 as chair. Hello everyone, welcome to the second day of the Toko Tajik conference. Allow me to present our chair for the first panel, the morning panel, Farah Chirkei. Thank you for joining us Chirkei and today we're going to have an interesting interesting panel for you starting with Persianisms and perversions among late Ottomans which reflects how the Persian language was inflected in a discourse of sexual vice and sexual impropriety and how it was expressed in the late Ottoman period. This is going to be delivered by Eric Blackthorn. Good morning Eric. And the second is going to be languages of pre-modern Islamic political thoughts. I'm very happy to introduce you a very old friend Dr. Mohamed El Merhab who is joining us from Groningen. I'm pretty sure I'm mispronouncing the university name but I can't I can't do as roided. Hello Mohamed. Hello hi, hi Amir. And the third and last speaker will be Dr. Mohamed Ali Dinakhil. He's joining us from Peshawar and he will be speaking on the promotion of Turkey to the status of Persian and Arabic. So without further ado I would like to hand over to Chirkei and uh all right well I don't have too much to do now it's just to you know ask Eric to commence his talk. I will alert you like 35 minutes into your talk you know about the time so anyway great thank you so much yes it's it uh forgive me if I'm a little groggy it's uh four a.m. where I am so uh quite early um but yeah let me share my screen and okay can everyone see that okay all right perfect so here let me start um yeah I'm definitely approaching uh you know this topic from a slightly different angle today so I'd be really interested to hear your comments and all of your thoughts um and yeah I guess I'll just start. So in the fall of 1911 several prominent members of Istanbul's literary community received a rather aggressive questionnaire in the mail posted by a new politically radical group of writers based in Salonika the self-proclaimed genç column or young pens the questionnaire consisted of a series of leading questions which essentially argued that Istanbul literati had failed in their task of developing an authentic original Turkish literature instead they continued to resort to the cliched poetic tropes of Ottoman divan literature to archaicizing expressions and phrases and above all to grammatical constructs and forms borrowed from arabic and persian the literary literary critique of the genç column there was fundamentally framed in biological terms the Turkish language they argued was suffering from a sickness hasta look and those who looked to supposed to pass for a cure were guilty of nothing less than obstructing natural evolution if the precise relationship between literary form and sociolinguistic sickness was somewhat undefined what actually were the symptoms of this disease and what were its case studies earlier that year the main ideologue of the genç column there had written an article on precisely this question Omer Seyfettin's brief polemic Yeni Lisan or new language had been published in the eponymous journal of the genç column movement in April 1911 in a team to give an account of both of the sicknesses of Ottoman Turkish and the form of its eventual cure Seyfettin proposed that the history of Turkish literature could be divided into two broad imitative mentalities one towards Iran which characterized a high Ottoman culture and the newer turn towards France among the literary avant garde although he found both ultimately problematic Seyfettin's venom was primarily directed at the influence of Iran in part because he felt that more deeply rooted in the constitution of Ottoman Turkish and in part because he felt that those authors of the Francophile tendency most notably the writers and poets of the Edebiya to Jedida or a new literature movement were in any case largely reproducing Persian at artifice and complexity through their attempts at European literary modernity in connecting Persian grammatical forms expressions and vocabulary to a notion of literary artifice Seyfettin was essentially in agreement with much of the Orientalist criticism on the matter and as it was described so well by Erdogan Akil in his presentation yesterday we find the same rhetorical link in Ejw Gibb's history of Ottoman poetry the final volume of which was published in 1909 it when it came time for Seyfettin to give literary examples of where this Persian influence had manifested in the full blown sickness his judgments were remarkably different from those of Gibb. In Yenil Isan Seyfettin provided five direct instances of this sickness these were the poems Hamam Name by the early 18th century poet Nedim, Chef Kengiz by the late 18th century poet Zunruzade Vefbi, Hüben Name by his contemporary Endurun Lufazl Bey and two 19th century works Name Idil by Osman Rahmi Effendi and the play Heder by Muallem Naji. But what do you think in terms of Seyfettin's literary prescriptions notably the excision of complex Persian and Arabic drivable grammar and vocabulary and a reconnection of high literature with what he regarded as the vitality of the Istanbulite urban vernacular is difficult actually to find much of a link between these works. The poetry of Nedim and Endurun Lufazl for instance were conceived by Gibb and likewise by Muallem 19th and 20th century literary biography as movements towards the very urban vernacular Hüben Seyfettin valorized. Nedim by incorporating the geography of the city heavily into his works and bringing in more popular poetic forms like Lasharka and Fossil Bey by practicing new dimensions of poetic autobiography and very similar to daily urban life. Although some of Nedim's most well-known verses were written in a mode of poetic competition of Iran these were highly peresophilic in content. Indeed his famous line that a single stone of Istanbul was worth all the land of Iran seems a phrase ripe for appropriation by the Gençh column there. The case for Vfb is a little bit clearer. He has 1783 Persian Ottoman farming dictionary Tufey Vfb which is sarcastically described by Seyfettin in the text the great service to Turkish literature was widely used as a school textbook for learning Persian vocabulary throughout the 19th century. He was well known for his fluency in Persian and serve as part of a diplomatic mission to the court of Kareem Khan Zand that would actually inspire a leader verse travelogue the Kaside-i Tanane. In his comparative mode Tanane is hardly that different from the comparative poems of Nedim. The emphasis is similarly on the superiority of the Ottoman state over the relative poverty and political weakness of the Zand and on aggrandizing the Ottoman dynasty as the true heirs the Shah-Nameh derives kingly tradition. Oswan Rahmi and Muallem Naji as two supposedly traditionalist poets of the 19th century which seem to align even more with Seyfettin's linguistic prescriptions yet Nameh-i Dil is informed largely a conservative but otherwise unremarkable mess-nadi whereas Muallem Naji's Heder is a wholly European style to act stage play the little formal relationship either to the conventions of divan literature or the Ottoman theatrical tradition. Instead as Seyfettin makes clear what linked these works to Iran and made them case studies of Persian literary sickness was their shared eroticism in particular the central poetic motif of what Seyfettin describes in actually Persianate terms as the hot avar char ebru with both phrases referring to the incipient mustache of the young male beloved. Constructing a psycho-historical theory of Turkish literature, Seyfettin argued that the primeval nomadic Turks like the Contemporaneous Bedouin Arabs had possessed an authentic healthy and natural heterosexuality which had given an innate vitality to both Turkic folk poetry and the Arabic poets of the Jahiliyan period. In both cases Seyfettin argued theirs had been lost in the course of their traversals of the decadent civilization of Iran. Indeed under Iranian influence Turkish vitality had been sublimated into the world of Ottoman divan literature as he wrote, quote, unable to make true love, poets began to fall into fantasies. The end result of this fantastic imagining was that the Ottoman literacy took as their desired objects only images of themselves. Their regrets he argued as a result of the Persian over-civilization into further and further realms of narcissism. And so despite Seyfettin's actually rather limited program of linguistic reform the true radicality of any Islam was to link Turkish literary modernity to the institution or for Seyfettin the recovery of heteronormativity, a project for taking up by other authors in following years. In the process the Persianate and the mode of deprecated desire rhetorically associated with it was placed fundamentally in the position of the non normative or to use the term contemporary theory the queer. As I argue in the first part of my dissertation project for late Ottoman intellectuals and writers like Umar Seyfettin as well as for his proprietors and contemporaries like Ahmed Mithat Effendi and Halideh Adib Adavar. It was above all the influence of Iran and the lingering presence of Persianism that served as the imminent internal contradiction through which the nature of Ottoman or Turkish literary modernity was to be conceptualized. In the process a certain relationship was established between the Persianate as a linguistic and aesthetic category and modes of dangerous transgressive or deprecated desire. The fracturing of the Ottoman linguistic interculture a project of transforming the vast field of Ottoman into an authentic Turkish language and a foreign Persian or Arabic over the course of the late 19th and 20th centuries but also a process by which affects and desires became queer designated as foreign pathologies infecting the national sociolinguistic body. Yet this process was never and indeed could never be completed thus I'm also interested in the ways that the Persianate could function as a site of queer subjectivity and as a space for the articulation of certain aspects of resistance heteronormative language and sexual epistemology. And it's in this regard I think that I would like to make a small but I think important intervention into the conceptual limits of the Persianate as an analytic category. You know within contemporary academic literature on the scope of Persianate studies it's almost invariable that the Tanzimat era a governmental reform which starts in 1839 is taken as the end point of the Ottoman incorporation into the Persianate world. The formulations of the historians Abbas Amanat and Nile Green who otherwise quite distinct in their considerations of the Persianate and the place of Iran within it are an essential agreement on this point. The Ottoman Empire was an integral realm of the Persianate cosmopolis until the 19th century when French largely replaced Persian as a language of literary cultivation and Ottoman Turkish came increasingly to be defined as an archaic and elitist register of a living Turkish vernacular rather than as a medium of cultural production in its own right. The script and language reforms of the early Turkish Republic are taken as the culmination of this process in which Turkish was finally severed from the Persianate ecumen and the nationalist project of engendering a mutual unintelligibility between the two languages became finally and irrevocably complete. From one perspective I think this is a very justifiable position for example Murat Umut Inan's an excellent article on Persian learning in the Ottoman world included in the 2019 volume the Persianate world frontiers of Eurasian and Franco essentially ends with Sumoza de Vefi in part because Vefi's late 18th century works were the kind of final last major additions to the Ottoman pedagogical canon for Persian within the domain of medicine education and yet I wonder whether the emphasis in that volume of deliberately de-emphasizing the notion of Iran and instead focusing on the material and practical culture of what Nile and Green calls perso-graphia in fact occludes the importance of the Persianate trace that is the way in which the symbol and metaphor of Iran and Persian lingered in culture beyond the actual practice of writing and reading while we regard now as Persian language texts. Now the texts I have discussed in this presentation or we'll discuss later could reasonably be considered works in Persian. Indeed according to statistical surveys of the Ottoman bureaucracy compiled by Carter Finley it appears that actual knowledge of Persian writing and reading was in the state of utter collapse even among the most literate Ottomans during this period. Yet in a sense it was precisely this estrangement which provided the room for experimentation and reformulation of what Persian could mean in both negative and positive terms. In this sense I draw more directly from Hamid Dawbashi's notion of perso-philia and the way in which the travel and transmigration of the notion of Iran even beyond the reach of the Persian language itself opened up new space for political definition within the former Persianate sphere. And in thinking through the alienation of the Persian language and Persianate modes of desire, I think this was switched to the next slide, sorry about that, yeah here we have ended in a puzzle based Humaan Naameh which will actually bound together sometimes with Sheth Kangyus and this is just an illustration from another one of puzzle based works in Naameh. So in thinking through the alienation of the Persian language and Persian modes of desire from the Ottoman interculture, I likewise draw from scholars in the field of Ottoman translation studies notably Walter Andrews, Victoria Holbrook and Salih al-Pakir. These authors argue or emphasize Ottoman literature as an epistemological order unto itself. As Pakir writes, the Ottoman interculture can be characterized as a literary cultural system which had acquired autonomy as a result of its hybridization and which discourses of style like Tars, Eddab, Saab, Kuslup and so on. An intertextual relation like Tarjameh, Nazire, Taklit, Talif, Mak played the structural role valid in the notion of distinct autonomous languages as such. In my work I similarly argue that just as the Ottoman interculture represented different epistemological order of language, so too did this Ottoman language support the different epistemological order of desire. We might note, for instance, that the categories that are flattened under the heading of sexual desire in most contemporary research were governed in Ottoman by multiplicity of categories including Ashk, Dostluk, Perestane, Padelik and Bazi. I'm sure that everyone here can kind of understand the rather Persian character of these governing terms, although this certainly was not to the exclusion of Arabic-derived vocabulary, which particularly in the medical and legal realm was of equal importance. Yet a Saifetine's treatise exemplifies it was Persian rather than Arabic that was the primary locus of anxiety in regard to the effects of such terms on Ottoman literature and culture. So in what follows I would like to discuss two ways in which this anxiety was culturally manifested in the year's preceding Saifetine's article. In the first place I went to discuss the writings of an earlier literary reformer, the author Ahmet Mithat Effendi and the ways in which his social linguistic project fed into Saifetine's linkage of the Persianate with the figure of the Char Ebru. Secondly, however, I would like to discuss how this linkage was subverted from the performative genre of Ajem Kantosu or Iranian Kabiray that perforated roughly between the period of Ahmet Mithat Effendi's writing and when Saifetine sent out his letters to Istanbul. Finally, I would like to think through how the second strand has continued in the contemporary Turkish culture through both the subversion of Ahmet Mithat Effendi and Omar Saifetine's value judgments in the writings of the queer encyclopedist Reshat Ekrem Kohtu and through the continued usage of Persianate vocabulary for obscene or semi-lessid modes of desire. So Ahmet Mithat Effendi is to an even greater degree than Saifetine, a kind of paradigmatic figure of the transition from Ottoman to modern Turkish literature. His prolific output ranging from dozens of novels and short story compilations to vast quantities of criticism, journalism, philosophical and economic criticism, travelogues and translations, made him among the first public intellectuals of the Tanzimat era to become wealthy from his literary work. Born and educated in the lower-class Istanbul district of Topane, throughout his career, Ahmet Mithat would emphasize the poverty and destitution of his childhood in promoting his eventual image as a self-made man. In his role as, quote, first teacher, then Ahmet Mithat sought to instill a particular set of moral and social values to the broader public, both literate and non, through his novels, which he largely wrote in the vernacular Turkish of the Istanbulite Esnaf. Indeed, as a literary historian Jalip Harlas noted, Ahmet Mithat's literary and social projects engage with Ottoman anxieties of increasing European cultural and economic influence by advocating for a new patriarchal order governed by the productive linkage of an Islamic ethos of charity with the entrepreneurial spirit of capitalist development. The subject matters of his novels, in this sense, had a directly instructive and pedagogical function, as well as an expressly reformist purpose. In large part this is expressed in the uplift of supposedly fallen women from the Ottoman minorities into domesticity, so the subject of his 1881 novel, the news on Yedid yashinda, is precisely this and here to reenact this in his own personal life, as well as through the suppression and foreclosure of certain possibilities of Ottoman gendered performance. So in this regard, we might note his condemnation of female cengi dancers who, quote, would put on men's clothes and draw a mustache on their lips in his 1910 novel, Jön Türk. Ahmet Mithat's heteronormative project in this regard was not quite as sharply defined as its safer teams lacking a consistent historical narrative or linguistic program, but it was a clear precedent to it, and nowhere is this clear than in his earlier linkage of the Persian language to the eroticism of the young male beloved in his 1882 novel, Durdana Hanim. So even before Durdana Hanim, Iran had appeared as a regular motif in Ahmet Mithat's work. Throughout his writings, the Persian language was associated with an alluring but dangerous sensuality. In the 1875 novel, Fela Tumbe Iler-Dakram Effendi, for example, the effect of hearing it was literal intoxication. The vernacularist Ottoman Turkish of his popular novels, he publicly argued, served to awaken his readers from the delirium induced by the Persian influence. Yet, like Umar Seyfettin, it was the eroticism of the young male beloved that was the primary locus of Ahmet Mithat's literary anxiety. Already early writers had made associations between this eroticism and the influence of Iran in Divan Durdja, exemplified by terms like Charebru, Dilber, Ottoman compound forms like Gulam Pare, Shahi Buz, and Mahbub Dost, and practices like Kurchek cross-dressing dance. By 1878, travelogues of Central Asia, like Mehmet Emineh Effendi's Istanbul Dan, Asia, Yavuzdeya, Seyahat, for serialized Ahmet Mithat's newspaper, Terjimane Haqqikat, explicitly traced practices like Kurchek dance and the seclusion of women to the pernicious cultural influence of Iran upon the nomadic Turks, in a ways directly prefiguring the narrative of Yenil Hasan. For Ahmet Mithat, this eroticism soon became an effect of language and the suppression of its desire equivalent to the management of these terms. It's a subsequent dismissal from Terjimane Haqqat of Muallem Naji, who was a son-in-law, for his use of words like Gulam, Charebru, Bade, and Saki in poetry is a case in point, as are his later attacks upon the so-called Ottoman decadence for their overly-personate vocabulary. And so Durgani Hanim kind of represents a summation of these different strands in Ahmet Mithat's thought, particularly through the representation of his protagonist, a young Iranian man in 1880s Istanbul named Arjan Ali Bey. And when we first encounter Arjan Ali Bey in the novel, he's already presented to us as a series of apparent contradictions. He haunts Istanbul's most impoverished and violent districts like Topane and the port of Galata, but is himself chivalrous on the spendthrift of Arjan's social status. He is supposedly Persian in background, but his features are described as Arab and as outfitfully European. Instead, his Iranian character is developed mostly through language, through Ahmet Mithat's Florida use of Persian vocabulary, metaphor, and grammar in his description, and through the quote, light striking Persian accent in his speech. The ending of the first chapter, however, reveals the most crucial contradiction. Or, as Ahmet Mithat explains, quote, the hero called Arjan Ali Bey is really a delicate young girl, Duteri Nazikter, named Ulve Hanim, who has adopted the guise of a young Persian boy, Gencha Arjan Puseri, to perform feats of altruism throughout the city. Before this is revealed, however, Arjan Ali Bey is depicted as a fraught object of desire for the inhabitants of the city, and as a faultless male beauty, Mahbub al-Mukamal, who recalls the eroticism of Ottoman demon literature. And as the novel comes to a resolution, it increasingly kind of disavows this eroticism and its Iranian guise in favor of the emergence of Ulve Hanim supposedly authentic self, a transformation that Ahmet Mithat uses to model and prescribe new norms of gender, language, and desire. And so this prescriptive aspect of the text is exemplified most directly in the scenes of Durdana Hanim, in which Arjan Ali Bey is presented as a kind of treacherous object of desire for the upright local Cherkess Sothet, who himself was considered, once considered something of a charred abru, only for this attraction, which as you know, he is continuously kind of framed as dangerous and transgressive to be sanctioned once he discovers that Ali is actually Ulve Hanim. Throughout the early encounters in the taverns and coffee houses of Istanbul's port districts, Ahmet Mithat continuously uses their interactions and interplay of looks to model for his readers the difference between moral and immoral desire. Cherkess Sothet, he declares, is not among the immoral ones, Sui Ahlak, who can be hated and shamed for pointing out the beauty of young men. His desirous looks towards Arjan Ali Bey, he writes, are chast and above all, quote, not comprised of Mahbub Dostuk. A corresponding movement occurs later in the novel, when Aisha Ebe, a woman who has fallen in love with Arjan Ali Bey and is herself dressed in men's clothes, has nevertheless defended as proper. As Ahmet Mithat reminds us, quote, she fell in love believing her a man not a woman. At the same time, Arjan Ali Bey is continuously described using the traditional erotic vocabulary of divan literature. And Cherkess Sothet's looks repeatedly threatened to turn transgressive until overcome with desire when sleeping in the same hotel room. He looks upon Arjan Ali Bey as he sleeps and learns that behind this Persian exterior is an Ottoman woman rather than an Iranian char d'abru. And so these scenes have been understood as reflections of Ahmet Mithat's personal disapproval of homoeroticism. And yet considering the expressly educational and reformist purpose of Ahmet Mithat's popular novels, it's surprising that Durdana Hanum has not been read as promulgating and enacting a discourse of nominative and non-normative gendered performance, desire, and terminology, rather than simply reflecting an existing state of affairs. Indeed, Ahmet Mithat's own correspondence with Muallim Najee records the struggle to match the conceptual complexity of the Ottoman language relating to desire and the practice of looking to a language of desire more aligned with an emergent heteronormativity. Rather, I read Arjan Ali Bey as a sort of stand-in for a whole subculture of desire and gender performance, still evident in the underclass neighborhoods of Istanbul, which Ahmet Mithat's project of social linguistic reform sought to disavow. As the novel remarks early on, social remnants of the abolished Janissary Corps, still present in Galata and Topane, such as the Telembeje firefighters, maintained practices like kurcek dance and open expressions of Mahbub Dostluk, despite their increasingly illicit character. Although formally banned in 1856, for example, as late as 1879, kurcek's continued to perform illicitly in the taverns and coffeehouses of his districts, often working as prostitutes once their performances were complete. Within the musical genre of the street Destan, a former cheaply printed narrative song distributed by a tenor and salesman, neighborhood residents constructed a kind of counter-public to use Michael Warner's term, in which famous crimes of passion, battles over urban territory, and the qualities of beautiful Cearebru and Mahbub were celebrated, and the norms of the Assypid, Istanbulite bourgeoisie mocked and contravened. As noted by the scholar Nurcin Illeri, Telembejes, who concentrated 70% of the writers of such Destans, regularly described their male beloveds using terms like Mahbub, Cearebru, and Shaba Emred in these works, alongside depictions of scenes of sadomasochism, sexual murder, and Cessna is kind of very transgressive, sexual practices. So, after Mitha's emplacement about Jamali Bay into Gauta and Tokane, I argue, thus served to map a specifically Persian eroticism and gender ambiguity onto the treacherous urban subcultures of these districts, and constituted a link, a rhetorical link, between the Cearebru, the Koçak, Iran, and the Persian language that would ultimately be taken up by Saifetin and threw him into the project of social linguistic reform during the early Turkish Republic. It was this very assemblage of different markers of alterity that I believe also served to constitute the Persian as a contingent site of kind of queer subversion. So, here I want to briefly think through the late Ottoman genre of Ajem Kantosu, or Iranian Kabiray, as a kind of subversion of the very same set of associations that produced Ajem Ali Bay. And indeed, it emerged in the very same theaters and light clubs that Ajem Ali Bay is said to have haunted in Durdana Hanam, and may have actually been the inspiration for the character. Starting roughly around the time of the novel's publication in 1882, young Armenian and Greek actresses, resident in Topana and Gaza, began to cultivate audiences among resident populations by borrowing freely from deprecated cultural forms like Koçak dance, and its hysterical ethnic types of the shadow theater to craft a new syncretistic genre of musical Kabiray known as Kanto. It was most clearly when these actresses took on the persona of an Iranian, that is, in Ajem Kantosu, that the