 So I would like to offer a preamble to the entire conference and tell you how it came about, how we decided to go with the name Turko Tajik rather than Turko Persianate. The idea behind it is of course to integrate more closely the Arabic tradition into it and not focus on Turkic and Persian spheres of cultural tradition and exchange. Turko Tajik of course was simply meant in most of the medieval period to denote a non-Turk, someone who was other than the Turk collective self. It could sometimes refer to the Abbasid Arabs, it sometimes referred to various Iranian tribes across the Iranian plateau and sometimes to actual Persian speaking people. Turko Tajik in my opinion is a wider tent that we could pitch over this civilization that we want to talk about and it really is a civilization that we're talking about. It's in a way an all encompassing narrative of who belongs to a cultural world, whether they're far or near and this is something that is constantly rhymed in the histories that you look to. Turko Tajik, Duro Nasdik, both Turk and both Tajik, whether those far or those near, there's an idea that it's a fusing together of various peoples and a casual term to encompass the collective self that inhabits this realm. And we really are talking about realms. We, in this introduction, I would like us to challenge and jettison some assumptions that we bring with our modern conception of identity and belonging. The realms of Iran to run roughly corresponding to Central Asia room corresponding to Anatolia and the Balkans and Hindustan corresponding to South Asia. These were thought of as large imperial realms consisting of many, many dominions, peoples, cultures, and ways of being, ways of inhabiting space. The common expression for these are Mamalika Mahruse, the guarded dominions. And one that in particular stood out to me was Mamalika Vasile Masalik, the dominions of capacious courses or dominions of expansive paths. And I've underlined the S, the S's over here because I really think that this underlines the multiplicity and ambiguities that are not just an accidental part, but they're a defining feature of the world that we're discussing. I hear that your entirety, the entirety of your dominion, whether you're in room or in Hindustan, is consisting of dominions all with their own expansive paths and expansive roots to cultural existence. Maslak could mean creed, it could mean approach. The idea that's incaptured here is very much both creed as a way of being, both paths, it's an expansiveness, a greatness that is both temporal and mental. So these are the assumptions that we should take in for our conference today and the day tomorrow. I'd like to demonstrate this by giving you a few examples that have really stood out in my mind. And I would like to begin with a Turkish poem by the great Turkish poet Ali Şir Navayih, who was from Herat, Khorasan. He says, How easily I conquered and reigned without a battle from the step to the Khorasan. There's a beautiful verse. That perfectly incaptures the idea of having a literary dominion across Turan, stretching well into Iran, and really covering places that we assume are inherently Persian. Shiraz, the center of farce, is commonly thought of a bastion of persianess and persianess existence. Yet it's also, as we see in this poem, an integral part of a turkophone world. An example also that I would give to really consolidate this idea is something I came across in one of the 18th century memoirs I was reading by a Tajik administrator. This is in the 18th century in Shiraz. It's set in the Chancellery. So these are administrators whose job it is to write documents in Persian, the language of imperial administration. And one of these administrators, the memoir writer, he's talking about his uncle sitting down with two generals, one Afghan and one Uzbek. He's talking about an edict that he's received from one of the provinces to these two generals. The edict of course is written in Persian, but the conversation that is held between the three is in Turkish. The Afghan from Kandahar, the Tajik Persian speaking administrator from Shiraz, farce, and the Uzbek from Turan are sitting in one room discussing a Persian written edict, but discussing it in Turkish. So there are lingua francas that mold together and integrates together in different mediums of communication. And that's something that I would like to also emphasize in terms of what exemplifies this culture. What exemplifies this culture is being both Turk and Tajik, being master over Turkic Persian and Arabic traditions. This is a poem from the Seljuk era rendition of an old Persian tale, Visoramin. And in it, the poet begins by praising some of the sultans and the princes of his day. One of the princes is praised in this verse. Whatever the language of the prose may be, he can turn it into masterful verse in Dari, Persian, Tazi, Arabic and Turkish. His stanza rejuvenates one's soul. Here we have the perfect idea that the idea of the perfect cultured gentleman is someone who has equal dexterity and seamless transition between these different languages and traditions. And also when I say it's a mode of being, a mode of inhabiting, it's not an ethnic understanding by any stretch of the imagination in most of this era. Turk really dominated the idea as being brave, warrior-like. You could be Kurdish or Uzbek or from any background really and inhabit the mentality of a Turk and Tajikness also. You could be a Turk and be Tajik-like. In a verse by Rumi, we have this captured in the following, in the following way. When in the dead of night one onslaught is followed by another, become nimble, become Turk, do not engage in gentility and Tajikness. So what we have here is a world that is not defined by rigid and static ways of ethnic and national belonging. It's defined again by different and simultaneous ways of being. The defining feature is its multiplicity and its ambiguities and how well its members, the people who inhabit this world, can transition and negotiate these ambiguities. So without further ado, I would now like to hand over to our first speaker, Kevan Tahmasbian. Kevan Tahmasbian will be talking about something quite interesting, oniromancy, the idea of dreams and how these are integrated into the understanding of people in the Turk and Tajik world, how they interpret and make sense of their world. So Kevan, thank you for joining us and please proceed. Thank you, Mr. Professor. Good morning. Thank you very much for inviting me and thanks everyone for joining this talk. Today I'm going to talk about the politics of dreaming of quotation manuals or dream dictionaries in Islamic literatures of the Middle East. So can I share my screen? My focus today is on examples from Arabic, Persian and Turkish sources. I chose a dream dictionary for this talk because I think they provide a very good example of the callous sense of Arabic, Persian and Turkish dream culture, especially through translation and very translation. By dream dictionaries, as I'm showing in this slide, I mean a rich tradition of works such as in Arabic interpretation of dreams or in Arabic interpretation of dreams attributed to the most famous dream interpreter in the Islamic world, who is not actually a dream interpreter. Another work here is the pseudopigraphic treatise, Division of Dreams or Pasi Mahvolya, attributed to the sixth Shi'a-Taman Jafar Sader. Also, the pseudopigraphy book of Daniel or Ketavidanyan, presumably translated by Khalil Esfahani at the order of Khalif al-Mahdi and also the translation of Artemis' treatise on neighbor critica into Arabic by Onayn ad-Nesha at Khalif al-Mahdi's order. We can add to this list Kitab al-Namat by Ibn Abid Dunnah and Tahrir al-Ru'ya by Ibn Al-Taiba, Kitab al-Tahrir, fi R'u'ya al-Qadirif al-Tahrir by Abu Sa'd al-Dinah, Farid. Al-Ishwarat fi al-Malabarat by Ibn Shahin and Tahrir al-Namat fi Tahrir al-Namat by Abdullah al-Namat. As for Persian sources, some Persian examples include the partially extant dream interpretation or the treatise Khakwazari by an anonymous writer in the 12th or 13th century, presumably translated from Arabic sources which comprises three earlier seminal treatises in the book of Prophets Daniel, Kitab al-Daniyya al-Apehranbagh, Kitab al-Misireen, Kitab al-Basad al-Sireen, and the book of Karamani, Kitab al-Karamani. Another important Persian manual is, Hawaish ibn Al-Brahima, Tiflisi, Kamal al-Tahrir. Tiflisi compact is important during the dictionary from the rich variety of Arabic sources. I will talk about Tiflisi's Kamal al-Tahrir more later. And another Persian example is, is the author of Groyal Interpretation or Tahrir al-Saltani. This one contains a short introductory chapter on the relation of dreams to the faculty of imagination of Fatima Tahrir which is very interesting to read. For Turkish manuals, we know Tahrir namaz as these works are called in Persian and Turkish, when known to Ottomans. As for example, a Turkish version of suda-pigraphic Tahrir namaz attributed to al-Misireen, which is preserved in Leiden, or Tajami Kitab al-Tahrir namaz by Ahmad al-Dahi. This one is a Turkish translation of Abubash ibn Abdullah al-Wassad, probably of the name Kitab al-Tahrir which was written originally in Arabic. And very important for the purposes of this conference is that I used the Persian version of the work for his translation. This work in dream interpretation is also dedicated to the Ghermi and Prince Yahub II. Also, other Turkish manuals which are closely brief dating from 16th to 19th century and written by anonymous writers such as the anonymous Tahrir namaz that you saw or two 16th Tahrir namaz in a collection compiled by Mehmed Amin Hoja in Istanbul around 1810. And very important to my discussion today is the point that the anonymous Tahrir, one of these Tahrir namaz estates that it had originated in the circle of Olamar at the court of an emperor of Qadishah in Kharat, as Yaneh Schmidt has quoted in one of his articles. Let me go to the next slide. So as I have mentioned in this abstract, manuals for dream interpretation or dream dictionaries have usually been studied for the intricate symbology and classification of dream images they present, but not for any political significance they might bear. But there are reasons that make such a political approach to apparently apolitical pseudoscience of oneromancy, what Tahrir and onerocritical writing possibly. First of these reasons for me is the large number of dream interpretation manuals commissioned by or composed for the caliphs and sultans in the Islamic world which attests to an enormous dream interpretation industry spread in medieval times across Abassi, Saju, Safavid and Ottoman courts and the streets. Examples as I'm showing in this slide, then read out, the pseudo-pay-per-fee book of Daniel was reasonably translated by Khalilis Bani at the order of Khalif al-Mati as I mentioned earlier. Again, Arty Midriss, Trettis and onerocritical was translated into Arabic by Hanaynab Nesha at Khalif al-Mani's order. Also, this is very important, Obeyshah Taflisi who I introduced a while ago and an immigrant from Taflisi to the Georgia who composed Kamala Tavir in Persian to the Seljuk Sultan of Ruh, Khalijar Salan. A very important point about this for the purposes of a conference and the coalescence of Arabic, Persian and Turkish literature is that it is actually a selection of six classical, authoritative reference books in Muslim, Arabic or onerocritical literature. It is written originally in Persian, but was translated into Turkish from Persian for Sultan Suleiman, 16th century by Qatab Khazra bin Al-Hadi from Bawazi. And the last example here is the dedication of Ismail Ibn Azam al-Muqab al-Aqoey, the author of Royal Interputation, Qabira Sultani in 14th century to Shah Shajar, the Muzaffari ruler in 14th century Shiraz. Interesting in this book, Qawziyab al-Aqoey created the styles as Taflisi's Monatan as a styling as well. We will talk about it later. The second reason why we can consider the dream interpretation manual as politically significant right in this, the prominent status of dream interpreters as political advisors in medieval Islamic courts. Just remember that the first caliph Abu Bak was Plainsbury's talent in dream interpretation as per Shamblesani or Bukhari, for example. Or Abu Saddi Nalbari, the scribe and a neighbor critique of the Ghaznavid court, who wrote the famous work of dream interpretation, Al-Bardari Fattabi, who dedicated it to the Abbasid Caliph, Al-Bardari Allah. Again, this book is another important source for styling the circulation of anaeromantic cultures across Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, because it has used an anonymous hoax translation of Ait-e-Midriss anaerocritica. It has used pseudo-pivific anaerocritica of al-Nasireen. Then it is translated into Persian under the title Al-Nasiree in the title of Al-Qadir Fattabi. And then translated into Turkish from Persian by Ibn Arab Shah in the 9th century. For another example of the political significance of dream interpretation for Muslim rulers, I can refer to the second caliph Umar. He's a Vice-Tabu Musaash Ali, the governor of Basr, about persistence in dream interpretation along other religious duties. Just remember that the industry was so huge in Abbasid Caliphate that Hassan Ibn Hussein al-Khala has listed over 5,000 dream interpreters in his book, Talahut al-Mathri. Okay, all of these examples, of course, I'm aware, should be understood in light of the prominence of dreams in Islam in general. Those of you who have grown up in a Muslim family or in a Muslim society can admit how important personal dreams are taken in these cultures and how they shape decision-making. I mean, I think as someone who has been raised in a Muslim family, you can tell a few personal, interesting stories of dreams and how they shape decision-making for yourself or for the people, you know. Perhaps this is rooted in stories from Qur'an in which very important decisions are made based on dreams and dream interpretations, as in the story of Ibrahim, the Prophet Dreamer, who decides to sacrifice his own design because he thinks he is commanded in a dream. Or the story of Yusuf, the Prophet Dreamer, also the dream interpreter, who acted as an economic policymaker and advisor in the times of family in ancient Egypt based on the interpretation he made of Pharaoh's dream. Okay, next slide. With this introduction, let me go directly to the heart of matter and try to reformulate the hypothesis I'm working on and trying to gather evidence for from medieval Arabic, Persian, and Turkish cultural and political spheres. I mean the hypothesis regarding the political significance of these dream interpretation manuals and dream dictionaries. My hypothesis is that dreams are politically sensitive in Islamic history and the sensitive aspects of dream is related to the registry of riots, rebellions, uprisings, seditions, but not that were raised by visionaries and dreamers and prophethood claimants and Mahdi claimants who every once in a while threatened the established order across the caliphates, sultanates, and empires in Islamic territories. We know that many of these revolutionaries major course of dreams they have dreams in order to legitimize their claims just in the same way that Muslim rulers, caliphs and kings legitimize their sovereignty or right to power through dreams. Some examples of those kinds of dreams which I have tentatively called power consolidating dreams and power threatening dreams I've given here. We have Shah Asmai's dream of being assigned the holy mission by the first Shi'a Imam Ali which marks the beginning of the Safavid dynasty. And we have the famous Osman's dream the founder of Ottoman Empire Osman was sleeping in the house of Sheikh Abdullah Ali when he saw that a moon arose from the holy man's breast and came to sink in his own breast a tree then sprouted from his navel and his shade compassed the world beneath this shade there were mountains and streams flowed forth from the foot of each mountain some people drank from these runny waters others watered gardens while yet others caused fountains to flow. When Osman awoke he told the story to the holy man and Sheikh Abdullah Ali who said Osman my son congratulations for God has given the imperial office to you and your descendants. And now for contentious seditious dreams we have Fazlullah Sarawadi's dreams the founder of Guarufiya movement that thus Islamic lands from Central Asia to the Iranian Plato the Caucasus Anatolia and the Balkans in Timurid era we know Fazl has recorded many of his dreams in his no-nama the book of dreams I have translated some of his dreams dream texts into English you can find them if you're interested on my blog and medium we know that Fazlullah Guarufiya derived his letterist approach to the interpretation of the Quran from his persistent engagement with dreams and dream interpretation I mean he was actually a professional dreamer and dream interpreter especially during his soldiers in Kharaz in the mosque of Togchi in Asfahan in the Jaloy with the court of Tabriz and in Barakul where he spent his last years of his life he was a professional skilled dream interpreter let me give you one of his dreams in my translation on a Wednesday in the month Jamal al-Augval in Borujer seeing in a dream the lame man the lame man is Timur sent somebody after me to arrest and kill me he was saying no one ever can know for what one is called upon when one is called upon meaning no one ever knows why I have sent after them he was asking 400,000 reeds from me reeds RGED and saying finally that he arrested and killed me but I saw myself alive safe and sound okay let me give a Turkish example one of the most aggressive dreams that is Sheikh Badreddin in 1416 revolted against Sultan Mehmed I Badreddin's claim to be the second Jesus was based on his dream vision of Jesus's dead body in the hands of two men dressed in green so with these dream dream interests and conflicts we can see the political sensitivity of dreams in Islamic world so my hypothesis is that dream interpretation manual served a neutralising function against the contentious dreams and trouble making visionaries especially when we remember that according to a prophetic hadith true dream is one constituent of 46 constituents of prophethood so when we understand the dangers that dreams pose to the establishment the fact that almost everyone on the street could have claimed that they have seen such and such a dream and they have taken it and interpreted it to be a sign of their prophethood for example then it should not be surprising that we think the sovereign needed to exert power not only on this worldly realm but extend his control to the realm of dreams I mean the dreams of his subjects by controlling the way those dreams are interpreted so that not everyone is authorised to pass judgements on the meaning of dreams and not all dreams or dream interpretations are authorised we know also that a delicate classification of dreams and dreamers is already integrated within Islamic and neurocritic discourse when for example dreams are classified famously as true dreams and false dreams what the other causes are and also some of the dreams that are identified as as-bas-ah-lan which means they are nonsense and essentially lacking any interpretation so we see how our relations permeates the world of dreams also when it comes to establishing a hierarchy of dreamers I mean according to Islamic science of dreams the prophets, kings, imams Sufis and Olamans are the ones whose dreams are considered valuable to be narrated and interpreted let me give you a better example of such hierarchisation of dreams which comes to our eyes at the first glance when we look at the table of contents of many of these manuals for dream interpretation just let me give you some examples from Persian as I'm showing in this slide for example from the partially extant dream interpretation manual by an anonymous writer in the 12th or 13th century which I introduced at the beginning of my talk today in the extant chapters of this book we find chapters on truths or falsity of dreams and the rights of dream interpretation mostly about how the dreams should be recounted how they should be interpreted and the delimitation of the times in which a dream is for example the author says that the dreams seen at noon give no interpretation or again the writer says that not all days or months are suitable to dream meaningful dreams and so on and then let me add a very important point here when it comes to the hierarchisation of the dreams scenes or dream objects we see the list of these dream scenes in the dream glossaries almost always starts with very sensitive objects such as seeing golden dreams or seeing imams or seeing the caliph or the rulers or the agents and then there follows the list of more ordinary dream objects usually in alphabetical order but I'd like to emphasise that these sensitive objects which are closely tied to power are usually separated from the subsequent glossary of ordinary objects and the interpretations for them are given in more elaborate details for example they say that if you see God in your dreams it means that you are just dear to God don't think anything else don't think that you are a prophet you will have a good marriage or you will be well seen in the future we can see why this separation of sensitive objects from ordinary objects is there because most of these Mahdi claimants or prophets with claimants usually claim to have seen God or the prophet or an imam when they want to legitimise their claim let me give another example from who I should Tiflisi's ok Tiflisi has written a classical introduction with short chapters under Fazilat or superiority of the science of Romance and the distinction of the humours of the dreamers and their impact on the dreams and the classification of dreams into true, false and as false Ahlumans are already mentioned and he cites various authorities in the science usually of Messiri, Kermani, Jovarimabibi or Jafar Asad and then there comes a chapter on the superiority of some people's dreams for example superiority of Facebook people's dreams to the unfaithful people's dreams I mean, of mu'mins and coffers and then he breaks down Khudavandan harp, I mean dreamers in 14 categories which are kings, judges, theologians, I mean Obahar, scholars, I mean freemen, servants, wives, other women or Masturan at home the wealthy, the poor the children who have reached maturity and in the end the children who have not reached maturity and then Tiflisi passes this verdict the truest of all these 14 types of dreams and whoever is closer to the king his dream is truer and then in the next chapter again there is this ideological hierarchy that the Muslim's dreams are better and truer than the infidels dreams and the dream of the veiled is truer than the dream of the unveiled and the dream of the wise is truer than the dream of the ignorant the early stream is better than the youths and the man's dream is truer than the women and the free woman's dream is better than the servants and so on so discrimination is there the realm of dreams is not intact from the power relations of the real world and then Tiflisi follows by his list of dream objects to be interpreted and he starts classically with the interpretation of seeing God in dreams then seeing the angels, then seeing the prophets in dreams and then he adds that he has just imitated this organization of his chapters he is just imitating the masters of this art in his classification of dream objects and when he is done with his privileged dream objects he gives the list of other dream objects with their interpretation in an alphabetical order so this is Kamala Tavi, a folia from Kamala Tavi which this manuscript belonged to Sultan Sadeem I okay let's summarize in Islamic Science of Oneromancy one not every dream is true and qualified to be interpreted two not everyone is qualified to interpret the dreams and three the truths or untruths of the dream very much depends on the social status of the dreamer true work and more valuable dreams belong to the people from more conservative, economic or political sectors of society I mean the ones who are closer to the center of power I hope I have managed in showing to what extent such hierarchies and dream interpretation manuals work toward discriminating certain dreams and certain dreams over others and how this huge industrial works to neutralizing the dangerous interpretations that could be made of certain dreams the observation led me to think about the prevalent dream writing Muslim world in Persian in Arabic and Turkish as a genre so I began to look for differences in the style, in the presentation and in the purpose of dream writing to see what subgenres can be distinguished within this genre and my goal was to see to what extent I could set the subservient stock dream accounts and their interpretations against the rebellious individualized vision of real literature which has more scholarly attention to fields in these three languages which I mean Arabic, Turkish and Persian Before I continue to discuss the different divisions and sub-divisions within Islamic dream writing as a genre, I think it's important just to talk a little bit about how I developed this idea of the a narrow critic versus the visionary so let me tell you how it started my only research is mainly Persian modernism with a focus on