Shii News and Resources > Projects > The Subalterns Project > The First Workshop – Edinburgh, 7-8 November, 2015

The First Workshop – Edinburgh, 7-8 November, 2015

The First Workshop – on the pre-Safavid period – was held at the University of Edinburgh, on 7-8 November 2015.

The programme of the workshop’s presentations is below.

A written description of the workshop is available in the latest IMES Alumni Newsletter, here.

Check the Subalterns’ project’s Twitter account for the latest information about the project: https://twitter.com/perssubalterns

Videos:
[to watch videos from the workshop click here]
(Alternatively, the individual presentations can be viewed via YouTube here)

Attendees:

Dr. Sussan Babaie
Andrew W. Mellon Lecturer in the Arts of Iran and Islam
The Courtauld Institute of Art
London

Professor Albert de Jong
Professor of the Study of Religion
Leiden University Centre for the Study of Religion

Dr Rebecca Gould
Reader of Translation Studies and Comparative Literature
University of Bristol

Professor Carole Hillenbrand
Honorary Professorial Fellow, IMES, Edinburgh University;
Professor of Islamic History, St Andrews University

Professor Robert Hillenbrand
Honorary Professorial Fellow, IMES, Edinburgh University;
Professor of Islamic Art, St Andrews University

Dr Alexey Khismatulin
Senior Research Staff member
The Institute of Oriental Manuscripts (St Petersburg)
The Russian Academy of Sciences

Dr. Derek Mancini-Lander
Lecturer in the History of Iran
SOAS, University of London

Dr. Bruno De Nicola
Research Fellow in Middle Eastern Studies
University of St. Andrews

Ms Michelle Quay
PhD Candidate
Faculty of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies
University of Cambridge

Dr Lloyd Ridgeon
Reader in Islamic Studies
The University of Glasgow

Dr Christine van Ruymbeke
Soudavar Senior Lecturer in Persian
Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
University of Cambridge

Dr Miklos Sarkozy
Visiting Research Fellow
Institute of Ismaili Studies,
London, UK

Dr Riza Yildirim
Associate Professor of Ottoman and Safavid History
TOBB University of Economics and Technology
Department of History
Ankara / Turkey

Abstracts:

Dr Sussan Babaie
Andrew W. Mellon Lecturer in the Arts of Iran and Islam
The Courtauld Institute of Art
London

The ‘riffraff’ in Timurid painting: toward a social history of food service

This paper considers the oft-ignored cast of characters in Persian painting, especially of the fifteenth century, whose role it is to populate princely scenes of entertainment. Representations of cooking – rolling the dough into noodles, mixing the contents of the pot, fanning the fire, grilling the bird – and of serving food – carrying dishes or tables laden with dishes and bottles – become increasingly visible in book paintings but are subsumed in discussions of iconographies of kings and heroes. While no real trace of the ‘lowlifes’ in such courtly context seem to have survived, written and pictured evidence of cooking and serving of food yield some preliminary observations on the significant role played by the persons we might now call working ‘in the food service industry’.

Professor Albert de Jong
Professor of the Study of Religion
Leiden University Centre for the Study of Religion

Their masters’ voice? The genesis of Zoroastrian Persian literature

In spite of its obvious drawbacks, Zoroastrian Middle Persian in the Pahlavi script remained the chief vehicle of Zoroastrian literary production for centuries after the Arab conquests. It is attested not only in the production, in the ninth century, of a whole library of priestly texts (the “Pahlavi books”), but it is also well attested in documentary (legal, economic) texts and in inscriptions. The production, both in terms of copying old texts and of composing new ones, of this literature in its own script continued for centuries, but came to be accompanied by the production, first, of literary texts and then of texts meant to instruct or represent Zoroastrianism for a lay audience. Both the maintenance of the complicated Pahlavi script and the production of Persian literary and educational texts have usually been interpreted in starkly functional terms. Interestingly, quite similar developments of Jewish Persian literature may suggest different possibilities of understanding. This paper will attempt to move beyond the functionality of these developments, and probe these shifts for what they can show us about the double process of participating in, and remaining separate from, wider Iranian society.