play with gender performers had characterized Koçak dance and the Zenay character from Orto Ayuno improvisational theater was maintained. In the costume of an Iranian youth, actresses like Peruz, pictured here, performed as male figures and sang love duets with more feminine-coded Kanto singers. In other Iranian Kanto's, like those performed by the actress Minyon Virgini, the singer performed as a young Persian man in love with her own stage persona. According to some accounts, Islamic Iranians were particular fans of the genre and were patrons of the performers, and in this sense, that link between Iran and its very local mode of kind of ambiguous to gender performance is actually quite direct. In essence, Ajem Kantosu was a kind of parodic inversion, I argue, of the sort of associations that are metadefendi, and later Urmese 15 would ascribe to the Persian. It was likewise a kind of guise to which various forms of marginalized ethnic, gendered and erotic identities could be represented in the public sphere. And to a certain extent, this is true of Kantosu even in his current form. We might look in this regard to Minyon Virgini's contemporary namesake, Khursus Virgine, which was a stage persona of the late safety Dursunolu, and Dursunolu's insistence that Khursus Virgine not be understood as a drag performance but as a continuation of the Zenay tradition has been criticized for absolving Khursus political responsibility in the present. But here I would like to argue instead that this was in fact central to actually the political nature of the character. Here in an arrow in which this period, the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid, is routinely characterized in Turkish media as actually fulfilling Akman Betat's vision of a patrimonial capitalist Islamic order, Khursus Virgine's conflation of the Zenay with the Armenian Kantosu I think speaks to the continued intersection of the queer, the minoritarian positions, and the continued haunting of the Persianate into the nation state. And then even more remarkable is the persistence of Persianate terms related to condemned or semi-lessed forms of desire and gender performance in contemporary Turkish as obscenity or slang. And you know, I won't go through all of them, but you know, these include common terms like pushed, zampara, kulampara. And you know, of course, it's hardly unexpected that the process of Republic-era language reform did not aim to produce new equivalents of translations to these obscene terms. But this should be compared to how our correspondence proposed by Ottoman physician Mazar Osman in 1909 between the Persian Ottoman term Mahbub Perestik and the European sexological term Uranism was replaced during our public with the direct translations, buddhanism and homosexuality, and eventually culled into the neologism estrogen cell in the 1960s. So instead, what is resulted is actually a kind of dual register of language related to desires and sexual identities. The Persianate subsisting in slangs, you know, common speech and insults, but sort of largely outside the contemporary textual tradition. And here, though, I should add an important caveat, which is that by emphasizing the multiplicity of Ottoman terms for what has now been kind of remapped according to the epistemology of sexuality and the continued persistence of this kind of queered Persianate into contemporary language, I do not claim that these are somehow more authentic or local terms or reflect a more deep-rooted sensibility. And so there's some current studies of Zener Koçek performance in contemporary Turkey that characterize these genres as the quote return of the repressed. And I think this kind of comes too close arguing that these are more internal or authentic to Turkish culture than other presumably foreign phenomenon. And I think in both accounts arguing this would be to reproduce the very logic of national emotionalization that kind of fractured Ottoman into a supposed constituent tongues in the first place. So instead here, I follow Everyn Sovje's recent suggestion that the engagement of critical translation studies with queer studies, and here I would add Persian studies, can move us away from the binary logic of authenticity, modernity and locality into a broader critique of what she terms homo-lingualism, that is the naturalized correspondence between language and culture. So here I would add that the Ottoman interculture itself and the persistence of the alienated Persianate may also act as a kind of productive site for the critique of such homo-lingualism. And indeed the Persianate as an assemblage of defecated affects and modes of desires, why it kind of stands as inherently polyglot. And in this sense that my research also engages with the encyclopedic and erotological projects of Rishat Ekrem Kothu and Huki Akhtunj as archives of this polyglossia, you know, as projects with similarly mapped intersections of precarious life, the minoritarian position, and ephemeralities of queer ethics and desires. So as I'm coming to a conclusion, you know, I'd like to return to what the scholar Rustem R. II Altenay has called Rishat Ekrem Kothu's queer archive, that is his monumental unfinished project, Istanbul Psychopedia. And in his entry on Ajem Ali Bey, which was published in 1958, Kothu undertook what I consider to be a reparative reading of this otherwise prescriptive character. Recognizing that Ajem Ali Bey was a consummate deployment of the very eroticism that Ahmet Adefendi wished to disavow, Kothu was able to read through Donahannam-I-Gaines' intended didactic purpose by liberally editing long quotations from the novel, such that most of Ahmet Mithat's moral pronouncements were absent. Instead, the erotophobic anxieties of the novel were recast as matters of taste and aesthetic sensibility, situated within a polyglossal Istanbul in which various modes of desire, beauty, and play could coexist in their epistemic diversity. Kothu ends the entry somewhat ruefully. I mean, the Ajem Ali Bey was perhaps too extreme a type for the era and was thus balanced out by the more conventional ending of the novel. And the men of the novel, Chirka Stobet and Ulyav Khan of Mary, and started novel kind of family, basically. So, you know, nevertheless, throughout Istanbul's psychopedia, we are given numerous examples of this type extant, not only in the Ottoman past, but in 1960s Istanbul. As Altoni writes, quote, ignoring the historical paradigm shifts in the norms of gender and sexuality, Kothu suggested some continuity between the perverse performances of this time and Ottoman performance genres that had to a large extent already disappeared or gained new meanings. And so there's the linkage of the perverse and the personate that constitute Ajem Ali Bey could thus be reconstituted, a deprecated figure transformed into a site of critique. So, Omar Seyfettin died in 1920, only nine years after mailing out his famous questionnaire. And towards the end of his life, he had become engaged in a new project alongside the poet Yahya Kemal, and the author Yahkuq Qadri, which sort of reshiftly rounds of Turkish culture from Iran towards what they perceived as the classicism, rationality, and clarity of the Hellenistic. And so in 1918, for example, Seyfettin produced a sort of idiosyncratic translation of the Iliad. Although he retained a certain attachment to the Istanbul vernacular Turkish, he had crazed in Iliasan. This was perhaps a view of Istanbul colored by his life in Salonika and the provinces of the empire. And now, after having actually lived in Istanbul, his search for an authentic Turkish ranged much farther into the past, whether it was the classical or the kind of incipient Turanism movement. And yet, even as his ideas would take off and be extended in the subsequent Turkish Republic, his colleague Yahya Kemal appeared to be having certain misgivings. Although Yahya Kemal continued within the political sphere of Kemalism after the war, after the First World War, as a professor, parliamentarian and diplomat, his post-war poetry came instead to evince a kind of aesthetic return to order, now framed to a strongly Berksoning conception of time and history, where he had once preached the creation of a, quote, white language and classical principles and the removal of Persian influence. His later works were marked by continued engagement with Hafez, Omar Hayyam, and Persian literary forms like the Rubai'i and Gazel. In these poems, the Ottoman past, whether through the aesthetic vehicle of an antediluvian tulip era or through the usage of deprecated language, tropes and product forms, became a means through which the heritage of Iran was claimed once more as the patrimony of Istanbul. And where Seyfettin had criticized the figure of the Char Ebru as a symptom of the Persian segments that haunted Ottoman literature, Kemal's poems instead imagined a beautiful view enthralling the city during the time of Medin, quote, his accent as if he had come from Shiraz, a nostalgic evocation he wrote of the age of Arjan Perest in the lands of Rome. Thanks. Thanks very much, Eric, for this wonderful and the rich presentation of truly in-breath, wonderful. So the floor, the virtual floor is open to question. You can raise your virtual hands in the, according to the Zoom function. Okay, Roy. Yeah, thank you, Eric. Really interesting stuff and wonderful images. One question that I imagine, it's the performativity and literary aspect of the of the talk are really fascinating. But may I ask you to say a little bit more about the context within which it operated within increasing national discourses and political change within, I wouldn't say Ottoman society because it's a very particular Istanbul society, but it's the hearts of the Turkish-speaking parts of the Ottoman Empire at the time. Yeah, for sure. So I can think about this in two ways. I mean, one way would be the sort of changing relationship between Iran and the Ottoman Empire during this time and in terms of the way that as a political project, there was, I think, you know, partially because of the censorship of political topics within, you know, journalism, literary discourse during, even during Abdul Aziz, but particularly during the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid, there was a way in which I think political theory and the kind of political project of what the Turkish nation state would look like was framed thus in kind of very aesthetic and literary terms, right? And so for this reason, I think that's why this, you know, notion of Persianism and this notion of, you know, what the Persian influence within Turkish culture actually represented maybe in a way became such an important topic where it was because it was a way of framing what the political content of the future kind of Turkish state would be in a way that wasn't actually directly political, right, or explicitly political. And I think, you know, in terms of the relationship between the Ottoman Empire and Iran, you know, we see, I won't have this kind of normalization of relations, right, because we have now in the 19th century treaties that recognize, for example, Iranians as foreign citizens now in the Ottoman Empire, right, rather than before they were considered just generically in the category of Muslim in the Ottoman system. But with that, I think, came both a kind of certain exoticism and a certain sorts of kind of alienation also, right? So it's interesting that, for example, during this period, it's during the late 19th century that the performance of Muhadim, you know, Ashrada really, you know, became a very, very public spectacle in Istanbul, right? Because now it was actually kind of permitted to kind of go ahead from the kind of center of the Iranian community in Fati and kind of actually performed this long procession. But what you see is that as that actually becomes more more public within Turkish literature, within the journalist community, within, you know, in terms of just, you know, popular culture, it becomes a very kind of sign of something very alien and very foreign about Iran and about Shi'ism and about kind of this different mentality, right? And so, you know, by the late 19th century, you know, Ashrada in Istanbul has become a kind of tourist attraction for, you know, Turkish Istanbulites to go and watch this kind of exotic performance. There's a very funny line by Ubedullah Fendi, who was a kind of traveler who went to Iran during the First World War and he traveled to both the United States and Iran. He said that United States is a land of material weirdness and Iran is a land of cultural weirdness, right? So it's a very kind of interesting way in which, you know, that kind of Persian commensurability, which I think existed before became something very incommensurable and became very kind of a kind of hard cultural line between kind of this notion of a Turkish culture and exoticized Iran. More questions? Well, allow me to use my role and ask you so, I mean, and forgive my ignorance, but so you brought in that image, which was a translation of Vamberi's travel to Central Asia. But Vamberi also has a number of passages about this, those abhorrent sexual practices that he allegedly saw in Heba. So I was wondering, but Vamberi was, you know, he was very much sort of sensitive to the expectations of the Victorian sort of British public. So I was wondering what's your take on, you know, the perhaps, you know, an influence of Victorianism on sort of concepts of heteronormativity, et cetera. I know that there is a lot of literature about that. So forgive my influence. I mean, probably my reading stopped with, stopped probably with Aruai Habs' book on the birth of homoericism or something like that. So I was wondering what you see, how you sort of understand the concept of, or sort of the influence of Victorianism. The other thing that I was wondering about is that you sort of use, and I'm pretty sure you are very sort of conscious about this, but anyway, so you use Persianate and Iranian sort of interchangeably. Is it a function of your sources or, so how do you do that? Because obviously there must have been sort of a, you know, sort of a monolingualization of the understanding of nations in the 19th century, right? So Iran coming to be sort of associated with Persian. Although it's obvious that, you know, in the 17th and 18th century context, it wouldn't have been the case, right? So SAP gained the, being the case in point. But my third question, so this is, so Ajem and Iran, right? So the question, the second, the third question that I would have is, is, is, you kind of, I was fascinated by, you know, your references to the 19th century celebrations of the Muharram. So I was wondering how, if you see also traces of sort of previous religious antagonists continuing into this, these sort of antagonists again, you know, these sort of ill feelings or sort of this, I can't find the right word. But anyway, so this critique of the use of Persian vocabulary, right? I have a fourth question. I was just wondering, I mean, do you also, I mean, so you had, you had, you had, you referred to sort of, you know, heteronormative phrases kind of being associated, particularly with, with Persian, but I was wondering, there must have been other, I mean, I mean, there are other sources for vocabulary, I guess, Iran, Armenian must have, must have also been like, I think, I think it's an Iranian word. So, I mean, do, do you see other such minorities as sort of sources for you know, nonsexual, normative vocabulary? Sorry. Okay, thank you so much. These are great questions. I guess I'll work backwards. So can you grab the first one? Yes, absolutely. I mean, definitely Armenian, Greek, Roma languages particularly became really sources of, or remain, remain sources of, you know, this kind of language for, yeah, illicit sexualities or kind of obscene desires or things like that, right? It's definitely, I mean, it's interesting in that sense that the, you know, more Persian-derived words kind of coexist, I think, with Armenian-derived terms, you know, Greek-derived terms. And one of, you know, the project that I reference Hulki Akhtunj's Argosuzlu is, you know, precisely kind of trying to trace all these kind of, you know, these terms that seem to be coming out of both minority languages and coming from, you know, words from Arabic and Persian that were not kind of lost or translated in the process of language reform but survived in that kind of lower register. In regards to, or is this next one? But so what I was driving at is the politics of all that, right? So is it Persian, is Persian sort of such a sort of a special source of vocabulary or do you see parallels with other minority languages or minority countries? Yeah, I definitely do. I mean, I guess, you know, the main difference from Persian would be that it was, again, kind of part of the Ottoman corpus in a way that was a little bit different from, for example, Armenian or Greek, right? So I think, I think that kind of intersection, which we see in Cem Kantosu of an Armenian actress performing as Iranian and doing these kind of things, actually kind of is a kind of, you know, I don't want to say it's a manifestation, but it's a kind of interesting parallel to the way in which, yeah, Armenian terms and Persian terms seem to kind of exist on that level in contemporary Turkish. In regards to the religious aspect and the sectarian aspect, yeah, definitely. I mean, to give an example, often Mithat, often Mithat Effendi traveled with Mithat Pasha to Baghdad, and that's where he kind of became the sort of, he did kind of develop that sort of intellectual figure as a kind of attache in Baghdad. You know, and what we see is that, you know, a lot of the kind of theorists of, you know, Ottoman social reform, Ottoman historical writing, you know, like Mithat Effendi, like Osman Hamdi Bey, were actually kind of in Baghdad at that point in time. And when we read, for example, their letters or the correspondence, you know, the question of Shiism as this kind of Iranian, you know, this kind of vector for Iranian influence is actually very, very present, right? It's very evident. I think Osman Hamdi Bey has a very interesting section where he talks about, you know, sort of in a similar way that, you know, like, there is this kind of, you know, aspect of the foreign that is kind of working its way inside the Ottoman state through this kind of, through that kind of influx of Shiism through Iraq and through different places. So yeah, definitely. I mean, I think when it comes to like, say, Fettin, the sectarian aspect is definitely downplayed in terms of, in his frame more in terms of, you know, aspects like culture and, you know, kind of notions of, yeah, nomadism versus civilization and things. But I think in the earlier period, and, you know, particularly around the 1860, 1870s, that more sectarian aspect was really present and really interplayed with what later developed. I think there's a Victorian one next. Yeah, yeah, definitely, you know, yeah, absolutely. I mean, one thing that I think is important to remember is that like, it was not the case, for example, that there was a kind of progression of heteronormativity, right, in the sense that like, London or New York or whatever becomes fully heteronormative and then Istanbul follows, right? I mean, because maybe because I'm more in that kind of like, Foucaultian, you know, tradition, you know, I mean, for me, I think what we see is actually kind of simultaneous process. Which is structural. So there are structural reasons for that. I think it is structural. I don't think it's purely in the realm of culture, but it is expressed in different ways according to the cultural content that exists, right? So, yeah, in the Ottoman case, for whatever reason, that is in place upon Persian. But I don't think that by itself, that's necessarily structurally different from the same kind of, you know, sort of interior civilizing mission that you see among Victorian reformers in the slums of London, right? Or, you know, reformers in Paris at that time. So, yeah, for sure. I think it's actually very, very connected. And it's about a kind of system of, yeah, of a structure of trying to account for maybe class difference in this new kind of moral, sexual kind of way, if that makes sense. And I think you have one more question, which I'm forgetting right now. Ajem and Iran and India, perhaps. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think that's where that process is really coming in. Because, you know, in the 18th and early 19th centuries as well, there's definitely, I think, no necessary, you know, correspondence between, you know, Ajem and Persian itself, right? I mean, Farsi or Ajem. And in this regard, I mean, for example, the language of Ajem Kantusu is a kind of mix of sort of Asari Turkish and Persian, right? So, sometimes it's more Asari and sometimes it's more directly Persian. So, in that sense, you know, the notion of Ajem is more, is broader than just what we would consider in the national terms to be the Persian language itself today, right? But at the same time, you know, it's also, because a little bit later, but a kind of simultaneous process was occurring within Lake Qajar and possibly Iran. Because of that, you end up with, by the end of it, yeah, a very kind of distinct notion of Turkish as a, you know, language of Turkey and Persian as a language of Iran to the exclusion of languages which seem to be in the kind of middle like Asari, right? So, yeah, definitely. I mean, I think this is where you kind of trace that process by which Persian becomes kind of localized in this geography of Iran. Thanks. Thank you so much. Thank you. Further questions from my learned colleagues? If we have time, I'll just sneak in a small question slash observation, especially with regard to Ajemi or Ajemçe, like the language of the, that's quite interesting because given the period that I'm looking at, which is more early modern, in the kind of oral storytelling, performative almost storytelling of Korkuktede, which is kind of the mythos of the Turkmen on the Iranian plateau and beyond. Ajem has no connotation with Persian language at all. Like Chuke said, it's very much a modern kind of association that is being made between its Ajem, then it must be somehow Persian or Persianess because the hero, the Turkmen hero of Korkuktede also describes himself in terms of not just Turkmen lineage, but he calls himself Ajem or Lu, son of Ajem or Ajem Bon. So that was very interesting for me to see the transition that is being made. There are still ways in which this Toko Tajik world is being made sense of, but it's increasingly one people being associated with one language, being kind of placed in a certain geographic territory along national lines. I would like to actually follow up on Chuke's question with regard to different languages being kind of assigned different roles in this kind of literature that she talks about. And I'm in particular interested about Arabic because Arabic in the period that I study is very much a hallowed language. It's a sacrosanct language. How is that kind of repurposed in the literature? Thank you so much. Let me talk a little bit about your first point and then I'll talk about the second point. In terms of the way in which the category of Ajem becomes nationalized and ethnicized during the 19th century, you see this also very clearly in the way that Iran and Tehran become ethnicized. There's a way in which obviously there are always kind of associations made, but there was I don't think a kind of necessary attribution, for example, of Iran to just Persian language speakers and Tehran to central Asian Turkish speakers or Turkish speakers. And what's very interesting is that when Tehranism as a kind of philosophical, political, linguistic concept in the late Ottoman Empire and early Turkish Republic kind of tries to formulate itself, you know, they have a real dilemma in the sense that Tehran appears kind of dependent, A, upon the Shahnana tradition and B upon, again, a notion of Iran as this kind of counterpoint. And so what is the independent existence of Tehran as a civilization? So you read Zia Gokalp, for instance, who is kind of the ideologue of Tehranism at some point. And he says very explicitly, yes, there are people who say Tehranism or Tehran comes from the Shahnana, therefore it's not even Turkish at all, but, you know, through the practice of Turkology and through anthropology and through archaeology, we can assert a kind of authenticity to Tehran, which is not dependent upon the Persian literary tradition. So, so yeah, I mean, it's very interesting the process by which these categories, which are really are, you know, social, sometimes poetic categories become instead very defined in terms of ethnos, right? And in regard to your second question, yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's very interesting because in a very generic way, a lot of literary reformers during this period will say, you know, Arabi, Farsi, right? But they, or Arapcha, Farsi, but they don't really, in a kind of literary sense, actually focus on Arabic that much, right? Like it's the kind of set construction to refer to these foreign elements in Ottoman. But when you read most of these writers, Arabic kind of is not really the main topic of concern until the Republic. For me, what that signifies is that the shift to secularity actually is very important in the way that Arabic is then kind of lumped in with Persian as a problematic aspect. I mean, there's different ways you can also frame that. You can frame that in terms of the Ottoman empire is, you know, still geographically mostly, you know, Arabic-speaking empire until 1918, right? But I think really when you look at the way in which, what is the central problematic, really up until the declaration of, you know, state secularism and the declaration of the Republic as the, you know, the nation forming a kind of foundational principle of the state, it's really at that point that Arabic becomes a bigger problematic than Persian. And I think, you know, for that reason, that's why we kind of have that shift that takes place. And it's also perhaps a reason, I mean, not necessarily because the amount of Persian or Persian vocabulary in Ottoman was, I think, always less than the amount of Arabic vocabulary. But I think that's perhaps the reason why the excision of Persian at terms was, I think, probably more completed than the removal of Arabic-derived terms during the language forms of the Republic. Thank you very much. And, you know, I would have further questions along to follow this up. But I think we, it's high time that we moved on. Thank you very much indeed, again, Eric for this wonderful talk and the very insightful answers as well. So, Dr. Muhammed, a marhab of the University of Kroningen is our next speaker who is going to talk about languages of pre-modern Islamic political thought. Thank you. Thank you. I just tried to share my slides for some reason. Okay, let's see. Okay, I