 my heart and will hopefully fill the enormous gaps in my knowledge. I don't want to take any of the precious minutes that belong to the speakers so let's launch into introducing them. Our first speaker has a very special place in the heart of anyone who is engaged in Persian studies and of course at SOAS. I'm delighted to introduce you to, if you needed any introduction, to Mrs Fatemeh Sudova Farmon Farmoyon. Fatemeh John is an absolute stalwart supporter of Persian studies, heading her family's foundation and an incredibly hands-on organizer of these amazing events that for years has been the jewel in the crown of the series of conferences and seminars and symposium we've had on Iran. Fatemeh John will be moving us on to look at the prestige of the Persian culture when it comes to the turco, the Khanate if you like, and looking at this bicultural turco-Persian imperial entity and the title of her talk is Fraying at the Edges Iran and the Khanate of Central Asia and the case study is the first Qajar ruler, Agha Mohammad Khan, whose ancestral base was Marv and was considered by him and by his clan an integral part of Iran. We will move further down the eastern borders of modern Iran and very much welcome Dr. Sajad Najati from Toronto. In fact, I don't know, are you actually in Toronto right now? Oh right, so you've just had sort of breakfast or brunch and Sajad John will give us a talk entitled Protonationalism in Early Modern Iran and Afghanistan, well obviously shining the spotlight on the interconnected histories of Iran and Afghanistan, where it's often blared by nationalist inspired discourses and we'll also look at the competing forces on these territories and with a large on claim that the Afghan occupied lands of Khurasan, which are now the modern day Afghanistan, were really part of the greater Iran. Sajad is a senior lecture, a session or lecture at the University of Toronto and I didn't want to take any minutes off you, I don't really need to introduce Fatima John to you but Fatima John born in Iran and an absolute citizen of the globe, she never stands still a multilingual, passionate scholar, independent scholar and with a forensic analysis of from the arts to history, manuscript, geography, environment and so on. Certainly I have a personal pleasure in being able to move away from Professor Perry's books on my bookshelves, which are longing for me to get back to my office and so as to having him as our third panelist in this final session. Professor John Perry an emeritus professor from University of Chicago and you really need about 10 minutes to just scroll down through the list of his publications more than the dozen books articles and the numerous awards that has been bestowed upon him on his work on the history of Persian language and so much more. Professor John Perry will look at Sir William Jones and a migration of the idea of Iran to India. So obviously for all of you here you know that the since the 10th century Northern India has been very closely associated with the influence of Persian culture and its literature and administration was ever increasingly Persianized. This began to wane under the Safavid rule and then the talk would be encapsulated in looking at the Orientalist Sir William Jones and the judge obviously and his influence on the being the pioneer of looking you know being the product if you like of this period where the access shifts from both Persian India versus Britain and modern West. So really looking at the first I think Sir William Jones perhaps has the first claim to the title of Orientalist. So Fatima John can I please invite you I will ask you all to please take to the 30 minutes with the exception of Mrs Sudova it is her gig this is her party and she saw her party you may have 35 minutes Fatima John and all the others please mute your mics and we are in your hands Fatima John please start your paper on fraying at the edges Iran and the Khanate of Central Asia and you might need to unmute yourself Fatima John your mic is muted. Okay is that it? Perfect. Already seven minutes past five. No, yeah but now you're the best. I told you. Okay after thanking the members of the team who organized this event under the most challenging circumstances I would like to pay homage to the memory of Michael Axworthy. Some years ago after his brilliant talk at Iran Society on other Shah's army I asked him whether the Anayali Khan of the Caucasian-Jabonshire tribe had been the herald and standard better of his troops at the end as they entered Delhi. The information was relayed to me by one of Panohan's direct descendants but I had no documented confirmation. It seems that he and his tribesmen were deported to Khorasan to prevent mischievous cross-border Caucasian tribes loyal to the Safavids and once there were recruited for the Indian campaign. Upon his return from India Panohali Khan hastened back home to appropriate Parabakh very much in the news which remained under the sovereignty of his clan for three generations. He himself died while residing together with Agha Mohammad as honorary hostages at the court of Karim Khan Zan. His son and successor Ebrahim Khalil Khan was twice besieged by Agha Mohammad Khan in his waters of Shusha renamed Panoha. The second successful siege occurred five days before the Shah's assassination and is often remembered for the poetic exchange inspired by verses from the 15th century poet Orfi adapted to incorporate upon on the words Shish and Panoh. Here were two leaders of Turkic clans negotiating war with Persian poetry. Ebrahim Khalil Khan sought Russian protection only to end up murder a few years later by those very same saviors. So the period preceding the Russian aggressions of the early 19th century was the great zone of geo-filtered that would end up in Russia's favor. It was a Russian rise to power that tilted directly to their side. Conversely it was their incursions on translocation that arose the worst in our war upon during his Luther Sack of Tbilisi and eventually bought about the loss of Georgia. That's where there was no surprise about my question. He confirmed that these two of Norder's top military leaders directly of Georgia and Ahmad Khan Abdoli of Afghanistan had gone rogue so to speak and found of their own independence, say so after another Shah's assassination. Irrectly opted for Russian protection whereas Ahmad Shah Abdoli was nominated by Pashtun Tribal Council as the first king of Afghanistan with the adopted epithet Dora Doraani. Dora was commonly used for royalty. I have a silo of Abbas Mirzor where it says Dora Dariyoye Khosrabi. So he imposed anyway he imposed his hegemony over large swathes of Maratha territory in India and Iranian Khurasan where other contenders were lying for control. After his death it was back to tribal politics until the British intervened. Missing from the list of the multinational components of Norder Shah's front line are Uzbek leaders or the many of their clansmen joined as mercenaries. The Sheyvanids that Uzbeks have pushed across the Sierra Dalia and wrestled control of Trans-Oxiana and Khuras in the dying days of the Timurids. So these regions had in effect been politically divorced from Iran since 1500 with no inclination to participate in the military adventures of the self-proclaimed air to the self-evident. The Sheyvanid era in Trans-Oxiana was the culmination of mass migrations. The seas of which had been sown as early as the third century when China expelled the shamanal huns on their northern frontier and thereby unleashed the first waves of a maelstrom westwards on the corridor of the Eurasian steppes where Turkic groups met, clashed and mixed with earlier Indian European tribes were done likewise in an eastward direction as of the third millennium beastie. Much of this is well known but it helps to provide a sequential framework. So it's three million years later we have a Turkic horse later to be joined by our Mongols on the move. A Turkic presence was already attested in the Sasanian present era when they joined forces with the Emperor Kostro and Rushan Wanwan against the White Huns or Hephaelites. Much the same happened under the Salmonees when the still obscure Sarjok can help the Iranian dynasty against Karakhanid rivals who were to found an Islamic Turkic state that stretched from Samarkand to Koshchak. Meanwhile, the Somonis were capturing Turkic nomadic trainers, elite guards of their court and sellers, military slaves, the Abbasid caliphs that invited them. In time, these Turkic groups would rise against their masses and create their own powerful dynasties. The Abbasid slave guards of the Somonis were the first to pursue such ambitions defeated in Khorasan by the massive arrival of the Oghuz tribes in the 10th century. They were displaced eastward and became the first Persian rulers of India with their capital at Lahore. Close on the hills came the 24 tribes of the Oghuz who raided and wrote half of them northern Iran. They're actually 22 if you exclude the Khalaj until one of their clans, the Sarjus, established a larger source of life-wise run by Persian administrators. According to Romata, Oghuz brought with them the lightest of cultural births, so the Persian culture, quote, exercise upon them a peculiar attraction to which they readily responded, unquote. Their leaders converted to Islam and adopted Persian culture and institutions, but the illiterate rank compiled of the Oghuz was little affected by the sophistication of their leaders, remained beholden to their troublesome ways and a serious nuisance to chiefs to a spot to reign over a sultanate consisting of the ancient civilizations of western Asia. Upon the advice of the Vizier Nizam, Malkut's sultans dispatched their unruly tribes into the frontiers of Rome as militant missionaries. The repercussions went beyond Islamization and determined the future historical course of western Asia and eastern Europe for centuries to come. The presence of large numbers of Turkic tribes in northwestern Iran and Anatolia initiated the process of Turkicization as it did in Transoxian, where local Iranian languages like Khurasmen and Sokken, while influencing Turkic speech, were paradoxically on their way to extinction, accepting the premiers. The Turkicization of the spoken language, mainly in rural areas, did not dethrone new Persian from its high pedestal after Al-Bukhara was a major center of his gestation. It is ironic that while the rural population of Transoxian were absorbing Turkic dialects, the cities of Khurasan were spawning the golden age of Persian poetry and prose that set the center for literary creation thereafter. From the Turkic perspective, Mahmoud Koshkari, the author of the Divan-e-Logat al-Qurit in Arabic and like that, was critical of the slurred speech of urban bilinguals in favor of the pure, elegant Turkic of his kindred Khara Khanis, who ruled contemporaneously with the Seljuk Sultanate, using the Turkic language and the Uyghur alphabet while venerating Afrosyabas, their Iranian ancestors. The proliferation of nomadic groups in the northern steppes in the wake of the Mongolian conquest provided reinforcement for a Turkic Islamic identity. A large contingent of Turks assembled on the flip-trap steppes, followers of the Chinggis, in a Turkic Mongolian milieu that distanced them from the Persian of work or not from Islam. Even though the protracted stay on the northern steppes was not ingenious to the Persianization of the Chokha-e-Tahid and Jushi descendants of Chinggis, as had been the case with the Qasnabis and Saldus, their speech was infused with Persian and after Islamization with Arabic too. As the majority of warriors in the Mongol armies were of Turkic rather than Mongol ethnicity, reconfigurations of tribal composition and identity were not impregnable. The Mongols themselves were few in number, but with unabated prestige remained supreme as the head of various tribal formations and political entities. Yet the Persian magnetic pull was strong enough to turn the Ilkhanid Mongols of Iran into patrons of a sophisticated Persianized culture that interacted more with