Dr Rebecca Gould
Reader of Translation Studies and Comparative Literature
University of Bristol

Poetry as Political Critique: Khāqānī’s Christian Qaṣīda

In this presentation, I will discuss the transformation of a literary genre—the Persian prison poem (ḥabsīyyāt)—in sixth/twelfth century Shirwān as a critical response to Islamic legal norms for governing non-Muslim peoples. While the first innovator in this genre was Mascūd Sacd Salmān of Lahore (d. 1121), Khāqānī of Shirwān (d. 1199) brought the prison poem to a new pitch of political salience a few decades later. My presentation lays particular emphasis on how the prison poem genre engaged with non-Muslim populations, particularly Christians, of Saljūq domains.

By tracing how Khāqānī brought the aesthetics of incarceration to bear on Islamic legal regulations pertaining to non-Muslim communities (ahl al-dhimma), I suggest new ways of understanding the politics of poetry in Persian culture. As I delineate the intertextual references to legal stipulations (shurūṭ) pertaining to non-Muslims that suffuse Khāqānī’s
Christian Qaṣīda, I demonstrate how the Persian poetics of incarceration coalesced into a powerful internal critique of Islamic law.

Briefly stated, my argument is that Khāqānī engaged critically with Islamic legal writings pertaining to the treatment of non-Muslims in his Christian Qaṣīda. He did this through acts of literary subversion: whereas Islamic legal writings insists that non-Muslims must wear special clothing such as the zunnār to distinguish themselves from the Muslim majority population, Khāqānī presents himself in his verse (fictionally) as a Christian who wears non-Muslim clothing with pleasure. Khāqānī therefore uses poetry to identify with non-Muslim populations and to offer a critique of the discriminatory practices enshrined within Islamic legal writing.

Dr Alexey Khismatulin
Senior Research Staff member
The Institute of Oriental Manuscripts (St Petersburg)
The Russian Academy of Sciences

To Appoint Subalterns to the Saljūq State Positions, To Take al-Ghazali’s Letters of Recommendation and To Submit a Job Statement to the Saljūq Sultan

The presentation (in PPT) is divided into three sections announced in the heading. As a foreword, it begins with the more or less known Ghaznavīd procedure of appointment, briefly described by Abū’l-Fazl Bayhaqī in his Tārīkh. The principal document necessary for this procedure was a standard work agreement—muvāza‘at—that is, an official document prepared by an employee himself and similar to the modern contract of employment, consisting of a list of official duties.

The first section then turns to the Saljūq manuals and textbooks, compiled for the Saljūq state secretaries and published by modern scholars. To cover the whole Saljūq period, from the Great Saljūqs to the Saljūqs of Anatolia, this section relies upon the two main sources—the ‘Atabat al-kataba by Muntajab al-Dīn al-Juwaynī (the head of the State Chancery under Sanjar) prepared for publication and published by the late Muhammad Qazvīnī and ‘Abbās Iqbāl in 1329/1950 (Tehran) and the Taqārīr al-manāsib by Kamāl al-Dīn Quniyavī published by the late Osman Turan in 1958 (Ankara). These manuals and textbooks show how an employee was appointed to the state position in that period. In fact, there were three types of the official documents necessary for such appointment. The first and basic document was mashrūh.

Mashrūh—‘description’—means a list of job responsibilities, or a detailed task list. The purpose of mashrūh was to define the work that needs to be done by an employee with indication of his salary. Mashrūh was compiled for each position by a secretary of the involved department, then registered and finally approved by the Ministry of finance (dīwān-i istifā). Although mashrūh was the key document while appointment, there is neither complete nor incomplete mashrūh among the official documents included in the Saljūq manuals and textbooks. There were some reasons why they have only references to mashrūhs with no mention of muvāza‘at at all.

Manshūr—‘the announced edict’—was the second official document compiled on the base of mashrūh by a secretary of the Chancery of the Highest Ministry (dīwān-i a‘lā) and issued on behalf of the employer that is the Saljūq sultan or minister. The purpose of manshūr was to let the involved authorities know that a certain person was appointed to such and such state position.