hope it's working now. Perfect. Okay, so hello everyone. Thank you, friends. Thank you, Amir Parsa for inviting me to this workshop. It's great to be back although virtually at SOWAS to see friends from SOWAS where here, I mean at SOWAS I got my PhD and my MA. And in the interest of time, I'll start immediately. And basically the symbiosis of Turkic, Arabic, and Persian cultures across the medieval and early modern Islamic world which the present workshop is interested with is very visible, especially in the field of the history of pre-modern Islamic political thought. And my talk today will discuss the difference between languages in the abstract sense that is Arabic, Persian, or Turkish, and political languages of Islam or the languages of Islamic political thought in pre-modern Islamic societies. And basically the argument I'll try to make is that using both interchangeably is basically a distortion of the cultural, social, political mesh of pre-modern Islamic political, sorry, societies. And the start, yeah, so basically this is the essence of my talk today. The starting point of my talk is a treatise titled Nisbah al-Hidayah fi tariq al-Imama or the guiding lamp to the path of the Imama. It's a Sufi political thought treatise which was dedicated by an unknown author to the Mamluk Sultan, most likely to the Mamluk Sultan, Adahir Baybars. And basically Nisbah al-Hidayah or the guiding lamp was a distinctly Sufi strain of political thought in the 13th century or during the early Mamluk period. It was presented by its anonymous author to, most likely to Baybars one as a uniquely Sufi conception of the Imamate and the ideal of the rule of law. So this Nisbah is this Mamluk Sufi attempt to conceptualize political authority and make case for the rule of law in a distinctly Sufi fashion. It was authored at a point in Islamic history when Sufi thought was burgeoning in the central, eastern and western parts of the Islamic world. And I avoid using Arabic speaking or Persian speaking or Turkish speaking part of the Islamic world because many of you know that is way more complicated than that. And the disciples of great Sufi figures like Najm al-Din Qubra, Suhra Wardi, Ibn Arabi, Abu Hassan al-Shadili, Jalal al-Din Rumi and Ahmad al-Badawi spread throughout the Islamic world and permeated all social groups. As such the Nisbah, this distinctly Sufi work was the manifestation of a political context that encouraged the production of political thought and similarly the result of a Sufi intellectual context that witnessed great advances in speculative Sufism. And it was in 1995 that Professor Wilfred Madeleine brought Misbah l-Hidaya to light. Yet the Misbah did not simply have a Sufi outlook as Professor Madeleine suggested, but it was expressed in a distinctly Sufi way. The author did not compose the Misbah as a political work merely influenced by Sufism, but rather as a Sufi treatise that treated distinctly Sufi political ideals, political thought, and he presented it as such to his dedicated and intended audience. The Misbah was a Sufi work whose content relied on Sufi texts and we will discuss that on Sufi languages and Sufi concepts. Most importantly the author, the anonymous author of the Misbah, strived to present it as a purely and distinctly Sufi work and desired it to be read as such. So there is a need to examine the Misbah and most importantly place an anonymous author within his ideological, intellectual, and social scholarly context. And his attempt to present Sufism as a third alternative to Ash'aarism and Mu'tazilism, the author revealed two valuable clues, one on his sources and the other on his political theory. The first clue related to his sources and his agency in using them. And the author, I noticed, used of course Al-Mawardi's Adab al-Dunia al-Din, the ethics of the world and religion on whether to rely on reason or revelation, known discourse, Akal or Shara, in justifying the requirement for an Imam. The author of the Misbah skillfully modified Al-Mawardi's discussion and integrated Sufism into it. And clearly this was not a case of someone simply repeating or collating earlier discussions or texts, but a rather highly erudite and able scholar who was capable of selecting, rearranging, modifying, and employing earlier political discussions and texts to suit his own purposes, his own political thought, basically. As for the clue concerning his political theory, the author of the Misbah revealed that his distinctly Sufi treatise legitimated the forceful seizure of the Sultanate, no surprise here, of course. Likewise, the author of the Misbah advocated the requirement and legitimacy of coercive authority by working out a meticulous synthesis of the stipulation for the Imamate of Al-Juwaini and Al-Ghazali, especially Giyyat al-Umam, or aid to nations shrouded in darkness, a very important Shafi'i text, and Al-Ghazali's Mustasiri or the scandals of the Isoterics and the virtues of the Caliph Al-Mustazir. And in uphold, as I mentioned, in order to uphold the concern for the rule of law, he relied on other carefully selected texts, including Al-Mawardi's Adab al-Dunya. But something was still missing. There were several conceptual clues that the Misbah greatly benefited from Al-Suhrawardi and especially Ibn Arabi. And this made perfect sense. I keep on coming back. This is an idea of the intellectual network within which the author flourished. This made perfect sense. The anonymous author was clearly trained in the same ideological tradition and scholarly milieu. He was a Sufi, a Nashari, and in all likeness, a Shafi'i scholar. Yet I couldn't establish a direct link to Ibn Arabi. And then I thought that it could be that Ibn Arabi's influence on the Misbah came through a non-Arabic text. So I enlisted the help of a colleague who was familiar with medieval Persian literature, but they couldn't identify this influence. And as a last resort, we both translated non passages of the Misbah to English as a very basic way of doing it. And we started searching Turkish and Persian texts in English translation, but only texts that were clearly linked to Ibn Arabi's Sufism. And after a while, the mystery was solved and we identified that the Misbah was influenced by a Persian text, Mersad l-Aibad min al-Mabda ilal ma'ad, or the path of God's bondsman from origin to return in near contemporary compendium of Sufism that was authored by a renowned Sufi scholar, Najmeddin Da'ay-Razi, in the 13th century, the known Ashari Sufi thinker. And the pieces of the puzzle started to fall into place. The author of the Misbah, in fact, used this text to highlight the rule of law in another distinctly Sufi manner. And we're talking about near contemporary text, of course. Well, I mean, clearly this text reached him within a short period. To achieve this end, the anonymous author resorted to the Mersad and other texts in order to articulate a Sufi theory of moderation of the exercise of power by the coercive Sultan. Now, the Mersad was a heavily influenced text by Ibn Arabi and Suhra Wadi and was a founding text that explained the Sufi doctrine summarizes elaboration and demonstrated the Islamic roots of Sufism. Most importantly, the Mersad included an important contribution to Islamic political thought in a distinctly Sufi terminologies, most notably in the fifth part, where Razi discussed the conduct of the ruler, pizier, judges, and other professions. The largest section of the Misbah was heavily influenced by this Ashari Sufi text, by Razi's text. From the beginning to the end, the essay of this chapter, the author used rearranged passages from Razi's Mersad in a really impressive, systematic, and purposeful manner. The near verbatim use of the Mersad can be spotted in fact at the start of the Mersad, of the second chapter of the Misbah, where the author described Imam al-Din. And in the first chapter of the fifth part of the Persian Mersad, titled Concerning the Wayfaring of Kings and the Lords of Command, it's related that there are two classes of kings, kings of the world and kings of the religion. Of course, this is a translation for Imam al-Din and Imam al-Dunya. As for those who are the kings of the religion, it said they have opened the supreme talisman of form with the key of the law, that's Sharia, held in the hand of the path, the tariqa, with the eye of the truth, the haqiqat. They have contemplated the states and attributes stored and hidden in the depth of their being, like buried treasure and gems. They have penetrated to the mystery of the treasure of he who knows himself, knows to his Lord. This was verbatim how the Arabic Misbah described Imam al-Din and Arabic based on the Persian Mersad. And I have to say this is beautiful text, whether in Arabic, Persian or in English translation. And the author of the Misbah succeeded in presenting this coherent Sufi political theory to the Mamluk Sultan Baibars, most likely to the Mamluk Sultan Baibars. The author expressed his distinctly Sufi theory of legitimate, coercive and just sultanate based on four tenets. The first were the conception of the highest political authority that was in harmony with the coercive sultanate as argued for by Mawardi, Jwaini and Ghazali. The author of the Misbah achieved this first aim, as I mentioned, based on the shrewd synthesis of these texts and these Arabic texts. The second tenet was upholding the rule of law, which the author expressed in a Sufi language that was rooted in the Arabic works of Al-Mawardi and the Persian texts of Da'ay-Razi and through a mystical and Islamized system of ethics that included the Sufi conception of the philosopher king. The third tenet of the Misbah was that its author succeeded in presenting a distinctly Sufi theory. So although the Misbah was deeply rooted in Sufi Ashari and Shafi'i thought, the author still succeeded in making a distinctly Sufi through a careful artful reworking of the Arabic adab dunya and the Persian mursad. The fourth tenet, of course, which is perhaps not of concern to us today, was that the Misbah tried to accommodate the concerns of its dedicated sultan-bebers. Now this is where it gets interesting for our workshop, is that the mursad was translated from Persian to English and the translation appeared in 1982. But the translation of the translator of the mursad denied that it had any influence on the central and quoting the translator in the central and African Islamic regions, that is the Arabic speaking world, which is a rather surprising assumption, because when we work on a text, in fact, we strive to prove that it was influential outside its known circulation. The editor and translator knew very well though that Razee wrote in both Arabic and Persian, and that Razee himself became a Sufi in Egypt. In his own word, Razee's interest in Sufism was awakened in Egypt, where he became a murid of Shaykh Rizbihan al-Wazan al-Masri, who had been initiated to the Suhrawar line. Moreover, Razee also wrote in Arabic. He authored a renowned text, Manarat Saireen wa Maqamata Taireen Billah, like towers for those voyaging to God and the stations of those flying with God, which is another founding Sufi text with important political items. So please allow me to summarize again. Wilfred Madelung missed the heavy influence of the Persian mursad on the Arabic msbaha. Furthermore, the mursad was translated from Persian to English in 1982, but the translator of the mursad denied that it had any influence on Arabic texts. Yet Razee also wrote in Arabic, as I mentioned, Manarat Saireen, which is a very important text with important political ideas, and it appeared in 1993 in an Arabic edition. The translator of the mursad into English and following him, Professor Ann Lampton at SOAS at the time, mistook the Manarat for an Arabic translation of the mursad. To add to this series of colossal errors, an Arabic translation of the mursad appeared in 2002, which was completely unaware of the Arabic msbaha and earlier Arabic translations of the mursad, and it appeared as Falsafat Tassawuf wa Dawa ilallah. Remarkably, it was not until 2017 that Hussain Yilmaz, a historian of the Ottoman Empire, noted that the importance of the mursad as a founding text that was popular from Cairo to China in his seminal work, Caliphate redefined. So it was a historian of the Ottoman Empire that spotted the influence of this Persian text. And of course, in 2022, I noted the influence of the Persian mursad on the Arabic msbaha. And I'm afraid that this mess really is rooted in a serious impediment in the fields of the history of, well, in the fields of Islamic history, Islamic studies, Middle Eastern studies, and Central Asian studies. And I will only focus on the part related to the history of Islamic political thought in what forms. And I call this impediment the mythology of genre, especially in the history of Islamic political thought. And the idea is that some scholars contend that the genre of a political text is fixed in both content and style, and therefore dictates the postulated political ideas within the text. Furthermore, the genre is occasionally reconstructed along fictional dichotomies, especially between Arabic and Persian, and in Arabic and Persian texts, and an elusive and highly problematic pursuit of cultural continuity in political ideas. The scheme such scholars propose is simple. Islamic political thought produced by jurists only treated religion and the so-called theory of the caliphate. While the literati broadly defined as non-jurists were interested in the themes of kingship, the sultanate, the arts of statecraft and administration, and ancient conceptions of justice. And relentless attempts by scholarship aimed to uphold fixed and continuous genres, especially mirrors for princes. The fixation somehow transformed the discourse on medieval Islamic political thought to one of genre as opposed to one of conceptions of political authority and governance. And Lampton, for example, delimited three main formulations of political thought, the theory of the jurists, theory of the philosophers, and literary theory. And this once widely accepted and still resonant scheme, literary theory is understood to include the genres of mirrors for princes and administrative manuals. Lampton's categorization assumed that the first formulation, and I'm quoting Ann Lampton, was the most truly Islamic of the three. The third formulation, on the other hand, is concerned with the practice rather than the theory of government, and seeks some measure to assimilate Islamic norms to Sasanian traditions of kingship. Its basis is justice rather than right religion or knowledge. And so unchanging and blurred was this categorization that with time, it became almost sufficient for some scholars to recognize the genre of political text in order to presume the postulated political theory, or the theory in general. It even became possible for some to claim that language in the abstract sense, that is Arabic Persian or Turkish dictated the political language of a treatise. As such, Arabic version or Turkish treatises upheld different political ideals. And postclassical texts, so after the 9th century, up to the 1514, do not fit well with this categorization. In addition of the previously discussed Nersad, which was a great proof to refute this approach, I'll present very briefly two more cases where complications arose from assuming that the genre determines the content of a political text. And the first one is Bahrel Fawaid, the known mirror titled Bahrel Fawaid, the Sea of Precious Virtues, which was composed in mid-12th century Syria. It's a Persian text composed in Syria, and the anonymous Persian word counters any suggestion that the mirrors for princes genre was any less an Islamic formulation of political thought than that of treatises written by jurists. There is nothing in this mirror that supports the stigma of being less Islamic, which Lampton had associated with this genre. This treatise reflects an unembellished Shafi'i Ash'ari and Sufi tone, an Islamic conception of justice and a clear influence, very clear in fact, of Al Ghazali. Bahrel Fawaid contradicts the idea that the genre itself dictates the political content of mirrors for princes. Moreover, it was deeply rooted in the Arabic tradition of authoring advice literature. In 2001, Professor Kheer Khan Fandkhalder, Dutch scholar who was working at Oxford at the time, noted the influence on the Bahrel Fawaid of an Arabic word work titled Mufid al-Auloum wa Mubid al-Humoum, authored in 1156. And the second and final case I want to present is a more known of course, is Kitab nasiha al-Muluk, or Book of Council for Kings, which is a mirror attributed strongly to Ghazali as Patricia Krone established in 1987. This work was in two parts. The anonymous mirror, nasiha al-Muluk, and the Risala, the epistle, which may have been according to Krone, Krone al-Ghazali or based on his writings. Now both parts were available in Arabic and Persian. The cataloger of the Damassin Ashrafiya library, and this is a 13th century library where we have the index of this library and Professor Konrad Herschler worked extensively on this index. The cataloger of this library, again in the 13th century, noted next to it suspiciously next to these titles on the index, Fihi Nazar, thus counting doubt on the attribution of these texts to al-Ghazali. So we're talking about an index in the 13th century. And most likely these texts were available in both Arabic and Persian in the Damassin library. So basically he cast a doubt on whether the Council for Kings or the Risala al-Ghazali, al-Ghazali's epistle were really authored by al-Ghazali. And then again in 1924, Zaki Mubarak, who worked on al-Ghazali's works, noted that the book was weak in the treatment of several topics, and quoting Zaki Mubarak, and consequently unlike al-Ghazali. In 1938, with the first Persian edition of Nasiha al-Mulu, the editor Humayee fiercely defended the authenticity of the work, but later in the second edition in 1972, he accepted that was a part of this work that was uncharacteristic of Ghazali. So it took over 60 years to recognize the concern that has been voiced in 1924, and in fact seemed rather obvious to an average medieval scholar like the Damassin catalogue. And there's a simple explanation for this confusion and for these continuing confusions, that scholars considered Nasiha al-Mulu to be a fixed Persian mirror for princes rather than a work that comprised political conceptions that could not have been expressed by al-Ghazali. Examining this mirror as a work of Islamic political thought would have led the same scholar to different conclusions, the attribution of this text to a Nashiari or Shafi'i Sufi thinker ought to have immediately alarmed a historian of Islamic political thought. In 2000, and by the way, this is the, if you're interested in the catalog of the Ashrafiya library, you can look at Conrad Herschler's book, Plurality and Diversity in Arabic Library, and see how people read in several languages, in fact. In 2008, and again in 2015, Alexiki Smutalin confirmed beyond any doubt the forgery of Nizam al-Mulk's Seer al-Muluk, the Siasat Namae, and parts of Ghazali's Nasiha al-Muluk. In fact, he even succeeded in unmasking the identity of the potential counterfeiter. Yet people ignore these findings and subsequent studies still insist on ascribing Nasiha al-Muluk to Ghazali and Seer al-Muluk or Siasat Namae to Nizam al-Muluk, and in fact basing major arguments and conclusions on this false attribution. This includes a book Advice for the Sultan, Prophetic Voices and Secular Politics in Medieval Islam, published by Oxford in 2014, and another book published anyway in 2015. So to conclude, basically, so this is the idea I'm trying to convey to today. There are scholarly studies and general readership works that refer interchangeably to languages in the abstract sense, that is Arabic, Persian and Turkish, and political languages of pre-modern Islamic texts. These views are utter distortions of the pre-modern Islamic world, of the social, religious, cultural networks that existed, and within which authors of Islamic political thought flourished and operated. And this is best left for study under the purview of modernists specialized in the history of nationalism. Pre-modern Islamic authors displayed an astonishing agency in benefiting from their influences to suit their own aims in writing political texts. They had mastered the delicate art of including, excluding, rearranging, and altering passages from earlier writings that they borrowed from, and most importantly adding to them to express their own political thought and their own political concerns and idea that dealt with their own time. And as I hope I already demonstrated, it mattered little if these influences were Arabic, Persian, Turkish, or Syriac or Greek. These authors communicated their thought using specific political languages that were intended to be understood as languages, as political languages by their audiences. Dedicates and interlocutors based on prevailing conventions at the time. And understanding this authorial agency is the key to retreating the political languages of medieval Islamic societies, not languages in the abstract sense. So languages in the abstract sense, Arabic, Persian, or Turkish, should not be confused with the political languages of Islam or some scholars say, or the political languages of pre-modern Islamic political thought. What matters most is understanding the ideological, scholarly, and social networks of these authors. We've seen how Razi, for example, Sufi network ranged from Egypt and North Africa into Central Asia and how this network translated and used and adapted ideas in order to convey their own political ideas. And to understand these languages, we should be aware of the conventions, and I'm here using, of course, the work of Quintan Skinners and others. We should understand the conventions of the prevailing discourses at the time. And the idea of an idiom where the meaning is only understood by those who are familiar with these conventions is central to understanding these political languages of pre-modern Islamic political thought. Languages in the abstract sense in the case of the history of pre-modern Islamic political thought are, I argue, irrelevant. And this is basically the idea I wanted to communicate. Thank you. Thanks very much for this very interesting and provocative talk. Thank you. You're welcome. I'll stop sharing my slides. So, questions from the audience. You're welcome. Roy. Yeah, thanks, Muhammad. It's terrific. Really, really interesting and very intriguing. May I introduce maybe a larger question on top of whatever you were saying that I was a bit curious about. And you mentioned Hussain-il-Maz, and he's where Caliphate 3 defined it. One of the points that really interesting and very important point I think that he's making there is by taking the Caliphate and show how a term that has a whole set of connotations, understanding and political significance being, let's say, remolded to introduce new or additional concepts of messianism or this kind of millenarian or millennial moment of the 16th century in the Ottoman context. And I thought about how this kind of frame of taking existing language and deliberately changing it using different traditions to meet these kind of, let's say, temporal needs. How can this correspond with your theory here or your understanding here? And in particular, when we have the layer of prestige and different levels of prestige of those three languages. Now, I'm quite convinced by what you were saying. I'm just trying to think how this element of this special position of Arabic, for example, within all this that you need this stamp of Arabic to make something legitimate in a certain way or usable. So how do you think we can maybe use this kind of understanding? The nice thing of the Ottoman case is that it provides a very visible way of juggling with the three languages by some of these authors, Sufi-minded authors that Yilmaz and others worked on to show that basically they picked and choose from whatever text or tradition was needed to legitimate the rulers or to propose their own ideas. And in fact, it is exactly the same in the Mamluk tradition, in the early Mamluk tradition, the late Ayyubid tradition, where people adapted these ideas, used texts that were focused on the Caliphate of Baghdad, removed any mention to the Caliph, to the Caliph and used it for the Mamluk Sultan. Whether the text was Greek, a lot of use of Greek texts, Syriac texts, Persian texts, Turkish notions of legitimations are used in Arabic texts. So I don't see the sacred function of Arabic in the Mamluk case, but definitely I see very similar way of adapting, excluding and including and molding existing texts to propose new ways of legitimation of the Mamluk Sultanate in the presence of an Abbasid Caliph or in the absence of an Abbasid Caliph. So in a way it's similar to what Yilmaz observed in the Ottoman case, and I think this applies almost to every phase of pre-modern Islamic history. The idea that there are continuous ways of legitimating rulers or continuous ways of looking at justice or adil or this is all distortion basically, and we should always contextualize these ideas. If I may continue, and that's I mean the idea of who was it, Lampton, I think that you presented that there is a very Arabic-centric notion that if it's important it's in Arabic and all the rest are kind of decoration and we need to Arabicize things and yeah, I find it kind of very it's to the level of we give, we label texts in a certain or as a certain language. I had this, one of our dear colleagues from another university in London, Muhammad, that we are both very much familiar and appreciate him, asked me at one point to help him with the Persian text. He said that he will ask my help and then when I asked him what about the texts he said I understood everything. He works on Arabic, he has superb Arabic but no official Persian but he understood everything. He didn't need this assistance of a Persian reader to understand the text, which is Persian, and this is another layer of that is that the labeling or kind of decoration of the grammar or syntax of one language that said okay this is Persian but it's Arabic. The question is how symmetrical these processes were in terms of flowing between the language that I don't know, maybe it's actually a question to Ferens as a more of a literary scholar here that it's worth considering because it's not only the aesthetics and the syntax, it's also values and content. Sorry I'm blabbering, I don't have a clear question. But values are actually a good word here basically. So what at the same time, I mean I get what Professor Amman had the same at the same time, but perhaps we should also consider the agency of the author and what he for example, what he wanted to know, what he wants the text to be in as it were. So okay, so case in point, you know, in Shah text, right, so epipolarism. Very heavily, using very heavy Persian, you know, this