China than with the Turk-Mongolian ambience of the Khebchak and the Golden Horde. That tendency would culminate with a spectacular one-man show stage by Timur and its brilliant Angkor in Herat. The development of a common Turkic idiom based on our local later known as Chokha-e-Tahid to a literary language modeled on Jo-Ami was achieved by Nireli Shir-Nabai, the erudite, the year of Sultan Hussein Baibara, the last important and highly cultured Timurid prince of Herat upon the latter's behest. This would allow Chokha-e-Tahid to be used as an administrative and even literary tool without the need for a Persian transfer, a turning point in cultural relations between Iran and Trans-Oksion. The Timurid empire, which is best to be repeated, was culturally Persian, having split between Samarkand and Herat after Timurid, that was fragile as a result. A branch of the Uzbek-Sheva needs the Arab choice to cover Khurasm already in the late 15th century, with the history of portrayed with the northern steps of Khurasmians were among the first to Turkish start even before the appearance of the Mongols. So the adoption of Chokha-e-Tahid for their chance-tree was a natural outcome of linguistic change. Meanwhile, their kingsmen from another Cengizid branch descended from Jushi, offered support to the last Timurid of Samarkand under the leadership of Mohammad Shevani, also known as Shobach or Shevak. He was descended from Jushi, as I said, was the eldest son of Cengiz. Contrary to Jushi and Chokha-e-Tahid who resented Islam as inimical to the Mongolian Yassar or Shevani constitutionally prepared his conversion to orthodoxy, which he would defend asidiously. With the Safavid declaration of Shizm as a state religion, the Persian came to become completed with Shi'ite heresy and Chokha-e-Tahid with Sunni orthodoxy. Folk Shi'ite herodoxy had been rampant in Iran before the Safavids and was congenial to no widespread on Shamanism, but the dogmatization of Shi'ites and mainly through the agency of Lebanese religious scholars deepened the gulf where Shi'ite arrived. Bilingualism was not the problem, as recently mentioned by the poet Shafi'i Katkani, minority languages formed the backbone of Iranian identity and an in-depth understanding of the culture's timing without them. Chokha-e-Tahid could only become erosive to itself by the Persian by being decontextualized from the cultural baggage that initiated the speakers to trade the administration and court culture. Turkic idioms were heavily imbued with Persian terminology and that goes for Ottoman-Turkic too, so the cultural link was not completely severed. Cities with a long history of Persian literacy, mainly Bukhara did not appear to Chokha-e-Tahid. They steadfastly come to Persian within a Sunni mode. To this day, Bukhara remains Persian-speaking, notwithstanding the presence of an Uzbek minority, even Stalin's efforts to throw another range into their autogic identity were ineffective. Time and again on my trips I've been surprised by the tenacity of these things. In 2003, a woman hearing that I was from Iran placed me at the center of a circle while she and her autogic friends and a few bemused Uzbek women with their multiple braids and embroidered velvet calves circumambulated my person. It was an incredible experience, but it shows how deeply felt these links are. By 1500, Sheyvani Khan was in control of the whole of Trans-Oxiania with Timurid Herat and much of the rest of the Khorasan to Khorasan. When Sheyvani Khan came to the defense of Khorasan, Sheyvani Khan was killed during their confrontation at Mab in 1510. After the devastating onslaught of the Mongols on Mab, the Holy Oasis had become a new man's land, though still nominally part of Khorasan in Iran. It was prey to sporadic and short-lived incursions while the Khans who raided Khorasan repeatedly, but not European, during a part of the 16th century and well into the early 17th. Later attempts ever lasted long. After brief return of Babur to his ancestral lands, he was also by Sheyvani Khan's nephew established a federative system of apanages that would extend to Balkh and Purghanat. The apanages of Samarkhand, Bukhara, Tashkent and Balkh, inclusive of their provinces but with pockets of independence, were held by Chinggid the Khan's descendant from the four sons of Abul Khair Khan, the grandfather of Mohammad Sheyvani. The Khans were in turn backed by Uzbek military amirs who claimed dissent from their apanama skulls and held leader of the 14th century converted to Islam. It was an uneasy model with instigated rivalry between the sons of the family. The long rule of the powerful Abdullah Khan and Supreme Khan effectively eliminated the apanages. After his death, the succession passed to another line descended from Jushi, the Jhanids, also known as Togay Temurids, under whom Baath became the seat of the heir apparent and a second capital. The fracture of the crown into smaller entities once again exacerbated international rivalry between pretenders of Chinggid's lineage and their military amirs without affecting their hostile attitude of the Safavid state. Nor were the powerful Naqshbandi Sufi orders whose influence had grown considerably inclined to depict the Shiite heretics. sectarian massacres' federatorical propaganda kindled strong emotions and were met with brutal retaliation by the opposing factions but often served as an excuse for the ultimate aim of targeting Khurasan. In briefs since the separation of Herat from Bukharan under the later Temurids, trans-Occisional have roll-intents and purposes broken away from Iran, but the ambition to conquer or at least to raid large parts of Khurasan endured alternating with periods of peaceful relations, mostly when trouble brewing at home impeded adventurism aboard. Whenever they penetrated deep into Iranian territory, it never lasted long, but the looting of the shrine of the Imam Rezaim mashat often preached to wars on more than one occasion. One successor of Imam Al-Shaybani invaded Khurasan five times in Herat, at least twice in the 1530s, only to be repulsed by Shorbat al-Masban Ghidz and Bush troops every time. Yet a certain interdependence persisted. Renegade Khantret and all the Helmbrunn had little choice but to seek asylum at the court of the Suha. The attacks resumed as the end of the 16th century with another sacking of mashat and the sword rockets inhabited the more looting of the shrine. In the last years of Abdullah Khan, all of Khurasan, including Herat, was conquered by Jesus, but the emirs who raided as far as Yazan Kaushan, this time staying on for a decade from 1588 to 1598. Attempts at driving them out remained conclusive until the death of Abdullah Khan in 1598 when Shah Abbas reconquered Khurasan, but failed to recapture Balkh in 1692. Hostility resumed after Shah Abbas died. One Khan was reputed to campaign in Khurasan more often than he went to the bar, but even he relented eventually to engage in peaceful relations. These campaigns were unsustainable over a longer period and there seems to have been little compulsion to hold them to Khurasan permanently. Hostility was driven as much by sectarian differences than its attendant atrocities, as by other seriously divisive problems, mainly the abduction of thousands of Persians and Russians to sell in the slave markets of Bukhara and Khiba, justified on the grounds that infidels were fair game. The intermediaries were often unassiliated Turkmen, tribes who moved between Khurasman and Khurasan, selectively backing one Khan on another according to expediency. The Khans were happy to plunder while the Safavids were more intent on impeding intrusive marauders from between the frontiers of Khurasan, rather than to recuperate lost territory in child transdoccion at a time when they had to deal with more threatening Ottoman incursions on the western ground. Internal rivalries would eventually weaken the Khan, so 17th century would be set with crisis. The Arab shahs were on their way out, the Khurasan capital was moved from Wurganj to Khiva due to water problems. The Khans of Khiva were raiding Bukhara, hordes of nomadic Kazakhs were crossing the Sirdaria to the Zarafshar valley and joining Uzbek rebels to revist transdoccionia to the point of famine and cannibalism. But early 18th century the Safavid and Mughal empires had become more advanced while the Khanates were also in this way. Now the shah was too engaged elsewhere to react to raids and abductions in the immediate. His attention was taught, these were taught in the other way, dispatched to Sardar's ability to deal with the Khanates during his options. By the time he returned, only Balhad been recaptured and within a few years it would be retrieved by Ahmad Shodorani and integrated into the new state of Afghanistan. Judging by his actions, now the shahs took his campaigns to Bukhara and Khiva with little intention of eliminating the Khanates rather he sought to subjugate them by backing supported clans in exchange for tribute in the form of grain fodder and horsemen. The Chinggits and Uzbek elites with all their impighting were firmly ensconced and even with another formidable battle-hardened army, the reintegration of outlying breakaway provinces into a reconstituted Iranian empire would scarcely be envisaged. As the Khanate of Bukhara and his emirs were impressed by Nader Shah's military exploits, they visited his camp to offer their submission, so there was no need to occupy Bukhara. But Khiva was besieged to obtain the liberation of the slaves who were liberated by the thousands. The ruler Ilbar Khan was executed for murdering the Dribar v. Sheikhs who had delivered Nader's message and replaced him with the journeyed Nader Shah undoubtedly, sorry, interdates hopes that his proposition for the creation of his jahari must have to unite Muslims might eventually lose out in a loose reunification. But these were vain hopes that were insurmountable on both sides. At the time of Nader's arrival in Bukhara, the power behind the Khan was the Ataliq, a tutor from the Mankid with a tribe similar to the Atal-Bakhan post-al-Jughiran. The son of the post-Ataliq, Muhammad Rahim, enjoyed the patronage of Nader Shah to the point of commanding large numbers of Uthman warriors to pacify Bukhara on his behalf. After Nader Shah's death, the Mankids would betray his misplaced trust. The dynasty was actually founded by Muhammad Rahim's uncle Daniel Bayh with a joint puppet in the background. The first time in over two centuries that the non-Jingis had held the reins in Bukhara and stayed in power until 1920. But their hold on Khuras was short-lived. Having lost Khiba, the Third Mankid, the fanatical Shah Murat, proceeded to attack Mankid between 1785 and 1789-90. Northern Khurasan was the homeland of Nader Shah and although sporadically raided, Mank had never been integrated into Khana-Turna fanat. Shah Murat killed Bahram Ali Khan and Zedin Luhayjar, also known as Asadun Luhan and Bayram Ali in a tourist-like form. The independent lord of Marr who was late to Resim Asha after destroying his citadel, he annexed Marr and deported the sedentary, run-and-shared inhabitants including the family of Bahram Ali Khan to Bukhara and Samakhat where they resettled separately from the local version-speakers. Iran was unable to respond in the immediate but the Bajas were not about to forgive or forget. Marr was not occupied for long due to mistrust and rivalry between the sons of Shah Murat. Turkmen tried to move in to occupy Bajas. So here we go in answer to one of the questions with more about the Turkmen, a tricky designation that can have as many meanings as there are Turkmen clans. The most widely accepted definition is that of early Islamic sources that there would be no need that the Oghuz who converted to his number thereafter designated as Turkmen. The Oghuz first penetrated the periphery of Trans-Oxian in the 8th century at about the same time that Arab pros-lighters also reached the region. The races of northern Khorasan provided the base of these pastoralist groups, not all of them moved out in the 11th century to raid