translational dynamisms that shaped the modern transformation of Persian poetry which necessarily opens up a comparative interface with European politics in my work and post-doctoral research I investigated a lot of the most critical Persian in the work of the late 19th Moorish writer a Persian Iranian writer Muzaffat Hadi al-Hunzadeh who was the first to introduce the idea of critique into Persian as I was doing research on the beginnings of critical discourse in modern Persian literature drawn to the genre of dream writing simply because dream writing constitutes a dominant critical genre in the early 20th century Persian literature very much favoured by the reformists and revolutionary writers of the Iranian constitutional movement such as Muzaffat Hadi al-Hunzadeh in his Tretis one word iek kalameh in 1871 and they true dream co-authored by Sele Jamal of Dina Ba'ez and Malakul Motul Kallameen and Sheykh Ahmad Kailmani and Abdul Rahim Talabof in Masalika al-Mohsani in the ways of the 1905 and Sele Jamal of Dina Ma'ez they all employed dreams as device for their sharp critiques against tyranny and their hopes for freedom and justice to come in my forthcoming book modernity in food notes the invention of critique in the modern world I tried to demonstrate how this political critical function is new to the genre of dream writing in Persian so for this purpose I needed a classification system to distinguish this genre as a form of communication via dreams with socially agreed upon conventions so to distinguish dream writing as a genre I needed to distinguish the different forms different contents and functions of the works that were produced in this genre so the question was okay dreams have been recorded and circulated across the borders of the Muslim world so how and why I thought about the different ways I could classify the dream texts and by dream texts I mean any text that contains an account of the dream that may or may not have been actually dreamed so to begin with generic classification dream texts can be very broadly and generally based on war I mean as I'm showing this a slide it can be simply one prose which includes most of the texts in the genre which we have discussed for example which is translated which has used Arabic sources but then it is written in Persian then it is translated in Turkish then we have poetry such as the chapter entitled Al-Qurian dream and its interpretation which contains a symbology of 80-100 which contains a symbology of 80 wonderful stork dream images and a Turkish example is as I have mentioned earlier the translation of Turkish verse and dedicated to Sultan Muhammad and the third one which is definitely a modern invention is drama as in some works of Iranian constitutional movement such as True Dream that I already mentioned next slide another way to classify dream writings across these languages is just to look at the resources in which the literature has been produced so the main resources for pre-modern dream writings are the Quran the biblical stories according to the books of exegesis Tafsir the dreams of the kings and other senior courtiers and histories and chronicles in Tari, I mean Sufi's dream visions and hagiographies in Paskaras these are mainly known as visions so we have dream diaries as for example with As-Salaamu Alaykum or the dream letters of the Balkan female Ottoman dervish As-Shia Khatun of Moscow in 17th century as well as the more extensive dream diary of Niyazi MS3 in 17th century Niyazi MS3 in his extraordinary prison notebooks recorded all manner of esoteric encounters including a series of angelic lectures in which Gereld explained to him in Turkish the secrets of the science of letter divination or Jaf also it's worth mentioning here the earliest example of the Sufi autobiography poetry narration which is perhaps the Bad Ash'an of al-Haikimah termity in 10th century which termity describes not only the content of his own dreams but also those of his wife whom he clearly regarded in some sense as his instructor also in the book Dreams and Lives in Ottoman Istanbul a 17th century perspective as linear as the blue explores biography writings and dream narratives in 17th century Istanbul to show how learned circles narrated dreams to assess their position in the Ottoman enterprise which is very interesting and other sources as indicated in this slide include the stories of the prophet's ascension during interpretation which I discussed in psychopedias and anthologies these generally classifications just look like constellations and the same materials according to new relations and purposes with different principles for example as you can as I have shown in this slide we can also think of dreams that were recounted to prove the power or the privileged status of the dreamers as in pascaras or chronicles but there are also dream accounts that are given to show the power of dreams themselves in shaping the real lives of people who are not always of high social ranks also there are individualized dream accounts as is the case of the dream of the prophets kings, imams, sufis etc and there are dream accounts of anonymous dreamers and also there are stalk dream accounts as is the case with dream dictionaries which are better called stalk dream sins which as I try to show can have a neutralizing function I mean invasive subversive dreams troublesome dreams and dreamers so just to conclude I repeat my working hypothesis just showing the last slide before I finish these stalk dream sins and their stalk interpretation could play an important role in reducing the subversive politically dangerous visions to mere dreams so they first reduce the visions to simple dreams and then in the next step they interpret dreams in a politically harmless or neutralized way okay let me finish with a personal story of my relationship to dream cultures and ethnography of dreams I was born and raised in Asfahan a city in central Iran which was the capital city to two empires of Sadjouks and Safavids I can remember as a child that at the mother's corner of the antique drama and mosque in Asfahan there sat an old man surrounded by a huge crowd consisting mostly of women who referred to the man for interpreting the dreams I don't think that the old man is still alive but I guess the tradition is continued by some successor it was this image of a man surrounded by inquiring folks as an authority in the realm of dreams a man who interpreted ordinary people's dreams and let people make very important decisions for their lives based on those interpretation it was this interesting image that made me think of the crucial traditional role of the neurocritic as the medium between the street and the court between the street and the government as I mentioned at the beginning of my talk my research is just taking its first steps I've really helped with the help of colleagues and friends especially in Turkish and Arabic villages especially with expert suggestions feedback and comments from the history of contentious dreams and dream decisions I can arrive at the satisfactory, sub-discursive classification of the genre of dream writing across Arabic, Persian, Turkish, political and social histories thank you very much for your time thank you I just spoke sharing this screen thank you Kavan for a fantastic and fabulously interesting talk on Onaira Mancey and dream interpretation my pleasure I have several questions of my own but I would just like to ask our participants if you want to ask your questions please put them in the chat box address to everyone, you don't need to message me directly I'd like to take advantage of my position as host and chairman to go with the first question my first question is regarding the language of the Tahrir Namir in Turkish, Arabic and others in Persian do these different languages also reflect a different approach in terms of the Islamicot notions that they engage with, are the Persian manuscripts that you looked at more engaging with certain prophets versus the Turkish manuscripts unfortunately I'm very inexperienced let's regret to Turkish manuscripts because I have not seen many of them but with Arabic and Persian manuscripts I mean Arabic and Persian dream interpretation manuals mostly based on some kind of translation so the circulation of the stream interpretation manuals just happens through some kind of translation and re-translation of course for example when we look at Taubeisha Teflisi Teflisi's work so we see that the language that he chooses is just an official courtly, something very elevated prose that is he uses for writing this dreamer's talk sorry it's stock dream scenes and stock dream interpretations but when we see the Qazi'a Barghuhi inversion which is which he chooses a more ordinary prose of course perhaps this is related to the time in which the different times in which these two works were written but perhaps we can say that this language is very much effective but translation rather than creation some kind of a language register for recording some stock dreams and just offering their interpretations so I see that it is rather an effective translation more than for example see that Qazi'a Triton 12th century or 13th century we see some parts of just a word for word translation of course there are some parts that have been added by the anonymous writer so we can compare the language of these romantic literature with other works produced in these pseudoscientific liturgies for example the Tanquilusha which is a broken astral natal astrology we see that the language of course it is a translation of a pseudopigraphic work but we see that the writer or the translator of Tanquilusha into Persian which was an anonymous translator we are not even aware of the date, the exact date in which she has translated or she has translated this work he uses a very sometimes very localised work just of the words that he uses are for example from Tabari you know mingled with Persian I see a question by one of our co-hosts asks whether the different uses of the prophets you mentioned Abraham as a dreamer prophet and kind of like an iron man in himself and you surf especially does this also reflect which prophets to which kind of sultans for example Salim in his Tabir I think would have used certain prophet dreamers as an exemplar that maybe for the Safavids would not have been the case so you mean that how these prophet dreams were used as some kind of legitimising thing or some kind of model the question was do the different prophets used in the inocratic texts reflect different political purposes by different sultans so this is exactly what I'm gathering evidence for so this is something that I need to read I don't think that we can find any clear evidence for this in dream interpretation manuals we should search books of history and chronicles more for how these dreams or prophet dreamers were used as some kind of legitimising some sultans or some callips decision or just right to power or something like that but in the dream interpretation manuals that I have read mostly they are not given details of for example they are dedicated to sultans and they are dedicated to callips but we do not see personal stories of how a sultan has used such and such prophet dreamer or dream interpreter as a role model so I think that the sources which we should look for just to be able to answer this question are mostly the books of chronicle and history so I have not seen anything in just to be able to answer this question I have not seen for example a story in which a sultan bases his decision for such and such a thing just based on for example he brought him sacrifice of his son or just making reference to use of stream interpretation strategy. I see Thank you very much I would like to now move on to our second speaker from the University of Cambridge who will be talking to us about intellectuals writing in Arabic under the Mongols in Iran so Yusuf if you can join us with your camera and you can start sharing your screen and without further ado I would not like to take any more time away from you so please begin Hello everyone good morning is the correct screen being shared that's the standard question for everyone all the time I would ask that you go full screen if possible yeah fantastic cheers okay so that's the good morning thank you for inviting me to take part in this presentation so this is or this conference sorry this presentation is based on my ongoing Ph.D. research on intellectual life in Mongol Hald Iran so this paper focuses primarily on the intellectual communities in Ilhanid Marraha touching on the intellectual production in both locations taking into account the main source the Arabic biographical dictionary of the Ilhanid history and tradition traditionist from Baghdad I'm using this as a source to reconstruct the Ilhanid Muslim scholarly community as one of the very few Arabic historical sources from within the Ilhanid itself Ibn Ul-Forti's dictionary offers a unique view on the diversity and the vibrancy of Ilhanid intellectual circles but hasn't really been explored exploited for this purpose so the dictionary is as I said the only surviving Arabic biographical dictionary from Ilhanid Iran with close to 6,000 entries so it's one of the biggest biographical dictionary the close to 6,000 entries and its extant portion which goes from the letters ayin to meem I think if I remember correctly just ayin to meem it's arranged in alphabetical order through the lakhabs the nicknames of the titles of the subjects now the dictionary has not been the subject of any systematic study yet with only a few book chapters or articles written about it for example Devin De Rises in 2004 for visionettes of cultural interaction in the time of the Chinggisid Conquest to Ibn Ul-Forti Mikhal Biran in 2019 for its content on books and libraries in Baghdad and Nurran Bin Azuna last year for the place of the written word in the dictionary following the recent work of Conrad Herschela and others but the 6,000 or just under 6,000 biographical notices included by Ibn Ul-Forti can be used for very valuable partial reconstruction of intellectual life and network in Iran so the two cities that I'm looking at in my research at this stage are Marah and Tabriz these cities both really become major intellectual centres within the Ilkhanid period kind of displacing other cities around the eastern Islamic world after the the Chinggisid Conquest in the beginning of the 13th century so by the time of the Conquest of Baghdad the centres of power and the centres of intellectual administrative centres in the Ilkhanid and a shift from places like Bukhara and Samarra and etc to Marah and Tabriz one of the reasons for this I've got three reasons here so the first is Hulu Gu's westward campaign which brought with it as recorded in a text preserved by Kutubu Dina Shirazi Hulu Gu's westward campaign attracted many members of the Persian intellectual elite who would accompany the army and settle in Marah and Tabriz another reason for the development of this intellectual centres here in Marah is a Nasirah Dina Tusi's establishment of the observatory of the Marah Observatory which is one of the main reasons for creating this intellectual centre but the function of the observatory went beyond the function of the observatory, the aim behind the observatory went beyond the astronomical features of the observatory itself but seems to be part of Nasirah Dina Tusi's own attempt to create his own intellectual centre where he populated Marah with about 400 or so families that had been displaced due to the Mongol conquests sending out one of the Marah and elites with a royal edict to gather people who had been displaced and moved to the Arab lands so western Iraq and Syria and other places and bringing them back to Marah to set up or create this intellectual environment moving on to one of the aspects of my research is that one of the things that I've been doing is gathering in Ibn al-Fuwati's dictionary about the somewhere around 200 or so entries on Ibn al-Fuwati's that are included in Ibn al-Fuwati's dictionary of individuals that he records as being present in Marah and Tabriz during the time of his right and during the al-Khanid and recording the geographical Nisbahs to find out essentially where they were coming from and how they had arrived in Marah and Tabriz Ibn al-Fuwati records so either geographical Nisbah affiliation to locations or he mentions residence and presence in Marah and Tabriz at some point in this period so here's the map of individuals that Ibn al-Fuwati records present in Marah as you can see here huge number of locations there's a lot of overlap as well you have individuals coming from Kashgar and also in the Mamluk lands in Syria and the Levant that indicate to some extent the borders between the Mamluk and the al-Khanid were not entirely closed off to certain types of movement for example if I move on to Tabriz as well although Marah has a larger number of entries partly because Marah includes entries on the observatory while Tabriz does not this is similar there's a similar phenomenon of people coming from as far off as Kashgar and Bukhara individuals coming still from Bukhara indicating it's standing as an intellectual centre still but this wide variety of individuals in both places in Marah and Tabriz is an indication of the cultural vibrancy and intellectual exchange or the type of intellectual exchange that was going on in Marah and Tabriz we'll move on to some examples of this type of travel and the relationship that the travel had with intellectual output and intellectual production in the two cities in Arabic and in Persian you have for example people travelling both from Marah and Tabriz outside of the al-Khanid lands so from Marah and Tabriz either to eastern China sorry western China or all the way to all the way into the Mamluk lands or even you have some individuals from those places from Central Asia East of the Stan in China travelling to Marah and Tabriz for example one of the individuals records as a person by the name of Kamal who appears to have travelled from India as he records coming to the presence of Naseera Dina Tosi to study philosophy with him it's an interesting entry because Ibn al-Fawti records that this Kamal or Dina Aflaton despite his name for some reason being Plato was unable to study adequately the philosophy taught by Naseera Dina which led to Naseera Dina asking Ibn al-Fawti to write his notes down and he responds jokingly saying suppose I write his notes for him should I memorise them on his behalf too but what's interesting also about this individual is how the entry shows some of the cultural interaction in this Arabic language context that was initiated by the Mongols he would wear as he says a Mongol hat as an adopt Mongol dress and would say things he didn't understand which possibly either could be him speaking about philosophy or even speaking in other languages or saying things in Mongolian that were incomprehensible there's another entry that Ibn al-Fawti records where an individual would amuse the Mongol elites by saying sentences and phrases in Mongolian that he didn't without understanding what they meant that would provide amusement to the Mongol elites that would gather to listen to him talk the travelers included travelers going out of Maragh and Tabriz or Baghdad and into eastern the east of Central Asia and into China so for example you have these two brothers and who were distinguished poets as he in Arabic as Ibn al-Fawti says he was one of the poets and the child of some of the merchants they both traveled together to China with another individual Jamal another individual Ibn al-Fawti records that he managed to narrate and transmit their poetry yet when they traveled to China information about them ceased and he wasn't able to to hear anything about them again in addition there's another individual who traveled from Maragh or traveled from the al-Khanid into Central Asia is the al-Hassan al-Wasati who is from as the name says al-Wasati in Iraq who traveled who had mentioned that he traveled to Khurasan Central Asia and entered China returning there after a period of time and then studying mathematics and other subjects and meeting in Maragh before it appears traveling to Baghdad in the beginning of the eighth century despite the almost constant political tension between the Mamluks and the al-Khanid as well however the period also serve as useful indications to the fact that movement between the two realms continued fairly uninhibited especially for scholars, Sufis and merchants the fame of the Maragh Observatory attracted individuals from locations as I mentioned Irbil and Halab Al-Apo if I go back to the map here we have one Majduddin Abul-Fadl Ibn Qadi Basida Al-Irbili Al-Qadi who is a judge from Irbil who came to the Observatory in the 660 Hijri calendar the 11th scholar as well Thakhruddin Abul-Farad al-Sufi who seems to have been well travelled actually before coming to the Observatory going from Syria first then to Egypt performing the Hajj and going to Yemen before heading to Anatolia and reaching Azerbaijan and going to Maragh through Armenia so Ibn Al-Fawti's dictionary is a valuable source Arabic source for retracing the steps of many of these many of these Arabic these intellectuals in an Arabic language context frequently recording lines of poetry and hadith transmissions from these scholars so what made these or what attracted these scholars to the Maragh and Tabriz well it wasn't just the intellectual environment but it was also patronage and the patronage available for the scholars came from multiple sources the primarily Mongol Ilkhans were also frequent patrons the Persian administrative elite and the local Amirs but all three groups didn't just take an interest in intellectual production in their own languages the Persian administrators for example didn't just take an interest in Persian intellectual production they were heavily involved in the patronage and production of Arabic literature as well the patronage attempts shouldn't just be seen in the context of a Persian Renaissance as some historians have argued but also as an attempt to maintain and preserve also broadly Islamic and Arabic intellectual traditions the Mongol Ilkhans also took an interest in people with linguistic skills and Arabic scholars from Arabic speaking lands so for example there's the Deen Al-Mawsali An-Nakash who was present with another Sufi Shaif muhideen Abu-Muhammad Abdul-Muhdi who stopped in Baghdad before going to Tabriz and as Ibn Al-Fawti records is a Deen Al-Mawsali An-Nakash was good at inscriptions inscribing and stitching things and they became close to one of the wives of the Ilkhana Ghazan Bulu Ghana Khartun through whom they achieved status and money and became close to the Ilkhana rulers they were given or they they managed to take leadership of Azawi in Tabriz that was attended by al-Aqabi of the Muruq and the Salatin as well as the Fufara and the Arafin so both the political elite and the religious and spiritual elite would attend the Azawi as their Sufi lodges and as Ibn Al-Fawti records he says that he has poetry spiritual poetry that was probably the origins in Mosul and Baghdad most likely in Arabic Ibn Al-Fawti then can also serve as a way to trace connections of scholars and their networks in predominantly primarily Arabic context demonstrating the intellectual networks of Arabic literary figures in the Ilkhana one of these examples is the individual Rashida Deen Al-Mashhadi who doesn't have any extant work or was almost entirely unknown but through Ibn Al-Fawti's dictionary we can reconstruct his intellectual networks with his associations with the Persian administrative elite the intellectual elite and other members or local governors etc so while Ibn Al-Fawti doesn't record an entry on Rashida Deen Al-Mashhadi himself Ibn Al-Fawti's entry in his son Abul Mahasim Yusuf informs us that Rashida Deen was in Tabriz in 1279 of the Common Era where his son Abul Mahasim was born before they both moved to Baghdad together in 1283 the entries that Ibn Al-Fawti includes show him to be a very well connected individual so he has a connection with the Jewaini family where with both Shamsud Deen Al-Jewaini the Persian administrative Sahib Diwan of the Ilkhana and his son Sharafud Deen Haroon for whom he wrote for whom he wrote some poetry praising the birth of Ibn Sharafud Deen Haroon on Monday the 8th of Rabi'a on 22nd of September in 1275 so Rashida Deen wrote a poem that Ibn Al-Fawti records celebrating his birth praying for Al-Ma'moon and also praying for the continued reign of the Ilkhana Ghazan the last in addition the patronage of the Jewaini family for Arabic literature, Arabic scholarship can also be seen in the connection here that Shamsud Deen Al-Jewaini has with an individual Ibad Deen Umar Al-Maqil Qazveeni a judge in Nakhjavan who Ibn Al-Fawti met in 1276 according to Ibn Al-Fawti at the hands of Ibad Deen Shamsud Deen Al-Jewaini himself studied the Arabic literary sciences and the Maqamat Al-Haridi and it was for Shamsud Deen that Ibad Deen wrote and dedicated a commentary or a gloss on the Qashafal of Azza Makhshari with a poetical dedication that Ibn Al-Fawti saw in Arabic to Shamsud Deen in the beginning of the text Rashida Deen was also associated with a number of other prominent figures in the intellectual elite such as the Qadi of Herat Fakhrodeen Al-Bayyari in which he also writes for whom he also writes a poem praising