Persian, Persian Arabic, Chanseh language, right, so basically and used by let's say both the Mughal Chansehri, the Ottoman Chansehri and the Southwood Chansehri, the main difference being perhaps in the set of finite verbs, right, so like cat and etc. Right, so but so what I'm driving at is you need in more training in this Persian Arabic Chansehri language and sort of the underlying sort of intellectual tradition, Islamic law, Persian poetry etc. then actually the actual vernacular language, right. So this is what we are talking about, I mean, and I like your suggestion is that the need for studying this whole phenomenon as a product of network, because it's networks who that were reading and exchanging among themselves these texts, not sort of national mission. And also we perhaps need to distinguish the language of Chansehries, which are direct legitimation or projecting imperial or projecting power, versus political thought, which I focus on where these texts are not necessarily to project a certain power or to legitimate in a letter between the Mamluks and the Ilkhanids or vice versa, but really to discuss ideas what is the limit of political power, what are the extents of the rulers power, can you remove a ruler. So these are also very academic discussions in the sense and this is where they use ideas from all over the Islamic world or non-Muslim world even. And they remold them, they use them again. In terms of being perso-centric or arabocentric in the 13th century, in Cairo, in Damascus, you don't feel that there's any limit to ideas ranging from what people call al-taik, legitimation, divine mandate. These are all ways to basically to discuss concerns, contemporary concerns to these authors, their present and immediate concerns, whether they refer to certain notions from pre-Islamic time or the Islamic time or from the sharia are just ways that are understood by their audience. As you mentioned, certain terms to discuss specific ideas. Thank you. There was one question in the chat, it was more like a simple clarification. Was there was a reference to Imams of King, does it have any shia or even Ali confrontations who were the peers or guides in quotation marks in this Sufi tradition? So Imam here, this is a very Ash'ari Sufi text in all likeness, a Shafi'i text. And it refers a lot to Jwaini, especially to the Fada'ih al-Batiniya. So it is from a completely different tradition. Imam here means the ruler, the ruler who can be deposed and who can be, so he is fallible and the Imam can be deposed and can be changed. So it's a different conception of Imam. This is more in line with Ghazali and Jwaini's conception of the Imam. And in fact, with direct references, especially when it comes to the 10, the 10 rites of the Imam over his subjects, they're directly based on Shrut's synthesis of Ghazali and Jwaini and do not refer to the Shia tradition. In terms of the Sufi specific order of this author, he made every effort to conceal that and to make it a generic Sufi text. And this is where the use of Mursad was truly very, very intelligent use of the Mursad. And we tried to identify what kind of tariqa he followed. It is very difficult to, he made every effort to make it a generic Sufi text. I have a problem with the word pre-modern. I mean, it really lumps together all sorts of things. So do you imply that this set of the understanding between language and power, or language and politics changed only with modernity? Because that's what this seems to imply. No, in fact, I don't think so. I do not. It's just because the whole idea is to contextualize this political thought and to avoid, for example, I discuss the caliphate and that there is no yearning, continuous yearning in Islamic societies to the caliphate from the ninth to the 20th century. This is a construction that people from all ideological backgrounds or political backgrounds in Islamic history at some point consider that this is a long gone ideal or just a romantic idea. So pre-modern was just to avoid medieval in the sense that whatever this period between the classical Islamic period and the early modern Islamic period, which is also very difficult to pinpoint as you know. Sure, sure, sure. That's why I really like your suggestion that we should approach the whole affair in a kind of a more networked fashion. Thank you. Another question from the learned audience. Amir, have you raised your hand? Yes, I just wanted to maybe, well not challenge, but make an observation that might complement and maybe clash and challenge your points. I absolutely agree that not just in religious discourse and Sufi discourse, but in political discourse, cultural discourse, all of these things, there's an inherent just acceptance of multilingualism and that's why I emphasize that poem at the beginning where the author of the epic Visoramin, who's serenading the Seljuk prince, describes him in an inherently multilingual sense. He's saying whatever language he chooses, selects, he can compose miraculous verse, whether it be in Tazi, Arabic, Dari, Persian or Turkish. The idea is that to be an erudite prince, and I think in this case to be an erudite scholar, one of you, you have to have a masterful kind of command of a multiplicity of these languages. Having said that, I think that some contexts, at least in my experience of studying late Safavid Iran and 18th century Iran, there are some languages that come to the fore. So Arabic amongst the Sufis and Ulema seems to be quite an important thing for Safavids and 18th century kind of scholars and writers. It's very common for them to attack one another, saying you don't even know how to read the Arabic texts properly. Your Arabic grammar and syntax are terrible. So how could you possibly tell us about the most Islamic way to rule or Islamic legitimacy? And at the same time, the converse is people write in Arabic when they don't even need to. They're writing treatises, they write Arabic, but even when they compose poetry, even when they deliver sermons in Amos, they resort to Arabic. These things, my view is limited to very specific context, the late Ayyubid, early Mamluk, even it doesn't apply to the late Mamluk period. So yeah, I do not, in fact, we agree on this. Later on, things change. Different parts of the Islamic world look at the function of Arabic language differently. So yeah, this could be the case. For example, you've discussed Ajam. Ajam, for example, I look at Ibn Jama'a who writes in Arabic only. And when he mentions Ajam, Ajam scholars, he's talking about his teachers who are experts in speculative jurisprudence in the Madrasa of Damascus and Cairo. So Ajam is a complementary word for knowledge. These are the experts of speculative khusrushahi and other experts in speculative jurisprudence. So these things change. And this is exactly my point, is that we have to look at this specific scholarly networks, ideological background, political context. These things are not the same throughout the pre-modern and early modern Islamic history. Thank you. Shari, if I can raise another issue that goes from Amir's point, one of the things you said, Amir, is that they wrote Arabic when they didn't need to. And this is something that the necessity of writing in Arabic is something that I kind of question because it's a choice and why isn't it a legitimate choice for those who have or who master different languages not to choose according to different needs. It doesn't need to be communicate certain things. It's also to establish one's position or show off or just because they felt that it's comfortable for them or they want to play with it. I mean, it's people after all. And people have a very complex motive. But one of the things that actually Muhammad Yussel, I'm just again, I'm trying to grab it. It's a very complex issue that we are talking about. The Islamic nature of things that what do you mean when you mean this is Islamic, this is not Islamic. And I'm not sure that it kind of communicates with Amir. You were there for the discussion in the workshop we had on Tuesday about what is the borders of what is considered to be Islamic and what is more Islamic and less Islamic. And this is something that both for us and for people who were writing in the pre-modern that I'm not sure how to go around that. That's a very interesting question. How do we draw the borders of this, as I call it, Turkotagic world or as you call it, the Islamic world or Islamic world? That's the challenge, in fact, that we have to continuously work on. And I can give an example just to discuss it basically with no answer or no definitive answer. If we look at justice, the notion of adab and how Anne Lampton and others up till today who continuously talk about Islamic justice versus non-Islamic justice, pre-Islamic Arabian Murua and Sasanian justice as a secular, pre-modern justice. And you look at these mirrors for princes, even when they mentioned Sasanian kings or Egyptian kings or Alexander the Great, these are just tools to put limits on the discretionary exercise of power. They are not romantic ways to recreate the Sasanian or Egyptian empire. These are Islamic notions in the sense that they reflect the standards of the Islamic society at Cairo and the late Ayyubid and early Mamluk period. They give examples of the Sasanian king or Alexander the Great or ancient Egyptian kings or Muluk el-Hint not because they want to recreate an empire, it's just because these are tools made available to them because they are literate, right? They are they're jurists, but they're also poets. They also they use it to basically curtail the exercise of power and I call it the Islamic notion of justice, but I could easily call it what Amir mentioned the Tajik or Turko Tajik. It doesn't matter, but it is only a tool to mention Alexander the Great or Aristotle or Ardashir. It's only tools and some people take it too seriously that there's a Sasanian notion of justice versus an Islamic notion of justice. I think these authors never read anything related to a Sasanian text or a Greek text in Greek and they had no clue of what society in Athens looked like. So it's just a tool to promote justice and curtail the exercise of power. This is my meaning when I say Islamic and this will change of course with time and with context. If there are any further questions then thank you very much Professor Merhab for your inspiring talk and but we might want to move on to our next and last speaker of this panel Dr. Mohamed Ali Dinahel. I'm not sure if I pronounce this well from the University of Teshawar talking about the promotion of Turkey to the status of Persian and Arabic. You need to unmute yourself. Okay. Thank you very much for inviting me to this session so that I may share my research with this Galaxy scholar. So first upon that how I selected this topic for my research. So I was reading this Babarnama by Zahiruddin Babar and I found that in one place he has written that Alisher Nauai that the Chagatai are the the old Turkic language. It was the language of the Alisher Nauai and Alisher Nauai belong to the 15th century. So I wondered that why Babar said that the Turkey the Turkey language it is the language of Alisher Nauai because it is I mean an old language. So then I started my research and let me share my study and this research show. I found that in Central Asia there are three languages they remain dominant the Arabic, Persian and the Turkish language. So the structure of my this presentation is that first upon I will discuss about the Turkish language and literature in Central Asia before Islam. Then Arabic is literary language in Central Asia. Then Arabs cultural impacts on Central Asia and that will be followed by Persian language and literature and their cultural impact on Central Asia and then the emergence of Turkey as literary language while countering Arabic and Persian languages in Central Asia. So initially the word Turkey that is found in Chinese sources and in the Arahul inscription they had their oral as well as written literature. Central Asian national tradition they lost the significance after the acceptance of Islam. Now about the Central Asian the the Turkic sources before Islam in Central Asia. So a Chinese traveler by the name of Ivan Song who traveled to Central Asia in the 7th century he points to the existence of the literature of this art but not even the titles come out. I mean he has mentioned that there were some some sources in the in the Turkey language in Central Asia but even he has not mentioned the titles. Later on Albirumi he has he writes that Kutibabin Muslim the governor of the province of Farasan he exterminated priests together with the Airbus. But actually before Islam we don't have I mean literature in the Turkey language in Central Asia. Later on the Arabic language in Central Asia. In the first three centuries of the Muhammadan era the Arabic language remained the language of all sorts of prose literature in Central Asia. In 19th century a Russian scholar he has compiled a two-alume anthology of Arabic and Persian sources for the history of the Golden Horde. Later on he published these sources he compiled and published these in 1834 in St. Petersburg. These sources will tell us every aspect of everyday life from language to administration and from this sophisticated literary and historiographical tradition to the conducted trade. I mean that all these themes we can find written in the Arabic language about the Central Asia. Then the the contacts between the Arab and the Central Asian people that can be found that we see that they're first established in the distant past. As Barbak is the fifth century at the time at their time big merchants caravans with goods from the cities of Central Asia and Farasan they went to the cities of Iraq and Syria via Iran. In Central Asia in parts of India and Southeast Asia Islam became the majority religion and its swag the Arabic language was introduced as a vehicle of religion and culture. Moreover even though these areas were never annexed by Arabic speaking people commercial relations with the Central Arabian areas were often very I mean intense and they newly in the newly one land conquering Arabs like from the north side the Syria Iraq from the west to Egypt north of America. They imposed not just Islam but also Arabic language and Arabian culture. We usually refer to these areas Arab to the eastern northeast so the coming of Islam did not produce the same effect Arab culture. I mean comparatively it had little impact and we can see that the Arabic script and a host of the loan words that can be found in the Central Asian Turkish language. When Kutiba bin Muslim he was the governor of Farasan large-scale conversion did not take place until 700 years later when under the influence of the Samanites Turks in large number they were induced to accept Islam of the moon free will. Individual of Turks have previously accept Islam but in 10th century Islam became dominant factor in Turkish society. When Turkic are wanted to Islam they claim a direct link with the Prophet and thereby raise the standing in the eyes of other Muslims. Their traditional history folklore and mythology had been altered to accommodate numerous Islamic elements. So Diwan Lohatul Turk written by Mahmood Kashgari that exhibit the influence from the direction of Arabic Persian literary culture. With the establishment of Baghdad is the political and intellectual capital of the Muslim world of that in 9th century attempts were made to explore Central Asian region Muslim others they wrote histories, biographical dictionaries, ufayat, obituaries, theological discussion, legal opinions, geographies, travel literature, political treaties, advice literature, most of these written in Arabic language later translated into Persian. The new civilization brought with it new languages, a new religion and a new method of administration. So we can also I mean this cultural and cultural influence Arab marriages with Persian we can also see this aspect then the Arab historiography of Central Asia. Many Arab scholars and historians they have written history of the Central Asia we can see this he died in 892 he has written about the beginning of the Arab conquest at early 8th century with the appointment of Muslim governor of Khorasan in the year 714 AD. Another book written in Arabic language about the history of the Central Asia which is it is written by Abu Jafar Muhammad al-Tabri. He spent most of his time following the travels in Baghdad the intellectual capital of the Muslim world of that time. He described events that occurred throughout the history of the ufayat and of a side down to the year 1915. Tabri work was later on translated into Persian by Samanite wazir Balami. Tabri described the pie between the Khorasan and Sogdian. Sogdians wrote to the king of Shash. Shash it is the old name of the Tashkan and to the Elkhash title of the ruler of the Samarkand. They wrote that if the Arab vanquishes they will visit upon you the life that they brought us. Then there is another book Abu Hassan Ali bin Muhammad al-Madhaini. He was from Iranian race and wrote in Arabic according to Faris al-Ulum wrote in greater details than others on the history of Khorasan, India and Fars. Tabri most frequently quotes this book of Madhaini. Early Turkic authors written in Arabic. Then we can see that a lot of Turkic people authors and writers they were also written in Arabic language and not in their own Turkic language. Like Tariqi Bukhara it is written by Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Ja'par al-Narshaki. He was from the village of Narshakh near Bukhara. He delivered his history to Samandi Amir Nuh ibn Nasser in the year 1943 and his book he described the rise of Samanites. It was a central Asian post Islamic ruling dynasty. They are believed to be descendants of Saman Khuda and in provincial they come from the vicinity from the city of Bulkir, Nadran, Afghanistan. The first Turkic Muslim dynasty in Central Asia. The period of rule of the Turkish Khara Khanite dynasty is a period of cultural retroagration. Then the one Lohatul Turk as I already mentioned that it is written by Mahmud Kashgari. Actually it is about the different dialects of the Turkic language but he has written it in the Arabic language. The one Lohatul Turk is the earliest known Turkic language. It was written in Arabic in 1075 eddy. He came to Baghdad and wrote the Diwan and dedicated it to the Khalif al-Muqtadi. It is written for an Arab audience, presumably in order to explain to the court at Baghdad the language and customs of their warlords. Then the Turkic literature in the in Central Asia after Islam. Like there is a very important sort of advice literature by the name of Uthud-Ubilik. It is written by Yusuf Haas Haajib. It is in the Turkish language. Central Asian own rich textual tradition later on we can see. As already I mentioned that Babar he called this Alicia Navai a 15th century poet and writer that the the Turkey it is language of the Alicia Navai. So from 15th century on what we can see a lot of textual tradition in the Turkic language from particularly from 16 to 19th century. Only but these different sources we can find these in manuscript form and majority of these sources written in the Turkic language. They are unedited and unpublished. They are available in different libraries. It allows them being published to whatever but the manuscript they are unedited and unpublished. Then the Persian as literary language in Central Asia. Like as already I said that until the third century Hijrah Arabic it was a language of almost majority of the prose work. So from the fourth century Hijrah the Persian language gradually established itself as the literary language. The number of prose composition in Turkey language that was still extremely and significant. Persian impacts like the literary culture and linguistic impacts on the on the Turkey language and there's a hole on the Central Asia. So this will be it is a long didactic poem in a Persian Islamic mirror for Francis tradition better for Francis is a particular generalized wise better self then different Iranian civilization. We can also see that they had their deep roots in this in this region of the Central Asia. So these different civilization they had their impacts on the Central Asia and different timing dilates of the of the Persian language like Dari and Tajik it is spoken here in the Central Asia. Religious landscape was shared by Zoroastrian Buddhism Buddhist and Manitian and Jewish tradition Samanite era and in this particular in the Samanite era Bukhara became famous for construction of libraries and scholarship. Samanites they patronized writers and scholars no less than the the Boid. Boid it was a Shia Iranian dynasty from 1933 to 1062. Samanites they being although they were Persian they patronized cheaply Persian poetry but along with these there were at the report many poets who wrote an Arabic language. The fourth there is a book by by the name of Muthanabi it is written by Salabi in fourth section we can of this book we can find poets that they have written in the I mean the poetry in the Arabic language. Similarly another book Hududul alam the frontiers of the world by an unknown author it was compiled in the 982. The unknown author dedicated the manuscript to a member of the Faryabunnaite dynasty vessels of the Samanite in northern Afghanistan it is also written in the Persian but falls into the category of the geography geographical literature. This is I mean the the background of the dominant languages in Central Asia like the first the Arabic language and then the Persian language then how the Central Asian poets writers they realized why we should not I mean write in our own Turkish language so their efforts efforts of for identity in this context we can like already I I shared that this the work of Mahmud Kashgiri the one author it is very important he became deeply convinced of the need to enlighten the Arabs about the Turks and their language and Hudududul developed the reminder of his life I mean that there are two important writers the first one is this Mahmud Kashgiri he tried to convince the Arabs about the importance and significance of the Turkish language and then the next one is the Alisher Nawai that he tried to compare and prove the Turkish language is I mean superior to the Persian so here I'm talking about this the efforts of the Mahmud Kashgiri and later I will discuss the efforts of the another this Alisher Nawai so for many years he traveled through the length and breadth of Central Asia he was visiting its cities and living among its robotic tribes carefully recording all that he saw and hard and settling eventually in Baghdad he reused his notes to write in 1774 AD a book titled Diwan Lohatul we can say I mean to the dictionary of the Turkish language so the work is it is this Diwan it is a sort of encyclopedia in content Central Asian history geography biography genealogy folklore mythology customs traditions language and syntax and many other objects are touched on by this so Mahmud Kashgiri among this mass of data are to be found various evidences of the extent of the impact of Islam on the on the Turks actually he has compiled this data in the Central Asia in the Turkic world and then he went and settled in the Baghdad and compiled his book Diwan there in Arabic language now incorporating Turks in the Muslim history of Iraqi the origin of the Turks it is I mean still debated there are different views of different authors and historians about the origin but it is established that they emerged as a significant political form rather than an ethnic category and in Mongolia in the middle of six centuries Turks were popularly considered better soldiers and royal servants of the new Muslim historian and geographers felt the need to explain their origins and find ways to include the Turks in the Muslim narrative the Turks were therefore incorporated into the Muslim account of creation and work according to their place in the history as descendants of Iyafes one of the new three sons new the prophet of Allah Muslim authors also sought to explain the Turks and provincial presence within the boundaries of Muslim civilization it is very interesting that we can also find that these Turks writers they written some hadiths to prove the superiority of the Turkic language and the Turk people like during the first several centuries followed the the death of the holy prophet peace be upon him various political and religious factions gave currency to thousands of spurious hadiths and defense of their particular tenets are to prove a point of law or doctrine they wish to make so Kashgar related to I mean to hadiths which have a particularly Turkish flag the pass which he gives in his introductory remarks in his book the one total Turk in the introduction he writes that the prophet said learn the Turkish language learn the Turkish language for their for their rule will long and uh Mahmud Kashgiri he declares that he had the hadiths from a reliable Imab of Bukhara and also independently from one in Nishapun both of whom uh have sworn to its authenticity and related with complete Islam he fails high work name either of the two Imams to give the alleged Islam he said if this hadith be true then the learning of the Turkish language is obligatory for every Muslim every be not then the reason still orders it I mean that the learning of the Turkish language is significant and important uh Mahmud Kashgiri he was extremely proud of his Turkish ancestry and his aim in writing the D1 was to facilitate the learning of Turkish by Arabs by 1074 Turks had the seven power of Islam in their hands and the authority of the side caliphs uh had become no more than knowledge thus the hadiths serve the double purpose of establishing a link with the prophet in the same time of showing that the prophet himself had recommended what he I mean Al-Kashgiri was also indicating namely the learning of the Turkish by the the second hadith uh according to Kashgiri uh was obtained with complete Islam from a sheikh al-Imam al-Zahid al-Hussain ibn al-Khalafi who had had from ibn abi al-Dumiya also known as ibn al-Uwarki as well as from a book written by a sheikh abu bakr al-Mufid al-Jerjai had their uh hadiths which he has mentioned it states that God said I have a host which I have called Turk and settled in the east if any people shall arouse my wrath I shall give them into the power of this host uh Mahmood Kashgiri uh while commenting on this second hadith he said that this is then for the talks a superiority over all other people because God took upon himself the naming of them uh he settled them in the most excellent place on earth and territories cause air in the best and he called them by host more work in the Turks Kashgiri writes further he tries to explain that more work in the Turks are to be seen innumerable praiseworthy qualities such as beauty, generality, kindness, breeding, respect for personages, fulfillment of promise, modesty, a lack of boasting, weller and