Persian Literature and Modernity: Production and Reception 2018038230, 2018054408, 9780429505348, 9780429999628, 9780429999611, 9780429999604, 9781138585331

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of figures
Contributors
1 Introduction
PART 1
2 Rival texts: modern Persian prose fiction and the myth of the founding father
3 Reactionary interbellum literature and the demonic in Iran: ʿAlavī and Hidāyat
4 Linguistic realism and modernity: the ontology of the poetic from Suhrawardī to Ṣāʾib
5 A predestined break from the past: Shiʿr-i Naw, history, and hermeneutics
PART 2
6 Intimating Tehran: the figure of the prostitute in Iranian popular literature, 1920s–1970s
7 Classical Persian canons of the revolutionary press: Abū al-Qāsim Lāhūtī’s circles in Istanbul and Moscow
8 Pneumatics of Blackness: Nāṣir Taqvā’ī’s Bād-i Jin and modernity’s anthropological drive
Index

Citation preview

Persian Literature and Modernity

Persian Literature and Modernity recasts the history of modern literature in Iran by elucidating the bonds between the classical tradition and modernity and exploring textual, generic and discursive formations through heterodoxical investigations. This is first done through the rehabilitation of concepts embedded in tradition, including the munāzirah (debate), Ahrīman (the demonic), tajarrud (radical aloneness) and nāriz̤ āyatī (discontent). Following this are broader structural and processual treatments, including the emergence of the genre of the social novel, the international dimension of Persian and Persianate canon formation, and the development of salvage ethnography and anthropological discourse in Iran. Covering literary experiments from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries, the chapters in this volume make a case for stepping outside the bounds of orthodox literary scholarship in Iranian Studies with its associated political and orientalist determinants in order to provide a more nuanced conception of literary modernity in Iran. Offering an alternative reading of modernity in Persian literature, this book is an invaluable resource for scholars and students interested in the history of modern Iran and Persian literature. Hamid Rezaei Yazdi is an educator and researcher in the field of Middle Eastern studies, with an emphasis on the historiography of modern Iran. He received his PhD from the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto and is currently a Professor in the Department of Liberal Studies at Humber College. Arshavez Mozafari is a historian of modern Iran based in Toronto. He received his PhD from the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto.

Iranian Studies Edited by: Homa Katouzian University of Oxford

and Mohamad Tavakoli University of Toronto

Since 1967 the International Society for Iranian Studies (ISIS) has been a leading learned society for the advancement of new approaches in the study of Iranian society, history, culture and literature. The new ISIS Iranian Studies series published by Routledge will provide a venue for the publication of original and innovative scholarly works in all areas of Iranian and Persianate Studies. Gender and Dance in Iran Biopolitics on the Twentieth-Century Stage Ida Meftahi Persian Authorship and Canonicity in Late Mughal Delhi Building an Ark Prashant Keshavmurthy Iran and the Nuclear Question History and the Evolutionary Trajectory Mohammad Homayounvash The True Dream An English Translation with Facing Persian Text Ali-Ashgar Seyed-Gohrab and Senn McGlinn Popular Iranian Cinema before the Revolution Family and Nation in Filmfarsi Pedram Partovi Persian Literature and Modernity Production and Reception Edited by Hamid Rezaei Yazdi and Arshavez Mozafari

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ middleeaststudies/series/IRST

Persian Literature and Modernity Production and Reception Edited by Hamid Rezaei Yazdi and Arshavez Mozafari

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Hamid Rezaei Yazdi and Arshavez Mozafari; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Hamid Rezaei Yazdi and Arshavez Mozafari to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Every effort has been made to contact copyright-holders. Please advise the publisher of any errors or omissions, and these will be corrected in subsequent editions. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Yazdi, Hamid Rezaei, editor. | Mozafari, Arshavez, editor. Title: Persian literature and modernity : production and reception / edited by Hamid Rezaei Yazdi and Arshavez Mozafari. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. | Series: Iranian studies ; 37 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018038230 (print) | LCCN 2018054408 (ebook) | ISBN 9780429505348 (master) | ISBN 9780429999628 (Adobe Reader) | ISBN 9780429999611 (Epub) | ISBN 9780429999604 (Mobipocket) | ISBN 9781138585331 | ISBN 9781138585331(hardback) | ISBN 9780429505348(ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Persian literature—1796—History and criticism. Classification: LCC PK6406 (ebook) | LCC PK6406 .P47 2019 (print) | DDC 891/.55409—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018038230 ISBN: 978-1-138-58533-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-50534-8 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

1

List of figures Contributors

vii viii

Introduction

1

H A M I D R E Z A E I YAZ DI AND ARS HAVE Z MOZ AFA R I

PART 1

2

Rival texts: modern Persian prose fiction and the myth of the founding father

25

H A M I D R E Z A E I YAZ DI

3

Reactionary interbellum literature and the demonic in Iran: ʿAlavī and Hidāyat

85

A R S H AV E Z M O Z AFARI

4

Linguistic realism and modernity: the ontology of the poetic from Suhrawardī to Ṣāʾib

112

H E N RY M . B O W L E S

5

A predestined break from the past: Shiʿr-i Naw, history, and hermeneutics

141

FAT E M E M O N TAZ E RI

PART 2

6

Intimating Tehran: the figure of the prostitute in Iranian popular literature, 1920s–1970s JAIRAN GAHAN

165

vi

Contents

7

Classical Persian canons of the revolutionary press: Abū al-Qāsim Lāhūtī’s circles in Istanbul and Moscow

185

S A M U E L H ODGKI N

8

Pneumatics of Blackness: Nāṣir Taqvā’ī’s Bād-i Jin and modernity’s anthropological drive

213

PA R I S A VA ZI RI

Index

243

Figures

2.1 The archetypal Shaykh and Shūkh, Hasan Ansārī, Nūshdarū 2.2 (a–d) Parallel Texts, Hasan Ansārī, Nūshdārū 7.1 [Artist unknown], back cover illustration, Abū al-Qāsim Lāhūtī, Krimil, trans. Nâzım Hikmet 7.2 [Artist unknown], cover illustration, Krimil 8.1 Still from Bād-i Jin 8.2 Still from Tranquility in the Presence of Others 8.3 Still from Nifrīn

38 43 196 197 216 221 223

Contributors

Henry M. Bowles is a DPhil student in Classics at the University of Oxford. He holds a PhD and MA in Comparative Literature and an MA in Middle Eastern Studies, all from Harvard University. Jairan Gahan is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto. Her novel Zīr-i Āftāb-i Khushkhiyāl-i ‘Asr (Under the Carefree Afternoon Sun) won the Golshiri Award for First Novel in 2011. Samuel Hodgkin received his PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. He has taught at the University of Chicago and Colgate University, and he completed his dissertation as a Mellon Humanities Fellow and an exchange scholar at Harvard University. Fateme Montazeri is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Near Eastern Studies, University of California Berkeley. She received her BA and MA from the University of Tehran and completed another MA at the Graduate Theological Union. Arshavez Mozafari is a historian of modern Iran based in Toronto. He received his PhD from the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto. Parisa Vaziri is an Assistant Professor at Cornell University with joint affiliation in the departments of Comparative Literature and Near Eastern Studies. Her research explores the legacies of African slavery in the Indian Ocean world. Hamid Rezaei Yazdi received his PhD from the University of Toronto. He is currently a Professor in the Department of Liberal Studies at Humber College.

1

Introduction Hamid Rezaei Yazdi and Arshavez Mozafari

Scholarship on Persian literature and its place in the history of modern Iran is haunted by questions of origins and influence. Despite continuing efforts to disentangle them from their perceived indebtedness to European and Anglo-American models, Persian texts remain tethered to the metropolitan spark of genius in one shape or form. Ever since “first contact” was made in the nineteenth century, this influence is argued to have “increased in width and intensity.”1 Indeed, frameworks that rely considerably upon Western benchmarks, modalities and timelines have been employed regularly to explain the history of modern Persian literature – and with astonishing currency and success. What this volume seeks to do is expose the limits of key suppositions concerning textual production and reception as they are premised upon the “rule of colonial difference.”2 Without thoroughly discounting the notion of colonial servility and its effects on textual production, what we are here primarily concerned with are organic literary developments, local and regional networks and rooted forms of experimentation.3 Above all, we seek to disburden modernity of its aseptic remoteness from tradition by acknowledging tradition’s role in shaping Iranian modernity. Occluded by decades of literary scholarship – perhaps due to convention – the necessity of this intervention is made all the more glaring once one considers the way the widespread employment of spatial metaphors in prevailing histories betrays the underlying notion that modern Persian works are somehow the (frequently rotten) fruits of Western imagination and industry, in the same vein as “legal and institutional frameworks”4 and other constructions of the “self and community.”5 Standard accounts relate how a certain format (the novel, the novella, the short story) or genre (for instance, Shiʿr-i Naw [New Poetry]) “entered” Iran at a certain point in time, was “introduced” into Persian literature by an exemplary figure (often a founding father), was “brought back” by Iranian students or by other members of the intelligentsia studying or living in Europe (predominantly through translation), or followed shortly after schools or technologies, cut from the cloth of the West’s intellectual tradition, were “imported” into the country, one prime example being the printing press.6 Similar to the way communicable diseases – as part of the civilising mission of the Anglosphere – and other “immense distortions”7 were thought to have smote native barbarism into the maw of obscurity, the introduction of literary

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masterpieces to Iran was considered to be the birth of a higher culture and aesthetic decorum. As this line of thinking sees it, Western works entered Iran the same way Europe is said to have miraculously entered history – as possessing the full powers of reason, freedom and individualism,8 without any regard for the fact that the European Enlightenment was itself (and continues to be) a vehemently contested process.9 The closer a region was to Europe – as in the case of Ottoman Turkey10 or Egypt – the sooner it benefited from an exposure to modern ideas and literatures.11 Not surprisingly, Turkey and Egypt sometimes feature in these histories as an isthmus over which European literary, political and social influences were channeled into Iran.12 Thus, even though the fifteenth century age of discovery compressed the world by way of marine-based commercial networks and brought about its own form of literature (travel mythologies),13 the idea that civilisation emanated outward and dissipated the further it travelled still predominated, perpetuated as it was by a number of Iranian intellectuals.14 Representations of authentic literary praxis are closely connected to temporality as well. After all, if every post-Mediaeval text possesses the status of an original due to the author’s role as owner,15 then any variation penned elsewhere will inevitably be secondary, a mass-produced copy of the master template, and no credit will be afforded to so-called “transformative appropriations,” as was so in the case of Greco-Roman literature.16 It will be perpetually belated, delayed.17 This is blatantly so in the case of translations.18 The overarching argument is that an “enchant[ed]”19 Iranian literati was first introduced to the modern novel through translations of European works, which they then unreflectively imitated, giving rise to the first Persian novels.20 There have, of course, been some welcomed individual attempts to offer a more nuanced reading of the historical contingencies that contributed to the development of literary modernity in Iran.21 These, however, remain rare exceptions to the prevailing grand narrative. This grand narrative has a few other noticeable features. The prominence of the exceptional artist – also known as the founding father – is quite glaring,22 particularly in his ability to “secure membership” in a rational cosmopolitanism23 by singlehandedly breathing new life into the stagnating literature of tradition. Digestible due to the Western intellectual taxonomies (-isms) used to describe him, he is “bestow[ed] [with] immediate status”24 for having revolted against tradition’s uncompromising resistance to the alms of modernity.25 No configuration that highlights the “ambivalence” at the heart of the tradition/modernity debate is even considered because the prevailing convention is committed to a triumphalist inferiority: a romanticised drama of sacrifice and labour in which the self of historical groundedness is negated in a pathetically mutilated attempt to break with a parochial stagnation and join the ranks of the forces of progress. This conflict applies to the entry of modern ideas and practices, whether they arrive in the form of political restructuring, educational reforms, legal amendments or literary innovations. It also serves as the dominant methodology for historicising the literature in question.26 This is why scholars of the so-called engagé or “committed literature” school (adabiyāt-i mutiʿahid) view literary history as an imaginative extension of an

Introduction 3 episodic (socio-)political conception of history or a repository of political representations and critique.27 Here, the “tension” between literature and politics, particularly due to state-led modernisation, is argued to be at the core of Iran’s modern literary experience28 and it is through the struggle between the rational emancipatory spirit and Asiatic despotism that “the consciousness” not of small premodern aristocratic circles but of the masses is heightened.29 A chasm that separates tradition from modernity is repeatedly posited,30 and the progression from protest literature to resistance literature to national literature is seen as a “rehears[al] [of] the Enlightenment trope of sequential linear progress.”31 Even when scholars, particularly in comparative literature, distance themselves from the supposed political basis of literature32 (or even the historical)33 by focusing on aesthetic theory, they remain beholden to the jewelled archetypes of modernism, such as Franz Kafka (1883–1924), Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–81), Rainer Rilke (1875–1926), James Joyce (1882–1941) and Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49),34 or the conceptual metrics diffused in Western academic circles. The mundane secrets of Persian texts are only grasped once they are categorised as conservative realist, social realist or social individualist (and the list goes on),35 and authentic novel writing cannot be achieved without at least a degree of psychologisation.36 It is in keeping with this vision that literary history is contoured by genre and generic specificities with evolutionary undertones.37 The pitfall of “swift accommodation”38 is, indeed, the inevitable failure or tormented half-success that follows.39 The failure of the Persian novel to gain international recognition was in fact a central theme at the first conference on the Persian novel held at Tehran in 1994.40 Unsurprisingly, a study on the pathology of Persian fiction reached its sixth reprint in 2015.41 The nativist endeavour to reverse the idea of a foreign platonic ideal often times falls short as well because the Western archetype is simply construed as having already subsisted within the Iranian Lebenswelt.42 The otherwise unattainable futural temporality of the metropole is effectively claimed as the mythic time of a national golden age. This involves, for example, the “discovery” of dramatic elements such as dialogue, conflict and setting in an ancient epic or the recognition of the attributes of a Western novelistic genre in a Persian work.43 A favourite subject is finding examples of “stream of consciousness” (or more recently, “magical realism”) in Persian fiction.44 Similar to the impulse to join an enlightened global culture by unearthing liberal values deep in the recesses of Iranian national memory, there is a need to disband the anxiety of lack. This orientalist narrative is perpetuated not due to the nativist sanctification of tradition, but the celebration of tradition as modern. The prevailing scholarly orthodoxy has constituted a parallel discourse that is suspended above literary developments in Iranian society, particularly in relation to public reception and readership. Vastly popular books that have been reprinted in double digits and entire bodies of work, such as Difāʾ-i Muqaddas (Sacred Defence) literature, which is based on the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88/1359–67 hs.) experience,45 have rarely been considered to be worthy of critical attention and inclusion in the canon because they are somehow devoid of “artistic value.”46

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Some have even gone as far as to reduce the rich mosaic of literary works produced after the 1978–9/1356–7 hs. Revolution to “Islamic fiction,” a genre that is said to have failed “to mature or to attain artistic distinction.”47 An official report released by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance (Vizārat-i Farhang va Irshād-i Islāmī) regarding best-selling books48 reveals the extent of this exclusion. In the Ministry’s report, covering the publication of prose fiction in Iran from 1992–3/1371 hs. to 2006–7/1385 hs., a few familiar names from the established canon appear next to the names of many excluded authors. Two prominent examples are Fattānah Ḥāj Sayyid Javādī (b. 1945–6/1324 hs.) and Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn Muʾtamīn (1914–5–2005–6/1293–1384 hs.). Topping the list, Javādī’s Bāmdād-i Khumār (Drunken Morrow, 1995–6/1374 hs.) has been reprinted no less than thirty-eight times – with a corresponding lack of attention in scholarship.49 Muʾtamīn’s Āshiyānah-i ʿUqāb (The Eagle’s Nest, 1939–40/1318 hs.) has received even less critical attention despite the fact that it has gone through eleven reprints, according to the report.50 Appearing next to some household names (Hūshang Gulshīrī [1938–2000/1316–79 hs.], Jalāl Āl-i Aḥmad [1923–69/1302– 48 hs.]) in conventional histories, Javādī and Mu’tamin’s works amount to no more than ʿammah pasand literature, we are told, appealing only to the masses.51 The poet Qayṣar Amīnʹpūr (1959–2007/1338–86 hs.) and the renowned author and filmmaker Muḥsin Makhmalbāf (b. 1957/1336 hs.) represent another notable literary caste elided by the scholarly orthodoxy insofar as they do not live up to the critical ideal, meaning the committed anti-establishment figure.52 Their association with the field of war literature and state institutions, such as the Department of the Arts (Ḥawzah-yi Hunarī), is considered reactionary, suspect at best53 and productive of uninspired mediocrity.54 The studies in this volume depart from premises that hinge upon the Enlightenment ideal of historical progression and modernity as a perfected state of being. The abstract and metropolitan futural identity of colonial modernity, as upheld by the intellectual Fernweh of an orthodox scholarly regime, inhibits the seemingly archaic, parochial and mundane from participating in the modern. The strictly defined linear periodisation that underpins this teleology is devoid of the granular movements (appearing in the form of experiments, adaptations and improvisational strategies) traceable along the porous frontiers of the new and old. Negligible at first glance, these historically contingent transformations (even those that led to the orthodoxy that is being questioned) are at the heart of the following chapters. Assuming the logic of alternative modernities, this volume prioritises the particularity of Iranian modernity – both in terms of its literary products and experiences. The first part of the volume explores key but repressed concepts of the literary tradition that assisted in the comprehension, sculpting and refashioning of modernity. In Hamid Rezaei Yazdi’s contribution, this concept is the munāzirah (debate) and its dialogical capacity to stage the confrontation, but also synthesis, of antinomies; for Arshavez Mozafari, it is Ahrīman (the demonic) and its relationship with love and decadence; Henry M. Bowles’ study introduces us to the notion of tajarrud (radical aloneness) and how the imagination in this state is productive of

Introduction 5 reality; and finally, Fateme Montazeri brings us the classical notion of nāriz̤ āyatī (discontent) as it arises out of the free will versus predestination debate and continues to inform Shiʿr-i Naw. The second part of the volume is dedicated to a broader look at elided structural and processual aspects of modern Persian literature. In the case of Jairan Gahan, we are given insight into the early formation of the genre of the social novel by way of Tehran’s red light district; Samuel Hodgkin addresses the international dimension of Persian and Persianate canon formation through the early career of the Iranian poet and revolutionary Abū al-Qāsim Lāhūtī (1887–1957/1305-1376 hq.); and Parisa Vaziri uses modern literature and film to reveal the development of salvage ethnography and anthropological discourse as a whole.

Notes 1 Věra Kubíčková, “Persian Literature of the 20th Century,” in History of Iranian Literature, ed. Jan Rypka (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1968), 362. The notion of a literary “first contact” is a prevalent feature in Iranian studies scholarship. In effect, it implies the beginning of modern literary history. It is our contention that the introduction of European works, while significant, must be placed alongside a whole series of other determinants that shaped the modern literary imaginary. For more on the debates surrounding the idea of a “first contact,” it is best to refer to scholarship on the Americas and NativeEuropean relations. For instance, see Annette Kolodny, In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). 2 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 22. This is why the achievements of socalled civilised colonials (in this case those who replicate the authenticity of European literary forms) are perpetually deferred and the rule of difference endlessly renewed. Central to this operation is the temporal logic of the colonial narrative in which the coloniser is continually reproduced as “an exception precisely to vindicate the universal truth of [his] theory.” 3 For instance, Rahimieh refers to the Persian translator of James Morier’s (c. 1780–1849) Adventures of Hajji Baba of Isphahan (1824) as being an exemplary experimenter (Nasrin Rahimieh, “A Systematic Approach to Modern Persian Prose,” World Literature Today 63, no. 1 [1989], 15). 4 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 14. 5 Ibid., 37. 6 For some examples, see Yaḥyá Āryan′pūr, Az Ṣabā tā Nīmā [From Ṣabā to Nīmā], 9th ed. (Tehran: Zavvār, 2007–8/1386 hs.); Muḥammad Ḥuqūqī, Adabiyāt-i Imrūz-i Iran [Iranian Literature Today] (Tehran: Qaṭrah, 1997–8/1376 hs.); Ḥasan Mīrʿābidīnī, Ṣad Sāl Dāstān Nivīsī-yi Iran [A Hundred Years of Story Writing in Iran], 4 vols., 5th ed. (Tehran: Chishmah, 2007–8/1386 hs.); Hurmuz Raḥīmiyān, Adabiyāt-i Muʿāṣir-i Fārsī: Advār-i Nas̠ r-i Fārsī az Mashrūṭiyyat tā Suqūṭ-i Salṭanat [Contemporary Persian Literature: Stages of Persian Prose from Constitutionalism to the Collapse of the Monarchy] (Tehran: Samt, 2000–1/1379 hs.); ʿAbdul ʿAlī Dastʹghayb, Paydāyish-i Rumān-i Fārsī [The Genesis of the Persian Novel] (Shīrāz: Navīd-i Shīrāz, 2006–7/1385 hs.); Muḥammad ʿAlī Sipānlū, Nivīsandigān-i Pīshraw-i Iran [Pioneering Iranian Writers] (Tehran: Nigāh, 2007–8/1386 hs.]; Shams Langarūdī, Tārīkh-i Tahlīlī-yi Shiʿr-i Naw [An Analytical History of New Poetry], 4 vols., 3rd ed. (Tehran: Nashr-i Markaz, 1990– 1/1369 hs.); Jamshīd Malikpūr, Adabiyāt-i Namāyishī dar Iran [Dramatic Literature in

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Hamid R. Yazdi and Arshavez Mozafari Iran] (Tehran: Tūs, 2006–7/1385 hs.); and Christophe Balaÿ, La genèse du roman persan moderne (Tehran: Institut français de recherche en Iran, 1998). Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1994), xxii. Timothy Brennan, “From Development to Globalization: Postcolonial Studies and Globalization Theory,” in The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies, ed. Neil Lazarus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 133. Persian works have not altogether been devalued relative to the Western archetype. As Karimi-Hakkak puts it, “Although [some early poems of the twentieth century] owe their existence to their authors’ contact with certain identifiable texts of foreign origin, they have been classified in their own linguistic culture neither as verse translations of those foreign texts, nor as imitations in any sense. Instead, wherever possible such texts are invariably judged as superior to their foreign counterparts” (Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, “From Translation to Appropriation: Poetic Cross-Breeding in Early Twentieth-Century Iran,” Comparative Literature 47, no. 1 [Winter, 1995]: 53). One can think of the varying perspectives posed by the likes of John Ruskin (1819– 1900), Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), George Orwell (1903–50), W. H. Auden (1907–73) and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80), among others. For a full discussion of these thinkers’ positions on the Enlightenment or the logic of colonialism, see Ashish Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: The Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), esp. pp. 12–13 and 36–45. Ertürk refers to these in-between fantasies in these words: “A more broadly generalized (yet no less positivist) understanding of Turkey as a bridge between the East and the West, or the cultures of Eastern Islam and Western Christianity, is still alive and well.” It is “at the center of national and transnational elite-liberal geopolitical fantasies” (Nergis Ertürk, Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011], ix). Contrast this proximity to civilisation to the migration crisis facing Europe today. While the colonies closest to Europe were thought to have benefited the most from European civilisation, they are now the suppliers of the most maligned subjects. As Evans puts it, “The new racism in France is different from colonial racism in that it is the product of [ . . . ] decolonisation and the breakdown in the colonial hierarchy. Immigrants from Africa generate so much anxiety in France because by living in France they are seen to be transgressing the boundary between ‘here’ and ‘there,’ overturning the spatial relations between centre and periphery which colonialism established” (Martin Evans, “Languages of Racism within Contemporary Europe,” in Nation and Identity in Contemporary Europe, ed. Brian Jenkins and Spyros A. Sofos [London: Routledge, 1996], 46). In considering Turkish poetry as an important source of inspiration for Iranian poets during the Constitutional era (1906–11/1324–29 hq.), Langarūdī asserts that, due to their proximity to Europe, Ottoman Turkish “poets had vastly benefited from European poetry” (Langarūdī, Tārīkh-i Tahlīlī-yi Shiʿr-i Naw, vol. 1, 44). Adrian Carton, Mixed-Race and Modernity in Colonial India: Changing Concepts of Hybridity across Empires (London: Routledge, 2012), 11. In the case of Iran, for example, some of the country’s most influential journals were headquartered in regions adjacent to, or under direct rule of, Europe: Ḥikmat (Wisdom, first published in 1892/1309–10 hq.) and S̠ urayyā (first published in 1898/1315–6 hq.) were based in Cairo, Akhtar (Star, first published 1875/1291–2 hq.) in Istanbul, and Ḥabl al-Matīn (The Firm Cable, first published in 1893/1310–1 hq.) in Calcutta. Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi, “Introduction: Of Colonies, Cannibals and Vernaculars,” in Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice, ed. Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi (London: Routledge, 1999), 2. Tim Whitmarsh, Greek Literature and the Roman Empire: The Politics of Imitation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 27.

Introduction 7 17 Of course, this is related to what has been called “the ambivalence of mimicry.” Bhabha introduces the notion by saying that the “almost the same, but not quite does not merely ‘rupture’ the discourse, but becomes transformed into an uncertainty which fixes the colonial subject as a ‘partial’ presence. By ‘partial’ I mean both ‘incomplete’ and ‘virtual.’ It is as if the very emergence of the ‘colonial’ is dependent for its representation upon some strategic limitation or prohibition within the authoritative discourse itself. The success of colonial appropriation depends on a proliferation of inappropriate objects that ensure its strategic failure, so that mimicry is at once resemblance and menace” (Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture [London: Routledge, 1994], 86). In other words, the “everyday paradox of third-world social science is that we find these theories, in spite of their inherent ignorance of ‘us,’ eminently useful in understanding our societies” (Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 29). Other categories of being, other forms of difference can only theoretically and categorically be knowable to the extent that they are commensurate with the West (Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, 226). 18 Translation and its connection to colonial societies has been enriched by studies seeking to unearth the practice’s role in the production of civilisational hierarchisation, accessing the past, and the reinvention of local social, cultural and religious codes. For more on this connection, see Tejaswini Niranjana, Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Vincente L. Rafael, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993); Tejaswini Niranjana, “Translation, Colonialism and the Rise of English,” Economic and Political Weekly 25, no. 15 (April, 1990): 773–9; and Douglas Howland, “The Predicament of Ideas in Culture: Translation and Historiography,” History and Theory 42, no. 1 (February, 2003): 45–60. 19 This word is used in reference to Sayyid Majd al-Dīn Fakhrāʾī (nom de plume, Gulchīn Gīlānī, 1909–72/1288–1351 hs.) [Kubíčková, “Persian Literature of the 20th Century,” 405–6]. 20 A dedicated bibliographical essay could perhaps do justice to the sheer prevalence of this claim. For some instances, see Balaÿ, La genèse du roman persan moderne; Christophe Balaÿ and Michel Cuypers, Aux sources de la nouvelle persane (Tehran: Institut français de recherche en Iran, 1987); Omid Azadibougar, “Translation Norms and the Importation of the Novel into Persian,” International Journal of Society, Culture & Language 2, no. 2 (Summer and Autumn, 2014): 89–102; Aḥmad Muḥsinī and Ārsīnah Khāchāṭūriyān Sarādihī, “Nihz̤ at-i Tarjumah dar ʿAsr-i Qājār [The Translation Movement during the Qājār Period],” Payām-i Bahāristān (2nd ser.) 3, no. 11 (Spring, 2011/ Bahār, 1390 hs.): 787–97. 21 See for example Muḥammad Istiʾlāmī, Barrasī-yi Adabiyāt-i Imrūzī-yi Iran [An Analysis of Contemporary Iranian Literature] (Tehran: Amīr Kabīr, 1976–7/1355 hs.); Kamran Rastegar, Literary Modernity between the Middle East and Europe: Textual Transactions in Nineteenth-Century Arabic, English, and Persian Literatures (New York: Routledge, 2007); Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, Recasting Persian Poetry: Scenarios of Poetic Modernity in Iran (Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 1996); Kāmrān Sipihrān, Radd-i Pā-yi Tazalzul: Rumān-i Tārīkhī dar Iran, 1300–1320 [Vestiges of Uncertainty: The Historical Novel in Iran, 1300–1320 hs.] (Tehran: Shīrāzah, 2001– 2/1380 hs.); Fatemeh Keshavarz, Recite in the Name of the Red Rose: Poetic Sacred Making in Twentieth-Century Iran (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2006); Qayṣar Aminʹpūr, Sunnat va Nawʹāvarī dar Shiʿr-i Muʿāṣir [Tradition and Innovation in Contemporary Poetry] (Tehran: Shirkat-i Intishārāt-i ʿIlmī va Farhangī, 2003– 4/1382 hs.); Kāmrān Sipihrān, Tiʿātrukrāsī dar ʿAsr-i Mashrūṭah (1285–1304) [Theatrocracy in the Constitutional Era (1285–1304 hs.)] (Tehran: Nīlūfar, 2008–9/1387 hs.); Bahrām Bayz̤ āʿī, Namāyish dar Iran [Theatrical Performance in Iran], 8th ed. (Tehran: Rushangarān va Muṭāliʿāt-i Zanān, 2011–2/1390 hs.); and Mohammad Mehdi

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Hamid R. Yazdi and Arshavez Mozafari Khorrami, Literary Subterfuge and Contemporary Persian Fiction: Who Writes Iran? (New York: Routledge, 2014). Some examples include Michael C. Hillmann, “Al-e Ahmad’s Fictional Legacy,” Iranian Studies 9, no. 4 (Autumn, 1976): 248–65; Kamran Talattof, “Breaking Taboos in Iranian Women’s Literature,” World Literature Today 78, no. 3–4 (December, 2004): 43–6; M. Hussein Fereshteh, “Samad Behrangi’s Experiences and Thoughts on Rural Teaching and Learning,” Journal of Thought 30, no. 4 (Winter, 1995): 61–74; John Zubizarreta, “The Woman Who Sings No, No, No: Love, Freedom, and Rebellion in the Poetry of Forugh Farrokhzad,” World Literature Today 66, no. 3 (Summer, 1992): 421– 6; Girdhari Tikku, “Furūgh-i Farrukhzād: A New Direction in Persian Poetry,” Studia Islamica 26 (1967): 149–73; Rivanne Sandler, “Simin Dānešvar’s ‘Model’: A Literary Sign of Modernity,” Oriente Moderno, Nuova serie, 22, no. 1 (2003): 197–218; Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, “A Well Amid the Waste: An Introduction to the Poetry of Ahmad Shamlu,” World Literature Today 51, no. 2 (Spring, 1977): 201–6; Hamid Dabashi and Golriz Dahdel, “Nimā Yušij and the Constitution of a National Subject,” Oriente Moderno, Nuova serie, 22, no. 1 (2003): 93–129; Deborah Miller Mostaghel, “The Second Sadeq: The Short Stories of Iranian Writer Sadeq Chubak,” World Literature Today 53, no. 2 (Spring, 1979): 227–31; and Sīrūs Shamīsā, Dāstān-i Yak Rūḥ: Sharḥ va Matn-i Kāmil-i Būf-i Kūr-i Ṣādiq Hidāyat [The Story of a Spirit: An Annotated Full Text of Ṣādiq Hidāyat’s The Blind Owl] (Tehran: Intishārāt-i Firdaws, 1992–3/1371 hs.). Rong Cai, The Subject in Crisis in Contemporary Chinese Literature (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004), 49. For a similar occurrence in the Chinese context, see Leo Ou-Fan Lee, “Literary Trends: The Quest for Modernity, 1895–1927,” in An Intellectual History of Modern China, ed. Merle Goldman and Leo Ou-Fan Lee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 182. See, among many similar works, Homa Katouzian, Sadeq Hedayat: The Life and Legend of an Iranian Writer (London: I.B. Tauris, 1991); Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak and Kamran Talattof, eds., Essays on Nima Yushij: Animating Modernism in Persian Poetry (Leiden: Brill, 2004); Farzaneh Milani, “Love and Sexuality in the Poetry of Forough Farrokhzad: A Reconsideration,” Iranian Studies 15, no. 1–4 (1982): 117–28; and Sīrūs Ṭāhbāz, Kamāndār-i Buzurg-i Kuhsārān: Zindigī va Shiʿr-i Nīmā Yūshīj [The Great Highland Archer: The Life and Poetry of Nīmā Yūshīj] (Tehran: S̠ ālis̠ , 2007–8/1386 hs.). In Shiʿr-i Naw az Āghāz tā Imrūz [New Poetry from Beginning to Present] (Tehran: Amīr Kabīr, 1971–2/1350 hs.), Muḥammad Ḥuqūqī classifies contemporary poetic currents as adherents of the “Nīmāic” style. This book has gone through several reprints, most recently in 2014–5/1393 hs. Whether dealing with classical or contemporary literature, historians often view literary history as an extension of, or at least parallel to, political history. This explains why most literary histories of Iran “have an almost similar structure [ . . . ] In general, after verse and prose are considered completely separate spheres [a type of] periodisation based on conjunctures of political history begins to prevail over other classifications. The general outline of literary histories in Persian [ . . . ] has been shaped on the basis of political conjunctures and under headings pivoted upon powerful dynasties” (Maḥmūd Futūḥī, Naẓarīyyahʾ-yi Tārīkh-i Adabiyāt [A Theory of Literary History] (Tehran: Sukhan, 2008–9/1387 hs.), 253). “From Shahrīvar 1320 [September 1941], with the demise of Riz̤ ā Shāh’s despotic reign and the entry of the Allies, Iran entered a turbulent stage in its history which lasted until the coup d’etat of 28 Murdād, 1332 [19 August 1953]” (Ḥasan Mīrʿābidīnī, Sayr-i Taḥavvul-i Adabiyāt-i Dāstānī va Namāyishī az 1320 tā 1332 Shamsī [A Survey of the Development of Persian Fiction and Plays from 1320 to 1332 hs.] (Tehran: Nashr-i Ās̠ ār, 2011–2/1390 hs.)). This standard opening, and similar variations pertaining to different periods, appears in numerous histories. For some examples see, Muḥammad Riz̤ ā Shafīʿī Kadkanī, Advār-i Shiʿr-i Fārsī: Az Mashrūṭiyyat tā Suqūṭ-i Salṭanat [Periods of Persian Poetry: From Constitutionalism to the Collapse of the

Introduction 9 Monarchy] (Tehran: Sukhan, 2001–2/1380 hs.); Z̠ abīḥullāh Ṣafā, Tarīkh-i Adabiyāt-i Iran [The History of Iranian Literature] (Tehran: Quqnūs, 1994–5/1373 hs.); Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn Muʾtamin, Taḥavvul-i Shiʿr-i Fārsī [The Transformation of Persian Poetry] (Tehran: Sharq, 1959–60/1338 hs.); Some works combine genre categories and political periods in their classifications. For instance, see Āryan′pūr, Az Ṣabā tā Nīmā and Jan Rypka, ed., History of Iranian Literature (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1968). 27 See, among many similar works, M.R. Ghanoonparvar, Prophets of Doom: Literature as a Socio-Political Phenomenon in Modern Iran (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984); Kamran Talattof, Politics of Writing in Iran: A History of Modern Persian Literature (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2001); Dastʹghayb, Paydāyish-i Rumān-i Fārsī; Riz̤ ā Barāhinī, Qiṣṣah Nivīsī [Story Writing], 4th ed. (Tehran: Nigāh, 2013–4/1392 hs.); Michael C. Hillmann, “The Modernist Trend in Persian Literature and Its Social Impact,” Iranian Studies 15, no. 1–4 (1982): 7–29; Reza Arasteh, “Modern Persian Prose Writers,” Books Abroad 33, no. 4 (Autumn, 1959): 401–3; Roxane Haag-Higuchi, “Historical Events in Persian Novels,” Oriente Moderno, Nuova serie, 22, no. 1 (2003): 131–44; Kamran Talattof, “‘I Will Rebuild You, Oh My Homeland’: Simin Behbahani’s Work and Sociopolitical Discourse,” Iranian Studies 41, no. 1 (February, 2008): 19–35; Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, “Of Hail and Hounds: The Image of the Iranian Revolution in Recent Persian Literature,” State, Culture, and Society 1, no. 3 (Spring, 1985): 148–80; Kamran Talattof, “Iranian Women’s Literature: From Pre-Revolutionary Social Discourse to Post-Revolutionary Feminism,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 29, no. 4 (November, 1997): 531–58; Kamran Talattof, “Postrevolutionary Persian Literature: Creativity and Resistance,” Radical History Review 2009, no. 105 (Fall, 2009): 145–50; Blake Atwood, Reform Cinema in Iran: Film and Political Change in the Islamic Republic (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016); Sorour Soroudi, “Poet and Revolution: The Impact of Iran’s Constitutional Revolution on the Social and Literary Outlook of the Poets of the Time: Part I,” Iranian Studies 12, no. 1–2 (Winter–Spring, 1979): 3–41; and Manoutchehr M. Eskandari-Qajar, “Novellas as Morality Tales and Entertainment in the Newspapers of the Late Qajar Period: Yahya Mirza Eskandari’s ‘Eshgh-e Doroughi’ and ‘Arousi-e Mehrangiz’,” Iranian Studies 40, no. 4 (September, 2007): 511–28. 28 “[D]uring the continuing conflict between traditionalists and modernists, some modernists have argued that there is a connection between traditional literary forms, subjects and advocates, and the traditional, oppressive political power structure that many modernists have felt it was their major duty to combat” (Hillmann, “The Modernist Trend,” 11.). Writers perceived as not adhering to this duty may even face the wrath of the critic. Suhrāb Sipihrī (1928–80/1307–59 hs.), for instance, did not explicitly deal with contemporary political issues in his poetry and was thus labelled “a little mystical bourgeois [bachah būdā-yi ashrāfī]” by the prominent critic Riz̤ ā Barāhinī in Talā dar Mis: Dar Shiʿr va Shāʿirī [Gold in Copper: On Poetry and Poetry Writing] (Tehran: Zamān, 1994– 5/1373 hs.), 520. This book was first published in 1964–5/1343 hs. and has gone through several reprints since. Though still overtly politicised, there are studies that have moved beyond this deadlock. As Karimi-Hakkak puts it, “[I]t is not hard to demonstrate the ways in which the contemporary literature of Iran mediates the intellectual perception of the entire modern process as a great historical rupture, and predicts its imminent collapse and its rather automatic replacement by an ‘other’ entity capable of reintegrating the diverse ideals of progress, freedom, and justice, as well as the reestablishment of social links with native – and traditional – ways and values in a novel social configuration” (Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, “Revolutionary Posturing: Iranian Writers and the Iranian Revolution of 1979,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 23, no. 4 [November, 1991]: 508). 29 Hamid Dabashi, “The Poetics of Politics: Commitment in Modern Persian Literature,” Iranian Studies 18, no. 2–4 (Spring–Autumn, 1985): 170. See also Reza Navabpour, “The ‘Writer’ and the ‘People’: Jamālzādah’s Yekī Būd Yekī Nabūd: A Recast,” British

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Hamid R. Yazdi and Arshavez Mozafari Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 23, no. 1 (May, 1996): 69–75; Leonardo P. Alishan, “Ahmad Shamlu: The Rebel Poet in Search of an Audience,” Iranian Studies 18, no. 2–4 (Spring–Autumn, 1985): 375–422; and Kubíčková, “Persian Literature of the 20th Century,” 362. Nīmā Yūshīj (1897–1960/1276–1338 hs.) has often borne the brunt of such impositions. That the poet declared at the First Iranian Writers’ Congress (Kungirah-i Navīsandigān-i Iran) in 1946/1325 hs. that “the main stuff of my poems is my pain [ . . . ] I compose poetry for my own suffering,” does not impede historians from asserting that “if Nīmā had from the beginning composed poetry for his own sake [barāyi dil-i khudash Shiʿr mīguft] (. . .) New Poetry would not have evolved and certainly he would not be considered the theoretician and architect of New Poetry” (Langarūdī, Tārīkh-i Tahlīlī-yi Shiʿr-i Naw, 5). The writer and activist Jalāl Āl-i Aḥmad (1923–69/1302–48 hs.) once altered parts of Nīmā’s poem “Pādishāh-yi Fatḥ [The King of Conquest]” in order to align it with the leftist agenda of the journal Nāmah-yi Mardum (The People’s Journal), in response to which the poet complained: “Those who are better experts than me [in understanding my own poetry] have omitted two paragraphs that are essential to the life of the poem, and I shall add them in the next edition” (cited in Sīrūs Shamīsā, Rāhnamā-yi Adabiyāt-i Muʾāṣir: Sharḥ va Taḥlīl-i Guzīdah-yi Shiʿr-i Naw-i Fārsī [A Guide to Contemporary Literature: Analysis of Selected Works of New Persian Poetry] (Tehran: Nashr-i Mītrā, 2003–4/1382 hs.), 152–3. We thank Fateme Montazeri, who is featured in this volume, for drawing our attention to this particular communication. Bill Ashcroft, Post-Colonial Transformation (London: Routledge, 2001), 11. This may be due to an “unwillingness to face the brutality of the colonial [or political] context.” For a discussion of Albert Camus (1913–60) in this regard, see Amar Acheraïou, Rethinking Postcolonialism: Colonialist Discourse in Modern Literatures and the Legacy of Classical Writers (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 111. Regarding Sīmīn Bihbahānī’s (1927–2014/1306–93 hs.) “Raqqāṣah,” Tourage states: “Instead of deriving the meaning of the poem from its external features (for example, from its historical context), it is the external features that are viewed as derivative. This is not to disregard the intentionality of the author – as if she is irrelevant or did not know what she was writing. Rather, insofar as hermeneutics as a praxis of interpretation is envisioned as a sustained open process of meaning production, the latent authorial intent is differentially reproduced in every act of reading this poem” (Mahdi Tourage, “Text and the Body in a Poem by Simin Behbahani,” Iranian Studies 41, no. 1 [February, 2008]: 61–2). See Jamāl Mīrṣādiqī, Adabiyāt-i Dāstānī: Qiṣṣah, Dāstān-i Kūtāh, Rumān [Fiction: Tale, Short Story, Novel], 4th ed. (Tehran: Bahman, 2002–3/1381 hs.); Ruhullah Zarei, “Axes of Evil Live Evermore: Brother Poe in Iran,” The Edgar Allan Poe Review 4, no. 2 (Fall, 2003): 14–21; Leila Baradaran Jamili and Bahman Zarrinjooee, “An Artistic Metempsychosis: James Joyce’s and Sadeq Hedayat’s Nonlinear and Chaotic Imagination,” in Joycean Legacies, ed. Martha C. Carpentier (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 230–57; Manoutchehr Mohandessi, “Hedayat and Rilke,” Comparative Literature 23, no. 3 (Summer, 1971): 209–16; Nasrin Rahimieh, “Die Verwandlung Deterritorialized: Hedayat’s Appropriation of Kafka,” Comparative Literature Studies 31, no. 3 (1994): 251–69; Nasrin Rahimieh, “Magical Realism in Moniru Ravanipur’s Ahl-e gharq,” Iranian Studies 23, no. 1–4 (1990): 61–75; Homa Katouzian, Ṣādiq Hidāyat va Marg-i Navīsandah [Ṣādiq Hidāyat and the Death of the Author] (Tehran: Markaz, 1993–4/1372 hs.); and Bahrām Miqdādī, Hidāyat va Sipihrī [Hidāyat and Sipihrī] (Tehran: Hāshimī, 1998–9/1377 hs.). This approach has also gained an immense amount of traction in Iranian journals. For example, see Laylā Hāshimiyān and Riz̤ vān Ṣafāʹī Ṣābir, “Shakhṣiyatpardāzī dar Shish Dāstān-i Kūtāh-yi Hūshang Gulshīrī [An Analysis of Characterisation in Six Short Stories by Hūshang Gulshīrī],” Faṣlnāmah-yi Pazhūhishʹhā-yi Naqd-i Adabī va Sabkʹshināsī 2 (Winter, 2011/Zimistān, 1389 hs.): 169–91; Siyāvash Gulshīrī, “Pust Mudirnīsm dar

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Adabiyāt-i Dāstānī-yi Muʿāṣir-i Iran (Barrasī-yi Muʿalifahʹhā-yi Pust Mudirn dar Ās̠ ār-i Hūshang Gulshīrī) [Postmodernism in Contemporary Iranian Fiction (The Study of Postmodernist Features in Hūshang Gulshīrī’s Works)],” Pazhūhishnāmah-yi Adab-i Ḥamāsī (Pazhūhish Nāmah-yi Farhang va Adab) 6, no. 10 (Fall–Winter, 2010–11/ Pāīz va Zimistān, 1389 hs.): 242–78; Arsalān Gulfām, Bilqays Rawshan, and Farzānah Shīrʹriz̤ ā, “Kārburd-i ‘Naẓariyyah-i Jahān-i Matn’ dar Shināsāʹī-yi ʿAnāṣur-i Sāzandah-yi Matn-i Ravāʹī-yi Dāstān-i Shāzdah Iḥtijāb: Bar Mabnā-yi Rūykard-i Shiʿrshināsī Shinākhtī [The Application of Text World Theory to Recognise Narrative Elements in Shāzdah Iḥtijāb: A Cognitive Poetics Approach],” Justārʹhā-yi Zabānī 5, no. 5 (January– March, 2015/Bahman va Isfand 1393 hs.): 183–206; and Maryam Riz̤ ābaygī, Muḥammad Īrānī, and Maryam Qurbāniyān, “Baynāmatniyyat va Dawr-i Bāṭil: Du Muʿalifah-yi Pasānawgirā dar Rumān-i Paykār-i Farhād-i ʿAbbās Maʾrūfī [The Study of Intertextuality and the Vicious Cycle as Two Postmodern Elements in ʿAbbās Maʾrūfī’s Paykar-i Farhād],” Naqd-i Adabī 5, no. 20 (Winter, 2013/Zimistān, 1391 hs.): 121–42. These categories are used by Arasteh in “Modern Persian Prose Writers.” Similarly, “realism” is attributed to Muḥammad ʿAlī Jamālzādah (1892–1997/1270–1376 hs.), “surrealism” to Ṣādiq Hidāyat (1903–51/1281–1330 hs.) and “romanticism” to Muḥammad Ḥijāzī (1900–74/1279–1352 hs.). See, for example, Langarūdī, Tārīkh-i Tahlīlī-yi Shiʿr-i Naw, 21–2. Houra Yavari, Ravānkāvī va Adabiyāt: Du Matn, Du Insān, Du Jahān [Psychoanalysis and Literature: Two Texts, Two Selves, Two Worlds] (Tehran: Sukhan, 2007–8/1386 hs.). The term “psycho-fiction” has been coined to accommodate this reading. See the introduction to Homa Katouzian, ed., Sadeq Hedayat: His Work and Wondrous World (New York: Routledge, 2008). For some examples, see Sīrūs Shamīsā, Sabkshināsī-yi Nas̠ r [The Stylistics of Prose] (Tehran: Mītrā, 2008–9/1387 hs.); Mīrṣādīqī, Adabiyāt-i Dāstānī; Mīrʿābidīnī, Ṣad Sāl Dāstān Nivīsī-yi Iran; Ḥusayn Pāyandah, Dāstān-i Kūtāh dar Iran [The Short Story in Iran], 3 vols. (Tehran: Nīlūfar, 2016–7/1395 hs.); Dāriyūsh Ṣabūr, Ufuq-i Ghazal-i Fārsī: Pazhūhish-i Intiqādī dar Taḥavvul-i Ghazal va Taghazzul az Āghāz ta Imrūz [Horizons of the Persian Ghazal: A Critical Investigation into the Transformation of the Ghazal and Ghazal-writing from Beginning to Present], 2nd ed. (Tehran: Zavvār, 2004– 5/1383 hs.); Sīrūs Shamīsā, Anvāʾ-i Adabī [Literary Genres], 4th ed. (Tehran: Mītrā, 2003–4/1382 hs.); ʿĪsá Amn Khānī, Igzīstānsiyālīsm dar Adabiyāt-i Muʾāṣir-i Iran [Existentialism in Contemporary Iranian Literature] (Tehran: ʿIlmī, 2012–3/1391 hs.); Masʿūd Jaʾfarī, Sayr-i Rūmāntīsm dar Iran [The Evolution of Romanticism in Iran] (Tehran: Nashr-i Markaz, 1989–90/1368 hs.). In such studies, a priori categories such as “historical novel,” “social novel,” “romanticism,” and so on are deployed empirically for purposes of definition, categorisation and evaluation. Jan Rypka, “History of Persian Literature up to the Beginning of the 20th Century,” in History of Iranian Literature, ed. Jan Rypka (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1968), 79. For some examples, see Hīvā Gūrān, Kūshishʹhā-yi Nāfarjām: Sayrī dar Ṣad Sāl Tiʿātr-i Iran [Futile Attempts: A Survey of One Hundred Years of Theatre in Iran] (Tehran: Āgāh, 1980–1/1359 hs.); Mehrzad Boroujerdi, Iranian Intellectuals and the West: The Tormented Triumph of Nativism (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996); and Ḥasan Mīrʿābidīnī, “Dāstān-i Dāstān Nivisī [The Story of Story Writing], (1),” Bukhārā 39–40 (December, 2004–March, 2005/Āzar-Isfand, 1383 hs.): 66–78. Ḥusayn Pāyandah, ed., Maqālāt-i Nakhustīn Simīnār-i Barrasī-yi Masāʿil-i Rumān dar Iran [Proceedings of the First Conference on an Investigation of Novel Writing Issues in Iran] (Tehran: Daftar-i Muṭāliʿāt-i Adabiyāt-i Dāstānī, 1995–6/1374 hs.). Fatḥullāh Bīniyāz, Darāmadī bar Dāstān Nivīsī va Ravāyat Shināsī: Bā Ishārah-yi Mawjiz bih Āsīb Shināsī-yi Rumān va Dāstān-i Kūtāh-yi Iran [An Introduction to Story Writing and Narratology: With a Concise Intimation on the Pathology of the Iranian Novel and Short Story] (Tehran: Afrāz, 2014–5/1393 hs.). For a similar title, see Javād

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Hamid R. Yazdi and Arshavez Mozafari Mujābī, “Āsīb Shināsī-yi Adabiyāt-i Jahān-i Sivvum [The Pathology of Third World Literature],” Takāpū (New Series) 3 (June–July, 1993/Tīr, 1372 hs.): 64–7. For a critique of nativism and its role in reimagining postcolonial subjecthood, see Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Out of Africa, Topologies of Nativism,” in The Bounds of Race: Perspectives on Hegemony and Resistance, ed. D. LaCapra (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 134–163; Nandy, The Intimate Enemy; and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (London: Macmillan Education, 1988), 271–313. See Rahmatollah Valadbeigi and Tahereh Babakhani, “Connection between Epic and Play in Shahnameh: Comparative Study of Cognitive Drama Features in Two Stories of ‘Rostam and Sohrab’ and ‘Rostam and Esfandiar’,” Journal of Sociological Research 5, no. 2 (2014): 7–18; Mohammad Reza Shahbazi, Saeed Yazdani, Somayeh Avarand, and Maryam Jamali, “An Anthropological Study of the Dramatic Elements of the Book of Arda Viraf in Iran,” Anthropologist 28, no. 3 (2015): 492–502; Michael Beard, Hedayat’s Blind Owl as a Western Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990); ʿAlī Khazāʿīʹfar, ‘Riʾālīsm-i Jādūʿī dar Taz̠ kirat al-Awliyāʾ [Magical Realism in Taz̠ kirat al-Awliyāʾ],” Nāmah-yi Farhangistān 25, no. 1 (May–June, 2005/Khurdād, 1384 hs.): 6–21; Taqī Pūrnāmdāriyān, Ramz va Dāstān′hā-yi Ramzī dar Adab-i Fārsī: Taḥlīlī az Dāstān′hā-yi ʿIrfānī-Falsafī-yi Ibn Sīnā va Suhravardī [Symbols and Symbolic Stories in Persian Literature: An Analysis of the Mystical-Philosophical Stories of Avicenna and Suhravardī], 6th ed. (Tehran: Intishārāt-i ‘Ilmī va Farhangī, 2006–7/1385 hs.). Bahrām Miqdādī, “Būf-i Kūr va ‘Uqdih-yi Udīpī [The Blind Owl and the Oedipus Complex],” Jahān-i Naw 25, no. 1–2 (Spring, 1970/Bahār, 1349 hs.): N.p.; Tūraj Rahnamā, “Chand Vizhagī dar Būf-i Kūr [A Few Features of The Blind Owl],” Sukhan 23, no. 5 (March–April, 1974/Farvardīn, 1353 hs.); Michael C. Hillmann, ed., Hedāyat’s The Blind Owl: Forty Years After (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1978); Iraj Bashiri, The Fiction of Sadeq Hedayat (Santa Ana, CA: Mazda, 1984); Bahrām Miqdādī, “Būf-i Kūr va Khashm va Hayāhū [The Blind Owl and The Sound and the Fury],” Pazhūhish-i Zabānʹhā-yi Khārijī 20 (2004–5/1383 hs.): 145–60; Yavari, Ravānkāvī va Adabiyāt; Katouzian, ed., Sadeq Hedayat; Rahimieh, “Magical Realism”; Taqī Pūrnāmdāriyān and Maryam Sayyidān, “Bāztāb-i Riʾālīsm-i Jādūʿī dar Dāstān′hā-yi Ghulām Ḥusayn Saʿidī [A Reflection on Magical Realism in Ghulām Ḥusayn Saʿidī’s Stories],” Zabān va Adabiyāt-i Fārsī 64 (Spring, 2009/Bahār, 1388 hs.): 45–64; Riz̤ ā Nāẓimiyān, ʿAlī Ganjiyān Khanārī, Dāvūd Asprahm, and Yusrā Shādmān, “Barrasī-yi Guzārahʹhā-yi Riʾālīsm-i Jādūʿī dar Rumānʹhā-yi ʿAzādārān-i Bayal-i Ghulām Ḥusayn Saʿidī va Shabhā-yi Hizār Shab-i Najīb Maḥfūẓ [An Investigation of Magical Realism in Ghulām Ḥusayn Saʿidī’s The Mourners of Bayal and Naguib Mahfouz’ Arabian Nights and Days],” Adab-i ʿArabī 6, no. 2 (Fall–Winter, 2014–5/Pāʿīz va Zimistān, 1393 hs.): 157–78; Mīrʿābidīnī, Ṣad Sāl Dāstān Nivīsī-yi Iran, vol. 3, 932–3. Critical treatment of war literature in Iran is relatively meagre in comparison to the large body of works that exist in this field. According to Mīrʿābidīnī, between 1979–80/1358 hs. and 1992–3/1371 hs. approximately 1600 short stories and forty-six novels on war were published in Iran, authored by more than 258 writers (Ṣad Sāl Dāstān Nivīsī-yi Iran, vol. 3, 889). Some examples of the few critical treatments that exist, include: Pedram Khosronejad, ed., Iranian Sacred Defence Cinema: Religion, Martyrdom, and National Identity (Canon Pyon, UK: Sean Kingston, 2012); Muḥammad Ḥanīf, Jang az Sih Dīdgāh [War from Three Perspectives] (Tehran: Ṣarīr, September 9, 2007/Shahrīvar 18, 1386 hs.); Riz̤ ā Rahguz̠ ar, Nīm Nigāhī bih Hasht Sāl Qiṣṣah-yi Jang [A Cursary Look at Eight Years of War Stories] (Tehran: Sāzmān-i Tablīghāt-i Islāmī, Ḥawzah-yi Hunarī, 1991–2/1370 hs.); and Bilqays Sulaymānī, Tufang va Tarāzū: Naqd va Taḥlīl-i Rumānʹhā-yi Jang [The Gun and the Scales: Criticism and Analysis of War Novels] (Tehran: Rūzigār, 2001–2/1380 hs.). Interestingly, some war novels have been translated into English – among them: Ahmad Dehqan, Journey to Heading 270 Degrees, trans.

Introduction 13

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Paul Sprachman (Santa Ana, CA: Mazda, 2006); Habib Ahmadzadeh, Chess with the Doomsday Machine, trans. Paul Sprachman (Santa Ana, CA: Mazda, 2008); and Habib Ahmadzadeh, A City under Siege: Tales of the Iran-Iraq War, trans. Paul Sprachman (Santa Ana, CA: Mazda, 2010). The use of this claim in dismissing many works as artistically unworthy is so widespread that it would be futile to try to index it. Many anthologies simply exclude authors outside of the established canon. Others make the exclusion through comparison by mentioning, in passing, the name of a non-canonical writer next to a canonical one in justification of the claim to “artistic value.” In one instance, Jamāl Shahrān (b. 1920–1/1299 hs.), an obscure author in orthodox historiography, is evoked as a “naturalist” writer concerned with “the poverty of the most oppressed inhabitants of the depths of Tehran . . . [but who lacks] the narrative prowess and structural innovation” of Hidāyat and Ṣādiq Chūbak (1916–1998/1294–1376 hs.), both of whom enjoy canonical status. Dar Justijū-yi Zindigī (In Search of Life) is the book in which Shahrān seemingly attained “artistic achievement,” and this is said to be because “[he] had spent part of his life in Europe and was familiar with modern literature” (Mīrʿābidīnī, Sayr-i Taḥavvul-i Adabiyāt-i Dāstānī va Namāyishī, 66–7). In opposing Edward Brown’s (1862–1926) decision to call the 19th century poet Yaghmā-yi Jandaqī (1781–2–1859–60/1196–1276 hq.) Iran’s Arthur Rimbaud (1854–91), a critic protests that “in Europe’s embryonic bourgeois society Rimbaud became the founder of symbolism in world history . . . while this one wasted his energies on . . . vulgarities.” This claim is made in preparation for what will follow: Nīmā Yūshīj as the founder of New Poetry in Iran (Langarūdī, Tārīkh-i Ṭahlīlī-yi Shiʿr-i Naw, 36). Encyclopaedia Iranica, s.v. “Fiction, ii(c),” www.iranicaonline.org/articles/fiction-iicthe-short-story (accessed March 14, 2017). The report was released by Khabarguzārī-yi Dānishjūyān-i Iran (Iranian Students’ News Agency) on August 25, 2006/Shahrīvar 3, 1385 hs. under the title “Guzārishī az Rumānʹhā-yi Pur Furūsh-i Iran dar 14 Sāl-i Guzashtah [A Report on Iran’s Best-Selling Novels over the the Past 14 Years].” Afshin Matin-Asgari, “The Intellectual Best-Sellers of Post-Revolutionary Iran: On Backwardness, Elite-Killing, and Western Rationality,” Iranian Studies 37, no. 1 (March, 2004): 73–88. There have been other appraisals of this novel, such as in ʿAbdul ʿAlī Dastʹghayb, Az Darīchah-yi Naqd: Majmūʿah-yi Maqālāt [Critical Perspectives: Collected Works], vol. 5 (Tehran: Khānah-yi Kitāb, October–November, 2012/Ābān, 1391 hs.), 3209–42; and Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, “Nigāhī bar Muvaffaqʹtarīn Rumān-i Īrānī dar Dahah-yi Guzashtah [A Look at the Most Successful Iranian Novel of the Previous Decade],” Iran Nāmah 15, no. 3 (Summer, 1997/Tābistān, 1376 hs.): 254–67, but these have been scant in comparison to the novel’s popularity. Furthermore, it is not given due consideration due to its mass appeal (thus, its association with “popular literature”) and its “traditionalism” (Mīrʿābidīnī, Ṣad Sāl Dāstān Nivīsī-yi Iran, vol. 4, 1267 and 1274). Also labelled as “popular literature,” Āshiyānah-yi ʿUqāb is said to be “a sentimental novel whose conservatism can be perceived not only in the morality it spreads but also in its form. Lethargy, long-windedness and lack of coherence are characteristic of this novel” (Mīrʿābidīnī, Ṣad Sāl Dāstān Nivīsī-yi Iran, vol. 1, 46). Incidentally, and not included in the Ministry’s Report, Muʾtamīn’s other, and more popular, novel Payāmbar (The Prophet, 1936–7/1315 hs.) was reprinted twenty times between 1936–7/1315 hs. and 1976–7/1355 hs., and translated into French – prefaced by Henri Massé (1886–69) – in 1956–7/1335 hs. and English in 1963–4/1342 hs. The novel has received no critical attention in Iranian studies, except for a brief mention in Istiʾlāmī, Barrasī-yi Adabiyāt-i Imrūzī-yi Iran, 109. There is a derogatory sense in the Persian phrase “rumān-i ʿāmmah pasand” (lit. novels appealing to the masses) that is not quite captured in the English equivalent “popular novel.” Farzad points out how there “is very little published in-depth material that looks critically at the works of poets like Aminpur and what there is mainly consists of rare

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newspaper interviews or accounts of comments given at poetry workshops or special events” (Narguess Farzad, “Qeysar Aminpur and the Persian Poetry of Sacred Defence,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 34, no. 3 [December, 2007]: 357). This applies to Amīnʹpūr’s non-fiction work of literary criticism, Sunnat va Nawʹāvarī dar Shiʿr-i Muʿāṣir [Tradition and Innovation in Contemporary Poetry], 3rd ed. (Tehran: ʿIlmī va Farhangī, 2007–8/1386 hs.). In this important work, Amīnʹpūr tries to break free from the hold of “modern” (defined as contemporary, rational, secular and anti-traditional) readings of Persian literature and instead offers the category “nawʹāvarī [innovation],” concluding that “tradition is not a barrier to innovation; rather, it is its necessary precondition” (64), promoting the concept “sunnat-i nawʹāvarī [a tradition of innovation].” To our knowledge, it has only been reviewed in a single journal article: Maḥmūd Futūḥī, “Masʿalah-yi Mudirnīsm: Sunnat va Nawʹāvarī az Nigāh-i Qayṣar Amīnʹpūr [The Question of Modernism: Tradition and Innovation from Qayṣar Amīnʹpūr’s Perspective],” Tajrubah 1 [April–May, 2011/ Urdībihisht, 1390 hs.]). 53 Mīrʿābidīnī makes this charge against Makhmalbāf explicit in these terms: “Makhmalbāf . . . [who] was active in the ‘Department of the Arts’ is the representative of the [type] of writers who congregated [there] and created works in accordance with Islamic ideology [and] state policy [bāvarʹhā-yi niẓām]” (Mīrʿābidīnī, Ṣad Sāl Dāstān Nivīsī-yi Iran, vol. 3, 891]. Amīnʹpūr has also been questioned for his involvement in state-run organisations (Farzad, “Qeysar Aminpur,” 354). 54 Mīrʿābidīnī, Ṣad Sāl Dāstān Nivīsī-yi Iran, vol. 3, 891. Mīrʿābidīnī is not alone in this assessment. A host of critics commenting on war literature in Iran have similar views and Mīrʿābidīnī cites them in the forty-odd pages he dedicated to the subject in his monumental four-volume study on prose fiction in Iran. Most writers are said to “adhere to their ideological vocation without regard for aesthetic principles.” They “were not professional writers” and for this reason they have produced “very few works that have been able to portray [the war’s] reality artistically.” Most works are described as “raw [pardākht nashudah],” “rooted in ideological theses,” “superficial,” steeped in “mystical tendencies [ . . . ] akin to mystical or theological treatises [risālah-yi kalamī yā ʿirfānī],” characterised by “defect in prose and technique,” “shallow characters,” “inconceivable and forced settings and dialogues [ . . . ] devoid of literary value [ . . . ] deviating from realism [ . . . ] simplistic and [closer to] reportage than possessing literary value [ . . . ] travelogue-like and dependent on metaphoric imagery,” (890–924). This has happened, we are told, because “Muslim story writers [qiṣṣah nivīsān-i Musalmān]” are propagandists of the state driven by ideological incentives (896–909).

Bibliography NEL sources Aminʹpūr, Qayṣar. Sunnat va Nawʹāvarī dar Shiʿr-i Muʿāṣir [Tradition and Innovation in Contemporary Poetry]. Tehran: ʿIlmī va Farhangī, 2003–4/1382 hs. Amn Khānī, ʿĪsá. Igzīstānsiyālīsm dar Adabiyāt-i Muʾaṣir-i Iran [Existentialism in Contemporary Iranian Literature]. Tehran: ʿIlmī, 2012–3/1391 hs. Āryan′pūr, Yaḥyá. Az Ṣabā tā Nīmā [From Ṣabā to Nīmā], 9th ed. Tehran: Zavvār, 2007– 8/1386 hs. Barāhinī, Riz̤ ā. Qiṣṣah Nivīsī [Story Writing]. Tehran: Nigāh, 2013–4/1392 hs. Barāhinī, Riz̤ ā. Ṭalā dar Mis: Dar Shiʿr va Shāʿirī [Gold in Copper: On Poetry and Poetry Writing]. Tehran: Zamān, 1994–5/1373 hs. Bayz̤ āʿī, Bahrām. Namāyish dar Iran [Theatrical Performance in Iran], 8th ed. Tehran: Rushangarān va Muṭāliʿāt-i Zanān, 2011–2/1390 hs.

