Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit (Wiley-Blackwell Manifestos) by Bruce B. Lawrence

Author:Bruce B. Lawrence [Lawrence, Bruce B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781118780008
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2021-09-07T18:30:00+00:00

Notes

1 His fame now extends to the Internet age. See Richard Feloni, “Why Mark Zuckerberg Wants Everyone to Read the 14th Century Islamic Book ‘the Muqaddimah’,” Business Insider (June 2, 2015) at http://uk.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-the-muqaddimah-2015-6?r=US.

2 Mana Kia, Persianate Selves: Memories of Place and Origin before Nationalism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020): 14.

3 Abbas Amanat, “Remembering the Persianate” in Abbas Amanat and Assef Ashraf, The Persianate World: Rethinking a Shared Sphere (Leiden/Boston, MA: Brill, 2019): 34. “Hindustan” is the Persian name to describe the Indian subcontinent.

4 For much of the analysis that follows, I am indebted to Richard M. Eaton and his deft exposition of Persianate antecedents, developments, and challenges in an article, “Revisiting the Persian Cosmopolis,” Asia Times (July 19, 2014). See http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/SOU-01-190713.html, no longer extant but available at https://www.gcgi.info/blog/423-revisiting-the-persian-cosmopolis-the-world-order-and-the-dialogue-of-civilisations. The essay anticipates, and is now superseded by, Eaton’s recent monograph, India in the Persianate Age 1000–1765 (London: Penguin, 2019). This monograph is especially notable for its reassessment of south India at the intersection of two cosmopolises: Persian and Sanskrit: “a deeper trend in the Deccan’s cultural history, namely a progressive interpenetration of the Sanskrit and Persianate worlds between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries” (pp. 457–458). Later, the great Mughals facilitated the formation of a transregional empire with the “circulation of people along established transregional networks that connected key centres of Persianate cultural production” (p. 901). The denouement of the early modern period is also marked by literary indices: “Between the mid eighteenth and the late nineteenth centuries, two great transregional languages, which for centuries had defined the Sanskritic and Persianate worlds, became artefacts in India, eclipsed in the north by new literary genres in dialects of spoken Hindavi – prominently Braj and Urdu. And yet, although the patronage of Sanskrit and Persian literature and the usage of the two languages receded dramatically, the values, sentiments and ideas sustained through their respective literary traditions had become deeply enmeshed over the course of nearly a millennium of mutual interaction” (pp. 922–923). It is hard to imagine a more expansive narrative of the Persianate tradition in South Asia than Eaton here provides.

5 See Eaton (2004) “Revisiting the Persian Cosmopolis” cited above.

6 For a further engagement with the stability and expansion of Persian literary conventions throughout eastern Islamdom, from the 9th to the 19th century, including China, see Brian Spooner and William L. Hanaway, eds., Literacy in the Persianate World: Writing and the Social Order (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2012). On the basis of more than 30 years of archaeological and textual studies, Victor Mair concludes that: “the Iranian peoples (i.e., speakers of Iranian languages) were the paramount Kulturvermittlers (culture brokers/transmitters) of Eurasia from the Bronze Age through the late medieval period” (p. 389). Not only was Persian prominent and the art of writing Persian preserved among Chinese Muslims but Persian continues to be taught in contemporary China (p. 404).

7 Saïd Amir Arjomand, “Defining Persianate Studies,” Journal of Persianate Studies I (2008), 3–4. I have omitted part of the defense of this new journal and altered the last sentence to clarify the author’s intent.

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