manliness. The hadiths can also be viewed as an enderic attempt uh uh on the part of al-Kashgiri to justify the absorption of power and Baghdad by the Turks since in the light of the hadiths it could be argued that the Arab of a side had by the protection incurred the wrath of God who had uh dear upon his promise brought down to them his Turkish host this hadiths provided the Turks with a religious origin for their name but not for the Turkish people themselves so Turks remember popular uh uh uh a sort of legend uh Arjeni Kohn and the uh white wolf of their origin uh Kashgiri once said that all 20 principle branches of the Turkish people can trace their descent back to Turk. Turk according to Kashgiri he was the son of Yafiz and Yafiz he was the son of Nuh the prophet uh then in his uh entry uh for the word Turk Kashgiri in his T1 he is it is a sort of dictionary soon he has explained uh different words so once he has written their Turks they are uh I mean descendant of the of the Turk and Turk he was the son of Yafiz and Yafiz was the son of Nuh but in another place in his D1 uh uh when he has explained the word Turk so he writes Turk is the name of the son of Nuh uh before this he has written that the son of Nuh he was Yafiz and the son of Yafiz was Turk but here while he is uh I mean explaining the word Turk he writes that Turk is the name of the son of Nuh the prophet the intervening Yafiz with already he mentioned he has omitted here the hadith thus serves to support the eologistic opening paragraph of the D1 in which the atar asserts in the opening paragraph the atar he has written that when I saw that God most high is caused the son of our tomb to rise in the zodiac of the Turks and set the kingdom among the spears of Hever that he called them Turk and gave them rule making them kings of the age and placing in their hands the reins of important authority appointing them over all mankind and directing them to the right that he strengthened them who are affiliated to them and those who endure on their behalf so that they attain from them the utmost of their desire and are delivered from the uh ignominy of the slavish forever then I saw that uh every man of the reason must attach himself to them or else expose himself to their falling arrows and there is no better way to approach them than by uh speaking their own tongue thereby bending their ear and incline their heart and when one of their fools comes over to their side they keep them secure from fear of them then others may take refuge with them and all fear of harm be gone it is the the opening paragraph of the D1. Instead of Arabic words Allah and Rasoolullah Kashgari use Turkish words Tangri and Yalah ush respectively in his D1. Suntr-i-Shayatek Turks had been using the twelfth animal calendar I mean that they are not using this sort of a hijri or Islamic calendar but they are using the Ergun traditional calendar they had no names for the seven days of the of the weekend uh Arabic ones names were used only in the in the city so then we can also find these on the superiority of the of the city of Bukhara and here we can see that once again there is a ship from the uh from Arabic to the Persian language like this so uh Hades on the superiority up for Bukhara Abu Abdullah Muhammad bin Ahmad bin Sulaiman al Bukhari he wrote a book on the capital of Samanids Bukhara somewhat later in nineteen hundred forty three forty four Abu Bakr Muhammad bin Jafar al-Narshakhi who died in nine hundred fifty nine he presented this book to Nuh bin Nasir a history of Bukhara written in erotic language Hades from the prophet and his disciples are quoted on the superiority of this town uh in the 13th century with the people from the greater part nourished no inclination toward the study of the Arabic books Abu Nasir Ahmad bin Muhammad al-Kubawi by request of his friends he translated this book uh into Persian language uh then the last uh I mean the efforts so uh uh about the uh superiority of uh turkey language uh as compared to the uh Persian language already I mentioned this so al-Ishir Nawai al-Ishir Nawai he has written an important book by the name of Muhaq-e-Mathul-Nogatain Muhaq-e-Mathul-Nogatain uh we can um translate a judgment between two languages so like uh Kashgari already uh already he mentioned that Kashgari does not pursue the matter of the genealogy of the of the Turks further but an amplification of this religious origin of the origin of Turks is to be found in the Muhaq-e-Mathul-Nogatain of al-Ishir Nawai al-Ishir Nawai uh he has written that when the prophet Nuh was delivered from the disasters of the flood and once again set foot upon the ground no traces of mankind remained in the world then Nuh sent to the land of Khata his son Yafiz who is said by historian may have been the father of the Turks and he the Nuh met Sam who has been described as the father of the Portians the ruler of the lands of Iran in Turan and he sent Haam who is said to be the father of the Hindus to the land of India historians say that Yafiz father of the Turks was a prophet and for this reason was deemed superior to his brothers actually al-Ishir Nawai in his this book Muhaq-e-Mathul-Nogatain he has tried to compare two languages Persian and the turkey language but he has started from the comparison of the three sons of the Nuh prophet like he had three sons Yafiz, Sam and Haam and he tried to prove that Yafiz he was a prophet and the Turks they are the descendants of the Yafiz so the Turks they are superior to the descendants of the other sons of the prophet like the Sam whose descendants are the Persian and the Haam whose descendants are the Indian people so here he has tried that Yafiz he was a prophet so being descendants the Turks being descendants of the prophets they are superior and their language is superior to the Persian as well as the Hindi language of the India Muhaq-e-Mathul-Nogatain as I already told that it is a judgment between the two languages it is we can say it is that it is a masterpiece of the Nawai it is last work of the Nawai who completed it in December 1499 eddy he defended his thesis that turkey language it is superior than Persian for literary purpose repeatedly in the way he emphasizes his his his belief in the richness precision and millability of the Turkey vocabulary as opposed to Persian for example he has written their tarf say a word for the beauty beauty mark on the woman's face but there is no no comparable word in the Persian similarly he has written that many turkey words have three or four or more meanings Persian according to Nawai like such flexible words that have I mean four three four or five or more meanings and he has also written that the Turkic languages this turkey language have nine words used to identify separate species of duck which illustrates the capacity of the Turkic languages to make more precise distinction Persian according to Nawai has but one word that covers all of these so now let me conclude this discussion that before Islam according to different historians like the Chinese traveler even song and later on this Central Asian writers even song he is written that there were books in Central Asia written in Turkey language but later on the historian said that even he has not mentioned any single title so we can't say that whether they were books written in Turkey language or not later on this the author of the Kitab-ul-Bahin he has written that went to Tabab in a Muslim he came to Central Asia and there were I mean people in priests who have written the turkey language but he exterminated these priests and he also sort of destroyed their books so but then the the the researchers they are they are saying that even this the author of the I forgot his name the author of the Kitab-ul-Bahin he has also not mentioned even a single title of these books written in Turkey language before Islam later on the Arab people they wrote about Central Asia wrote about the Turkey the Turkic people about their history about their geography and all these works we can find in the Arabic language tell the third century history Arabic it was a dominant language of prose in the Central Asian and after the fourth century we can find the the Persian is a dominant language meanwhile we can also see that the the Turkic people they were also writing in Arabic and later on in the Persian languages and but at the same time at the 11th century you can also find a book of this written by Yusuf Khasa derivatives in the ancient Turkey language but this Mahmud Kashgari although he has written his book in the Arabic language but it is about the the turkey people their language their geography their culture mythology history folk lore and all these things he collected data and then he compiled his book while sitting in Baghdad and then Alicia Navai formally Mahmud Kashgari he was I mean on one hand he was trying to convince the Arabic people about the significance and importance of the Turkey language and Alicia Navai he was trying to prove the superiority of Turkey language who are the particularly who are the the Persian language in his book he has written that Arabic it is a sort of sacred language for the people because it is a language of the Holy Quran it is a language of Islam but here he said that here I am trying to compare not the Turkey language with the Arabic language but to compare the Turkey language with only with the Persian language and then he has tried his best to prove his Turkey language as superior to the Persian language so this is the end of my presentation thank you all for your attention thank you very much Dr. Dinachal the floor is open for question okay so there is a question in in in the chat box did Navai also compose in Persian or Arabic what was the position of his tumultuous patrons who funded many Persian works but you need to okay okay thank you actually Alicia Navai he himself at that time wrote poetry in the Persian language initially when he was writing poetry he was composing poetry in the Persian language he was using his pen name which is called Takhalus as Fani so he himself I mean wrote in the Persian language but it is his last book Mohakim Atul Lohaten he wrote this book we can say some almost one years before his death so finally he convinced that Turkey it is superior as to be as compared to the Persian language although at that time also the people they were writing in the Persian language and as I told you that he himself he has written in the Persian language thank you thank you yeah Amir thank you for that very interesting presentation I would like to perhaps take your last point that he composed the Mohakim Atul Lohaten just a year before his death and all throughout his life he had composed in of course Turkish which he's very well known for now but also Persian his divan in Persian is rather quite copious work and the quality of the work is impressive it's his Turkish verse and his Persian verse are equally illustrative of his literary genius do you think however that the fact that he wrote the Mohakim Atul Lohaten just a year prior to his death at the culmination of his career is reflective in any way of his frustration that his Turkish verse was not as widely appreciated as his verses in Persian and in Arabic is this maybe reflective of the wider society of Timurid elites and their kind of focus on Persian and Arabic rather than Turkish actually one reason he has mentioned in his divan this Mohakim Atul Lohaten that why he I mean wrote this Mohakim Atul Lohaten he has written that many Turkish people authors and writers they are writing in the in the Persian language and they are ignoring their own Turkish language so he said that this is my struggle there to convince my own people that why they are sort of underestimating their own language and their writing maybe he has realized this this Turkish identity and you are very right that maybe his works written in the Persian language they have not got so much appreciation that is why that he but he has written that only that I am I am noticing that our own people they are underestimating their language and they are writing in Persian language so I wrote this book and I proved the superiority of the Turkish language for the Persian language so that our own people they may know that our language that is I mean a language of the level of the Persian Arabic and other languages I have some comments and questions one one one just a very small bit that Navai also has an Arabic dictionary which is published by Agastur 11 11 the but but more importantly so I mean you also mentioned that you know instead of Allah in the the one look at the turk look at the turk you have the you have you know the indigenous turkish vocabulary instead of borrowing the Arabic vocabulary so instead of Allah you have tengri and and I don't know there are quite a number of other examples so what's your take on that actually Mahmood Kashfari he collected the folklore of the people different I mean the poetry the folk the folk poetry and the the people the masses the common people they were using I mean these local words and they were they have not used at that time the Arabic language like the Allah and Rasulullah so here he has actually he has written that I am trying to convince the Arab people that our language that is like he he quoted these two hadiths to prove the superiority so he means that our language it is I mean quite important and significant language and we have words for all these religious I mean figures and all these things so maybe he has tried that our language has the capacity and there is no contrast and conflict with the Arabic language and we have our indigenous words right but then sure sure enough but then later various Turkic literary languages they did adopt a word like Allah so then what happened maybe that he tried to prove the language in the religious context because while presenting hadiths to prove the superiority so that is why that he has tried to include these indigenous words in his dictionary that the non-Turkic people so that they may I mean know what we can say the flexibility and the most heart of broader vocabulary of the Turkic language right are you also sure that you know he was kind of doing this folkloric work and then Professor Marhab will have a question so because I mean he himself says that he comes from the Karakhanid you know aristocracy I mean I would frankly I would I would rather read it more as a kind of a political work of pursuing some kind of you know this is dedicated to the caliph so I was wondering if this is somehow a cultural project for a you know a Karakhanid family member you know positioning the Karakhanids in the caliphate I mean by the time he writes this I believe they have already been under the serjuks I think so just wondering so was is there some politics there for sure because he has dedicated this to the caliph but so far as this the the folkloric data is concerned so men and it was that he was trying to explain all of the dialects of the I mean different dialects of the Turkic language so he has collected this folkloric and all these fieldwork data to better explain the the different dialects of the Turkic language thank you just question which when you mentioned the translation of God but Tengeri I mean use of Tengeri I wonder about these Mongolian languages or what later is called Tatar or Merkits and are they mentioned as Turkic languages in these in these texts are they referred to as as Turkic languages I later on Ibn al-Athir refers to the Mongols as a Turkic people but what about Turkic dictionaries Turkic texts that they also see the Tatar the Mongolian speaking tribes as as Turkic actually this day the the Arhun inscription which the the Turkic people they claim that it is their first I mean written sample of the Turkic language it is this it is uh uh located in the in the Mongolia it is not located in the in the in the Turkic region and some some people they have I mean included this Mongolian as the Turkic people but so far as this Mahmood Kashgiri is the one is concerned so he has not mentioned the Mongolian but all of the dialects and different regions of the Central Asia till the basically he was from the Kashgar I mean bordering with the with the China so he is include including all these areas as the Turkic region and not the Mongolian he has not used the word Mongol but only the Turkic word and from different languages like this uh another language just I forgot the name but he has also considered that language as a dialect of the Turkic languages not he has not considered that a separate language but he is considered it is a dialect of the of the Turkic language and that is why he has collected data from the different regions and included all these varieties as dialect of the a broader and a great Turkic language not different languages thank you thank you further questions okay there aren't further questions then I think we should uh close for now and have lunch and then come back I believe in an hour and a half yes a half past one is when we commence the last panel panel four led by and chaired by Roy Fischel it will consist of two presentations one on Nadir Shah and the other on the poetics and protest theology in the late 19th and early 20th century in South Asia all right well then we should thank our speakers as well as the audience uh so see you later then thank you thank you very much thank you goodbye okay bye bye hello sorry I'm a bit late um do you want to start or uh sure I'll just uh well I suppose I'll just introduce you hello everyone welcome back it's nice to have you back um this panel will be chaired by Roy Fischel who is my supervisor and who has kindly um offered to join us and chair this last panel this last panel is I have to admit a little bit close to my own heart because it's very much to do with my own research at least the first presenter's subject is to do with my own research the first presenter is Muhammad Habib Sashmali who is joining us from Istanbul and he's going to be presenting on Nadir Shah's challenge to the Ottomans at the heart of Islam and after that we're going to be joined by Dr Saida Mirsadri from the University of Paderborn and she will be discussing the poetics and protest theology uh that is um that was current in the very early uh era of modernity so we have going from the 18th to the early 20th century covering a wide expanse and a lot of subjects that are intermingled across this Turkotagic world other than that I would like to hand it over to Roy and let's begin thank you Amir and thank you all for joining back from lunch assuming that you're in this area of time zones um um I think that Amir you've presented our speaker so we can start with the first presentation so please go ahead I'll make noises when we are starting to run out of time okay thank you thank you Roy and thank you Amir I'm happy uh to be here and to be in the last presentation to be in the last panel as well uh so everyone is I guess tired and I don't expect tough questions uh in this panel uh so let me first uh share my screen I guess I can yes that's great I just to test whether PowerPoint is working or not I'm shifting pages and it's okay great and we are in the first page yes now first page now you should see something else do you see another page no no we're still in the first page oh that is that is not not okay yeah yeah now it moved and I am but I wanted this way so now for example I again change the page I'm still continuing to change does it affect no now we are on page two oh now we are jumping to five so I think that it's just need to yeah yeah now it's good okay let's let's keep it that way then okay and this might even be better okay thank you so first of all let me tell you that um this presentation is derived from my phd thesis that I defended last September at University of California Davis uh under the supervisorship of Arquites John and it was composed of eight chapters and today I'm going to present apart from the last chapter so the after Nadir expelled the Ottomans from Iran successfully in the end of 1735 after a series of fights to recover the former Safavid provinces since 1730 following this victory Nadir founded what he claimed to be a Sunni dynasty in Iran in 1736 replacing the Shia Safavids and was entitled as Nadir Shah for concluding peace with the Ottomans he proposed five conditions two of which created serious conflict conflicts in the following decade let me show you these five proposals as well so first he demanded the Ottoman Sultan to accept Jafarism the common legal school of Iranians as the fifth Sunni school in the latter's authority as the caliph of all Muslims second Nadir asked for the allocation of a special prayer corner in the Kaaba for Jafiri pilgrims there is a consensus in modern scholarship that the port had considered both demands impermissible from the beginning based on close reading of Ottoman and Persian sources of the time my paper argues that in the first reply in 1736 the port only rejected the Rukh in the Kaaba but tacitly acknowledged Jafarism as a legitimate Sunni legal school however Nadir insisted on the invisibility of Jafarism in Islam's heartland underlining the invisibility of his proposals Istanbul began to reject Jafarism explicitly only after Nadir's insistence why did the Ottomans change their position what were the inter-imperial implications of Nadir's Jafarism and Rukh offers and why did he formulate them as inalienable from one another I explore these questions within the framework of religiopolitical dynamics of inter-imperial rivalry among prominent Muslim empires focusing on the visibility aspect I argue that the shared religiopolitical culture among the Ottoman Persian and Arabic spheres made visibility and publicity the very objects for which the Ottoman and Iranian rulers competed to gain political superiority and Ottoman concession of Nadir Shah's demands would have provided substantial legitimacy for Nadir Shah within and beyond Persia what mattered for the port was more the religiopolitical challenge of Nadir to the house of Osman through shared visible symbols than the legitimacy of Jafarism according to Sunnis the Iranian Ottoman conflict revolving around the Jafarism proposal took 11 years to be resolved between 1736 and 1747 this period can be divided into two as peaceful and hostile taking the outbreak of war in 1733 as the dividing point in what follows I will only explore the first part of the conflict covering the seven-year period between 1736 and 1742 I discuss this period under two dials as inauguration of the proposal and escalation of the conflict taking the year 1738 as the beginning of the escalation period the inauguration section explores Nadir Shah's inauguration of the Jafarism proposal in 1736 and investigates the negotiation process between the Ottoman and Persian delegations in Istanbul in the same year the escalation part covers the continuation of negotiations through diplomatic correspondence between 1738 and 1742 the Ottoman and Persian delegations discuss Nadir's proposals over eight conferences in 13 sessions in Istanbul in August and September 1736 at the end of one month negotiations the Ottoman site explicitly accepted the following three proposals the appointment of residence to the respective capitals the nomination of an Iranian emir ul haj commander of the pilgrims and third freeing and exchanging prisoners regarding regarding the two most controversial demands the port implicitly recognized Jafarism as a Sunni school but explicitly rejected a Jafiri written in the Kabe as modern scholarship commonly assumed that the Ottomans refused to accept Jafarism as a Sunni school from the outset explicitly I will discuss the Ottoman implicit acceptance of Jafarism below the clearest evidence for the Ottoman acceptance is that the peace agreement Ahit Nami Humayun sent by Mahmud I the Sultan to Nadir Shah stated that in doctrine the people of Persia had joined the Sunni sect as before the agreement mentioned the new doctrinal school of the Persians as Sunnism but left the legal school they would follow which was nothing else than Jafarism unspecified besides the Ottomans showed their acceptance of Nadir's state as a Sunni state through the letters of the Sultan the Grand Vizier and the Sheikh Hünistam unequivocly all of these congratulated Nadir for for removing heresy Imatee Asar with At-Radiye and erecting the columns of the Prophet Sunni Iqamati Menara Sunnitesenye in Iran another expression of the new Ottoman acceptance of the Persians as Sunnis was that the Ottomans and the Persians were to add more praises to one another's titles in correspondence due to the correction of the sect of the Iranians the Ottoman site also accepted to send two Ottoman ulema to Iran who were to declare the Ottoman caliphs support to Nadir in a congregational Friday prayer the silence of the Ottoman letters on Jafarism was another indicator of the Ottoman implicit acceptance of Jafarism only the letter of Sheikh Hünistam Pezullah Efendi Zadir Mustafa Efendi referred to Jafarism by name he first listed the three proposals of Nadir that the Ottomans explicitly accepted then he wrote the other demands as the acceptance of Imam Jafar's legal school as the fifth friendly school and the establishment of rukun for the Jafarist in the Kaaba surprisingly the Sheikh Hünistam started to provide his indirect legal excuses for not accepting a Jafiri rukun in the Kaaba and continued the letter without coming back to the Jafiri question he completely omitted the demand for the acceptance of Jafarism as the fifth school the Sheikh Hünistam's mentioning of the Jafiri proposal among Nadir's demands but leaving it unanswered in the letter shows a conscious neglect it gave Nadir the message that the Ottomans had no problem with the Jafiri legal school as long as he did not ask for the explicit recognition of it contemporary historians unlike their modern counterparts underlined the Ottoman tacit acceptance of Jafarism as well. Shemdani Zadir Süleyman Efendi wrote in his chronicle that the government consented to the Jafiri school by reasoning that it is their version school it does not affect us. Muhammed Esther Abadi Nadir's official connector highlighted that the Ottoman sultan's letter did not show explicit acceptance of the Jafiri school Esther Abadi did not write that the port refused to accept Jafarism on the other hand he does explain the clear Ottoman rejection of the rukun offer the Iranian version of the Najaf document which was signed at the end of the Council of Najaf in the end of 1742 in Baghdad drew attention to the Ottoman acceptance of Jafarism in the first instance again the document stated that the Ottoman government accepted four of Nadir's five offers in 1736 including the legitimacy of Jafarism the document states that Ottoman statesmen accepted the Jafiri sect why then did the Ottomans categorically reject to grant explicit recognition to Jafarism this question requires us to look at the internal and external dimensions of Nadir Shah's religious proposals of