Introduction 15 Bīniyāz, Fatḥullāh. Darāmadī bar Dāstān Nivīsī va Ravāyat Shināsī: Bā Ishārah-yi Mawjiz bih Āsīb Shināsī-yi Rumān va Dāstān-i Kūtāh-yi Iran [An Introduction to Story Writing and Narratology: With a Concise Intimation on the Pathology of the Iranian Novel and Short Story]. Tehran: Afrāz, 2014–5/1393 hs. Dastʹghayb, ʿAbdul ʿAlī. Az Darīchah-yi Naqd: Majmūʿah-yi Maqālāt [Critical Perspectives: Collected Works], 5 vols. Tehran: Khānah-yi Kitāb, October–November, 2012/ Ābān, 1391 hs. Dastʹghayb, ʿAbdul ʿAlī. Paydāyish-i Rumān-i Fārsī [The Genesis of the Persian Novel]. Shīrāz: Navīd-i Shīrāz, 2006–7/1385 hs. Futūḥī, Maḥmūd. “Masʿalah-yi Mudirnīsm: Sunnat va Nawʹāvarī az Nigāh-i Qayṣar Amīnʹpūr [The Question of Modernism: Tradition and Innovation from Qayṣar Amīnʹpūr’s Perspective].” Tajrubah 1 (April–May, 2011/Urdībihisht, 1390 hs.). Futūḥī, Maḥmūd. Naẓariyyahʾ-yi Tārīkh-i Adabiyāt [A Theory of Literary History]. Tehran: Sukhan, 2008–9/1387 hs. Gulfām, Arsalān, Bilqays Rawshan, and Farzānah Shīrʹriz̤ ā. “Kārburd-i ‘Naẓariyah-i Jahān-i Matn’ dar Shināsāʹī-yi ʿAnāṣur-i Sāzandah-yi Matn-i Ravāʹī-yi Dāstān-i Shāzdah Iḥtijāb: Bar Mabnā-yi Rūykard-i Shiʿrshināsī Shinākhtī [The Application of Text World Theory to Recognise Narrative Elements in Shāzdah Iḥtijāb: A Cognitive Poetics Approach].” Justārʹhā-yi Zabānī 5, no. 5 (January–March, 2015/Bahman va Isfand 1393 hs.): 183–206. Gulshīrī, Siyāvash. “Pust Mudirnīsm dar Adabiyāt-i Dāstānī-yi Muʿāṣir-i Iran (Barrasī-yi Muʿalifahʹhā-yi Pust Mudirn dar Ās̠ ār-i Hūshang Gulshīrī) [Postmodernism in Contemporary Iranian Fiction (The Study of Postmodernist Features in Hūshang Gulshīrī’s Works)].” Pazhūhishnāmah-yi Adab-i Ḥamāsī (Pazhūhish Nāmah-yi Farhang va Adab) 6, no. 10 (Fall–Winter, 2010–11/Pāīz va Zimistān, 1389 hs.): 242–78. Gūrān, Hīvā. Kūshishʹhā-yi Nāfarjām: Sayrī dar Ṣad Sāl Tiʿātr-i Iran [Futile Attempts: A Survey of One Hundred Years of Theatre in Iran]. Tehran: Āgāh, 1980–1/1359 hs. “Guzārishī az Rumānʹhā-yi Pur Furūsh-i Iran dar 14 Sāl-i Guzashtah [A Report on Iran’s Best-Selling Novels over the Past 14 Years].” Khabarguzārī-yi Dānishjūyān-i Iran [Iranian Students’ News Agency] (August 25, 2006/Shahrīvar 3, 1385 hs.). www.isna.ir/. Ḥanīf, Muḥammad. Jang az Sih Dīdgāh [War from Three Perspectives]. Tehran: Ṣarīr, September 9, 2007/Shahrīvar 18, 1386 hs. Hāshimiyān, Laylā and Riz̤ vān Ṣafāʹī Ṣābir. “Shakhṣiyatpardāzī dar Shish Dāstān-i Kūtāh-yi Hūshang Gulshīrī [An Analysis of Characterisation in Six Short Stories by Hūshang Gulshīrī].” Faṣlnāmah-yi Pazhūhishʹhā-yi Naqd-i Adabī va Sabkʹshināsī 2 (Winter, 2011/ Zimistān, 1389 hs.): 169–91. Ḥuqūqī, Muḥammad. Adabiyāt-i Imrūz-i Iran [Iranian Literature Today]. Tehran: Qaṭrah, 1997–8/1376 hs. Ḥuqūqī, Muḥammad. Shiʿr-i Naw az Āghāz tā Imrūz [New Poetry from Beginning to Present]. Tehran: Amīr Kabīr, 1971–2/1350 hs. Istiʾlāmī, Muḥammad. Barrasī-yi Adabiyāt-i Imrūzī-yi Iran [An Analysis of Contemporary Iranian Literature]. Tehran: Amīr Kabīr, 1976–7/1355 hs. Jaʾfarī, Masʿūd. Sayr-i Rūmāntīsm dar Iran [The Evolution of Romanticism in Iran]. Tehran: Nashr-i Markaz, 1989–90/1368 hs. Karimi-Hakkak, Ahmad. “Nigāhī bar Muvaffaqʹtarīn Rumān-i Īrānī dar Dahah-yi Guzashtah [A Look at the Most Successful Iranian Novel of the Previous Decade].” Iran Nāmah 15, no. 3 (Summer, 1997/Tābistān, 1376 hs.): 254–67. Katouzian, Homa. Ṣādiq Hidāyat va Marg-i Navīsandah [Ṣādiq Hidāyat and the Death of the Author]. Tehran: Markaz, 1993–4/1372 hs.

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Khazāʿīʹfar, ʿAlī. “Riʾālīsm-i Jādūʿī dar Taz̠ kirat al-Awliyāʾ [Magical Realism in Taz̠ kirat al-Awliyāʾ].” Nāmah-yi Farhangistān 25, no. 1 (May–June, 2005/Khurdād, 1384 hs.): 6–21. Langarūdī, Shams. Tārīkh-i Ṭahlīlī-yi Shiʿr-i Naw [An Analytical History of New Poetry], 4 vols., 3rd ed. Tehran: Nashr-i Markaz, 1990–1/1369 hs. Malikpūr, Jamshīd. Adabiyāt-i Namāyishī dar Iran [Dramatic Literature in Iran]. Tehran: Tūs, 2006–7/1385 hs. Miqdādī, Bahrām. “Būf-i Kūr va Khashm va Hayāhū [The Blind Owl and The Sound and the Fury].” Pazhūhish-i Zabānʹhā-yi Khārijī 20 (2004–5/1383 hs.): 145–60. Miqdādī, Bahrām. “Būf-i Kūr va ʿUqdih-yi Udīpī [The Blind Owl and the Oedipus Complex].” Jahān-i Naw 25, no. 1–2 (Spring, 1970/Bahār, 1349 hs.): n.p. Miqdādī, Bahrām. Hidāyat va Sipihrī [Hidāyat and Sipihrī]. Tehran: Hāshimī, 1998–9/1377 hs. Mīrʿābidīnī, Ḥasan. “Dāstān-i Dāstān Nivisī [The Story of Story Writing], (1).” Bukhārā 39–40 (December, 2004–March, 2005/Āzar-Isfand, 1383 hs.): 66–78. Mīrʿābidīnī, Ḥasan. Ṣad Sāl Dāstān Nivīsī-yi Iran [A Hundred Years of Story Writing in Iran], 4 vols., 5th ed. Tehran: Chishmah, 2007–8/1386 hs. Mīrʿābidīnī, Ḥasan. Sayr-i Taḥavvul-i Adabiyāt-i Dāstānī va Namāyishī az 1320 tā 1332 Shamsī [A Survey of the Development of Persian Fiction and Plays from 1320 to 1332 hs.]. Tehran: Nashr-i Ās̠ ār, 2011–2/1390 hs. Mīrṣādiqī, Jamāl. Adabiyāt-i Dāstānī: Qiṣṣah, Dāstān-i Kūtāh, Rumān [Fiction: Tale, Short Story, Novel], 4th ed. Tehran: Bahman, 2002–3/1381 hs. Muḥsinī, Aḥmad and Ārsīnah Khāchāṭūriyān Sarādihī. “Nihz̤ at-i Tarjumah dar ʿAsr-i Qājār [The Translation Movement during the Qājār Period].” Payām-i Bahāristān (2nd Series) 3, no. 11 (Spring, 2011/Bahār, 1390 hs.): 787–97. Mujābī, Javād. “Āsīb Shināsī-yi Adabiyāt-i Jahān-i Sivvum [The Pathology of Third World Literature].” Takāpū (New Series) 3 (June–July, 1993/Tīr, 1372 hs.): 64–7. Muʾtamin, Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn. Taḥavvul-i Shiʿr-i Fārsī [The Transformation of Persian Poetry]. Tehran: Sharq, 1959–60/1338 hs. Nāẓimiyān, Riz̤ ā, ʿAlī Ganjiyān Khanārī, Dāvūd Asprahm, and Yusrā Shādmān. “Barrasī-yi Guzārahʹhā-yi Riʾālīsm-i Jādūʿī dar Rumānʹhā-yi ʿAzādārān-i Bayal-i Ghulām Ḥusayn Saʿidī va Shabʹhā-yi Hizār Shab-i Najīb Maḥfūẓ [An Investigation of Magical Realism in Ghulām Ḥusayn Saʿidī’s The Mourners of Bayal and Naguib Mahfouz’ Arabian Nights and Days]. Adab-i ʿArabī 6, no. 2 (Fall–Winter, 2014–5/Pāʿīz va Zimistān, 1393 hs.): 157–78. Pāyandah, Ḥusayn. Dāstān-i Kūtāh dar Iran [The Short Story in Iran], 3 vols. Tehran: Nīlūfar, 2016–7/1395 hs. Pāyandah, Ḥusayn, ed. Maqālāt-i Nakhustīn Simīnār-i Barrasī-yi Masāʿil-i Rumān dar Iran [Proceedings of the First Conference on an Investigation of Novel Writing Issues in Iran]. Tehran: Daftar-i Muṭāliʿāt-i Adabiyāt-i Dāstānī, 1995–6/1374 hs. Pūrnāmdāriyān, Taqī. Ramz va Dāstānʹhā-yi Ramzī dar Adab-i Fārsī: Taḥlīlī az Dāstānʹhā-yi ʿIrfānī-Falsafī-yi Ibn Sīnā va Suhravardī [Symbols and Symbolic Stories in Persian Literature: An Analysis of the Mystical-Philosophical Stories of Avicenna and Suhravardī], 6th ed. Tehran: Intishārāt-i ʿIlmī va Farhangī, 2006–7/1385 hs. Pūrnāmdāriyān, Taqī and Maryam Sayyidān. “Bāztāb-i Riʾālīsm-i Jādūʿī dar Dāstānʹhā-yi Ghulām Ḥusayn Saʿidī [A Reflection on Magical Realism in Ghulām Ḥusayn Saʿidī’s Stories].” Zabān va Adabiyāt-i Fārsī 64 (Spring, 2009/Bahār, 1388 hs.): 45–64. Rahguz̠ ar, Riz̤ ā. Nīm Nigāhī bih Hasht Sāl Qiṣṣah-yi Jang [A Cursary Look at Eight Years of War Stories]. Tehran: Sāzmān-i Tablīghāt-i Islāmī, Ḥawzah-yi Hunarī, 1990–1/1369 hs. Raḥīmiyān, Hurmuz. Adabiyāt-i Muʿāṣir-i Fārsī: Advār-i Nas̠ r-i Fārsī az Mashrūṭiyyat tā Suqūṭ-i Salṭanat [Contemporary Persian Literature: Stages of Persian Prose from Constitutionalism to the Collapse of the Monarchy]. Tehran: Samt, 2000–1/1379 hs.

Introduction 17 Rahnamā, Tūraj. “Chand Vizhagī dar Būf-i Kūr [A Few Features of The Blind Owl].” Sukhan 23, no. 5 (March–April, 1974/Farvardīn, 1353 hs.). Riz̤ ābaygī, Maryam, Muḥammad Īrānī, and Maryam Qurbāniyān. “Baynāmatniyyat va Dawr-i Bāṭil: Du Muʿalifah-yi Pasānawgirā dar Rumān-i Paykār-i Farhād-i ʿAbbās Maʾrūfī [The Study of Intertextuality and the Vicious Cycle as Two Postmodern Elements in ʿAbbās Maʾrūfī’s Paykar-i Farhād].” Naqd-i Adabī 5, no. 20 (Winter, 2013/ Zimistān, 1391 hs.): 121–42. Ṣabūr, Dāriyūsh. Ufuq-i Ghazal-i Fārsī: Pazhūhish-i Intiqādī dar Taḥavvul-i Ghazal va Taghazzul az Āghāz ta Imrūz [Horizons of the Persian Ghazal: A Critical Investigation into the Transformation of the Ghazal and Ghazal-Writing from Beginning to Present], 2nd ed. Tehran: Zavvār, 2004–5/1383 hs. Ṣafā, Z̠ abīḥullāh. Tarīkh-i Adabiyāt-i Iran [The History of Iranian Literature]. Tehran: Quqnūs, 1994–5/1373 hs. Shafīʿī Kadkanī, Muḥammad Riz̤ ā. Advār-i Shiʿr-i Fārsī: Az Mashrūṭiyyat tā Suqūṭ-i Salṭanat [Periods of Persian Poetry: From Constitutionalism to the Collapse of the Monarchy]. Tehran: Sukhan, 2001–2/1380 hs. Shamīsā, Sīrūs. Anvāʾ-yi Adabī [Literary Genres], 4th ed. Tehran: Mītrā, 2003–4/1382 hs. Shamīsā, Sīrūs. Dāstān-i Yak Rūḥ: Sharḥ va Matn-i Kāmil-i Būf-i Kūr-i Ṣādiq Hidāyat [The Story of a Spirit: An Annotated Full Text of Ṣādiq Hidāyat’s The Blind Owl]. Tehran: Firdaws, 1992–3/1371 hs. Shamīsā, Sīrūs. Rāhnamā-yi Adabiyāt-i Muʾāṣir: Sharḥ va Taḥlīl-i Guzīdah-yi Shiʿr-i Naw-i Fārsī [A Guide to Contemporary Literature: Analysis of Selected Works of New Persian Poetry]. Tehran: Nashr-i Mītrā, 2003–4/1382 hs. Shamīsā, Sīrūs. Sabkshināsī-yi Nas̠ r [The Stylistics of Prose]. Tehran: Mītrā, 2008–9/1387 hs. Sipānlū, Muḥammad ʿAlī. Nivīsandigān-i Pīshraw-i Iran [Pioneering Iranian Writers]. Tehran: Nigāh, 2007–8/1386 hs. Sipihrān, Kāmrān. Radd-i Pā-yi Tazalzul: Rumān-i Tārīkhī dar Iran, 1300–1320 [Vestiges of Uncertainty: The Historical Novel in Iran, 1300–1320 hs.]. Tehran: Shīrāzah, 2001– 2/1380 hs. Sipihrān, Kāmrān. Tiʿātrukrāsī dar ʿAsr-i Mashrūṭah (1285–1304) [Theatrocracy in the Constitutional Era (1285–1304 hs.)]. Tehran: Nīlūfar, 2008–9/1387 hs. Sulaymānī, Bilqays. Tufang va Tarāzū: Naqd va Taḥlīl-i Rumānʹhā-yi Jang [The Gun and the Scales: Criticism and Analysis of War Novels]. Tehran: Rūzigār, 2000–1/1379 hs. Ṭāhbāz, Sīrūs. Kamāndār-i Buzurg-i Kuhsārān: Zindigī va Shiʿr-i Nīmā Yūshīj [The Great Highland Archer: The Life and Poetry of Nīmā Yūshīj]. Tehran: S̠ ālis̠ , 2007– 8/1386 hs. Yavari, Houra. Ravānkāvī va Adabiyāt: Du Matn, Du Insān, Du Jahān [Psychoanalysis and Literature: Two Texts, Two Selves, Two Worlds]. Tehran: Sukhan, 2007–8/1386 hs.

EL sources Acheraïou, Amar. Rethinking Postcolonialism: Colonialist Discourse in Modern Literatures and the Legacy of Classical Writers. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Ahmadzadeh, Habib. Chess with the Doomsday Machine. Translated by Paul Sprachman. Santa Ana, CA: Mazda, 2008. Ahmadzadeh, Habib. A City under Siege: Tales of the Iran-Iraq War. Translated by Paul Sprachman. Santa Ana, CA: Mazda, 2010. Alishan, Leonardo P. “Ahmad Shamlu: The Rebel Poet in Search of an Audience.” Iranian Studies 18, no. 2–4 (Spring–Autumn, 1985): 375–422.

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Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “Out of Africa, Topologies of Nativism.” In The Bounds of Race: Perspectives on Hegemony and Resistance, edited by Dominick LaCapra, 134–63. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991. Arasteh, Reza. “Modern Persian Prose Writers.” Books Abroad 33, no. 4 (Autumn, 1959): 401–3. Ashcroft, Bill. Post-Colonial Transformation. London: Routledge, 2001. Atwood, Blake. Reform Cinema in Iran: Film and Political Change in the Islamic Republic. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Azadibougar, Omid. “Translation Norms and the Importation of the Novel into Persian.” International Journal of Society, Culture & Language 2, no. 2 (Summer and Autumn, 2014): 89–102. Balaÿ, Christophe. La genèse du roman persan modern. Tehran: Institut français de recherche en Iran, 1998. Baradaran Jamili, Leila and Bahman Zarrinjooee. “An Artistic Metempsychosis: James Joyce’s and Sadeq Hedayat’s Nonlinear and Chaotic Imagination.” In Joycean Legacies, edited by Martha C. Carpentier, 230–57. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Bashiri, Iraj. The Fiction of Sadeq Hedayat. Santa Ana, CA: Mazda, 1984. Bassnett, Susan and Harish Trivedi. “Introduction: Of Colonies, Cannibals and Vernaculars.” In Post-Colonial Translation: Theory and Practice, edited by Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi, 1–18. London: Routledge, 1999. Beard, Michael. Hedayat’s Blind Owl as a Western Novel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Boroujerdi, Mehrzad. Iranian Intellectuals and the West: The Tormented Triumph of Nativism. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996. Brennan, Timothy. “From Development to Globalization: Postcolonial Studies and Globalization Theory.” In The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies, edited by Neil Lazarus, 120–39. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Cai, Rong. The Subject in Crisis in Contemporary Chinese Literature. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004. Carton, Adrian. Mixed-Race and Modernity in Colonial India: Changing Concepts of Hybridity Across Empires. London: Routledge, 2012. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. Dabashi, Hamid. “The Poetics of Politics: Commitment in Modern Persian Literature.” Iranian Studies 18, no. 2–4 (Spring–Autumn, 1985): 147–88. Dabashi, Hamid and Golriz Dahdel. “Nimā Yušij and the Constitution of a National Subject.” Oriente Moderno (Nuova serie) 22, no. 1 (2003): 93–129. Dehqan, Ahmad. Journey to Heading 270 Degrees. Translated by Paul Sprachman. Santa Ana, CA: Mazda, 2006. Encyclopaedia Iranica, s.v. “Fiction, ii(c).” By Jamāl Mīrṣādiqī. www.iranicaonline.org/ (accessed 14 March 2017). Ertürk, Nergis. Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Eskandari-Qajar, Manoutchehr M. “Novellas as Morality Tales and Entertainment in the Newspapers of the Late Qajar Period: Yahya Mirza Eskandari’s ‘Eshgh-e Doroughi’ and ‘Arousi-e Mehrangiz’.” Iranian Studies 40, no. 4 (September, 2007): 511–28.

Introduction 19 Evans, Martin. “Languages of Racism within Contemporary Europe.” In Nation and Identity in Contemporary Europe, edited by Brian Jenkins and Spyros A. Sofos, 33–53. London: Routledge, 1996. Farzad, Narguess. “Qeysar Aminpur and the Persian Poetry of Sacred Defence.” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 34, no. 3 (December, 2007): 351–74. Fereshteh, M. Hussein. “Samad Behrangi’s Experiences and Thoughts on Rural Teaching and Learning.” Journal of Thought 30, no. 4 (Winter, 1995): 61–74. Ghanoonparvar, M.R. Prophets of Doom: Literature as a Socio-Political Phenomenon in Modern Iran. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984. Haag-Higuchi, Roxane. “Historical Events in Persian Novels.” Oriente Moderno (Nuova serie) 22, no. 1 (2003): 131–44. Hillmann, Michael C. “Al-e Ahmad’s Fictional Legacy.” Iranian Studies 9, no. 4 (Autumn, 1976): 248–65. Hillmann, Michael C., ed. Hedāyat’s the Blind Owl: Forty Years After. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1978. Hillmann, Michael C. “The Modernist Trend in Persian Literature and Its Social Impact.” Iranian Studies 15, no. 1–4 (1982): 7–29. Howland, Douglas. “The Predicament of Ideas in Culture: Translation and Historiography.” History and Theory 42, no. 1 (February, 2003): 45–60. Karimi-Hakkak, Ahmad. “From Translation to Appropriation: Poetic Cross-Breeding in Early Twentieth-Century Iran.” Comparative Literature 47, no. 1 (Winter, 1995): 53–78. Karimi-Hakkak, Ahmad. “Of Hail and Hounds: The Image of the Iranian Revolution in Recent Persian Literature.” State, Culture, and Society 1, no. 3 (Spring, 1985): 148–80. Karimi-Hakkak, Ahmad. Recasting Persian Poetry: Scenarios of Poetic Modernity in Iran. Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 1996. Karimi-Hakkak, Ahmad. “Revolutionary Posturing: Iranian Writers and the Iranian Revolution of 1979.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 23, no. 4 (November, 1991): 507–31. Karimi-Hakkak, Ahmad. “A Well Amid the Waste: An Introduction to the Poetry of Ahmad Shamlu.” World Literature Today 51, no. 2 (Spring, 1977): 201–6. Karimi-Hakkak, Ahmad and Kamran Talattof, eds. Essays on Nima Yushij: Animating Modernism in Persian Poetry. Leiden: Brill, 2004. Katouzian, Homa, ed. Sadeq Hedayat: His Work and Wondrous World. New York: Routledge, 2008. Katouzian, Homa. Sadeq Hedayat: The Life and Legend of an Iranian Writer. London: I.B. Tauris, 1991. Keshavarz, Fatemeh. Recite in the Name of the Red Rose: Poetic Sacred Making in Twentieth-Century Iran. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2006. Khorrami, Mohammad Mehdi. Literary Subterfuge and Contemporary Persian Fiction: Who Writes Iran? New York: Routledge, 2014. Khosronejad, Pedram, ed. Iranian Sacred Defence Cinema: Religion, Martyrdom, and National Identity. Canon Pyon, UK: Sean Kingston, 2012. Kolodny, Annette. In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. Kubíčková, Věra. “Persian Literature of the 20th Century.” In History of Iranian Literature, edited by Jan Rypka, 353–418. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1968. Lee, Leo Ou-Fan. “Literary Trends: The Quest for Modernity, 1895–1927.” In An Intellectual History of Modern China, edited by Merle Goldman and Leo Ou-Fan Lee, 142– 95. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

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Matin-Asgari, Afshin. “The Intellectual Best-Sellers of Post-Revolutionary Iran: On Backwardness, Elite-Killing, and Western Rationality.” Iranian Studies 37, no. 1 (March, 2004): 73–88. Milani, Farzaneh. “Love and Sexuality in the Poetry of Forough Farrokhzad: A Reconsideration.” Iranian Studies 15, no. 1–4 (1982): 117–28. Miller Mostaghel, Deborah. “The Second Sadeq: The Short Stories of Iranian Writer Sadeq Chubak.” World Literature Today 53, no. 2 (Spring, 1979): 227–31. Mohandessi, Manoutchehr. “Hedayat and Rilke.” Comparative Literature 23, no. 3 (Summer, 1971): 209–16. Nandy, Ashish. The Intimate Enemy: The Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Navabpour, Reza. “The ‘Writer’ and the ‘People’: Jamālzādah’s Yekī Būd Yekī Nabūd: A Recast.” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 23, no. 1 (May, 1996): 69–75. Niranjana, Tejaswini. Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Niranjana, Tejaswini. “Translation, Colonialism and the Rise of English.” Economic and Political Weekly 25, no. 15 (April, 1990): 773–9. Rafael, Vincente L. Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993. Rahimieh, Nasrin. “Die Verwandlung Deterritorialized: Hedayat’s Appropriation of Kafka.” Comparative Literature Studies 31, no. 3 (1994): 251–69. Rahimieh, Nasrin. “Magical Realism in Moniru Ravanipur’s Ahl-e gharq.” Iranian Studies 23, no. 1–4 (1990): 61–75. Rahimieh, Nasrin. “A Systematic Approach to Modern Persian Prose.” World Literature Today 63, no. 1 (1989): 15–9. Rastegar, Kamran. Literary Modernity between the Middle East and Europe: Textual Transactions in Nineteenth-Century Arabic, English, and Persian Literatures. New York: Routledge, 2007. Rypka, Jan, ed. History of Iranian Literature. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1968. Rypka, Jan. “History of Persian Literature up to the Beginning of the 20th Century.” In History of Iranian Literature, edited by Jan Rypka. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1968. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1994. Sandler, Rivanne. “Simin Dānešvar’s ‘Model’: A Literary Sign of Modernity.” Oriente Moderno (Nuova serie) 22, no. 1 (2003): 197–218. Shahbazi, Mohammad Reza, Saeed Yazdani, Somayeh Avarand, and Maryam Jamali. “An Anthropological Study of the Dramatic Elements of the Book of Arda Viraf in Iran.” Anthropologist 28, no. 3 (2015): 492–502. Soroudi, Sorour. “Poet and Revolution: The Impact of Iran’s Constitutional Revolution on the Social and Literary Outlook of the Poets of the Time: Part I.” Iranian Studies 12, no. 1–2 (Winter–Spring, 1979): 3–41. Talattof, Kamran. “Breaking Taboos in Iranian Women’s Literature.” World Literature Today 78, no. 3–4 (December, 2004): 43–6. Talattof, Kamran. “Iranian Women’s Literature: From Pre-Revolutionary Social Discourse to Post-Revolutionary Feminism.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 29, no. 4 (November, 1997): 531–58. Talattof, Kamran. “‘I Will Rebuild You, Oh My Homeland’: Simin Behbahani’s Work and Sociopolitical Discourse.” Iranian Studies 41, no. 1 (February, 2008): 19–35. Talattof, Kamran. Politics of Writing in Iran: A History of Modern Persian Literature. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2001.

Introduction 21 Talattof, Kamran. “Postrevolutionary Persian Literature: Creativity and Resistance.” Radical History Review 2009, no. 105 (Fall, 2009): 145–50. Tikku, Girdhari. “Furūgh-i Farrukhzād: A New Direction in Persian Poetry.” Studia Islamica 26 (1967): 149–73. Tourage, Mahdi. “Text and the Body in a Poem by Simin Behbahani.” Iranian Studies 41, no. 1 (February, 2008): 61–74. Valadbeigi, Rahmatollah and Tahereh Babakhani. “Connection between Epic and Play in Shahnameh: Comparative Study of Cognitive Drama Features in Two Stories of ‘Rostam and Sohrab’ and ‘Rostam and Esfandiar’.” Journal of Sociological Research 5, no. 2 (2014): 7–18. Whitmarsh, Tim. Greek Literature and the Roman Empire: The Politics of Imitation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Zarei, Ruhullah. “Axes of Evil Live Evermore: Brother Poe in Iran.” The Edgar Allan Poe Review 4, no. 2 (Fall, 2003): 14–21. Zubizarreta, John. “The Woman Who Sings No, No, No: Love, Freedom, and Rebellion in the Poetry of Forugh Farrokhzad.” World Literature Today 66, no. 3 (Summer, 1992): 421–6.

Part 1

2

Rival texts Modern Persian prose fiction and the myth of the founding father Hamid Rezaei Yazdi

I propose a new paradigm for historicizing literary modernity in Iran, one that incorporates the figure of Muhammad ‘Ali Jamālzādah (1892–1997/1270–1376)1 for quite different reasons than those cited for a founding father in conventional scholarship on the subject. In order to understand Iranian literary modernity in its historical context, I contend that prevalent analytical paradigms such as translation, imitation and influence (founded on a priori assumptions about the opposition of “traditional” and “modern”) must be supplanted by one that heeds the parallel, and simultaneous, coexistence of Iranian and Islamic literary traditions alongside transnational trends – a synthesis that Jamālzādah epitomizes in his work. Premised on a temporally, and often spatially, linear conception of the modern-ashistorical-epoch, the grand narrative that postulates modern non-European literature as an imitated byproduct of the Western master template has effectively silenced an important feature of Iranian literary modernity: the dialogical2 synthesis of indigenous and global literary trends, resulting in an improvisational refashioning of novel experiences in dialogue with established ones.3 I am specifically referring to historically contingent circumstances that led to the re-employment of the centuries-old genre of munāzirah (debate) as a means for the engagement of rival discourses over the question of Iran’s modernization. What we term modern Iranian prose fiction emerged out of this ongoing debate. To this day, however, the ahistorical and ideologically laden employment of the term modern has restricted the field to an exclusivist account that has seriously impeded a historical understanding of literary modernity. Perpetuated through its own self-affirming canons, founding fathers and stellar figures, this account has bestowed upon Jamālzādah the status of a pioneer, the harbinger of European-style prose fiction in Iran.

The making of a founding father Says Jamālzādah: If we provide a comprehensive list of the novels and stories written and published in our country within the last twenty or thirty years, we will see that at least ninety percent of what has been written belongs to the same category of subjects and themes propounded in [my] stories.4

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This declaration conveniently echoes the now standardized verdict conferring upon his person the status of a founding father. Both in conventional scholarship on the topic and within the broader cultural discourse in contemporary Iran, it is universally acknowledged that modern prose fiction entered Iran with Jamālzādah, who first successfully broke free from the turgid style of traditional Persian prose and painstakingly established the template for modern, European-style prose fiction in his famous “manifesto” which appeared as the prologue to his first short story collection, Yakī Būd u Yakī Nabūd (Once upon a Time), published in 1921/1300. This narrative has contributed to an ideological hermeneutics that takes the category modern as an established and completed spatio-temporal telos originated in Enlightenment Europe before applying its supposed essential properties to gauge the modern-ness of prose literature produced in Iran from the late nineteenth century onward. Such readings have led to the now-indoctrinated periodization of modern Iranian prose fiction to the figure of Muhammad ‘Ali Jamālzādah.5 That this periodization follows certain visions of what constitutes “modern” literature warrants a detailed discussion in its own right.6 For the purposes of this study, it suffices to state that standard accounts of the history of modern prose literature in Iran invariably bestow the status of an initiator, a founding father, upon Jamālzādah following the publication of his first short story collection Once upon a Time in 1921, a feat, the narrative continues, that Jamālzādah could never again achieve despite penning several other short story collections and novels during his long writing career.7 The explanation offered for this declaration is that Jamālzādah was the first Iranian author who successfully and systematically liberated Persian prose from the pompous prose style as well as the elitist and esoteric subject matter of traditional Persian scribes, dealt with ordinary masses and their concerns in his writings, and advocated the use of plain language in fiction (these are said to be the elements of “social realism”). That Jamālzādah himself addressed these same issues in his famous prologue to Once upon a Time has enabled literary historians to make the convenient, if less demonstrable, claim that Jamālzādah is the founder of a new literary school, the parameters of which he laid out in his historic prologue: the “‘manifesto’ of the new literary school.”8 The seal of convenience is then placed upon the narrative with the pronouncement that these elements of “social realism” had already been laid out, defined and perfected in modern European literature which served as a model for the Iranian founding father. Possibly the earliest declaration of this nature belongs to Russian scholar Konstantin Ivanovich Chaikin.9 Pronounced some six years after the publication of Jamālzādah’s collection, Chaikin’s Orientalist assessment seems to have set the critical standards for reading modern Iranian prose literature ever since. This account was officially sanctioned, in 1946/1325, at the First Iranian Writers’ Congress in Tehran. There, the prominent scholar and poet Parvīz Nātil Khānlarī further cemented this pronouncement which would serve as the analytical guide for generations of literary historians: “The short story, or novella as the French describe it, came to Iran much later than the novel because translations of the European prototypes of the genre had also been published [in Iran] much later. . . .

Rival texts 27 The torch-bearer of novella writing in Persian is Muhammad ‘Ali Jamālzādah who published Once upon a Time in 1339 HQ [1921] in Berlin.”10 Subsequent to these early rulings, Iranian and non-Iranian scholars and literary historians alike have followed suit, almost without exception, in setting the clock for the emergence of “modern” prose fiction in Iran to 1921 and to the first appearance of Once upon a Time in print.11 Others have added slight nuances to this standard account by ascribing the emergence of European-style realism in Persian fiction to a few decades earlier, before Jamālzādah reportedly perfected it. In this minor variation on the standard narrative, some earlier authors are credited with having introduced elements of European “realism” – defined as attention to detail and to common people’s lives in plain language – to Persian letters in the form of travelogues, newspaper columns, or quasi-novels and short stories: ‘Abdul Rahīm Talibov (1834–1911/1213–1290) in Masālik al-Muhsinīn (The Ways of the Charitable); Zayn ul-Ābidīn Marāghahī (1840–1910/1255–1328 HQ) in Sīyāhat Nāmah-yi Ibrahīm Beig (Travelogue of Ibrahim Beig); ‘Ali Akbar Dihkhudā (1879–1956/1257–1334) in his famous columns “Charand u Parand” (Fiddle-Faddle), serialized in the weekly Sūr-i Isrāfīl (Seraphim’s Trumpet, first published January 1899/Dey 1277); and Hassan Muqaddam (1898–1925/1277–1304) in some of his short stories. However, it is always Jamālzādah who perfected European realism and the technique of writing in plain language until, that is, Sādiq Hidāyat (1903–1951/1281–1330) – Jamālzādah’s younger and more controversial contemporary – “breathed new life into the corpus of Iranian literary fiction.”12 These pronouncements are premised on a number of assumptions: that prose fiction we posthumously call the novel or the short story were invented in Europe as such; that, therefore, the European novel or novella constitutes the authentic prototype against which non-European byproducts can, and indeed must, be measured for authenticity; that these forms of prose fiction were “introduced” in the non-Europe through translation; that pioneering authors in these regions imitated these novel forms, often initially unsuccessfully;13 that literary modernity in the non-European world always starts with some sort of rupture, a decisive break from backward indigenous “tradition” (itself an invented category); and that, finally, periodization of the “modern” literature in question begins with this decisive break. It follows that “Iranian short story . . . owes much of its evolution to Western short stories and novels.” And if Jamālzādah is credited with founding modern prose fiction in Iran, it is because he “was raised with the European tradition. He completed his education in a French college in Beirut and thereafter in France and Switzerland and found his growth within Western literature.”14 Jamālzādah, himself, begged to differ throughout his long life. Not that authorial intent or the author’s views constitute an entirely legitimate method to distill meaning from her/his work. Despite post-structuralist poetics announcing the death of the author, however, issues such as human agency, authorship, legacy, censorship, copyright, advertising, sales, marketing and readership continue to be anchored to an individual author.15 Additionally, there is reason to believe that the author’s identification of her/his own work may point us toward certain discursive patterns

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that can help situate a work historically, especially when placed in the context of a work’s reception, which in the case of Jamālzādah was one of mixed reaction. Once upon a Time was received with enthusiasm among certain members of the literati but met with a drastically different reception at home when copies of the first edition were burned in public and the author was pronounced an apostate.16 Jamālzādah’s persistent rejection of placing his own work (and in fact the works of other Iranian authors) within the imitation-influence paradigm needs to be seen in this context. The sheer force of this rejection by Jamālzādah – along with the corresponding neglect of the same by literary historians and critics – discloses the extent to which the imitation-influence paradigm has dictated its own vision on histories of modern literature in Iran. Throughout his life Jamālzādah rejected the claim that modern Iranian literature, including his own work, is a product of imitating European authors. In fact, time and again he advocated a revival of Iranian literary heritage rather than imitating foreign authors. Some twelve years after the publication of Once upon a Time, for example, Jamālzādah defended the use of traditional verbal devices, rhetoric and syntax in an article entitled “Mujdah-yi Rastākhīz-i Adabī” (Annunciation of Literary Resurrection), arguing that this old style which has been common in Persian prose in recent centuries and will perhaps be admired someday due to its novelty . . . was earlier deprived of its liveliness owing to being used excessively and redundantly . . . and becoming similar to pre-chewed food and tasteless, lifeless cud. . . . It must not be imagined that the writer of these lines, simply because he introduced a ‘literary revolution’ in his language, believes that we must immediately take an axe and uproot anything that has been common in Persian literature thus far and has given it its fame, charm and eloquence. Never. For such an assumption is utterly invalid and erroneous . . . today we can draw on these same techniques and verbal devices to embellish the bride of Persian prose such that it would not be possible to do in many other languages.17 What was it that prompted Jamālzādah, the “founding father” of European-style novellas, to strongly and repeatedly denounce imitation of European models among Iranian authors while upholding, indeed revering, all that would be considered “traditional” in Persian literature?18 This seemingly contradictory behaviour has either been entirely overlooked, or it has prompted, among the few who have noted it, the (sometimes confounded) pronouncement as to the existence of parallel elements in Jamālzādah’s oeuvre.19 The existence of parallel elements had initially been registered by the first commentator of Jamālzādah’s works, the erudite and fiercely critical Muhammad Qazvīnī (1874–1949/1256–1328). Speaking about Jamālzādah’s first two publications, Qazvīnī’s remarks underlined a mixed reaction to the European influence: His Tārīkh-i Ravābit-i Rūs va Iran [History of Russo-Iranian Relations] is an example of the breadth of his knowledge and his critical and inquisitive vigour

Rival texts 29 in European fashion, while his Once upon a Time is a template for his delightful, effortless and simple style which is devoid of foreign elements . . . it is only this style which must be the blueprint and guide for any modern Iranian writer who cares to write in the ancestral language but who does not want, as is customary among some writers in the modern period, to beg for words, sentences or modes of expression from the Europeans.20 The views of Qazvīnī – the man who, according to Jamālzādah, made him the writer he became – about Once upon a Time as the epitome of a Persian bereft of European influence predate assertions that would, decades later, proclaim the same work as exactly the opposite. However, while Qazvīnī praised the absence of European influence in Once upon a Time, he equally commended Jamālzādah’s “European” vigour in his research-based, non-fiction work History of RussoIranian Relations. Qazvīnī’s mixed feeling toward European influences in contemporary Persian was shared among most members of the Iranian expatriates in Berlin. This anxiety of influence revolved around the fear that the existence and increasing entry of “foreign” words into Persian was threatening to drive the millennia-old mother tongue to extinction. This often meant not only the contemporary surge in European loan words (particularly French, English and Russian) but also the overuse of existing Arabic and Turkish terms. A relatively recent development, this foreign assault on the very core of Iranian identity had reportedly started with the unprecedented contact with the outside world in the form of colonial powers since at least the middle of the nineteenth century and was paralleled by, even worse than, the humiliating military defeats and loss of Persianate territory to the Russians in recent decades. Two main social strata were blamed for facilitating and intensifying this onslaught: the ‘ulama (traditional clerical class) and the Europeanized dandies (alternatively, Farangī or Farangī Ma‘āb21), an emergent class of individuals who had either travelled or studied in Europe – incidentally, caricatures of these same classes feature as two of the main characters in Jamālzādah’s first-ever published short story “Persian Is Sugar.” The consequence was deemed to be an Iranian identity who, cut off from his millennial national roots, was neither fully Iranian nor quite European (or Arab or Turkish), conversant in a strange Persian infused with unintelligible and forced foreign constructions: a camel-cow-cheetah, or as the saying goes in Persian, a shutur-gāv-palang.

Shutur-gāv-palang: a hybrid creature In a dialogue written by an anonymous author sometime in the final decades of the nineteenth century, titled The Cleric and the Clowns (shaykh u shūkh),22 the cleric, described as having an “average height, venerated beard, a radiant forehead, a shabby but clean garb, an unpretentious turban, with an air of seriousness and respect” takes on the clownish Europeanized students who are described in fragments throughout the text. Initially, they are referred to as “apes” (būzīnah), in sarcastic reference to their apish imitation of foreigners. Fragmented descriptions

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of the students are also scattered throughout the text with portrayals such as these: delicate voice (bārīk kardan-i sidā), effeminate (zan sifatān), delicate body (badan-i nāzuk), done up locks (zulf-i makush), wearing gold-rimmed hats and scarves, buttocks-revealing pants (shalvār-i kūn namā) and testicle-revealing frocks (sardārī-yi khāyah namā), delicate hands and made up face and styled hair (dasthā-yi latīf va sūrat-i ārāstah va mūhā-yi pīrāstah). What stands out in these fragmentary descriptions is the students’ hybrid and split identities: at once human and ape, male and female, Muslim and non-Muslim, Iranian and non-Iranian (indeed, the text projects the students at times as Iranian and at others as foreign subjects, occasionally even on the same page), the Shūkh becomes the anthropomorphized locus of competing identities. In the words of one of the students, contemporary Iranians “are confused when it comes to clothing. Every hour they metamorphose into a new shape. Some have become living examples of ushtur-gāv-palang.”23 It was the same types that Qazvīnī condoned and held responsible for destroying what remnants of the Iranian identity had survived in the form of the Persian language. In a letter to Jamālzādah dated 28 December 1922 (6 Dey 1301), Qazvīnī commended him for his contribution to the homeland’s literature and to saving the Persian language from “these vacuous ushtur-gāv-palang youth who are neither literate in Arabic, nor in European [languages] nor in Persian [but who] proceed to butcher the Persian language on a whim until they strike the final blow to it.”24 This anxiety over a disintegrating, interbred Iranian identity appeared until at least the second part of the twentieth century. In The Gigolos and Gigolettes of Tehran, author and social researcher Hidāyatullāh Hakīmullāhī described the capital, Tehran, as a decadent and corrupt city where the inhabitants follow the latest Parisian and Hollywood trends and yet live in the world’s dirtiest and messiest capital city where anything goes, a “shutur-gāv-palang environment.”25 Hakīmullāhī penned several other novel-reports that exposed the underbelly of the city’s aggressive Westernization,26 but what his apprehension revolved around was a split identity, divorced from its own roots but not quite at home in a rapidly Westernizing society. Shutur-gāv-palang, a literal reference to an animal in classical parlance, had, in its modern usage, transformed into a metaphorical creature signifying the existence of parallel identities.27 The munāzirah (debate) was the narrative framework that best accommodated this fragmented identity. This fragmentation does not necessarily represent the sometimes romanticized fallen psychic state of the modern self (imagined as whole and stable before the fall). It has to do, rather, with the addition of competing layers of identity onto an Iranian selfhood whose millenarian stability is perceived to be in danger. Itself transformed from its classical function in the form of a dialogue between the mentor and the disciple, the wise and the haughty, the munāzirah was increasingly employed as the narrative of choice for fielding the emerging, and contending, aspects of Iranian identity in a rapidly transforming world. The classical genre had involved the polemics exchanged between two established figures representing time-honoured values or vices.28 This exchange was often in verse and for didactic purposes in literary or philosophical expositions or in prose in

Rival texts 31 religious texts, presented in the form of tawzīh al-masā‘il (exposition of religious matters). While the munāzirah continued to be employed in these capacities well into the twentieth century,29 it increasingly began to be the narrative means through which competing discourses engaged in debate over questions ranging from modern Iranian identity to contemporary sociopolitical issues.30 Thus, the main feature of the munāzirah is its dialogical orientation. It forms the frame narrative through which the global and the local, the status quo and the novel, the religious and the secular, the rational and the inspirational coexist, intersect, repel, attract, overlap and, most importantly, inform each other.

Munāzirah: a discursive formation The participation of rival discourses and styles in the munāzirah is so conspicuous that at times the munāzirah itself becomes unrecognizable as such. Beyond formally recognizable generic features (those of a continuous dialogue between two or more contenders) in some texts, the munāzirah increasingly became a compendium of competing genres. The intertextual relation among various texts (along with their attendant ideologies) which intersect within the frame narrative of the munāzirah thus turns it into a discursive formation in the Foucauldian sense. These embedded texts are either physically present in the form of parallel texts or, as we will see later, they are summoned to partake in the dialogue of genres.31 In Rafīq u Vazīr (The Friend32 and the Minister, ca. 1860/1239) written by Malkum Khan (1833–1908/1212–1287), for example, the text of the munāzirah provides the narrative frame for Malkum’s earlier piece kitābchah-i ghaybī (The Unseen Booklet) on which it is based and of which it becomes an extension.33 In the opening line of Rafīq u Vazīr, the author himself calls the piece a “mukālimah”34 or conversation and it is indeed into this conversation that the different texts enter, for the kitābchah-i ghaybī is itself written in the form of direct address and overlaid with the texts of a letter and of a proposed constitution. These texts, written at different times, concerning different issues and belonging to different genres, converge in the frame narrative and are couched within the rival ideologies of the contenders, all of which find simultaneity in the present-ness of the munāzirah. It is no wonder, then, that the munāzirah, the narrative of unceasing debate, repeatedly ends, here and elsewhere, without any resolution. Like the present which it narrates, the munāzirah is unfinished, inconclusive and in the making. These features reemerge in Tafsīl-i Guftigū-yi yak Mīrzā-yi ‘Ālim bā yak ‘Avām-i Mustahzar (A Detailed Account of the Conversation between a Learned Bureaucrat and an Informed Commoner). This munāzirah was written by an anonymous author circa 1860s/1239s35 addressing the many ills and deficiencies paralyzing the country. The table of contents lists thirty-one scenes (majlis) but is abandoned shortly after the opening of the fourth scene, a practice common in Constitutional era writings,36 a narrative acting out of the lack of a consensus, the persistence of the debate. In discussing the importance of having a well-trained and well-fed army, for example, the Commoner invokes the chapter “thaghūr” from Sahīifah-i Sajjādīyyah

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(The Book of Sajjād) in which the wellbeing of border troops is sought and recommended through the medium of supplication.37 The book, says the Commoner, is also to be found in a London library. He further asserts that the Europeans have adopted such wisdom from Islamic literature and have thus been able to order their affairs excellently. Upholding the authority of The Book of Sajjād, a text of tradition, the Commoner nevertheless invokes the prestige of the London library to legitimize his claim. The library as a space in the present for the accumulation of past knowledge and for the collection of former texts, languages, stories and histories provides an apt metaphor for the frame narrative of the munāzirah as a collection of texts, genres, styles and ideologies: the Sahīifah, Hafiz and Sa’di, written in liturgical style, in verse, or in prose (respectively) appear in Arabic, Persian, English and Russian in this munāzirah.38 A similar strategy is at work through continual references made by the Commoner to the histories of Russia’s Peter the Great and France’s Napoleon, both of whom are valorized as embodiments of wise, patriotic and able emperors and also to Bismarck as the embodiment of a wise statesman.39 These histories are frequently presented in the form of hikāyat (folktale).40 When the Bureaucrat objects to the teaching of French on grounds of such practice making pupils irreligious, the Commoner relates the learning of language to the knowledge of history. He then contributes, through a short hikāyat, the advances of the reign of Peter the Great to his promotion of education and languages (including Turkish, Arabic, Persian) and publications, citing Voltaire’s The History of Peter the Great, which is later compared to Lisān al-Mulk’s Nāsikh al-Tavārīkh41 which, itself being based on ‘Abdul Razzāq Beyk’s History,42 fades in comparison.43 Such an interwoven network of intertexts points to the fielding of competing discourses from different epochs, disparate genres, various styles and diverse ideologies vying for expression. The munāzirah as such is a palimpsest where texts – a political treatise, a historical sketch, a dramatic piece and a story contained in a dialogized munāzirah – are cited, recited and deployed as commensurate narratives. Yet another instance of intertextual and interdiscursive rivalry is presented in Yak Kalimah (One Word, 1874/1291 HQ). Authored by Mirza Yûsif Khan Mustashār al-Dawlah Tabrīzī (1823–1895/1239–1313 HQ),44 Yak Kalimah is a dialogized treatise written in the form of an imaginary conversation among three characters: the narrator who self-identifies as the author himself (Mustashar alDowlah), the Hātaf-i Ghaybī (Unseen Angel)45 and the Friend. Through a gradual merging of these three characters, the secret to the progress of Europe is summarized in “one word” (yak kalimah): “the book of law.” This multi-voiced character then takes on the task of elaborating the nineteen Codes of French law, equating each and every section of the French Codes with Quranic verses and Islamic traditions (hadiths). Besides the physical presence of three parallel texts here, the three characters, as well, are narratively synonymous as internal focalizers. These characters serve the same function: to warn Muslims of their alleged backwardness, to introduce them to the concept of law, and to prove that French constitutional laws are in strict accordance with Islamic laws and can therefore be adopted and implemented wholesale by Muslims. The fact that the Friend refers

Rival texts 33 to the prophet of Islam as “your prophet” – as if he, the Friend, were not of the same ethnicity or religious orientation as the main author-narrator – reveals a simultaneous foreignness in the narrator’s indigenous speech. This is further reinforced through the image of the Hātaf-i Ghaybī, an Islamic angelic figure, rising from the west and facing the lands of Islam rather than rising from within it. This multi-voiced narrator, then, is a discursive act anthropomorphizing the coexistence of overlapping identities and rival discourses, namely, the texts of the French Codes and of the Islamic scriptures. Not surprisingly, neither one of the structurally distinct but narratively commensurate characters is in disagreement about the French Codes being consistent with Islamic teachings or about what is to be done to save Iran from its current state. In short, the structure of Yak Kalimah sets up a narrative framework in which one semantic unit (author-angel-narrator-Friend) personifies the dialogic interaction of voices and ideologies in contemplating the reasons for Iran’s miserable state and convincing the addressee(s) that the solution is in one word: the book of law. This narrative feature turns what is compositionally written in the form of a monologic treatise into a dialogic interaction. We now turn to an untitled piece written in 1871/1205 by an anonymous author.46 It is a collection of three separate dialogized stories revolving around the same theme: the premiership of Mirza Husayn Khan Mushīr al-Dowlah (1827–1881/1206– 1260) during the reign of the Qajar monarch Nāser al-Dīn Shah (r. 1848–1896/1227– 1275). In the first part, written as a quasi-stage paly, a conversation takes place between the prime minister, Mushīr al-Dowlah, and his deputy, a Mirza ‘Abbās Qulī. In the conversation, the prime minister lays out the details of his plan to eliminate all competition at the court and among the clergy and governors and to keep the Shah’s mind occupied with irrelevant issues as he, the prime minister, will secure possessions and positions for himself. In the second part, also written as a stage play in four acts, the same criticism towards the prime minister and his corrupt policies is staged in the form of a popular court play known as baqqāl bāzī,47 a form of commedia dell’arte featuring a grocer often played by the famous court jester Karīm Shīrahī.48 In the third part, the same attack on the prime minister and his policies is revisited, this time in the form of a quasi-interview-dialogue. The network of intertexts in this collection reproduces the same issues in various ways. In it, the same topic is focalized from four different perspectives: once through the eyes of the corrupt minister and his deputy, another time through the eyes of the courtiers, witnesses to the royal stage play which also acts out the same issue, and finally through the dialogue between two contenders. Each text mirrors the other, effectively making the overall text the product of the conversation of texts and styles in which what is signified is not presented as a final product but constantly recycled in a process of ongoing production. Meaning is produced precisely through the interplay between texts rather than as a fixed and ultimate point of reference.49 The production of meaning in this munāzirah therefore is a contested process in which we witness the juxtaposition of several genres (direct address, dialogue, drama, munāzirah), languages (Persian, Turkish, Arabic, French), styles (formal language, colloquial speech, obscenities, poetic language) and ideologies.

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Closer in time to the establishment of a nascent parliament in Iran, Mukālimah-i Sayyāh-i Īrānī bā Shakhs-i Hindī (The Dialogue between an Iranian Traveler and an Indian Person) is one of the well-known and influential munāzirahs of the preconstitutional era.50 It is a conversation between an Iranian traveller who meets an Indian person in that country and the two engage in a lengthy dialogue about a myriad of issues revolving around the absence of law and order in Iran. In the prologue to this work, the author proposes that now that in these modern times most of the populations of the world have become literate, the best way to educate them is through “treatises . . . [in which] the means of reform and such are expressed in the best way through the use of sweet words, palatable phrases and exhilarating speeches by utilizing popular sayings and famous tales.” The Europeans have done this through “novels” (rumān u qisas), but “records of the habits and manners of the Europeans cannot be beneficial to the Asian.” A similar logic applies to the “translation” (tarjumah) of “others’ tales and stories” whose only utility is “to waste time and to ruin [national] habits,” which is why Iranian intellectuals must “adapt” (ta’līf) only certain foreign works “by observing national taste and indigenous morality.” That is why this treatise known as Mukālimah-i Sayyāh-i Īrānī bā Shakhs-i Hindī encompasses all the points and affairs which the learned men of Europe consider in writing novels: shortcomings are presented through sweet words and palatable phrases, their improved alternatives are shown through simple terms, and displays the ways to reform them [the shortcomings] in a simple language.51 In a separate section entitled “Note” (tabsirah), the author mentions that the “articles of this treatise were serialized in one of the [foreign] newspapers in the style of a novel, and one of the Persian newspapers, too, translated excerpts from it.”52 This introduction succinctly puts into words the rivalry among several texts for expression: the traditional tale (hikāyat), proverbs, translation, the newspaper article, English language, Persian language, the novel and the treatise (risālah). Other texts not mentioned in the prologue but nevertheless partaking in the rivalry are the Quran, prophetic traditions (hadiths), historical accounts, texts of legal codes whether cited implicitly or explicitly (for example, the Sharia law, the Ottoman law, Russian law, and French and British laws), popular adages, colloquial expressions, scribal jargon, the language of the educated and the language of the commoner, journalistic texts, travelogues and poetry. This anthology of intertexts unleashes mazelike networks of narratives, accompanied by their attendant discourses and ideologies, that articulate the language of the munāzirah: ambivalent, inconclusive, polyphonic dialects that cite, recite, deflect and appropriate each other. The opening line of the dramatic prose dialogue which purports to be written “in the style of a novel” is in verse. It reads: “Grievance garbed as tale/T’s how thou shalt prevail.”53 The word used for “tale” in this line is “hikāyat.” At the very outset, then, four genres compete for relating the story that is to follow: dramatic dialogue, the novel, the traditional hikāyat, and poetry. And indeed all four genres

Rival texts 35 occupy space within the narrative of the munāzirah. Nor is this a simple word game, for each genre represents ideologies. Lines of verse, for example, are scattered throughout the narrative. What is important is the dual purpose that verse serves in the narrative. At times considered as the source of tradition’s moral degeneration because of its empty witticism and its panegyric tendencies, at others cited as the authority on the highest moral values, poetry functions both as signifier and signified, simultaneously representing and represented. At the outset of Scene Two, for instance, the Iranian traveller calls on the Indian person to deliver his promise of explicating the taxation system in India. The Iranian’s request is verbalized through a line of verse (a traditional practice among literati) which translates roughly as “the speech of the beloved is sweeter than sugar, O darling.” The Indian person takes the poetic praise as a sexually suggestive comment, protesting that such perversion does not befit their relationship, which misconception the Iranian corrects by saying that the misunderstanding is a result of the poor educational system in India, finishing with another maxim, in verse, from the famed poet Sa’dī: “Do not speak without reflection.”54 The Indian person then attributes this misunderstanding to “the divans of Iranian poets which, being a reflection of the Iranian imagination, are all filled with superstition of this sort.”55 Ironically, however, the Indian person concludes his own speech about the adverse effects of poetry “on public morality” by citing a line of verse as the authority. This early interaction sets the tone in the rest of the munāzirah. At once a relic of a superstitious past and an authority for the judgement of the present, poetry simultaneously embodies several “languages”: superstition, empty praise, witticism and moral authority on matters both anterior and posterior. Embedded within the physicality of the prose text of the munāzirah, poetry actualizes the presence of the language of tradition in unison, but also in collision, with the language of the present. And indeed, numerous citations of lines of poetry throughout the munāzirah play the dual role of an outdated mode of thought or the seal of approval on a notable statement. It is in its dual role that the Iranian traveller can cite poetry to justify the despotic indulgence of police agents in doling out arbitrary punishments while the Indian person can use it to incite the Iranian rulers to check the growing influence of Farangīs in the country.56 The Iranian, the voice of tradition and of the sharia, denounces the use of poetry (sometimes citing poetry as authority), dismisses religiously inspired augury, condemns the use of history in almanacks and criticizes Iranian newspapers as extensions of such narratives while at the same time narrativizing in an Iranian newspaper which purports to be a translation of a foreign newspaper. Such multilayered and conflicting confluence of impulses finds simultaneous narrative expression through the munāzirah. Furthermore, concurrently with these texts and genres, their temporal orientations enter the dialogue as well. Although texts of the past are denigrated and rendered inferior for not being present-oriented, these texts nevertheless make their way into and occupy space side by side the texts of the present and in the present text of the munāzirah. They are also invoked alternatively as futural texts: the purported compatibility of sharia law with Western principles, poetry as moral authority on novel concepts.

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The same spatial and temporal simultaneity characterizes the closing pages of this munāzirah where the prologue to a future “comprehensive law” is projected in text, a text, nevertheless, composed of the dialogue of intertexts and of temporalities. It is a text that is addressed to the “sharia religionists” (mutasharri‘īn) and to “the ignorant” (juhhāl) and to “the statesmen” (dawlatīyān) and to “the commoners” (‘avām), a fact that is also linguistically acted out in the text as the language constantly shifts among dialects, styles, languages – Persian, Arabic, Hindi, English – colloquial expressions, proverbs, bureaucratic language, Quranic verses and prophetic traditions, and even images;57 a text that calls forth the texts of Sa’dī, of the Ottoman and Russian constitutions, of the monarchical constitutions of England, Germany and Japan and of the Sharia law;58 a text that evokes the just Anūshīrvān59 and Prince Bismarck as textual contemporaries; a prose text, finally, that ends, as it had started, in a line of verse and that refers to itself as an intertext: “Of a thousand finished tales a single unfinished point/I drew; seek in this point finished tales.”60 And indeed the text of the munāzirah itself is left incomplete, for the author had projected in the prologue that “this treatise has been composed on ten topics and in five volumes, of which this is the first.”61 There of course never followed any other volumes. The practice of invoking and then contesting the invoked text is not limited to the narratives of tradition (poetry, religious texts and so on). European travelogues are time and again summoned, at times as textual authority, at others as narratives of prejudice. A certain Mr. Meilleur’s The History of the Nineteenth Century is invoked, for example, to remind us of the merits of Mirza Muhammad Taqī Khan Amīr Kabīr (1807–1852/1186–1230),62 placing him next to other greats such as Prince Bismarck, William Gladstone and Ottoman prime minister Midhat Pasha. John Malcolm’s 1815 History of Persia (Tārīkh-i Malkum), James Morier’s Haji Bābā of Isfahan (1824), Sīyāhat Nāmah-yi Lurd Milīyār (The Travelogue of Lord Millard, year unknown), Sīyāhat Nāmah-i Lurd Garzan (possibly George Curzon’s 1892 Persia and the Persian Question), Tārīkh-i Mūsīyu Mārtan (a certain Monsieur Martin’s History, possibly 1840) are all evoked to attest to the defects within the country, though this does not preclude the observation that these texts are nevertheless written in an “insulting and humiliating and ridiculing” manner.63 The contested nature of the cited narratives is reinforced when sometimes the same text is called forth once to be rejected as historically biased and again to be cited as historical evidence. This type of narrative contestation is not confined to travelogues. The very text of the Quran is subjected to the same textual scrutiny. In discussing the civil courts and their lack of respect for an alleged wrongdoer’s privacy, the Indian person cites the Quranic phrase “lā tajassasū”64 to prove, here as elsewhere, that the current practices in Iran are un-Islamic. When the Indian character asks about what will happen to a government agent who commits a crime in his private dwellings, the Iranian person cites the very same verse to defend the status quo.65 The same verse is cited by the Iranian once again to justify the lack of religious notaries’ knowledge or sufficient investigation before certifying a marriage or a divorce.66 No narrative is spared the intense process of scrutiny and contestation. In this way, the

Rival texts 37 network of intertexts does not merely involve the fielding of parallel narratives side by side; it also entails the temporal and ideological interaction among them. Another text written by Malkum Khan in 1905/1284 displays these features. Nidāy-i ‘Adālat (Proclamation of Justice) was presented to Muzaffar al-Din Shah on his third trip to Europe.67 The main issue presented in this piece is the necessity of establishing a parliamentary system as the only solution to the miseries of Iran. It starts with this sentence: “A petition which one of the ministers has presented to His Majesty at Paris in the month of August in the year 1905.”68 We are then led to the minister’s prologue in which he explains why he has undertaken to write this petition, the text of which he assumes that the king will, on the following day, recite verbatim to his company. What follows is the text of the petition (to be read out by the Shah) followed by the text of a short letter addressed by the authorminister to the king urging him to ensure the implementation of the constitution. The final text is the text of the Proclamation, which is the draft of a nascent constitution. There are three layers of narration here: the author who writes the piece, the minister who is reportedly the author of the text and the king who will read out the text. We are also presented with several genres: a petition, a letter, a draft constitution and a dialogue. Through the synthesis of voices, perspectives, readers, addressees and genres, this polyglot piece animates the intense negotiation of perspectives which contributed to the buildup of a reform movement in Iran. A notable characteristic of Malkum’s writings, the negotiation of perspectives is foregrounded to such a degree that a certain text, even if not formally written as such, still includes the dialogic features of the munāzirah. Here, for instance, even the text of the petition, which serves as the introduction to the text of the draft constitution, embeds an implied dialogue marked by the signposts “I say” (mīgūyam) and “you will respond” (khwāhīd guft) in which anticipation of opposition toward a future constitution is rehearsed in the form of questions and answers. The text of the constitution then sets out its terms under separate chapters and headings: security of life and of possession, a legislative assembly, an executive body, freedom of speech and of the pen, legal protection (‘adālat-i qānūnī), compulsory education69 and human rights.70 The dialogic question and answer form finds its way to the text of the constitution too. This is significant because a body of laws, which is supposedly a static and enclosed text, is nevertheless pried open to negotiation through this narrative act. The embedded questions and answers enact an internal debate in which not only the voices of the advocate and anticipated opponents but also those of the king and of the mediating discourse of Islam are included. Less than a year after the establishment of the first Majlis, the figures of Shaykh and Shūkh (Figure 2.1) reemerge in Muhammad Hasan Jābirī Ansārī’s Ganjīnah-i Ansār yā Rumān-i Shaykh u Shūkh (The Treasury of Helpers or Shaykh and Shūkh: A Novel). Published on 22 November 1907 (30 Aban 1286), this hybrid narrative was meant to be the first issue of a periodical by the same name (The Treasury of Ansār) which the author had meant to found. It also purports to be a “novel.” At the same time, its writing style is a blend of the verbose and rhythmic

Figure 2.1 The archetypal Shaykh and Shūkh, Hasan Ansārī, Nūshdarū. (Reproduced from Muhammad Hasan Jābirī Ansārī, Nūshdarū Tahzībul Akhlāq, Tārīkh-i Nisf-i Jahān va Hamah-yi Jahān [lithography] [Isfahan: Mirza ‘Ali, 1913/1292]. Courtesy of National Library and Archives of I.R. of Iran, MS. 1105093.)