Azerbaijan, Trans-Korps, KSD and Eastern Anatolia. The largest concentration of Turkmen was in Khorazmur. At the end of Arab Shoah, it ruled around 1700. They murdered a quarter of the population, while a large number also moved into northern Khorasan after the fall of the South face. With no fixed allegiance, they shifted between one or another party. As the main intermediaries of the state, they came under frequent attack from the Iranian side. But occasionally, Serb Kriwa was unofficial and undependable, sorry, military auxiliaries. The clash of Yomut Turkmen with Uzbekistan 1770 resulted in the capture of Kriwa from the Uzbek Filmgrat, followed by Anarchy and the expulsion of the Yomutudan conversion map. So this was optimistic. Over the centuries, the composition of Turkmen tirelessly configured as a result of widespread movements, contacts with other tribes, and fluctuating political and economic ties. Having absorbed Tajik's Persians, Kurds and various tribes from the steppes, not all the Turkmen were of Uzbekistan, nor were they even Turks. Those who sedentarized or joined confederations came to be known more often by their tribal or political affiliations rather than as Turkmen. The Kharjahs are a case in point. As followers of Sheikh Eid, out of the Safavid order, they were among the earliest groups to join the Fezal Vashem, where they were often known by the name of their tribe and its subdivisions rather than as Turkmen. In the Safavid period, they held the governorship of Yanderevan and Qarabagh and became a force to reckon with. When Shah was dispatched Kurdish and Turkmen tribes to defend the north-eastern marches against Turkmen and Uzbekistan, the Kharjahs and Tunjans that would have been transferred to Astarabad and Marv. The mobility of Turkmen groups makes it difficult to pinpoint their precise locations at any given time, but the Kharjah present at those locations may go back earlier. Persian historians often refer to Marv as the homeland of the Kharjahs, and their origin is variously traced to those migrations or to the tribes who joined her local Khan's campaigns in Iran. By the Safavid era, if not earlier, the Qoyunlu clan, or Qabanlu clan, they were also called to train over Iran, held the port of Aqaile at Astarabad, by the way Astarabad is Gorgal, it's not what Zanderan is, one or two people have said, and that's where Aqa Muhammad was born. Although Marv was devastated and depopulated cruelly by the Mongols, its ancient history awarded the special place in Iranian memory. It was one of the 16 perfect lands named in the Avesta, and an important acumen, etc. It was where the Silk Road was launched officially, when a delegation from Han Emperors from China was met there ceremoniously by Park and Cavalrymen. It was where the last Sasanian Emperor Yatsigevti was murdered on his flight from the Arab armies. It was a hub of religious interaction between the Russian Buddhist mannequins, Christians who had the large bishopric there by the way, and it was from there that Abu Muslim Khurasoni launched the Abbasid Revolution, following which it became the capital of the Eastern Caliphate of Norma. And finally in its heyday, it was a seat of learning with libraries of the practice of the greatest early Islamic polymaths. It had its last great days under the Selja, as is evident from the famous tomb of Sultan Selja, which has sadly been destroyed by misguided restoration, entrusted to Turkish experts who were daunted with uncharacteristic trilobate Arabu and the Lucian archers beneath the groom. Robert Hill and Van spoke about it some years ago at the IHR church, just towards, I think there's a podcast you can listen to. After the Mongol onslaught destroyed the city, and there was a whole ton of land, the famous dam on the Morkau River that nourished the Turkish tribes, and their flocks continued to roam in the area. The only major monument erected after the Mongol ravages was a citadel of the Ezzidine Lour, as the Don Blu-Kochars built by the Ramali Khan, or by Ramali Khan, or one of his predecessors, Mehrab Khan Qarabavi, who had also been a governor of Marek. The Ezzidine Lour dominated the races until 1785, entertaining variable relations with Turkmen tribes, when that area where Muslims saw Lour, saw Ruf, and took care, and later, Yomuts. So, Kevin mentioned that giving refuge to Muhammad Hasan Khan Qajar in the Qarak desert, so I won't repeat that. The Salurs were considered the most noble tribe among the Turkmen, and they enjoyed a certain paramount to cook golden among the original Oghuz. They traded in skins and horses rather than in slaves. Their daughters were sought as brides by the Qajar chiefs. Baron Ali Khan's mother was the Salur, as was the mother of that Alisha, who was born of an Ezzidine Lour Qajar union, indicating the reverence these tribal elders enjoyed among their kinsmen, as confirmed orally by all the members of the Qajar clan. After his coronation, Aqa Muammar Khan sought to recover lost provinces. He wrote to Zaman Shafqab, which reclaimed the possession of Baq, the polite refusal arrived after that, and he contemplated the recapture of Baqa Muammar. On his barefoot and cheerful pilgrimage to the shrine of the members of his tribe, he stroked to grieve on the grave of Aqa Bahram Wali, as he called him. He heard the letters voice imploring him to avenge his blood, not that the kinship was there, and to take punitive action for the cruel fate inflicted on them. Had he lived the home of Muammar Khan, he would have undoubtedly reacted as ruthlessly to the occupation of Muammar, but he didn't do that at this particular extent. Shah Murat had sent his son, Amir, that they're not selected to go on a map, but upon his death and the accession of his other son, Amir Hadar, the Amir said that it was recalled to Bukhara. Suspicious of his brother's intention, he dissipated and stayed on in rebellion until his son was run out. He was considering sanctuary in Afghanistan, but the new Qajar governor of Khorasan, Prince Muhammad Ali Mirzal, an appearing and Uzbek-Abqa, an alliance striving to restore the frontier of Khorasan, invited him to stay in Mashhad as his personal guest. The next governor, Prince Shujar Sartlan, an unwisely suspended his allowance to the Amir, that he was thinking of appealing to Russians or in English protectors, when he met James Rayleigh Fraser in Mashhad. Through Fraser's conversations with the Amir Zadeh, we learned that the son of Bahram Ali Khan, Muhammad Hussein Khan Amarbi or Marwazi, who resided as an honorable captive at the court of Bukhara, was plotting revenge. He contacted the Amir Zadeh to help him recover Bukhara from Amir Hadar. When news of the conspiracy leaked out, they both had to flee to Mashhad where the Khan Amarbi, as he was known, proceeded to the encampment of Agha Muhammad Khan. There he was asked to deliver a message to Shah Murad, demanding capitulation, but he seems to have ended up at the court of Bukhara, but that is showing terror. Any attempt by Bukhara or Khiba to build a void was short-lived in the face of the looming Russian threat. We have no report on the ultimate fate of the Amir Zadeh, but the issue of map continued to plague relations with Bukhara. And there are at least three later editors worth mentioning, one of which will again answer a previous question. The first was unveiled when the anonymous Safar Al-Mabukhara was published in Tehran in 1995 and reviewed in English by James Gustafson in 2013 in Iranian studies. It has since been identified as the travel memoirs of Abbas Holi Khan, an envoy sent by Mohammad Shorhar in 1844, upon the request of British archer Justin Shield, who in the wake of the murder of British agents Colonel Storart and Captain Connolly and Bukhara, was concerned that the same fate might be called Joseph Warp, a Christian combat and missionary who travelled there to inquire about their fate. Abbas Holi Khan spent four days in Marq before meeting the Amir of Bukhara to present his case, namely that Marq was the homeland of the Harjahs, invoking the historical and cultural unity of Iran and greater horrors found with Trans-Oxiana. He retraced Iran's hereditary right to map to the reign of the first epic king Manu Tser, the grandson of Tehran in the Shonam. With the latter began the conflict between Iran and Tehran, of course, represented by Afrosyabh, which was resolved by the Arab, the archer Harash, landing on the opposite side of the map to demarcate the front here between the Iran and Tehran. The reference to epic heroes present as Gustafson maintains a conceptual geography of Central Asia that supports the difference as well as unity in a person's cultural sphere. It is this emotionally charged devotion to historical or mythological memory that turned the Shonamah of Marq Han into this upholding of a common identity that was alien to the Amir's blink of view and denial of unifying praise. By the way, Abbas Holi Khan saved the world and took him back to Tehran. A more pragmatic discourse was held by Sultan Murat Mirzahir Sahib, who led the final unsuccessful campaign during the hereditary war of 1857-57. The Gustafson's lengthy argument as reported by British Sharjah that there is weakness in its remorse was that apart from being the homeland of large part of the Tajah tribe and as rightfully belonging to Persia as any of the Shor's dominions, quote unquote, the stronghold of map was strategically vital because the front until the Persia, quote, being terminus with the country of the Turkmen, unquote, are too long to prevent inroads and kidnappings, except to the possession of map, which is best reached through Iraq and the forts enroute the consignal race. The final attempt was a map campaign led by Prince Hamzeh Mirzahir Ahmad Holi in 1860, when his army was soundly defeated by Turkmen tribes. Arthur de Gobineau wrote a satirical story about this in Lenovel of the Asiatic called the Star of the Gambarali. It wittily exposes the corruption and aptitude of the army responsible for that military disaster. Less than a quarter of a century later, the Russian flag of the map, the great game was in full swing. The negative or positive effects of that transformational moment are beyond the scope of this talk, but there is no doubt about the distortion of the long-term memory of the shared culture distinguished by its similarity, as much as by its differences, as opposed to an approach that serves short-term policies rather than historical truth, and misrepresent and impoverishes the enriching gift of cultural awareness. Examples of these, but I have no time for that. Thank you, Nargis, for giving me a note. It's a wonderful, well, you were spot on. You were just 32 minutes. Thank you very much, Mrs. Sudhava. Dr. Saadjad Najoti, may I invite you now to talk on proto-nationalism in early modern Iran and Afghanistan, and to our lovely audience, do put your questions in the chat, which we will answer after all speakers have completed their papers. Over to you, Saadjad, John. Can you hear me? Thank you very much, Nargis. And if I may just have access to sharing the screen, please. Before starting my lecture, I just wanted to take a moment to thank all the organizers involved in having this event take place. The Sudhava organization, the Center for Iranian Studies at SOAS, also the organizing committee. I can only imagine how difficult it must be to organize a symposium of this breadth and scope, and it must be doubly difficult to do so in the context of a global pandemic. So I'd be remiss if I didn't say thank you to all the organizers. One of the main themes of this year's symposium is the transition of Iran to a new world order, or the way I like to see it is the gradual shift of Iran from early modernity to modernity. With this theme in mind, the present lecture was developed with the aim of outlining the early development of nationalism, one of the defining features of modernity in Iran, as well as its eastern neighbor, Afghanistan, with which Iran shares a lengthy history. For the purposes of this lecture, I've defined nationalism very broadly as an ideology of common