Jafarism and Rukun Indikaba as modern historians suggest internally the proposal would have weakened the legitimacy of the Safavid dynasty which could have re-emerged against Nadir at any time moreover there were many Sunni subjects in Persia and in Nadir's army to find a middle way between Sunnis and Shis would have helped to conciliate the differences in Persian society in the external side which is the focus of this paper if Jafarism was accepted as a Sunni legal school the Ottomans could not have easily justified their attacks against the Persians on the basis of the Iranian heresy more importantly Jafarism would have worked as a facilitator for Nadir's imperial aims as Nadir's ambitions extended beyond the boundaries of Iran embracing an ecumenical religious wave would have matched with his universal ideals perfectly. Hamid Algar underlines that the establishment of a Jafiri Rukun at Kabe would have been the outward sign of the Ottoman acceptance of Jafarism as the fifth Sunni legal school. Considering the Ottoman compliance to Jafarism this outward sign emerges as the most problematic element in Nadir's proposal from the viewpoint of the port. Negotiations in Istanbul, Ottoman letters to Nadir and Mahmud's instructions to the Ottoman ambassador to Iran show that the port formulated its delicate response by paying attention to the difference between internal and external aspect of Jafarism proposal. It is important at this point to underline that both Nadir Shah and the Iranian mission in Istanbul portrayed the Jafarism proposal only as an internal affair claiming that the compilation of Nadir's kingship in Persia depended on the acceptance of his demands by the Ottoman Sultan due to the former's unsettled authority over his realm. Critically during the discussions among Ottoman Ulema and statesmen regarding the sending of two Ottoman Ulema to Iran the elements concluded that the demanded two Ulema could be sent because the demand seemed to be related to the strengthening of Nadir's uncertain authority in Iran. The royal authorization for sending the Ottoman Ulema shows that the port had no problem with the internal aspect of Jafarism. Unlike its implicit recognition the port unequivocally rejected the external aspects of the Jafarism proposal. The Kaaba stood as the single most critical symbol over which Ottoman and Iranian rulers engaged in a religious political competition throughout the entire Jafarism debates. In the conferences in Istanbul the Ottoman representatives made it clear that the congregational prayer at a designated location for the Jafar pilgrims in the Kaaba is their major concert. After providing several reasons one of which was the creation of this order fitna in the hijaz due to the religious fanaticism of the people of the hijaz against unfamiliar sects they call it that way they emphasized that this proposal is harmful to the order of the sublime sultanate and should be withdrawn. The Grand Vizier's letter also drew attention to the would-be opposition of the people of the hijaz to such a change and express Ottoman uneasiness with the allocation of a special prayer location for pilgrims of a certain country in practice. He underlined that people have so far prayed not according to their country but according to the legal sect they follow across countries. The Grand Vizier's words also implied that the port was not comfortable with the propaganda aspect of a Jafar pilgrim. He wrote that Nadir's achievement in Persia and the sultan's support of it would have been heard by every Muslim, lowly or distinguished in the Kaaba which was the gathering place of ethnicities in the world. Thus there was no reason to create this order in the hijaz. Mustafa Pasha the Ottoman ambassador to Iran was instructed by Mahmud that should Nadir ask further questions about the written issue the ambassador needed to raise the following points. The Ottoman dynasty had acquired the title of caliph of god by incorporating the two holy sanctuaries into the Ottoman domains however they refrained from calling themselves ruler of the haremain hakimil haremain and instead called themselves servant of the haremain hadimil haremain. These holy sanctuaries were like two stable poles and had several special privileges. It was an established custom of the Ottoman dynasty to leave everything in these sanctuaries as it was and to not interfere. In his long introduction to royal peace, Mahmud the first qualified the Ottoman dynasty as possessing the great caliphate and himself as caliph on earth and imam of all people and as deserving to be called the commander of the faithful. The remarks of the sultan and the grand vizier showed that the port considered Nadir's proposal as a challenge to the religious political supremacy of the house of osman in the muslim world. Indeed historical precedence demonstrated that muslim rulers expressed their political challenges to the ruler possessing the hijaz through outwardly pious initiatives in the holy cities and holy cities and particularly in the caliphate. Robert Olson aptly observed that Nadir's goals with his religious proposals were in court to establish his independence as a muslim ruler and also to lay down a challenge to Istanbul's sovereignty and of court. The Ottoman responses clearly clarified that the Ottomans were not going to share their prerogative in the hijaz with Nadir Shah, the first ruler of a newly born union dynasty bordering the eastern frontier of the empire. Nadir's offer would have created a visible change in the Kaaba for the first time in centuries, which would have contributed to Nadir's trans-regional religious political legitimacy posing a challenge to that of the sultan. A jafferir in the Kaaba would have declared Nadir's outstanding achievement of removing heresy from Iran and establishing syunism in Persia five times a day forever to muslims from all around the world. Furthermore, it was highly likely that the syunism in the hijaz and other parts of the Ottoman realm would have opposed such a radical change. In the end, this was an overnight change of sectarian identity after more than 200 years under the force of a severe ruler who adhered to syism until his coronation. By explicitly accepting jafferism as a legitimate legal school and allocating a special corner in the Kaaba for its followers, the great caliph would have taken a major risk that could have harmed not only his own legitimacy but also that of his dynasty. So now I move on to the escalation part. In the escalation period, several reciprocal embassies were exchanged between Istanbul and wherever Nadir was. During this period, Nadir sent five missions to the missions to the Ottoman capital, two of which were returning Ottoman missions, and Mahmoud I sent two embassies to Nadir Shah. First, before waiting for the Ottoman response of 1736, Nadir Shah sent a mission to Istanbul and added two further stipulations to conclude peace, the ending of the fight between the Ottomans and the Russians, and the approval of Russia of the peace between the Ottomans and the Persians. Nadir's introduction of the Russian conditions and insistence on the former proposals made it clear for the port that Nadir was not to be satisfied with establishing authority within Iran. The port was fighting a difficult war against the Russo-Australian alliance at that time, and Nadir kept rejecting to sign peace with the Ottoman Sultan. These were indicators that Nadir was not so inclined toward unity and peace with the great Caliph as he pretended in his letters. Significantly, unlike the case in 1736, Nadir only sent a letter to Mahmoud I not to the Grand Vizier in 1737. Nadir maintained this diplomatic stance, indicating equality in rank between the Ottoman and Persian states until his death in 1747, even after the Treaty of Qarban in 1746. In response, the Ottoman Sultan wrote that the Ottoman fight in the name of Islam against the aggression of the infidel Russians was to continue. Certainly, the religious discourse was to counter and weaken Nadir's religious political discourse, which pressured the Ottoman Sultan to accept Jafarism due to religious unity between the Ottomans and the Iranians. The Sultan also reprimanded Nadir's reluctance to conclude peace with the Ottomans in Indirek, but strong words with reference to international law and diplomacy. The word, the phrase that the Sultan used in the letter was that. Nadir wrote his direct response to the Ottoman reply to Jafarism offer and royal peace document after he has recently captured Kandahar and when he was on the way to conquer India. Ali Mardanhan, the Iranian envoy carrying the letter, died on his way to Istanbul, but the port still received Nadir's letter in August 1739. Nadir's letters had two main claims. First, explicit recognition of Jafarism and the rupt in the Kaaba were indispensable for the peace. Second, the Ottoman Sultan was the great Caliph. Thus, he had complete authority to grant both of these religious demands. He qualified the Ottoman state as possessing supreme sultanate and great caliphate and the Sultan as protector of Islam. Regarding the Jafarism question, he expressed that if it had pertained to either politics or economy, he would have sold it by himself without inconvincing the shadow of God, i.e. Muhammad I. However, he added, this matter was within the power of the Sultan given the religious and legal nature of the question. Nadir basically turned the great caliphate of the Sultan against him as an effective religious political weapon. He aimed to undermine the caliphate of the Sultan by challenging it not directly, but indirectly. Moreover, Nadir's qualification of his offer as religious as opposed to political or economic indicated at least two things. First, similar to the presentation of the Jafarism offer as an internal matter in 1736, Nadir maintained the same discourse that he had no political aim that could possibly threaten the Ottomans. Second, his audacious assertion that he would have solved the problem by himself if it had been about politics or economics was a dangerous showing off of his political and economic might threatening the Ottoman Sultan. In a word, Nadir's insistence on the declaration of the recognition of Jafarism, an establishment of the Rukmin Dikabe, verified for the port that Nadir's real aim went beyond the internal reasons he had presented so far. Moreover, Muhammad I, Ahit Nami Humayun became void as Nadir did not agree to make peace with the Sultan on these conditions. The port waited for the arrival of Haji Ham, the envoy replacing Ali Mardanhan to respond to Nadir's letters. Nadir had written the letter after he conquered India in 1739. Now, he styled himself as King of Kings, Shah-u-Shaan, and Sultan over the sultans of the earth, Sultan Berseratini Jihad, as struck on the new coins in India. The hutpe in Delhi on Eid al-Adha on March 21, 1739 was also read in his name. Nadir's letter to Mahmut I mostly boosted his victory over the Mughal Muhammad Shah. He highlighted that with this victory, the well-protected domains of Persia now extend to the end of India and Indian Ocean. He briefly mentioned the Jafarism offer, clearly repeating his demand of the Sultan. In this letter, Nadir did not change his respectful language towards Mahmut I, whom the Persian Shah again called the processor of the Great Caliphate several times with titles such as Evgi Hilafet, Hilafeti Kübra, Azam Hilafet, and Sultanate Jihana Dari. The ports applied to all the Persian letters carried by the missions of Ali Mardanhan and Haji Han. In total, six letters were sent to the Persian court with the mission of Minif and Nazir Effendi's in June 1741. Two from Mahmut I to Nadir Shah, two from the Grand Vizier to the Itimazid Devle, and two from the Sheikh Iristan to the Itimazid Devle again. These letters marked the categorical shift of the Ottoman position on Jafarism from implicit recognition to explicit rejection. While Nadir Shah gained victory in India and Central Asia, the Ottomans also defeated the Russo-Austrian Alliance in 1739. Mahmut I responded to Nadir's boasting about his victory in India by describing the victory of the standard of the Prophet, i.e. the Ottomans, over the infidels without naming the Russians and the Austrians. The letter presumably underlined that the Ottomans had not fought against another Muslim state, e.g. the Mughals. The second letter from the Sultan dealt with the Jafarism question. Mahmut stated that the Ottoman state accepted three of the Nadir's proposals since they did not include any legal, political, or economic problems. He continued that the Ottoman state had been strictly bound by the Sharia from its birth to the present day. Thus, he added, they asked the Ulema about these proposals, and the Ulema had unanimously agreed that religious law did not allow the acceptance of the Jafiri Legals whose legitimacy. Mahmut's pointing to the Ulema as the highest legal authority was a direct response to Nadir's claim that to accept his Jafirism proposal was within the authority of the Great Caliph. The Ottoman Sultan basically suggested that legal matters were beyond his legitimate authority, as only the Ulema had jurisdiction over the legal area. With this mode, he warded off Nadir's turning of his caliphate against them. Mahmut's remarks also demonstrated a categorical change in the Ottoman approach to the legitimacy of the Jafiri legal school. In 1736, the Port had accepted Jafirism though implicitly. In 1741, however, the Ottoman state explicitly rejected it on legal grounds. Critically, the Port's precaution in implicitly accepting Jafirism at the beginning of negotiations enabled the Ottoman to transition to explicit rejection easily. Mahmut touched upon the political aspect of the proposal as well. The Sultan referred to verbal expressions used by the Persian ambassadors who claimed that there were two reasons for Nadir's insistence on the proposals. First, they would be privileges for Nadir alone among rulers. Second, they would relieve Nadir of the burden and shame associated with Iran's previous sect. These reasons capture again how a seemingly religious proposal was simultaneously political. They show also the incorrectness of Nadir's claim in his letter sent with Ali Mardanhan that the two proposals pertained only to religion and not to politics or economics. They were political proposals from the outset. After underlining the political aspect of the proposal, Mahmut added that the granting of the ability to appoint a Persian emiral hajj would suffice to both of these needs, i.e. gaining privilege and relief from shame. The Sultan reasoned that neither a Muslim ruler today nor earlier Safavid Shahs had attained that privilege of appointing an emiral hajj. Mahmut again clarified that it was not the port but religious law itself that did not allow the acceptance of Nadir's Jafirism proposals. That is why he concluded these proposals should be forgotten completely. Another important indicator of the firm Ottoman rejection of the Jafirism offered seems to have been the sending of the two envoys who were from the finance bureaucracy and non-experts in religious law. Moreover, the ladders of the Sultan and the Grand Vizier, although not that of the Shehir Islam, did not name Jafirism explicitly. They always referred to it indirectly as had been the continuing discursive attitude of the port since 1736, showing the Ottoman decisiveness on this matter. One of the two ladders of the Shehir Islam presented the legal justification for rejecting the Jafir illegal school as a legitimate Sunni school in one major argument. Respectable books of the Hanifist school recognized only four legal schools belonging to Sunni doctrine. These books were full of references to the other three schools, i.e. Shafi, Humberi and Maliki, and distinguished the Hanifi legal weaves from the other schools on every legal matter. Apparently, there was no reference in these books to the legal weaves of the Jafiri school. Approving a legal school as legitimate depended on the weaves of the imams of the legal school recorded explicitly in the respectable legal books. Thus, in the absence of weaves of Hanifi imams on Jafirism, the Hanifi ulema of today had no authority to accept that legal school as a legitimate Sunni school. The way the Shehir Islam justified the Ottoman rejection aimed to close the door completely. When the great Caliph pointed to the ulema as the authority on Jafirism proposal, the Ottoman ulema pointed to the great imams of the Mezhet who had passed away centuries before and who had not granted their approval to the Jafiri legal school within Sunnisim. It meant a deadlock for Nadir's highly desired religious proposal. Regarding the Jafiri rukh in the Kaaba, the Ottomans changed their reasoning there as well. Unlike the indirect reason of Pesar given in 1736, the Shehir Islam now boldly stated that Jafirism was not a valid legal school according to Sunnisim and that there could not be a rukh in the Kaaba for an illegitimate school. All in all, Nadir's insistence on the explicit recognition of Jafirism and establishment of rukh in the Kaaba convinced the port that Nadir's proposal posed a political challenge to the Ottomans. Istanbul thus abandoned its former position of implicitly recognizing Jafirism and rejecting the rukh in the Kaaba with vague political and indirect legal excuses. Now it rejected both of them with explicit and direct legal justifications in such a way that no room remained for Jafirism to be accepted. It was neither Mahmut I nor the current Hanifi ulama but the deceased great imams of Hanafism who could rule on this matter. In the ladders of 1741, the port presented itself as if its earlier rejection was the same as what it now conveyed. From this point on, the Ottomans behaved as though they did not recognize Jafirism even explicitly. Modern scholarship has accepted the official Ottoman narrative in which they presented themselves as a sultanate that had rejected Jafirism offers from the beginning on legal grounds as the actual case. In the face of the categorical Ottoman rejection, Nadir Shah also categorically changed his insistence. Nadir sent Ottoman envoys of Munif and Nazif Effendi's back from Dagestan with two epistles. Out of the two ladders from Nadir in 1742, the Ottoman registrar of royal ladders only includes one. In this letter, Nadir asked the sultan to send two respectable ulama to Persia. These ulama and the Persian ulama would gather in the presence of Nadir. Nadir suggested that with his own interference, all the spirit matters would be sold and peace would be established. In contrast to the Ottomans, Nadir's official chroniclers included only the second ladder in their works. In this second ladder, Nadir demanded territories from the Ottoman domains which he claimed he had inherited from Timut unless the port accepted Jafirism. He named Iraq-Arab, Yarbakir and parts of Azerbaijan which are corresponding to one and the surrounding territories in Kurdistan as the inherited lands currently under Ottoman occupation. Nadir threatened the Ottomans with war by asserting that to solve the question completely, he would come to the Ottoman domains. He concluded his letter with a sarcastic threat. In quotes, I am hoping that if Allah wills, the matter may be arranged there on my arrival. Thus, Nadir pushed his demand further in all directions both by demanding two Ottoman ulama and threatening the Ottomans with war. Around mid-1742, Nadir sent another ladder to Ahmed Pasha, the governor of Badat and repeated the same demand and threat. Either the port would accept the Jafirism proposals or Nadir would march on the Ottomans. Ironically, Nadir Shah still continued to recognize Mahmud I as the great Caliph in both of these letters. This clear inconsistency between discourse and action shows the importance of taking context in the account when analyzing diplomatic discourse. In this specific context, Nadir used the language of inferior, not to show his obedience to the superior, but to undermine the power of the superior more effectively. That discourse would render the Sultan's position wrongful as Mahmud, the great Caliph, had wrongfully rejected the purely religious offer of a Muslim ruler who paid utmost respect to the Caliph and who aimed to do nothing but reconcile Muslim people divided for centuries. Nadir's discourse could address several audiences, such as Ottoman subjects on the Eastern frontier, people from lower and higher classes in Istanbul, people of the Hijaz, Persian subjects, and so on. The port received a summary of Nadir's response in March 1742 from the report of Minif and Nazif Effendi's amount before their arrival in Istanbul. Regardless of Jafirism, Nadir's inheritance claim to Ottoman lands carried the crisis to a higher level and the port sent war orders to several Pashas as early as March 1742. The Sheikh Hristam Said Mustafa Effendi issued a fatwa, declaring the legality of fighting against Nadir next month. Moreover, in line with the post 1738 policies of the port, the fatwa considered Jafirism to be a school within Shizm, which rendered its sanitization legally impossible. In addition, with references to heresy and abode of Islam in the fatwa, the port returned to its age-old religious-political discourse against the Iranians. Thus, for the first time since 1736, the Ottoman side showed that it would recognize the Persians as heretics as before. This was the Ottoman government's counter threat to Nadir's threats. The Ottomans did not give up diplomacy completely, though. In his reply letter, Mahmut I stated that Nadir had demanded too further Ulamato discuss the Jafirism proposal with sincere religious intentions. However, he added, as long as Nadir's aim was to establish affection and union between Muslims and to remove this unity, this fortunate aim would be achieved. Clearly, the Sultan was questioning Nadir's religious intentions. Then, Mahmut wrote that in early Islamic history there had only been this agreement on legal matters through, however, these turned into doctrinal disagreements. This remark meant that even if problems in legal matters regarding Jafirism could be solved, it would not guarantee the solution of doctrinal problems, per se. Mahmut added that those times were times of independent legal reasoning. And the saved party, i.e. the Sunnis, had chosen unity in doctrine and four legal schools in legal jurisdiction. The Sultan basically repeated what the Sheikh Hirstam had written in his last epistle. Not the Ulema of today, but earlier imams of the Medzhet had exclusive right to accept or deny the legitimacy of a certain school. Both the Sheikh Hirstam and the Sultan referred implicitly to the famous post-10th century Sunni legal principle that the gate of independent legal reasoning was closed. To show that rulers were bound by the earlier Ulema, Mahmut followed the next sentence with a carefully selected phrase. Rulers who were in the hands of those sects. Then he remarked that sending two Ulema would be pointless and would only increase the conflict as there was no legal way for Jafirism to be accepted. He concluded that for the good order of both states, Nadir should give up his insistence on Jafirism. This letter closed the long period of diplomatic correspondence and negotiation that had started in 1736. So to conclude, what primarily created conflict between Nadir Shah and the Ottoman Sultan was not the legality of Jafirism according to Sunnis, but the visibility of Nadir's achievement in the corner of the Kaaba, the center of the Muslim world. When the former pertained to the internal aspect of the proposal, which the Ottomans consented to, the letter was about Nadir's external challenge to the house of Osman, which the port did not tolerate from the outset. It was for this reason, a seemingly scholarly conflict over a juristic proposal evolved into a major fight between the Ottomans and the Persians in 1743. However, both parties continued to maintain the political competition below the surface of a legal offer through a shared language. The shared legal and diplomatic language was not simply the arena upon which this rivalry took place. The symbolic use of words and arguments made political competition visible but did not remain only as symbols. They were the bitter things the rivals were fighting for in the Ottoman, Persian and Arabic trans-regional sphere. Thank you. Thank you very much and perfect timing. Very rich and I'm sure that we have so much to talk about here. Florence, why don't you start? And how about if you could just finish the sharing? Oh, perfect. I have two tangentially related questions and one very small comment or suggestion. The suggestion is, I mean, I know you are struggling with, you know, not to repeat words and when you write, but, you know, it doesn't sound well when you talk about, you know, them as the Persians. I mean, simply they were not Persians. I mean, it's just, I don't think that we should use these, you know, loaded categories in this case. I know it's difficult because there are just so many words to refer to these. So anyway, the other, the other more important, more importantly, I mean, I was wondering, so Tucker and Tucker, I'm sure you are more familiar with his work than myself, but he's writing, he writes that basically, Nader had a kind of a, you know, he had, you know, he was playing a double game and he was basically saying different things to the Ottomans. I mean, things that were different from how he was going to sell this project on the home front. So I was wondering what your take on that is. And secondly, I mean, I see, I see in the, I mean, to the extent I'm familiar with this, but I see in the literature, and I see also this in your talk, and maybe this is the way we should move forward. But so I see this tendency of, you know, very much a top down view of all this, all this Nader phenomenon. And this is to a certain extent very much understandable because, I mean, on the one hand, we are talking about diplomatic history, and on the other hand, many of many scholars work on this subject have a set of an international relations background of sorts. So, and basically, you know, I mean, there is the drive to sort of connect this to a broader diplomatic history historical framework. So that's quite understandable. But I was wondering if you can also, if this on the part of Nader, what you take, I'm really interested in what you take on this. So what is this attempt to say goodbye to Trevor Sheehan? Is this only a project of Nader and his sort of central command, central committee? Or is there also sort of a social basis for this? And, you know, I'm really interested in this. Obviously, we do know that there are continuing, obviously, there are soon elements in the Saffron realm. But, you know, I'm saying this because I worked on a text, it's a poetic text. It is from the time of Nader, it's in Turkish. And basically, it's basically a full of dialectic poems about, you know, how to pray in the Shiite way, etc. So very basic stuff, basic