and comparing the judge in his philosophical acumen to Fakhrodeen Al-Razi and that the judge took an acute interest in philosophical matters as attested to by philosophical questions that he asked Naseera Deena Tusi in Maradha which I'll come to shortly. I don't think, I think I'll mention one more point about this network here that is Rashida Deen Al-Mashhadi's son Abu Mahasin Yusuf who it seems at some time probably after the death of his father in 7.01 or 13.01 Abu Mahasin Yusuf was called by the Vizier Sa'adud Deen Sa'adud Deen to educate his children and teach them literature and Sa'adud Deen Sa'adud Deen seems to have taken an interest in Arabic poetry and literature as the scholar Imadud Deen Muhammad Ibn Abdul Rahman Al-Orbaidi who is associated with them dedicated a poetry anthology which is a collection of poetry for pre-Islamic and Islamic poetry as seems to be a primer on good poetry and good literature for education or good literary education at some point in the first half of the 14th century possibly after the execution of his patron Sa'adud Deen Sa'adud Deen Abu Mahasin Yusuf may have moved to Damascus where he was able to transmit his father's poetry to a Sephardi who records Rashida Deen Al-Mashhadi a brief entry in his Dictionary of Contemporaries we have also in Arabic biographical dictionary some valuable portraits as I call them of scholars that move from the Ilkhanat to the Mamluk lands so here you have Tadrud Deen Tabriz who provides a complete list of the teachers and subjects that he studied most of which we can find in other Arabic biographical dictionaries or who have excellent works so you've got Burhanud Deen Al-Urbaydi Rukhnud Deen Al-Astrabadi we have Khutubud Deen Al-Shirazi Jandarani he mentions here an individual who he studied inheritance law with whose text on inheritance law in Persian is preserved in the Safina Tabriz and so this individual Tadrud Deen Tabriz he moved to Egypt where he became a popular teacher and a scholar and Safadi praised his knowledge and his acumen but was critical of his Arabic ability to speak in Arabic due to his Persian background so the works of an individual like Tadrud Deen Tabriz whose only excellent work I think is his marginal commentary on the Shafi legal texts but he also has other texts related to grammar and the sciences of Hadith moving on to the intellectual or the Arabic context of the Ilkhaneh court the Ilkhaneh court was primary a multilingual court where you had all of these scholars and intellectuals contributing to this multilingual court but the Ilkhanehs themselves having knowledge of all of the different languages that were spoken at the court so Safadi mentions that Ghazan used to speak in Turkish and Mongolian and Persian he would only talk in some of those languages in Persian probably to a private audience of Rashida Deen and some other high ranking individuals and he would understand most of what people who came to him said in Arabic but wouldn't let on the fact that he knew that the famous Shia philosopher had to have Persian questions of the Ilkhaneh translated into Arabic to him in addition the Madrasa education or education in Ilkhaneh Maragh and Tabriz also appears to have been a mixture of both Arabic and Persian for example as I mentioned the questions asked by Fakhrodeen Al Bayari were in Arabic including other questions and answers that were given by Nassirah Dina Tosi also in Arabic his discussions with Nejemuddin Al-Katibi his correspondence with Sajruddin Al-Qunawi primarily preserved in their Arabic forms however Persian was also used as the medium of communication in intellectual circles so you have one of the treatises recorded in Rashida Deen Hamadani the viziers which is his treatises on the illiteracy or the virtue of the illiteracy of the prophet which was discussed in Persian so they are discussing Rashida Deen's treatise and analysing its grammar and some of the arguments used in Persian so this period was a time in which Persian was considered to be rising as the lingua franca and Arabic was lamented as having a decline or suffering a decline however the what the biographical dictionary show and the poetic samples in various dictionaries show that as Andrew Peacock has recently argued that notions of a cultural revival in 13th century Iran should be qualified by the evidence this was not simply a Persian renaissance but an Arabic but an Islamic Arabic one as Arabic continued to be persisted as a language in predominant language in literary religious and scientific fields but the relationship between Arabic and these other languages also raises the question of audience so who for example when a scholar would choose to write in either Arabic or Persian who were the intended audiences well it seems to be that from a number of texts that we have some of the texts that are preserved in the Safini Tabriz that Arabic was primarily used for public or international audiences or for pedagogical reasons so as texts that were used in Madrasas whereas Persian was used for private or local audiences particularly in works that had dedications or in works that had dedications or works that were intended for example for a private group of Sufis as this period was also saw the rise of Persian Sufism and the synthesis of like metaphysical or philosophical Sufism with philosophy or the rise of philosophical Sufism so Giovanni Martini has examined some of the works of Al-Adola Simnani as noted that Arabic works had been intended primarily for public consumption which can also be seen in some of the private correspondence of Al-Adola Simnani in his epistolary debate with the Persian Sufian follower of the school of Ibn Arabi Abdel Razak Al-Kashani on the topic of Wahdat Al-Wujud now this didn't just extend, this wasn't just a phenomenon in Ilkhanid Iran either if you look in, if you look in Mamluk Egypt in Cairo said that as recorded by Al-Farghani his student would teach in Arabic, he would teach primarily in Arabic and then when he wanted to discuss or comment on a line of poetry from Ibn Al-Farad specifically for his Persian audience or his disciples he would switch to Persian so there's, you have in one gathering or in one setting that switch between addressing a public audience with Arabic and a private audience with Persian and that's in an Arabic predominantly Arabic context in Cairo but in addition you also have Rashid al-Din al-Hamadani's Mujmu'a Rashidiyya an extensive, for which he embarked on an extensive manuscript production project which where the text would Rashid al-Hamadani's collection of theological works were translated into Arabic to increase the readership and the works were sent around to various places in the Ilkhanid and in Syria but these texts unfortunately especially Rashid al-Din's texts haven't really received as much attention as they should since the publication of Joseph Al-Es's book in which he argued that Rashid al-Din's primary purpose was just to prove his Muslim credentials disregarding the philosophical and theological value of the texts which may have been a reason for the general neglect of studying them until recently with the work of individuals like Stefan Kamola and Yoni Brak and both of their PhDs over the entire corpus of Rashid al-Din's works much of its surviving in its Arabic version provides, it proves to be a very useful source for a number of aspects of intellectual literary history Rashid al-Din prefaces his Arabic version of his Majmour, his corpus of theological works with about just over 80 endorsements mostly in Arabic, almost entirely in Arabic with Persian interspersed with lines of Persian poetry from prominent intellectuals and figures in the Ilkhanid the endorsements are replete with examples of original poetry containing historical information on the production of the Majmour intellectual activity and the lives of its endorsers so for example here's one of an individual Nidham al-Din who records that he had actually spent around ten years travelling around the eastern Islamic before coming into the presence of Rashid al-Din and attending his court so you have some really valuable sources in Arabic that haven't haven't been studied or examined primarily because of the focus on Persian literature and Persian poetry and the notion that Arabic experienced a decline, another corpus of texts is Amin Adin Harjibullah's texts in the Safini Tabriz Amin Adin Harjibullah is an individual who is almost entirely unknown the only surviving texts we have of him are all recorded or reproduced in the Safini Tabriz this compendium of texts written in Tabriz in the beginning of the 8th Hijri century the beginning of the 14th century and Amin Adin wrote in both Arabic and Persian so most of the works that he produced in Arabic are pedagogical basic primism, theology, Sufism and legal theory but he also is a phenomenon of local public and private audience or international local audiences also seems to apply in his works as the Persian works seem to be his Kitab al-Aurad Kitab al-Wardas Subh which contain Persian instructions for performing Arabic supplications in different occasions may well have been his instructions and he gave lectures in Persians as indicated by his Lata'if which is his discourses or his statements and stories the only treatise that he wrote seems to have written for a specific person in mind was his Resali ilm al-Aqal which is in Persian and it is part of court debates held when the Mongol Ilhan asked the question about whether knowledge or intellect or superior so these texts seem to fit into a general pattern that I mentioned of Arabic being used primarily for public works and Persian for local private audiences so with that let's come to a close here and just summarize that Arabic biographical dictionaries prove to be valuable sources for reconstructing intellectual networks in Ilhan al-Iran and the nature as Arabic biographical dictionaries means they tend to focus on production in Arabic by Ilhan al-Iran intellectuals for whom Arabic has been the primary language of communication but it was the primary written language in addition the Mongol and Persian elites contributed to this flourishing intellectual environment in which Arabic persisted as a dominant language of scholarship and literature during this so called Persian renaissance in addition the intellectuals traveling throughout the eastern Islamic world contributed to their linguistic abilities and the recording of different locations of different people and finally a comment on where we can find evidence of Arabic literary and intellectual production rather than looking for extant texts manuscripts that we can study we should also look for intellectual production biographical dictionaries because they tend to preserve in some cases a lot more examples of intellectual production names of books and people and poetry and other examples of literature that we can draw on as valuable sources for intellectual networks and cultural exchange in Mongol and I'd like to open it up for any questions now I think my time is up so Thank you Yusuf I was basically just writing down as many questions as I can I didn't think I'm going to abuse my position as chair to just hog you for myself I would like to go to Muhammad el-Mehrab's question and I'll begin with his observation which very much echoes my own this idea that has been quite dominant in the scholarship that you mentioned the idea of Iran realm as a realm where the Mongols come in and they revive this kind of national spirit and of course that connotes the monolingual idea of Persian as the main vehicle for that whereas we've seen actually Persian was not exclusive to the Mongol Ilkhaneids Iran's Amin it was spoken as you mentioned also in Cairo one of the main languages of this Iran's Amin was Arabic among these intellectuals it was an integral part and the section that you showed us from the manuscript is that Qazan speaks in Turkish in Mongolian and Persian and Qazan Khan spoke in Turkish Mongolian and Persian and Arabic was also a language of the court as well through translation I understand he had to have a translator so there are a multiplicity of languages being shared and communicated through in these settings in this widoturkotagic world so without further ado I would like to go to Muhammad's first question which is to do with the religious aspects the Joanis were they Hanafi or Shafi which denomination of Islam that they held you from there's not much indication about which legal school they adhered to but for example probably lots of things I didn't get a chance to mention due to time but they offered their patronage to both Shafi and Hanafi scholars so Rasheed al-Din al-Mashadi was noted as being a Hanafi they also offered their patronage to Shiz Shiz scholars as well so it's similar to what Yudith Fyfer has spoken about many academics working on Ilkhanid Iran have spoken about where there's this kind of confessional ambiguity in Iran in Ilkhanid Iran although for them it seems that confessional boundaries were drawn examples of people he mentioned as Hanbali scholars who became Shi'is who became Sunni or Shafi'is who became Hanafi or Hanafi's who became Shafi in other cases it's quite difficult to work out what exactly what denomination certain individuals were I would mention though that Tabriz was predominantly Shafi and they've been offered to record some madrasas in Tabriz that were the endowments were given only for Shafi scholars but as for the Jawani family themselves I'm not really an indication of whether they were Hanafi or Shafi'is I see to actually follow up on this question by Mohammed you mentioned does that mean that there were significant Sufi influences amongst this intellectual class writing in Arabic yes, yeah so because of the preservation of texts you have the most of the Sufis of Ibn Arabi's circle so Andrew Peacock has recently shown that individuals like Dawood al-Qaisari Abdul Razak al-Kashani were primarily working not in an Anatolian-Ottoman context so Dawood al-Qaisari's a number of Dawood al-Qaisari's texts in Arabic are dedicated to the son of Rashid and Dawood al-Qaisari's texts his commentary on the Fusus al-Hikm his introduction became a standard textbook for teaching the philosophy of Ibn Arabi but you also had the discussions in Persian as well so the debate between Allah Adola Simnani and Abdul Razak al-Kashani took place in their Persian letters I see to add on to that you have a development or increasing development in the articulation of philosophical concepts in Persian and one of the primary examples of that is Rashid al-Din al-Hamadani's texts which he wrote first in Persian and one of the things he does is he creates new terminology new he creates new terminology that he's come up with himself which could be as a result of his writing he takes Arabic concepts trying to find ways to express them in Persian and then they're translated back into Arabic when he gets translation but commissions the translation of the texts Fascinating I would like to move on to Muhammad's second question do you know if they claim descent from Imam al-Haramain al-Jawaini what was the lineage that these people claimed I've heard that when I was that's actually one of the things that got me to study when I heard that when I first heard that somebody told me that they might have been related to al-Jawaini Imam al-Haramain but I haven't found any indication of that in the sources I think it's just a geographical the fact of shared geographical origin for example you have in the same time Sederuddin Hamouya or Hamaway depending upon how you choose to pronounce it who also had the Nisbah al-Jawaini but there's no affiliation with Imam al-Haramain I see okay I'm going to stop myself from asking any more follow-up questions so we can move on to the next speaker Professor Yamamoto who is kind enough despite his busy schedule to join us today to talk about the Sufi context in Anatolia and especially in the Ottoman context so hello Professor Yamamoto thank you for joining us thank you very much for rearranging the schedule thank you very much should I share the screen yes go ahead can you see the screen can you see the screen yes I can see it I would just ask that you go full screen oh can you see it okay perfect then I would like to start my presentation first of all thank you very much for giving me such great opportunity so today the theme of this presentation is intended to examine a model that considered how the Ottoman Tasawaf were like Sufism accepted the Arab or Persian classic as the canons and attempted to develop like Tasawaf their own history of Tasawaf like Turkish history of Tasawaf so we regard to the Ottoman studies as an extensive amount of historical research but like theological or the Sufis like mystical research has developed over the past two decades so this is like relatively like a new field the study of the Tasawaf in particular is fairly a new field like partly due to the secularism policy of the Republic of Turkey it is not only because of the economic reason but because of the political history of the Turkish Republic but we cannot say that there is a comprehensive understanding of the history of Tasawaf from the Ottoman Empire to the present day the foundation is being laid by so recently the foundation of the Tasawaf studies is being laid by the studies by the Marumah University or the Istanbul University, especially like Ilahiyah the faculty of theologies and by Mustafa Kara or Ismail Kara's like works a bias of how can I say, like marginalization exists with regard to the Ottoman soul and this marginalization has long undervalued the Ottoman Sufism so this marginalization is one as I mentioned earlier with the establishment of the Turkish Republic the Tasawaf tradition Tasawaf itself become like a political issue and Tasawaf itself has become marginalized to society and the environment for its study was not available until the recent day and secondly, the Turkish language itself like compared to the Arabian Persian language studies in Islamic scholarship like even in Turkey and the Turkey was not treated as like a central vision in Islamic studies the previous studies have also assessed that the Ottoman intellectual tradition was nothing more than rehashed like a copy and a paste and Arab or the Pelican sciences and that it was the period and also the many scholars actually concluded that the Ottoman tradition or the Ottoman period was nothing but a period of stagnation however there is a trend towards re-evaluation of the history of the Ottoman thought such as in the work of Harid-u-Wa-Riheb especially his work, the Islamic intellectual history in the 70th century, the scurry encouraged the Ottoman Empire in the mangleb which examined the development of logic and philosophy in the 18th century so right now we also need to create a new analytical perspective to re-evaluate the history of Tasawaf or Sufism in the Ottoman Empire but today I would like to see Ottoman Tasawaf from a perspective of like a radicalization like localization inheriting the Arabic and Pelican Sufi tradition and in my view to study the Ottoman Tasawaf is to consider the process of localization or like a Bionic localization so the first these Ottoman ulamans or the Sufi intellectual they study they study like original canons like even Arabies or like Rumi, it's like a classics and this is like an attempt to take the Persian and Arabic classics of Tasawaf as a kind of how to retell them to the Turkish elites and the masses so this translation process can be divided into three types so the first is the way in which the main concepts of Tasawaf are extracted from the classics and express in verse in order to convey them in an easily understood form in translating this Arabic or Persian classics and extract the essence of it and translate into like a local Turkish language the second is to take the main canon Tasawaf and write the Turkish version of it like creating their own classic so just studying Arabic and Persian works is somehow like a passive endeavor but when the time passes the Turkish Sufi intellectual they have tried to create their own canons for the Turkish society so this is like a second phase and the third is to write commentaries of Tasawaf like Shara like Tasawaf's major canons in Arabic or either in Turkish to position themselves like a Turkish Arden within the global Sufi network the first is a poem this phase like introducing the concept is mainly done by like a poem and as if it's well known that you point to your Ahmet Yassavi or the UNISM that introduced the basic Sufi worldview to the masses like Turkish masses and made a significant contribution to the Islamization of the Turkic society there are poems in plain Turkish and using Persian literary motifs such as a legend of Laira and Majnuuns were invited Turkish society into the literary world of Islamic civilization and established its identity as the Turkic speaker on the other hand like Manakep's Naameh, like Manakep's contributed to the localization of Tasawaf not by introducing the concept of the Sufism but introducing their ideal examples so in this case not only like Arab Sufis or Persian Sufi but the Turkish Sufis like shape of like a Sufi orders or the Sufi intellectuals as Tasawaf permits Turkish society not only Manakep's but Sufi's diaries or the Vakiad the books about the dream interpretation are also important sources for understanding how each of the intellectuals that each of the Sufi's alims or who are practicing slug in the Sufi Talikas like observe the Tasawaf in their own manners and in this presentation I would like to introduce one example in this first phase this is like Inus Emelis, like Risatunus here like Risatunus here So this Inus Emelis is usually most famous for his D1 collection but he also left a remarkable poem which is called Risatunus here The Inus Emelis, like Risatunus here was written for the masses using the methodologies of tahliye So tahliye is like getting rid of the bad qualities from the former heart and tahliye is like decorating the good quality to your good heart So this is like a methodology of the Tasawaf and as explained in like Abu Talib Maki's Kudro group or in the third and fourth part of the Abu Hamid Qasaris if you are promoting and also in this poems he used lots of metaphors about the war and the conflicts and this poem is a valuable resource like historical resources as they attempt to introduce the Tasawaf classics to the masses not only in the concept but also like a structure and using the confusion of the Turkish society at the end of the Seljuk dynasty as an example The second from the 15th century onward there was a trend to create new Tasawaf classics in Turkish rather than simply extracting the essence of the Tasawaf concept and explaining it in plain language So this, for example like Risatunus here like this is also have this structure first the individual try to get rid of the bad qualities in the heart like angers or the greed and eventually that so-called Sufi traveler gained good qualities and reached Hakika but still this poem is like like an abstract of the essence of the Tasawaf concept which is derived from like Abu Tarismaki or the Ghazadi but this second part so this is try to create their own like independent classic so to create like a Turkish like a Turkish market in the Islamic civilization and some representative works are like Eshref or Rumi's like Muzaffin Nufus or Yaziz or Mehmet Effendi's Muhammadiyye or Ahmet Bizhan's the Enwar al-Pashkin So the greatest difference between poetry and such classic is that these in the second phase these introduce not only the concepts of Tasawaf or not only like exemplars of the one Sufi's lives or the actions or like a heroic legend but try to show the system of the knowledge or like a structure of the Tasawaf knowledge the Arabic like Kalam or like Fikr texts were used in Madrasa and there are of course like lots of scholars such as Dawood Qaisili who wrote their classic in Arabic but in this the people who are engaged in these second phases this creation of Turkish classic contributed to the creation of the market for Turkish language literature in the Islamic civilization and also this is the field of like ethics more than like Tasawaf but the Qunirzad Ali completed Akhlaq al-Ali which is the Turkish version of the Akhlaq Nasseries like the contents or even the structure is almost the same 90% is the same but the Akhlaq Nasseries I'm not sure everywhere even though written in Persian and this Akhlaq al-Ali is written in like Ottoman Turkish so this is also a really good example that that's how this Turkish Ali tried to runiculate the like a Persian classic to like a local Turkish to create their own like a Turkic like a Qunin and of course Akhlaq al-Ali is based on like a Greek ethic and thus by importing the Persian contents of political ethics the Ottoman Empire also observed like a Greek tradition so like first of all it was like a Greek and then it was translation to like a Persian and then it was in the Turkish so by reading this classic we can trace the history of the localization of around here the third part I think this is the most important part the next is the commentary tradition like a Sharif tradition of the Qunis which may be aimed at the most layers of the south localization this was also like aimed for the elite because this Akhlaq al-Ali was written for like a certain like how how they should try to govern their own states the