origin, ethnicity, and or cultural ties, as well as how such an ideology manifests itself within the demarcated territorial boundaries of a nation state. Now, despite the criticism of nationalism in the age of globalization, where in increased activities across national boundaries, renders borders increasingly redundant, nationalist sentiments remain important features of society in Iran and Afghanistan to the present. And this is to mention nothing of the Iranian and Afghan communities living in the diaspora, but many of whom have a strong sense of affiliation or belonging to their homeland or the Watan or the Watan. The present reality of Iran and Afghanistan as distinct nations belies a long history of interconnectedness in terms of culture, economy, and politics. There are myriad examples that one could draw upon to illustrate this interconnectedness. In the cultural sphere, Iran and Afghanistan represent core lands of the so-called Persian zone. That is that vast territorial expense that is defined historically by Persian culture. For a germane example, we need look no further than the Shah Naamah, masterpiece of Persian literature that was composed by Abu Qas al-Firdausi in the 10th century and which is often described as the national epic of Iran. Yet it will be recalled that the Shah Naamah was presented to the Ghaznaved ruler, Sultan Mahmood, whose court was based in Ghazna of what is today southeastern Afghanistan. With respect to political history, numerous dynasties competed for control over territories encompassing parts of what is today Iran and Afghanistan historically. We can trace some of these competitions back to the pre-Islamic period through to the early Islamic period and as late as the Safavid period and as I will discuss in this lecture beyond the Safavid period. This interconnected history between Iran and Afghanistan raises the important question. What factors can be attributed to the firm divide between the two countries? Now many scholars point to the rise of European nationalism as the main culprit. According to such narratives, nation states first developed in early modern Europe, then through the influence of European colonial powers, the idea of the nation state is imported to the non-Western world in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. But while there is no denying that colonial powers, especially imperial Russia and Britain, played a formative role in the development of the nations and nationalisms of Iran and Afghanistan. We should not, I argue, discount some of the local roots of nationalist sentiments or what I have termed proto-nationalist, proto-nationalism. These proto-national sentiments predate the arrival of these European powers in the region and would, as I shall argue, influence the course that nationalist discourses would take in the modern period. Now, by proto-nationalism, I simply refer to those sentiments that would form, again, the core aspects of the nationalist discourses of Iran and Afghanistan in the modern era. Now, the development of these proto-nationalist sentiments can be traced back to the late Safavid era, in particular the reign of Shah Abbas, which is seen as the apex or the zenith of Safavid rule. According to the Safavid historiography, the death of Shah Abbas marks the beginning of the slow decline of the Safavid empire. And the Eastern provinces slowly begin to break away in a process that Fatima John has described as the fraying at the edges. Here we have a map and I hope everybody can see the map of the situation on the peripheries of Iran in the late Safavid period with all of these tribal pressures existing on the borderlands. Now, my focus is on the region of Horasan in the east, where the challenges to Safavid authority came mainly from Afghan or Pashtun tribal groups seeking autonomy. In the early 1700s, the Telsi Afghans were able to take over what had hitherto been the Safavid province of Kandahar. And within a short decade, the Abdali Afghans would move on to Herat and assume control over that also hitherto Safavid province. The importance of these Safavid, anti-Safavid insurrections led by the Afghans cannot be underestimated. The period of Qalsay rule in Kandahar set in motion a process of independent Afghan statehood, a major component of which was Kandahar becoming the imperial capital of the Durrani state, which was established in 1747 by the Abdalis, who thereafter became known as the Durrani's. Sorry, let me just enter full screen for this presentation. Now, the rise to prominence of the post-Safavid monarch, Nader Shah Afshadi, temporarily halted the Afghan tribe, Afghan drive towards statehood, seeking to reconstitute the domains of the Safavid Empire. Nader assumed control of Herat in 1730, ending roughly two decades of Abdali rule in the province. With the possible exception of his campaigns in the Caucasus, the battle for Herat served as the most arduous of Nader's numerous incursions in Khorasan. Unlike many of his other conquests, Nader was unsuccessful in capturing Herat by sheer force, but instead his victory was achieved through mediation with its Abdali defenders. In part to placate his Abdali adversaries, Nader was compelled to appoint an Abdali chief as the governor of Herat and enlisted many Abdali tribesmen into the Naderid army. The Abdalis would go on to play a central role in the subsequent campaigns of Nader Shah, including the conquest of Kandahar in 1738 against the Kalzai Avgats. The Abdalis, it would not be an overstatement to say were instrumental to creating what Ernest Tucker has described as the Timurid inspired world empire that Nader Shah had established, and that at its height extended from Iraq in the west to India in the east. And here we have a map of the vast territorial expanse of the Naderid empire. Now in the power vacuum that was created by Nader's assassination in 1747, there were various local powers that emerged to contend for the throne. In Khurasan, there was two main contenders, the Qajars under their chief Agha Muhammad Khan and the Abdalis under their chief Ahmad Khan, the soon to be Ahmad Shah Durrani. This Qajar Durrani rivalry sparked what had become, what was to become a decades long political duel for the fate of Khurasan that became entwined with the so-called great game between Imperial Russia and Britain. The end result of this great game was the demarcation of rather firm boundaries between modern Iran and Afghanistan. Now the foregoing summary reinforces my initial assertion that the history of the lands comprising present day of Afghanistan and Iran are closely linked. And accounting for this deeply interconnected history allows us to reassess various assumptions over simplifications, misconceptions and contradictions concerning nationalism in Iran and Afghanistan that still predominate in the scholarship today. One of the problems that I wanted to address in this lecture was the view of the Afghan state as a creation of colonial Britain, which feeds into an alternate or a similar narrative I should say that was endorsed fully by the Qajars that the Durrani lands of Khurasan were traditionally Iranian territories that were incorporated into the Afghan state primarily through the machinations of colonial Britain. In his work, the making of modern Afghanistan, Benjamin D. Hopkins persuasively argues that present day Afghanistan was conceptually and materially a creation of the British colonial regime of India in the 19th century. But what is interesting is that the view of Afghanistan as a colonial creation was seemingly equally widespread, existed seemingly with the seemingly equally widespread yet conflicting narrative that Afghanistan was established by Ahmad Shah Durrani, who is seen by Afghans as the founding father of their nation, the baba of the country, but whose reign predated British activities in the region by several decades. This raises the question, is modern Afghanistan a colonial creation or one of Ahmad Shah? There's no scholarly consensus, but the truth seems to lie somewhere in between. With respect to territoriality, one of the key features of modern nation states, the view that Ahmad Shah founded Afghanistan is tenuous at best. As several scholars have noted, primary sources do not refer to the Durrani territories as Afghanistan, but instead use territorial markers such as Khurasan or Hindustan and the like. It is true that the core lands of Ahmad Shah's empire, here we have an image of Ahmad Shah, and here we have a map of the empire. The core lands of the Durrani state namely Kabul, Kandahar, Herat and Balgh would form the heartland of what was to become Afghanistan. And in this respect, the Durrani empire may be considered a precursor to present day Afghanistan. However, it should be emphasized that any notion of a territorially bounded nation would have been alien to Ahmad Shah, who followed the example of his predecessor Nadir Shah and seeking to create a Timurid style world empire. The borders of this empire were not fixed but expanded well into Iran and India. There is also indication that had Ahmad Shah survived a little bit longer, he would have also actively engaged in central Asia, which at the time was being threatened by the Qing empire in the northeast. In this regard, Ahmad Shah's worldview was more globalist and orientation than nationalist. At the societal level, moreover, Ahmad Shah nurtured a form of Islamic cosmopolitanism that was not uncommon to pre-modern Muslim societies across Asia. Now, I would argue that Ahmad Shah's most significant contribution to the nationalist discourse in Afghanistan was not territorial in nature. Rather, it was the genealogical claims that he asserted in support of his claims to rule. Despite patronizing Persian culture and cultivating a Persian language administration, Ahmad Shah placed strong emphasis on the Pashtun or Afghan identity of the ruling elite of the Afghan state. Indeed, in various primary sources from Ahmad Shah's reign, Biyat Mahmood al-Hussaini's tariq Ahmad Shahi, which was the court commission chronicle of the early Durrani period. Or whether it be other official documents such as the well-known correspondence between the Shah and the Ottoman ruler Sultan Mustafa III, Ahmad Shah asserts his legitimacy by claiming that his ancestors historically had served as leaders not just of the Durrani Confederacy to which he belonged, but of all Afghan Pashtun tribes. I argue that the emphasis on the Afghan Pashtun identity of the Durrani state under Ahmad Shah would ultimately become a pillar of nationalism as it developed under his successors. A prominent example may be detected in the works of the Afghan statesman Mahmood Tarzi, who's regarded as the ideologue of modern Afghan nationalism. In the writings of Tarzi who incidentally belonged to the Durrani tribe like Ahmad Shah himself, the Afghan Pashtun identity of Afghanistan is tactfully utilized as one of the core features that differentiate the country from Iran. In this respect, ideas of Afghan identity disseminated by the ruling elites of the Durrani state since the time of Ahmad Shah arguably played a more important and significant role than the activities of colonial Britain in the creation of a distinct Afghan polity. Now returning to the role of the British and the Durrani Qajar dispute over Khurasan, the second main point I wanted to cover in this lecture. The main controversy surrounding this dispute was the province of Herat, which was a bone of contention between the Durrani and the Qajars. The view espoused by Iranian authors in the late 18th and early 19th century, including Riza Quli Khan Hidayat, my apologies. Riza Quli Khan Hidayat and Mohamed Taqi Khan Lisan al-Mulk is that Herat, I should say, was the realm of Iranian kings. And here the reference is clearly to the Safavids. The first of the Qajar dynists, Agha Mohamed Khan and his successor, Fata Ali Shah, considered themselves as legitimate hares of the Safavids and sought to reconstitute the Safavid Empire. And this included the Afghan occupied territories of Khurasan. In the year 1797, the Qajars in fact sent an emissary