājīk’.” According to Muhammadjon-i Shakuri, however, the author
behind this critical article was not Jalāl Ikrāmī but Abbās ʿAlīev (1899–1958). Shakuri, Abbos Aliev, 114.
67
Ikrām, “Naẓare ba ‘Namūna-i adabiyāt-i tājīk,’” 23–24. These enmities came to a climax after Tajikistan was
declared a Soviet Republic in 1929 and the new Tajik government demanded that territories including
Samarkand and Bukhara be attached to it—a request that was ultimately turned down. See, Bergne, Birth of
Tajikistan, 100–24; and ʿAbd al-Qādir Muḥiddīnūf’s most controversial contribution to this debate, “Mardum-i
shahr va aṭrāf-i Bukhārā tājīkand yā ūzbak,” which was published in Rahbar-i Dānish in September/October 1928
and in a concurrent Russian version by the Central Asian Bureau of the Central Committee of the All-Union com-
munist party. Fedtke “Soviet Nationalities Policy,” 32. On this fateful contribution, see also Rzehak, Vom Persischen,
159–60, 302–4.
68
Ikrām, “Naẓare ba ‘Namūna-i adabiyāt-i tājīk,’” 24. It is significant that the critique was published in the first
issue of Rahbar-i Dānish after Lāhūtī dropped out as the journal’s editor in chief. Lāhūtī wrote the introduction to
664 Thomas Loy
year in which ʿAinī published his much acclaimed first Tajik novel Dākhunda, the fate of his
anthology was sealed when politicians in Tashkent and Moscow accused it of containing
counterrevolutionary and pro-monarchic messages.69
Translations and Radicalizations

In search of proper models for future Tajik literature, the literary section in Rahbar-i Dānish
also offered space for portraits of non–Central Asian writers and translations of their works.
But here too no clear line can be discerned. The selection was probably based primarily on
the taste of the respective translator and biographer.70 In addition to the well-known short
stories “One Night” by Rabindranath Tagore and “The Tunnel,” taken from Maksim Gorky’s
cycle Skazky ob Italii (Italian Fairy Tales,” 1911–1913), a number of lesser-known works of
mainly Russian authors from the collection Library of the Youth Organization of the
World in Struggle (Kitābkhāna-i kāmsāmālān-i jahān dar mubāriza) were translated and pre-
sented to readers from 1929 onward. The translators do not elaborate on the selected
authors and their works, nor do they give reasons for the selections made.71
Slightly more revealing are the portraits of writers also presented in this period. The
first of these, by Raḥīm Mīm, appeared in issue 4/5 (1928) and summarized the life and
work of Mirzā Fatḥ-ʿAlī Ākhūndzāda (1812–1878).72 In the same issue Maksim Gorky and
his writings were introduced to Tajik readers.73 On the occasion of the hundredth birthday
of Lev Tolstoy, Manāfzāda took the opportunity to propose the work and style of this
world-famous Russian “classic” and “romantic” littérateur as a model for young Tajik writ-
ers. However, as a precaution he added that in today’s time of revolution and class struggle
Tolstoy’s “ideology of nonviolence is of course no longer appropriate.”74 In the following
year, Raḥīm Mīm dedicated himself to the “skilled and prominent playwright and short
story writer” Anton Chekhov on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death, although the
article is preceded by the author’s warning to the readers that the works of this “bourgeois
writer do not deal adequately with the subject of work nor of workers.”75 Conflicting mes-
sages also can be found in a 1930 obituary written by Bīktāsh in which he commemorated
and bemoaned the early death of the “Russian revolutionary and red poet” and “truly pro-
letarian writer” Vladimir Mayakovsky. However, in Bīktāsh’s view, Mayakovsky had
betrayed the ideals of the revolution and done harm to the proletarian cause by commit-
ting suicide.76
ʿAinī’s anthology and was instrumental in the publication of the work, which was already controversial at the time
of its creation. Rzehak, Vom Persischen, 160–4.
69
Shakuri, Khuroson ast injo, 206–7. Ṣadr al-Dīn ʿAinī remembers the critique and prohibition of his Namūna-i
adabiyāt-i tājīk in his short autobiography “Mukhtasar-i tarjima-i hol-i khudam,” 97–98.
70
Between 1928 and 1930, a total of twelve literary translations by at least six different translators, as well as five
writer biographies, were published in Rahbar-i Dānish.
71
The translation of Tagore’s short story “Yak shab bā Saʿādat” was published without any reference to the trans-
lator. Gorky’s “Tūnal” was translated by Tūraqul Dhihnī. A more detailed description and analysis of the translations
is beyond the scope of this essay.
72
Raḥīm Mīm, aka Raḥīm Ḥāshīm, (1908–1993) was born in Samarkand and graduated from a Russian-language
school. In the 1920s and 1930s he worked for several Tajik periodicals and for the Tajik State Publishing House in
Samarkand and Stalinabad. In the late 1930s he was arrested. In 1954 he returned from the labor camp. In the fol-
lowing decades Raḥīm Ḥāshīm was a well-known and respected translator and literary historian.
For Ākhūndzāda article, see Raḥīm Mīm, “Mirzā Fatḥ-ʿalī Akhūndūf.” This portrait does not deal with
Ākhūndzāda’s literary works but with his early attempts to develop a Latin alphabet for Persian and Azeri.
73
Mūsavī, “Māksīm Gūrkī.”
74
Manāfzāda, “Līv Nīkulāīvīj Tālstūī,” 25. Following this six-page introduction, Raḥīm Mīm contributed “Yak shu-
dan żarūr ast,” a translation of Tolstoy’s 1905 short story “The One Thing Needful.”
75
Raḥīm Mīm, “Antun Chekhūf,” 10.
76
Bīktāsh, “Vilādīmīr Māyākūvīskī.” For Pairau Sulaimānī’s Mayakovsky-style poem “on the occasion of the sui-
cide of the Russian revolutionary poet,” ibid., 20.
Iranian Studies 665
So it seems that at the beginning of the 1930s nobody knew any longer who exactly the
Persianate or European literary models for young Tajik writers should be. With this growing
uncertainty, the tone of criticism also changed in Soviet Central Asia. In Uzbekistan, the
heated atmosphere of the cultural revolution and the upcoming first Five-Year Plan “favored
a general rhetoric of struggle and acceleration . . . and the fiery youth was ready to adopt this
verbal radicalism rather than following some Party publicists’ call for patience.”77 This
aggressive tendency also can be observed in Rahbar-i Dānish. However, most contributions
in the journal were less ideologically “committed” than those appearing in other Tajik
language periodicals of the time, such as Tājīkistān-i surkh, run by the twenty-year-old
Ghulāmriżā ʿAlīzāda and his circle, most notably Sātim Ulūghzāda.78 For all of them, literary
criticism was a powerful weapon in the intensifying “class war” announced by the political
leaders. ʿAlīzāda did not accept any literary figure except Lāhūtī. In a 1932 serial article,
ʿAlīzāda wrote that he “witnessed the appearance of a bourgeois ideology in our literature”
and demanded that his contemporaries “intensify the struggle against the rotten liberalism
and the agents of class enemies on the battlefield of ideology.”79 ʿAlīzāda’s ideological
outlook was built upon similar ideas published in Tājīkistān-i surkh three years earlier by
the eighteen-year-old ʿAlī Khush, who wrote:
Right now, it is our main and stern duty to put the proletarian class literature that
already exists in Tajikistan on the right track and to make sure that our literature
does not deviate one millimeter from the tasks assigned to it. This includes portraying
the building of socialism and the class struggle of the proletariat.80
By the end of the decade, the more radical writers and critics had pushed their way into
the journal. In the first two years of its publication, articles that were too abrasive were still
being rejected by the editors of Rahbar-i Dānish. In issue 3 (1927) the following editorial note
was addressed to Sātim Ulūghzāda: “The things that you criticized are not in the article. Read
the article again carefully.”81 Having his contribution rejected did not discourage the young
critic. Only two years later, Ulūghzāda’s damning review of a short story by Manāfzāda was
published in the journal. Spanning three pages, Ulūghzāda’s review was even longer than the
work he criticized. He accused Manāfzāda’s short story “Latāfat-āy firīb khūrd” (The
77
Baldauf, “Educating the Poets,” 197.
78
The publication organ of the Tajik Communist Party and government appeared for the first time in 1925 under
the title ʿīd-i Tājīk and later Bīdārī-i Tājīk. In 1928, it was renamed Tājīkistān-i Surkh (Red Tajikistan).
In his publications on the history of Tajik literary criticism, Abdulkholiq Nabiev (Nabavi) mentions that not
much is known about Ghulāmriżā ʿAlizāda (1908–1937) and many other Tajik publicists of the late 1920s and
1930s. Many of them are not included in Soviet encyclopedias or in the Encyclopedia-i adabiyot va sanʿat.
According to Nabiev (Taʿrikh-i tashakkul, 20–21), ʿAlizāda was “probably sent to Tajikistan after graduation from
one of the Party faculties” and from 1929 onward worked for various Tajik newspapers. His first article appeared
in July 1929 in Tājīkistān-i Surkh, where he was head of the public relations department. In April 1930, he was
announced as executive secretary (kātib-i masʿul) and editor (moḥarrīr) of the newspaper Javānān-i Tājīkistān. From
1931 until its dissolution in April 1932, Ghulāmriżā ʿAlīzāda was executive secretary (kātib-i masʿul) of the Tajik
branch of the Association of Proletarian Writers (APP).
Sātim Ulūghzāda (1911–1997) was born in a village in the Ferghana Valley (in today’s Uzbekistan) and was edu-
cated in a Soviet orphanage. In 1929, he graduated from the Tajik teachers training college (dār ul-muʿallimīn-i
Tājīkistān) in Tashkent. A year later he moved to Stalinabad and worked for several Tajik periodicals. Beginning
in the late 1920s, he published many literary critical essays. In 1934, he became the executive secretary (kātib-i
masʿul) of the newly established Tajik Writers’ Union, and in the late 1930s he started his own very successful career
as a Tajik prose writer.
79
ʿAlīzāda, “Mubāriza barā-yi firqagī-i adabiyāt”; cf Nabiev, Taʿrikh-i tashakkul, 22.
80
ʿAlī Khushmuḥammadzāda (1912–1942) was born in the Rasht region (Tajikistan). In 1928 he entered the Tajik
teachers’ college in Samarkand and two years later he was sent to Stalinabad and worked there in various positions
for various periodicals. He was arrested in 1937 and died in 1942. Quotation is from ʿAlī Khush, “Mulāhizahā-yi mā
dar jabha-i adabīyāt-i prūletārī”; cf. Nabiev, Taʿrikh-i tashakkul, 21.
81
Idāra, “ʿAlāqa-i mā bā khwānandagān,” 36.
666 Thomas Loy
Deceived Latāfat) of not being literature because its author delivered a “mere journalistic”
report “based on pure chance and random encounters.” Ulūghzāda did not see the text or
the female protagonist described in it as a “typical” (Russ. tipichnyi) representation of his
own generation.82 Now, in the early 1930s, the editors had little choice but to add in
small print at the end of Ulūghzāda’s harsh review that those who read it also should
have a look at the criticized work. Be that as it may, the critically panned work remained
Manāfzāda’s only short story published in Rahbar-i Dānish.83
Yet, in general, the literary criticism in Rahbar-i Dānish was more moderate than in other
contemporary periodicals. As late as 1930, it was still possible to publish an article in which
the virtues of prerevolutionary Jadid literature—especially ʿAbd al-Raʾūf Fiṭrat and his prose
writings of the 1910s—could be praised and proposed as models of a new Tajik literature.84
Sharīfjān Ḥusainzāda viewed Fiṭrat as “the first to pioneer prose and novel writing in Tajik
literature” and a master who “uses the commonly understandable Tajik language in his
prose and the fine and beautiful style of courtly literature in his poetry.”85 Although he crit-
icized the Jadids (as was customary at the time) and especially Fiṭrat as “moral preceptors of
the local bourgeoisie” and saw severe shortcomings in Jadid “content and ideology,” he con-
textualized this Central Asian enlightenment movement as caught in a historical quandary,
as they had to fight a two-front battle against “foreign capital” (sarmāya-i ajnabī) and the
“remnants of the [local] feudal system” (anṣarhā-yi bāqīmānda-i daur-i fīādālīzm).86 In
Uzbekistan, the former members (and sympathizers) of the Jadid movement had fallen
out of favor as early as 1927 and subsequently became prime political targets.87 From
that year, Fiṭrat, after not having published any texts in Persian or Tajik for almost a decade,
became engaged in the creation of Tajik culture and literature. In 1927, Fiṭrat authored the
first ever play in Tajik, and for two years he published articles in Rahbar-i Dānish mainly deal-
ing with the Tajik Latinization program.88 Apparently, he was supported by the very influ-
ential educator and cultural functionary Nis̲ ār Muḥammad Afghān, who won him over to
the Tajik cause.89
82
Ulūghzāda, “Yak nigāh ba nas̲ r-i tājīkī.” In his review, Ulūghzāda consistently referred to Manāfzāda as an edi-
tor (muḥarrir) and not as a writer (navisanda). In a subordinate clause he praised Jalāl al-Dīn Ikrām’s thematically
similar short story “Chī bāyad kard?” published in RD in 1929.
83
Manāfzāda, “Latāfat-āy firīb khūrd.”
84
ʿAbd al-Raʾūf Fiṭrat (1886–1938) was born in Bukhara and studied in Istanbul, where he wrote his first prose
works. In 1927, Fiṭrat became a member of the Scientific Board of the Tajik Republic (shūrā-i ʿilmī-i jumhūrī-i
tājīkistān), and a year later did the same in Uzbekistan. He was arrested in 1937 and shot in October 1938; Borjan,
“Feṭrat.” For a recent discussion of the Jadid movement in Central Asia, see Baldauf, “Jadidism,” and Eden et al.,
“Moving Beyond.”
85
Sharīfjān Ḥusainzāda (1907–1988) was born in Kān-i Bādām. He attended an Uzbek-language school in Kokand
until 1923 and graduated from the Baku Pedagogical Institute in 1926. Ḥusainzāda’s early professional career
unfolded between the capitals of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. In 1940, he was appointed head of the Department of
Tajik Language and Literature at the State Pedagogical Institute of Stalinabad. He directed the Institute of
History, Language, Literature, and Archaeology (1943–1947) and the literary branch of the Institute of Tajik
Language and Literature (1948–1958). From 1963 until 1984, he served as head of the Department of Classical
Tajik Literature at Tajikistan State University. In 1983, he was awarded the Rudaki State Prize.
86
Husainzāda, “Mubāriza.”
87
Baldauf, “Educating the Poets,” 194–198.
88
It is noticeable that Husainzāda in his article makes no mention of this first play in Tajik, a milestone for Soviet
literature, probably because already, at the end of the 1920s, Fiṭrat’s version of the play was no longer in line with
political guidelines. On Fiṭrat’s controversial play “Shūrish-i Vāzeʿ,” see Holzwarth, “Aufstand.” Fiṭrat’s outline and
defense of a new Tajik alphabet were published in RD 3 (1927): 12–14; 4–5 (1928): 13–16; and 10 (1928): 8–10. For a
discussion see Rzehak, Vom Persischen, 235–37. Two further articles of Fiṭrat appeared, in RD 1–2 (1928): 12–14 (on a
fifteenth-century dictionary); and in RD 3 (1928): 11–17 (on the divan of Saīf al-dīn Isfarangī). For a list and analysis
of Fiṭrat’s writings, see Allworth’s Preoccupations and Evading Reality.
89
Nisār Muḥammad Afghān (1887–1937) was born near Peshawar in British India. In 1920, he emigrated to
Tashkent and became a Soviet citizen. After heading the Tajik teachers’ college in Tashkent from 1924 to 1926,
Iranian Studies 667
Prose and Poetry

The literary section in Rahbar-i Dānish was divided into prose and poetry, poetry having been
considered the true essence of Persian literature for centuries. An average of two to three
poems appeared in every issue. Poetry in Rahbar-i Dānish was dominated by a handful of
names. Most prominent among them were Ātajān “Pairau” Sulaimānī, ʿAbdullāh “Suhailī”
Jauharīzāda, Aḥmadjān ʿAbd al-Saidzāda “Ḥamdī,” and, outshining all others, Lāhūtī.90
More than 80 percent of the poetry published in Rahbar-i Dānish came from these authors.
Another poet featured in Rahbar-i Dānish was the nineteen-year-old ʿAbd al-Salām
Pīrmuḥammadzāda “Dihātī,” who in February 1930 also contributed a literary critique in
which he attacked his older colleague Suhailī for his use of Arabic and old-fashioned
Persian words and his frequent repetition of motifs as a negative example of backward
poetry.91 Condemnation of the “old poetry” was a running theme throughout the issues
of Rahbar-i Dānish. But there was no consistent idea about how to properly replace the old
and outdated poetic forms. It is telling that despite the fact that Suhailī was often criticized
quite sharply in Rahbar-i Dānish, he was one of the most frequently printed poets in the jour-
nal. In response to Dihātī’s criticism of Suhailī, the editorial staff again felt compelled to sub-
mit its own position on the criticized work. The editors emphasized that it did not suffice to
simply condemn old-fashioned poetic usages and demanded a more proactive approach and
concrete suggestions for a reform of the literary language and poetry.92
But at the end of the 1920s, poetry was no longer regarded as the prime genre of Central
Asian literature. Prose writing gained importance, and even the generation of young poets
like Pairau and Dihātī tried their hands at writing short stories (ḥikāya), albeit without much
success.93 In issue 2 (1927) the editors of Rahbar-i Dānish announced a competition for young
Tajik writers (nauqalamān-i tājīk) and suggested some topics for future works of poetry and
prose. They promised to select the best submissions and publish them in the journal. The
proposed topics for prose writing were the following: (a) How did Raḥmatullāh Īshān get
his fourth wife?; (b) Why was Fāziljān excluded from the youth [organization]?; and (c)
What were the atrocities committed by Būtābāī Qūrbāshi in the village Jūībār during the
Basmachi revolt?94 A few months later Jalāl al-Dīn Ikrām’s short story “Raḥmatullāh
Īshān” was published in Rahbar-i Dānish.
However, many of the submissions did not meet the demands of the journal. Shortly
before he was dismissed from his post, the editor in chief Muḥammad Mūsavī complained
in February 1929 that “during the last months we have received some short stories that
he held various prominent posts in the Communist Party of Tajikistan, including that of People’s Commissar for
Education (Rzehak, Vom Persischen, 148–49).
90
Ātajān Pairau Sulaimānī Bukhārāī (1899–1933) was born in Bukhara. He came from a Mashhadi Jewish family
and received a traditional Muslim education as well as private instruction in Russian. Pairau’s poetry was promoted
by Ṣadr al-Dīn ʿAinī but attracted severe criticism in the late 1920s and early 1930s. He died of typhoid fever in
Samarkand in June 1933. On Pairau Sulaimānī and his works, see Hitchins, “Solaymāni” and “Bukharan Poet.”
ʿAbdullāh “Suhailī” Jauharīzāda (1900–1964) was born in Uroteppa (present-day Istaravshan), received a tradi-
tional school education, and graduated from the teacher training college in Samarkand in 1924. Bečka names
Suhailī as one of the founders of revolutionary poetry; “Tajik Literature,” 569.
Aḥmadjān ʿAbd-al Saidzāda “Ḥamdī” (1875–1946) was born in Bukhara and was a close companion of ʿAinī. He
worked as a representative of the Bukharan government in Moscow (1920–1924). In the 1930s he also translated
works by Pushkin and other Russian poets into Tajik; Adibon-i Tojikiston, 616–17.
91
ʿAbd al-Salām Pīrmuḥammadzāda (1911–1962) was born in Samarkand and moved to Stalinabad in 1935. He was
also known as “Dihātī” and belonged to the Komsomol generation of Tajik literature. For the critique, see
Pīrmuḥammadzāda, “Adabiyātamān-rā”.
92
See Noelle-Karimi “Pīrmuḥammadzāda Dihātī.”
93
Dihātī’s three short stories in Rahbar-i Dānish were “Ḥamīda-i siyābakht”; “Dāgh-i farzandī”; and “Ajinahā-yi
chūpānatā.” They were modeled on works by his mentor Ṣadr al-Dīn ʿAinī and received no further attention.
Pairau Sulaimonī’s “Gulandām,” a love story situated in a Tajik village, was heavily criticized one and a half
years after its publication for being “implausible” and far from the reality of village life (Aʿlāzāda, “Pārchahā”).
94
Idāra, “Mauzūʿhā-yi mā.”
668 Thomas Loy
have only little scholarly and artistic value. . . . Since we have to keep the scientific standard
of the journal we cannot publish every single one of these texts.” At the same time, he calls
on the literary clubs in Samarkand, Bukhara, and Uroteppa to follow the example of Khujand
and set up a “literary wall-newspaper” (rūznāma-i adabī-i dīvārī) for young and inexperienced
writers to increase their skills and enthusiasm for literature.95 A few months earlier, Mūsavī
had been dissatisfied with the “endless and fruitless” debates on the renewal of the literary
language, and he called on writers to finally translate their words into deed: “Everyone keeps
repeating that the literary language has to be changed—but we all know that—now we finally
need results in lexicon and style.”96
ʿAinı̄ and the “Young Pens” of New Tajik Prose: Jalā l al-Dı̄ n Ikrā m and ʿAzı̄ zı̄
Following the publication of the serialized story of the “poor Tajik” Ādīna, its author, Ṣadr
al-Dīn ʿAinī, was regarded as the “undisputed leading . . . writer” of Soviet Tajik prose liter-
ature.97 Two of his early short stories were published in Rahbar-i Dānish: “Aḥmad-i dīvband”
in 1928 and “Māhrūy” in 1929.98 The former, which had autobiographical features, over the
years became ʿAinī’s most famous short story. The latter was reprinted only once, posthu-
mously, in the fifth volume of his collected works. “Māhrūy” is a fictionalized story based
on the alleged murder of a young Tajik Red Army soldier by an anti-Soviet (Basmachi) leader
in 1926. It tells the story of Māhrūy, the fiancée of the murdered hero, and can be seen as a
literary showpiece for young writers, as requested in the announcement mentioned above.99
Next to ʿAinī, the two most productive and widely discussed young Tajik prose writers in
the late 1920s and early 1930s were Jalāl al-Dīn Ikrām and Baḥr al-Dīn ʿAzīzī. Ten out of
twenty-four short stories published in Rahbar-i Dānish between 1927 and 1930 were written
by them: five by Ikrām and five by ʿAzīzī.100
In his memoirs Ikromi remembers his first meeting with Ṣadr al-Dīn ʿAinī in Bukhara in
summer 1927. When he showed ʿAinī his first poems and a piece of prose, the latter advised
him to stop writing poetry and instead concentrate on prose. With the support of ʿAinī, Jalāl
al-Dīn Ikrām’s first piece of prose, “Shabe dar rīgistān-i Bukhārā,” was then printed in issue 2
of Rahbar-i Dānish “without any editorial changes,” as Ikromi proudly emphasized in retro-
spect.101 But the situation didn’t last. Jalol Ikromi recalls that ʿAinī corrected and revised his
three-and-a-half-page short story “Shīrīn,” about a young bride who is kidnapped on her
wedding night by a gang of brutal Basmachi, “six or seven times” before he considered it
publishable.102 Even after its publication, some commentators were very critical of Jalāl
al-Dīn Ikrām’s short story.103
95
Idāra, “Dar aṭrāf-i yak masʿala-i muhimm.” “Wall-newspapers” (a literal translation from Russian stengazeta)
were printed in limited editions and glued on boards.
96
Mūsavī, “Maktūb.”
97
Grassi, “Soviet Tajik Fiction,” 693. On the story “Ādīna, yā ki sarguzasht-i yak tājīk-i kambaghal” (Ādīna, or The
Destiny of a Poor Tajik), which was published in the monthly Āvāz-i tājīk between August 1924 and April 1925, see
later discussion.
98
ʿAinī, “Aḥmad-i dīvband” (part 1); ʿAinī, “Aḥmad-i dīvband” (part 2); ʿAinī, “Māhrūy.”
99
ʿAinī, “Mohrūy.” On “Aḥmad-i dīvband,” see later discussion.
100
Jalāl Ikrāmī’s short stories published in Rahbar-i Dānish were: “Shabe dar rīgistān-i Bukhārā,” “Shīrīn,”
“Raḥmatullā Īshān,” “Āyā chī bāyad kard?” and “Yak ḥauża-i purkhūn.”
Baḥr al-Dīn ʿAzīzī’s short stories were: “Buzkashī,” “Bīdānabāzī,” “Pādishāh- Pādishāh,” “Nikāḥ-i Dilkhwāh,” and
“Gul.”
101
Ikromi, Yoddoshtho, 127–30.
102
Ikromi, Yoddoshtho, 131–33. After her father and groom are killed by the Basmachi, the bride Shīrīn manages to
escape from her kidnappers. In the middle of the night a Red Army search party finds her. The soldiers kill the
ringleaders and capture the rest of the Basmachi. This plot comes close to what the editors of Rahbar-i Dānish
had suggested as suitable topics for prose works in RD 2 (1927).
103
See, for example, Manāfzāda’s critical comments on Ikrāmī and his second short story “Shīrīn” in the same
issue, 39–40.
Iranian Studies 669
In the late 1920s and early 1930s, it was not Jalāl al-Dīn Ikrām (the 1960s to 1980s hero of
Soviet Tajik prose), but Baḥr al-Dīn ʿAzīzī who was considered the most talented young Tajik
writer. Most critics highly praised his simple language and fluid style as well as the
up-to-date content of his prose. From the autumn of 1929 onward, the twenty-five-year-old
ʿAzīzī published short stories as well as contributions to the regional geography and ethnog-
raphy section (kishvarshināsī). Baḥr al-Dīn ʿAzīzī was born in Uroteppa in 1894, the son of the
poet Mullā ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz “Jazmī.” He visited the madrasa in Uroteppa and, beginning in 1916,
continued his education in Bukhara. In the early 1920s, he completed a two-year teacher
training course in Tashkent and then worked as a teacher and member of the executive com-
mittee in his birthplace. During his studies in Bukhara he wrote in Turki and Persian using
the pen name “Azmī.” In the 1920s he also signed his works as “Tarsānchak” and “Tarsakī”
(the coward). He was best known for his contributions to the satirical weekly Mullā Mushfiqī
and for his articles critical of language and literature. ʿAzīzī was arrested in 1937 and died in
prison in 1944.104
In an article published in June 1930, Sharīfjān Ḥusainzāda views Baḥr al-Dīn ʿAzīzī as “one
of the promising newcomers” in Tajik literature and “a typical example of our newborn peas-
ant literature. He solely stands out from our contemporary poets and writers in his simple
style and language.”105 Ḥusainzāda saw ʿAzīzī’s “biggest achievement” as his “simple style,”
remarking that along with his aim “to acquaint the readers with village life and the living
conditions of the peasants . . . ʿAzīzī is in touch with the emotions and worldview shaping
the peasant outlook. . . . He does not refer to the feudal past but to the socialist reforms
introduced at the village level.” But, as was usual in the 1920s and 1930s Soviet dialectical
approach, this positive review did not come without criticism: “At the same time, ʿAzīzī’s
idealization of peasant life is one of his greatest shortcomings. His stories fail to reflect
the ongoing class struggle at the village level. He does not show the struggle of the poor
against the old elites and parasites. . . . He does not show the role of the Party and the
Soviets in the villages. . . . His stories bear witness to his failure to highlight the salient
aspects of present-day village life.”106 What Husainzāda does not mention is that Baḥr
al-Dīn ʿAzīzī was not the son of a peasant but came from a family that belonged to the
pre-Soviet religious elite—like most of the other literary newcomers in the late 1920s.107
In his short stories and other pieces of prose in Rahbar-i Dānish, ʿAzīzī turns away from
the obsolete and outdated beliefs of his father and forefathers.108 Nevertheless, his writings
also show the powerful nature of old thought patterns in rural Tajikistan—even under the
conditions of the new Soviet power and modern science.
ʿAzīzī’s naive village heroes are easily seduced by the allure of the non-socialist life. Most
of the people around them still cling to their old traditions, amusements, and beliefs. Status
symbols (horses) and gambling (quail fights) are more important to them than working for
the common good. The weak heroes in ʿAzīzī’s short stories are hurled into the abyss: their
children die of curable diseases (“Gul”), they go into debt and drag their families to ruin
104
Rzehak, Vom Persischen, 189.
105
Husainzāda, “Mubāriza,” 20.
106
All quotations: ibid., 19–20.
107
Other young writers with pre-Soviet religious nobility (aṣīlzādagān) backgrounds were Jalāl al-Dīn Ikrām and
his friend Bahā al-Dīn Ikrām, who in 1927 and 1928 also contributed two short stories (and some articles) to Rahbar-i
Dānish—“Faqirazan va klūb-i zanān,” and “Yatīma.” On Bahā al-Dīn Ikrām, see Ikromi, Yoddoshtho, 155–60, 180–82.
108
Baḥr al-Dīn ʿAzīzī also contributed two texts in the section “Regional Geography” (kishvarshināsī), “Istarafshan –
Uropteppa”—here he analyzes and compares the different names of his birthplace; and “Chil hujra”—in which he
describes a former pilgrimage site near Uroteppa and the superstitions and beliefs connected to it. The style of
these prose texts does not differ from that of his literary pieces; however, the hero in them is not fictitious but
the author himself. He also contributed two articles commenting on the main literary topic of these years, the
development of a new Tajik literary language: “Ba zabān-i darī-i durrī,” and “Darbāra-i zabān-i adabī-i tājīk.”
Cyrillicized versions of both texts are reproduced in the collected volume Zabon-i tojiki dar mabno-i mubohisaho,
357–63 and 653–65.
670 Thomas Loy
(“Bedānabāzī”), or they pay for their naivety with their lives (“Buzkashī,” “Pādishāh-
Pādishāh”). If there weren’t clear references to Soviet modernization and technical
innovations in these short stories, their content would be difficult to distinguish from the
progressive prose of the 1910s in Central Asia.109
It can be assumed that depicting (and praising) ʿAzīzī as a writer who continued the
pre-Soviet literary tradition of the Jadids would have been impossible in other Soviet peri-
odicals in 1930. It is very likely, however, that Husainzāda’s positive assessment of ʿAzīzī’s
works did him a disservice in the years to come. Moreover, the critic also judged negatively
one aspect of Azīzī’s writings that was thoroughly praised by many other contemporaries. In
Husainzāda’s view the language used by ʿAzīzī “cannot keep up with the fast pace of the
ongoing progress. It is that of a certain locality, and therefore it is not and will not become
the language of all Tajiks. It cannot constitute the basis of the Tajik literary language.”110
Instead, Husainzāda preferred the language of ʿAinī as someone who, like a few others
after the October Revolution, “had turned his back on the bourgeois milieu’s prose” and
“was the first to side with the Soviet writers.”111 Ṣadr al-Dīn ʿAinī’s recent prose works,
and especially his novella (qiṣṣa) “Ādīna,” also were praised by other commentators in
Rahbar-i Dānish. Raḥīm Mīm wrote a synopsis and review of this “first Tajik revolutionary
novella,” which was published at the end of 1927 and was “out of print just two months
after its publication.”112 In this novella, ʿAinī described the tragic fate of the “poor Tajik”
farmer Ādīna, who had to leave his mountain home to earn a living in the factories of
Russian Turkestan. After the October Revolution he returned to his homeland, where the
old elites were still in power. After an unsuccessful attempt to take action against them,
Ādīna leaves the mountains again and finally dies alone in Tashkent. In this story, Raḥīm
Mīm did not see the fate of an individual person, but the portrait of a “damned and
oppressed social class and the atrocities before the [revolutionary] reckoning” (tabaqa-i
maḥkūm . . . va ẓulmdīda va jafāhā pīsh az ḥisāb) and the birth of a revolutionary Tajik language
and literature.113
In the short story “Aḥmad-i dīvband” (Ahmad the Exorcist) ʿAinī succeeded in “transmit-
ting” folk beliefs from the Bukhara oasis in a humorous and yet ethnographically accurate
way to present-day Soviet readers. Although at the end of the story the Central Asian spir-
itual world is explained scientifically, this tale preserves the world and religiosity of the peo-
ple of Central Asia for later generations.114 But ʿAinī’s gaze into the menacingly dark throat
of the prerevolutionary Central Asian world of ghosts—as depicted in the epigraph of this
article—was only a tepid foretaste of the horrors and the “devils’ dance” of the coming dec-
ade in the Soviet Union.115
109
On the beginnings of a new, modern ( jadīd) literature in Central Asia in the early twentieth century, see
Kleinmichel, Aufbruch.
110
Husainzāda, “Mubāriza,” 19–20.
111
Ibid., 20.
112
Raḥīm Mīm, “Yakumīn qiṣṣa-i inqilābī-i tājīk,” 38.
113
Ibid., 38–39. Raḥīm Mīm described the language of the novel as “Persian, which is easy to understand and
written in a simple and natural style” (41). It also is interesting and clear-sighted that throughout the text he
refrained from using the ethnic term “Tajik” to describe Ādīna’s origins but offers instead the social category of
“a poor peasant . . . born in one of the villages of Qarātegīn,” a region in the heart of the newly founded Tajik
SSR. Probably Raḥīm Mīm opted for this circumspection to avoid being accused of being a Tajik nationalist
(millatgarā, tājīkparast), an accusation repeatedly used against publicists and politicians in Central Asia beginning
in the late 1920s.
114
“Aḥmad-i dīvband,” which also features fantastic descriptions of pre-Soviet nature and the landscape around
the burial mound of its author’s birth village in the oasis of Bukhara, was republished several times in the Soviet
Union (1936, 1938, 1963, 1969, and 1978). Translations of the short story are available in Russian (1961 and 1973),
English (1998), and German (2021).
115
The Devils’ Dance is the title of a recently published novel by Hamid Ismailov, an Uzbek writer in exile, who
describes in it the fate of three famous Uzbek writers of the early twentieth century, all of whom were arrested
in 1927 and shot on the same day in October 1938. These were ʿAbd al-Raʾūf Fiṭrat, Chūlpān, and ʿAbdallāh
Iranian Studies 671
Epilogue
The late 1920s and especially the 1930s in the Soviet Union often seem enigmatic, with myr-
iad political and ideological changes and insecurities. The political climate worsened rapidly,
and rivalries among intellectuals intensified as violence spread from the central regions of
the Soviet Union to the southern periphery. New players were thrown into Moscow’s
political-ideological arena, and a new generation of Central Asian writers and intellectuals
was formed in this period. Jalāl al-Dīn Ikrām—one of the young Tajik literary figures who
closely followed the political and editorial guidelines of Rahbar-i Dānish—tried to justify him-
self in his memoirs: “We did not know [then] that all of this ‘criticizing’ (tanqidhā) . . . was
only the introduction to the upcoming murders, arrests and exiles,” he wrote, and con-
cluded, somewhat complacently: “We were naive and believed in the party.”116 But in the
1930s, naivety, opportunism, and political conviction did not protect the actors from the
mercilessness and brutality of the Stalinist apparatus. Jalāl al-Dīn Ikrām himself was arrested
in 1937. He was fortunate enough to survive prison and, after being released in December
1939, he (now going by the name Jalol Ikromi) rose to become the star of the new Soviet
Tajik prose. Others, like Baḥr al-Dīn ʿAzīzī and almost all of the pre-Soviet Central Asian
cultural elite, did not survive Stalin’s rule. Their biographies were erased, their works
withdrawn from circulation, and their first attempts to create and shape a new Tajik
literature on the pages of Rahbar-i Dānish almost forgotten.
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Roberts, Flora. “Old Elites under Communism: Soviet Rule in Leninobod.” PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2016.
Rustamzoda, Muhammadzarif. “Tāʿrīkh-i bāsharaf (1927–2017).” Accessed 22 May 2021. http://www.marifatiomuz-
gor.tj/right_content.php?id=1.
Rzehak, Lutz. Vom Persischen zum Tadschikischen. Sprachliches Handeln und Sprachplanung in Transoxanien zwischen
Tradition, Moderne und Sowjetmacht (1900–1956). Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2001.
Schild, Kathryn Douglas. “Between Moscow and Baku: National Literatures at the 1934 Congress of Soviet Writers.”
PhD diss., University of California, 2010.
Seay, Nicholas. “Soviet-Tajik Writing Intelligentsia in the Late 1930s.” RUDN Journal of Russian History 19, no. 1 (2020):
119–35.
674 Thomas Loy
Shakuri, Muhammadjon. Abbos Aliev. Dushanbe, Tajikistan: Shujoyon, 2010.

Shakuri, Muhammadjon. Fitna-i inqilob dar Bukhoro. Dushanbe, Tajikistan: Shujoyon, 2010.
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Samon, 2005.
Tagore, Rabindranath. “Yak shab bā Saʿādat.” Translation. Rahbar-i Dānish 1/2 (1928): 34–36.
Ulūghzāda, Sātim. “Yak nigāh ba nas̲ r-i tājīkī. Latāfat-āy firīb khūrd.” Rahbar-i Dānish 1 (1930): 24–26.
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Thomas Loy is a research fellow at the Oriental Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague (Department of
South Asia). His research interests include Jewish history and commemorative cultures in (Soviet) Central Asia and
Tajik language and literature.
Cite this article: Loy T (2022). The Guide to Knowledge: The Journal Rahbar-i Dānish and Its Role in Creating a Soviet
Tajik Literature (1927–1932). Iranian Studies 55, 653–674. https://doi.org/10.1017/irn.2022.3
doi:10.1017/irn.2021.14
A RT I C L E
Disciplining Persian Literature in Twentieth-Century

Afghanistan
Aria Fani
Assistant Professor of Persian and Iranian Studies, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA
(Received 17 April 2021; revised 5 August 2021; accepted 11 August 2021)
Abstract
How was Persian literature disciplinized in the twentieth century? This article addresses this question
by focusing on twentieth-century Afghanistan and outlining the sociohistorical processes that helped
to transform scholarly and literary production into a social enterprise. A major outcome of these
underexamined processes was the making of Dāʾerat ol-maʿāref-e Āryānā (1949–79) in Kabul, the first
modern encyclopedia produced in Persian. The article explains the multilayered significance of
Āryānā’s literary taxonomies, reading practices, and historiographical models that reified Persian
literature as an object of academic study and national veneration in Afghanistan. A close reading of
Āryānā’s account of Persian literary history illustrates its complex relationship with both Iranian
and Afghan nationalisms of the 1940s and 1950s and its contributors’ adherence to a modern method-
ology. The present study places Āryānā squarely within a transregional ecosystem that brought about
the institutionalization of literature in Persian-speaking lands.
Keywords: literary historiography; twentieth-century Afghanistan; Encyclopedia Āryānā; literary style/sabk
In 1944, a cadre of Afghan scholars founded the Encyclopedia Association in Kabul.1 They
would go on to create Dāʾerat ol-maʿāref-e Āryānā, the first encyclopedia in Persian (1949–
79).2 The publication of Āryānā marked a significant moment in the institutionalization of
Persian literature by codifying a new mode of literary knowledge into an encyclopedic cat-
egory that posed as bounded and settled. I first came across Āryānā on the bookshelf of my
Afghan neighbor in California ten years ago.3 What I encountered then, having been ignorant
of its history, was a well-structured nugget of information, a reference point for knowledge
pertaining primarily to Afghanistan. In writing this article a decade later, I aim to critically
1
In Persian, Anjoman-e dāʾerat ol-maʿāref. For an entry on Encyclopedia Āryānā, see Dāneshnāmeh-ye adab-e Fārsi,
3:128.
2
In Iran, Dāʾerat ol-maʿāref-e Fārsi or the Persian-Language Encyclopedia, directed by Gholām-Hosayn Mosāheb and
his associates, was published in three volumes in 1966, 1977, and 1995. In 1975, Ehsan Yarshater launched
Dāneshnameh-ye iran va islam or the Encyclopedia of Iran and Islam. In its title, the Persian term “dāneshnameh” (liter-
ally, “book of knowledge”), dating back to Ebn Sina’s Dāneshnāmeh-ye ʿalāʾi (1034–49), replaced the Arabic loanword
dāʾerat ol-maʿāref. In the 1980s, the name of the project was changed to the Encyclopedia of the Islamic World, which is
still ongoing. In Central Asia, the first Persian-language encyclopedia developed in the late 1970s as an outgrowth of
the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. The Tajik Soviet Encyclopedia (Энциклопедияи советии тоҷик) was published in eight
volumes between 1978 and 1988.
3
This reminds us that encyclopedias like Āryānā had a different material life in the age of their prevalence. For
one, they were not just found at institutions but were also (used and enjoyed) in homes.
676 Aria Fani
outline historical processes that culminated in the production of this landmark work of
scholarship, which has yet to receive critical attention in English or Persian.4
At a time when Pahlavi-era scholars were bringing Persian literary history into congru-
ence and synonymy with Iran as an ethno-territorially defined entity, Āryānā offers us a
more ecumenical approach to conceptualizing literary history. In their cultural undertaking,
Afghan scholars faced a challenging task, one that involved navigating parochial accounts of
Persian literature produced in Iran, on the one hand, and reactionary ethnocentric politics
and policies of certain Mosāhebān officials, on the other.5 As my analysis shows, Āryānā as an
end product is entirely irreducible to any single discourse or ideological impulse. Āryānā
responds to Iranian nationalist efforts by highlighting the poetic contributions of Central
and South Asian poets and dynasties, shifting the center of gravity away from Iranian terri-
torial nationalism. Similarly, it counterposed the ethnocentric impulses of the state that
aimed to valorize Pashto as a national language at the expense of Persian. Overall, a close
reading of Āryānā illustrates that slippery categories like modern and national advance a
scholarly discourse only if critically examined in light of their historical contingencies,
internal tensions and contradictions, and muted potentialities.
This article outlines particular cultural-historical contexts that help explain Āryānā’s
salient features vis-à-vis different facets of Afghan nationalism in the latter part of the twen-
tieth century and Persian literary nationalism more broadly. First, it traces the formation of
literature as a modern conceptual category in twentieth-century Afghanistan. Then, it exam-
ines the language policies and politics of the 1930s and 1940s to set up the right historical
context. The final sections delve into Āryānā, its making, contributors, source materials, and
distinct historiographical features. The focus of this article is volume three of the encyclo-
pedia, which contains an extensive account of Persian literary history. Without bearing these
contexts in mind, we run the risk of rendering Āryānā a standalone text and separating it
from its disciplinary history.6
Literature: The Rise of a Modern Concept

The institutionalization of literature as a discipline took place through multiple sites of cul-
tural production.7 Many of the activities that contributed to these disciplinary processes
were based in literary and historical associations or anjomans.8 Some were centered around
state schools and universities while others revolved around linguistic and philological con-
nections.9 Collectively, these sites formed integral parts of print culture that made inroads
without which such disciplinary processes would have been unimaginable. As such, these
4
Āryānā is absent from critical studies on the formation of literary history written in Persian. See, for instance,
Fotuhi, Nazariyeh-ye tārikh-e adabiyāt. Fotuhi examines works of critical theory on literary history and literary his-
tories of Persian composed in various languages. Yet, he fails to mention a single Afghan literary history of Persian.
This omission is particularly noteworthy since the literary historiographical part of volume three of Encyclopedia
Āryānā, the focus of this article, has been edited and republished in Iran as a standalone work. See Kahduʾi, ed.,
Adabiyāt-e Afghanistan. Sadly, glossing over Afghan cultural production is all too common inside Iran, as evident
in the work of Fotuhi, a literary scholar whose institution (Ferdowsi University of Mashhad) is much closer to
Herat than it is to Tehran.
5
On Zhubal’s scholarly response to Iranian literary historiography, see Ahmadi, “‘The Cradle of Dari.’” For more
on the language politics of this period, see Farhang, Afghanistan dar panj qarn-e akhir, 690–94.
6
Since this article makes use of “institutionalization” and “disciplinization” as analytical categories, it is impor-
tant to comment on their distinction. I see the latter as a sub-phenomenon of literary institutionalization; as such all
disciplines are institutions, but there are many institutions that are not disciplines. In this article, there is an
implicit distinction between literature and literary history and scholarship. Literature is seen as an institution
and literary scholarship as a discipline, and therefore a sort of institution. Quite naturally, there exists a great
deal of slippage, particularly when one speaks of literature as a discipline.
7
For an account of the disciplinization of Persian literature in Iran, see Fotuhi, Darāmadi bar adabiyāt-shenāsi.
8
For the role of anjomans, see Fani, “Becoming Literature,” chap. 1.
9
Vejdani, “Indo-Iranian Linguistics.”
Iranian Studies 677
sites should not be seen as standalone or sealed off from one another. Instead, they should
be conceptualized as co-habitual, each creating its own unique center of gravity while simul-
taneously contributing to the creation of literature as a national enterprise. The institution-
alization and nationalization of literature in the twentieth century is a uniquely
transregional phenomenon whose processes and local manifestations in the
Persian-speaking world have been analyzed in this special issue of Iranian Studies.
Any examination of literature as a modern discipline will have to begin with the rise of
literature as a conceptual category. The idea of adabiyāt or literature in Persian as a canon of
writings that embodies the literary and civilizational achievements of a unitary people
defined by a certain ethnic genealogy and territorial sovereignty goes back no further
than the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Literature as a concept was first introduced
to elite Afghan readers in the pages of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century period-
icals. In 1911, Mahmud Tarzi, a towering Persian-language intellectual and a pioneer of jour-
nalism in Afghanistan, established Serāj ol-akhbār (The torch of news) in Kabul, a biweekly
periodical that produced one of the earliest articulations of the notion of adabiyāt in
Afghanistan.10
The first issue of Serāj ol-akhbār, printed on October 9, featured an essay under the novel
rubric of adabiyāt. It was written by Mowlawi ʿAbdol Raʾuf Ākhundzādah, poet, scholar, and
chancellor of Kabul’s Madrasah-ye Shahi, the country’s most prestigious seminary.11 An edi-
torial note mentioned that ʿAbdol Raʾuf contributed the article at Tarzi’s request, which was
then printed “word for word” in the newspaper.12 ʿAbdol Raʾuf opened his article with a
rhyming line: adabiyāt chistand / va az che bahs mirānand, or “what are adabiyāt / and what
topics do they discuss?”13 He evoked adabiyāt as a plural term, similar to its use in premod-
ern texts such as Nafāʾes ol-fonun fi ʿarāʾes ol-ʿoyun (The jewels of science and the brides of the
eyes), composed by Mohammad ebn-e Mahmud-e Āmoli (d. 1353) in the fourteenth
century.14 The use of adabiyāt in that text alongside tabiʿiyāt (natural sciences), sharʿiyāt
(religious sciences), and riyāziyāt (the science of mathematics) denotes its earlier disciplini-
zation in the post-Mongol scholastic milieu in which it served as a designation for sciences
pertaining to adab.15
In his article, ʿAbdol Raʾuf asserted that adabiyāt, or the knowledge derived from adab
(ʿolum-e adabiyah), was first studied in madrasahs and constituted an integral component
of Islamic learning.16 But in the early twentieth century, he wrote, adabiyāt entered a new
site of literary production: periodicals. ʿAbdol Raʾuf’s article is extremely important for
two reasons. Firstly, it illustrates that the semantic boundaries of adabiyāt in the early
twentieth century were far from settled. The supple ambiguity with which ʿAbdol Raʾuf
conceptualized adabiyāt closely mirrors the term’s polysemy in Mohammad Hosayn
Forughi’s late nineteenth-century Literary History.17 In the 1910s, the term “adabiyāt” had
not yet accrued its meaning as a singular designation for a nationally anchored canon of
literary works. It remained closely tied to adab as “proper forms of aesthetic style and
10
For critical studies on Tarzi’s ideas and consequential career, see Ahmadi, Modern Persian Literature, chaps. 2
and 3; Schinasi, Afghanistan at the Beginning, 97–101; Gregorian, “Mahmud Tarzi”; Arbabzadah, “Modernizing.” In
Persian, see Sakhāwarz, Tarzi va Serāj ol-akhbār.
11
Serāj ol-akhbār, no. 1 (1911): 10–12. Digitized in Afghanistan Digital Library, New York University Libraries.
Accessed August 14, 2017.
12
For an examination of ʿAbdol Raʾuf’s article, see Arbabzadah, “Modernizing.”
13
Serāj ol-akhbār, no. 1 (1911): 10.
14
For an analysis of this text regarding its importance for the term adabiyāt, see Fani, “Becoming Literature,”
chap. 1.
15
For Āmoli, these sciences included khatt (calligraphy), loghat (lexicography), eshteqāq (derivation), tasrif (mor-
phology), nahw (syntax), maʿani (semantics, a component of rhetoric), bayān (clarity, a branch of rhetoric focused on
metaphor and simile), badiʿ (rhetorical figures, also means elocution), ʿaruz (prosody), and others. Āmoli, Nafāʾes
ol-fonun, 16.
16
Serāj ol-akhbār, no. 1 (1911): 11.
17
On the importance of the Forughis to this project, see Fani, “Iran’s Literary Becoming.”
678 Aria Fani
ethical conduct.”18 Secondly, ʿAbdol Raʾuf’s article displayed critical awareness of the fact
that writing in Serāj ol-akhbār marked an important shift from older (madrasah) to modern
(periodicals) sites of learning and literary production. ʿAbdol Raʾuf may be the only literary
intellectual who has given such a clear nod to the rise of a new disciplinary formation.
As Mana Kia has recently argued, adab was more than just a discourse of self-
comportment. Adab entailed certain aesthetic and moral values embedded in a literary cor-
pus and systematized forms of knowledge that were transmitted through education and
other forms of sociality. As such, “we can consider adab as the mode by which Persians iden-
tify.”19 The adab of ʿAbdol Raʾuf’s world was undergoing a radical conceptual realignment in
order to produce and denote civilizational and national affiliation and distinction. The idea
of civilization, once associated with civility, was itself undergoing an important transforma-
tion. Its twentieth-century iteration invoked “a world community consisting of multiple civ-
ilizational blocs existing alongside one another and each characterized by a distinctive
moral-aesthetic essence.”20 In other words, the moral community of adab was being over-
shadowed by the civilizational-national community of adabiyāt. And while adab sided more
closely with becoming, adabiyāt largely sided with identity or being. Instead of arriving at
Persian as a shared language of learning, under the logic of adabiyāt, one was simply born
as a Persian.21
ʿAbdol Raʾuf’s article heralded a programmatic engagement with the notion of literature
in Serāj ol-akhbār. Tarzi established a column that produced the most lucid expression of lit-
erature in early twentieth-century Afghanistan. For instance, in a column on akhlāqiyāt or
ethics, Tarzi wrote, “Every people is alive through its language, and every language through
its literature.”22 He argued that the existence of a people depended on how well they safe-
guard their language, forming an organicist idea whereby the nation and its literature con-
stituted a whole. Tarzi’s views on language were closely echoed by literary intellectuals in
Iran as well as by a global network of intellectuals writing in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries within the framework of many other literary traditions.23
During its seven-year run from 1911 to 1918, Serāj ol-akhbār introduced a set of new con-
cepts like adabiyāt and turned them into fixtures in the Afghan cultural landscape. Tarzi’s
biweekly periodical helped to identify language and literature as entities affiliated with a
national community defined on the basis of territorial and ethnic belonging.24 Tarzi did
not just initiate conversations about what it meant to speak of a distinctly Afghan literature
and language; he also helped to create the ʿEnāyat publishing house and gestured towards
the need to establish literary institutions in order to make the literary patrimony of
Afghanistan more recognizable inside and outside of the country. What Tarzi had in mind
was an entity, supported by the state, which would be tasked with safeguarding and regu-
lating Persian and Pashto, and that would hold a culturally authoritative and socially prev-
alent position in Afghanistan.
The rise of national education and literary and historical associations in Afghanistan in
the second quarter of the twentieth century led to the codification of not only adabiyāt,
but also a host of other conceptually realigned notions. For instance, tārikh came to signify
a positivist account of a unitary people’s history with the nation-state posited as its national
subject.25 During the 1920s, Qāri ʿAbdollah Khān (d. 1943), the distinguished malek ol-shoʿarā
or poet laureate, educator, and scholar, developed a number of literary textbooks for
18
Kia, Persianate Selves, 9.
19
Ibid., 174.
20
See Marashi, Exile and the Nation, 100.
21
The question of how adab operates within the discourse of adabiyāt today deserves extensive analysis better
reserved for another article.
22
Farhādi, Maqālāt, 632.
23
See Allan, Shadow of World Literature; Mufti, Forget English!
24
Fani, “Becoming Literature,” chap. 1.
25
On the formation of history as a national enterprise in Afghanistan, see Green, ed., Afghan History.
Iranian Studies 679
elementary and secondary education in emerging state schools in Afghanistan. Qāri’s text-
books helped to turn adabiyāt into an object of pedagogy.
In his literary textbook for secondary education or roshdiyah, printed in 1930/31, Qāri
wrote the following under the heading “Literature and Other Sciences”: “Adabiyāt is con-
nected to and interacts with some sciences, at times it speaks of them; through its sweet
language it makes their benefits accessible.”26 He commented on how adabiyāt conveys
ideas derived from falsafah (philosophy), akhlāq (ethics), tasavvof (mysticism), ʿelm-e ejtemāʿ
(sociology), and tārikh (history). On the connection between literature and history, Qāri
wrote:
Literature is one of three [types of] sources [used in] history. In the same manner that
one can decipher the state of a nation through oral narratives and ancient artifacts, one
can decipher the customs and manners of that nation through literature. Also, the
inscriptions of monuments, fragments of history, and the biography of people may
all be literature, but they also aid with [the writing of] history.27
The common denominator of literature and history, according to Qāri, is how they both
embody the nation. The task of drawing shared elements between entities called adabiyāt
and tārikh (history), imagined as self-contained, would not have made any sense to Qāri’s
literary predecessors in the early nineteenth century who operated outside national educa-
tional institutions. That said, the entwinement of literature and history did not fully take
shape in Qāri’s literary textbooks, which remained beholden to the tazkerah genre in their
biographical orientation.
The historicization of adabiyāt within an emerging narrative of Afghan national history
would ultimately take place in the 1930s, thanks in large part to the rise of literary associ-
ations in cities like Kabul and Herat.28 Anjomans helped to expand the domain of print cul-
ture and created a new structure of networking centered around bylaws and formal positions
such as president and secretary, modeled on European and Indian language academies that
had preceded them.29 The ideas that literary intellectuals like Mahmud Tarzi had forged in
the 1910s gained currency as a state-sponsored cadre of literary intellectuals became profes-
sionally preoccupied with conventionalizing certain discursive practices that aimed to reify
and regulate Persian literature as its nationally enshrined object of analysis.30 Journals like
Kābol (1931–79), Herāt (1932–80), Āryānā (1942–86, published irregularly after 1979), ʿErfān
(1950–78), and many others became venues for the formation of a new mode of literary
knowledge. As such, these anjomans cannot be described as “merely” language academies
that aimed to reconfigure and standardize Persian-language grammar and vocabulary for
the needs of an emerging reading public and educational institutions; they also crucially
reconceptualized language and literature as part of a national imaginary.
The establishment of Puhanżi-ye adabiyāt va ʿolūm-e bashari or the Faculty of Letters at the
University of Kabul in 1944, less than a decade after the University of Tehran’s Faculty of
Letters, put in place a literary curriculum, as well as academic rules and practices, that
cemented Persian literature as a disciplinary formation.31 In the 1950s, the University of
Kabul’s Faculty of Letters launched three scholarly journals: Adab (1953–78), written mostly
in Persian but periodically featuring articles in Pashto and English; Wazhmah, meaning
26
ʿAbdollah Khān, Adabiyāt, 4.
27
Ibid., 7–8.
28
On the rise of national historiography in Afghanistan, see Nawid, “Writing National History”; Green, ed., Afghan
History, 1–51.
29
This proliferation of anjomans in British-ruled India had preceded both Iran and Afghanistan. See Stark,
“Associational Culture”; Perkins, “New Pablik.”
30
Ahmadi, “Kabul Literary Society”; Zhubal, Tārikh-e adabiyāt-e Afghanistan, 166. On the history of literary asso-
ciations in general in Afghanistan, see Anusheh, ed., Dāneshnāmeh-ye adab-e Fārsi, 3:126–33.
31
Gregorian, Emergence of Modern Afghanistan, 309–11.
680 Aria Fani
breeze, printed entirely in Pashto with some articles in English; and Joghrāfiyā, or Geography,
published in both Persian and Pashto.32 The university department began to operate with a
core faculty of eighteen domestic professors, two foreign professors, and ten students who
majored in Persian and Pashto literature.33 The faculty offered courses on history, linguistics,
literary history, poetry, journalism, and geography. It also employed sixty-five domestic and
seven foreign lecturers on a permanent basis to teach its courses.34 The Kabul Faculty estab-
lished connections with its institutional counterparts in the region by hosting and sending
students and visiting professors to institutions like the University of Tehran. It produced
educators and scholars of Persian literature trained for the first time within a local univer-
sity setting.35
Let us draw together the institutional transformations outlined above. The institutional-
ization of adabiyāt as a new disciplinary formation in the 1940s and 1950s ratified earlier
developments from the early twentieth century which were rooted in associational culture
and civil society. In the course of half a century, literature became the prized object of a
national discipline through the creation of co-habitual spaces such as anjomans, faculties
of letters, printing houses, libraries, and state schools. These spaces were frequented by
many of the same literary intellectuals who played multiple roles across several organiza-
tions; nonetheless they strove toward a single aim that concerned the making and edification
of a civilizational and national community. The radical conceptual realignment of adabiyāt
produced and was itself inaugurated by new modes of historiographical production.
While adab, with balāgha or the sciences of rhetoric as its main instrument, emphasized
the cultivation of skill sets and behavioral dispositions regardless of birthplace and origin,
adabiyāt, with literary history as its main instrument, served as a discourse through
which people learned to think of themselves in relation to a national territory and identify
with its history through the sanctioned narratives of its past. It took half a century for the
processes outlined above to play out; Āryānā’s entry on Afghan literary history provides per-
haps the most overt and structured product of these historical processes. One of the novel
qualities of Āryānā is the fact that a new genre called encyclopedia contributed to the reifi-
cation and codification of literary history as another new genre, making the latter appear
more structured and authoritative.
Language Policies and Politics of the 1930s–1940s