Rival texts 39 language of traditional scribes, the convoluted parlance of traditional accountants, the heavily allusive, Arabicized and academic style of traditional seminary curricula, and the simplified, foreign accented expression of the modern journalist, reflecting the professional and educational background of the author.71 Ganjīnah-i Ansār yā Rumān-i Shaykh u Shūkh, then, is an anthology of parallel texts, genres and styles focalized through the figures of Shaykh and Shūkh and addressed to the nation. The subtitle of the magazine reads: “For the progress of the state and the nation and public welfare.”72 The rapid consumption of the published copies of this text is testimony to the enormous appeal of the munāzriah for the readership of the time.73 The sheer number of parallel texts in this relatively short narrative is so conspicuous that it becomes difficult, even visually, to excavate the issues being discussed. These are, nonetheless, centred around the urgent tasks that lie before the nascent parliament: establishment of a national bank (bānk-i millī-yi Iran), reform of the country’s finances through foreign loans, establishment of a legal apparatus, improvement of the military, and development of trade and industries, among others. The mere tabling of these issues, however, does not constitute the elemental objective of the narrative. The plurality of the means of signification is as important, if not more so, in order to reach the widest audience possible. This is why the fragmentary text(s) of this munāzirah employs a myriad of styles and genres. It starts, for instance, with supplication in the style of an oration given at the beginning of a religious sermon. This narrative is followed, immediately, by a line in verse, which is itself followed by an autobiographical paragraph in which the author mentions his purpose for writing. This section also ends with a line of verse. We are then introduced to the text of the munāzirah through a subtitle that reads: Hazl-i Vajd. Given the grammatical functions of the izāfah construct in Persian (used as an attributive/causative or a possessive), this title could be translated as “a jest on ecstasy” or, alternatively, as “ecstasy’s witticism.” This ambiguity and plurality of meaning is indeed reflected in the rest of the text(s) through the employment of various genres, styles and accents. The opening exchange between the two figures, for instance, contains three languages, all embedded in Persian. The Shaykh’s greeting is in Arabic,74 to which the Shūkh responds: “I beg your pardon, I don’t know Arabic but for your kindness I am thankful and grateful, thank you, merci merci.”75 The same message is thus repeated five times, twice in Persian, once in English and twice in French. The coexistence of languages is paralleled by the simultaneity of genres in the rest of the munāzriah. In addition to numerous intertextual allusions to the Quran, traditions, folk tales, proverbs (both in Persian and in Arabic), verse (both in Persian and in Arabic) and quotations from historical figures, the conversation of the Shaykh and the Shūkh is interrupted with another metanarrative subtitled “Fiddlefaddle” (shirr u virr)76 in which the editor (ra‘īs), director (mudīr), deputy (mu‘āvin) and secretary (daftar dār) of the hybrid newspaper-munāzirah-novel discuss the usefulness of the author’s intention to launch a magazine. We are then presented with another subtitle, “Issue two” (numrah-i duvvum), under which the author interjects to justify his intention, addressing the readers

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directly and citing both Persian and Arabic verses in support. Yet another subtitle follows, “Educating minds” (parvarish-i afkār), which mirrors the titles of editorial articles in contemporary newspapers and in which the author speaks about the necessity of promoting education and exchange of ideas as an important step in mending the country’s problems. This is followed by another article of similar orientation subtitled “Explanation of the freedom of speech and of pen” (tashrīh-i āzādī-yi zabān va qalam). The next subtitle (“The rest of the debate from issue one after the introductory comments”) takes us back to the rest of the conversation between the two figures.77 The conversation, and with it the munāzirah, ends when the Shaykh, the fictive character, closes by introducing issue three of the newspaper-munāzirah-novel entitled “Poetry Moetry” (shi’r u mi’r)78 which is entirely in verse and in which the author-poet-journalist laments the persisting problems in Iran and invites the nation and the state to unite through the Majlis.79 In the final section, titled “Novelty” (badī‘ah), the author’s family genealogy and his ancestral lineage as royal scribes are presented by citing verbatim the texts of two royal decrees, written in mediaeval style, in which the monarch bestows fief on the author’s ancestors. The very narrative structure of this munāzirah, then, acts out a mélange of rival identities and texts, all presented as a “novel.” Into this mix are thrown character types, consciousness of which was increasingly becoming associated with identity.80 While in the pre-constitutional munāzirahs the focus had been on adaptation of Western laws, in the constitutional era necessity of adaptation began to gradually equate anxiety of adoption. The phrase “peoples are blasted by their imitation” (khalq rā taqlīdishān bar bād dād) became a catch phrase in many narratives in this period and later.81 In this vein, both the Shaykh and the Shūkh are presented as figures of excess, while the authornarrator occupies an invisible intermediary space alternating his support or denouncement of either figure. Representing the social type “farangī ma‘āb” (European mannered), the Shūkh is lambasted for his excesses: The farangī ma‘ābs are a step ahead of them [Europeans themselves]. The farangī only rejects His Eminence the Prophet peace be upon him, [while] the farangī ma‘āb [rejects] from Adam to Muhammad, even the creator of the universe. The farangī drinks a little alcohol to help digest his food, [while] the farangī ma‘āb [drinks] a demijohn of araq and wine to the point of passing out in alleys or gutters. The farangī denies the sky [meaning the metaphysical world], [while] the farangī ma‘āb [denies] both the earth and the sky. The farangī urinates standingup, [while] the farangī ma‘āb [urinates] on the wall so that the splashes land on his clothes. The farangī declines to use naturally made henna, [while] the farangī ma‘āb [uses] alkaloid Sulphur until the hair goes gray. The farangī eats fresh porkmeat or cheese where he cannot find poultry or lamb, [while] the farangī ma‘āb, despite the availability and low price of poultry and fatty calf meat, buys the disgusting and rotten cheeses of Farangistān [i.e. Europe] at a hefty price and eats them, never mind other foul eatables such as lobster broth and frog stew and lizard kebobs and soups.82

Rival texts 41 The Shaykh’s appearance and mannerisms are equally described as excessive: “Behold this lice infested [person] who . . . pulls his cloak on his head lest stench and vapour escape his nostrils, what nonsense he speaks.”83 Reemerging in various forms in many texts in this period and beyond (including in Jamâlzâdah’s first short story), these two figures increasingly became the archetypes of excess but also embodiments of the split subject of Iranian modernity and the competing discourses its fragments represented. This in turn led to the anthropomorphization of the nation and generated discussions about healing the ailing national body.84 Another work by Muhammad Hasan Jābirī Ansāri, Nūshdārū, Tahzībul Akhlāq (The Remedy, Edification of Morals, 1913/1292), takes up this issue. Informed by a medicalized discourse, Nūshdārū is the dialogue between two characters called “Old Man” (pīr) and “Youth” (javān). In this munāzirah, the participants discuss the miserable state of the country with an emphasis on the corruption and inefficiency of the government as well as the decadence rampant in the capital. The conversation starts in a teahouse on Tehran’s famed Lālah Zār Avenue (itself a living example of discursive transformations) where the characters observe, over an opium roll on hookah, the young men and women who are compared to “fair princesses and princes,” striding by in European attire.85 The two contenders engage in criticizing a wide array of social ills, from the sham of language purification to the replacement of the traditional notation and accounting system known as siyāq with modern calculus. In each case, the state of affairs before and after the introduction of a modernizing project is sarcastically compared using the headings “kuhnah parast” (the old-fashioned) and “īrān-i naw” (new/modern Iran). Before the introduction of calculus, all affairs and balances were in order. Now with an army of fiscal administrators, the state of the country’s finances is in shambles. Before this change, the state paid all its servants solely on tax money; now with income from customs, foreign travel, modern coinage, oil, contracts and international port cities, it is in debt. Before the change, the legal system was swift and effective. Now a legal claim can circulate for months among longwinded lawyers and the bureaucracy with no resolution. The ministry of war, the foreign ministry, the ministry of post and telegraph, the ministry of agriculture are all sharply and sarcastically criticized as ineffectual facades of governance. From modern medicine to modern schools, from novels to showrooms and cinemas are placed under scrutiny. Vis-à-vis these observations, the old man and the youngster also attack certain aspects of the traditional way of things: the excesses of the royal patronage system, the extravagance of the princes, the lavishness of their ceremonies and parties, the overindulgence of the courtiers and ministers, the hypocritical mullahs and corrupt judges, a double entente that is thematically parallel with the setting of the drama: “Tehran is a hodgepodge of a zoo [jangal-i mawlā]. She embraces all manners of animals: nightwalkers, hypocrites and the affluent.”86 Indeed, the most discernible feature of this munāzirah is the coexistence of in-between figures, states and texts. Starting with the multilayered narration in this munāzirah, indeterminacy reigns supreme. In the prologue the narrator introduces himself as Mirza ‘Ali who has embarked on editing and distributing the author’s treatise. Within the text itself,

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the voice of the author merges both with the old man and with the youth while at one point in the story the headings “Youth” (javān) and “Old Man” (pīr) turn into Fakir (faqīr) and Dervish (darvīsh), suggesting the merger of all four characters into the figure of the mystic. The narrative itself is a muddled corpus of genres. Self-identifying as a treatise (risālah), poetry (shi’r-i man), travelogue (sīyāhat nāmah), satire (hazl), didactic (ta’līm), allegory (tamsīl), advice (nasāyih) and witticism (latāyif), it also shows consciousness of the competing genres of journalism (which it views as corrupt), the novel (which corrupts Iranian morality) and classical tales such as Kalīlah u Dimnah87 and Marzbān Nāmah88 from which Iranians should draw their way of life.89 This polyphonic admixture of genres and texts is also manifested by the existence of parallel texts. Similar to Ansārī’s earlier work, Ganjīnah-i Ansār authorial “footnotes” occupy a parallel position on the page with the main narrative at times occupying more space on a given page. These metanarrative texts themselves represent a myriad of genres, styles and textual asides. They appear in the form of hikāyats, geographical information and historical evidence, topographical observations, mathematical definitions, poetic interjections, citations from other works, references to the author’s other books, grammatical instructions, political commentary, Quranic citations, economic advice, cultural insights and religious commentary in the form of interpretive tafsīr (Figure 2.2 (a–d)). And as if to demonstrate the parallel, as opposed to a peripheral, position of these “footnotes,” even parts of the main narrative of the munāzirah itself are included in the footnote.90 An assortment of dialects and transcribed foreign terms side by side Persian words further underline this coexistence.91 Arabic and Persian maxims or verse, usually adages on the same topic, are dispersed throughout the narrative. While making use of several French words himself, the old man nevertheless laments the “Parisian-tempered Persian” (pārsī bā pārīsī āmīkhtah) and sermonizes about the futility of teaching Iranians French. Likewise, the refusal of Iranians to hear of anything in Arabic has caused them to lose sight of their Islamic history’s political lessons and created an unsound culture in which Arabic names have to be changed into Persian ones in order for the named to get a job.92 The arbiters of such fragmented ideologies are hybrid entities that embody shifting loyalties, fluid perspectives and alternative modes of being. As we have seen in other munāzirahs, besides merging with the author-narrator’s voice, the old man and the youth change their position on a given topic without being able to adhere to a single ideology as it might seem otherwise given the strength of their initial arguments.93 After challenging the old man on the necessity of modern schools and the teaching of French to pupils, for example, the youth suggests that educating women in modern sciences and in French is a vain project, at which point the author interjects, through a footnote, ensuring the readers that he is not against female education by citing a Quranic verse in support of knowledge. Suggesting that the establishment of modern schools in Iran is an enactment of the popular saying “neither crow nor partridge” about the vanity of emulation (bih ‘ayn misl-i kalāgh u kabk shud), the old man goes on a few pages later to argue for the necessity of a national elementary education.

Figure 2.2(a–d) Parallel Texts, Hasan Ansārī, Nūshdārū. (Reproduced from Muhammad Hasan Jābirī Ansārī, Nūshdārū Tahzībul Akhlāq, Tārīkh-i Nisf-i Jahān va Hamah-yi Jahān [lithography] [Isfahan: Mirza ‘Ali, 1913/1292]. Courtesy of National Library and Archives of I.R. of Iran, MS. 1105093.)

Figure 2.2 (Continued).

Figure 2.2 (Continued).

Figure 2.2 (Continued).

Rival texts 47 A similar shift in ideology occurs when the old man discusses the issue of language. Having earlier condemned the divine status enjoyed by translators and the impracticality of teaching French in Iran, the old man promotes the necessity of sending students to Europe for the very purpose of translation of “Parisian sciences” (‘ulūm-i pārīs). Arabic meets with a similar mixed fortune. Although the old man (and at times the youth) uses Arabic terms, proverbs and maxims throughout, he is nevertheless against publicizing Arabic and instead promotes the national language, advising that national elementary education must include Persian language, religious studies and ethics (pārsī, dīnī va akhlāqī). Having thus established his promotion of a national identity, he goes on to advocate the superiority of religious unity over national unity (ijtimā’ u ishtirāk-i dīnī akmal az vatanī ast). Finally, while his speech is replete with modern medical terms (hence the title of the munāzirah), the old man asserts that traditional medicine is superior to modern medicine.94 While passing judgement on the state of the nation, the old man and the youth nevertheless enact its itinerant identities. Such unsettled and homeless identities find expression in descriptions of the national character as that of a crossbreed: “Each of their veins has the trace of a fair Turk, Tajik, Iranian, Caucasian, Armenian, Zoroastrian, Swedish, Russian, a Lur, a villager, a Bakhtīyārī, a gendarme, and a Cossack.”95 These “new Iranians” are “a scion of a London flower crossed with a Muscovite.”96 Citing an exact sentence from his other book, the author reemphasizes the disrupted, conflicted, ambiguous and multilayered character of the body-national, in Persianized Arabic: “Iran is an explosive mass, composed of differing forms, to the point of chaos, towards constitutionalism and the [rule of] law” (Al-Īrān jism-i nārī, yatashakkal bih ashkāl-i mukhtalifah, hattal harj u wal marj, sū-yi al-mashrūtah wal qānūn). At the closing of the narrative, the youth asks the old man to summarize his observation of the nation’s capital. What follows is not only a vivid description of a fragmented collective, but also of the unresolved and tentative ending of the munāzirah: Youth: How did you see the people of this area? Old man: On the surface a united group, in essence differing hearts. At present like a headless herd, a flock without a shepherd, enchanter and enchanted, despotic yet obliged, prepared yet in impediment, ignorant and arrogant, learned yet blind, liberated yet captive, ignorant and besieged, commanding yet appointed, functionary yet excused [ma’mūr u ma’zūr], imperious yet constrained, friend yet hated, adversary yet desired, burglar and bold, liar yet famed for honesty, deceitful yet upheld as righteous, epileptic and political master, demented yet constitutionally cleansed, merchant yet down to his abacus mortgaged to the bank, and tradesman yet his trade stealing at all cost . . . Youth: What did you find most among them? Old man: 1. fornication 2. debauchery . . . 7. phonograph 8. photograph . . . 10. novel forms . . . 13. parted hair97 14. various factions . . . 27. nouveau

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Hamid R. Yazdi scholars . . . 29. fluent charlatanry [fisāhat-i shārlātānī] . . . 35. ruffian philosophers . . . 47. deserters of the homeland . . . 49. excess of illusions [fuzūnī-yi khīyāl] . . . 52. newspaper specials [fuqol‘ādah-i jarāyid] . . . 61. reversed synthesis [fi’l u infi‘āl-i‘aks uftādah] . . . 68. bowtie sporting religionists [faqīh-i fukulī] 69. Frenchislamic jurisprudence98 . . . 75. “the-agent-of-whathe-wills” farangī [farangī-yi fa’āl-imā yashā’].99

This dizzying array of hybrid entities represents the social equivalent of narrative polyphony. Contradictory yet coinciding, episodic yet continuous, fragmented yet whole, syncretic yet simultaneous, these various discourses, factions, classes, languages, idioms, neologisms and identities form the very vocabulary of the munāzirah. Jamālzādah’s work falls along this continuum. He in fact showed consciousness of this development in Iranian literature when he opined, in reference to this munāzirah: “In the annals of story writing in Iran in recent times, one can perhaps count these two books [Ansārī’s Remedy and Afsānah-i Mahjūr u Maghrūr] – next to Talibov’s works, The Travelogue of Ibrāhīm Beig, and Muhammad Bāqir Mirza Khusravī’s Shams u Tughrā – among the pioneers of Persian stories in the contemporary era.”100

The Berlin Circle The handful of specimen above represents a much larger body of similar texts that collectively belong to a discursive formation whose ‘enunciative principle’ is dialogic.101 It does not conceive of posthumously invented binaries (such as traditional vs. modern, religious vs. secular, etc.) as located at different points along a linear axis of time. Nor does it always perceive them to be essentially and diametrically opposed (at least not until later periods). It functions on the premise that these binaries are simultaneous and in many cases commensurate, though obviously belonging to different cultural spheres. Its narrative structure (including, and specially, its deep structure) reflects the contestation of various perspectives in their simultaneity. Its character archetypes replicate a similar trajectory. Their interaction is contestatory and the resolution of their debate is unsettled. The resulting narrative is hybrid, in flux, inconclusive, characterized by contestation and threshold positionings, digression and parallel, rival texts. During the First World War, on the initiative of Sayyid Hasan Taqī Zādah (1878– 1970/1257–1348), a group of Iranian expatriates in Berlin was involved in political activism against Russian and British intrigues in Iran. They self-identified as the ‘Berlin Circle’ (anjuman-i birlīn). The Berlin-based journals Kāvah (lit. Blacksmith, published 1916–1922/1334–1340) and Irānshahr (published 1922– 1927/1301–1306) acted as forums for the Berlin Circle’s views on politics, history, culture, science and literature. The Circle also organized bi-weekly conferences and workshops under the title “Scientific and Literary Conversations.” The founding members of these bi-weekly meetings included notable personalities such as Mirza Muhammad Qazvīnī (1877–1949/1256–1328), Sayyid Hasan Taqī Zādah, Muhammad ‘Ali Tarbīyat (1877–1940/1256–1940), Muhammad ‘Ali Jamālzādah, Husayn

Rival texts 49 Kāzimzādah Irānshahr (1884–1962/1262–1340) and later Ibrāhīm Pūrdāvūd (1886–1968/1264–1347), among others. Some members were prominent figures. Hasan Taqī Zādah (a former member of the National Consultative Assembly) and Husayn Kāzimzādah Irānshahr, for instance, published the journals Kāvah and Irānshahr in Berlin, both among the most influential Persian journals at the time, while Muhammad ‘Ali Tarbīyat (also a former member of the National Consultative Assembly and the founder of the first public library in Iran) cofounded the journal Ittihād (Union) in Iran in 1908. A brief look at the personal lives of some of these figures illustrates the extent to which their transformations and internal contradictions are reminiscent of the split identities narrativized in the munāzirah. Born to a religious family in Tabriz and to a clerical father, Taqī Zādah’s early education included typical subjects on the traditional seminary curriculum (such as the Quran, Arabic, philosophy and astronomy), but soon he was drawn to European learning in which he engaged but some of which, such as learning French, he had to hide from his devout father.102 Appearing as a cloaked and turbaned cleric in his first post as deputy to the National Consultative Assembly in 1906/1285, Taqī Zādah transformed into a tuxedo wearing dandy in his later years. Taqī Zādah, the cleric-turned-farangī, is famous for having summarized the solution to Iran’s problems in the wholesale adoption of European values.103 In the issue of the periodical where Jamālzādah’s first short story “Fārsī Shikar Ast” (Persian Is Sugar) appeared, he reiterated that declaration in these words: “Adoption of the principles and manners and customs of European civilization and accepting them unconditionally.”104 The moral and literary role model for the entire cohort of Berlin expatriates, Muhammad Qazvīnī was, next to Taqī Zādah who had founded it, the pivot around whom the literary gatherings in Berlin revolved. Jamālzādah goes as far as claiming that the contemporary adherence to methods of research and composition was a direct result of Qazvīnī’s teachings and modelled after his exemplary work, a method which, according to Jamālzādah, he had learned from the prominent Iranologist Edward G. Browne. “There is no doubt,” Jamālzādah continued, “that in the history of Iranian culture, at the crossroads of traditional modes and modern methods in scientific research, the name of Mohamad Qazvīnī will shine like a luminous star for ages.”105 A lexicologist, linguist and literary historian, Qazvīnī had seminary education and was well-versed in traditional scholarly approaches. However, he was also an avid supporter of the European scientific method. In fact, Taqī Zādah, who also descended from a clerical line, took example from Qazvīnī in following the European method. In his own scholarship, however, Qazvīnī continued to use the language and rhetorical approaches customary in traditional seminary education (i.e. among others, copious allusions to the Quran and traditions; references to the poetry of masters of yore in advancing an argument; and the use of rational debate as opposed to reliance on empirical data), and yet he was a staunch proponent of using plain language accessible to the masses, which he proceeded to employ in his private correspondences.106 The proceedings of the “Scientific and Literary Conversations,” as well, were identical to the issues, subject matters, themes and compositional format of the

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munāzirah as I have described it above. In one of these meetings, for example, the debate centred on the question of Iranians’ emulation of Europeans. After much deliberation and debate, the members decided that Iranians should imitate Europeans in all respects except language and religion, meaning Islam.107 Yet Muhammad ‘Ali Tarbīyat’s 15 December 1918 (23 Azar 1297) lecture on Zoroaster (the prophet of Iran’s pre-Islamic religion) was received with much enthusiasm and national zeal. Major Habībullāh Shaybānī delivered a talk on neurology (translated from French) on 14 May 1919 (23 Ordibehesht 1298) followed by some odes from the Divan of Zahīr Fārīyābī (Persian poet, d. 1201 CE). On the same day, Jamālzādah gave a talk on the subject of novel writing and the necessity of writing in plain language, presenting two short hikāyats as specimens of this form of writing. Many of these gatherings were either entirely devoted to reciting poems (such as the meeting on 3 July 1919/11 Tir 1298) or were centred on different topics but concluded with poetry recitations. On July 9/Tir 17, for example, ‘Izzatullāh Hidāyat gave a talk about zoology and botany, followed by recitation of an ode from Zahīr Fārīyābī. On 30 July 1919 (7 Mordad 1298) Kāzimzādah Irānshahr read a chapter from his own book on public education followed by an ode from the Divan of Mahmūd Anvarī (Persian poet, 1126–1189 CE); A’zam al-Saltanah gave a talk on the value of currency on 6 August 1919 (14 Mordad 1298), followed by the recitation of an ode by Anvarī. On 13 August 1919 (21 Mordad 1298) Jamālzādah read an excerpt from his translation of an article by Ernest Renan on Islam followed by the views of “another European historian” about Islam and its role in the progress of sciences. On 13 May 1920 (23 Ordibehesht 1299) Kāzimzādah Irānshahr read an article titled “The Influence of Arabic in Persian.”108 Jamālzādah first read his “Persian Is Sugar” in these gatherings and among such men. This would have been the very first public appearance of Jamālzādah’s story. Jamālzādah relates how he was, besides being the youngest and least experienced participant in the Circle, worried about Qazvīnī’s reaction and even expected him to harshly criticize the story. To his surprise, Qazvīnī was full of praise for the story, and the committee decided to publish “Fārsī Shikar Ast” (Persian is Sugar) in the journal Kāvah (the story appeared in the 1921/1299 issue on January 11/Dey 21). This was the first story by Jamālzādah to appear in print.109 It would later be published as the first story in the collection Once upon a Time.

Persian Is Sugar: a re-reading In a piece entitled “A Literary Criticism: New Publications” (intiqād-i adabī matbû‘āt-i jadīdah) which first appeared in the journal Irānshahr on 24 June 1925 (3 Tir 1304), Qazvīnī reviewed ‘Abbās Iqbāl Âshtīyānī’s Course on General History (published the same year by Kāvīyanī Press in Berlin) which was intended as a textbook for first year high school students in Iran. In it, Qazvīnī voices the same concerns that preoccupied the members of the Berlin Circle, including Jamālzādah: If someone seeks an exemplar of flowing composition, fluency of expression, clarity of the subject, lucidity of meaning, and excellence of syntax they must

Rival texts 51 certainly read this book . . . in order to see how artfully, masterfully, and skillfully the author has achieved this in his treatment of one of the most fascinating subjects of European [thought], meaning the history of ancient peoples, and has created a book, pleasant and precious in the utmost, in the best form and simplest composition in our own contemporary Persian and without drawing from European words, ‘pompous’ Arabic terms, Turkish constructions and expressions, or from archaic and obsolete Persianisms [Fārsī hā-yi Mansûkh-i qadīmī] so that commoners and children can comprehend it with ease while the literati [will] enjoy its smoothness of style. . . . And there is no doubt that the erudite author would not have accomplished such a momentous feat if it were not for his vast command of Persian and Arabic literatures (in addition to his deep knowledge of European languages and sciences which inform the basis of the subject of this book) . . . . It is evident that if the author’s knowledge were limited to European learning while wanting for [knowledge of] Persian and Arabic literatures, like most of his ‘modern’ compatriots, then his composition and choice of words would look entirely different, meaning it would be of the same breed as the writing style of modern ‘literati’ whose columns fill newspapers in Tehran and whose vulgar diction, fraught with verbal, grammatical, syntactical, and orthographic errors and filled with foreign words and expressions, are a slap in the face of readers.110 It is hard to miss Qazvīnī’s ambiguous, and simultaneous, condemnation and endorsement of disparate influences in a Persian that is at the same time composed of those same elements in a commentary that is uncannily identical to the types of ideation we have witnessed in the munāzirah. Qazvīnī proceeds to recommend the same type of approach to aspiring writers: to combine their knowledge of European learning and Persian and Arabic literatures in a writing style that is plain, easy to understand, and devoid of errors and pomposity – a Persian that is (and at the same time is not) influenced by “foreign” elements. “Persian Is Sugar” is the dramatization of these preoccupations. Narrated by an expatriate returning to Iran, the story paints a picture of the country’s disorder in the form of the officials’ corruption. Sensing the possibility of booty from the farangī looking narrator, the border guards place him under temporary arrest. The guards strip the narrator of all his belongings except two items which he manages to take back: “The only thing[s] I could take from them unharmed was my European [farangī] hat and my belief [in Islam].”111 Parodic effect is not the only function of this statement. It also points to a figure whose inseparable treasured possessions, emblems of his identity, are tokens of two worlds. The self-identification of the narrator to another character, Ramazān, as “an Iranian and your religious brother”112 places Iranian-ness precisely in a liminal space between Islam and Farang reinforced by the liminal zone suggested by a border town. The Iranian imaginary, in other words, is the locus of the intersection of parallel identities. The other characters in the story are indeed the embodiments of this discursive convergence. “Fārsī Shikar Ast” is the story of the convergence of rival discourses

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anthropomorphized in the figures Farangī Ma‘āb (lit. European mannered), Shaykh (Cleric), and the naïve youth, Ramazān, focalized through the eyes of the narrator, himself professing a “brotherly” affinity with all three. Representatives of their social types, the two characters Farangī Ma‘āb and Shaykh are described as caricatures of excess: the former, “one of those notorious Farangī Ma‘ābs,” is wearing “a collar as long as a samovar pipe . . . sitting atop a ledge, and under the pressure of this collar which was like the pillory around his neck [he] was reading a ‘novel’ in the dim light.” His opposite number, the Shaykh, looks like a shining white cat coiled on a heap of coal dust . . . but it turned out that it is a Shaykh squatting as is customary while hugging his knees and wrapping his cloak around him, and the shining white cat is his . . . turban of which the ending had come loose and looked like a cat’s tail.113 It is to these incarnations of excessive duality that Ramazān, the newcomer with a felt hat, turns for help. Instinctively turning to the more familial Shaykh, Ramazān begs for an explanation for his unwarranted incarceration. The Shaykh responds in a verbose and heavily Arabicized Persian which defies comprehension. As an example, part of the Shaykh’s response reads thus (I have replaced Arabic words in the original with their italicized Latin equivalents in order to convey a similar sense to the English reader): “ut spero [I hope] that mox [soon] the bail money shall become apparent and quidem [surely] the alpha and quidem the beta of quo factum est [how this came to be] either statim [immediately] or tandem [ultimately] shall reach our auscultations.” Thinking the Shaykh is a “possessed” (jinni) Arab, Ramazān turns to Monsieur Farangī Ma‘āb. The latter responds to Ramazān’s query with an equally bizarre Francophonized Persian (transliterated French words in original): Oh friend and beloved compatriot! Why have they put us here? I have been excavating my skull [but] absolument do not find a thing, neither a positif thing nor a négatif thing, absolument! Is not this comique that they take me, a diplomé youth from the best famille, in place of a . . . of a criminel and do treatment to me as it went ahead formerly? Terror-stricken, Ramazān cries out to the guards for help at which point the narrator steps in and assures the youth that he is Iranian like him, as are the other two. Ramazān is not convinced: “Did you see how these lunatics cannot understand a word of [normal] speech and kept speaking in the language of the jinn?” to which the narrator responds: “Bro these are neither possessed nor deranged, on the contrary [they] are Iranian and our compatriots and religious brothers!” (barādar-i vatanī va dīnī).114 As creatures of liminality in folk imagination, the jinn are metaphysical entities according to the Quran that can take both a physical form and a metaphysical nonform.115 The fact that both the Shaykh and the Farangī Ma‘āb are described as such is noteworthy, as is all the characters’ “brotherly” kinship. Caught between their

Rival texts 53 Iranian identity, Islamic heritage and manifestations of European influence, the four “brotherly” characters represent disparate discourses in a story that dramatizes the polyphonic munāzirah of contending voices within the liminal space of the jail. Both in his brief introduction to the story’s first appearance in Kāvah (1921/1300) and in the lengthy prologue to the fifth edition of the collection Yakī Būd u Yakī Nabūd, Jamālzādah addressed the issue of polyphony. In the former, he announced the publication of the collection, of which “Fārsī Shikar Ast” was to be an example, in a near future. The aim of the collection, written for “the amusement of the mind” (tafrīh-i khātir), was to “present a specimen of contemporary Farsi’s usual and current” use (nimūnahī az fārsī-yi ma’mūlī va mutadāvil-i imrūzah).116 In the prologue to the collection’s fifth edition, Jamālzādah reiterated this aim and expressed satisfaction over the collective attempts to purge Persian from “European, Turkish, and Arabic words and expressions and constructions.”117 So far as the promotion of the national language is concerned, this was a national-literary manifesto with the aim of purging the national tongue from “foreign” languages. This was to be a purge limited to story, however, for the discourse of Jamālzādah’s work continued to draw on the discursive dialogism of the munāzirah.118 For in this prologue Jamālzādah advised emerging writers to study and learn several foreign languages, travel nationally and internationally, to mix and mingle and [engage in] conversation, debate, munāzirah, and argumentation with various classes of people from every ethnicity, nationality, [belonging to] any faith, belief system, party or creed, and particularly a continuous and deep understanding of Iran’s own peoples. He proceeded to warn young writers to avoid “unsound emulation,” advising that “it is absolutely unnecessary that we uncritically model [our] style of writing after the farangīs’ unless it is deemed appropriate by the dictates of sound judgment.”119

The “manifesto,” Once upon a Time and other works As mentioned at the outset, Jamālzādah’s prologue to his first short story collection, Yakī Būd u Yakī Nabūd, has been celebrated in conventional scholarship as a literary “manifesto” that heralded the dawn of European-style prose fiction in Iran. We can revisit this important essay, however, in light of the historical context laid out above. In his first prologue to Once upon a Time, Jamālzādah denounced the “despotic political essence of Iranians . . . [which] can also be seen in the field of literature, meaning the writer only considers elite [audiences] when taking up the task of writing.” In order to amend this situation, he continued, efforts must be made to mobilize “the inshā’ on the path of the novel and the hikāyat.”120 Literally meaning “composition,” the inshā’ is an indigenous form of prose narrative consisting of various genres: letters, official correspondence, and descriptive or narrative accounts. Furthermore, the classical inshā’ literature was meant to also serve as a

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model of good writing for aspiring scribes and literati.121 In his prologue, Jamālzādah does not propose a complete abandonment of this indigenous genre in favour of the novelistic style. Instead, he promotes the use of a “novelistic inshā’” (inshā’-i rumānī), alternatively termed “hikāyat-based inshā’” (inshā’-i hikāyatī) a few pages later. In other words, Jamālzādah was not advocating a wholesale adoption of the European novel. As is evident in these hyphenated constructions, modern prose, the way Jamālzādah conceived of it, was to be a mixture of the Perso-Islamic inshā’, the indigenous hikāyat and the European novel.122 As a matter of fact, all the “stories” in the collection Yakī Būd u Yakī Nabūd are identified as hikāyats (For example: “The first hikāyat: Fārsī Shikar Ast” and so on), a designation that resists convenient categorization, for even though the subject matter of these story-hikāyats was novel, the author made a point of identifying them as the continuation of the indigenous tradition of storytelling. This is also confirmed by his choice of the title for the collection, Once upon a Time, a phrase with which children’s tales in folk literature start. The author’s conscious choice of this title becomes more apparent when we note that he entitled one of his late works Qissah-yi Mā bih Sar Rasīd (Thus Ends Our Story, 1979/1358). The two standard phrases mark the beginning and end of folk tales. What is more, the multi-generic capacity of the inshā’, similar to the dialogic orientation of the munāzirah, offered a formidable opportunity for the inclusion of several parallel genres in a frame narrative where contending approaches could be incorporated. Another point overlooked in orthodox scholarship is that contemporary consciousness did not conceive of the European novel as, necessarily or merely, an aesthetic construct. Rather, it was perceived as an effective means through which the Europeans had figured out a way to make complex scientific, philosophical or religious notions accessible to the public by presenting them in the form of stories and in plain language.123 This is in fact what Jamālzādah had in mind when he referred to “literary democracy” (dimukrāsī-yi adabī) in the prologue: presenting information in a language accessible to the masses. He proceeded to provide an example citing the popular science works by the French astronomer Camille Flammarion (1842–1925) who “has clothed many important topics in astronomy and mathematics in the garb of novels and hikāyats.” In this vein, contemporary perceptions of the novel viewed the genre itself as having a fluid form and thus being open to the inclusion of many other fields. The author asserts, Only novelistic inshā’, by which it is meant hikāyat-based inshā’, whether it is in the form of a book or a ‘theatrical’ piece or a letter and so on, can accommodate the use of all the words, expressions, proverbs, jargon, different syntactic structures, and different dialects in a language.124 It was only posthumously that the idea of the novel as the realization of Europe’s superior literary culture – and as an established genre with certain formalistic and thematic prerequisites – was constructed and dictated on the reading of Iranian works.125 Jamālzādah resisted and denounced this reading throughout his life.

Rival texts 55 In his 1954/1333 prologue to the fifth edition of Yakī Būd u Yakī Nabūd, for example, he declared that we can find prominent instances of these new literary styles or as is popular today [these] ‘literary schools’ known variously as ‘romanticism’ and ‘symbolism’ etcetera and even ‘surrealism,’ which have been imported into Iran as souvenirs from Europe and America, in our own ancient and aged literature.126 Jamālzādah’s rhetoric became more reproachful when in 1955/1334 he denounced those who engaged in a “blind emulation of the farangīs” in these terms: To those literary wannabes [jūjah udabā] who stuff their mouths and speak of European ‘literary schools’ thinking that they have brought coal to Newcastle must be said, sirs, if you had done a little research, you would have found excellent examples for every style and school which in your blind emulation of the farangīs you call ‘school’ [maktab].127 He proceeds to provide one such example of a “realist” depiction of the comic figure of a dying old man in a mosque by the nineteenth-century classical poet Qā‘ānī (1808–1854/1223–1270 HQ) “who lived a long time before the founder of the ‘realist’ method who was one of the prominent French writers known as ‘Zola.’”128 Note Jamālzādah’s ambiguous conception of origination. While recognizing Zola as the founder of the “realist method,” the author nevertheless attributes it to an early nineteenth-century Iranian poet. Jamālzādah’s own work was informed by a mix of European and indigenous storytelling techniques, but it is important to note that he tirelessly advised against blind emulation of European styles and resisted following the literary -isms trending in his homeland.129 This split identity is observable in Once upon a Time. As noted earlier, the author identified the stories in this collection as hikāyats. Starting from the hyphenated identity of these story-hikāyats, other dialogic elements form the deep structure of Once upon a Time. Liminal settings, split identities, discursive rivalry and parallel texts are among such elements. Dialogue is narrativized either in the form of caricature opposites (such as in “Persian Is Sugar”) or merged within the same character. When a character is not depicted as such, he is deployed either as an idealized embodiment of what is imagined to be pure Iranian nature or as a lost soul. A brief look at the stories in this collection confirms these observations. The second hikāyat, “Political Dignitary” (Rajul-i Sīyāsī, 1918/1297), is a firstperson account by the main character Hāj Shaykh Ja’far, an illiterate comber by profession, relating his odyssey to become a political notable. This he achieves by learning to manipulate his way through a web of rival discourses. Time and again in the story, Shaykh Ja’far relates his experience learning a new “language.” He learns the nationalist discourse from his son who has been taught at school the story of Kāvah the Blacksmith (reimagined as a national hero in contemporary

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Iran). The discourses of the Democrats and the Moderates he learns from the “convoluted and wonky words” spoken to him on his first visit to the Consultative Assembly (majlis); populist discourse from an “interview” by a reporter “who asked me vulgarisms beyond the jinn’s comprehension”; and political rhetoric from his ally and rival Hāj ‘Ali who informs him, “just like it is popular that the goldsmith have their own goldsmith lingo [zabān-i zargarī], politicians also have a special language.” He also advises Shaykh Ja’far that unless he has had experience being a mullah, he must learn this language. He quickly learns that he must infuse his speeches with “a hikāyat of Europeans’ patriotism” next to “some outof-context corny poem” in order to appeal to the masses.130 In this context, Shaykh Ja’far’s ascent to political predominance becomes possible only when he learns to successfully navigate parallel discourses. The world of this story is equally peopled by hybrid entities. The narrator’s political mentor, the lowly Hāj ‘Ali, who has himself managed to climb his way to being an MP, becomes a successful merchant at the end of the story. The school principal, the emblem of modern education in the country, “recited a host of [Quranic] verses and hadiths” to convince Shaykh Ja’far to pay his son’s tuition, or “I would simultaneously be an infidel and a traitor and a fool.” The National Assembly itself is comprised of “fukulīs . . . and turbans.”131 The overlapping figures of Shaykh and Shūkh which we have seen amply fielded in the munāzirah were now gradually condensed into the antithetical figures of ākhūnd and fukulī in popular imagination.132 The fact that these two figures represent members of the majlis, the site of collective national will, in this story is significant. They represent the split character of national consciousness. Similar to Ramzān’s confusion in “Persian Is Sugar,” the masses, as well, seem to be confounded and lost by the plethora of incidental messages hurled at them by political dignitaries. Drawn to Shaykh Ja’far’s addresses of “Oh Iranian brethren! Oh Iranian zealots!” the dumbfounded masses suddenly disperse and go about their business throughout the story. Shaykh Ja’far, nevertheless, manages to be elected “on thousands of votes both by the Democrats and the Moderates” only to beg the reader in the final lines of the story “not to consider us, nor to call or want [us], to be a political dignitary.”133 A pattern now emerges where an idealized Iranian essence becomes the locus of contending discourses as well as of foreign encroachment. Whereas Ramzān and the masses in the first two stories have been caught between representatives of rival discourses, in the third hikāyat, “The Friendship of Auntie Bear” (Dūstī-yi Khālah Khirsah, ca. 1915/1294), Habīullāh becomes the victim of Russian aggression. Impersonating authentic Iranian-ness, Habīullāh is a “fair youth of 22 years, well built, tall, [with] wide shoulders, jolly, sweet spoken, well-tempered, [with] a sense of humour and a knack for sarcasm, gallant [mashtī], warm blooded, and a traditional wrestler [zūrkhānah kār].”134 Habīullāh, a devout Muslim who has “not known the taste of wine nor arak . . . and has twice made pilgrimage to the shrines of the owner of Zulfaqār [i.e., first Shiite Imam ‘Ali] and his wronged offspring [third Shiite Imam Husayn] on foot,” is garbed in Iranian-made clothes, “wearing a felt hat from Burūjird, a silk sash from Yazd, a woolen Kurdish cloak, and a pair of quilted espadrilles from Isfahān.”135 Riding on a horse-drawn carriage

Rival texts 57 with the narrator and some other passengers, Habīullāh is the only one who insists that they carry a wounded Russian soldier laying on the snow with them to safety. While helping the latter up on the carriage, Habīullāh drops his pouch, revealing the coins he has been saving for a long time. When the soldier is delivered to his comrades, he blurts out a few words of Russian after which the Cossacks beat and tie up Habīullāh and take him away. The next morning, the narrator finds Habīullāh executed by the Cossacks and watches as the wounded soldier takes his coin pouch and limps away. In the fourth hikāyat, “Mullah ‘Ali’s Lament” (Dard-i Dil-i Mullā ‘Alī, 1915/1294), the most unlikely protagonist is selected for a story about the trials of a secret romance: a rawzah khwān or an orator who narrates the tragic battle of Karbala at Shiite ‘Ashura rituals. This romance occurs within the context of, and in stark contrast to, his traditional marriage. A devout and illiterate Muslim, Mullah ‘Ali opens the story by complaining about how irreligiosity, blasphemy and newspapers have taken over the world and continues to relate his predicament from his prison cell. Similar to the setting of “Persian Is Sugar,” the prison cell acts as a liminal space within which parallel stories are told. In fact, Mullah ‘Ali’s story unfolds through two parallel narratives. In one, he relates his marriage to his late mentor’s wife (a common practice at the time) whom he continuously praises through all manners of supplications. In the other, he chronicles his mad infatuation with a neighbour’s ill daughter after he is called in to pray for her recovery. In the former, he attributes his infatuation to “the seductions of the damned Satan who intends to taint [this] reciter of [the tragedies of Imam] Husayn and to distract the Shiites of [Imam] ‘Ali from remembering his martyred son.” In the latter, he condemns God and doubts his judgement and justness and even intends to commit suicide (a grave sin in Islam).136 Neither narrative of course comes to a stable end: his wife passes away as does his sickly beloved, with Mullah ‘Ali being caught while kissing his dead beloved’s lips in a mosque. Parallel narratives and cross-bred identities are showcased poignantly in the fourth hikāyat, “What’s Sauce for the Goose” (Bīlah Dīg Bīlah Chughundar, 1921/1300). This story had apparently wounded popular sentiment the most when copies of the first published edition of the collection were burned in Iran.137 The narrator, an Iranian expatriate living in Europe, feels a strong yearning for the traditional hammams (Turkish bath) in his homeland. His consuming search for a hammam masseur yields an unlikely find: a farangī masseur who has mastered the art of traditional Iranian bathing during his stay in the country. A masseur by profession, the farangī has served in the country as a “foreign advisor to the Ministries of Interior Affairs, Foreign Affairs, Finance, Defense, Culture, Public Welfare, Post and Telegraph, Customs, Commerce and so on and so forth.”138 In the munāzirah-styled dialogue that ensues the farangī relates the story of his rise to prominence in Iran to the astonishment of the narrator. A biting criticism of the country’s sorry state of affairs is contained within this frame narrative through the evocation of a network of intertexts. The first text that is summoned is James Morier’s The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan (1824). Through direct quotations, this text is conjured to

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attack the rampant dishonesty in the country. The second text which takes over from the frame narrative is “Chapter Three: The People and Government of Iran” cited verbatim from the travelogue written by the farangī during his stay in Iran. This text is used to effect scathing criticism of the widespread corruption and injustices towards the masses and women. The characters in all three texts are hybrid, shifting or split identities. In the frame narrative, Iranian people are likened to the figures in “a carnival where anyone can don any garb and no one questions him.” In the second narrative Iranians are said to have opposing dual intents mediated through the use of false avowals (qasam). In the third narrative, the multilayered farangī-narrator-author proceeds to categorize Iranians into three groups: the Yellow Hats (zard kulāh-hā), the White Hats (sifīd kulāh-hā) and Black Hats (sīyāh kulāh-hā). The White Hats and the Black Hats, representatives of the ākhūnd and the fukulī, respectively, unleash all sorts of injustices on the Yellow Hats who gravitate sometimes to this and sometimes to that group. Jamālzādah’s concern with language resurfaces when the fukulīs are said to speak the true Esperanto, “a compound of words from various European languages with the occasional use of some Persian, Arabic, and Turkish words.”139 The final hikāyat, “His Excellency Mister Rootless” (Vaylān al-Dawlah, 1921/1300), is a description of “a species of a plant that grows only on Iranian soil, bearing a fruit called a-pea-in-everyone’s-broth [nukhud-i har āsh].” This fragmented character wears clothes “every item of which has come from a [different] place and belongs to a [different] person.”140 Having himself had seminary education, he is friends both with the Interior Minister and with His Holiness Rootless (Vaylān al-‘Ulamā). He has travelled every inch of Iranian soil, sleeps in a different bed every night and eats his meals in different houses. After a brief description of this character-archetype, the narrator details Mister Rootless’s suicide before which he leaves a note part of which reads, “I am not sure if anyone will recognize my dead body or not” and ends with a line of poetry from Bābā Tāhir, the famed eleventh-century Persian poet.141 The collection ends with an alphabetized list of some colloquial expressions and popular sayings in Persian, as if to bring a narrative whose principal anxiety is the fragmentation of Persian identity (linguistic and national) to a wholesome end. This can also be viewed in the context of Jamālzādah’s ongoing interest in recording popular sayings.142 The narrative features of the munāzirah proper are also discernible in several of Jamālzādah’s other works. Shifting and ambivalent attitudes towards the archetypal figures of shaykh-hajji-ākhūnd and farangī ma‘āb-fukulī are present in the form of their dialogic face-off in some stories. In “Persian Is Sugar,” we recall, Farangī Ma‘āb is presented as a figure of excess responsible for the contamination of the Persian language, while in Rāh Āb Nāmah (The Book of the Water Canal, 1942/1321) the Westernized dandy represents a progressive figure with a genuine interest in the betterment of the regressive locals’ hygienic conditions without running water. The dandy’s repeated attempts and his subsequent failure drives the dramatic element in this story.

Rival texts 59 This confrontation is not limited to character types, however. In many stories the rivalry manifests itself in the author’s mixed attitude towards manifestations of tradition and Euro-style novelty. This has led many critics to conclude that Jamālzādah is in a curious “state of suspension.”143 The charge is that on the one hand Jamālzādah propagates European-style modernization and progressive ideas while attacking prejudice and tradition, such as in Qultashan Dīvān (1946/1325), Rāh Āb Nāmah, “Du Ātashah” (The Zealot) and “Mīrzā Khattāt” (Mirza Calligrapher) from the collection Ghayr az Khudā Hīch Kas Nabūd (None Existed but God, 1961/1340). On the other hand, he preaches about a return to indigenous roots and satirizes intellectual advocates of modernization while at the same time admiring the common people who are the purveyors of those same prejudices and traditions.144 Several stories in various collections confirm the critics’ disgruntled charge. In the stories “Yak Rūz dar Rustam Ābād” (A Day in Rustam Ābād) and “Darvīsh-i Mūmī” (The Mummified Dervish) from the collection Talkh u Shīrīn (Bitter and Sweet, 1955/1334), Jamālzādah reveals his reverence for indigenous tradition. In the former story the narrator comes to the conclusion that the village is heaven on earth and what modern intellectuals cannot convey in hours of discussion, the commoners can express with a single proverb. In the latter, the doubts and spiritual angst of the nouveau intellectuals is contrasted with the solace of the illiterate. In “Namak-i Gandīdah” (Rotten Salt) – from the collection Kuhnah u Naw (Old and New, 1959/1338) – a group of intellectuals decides to amend social backwardness but during their mission they learn that they must first reform themselves. In the story “Shūrābād” – from the collection Āsimān u Rīsmān (Mishmash, 1965/1344) – a group of intelligentsia goes to the village to eliminate illiteracy, but they find a group of poor and desolate people who eat grass and mice. They need fodder, not lectures and bylaws. The villagers attack the contingent and drive them away. In “‘Arūsī Dārīm u ‘Arūsī” (We Have a Wedding) and “Saqat Furūsh u Pīr-i Qawm” (The Peddler and The Tribe’s Wiseman) – from the collection Qissahā-yi Kūtāh Barā-yi Bachahāy-i Rīsh Dār (Short Stories for Bearded Babies, 1974/1353) – the author invites readers to accept the wisdom provided by tradition. Digression (involving not only digression from the main storyline but also presenting the inserted fragments in random generic forms) is another narrative feature of the munāzirah existing in several of Jamālzādah’s works. In “Kabāb-i Ghāz” (Goose Kebab) from the collection Shāhkār (Masterpiece, 1958/1337) the story itself seems to be the frame narrative by means of which many popular proverbs and colloquial expressions are indexed. The story, large parts of which are written in the form of dialogue, therefore turns into a compendium of different issues set alongside each other with no apparent reason. And though by no means the only one of its kind, Sar u Tah Yak Karbās (Isfahan Is Half the World, 2001/1380)145 is a dizzying network of intertexts presented in the form of a novel. This hybrid text starts with the author’s childhood memories in Isfahan. When the author returns to his hometown after thirty-five years, the story turns into a travelogue by means of which we see the city through the eyes of the author-guide. This part of the novel resembles a tour guide to Isfahan, complete with mention of

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tourist attractions, local handicrafts and a tour of local neighbourhoods. The author then gives a history of the Constitutional movement in Iran and his father’s role in it, even quoting parts of his father’s quasi-play Ru’yā-yi Sādiqah (A Vivid Dream, 1899/1278). This story is abandoned and a new one starts where the author meets his childhood friend Javād Āqā who tells his own story to the author. He speaks of meeting a dervish known as Mawlānā ‘Abdulhādī and his mystical wanderings with the latter, during which visiting the shrines of saints or tombs of poets and philosophers is accompanied by an encyclopaedic biography of the saints. Javād Āqā is taken on a journey written in the style of travelogues. This story is interrupted with the appearance of Javād Āqā’s brother who is tired of his decadent European lifestyle and is in need of spiritual guidance. The two brothers meet the Dervish, both being the two ends of the “Karbās” (burlap) in the title who reach the same destination via different routes.146 The rest of the story is an explanation of the mystical views of the Dervish which includes a section on the author Sādiq Hidāyat condemning his empty existentialist angst and concluding that the solution to the bewilderment of intellectuals is in returning to the stasis of mysticism and tradition.147 A cursory look at some of Jamālzādah’s other works, correspondences and views reveals his conception of modern storytelling as an engagement (fictional as well as non-fictional) with a vast range of novel concerns in a plain language, but not, necessarily, with the novelistic style as some abstract ‘Western’ construct. In his estimation, this applied not only to his own works but to the works of other Iranian writers (whether writing fiction or non-fiction). This is demonstrated by the sheer range of authors of all persuasions who corresponded with Jamālzādah and sought his blessings throughout his prolific career as a letter writer and commentator.148 In response to the publication of the second volume of Sayyid Abulqāsim Anjavī Shīrazī’s Qissahā-yi Īrānī (Iranian Stories) in 1974/1353, where the author had addressed the mothers of the nation to draw on indigenous “oral culture and resist the relentless onslaught of decadent culture and the banal modernity of the West,” Jamālzādah wrote: If I had the capacity I would publish that address in the form of a pocket book . . . and would distribute it in major cities in Iran and would then congregate gatherings which fathers and mothers would attend in hundreds and thousands where the city’s orator would read this very important and useful address to them, word for word, from the pulpit and in a loud voice, and whenever [the orator] reaches a point when he thinks some in the audience might not correctly understand the meaning or significance of the statement, he should interpret it for them in plain language while adding ideas similar in meaning and significance with the aid of Quranic verses and hadiths.149 References to gatherings in a mosque, the orator on the pulpit, the Quran and the use of plain language summarize in many ways Jamālzādah’s own approach to story writing: the dramatization of rival, but mutually inclusive, as well as shifting ideologies.

Rival texts 61 Importantly, Jamālzādah viewed the pulpit as the more effective means of public awareness regarding storytelling. In regards to the question of influences, this warrants mention of the author’s father. Jamālzādah’s father, Sayyid Jamāl ad-Dīn Vā‘iz Isfahānī (1862–1908/1279–1326 HQ), was an undeniable and important influence on his work. A cleric and Constitutional activist, Sayyid Jamāl was known for his fervent sermons on the pulpit inciting the masses to rise against the monarchy’s injustices.This eventually took him to the gallows in 1908, but the name Vā‘iz Isfahānī (the Preacher from Isfahan) lived on in association with his passionate sermons which were published in a dedicated weekly called al-Jamāl during the years 1907 to 1908 (1325 to 1326).150 In a society where the masses received their updates from the pulpits, Sayyid Jamāl’s exceptional appeal was his use of plain language accessible to the public. Taqī Zādah recalls that one of the best qualities and advantages of that late [orator] was his speeches in the common language, and it was because of this that the impact of his words, in which he often addressed the masses as ‘my felt-hat brothers,’ was unmatched.151 Jamālzādah himself admitted that even though he had been influenced by Voltaire, Anatole France, Moliere and Hafez, “perhaps none of them has had as much influence on me as my father.”152 Even in this short statement it is possible to discern the existence of parallel influences on Jamālzādah. But important for our discussion is the assertion that the author learned his “social realism” from his father’s sermons, if also from his familiarity with European literature. Indeed some critics have noted that some of his stories are a hybrid between a narrator’s narration and an orator’s va‘z (preaching) and khutbah (a plea of exhortation recited by a cleric at the beginning of a religious sermon).153 Jamālzādah himself revealed that his novel Sahrāy-i Mahshar (On the Plain of Judgement Day, 1947/1326) was based on his father’s Ru’yāy-i Sādiqah (A Vivid Dream, 1899/1278), itself a quasi story-play-munāzirah recounting the fictional trial of Zil ul-Sultan the infamous governor of Isfahan from 1871 to 1904 (1288 to 1322 HQ).154 In his commentary and advice on story writing, too, Jamālzādah exhibits a host of various influences, apparent in parallel citations from copious sources. His Tarīqah-i Nivīsandigī va Dāstān Nivīsī (On Being a Writer and Story-writing, first delivered at Shiraz University in 1965/1343 and published by the university’s press the following year) stylistically reads like a typical munāzirah: a frame narrative that is made up of a web of intertexts (which defies linear coherence), shifting positions and condemnation of imitation. For instance, in speaking about the novelistic genre in Iran and citing the text of the Quran and various classical poets, Jamālzādah invokes a tenth-century text, Tārīkh-i Yamīnī (Yamīnī History), and its definition of maqāmah (short tale), concluding that “this, as you can see, is exactly the same as the Farangīs’ novel.” This is not a simple temporal elevation of a text of tradition over a European genre, for later Jamālzādah will warn against imitating the language or style of classical writers.155 A similar shifting attitude

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applies to European literary schools. Asserting that there was not much variance in story-telling, in its modern sense, in classical Persian literature, Jamālzādah informs the audience later that genres such as “classicism,” “romanticism,” “realism” and “symbolism” had existed in Iranian literature for aeons.156 Similarly, he warns against the common practice of citing European and other foreign thinkers to authenticate a claim, a practice, Jamālzādah confesses, he has himself “not always been immune to.”157 In fact, the text of On Being a Writer runs parallel to copious citations from Voltaire, Diderot, Laozi, Hafiz, Sa’dī, Rumi, the Quran and academics, among several others. Do not, Jamālzādah continued, turn your stories into a mullah’s pulpit or a nationalists’ podium or into an imitation of some Farangī writers’ reflections on philosophical, mystical or social topics, only to advise his audience elsewhere that the ideal writer “should simultaneously be [the mouthpiece for] the school, the pulpit, the theatre, and the zūrkhānah.”158 This polyphony of parallel discourses and shifting positions would, of course, best describe Jamālzādah’s own stories as we have amply seen.

Conclusion Let us revisit the opening quote at the outset of this paper. In it, Jamālzādah asserts that most of the prose fiction produced in contemporary Iran “belongs to the same category of subjects and themes propounded” in his stories. Importantly, Jamālzādah does not make reference to a novel style of writing, but to a category of subjects and themes with which he engaged throughout his writing career and which he believed informs a majority of works of fiction written decades later. A sampling of such works spanning the 1920s to the 1970s confirms this view. Indeed a host of important works (fictional and otherwise) in this period reflected the same concerns and anxieties articulated in the munāzirah – and often in similar narrative fashion: a frame narrative populated by rival styles and genres through which the archetypal figures of Shaykh u Shūkh compete for discursive hegemony. It is no wonder, then, that one can witness many incarnations of these figures both in popular culture and in contemporary writings extending from the second half of the nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries. The figure of regressive tradition, the Shaykh, may appear in these writings as Hajji, ākhūnd (a lowly cleric, as opposed to the highly educated and often respected mujtahid), mutihajjir (primitive), ‘aqab uftādah or ‘aqab māndah (backward), ummul (conservative, old-fashioned), lūtī, dash or jāhil (an ambiguous figure representing, alternatively, tradition’s protective honour or vagabond rascality). His opposite number, the Shūkh, represents, alternatively, enlightened reform or rootlessness and blind emulation of Europe embodied variously as Farangī or Farangī Ma‘āb (European mannered), munavvar ul-fikr or rawshan fikr (lit. enlightened-minded), mutijaddid (modernized), gharb zadah (infatuated or infested with the West), qirtī (dandy), and fukulī or jūjah fukulī (bowtie wearing dandy).159 At times as categorical opposites, at others nuanced expressions of the same figure, the two types become the alter(ed) egos of Iranian consciousness. They embody the anxieties, fears and hopes of a national community that seeks to strike a balance between its Perso-Islamic heritage and its modern-ness. Alternately

Rival texts 63 denigrated or upheld, the two figures populate the pages of various works either as the main protagonists or as alien forces converging upon an intermediary figure who is a victim of their designs and who is imagined as the embodiment of primordial Iranianness.160 It is to these figures that a multitude of fictional and nonfiction works return time and again. Sayyid Fakhruddīn Shādmān, one of Iran’s leading intellectuals in the 1940s and the 1950s, defined the fukulī-type in these terms: fukulī is an indecent and narrow-minded Iranian who thinks Western civilization amounts merely to dancing cheek to cheek, gambling, and going to smoke-filled pubs, yet is oblivious to the fact that the foundation of Western civilization is actually based on reading, deliberation, and argumentation.161 Seen as an apish imitation of European lifestyle and mannerism, fukulī’s way of being came to increasingly signify a blind infatuation with the glitter and superficial aspects of Western culture. His adaptation of Europe was perceived as phoney and show-offish. He donned Western style clothes, mixed his Persian with foreign words, joined gentlemen’s clubs, fashioned a Western hairstyle and worst of all, mocked and belittled the customs and tradition of his Iranian heritage. Jalal Al-i Ahmad, one of the most influential intellectuals of the 1960s, considers “fukulī ma‘ābī” (acting like a fukulī) as an illness and enumerates it among the manifestations of his famous notion of gharbzadagī or infatuation with the West.162 These theorizations of fukulī corresponded with the fielding of his doppelganger, the jāhil, in fictional works. The play Ja’far Khān az Farang Āmadah (Ja’far Khan Has Returned from Europe, 1922/1301), written by Hasan Muqaddam (1897– 1925/1276–1304), restaged the urbanite drama of the two figures’ face-off one year after Jamālzādah’s “Persian Is Sugar.” Intended as a comic piece, the play was originally published by Matba‘ah Fārūs in 1922/1301 and staged in the Grand Hotel in Tehran by the Young Iran Association of Comedy (Majma’-i Kumidī-yi Iran Javān). It enjoyed an immediate and noisy success. It was hailed in almost every journal at the time and had reruns outside of Tehran.163 Its lasting impression on the Iranian psyche is attested to by the filmic restaging of the comedy as late as 1987 by the veteran director ‘Ali Hātamī under the slightly modified title Ja’far Khān az Farang Bargashtah. Also written in 1922/1301, Murtazā Mushfiq Kāshānī’s (1902–1977/1281– 1356) novel Tihrān-i Makhūf (Ghastly Tehran) was first serialized in the popular journal Sitārah Iran (Iran Star) and went through several editions afterwards. The many events of its multifarious plot revolve around a tragic love story. Farrukh and Mahīn are related by blood but separated by riches. They are products of modern schooling and have loved each other since childhood. Mahīn’s father, F . . . Saltanah (indicative of his royal descent), strongly opposes their union. He has plans to wed his daughter to Prince K’s son, Sīyāvush Mirza, a corrupted and womanizing young prince. The rest of the novel chronicles Farrukh’s attempts to reunite with Mahīn – who has died, leaving behind their child – and to track down the perpetrators to avenge Mahīn’s tragic death.

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As the title of the novel suggests, the gruesome city – this product of the onslaught of Westernization in contradistinction to the idyllic stability of the village – becomes the archetypal setting for contesting discourses. Time and again Tehran is evoked as the stage for this rivalry: “the villain-rearing environment of the capital” or “the corrupt environment of Tehran” provides the stage for the rivalry between various invocations of the figure of fukulī.164 Mahīn’s father and his aristocratic stock in the novel are clearly identified as fukulīs. Pitched against this group are Farrukh and Mahīn who would qualify as fukulīs in many respects. Farrukh is referred to as “farangī ma‘āb” and Mahīn reads novels, to the dismay of her father who refers to them as “sinful books” (kutub-i zāllah).165 Their marriage ideals, against their fathers’ feudalist match-making, are informed by bourgeois ideals of heterosexual love based on mutual attraction and responsibility. However, their “fukulī-ness,” as portrayed in the novel, is a progressive one, a moral and ethical version of what Mahīn’s father and his associates represent. Likewise, though Farrukh and Mahīn have been educated in modern schools and read novels, they represent the chastity and honour revered by tradition. In this context, the Jāhils, Mullahs and Hajis of the novel are either the reactionary and conservative representatives of all the wrong aspects of tradition, or else they are its blind followers. “A bunch of dogmatic mullahs who are obstacles to Iran’s progress” resurface several times in the novel as perpetrators, instigators of unrest, corrupt advocates, sexually deviant, regressive traditionalists and “enemies of science and knowledge” whose motto is, “Don’t send your children to modern schools because the foundation of the religion [i.e. Islam] and faith will be harmed.” This group is referred to as “jāhil leaders” and “jāhil ākhūnds” whose power rests on the ignorance of their followers who make up the ranks of “lūtīs” and thugs.166 Far from being simple ontological opposites, the categories summoned by the novel enact the indefinite and fluid discourses of modernity that are in constant ebb and flow among rivalling figures, a contested politics of identity formation. While the novel narrates its way through these webs of contestation, not once does the narrator refer to it as a novel. We hear of “this tale” (hikāyat) or “our fable” (hikāyat) or else “our history” (tārīkh) whose main character, Farrukh, is described as a “pahlavān,” a traditional wrestling champion belonging to the lūtīs’ group.167 The many intervening subplots which at times entirely take over the main story are also reminiscent of the parallel texts we have witnessed in the munāzirah. The main character in Sādiq Hidāyat’s Hājī Āqā (Mister Hajji, 1945/1324) has the designation, appearance and mannerisms of a mullah, while at the same time being a product of bourgeois capitalism. This hybrid character runs all the affairs of the state, from the market and newspapers to politics and economy, from his private quarters where the entire story unravels in this novel of ideations. No one is spared Mister Hajji’s rabid condemnations. Gul-u-Bulbul, the cousin of one of Hajji’s wives, is described as the nouveux riches whose idea of progress is to marry fashionable women and let them roam freely with men in dance parties; the religious minister, Mr. Hujjat al-Sharī‘ah, is a corrupt cleric who serves as the Hajji’s opium dealer; Hajji’s son, Mister Junior (Āqā Kūchak), is a fukulī who has returned from Europe and leads a life of gambling and partying. Hajji’s own religious

Rival texts 65 appearance and designation are a sham which in a society based on “cheating, lies, deceit, antagonism and fraud” guarantees advancement; he is at times progressive modern, sometimes anti-religious, at times an avid supporter of democracy, sometimes anti-Europe (“Europe is a bad seed”), a believer in “évolution” (French in original), an embodiment of Iran’s backward tradition, cognizant of the Marxian view of religion as the opiate of the masses and yet an accomplice in the mullahs’ corrupt fraternity.168 Portrayed as a land of duplicity, Hidāyat’s Iran is peopled by hybrid identities that oscillate between the jāhil-fukulī discursive domains, with the Hajji at its anthropomorphic centre. From the 1950s onward, the figure of jāhil was reimagined as the manly guardian hero of national honour vis-à-vis the increasingly detested, rootless and decadent fukulī. Husayn Madanī’s Ismāl dar Nīyu Yurk (Ismāl in New York) is perhaps the first novel that revolves around these figures’ confrontation as the main driving force of the narrative. First serialized in the journal Sipīd u Sīyāh (White and Black) in 1953/1332 and later published in book form in three volumes a year later, the novel immediately became a best seller.169 The events of the novel revolve around the adventures of the protagonist of the novel, Ismāl, embodying the venerated values of honour, chivalry and manliness and dressed as his type always was in a dark suit and velvet hat, never wearing a tie (unlike the fukulī), carrying a silk handkerchief which he could wield as a weapon of sorts, never in an emasculating office job and obstinately opposed to what was considered Western ways of sociability. A truck driver who is contracted by Allied forces during World War II to transport arms and ammunition to the Russian front, Ismāl meets an American marine named William. William intends to return to the U.S. on leave and encourages Ismāl to join him. Ismāl agrees and the rest of the novel chronicles his adventures in the New World. In his escapades Ismāl constantly commits acts in defiance of Western sensibilities of civility and continually embarrasses William or gets into trouble with law enforcement agents. However, on account of his obstinacy and self-assurance, he refuses to be disciplined by their civilized and civilizing etiquette. Ismāl returns to Iran at the end of his long journey and in a momentous public address lectures his friends on the uniqueness and beauty of their homeland while downplaying the purported civilizational glories of the West as superficialities built on the wickedness and dishonesty of its politicians. He forms the Ismālyyūn Party and marries his concubine, Shukat. The events of the novel do not follow a cohesive plot line and read like many parallel hikāyats. In one such episode and during a visit to Hollywood, Ismāl declares that “the true meaning of film and cinema [is] absolute deception.”170 Later when he is asked by Alfred Hitchcock to accept the role of the native leader in a Tarzan movie, he turns down the offer because he will not hear of an American actor beating him up in the movie. Ismāl ends up accepting the role but ruins the scene by beating up Tarzan.171 He concludes that in Iran only the uncivilized go to the Cinema Civilization.172 He also blames American movies for the prevalence of violence in Iranian society, including his own inclination for fighting. In a farewell address to his American friends on his way back to Iran, Ismāl tells them that unlike what he had heard about Western civilization, he found it nothing but a

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bunch of buildings and cars and hordes of pleasure seeking and thoughtless people. And finally, Ismāl declares at the end that Western civilizational etiquette and manners are a hindrance to freedom and that in this sense America is “hundreds of years behind Iran.”173 As can be seen from this handful out of the many similar examples in the novel, Ismāl returns the colonial gaze in every conceivable way, defying signs of the West’s hegemony from colonialism to civilized manners, from morality and ethics to technology, from Hollywood to the Statue of Liberty. The discursive significance of Ismāl in New York becomes apparent when we note that an entire cinematic genre known as Fīlm Fārsī emerged in Iran in the 1950s and ’60s around Ismāl-type adventures. Public demand was so determining that a given movie star’s rise to celebrity status might be determined by his success in impersonating the now revered figure of the lūtī-jāhil.174 Iranian cinema and its audiences still find fascination in nuanced fusions of various aspects of the jāhilfukulī discursive spheres. Kamāl Tabrīzī’s 2004/1383 film Mārmūlak (The Lizard), for example, depicts a petty thief’s adventures in escaping jail. This he manages by disguising himself in the religious attire of a mullah who has previously recited sections of Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince for the thief. With the help of the mullah’s guise and reverting to the morale of Saint-Exupery’s novella, the thief successfully and continuously evades the police – until he realizes that he can no longer completely shake off his Saint-Exupery/mullah identity. The handful of novels I have evoked in this section is meant to demonstrate a similar preoccupation by fictional characters who struggle to navigate the two archetypal figures’ identitarian associations and by narrative arrangements that incorporate parallel texts. One can come across many other novels and short stories, from different decades, that readily fit this description: Hamzah Sardāvar’s Kīmīyāgarān (The Alchemists, 1954/1333), Mushfiq Hamidānī’s Tahsīl Kardahā (The Educated, 1955/1334) and Rajab ‘Ali I’timādī’s Shab-i Īrānī (Iranian Night, 1974/1353) are some typical examples. In these fictional accounts the jāhil-fukulī interrelation is never an easy one, nor is it a question of clear-cut ontological difference, for as we have seen the dividing representational lines between the two are often crossed, shifted or repositioned, as individual cases may dictate, to form mélanges of being that ultimately represent variations of the same self. This double entendre called for a medium that could accommodate the rivalry and the ensuring debate. The munāzirah and its dialogical orientation proved to be the appropriate medium for this contestation, and Iranian prose fiction at large emerged as the dramatization of this discursive contention. From what I have detailed above, I am not claiming to have unearthed the indigenous “roots” of modern Iranian prose fiction in some nativist instant of brilliant discovery. Nor am I denying Western influences in some aspects of its emergence and development. Likewise, I am not proposing that the rubrics I have detailed above can be universally deployed to read all Iranian works of fiction. I have, however, identified a pivotal moment in the history of Iranian literary modernity in which various competing aspects of Iranian identity were put to intense debate, with the munāzirah as its dramatic vehicle. In other words, an important factor in the development of Iranian prose fiction is to be sought in the transformation of

Rival texts 67 the munāzirah which, reappropriated from its classical function, provided the structural and thematic means for a dialogical interaction among competing discourses. In highlighting these developments, I have made a case for a historical understanding of literary modernity in Iran while challenging the forced and ideological readings that have dominated the field as a result of uncritical deployments of modern. Jamālzādah is a notable instance in this historical moment, but certainly not its “founding father.”

Notes 1 All Iranian dates provided in this study are in accordance with the solar (Shamsī, also known as Jalālī) calendar unless the date provided in a primary source is in the lunar (Qamarī) calendar, in which case the given date will be followed by the acronym “HQ” standing for Hijriī Qamarī. All dates are preceded by the Julian equivalent. 2 In my use of dialogism as an analytical tool, I have drawn largely on Bakhtin’s insights – albeit with some important qualifications. For Bakhtin, dialogism is first and foremost a linguistic phenomenon best exemplified in the novel. The central problem in the novel, says Bakhtin, is the problem of representing another’s speech (Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogical Imagination [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981], 337). Unlike the ancient genres (such as the epic and poetry) in which one authoritative voice or ideology overrides all others, the novel is a hybrid genre, “an artistically organized system for bringing different languages in contact with one another, a system having as its goal the illumination of one language by means of another” (ibid., 361. Emphasis in original). This has at least two implications. First, the novel in this capacity is perceived as an idealized artistic form that is essentially dialogic, which is why Bakhtin deems it necessary to speak of the “authentic novel” as the only vehicle for the expression of dialogism (ibid., 356). Therefore, much in Bakhtin’s analysis of the novel is in formally descriptive terms but also informed by a platonic vision of a pure form. Second, for Bakhtin dialogism is as much a linguistic-artistic phenomenon as it is an implicit political statement reacting to the very monologic soviet milieu in which he wrote. My use of dialogism departs from Bakhtin’s in these two important respects. I do not conceive of the munāzirah in its modern employment as an established genre or a sublime paradigm for artistic or democratic expression. In fact, a defining feature of the munāzirah is incoherence and inconclusiveness. As for dialogism as a political statement, my use of the term may be considered political to the extent that it challenges stock readings of the history of Iranian modernity as an opposition between the allegedly well-defined and mutually exclusive forces of “progress” and “tradition.” Such conceptions derive from a linear understanding of progress and impose a singular reading on heterogeneous histories. I have therefore used Bakhtinian insights merely for analyzing the ways in which competing discourses of Iranian modernity rivalled, opposed, informed, appropriated and overlapped one another, resulting in the formation of hybrid entities facilitated by their very interaction. Whereas for Bakhtin dialogism is contained within the novel, my usage of the term foregrounds it as the very process through which hybrid genres germinate. It is in this capacity that concepts such as “dialogism,” “synthesis,” “coexistence” and “simultaneity” are employed in this study. 3 By using terms such as “coexistence” and “synthesis” here, I do not intend to reduce the history of Western dominance over the non-West to liberal fantasies of mutual tolerance, concessions and compromises. By the same token, viewing this history as an account only of conflict and diametrical opposition disregards novel formations, linkages and flows that result from cross-cultural pollination. Just as liberal constructs of globalization and multiculturalism obfuscate tension, betrayal, injustice and domination, historyas-conflict, likewise, obscures connections, associations, alliances and interdependence.