to the court of one of Ahmad Shah's successors, Zaman Shah, demanding the withdrawal of Afghan forces from what the Qajars viewed as Iranian territory in Khurasan, including Herat, but also Kandahar, Baal, and many of the regions in between. Now, this was the first attempt in a decades-long Qajar effort to re-establish control over Herat. These ambitions eventually culminated in the Anglo-Iranian War of 1856-57. The defeat of the Qajar forces in this battle led to the Treaty of Paris. And the terms of this treaty required the Qajars to permanently withdraw all claims to authority over Herat. As Abbas Amanat has pointed out in several of his publications, in the national consciousness of Iran, the Treaty of Paris was a catastrophe, second only to the Treaty of Turkmenchay with the Russians, which of course resulted in the permanent seeding of control of the Caucasus. From the Iranian perspective, the Treaty of Paris was yet another instance of the Qajars being forced by an imperial power to seek control of traditionally Iranian territory. Now, the view of Herat as a rightful domain of the Qajars and as he heirs to the Safavids is quite controversial, given that the province had long been contested by various polities throughout its history. Prior to the Safavid takeover of Herat in the early 16th century, the province had served as the capital of the Timurid prince Sultan Hussein by Qara. And throughout the early 16th century and the post Timurid period, the Safavids and Uzbeks dueled for control over Herat on several occasions. Ultimately, the Safavids were able to arrest control of the province from the Uzbeks and the province remained in Safavid control throughout the 17th century. But Herat was administered by various different regimes throughout the 18th century, including that of the Abdullis of Nader Shah and after Nader Shah, the Durranis. Taken in its historical context then, the Durrani Qajar rivalry appears to be a more recent manifestation of a long series of disputes over the sovereignty of Herat that spans over many centuries. Now, to counter some of the claims made by the Qajars to rightful authority over Herat, the Durrani's themselves also devised various strategies to assert Herat as an Afghan territory. In early Durrani era sources, beginning with the reign of Ahmad Shah, for instance, they strongly emphasized the brief period of Afghan rule in Herat after the fall of the Safavids in the province in the 1710s. This period of rule lasted until 1730 when the province was, as mentioned earlier, invaded by Nader Shah. But soon after Nader Shah's reign, the Durrani forces recaptured Herat and it remained under Afghan control ever since. Ahmad Shah and his successors derived their legitimacy from their status as the descendants of the Abdullis chiefs, the Khon Zodaz, who had established rule in post-Safavid Herat. And as such, these claims were intended to demonstrate that the Durrani's were, it was only natural that the Durrani's would have exercised rule over the province in the aftermath of Nader Shah's assassination. There was also an important sectarian dimension to the Afghan claims over Herat and its surrounding regions. Primary sources from the early Durrani period seek to credit this Safavid era as a sort of historical anomaly. According to this view, the Safavids converted what had hitherto been a Sunni country in Iran to Shiazm. They credit Nader Shah for recognizing Iran's Sunni history and distancing himself from Safavid Shiazm. But as a merciless tyrant, Nader's rule was destined to fail. In the end, Nader's reign was merely a short, brief interlude between extended periods of just Afghan rule. Now under Ahmad Shah's successors, the ideological battle for the hearts and minds of the people of Herat, it continued unabated. In response to the Qajar mission to the Durrani court demanding the withdrawal of Afghan forces, it is no coincidence that Ahmad Shah's grandson, who was ruling at the time, his grandson Zaman Shah, commissioned a member of the Chishti Sufi Order to compose a history of the Durrani dynasty. In this work known as the Hussain Shahi, the Abdali Afghans are said to have taken their name from the 10th century Sufi master, Abu Ahmad Abdul, who is the patron saint of the Shrine town of Chisht, just east of Herat. You know, just go back to the map of the Durrani empire and here we see Chisht, this important town just to the east of Herat. Now the reality is that there's no reliable historical evidence to support this Abdali-Chishti relationship, yet it has since become a stock feature of studies about the Abdali and their state. I would argue that this claim was an invented tradition specifically designed to assert the presence of the of the Abdali Afghans in Herat dating back to the 10th century and to thereby trump any historical claims put forward by the Qajars and their supporters to rightful authority over Herat. In essence, the Afghan presence predates that of the Qajars in the region and therefore they're the legitimate claimants to authority over the region. Now what we see here is that the claims made by the Qajars and as documented in the Qajar historiography were met by many counterclaims that were devised at the Durrani court but which are typically overlooked in the scholarship. These are important because they point to the development of a lively robust debate surrounding Khurasan and its fate that continued throughout the first half of the 19th century and that culminated in the Treaty of Paris. The idea here is not to diminish the role of Britain or Russia, who obviously exploited the Durrani Qajar dispute and worked to create a firm national boundary dividing the Iranian and Afghan states to protect their interests in Afghanistan and by extension their possessions in India. But what is crucial to note here is that the seeds of nationalism sown by the Qajars and the Durrani in their duel for the fate of Khurasan played an equally significant part in the formation of modern Iran and Afghanistan as distinct nations and I'm not sure at what point I am in the timeline but I will end my lecture at this point to give an opportunity to the other panelists to speak and also for the question answer period. Thank you. Thank you very much Sajad. In fact you do have a couple more minutes if you'd like to or would you like to pause and perhaps follow through with the discussion at the end or is there any other points that you're very keen to emphasise? Yeah there's a lot of points. I would think that they might get a little bit too detailed. I wanted to give a little bit more detail about the nature of the dispute in the 19th century. Very good. Yes keep us hungry. We'll be waiting for that and it now gives me great pleasure to invite our final speaker of the day and this session Professor John Perry who will and I can't wait personally. I'll be all ears Professor Perry to learn your thoughts on Sir William Jones, the jurist and how he will feature in this talk and you'll be so well positioned as a historian, linguist, philologist yourself so can I please invite you to talk about Sir William Jones and the migration of the idea of Iran to India. The floor is yours. Thank you very much. Can everybody hear me? Yes very clearly. Okay well it's an honour to be the final speaker at this symposium so let me begin just by thanking all the organisers and my fellow participants in this outstanding symposium very well conceived and in view of the circumstances extremely well organised. So we have Sir William Jones and the migration of Iran to sorry yes the idea of Iran, the migration of the idea of Iran to India which I prefer to think of in modern terms sometimes as the outsourcing of Iran to India, the land of Iran having somewhat failed in its support in those days. India had long been familiar to Iran in the west as the land of fabulous wealth, wonders and wisdom from early Sasanid times. The Sanskrit collection of animal fables known as the Panchatantra was translated into middle Persian then by Ibn al-Makhafah into Arabic as Kaleela wa-Dimna and rapidly acquired versions in Greek, Latin and Old Spanish, Hebrew, English and indeed most medieval European languages to become an early self-motivational bestseller, a rival to Isop's fables or the discipline at Larry Kales. The actual personisation of North India, North Indian literary and administrative culture began with Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna's conquest of Lahore and Punjab province in the early 11th century. His destructive incursions targeting the fabled wealth of Hindu temples had a positive side. The philosopher and pioneering endologist Abu Rehan of Biruni, embedded with the army, learned Sanskrit and consulted Hindu pandits, publishing two volumes in Arabic of his impressions of Indian science and theology. Subsequent dynasties of Turkish military Mamluks consolidated the Muslim mastery of the Punjab and poets such as Masood Isadi Salmani who died in 1121 and Amir Khosru Dehlavi died 1325 who gloried in being of mixed Turkish Persian and Indian birth secured Persian's domination, Persian's position as the language of Indian courts. In 1526 to 25 to 26, Babur the late Timurid Prince of Fergana descended from Chinggis Khan on his mother's side and Tamalain on his father's, a former client of Ismail Safavi and an accomplished poet and memoirist in Chagatai Turkish and Persian conquered Delhi and Agra, founding the Mughal Empire. This venerable institution was to remain the principal patron of Indo-Persian literature for more than three centuries, even when politically subordinate to more powerful regional conquerors such as now the Shah in 1732 and the English East India Company from 1766 when General Robert Clive persuaded Shah Arlam to seed the Diwani that is the monopoly of revenue collection in Bengal and thus the de facto government of India. Hot on the heels of poets as ever came lexicographers. India initially more native to Iran to India than immigrant and from the early 14th to the late 19th century dozens more Persian dictionaries were produced in India than in Iran. One example is the popular Farhanga Johangiri Hossain N. Jew from Shiraz, completed in 1602 at Iqbar's court. This was used also by Europeans even beyond India. Thomas Hyde, Laudian professor of Arabic and Oxford cited it in his Latin monograph on the religions of the ancient Persians in 1700. Then in 1722 came the Afghan invasion of a dying Safavid empire. Among the first and most directly affected by the fall of Isfahan and who has left us the most complete picture of the catastrophe and its aftermath in his memoirs completed in 1742 was the Shi poet and scholar Sheikh Hazin Lahidi of Gilan. As a boy he grew up with his father at the Safavid court as a precocious polymath and poet. In 1721 as the Afghan army closed in to blockade the starving capital he tried in vain to persuade Shah Sultan Hossain and his own family to flee before it was too late. Then leaving behind his pressured library he slipped away disguised as a peasant and after two years teaching among the lures in Khoramabad he organizing there a militia to defend the town against the advancing Ottoman army and a dispiriting visit to his homeland Russian occupied Gilan in 1734 horrified by the continued oppression under Nader Shah he left Iran and settled in the Mughal court of Delhi. Here five years later he went into hiding to avoid a massacre when Nader Shah invaded the city. He moved on to Agra and then Benares modern Varanasi where he died and was buried in 1766. In his exile Hossain was treated as a celebrity open-minded he sought out fellow scholars of all faiths according to Sir Gore Ousley British orientalist of the next generation a colleague of Jones Hossain was equally admired and esteemed by the musulman, Hindu and English inhabitants of India. In the half century between the final calamitous collapse of respectively the Safavid and the Zan dynasties say 1730s to 1780s some hundreds of literate and variously prominent Iranians not only Safavid survivors often with their families fled to India several like Abu