first part is about the individual the second part is about the family and the third part is about the devlet or the daula but mostly like the Turkish poems this is more like we call it like a Haruk edibi it's mainly for the Turkish masses but the third part is especially aimed for the like the elite in the Ottoman society the Anatolian tradition of the commentaries has developed since the 16th century and until you know present and we can say there are four major currents in the Ottoman-Tasawian tradition these are Ibn Arabi and Rumi and Sufrabali and Ghazali the most influential of those were Ibn Arabi and Rumi like the first one and the second one there is no doubt and the works written by these four men continue to inspire authorities at the canons or the Ottoman Empire but here we must not forget that these four are more like a current these are not like individual schools like a legal or like a masjid or like an ashram later I will talk about the details of these four currents and I'm sure everybody knows about Ibn Arabi schools so I would just generally introduce the so I will not explain detail of this concept but this Ibn Arabi and his work Hussuzu Hekham this can be considered as like the first most important canon for the Ottoman-Sufi elites and this was also the most biggest school or biggest currents among the Ottoman-Sufi groups it begins from like Sadotin Konavi and Bosnian Navy like there are almost hundreds of thousands of the Sufi alims and until we can say after the iconic who lived in the end of the Ottoman Empire until the early period of the Turkish Republic so this Ibn Arabi currents introduced the concept of or the five dimensions of existence or so on today I would like to introduce one scholar as example who is Ismail Haq Bursebi who lived in Ismail Bursebi was a scholar of the Akvali school who was active in the 18th century and his most famous work is his commentary of the Quran, the Ruhul Bayan which is written in Arabic with a few Persian like words, like a poem and it is an interesting note that while observing the ideas of Ibn Arabi and Lumi he also left the commentary of the Mastavi and he was aware of the importance of explaining this concept in Turkish for example in his preface of his book Rup Rup in modern Turkish because he states that even Arabic writings or even Arabic haqiqa have become the hidden treasure like gizli has in it like hidden treasure among the masses like Turkish masses because they are not explained in Turkish and one this is a clear record but I think it's one of his students the students ask him to write Turkish commentary about the even Arabic so that everybody can share this hidden treasure so Rup Rup is relatively really small text but the importance of this text that there was the commentary of Turkish commentary before him but this was main for the elites of the elites of the Ottoman Sufi so called like havasa havas not only just able to read the Ottoman Turkish but who are qualified enough to understand the articulated concept but this Rup Rup is relatively aimed for like not the elites of these but who have enough literacy to read the classics and another example in his hadith commentaries he also explained the word like Yunud Yunud means heart but he especially emphasized the Turkish word like Yunud Yunud is an important concept for the Turkish people and the word is meaning no less rich than the word color so from this point of view it is clear that his use of Turkish language is never intended only to assist those who do not understand Arabic provision but to convey that they are the concept that can be only conveyed in the Turkish language so he also write a book in Arabic and he can also write like a Turkish poem but in some of his book like he intentionally used the Turkish like language like local language because there is like the Turkish language has its own like a special role like Turkish masses and another one is Lumi's Masnavi this can be the second largest like occurrence and for example like as I said Brussefi also left the commentary of the Lumi's Masnavi and Ankaravi also left the commentaries about like Lumi's philosophy but here for example Ankaravi especially emphasized the importance of Lumi he said that this poetry itself is like an origin of the like Ilham like inspiration and he has the importance of the poetry that express the essence of things through representations or like rendering like a liaison rather than the systematic philosophy so this is a big difference between like Akubali and like a philosophy and Lumi's poetry so Akubali and philosophy is more like a structural philosophy like a systematic way of articulating the Tassaw concept and Lumi's poetry according to the Ottoman Sufi is more like conveying the taste of like experiential like a knowledge about the Tassaw concept and we can see the good say application of this concept in the Kamebrevi Tariqa in the Turkish history because the Kamebrevi Tariqa is not just like educating like people through the mystical philosophy but they also build like a kitchen we call like a Kamebrevi Mutfau like and they appoint all like the Muleids in the kitchen and through like cleaning the the kitchen or the cooking food it's like a means to understand like Lumi's philosophy and not only the Kamebrevi kitchen also the semazen or the hat like calligraphy or the music they all try to apply the practices as the experiences to taste the taste of the Tassaw and one of the most outstanding figures among the like shapes of the Memebrevi Order was the Shafeguarded that his poem La Fussene Ash is known as a masterpiece of Anatolian mystical mystical like a poetry and the entire poem in which the mazmum, even the secret message is concealed is the art of struggle for the truth in a very act of reading it and also there was a occurrence of the old group who were well-burst in the Shafeguarded Hayaka Room but this one's like relatively like a small group comparing to the Ibn Arabi Aquarians or the Lumi's occurrence we can skip but one of the most important or famous works about the commentaries of the Sufra about this work is the Ankaravis commentaries of Shafeguarded Hayaka Room and it was the critical edited and published by the professor Bilal Kurshvalat and I didn't mention in in the previous slide but there was also a trend influenced by the Birgibi who was active in the 16th century Istanbul although it did not become the mainstream and of the Ottoman Sufiska circle yet it was very influential between the 16th century until the 70th century which is called like a Kaduzardli movement this circle so to correct the situation of the soul will correct the corruption of the soul at the time which lean too much toward the mysticism and this Birgibi school like emphasizing following the prophetic sunna by through the deep reading of the Hadith and I would like to know that as a pioneering trend of the Hadith reform movement that occurs throughout the Islamic civilization in the 18th century and some of the famous among the famous alim there was called like a Bahmet Rumi Akhesari and he is considered as the one of the first admirer of the even time media in the Anatolian region and importantly these four currents as I mentioned before were not independent and in competition with each other so this is not like independent school try to negate each other through the computer which one is the best the four circle developed by influencing each other by sometime compensating for each other's structural deficiency or sometime bringing out the best of each other so this integration of the Ottoman style Sufi world is the achievement of the Turkic world which observed the Sufi literature of the Arab or the Persian literature and furthermore established the way to express in the Turkic language so this canonical language is the Arab-Persian but the way they articulate the concept in Turkish and about the currents they mix you know these four major trends with Ibrahim, Lumi and Ghazali and the Sufravati and Ghazali is also I forgot to mention in the slide but it didn't become so called like a mainstream like independent currents but of course like everybody read the Ghazali and many Sufi alims left the commentaries of Ghazali if you are on the team and another is that Ayih Halawar there was this scholar called the Khadimi and he left the commentary of the Ghazali Ayih Halawar in Arabic to educate the students in the Madrasa and I think some of you may notice but the name of Ismail Ankarabi was mentioned in every four slides like you know as Akhbarians and also like Lumi and also like as Sufravati like currents so Ankarabi is a good example of embodying this integrative like worldview of the Ottoman Sufi circle so he is the scholar who while also being a commentator of Maslowi and also translated Sufravati writing in the Turkish and also he is the commentator commentator of the event Arabic for Suzul Hikm and when you only look at his list of work to understand the Ottoman Sufi tradition is the melting pot of the various currents and in his commentary of Ayatollah he left us to the Ghazali's commentary and argued that his interpretation is inadequate it's not enough and he mentioned Ankarabi's commentary is closer to the truth by adding like a Rumi interpretation so Ankarabi's remarks indicate that he was never just a commentator who translated old classics and passed them on to the future generation that he observed these four currents in his own way and pursued a method that would bring him to the closer to the truth means I want to say that he's not just like a passive audience who just observed the Arabic and Persian currents and just translating Turkish language like while in the process of this translation he tried to overcome the deficiency of the previous works in Islamic civilization so he believes that this Ottoman synthetic worldview like integrated worldview can create like something new, like news perspective to the Islamic civilization and moreover this integrated worldview or Ottoman surface is applied differently by the different intellectual like Ankarabi has his own way about this like Ottoman like integrated like a worldview and another has their own way to articulate this concept for example by Erzunumi the Marifet Dam the masterpiece of encyclopedic writing in Turkish this is the book of like a classification and it was written in Turkish and this book covers not only the super tradition but all the Islamic studies and the sciences over his time I think he listed more than like 300 sciences in his own book but it is not a mere encyclopedia but this is like encyclopedia of super tradition or encyclopedia of like a Turkish-Sufi integrated like a worldview and as he explained in the introduction the book's classification of the sciences, the method of the classification sciences in his book represents the journey of the human spirit from the macrocosmos to the microcosmos and then to the truth through the spiritual practice so he put so he record the natural sciences as the method to understand the haqiqa or the macrocosmos like Adam and Kabir and then he listed like Islamic sciences or some of the sciences about the human body or the psychology is the methods to understand the microcosmos which are the human being and what's interesting the last chapter is the end with the practice of the nakshbandi order especially about the method of the spiritual practices so he start with the macrocosmos sciences and the microcosmos sciences and end with the individual mystical practices so the order of this book is represent so-called like seirustruk, like seirustruk the spiritual journey of the Sufi practitioner like Sufi Murid and this structure is probably the fruit of observing the motive and methodology of the Sufi talents out of our Persian world so in conclusion as we have seen with this three type of localization or the Burankarization the Turkish culture were not just the passive inheritors of the past they sought to express their own integrated world view sometimes by creating like a Turkish classics or sometimes by blending the Arab and Persian Sufi tradition and not only just translating more like transliterating by the classic but they are trying to create like original framework which can be the good example would be like a or the Ismail Ankarabiz like a letter works so if we see to re-evaluate the history of the Ottoman Sufi tradition now I believe the process of localization would help us to see the Ottoman Sufi tradition from the new perspective so thank you very much for hearing as the basis of the presentation Thank you Professor Yumamoto for a truly eye-opening presentation on Sufism in the Ottoman and Turkish speaking context the first question that I would ask from the list is the difference between Gunush and Qalb how does the Perso-Arabic kind of inflected Qalb relates to the more Turkic idea of the Turkish heart Gunush what are the similarities and where does the Turkish kind of conception of heart kind of differ or add something that the Perso-Arabic version does not from his explanation I am not convinced enough that there is a great distinction about the Qalb and the Gunur he tried to say that Gunur has more a mystical or spiritual meaning not only just as an organ but there was lots of words in Arabic these are also Qalb or Ruh or Fudar and each of the words has a spiritual meaning but I think the way he wanted to say is that not just like a linguistic perspective but when the Turkish society with the Turkish people like use this word Gunur meaning the heart it gives a special flavour to the Turkish heart as like a native speaker I think this is what he wanted to say like if the native Arab speaker or native Persian speaker speaks their own language I think this is what I understand they also feel like a special nuance or meaning but since the Bülsevi in his book this book was written for Turkish readers that's why he tried to emphasise the native speaker can understand there is a special flavour of the Turkish language for a native Turkish speaker I see so it's primarily a localisation the second question is to do with the Marifat Name and the question is how does the Marifat Name fuse its ideas on natural sciences with its idea of spiritual enlightenment can you repeat the question again how does the Marifat Name relate its concepts of the natural sciences with its conception of spiritual enlightenment of spiritual enlightenment so in his introduction as I said he said that this book has this three realm macrocosmos and microcosmos and spiritual practice so this natural science is not just analysing the suburb or suburb of the world but this to understand how the creator creates this macrocosmos as the sign for the existence of Allah and also this is like the first steps for the Sufi like Munis to work to pass the world of the macrocosmos so there is three stages so this is his own understanding of the spiritual macons so first the students study of natural sciences to understand the area of this world and then they move to the second stage as like a microcosmos and understanding the characteristic of the human body and also the heart then this was the first time the Sufi were allowed to practice like an actual spiritual practice so what he wanted to say is that this natural sciences and Islamic sciences and so typical Sufi practice were not the independent field that these are all related to each other and there was no real Sufi master who can only study like Sufi practice well there is no a real audience who can only specify with Islamic science the real intellectual should master the whole sciences and each of the sciences were actually showing something like a sign like a divine sign like a creator I see thank you very much again for a fantastic presentation I would like to just point out that the second panel will be held and chaired by Andrew Newman he will be talking on Persian literature in the Ottoman context so we had Sufi literature by professor Yama Mota we're going to be discussing Persian literature more broadly in the Ottoman context and also going to India textualization of Islam in early modern India by professor Sushmita Banerjee and from there Andrew Newman will chair the last talk of the day on domesticated modernities in Iran and Turkey coming to the modern 20th century period and finishing the day there so join us again in about an hour and a half at 1.30 and professor Andrew Newman will be here to hosting and taking care of the presenters thank you again to all of our presenters all of them were absolutely breathtaking I cannot wait to have the chapters for the forthcoming edited volume and some literature to actually read and to cite thank you very much and take care see you guys soon PhD last stage what is that? last stage PhD student at the University of Vienna in Vienna and also I'm working as a senior lecturer in our department Near Eastern Studies yeah my main focus on my PhD dissertation is Ottoman Literary Culture in the early 17th centuries and today I will talk about the Persian literary influence on Ottoman poetry so let me first share my screen sorry can you see my screen now so do you see it now? yes so before I proceed I would like to introduce my main goal and the scope of holding this talk through this study I am to explore how the Ottoman poets are perceived by Persian poetry Persian sorry a little bit confused the Ottoman poets perceived the Persian poetry and to do that I will focus on a dictionary of poetry called the Sturulamel the Sturulamel is written by Mehmet Riyazi an Ottoman scholar poet from the early 17th century 16th and this dictionary was compiled to explain many love the expressions workplace, idioms and argot seen in contemporary Persian poetry to the Ottoman reader by contextualizing Riyazi Effendi's Sturulamel I will discuss the Persian poet Persian literary influence on contemporary Ottoman poets this influence is a controversial issue in the modern historiography of Ottoman literary history I emphasize controversial this issue because this topic has not been discussed in depth in our field it is also overshadowed by the nationalistic approach that still dominates the field in the Ottoman literary historiography so in order to contextualize Riyazi Effendi's work we should shortly turn our gaze to modern Ottoman literary historiography therefore I would like to touch upon its main problems to demarcate the boundaries of my talk I should also say that I will confine myself only to Ottoman d1 poetry I won't speak of the other literary genres unless it is absolutely necessary and then I will proceed with the literary scene and atmosphere in Istanbul in the early 17th century in accordance with their relationship to the literature in Persian by doing so I believe I can associate the context in which the Sturulamel was written and the Persian literary influence on the Ottoman poets so even today the modernist the modernist historiography of Ottoman literature is under the influence of a nationalist perspective the roots of this issue go back to the 19th century when modernity and nationalization were at their peak saying this I am primarily talking about the author of a history of Ottoman poetry Elias John Wilkinson Gibb by the way I should add that the famous Iranist Edward Brown completed Gibb's book while categorizing Ottoman poetry the famous Scottish Orientalist Gibb defines it directly he defines Ottoman literature as a sub-range and imitation of Persian literature to Gibb the Ottomans are the parrots of the Persians and they see the world with Persian eyes an analogy that angered the 20th century Istanbul intelligentsia so he believed that this great race to which the Ottoman belonged has never produced any religion philosophy or literature which bears the stamp of its individual genius partly for this reason we can say that the literary historiography in Turkey started with a reactionary move against Gibb as a result of this reactionary attitude many modern Ottoman historians categorize Ottoman history as the history of taking a unique position against the Persian poetry the Persian classics this categorization covering the period before the compilation of the Suryul Ahmed can be summarized as follows the beginnings are the 14th and the 13th and 14th centuries vernacularization, literary adaptations from the Persian classics and then in the 15th century we see the Ottoman court's literary patronage of the divine poetry and the first examples were given in the Ottoman language, Ottoman Turkish the first half of the 16th century the institutionalization of Ottoman divine literature formation of a crowded literary republic in Istanbul and the second half of the 16th century the so called classical or original Ottoman literature and Barqi was the embodiment, was the typical example of this classical school so the mainstream historiography emphasizes that Ottoman literature was heavily influenced by the Persian literature although most Ottomanists do not consider this influence a sub-branch of Iranian literature like Gibb the founding role of Persian classics in Ottoman literature is acknowledged after its establishment the entire historical development of Ottoman divine literature is formed by accepting Persian literature as a standard the classical Ottoman poetry is assumed to be immersed vis-à-vis Persian, namely its originality is emphasized by the distance it takes from its Persian sources of course this definition of classic is very problematic here I won't go into details or I can do so in Q&A I think this line of development is not well understood today and the Sturul Ameli is at the center of these discussions at this point one of the main determinants of historiography is the Ottoman Turkish according to the mainstream narrative only from the half of the 16th century Ottoman Turkish became suitable for divine poetry the subject's images were settled and the Ottoman divine poetry found its own voice and more importantly now the Ottoman poets have surpassed their Iranian counterparts the origin of this narrative actually goes back to the works and biographies of the related period indeed the Ottoman poets constantly compare themselves to Persian canonical figures such as Nizami, Saadi Salmane Saaveci, Molla Jami and Hafiz and of course I don't need to state that they claim to have won this race the Ottomans in fact this is a kind of poetic rivalry an Aegon seen in the ancient Greece it is a kind of discursive modus vivendi competition or rivalry is one of the main motives in the one literature and poetic competition is an indispensable form of discourse and legitimacy for poets' own positions against their fellow poets enemies and role models as for the reality of the matter you appreciate that it can be measured after all between two literary fields the Persian and the Ottoman ones how can we decide which is better it's impossible to me at this point the problem or fault is not actually the poets of the period or the teskire writers expressing the situation they were in this source of this problem is that the modern literary seriography accept this information as real and puts it into use so this narration claims that Ottoman divan literature found its own voice in the second half of the 16th century against Persian classics and the Turkish language was perfectly adapted to Aruz Brozili however when we look at the points of the period we see a much more complex picture firstly I am not completely sure that Turkish has been adapted to Aruz Brozili if we look at Riyazi Riyazi founded the writer of Dostrol Amen he still finds Turkish weak at the beginning of the early 17th century compared to Persian therefore he sees Persian as an indispensable element for Ottoman poetry as such it can be said that the language of divan poetry not Turkish was established nothing more I will return to this issue later secondly yes there was a lyrical poetry school in Istanbul and tradition that found its most typical example in Barqi the famous poet laureate in the Ottoman court this is certain however let me point out this school was not 100% original either in terms of form and content it was an Ottomanized extension of the great Persian poetry tradition the Ottoman divan poetry was not a unique school completely independent of Persian poetry but this poetic tradition was a bit old for the new generation of poets born at the end of the 16th or the beginning of the 17th centuries this new generation of poets was reading and imitating innovations in Persian poetry just as the poets before them did that's how literature works so let me give an example of this effect and the coming of the innovations in the Ottoman poetry so let's look briefly at the year 1617 the book of the cup bearer Sakiname of Atay a poet from Istanbul also a friend of Ziafendi in a classical magic scene Atay is in the magic with his friends and he tells his friends that he is tired of old stories like Veila and Mecnun Farhad and Shireen and now he wants to write something new something completely new and the solution he found is to write a new Sakiname in the way of Zuhuri Zuhuri as we know the Hindi poet famous for his Sakiname and to many examples from him in his dictionary introduced him to the Ottoman literary public 10 years before Atay planned to compose his new literary work many literary historians thought of as originality in the 17th century was the verses uses and contents that the new generation of poets took from the the so-called new original local elements