It is important to briefly detail key language policies and politics implemented by the
Mosāhebān dynasty in the 1930s and 1940s. These sociopolitical realities provide a crucial
background against which Āryānā needs to be understood. The term “Āryānā” itself encap-
sulates key intellectual developments during a period in which “Afghan historians claimed
that ancient Aryana or Aryanam Vaejah (that is, the territory defined in the Avesta as the
land of Aryas) composed the regions that formed modern-day Afghanistan.”36 These con-
certed efforts, aimed at bringing Afghanistan as a political entity into alignment with an
ancient cultural geography called Āryānā, primarily took place within the framework of
32
In the literary and academic domains of the period, one may not neatly separate Persian from Pashto or vice
versa. Many articles composed in Persian extensively quoted Pashto verses and often left them untranslated. Pashto
articles quoted Persian poetry even more regularly. Topics related to Pashto literature (e.g. the Pashto qasida) were
sometimes written in Persian. Overall, the two languages are inextricably entangled as they seek to chart a disci-
plinary domain in the 1940s and 1950s.
33
Shāyān, Āshenāʾi, 18.
34
Ibid., 24.
35
Iranian scholars such as Sādeq Rezāzādeh Shafaq, Saʿid Nafisi, and later Mohammad ʿAli Eslāmi Nodushan all
spent time as visiting professors at the University of Kabul. In 1958, fifty-eight students, most of whom were from
the Soviet Union and the United States, enrolled at the University of Kabul to study Persian and Pashto. Ibid., 59.
36
Nawid, “Writing National History,” 191. On Aryanism in Russian imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet Central Asia,
see Laruelle, “Return of the Aryan Myth”; Battis, “Soviet Orientalism.”
Iranian Studies 681
the disciplinary formation described in this article. The historian Mir Gholām Mohammad
Ghobār (d. 1978) was the first to link Āryānā and Bactria to the idea of ancient
Afghanistan.37 Āryānā was not only a pre-Islamic cultural geography, but also a racial38 geog-
raphy for Ghobār and his cohort; the key term used here was “nezhād.”39
Ahmad ʿAli Kohzād, who later served as a member of the Encyclopedia Association, sig-
nificantly expanded on the ideas of Ghobār and ʿAbdol Hayy Habibi (d. 1984) in the journals
Kābol and Āryānā and later in his monographs.40 Kohzād’s writings helped codify Āryānā into
a stable historiographical fixture in the modern genre of national history in Afghanistan.41
Overall, in the 1930s and 1940s the term “Āryānā” accrued a new historiographical referent:
ancient, pre-Islamic Afghanistan. As such, Āryānā signaled the historicity of Afghanistan as a
political entity, an effort to back-shadow the existence of a modern nation-state.42 This story,
however, would be necessarily incomplete without critically taking into account language
policies in Afghanistan. In order to better understand how the rise of Persian literary history
relates to broader conceptions of Afghanistan as Āryānā, one must place its formation in the
context of the Pashtun nationalism which was ascendant in the 1930s and 1940s.
Pashtun nationalism made inroads into the domains of policy, civil society, and state
apparatus in the 1930s.43 During the rule of Mohammad Nāder Shah and early years of
Mohammad Zāher Shah (r. 1933–73), the state began to promote Pashto.44 In 1936, Pashto
was declared “the official language of Afghanistan” by a state decree.45 In 1937, the
Ministry of Education decided to make Pashto the language of elementary-school instruction
across Afghanistan.46 The Kabul Literary Association, established in the early 1930s, was dis-
banded in 1940 in favor of the Pashto Tolana or the Pashto Academy that began to operate in
37
Ghobār, “Tārikhcheh-ye mokhtasar-e Afghanistan,” Sālnāmeh-ye majallah-ye Kabul (1932): 7–40; “Afghanistan
joghrāfiyāʾi,” Kabul 1, no. 4 (September 1931): 44–57. See also Nawid, “Writing National History.”
38
For instance, see Ghobār’s article “Adabiyāt dar Afghanistan” in the first issue of Kabul 1, no. 1 (1931): 13. In it,
Ghobār writes, “The countries of Persia [Mamlekat-e Fārs] and Afghanistan appear to possess a shared Aryan race. The
languages of the two countries such as Sogdian of Transoxiana have a shared genealogy.” Other intellectuals con-
tributed to the development of Āryānā as an ethno-historical discourse; see, for instance, ʿAbdol Hayy Habibi,
“Nokāti chand az tārikh va zabān-e keshwar-e mā,” Āryānā 1 (February 1943): 21–23.
39
For a summary of a debate on the racial valences of ethno-nationalism in Afghanistan, see Nawid, “Writing
National History,” 193–94. On Afghanistan-Germany intellectual connections, see Wardaki, “Rediscovering Afghan
Fine Arts.” Wardaki’s research reverses the passive syntax with which we examine Afghan nationalism, attributing
all ideas of racial, linguistic, and literary nationalism to contact with European cultures.
40
See Kohzād, Āryānā. For more on the role of Kohzād and ancient studies in the formation of Afghan national-
ism, see Green, “Afghan Discovery of Buddha.” Relevant to this study is Green’s statement “In a radical revision of its
historical identity, between around 1930 and 1960 Afghanistan was transformed from an Islamic Amirate and a
Pashtun dynastic dominion into a monarchical nation-state that was the heir to the ancient land of ‘Aryana’” (48).
41
Another work that shows the pervasiveness of the idea of Āryānā in Afghan historiography in the 1930s and
1940s is Turwāyānā, Aryānā yā Afghanistan. This book was originally published in Kabul in 1945.
42
Before colonial modernity, political divisions did not neatly match natural designations (Māvarāʾ on-nahr or
Transoxiana, for instance, is a natural designation). The idea of Afghanistan as a unitary nation-state took form
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The term “Afghanistan” itself appears to have been used
for the first time by the British “probably in the upper corridors of the administration in Calcutta in the 1830s.”
Schiffman and Spooner, “Afghan Languages,” 6.
43
For analyses on earlier decades, see Wide, “Demarcating Pashto.” The following passage is particularly relevant:
“It was not until the 1910s, through a concerted effort of state-backed reformist intellectuals, that Pashto was imag-
ined as a language of the ‘modern’ Afghan nation state. Even here, however, the project remained incomplete: in
escaping its status as subordinate to Dari-Persian, it never escaped its status as a symbol, rather than living and
breathing component, of the Afghan state” (112).
44
Showkat ʿAli Mohammadi Shāri outlines some of these policies in detail in “Zabān-e Pārsi, sāzeh-ye howiyyat-e
melli-ye Afghanistan.” For a survey of secondary sources on the social and political space of Pashto and its linguistic
variations, see Hakala, “Locating ‘Pashto’ in Afghanistan.”
45
Nawid, “Language Policy in Afghanistan,” 36.
46
Ibid.
682 Aria Fani
its place.47 The association’s journal, Kābol, continued uninterrupted under the same name,
but it became an exclusively Pashto-language publication. The Pashto Academy was tasked
with the production of dictionaries and standardization of Pashto grammar.48 While the
Constitution of 1923 did not state a clear language policy, the Constitution of 1964 unequiv-
ocally stated that “It is the duty of the state to prepare and implement an effective program
for the development and strengthening of the national language, Pushtu.”49
Many of these policies faced serious roadblocks. For instance, given the historical primacy
of Persian as a language of education, the state struggled to implement its Pashto-only lan-
guage policy. In a reversal of its previous policies, the government restored the status of
Persian as an official language in 1946.50 One of the central questions at the heart of lan-
guage policy was who counted as Afghan. The term underwent different conceptual align-
ments in the twentieth century, shifting from an older sense limited to Pashtuns, to a
radical reframing that claimed all those residing within the country of Afghanistan,51 and
back again to Pashtuns only in the 1930s and 1940s. Overall, the monolingual policies and
politics of the state in this period based on Pashto-language nationalism “utterly failed”
and were largely “abandoned.”52 In summary, Pashtun nationalists drew on Aryanist theo-
ries, anchored in archeological and nationalist linguistic discourses, in order to position
themselves as Afghanistan’s autochthon.53 The critical attention paid to linguistic, literary,
and ancient history in this period must be understood within this sociopolitical context.54
However, as my analysis illustrates, the pursuit of such policies by the state did not produce
a literary discourse that would reflect in any stable or straightforward way the principles of
an ethnocentric nationalism.
A Transregional Collaborative Process

The Encyclopedia Association, founded in 1944, developed its own bylaws in 1954 and oper-
ated semi-independently, supervised by the Secretary of Education.55 It commissioned and
published books in Persian and Pashto on the history, geology, geography, literature, and
educational history of Afghanistan, both ancient and modern.56 The association’s grand pro-
ject was called Dāʾerat ol-maʿāref-e Āryānā or Encyclopedia Āryānā (henceforth Āryānā). Āryānā
is the first Persian-language encyclopedia carried out by a team of collaborators and concep-
tualized within an associational framework, making it a new genre of scholarly production.
Āryānā was focused on the languages, literature, politics, history, religions, folklore, and the
47
For a study on the different literary figures of this time and the Persian-Pashto cultural interplay, see
Hewādmal, Roshd-e zabān.
48
Nawid, “Language Policy in Afghanistan,” 36. Reshtin’s Pashto Grāmer is one such example.
49
See Article 35 in the Constitution of Afghanistan (1964), 19. Digitized Afghanistan materials in English from the
Arthur Paul Afghanistan Collection, Collection at the University of Nebraska-Omaha.
50
Constitution of Afghanistan (1964), 37.
51
For instance, Article 8 of the Constitution of 1923 states, “Any person [hamah-ye afrādi] who resides in the coun-
try of Afghanistan, regardless of religion or sect, is considered a citizen of Afghanistan [tabaʿah-ye Afghanistan].” This
article redefines Afghan-ness not in (Pashtun) ethnic terms, but national and territorial terms. Nezām-nāmah-ye
asāsi-ye dowlat-e ʿalliyah-ye Afghanistan, 3. For more on the formation of Afghanistan’s first constitution, see
Ahmed, Afghanistan Rising. Article 1 of the Constitution of 1964 adds another sentence to this article for further clar-
ification: “The word Afghan shall apply to each such individual.” Constitution of Afghanistan (1964), 3.
52
Ahmadi, Modern Persian Literature, 48–49.
53
The category “Pashtun nationalists” is not stable or homogenous. There existed a plurality of opinion among
nationalist-minded Pashtuns, the examination of which lies outside the purview of this article.
54
On more strictly political ramifications of Pashtunization, see Bezhan, “Pashtunistan Issue and Politics.”
55
Dāʾerat ol-maʿāref-e Āryānā, 3:i. In 1955, the Encyclopedia Association became affiliated with the Ministry of
Education.
56
Ibid.
Iranian Studies 683
notable figures of Afghanistan.57 It was organized alphabetically and included diagrams and
illustrations. All six volumes were first composed in Persian and then translated immediately
into Pashto by the Pashto Tolanah. The first volume of Āryānā was released in 1949 and the
last was printed exactly two decades later.58
The subentry on Afghan literary history was subsumed under the entry on Afghanistan,
included in the third volume, released in 1956. The subentry had synthesized the most
recent research on language theory, literary history, and cultural archaeology into a coher-
ent historical narrative. Āryānā took a significant step in gathering, consolidating, and struc-
turing two decades of research that had been published in Afghanistan, Iran, India, and
elsewhere. In writing this subentry, Afghan encyclopedists grappled with such questions
as: How have different literary traditions contributed to the making of Afghan culture
and literature? What is the role of the Eastern Islamic lands in the rise of New Persian as
a polycentric literary tradition? In 228 pages, Afghan scholars produced the first collabora-
tive and most capacious narrative of Afghan literary history yet in existence. In doing so,
they helped to chart literary history as an emerging field of study marked by its own set
of methodological tools and primary sources.
Thus far, Āryānā has been primarily mined for its knowledge of Afghanistan. As a result,
some of its other key features, particularly its historiographical innovations that pertain to
Persian literary history more broadly, have not been understood or analyzed.59 I will lay out
my main arguments at the outset to guide the reader through different parts of this section.
The compilation and publication of the entry on Afghan literary history represents the first
entwinement of adabiyāt and national historiography in an encyclopedic format. It puts forth
an innovative method of periodization that reconciles a long-standing modern tension
between periodological and typological approaches to literary periodization. Finally,
Āryānā’s entry on literary history evinces an inherent tension between ecumenical and ter-
ritorial visions of Afghanistan as a cultural entity. Highlighting this inherent tension is key
to understanding Āryānā’s place within the discourse of literary nationalism.
The team that contributed to researching and writing this section included Mir Gholām
Mohammad Ghobār, Ahmad Jāwid, Ahmad ʿAli Kohzād, Khāl Mohammad Khastah, ʿAbdol
Haq Bitāb, ʿAbdol Raʾuf Binawā, ʿAbdol Ghafur Rawān Farhādi, and Mohammad Hosayn
Behruz.60 Ghobar and Kohzād served as members of the Kabul Literary Association and
Afghanistan Historical Society. Bitāb, Afghanistan’s last poet laureate, taught at the
University of Kabul’s Faculty of Letters. Jāwid was a graduate of the University of
Tehran’s doctoral program in Persian literature while Behruz was a graduate of the
University of Kabul’s Faculty of Letters. Rawān Farhādi, who later served as Afghanistan’s
ambassador to the United Nations, was a lecturer at the University of Kabul. Khastah was
a scholar and poet from Bukhara who had moved to Afghanistan in the early twentieth
57
Encyclopedia Āryānā is, to the best of my knowledge, the first work self-classified as a “dāʾerat ol-maʿāref” in the
Persian language. As Elias Muhanna has noted, the term is an Arabic calque for the pseudo-Greek term “enkuklo-
paideia” (literally, “child-rearing or training in a circle,” i.e. the circle of arts and sciences), and its usage in this
instance is novel. World in a Book, 10. Encyclopedism is a more general category that has a long-standing history
in the Islamic tradition. Here, I am not broadly referring to works that possess encyclopedic features and techniques
or an expansive compilatory scope. What specifically concerns my framing in this article is the encyclopedia as a
new informational medium that took shape within a specific disciplinary formation called Persian literature. For
a history of Persian-language encyclopedias, see Moqaddasi, Dāneshnāmehʾhā-ye Irāni.
58
The dates of release for other volumes are as follows: second (1951), third (1956), fourth (1962), fifth and sixth
(1970).
59
This entry on Encyclopedia Āryānā clearly underscores this approach. It states: “[The encyclopedia’s] value pri-
marily lies in its articles and titles related to Afghanistan.” It frames the rest of Encyclopedia Āryānā as a poorly edited
derivative of Iranian and European sources. Anusheh, ed., Dāneshnāmeh-ye adab-e Fārsi, 3:6.
60
The latter had earned his bachelor’s degree in Persian language and literature from the University of Kabul,
connoting the fulfillment of the recently developed discipline of literature within the national educational system.
He went to Moscow to earn his PhD and worked with a group of Soviet Orientalists on a critical edition of the
Shahnameh.
684 Aria Fani
century. And Binawā was a Pashto-language poet and writer. It is important to note the affil-
iations of these scholars because they demonstrate the extent to which institutional sites of
literary production were distinctly co-habitual, whereby graduates of university education
end up co-authoring sections of Āryānā. This is an example of the self-perpetuation of
this institutional process.
More research should be done on Āryānā’s drawing on (or lack thereof) different informa-
tional ecosystems. Such inquiries could tell us a lot about the varied and multidirectional
elements of Afghan intellectual history in this period. For example, in his brief preface to
the third volume, Sayyed Ahmad Shah Hāshemi stated that Āryānā made extensive use of
many European sources in French, German, Russian, Italian, and English.61 According to
Hāshemi, English-language sources predominated. Did the dominance of English have any-
thing to do with the fact that the US embassy had opened in 1941 in Kabul as a prelude
to the many Afghan students that were later sent to study in the United States via
Fulbright? Concerning non-European sources, did Afghan scholars primarily access those
texts through Iranian imprints? Were these imprints recent or from decades earlier? Does
the same pattern form when it comes to both literary and nonliterary topics? Arriving at
a more nuanced sense of Āryānā’s citational ecosystem (and its exclusions) will require a
close reading of different entries.
Āryānā’s entry on literary history drew on and repurposed a large number of texts repro-
duced in various time periods and through different discursive practices: biographical dictio-
naries (tazkerahs), poetic anthologies ( jong), literary histories (tārikh-e adabiyāt), divāns
(collected works), historical studies, periodicals, and lecture notes developed for modern
educational institutions. Unlike the linguistic section of Āryānā’s literary history that refer-
enced Orientalist knowledge in European languages, the section of New Persian literature
only drew on non-European sources. This may be because the conceptual framework and
insights of European sources like E. G. Browne’s A Literary History of Persia had been fairly
internalized by Persian-language periodicals and literary histories that proliferated in the
first half of the twentieth century.
Among sources used by Āryānā’s entry on New Persian literary history, one sees texts pri-
marily produced in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and India: Shibli Nuʿmāni’s Shiʿr ul-ʿAjam
(The poetry of Persians), Sadr ol-Din ʿAini’s Examples of Tajik Literature, Bahār’s
Sabk-shenāsi, Sādeq Rezāzādeh Shafaq’s History of Iranian Literature, Khāl Mohammad
Khastah’s personal manuscripts, as well as the journals Kābol, Āryānā, ʿErfān, and Adab. As
Alexander Jabbari has argued, the construction of literary history as a modern genre was
necessarily a socially and linguistically mediated act of repurposing and synthesis, not a
clean break from the “premodern” modes of literary and cultural production.62 What
makes these multi-discursive source texts appear seamlessly within a standalone narrative
of Afghan literary history is their positioning within the discourse of adabiyāt.
Adab(iyā t) and Ā ryā nā

One may ask: Why produce an encyclopedia? The idea that “evolved” nations engage in the
production of encyclopedias in order to historicize and showcase their folklore, ethnicity,
music, poetry, and other cultural fixtures resonated with scholars around the world in
the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.63 In this period, the production of ethnically
61
Dāʾerat ol-maʿāref-e Āryānā, 3:alef–be (A–B).
62
Jabbari, “Late Persianate Literary Culture.”
63
For example, in an article called “Ahamiyat-e tarjomah” (The importance of translation) in Kabul (no. 4, 1931:
31–44), Ahmad ʿAli Khān Dorrāni called on Afghan intellectuals to undertake the translation of ʿolum-e jadidah or
“modern sciences.” As an example, he mentioned “Dāʾerat ol-Maʿā ref-e al-Bostāni” or al-Bustani’s encyclopedia
(43). For another example that highlights the importance of encyclopedias to the nation-state and its civilizational
achievements, see Gholā m Jilā ni Khā n Jalā li, “Dāʾerat ol-Maʿā refhā,” Ā ʾinah-ye ʿerfā n 2.5 (1935): 17–32. This essay,
which was published as a series, had been inspired by a similar article in the Arabic-language periodical al-Hilā l.
Iranian Studies 685
oriented encyclopedias proliferated.64 The case of Butrus al-Bustani (d. 1883) is particularly
instructive here. In 1876, al-Bustani created the calque Dāʾirat ul-maʿārif or “Circle of
Knowledge” as a title for his project Encyclopédie arabe.65 Encyclopédie arabe may have been
primarily conceptualized by al-Bustani, but it was carried out by a team of collaborators.66
It has been dubbed the first modern encyclopedia in Arabic, an assertion made, according to
Francesca Bellino, for reasons described below.
As a cultural enterprise, its publication, distribution, and importance would have been
difficult to conceive before the rise and accessibility of the printing press. The writing of
Encyclopédie arabe had been informed by “positivist, empirical, secular, and scientific”
forms of knowledge.67 If Encyclopédie arabe “provided the Arabic reading public with a cur-
rent catalog, albeit a partial one, of man’s knowledge about his nature, his world and his
accomplishments,” then Āryānā, produced around three quarters of a century later, provided
Persian and Pashto readers with a distilled body of knowledge created by a new disciplinary
formation in twentieth-century Afghanistan.68
There are other discursive similarities between these two landmark projects. Al-Bustāni’s
differentiated use of adab is particularly insightful and relevant here, as explained by Bellino:
In the entry on adab, al-Bustani distinguishes between the singular (adab) and plural
(ādāb) forms. The former has a technical sense and designates a certain branch (adab
ul-qaḍi or adab ul-shāʿir) of science (ʿilm ul-adab) that requires a technical terminology.
The latter covers the general meaning of knowledge, as a synonym of al-ʿulum and
al-maʿārif. In addition, al-Bustani adds the meanings of the various forms derived
from the root to those two meanings.69
Encyclopédie arabe holds an important place in the conceptual realignment of adab, which
culminated in its twentieth-century disciplinization as literature across much of the
Arabic-speaking world.70
Released in 1952, the second volume of Āryānā dedicates a five-page entry to adab.71 The
entry draws on a number of different sources such as Muhammad Farid Wajdi’s
Arabic-language encyclopedic work Kanz al-ʿulūm wa-l-lughah (1905), Jaʿfar Ibn Muhammad
Baytī’s Mawāsim al-adab wa-āthār al-ʿAjam wa-l-ʿArab (1908), Jalāl Homāʾi’s Tārikh-e
adabiyāt-e Irān (1930), and an uncited American encyclopedia. The entry defines adab as
an ʿelm or science (invoked here in its older sense as any systematized form of knowledge)
and ascribes two senses to it, a capacious sense that deals with language in general (adab-e
lesān) and a narrower sense that is concerned with the literary (adabiyāt). The former, more
general sense is encapsulated by adab as a discourse of proper conduct.
64
On Qazaq sovet èntsīklopedīyası or the Kazakh Soviet Encyclopedia (1972–78), for instance, see Baker, “Ethnic
Words,” 141–53.
65
This Arabic calque generates valences that need to be analyzed. Premodern encyclopedic works utilized differ-
ent plural nouns as a way of indicating their scope and comprehensiveness. As such, the idea of a circle of knowl-
edges or maʿārif signals a certain continuity with premodern encyclopedic texts. Whereas, Dāʾirat ul-tarbiyah or
maʿrifah, a more literal Arabic translation of the corrupted Greek term “enkuklopaideia,” would have signaled
more of a departure in that sense. On the other hand, the term “maʿārif” implies a nonspecific sense of knowledge,
in comparison to more specific terms like wafāyāt, masālik, ʿajāʾib, or funun deployed by premodern texts. See Tuttle,
“Educational and Social Worlds.” I am grateful to Cameron Cross for this observation and reference.
66
Bellino, “Arabic Encyclopaedias,” 154. Afghan scholars were well aware of al-Bustani’s encyclopedia and refer-
enced it in periodicals such as Kabul. For instance, see Ahmad ʿAli Khan Dorrāni, “Ahamiyat-e tarjomah,” Kabul 1, no.
4 (September 1931): 43.
67
Bellino, “Arabic Encyclopaedias,” 124.
68
Jandora, “al-Bustāni’s Dāʾirat ul-maʿārif,” 89.
69
Bellino, “Arabic Encyclopaedias,” 153.
70
El Shakry, The Literary Qur’an; Allan, “How Adab Became Literary.”
71
Dāʾerat ol-maʿāref-e Āryānā, 2:598–602.
686 Aria Fani
Following this general note, the entry provides two subcategories: the science of adab in
the East and in the West. In its note on the Eastern iteration of adab, Āryānā emphasizes
adab’s two valences as literary form and proper conduct. It then enumerates different
branches that pertain to the science of adab, not dissimilar to Āmoli’s Nafāʾes ol-fonun, and
briefly discusses various literary genres in poetry and prose. Āryānā’s section on the
Western iteration of adab similarly ascribes two senses to the idea of literature, one broadly
used to refer to a body of written or printed works on any particular subject and a narrower
sense to mean literary form. The subentry enumerates different literary genres common in
Western European literary traditions. What differentiates the Eastern and Western iterations
of adab/literature, Afghan scholars argue, is the fact that the etymology of “literature” in
European languages mutes any connections to orality while adab is not etymologically
limited to writing.
Curiously, the term “adabiyāt” in Āryānā was itself subsumed under the entry on adab.
This entry was devoted exclusively to the University of Kabul’s Faculty of Letters.72 It
included a note about the founding of Afghanistan’s first department of literature in 1944
and a list of courses such as “Persian Literary History” taught therein. “Faculty of
Letters” is quite an appropriate entry to be placed next to adab for it not only signifies
adab(iyāt)’s conceptual transformation and disciplinization within an academic paradigm,
but it also demonstrates the co-habitual, multi-generic, and self-perpetuating nature of
this historical process. The takeaway here is clear: adab does not just seamlessly become lit-
erary through a handful of texts or even institutions, no matter how seminal they may be. It
happens through complex social processes whose local and transregional contexts must be
critically examined. The alternative would be to attribute the rise of literature to a
taken-for-granted contact with colonial modernity.
Āryānā’s entry on adab shows that Afghan scholars, and Middle Eastern intellectuals more
broadly, were not passively receiving and importing a model of literariness into their local
cultures. To the contrary, the formation of adabiyāt as literature necessitated grappling with,
debating, and reconfiguring concepts such as adab. Writing in the 1950s with limited access
to primary resources, Afghan scholars displayed a critical awareness of the fact that the idea
of adab, both in the East and West, was far from fixed or universal.73 The adab entry alone
demonstrates the precision and inventiveness with which Afghan encyclopedists aimed to
define and parse out one of the most culturally consequential and pervasive concepts of
their milieu.
Ā ryā nā and the Codification of Literary History

In the early 1930s, the concept of literary history needed to be defined clearly in the pages of
journals like Kābol. In delineating models for the writing of literary history, Afghan scholars
drew on a wide variety of sources, including ʿAbbās Eqbāl Āshtiyāni’s column “Tārikh-e
adabi” in the journal Dāneshkadeh, Shibli Nuʿmāni’s Shiʿr ul-ʿAjam, Edward Browne’s A
Literary History of Persia, and many others. By the mid-1950s, literary history posed as a
more bounded category, occupying a central place in the national historiography of
Afghanistan.74
Āryānā’s subentry on Afghan literary history included the following sections:
1. Indo-European Languages75
72
It was titled “Adabiyāt (Fakultah).” Dāʾerat ol-maʿāref-e Āryānā, 2:602.
73
Consider, for instance, a note at the end of the section on Adab in the West explaining that the idea of literature
as a canon of works on any particular subject is a contemporary usage of the term. Ibid.
74
Two major literary histories of Afghanistan were published in the 1950s. See Kohzād, Tārikh-e adabiyāt-e
Afghānistān; Zhubal, Tārikh-e adabiyāt-e Afghanistan. On the latter, see Ahmadi, “‘The Cradle of Dari.’”
75
Indo-European and Indo-Iranian were separate categories in the encyclopedia. Dāʾerat ol-maʿāref-e Āryānā,
3:937–43.
Iranian Studies 687
2. Vedic Literature as It Relates to Afghanistan

3. Avestan Language and Literature
4. The Origins of Orthography and Its Variations in Afghanistan
5. The Proliferation of Greek Language, Literature, and Orthography in Afghanistan
6. Parthava or the Pahlavi Language and Literature of Khorasan
7. The Reviving and Flourishing of Sanskrit Literature in the Kushan Period in
Afghanistan
8. Afghanistan and Middle Persian Literature
9. New Persian Language and Literature
These section headings clearly demonstrate the expansive research scope of Afghan encyclo-
pedists and their inclusive understanding of literary history, which entailed wide-ranging
topics such as orthography, literary canon, and scripture. These sections included scholarly
discussions on the ways in which such literary traditions as Greek, Sogdian, Sanskrit, and
Eastern Middle Persian shaped the literary culture of contemporary Afghanistan. As such,
these encyclopedists did not seek to chart the literary history of a territorially defined
and self-contained political entity or highlight the role of a single literary tradition at the
expense of others. Instead, they aimed to situate Afghanistan within a distinctly multilingual
and transregional ecumene. Essentially, Afghan encyclopedists deployed the Indo-European
hypothesis in order to weave together fragmented and discontinuous cultural episodes into
a national unit that is both geographically and historically coherent. Their emphasis on
Āryānā as an organizational concept—as opposed to the more contested and limited term
“Afghan”—dovetails well with the task of composing a national literary history out of
Vedic, Greek, and Persian traditions.
The entry on Afghan literary history opened with the following statement: “A new avenue
of inquiry was created in 1876 in linguistics and scholars discovered that there are similar-
ities among European and Indian languages such as Greek, Latin and Sanskrit.”76 Inspired by
and in response to the work of Sir William Jones, a body of language theories by such lin-
guists as Gaston-Laurent Coeurdoux (d. 1779), Franz Bopp (d. 1867), Jacob Grimm (d.
1863), and Karl Verner (d. 1896) emerged in the nineteenth century that elaborated on
the idea of language families.77 Afghan encyclopedists offered summaries of these scholars’
work and asserted that formal similarities among languages are explained by the fact that
there once existed a single primordial Indo-European tongue, an idea referred to as proto
Indo-European by linguists today.78 They contended that each Indo-European language is
in possession of a unique set of features and that geography is the key factor that determines
those unique features.
Indo-European language theory opened new horizons for Afghan scholars who sought to
historicize the ethnic constitution of their nation and locate its distinctive place in an
emerging cultural configuration within which every nation was imagined as possessing its
own unique literary tradition.79 This objective found its most lucid expression in the follow-
ing paragraph, which prefaced subentries on Indo-European languages:
If the speakers of the initial and primordial Indo-European language are enfolded in the
layers of prehistory, the speakers of the Indo-Aryan family of languages enter the scene
in the beginning of the historical period. They consisted of a series of tribes that used to
live in Aryana Vaeja, in the upper range of Syr Darya and Amu Darya, and the domain of
their common living extended to the region of Bactria [Bākhtar] in northern Aryana or
76
Ibid., 3:408.
77
1876 may refer to the publication year of Verner’s article “Eine Ausnahme der ersten Lautverschiebung” or “An
Exception to the First Sound Shift” in the journal Comparative Linguistic Research.
78
Dāʾerat ol-maʿāref-e Āryānā, 3:408.
79
Mufti, Forget English!
688 Aria Fani
present-day Afghanistan. The communal life and position of Aryans or Indo-Aryans has
had a significant impact on the literary history of our country, because this living
together is what led to the formation of Aryan language(s), from which common
Indian and common Aryan languages have derived. The oldest contrasting branches
[shākhah-hā-ye motaqābbelah] of these languages are Vedic Sanskrit and Avestan lan-
guages, which have been identified by present-day linguistic research as the origin of
the Indian and Aryan families of languages, respectively.80
The idea that the proto Indo-European language originated in present-day Afghanistan was
informed by a broader scholarly impetus to shed light on the role of Central Asian languages
and cultures in the making of the Sassanian Empire before the advent of Islam and the rise of
New Persian in the courts of Persian-using dynasties between the early ninth and tenth
centuries. It drew on archaeological findings and historical writings regularly published in
journals such as Āryāna, the main organ of the Afghanistan Historical Society. This was
also an effort to reorient Persian literary history as conceptualized by Iran-centric accounts
produced in Tehran.
Iran-centrism refers to the idea that Iran, posited as a primordial geo-cultural entity, is
the exclusive and native domain of Persian literature. For instance, Eqbāl Āshtiyāni’s series
of essays titled “Literary History,” which appeared in Dāneshkadeh in the late 1910s, offered
one of the earliest schemata of Persian literary periodization from an Iran-centric perspec-
tive. His schema fragmented previously overlooked Persianate empires whose centers of
power fell outside the borders of late Qajar Iran.81 Āryānā focused on Persianate polities
such as the Ghurid (879–1215) and Kurt (1244–1381) dynasties, which ruled from a territory
most of which falls into what is today Afghanistan. Nonetheless, the authors consistently
emphasized the polycentric nature of Persian literary culture.82 Afghan encyclopedists’
instinct to push against the marginal place assigned to Central Asia has been widely accepted
today.83
Highlighting the place of Central Asia as an integral part of a Persian-speaking ecumene,
and not as a marginal land in between civilizations, was integral to the reification of an
Afghan literary history that was itself subsumed under a larger encyclopedic entry on
Afghanistan. The ecumenical and polycentric thrust of Āryānā’s literary history, placed
within a strictly territorially defined idea of Afghanistan, produced an inherent tension
not just in Āryānā, but in the making of literary nationalism more broadly. One of the
main objectives of the Encyclopedia Association, funded by the Mosāhebān dynasty, was
to produce a text at the service of a territorially and ethnically defined idea of
Afghanistan. Yet, the final outcome in many ways is counterposed to any parochial and
ethno-territorially defined project.
There are two points here that broadly pertain to the study of literary nationalism.
Firstly, the discourse of literary nationalism should not be reduced to a singular thrust. In
fact, ecumenical and parochial impulses often exist side by side, creating irresolvable ten-
sions, and the extent to which one is muted or animated at the expense of the other should
be subject to analysis in individual circles and texts and at different times.84 And secondly, it
is important to remember that twentieth-century intellectuals were not working within
ready-made scholarly models whereby they would import a universal model of literature
and literary history into their local environment. Literary histories created in the shadow
80
Dāʾerat ol-maʿāref-e Āryānā, 3:408–9.
81
Fani, “Becoming Literature,” chap. 2.
82
For instance, the mass migration of Persian-speaking scholars and poets to Mughal South Asia was marked as a
normative event given that the Persian language had made inroads into the subcontinent in previous centuries. See
83
For a recent study of the place of Central Asia in shaping Persian and Perso-Islamic empires, see Rezakhani,
Reorienting the Sasanians. For a study on modern Central Asia, see Pickett, Polymaths of Islam.
84
Marashi analyzes a similar tension between Iranian and Parsi scholars in the 1930s. See Exile and the Nation.
Iranian Studies 689
of romantic nationalism were seldom aligned with the dominant discourse of power in ways
that could be straightforward and predetermined.
Periodizing Persian Literature

The bulk of Āryānā’s literary history was focused on New Persian literature, organized as
follows:
1. The Persian Language and Literature

a. Nomenclature
b. The Place of Origin and Development of the Persian Language
c. The Earliest Persian-Language Poets
i. Oldest Prose Works
d. Arab Domination and Arabic-Persian Interplay
e. Tahirid Dynasty (821–73)
i. Poets
f. Saffarid Dynasty (861–1003)
i. Poets
g. Samanid Dynasty (819–999)
i. Samanid Poets
ii. Prose in the Samanid Period
iii. The Characteristics of Samanid Prose and Poetry
1. Poetic Style (Sabk) and Historical Periods
h. The Poetic Style (Sabk) of the Ghaznavid Period (977–1186)
i. Scientific Production in the Twelfth Century
i. Arabic-Language Works by Ghaznavid Scholars
j. Literature in the Seljuq Period (1037–1194)
k. The ʿErāqi Style
l. The Ghurid Dynasty (879–1215)
m. Persian Prose in the Twelfth, Thirteenth, and Fourteenth Centuries
n. The Rise of the Mongols and Its Influence on Persian Literature
o. The Kurt Dynasty (1244–1381)
p. The Timurid Period (1370–1507)
q. The Second Period of Persian Prose
r. Literary Works of the Sixteenth Century
s. Afghan Literature after Sultan Hosayn Mirza (d. 1506)
i. The Indian Style or Alternatively, the Style of Modern Poets (Moteʾakherin)
t. The Poets of the Seventeenth Century
u. The Third Period of Persian Prose
i. The Published Prose Works of the Seventeenth Century
v. Afghan Literature from Nāder Shah Afshār (d. 1747) to Mohammad Nāder Shah
(d. 1933)
i. Afghan Poets of the Twentieth Century
ii. The Fourth Period of Persian Prose
w. Sources
i. Tazkerahs
ii. History
iii. Literary History
iv. Collected Poems (Divān)
v. Selected Works and Anthologies
vi. Collected Periodicals
vii. Miscellaneous Works
690 Aria Fani
This section aimed to cover more than a millennium of Persian literary production by plac-
ing the works of dozens of Persian-language poets and scholars in historical and stylistic
contexts. In conceptualizing and transforming this history into more manageable units,
Afghan encyclopedists did not commit to a singular organizing principle. They employed
a multitude of methods such as dynastic (e.g. Timurid), fields (e.g. history), stylistic (e.g.
Indian), and formal genres (e.g. ghazal). As a result, they represented Persian as a multi-
discursive and multi-dynastic literary tradition. The use of both periodological and typolog-
ical approaches to the writing of literary history, which were often separated under the
ethos of Western European modernism, was highly innovative.85 This hybrid scheme
shows that Afghan scholars resorted to different tools in order to carry out the task of
nationalizing Persian as a distinctly polycentric and transregional literary tradition.
Writing an Afghan literary history would only be possible in reference to trends, political
and linguistic, that took shape outside of the nation-state’s territory. Āryānā is by no
means a singular text in that regard. Recent scholarly works have demonstrated the trans-
regional scope and outlook of Afghan historiography in Persian.86
The idea of poetic styles and extrapolating a critical vocabulary with which to study them
has a long-standing history in Arabic and Persian poetic debates, rhetorical treatises, and
tazkerahs or commemorative compendia. The question of sabk or style was particularly per-
tinent in twentieth-century Iran and Afghanistan, a certain iteration of which in the form of
Mohammad Taqi Bahār’s Sabk-shenāsi became an integral part of Persian literature as an aca-
demic discipline in the 1940s. The idea of sabk afforded literary historians a robust mecha-
nism for periodization, a blend of literary typology and strictly political demarcations. It also
produced a set of philological features with which scholars and students would attempt to
identify undated manuscripts.87 By the early 1950s, Bahār’s classification of Persian prose
(and to a much lesser extent poetry) into the four styles of Khorāsāni, ʿErāqi, Hendi
(Indian), and Bāzgasht or Return had become distinct historiographical signposts for more
than a millennium of Persian literary production. Bahār’s classification was first articulated
in the pages of journals such as Armaghān and Mehr, and later published in three volumes
commissioned by the University of Tehran. Afghan scholars were in conversation with schol-
arly trends in Iran.88 As such, Bahār’s insights entered an encyclopedia entry through
Āryānā. But this inclusion was far from uncritical.
Under the heading “The Characteristics of Samanid Prose and Poetry,” Āryānā introduced
its readers to the idea of style.89
In the Arabic language, sabk (or style) means to melt and pour gold or silver. In the ter-
minology of contemporary odabāʾ it refers to a distinct kind of prose or poetry as well as
to the comprehension and articulation of ideas through the configuration of words,
selection of vocabulary, and modes of expression. The branch of knowledge that dis-
cusses different styles in a language is called Sabk-shenāsi [Stylistics].90
Following this definition, the encyclopedists recognized the fact that the classics (qodamā)
had their unique critical vocabulary such as fann (art or technique), tarz (way or method),
85
For a critique on separating the two in modern literary historiography, see the opening chapter of Kronfeld’s
Margins of Modernism.
86
See Schwartz, Remapping Persian Literary History; Nawid, “Writing National History”; Green, ed., Afghan History;
Crews, Afghan Modern.
87
Āryānā itself became available to Iranian readers soon after its publication. We know this because each volume
of Āryānā would feature notes that were sent to Kabul in praise of the project from other cities, domestic and inter-
national. On Iran-Afghanistan literary connections, see Fani, “Becoming Literature,” chap. 4; Rasikh, “Orientalism
from Within.”
88
See Fani, “Becoming Literature,” chap. 4; Rasikh, “Orientalism from Within.”
89
90
Ibid.
Iranian Studies 691
and tariqa (road or pathway), and discussed literary style through many different conceptual
frameworks.91 Ultimately, they argued that Stylistics is a new discourse and few others have
contributed to its development more than Mohammad Taqi Bahār.92 I left the term “odabāʾ”
untranslated in the above passage because its valences could not be covered by a single
English term. Adib broadly refers to someone not only learned but also with a commanding
grasp of Arabic rhetorical techniques.93 This reference in Āryānā is particularly fascinating
since the odabāʾ as a class had largely given way to new classes of professionals such as
teachers, university professors, and literary scholars. But mediated continuity in forms of
knowledge—from which sabk was derived—echoes even in a modern encyclopedia composed
by a cadre none of whom are professionally called adib anymore.
Āryānā’s characterization of Bahār’s stylistic classification afforded it greater flexibility,
adding more caveats to understandings of sabk that carried with it certain value judgements
about poetic language and comprehensibility. Afghan scholars wrote, “Each style includes
many schools and the characteristics [of those schools] differ in nuance but they broadly
adhere to the [main] category. Furthermore, there also exist ‘in-between’ styles which
have their own masters.”94 The recognition that there are other stylistic categories beyond
what Bahār had identified in his book added complicated philological approaches to the
study of Persian literature. For instance, Afghan scholars did not only explain but also qual-
ified the Khorāsāni style, or “ancient Afghanistan” as they alternatively called it. They added
this caveat: the Khorāsāni style may have originated in Khorāsān but it was not strictly lim-
ited to that region; the question of style has to do with era not location.95 They then offered
another important caveat: “In classifying different styles, some have identified a style called
Fārs (the region) distinctly separate from the ʿErāqi style. One should remember that these
classifications have a general objective. Should we go by subtle distinctions, one can mention
many other styles and even come up with a separate style for each poet.”96
The encyclopedists recognized that literary styles need to be carefully qualified and that
each stylistic category serves a particular purpose, some general and some more specific. At
the core of that recognition lies the idea that sabk needs to serve as a descriptive category
modified by the specificities of Persian poetry and prose, rather than a fixed analytical cat-
egory employed to mark sharp historiographical breaks in literary history. Recent scholarly
debates on the merit of retaining Sabk-e Hendi or the Indian Style as a descriptive category
and applying it to the study of Persian literary production from the sixteenth to the eigh-
teenth centuries have taken into account that, ultimately, sabk may not serve as a monolithic
and fixed category of aesthetics and that many poets possess their own unique styles.97
Bahār’s fourth stylistic category was called Bāzgasht-e adabi or Literary Return, which he
understood as a movement led by Iranian poets emulating “pre-Indian” style poets such as
Hāfez, Saʿdi, and Ferdowsi. Āryānā shared Bahār’s impression that “literary return” as a lit-
erary movement was happening in Iran.98 But unlike Bahār, Āryānā did not give sole primacy
91
Ibid.
92
Ibid.
93
Adib as a designation denoted both specific professional skills and many general types of expertise that were
usually not mutually exclusive. For more careful definitions of adib, see Pickett, Polymaths of Islam.
94
95
Ibid. Similarly, in “Sheʿr beh sabk-e Khorāsāni dar Hend” (Khorāsāni style of poetry in India), Bahār empha-
sized that poetic style was not determined by the region where it was produced. He examined a few verses by
the Persian-language poets of India and claimed that they were composed in the Khorāsāni style. Mehr 2, no. 3
(1934): 298–99.
96
97
Mikkelson, “Of Parrots and Crows.”
98
“… and bāzgasht in the styles of Khorāsān and ‘Erāq which has had currency in Iran since the nineteenth cen-
tury until today.” Dāʾerat ol-maʿāref-e Āryānā, 3:442. Kevin Schwartz has challenged the idea that Literary Return was
happening only in Iran by looking at the ways in which Afghan and Indian poets and tazkerah writers were engaged
with the work of the masters of Persian poetry in different ways and contexts. Remapping Persian Literary History.
692 Aria Fani
to Literary Return by adding the words “or new styles” before each category.99 In referring
to “new styles,” Afghan scholars broadened their historiographical horizon to include
Central Asian poets well beyond Afghanistan from the nineteenth and early twentieth cen-
turies who were overlooked by Bahār’s Iran-centric classification. Similarly, in their
characterization of Indian Style poetry (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries), the encyclope-
dists did not exclusively commit to a single category (Sabk-e Hendi) by creating an alternative
fixture subsumed under “or the style of modern poets.”100
The crucial inclusion of the disjunctive “or” functioned as a critical mechanism of histo-
riographical rewriting, bringing marginalized and sub-canonical poets back to the center of
canonical debates on Persian literary history. It also reflected the broader scholarly impetus
of Āryānā to highlight Central and South Asia as a formative site in the formation of the
Persianate ecumene. In fact, one of the most valuable features of the entry on Afghan liter-
ary history is its extensive list of Central and South Asian poets and samples of their work,
many of which must have been compiled and edited by Mawlānā Khāl Mohammad Khastah
(d. 1973), who played an important role in anthologizing the work of two generations of
Persian-language poets in Afghanistan.101
Conclusion
The nation-state as a political formation was entirely new to the Persian literary ecosystem,
giving rise to new configurations of identity and social and cultural institutions to produce
and safeguard them. But the idea that Persians’ relationships (invoked here in the sense used
by Mana Kia) with their textual tradition were mediated by both local and trans-local con-
nections and contestations is not peculiar to the nation-state or its nationalisms. As Kia
reminds us, connections to place, self, and community were multiple or “aporetic,” simulta-
neously accommodating and negotiating different forms of distinction or even opposition.102
We must then resist the urge to universalize literature as a conceptual category and remain
attentive to local knowledge and politics. That is why the work of Mosāhebān-era scholars in
producing Āryānā must be understood against the backdrop of both local and trans-local
cultural and historical contexts.
This article is inspired by and a response to the growing scholarly impetus to interrogate
concepts that have been treated as universal and timeless. It is thanks to this body of schol-
arship that literature is gradually becoming a contested category. Michael Allan’s In the
Shadow of World Literature examines the most salient features of literature as a modern
notion. Allan shifts our attention away from literature as a fixed canon and toward particular
reading practices that become enshrined as literary and modern.103 Similarly, in Forget
English!, Aamir Mufti argues that the idea of literary history is an outgrowth of colonial
modernity that conceptualizes the world as an assemblage of different civilizations, each
in possession of a unique literary tradition.104 Both studies begin decidedly right after the
formation of literature as a conceptual category and analyze its impact on our understanding
of what counts as literary.
This article unpacked the internal processes by which a new disciplinary formation of lit-
erature took form in twentieth-century Afghanistan. Because when we begin only in the
aftermath of the inauguration of literature as a modern discourse, it is more likely that
we will take for granted the historical process by which literature took anchor and as a result
present it as more bounded and settled than it actually is. Such an outlook also runs the risk
of affording too much agency to discourses of colonialism in shaping local iterations of
99
Schwartz, Remapping Persian Literary History.
100
101
His two anthologies include Moʾaserin-e sokhanwar and Yādi az raftagān.
102
Kia, Persianate Selves.
103
Allan, Shadow of World Literature.
104
Mufti, Forget English!
Iranian Studies 693
literature and literary history. Even though both Allan and Mufti explicitly allude to the con-
ceptual multiplicity of literature in different local contexts, readers may be forgiven for
thinking that the idea of literature spread in a modular fashion in the aftermath of colonial
modernity. By placing Āryānā squarely within a new disciplinary formation, this article
strove to show the contingent and multivalent nature of texts produced in the emerging
shadow of nation-states.
Further extensive research on the disciplinization of music, education, and literature in
Afghanistan will more forcefully challenge the facile idea that the nationalization of
Persian literary culture was a strictly Iranian enterprise or that it was a West-East phenom-
enon, whereby the latter uncritically imported new forms of knowledge and distributed it
seamlessly and unproblematically.105 If there is a single takeaway from this article, it is
the following: the cadre of professionals that produced Āryānā was committed to a modernist
methodology that resisted the conscription of their product into romantic and territorial
nationalism. In a sense, their methodology makes visible the inherent desire within nation-
alism for rendering the past knowable through historical positivism. But since not every ele-
ment of that past is the desideratum of the nation, there arises an irresolvable tension
between a nationally sanctioned past and the past reified through modernist methodologies.
This discursive incompatibility and all of its attendant contradictions lie at the heart of
Persian literary nationalisms in the twentieth century. The way we read modern texts like
Āryānā determines the degree to which the nation can emerge as a coherent unit of belong-
ing in our own milieu.
Acknowledgments. I am grateful to colleagues who read and commented on this article: Cameron Cross, Nile
Green, Alexander Jabbari, Ali Altaf Mian, Shahla Farghadani, Marjan Wardaki, Sam Hodgkin, Kevin Schwartz,
Nicole Ferreira, and the anonymous reviewers of Iranian Studies.
Periodicals
Adab. Kabul: Pohanzi-ye adabiyāt va ʿolum-e bashari, 1953–78.
Ā ʾinah-ye ʿerfā n. Kabul: Ministry of Education, 1930–?
Armaghān. Tehran: Anjoman-e adabi-ye Iran, 1920–79.
Āryānā. Kabul: Anjoman tārikh-e Kabul, 1942–86 (published irregularly after 1979).
ʿErfān. Kabul: Vezārat-e taʿlim va tarbiyat, 1950–78.
Herāt. Herat: Anjoman-e adabi-ye Herāt, 1932–80.
Kabul. Kabul: Anjoman-e adabi-ye Kabul, 1931–79.
Mehr. Tehran, 1933–67.
Sālnāmeh-ye majallah-ye Kabul. Kabul: Anjoman-e adabi-ye Kabul, 1932–37.
Serāj ol-akhbār. Kabul: Matbaʿah-e Māshin Khānah, 1911–18.
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Cite this article: Fani A (2022). Disciplining Persian Literature in Twentieth-Century Afghanistan. Iranian Studies 55,
675–695. https://doi.org/10.1017/irn.2021.14
doi:10.1017/irn.2022.32
A RT I C L E
Soundwaves of Dissent: Resistance Through Persianate

Cultural Production in Afghanistan
Mejgan Massoumi
Fellow & Lecturer, COLLEGE (Civic, Liberal, & Global Education) Program Stanford University
(Received 4 April 2022; revised 21 April 2022; accepted 21 April 2022)
Abstract
In the decades of the 1960s and 1970s, sound recording technologies—including radio and cassettes—
proliferated in Afghanistan and reached transnational lengths. While the state came to dominate these
technologies, it could not prevent users from circumventing its censors with alternative perspectives
and discourses. This article highlights the examples of Farīda ʿUsmān Anwarī, a noted radio announcer,
producer, and journalist, and Aḥmad Ẓāhir, Afghanistan’s most popular musical icon to date, to
showcase the ways in which the Persianate literary canon served as the medium for sounding dissent
amid the changing social and political dynamics of the time. Pushing the boundaries of recorded
speech created an alternative space where dissent became possible and the strategic use of mass
media paved the way for transnational sonic solidarities among a diverse community of listeners across
the Persian-speaking world and beyond.
Keywords: Radio; Poetry; Performance; Cassettes; Persianate Afghanistan; Farīda Anwarī; Aḥmad Ẓāhir
For Afghans, the decades of the 1960s and 1970s marked their engagement with new forms
of global communication technologies and political experimentation.1 The establishment of
a constitutional monarchy in 1964 ushered in certain civil rights, including freedom of
speech, which directly impacted radio, music production, and other forms of art. A coup
in 1973 led to a republic that inaugurated formal state cultural institutions for film, theater,
and performing arts. By 1979, experiments with communism fused radio and television
through the state-sponsored media corporation Radio Television Afghanistan (RTA), and fur-
ther popularized regional maḥalī (local folk music). World historical events complemented
these domestic affairs, and Afghans came to see themselves at the center of the ideological
struggles spanning the globe. The Cold War, the rise of student protest movements, decolo-
nization, anti-imperialism, and new modes of identity formation inspired revolutions from
Kabul to Herat, Panjshir to Bamiyan, and Kandahar to Balkh. Radio broadcast the pulse of
these events, revealing the ways in which the Afghan people responded to these historical
accidents through music, poetry, and literature.
If this special issue of Iranian Studies considers the national and cultural diversity of
Persianate societies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from a variety of perspec-
tives, this article’s main concern is how Afghans used communication technologies to
1
I use “Afghan” here to describe a geographic and civic identity, not an ethnic one. Citizens of Afghanistan spoke
multiple languages and applied a variety of ethnic, linguistic, religious, geographic and other terms of self-
identification.
698 Mejgan Massoumi
engage a transregional Persianate heritage and participate in local and global politics. I
elucidate this through three specific examples: first, literary-focused radio programs pro-
duced by Afghan women that refashioned local traditions of poetry recitation with music
and commentary, serving as a medium to respond to everyday challenges in social and polit-
ical life; second, popular music that traversed broadcasting censors through the circulation
of cassettes and the poetry of state-supported political activists; and third, the performance
of poetry and song that considers the symbolic, affective, and embodied dimensions of
Persian culture and literary production as acts of political resistance to local Afghan politics.
These examples center on two important historical figures from Afghanistan: Farīda
ʿUsmān Anwarī (b. 1947), a noted radio announcer, producer, and journalist; and Aḥmad
Ẓāhir (1946-1979), Afghanistan’s most popular musical icon to date. While Anwarī, through
reciting the classical works of Persianate poets, used her voice as a medium to respond to
the challenges of everyday life amid growing authoritarian rule and Cold War politics,
Ẓāhir subverted the soundwaves to critique state and society by drawing on the poetry of
more radical and leftist contributors of the Persianate literary canon. Due to their emphasis
on orality and aurality, the contributions of Anwarī and Ẓāhir also exemplify how a combi-
nation of performance, radio, and cassette tape technology became the most accessible
mediums for sharing knowledge across a diverse spectrum of listeners.2 In other words,
because these mediums placed a premium on speaking and hearing, as opposed to reading
and writing, they reached a broader audience and cut across literacy barriers to disseminate
information and knowledge. Moreover, the fact that Dari (Afghan Persian) served as one of
the predominant languages of communication, poetry, and song allowed for subversive
Afghan voices to be heard across a vast landscape of listeners, creating the space for trans-
national sonic solidarities among diverse communities.3
The praxis of broadcasting oral traditions (story, song, and poetry) equipped Afghan
sound technology producers and consumers with the emotional, social, and intellectual
capacity to cultivate forms of resistance to the state’s cultural hegemony, particularly
through the 1973 and 1978 coups. Deploying their oratory skills and cultural capital, these
actors countered official ideology, thus turning tools of state making (radio and recording
technologies) into means of self-liberation. Within this frame, the interpretive task at
hand is to look for patterns of meaning and ask what divergent interpretations and incon-
sistencies in popular culture might tell us about the mainstreams and margins of society. By
placing subversive and state-sponsored voices in conversation with one another, and by
bringing radio performers and producers into the historical fold, a more nuanced under-
standing of Afghanistan’s past comes into focus. In this new iteration, the oral and aural
qualities of language and literature serve as keynote elements of change.
On Persian As A Transnational Language

