Joseph and His Two Wives: Patterns of Cultural Accommodation in the Judæo-Persian Tale of Yusof and Zoleykhā

The Tale of Yusof and Zoleykhā appears as part of a religious epic poem, the Bereshit-nāma (Book of Genesis), by the fourteenth-century Judæo-Persian poet Shāhin. Composed in 1358–59, in classical Persian with an admixture of Hebraisms and written in Hebrew characters, this tale was enormously popular within Persian-speaking Jewish communities and was frequently copied on its own. The paper focuses on two episodes from this story: Yusof’s marriages to Zoleykhā and to Osnat (Asenath). Shāhin was active in the late Il-khanid and early post-Mongol periods, when new forms of patronage of literary and artistic production emerged seeking to blend different cultural worlds. The poet indeed fashioned unique amalgams of Jewish and Perso-Islamic traditions, both in form and content. The two episodes constitute small case studies for exploring Shāhin’s diverse array of sources and for determining the thematic and structural ramifications of this fusion. The paper pinpoints how Shāhin accommodated and adapted Jewish and Islamic materials and demonstrates that, though Jewish, the poet firmly ensconces himself in a Persianate cultural sphere.

An Iranian Shāh-nāma Writer at the Court of Bāyezid II: Malekzāda Āhi

Malekzāda Āhi was an Iranian-born Shāh-nāma writer (shāh-nāmaji, Ott. şehnameci) who served at the court of the Ottoman sultan Bāyezid II (r. 1481–1512) and composed the first Ottoman dynastic history to bear the title of “Shāh-nāma.” Accompanying the sultan since his years as a prince, Malekzāda wrote his Shāh-nāma after the tradition of Ferdowsi (d. 1019–20) and Nezāmi (d. 1209), in addition to many odes (qasidas) in praise of his patron. Despite his contemporary reputation as the “master of the verse (malek al-kalam)” in the sultan’s palace, a series of unfortunate accidents led to his relative obscurity in modern historiography. Malekzāda Āhi’s experience as a Shāh-nāma writer is representative of the position held by Iranian artists and scholars in the early sixteenth-century Ottoman palace. His Shāh-nāma also should be regarded as one of the earliest transmissions of the Shāh-nāma style of history-writing to the Ottoman realm. In this article, I attempt to uncover Malekzāda Āhi’s real identity and shed light on his activities in the palace circle, based on archival documents that are studied here for the first time.

Narratives of Home on the Fringe of Tehran: The Case of Shahriar County

This paper focuses on the notion of home as a narrative of one’s lived experience that clashes with planners’ understanding of housing and housing policies, using as a case study Shahriar County, located on the western fringe of the metropolitan area of Tehran. Following Heidegger, the feeling of home is a fundamental aspect of human existence. From this perspective, housing policies and spatial planning impact the sense of home in a geographical context. The empirical analysis is based on an overview of institutional changes since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, and interviews with inhabitants of Shahriar. The results indicate that Iran has developed a particular form of neoliberal, speculative model of urban development, in which urban segregation and seclusion and uneven regional development are noteworthy. Consequently, the sense of home is structurally undermined on the metropolitan fringe, generating a feeling of living on the edge of the world.

An Analysis of the Rug-Washing Ceremony in Mashhad-e Ardehāl, Kāshān

The Iranian religious ceremony of rug-washing (qāli-shuyān), commemorating the martyrdom of Emāmzāda Soltān-ʿAli b. Mohammad Bāqer (d. 734/116), is held every year in the second week of autumn in Mashhad-e Ardehāl, a village of Kāshān, Esfahān Province. This ceremony is unique amongst Twelver Shiʿis for its observance in accordance with the solar calendar rather than the lunar. The objective of the present article is to analyze this ceremony and explain its features. The necessary data for this research have been collected from fieldwork on the historical geography of the region and related historical documents. In the analysis of this ceremony, attention is paid to its time, place, and mode of performance. This study suggests that the rug-washing ceremony is at least partly descended from an ancient Mithraic ritual, to which some Zoroastrian features were added in the pre-Islamic period, such as the limiting of its performance to priests; during the Islamic era, ritual Shiʿi elements were further added thereto. As currently performed, this ceremony, exclusive to Ardehāl and dating to the Qajar and possibly Safavid periods, thus bears certain similarities to rituals performed at Karbalāʾ.

