Holy Figures Portrayed in the Edinburgh Fragment of Rashīd al-Dīn’s World History

This paper has two purposes. One is to look carefully at the way that the stories of Sālih and Samson are told in the Edinburgh fragment of Rashīd al-Dīn’s World History and its accompanying illustrations, and the messages that these convey. The second is to explore the interplay of text and image in what might be termed “the Moses cycle” and to consider the motivation for the unusual textual and pictorial emphasis on Moses. Several aspects of the cycle are analyzed: Moses as an antetype of Rashīd al-Dīn himself, the impact of the Qur’anic text and Moses as a precursor of the Prophet Muhammad.     

Ṭūsī Reloaded: Ismāʿīlī Paths of Sufi Wayfaring and Sufi Paths of Ismāʿīlī Apophaticism

Much ink has been spilled on the tumultuous life and works of Na?īr al-Dīn ?ūsī. This paper re-evaluates his connections with Sufism and Ismā?īlism, and challenges the reduction of the former to a late interest, and the latter to an early affiliation abandoned in the wake of the Mongol invasion. The paper argues that Sufi and Ismā?īlī themes, sources, and ideas are in an organic interpenetration in ?ūsī’s works throughout his career. While his early Ismā?īlī eschatology has a fundamentally Sufi nature, his late Sufi treatise adopts the key components of Ismā?īlī negative theology of the divine nature. The case of ?ūsī illustrates that the Ismā?īlī double negation was preserved in Iran and Central Asia, and put into creative interactions with Sufism in the thirteenth century.     

War Trauma and Alcoholism in the Early Writings of Charlotte and Branwell Brontë

During and after the Napoleonic Wars, there was an outpouring of military-based biographical writing never before seen in British history. Over 200 military memoirs were published either as standalone entities or in periodicals such as Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and The United Service Journal. As a result, the experiences of ordinary soldiers were brought to the forefront of Britain’s public consciousness. Although many of these memoirs glorified war, a number revealed the psychological damage war inflicted on the British male population and explicitly exposed the horrors of combat to a domestic readership. Furthermore, this explosion of life writing also exposed a connection between suffering and alcoholism, consolidating trauma as a post-war, national problem. The Brontës, typically recognized as canonical, Victorian authors, first participated in this military-based literary movement. This article attempts to reposition and establish two of the siblings – Charlotte and Branwell – as significant post-war commentators. By focussing on their military reading, it will become clear how they vicariously processed and reimagined war trauma and addiction through their Glass Town and Angrian sagas. Not only will this article argue that the introduction of military biography into British society generated wide-scale recognition of war trauma, despite its absence within contemporary medical discourse, but it will also argue that the young Brontës’ literature is an important historical source for understanding and re-evaluating the public response to post-war military masculinity.     

Shiʻi Piety and Dynastic Legitimacy: Mashhad under the Early Safavid Shahs

Mashhad, the site in northeastern Iran of the shrine of the eighth Shi?i imam, is arguably one of the largest and wealthiest sacred shrines in the world. The gilded dome over the imam's mausoleum stands amidst an expansive complex of courts, monumental gateways, libraries, museums, guesthouses, and administrative offices that cater to thousands of pilgrims each year. This paper examines the period, under the aegis of the early Safavid shahs, when Mashhad was established as the preeminent Shi?i pilgrimage center in Iran. Appropriating the Timurid ecumenical vision for the shrine, the Safavid shahs refashioned the holy city into a site that celebrated the triumph of Twelver Shi?ism in the Safavid realm and reinforced Safavid claims of legitimacy. While highlighting Shah Tahmasb's personal devotion to Mashhad, and his privileging of the shrine within Safavid sacred topography, the paper focuses on Shah ?Abbas's urban reshaping of Mashhad and the architectural and institutional expansion of the shrine during his reign, thereby enhancing its status as the leading spiritual center in the Safavid empire.     

Sar-qoflī in the Customs and Laws of Modern Iran: The Emergence of Haqq-e Kasb o Pīshe o Tejārat and the Evolution of the Shop-lease Contract System

In the shop-lease contract with sar-qoflī, which is a widely practiced form of lease contract in today's Iran, a lessor of a shop sells to a hirer a right called sar-qoflī which amounts to almost as much as the entire value of the shop's ownership, while obtaining a monthly rent of only small value. This peculiar form of contract was brought into existence based on a new right called “haqq-e kasb o pīshe o tejārat,” that emerged as a result of the blending of traditional customary practice relating to real estate leasing with Anglo-American value concepts. The adoption of this right, causing as it did the lessor's responsibility for compensation for the value of the usufructuary right, drastically changed the relationship between lessors and hirers in Iran.     

Iskandar's Bibulous Business: Wine,Drunkenness and the Calls to the Sāqī in Nizāmī Ganjavī's Sharaf-nāma

The twelfth-century poet Nizāmī Ganjavī has produced his version of the adventures of Alexander as a unique composition mingling known Persian historiography and Qur'anic legends with unusual non-Islamic, especially Greek, elements in order to create his Iskandar-nāma (containing two parts, the Sharaf-nāma and the Iqbāl-nāma) as a synthesis of eastern and western cultures. A first point is the examination of the reasons behind the importance given to wine and drunkenness within the narrative. The poet has stressed this further by heading each chapter with a call to the sāqī. The essay examines the appositeness of the invocations with the episodes in the narrative, it analyses examples of wine imagery (containing references to medicine, to the mirror and to religion) and questions the relation between authorial persona, narrator and characters, examining in particular the famous teetotaler claim in one of the introductory chapters of the first part of the Iskandar-nāma.