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I deploy these terms, therefore, simply to describe the parallel and simultaneous existence of interacting mores (conflictual or otherwise), each competing for self-expression. 4 Letter from Muhammad ‘Ali Jamālzādah originally published in the 10 July 1967 (Tir 19, 1346) issue of the journal Pārs. Reprinted in Sūsan Asīlī, ed., Nāmah’hā-yi Jamālzādah dar Kitābkhānah-i Markazī-yi Dānishgāh-i Tehran [Jamālzādah’s Letters at the Central Library of the University of Tehran] (Tehran: Sukhan, 2008/1387), 524. Unless otherwise noted, all translations in this essay are mine. 5 Documenting all the instances of this periodization would likely fill up enough pages for a bibliographical article. It suffices to point here to the fact that this periodization is so culturally prevalent that it has found its way, as a historical given, into national education in Iran. High school and introductory general education textbooks at the postsecondary level continue to feed successive generations of students the same paradigms. See, for example, Islamic Republic of Iran’s Ministry of Education university preparatory textbook Adabīyāt-i Fārsī [Persian Literature] (Tehran: Madrisah Publications, 2002/1381), 68; and Hurmuz Rahīmīyān, Adabīyāt-i Mu‘āsir-i Fārsī: Advār-i Nasr-i Fārsī az Mashrūtīyat tā Suqūt-i Saltanat [Contemporary Prose Literature: Periods of Persian Prose from Constitutionalism to the Decline of the Monarchy] (Tehran: SAMT, 2001/1380), 74, published by The Organization for the Study and Composition of Humanities Textbooks for Universities (SAMT). Both textbooks view Jamālzādah’s status as the founder of modern prose literature in Iran as a historical given. The only existing English translation of the collection Yakī Būd u Yakī Nabūd, as well, introduces Jamālzādah to English-speaking readership as “the undisputed founder of modern Persian fiction and the herald of literary modernism in Persian” who “successfully introduced the short story and novel to Persian literature.” Heshmat Moayyad and Paul Sprachman, trans., Once Upon a Time (Yeki Bud Yeki Nabud) (New York: Bibliotheca Persica, 1985), 9. Finally, the official website of Jamālzādah, hosted by the University of Tehran, has this introduction on its home page: “Muhammad ‘Ali Jamālzādah has the same admirable role in prose which Nīmā [Yūshīj (1897–1960/1276–1338)] played in Persian poetry, with this notable difference: if Nīmā broke meter and rhyme, his innovation was erected upon an ancient and powerful edifice [i.e. classical Persian poetry]. But what Jamālzādah accomplished was the heralding of a style [i.e. European-style short stories and novels] with no precedence.” Official website of Muhammad ‘Ali Jamālzādah, http://jamalzadeh.ut.ac.ir/index.php?option=com_content&view=categor y&layout=blog&id=4&Itemid=1 (accessed February 19, 2017). 6 For a discussion of some of these visions, see the introduction to this volume. A common theme among these studies is the consideration of “modern” as a telos which Iranian literature has to aspire to. For some examples, see Michael Beard, Hedayat’s Blind Owl as a Western Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), a study largely dedicated to finding parallels between Hidāyat’s controversial novel The Blind Owl (1936/1315) and “Western” literary traditions. For exemplars of works equating literary developments with Euro-inspired political paradigms, see Kamran Talattof, Politics of Writing in Iran: A History of Modern Persian Literature (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000); and Mohammad Reza Ghanoonparvar, Prophets of Doom: Literature as a Socio-Political Phenomenon in Modern Iran (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984). For examples of scholars assessing an Iranian work’s “greatness” in relation to the degree of its affinity with Western templates, see Hūrā Yāvarī, Ravānkavī va Adabīyāt [Psychoanalysis and Literature] (Tehran: Sukhan, 2008/1387). The prominent literary critic Homayoun Katouzian, as well, saw the greatness of Sādiq Hidāyat in his “psycho-fiction” reflecting “the essentially subjective nature of the stories, which brings together the psychological, the ontological and the metaphysical in an indivisible whole.” Sadeq Hedayat: His Work and His Wondrous World (London: Routledge, 2008), 10. Many, such as the influential critic Rizā Barāhinī, embodied all these perspectives in their histories. Highlighting Jamālzādah’s failure to write “authentic stories,” for example, Barāhinī had this to say: “Jamālzādah is temporally contemporary to Thomas

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9

10 11

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14 15

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Mann, Herman Hesse, André Gide, [E. M.] Forster, [Aldous] Huxley, [Ernest] Hemingway, and [William] Faulkner but from a literary point of view, [he is] the contemporary of some nineteenth century authors. This is a disaster.” Rizā Barāhinī, Qissah Nivīsī [Story Writing], 4th ed. (Tehran: Nigāh, 2014/1393), 517. In the succinct words of one critic, “What has been written about Jamālzādah in contemporary histories is that he is the pioneer of story writing, and [that] the collection of short stories Once upon a Time was a masterpiece of its kind but [that] what he wrote after that had little value.” Homayoun Katouzian, “Darbārah-yi Jamālzādah va Jamālzādah Shināsī” [About Jamālzādah and Studies of Jamālzādah], in Yād-i Sayyid Muhammad ‘Ali Jamālzādah [In Memory of Sayyid Muhammad ‘Ali Jamālzādah], ed. ‘Ali Dihbāshī (Tehran: Sālis, 1998/1377), 183. Dihbāshī, Yād-i Sayyid Muhammad ‘Ali Jamālzādah (henceforth: In Memory), 169. See also Yahyā Āryanpūr, Az Sabā tā Nīmā [From Sabā to Nīmā] (Tehran: Zavvār, 2008/1387), 280–1. For an example of a dedicated study on this topic in English, see Haideh Daragahi, “The Shaping of the Modern Persian Short Story: Jamalzadeh’s ‘Preface’ to Yiki Bud, Yiki Nabud,” The Literary Review 18 (Fall, 1974): 18–37. “It is only with [Jamālzādah’s] Once upon a Time that the realist school and style found first expression in Iran, and it is this same school and style that in fact became the new cornerstone of story-telling in Iran and only from that day on can one speak of the emergence of novellas, stories, and novels in Iran’s millennial literature.” Cited in Āryanpūr, From Sabā tā Nīmā, vol. 2, 281. See also Dihbāshī, In Memory, 97. Published in the proceedings of the congress under the title Nakhustīn Kungurah-i Nivīsandigān-i Iran [Iranian Writers’ First Congress] (Tehran, 1946/1325), 156. See, among other examples, Hasan Kamshad, Modern Persian Prose Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 93, 106; Āryanpūr, From Sabā tā Nīmā, 280–1; Mihrdād Mihrīn, Sarguzasht va Kār-i Jamālzādah [The Biography and Career of Jamālzādah] (Tehran: Kānūn-i Ma‘rifat, 1963/1342), 76, 130–3; as well as the following scholars featured in Dihbāshī, In Memory: Îraj Afshār, 142–3; ‘Abdul ‘Ali Dastghayb, 246; Ibrāhīm Istajī, 307–310; Tūraj Rahnamā, 411–14; Muhammad ‘Ali Homayoun Katouzian, 579; the Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on Jamālzādah translated by Mānī Pidrām Fard, 603; and Time magazine’s reportage (28 November 1997) on the passing away of Jamālzādah, translated by Vīdā Farhūdī, 605. Similar views by orientalist scholars are quoted in Mihrīn, The Biography and Career: Van Yan Rypka, 149; T. P. Heaten, 151; Franciszek Machalski, 156; B. Nikitine, 159–61; and A. Schoiteff, 172. Kāvah Guharīn, “Were It That This Story Would Not End . . . ,” in Dihbāshī, In Memory, 240. See also Jamāl Mirsādiqī, ibid., 295, Ibrāhīm Istajī, ibid., 305, and Mihrīn, The Biography and Career, 191. For an example pertaining to Jamālzādah, see Ruyā Litāfatī’s “Jamālzādah and Maupassant” in which the author discloses that Jamālzādah’s short story “Dūstī-yi Khālah Khirsah” (The Friendship of Auntie Bear) is “a half-baked imitation” of Guy de Maupassant’s “Boute de Suif,” originally translated into Persian by Muhammad Qāzī as “Tupulī” (Chubby). The author goes on to say, “In fact Jamālzādah’s story is a case in point of the degree of the influence of the structural patterns of French literary fiction on Iran’s embryonic literature, [an influence] that can also be seen in the works of Sādiq Hidāyat.” In Dihbāshī, In Memory, 225. Peter J. Checklowski, in Dihbāshī, In Memory, 203. For a post-structuralist analysis of the “death of the author,” see Ronald Barthes’ “The Death of the Author,” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 2010), 1322. For a critique of this vision, seeing the author as a classifying principle within a discursive formation, see Séan Burke, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida, 3rd ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008). Jamālzādah’s letter to ‘Ali Dihbāshī dated 13 January 1993 (23 Dey 1371), in Dihbāshī, In Memory, 598. See also ‘Abudl ‘Ali Dastghayb, “Jaygāh-i Jamālzādah dar Nasr-i

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Hamid R. Yazdi Naw-i Fārsī” [Jamālzādah’s Place in Modern Persian Prose], in Dihbāshī, In Memory, 252. Muhammadi ‘Ali Jamālzādah. “Mujdah-i Rastākhīz-i Adabī,” Kūshish, no. 15 (March 1933/Esfand 1311), quoted in Mihrīn, The Biography and Career, 195–206. Mīrābidīnī, among many others, noted Jamālzādah’s infatuation with tradition and mysticism. Dihbāshī, In Memory, 158. Ridgeon also describes how Jamālzādah nostalgically described the physical, moral and spiritual values associated with the traditional wrestling houses known as zūrkhānah with great awe. See Lloyd Ridgeon, Morals and Mysticism: A History of Sufi-futuwwat in Iran (New York: Routledge, 2010), 167. For Jamālzādah’s own views on mysticism, see Muhammad ‘Ali Jamālzādah, Qissah Nivīsī [Story-Writing], ed. ‘Ali Dihbāshī (Tehran: Sukhan, 1999/1378), 391–400. Michel Cuypers asserts that “we can observe, from his very first stories, the dichotomous presence of Western and Eastern elements in this writer” Dihbāshī, In Memory, 68. In analyzing Jamālzādah’s “Dīdār-i Nīmah Shab” (Midnight Visit, ca. 1911/1290), Cuypers believes that Jamālzādah’s story was modelled after François-René de Chateaubriand’s Atala, ou Les Amours de Deux Sauvages dans le Desert (1801). Yet later he admits that the young Jamālzādah had centred his story around the Islamic maxim Hu-w-al-bāqī wa kull-i shay’ hālik alongside elements of “classical didactic hikāyats.” Dihbāshī, In Memory, 68–71. Ghulām Husayn Yūsifī recognizes that even though Jamālzādah has some European influences in his works, he has “preserved his Iranian spirit” and is against imitation. Yūsifī asserts that in Jamālzādah’s works one of the characters often expresses his observations or experiences while at the same time this does not preclude action in the story. The former is assumed to be an element of traditional Persian “story-telling” (qissah gū’ī) while the latter is said to derive from Western techniques of prose fiction. By combining the two, Jamālzādah has achieved “a certain authenticity in his book.” Ibid., 51, 124. Ābidīnī also notes that Jamālzādah makes conscious use of European fictional techniques while at the same time drawing on ancient traditions of storytelling in Iran, ibid., 151. In Heshmat Moayyad’s estimation, Jamālzādah “is the product of two worlds. . . . This remarkably congenial amalgam of the two cultures made him an expatriate defender of old Iranian values as well as an effective, long-distance promoter and propagator of Western ideas among generations of younger writers living in a rapidly changing Iran.” Heshmat Moayyad and Paul Sprachman, Once upon a Time, 1. Muhammad Qazvīnī, Bīst Maqālah-yi Qazvīnī [Twenty Essays by Qazvīnī] (Tehran: Sharq, 1954/1333). Qazvīnī’s article had originally been written 14 November 1924 (Aban 23, 1303), three years after the publication of Yakī Būd u Yakī Nabūd. Jamālzādah’s History of Russo-Iranian Relations was initially serialized in the Berlin-based journal Kāvah in 1921/1300 and later published in book form at Tehran in 2005/1384. Farang, or Farangistān (meaning “the land of the Franks”), represents more than its physical reality in the form of borders, peoples or institutions. This coinage from the Qajar era is a loaded term that invokes far more than what a geographical designation would signify. In fact, the imaginary geography of Farang includes America. It is, in the context of early modern writings in Iran, associated with an imaginary horizon of all that is good (law and order, progress, freedom, reason, etc.) or all that is to be shunned (infidelity, decadence, imperial exploitation, deceit, etc.). Farangī or Farangī Ma‘āb are the adjectival derivatives meaning “the people of Europe,” “European” or “Europeanized dandy.” Farang was imagined as such until at least the late 1960s: “My intention everywhere [I use] the word Farang or Farangistān is all Farangīs and their lands whether European or American or otherwise.” Jamālzādah, Qissah Nivīsī I will consequently be using the words “Europe” and Farang (as well as their derivatives) alternatively from this point forward in order that the intended sense of the words in Persian may be retained and conveyed. No one seems to have been able to assign a precise date to this munāzirah. At the conclusion of the narrative in one of the extant manuscripts (at the Malik Archives in Tehran), the author self-identifies as “Muhammad Taqī son of the late Âqā ‘Alī Naqī known as

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27 28

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Mirza Hidāyat Allah Shīrazī.” However, this appears next to the clearly fictive date given “at the forty fifth hour of the tenth day of the week [dah shanbah] in the month of zī panbah [a fictive month] . . . in the year 15764 before Hijrah.” Ahmad Mujāhid, ed., Shaykh u Shūkh: Bahsī Intiqādī bayn-i Shaykh-i Sunnat Garā va Shūkh-i Mutijaddid, Risālahī Sīyāsī Ijtimā ‘ī az Avākhir-i Dawrān-i Qājār [Shaykh u Shûkh: A Critical Debate between a Traditionalist Cleric and the Reformist Students, a Sociopolitical Treatise from the End of the Qajar Era] (Tehran: Rawzanah, 1994/1373), 82. The author’s self-identification as the person named above, therefore, could be equally fictive. Another extant manuscript held at Ayatollah Mar‘ashī Najafī Library (No. 4379) in Qum, Iran, is dated “seventeen Rabi’al-Awwal 1303 [twenty fourth December 1885].” To my knowledge, no other source specifies a date for this munāzirah. Mujāhid, Shaykh u Shūkh, 2, 9, 23, 26, 29 and 25, respectively. Emphasis added. Muhammad ‘Ali Jamālzādah, Khātirāt-i Sayyid Muhammad ‘Ali Jamālzādah [The Memoirs of Sayyid Muhammad ‘Ali Jamālzādah], ed. Īraj Afshār and ‘Ali Dihbāshī (Tehran: Sukhan, 1999/1378), 306. Emphasis added. Hidāyatullāh Hakīmullāhī, Gīguluhā va Gīgulithā-yi Tihrān [The Gigolos and Gigolettes of Tehran] (Tehran: Shirkat-i Sahāmī-yi Chāp, 1947/1326), 4. Emphasis added. Among others, see his Yād Dāshthā-yi Yak Dīktātur [Diaries of a Dictator] (Tehran: Mihr, 1956/1335); Bā Man bih Dār ul-majānīn Bīyāyīd [Come with Me to the Psychiatric Ward] (Tehran, 1947/1326); Bā Man bih Shahr-i Naw Bīyāyīd [Come with Me to the Red District] (Tehran: Shirkat-i Sahāmī-yi Chāp, 1948/1327). In its classical usage, the phrase ushtur-gāv-palang (alternatively, shutur-gāv-palang) signifies a giraffe. The giraffe was said to have the body and hooves of a cow, the patterned skin of a cheetah and a long neck like a camel. See relevant entry in the Dihkhudā Lexicon. It is important to note that the use of the term “genre” is useful only insofar as it denotes a formal composition. It must not be understood in the literal sense of an aesthetic movement, for much in the writings of the period does not adhere to the formal requirements of the munāzirah as a literary genre, though these writings almost invariably draw from its dialogical orientation. It would therefore be more accurate to speak of the munāzirah as a discursive formation in its Foucauldian sense. Parvīn I’tisāmī (1907–1941/1285–1320) is often rightly invoked as the only prominent poet in the modern era who continued to employ the munāzirah in its classical capacity. However, this invocation has been made in reference to I’tisāmī’s adherence to the formal constraints of the classical genre rather than her subject matter, which vacillated between moral-philosophical musings and contemporary issues. What is lost to generically oriented assessments is that even when a polemic was not written compositionally as a munāzirah, it was invested in its dialogical approach towards competing ideologies. For a specimen of I’tisāmī’s poetry, see: Parvīn I’tisāmī, A Nightingale’s Lament: Selections from the Poems and Fables of Parvin Eʼtesami (1907–41), trans. Heshmat Moayyad and A. Margaret Arent Madelung (Lexington, KY: Mazda Publishers, 1985). Despite the conspicuous and widespread employment of the munāzirah in contemporary Iran, Atabaki categorically denies the existence of debate in “Persian classical literature [in which] the dialogue is virtually unknown.” Analyzing a handful of random munāzirahs, he comes to the unqualified conclusion that Iranian “authors in the second half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth-century adapted an alien, characteristically European literary form for their own purposes.” Touraj Atabaki, “Dialogue, A Literary Form in Persian Nineteenth/Twentieth Century Political Discourse,” in Proceedings of the Second European Conference of Iranian Studies, ed. Bert G Fragner, Christa Frager, Gherardo Gnoli, Roxane Haag-Higuchi, Mauro Maggi, and Paola Orsatti (Rome: Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1995), 39–46. In my analysis of the narrative features of the munāzirah henceforth, I refer to several contemporary texts. Space limitations do not allow for an in-depth treatment of each text. Therefore, I will only make passing reference to the titles or sections of each work. Further bibliographic information can be obtained from the relevant endnotes.

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32 The “Friend” features in many munāzirahs (and other texts within advice literature) in various incarnations. His agency is not limited merely to being an opponent in its modern sense, however. As his designation (Friend) suggests, his main function is to partake in the moral reform of his misguided companion. The rivalry dramatized in the munāzirah between contending figures must be seen in this context: not solely as dialectic opposition in its modern sense, but as dialogic association. While this association often yielded a consensus in classical advice literature, it became characterized more and more by contestation in the transformed munāzirah. This explains the abandoned or unfinished texts of many munāzirahs as will become evident in some examples below. For the role of the Friend in the formation and reformation of Persianate selves, see Mana Kia, “Indian Friends, Iranian Selves, Persianate Modern,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 36, no. 3 (December, 2016): 398–417. 33 Kitābchah-i Ghaybī [The Unseen Notebook] was written circa 1858–60/1237–39. This treatise is written in the form of direct address to Mirza Ja’far Khan Mushīr al-Dawlah, then the head of the Supreme Council of Ministers set up by Nāsir al-Dīn Shah. Rafīq u Vazīr (The Friend and the Minister) is a conversation between a concerned enquirer (the Friend) and a corrupt minister. The former is personified as the Rafīq (Friend) and the latter as Vazīr (minister). These character archetypes are in fact anthropomorphized social ideologues, one propagating fundamental reform and the other intent on prolonging the status quo for, mainly, personal gain. 34 Hujjatullāh Asīl, Risālah hā-yi Mirzā Malkum Khān Nāzim al-Dawlah [The Treatises of Mirza Malkum Khan Nāzim al-Dawlah] (Tehran: Nashr-i Nay, 2009/1388), 60. 35 No one seems to have dated this unpublished munāzirah. The text itself, however, gives indications of the time it was composed since most references are to the final years of Muhammad Shah’s reign (r. 1834–1848/1213–1227) and the first half of Nāsir al-Dīn Shah’s rule (r. 1848–1896/1227–1275). For references to the probable date, see Tafsīl-i Guftigū-yi yak Mīrzā-yi ‘Ālim bā yak ‘Avām-i Mustahzar, n.d., Digital Collections, 7406, University of Tehran Central Library and Archives, 21, 43, 51, 57, and 67. 36 The now well-known munāzirah, Muqīm u Musāfir (The Resident and the Traveler), written in 1909/1288, purports to be “volume one of the book” on its last page. The texts of Shaykh u Shūkh (The Cleric and the Clowns) and Musāhibah-i Sayyāh-i Īrānī bā Shakhs-i Hindī (The conversation between an Iranian Traveler and an Indian Person) also claim to be the first volume in a series of volumes to follow. Numerous serialized munāzirahs such as these were fragments of future instalments which never appeared. 37 The chapter referred to is a prayer in a collection of prayers, Sahīfah-yi Sajjādīyyah, reportedly authored by the fourth Shiite Imam, Zayn al-‘Ābidīn. The book is popularly known as the Bible of the Prophet’s family (ahl-i bayt). 38 Tafsīl-i Guftigū-yi yak Mīrzā-yi ‘Ālim bā yak ‘Avām-i Mustahzar, 43–4. 39 Ibid., 51, 70; 47, 70 and 49, respectively. 40 See for example the hikāyats relating some events surrounding Napoleon’s concubine, Josephine, and Peter the Great’s visits to Europe, ibid., 47, 72, respectively. The hikāyat is a traditional form of storytelling where moral and ethical axioms are presented in the form of a short tale or allegory, in prose or in verse. The great mediaeval poet Sa’dī’s Gulistān (Rose Garden), considered the highest achievement in Persian prose, is a compendium of such hikāyats which have served as a treasure house of wisdom and axioms for generations. For more information, see Franklin Lewis, “Golesān-e Saʿdi,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, 11, no. 1: 79–86, www.iranicaonline.org/articles/golestan-e-sadi (accessed September 14, 2016). 41 Nāsikh al-Tavārīkh (lit. Transcriber of Histories) is a universal history written by Mirza Muhammad Taqī Sipihr in nine volumes, composed on orders from Muhammad Shah Qajar (r. 1834–1848/1213–1227) and his Prime Minister Haji Mirza Āqāsī. Its composition started in 1258/1842 and ended in 1858/1274. 42 ‘Abdul Razāq Dunbulī (1754–1827/1167–1242) cooperated with Mirza Rāzī and Mirza ‘Abdul Karīm Ishtihārdī in the writing of Zīnat al-Tavārīkh (Ornament of Histories) circa 1799/1214.

Rival texts 73 43 Tafsīl-i Guftigū-yi yak Mīrzā-yi ‘Ālim bā yak ‘Avām-i Mustahzar, 31, 50–1, respectively. 44 Mustashār al-Dawlah is considered to be among the pioneers of reform in modern Iran. See, among many other sources, Nāzim ul-Islām Kirmānī, Tārīkh-i Bīdarī-yi Irāniān [History of Iranians’ Awakening], vol. 1 (Tehran: Intishārāt-i Bunyād-i Farhang-i Iran, 1979/1357), 179. Kirmānī considered Yak Kalimah among the pioneers of the social movement calling for freedom and reform in Iran and an influential work in awakening the masses. It later served as the political manifesto of the Anjuman-i Makhfī (Secret Society) which was established circa 1904/1283 (Āryanpūr, From Sabā tā Nīmā, vol. 1, 30 and 280 onward). Also see, Firaydūn Ādamīyyat, Fikr-i Āzādī va Muqaddamah-i Nihzat-i Mashrūtīyyat [Awareness of Freedom and the Prologue to the Constitutional Movement] (Tehran: Sukhan, 1961/1340), 194. The treatise was published at least twice before the author’s death in 1895/1274 and twice after his demise, once in 1906/1285 in Tabriz and again in May 1907/Khordad 1286 at the Royal Printing House in Tehran. See Ali Asghar Seyed-Ghorab and Sen McGlinn, trans., The Essence of Modernity: Mirza Yusof Khan Mustashar ad-Dowla Tabrizi’s Treatise on Codified Law (Yak Kaleme) (Amsterdam & West Lafayette, IN: Rozenberg Publishers & Purdue University Press, 2008), xvi. Also see Muhamad Ismā’īl Rizvānī, “Bīst u du risālah-i tablīghātī az dawrahi inqilāb-i mashrūtīyyat” [Twenty-Two Propagandist Treatises from the Constitutional Era], Rāhnamā-yi Kitāb 12, no. 5–6 (Summer, 1969/1348): 229–240. 45 According to the Dihkhudā Lexicon, Hātaf-i Ghaybī is an angel that calls out news of the invisible, metaphysical world to earthlings. The figure has a long-standing presence in Persian literary tradition. 46 I gained privileged access to this valuable unpublished manuscript through the generosity of Mr. Hamid Amjad, who kindly gave me access to his private library in the Fall of 2012 in Tehran. It is quite probable that this collection was written by a prince, a courtier or a court official of some stature since the author is clearly familiar with many highranking officials and court personalities and has had access as an attendee to the play staged before the Shah. Additionally, the text of the munāzirah and the author’s animosity towards the prime minister betrays the type of court intrigue that eventually led to the Shah’s dismissal of Mushīr al-Dawlah in 1873/1252. For further information on the conspiracy against the prime minister, see Ādamīyyat, Awareness of Freedom, 91–2. 47 Literally “grocer’s play.” The characters involved in this play are a grocer and a couple of rascals who harass the former and continually distract him while robbing him of his inventory. In the process, the trio expose the corruption of government officials and the miserable state of security in the country. 48 It is not clear who the author of this popular play is. Some scholars (Āryanpūr, From Sabā tā Nīmā, 326–7) have attributed it to Muhammad Hasan Khan I’timād al-Saltanah. Others believe the play was written by Amīn al-Dawlah Kāshī or by Mirza Muhammad Sa’īd Lashkar. For a review of the literature on this topic, see Jalāl Matīnī, “Namāyish Nāmah-i Baqāl Bāzī dar Huzūr (Matn-i Kāmil)” [Grocer’s Play before His Highness (Complete Text)], Iran Nameh 26 (1989): 286–90. 49 These insights follow the definition of intertextuality by Kristeva and Barthes. For Kristeva, intertextuality involves “a vision of texts as always in a state of production, rather than being products to be quickly consumed.” Graham Allen, Intertextuality (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 34. Similarly for Barthes, “meaning occurs because of the play of signifiers, not because a signified can be found to stabilize a signifier.” Ibid., 74. 50 What is known as the Constitutional Revolution spanned the years 1906–1911 and led to the establishment of the first consultative assembly (majlis) in Iran. This munāzirah, written by Mirza Sayyid Hasan Kāshānī, was first serialized in the influential journal Habl al-Matīn of Calcutta between 1898–99/1277–78. It started on 2 August 1898 (11 Mordad 1277) and continued until 11 September 1899 (20 Shahrivar 1278). The author himself mentions in the prologue that the work was serialized “in 1894 . . . in one of the [foreign] newspapers.” Sayyid Hasan Kāshānī, Mukālimah-i Sayyāh-i Īrānī bā Shakhs-i

74

51 52 53 54 55 56 57

58 59 60 61 62

63 64 65 66 67 68 69

70 71

Hamid R. Yazdi Hindī [The Conversation between an Iranian Traveler and an Indian Person], ed. Ghulām Husayn Mīrzā Sālih (Tehran: Kavīr, 2001/1380), 25. It was shortly after published in book form at least twice in 1286/1907. See Mūsā Najafī, Bunyād-i Falsfah-i Sīyāsī dar Iran [The Foundation of Political Philosophy in Iran] (Tehran: Markaz-i Nashr-i Dānishgāhī, 1997/1376), 61. Kāshānī, The Conversation, 21–3. Ibid., 25. My translation from the original: shikāyat dar hikāyat nāzanīn ast / shikāyat ar kunī rāhash chunīn ast. Kāshānī, The Conversation, 26. Considered the master of Persian language and a source of ethical authority, Sa’dī’s maxims were “known to all, from the king to the peasant.” John Malcolm, Sketches of Persia (London: Casselle, 1888), 86. Kāshānī, The Conversation, 45–6. Ibid., 128, 138. The first image portrays Nādir Shah (1688–1747/1067–1126), and the second depicts Amīr Kabīr (1807–1852/1186–1230). Both are invoked as exemplary and patriotic individuals, the former as a monarch who extended the borders of Persia to India and the latter as an able prime minister who tirelessly worked for the progress of the country. Kāshānī, The Conversation, 108, 133, respectively. Kāshānī, The Conversation, 222–5. Proverbial pre-Islamic Persian king known for his just government. The original reads: az hizārān qissah-i kāmil bih nāqis qissahī / iktifā kardam tu jū zīn nuktah kāmil qissahā. Kāshānī, The Conversation, 231. Kāshānī, The Conversation, 23. Mirza Muhammad Taqī Khan Farāhānī, known as Amīr Kabīr (the grand minister), occupies a unique space in the annals of the modern history of Iran. He is often credited as an able and patriotic minister who worked tirelessly to improve the miserable conditions of Iran. Among his many reforms are the establishment of the first modern polytechnic academy, known as the Dar al-Funūn, in 1851/1230, the founding of one of the first newspapers, called Vaqāyi’-i Ittifāqīyah (News or Times) in Iran in the same year, the ordering of the country’s financial affairs, and the establishment of Iranian embassies in London and St. Petersburg. For more information, see Hamed Algar, “AMĪR KABĪR, MĪRZĀ TAQĪ KHAN” (1989), Encyclopaedia Iranica, 1, Fasc. 9: 959–63, www. iranicaonline.org/articles/amir-e-kabir-mirza-taqi-khan (accessed September 23, 2016). Kāshānī, The Conversation, 66–7, 157. Quran 49:12. The full phrase reads: “O believers, avoid much suspicion, for some suspicion is a grave sin, and do not spy [on each other], nor backbite [against one another].” Kāshānī, The Conversation, 101–7. Ibid., 172. Asīl, Treatises of Mirza Malkum Khan, 11. Ibid., 136. The phrase used is ūlūm-i kasbī or acquired knowledge. The author speaks about the necessity of supplementing intellect with acquired knowledge because by itself the intellect cannot figure out the recent inventions and advances and needs to be accompanied by acquired knowledge. It is implied, therefore, that all officials must be educated in modern sciences. Asīl, Treatises Mirza Malkum Khan, 141–51. A clerical polymath, Ansārī wrote social, political and ethical treatises. Ansārī had undergone seminary education and was trained as a cleric. He was also a journalist and founded his own journal. Muhammad Sadr Hāshimī, Tārīkh-i Jarāyid va Majallāt-i Iran [A History of Periodicals and Magazines in Iran], vol. 4 (Isfahan: Kamāl, 1985/1364), 164. Also see Jamshīd Mazāhirī, “Mirzā Hasan Khān Jābirī Ansāri 1287–1376 HQ Mu‘allif-i Tārīkh-i Isfahān” [Mirzā Hasan Khān Jābirī Ansāri 1870–1957 the Author of History of Isfahan], Mirās-i Jāvīdān 19–20 (Fall and Winter, 1998/1377): 186.

Rival texts 75 72 Najafī, The Foundation of Political Philosophy, 27. 73 Apparently, copies of the magazine were swept up so quickly that the author himself later would pay a considerable sum to get a copy of his own. See Najafī, The Foundation of Political Philosophy, 27–8. 74 It reads: Salām ‘alaykum, bih hukmullāh bilkhayr wal ‘āfīyah wal surūr, meaning “peace upon you, at the command of Allah, as well as welfare, prosperity and happiness.” 75 Emphasis added to words that appear as such in the original, albeit transliterated into Persian. Najafī, The Foundation of Political Philosophy, 411–12. 76 Najafī, The Foundation of Political Philosophy, 429. According to the Dihkhudā Lexicon, the term shirr u virr itself is a Persianized loan word from the French charivari meaning “ruckus.” 77 Najafī, The Foundation of Political Philosophy, 431–4. 78 In Persian the doubling of the same word by replacing its initial letter in the second coinage creates a rhythmic effect that gives the initial word a generic connotation. As such, translation fails to give an English equivalent. My use of “moetry” is therefore to echo the rhythm in the original, through merging the words “musical” and “poetry.” 79 Najafī, The Foundation of Political Philosophy, 440–2. 80 The periodical Habl al-Matīn, for example, considered Reza Shah’s (r. 1305–1320/1925– 1941) proposal for a uniform national attire a “kūdatā-yi akhlāqī-yi lāzim” (necessary moral coup d’etat), no. 1 (27 November 1928/6 Azar 1307): 25–26. 81 Besides its appearance in this munāzirah (Najafī, The Foundation of Political Philosophy, 424), phrases approximating this sense abound in many writings in this period. See for example Shaykh u Shūkh and Guftigū-yi Mirzā va ‘Avām, discussed above. 82 Najafī, The Foundation of Political Philosophy, 412. 83 Ibid., 412. 84 For a tropological account of the anthropomorphization of the nation, see Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, “From Patriotism to Matriotism: A Tropological Study of Iranian Nationalism, 1870–1909,” Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 34 (2002): 217–38. For the prevalence of medical metaphors in nationalist discourse, see Mohamad TavakoliTarghi, “Tajaddud-i Rūzmarrah va ‘Āmpūl-i Tadayyun’” [Quotidian Modernity and the “Injection of Religiosity”], Iran Nameh 24, no. 4 (Winter, 2009): 41–76. 85 Najafī, The Foundation of Political Philosophy, 448–51. For a brief history of the Lālah Zār Avenue and its transformations, see Sayyid Mohsen Habībī and Zahrā Aharī, “Lālah Zār – ‘Arsah-yi Tafarruj, az Bāgh tā Khīyābān” [Lālah Zār – Space of Entertainment, from Garden to Avenue], Hunarhā-yi Zībā 34 (Summer, 2008/1387): 5–15, as well as Nāsir Najmī, Tehrān-i ‘Ahd-i Nāsirī [Tehran during Nāsir al-Dīn Shah’s Times] (Tehran: Attār, 1985/1364). 86 Najafī, The Foundation of Political Philosophy, 452. 87 Known as Panchatantra, this ancient collection of animal fables is believed to have originated in India between the years 500 to 100 BCE. It is a collection of interrelated tales within a frame story involving two jackals Kalīlah and Dimnah. In the sixth century CE, it was brought into Iran by the royal physician Burzūya and translated into Middle Persian. Ibn al-Muqaffa’ translated it from Middle Persian into Arabic after the advent of Islam. For further information, see Mahmoud Omidsalar, “KALILA WA DEMNA ii. The Translation by Abu’l-Maʿāli Naṣr-Allāh Monši,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, 15, Fasc. 4: 386–97, www.iranicaonline.org/articles/kalila-demna-ii (accessed September 25, 2016). 88 Marzbān Nāmah is largely an adaptation of Kalīlah u Dimnah. It was first written in Tabarī, an Iranian dialect, and later reproduced into Persian by Sa’d al-Dīn Varāvīnī in the thirteenth century CE. For more information, see Zabīhullāh Safā, Tārīkh-i Adabīyāt dar Irān [History of Literature in Iran], vol. 2 (Tehran: Quqnūs, 2002/1381), 364–6.

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89 Najafī, The Foundation of Political Philosophy, 453–86. 90 Ibid., 489–90. 91 These French words are not offered as translations but are transcribed and embedded within the Persian narrative intended to carry their original French sense: garcon (ibid., 449), madam (452), antique, musée (462), charlatan (479), ultimatum (485), monsieur (486), injection (488, 491), famille (488), program (489), toilet (491). Persian dialects from around the country are also included: Kāshānī (explained as such by the author in a footnote, ibid., 463), Khurāsānī (also pointed out in a footnote, 464), and Turkishaccented Persian in an implicit parody of Ahmad Shah (r. 1909–1925/1288–1304) as the infant king accepting his royal appointment. 92 Najafī, The Foundation of Political Philosophy, 454, 474–8. 93 Ibid., see pages 468–9, 473, 475, 479, 483 for examples. 94 Ibid., 468–95. 95 Najafī, The Foundation of Political Philosophy, 451. Both Lurs and Bakhtīyārīs are a southwestern tribal peoples of Iran. Under the command of Sardār Asa’d, they played a key role in the conquest of Tehran and the reestablishment of the constitutional government in 1909/1288. 96 Najafī, The Foundation of Political Philosophy, 473. 97 Perceived as a womanly practice now common among men who emulate farangī manners. 98 The original phrase is “fiqh-i farānsah.” Since the term “fiqh” signifies Islamic jurisprudence which is now attributed to France, I have coined the term “Frenchislamic” to convey that sense. 99 This expression is derived from Quran 3:40 in which God is projected as the agent of his own will: “Yea, thus is Allah. He does what he wills” (kazālik allāhu yaf‘alu mā yashā’). To use this expression in reference to the Farangī is to emphasize the blasphemous god-like authority he wields over the country’s fate. The full excerpt is from pages 496–8. 100 Muhammad ‘Ali Jamālzādah, “Du Sā‘atī bā Mardī Adīb u Dānishmand” [Two Hours with a Learned Man of Letters], Yaghmā 180 (July, 1963/Tīr 1342): 165–8. Ansārī’s second work, Afsānah-i Mahjūr u Maghrūr (The Story of the Alienated and the Haughty), to which Jamālzādah refers, is couched within a larger volume titled Āftāb-i Dirakhshandah (The Shining Sun, 1923/1302) in which modern discoveries in the sciences are verified against Quranic verses – a practice which, as we have seen, was common in the munāzirah. ‘Abdul Rahīm Talibov was an Iranian intellectual and social reformer. Zaynul ‘Ābidīn Marāghahī’s Sīyāhat Nāmah-i Ibrāhīm Bayg (The Travelogue of Ibrāhīm Beig) was published in Istanbul in 1903/1282. Muhammad Bāqir Mirza Khusravī’s Shams u Tughrā (Shams and Tughrā) was completed in 1909/1288. 101 Even in this rather lengthy detour from the main topic of this essay, I have had occasion to only sample a handful of instances of the sheer omnipresence of the munāzirah in the writings of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Iran, which include myriads of similar texts in the form of treatises (scientific, philosophical, religious, economic, political), monographs, newspaper articles, plays, popular songs, histories and stories that readily fit the enunciative principle of the munāzirah. I have also only highlighted some of the narrative features of the munāzirah, but not its discursive relation with historical developments in contemporary Iran. For a brief discussion of the latter, see my “The Dialogical Tradition of Iranian Modernity: Monāzereh, Simultaneity, and the Making of Modern Iran,” Iranian Studies 49, no. 3 (May, 2016): 327–57. For more on discursive formations and enunciative principles, see Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Vintage Books, 2010), particularly pages 106–17. 102 Īraj Afshār, Zindagī-yi Tūfānī, Khātirāt-i Sayyid Hasan Taqī Zādah [A Tempestuous Life, Memoirs of Saayid Hasan Taqī Zādah] (Tehran: Intishārāt-i ‘Ilmī, 1993/1372), 15–25. For an account of some of his transformations, see Muhammad ‘Ali Homayoun

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103

104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118

119 120 121

122 123

Katouzian, “Sayyid Hasan Taqī Zādah: Sih Zindigī dar Yak ‘Umr” [Sayyid Hasan Taqī Zādah: Three lives in one lifetime], Iran Nameh 21, no. 1–2 (Spring and Summer, 2003): 7–48. In an often quoted proclamation, Taqī Zādah declared, “The only [solution is that] Iran must become Europeanized in appearance and in essence and in body and in soul. Period.’’ (Īrānbāyad zāhiran va bātinan va jisman va rūhan farangī ma‘āb shavad va bas). “Dawrah-i jadīd” [New Series], Kāvah 5, no. 1 (22 January 1920/1 Bahman 1298), 1. Hasan Taqī Zādah, “Dībāchah-i sāl-i duvvum-i kāvah” [Prologue to the Second Year of Kāvah], Kāvah 1, no. 2 (11 January 1921/21 Dey 1299), 1. Jamālzādah, Memoirs, 216. Ibid., 212–18. Ibid., 172. Ibid., 172–84. Ibid., 229. Qazvīnī, Twenty Essays, 274–5. Muhammad ‘Ali Jamālzādah, Yakī Būd u Yakī Nabūd [Once upon a Time] (Tehran: Kānūn-i Ma’rifat, 1954/1333), 31. All quotes referenced henceforth are taken from the collection’s fifth edition cited in this note. Ibid., 41. Ibid., 33. Ibid., 38–42. In Quran 55:14, they are said to be created out of a fire without smoke. Surah 72 in the Quran is entitled Al-Jinn. Kāvah 1, no. 2 (11 January 1921/21 Dey 1299): 8. Jamālzādah, Once upon a Time, 5th ed., i. Story and discourse are employed here in the capacity proposed by Todorov where story represents the isolated theme or argument of a given text, while discourse signifies the overall structure and narrative modes from which the story is derived. For more on these concepts, see Tsvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978). Jamālzādah, Once upon a Time, v–x. Ibid., 16–19. Paul Jürgen’s definition aptly covers the historical development and multi-generic orientation of the inshā’ as well as its status as the ideal form of writing: inshā’ is defined as “the process of creating or composing something as well as the result of this process and the rules of the art; it denotes a genre of prose literature, copies, drafts, or specimens of official and private correspondence. Their aim in composing or compiling works of enšā’ was to show what and how cultivated men should write to different individuals or groups on different occasions.” Paul Jürgen, “ENŠĀ’,” Encyclopaedia Iranica 8, Fasc. 5: 455–7, www.iranicaonline.org/articles/ensa (accessed September 20, 2016). Jamālzādah, Once upon a Time, 19–21. Examples abound in contemporary literature where a newspaper article, a treatise or a poem may self-identify as a “novel” (rumān in Persian). We have seen some examples of this in the discussion of the munāzirahs above (such as in The Treasury of Helpers and Shaykh and Shūkh: A Novel) or in Qazvīnī’s description of a high school textbook. For another such example, see Ā‘īnah-i Mashrūtah (Mirror of/for Constitutionalism) written in 1925/1304. In this book, the author presents the events of the Bolshevik revolution in story form, concluding that he has decided to tell his story “in the form of a ballad and a tale or novel” (bih tawr-i chakāmah u qissah yā rumān) to engage the literary tastes of Iranians. The entire book, of course, is in verse, in the form of mathnavī and modelled after the Shāhnamah of Firdawsī. Mirza Muhsin Dastgirdī, Ā‘īnah-i Mashrūtah [Mirror of/for Constitutionalism] (Tehran: Mihr Nāmag, 2006/1385), 35.

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124 Jamālzādah, Once upon a Time, 17–21. 125 Elliott Colla makes a similar observation regarding the Egyptian novel in “How Zaynab Became the First Arabic Novel,” History Compass 7, no. 1 (2009): 214–25. Commenting on Yakī Būd u Yakī Nabūd and its fame, the “Europeanized” Taqī Zādah did not once refer to it as a collection of short stories or a novel but as “one of the first amusing writings in the common language,” in Jamālzādah, Memoirs, 18. 126 Jamālzādah, Once upon a Time, 5th ed., v. 127 Sayyid Muhammad Ali Jamālzādah, Kashkūl-i Jamālī [Jamālī’s Compendium] (Tehran: Kānūn-i Ma’rifat, 1960/1339), 75–6. As the title suggests, this book itself is a compendium of genres: newspaper clippings, proverbs and popular sayings, poetry, and hikāyats, among others. 128 Ibid., 76–80. 129 Katouzian notes that after the demise of Kāvah and the appearance of Yakī Būd u Yakī Nabūd “Jamālzādah never again fit in with any of the social, political, and literary paradigms common and customary in contemporary Iran.” He fit in neither with the romantic nationalism nor with the romantic leftism of the time. The Aryanism and romantic nationalism which characterized not only official state ideology and policy but also the ideology of the dissent, did not appeal to Jamālzādah. When the heated debates over “old and new” poetry raged on the literary scene, Jamālzādah remained silent. Dihbāshī, In Memory, 188–91. 130 Jamālzādah, Once upon a Time, 40–1, 42, 44, 47, 56, 58. 131 Jamālzādah, Once upon a Time, 49, 42. 132 Literally meaning “faux col wearing dandy,” the figure of fukulī, similar to his other incarnation Farangī Ma‘āb, came to symbolize blind emulation of European values while the figure of the ākhūnd (cleric) at times embodied tradition’s regressive attitude. There are countless references to the two figures in contemporary writings in Iran. Similar to their portrayal in “Persian Is Sugar,” the two figures and their excesses are time and again blamed for the country’s many problems. For one such example see “Javāb-i āqā-yi barzakhī” [Response to Mr. Purgatory], Habl al-Matīn 21 (10 July 1925/18 Zil Hajjah 1343): 8–9, in which the author believes “neither ākhūnd nor fukulī is of use to us” (na ākhūnd va na fukulī bih kār-i mā mikhurad). 133 Jamālzādah, Once upon a Time, 61. 134 Ibid., 64. The attributes mashtī and zūrkhānah kār are traits associated with the valour and gallantry of national Iranian heroes. Jamālzādah had utmost respect for these purported manifestations of Iranian nature. For more information, see note 18. 135 Jamālzādah, Once upon a Time, 65–6. 136 Ibid., 83, 89–90. 137 Moayyad and Sprachman, trans., Once upon a Time, 11. I have used Moayyad and Sprachman’s translation of the title. 138 Jamālzādah, Once upon a Time, 97. 139 Ibid., 112–13. 140 Ibid., 116. 141 Ibid., 119. 142 “I have had an interest in recording [colloquial] expressions, proverbs, and phrases, both in the past and in present, for I view them as the foundation, skeleton, and substructure of language.” Jamālzādah, Memoirs, 40. 143 Ābidīnī in Dihbāshī, In Memory, 159. 144 This is sometimes perceived to be such an inadmissible assault on modern that some critics have classified Jamālzādah under “Traditionalist Story Writers.” Hasan Mīrābidīnī, Sayr-i Tahavvul-i Adabīyāt-i Dāstānī va Namāyishī az 1320 ta 1332 Shamsī [A Survey of the Development of Persian Fiction and Plays from 1941 to 1953] (Tehran: Nashr-i Āsār, 2012/1391), 157. 145 This work has been translated into English as such. Wilma. Heston, trans., Isfahan Is Half the World: Memories of a Persian Boyhood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).

Rival texts 79 146 My translation of the title of this work is literal. Idiomatically, the expression “two ends of the same burlap” in Persian conveys the sense of a group of people being of the same essence, as in “they are all the same.” This suggests that the two brothers who have taken drastically different routes in life (reminiscent of the cleric and the dandy in Jamālzādah’s first short story) are in essence manifestations of the same identity. 147 Some critics, of course, see this as a sign of Jamālzādah’s incompetency in writing a “truly modern” novel. See Ābidīnī in Dihbāshī, In Memory, 160–3 as well as note 144 above. 148 The published volume containing Jamālzādah’s letters preserved at the University of Tehran’s Central Library – which does not contain all of his correspondences – exceeds 800 pages. Authors consulted with Jamālzādah on a plethora of subjects on which they had written books and to which Jamālzādah often provided detailed responses and advice: Understanding Iranian Pistachios, Economy and Revolution, My Uncle Napoleon (a popular work of fiction), The History of Nishapur, Muhammad (PBUH) in the Torah and the Bible, among numerous others. Sūsan Asīlī, ed., Nāmah’hā-yi Jamālzādah dar Kitābkhānah-i Markazī-yi Dānishgāh-i Tehran [Jamālzādah’s Letters at the Central Library of the University of Tehran] (Tehran: Sukhan, 2008/1387), 76–83, 181–91, 192–202, 771–80. 149 Ibid., 176. 150 Hāshimī, A History of Periodicals and Magazines in Iran, 250. 151 Dihbāshī, In Memory, 134. 152 Ibid., 80–1. 153 See, for example, Hasan Ābidīnī in Dihbāshī, In Memory, 151. Incidentally, Ābidīnī refuses to give the works of Jamālzādah the status of “real stories” or fiction time and again on these same grounds, ibid., 153. Balaÿ and Cuypers also have a similar view. Cristophe Balaÿ and Michel Cuypers. Aux sources de la nouvelle persane (Tehran: Institut Français de Recherche en Iran, 1987), 187. 154 Dihbāshī, In Memory, 18. 155 Jamālzādah, Story-Writing, 32, 135–6. 156 Ibid., 80–1, 136–8. 157 Ibid., 133–4. 158 Ibid., 128, 74. 159 This list is not exclusive, nor is it exhaustive. Several other popularly used nouns or adjectives may readily fit within either category. The figure mashtī or mashdī (one who has made pilgrimage to the holy city of Mashhad in north east Iran), for example, may be added to the first group while the relatively more recent construct sūsūl (a fop) can be added to the second. They are also sometimes gender neutral. This points to the prevalence of these figures in the Iranian imaginary. Relatively few dedicated studies have explored this important aspect of Iranian culture, however. For some examples, see Willem Floor, “The Lūtīs: A Social Phenomenon in qājār Persia: A Reappraisal,” Die Welt des Islams, New Series 12, no. 1/2 (1971): 103–20; Homa Nateq, “Farang u farangī ma‘ābī dar Iran, risālah-i Shaykh u Shūkh” [Europe and European-Manneredness in Iran: The Treatise Shaykh u Shūkh], Zamānah Naw 12 (September 1986/Shahrivar 1365): 47–68; Nādirah Jalālī, “Lūtīgarī dar ‘Asr-i Qājār” [Lūtī-ism in the Qājār Era], Payām-i Bahāristān, 2nd ser., 3, no. 11 (Spring, 2011/1390): 131–58. 160 Other scholars have commented on the ambiguity of these figures. Regarding the figure of Farangī Ma‘āb, for instance, Afsaneh Najmabadi asserts that “The early usages of farangi’ma’ab were positive and neutral. Eventually, however, it became ambiguous, ambivalent, and completely negative,” in Women with Moustaches and Men without Beards (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 139. 161 Sayyid Fakhruddīn Shādmān, “Taskhīr-i Tamaddun-i Farangī” [The Conquest of Western Civilization], in Ārāyish va Pīrāyesh-i Zabān [Beautification and Purification of Language] (Tehran: Chāpkhānah-i Iran, 1948/1327), 18.

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162 Jalal Al-i Ahmad, Gharbzadagī [Westoxication] (Tehran: Intishārāt-i Ravāq, 1964/1343), 79. Alternative translations have been suggested for the concept of gharbzadagī. Some examples are “West-struck-ness,” “Euromania,” and “Occidentosis.” 163 Jamshīd Malikpūr, Adabīyāt-i Namāyishī dar Iran [Performance Literature in Iran], (Tehran: Tūs, 1984/1363), 185. 164 Murtazā Mushfiq Kāshānī, Tihrān-i Makhūf [Ghastly Tehran], 4th ed., vol. 2, (Tehran: Bungāh-i Matbū‘ātī-yi Parvīn, 1941/1320), 267–72. 165 Ibid., vol. 1, 156, 28, 180. 166 Ibid., vol. 1, 164–228, vol. 2, 50–74, 246. 167 Ibid., vol. 1, 3, vol. 2, 165, 190. 168 Sādiq Hidāyat, Hājī Āqā [Mister Hajji], 2nd ed. (Tehran: Intishārāt-i Jāvīdān, 1951/1330), 19, 87, 93, 98, 99, 106, 149, 163, 167, 184, 202–4. 169 The first edition of the novel was published in 11000 copies, as compared to the average 500–1000 copies for novels in the Iranian market at the time. It became the bestselling novel in the year of its publication. Hassan Mīrābidīnī, Sad Sāl Dāstān Nivīsī-yi Iran [A Hundred Years of Story Writing in Iran], 5th ed. (Tehran: Chishmah, 2008/1387), 284. 170 Husayn Madanī, Ismāl dar Nīyu Yurk [Ismāl in New York], 4th ed. (Tehran: Mu’assisahi Sharq, 1955/1334), 95. 171 Ibid., vol. 2, 125. 172 Ibid., vol. 3, 20. Cinema Civilization was an actual movie theatre in contemporary Tehran. Since movies were regarded as the glittery (thus deceptive) manifestation of Western culture, Ismāl is creating a pun that dually criticizes both. 173 Ibid., vol. 3, 97, 104, 124. 174 Two of the most popular screen personalities in Iranian cinema, Nāsir Malik Motī‘ī and Muhammad ‘Ali Fardīn, owed their fame to their role as jāhils. Like Malik Motī‘ī, Fardīn had tried his luck with other roles as a teacher or an investigative journalist. But he did not make his fame until he entered the venerated role of the jāhils or lūtīs. In Nizām Fātimī’s Dihkadah-i Talā‘ī (The Golden Village, 1964/1343) he played the role of a Science Corps teacher. In Gurg Hā-yi Gurusnah (Hungry Wolves, 1962/1341), which he himself directed, Fardīn played the role of an investigative journalist. He also tried his luck with comedy in veteran director ‘Ali Hātamī’s Bābā Shamal (1971/1350) and Jalāl Muqaddam’s Rāz-i Dirakht-i Sinjid (The Secret of the Oleaster Tree, 1971/1350), as well as in Masūd Kīmīāī’s Ghazal (1976/1355), all to an unrecognizing and unyielding audience, this despite the fame of the well-respected directors ‘Ali Hātamī and Masūd Kīmīā‘ī. Hamid Reza Sadr, Iranian Cinema: A Political History (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 119 onward. For an in-depth study of the Fīlm Fārsī genre, see Hamid Naficy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema, vol. 1 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011), particularly chapter 5 “Modernity’s Ambivalent Subjectivity: Dandies and the Dandy Movie Genre,” 277–308.

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Rival texts 81 Asīlī, Sūsan, ed. Nāmah’hā-yi Jamālzādah dar Kitābkhānah-i Markazī-yi Dānishgāh-i Tehran [Jamālzādah’s Letters at the Central Library of the University of Tehran]. Tehran: Sukhan, 2008. Balaÿ, Christophe and Michel Cuypers. Aux sources de la nouvelle persane. Translated by Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak as Sarchishmahā-yi Dāstān-i Kūtāh-i Fārsī. Tehran: Institut Français de Recherche en Iran, 1987. Barāhinī, Rizā. Qissah Nivīsī [Story Writing], 4th ed. Tehran: Nigāh, 2014/1393. Dastgirdī, Mirza Muhsin. Ā‘īnah-i Mashrūtah [Mirror of/for Constitutionalism]. Edited by ‘Ali Mīr Ansārī. Tehran: Mihr Nāmag, 2006. Dihbāshī, ‘Ali, ed. Yād-i Sayyid Muhammad ‘Ali Jamālzādah [In Memory of Sayyid Muhammad ‘Ali Jamālzādah]. Tehran: Sālis, 1998. Habībī, Sayyid Muhsin and Zahrā Aharī, “Lālah Zār – ‘Arsah-yi Tafarruj, az Bāgh tā Khīyābān [Lālah Zār – Space of Entertainment, from Garden to Avenue].” Hunarhā-yi Zībā 34 (Summer, 2008): 5–15. Hāshimī, Muhammad Sadr. Tārīkh-i Jarāyid va Majallāt-i Iran [A History of Periodicals and Magazines in Iran]. Isfahan: Kamāl, 1985. Hakīmullāhī, Hidāyatullah. Gīguluhā va Gīgulithā-yi Tihrān [The Gigolos and Gigolettes of Tehran]. Tehran: Shirkat-i Sahāmī-yi Chāp, 1947. Hakīmullāhī, Hidāyatullah. Bā Man bih Dār ul-majānīn Bīyāyīd [Come with Me to the Psychiatric Ward]. Tehran, 1947. Hakīmullāhī, Hidāyatullah. Bā Man bih Shahr-i Naw Bīyāyīd [Come with Me to the Red District]. Tehran: Shirkat-i Sahāmī-yi Chāp, 1948. Hakīmullāhī, Hidāyatullah. Yād Dāshthā-yi Yak Dīktātur [Diaries of a Dictator]. Tehran: Mihr, 1956. Hidāyat, Sādiq. Hājī Āqā [Mister Hajji], 2nd ed. Tehran: Intishārāt-i Jāvīdān, 1951. Islamic Republic of Iran Ministry of Education. Adabīyāt-i Fārsī [Persian Literature]. Tehran: Madrisah Publications, 2002. Jābirī Ansārī, Muhammad Hasan. Nūshdarū Tahzībul Akhlāq, Tārīkh-i Nisf-i Jahān va Hamah-yi Jahān [lithography]. Isfahan: Mirza ‘Ali, 1913/1292. National Library and Archives of I.R. of Iran, MS. 1105093. Jamālzādah, Muhammad ‘Ali. Rāh Āb Nāmah [The Book of the Water Canal]. Tehran: Kānūn-i Ma’rifat, 1942. Jamālzādah, Muhammad ‘Ali. Yakī Būd u Yakī Nabūd [Once Upon a Time], 5th ed. Tehran: Kānūn-i Ma’rifat, 1954. Jamālzādah, Muhammad ‘Ali. Kashkūl-i Jamālī [Jamālī’s Compendium]. Tehran: Kānūn-i Ma’rifat, 1960. Jamālzādah, Muhammad ‘Ali. “Du Sā‘atī bā Mardī Adīb u Dānishmand” [Two Hours with a Learned Man of Letters].” Yaghmā 180 (July, 1963/Tīr 1342): 165–8. Jamālzādah, Muhammad ‘Ali. Khātirat-i Sayyid Muhammad ‘Ali Jamālzādah [Memoirs of Sayyid Muhammad ‘Ali Jamālzādah]. Edited by Īraj Afshār and ‘Ali Dihbāshī. Tehran: Sukhan, 1999. Jamālzādah, Muhammad ‘Ali. Qissah Nivīsī [Story-Writing]. Edited by ‘Ali Dihbāshī. Tehran: Sukhan, 1999. Jalālī, Nādirah. “Lūtīgarī dar ‘Asr-i Qājār” [Lūtī-ism in the Qājār Era].” Payām-i Bahāristān (2nd Series) 3, no. 11 (Spring, 2011/1390): 131–58. Kāshānī, Sayyid Hasan. Mukālimah-i Sayyāh-i Īrānī bā Shakhs-i Hindī [The Conversation between an Iranian Traveller and an Indian Person]. Edited by Ghulām Husayn Mīrzā Sālih. Tehran: Kavīr, 2001. Kirmānī, Nāzim al-Islam. Tārīkh-i Bīdārī-yi Īrānīyān [The History of the Awakening of Iranians]. Tehran: Intishārāt-i Bunyād-i Farhang-i Iran, 1979.

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Madanī, Husayn. Ismāl dar Nīyu Yurk [Ismāl in New York], 4th ed. Tehran: Mu’assisah Sharq, 1955. Malikpūr, Jamshīd. Adabīyāt-i Namāyishī dar Iran [Performance Literature in Iran]. Tehran: Tūs, 1984. Mazāhirī, Jamshīd. “Mirzā Hasan Khān Jābirī Ansāri 1870–1957 the Author of History of Isfahan [Mirzā Hasan Khān Jābirī Ansāri 1287–1376 HQ Mu‘allif-i Tārīkh-i Isfahān].” Mirās-i Jāvīdān 19–20 (Fall and Winter, 1998): 182–7. Mihrīn, Mihrdād. Sarguzasht va Kār-i Jamālzādah [The Biography and Career of Jamālzādah]. Tehran: Kānūn-i Ma‘rifat, 1963. Mīrābidīnī, Hassan. Sad Sāl Dāstān Nivīsī-yi Iran [A Hundred Years of Story Writing in Iran], 5th ed. Tehran: Chishmah, 2008. Mīrābidīnī, Hassan. Sayr-i Tahavvul-i Adabīyāt-i Dāstānī va Namāyishī az 1320 ta 1332 Shamsī [A Survey of the Development of Persian Fiction and Plays from 1941 to 1953]. Tehran: Nashr-i Āsār, 2012. Matīnī, Jalāl. “Namāyish Nāmah-i Baqāl Bāzī dar Huzūr (Matn-i Kāmil) [Grocer’s Play before His Highness (Complete Text)].” Iran Nameh 26 (1989): 286–98. Mujāhid, Ahmad, ed. Bahsī Intiqādī bayn-i Shaykh-i Sunnat Garā va Shūkh-i Mutijaddid, Risālahī Sīyāsī Ijtimā ‘ī az Avākhir-i Dawrān-i Qājār [Shaykh u Shūkh: A Critical Debate between a Traditionalist Clergy and the Reformist Students, a Sociopolitical Treatise from the End of the Qajar Era]. Tehran: Rawzanah, 1994. Mushfiq Kāshānī, Murtazā. Tihrān-i Makhūf [Ghastly Tehran], 4th ed. Tehran: Bungāh-i Matbū ‘ātī-yi Parvīn, 1941. Nakhustīn Kungurah-i Nivīsandigān-i Iran [Iranian Writers’ First Congress]. Tehran, 1946. Najafī, Mūsā. Bunyād-i Falsfah-i Sīyāsī dar Iran [The Foundation of Political Philosophy in Iran]. Tehran: Markaz-i Nashr-i Dānishgāhī, 1997. Najmī, Nāsir. Tehrān-i ‘Ahd-i Nāsirī [Tehran during Nāsir (al-Dīn Shah’s) Times]. Tehran: Attār, 1985. Nateq, Homa. “Farang u farangī ma‘ābi dar Iran, risālah-i Shaykh u Shūkh [Europe and European-Manneredness in Iran: The Treatise Shaykh u Shūkh].” Zamānah Naw, no. 12 (September, 1986): 47–68. Qazvīnī, Muhammad. “A Literary Criticism: New Publications.” Iranshahr 3, no. 8 (3 Tir 1304): 462–78. Qazvīnī, Muhammad. Bīst Maqālah-yi Qazvīnī [Twenty Essays by Qazvīnī]. Tehran: Sharq, 1954. Rahīmīyān, Hurmuz. Adabīyāt-i Mu‘āsir-i Fārsī: Advār-i Nasr-i Fārsī az Mashrūtīyat tā Suqūt-i Saltanat [Contemporary Prose Literature: Periods of Persian Prose from Constitutionalism to the Decline of the Monarchy]. Tehran: SAMT, 2001. Rizvānī, Muhamad Ismā’īl. “Bīst u du rasālah-i tablīghātī az dawrah-i inqilāb-i mashrūtīyyat [Twenty-Two Propagandist Treatises from the Constitutional Era].” Rāhnamā-yi Kitāb 12, no. 5 & 6 (Summer, 1969): 229–40. Sadr Hāshimī, Muhammad. Tārīkh-i Jarāyid va Majallāt-i Iran [A History of Periodicals and Magazines in Iran]. Isfahan: Kamāl, 1985. Safā, Zabīhullāh. Tārīkh-i Adabīyāt dar Irān [History of Literature in Iran], 10th ed. Tehran: Qoqnūs, 2002. Shādmān, Sayyid Fakhruddīn. “Taskhīr-i Tamaddun-i Farangī [The Conquest of Western Civilization].” In Ārāyish va Pīrāyesh-i Zabān [Beautification and Purification of Language]. Tehran: Chāpkhānah-i Iran, 1948. Tafsīl-i Guftigū-yi Yak Mīrzā-yi ‘Ālim bā Yak ‘Avām-i Mustahzar. MS. 7406. Digital Collections. Tehran: University of Tehran Central Library and Archives.

Rival texts 83 Tavakoli-Targhi, Mohamad. “Tajaddud-i Rūzmarrah va ‘Āmpūl-i Tadayyun’ [Quotidian Modernity and the ‘Injection of Religiosity’].” Iran Nameh 24, no. 4 (Winter, 2009): 41–76. Yāvarī, Hūrā. Ravānkavī va Adabīyāt [Psychoanalysis and Literature]. Tehran: Sukhan, 2008.

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Najmabadi, Afsaneh. Women with Moustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity. Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005. Rezaeiyazdi, Hamid. “The Dialogical Tradition of Iranian Modernity: Monāzereh, Simultaneity, and the Making of Modern Iran.” Iranian Studies 49, no. 3 (May, 2016): 327–57. Ridgeon, Lloyd. Morals and Mysticism: A History of Sufi-Futuwwat in Iran. New York: Routledge, 2010. Sadr, Hamid Reza. Iranian Cinema: A Political History. London: I.B. Tauris, 2006. Seyed-Ghorab, Ali Asghar and Sen McGlinn, trans. The Essence of Modernity: Mirza Yusof Khan Mustashar ad-Dowla Tabrizi’s Treatise on Codified Law (Yak Kaleme). Amsterdam and West Lafayette, IN: Rozenberg Publishers and Purdue University Press, 2008. Talattof, Kamran. Politics of Writing in Iran: A History of Modern Persian Literature. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000. Tavakoli-Targhi, Mohamad. “From Patriotism to Matriotism: A Tropological Study of Iranian Nationalism, 1870–1909.” Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 34 (2002): 217–38. Todorov, Tsvetan. The Poetics of Prose. Translated by Richard Howard and Jonathan Culler. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978.