While Afghanistan is a multi-ethnic and multi-lingual society, this article’s singular focus on
Dari elucidates the language’s important historical role in mass communications and points
to the various cultural functions it affords in the Afghan context. At varying times in
Afghanistan’s modern history, as Aria Fani discusses, the state attempted to create a mono-
lingual society by advancing Pashto as the national language. However, given the primacy of
Persian as the language of education and bureaucracy, such attempts were curtailed.4 This
resulted in recognizing both Dari and Pashto as the national languages of Afghanistan in
2
My use of aurality is inspired by the work of ethnomusicologist Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier, who discusses how
listening has been central to the production of notions of language, music, voice, and sound that determine the pol-
itics of life. See Ochoa Gautier, Aurality.
3
While the constitution of 1964 designates Dari as one of the official languages of the state, to maintain consis-
tency with this special issue’s other contributions, I use Dari and Persian interchangeably.
4
Fani, “Disciplining Persian Literature.”
Iranian Studies 699
the 1964 Constitution.5 While radio began broadcasting in these official languages, other
regional languages—including Uzbek, Turkmen, Balochi, Pashayi, and Nuristani—also received
airtime, particularly in the late 1970s and 1980s, with the arrival of a leftist regime that pro-
moted Afghanistan’s regional cultures and traditions on radio and television. Nonetheless,
Persian remained the cohesive cultural force throughout the country.6 Parallel to regional
and local languages within a given cultural setting, Persian operated as a lingua franca and
often adopted elements of local cultures and modes of expression, leading to the existence
of various Persian dialects, including Herati, Hazaragi, Badakhshani, and others. The wide dis-
semination of Persian poetry and song capture this linguistic versatility and adaptability.
In this regard, the element of language as a category of analysis in the Persianate per-
forms an important historical and aesthetic function that demands critical attention. In
the twentieth century, even as its global reach had significantly waned, Persian served as
a medium of transnational communication and international prestige for Afghan artists,
as historical and contemporary literary authorities were summoned in order to frame and
comment on local issues of cultural and political import.7 Their use of Persian amounts
to leveraging linguistic authority and prestige in order to challenge the state’s power and
build cultural capital. In other words, it is the eminence of Persian as a vernacular language
that directly concerns my analysis here. As such, the examples in this article showcase the
diversity and multiplicity of linguistic modernity in various zones of Persianate lands. Wali
Ahmadi’s reminder of Persian’s polycentric history is particularly apt here:
The engendering of a national imagination in Persian has been a complicated one,

largely because the present extent of Persian cultural space does not correspond to
any one “national soul.” Persian literature has historically transcended well-defined ter-
ritoriality and has never been exclusively “Iranian literature” or “Afghan literature” or
“Tajik literature” (or, for that matter, “North Indian literature”).8
In this sense, detaching Persian from a specific national imaginary allows for its transre-
gional performance and function to be critically examined, even in the era of intersecting
nationalisms. Indeed, many states and nations (and nation-states) can claim and contest a
common literary and cultural heritage rooted in Persian. By then considering the diverse
linguistic usages of Persian— in this case, through mass media in Afghanistan—what
comes to the surface is the language’s variegated socio-historical reception and the complex-
ity and intimacy of Persian literary and cultural dynamics from within and without.
Towards this end, to distill how mass media technologies allowed for expressions of social
and cultural resistance through Persianate literary cultural production, I begin with a brief
discussion of regional connections that showcase the longue durée history that precedes and
informs these twentieth-century sonic collaborations. If literary radio programs and music
from Afghanistan resonated with diverse communities spanning the Middle East, Central
and South Asia, it is precisely due to centuries of vernacular cultural practices that entwined
millions of inhabitants across regions.9 Poetry, performance, song, and sonic collaborations
recall and rewrite more than a thousand years of textual history, and even more years of
cultural memory. Against this backdrop, I then provide the historical journey of
Afghanistan’s modern political formations through sound—in other words, through the
aural landscape that imparted meaning on Afghan identities. Attuned to sound, content,
5
For a more detailed analysis of the politics of language making in twentieth-century Afghanistan, see Ahmadi,
Modern Persian Literature in Afghanistan; and “Article 3” in Constitution of Afghanistan 1964.
6
Ahmadi, Modern Persian Literature in Afghanistan, 2.
7
For a collection of critical scholarship on language and literature in modern Afghanistan and its transnational
connections, see the co-edited volume, Green and Arbabzadah, Afghanistan in Ink.
8
Ahmadi, “Exclusionary Poetics,” 408.
9
For a discussion of the history of music in Afghanistan that considers transregional influence, see Baily, “Music
and the State”; Sakata, Afghanistan Encounters; and Slobin, Music in the Culture of Northern Afghanistan.
700 Mejgan Massoumi
and context, this article is a starting point for further reconstructions of Afghan history and
its enduring importance as a central producer of Persianate culture.
Persianate Poetic Soundscapes

Thinking about poetic soundscapes in twentieth-century Afghanistan requires a historical
understanding of Persian as a shared language that linked diverse peoples across regions
and polities. Recently, historians of the Persianate world have examined conceptions of
place and movement through languages, literature, customs, and cultural imaginations.
These formations spanned a broad geography and existed outside the anachronistic shadow
of nationalism.10 Up through the early nineteenth century, Persian was the language of power
and knowledge across the Middle East, Central and South Asia. As the lingua franca of litera-
ture, poetry, storytelling, and spirituality, Persian encompassed multiplicity, relationality, and
similitude.11 As Kevin Schwartz writes, “Turks, Arabs, Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, Persians, and
many others used the language with little thought that doing so would define them in strict
ethnic or territorial terms.”12 Proximities and similarities constituted a framework that dis-
tinguished people while simultaneously accommodating plurality.
This growth in vernacular culture was not limited to a written tradition. It combined oral-
ity, practice, and daily rituals where various strands of spiritual knowledge were found in
new forms, including songs. From the seminal masnawī (rhymed couplets) of Mawlānā
Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Balkhī (d. 1273) to the poetry of the scholar-singer Amīr Khusraw
(d. 1325) and the ghazals (lyric poems) of ʿAbd al-Qādir Bīdil (d. 1720), a diverse literary cul-
ture translated sacral and mystical sentiments into music that was shared among communi-
ties across space and time.13 These songs and texts served as the soundtrack of everyday life
across the vast plains of the Persian-speaking world. Melodies, lyrics, and rhythms were pre-
served and disseminated through generations via oral traditions. The bā-sawād (literate)
read, translated, and transported poetry to the bī-sawād (illiterate) of their communities.
Songs preserved poems and people. Embedded in music are idioms, imagery, metaphors,
and stories that recall a deeper past and have been reinterpreted by different cultures
over time. Even in the prevalent tradition of tadhkira writing (biographical anthology), it
was often hearing poetry in tea/coffee houses or recitation circles that allowed for its
recording and preservation.14 Reading against this long history compels us to recognize
the everyday soundscapes of the diverse societies and peoples of the Persianate world as
a reflection of centuries of transregional coexistence and cultural memory.
In the 1960s and 1970s, we hear the reverberations of these transcultural connections
through sonic collaborations broadcast on the radio. A lesser known, yet prevalent example
comes from the duet sung in 1965 between renowned Afghan female singer Khānum Zhīlā
(1943–2009) and Muḥammad Rafīʿ (1924–1980), the famous Indian playback singer of
Bollywood films. Together, they sang in Persian. Using the poetry of Bāriq Shafīʿī, an
Afghan contemporary, sacral and mystical imagery conveyed the theme of love.15 Khānum
Zhīlā and Muḥammad Rafīʿ took turns singing each line of the chorus:
10
Persianate refers to the social and cultural formations associated with the Persian language and to forms of
expression and practice inspired and generated through contact and engagement with Persian across the
Islamicate world. The term was first coined by Marshall Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, Vol. 2, 293–294. For more
recent studies, see Ahmed, The Loss of Hindustan; Green, The Persianate World; and Kia, Persianate Selves.
11
Kia, Persianate Selves.
12
Schwartz, Remapping Persian Literary History.
13
Mawlānā is traditionally associated with Balkh, and given the nisba Balkhī, a name that holds particular pride
for Afghans (in contrast to the Turks, who emphasize the “Rumi” part of his name).
14
For more on the production, circulation, and citation networks of tadhkiras of Persian poets in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, see Schwartz, “A Transregional Persianate Library.”
15
A brief discussion of Bāriq Shafīʿī’s works and his later involvement in the leftist party of Afghanistan can be
found in Ahmadi, Modern Persian Literature in Afghanistan, 99.
Iranian Studies 701
Rafīʿ:
Ay tāza gul tū zīnat-i gulzār-i kīstī?
Oh, fresh rose, whose garden did you come from?
Zhīlā:
Ay murgh-i bāgh-i dil tū giriftār-i kīstī?
Oh, the songbird of the garden’s heart, who has captured you?
Rafīʿ:
Giriftār-i tūstam
I am captured by you
Zhīlā:
Zi gulzār-i tūstam
I reside in your garden
Zhīlā and Rafīʿ:
Māīm hardū zīb-i gulistān-i zindagī
We are both the beauty of the garden of life.16
For Afghans, Indians, Iranians, and many others with shared Persianate culture and tradi-
tion, the imagery of the beloved, the songbird, and the garden are as familiar as the instru-
mental sounds of the tabla (drum) and accompanying harmonium. Part of this is due to the
fact that Persian, particularly its literary form, has remained relatively accessible to a con-
temporary speaker of the language. As Dick Davis notes, a modern Persian speaker can read
the works of a tenth-century poet with relative ease due to the continuity of poetic rhetoric
from the earliest poems to the mid-nineteenth century and beyond.17 Moreover, Afghan
classical music as a sub-branch of North Indian classical music shares instruments, ragas (melo-
dies), and rhythms that resonate across borders and, like poetry, have a deep, connected history.18
Song in the realm of Bollywood films combines various genres and linguistic registers, yet speaks
in a cultural vernacular that continues to hold valence across South and Central Asia and the
Middle East.19 Along these lines, to imagine a community of listeners across a diverse ethnolin-
guistic terrain responding to the Zhīlā-Rafīʿ duet is to recognize a pre-existing cultural space
where textual, oral, and aural translation flowed across and between diverse communities. To sit-
uate how these cultural connections persisted well into the twentieth century, the remainder of
this article turns to three sonic vignettes—radio, performance, and cassettes—that explore the
historical and affective ramifications of Persian poetry in Afghanistan.
Radio
As communication technologies like the radio became a staple of twentieth-century com-
merce and industrialization, the Afghan state’s ability to operate the technology became
critical to managing the nation and demonstrating its fitness as a modern state. To this
end, the state began purchasing radio technology almost immediately after its global com-
modification in the 1920s. After winning diplomatic independence from Britain in the vic-
tory of the Third Anglo-Afghan War of 1919, Afghan officials were deeply invested in
proving they were worthy of sitting at the international policy table. Incorporating the latest
16
I thank Ahmad Rashid Salim for his assistance in translating these lyrics. For a sound recording of Khānūm
Zhīlā and Muḥammad Rafīʿ singing Ay tāza gul tū zīnat-i gūlzār-i kīst- ī?, see the YouTube video provided by
Afghan Music HD, “Mermon Zhila & Mohammad Rafi.” This song was originally performed as a duet between
Khānum Zhīlā and Ustād Khīyāl, her mentor and a notable singer, songwriter, and composer of Afghan music.
17
Davis, “A Brief History of Metaphor in Persian Poetry,” 15–16.
18
For detailed studies on the classification of Afghan classical music as a sub-branch of North Indian classical
music, see Slobin, Music in the Culture of Northern Afghanistan; and Sakata, Music in the Mind.
19
Ahmed, “Future’s Past,” 52.
702 Mejgan Massoumi
global communication technology would bolster Afghan desires to appear competitive on an

international scale alongside other nation-states emerging out of decolonization.
From the time the radio transmitter was first introduced, the state relied on international
support to build its broadcasting infrastructure. This began with sending Afghans abroad to
gain the technical knowledge required to operate radio. In 1926, King Amān Allāh Khān
(r. 1919–1929), the royal architect of Afghan modernism, sent engineer ʿAtāʾAllāh to
Germany for the training necessary to establishing and installing radio in Afghanistan.20
After a year of dedicated learning, he returned to Kabul with German technicians and two
radio transmitters. In 1927, for the first time, radio was broadcast from Afghanistan. The offi-
cial radio station—Rādīyū Kābul—was housed in a small room of the Kūtī Landanī building
near Artal Bridge in Kabul.21 Literally meaning “London Box,” the building’s name was
inspired by its British colonial architecture. Some accounts indicate that Kūtī Landanī was
originally a café that was later appropriated for the radio station.22 However, transmissions
were limited to only a few people in Kabul who could afford the broadcasting set.
By the 1960s, radio broadcasting in Afghanistan had expanded to the entire country.23
Once again, German technicians helped the Afghans acquire advanced Siemens transmitters
that allowed radio waves to reach longer distances. King Ẓāhir Shāh (1933–1973) and Prime
Minister
Muḥammad Dāʾūd Khān (1953–1963) revived Amān Allāh’s vision for modernization, plac-
ing a premium on radio as the prime instrument to educate the population, create a unified
nation, and propel it into the future. In 1964, with the construction of seven recording stu-
dios, two concert studios, and a large auditorium, the Ministry of Information and Culture
changed the station’s name from Rādīyū Kābul to Rādīyū Afghānistān.24 It also became the cen-
ter for the patronage and promotion of new popular music suitable for radio broadcasting. In
addition to Persian and Pashto, daily radio programs of one hour to an hour-and-a-half were
available in English, German, Russian, and Urdu.25 The state’s support for these languages
reflected Afghanistan’s bilateral relationships in the Cold War era, during which it remained
non-aligned.26 Moreover, the state invested in casting bilingualism as a vital survival skill in
a twentieth-century world defined by international trade and business.
In 1964, like national broadcasting, the Afghan constitutional monarchy was new. King
Ẓāhir Shāh’s (r. 1933–1973) experiments with democratic values coincided with his modern-
izing agenda for Afghanistan, as he sought to integrate the population outside Kabul into the
national communication system through the creation of the Mūdīrīyat-i kunfirāns-hā
(Department of Conferences) in 1964. This bureaucratic arm of the state was responsible
for organizing meetings at provincial centers and in villages with the objective of increasing
the level of information circulating among local populations. These efforts were part of the
plan to integrate Afghanistan into the international information system and showcase a
“progressive” nation where the press reflected differences of opinion.27 By the mid-1970s,
the plan had worked. Afghanistan had 70 different dailies, weeklies, trade publications, tab-
loids, and 16 daily newspapers. Many of these publications were anti-establishment
20
For more on the scientific and technical knowledge exchange between Afghans and Germans, see Wardaki,
“Rediscovering Afghan Fine Arts.”
21
Ghīyasī, “Nīm-qarn Irtibāt wa Paywand az Tārīkh Sadā”; Shākir, “Az Āghāz Tāh Imrūz”; and Ḥusaynzāda, “Az
Rādīyū Kābul tā Rādīyū Afghānistān.”
22
Ḥusaynzāda, “Az Rādīyū Kābul tā Rādīyū Afghānistān.”
23
Anon, Afghanistan, Ancient Land with Modern Ways.
24
Malyar, Tārīkh-i Rādīyū-i Afghānistān, 2.
25
Upon surveying Pashtūn Zhagh, a state-sponsored periodical produced by the Ministry of Information and
Culture and Radio Afghanistan, these foreign languages were featured in nearly every printed radio schedule
throughout the 1960s and 1970s. See also, Republic of Afghanistan Annual 1977, 268–70.
26
For a historical discussion of Afghanistan’s entanglements during the Cold War, see Crews, Afghan Modern;
Nunan, Humanitarian Invasion; and Westad, The Global Cold War.
27
Rawan, “Modern Mass Media and Traditional Communication in Afghanistan,” 159.
Iranian Studies 703
periodicals produced mainly by leftist intellectuals, some of which were later banned,
including Kumak, Parcham, Khalq, Waḥdat, Mardum, Payām-i Wijdān, and Afghān Millat, among
others.28
Broadcasting followed the subversive tide of print media. Although the government was
keen to use radio technology as a propaganda machine to keep the public informed of its
programs, edicts, and policies, the radio’s social side effects were sometimes unpredictable
and unintended. Programs that began as poetry readings and folktale recitations turned into
platforms for conversations around issues of language, nationalism, and identity.29 At the
forefront of these programs were Afghan women. They served as the producers, creative
directors, and announcers whose voices were broadcast on the airwaves. Farīda ʿUsmān
Anwarī is one such example. As an intellectual, she used her voice as an art form to celebrate
and popularize the poetry of the Persianate world’s most enduring poets, most notably of
Mawlānā. As a celebrated journalist, announcer, and reciter of poetry, Anwarī’s aural and lit-
erary imprint suggests new ways to think about sound and mass media during this period.
Anwarī began her broadcasting career in 1966 while still studying as an undergraduate in
journalism at Kabul University. Radio administrators—including her professor, Ḥusayn Rīyāżī,
who oversaw the radio’s Prugrām-i maʿārif (the Education Program), and Karīm Ruhīnā, the
General Manager of Radio Programs—recognized her talent for public speaking and recruited
her to work for the station.30 Inspired by the examples of the earlier generation of trail-
blazing women and radio announcers—including Laṭīfa Kabīr Sirāj, Shafīqa Ḥabībī, Shukrīya
Raʿd, Nafīsa ʿAbbāsī, Fahīma Amīn, and Nūrjān Farhānī—Anwarī took the job, with her first
assignment being to manage Prugrām-i maʿārif. Soon thereafter, she produced other popular
radio programs, including Az har chaman samanī (Flowers from Every Garden), Surūd-i hastī
(The Song of Being), Tarāzū-yi ṭilāʿī (Golden Scales), Naqd-i adabī (Literary Criticism), and
Bāz-shināsī-yi khabragān-i hunar va adab (Getting Reacquainted with Experts of Arts and
Literature). She co-hosted one of her most popular radio programs, Zamzama-ʾhā-yi
shabhangām (Nocturnal Whispers), with noted Afghan writer and novelist Akram ʿUsmān.
Farīda Anwarī’s broadcasting career coincided with the fluid and experimental moment of
radio’s transition from a local station to a national one. This presented Anwarī with the
space to test the boundaries of radio speech and create new spaces for women’s voices on
the airwaves. Following the adoption of the 1964 Constitution, state-led modernization pro-
grams encouraged more women to join the workforce. As in other countries in Asia, Africa,
the Middle East, and Latin America, there was also an attempt, if modest, to eliminate gender
inequality through state action.31
In 1975, during a week-long seminar on the life and work of Mawlānā, Radio Afghanistan
featured songs, music, and poetry recitations in his honor.32 Anwarī’s recitation of
Mawlānā’s poems became so widely popular that events honoring the poet’s life and work
became a regular part Radio Afghanistan’s programming. Not only did these programs
have the positive effect of raising awareness and literary appreciation among both the intel-
ligentsia and general public with access to radio, but they also exemplified the ways in which
28
Āhang and Siddiq, Dā Afghānistān Matbū’āt- Yewā Katana, 41. Quoted in Rawan, “Modern Mass Media and
Traditional Communication in Afghanistan.” Faridullah Bezhan also discusses the emergence of independent news-
papers in the post-1964 period that served as one of the driving forces in the political and cultural dynamics of the
time. See Behzan, “Artist of Wonderland.” The Hoover Institution Library & Archives at Stanford University holds an
inventory of Afghan partisan serials.
29
Az har chaman samanī, Surūd-i hastī and Tarāzū-yi ṭilāʿī were among the radio programs that featured poetry,
literary critiques, and commentary on contemporary music, politics, and culture. For a short biography of the
Afghan women who worked in radio, television, cinema and theater, see Daro, Awāzi Mandagār-i Zanān.
30
Radio Āzādī, “Ba Bahāna-yi Shaṣt-u Panjumīn Bahār-i Ṣadā-yī Hamīsha Sabz-i Farīda Anwarī.”
31
Al-Ali, Women’s Movements in the Middle East; Russell, “Women’s Mobilization in Latin America”; and Armstrong,
“Before Bandung.”
32
Republic of Afghanistan Annual 1975, 292; “Seminar on Life, Works of Maulana Balkhi Opens,” The Kabul Times,
October 2, 1974.
704 Mejgan Massoumi
Afghans were using global technology and refashioning it to reflect local image-making prac-
tices. Indeed, the strategic use of global radio technology affected the programming the pro-
ducers created and, ultimately, their relationship to their listening communities.
Poetry has played a lasting and important role in the Persian language’s expression of
social critique and political discontent. In her discussion of evolving forms of poetic protests
in Persian, Nahid Siamdoust describes how some classical poets of the Persian canon openly
criticized their social and political milieus.33 Siamdoust contends that, in the Iranian context,
it was not until the creation of the popular Gulhā radio programs in the 1950s that classical
Persian poetry and music was disseminated via broadcasting technology to a wider public.34
Similarly, in the 1940s, radio in Afghanistan helped reintroduce and circulate classical
Persian poetry and music to an Afghan audience, particularly through the introduction of
the Kabuli ghazal, a song form that uses Persian texts from a variety of sources. In musical
terms, the Kabuli ghazal style is related to ghazal singing in India and Pakistan, but the set-
ting of the texts to music is distinctly Afghan, with interpolated couplets sung in free
rhythm, fast instrumental sections, and dramatic rhythmic cadences.35
By the 1960s, Anwarī’s literary radio programs were reaching a broad audience and gain-
ing in popularity due to her ability to embody poetic forms that were simultaneously both
old and new—old in their lyrics, new in their performance. As I explain below, while Anwarī’s
programs did not formally serve as a channel for political opposition, as their content was
artistic rather than political, the choice of declamation based on the texts of classical
Persianate poets allowed her to offer subversive political commentary while retaining an
air of deniability.36 This careful, albeit deliberate, meditation of dissent followed the changing
pulse of all major political, social, and cultural developments of the period. While political
magazines used novel tools like the publication of cartoons and caricatures—largely absent
from print media in Afghanistan before 1964—to express political criticism, in the space of
the mass media recording industry, Anwarī’s use of Persian poetry took full advantage of
the social and political context; she was able to employ this medium to voice dissent without
censorship.37 The new era ushered in by the 1964 Constitution needed new media, and poetry
provided an ideal means for new ideas and new ways of engagement.38 In addition, being the
producer of her own show allowed Anwarī to control its content and strategy.
Anwarī deployed selected texts from the repertoire of classical Persian poets to suit her
audience’s situations and reflect their moods. Specifically, while Afghanistan’s political exper-
iments continued throughout the 1960s and 1970s—a constitutional monarchy in 1964, a
republic in 1973, and a leftist government in 1978—the Sufi poetry of the classical period
helped Anwarī frame the challenges of everyday life. Marī Wāḥīdī (b.1950), Anwarī’s contem-
porary and a teacher of Dari in the 1970s, recalls her illiterate mother being moved to tears
while listening to recitations of the opening lines of Mawlānā’s masnawī:
Bishnaw az nay chun shikāyat mīkunad

Now listen to this reed flute’s deep lament
Az judāʾī-hā ḥikāyat mīkunad
As it tells the tale of separation39
33
Siamdoust, Soundtrack of the Revolution, 50.
34
Siamdoust, Soundtrack of the Revolution, 50, 58.
35
Baily, War, Exile and the Music of Afghanistan, 24–25.
36
Nahid Siamdoust makes a similar conjecture in the case of Mohammad Reza Shahjarian’s effect while singing
his most famous ballad Bird of Dawn, which is based on a Persian poem that became a song of protest. See Soundtrack
of the Revolution, 37–38, 63–85.
37
Bezhan, “Artist of Wonderland,” 634–635.
38
Bezhan, “Artist of Wonderland,” 636.
39
I thank Ahmad Rashid Salim for his insights into the variable ways this poem has been translated.
Iranian Studies 705
At a very young age, Wāḥidī’s mother, Bībī Lāl, had to leave her home in Badakhshan, a
northern province of Afghanistan, to join her husband’s family in Kabul. Mawlānā’s verses
provided comfort in a world that had separated her from her family. Bībī Lāl imagined
these verses were written precisely for her. “Mīguft, īn az man hast” (this is mine), Bībī
Lāl would say.40 Here, metaphor enables multiple layers of meaning, especially around the
crucial theme of love and separation, particularly from the beloved. As Breyley contends,
in the works of classical Persian poets, the beloved may represent many ideas, including
romantic partners, a spiritual companion, the divine, or “an ideal such as justice or
freedom.”41
Anwarī, as the performer, was guided by Mawlānā’s words and works to create new mean-
ings and relevance for a contemporary audience by playing with the multiple layers of
meaning and allegorical references expected by readers and listeners of Persian poetry.42
Bībī Lāl’s reception of Mawlānā’s poetry illustrates how the timeless quality of verse
could be interpreted by a listener in twentieth-century Afghanistan; in this case, the sepa-
ration from one’s family home demanded by societal gender norms. Moreover, one did not
need to know how to read in order to understand the sorrows of Mawlānā’s reed. Before lit-
eracy became widespread, the performance of poetic texts was central to cultural and social
life. That these recitations occurred over the radio and reached thousands of listeners not
only allowed for its dissemination, but also its multivarious interpretations. Melodic recita-
tion and music were the primary means of transmitting poetry across social classes, includ-
ing to people without access to books or other inscribed art, making it a major medium for
all types of listeners to find relevance and meaning for their everyday lives. Poetry here
stands for both composition and affect. In Afghan culture, there is a profound connection
between poetry and experience, to the extent that many Afghans, like Bībī Lāl, consider
poetry to define the essence of their identity.43 Centuries of rich poetic tradition in
Persian became an axis through which a national discourse was articulated and resonated
with personal experiences.
Anwarī’s recitation over the airwaves represented an alternate space wherein a commu-
nity of listeners interested in intonations of Persian poetry and the possibility for diverse
usage in the context of daily life existed. When Anwarī recited Mawlānā’s poems, fused in
her voice were not only a thousand years of a poetic tradition, but also the long arc of a
modern political struggle for freedom and identity. Anwarī’s attraction to and performance
of the rich tradition of classical Persian poetry circulated as currency in the symbolic market
of the Afghan search for a contemporary identity, whether in the case of Bībī Lāl and her
attachments to notions of a home or in the case of a broad Afghan audience struggling to
express its self-conception as a community while grappling with the contradictions inherent
in it.
Anwarī capitalized on a shared language and literary heritage to create a forum for dia-
logue about life, spirituality, belonging, unbelonging, and love. If the state was invested in
creating a national culture based on the work of these poets, that goal was inconsequential
to the larger work of Anwarī’s recitations: giving people comfort in the face of political and
social turmoil. Drawing on the canon of classical Persian poets afforded Anwari protection
from an increasingly authoritative state in the 1970s and, despite its restrictions, allowed
her to embody indigenous literary traditions that carried and fueled shared sentiments
and the variegated experiences of her Afghan audience. For centuries, palaces, teahouses,
and private courtyards served as venues for the dissemination of poetry in the Persianate
world.44 By the 1960s, radio was serving as one such venue for taking pleasure in the sounds
40
Marī Wāhīdī (Afghan school teacher in the 1970s) in discussion with the author, January 28, 2019.
41
Breyley, “The Language of Love,” 160.
42
43
Baily, The Spiritual Music of Ustad Amir Mohammad; and Sakata, Music in the Mind.
44
706 Mejgan Massoumi
and semantics of classical Persian poetry and music, while continuing to entertain and
inspire.
Alongside the important role broadcast radio played in connecting classical Persian
poetry to the experiences of daily life, popular music aired on the radio contributed to
the era’s growing sense of dissent. As seen further below, it was once again a Persian literary
heritage that amplified this “revolution in sound.” Perhaps no other musician from the
1960s and 1970s is better remembered for his imprint on pop music than Aḥmad Ẓāhir.
Born on June 14, 1946 in Kabul, Aḥmad Ẓāhir established himself as a singer in the 1960s.
His popularity swelled over this decade and the next as he took advantage of the burgeoning
radio and recording industries and developed a broad repertoire of romantic, self-reflective,
and politically charged songs. As the son of a court doctor, minister of health, and influential
politician, valuable social connections enhanced Ẓāhir’s artistic success. He forged long-
lasting relationships with cultural leaders, including musicians, composers, and poets across
the region and world. He socialized among a diverse spectrum of people, from elites to
everyday Afghans, and was extremely charitable to the poor. Distinguished musically by
his vocal stamina and new compositions, he sustained his career by producing an immense
corpus of songs totaling over 20 albums, surpassing what many singers produce in a
lifetime.45
Like Anwarī, Aḥmad Ẓāhir’s rise to stardom corresponded with the political transforma-
tions of the 1960s and 1970s. When, while still in high school, he began his musical career,
the constitutional monarchy formed under King Ẓāhir Shāh in 1964 provided some civil lib-
erties, including freedom of speech. This provision impacted musicians, specifically, by pro-
tecting recording artists like Ẓāhir from censorship. With President Dāʾūd Khān’s coup in
1973, Aḥmad Ẓāhir recorded songs that celebrated the change in guard and establishment
of the Afghan republic.46 However, as the political climate between 1973 and 1978 became
increasingly autocratic, Aḥmad Ẓāhir once again took to the airwaves to sing of society’s
social ills, including the famine of 1977 and the general poverty of the nation.47 When
Dāʾūd Khān and his family were brutally murdered inside the Presidential Palace and
another regime change inaugurated the arrival of communism in Afghanistan in 1978,
Aḥmad Ẓāhir again took to music to record songs of liberation and critique hegemonic
power. The increasingly political tone of his songs now received pushback from state cen-
sors, who did not allow their broadcast on radio. However, these songs were circulated
through cassettes and underground channels across Afghanistan and the broader region.
In 1979, Aḥmad Ẓāhir died in what is officially reported as a car accident, although his
father—a doctor—confirmed a bullet was shot in the back of his head.48 His funeral was tele-
vised and drew thousands of Afghans, who followed his hearse through the streets of Kabul.
Radio in the 1960s and 1970s in Afghanistan, whether broadcasting the poetry of Mawlānā
or the songs of Ẓāhir, provided a medium for political expression and social commentary
that often outweighed verbal communication and behavior. While poetry and song can be
analyzed for the weight of their content, their significance also lies in their reception as
45
Nūrmal, Aḥmad Ẓāhir; Razzāq, Aḥmad Ẓāhir Chigūna Tirūr Shud?; and Madadī, “Taḥāwul-i Mūsiqī-yi Afghānistān
Dar Qarn-i Akhīr.”
46
The song, Mubārak, Jumhūrī-yi Mā Mubārak (Congratulations to Our Republic) was performed by Aḥmad Ẓāhir
and recorded at the studios of Radio Afghanistan on the inauguration of Dāʾūd Khān’s presidency in 1973. See,
Nūrmal, Aḥmad Ẓāhir, 87–88.
47
The song, ʿAjab Ṣabrī Khudā Dārad (Astonishing is God’s Patience) was recorded on the Ariana Music label; the
lyrics capture the sentiment of disparity amid social impoverishment. The song was censored in 1977 for containing
lyrics that equated God to man. Shams al-Dīn Shāhābī (producer and owner of Ariana Music studio) in discussion
with the author, June 22, 2018. For the full lyrics of ʿAjab Ṣabrī Khudā Dārad, see Nūrmal, Aḥmad Ẓāhir, 175–176.
48
In an interview, Aḥmad Ẓāhir’s sister, Zāhira Ẓāhir, describes how her father and other family who saw the
corpse confirmed a bullet was shot to the back of his head. See, Nawabi, “Interview with Zahira Zahir.” For various
theories surrounding Aḥmad Ẓāhir’s death, which has not been the subject of any government investigation to date,
see Razzāq, Aḥmad Ẓāhir Chigūna Tirūr Shud?
Iranian Studies 707
political acts. Indeed, the reception of radio extends well beyond the technology’s determin-
ing function to address transformations that occur in listener perceptions of the sounds
broadcast, altering the soundscape.49 Figures like Anwarī and Ẓāhir captured the sentiments
of their milieus not just through their subversive critiques of society, but also through lit-
erature that allowed some to imagine an alternate present and future. These figures also
illustrate how producers and musicians in Afghanistan shaped national broadcasting culture
as much as geopolitics did throughout the 1960s and 1970s. As material and sonic limits were
imposed on radio by successive Afghan regimes, the state did not anticipate how radio’s pro-
ducers and musicians would circumvent censors and use the technology to sound dissent.
Performance
While radio as a site of state control is important to understanding the state’s performativity
of its professed values, principles, and aesthetic and acoustic expressions (in short, its
identity), it is also pertinent to locate the artists’ position within this spectrum.
“Performativity,” as Nahid Siamdoust argued in the context of Iran, “relies on citationality,
referencing fragments of traditions, cultures, discourses, and communal memories.”50
Similarly, in Afghanistan, to the extent that Afghans validated the state’s existence and
authority through the expression of their discontent, they also resisted it through artistic
mediums, including the performing arts. To perform alternative subjectivities, Afghan artists
like Anwarī and Ẓāhir drew on various traditions and repertoires of contention. In doing so,
they challenged ideas surrounding issues of gender, freedom, religion, and politics. Anwarī
and Ẓāhir’s examples of literary and aural performativity allowed for diverse interpretations
of the past and engagement in a national discourse about the future. In other words, their
poetic and musical performances were simultaneous expressions of identity and political or
social dissent.
While Anwarī was not a self-proclaimed feminist, her on-air personality certainly rubbed
against traditional gender norms that relegated women to the private sphere and did not
value the amplification of female voices on the radio. In her poetry recitations, she relayed
strong emotions, changed the pitch of her voice to cater to the tone of the poem she was
reciting, and used her voice to connect with her listeners. She was a self-identified artist,
and she imagined her audience to understand this, declaring in a 1973 interview:
[S]omeone who can recite a poem and attract listeners is a true artist, in the way that an
actor in theater can capture the attention of the audience. The declamation of poetry is,
for this reason, close to the performance of theater and drama artists.51
Anwarī’s talent—as a gripping orator capable of drawing in her audience—transformed radio

in Afghanistan into a medium of (re)introducing and performing classical Persianate litera-
ture for the nation. By combining poetry with music and declamation, she not only encour-
aged contemplation of the poetry itself, but also extended and amplified localized traditions
of performance and artistic expression. In this sense, her programs helped solidify her rep-
utation as a purveyor of Afghanistan’s linguistic and literary cultural heritage. At a time
when various global musical and poetic influences infiltrated Afghanistan, figures like
Anwarī helped deploy the popularity of Afghan arts and local cultural practices that cele-
brated the rich cultural tradition of reciting and reflecting on classical poetry. For
Afghans, the arts embodied a unique form of cultural expression and possible space for
autonomy, especially as the state attempted to enforce its legitimacy through ideological
and disciplinary apparatuses that included mass media. Reproducing the legitimacy of the
49
For more on soundscapes, see, for instance, Schafer, The Soundscape; and Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape.
50
Siamdoust, Soundtrack of the Revolution, 10–11.
51
“Wa Ḥālā Farīda Anwarī Sukhan Mīgūyad,” 22.
708 Mejgan Massoumi
Afghan state, particularly in the 1970s, was often enacted performatively through discourse
and practice, as evidenced by the political speeches, new forms of governance (including
constitutions), edicts, and proclamations following the coups of 1973 and 1978. Citizens
embodied and replicated these signifiers of state legitimacy through their choice of clothing,
recitation of national anthems, and participation in national events and rituals. Nonetheless,
while many accepted the state’s attempts to infringe on its citizens’ daily lives and activities,
others resisted through subversive acts. Here, poetry and music afforded a great sense of
freedom and often functioned as means of offering discreet dissent and social criticism.
In the case of Aḥmad Ẓāhir, his public performances and concerts allowed for a communal
sharing of critical views not available elsewhere, particularly for what they allowed in terms
of the spontaneity of live action. The concert space enabled the deliberate coming together
of strangers who engaged with each other through certain texts via songs and became
involved in a conscious act of intentionality, awareness, and an interest in imagining the
ways in which the world could be. Inherent in this process was the unconscious human
impulse to build the world from social conditioning, scientific rationality, artistic traditions,
and the individual struggle for survival.52 Gatherings around music were also important
because they were based on local and long-standing engagements with the embodied
sense of sound, rooted in poetry as the master sonic form. Both the concert atmosphere
and poetry and song as artforms and image-making practices allowed the space of public
performance to turn into a national conversation outside official parameters.
In May 1978 in Kabul, only weeks after a coup brought a Soviet-aligned government to
power in Afghanistan, Aḥmad Ẓāhir performed a concert in one of the city’s main movie the-
aters, Dā mīrmanu tulāna. At the time, Ẓāhir’s relations with the new government were
increasingly hostile, mainly due to years of tension and his refusal to publicly support
Afghan leftist parties. As they began to take on political undertones, his songs were increas-
ingly censored on Radio Afghanistan. He had already been the victim of a Soviet smear cam-
paign that accused him of murdering his second wife, Khālida.53 This confluence of events
inspired a marked shift in Aḥmad Ẓāhir’s lyrical focus. He became even more political
and partisan in his song choices and more provocative in his live performances. A concert
attendee, Malālī Mūsī Niẓām, recalls, “As hundreds of spectators watched, the singer with
the golden voice and unique humble disposition came out onto the stage alone and took
the microphone to his hand and his eternal, magical voice resonated through the entire
hall, singing”54:
Zindagī ākhir sar āyad, bandagī dar kār nīst

Life will eventually end, there is no use for submission.
bandagī gar sharṭ bāshad, zindagī dar kār nīst
If submission is mandatory, there is no life.
bā ḥaqārat gar bibārad bar sarat bārān-i durr,
If pearl raindrops were to come down on you in humiliation
āsmān rā gū: biraw, bārandagī dar kār nīst
Go and tell the heavens: go, there is no use for such downpour
gar fishār-i dushmanān ābat kunad, miskīn mashaw,
52
Nelson Goodman analyzes the philosophical value of symbols and their use in artistic practices (including per-
formance), among other human activities. He offers a compelling argument for how humanity needs art, as much as
science, to understand human existence. See Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking.
53
Aḥmad Ẓāhir was allegedly forced to marry Khālida, the daughter of Saʿīd Dāʾūd Tarūn, an Afghan leftist and
the Chief of Police under President Nūr Muḥmmad Tarakī (1978–79). In 1978 Aḥmad Ẓāhir was imprisoned on sus-
picion of murdering Khālida, but was later found not guilty. See Nūrmal, Aḥmad Ẓāhir, 1–22. Ustād Armān, a noted
Afghan musician and vocalist, recalls visiting Aḥmad Ẓāhir in prison and his contempt for those suggesting he had
murdered a woman. See Yousofi, “Studio 19 – Haroon Yousofi with Ustad Arman,” 19:24–20:38.
54
Niẓām, “Zindagī Ākhir Sar Āyad.”
Iranian Studies 709
If the pressure from the enemies deluges you, do not despair

mard bāsh, ay khasta-dil, sharmandagī dar kār nīst
remain a man/firm, oh you tired soul, there is no shame.
zindagī āzādī-yi insān-u istiqlāl-i ūst
Life is a human being’s freedom and independence
bahr-i āzādī jadal kun, bandagī dar kār nīst
Fight for freedom, for submission is not an option.55
The lyrics of Zindagī ākhir sar āyad (Life will eventually end) belong to renowned Iranian poet
Abū al-Qāsim Lāhūtī (1887–1957), who spent much of his life in exile in the Tajik Soviet
Socialist Republic.56 Originally written in 1930, the chain of transmission by which
Lāhūtī’s ghazal passed through West and Central Asia is a testament to the enduring rele-
vance of the work. Samuel Hodgkin notes that Zindagī ākhir sar āyad was formally published
as a song in 1942, which coincided with World War II and thus permitted Soviet publishers
and critics to read it as a rejection of fascism. As Soviet cultural influence accelerated in
Afghanistan over the course of the 1970s, Lāhūtī’s works were sold in Kabul bookstores
and recited over the airwaves on Persian-language Radio Moscow. Given the spread and cir-
culation of his poetry, it is no coincidence that Ẓāhir was singing Lāhūtī’s love ghazals over
the airwaves and in his concerts well before the Soviet invasion. It is when Ẓāhir’s songs took
on an increasingly political tone in the final years of his life that he drew from Lāhūtī’s more
revolutionary verses, such as Zindagī ākhir sar āyad.57 The groundedness and musicality of
Lāhūtī’s poem, its depiction of oppression and freedom, and, most crucially, its avoidance
of historical or geographic specificity all contributed to its successful circulation and adap-
tation to a variety of contexts, including Ẓāhir’s popular song.
At a time when a strict code of conduct emanated from the established Afghan political
authority, the lyrics and feelings associated with this song, and Aḥmad Ẓāhir’s performance
of it, allowed for political and cultural dissent through music. Using the poetry of a leftist
sympathizer (and poet laureate) enabled Aḥmad Ẓāhir to initially pass through the radio
censors. Indeed, it was through the usage of the state’s official register (i.e., radio) that
the creation of an alternative space was born, where dissent became possible in a discreet
yet clever way. In his performance of this song, Aḥmad Ẓāhir succeeded further by travers-
ing the space between what James C. Scott termed the “public transcript” (authorized by the
dominant power) and the “hidden transcript” (the critique of power spoken behind its back)
to create new meanings through an act of musical subversion and defiance.58 According to
Scott, the “public transcript” is used to invoke what is permitted by the state. The enforce-
ment of censorship, including on the radio, is one way the Afghan state exercised its official
authoritative culture and promotion of a “public transcript.” The disciplinary nature of this
act reinforced the state’s relationship to its subjects by intruding into a very personal sphere
via monitoring lyrics and sounds that evoked feelings and various emotions.
In the realm of cultural production and music, musicians like Aḥmad Ẓāhir had to submit
to official regulations to obtain clearance for lyrics and permits for performances. The lyrics
of Zindagī ākhir sar āyad, however, provided a pointed depiction of Afghanistan as captive to
an oppressive state. Ẓāhir’s performance of the song was intended to embody the people’s
sentiments and, in this way, helped promote the “hidden transcript,” or that which was
not officially approved. Ẓāhir used his medium—music—to widen the parameters of the
55
Song transcribed from another performance, Aḥmad Ẓāhir, 4th live (majlisī) album, track 10, with the addition
of the ghazal’s final lines, which Niẓām specifically recalls from the performance she witnessed.
56
Lāhūtī is the author of the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic’s anthem. See Hodgkin, “Lāhūtī: Persian Poetry in the
Making of the Literary International, 1906–1957.”
57
Hodgkin, “Lāhūtī: Persian Poetry in the Making of the Literary International, 1906–1957,” 363.
58
Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance as quoted in Siamdoust, Soundtrack of the Revolution,11.
710 Mejgan Massoumi
“public transcript” through this subtle, subversive act. Persian poetry transformed into pop-
ular song, and connecting concert attendees in collective performance, augmented the pos-
sibility of its circulation. Sung anthems encouraged simultaneous and collective vocal
articulation in ways that poetry alone typically did not. In doing so, music then had the
power to generate senses of alliance, cohesion, and solidarity.59 Music became the message
and medium for political action.
The 1978 concert attendee concludes her recollection with thoughts on the poem’s sig-
nificance. She imagined that Lāhūtī produced his ghazal “in loathing for the suffocation
and dependence that he too had experienced under similar conditions of Soviet occupation
and subjugation in a country like Afghanistan, in Tajikistan.”60 Whether or not Lāhūtī’s
intention was to be subversive in his prose is inconsequential. More importantly, the
poem’s ability to traverse space and time and attract collective experiences of oppression
gave new power to its declaration of defiance. The poem’s lives are a testament to the con-
tinued durability and portability of traditional Persianate poetry, which can be repurposed
for new occasions, new ideologies, and new revolutions.61 The concert attendee and Aḥmad
Ẓāhir’s shared reading of Lāhūtī’s poem indicates the poet’s literary relevance to the political
moment, when a despotic leftist government took shape in Afghanistan, and the power of
musical performance to connect like-minded citizens in opposition to the state.
As Farzaneh Hemmasi contends, song—particularly popular songs and political anthems—
augments the possibilities of poetry’s circulation and collective performance.62 The effect of
one of Aḥmad Ẓāhir’s politically and socially charged songs reveals how Persianate poetry
played a strong role in connecting a diverse community of listeners. As a celebrity-type fig-
ure who embodied “freedom of expression,” he broke through the constraints of the domi-
nant culture to experiment with new ways of being, using his voice and selected poetry as
his source of cultural resistance. For many, Aḥmad Ẓāhir’s lyrical voice, music, and perfor-
mances became a focal point for imagining an alternative world and longing for political and
social change. He attracted audiences that perceived him as a symbol of change and the
embodiment of their aspirations. In his quest to challenge the predominant social-political
order through song choice and lyrics, he represented the aspirations of those who wanted to
change the status quo, becoming an icon of dissent. But Ẓāhir’s deployment of Persian
poetry as an act of dissent was also one of cultural preservation: he relied on a body of lit-
erature familiar to the listener, one which could withstand the test of time. Recently, with
Afghanistan’s seizure by the Taliban in August 2021, Zindagī ākhir sar āyad served as a clarion
call, as people repeated Lāhūtī’s words: “Bahr-i āzādī jadal kun, bandagī dar kār nīst” (Fight for
freedom, for submission is not an option).
As the United States ended its twenty-year “War on Terror” in Afghanistan, paving the
way for the return of the Taliban, Afghans faced a confluence of multiple crises. Beyond
the Covid-19 pandemic, drought, and dire economy, they confronted a resurgent Taliban
movement that quickly mobilized to seize power. Many scrambled to leave the country, fear-
ful that living under despotic rule would destroy any aspirations for a better future. As
Afghans—particularly women—are determined to fight and deny the Taliban the opportu-
nity to reimpose their rule, slogans of freedom, justice, and peace are bolstered by the poetry
and songs of the Lāhūtī/Ẓāhir variety, particularly Dawood Sarkhosh’s Sarzamīn Man (My
homeland).63 The circulation of this song signals a sense of collective participation in
what has become an informal anthem of resistance and the struggle for survival.
59
Farzaneh Hemmasi, “Rebuilding the Homeland in Poetry and Song,” 193.
60
Niẓām, “Zindagī Ākhir Sar Āyad.”
61
Hodgkin, “Lāhūtī: Persian Poetry in the Making of the Literary International, 1906–1957,” 364–65.
62
Farzaneh Hemmasi, “Rebuilding the Homeland in Poetry and Song,” 193.
63
In anti-Taliban protests after August 2021, the song Sarzamīn Man by Dāwūd Sarkhush has been used as an
anthem for rallying shared sentiments of loss and belonging. See, Makoii, “My Homeland.”
Iranian Studies 711
Cassettes
The audiocassette was another form of mass media that proliferated during the decades of
the 1960s and 1970s and profoundly affected the dissemination of sound and sonic experi-
ences. Radio recording significantly improved with the advent of the tape recorder and mag-
netic tape, as such allowed sound to be recorded, erased, and re-recorded on the same tape
multiple times. Indeed, the small, portable, and plastic audio cassette was conducive to cre-
ative energies that flowed through and beyond it, making it a highly malleable product that
could be distributed on a mass scale. In Afghanistan, the production and mass distribution of
commercial audio cassettes of Afghan music began in Kabul in the early 1970s. Outside the
official radio station, the three major recording studios of the time were Afghan Music,
Music Center, and Āriānā Music. These businesses were registered with the Ministry of
Information and Culture and subject to governmental approval for printing labels, distribu-
tion, and censorship.64
In recent decades, the term “cassette culture” has been frequently employed by scholars
engaged with media and communications to describe the variety of social practices gener-
ated by audiocassette hardware. In their infancy, cassettes represented what Peter Manuel
described as “an emancipatory use of media,” as it was decentralized, provided space for sig-
nal feedback, and enabled collective and self-organized production, unlike one-way transmis-
sions of mass media like the radio.65 As a living archive that engages people in social habits,
and through which culture might be accessed, cassettes served as a vehicle for meaning,
offering a secure space to create a sense of autonomy and self-determination.
Sreberny-Mohammadi and Mohammadi’s study of the important role small media—includ-
ing leaflets and audio cassettes—played in the revolution that deposed the Shah of Iran
reveals how deeply embedded cultural modes of communication, alongside media technolo-
gies, helped mobilize a population within a repressive political context.66 Moreover, well
before the technology of recorded sound, singing devotional poetry and scripture marked
the soundscape of religious life across the Islamic world. Charles Hirschkind’s study of
cassette-sermons in Cairo’s popular neighborhoods shows how small-time preachers,
whose voices were suppressed by authoritarian regimes in the Middle East in the 1970s,
could reach large audiences through the physical (hand-to hand) dissemination of tapes.
While many believe that the clandestine transfer of Islamic sermons is associated with mil-
itancy, when they first appeared, their messages were rarely about inciting violence; instead,
they were primarily used as instruments of promoting ethical self-improvement and pious
living. Hirschkind situates cassette sermons in relation to Egypt’s Islamic revival and sheds
light on the ethical labor undertaken by Cairo’s Muslim listeners in the mid-1990s. In short,
the cassette-sermon contributed to the Islamic revival in various ways, manufacturing its
own success through addressing counterpublics.67
Access to audio hardware and the societal impact of literacy were closely connected in the
context of Afghanistan in the 1960s and 1970s, helping to usher its own type of counterpub-
lic. In 1978, Anwarī recorded three cassettes of her poetry recitations with the Āriānā Music
recording studio. This marked the first time that a recording of poetry was in high demand
and sold in the market in Afghanistan. The cassettes featured poems by Mawlānā, Hāfiẓ-i
Shīrāzī, and Ḥamīd Muṣaddiq (1940–1998).68 Recordings of Anwarī’s recitations reveal a
warm and invitingly pitched voice that inflects the anxiety or calmness of the poetry. Her
64
Shams al-Dīn Shāhābī (producer and owner of Ariana Music studio) in discussion with the author, June 22,
2018.
65
Manuel, Cassette Culture, 4.
66
Sreberny-Mohammadi and Mohammadi, Small Media, Big Revolution.
67
Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape.
68
Dānishnāma Aryānā, “Farīda Anwarī”; and Ahrārī, “Farīda Anwarī.” A newspaper article from 1983 details high-
demand recordings in Afghanistan, including Anwarī’s cassette of poetry. See, “Taking Music to Every Home,” The
Kabul Times, February 16, 1983.
712 Mejgan Massoumi
delivery is measured and professional, speaking at a natural, if not soft, pace while clearly
articulating all the words. The new circulatory potential of cassette tapes allowed
Anwarī’s recitation of classical Persian poetry to reach a broad audience, creating cultural
literacy and an affect that attracted listeners. Furthermore, the new objectlike quality of
poetry recorded on tapes transformed Anwarī’s speech into individual assertions, and oral
mnemonics into analytical memory.69 Equipped with these newfound abilities and the
autonomous reasoning they facilitated, Persian-speaking listeners were able to reconnect
with aspects of their literary cultures as well as reflect and revise their meanings within
daily life.
Instrumental music served as another important aspect of both literary programs and
cassette recordings featuring poetry. As popular foreign styles began exerting influence
on Afghan music and performance art in general, there was growing interest to preserve
the native classical “art music” of Afghanistan; music that featured eastern instrumentation
including the rubab, harmonium, tabla, and sitar. This, however, does not mean that western
music was altogether absent from these programs. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb Madadī, a former Radio
Afghanistan Director, recalls that in radio programs featuring European and western music,
Anwarī was the only person familiar with the appropriate languages and capable of
pronouncing the associated technical words correctly when explaining song choices.70
The distinction here is that when the programs featured poetry, the choice of eastern
music complimented the recitations in an effort to garner listener appreciation for both
poetry and music.
In an interview published in 1974, Anwarī commented on the importance of poetry in
contemporary society, stating:
[T]ruly speaking, these days the phrase of a contemporary Arab poet that has become
popular is: “a poem is the whisper of a human being to himself or the whisper of a poet
to his contemporary.” But I do not agree with this because a poem is not always a whis-
per, sometimes it can be aggression. It can be a loud cry, and sometimes it is directed at
an individual or thing. If we imagine a poem to be a whisper then it is like a soft dream,
then we cannot think of the Shāhnāma of Firdawsī to be a poem because it mostly deals
with protests of the poet and his dissatisfaction and objection to his land. Why should
the prophecy of a poem be so small that a poet should be confined to writing it only for
his contemporaries? When we read Saʿdī, Māwlānā, Hāfiẓ and Niẓāmī, we are not their
contemporaries, but we still appreciate their poetry…a poem is a melody that surpasses
time and that is what makes it last.71
Anwarī’s assertion of the multivalent significance of Persian poetry and its ability to tran-
scend meanings across space and time points to the medium’s diverse contestations and
instantiations. Anwarī would argue that it is the declamation of Persian poetry that gives
it power and preserves its longevity. Cassette tapes and literary programming amplified
this power by deploying speech and sensory modes of understanding as public practice
and participation. The mass distribution of cassettes aided figures like Anwarī in the ongoing
task of preserving language and Persian literature in Afghanistan.72 Via cassettes, the acous-
tic modulation of emotion through the declamation of classical Persian poetry was rebirthed,
69
Charles Hirschkind pointed out the functional efficiency of the cassette tape in Egypt as a vessel for transport-
ing Islamic sermons to a broad audience. See, Chapter 3 “Cassettes and Counterpublics” in Hirschkind, The Ethical
Soundscape, 105–142.
70
Radio Āzādi, “Ba Bahāna-yi Shaṣt-u Panjumīn Bahār-i Ṣadā-yī Hamīsha Sabz-i Farīda Anwarī.”
71
Anon, “Reciting Poetry a Delicate Art.”
72
John Baily discusses the importance of documenting music censorship in Afghanistan in order to support sup-
pressed cultural expressions and the preservation of Afghan music in the diaspora. See, Can you stop the birds singing?
and “Kabul’s music in exile.” For a discussion of the circulation of Persian ballads in the Afghan context, as well as
their recording in historical manuscripts, see Schwartz, Remapping Persian Literary History, 124–164.
Iranian Studies 713
providing another space where the concerns and characters of the Afghan public could be
elaborated and understood.
Cassettes were also increasingly important for circulating otherwise censored sounds and
lyrics. Indeed, some of Aḥmad Ẓāhir’s songs circulated via informal cassette recordings.
Here, cassettes represented a particular advantage in the transmission of sound. In addition
to the technology’s immense mobility and low price point, cassettes also allowed citizens of
diverse backgrounds to play a part in disseminating Afghan culture in ways other devices
could not.73 In this regard, the informal circulation of cassettes was particularly key to
bypassing state censors and enabling the proliferation of evolving forms of artistic and
poetic protest to a mass audience.
One of the last songs performed by Aḥmad Ẓāhir borrowed from the poetry of celebrated
Persian poet Sīmīn Bihbahānī (1927–2014). Although this song was never formally released,
it gained popularity through its informal, underground circulation via cassette tape. This
speaks to the longevity and efficacy of this technology, as it allowed people to build vibrant
cultures under the thumb of repressive institutions. In this sense, cassettes played an impor-
tant role in the construction of such spaces. While it would be easy to dismiss the informal
circulation of cassettes as a channel of mass media distribution, such a view overlooks the
fact that it was actually a rich site in which people constructed and enacted ambivalent sub-
jectivities in relation to the state.
As a purveyor of political poetry, Bihbahānī’s verse lent itself to transnational mobiliza-
tions across the Persian-speaking world. An interesting aspect of her treatment of the ghazal
is that while she retained its poetic structure, she also expanded its subject matter to include
a woman’s experience of romantic love, desire, and disappointment, as well as increasingly
took on political and social issues.74 While Aḥmad Ẓāhir’s repertoire included a broad range
of poets from across the Persianate canon, his selection of a contemporary feminist poet
from Iran had as much to do with his cosmopolitan sensibilities as it did the political climate
of the time.75 The chosen lines (turned into lyrics) borrowed from the poetry of Sīmīn
Bihbahānī were as follows:
Āsmān khālīst khālī, rawshanānash rā ki burd?