or words seen in the early 17th century Ottoman poetry should be re-evaluated under the effect of Persian influence on the new generation of poets in Istanbul especially in poems of poets born at the beginning of the 17th century a duality emerged that is an understanding of poetry that included both the traditions of the 16th century Ottoman poetry and the innovation of contemporary 17th century Persian literature so the dictionary the dictionary was written in this atmosphere so I want to keep this part as short as possible I am to explain the contents to the participants who are out of the Ottoman literary history so when we look at the Istanbul at the end of the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th century we are faced with the following picture in terms of the Ivan poetry the Ivan poetry has been urbanized for several generations its traditional tendencies some unique features and genres have formed and literary patronage has grown in the city in the Ottoman capital exceeding the limits of the palace and the courtiers and although the literary production belonged to the members of the Ulama organization to a large extent it also spread to different groups of the Ottoman society it's a pretty complex picture and at this very moment the works of poets such as Urfi, Zuhuri, Muhteşem Vahşi and etc somehow reached Istanbul from the Persian speaking lands like the old ones this poets were new examples, role models for Ottoman poets born in the second half of the 16th century as in the case of Riyazi this is an interesting moment actually because I can't give a full answer to this question did the younger generation of poets in Istanbul really get bored of this traditional urban lyrical poetry and want to create something new or did Sepkihindi poets whose works came to Istanbul from far India put this concept of innovation in the poet's minds in Istanbul I favor the second option because almost everything called innovation in this period in Istanbul was actually created with reference to Sepkihindi these fresh-tongued poets to found this innovation in Persian literature re-reading old classics getting inspired by the Sepkihindi poets so the dictionary on which I will speak about was a production of this so Riyazi Efendi the writer of this dictionary was born in such an atmosphere, such an environment now let's take a look at his life in rough outlines. Mehmet Riyazi Efendi his full name was born in 1572 his family was one of the typical Mehmet families of the 16th century Istanbul, he was educated in Istanbul and like many D1 poets of the period he was a member of the Ilmi organization he worked first as a professor and then as Qadr and he he had he had a D1 bibliography of poetry Dsturulamel sorry Riyazi Shuara and his dictionary Dsturulamel he died in the middle of the 17th century as of his birth year Riyazi was born in a period when lyric D1 poetry was popular in the 16th century this is without doubt we see the reflection of this in hundreds of his gazelles that are already in his D1 he even wrote a dystic a couplet in one of his poems our Riyazi we are the followers of Baqi our master the part of enemies is the part of Urfi and Mukteshem the dystics gives a clue about Riyazi's view of SEPKI HINDI if this was the case why did Riyazi find the right work like Dsturulamel let's look at this now so some basic points so this work Dsturulamel was written at the beginning of the 17th century probably between 167 and 9 the exact date is unknown and unfortunately we do not have a record of the existence of the autobiography actually this work was transcribed as a master thesis in Turkey in 2013 but I am not relying on this thesis because it was done without considering the manuscript differences and the other problems the manuscript I used was copied in 1628 this is the second closest copy to the autobiography the first one is in Vienna but I will be able to see this copy in mid-May now let's start with the basics first what is the content of this work and why was it written so Dsturulamel was is a Persian-Turkish dictionary of poetic terms and Riyazi et al. prepared this dictionary to explain many of the expressions workplace idioms and argocene in contemporary Persian poetry although the number of entries in the 18th and 19th century copies of this dictionary is around 1000 in the 17th century copy the number is around 700 the remaining 300 or so must have been added by anonymous writers or owners to the dictionary later on these 700 entries are explained in terms of content in dictionary and supported by examples from 10th to 17th century Persian poetry the entries are alphabetical many of the terms this works explained are not found in standard dictionaries today the work is written in a relatively simple language so we can classify the contents of the dictionary as follows metaphors, saying and proverbs slangs, insults our go literary terms suffixes, prefixes and their functions so what makes this entry special? It is impossible to find the meaning of many of these entries in standard Ottoman or Persian dictionaries more precisely we can find these entries in dictionaries but often they do not have the meaning in this dilemma an important part of these entries consists of words that have gained a new meaning in the pre-modern Persian poetry to give a few examples Gajar the explanation Gajar it is a yellow piece of cloth the Jewish people do not have special caps in Iran as they have it in the room but they put this yellow piece of cloth on their shoulders in order to separate themselves from the others the second example Cennari I am going to read my own translation that is what they say if there is no relationship between two things and he gives an example from Kemal yes these entries are the words that have been shaped, stretched and gained new meaning within the tradition of Persian poetry and the dictionary is full of them therefore we can say that it offers information that standard Ottoman dictionaries cannot use us today this is one of the points that makes Dosturulamel valuable maybe it will provide a key to understanding the Ottoman Divan poetry more precisely so why did Riyazi Effendi feel the need to write such a work as I mentioned about Persian poetry had a wide circulation network in the literary public of Istanbul in the early 17th century here this dictionary of Riyazi Effendi is a kind of guidebook for this new generation of poets in other words the work aims to explain the subtle new and incomprehensible uses in Persian poetry to the Ottoman literary public and show them with examples so to understand the 6th century or 7th century old Persian poetry in Ottoman geography in the early 17th century an effort and a desire were needed speaking of Dosturulamel I should also mention a comparison that Riyazi made between the Turkish and Persian languages after he praised the Persian languages language in Dosturulamel saying and rhymed one should not be surprised that those whose character were upon the veracity inclined to the Persian poetry because this language is a melody that gives one pleasure and the masters compose it in Iran and a few years later in his biography he went a bit far and said that composing poetry in the Turkish language was very difficult because the Turkish words were poor and unsuitable for the Yavon poetry Riyazis claims seem interesting in terms of the 17th century Yavon poetry because the main modern narrative historiography which was first created by Ashik Celebi and then followed and believed by the modern literary historians was that the and the coarseness of the Turkish language were supposed to be an issue of the previous centuries especially in the 15th century but what Riyazis suggested necessitates that we should reconsider this claim although it gives us enough food for to reconsider how the history has been canonized Dosturul Amal has an underrated place in the history of Ottoman Divan poetry sorry in two available studies on Dosturul Amal the work was not evaluated according to its historical context there are 37 copies of Dosturul Amal a relative good member considering the manuscript culture we consider these copies together with other dictionaries influenced by Dosturul Amal these dictionaries altogether certainly are one of the sources of Ottoman Divan poetry it probably tells more or gives room for further speculation because this dictionary and its successors constructed a bridge between the worlds of Persian and Ottoman poetry poets, protestors and Tusiads information about the intricacies of Persian poetry with this bridge or through this bridge and this ultimately produces an inevitable effect the continuing influence of Persian poetry on the Ottoman poets in Istanbul while this dictionary explains the uses of Persian poetry in the last seven centuries it also adapts them to the Ottoman field thus Ottoman poets are taught how to use an image and what it means okay so the sources of Dosturul Amal it is understood that Riyazi Effendi used many sources while writing his dictionary Dosturul Amal is brim with the dystics of the poets while explaining the terms Riyazi Effendi gives this verses as an example accordingly Riyazi Effendi includes dystics of 117 different poets apart from the anonymous ones in the Dosturul Amal who were these poets the poets that Riyazi quotes lived in geographies where Persian was widely spoken between the 10th and the 17th centuries these names can be divided into three categories A, the canonical names such as Saadi Shirazi, Hafiz Nizami, Mevlana Jalal Ibn Rumi etc the contemporary ones the Saqi Hindi poets Urfi, Muhtesham Zuhuri and the third one are the lesser names and the anonymous ones so these poets come from or were born in cities such as Dalhi, Nishapur Baghdad, Hamedan etc it's a vast geography so they usually presented their works to Seljuk, Safavid or Mughal poets and of course some could not find a place in the literary patronage so how did Riyazi Effendi read these Persian poets in the manuscript culture we do not know whether Riyazi learned these names from separately ones or various ontological miscellanies or by listening to their couplets in literary gatherings in addition to these poets Riyazi makes mention of 12 separate works in his dictionary and those are the names that he used what does all this tell us so while Riyazi Effendi's case is a single case with its limited examples it may be still safe to generalize his example to wider literary circles Riyazi Effendi is a figure of the Ottoman literary public of the period both professionally and in his literary career and he is a typical reflection of a certain group of bureaucrats called poets who are mainly engaged in Bivan poetry for this reason we can assume that he also followed the Iranian poets he was interested in in Istanbul at the beginning of the early 17th century so this dictionary also shows us this the vast area of the Persian-Turkish Republic of Letters in the pre-modern period in other words a network that starts from south India and extends to Istanbul and covers from the 10th century to the current 70th century so what was the effect of Distur El Amel when it was written on the Ottoman poets I think I have still time 10 minutes maybe yes it is not an easy task to measure this impact in an environment where there was no printing technology that is in the world of manuscripts therefore I must say that the examples I will give here are the findings of a preliminary study rather than being the results of a larger study we have some clues about the circulations of Persian poetry and especially in the Ottoman literature public in the 17th century True Letters Miscellaneous and Divans one can follow the traces of this circulation the effect of Persian literature on the Ottoman contemporaries counterparts for example when we look at the letters of one of the literary figures of the period Nargisi Efendi also a friend of Riyazi we come across poets such as Mollocami, Urfi Kaati Bin Işaburi Muhteşem, Vahşi my German etc etc similar examples can be found in letters written by different poets in the same period this means that Persian poetry was in constant circulation in the 17th century Ottoman literature public through literary letters especially Miscellaneous of poetry can tell us a lot about the relationship between Ottoman-Persian poetry poetry compilations are not considered very important in Ottoman literary historiography these Miscellaneous however can tell us a lot about the literary atmosphere reading habits and the Ottoman Republic of Letters Mejmua a literary Miscellaneous that I came across in Süleymaniye in Turkey is a good example in this regard this Miscellaneous was compiled in the first half of the 17th century and different owners continued to add points within the until the middle of the 18th century the contents of the Miscellaneous includes almost every poet I have mentioned in the written sources of the Süleymaniye and in addition to this there are also Nazires parallels written by Riyazi and the poets around him to each other and the Iranian poets as a whole this source proves to be a very good example of how Persian poetry and especially contemporary Seppke-Hindi poets were received in Istanbul in the 17th and 18th centuries. Divans are the sources where we can see the direct effect of the Süleymaniye a copy of the Süleymaniye I am working on gives an interesting clue in this regard. Accordingly in an entry in Doi-Bam on the folio sorry the slide is missing I don't know why but here Accordingly in an entry in Doi-Bam you can see it here on the right side it is emphasized that this term is used in an old by Nefi a poet of the period and an explanation is given yeah, in Doi-Bam it means the watcher. Nefi used this entry in one of his poems and then Riyazi found a quote Salmane Salviqi a couplet from Salman. So Nefi was a poet whom Riyazi personally knew he wrote poetry in Ottoman and Persian and compared himself to Seppke-Hindi poets such as Uffi and Mukeshem in most of his poems which means his poetry rather than intense Persian poetic influence therefore we can say that Nefi built his own poetic persona vis-à-vis Persian poets so in the D1 of Nefi the concept of Hindu-Yubam which presumably has no predecessor may have come directly from Riyazi's Dostrolame I also looked at the D1 of several prominent Ottoman poets of the 16th century to find this term Nefi Rez Dostrolamel and use this concept or he may stumble upon it in a poem and took it for his own use we cannot know more examples can be found in the D1 of Atayi, Cevri, Faizi, Haleti and Riyazi himself the poets of the early 17th century so Riyazi's Dostrolamel is the first example of Turkish-Persian poetry dictionaries in the Ottoman history. I don't know if there were similar examples in the pre-modern Persian literature but the way Riyazi Efendi compiled his dictionary paved the path for compilers of future dictionaries in the Ottoman literary history in this direction the Dostrolamel was copied for centuries and editions were made by anonymous writers or owners and maybe more importantly we see some similar-minded dictionaries were compiled following the way Riyazi Efendi created Ferhangi Shuri, Tukvetul Emsal Mejmaul Emsal and the modern dictionaries from the 20th century so conclusion in this talk I try to touch upon the cultural historical impact of Persian literature in Ottoman Istanbul in the early 17th century in doing so I had to criticize the dominant literary historiography because Riyazi Efendi's attitude shows us points where modern Ottoman literary historiography needs to be revisited apart from that we also saw why and in which context Dostrolamel was written I also mentioned the written sources of Dostrolamel and I must say that this is one of the points that impressed me the most because in this way we can see the interest of an Ottoman poet in Persian poetry in the early 17th century and the extent of literary circulations between Persian and Ottoman geographies I also trace the entries found in Dostrolamel in letters, miscellanies and divas but most of these are needed in this regard thank you for listening thank you very much for that excellent talk we'll open up to questions now if anyone has any questions just raise your hand in the in the raise hand function and we'll get to you in the meanwhile I'd like to begin with asking a question of my own we talked a lot about rather you talked a lot about the interplay between Persian and Turkish I'm wondering to what extent because I'm quite unfamiliar with Ottoman Turkish poetry to what extent the Ottoman poets incorporated Arabic and I don't mean just in the language that they use there are a lot of Arabic loanwords rather I mean whole Arabic phrases and whole Arabic stanzas because this is a constant in Mughal Hindustan in Safavid Iran and even Central Asia where you have one stanza in Persian the other in Arabic or sometimes one in Turkish the other in Persian and back and forth the Ottoman language was an imperial one and the Ottoman poets were using the three or maybe two major languages of the Islamic Republic of Letters what I mean by that the Arabic and the Persian languages so in the 1.3 I give the first place to the Persian language because the most of the idioms images metaphors were coming from the Persian classics but Arabic too as a language and as a literature was a important place in the Ottoman literature of course the Ottoman poets used many Arabic words idioms, ayats, hadises and I don't know historical references in their poems yes it was very important in the Ottoman literature it's a mixture the Ottoman language Thank you for that answer Let's go to Sushmi Sabanerji's question can you briefly comment on the influence of Sapki Hind the Indian style on Persian literature in Ottoman It was quite decisive especially in the late 16th century and from the early 17th century on First of all expanding on or giving a brief overview of what Sapki Hind actually entailed what it essentially was It was a I don't know if it is too if it's wrong if I call them a new poetic movement in the 16th century most of the Sapki Hind poets were not accepted in the Safavid and they moved to India to find new literary patterns and they submitted their literary works to the Mughal and there they invented a new poetic content and this content somehow ended up in Istanbul at the late 16th century the the metaphors or the images they created they used were different than the traditional Persian literary school different than what Hafiz Nizami used and they also put the the daily language in the poetry the Ottoman poets lived at the end of the 16th and the beginning of the early 17th century were influenced by this poetic movement and they influenced the whole literary scene in the pre-modern Ottoman literary culture especially after the 17th century Interesting to note that Safavid Iran is the one most interested in the Sabkehendi it goes to India and then it does a roundabout all the way on the other side of Iran to go to Because there was a poetic shift in the Safavid court I think the Safavid Shahs supported the poets who wrote poems for the Shahid the leaders of the Shia order and the Safavid Shahs like Pahmas and the other ones Abbas did not patronize the old school of Persian poetry anymore and therefore the poets had to change their court they had to find new literary patrons I see I would like to ask a final question on the influence of Shahnameh tradition poetry which is something that is very strong in Safavid Iran but Mughal Hindustan and also the Khanates in Central Asia the Khanate of Bukhara in particular is very adamant it has great patronage circles for the production of Shahnames and also the incorporation in their historiography their chronicles and so on there was I understand a Turkish translation or several brothers the Turkish translations of the Shahnameh were they merely translations were there new editions how did the people of Ruhm engage with that tradition and what did they add to it it's a very good question I could only answer this question until the 17th century after that I don't know what has happened but the Shahnameh and Firdesli one of the founding figures of the Ottoman Divine Literature there were many adaptations and many translations from his work and what is maybe more important is that there was a official post in the Ottoman court which is called Shahnamehji a state official who whose duty is to write new Shahnameh for the new sultans and these figures were very important for the literary scenes in the Ottoman literary public in the pre-modern period and industrial ML2 Riyazi Effendi took many examples from Firdesli and put these couplets in the circulation in Istanbul in the literary scene that's fascinating methods thank you again for a wonderful presentation thanks what we're going to move on to now is a presentation on the textualization of Islam in India and I think the Q&A has led us quite smoothly from Anatolia and the western part of the Turkotagic world down to the eastern part into India and to see how literature is produced and the conditions under which it engages with the rest of these traditions that we've been talking about so Sushmita Banerjee hi and thank you for joining us please start your presentation as soon as you're ready thank you I hope I'm audible you are yeah okay I'll share my screen I hope my screen is visible yes I was just about to ask you to go full screen which you already did so my paper is called textualization of Islam in early modern India I've also added a subtitle to it construction of knowledge archive in the letters of Abdelhaq Muhaddis Bailavi in South Asia Arabic and Persian literature was produced in different millions the court chronicles Mirofa princes literature produced in the 13th and 14th centuries under the Delhi Sultans and regional sultanates dealt with a whole range of themes but many texts were also produced in various other languages so for instance Braj they were multilingual texts they were also texts which are regarded as as diglossic in nature and the reason there were a large number of people who immigrated to India in the 13th and 14th century on account of the Mongol pressure many of these people who immigrated to India largely North India were Turks, Tajiks, Mongols and they settled here but largely it was the Persian culture and Persian language which became the official mode of communication especially in the courts of North India in Deccan however along with Persian Dakinni Urdu was also used the Sufis and itulent preachers also adopted Persian as a language of literary production and different kinds of texts were produced by the Sufis which included Paskarat Malfuzat Makhtabad and others many of these texts circulated through the oral medium they were also written down copied and are now available in different manuscript libraries several people from South Asia also travelled to Egypt to receive training in Hadith as well as Sufism Christopher Bahal in recent years has looked at the link that existed between South Asian scholars and scholars from Mecca and Medina so for instance he refers to Muhammad the Mamini who was from Egypt who came to India in the 15th century and settled in the port of the Sultanate. Arabic historiography also flourished along with Persian historiography in the medieval period and we have several Sufis who also adopted Arabic as well as Persian in the textual tradition the Persian was largely dominant vis-a-vis Arabic. Ibn Khalkhin's Arabic text served as a model for Arabic history writing in South Asia and some of these texts tried to show connections between people places and practices across the western Indian ocean so Bahal for instance refers to Haji Dabir who had strong personal ties in Mecca but lived in Ahmedabad he belonged to a family of scholars and he wrote texts which discussed the chronology of the Gujarat Sultans and biographies of some famous personalities similarly there were other individuals as well like Al-Adras who discussed biographies of people who traveled from Gujarat to the Hijaz Roy Fischel has also looked at Dekini scholars who gave patronage to trans-oceanic Arabic historiography however there was a change that we notice in the 16th century primarily because of the Mughal intervention so with the establishment of the Mughal Empire in the subcontinent in the early 16th century Persian emerged as the official language of communication though texts continue to be produced in Braj, Sanskrit Arabic and other Hindi and other languages but as far as the state was concerned the state gave immense patronage to Persian scholars poets and the state had a history department which produced a whole range of historical chronicles about the Mughals primarily but also about the history of the Indian subcontinent many of the texts that were produced especially the mirror for princess literature or the texts that dealt with norms of governance were influenced by the Akhlaq literature Nasruddin Tusi's Akhlaq-e-Nasri had cast a deep influence on Mughal court literature the main focus of the Akhlaq literature was the fact that human nature needs disciplining the goal of political organization could be achieved through justice and justice was the cornerstone of social organization the rights of all subjects were to be kept safe irrespective of their religious affiliation and the true king was supposed to imbibe all these qualities so justice was defined as social harmony