3

Reactionary interbellum literature and the demonic in Iran ʿAlavī and Hidāyat Arshavez Mozafari

While interbellum Iran (1921–41/1299–1320 hs.) has come to be recognised as a pivotal period in the development of a local discourse on willpower,1 it was also witness to a crisis of this discourse as reflected in the literary descent into demonic love or, to put it more precisely, the obtuse love of the demonic. This short article is a meditation on the integral role of the demonic, a category often confined to the halls of tradition, in the formation of a modern reactionary literature that laments the incredibly daft and decadent stupor of late-Sasanian society. It is my contention that as an amalgam of the aesthetics of classical Persian love poetry2 and prevailing secular nationalist norms,3 demonic love came to be construed as an outgrowth of an insufferable naiveté that sacrificed imperial sovereignty and threatened the legacy of racial cohesion in favour of a bastardised moralism. The literature under consideration seeks to invoke a legitimate vitriol of demonic elements by emphasising a type of numb aloofness that forsakes overwhelming amounts of evidence laid bare. Hatred is not, as liberals might put it, intimately tied to the limiting and pejorative notion of “moral provincialism.”4 In fact, it is grounded in years of neglected historical testimony reinforced by a degenerated moral code and culture. Thus, in opposition to the “composite project” of “rooted cosmopolitanism,” which prioritises duties to oneself and the ethical community,5 rooted provincialism is a recognition of one’s role as the legatee of ancestral strength and struggle in the midst of a decaying communal presence. Ideologically sanctioned by the early Pahlavī state, it was the modernist writer Ṣādiq Hidāyat (1903–51/1281–1330 hs.) who gave voice to the vitriol in his 1930–1/1309 hs. work Parvīn Dukhtar-i Sāsān (Parvīn, the Sasanian Girl, hereafter, Parvīn) and his literary companion, Buzurg ʿAlavī (1904–97/1282–1375 hs.), who briefly explored the concept of demonic love in the 1931–2/1310 hs. short story, Dīv! . . . Dīv! (Demon! . . . Demon!, hereafter, Dīv!). Classically, the intermingling of amorism and the demonic often took place in a field of poetics that derived much of its imagery from Islamic narratives.6 The early Pahlavī period was not devoid of this relationship between evil and (the object of) love, as was evident in a couple of ghazals composed by the poet ʿAbbās Furāt-Yazdī (1894–5–1968/1273–1347 hs.).7 Works that touched upon this relationship were interspersed in literary journals, including Armaghān, among more recognised deployments of the demonic, such as for the purpose of demonisation8

86 Arshavez Mozafari or establishing a standard of measurement.9 In one example, a beloved’s hair is described as being akin to the snakes hanging off of the shoulders of an ancient Iranian avatar of evil, Z̤ aḥḥāk, the same snakes that are nourished by the blood of the youth (bibīn zi zulf chū Z̤ aḥḥāk yik dū mār bih dūshash / kih khūn-i khalq hamī zān dū mār larzad u rīzad).10 In another poem, the beloved is a heavenly maiden (known as an ḥūrī) who is tightly embraced even though there is full awareness of her satanic essence (ḥūrīst Shayṭān dar baghal).11 Amorous poems that romanticised the metaphorical embrace of the demonic ran parallel to racialised works12 that lamented the same movement with different placeholders. In the 1934/1313 hs. article, “Kākh va Dakhmah-yi Asātīd-i Sukhan [The Palaces and Tombs of the Literary Masters],” the poet and editor of Armaghān, Vahīd Dastgirdī (1880–1–1942/1298–1361 hq.), writes about the neglected ancient nobles of Iṣfahān (gūyī Iṣfahān farzandān-i khalaf-i khīsh rā bidrūd guft), with their dilapidated tombs and the failed renovation projects of the modern era (valī saranjām dakhmih bih shikl-i khijalatāvar āghāz bāqī mānd). He attributes this carelessness to the very constitution of Iṣfahān’s residents, for only a polluted race (nizhād-i ālūdah) would desert the city’s glorious past.13 Similar to the ambiguity and radical moral reshaping inherent in Furāt-Yazdī’s writings, Iṣfahānīs here are portrayed as having posited an identity between the demonic and the angelic (dīv rā bā Surūsh hamsang khvāndah), and Ahrīman, the hypostasis of evil in Zoroastrianism, to be superior to the divine Yazdān.14 In another work written during the same year on the occasion of the 1934/1313 hs. Firdawsī Millenium Celebration,15 Sharīf al-Salṭanah (d. 1978–9/1357 hs.) conjures the image of the demonic in blunter terms. “Bi Nām-i Jashn-i Firdawsī [In Honour of the Firdawsī Celebration]” takes its readers back to the ominous days that prompted the master poet Firdawsī (c. 940–1025/328–415 hq.) to produce his tenth-century epic, the Shāhnāmah (Book of Kings). Similar to Dastgirdī’s view of modern Iṣfahān, Firdawsī is described as having had to contend with the reality of a depraved leadership (furūmāyagān jāygīr-i mahān), forgotten customs, injustice and a withering language (zabān-i nīyākān biraftah zi yād / namāndah nishānī zi āyīn u dād). The garden of Iran was infested with weeds (gulistān-i Iran shudah khārzār) and nothing of the past’s richness remained (namāndah zi purmāyagān yādgār) due to the collapse of the Sasanians and the burrowing of the Turks and Arabs (girānmāyah bungāh-i Sāsāniyān / shudah Tāzī u Turk rā āshiyān). Brimming with agitation and grievances (chinān az nahādash barāmad khurūsh / kih āvard andar sarash khūn bih jūsh), Firdawsī was given a divine injunction to unsheathe the sword of language (bih gūsh āmadash nāgahān az Surūsh / kih tīgh-i zabān bar gushāy u bikūsh) for the sake of memorial.16 What is unique about the Firdawsī Millenium Celebration is that more than resuming what Firdawsī was memorialising, the state was recollecting the act of recollection itself. Even though the “remembered remembering that occurred yesterday does not belong to the present remembering as a really inherent component of its concrete unity,”17 there is nevertheless an appreciation of the power of Firdawsī’s consciousness and a desire to access it. By allowing “the whole complex of the earlier consciousness [to be] reproduced,”18 the state, along with its

Interbellum literature and the demonic 87 supporters among the intelligentsia, can probe into the question that Firdawsī must have asked himself: Why was Ahrīman held close to Iran’s bosom (paẕīrad dar āghūsh-i khvud Ahrīman)?19

Hidāyat’s Parvīn Dukhtar-i Sāsān As part of a critique of the trickledown myth of the founding father20 and the thesis that Hidāyat outshone his contemporaries in creative dexterity and modernist comprehension,21 it is my contention that though more filial than sexual, ʿAlavī’s Dīv! was much more effective in engaging the amorous tension with the demonic and the maligned decadence of the period than Hidāyat’s Parvīn, a work that was guided more by a linear demonisation template. With the prospect of war resuming with the Arabs in the late-Sasanian period (hamah mīgūyand hamīn rūz′hā jang dar mīgīrad), Parvīn begins with an artistic dilemma: If the Sasanians are defeated, the Iranian artist and patriarch Chihrah Pardāz will be forced to immortalise Arab appearances (chihrah-yi Tāzī′hā)22 rather than his preferred muses, his cherished daughter and the Sasanian nobility (agar hamān dastgāh-i pīsh barpā būd man yikī az chihrah pardāzān-i darbār būdam).23 What makes this prospect haunting is not only the bloodlust of the Semitic ahrīmans (demons) seeking to tear asunder Iran’s foundations (gūyī dastahī az ahrīmanān va dīvān tishnah bih khūn hastand kih barā-yi barkandan-i bunyān Īrāniyān khurūshīdahand),24 but that elevated artistry once dedicated to Aryan beauty must now be used to depict and memorialise foreign monstrosity. In other words, Chihrah Pardāz is met with the horrific possibility of rendering the demonic more vividly repulsive – an abhorrently transgressive act that will amplify evil through aesthetics25 – and introduce it as a historical document for future generations to glare at in awe, unlike his previous works, which are undoubtedly awaiting imminent and savage destruction. This is why the patriarch’s final act as an artist is to secretly draw a portrait of his daughter, Parvīn, who he wants to visually preserve after her marriage to Parvīz (īn pardahī kih az rū-yi tū mīkisham anjāmīn kār-i man khvāhad būd chūn mīdānam kīh nāmzadat Parvīz dīr yā zūd tū rā bih zanī mībarad).26 Like a melon tree that directs all its nutrients to the growth of a lone fruit, Chihrah Pardāz commits himself entirely to this one image, allowing him to foreclose the possibility of artistically reproducing evil at a higher level and rendering Parvīn incorruptible.27 Thus, even though Chihrah Pardāz is fearful of his daughter’s possible contamination in actuality (gūyī farmānfarmāī-yi hurmuz siparī shudah ahrīmanān va dīvān bar bungāh-yi ū jayguzīn shudahand),28 he hands off the portrait – along with its associated sense of incorruptibility, which in fact may simply be a way for him to allay his fears – to Parvīz as he prepares to join the resistance against the Arab armies. What is remarkable is that he asks Parvīz to return the image to him if he survives the war (dar hingām-i kārzār az man dildārī khvāhad kard pas az anjām-i jang ān rā pas khvāham dād).29 The focal point is indeed the image and the theme of corruptibility. In Parvīn, the sense of insularity provided by the image is surrounded by constant threats of Ahrīmanic penetration of both the divine terrestrial and celestial

88 Arshavez Mozafari realms (bihisht rā rū-yi zamīn dīdand [ . . . ] sardārān-i ān′hā guftahand agar bikushīd yā kushtah bishavīd mīravīd bih bihisht). As the animalistic Arab armies unchain themselves and plough through Iran’s paradisal kingdom (dīvān va dadān zanjīr-i khvud rā pārah kardahand30 [ . . . ] hamah khushī′hā rā dar Iran chishīdand marz va būm ābādī′hā va kishtzār′hā rā vīrān kardand),31 they turn it into a hellish graveyard (bihisht-i shumā dūzakh-i mā shud32 [ . . . ] Iran īn bihisht-i rū-yi zamīn yik gūristān-i tarsnāk-i Musalmānā shud). In their wretched sleeplessness (dar jilaw-i dīv′hā-yi bīmnāk dīgar nimītavānam rū-yi tushak bikhvābam),33 the Iranians ask questions that rest at the heart of theodical investigations, such as the purpose behind Ahūrā Mazdā’s creation of Ahrīman (chirā Ahrīman rā āfarīd?).34 This restless questioning – a feature that is shared with other demonological works of the time – serves as the preamble to a richly detailed treatise on evil that had yet to be written. Rather than approach the matter in a Dionysian way, by first asking “what evil is, and then whence it arises,”35 Hidāyat reverses the order of inquiry by first identifying demonic loci and then asking about its nature. Later on in the story when Parvīn is threatening to drive a dagger through her heart in protest of her impending marriage to an Arab commander (khanjar rā bih dū dast giriftah bā hamah-yi zūr va tavānāʿī-yi khvud mīzanad rū-yi pistān-i chapash va bidūn-i īnkih nālah bikunad mīkhvurad bih zamīn)36 – a clear and willful attempt to preserve her purity, which transforms the role of Chihrah Pardāz’ portrait from a preserver of incorruptibility to an instance of remembrance due to her impending death – she engages in an anti-Islamic diatribe where she declares the Arabian God to be none other than the vindictive Ahrīman of Zoroastrian cosmology (khudāī kih shumā mīparastīd Ahrīman, khudā-yi jang, khudā-yi kushtār, khudā-yi kīnahjū, khudā-yi darrandah ast kih khūn mīkhvāhad).37 Through an opening offered by festering Arabian sewage (munjalāb-i chirkīn-i Tāziyān)38 Hidāyat contributed to a remapping of the divine and the demonic.39 Collapsing Islamic divinity into the figure of Ahrīman had the effect of not only compromising the object of orthodox Perso-Islamic worship, but also reviving pre-Islamic cosmological categories.

ʿAlavī’s Dīv! . . . Dīv! Before ʿAlavī became a towering leftist novelist later in the interwar period and onward by taking his demonological discourse in a decidedly psychological, antistatist and anti-capitalist direction,40 he was for a time committed to romantic nationalist thought as manifested in Dīv!, a work published soon after Hidāyat’s Parvīn. Even though it may indeed be the case that the story narrativises the nationalist credo of eventual communal revival and triumph,41 its seminal importance does not lie in this widely held attitude, which occludes the story’s unique demonological tenor. The narrative’s demonological significance lies in the question of evil’s absorbability into Aryan existence and the ultimate failure of this promise.42 ʿAlavī’s story begins with invasion, streaming tears (chishm′hā-yi ashkbār-i zan′hā-yi nāzī) and blood-stained alleys (khūn-i garmī kih hanūz lakhtah nashudah ast). The Kufan market where the story is initially set is pandaemonic: war booty

Interbellum literature and the demonic 89 is auctioned off to the highest bidder in the midst of broad daylight killings (ān pārah qālī rā bih qaymat-i hizār dīnār barā-yi pādishāh-i ḥabashah mīkharand [ . . . ] yik zan-i Arab hamān mard rā az ʿaqab bā kārd mīkushad). The first glimpse into the demonic is made when Ahrīman is heard being anonymously cursed as Iranian women are sold off as slaves (yikī nifrīn bih Ahrīman mīfiristad). Among these women is Arnavāz,43 the person who would later give birth to her owner’s mixed race child.44 Away from the market in a distant shack (kulbah), a group of Iranian outlaws contemplate the events that are transpiring within their crumbling empire. As a microcosmic materialisation of Zoroastrianism’s cosmic dualism, the group’s elder (pīr-i mard) states that because the invasion is a moment in Ahrīman’s grand confrontation with Ahūrā Mazdā, Iran will surely survive because the former’s defeat is predicated upon a strict determinism (dar īn jang-i Iran va Tāzī dushmanī miyān-i Ahūrā va Ahrīman jilvahgar shudah ast. chigūnah mumkin ast kih Ahrīman barā-yi hamīshah bar Ahūrā chīrah gardad? Ahūrā jāvidānī ast. Ahrīman murdanī ast). The protagonist and fellow outlaw, Zarāvand, swiftly agrees with this assessment (āh, chih rāst guftī, īn′hā dīv hastand).45 Thus, at this very early stage, there is no sense that the Arabs are (even capable of) concealing their true demonic nature. Both the outlaws and the reader are aware of a demonic presence.46 Not only are the outlaws aware of the general presence of evil, they are also attuned to its closing proximity (siyāhī az dūr bih sū-yi mā mīāyad ) as embodied in the frightening voice of a distressed child (ṣidā-yi parīshān-i bachah [ . . . ] hamah rā harāsān kard) who, as we will later find out, is Arnavāz’ offspring, Garzuvān. However, the enduring inability to reason beyond this intuitive moment, which is evident throughout the narrative, can be rather disconcerting and even intolerable to the audience due to the stark palpability of evil. Nevertheless, the ominous voice causes Zarāvand to trip over and smother the fire that was keeping the room warm, sending up a dark plume of smoke that fills the air (Zarāvand az jā just va bih sūī dar raft, dar rāh pāyash bih chahārpāyah khvurdah, bar rū-yi ātash uftād. shuʾlah khāmūsh shud. dūd-i ghalīẓī tamām-i utāq rā farāgirift ).47 As a Zoroastrian symbol of truth,48 the fire was prominent a few moments earlier when the Arabs were equated to Ahrīman’s forces. In fact, it was a truth that emerged the moment the flame was stabilised in the hideout. The appearance of the child had the opposite effect, as the flame was smothered immediately afterward. As such, the function of the fire as the central object in Dīv! differs from the portrait in Parvīn. While the latter contained the conscious decision to preserve purity and memory, the smothered flame reflects the decadent withdrawal of comprehension. Garzuvān’s first utterance is in conformity with truth at the level of content insofar as he mentions that his moribund mother is in need of immediate medical assistance (mādaram dārad mīmīrad),49 but the narrative hints deployed thus far (such as the smothered fire) point beyond this diversionary truth to the child’s Inner Demonic Lie.50 To put it differently, even though the outlaws made decisive observational, cosmological and intuitive judgements early on, the clumsy loss of the fire marked the irreversible structural emergence of character naiveté and reader frustration in the story. The stark contrast between these judgements and

90 Arshavez Mozafari the emergent naiveté allude to the integral role of the reader as someone who is first inculcated as a passive demonologist (via character-driven judgements) and then as a frustrated participant of revivalist strategies who must rectify (naive) ancestral failings.51 Another pivotal moment in the story is when Arnavāz’s distant cries of pain are negated by bellowing winds (gāhī āhang-i nālahī bih gūsh mīrisīd [ . . . ] amā narah′hā-yi mahīb-i bād ān rā az miyān mīburd).52 Instead of expressing the overriding ineffability of Arnavāz’s grief, the winds represent the way chivalry (javānmardī), masculinity (mardī), love (mihr) and truth (rāstī) are eclipsed by demonic and bestial ascendance (dīv va dad chīrah gashtand).53 It is in the midst of these demonic negations that Zarāvand kneels down to embrace Garzuvān (Zarāvand ū rā dar āghūsh girift),54 a clear indication of demonic victory. While the protagonist is under the impression that he is simply consoling a young child, what he actually has in his clutches is the “kingdom of hell.” It is this sublime notion that is presented directly to the reader.55 What is more, Garzuvān himself is not portrayed as someone who is cognisant of his pure evil, perhaps because it is still at an inchoate stage at this juncture. Nevertheless, since ʿAlavī does not delve into character psychology in this story, inner awareness of evil is further attenuated and displaced onto the reader. The decadence of this whole affair is taken to pathetically absurd heights when the protagonist doubles down on his moral coddling: Zarāvand, in a moment of bewilderment (bāvar nimīkard), is forced to digest the identity of Garzuvān’s Semitic father and contemplate whether he should assist the demon spawn (āyā īn bachah az ān shuturchirān ast? [ . . . ] gūyī bachah dīvī dar āghūsh dāsht). In a revealing but devastating gesture, Zarāvand instinctively clutches the child even more tightly than before and decides to take him back to the hideaway to be warmed by the renewed fire (Zarāvand bachah rā dar āghūshash fishār dād [ . . . ] ammā ū rā bih kulbah burd. ātash rā rawshan kard bachah rā garm kard).56 Notice how once again the fire is stabilised. As a marker of truth, this “centre of [Zarathustra’s] cultus”57 reveals how the child’s demonism has become conscious to the protagonist, but what is more remarkable is that even when the absolute knowledge of the reader is shared with Zarāvand, he maintains his course. He simply does not ingratiate himself with the audience by recovering from his unthinking moralism and baffling disregard for what has clearly become the peak of imperial decline. As such ʿAlavī is here not participating in what has sometimes been construed as the blind worship of pre-Islamic Iranian civilisation, but rather a speculative investigation into its decline. As has become clear, the vicissitudes of the fire is an enduring theme in the story. It is revisited again when Arnavāz tells Zarāvand that her dying wish is for him to raise Garzuvān to be an Iranian because the thought of having an Arab son repulses her (agar hanūz mihr-i man dar dil-i tū bāqī ast, az bachah-yi man nigahdārī kun. [ . . . ] ārizūyam hamīn būd kih bih Iran biyāyam. īnjā bimīram va pisaram Īrānī bishavad. hīch vaqt nakhvāstam kih yik nafar Tāzī az man bih vūjūd biyāyad).58 As she utters her dying wish the fire is again extinguished (shuʾlah khāmush shud).59 Though this may superficially represent Arnavāz’s descent into death, it

Interbellum literature and the demonic 91 can also be connected to the impossibility of her wish (its inherent untruth). When it comes to the Lie as the “ultimate source of impurity,”60 it does not matter whether there is a fire or not. Both its presence and absence point to the promised demon (dīv-i mawʿūd).61 Even years later when all-out desecration of the Aryan realm is looming (ammā az īn dilam mīsūzad kih dīgar kasī az mā namāndah ast. bā raftan-i mā Iran ham khvāhad raft. āngāh dīvān tākht va tāz khvāhad kard),62 Zarāvand utterly fails to locate his self-destructive role in the facilitation of evil. ʿAlavī successfully underlines the protagonist’s absurd naiveté when he is made to contemplate the demonism of every outlaw before that of the true demonic mole (hamah dīv shudahīm).63 The reader’s banked frustration and anger finally erupts through Garzuvān’s Iranian wife who accuses her husband of being a Semite-blooded demon (ū dīv ast, ū dīv ast, ū dīv ast! [ . . . ] īn khūn-i chirkīn-i Tāzī ast kih dar ū jilvahgar shudah ast). Zarāvand himself is attacked for the cardinal error of providing the demon refuge when he was better off left for dead (chirā ū rā az khānahat bīrūn nakardī?).64 It is through the wife’s verbal barrage that the reader is reminded of classical demonic amorism. In the same way that the poet is frustratingly enraptured by the demonic features of the Beloved and who seeks to participate in Divine Unity, Zarāvand’s own demonism is predicated upon the earlier embrace of the promised demon (bizihkār tuyī kih bā dīv sākhtahī [ . . . ] bā ū hamdastī kardī va dīv shudī).65 This possibility emerged out of ʿAlavī’s desire to involve an increasingly contemptuous reader in a revivalist strategy that defined interbellum Iran.

Notes 1 For more on the topic of voluntarism in modern Iran, refer to Cyrus Schayegh’s Who Is Knowledgeable Is Strong: Science, Class, and the Formation of Modern Iranian Society, 1900–1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), the preeminent work on the topic. 2 Love poetry has been treated in various ways, with much focus paid to its metaphors, such as candles and wine (see Ali Asghar Seyed-Gohrab, “Waxing Eloquent: The Masterful Variations on Candle Metaphors in the Poetry of Ḥāfiẓ and his Predecessors,” in Metaphor and Imagery in Persian Poetry, ed. Ali Asghar Seyed-Gohrab [Leiden: Brill, 2012], 81–124; and Nasrollah Pourjavady, “Love and the Metaphors of Wine and Drunkenness in Persian Sufi Poetry,” in Metaphor and Imagery, 125–36), and the function of the glance (see Mireille Schnyder, “Die Einsamkeit im Liebesblick. Zur deutschen und persischen Liebeslyrik des 17. Jahrhunderts,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 70, no. 3 [1996]: 369–93). Originally developed in Persian court literature (J.T.P. de Bruijn, Persian Sufi Poetry: An Introduction to the Mystical Use of Classical Poems [Richmond: Curzon, 1997], 68), this type of poetry was later suffused with Sufi themes, i.e. the mystical conception of divine love. In Sufism, love is closely associated with the Divine Beloved, the relationship between God and man, along with the location and origins of love itself (see William C. Chittick, “The Dialectic of Love in Early Persian Sufism,” Journal of Dharma 36, no. 1 [January– March 2011]: 99–113). Although it is true that love poetry has been in some measure neglected in Western scholarship due to the rationalist rejection of the mundus imaginalis (see Leonard Lewisohn, ed., Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry [London: I.B. Tauris, 2010]), it can also be said that the genre transformed and

92 Arshavez Mozafari was utilised differently during periods of rationalist ascendance, as was the case during the first Pahlavī period when the need to highlight antagonisms was clearly present. Note the special issue of Iranian Studies 42, no. 5 (2009), edited by Dominic Parviz Brookshaw, “Love and Desire in Pre-Modern Persian Poetry and Prose.” In Brookshaw’s own contribution to the issue, “To be Feared and Desired: Turks in the Collected Works of ‘Ubayd-i Zākānī,” 725–44, we are introduced to the pre-modern admixture of desire and danger, an aspect of amatory poetry that carries over into my account of demonic love. Supplemental to this is the longstanding Sufi position that Satan is the greatest lover of God, which thus cements the association between evil and amatory rhetoric. However, the complication is that Satan’s dogmatic love proved that he is concerned more with self-worship than his Beloved, which dislocated him from the realm of the amatory into that of antagonism. In other words, Satan is indeed a lover, but his love is ultimately specious (see Ali Asghar Seyed-Gohrab, “The Erotic Spirit: Love, Man and Satan in Ḥāfiẓ’s Poetry,” in Hafiz and the Religion of Love, 107–23). While the conclusion that amatory Persian ghazals harbour both secular and mystical elements (de Bruijn, Persian Sufi Poetry, 55), the present paper puts forward a different fusion: one between the form of amatory poetry and the racialised discourse of secular nationalism. 3 It is impossible to think about interwar secular nationalism in Iran without considering the rise and fall of Riz̤ ā Khān (later Riz̤ ā Shāh Pahlavī, 1878–1944/1295–1363 hq./r. 1925– 41/1304–20 hs.). Besides my demonological approach, there are several more prominent and well-accepted frameworks through which early Pahlavī Iran has been studied. The classical approach is concerned generally with international relations (power politics and geopolitical wrangling) along with the composition and power brokering of elites, often using many foreign sources to substantiate claims (see Nasrollah Saifpour Fatemi, Diplomatic History of Persia, 1917–1923: Anglo-Russian Power Politics in Iran [New York: R.F. Moore Co., 1952]; George Lenczowski, Russia and the West in Iran, 1918–1948: A Study in Big-Power Rivalry [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1949]; Werner Zürrer, Persien zwischen England und Rußland, 1918–1925: Grossmachteinflüsse und nationaler Wiederaufstieg am Beispiel des Iran [Bern: Peter Lang, 1978]; Mohammad Gholi Majd, Great Britain and Reza Shah: The Plunder of Iran, 1921–1941 [Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2001]; Herbert Melzig, Resa Schah: Irans Aufstieg und die Großmächte [Stuttgart: Union Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1938]; Mohammad Gholi Majd, From Qajar to Pahlavi: Iran, 1919–1930 [Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2008]; Homa Katouzian, State and Society in Iran: The Eclipse of the Qajars and the Emergence of the Pahlavis [New York: I.B. Tauris, 2000]; Yair P. Hirschfeld, Deutschland und Iran im Spielfeld der Mächte: internationale Beziehungen unter Reza Schah, 1921–1941 [Düsseldorf: Droste, 1980]; Ghazal Ahmadi, Iran als Spielball der Mächte?: die internationalen Verflechtungen des Iran unter Reza Schah und die anglo-sowjetische Invasion 1941 [New York: Peter Lang, 2011]; and Akbar Valīzādah, Ittiḥād-i Jamāhīr-i Shawravī va Riz̤ ā Shāh: Barrasī-yi Ravābiṭ-i Iran va Shawravī Miyān-i Dū Jang-i Jahānī [The Soviet Union and Riz̤ ā Shāh: An Examination of the Inter-War Relationship between Iran and the Soviets] (Tehran: Intishārāt-i Markaz-i Asnād-i Inqilāb-i Islāmī, 2006–7/1385 hs.)). Also of concern are the biographies of the most distinguished or infamous of these said elites, with Riz̤ ā Shāh being at the top of this list (see Riz̤ ā Niyāzmand, Riz̤ ā Shāh: Az Tavallud tā Salṭanat [Riz̤ ā Shāh: From Birth to Kingship] (Bethesda, MD: Bunyād-i Muṭāliʿāt-i Īrān, 1996–7/1375 hs.); Donald N. Wilber, Riza Shah Pahlavi: The Resurrection and Reconstruction of Iran 1878–1944 [New York: Exposition Press, 1975]; Iskandar Dildam, Zindagī-yi Pur Mājarā-yi Riz̤ ā Shāh [Riz̤ ā Shāh’s Eventful Life] (Tehran: Nashr-i Gulfām, 1992–3/1371 hs.); Khusraw Muʾtaz̤ id, Az Ālasht tā Āfrīqā: Riz̤ ā Shāh-i Pahlavī, az Kūdakī tā Salṭanat, az Salṭanat tā Suqūṭ, Dawrān-i Tabʿīd-i Mūrīs, Dūrbān, Zhūhānisbūrg [From Ālāsht to Africa: Riz̤ ā Shāh Pahlavī, From Infancy to Kingship, Kingship to the Fall, and the Period of Exile in Mauritius, Durban, and Johannesburg] (Tehran: Dawr-i Dunyā,

Interbellum literature and the demonic 93 1999–2000/1378 hs.); Kayvān Pahlavān, Riz̤ ā Shāh az Ālishtar tā Ālasht: Niyāyī-i Lur-i Riz̤ ā Shāh [Riz̤ ā Shāh from Ālishtar to Ālasht: Riz̤ ā Shāh’s Lur Ancestry] (Tehran: Intishārāt-i Ārvan, 2004–5/1383 hs.); and Khusraw Muʾtaz̤ id, Riz̤ ā Shāh: Suqūṭ va Pas az Suqūṭ [Riz̤ ā Shāh: The Fall and Its Aftermath] (Tehran: Muʾassasah-yi Muṭāliʿāt-i Tārīkh-i Muʿāṣir-i Iran, 1997–8/1376 hs.)). This approach is in some ways typified by Cyrus Ghani (1929–2016) in his Iran and the Rise of Reza Shah: From Qajar Collapse to Pahlavi Rule (London: I.B. Tauris, 2000) in that emphasis is placed on the interests, machinations, clout and alliances of certain power players such as ministers, chieftains, army officers, and courtiers (examples include George Curzon [1859–1925], Vsevolod D. Starosselsky [1875–1935] and Ḥasan Pīrniyā [1872–1935/1289–1354 hq.]) (Ghani, Iran and the Rise of Reza Shah, 122), along with the institutions and/or regions that they represent, whether they be the foreign office, provinces, or any other organised entity exemplifying official status according to the perspective of already sanctioned normative bodies. By presenting to the reader the accounts of key personalities, the historian is believed to be outlining the integral workings behind the development of events. As such, the underlying methodology privileges the role of distinguished actors over collectives. “[R]ebels and insurgents,” “southern tribes” and entire industries (Ghani, Iran and the Rise of Reza Shah, 91, 302 and 405, respectively) are mentioned as if they are chess pieces ultimately beholden to the strategies of greater men. Politicking, the transmission of important messages (either through lesser intercessors or entire delegations [Ghani, Iran and the Rise of Reza Shah, 225 and 103, respectively]), the replacement of important decision-makers or commanders (e.g. H.B. Champain [1869–1933] taking over Lionel Dunsterville’s [1865–1946] role), the designation of appointments (e.g. Riz̤ ā Khān’s promotion to sardār-i sipāh [commander of the army]), or cabinet shuffles (e.g. Riz̤ ā Khān’s 1924/1342 hq. Reorganisation) [Ghani, Iran and the Rise of Reza Shah, 65, 200 and 319, respectively] are seen as being more influential than the direction of social forces, economic determinants and other variables. Even when other sections of society are brought into brief focus (such as shopkeepers, craftsmen and artisans), it is usually done under the looming presence of an outstanding figure (Arthur Millspaugh [1883– 1955], for instance [Ghani, Iran and the Rise of Reza Shah, 275]). In Touraj Atabaki and Erik J. Zürcher’s edited volume, Men of Order: Authoritarian Modernization under Atatürk and Reza Shah (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004), we see an extension of the first position’s focus on key personalities, but with added emphasis on their projects (e.g. reform initiatives), ideological affiliations and interactions with particular social classes (for other examples, see Lester A. Lee, “The Reforms of Reza Shah” [PhD diss., Stanford University, 1950]; Amin Banani, The Modernization of Iran, 1921–1941 [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1961]; M. Reza Ghods, “Iranian Nationalism and Reza Shah,” Middle Eastern Studies 27, no. 1 (January, 1991): 35–45; Bāqir ʿĀqilī, Riz̤ ā Shāh va Qushūn-i Muttaḥid al-Shikl, 1300–1320 [Riz̤ ā Shāh and the Army Uniform, 1300–1320] (Tehran: Nashr-i Nāmak, 2011–2/1390 hs.); and Ḥamīd Baṣīratmanish, ʿUlamā va Rizhīm-i Riz̤ ā Shāh: Naẓarī bar ʿAmalkard-i SiyāsīFarhangī-yi Rūḥāniyūn dar Sālʹhā-yi 1305–1320 [The ʿUlamā and the Riz̤ ā Shāh Regime: A Look at the Political-Cultural Acts of the Clergy during the Years of 1305– 1320 hs.] (Tehran: Muʾassasah-yi Chāp va Nashr-i ʿUrūj, 1997–8/1376 hs.)). Among these, the integral aspects of the modernisation project (including economic development, educational reform, etc.) have been given ample attention (see Ahmad Minai, “Economic Development of Iran under the Reign of Reza Shah” [PhD diss., The American University, 1960]; and Mina Marefat, “Building to Power: Architecture of Tehran 1921–1941” [PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1988]). As we see in Men of Order, processes and motifs of Iranian modernisation, such as secularisation, the republican endeavours of “secularist elites” (Touraj Atabaki, “The Caliphate, the Clerics and Republicanism in Turkey and Iran: Some Comparative Remarks,” in Men of Order, 45), the formation of political parties, the focus on language, authoritarian

94 Arshavez Mozafari acceleration of the reform process (Erik J. Zürcher, “Institution Building in the Kemalist Republic: The Role of the People’s Party,” in Men of Order, 110 and 61, respectively) [and the degree to which such reforms were an extension of inherited programmes (Matthew Elliot, “New Iran and the Dissolution of Party Politics under Reza Shah,” in Men of Order, 84)], state-building the adoption of European traditions and codes (Touraj Atabaki and Erik J. Zürcher, “Introduction,” in Men of Order, 9 and 11, respectively), and other related matters are compared and contrasted with, in this instance, the Kemalist project. As an inheritance of the classical approach described above, here the presence of paramount figures such as Riz̤ ā Shāh and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (1881–1938/r. 1923–38) loom large and issues such as their approach to the question of the clergy and religiosity in general, the extent of social base support (Homa Katouzian, “State and Society under Reza Shah,” in Men of Order, 21 and 29, respectively), their level of commitment to grounding principles, their leadership styles (Stephanie Cronin, “The Army, Civil Society and the State in Iran: 1921–26,” in Men of Order, 133), and inclinations (Elliot, “New Iran,” 84), successes and legacies (Zürcher, “Institution Building,” 98), and the relationship between them (Houchang Chehabi, “Dress Codes for Men in Turkey and Iran,” in Men of Order, 221) are discussed in great detail. Thus, while this approach withdraws to a certain extent from the overdetermining influence of personalities by focusing on the actual facets of modernisation, it still retains the classical allure of potent and larger than life figures. Another approach to the study of the early or first Pahlavī period takes into account the interaction between established power brokers, their projects, the often neglected subaltern forces that were active during the time, and the unexplored conditions behind the rise of the modernising state (see Stephanie Cronin, The Army and the Creation of the Pahlavi State in Iran: 1910–1926 [London: Tauris Academic Series, 1997]). Room is also made for previously unexamined median classes with their own oppressive tendencies (see Mohammad Gholi Majd, Resistance to the Shah: Landowners and the Ulama in Iran [Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2000]). An example of this sort of approach can be seen clearly in Stephanie Cronin’s Soldiers, Shahs and Subalterns: Opposition, Protest and Revolt, 1921–1941 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Other works include Stephanie Cronin, ed., The Making of Modern Iran: State and Society under Riza Shah 1921–1941 (New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003); Touraj Atabaki, The State and the Subaltern: Modernisation, Society and the State in Turkey and Iran (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007); Stephanie Cronin, Tribal Politics in Iran: Rural Conflict and the New State, 1921–1941 (London: Routledge, 2007); and M. Reza Ghods, “The Iranian Communist Movement under Reza Shah,” Middle Eastern Studies 26, no. 4 (October, 1990): 506–13. By “[d]eliberately shifting the spotlight downwards” towards “the political ‘crowd’ in Tehran along with provincial towns and cities as they were mobilized by guild-based and/or clerical leaderships; the urban and rural poor; the new working class in the oil fields, junior tribal khans; the lower ranks of the army and politically dissident elements within the officer corps, [ . . . including] the methods, mechanisms and institutions these groups used to articulate an agenda of their own” can help provide a more complete view of the period and enhance our understanding of the elites as well (insofar as Riz̤ ā Shāh emerged from the peasantry) [Cronin, Soldiers, Shahs and Subalterns, 4]. There are, additionally, other aspects of the past that are drawn into the fold due to the focus on the subaltern, particularly the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1906–11/1324–29 hq.) and its championing of popular political participation [Cronin, Soldiers, Shahs and Subalterns, 7]. In the same way that this sustained pedigree is given greater attention, along with its influence on the contestation of authority (through the inheritance of methods, tools, traditions, discourse, etc.), the systemic attempt to contain and manipulate subaltern forces is also emphasised, as is the case when Riz̤ ā Shāh’s style of paternalistic politics is discussed (Cronin, Soldiers, Shahs and Subalterns, 29, 40 and 19, respectively). Rather than exclusively investigating the political role of subaltern formations, an understanding of their social composition

Interbellum literature and the demonic 95 (including leadership), the use of rumours as a tool of communication, the decision to avoid certain encounters, and their connection with popular discontent (Cronin, Soldiers, Shahs and Subalterns, 129, 166–7, 133 and 173, respectively) may lead to greater insights. At times, the dichotomy between the elites and the subaltern is complicated when oppositional forces such as the ‘ulamā are internally split between the two sides and when the state attempted to negotiate or co-opt popular agendas and interventions (Cronin, Soldiers, Shahs and Subalterns, 198 and 217, respectively). The next type of literature benefitted from the explosion of heterodoxy in the humanities and is thus the most removed from the classical position. As an umbrella term, this heterodoxy encompasses areas of study such as gender, iconography, technology, daily life (practices, subjective experiences, lifestyles, occupations), non-state actors and institutions (intellectuals, reformers, technocrats, the press, etc.), differential modernities, educational reform (as opposed to principle areas of reform, such as the economy), cultural life (literature, theatre, music, sports, architecture, museums, etc.) and how these factors interacted dialectically with state-led modernisation. One recent work that does well to bring these different strands together is Bianca Devos and Christoph Werner’s edited volume, Culture and Cultural Politics under Reza Shah: The Pahlavi State, New Bourgeoisie and the Creation of a Modern Society in Iran (New York: Routledge, 2013). Cross-disciplinary cultural investigation of this sort exposes the unsuspected agents of social change (such as the modern middle class and a multitude of active reformists and intellectuals operating mostly from without the state apparatus), the impetus behind popular cultural appropriations, a cultural life that is often considered deadened and stale even though a number of domains were opened up or completely transformed during the period (including sites of entertainment), pragmatic state-initiated policies and the way they were informed by a well-solicited group of foreign advocates, the relationship between cultural politics and identity formation (through the influence of education and the initiative of key modernists), and the interaction between culture and politics, reformer and state. Here, state agency, or rather the consistency and motility of authoritarian assertiveness, is challenged as the exclusive purveyor of change (Bianca Devos and Christoph Werner, “Introduction,” in Culture and Cultural Politics, 1–11.). In my work, I am concerned with the socio-religious and cultural counter forces or underside of modernity in Riz̤ ā Shāh’s Iran. A period conventionally thought of in terms of its secular nationalism and systematic modernisation programmes, interbellum Iran was a staging ground for a secularist absorption of an older cultural and religious (demonological) discourse. What I seek to demonstrate is that notions of evil thought to be most at home in occultism, superstition, primitive religious rituals and the like can become entangled in and thus help define state programmes, avante garde intellectual debates, and technological and scientific discourses. 4 Leonidas Donskis, Forms of Hatred: The Troubled Imagination in Modern Philosophy and Literature (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B.V., 2003), 22. 5 Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 232. 6 It is thus unsurprising that poetry, especially during the early Islamic period, was pejoratively considered the “Koran of Satan” (Firuza Abdullaeva, “The Origins of the Munāẓara Genre in New Persian Literature,” in Metaphor and Imagery, 258.). While the poetic enterprise itself may have been deemed satanic, the way demonic figures were deployed in classical and modern poetry is anything but one-sided. Parodisation, in one example, permitted the devil to take on the appearance of a shaykh who enjoined followers to engage in sexual intemperance under the sign of the Divine Law (Julie Scott Meisami, Structure and Meaning in Medieval Arabic and Persian Poetry: Orient Pearls [New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003], 38). This in turn allowed the satanic not only to fulfil its function as a “lure” (Whitney S. Bodman, The Poetics of Iblīs: Narrative Theology in the Qur’ān [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011], 11.), but also

96 Arshavez Mozafari exert its haughtiness through the facade of pedantic adherence to the Law. Working off the theme of Iblīs’ resentment of Adam, Ḥāfiẓ (c. 1326–90/726–92 hq.) devotes a few of his verses to describing how the Beloved is everywhere and subject to universal embrace, a characteristic that greatly aggravates the Iblīs’ ghayrat (“jealousy and offended honour”) [Seyed-Gohrab, “Waxing Eloquent,” 116]. Although there is in poetry a split between Satan’s “embodiment of analytical, loveless intellect and his overbrimming love for his Lord” (Annemarie Schimmel, A Two-Colored Brocade: The Imagery of Persian Poetry [Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992], 61), members of the early Pahlavī literati such as Hidāyat implicitly opt for a variation of the latter conception, which in turn permits their flirtation and confrontation with the demonic. The literature is suffused with Satan’s “amorous gestures of coquetry,” which does not simply “entangl[e] the soul in the world of lesser spiritual attainments” (Peter J. Awn, Satan’s Tragedy and Redemption: Iblīs in Sufi Psychology [Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1983], 139), but rather the unconscious basis behind individual idiosyncrasies, memory recollection, and even existence (see Arshavez Mozafari, “Hidāyat’s Libidinal Hell: Persian Fiction and Inscribing the Demonic,” Iranian Studies 49, no. 5 (2016): 887–911). Though it might not appear as such, classical writings on love and the demonic imply that one should not be too engrossed in a loving union with the Lord, for “this nourishment fattens the soul and makes it lethargic.” The best solution may might as well be to “encounter [ . . . ] the face of Iblīs,” which simultaneously affirms “the glory of the Separated One’s perfection” (Awn, Satan’s Tragedy and Redemption, 146.). Whether through parody, jealousy, extreme fidelity or simply the place one escapes to when one is too enraptured by love, there is a pervading romanticism that grips demonism. 7 In one ghazal, Furāt-Yazdī describes a lover whose days have become depressingly dark (rūz-i man tīrahtar az shām shud az āh-i darūn) because his beloved is out of reach, and this has stripped him of all sense and faith (līk hūsh u dil u dīn burd chih āsān az man). When a shaykh is asked how to liberate oneself from Satan (as the embodiment of this love), he responds by saying that simply looking in his direction is enough to have him scurry away (guft bā shaykh ḥarīfī kih zi Shayṭān bigurīz / guft har sūy garīzān shudah Shayṭān az man) (ʿAbbās Furāt-Yazdī, “Ghazal [1],” Armaghān 10, no. 1 [April, 1929/ Farvardīn, 1308 hs.]: 23.). The shaykh is thus too consumed by his own hubris to realise that the expulsion of Satan is also the casting off of love itself. In another poem, FurātYazdī situates evil in a different position in relation to love. Here, life is presented as not worth living if union with the beloved (possibly God) is not fully established (zindagī-yi bīmadad chishmah-yi ḥayvān narisad) and Iblīs is seen as an entity out to thwart benediction (bad zi chism-i bad-i Iblīs bih riz̤ vān narisad) (ʿAbbās Furāt-Yazdī, “Ghazal [2],” Armaghān 9, no. 8–9 [November and December, 1928/Ābān and Āz̠ ar, 1307 hs.]: 481), not serve as an equivalent to love. As a counterpart to the shaykh in the previous poem, the preacher asks why love does not visit him (guft vāʿiẓ zi chih az ʿishq marā nīst naṣīb) [Furāt-Yazdī, “Ghazal (2),” 481]. The preacher is a sobered version of the earlier mentioned shaykh in that now he knows what his hubris has cost him dearly. However, because the preacher in a sense maintains his air of superiority even in defeat, the poet responds by saying that love will never descend upon the unknowing (guftam īn dawlat-i pāyandah bih nādān narisad) (Furāt-Yazdī, “Ghazal [2],” 481.). Not only are religious figures incapable of tracing the steps of love, they are completely impervious to Satan’s altering appearance. In here lies already the sense that thinkers outside the scope of formal institutionalised religion are better equipped for the task of understanding love and the demonic. 8 In studies related to Iran, the demonic usually appears in the highly saturated form of “demonisation,” particularly in the context of contemporary international relations and American political science. This is a more recent emergence that links governmental policy to accusations of culpability. I have avoided an archival investigation of demonisation as a way to unmoor the demonic from the assumptions and implications of this

Interbellum literature and the demonic 97 discourse, but I have come to realise that a historical study on the emergence of what can be called the academic study of demonisation (as it pertains to Iran) is sorely needed. For examples of this discourse, see Chapter 9 of Abbas Amanat, Apocalyptic Islam and Iranian Shi’ism (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009); William O. Beeman, The “Great Satan” vs. the “Mad Mullahs”: How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other (Westport: Praeger, 2005); the introduction to Ali Pirzadeh, Iran Revisited: Exploring the Historical Roots of Culture, Economics, and Society (Berlin: Springer, 2016); Dina Porat, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: New Uses of an Old Myth,” in Demonizing the Other: Antisemitism, Racism and Xenophobia, ed. Robert S. Wistrich (London: Routledge, 2011), 322–34; the introduction to Jason Jones, The American Rhetorical Construction of the Iranian Nuclear Threat (London: Continuum, 2011); Part III of Yvette Hovsepian-Bearce, The Political Ideology of Ayatollah Khamenei: Out of the Mouth of the Supreme Leader of Iran (New York: Routledge, 2016); Maysam Bahravesh, “A Crisis of Confidence Revisited: Iran-West Tensions and Mutual Demonization,” Asian Politics & Policy 3, no. 3 (July, 2011): 327–47; Paul R. Pillar, “The Role of Villain: Iran and U.S. Foreign Policy,” Political Science Quarterly 128, no. 2 (Summer, 2013): 211–31; David Menashri, “Iran, Israel and the Middle East Conflict,” Israel Affairs 12, no. 1 (2006): 107–22; the introduction to Mehri Honarbin-Holliday, Becoming Visible in Iran: Women in Contemporary Iranian Society (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013); Gareth Porter, “Israel’s Construction of Iran as an Existential Threat,” Journal of Palestine Studies 45, no. 1 (Autumn, 2015): 43–62; Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, “The Iran ‘Threat’ In a Kafkaesque World,” Journal of Palestine Studies 42, no. 1 (Autumn, 2012): 24–45; Rusi Jaspal, “Anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in Iran,” Israel Affairs 19, no. 2 (2013): 231–58; and Gareth Porter, “How U.S. Intelligence Got Iran Wrong,” Middle East Policy 21, no. 3 (Fall, 2014): 95–103. The logic of this discourse has seeped into historical investigations through the cloak of alterity (or otherness). For instance, consult Abbas Amanat and Farzin Vejdani, eds., Iran Facing Others: Identity Boundaries in a Historical Perspective (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 9 Our distance from evil can be measured by determining our level of knowledge (Andrew Michael Flescher, Moral Evil [Washington: Georgetown University Press, 2013], 176), but evil itself can be measured as well. For example, it can be measured when combining the degree of wrongness with the pleasure taken in pursuing evil ends (Luke Russell, Evil: A Philosophical Investigation [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014], 47). Of course, in the Western tradition the pinnacle of evil is located in the Auschwitz event (Marc Froment-Meurice, Solitudes: From Rimbaud to Heidegger, trans. Peter Walsh [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995], 220; and Robert Rozett, “Diminishing the Holocaust: Scholarly Fodder for a Discourse of Distortion,” Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs 6, no. 1 [2012]: 53) and almost every subsequent identification of evil is somehow measured against it. (Close behind it are the moments of mass political violence perpetrated by the communists in Russia and China. For the debates that surround comparisons of the three, see Helmut Dubiel and Gabriel Motzkin, eds., The Lesser Evil: Moral Approaches to Genocide Practices [London: Routledge, 2004].) In fact, it was after Auschwitz that evil was argued to have become immeasurable and always in excess (Emmanuel Levinas, “Transcendence and Evil,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis [Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987], 175–86, 180.). In some Persian works the figure of evil is used as a yardstick to express the aesthetic and romantic quality of certain entities. In one case, the passionate desire for a beloved is thought to be capable of taming the visceral energies of Satan through sheer intensity. Out of the vacillation between distinct hellish and heavenly moods (ān khūy-i hamchū dūzakh-i ū har chih mīkunad / ān rūy-i chūn bihisht buvad ʿuẕrkhāh-i ū) that are produced by intense love, Satan is reduced to a loyal dog at the threshold of love (bīchārah sagīst bar dar-i īn khānah) (Mullā Muḥammad Ṣūfī, “Untitled Poem,” Armaghān 12, no. 1 [April, 1931/Farvardīn, 1310 hs.]: 38). Moving away from the idea of supplanting Satan, there is also the idea of equaling him in his guilt. In an older poem, we see how a joke

98 Arshavez Mozafari

10 11 12

13 14

made in the royal court is meant to describe how the lustful disposition of an old and aesthetically detestable woman is in proportion to Satan’s guilt (māyil-i shahvat az ān bīsh kih Shayṭān bih gunāh) [Qāʾānī Shīrāzī, “Qaṣīdah,” Armaghān 15, no. 5 (August, 1934/Murdād, 1313 hs.): 325]. In another case, the disdain a poet has for a rival’s poetry is reflected in the observation that the latter’s works are indeed beautiful, but only insofar as they are deemed to be ornaments adorning a demon (barā-yi zīvar-i ʿifrīt shiʿr rā dar gūsh). He is accused of having achieved fame the same way Satan reached his state of infidelity (chū kufr-i Shayṭān shiʿr-i vay ishtihār āvarad) (Nijātī, “Tasliyat [Condolences],” Armaghān 14, no. 6 [September, 1933/Shahrīvar, 1312 hs.]: 419). By being used as a criterion of measure, Satan becomes “determinate in itself” (G.W.F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. and ed. George di Giovanni [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010], 289.) because while his guilt, degree of seduction, etc. can themselves be measured, their treatment as a single amalgam can itself be a standard of measurement. Qudrat Qumī, “Sirishk-i Mastī [Tears of Drunkenness],” Taqaddum 1, no. 5 (January, 1928/Day, 1306 hs.): 294. Anonymous, “Ghazal,” Armaghān 12, no. 8 (October–November, 1931/Ābān, 1310 hs.): 545. In nationalist discourse, the Mongols, Turks and Arabs (particularly the latter) became associated with not only degeneracy and ineptitude but also sexual and linguistic excess (Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism and Nationalist Historiography [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001], 92–3). Stretching back to the early nationalists of the late nineteenth century, such as Mīrzā Fatḥ ʿAlī Ākhūndzādah (1812–78/1227–95 hq.) and ʿAbd al-Ḥusayn Mīrzā Āqā Khān Kirmānī (1853–4–1896/1270–1314 hq.), they were posited as being the irreducible originators of every reprehensible manifestation of Iranian vice and incivility (Ali M. Ansari, The Politics of Nationalism in Modern Iran [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012], 30). The Arab predilection for immoral instigations of every variety was considered irremediable, which made it easier for them to be “other[ed]” (Ansari, Politics of Nationalism, 58.). Emerging much farther back in time, it has been noted that “anti-Arab animosity enjoyed an authentic and traditional pedigree which not only drew on traditional historical myths, such as Firdawsī’s Shāhnāmah, but had been embedded within Iranian Shi’ism in traditional rituals such as the cursing of the Caliph ‘Umar and the general dismissal of the first three caliphs as illegitimate” (Ansari, Politics of Nationalism, 145–6.). While there were intellectuals such as Sayyid Ḥasan Taqīzādah (1878– 1970/1257–1348 hs.) who attempted to counter this nationalist assault by crediting Islam for its benefits (Ansari, Politics of Nationalism, 150.), what predominated was the discourse that recounted “the victory of savages over civilized people” (Majid Sharifi, Imagining Iran: The Tragedy of Subaltern Nationalism [Plymouth, MA: Lexington Books, 2013], 82). Due to a great deal of factors, including the anachronistic retrieval of an unsullied pre-Islamic past and the construction of a genealogy of decline focused on the malignant Arab (David Motadel, “Iran and the Aryan Myth,” in Perceptions of Iran: History, Myths and Nationalism from Medieval Persia to the Islamic Republic, ed. Ali M. Ansari [London: I.B. Tauris, 2014], 119–46), along with the erection of a centralised state through the implications of the 1919/1337 hq. Anglo-Persian treaty (Ghods, “Iranian Nationalism,” 37) and geopolitical consolidation, there was created a statesanctioned and nationalistic revivalist movement that was both reflected in and influenced by the writings of the time. Vahīd Dastgirdī, “Kākh va Dakhmah-yi Asātīd-i Sukhan [The Palaces and Tombs of the Literary Masters],” Armaghān 15, no. 2 (May, 1934/Urdībihisht, 1313 hs.): 97–8. Those possessing foreign lineage are seen as putting undue and relentless strain on the city’s legitimate inhabitants (farzandān-i ḥaqīqī-yi Iṣfahān rā dast-i sitam az garībān bar nimīgīrand ), and this prompts Dastgirdī to call on the backing of state power. He does so by holding Prime Minister Muḥammad ʿAlī Furūghī (Ẕakāʾ al-Mulk, 1875– 1942/1292–1361 hq.) to his word that he will allocate resources to revivalist

Interbellum literature and the demonic 99

15

16 17 18 19 20 21

22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

programmes (dar Tehran shumā vaʾdah-yi ʿumrān va sākhtan-i maqbarah-yi ustād Kamāl al-Dīn rā bih mā dādīd) [Dastgirdī, “Kākh va Dakhmah,” 97–9]. The Firdawsī Millenium was a collection of concurrent international events commemorating the achievements of the medieval Persian poet, Firdawsī. For more, see Parisa Zahiremami, “Hizārah-yi Firdawsī, Farhang Pīrāī va Huvvīyat Ārāyī [The Firdawsī Millennium: Reformulating the Culture and Reforming National Identity],” Iran Nameh 27, no. 1 (2012): 3–25. Sharīf al-Salṭanah, “Bi Nām-i Jashn-i Firdawsī [In Honour of the Firdawsī Celebration],” Armaghān 15, no. 8 (November, 1934/Ābān, 1313 hs.): 576–7. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book – General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, trans. F. Kersten (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1983), 80. Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893– 1917), trans. John Barnett Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), 60. Sharīf al-Salṭanah, “Bi Nām-i Jashn-i Firdawsī,” 576. See Hamid Rezaei Yazdi’s contribution to this volume. The argument that Hidāyat was a central mentor in the literary circles of his time (and his entire generation, which can be termed his) and had access to European manuscripts that he then shared with other authors, etc. has often spilled over into the notion that his contemporaries pale in comparison to his talent and genius. For examples of how ʿAlavī has been both implicitly and explicitly subordinated to Hidāyat through granular and seemingly innocuous remarks (even by ʿAlavī himself), see Homa Katouzian, “Introduction: The Wondrous World of Sadeq Hedayat,” in Sadeq Hedayat: His Work and His Wondrous World, ed. Homa Katouzian (London: Routledge, 2008), 1–14; Donné Raffat, The Prison Papers of Bozorg Alavi: A Literary Odyssey (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1985); Nasrin Rahimieh, “Hedayat’s Translations of Kafka and the Logic of Iranian Modernity,” in Sadeq Hedayat, 124–35; Nasrin Rahimieh, “Persian Incursions: The Transnational Dynamics of Persian Literature,” in A Companion to Comparative Literature, ed. Ali Behdad and Dominic Thomas (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 296–311; Hasan Javadi, Satire in Persian Literature (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1988); Hamid Dabashi, The World of Persian Literary Humanism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); G.M. Wickens, “Bozorg Alavi’s Portmanteau,” University of Toronto Quarterly 28, no. 2 (January, 1959): 116–33; Nasrin Rahimieh, “A Systematic Approach to Modern Persian Prose Fiction,” World Literature Today 63, no. 1 (Winter, 1989): 15–19; Tahereh Rezaei and Fazel Asadi Amjad, “Ethics and Politics in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent and Bozorg Alavi’s Her Eyes,” Persian Literary Studies Journal 2, no. 2.3 (Summer and Autumn, 2013): 35–60; and the introduction to Nahid Mozaffari and Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, eds., Strange Times, My Dear: The PEN Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literature (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2005). Ṣādiq Hidāyat, “Parvīn Dukhtar-i Sāsān [Parvīn, the Sasanian Girl],” in Parvīn Dukhtari Sāsān va Iṣfahān Niṣf-i Jahān [Parvīn, the Sasanian Girl and Iṣfahān, Half of the World] (Tehran: Muʾassisah-yi Chāp va Intishārāt-i Amīr Kabīr, 1963–4/1342 hs.), 12–13. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 20. For a discussion regarding the relationship between beauty and evil, see Chapter 6 of Colin McGinn, Ethics, Evil, and Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003). Hidāyat, “Parvīn,” 16. Think of the elevation of a “sensible form [ . . . ] to the rank of a theophanic Image” (Henry Corbin, Creative Imagination in the Ṣūfism of Ibn ‘Arabī, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), 156.). Hidāyat, “Parvīn,” 21. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 30.

100 Arshavez Mozafari 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

Ibid., 22–3. Ibid., 48. Ibid., 32–3. Ibid., 36. Fran O’Rourke, “Evil as Privation: The Neoplatonic Background to Aquinas’s De Malo, I,” in Aquinas’s Disputed Questions on Evil: A Critical Guide, ed. M.V. Dougherty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 212. Hidāyat, “Parvīn,” 54–5. Ibid., 46. Ibid., 30. For another study that investigates the remapping of the divine and the demonic, see Moshe Sluhovsky, Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, & Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). To understand this shift, it is enough to briefly review the early stages of capitalist development in Iran. Different from the rentier state capitalism of the second and final Pahlavī monarch, Mohammad Reza Shah (1919–80/1298–1359 hs./r. 1941–79/1320–57 hs.) and its basis in petrodollars (Theda Skocpol, “Rentier State and Shi’a Islam in the Iranian Revolution,” Theory and Society 11, no. 3 [May, 1982]: 269), Riz̤ ā Shāh’s reign was known for its adherence to etatism – or state capitalism (Ervand Abrahamian, Iran between Two Revolutions [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press], 140) – and its commitment to a command economy. This platform allowed for unprecedented developments in industry and infrastructure, which in turn led to the formation of a small but heavily concentrated working class and a restructuration of Iran’s urban centres. Revenue growth through oil production royalties, customs levies, income taxation, state monopoly profits and deficit financing (Abrahamian, Iran between Two Revolutions, 146–8) started to create the necessary conditions to finally permit Iran to partially transition away from nineteenth-century barriers to capitalist accumulation as they appeared in the form of an outmoded and restrictive commercial policy, misallocated agricultural surplus, and the immobile wealth hoarded by merchants and landowners that was not permitted to take on the character of self-expanding capitals (Ahmad Seyf, “Obstacles to the Development of Capitalism: Iran in the Nineteenth Century,” Middle Eastern Studies 34, no. 3 [July, 1998]: 79–80). Corresponding in minimal measure to the way the figure of the Devil in European Christendom entered a phase of exponentially increased potency and externalisation during the proto-capitalist transformations of the sixteenth century (Omar Lizardo, “The Devil as Cognitive Mapping,” Rethinking Marxism 21, no. 4 [2009]: 607), it can also be said that the entrance into Iran of capitalist nomenclature, relations and effects carried the demonic further away from its pre-modern grounding by allowing it to “condense” (Lizardo, “The Devil as Cognitive Mapping,” 611) the logic of the ongoing reorganisation of the prevailing economic model. Whether deployed as a grievance against the illegitimate acquisition of wealth (Rashīd Yāsimī, “Shahāb [Shooting Star],” Armaghān 7, no. 6–7 [September, 1926/Shahrīvar, 1305 hs.]: 373–4) or within the discourse of internal relations (Rasūl Nakhshabī [Maḥmūd Maḥmūd], “Takāmul yā Inqilāb [Evolution or Revolution],” Āyandah 2, no. 12 (March, 1928/Isfand 1306 hs.): 873–81), interwar economic writings already harboured the demonic, years before ʿAlavī turned to the topic. For the politician and historian Rasūl Nakhshabī (1882–3/1965/1261–1344 hs.), it was clear that the prioritisation of spiritual progress (taraqqīyāt-i rūḥī) over earthly developmentalism would be beneficial for national progress. According to him, the satanic emerges in the form of predatory industrial nations (dasāʿis-i duval-i ṭammāʾ-i Shayṭān-i ṣanʿat) that actively thwart this strategy (Nakhshabī, “Takāmul yā Inqilāb,” 880–1). Taqīzādah took a different approach. Evoking apocalyptic imagery (shūr va nashūr) to describe the incessant activity of stock exchanges in metropolitan centres such as Paris, London and New York, and the immense prowess of an attacking dragon (izhdihā-yi ṣawlat) to convey the character of American and European Banks, Taqīzādah argued that Iran should dive into this

Interbellum literature and the demonic 101 economic system of chaos and cease squabbling over archaic notions such as usury (ribā) in the local settings of Ardabīl, Marāghah, Iṣfahān and Burūjird (Sayyid Ḥasan Taqīzādah, “Muqaddamah-yi Taʾlīm-i ʿUmūmī yā Yikī az Sar Faṣlʹhā-yi Tamadun [The Introduction of Universal Education or One of the Topics of Civilisation],” in Sayyid Ḥasan Taqīzādah, Maqālāt-i Taqīzādah, Jild-i Sivvum [Taqīzādah’s Essays, Vol. 3], ed. Īraj Afshār (N.p.: Chāpkhānah-yi Bīst va Panjum-i Shahrīvar, 1972–3/1351 hs.), 82). In the case of the Marxist theoretician and physicist Taqī Arānī (1902–40/1281–1318 hs.), money-worship (pūlparastī) was conveyed through the structure of evil idol-worship (butparastī) (Taqī Arānī, “Pūl az Naẓar-i Iqtiṣādī va Ahamiyat-i Ān dar Ijtimāʾ-i Fiʾlī [Money from an Economic Perspective and Its Significance in Today’s Society],” in Taqī Arānī, Ās̱ ār va Maqālāt [Œuvre] (Köln: Pahl-Rugenstein Verlag, 1977), 226). Of course, the notion that bourgeois practice “resemble[s] that hideous pagan idol who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain” (Karl Marx, “On Imperialism in India,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker [New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1978], 664.) is instilled within the very origins of Marxist theory. It is precisely out of this cluster of demonographical inscriptions (both decrying demonic presence and advocating union with it) that ʿAlavī emerged when he finished writing the short story, Chamidān (The Suitcase), in June, 1934/Khurdād, 1311 hs. In the first short story of the same name, the demonic acts as an intrusive third element that disrupts a potential romantic union between the narrator and a Russian love-interest named Kātūshkā (for another example of demonic disruption, this time in Iranian cosmological history, see Bruce Lincoln, Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars: Critical Explorations in the History of Religions [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012], 51). While traditionally the satanic third serves to incite the consummation of a nāmaḥram bond, in the case of Chamidān the demonic emerges in the form of a structural prohibition. The interdiction does not emanate from conventional sources of authority (nah pidar va nah mādar) [Buzurg ʿAlavī, “Chamidān (The Suitcase),” in Chamidān (Tehran: Muʾassisah-yi Intishārāt-i Nigāh, 1998–9/1377 hs.), 16], for they appear inconsequential at this point. After all, the “sentimental veil” of the family had been ripped off by the intrusion of bourgeois relations (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto [New York: International Publishers, 2007], 11). Nor can it be said that any particular person is coercing Kātūshkā (hīch kas ū rā majbūr nimīkard) to marry someone she is not in the least interested in (ʿAlavī, “Chamidān,” 16), for the satanophanic event does not occur in the appearance of individuality at all. As such, morality is effectively jettisoned in favour of a social and structuralist explanation (for a discussion of moral evil and the social problem, see Lars Svendsen, A Philosophy of Evil, trans. Kerri A. Pierce (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2010), 22–3), but it is not clear whether for the narrator this structure is defined by levels, instances or a totality (Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster [New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971], 90). On the one hand, determination comes from three different loci: money (pūl), society (jāmiʿah) and environment (muḥīṭ), but on the other, all these instances are embodied in a sinister, tattered and frightening demon (dīv-i manḥūs-i mundaris-i mahīb). By suggesting that these are the sources of coercion (majbūr mīkard) that prevent Kātūshkā from establishing any meaningful union with the narrator (ʿAlavī, “Chamidān,” 16), ʿAlavī is again able to advance a demonological critique of capitalist society. In this way, there is an odd truth to Nakhshabī’s claim that modern sociologists (ʿulamā-yi ʿulūm-i ijtimāʿī) have inherited the Zoroastrian preoccupation with Ahrīman (Nakhshabī, “Nasl-i Āyandah-yi Īrān,” 373). Besides the demonic social, “the universal and natural validity of the signs and abstractions engendered by the market mechanism,” such as money (Michael T. Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America [Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010], 10), leads to “the universal and natural validity” of the idea of the demon in the Iranian context. In this instance, the malignant being does not need to hijack Kātūshkā’s body to make her

102 Arshavez Mozafari sell herself for a lifetime (biravad khvudash rā bifurūshad, barā-yi yik ʿumr bifurūshad) [ʿAlavī, “Chamidān,” 16], because it is the external demonic structural and relational substance in the form of money and the environment that coerces her to assume the “definite form [ . . . ] of social consciousness” (Karl Marx, “Marx on the History of His Opinions [Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy],” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 4) necessary for her to sell herself. Similar to Chamidān, the narrator in ʿAlavī’s Intiẓār (Expectation) is able to identify a troubling relationship between a character and the demonic as the crux of the narrative, and this takes place right in the beginning when a communist political prisoner who also so happens to be a sculptor (yik nafar zindānī-yi siyāsī [va] mujassamahsāz) teaches the narrator and a fellow prisoner identified only as M the basics of his craft (Buzurg ʿAlavī, “Intiẓār [Expectation],” in Varaq Pārah′hā-yi Zindān [Notes from Prison] (Tehran: Muʾassisah-yi Intishārāt-i Amīr Kabīr, 1978–9/1357 hs.), 38). Similar to an actor who transitions from his role as the representative of an essence by coinciding with that which he mimics (G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004], 452), Intiẓār presents readers with a major character (M in this case) who comes to resemble a mask of his creation, but only insofar as he already has within him the undeveloped essence that is fully actualised in the mask. By creating grotesque and comedic forms, from dog and monkey heads (kalah-yi sag [ . . . ] kalah-yi maymūn), to a mask of Satan (māsk-i Shayṭān) and the caricatures of wellknown personalities (kārīkātūr-i maʾrūf) (ʿAlavī, “Intiẓār,” 38), M is able to give full expression to his unrevealed psychopathological core. The status of the masks and sculptures as fully ādam′hā-yi actualised reflections of an undeveloped but present core is seen in the way they appear to leer back at their creator and potential visitors (radīf-i ʿarūsak′hā pahlū-yi ham īstādah būdand, hamah yik shikl, bā yik qīyāfah, hamah bā yik adā. radīf-i kārīkātūr-i palangarī [sic] bā dahan kaj, chism′hā-yi ishārah kunandah va khvandah zanandah khīrah bih ādam nigāh mīkard) [ʿAlavī, “Intiẓār,” 38–9]. Here, the representation is more real and actualised than the essence it mimics because the mask as representation is M’s bodily reality in a futural state (“Representations are bodies too!” [Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 86]. When M looks down at the sculptures and masks, he bellows out a frightening laugh (khvandah-yi vaḥshatnāk) [ʿAlavī, “Intiẓār,” 38] but the laugh is not so much in this instance a “violent agent for change” (Plato, The Republic, trans. Tom Griffith and ed. G.R.F. Ferrari [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003], 75) than a reflection of a brewing transformation at the core of his being. The narrator announces early on that his audience should not be surprised (mawjib-i taʿajjub nashavad) by how M will quickly come to resemble the constructed figures (ʿazīzān-i M bih shikl-i ʿarūsak dar mīāyand). Even though M’s sculpted products are odd due to their unnatural eyes (makhṣūṣan chishm′hā-yi ʿarūsak′hā ghayr-i ṭabīʾī būdand) [ʿAlavī, “Intiẓār,” 39], this unnaturalness has a strong component of reality attached to it. In fact, the general prison population’s ignorance regarding the cause of M’s growing insanity (ʿillatash rā nimīdānand) [ʿAlavī, “Intiẓār,” 39] is precisely because of their unwillingness to equate this unnaturalness with reality. They do not realise that when he is laughing in front of the demonic objects of his own creation, he is doing so because he is looking straight into the heart of his hidden insanity (dar tah-i ān khvandah dīvānigī pinhān būd) [ʿAlavī, “Intiẓār,” 40]. As an “absolute discharge [of . . . ] unutilizable [ . . . ] psychic energy” (see Sigmund Freud, “Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. VIII, trans. and ed. James Strachey [London: The Hogarth Press, 1964], 9–238). M’s laughter intensifies over time as more and more of his being is directed into its production. Only when his laughter enters a new stage of frightening intensity and he begins to purposefully alter his appearance in strange ways, particularly around his eyes (mīkhvāst kih chishmhāyash bā māl-i dīgarān farq dāshtah bāshad), does he arouse

Interbellum literature and the demonic 103

41 42

43 44 45 46

the attention of others. In addition to dreaming that his eyes are as bright as headlights (khvāb dīdam kih chishmhāyam mīdirakhshad) [ʿAlavī, “Intiẓār,” 42], the change in appearance draws M closer to the grotesque features of the carved masks and sculptures. The transformation is complete when one morning he is caught perched up like an owl screaming in the corner of his cell (bi jā-yi “M” gūyī jughdī dar gūshah-yi utāq kiz kardah būd) [ʿAlavī, “Intiẓār,” 47]. Here, M comes to represent the satanic mask, thus distorting the logic of representation itself. Though perceived by many nationalists at the time as the supreme modern entity capable of avenging and sustaining the legacy and law of the fallen Iranians in Dīv!, the early Pahlavī state is considered in ʿAlavī’s early 1940s work Panjāh va Sih Nafar (Group of Fifty-Three) to be the cause and result of an all-consuming interwar darkness (ḥukūmat-i dawrah-yi sīyah). In this account of life in Qaṣr Prison, ʿAlavī without reservation speaks of the ever increasing satanic intentions of the prison authorities (rūz bih rūz qaṣd-i shayṭānī-yi zindānbānān dar āzār risāndan bih mā āshikārtar mīgardīd) (Buzurg ʿAlavī, Panjāh va Sih Nafar [Group of Fifty-Three] (N.p.: N.p., 1941), 98). Compared to his earlier romantic nationalist sentiments, the locus of darkness has radically altered and is now nestled deep within the bureaucratic structure of the state apparatus. In this space, the “special technical expertise” harboured by the officials (Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, trans. Ephraim Fischoff et al. and ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich [Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978], 958.) is located in their duplicity (dū rūʿī). In other words, midlevel prison administrators had to manoeuvre around pressures emanating from both higher ranking officials (raʾīs-i zindān) and the incarcerated (zindāniyān) [ʿAlavī, Panjāh va Sih Nafar, 105]. In this self-preservative dance, the demonic became recognised for the first time as being intertwined with administrative technique (az ṭarafī dar mavāqiʾ-i sakht saʾy mīkard kih zindāniyān rā sharūr va Shayṭān qalamdād kunad va az ṭarafī dīgar dar mavāqiʾ-i ‘āddī mīkūshīd bih har vasīlahʿī shudah khabar-i khushī barā-yi zindāniyān biyāvarad va dil-i ān′hā rā bih dast āvarad) [ʿAlavī, Panjāh va Sih Nafar, 105]. By tracing these types of strategies back to the ruling class, the indispensability of demonisation (az īn jahat ānhā rā dīv-i ādamkush va khūnkhvur qalamdād mīkardahand) [ʿAlavī, Panjāh va Sih Nafar, 193] in maintaining normative socio-political conditions is brought to the fore as a centuries-long conspiracy to restrict the grounding of progressive politics. In one fell swoop, ʿAlavī conducts a full-on reversal of his earlier nationalistic stance by asserting that the rhetorical attack of the Sasanians against Arab standing was solely for the sake of perpetuating courtly power (taṣavvur kunīd hingāmī rā kih nihz̤ at-i Islam dar mīyān-i qabāʿil-i Arab ījād gardīd va qudrat va sulṭah-yi darbār-i Sāsāniyān rā tahdīd mīkard, agar ān rūz az yikī az umarā-yi darbār-i Sāsānī rājiʾ bih īn nihz̤ at suʾālī mīshud, chih javābī mīshinidīm?) [ʿAlavī, Panjāh va Sih Nafar, 193]. Roja Dehdarian, “Bozorg ‘Alavī on the Young Literary Scene,” in Culture and Cultural Politics, 243–4. In Christian thought, there is the notion of an absorbable evil that does not disrupt the good, but rather facilitates it. In other words, evil is absorbed into the good. For more on this idea, see Chapter 6 of Bruce Langtry, God, the Best, and Evil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). In the case of Dīv! what we observe is an impossible absorption. Buzurg ʿAlavī, “Dīv! . . . Dīv! [Demon! . . . Demon!],” in Dīv! . . . Dīv!, Vabā, and Yikkah va Tanhā [Demon! . . . Demon!, Cholera, and Solitary Soul] (Tehran: Muʾassisah-yi Intishārāt-i Amīr Kabīr, 1978–9/1357 hs.), 5–7. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 8. In opposition to Nature’s hidden evil in Joseph Conrad’s (1857–1924) Heart of Darkness (1899), here Semitic evil is put on full display, only to later withdraw into obscurity in the form of the mongrel child. In the words of Hesiod (c. 8th c. BC) who spoke of

104 Arshavez Mozafari

47 48

49 50

51

52 53 54 55

56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

Prometheus’ conflict with Zeus, “The white bones of the ox he set by contrast to the side, / Hidden within the glistening fat – such was his crafty scheme” (Hesiod, “Theogony,” in Theogony and Works and Days, trans. Catherine M. Schlegel and Henry Weinfield [Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press], 40). Instead of fat, ʿAlavī wrapped the white bones with the perceived vulnerability of childhood. ʿAlavī, “Dīv!,” 10. R.C. Zaehner, The Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1961), 46. Notice how this symbolism differs from its uses in classical Persian literature (see R. Zipoli, “Poetic Imagery,” in General Introduction to Persian Literature, ed. J.T.P. de Bruijn [New York: I.B. Tauris, 2009]). ʿAlavī, “Dīv!,” 10. The truth of the signs is located in the point of enunciation: the child and his “terrifying phantom-like Voice” (Slavoj Žižek, “In His Bold Gaze My Ruin Is Write Large,” in Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan [But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock], ed. Slavoj Žižek [London: Verso, 2002], 234). When the child finally appeared after his voice led to the fire dying, the terrifying aspect of the voice dissipated, for all that stood was the child – “the moment of embodiment” (Žižek, “In His Bold Gaze My Ruin Is Write Large,” 234). The seemingly innocuous visage of the child dislocated the suspicion, looming darkness, and smothered truth, even though his voice betrayed his eternal culpability. The frustration does help to destabilise the reader, as in the case of Italo Calvino’s (1923–85) If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979), but ʿAlavī does not opt for an effortlessly free flowing subjectivity. There is in Dīv! a deliberate attempt to rouse feelings of disappointment and frustration from this destabilisation. ʿAlavī, “Dīv!,” 7. Ibid., 7–8. Ibid., 10. For more on this notion, see Immanuel Kant, “Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime,” in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and Other Writings, ed. Patrick Frierson and Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 14. ʿAlavī, “Dīv!,” 11. Zaehner, The Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism, 47. ʿAlavī, “Dīv!,” 12. Ibid. Zaehner, The Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism, 81. ʿAlavī, “Dīv!,” 12. Ibid., 12–3. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 13–4. Ibid., 14.