Mithāl —‘rescript’—the third official document also issued on behalf of the employer by a secretary of the Chancery of the Highest Ministry (dīwān-i a‘lā). This document seems to have been compiled in support of manshūr confirming its validity after some time.

The second section touches upon the Persian letters written by al-Ghazālī (d. 1111 AD) mostly within the last years of his lifetime and addressed to state and religious figures. The letters were collected by a medieval compiler—evidently a descendant of the imām—into a volume published by ‘Abbās Iqbāl in the mid 50-s. Some of these letters represent the letters of recommendation written by al-Ghazālī on a background of the negative social phenomena and having a foreground to introduce a subaltern to the high administration.

The last section concerns two job statements—the Siyar al-mulūk (or Siyāsat-nāma) and the Rāhat al-sudūr wa āyat al-surūr. The first book was demonstrated by me elsewhere to have been fabricated by Muhammad Mu‘izzī Nīshābūrī (d. 1124–28 AD), Amīr-i Mu‘izzī—the most famous court poet of the Saljūq dynasty—and attributed by him to Nizām al-Mulk. The second book was compiled by Muhammad b. ‘Alī al-Rāwandī in the beginning of the 13th century AD. With these compilations, both authors had the same purpose and sole selfish reason—to prove their qualifications for appointment to the court positions and thus to ensure themselves a job.

Dr Derek Mancini-Lander
Lecturer in the History of Iran
SOAS, University of London

Subversive Skylines: Local History as Subaltern History in Mongol Yazd

Recent scholarship has documented the special ties that Rashiduddin Fazlullah fostered with the city of Yazd. The vaqfnamah-i rabʿ-i rashidi evidences that the vizier owned extensive properties there, which he endowed for his mega-complex in Tabriz and for local institutions in Yazd. He also constructed a madrasah complex in Yazd’s city-centre and married his daughters to Yazdi notable families that he had met when studying medicine in Yazd as a young physician. Although his activities in Yazd reflect older patterns of imperial engagement with Yazd in particular, it is evident that Rashiduddin was also acting as an intermediary agent in a larger programme of acculturation, in which the Ilkhans represented themselves as champions of Islamo-Persianate culture and as benefactors of Persianate urban institutions throughout their realm. While Yazd played a key role in this project of acculturative self-fashioning, Yazdis were not passive participants in this process; the designs of imperial agents were entangled with similarly energetic projects of Yazdi actors, who made strategic use of Rashiduddin and his legacy for their own political ends.

This paper argues that Yazd’s local histories provide a view of the Ilkhanid programme and its architects from outside the imperial centre, offering accounts of events that complicate those found in the court histories and showcasing a subaltern practice of historical writing that was particular to Yazdis. By placing Rashiduddin’s family at the centre of Yazd’s history, Yazdi authors were appropriating the Ilkhanid legacy of acculturation that Rashiduddin had facilitated. But this objective was enmeshed with local concerns, absent from courtly accounts. These centred on a power-struggle in Yazd between the ruling Atabayks and the Arizi sayyid family, which began when the sayyids built a madrasah that overshadowed the Atabayks’ family shrine-complex. Yazd’s historians wove the Ilkhanid viziers into a narrative encompassing both Yazd and Tabriz, in which Rashiduddin’s son and successor, Ghiyasuddin intervenes in that local conflict, bringing a conclusion to the violence and facilitating the predominance of the sayyids over their rivals. I contend that Yazdi authors, who were writing over a century after the events, inserted Rashiduddin’s family and the Ilkhans into the city’s historical narrative at a moment that they deemed pivotal, when Yazd’s sayyids, with Ilkhanid support, displaced the Atabayks and became powerful representatives of the city vis-à-vis the empire. With the Ilkhans’ intercession, the political and social circumstances of the city were transformed along with its skyline. Thereafter, the sayyids achieved prominent positions in Yazd and at the court, as scribes, astrologers, physicians, and historians.