The skies are empty, who took away its light?
Tāj-māhash, sīna rīz kahkashānash rā ki burd?
Its moon’s crown, its galaxy’s necklace, who took them?
Bāghbān tanhāst, tanhā, gird-i ū juz khār nīst
The gardener is alone, lonely, surrounded by thorns
Bīd mushkash rā, gulash rā, arghawānash rā kī burd?
His fragrant willow, his rose, his judas-tree, who took them?
Pīsh az īn-hā īn zamīn rā asmān-ī sabz būd
Before this, this earth and its sky were green
Nīst īnak juz sīyahī, asmānash rā kī burd?
It’s nothing but barren now, who took away its sky?76
73
Andrew Simon argues this point in the context of Egypt’s cassette and mass media culture. See, Simon, Media of
the Masses. Blake Atwood discusses the informal circulation of videocassettes in Iran after their ban in 1983. See,
Atwood, Underground: The Secret Life of Videocassettes in Iran.
74
Hemmasi, “Rebuilding the Homeland in Poetry and Song,” 194.
75
In addition to Persian, Aḥmad Ẓāhir sang in English, Hindi, Pashto, Urdu, and Russian. For an anthology of his
musical repertoire and collection of recorded albums, see Nūrmal, Aḥmad Ẓāhir.
76
For a recording of Aḥmad Ẓāhir singing Āsmān khālīst with these selected lyrics, refer to YouTube video
“Ahmad Zahir: Asoman Khalist Khali.” For Sīmīn Bihbahānī’s full poem from which Aḥmad Ẓāhir selected lyrics,
see Nūrmal, Aḥmad Ẓāhir, 379. For an analysis of Sīmīn Bihbahānī’s poetry in Aḥmad Ẓāhir’s songs, see Paymān,
“Jāygāh-i Shiʿr”; and Muḥammadī, “Yādbūd-i Sīmīn-i Bihbahānī.”
714 Mejgan Massoumi
Sung in 1979 in the shadow of the increasingly authoritative atmosphere created by the rule
of President Nūr Muḥammad Tarakī (1978-1979) and the People’s Democratic Party of
Afghanistan (PDPA), these lyrics can be read as a response to the state’s oppressive, bullying,
and stringent policies. Cold War sentiments of disillusionment and loss of meaning are cap-
tured in the song: “The gardener is lonely, alone, surrounded by thorns.” Those elements of
nature and life that used to sparkle like the “moon” or grow like a “flower” no longer existed.
The “empty skies” demonstrated the fear and desolate environment left in the wake of the
morally bankrupt regime that rose to power through a bloody coup.77 The rhetorical ques-
tions scattered throughout the ghazal also serve the purpose of confronting power, speaking
back to it. While Bihbahānī’s avoidance of historical specificity allows for the poem’s mallea-
bility in different contexts, Ẓāhir’s adoption of her poetry presents an alternative iteration of
the nation and call to engage Afghanistan’s problems through questioning the identity of the
perpetrators. The refrain “Who took them?” reveals a callous and complacent political sys-
tem and the unfortunate stifled truth of despotism.
As Afghanistan experienced political changes in yet another coup in 1978 and entered a
new era of repression, Ẓāhir positioned himself as an agent willing to both articulate and
question the country’s transformation. Here, informal cassette circulation played a key
role in distributing Ẓāhir’s message and also raises fundamental questions about the effec-
tiveness of censorship. Despite the broad bans imposed by state authorities, the distribution
of cassettes on the informal black market allowed for the extensive, illicit enjoyment of
prohibited music. Banned music and songs—like Ẓāhir’s Āsmān khālīst and Zindagī ākhir
sar āyad—were able to bypass censors and circulate among the general populace. The
widespread popularity of Ẓāhir’s songs is indicative of his ability to capture the Afghan pop-
ular imagination during a specific moment of political and social change, as well as the
search for an alternative world. While the censorship of music reflected a profound and per-
sistent concern about the fate of national culture, alongside freedom of speech, the state was
also testing official boundaries and the limits to which artistic and creative work could be
controlled and suppressed. At best, oppression through sound entailed recalibrating calls
to action into something discreet to bypass censors. At worst, reducing creativity to the
production of state-controlled propaganda created an emboldened public, leading impregna-
ble violence, not change.
Recorded music became a weapon in the cultural war advanced by successive Afghan
leaders, including the PDPA. Such leaders used recorded music as a medium to persuade peo-
ple how to behave and act, a “soft power” to be wielded in larger cultural battles around
religion, tradition, modernity, and freedom. Musical styles and content were carefully con-
sidered before being broadcast or circulated to the world, but the gap between what the state
sought to promote and the realities of everyday life for a typical Afghan is evident in the
popularity of Aḥmad Ẓāhir’s songs, despite the fact that such songs had to bypass censorship
and circulate informally. While the state enforced different criteria around the production
and selection of appropriate cultural work, musicians like Ẓāhir were not as easy to manip-
ulate. These performing artists were not without agency in the messages they produced and
embraced through their lyrics. As increasingly autocratic regimes took strong measures to
ban freedom of speech, thought, and creativity, Afghans engaged in cultural dissonance
through music, poetry, and protest, ultimately forging their own revolutions. Informal cas-
sette circulation triggered significant anxiety, as it decentralized the state-controlled Afghan
media. Entangled within this anxiety was a struggle over what constituted Afghan culture
and who had the right to create it. Indeed, circumventing censors enabled the success of
that deemed forbidden and prohibited; that which would ultimately make its way into
Afghanistan’s historical record.
77
Leftist Nūr Muḥammad Tarakī came to power through a bloody coup involving the seizure of the Afghan pres-
idential palace and death of President Dāʾūd Khān, along with his family members, in 1978.
Iranian Studies 715
Conclusion
This article articulated how radio, cassettes, and performance served as important political,
societal, and ideational spaces, as well as how Afghans—producers and consumers alike—
imbued such media with meaning and importance in their cultural lives. Indeed, there
are many reasons to consider Persian poetry, poetic recitation, sung poetry, and song as a
continuum of expressive cultural forms that rely on words, sound, and affect.78 The examples
of Farīda Anwarī and Aḥmad Ẓāhir showcase the ways in which the Persianate literary canon
served as the medium to preserve the traditional Afghan cultural practices of reciting, mem-
orizing, and singing poetry, as well as sounding dissent during a time of social and political
upheaval. While Anwarī’s declamation of Mawlānā’s poems promoted a sense of comfort,
identity, and stability in turbulent times, Ẓāhir’s usage of Lāhūtī and Bihbahānī reflected dis-
sent. Taken together, both artists’ use of classical and modern Persian poetry indicates the
central and important role this literature and its concomitant sounds played in Afghan his-
torical memory and everyday life.
As Afghanistan transformed from a constitutional monarchy to a republic, the decades of
the 1960s and 1970s revealed the disjuncture and fissures inherent in the project of nation-
building. Against this backdrop, the voices of Anwarī and Ẓāhir sought to capture and relate
public sentiments of these tumultuous events by engaging with and drawing inspiration
from the classical and modern masters of Persian poetry. These texts were employed to
help articulate and memorialize local events and identities amid chaos, a usage of poetry
that is not uncommon to Persian-speaking communities across Central and South Asia
and the Middle East.79 Given this history, Anwarī and Ẓāhir’s deployment of Persianate lit-
erature reveals that Afghans were actively engaged in forms of experience and thinking that
transcended the assumption that the nation’s political borders determines the nature of its
experiences, ideas, or politics.
If one of the functions of the “Persianate” as an analytic category is to question the char-
acter and role of political boundaries and state structures, then, as described here, radio,
music, and poetry are among its fiercest advocates. The movement of aural technologies
and sounds transcended political boundaries and embedded Persian linguistic cultural prac-
tices across a diverse terrain of people and communities, which continue into the modern
period. Lyrics by Persian-speaking poets served as the textual fabric upon which the
Persianate universe thrived and sustained, despite the creation of modern states and ethno-
linguistic nationalisms. Poetry imbued into music and song often received a wider audience
due to its ability to transcend literacy and the emphasis on memory that helped circulate it.
The common motifs in musical systems and the development of musical instruments are
areas of lost commonality. Lyrics as a method of memorizing intricate details of a vast rep-
ertoire, vocal styles, and the transmission of an oral musical tradition are not unique to spe-
cific nations, but rather attest to a larger regional and cultural sphere where such practices
are common and sustained.
In Afghanistan, the practice of collective listening to Persian poetry through recitation or
song was founded on a certain discursive openness, understood as a necessary condition for
the task of collectively rethinking the past’s contribution to an unfolding future. As both a
new and modern phenomenon of its time, radio represented this space of possibility for a
variety of experiments in thought and culture, as well as their unexpected outcomes.
Subsequent recording technologies like the cassette also changed the ways in which
Afghans were able to actively participate in the recreation of their social and political
milieus. They formulated their own sonic revolutions rooted in classical and modern
Persian texts and aided by musical improvisations and the circulation of sound.
Protecting and preserving a vast literary heritage through sound became one of the most
78
Hemmasi, “Rebuilding the Homeland in Poetry and Song,” 193.
79
Kevin Schwartz provides an erudite discussion of the place of war-ballads within Afghanistan’s literary and
national history. See Chapter 3 in Schwartz, Remapping Persian Literary History, 124–162.
716 Mejgan Massoumi
potent weapons to combat various state attempts at remaking Afghan culture and redefining
Afghan pasts.
One of the attractive features of the category of the Persianate world is the varied
range of its application. While many scholars have leaned primarily towards
explorations of literary, textual, and linguistic matters, this study of the space of sound
and music provides a unique aural guide to the social, cultural, and political formations
and activities in which notions of the Persianate have resonance. The boundless and ethereal
qualities of sound also aids the study of the “Persianate” through the extent to which we
conceptually grasp it as a way to question the character and role of boundaries and state
structures, as well as probe socio-cultural complexity. Nonetheless, it is important not to
use the term restrictively. Explorations of its fluidity and heterogeneity across space and
time allow for nuance and its stronger impact as an analytical tool. Borrowing from
Joanna de Groot’s discussion, the Persianate is employed to indicate something continuously
in process, rather than a fixed or uncontested entity.80 In short, this study of soundscapes in
Afghanistan has attempted to offer a fresh standpoint from which to engage and appreciate
Afghan identities and their centrality in the making of poetry, music, and art in the
Persianate world.
Acknowledgments. Earlier versions of this article benefited from incredibly helpful comments provided
by Farhad Azad, Robert Crews, Munazza Ebtikar, Sabauon Nasseri, Ahmad Rashid Salim, Zarlasht Sarwari,
and Marjan Wardaki. I would like to especially thank Aria Fani and Kevin Schwartz for their meticulous
readings and editing suggestions throughout. Cameron Cross provided erudite suggestions in the final stages of
this article. Comments from the two anonymous reviewers of Iranian Studies improved the structure and scale of
this article.
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doi:10.1017/irn.2021.22
A RT I C L E
Persian Studies in India and the Colonial Universities,

1857–1947
Gregory Maxwell Bruce

Department of South & Southeast Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, California, USA
Abstract
The establishment of the colonial universities in India was a watershed moment for the history of
Persian studies on the subcontinent. Despite the rise of English and vernacular literatures in the nine-
teenth century, Persian remained an essential language of instruction in colonial colleges, with gener-
ations of Indian students studying Persian to pass university examinations. By closely studying
university calendars and courses, this article demonstrates that the colonial universities created and
sustained an ecosystem for Persian studies throughout the colonial period, as Orientalists and increas-
ingly Indian Persianists continued to invest in Persian instruction and curricular development. The
breadth, diversity, refinement, and expansion of Persian college curricula—which included texts
from the classical Persian canon and contemporary literature written by Iranians and Indians—testify
to the continued fluidity and dynamism of Persian studies throughout the period. Such a phenomenon
demonstrates that the debates and engagement around the Persian language in colonial India contra-
dict its depiction as an obsolete or entirely classical language, and also that colonial college curricula
influenced which texts were edited, compiled, printed, translated, and commented upon.
Keywords: colonialism; education; India; nineteenth century; Persian studies
The founding of the colonial university in British India in 1857 was a watershed moment for
the history of education on the subcontinent. For the first time, colleges were affiliated with
a central examining body, degree programs and curricula were standardized, and Indian stu-
dents and teachers across imperial British India and the princely states studied the same cor-
pus of prescribed literature in preparation for the university’s examinations. The
transformations wrought by the rise of the colonial university have been studied as the out-
growth of early colonial knowledge systems and as mechanisms of colonial and imperial
power.1 These studies have chiefly focused on Orientalist scholarship, British imperial policy,
and English literary education. Far less attention has been paid to the ways in which the cur-
ricula of colonial universities influenced the study of what were called classical languages
and literatures—such as Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit—in colonial India.
The foundation and incorporation of the colonial universities also brought widespread
changes to the study of Persian in India. The uniformity of the university curriculum con-
trasted sharply with the variable corpuses of texts and methods that characterized the
1
For an outdated yet useful English-language overview of the foundation of the colonial universities, see Ashby,
Universities. For Orientalist scholarship and the university, see Dodson, Orientalism, Empire, and National Culture. For
the university as a mechanism of imperial power, see Allender, Ruling through Education. For the formative work
on the role of English literature in the project of colonialism, see Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest.
Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/
4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
720 Gregory Maxwell Bruce
transmission of Persian from teachers to students in the Mughal period.2 As this article will
demonstrate, the institutionalization of Persian created and sustained demand for Persian
teachers at colonial colleges across British India and in the princely states. From the foun-
dation of colonial universities until the 1947 partition, the Persian curriculum underwent a
gradual process of expansion as Indian Persianists came to exercise greater control over it.
What began as a small selection of texts, such as Gulistān, Būstān, Anvār-i Suhailī, and the
Sikandarnāmah of Niẓāmī, grew to include a much wider corpus of Persian classics, Persian
translations of texts ranging from English-language Orientalism to contemporary Turkish
dramas, and works by contemporary Indian and Iranian writers.
The curricular reforms wrought by the architects of the curriculum also created and sus-
tained markets for critical editions, classical and contemporary commentaries, and transla-
tions into English and Urdu. In some cases, there appears to be a cause-and-effect
relationship between the adoption of texts into the colonial curriculum and their appear-
ance in print. The excavation, editing, and publication of the Persian writings of Ghiyās
al-Dīn Rāmpūrī (d. 1852; lexicographer and Persian teacher) by the Naval Kishor Press in
the 1880s and 1890s will be examined as a case in point.
The colonial universities were examining bodies and degree-conferring institutions, not
brick-and-mortar teaching institutions. Beginning at their foundation in 1857, the universi-
ties administered examinations leading to bachelors’ degrees and more advanced degrees in
the arts and sciences. They prescribed curricular study to affiliated colleges, administered
standardized exams to students, and awarded degrees to successful candidates. The termi-
nology used to describe the examinations varied among universities and changed over
time, but the influential system used by the University of Calcutta in its early years illus-
trates the typical progression of examinations. Students studying at an affiliated college
in pursuit of a Bachelor of Arts degree were expected to pass an entrance examination (sim-
ilar to achieving a secondary school diploma), then progress to a First Arts (FA) examination
or a Bachelor of Arts (BA) examination. More advanced degrees, such as an MA, were added
later. All students had to pass examinations in English. However, students also were required
to sit for an examination in an elective language. The options varied among institutions and
changed over time, but most universities required FA and BA examinees to pass an exami-
nation in a classical language. At the Calcutta and Bombay universities, students could
choose among Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Persian.3 Comparison of the teach-
ing faculties at most affiliated colleges suggests, perhaps not surprisingly, that teachers of
Greek, Hebrew, and Latin were relatively scarce in India. Students in affiliated colleges
were much more likely to have access to faculties of Arabic, Persian, or Sanskrit.
The reasons a student might choose to study Persian ranged from utilitarian through cul-
tural to aesthetic. By the 1890s, the relative ease of Persian had established it as a much
more popular elective than the other languages.4 Persian having been a language of educa-
tion and administration in India, the first generations of examinees, many of whom were the
children of administrators, were exposed to the language from an early age and likely found
2
See Kinra, Writing Self.
3
At the University of Calcutta, students sitting for the BA exam were allowed to select a vernacular language such
as Urdu or Hindi until 1864, when the vernacular languages and Persian were removed starting with the FA exam;
they were not reinstated until 1874, when Persian reappeared alongside other classical languages. They retained this
position thereafter. Calcutta, Calendar 1864–65, 38, 40; Calcutta, Calendar 1874–75, 37, 40. Persian was not an option on
the FA and BA exams at the University of Bombay in the 1860s, but was made an option by 1871. Bombay, Calendar,
1865–66, 64, 67; Bombay, Calendar, 1871–72, 47, 49. At Madras, students sitting for the FA and BA examinations could
choose from a range of classical and vernacular languages, including Persian. Madras, Calendar 1876–77, 34, 39;
Madras, Calendar, 1892–93, 49, 55.
4
For example, Gandhi in his autobiography famously describes a time in high school when he considered drop-
ping Sanskrit and taking Persian instead because it was easier. He also writes that students generally considered
Persian an easy language (Gandhi, Autobiography, 15). The general perception that Persian was an easier language
also was the subject of debate at the university (Nuʿmānī, “Ispīch,” 46–48).
Iranian Studies 721
the Persian curriculum to be a convenient means of advancement on the examinations.

Persian also was more useful than Sanskrit or Arabic to students seeking to master Urdu
—which was by the mid-nineteenth century the language of administration, education,
and everyday life for Indians throughout British India and the princely states—since
Persian idioms were and continue to be parts of everyday Urdu speech and culture, just
as Persian maxims, quotations, and literary allusions were, and continue to be, part of every-
day literary Urdu.5 The ubiquity of Persian quotations and passages in Urdu books at the
time are evidence that Urdu writers expected their readers to know Persian. Many writers
corresponded in the language. Urdu poets wrote original verse in Persian.6 Persian contin-
ued to be used in the princely states even after it was officially displaced by the British, and
remained current even after the adoption of vernacular languages such as Urdu. One grad-
uate of the University of Calcutta’s BA examinations, Masʿūd Ḥasan Maḥvī, who worked for
the princely state of Hyderabad, published a collection of Persian odes in praise of the Niẓām
of Hyderabad modeled on the poetry of Qaʾānī, whom he had studied in preparation for the
examinations.7 Persian also was and remains an important language of popular lyrics in the
postcolonial period. Of the most cherished qavvālī songs of praise, which are performed at
Sufi shrines throughout South Asia, many are in Persian. Although the focus of the present
article is on the curriculum of Persian studies in the colonial universities, it is important to
keep in mind that this curriculum was part of a larger cultural world in which Persian per-
sisted as a language that served a wide range of functions throughout the colonial period.
Students sitting for the university examinations chose to study Persian for a wide range of
reasons, but the broader question is why students enrolled in affiliated colleges and prepared
for the examinations at all. As David Lelyveld has shown, most Indians, even among the lit-
erate, did not take to English education in the early years of the colonial universities.8 Those
who did study in the colonial system were mainly focused on careers in or related to the
system of government offices and courts, which Lelyveld calls the “kachahrī [court; office]
milieu.” For example, by the end of the nineteenth century, a university education had
become one means of qualifying for some legal jobs and a prerequisite for high-level prac-
tice.9 Although by no means a guarantee of official employment, as the colonial period wore
on university education became increasingly important for securing coveted positions in
government service. This partly explains the explosion in numbers of university graduates
around the turn of the century. As we shall see, the institutionalization of Persian to meet
the demands of examinees hoping to become government officials created and sustained an
ecosystem for Persian studies in colonial India, especially in the overlapping areas of educa-
tion and publication.
The calendars of the colonial universities are a rich yet largely untapped mine of infor-
mation about the development of Persian studies in India under British rule. The university
calendars contained the history, bylaws, and regulations of the universities as well as infor-
mation about their administrations and examinations. They generally presented the curric-
ulum for examinations as sketchy lists of classic texts, names, or modern anthologies for
students. By identifying these texts and their authors, studying the exams themselves,
and consulting the readers, we can trace changes in the Persian curriculum across regions.
We learn the names of the examiners who designed the curricula, those of Persian teachers
at affiliated colleges, the names of students who passed Persian examinations, and what
kinds of fellowships were available to support the study of Persian. We also can access
the Persian examinations themselves to gain insight into the kind of training and methods
5
For examples, see Riżvī, Farhang-i Amsāl.
6
The trend continued well into the twentieth century. For example, the popular poet Jigar Murādābādī (d. 1960),
whose verse was criticized in his own lifetime for its lack of classicism, included a collection of Persian poems with
his Urdu ones (Murādābādī and Sikandar, “Bādah-i Shīrāz”; Bruce, “Jigar Murādābādī”).
7
Maḥvī, Nazr-i ʿAqīdat.
8
Lelyveld, Aligarh’s First Generation, 88–105.
9
Ibid., 96.
in Persian studies that teachers of Persian in colonial colleges were required to impart to
their students.
The calendars also remind us that throughout the colonial period Persian remained a lan-
guage and literary tradition not exclusive to any religious community or geographical region
in India. Indians with Hindu, Parsi, and Muslim names appear in positions as Persian teach-
ers at colonial colleges and as university examiners, and the Persian faculty at a college like-
wise might comprise members from different religious communities.10 The makeup of
graduate lists was similarly multicommunal, with Hindu and Parsi graduates in some
cases outnumbering Muslim ones.11
The demand for Persian among students meant that affiliated colleges throughout British
India had to hire faculty members with expertise in Persian to train students to pass the
examinations. In the early years of the university, Persian teachers came from a wide
range of backgrounds. Some had been educated at colonial colleges, such as the Calcutta
Madrasa or Delhi College, prior to the foundation of the universities. Others were products
of the colonial university system.12 Still others had studied Persian privately at the feet of
tutors and masters.13 For example, Shiblī Nuʿmānī (1857–1914), was a professor of Arabic
and Persian at the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College in Aligarh (initially affiliated
with the University of Calcutta and later with Allahabad).
All teachers of Persian at colonial colleges, regardless of their educational background,
were charged with preparing students to answer the same kinds of questions on the colonial
examinations. For a scholar like Shiblī, the philological focus of the examinations, which
mainly asked students to translate and analyze the grammatical elements in texts, would
have seemed much narrower than the aesthetic and ethical purposes that the same texts
had played in his early education.14 Still, the demand for Persian instruction provided
him and other Persianists with new forms of institutional patronage and the opportunity
to teach Persian to students, many of whom eventually rose to positions of influence as pol-
iticians, communal leaders, writers, journalists, and educators.15 The positions in affiliated
colleges also afforded some Indian Persianists to become involved in university administra-
tion and examination boards, and some eventually designed and implemented their own
Persian curriculum in the form of selections and readers prescribed by the university sen-
ates, many of which are surveyed here.
The following sections survey major shifts and variations in the Persian curriculum across
the Indian colonial universities from their founding in 1857 until independence and parti-
tion in 1947. It assumes that the question of who read what in Persian in colonial India is
foundational to a broader reassessment of theories about the displacement and eventual dis-
appearance of Persian in the period. Although the focus of the article is on Indian education,
it seeks to contribute to comparative studies of reading practices across the Middle East and
Central Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.16
10
Bombay, Calendar, 1906–1907, 364–442; 367.
11
Ibid., 311–12.
12
One example was the compiler of the first Persian curriculum for the University of Allahabad (ʿAlī, Int́ armīd́ iyat́
Kors Fārsī, front matter).
13
Nadvī, Ḥayāt-i Shiblī, 58–170.
14
Shiblī rarely wrote directly about the role that Persian played in his education, but his letters (some in Persian),
Persian and Urdu poetry, books, and essays evince the centrality of his formal and informal education in Persian to
his intellectual formation. Examples are too numerous to cite, but see his own Persian poetry in Nuʿmānī, Kulliyāt-i
Shiblī—Fārsī; his quotations, allusions, and discussions of Persian poetry in letters to colleagues and students in
Nuʿmānī, Makātīb-i Shiblī; his articles about Persian literature in Nuʿmānī, Maqālāt-i Shiblī; his formative study of
Rumi’s life and poetry in Nuʿmānī, Savāniḥ-i Maulānā Rūm; and his magisterial analyses of the history and aesthetics
of Persian poetry in Nuʿmānī, Shiʿr al-ʿAjam.
15
For an overview of the intellectual lives and social and political influence of students educated at the
Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College, an affiliate of Calcutta and later Allahabad, where Persian was one of six
options on the compulsory classical language examination, see Lelyveld, Aligarh’s First Generation.
16
For example, Strauss, “Who Read What.”
Iranian Studies 723
Calcutta University and the Making of a Curricular Canon for Persian

When the University of Calcutta was founded in January 1857, it administered examinations
in Persian to students sitting for the entrance and Bachelor of Arts exams; an intermediary
exam, First Arts, was added a few years later.17
The first three decades of the Persian curriculum at the University of Calcutta drew heavily
on the canon of texts compiled and published by Orientalists and Indian Persianists decades
earlier. Most of the texts in the curriculum had been compiled by the faculty at the British
East India Company’s Fort William College, which was founded in Calcutta in 1800 as a language
school for company officers. For example, prominent texts of the curriculum, including Gulistān,
Būstān, Sikandarnāmah, the letters of Abū-l-Fażl, and Akhlāq-i Jalālī, had all been included in the
college’s six-volume anthology Miscellaneous Works of Prose and Verse (1809–11).18 The adoption
of this corpus by the early university examiners was in part a response to the debates among
British administrators and Indian scholars divided along ideological lines into Anglicists and
Orientalists in the decades before the universities were founded.19
The Persian curriculum at the University of Calcutta was influential not only because it deter-
mined the curriculum at affiliated colleges, but also because some of these colleges later drew
from it as they transformed into independent universities. The Oriental College in Lahore was an
early affiliate until its administration founded the University of Panjab in 1882, to which colleges
throughout the region and elsewhere (for example, the princely state of Hyderabad) later
became affiliated. Likewise, Muir Central College in Allahabad had been an affiliate of Calcutta
until its faculty, along with the faculty of several other affiliated colleges, incorporated the
University of Allahabad in 1887. Later, the Persian curriculum at schools inherited the legacies
of the University of Calcutta Persian studies canon. These included Aligarh Muslim University
(founded 1920), which had, in its initial form as the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College at
Aligarh, been affiliated to the University of Calcutta and later to the University of Allahabad.
The university’s initial Persian curriculum assigned a mere handful of texts, such as selec-
tions from the Gulistān and Būstān of Saʿdī; Anvār-i Suhailī by the Timurid writer Vāʿiẓ Kāshifī;
selections from the Sikandarnāmah of Niẓāmī; and the letters of Abū-l-Fażl (courtier to the
Mughal emperor Akbar).20 By 1863, the works by Niẓāmī and Abū-l-Fażl had become the text-
books for the FA, and readings from Akhlāq-i Jalālī by Davvānī and the Dīvān of Ḥāfiẓ were
adopted as textbooks for the BA.21 By 1869, the university consolidated its entrance exam-
ination into two publications: Iqd-i-Gul (Roman-script title; comprising selections from the
Gulistān and Anvār-i Suhailī) and Iqd-i-Manzum (Roman-script title; comprising selections
from the Būstān).22 First published in 1863, both texts were the products of a collaboration
between the Orientalist William Nassau Lees, who was the university’s first examiner in
Arabic, Persian, and Urdu (1858–59; 1863–64), and Kabīr al-Dīn Aḥmad, who was then a pro-
fessor of Arabic and Persian at the Calcutta Madrasa (an affiliate of the University of Calcutta
after 1868).23 The Iqd readers remained perennial textbooks for Persian until 1884, when
they were replaced by a new selection by Kabīr al-Dīn Aḥmad.24 Both continued, however,
to be used as texts for students in the form of commentaries.25
17
Calcutta, Calendar 1858–59, 17.
18
Das, Sahibs and Munshis, 161–63.
19
See the edited volume of primary sources that not only illuminate the subtleties of these arguments, but also
remind us of the central role that colonized Indian scholars played in shaping them (Moir and Zastoupil, Great Indian
Education Debate).
20
Calcutta, Calendar 1858–59, 69, 71; Calcutta, Calendar 1863–64, 89.
21
Calcutta, Calendar 1863–64, 93–95, 97–99.
22
23
Lees and Ahmad, Iqd-i Gul, front matter.
24
Calcutta, Calendar 1881–82, 72–82, 90; Aḥmad, Muntakhabāt-i Fārsī; al-Dīn, Guldastah-yi Dānish.
25
For example, a full translation and commentary on Iqd-i Gul by Adālut Khān (his spelling) was in its third edi-
tion in 1894, and its companion volume, Adālut Khān’s commentary on ‘Iqd-i Manzum, was in its fourth edition in
1895. Khān, The Iqd-i Gul, front matter; Khān, The ‘Iqd-i Manz̤ ūm, front matter.
In 1867, Persian was removed from the list of elective classical languages for the FA and
BA examinations, although it remained an optional language for the entrance examination.26
The reasons for the removal are not given in the calendar, but this would not be the first
time that Persian’s place in the curriculum would prove precarious.27 When Persian was
eventually reinstated in the Calcutta FA and BA exams in 1874, the FA course had changed
to include new texts such as Sih Nasr by Nūr al-Dīn Ẓuhurī; Ruqʿāt (letters) by ʿAbd al-Qādir
Bīdil; the qasida of ʿUrfī Shīrāzī; and the Sikandarnāmah. The BA examination had been
rewritten to comprise the Vaqāʾiʿ of Niʿmat Khān ʿĀlī; Durrah-yi Nādirah (a history of Nādir
Shāh) by Mirzā Mahdī Khān Astarābādī; the qasida of Khāqānī; and the qasida of Badr
Chāchī.28 This remained the course of studies for a decade.29
By 1881, the Persian curriculum had grown to add an honors course for the 1882 and 1883
exams. Still mainly focused on classical texts, it added selections from the Shāhnāmah; Tuḥfat
al-ʿIrāqain by Khāqāni; Ḥadīqah by Sināʾī; the Dīvān of Anvarī; and the qasida of Qāʾānī—and,
in prose, excerpts from the Dasātīr; selections from Tārīkh-i Vaṣṣāf (a history of the Īlkhānids)
by Fażullāh Shīrāzī; treatises by Mullā Tughrā; and selections from the Mughal chronicle
Akbarnāmah by Abū-l-Fażl.30 The curriculum continued to reflect the interests of the
Orientalist examiners who designed it. For example, in addition to the aforementioned
work, students also read Saifi’s study of meter and Jāmī’s treatise on rhyme. Both treatises
had recently been studied and translated by Heinrich Blochmann, who had been the head
examiner in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu at the University of Calcutta in 1865 and then
again from 1868 to 1875.
The 1880s witnessed a rapid expansion of the Persian curriculum as Indian Persianists
gained autonomy over the courses and examinations. Many of the Persianists who came
to control the curriculum had been trained in the colonial universities. For example, by
1887, the Persian entrance and FA exams at Calcutta were overseen by an Indian,
Abū-l-Khair, who was an MA graduate of the colonial education system.31 The university
had by then (in 1886) also added an MA examination in Persian. By the 1890s, boards of stud-
ies had been established for the languages. The Persian board comprised a mixture of British
Orientalists and Indian scholars. In 1894, the Arabic, Persian, and Urdu board comprised
eleven Indian scholars and four British.32 Two decades later, in 1917, the board consisted
exclusively of Indian scholars, most of whom held degrees from colonial universities.33
Two English names appear on the 1920 list, but the president and all but one of the exam-
iners were Indian Persianists.34 Subsequent increases in Indian control over the curricula
26
Calcutta, Calendar 1867–68, 38–40. Persian is only offered as an elective for entrance exams in the 1868–69, 1869–
70, and 1870–71 calendars (the last-mentioned includes curriculum for exams through 1873).
27
In the 1890s, it was proposed in the University of Allahabad senate that Persian be removed from the curric-
ulum. Charges were that the language was too easy and thus drew students away from studying Arabic and Sanskrit,
and that it did not have the capacity to train students’ capacity for thought and imagination. In response, Shiblī
Nuʿmānī designed curriculum that he thought made Persian as challenging as the other languages. Then, in
1899, he defended the inclusion of Persian on aesthetic, historical, literary, and philological grounds in a speech
to the Muhammadan Educational Conference (Nuʿmānī, “Ispīch,” 46–52). Ultimately, the proposal to remove
Persian from the curriculum at Allahabad was not adopted.
28
Calcutta, Calendar 1874–75, 86–93.
29
It was repeated in the calendars until 1884, when Kabīr al-Dīn’s anthologies were adopted (described later).
30
31
Calcutta, Calendar, 1887, xxxiv, lxxiii-lxxviii, 125.
32
Calcutta, Calendar 1894, 120–26.
33
Calcutta, Calendar 1917, 18. This may be related to the educational reforms of the 1880s, which sought to inte-
grate schools founded and run by Indian educators and to increase the involvement of classically trained Indian
scholars (Paranjpe, Source Book, 169). This explanation is not entirely satisfactory, however, since the reforms
were primarily aimed at high schools and middle schools and increasing access to trade schools, and the transfer
of power over university curriculum to Indian Persianists does not obviously fall under the broader objectives of
this program.
34
Calcutta, Calendar 1920 & 1921, 37, 44.
Iranian Studies 725
were aided by the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms of 1919 and its proposed form of govern-
ment, called a “dyarchy,” in which control over education was delegated to the provinces
and gave greater control over curricular matters to Indian educators. By 1947, the board
comprised all Indian scholars, most of whom held degrees from British universities such
as Cambridge, London, Edinburgh, and Leeds.35
The shift in control from British to Indian examiners was accompanied by the introduc-
tion of new texts and continued curricular expansion. In 1884, Kabīr al-Dīn Aḥmad, who
coauthored Iqd-i Gul with Lees and was now a fellow of the academic senate of the
University of Calcutta, produced a new course for the BA exam, Muntakhabāt-i Fārsī
(Selections of Persian; Calcutta: Urdu Guide, 1884), comprising selections from the
Taʾrīkh-i Fīrūzshāhī, Vaqāʾiʿ of Niʿmat Khān ʿĀlī, the Shāhnāmah, and the qasida of Ẓahīr
Fāryābī.36 In 1885, the university also introduced a new entrance course designed by
Muḥammad Moḥy al-Dīn, then professor of Arabic and Persian at the Government School
in Allahabad. Titled Guldastah-yi Dānish, the course consisted of unattributed selections
from Raużat al-Khuld (also known as Khāristān, 1332–33, revised 1336–37; an early imitation
of the Gulistān) by Majd Khvāfī; excerpts from the collected poems of Saʿdī and Ḥazīn; and
selections from Makhzan al-Asrār by Niẓāmī.37 The selections by Kabīr al-Dīn Aḥmad and
Muḥammad Moḥy al-Dīn marked a new trend in curricular design at the university, whereby
selections in the form of university-approved readers came to replace lists of texts in the
university calendars, especially for the entrance and intermediate examinations. Nearly
all of them were compiled by Indian Persianists.38
For the next several decades, the core canon of texts outlined above remained the same at
the University of Calcutta. New texts were added as new editions became available and as the
university expanded its curriculum and added more advanced exams. Some texts, for exam-
ple, the Ruqʿāt (letters) of Jāmī, earlier printed by Fort William and added in 1892–93, were
not regular staples. Some, for example, the Masnavī of Rūmī (added in 1896), were surpris-
ingly late additions. Others, for example, tazkirahs by Daulatshāh Samarqandī and ʿAufī,
both added in 1919, seem to reflect contemporary Orientalist scholarship (both had recently
been compiled by E. G. Browne). By 1947, the curriculum had come to include classical and
contemporary Persian works. On the entry-level matriculation examination alone, students
were now expected to study selections from curricular classics as well recent additions and
contemporary literature, such as the poems of Ibn Yamīn, the rubāʿī poems of ʿAṭṭār, and
selections from the Iranian poet Īraj Mīrzā (1874–1926).
By 1947, the scope and form of the advanced examinations (BA and MA) in Persian at
Calcutta also had changed and expanded considerably. The prescribed texts comprised a
much longer list of classical and contemporary Persian literature covering a much wider
range of topics. The nature of the exams themselves also had changed. Early exams had
focused on translation and philological analysis. By the end of the colonial period, students
were expected to demonstrate familiarity with historical context, secondary literary criti-
cism and scholarship, and specialist disciplines.
In 1947, the MA exam set for 1948 required students to produce papers on the history of
Persia, the history of Persian literature, Persian philology, modern Persian literature, and a
fifth paper on an elective topic.39 For the elective exam, students could choose to focus on
Persian literature, the historical literature of Iran, the historical literature of India, philoso-
phy and mysticism, or philology. Textbooks included not only Persian literature, but relevant
secondary literature in Urdu and Persian by Indian Persianists. In Urdu, students read the
five-volume study of Persian poetry Shiʿr al- ʿAjam by Shiblī Nuʿmānī and the two-volume
35
Calcutta, Calendar Supplement for 1947, 33.
36
Aḥmad, Muntakhabāt-i Fārsī.
37
Al-Dīn, Guldastah-yi Dānish.
38
Calcutta, Calendar 1917, 382, 390, 399, 406, 412–13.
39
Calcutta, Calendar Supplement for 1947, 362–66.
study of Persian philology Sukhandān-i Fārs by Muḥammad Ḥusain Āzād. In Persian, they read
secondary scholarship such as Sukhanvarān-i Irān dar ʿAsr-i Ḥāżir (1933) by Muḥammad Isḥāq
(a Calcutta-based scholar). The exams also incorporated contemporary Persian literature from
India and Iran, including Payām-i Mashriq by Muḥammad Iqbāl (1877–1938) and poems by the
Iranian writers Muḥammad-Taqī Bahār (1886–1951) and Parvīn Iʿtiṣāmī (1907–41).
University of Bombay: Wisdom Literature, History, and More

The University of Calcutta was not the only university whose examinations exerted influence
over Persian studies in India in the colonial period. Incorporated in July of 1857, the
University of Bombay was in its early years a much smaller institution than its sibling in
the northeast. By its fifteenth year, it listed only seven affiliated colleges, mostly in
Bombay (but also in Poona), only four of which were affiliated in the arts, compared to
the forty-four institutions affiliated to Calcutta just a year earlier.40 By 1887, the university’s
domain had grown in number to fifteen and expanded in geographical reach to include affil-
iated institutions in cities across western India stretching from Karachi in the north to
Kolhapur south of Bombay, and Ahmadabad, Baroda (Vadodara), Bhavnagar, Bombay
(Mumbai), and Poona in between.41
The early Persian programs at the University of Bombay were overseen by pairs compris-
ing a European Orientalist and an Indian scholar. In the 1860s, these were Reverend John
Wilson, who had founded Wilson College (later the Free General Assembly’s Institution) in
Bombay in the 1830s, and one Mūsā Khān who is otherwise not mentioned in the calendar.42
In the 1870s, the examiners were the Hungarian-born Orientalist Edward Rehatsek (translator of
several Persian historical and ethical texts into English, including the Gulistān and Bahāristān)
and ʿAbd al-Fatḥ Maulavī, who was professor of Arabic at Elphinstone College in Bombay.43
By the 1880s, the examinations were overseen by pairs of Parsi and Muslim Indians.44 In one
case, both members of the pair graduated from the same college in Bombay.45
The Persian curriculum at the University of Bombay included many of the same works of
poetry and moral philosophy as the curriculum at Calcutta, but added to them a number of
works on history and legend. The Gulistān, Dīvān of Ḥāfiẓ, Anvār-i Suhailī, Bahār-i Dānish,
Sikandarnāmah, and Akhlāq-i Jalālī were all prescribed textbooks in the first decades of the
university. To these were added in the 1860s and 1870s sections on the first Mughal
Emperor Bābar from the history of India by Firishtah (d. 1620); the Shāhnāmah; and selections
from the legends of Ḥātim Ṭāʾī.46 Later, in the 1880s, the BA examinations added selections of
Raużat al-Ṣafā by Mīrkhvānd on Sassanid history or the early Mongols (Chingīz Khān), depend-
ing on the year; selections from Ḥabīb al-Siyar by Mīrkhvānd’s grandson, Khvāndmīr, on the
Abbasids or Īlkhāns; and passages in the Ātash-kadah by Luṭf ʿAlī Āzar Bīgdilī in addition to
selections from the Shāhnāmah, Saʿdī’s Ṭayyibāt (odes), and Rumi’s Masnavī.47
The emphasis on the history of Persia and Persian wisdom literature continued into the
twentieth century as contemporary works were added to the Persian classics. For example,
excerpts from the Qajar-era history of Persia Nāmah-yi Khusravān by Jalāl al-Dīn Mirzā (1827–72)
appeared alongside curricular classics. The intermediate examinations prescribed an eclectic
mixture of Indo-Persian history, texts from the Calcutta canon, Sufi classics, and recent auto-
biographical literature such as Ḥazīn Lāhijī’s travelogue. The BA exams similarly drew from
canonical historiographical texts and Sufi classics, as well as contemporary works, such as
40
Bombay, Calendar 1871–72, 194–220; Calcutta, Calendar, 1870–71, 127–28.
41
Bombay, Calendar 1887–88, 353–424.
42
Bombay, Calendar 1865–66, 172.
43
Bombay, Calendar 1871–72, 186.
44
Bombay, Calendar 1883–84, iii, xlv, lxvii, ccxiii.
45
Bombay, Calendar 1887–88, iii, xlvii, lxxv, ccviii.
46
Bombay, Calendar, 1865–66, 38; Bombay, Calendar 1871–72, 24–25.
47
Bombay, Calendar 1883–84, 24–26; Bombay, Calendar 1887–88, 25–28.
Iranian Studies 727
the letters (Munshaʾāt) of the Qajar prince and governor Farhād Mirzā (1818–88). The MA
exam likewise drew from a wide range of genres and included, in addition to textbooks
that had been standard elsewhere, the Maqāmāt-i Ḥamīdī by Qāzi Hamid al-Dīn and the
Sufi allegorical poem Gulshan-i Rāz by Maḥmūd Shabistarī (d. ca. 1339–40).48
This corpus of texts remained largely unchanged in subsequent decades, although a hand-
ful of new texts were added. In 1924–25, for example, students read the same texts as they
had in 1906, although the texts were rearranged and reassigned to different exams.49 New
texts included a Persian translation of Kalīlah va Dimnah by Naṣrullāh Munshī; Miʿrāj
al-Saʿādat (a work in ethics translated from Arabic) by Mullā Aḥmad Narāqī (d. 1829); and
the Persian translation of John Malcolm’s History of Persia by Mirzā Ḥairat. Ḥairat was himself
a part of the colonial university system, having taught Persian at Elphinstone College in
Bombay in the 1870s and 1880s, been elected to the University of Bombay senate in 1876,
and served as examiner in Persian at Bombay in 1879.
University of Madras: Classical and Contemporary Persian in South India

Of less influence than Calcutta and Bombay, perhaps, but nonetheless remarkable for the
innovativeness of its Persian curriculum, was the University of Madras. Incorporated in
September 1857, Madras administered examinations to colleges in the Deccan (South
India) in cities such as Aurangabad, Bangalore, Madras, Mysore, and Hyderabad. Persian
appears to have been a late addition to the curriculum. No examiner for the language
was named until 1872, and one did not begin to appear regularly until 1875.50 Unlike
Calcutta and Bombay, Madras required students to pass an examination in an optional lan-
guage, not a classical one, until the MA level. Persian was one of eleven options, including
Tamil, Telugu, “Kanarese” (Kannada), Malayalam, Hindustani (Urdu), and Uriya, at the first
examination and BA levels. It was only at the MA level that candidates had to pass an exam-
ination in Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Arabic, or Persian.51
The Persian texts studied by examinees at Madras-affiliated schools combined some of the
standard texts used at Calcutta and Bombay with texts not studied elsewhere. For example,
students studying for the matriculation exam in 1876 studied the Gulistān and Būstān, just like
those studying for exams at Calcutta and Bombay.52 However, in the following year, they
were required to read Ḥikāyāt-i Dilpasand by Muḥammad Mahdī Vāṣif, a collection of animal
fables in Persian adapted from “European stories translated from Greek” by a local poet.53
Also included were selections from the poetry of both the eighteenth-century Indian Sufi
proselytizer Mirzā Maẓhar Jān-i Jānān and the seventeenth-century Sufi poet Ṭāhir Ghanī
Kashmīrī (recently translated into English by Mufti Mudasir Farooqi and Nusrat Bazaz),
neither of whom appears to have been studied elsewhere. In 1879, they also studied poetry
by Asīr Iṣfahānī.54 Asīr’s Dīvān had been published by Nawal Kishore that same year.
In the 1890s, the Madras curriculum continued to incorporate moral fables and contempo-
rary Persian translations. The examinations for 1892 and 1893 involved standard textbooks
such as the Būstān and Anvār-i Suhailī.55 They also incorporated ʿAyār-i Dānish (a version of
the Indian Panchatantra animal fables compiled by the Mughal vizier and chronicler
Abū-l-Fażl) and Persian translations of two Turkish plays by Mirzā Fatḥ ʿAlī Ākhūnzādah
(Mirza Fatali Akhundov; 1812–78): Vazīr-i Lankarān and Ḥikāyat-i Ḥakīm-i Nabātāt va Mostaʿlī
48
Bombay, Calendar 1906–1907, 719–21.
49
Bombay, Calendar 1923–24 and 1924–25, 795–99.
50
Madras, Calendar 1876–77, 181, 187, 190.
51
Madras, Calendar 1876–77, 34, 39, 47.
52
This section is based on Madras, Calendar 1876–77, 96–108.
53
Vāṣif, Ḥikāyāt-i Dilpasand, 2, 103.
54
Madras, Calendar 1876–77, 108.
55
The calendar also lists Muntakhabāt-i Fārsī, which is almost surely the anthology by Kabīr al-Dīn Aḥmad dis-
cussed earlier. Madras, 1892–93, 451–52, 453, 455, 457, 459, 461, 463, 465.
Shāh.56 The same corpus continued to be prescribed by Madras for decades and appears not to
have been substantially revised until the 1930s. The same set of texts appears in the 1902–3 cur-
riculum with only minor changes.57 By the 1920s, a mixture of canonical classics, Safavid- and
Mughal-era poetry, and contemporary Persian by the Indian poet-philosopher Muḥammad Iqbāl
had been incorporated.58 By 1939, the textbooks prescribed for the intermediate exam had
shifted focus to contemporary Persian literature. The intermediate exams for 1939–41, for exam-
ple, all assigned Āʾīnah-yi ʿAjam by Muḥammad Iqbāl; 1939 and 1941 required selections from the
Gulistān, whereas the 1940 exam assigned a reader of selections in modern Persian and
[Dāgustarān yā] Intiqāmkhvāhān-i Mazdak (1921; a historical novel about the Arab conquests
and the fall of the Sassanid Empire) by ʿAbd al-Huṣain Sanʿatīzādah Kirmānī (1895–1973).59
The Madras curriculum’s combination of curricular classics and contemporary Persian lit-
erature written in Central and South Asia continued to the end of the colonial period. In
1939, students preparing for the BA exam read canonical ethics works along with the afore-
mentioned novel by Sanʿatīzādah; Persian translations of Ākhūnzādah’s plays Vukalāʾ-i
Murāfaʿah (one of the three plays in the translated anthologies of his plays mentioned
above) and Mard-i Khasīs; a Persian translation of James Justinian Morier’s The Adventures
of Haji Baba of Isfahan, which had been translated into Persian and published by Nawal
Kishore Press in Lucknow in 1886; selections from the Indian poet Mirzā Ghālib (1797–
1869); and the Jāvīdnāmah by Muḥammad Iqbāl.60 They read Nal Daman by the Mughal
poet Faiżī alongside selections from Nasīm-i Shimāl (probably excerpts from the journal by
Ashraf Gīlānī, 1870–1934, which published satirical verse on contemporary events). Those
preparing for the 1940 exam also read selections from the social reformist novel
Siyāḥatnāmah-yi Ibrāhīm Beg (1895) by the Turkish-born Iranian writer Zain al-ʿĀbidīn
Marāghah-yī (1840–1910) and selections from the anthology Poets of the Pahlavi Regime
(Bombay 1933) by the Parsi Persianist Dinshaw J. (Jijibhoy) Irani (1881–1938). Students sitting
for the honors exam added to these texts Taʾrīkh-i Adabiyāt-i Īrān (first published in Tabrīz in
1929–30) by Jalāl al-Dīn Humāʾī.61
The gradual expansion of Persian studies at the three founding colonial universities of
Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras did not take place in isolation from institutional changes and
curricular developments elsewhere. Some of the texts adopted by Bombay and Madras in
the 1890s and afterward were initially adopted by the new universities founded in the 1880s,
Panjab and Allahabad. The program at the University of Panjab followed Calcutta in offering
examinations in Persian to fulfill the classical language requirement. It also introduced new
Persian-medium examinations of its own and established degree programs focused exclusively
on Persian. This led to the adoption of new textbooks, the expansion of the curriculum, and
increasing specialization. Allahabad followed the basic structure of the Calcutta curricula. It
also followed Calcutta’s practice of having Indian scholars design curriculum and produce
anthologies as textbooks. It is to the curricular changes at those universities that we now turn.
Specialization at Panjab University

Incorporated in October 1882, the University of Panjab was unique among the colonial uni-
versities for its specialized degrees in Persian studies. Like Calcutta, it had a Faculty of Arts
that conferred entrance, intermediate, Bachelor of Arts, Master of Arts, and Doctor of
56
Three of Ākhūnzādah’s plays, including Ḥakīm-i Nabātāt, had been translated into Persian by Mirza Dja’far and
published without attribution as Trois Comédies (Persian title: Kitāb-i Tamāshākhānah; 1885). They were soon thereaf-
ter translated into English and published (likewise without attribution) in a bilingual Persian-English volume by
A. Rogers as Three Persian Plays (1890).
57
Madras, Calendar 1902–1903, 179–206.
58
Madras, Calendar 1924, 501–12.
59
Madras, Calendar 1938–39, 349, 358.
60
Ibid., 466–67, 483.
61
Ibid., 568.
Iranian Studies 729
Literature degrees. However, unlike the founding universities, Panjab also housed a Faculty
of Oriental Learning that served its broader mission to encourage the study of “Eastern clas-
sical languages.”62 The existence of the Oriental faculty meant that Panjab not only followed
Calcutta and others in requiring students to pass an examination in a classical language such
as Persian as part of the otherwise English-medium curriculum, but also that it conferred
Bachelor of Oriental Learning degrees requiring a classical language (Arabic or Sanskrit) and
any two of a handful of elective subjects, including Persian.63 The Oriental faculty also offered
diplomas in “Oriental languages” (Arabic, Sanskrit, and Persian) and conferred literary titles to
successful candidates. Examinees who passed the proficiency exam in Persian were awarded the
title “Munshī.” Those who passed the high proficiency exam were “Munshī ʿĀlim.” Those who
passed the honors exam were given the title “Munshī Fāżil.”64
By the 1890s, the University of Panjab Persian courses were already highly specialized,
covering a wide range of genres in prose and poetry. The entrance exam used as its textbook
an anthology reader, Ganjīnah-yi Khirad. Produced for students in secondary schools in the
Panjab, the reader by its eleventh edition (1912) was fully vocalized and comprised selections
from textbooks used elsewhere.65 To prepare students to read Ganjīnah-yi Khirad and pass the
entrance examination, students in middle class courses in secondary schools read the primer
Sarmāyah-yi Khirad. Although not a university textbook per se, Sarmāyah-yi Khirad was unique
among the university textbooks for its focus on conversation.66 Of the book’s 232 pages, the
first 43 comprised dialogues under the heading of “daily conversation” (guftugū-yi yaumiyah),
covering various topics related to everyday life (e.g., illness, bathing, clothing); emotions
(e.g., anger, surprise); and social interaction with Persian-speaking people (e.g., “the man-
ners of social interaction of the people of Iran”). Students also read selections from the
Persian letters of the nineteenth-century Indian Persian writers Mirzā Ghālib and Mirzā
Qatīl in addition to canonical works of prose and poetry.67
The anthology textbooks for the 1897 intermediate and Bachelor of Arts examinations at the
University of Panjab illustrate the expansion of Persian studies as part of arts faculty exams in
the decade following incorporation. Unlike the calendar lists divided simply into prose and
poetry, the intermediate reader organized texts into a wide range of genres in prose and poetry
and included a large number of classical and contemporary works.68 The BA course for 1899
was even more expansive, adding works of poetry, history, and rhetorical theory, including
the writings of the Qajar courtier and reformer Mirzā Abū-l-Qāsim Farāhānī Qāʾim Maqām
(1779–1835); the Āʾīn-i Akbarī; Akhlāq-i Nāṣirī; a Persian translation of Alf Lailā va Lailā; and
Miftāḥ al-Adab (an elementary work on Arabic grammar and morphology).69
The University of Panjab’s honors programs in Persian administered by the Oriental fac-
ulty were highly specialized and accelerated counterparts to the arts faculty curriculum. In
1901–2, the Oriental entrance exam comprised selections from the arts faculty’s intermedi-
ate exam and added to it readings from Akhlāq-i Muḥsinī and the study of Arabic grammar.70
The intermediate exam comprised the Persian BA course plus supplementary readings in
Persian literature and the study of Arabic grammar and literature.71 The Bachelor of
62
Panjab, Calendar 1900–1901, 22–34.
63
Ibid., 52–85.
64
Ibid., 71–74, 95–97.
65
Punjab, Ganjīnah-yi Khirad, front matter, 1.
66
Conversational Persian had been part of the training of British officers in the Fort William College, most
famously with the use of Gladwin’s The Persian Moonshee. However, Gladwin’s book was never adopted for use in
the curriculum of the universities, and, with the possible exception of Persian translations of contemporary dramas,
the books that were incorporated into the university curriculum did not include conversations that could serve as
models for speaking practice in everyday contexts.
67
Punjab, Sarmāyah-yi Khirad.
68
Panjab, Int́ armīd́ iyat́ Kors Fārsī.
69
Panjab, Bī E Kors Fārsī.
70
Panjab, Calendar 1900–1901, 61.
71
Ibid., 70.
Oriental Learning exam for that year assumed these courses as background and required stu-
dents to study a handful of other texts and the entire Arabic BA course.72 The Munshi (pro-
ficiency) exam in Persian comprised the regular Persian intermediate course and added to it
works in poetry, ethics, history, and letters. It also required students to have analytical com-
mand of Persian and Arabic grammar and to translate from Persian into Urdu and Urdu into
Persian. The Munshī ʿĀlim (high proficiency) course consisted of the Persian BA course; a
Persian grammar Makhzan al-Favāʾid by Fāʾiq Lakhnavī (fl. 1810) in addition to other texts;
and the entire intermediate course in Arabic. It also required Persian-Urdu and
Urdu-Persian translation. The Munshī Fāżil (honors in Persian) exam included readings in
rhetoric and prosody, history, an essay in Persian, Persian-Urdu and Urdu-Persian transla-
tion, and the entire BA course in Arabic.73
Over the course of the following decades, the Persian curriculum at the University of
Panjab proved to be more mercurial, specialized, and expansive than that of other universi-
ties. In 1927, the syllabus for the intermediate, First Arts, and Munshī examination com-
prised a mixture of standard and less-common texts.74 By 1936, the Persian studies
program had grown to comprise a massive corpus of no fewer than two hundred texts
and ten different degree and diploma programs.75 Students were assigned secondary read-
ings by Orientalists and literary critics in English, Urdu, and Persian. Textbooks included
classics of the colonial curriculum as well as Persian works in poetry and prose by contem-
porary Indian writers, such as Āʾīnah-yi ʿAjam by Muḥammad Iqbāl and Dabīr-i ʿAjam (1928; a
magisterial Persian-language study of poetics, rhetoric, and literary theory) by Aṣghar ʿAlī
Rūḥī (professor of Oriental Languages at Islamiyah College, Lahore).76 Other contemporary
works included Persian translations of plays by Ākhūndzādah and Haji Baba of Isfahan by
Morier, and the aforementioned Siyāḥatnāmah-yi Ibrāhīm Beg. Secondary readings included
English-language histories of Persia and Persian literature by Browne, Levy, and Rogers, as
well as the Urdu study Shiʿr al-ʿAjam by Shiblī Nuʿmānī.
By the end of the colonial period, the specialist examinations at the University of Panjab
reflected the abiding influence of the early colonial curriculum, the legacy of the expansions
of the 1880s and 1890s, the integration of contemporary Persian literature by Indian and
Iranian writers, and the specialization of Persian studies as both a philological and historical-
literary discipline.77 In the early years, the curriculum was divided into prose and poetry and
included a narrow range of genres. Later, the textbooks divided the readings, especially in
poetry, into specified genres. By 1934, the curriculum was organized by discipline. For exam-
ple, the course of studies in mysticism and moral philosophy for the Munshī Fāżil exam of
that year combined treatises in ethics with Sufi literature, including Akhlāq-i Jalālī; Kashf
al-Maḥjūb (eleventh century, the earliest surviving treatise on Sufism in Persian, edited
and published in Lahore in 1903) by al-Hujvīrī; and the mystical allegories in verse
Gulshan-i Rāz and Manṭiq al-Ṭair. Students also were expected to translate between Persian
and Urdu and produce an original composition in Persian.
Standardization at Allahabad University