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106 Arshavez Mozafari Valīzādah, Akbar. Ittiḥād-i Jamāhīr-i Shawravī va Riz̤ ā Shāh: Barrasī-yi Ravābiṭ-i Iran va Shawravī Miyān-i Dū Jang-i Jahānī [The Soviet Union and Riz̤ ā Shāh: An Examination of the Inter-War Relationship between Iran and the Soviets]. Tehran: Intishārāt-i Markazi Asnād-i Inqilāb-i Islāmī, 2006–7/1385 hs. Yāsimī, Rashīd. “Shahāb [Shooting Star].” Armaghān 7, no. 6–7 (September, 1926/ Shahrīvar, 1305 hs.): 373–4. Zahiremami, Parisa. “Hizārah-yi Firdawsī, Farhang Pīrāī va Huvviyat Ārāyī [The Firdawsī Millennium: Reformulating the Culture and Reforming National Identity].” Iran Nameh 27, no. 1 (2012): 3–25.

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4

Linguistic realism and modernity The ontology of the poetic from Suhrawardī to Ṣāʾib Henry M. Bowles

Untiming literary Modernity Among the great ironies of Persian literary history is the rejection by nineteenthcentury “Modernizers” of a pre-colonial poetics having more in common with Modernism than the showy nostalgia of Qajar classicism or the “romantic nationalism” of the turn of the twentieth century. The formal experimentalism (and the cult of ostensible novelty) hastened by the early twentieth century’s shiʿr-i naw (New Poetry) or Ṣādiq Ḥidāyat’s Būf-i kūr (1937) should be understood not as a “Westernizing” innovation but as a (perhaps unwitting) reawakening to a Modern tradition that has little to do with European influence and still less to do with chronology. Moreover, the traditional account of “Modernism” as an import1 – one drawn in the shadows of anthropology and economics and corroborated by the models of literary “diffusion” offered by Fredric Jameson, Franco Moretti, and Pascale Casanova – is due for reconsideration, as is the “stadial” and “historicist” notion that Modernism is a function of (inevitably Eurocentric) time.2 If Persian literary “Modernity” in the twentieth century required “compromise” (Moretti) with “western machineries of representation” (Jameson) in order to gain entry to “l’espace littéraire mondiale” (Casanova), then this is only anamnesis.3 Persian letters had already and at length borne witness to literary “Modernity,” and this in a sense neither idiosyncratic nor “relative.” The sine qua non of any Modernity of the verbal arts is the eclipse of the language of nature – one where ingenuous, limpid, given speech disappears into the world – by the language of mind. Ingenuity and inventiveness, “innere Bewegungen” (inner movements)4 and poetic caprice – these come to the fore as imagination shatters the mirrors of language and nature (and the “decorum” meant to unite the two), transmuting the nonpsychic world into a reflection of individual and profane desire. “Je dis: une fleur!” (I say: a flower!) Mallarmé pronounces in Crise de vers, heralding a poetics where thought turns into object, “virtualité” (virtuality) imagination, “l’idée même” (the very idea) a flower.5 Such is the reformation of the trinity of language, nature, and psyche – one where the last brings the first two irrevocably to heel – failing which literary Modernity no matter time or place does not come to pass. Mallarmé’s poetic realism – thought realizing ontic effects by words alone – is rather less than remarkable for the student of Persian literary history. Certainly,

Linguistic realism and modernity 113 Decadence and Symbolism offer a very real premonition of the linguistic realism (and hence unreality) that would give life to Modernism and Postmodernism in Europe (Frank Kermode would rightly call them “palaeomodernist”). Modernism depends upon the Decadent and Symbolist cult of “idéalisation forcée” (forced idealization) and “un moi . . . qui . . . exprime [la réalité] en images plus vivantes que la vie elle-même”6 (a self . . . which . . . expresses [reality] in images more alive than life itself).7 Still, little in Mallarmé or Baudelaire or Huysmans, at least with respect to their understanding of world, thought, and word, would be wholly out of place in post-Timurid Persian attitudes towards verbal creation – and this less because Europe’s literary Modernity has non-European likenesses than for the more elementary reason that Europeans are rather late entrants to the game. No anachronism or geographic displacement – an “Orientalist taxonomy”8 still less – is at play in speaking, in a single drawn-out breath, of “Modernity” as belonging to European letters after the Enlightenment and to Persian poetics after the Timurid period. At stake in each is the realism of language, the eclipsing of world and word by mind. This interplay between “Modernity” and realism was, moreover, recognized as such by the contemporaneous witnesses. Well before “Modern” surfaces in the European languages, beginning in the sixteenth century, as a name for “the present” – and well before the word would come to firmly denote post-Symbolist aesthetics – muḥdath (Modern) is what observers of Arabic poetics called an earlier and similar linguistic realism. The badīʿ (innovative, heretical) attitude towards language characteristic of the poets of the early Abbasid period – of Bashshār ibn Burd (d. ca. 783/167 hq.), Abū Nuwās (d. ca. 814/199 hq.), and Abū Tammām (d. ca. 845/231 hq.) – was the issue. Theirs was, as al-Āmidī, a secretary at Baghdad and Kufa in the tenth century CE, would put it in his Muwāzana (Weighing), a poetics where khayāl and fikrah, “imagination” and “contemplation,” break from and overtake tartīb and lafẓ, “composition” and “expression.”9 The result is a language torn away from salīqah and ṭabʿ, “instinct” and “nature,” one reducing the outer world to a shroud of the imagination. The apparently inordinate Persian influence on the “Modernism” of early Abbasid poetry in Arabic need not be stressed. That muwallad (of mixed-descent) was a near synonym of muḥdath (Modern) is sufficient to suggest the contemporaneous consensus on the matter.10 More significant is the fact that when Persian poets themselves begin, after, perhaps, the start of the fifteenth century,11 to regularly stress Modernity for its own sake – turning claims to the tāzah (fresh) and naw (new) into topoi and not inaccurate clichés – they too are seizing upon the same interplay between literary Modernity and linguistic realism so alarming to the more “decorous” of muḥdath poetry’s critics (e.g. al-Āmidī and Ibn Ṭabāṭabā [d. 934/322 hq.]). Only now without the opprobrium. Neither formal nor content-neutral – and relative only insofar as its break from a norm subordinating mind to nature is recognized contemporaneously as “new” – the “Modernity” of letters is little bent by differences in geography, language, or time. Such is, in any case, what this chapter attempts to lay bare. Literary Modernity is never, I shall suggest, about poetry per se. No matter how much ʿUrfī (d. 1591/999 hq.), Fayḍī (d. 1595/1004 hq.), and Naẓīrī (d. ca. 1612/1021 hq.) – three

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of the great lyricists active at the Mughal court in the late sixteenth century – profess their stylistic radicalism, these are poets feasting at a table that they did not set. Conceiving of the extraverbal world as servant of the language of the psyche is no mirror of developments in, say, the ghazal in some intrinsic sense. Rather – and here the Foucault of Les mots et les choses is worth heeding – such a poetic conception is possible only in light of broader, inartistic developments in the understanding of how discourse relates to world and mind. Of “l’immense réorganisation de la culture” (the great reorganizing of culture) in the Baroque period that marks Modernity’s advent, Foucault describes a world where “les choses et les mots vont se séparer” (things and words will separate).12 The uniquely Modern rejection of a language of nature and decorum in favour of a discourse bending each to the will of the imagination is an event neither ex nihilo nor especially “literary.” Subjectivism’s eclipse of outer constraint – and the linguistic realism that results – reflects more fundamental, not necessarily “aesthetic,” changes in how the individual relates to language. When, for the SafavidMughal lyricist, expression, truth, and (even) divinity come to “life” as shadows of the mind, such an event is neither discrete nor isolated. The mind’s disentangling from inhuman constraints, a not entirely poetic event nevertheless registered in later Persian poetics, will quite predictably reverberate the (intellectual) world over. The disentangling of word and thought, the eclipsing of language and world by mental design, the idolizing of inner truth – these had already been a central concern (an objective, indeed) of certain elements within the speculative-theological tradition. These elements offer more or less systematized philosophies of a discourse grounded in anā l-ḥaqq (I am the Truth), that sentiment of inner dominion for which Manṣūr al-Ḥallāj was either beheaded or hanged in Baghdad in 922/309 hq. A purely poetic or even belletristic approach to the question of literary Modernity would be hopelessly artificial, since the recasting of the relationship among psyche, world, and word runs considerably deeper than verbal art. A corrective as much to provincially poetic accounts of Persian literary history as to provincially philosophical accounts of Iran’s history of ideas,13 this chapter begins of necessity outside the strictures of poetics, examining the inklings and adumbrations of discursive Modernity in philosophy and speculative theology. Shihāb al-Dīn Yaḥyā al-Suhrawardī (d. 1191/587 hq.) and Ṣadr al-Dīn Muḥammad Shīrāzī (or Mullā Ṣadrā) (d. ca. 1640/1050 hq.), two of Iran’s most original (and influential) voices in post-Peripatetic thought, will reveal the conditions for specifically poetic Modernity crystallizing before and apart from the fevered formalism and figural pyrotechnics of the so-called sabk-i hindī (“Indian style”), that poetic avant-garde so favoured by the Safavid and Mughal courts. The shaykh al-ishrāq (Master of Lights), as Suhrawardī would come to be called, is already making the case for a “realism” of discourse, turning the psyche into a crucible for truth, language into a tool for refabricating the non-psychic world. If Suhrawardī “set the agenda for later Islamic philosophy,”14 it was left to Mullā Ṣadrā, legatee and interlocutor for the “School of Iṣfahān,” four centuries later to put the shaykh’s realism in (slightly) more traditional terms.15 Ṣadrā draws upon Suhrawardī’s doctrine of truth as event of the psyche (because self-present) to imagine the possibility of a human appropriation of the divine illocutionary. The

Linguistic realism and modernity 115 “worlding” of the word – the capacity and right to realize the mind’s designs in the world by language alone – ceases to be the property of God. With sufficient (human) desire, Ṣadrā proclaims, the imagination’s inner discourse breaks out of the bounds of the psyche. Private, personal language enjoys such prestige in Suhrawardī and Mullā Ṣadrā that it alone is the locus of the world’s renewal and the individual’s salvation before death. This living, present-tense soteriology, one to be assumed by the individual, is a condition of the human qua human. Hieratic elitism erodes substantially in Suhrawardī and Mullā Ṣadrā, for the individual, by sheer virtue of possessing a psyche, possesses ipso facto the means and right to right the world – and this by a rectitude of an inner discourse worlds more substantial and true than nature or decorum (i.e. social discourse).16 A human psyche besotted with its ability to turn the extraverbal world into its personal reflection – worse definitions of the psychology of Modernity could be found. This is, moreover, a “secular psychocentrism,” one perhaps paradoxically veering away from theology and divinity per se, as unspoken human language mirrors the amar ilahī (divine imperative), eclipsing divinity itself all the while.17 Secular psychocentrism is the very heart of any conception of language worthy of the designation “Modern.” It also explains the mental kaleidoscope extended and put on such flagrant, fantastic display in Modern poetry – not least in that of the Safavid-Mughal period. Turning, finally, to poetry proper and taking, specifically, the voice of Ṣāʾib (d. ca. 1677–8/1088 hq.) as synecdoche for the so-called sabk-i hindī (Indian style), this chapter will conclude by showing that Safavid-Mughal lyric is anything but ex nihilo.18 Its shanīʿ (twisted) poetics – to use Riz̤ ā Qulī Ḥidāyat’s scathing epithet19 – grows out of a realism of inner language whose clear outlines theology and philosophy had already drawn. Born in Tabriz, but, like his predecessors the previous century, leaving Safavid Iran for the Mughal court, Ṣāʾib gives in his dīwān a “strong” version in verse of the secular psychocentrism that the legatees of al-Ḥallāj had wrought already in prose. Like Suhrawardī and Mullā Ṣadrā, Ṣāʾib marries a distrust of the nonpsychic world – appearance, nature, the concept of a God inaccessible – with a full-throated confidence in the human ability to grasp truth. And this, once more, from within, inner discourse enjoying an augmented reality and prestige at the expense of life outside the psyche. The poet explicitly sets himself the project of renewing everyday, banal discourse (poetic or no) by refracting language through his inner world. And in toying with the siyāhī-yi sukhan (blackness of discourse), in manipulating maʿnā (meaning), in exploiting the ḥusn-i taʿlīl (phantastic aetiology) and the poetic syllogism,20 the poet is granted the right to use language to break the spell of a mystifying and fallen outer world in the here and now – to attain, that is, secular salvation.

Suhrawardī: language as psychic mirror Everything that alarms critics about the “Indian” poets – the fixation with inner meaning, the wantonness with language, the disregard for the empirical world – is presaged by Suhrawardī and the ishrāqī project.21 These “vices” are the very stuff of the sabk-i hindī’s Modernism, the “Modernity” of letters emerging from deeper

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changes in the use and value of language. Discourse becomes less a means to represent the phenomenal world buffeting the individual than the means by which the individual attempts to impart “inner,” noetic meaning to the surrounding world. The privatizing of discourse in post-mediaeval Europe is reflected in the Baroque and Metaphysical concetto (where, as Samuel Johnson censoriously puts it, “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together”), again in the postSymbolist turn towards what Baudelaire calls “la majesté superlative des formes artificielles” (the supreme majesty of artificial forms), and yet again in prose narrative’s subjugation of “äußere Vorgänge” (outer events) to psyche in the species of free-indirect discourse.22 None of this is essentially European in the least. In the twelfth century CE, Suhrawardī is already setting the stage for the rise and audacity of the poetic syllogism, the breaking of phenomenal representation on the shores of the imagination. And well before John Donne or Andrew Marvell or Richard Crashaw, all writing in England in the seventeenth century, can provoke Dr. Johnson’s ire, the concetto will carve an unmistakable place for itself in the post-Timurid Persian poem. Again, though, the poetic turn towards non-phenomenal “representation” reflects an interiorizing of truth and realism of language unlikely to be restricted to poetry proper. Just as post-Tridentine devotionalism and its “sanctification of . . . the devout wit” seems to find its counterpart in Baroque poetics, Suhrawardī’s systematization of al-Ḥallāj’s promise of salvation by mind prepares the soil for developments in lyric poetry.23 The triumph of inner contemplation over sensory perception – the condition for replacing realism with linguistic realism – emerges especially in the shaykh’s notion of self-consciousness as efficient cause. Suhrawardī explicitly advertises his revelation of reflexive thought’s causal supremacy in recounting his conversion from Avicennan Peripateticism to something more Pythagorean.24 Obscured by an emanationist cosmology and the theatrical neologisms (to say nothing of the moniker shaykh al-ishrāq) is the fact that Suhrawardī does not intend by “light” an object of understanding. No sense can be made of his project if this basic point is lost from sight. Neither extrinsic to consciousness nor an entity that some independent awareness can come to know, light is consciousness. Indeed, the entirety of Suhrawardī’s rhetoric of illumination can quite justifiably (even preferably) be seen as a metaphor for self-understanding. Emphatically not transitive for Suhrawardī, “to light” should be understood in something like the middle voice. One entity does not in any usual sense “light” another. The verb, rather, implies “to illuminate in order that the self may come to light.” Suhrawardī collapses, that is, presence to self and presence to light: kull man kāna lahu dhāt lā yaghfulu ʿanhā fa-huwa ghayr ghāsiq li-ẓuhūr dhātihi ʿindahu . . . huwa nūr maḥḍ (whoever has a self is not unaware of it: since the self is manifest to itself, he is not a dark being . . . he is pure light).25 The atemporal circularity is crucial to Suhrawardī’s project. Becoming aware of dhāt (“self”) is what secures and substantializes that self in the first place. Knowledge of light, knowledge of self – these are independent entirely of the non-psychic, sensory world. Fa-yajibu an yakūna idrākuhā lahā li-nafsihā ka-mā

Linguistic realism and modernity 117 hiya (Knowledge of it [the self] must be for itself as it is), Suhrawardī explains.26 The philosopher proceeds to call the “associates” of the self-illuminating entity, the entity possessing anāʾīyah (subjectivity), the other lights of the world. Conversely, the ghāsiq (concealing) and barzakh (isthmus) is, by definition, deprived of self-awareness.27 “Ténèbre pure” (pure darkness),28 antithesis of presence and selfhood, the barzakh or “dark body” is for Suhrawardī actually closer to its sense in the Qurʾān than in mainstream Ṣūfī thought after Ibn ʿ Arabī (d. 1240/638 hq.) – though now with a crucial twist reflecting the individual’s assumption of soteriological responsibility. Wa-min warāʾihim barzakhun ilā yawmi yubʿathūna (And beyond them is an isthmus until the day that they are resurrected), instructs Sūrat al-Muʾminūn (Q 23: 100). The sense of the barzakh in question – one corroborated by the Qurʾān’s two other, topographical uses of the word (25: 53; 55: 19–20) – seems to be nothing other than “the grave,” the temporal world blocking the reunion of divinity and soul until God finally yadʿū (summons) the latter as khalqan jadīdan (a new creation, S17: 42). For Suhrawardī too, barzakh signifies the antithesis of actualization and form: al-barzakh khafī li-nafsihi ʿalā nafsihi (the isthmus is concealed to itself because of itself). The difference – and here the shaykh departs markedly and remarkably from the Qurʾān’s account – is that the barzakh can be countered and overcome by autonomous will in the here and now. Resurrection becomes, that is, a project of self-recreation. The deepening of presence to self and the autonomy of consciousness in Suhrawardī can and should be historicized. It represents an elaborate philosophical façade (the grating term “theosophical,” pace Corbin, should be avoided) built on precisely the sort of private soteriology announced by al-Hallāj and never less than discomfiting to orthodox observers. Not simply does the ishrāqī project break quite obviously with traditional notions of transcendent, unknowable divinity, but its historically radical individualism tears it away even from “orthodox” Peripateticism. Suhrawardī’s discomfort with a “passive imagination” is, indeed, precisely what leads the philosopher to jettison the Peripatetic account of cognition in particular and faculty psychology in general. Immaterial form does not, as the shaykh has it, “subsist” in a material psyche. Rather, that psyche is itself immaterial insofar as it is united directly to the paracletic light. Wa-hādhā l-rūḥ (the spirit is, then), Suhrawardī instructs, mutabaddad fī jamīʿ al-badan (suffused into all of the body). Wa-huwa ḥāmil al-quwā l-nūrīyah (And it is the seat of the faculties of light), he continues.29 Suhrawardī’s impatience with faculty psychology – al-ḥawāss al-bāṭinah ghayr munḥaṣirah fī l-khams (the inner senses are not limited to the five), he insists – lies in the disconnect and division of formal consciousness that it presupposes.30 The philosopher rejects the notion that the individual’s wahmīyah (speculative) and mutakhayyilah (imaginative) capacities are clouded by virtue of their placement in the body. Al-ṣuwar al-khayālīyah (the imaginary forms) are not, that is, relegated to and makhzūnāh fī l-khayāl (stored in the imagination).31 Instead, Suhrawardī prefers to imagine the pneuma seating itself in the heart, “suffusing” the body, and only then inspiring images in the mind.

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Against the “preserving” and then obfuscating of immaterial knowledge in the quwā l-badan (bodily faculties), Suhrawardī resuscitates Platonic anamnesis. Knowledge once forgotten cannot reside in the physical (and obscure) body; rather, it remains entirely in the immaterial world of light: fa-laysa hādhā -lladhī yadhkuruhu bi-ʿaynihi fī baʿḍ quwā badanihi (That which one remembers is not itself in any of the bodily faculties). This is because laysa l-tadhakkur illā min ʿālam al-dhikr (there is no recollection save for from the world of remembrance), for there sulṭān al-anwār al-isfahbadīyah l-falakīyah (the ruler of the celestial lights of Isfahbad) forgets nothing.32 The “light of Isfahbad” is, indeed, the divine psyche in corporal form.33 The remembrance of true knowledge – the act producing “self-illumination” – is an act immanent with light. And it is this extraordinary increase in the power and prestige of the human mind that explains the shaykh’s refusal of the notion that nonhuman entities have ideal counterparts above the sublunar world. Rejecting traditional Peripatetic faculty psychology in favour of a direct connection with an immaterial light itself produced by self-knowledge has monumental implications for the relationship between the individual (and, ultimately, the poet) and language. The move is away from the (ultimately Platonic) notion that impermanent reality begins to yield itself only to the intellect towards a mystical empiricism of sorts, one affording “inner” experience ultimate authority – and one opening the gate for the language of psyche to eclipse that of nature. Not dialectics, not reasoning aimed at reaching truth absolute, apodictic, and external but amr ākhar (something else) emerges as truth’s criterion.34 This amr ākhar is tajarrud, “oneness with self,” “radical aloneness.” Presupposing willingness and not knowledge – and so inherently not just individualistic but democratic – tajarrud envisages truth as event of the psyche. Inner life bleeds into and drowns out the natural world. No clearer antecedent for ingenuity’s “Modern” remaking of nature – in free, chimeric association, in the concetto, in the ḥusn-i taʿlīl (phantastic aetiology) – could be found. Unreasonable, indescribable, and relative only to the individual, Suhrawardī’s tajarrud dramatizes an epistemology collapsing self-revelation and knowledge. Inner truth’s relativism, meanwhile, begins to produce something like a secular propheticism. This revisionist, non-sacral “prophecy” goes backwards, breaking out of Abrahamic lineage. It goes forward as well, mischievously but necessarily given Suhrawardī’s demotic individualism, leaving dogma on khātam al-nabīyīn (the Seal of the Prophets) in a state most uncertain. Present and past, meanwhile, unite in Suhrawardī’s (false) attribution to Plato of declarations from the Plotinist Theology of Aristotle, an account obviously inspiring the shaykh’s own starry-eyed reports of knowledge by tajarrud. “Plato,” Suhrawardī tells us, yarā fī dhātihi l-nūr wa-l-bahāʾ (saw within himself the light and luminosity).35 Likewise, raʾaytuʿinda l-tajarrud (in the state of self-revelation I saw), he recounts, aflākan nūrānīyatan (luminous bodies). Prioritizing inner certitude over phenomenal experience – breaking inhuman, extrinsic truth into a kaleidoscope of individual fancy – becomes the aim of Suhrawardī’s psychology. His is a theory of psyche where perception enjoys a degree of liberation from the outer world typically enjoyed only by prophets and

Linguistic realism and modernity 119 seers. Part of a general psychology of the human qua human, the autonomy of mind, the right to uncover (personal) truth from within, is neither more nor less than a universal feature of man. The impulse away from the hieratic, the sacral, and the vatic could hardly make itself more clearly heard. Indeed, Suhrawardī equips the unworldly psyche with a non-phenomenal analogue to the traditional five senses, describing a samʿ ghayr mashrūṭ bi-l-udhun, wa-baṣar ghayr mashrūṭ bi-l-ʿayn (a hearing not dependent on the ear, and a vision not dependent on the eye).36 Belief in the salutary power of individual, subjective reflection – redolence with post-Calvinist “optimism” being unmistakable here – is an essential filament in the tissue of any Modernity of letters. The world may be fallen, the light being scattered amidst dark bodies, but direct connection with the ultimate guarantor of truth is, says Suhrawardī, available nevertheless. And the age of revelation is only just beginning. Infataḥa bāb (the door is opened), insists the shaykh in a near provocation, ḥuṣūl al-barakāt (to the reception of divine gifts).37 The directness of this connection breaks as much with religious orthodoxy (little enamoured of this sort of Paracletic accessibility) as with Peripatetic hylomorphism and its more sceptical epistemology. So direct is the connection with the light of self that, in principle, baqiya atharuhā fī l-dhikr . . . ṣarīḥan (its traces remain in the psyche . . . clearly). So ṣarīḥan (clearly) indeed that lā yuḥtāju ilā taʾwīl wa-taʿbīr (hermeneutics and interpretation are unnecessary). Rooted in human psychology as such – housed, indeed, in the sensorium of psyche – truth gives itself over to an access relatively unmediated, one not in the past but in the here and now, one not restricted to a hieratic elect but open to the individual qua individual. Individualism and egalitarianism, the twinned, intertwined, but essentially separate filaments of Modernity, are quickening rapidly in Suhrawardī. So too are relativism – truth bending now to self-discovery – and soteriological egalitarianism. Near the end of Kitāb Ḥikmat al-ishrāq, the shaykh sketches a brief genealogy of enlightenment, one reaching well beyond the Abrahamic prophets. Citing Plato and Hermes and Muḥammad, Suhrawardī apostrophizes his readers as if to say that they too are capable of such self-presence. Suhrawardī’s is an invitation to enlightenment. Such knowledge and experience – knowledge now being inner experience – is available to anyone at all who endeavours to turn away from shawāghil ḥawāss al-ẓāhirah (the sensory cares of the extrinsic), dies to the ghāsiq (darkness), and looks instead to the (vestige of) divinity already contained within, which is to say to al-nūr al-isfahbad (the light of Isfahbad).38 Perseverance is the single quality required. In humanizing transcendental truth, shattering extrinsic authority into so many subjective reflections, Suhrawardī offers a view of verbal creation that pushes al-Ḥallāj’s subjectivism to its limits. The sources of prophecy and aesthetic experience are now assimilated as one, a singular event of inner discovery that can draw language with it, tearing discourse away from the fabric of decorum and nature. Everyday inner experience emerges as that amr ākhar (something else) towards which dialectical and apodictic reasoning, dependent as they are on inhuman sources of authority, can only dimly gesture.

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Nubūʾah (prophecy) is not the only genre of verbal creation to emerge from ʿālam al-ashbāḥ al-mujarradah (the world of abstract apparitions). In a single telling breath, Suhrawardī can subsume into one category al-manāmāt wa-lkahānāt wa-akhbār al-nubūʾāt (dreams, divinations, and prophetic messages).39 Any message, any gospel, so long as reflective of the individual’s inner experience – which at last is only self-revelation – is in essence no different from nubūʾa (prophecy). Reflexive exploration and inner experience plumb the same ʿālam (world) from whence erstwhile prophets would intermingle with al-ajsād wa-l-ashbāḥ al-rabbānīyah (“[holy] bodies and divine visions”).40 Once self-presence and selfrevelation are achieved, an imagination clouded by contact with inhuman, dark bodies is cleared.41 Any human psyche can come to realize umūr mughayyabah (concealed things), engage in αἴσθησις (aisthēsis), perceive by the inner “senses” – and then wrench from this experience a private language, one truer, closer to being, one giving body and voice not to nature or decorum but to the authority of mind.42 This is a quintessentially Modern view of the interplay between individual and discourse. It is not, indeed, unworthy of Mallarmé (or, rather, Mallarmé is not unworthy of it). It shows, moreover, that the house inhabited by the non-phenomenal conceit, the idea living and breathing by imagination alone, the chimera so dear to the Safavid lyricist, is already well elaborated within the speculative-theological tradition. And it gives ultimate authority to a language of inner αἴσθησις, to words more real than the shrouded world. The inner sensorium gives birth to all aesthetic experience and to its verbal translation – to prophecy, yes, but the prophetic is finally but one species of a genre of verbal creation more expansive and largely non-sacral. Suhrawardī has, by the end of Kitāb Ḥikmat al-ishrāq, expanded the genres of truth-revealing verbal creation, of speech more real than the world, beyond even manāmāt (“dreams”). Umūr mughayyabah (“concealed things”) can manifest themselves bi-samāʿ ṣawtin (by the hearing of a sound) and then fī asṭurin maktūbatin (in written lines). No matter the medium, so long as the product is nature remade by inner language, human ingenuity can through creation make a truth truer than existence. All non-phenomenal “sensory” data perceived by the psyche are muthul qayyimah (autonomous representations). This includes al-jibāl wa-l-buḥūr wa-l-araḍī wa-laṣwāt al-ʿaẓīmah wa-l-ashkhāṣ (mountains, seas, countries great sounds, and people). A geography – like truth or self-presence itself – already only latent and writ small in the psyche, this the individual can access dūna ḥarakah (without moving).43 It is only a matter of giving these muthul (representations) translated, worldly form. The truth-creating word is a right and rite of the mind, an internal kalimah (discourse), a light of the psyche irradiating being greater than existence, truth more real than nature. Va-az shuʿāʿ-i īn kalimah kalimahʹī dīgar (And from the light of this word comes another word), says Suhrawardī of light and language and their home in the sacred psyche.44 Human ingenuity can translate this hidden, psychological truth into being through ṣuwaran . . . fī ghāyat al-ḥusn (forms of extreme beauty) and ka-tamāthīl ṣināʿīyah fī ghāyat al-luṭf (as artistic representations of

Linguistic realism and modernity 121 extreme grace).45 And, inevitably, the purest form of revelation is latter-day “prophecy,” where the language of the mind intervenes and recreates a world otherwise given over to the barzakh (“isthmus” and “dark body”). Suhrawardī’s thesis is that the ability to rewrite the world by the light of the mind is no special province of the prophet. Harʹkihʹrā rūḥast kalimah ast (Whoever has a soul has a word), he proclaims in Āwāz-i par-i jibraʾīl (The Song of Gabriel’s Wing).46 Jesus may have been the kalimah and rūḥ, “word” and “spirit” of God, but possession of the inner discourse able to shed light on the world belongs to all of humanity. Va-ādamyān yak nawʿand (For humans are of a single kind), the shaykh instructs. It is only, finally, a matter of translation – a matter of finding the fitting form for a language more real than the world. For this utterly “real” language Safavid-Mughal lyric offers itself as the ultimate medium.

Mullā Ṣadrā and the illocutionary will The refraction of nature through a language of the inner senses – and the normative sense that this refraction is more fully existent than the “real” world – is the precondition for any Modernity of discourse. “Realism” of language requires a strong normative accent and a shift, indeed, in the hierarchy of values governing the trinity of psyche, language, and nature. Words “spoken” at first only within the confines of the psyche must come to receive enhanced and extraordinary prestige. The language of the mind, that is, must be esteemed as more “real,” more substantial, more fully one with being, than both nature and the shared fabric of discourse (Lacan’s Autre). Suhrawardī’s language of light and light of language, each indissoluble and inhabiting the human psyche, each irradiating outwards to remake a ghāsiq (darkened) world, rests on a singular normative twist. Namely, human ingenuity must be valued at the expense of the inhuman, natural world. Modernity seems always to unfold from this twist, in contexts as varied as Baudelaire or Gauthier’s cult of the artist creating “d’après l’image écrite dans leur cerveau, et non d’après la nature” or in the early Abbasid poet’s turn to conceits ever more removed from the real world.47 The Modernity of Persian letters presupposes, then, a theory of psyche and mind, a theory too of private language, and an ethical conviction that the discourse of the imagination deserves to overtake the inhuman world. Positing an unworldly and atomistic space of subjective reflection, making erstwhile prophecy an event of everyman’s (true) knowledge, converting truth into self-revelation, Suhrawardī reveals Modernity’s preconditions as they array themselves in the soil of speculative theology. Not until Mullā Ṣadrā, however, does Suhrawardī’s inner αἴσθησις, an inner authority ever less hieratic and ever less sacral, emerge at the absolute centre of dialectics. In the history of Islamic thought, the elevation of inner perception as the locus of soteriology in a world concealed by linguistic delusion (the iʿtibārī) – by ḥikāyāt wa-ʿunwānāt (stories and appellations)48 – must be considered the counterpart to the maʿnā-yi tāzah (fresh meaning) of the “Indian” poet. Mullā Ṣadrā radicalizes Suhrawardī’s “self-presence,” and in so doing lays the ontological grounds for the heightened authority to be enjoyed by private

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language. An entity exists only to the extent that it knows itself, self-knowledge automatically producing essence. The main theological problem with this substance-producing self-knower, as Ṣadrā himself anticipates, is that the human begins to assume a suspiciously close resemblance to dhāt al-wājib (the necessary being) – or God. Ṣadrā’s solution is to suggest that the individual differs from God, that entity of pure self-knowledge, not qualitatively but quantitatively. The human exists and knows itself less fully than the first cause, even as the soul remains “linked” and essentially indistinguishable from the necessary being. This is already, then, a bold humanization of the sacral and divine. In its creative and active force, the psyche in Mullā Ṣadrā’s thought takes on a soteriological role only hinted at by Suhrawardī. The soul becomes the point of “necessary” – divine, causal – intervention in the world of becoming: it is the first and last of things in the temporal world,49 min allāh (from God) in mabdūʾ (origin) al-ʿaql wasaṭat al-kull (the mind is the medium of everything).50 The Modernity of Ṣadrā’s psychocentrism lies in the intertwining of two historically discordant convictions, the ideals of the soul as cherished creation and ingenious creator. The notion that lam yakhluq allāh akhlaqan ʿaẓam min al-rūḥ (God created no creation greater than the soul) must be adulterated with optimism or hubris, the ability of the soul to realize its own perfection before death affirmed. “Un optimisme facile” (an easy optimism) is how Corbin will characterize the heightened force of the psyche in Ṣadrā,51 but it is important to keep in mind that this, in a sense, is the point. Ṣadrā uses the soul in an effort to surmount what he sees as an overly pessimistic view of existence in Suhrawardī. In particular, the shaykh fails to grant sufficient power to the divine light that makes man sapiens (“thinking”). Suhrawardī’s view of an existence inhabited by particularities non-psychic in their essence, bodies whose darkness is due precisely to their lack of self-illuminating knowledge, is too dualistic, too (indeed) pagan for Ṣadrā. Ṣadrā’s antidote to (zandaq) dualism is a view of the world whose every entity pulsates more or less with wujūd (existence). This is a “being” utterly dependent upon a self-revelation and actualization whose possibility is seemingly limitless. The psyche’s role in this great chain of major and minor being is to use the stillbenighted particularities surrounding it to reach li-l-istikmāl (for realization, completeness, perfection).52 This optimism places upon the individual a not inconsiderable burden, one to be borne not in the hereafter but in the present, not in works or acts but in proper mental conditioning. With this individual responsibility comes a view of the psyche as increasingly autonomous from the “necessary” cause. God may offer paracletic assistance, but this is strictly the result of anwār al-barāhīn (the lights of demonstration). Thought and reason – the human invitation for divine “assistance” – is the act that counts, reflection alone initiating iṣlāḥ al-ʿuqūl al-munfaʿilah (the reparation of the passive intellects).53 Once awakened, the human mind becomes an allegory for God, commanding among the passive faculties the same awe and obedience as the angels before the first cause.54 Cultivating the psyche and the inner kalimah (discourse) whose rectitude determines living salvation leads Ṣadrā to a realism of language even more explicit than

Linguistic realism and modernity 123 Suhrawardī’s. The right language of the awakened mind is simply more real, more substantial, more fully existing than the weak entities and shadows of the nonpsychic world. Echoing a fantasy already (and revealingly) at play in the Rasāʾil (Epistles) of the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ (Brothers of Purity) from the early Abbasid period, Ṣadrā cites a khabar where Muhammad promises a total eclipse of the world by the language of the mind. This khabar, summoned near the end of the Taʿlīqāt on the Kitāb Ḥikmat al-ishrāq, depicts a perfected psyche realizing its intent by words alone. The soul gains, that is, the right to speak objects into existence: “Kun!” (“Be!”) this psyche can pronounce, and the object appears.55 This illocutionary right turns the relationship between mind and word into an allegory for that between God and speech – this according to Ṣadrā’s own cosmology. “Kun” (“Be”) is precisely the qawl (enunciation) at the heart and start of cosmogony. It is al-amr al-ilāhī (the divine imperative) from which all mawjūdāt (existents) pour forth. Moreover, al-rūḥ al-quds (the holy spirit), the psyche of God, is not other than this reality-making command: Wa-lā wāqiʿah taḥt qawl ‘kun’ (“and it [the holy spirit] is no reality below the enunciation, ‘Be’”), Ṣadrā explains. Li-annahā nafs al-amr wa-l-qawl (Because the soul is the imperative and enunciation).56 The conclusion to be drawn is little ambiguous. In promising the actualized soul union with the world-making word, Ṣadrā promises the human psyche a right otherwise (and traditionally) reserved for a single soul – namely, that of God, al-rūḥ al-quds (the holy spirit). The philosopher shows little reticence here, promising the enlightened mind a world in paradise completely its own. Whatever the soul can imagine, whatever it can desire – food, drink, riches, and sex – materializes faster than the eye’s blinking or the heart’s beating.57 For the actualized soul, the non-psychic world becomes little other than a reflection of desire made manifest by language alone. Ṣadrā’s unbounded psyche involves a secular theomorphosis, a desacralization where the human approaches and appropriates the language and light of the divine mind. This stripping away of the transcendent, even as the otherwise ineffable is made at hand in the here and now, is indeed, one way of characterizing Modernity. Tellingly, the voice of Ibn ʿArabī sounds ever louder throughout the Taʿlīqāt, and it is, indeed, with his voice (and not Ṣadrā’s own) that the glosses conclude. Desiring istikmāl (actualization, perfection), the human must meditate on the obstacles preventing him from turning word into thing – as though this were the human soul’s natural right, one stymied only by a momentary lapse into the sublunar, material world.58 Nothing less than the reunion of psyche with the illocutionary right, salvation is entirely an affair of the mind, incumbent wholly upon the individual. No act can lift the veil keeping the psyche from its inborn right of worldcreating word – save for the right kind of inner speech “act.” The peroration to the Taʿlīqāt, more or less abandoned to Ibn ʿArabī, portrays the force of imagination as of the same intensity and power as the will of God.59 Identical in essence, the creative will of man is the creative will of God.60 In giving the Taʿlīqāt over to Ibn ʿArabī, Ṣadrā merely permits the first to give “poetic” voice to what he has himself already stated in apodictic terms. Li-l-ittiṣāl bi-l-ʿaql al-faʿʿāl (By connecting with the active intellect), the actualized psyche

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perceives the concrete correlate to what it imagines.61 Once perfected, the psyche drops the veils keeping its inner designs in a state of potentiality alone – so that its intent may radiate out into the world by words alone. The result is nothing other than the inside-outside inversion that Ibn ʿArabī had promised in paradise. Sense data, that is, no longer flows into the psyche from the phenomenal world through the five senses. Rather, the organs registering the sensual world from the outside are all replaced by that faculty which can build multisensory worlds within the psyche: the living, active imagination. The domination of the psyche by the mind’s eye as the imagination subjugates to itself outwardly gathered sense data is no “inner” affair. In strengthening, rather, its non-sensual “perception,” the psyche makes itself the conduit for an inner discourse commanding an increasingly illocutionary force. Even before death, even before taking its place in paradise, the psyche dominated by the imagination can eclipse the weaker existents of the nonpsychic world – and in a single word. The soul begins to appropriate, that is, the right to the cosmogonic “kun.” The ability to speak and think desire to life is not, then, a special privilege of the psyche after death. Enlightenment – the attainment of psychic and so ontological intensity – does not and need not wait. The banal wahm (fancy) of the unactualized soul will, to be sure, traffic in images deprived of existence. The inner discourse of the realized soul, however, possesses a reality scarcely a hairsbreadth away. Ṣadrā will speak of al-ʿilm bi-ḥaqīqat al-wujūd lā yakūnu illā ḥuḍūran ishrāqīyan wa-shuhūdan ʿaynīyan (knowledge of the truth of existence not taking place save for through enlightened presence and real witnessing).62 Ultimately, however, it becomes clear that ḥaqīqat al-wujūd (the truth of existence) is far from independent of its perception by the realized mind. The more realized the psyche, the more it can make being in the here and now. Within the modest confines of the inner sensorium, the inner language of the realized psyche is not destined to remain. Himmah (desire), tashwīq (longing) is the critical, active ingredient.63 The enlightened mind must match its existential intensity with intensity of will, and only then might wahm (fancy) break out into existence.64 Only then might the mind become Ṣadrā’s “light penetrating into the non-being which it organizes in giving being.”65 The greatest proof for the elevation of psychic life over the phenomenal world in Ṣadrā’s thought – an elevation failing which Modernity would be inconceivable – is the recourse to “apperception” at the expense of dialectics, to the burhān mashriqī (enlightened proof) at the expense of the burhān manṭiqī (logical proof).66 Critics often (and somewhat misleadingly) cast this as an effort to synthesize Avicennan Peripateticism with Ṣūfī intuitionism.67 As in Suhrawardī, however, inner experience and apperception in Ṣadrā seem rather faintly dependent on paracletic intervention. The shortest path to wujūd is not by syllogism or argument or reason. Ṭalaʿat shams al-ḥaqīqah (The sun of truth rises), says Ṣadrā, min maṭlaʿ al-ʿirfān (from the ascent of inner knowledge). Ruʾyatuka (your vision) – that is, one’s own vision, one’s vision within – is the source of truth, aḥsan aʿmāl (greatest of acts).68 In Ṣadrā’s hierarchy of understanding, inner “proof” and inner “truth” are paramount, dialectics and reason a propaedeutic for a psyche still shrouded by the

Linguistic realism and modernity 125 world of matter and weak existents. And like that of the shaykh al-ishrāq, Ṣadrā’s own rhetoric book-ends formal argumentation with dramatic and emotive appeals to personal experience, generally his own – beseeching the reader to imitate this inner journeying and to take dialectics as no more than an entry point for personal ruʾyah (vision).69 The Theology of Aristotle seems to offer a model in this respect. Both Suhrawardī and Ṣadrā are, in any case, much taken with the inner ascent of “Plato.” Desacralized and humanized would be just descriptions of apperception in Ṣadrā. Even, however, his formally argued epistemology is steeped in this secular psychocentrism. Sublunar, material, weak in existence, the phenomenal world is never for Ṣadrā experienced per se. This is orthodox Peripateticism through and through – though with a difference. Al-māddah (Matter), Ṣadrā explains (in an impressively harmonious marriage of Neoplatonic and ishrāqī jargon), manbaʿ al-ʿadam wa-l-ghaybah (is the source of non-existence and concealedness).70 In consequence, kull idrāk (all understanding) will depend upon the psyche’s tajrīd (withdrawal) from conditions blinding to the mind’s eye. Ṣadrā’s solution to the “problem” of hylomorphism is nevertheless considerably more psychocentric – more optimistic even – than his Neoplatonic antecedents’. In Platonism’s Hellenistic and Imperial variants, the solution to the problem of matter’s unknowability is to promise the psyche the capacity to dissolve the hylomorphic phenomenon through the abstraction of form. Ṣadrā goes considerably further – and in a direction that need be understood as historically unusual and perfectly Modern at the same time. Of Ṣadrā’s epistemology, Corbin talks (justly) of “une phénoménologie authentique.”71 Rizvi talks (also justly) of a “pan-psychicism.” Essentially, Ṣadrā’s solution to the ghaybah (absence) inherent to matter is to reduce the intellected object to extrojection of the psyche. Maʿqūlāt (existents), Ṣadrā states simply, muttaḥidah maʿa man yaʿqiluhā (are at one with their perceiver). The light that the psyche projects onto the non-psychic object produces a form which is finally an extension of the organ of perception.72 And it is this new phenomenon that is perceived even by the physical senses. This epistemological loop, sense-perception mirroring the intellect’s projection, is as independent of supralunar “light” as the inner vision of apperception. Burhān manṭiqī (logical proof) and burhān mashriqī (enlightened proof) alike, that is, suggest a mode of understanding with the human psyche and private perception at its absolute centre. The result is a necessarily perspectivist, indeed relativist view of the ontic, one involving what Christian Jambet calls “la vie comme perspective . . . une vision plurielle, monadologique, de l’être de l’étant” (life as perspective . . . a plural, monadological vision of the being of existence).73 The secular psychocentrism in Ṣadrā’s and Suhrawardī’s account of the soul’s relationship to the world is every bit as much about language as it is about extralinguistic “existence.” Al-amr al-ilāhī (the divine imperative) may be the fount of cosmogony, but the right to leave light or existence where the word once was, to make a sensual correlate where “kun” (“be”) was once spoken, is one for both philosophers ever more available to the human psyche. Bespeaking a deep optimism matched only by its humanism, this view spells a shift in the norms

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governing psyche, word, and world. Namely, the language of the mind comes to enjoy a prestige at the expense of the non-psychic world. Because this shift is woven into the very epistemology and ontology of Suhrawardī and Ṣadrā, it leaves hieratic conceptions of understanding on ground distinctly less than firm. Every human meets the minimal condition for deeper self-presence simply by virtue of possessing the immaterial light that is the soul. With divinity internalized – and “sacred” experience collapsed into self-knowledge – no human is exempt from the possibility of salvation. And this is precisely where the notion that humans can appropriate the divine illocutionary word – the phantasy of linguistic realism – is at play. With sufficient inner will, the imagination and the otherwise hidden forms of ʿālam al-mithāl (the world of the imagination) can come into existence: “For if man had a sufficiently strong imagination, if the desire (himmah) in his heart were sufficiently intense,” proclaims Ṣadrā, “all that he desired would be present, in a perfect presence.”74 Little wonder, then, that Ṣadrā’s narrator ends his journey in al-Asfār al-arbaʿah (Four Journeys) by moving to remake the earthly world by light of the (self-)illuminating mind.75

Ṣāʾib: a linguistic resurrection of the world As perhaps its most illustrious practitioner, Ṣāʾib demonstrates the sabk-i hindī’s dependence upon the “unveiling” (or invention) of the inner word’s capacity to breathe new life into a fallen outer world. Metapoetic statements throughout Ṣāʾib’s dīwān point with remarkable consistency to this humanizing and privatizing of truth – and then to the “realist” (and so Modern) conception of language that results. Regrettably synchronic analyses notwithstanding, the Modernity of Safavid and Mughal lyric is (obviously) not sui generis – and not simply because it is already being adumbrated, as Suhrawardī and Ṣadrā demonstrate, in speculative theology and philosophy. The inclination to see the Indian style as emergent only in the sixteenth century, only in Mughal India, and only under the spell of Navāʾī (d. 1501/906 hq.) or Fighānī (d. ca. 1519/925 hq.) – a view espoused by Wālih Dāghistānī, ʿAbd al-Bāqī Khān, and (more or less) Shiblī – touches upon only a part of the story.76 Coming to terms with the sabk-i hindī requires a more historically generous account, such as that of Aḥmad, who rightly finds in the Indian style a “deepening [of] ingredients . . . there almost from the beginning.” Already in the Ghaznavid court of the eleventh century, the ghazals of al-Nakatī (fl. 11th/5th c. hq.) and Masʿūd Saʿd Salmān (d. ca. 1121–2/515 hq.) show “a trend towards complicated and ‘unexpected’ imagery.”77 The history of the idea of a word more real than the world runs as deep in Persian letters as it does outside of Iran’s verbal arts. Though perhaps writ rather small, the premonitions of the avant-gardism of Safavid and Mughal lyric are already making themselves felt at New Persian’s very advent. Jettisoning self-effacing, denominative language, one where words are grounded in tropes of resemblance,78 an implicit theory of language will emerge holding nature as no more than a pale imitation of language. This is the unfettering of the word from the empirical world that Bausani sees in the Indian style’s erosion of “homoeomorphy in

Linguistic realism and modernity 127 comparison.”79 It is also the disentangling of language from unvarnished, ingenuous feeling. Put otherwise, both the Classical (extrinsic, empirical) and the Romanticoaffective grounds of mimesis begin to find themselves displaced by a discourse supposed to be shorn of connection to the non-psychic world. “Emotionally . . . intense”80 and “simple and direct”81 description is already under siege in Samanid and Ghaznavid verse.82 So too is the mimesis of nature, there being little question that what Fouchécour terms “l’irréalisme” and the tendency towards the “image outrée où le naturel est dépassé et paraît déplacé” (ingenious image where the natural is superseded and appears displaced) is presaged in the tenth and eleventh centuries – and loudly.83 The basis, then, for the total refraction of the empirical world through the transcendent and objectifying mind’s eye – and its “schémas mentaux”84 (mental schemes) – is laid quite early. This is the case even if Persian poetics is not yet ready for the routine “telescoping into a single image [of] a variety of emotional states” or the ascent of “cerebral artifice . . . pushing familiar images to unfamiliar and unexpected lengths” found in a Fighānī or an ʿUrfī.85 Fidelity to the empirical world and sincerity are not yet fully jettisoned. Rūdakī (d. ca. 940/329 hq. 941), in a well-known exordium to a qaṣidah (panegyric) praising Sīstān, draws explicit attention at once to the sincerity and simplicity of his lafẓ (“expression”), even while (remarkably) acknowledging the outmoded character of his āsān (“bare”) style: īnkih madḥī chunānkih ṭāqat-i man būd lafẓ hamih chvūb u-ham bihʹmaʿnā-yi āsān86 This is an encomium made to the measure of my powers, its expression at once sound and of simple meaning. The self-conscious conservatism of Rūdakī’s style advertises the fact that the twisting of nature through what Shiblī terms “the intemperateness of the imagination” would soon leave a poetics of the khvūb and āsān, the “sound” and “bare,” quite out of favour.87 Inklings of Modernity are beginning to crystallize, Rūdakī admitting that he has neither will nor means to keep up, as the topoi of the unworldly and novel begin to exercise an influence that would reach its own inorganic efflorescence in the post-Timurid poem.88 Painting, nevertheless, with a somewhat splayed brush, the tendency in Rūdakī is indicative of the Samanid and Ghaznavid poet’s more generally. As C.-H. de Fouchécour observes in his history of nature in the early New Persian poem, Farrukhī (d. 1038/429 hq.) continues to “trait[er] plus nettement pour eux-mêmes les thèmes de la nature” (treat nature’s themes more clearly in themselves). A similar “tendance au réalisme” (tendency towards realism) marks the works of Manuchihrī (d. 1040/432 hq.) and ʿUnsurī (d. 1039/431 hq.).89 A selfsame through-line weaves through and draws together the histories of Modernity in Iran’s speculative theology and poetics. That one speaks the language of metaphysics and the other of topos, trope, and scheme should not obscure the fact that each is a scarcely distorted mirror of the other. Unmaking

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and then remaking the organic world by the inorganic, poet-made language so vaunted by the later (or “Modern”) Persian poet involves what rhetoricians call metalepsis and literary theorists the pathetic fallacy. These displacements and inversions of subjective truth at nature’s expense, however, involve a theory of inner discourse, one voiced ever louder in Suhrawardī’s wake, as more fully one with being than nature itself. In rhetorical terms, metaphoric description, one rooted in sensory resemblance, gives way to catachresis, to the wilful and idiosyncratic assertion of predicates missing what Wolfhart P. Heinrichs calls a “substratum.”90 The metaleptic reconceiving of natural causation is the ultimate consequence, effect and cause being usurped by fiat of the psyche. Private, personal, and idiosyncratic, this move depends upon the substantializing of inner will enshrined in Suhrawardī’s and Mullā Ṣadrā’s “intuitionist” dialectics. It is, indeed, the discursive answer to the humanizing and democratizing of truth. As the history of Persian dialectics after Suhrawardī suggests, the poetic internalization of reality resembles Ṣūfī pietism precisely not because these are (as Saljūqī has it) “inspirations issuing forth from the firmament of Ṣūfism.” Nor is it the case with the sabk-i hindī that “this style can be observed in every poet to the extent of how deep he is in Ṣūfism.”91 Quite to the contrary, the domination of nature by the ascendant inner will – and by means of a “realist” discourse – is a laicization of “mystical” gnosis. What Navāʾī calls “this night in which there is no shining sun,” the “decline” (read: “Modernizing”) of the Persian poem in the Safavid-Mughal age relies on the ascent of the “imagic argument (mithāliyah),” of the “complex conceit,” of “‘cerebral’ artifi ce.” Such is the formal consistency of literary Modernism. The “later poets,” as Annemarie Schimmel notes, appear to “have observed only the passing shadows of the world and not the permanence behind it.”92 But this sense of the fallenness of appearance and of “the inadequacy of . . . language”93 is belied by a full-throated confidence in private poetic discourse. The public, vacuous, and banal language of the everyday, a language holding us addicted to and mystified by outer appearance (Peripatetic “matter” or the dark barzakh of Suhrawardī), can be swept away and remade by a language connected to inner ingenuity. Once more, this is Modernist optimism in the utterly human capacity to resuscitate the world. The crucial point is that the Modern confidence in the ability to undertake Baudelaire’s “essai permanent et successif de réformationde la nature” (permanent and repeated attempt to reform nature) depends upon a realism of discourse, for it is through language that the self-present will of Suhrawardī and Mullā Ṣadrā reaches outside of itself.94 To transmute zamīn (earth) into āsmān (sky), to displace the withered paradise of “reality” with gul[hā]-yi kāghidh (paper roses), to reduce the outer world to ṣad hazār āyinah (one hundred thousand mirrors) of the mind (from Ṣāʾib all) – requires the realist (and Modernist) confidence that discourse and khvīsh bih tadbīr (rightness in deliberation) can cut into and through the world to produce ontic effects. Breaking the outer world according to the will of the mind requires, however, that this tadbīr (deliberation) be bīgānah (defamiliarizing). The poetic syllogism especially, the mode, that is, by which the imagination undoes the

Linguistic realism and modernity 129 spell of fallen and banal reality, requires an undoing too of normal causation. Ṣāʾib could hardly be more explicit on this point: gar tavānī hamchu mardān az sabab pūshīd chashm ʿālamī dīgar bihʹghayr azʿālam-i asbāb hast. If to causality you can close your eyes like certain men, There is another world alien to the world of causes.95 That the broken world of normal causality is reparable by the grasp of language is precisely what Ṣāʾib is at pains to prove in his dīwān. The reason for the accessibility of this “other world” is that, as Suhrawardī and Ṣadrā argue explicitly, it is not (or no longer?) governed by some inaccessible divinity. Rather, it is “another world” as macrocosm of the mind, the psyche extending out beyond itself through the discovery of language’s otherwise concealed ontic force. The duty of the selfpresent mind is (as Suhrawardī and Ṣadrā have it) to unlock this world-renewing force in discourse. Salvation depends upon it: agar ḥayāt-i abad khāhī az sukhan maguḏar kih āb-i khiḍr nihān dar siyāhī-yi sukhan ast. If you wish for unending life, do not pass over discourse, For the water of Khiḍr (i.e. of life) is concealed in the blackness of discourse.96 The extracted “blackness” of discourse is, for Ṣāʾib, the best proof that whatever reality is contained in language is a ductile figment of the mind. “Blackness,” indeed, is language’s ontic force utterly occluded by “normal” discourse and poetic cliché, both of which again correspond to the Peripatetic world blinded by matter and dead (as Suhrawardī would have it) to self-presence. The first task, then, is to strip away the banal and fallen expression of the everyday. Only poetic language – Ṣāʾib’s version of Suhrawardī and Ṣadrā’s apperception – can begin to achieve this extraction. Ṣāʾib talks of the toil he suffers from “untying” but a single knot of discourse: az pīch u-tāb reshtih-yi jān mīshavad gerih tā yak gerih az zulf-i sukhan bāz mīkunam. The thread of my soul becomes a knot from the twisting and turning As I undo a single knot of discourse.97 A maʿnā – signified or topos – not yet living in the world of normal causality but quickening and pulsating within the imagination must, Ṣāʾib tells us, be the poet’s aim. This maʿnā of the mind will be bīgānah (“alien”) to appearance, for only then does language surpass nature. Indeed, Ṣāʾib depicts himself throughout his dīwān as party to an unending agon between those blind to what lies beyond an appearance less real than the poet’s inner word and an individual capable of conjuring this deep reality. Dar mulk-i ṣūrat nīst mārā gūshah-ī ṣāʾib, (“In the world of appearance there is no place for us, Ṣāʾib”), the poet reminds himself. This is a world where the chashmi ṣūrat (“eye beholden to form”) is blind to ḥusn-i maʿnā (“excellent meaning”).98

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Critics err in seeing the Safavid-Mughal poets’ self-professed fetish for novelty as primarily a function of rivalry, whether with predecessors or one another.99 Superficial because restricted to verbal art proper, explanations for the sabk-i hindī in terms of the anxiety of influence ignore the deep and enduring roots of which the poet’s bīgānah (defamiliarizing) theory of discourse is but a single fruit. The secular psychocentrism of speculative theology is another such fruit, growing from the same implicit theory of discourse, being, and mind. Hence the cross-pollination between poetry and philosophy, one evinced as much in the “poetic” apperception cultivated by Suhrawardī and Ṣadrā as in the tendency of the sabk-i hindī to find itself abounding in what Ibn al-Muʿtazz (d. 908/296 hq.) identifies in his Kitāb al-badīʿ as al-madhhab al-kalāmī (“philosophizing discourse”).100 Ṣāʾib will thus talk of ʿālam-i ījād (“the world of existence”) andʿadam (“inexistence”), of hastī-yi muṭlaq (“unconditioned being”) and ʿaql u-hūsh (“reason and intellect”).101 This is less empty philosophizing than acknowledgement of a debt to broader developments in the history of ideas – developments, indeed, whose contours are little other than the Modernity of letters’. Moreover, the poet’s solution to zandān-i ʿadam (“the prison of non-being”) reprises Suhrawardī’s and Ṣadrā’s: only a discourse emanating out of furūgh-i dil (“the light of the heart”) and dil-i rushan (“the enlightened heart”) promises a reconstruction and resurrection of reality.102 That the truth of which the outer world is deprived happens to be not out of the individual’s reach – and far from it – is the very promise of Modernism. If “Western” Modernity is for Weber and Heidegger a function of the withdrawal of the horizons of non-knowability, literary Modernity is the promise that this withdrawal owes itself to the force of private language. The twist, however, is precisely that this is not “ordinary” or “known” language, reinforcing as the latter does truth taken for granted. Rather, this is a language utterly subjective, utterly dependent upon inner will and imagination. Ṣāʾib, in a manner far more radical than, say, Ḥāfiẓ, describes truth beyond appearance – the truth that will manifest, for instance, in a new topos or maʿnā – as an inner event. The parallels with the Stoic cult of inner truth and self-cultivation, another Modern moment and another moment indebted to a laicized mysticism in Platonism’s shadow, are telling, as τὸ ἡγεμονικόν (“the inner commander”) of Marcus Aurelius (d. 169) should recall ishrāqī self-presence.103 So paramount is shughl-i khvud sāzī (the job of self-building) says Ṣāʾib, that marā khānah sāzī bāz dāsht (it kept me from house-building).104 Like the “fallen” or banal discourse seducing us ever further into zandān-i ʿadam (the prison of non-being), the body is prison of the soul. Ṣāʾib imagines his pre-existential khvud, one existing and resplendent before its fall into zandān-i badan (the prison of the body), as at once tajarrud (radical isolation) and the hegemon of its own kingdom. Dar iqlīm-i tajarrud pādeshāh-i vaqt-i khvud būdam (In the country of inner freedom I was a king in my own time), the poet proclaims.105 Just as speculative theology under al-Hallāj’s spell makes soteriological responsibility more and more a humanistic event of the living present, so too does the Safavid-Mughal poet envision the liberation of rūḥ (soul) from this jasm-i muḥāl (inexistent body) as

Linguistic realism and modernity 131 anything but posthumous.106 Language lights and then becomes the path to the poet’s salvation, as Ṣāʾib promises an unchaining of the will in the here and now – through the renewing power of the poetic word. The withdrawal into the self – and the conviction that ultimate meaning pertains to the psyche – unfolds into an elaborate rhetoric of nomadism in Ṣāʾib’s œuvre. So much closer to truth than the outer world is Ṣāʾib’s soul that the poet has no need of company. Recalling Suhrawardī’s promise of a journey through an inner world dūna ḥarakah (without moving), Ṣāʾib proclaims that he has no need of sayr u-dawr (travel and roving): Waḍʿ-i jahān az nuqṭah-yi dil dīdihʹam tamām (I’ve fully seen the situation of the world from the core of my heart).107 The predictable result of this solipsism, one on no clearer display than in the epistemology of Ṣadrā, is a desperate anomie with which any species of the Modern is conversant. Az bīʹkasī (Out of isolation), Ṣāʾib laments, bā ṣūrat-i dīwār mīʹzanam ḥarf (I talk with an image on the wall).108 Others bring with them an exhausted and meaningless discourse. In a remarkable line, Ṣāʾib likens his own alienation to the novel and invented meaning beyond ordinary language: ānchunānkih az lafẓ gardad maʿnā-yi bīgānah dūr man az waḥshat dar savād-i shahr ṣaḥrā-ī shudam109 Like the strange meaning that turns far from its expression, I out of fear became a traveller in the blackness of the city. How, precisely, does this cult of individual truth relate to language? Ṣāʾib answers the question with a question: chih lāzam ast barāyam az khvīshtan Ṣāʾib? marā kih har kaf-i khākī jahān-i dīgar shud.110 What would be needed outside of the self, Ṣāʾib, Me from whose every handful of earth another world is made? Ultimately, the conviction that fallen discourse is renewable by the mind’s ingenuity results in the proliferation of tropes grounded less and less in phenomenal resemblance. These figures and the often (expressly) jarring images that they permit draw from the well that Suhrawardī had called amr ākhar (something else), which is to say from apperceptive, subjective, private experience. The specialists in ʿilm al-badīʿ (the science of figures) characterize these tropes that answer to nothing save inner sense as exempla of ḥusn-i taʿlīl (phantastic etiology) and tajāhul al-ʿārif (feigned ignorance).111 These figures are, more broadly, species of the pathetic fallacy, impossibly remaking the outer world according to a reality neither of nor out of this world – but instead radiating from nuqṭah-i dil (the core of the heart). Figural analysis (whether contemporary or contemporaneous) is hardly necessary to demonstrate that the transmuting of nature into psychic reflection is among the chief concerns of the Safavid and Mughal practitioners of the sabk-i tāzah

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(innovative style). Ṣāʾib himself is unambiguous on the point. Indeed, in a manner entirely in keeping with Suhrawardī and Mullā Ṣadrā, Ṣāʾib aims to make selfpresence and self-realization the gathering of force for a remaking of the nonsubjective world. Khvush ān gurūh (sweet are those), Ṣāʾib tells us, who zamīn-i khvīsh bih tadbīr āsmān sāzand (with contemplation build their own ground into a sky).112 Through thought ingenious and industrious – thought that “constructs” (sākhtan), thought that twists language into something bīgānah (foreign) – the poet performs a Lazarus trick on a dying world. Chūn āftāb (Like the sun), says Ṣāʾib, fikr-i man āfāq-rā girift (my thought captured the horizons). Again, inner thought realizes a reality effect only through the ḥusn-i gharīb (defamiliarizing beauty) of discourse: ḥusn-i gharīb zūd jahāngīr mīshavad (defamiliarizing beauty rapidly conquers the universe).113 Ṣāʾib’s desire to collapse thought and the empirical world in an act of soteriological heroics accounts for much of the (often cosmic) hyperbole in his dīwān. Fikrash (His thought) becomes kawkabhā (“stars” or perhaps “flowers”). The poet himself transforms into rawshanī bakhsh-i zamīn u-āsmān (a light-giver of earth and sky).114 He shifts shapes into a kūhsār (mountain) that wryly laughs.115 The imperious optimism of these hyperboles, however, only attains its fullest expression in the ḥusn-i ta‘līl (“phantastic etiology”), where multiple hyperboles hang together by fiat of the imagination. As a rule, these impossible scenes depend on the displacement of human desire onto the natural world. az shawq-i ham āghūshī-yi ān qāmat-i mawzūn gulhā hamih āghūsh u-kenār ast bihʹbīnīd.116 Out of the desire for the full embrace of that graceful figure, See how the flowers are all now bosoms and chests. Not simply have the flowers in this bayt (couplet) been endowed with human desire for a human form, but this desire transforms them into precisely the sorts of libidinal fragments of the body (“part-objects” in psychoanalytic terms) which would race through the desirous lover’s heated imagination. The desire for the power to transmute and alchemize and remake (sākhtan) by nothing but will allegorizes – at once acknowledging and disavowing – the primary desire behind all of the controversial scenery of Ṣāʾib and his fellow “Indian” stylists. The desire is to reduce outer world to shadow of the imagination – and all through a discourse recognizing no distinction between denomination and performance.