coordination balancing of conflicting interests and attaining etadal or equipoise Sharia was not to be understood in the same sense as jurisprudence but it was the objective of the state was to ensure that the people from diverse temperaments are able to live peacefully and Sharia was supposed to avoid any kind of conflict if you look at some of the Mughal texts like the Ayyari Agbari or Mausai Jahangir which were produced by the court we see a huge influence of the Akhlaq literature Muzaffar Alam has talked at great length about the Akhlaq literature in his writings however it's true that the Mughal states influence on the literary world the Persian literary world of the Indian subcontinent in the 16th 17th century was huge but is it possible to go beyond the state to look at some of these ideas how these ideas were being propagated by the Sufis or by other scholars for common Muslims so did common Muslims also try to imbibe these virtues about relating to social harmony equipoise for instance were the Sufi peace advocating these virtues in their writings in the didactic texts that were written by them or in other words were these ideas part of the larger intellectual milieu of the early modern period in India and it was not just the state which was a pretenator of these ideas but it was a participant in the larger intellectual milieu so in order to answer these questions I am looking at the letters of the scholar called Abdelhaq Mahdus Thehlavi who lived from 1551 to 1642 he lived in Delhi primarily he was trained as a scholar of Islamic learning he wrote both in Persian as well as Arabic he received training in Hadiths he was also initiated to Sufism, Qadri Sufism initially by his father and then by other Sufi peace interestingly he traveled to the Hijaz in 1589 and stayed in the Hijaz, stayed there for three years he received training in the Mishkatil Mashabi under the Muttaki Sufis Abdelhaq Mahdus who was a South Asian Sufi who had settled in Mecca so he received training in Hadiths learning from him he also received training in Sufism under Abdelhaq Mahdus in the Hijaz he stayed there for three years and having received training in Hadiths and Sufism he came back to India in 1591 he was a prolific author who produced large number of texts in Arabic and Persian and also he wrote large number of essays in Persian these texts were, I will talk about the content of this the genre of these texts briefly interestingly enough he never sought direct patronage from the Mughal court though he was based in Delhi, apparently he also stayed in Fatehpur Sikri which was the capital of the Mughals for a short while but he doesn't discuss about that phase of his life otherwise he is quite vocal about his own life in fact in one of the Taskaraths that he had written he talks in great detail about his own family along with 250 other South Asian Sufis who lived in India from the 13th century to the 17th century so in this particular text he talks about his family his grandfather his father his uncle and he also talks about his own life in a few other texts as well he provides details about his own life he also prepared a list of his own writings in this particular list he talks at a great length about each of the texts that he had written how long they were and briefly also explains the content of these texts so he wrote commentaries on the hadiths Mishkatul Mashabi both in Arabic as well as Persian then he wrote the Sufi biographical encyclopedia or the Taskarath Akbarulakhyar he also wrote a very very brief tariq he wrote letters to both Mughal courtiers and Sufis and I will be focusing primarily on the letters in this paper today he wrote biographies of the Qadri Sufis he wrote biography of the Muttaki Sufis he also wrote very short treatises on ideal conduct for Muslims ethical behavior he wrote a travelogue and most of these texts are not available only 16 of these texts out of 48 that he had written had survived but all his essays or the letters have survived so I will be talking about some of these letters today exchange of letters was very common in Indian subcontinent we have Sufis sheikhs for instance wrote letters to their murids sometimes courtiers also wrote letters to Sufis seeking their opinion about various problems or their opinion about Islam and largely about conduct so Naqshbandi Sufi Khaja Bakibilla who died in 1602 and sheikh Ahmad Serhindi who was a contemporary who was also a Naqshbandi Sufi they wrote a large number of letters to fellow Sufis to mobile courtiers to disciples Abdul Haq interestingly also wrote letters to some of the same people to whom sheikh Ahmad Serhindi and Bakibilla were writing but the nature of these letters are quite interesting in fact he tried to map the existing communication network by writing letters to mobile courtiers such as Faisi who was the brother of Abul Faisal who was a friend as well as a courtier of Akbar Murtaz Khan who held important position under Akbar and Jahangir and was also matrimonially related to Abdul Haq as his daughter was married to Abdul Haq's son Murul Haq Abdul Rahim Khane Khanan again a very very prominent scholar who was associated with Akbar and Jahangir and in addition to that he also wrote letters to Sufis, I will come to Sufis in a moment like Bakibilla, Abumali and Abdullah Niyazi so what was the nature of these letters that Abdul Haq wrote which is apparent from the content of these letters that Abdul Haq also held as a major was also a teacher and he taught in a different way and it is likely that as a teacher and with large number of students that he had he spoke to the congregation about the tense of Islamic faith most of these letters that Abdul Haq wrote to the courtiers and to an extent also to the Sufis carry a lot of citations from the Quran Hadith as well as various Arabic and Persian texts which were not commonly in circulation in the South Asian knowledge networks. Now if you look at the normative literature which was being produced by the Mughal court there was a huge emphasis on disciplining of lives of the courtiers Rosalind Hanlon has talked about this aspect about how Akbar sought to discipline the lives of the courtiers and how he tried to give his own interpretation to masculinity. If you look at Abdul Haq Abdul Haq also talked about self-disciplining particularly he talked about control over nafs but he talked about it in a very, very different manner, very different from the way the Mughal court interpreted it so in one of the letters that he wrote to Faizi he argued that the two kinds of people those who are wandering away time in pleasantries of life, Ashwashra and those who are indulging in all sorts of pleasures of life but while others who are living their life in solitude and sadness. Abdul Haq felt that it was nafs or lower soul which was responsible for drifting people away from and towards an inappropriate luxurious life. Hence it was pertinent to have patience Sabir and focus on the current part that would lead to God. So by upholding virtues of simple life Sabir which was similar to the kind of discourses that the Sufi sheikhs would actually have with their disciples or with the audience Abdul Haq put in trying to superiority of such people and also confirmed that this was the true sharia path that would lead to the ultimate reality and help in self-discipline but Abdul Haq was though he was initiated to a Sufi order he was not a Sufi peer but he disclosed virtues of an ideal Muslim life in several correspondence to Abdul Rahim Khana Khana who was a very, very influential Mughal courtier. Khana Khana was Marjalingh Mughal he wrote in Arabic, Persian, Turkish Braj and sometimes also used Hindavi metaphors and Hindavi religious vocabulary. Abdul Haq was trained in both Hadis studies as well as because of his initiation in the Sufi order he carried terminology from both domains in his letters. In a letter to Khana Khana he wrote that there was need to abide by decrees of venerable scholars or Buzur because we cannot reach their stature in addition he also said that all deeds span both Zahir and Bathin so to reach the stage of Marifat Muslim first needs to have firm belief in the path prescribed by prophet and purify the Bathin by doing Zikr in solitude so that the nafs is enlightened by Mure Haq and that would enable people to develop love for God. Elsewhere Abdul Haq also associated the need to purify nafs by following the prophetic path and making apt preparations for the day of judgment. He underlined that the prophet is the best Usta and one should do remembrance on the qualities of God so making effort in the right direction is pertinent to tread the path of Marifat and this can be attained by controlling nafs so that one's heart gets connected with Munri Ilan. He cited the dikta of Sheikh Abdul Qadir Jalani who advised his followers to read to Rukat Namaz at night and raise invocations that will enable them to get Naimut which in turn will look after their Akhirat. Abdul Haq reminded Khani Khanan that pleasures of the world are the cause of pain as this world is a place of work and not relief and hence one should intend to attain spiritual pleasure through Sabra and Shukra and thus spreading the path of Haq for Akhirat. So he was talking about self-discipline but this is very different from what the Mughal quote I was prescribing. The Akhirat literature talks at great length about Aithudal or the path of moderation. In various writings Abdul Haq also talked about moderation and interestingly enough he did not see any contradiction between Sharia and Tarika. So in the Akbar Lakhia he mentioned he cited the dikta of Sheikh Hassan Tahir who had argued in a recital that Sharia is following the commandments of the Prophet. It is also about obedience. Tarika is being detached from all when Haqqikat is understanding the manifestation. Sharia means compliance. Tarika means control over nafs. Haqqikat means being united with God. Sharia is the middle path. Sharia is Aithudal. It's the path of moderation or equipoise. Tarika means to stop thinking about oneself and Haqqikat is to meet with friends. Sharia also means being obedience to the lawful. Tarika means indifference to the other and Sharia is abiding. Tarika is fana, annihilation. Haqqikat is eternity. So, Abdelhaq keeps talking about Sharia in most of his literary writings, but he did not see any kind of contradiction between mysticism and Islamic practices. In the text Marjul Bahrain, Abdelhaq stated that people can be classified into three categories. Those Fouqah and Ulmah Zahiri who are in the state of denial and hence do not regard being guided by nafs as problematic. Mashaykh gives commandments against Sharia. It is acceptable to them. Then there are scholars who believe in the tenets of the Ulmah and Fouqah as their only concern. And the third category of scholars argue that they are bound by the Sharia, but due to Haal they are transgressing it. Abdelhaq argued that these people lack knowledge and they are far away from Marifat and some of these people also lack iman and hence they are away from Islam. But he cautioned people that during any kind of behest in kind of argument, people should always adopt the moderate path. Zahiri Ilm should hold primacy and any statement that is made during the condition of what is not reliable. He also argued that any Mashaykh who in order to take the path of Tauheed starts living in the forest and argue and stops having food that is threatening. He also said that Atadal is the best path even for the Sufi so it is not just a path for following the Sharia or for any kind of conflict resolution but also the best path for Tariqa because without following the stage of Atadal one cannot follow the essential or righteous path. So it is pertinent to control the Nass. Just like the Mughal state which focused on conflict resolution Abdelhaq also talked about conflict resolution though Abdelhaq's concern was largely with Muslims and not with people from who were non-Muslims. So Abdelhaq argued that jurists often find that there are difference of opinion regarding the true path. He did not take any particular path as the definitive path and didn't prescribe that any one path is better than the other unless it was against the Sunnah. So for instance he said that he wrote in one of the letters that people hold Fakir who does sabr is better than the rich person who does Shukr but he said both are complementary to each other. Similarly with regards to Ulmin Akli and Ulme Akli he did not condemn Ulme Akli but he heard that Sharia is of prime importance and only after that one should practice philosophy. He argued that all Muslims irrespective whether they were Ulma or Sufi or Umrah they all need to practice abstinence and they should follow a path which is based on Sunnah and that should be the sole intention of life. He provided and it is in one of the letters that he wrote to Sufi Kwaja Bakibilla he provided detailed exposition regarding the Sufi practice of Samah. Now some Orthodox scholars or sometimes it is argued that the Ulma were always against Samah or musical gathering but if you look at Abdul Haq he was not prescribing that whether Samah was illegal or not and he provided a whole range of opinions regarding Samah. So and this actually resonates his training as a muhatis as he presented arguments and counter arguments on the basis of proofs and citations that were derived from the writings of Sufis and Ulema and also negated the weak or inauthentic premises but he did not have any a priori derivative stand regarding permissibility of the Samah. So in this particular letter that he wrote to Bakibilla he cited from the writings of Junaid Bakdadi, Imam Ghazali, Ahmad Dawud, Ahmad Hanbal, Sheikh Jamal Abbas, Sheikh Shohabuddin Shauravardi, Sheikh Bahauddin Zakaria, Sheikh Kududdin Bakhtiyaraki, these are South Asian Sufis, Sheikh Fariduddin Ghanjishakar, Khazi Hamidi, Nizamuddin Auliya and Sheikh Nasiruddin Mahmoud Chiragid Ali as well as a prophetic Khudis. So I will briefly summarize this to show how he tried to resolve conflicting opinions that existed regarding Samah in the Islamic world. So Abduhuk stated that some sources argue that Hazrat Junaid Bakdadi was a regular to the Majlis of Samah but later stopped going there and on being asked he mentioned that he used to go to the Majlis of Samah to meet friends but he felt that this talk was taking this controversial as Hazrat Junaid Bakdadi also stated that Samah is not forbidden as per Sharia provided it entails only human voice. Ahmad Abud Dawud reported that Hazrat Umar was once walking on the road and when he heard some music he closed his ears but did not ask his accomplice to close his ears. Similarly, Sheikh Jamal Abbas was going for namaz when he heard somebody singing loudly and he asked if there was a problem and why he was crying and screaming and screaming so loudly. Ahmad Hanbal reported that in Samah, music and dance is not permissible but there is no hadith that Samah is permissible or forbidden. In fact, Abduhuk reported one hadith where prophet which apparently showcased a prophet's approach towards music. Once Ayesha was singing and playing a drum while prophet Muhammad was sleeping so when Abu Bakr scolded her for making noise a prophet stopped Abu Bakr from reprimanding Ayesha as she was singing on the occasion of Eid but Abduhuk felt that this hadith was of doubtful authenticity. Some Muslims held that if they were performing a difficult task then listening to Samah provided them with dynamism to tread the path easily. Abduhuk did not really agree with this particular opinion and said that if drinking alcohol provides a Muslim with the same kind of vigor as Samah will consuming alcohol be regarded as permissible? He said that performance of Samah is not problematic but the kind of statements that sometimes that are given to show that it is permissible are unconvincing and a reader cannot read a stage of funna and enduring Samah because one is in the state of wajda. He narrated several anecdotes regarding South Asian Sufis regarding the practice of Samah. So according to one such account Sheikh Sohrabuddin Sohrabuddin never invited Sheikh Ahmad Kirmani who is a promoter of Samah to his majlis and if there was any reference to Sheikh Kirmani in Sheikh Sohrabuddin he would not want to hear his name but this was a story which was narrated in the Sohrabuddin sources but as per the Chishti sources Sheikh Ahuddin once came to Sheikh Sohrabuddin Sheikh Sohrabuddin Sohrabuddin Sohrabuddin's majlis and expressed a desire to listen to Samah but due to the nature of the demand placed by Sheikh Ahuddin Sheikh Sohrabuddin Sohrabuddin permitted performance of Samah but himself stayed away and started reading Namahs. This is from Chishti source. Sheikh Bahuddin Zakari was also a Sohrabuddin Sufi apparently listened to Samah in solitude and even got into ecstasy. However, Ahuddin argued that this Chishti rendering of Sohrabuddin narratives seemed to be weak and unreliable. He also discussed the Chishti Sufi approach towards Samah which is participated in Samah and ensured that it conformed to the norms of the Sharia Sheikh Bahuddin Bakhtiyar Papi used to keep Rosa and listen to Samah and he died in state of ecstasy Sheikh Hamiduddin Nagori or Sohrabuddin lied Samah though the Ulima of his age did not like it and tried to stop it. Sheikh Nizamuddin Aulia introduced apparently some changes in the Samah and Sheikh Nasruddin Mahmud was his disciple enjoyed listening to Samah but once Samadhi started playing musical instrument during the performance so he left the much less. So when people told him that he was not adhering to his peers' tariqa Sheikh Nasruddin told that his peers' tariqa is not the reason or the proof to follow it and Nizamuddin Aulia heard the story and he agreed that usage of musical instrument is not permissible so Abdullah concluded this long letter to Vakibella by suggesting that Murids should know the Sharia and then they should follow their peer and not otherwise and this was in sharp contrast to some of the other Sufis like Abdul Rahman Chishti who argued that whatever my peers says that is my tariqa. Abdullah talks at great length about Sharia and Sunnat as well as tariqa in these letters, especially letters that he wrote to Sufi sheikhs like Vakibella, Abdullah Niyazi and Abul-Mahli. Abdul Haq wrote that Sufis and Ulema are not antagonistic to each other. Talib should follow the path of God but first should have Iman and then tread the path of Mahmud for God. True Iman is from Ulema and there is both fear and hope a fear of God in lifetime and hope for God's benevolence in the Akhira. It is important that Iman should include Amal to the norms of Sunnat as Abdul Haq argued Sharia is the base ish is the pillar and hence the instructed Muslims to obey the Sharia first because if one becomes Sufi first and under the control of Haal tries to follow the path of God then his in will be deficient. He also cited the Ditta of Abdul Qadir Jilani that every Haqika that ignores the Sharia is not reliable as proofs required to justify Haqika Sunnat and the Quran. While laying down the norms of Sufi tariqa, Abdul Haq stated that to tread the correct path one needs to understand the tariqa first and the correct tariqa is to do Ibadat of Quran. If due to ignorance some people choose a wrong path and argue that Nama and Rosa are appropriate. Thank you. He strongly condemned strongly condemned any innovation of changing the norms prescribed for the Muslims. So in one of the letters that was written at the time of the death of Haqqa to Mughal Kote Murtaza Khan he argued that Prophethood and Sultanate these are two different things. Farouk had claimed Godhood for himself though he was not capable of these actions because the claim of Prophethood is only for those people who get affairs from God who are seamless blessed with specific miracles and they bring Sharia to the world and they get ill from so that Jahalat is removed from this world and prophets have their own Ummat and so prophets make no claim for Saldana. Now this statement and this particular letter is very interesting because the kind of religious practices and kind of claims that Akbar was making it seems that after his death Abdul Haqq was trying to tangentially indicate that such practices should not continue in the future. Sheikh Abdullah Niyazi who was a former Mehdiwi and also servitor of Salim Chishri's Dargah which was patronized by the Mughal Kote, Abdul Haqq wrote large number of letters to him as well and informing him about the Adhikad of Sufis. Though he was quite elderly, Abdul Haqq wrote a letter in which he talked about the Sirat-e-Mustaqim or the True Path of God to get rid of fallacies. He argued that if a Sufi denies the import of Sunnah and projects something else as the core of Tasafuf then he is deficient in his belief. He reiterated that every Muslim should give importance to the knowledge of Fiqh as it enables them to read the method to understand the Tents of Faith and Quran. He cited several Hadiths in the letters he wrote to Abdullah Niyazi and underlined that Prophet's stature is very high and it is pertinent to we follow him stop all forms of Bidda that do not follow the Incarnate Sharia. He also argued that Sultans should not go against Deen and Ulema should follow and teach the Quran to people and never give any Fatwa that is against the Sharia and they should detach from everything else that is against them. Abdullah Niyazi was also closely associated with the Mughal court and it seems that through this letter and the kind of directions that he was given to this elderly Sufi he was commenting on the prevailing political and religious conditions where people were taking liberties with the tenets of Islam and hence he felt the need to reiterate the basics of Islamic Fiqh and especially to the leaders of the Muslim community. In several letters that he wrote to Abdullah Niyazi he talked about how several practices which are followed by Muslims are like going for Ibadat on Sharia Barat going to the graveyards of the department so he argued that people believe although this is untruth but people believe it doesn't do any harm to religion but it was duty of the Masha'a to guide people regarding these appropriate practices so that people follow the correct path and if any point of time any wrong with this is cited as a proof for a wrong path that is extremely harmful because Jihad Sufism is extremely harmful. Abdullah argued further that the true Perika is the path that takes the salik to the path of Marifat and it includes purity of heart and there is no dilemma regarding the correct path so while citing communication between Abu-Ali-Sinah and Sheikh Abul-Kher Abdullah recounted that raha-tariqat is not different from raha-i-haq provided people don't get busy in the pleasures of the world and people follow all the tenets of the Sharia by keeping rusa play-paying, zakat, performing salat, etc. so that the akhirat is comfortable so in most of the letters to Abdullah Niyazi he raised concern about the innovations that had been brought to the faith because of false these improper conduct of common Muslims and lack of proper guidance by the Mashaik though he did not directly indicate that Abdullah Niyazi was conducting all this or he was deliberately conducting all these but it seemed that he felt the great need to guide him regarding the correct path so that he could transmit the same to his followers though most of the Sufi writings if you look at most of the Sufi writings in the Indian subcontinent they tend to focus on a particular Sufi order the Sufi path Abdullah Niyazi did not propagate norms and ideas of any Sufi order neither in the Akbarul Akhiyar which was a Sufi biographical dictionary nor in his letters to fellow Sufis in fact he borrowed ideas and subjects and cited the dicta of Sufi preceptors from across time and space so he write he supported the dicta of Sufis from the Shazli order, Muttaki Sufis Chishti's, Soharavadi's Sufis from Central Islamic lands, Sufis from South Asia so for instance he reported the dicta of Sheikh Ashtabuddin Ahmad Zarukh who had premised on firm belief and trust in God and following Sunnah acquiring sound knowledge regarding the attributes regarding the attributes of God from Mashaik and following the prophetic path. He also cited the dicta of Sheikh Abuhal Sinsen Shazli who had advised one should converse with people so that it helps the Salik in following the true path. He reiterated the need to first make the Akhi that strong and then follow Sunnah. He cited the dicta of Sheikh Ali Muttaki who was the teacher of Sheikh Abdul Wahab Muttaki Abdul Haq's own teacher in the Hijaz in a Rasala and with regards to the appropriate path to reach God that is through Ibadat of God by fulfilling obligatory and supragetary prayers obedience to Sunnah in reading the Quran etc. So if Abdul Haq argued that following the directions of Pir and Sheikh is important a Salik does get a benefit from it but and he himself initiated into the Qadir-e-Sulfi order so he also cited the dicta of Sheikh Abdul Qadir-e-Jalani more often than any other Sufi and in one of the letters that he wrote to Bakibullah he reinforced the idea that all other practices are secondary Sufi must adhere Sufi's practices must be grounded in the Sunnah and this was interesting because Bakibullah had enrolled a large number of disciples he was an Akshbindi Sufi but he had enrolled a large number of disciples including