The expansion and specialization at the University of Panjab was paralleled by similar pro-
cesses of expansion and regularization of the syllabus at the University of Allahabad, which
further cemented the place of Persian studies in the Indian colleges. Founded in 1887 and
incorporated in November 1889, Allahabad followed the examination structure of its parent
72
Ibid., 82.
73
Ibid., 95–96.
74
Bilgrāmī, Sharḥ-i Int́ armīd́ iyat Kors Fārsī.
75
Panjab, Calendar 1936–1937, 150–76, 879–80, 905, 940, 960–61, 986–87, 1090, 1093, 1095–96, 1109–13.
76
Rūḥī, Dabīr-i ʿAjam, 2–4.
77
Panjab, Calendar 1936–1937, 1111–13.
Iranian Studies 731
institution, the University of Calcutta.78 Students sitting for all examinations, from entrance
to BA, had to pass exams in English, history and geography, mathematics, and a classical lan-
guage (Sanskrit, Arabic, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, or Persian). As elsewhere, Latin, Greek, and
Hebrew were unlikely choices for students. Of the twenty-four colleges affiliated to the uni-
versity in arts in 1894, only one, Women’s College in Lucknow, listed a faculty member who
taught Latin, and only one other, St. George’s College in Mussoorie (managed by Catholics),
taught “classics” (certainly Latin, perhaps Greek).79 None listed Hebrew. By contrast, nearly
all affiliated colleges listed faculty in Arabic, Persian, or Sanskrit.
The relative ease and accessibility of Persian made it a popular choice with Allahabad uni-
versity examinees.80 By 1899, the general preference for Persian meant that few students
opted for the more difficult courses and exams in Arabic and Sanskrit. Consequently, the sta-
tus of Persian as a classical language was questioned by the British director of education in
the region, and a proposal was made to remove Persian from the list of elective classical lan-
guages. In response, Shiblī Nuʿmānī, retired professor of Persian and Arabic and current
examiner in Persian at Allahabad, produced a new curriculum designed to demonstrate
that Persian was worthy as a classical language. In a speech before an educational confer-
ence, he argued that the treasury of historical literature, especially the history of
Muslims, available in Persian was unique, and therefore Persian deserved continued institu-
tional support. The resistance to the proposed exclusion of Persian worked. It remained an
elective classical language.
The Persian faculties at affiliated colleges evince the role that the University of Allahabad,
like the other universities, played in sustaining an ecosystem for Persian studies. Persian
studies faculty bore titles such as Professor of Persian and Head Persian Teacher. Others
bore broader titles, such as Professor of Oriental Literature (e.g., at Muir Central College
in Allahabad). Such professors were accompanied by many other Persian instructors—bear-
ing titles such as masters, maulvis, munshis, and teachers—employed by the schools. The
calendars do not record the names and subjects of the latter, but many are identified as
part of the Oriental (studies) faculties, and some of them, especially those bearing titles asso-
ciated with Perso-Arabic studies such as maulvi and munshi, surely taught Persian. Of the
twenty-four colleges affiliated to the university in arts in 1894–95, seventeen listed
Persian teachers among their faculty, spread across a wide range of departments.81
Maharaja’s College in Jaipur, for example, retained two Persian professors (one in the
English department, the other in the Oriental department), a superintendent of Persian
and Arabic in the Oriental department, three teachers of Persian in the English department,
and a head instructor and nine teachers of Persian in the Persian department (separate from
the Oriental department), for a total of sixteen Persian studies faculty members.82 Persian
studies also were encouraged by prizes for academic excellence in the subject; for example,
the Maulvi Hyder Husain prize at Muir Central College, Allahabad.
The faculty listings also remind us that Persian was neither exclusively the purview of the
colonial system nor exclusively the purview of any particular religious community. The
assistant professor of Persian at Canning College in Lucknow (later Lucknow University)
was a Hindu named Munshi Ramkishen, without degree titles to suggest that he was the
product of the colonial university system.83 The multicommunal quality of Persian stands
78
Allahabad, Calendar 1894–95, 37–52, 84–104.
79
Ibid., 183, 202.
80
Nuʿmānī, “Ispīch,” 46–52.
81
These were Muir Central College, Canning College, MAO College, Aligarh, Agra College, St. John’s College in
Agra, London Mission College in Benares, Maharaja’s College in Jaipur, Christian College in Lucknow, Jabbalpore
College, Madhava College in Ujjain, Lashkar College in Gwalior, High School in Fyzabad, Ramsay College in
Almorah, the Women’s College in Lucknow, Christ Church in Kanpur, and Meerut College. Allahabad, Calendar
1894–95, 177–203.
82
Ibid., 194.
83
Ibid., 183.
in contrast to Sanskrit and Arabic, which were almost exclusively the purview of Indian
scholars with names suggesting Hindu and Muslim backgrounds, respectively, or European
Orientalists.84
The first curriculum for examinations at the University of Allahabad consisted of a mix-
ture of the classic colonial texts and new innovations. The first designer of Allahabad’s cur-
riculum, Amjad ʿAlī, had been educated in the colonial system up to an MA degree and was
professor of Persian at Muir Central College in Allahabad. His entrance examination for 1891
(the first year exams were held) included standard Calcutta texts such as the Gulistān, Būstān,
and the Dīvān of Hāfiẓ. To these he added texts not widely assigned on Calcutta’s exams,
including the mystical-moral poetry by ʿUmar Khayyām and Ibn Yamīn, Jāmī’s Bahāristān.
He also assigned selections from Āsār al-Ṣanādīd (a work on the architecture of Delhi by
the contemporary Indian reformer and educationist Sayyid Aḥmad Khān [d. 1898]).85 His
intermediate course likewise drew from a mixture of classics and contemporary works, stan-
dard textbooks, and new additions. To Calcutta standards were added the Bahāristān of Jāmī;
the Safarnāmah (1873) of the Qajar Shah Nāṣir al-Dīn; the travelogue and autobiography of
Ḥazīn Lāhījī (d. 1766); a work by the Indian scholar Imām Baksh Ṣahbāʾi (d. 1857), who
had taught Persian at Delhi College in the first half of the nineteenth century; and excerpts
from Ghazāli’s mystical Kīmiyā-yi Saʿādat.
Amjad ʿAlī’s BA course likewise drew from curricular standards, but also included recent
works, such as selections from poetry by the Qajar poet Mirzā Raḥīm Yaghmā (d. 1859) and
the Indian poet Mirzā Asadullāh Khān Ghālib (d. 1869). It also incorporated Indo-Persian lit-
erature, for example, the Sih Nasr of Ẓuhūrī and Naldaman by the Mughal emperor Akbar’s
court poet Fayyāżī.86 In 1895–96, the MA examination in Persian added texts that had not
been staples of the Calcutta curriculum, such as Tauqīʿāt-i Kisrā (a work translated from
Arabic for one of the sons of the Mughal emperor Shāh Jahān purporting to record the say-
ings of the Sassanid emperor Naushīrvān) and Iʿjāz-i Khusravī (a prose miscellany by the
thirteenth-century poet from Delhi, Amīr Khusrau).87
Amjad ʿAlī’s courses were replaced in 1897 by new entrance and intermediate courses
designed by Shiblī Nuʿmānī. Shiblī drew from the same textbooks as Amjad ʿAlī in the
entrance course, but added selections that had been introduced elsewhere, including
Nāmah-yi Khusravān (a nationalist history and biographical dictionary of Persian kings) by
the Qajar historian Jalāl al-Dīn Mirzā (1827–72).88 To the intermediate course Shiblī added
selections from the Persian translation of John Malcolm’s History of Persia (1815) by Mirzā
Ḥairat Irānī and the eighteenth-century Maʾāsir al-Umarā (biographies of Mughal notables)
by Samsam al-Daulah Shāh Navāz Khān.89 The BA and MA examinations for 1899 repeated
earlier curricula, adding only selections from Manuchihrī to the BA exam.90 Shiblī’s syllabi
were eventually replaced by Amjad ʿAlī’s in 1906, which remained in use until 1914.91
The curriculum at Allahabad from 1914 to the 1930s witnessed relatively few new addi-
tions to the canon of texts established by the early examiners. The 1914 curriculum for
the intermediate examination by Mirzā Muḥammad Ismāʿil Khān (professor of Persian at
Christian College, Allahabad) adds only the letters of Bīdil and Akhlāq-i Nāṣirī, neither of
which was new to the colonial curriculum.92 His 1918 BA curriculum retained most of the
previous curricula, but added selections from Bīdil’s prose; the odes of Sanāʾi; selections
84
One important exception to this rule was Sayyid ʿAlī Bilgrāmī, who was examiner in Sanskrit at the University
of Madras in the 1890s. Madras, Calendar 1892–93, ii. For his life and works, see Bruce, “Bilgrami Brothers.”
85
ʿAlī, Muntakhabāt-i Fārsī.
86
ʿAlī, Bī E Kors Fārsī.
87
Allahabad, Calendar 1894–95, 140–41.
88
Nuʿmānī, Int́ rans Kors Fārsī.
89
Nuʿmānī, Int́ armīd́ iyat́ Kors Fārsī.
90
Allahabad, Calendar 1898–99, 171.
91
Allahabad, Calendar 1904–1905, 185, 192; Allahabad, Calendar 1908, 167, 171.
92
Khān, Intarmidiyat Fārsī Kors.
Iranian Studies 733
from Kamāl al-Dīn Ismāʿīl; and selections of odes by Fughānī (Fighānī), ʿAbd al-Vāsiʿ, and
Rashīd al-Dīn Vaṭvāṭ.93 The revised BA course for 1919 pared the new course down, but
added nothing new.94 A decade later, however, in 1928, the course had expanded in size
to include multiple disciplines similar to those at the University of Panjab, but comprised
largely the same texts that had been used previously. The intermediate exam added only
Tuḥfat al-ʿĀlam (a history of England in Persian) and Āʾīnah-yi Iskandarī by Amīr Khusrau.
The BA excerpted a laundry list of by then standard textbooks, but added selections from
the eighteenth-century Indian poets Sarkhush and ʿAndalīb (both excerpted in an anthol-
ogy). Students also were advised to read Ṣanādīd-i ʿAjam by the Indian scholar M. H. Nāṣirī
for their history of literature exams.95 The MA exam used the same textbooks as before,
but added several less common works, such as Rasāʾil by Yamīn al-Dīn Tughrā Mashhadī,
Shabnam-i Shādāb by the Safavid-era poet Ẓahīr al-Dīn Tafrishī, Ākhūnzādah’s play
Sarguzasht-i Shāh-i Langarān, and selections from the poems of the eighteenth-century
Indian mystic and poet ʿAndalīb. It also assigned works of scholarship on Persian literature
and language in English and Urdu as well as works on Persian grammar and poetics.96
Legacy: The New Universities

Successor institutions to the colonial curriculum generally followed the structure and cur-
ricula set by the earlier institutions. Allahabad was the last colonial university to incorporate
before the explosion of independent universities began in the second decade of the twenti-
eth century. For six decades, three (and eventually five) universities had set the trajectory of
Persian studies in colleges across British India and the princely states. Starting in 1916,
British India witnessed the rapid rise of autonomous universities and the decentralization
and diversification of control over Persian studies. Between 1916 and 1923, ten new univer-
sities were incorporated. Most emerged from an affiliated college, just as the University of
Panjab had emerged from the Oriental College in Lahore and the University of Allahabad
from Muir Central College in Allahabad—both of these previously affiliated to the
University of Calcutta. Some universities would later emerge as leading centers of Persian
studies. Osmania University in Hyderabad (incorporated August 1919) was an Urdu-medium
university with an active community of Persian scholars that produced important transla-
tions from Persian literature. The universities of Lucknow (incorporated December 1920)
and Delhi (incorporated May 1922) would be important centers of Persian studies in colonial
and postcolonial India. Aligarh Muslim University (incorporated December 1920), formerly
the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College affiliated to the Calcutta and Allahabad universi-
ties, likewise emerged as a major center of Persian studies and Mughal history, producing
influential scholars such as Nazir Ahmed (1915–2008) and K. A. Nizami (1925–97).
An early curriculum for the intermediate examination at Osmania University comprised
texts that had been standard for decades.97 Likewise, the verse portion of the BA course in
Persian at Aligarh Muslim University published in 1924 collected texts that had long been
standard at Allahabad. The prose portion, however, added two texts not previously preva-
lent: the eleventh-century work of political wisdom Qābūsnāmah by ʿUnṣur al-Maʿālī,
which had been available in print since the mid-nineteenth century, and Lubāb al-Albāb
(1221) by ʿAufī (the oldest-surviving Persian taẕkirah of poets, edited and published by
E. G. Browne in 1903–6).98 This suggests that the practice of augmenting the colonial curric-
ulum that began in the 1880s with Kabīr al-Dīn, Muḥy al-Dīn, and Amjad ʿAlī continued as
93
Khān, Bī E Fārsī Kors.
94
Allāhābādī, Bī E Kors Fārsī barā-yi 1919.
95
Allahabad, Calendar 1928, 323–27.
96
Ibid., 355–58.
97
ʿUsmāniyah, Niṣāb-i Fārsī.
98
ʿAlīgaŕh, Niṣāb-i Fārsī barāyi Imtiḥān-i Bī E.
Persian studies faculties at the new universities developed curriculum in response to subse-
quent scholarship.
The Colonial Curriculum and Persian Publishing

Throughout the colonial period, the expansion of the Persian curriculum in the universities
created and sustained a marketplace for critical editions, commentaries, and translations
produced for students preparing for examinations. Recent scholarship on the proliferation
of print in colonial India has focused mainly on the rise of vernacular literature and the
emergence of the vernacular public sphere.99 Far less attention has been paid to the publi-
cation of literature in classical languages such as Persian in the same period.100 Yet govern-
ment publications lists and library catalogs testify to the prolific and sustained publication of
Persian texts throughout the colonial period.101 The prescription of particular texts by the
colonial universities created instant, widespread demand for new editions of Persian classics.
The correlations between the inclusion of Persian texts in the curriculum and their compi-
lation, editing, and publication by the British-backed Nawal Kishore Press is evidence of the
role that the curriculum played in sustaining market demand. For example, the first edition
of the Qaṣāʾed of Badr Chāchi, published by Nawal Kishore in 1873, corresponds with its
inclusion in the syllabus of the Bachelor of Arts examination at the University of Calcutta
in 1875 when Persian regained its place as a subject on BA exams. The first edition of the
Vaqāʾiʿ of Niʿmat Khān ʿĀlī, which also was included in the BA syllabus, appeared just a
few years before, in 1870. Its continued publication by Nawal Kishore likewise corresponds
with its continued inclusion on the exams at Calcutta and other universities in subsequent
decades (I have found references to printings in 1873, 1884, 1886, 1894, 1896, and 1906).
The works of Ghiyās al-Dīn Rāmpūrī (b. ca. 1785; d. 1852) provide an illustrative example
of the ways in which the colonial curriculum influenced the excavation, compilation, editing,
and publication of Persian literature by Indian presses in the colonial period.102 Ghiyās al-Dīn
taught Persian at the court of the Navvāb of Rampur in the first half of the nineteenth cen-
tury, authored a handful of commentaries in Persian on classical Persian texts, penned a
handful of medical texts in Persian, compiled an influential monolingual Persian dictionary,
wrote Persian and Urdu poetry, and penned a long cycle of fantastic tales in Persian
dedicated to the Navvāb’s wife. The dictionary, Ghiyās al-Lughāt (1827), was probably first
printed in 1848–49. All his other works remained in manuscript until the final decades of
the nineteenth century, when some of them were edited by his son and published by
Nawal Kishore.
Among the works by Ghiyās al-Dīn that were eventually published, most were relevant to
the colonial university curricula. His commentary on the letters of Abū-l-Fażl, Sharḥ-i
Abū-l-Fażl: Do Daftar, was published in 1890 and again in 1897. His commentary on Saʿdī’s
Gulistān, titled Bahār-i Bārān, and his commentary on Niẓāmī’s Sikandarnāmah, titled Sharḥ-i
Sikandarnāmah, were both published in 1891. By 1898, his commentary on the qasida of
Badr-i Chāch, which he had written as a guide for his sons, was in its second printing.103
99
For discussions of the rise and dissemination of print in the colonial period, mainly focused on vernacular lan-
guages, see Dubrow, Cosmopolitan Dreams; Minault, Secluded Scholars; Orsini, Print and Pleasure; Pritchett, Marvelous
Encounters; Robb, Print and the Urdu Public; and Stark, Empire of Books.
100
Two important preliminary discussions of Persian book production in India and nineteenth-century printing
are Tavakoli-Targhi, “Early Persianate Modernity,” and Shah, “Sustaining Authority.”
101
The British government’s quarterly lists of published works have recently been digitized and made freely
available online. See “Digitised ‘Quarterly Lists,’” British Library. For evidence of the proliferation of Persian publi-
cations despite the so-called decline in Persian readership at the time, one need only consult library and publica-
tions catalogs. A search in WorldCat (http://www.worldcat.org) for Persian-language books published by Nawal
Kishore between 1857 and 1947 yields around 1,200 titles, compared to approximately 2,400 for Urdu.
102
For his life and works, see Bruce, “Ḡiāṯ-al-Dīn Rāmpuri.”
103
Rāmpuri, Sharḥ-i Qasāʾid-i Badr-i Chāch, 410.
Iranian Studies 735
By contrast, his works not related to the colonial exams were mostly left in manuscript.104
His unpublished works include commentaries on other Persian works, including on the cel-
ebrated Masnavī Nairang-i ʿIshq by Ghanīmat Kunjāhī (d. 1675); treatises on Persian poetics,
grammar, and style; original works on medicine; and long and short collections of fantastic
tales. Genre alone cannot be thought to determine general interest, since demand for fantasy
literature, at least in vernacular languages such as Urdu, was high at the time.105 The only
exception to the rule appears to be Ghiyās al-Dīn’s letters, Rayāḥīn-i ʿAẓīm (1890), which were
never prescribed as a colonial textbook. However, as we have seen, Persian letters by
Abū-l-Fażl, Bīdil, Ghālib, Mirzā Qatil, and other Indian Persian writers were part of the colonial
curriculum, and it is not difficult to imagine that the letters in Rayāḥīn-i ʿAẓīm, which closely
resemble those of Abū-l-Fażl in style, were published in hopes that they might be adopted.
Ghiyās al-Dīn was not the only Indian Persianist whose works were excavated and pub-
lished in tandem with changes to the colonial curriculum. For example, in 1881, Nawal
Kishore published a commentary by Imām Bakhsh Ṣahbāʾī (d. 1857) on the Sih Nasr of
Ẓuhūrī. Sih Nasr had been introduced into the Calcutta curriculum in the mid-1870s, was
later adapted by the universities of Panjab and Allahabad, and remained a textbook in
Allahabad’s curriculum throughout the colonial period. Ṣahbāʾī’s commentary would have
been useful as a guide to Ẓuhūrī’s prose. Students on the MA exam at Allahabad in 1902 not
only had to translate it into English, but also explain allusions in it, gloss vocabulary, and vocal-
ize and analyze etymology, all these being primary concerns of commentaries on Persian texts.
The new commercial function of classical commentaries as guides for college students
affected the way that the editions were marketed. The cover pages of Nawal Kishore editions
often replaced the original, literary titles of commentaries with names that clearly identified
the books as pedagogical tools and study aids. For example, the commentary by Mullā Quṭb
al-Dīn Fārigh on the odes of ʿUrfī bears the poetic and chronogrammatic title Faiż-bār
(Bearing or Raining Bounty; 1682–83).106 The Nawal Kishore edition replaces the original
title with the more commercial Sharḥ-i Qaṣāʾid-i ʿUrfī (Explication of the Odes of ʿUrfī).
The Persian curriculum also created markets for new commentaries on Persian classics,
including some in Urdu. Many of these texts were published not by the government-backed
Nawal Kishore, but by independent presses that also published Persian and Urdu literature.
The authors of these commentaries and translations were often, themselves, employed by
the colonial colleges. For example, the author of Sharḥ-i Ruqʿāt-i Bīdil (Lucknow: Anvār-i
Muḥammadi, n.d.), Ḥakīm Shaikh ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Daryābādī, was a professor of Arabic and
Persian at Canning College in Lucknow.107 Bīdil’s Ruqʿāt or letters had been incorporated
into the First Arts examination at the University of Calcutta in 1874, where they remained
in use as a textbook for over a decade. The publishers of the commentary describe Bīdil’s
letters as an “illusory world of deception” (ṭilism-i firīb) and ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz’s text as “intelligi-
ble by common people” (ʿām-fahm).108 ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz’s text was thus self-consciously written
and marketed as a college teacher’s guide for perplexed students.
As the Persian courses grew to include a larger and wider-ranging corpus of texts, the
demand for study aids grew from commentaries on particular texts to include explications
of the curriculum itself. Sharḥ-i Bī E Fārsi Kors (Meerut: Qāsimi Press, 1907) is a running glos-
sary in Urdu on the BA course designed by Amjad ʿAlī for the Persian examination at the
University of Allahabad in 1908. Coauthored by teachers of Arabic and Persian, the
335-page commentary contains Urdu definitions of key terms and Urdu translations and
summaries of the Persian. It also includes the page numbers of Amjad ʿAlī’s anthology
104
Shikīb, Rāmpūr kā Dabistān-i Shāʿirī, 267–72.
105
For discussions of the marketability of folk and fantasy literature, see Pritchett, Marvelous Encounters and
Romance Tradition; and Pasha M. Khan, Broken Spell.
106
Fārigh, Sharḥ-i Qasāʾid-i ʿUrfī, 162.
107
Al-ʿAzīz, Sharḥ-i Ruqʿāt-i Bīdil, 64.
108
Ibid., front matter, 64.
textbook to facilitate cross-reference and study. Similarly, Sharḥ-i Int́ armīd́ iyat́ Kors Fārsī
(Lahore: Karimi Press, 1927) is a commentary on the FA Persian and Munshi examinations
at the University of Panjab.109 It likewise provided students with Urdu glosses of key
terms, explanations and translations of difficult passages, and page numbers of the pub-
lished course to facilitate reference and study.
The colonial curricula also created a marketplace for English translations, many of which
were marketed specifically as study aids for students. In the 1890s, Thomas George, then
head translator at the chief court in Panjab, translated the entire Persian intermediate cur-
riculum at the University of Panjab into English as a textbook in four volumes for stu-
dents.110 By 1906, the translation was in its third edition.111
The translations of Bahāristān (1487) by ʿAbd or-Rahmān Jāmī (1414–92) into English by
Indian scholars are a case in point.112 Amjad ʿAlī was the first to adopt the text in his
1889 readers for the 1891 entrance and intermediate exams for the University of
Allahabad.113 His courses were current for several years before being made current again
in 1906. By then, Jāmī’s text also had been adopted for the exams at the University of
Bombay, where it remained a regular part of the curriculum for decades.114 A complete
translation of Bahāristān had been done by Edward Rehatsek and published in Britain anon-
ymously and for subscribers only by Richard Francis Burton’s Kama Shastra Society in
1887.115 The Bahāristān’s sexually explicit and potentially offensive material meant that
only certain chapters could be prescribed for examinations, and that some material from
the remaining chapters was expurgated. The inclusion of the expurgated text on the colonial
exams created a market for partial and expurgated English translations for students.
The first translation of Bahāristān for students was The Behàristàn-i-Jàmi or Abode of Spring
in two volumes (1899, 1900) by Sorabji Fardunji Mulla, a Parsi who had been educated in the
colonial university system and taught at Elphinstone College in Bombay.116 His translation
omits the sixth chapter (called raużah [garden]) of the text, which includes sexually explicit
humor, and also omits some of the Arabic passages in the Persian. Mulla corrected Rehatsek
without referring to him. He also included material for students: an introduction about
Jami’s life and text as well as interlinear glosses and notes to facilitate study.
Mulla’s translation was followed by Baharistan-i-Jami (1914) by Chhotubhai B. Abuwala and
Md. Hasibullah Qureishy.117 Abuwala had studied at the Gujarat College in Ahmedabad and
Wilson College in Bombay, both affiliates of the University of Bombay, from which he had
earned a BA in language and literature in 1914 with Persian as his classical language.
Qureishy had passed the Persian-medium high proficiency in Persian examination from
the University of Panjab. The Abuwala and Qureishy translation includes only Jāmī’s intro-
duction and chapters 1–4 and 7–8, and, like Mulla’s, expurgates sexual and risqué material. In
addition to providing students with a lengthy biographical and critical introduction, they
also include copious notes on each chapter. They apparently intended their work to be
read alongside the original Persian, since the notes comprise glosses of transliterated
Persian words and phrases not found in the translation itself. Their translation also includes
a concise five-page summary of each translated chapter, complete with an overview of the
major themes addressed in the book’s many moral anecdotes.
The final edition for students was Bahāristān-i Jāmī (title in Persian; 1941) by Sayyid ʿAbd
al-Raʾūf, who held three colonial degrees, including a BA and a degree in translation
109
Bilgrāmī, Sharḥ-i Int́ armīd́ iyat́ Kors Fārsī.
110
George, Translation and Explanation (1897).
111
George, Translation and Explanation (1906), front matter.
112
For a detailed discussion of these translations, see Bruce, “Making Sense.”
113
ʿAlī, Muntakhabāt, 31–47; ʿAlī, Int́ armīd́ iyat́ , 54–7.
114
Bombay, Calendar 1906–1907, 719; Bombay, Calendar 1923–24 and 1924–25, 795.
115
[Rehatsek], Beháristán. On Rehatsek, see Bruce, “Edward Rehatsek.”
116
Mulla, The Behàristàn-i-Jàmi or Abode of Spring.
117
Abuwala and Qureishy, Baharistan-i-Jami.
Iranian Studies 737
studies.118 Unlike the previous translations for students, Sayyid ʿAbd al-Raʾuf’s book is explic-
itly advertised on the cover page as prescribed for the examinations at the University of
Bombay. It is the least complete translation, comprising only the first, seventh, and eighth
chapters, but it also contains an English glossary and his own edition of the Persian text.
Conclusion
The Persian curriculum in the colonial universities had a profound influence on intellectual
and cultural life in India. The sheer number of graduates who passed through the system by
the partition of 1947 is enough to illustrate the point. In the first few decades of the univer-
sities’ existence, the number of graduates was small enough for the editors of the university
calendars to publish their names in cumulative lists. For example, we find in the University
of Calcutta calendars of the 1880s and 1890s a cumulative list of graduates, from the earliest
days to the present. The Calcutta calendar for 1881–82 records some 1,650 BA graduates and
around 3,350 students who had passed FA and entrance exams.119 Of these, as outlined above,
a substantial number would have completed the classical examination in Persian. By the
1900s, however, the number of graduates was too large to maintain the cumulative rosters,
and calendars printed only those students who had successfully completed exams in the pre-
vious cycle (usually two years). The University of Panjab calendar for 1936–37, for example,
records that around 2,500 students earned DLitt, MA, and BA degrees in 1935–36. Among the
listed are those who earned MA degrees in Persian and BA degrees with honors in Persian. Of
the approximately 300 students who earned specialist MA degrees in the Faculty of Oriental
Learning that year, 228 earned the Munshi Fazil or honors Persian degree.120
The colonial universities created unprecedented forms of standardization for Persian
studies in British India. The prescription of textbooks for university examinations meant
that students at affiliated colleges across British India read the same selections from the
same corpus of texts in preparation for the same examinations.
The curriculum of the colonial universities also created and sustained a massive ecosys-
tem for Persian studies in colonial India. With classical studies as a necessary part of the
exams, the colonial universities guaranteed continued demand and support for Persian fac-
ulty at affiliated colleges. They likewise ensured a sustained market demand for editions of
Persian literature, commentaries in English, Persian, and Urdu on Persian textbooks, and
English and Urdu translations for students. Future studies, following the pioneering work
of Gauri Vishwanathan on the politics of English-language instruction, might examine the
politics of the changes wrought in the Persian canon, such as the inclusion of Persian trans-
lations of Orientalist histories (e.g., Malcolm) and contemporary literature (e.g., the plays of
Ākhūnzādah), and their relationship to broader colonial and imperial projects.
The university calendars also show us that Persian remained a multicommunal language
throughout the colonial period. Persian studies in colonial India counted Hindus, Muslims,
Parsis, and Sikhs, as well as British Orientalists, among its students, teachers, examiners,
translators, and scholars.
Far from a fixed corpus of classical texts focused on any one particular region, the Persian
curricula in the colonial universities gradually expanded to include classical and contempo-
rary works drawn from a wide range of fields and genres and written by authors from across
the Persian and Persianate ecumene, from Azerbaijan through Iran to India. Classics such as
Gulistān, Akhlāq-i Jalālī, Anvār-i Suhailī, and the Sikandarnāmah were studied alongside
Mughal-era Indo-Persian poetry and prose, histories and poetry by Iranian writers from
the Qajar and Pahlavi periods, and contemporary works by Indian writers of Persian such
as Muḥammad Iqbāl and Aṣghar ʿAlī Rūḥī. The present article has noted the significance
118
Al-Raʾūf, Bahāristān-i Jāmī.
119
Calcutta, Calendar, 1881–82, 210–311.
120
Panjab, Calendar 1936–1937, 778–814, 833–36.
of the changes made by Indian Persianists in the 1880s and 1890s without speculating about
the relationship of these changes to educational reform. To what extent the Hunter
Commission reforms of 1882–83 played a role in shifting control over the curriculum to
Indian scholars is unclear, since the main focus of the reforms was on the promotion of ele-
mentary education and industrial or commercial training (as opposed to the literary curric-
ulum of the universities).121 The Hunter Commission does not explain, at least not entirely,
the autonomy afforded to Indian examiners and curricular designers, let alone the more
important question of why the Indian scholars selected the texts that they did.
The next step for the study of Persian in the colonial period is to paint a fuller picture by
studying the figures who received, produced, and transformed the curriculum by making
connections between broader debates and decisions made about the selection of texts,
and by comparing the selections themselves, to gain insights into shifting attitudes about
inclusion and exclusion in curricular design. Research also must relate changes and develop-
ments in the curriculum to extracurricular literary trends. The persistent production of
Persian literature, particularly poetry, by Indians in the colonial period attests to its ongoing
cultural significance. The popularity of Persian qavvālī songs of praise; major Persian works
by Muḥammad Iqbāl; the abiding presence of Persian verse in the collected works of Urdu
poets in the colonial and postcolonial periods; and the scholarly attention paid to Persian
letters by a wide range of thinkers—from the Islamic scholar Ashraf ʿAlī Thānvī to the
Marxist progressive Sajjād Ẓahīr—all attest to the continuing significance of Persian letters
throughout the colonial and postcolonial periods, despite the displacement of Persian as a
language of governance in the early nineteenth century. What influence the curriculum
of Persian studies in the colonial universities had on the development of Indo-Persian liter-
ature and Indo-Persianate thought in the colonial and postcolonial periods remains a central
question for future research.
Acknowledgments. Many thanks are due to Aria Fani, Alexander Jabbari, and Kevin Schwartz for their comments
on an early draft of this paper, and to the anonymous reviewers at Iranian Studies for their feedback and corrections.
I also am grateful to the editors of Iranian Studies, Cameron Cross and Sussan Siavoshi, for their suggestions and for
shepherding the article to publication. All errors and omissions are, of course, my own.
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Cite this article: Bruce GM (2022). Persian Studies in India and the Colonial Universities, 1857–1947. Iranian Studies
55, 719–740. https://doi.org/10.1017/irn.2021.22
doi:10.1017/irn.2022.30
A RT I C L E
Forlorn Arabs and Flying Americans: National Identity

in the Early Childhood Curriculum of Postrevolutionary
Iran, 1979–2009
Shervin Malekzadeh
Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, Colgate University, Hamilton, NY, USA
(Received 30 March 2022; revised 20 April 2022; accepted 21 April 2022)
Abstract
Drawing upon three decades of postrevolutionary textbooks, this article traces the development of the
Arab Muslim as a recurring character in the early elementary curriculum of the Islamic Republic, set
against the historical context of Iranian modernization and state formation in the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries. Sympathy for the Arab by the postrevolutionary state included a rebuke and
an affirmation: Look at what has happened to the Arabs who were not able to defend their homes
and their homeland, and look at what has not happened to us. Set against the Palestinian Arab figure
are the accomplishments of American scientists and inventors who feature prominently in the postrev-
olutionary curriculum as sources of emulation for young readers. Star turns from Thomas Edison,
Alexander Graham Bell, and Orville and Wilbur Wright invite a reconsideration of the role of the for-
eign Other in the construction of Iranian national identity, notably the expectation that the dispos-
sessed constitute natural allies in Iran’s ceaseless struggle against “the West.” Islamization of the
primary school curriculum since 1979 has not come at the expense of Iranian national identity but
as its expression, elucidating the ways postrevolutionary educational materials can serve as a reposi-
tory for tracing the continuities and permutations in depicting the Arab or Western Other as well as
different civilizational ethos of the Islamic and Persianate world across time.
Keywords: Arabs; identity; Iran; nationalism; Persians; postrevolutionary education; textbooks
Khāled stood motionless as the soldiers surrounded him. All of his friends had run away
but he stood alone, a rock still held in his hand. Only six years old, he showed no sign of
fear. This only angered the soldiers more. They leveled their rifles at him. “Who taught
you to throw stones at us?” one shouted. “If you don’t tell us, we will kill you! There
are no cameras here! No one will know that you’re dead!” Khāled relented. “My brother,
my brother Mohammad.”
The soldiers rushed to Khāled’s home, certain that they were about to arrest a major
leader of the rebellion. Khāled’s parents opened the door. The soldiers demanded to
see Mohammad. “We will not return your other son until you bring him!” they shouted
angrily. “Bring him now!” A smile passed over the father’s face. He went inside and
returned with a small child. “Here is Mohammad,” he said. “He is three years old.” The
soldiers were stunned, unable to speak.
742 Shervin Malekzadeh
In the confusion, Khāled broke free from his captors. He ran to his brother and held him
close. The story took a gruesome turn: “This time you come with us and strike them with
rocks too. Don’t be scared! Alright?” Mohammad nodded his head and said: “I too will come
so that I can hit them with rocks.” At that moment, the Israeli officer slammed the butt of
his rifle into Mohammad’s head and warm blood spilled onto Khāled’s hands (Fig. 1).1
“The Palestinian Teacher” appeared halfway through the third-grade primer, in a corner of
an Islamic Republic primary school curriculum, carefully gauged to solicit outrage from its
young audience. With its stark depiction of malice highlighted by the soldiers’ almost car-
toonish cruelty, the lesson traced for its readers a world of manifest evil in which the injus-
tices suffered by the dispossessed, even by children such as the irrepressible Khāled and
Mohammad, went unredeemed. A call to arms, Mohammad’s martyrdom prefigured the
courage expected of Iran’s “children of the revolution” even as it darkly warned them of
the fate that awaited those who would lose their land.
Their task was to bear witness to crimes unseen or ignored by much of the rest of the
world. Iran after 1979 had proclaimed itself advocate and agent for the rescue and revival
of the oppressed of the world, above all the community of believers, or ummat al-Islām. As
such, the boundaries of Iran’s imagined community extended in the post-1979 era beyond
the borders of the traditional “Guarded Domains of Iran” to include its Arab and Muslim
neighbors, now conceived as both participants and beneficiaries of the Islamic Revolution.2
This new internationalist aspiration was in reality the latest iteration of an older nation-
alist project of Irāniyat, fostered by the late Qajar and Pahlavi states primarily in the early
twentieth century and rooted in the distant traumas of the nineteenth century.3 In the new
reverie on what it meant to be “truly” Iranian, the plight of the forlorn Arab served as sym-
bol and reminder of the indispensability of preserving Iran’s sovereignty against foreign
encroachment; the dismemberment of Lebanon and Palestine in the twentieth century was
less an inspiration for global struggle than it was a contemporary reminder of the catastrophes
of Golestan (1813) and Turkmenchai (1828), two early nineteenth-century Perso-Russian trea-
ties that resulted in significant territorial losses for Qajar Iran in the Caucasus.4
Drawing upon three decades of postrevolutionary textbooks, this article traces the devel-
opment of the Arab Muslim as a recurring character in the early elementary curriculum of
the Islamic Republic, set against the historical context of Iranian modernization and state
1
“The Palestinian Teacher,” in Fārsi-ye sevom-e dabestān, 1386/2007, 133–35. All primary evidence presented in
this article is based on original research carried out during 2008–2009 and 2013 in the archives of the Iranian
Ministry of Education’s Organization for Educational Research and Planning (OERP). The archives include the entire
collection of Persian primers covering grades one through three published between 1979 and 2009, as well as selec-
tions from late Pahlavi–era primers, grades two through five.
2
The phrase “Guarded Domains of Iran” (Mamālek-e mahruseh) was originally coined during the early sixteenth
century to describe the territorial domains of the Safavid kings, who fostered an Iranian national unity centered
around the Persian language and literary corpus, and the Twelver Shiʿi religion. Under Agha Mohammad Shah
Qajar and his successors, the term again was used to legitimize the Qajar dynasty and to foster a newly emerging
sense of Iranian nationalism. Originally stretching from Dagestan in the north to the Indian Ocean in the south,
defeat in war to Russian and English armies during the nineteenth century called into question the legitimacy of
the Qajar monarchy and its claim to be the true defender of the Guarded Domains. Amanat, “Russian Intrusion,” 38.
3
Kashani-Sabet (“Fragile Frontiers”) observes that the concept of Irāniyat (“Iranianness,” or more simply “being
Iranian”) existed long before the rise of modern nationalism in the nineteenth century, making the task of “imag-
ining” the Iranian community less challenging than in other places. She writes, “The impulse to set apart things
Iranian—land and language, culture and civilization—had old roots and simply found a new application and context
in nationalism.”
4
The wars with Russia (1804–1813 and 1826–1828) remain prominent in the collective psyche of Iranians, many of
whom can still recite the names of the territories lost to the tsarist regime more than two centuries ago; Amanat,
“Russian Intrusion.” Monica Ringer details how political and social responses to the trauma of defeat laid the foun-
dation for modern education in Iran in Education, Religion, and the Discourse of Cultural Reform.
FIGURE 1. “The Palestinian Teacher,” Fā rsi-ye sevom-e dabestā n (Third-grade Persian), Tehran: Ministry of Education, 1386/
2007.
formation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.5 Whereas the Pahlavi state had por-
trayed the Arab as an abject figure incapable of redemption other than by the grace and
intervention of Iranian civilization and culture, he was rendered merely pitiful by the
5
A useful summary of modern state formation as “the dynamic, historically informed, often contingent process
by which states emerge in relation to societies” can be found in OECD “Concepts and Dilemmas,” 13–14. See also Vu,
“Studying the State.”
Islamic educational system.6 Sympathy for the Arab by the postrevolutionary state in its pri-
mary school materials included a rebuke and an affirmation: Look at what has happened to
the Arabs who were not able to defend their homes and their homeland, and look at what
has not happened to us.7
As he has throughout Iran’s modern history, the imagined Arab remains an object in cons-
tant need of rescue, stripped of any meaningful agency or subjectivity. The Islamic Republic of
Iran’s innovation was to place him within a narrative of national failure. Iran’s strident advo-
cacy on behalf of the region’s dispossessed reveals itself to be ultimately inseparable from the
Arab’s inability to protect himself, or from Iran’s deep-seated desire to demonstrate its supe-
riority over its neighbors, a compensation for its own weakness in the world.8
Set against Arab suffering and defeat in the Islamic Republic’s elementary textbooks are the
accomplishments of American scientists and inventors who feature prominently in the postrev-
olutionary curriculum as sources of emulation for young readers. Star turns from Thomas
Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and Orville and Wilbur Wright invite a reconsideration of the
role of the foreign Other in the construction of Iranian national identity, notably the expectation
that the dispossessed constitute natural allies in Iran’s ceaseless struggle against “the West.”9
More than just primers, the Persian textbooks presented in this article provide young stu-
dents with their first exposure to the ideology of the revolution and the official values of the
Islamic Republic. These textbooks matter to the field because they contain what Mandana
E. Limbert refers to as official “wish images,” idealized projections manufactured by elites
of the perfect (and obedient) members of society against which daily life can be measured.10
Unique among media in Iran, textbooks come with a guaranteed readership, making them
an important source for understanding the shaping of Iranian historical consciousness
among an increasingly literate population.11 Textbooks more broadly serve as markers of
Iran’s participation in a universal modernity, a participation that takes place within the
framework of a distinctive Iranian culture. By reproducing the most advanced and modern
knowledge in the standardized format of a national curriculum, textbooks act as an instru-
ment of indigenization and mediation “between the parochialism of national identity and
the universalism of modern knowledge.”12
The organization of a coherent and consistent ideological message in textbooks after 1979
has been haphazard, at best.13 Immediately following the revolution, and acting on their own
6
Vejdani has shown that Pahlavi-era textbooks consistently emphasized the abjectness of Arab (as opposed to
Muslim) culture and behavior, a distinction that the postrevolutionary school system continues to preserve;
Vejdani, Making History, especially 74–91. Islam, particularly as practiced by Iranians, remained a positive historical
force in the prerevolutionary curriculum during the final years of the monarchy, when state secularization was at its
height. See Fārsi-ye dovom-e dabestān, 1355/1976; Fārsi-ye sevom-e dabestān, 1355/1976; Fārsi-ye chāhārom-e dabestān,
1355/1976; and Fārsi-ye panjom-e dabestān, 1355/1976.
7
Malekzadeh, “Schooled to Obey.” The dissertation traces continuities between the memory of Qajar territorial
losses and the centrality of national self-preservation to the Pahlavi and IRI projects of modernization and schooling;
see especially chapters 1 and 4.
8
For a full-throated discussion of the depths and durability of Iranian contempt toward Arabs, including by the cur-
rent regime, see Zia-Ebrahimi, Emergence of Iranian Nationalism. The belief that Arabs were uncivilized and barbaric before
the advent of Islam was axiomatic for Morteza Motahhari and Ali Shariati, whose writings were foundational to the
curriculum of the IRI school system. By contrast, both authors exulted in the possibilities of Islamic practice under
the Iranians. Motahhari, Khadamāt-e moteqābel-e Irān va Eslām; Shariati, Bāzshenāsi-e hoviat-e Irani-Islami.
9
Golnar Mehran’s widely cited 1989 article, “Socialization of Schoolchildren in the Islamic Republic of Iran,”
refers to the “New Islamic Person” as the ultimate goal of the postrevolutionary curriculum. According to
Mehran, this individual “hates the prerevolutionary regime, rejects any form of dependence on the West, mistrusts
the non-Muslim world and is highly critical of Western ways, and sympathizes with all oppressed peoples, especially
Muslims’” Mehran, “Socialization,” 49.
10
Limbert, “Oman.”
11
Vejdani, “Place of Islam.”
12
Marashi, Nationalizing Iran, 98.
13
Systematic study of the internal politics of Iran’s Islamic school system remains almost nonexistent, despite the
presence of an expansive literature and understanding of factionalism under IRI rule. See “Structure No System: The
Iranian Studies 745
initiative, several groups within the nascent regime began to till the pedagogical soil in which a
new school system could be sown. Their self-assigned task was to produce the goals and philos-
ophy suitable for an Islamic education. With the Ministry of Education in disarray, these early
efforts were confined to the Office of Investigations housed in the Organization for Educational
Research and Planning, or OERP. OERP has deputy ministerial status in the Ministry of Education
and is responsible for preparing, producing, and distributing textbooks. Although the head of
the department is a political appointee, OERP has a reputation for being one of the more
technocratic-minded and professional elements of the educational structure in Iran.
Work in the Office of Investigations stopped altogether with the absorption of groups into
the newly resurrected Supreme Council of Education (SCE). The SCE was restored in early
1980 under the auspices of the governing Revolutionary Council after a nearly three-year
hiatus.14 As an agency, the SCE fuses both legislative and executive functions. Its mandate
is to devise the goals and curriculum appropriate for an Islamic society, as well as to imple-
ment educational policy. Importantly, as the ultimate legislative authority over matters of
education, the SCE has the final word on the annual goals of the curriculum, although
since 1984 any new major policy initiatives mounted by the SCE must first be approved
by the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution, or SCCR.
Although this article focuses primarily on the Arab Other in the context of contemporary
Iran, it points to future research on depictions of the Persianate in national settings other than
Iran. If the Arab has an outsized presence in the curriculum of a purportedly post-nationalist,
post-Persianate Islamic Republic, then what becomes of him when his story is told by other
Persian speakers—the Tajik, the Afghan, the Uzbek—whose voices are notably absent in the
Iranian curriculum? How do these countries reckon with their own Persianate pasts and
how do they come to terms with the Iranian, whose contemporary descendants lay exclusive
claim to the Persianate world? The question of who gets to be the inheritor of Persianate leg-
acies ultimately rests on a fallacy.15 As Fani argues elsewhere, students of Iranian and
Persianate studies would do well to step back and view nationalist projects transregionally—
not to adjudicate which one is more historically authentic, but to critique the epistemic circle
within which they all stand, whether it be in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, or Uzbekistan.16
The Immemorial Iran

The embrace of Iranian chauvinism is hardly to be expected from a curriculum and revolution
whose leaders routinely, and quite loudly, condemn nationalism as conspiracy, an instrument
of imperial rule designed to sow division within the developing world. The purpose of Islamic
schooling is neither patriotism nor the preservation of sovereign borders but preparation of
the public for the defense of the ummah. The nation–state, at best, plays a subordinate role
in what is understood to be an endless struggle against oppression and injustice.17 For
Foundations of the Politicization of the Postrevolutionary School System (1979–1989),” in Malekzadeh, Ambiguous
Outcomes. For a Persian-language account of the institutional challenges and failures of the postrevolutionary
Ministry of Education, see Mohammad Rezaei, Tahlili az zendegi-ye Ruzmarreh-ye dānesh āmuzeshi. Mohammad
Ayatollahi Tabaar provides a compelling account of polarization in Iran in Religious Statecraft: The Politics of Islam
in Iran, an important update to Mehdi Moslem’s seminal work, Factional Politics in Post-Khomeini Iran.
14
The Supreme Council of Education was originally established in 1966. The Council met from the 1968 through
1977, after which it ceased activities. In its original incarnation the responsibilities of the SCE were limited to pro-
ducing the goals and standards of the Ministry of Education and did not include the executive and legislative powers
granted to it in the postrevolutionary period.
15
There is an unusual urgency to the matter that poisons discussion in the public sphere. See the following dis-
cussion over who “owns” Nowruz for a recent example: @CCAForum, March 13, 2022, https://twitter.com/
CCAForum/status/1503026326990643204.
16
Fani, “Two Nations Find a Poet.”
17
Observers of Iran typically characterize the postrevolutionary educational system as an unblinking apparatus of
the state, “an educational model atypical at the international level” in which “purification and [ideological] com-
mitment take precedence over knowledge and skills”; Paivandi, Discrimination and Intolerance, 9. Patricia J. Higgins
stalwarts like the following high school principal interviewed in Tehran in 2008 by the soci-
ologist Mohammad Rezaei, the denial of nationalist projects constitutes a profession of loy-
alty as well as a commitment to professional duty:
We especially condemn nationalism. Imam Khomeini held nationalism to be a source of

division. We must not propagandize nationalism in the school. This would be like teach-
ing racism. . . . Are we teaching the Koran? Do we start the morning assembly with the
name of God? Do we have prayer in the morning? . . . We must not do anything that
would lead to the flag taking the place of the Koran. It’s not important whether or
not there is a flag but the Koran must be present, velāyāt (guardianship) must be pre-
sent, the Imams and the holy sites must be present.18
In truth, the rejection or acceptance of nationalism has not been an issue in modern Iran,
before or after 1979. Religious and secular camps have not been “at two opposite extremes
along a spectrum, with secularists propagating nationalist ideals and religious leaders oppos-
ing those ideals.”19 Although some ideologues claim to reject nationalism, Aghaie notes that
“their actual writings and speeches relied heavily upon nationalist concepts” shared by their
rivals.20 These include assumptions about Iran’s primordial and organic character as a
2,500-year-old nation with an uninterrupted history that “looms out of an immemorial
past and glides into a limitless future.”21
Official denunciations of nationalism have had, in any case, almost no impact on textbook
content. Indeed, gaps between official talk and textbooks, rhetoric, and pedagogical practice
are hardly a new phenomenon in modern Iran, as Farzin Vejdani’s research on the early his-
tory curriculum shows. Despite conventional belief that Pahlavi nationalist historians con-
sidered the introduction of Islam to Iran to be the source of backwardness, history
textbooks throughout the twentieth century “neither ignored Islamic history nor claimed
that Islam was the cause of Iranian decline.”22 Closer to the present day, there is a growing
if nascent literature dedicated to tracing the presence of Iranian nationalism in educational
design after 1979. This research demonstrates that Islamization of the curriculum since 1979
has not come at the expense of Iranian national identity but as its expression.23
and Pirouz Shoar-Ghaffari write that a rigid hierarchy of educational needs comprises the formal ends of the school
system, beginning with “religious and spiritual ones first, followed by scientific and cultural, social, political, and
finally economic goals”; Higgins and Shoar-Ghaffari, “Women’s Education,” 20.
18
Interviewed in Rezaei, Tahlili az zendegi-ye Ruzmarreh-ye dānesh āmuzeshi, 160.
19
Aghaie, “Islam and Nationalist Historiography,” 25. At the time of the principal’s remarks the curriculum con-
tained numerous examples of nation-building exercises, including an extended lesson for third graders on the
importance of the Islamic Republic’s flag, simply titled “Flag” (Parcham).
20
Aghaie, “Islam and Nationalist Historiography,” 25. Earlier Aghaie writes, “Hence, nationalism is not, strictly
speaking, an ideology or a single belief. Rather, it is essentially a discourse surrounding the idea of ‘nation.’
Within this discourse, the nation is defined and redefined in a contest between diverse political and social groups”
(21). For a powerful account of this process in the experiences of Iran’s major ethnic minorities, see Elling, Minorities
in Iran.
21
Anderson, Imagined Communities, 11–12. “No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind,” writes
Anderson. The Islamic Republic, for all its lofty goals of establishing the greater ummah, is no different.
22
Vejdani, “Place of Islam,” 206. Vejdani notes that the bulk of Iranian history taught in school takes place after
the arrival of Islam, a direct consequence of a nationalist logic that emphasizes the continuities of Iranian history, its
“nationalist narratives of resilience” (210).
23
The nationalism of the Islamic Republic as it is taught in the classroom remains woefully understudied. Little
has changed since Amir Hossein Mirfakhraie observed in 2008 that “there has been no systematic research on how
both Islamic ideology and non-Islamic discourses inform the construction of the ideal citizen in the school text-
books”; Mirfakhraie, “Curriculum Reform and Identity Politics,” 14. Notably, even scholars who center the
nation–state emphasize its initial abandonment by the IRI. The revolution’s embrace and promotion of an
Islamic-Iranian identity is typically described as a concession, made under duress. See Ansari, Politics of
Nationalism, 1.
Iranian Studies 747
Textbooks as primary sources therefore present a powerful corrective to conventional

thinking about education in postrevolutionary Iran. Far from being static, impermeable
instruments of dogma and ideology, textbooks have been highly unstable, subject to the
same forces of disruption that plague other social, cultural, and political realms in Iran.24
Tracing curricular content over time as historical artifact reveals the massive gaps that
exist between official rhetoric and formal practice, allowing researchers and analysts to bet-
ter assess schooling’s purpose and effects, as well as to elucidate how expressions of Iran’s
place in the world and engagements with its perceived Others may shift over time.
Modernity’s Dilemma: Setting the Arab Apart