Hassan Gulestane became rueful chronicles of this period his three uncles served Nader but then fell into two fell into disfavor and fled to India. Abu Hassan was a hostage in Karim Khan's retinue during the contest for power in central or western in Iran but in 1756 slipped away to the Shri Shrine city of Najaf and joined his family in India. Here at Moshe Dabad in 1782 he wrote his Mujmila Tabaorikh a detailed history of the early Zand period. Of those who stayed in Iran the poet and literary biographer Azar Bigdali famously lamented that the situation had reached such a point when no one had the the heart to read poetry let alone write it. In India meanwhile composition and recital at Persian verse especially the Ghazal were all the rage and not only at the and not only at the Rua's courts. By this time French, Armenian and subsequently British traders and commercial agents were settled in several cities. In the course of the 18th and 19th centuries more than 60 of these resident Farangis or their mixed stuffs offspring including eight women had sufficient command of Persian and later Urdu through dabble in the mild intoxicants of Ghazal or Rubai basking in the applause of indulged Indians to compose poems at the convivial mushaire verse readings. Some even accumulated considerable divans into this fluid social and cultural environment in 1783 stepped Sir William Jones newly knighted and married to Hannah Maria Shipley as a judge on the Bangal bench. Born in London in 1746 his father was a distinguished Welsh mathematician a fellow of the Royal Society and a friend of Sir Isaac Newton with relatives active in the Celtic revival. The boy entered Harold public school as honor scholarship as a child prodigy of the age of seven and graduated from Oxford in 1763 having sailed through the Greek and Roman classics to Hebrew and Arabic had been 1768. Jones accepted a prestigious commission from King Christian the 7th of Denmark to translate from the Persian into French. Astor Abad is Johan de Choye Naderie a life of the late Nader Shah. Jones despised this tyrant and gratuitously appended to his translation a treatise on Persian and Arabic poetry with 24 pages of odes by halfies rendered into elegant French. So already we know where he stands Jones was something of a rebel not alone among his peers in England sometimes distrusted its Celtic nonconformist or cosmopolitan fringes. Let us study the ancient Indians as we do the Greeks and the Romans. Jones urged his literate contemporaries but some read it him too pompous and imaginative and British liberals such as William Wilderforce and John Stuart Mill were also evangelical Christians with an e-jerk dire bias against Indian paganism. Jones was planning a history of Turkey and perhaps fortunately for Indo-Persian studies failed to land the post of ambassador to Constantinople. However he wasn't elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1772 and the next year even more advantageously to Dr. Johnson's prestigious Turks head club to enjoy coffee and conversation with such as Burke Gibbon and Goldsmith. Meanwhile he had been studying war and was called to the bar in London in 1770. For light relief he initiated a druid circle and as chief druid as chief bard entertained the company on the banks of the river Kilgeron, Kilgeron Castle in by Kilgeron Castle that is in Cardigan North Wales with occasional verse anticipating words of us and an extemporary piece new to the goddess Humor Manador that is Diana Mary Astarte or Gunga North Indian elected Persian publishing a series of verse translations and juxtaposing prose versions of Odes by Hafiz and Horace and in 1771 he wrote the first modern grammar of the language. In Calcutta he was not an employee of the company his boss was Warren Hastings the first governor of the presidency of Fort William and head of the council of Bengal de facto governor general of India. More of a scholar than a sabre rattling conqueror over the next 10 years Hastings supported Jones academic pursuits in particular the founding of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in Jones's second year. Here in a famous lecture in 1786 Jones was to propose his theory of the relationship between Greek, Latin, Persian and Sanskrit which inaugurated the sciences of comparative Indo-European philology and historical linguistics. Members responded with a spate of serious Indo-Persian studies such as Francis Gleidwin's translation of the Aene Akbari the institutes of Akbar on Mughal statecraft and the classic work of Persian Persian adab Sabi's Gullistan. In Indology Jones followed the lead of Dar al-Shakuh Shah Jahan's scholarly son who with a team of pundits from Benares had commenced the translation of the Sanskrit Upanishads into Persian in 1867. Jones's continuation of this project was the first direct translation from the Sanskrit into a Western language. He also launched the veritable craze among the German romantics with his 1780 translation of Kalidas' erotic drama Shakuntala, not that he neglected his judicial duties. When not presiding on the bench he pursued a project to record an exhausted digest of Hindu and Muslim law to legitimize British rule through the incorporation of native traditions. He also found time to pen helpful notes in favor of indigent Persian poets. He read and translated contemporary Persian Sufi poets including exiles such as Hazin and beyond all that. He ached for a chance to visit Iran where he had established friendly contact with Mirza Hossein Farahani, the Erudite San Vizier. In spring of 1791 he wrote to his envoy in Shiraz, Hartford Jones Bridges, no relation to Jones, acknowledging receipt of a letter from Lutwali Khan Zand to be forwarded to Timur Shah Dorani and Kabul, evidently a plea for help against an imminent attack from by Haga Muhammad Khan Qajar. He thanks Jones Bridges for sending him also a copy of Mirza Sadiq Nami's definitive history of the Zand dynasty, which is one of my major sources for my dissertation, and looks forward to visiting Shiraz within the next two years. But this was not to be. The Dorani ruler died a year later. Shiraz fell to the Qajars. Lutwali was betrayed and killed by Haga Muhammad in 1794, and Jones died in Calcutta on the 27th of April of the same year of a severe labor, severe liver infection. He was buried in Calcutta in the Park Street cemetery under an obelisk gravestone mourned like Hazin by British, Indian and Persian alike. I have a short coda looking forward about a little known contemporary of Jones in Calcutta, though I don't know if they ever met. Army officers Army officers and Khan company clerks needed to be taught the local contact language, assumed by the top brass to be Persian, the language of bureaucracy and high culture. John Berth, both of Chris Gilchrist, the Scottish surgeon with the company's Bengal Army became interested in the languages actually spoken in Northern India, particularly the Persianate, the Persianized vernacular of both Hindus and Muslims, later to be called Hindi and Urdu, which Gilchrist termed Hindustani. But tour of the region during 1785, particularly Faisal Badnailak now where Gilchrist sought out local poets, convinced him that this vernacular was a sophisticated medium with a literary register called Hendevi or Hindi. He reported that the pigeon variety called moors, which in English soldiers and clerks were generally content to use, was inadequate for the purpose and that Hindustani was more suitable than Persian, the usual medium taught often perfunctorily to more senior East India company employees. Gilchrist was accepted to tutor them in Persian and Hindustani and from 1787 compiled a Hindustani grammar and a dictionary in 1801 he was engaged as the first professor of Hindustani at the newly established College of Fort William. Hiring Monshees, native scribes, Gilchrist set them to translating stories from Persian into simple but elegant style of Hindustani to be printed in a modified Persian Arabic script. Some of these even became popular among Indian readers. The momentous transitioning to Hindi Urdu as the medium of oral communication and popular literature had been recognized. So I hail this otherwise of obscure Edinburgh medic as a pioneer field sociologist avant la lettre with a notable policy impact. The East India company did finally announce in 1824 and slowly implement its reluctant switch to Urdu as the official language of administration and it soon became clear to all that Persians Dholat that is its hallowed authority beyond its home in Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan was yielding to the age of national vernaculars. But that's another story. Thank you for your attention. Thank you very much indeed Professor Harry. I've been monitoring the question in the chat and I think everyone just all the mesmerize and listening to three very packed discussions and I know from the chat that there is by popular demand Mrs. Sudeva. They all say that they really need more of your paper and it's so packed with information and it's absolute tour de force that they need to pour over it and can't wait for the publication. Looking at the questions, there is a question addressed to Mrs. Sudeva but I'm just not quite sure what the period it says you know in that period of time why did Khorasan play such an important role. Now I'm rather concerned that this might open the topic for another lengthy lecture but maybe before I do a journey you could ponder over that while I get to slightly more to the point questions for Dr. Nijorzi, Sajorzi from Karim Javan first and then Omid Mandigori. The first one is that perhaps you could merge the two that do you consider dispute over control of Herot as rivalry between two competing dynasties from the same culture or a bigger dispute between two different nations over an important cultural centre followed by a question on the fact that you've used proto-nationalism for Iran and why can't you just use nation-state or nationalism for Iran as per Shah Naumeh and other evidences. So Sajorzi, would you like to address this? Thank you for outlining those questions. Very interesting and I suppose Karim has hit at the sort of heart of the issue of what constitutes the nation and did the Khajars and Durrani belong to the same culture or were they different nations? The way I would answer it is that the answer is a little bit complicated and there are aspects of both different trends that would ring true. There were aspects of culture that the Khajars and Durrani certainly shared. Both were conversant in Persian. They established Persianate state structures. If you were to open up some of the tariqs or the chronicles written by the Khajars and the Durrani's very similar languages being used and very similar ideas can be found in both. Both belong to a tribal background. The Khajar Turkic tribes and we have the Durrani Pashtun tribes and so definitely there are instances of overlap. However, there are very important differences that I tried to highlight in the lecture. One was the fact that they belong to different tribal backgrounds. The Khajars are native Turkic speakers and they emphasized and took pride in this Turkic background as indicated in various chronicles which provide detailed genealogies of the Khajars back to even the Seljuk period as Fatima had mentioned. Likewise, the Durrani's developed their own genealogical or tribal tradition that emphasized their Pashtun or Afghan identity and my argument that and I think there might be some disagreement but my argument is that Ahmad Shah and the Durrani's were proud of their Pashtun background and they defined the state in large part by its Pashtun identity. So these are clear differences between the Khajars and the Durrani's. So yes they are similar in some respects but different in others and for Omid's question is a very good question as well. Why can't the Khajars and ethnicities referring to the Khajars when he talks about Iran we're talking about the early Khajars. I think the answer would require us to delve into a little bit of theory of nationalism, what constitutes