theology, basic orthopraxis rather. But before that, you have hardly any text that would talk about these practical aspects of how to be a Shiite in Turkey that is directed to the, you know, former Kuzubash element of Iranian society. So that's why I was wondering, I mean, you know, I mean, so that's why I'm asking if there is a broader, do you think that there might be a broader social basis for, so is there a broader social reception of this goodbye to Trevor Sheehan project? It was a long question, sorry. No, thank you, thank you. These are great questions. And thank you for the suggestion as well in the beginning. So Roy, may I answer right now, or should I wait for other questions? Actually, I think it would better if you answer now, but I just want to jump on top of one of the very important points. And that's something that I found fascinating in your talk is it's a political question that is discussed, at least part of it in the language of religious authorities, or they kind of introduce themselves into the discussion, and then they raise the, or you mentioned the position of the people of the hijaz, if they are willing to see it even being. So there is a tension here between some kind of political question, theological question, and on top of the idea of is it a top-down issue, or is it a broader social affair? So if you can also address this point when, sorry, he's overwhelmed, I guess. Can you make your points a little bit more elaborate, or can you form them in a formal question so that I can get better and respond in a clear way? You know what, answer, Ference, and then I'll formulate it as a follow-up. Okay, thank you. First of all, Thakur's double game argument. First, let me say that I did not study the internal Iranian aspect of the question so much. So I cannot in a position to judge whether it was really as Thakur presents or not, but to me it seems his overall framework plausible. But at the same time, Muhammad Ballan also made a presentation about this and has a workshop paper. He argues that actually what Nadir introduced is not something that can easily be portrayed differently to different audiences. At the end, for example, you remove said and you say that, no, you're not going to be called Shi'i, but Sunni. So he says that these are great changes and you cannot just simply rule them out and you cannot ignore. He says, and Ballan's critique of Thakur's double game argument is that and this also seems quite logical. But again, overall, I agree with Thakur in the sense that this proposal has two main ways. One is two main phases. One is internal and the other is external. I think that Nadir has seen this proposal from this viewpoint as well because if you're not reading the mind of Nadir or somebody in the Iranian palace at that time, they themselves clearly suggest that no, it is only regarding the authority of Nadir within Persia and it has nothing to do with territories beyond Persia. They themselves expressed this. So regarding the second question, the top-down view of Nadir phenomena. Actually, this is something that I also would like to learn more. It would have been great to have more views on this. But I think that at least I argue in my work that even the top-down part of the question is not understood well. So it is difficult to understand more delicate layers of the question without seeing the general framework. For example, in my thesis also discussed heavily the Ottoman and Afghan confrontation in the 1720s. And your question can be more easily answered regarding that period because in the Ottoman realm, even in Istanbul, there were many people and even in the Ottoman army, there were many soldiers who were receptive of Afghan-Eşref Shah's call to them. And this case is strikingly higher in the borderland, especially within the Kurdistan region. However, regarding Nadir's case, I'm talking about the Ottoman part now. There might be some, but the memory of people regarding Nadir by people, I mean Ottoman service, is not so good. So he was, he besieged Baghdad twice and he killed many Ottoman pashas. So many people's subjects, not in the borders, but even in Erzurum, et cetera, suffered from food, et cetera, due to Nadir's amazing marches and campaigns. So the image of Nadir among Ottoman subjects, I guess, was not as popular as Eşref Shah, for example. So I don't know this. However, having said this, there are people in the Ottoman high circles who think that if this goes to another war, if not accepting Nadir's proposals is going to end up with another war and with a major misery, then let's accept it. Koca Ragıp Paşa was of this opinion, for example. So if more research can be done on these individual views, I guess we can find more views regarding the reception of Nadir's call. Because, for example, even today modern scholarship, some of it, at least, discuss Nadir's proposal only as a religious proposal as Nadir himself wanted to be seen. So it comes to mind that then it could also be possible that this same reception had occurred back in time. So I think this is a possibility. Regarding the Iranian side, unfortunately, my thoughts could only be speculations and I don't want to go into speculation. Speculation is in the form of reflection. I have a long list of questions. But Amir, would you like to, because Nadir is so close to your heart? That's exactly why I'm saving best for last. So I was hoping you'd go ahead. Okay. The story itself is absolutely fascinating. Why at this moment, after decades of peace between the Safavids, the Shia Safavids and the Ottomans, we are deteriorating relationship when the strong Shia kind of content declines. So it's a very odd story of political tension that is translated into religious tension at a time where religious tension, attention should have been eased in a way. So could you maybe elaborate a little bit more on this kind of complex political religious issue at this particular historical moment? Thank you. Actually, this was the main question of my thesis. And I tried to answer this question, basically. So you have basically 300 pages of answer ready? 500, actually. Unfortunately, 500. It's my bad. But let me try to summarize them the main point. Before summarizing, let me tell you that I argue that in the 1720s, the Ottomans fought against the Afghans to replace him with Prince Tahmasp and to re-establish Safavid state. This was one of my arguments in my thesis. Second, against Nadir Shah, the Ottomans found an imposter, Safavid prince called Safi Mirza, who came to the Ottoman lands in the 1730s. The Ottomans took him after 13 years from Rhodes Island and sent him to the front against Nadir Shah and the aim of the Ottoman army was to re-establish Safavid state again by taking down Nadir Shah. So it was very clear that Ottomans did not want extremely power, extremely dynasty in their border in the east. My basic answer is that if you consider the big Ottoman territories, it was encircled by religiopolitical and environmental walls and it creates an isolation for the House of Osman. And within this isolated realm, House of Osman enjoyed a monopoly of legitimate rule. Geographically, the south was closed by the Saharan desert and the Indian ocean. So there was no challenging group or dynasty or authority. In the west, it is the Christian Europeans. In the north, it was the Russians and in the east, it was the Heretic Kızılbaş. So if you, for example, want to raise against the Ottoman sultan from Cairo, from Alexandria, from Aleppo, from Crimea, the sultan says that I am the legitimate ruler possessing the great caliphate due to the possession of the Hijaz to holy sanctuaries. So you are the rabble, bari in Fök language. So sometimes people say that this is not by itself, is not sufficient. And I totally get this. Of course, this is not sufficient by itself to maintain your authority as the only legitimate ruler. However, it works as a soft power instrument. The main point is that it's a soft power argument. You can create a narrative around this caliphate issue. And the main function of the caliphate is that a second ruler besides caliphate is not legitimate. So you can enjoy your monopoly over these large territories only by, you can enjoy your monopoly without getting challenged by other by other dynasties. So what happened in 1722 is the breakdown fall of the Shia Safavid wall that encircled and protected the Ottoman domains and the legitimacy of the House of Osman for centuries. Now the Ottomans are open. The House of Osman cannot be easily, cannot easily continue its legitimate authority because there was now another alternative. And there were two main vulnerabilities of the Ottoman domains. First, the borderlands, the Kurds, and the Bedouin Arabs all the way from Georgia to Basra. And second, the Sharif of Mecca. The Ottomans did not have a clear and unchallenged and unquestioned authority over the Sharif of Mecca. Overall, after all, the Ottomans did not conquer Hijaz. The Sharif of Mecca himself submitted to the authority of the House of Osman and Sharif of Mecca enjoyed a very semi-independent position. So if an alternative power can show itself that it can protect Hijaz more effectively, that it can provide the Hijaz in a more better way than the Ottomans did, then he can easily shift his position. And then you can see the retraction of Ottoman domains quite easily and fascinatingly. The Ottomans could lose the Kurdistan era, the Basra, Baghdad, Hijaz all at once. It was a possibility. If you also think the technologies of war at that time, the power of the center over the periphery was quite weak. So that's why I argue the Ottomans did not want to have a possible alternative power beyond their frontier in the East. Fascinating way to frame this question and definitely another did the Ottomans a very good service in India. So in that sense of knocking down any kind of competition from there. No, thank you for that. Amir, it's just I'm aware of the time and since you are the master of ceremony. Even if there were hours of time, I think there wouldn't be enough time. I feel like me and Habib should have like our own two-man conference where we just dedicate the rest of the day. But we will definitely have to discuss because especially with what Ference raised on the internal and domestic issues speaking to this relationship. There are so many things that I would like to discuss with you on how internal state formation under Nader is influencing the discourse on are we Jafari Shi'i or are we Sunni, how he's kind of inflicting it very differently to different audiences in order to kind of maximize his legitimacy. Even the Council of Najaf is a very good example of this. But yeah, as I said, the questions that I have rattling around my mind, we're going to have to leave that for a proper discussion. It's not going to be one or two questions. That will be my pleasure. We should move on to our next speaker. Thank you very much for this fascinating paper and no less fascinating discussion. It is exciting to find the two people who care about Nader at the same time and place. I'm very excited about the next paper because we are looking towards South Asia where I am based. So Saida, please, if you could, I'll give you the stage now. What happened? We lost you for a second. So if you can start. Sorry, the connection was cut. Okay, perfect. So please go ahead. Sure, my screen. Can you see it? Yep. Okay. Hi everyone. Thanks for being here now to listen to my presentation. I might be disappointing you because unlike the other speakers since yesterday who would like more historical now to approach, mine is more of literally philosophical or theological nature and come from the background of philosophy of religion. But the good news is I'm not going to talk about all those boring philosophical issues and I'm more going to recite poetry to you and have you because I know you're already tired. So we're going to more have static pleasure than anything else, like more intellectual. I'm going to introduce two Muslim poets around the turn of the 20th century who responded to this, the sociopolitical situation that we're in almost in the same manner. The first one is Muhammad Iqbal, the Pakistani national poet. So these two figures are very important in their own cultures and countries. Iqbal is also regarded as a spiritual father of Pakistan, the one who had the idea of an independent Muslim country. But at the time when he composed this poem, there was no Pakistan, it was India. So Indian, I don't know, slash Pakistani poet in his poem, Shikwa, Complaint in 1911, composed in 19 or published in 1911. And the second piece of poem is by Muhammad Aqif Ersoy. He is also a very important in Turkey regarded as the Turkish national poem poet in his and the poem, the piece of poem of his, which I'm going to introduce is titled the Arabic translation translated Oh God is there no dawn to this ominous night composed in 1913 or published in 1930. What is strikingly interesting in these two pieces of work, which I found is the motive they use, both of them use and the way they react to the calamities of time, their time just to remind you of the historical background against which they compose these poems. It was like the time when Islam was in decline, the Ottoman Empire was losing territories to the enemy like the western Christians. Islam is losing its glory, not just that like wars are all around the Muslim world, Muslim countries, some of Muslim countries are colonized. There is war and bloodshed everywhere innocent people die, are killed like hundreds and thousands of them every day. So this is the setting. And faced with this, this much of pain and suffering, these two poets respond unlike what is what is the normal in the Muslim tradition, not with patience and forbearance and accepting their destiny, but with complaint. And then beyond that with with rebelling and protesting against God. So this makes their works in my eyes unique. And again, I said I'm coming from a philosophical like theological background with huge interest in world literature and languages. So this is more of this nature than historical or nautical. So what I detected with in these two pieces of poem was the motive of the pious rebel or the rebellious pious. And what do I mean by that the repious rebel is is a believing person in this case a believing Muslim who does not abandon the belief in God or his or her love for God, nor does he or she accept it with forbearance and patience, but rather rebels and accuses God while remaining loyal and loving him or her loyal to and loving him or her. So unlike the atheist who faced with like or a believer faced with suffering, who abandons faith. And a pious rebel does not abandon faith, keeps his belief and faith and love for God, but still does not accept the status quo and rebels and does not see anything beautiful in all these pain and suffering and does not accept his or her destiny and protest against God. And in the context of such the context where these pious rebels appear, one can observe that humans show that they can raise themselves above God that humans could surpass God in their morality, reminding God of the divine justice and divine duties in respect to his or her creation. If you would ask what is so special about that, I should I should mention certain preliminary points in order to make the case more clear. So I here I raise two questions in response to these questions that my point would get clear. And you would see why these the similarities between these two pieces of work are extraordinarily interesting. So the first question, what is so special about this motive? And second is, where could this motive be traced? In response to the first question, what is so special about this motive? I should very, very briefly mention what was or what is to the state Islamic traditional response to the problem of evil, which is called like the responses they give are classified under the rubric of theodicy, theodicy is any attempt by any religious or non religious tradition to justify the existence of evil in the world or justify God in the face of evil. So the Quranic response usually given by the scholars to the problem of evil is according to the Quran, the response is it's either test or trial or warning or for the purpose of soul making or spiritual growth or punishment. So evil is instrumental is and for greater good. And it is in fact no evil, it serves greater goods. And Islamic theologians philosophers finding the Quranic response not systematically enough or convincing enough provided also their own responses, which I list here very briefly. It's just a huge discussion, but I just briefly list here. Evil is caused by human free choice. This actual world is the best possible world attributed to Al-Ghazali. Evil is necessary for the existence of the material world. Evil is a privation of good, absence of good, and hence has no actual existence. Reward in the afterlife outweighs this worldly pain and suffering. Evil is a means to greater good. So you can see whatever response they give, one thing is for sure, evil does not exist. Evil is what we regard and assume as evil. It's not actually evil because it is an instrument for a purpose, for a key loss. And therefore it is good. So no recognition of the existence of genuine evil, let alone providing any room for objection, complaint or protest. Going to the Sufi tradition, one would expect to get another response that would be more existential, more giving more, providing more room for human complaint. But it's not the case, it is even worse. Sufis glorify suffering based on the Qur'an, on the Qur'anic narrative that offers ample examples of what it means to be Muslim, literally resigned, completely surrendering oneself, heart and body to God in a state of perfect trust, they say, that suffering is they go again to that idea that suffering is for spiritual growth and for soul making. So this led to the frequent idea that distress is a sign of divine favor as a setical view which became widespread in some Sufi mysticism, which often identified the highest degree of spiritual accomplishment with the virtue of ridah satisfaction with a divine decree. As a result, the saint opened heartedly and without hesitation, accepts tribulations, simply because they are from the God whom he or she loves. This is regularly encountered in the Sufi literature, life with all its hardships is divine gift in itself. So again, accepting pain and suffering with open arms. So I come to the second question. So the first question was, what is so special about this motive? What is special about this motive is you cannot find the traces of it in the Islamic tradition. The second question is, then how can we find the traces of it? How can we trace it back? Where does this motive come from? According to Navid Kermani, in his book, The Shrekngotas or English The Chair of God, with the subtitle Atar Job and the Metaphysical Revolt, which was published in 2005 and recently also translated into English, one can find this motive in Atar's Rebelling Fools. So Fariduddin Atar, 13th century Persian poet and mystic according to Navid Kermani in all his works, but especially in the Book of Suffering or Musibat Nome, gives, like, introduces this motive of rebelling fools who rebel against God, but they are fools. So in response to the question, how can suffering and injustice be reconciled with the idea of good, loving, old, powerful and all-knowing God, which is called a problem of evil, Atar's Rebelling Fools answer with revolt. Revolt against God quarrelling by and by quarrelling with God. And this is epitomized in the figure of Job in the Bible according to Navid Kermani. And just to remind you that the Quranic Bible, unlike the biblical Bible, biblical Job, the Quranic Job, unlike the biblical Job, does not protest, accepts all the suffering and pain granted to him by God until the end with patience and with supper and forbearance accepts whatever comes over him. So Navid Kermani argues right, it is true this biblical Job, this biblical Job motive could not be found neither in the Quran nor in the Islamic tradition, whether philosophy or theology or Sufism, but it could be found in Atar's works, especially in Mosif Atnami. So I brought a quote from the book about the Job motive, clinging to God, but simultaneously denying him the attribute of goodness. And finally, the wording of this negative emotion towards God, these are all elements of the Job motive, which is precisely not constituted by mere accusation or mere forbearance. The motive can be found in all of Atar's verse epics, though in an extremely pessimistic variation in the book of suffering, for here the poet describes suffering and the consequent rebellion more drastically than any other work of Islamic literature. So it's Atar in this is really unique, according to Navid Kermani. And what is interesting is in all the responses given to the problem of evil in the Islamic tradition, you see this optimism, this rather naive optimism, that the world is the best possible world, the end is going to be well. So all the evil and suffering in the world is justified. But in the book of suffering, the dominating mode and tone is very pessimistic and very dark. And of course, Atar was not the first one who introduced the idea of these foes, these rebelling foes. It has its history, the Islamic tradition in the image of the wise foes or Ohala al-Majaneen in Arabic or Kharrat Mandana Divaneh Persian, they already exist in the Islamic tradition and Atar is familiar with them. They were mystics, these Ohala al-Majaneen, who acted against social norms, defied the Sharia, questioned the religious authorities, but also questioned the political rule. And in order to protect themselves from the accusation of heresy or anything, they pretended they played the fool, they pretended to be insane. So under the guise of insanity, they could question everything from the religious authorities to political rule and at the same time refuse from following the Sharia. So this was like a motive already there and Atar was aware of that. But what is unique about Atar's fools is that they question not only the religious authorities and the political rule, but also God. They criticize not only the social injustice, but also divine justice. Unlike atheists, they refuse to deny the existence of God in the face of pain and suffering or turn away from him or her. They believe in God, but refuse to accept the Creator world as it is. So this is what is called like quarreling, the motive of quarreling with God. And Navid Karmani mentions that this idea of quarreling with God again is not without its traces in the Islamic tradition. Quarreling with God was especially widespread among the poets of the Turkish Bakhtashi Order. The Anatolian mystic and poet Yunus Andrem, was immersely popular to this day, criticized the Serat bridge, which all the dead had to cross even though it is finer than hair. And he also disapproved of the scales with which God weighs up the good and bad deeds of humans. A bridge, Yunus said, is built for people to cross it, not to fall down. Scales are fit for a grocer, but not for a God. A different Bakhtashi dervish, Khaigusuz Attal, said, you've built a bridge from her so that your servant comes and walks across it. We want to stay where we are. And if you are a hero, God, then walk across it yourself. This is in the Sufi tradition. And as one of the speakers yesterday duly mentioned, Yunus Andrem was influenced by the Persian mystics. So it is very much possible that this motive found its way in Anatolia through Yunus Andrem. And this is very much the motive we can find in Attar's works. Outside of mysticism, we can also find the traces of this motive of quarreling with God. Doubts about the justice of God's actions run through the entire poetry of Arab Persian culture. But what is clear about them, they are atheists. So they are just like some of them are accused of being atheists that some of them, like Omar Hayyan, some of them openly said that they were atheists like Ibn Raawendi and Al-Ma'ari. So this is no surprise to see them question God and question his or her justice. But as for the mystics, in fact, they are questioning God, apparently they are questioning God, but what they are questioning is the Ulamas conception and understanding of the day of judgment. So they are not questioning God and divine justice, but rather again the Ulamas, even if apparently they are questioning God. So again, as Kermani says, and I agree with him, this heretical piety is unique to Mus'ibat-Name. It seems to me, however, I'm quoting Kermani, that the book of suffering still constitutes the most violent outburst of heretical piety within this Islamic cultural realm. There is probably no other Islamic texts in which Job's motives are as central and as varied. Here what he means is the biblical job, of course, as in the book of suffering, the motive of cursing existence, suffering from death after a long life, but above all, the turn against God in hardship and the appeal finally to keep the promises he has made to humans. So if we take Kermani's, accept Kermani's claim, then this is a kind of what is suggested in the book of suffering is a kind of protest theology or protest theority or anti-theority, anti-theology. And this is a movement that started especially after the Second World War, and the advocates of these movements were Jews who directly or indirectly experienced the Shoah, but also there are some Christians amongst them who suggested this idea of protest theority or theology. According to them, God is not all good, so they question the omnipelavents of God. God is all-powerful and all-knowing, but not all good. So like Job, they say, we should keep protesting and rebelling till we draw the attention and favor of the divine towards us. So the idea is, as in the book of Job in the Bible and many other cases, God is like this all-powerful king, this sovereign king who can do whatsoever he wants. And he is just unmindful of his creator world, of his creatures, and we should keep protesting and rebelling until we can draw his attention towards us and to make it clear to him that he is acting unjustly. So this being said, now I come to these two pieces of poetry, in these two pieces of poetry, as I said at the beginning of my presentation, I could find the same motive that is the motive of the rebelling pious or the pious rebel or this is the motive of a quarreling pious, rebelling pious, whatever you want to call it, the motive of the biblical Job present in these two pieces of poem. And as it has come clear, the reason why it is strikingly interesting is that this is not at all the normal response a Muslim, a believing Muslim, a pious Muslim would give to the problem of suffering and pain. I would read also the poems, of course it is not all the like all the verses of these poems, just I selected some just some few verses in order to give you the impression of how it is like. I will also read them in the original language because the words and the melody