The Yazdi narratives, composed in the fifteenth century, represent a reimagining of this history. Their greatest value lies not in the truthfulness of events they describe, but in the utility of the story for contemporary Yazdi sayyids, who were vying for posts at the Timurid court. The sayyids’ continued prominence in imperial court-life depended on their ability to perpetuate the memory of their ancestor’s connection with the Ilkhans, a relationship they claim was forged amid Yazd’s transformation during the previous century.

Dr Bruno De Nicola
Research Fellow in Middle Eastern Studies
University of St. Andrews

Voicing heresy: a description of mendicant dervishes in Mongol Anatolia.

In 1243, when the power of the Seljuqs of Rūm was at its peak, the Mongols irrupted in Anatolia and made the Sultan acknowledging Mongol overlord-ship. The region has been progressively islamised, turning the 12th century majority Christian population into a predominantly Muslim populated land in the 13th century. However, the progressive Islamisation of the region did not imply homogenisation of the religious landscape. Like in other parts of the Mongol Middle East, different interpretations of Islamic belief, law and practise coexisted and on occasions confronted with each other. In this context, Sufi masters and followers appeared in Anatolia and Iran under Mongol rule, leaving abundant literature in Persian language on the life of their leaders, teachings and practises of the devotees. Contrasting with the abundance of written material on this “traditional”, more “hegemonic” Sufis, are those generally referred as the “mendicant dervishes,” wonderers that came later on to be referred as the Qalandars, the Ḥaydaris and the Abdals of Rūm. They used to move around the Middle East barefoot, shaved and practically naked chanting against the opulence of the ‘ulama, criticising the established Sufi masters and advocating poverty. The voices of these subalterns were not generally recorded and there is scant literature produced by them in the 13th century.

The manuscript held at the Bibliothèque National de France (Supplemént Turc 1120) contains a work generally knowns as the Fusṭāṭ al-ʿadāla and attributed to a certain Muḥammad b. Muḥammad al-Khatīb. The uniqueness of this work is that a part of it describes the different “heresies” that were present in Anatolia around the time of the last Seljuq Sultan of Rūm, Ghiyath al-Dīn Ma’sūd (d. 1308). A section of this manuscript provides a description of the Qalandar dervishes, their origin and their practices. Being the work a “mirror for princes” dedicated to the local ruler of Kastamonu in north-western Anatolia, and therefore belonging to the court literature of the period, its portrayal of the mendicant dervishes can be understood as a representation of “the subaltern” by “the hegemonic” discourse. In this paper, I will discuss the Qalandars’ description made in the Fusṭāṭ al-ʿadāla vis-à-vis the agency of the author. Further, I will offer a follow up of the history of these dervishes as they continued to be present in post-Mongol Anatolia and during the Ottoman period.

Ms Michelle Quay
PhD Candidate
Faculty of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies
University of Cambridge

Sufis and Subalterns: Blacks, Women, and Slaves in Hagiography
from al-Sulamī (d. 1091) to Jāmī (d. 1492)

In this paper, I examine attitudes toward and representations of the subaltern in select Persian and Arabic Sufi hagiographies from 1100-1500 CE. I follow the reading strategy of subaltern studies — “from within, but against the grain,” as Spivak describes it — but try to complicate this idea of a homogeneous class of ‘subalterns’ by deploying intersectional analysis, a technique current in gender studies. Intersectionality theory considers the effect on power structures generated by the interaction of various subordinated (subaltern) identities in a single subject. These subordinated identities are divided along the fault lines of gender, race, class, nationality, disability, and more.

The paper investigates the complex relationship between sainthood and subalternity, which often takes paradoxical form in these texts. While Jāmī would have us believe that “Whoever remembers God is separated from his aspect (ṣefat-e vey),” we find that the texts quickly violate this rule. I argue that the hagiographers surveyed here display an awareness of the intersectional nature of identity in their texts. It is true that their tendency is to simply reverse single-axis indications of subalternity (e.g. being black, female, or lower class) by reclaiming them into the unmarked, dominant group. However, figures with intersectional identities are difficult to reclaim, and as such the hagiographers often take a different approach; they compound the subject’s Otherness and transform this alterity into a badge of honour and an indication of spiritual superiority. Subaltern identities are therefore paradoxically portrayed both as inescapable and necessary to escape if one is to rise to the level of a saint.