The 1979 Revolution did little to disrupt the belief that Iranians were a people assigned a
unique destiny, if not by God, then by History. Nationalism remained “the determining ide-
ology of modern Iran,” the essential reference point “to which all competing ideologies have
ultimately had to adhere, and within which most have been subsumed.”25 If there were a
utopia to be found (or recovered) by the new Islamic order, it would be achieved by the for-
mation of the Iranian nation, promoted through, not despite, religious precepts and val-
ues.26 Salvation’s path once again ran through Europe and North America, also the
source of torments.27 The trauma of military defeat and the subsequent loss of sovereignty
over large swaths of territory in the early nineteenth century convinced Iranian reformers
that the country could only be saved by adopting western technology and modes of govern-
ment, a judgment largely shared by the leadership of the Islamic Republic.28 Constituting a
“dilemma of modernization,” generations of nationalizing elites faced the difficult challenge
of bringing development to Iran by importing foreign knowledge without sacrificing Iran’s
cultural identity.29
Efforts by early Pahlavi reformers to localize modernity while remaining true to an
“authentic” self corresponded with a concomitant desire to fix blame for Iran’s degradation
on the Arab invasion and conquest of Persia in the seventh century. Modern Iran would
be defined by the concepts and knowledge imported from the West, but its national
24
Malekzadeh, “Children without Childhood.” For a comprehensive study of the internal dynamics of Iran’s com-
plex and dissonant political system, see Brumberg and Farhi, Power and Change in Iran.
25
Ansari, Politics of Nationalism. He writes, “the notion that Iranians were somehow chosen had been reinforced
not diminished by the Islamist narrative” (222).
26
Islam was an expression of sovereign authenticity, of the “real” Iran, fulfilling a project already more than a
century old at the time of the revolution. Sami Zubaida disagrees, arguing that the Khomeinist project is unthinkable
outside of the modern, western paradigm of the nation–state, but he allows only a superficial role for religion,
describing it as an epiphenomenon, “sprayed on” the architecture of the state as a salve to the masses. Zubaida,
“Ideological Preconditions.” For a more sympathetic reading of the compatibility of Islam with modernity, see
Mirsepassi, Intellectual Discourse.
27
Inspired by similar reforms then underway in Egypt and Turkey, the Qajars under the direction of crown prince
Abbas Mirza launched a series of military reforms known as the Nezām-e jadid (1803–1833).
28
The current Leader has been quite consistent on this matter over the years. From 1985:
We are not against the process of getting raw materials from them. It should not be assumed that we reject the
products of western culture and its scientific advance that are sometimes miraculous. Such dogmatism is not
in line with Islamic views at all and we never follow this trend. We should design the building and it is not
important where the raw, needed materials are procured. However, these materials should fit the design.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, “Speech Made by His Excellency,” emphasis added. See also Khamenei, “Tā che tasviram
konand,” in which he says, “Shāgerdi bas ast!” (Enough with being a student!).
29
“Europe thus served as an important initial catalyst in considering the need to reform, a model of moderni-
zation, and at the same time, the specter of loss of territory and political autonomy that failure to reform would
enable.” From Ringer, “Negotiating Modernity,” 41. Much of the intellectual labor that went into reconciling foreign
knowledge with Iranian culture originally took place outside of Iran. For an account of the highly influential scene in
Berlin, see Matin-Asgari, “Berlin Circle.”
identity would be formed against the Arab, who represented negation, the absence of Iran
itself.30 The impulse to blame the Arab for Iran’s decline quickly ran headlong into the imper-
ative of historical continuity.31 The logic of modern nationalism dictated that there be an Iran
that “has always been there,” an unbroken presence from time immemorial. This was incom-
patible with the claim that the victory of the Muslim armies over the Sassanid empire repre-
sented a rupture in that historical timeline, marked by “silence” and loss.32
Interwar educational planners found their way out of this intellectual thicket in part by
reimagining Islam in civilizational terms, a phenomenon with origins outside of Iran but
belonging to all of humanity. “Islam,” Vejdani writes, “[has been] a positive historical force,
one that highlighted the equality of believers, rather than the ethnic hierarchy that elevated
Arabs over Iranians.”33 With the playing field leveled, the Iranian flourished, no longer deemed
a victim of conquest but as the Islamic world’s most vital and creative component.34
The revolutionaries who took control of the Ministry of Education in the late winter of
1979 embraced their predecessors’ approach. Islam was again separated from its origins as
an “Arab” religion, done so in a way that would enable the ascendence of Iran while
maintaining official commitments to pan-Islamism.35 In postrevolutionary textbooks, patri-
otic stories appear alongside lessons in the content and practice of religious faith, as
components—not rivals—of a shared national identity. Emerging from the pages is an
authentic Iran, triumphant, that could rightfully claim its status as the first among equals.
First among Equals (But Iran Makes Everything Better)

The Iranian would first need to be made into the Arab’s equal. This task falls to the third-
grade lesson “What Is the Basis of Superiority?” (Bartari be chist?) Released with the initial
wave of curricular revisions following the revolution, the lesson opens inside a mosque.
There, the Prophet Mohammad and his companions are engaged in conversation.
Suddenly, the Prophet’s close friend and follower Salmān al-Fārsi arrives for worship.
Mohammad smiles, pleased by this unexpected encounter. He beckons al-Fārsi, a Persian and
one of the earliest non-Arab converts to Islam, to come sit next to him. The gesture is not
well received by the others. One of Mohammad’s companions loudly voices his objection.
For him, al-Fārsi is beneath contempt: “Salmān is a Persian speaker and we are Arabs! He should
not be included in our group nor should he sit alongside us. He should sit at a level below!”36
The Prophet swiftly reprimands the individual, condemning his outburst with an
impromptu sermon on the true nature of Islam: “Being a Persian ( fārs) or an Arab,” he
exclaims, “is not a reason for thinking better or worse of a person. Neither our color nor
ethnicity makes us wiser. Nothing save piety and faith makes us better.”37 Mohammad
reminds those gathered there in the mosque that Islam is an experience without boundaries
or limitations, available to all comers. “We Muslims know each other as equals and as
30
Zia-Ebrahami in Emergence of Iranian Nationalism coined the phrase “dislocative nationalism” to describe this
phenomenon.
31
Vejdani, “Place of Islam.”
32
Zarrinkub, Do qarn-e sokut; Ram, “Immemorial Iranian Nation.”
33
Vejdani, “Place of Islam,” 211.
34
In turn, Islam made Iran better, a point repeatedly emphasized by Motahhari and Shariati in their prerevolu-
tionary writings. See Aghaie, “Islam and Nationalist Historiography.”
35
The overt ideological indoctrination at the heart of Iranian schooling, that is, the “Islamization” of school and
society by the postrevolutionary government, generally follows patterns determined by the “rules of the game”
associated with modern nationalism and state formation. Specifically, state leaders in Iran since the late nineteenth
century have sought to inculcate through schooling an imagined, “authentic” national culture capable of binding
state and society together. For an excellent discussion of the relationship between formal education and state efforts
in Iran to create the nation, that “abstract social category or framework tying together state, society, and culture”
see Marashi, Nationalizing Iran, 10.
36
“What Is the Basis of Superiority?” in Fārsi-ye sevom-e dabestān, 1359/1980, 83.
37
Ibid.
Iranian Studies 749
brothers. Accent and language do not separate us from one another. Where we live, our eth-
nicity, or our color must not separate us from one another.”38
It would not have been lost on the students reading the story that Mohammad makes his
oration on behalf of the only other named character in the story, and its only Iranian.
As Persian speakers, as Iranians, these same pupils learn that they must never accept second-
grade status within the ummah.39 It is a pointed message, delivered with uncommon passion
by the founder of the Islamic faith himself. The final paragraph steps outside of the story to
address students directly through the narrative fourth wall:
As you can see from this important guidance, we Muslims know each other as equals,
neither our accents nor our languages can separate us from one another. Where we live,
our race and our color will not divide us. We do not count anything other than piety
and faith (taqvā va imān) as sources of superiority.40
From the story’s title to its pallid insistence that Persians be treated as equals, the story
“What Is the Basis of Superiority?” reveals the insecurity of a revolution in its earliest
days. Extraordinary even by the heightened passions of the postrevolutionary curriculum,
it conveys an unmistakable message of defiance and dignity, staged behind an official line
of Islamic solidarity and struggle. It is a line that invariably fails to hold, typically at the
expense of Arab characters who soon tumble into ruin and loss.
Losing Their Religion

Loss, above all, of the land. Postrevolutionary textbooks from their first editions draw clear
connections among worship, faith, and the possession of mihan, or homeland.41 These earthly
bonds are affirmed by the story “Oh Iran, Oh My Homeland” (Ey Irān, ey mihan-e man), which
38
Ibid.
39
The politics of language choice and identity is a source of considerable anxiety for the founders of the Islamic
Republic. Khomeini delivered the following comments not long after the ratification of the Iranian Constitution in
April of 1979:
Sometimes the word minorities is used to refer to people such as the Kurds, Lurs, Turks, Persian, Baluchis, and
such. These people should not be called minorities, because this term assumes that there is a difference
between these brothers. In Islam, such a difference has no place at all. There is no difference between
Muslims who speak different languages, for instance, the Arabs, or Persians. It is very probable that such prob-
lems have been created by those who do not wish the Muslim countries to be united. . . . They create the issues
of nationalism, of pan-Iranism, pan-Turkism, and such isms, which are contrary to Islamic doctrines. Their
plan is to destroy Islam and the Islamic philosophy.
Cited in Atabaki, “Contesting Marginality,” 224. Atabaki reminds us that Iran’s 1979 Constitution binds the nation
through Islam as well as Persian, the latter designated as the lingua franca of the country.
40
“What Is the Basis of Superiority?” in Fārsi-ye sevom-e dabestān, 1359/1980, 83. Indeed, faith in Islam has long
been the gateway for Iranian superiority. The nationalist historian Abbas Iqbal, one of the most prominent intellec-
tuals of the constitutional era and a founder of what became Iran’s modern educational system, attributed the cul-
tural and political accomplishments during the Abbasid period to the prominence of Iranians, proclaiming that “the
majority of the learned figures among the clerics, philosophers, and poets who wrote in Arabic during this period of
Islamic civilization were Iranians”; Iqbal, Dowreh-ye tārikh-e ʿomumi, 125. Iqbal’s centering of Iranian excellence would
be echoed a few decades later by (the ostensibly anti-nationalist and “chief ideologue” of the Islamic Revolution)
Morteza Motahhari, who argued that Iranians contributed more to Islam than any other Muslim nation, including
the Arabs; Motahhari, Khadamāt-e motaqābel-e Irān va Eslām, 79–84.
41
Kashani-Sabet argues that the shift from an unbounded Persian identity based on language to an Iranian iden-
tity defined by territoriality and firm borders was the direct consequence of the calamitous military defeats of the
early nineteenth century. As she puts it, “Fear of disappearance from the world map led to a desire to protect and
promote the guarded domains”; Kashani-Sabet, “Fragile Frontiers,” 227.
first appeared in 1979. The third-grade lesson delivers a full-throated defense of Iranian
territory and soil as the source of national identity, one that is unambiguously Islamic:
Oh Iran, oh my glorious home. Your tall mountains are the symbol of the glory and dig-
nity of your children. Your wide fields are symbols of your freedom and liberty. The
rush of your rivers is a reminder of the shouts of freemen yelling “Allahu akbar!” Oh
Iran, oh my glorious home! Oh land of the pure and brave, oh land of free Muslims.
Oh, land of Islam and faith. I pledge allegiance to you.42
This is a corporeal love, tied to the permanence of geography, consecrated by the blood of
martyrs:
Oh Iran, oh my homeland! Oh Iran, my glorious home. I love you, the laughter of your
children. The shouts of your youth, the clamor of your people, I love them all. Oh, glo-
rious home, its pure soil colored by the blood of martyrs. I respect you. Each morning
and night I kiss the red tulips that grow in your cemeteries.43
There is the land, only the land, to be defended in ceaseless devotion against all enemies,
foreign or domestic:
Oh Iran, oh my glorious home! Oh, land of the pure and brave, oh land of free Muslims.
Oh, land of Islam and faith. I pledge allegiance to you, I strive with love for your devel-
opment. I love the true faith of your free people and stand ready to assist them. With
anger and hate I destroy your enemies.44
The pervasive concern that Iranians might fail to defend their homeland animates the nar-
rator’s loud defiance. To lose one’s country is to lose everything. The burden of statelessness
ultimately falls not to the Iranian, but to the Palestinian Arab, whose torments are described
in vivid detail in a series of tragic stories across the elementary school curriculum. “An
Adolescent from Palestine” appears immediately after “Oh Iran, Oh My Homeland” in the
third-grade primer. A rather pitiful scene opens the story. A young Palestinian boy, dis-
traught, stands alone in a refugee camp. The story’s narrator, an Iranian of a similar age,
attempts to initiate conversation and discover what is troubling the young Arab:
I went closer and sat next to him, but he didn’t notice, his heart seemed to be somewhere
else. I greeted him and he replied in kind, but then returned back to his thoughts. “Brother!
I see that you are upset . . . your sadness has made me upset also.” “Brother! I wish for you
to tell me your troubles so that I can perhaps help you to lighten your load” (Fig. 2).45
The Palestinian replies with a series of rhetorical questions that reveal the reasons for his silence:
He lifted his view from the ground and calmly looked at me and said: “Have you ever
heard of someone being run out of their own home, taken by force by another and
when the owner complains, his complaints are answered by bullets . . . ? Have you
ever been in a classroom that has its roof cave in because of a cluster bomb? Have
you ever heard of a hospital destroyed with the infirm still inside? Have you ever
heard of dolls that bring death to children?46
42
“Oh Iran, Oh My Homeland,” in Fārsi-ye sevom-e dabestān, 1359/1980, 91.
43
Ibid.
44
Ibid., 91–92.
45
“An Adolescent from Palestine,” in Fārsi-ye sevom-e dabestān, 1359/1980, 97.
46
Ibid., 97–98.
FIGURE 2. “An Adolescent from Palestine,” Fā rsi-ye sevom-e dabestā n (Third-grade Persian), Tehran: Ministry of
Education, 1359/1980.
The details of the occupation are graphic and unsparing. There are no safe places or activ-
ities available to the narrator: the classroom, hospital, and even children’s toys are potential
sources of death and devastation. The Palestinian’s only hope lies with those willing to come
to the aid and rescue of his people. Bearing witness, the young Iranian proclaims his deter-
mination to participate in the struggle:
Brother! These are the sufferings that weigh on our hearts and on the hearts of all free
people everywhere and I will help my triumphant and Muslim people save the house
and homeland of my comrades.47
The narrator addresses his audience directly in the final sentence, breaking the fourth wall
between the lesson and the reader to issue a final challenge: “And you brother! How will you
remember us while we are on this path?”48
“An Adolescent from Palestine” (Nowjavāni az felestin) received a dramatic makeover in the
late 1980s. No longer a passive victim, the story’s authors transformed the boy into a warrior
by replacing the image of a humble refugee languishing in a desert camp with one of an armed
militant prepared for battle. Now instead of casting his eyes to the ground, the young man
looks directly in the direction of his enemy with a rising sun in the background, presumably
signifying a day that will bring him and his people closer to victory. Despite his young age, the
young Palestinian has already seen and experienced more than his share of the violence.
Written in a dispassionate third-person narrative, and with his Kalashnikov at his side, he
details all the horrors that occurred after the Israelis drove his family out of its home:
47
Ibid., 98.
48
Ibid., 98.
He remembered incredibly bitter days. Days in which the Israeli executioners had forced
them to leave their homes, forced out by bullets and fiery bombs. Anyone who dared to
complain was answered with a hail of bullets. . . . Days in which the enemy’s bombers
had reduced the camps to dirt and blood, the tents shot full of holes. Refugee camps
whose population was filled mostly with brave, innocent Muslims, who ended up as
martyrs. . . . He remembered these bitter days along with hundreds of other bitter
days and held his rifle even tighter.49
Denied a proper childhood, the Palestinian’s only joys in life have been “the sweet days of
resistance and struggle,” the memories of which drew “a beautiful smile across his face.”50
Inspiring audiences to bear witness is no longer enough. The last version of the lesson before
its removal in the 1990s ends with the Palestinian leaving for the front, taking up arms and
dispensing with asking for aid from his Iranian readers. Its message to the reader is clear:
Muslims must take action to defend themselves.
Yet, it is weakness that has put the Palestinian in this position, his people’s future put at
risk by their loss of a homeland. The purpose remains national emancipation. After all, the
goal is not to eliminate Israel so that the Palestinians can become part of the community of
Muslims—they already are a part of the ummah. The aim is to push the Israelis out to restore
the Palestinian homeland. A variation on the theme of dispossession is found in the second-
grade primer, where Israel’s occupation again provides the crucible for transformation.
Presented in the first-person singular, “Letter from a Displaced Child” (Nāmehʾi az yek kudak-e
āvāreh) is written from the perspective of a young Palestinian refugee, marooned in a refugee
camp in southern Lebanon.
“Do you know who we are?” he asks the reader. “You and I are brothers. I am a Palestinian,
we are Palestinian-Muslim children.”51 Bound together in brotherhood by their religion and a
shared enemy, “the enemy of all free peoples everywhere,” the unnamed narrator goes on to
draw out the critical difference between himself and his Iranian counterpart, noting:
The name of our country is Palestine and the name of your country is Iran. You live in
your own country and in your own home. But we are displaced in the deserts. The
enemy has destroyed our home and homeland.52
The young orphan explains that since “your revolution became victorious,” Israel has become
frightened. Unable or too afraid to bring the fight to Iran, Israel has responded by tormenting
the much weaker Palestinian people. That Iran is both the remedy and source of the orphan’s
troubles is left unacknowledged. Only through struggle can there be hope of ever being free
again, but emancipation cannot be achieved alone. Once again, the text calls upon its readers,
the children of Iran, to consider how they might participate and engage with such a struggle.
In doing so, “Letter from a Displaced Child” appears to present a powerful alternative to nation-
alism, a call to stand in solidarity and purpose as Muslims against a terrifying enemy.
Iranians nonetheless receive a dispensation from the fight. In the postrevolutionary
reimagining of what it means to be Islamic-Iranian, it is always the vanquished Arab,
never the defeated Persian, who is portrayed in the pages of the textbooks. The Arab is
not an ally. He is a warning: The Palestinian has no home because he has no country.
Accordingly, the pretense that “Letter from a Displaced Child” is about the ummah disap-
pears in the 1982 edition of the primer. A ward of the Iranian struggle, the Palestinian
orphan attributes his people’s uprising to “the victory of your Islamic Revolution with the
leadership of Imam Khomeini,” in effect inverting the message of universalism found in the
49
“An Adolescent from Palestine,” in Fārsi-ye sevom-e dabestān, 1366/1987, 137.
50
Ibid., 137.
51
“Letter from a Displaced Child,” in Fārsi-ye dovom-e dabestān, 1358/1979, 48.
52
Ibid.
Iranian Studies 753
earlier lesson, “What Is the Basis of Superiority?”53 The experience of shared suffering forms
the nation, according to Motahhari, but in the textbooks it is almost always the Arab and his
children who must struggle.54 The Iranian only bears witness.
And then they were gone. By the late 1990s nearly all of the lessons on militant resistance
that had defined so much of the early-childhood curriculum had been removed, replaced by
an array of child-centered stories more concerned with replicating good habits and hygiene
than with the destruction of Israel.55 Along with them went the Arab, forlorn or otherwise.56
The removal of the dispossessed Arab from the curriculum can be understood as evidence of
a revolution increasingly confident of its ability to protect and preserve itself, even as it
reflected the preferences of an Iranian population that had moved on without much fanfare
from the dual-cultures debates of the past.57 With the successful defense of Iranian territory
during eight brutal years of war with Iraq, Iran’s leadership could reasonably claim to be the
first regime in two hundred years to “not lose an inch of Iranian soil.”58
Vigilance against enemies, real or imagined, had lost its urgency in a context where the
immediate priority of most students was to find a job.59 As merit and the credentialing pro-
vided by secondary and postsecondary education became increasingly tied to professional
success in the postwar period, Iranian families turned to schooling to get their children
into college, not the afterlife.60 All roads led to the university and the possession of creden-
tials, understood to be indispensable to success in the job and marriage markets. A school
system once vaunted as an ideological apparatus in the service of the state had by the
end of the twentieth century become a private resource for the social and economic
advancement of ordinary families and their children.61
The variability of textbook portrayals of the Arab Other punctures the persistent myth that
the Islamic Republic of Iran deploys curricular materials solely as extensions of an ideological
state apparatus. The movement away from militant self-defense and toward a greater emphasis
on meritocratic achievement anticipates the rise of the technocratic turn in Iranian politics
after the death of Khomeini in 1989, a transition from an outer to inner jihad, so to speak,
in which revolutionary morality combined with the pursuit of knowledge and expertise.
Interestingly, changes in curricular tone and content have historically been out of sync
with political developments outside of the classroom, suggesting that they were produced
in response to the demands and expectations of parents, teachers, and students.62
53
Ibid., 16, emphasis added.
54
Motahhari, Khadamāt-e moteqābel-e Irān va Eslām, 24.
55
The first-grade primer was the earliest to change. The 1989 edition, for example, devotes its back cover to a
message about hygiene. Bubbles rise from an oversized bar of soap, transforming into flowers as they move out of
the frame. We see a child’s hands washing with soap under water coming out of a faucet. The accompanying message
reads, “Children: If you want to become sick less often, use more soap when washing.”
56
Arnon Groiss highlights “The Palestinian Teacher” in his overheated 2007 survey of Iranian textbooks, arguing
that the postrevolutionary curriculum successfully bred intolerance toward minorities and women and instilled “in
the souls of school students, especially in the higher grades, feelings of hatred” toward non-Muslims in anticipation
of an eschatological struggle between “the forces of Good and Evil which is to culminate in the reappearance of the
. . . Hidden Imam”; Groiss, “Iranian Textbooks.”
57
Marashi’s Nationalizing Iran describes an unresolved “dual-cultures problem” (i.e., the pre-Islamic versus Islamic
identities of Iran).
58
“In times before the Islamic Republic, including the Ghajar [sic] and Pahlavi eras, some parts of Iranian soil
were separated off. After the Islamic Revolution, Iranian youth didn’t allow even an inch of Iranian soil to be sep-
arated from Iran. #StrongIRAN.” @khamenei_ir, Twitter, February 10, 2020, 10:45 a.m., https://twitter.com/khame-
nei_ir/status/1226940353531478017?lang=en.
59
Salehi-Isfahani, “Iran’s Third Development Plan.”
60
With university admission rates historically at 10 percent or lower well into the 2000s, it is debatable which of
the two was more difficult to obtain; Malekzadeh, “New Business.”
61
Rezaei, Tahlili az zendegi-ye ruzmarreh-ye dānesh āmuzeshi.
62
Although portrayals of forlorn Arabs fell from the pages of the curriculum, they did so just before the rise and
consolidation of technocratic politics during Rafsanjani’s first term in office as president. Conversely, textbook con-
tent was its most strident not in the early years after the revolution, as might be expected, but toward the end of the
Learning to Fly: Western Sources of Emulation

Tales of scientific discovery and accomplishment provide the counterfactual to Arab lives of
misery, as the possibilities denied to the Palestinian are made manifest by the achievements
of American inventors and scientists. If the tragedy of the Palestinian boy Khāled and his family
referenced at the outset of this article is to be avoided at all costs, then the adventures of
American aviators, scientists, and inventors are lives to be pursued, available for the taking.
Western achievement in science and technology belongs to all of humanity as proof of God’s
favor and presence. Science becomes not only a civilizational gift, but a righteous endeavor,
the expression of virtue available to all regardless of national origin or religious belief.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the series of lessons dedicated to tracing the origins
of human flight. The saga begins in the second-grade primer. “Feather and Wing” (Par va bāl)
opens with the wonderment of Āzādeh, who expresses to her companion ʿAli her longing to
join in flight the birds she sees every day in her yard. “Oh how I wish that God had given me
wings and feathers so that I might fly in the sky!” she cries out.63 ʿAli assures Āzādeh that
she can, that there is nothing stopping her from doing so. The seemingly miraculous is
within her reach. “How?” asks an incredulous Āzādeh. “God has given us feathers and
wings,” replies ʿAli. “Our ideas are our feathers and wings. Others, who like you desired
to fly, used their ideas to invent the airplane.”64 All humans possess reason, granted
(āfarid) by God. The capacity for flight is the birthright of all humans, a provision of
God’s grace. Flight has a heavenly source, but it is unrelenting human effort that brings it
into being, capacities well within the reach of all individuals.
Subsequent stories make no effort to conceal the origins of the first manned flights,
described in detail across a two-part lesson in the third-grade primer. One of the few hold-
overs from the Pahlavi-era curriculum, “The Story of Flight” (Dāstān-e parvāz), begins with
ambition, born of the native curiosity of humans. “Since ancient times humans have desired
to fly,” the story reads. “They wanted to fly in the beautiful blue sky, to climb higher than
the eagles and to soar through the clouds.” Though many “have made great efforts and sac-
rifices in order to reach this ambition,” it would be a German who would get there first:
One hundred years ago, in a corner of the country of Germany, a young man dreamed of
flying. His name was “Otto.” Otto paid very close attention to the broad wings of birds.
Otto said to himself: “If I can build a large and powerful wing, I can fly just like the
birds.” He went to work, experimenting and building wings but couldn’t fly with any
of them. Otto didn’t give up hope nor did he stop trying.65
Otto persisted until he prevailed, finally achieving his dream of flight using a homemade
glider. He went on to make multiple trips, until he tragically died in an accident. Years
later Otto’s story caught the imagination of two brothers and bike mechanics from Ohio:
Wilbur Wright was a bright and studious young man. One day, while playing, he fell and broke
his bones and so was forced to stay home for several years. He read many books during this
time of idleness. By chance he came across the story of Otto and his experiments. After read-
ing these stories Wilbur Wright decided to follow in his path. With the help of his brother,
Orville, he built wings with which he could safely land from a great height. Not long after
this these two American brothers began to think about building a machine for flying (Fig. 3).66
1980s, when lessons suddenly took on a harsher tone of Islamization. See “Reading Baba Ab Dad in Tehran: The
Development of Religion, Politics, and Citizenship in Postrevolutionary Iranian Primers, 1979–2008,” in
Malekzadeh, Ambiguous Outcomes.
63
“Feather and Wing,” in Fārsi-ye dovom-e dabestān, 1358/1979, 101.
64
Ibid., 101–2.
65
“The Story of Flight: The Human Bird,” in Fārsi-ye sevom-e dabestān, 1359/1980, 73–74.
66
Ibid., 79–80.
FIGURE 3. “The Story of Flight Part Two: The First Airplane,” Fā rsi-ye sevom-e dabestā n (Third-grade Persian), Tehran:
Ministry of Education, 1359/1980.
Three years of experimentation and effort lead to the grassy bluffs of Kitty Hawk, North
Carolina, and the first manned flight. The brothers invited their loved ones to bear witness
to this incredible historical event:
The flying machine turned on. Inside the two brothers sat with happiness and excite-
ment. Suddenly the plane took off from the ground and began to fly. The flight lasted 38
minutes. They returned to their happy friends, and after landing the plane safely,
Wilbur stepped out with pride.67
Wilbur and Orville went on to establish the first airplane factory, laying the foundation for
commercial flight, and beyond. “Scientists, after great effort,” the lesson concludes, “built
machines that could carry humans to the moon and land there. Scientists are once again
seeking ways to send humans further into space and to other planets.”68 As with the
Prophet’s admonitions in “What Is the Basis of Superiority?” the Wright brothers’ place of
birth is recognized in “The Story of Flight” but ultimately set aside as unimportant. The
invention of the airplane is not bound by origin or geography, but was made common to
humanity, a gift to be shared without prejudice or limitation.
A Revolution in Values
Education makes the achievement of such civilizational gifts possible by delivering knowl-
edge “that was both practical (scientific) and ethical—the improvement of manners in
67
Ibid., 80.
68
Ibid.
order to attain a civilized state.”69 The western scientist, valued for the utility of his contri-
butions to humanity, is invariably cast as a model of righteous behavior. Already a motif in
the 1980s, this became a more prominent and routinized feature by the late 1990s, when a
revamp of the textbook design introduced a more expansive morality to the curriculum.70
Thus, in the third-grade lesson “Hello, Mr. Bell” (Salām, āqā-ye Bel) a teacher explains to
her students that the inventor of the telephone Alexander Graham Bell began his career as a
teacher of deaf children. The telephone was created almost by accident, a by-product of Bell’s
desire to devise an instrument to test his students’ hearing. As they did with their chronicle
of aviation and flight, the authors take care to place the special genius of Bell within reach of
its readers.71 The story of the telephone is one of improvement. From the original rudimen-
tary device to mobile phones, each advance builds on the last, a linear path of progress that
any person, or nation, can join.72
Whereas “Hello, Mr. Bell” appears in the “Science and Scientist” section of the revised
third-grade primer, righteous action earns a young Thomas Edison a spot under the
“Individual and Social Morality” section. A companion to the lesson “The Sacrificers”
(Fadākārān), “An Enlightened Thought” (Fekr-e rowshan) introduces us to an eight-year-old
Thomas Edison, whose accomplishments are still far in the future, testing and measuring
an array of instruments and devices in his mother’s basement.73 Young Edison exhibits
the persistence and diligence that would make him famous later in life, working well into
the afternoon on his experiments. Only when night falls and the room is too dark to see
does he abandon his work. On one of those nights Edison calls up to his mother but receives
no reply. Worried, he looks through their darkened home, distraught. Eventually he locates
her in a far bedroom, stretched out on a bed in immense pain (Fig, 4).
Edison runs to fetch a doctor, who delivers grave news. His mother requires an operation
immediately. Any delay will put her life at risk. With tears in his eyes, Edison beseeches the
doctor to begin the procedure right away. “Then why are you waiting? Hurry up!”74 The doc-
tor replies that it is too dark. “The light in this home is not enough. I can’t operate with one
or two candles. We need more light.”75 Desperate to help his mother survive the night, and
at his lowest point, Edison finds inspiration:
Thomas’s tears were falling. He didn’t know how he could help his mother. Sadness had
gripped the entire house, little by little the pain gripped his mother until she was close
to passing out. Thomas thought and suddenly shouted: “I got it! I found a way!”
He ran quickly to the basement. He grabbed every candle there was. He also looked in
all of the rooms of the house and wherever he saw a candle, he grabbed it. Then he went
to fetch the big mirror of their home. Slowly, slowly he brought the mirror next to his
69
Ansari, “Taqizadeh and European Civilisation,” 48.
70
Part of a renewed effort in the late 1990s to bring “fundamental change” to what had been an ad hoc textbook
regime, the standardization of textbook design brought a more deliberate approach to classroom instruction.
Lessons were now divided into one of eight sections, presented in the following order: “Institutions” (Nahād-ha),
“Hygiene” (Behdāsht), “Individual and Social Morality” (Akhlāq-e fardi va ejtemāʿi), “Science and Scientists” (Dānesh
va dāneshmandān), “Religion” (Din), “Nation and Homeland” (Melli va mihani), “Nature” (Tabiʿat), and “Art and
Literature” (Honar va adab).
71
“Hello, Mr. Bell,” in Fārsi-ye sevom-e dabestān, 1386/2007, 88–89.
72
Kids, as always, are a bit more practical in their admiration of Bell’s invention. “Mr. Bell, if you hadn’t invented
the telephone,” says one student, “we would have wasted a lot of our time”; Ibid., 89–90.
73
A story of national heroes who risked their lives in service to others, “The Sacrificers” includes the well-known
story of Mohammad Hoseyn Fahmideh who, as a ten-year-old volunteer in the war with Iraq, sacrificed his life by
throwing himself under an enemy tank; literally, Edison is an “enlightened thinker.” The title of the lesson, Fekr-e
rowshan, plays on Edison’s fame as the inventor of the light bulb, rowshan being the Persian word for “illuminated” as
well as the root of the word rowshanfekr or “intellectual,” literally “enlightened” or “illuminated thinker” in English.
74
“An Enlightened Thought,” in Fārsi-ye sevom-e dabestān, 1386/2007, 66.
75
Ibid.
FIGURE 4. “An Enlightened Thought,” Fā rsi-ye sevom-e dabestā n (Third-grade Persian), Tehran: Ministry of Education, 1386/
2007.
mother’s room. He asked the doctor to help him put the mirror on the table. Together
they put all the candles on the table in front of the mirror and lit them. The room
became drenched, bathed in light. The doctor smiled and said, “Excellent my son,
you are very clever.”76
76
Ibid., 66–67.
Edison then enters into prayer: “While the doctor was busy with the operation, Edison sat in
the corner and lifted his tiny hands towards the sky and asked almighty God to save his
mother from pain and sickness.”77 Edison’s wit and quick thinking anticipates the future
inventor, but it is his grace and humility that carries the day, his mother’s rescue an affir-
mation of his faith and its reward. The curriculum once again privileges the ethical dimen-
sions of creativity and discovery over technical ability and accomplishment. Knowledge can
be lost or misused by nations, but the goodness of an eight-year-old boy who sacrifices his
own safety for others, or of a teacher committed to serving deaf children, is forever.
“Let [the Westerners] go to Mars or anywhere they wish,” Khomeini famously proclaimed
in Najaf in 1970, “they are still backward in the sphere of securing happiness to man, back-
ward in spreading moral virtues, and backward in creating a psychological and spiritual pro-
gress similar to the material progress.”78 The many stories of foreign achievement found in
the curriculum undermine this conceit, the convention that although Westerns are adept at
technology they continue to be hopelessly incapable of possessing the virtue needed to use
their knowledge in a worthy fashion.79 We see once more the revelatory power of textbooks
as primary sources. Rather than mechanically reproducing an official line of unwavering
hostility to the West, the curriculum shows the revolutionary state’s message to be much
more nuanced than the heated rhetoric of its leaders might lead us to expect. Characters
like Bell and the young Edison, by modeling righteous behavior, in fact serve as stand-ins
for the ideal Islamic-Iranian citizen.80
That the two inventors are neither Islamic nor Iranian makes no difference. In the
same way that the textbooks dispensed with the Arab origins of Islam, the framing of
Western science and technology as free-floating civilizational phenomena, unattached to
ethnic or national origins, enables state planners to reconcile the urgent need for outside
knowledge, which Iranian leaders have historically pursued with great ambivalence, with
the imperative to preserve the country’s “authentic” culture.81 Nothing is lost by the inclu-
sion of the outsider’s expertise, so long as it is rendered God-given, and where possible,
Iranian in origin.82
77
Ibid., 67.
78
Khomeini, Islam and Revolution, 262.
79
According to Khamanei, Americans are not only lacking in virtue, in their jealousy they will do whatever it
takes to prevent Iranians from putting an end to their monopoly on science:
Today, the Islamic Republic has raised the flag of justice and is determined to confront oppression and defend
noble human values. Now if this system with such lofty ideals leads its nation to the peak of scientific pro-
gress, certainly the interests of the world’s expansionist and domineering powers will be threatened. . . .
Considering this reality, we should make every effort to achieve scientific progress. But it should be noted
that scientific progress will not be attained through imitation. It will be accomplished through initiative, inno-
vation, originality, and the opening of new frontiers in science.
Khamanei, “Leader’s Address.”

80
In a follow-up exercise to the lesson on Edison, students are asked, “If you were in Thomas Edison’s place, what
would you have done?” “An Enlightened Thought,” in Fārsi-ye sevom-e dabestān, 1386/2007, 68.
81
Skepticism of the benefits of Western influence is hardly limited to the postrevolutionary period in modern
Iran. Menashri relates the following lament from Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1930:
It would be much better to educate [our students] here in the country where they are going to live, and with
whose progress they must inevitably be concerned. But we do not yet have the necessary machinery . . . I don’t
want to turn the Persian into a bad copy of a European. That is not necessary, for he has [a] mighty tradition
behind him.
Menashri, Education and the Making of Modern Iran, 106.

82
It is not by accident that the story of the Iranian philosopher and scientist, Abu Ali Sinna, one of the most
important figures from the Islamic Golden Age, appears in both the prerevolutionary and postrevolutionary third-
grade primers, with little change. The lesson credits his eleventh-century medical treatises as foundational to
Iranian Studies 759
Conclusion: Eternal Iran Valorized; the Persianate Subdued

The continuity of Irāniyat has always been premised on the fiction that it is the outsider who
needs changing and reform. The seduction of the foreign invader continues to be one of
Iran’s most enduring tropes, used over the centuries by regimes and reformers alike to
elide the memory of loss. Iranians take solace in their national permanence, in the enduring
belief that no matter the calamity or the circumstances, their culture will eventually subdue
and transform the invading foreigner.83 The ancient Greeks, the conquering Mongols and
Turkmen tribes, and the modern British, each in turn became better because they became
Iranian.84 All except the Arab, who finds no transformation in his encounter with Iran, a
country now serving as his advocate and protector. The Arab remains abject, an object
apart, a permanent warning against loss. For the Arab there is no salvation, no rescue.
But what of the Persianate? With an event like the 1979 Revolution often described and
understood as a complete break with the past, what space is there for the Persianate in post-
revolutionary Iran? If we assume that the modern period is not necessarily post-Persianate,
as many of the contributors to this volume and others insist, what remains of the Persianate
in Iran’s postrevolutionary context?85 After all, the Islamic Republic’s official adherence to a
set of universal values, shared in a common idiom by diverse populations spread across vast
distances and decoupled from the logic of “one land, one nation, one language,” arguably
places contemporary Iran closer to the accounts of the Persianate in the twentieth century
outlined in this volume than to the high modernism of the Pahlavi state or even the
late-imperial model of rule so haphazardly adopted by the Qajar dynasty in its final years.86
Despite revolutionary change, echoes of the Persianate frame remain, transposed to the
present and made—like Islam and the wonders of science—Iranian. The Persianate, that
sprawling, interconnected ecumene where a Persian speaker with the proper training and
manners could live and travel from Sarajevo to western China, was never entirely removed
from the postrevolutionary curriculum but reduced and reorganized to fit within the sover-
eign boundaries of a modern, Islamic Iran. No better example may be seen than in the treat-
ment of the poet Ferdowsi in the early curriculum. Despite the fact that Ferdowsi’s
Shāhnāmeh was circulated and emulated across the Persianate world and in multiple lan-
guages, the poet is restricted to being an icon and savior of the Persian language in postrev-
olutionary textbooks for second graders in the Islamic Republic.
Their school year culminates with a visit to the mausoleum of Ferdowsi, experienced
through the primer lesson “Ferdowsi.” The story is presented as a family’s memory of vis-
iting the poet’s tomb and memorial, albeit as an afterthought to the more important pil-
grimage to the shrine of Imam Reza.87 “Last year I went with my father, mother, and
sister on a pilgrimage to Imam Reza in Mashhad. My father said: “Near Mashhad there is
the ancient city of Tus and the tomb of Ferdowsi, the great poet of Iran” (Fig. 5).88
modern medicine, and so important that medical schools around the world continue to use them to this day; “Abu
Ali Sinnā,” in Fārsi-ye sevom-e dabestān, 1355/1976; “Abu Ali Sinnā, Dāneshmand-e Bozorg-e Irān,” in Fārsi-ye sevom-e
dabestān, 1365/1986.
83
Schirazi, Irāniyat, melliyat, qowmiyat.
84
Ram, “Immemorial Iranian Nation.”
85
Kia and Marashi, “After the Persianate.” The potency of the Persianate turn, and indeed of much recent his-
torical writing on modern Iran, has been in their transgressions, against not only conventions of periodization but
also the material, spatial, and political boundaries separating the “premodern” from the “modern” and Iran from
the rest of the Persian-speaking world.
86
For discussion of the late-imperial model, see Marashi, Nationalizing Iran. “High modernism” is discussed in
Scott, Seeing Like a State. Soleimani and Mohammadpour discuss the imposition of Persian language policy under
Pahlavi rule in “Can Non-Persians Speak?”
87
The eighth Shiʿi Imam and the only one to be buried within the borders of Iran.
88
Well into the nineteenth century, nearly a thousand years after the publication of the Shāhnāmeh, no account of
Ferdowsi associated the poet or his work with Iran. He was, Fani writes, “merely a poet from Tus”; Fani, “Two
Nations Find a Poet.”
FIGURE 5. “Ferdowsi,” Fā rsi-ye sevom-e dabestā n (Third-grade Persian), Tehran: Ministry of Education, 1386/2007.
Inspired by the convenience of proximity, the father suggests that the family make the trip.
“It would be good to go and visit there as well,” he advises the family.89
With everything in its right place and in the right sequence, the family finishes their pil-
grimage (ziyārat) at the golden-domed mausoleum, venturing out to Tus after several days.
When they finally arrive at the site, they encounter large crowds already gathered around
Ferdowsi’s tomb, pilgrims of another sort.90 The family joins the gathering. A tour guide
leads them around the complex, offering up familiar tropes and measures of Ferdowsi’s
greatness and importance, including that “Ferdowsi labored for thirty years before finishing
his book, the Shāhnāmeh.”91
The story’s narrator—“Ferdowsi” is one of the very few lessons where it is unclear
whether a boy or girl is telling the story—asks the father, “What kind of book was the
Shāhnāmeh?” The father replies, “The Shāhnāmeh is a great book in whose stories we can
read and learn about the great heroes ( pahlavān) of Iran.” The father continues, replicating
in a more intimate form the lessons that the fatherland (mihan) gives to its citizens: “All of
the stories of the Shāhnāmeh are written in verse. Just as you heard [from the tour guide],
Ferdowsi worked for thirty years to collect these stories and to put them into verse so
that the Persian language, the same language that we speak today, might survive.”92
Ferdowsi’s importance is in the language and the people he preserved. Without Persian,
there would be no Iran.93
89
“Ferdowsi,” in Fārsi-ye dovom-e dabestān, 1386/2007, 158.
90
As Grigor has shown, this practice of pilgrimage was an invention of early Pahlavi nationalism that shaped the
building of Ferdowsi’s mausoleum as a site of national memory and cultural heritage; Grigor, Building Iran.
91
92
Ibid., 160.
93
Left unsaid is the conceit that Ferdowsi “saved” Persian, and by extension Iran, from the hegemony of the
Arabic language. Ferdowsi’s reputation as the “savior” of Iranian culture and identity extends to coverage in
Iranian Studies 761
The remainder of the lesson consists of poetry and a father’s promise. Mashhad and the
pilgrimage to Imam Reza’s shrine already a fading memory, the two agree to continue learn-
ing together about the Shāhnāmeh and its many heroes and legends and tragedies. What
began as a one-off visit has become a lifetime endeavor. “Today I know the stories [from
the Shāhnāmeh] and I derive great pleasure hearing them repeated over and over again.”94
The curriculum had come full circle, the lessons of “What Is the Basis of Superiority?” undone.
The same Persian language that had been dismissed by the Prophet as a threat to Islamic unity
in his defense of Salmān al-Fārsi was now proof of belonging.95 If the figure of al-Fārsi—a
Persian speaker among early Arabic-speaking Muslims—was meant to convey Iran’s unsettled
belonging in the Islamic world of the post-1979 order, then Ferdowsi is an embodiment of the
assuredness of Persian cultural and linguistic superiority thirty years later.
The Persianate does not seem to persist in the Islamic Republic period as a dominating
framework, at least not in primary school textbooks, and certainly not in the ways that
nationalism does. But understanding what civilizational ethos replaced it, under what con-
ditions and when, remains an important endeavor to which educational materials may help
provide some clarity, whether those understandings come from the Pahlavi era or from cor-
ners and spaces of the Islamic Republic left unexplored here. If the stories of Khāled, Edison,
and al-Fārsi teach us anything, it is that educational materials are able to narrate a nation’s
insecurities and triumphs as they change over time. Tracking down that ethos, finding its
narrative threads, and tying them together into a coherent story of pedagogy may reveal
that the Persianate finds expression elsewhere and in unexpected ways.
Acknowledgments. This essay began as part of the Forum Transregionale Studien workshop Reading the “1979
Moment” in the Middle East, held in Berlin in June 2017. I am grateful to Amir Moosavi for inviting me to this very
important gathering, and for pushing me to think about identity beyond Iran and my own “guarded” perspectives.
Original research for this study was carried out at the archives of the Iranian Ministry of Education’s Organization
for Educational Research and Planning. All credit is due to the diligent and generous staff there for guiding me
through countless textbooks with patience and good humor. Thank you to the anonymous reviewers for their
encouraging and constructive comments. Finally, a very special thanks to Kevin Schwartz and Aria Fani for their
persistence, and above all their determination to see this article included in this special volume on the
Persianate. I am honored to be part of this impressive collection.
Bibliography
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Shervin Malekzadeh is a Visiting Scholar in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at Colgate University where he is
completing a book manuscript on the contentious politics of postrevolutionary and Islamic schooling in Iran. An
earlier career as a public-school teacher fostered his current research interests in the politics of education, national
identity, and the power of culture in authoritarian and postrevolutionary countries.
Cite this article: Malekzadeh S (2022). Forlorn Arabs and Flying Americans: National Identity in the Early Childhood
Curriculum of Postrevolutionary Iran, 1979–2009. Iranian Studies 55, 741–764. https://doi.org/10.1017/irn.2022.30
doi:10.1017/irn.2021.65
A RT I C L E
Marche Triomphale: A Forgotten Musical Tract in Qajar-

European Encounters
Mohsen Mohammadi
Ethnomusicology, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, USA
(Received 23 November 2021; accepted 13 December 2021)
Abstract
This article introduces Julius Heise’s Marche Triomphale which reveals a history that was eliminated dur-
ing the nineteenth century race theory publications. Beginning with an account of Iranians’ encounters
with European military music, this article provides a brief history of Iranian military bands in
European style, or the bands of muzikānchiān. It then addresses racial motivations behind a short
account on Iranian music in 1885 by Victor Advielle, a French administrator. Arthur de Gobineau’s race
theories were fashionable in nineteenth century Europe, and Victor Advielle used his fellow
Artesian, Alfred Lemaire, to prove their racial superiority. Through Advielle’s account, Lemaire became
the main figure of European music in Iran in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The article
proceeds with biographical information on two European musicians, Marco Brambilla (d.1867 in
Tehran) and Julius Heise (d.1870 in Tehran), and uncovers the earliest known piece published for
the bands of muzikānchiān: Marche Triomphale, À Sa Majesté Impériale Nassir-Ed-Din Shah Kadjar de Perse.
Keywords: Marco Brambilla; Joseph Arthur comte de Gobineau; Julius Heise; Iranian music; Alfred
Lemaire; military music; race theory; Nāsereddin Shah Qajar; Johann Strauss
The history of Iranian military bands following European style, or the bands of muzikānchiān,
is centered around a French musician, Alfred Jean Baptiste Lemaire (1842–1907). The perfor-
mances of these bands, as well as a whole repertoire of European-Iranian musical encoun-
ters, have remained unknown to us not only because of the lack of sources, but because
certain sources have been misconstrued and misremembered. One written source in partic-
ular, La musique chez les Persans en 1885, has caused much confusion. Published in 1885 in Paris
by Alfred Lemaire’s fellow Artesian from Pas-de-Calais, Victor-Hyacinthe Advielle (1833–
1903), the short book has remained the sole document on the history and establishment
of European-style Iranian military music, and its narrative has survived unchallenged. In
addition, Alfred Lemaire was the musician who initially arranged recordings for the
Gramophone Company when the first commercial recordings of music were made in
Tehran in 1906. The recording sessions included many performances by Lemaire’s bands
of muzikānchiān.
In this article, I present an archival discovery that seriously challenges this established
narrative. The source, which is the first published piece from the repertoire of the
muzikānchiān, is titled Marche Triomphale, À Sa Majesté Impériale Nassir-Ed-Din Shah Kadjar de
Perse. It is a march composed by Julius Heise (d. 1870) for the Iranian marching bands in
766 Mohsen Mohammadi
1864, twenty-one years before Victor Advielle published his book.1 Marche Triomphale stands
out as a unique archival document that has recently surfaced after 150 years. By considering
this specific case, the present article demonstrates the need for critical studies of the history
of Iranian music using archival sources that have long been hidden and require careful con-
sideration. Although military music may represent a small subset among other genres of
Iranian music, such sources reveal the history of Iran’s encounters with European music,
which was instrumental in the formation of the current “classical” music of Iran. The use
of archival sources is paramount to dislodging a history of Iranian music that has been
based on European writings from the colonial era. Furthermore, recovery of this forgotten
musical source reveals a possible connection between the Persian March by Johann Strauss
II and Heise’s work, as will be discussed.
Beginning with an account of Iranians’ encounters with European military music, both in
Europe and in Iran, this article provides a brief history of European-style Iranian military
bands (muzikānchiān). It then briefly addresses how and why Victor Advielle, a French admin-
istrator, published his short account of the music in Iran, an account that eventually became
the sole document on the subject and shaped modern studies of Iranian music. This article
then presents what I have learned about the composer of the Marche Triomphale, Julius
Heise (d.1870).
European Music in Nineteenth-Century Iran

Years before the Qajar rulers and members of the elite could view actual European musical
instruments, they read about them in newly compiled Persian-language books that described
aspects of European culture. In 1801, ʿAbd-ol-Latif Shushtari (1759–1805) wrote in his
Tohfat-ol-ʿĀlam what he had heard about European music.2 In the same year, Mirza
Abutāleb Khan was visiting London, encountered various genres of European music, and
heard the band of the Duke of York.3 A few years later, Abol-Hasan Ilchi (1776–1845) was
sent to Britain as the Iranian envoy and reported his encounters with European music to
the shah and other notables.4 Ilchi was later sent to Russia, and his reports included
more information on European military music.5
The largest comprehensive Persian encyclopedic dictionary, Loghat-Nāmeh-ye Dehkhoda,
claims that the French term musique is the root for the Persian term muzikān.6 However,
early Persian reports clarify that muzikān was borrowed from the Russian term muzikant/
musicant, which was in turn borrowed from Germanic languages. Iranian encounters with
European music emerged coincidentally after a tragic political incident. In 1829, when the
Russian envoy, Aleksandr Sergeyevich Griboyedov (1795–1829), was murdered by mobs in
Tehran, Prince Khosrow-Mirza Qājār was sent to the Russian court in an act of reconciliation.
He was welcomed by bands of military music on several occasions,7 and the secretary of the
delegation wrote down a new Persian term for the first time: muzekān.8 This term was sub-
sequently established as the Persian term for European military music. In another report
1
I discovered Marche Triomphale using secondary publications, and I introduced it in 2016 in Mohammadi, “Chef
de Musique or Chef de Macaroni: The Twisted History of the European Military Music in Persia.” However, I was
unable to locate a surviving copy. In 2020, Ershad Vaeztehrani unveiled the surviving copy of the publication,
which is kept at the Austrian National Library; see Vaeztehrani, “Alfred Jean-Baptiste Lemaire (1842–1907), Chef
de la Musique de Sa Majesté le Shah de Perse.” I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Ershad
Vaeztehrani forinforming me about this copy which is yet the only known surviving copy of Marche Triomphale.
2
Shushtari, Tohfat-ol-Ālam va Zeyl-e Tohfah, 388–89.
3
Esfahāni, Masir-e Tālebi yā Safar-Nāmeh-ye Mirza Abu-Tāleb Khān, 207–8.
4
Shirazi, Heyrat Nāmeh, 261–62.
5
Shirazi, Dalil-os-Sofarā, 169–70.
6
Deh-khoda, “Muzikān,” 21873.
7
Afshar, Safarnāmeh-ye Khosrow Mirza, 166, 207–11, 219, 222–23, 238.
8
Ibid., 198, 177.
Iranian Studies 767
from a Russian trip in 1855, muzekand/muzikand was used for bands and muzekandchi/
muzikandchi was used for musicians.9
The first band of muzikān in Iran was part of the Iranian regiments commanded by British
Officer Charles Christie (d. 1812) of the Bombay regiment, who entered Iranian service at the
request of Sir Harford Jones-Brydges (1764–1847), the British envoy to Iran from 1807 to
1811. The band was seen at the court of Crown Prince Abbas-Mirza (1789–1833) in Tabriz
in 1812, four months before Christie was killed during the Russo-Persian War of 1804–
1813. The band welcomed the British envoy to Iran by playing English tunes, including
the British national anthem, “God Save the King.”10 Five years later, the Russian envoy to
Iran was received in Yerevan, and an Iranian band also welcomed him with the British
national anthem, perhaps the same band from Tabriz in 1812.11 The Russian delegation
had their own music band comprising thirty musicians directed by a capellmeister (conduc-
tor).12 The secretary of the delegation mentioned band performances on several occasions;
the band must have played almost every day during the long travel and stay of the Russian
envoy.13 Thus, professional European military music was performed in public places in sev-
eral cities in northwest Iran. Fath-Ali Shah (r. 1797–1834), however, did not pay special atten-
tion to the military band of the Russian delegation, as is suggested by the reception of their
delegation at the shah’s encampment in Soltanieh, where they were placed close to a group
of court musicians and rope dancers who were the least respected court attendees.14
However, Crown Prince Abbās-Mirzā asked the delegation to send their military music
band for a close study. He requested that they play all the pieces they knew and then had
every instrument presented to him separately. He had every individual play something
and then asked them to march to music, admiring the harmony between different sounds.15
When Abbas-Mirza died in 1833, Fath-Ali Shah appointed his son Mohammad-Mirza the
crown prince. Mohammad Shah (1834–1848) was raised under the supervision of his father
Abbas-Mirza, and he continued his father’s efforts to modernize the Iranian army. In 1836,
two years after Mohammad Shah came to the throne, Sir Henry Bethune (1792–1851)
received 400 pounds sterling from the Iranian court to purchase musical instruments.16 A
year later, the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland reported publication
of the first Persian newspaper in Tehran and reproduced a transcript of the first issue. The
report included a description of a banquet at the British Embassy in Tehran on April 25,
1837, in celebration of the British monarch’s birthday. As the newspaper reported, the
“band” of music from the Bahādorān regiment played gharibeh (strange) instruments.17
This regiment, which was formed of Russian deserters from Caucasus and their sons,18
was seen a year later returning from a battle in Khorasan and was described as the only reg-
iment of the Iranian army that had a band.19
Three years after Henry Bethune was given a budget to purchase musical instruments,
two years after the band of the regiment of Bahādorān was reported to play in Tehran,
and one year after the same band was seen returning from an expedition, a European
9
Qazvini, Safar-Nāmeh-ye Seyf-ol-Molk beh Rusieh, 57, 62, 65, 67, 71, 76, 79, 83, 89, 133, 135, 148–49, 151–52, 154–55,
158, 160–64, 166, 168–69, 171.
10
Ouseley, Travels in Various Countries of the East, 1: 399.
11
Kotzebue, Reise nach Persien mit der russisch kais, 67.
12
Ibid., 42.
13
Ibid., 65, 71, 77, 93, 105, 107, 119, 135, 140, 149, 159, 169, 179–80, 192.
14
Ibid., 179–80.
15
Ibid., 108.
16
Stuart, Journal of a Residence, 312.
17
Gharibeh (‫ )ﻏﺮﯾﺒﻪ‬also could be a misread form of gharbieh, meaning Western. But in the nineteenth-century
Persian vocabulary, the common term for European was farangi, not gharbiyeh, and those Western instruments
and bands were indeed strange phenomena in traditional Iranian society. “Persian Newspaper and Translation,” 359.
18
Stuart, Journal of a Residence, 187.
19
Macdonald, Personal Narrative, 162.
musician was spotted in Iran. It is unclear whether the Iranian court recruited the first
European musician or the European musician came of his own accord, perhaps following
a fantasy about living in the exotic land of Persia. On December 12, 1839, Lieutenant Jules
Pichon from a French diplomatic and military delegation reported his first days in Tabriz
as follows:
During the first days of our stay in Tauris, Doctor Berthoni, whom I have already spoken
of, presented us to Mr. Marca, an Italian by origin who was employed by the troops of
the Shah of Persia as “chef de musique”; we had, in many circumstances, to praise him
for his kindness. Later Mr. Marca introduced us to Mr. Colombari, an Italian like him,
tied with Prince Karaman Mirza as painter.20
Marca’s proper name was Marco Brambilla, and his name was mentioned in several subse-
quent reports by European officers, such as Xavier Hommaire de Hell (1812–1848) in 1848
and Giuseppe Anaclerio between 1862 and 1866; the latter stated that Marco Brambilla
had left Turkey to attend the court of Iran.21 It may be that Marco Brambilla had a connec-
tion with another Italian musician who served at the Ottoman court to establish military
music bands in the European style in the 1820s, Giuseppe Donizetti (1788–1856), the older
brother of the famous Italian opera composer, Gaetano Donizetti (1797–1848). Bosquet
(also mentioned as Bousquet and Boschetti) and Royon (also mentioned as Rouyon and
Rouillon) are the other two European musicians who organized marching bands in Tehran
in the 1850s and 1860s.22
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the Iranian court expanded the army, and
new regiments were created. Several European musicians were hired to advance European
military bands in Iran. Julius Gebauer (1846–1895), born in the Czech city of Šternberk,
arrived in Tehran in 1879 as one of the Austrian officers who were hired to form the
new Austrian-style regiment of or in the Iranian Army (Fig. 1a).23 He was mentioned in
the Iranian Almanac (Sāl-nāmeh-ye dowlat-e ʿaliyyeh-ye Iran) of 1879, 1880, and 1881 along
with the Austrian officers.24 Julius Gebauer would perform at various gatherings of the
European community in Tehran, and he received the Iranian Order of Science.25 He was
last reported at a military review in Tehran on February 21, 1895, about five months
before his demise in Tehran on July 9, 1895.26 An Italian drummer, Monsieur Angelo,
also was mentioned as the director of drummers, Tabbāl-bāshi, of the Iranian army from
1877 to 1883.27 Alexandre Duval, a French violinist from Lyon, was another European musi-
cian who lived in Iran during the last years of Nāsereddin Shah’s era (d. 1896).28 Finally,
the Iranian Cossack Brigade, a cavalry unit founded in 1879, had their own music band,
which started with thirty-five musicians of European style (Fig. 1b).29 The band was men-
tioned in the Iranian Almanac from 1881 to 1884, and also was reported as playing at
social gatherings.30
20
Pichon, Journal d’une mission militaire en Perse, 1839–1840, 4.
21
Hell, Voyage en Turquie et en Perse, 2: 119, 131–32, 146; Anaclerio, La Persia descritta, 98, 139.
22
Brugsch, Reise der K. Preussischen Gesandtschaft nach Persien, 307; Anaclerio, La Persia descritta, 80; Lycklama à
Nijeholt, Voyage, 356.
23
Morel, “Les missions militaires en Perse,” 1–2.
24
Etemād-os-Saltaneh, “Sāl-Nāmeh-ye Dowlat-e Aliyyeh-ye Iran,” 1879, 40; 1880, 43; 1881, 25.
25
Sheykh-Rezaei and Azari, Gozāresh-hā-ye Nazmiyeh az Mahallāt-e Tehran, 1998, 1: 348; 2: 410, 431, 439, 458; Morel,
“Décorations,” 1–2.
26
Eyn-os-Saltaneh, Ruznāmeh-ye Khāterāt-e Eyn-os-Saltaneh, 1: 700.
27
Etemād-os-Saltaneh, “Sāl-Nāmeh-ye Dowlat-e Aliyyeh-ye Iran,” 1877, 9; 1878, 9; 1879, 23; 1880, 26; 1881, 8; 1882,
8; 1883, 10.
28
Gouget, Histoire musicale de la main, 357.
29
Shah, Ruznāmeh-ye Khāterāt-e Nāsereddin Shah dar Safar-e Sevom-e Farangestān, 2: 365.
30
Etemād-os-Saltaneh, “Sāl-Nāmeh-ye Dowlat-e Aliyyeh-ye Iran,” 1881, 16; 1882, 18; 1883, 21; 1884, 36;
Sheykh-Rezaei and Azari, Gozāresh-hā-ye Nazmiyeh az Mahallāt-e Tehran, 1: 21.
FIGURE 1. Two bands of muzikānchi in Tehran c. 1910: (a; left) Band of the regiment of Austrian style, founded by
Julius Gebauer, directed by Gholam-Reza Sālār Moʿazaz; (b; right) Band of the Iranian Cossack Brigade.
La musique chez les Persans en 1885 and the Fabrication of a Legend