used in these poems are instrumental to convey this mode of protest and rebellion. So since the form is also at the service of the content, I will recite them in the original and then translate them. The translations are mine amongst you are those who know Urdu and Turkish, so if they're please correct me because the translations I found for Shikva, I didn't like, for Akifar Soy's poem I couldn't find at all any English translation online, maybe in Turkey that are in libraries, but online in Germany I couldn't get any translation. So these are mines, mine translation correct me if I'm wrong. So in Shikva complained Mohammad Iqbal who is also a very important philosopher himself, so he's a poet philosopher starts, starts saying like depicting how the situation is in the Muslim world and imagines a garden, the garden of slum which is now withering away, the trees are turning yellow and dead and the garden is abandoned and he is like this Bulbul, like this what is Bulbul, this nightingale which is sitting in the in the midst of this garden and is complaining to God. So I start Jorata amuz mere ita besokhan he mochko, Shikva Allah se khalkan bedahan he mochko. The strength of my words is encouraging to me, word to me my complaint is against God. So the word he's using is khalkan bedahan, those who know Urdu in Persian this is like they can understand it is stronger than word to me, it's like may may dust be into my mouth, I how do I dare to say that but I'm saying that my complaint is against God. Oh God listen to the complaint also from the faithful to you, listen to some complaints also from the one accustomed to praise you. And then he depicts the scene how the situation is that slum is losing its glory, that Muslims like the Tawheed is is going lost in this world and instead the cross is getting power, the ringing bells of the churches are now heard and half of that as if God is not aware of all this, he says Khandazan khof ehsaos tojehe knehee, apne Tawheed kakosh paos tojehe knehee, infidelity is mocking, do you have some feeling or not? Do you have any regard for your own Tawheed or not? And then he goes on reminding God of all the services Muslims have given to God all throughout the Muslim history and like reproaching God, reminding God that if it were not for Muslims, your message of Tawheed would not be spread in the world. If it was not for Muslims, nobody would have known about you etc etc. So this is where he says Bausi and Muslim Nikia al-Khamterah. So reproaching God says, he says, how strange was the sight of your world before us? Here the stone was adored, there the tree worshipped, the human eyes being accustomed just to what they could see, how could they ever be amenable to accept that God they could not see? Are you aware at all? So this Tawheed kumalum is very strong to my ears but are you aware at all? Can you really realize who is the one who raised your name? It was the strength of Muslims' arm that did the service to you. And then again reproaching God goes on Which nation did become exclusively the seeker of you and became embroiled in war's calamities for you? Whose world conquering sword did world's ruler become by whose takbir did your sword in line become through whose fear idols did perpetually remain alarmed falling on their faces saying Hualahu ahad. So alluding to the Quranic verse Hualahu ahad. So he goes on saying like, if it were for Muslims all the idols would remain on earth, we turned the idols down and had them shout Hualahu ahad. And so just reproaching God and just reminding God of all the services as if God is not aware of them all. So you see this motive of this rebellion pious who turns also in anti-theodicy mentioned in this motive of Job like this pious rebel turns towards God and as if this old powerful king unmindfully is ignoring his servants reminds him of all the services and reminds him that he should now give the services back. And then when he goes on it the poem takes a very interesting turn where we see that now Iqbal plays the role of the jealous and passionate lover who is said that his beloved is now abandoning the garden the garden of Islam or all Muslims as these passionate lovers are sad that this beloved is now turning towards other lovers and abandoning their garden going to another garden. And says what the word Harjai is a very strong word. I don't know what connotations this word had at a time when Iqbal composed this poem but there's a purger word which means the person who is everywhere and in Urdu dictionaries as I checked it means both unfaithful so normally unfaithful as it is in Ottoman Turkish and also in Turkish today that Harjai means simply unfaithful. So it's not so a stronger word but it also can mean prostitute so to address God in such a language is very strong so he's playing this jealous and passionate lover who is mad at his beloved who left him alone. But after this rage and anger in Farsi he turns and says oh that happy day when you with elegance will come back when you unveil to our congregation will come back. Well Iqbal knew very well about Persian poetry most of his poems like 70% of his poems are in Persians he wrote both in Persian and in in Urdu his major work the reconstruction of religious thought in Islam is very much influenced by the Iranian thinkers because his PhD was under development of thought in in Persia. So he oftentimes quotes different Persian poets atar he doesn't quote but he's very much influenced by Molana and he regards Rumi as his guide in one of his books like Dante's Virgil guiding him towards the heavens. So the probability is there that he was very much familiar with this motive found in Aptar's poetry because he mastered the Persian literature. So this being Shekva now I go to the the second poem by Mahmada Kaffir Arsoy with the title Yara Bursuz Gijan Yokun Sabahu. Already from the title you can you can guess that the tone will be rebellious and and the atmosphere is very pessimistic and dark. Oh Lord is there no dawn to this ominous night is is the first title and the first verse um so he goes Oh Lord is there is there no dawn to this ominous night does the deliverance of the miserable come no earlier than the day of resurrection or the day of judgment we yearn for light but you grant us burning fire we are burning the yell you pour floods of blood upon us to drown and then again he too goes undepacting the situation of um the Muslim war the misery that that the coffer or or infidelity is rising Islam is it's declining um the message of tawhid is getting lost etc and again as if God is not aware of that he turns to God and says Islam is the most important thing in the world Yara Bursuz Gijan Yokun Sabahu. Should Islam be eventually downtrodden and dragged around or God what loss is it and what degradation and again here openly and closely questioning the divine justice says what is the point in crushing and destroying the press why didn't your justice instead annihilate the oppressor as you remember again in that motive it was humans positioned themselves above God and show that the morality they can they can they can be higher than God or gods um and then he goes on the perpetrator is kept alive while the innocent is dying the sin belongs to someone else while someone else is paying as if God is not aware of all these injustice um many questions are silenced by you cannot question um this is an illusion the Quranic verse that says he cannot be questioned about what he does but they will be questioned so it's like any time we ask questions you silence us with you cannot be you cannot question me or he that is God cannot be questioned so humans should always quietly accept whatever happens to them and they are always silenced human human faces these mysteries with terror so um you can see that um the in the title of man avid karmani's book it was also a terror of God his idea is that in um in attire's book the figures what they feel when they encounter the divine is mostly fear and terror and no awe or admiration or or or beauty so God is for them absolute terror um and the world is also nothing but beauty but terror um arising or something um and then uh Mahmada Arso goes on like again talking about the situation of the Muslim world and then says madame oh you divine justice if you wanted to burn you should have burned the evil doors but instead you picked up us to burn it and and and then he ends his poem with this brilliant verse which is again putting a question mark in the divine justice um is it not enough all the calamity you went through woe to me awesome croon is again like that um that phrase like may my mouth turn dry um that's woe to me but don't you exist you the divine justice so as you know the the biggest like the most important divine attribute in Islamic tradition especially in the Shia tradition is divine justice and uh Mahmada Qafar so very beautifully questions this divine justice which is um one of the elements of the motive this motive of the Berlin pious that I mentioned at the beginning so I end the conclusion it's strikingly interesting to preserve that the motive of the pious rebel suggested by the Persian poet mystic attar could be found in the poems of two of the modern muslim poets from two different corners of the muslim world one in turkish and one in ordu considering the fact that attars pious rebels and their metaphysical revolt remain unique and without likeness in the muslim tradition the presence of this motive in those two modern muslim poetic pieces gains more importance this motive might be a traveling motive that found its way from the Persian mystic poetry to the different corners of the turkotagic world how were the hypothesis needs further studies thank you for your attention thank you very much uh it was indeed very pleasing aesthetically beautiful things and the beautiful translations so thank you for sharing this with us um may I ask you just to stop the share so that I have no idea how it works go to the share screen yeah but I lost the share screen I don't know what it where it is uh you know I'll I'll share and then I can so I'll be a bit brutal about it and then I can stop share yeah that's good need work uh okay um oh perfect oh thanks yeah um first of all we have already a question in the chat uh can you expand on the concept of suffering as part of faith enlightenment I don't get the question um could the faith enlightenment the person faith and enlightenment could the person who asked the question I just I see only letters so I don't know who that is can you please elaborate I think we can circle back to that question uh yeah uh fairy please um it's a little broad question just a very small comment first you might maybe you want to check the dates of of Caigus's other I think there was a late 9 14th I think he died in the 15th century okay so well in any case it was just a direct quotation from the book but thanks for the hint all right uh so so I was now I was wondering I mean there is this uh reading of yours uh regarding suffering which uh I think is is follows a kind of a Bakhtinian uh pattern that is uh sort of the questioning of of the the order uh by some certain uh uh sort of uh anti-nominal elements like like Sufis uh so Bakhtin was talking about a laughter and and will in the poetry of Rabeli uh and so sorry so I was uh wondering if uh if we can also read the this kind of attitude as as not necessarily not necessarily you know it's not just you know not just a questioning of of the uh of the divine order or that is the order of society but also actually uh a statement or an assertion of that order you know that would be that would be a question uh even I'm not sure if I got your question right but um so basically you know when when questioning the fundamental fundamental of something you might at the same time you also you are asserting that that would be the right thing you know what what is this fundamental something but the divine order so this to see this divine God's God's justice so God's goodness right so when you when you questioning when you are questioning it uh uh so it is you know the question is is this a kind of revolt or is it is it actually a call for the confirmation of the divine order now so the question is is it is it a fruitful way of you know a way of thinking about it well um the the point is like um of course it's more the discussion that is discussed in the the context of philosophy of religion that the minute you say God is absolutely good and everything is good in whatever he or she does then you are not recognizing the existence of evil and if you want to recognize the existence of genuine evil and you want to fight against it you either should say God is either not omnipotent or omniscient or is not good and there are many such responses there are also responses given to the problem of evil assuming that God is limited in power added knowledge um so that these two propositions God an omnipotent omniscient good God exists evil exists traditionally they will say evil does not exist um this God with these attributes exists but if you want to accept the existence of evil genuine evil then you have to think about these divine attributes either you have to limit the divine power or no and knowledge or you have to um say God is not good and merciful etc and whether that's fruitful or not it's in some way it's fruitful because then in the first step to act against the evil and suffering in the world is to accept this existence so very much the the approach of the classical um Slavic responses is very escapist there's just there is no evil we deny it problem solved whereas it really exists and and there is a silence also so this could be instrumental for oppressors to oppress the oppressed even more saying like you shouldn't object this is a divine decree you should accept so even the sultans can also argue of this way and they did so if you want to question the the earthly authority you should first question the divine authority i would say um and this is what uh anti theology or the odyssey suggests and the you know i i hope i could respond to your question um thank you yes um i would like to uh ask you about the intellectual heritage of this movement um specifically with regard to the idea of being in pain and that as a road to to express discontentment uh against god did they speak to rumi at all because it really smacked of some parts of rumi's poetry especially when i think back to beishinawine nai uh asjadoyah haqayatm khanat there's so much that this movement could draw from that's uh kind of corpus of literature by rumi did they acknowledge him or was it mostly uh atar that was first and foremost uh in their minds um i wouldn't say whether this motive could also be in found in rumi i doubt for rumi um um problem of pain and suffering in the world is instrumental for for again soul making growth spiritual growth etc so even when there are many poets like rumi um longing to go back to their origin but it's more like um like out of their love their divine their love they have for the divine etc so this motive of a rebelling uh price you can by no means i would say find in in rumi it's a more um yeah their phonage sb so it's like more based on the idea of god as beauty and love so this put the neoclatonic idea i see hey come up please thank you uh thank thank you saida for this wonderful presentation it was really lovely to hear all the verses uh just and i also uh just admire how you navigate uh between a language it was fascinating uh it's it's great one thing we about the ottoman version of the memetalkives uh verse there was it was just something quite minor but i just say this it might be there might be some other uh mistakes also in in typing so it will be better for you just to check uh before publication uh there was a all male on life there was there was a bird or male or male and it was written only with elif instead of elif and well uh so love is missing and you can just check the other verses as well my question uh is so you make a comparison between past and today uh and in the past you look at pain and suffering and the individual uh taking the individual as the unit of analysis individual pain individual suffering and ikbal and akif from the uh from the modern world but uh their suffering or pain is not individual but communal uh communal tragedies or uh sufferings so for example did you see examples of similar uh communal sufferings and expression of them in in in literature let's say during the uh invasion of mongols uh to the islamic lands or for any other time i i i don't know and i don't know but i i thought that to make a comparison between more similar sufferings could be uh uh and more uh i'd love to say uh could make more sense uh in understanding the relationship between past and today uh in in literature but i'm i'm very uh far from the study of literature and uh and so on so i i may be uh i'm totally uh losing a point and thank you again um you know welcome thanks for your question but i would say like um i should object because because you said like um the pain and suffering atari is talking about is uh individual whereas akif arsoi and ikbal's um pain and suffering felt pain and suffering are collective uh which is not the case like in the case of atar it was the same thing and there were some wars um like kermani like around 30 pages this talks about the background uh the historical background there were wars um happening and um there was also news of the mongols attacking the muslim lands it's what kermani claims that atar was aware of so it was like a setting um where like pain and suffering is is like collective pain and suffering is is um in the society present and atar also gives many examples of the cases of a person like many poor people who turn towards god and ask for their risk for their bread uh daily bread and them because like uh feminine and hunger is rampant and then in response god uh is just silent and and then the beggar uh goes to the to the mosque and um crushes the window saying if if you don't give me bread i would do this and that so it's just he in in many of of the uh examples that atar brings in there are um present um like cases of collective suffer collective suffering so it's not at all personal and if it were individual suffering it would it would be rather very modern because like existential suffering this individual suffering that i'm suffering and god is silent this is very much modern it is not at all pre-modern so for atar it's also the collective suffering and in in the case of other mystics it is just yes they are all subjecting and and um any agony turned towards god but it's usually in the relation with god why have you turned against us why are you silent it's usually in this case existential questions but really humanistic like existential questions that are raised in the 20th century and 21st century dominantly are absent in both in atar's works and as well as um mahmadaka verse in the class so in that sense they are no matter not all thank you you're welcome actually in that sense if if i could get the question of suffering which one of the points that you made that i um found very interesting is the difference between the biblical job and the quranic job and the fact that we have the biblical one kind of sleeping here why do you think is that why this choice which which is a choice that those people those writers made right yeah well the motive i would say the motive was already there and they just simply picked up the motive and uh the question why atar is very much using the the biblical job's motive and karmany in his book goes into the historical survey and says that like there were some jews in neishabur at that time and the chances are that um that atar was very much familiar with the biblical job's motive etc so he also has some historical surveys there and then this motive comes to to anatolia and then sub-engine sub-count yeah no i understand the process that you are talking about but there is a difference between being familiar with the motive and picking it up and using yeah picking it up and not the other motive with whom i'm sure that you were familiar so so there is a conscious process here that i i find very interesting yeah as for the case of iqbal i can say because he was a philosopher too so my own phd thesis was on muhammad iqbal's metaphysics so that i can say but akif al soy is just a poet why he uses that i don't know what you'd ask him but iqbal is in this sense very modern because he emphasizes very much like the the anthropology iqbal introduces in his metaphysics is very strong in a traditional Islamic philosophy and metaphysics human being has no place everything is just filled so as this quotation famous quotation by modern philosophers is that the god the traditional god is so huge and big and spacious that lives no room for him being whereas in in modern philosophies the trend is towards even theology to place human being in the center and for iqbal it's the same it's the same thing he for him him being is very important him being is like he can unlike the Islamic tradition can stand before god and question god in in and and just because um he has the divine attributes he's just as important as god is so there is more room for him being and it's why he picked like he picked up this motive i would say but i'm not like a person i have no idea um now it's interesting and since we have a few more minutes we started a bit later than half past so i i i i really want to to pick on that point for the for iqbal because you are an expert in iqbal why do you think that he developed this kind of understanding what was the influence of him distancing or for this distance for more traditional ways of of understanding is it do you see it as familiarity with western philosophy and with anglo education yeah he got his education in in um in germany like he wrote his ph he was two just two years or the best no sorry four years in europe at cabbage and um in germany i think in heidelberg in munich and um he was very much familiar with the german idealism um german idealism human takes the center and he was very very well informed by um shia um philosophies where there are many like new ideas there so he just made a melange of all these um new philosophical developments and his own um preoccupation was to he was he was an indian so indian subcontinent was colonized so his own concern was to give back to muslim at least muslims in india um the strong like self strength like strength and self conscious like self um confidence so that they could like stand on their own feet and make their own destinies against them the traditional understanding which was very much ashari which which is very much deterministic everything is in the hands of god you should even in turkey to this day this is very dominant surprisingly enough that this destiny is just something written there up there and you cannot change it so it was against this idea he regarded future open nothing is determined by god and you can just um god is a co-worker with men in leading this chaos of the universe towards a cosmos so this was like very um so this was his preoccupation coming from a colonized country muslim country now which which brings us back to question that and maybe i'm i'm i'm going ahead of myself and sorry amir about that for more general discussion for these two days of what is kind of the islamic what those traditions that we are talking about cover when one of those so much associated with islamic identity in the subcontinent actually step out of many traditional ways to introduce this european influence to redefine the muslim right it's it's a fact that iqbal is is absolutely fascinating on so many levels yeah you you have a legitimate question it is what many who accuse iqbal of saying this is not islamic islamic philosophy what he's doing um he keeps coding the quran in any idea he has keeps coding the quran and he finds the traces of his idea in the tradition like in many different uh philosophical and theological schools and he's insist what i am saying it's called islamic and the heritage we had is not islamic it is Hellenistic so it is very much under the spell of the Hellenistic thought and it's not at all chronic so his claim is i'm going back to the quran to build my own islamic philosophy which is very much a melange of western and and uh like eastern and islamic tradition but he's himself very innovative in that and yeah your question that what is then islamic well thank you very much it's very quickly this discussion i actually have quite a few more questions and i think that your paper corresponds very in a very interesting way with some of the ideas that eric presented me in his paper in our morning and his middle of the night in the way of of trying to understand how these kind of traditions concepts were circulating in on the verge of the or in the modern world right in this huge so but i guess that we should leave that aside so i think that it's a great time to to thank our two speakers for very intriguing papers and discussions oh yes eric please i guess that it was a morning accident yeah um amir i'm leaving it for you to close uh okay sorry um amir the stage is yours back to back today and see uh fascinating talk uh i'm glad we had a non-historian kind of close it because the whole endeavor was based around trying to expand limited perceptions of what it means to belong to the turkic the arabic the persian tradition and this just in terms of disciplinary approach gave us a greater expanse on what we're trying to kind of cover by talking about the turkotagic world what it meant to belong to this world um every single presentation um that we've had these past two days filled me with great excitement for the follow-up to this project which is the edited volume that will come out we've had already without reaching out to anyone we've had interest from bloomsbury publishing and uh cambridge scholars publishing has also approached us um to ask for um us to work with them in bringing forward the publication so that is the the next step and i'll be sending out emails in the following days uh letting people know uh what the next steps are in terms of getting the the research and the wonderful presentations that we've had on to paper other than that i'd like to thank our two chairman as well uh fereng and roy thank you for joining us you definitely added to the conversation by steering it in the right direction so i'm grateful you joined us and that's it thank you very much thank you to all of our attendees as well you think as well that was great yeah thank you amir for inviting me to take part in this and sorry i couldn't attend yesterday i'm i'm sure that i've missed some fascinating talks but oh that reminds me i'm going to upload the recording of these uh two days onto the soas youtube channel so day one and day two will be uploaded onto soas's official youtube channel for us to review i'll definitely be going back over these presentations in the coming months so please do the same tourist thank you cheers