nationalism. There's definitely scholars out there that point to the Shah Naama as containing sort of the kernel of Persian or Iranian nationalism but then again the type of nationalism I was referring to and I tried to provide a brief definition was the modern form of nationalism with its fixation not just on common culture but also this very clearly defined and demarcated borders. That's one of the defining features of modern nation-states and I would argue that's why the Russians and especially the British were so obsessed with clearly demarcating what these boundaries were so that they can establish these clear-cut nation-states and I don't think that that was present yet prior to the arrival of the colonial powers. It was maybe starting to develop but it wasn't clearly well-defined as it would become in later periods. So that's one of the reasons why I would say that the countries that have a sort of nation-state irrespective of the fact that the Shah Naama definitely was a uniting feature of Iranians. Yes, that's it. So before I think, moving on to the last paper there's several questions for Professor Perry. There is a question from Roy Abulal Asoudov. I'm not sure whether addressed to Sadjad or to Fatemejan that it's about Azad Khan's relationship with Nadir. Did this play any role in transmitting an empire-building view for the Afghans? I'm not sure about that. I don't know too much about Azad Khan so I'm unable to answer but he certainly had a... I believe he was the one who castrated Agha Muammar. So he left a very lasting mark on Agha Muammar Khan's character and behavior. Yes, absolutely. Sadjad, do you have anything to add to that question? Well, I think if anyone should speak on this it's probably Dr. Perry. He's a specialist on the situation in the western half of Iran for sure and has written extensively about Azad Khan. The only point I would like to bring up is based on my preliminary research and this is one of the topics that I really wanted to discuss with Professor Perry was the identity of Azad Khan was he actually in Afghan and based on my research, although some of the sources do attribute him in Afghan identity, I believe this is because many of the Khelze Afghans that were in his army, they were stationed in western Afghanistan and formed an important part of his military. He himself, I'm not sure if he was actually identified as Afghan himself but that's a topic I guess for another day. Fantastic, thank you. Well, if I now move the conversation to Sir William Joe several questions around that. I had one as well, Professor Perry. I don't know whether any conversation in any of the writings of William Joe's whether he ever refers to Filippo Sassetti, I think the merchant in the 16th century who really first came across the idea of Sanskrit being so close to I mean he saw so many parallels with Italian that it sort of put it and I think he coined the name Sanskrit but that perhaps something to refer to later. Several questions from Dr. Takin about William Jones that considering that East India Company took up or do in place of Persian, so how was it that Persian continued to thrive and remain popular in India and you know so much so that Dr. Takin says that in his student days in 1960s you know this was still people could still lucidly declaim Persian poetry and another similar questions that another one is that do you think that his Welsh background played in a role in shaping his linguistics interests and and was he by any chance influenced through you know in view of his linguistic discoveries by Khanna Arezu and I think just perhaps maybe I'll pause over there to give you a chance to mull over these. Just to solve with Ozad Khan Afizan in Karim Khan's time it's interesting that he may not have been ethnically in Afghan but certainly he was always known as Ozad Khan Afizan and excoriated as an Afghan enemy by the western Iranians by Karim Khan and people so it's it's all part of this ethnic what should we call what do we call these days ethnic marking whatever yes of the time and they're certainly significant for the subsequent relationship and Herat likewise is on the border now that's really the Afghan still considered part of Afghanistan and the Iranians of course claimed it themselves and it's it's up grabs yes yeah and what do you assert in terms of longevity of popularity of Persian particularly literature to the 1950s and 60s over or do it's true the Indians are Indians are in some ways behind the times thank goodness in relation to culture and language and like the like some of the people in Jones's period they were so well acquainted with so-called versatile languages that they have reams of poetry and prose and ideas by heart in Latin and Greek and and respectively in Persian so you find people who can quite happily quote and function in literary Persian but the sticking point strictly in linguistic studies is that it is no longer Persian is no longer a living language in India is not used by a majority or considerable plurality of the population as their first language it's the major cultural language still I'm going to offend for example in a particular example of this kind of culture who is originally from Pakistan from the month of Cambridge he is in civil engineering professor of civil engineering but he's now fluent and happy in Turkish as well as presumably still improved do and he has a great stored Persian literature and law and described happily also I'm still writing historical articles on Turkish and Persian and Turkish Persian literary figures so it's to that extent Indian India is is certainly part of the Persian age cosmopolitanism but not a place where a Persian is still a spoken language as it is in Iran where it's wholly just the major spoken language for that matter there's a whole lot of Turkish natively spoken of various in Iran as we know so it's a very complicated matter absolutely and of course you know the role of national curriculum or you know when of course you proceeded by English and I think in Iran possibly you know following the French model of having an absolute set national curriculum whether you're in an elite school or in a 10th school in a rural place Farsi is the language of teaching and broadcast but undeniable that that part of the world you know people are you know incredibly multilingual never mind mother tongue but local languages of communication and because one cannot deny that Turkish one can deny it out of fear of nationalists that can dare to say how prevalent use of various this you know registers of Turkish are but without a doubt and for your interest Professor Perry fellow panellists from an earlier session Janet tells us that you might be interested to know that the divan of Mir Kamarul Dine Menat at the British Library with a reference given contains portraits of William Jones Warren Hastings and Richard Johnson and Cassie the oath to Jones in praise of his knowledge and to Hastings of his enlightened vision so we'll have to have that scanned and sent to you there is also a heads up for Mrs. Sudova from Simon Rose about relating to a much earlier period of history of Persian role as a sea trading hub with the Indians of continent there is to be an experimental archaeological expedition in the area of south Iran by sea demonstrating the trade route subject as always to permits being granted and I think I had a thing I saw another question for us about that expedition when is that you and yes please could you Simon Rose could you kindly give further detail could you please or perhaps you could separate an email about exactly perhaps a little bit of the subject now and I there was another question for I think did I hope sorry just forgive me if I've already read this out I don't think I have Dr. Nejati how do the Durrani campaigns to mashhad reinstalling Shah Rukh Afshar as a sort of client and subsequent battles with Muhammad Hassan Khan of Arjar fit into your story do you see proto-national claims or implications at the early date in the 1750s it's a very interesting question 1750s I'm afraid I don't I haven't read too much about any proto-nationalists sort of implications regarding Islam and Shah Rukh as as a client in mashhad one of the reasons maybe because this chronicle of Ahmad Shah's reign was commissioned in the year 1754 which was the year that the Durans captured mashhad and the chronicler Mahmoud Hussaini was actually a native of mashhad but it seems like he had a sort of soft spot for Shah Rukh so very uncritical not too many details about Shah Rukh himself and because the Afsharids of mashhad were clients of the Durrani's they weren't really adversaries and they were more satellites as I think Kevin mentioned so not so much details in the sources about any sort of proto-nationalist sentiments surrounding mashhad and the Afsharids there fantastic very good and I think another question from Kevin Glathill again I don't think I read this earlier someone claiming to be al-Zaat Khan or perhaps his son appeared among the Goklen and Nausha Prasad right here in the 1780s and is attested by the russian sources trying to mobilize against Ahmohamad Khan perhaps whether it is a comment or just all kind of people going yes exactly yeah all kinds of petty claimants yes yeah yes no that that is fantastic and I think that seems to have if there are any further questions I'm not sure Aki John whether there are any questions on the Facebook stream that you might like to share with us but otherwise I it's perhaps time to I don't know if the panelists now would you like to the three of you after this Q&A session are there any other points you'd like to and I don't know Professor Perry is don't see any other questions no there are no questions there yes and I would like to give one or two examples of how misguided nationalism can actually distort culture traveling from Qiba to the old capital or Gange of the old capital of the Khoraz region beautiful and which has since gone out of bounds people are not allowed to visit it's beautiful I saw a sign saying Izmukhshir I tried to figure out what Izmukhshir could possibly be asked the Turkmen guys they had no idea as finally it occurred to me that it was it was the birthplace of Zahmah Shari the great philologist of Quranic Arabic and also Persian and so I suggested it but nobody had ever heard about Zahmah Shari so we get a lot of distorted information like this because they cut off the connection with their previous heritage and you know I mentioned the restoration of Sultan Sanjar's tomb Robert Hillenbrand has a whole list of examples where I mean on my recent trip to Samarkhand last year that they're changing so many things that they're actually changing the face of their own immediate history so I think these distortions need to be exposed to keep the historical truth alive yes yeah and Fatemi, while I have you online is a question just coming for you that could you please explain whether at the time of your paper art was used only for and by the elites well sorry right the art in the period was used only for and by the elites the art yes artistic production I imagine yes it's a rather open and well yes and no of course it was always the elite who had two patron to be the patrons of the art and then finance it and so on I mean no one more so than Gohar Shah din Herat and so but what you have the guilds who transmitted the the crafts and they that's why they stayed alive from one dynasty to the other Timurid art to cover architecture to cover from central architect and so on you know and and and Safavid from Timurid because you had these guilds who preserved the secrets of the crafts and that that that was one of the secrets of of the survival picture until the modern era when it has gone haywire with with tile panels ordered in China you know industrial production and also yes yeah but I jump in here briefly yeah a couple of things just not to sell not to a short indoor person I've just been reminded that the Mosheirah tradition is still alive and well in in India everybody they they they get together and recite version poetry and especially also