The Daoguang Response to the Āfāqī khoja Jahāngīr during the 1826–1828 Jahāngīr Uprising

This study examines Qing state attention to the Muslim challenger Jahāngīr, leader of Xinjiang’s 1826–1828 Jahāngīr Uprising. It considers how imperial agents, guided by Emperor Daoguang, defined and processed this contender, as well what this rendering implied for views of “Hui Frontier” Muslims. As will be seen, Jahāngīr was depicted as not just “treacherous” and duplicitous, but also an external “barbarian.” This image – crafted from military reports, imperial edicts, confessions, ritual, sentencing, and punishment – served to clarify a narrative with two salient characteristics. First, the khoja was set as the keystone of the conflict, the management of whom signaled a restoration of imperial integrity. Second, he was differentiated from local Turkic Muslims “Hui,” who (with ambiguity) were framed as Qing subjects. This rendering mirrored earlier Qing (esp. Jiaqing Reforms) depictions of borderland rebel leaders, suggestive of a solidification of the “idea” of Xinjiang as interior to the empire.     

On the Artāy Vīrāz Nāmak

Sans résumé

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On the Arty Vrz Nmak

     

Yaḥyā Dawlatābādī’s Contribution to Persian Poetic Modernity

In 1912, Ya?yā Dawlatābādī composed two poems, the form of which diverged greatly from the canonical rules of tradition. Both poems were based on syllabic meters. Critics and historians of modern Persian literature have given these poems little consideration, and discussed them merely from the point of view of metrics. When compared to the great modernist endeavors in the poetry of the time, these pieces were judged severely, or altogether disavowed. This paper aims to show that, beyond mere metrical audacity, Ya?yā Dawlatābādī’s syllabic poems were in fact innovative. As the article argues, they were born out of the same quest for fresh poetic forms that induced contemporaneous modernists to create new, individualized poetic patterns.     

Al-Fārābī’s Cave: Aristotle’s Logic and the Ways of Socrates and Thrasymachus

In his commentary on Aristotle’s Rhetoric al-Fārābī harmonizes Plato and Aristotle in terms of philosophic education by ordering Aristotle’s eight logical works onto Plato’s famous image of the cave. He represents the way out of the cave with Aristotle’s four logical works of ascent (Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, and Posterior Analytics) and the return into the cave through Aristotle’s four logical works of the descent (Topics, Sophistical Refutations, Rhetoric, and Poetics). Al-Fārābī’s image of ascent and descent also alludes to Socrates’ conception of protreptic education in Book VII of the Republic. In essence, protreptic education consists in the Socratic art that freely turns the soul from the images and political interpretations of things to being itself. In this essay I argue that for al-Fārābī the four logical works of ascent guide the soul to free itself from its habituations so as to contemplate real beings, particularly the good of one’s own soul and the souls of one’s fellow citizens. Yet the ruler needs to use the arts of “descent,” as demonstrated by Thrasymachus, in order to rule the city well. The way of Socrates consists of the logical methods used to come to possess knowledge of being, while the way of Thrasymachus comprises the methods of persuasion to habituate citizens and protect the philosophic quest for the truth. Al-Fārābī, I conclude, combines the way of Socrates and the way of Thrasymachus in order to show that both ways are useful and necessary for good governance.     

“Neither Ākhūnd nor Fukulī”: Munāzirah and the Discourse of Iranian Modernity

Iranian modernity has chiefly been examined in the context of a dialectical antagonism between “traditionalists” and “modernists”—the main categories comprised of related sub-headings such as “Islamist” versus “secular,” “reactionary” versus “revolutionary,” and “regressive” versus “progressive.” Following this binaristic approach, Iranian adaptations of modernity have often been (de)historicized as a theatre of national “awakening” resulting from the toils of secular intellectuals in overcoming the obstinate resistance of traditional reactionaries, a confrontation between two purportedly well-defined and mutually exclusive camps. Such reductionist dialectics has generally overwritten the dialogic narrative of Iranian modernity, a conflicted dialogue misrepresented as a conflicting dialectic. It has also silenced an important feature of Iranian modernity: the universally acknowledged premise of the simultaneity and commensurability of tradition with modernity. The monāzereh (disputation or debate) is the account of the interaction between rival discourses that engaged in opposing, informing, and appropriating each other in the process of adapting modernity. Narrativizing the history of Iranian modernity as the conflict between mutually exclusive binaries overlooks its hyphenated, liminal identity—a narrative of adaptation rather than wholesale adoption, of heterogeneity rather than homogeneity, of dialogics rather than dialectics. The monāzereh is the account of modern Iranian histories.     

Le droit a l'adhyayana selon la Mīmāmsā

Summary This paper is a short survey of five Mmms authors - in chronological order, abara, Kumrila, Prabhkara, likantha, Prthsrathi Mira - in reference to the right (adhikra) of learning by heart the Veda (adhyayana). More or less explicitly, they dismiss it for the social class of the dra, and their gloss on the first stra of the dra is highlighted with the help of this view. The paper summarizes also a number of points raised by this complicated stra.