Conclusion The invention of “la langue comme . . . aptitude à présentifier la notion pure du ‘il y a’” (language as . . . capacity to make present the pure notion of “there is”) is the beating heart of literary Modernity.117 As Suhrawardī, Ṣadrā, and

Linguistic realism and modernity 133 Ṣāʾib reveal, this second-order perception of language as more fully being than the world can and does crystallize in milieux wholly independent of the threeheaded engine of post-1500 Europe (i.e. the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution). The disentangling of private discourse from the filaments of decorum and nature – and the blinding promise of total knowability via individual perception that this disentangling offers – may indeed be central to the story of poetic Modernity. Nevertheless, the history of ideas in Iran suggests that this account remains incomplete. For inner monologue to become “real,” for it to be conceived as a tool which can and should bring imagination to life, language and its abode in the psyche must be experienced as only too human. This is also the story, then, of the desacralizing of truth – one now fliting and flashing before the oculus mentis (mind’s eye) as a purely psychic event. And it is a story unfolding as much in speculative theology and philosophy as in verbal art itself. To experience inner life and speech, to feel inner journeying and discovery, to sense intuition and meditation all as more fully real than what is spoken according to custom or authorities sacral and divine – this is the subjective condition of Modernity. It is built into the post-Avicennan epistemology and ontology of Suhrawardī and Ṣadrā, only then to be enshrined in their turn towards apperception as the ultimate source of truth. Event of the psyche, anamnesis alone, this is an experience available to the human qua human – and, as such, it represents an antihieratic, even egalitarian dismantling of the traditional separation of the forms of knowledge. Secular psychocentrism opens the gate for poetic language as latter-day “revelation.” It permits Mallarmé to pronounce, “Je dis: une fleur!” (I say, a flower!), while out of oblivion the thought-object “musicalement se lève” (musically rises).118 It permits Ṣāʾib to ask “chih lāzam ast barāyam az khvīshtan” (what would be needed outside of the self?), and need no answer since the inner monologue itself is more real than the earth. Pace many observers,119 this is no reconciliation of philosophy or poetry with mysticism – or, if it is, then the “Modern” philosopher and poet, the shaykh al-ishrāq and the Safavid-Mughal lyricist, are making use of a mysticism of a decidedly humanistic, crypto-secular sort (a “strong” version of al-Hallāj). The psyche’s inner language is more prestigious and substantial than anything “out there,” and Paracletic assistance is beside the point. Once “untimed” and revealed to be neither particularly recent nor particularly “Western,” the pre-Modern “Modernity” of Persian letters offers an invitation. It suggests, indeed, just how much work remains to be done, the “realism” implicit in Suhrawardī, Mullā Ṣadrā, and Ṣāʾib’s accounts of language and imagination being anything but a hapax. The Middle Persian and Avestan corpuses are rich in moments (“nascent” or no) of precisely the realism at play in any moment of the verbal arts’ Modernity. The indissolubility of speech, thought, and act in the Gāthās are, indeed, suggestive in this respect, threatening to shatter any last relic of “stadial” or “historicist” Modernity. “Poetic thought,” Yasht 19 is already telling us, produces “brilliant lights.”120

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Notes 1 Julie Scott Meisami, “Iran: The Age of Translation and Adaptation (1850–1914),” in Modern Literature in the Near and Middle East, 1850–1970, ed. Robin Ostle (New York, NY: Routledge, 1991); and Kamran Talattof, The Politics of Writing in Iran: A History of Modern Persian Literature (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 19–65. 2 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Historicism and its Supplements: A Note on a Predicament Shared by Medieval and Postcolonial Studies,” in Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of ‘the Middle Ages’ Outside Europe, ed. Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). 3 Fredric Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (1986): 69; Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review Jan/Feb (2000): 58; and Pascale Casanova, “Le Méridien de Greenwich: Réflexions sur le temps de la littérature,” in Qu’est-ce que le contemporain?, ed. Lionel Ruffel (Nantes: Éditions Cécile Defaut, 2010), 115. 4 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur, 10th ed. (Tübingen: A. Francke Verlag, 2001 [1946]), 500. 5 Mallarmé, “Crise de vers,” in Poésies et autres textes, ed. Jean-Luc Steinmetz (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 2005), 345–61. 6 Charles Baudelaire, Le Peintre de la vie moderne (Paris: Éditions Mille et une nuits, 2010 [1863]), 22–5. 7 Frank Kermode, Continuities (New York, NY: Random House, 1988), 8. For the relationship between Symbolism and Modernism, see also M.H. Abrams, “Coleridge, Baudelaire, and Modernist Poetics,” in New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism, ed. Richard E. Amacher and Victor Lange (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 150–81. 8 Joseph A. Massad, Desiring Arabs (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 29. 9 e.g. Abū al-Qāsim al-Ḥasan ibn Bishr al-Āmidī, al-Muwāzana bayna shiʿr Abī Tammām wa-l-Buḥturī (“The Weighing of the Poetry of Abū Tammām and Al-Buḥturī”), 2 vols., vol. 1, ed. Aḥmad Ṣaqr (Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif, 1961), 24, 243. 10 Wolfhart P. Heinrichs, “Muwallad (2),” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., ed. P. Bearman et al. (Brill Online, 2016 [First print edition, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1960–2007]). 11 Maria Eva Subtelny, “A Taste for the Intricate: The Persian Poetry of the Late Timurid Period,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 136, no. 1 (1986). 12 Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 69. 13 Specialization is no alibi for failure to pursue the through-line, one whose filaments are woven of a shared philosophy of language, drawing the histories of Iranian philosophy, theology, and poetics so closely together. Relatively autonomic histories of Persian letters, with their penchants for Spenglerian organicism (Yarshater 1974 and 1986; Hodgson 1974), the anxiety of influence (Losensky 1993; Subtelny 1986), or regional and periodic ghettoization (Ḥidāyat 1867 and much of the bāzgasht-i adabī), are as ultimately incomplete as are accounts of philosophy too deeply cloistered within the history of dialectics (Corbin 1964; Walbridge 2005). 14 John Walbridge, “Suhrawardī and Illuminationism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy, ed. Peter Adamson and Richard C. Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 201. 15 Denis MacEoin, “Mullā Ṣadrā S̲ h̲ īrāzī,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, ed. Peri Bearman et al. (Brill Online, 2016 [First print edition, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1960–2007]). 16 The anti-hieratic, even egalitarian tenor of Suhrawardī and Ṣadrā is necessitated by a shared impatience with the traditional separation of the forms of truth (i.e. dialectics, allegory, apperception) according to the supposed sophistication of the believer. On this separation of forms, see Oliver Leaman, “Philosophy vs. Mysticism: An Islamic

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17 18

19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

Controversy,” in Philosophy, Religion, and Spiritual Life, ed. Michael McGhee (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 177–87, 178. “Consciousness becomes,” as Hossein Ziai puts it with pith, “The principle of illuminationist knowledge” (italics mine), in Knowledge and Illumination: A Study of Suhrawardī’s Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1990), 151. Reproof and failure both to historicize and to look at developments beyond poetics proper have been comorbid in commentary on the sabk-i hindī since the Qajar period, Ḥedāyat’s oft-quoted taẓkirah (see note 19) being exemplary in this regard. Inevitably (and ironically), part of the problem lies in taking the claim to and topos of radical novelty by the post-Timurid poet on its face. Efforts by Losensky (1993) and Subtelny (1986) have provided crucial correctives, removing more or less obfuscating chronological and dynastic caesurae in the unfolding of poetics. Much more work remains to be done, however, in re-grounding the study of Persian poetry (sabk-i hindī or no) in the soil of trends deeper and further reaching in the history of thought. This chapter aims to move Iranian intellectual history a step further in this direction. Riẓāqulī Khān Ḥedāyat, Majmaʿ Al-Fuṣaḥāʾ, vol. 1 (Tehran: Chāp-i pīrūz, 1957), 9–10; Iraj Parsinejad, A History of Literary Criticism in Iran (Bethesda, MD: Ibex Publishers, 2003), 23–38. Aziz Ahmad, “The Formation of Sabk-i Hindī,” in Iran and Islam: In Memory of the Late Vladimir Minorsky, ed. C.E. Bosworth (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1971), 6. Walbridge, “Suhrawardī and Illuminationism.” Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (London: Frederick Warne and Co., 1781), 8–10; Baudelaire, quoted in Abrams, “Coleridge, Baudelaire, and Modernist Poetics,”167; Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur, 10th ed. (Tübingen: A. Francke Verlag, 2001 [1946]), 500. Austin Warren, Richard Crashaw: A Study in Baroque Sensibility (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1957), 68–71. Walbridge, “Suhrawardī and Illuminationism,” 202. Suhrawardī, Œuvres philosophiques et mystiques, 2 vols., vol. 1 (Paris: Librairie d’Amérique et d’Orient Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1952), 110. Ibid., 112. Salman Bashier, “Barzakh, Ṣūfī Understanding,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 3rd ed., ed. Kate Fleet et al. (Brill Online, 2016 [First Print Edition, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2007]); Christian Lange, “Barzakh,” in ibid. Henry Corbin, Histoire de la philosophie islamique (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 296. Suhrawardī, Œuvres philosophiques et mystiques, vol. 1, 207. Ibid., 208. Ibid., 209. Loc. cit. Henry Corbin, En Islam iranien: Aspects spirituels et philosophiques, II: Sohrawardî et les Platoniciens de Perse (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 124, 136. Suhrawardī, Œuvres philosophiques et mystiques, vol. 1, 162. Loc. cit. Ibid., 242. Ibid., 236. Loc. cit. Ibid., 238. Suhrawardī, Œuvres philosophiques et mystiques, vol. 1, 234. Ibid., 236. Loc. cit. Loc. cit. Loc. cit.; Shihāb al-Dīn Yaḥyā Suhrawardī, The Philosophical Allegories and Mystical Treatises, ed. Wheeler M. Thackston, Jr. (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 1999), 15. Suhrawardī, Œuvres philosophiques et mystiques, vol. 1, 240.

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46 Loc. cit.; Suhrawardī, The Philosophical Allegories and Mystical Treatises, 15. 47 Baudelaire, Le Peintre de la vie moderne, 33. 48 Mullā Ṣadrā, The Book of Metaphysical Penetrations, ed. Ibrahim Kalin, trans. Seyyed Hossein Nasr (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 2014), 45 [translations mine]. 49 Shihāb al-Dīn Yaḥyā Suhrawardī, Le livre de la sagesse orientale, trans. Henry Corbin (Lagrasse: Éditions Verdier, 1986), 486. Ṣadrā citations given only in English are my translations from Corbin’s French rendition of Taʿlīqāt, these last having not yet been edited and published in full. 50 Ṣadrā, The Book of Metaphysical Penetrations, 67. 51 Ibid., 41; Suhrawardī, Le livre de la sagesse orientale, 489 (Note b). 52 Suhrawardī, Le livre de la sagesse orientale, 465. 53 Ṣadrā, The Book of Metaphysical Penetrations, 1. 54 Suhrawardī, Le livre de la sagesse orientale, 501. 55 Ibid., 663. 56 Ṣadrā, The Book of Metaphysical Penetrations, 74. Emphasis mine. 57 Suhrawardī, Le livre de la sagesse orientale, 662. 58 Ibid., 664. 59 Ibid., 668. 60 Ibid., 669. 61 Ibid., 647. 62 Ṣadrā, The Book of Metaphysical Penetrations, 25. 63 Ibid., 74. 64 Edward Willian Lane, Arabic-English Lexicon (London: Williams and Norgate, 1863), 3045; Suhrawardī, Le Livre de la sagesse orientale, 663. 65 Suhrawardī, Le livre de la sagesse orientale, 659. 66 Ṣadrā, The Book of Metaphysical Penetrations, 49. See also endnote 76 in ibid. 67 See, for instance, Sajjad H. Rizvi, “Mollā Ṣadrā Širāzi,” in Encyclopaedia Iranica, ed. Ehsan Yarshater et al. (New York, NY: Encyclopaedia Iranica Foundation, 2005). In contrast, Marcotte’s work on the interplay between perception and apperception in Suhrawardī smartly avoids casting “une connaissance ‘présentielle’” in mystical or (worse) theosophical terms. Roxanne D. Marcotte, “L’aperception de soi chez Shihāb al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī et l’héritage avicennien,” Laval théologique et philosophique 62, no. 3 (2006): 529–51. 68 Suhrawardī, Le livre de la sagesse orientale, 565; Ṣadrā, The Book of Metaphysical Penetrations, 56. 69 Suhrawardī, Le livre de la sagesse orientale, 567. 70 Ṣadrā, The Book of Metaphysical Penetrations, 55. 71 Suhrawardī, Œuvres philosophiques et mystiques, 519 (Note b). 72 Ibid., 1, 519, 559. 73 Suhrawardī, Le livre de la sagesse orientale, 477 (Note b). 74 Ibid., 1, 621. 75 Rizvi, “Mollā Ṣadrā Širāzi.” 76 Ahmad, “The Formation of Sabk-i Hindī,” 1. 77 Ibid., 2–3. 78 Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 205. 79 Alessandro Bausani, “Notes on the Safavid Period: Decadence or Progress?,” in Proceedings of the Ninth Congress of the Union Européenne des Arabisants et Islamisants, ed. Rudolph Peters (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1981), 19. 80 Ahmad, “The Formation of Sabk-i Hindī,” 3. 81 François de Blois, “Rūdakī,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, ed. P. Bearman et al. (Brill Online, 2016 [First print edition, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1960–2007]).

Linguistic realism and modernity 137 82 Famed patrons of Persian arts and letters, the Samanids ruled varying proportions of Khorasan and Transoxania for much of the ninth and tenth centuries. The Turkic Ghaznavids, meanwhile, ruled from Ghazna and Lahore what was in many ways a successor state (and one equally propitious for Persian letters) after the second half of the tenth century AD to the end of the twelfth. 83 Charles-Henri de Fouchécour, La Description de la nature dans la poésie lyrique persane du XIe siècle (Paris: Librairie C. Klincksieck, 1969), 239–42. 84 Ibid., 233. 85 Ahmad, “The Formation of Sabk-i Hindī,” 6–7. 86 Edward Denison Ross, “A Qasida by Rudaki,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 2 (1926): 223. 87 Quoted in Losensky, 15. 88 Quoted in Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, “A Stranger in the City: The Poetics of Sabk-e Hindi,” The Annual of Urdu Studies 19 (2004): 15. 89 Fouchécour, La Description de la nature dans la poésie lyrique persane du XIe siècle, 236–7. 90 Wolfhart P. Heinrichs, “Metaphor,” in The Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature, ed. Julie Scott Meisami and Paul Starkey (New York: Routledge, 1998). 91 Faruqi, “A Stranger in the City,” 23. 92 Annemarie Schimmel, A Two-Coloured Brocade: The Imagery of Persian Poetry (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 298. 93 Faruqi, “A Stranger in the City,” 56. 94 Baudelaire, Le Peintre de la vie moderne, 64–6. 95 Ṣāʾib Tabrīzī, Dīwān-i Ṣāʾib-i Tabrīzī (Tehran: Intishārāt-i Negāh, 2004), 1202: 6. 96 Ibid., 880: 4. 97 Ibid., 2782: 3. 98 Ibid., 311: 17; 281: 3. 99 Explaining poetic novelty in terms of some version of the anxiety of influence (of which autonomic, Spenglerian organicism is in fact a variant) is commonplace in the historiography of Persian letters. See, for instance, Losensky (1993); Ali Asghar Seyed-Gohrab, Courtly Riddles: Enigmatic Embellishments in Early Persian Poetry (Amsterdam: Rozenburg, 2008): 229; Yarshater (1974): 257. 100 Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, Abū Tammām and the Poetics of the ʻAbbāsid Age (Leiden: Brill, 1991), 9. 101 Ṣāʾib, Dīwān-i Ṣāʾib-i Tabrīzī, 1205: 7; 376: 2; 609: 9. 102 Ibid., 7. 103 Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 2.2. 104 Ṣāʾib, Dīwān-i Ṣāʾib-i Tabrīzī, 962: 3. 105 Ibid., 2651: 8. 106 Ibid., 1970: 10. 107 Ibid., 2813: 4. 108 Ibid., 2492: 1. 109 Ibid., 2683: 4. 110 Ibid., 1610: 10. 111 Geert Jan van Gelder, “A Good Cause: Fantastic Aetiology (Ḥusn al-Taʿlīl) in Arabic Poetics,” in Takhyīl: The Imaginary in Classical Arabic Poetics, ed. Geert Jan van Gelder and Marlé Hammond (Exeter: The E.J.W. Gibb Memorial Trust, 2009): 221–237. 112 Ṣāʾib, Dīwān-i Ṣāʾib-i Tabrīzī, 1569: 1. 113 Ibid., 1991: 8. 114 Ibid., 9. 115 Ibid., 352: 3.

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116 Ibid., 1344: 10. 117 Alain Badiou, Petit manuel de l’inesthétique (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1998), 43, 39; and Martin Heidegger, “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” in Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977 [1950/1960]). 118 Mallarmé, “Crise de Vers,” in Poésies et autres textes, ed. Jean-Luc Steinmetz (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 2005). 119 Ahmad, “The Formation of Sabk-i Hindī,” would be exemplary here. 120 Zoroastrian Texts, ed. and trans. Prods Oktor Skjærvø, 12.

Bibliography NEL sources al-Āmidī, Abū al-Qāsim al-Ḥasan ibn Bishr. al-Muwāzana bayna shiʿr Abī Tammām wa-lBuḥturī [The Weighing of the Poetry of Abū Tammām and Al-Buḥturī]), 2 vols., edited by Aḥmad Ṣaqr, vol. 1. Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif, 1961. Hedāyat, Riẓāqulī Khān. Majmaʿ al-Fuṣaḥāʾ, vol. 1. Tehran: Chāp-i pīrūz, 1957. Ṣāʾib Tabrīzī. Dīwān-i Ṣāʾib-i Tabrīzī. Tehran: Inteshārāt-i Negāh, 2004. Suhrawardī, Shihāb al-Dīn Yaḥyā. Œuvres Philosophiques et Mystiques. 2 vols. Vol. 1, Paris: Librairie d’Amérique et d’Orient Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1952.

EL sources Abrams, M.H. “Coleridge, Baudelaire, and Modernist Poetics.” In New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism, edited by Richard E. Amacher and Victor Lange, 150–81. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979. Ahmad, Aziz. “The Formation of Sabk-i Hindî.” In Iran and Islam: In Memory of the Late Vladimir Minorsky, edited by C.E. Bosworth, 1–9. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1971. al-Dīn Muḥammad Shīrāzī, Ṣadr (Mullā Ṣadrā). The Book of Metaphysical Penetrations. Edited by Ibrahim Kalin and translated by Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 2014. Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur, 10th ed. Tübingen: A. Francke Verlag, 2001 [1946]. Badiou, Alain. Petit manuel de l’inesthétique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1998. Bashier, Salman. “Barzakh, Ṣūfī Understanding.” In Encyclopaedia of Islam, edited by Kate Fleet et al., 3rd ed. Brill Online, 2016. First Print Edition, Leiden: 2007. Baudelaire, Charles. Le Peintre de la vie moderne. Paris: Éditions Mille et une nuits, 2010 [1863]. Bausani, Alessandro. “Notes on the Safavid Period: Decadence or Progress?” In Proceedings of the Ninth Congress of the Union Européenne des Arabisants et Islamisants, edited by Rudolph Peters, 15–30. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1981. Casanova, Pascale. “Le Méridien de Greenwich: réflexions sur le temps de la littérature.” In Qu’est-ce que le contemporain?, edited by Lionel Ruffel, 113–45. Nantes: Éditions Cécil Defaut, 2010. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Historicism and Its Supplements: A Note on a Predicament Shared by Medieval and Postolonial Studies.” In Medievalisms in the Posctolonial World: The Idea of “the Middle Ages” Outside Europe, edited by Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul, 109–19. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007 [2000].

Linguistic realism and modernity 139 Corbin, Henry. Histoire de la philosophie islamique. Paris: Gallimard, 1986. Corbin, Henry. En Islam iranien: Aspects spirituels et philosophiques, II: Sohrawardî et les Platoniciens de Perse. Paris: Gallimard, 1971. de Blois, François “Rūdakī.” In Encyclopaedia of Islam, edited by P. Bearman et al., 2nd ed. Brill Online, 2016. First print edition, Leiden: 1960–2007. de Fouchécour, Charles-Henri de. La Description de la nature dans la poésie lyrique persane du XIe siècle. Paris: Librairie C. Klincksieck, 1969. de Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Faruqi, Shamsur Rahman. “A Stranger in the City: The Poetics of Sabk-e Hindi.” The Annual of Urdu Studies 19 (2004): 1–93. Foucault, Michel. Les Mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines. Paris: Gallimard, 1966. Heidegger, Martin. “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes.” In Holzwege, 1–74. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977 [1950/1960]. Heinrichs, Wolfhart P. “Metaphor.” In The Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature, edited by Julie Scott Meisami and Paul Starkey. New York: Routledge, 1998. Heinrichs, Wolfhart P. “Muwallad (2).” In Encyclopaedia of Islam, edited by P. Bearman et al., 2nd ed. Brill Online, 2016. First print edition, Leiden: 1960–2007. Hodgson, Marshall G.S. The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, 3 vols., vol. 2, The Expansion of Islam in the Middle Periods. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975. Hodgson, Marshall G.S. The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, 3 vols., vol. 3, The Gunpowder Empires and Modern Times. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975. Jameson, Fredric. “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.” Social Text 15 (1986): 65–88. Johnson, Samuel. Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets. London: Frederick Warne and Co., 1781. Kermode, Frank. Continuities. New York, NY: Random House, 1988. Lane, Edward William. An Arabic-English Lexicon in Eight Parts. Beirut: Librairie du Liban, 1968. Lange, Christian. “Barzakh.” In Encyclopaedia of Islam, edited by Kate Fleet et al., 3rd ed. Brill Online, 2016. First Print Edition, Leiden: 2007. Leaman, Oliver. “Philosophy vs. Mysticism: An Islamic Controversy.” In Philosophy, Religion, and Spiritual Life, edited by Michael McGhee, 177–87. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Losensky, Paul E. “Welcoming Fighānī”: Imitation, Influence, and Literary Change in the Persian Ghazal, 1480–1680. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. MacEoin, Denis. “Mullā Ṣadrā S̲ h̲ īrāzī.” In Encyclopaedia of Islam, edited by P. Bearman et al. Brill Online, 2016. First print edition, Leiden: 1960–2007. Mallarmé. “Crise De Vers.” In Poésies et autres textes, edited by Jean-Luc Steinmetz, 345–61. Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 2005. Marcotte, Roxanne D. “L’aperception de soi chez Shihāb al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī et l’héritage avicennien.” Laval théologique et philosophique 62, no. 3 (2006): 529–51. Massad, Joseph A. Desiring Arabs. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Meisami, Julie Scott. “Iran: The Age of Translation and Adaptation (1850–1914).” In Modern Literature in the Near and Middle East, 1850–1970, edited by Robin Ostle, 45–62. New York, NY: Routledge, 1991.

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Moretti, Franco. “Conjectures on World Literature.” New Left Review Jan/Feb (2000): 54–68. Parsinejad, Iraj. A History of Literary Criticism in Iran. Bethesda, MD: Ibex Publishers, 2003. Rizvi, Sajjad H. “Mollā Ṣadrā Širāzi.” In Encyclopaedia Iranica, edited by Ehsan Yarshater et al. New York: Encyclopaedia Iranica Foundation, 2005. Ross, Edward Denison. “A Qasida by Rudaki.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 2 (1926): 213–37. Saberi, Reza, ed. and trans. Selected Verses from Sāeb Tabrīzī: A Bilingual Text. Los Angeles: Shirkat-i Kitāb, 2013. Schimmel, Annemarie. A Two-Colored Brocade: The Imagery of Persian Poetry. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992. Seyed-Gohrab, Ali Asghar. Courtly Riddles: Enigmatic Embellishments in Early Persian Poetry. Amsterdam: Rozenburg Publishers, 2008. Skjærvø, Prods Oktor, trans. Zoroastrian Texts, 3 parts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2007. Stetkevych, Suzanne Pinckney. Abū Tammām and the Poetics of the ʻAbbāsid Age. Edited by M.M. Badawi et al. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1991. Subtelny, Maria Eva. “A Taste for the Intricate: The Persian Poetry of the Late Timurid Period.” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 136, no. 1 (1986). Suhrawardī, Shihāb al-Dīn Yaḥyā. Œuvres Philosophiques et Mystiques, 2 vols., vol. 1. Paris: Librairie d’Amérique et d’Orient Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1952. Suhrawardī, Shihāb al-Dīn Yaḥyā. Le Livre De La Sagesse Orientale. Translated by Henry Corbin. Lagrasse: Éditions Verdier, 1986. Suhrawardī, Shihāb al-Dīn Yaḥyā. The Philosophical Allegories and Mystical Treatises. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2014. Talattof, Kamran. The Politics of Writing in Iran: A History of Modern Persian Literature. Syracuse, NY: Sycrause University Press, 2000. van Gelder, Geert Jan. “A Good Cause: Phantastic Aetiology (Ḥusn al-taʿlīl) in Arabic Poetics.” In Takhyīl: The Imaginary in Classical Arabic Poetics, edited by Geert Jan van Gelder and Marlé Hammond, 221–37. Exeter: The E.J.W. Gibb Memorial Trust, 2009. Walbridge, John. “Suhrawardī and Illuminationism.” In The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy, edited by Peter Adamson and Richard C. Taylor, 201–23. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Warren, Austin. Richard Crashaw: A Study in Baroque Sensibility. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1957. Yarshater, Ehsan. “Persian Poetry in the Timurid and Safavid Periods.” In The Cambridge History of Iran: The Timurid and Safavid Periods, edited by Peter Jackson and Laurence Lockhart, 965–94. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Yarshater, Ehsan. “Safavid Literature: Progress or Decline?” Iranian Studies 7, no. 1/2 (1974): 217–70. Ziai, Hossein. Knowledge and Illumination: A Study of Suhrawardī’s Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1990.

5

A predestined break from the past Shi‘r-i Naw, history, and hermeneutics Fateme Montazeri

The expression of discontent (nāriz̤ āyatī) is a recurring theme in the history of Persian poetry, but it was with the introduction of Shi‘r-i Naw (New Poetry) that it became recognised as a means of crystallising modern sociopolitical opposition. What has been eclipsed in the process is the enduring inner presence of the classical Islamic dilemma (which can be traced back to the Mu‘tazilites and Ashʿarites) of freewill versus predestination. It is in this light that I shall address and challenge the persistent intellectual currents that both defined and normalised literature as a decontextualised form of sociopolitical “commitment” segregated from classical literary currents. In so doing, I will focus on “Nīmāic” poetry, which is known for explicitly symbolising sociopolitical realities to the extent that it is labelled “social symbolic.”1 Nīmāic poetry is host to the tension between the mutable and the immutable in classical literature, and this will be revealed through a close reading of some exemplars from both sides of the philosophical divide. Thus, while references are made to the “old” and the “new” for the sake of convenience, binary opposition is given up in favour of a reformulative continuity.

Nīmāic poetics and leftist critique The link between the literary and the sociopolitical can be traced back decades before the emergence of Nīmā Yūshīj (1895–1960/1276–1338, henceforth Nīmā), the so-called “father” of Shi‘r-i Naw,2 to the late-Qājār period when classical literature was being heavily criticised for being too esoteric or mystical to mirror modern concerns. During this time, there was a call for a “new literature” tasked with a social commitment (i.e. ta‘ahhud ), an indispensable part of the larger modernisation project.3 While the literati as a whole did not follow the intellectual Mīrzā Malkum Khān’s (1833–1908/1212–1287) radical suggestion to do away with “the defect[s] of the Arabic script” by adopting a new one,4 there were those like the poet and activist Muhammad Taqī Bahār (1886–1951/1265–1330) who adamantly sought to disentangle literature from the “misfortunate lovers [and] miserable people” and the “invitation[s] to patience and a joyous afterlife” of the classics because of the thematic correlation to national oppression.5 By linking the new literature to sociopolitical commitment, its legitimacy was being consecrated, thus foreshadowing the dominant readings and appropriations of Nīmā’s

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non-political poetics in the decades to come.6 According to the poet Mahdī Akhavān-Sālis (1929–1990/1307–1369), “the leftists [ . . . ] attempted to introduce him [Nīmā] extensively, not for the sake of his poems but to benefit from his fame.” He adds: “The proponents of the [communist] Tūdah Party and the [leftist] Third Force fought to attract Nīmā, but [he] himself was not a member of any party or group.”7 Interpretive impositions often led to unabashed poetic alterations. As the author and activist Jalāl Āl-i Ahmad (1923–1969/1302–1348) writes: “I made certain omissions from [Nīmā’s] ‘Pādishāh-i Fath [The King of Conquest],’ [a gesture with which Ihsān] Tabarī [poet and ideologue of the Tūdah, 1917–89] agreed. When we published it [in Nāmah-yi Mardum], the old man [i.e. Nīmā] really began to grumble.”8 The poet alludes sarcastically to the event in a footnote: “Those who are more masterful than I omitted two paragraphs essential to the poem’s life. They shall be reintroduced in the next edition.”9 Notwithstanding this reassertion of poetic autonomy and later attempts, most notably by Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, to highlight the literary aspects of Nīmā’s modernity, the sociopolitical hermeneutic paradigm has persisted10 ever since Tabarī concluded in 1943/1322 that the morning [sobh] in “Omīd-i Palīd [Filthy Hope]” is indicative of a dawning society and night [shab], backwardness and ignorance.11 Sīrūs Shamīsā, the renowned literary critic, for instance, has interpreted the “neighbour” in Nīmā’s “Dārvag,” (My farm appeared dry/beside my neighbour’s crop) to be the Soviet Union,12 and elements of “Barf [Snow]” (I am terribly heavy-hearted by/this miserable guest-killing guesthouse/that has jumbled together unknown to each other/some drowsy ones, some uncouth ones, some unaware ones) to be an allusion to the Chinese nation, “who with no reason rejected communism to rescue themselves from dizziness.”13 The dominance of the sociopolitical reading eventually led to the formation of a generic theoretical framework in the study of Shi‘r-i Naw that includes nebulous rubrics, such as “social,” “political,” or “committed,”14 with Nīmāic poetry typically bearing the label “social symbolic.” Disregarding the conspicuous reflections of sociopolitical concerns inherent in constitutionalist-era literature, the adherents of this taxonomy claim that it was ultimately Nīmā who “blew into the body of Persian literature the spirit of commitment to social and political issues.”15 They have argued that his adoption of a symbolic rather than literal (tasrīhī) mode was meant to increase the multiplicity of meaning,16 but the taxonomy yielded the opposite effect: formulaic interpretations based on a determined set of definitions put forward by the critic.17 Such readings tend to confirm assumptions about the poet and relegate the artistic, polysemic nature of the poems to a simplistic, monosemic statement.18 A reductionist approach to authorial intention has been another outgrowth of this taxonomic determinism.19 In Rāhnamā-yi Adabīyāt-i Mu‘āsir (A Guide to Contemporary Literature), for instance, Shamīsā uses intentionality to distinguish Akhavān’s “monosemic [tak ma‘nā’ī]” poetry from Nīmā’s “universalism”20 and even suggests that it is linked to the joy of reception: “Should the reader not agree with the poet’s [political] inclinations,” he argues, “they will fail to enjoy his poems.”21

A predestined break from the past 143 As they did with Nīmā, the critics on the revolutionary left “discovered” that, for instance, the figure of the mard (the man) in the poem of the same name by Akhavān-Sālis and the shahrīyār (sovereign) in his “Khvān-i Hashtum [The Eighth Trial]” both represent Iran’s ruling monarch at the time and not, in the latter case, the mythical king of Rustam’s era.22 This subversive discourse even touched poems that did not explicitly lend themselves to formulaic sociopolitical readings. Consider the following excerpt from “Vahm-i Sabz [Green Illusion]” by Furūgh Farrukhzād (1935–1967/1313–1345): I wept in the mirror all day long Spring had entrusted my window To the green illusion of the trees My body could not be contained In the cocoon of my loneliness And the smell of my paper crown had polluted The atmosphere of that sunless scene23 Informed by the poetics of commitment, some critics argue that this poem – with its expression of female emotions – is a biography of Farah Pahlavi, the last queen of Iran.24 Conversely, the poet and painter Suhrāb Sipihrī’s (1928–1980/1307–1359) appreciation of nature and far-Eastern mysticism at the expense of radical politics was considered an unforgettable literary failure:25 “How is it possible to simply say, ‘Let us not muddy the waters [Āb rā gil nakunīm]’ when people are being slaughtered right close to the stream?” wonders the preeminent poet Ahmad Shāmlū (1925–2000/1304–1379).26 How is it possible that “all the destructive noises of modern life do not damage his [Suhrāb’s] mystical silence?”27 It is in this vein that Sipihrī became known as a poet secluded in his ivory tower [burj-i ‘āj nishīn], the “little bourgeois” [bachah būdā-yi ashrāfī] who is either ignorant of or unaffected by surrounding events: “If [the barrel of] a gun was pressed against Mr. Sipihrī’s right temple ready to be fired at any moment,” writes the critic Rezā Barāhinī, “would he still wash his face in the warmth of an apple?”28 Sipihrī has been a glaring exception, for even classics such as Hāfiz’s ghazals have been infused with the modern spirit of critique. In his edition of Hāfiz’s Divan, published in 1975/1354, Shāmlū attributes the discrepancies among the existent Divan manuscripts to the mediaeval poet’s subversive verses: the Divan did not survive because he could not entrust others with his controversial poems and the relentless persecution compelled his descendants to destroy his oeuvre.29 This view circulated among several twentieth-century intellectual circles. On the fifth night of the ten-night long poetry reading event organised by the Iranian Writers’ Association (Kānūn-i Nivīsandigān-i Iran) in 1977/1356, the militant poet and activist Saʿīd Sultānpūr (1940–1981/1319–1360), recently released from prison, delivered a talk on literary censorship by the Pahlavi monarchy in which he recited the following verses by Hāfiz:

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Fateme Montazeri Do you know what the harp and oud declare? / Drink wine in secret, for they’re doling out penalties. They plunder the honor of love and the lovers’ splendor / They inhibit the young and rebuke the old. They say neither speak nor hear the word of love. / It is a tough tale they tell.30

Sultānpūr justifies his political stance by claiming that Hāfiz, considered the epitome of Persian poetry, similarly criticised censorship through his verse.

History in Shi‘r-i Naw The scholarly preoccupation with standard leftist critiques has ironically obscured the unprecedented sense of historical awareness evident in Shi‘r-i Naw due to its supposed apolitical nature. This new consciousness of the past led to a re-engagement with the notion of mutability, that which is beyond and within history. A telling example is the following poem by Hamīd Musaddiq (1940–1998/1318– 1377), apparently of romantic persuasion, from the collection Ābī, Khākistarī, Sīah (Blue, Gray, Black): You laughed at me Without knowing How worriedly I stole the apple From the neighbour’s orchard ... And you passed by, And after many years still Quietly in my ears The rustle of your departing steps Keeps hurting me repeatedly And I wonder, Immersed in thoughts Why our little house had no apples.31 Besides the sentimental reading of a beloved who departs after being gifted an apple by an innocent youth, the piece can also be understood as the expression of dissatisfaction in the face of fate: the protagonist’s status pales in comparison to his neighbour’s affluence and he is ultimately punished for his attempt to transform the status quo. Because of its publication in 1964–5/1343 during the intensification of armed struggle against the state, this reading has been obscured by insurrectionary fervour. As Muhammad Alī Sipānlū, one of the founding members of the Iranian Authors’ Association notes: During the years when his poems were read in universities and even [when] occasional armed struggles were taking place, Hamīd Musaddiq remained aloof.

A predestined break from the past 145 He would always say, ‘my poetry is romantic [‘āshiqānah], it is not the political thing you have made it out to be [na īnkah bardāshtīd ān rā sīyāsī kardīd].’32 The dissemination of this poem in the politically charged environment of the time led to the rumour that the author had been arrested. This was, of course, not the case.33 The value of the historical as a reference point and standard, as well as its connection to modernity, was not lost on the literati, as illustrated by the poet, author, and activist Muhammad Mukhtārī: “The past cannot be denied in the interest of the present, and today should not be neglected at the expense of yesterday.”34 In “Oppressed Historical Memory,” Mukhtārī encourages a retrospective approach, such as the commemoration of the 14th of Murdād anniversary of the Constitutional Revolution and other “turning points” that are parts of Iran’s “national and historical memory.”35 He goes on to say that “the purpose [of referring to history, e.g. this commemoration] is to realise that modernity is not to be equated with sacrificing the past [mudirn būdan bah ma‘nā-yi qurbānī kardan-i guzashtah nīst]; rather, [it is] to preserve, compare, and remember the values that we created.”36 Barāhinī’s take was quite similar: “I do not view [an event such as] the revolution as a mere historical theme, but rather as a historical phenomenon with the potential to turn into an artistic-literary theme in the strongest sense of the word; this means the transition of history into literature [intiqāl-i tārikh bi adabīyāt].”37 He insists that literature should not turn into a historical account per se, but should rather be internalised as an intrinsic element. His admiration for the literati’s historical comprehension leads him to say that “there are some who do not have an accurate understanding of history [ . . . ] yet because of a keen perception of literature, they are able to grasp the essence of history better than professional historians.”38 This comprehension fills many of the works of Shi‘r-i Naw, as it did in the classical tradition, but the resemblance is barely recognised. The logic of sociopolitical commitment has created an artificial conflict between the new and old. It has normalised the presumption, embedded (even if tacitly) in the scholarly literature, that the bulk of Shi‘r-i Naw is “revolutionary” in nature,39 and that the “social aspect” of stock classical poems is either missing or “weak and ill” [ẓa‘īf va bīmār-gūnah].40 Whoever is involved in the classical tradition in one way or another, including Sufis, poets, writers, philosophers, historians, and politicians, is charged with having submitted to the prevailing social order as “privileged” actor who at best only speak of the maladies of the world in the broadest terms (e.g. “the injustice of the age [bīdād-i zamānah]”).41 In contrast, Shi‘r-i Naw is deemed to be the voice of human agency and sociopolitical transformation. A deep gap, therefore, is imagined to separate “the originality of human will and agency [isālat-i irādah va ikhtīyār-i ādamī]” in modern literature from “the dark predestinationism [qaẓā va qadar garāī-yi siāh]” in much of the classical tradition.42 In this way, they represent two contesting images of humanity and its relationship to the cosmos. The classical conception dictates that humanity and the cosmic order are independent and in conflict, with the former failing to influence

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the latter. Shi‘r-i Naw, on the other hand, is said to have reconfigured the role of the human. He is no longer “totally eliminated and subservient but a creature with responsible, profound dimensions,” placed alongside the cosmos in power and influence.43 The imaginary and constructed nature of this assumption needs to be challenged. In what follows, it will be demonstrated that neither is the human in Shi‘r-i Naw absolutely capable of pure transformative striving, nor is he in classical poems utterly restrained by predestination.

Limits of Sufi predeterminism It was in the eleventh century that predestinationism began to spread its roots throughout the lands of Islam44 with the aid of Ash‘arite theology and, specifically, the intellectual activities of Muhammad al-Ghazzali (c. 1056–1111/450–505).45 Contra Mu‘tazilite rationalism, the practical significance of fate as a guiding concept in Muslim lives was located in its ability to make a world full of tribulation ever so slightly more tolerable.46 However, the freewill and predestination debate in the Persian literary tradition can be traced back even further when considering the ancient Sufi contradiction between the captivity of love (‘ishq) and the freedom of reason (‘aql).47 True love is deemed present in some Sufi poems only in the complete absence of freewill: “[When] they ask what love is, tell them: the abandonment of freewill [gūyand ‘ishq chīst bigū tark-i ikhtīyār].”48 Love is thus likened to a fierce lion, as Rumi puts it: “In the clutch of a fierce bloodthirsty lion/ where is any resource except resignation and acquiescence?”49 It is the simultaneity of inescapability and sweetness that leads a spiritually elevated lover to willfully submit to this entanglement: “Even if I’m released from your love’s lasso, where will I escape to?/For life without you is a snare and freedom a prison.”50 For Sufis, everything is derived from the Most Beloved: “Whatever that king [khusraw] does, [he] does it sweetly [shīrīn].”51 Even the very act of complaining, in Hāfiz’s words, is unjustified: “Oh Hāfiz! It is unjust to complain about the distribution of fate [mashrab-i qismat].”52 The literary notion of submitting to fate, as such, leaves no space for any discontent, let alone for any calls to change the status quo. It is well known that this classical subservience provoked the ire of latenineteenth century anti-Sufi intellectuals including Sayyid Jamāl al-Din al-Afghānī (1838–1897/1217–1275), the political activist and Islamic ideologue who argues that the mystic’s absolute obedience to the sheikh is the main reason behind the decline of the Islamic world.53 This critique reached its apogee with the writings of Ahmad Kasravī (1890–1946), who proved formative in the intellectual movements of the 1940s and ’50s. In his attempts to harmonise modernity and rationalism with classical Islam, Kasravī stubbornly rejected the mystical tradition wholesale: “Sufism makes people weak, idle, and indolent [and] prevents the prosperity of the world.”54 In a controversial piece on Hāfiz, Kasravī interpreted the belief in predestination (“This is how God created us; this is what He wants for us”) as a pretext for lethargy.55 According to him, if it were not for the prevalence of Sufi teachings the Mongol invasion of the fourteenth century could have been courageously repeled.56 “Sufism has been incorrect from [its] inception,”

A predestined break from the past 147 concludes Kasravī, “and has incredibly harmed the Eastern masses [tūdah’hā-yi sharqī] over [the past] thousand years.”57 While it is argued that the modernist critique justified the timely emergence of a New Literature, there is no definitive fault line in the corpus to allow this strict philosophical divide to sustain itself. The renowned poet, philosopher, and politician Muhammad Iqbāl Lahūrī (1877–1938/1256–1317), for instance, offers an approach to Sufi literature that is rooted in freewill and individuality, notions he considers highly credited in the classics. Dubbed “the prophet of the self,”58 Iqbāl published two books in Persian verse, Asrār-i Khudī (Secrets of the Self) and Rumūz-i Bi-Khudī (Secrets of Selflessness), to restore and strengthen the true “self” of the colonised Eastern masses as it is best expressed in classical literature. Admiring Rūmi’s Masnavī as the “Pahlavī Quran,”59 Iqbāl begins both of his books by using relevant verses from this text.60 Throughout the Mas̱ navī, but particularly in its fifth daftar, Rumi provides eight types of evidence in confirmation of the freewill, after which he asserts: “No doubt there is freewill for us” (Ikhtīyārī hast mā rā bī’gumān). Conversely, traces of submission to predetermination are observable in non-Sufi literary genres and forms. In Ferdawsī’s tenth-century epic, the Shāhnāmah, the protagonist’s fortunes appear to be allotted by fate, and this is noteworthy because the period in which the text was produced was one of rationalist triumph.61 Rather than exclusively ascribing “predestinationism” to the heavens, the epic draws repeatedly from secular nomenclature, such as “fate [sar-nivisht]” and “time [dahr/ rūzgār].” Tragedy may be said to require by definition the protagonist’s defeat in the face of a force beyond his control, but reconciling that force with “fate” derives from the predestination discourse. It is in this light that when Rustam and his son, Suhrāb, tragically meet on the battlefield without knowledge of each another’s identities, it is “the world [jahān]” that is blamed, not any particular character: “Oh jahānā! Your demeanor is perplexing/the broken is from you, so is the whole.”62 Drenched in blood, Suhrāb tries to calm his agitated father, telling him: “zamānah [time] gave the key of my [murder] to you . . ./ It happened, unavoidably.”63 It is in modernity that these notions of freewill vs. predestination migrated to the context of “history” but this has been obscured by the one-sided Orientalist assumption that classical predeterminism has seeped into the modern Iranian state of mind.64 This supposition, no doubt nurtured by contemporary political polemics, ignores the recent wave of scholarship, particularly in Persian, that has brought to light examples of human agency in classical literature.65

Historical predestination The unprecedented modern understanding of human situatedness in history altered the contours of the freewill vs. predestination debate, and this is clearly evident in Shi‘r-i Naw. Note the poem “Ākhar-i Shāhnāmah [The End of the Shāhnāmah]” by Akhavān-Sālis, whose title carries a dual meaning: On the one hand, parallel to the poetic theme, the title signifies the archaism of the classics – including the Shāhnāmah – and the “crooked [and] sane” state of the present. On the other hand,

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the title sarcastically refers to the Persian proverb, “The end of the Shāhnāmah is sweet,” and contradicts it by asserting the bitterness of the end (of time, of the story). Without offering a quest for answers, the poem grieves over the deceits and disorder of the present: Han, where is the capital of this crooked [and] sane century?66 The poem intricately combines the temporal and the spatial by expressing the need to find a centre for this turbulent period, thus conveying a sense of “being lost in history”: Han, where is the capital of this fort-like turbulent century?67 The poem seeks to redefine the relationship between subjectivity and history. Since the present has become a “scene of denial, insult, treachery, and injustice,” there is a new need to overwhelm history: We are Conquerors of the forts of historical glory ... We are Survivors of the sad innocence of eras ... Han, where is the capital of the century? We are going to conquer it the capital of the century And capture its nothingness . . .68 There is a lack of uniformity in the way modern poetry depicts history and its power. At times overbearing and deterministic while in other instances a mere subtext, history’s variations are detectable throughout Shi‘r-i Naw’s corpus, as in the following examples by Akhavān-Sālis, Ahmad Shāmlū, and Wasif Bākhtarī. Praised for the way they reflect “social consciousness,” these poems will be compared to “solipsistic” classical pieces that evoke similar themes. Though human-centric, Shi‘r-i Naw does not necessarily prioritise willpower, as in the case of AkhavānSālis’ “Katībah [Inscription],” which depicts the ill-fated human endeavour for freedom. As the title foreshadows, subjective limitation is firmly inscribed and thus unalterable. The poem itself describes a group of hapless captives who hear an elusive voice in their “nightmare of dread and weariness,” encouraging them to read the “secret [rāz]” engraved on a rock “by wise men of old.” One night, after “many doubts and queries,” one of them crawls up to the rock and reads the inscription: “He shall know my secret Who turns me over!”69

A predestined break from the past 149 Heartened by hope, the captives begin the arduous task of turning the rock over. After much “sweating, . . . cursing, at times even crying,” they accomplish the task and one of them “whose chain was lighter” climbed upon it, Wiped the dirt-cracked inscription and mouthed the words (We were impatient) Wetted his lips (and we did the same) And remained silent To their extreme disappointment, it becomes clear that emancipation is but a deceit. The inscription on the rock asks them only to repeat the futile process: He swallowed and said faintly: “The same was written: ‘He shall know my secret Who turns me over!’”70 In “Katībah,” the notion of human agency is conveyed as self-deceptive. Underestimating an already-“inscribed” fate, the characters gullibly assume that their struggles will lead to change but nothing – e.g. a transcendental call or communal effort – proves liberating. As an accentuation of the illusion, the contextualising night scene transforms in tandem with the captives’ perspectives. The story itself begins with the absolute misery of the imprisoned as they curse their ears for having caught a heralding voice: One night, moonlight pouring damnation on us . . . As the captives begin their assiduous struggle in the hopes of turning the rock over and reading the inscription, this very “damned” scene takes on a thoroughly different tone: And the night was a glorious stream filled with moonlight . . . Finally, when the captives disappointedly figure out that they are promised no more than a vicious circle, the poem ends with the same night scene, this time having lost all of its radiance: . . . And the night was a sickly stream.71 The overshadowing predeterminism of “Katībah” is all the more representative because it was composed by a poet whose works are said to have derived from political struggle and are thus interpreted to highlight the predilection for freewill. Furthermore, the incorporation of an ancient Arabic idiom as the subject of the poem speaks to the way Akhavān-Sālis participated in the poetic intermingling of the new and old. Yet, the stress on historical limitation is complemented by the power of the freewill in other

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poems even if doomed to failure. Akhavān-Sālis’ “Chāvushī” (The Caravan Leader) is revealing in this regard: Let’s take our provisions for the journey Walk the irreversible path And see whether the sky is of the same colour everywhere?72 Akhavān-Sālis is quick to remind readers that his invitation is not religious, spiritual, or to put it in his own words “never toward the skies,” but rather “to the plane of non-godliness [bi sūy-i pahn-dasht-i bī-khudāvandīst].” Indeed, stepping on the path is greater than the destination: Let’s take our provisions for the journey Walk the path. Where? Wherever it may be Where? Anywhere but here Here I am blanched by endearment as I am of harassment. The dominant hermeneutic discourse of Shi‘r-i Naw reads this “anywhere but here” as the much sought-after “earthly political paradise” to which readers are called, even a reference to the Soviet Union, an object of much intellectual fawning during the 1950s and ’60s.73 What is certain is that it reflected a deep discontent with the status quo and a proclamation to experiment with other possibilities, even if failure was on the horizon: Come oh weary friend! Oh like me gloomy and sad! I am so heavy-hearted here Let’s take our provisions for the journey Walk the never-ending path.74 The centrality of human agency – as opposed to prophecy and mythical heroism – in Ahmad Shāmlū’s conception of messianism is evident in “Dar Āstānah [At the Threshold].” In this poem, it is the human qua messiah who demystifies history of its folkloric, religious, and ideological baggage: . . . Neither spirits, nor apparitions, nor camphor-bearing saints Neither fiends clutching fiery bullheads Nor the vilified Lucifer with his tasseled horn cap Nor the unlawful amalgam of diverging absolutes. – Only you Are the absolute existence Pure existence For you persist even in your absence, and your absence Is the emphatic presence of a miracle.75 The same point is reiterated in Shāmlū’s “Lawh [Tablet],” where mundane means are used to achieve redemption: the saviour is mankind in its earthly form and the

A predestined break from the past 151 guiding scripture a clay tablet. The saviour holds up the tablet and, in a “delirious fever,” cries unto the people: “This is all there is, and [it is] sealed . . . Gone are the days Of mourning some crucified Christ For today every woman is another Mary And every Mary has a Jesus upon the cross Albeit with no Crown of Thorns, no Cruciform and no Golgotha . . . ”76 The crowd, however, has “no ear or heart” for such words because its expectations do not accord with the exigencies of the time. The saviour is aware of this and issues the following grievance: I knew that they were awaiting Not a clay tablet but a Gospel A sword and some constables To ambush them with whips and maces . . . And yet, . . . in our time the sword is a legendary tool . . . My words the crowd ignored For I had said the last word about the heavens Without even mentioning the word heaven.77 For Shāmlū, not only are prophets replaced by mere mortals, divinity is also secularised in the form of history as judge. It is after passing “the threshold,” moving “from outside to inside,” and “seeing [the one] who sees” that mankind encounters history in this capacity: But an arbiter sits beyond the door, bereft of the portentous cloak of judges. His essence: wisdom and justice His manifestation: Time. And your memory will be judged for eternity in the annals of time.78 History recognises the limitations and adversities of being human (insān): Man [insān]. Embodies the hardship of [existential] responsibility ’Twas a short-lived occasion, an agonizing journey Yet ’twas singular, nor lacked a thing79 Shāmlū deifies history and its deterministic forces in the sense that it goes beyond being a pure and simple challenger of the human will by becoming the criterion by which the products of agency are assessed. Shāmlū aside, a discussion of the theme of history in Shi‘r-i Naw remains incomplete without reference to Wāsef [Vāsif] Bākhtarī (b. 1945).80 Bākhtarī’s

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poems, particularly in the anthology Sufālīnah-i Chand bar Pīshkhān-i Bulūrīn-i Fardā (Potteries on the Crystal Counter of Tomorrow), highlight the unconquerable power of history. The title itself, which ties the past to the future, foreshadows the frequent poetic insertions of time-related phrases in the work. The following episode from “Va Sidā Sidā-yi Shikastan Būd [And the Sound Was the Sound of Shattering]” is a telling example: From the ducks of the past [who flew] over the oceans Those who died forever young Salutes to you oh ducks of today floating on waters made of paper For the water of events passed through the sieve of your memories.81 In the poem, the inhabitants of the past are liable for the problems of today and even those of tomorrow. In the absence of any allusions to anthrocentric salvation, predestination weighs heavily on the text. In the following piece, the citizens of Jābulqā (the easternmost city in mythical Islamicate geography) are deceived not at a certain historical juncture but rather since eternity – or to use Bākhtarī’s words, “since the birth of fire”: Once upon a time there was a land called [ . . . ] Jābulqā [ . . . ] Its pearly womb [ . . . ] was pregnant with the name of an old merchant Who was related to the pigeon-keeper of the limbo since the birth of fire Every day He would show gold coins to his children in the mirror Then [ . . . ] sow these words like seeds in the ranch of their ears: “I have hidden a couple of coins in that marble pond If you remain silent and refrain from turmoil [ . . . ] you [will] enjoy [them].”82 The same theme of blaming history and our forebears, although concealed by metaphors and similes, is repeated in another of Bākhtarī’s poems: All of a sudden a dry pine tree [Whose] lineage [was] of the garden’s wounded Picked his head up from a broken branch’s arm [And] said, Oh superior ancestor! [It is] you [who] entrusted us [with this] barren soil.83 “The hidden hand” of historical predestination is clearly evident in “Az Fasl-i Dīgar [From the Other Fasl],” a poem that speaks to the passing of time and transformations driven by impersonal forces. Fasl – literally distinction – signifies the seasons of a year as well as book chapters. “A new fasl of this book will begin,” they say, I [reply] yes but

A predestined break from the past 153 A hidden hand Writes in blood Each line of it And You Oh thirsty for the beginning of another fasl – or [even] other fasls! Will never see it For that hidden hand Writes each word in an illegible, deformed handwriting Inverted and transformed Bākhtarī reconfigured the human freewill vs. historical predestination binary by discarding the idea of an exclusive opposition. History, in all its violence and might, is held responsible for the miseries of man, but enough agency is reserved for history to be pleaded with, particularly for the sake of freedom. This is attested to in the poem “Dar Sukūt-i Shammātah’hā [On the Silence of the Alarms],” where the ominous fate of humans is determined by pre-history: We . . . caught fire in your first big blaze Moreover, history is addressed directly: History! Oh half-green and half-withered Jungle! Although we old palms Caught fire at the dawn of your first big blaze, Can you preserve the poplar generation of tomorrow In the sanctuary that only you know of? . . .84 Bākhtarī’s poems offer evidence to counter the anthrocentric assumptions surrounding Shi‘r-i Naw. Furthermore, there is present an articulation of discontent that is prevalent in many other works of the literary movement. When this discontent is registered in historical rather than sociopolitical terms, rigid distinctions between new and old dissolve in favour of continuities. Given the similarities between the classical and the modern, it is worth re-thinking what “intrinsically” differentiates the invitation to action in Akhavān-Sālis’ “Let’s take [our] provisions for the journey/[And] walk the irreversible path” from Hāfiz’s “Come, let us [ . . . ] rend the sky’s dome and cast a new design [bīyā tā . . . falak rā saqf bishkāfīm u tarhī naw dar andāzīm],” or what makes Akhavān-Sālis’ “Katībah” more “committed” than Ferdowsī’s “We strive and so what are the results of our endeavours? [bikūshīm vaz kūshash-i mā chah sūd?].” In other words, there are spillages of predestination and freewill on both sides of the divide, and this undermines the dominant hermeneutic discourses. While Shi‘r-i Naw did indeed introduce new themes to the Persian literary repertoire, this did not necessarily imply a drastic break from the past. After all, there are other non-decisive historical contingencies to consider. The history of classical literature, often illustrated to be conservative and closed to much innovation, has been traditionally deemed to include different styles (sabk), with each style

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prominently containing particular genres and themes. According to the dominant discourse in literary historiography, for instance, Persian romantic-lyrical (taghazzulī) poetry became prevalent in the so-called “Iraqi [‘arāqī] style of the tenth to twelfth centuries.”85 One wonders that if the epic themes of the ninth and tenth century “Khurāsānī” style can be undisturbedly replaced by the “romantic” themes of the “Iraqi” style, then why is Shi‘r-i Naw interpreted to be the product of a definitive break from the classical tradition? It is in this context that the prevalent assumptions of the dominant leftist interpretation of Shi‘r-i Naw must be scrutinised.

Notes 1 For examples of such works see: Siyyid Mahdi Zarqānī, Chashm’andāz-i Shi‘r-i Mu‘āsir-i Fārsī [Perspective to Contemporary Persian Poetry] (Tihrān: Sālis, 1383/2004–2005), 202; and Alī Husayn’pūr Chāfī, Jarayānhā-yi Shi‘rī-yi Mu‘āsir-i Fārsī az Kūditā (1322) tā Inqilāb (1357) [Contemporary Persian Poetical Movements from the Coup (1943) to the Revolution (1978)] (Tihrān: Amīr-kabīr, 1378/2005–2006), 231–87. 2 For Persian literature of the late Qajar and early Pahlavi periods, see: Shāhrukh Miskūb, Dāstān-i Adabīyāt va Sarguzasht-i Ijtimā‘ – sālhā-yi 1300–1315 [The Story of Literature and the Trajectory of Society – 1921–1936] (Tihrān: Farzān-i rūz, 1378/2000). 3 Political journals that featured “New Literature” did so amidst discussions of literary and political modernisation, and so it is no coincidence that compositions advocating for literary modernisation emerged first and foremost in these periodicals. Tajaddud (Regeneration), the leading political organ of the Democratic Party of Āzarbaijān that Raf‘at published between 1917–20, for instance, had a special column devoted to “modernity in literature [tajaddud dar Adabīyāt].” See: Nassereddin Parvin, “Tajaddod,” Encyclopædia Iranica, 2004, www.iranicaonline.org/articles/tajaddod (accessed January 30, 2017). 4 This is from a letter by Malkum that was published in 1869 in the newspaper Hurrīyat (Freedom) [Mirza Malkum Khan, Risālah’hā-yi Mīrzā Malkum Khān Nāzim al-Dulah (Treatises by Mirza Malkum Khan) comp. Hujjat-Allāh Asīl (Tihrān: Nei, 1381/2002), 16]. For Malkum’s arguments for the script change, see: Ibid., 371–428. 5 Muhammad Taqī Bahār, “Ta’sīr-i Muhīt dar Adabīyāt” [The Impact of the Environment on Literature], in Bahār va Adab-i Fārsī: Majmūah-‘i 100 Maqālah az Malak ul-Shu’arā-yi Bahār (Persian Literature and Bahār: Collection of 100 Articles by Bahār), vol 1., ed. Muhammad Gulbun (Tihrān: Kitābhā-yi Jībī, 1351/1972), 396. According to Bahar, even romantic poetry is affected by society to the extent that a typical poet from an “oppressed nation” speaks of the beloved’s disloyalty [bī’vafā’ī] whereas a poet from a “victorious nation” naturally narrates the joys of seeing and uniting with the beloved. 6 Such political readings were at times subject to Nīmā’s approval. See: Nīmā’s letter to Ehsān Tabarī and his praise of Tabarī’s interpretation of his “Filthy Hope,” in Nāmah’hā: az Majmū’ah-i Āsār-i Nīmā Yūshīj (Letters), comp. and ed. Sīrūs Tāhbāz and Shar’āgīm Yūshīj (Tihrān: Daftar’hā-yi Zamānah, 1368/1989–1990), 609. 7 Mahdī Akhavān-Sālis, Sidā-yi Hayrat-i Bīdār [Sound of Vigilant Wonder], intro. Murtiza Khākī, 3rd ed. (Tihrān: Nashr-i Zamistān, 1390/2012), 418. 8 Jalāl Āl Ahmad, Arzyābī-i Shitābzadah [Hurried Evaluation] (Tihrān: Rivāq, 1358/1979), 42. 9 Nīmā Yūshīj, Majmū‘ah-’i Kāmil-i Ash‘ār-i Nīmā Yūshīj [Collection of Nima’s Poems], comp. Sirūs Tāhbāz (Tihrān: Nigāh, 1371/1992), 424. 10 See: Alī Bābā Chāhī, Guzārah’hā-yi Munfarad: Bar’rasī-i Intiqādī-yi Emrūz-i Irān [Separate Phrases: A Critical Analysis of Iran’s Contemporary Poetry] (Tihrān: Nashr-i Nāranj, 1377/1998), 87.

A predestined break from the past 155 11 Nīmā Yūshīj, Nāmah’hā, 722. For a detailed analysis of the role of the Tabarī’s introduction in the reception of the poem see: Karimi Hakkak, Recasting Persian Poetry (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1995), 250–62. 12 Shamīsā, Rāhnamā-yi Adabīyāt, 148. He also interprets the cold winter night and lamp in Nima’s “On the cold winter night” (On this cold winter night/ even the sun’s furnace does not burn/ like the warm furnace of my lamp . . .) as, respectively, society and Nīmā’s poems (Ibid., 172–3). 13 Ibid., 194. 14 For instance, see Kamran Talattof, “Postrevolutionary Persian Literature: Creativity and Resistance,” Radical History Review, 105 (Fall, 2009): 1. An example of a type of classification that places certain poets in more than one category can be seen in Zarqānī, Chashm’andāz-i Shi‘r-i Mu‘āsir-i Fārsī, 202. Another study to consider is Alī Husayn’pūr Chāfī’s Jarayānhā-yi Sh’irī-i Mu’āsir-i Fārsī az Kūditā (1322) tā Inqilāb (1357) [Contemporary Persian Poetical Movements from the Coup (1943) to the Revolution (1978)] (Tihrān: Amīr-kabīr, 1378/2005–2006), 231–87. 15 Husayn’pūr Chāfī, Jarayānhā-yi Shi‘rī-yi Mu‘āsir-i Fārsī, 199–201. Although Husayn’pūr Chāfī acknowledges the social inclinations of the constitutional poets, he considers such inclinations to be only “hasty and superficial.” 16 For example, see Zarqānī, Chashm’andāz-i Shi‘r-i Mu‘āsir-i Fārsī, 202. Zarqāni recognises that the capacity to convey meaning in “social symbolic” poetry differs from other poetic forms, but it goes unacknowledged that the different potentials for poetic signification may well be derived from such designations. According to him, “social” poems contain conscious and accessible messages beneath the surface of rhetorical complexities. In “symbolic” poems the inner meaning is obscured by a labyrinth of symbols and metaphors to the extent that certainty is frustrated. Finally, the true meaning of “polysemic” poems is known neither to the poet nor the audience, for it originates from the hidden corners of the poet’s inner soul. While this analytical division of poetry is beneficial insofar as it stresses the degree to which individual poems are open to interpretation, it also encourages reductionist readings to flourish. 17 Elaborating on why he makes use of poems in his zealous mystical narratives, ‘Ain al-Quzāt of Hamidān (1098–1131/492–525) writes: “Javānmardā! Deem these poems mirrors, for it must be known that a mirror has no face in itself but he who looks into it will see his own.” (Quoted in Taqī Pūrnāmdārīyān, Ramz va Dāstānhā-yi Ramzī [Symbol and Symbolic Stories in Persian Literature] (Tihrān: Shirkat-i Intishārāt-i Elmī va Farhangī, 1391/2012), 79.) To dub poems as social symbolic is to contaminate the poetic mirror in that they can no longer echo every reader. 18 For more on poetry as artistic vs. scientific expression, see Muhammad Rizā Shafī‘ī Kadkanī, Zabān-i Shi‘r dar Nasr-i Sūfīyyah [Language of Poetry in Sufi Prose] (Tihrān: Sukhan, 1392/2014), 24–42. According to Shafī‘ī Kadkanī, scientific statements refer to external realities, and always convey congruent messages, no matter the audience, and are thus subject to confirmation or denial. On the other hand, artistic expressions, such as poetry, impress various readers – and even the same reader on different occasions – with alternative connotations whose validity cannot be confirmed or denied. Poetry, as such, solicits the readers’ sympathy rather than their confirmation. 19 “Authorial intention” has been a focal point of twentieth-century critical theory, particularly “New Criticism” and “Deconstructionism.” See: William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,” Sewanee Review 5 (1946): 468–488. Revised and republished in The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: University of Kentucky, 1954), 3–18. 20 Shamīsā, Rāhnamā-yi Adabīyāt, 472. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Furūgh Farrukhzād, Tavaludī Dīgar: And Other Poems [Another Birth], trans. Hasan Javadi and Susan Sallée (Emeryville: Albany Press, 1981) 48. 24 See: Shamīsā, Rāhnamā-yi Adabīyāt, 301.