Although La musique chez les Persans en 1885 has been used widely as the unique text on the
history of Iranian music in the nineteenth century, as I demonstrate, it was a patriotic and
self-promoting collaboration between Alfred Lemaire and Victor Advielle, two compatriots
from Pas-de-Calais in France.31 Lemaire provided a story, and Advielle added patriotic and
heroic elaborations. In that short account, the history of thirty years of European military
bands in Iran was reduced to three simple figures: Bousquet, his sous-chef Rouillon, who
had started marching bands but abandoned them, and Marco, an Italian sailor who was
accused of ruining their efforts. Bousquet and Rouillon were not criticized, most probably
because they were Lemaire’s French compatriots. Marco, however, was ridiculed as being
excellent at making a macaroni that could compensate for his detestable music.32 It is
unclear whether this humiliation was articulated by Lemaire or Advielle; however, it was
a negative stereotype of Italians. Today, we know that Marco Brambilla was more significant
than Lemaire and Advielle made him out to be. Brambilla was instrumental in the formation
of European marching bands in Iran. He was well known among Iranians. Twenty years after
his death, a book was composed on the achievements of Nāsereddin Shah’s era, and his name
appeared along with that of Alfred Lemaire, as the two directors of military music
(muzikānchi-bāshi) of the Iranian army.33 Marco Brambilla was not the only European musi-
cian whose efforts were eradicated from the history of Iranian music by Alfred Lemaire, as
narrated in La musique chez les Persans. The work also completely ignored a German musician
who was active in Iran’s music scene before Lemaire arrived in Tehran. This German musi-
cian was trained at a major conservatory and published the first piece from the repertoire of
31
This section is a revised summary of my work on the subject; see Mohammadi, “Chef de Musique or Chef de
Macaroni,” 51–59.
32
Advielle, La musique chez les Persans en 1885, 6.
33
Etemād-os-Saltaneh, Al-Ma’āser val-Āsār, 26.
Iranian marching bands. Nonetheless, in his published account, Alfred Lemaire succeeded in
eliminating him from the history of music in Iran.
Alfred Lemaire was born in Aire-sur-la-Lys, a town in the Artois region of northern
France, but studied music in Paris. In 1881, he contacted the Association d’Appui Mutuel
des Enfants du Pas-de-Calais Résidant à Paris, an association for Artesian people living in
Paris, and requested to be registered as an associate member, although he had been living
in Tehran for thirteen years.34 That correspondence inspired a series of actions that was
meant to flatter the Artesian race of the members of the association and ultimately resulted
in the writing of a La musique chez les Persans. A year after Lemaire’s correspondence, an
unidentified member of the Association d’Appui Mutuel des Enfants du Pas-de-Calais
Résidant à Paris submitted a manuscript to the Académie des Sciences, Lettres et Arts
d’Arras, or Académie d’Arras, an academy founded in 1737 in Arras, the central town of
the Artois region.35 The entire manuscript was about the Artesian Alfred Lemaire and his
extraordinary efforts in teaching music and organizing music bands in Iran. The submission
was aimed at winning the Concours des beaux-arts, the association’s award in fine arts,
which had not been awarded to anyone for a long time.
Although the identity of the petitioner for the concours prize could not be revealed, there
is enough reason to believe that it was Victor Advielle, another Artesian who was born in
Arras. It was Victor Advielle who first wrote a short account on Alfred Lemaire in
L’Artesian, the journal of the Association d’Appui Mutuel des Enfants du Pas-de-Calais
Résidant à Paris, in which he also reported Lemaire’s correspondence with the association.
Finally, Victor Advielle produced a concise book on music among Iranians: La musique chez les
Persans en 1885. This notably short and self-published account became the sole “firsthand”
account on European music in Iran and Iranian music in the nineteenth century. As a
token of gratitude, Lemaire persuaded the Iranian court to decorate Victor Advielle as an
Officer of the Order of Science even before the book was printed. Advielle proudly mentioned
his Iranian decoration on the cover of the book.
Alfred Lemaire was a master at maintaining a network of power. He was the founder and
the first grand master of Lodge Bidāri Iranian, the Iranian branch of the major Masonic orga-
nization of the Grand Orient de France.36 He was hired by the Iranian court in 1873, with a
hefty annual salary of 1,300 tomans—which was the equivalent of 13,000 francs—plus an
extra 300 tomans (3,000 francs) in travel expenses, and another 300 tomans to teach
advanced courses to a group of ten music students.37 His salary would be raised regularly,
as it was reported to be a few thousand tomans by 1895.38 Despite his generous salary
from the court for his services as a musician, he was not completely focused on music edu-
cation. He was engaged in all manners of business, including importing European goods to
Iran. In 1888, his imported European goods, which could have been worth a million francs,
caused a scandal in Tehran when the Russians discovered he had falsely declared them as
ordered by the shah to avoid paying Russian taxes.39 He also was engaged in exporting
tobacco from Iran.40 In 1890, he was granted a contract to build a road from the northwest-
ern borders to Tehran. The contract included generous monopolies and exclusive rights for
shipping in Lake Urmia, building resting areas, and rehabilitating state lands all along the
road.41 Alfred Lemaire had no experience in construction and had no intention to manage
that ambitious project, but he probably acquired the contract by paying higher bribes to
34
Advielle, “M. Lemaire (Alfred-Jean-Baptiste),” 161n1.
35
Guérard, “Rapport sur le Concours des Beaux-Arts (Histoire).”
36
Sabatiennes, “Pour Une Histoire de La Première Loge Maçonnique En Iran,” 421–22.
37
Hashemian, Tahavvolāt-e Farhangi-ye Iran dar Dowreh-ye Qājārieh va Madreseh-ye Dārolfonun, 217–19. I am grateful
to Nader Motallebi-Kashani for referring me to the reproduction of Lemaire’s contract in this book.
38
Etemād-os-Saltaneh, Ruznāmeh-ye Khāterāt-e Etemād-os-Saltaneh, 1184.
39
Ibid., 624.
40
Nategh, Bāzargānān dar Dād va Setad bā Bānk-e Shāhi va Rezhi-ye Tanbāku, 107, 117.
41
Ibid., 43–46.
Iranian Studies 771
the Iranian officials so that he could sell it to subcontractors. The project was never carried
out.
As historical data show, but contrary to the narrative account published by Advielle/
Lemaire, Marco Brambilla was the main figure in the formation of European military bands
in Iran. He was seen there from 1839 to 1866. It was only after Brambilla’s death that the
Iranian court hired Alfred Jean-Baptist Lemaire. It was Alfred Lemaire, however, who remained
known in the history of music in Iran and became a hero. Lemaire’s presence in Tehran was
longer than Brambilla’s; moreover, his reputation benefited from European media, such as the
printing press, photography, and recorded music, all of which became part of the elite culture
in Iran in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Alfred Lemaire and his fellow Artesian
French community portrayed him as the hero of European music in Iran.
In the nineteenth century, racial determinism and other racial interpretations emerged
among European scientists and intellectuals. Those racial discourses shaped the writing of
a history of music for Iranians in Advielle’s short book. The main goal of the book was to
promote the Artesian race, not Iranian music. Notably, Joseph Arthur comte de Gobineau
(1816–1882), whose theory of racial determinism had an enormous influence upon the sub-
sequent development of race theories and practices in Western Europe, spent a few years in
Iran and produced influential works on the Aryan race, a racial pride that motivated chang-
ing the international name of Persia to Iran, the land of Aryans.42 When Victor Advielle pro-
vided a short account for his Artesian fellows, to make them proud of their race and to make
himself proud of producing an elegant piece, he never imagined his work would shape the
history of European music in Iran. Iranians discovered Advielle’s piece outside of its race-
promoting context, and to date there has been no reference to the writer’s motivations
or how they could have shaped his account.
Rediscovering a German Pianist in Tehran: Julius Heise (c. 1825–1870)

Thanks to a single mention of a European pianist serving the Iranian court, we are able to
confirm the name of the German musician that Lemaire selectively failed to mention in his
account of Iranian music: Julius Heise. A Dutch traveler and collector, Tinco Martinus
Lycklama à Nijeholt (1837–1900), who was in Iran in September 1866, mentioned meeting
a European pianist named Heise. According to Lycklama à Nijeholt, Heise was the shah’s pia-
nist and beloved by the monarch.43 This mention, which is the only known mention of Heise
in a European travelogue, was instrumental in discovering the existence and the identity of a
European musician who served the Iranian court and died in Tehran in 1870. Nāsereddin
Shah mentioned a pianist in his diary in 1866 and 1870. However, since his diary manuscript
registered a transliterated version of Heise’s name that is illegible in Persian, the name could
not be deciphered by the diary’s editors: one assumed it was Monazzah and the other sug-
gested Hanireh.44 On Sunday, February 11, 1866, Nāsereddin Shah wrote the following
about Heise (Fig. 2): “Then Monsieur Heise, the Russian [sic.] musician arrived. They had
brought the piano that was his own, and he played. He played extremely well.”45 Four
years later, on Thursday October 27, 1870, the shah was on the road to the Holy Shrine in
Karbala when news was telegraphed from Tehran that “the gardener of the square’s garden
and Monsieur Heise pianozan [the pianist] both have died.”46
Nāsereddin Shah mentioned Heise as a Russian musician, even though he was Germanic.
However, the reference to a Russian reflected a common practice among Iranians who would
42
Yarshater, “Communications,” 62.
43
Lycklama à Nijeholt, Voyage, 355.
44
Shah, Ruznāmeh-ye Khāterāt-e Nāsereddin Shah, Rabiossāni 1282 tā Rabiolavval 1283, 90; Shah, Shahriār-e Jādeh-hā, 52.
45
Shah, “Ruznāmeh-ye Khāterāt-e Nāsereddin Shah,” 1866, 198.
46
Shah, “Ruznāmeh-ye Khāterāt-e Nāsereddin Shah,” 1870, 295.
FIGURE 2. Heise in Nāsereddin Shah’s diary. From the National Archives and Library of Iran, courtesy of Majid Abde
Amin.
associate any person from Europe with their typical European term. That is how farangi
(Frankish) became the common Persian term for all Europeans.
A catalog of the musical works published in Austria in 1864 revealed a rare piece for the
piano: “Heise, Jules, Marche triomphale. (Ueberpersische Melodien.) Wien, Wessely & Büsing.
45 kr.”47 Two years later, in 1868, Handbuch der musikalischen Literatur provided a list of musi-
cal publications from 1860 to 1867, and included “Heise, Jul., Marche triomphale. A sa
M. Nassir-Ed-Tin, Shah kadjar de Perse. Wien, Wessely 8 Ngr.”48 In the same year of 1868
and on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the opening of the Conservatorium der Musik in
Leipzig, a book was published on the history of the conservatorium titled Das
Conservatorium der Musik in Leipzig.49 It provided rare information, including the names of
teachers and a list of students who had been admitted at the school each year. Among
those students who were admitted on April 2, 1843, which was the first year of conservato-
rium’s operation, was “Julius Heise aus Grossenhain.”50 The small town of Grossenhain is
located around sixty miles to the east of Leipzig in Germany.
Das Conservatorium der Musik in Leipzig revealed Heise’s German given name, Julius, which
was turned into its French version, Jules, when the book was published with a French title.
The book also revealed that the Conservatorium der Musik was founded by the famous
German composer and pianist Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847), and that it was the first school
of music in Germany. The famous German composer Robert Schumann (1810–1856), one of
the major figures of German Romanticism, also was a piano teacher at the conservatorium.51
We do not know Julius Heise’s year of birth; however, it is likely that the Conservatorium der
Musik would accept students at a young age, which means that Julius Heise would have had a
robust music education under the supervision of Felix Mendelssohn. Music lessons were
taught by notable musicians (such as Schumann).
The only known copy of Marche Triomphale is at the Austrian National Library. The
Landesbibliothek Coburg library in Germany holds a rare music sheet titled Les belles de
Bucharest: contredanse composée pour piano. Published in Vienna by H. F. Müller Veuve, it reg-
isters Jules Heise as the composer on the cover page. Landesbibliothek Coburg librarians
47
Büsing, Oesterreichischer Catalog, 6: 14.
48
Hofmeister, Handbuch der musikalischen Literatur, 324.
49
Kneschke, Das Conservatorium der Musik in Leipzig.
50
Ibid., 34.
51
Ibid., 10.
FIGURE 3. Cover pages of Persian March by Strauss, 1864–1865.
have concluded that the book had been published in 1848; however, a list of musical publi-
cations in 1852 in Germany and the neighboring countries included Les belles de Bucharest.52
There is no other composer from the mid-nineteenth century identified as Julius Heise;
therefore, it seems that Les belles de Bucharest was composed by the beloved pianist of
Nāsereddin Shah.
It is difficult to measure the real influence of Marche Triomphale on the European music
scene. As described, Tinco Martinus Lycklama à Nijeholt, another European adventurer,
Orientalist, and musician, met Heise in Tehran in 1866 and apparently was inspired by
him. Lycklama à Nijeholt composed a marche triomphale titled Les Gardes de Persépolise shortly
after returning to Europe.53 In addition, there seems to be a connection that is more than
coincidental between Heise, or Marche Triomphale (1864), and Persian March (Op. 289), com-
posed by the famous Austrian Johann Strauss II (1825–1899) in the same year of 1864
(Fig. 3). Since Heise was the musician living in Iran and Johann Strauss had no connection
to the shah, who ruled a country far from Austria, it is highly likely that Marche
Triomphale by Heise was an inspiration for Strauss’s Persian March. Heise and Strauss were
about the same age, and these two German-speaking musicians may have known each
other at a time when the world of composers and musicians was not large. When Heise
was in Vienna to publish his book in 1864, they may have met each other. It is notable
that Strauss dedicated his Persian March to the Shah of Persia. Strauss had no direct connec-
tion to the shah and never traveled to Iran. Perhaps he wanted Heise to take a copy with him
to Tehran, or maybe Strauss wished that Heise would inform the Shah of Persia about the
piece dedicated to him. In the following years, after Johann Strauss composed his Persian
March, he composed more exotic marches, such as Egyptian March (Op. 335, 1869), Russian
52
Hofmeister, Kurzes Verzeichnis Sämmtlicher Im Jahre 1852 in Deutschland, 6: 70.
53
Lycklama à Nijeholt, Les Gardes de Persepolis. I am grateful to Ershad Vaeztehrani for bringing this work to my
attention.
March-Fantasy (Op. 353, 1872), Russian March (Op. 426, 1886), and Spanish March (Op. 433,
1888).
Heise must have spent some time in Iran before publishing his Marche Triomphale in 1864,
perhaps having arrived in Tehran in 1863 or earlier. This suggests he lived in Iran for at least
seven years, from 1863 to his death in 1870. Alfred Lemaire arrived in Tehran in early 1868,
and the two musicians were the only European musicians working in Iran from 1868 until
Heise’s death in Tehran in 1870. Nevertheless, Lemaire completely ignored Heise in his
report to Advielle, even though Heise had published the first piece of music for Iranian
marching bands’ repertoire. In all likelihood, Lemaire attempted to replace Heise’s version
of this piece with one he wrote. Alfred Lemaire published a few pieces for the piano in
Paris in 1873, when Nāsereddin Shah traveled to Europe for the first time. Those pieces
included Kadjars Marsch (Marche Triumphale Persane), which appeared in Le Monde Illustré on
Saturday, July 12.54 Five years later when the shah was in Europe for the second time,
Lemaire published Kadjars Marsch as a piano piece and added to the cover page that the
march was “accepté Par sa Majesté Impériale Le Schah de Perse.”55
Conclusion
In oral traditions, historical information is usually passed on orally and transformed to
mythology. Ethnography is the sole method of studying those traditions. In semi-oral tradi-
tions, as found in Iran, scattered information on music has been documented randomly and
sporadically. Those documents are the only sources available; they remain unchallenged. It is
essential to be critical of these sole pieces of information and not accept them at face value.
It may seem obvious that source criticism and the search for new sources are essential to
historical studies, but, at least in the case of Iranian music, historical research is based
mainly on a few available written sources that are usually taken at face value. This article
has unveiled a new source that seriously challenges the dominant narratives about the his-
tory of European music in Iran. It has provided a short history of European music in Iran and
explained the role of a sole document shaping that history, La musique chez les Persans en 1885.
The source’s role in the erasure of two significant players in the history of European music in
Iran, Marco Brambilla and Julius Heise, was briefly described. I have attempted to recover
Iranian music history with the discovery of hitherto hidden sources and by introducing
the German pianist Julius Heise, who was active in Tehran in the 1860s. This recent discovery
is now supported by the finding of Marche Triomphale, the first published composition from
the repertoire of European military bands in Tehran. Exploration of the history of European
music in Iran and the musical analysis of Julius Heise’s Marche Triomphale reveals that a self-
proclaimed hero, Alfred Lemaire, eliminated the role his predecessor Julius Heise had in
shaping European music in Iran through the selective account and influential narrative of
La musique chez les Persans en 1885. Not only did Lemaire selectively remove Heise from
this narrative, he also further concealed the influence of Heise by composing his own
march titled Kadjars March: Marche Triomphale Persane56 without acknowledging himin the
historic record.
This article highlights the need for a critical study of Alfred Lemaire’s influence on the
history of music in Iran, considering both traditional music and the growth of European
music in Iran. Lemaire lived in Iran for four decades as the most powerful person related
to music. His legacy and publications, which form the body of written sources on Iranian
music prior to World War I, have been generally accepted without critical inquiry. This arti-
cle is only the first step in that inquiry, which should cover all aspects of musical life in Iran.
Further studies may reveal Lemaire’s influence on various aspects of music, such as the
54
Lemaire, “Kadjars March.”
55
Lemaire, Kadjars.
56
Lemaire, “Kadjars March (Marche Triomphale Persane).”
Iranian Studies 775
theory of music and the notion of music and the musician in society. When conducting this
research, it will be important to consider the social circumstances of music in Lemaire’s
time. He represented European music, a musical culture that seemed far superior to the tra-
ditional music of Iran, and that supposedly superior music also was presented in military
uniform. Understanding Lemaire’s actions is essential to understanding the music of Iran.
The discovery of a forgotten work by a musician who had been eliminated from history pro-
vides one example of Lemaire’s influence on the history of music in Iran.
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Mohammad-Esmaeil Rezvani and Fatemeh Qaziha. Vol. 2. Tehran: Sazman Asnad Melli Iran, 1992.
Shah, Nāsereddin. Ruznāmeh-ye Khāterāt-e Nāsereddin Shah, Rabiossāni 1282 tā Rabiolavval 1283 be Enzemām-e
Safar-nāmeh-ye Māzandarān. Edited by Majid Abde Amin. Tehran: Anjoman Asar va Mafakher Farhangi, 2016.
Shah, Nāsereddin. Shahriār-e Jādeh-hā: Safar-nāmeh-ye Nāsereddin Shah be Atabāt. Edited by Parviz Badi‘i. Tehran:
Sazman Asnad Melli Iran, 1993.
Sheykh-Rezaei, Ensiyeh, and Shahla Azari. Gozāresh-hā-ye Nazmiyeh az Mahallāt-e Tehran. 2 vols. Tehran: Sazman Asnad
Melli Iran, 1998.
Shirazi, Abol-Hassan. Heyrat Nāmeh: Safarnāmeh-ye Mirza Abol-Hasan Khan Ilchi be Londan. Edited by Hasan Morsalvand.
Tehran: Rasa, 1985.
Shirazi, Mohammad Hadi. Dalil-os-Sofarā: Safarnāmeh-ye Mirza Abol-Hasan Khan Shirazi Ilchi be Rusiyeh. Tehran: Markaz
Asnad Farhangi Asia, 1978.
Shushtari, Mir Abd-ol-Latif. Tohfat-ol-Ālam va Zeyl-e Tohfah. Edited by Zeyn-ol-‘Ābedin Kermāni. Mumbai: Matba
Islami, 1847.
Stuart, Charles. Journal of a Residence in Northern Persia and the Adjacent Provinces of Turkey. London: Richard Bentley, 1854.
Vaeztehrani, Ershad. “Alfred Jean-Baptiste LEMAIRE (1842–1907), Chef de la Musique de Sa Majesté le Shah de
Perse.” Master’s Dissertation, Sorbonne Université, 2020.
Yarshater, Ehsan. “Communications.” Iranian Studies 22, no. 1 (1989): 62–65.
Mohsen Mohammadi specializes in the music of Iran and the Middle/Central/Near East and plays the setar. His
publications are based on his first-hand experience as a musician, on fieldwork, and on a wide range of first-
hand historical sources including manuscripts, diaries and memories, old newspapers, and early recordings. His
research interests include musical cultures in Persian and Indo-Persian countries, history of music in oral traditions,
colonial and contemporary literature on Iranian music, classicization of music, and early recordings. He is currently
Director of Indo-Persian music at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music.
Cite this article: Mohammadi M (2022). Marche Triomphale: A Forgotten Musical Tract in Qajar-European
Encounters. Iranian Studies 55, 765–776. https://doi.org/10.1017/irn.2021.65
doi:10.1017/irn.2022.19
A R C H I VA L R E P O RT
Not By Archives Alone: The “Revolution” in Soviet

Central Asian Literary Studies
Claire Roosien
(Received 19 February 2022; accepted 25 February 2022)
In contemporary Central Asia, Soviet-era authors are national heroes. Writers’ natal homes
have become lovingly curated home-museums; statues of poets bedeck city squares; and
schoolchildren write dictations from twentieth-century novels. Less often discussed in
public, such writers also once belonged to the Soviet Writers’ Union, many of these poets
called themselves “proletarian,” and their novels purported to imagine “revolution.”
Poems about tractors rarely appear in today’s anthologies, and new editions of 1930s novels
excise the once-obligatory references to Stalin. In reaction to their Soviet-era canonization,
some writers have been knocked from their pedestals, as recently happened to Hamza in
Uzbekistan.1 Due to the political sensitivity of many Soviet writers in Uzbekistan, most
serious scholarly attention has turned, since 1990, toward transitional Jadid writers of the
early revolutionary years who were ultimately devoured by the official regime, such as
Cho’lpon and Fitrat.
If the official narrative within Central Asia has emphasized national genius to the exclu-
sion of political context, Western scholars have tended toward a more pessimistic account,
stressing the political pressures that limited the scope within which Central Asian writers
could work. Beginning at the height of the Cold War, some scholars sought evidence of
“Aesopian” languages of resistance, through which authors encase their social critiques in
officially acceptable framings.2 Too often, however, those eager to read between the lines
neglect reading the lines on the page. While scholars of Russian literature have studied
Gorky and Sholokhov, Platonov and Pil’niak as literature, despite the political strictures in
which they wrote, few scholars in the Western academy have granted Central Asian litera-
tures the dignity of careful, theoretically informed and properly historicized literary
scholarship.3
Different as the two approaches may seem, they are both responses to the same problem.
There is a deep pathos and profound ethical dilemma inherent in the study of Central Asian
literature in the context of Soviet (neo-/ post-) coloniality. It can be wrenching to acknowl-
edge how much Central Asian writers depended on material support from the Party, and
1
Kamp, “Symbol of Ideology: Hamza’s martyrdom, erased.”
2
Edward Allworth’s field-defining work took such an approach; see Allworth, Uzbek Literary Politics and idem.,
Evading Reality: The Devices of ʻAbdalrauf Fitrat, Modern Central Asian Reformist.
3
There are several important exceptions from emerging scholars, including Kudaibergenova, Rewriting the Nation
in Modern Kazakh Literature: Elites and Narratives; Caffee, “How Tatiana’s Voice Rang across the Steppe: Russian
Literature in the Life and Legend of Abai”;Hodgkin, “Romance, Passion Play, Optimistic Tragedy: Soviet National
Theater and the Reforging of Farhad”; and Sharipova, “The Decolonization of the Environment in Kazakhstan:
The Novel Final Respects by Abdi-Jamil Nurpeisov.”
778 Claire Roosien
how imbricated they were in its discourses even in times of terror. But Central Asian writers
should not be reduced to mouthpieces for the Moscow Party line, when, in fact, they were
instrumental in re-interpreting, reshaping, and resisting it. Without understanding official
discourses and institutional structures, it is impossible to fully appreciate Central Asians’
appropriations of them. Nor can we understand or appreciate the Central Asian contribu-
tions to Soviet literature, and indeed, to an emergent world literature, without engaging
with the actual texts they produced.4 Studying Central Asian literature, then, requires atten-
tion to both political context and aesthetic form, drawing on the full variety of sources avail-
able in post-Soviet archives and libraries. While not exhaustive, this article offers a guide to
several key archives and libraries in the former Soviet Union, contending that while archives
greatly enrich the study of Soviet cultures, library collections of Soviet-era books and
periodicals will be at least as crucial to the ongoing reevaluation of modern Central Asian
cultures and literatures. I focus primarily on literature produced in Uzbekistan. Because of
the parallel institutional structures in most Central Asian republics, however, these notes
will be applicable also to scholars of other Central Asian literature and culture.
The National State Archive of Uzbekistan

Researchers on Soviet Central Asian literature before 1932 face a conspicuous gap in the
archival record. After the 1917 Revolution and for much of the 1920s, Central Asian literature
operated under the auspices of informal social networks, many of which had roots in the
pre-revolutionary progressive intelligentsia, or Jadids. Often local and ephemeral, these
groups represented diverse intellectual trends and reflect the cultural decentralization of
the early Soviet years.5 For example, under the direction of Abdurrauf Fitrat, the
Chagatay Conversation (Chig’atoy Gurungi) promoted research and discussion on the
Turkic cultural heritage of Central Asia; it also promoted early discussions of script reform
in Central Asia.6 By the late 1920s, the Party and its activists had condemned most indige-
nous cultural groups. Under influence from Moscow, in 1928 local Party activists founded an
Uzbekistan and all-Central Asia chapter of the Association for Proletarian Writers.7 At the
same time, a group of non-European activists organized a chapter of Red Pen (Qizil
Qalam), a literary group whose name conveys the outspoken political commitment of its
members.8
Red Pen and the Association for Proletarian Writers reflected a new, Party-oriented
tendency in Central Asian literature, distinct from the earlier, Jadid-inflected groups.
However, all these early organizations have the same status in the archival record. All
were condemned as counter-revolutionary in the 1930s, and their archives, such as they
4
Recent scholarship has shown the Soviet contribution to a 20th-century discourse of world literature; see
Hodgkin, “Persian Poetry in the Second-World Translation System”; Khotimsky, “World Literature, Soviet Style:
A Forgotten Episode in the History of an Idea”; Gould, “World Literature as a Communal Apartment: Semyon
Lipkin’s Ethics of Translational Difference”; and Djagalov, From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and
Cinema between the Second and Third Worlds. On debates surrounding “world literature” as a Eurocentric category
rooted in assumptions about translatability, see Mufti, Forget English! and Apter, Against World Literature.
5
The definitive study of the pre-1932 period is Khalid, Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early
USSR.
6
Ibid., 20.
7
A Tashkent Association of Proletarian Writers was formed in 1923, but it appears to have been dominated exclu-
sively by Russian-speakers, with a largely defunct Uzbek section; see Karimov, XX asr adabiyoti manzaralari, 250.
8
A chapter of Red Pen existed also in Azerbaijan, founded under the direction of the Council of Propaganda that
was organized at the Congress for the Peoples of the East in 1920. It is possible the Central Asian chapter of Red Pen
also formed under Party direction, but I have found no documentary evidence for this. The Central Asian chapter of
Red Pen was dissolved in 1930, while the Association of Proletarian Writers persisted until 1932. For a useful over-
view of literary organizations in early Soviet Uzbekistan, see Baldauf, “Educating the Poets and Fostering Uzbek
Poetry of the 1910s to Early 1930s.” On the Azerbaijani chapter of Red Pen, see Feldman, On the Threshold of
Eurasia: Revolutionary Poetics in the Caucasus, 176–207.
Iranian Studies 779
were, were largely destroyed. Today, those who research their work must scavenge for traces
of their activity in early Soviet publications, in scattered archival files of the Party-state and
personal files. Some materials relevant to early literary groups can be unearthed in the state
archives of Uzbekistan, and while post-Soviet scholars from the region have done essential
work in recovering these legacies, much remains to be done.9
In April 1932, the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party issued a decree
dissolving all literary organizations and restructuring them under a single umbrella, the
Writers’ Union.10 Soon, the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934 promulgated Socialist
Realism as the sole mode for cultural production under the auspices of the Writers’
Union. Ostensibly, the Union was to eliminate the supposed problem of factionalism in orga-
nizations such as the “left opportunistic” Association for Proletarian Writers. The Writers’
Union was to adopt a “big tent” approach, accommodating both Party and nonparty
participants in an effort to produce a Socialist Realist literature that would draw in the
wider masses. The actual effect, of course, was to subject Central Asian literature to an
unprecedented level of centralized hierarchy. A once-polycentric literary scene, with seden-
tary hubs in Samarkand, Bukhara, Ferghana, and to a lesser degree, Tashkent, became
centered around Tashkent, whose chapter of the Writers’ Union reported directly to
Moscow. Parallel chapters of the Writers’ Union were formed in the other Soviet national
republics as well: for example, many Tajik-speaking writers from Bukhara and Samarkand
made an exodus to Stalinobod (modern-day Dushanbe), and smaller Writers’ Union chapters
were formed also in Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan.11 However, because Uzbekistan inherited
the major cultural hubs of sedentary Central Asia, it remained a center of officially spon-
sored cultural activity in the region throughout the Soviet period, becoming an international
fulcrum for Soviet cultural exchange with the Third World during the Cold War.12
The archival record reflects this new degree of centralization. In Uzbekistan, the primary
archival collection ( fond, f. 2356) for the study of the literatures of Uzbekistan, which collects
the documents of the Writers’ Union of Uzbekistan, is located in the Uzbekistan State
Archive in Tashkent.13 The inventories (opisi) for this archive are not currently available
online, so even to consult them requires researchers to travel to Tashkent on a research
visa and obtain permission for archival access, usually through affiliation with the Academy
of Sciences, or, less frequently, other institutions, such as the National University of Uzbekistan.
Despite evident hierarchicalism in the Soviet Writers’ Union, the archives reveal the cen-
ter’s inability to control cultural production on a granular level, especially in languages
other than Russian. The archives brim with unfulfilled plans, unfunded initiatives, and
reports of “counter-revolutionary” works that somehow managed to be published. The doc-
uments contained in the Tashkent archive comprise the official records of the Writers’
Union: meeting protocols, plans for upcoming initiatives, correspondence with Moscow
and the Union’s regional chapters, and, occasionally, stenographic reports from Writers’
Union meetings and interrogations. Meeting protocols, usually quite laconic, convey what
was discussed at regular meetings. They are particularly useful insofar as they report who
actually participated in the organizational work of the Union, rather than those who
9
See, for example, Nabiev, Narzulloi Bektosh va ilmu adabi tojiki solhoi 20–30 sadai XX; Alimova and Rashidova,
Mahmudxo’ja Behbudiy va uning tarixiy tafakkuri; and Karimov, XX asr adabiyoti manzaralari.
10
See “O perestroike literaturno-khudozhestvennykh organizatsii,” 128.
11
On the exodus to Stalinobod, see Roberts, “City on Paper: Writing Tajik in Stalinobod (1930–38).” On the early
formation of chapters of the Writers’ Union in national republics, see Schild, “Between Moscow and Baku: National
Literatures at the 1934 Congress of Soviet Writers.” Useful starting points for research on Kazakh and Turkmen lit-
erature include, respectively, Kudaibergenova, Rewriting the Nation in Modern Kazakh Literature: Elites and Narratives,
and Clement, Learning to Become Turkmen: Literacy, Language, and Power, 1914–2014.
12
See Kirasirova, “Building Anti-Colonial Utopia: The Politics of Space in Soviet Tashkent in the ‘long 1960s’”; and
Djagalov, From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema between the Second and the Third Worlds.
13
Soviet archives were usually organized according to fond, or repository, most of which correspond to Party or
state institutions. Each fond is divided into several opisi, or inventories, which in turn organize dela, or archival files.
780 Claire Roosien
belonged to the Union in name only. The correspondence still available at the archive is
spotty in its coverage, but reveals interesting conflicts in many cases. Perhaps most prom-
isingly to scholars of literature, the archive has also retained some written critiques of Uzbek
literature, as well as the stenographic reports of meetings discussing specific works.
Importantly, the documents in the archive reflect that the Uzbekistan Writers’ Union was
not exclusively an institution for members of the Uzbek nation, and the archive has much
to offer scholars of literature in languages other than Uzbek, including Russian, Tajik, and
Uyghur. Most documents in the National Archive of Uzbekistan are in Russian, although
some particularly revealing stenographic reports and written critiques are in Uzbek, includ-
ing some in Arabic script.
Since well before 1917, literature in Central Asia has been closely linked to pedagogical
aims. The Jadids, or Islamic modernist reformers of Central Asia, placed “enlightenment”
at the forefront of their agenda, and most literary careers in early Soviet Central Asia mean-
dered through teaching and education policy in addition to the arts, particularly since
full-time employment as a writer was rare in the early Soviet decades. Consequently, the
literature of the early post-revolutionary years—including theater, prose literature, and
poetry—placed an uncommon emphasis on moral and political education. After the promul-
gation of Socialist Realism, with its emphasis on accessibility to the “people” (narodnost’),
Central Asian literatures retained their pedagogical focus. The inextricable connection
between literature and pedagogy in Central Asia is reflected in f. 94, which contains the
archive of the People’s Commissariat for Education (Narkompros/Ministerstvo
Prosveshcheniia USSR). The records of the Narkompros reveal literature to be an integral
part of the Party’s agenda for the cultural “enlightenment” of Central Asia’s masses, and
show the Writers’ Union to be part of a complex of Party-sponsored initiatives for cultural
construction, including libraries, Red Teahouses, literary circles, and other institutions for
circulating and promoting Party-sponsored literatures.14
The Russian State Archive of Literature and Art

Moscow’s archives are essential to students of Soviet Central Asian cultures for two main
reasons. First, because Soviet culture was organized hierarchically, with all roads leading
to Moscow, many key documents can be found only there. Local Central Asian institutions
consistently reported to their higher-ups in Moscow, and these reports often supply a
bird’s-eye view that is difficult to discern in the day-to-day records held in Tashkent and
other Central Asian cities. Second, since the political vicissitudes of the Soviet- and
post-Soviet periods hit close to home, some of the most sensitive archival materials have
been classified or disposed of in the region. Founded in 1941 to unify a variety of Party,
state, and personal archives, Moscow’s Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI)
is an essential, and vastly underutilized, repository on Central Asian literatures. The archive
contains reports from Moscow brigades sent to supervise and report on Central Asian liter-
atures; it also includes correspondence and reports sent to the central Writers’ Union from
regional Union leaders. Certainly for the early Soviet period, more documents pertaining to
the Uzbekistan Writers’ Union are accessible at RGALI than at the State Archive of
Uzbekistan (O’zMDA) itself. For example, while O’zMDA contains only scattered meeting pro-
tocols, RGALI includes a more exhaustive record as well as a number of detailed stenographic
reports from Uzbekistan Writers’ Union meetings in both Uzbek and Russian. The sources in
RGALI are particularly revealing when it comes to the dark years of 1936–38, as some
14
On Red Teahouses as cultural institutions, see Roosien, “‘Not Just Tea Drinking’: The Red Teahouse and the
Soviet State Public in Interwar Uzbekistan.” On state-sponsored cultural institutions in Kyrgyzstan, see İğmen,
Speaking Soviet with an Accent: Culture and Power in Kyrgyzstan; and on Kazakhstan, see Ramsay, “Nomadic Hearths
of Soviet Culture: ‘Women’s Red Yurt’ Campaigns in Kazakhstan, 1925–1935.”
Iranian Studies 781
relevant files remain classified in Tashkent, and much of the Terror played out under the
direction of brigades of Moscow-based writers.
The Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History

The Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI) also has much to offer with
respect to Soviet literature. The files of the Central Asian Bureau (f. 62) include materials
relevant to Turkestan and the Soviet Central Asian republics through the mid-1930s. Of par-
ticular interest are documents pertaining to the institution known at various times as the
Division of Agitprop (APO), Division of Agitprop and the Press (APPO), and the Division of
Culture and Propaganda (Kul’tprop). These files are particularly useful for researchers inter-
ested in the press, as the archive contains a wealth of statistics on the names, languages,
editorial composition, and relative importance of a variety of early Soviet newspapers
and journals. Other documents register complaints from agitprop administrators about
the “failings” of cultural institutions and critiques of the press’s “explanations” for contro-
versial policies such as collectivization. This collection is particularly useful for the Party
perspective on the sparsely documented cultural organizations of the 1920s.
Most of the archival materials in RGASPI are in Russian and reflect the views of
Russian-speaking administrators who both wielded great power and misinterpreted local
realities. They must be read with caution. For example, one notorious Secret Police docu-
ment from the Central Asian Bureau files describes a pan-Turkic conspiracy in 1920s
Kokand, which supposedly involved several well-known writers. No other evidence exists
to support the existence of such a group, which was most likely the fabrication of paranoid
officials.15 Likewise, agitprop administrators’ assessment of the local press, especially press
in local languages, is often quite superficial, as their understanding of non-Russian press was
usually dependent on translated digests.
Also worth mentioning is Moscow’s Komsomol (Communist Youth League) archive, once
independent, but now a division of RGASPI housed in a separate building across town.
Communist Youth League members were a driving force in Soviet cultural production,
and they organized cultural festivals, literary competitions, and “outreach” drives to the
countryside. The collections of the Komsomol archive include stenographic reports of activ-
ist conferences and extensive files on major Komsomol events. There are also many reports
on initiatives to expand access to radio, film, and periodical press, often providing unique
insight into the local reception of Soviet mass media and cultural production. The
Komsomol archive’s inventories are organized according to republic, enabling researchers
to quickly identify relevant materials along national lines.
The Alisher Navoiy Literary Museum

While state archives offer some irreplaceable documents, when it comes to manuscripts,
researchers will need to look elsewhere. The former Soviet Union is dotted with the home-
museums of venerated cultural producers, and Central Asia is no exception. Tashkent, for
example, hosts the home-museums of luminaries such as writers Oybek and Abdulla
Qahhor, the famed musician Yunus Rajabiy, and renowned dancer Tamara Xonim, among
many others. The museums are worth visiting just for their public exhibitions alone, but
many also hold some or all of the personal archives of each author.
The most significant museum archive for the study of Soviet Central Asian literature in
Uzbekistan is the Alisher Navoiy Literary Museum in Tashkent, which was founded in
1939 as part of the preparations to celebrate the quincentennial of medieval Persianate
poet ʿAli Shir Navaʾi. In the 1960s, the museum established an archive organized mostly
15
The file is located in RGASPI, op. 2, d. 2199. For more discussion of this conspiracy theory, see Khalid, Making
Uzbekistan, 374.
782 Claire Roosien
by author names. The museum’s administration has recently been in transition and, like cul-
tural institutions everywhere, appears woefully underfunded. However, researchers who are
able and willing to wade through shelves of disorganized files will find a trove of documen-
tation from some of the most prominent writers of Soviet Uzbekistan, from still-renowned
authors like G’ofur G’ulom, whose name still bedecks a major subway station in Tashkent, to
once-major but now-forgotten writers like Oydin and Husayn Shams. The files include per-
sonal documents and correspondence from some authors. Most significantly, the archive
holds manuscripts and unpublished proofs, as well as significant manuscript collections of
medieval and early modern Central Asian literature. Copies can be quite expensive and
researchers are expected to submit and adhere to a list of authors they wish to study before
gaining access to the library.
Library Collections
Since the “archival revolution” opened Soviet archives to Western researchers, scholarship
on the region has heavily emphasized intensive archival research. While this work has
greatly enriched the scholarly understanding of Soviet social and political history, an exces-
sively archive-focused approach has limitations for the study of Soviet culture.16 At various
historical turning points, archives—particularly those located in Central Asia—have classified
or otherwise disposed of key documentary evidence of local literatures. Personal archives,
albeit valuable, have been lost or rendered inaccessible.
Meanwhile, published materials from the Soviet and post-Soviet periods must be handled
with great caution. As political priorities changed, Soviet republications scrubbed out-of-date
language. The names of purged cultural figures were routinely eliminated from texts and, in
some cases, literally defaced in physical copies of books. Consequently, serious scholars of
literature and culture must undertake significant searches just to identify the original
texts of major works, and to parse how they have been revised. While the “authentic”
first editions are invaluable, their revision histories often reveal much about the ongoing
process of interpretation and revision that took place with input from authors, their editors,
their censors, and later, the scholars who study them. For example, Abdulla Qahhor’s
major novel The Mirage (Sarob) was published first in the official journal of Uzbekistan’s
Writers’ Union, then issued in book form in the late 1930s, and subsequently republished
in heavily redacted editions over the course of the twentieth century, including the
post-Soviet period.17 Other works were published once and completely forgotten after
their writers were purged; such is the case of the prolific writer Husayn Shams, a leading
figure in the cultural life of the 1930s, but largely forgotten after his fall from grace during
the Great Terror.
In Uzbekistan, the major library collections are held at the Alisher Navoiy National
Library (Alisher Navoiy Milliy Kutubxonasi). However, the collections of books are difficult
to access, often requiring days to retrieve, and the catalogs are incomplete. Scanning and
copying is expensive and heavily restricted; many early Soviet books are held in the rare
book and manuscript collections, where access policies are more restrictive still.
Many university libraries in the United States hold useful, albeit spotty collections of
Central Asian periodicals and books.18 Also worth mentioning are the collections of
Central Asian publications bequeathed to the New York Public Library (NYPL) by Edward
Allworth. While some items are represented in the digital catalog, the most exhaustive
16
On the impact of the “archival revolution” in Soviet social history, see Fitzpatrick, “Impact of the Opening of
Soviet Archives on Western Scholarship on Soviet Social History.”
17
It is now available in a very reliable scholarly edition; this is not the case for many other Soviet-era works. See
Qahhor, Tanlangan Asarlar.
18
Particularly useful collections are housed at the University of Chicago, Harvard University, University of
Illinois – Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Figure 1. A speech by Akmal Ikromov, published in 1934 and defaced by a reader at the Russian State Library, pre-
sumably after he was purged in 1937–38. O’zbek Sovet Adabiyoti, no. 6 (June 1934): 3.
catalog is Allworth’s own, also held by NYPL off-site.19 The collection primarily comprises
publications from the 1920s in Central Asian languages; as it is stored off-site, it usually
19
Eren, Preliminary List of Publications from the Former Soviet East, by Language Group in the Slavic and Baltic Division.
784 Claire Roosien
takes several days to retrieve items from the collection. Many of these rare publications have
unfortunately been lost, but the collection remains an essential starting point for any
US-based student of Central Asian literature. I would also be remiss not to mention the sig-
nificant digital collections of Central Asian (mostly Uzbek) literature located at ziyouz.com
and kh-davron.uz.
Perhaps the most useful collection of Soviet-era Central Asian literatures is located in
Moscow at the Russian State Library (Rossiiskaia Gosudarstvennaia Biblioteka), which
collected and still retains most publications from the entire Soviet Union. The card catalogs
for books and periodicals in Central Asian languages are held at the Oriental Division
(Vostochnyi otdel) of the RSL, across the street from the main building in downtown
Moscow. The catalogs are organized by subject and language. Most catalog records for
texts in languages other than Russian remain undigitized, and photographing catalog
cards is strictly prohibited. After transcribing full call numbers and bibliographic informa-
tion for books, researchers will need to proceed to the Periodicals Reading Room in Khimki, a
suburb of Moscow, where most books in Central Asian languages are held. The Khimki
reading room also holds the invaluable Soviet-era press chronicles (letopisi) with full
bibliographic information about Soviet-era publications, including the often rapidly
changing titles of newspapers and journals. Particularly valuable items include the official
publications of the republican Writers’ Unions, as well as arts and culture journals such
as Uzbekistan’s Guliston. Most newspapers and journals regularly published literary features,
so almost no publication can escape the purview of serious scholars of Central Asian liter-
ature. Despite the logistical challenges in obtaining call numbers, most materials are in
excellent condition. Photography is permitted free of charge and almost without restriction,
and the reading room staff is generally able to bring up requested items within the hour. The
RSL also permits remote requests for scans, although payment usually requires assistance
from someone on the ground in the Russian Federation.
Conclusion
While the “archival revolution” began decades ago in Soviet history, it has yet to fully
reshape the scholarly understanding of Central Asian literatures. Today, the field of
Central Asian culture is poised for its own “revolution,” drawing not only on the official
archives of Party-run organizations, but also the full spectrum of published books, periodi-
cals, and ephemera. This type of research requires a careful triangulation between archival
records, publication histories, and textual analysis—a kind of historical-critical textual work
that is paralleled only in the study of sacred texts. By accounting for the full variety of
sources—including published materials in the entire array of languages and scripts, personal
archives, and Party-state institutions—scholars can produce a new story about Soviet Central
Asian literature; one that takes account of its political overdetermination, formal innovation,
and aesthetic originality, even under conditions of duress.
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Iranian Studies 55, 777–785. https://doi.org/10.1017/irn.2022.19
doi:10.1017/irn.2022.34
A F T E RWO R D
Afterword to Persianate Pasts, National Presents: Persian

Literary and Cultural Production in the Twentieth Century
Rebecca Ruth Gould

Professor and Professorial Research Fellow, Islamic World and Comparative Literature, University of
Birmingham, Birmingham, UK
(Received 22 April 2022; accepted 22 April 2022)
What is the relevance of the Persianate as a category of analysis in a world wherein even
world literature continues to be framed as the literary history of discrete nations? First
coined by historian Marshall Hodgson in 1974, Persianate initially referred to cultures
such as Georgian, Armenian, Chaghatay, Urdu, and Ottoman, which were heavily
influenced lexically and culturally by Persian without themselves being related to Persian
linguistically.1 Gradually, an additional meaning was grafted onto “Persianate,” which refer-
enced cultures such as Judeo-Persian that were linguistically Persian but culturally diverse,
bearing multiple alphabets, religions, and identities. These two meanings—the first grounded
in cultural affinity and the second in linguistic origins—complement each other and ensure
that the concept of the Persianate is reducible neither to language nor to identity.
Yet for those who have not been swept up in the Persianate turn, including many outside
the Euro-American academy, the word “Persianate” still lacks a clear referent.2 Iranians,
Afghans, Tajiks, and South Asians transliterate into English the same words differently,
transposing the same signifieds into divergent signs. In deference to these regional differ-
ences, sympathetic—or sometimes simply bewildered—outsiders often reframe the Persian
language more locally and colloquially as Dari, Tajik, and Farsi. Such reframing under the
aegis of national boundaries promotes the perception that these literatures and cultures,
which rely on the same cultural referents, could be studied in isolation from each other.
The articles in this special issue refute the tendency to homogenize the literatures of
Western and Central Asia as Persian, on the one hand, and to fragment them as a hodge-
podge of discrete national formations, on the other. In vastly different yet interconnected
ways, they reveal the relevance of the category of the Persianate after nationalism has
ineluctably shaped the meaning and value of the term. In exploring the trajectory of the
Persianate over the course of the long twentieth century, these articles compel us to
think differently about utility of vernacular modes of expression that are inflected by, yet
not wholly contained within, nation-based rubrics. While Hodgkin, Massoumi, and Loy
examine the creation of transregional idioms through various institutions of Persianate
culture—such as the anthology, the radio, and the periodical—Fani and Jabbari examine
how intellectuals from the Persianate periphery shaped a dominant Persianate culture. In
1
Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, 293–94.
2
Kaveh Hemmat is among those who have recently tracked this turn in “Completing the Persianate Turn.”
Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://cre-
ativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,
provided that no alterations are made and the original article is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University
Press must be obtained prior to any commercial use and/or adaptation of the article.
788 Rebecca Ruth Gould
his examination of nineteenth-century university calendars and courses, Bruce shows how
colonial universities in India helped to establish Persian studies as a discipline.
Malekzadeh shows us how postrevolutionary Iran’s educational curriculum tracks “continu-
ities and permutations” in depictions of foreign others, whether Arab Muslims or Europeans
and Americans.
Collectively, these authors show us how the concept of the Persianate encompassed the
heterogenous registers of Farsi, Dari, and Tajik well into modernity, even after the demise of
a premodern Persianate ethos that encompassed literary culture from Bosnia to Bangladesh.
While Persianate literatures follow a centrifugal trajectory in modernity, Turkic and Arabic
literatures have tended to move in a centripetal direction, in the direction of greater consol-
idation and centralization. In their movement toward homogenization and standardization,
Turkic and Arabic literary histories are regularly presented as unified wholes, even when
they are internally diverse. The same might be said for English, under the aegis of the “global
Anglophone,” a label that erases differences in the pursuit of globalization. Meanwhile,
Persianate culture has been increasingly fragmented in modernity, notwithstanding the
great degree of linguistic continuity among Persianate registers. While Farsi and Dari are allo-
cated to separate literary geographies, they are mutually comprehensible. For all intents and
purposes, the Tajik spoken in Tajikistan, the Dari spoken in Afghanistan, and the Farsi spoken
in Iran are regional variations on the same Persianate idiom.
Although we lament the loss of the cosmopolitan ethos that seemed to be embedded
within Persianate pasts, in fact the concept of the Persianate was invented to serve modern
needs, after the partial demise of the worlds it referenced. Even the word “Persian,” from
which “Persianate” derives, is not easily captured by a single word in the language to
which it refers, which is instead divided up into the regional categories of farsi, dari, and
tajiki. To call the Persianate a product of the modern imagination is not, however, to equate
it with falsehood. Often, things are first named only once their absence becomes palpable.
Whereas previously continuity among the various registers of the Persianate world could
simply be assumed, the reconfiguration of heterogeneous Persianate tongues in modernity
required a single word to encompass them all. Claiming this concept as modern means
recognizing how the cosmopolitan ethos intrinsic in the idea of the Persianate serves uniquely
modern needs. It also means underscoring why the values the Persianate embeds may be worth
reviving again. One modern need to which the Persianate corresponds is our longing for a com-
munity that is not subject to the exclusionary boundary-making of the nation-state. Another
contribution made by the Persianate in modernity is in creating spaces for those who occupy
the peripheries of empires, who do not fit into the linguistic, cultural, or political mainstream.
The articles in this special issue return us to another dimension of the Persianate, which is
rooted in the original linguistic meaning of ʿajam, the premodern Arabic word for Persians and
other non-Arabs. The term ʿajam has been appropriated by many indigenous peoples on the mar-
gins of the Muslim world, not only in Persianate domains, but also in the Arabophone Caucasus
and Africa, to describe their languages as recorded in the Arabic script.3 We need not look far to
understand the appeal of the concept of ʿajam—originally meanings mute and deaf and later sig-
nifying outsider and foreigner—in a world of xenophobic confrontation. Analogously the word for
“barbarian” in many languages of antiquity was also associated with the foreign and exotic.4
Being a barbarian, argues Indian philosopher Sudipta Kaviraj—occupying the position of the
one who is called ʿajami—confers certain epistemic advantages on the observer.5
The reconfiguration of this etymology across time and space was a process led by the
authors, editors, and scholars whose lives and work are documented in this special issue. It
is a transformation that reveals the contributions that non-Iranian Persians of the
3
The world of African ʿajam is discussed in Ngom, Muslims beyond the Arab World. ʿAjam in the Caucasus is dis-
cussed in Gammer, ed., Written Culture in Daghestan, 17–40.
4
See Boletsi, Barbarism and Its Discontents.
5
Kaviraj, “On the Advantages of Being a Barbarian.”
Iranian Studies 789
Persianate world made—and continue to make—to Persian culture and to world literature. The
contributors to this special issue take the peripheral consciousness inscribed into the concept
of ʿajam one step further in time and space, and situate it in a world of nations, dominated not
just by Iran but by Russia and the Soviet Union (Hodgkin and Loy), Afghanistan (Fani and
Massoumi), the Arab world (Malekzadeh), and South Asia and Iran (Jabbari and Bruce).
The hegemony of nations contributes to numerous anomalous configurations within
modern scholarship, including the ongoing marginality of modern Afghan writers within
the Persian literary canon, and the relative absence of Tajik, modern Dari, and other
non-Iranian Persianate literatures within Persian studies. Sometimes posited as a panacea
to nationalisms past and present, the concept of the Persianate can widen the field of
Iranian studies and reveal the numerous intersections of Persian literature with Soviet,
Central, and South Asian studies. The takes on Persian literary culture from the
Persianate peripheries offered by Jabbari, Hodgkin, Loy, Fani, Massoumi, Bruce, and
Malekzadeh bring into relief the ongoing value of Persianate cosmopolitanism to our post-
colonial and post-national presents. Cultural and ethnic outsiders are most at home along
the peripheries of Persianate literary culture: in Afghanistan and Tajikistan, and throughout
the Caucasus. By virtue of being detached from sharply delineated national borders, the
Persianate ethos complicates and even calls into question modern geopolitics.
In their introduction, Schwartz and Fani rightly caution us against “reifying or centralizing
the Persianate.” It is imperative that we not replace the totalizations of Eurocentric national-
ism with an equally totalizing Persianate rubric which ignores layers of Turkic, Pashto, Urdu,
and other South Asian literary cultures that have always shaped the literary landscapes of
West, Central, and South Asia. At the same time, far from surrendering to modernity’s mono-
lingualism, we can read texts from Iran, Afghanistan, Central and South Asia, and the Caucasus
in light of the Persianate contexts and cultures within which they have long been embedded.
Where Persian is singular, the Persianate is plural. Reading the contemporary moment
through the lens of Persianate culture—taking plurality as a norm rather than a special
case or an anomaly—means reenvisioning geographic constellations that we all too often
take for granted. By recognizing the coherence, the cogency, and the contingency of
Persianate cultures across Eurasia well into the twenty-first century, we decenter the nation-
alisms in our own midst. At its best, engaging with the concept of the Persianate in an era
riven by conflicting nationalisms and perpetual imbalances of power can help us respond to
Walter Benjamin’s mandate: if we want to write in the tradition of the oppressed, we must
learn to brush history against the grain.6
Acknowledgments. This work is indebted to my ongoing ERC-funded project, Global Literary Theory
(ERC-2017-STG Grant Agreement No. 759346).
Bibliography
Benjamin, Walter. “On the Concept of History.” In Selected Writings: 1938–1940, edited by Michael William Jennings and
Howard Eiland, 389–400. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.
Boletsi, Maria. Barbarism and Its Discontents. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013.
Gammer, Moshe, ed. Written Culture in Daghestan. Helsinki: Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, 2015.
Hemmat, Kaveh. “Review Essay: Completing the Persianate Turn.” Iranian Studies 54, no. 3–4 (2021): 633–46.
Hodgson, Marshall. The Venture of Islam, Volume 2: The Expansion of Islam in the Middle Periods. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1974.
Kaviraj, Sudipta. “On the Advantages of Being a Barbarian.” In The Invention of Private Life: Literature and Ideas, 11–21.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.
Ngom, Fallou. Muslims beyond the Arab World: The Odyssey of Ajami and the Muridiyya. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
6
Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 392.
Cite this article: Gould RR (2022). Afterword to Persianate Pasts, National Presents: Persian Literary and Cultural
Production in the Twentieth Century. Iranian Studies 55, 787–789. https://doi.org/10.1017/irn.2022.34
REVIEWS
The Emperor Who Never Was: Dara Shukoh in Mughal