poems newly created newly newly written in in person and what's the other thing yeah the the question of language is is very is crucial to all these things of course but in very different ways and going back to actually some something that Sir Jod mentioned I think the in Britain and are you actually talking about Jones and his his being Welsh the British in right up into the 19th century actually will forbade the Irish to speak their own language in fact and the Iranians up to very recent times were trying to stop the Azerbaijanis from speak from publishing Azerbaijani literature banning imports of that sort of thing so today things are for the moment anyway just a little more sensible but God knows I mean recently we've come across horrible examples of return to some primitive biases as a little low stones load stones once again yes yes I know that you know from colleagues or people have worked within Uzbekistan it's not very easy to you try to even publish books in fashion let alone have the literary circles that they would have language identity are so intimately linked that the very tricky dealing with absolutely absolutely I have to say that when I please you find the Virginia the reasons are very different in some cases the intention is to create a new identity from all that in other cases because I know the identity is being destroyed for political reasons from outside so its strength is being undermined within because because it can serve as a vehicle for attacks from hostile enemies and so on so you have a diversity of reasons for the distortion of cultural integrity yes yeah absolutely I perhaps I'll finish with one couple of course every time I say I'll finish with this question another one pops up at first oboe one from Abolala Sudovar how did and perhaps panellists if you would keep it brief how did the Durrani's view Azad Khan did they feel that they owed anything to him I think I'll take up yes please okay please yeah I honestly this is one of the reasons why I'm questioning the identity of Azad Khan there's no information on him in any of the Afghan sources and they usually provide at least some details about some of these prominent figures and yeah I do believe that again that identification as Afghan most likely is due to the large number of Afghans in Azad Khan's army and so because they became associated with their leader he by extension would have taken on that identity to some extent but again this is just a working theory but do you have to answer Abolala's question I haven't found any details in the on that thing does it still have some Caucasian connection yes I think I think I think so yeah I think there must be some connection to Georgia which I believe married married the Georgian princess exactly so that's my sort of working to go all the way to Tiflis and marry a Georgian princess and Professor Perry would you like to have the last word on this it's not something important I have to add that as well as thanking the organizers and presenters for this marvelous occasion I do want to acknowledge my wife Ranjana and Dr. Tara for technical help in the zooming of this very difficult activity wonderful family effort and well thank you very much and we are very good time to before I invite Professor Charles Melville back to wrap up the today's proceeding so I am really grateful to Mrs. Thornton, Vesodovar, Farmon Farmonion, to Dr. Saadjod Nejoti and to Professor John Perry and I'd like for Professor Perry I went to when I was working on the grammar I went to look at our special collections at the Saad's library where you have to put in a request to look at a copy of William Jones's grammar I have to say it was pretty good it may be you know maybe not as formidable as perhaps softer around the edges compared to Professor Ann Lampton's but I was mega impressed with his attention to detail anyway some of the stuff is really he knew his stuff and thank you very much indeed and before I sign off I'm also would like to thank all our participants who are staying the course with us and I'll hand over to Professor Melville yes well thank you very much it's interesting of course that Jones did his grammar without ever going to Iran and before he even went to India I mean this is quite remarkable it is the case of course that pretty well every English grammar of Persian for the next hundred years was written by people in India and most of them had never been to Iran either and I was writing a brief article about this that never got published but some of the examples of stock conversations you could have were really incredibly amusing they're all written in this sort of Indian mentality about what you say to your servants about how long you're boiled eggs should be boiled and stuff like that but the whole a whole raft of one English grammar after another was written by British Indian officials who'd never been anywhere near Iran anyway I've listened to the last panel as to the other three just quietly in the background of course and the first thing is to thank this recent panel but all our nine speakers for a day that I think has hung together extremely well and in which we've started with Russia and the encroachments and the cultural interactions with the great neighbour to the north on the one side and we've gone through also in the last panel Iran's interactions with central Asian entities and then down into India so we've we've seen really Iran talking about moving into a new world order we have explored all the boundaries that really begin to form a sort of at least Iran's physical and geographical boundaries of course they're just taking place now beginning to shape up in the period we've been talking about one of the sort of stock appreciations of the 18th century of course is the the notion that after the Safavids Iran sort of plunged back into this tribal chaos and then emerged out of this in the early 19th century with the establishment of the Qajar dynasty and because in some sense that's more or less true but I think what we've seen actually is a classic example of a long-term phenomenon in the Iranian history of the alternation between a strong more or less centralised rule and then fragmentation and that doesn't necessarily mean that the continuities aren't there throughout these periods of fragmentation and one only has to think of the safari it's actually who were mentioned much earlier on in the day well maybe only actually by Sajad I think as you know carrying the flag of Persian culture in the sense of Iranian that's even through the 9th century where of course Iran as a country had more or less ceased to exist in theory so I think what we've seen is partly an exploration of this phenomenon in the case of the late 18th and early 19th century and also the the extraordinary interest of what was going on in this period which appears to be so chaotic from the outside in terms of artistic continuities and changes and of course it's a bit of a cliche but continuity and change is very much a sense of what one has and this is really just a slice of history I mean I think Fatima's talk took us through a great long sort of look back of really the whole situation regarding Iran's interaction with Turan essentially I mean this is what it is and this has gone on for centuries Sajad was talking about the long interaction of course with East and Greater Khorasan and who it belongs to and I mean the fact is these are very long Jurae issues and the question of language and Shahnameh and identities all comes into the mix time and again through all these long periods so I personally think we've had a very stimulating day and all the panelists have delivered what they were expected to deliver and promised to deliver and given us a good treat I'd like to say that unfortunately the question and answer sessions have not been preserved I mean the chat is preserved or the chat is largely among us and probably should be deleted but the Q&A session unfortunately is not there so and of course we haven't been able to answer every single question so if anybody had a question that hasn't been answered I'd recommend they get in touch with the individual speaker concerned I don't think after a rather a long day we need to hear an awful lot more about me but I'd just like to remind our speakers that in due course I'll be asking for your papers to be presented to me in written up form for publication you'll probably have quite a nice long time to do this because depending on what the Suda Foundation decides and everybody's energy the chances are we'll have a second Karjah period to follow this one and it may be as in the case of the Safavid two Safavid conferences we merge both conferences into one volume I have to say that for me as editor this is actually really hard work so we may decide to just do this volume as a standalone volume which I think actually works rather well and then do a later Karjah one for a second volume because in the case of the Safavids of course it's a much longer period and it was so many bits from one end and another and one subject from another but it seems sensible to wait till they roll together but anyway so we'll have to let you know about that and the series is beautifully well established now and we're looking forward to a continuation of it just see if I had any other comments to make I think really I've said everything I wanted to say except perhaps just a code on the question of India because apart from the grammarians and John Perry referred to the lexicographers I mean we've also got to bear in mind that there are probably as many Persian manuscripts in India as there are in Iran and these are I wouldn't say neglected but they are increasingly neglected now and anybody who's been to India and looked at the collections of Persian manuscripts sees there in a very poor condition and that the resources available for looking after them are very much reduced I think this reflects partly on this question of nationalism because at the moment the Persian heritage is not a top priority in India so I would encourage everybody interested in this phenomenon of the spread of Persian outside the immediate borders of modern Iran to remember to try to look at and consult and ideally save the incredibly rich and important collections which are of course are also an interesting reflection of how Persian culture travelled and what was it what texts were thought to be interesting and to be preserved and of course we all know that Saudi's Gulistan was probably one of the most and it was even used for the Indian civil service exams for tens of years this was one of the set texts Platt's edition and translation of which I'd have to say I have a copy was a set text for the British Raj for many years so there's a huge overlap of course with India which is I'm very glad that we were able to get this in at the end so without more ado I think it's really just to reiterate our thanks to our panelists and to Aki at the background who sat through the whole day looking after us and making sure everything was working I'd like to thank very warmly my co-convener Sarah for all her efforts and making sure that this did actually happen this year and everybody for participating so fully and enthusiastically in our day I'm just a final word from my thank you very much you're looking great I'm very glad you could join us so I think that's all from me so I'm going to be quiet now and I shall leave the meeting and hope to see you all again in real life before too long thank you wonderful there yes there's a question about the contact details so please anyone who wishes to you could either send it to so as you know you'll find Sarah on the also as website so perhaps might be easier to forward any queries you have to that and then we'll be able to forward them to their speakers that might be easier although most of the speakers emails are on their institutions pages so I just so I'll read out that last request just thank you Nargis thank you thank you so much such a lovely way of spending Saturdays and I put my fairy lights out for you as well may the rest of your Saturday be scintillating