This article examines how the Persian prison poem (habsiyāt) incorporated Islamic legal norms for governing non-Muslim peoples into its poetics. By tracing how Khāqāni of Shirvān (d. 1199) brought the aesthetics of incarceration to bear on Islamic legal regulations pertaining to non-Muslim communities (ahl al-zemma), I offer a new perspective on…[Read more]

Mīrzā Fatḥ ‘Alī Ākhūndzāda’s Letters from Prince Kamāl al-Dawla to the Prince Jalāl al-Dawla (1865) is often read as a Persian attempt to introduce European Enlightenment political thought to modern Iranian society. This essay frames Ākhūndzāda’s text within a broader intellectual tradition. I read Ākhūndzāda as a radical reformer whose inte…[Read more]

Review of Ali-Akbar Dehkhoda, Charand-o Parand. Revolutionary Satire from Iran, 1907–1909, Translated by Janet Afary and John R. Perry, in Iranian Studies

During the final decade of his productive life, Moshe Gammer (1950-2013) edited the first major English-language series on Daghestani philology. This chapter examines key aspects of Gammer’s legacy, while offering an overview of Daghestani philology from the colonial period to the present, and outlining how this field of inquiry enables us to r…[Read more]

Addressing Walt Whitman’s reception in Iran, the present essay focuses on the front cover of a book-length translation of Whitman into Persian to study how Whitman’s image is visually translated for an Iranian audience. Among literary discourses of contemporary Iran, the one that associates poetry with mysticism plays the most significant role in…[Read more]

The Arabic narrative sources record a host of tales related to the founding of Baghdad and to its founder, the caliph al-Manṣūr. In one account, reported in several versions by al-Ṭabarī and al-Ḫaṭīb al-Bagdādī, a Byzantine ambassador arrives at al-Manṣūr’s court and criticizes the caliph’s new capital. The present paper suggests that the tale m…[Read more]

Section 295-C of Pakistan’s penal code prohibits insulting the Prophet and carries a mandatory death penalty. This law was passed based on a claim of ijma‘ (consensus among Islamic scholars) that such an offense is subject to a hadd (divinely fixed) punishment. Nearly half of those charged under this statute crimes of hadd are Christians, who mak…[Read more]

The present edition was originally prepared for a paper given at the international conference “Bridging the Worlds of Judaism and Islam” held at Bar-Ilan University on January 3-4, 2006 (“ʿAlī ibn Ṭaybughā’s commentary on Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, Sefer ha-Maddaʿ, Hilkhot Yesodei ha-Torah I-IV: a philosophical ‘encyclopaedia’ of the 14th century…[Read more]

Among the great diversity of source material and multiple historio- and biographical works covering the history of the early Qāsimī state , Yaḥyā b. al-Ḥusayn b. al-Qāsim’s (d. after 1100/1687) Bahǧat al-zaman fī tārīḫ al-Yaman occupies a position of paramount importance. For the political, economic, social, cultural and intellectual hi…[Read more]

The literary relation between Parvin E’tesami and Walt Whitman remains a largely unexplored field. This article analyzes the connection between “God’s Weaver” and “A Noiseless Patient Spider” to shed light on Parvin’s creative reception of Whitman. Creating a mixed-breed spider, combining characteristics from both
Whitman’s insect and the Persi…[Read more]

This article examines the panegyric across the literary traditions of West, South, and East Asia, concentrating on Arabo-Persian qaṣīda, the Sanskrit praśasti, and the Chinese fu. In radically different albeit analogous ways, each genre elaborated a political aesthetics of literary form. The West, South, and East Asian genres each cultivated a met…[Read more]

Building on the multivalent meanings of the Arabo- Persian tarjama (‘to interpret’, ‘to translate’, ‘to narrate’), this essay argues for the relevance of Qur’ānic inimitability (i’jāz) to contemporary translation theory. I examine how the translation of Arabic rhetorical theory (‘ilm al-balāgha) into Persian inaugurated new trends within the study…[Read more]

While the cosmopolitan turn in political and literary theory encourages us to move beyond national frameworks, the Caucasus remains mired in ethno-national categories from the Soviet past. This essay examines how these categories are being mobilized in the service of a nominally cosmopolitan agenda in the contemporary memorialization of the writer…[Read more]

This essay examines how translation theory can globalize contemporary literary comparison. Whereas Persian studies has historically been isolated from the latest developments within literary theory, world literature has similarly been isolated from the latest developments within the study of non-European literatures. The methodology of hard…[Read more]

Discusses 1) Kalām and the Syro-Arabic transmission of Galen’s medico-philosophical writings, in particular On the Usefulness of the Bodily Parts, and Nemesius of Emesa’s On the Nature of Man; 2) the reception of Abū Bakr al-Rāzī in 10th and 11th century Muʿtazilī thought; includes an edition and translation of two chapters of Abū Jaʿfar Muḥamma…[Read more]

This paper attempts to provide answers to the following questions: What are the causes of political changes in Africa in the 21st century? Are these changes people-led? What are the challenges militating against people-led political changes in Africa? The paper takes a look at the nature of the post-colonial states of Africa since the Cold War…[Read more]

This palaeographical guide grew out of a workshop («A Jewish Theologian’s Arabic Guide to State Administration: Mukhtaṣar fī ṣināʿat al-kitāba of Sahl b. al-Faḍl al-Tustarī»), organised by Dr. Luke Yarbrough at the NYU Abu Dhabi, 29-30 March 2017. Comments and corrections are welcome (g.schwarb@gmail.com).

This paper examines a 9th-century Arabic text of genethlialogical astrology, arguing that while it presents itself as heir to a Greek science deriving from India, it is also a testament to the pervasive role played by Sasanian intellectual culture in the 8th- to 10th-century Greek-Arabic translation movement. After a description of the…[Read more]

The article offers a bibliographical aperçu of Zaydī-Muʿtazilī Kalām-studies from the 15th through 18th centuries based on MS Munich, Bavarian State Library, Cod. arab. 1294. This codex contains ʿAbd Allāh b. Muḥammad al-Naǧrī’s as yet unedited K. Mirqāt al-anẓār, a major kalām textbook which for almost three centuries constituted the b…[Read more]