India. Supriya Gandhi (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2020). Pp. 338. $32.00 hardcover. ISBN 9780674987296
Reviewed by Anurag Advani , Department of South & Southeast Asian Studies, University
of California, Berkeley, USA
The Mughal prince Dara Shukoh (1615–1659) has a hotly contested legacy in South Asia.
Whereas many champion him as a tragic hero who represented hope for future Hindu–
Muslim unity, others dismiss him as being too intellectually minded to have made a fitting
ruler. Supriya Gandhi’s recent book, The Emperor Who Never Was: Dara Shukoh in Mughal India,
offers the most comprehensive, insightful, and eloquent analysis to date of Dara’s life and
times. First, Gandhi argues that Dara was a natural product of the Mughal world he inhabited
rather than an embodiment of modern ideas like secularism and liberalism. In her words,
“Dara Shukoh was never a liberal, nor did he promote interfaith harmony in the modern senses
of these terms. Yet he oversaw an extraordinary exercise in cross-cultural understanding.”
(p. 7). A second stereotype portrays Dara as the wronged prince whose legitimate right to
the Mughal throne, as the chosen heir of Shah Jahan, was usurped by his jealous, power-hungry,
bigoted younger brother Aurangzeb. Gandhi convincingly breaks down the dichotomy between
the two brothers, describing how they grew up in the same milieu and imbibed similar ideas
from their ancestors and contemporaries, even as their thoughts and actions reflected their
divergent personalities. She therefore urges us to resist the teleological narrative that Dara’s
rule could have changed the course of South Asian history.
The book is chronologically divided into nine chapters. The first three chapters capture
the complexities of the Mughal royal family in which Dara Shukoh was born and raised. As
the peripatetic imperial camp settled in Ajmer from 1613 to 1618, contemporary English
travelogues convey their impressions of religious tolerance, economic prosperity, and polit-
ical factionalism in South Asian society. Until 1622, Dara’s early childhood was shaped by his
family’s interactions with Hindu ascetics and Sufi saints, along with a close bond with his
older sister Jahanara. When Khurram (now Shah Jahan) rebelled against Jahangir and Nur
Jahan, Dara and Aurangzeb were taken hostage by their grandparents in Lahore in 1626.
As Gandhi astutely observes, his father’s bloody rise to power against other contenders to
the throne foreshadowed Dara’s own tussle with his brothers three decades later. Shah
Jahan’s coronation also marked Dara and Aurangzeb’s reunion with their mother and father.
But Mumtaz Mahal’s death during childbirth in 1631 left Jahanara and Dara in charge of the
household. Dara’s wedding to Nadira Bano Begum took place in 1633 amid an ostentatious
display of wealth.
In chapters 4 and 5, we learn that in his youth, Dara became the most important Mughal
prince, his father’s favorite and next in the royal reckoning, although he was often overshad-
owed by Aurangzeb’s military prowess. While Dara was given nominal governorships of
Punjab, Kabul, and Allahabad, Aurangzeb gained more experience in war and statecraft
through governorships of the Deccan and Gujarat. In this capacity, Aurangzeb stormed the
temple of the Jain merchant Shantidas in Gujarat in 1645. Gandhi opines that this attack
“served to assert his authority in a new territory . . . by desecrating Shantidas’s temple,
Aurangzeb also struck a blow at his father and eldest brother” (p. 127). While it may be
814 Reviews
true that Aurangzeb’s motives included politically undermining Shah Jahan and Dara
Shukoh, we cannot completely negate the religious element in this act. Not all rhetoric
against kāfirs (infidels) can be explained as political legitimacy or expediency. How do we
understand acts of violence committed in the name of Islamic belief on their own terms,
without invoking the logic of political strategy to defend against Hindutva-led allegations
of Muslim cruelty and barbarism?
Gandhi’s writing seamlessly twins court intrigues with Dara’s theosophical ruminations.
Together with his sister Jahanara, Dara became profoundly immersed in Sufi esotericism
under the guidance of the Qadiri saint Mulla Shah Badakhshi. Aside from writing Sufi trea-
tises, they made several trips to Kashmir, generously patronized architecture in Srinagar,
and invited Mulla Shah to visit the Mughal court. Dara’s early Persian works, the
Safīnat-ul-Auliyāʾ (1640), Sakīnat-ul-Auliyāʾ (1643), and Risāla-yi Haqqnumā (1646), reveal his
changing outlook on the Sufi path to divine gnosis, as he became more interested in
Hindu mysticism and tried juxtaposing his knowledge of yogic chakras with sultān-ul-azkār
(heightened divine remembrance).
Chapters 6 to 8 focus on the final productive and eventful years of Dara’s life. After the
failure of his Qandahar campaign in 1653, he wrote the Hasanāt-ul-ʿĀrifīn (1654) on Sufi
ecstatic expressions, Majmaʿ-ul-Bahrain (1655) on the search for Indian monotheists
(muwahhidān-i hind), and Sirr-i Akbar (1657) on translating the Upanishads. Dara also commis-
sioned a new Persian translation of the Sanskrit Yogavashishta and was deeply interested in
occult sciences like demonology, geomancy, and astrology. These later works hint at Dara’s
resistance to the dogmatic practices of the Muslim clergy (‘ulamā). But more significantly,
they emerged from his interactions with various non-Muslim figures, including
Kavindracharya Saraswati, Baba Lal, Jagannatha, Banwalidas, Chandar Bhan Brahman, pun-
dits in Benaras, Sarmad Kashani, and Father Roth. And yet, Gandhi emphasizes that inter-
faith knowledge production was not unique to Dara, since royals like Akbar, Jahangir,
Shah Jahan, Jahanara, and his brothers Shuja and Murad similarly patronized religious
and literary projects. As previous scholarship has also noted,1 Dara was casting himself in
the mold of a well-rounded Mughal philosopher-prince by displaying cultural refinement
and closely engaging with Islamic and Indic spiritual traditions.
Parallel political developments exacerbated the rift between Dara and Aurangzeb, culmi-
nating in the bloody War of Succession (1657–1659) that ended Dara’s life, which is the sub-
ject of chapter 9. Our only sources for the succession struggle are chronicles dedicated to
Aurangzeb, Murad and Shuja (p. 215), but Gandhi reorients the reader to Dara’s perspective.
Despite having the emperor’s support, he was thwarted by the reluctance of nobles like Jai
Singh and the lack of help from Rajput rulers, as well as his brother’s rebellions. Gandhi chal-
lenges the notion of Dara’s weak political and military skills, since Aurangzeb’s victory was
not apparent until the very end. Finally, Gandhi debunks Aurangzeb’s religious motives in
accusing Dara of apostasy and heresy, arguing that it was merely a ploy to sway the
ʿulamā and incite public protest in order to execute Dara. Aurangzeb made sure Dara died
in ignominy, burying him in an unmarked grave in the Humayun’s Tomb complex in Delhi.
Throughout the book, Gandhi stresses the crucial role that women played in Mughal high
society. Nadira Begum is a constant presence, whose pivotal interventions, political counsel,
and relationships in the harem were deeply intertwined with the lives of Dara and their chil-
dren. But the most prominent female figure of authority in the book is Jahanara. Jahanara
features on her own terms: as a disciple of Mulla Shah who wrote Sufi treatises, as a patron
of architecture, literature, and trading investments, as a peacemaker who was equally
1
See Rajeev Kinra, “Infantilizing Bābā Dārā: The Cultural Memory of Dārā Shekuh and the Mughal Public Sphere,”
Journal of Persianate Studies 2, no. 2 (2009): 165–93; Munis D. Faruqui, “Dara Shukoh, Vedanta, and Imperial Succession
in Mughal India,” in Religious Interactions in Mughal India, ed. Munis D. Faruqui and Vasudha Dalmia, 30–64 (New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2014); Muzaffar Alam, “In Search of a Sacred King: Dārā Shukoh and the Yogavāsiṣṭhas of
Mughal India,” History of Religions 55, no. 4 (2016): 429–59.
Iranian Studies 815
revered by her contrary brothers, and as a close political adviser and confidante of her
father. In this sense, Gandhi’s book also contributes to recent studies on Jahanara.2 One won-
ders, however, why Dara’s other sisters, Roshanara and Gauharara, do not feature signifi-
cantly in his story. Roshanara supported Aurangzeb in the War of Succession, but no clear
reason is given for her animosity toward Dara.
These minor quibbles aside, The Emperor Who Never Was is a superbly crafted, engrossingly
written, compellingly argued book that is a landmark contribution to the histories of Mughal
India, Sufism, and Persian literature. Academics and lay readers alike will delight in its lucid
prose, attention to detail, and careful, sensitive examination of several underused archival
sources, including Dara’s first muraqqa or album (1633), his Samudrasamgama (1655), and
Tawakkul Beg’s Nuskha-yi Ahwāl-i Shāhī (1666). In weaving a complex tapestry of South
Asia in the seventeenth century, Gandhi accomplishes much more than a mere biography
of Dara Shukoh: her anecdotal style brings to life court intrigues, battle scenes, epistolary
exchanges, meditations on Indic and Islamic philosophy, nuances of the Sufi pīr-murīd
(master-disciple) relationship, public perceptions of sovereignty, and skillfully interpreted
poetry and paintings. Dara Shukoh’s story has had many afterlives in South Asia, but this
monograph is testament to the power of timely, persuasive scholarship in reshaping popular
imagination.
doi:10.1017/irn.2022.16
Persianate Selves: Memories of Place and Origin before

Nationalism. Mana Kia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020).
Pp. 336. $30.00 paper. ISBN: 9781503611955
Reviewed by Behzad Borhan , Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University, Montreal,

Canada ([email protected])
Books begin with their titles. My first task is always to translate the title of a book into
Persian. Here I asked myself, “How would ‘we’ render Persianate Selves?” The term
Persianate resists a clear-cut translation, primarily because it delineates a more expansive
meaning than the term “Persian.” Fārsī-zabān1 (Persian-speaking), which is considered the
closest equivalent to “Persianate,” restricts its conceptual framework to the spoken lan-
guage. Marshall Hodgson, who coined the term “Persianate,” reminds us that not all the peo-
ple in the “Persianate zone” spoke Persian. Other translations such as Qalamrow-i zabān-i fārsī
for “Persianate world”2 also duplicate the words or cannot be applied to other adjective
phrases like Persianate languages/culture or Persianate studies3.
2
See Nausheen Jaffery, Jahan Ara Begum: A Biographical Study (1614-1681) (New Delhi: Idāra-yi Adabiyāt-i Dehlī,
2011); Afshan Bokhari, Imperial Women in Mughal India: The Piety and Patronage of Jahanara Begum (London:
I. B. Taurus, 2015); Muzaffar Alam, The Mughals and the Sufis: Islam and Political Imagination in India, 1500–1750
(Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2021), 259–330.
1
The Association for the Study of Persianate Societies has rendered its Persian name as Anjuman-i muṭāliʿāt-i
jawāmiʿ-i fārsī zabān. See www.persianatesocieties.org/about/.
2
For more suggested translations, see Amanat, “Remembering the Persianate”.
3
See Amir Arjomand, “From the Editor: Defining Persianate Studies”.
816 Reviews
The lack of a satisfying and self-evident translation is instructive here. Hodgson first
developed the conceptual category of “the Persianate” in order to highlight the social and
cultural dynamics of a premodern world that have been poorly understood today. The pro-
noun “we,” as in “we Persians” formulated in my earlier question, comes from the fact that I
was born to Persian parents in Iran and grew up speaking Persian. According to the logic of
modern nationalism tied to ethnicity, territory, and mother tongue, I call myself a Persian.
However, Mana Kia’s argument serves to show that this was not the case before modern
nationalism. Over the course of seven chapters, Kia argues that Persian ethnicity was not
only based on blood and lineage, nor were “native” Persian speakers the only people
considered to be Persian. A Persian could be anyone in the vast cultural cosmopolis
stretching from the Balkans to Bengal who was associated with a set of embedded forms,
acquired and circulated transregionally, in which Persian operated as a shared language.
She tells us that premodern authors did not use a single term in reference to writers and
speakers of Persian (e.g., Tājīk, ʿAjam, Qizilbāsh) and that these terms were not free-standing,
but were bound to specific contexts.
Kia reconceptualizes the meaning of origin and place in the context of Persian by focusing
on people who lived in Iran and Hindustan in the eighteenth century. The book’s temporal
focus spans between two critical events: the fall of the Safavids in 1722 and the production of
Macaulay’s famous 1835 memorandum, “Minute upon Indian Education.” The former is
critical because it defined the shared meaning of place and origin and brought about the
construction of our modern idea of Iran, while the latter is significant since it formally
began the process of displacing Persian as the language of power in the subcontinent and
thus transformed shared meanings based on origin, place, and lineage (p. 20).
Kia has thoughtfully drawn on a constellation of primary sources by three interconnected
generations of authors. These works, which she collectively calls “commemorative texts,”
include a wide range of histories, tazkirahs (often translated as biographical dictionaries),
travelogues, and autobiographies. To access the memoirs of Safavid times, Kia focuses on
authors such as Muhammad ʿAlī Hazīn Lāhījī (d. 1766/1180) and Vālih Dāghistānī
(d. 1756/1169). For the accounts of the next generation, particularly about Nadir Shah’s
era, she has mostly focused on the works of Luṭf ʿAlī Āzar Baygdilī (d. 1780/1195) and
ʿAbd al-Karīm Kashmīrī (d. 1784/1198). To examine memoirs of the third generation who
fled the Iranian domain after the fall of the Safavids, she selected scholars such as Abū
Ṭālib Khān Iṣfahānī (d. 1806/1220) and ʿAbd al-Laṭīf Shushtarī (d. 1806/1220). According
to Kia, these adibs (bearers of adab), as the representative figures of different geographical
places and lineages, are all Persians. She argues that their place of birth constituted only
one element of their lineage alongside other types of places, such as ancestral homeland,
and site of study or profession, which assumed more significance than their birthplace
(p. 104). Kia sees these diversities as not categorical but more “aporetic” (as formulated
by Derrida): meaning, based on porous limits and permeable distinction.
Adab is a key concept for Kia. It is through Persianate adab that lineage, place, origin, and
language gained meaning for people as a basis of identification as Persians. She understands
adab as the aesthetic and ethical form of thinking, acting, and speaking, the epistemological
ground on which Persians identified themselves. In other words, perceiving, desiring, and
experiencing adab provided the coherent logic of being Persian. Through adab, space turned
into place, and place obtained a moral meaning (p. 96). It was through the logic of adab that
relations between selves and collectives became intelligible (p. 100), lineage was understood
(p. 102), and language was deployed. Adab regulated an understanding of kinship distinct
from blood and situated Persians ontologically in a world of relationships (p. 200).
The centrality of the term adab in the main argument of the book begs a deeper and
broader historical examination of the term, especially the differences that Persianate adab
—as portrayed in Pahlavi sources, Shāhnāma, and andarz literature—may have had with
the modalities of adab in the broader Islamicate world. Kia does not directly speak about
the limitations and boundaries of adab. Therefore, greater clarity on the interplay of
Iranian Studies 817
aesthetics and ethics within the discourse of adab would have further strengthened her argu-
ment. Specifically, how did different manifestations of adab function in the process of being
transregionally Persian? Also, the reader may wonder what could be considered as the
counter-adab. That is to say, upon what basis did Persianate adab mark certain people as
bī-adab (who lacks adab) and certain attributions and behaviors as bī-adabāna (lacking adab)?
Besides the term adab, throughout the book, Kia revisits many emic terms such as Turan,
Hindustan, and Timurids, which, despite being approximate and contextual-based, resurrect
the broader interpretations of place and origin before nationalism. In addition to the
multifarious arguments in favor of the Persianate hermeneutic of adab, Kia also offers a
novel approach to reading Persianate biographical literature (tazkirah). She highlights a
conventional method and structure of remembering the past between the authors of
commemorative texts. Apart from commenting on the lives of notable figures, Kia shows
us how these texts served as means by which authors identified themselves and claimed
their affiliations. Biographers represented certain pasts and certain individuals in a specific
way within which their lineages and social relationships were nested, and they did so based
on the epistemology of Persianate adab.
Kia has managed to develop and justify her argument and recover premodern configura-
tions of identity and sociability that have been displaced by modern nationalism. Persianate
Selves: Memories of Place and Origin before Nationalism is a strong addition to the burgeoning
field of Persianate studies and a product of excellent primary source research, particularly
beneficial for scholars of Persian literature, Middle Eastern and South Asian studies,
Islam, and transnationalism. Overall, Kia’s novel insights and approaches locate Persianate
Selves among the books that will generate lasting conversations in the field, as suggested
by the name of its author, mānā (perpetual).
Bibliography
Amanat, Abbas. “Remembering the Persianate.” In The Persianate World: Rethinking a Shared Sphere, edited by Abbas
Amanat and Assef Ashraf. Iran Studies, vol. 18. Leiden: Brill, 2019.
Amir Arjomand, Saïd. “From the Editor: Defining Persianate Studies.” Journal of Persianate Studies 1, no. 1 (2008): 1–4.
doi:10.1017/irn.2022.36
Remapping Persian Literary History, 1700–1900. Kevin L.

Schwartz (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020). Pp. 233.
$100.00 hardcover. ISBN 9781474450843
Reviewed by Matthew C. Smith, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

([email protected])
Kevin L. Schwartz’s Remapping Persian Literary History, 1700–1900 takes a fresh approach to dis-
cussing the “literary return” (bāzgasht-e adabī) school of poetry that reached its zenith at the
Qajar court of Fath ʿAlī Shāh (1772–1834). Schwartz frees the discussion of this era from the
framework of stylistics and nationalism and considers the concept of literary return as an
extra-national phenomenon, focusing on “literary communities debating and engaging an
open-ended canon according to their own social and political contexts” in Iran,
Afghanistan, and India (23). In doing so, he upends the conventional scholarly narrative,
shedding new light on historical details and providing a model for further research.
818 Reviews
The book is divided into an introduction and four chapters, the first examining the place
of literary return within the historiographical discourse and the other three offering case
studies from Iran, Afghanistan, and India. The introduction stresses the importance of bio-
graphical dictionaries (tazkireh) as a means of “exploring the social bonds among communi-
ties of poets” (23) as well as revealing how poets related to the larger community. Schwartz
mines certain biographical dictionaries to create graphical aids he calls “network maps.”
The first chapter explores the tendency among Persian poets in Iran, Afghanistan, and India
during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to refer to past masters of the canon. It opens
with a review of Muhammad Taqī Bahār’s conceptualization of the literary return school and
the so-called Indian style (sabk-e Hindī). Schwartz recognizes that Bahār “leveraged” the tazkireh
genre to “shape a narrative of Persian literature’s development” and notes that Bahār shifted
the focus from an international body of Persian literature “into a narrative of Iranian literary
history ” (37, emphasis in the original). Contrasted with this new Iranian literature was the
Indian style. Schwartz characterizes Bahār’s view of the Indian style as “Persian poetry gone
astray and in decline” (38). He argues that Bahār’s portrayal of literary development as a cul-
tural conflict divided by national borders interrupted our understanding of how poets
responded to the events of their day and interacted with the canonical body of Persian liter-
ature. Although Schwartz relies on Bahār’s Sabkshenāsī for his argument, that work was explic-
itly intended as a history of Persian prose. Although the text supports Schwartz’s argument, he
makes fewer references to Bahār’s writings addressing poetic stylistics.
Schwartz then examines evidence for the existence of a literary return school of poets in
Iran. Looking at literary biographies and anthologies by authors such as Lotf ʿAlī “Āzar”
Baygdelī (d. 1781) and Rezā Qolī Khān Hedāyat (d. 1871), Schwartz traces the roots of the his-
toriographical process that reduced the complex “social and historical circumstances of
post-Safavid Isfahan” to a simplistic narrative that served as “a crucial linchpin in the story
of Iranian literary salvation” (48). He addresses the paradox of the depiction of literary return
as both revival and mimicry by Hedāyat and later critics. Of course, portraying the poetry of
the era as such allowed poets of the early twentieth century (like Bahār) to break with tradition
while also positioning themselves as the true guardians of Iran’s literary heritage.
In Afghanistan and India, the concept of literary return is detached from Iranian nation-
alism. Modern scholars of Afghan poetry debate the existence of a coherent movement,
although that debate has largely been shaped by the model for discussing literary return
in Iran: poets imitating older styles “at the expense of other styles across state and society.”
This model, Schwartz argues, ignores the social environment in which the Iranian school was
nurtured and assumes a “coherent assembly of poets” (57). Removing the idea of literary
return from the conception of a literary school in geographical proximity, perhaps with
the patronage of a court, and considering it as a trend in a larger arena “allows for assessing
engagement with the masters in the nineteenth century as a feature and function of textual
production and circulation” (57). Schwartz takes as his point of reference the genre of
Afghan “war-ballads” ( jangnāmeh) that described the events of the first Anglo-Afghan War
(1839–1842) in the style of Ferdawsī’s Shāhnāmeh.
In the case of South Asia, discussions of literary return have been subsumed into a nar-
rative of the decline of the Persian language in the face of British policies promoting English,
as well as “the growing usage of Urdu as a means of literary expression” (59). British involve-
ment with the Mughal successor states gave rise to an English-speaking class of administra-
tive secretaries (monshi), replacing Persian as the administrative language. Schwartz
describes this phenomenon within a broader trend in which the “prevalence and practice
of Persian administrative norms were slowly being phased out.” As for the rise of Urdu lit-
erature, Schwartz traces the complex path, “occurring in fits and starts in both the
Subcontinent’s north and south over several hundred years” (63), toward becoming a literary
language in the nineteenth century. Still, as he notes, Persian poetry retained an important
place within literary culture and argues it should be considered as having “refashioned”
itself when confronted by social and linguistic change, rather than being overwhelmed.
Iranian Studies 819
Reference to the past masters of Persian literature was one way in which this refashioning
was articulated.
The second chapter focuses on the development of the literary return movement in
Isfahan during the eighteenth century. Schwartz argues that these developmental stages
demonstrate how the urge to refer to the earlier epochs of Persian poetry were driven
both by social and political change as well as the links between poets that formed a distinct
community. It is an overdue historicization of the movement’s roots, digging into the effect
of patronage and politics and providing evidence for the poets’ views directly from their
poems. Schwartz provides a visual network map to show how poets interacted with or
related to each other. I found these illustrative aids a provocative means for exploring ave-
nues of research, although one regrets that they were not printed in color and given a larger
space, particularly as they grow more complex.
Chapter 3 studies the war-ballads of Afghanistan based on Ferdawsī’s Shāhnāmeh, as men-
tioned. Schwartz’s approach to these texts differs significantly from that in chapters 2 and 4
because it is the genre itself that manifests the idea of literary return:
Their [the war-ballads’] very existence may point to an alternative model of what is meant
by ‘literary return,’ based not entirely on collective action and output by a group of poets,
but on processes of textual production, circulation and reception as well. (129)
He also acknowledges that imitations of the Shāhnāmeh are found throughout South Asia as
well as Afghanistan and Iran. The strongest connection to the other two cases is how poets in
the nineteenth century referred to one of the foundational works of Persian poetry to com-
ment on contemporary events. The example goes a long way toward refuting the claim of
later historians that literary return only produced pale imitations of the masters with no
connection to the author’s social environment. It could be argued however, that Schwartz
himself is drawing geographical borders around a literary phenomenon, that is,
Shāhnāmeh-like poems, that transcended them. He does anticipate this criticism to a certain
extent by discussing British involvement in the production of these texts, but it does leave
the reader to wonder why this section of the book required a geographical designation at all.
The fourth chapter discusses literary return at the court of the last Nawab of Arcot,
Muhammad Ghaws Khān Bahadur. It offers a fascinating look at a community of poets debat-
ing the relevance of classical Persian poetry while the Persian language itself was disappear-
ing from “cosmopolitan” use. The existence of this literary activity complicates, if not
contradicts, the narrative of Persian poetry’s decline in South Asia. He describes literary
debates about the relationship between classical poetry and later styles that echoed the con-
cerns of poets in Iran and elsewhere. He supports his argument again with a set of complex
network maps, which can be difficult to decipher although they do give a good impression of
these intricate sets of relationships. The chapter provides an interesting perspective not just
on the debate about literary return but on the development of Persian poetry as poets coped
with a shifting political, social, and literary landscape.
Remapping Persian Literary History, 1700–1900 is the first serious attempt to pick apart one of
the foundational assumptions of Persian literary historiography and achieves its goal admira-
bly. Schwartz adds a great deal to our understanding of the historical facts surrounding this era
and demonstrates that the relationship between poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies with their predecessors was born of social conditions and used by those later authors to
understand and reflect on their times. He takes this idea into the Persianate world, uncovering
communities of poets grappling with the same issues. Even when the application is a little
uneven, it is still an intriguing and useful tool for provoking further scholarship. Finally, the
book is notable for transcending the criticism of scholars who dismiss the poetry of this era
on qualitative terms and claim that the best that can be said is that some poets produced wor-
thy imitations of their betters. Poetry is born of people communicating their ideas about the
820 Reviews
world around them, where they have come from, and where they are going, and Schwartz’s
work asks us to listen more closely to these conversations.
doi:10.1017/irn.2022.7
The City and the Wilderness: Indo-Persian Encounters in

Southeast Asia. Arash Khazeni (Oakland, CA: California
University Press, 2020). Pp. 264. $85.00 (Hardcover), $29.95
(Paperback) ISBN: 9780520289680.
Reviewed by Kevin L. Schwartz , Research Fellow, Czech Academy of Sciences
The frontier is a space of natural contradiction. It is as much defined by expansion and fluidity
as contraction and demarcation. But amidst this messiness, it is also a place of encounter and
contact. It is this last facet of the frontier that frames The City and the Wilderness: Indo-Persian
Encounters in Southeast Asia by Arash Khazeni, a Professor of History at Pomona College. The
book is a series of micro-histories tracing the ways in which British and Indo-Persian officials,
secretaries, travelers, botanists, and artists understood, mapped, and defined the Southeastern
frontier of the Mughal Empire by employing a hybrid epistemological framework that “merged
Indo-Persian knowledge and its perceptions of the wondrous edge of the Indian Ocean with the
Orientalist pursuits of the East India Company and its scientific wing” (p. 2).
The book is divided into two parts. Part One, “Indian Ocean Wonders,” explores how the
Southeast Asian world, or “lands below the winds,” was depicted by Indo-Persian travelers
through an Islamicate frame of wonders (ʿajaʾib) tinged with a new appreciation for
European scientific knowledge. As eighteenth-century “Indo-Persians travelers came to serve
the East India Company as intermediaries, interpreters, and translators of environments, king-
doms, and cultures on the edges of Mughal India” (p. 49), traces of the colonial sciences—such
as archaeology, geography, and botany—began to rub-off in their works. The result of this amal-
gamation was the creation of “hybrid” texts that captured the period of transregional contact
taking shape during the waning days of the Mughals and rise of the British Raj. While cultural
intermediaries in the opening chapters, like Mirza Abu Talib Khan Isfahani and Mir ʿAbd al-Latif
Khan Shushtari, are not unknown to scholars for their treatment of the European or Indian
“other,” their observations of the Southeast Asian frontier are freshly presented here.
The second part of the book, “Mughal Meridian,” consists of three chapters. Each chapter
focuses on a different figure’s engagement with the imperial and cultural worlds of Mrauk U
(1430-1784) or the Konbaung dynasty (1752-1885). One is Michael Symes, who served as the
envoy of the 1795 East Indian Company (EIC) embassy to the Konbaung dynasty and was
“among those company agent-explorers embedded, skilled, and immersed in the cultural
terrain of Persian” (p. 74). Symes and his mission were responsible for both making diplo-
matic contact with the Burmese Kingdom and providing the company with scientific knowl-
edge of its physical and cultural landscape. The result was Symes’s Account of an Embassy to
the Kingdom of Ava (1800), which was heavily based on information gleaned and mediated
by Indo-Persian intermediaries and middle-men either accompanying the mission or resid-
ing in the Burmese Kingdom itself. Through a close accounting of the mission and Symes’s
work, Khazeni demonstrates that the hybridity of colonial and Indo-Persian epistemologies
can cut both ways in defining the texts they inhabit and thoughts they shape: if Abu Talib
Khan and Mir ʿAbd al-Latif Khan wrote Indo-Persian travelogues with a colonial frame,
then Symes wrote an English safar-nāmah (travelogue). The textual frontiers of the
Iranian Studies 821
eighteenth and nineteenth-century Indo-Persian world, connecting genres and operating

across languages, appear just as messy as the physical ones, and the exploration of their con-
tours equally as enriching. Khazeni’s attention to the genre-bending nature of the texts ana-
lyzed in The City and the Wilderness is a welcome contribution to more recent scholarship,
such as that of Walter Hakala, Alexander Jabbari, and James Pickett, who have made similar
observations elsewhere in the Persianate world.
The focus of Chapter Four is Singey Bey, who accompanied the 1795 EIC mission and was
tasked with providing botanical and landscape drawings during the journey. These drawings
would later appear as lithographs in Symes’s printed account. Bey’s drawings “were essential
to the mission’s venture to collect and classify the rare botanical specimens and flora of the
Burmese Kingdom and its vast monsoon forests” (p. 119), Khazeni writes, and highlight the
importance of the forest and fauna as a site of cultural encounter, in particular for the mis-
sion’s contact with the sacred signs of Buddhism. Bey was among a cadre of native artists
trained by the EIC in the 1790s and, for Khazeni, represents how colonial botany was
indebted to people like him. It is yet another example of how the Indo-Persian “moonshee”
(munshī) helped shape British colonial understandings of the surrounding world in the eigh-
teenth and nineteenth centuries, complementing the work of earlier scholars like Kumkum
Chatterjee and Simon Digby.
The focus of the final chapter is another Indo-Persian munshī, Shah ʿAzizallah Bukhari
Qalandar, who along with others in the service of the EIC—through the employ of the
Scottish officer and Orientalist John Murray MacGregor (d. 1822)—helped “decipher the syn-
cretic Theravada Buddhist beliefs and rituals of Mrauk U through the translation of Pali lit-
erature into Persian” (p. 134). Shah ʿAzizallah and others’ translations from Pali-into-Persian
reveal the syncretic world of Mrauk U, from the extent to which the kingdom relied on an
Indo-Persian cultural lexicon for imperial self-fashioning to how its Muslim denizens could
recognize and accept Buddhist holy men as akin to Sufi mystics and ascetics.
Here, it seems, on the frontier between the Mughal and Arakan Empires, between Islam
and Buddhism, cultural and religious sensibilities were intertwined, enmeshed, and made
mutually legible, a feat made possible by Indo-Persian peoples and vocabularies. There is
perhaps no greater testament to the relevance of employing a Persianate frame to trace
the transregional connections across South and Southeast Asia, nor to its overall methodo-
logical and scholastic viability elsewhere. The many (often valid) critiques levelled against
the Persianate frame notwithstanding, most notably advanced by the late Shahab Ahmed,
Khazeni convincingly argues that it was the world of Indo-Persian that brought together
travelers, Sufis, Buddhists, Armenian merchants, Orientalists, secretaries, artists, and bota-
nists. Remarkably, and crucially, there is nary a significant mention of Iran anywhere in
the book. The Persianate frame, at times misapplied as a short-hand to explore Iran’s contact
with the outside world, demonstrates its fullest potential when Iran is historicized and
de-centered from the narrative, or even absent altogether.
Khazeni’s book also reveals the immense value of utilizing an “East-East” paradigm rather
than one of “the West and the Rest” when it comes to exploring cross-cultural and cross-
regional encounters in Eurasia. As Khazeni puts it: “It now seems worthwhile to delve
more deeply into the archive of vernacular representations of spaces and environments,
not within the context of the European encounter but rather within the missing terrain
of inter-Asian contacts and exchanges (p. 13).” Khazeni has offered an admirable contribu-
tion to this growing body of literature that seeks to explore the construction and develop-
ment of the transregional Persianate world in the eighteenth to twentieth centuries by
looking outside of Europe. Further likeminded possibilities in the study of South and
Southeast Asia, as elsewhere across the Persianate world, remain an open frontier.
doi:10.1017/irn.2021.58
822 Reviews
Polymaths of Islam: Power and Networks of Knowledge in

Central Asia. James Pickett (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2020). Pp. 301. $54.95 hardcover. ISBN: 9781501750243
Reviewed by Jürgen Paul, Center for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, Hamburg University,
Hamburg, Germany ( [email protected])
This book is a much revised version of a PhD dissertation. The author tackles the task of
describing and analyzing the social and intellectual world of Central Asia, in particular
Bukhara, during the long nineteenth century. This long century is practically coterminous
with the rule of the Manghit dynasty (1753–1920); it lasts from the reestablishment of
autochthonous rule following the Iranian intermezzo (Nadir Shah’s conquest of
Transoxiana and Khwarazm in the 1740s) to the end of autocratic rule after the October
Revolution and the subsequent establishment of the Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic.
The polymaths quoted in the title are Islamic scholars: ulema, graduates, alumni, and teach-
ers of the famous Bukharan madrassas. Pickett not only considers them scholars, legal experts,
qadis, or muftis, but also mystics, poets, healers, experts in occult sciences, astronomers, and
astrologers, hence the term “polymath” in the book’s title. The world of these polymaths was
undoubtedly the Persianate (Sunni) sphere, covering—in the nineteenth century—still much of
the eastern Islamic world, in particular Central Asia and what is today Afghanistan, parts of the
Indian subcontinent, and reaching out into the Turkic-speaking world, the steppes of Eurasia,
Tatarstan, southern Siberia, and Xinjiang. These regions formed the catchment area of the
Bukharan educational system, with Bukhara and wider Transoxiana at the center, followed
by the mountainous regions that today belong to Tajikistan and the northern rim of the
Hindu Kush. All other regions had a more marginal position in this world. Pickett shows
that these areas were indeed home for the majority of students of the Bukharan madrassas.
Students from Shiʿi Iran were not on the archival record examined in this study.
Polymaths of Islam meticulously analyzes prosopographical sources and biographical
dictionaries that record the lives and deeds of scholars (mostly jurists), poets, and others.
Together with narrative and archival sources (e.g., foundation deeds), these materials provide
us with a much more detailed picture of the Bukharan madrassas than what has previously
emerged. In light of Pickett’s historicization of Bukhara, the image we have today of the city
as an ancient center of Islamic learning, going back perhaps even to the earliest centuries
of Islam, has to be revised: Bukhara the Noble, or Bukhara-yi sharif, owes its fame as an educa-
tional center to the vast and continuous building and founding activities under the Manghits,
and we can even suppose that there was a good deal of active promotion going on. Bukhara
competed not with neighboring centers (such as Samarqand and Herat), but with the great
capitals of the Persianate world. Bukhara faded only where Lahore and Delhi made their influ-
ence felt. On the other hand, Bukhara did not radiate into Shiʿi Iran even if the religious boun-
dary was not as tight as is frequently assumed. In any case, at the end of the nineteenth century
there were as many madrassas in Bukhara as in Istanbul, and they were rather busy.
Pickett does not analyze his polymaths of Islam in a social vacuum. They are one of
several groups of notables, the other important group being the Turkic emirs who held polit-
ical and military power, and monopolized a majority of influential positions in the Manghit
state. Whereas scions of Turkic noble families could and sometimes did attend madrassas to
a degree that made them part of the scholarly elite, this was impossible the other way round:
no amount of teaching could allow a man not born into a relevant family access to certain
offices and positions. Descent, and not learning, was the decisive factor here. Both groups of
notables—the Islamic scholars and the Turkic emirs—depended on each other, however, to a
degree that came close to symbiosis. Other important social groups, such as merchants and
nobles engaged in long-distance trade, simply do not show up because there are no sources
Iranian Studies 823
about them. No one ever had the idea to compile a biographical dictionary of the great trad-
ers of Bukhara. This also is true for many other parts and periods of the Muslim world: land-
owners, traders, and others appear in the prosopographical literature only insofar as they
won recognition as scholars, poets, or doctors.
The historical sources also allow a glimpse into the inner workings of the Bukharan
madrassas, their curricula and syllabi. Pickett distinguishes a core curriculum comprised
of Arabic—most of the works studied are in that language—logic, rhetoric, speculative
theology, and philosophy. The rest, in particular substantive law, was taught in the selective
courses, much of it in later years of education. The result is surprising, perhaps even for the
author: “The curriculum aimed at cultivating intellectuals who were capable of grasping the
underlying principles of their subject matter” (p. 111). This is very much in contrast to what
previously was assumed: learning in late madrassas was learning by rote, deadly for the spirit,
narrow in outlook, killing initiative and inspiration, and certainly not a path to using one’s own
critical thinking. Moreover, it was hardly efficient on top of all that, with ignoramuses gradu-
ating in large numbers. Bukharan madrassas, until now, were judged along the lines established
by the modernizers in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Central Asia, the so-called
Jadids (the “New or Young Ones,” the name is derived from the new methods in learning they
set out to establish), in particular perhaps Sadriddin ʿAyni, the famous Tajik litterateur (1878–
1954). Their judgment of Bukharan madrassas was pungent, and they frequently covered their
former colleagues with acrimonious scorn and mockery. This view of the Bukharan madrassas
and their graduates and teachers survived into the Soviet period: no wonder, then, that the
Bukharan madrassas were depicted as supposed dens of superstition, made to instill ignorance
and prevent the intellectual awakening of the toiling masses.
Research on Central Asian intellectual and educational history has concentrated very much
on the Jadids, with much less space allotted to the “old” ones, or the Qadims: if there is some-
thing new, by necessity there must be something old, and if there is a Jadid movement, it fol-
lows that all the others were partisans of the old system. These people of course were the vast
majority of Bukharan madrassa graduates until 1920. Serious attempts to deal with their intel-
lectual production were made only after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Pickett’s work is not
the first, but one of the best documented books on them, and he shows a richness and com-
plexity of intellectual activities that were a revelation to this reviewer. Pickett achieves this in
particular because of his broad scope of sources. In addition to the prosopographical literature,
chronicles, and archival material (in Uzbek, Persian, and Russian), he has used a hitherto prac-
tically unknown type of manuscript source, the so-called jung. Jung books are notebooks,
mostly kept by men working in the judiciary for their own use. There are quite a lot of
these notebooks; in Tashkent (in the holdings of the Beruni Institute for Oriental Studies)
there are about fifty of them, and smaller collections are kept in Dushanbe and Saint
Petersburg. To the best of my knowledge, Pickett is the first researcher to have made use of
this type of source material for studies of social history.
Overall, the jung notebooks reflect the multifarious activities of their writers: they have a
lot of legal material, in particular copies and drafts for legal statements (fatwas), but also
other legal documents, together with, for some manuscripts, a large number of original
papers with their seals. Besides this scholastic and legal material, they include poetry, mys-
tical treatises, correspondence, texts on occult sciences, recipes for medicine, and guides to
drawing up talismans and other magical agents. They also contain some economical infor-
mation: lists of how much a qadi would earn in a given place, notes on debts, the lending of
books and money, and so forth. Thus, they reflect exactly what Pickett has set out to show:
that the qadis and muftis in late nineteenth-century Bukhara were more than just legal
scholars; they were indeed polymaths. The merit of this book lies primarily in the profound
reevaluation of the Bukharan madrassas and their graduates.
doi:10.1017/irn.2021.24
824 Reviews
Exile and the Nation: The Parsi Community of India and

the Making of Modern Iran. Afshin Marashi (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 2020). Pp. 328. $55.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9781477320792
Reviewed by Samuel Thrope, National Library of Israel, Jerusalem, Israel
([email protected])
In the olden days it was the custom that the Zoroastrians of India would go to Iran to con-
sult with the wise sages of Zoroastrianism in order to learn the faith. Today a different
situation prevails in which the Iranian Zoroastrians have become ignorant of their religion
and beliefs and it is the Parsis who have achieved knowledge of the faith and produced
great scholars.1
As the Indian Zoroastrian scholar, public figure, and philanthropist Dinshah Irani wrote in
his popular Persian-language introduction to Zoroastrianism, the 1927 Peyk-e Mazdāyasnan
quoted above, for centuries the Indian community, known as Parsis, looked to Iran for reli-
gious guidance and instruction. Among other sources, this dependence is evidenced in the
revāyāt texts, epistles containing doctrinal and other questions sent from the Indian commu-
nity to their Iranian coreligionists. These letters aimed to bring Indian religious practice in
line with Iranian Zoroastrian orthodoxy.2
Over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though, a radical
realignment took place in the relationship between the Zoroastrian communities of India
and Iran. Precipitated by technological advances in communications, travel, and industry,
as well as the rise of new political formations and new ideologies, the supremacy of the cen-
ter over the diaspora was reversed.
In part, Afshin Marashi’s Exile and the Nation: The Parsi Community of India and the Making of
Modern Iran is a new history of this historic realignment. The book’s innovation, and one of its
main contributions to the field, is how it puts different disciplines and traditions of Iranian
studies in mutually illuminating conversation. In particular, Marashi juxtaposes the study of
Zoroastrianism as a religious and intellectual tradition, and especially the Parsi stream thereof,
with research on colonial and postcolonial Iranian modernities.
Marashi begins his study in the mid-nineteenth century, by which point “the bulk of the
Parsi community’s prosperous industrial and merchant class had settled in Bombay, and the
city came to serve as the nodal point for a Parsi global trading network” (p. 11). With their new-
found political clout and prosperity, the Indian community sought to improve the conditions of
Iranian Zoroastrians; Parsis established schools and charitable foundations in Iran, sent perma-
nent representatives, and appealed to the ruling powers on behalf of the Iranian community.
The first chapter of Exile and the Nation deals most directly with this inter-Zoroastrian
issue. The chapter’s focus is the figure of Arbab Kaykhosrow Shahrokh (1874–1940). Born
into rural poverty in Kerman, Shahrokh was an Iranian Zoroastrian who came to serve as
the community’s representative in the Iranian parliament for three decades beginning in
1909, among many other public roles. The critical turning point in Shahrokh’s career was
the patronage and education he received from the Parsi community. Shahrokh was sent
to study in a Bombay school whose mission was, as Marashi writes, “to produce a new
Parsi intelligentsia committed to fostering a liberal, reformed, and modernist understanding
of the faith” (p. 31). This steeping in liberal ideals of tolerance and equality, Marashi argues,
inspired Shahrokh to challenge the discriminatory social restrictions imposed on Zoroastrians
1
Irani, Peyk-e Mazdāyasnan, 8–9, quoted in Marashi, Exile and the Nation, 83.
2
Sheffield, “Primary Sources,” 533–34.
Iranian Studies 825
by the Muslim-majority society and to give birth to an Iranian nation more modern and
enlightened during the Constitutional Revolution and thereafter.
Marashi opens the first chapter with Shahrokh’s death in 1940, describing the paradoxically
minor coverage in the Iranian press of the passing of such an influential figure. The explana-
tion, we learn, may well lie in the fact that Shahrokh’s son, Shah-Bahram, served in Nazi
Germany’s Ministry of Propaganda as the principal spokesman for the Persian-language broad-
casts of Radio Berlin. Under the shadow of Reza Shah’s increasingly dictatorial reign, many
believed that Shahrokh was assassinated as punishment for his son’s unwelcome politics.
The narrative framing of this chapter as a murder plot deserves our attention for a number
of reasons. First of all, it encapsulates an overarching theme: The father suffers the sins of the
son—a reversal of the biblical injunction unto the seventh generation. This ethical dictum, here
expressed most starkly and violently, is, in a sense, Marashi’s guiding principle throughout the
book. Each of the book’s five chapters takes a different perspective on the porous boundary
between liberalism and illiberalism. The Parsi attempt to ground the creation of a more toler-
ant, open, and modern Iranian nation in the shared ethnic and cultural heritage of Zoroastrians
and Muslims alike necessarily also produced its opposite. Marashi embraces and welcomes this
paradox, reveling in the “myriads of conflicted, ambivalent, and often contradictory responses
stemming from the same experience of newfound transoceanic contact” between Parsis and
Iranians (p. 11). Exile and the Nation incorporates the best insights of deconstructionism and
postcolonialism without being beholden to their jargon and style.
Questions of style are just as central to Exile and the Nation as questions of argument. Marashi
has chosen a biographical approach to his subject, and each chapter refracts the Parsi-Iranian
encounter through the prism of a single, exemplary life. Following the discussion of Shahrokh
are chapters devoted to the Parsi intellectual, philanthropist, and community leader Dinshah
Irani (1881–1938; chapter 2); the Bengali poet and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore
(1861–1941), whose official visit to Iran in 1932 came about through Parsi intervention (chapter
3); Ebrahim Pourdavoud (1886–1968), the Iranian Muslim scholar and translator of classical
Zoroastrian literature into Persian (chapter 4); and Saif Azad (1884–1971), the Third-Worldist,
revolutionary, and agitator against British colonialism (chapter 5). In Marashi’s skillful and nov-
elistic retellings, these biographies reveal the extent to which Parsis influenced the develop-
ment of Iranian nationalism and the Iranian nation as interlocutors, teachers, impresarios,
and financial backers. At the same time, we learn how that influence intersected (again, con-
tradictorily) with Romanticism and racism, colonialism and revolution, liberalism and author-
itarianism. One of the most important lessons of Exile and the Nation is that the Parsi moment in
modern Iranian history was anything but marginal or parochial.
My own field is Zoroastrian literature in Middle Persian: the Pahlavi “ninth-century books,”
in Harold Bailey’s famous coinage, written or redacted in the first centuries after the Islamic
conquest of Iran in 650. There is much in Marashi’s book that was particularly instructive
for me and helped to bridge the gap between “classical” Zoroastrianism and the Parsi religion
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My own limited (and, it must be said, very naive)
experience living and learning from the Parsi community in Bombay left me primarily per-
plexed. Indian Zoroastrianism seemed almost unrelated to the religion described in the
Bundahišn, the Denkard, and other Middle Persian works. This was, of course, unfair and no
more sensical than judging a twenty-first-century Manhattan Jew by the standards of the
Mishnah—though my impression is that I was not alone in having this particular prejudice.
In any case, Marashi’s discussion of Irani’s Zoroastrian writings was especially illuminating.
Irani’s Persian-language books, aimed at the popular audience of Muslim Iranians, reimagined
the religion of Zoroaster as an ethical and mystical doctrine in terminology borrowed from clas-
sical Persian Sufism and other sources.
I would have wished for Exile and the Nation to devote more space to literary questions. How
did reading Pahlavi literature impact these or other thinkers’ later ideas and writings? Did the
content and theology of the Zoroastrian canon, which was in fact still taking shape in the writ-
ings of Parsis and Orientalists alike during the period, make a difference, or were the law-
826 Reviews
bound and theological Pahlavi books precisely what Marashi’s heroes paradoxically rejected?
Nonetheless, the work succeeds in reconceptualizing Iranian modernity, and Iranian national-
ism especially, in light of the Parsi-Iranian encounter. Through the stories of the book’s five
protagonists, Exile and the Nation shows how Parsis played pivotal roles in the development
of the ideologies that defined twentieth-century Iran. At the same time, Marashi’s book
expertly weaves together disparate subfields within Iranian studies—namely, classical
Zoroastrianism, colonialism, and Sufism—that are rarely in conversation. As such, scholars
in the field will doubtlessly find Exile and the Nation enlightening and instructive.
Bibliography
Irani, Dinshah. Peyk-e Mazdāyasnan. Bombay: Anjoman-e Zartoshtiān-e Irāni-ye Bambaʾi, 1927.
Sheffield, Daniel J. “Primary Sources: New Persian.” In The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Zoroastrianism, edited by
Michael Stausberg, Yuhan Sohrab-Dinshaw Vevaina, and Anna Tessmann, 529–42. Chichester: John Wiley &
Sons, Ltd., 2015.
doi:10.1017/irn.2022.33
S H O RT R E V I E W S
Meysam Safarchi, Tejā risā zi va masrafgarā yi: tahavvol-e fazā

va farhang-e shahri dar Tehran [Commercialization and
Consumerism: Transformation of Urban Space and Culture in
Tehran] (Tehran, Iran, Ney Publishing, 2021)
Reviewed by Nooh Monavvary , University of Tehran
([email protected])
Commercialization and Consumerism is a critical reading of what the city of Tehran has been
going through during the recent decades. By a dual focus on the fields of urban sociology
and political economy, Safarchi has led an extensive qualitative inquiry to show how
Neoliberalism has gradually captured urban spaces while public bodies of authority and gov-
ernance have remained apparently inactive in the face of financialization, corruption, and
privatization of public spaces that have deprived social and communal owners of the city
of almost all of the newly created spaces. Regardless of arguments on either irrelevance
or inadequacy of the concept of Neoliberalism in the case of Iranian political economy,
Safarchi’s contribution is particularly significant for two main reasons. First, he consciously
refuses to follow the well-established approach of merging a critical cultural study of the city
with augmenting an aesthetic resistance by consumers. This cultural approach results in an
equivocal analysis that might not even see the most obvious cases of neoliberalization in
Tehran’s urban spaces. What’s more, he is audacious enough to talk about the variegated
roles of Islamism in providing ideological content for the comprehensive project of commer-
cializing public spaces. Suffice it to say, Safarchi’s book is definitely a reliable source for
reflecting on the consequences of exposing Tehran to emergent patterns of Neoliberalism.
Finally, I would like to express my sincere respect to Meysam, who left us way too soon
and lived as a true believer in the emancipatory role of critical social sciences.
doi:10.1017/irn.2022.44

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Iranian Studies, Volume 55, Number 3, July 2022

Special Issue: Persianate Pasts; National Presents: Persian

GUEST EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION

Persianate Pasts; National Presents: Persian Literary and

Aria Fani and Kevin L. Schwartz

(Received 21 April 2022; accepted 21 April 2022)

the pedagogical role of Persian in twentieth-century India. Bruce’s uncovering of curricula

From Persianate Cosmopolis to Persianate Modernity:

(Received 8 June 2021; revised 1 March 2022; accepted 11 March 2022)

Shibli’s Poetry of the Persians between Adab and “Literature”

genre. Synthesizing Islamic historiographical methods with the techniques of European

knowing the limits and extent of everything…adab…means dānish [knowledge]…but in

A Tale of Two Translations

referring to the Arya Samaj, a Hindu proselytizing movement), which he compares to

The Afghans’ approach to translation was grounded in traditional Persianate sensibilities.

The Afghan translation is highly literal:

Fakhr-i Daʿi’s translation takes significant liberties with the text:

hegemony, his confidence is understandable.71 Fakhr-i Daʿi’s translation exemplifies

Soviet Persian Anthologies: Transnational, Multinational,

Soviet Persian Anthologies: Transnational, Multinational, International

Overview of Terms: Transnational, Multinational, International

E. M. Quatremere, E. G. Browne, and V. A. Zhukovskii.19 An opening section, showing an espe-

Conclusion: From Tajik Nation to Persianate International

The Guide to Knowledge: The Journal Rahbar-i Dā nish and

A Short but Varied History: Rahbar-i Dā nish (1927–1932)

Translations and Radicalizations

Prose and Poetry

Ikrām, Bahā al-Dīn. “Yatīma,” Rahbar-i Dānish 6 (1928), 33.

Shakuri, Muhammadjon. Abbos Aliev. Dushanbe, Tajikistan: Shujoyon, 2010.

Disciplining Persian Literature in Twentieth-Century

Literature: The Rise of a Modern Concept

Language Policies and Politics of the 1930s–1940s

A Transregional Collaborative Process

Adab(iyā t) and Ā ryā nā

Ā ryā nā and the Codification of Literary History

2. Vedic Literature as It Relates to Afghanistan

Periodizing Persian Literature

1. The Persian Language and Literature

Soundwaves of Dissent: Resistance Through Persianate

On Persian As A Transnational Language

The engendering of a national imagination in Persian has been a complicated one,

Persianate Poetic Soundscapes

global communication technology would bolster Afghan desires to appear competitive on an

Bishnaw az nay chun shikāyat mīkunad

Anwarī’s talent—as a gripping orator capable of drawing in her audience—transformed radio

Zindagī ākhir sar āyad, bandagī dar kār nīst

If the pressure from the enemies deluges you, do not despair

Āsmān khālīst khālī, rawshanānash rā ki burd?

Persian Studies in India and the Colonial Universities,

Gregory Maxwell Bruce

Keywords: colonialism; education; India; nineteenth century; Persian studies

the Persian curriculum to be a convenient means of advancement on the examinations.

Calcutta University and the Making of a Curricular Canon for Persian

University of Bombay: Wisdom Literature, History, and More

University of Madras: Classical and Contemporary Persian in South India

Specialization at Panjab University

Standardization at Allahabad University

Legacy: The New Universities

The Colonial Curriculum and Persian Publishing