Dr Lloyd Ridgeon
Reader in Islamic Studies
The University of Glasgow

Female Sufis in the Medieval Period

This paper will assess the extent to which females were active in the medieval period. It will outline a range of perspectives – all male – which reveal a very diverse range of views, some of which were positive about female participation in the tradition, and others which were misogynist. The presentation investigates not only the social reality of female participation, but also describes how some Sufis presented an idealised version of femininity in which the divine was manifested as the ideal woman. A range of texts will be utilized, from Sufi manuals, poetry and hagiography. The work is an attempt to listen to the voices of women through these male authored texts, and present an alternative understanding of Sufism, as studies for so long have focused on the “big men” of Sufism, such as Rumi or Ibn ‘Arabi.

Dr Christine van Ruymbeke
Soudavar Senior Lecturer in Persian
Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
University of Cambridge

The naughty female of the subaltern class in Kashefi’s version of the Kalila-Dimna

Since their inception, Kalila-Dimna studies have been hijacked by Sanskrit and Syriac scholarship: the scholars in the Arabic and Persian literary fields who ventured to approach the famous text, have mostly concentrated their research time and effort on the vexing question of textual heredity, leaving almost unexplored the contents, purpose and range of the stories.

The Anvar-e Sohayli is a Persian rewriting of the Kalila-Dimna stories, written by Va’ez Kashefi at the Herat Court of Sultan-Hosayn Bayqara. Perched at the end of the hereditary line, this version of the stories has not yet received the scholarly attention which both its contents and the innovations introduced by its fifteenth-century rewriter deserve. The latter in particular, very helpfully opens up the understanding of the stories’ specific pedagogy and technique. My forthcoming monograph on the Anvar-e Sohayli figures as a pioneering study of the actual contents of the text, but also of the KD stories in general, so often mentioned, but remaining pitifully understudied.

Though usually mentioned under the basked-term “animal fables”, the stories contained in the KD versions often feature human characters. These are divided in a rigid bi-polar society: those dwelling at court, and those who are part of the proletariat. Several of the plebeian female characters and their actions and choices are examined in the present paper. I will argue for the need to thoroughly revisit the received idea that the stories are lightweight amusing literature. Beyond the apparent misogynous topics which are enacted in a specific type of farcical stories, one can decode at first level, a very serious engagement with unhappy marital bondage and the expression of attitudes not unfamiliar to feminist discourse. These stereotypes are pilloried and use emblematic premises for psychological demonstrations. This creates the necessity to decode the stories with the tools proposed by present-day gender-studies. And at the second, deeper level, these stories are vectors of cases of Game Theory avant-la-lettre.

Dr Miklos Sarkozy
Visiting Research Fellow
Institute of Ismaili Studies,
London, UK

The Dīwān-i Qā’imiyyāt and the Mongols – a reassessment of Mongol-Nizārī contacts in the light of a newly discovered literary source

It is a well known fact, that the Mongol Empire played a decisive role in the collapse of the Nizārī State. As a consequence, the memories of Mongol-Nizārī contacts in later Classical Persian tradition preserved a rather negative image where the Nizārīs are represented as persecuted Iranian Shi’i subalterns of the invading Mongols.

In the light of the newly discovered Dīwān-i Qā’imiyyāt, an important Nizārī Isma’ili literary source of the 13th century, however, early Nizārī-Mongol contacts need to be completely re-evaluated. Besides hymns in praise of the Qiyāma and different Nizārī Imams the Dīwān-i Qā’imiyyāt preserved remarkable historical material relating to the Mongol-Nizārī contacts before 1256 CE.

Some qasīdas mention the lapse of the Khwārizmians and the arrival of the ’Tatars’ and celebrate the Mongol victory over the Khwārizmians mentioning various cities which fell into Nizārī hands due to the Mongol interference.