those who had already been initiated into other Sufi order so it seems that he had disciples from diverse mystical orientation and Abdul Haq tried to guide himself towards a proper method in fact in another letter to Bakibullah he summarized a letter summarized an essay called Fakhre Muhammadi which was written by Sheikh Ahmad Ibrahim underlining that Dervish Murshid Murid should draw illustrations from Prophet's life and Sunnah in this letter it's argued that Salih should follow Usul and Kawayyat that will enable him to become friend or companion of God, sorry companion of Prophet on the day of judgment the presence include avoiding novelty being attentive being regularly in offering Salat in order to receive God's benefits Abdul Haq explained that regarding Namaz as not as an obligatory ritual and just not focusing on the inner meaning of Namaz can be very harmful so people should have unwavering faith in Prophet's tariqa should stay away from negative actions forgive people who have committed sins and keep one's heart busy in remembering Prophet who should be thought of as the Sheikh or Peer he emphasized that Prophet and Sheikh and Peer are the same and hence following Prophet's order is mandatory and one can be trained by reading the Hadith which would augment the love for him and practicing a Muslim will get a vigor to follow Prophet's mandate so Abdul Haq reported that the Faki should have fear of God as wearing Zahiri Sufi dress is not enough unless they have Iman and being busy in Samah is no good if Namaz is regarded as a prefectory ritual so the intention of mashayats of all tariqa was not limited to shielding the muris and instructing them in Sufi practices Abdul Haq stated that the mursheeds should educate their disciples about the norms of Sunnah so that the part advocated by the great Sufis and scholars is adhered to and no Bidda is introduced he also talked about Akhirat very often in the letters that he wrote to the courtiers so he in fact classified people into four categories He did not claim that any particular category of people was superior but people would get rewarded in the Akhirat as per their conduct in this world so hence it was important for Muslims to do Shukr and understand that that if Haqq and his originates from God and women beings have no existence without God so he wrote that he also argued that the notion of Akhirat is of great importance because the debt is inevitable but people somehow are negligent they are busy in seeking pleasures due to the control exercised by the lower soul and do not perform their duties and in one such although most of the tone of his letters was very very serious but he narrated an anecdote in which he mentioned that a man was running away from a lion and fell into a well and then he realized that there was a snake lying on the ground and he was facing death but in that moment of despair he got carried away by seeing a honey bee's nest and thought that if he consumes honey then he will be so happy and he fell down and he died so he argued that it was due to nuts that this man forgot about death so he reminded people across his writings not just in the letters that people should focus on the Akhirat and pursue the true path that will help them on the day of judgment although Bilhuk was a scholar of hadith he rarely talks about kafir, he rarely talks about non-muslims he talks a great length about making one's iman strong and in one such letter he commented on iman's acceptance at death so he cited Ibn al-Arabi's text Fusus al-Hikam and he said that some scholars believe that while there is a condemnation of Pharaoh's religion but there is no condemnation but his iman is accepted Bilhuk felt that if an entire life is spent in kafir then at the time of Akhirat once iman cannot be accepted he was critical of this position and he said that no ayat of Quran can actually explain what has been mentioned in Fusus al-Hikam and this kind of iman is not acceptable and if this is acceptable then what is kafir so to conclude Abdullah's letters to Qoteers demonstrate his desire as a teacher to edify Muslims about Islamic practices and context they carried the directed tone of the teacher but usually the letters that he wrote to Qoteers they were presented in a simple fashion in contrast to this so he focused on themes like offering namaz, invocation, thanksgiving practices which would benefit Muslims on the day of judgment abstaining from worldly pleasures he used simple words usually avoided difficult Arabic terminology though he summarized the ideas which were there in the Arabic text in simple position language he also cited verses from the Quran and citations from the hadith but they do not form the core of these letters in fact he focused more on explanation so that the readers could give the Qoteers largely or the general readers were probably accessing these resellers could read them but if you look at he also cited from the lives of great Sufis and scholars many of whom were not based in South Asia like Junaid Baghdadi Sheikh Abdul Qadir Jilani Sheikh Zikrallah and many others and many of these people were usually not cited in the Persian literature or Sufi literature in the Indian subcontinent but Abdul Qadir chose to provide his own rendering of the subject rather than providing proofs all the time because he tried to make these letters as easy to read as possible but when he wrote letters to the Sufis they were thematically much more complex one can see that how he was trying to showcase his knowledge regarding the Arab knowledge systems and his vast knowledge of hadiths as well as Sufism and a whole range of other texts the letters that he wrote to some of the very very senior Sufis like Baki Bilal Abdul Laniyazi or Shah Wilmal were much more complex linguistically as well as thematically it seemed that he tried to showcase his knowledge to his knowledgeable knowledgeable peers it is interesting Baki Bilal was also writing letters to courtiers and to Sufis regarding the Surahs of Quran regarding Dua but he never wrote any letters to Abdul Haq Abdul Haq wrote letters to Baki Bilal on similar themes and he also wrote to others but doesn't seem that Abdul Haq was trying to treat Baki Bilal as his machine or as his teacher he was certainly not seeking guidance from him but he was trying to showcase his vast knowledge of Islam and Sufism so it seems sexual scholasticism we relate to circulation of sexual scholasticism of Abdul Haq like the circulation of knowledge pertaining to tenets and practices of Islam the dicta of Islamic scholars from Egypt central Islamic lands which largely circulated in the Arabic scholarship could now circulate in the Persian language because of Abdul Haq's vast repertoire of knowledge regarding Hadith Islamic faith training in Sufism and he could easily cite introduce and summarize the dicta of Arab scholars in Persian in doing so he produced didactic texts in different genres letters are just one example he did so in other types of texts as well and depending on the audience there were Sufis of Forteus who used a differential approach he engaged with themes that concerned the moobals like Aithidal, moderation, resolution of conflict, self discipline guidance regarding true faith Sufi Tariqa and the Sharia but unlike some of his contemporary Sufis he did not use Hindavi motifs or Hindavi tomes and did not showcase any of its influence on Islam he did not even prescribe non Islamic precepts as equivalent to Islamic precepts which were done by some of his contemporary Sufis his approach towards writing was to unravel the truth and focus on aspects of moderate part within Islam without transgressing the prescriptions of some Thank you Thank you so much for your wonderful presentation So for questions please put your questions in the text box so I can basically read them out loud to Sushmita and we can get going like that but before we go on to the questions I would just like to say what was most interesting to me is the fact that Dahlavi here Abdullah Dahlavi does not see a tension between the Sharia and Sufism whereas as a historian of late Safavid Iran there is such a great tension between the Sufis and the more juristic minded ulema who are very Sharia based and just merely tension its outright hostility where one party is accusing the other of being kafir of not even being part of the Islamic religion if you read some of the and there are so many anti-Sufi treaties that are written in the late Safavid period it's very much about Sufis not being Muslim but being maybe Zoroastrians being various kind khawaraj is also something that they're called imagining that the Sufis are partaking in various kinds of sexual vice and un-Islamic practices it's fascinating to me that Dahlavi combines his Sharia and even uses it as a basis to build his Sufism on so that was absolutely fascinating to me I'm not expecting any comments on that but I suppose we'll go on to the first question and get the ball rolling that way you have mentioned of Dahlavi saying that he never sought patronage from the cause I just wonder what was his way of income as he wrote his works if he did not benefit from the quarterly patronage so he was his father had established a mother-sa in Delhi and his father used to teach in that mother-sa Abdul Haq started writing at a very early age when he was in his 20s he started writing the Akbarul Akhiyar then he went to the Hijaz so by the time he was 40 he had actually acquired a lot of knowledge and then he started writing more and more texts in fact most of these letters were written towards the end of 16th century to early 17th century and he continued teaching at his father's mother-sa and he had large number of students so if you try to take the intellectual network of Abdul Haq Dahlavi he had many many students who came and learnt from him many of them learnt hadiths from him but they also received training in other branches of knowledge and he was likely that as a teacher he probably earned his living and he did not seek koth petrishya well as I mentioned briefly that he did go to Fatehpur secretly for a very short period of time which was the capital now interestingly if he doesn't mention about this incident at all in wherever he talked about his own life he otherwise talks about his great length about himself his achievements his writings and at least in three of his books he talks about himself along with some of the other great people but he doesn't mention about this incident we get to know it from another text called the month of khawal tavari and he's probably spent around five years in Fatehpur secretly but it is likely that the kind of political environment that was there in the Mughal koth he did not find it conducive because the kind of ideas that were for instance was circulating so he was claiming that Akbar is Insane Kamil he's the perfect man Akbar is the Mujtahid of the age and there were various other ways in which Akbar was not treated like a prophet but he was being made into a larger than life figure so it's obvious that Abdul Haq who wanted everybody to follow the prophetic path was very uncomfortable with what was happening in the Mughal koth and hence he chose not to talk about this phase of his life and he continued his life as a teacher and he became very famous many of his students went on to become kothiers they also and he was, Abdul Haq was cited very often during his lifetime so when all these thaskarads were produced in the 17th century there was a reference to Abdul Haq so that he was a great scholar of hadiths he had written the Akbar-ul-Lakhia so his texts were in great circulation you'll find large number of manuscripts of the Akbar-ul-Lakhia the Sufi kaskarad and many of his other texts he wrote a biography of prophet Muhammad he wrote hadiths he wrote short treatises so it was probably an account of his teaching and his scholarship that he continued he didn't have to seek patronage from the koth it is another question yes I'll read that out this is more of a modernist question it's from Razia Aravi in your discussion of Nasiri in ethics and Akhlaq literature which is heavily influenced by religion do you see any connection to the modern genre of conduct literature which is more influenced by gender see I have not really worked on Akhlaq literature am I audible yes I have not really worked on Akhlaq literature Muzaffar Alam has talked at great length about Akhlaq literature and its influence on the Mughal quote but I don't see any connection with gender in the Akhlaq I don't think even he has talked about any influence of gender in the Akhlaq literature as such the history with regards to gender in Mughal is not very strong it's quite weak but Rosalinda Handlin has talked about the norms of masculinity and how Akbar tried to define what kind of conduct the male courtiers should have but I do not see a lot of influence I have not really thought about it but I don't think the scholars who have worked on Akhlaq literature have also talked about the gender aspect I see okay if there are any other questions now would be the time actually one final question that I had what we see in a lot of Sufi Tarikas whether Sunni or Shi'i is the lionization of the nephew of the Prophet Ali Ibn Abi Talib is that also the case in his own Sufi order that Ali became a prominent figure or an exemplar of Sufi kind of enlightenment Abdelhaq was initiated to the Qadri Sufi order but he did not write any original text on Qadri Sufism so what he did was he wrote a biography of Abdul Qadir Jalani the Akbar Alakhiar was a biographical dictionary which included biographies of Sufis from various Tarikas Qadri, Shishki, Sohrabaddi and I have read the Akbar Alakhiar but I do not see any kind of special importance being given to Ali so I don't think he tried to do that he focused largely on he kept saying Sharia and Tariqa they are all this together Tariqa that doesn't follow the Sharia because there were contemporaries Sufis who said that whatever my piece is that is my Tariqa so Abdelhaq was more interested in countering that line of argument but I have not really encountered any his writings where he tried to elevate the position of Ali to a different level Thank you very much Sushmita Banerjee that was a wonderful presentation and I had a terrific time listening to it we are going to move on to a very unique actually given what has come so far a very unique presentation we have mostly been focusing on medieval and early modern we are going to go forward now into the modern era and we are going to go to foreignization and ways of looking at the self in two major countries in West Asia which are as both to this wider turquotagic world that we have been speaking of Iran and Turkey so Razia Aravi lovely of you to join us please briefly introduce yourself and launch right into your presentation Thank you very much So my name is Razia Aravi I am originally from Iran it's been seven years I'm living in US so I study comparative literature at the University of Michigan I work on translation, gender and genre in modern period and I'm interested in migrating texts among like French, Arabic Turkish and Persian in this period with a focus on gender studies so in I will share my screen just a second Before you actually get started I would just like to say with regard to questions post the questions in the chat box as we go along and the questions pop into your head so we can come back to them at the end of the talk and launch right into the Q&A more smoothly Thank you, go ahead Okay So I start with my presentation the domesticated modernities in Iran and Turkey by talking about Edward Said his traveling theory so in his article Traveling Theory, Edward Said wrote quote like people and schools of criticism ideas and theories travel from person to person situation to situation and from one period to another the traveling concept specifically relevant to this paper or presentation is about feminism and women rights that I will talk about circulate in Egypt and Turkey and Iran through a translation Said argues that theories develop in response to specific historical and social reasons but when they move from their point of origin the power and rebelliousness attached to them dissipates as they become domesticated dehistoricized and assimilated to their new location so this is one first example where he uses domesticated as a kind of negative connotation for the word when a theory travels he says there is also the possibility that a theory can be reinterpreted and does reinvigorated by a new political situation however he does not elaborate further on this possibility which is a more positive possibility in his regard to traveling theory he specifies four different stages for a theory to travel first he talks about the point of origin or set of circumstances in which the idea came to birth second there is a distance traversed and third is a set of conditions conditions of acceptance or resistance to the theory and the final stage is the transformation of the theory into new users in a new time and place Said asks questions about the limits and possibilities of a theory that makes it either adaptive or non-adaptive for a new setting however he leaves these questions unanswered so he moves on after talking about these stages and kind of elaborating on traveling theory to talking about a concept which is very interesting to me it's called creative misreading before coming to elaborating what creative misreading would be for Said I would like to talk about translation and how a theory gets translated in a new context so Said does not talk about translation or translation being a medium for a theory or a set of ideas to travel but since this in this context when I'm talking about Egypt, Iran and Turkey translation is the most important medium I'm going to talk about translation as refraction so André Laufet, the French translator states that a writer's work gains exposure and achieves influence mainly through misunderstanding and misconceptions or to use the more neutral term refractions so it's very important to pay attention to the way that he talks about misunderstandings and misconceptions because Said also is talking about creative misreadings as a form of resistance to only imitating theory this is also interesting to talk about when we are considering translation as refractions producing different meanings in different directions to talk about prismatic approach to translation by Matthew Reynolds Matthew Reynolds sees translation as a dynamic activity fully engaged with cultural systems and he describes it it would no longer be a channel between one language and another he basically moves on from linguistic transmission of translation and he says that it's rather a prism it would be seen as opening up the plural signifying potential of the source text and spreading it into multiple versions each continues with the source different from it and related to the other versions do different from all of them too so translation as refraction and translation as prism introduces us to this idea introduces us to how translation can create different meanings and it shows different potentials for a theory when it travels through translation so after talking about these concepts about translation we come back to the idea of creative misreading that Said talks about he says it's the critics responsibility to creatively misread the theory this is the form of critical reading and resistance to the theory he writes quote when it is elevated to a general principle the idea that all reading is misreading is fundamentally an abrogation of the critic's responsibility it's never enough for a critic taking the idea of criticism seriously simply to say that interpretation is misinterpretation or that borrowings inevitably involve misreadings so here I would like to suggest a few things this misreading and creating resistance to literature is very important in colonial theory and when we are talking about misreading or reading in regard to translation many scholars argue like they argue that translation is a form of reading and also she talks about translation as a form of erotic and intimate reading so when we are talking about Menzai talks about reading we can also talk about translation as a form of reading and when we are doing like prismatic translations and refractive translations this can be also regarded as a creative misreading that Saeed is talking about here also he talks about this the critic's responsibility to misread or misinterpret in theory and create this space of resistance or in betweenness when theory travels but here I argue in my case that he dismisses the role of the translator and be regarded as the critic in this sense because it's the responsibility of the translator to first read the text so he or she will be the first person to misread the text and create this space of in betweenness or resistance in translation studies so then we come to the word domestication that Saeed uses for a theory when it travels from one point to another when discussing traveling theory Saeed uses the word domestication when the theory gets localized in a new setting for Saeed it has a negative meaning since he emphasizes that when a theory gets domesticated it loses its primary power the concept of domestication occurs in translation studies as well Laurence Venuti is one of the famous scholars who wrote on this ideas of foreignization and domestication Venuti describes a domesticating method in which the translator leaves the reader in peace as much as possible and moves the author towards him in much freer rewriting of the foreign text according to the intelligibility and interests of the receiving culture than foreignization which is the form of translation where the translator leaves the author in peace as much as possible and moves the reader towards him. Venuti discusses the concept of foreignization and domestication when the text is translated from a colonized language into the colonizer's language so just one point to highlight foreignization is a more preferred let's say form of translation when it comes to the post-colonial theory because foreignization creates the kind of resistance that we are looking for when a text travels from the colonizer's the colonized to the colonizer's language in order to unsettle the colonizer's language and context but domestication is not a preferred paradigm of translation in this concept but here because in my research I'm talking about a different route I'm talking about local translations rather than global to local translations I argue that domestication can be favorable in this context when texts get locally translated from like Egypt to Turkey or Iran so I basically argue that theory does not lose its power when it's tamed as Said says or domesticated in its new context it exhibits its true potentiality through translation so according to the Newsy foreign text may be chosen because the social situation in which it was produced is seen as analogous to that of the translating cultures and thus as illuminating of the problems that a nation must confront in its emergence a translator may choose a foreign text because its form and theme contributes to the creation of a specific discourse of nation in the translating culture Manuti further elaborates that a translation strategy may also be affiliated with a national discourse because it employs a dialect that has gained acceptance as the standard dialect or the national language the text translated in Iran and Turkey during the 19th and 20th century were centered on nationalism and gender to emphasize the nationalist agenda of modernity during this period translators or later authors chose text on this courses around women's education and nationalism so a little bit like I'm going to provide a brief background about translation history in Iran and Turkey before talking about the cases studies that I have here so across the 19th century translation was a growing industry in both countries with growing literacy across the Middle East cultural commodities proliferated presses were founded, books, newspapers and magazines emerged Arabic works were translated into Turkish and Persian and vice versa also there were lots of like English and French works being translated into Persian and Turkish while writing produced in Europe of salience to reformist, emergent nationalist and gender activist groups were translated early nearly simultaneously into Arabic, Turkish and Persian and other languages in the Iranian and Turkish context during the modernization period of the 19th century many men started translating a variety of books from different languages for the sake of speeding up national modernization women's role were important in these nationalist projects as Merlin Booth writes throughout the Ottoman Empire including Egypt translation is one index to the importance and contrast of debates on gender organization girls education and gender seclusion as political and global issues for modernizing elites and this is true also for Iran where translators purposefully chose the foreign and local text that would teach women their new roles as mothers and daughters of the nation during this period the body of translated literature is in harmony with the national discourse that was focused on creating female national identities desirable for the nation. The traveling text opened a space for a body of literature on women's rights although this literature already existed in both