From Etelāʿāti to Eslāhtalabi: Saʿid Hajjarian,Political Theology and the Politics of Reform in Post-Revolutionary Iran

This article examines the importance of the political thought and praxis of politico, ‘reformist’ strategist and intellectual, Sa?id Hajjarian, and his rethinking of the post-revolutionary Iranian state’s sources and bases of legitimacy in the 1990s and 2000s. It also provides an exposition and assessment of a number of his recommendations for the realisation of ‘political development’ (towse?eh-ye siyāsi) in the post-revolutionary order and their contribution to the discourse of eslāhāt during the presidency of Hojjat al-Islam Mohammad Khatami (1997–2005). Moreover, it attempts to situate Hajjarian within a broader spectrum of reformist political opinion and its proponents within the Islamic Republic of Iran’s political class.     

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.     

Rhetoric,Narrative, and the Remembrance of Death in ʿAttār's Mosibat-nāmeh

This paper examines the anecdotes of ?Attār’s Mosibat-nāmeh as temporal phenomena from the perspective of a reader moving progressively through the text; it is argued that that these anecdotes do not function primarily as carriers of dogmatic information, but as dynamic rhetorical performances designed to prod their audiences into recommitting to a pious mode of life. First, the article shows how the poem’s frame-tale influences a reader’s experience of the embedded anecdotes by encouraging a sequential mode of consumption and contextualizing the work’s pedagogical aims. Next, it is demonstrated that these anecdotes are bound together through formulae and lexical triggers, producing a paratactic structure reminiscent of oral homiletics. Individual anecdotes aim to unsettle readers’ ossified religious understandings, and together they offer a flexible set of heuristics for pious living. Finally, it is argued that ?Attār’s intended readers were likely familiar with the mystical principles that underlie his poems; he therefore did not use narratives to provide completely new teachings, but rather to persuade his audience to more fully embody those pious principles to which they were already committed.     

The Social and Literary Context of German Translations of Saʿdi’s Golestān

Sa?di’s Golestān has been translated into German numerous times since the seventeenth century. The purpose of this article is to examine the social and literary context of three German translations and translators: Karl Heinrich Graf, a theologian and researcher of the Old Testament, published his translation of the Golestān in 1846 during German Romanticism; Dieter Bellmann, a professor of Oriental studies, published a revision of Graf’s Rosengarten in 1982 in the German Democratic Republic, where literature was strictly regulated; Kathleen Göpel published her indirect translation from English, prepared by the Afghan translator Omar Ali-Shah, in 1997, at a time of intercultural literature, also called “bridge literature.” Through examples the article shows how the context may have influenced their translations and how the text has changed when traveling across linguistic and cultural borders.     

Authorial Voices and the Sense of an Ending in Persian Diaries: Notes on Eʿtemād al-Saltaneh and ʿAlam

This essay examines certain common themes as well as conflicting voices in two extensive sets of Persian diaries, written almost a century apart, by Mohammad-Hasan Khān E?temād al-Saltaneh (1843?96), a long-time courtier and confidant of Nāser al-Din Shah Qajar (r. 1848?86) and Asadollāh ?Alam (1919?78) a close associate and court minister of Mohammad-Reza Shah Pahlavi (r. 1941?79). On the whole these diaries provide significant amounts of information about the inner workings of the court and the overall institutional setup of the Iranian state in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although in writing their diaries these authors did not set out to produce a literary work, and nor did they intend to chronicle a general history, each in his own way captured his respective epoch and, within their limitations of time, scope, and insight, each reflected a broad range of private and social relationships. Also each in his own way echoed older ministerial voices, reminiscent of the voice that often resonates in the “mirror for princes” genre, of part player part intimate observer, and with a certain sense of admonition and resignation, lamenting the loss of an era which they felt was slipping away as they wrote.     

The Place of the Mālavikāgnimitra within Kālidāsa's oeuvre

Indo-Iranian Journal -     

The Mazandarani Dialect of Kalijān Rostāq

Located in the Caspian forest south of the capital city of Sāri in Mazandaran, the rural district of Kalijān Rostāq is home to a number of close-knit villages which share a local Mazandarani dialect. The vernacular offers some authentic features in phonology, morphology, and lexis that are otherwise lost in the urban variety spoken in Sāri due to contact with Persian. In an attempt to elucidate on the loosely-known aspects of the Mazandarani language, this study offers a sketch grammar of the dialect of Kalijān Rostāq with a view to typological features. The glossary that follows includes many Caspian cultural items that are already moribund in the language.     

Saʿdi-ye Shirāzi and Bono Giamboni in Dialogue: A Comparative Approach to Temperance

This article presents a study of two coeval works on morals: the first belongs to the classic Persian tradition, the Golestān (The Rose Garden) by Sa?di (Shirāz 1210–91 or 1292); the second, Il libro de’ vizî e delle virtudi (Book of Vices and Virtues) by Bono Giamboni (Florence 1240–92), belongs to the first didactic prose in vernacular Italian. The study will specially concern the theme of temperance ????? qanā?at, central to both Islamic and Christian morals. An analysis is made of passages dedicated to this theme in both texts, also through comparative observations, in order to identify the approach characteristic to each work.     

A Gāthic Rite? A Critique of the Cosmological Interpretation of the Gāthās I

In the last few decades ritual interpretation of the Gāthās has replaced the biblical one as the dominant paradigm. The emphasis on the central role of ritual in the Avesta is well justified. This realization has given rise to the question of the role and meaning of ritual in the Gāthās. Marijan Molé had tried to argue that the Gāthās in fact describe and accompany a rite whose purpose was the preservation/renovation of the cosmic order. Students of the Gāthās working within the new paradigm have taken up Molé’s general frame. They have tried to show that the Gāthās, collectively or individually, is the text of a particular rite that served, among others, to preserve the cosmic order, especially the daily rise of the sun. The article questions the validity of this thesis. Its focus is on the version of the thesis we find in a number of recent publications by Jean Kellens. He tries to show that the first Gāthā (Ahunauuaitī) describes a unitary pre-dawn ritual that comprised a haoma rite and an animal sacrifice, and had cosmological and eschatological pretensions. His textual analyses and arguments are examined in some detail. The article concludes that Kellens's attempt must be deemed unsuccessful.