The Saffarid Yaʿqub b. Layth and the Revival of Persian Kingship

The sparse historical data suggest that Yaʿqub b. Layth was the first Iranian ruler following the Arab-Islamic conquests to make significant efforts to revive Persian kingship. This article seeks to clarify, as far as possible, Yaʿqub’s actions and goals, as well as the context for his efforts. This interpretation of the sources argues that the Saffarid ruler’s government faced a crisis of social legitimacy owing to the tense relations that developed between Yaʿqub and the caliph on the one hand, and the nobles of Khorasan on the other. In this context, only in the last four years of his rule was Yaʿqub, in an effort to legitimate his power, forced to turn away from dependence on caliphal investiture and to appeal instead to a revival of Persian kingship (without the official use of the title “king”).

“Neither Eastern nor Western, Iranian”: How the Quest for Self-Sufficiency Helped Shape Iran’s Modern Nationalism

This essay identifies an historically-enduring Iranian insistence on self-sufficiency—which can be summed up, in a superordinate manner, as the idea that the world needs Iran more than Iran needs the world. Economically, this insistence is reflected in a (rhetorical) quest for self-reliance in production; politically, it tends to be articulated in an instinctive anti-(neo)colonial, often defiant stance vis-à-vis the world; and culturally, it is often expressed as a claim to civilizational grandeur, indeed uniqueness. The origins of this conceit have to be sought in antecedents combining economic perceptions with cultural assumptions that long precede Western imperialism and modern nationalism. These, in turn, are grounded in patterns of thought that reflect specific pre-modern physical and geopolitical conditions which go back to pre-Islamic notions of paradisiacal abundance as much as to economic realities encapsulated by Aristotle’s idea(l) of the self-sufficient household. I also argue that the notion evolved over time even as it retained its moral core. What was an instinctive dismissal of the outside world as dispensable, after 1800 became a self-conscious stance against foreign encroachment, real or imagined. In the course of the twentieth century, a quest for material autarky coupled with an insistence on cultural exceptionalism became an integral part of modern Iranian nationalism.

The Emergence and Development of Persianate Sufism: Khorasan, Ninth to Twelfth Centuries

This paper examines the emergence of Sufism and its differentiation from other religious trends in early Islamic Khorasan and Transoxania and traces the influence of Buddhism and Manichæism on the development of Sufism. The corresponding professionalization of the Sufi sheikhs in this formative process went hand in hand with the elaboration of Sufi mystical theory. The theoretical elaboration of Sufism consisted in the development of a theory of divine love culminating in the masterpieces of Farid al-Din ʿAttār on the eve of the Mongol invasion. The paper highlights the strong connection between Sufism and fotovvat (urban brotherhoods) during the emergence of Sufism in Khorasan and its gradual weakening that resulted from the increasing professionalization of Sufism and the formation of a distinct Persianate Sufi identity. The appropriation and transformation of royal symbolism in the Sufi texts is then analyzed in the last section.

How to Found a New Dynasty: The Early Qajars’ Quest for Legitimacy

This paper focuses on how early Qajars established their rule and legitimacy. At first, Āqā Mohammad Khān, the first shah, imitated other rulers since Nāder Shāh, such as Mohammad-Hasan Khān Qājār, Āzād Khān Afghān, and Karim Khān Zand, in his coins and documents. Like his predecessors, he also tried to install a Safavid prince at Tehran as a puppet ruler. However, following his official coronation and his conquest of Iran, he changed the format of his royal edicts and issued extraordinarily heavy gold coins. Nevertheless, neither Āqā Mohammad Khān nor his successors created an official genealogy to legitimize their rule, instead modifying a genealogical tree of Ottoman origin to juxtapose their names alongside those of other royal families without connecting themselves directly to Biblical or Qurʾanic ancestors. The early Qajar case reveals new methods of establishing dynastic legitimacy which differed from the approach of earlier dynasties in the Persianate world.