Iranian and Turkish they occupied a peripheral location in literature so moving on to talk about this case study I will first elaborate why they chose when it comes to translating on women's education in these two Islamic context why they choose local text over global text when choosing a foreign text from the West one implication for those engaged in the domestication of the new translated ideas in the above mentioned Turkey and Iran context was how to use translation productively as a social tool as intellectuals were arguing over how best to confront and receive Europe as a set of technologies a set of cultures a political space with frightening and appealing implications this implication was not a big issue when circulating local or regional text since they already had gone through one layer of domestication in my discussion of Qosem Amin I will talk about how he was already influenced by the by Darwinism so there is this set of already traveled idea of Darwinism in him and then how he implements this idea in his argument of Tahriratul Mara this implication was not a big issue when circulating local text since they already had gone through one layer of domestication however the process of adapting a text created a new issues for the translator that resulted in creative modifications of the target language which is also the aspect of misreading that Sayid talks about intellectuals working across different languages such as English, French, Arabic, Turkish and Persian grappled with questions of how inherited languages out to be retooled or not even for contemporary purposes and what the relationships were or out to be between spoken and written idioms particularly since texts were communicated orally and received as well as through written manuscripts or printed books in societies like Iran and Turkey these questions resulted in a new vernacular language to facilitate to facilitate communication between these translated works and ordinary people reading them so about this like I'm not going to go into detail about this new vernacular language reform that happened in Turkey and then more implicitly in Iran too but I'm going to say a few words about how the Iranian translator uses different words for gender and for women and how he is being creative in his translation and opening the space for new positive terms like using for women so moving on to Osam Amin this is going to be a case to study how his book got translated into the Iranian context and how the Turkish authors were influenced by him in their own work on women's education so in 1899 Osam Amin the Egyptian writer published a book on the emancipation of women however this publication unlike his other works gave him greater fame along with notority due to its subject before delving into women's issues inspired by Darwinism Amin comments on the Islamic society in general by saying that under the new changes happening all around the world the Islamic community is weak to face the pressures and consequently it will not survive in a world ruled by the laws of natural selection for Amin the cause of this weakness is ignorance ignorance about the true sciences from which alone can be derived the laws of human happiness later he narrows down his analysis to the family and the relation of men and women in the family by writing that quote the relations of men and women of mother and child are the basis of society end quote the deficiency of Islamic society is due to the dysfunction of smaller institutions like families since in Muslim countries neither men nor women are properly educated to create a real family when talking about these issues he underlines that these faults are not due to Islam or Islamic law the sharia Amin indeed states that the original Islamic system and laws were the first law to provide for the equality of women and men came into it from the outside from the people who were converted and brought in their own beliefs at the heart of the social issues lies the position of women Amin argued that in order to get rid of ignorance and weakness women's position in the society should be improved through education women's education should have elementary schooling in aiding them with managing the household properly and playing their roles in the society therefore their education should include reading, writing, some notions of natural and moral sciences of history and geography hygiene physiology as well as religious education physical training and training of artistic taste just inside parenthesis he also compares women's education to men's education and he says that women do not need to be educated like along with men it's just the basic things are just enough for women's education the independence that women could gain from education is the core goal for Amin for he states that unless a woman could support herself okay yeah sorry unless a woman could support herself she would always be at the mercy of a male of male tyranny no matter what rights the law gave her and would have to secure power for herself by devious means the purpose of his emphasis is to make sure that his readers would not think that Amin suggested reforms deviates from Islamic law he keeps emphasizing that these all are suggested by Islam and Sharia he says that Islam declared women's freedom and emancipation and granted women all human rights during a time when women occupied the lowest status in all societies and then he comes to his conclusion on women's struggle in the path of their emancipation he takes his stance on the Quran and Sharia's interpretation and he says on the matters that have been discussed in Oran and Hadith men must obey the instruction word by word despite the consequences however on the other hand when there is no text or interpretation on social issues at hand then one must choose among alternatives in the light of social warfare in the latter case one should be cautious that traditional rules and interpretations are not considered custom set in stone it is legitimate to seek a new interpretation which meets the need without departing from the general principle of the Sharia with the gradual process of modernization that happened in most Islamic countries during this period there were major social and cultural issues that were raised one in particular was the question of women's rights and their status and how this question influenced by Amin's writing appears in Ahmet Oğlu's writing so two years after the publication of Tahriratul Mar'a in 1899 in 1902 I think or 1901 I'm not exactly sure Ahmet Oğlu the Turkish writer he published a book mostly like a pamphlet called Islam Likta Kadın and in this he kind of like the influence is obvious when he is talking about women's issues so in women according to Islam or in the Islamic world he actually writes it in Russian the main body of the work begins by discussing the rights and positions of women according to the Quran and the actions of the Prophet and his companions so we see that in this one the first example from like like traveling instead of ideas into Turkish with a slight difference that Oğlu talks about he's own historicizing the moment of Sharia so his work is different from that of I mean in a sense that it takes up these like issues of women and women's education in the context and the treatment of women and the condition of society in general in Arabia prior to the advent of Islam in this way it's he seeks to make two fundamental points first that the rights accorded women in real Islam are very broad and liberal and second then when taken in context they reveal the Prophet's attitude towards women as quite favorable overall it shows how Islam is not only compatible with with but also supportive of women's rights and freedom in society yet the type of historical argument he uses to make his point serve to determine the inviolable eternal quality of revealed scripture so Muhammad's project the Prophet's project is described as an historical event in Oğlu's pamphlet whose content has to be understood in that specific historical cultural milieu Holly Shister in her book between two empires on the life and works of Oğlu argues that this historicism that includes the revelation itself is what makes Oğlu's work so different from other Muslim reformers of his time who also wrote on the topic if he compare what Oğlu says on women's rights and positions in Islam to what Qasem Amin said these differences become obvious for instance when addressing the issue of polygamy both men disapprove of it and both men see it as discouraged by Quran noting that the Quran tells men a second marriage is permissible only if they can be fair and that is like unlikely as these paragraphs show when compared to each other on this issue in many ways the treatment of intentions of the two authors towards polygamy are the same they both use the same Quranic quotation to show that Islam properly understood favors monogamy however whereas Amin is limited to stating that the Quran does not approve polygamy but simply allows it Oğlu ventures an historical explanation as to why the Quran should allow what it does not approve so this is that I will just briefly mention that this is how he intervenes with this influential work from Amin and how he adds his own kind of like prism or refraction as I talked about it with translation he takes it further in his own context and with his own knowledge so I will move on to now to talk about the Iranian case so the Iranian case is a translation it's not like a work of influence so I will talk about Ehteslam ul-Mulk and his translation of Tarbiyat al-Nesfan Mirza Yusef Hanash Yani known as Ehteslam ul-Mulk was one of the famous Algerian writers and translators in Iran unfortunately there is not much information about his personal life the only biographical source on Ehteslam ul-Mulk is by the writer Ali Akbar Tehuda mentions that Ehteslam ul-Mulk learned Arabic in his childhood and was well read in Arabic literature he also published Surat al-Hend in Egypt and it was a translation from a French work Tehuda also comments on Ehteslam ul-Mulk's art of translation skills saying that Ehteslam ul-Mulk's translation of Victor Hugo's is amazing to the point that if Hugo wanted to write his book originally in Farsi it would have been as great as Ehteslam ul-Mulk's translation so since he was born and raised in Tapriz it can be argued that he was Ehteslam ul-Mulk was already aware of the process of modernization that was already in Turkey and in Istanbul as he mentions himself in Tarbiyat al-Nesban he used to read Turkish and Arabic periodicals and books through being exposed to these texts and with the social and political changes that were happening in Iranian society at that time he deems it necessary to share his knowledge of the books he was reading with other Iranians through translation he had articulated his aim for translation as the way for making Iranians familiar with the poetry and prose of great writers so in this period particularly since the feminist thoughts were rare and very few people were thinking about the other invisible half of the Iranian population there was the lack of Persian educational texts that were written on women's education it was in this context that Ehteslam ul-Mulk translated some parts of Qasem Amin's book I say some parts because it's not the whole book he chooses not to translate a specific chapters especially like the one on veiling because it's a very sensitive topic to touch on in this period in Iran so he just excludes some parts of Amin's book the translation as well as the original text feels a necessary gap for women and paves the way for more work and translation on this specific subject so again this refers to what I was talking about translation as refraction because translation can also contribute to creating source texts when there is not much like available on specific subjects like women's education in this case the translation of this book was important in bringing Iranian women's right and issues into the attention of more writers and poets of modern Persian literature okay and then in his introduction Ehteslam ul-Mulk states his goal of translating the book as many European scholars have written various sources on the importance of women's education and each one of those books are hundreds of pages since there is no such a book in Farsi that talks about the significance of women's rights and education I have decided to translate some parts of Tahrirat ul-Mara and call it Tahrirat al-Islam from this quote it's very it's obvious that he chooses to translate this book to fill the gap that exists on women's education in Persian language the focus of translation is to highlight the importance of women's education when he says women are in need of education in order to educate their own children this education would help them to resort to religious piety and stay away from corruption caused by ignorance the same discourse that we see in Amin they can be good in saving money and will have a strong will so that for those women who do not have male guardianship they could make their ends meet and avoid humiliation all together however women who lack education they will take refugee in earning their living from shameless jobs shameful jobs like such as a bigory so he adds like this independency for women which is not present in Amin's discourse about women so his book as I mentioned becomes a textbook after the constitutional revolution in 1910 in Iran the ministry of education asks to translate this book because they didn't have any books on educating girls but there were lots of educational textbooks for boys so he translates this and it's very important when we are talking about translation as creative misreading or creation it's very important to look at in what context this book got translated so about the importance of translation and publication of this book for the Iranian society and women it should be noted that this book was published in a time period where some Muslim religious readers of Iranian society like Sheikh Fazullah regarded both the opening of schools for women's education and elementary schools for young girls as equal to the spread of houses of prostitution Abdul Rahim who was a modern Iranian intellectual and reformist contemporary and a friend of Ita Samol Mulk wrote a letter to Ita Samol Mulk and told him I have received two editions of Tarbiatan Eswan that you have written I have read the book from the beginning till the end and Bravo for your talented feet of translation with publication of this book you have built the first break for a modern society that in the future when women will be talking about their rights in the society they will definitely talk about the translator of Tarbiatan Eswan most often the translator is considered as a mediator between two different languages and cultures however in this case the translator is more of a creator of an absent text in the target language that is equal to writing the text the original text in the source language itself so about the words just briefly that he uses for women so he chooses to use the word Zan in comparison to the words that mostly used in Qajar period Zaife, Begum or Baji which were like inferior let's say words to use for women but he chooses to use a more like kind of like neutral word for women as Zan it was the first time that this term for Zan was used throughout one book when they were talking about women so yeah I talked about this one and this is just a slide about some of the textbooks that you see here I'm not going to talk about more like about these because they have they are like different books and they are very like long but as you see in these pictures here the pictures taking from this manuscript show that the other textbooks that were available in the Iranian society they were mostly centered on boys education and if you see here gender roles are all male gender roles and there is no space for a girls education or a girls role in the society there is no even in these pictures there is no appearance of women like women or even girls student girls students in these pictures so when like imagine in this context it was the first time that Ehti Samolmolk was writing a book that was solely on girls education or women's education in Iranian context and then at the end I would like to talk about the legacy of his translation so Ehti Samolmolk took I mean's advice in his personal life as a father as well and did his best to educate his daughter Parvina Ehti Sami whose poetry is the concrete proof of her father's influence on her first of all he made sure that his daughter was not limited only to learning about how to manage the household and she would go beyond to learn the literature out the east and the west Parvina started her education at the American Presbyterian school in Tehran and learned English however her father also asked some of his friends to teach Parvina Islamic thoughts and philosophy of literature philosophy and literature upon her father's request Parvina joined different literary and political gatherings that her father initiated as Ehti Samolmolk translated from I mean one of the major benefits of women's education is that it would enable them to be more visible in the society by playing a role in it after Parvina graduated from her school she was hired as a teacher at the same school most important most important a duo was her poetry that acted as a mediatory vehicle to deliver her father and consequently Amin's ideas on women's education to a larger Iranian population since she was one of the few famous female poets in Iran there is no record of the reception of Tarbiata Nesvan we cannot see how the audience or readers acted to Tarbiata Nesvan other than it was used as one of the primary materials in Gora's school there is enough data to show that Parvina's poetry was read by many Iranians regardless of their gender and when we read her poetry I have just a very translation of one of her poems here for you it shows that she also preaches the same ideas that were stated by her father in Tarbiata Nesvan in this piece of poem in Parvina's poetry in particular those that were centered on women and their issues and her father's influence is clear it just like I leave this poem for you to read and it just shows that this legacy of translation goes on even after the decades it was published so my presentation was just to show how when a translation gets domesticated it shows its true potentials and it gets domesticated in a sense that it helps the culture it creates different ideas that were absent in that culture and I think we need in translation studies to think more about positive connotations of domestication when we change the route from like the one that Minuti talks about thank you that was a wonderful presentation there are so many things that I would like to pick up on so while the rest of you can enter your questions I'd like to begin with my own and that's with regard you mentioned it quite briefly actually the pushback against this kind of education of women and the likening of schools for girls as houses of prostitution how did the conservative Ulema who were very skeptical with regard to the education of women really articulate their version of an Islamic resistance to a foreign western kind of intrusion into their society how did they question the Islamist society of this movement because the people who are trying to advocate for the education of women they're doing it in reference to Islam it's not an anti-Islamic thing or even a non-Islamic thing in their minds at all yeah exactly so even I think in this period with people like Khaja who was that Sheikh Fazlullah Nudi I think they also see even people who are awesome I mean or anti-Islamic in this context there are lots of them like like Ahunzadeh or people like that they still see them as using Islam as something that they want to support using Islam as a way of support for their modernist or westernized ideas so there were like these preaches by them or pamphlets that that bored women from going to the schools that these people were just like funding so I think they they don't believe in the way that they use Islam as a way of like support for their modernist ideas that's why they think that we should go back to the Islam that they think about the main and not the one that is influenced by modernization or westernization because I know that from like Qosem Amin's book there was the backlash in Egyptian society after it was published and to the point that he had to change a little bit Tahrir At-Tormara and publish another book maybe a year after called The New Woman and change kind of his discourse he was still very much like activist in his tone but like I know in Egyptian society there was a backlash even when using Islam to support women's education and in Iranian context definitely with people like Fazlullah Nureed it's always there's this backlash Thank you very much Khosrow would like to know the first bait the first stanza of the Persian poem that you showed us I think is referring to the Parvian Ertsasami one Yes let me see let me read it oh okay I will read it for all sisters as long as the opportunity for indivir is there the abjectness of Iranian women is due to their ignorance so she basically puts the blame on Iranian women because she thinks that this was very interesting for me to read because the ground for women's education is this very like ripe and ready and it's for the women to use these opportunities and get educated in the country so this can be because of her father's education and her father's works on women's education that she assumes or thinks that the society is very much ready for women's education and they just have to like snatch this chance and get educated in the Iranian context I see with regard to connecting it to the wider concepts and the wider trends that are going on in this period in the 20th century all across the Middle East there seems to also be a repurposing of Islam to push for progressive change just with regard to Parine Tassami's poems there's a lot about the new role of women in society but it's also the role of Islam in society I remember one of the most famous poems that she had and we studied this when we were in school I think it was the 5th or 6th grade it was about a drunken man walking down the street and one of the morality police catches up to him and wants to take him in and basically just register him and the back and forth is essentially about how it's a satirical piece about how the person who's the morality police is actually immoral and is a hypocritical it echoes half is but it's set in a very kind of modern setting the role of Islam in society and the role of the police and like authorities in how they regulate the Islamicness of society so how do you see the gender debates that you've discussed with regard to translation and all of that connecting to the wider movement for change I think with your question about how she kind of like writes in a satirical tone about this authorities and like preaching these moral lessons I think with that we can see it in this context too when we're talking about Islamic lessons or ideas mixed with like supporting or fighting for rights I think the kind of conflict starts with modernization process when people like as I said Ahun Sadeh or his supporters like even Karimani I think at some point they feel that for a modernization project for Iranian context you should become detached from Islamic thought and from religious thoughts and they like literally deny any connection to Islam when they're writing about like what kind of modernization project they have in their mind and then we have another poll in here which is like people like Qasem Amin who think that using religion would help them to just advocate for the idea of modernization so as you can see like in Iranian context too there is these like like polar views of Islam and then at the same time when it comes to gender issues and women's issues I think mostly she refers in that point to people who preach about these moral lessons as I think there are a lot in Iran but they don't really believe in it themselves so they talk about it for the general public and they talk about it for like specific goals that they have in the society as leaders but they don't practice it in their own lives so she kind of like ridicules these figures by saying that how can we believe in these ideas of these clergy or these like leaders when they don't believe in it and they don't practice it in life so that's how I remember that point alright thank you very much are there any more questions for Razia Aravi I think that is it for today that concludes our first day of the conference I look forward to seeing all of you tomorrow at 9 o'clock for the second day where Professor Chirke will be panelling the first panel on language symbiosis and how these three major languages and language groups really blend into one another to create a shared discourse from the Ganges Delta all the way to the Balkans and the Nile Delta again I have to thank you our three speakers Razia, Erjan and Sushmita I look forward to discussing your work essentially because we're going to turn all of these into chapters in the edited volume that will be upcoming and throughout all of your presentations I remember thinking that I can't wait to get my hands on a published version of this so I can read it and cite it properly thank you again and I'll see you all tomorrow take care thank you