Other qasīdas go even further by praising Genghis Khān for his magnanimity shown towards the Nizārīs, enhancing that Genghis Khān was a divine messenger sent by the Imām of Alamūt to liberate the suffering Shi’i people in the Persian lands. This events all hint to a strong Nizārī-Mongol alliance before 1231 CE as it was confirmed by other Persian, Arabic, Armenian and Chinese sources.

On the other hand, there are qasīdas which perhaps refer to the souring Nizārī-Mongol relations after the fall of the Khwarizmian dynasty in 1231 CE. The tale of the ’Genghis -i thānī’ and the murder of Chaghatai Qorchi, a prominent Mongol military leader in 1249/1250 CE which was widely celebrated in the Dīwān-i Qā’imiyyāt throw a rare historical light on lesser known events in the years preceding the conquest of Hulagu.

Due to the fact that in the Dīwān-i Qā’imiyyāt there is no hint to the ultimate fall of the Nizārīs at the hands of the Ilkhanid Mongols it is almost probable that the bulk of this poetical work had been composed before 1256.

Since the Dīwān-i Qā’imiyyāt preserved material about the first Mongol conquest of 1219-1223, this collection can be characterized as an example of a rather positive Nizārī attitude towards Mongols and entirely rewrites our beliefs about the position of Shi’i groups during the early Mongol period.

Dr Riza Yildirim
Associate Professor of Ottoman and Safavid History
TOBB University of Economics and Technology
Department of History
Ankara / Turkey

Futuwwa Ritual Gatherings as a Worship and Social Organizer
One of the major differences between rationalized Islamic orthodoxies, be it Sunni or Shi’ite, and subaltern religious traditions (mostly rested upon Ali-centred doctrines) manifests itself in the concept of worship. Backed with a well-developed juridical discourse, the orthodox view relies on the concept of the one transcendental God with a vigilant stress on absolute separation between the deity and the creatures. Salvation can only be attained through securing the amnesty of God. As a result, the concept of worship (ibādat) revolves around the idea of imploring to God to receive His grace and to spare from His wrath. The views in subaltern pro-Alid traditions, on the other hand, are mostly prone to subsume a continuity of deity from God towards every segment of creatures. As opposed to the orthodox view, deity is not confined to one transcendental being but disseminated through universe. Salvation means to understand and experience the essence of intrinsic bonds between nature and deity. Therefore, the very kernel of worship here has nothing to do with the idea of imploring; it is rather perceived as a mean of elevation and purification in consciousness. In this view, worship gears human conscience to further comprehend man’s existential relationship with the Deity, which also means to merge within the Deity. Therefore, worship does not aim securing God’s forgiveness but to fuel human consciousness to discover his own divine substance.

A basic character of worship in the second view is communality. Since it is perceived as a means of establishing bonds with the society (and even with some deities), the worship here is well-established ritual which can only be performed communally. This is exactly the case among futuwwa groups of the middle ages. Periodical gatherings of futuwwa people in futuwwa houses were realized as well-defined rituals. I argue that these ritual gatherings must be deemed as a particular type of worship. In that respect, especially the rites of initiation that marks the full membership of a novice to the community deserves close attention. This paper aims to analyze futuwwa ritual gatherings as a worship act. It also addresses the question of the correspondence between the ritual structure of these gatherings and the fabric of the futuwwa communality.

The First Workshop: pre-Safavid period

7-8 November 2015

IMES Department, 19 George Square, University of Edinburgh

Schedule

(Please be aware that times are subject to change.)

Saturday, 7 November 2015

9 am – Welcome

15 – 10 am – Dr Sussan Babaie

The ‘riffraff’ in Timurid painting: toward a social history of food service

10 – 10.45 am Dr Lloyd Ridgeon

Female Sufis in the Medieval Period

45 – 11.30 am Ms Michelle Quay

Sufis and Subalterns: Blacks, Women, and Slaves in Hagiography from al-Sulamī (d. 1091) to Jāmī (d. 1492)

30 am – 12 pm Coffee Break

12 – 12.45 pm Dr Bruno de Nicola

Voicing heresy: a description of mendicant dervishes in Mongol Anatolia

45 – 1.30 pm Dr Alexey Khismatulin