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25 See Akhavān-Sālis, Sidā-yi Hayrat-i Bīdār, 422. 26 Bihrūz Sāhib Ikhtiyārī and Hamīd Rizā Bāqirzādah, comp., Ahmad Shāmlū: Shā’ir-i Shabānah’ha va ‘Ashiqānah’ha [Ahmad Shāmlū: Poet of the Nightly and the Lovely] (Tihrān: Hīrmand, 2002), 401. 27 Rezā Barāhinī, Talā dar Mis: dar Shi‘r va Shā’irī [Gold in Copper: On Poems and Poetry] (Tihrān: Zamān, 1374/1968–69), 520. 28 Ibid., 511 and 521. Barāhinī is here referring to the following excerpt from Sipihrī’s poem “Musāfir” (Traveller): “And which land was it / where we sat on nothing / and washed our faces and hands in the warmth of an apple?” 29 Shams-al-Din Muhammad Hāfiz, Hāfiz-i Shīrāz bi-rivāyat-i Ahmad Shāmlū [Hāfiz of Shiraz Narrated by Ahmad Shāmlū] (Tihrān: Murvārīd, 1362/1983–84), 8–9 and 15. 30 Nāsir Muʹazzin, Dah Shab: Shabhā-yi Shāʹirān va Nivīsandigān Dar Anjuman-i Farhangī-yi Īrān va Ālmān [Ten Nights: The Nights of Poets and Authors in the Cultural Association of Iran and Germany] (Tihrān: Amīr kabīr, 1375/1978), 267. Translation by Alavi in Samad Josef Alavi, “The Poetics of Commitment in Modern Persian: A Case of Three Revolutionary Poets in Iran” (doctoral dissertation, Berkeley, 2013), 1–3. For more about Sa’īd Sultānpūr see the first chapter of this dissertation. 31 Hamīd Musaddiq, Du Manzūmah [Two Compendia] (Tihrān: Nashr-i Kānūn, 1377/1998), 3–4. 32 Quoted in Ahmad Abū Mahbūb, Dar Hāy u Hū-yi Bād: Zindagī va Shi‘r-i Hamīd Musaddiq [Among the Bustle of Wind] (Tihrān: Sālis, 1380/2001), 36. 33 Ibid., 38. 34 Muhammad Mukhtārī, “Hāfizah-i Tārīkhī-i Mazlūm” [Oppressed Historical Memory], in Tamrīn-i Mudārā: Bist Maqālah dar Bāz’khānī-yi Farhang va . . . [The Practice of Tolerance: Twenty Articles in Re-Reading of Culture etc.] (Tihrān: Vīstār, 1377/1998– 99), 266. 35 Ibid., 263. 36 Ibid., 265. 37 Rezā Barāhinī, Buhrān-i Rahbarī-yi Naqd-i Adabī va Risālah-yi Hāfiz [The Crisis of Leadership in Literary Criticism and the Treatise of Hāfiz] (Tihrān: Vīstār, 1375/1968– 69), 23. 38 Ibid., 26. 39 For an example that illustrates new Persian literature as a sharp break from the old, see Ehsan Yarshater, “The Development of Iranian Literatures,” in Persian Literature, ed. Ehasan Yarshater (Albany: Bibliotheca Persica, 1988), 31. A critique of this position is offered by Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak in “Payām’āvarān-i Inhidām: Adabīyāt bi Masābah-‘i Padīdah-ī Ijtimā’i Sīyāsī dar Īrān-i Imrūz” [Heralds of Destruction: Literature as a Sociopolitical Phenomenon in Today’s Iran] review of Prophets of Doom by M.R.Ghanoonparvar, Iran Nameh 4, no. 2 (Winter, 1986): 311–21. 40 Alī Muhammadī and Ni‘mat-Allāh Panāhī, “‘Anāsur-i Ijtimā‘i va Insānī dar Shi‘r-i Nīmā Yūshīj” [Social and Human Elements in the Poetry of Nīmā Yūshīj], Nāmah-‘i Pārsī, no. 48–49 (Spring and Summer, 1388/2009): 88. 41 Muhammad Mukhtārī, Insān dar Shi‘r-i Mu‘āsir, yā, Dark-i Huzūr-i Dīgarī: bā Tahlīl-i Shi‘r-i Nīmā, Shāmlū, Akhavān, Farrukhzād [The Human in Contemporary Poetry, or Understanding the Other’s Presence: With an Analysis of the Poetry of Nīmā, Shāmlū, Akhavān, and Farrukhzād] (Tihrān: Tūs, 1372/1993), 91. 42 Muhammadī and Panāhī, “‘Anāsur-i Ijtimā‘ī va Insānī dar Shi‘r-i Nīmā Yūshīj.” 43 Zarqānī, Chashm’andāz-i Shi‘r-i Mu‘āsir-i Farsī, 208. 44 Asghar Dādbih, “Jabr va Ikhtīyār: Didgāh-i Tārīkhī” [Predestination and Freewill: A Historical Perspective], Dāyirat al-Ma‘ārif-i Buzurg-i Islāmī, http://cgie.org.ir/fa/article/9048 (accessed September 2016). 45 Abu’l-Hasan al-Ash‘arī (873–935), founder of the Ash‘arite school, rejected the rationalism of the Mu‘tazilites after following them for forty years. In 913/300, he recited a

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treatise, preserved in “al-`Ināba ‘an `Usūl al-Dīyāna,” in which he rejects human will and freedom. For more on the Ash‘arites see: William Montgomery Watt, “al-Ashʿarī, Abu ’l-Ḥasan,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., ed. P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C.E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, W.P. Heinrichs. Consulted online on 5 October 2016 http:// dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_SIM_0780 Dādbih, “Jabr va Ikhtīyār.” The love/reason dichotomy appears in the initial phases of Persian literary history in the guise of the contradiction between faith (īmān) and reason. The poems of Sanā’ī of Ghaznah, written in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, are among the first examples that clearly thematise the opposition between reason in the form of Greek/Avicennean philosophy versus Islamic faith (Shafī‘ī Kadkanī, Zabān-i Shi‘r, 43–6). Jalāl al-Din Muhammad al-Balkhī (mashhūr bi Mawlavī), Kullīyāt-i Divan-i Shams, based on the ed. Badī‘ al-Zamān Furūzānfar (Tihrān: Intishārāt-i Nigāh va Nashr-i Naw, 1371/1992), 209. Jalāl al-Din Muhammad ibn Muhammd al-Balkhī al-Rūmī, Masnavī-i Ma‘navī, ed. and trans. A. Nicholson (Lahore: Sang-e Meel Publication, 2004), book 6, 1245. Muslih al-Din Sa‘dī, Kullīyāt-i Sa‘dī, ed. Muhammd Alī Furūghī (Tihrān: Hirmis, 1385/2006–7), 820. Jalāl al-din Muhammad al-Balkhī (mashhur bi Mawlavī), Divan-i Kāmil-i Shams-i Tabrīzī, intro. Badī‘ al-Zamān Furūzānfar (Tihrān: Sāzmān-i Intishārāt-i Jāvīdān, 1352/1980), 328. Here the poet plays with the names Khusraw and Shīrīn as historiomythical love couples. Shams al-Din Muhammad Hāfiz, Divan, ed. Muhammad Qazvīnī and Qāsim Ghanī (Tihrān: Vizārat-i Farhang va Irshād-i Islāmī, 1381/2002–3), 208. The mashrab is a place where water is distributed and is thus connected to the way water is apportioned. Qismat refers to division. When put together, masharb-i qismat can be defined as the division of everybody’s share. Lloyd Ridgeon, Sufi Castigator: Ahmad Kasravi and the Iranian Mystical Tradition (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 23. Ahmad Kasravī, Sūfīgarī [Sufism] (Tihrān: Farrukhī, 1342/1963), 8. Ahmad Kasravī, Hāfiz chah mī’gūyad? [What Does Hāfiz Say?], 2nd ed. (Tihrān: n.p., 1322/1943), 12. Kasravī, Sūfīgarī, 14–15. Ibid., 12. Ahmad Surūsh, introduction to Kulliyāt-i Ash‘ār-i Fārsī-yi Mawlānā Iqbāl Lāhūrī, by Iqbāl Lāhūrī (Tihrān: Kitābkhānah-i Sanā’i, 1343/1964–65), no p. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 55. Ferdawsī is generally believed to have been of the rationalistic Mu‘tazilite persuasion, but Ardistānī Rustamī challenges this dominant conception by providing examples from the Shāhnāmah in which the Ashʹarite inclination outweighs the rationalist position. See: Hamīd Rezā Ardistānī Rustamī, “Nigāh’i bih Andīshah’hā-yi Kalāmī-i Hakīm Firdawsī” (A View to the Theological Thoughts of Hakīm Firdoawsī), Zabān va Adabīyāt 6 (1385/2007): 75–98. Abu’al-Qāsim Firdawsī, Shāhnāmah, ed. Jalāl Khāliqī Mutlaq, intro. Ehsan Yarshater, vol. 2, (New York: Bibliotheca Persica, 1987), 171. Ibid. See Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (New York: Random House, 2003). This book promotes the supposed indolence of Iranian women, which is corroborated even by the book cover that depicts a cropped image of two women who have their heads lowered. The success of the book, which lasted on the New York Times bestseller list for 100 weeks, as well as its translation into 32 languages speaks to the popularity of drawing from literature to support the claim of the East’s “backwardness.”

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On the success of the book, see Mahnaz Kousha, Voices from Iran: The Changing Lives of Iranian Women (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2002), 227–8. See: Ardistānī Rustamī, “Nigāh’i bih Andīshah’hā-yi Kalāmī-i Hakīm Firdawsī,” 75–98; Sayyid Mahdī Zarqānī, “Rūy va Āyīnah: Pajūhish’ī darbārah-’i Lutf u Qahr-i Ilāhī Dar Andīshah-‘i Sanā’ī” (Face and Mirror: Research on Divine Wrath and Favour in Sanā’ī’s Thought), Kayhān-i Farhangī 155 (1378/1999–2000): 46–9; Sumayyah Bābāī, “Bar’rasī-i Qazā va Qadar dar Tārīkh-i Bayhaqī” [A Study of the Divine Decree and Predestination in the History of Bayhaqī], Zabān va Adabīyāt-i Fārsī [Arāk: Dānishgāh-i Āzād] 16 (1388/2009–10): 71–90. Mahdī Akhavān-Sālis, Guzīnah-’i Ash‘ār [Selection of Poems] (Tihrān: Murvārīd, 1371/1992–3), 110. Ibid., 111. Ibid., 112–13. Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, trans., An Anthology of Modern Persian Poetry (Boulder: Westview, 1978), 91. Ibid. Ibid. Akhavān-Sālis, Guzīnah-’i Ash‘ār, 82. Shamīsā, Rāhnamā-yi Adabīyāt, 496. Ibid., 88. Ahmad Shāmlū, Dar Āstānah [At the Threshold] (Tihrān: Nigāh, 1376/1997), 18–19. Karimi-Hakkak, An Anthology of Modern Persian Poetry, 57. Ibid., 58–9. Shāmlū, Dar Āstānah, 20. Ibid., 19–21. Shafiq Shamel discusses the way Afghan poems reflect of historical vision and epic memory in “Afghanistan and the Persian Epic Shahnama: Historical Agency and the Epic Imagination in Afghan and Afghan-American Literature,” in Afghanistan in Ink: Literature between Diaspora and Nation, ed. Nile Green and Nushin Arbabzadah (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 209–27. Wāsef Bākhtarī, Sufālīnah’ī Chand Bar Pīshkhān-i Bulūrīn-i Fardā [Potteries on the Crystal Counter of Tomorrow] (Kābul: Parnīyan, 1388/2010), 142. Ibid., 144. Ibid., 166. Wāsef Bākhtarī, Dībāchah’ī dar Farjām [A Prologue to the End of Time] (Peshawar: Kitāb-khānah-‘i Sabā, 1375/1997), 39–40. Such examples can be found in the works of prominent historians of Persian literature such as Jan Rypka, Ẕabīh-Allāh Safā, and Ehsan Yarshater, among others.

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Lāhūrī, Iqbāl. Kulliyāt-i Ash‘ār-i Fārsī-yi Mawlānā Iqbāl Lāhūrī. Tihrān: Kitābkhānah-i Sanā’i, 1964–5/1343. Langarūdī, Shams. Tārīkh-i Tahlīlī-i Shi‘r-i Naw: az Mashrūtīyyat tā Kūditā [An Analytical History of New Poetry: From the Constitutionalism to the Coup], vol.1 and 4. Tihrān: Markaz, 1991–2/1370. Malkum Khan, Mirza. Risālah’hā-yi Mīrzā Malkum Khān Nāzim al-Dulah [Treatises by Mirza Malkum Khan] compiled and introduction by Hujjat-Allāh Asīl. Tihrān: Nei, 2002/1381. Miskūb, Shāhrukh. Dāstān-i Adabīyāt va Sarguzasht-i Ijtimā‘ – sālhā-yi 1300–1315 [The Story of Literature and the Trajectory of Society: 1921–1936]. Tihrān: Farzān-i rūz, 2000/1378. Mu’azzin, Nāsir. Dah Shab: Shabhā-yi Shā‘irān va Nivīsandigān Dar Anjuman-i Farhangī-i Īrān va Ālmān [Ten Nights: The Nights of Poets and Authors in the Cultural Association of Iran and Germany]. Tihrān: Amīr kabīr, 1978/1375. Muhammadī, Alī and Ni‘mat-Allāh Panāhī. “‘Anāsur-i Ijtimā‘ī va Insānī dar Shi‘r-i Nīmā Yūshīj [Social and Humanistic Elements in the Poetry of Nīmā Yūshīj].” Nāmah-‘i Pārsī, no. 48–49 (Spring and Summer, 2009/1388): 87–113. Mukhtārī, Muhammad. “Hāfizah-i Tārīkhī-i Mazlūm [Oppressed Historical Memory].” In Tamrīn-i Mudārā: Bist Maqālah dar Bāz’khānī-i Farhang va . . . [The Practice of Tolerance: Twenty Articles in Re-Reading of Culture and etc.], 261–6. Tihrān: Vīstār, 1998–9/1377. Mukhtārī, Muhammad. Insān dar Shi‘r-i Mu‘āsir, yā, Dark-i Huzūr-i Dīgarī: bā Tahlīl-i Shi‘r-i Nīmā, Shāmlū, Akhavān, Farrukhzād [Human in Contemporary Poetry, or Understanding the Other’s Presence: With an Analysis of the Poetry of Nīmā, Shāmlū, Akhavān, and Farrukhzād]. Tihrān: Tūs, 1993/1372. Musaddiq, Hamīd. Du Manzūmah [Two Compendia]. Tihrān: Nashr-i Kānūn, 1998/1377. Pūrnāmdārīyān, Taqī. Ramz va Dāstānhā-yi Ramzī [Symbol and Symbolic Stories in Persian Literature]. Tihrān: Shirkat-i Intishārāt-i Elmī va Farhangī, 2012/1391. Sa‘dī, Muslih al-Din. Kullīyāt-i Sa‘dī. Edited by Muhammd Alī Furūghī. Tihrān: Hirmis, 2006–7/1385. Sāhib Ikhtiyārī, Bihrūz and Hamīd Rizā Bāqirzādah, comp. Ahmad Shāmlū: Shā‘ir-i Shabānah’ha va ‘Ashiqānah’ha [Ahmad Shāmlū: Poet of the Nightly and the Lovely]. Tihrān: Hīrmand, 2002–3/1381. Shafī’i Kadkanī, Muhammad Rizā. Zabān-i Shi‘r dar Nasr-i Sūfīyyah [Language of Poetry in Sufi Prose]. Tihrān: Sukhan, 2014/1392. Shamīsā, Sīrūs. Rāhnamā-yi Adabīyāt-i Mu‘āsir: Sharh va Tahlīl-i Guzīdah-‘i Shi‘r-i Naw-i Fārsī [A Guide to Contemporary Persian Literature: Analysis of a Selection of New Persian Poetry]. Tihrān: Nashr-i Mītrā, 2004/1383. Shāmlū, Ahmad. Dar Āstānah [At the Threshold]. Tihrān: Nigāh, 1997/1376. Tāhbāz, Sīrūs and Shar’agīm Yūshīj, eds. Nāmah’hā: az Majmū‘ah Āsār-i Nīmā Yūshīj [Letters: From Collected Works of Nīmā Yūshīj]. Tihrān: Daftar’hā-yi Zamānah, 1989–90/1368. Yūshīj, Nīmā. Majmū‘ah-’i Kāmil-i Ash‘ār-i Nīmā Yūshīj [Collection of Nima’s Poems], compiled by Sirūs Tāhbāz. Tihrān: Nigāh, 1992/1371. Zarqānī, Siyyid Mahdi. Chashm’andāz-i Shi‘r-i Mu‘āsir-i Fārsī [Perspective to Contemporary Persian Poetry]. Tihrān: Sālis, 2004–5/1383. Zarqānī, Sayyid Mahdī. “Rūy va Āyīnah: Pajūhish’i darbārah’-i Lutf u Qahr-i Ilāhī Dar Andīshah-’i Sanā’ī” [Face and Mirror: A Research on the Divine Wrath and Favour in Sanā’ī’s Thoughts]. Kayhān-i Farhangī, no. 155 (1999–2000/1378): 46–9.

A predestined break from the past 161 EL sources Alavi, Samad Josef. “The Poetics of Commitment in Modern Persian: A Case of Three Revolutionary Poets in Iran.” Doctoral diss., Berkeley, 2013. Farrukhzād, Furūgh. Tavaludī Dīgar: And Other Poems [Another Birth]. Translated by Hasan Javadi and Susan Sallée. Emeryville: Albany Press, 1981. Ghanoonparvar, Mohammad Reza. Prophets of Doom: Literature as a Socio-Political Phenomenon in Iran. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984. Karimi-Hakkak, Ahmad, trans. An Anthology of Modern Persian Poetry. Boulder: Westview, 1978. Karimi-Hakkak, Ahmad. Recasting Persian Poetry. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1995. Keshavarz, Fatemeh. Recite in the Name of the Red Rose. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006. Kousha, Mahnaz. Voices from Iran: The Changing Lives of Iranian Women. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2002. Loloi, Parvin. “Translation of European Poetry and Their Reception.” In A History of Persian Literature. Edited by Ehsan Yarshater, vol. 11: Literature of the Early Twentieth Century from the Constitutional Period to the Reza Shah, edited by Ali-Asghar SeyedGohrab. 311–51. New York: I.B. Tauris, 2015. Loraine, Michael.B. “Bahār, Moḥammad-Taqī.” Encyclopædia Iranica, II/8, 795–6. www. iranicaonline.org/articles/Bahār-mohammad-taqi (accessed 10 January 2017). Nafisi, Azar. Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. New York: Random House, 2003. Parvin, Nassereddin. “Tajaddod.” Encyclopædia Iranica, 2004. www.iranicaonline.org/ articles/tajaddod (accessed 10 January 2017). Ridgeon, Lloyd. Sufi Castigator: Ahmad Kasravi and the Iranian Mystical Tradition. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Saussure, Ferdinand de. Writings in General Linguistics. London and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Shamel, Shafiq. “Afghanistan and the Persian Epic Shahnama: Historical Agency and the Epic Imagination in Afghan and Afghan-American Literature.” In Afghanistan in Ink: Literature between Diaspora and Nation, edited by Nile Green and Nushin Arbabzadah, 209–27. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Talattof, Kamran. “Postrevolutionary Persian Literature: Creativity and Resistance.” Radical History Review, no. 105 (Fall, 2009): 145–50. Watt, William. Montgomery. “al-As̲ h̲ ʿarī, Abu ’l-Ḥasan.” Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., edited by P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C.E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, and W.P. Heinrichs. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_SIM_0780 (accessed 5 October 2016). Wimsatt, William K. and Monroe C. Beardsley. “The Intentional Fallacy.” In The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry. Lexington: University of Kentucky, 1954. Yarshater, Ehsan. “The Development of Iranian Literatures.” In Persian Literature, edited by Ehsan Yarshater, 3–37. Albany: Bibliotheca Persica, 1988.

Part 2

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Intimating Tehran The figure of the prostitute in Iranian popular literature, 1920s–1970s Jairan Gahan

Between the 1920s and the 1970s, the figure of the diseased prostitute as “disgusting” (munzajir kunanda), but “pitiful” (riqqat-barangīz), and spectacular (dīdanī) appeared prolifically in a wide range of Iranian literature,1 including serialized novels, avant-garde short stories, naturalistic novels, moral advice novels,2 and semi-ethnographic journalistic accounts of the red-light district of Tehran.3 This figure initially emerged at the core of what is broadly glossed as the genre of “social novel.” The literary display of prostitutes’ suffering constructed their bodies as vulnerable and in need of rescue; imagined the public readership as morally progressive and socially committed; while at the same time proved to be a popular and profitable spectacle that ensured the market success of “social novels.” In this article, through a close engagement with this broad literature, I explore the genealogies of modern popular literature and its early affective economy in Iran. In particular, I revisit early formations of the genre of “social novel,” tracing the literary construction and cultivation of emotions that constitute the bedrock of liberal humanitarianism and modern progressive aspirations in Iran. The interest of this study lies not in criticizing the taxonomies of modern literature, but rather in problematizing two grand assumptions about them. The first is that modern literature emerged as a primarily political instrument.4 The second is the assumption that the Iranian novel, thematically and formalistically, is a mere imitation of Western novels. The former subordinates literary form to ideology, while the latter suggests a certain sense of belatedness to the emergence of modernity both in Iran and in Iranian literature.5 Literary spectacles of suffering prostitutes first appeared in early forms of popular literature in serialized novels such as I too Have Cried (Man ham girya kardam, Jahāngīr Jalīlī 1923), and Dark Times (Rūzgār-i siyāh, ‘Abbās Khalīlī 1924). Not only did such novels facilitate a socio-moral campaign against prostitution, but they also proved to be popular and profitable in the publishing industry. Serialized novels and exposé accounts of prostitutes’ lives became so popular that many were later published as stand-alone volumes. Tuysarkānī, the editor of The Red Twilight (Shahfaq-i surkh) periodical, in his prefatory remarks to the famous novel I too Have Cried (Man ham girya kardam, 1933), claims: One reader, after appreciating [our efforts for publishing I too Have Cried], even suggested that we print many extra copies, using donations, for free distribution

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Jairan Gahan amongst people so that [the novel] finds its way to coffee houses [ghahva khāna], public circles, religious ceremonies [rawza khāwnī],6 and similar places so that it is accessible to all classes of people. May [this book] be a lash of a moral lesson for those who have deviated from the path of chastity.7

The idea that literature can “flog” its readership and discipline was entrenched in the tendency of novelists to associate literature closely with reality. The notion that reading literature is a practice that can lead to self-improvement and moral refinement emerged widely with the rise of social novels in the early 20th century. The rise of the social novel developed in the context of growing literacy rate, emergence of public libraries, typographic print, textual commodification, and commercialization of print.8 In a 1935 edition of the weekly publication Humāyūn, ’Alīakbar Hakamīzādah wrote an article about modern forms of entertainment including the novel. He argued that since “[human] nature is receptive to stories, stories affect the self [nafs] and conscience [vijdān].”9 Novelists emphasized that morally committed literature could align readers with some subjects and against other ones, that literature can in fact orient readers towards certain moral actions, while warding them off from obscene ones and creating collective moral groundings. Within this growing commercialized literature, a certain popular conception of morality emerged, which relied on the production of affective attachment of subjects to abject vulnerable bodies. The morally and socially responsible modern subject was imagined as one who is saddened and moved by the wretched life of the prostitute. This compassionate popular morality relied on the production of the spectacle of suffering bodies, which constructs a certain shared understanding of moral progress and social reform, tying people’s public lives to their private intimate worlds through a sense of shared feeling, i.e. compassion. In the present study, I explain the work that emotions do in the literary production of modern Iranian subjects. In doing so, I offer a non-Western genealogy of modern popular literature and investigate the role of emotions, as historically contingent and socially constructed, in the development and formation of modern Iranian literature.

Genealogy of popular moral literature Early popular literature in Iran, which is addressed as the “social novel,” (rumān-i ijtimā‘ī or dāstān-i ijtimā‘ī), emerged in the 1920s and became widely popular in the 1930s and 1940s. There are no formalistic features such as narrative style or literary tools and techniques that define this genre. To be sure, there is no formal coherency even in terms of the length of these literary pieces. Scholars of modern Iranian literature include a broad spectrum in this genre, which is comprised of short stories, novellas, and long novels. Examples of short stories include the two collections of Ali Dashtī, Sedition (Fitna, 1945) and Magic (Jādū, 1942). Examples of novellas include Javad Fāzil’s abundance of works such as the famous The Prostitute (Fāhisha, 1942) and The Innocent Lady (Bānū-yi bi gunāh, 1952). Earlier social novels include Mushfiq Kāzimī’s The Horrific Tehran (Tehran-i makhūf, 1925) and Muhammad Hijāzī’s famous trilogy Zībā (1931), Humā (1927), and

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Parīchihr (1921), and are each more than 300 pages long. The category of the “social novel” broadly incorporates popular fiction written in the first half of the 20th century. Although social novels were highly diverse in form, their authors were mostly journalists with similar backgrounds. As part of the emerging upper middle class in Iran, early novelists were predominantly journalists who also held government jobs and political positions, fighting on nationalist, Islamist, and other political fronts. Mushfiq Kāzimī, one of the early novelists of this genre, was appointed the First Secretary of the Iranian Embassy in Sweden. He was also on the editorial board of journals such as Irānshahr and The Francophone Press (Nāmah-yi farangistān).10 Similarly, Ali Dashtī, known for his novels Sedition and Magic, was a political activist and a senator.11 In his youth, he received religious training in Najaf, but later he became critical of Islam.12 He also co-published the controversial journal The Red Twilight. In this journal, he printed popular serialized stories including Prison Days (Ayyām-i mahbas), which were his own memoirs of his time in prison as a political activist. Muhammad Hijāzī, known for his social trilogy, all three of which evolve around their eponymous heroines, held different political positions including appointed and elected senator of Tehran in the second Pahlavi period (1941–1979).13 Since he had studied telegraph engineering in Europe, he was appointed as the director of the Ministry of Post and Telegraph. This was while he was also the director of Iran Today (Iran-i imrūz) journal, 1939–1942.14 Not surprisingly, these novelists with backgrounds in religious training, journalism, and politics positioned themselves as religious authorities, technocrats, doctors, and social scientists at the forefront of “socio-moral reform” (islāhāt-i akhlāqi va ijtimā‘ī), a cultural and political movement that was central to notions of progress in the collective imagination of Iranians in the first half of the 20th century.15 In the prelude to Ali Dashtī’s famous novella Sedition, he claims that novelists are in fact “doctors.” He further asserts that his novel is a “moral piece” (nivishta-yi akhlāqī) since it reveals the harsh consequences of “moral deviancies.”16 In prefatory remarks to another collection, Magic (1952), Dashtī quotes Ibrāhīm Sahbā’s appraisal poem, in which he recognizes Dashtī as a social physician: “You [Ali Dashtī] are the doctor of social ailments, you should be writing prescriptions.”17 Authors received applause for writing novels committed to socio-moral reform. In praise of the novel Nighttime Play (Tafrihāt-i shab, 1934), Jāmālzāda observed “clear signs of strict nationalism, which prove the author’s consistent love for Iran’s land and salvation and happiness of all its people.”18 There are numerous similar cases where socio-moral commitment is mentioned in meta-passages that are placed outside the progression of the plot. In The Prostitute (Fāhisha, Fāzil 1953), the narrator of the story expresses his concern about social problems: Alas! How great would it be if only in Iran, instead of ministries that encourage idlers and sloth, there was a small organization for socio-moral well-being [of people] to purify the dirty water [of the society] from its source, instead of so much poisonous political propaganda?19

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The most significant common element in popular novels that has led to their prepackaging as “social novels” is this progressivist attitude that is intertwined with socio-moral commitment to the future of Iran.20 Scholars of modern Iranian literature map these moralist sentiments onto political events of the time. Consequently, they interpret the emergence of popular serialized fiction as a result of the aftermath of the Constitutional Revolution (1905–1911).21 The centrality of the image of the prostitute is interpreted as a literary articulation of the mass disappointment that followed the outcome of the Constitutional movement. This line of reasoning imposes the political temporality of modern Iran onto the temporality of modern Iranian literature, as it draws a direct correlation between the constitutional revolution and the emergence of new forms of literature. Furthermore, it leads to the reduction of literary forms and concepts to ideological expressions ignoring the historical contingency of moral sensibilities of the time, which were simultaneously both formed and informed by modern popular literature. Another overlooked aspect in the historiography of modern Iranian literature is the role of entertainment and profitability.22 Genealogically, the idea of the “social novel” refers to popular serialized novels of periodicals in the 1920s. In the backdrop of growing literacy rate, diversification of readership, and the passing of WWI hype, the contents of periodicals and newspapers diversified from being mostly political news to incorporating social issues and entertaining columns including serialized stories with historical or social themes.23 The early novels of this genre, such as The Horrific Tehran and Zībā, were first printed as serialized stories. The former was printed in The Star of Iran (Sitāra-yi Iran), a periodical first published in 1914, while the latter was printed in The Red Twilight, a journal first published in 1921. Hussein-Qulī Musta‘ān (1904–1983), Javad Fāzil (1914– 1961), and Ali Dashtī (1895–1981) were among the prolific authors of these serialized social-stories. While powerful and established writers such as Sādiq Hidāyāt (1903–1951) were having a difficult time surviving the market, serialized stories were being reprinted on relatively large scales.24 They provided the opportunity for publishers to test the popularity of novels before printing them independently. In his prefatory comments to Prison Days (Ayyām-i mahbas, 1922), Ali Dashtī notes that his decision to publish the serialized story as a separate novel was due to the strong reception from his fans and requests of his intellectual interlocutors (rufaqā-yi fāzil) in Tehran. Similarly, the prefatory comments to the novel Dark Times (Ruzgār-i siyāh, 1925) claim that fan letters to the newspaper Action (Iqdām), which first published the novel as a serialized story, are a testament to the immense “impact of this book on people’s morale (rūhīyāt).” The comments further claim that the book had sold a thousand copies in a week.25 As two facets of social novels, profitability and moral reform developed hand in hand and relied on one another. Authors practiced their socio-moral commitment by exposing what was understood as the social illness “bimārī-yi ijtimā‘ī,” while advocating for socio-moral reform (islāh-i akhlāqī ijtimā‘ī). Jahāngīr Jalīlī, in a metanarrative in his famous social novel I too Have Cried, writes: “If writers cannot

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inure human nature to moral temperaments, it is better that they abstain from narrating evil matters and quit teaching the society for good.”26 The popular social novel, committed both to reformist values and market success, was a part of the larger growing print culture, which was the bedrock of the emerging public sphere.27 The figure of the fallen woman was central to both the moral campaign of the emerging elite and the market success of serialized novels. The will to reform and rescue the figure of the fallen woman was instrumental in the articulation of moral commitment of the authors. At the same time, it attracted a wide audience as it exposed a mode of urban life that was novel and emerging. The fallen woman was not merely invented as a literary instrument to serve political ends. Rather, the genre of the “social novel” is popular commercialized fiction ordained by strong moral sentiments. This figure is a literary expression of these sentiments, which were at once contingent upon newly emergent urban sensibilities and everyday experiences in the rapidly growing Tehran of the early 20th century. It was such lived experiences that in turn shaped dominant moral sensibilities of the time.

Sexual geography in popular literature Popular serialized novels that evolved around the theme of prostitution emerged contemporaneously with major transformations of urban life in Tehran in the 1900s. These transformations prompted the emergence of novel urban sensory experiences and modes of sociability. Newly constructed streets such as Bāb-Humāyūn, ChirāqGāz, Lālazār, and Marīzkhāna became increasingly multifunctional sites for entertainment, business transaction, and other urban services.28 The development of relatively swift modes of inner city transportation including horse and steam tramways and cars allowed for the flow of people across different neighborhoods in the city. Together, these urban changes with rapid population growth boosted the surfacing of non-familiar and non-filial sites of sociability such as cafés, hotels, and bars. Simultaneously, sex-work, gambling, and alcohol and opium consumption became visible urban vices in growing public venues such as cafes (qahva khāna), opium bars (shirakish khāna), gambling houses (qumār khāna), and brothels (qahba khāna). Accordingly, serialized novels depicted forms of male dominant public entertainment, framing them as “social ills” of urban life.29 Novels including Making Ends Meet (Dar talāsh-i ma‘āsh, 1923), Humans, the High Creatures (Ashraf-i makhlūqāt, 1924), Mas‘ūd’s Nighttime Play (Tafrīhāt-i shab, 1932), and the popular I too Have Cried (Man ham girya kardam, 1933) provide vivid, thick descriptions of Tehran of the time, exposing sub-cultures of sex-work and other urban vices. In Nighttime Play, Masūd takes the reader to a nightclub in a cheap hotel (mihmān khāna): The lounge is packed with people. Thick smoke, mixed with customers’ breath, has created a really miasmic and dirty atmosphere. The tumult and live music together make for annoying plangency. One hears recurrent shouts of salute and clicking sounds of wine glasses, which are being filled up and emptied constantly. A few people are dancing on the small stage. A monkey

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Jairan Gahan face and stork legged woman is displaying her latest dance moves with her ridiculous prancing. Customers exchange indecent words and improper jokes. Bartenders take empty bottles away and replace them with new ones stealthily.30

Social urban novels offer a thorough picture of bars through dense descriptions of costumers, bartenders, and the overall ambiance.31 They portray heterosocial sites of entertainment as “the drainage of social excrement.”32 Spaces of urban vice were understood as drainpipes of urban excess framed as filth. The Horrifying Tehran, known as the first novel with Tehran as its central theme, travels between neighborhoods and places with different characters, describing in detail the Tehran of the 1890s. The novel opens with a thick description of Tehran’s class division: Although Tehran is a large city, carriages and wagons (durushka va vāgun) only travel in northern parts. The southern part of Tehran, where the poor reside, has extremely narrow and meandrous allies, and quarters. In this southern part of the city, there is a neighborhood called Chāla-Maydān.33 Opening the novel in a “disgusting” (mushma‘iz kunanda) coffee house in ChālaMaydān, a poor neighborhood, the novel navigates the reader from one scene to another: from a private mansion in a posh northern neighborhood, to an opium bar on Manūchihrī Street, to a brothel in Pich Shimrān, which is referred to as the ill neighborhood (mahalla-yi marīz). Miasma, fog, smoke, dim light, and dirt set the ambiance of these urban places of misconduct: The day our story starts, a group of people were sitting in a coffee house [in this neighborhood] chatting. Due to the wind gust, the doors were closed. The smoke of opium pipes and the steam of samovars had taken over the place. It was completely dark. [ . . . ] One could see the wind levitating an abundance of dust in the alley. The dust and the gusting wind express the morally chaotic Tehran. Deviant excessive sexuality is established through journeys between these “ill sites.” In the brothel, the reader becomes acquainted with the life stories of prostitutes. Using a first-person narrative, each character maps her journey from the domestic sphere in her earlier life, to the public house (khāna-yi ‘umūmī) where she now resides. Significantly, two common terms to address prostitutes were zan-i har ja‘ī and zan-i ‘umūmī. The former literally translates as “a woman of any place” and the latter as “public woman.” These terms reflect and reinforce the private-public division, with the latter as fundamentally masculine, phallocentric, heteronormative, and rational, and the former as feminine, passionate, and excessive.34 The uncontainable female body that could be anywhere embodies the excessive, chaotic, and rapidly changing city. The sense of morality – or the lack thereof – in urban popular literature was profoundly entangled with urbanity, femininity, suffering, and vulnerability. Early popular urban novels are imbued with tales that are often premised on the idea of

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moral confusion, loss of faith, and the failure of the reformist will in the city, all of which are articulated through the failure of the life of a fallen woman. In the novel The Prostitute, Tehran’s moral demise is directly defined in terms of the growing number of brothels: “Our city is filled with brothels from head to toe. [ . . . ] These private brothels (najīb-khāna) are agitating the modest people of this city. They are eradicating modesty, chastity, and morality from Tehran’s landscape.”35 The female character slips off the straight path in the city, ends up in a brothel, and subsequently dies of diseases. Ziba, the eponymous novel by the prolific social novelist Hijazī, captures the enmeshment of femininity, urbanity, and morality. The plot follows a young seminary student, the devout Shaikh Hussein, who moves from Mazīnān, a small town in Khurāsān, to Tehran, where a female prostitute seduces him. As the Shaikh falls head over heels for the prostitute, he abandons his innocent beloved, Zainab, back in the village. He even leaves seminary school to start working at a corrupt bureaucratic job – which the prostitute finds for him – and becomes immersed in Tehran, where he loses all of his faith and spirituality. Through the Shaikh’s encounter with the prostitute, an urban/ rural split is mapped onto broad dichotomies including material/spiritual, feminine/masculine, and bodily/transcendent. While Tehran’s world is materialist (dunyā-yi māddī), the village is the site of spirituality (ma‘navī).36 The idea that Tehran lacks morality created the urgency and need for a moral fight which in turn prompted the emergence of literary writers as moral crusaders. Social novels depicted urban space as excessive, maddening, chaotic, and immoral against the still, steady, spiritual village.37 In the words of the Shaikh: The massiveness of the city belittled me such that I lost stream of thought for a couple of days. [ . . . ] Everything looked gigantic to my eyes. The width and length of streets, and the Bazar, the plentitude of the mosques, the height of walls, all made me speechless. [ . . . ] After all, my point of reference was Mazīnān [protagonist’s hometown] and Sabzivār [where the protagonist was sent to receive Islamic teaching]. And I wrongfully assumed that the level of knowledge and piety in this city would accordingly, be as high [compared to those].38 The sense of loss of morality and faith in both God and humanity in Tehran gives rise to theological accounts of salvation (rastigārī) through the repentance (tawba) of the prostitute and her return to the domestic sphere. Early modern popular literature was not strictly ideological at the time. Rather, its form and plot embodied moral sentiments that were rooted in urban social and sensory experiences articulated in terms of displaced excessive femininity.

Literary humanitarianism and the contagion of emotions Beginning in the mid-1920s in popular fiction, a sub-category emerged which revolved strictly around the lives of diseased prostitutes, many of whom died toward the end of the plot. This literature described the prostitute’s body as

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infected, pitiful (tarrahum barangīz), and disgusting (munzajir kunanda), but still spectacular (didanī), as it gestured towards cultivating a compassionate commitment to the social and moral future of Iran. One of the earliest novels of this kind is Khalīlī’s semi-biographical account of his exile time entitled Dark Times (Rūzgār-i siyāh, 1925). This popular serialized novel is a fiction-memoir based on the life of a prostitute whom the author/narrator meets in Kermanshah.39 The author meets the character on her deathbed, as she is suffering from advanced syphilis and tuberculosis. The story is partly told from the viewpoint of Khalīlī as the narrator and partly from the viewpoint of the prostitute, whom we learn has fled Tehran to her hometown in Kermanshah, from the brothel she was kept in (against her will) to a shabby shack. Khalīlī describes his first encounter with her as follows: When we [Khalīlī and a friend] went to her bed, we saw a golden face, and a pair of lovely marble teary eyes. Once the patient saw me, tears burst out of the marble of her eyes, and tumbled down her cheek, leaving a trace on her yellow visage. Sorrow was stuck in the throat of that tubercular woman [ . . . ] I saw red blood on that infected pillow [ . . . ] I saw it with my own eyes. I heard the heart-burning cry of her wretched body on the floor. Thou the readers, show some pity (riqqat), kindness (ra‘fat), and generosity (rahmat) towards the miserable.40 As Khalīlī tries to find a good physician for her, her ailments worsen and she dies eventually. In the preface to the second edition, Khalīlī claims that people were moved by reading his novel/memoir, “as a result of the impact of the book, a wrongdoing woman (zan-i siyāh kār) repented and was freed.” He further promised to make the third edition freely available to the public. The validity of his claims is of little importance. What is significant is the way in which he situates his popular novel in the market, not simply as an entertainment product, but also as a piece that is emotionally impactful and can transform the readers themselves. The figure of the diseased female body, Mir‘ābidīnī argues, is rooted in the “influence of French romantic novelists such as Alexander Duma and Victor Hugo.”41 However, the diseased female character with tuberculosis shape-shifts into the female prostitute with not only tuberculosis but also venereal disease, as this stock character travels to Iranian popular literature.42 The emergence of this particular diseased female body cannot be explained simply in terms of Western “influence.” Rather, it should be understood as circulation of a concept. This character further needs to be situated in the historical and social particularities of Iran in the 1920s, when venereal diseases moved to the forefront of sanitary reforms as an epidemic that endangered mothers, children, and the nation.43 Women were understood as the primary carriers of venereal diseases.44 However, physicians differentiated the female body from the body of the prostitute with the latter being a more potent site of venereal disease infection since they rendered the body of the prostitute as innately prone to catching and transmitting microbes of venereal diseases. Dr. Dūbshān, the physician of the Government’s Hospital

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(marīzkhāna-yi dawlatī ), published a book on syphilis in 1920 in which he asserted: “Prostitution is the main cause of syphilis.” He keenly observed: “Ten years ago in the streets of Tehran, one would rarely encounter a prostitute. Today however, prostitutes are in major passageways. Which one of us has never crossed path with a prostitute?” He went on warning about contagious diseases of prostitutes: “All prostitutes contract gonorrhea within the first three months from when they start working [as a prostitute]. Within the first year they contract syphilis.”45 Tūmāniyāns, a prolific writer and a physician, who authored manuscripts on public health, suggested that prostitutes were mostly infertile due to the “plentitude of the microbe of gonorrhea in their ovaries.”46 He explained that since prostitutes were sterile due to chronic gonorrhea, they rarely became pregnant. The body of the prostitute, as the primary transmitter of venereal diseases, was put at the center of two contradictory forces. Her body was understood as immoral, un-Islamic, and polluted and simultaneously as the most vulnerable to diseases. In addition, as prostitutes were known to historically cater to military camps, the public press began to see them as instrumental to foreign assault.47 Prostitutes were put at the spotlight of reformist, moral, and religious literature as the most vulnerable penetrable bodies without boundaries, both in danger and dangerous. They simultaneously evoked contradictory feelings of compassion and fear, empathy, and resentment. An attitude emerged from this literature that expressed a commitment to the social, political, and moral future of Iran, while being tied to miserable stories of prostitutes. In other words, the popular moral literary campaign to save/ cure the prostitute relied on conceptualizing the prostitutes as ill, and therefore vulnerable. One of the earliest novels that exclusively revolves around the life of a prostitutes is I too Have Cried. The plot follows the lives of two childhood friends who have deviated “off the straight path” (as rāh-i rāst bi dar shuda and ) and fallen into the trap (tala) of prostitution. In the resolution of the plot, the friend who is suffering from both syphilis and tuberculosis dies. This event causes the other friend to have an epiphany, quit her job, and return to her childhood home. The novel is distinct from other social novels in its unique narrative technique with the story as a first-person narration entirely told from the point of view of the prostitutes with a confessional tone. The novel exposes the protagonist’s daily struggles as a prostitute (however fictional and hardly believable) as she handles, finds, and serves customers. Distinct scenes in cafes, bars, and streets offer an account of modes of sociability, ways of moving, as well as the ambiance, soundscape, and even scentscape of public venues in the Tehran of the time. The reader becomes acquainted with minute details about social dynamics in cafes, conversations people have in bars, the way public transportation with an “automobile” works, and men and women’s attire in public places: Despite the honking of cars and carriages, and people’s hustle and bustle, one can still hear the striking clock of the municipality that sounds 5 o’clock. Harjā‘ī women [prostitutes] are wandering here and there. Chauffer assistants hang together, talking nonsense, shouting and throwing indecent words at one

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As the main character hears that her friend is on her deathbed, she tries to catch a cab in one of Tehran’s busy squares to rush to her: My poor Parvin [the childhood friend] is ill. What should I do? No one takes me seriously. I need to lure the unfair chauffeur to get some discount on the cab fare for the suburbs.49 This point of view allows for the reader to see the moral demise of Tehran from the eyes of the main character and simultaneously displays the nitty-gritty life of the prostitute. As the main character articulates the destitution that she faces both as a prostitute and a sinner, she allows the audience to feel close to her and identify with her. At the same time, with a confessional tone she apologizes on behalf of prostitutes, fabricating a sense of urgency and a need for change. Thou who have cried yourselves to sleep every night; thou, the wretched and dark-fated who have been deceived, like me, and are crying in regret; thou, who know the meaning of burning from inside; I am addressing you; I too have cried!50 This apologetic, confessional tone becomes dominant in the literature on prostitutes. But in order to be moved by prostitutes’ confession, one had to be able to feel “with” and feel “for” her.51 In fact, literature on prostitution relied on the possibility of transference of emotions and incitement of “feeling with” and “feeling for” characters through narrative techniques, some of which were discussed above. First-person narration, the intimate relation of the narrator to characters, the vivid use of setting and ambiance such as miasmic air, and political and moral metanarrative commentaries, are shared techniques in literature on prostitution as well as in popular literature.52 Significantly in this literature, the notion that vulnerable bodies are swift transmitters due to their loose boundaries and potential for contagion, made the body of the prostitute effective for the transference of humane and ethical emotions such as sympathy (dilsūzī), kindness (shafaqat), and pity (tarahhum). Many Shahrinaw accounts clearly state that the purpose of exposing the lives of prostitutes is to induce the compassion of the readers and ultimately to move them. On the first page of I Was Not Always a Prostitute (Man Fāhisha Nabūdam), Firaydūn Mirzā-Nādirī attempts to incite compassion: “In the corners of the human heart, there is no space for mercy [muruwwat] and pity [rahm]. Rather, kindness [mihrabānī] and sympathy [dilsūzī] should be manufactured [tawlīd shawad] forcefully and boldly.”53 In I too Have Cried, the narrator, who is a prostitute, states: “Narrating the story of my fall shall be a red light warning at the abysmal

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and dangerous well [of prostitution].”54 Mehdi Mashāyikhī, in the prelude of An Evening in the Disreputable Neighborhood (Qurūbī dar mahalla-yi badnām, 1975), warns young girls from “traps” of corrupt life and “hopes” that his novel would “shake” them a little.55 Literature tapped into readers’ emotions. It incited affective response to scenes of suffering, while at the same time aiming to cultivate them. As much as it was believed that bad literature could move the reader in all the wrong ways, it was accepted that good literature could align the reader in all the right ways. This “moving” of the reader relied on the production of the affective attachments of the public to the vulnerable body of prostitute. This distribution of feelings facilitated the final judgment call of the readers and subsequently leads them to embrace the novel’s call to moral action. In this “affective economy,” the figure of the oppressed (mazlūm), slipped from Shi‘a discourses on justice, into the figure of prostitute.56 In Dark Times, the character confesses her first relation with a man to her friend. She explains: “I am a weak human, a oppressed human, a defeated human.”57 The friend who heard the confession describes her own reaction: “I was shivering from hearing this story, I told myself I should learn from it or otherwise it will happen to me too.” Later, she too slips many times ending up in a brothel in Tehran. It should be noted that the feelings which tie the readership to the figure of the prostitute are fundamentally and thoroughly based on the ways in which male, reformist, middle-class authors felt “about” prostitutes. There is no unmediated access to the prostitute’s impression or expression of her feelings. All that is left of her feelings is the imagination of the authors and how they felt “about” prostitutes. For instance, in I Was Not Always a Prostitute, the narrator describes the prostitute’s smile as she is approaching him: “As her smile grew wider, her sorrow increased! This redundant smile, this new face, saddened me more than it pleased me! Everyone has seen such smiles! [ . . . ] This is the same artificial smile. The fakeness of it is as clear as sunlight.” Here, the feeling of sadness is transmitted to the narrator through the prostitute’s smile, which the narrator surprisingly reads as an expression of sadness as opposed to happiness. The narrator’s sadness “for” and “with” the prostitute is preceded by his feeling “about” the prostitute. Consequently, the transmission of emotions from prostitute characters to the audience is limited to and defined by the author’s preconditioned feelings “about” prostitutes. In A Night at the Disreputable District (Qurūbī dar mahalla-yi badnām), the narrator comments on prostitutes’ feelings: “In their silence there were thousands of cries, in their looks there were longing and begging. They wanted to talk, they wanted to cry and tell women and girls on the other side of city that we were deceived.”58 The moral, medical, and social pre-orientation of authors then limits the possibility of empathy with the prostitute. Compassionate narratives of the vulnerability of prostitutes are in fact rooted in prior affective responses of the authors toward prostitutes. The two main emotions that were evoked in these literary texts were disgust and compassion. Although the notion of prostitution is tied to sexual desire, there is little or no mention of pleasure, even in the excessive form of lust, in most of these literary accounts. Rather, they are imbued with explicit sceneries of bodies that are

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infected with venereal diseases. In A Night at the Disreputable District the narrator-author reports his visits to brothels and encounters with prostitutes. He describes one of the floors of a brothel as follows: “There were two rooms, each with two beds, with filthy stench mattresses . . . the room smelled of hate, and repulsion. [It was so bad] that it immediately killed any appetite for life.”59 The next section of the book focuses on the lives of prostitutes and is called “life in filth.” In I Was Not Always a Prostitute, the narrator laments the “misfortunate” (badbakht) life of the prostitute: “Wow, how heartless humans are! They all see these horrifying views, these sad faces, and hear the heartbreaking cries of orphans and miserable ones, and the disasters of capitalism [ . . . ] and still they are not even a little affected ‘muti‘assir.’”60 Muti‘assir, in its Arabic root means “to be impacted,” or “affected.” However, it is also defined as “sorrowful” (andūhgīn). To be affected in a sad way by the filthiness of prostitutes and their life condition works to differentiate people who care, from those who do not; it divides the public as those who are “heartless” and those who are compassionate.61 Come with Me to Shahrinaw (Bā man bi Shahrinaw Biyāyīd) stands out in this literature as Hidāyatullah Hakīmilāhī, the author, explicitly campaigned for helping women and children in the red-light district of Tehran.62 He went to the field, took pictures and even mobilized a few philanthropists to sponsor some of the children there.63 The author opens the first volume of his two-volume book Come with Me to Shahrinaw with vivid descriptions of customers and prostitutes and their displayed skin diseases in the district: a woman with chancre, whose body tissue is damaged and has a strong stench; a man facing the wall trying to put a bandage on the syphilis wounds of his sexual organ; he is described throwing bloody cottons into the running ditch on the side of the street, “infecting public water”; and young children who have syphilis wounds on their mouths due to unsafe oral sex.64 In one section, the author visits a very poor brothel in the district. The pimp takes him into a room where they wait for the prostitute to arrive. As she walks in, the author describes her: Without looking at us, or giving me a price, which was the norm in Shahrinaw, in such a flagrant scene, she lied down naked on the carpet. She threw away her underpants with her feeble, skinny, dark arms!! [ . . . ] eyes closed, the woman is lying on her back. There are numerous brown spots and old deep wounds on her thighs and special thing [her genitals]. Her sexual organ is so ugly that it affects any sane person. The left side of it is completely gone. It is not clear which disease has eaten it up!!65 Hakīmilāhī, inviting the reader to be affected by this scene, describes the prostitute’s skin condition in further detail. The concept of disgust has mostly been theorized in relation to desire in psychoanalytic thought.66 However, its spectacle has a social effect: disgust as a spectacle plays a role in organizing an intimate public as being progressive moral actors. While the prophylactic feeling of disgust maintains the gap between the disgusted and the disgusting, reinforcing the boundaries between the ulterior self

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and the inferior “contaminating” other, at the same time it defines a certain set of actions and emotions for the readership.67 If emotions are “social technologies,” then disgust in these literary-journalistic texts socializes the liberal readership not to interact with disgusting objects, but to watch, learn a lesson, feel pity, and do good, all at the same time. For Hakīmilāhī, disgust as the antithesis of ignorance is a humane feeling when coupled with pity. He sees prostitutes as “mad,” “cursed,” “infected,” but also “pitiful” (riqqat-anīz, tarahhum-barangīz, mazlūm). The vulnerability of the figure of the prostitute gets reaffirmed as characters are exposed: not only are their bodies exposed in explicit descriptions, but so too are their private, intimate feelings. This exposure is made possible through intimate relationships that authors claim they establish with characters, and the use of firstperson narration. The intimate and affective moral crusade evoked in Hakīmilāhī’s works and other literary and journalistic accounts of prostitutes, is not merely premised on prophylactic reasoning and the survival impulse of disgust, or on medical science on venereal disease.68 Rather, it relies on the creation of a shared spectacle of suffering which can only be achieved through the production of affective attachments to the abject and vulnerable female body of the prostitute. The bedrock of the early 20th-century literary humanitarian public was this particularly liberal sensibility that keeps the boundaries between the self and the other, while it aspires to “rescue” the disgusting other.

Affect in modern Iranian literature The figure of the ill prostitute is a part of the legacy of modern Iranian literature and it continued to have a central place in later Iranian modern literary forms. In his famous short story, “At the Red Light” (zir-i chirāgh-i ghirmiz), Sādiq Chūbak pictures a snapshot of the lives of women in a brothel in the red-light district of Tehran. The story revolves around the death of a prostitute from a syphilis-induced epileptic seizure. The descriptions are once again vivid and disgusting.69 Similarly, Hūshang Gūlshīrī in “Behind the Cane Stalk” describes the prostitute character: “Her mouth is weird. Her mouth is deformed. [ . . . ] She is all stained, all her body. There is not one healthy part in her body. Believe me.” Almost without exception, literary authors in the 20th century cultivated and distributed compassionate sensibilities that were haunted by a sense of disgust toward the vulnerable female body. Disgust, together with a sense of sadness, creates a shared compassionate social orientation for readers who share the same sense of morality. The literary moral campaign with the feeble, ill prostitute at its center was not simply directed towards “rescuing” (nijāt) prostitutes. Rather, the moral campaign at once called the readership to be active witnesses to the suffering of the weak (i.e. the prostitute), feel responsible, and ultimately do something about it by taking moral action. Disgust as an affect translates into compassion as a feeling, which is the bedrock of reformist politics and transcends political difference, at the ideological level. The production of this intimate attachment is at the core of modern Iranian literature. It reflects a modern Iranian ethos in which humanitarian compassion is the primary constituent of moral action.

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Modern Iranian literature, both popular and avant-garde, at once reflected and produced an affective economy, which relied on vivid expositions of diseased women, and the compassionate attachment of the public readership to vulnerable, repulsive female bodies. This compassionate impulse goes beyond the ideologies of the authors. Writers in different political fronts converged in using techniques that facilitated the production of an imagined intimate public. In doing so, they conveyed their sensory and everyday social experiences of the modern cityscape. The advent of modern popular literature was enmeshed with reformist aspirations that were realized and produced with the narrativization of suffering, imagining intimate spheres, and producing spectacles of vulnerability. The figure of the ill prostitute facilitated the formation of this intimate literary public, with progressivist sensibilities and moral aspirations, and a sense of temporality committed to the future of Iran. The construction of sensibilities is understudied both in the historiography of modern Iran and in modern Iranian literature. However, they constitute the bedrock of modern literary formations, as well as modern moral subjectivities. Furthermore, literary affect and emotion cannot be reduced to ideas and ideologies, nor can they be understood as imitations of Western sensibilities. Rather, they are historically contingent on everyday experiences, modes of sociability, and ways of moving and seeing. The investigation of sensibilities and their connection to literary form can open up new avenues for understanding the development of Iranian modern literary forms and their interconnectedness to the everyday experiences of modernity in Iran.

Notes 1 Throughout this article, I mostly refrain from using the term sex-work. The two terms, sex-work and prostitution, can be used interchangeably as both are defined broadly at the nexus of sex and money. Feminist activists introduced the term sex-work around the 1970s to emphasize the labor aspect of the profession and further legitimize and destigmatize it. For a more detailed analysis of the genealogy of both words in English see Melissa Hope Ditmore, Encyclopedia of Prostitution and Sex Work, vol. 1 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006). The term prostitution, however, is still used, in particular in historiographical works. For the purposes of historical contingency and discursive accuracy, the term prostitution will remain the main term of reference, as I explore the literary construction of a particular figure, referred to as “fāhisha” which I have translated into prostitute, in a specific body of literature. 2 For a serialized novel see The Lover (Khātirkhāh, Arvanaqī 1972). For avant-garde short stories see Hūshang Gūlshīrī’s “Behind the Cane Stalks,” (Pusht-i sāqihā-yi tajīr) Hūshang Gulshīrī, Nīma-yi tārīk-i māh (Tehran: Nilūfar, 1380). For naturalist novels, see Tūtī (ZakariyyāHāshimī 1969). This novel is experimental because of its real-time mode of narrative. The story is told from the third-person point of view and follows a strict real-time linear plot, in which there are no cuts, or time jumps. For moral advice novels, see Why did I End Up in the Brothel? (Chirā bi fāhisha-khāna raftam, Syed M.M 1974), and The Resident of the District of Sorrow (Sākin-i mahalla-yi qam 1963). 3 For semi-ethnographic accounts of the red-light district of Tehran see Come with Me to Shahrinaw (Bā man bi Shahrinaw biyāyīd, Hidāyatullāh Hakīmilāhī 1945). The official red-light district of Tehran, called Shahrinaw, was formed around 1922 and shut down in 1981, when the consolidating Islamic Republic shut down its gates.

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4 Kamran Talattof in The Politics of Writing in Iran: A History of Modern Persian Literature categorizes the critical and progressive attitude of early popular novels under a singular “Persianist” ideology. He argues that “this ideology inspired authors to write in a new style with the hope of modernizing literature.” Accordingly, he recounts the reason behind the emergence of modern literature to be the “Persianist” ideology. He argues “ideology leads literary representation.” He further asserts that different ideologies, including, Marxism, Islamic fundamentalism, and nationalism develop their own specific metaphors, which in turn inform literary movements and forms. 5 For instance, Ghanoonparvar and ‘Ābidinī both consider Jamālzāda to be the first Iranian author to develop novels that were modern and “mature” in their literary forms and techniques. Although Ghanoonparvar briefly acknowledges early social novels, he maintains the idea that Jamālzāda is the main figure who initiated “literary democracy” while he was living in Europe. He further attributes Jamālzāda’s success in creation of modern literary forms including short stories and novels, to his commitment to initiate a literary trend that imitated Western literature in “dealing with everyday lives of people.” See “Sair-i tahavvul-i rumān.” 6 Ritualistic commemoration of the martyrs of Karbala through the professional men called rawzah-khān, who recited eulogies. 7 Jahāngīr Jalīli, Man ham girya kardam (Tehran: Khāvar, 1933). 8 For more information on print technology in early 20th century Iran see Afshin Marashi, “Print Culture and Its Publics: A Social History of Bookstores in Tehran, 1900–1950,” International Journal Middle East Studies 47, no. 1 (February 1, 2015): 89–108; and Zabīh Allāh Safā, Nasr-i Fārsī (Tehran: Kitābfirūshī-i Ibn-i Sīnā, 1968), 139–41. 9 Akbar Hukmīzādah, “Tablīgẖāt (cinamā, rumān, girāmāfūn),” Humāyūn 1, no. 6 (1935): 29–30. 10 Yahyā Āriyanpūr, Az Sabā tā Nīmā: tārīkh-i sad va panjāh sāl adab-i fārsi, 5th ed., 2 vols. (Tehran: Shirkat-i sahāmī-yi kitāb-hā-yi jībī, 1978). 11 ‘Abdullah Shahbāzī, “Zindagī va zāmānah-yi Ali Dashti,” Mutāli‘āt-i tārīkhī 2, no. 1 (April 2, 1383): 8–137. 12 Iraj Parsinejad, ʻAlī Dashtī va naqd-i adabī (Tehran: Intishārāt-i Sukhan, 1387). 13 Āriyānpūr, Az sabā tā nīmā, 243. 14 Abdullah Hakimfar, “Vafāyiyāt-i mu‘āsir: ustād Muhammad Hijāzī (Muti‘ al-dawlah),” Gawhar 1, no. 2 (March 24, 1974): 89–93. 15 The term becomes prolific in the early 20th century in public press in journals and periodicals. Just as an example see Manūchihr Farsād, “Nazarī ba tārikh va dars-i ‘ibrat,” Kāwa, vol. 1, no. 9 (June 24, 1916): 2–7, cited on 3. 16 Ali Dashti, Fitnah (Tehran: Ibn-Sīnā, 1944), 7. 17 Ali Dashti, Jādū (Tehran: Ibn-Sīnā, 1952), I. 18 Muhammad Masūd, Tafrīhāt-i shab (Tehran: Telāvāng, 2006). 19 Fāzil, Fāhisha, 121. 20 Kamran Talattof, The Politics of Writing in Iran: A History of Modern Persian Literature (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 19–66. 21 Hasan Mir‘ābidīnī in his canonical work on modern Iranian literature, Hundred Years of Writing Literature in Iran, notes that “authors of [social] novels reflect the mass disappointment of the failure of the revolution, through describing prostitution, political and bureaucratic corruption, and social insecurities that followed the constitutional years [i.e. years after the Constitutional Revolution in 1905–19011].” 22 Ghanoonparvar disregards the literary value of early social novels including those of Dashtī and Hijāzī, partly due to their mass appeal to women. As he recounts the history of the novel in Iran, he mentions this literature only very briefly and quickly moves on to extensive analysis of Jamālzāda’s works as the origin of modern novel. He notes that this literature was mostly written with the purpose of “inciting the middle class, especially women.” See “Iranian Novel.”

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23 As Yahyā Āriyānpūr notes, newspapers and publications never merely attended to political currents of the time. Rather, publications included news about science and literature from the very beginning. See Az Sabā tā Nīmā, 228–33. For instance, the heading of the daily publication, Akhtar, first printed in 1876, announces that it covers “all matters from political events and politics to science, art, literature and other [matters of] public interest.” Even the practice of feuilleton writing in periodicals goes back as early as 1897, in Tarbiyyat, a weekly publication printed in Tehran. However, gradually mass entertainment moves to the forefront of periodicals and newspapers, as the readership expands. 24 Hasan Mir-abedini, Hundred Years of Writing Literature in Iran, 2nd ed., vol. 1, 4 vols. (Tehran: Chishma Publishing House, 2008). 25 Abbas Khalīli, Rūzgār-i siyāh (Tehran: Iqdām, 1342/1963). 26 Jahangīr Jalilī, Man Ham Giryah Karadm (Tehran, 1328/1949), 83. 27 For more detailed discussion on public sphere see Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 21, 41. 28 Muhsin Habibi, Az shar ta shahr: tahlili tarikhi az mafhum-i shahr va sima-yi kalbudi-i an: tafakkur va tassur (Tihran: Dānishgāh-i Tehran, 2006), 134. 29 Articulation of social problems in terms of social ills is rooted in outburst of epidemic and pandemics such as Cholera, and Typhoid in the late 19th century in Iran. For more discussion on the emergence of medicalization of socio-political discourse see Mohammad Tavakoli-Targhi, “Everyday Modernity and Religious Inoculation,” Iran Nameh 4, no. XXIV (2008). 30 Masūd, Tafrīhāt-i shab, 8. 31 Hasan ʻĀbidīnī, Sad sāl dāstānʹnivīsī-i Īrān (Tehran: Nashr-i Chishma, 2004). 32 “fāzilāb-i kisāfathā-yi ijtimā‘ī” cited in Masūd, Tafrīhāt-i shab. 33 Mushfigh Kāzimī, The Horrific Tehran (Tehran-i Makhouf) (Tehran: Ittihad, 1924), 15. 34 For more discussion on gendered analysis of the modern public sphere see Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text 25/26 (1990); and Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York and Cambridge, MA: Zone Books; Distributed by MIT Press, 2002). 35 Fāzil, Fāhisha, 135. 36 Muhammad Hijāzi, Zībā (Tehran: Ibn Sīnā, 1932). 37 Madhava Prasad, “Realism and Fantasy in Representations of Metropolitan Life in Indian Cinema,” Journal of Moving Image 1, no. 2 (2001). 38 Hijāzi, Zībā, 21. 39 Born and raised in Najaf, Khalīlī fled Iraq at a young age, following his involvement with the anti-colonial Nihzat-i Islamī movement for the independence of Iraq. He resided in Tehran, where he became one of the most controversial journalists of his time, writing in periodicals and newspapers including Ra‘d, Rūznāmah-yi baladiyya, Bahār, and his own newspaper Iqdām, for which he was exiled to Kermanshāh in December 1921 until January 1922. See Ja‘far Shuujā‘-Kayhānī, “‘Abbās Khalīlī, Pishru-yi sabkī jadīd dar jūrnālīsm,” Nāmah-yi farangistān 9, no. 53 (June 1, 1394): 120–6. 40 Abbas Khalīli, Rūzgār-i siyāh (Tehran: Iqdām, 1963). 41 Hasan ʻĀbidīnī, Sad sāl dāstānʹnivīsī-i Īrān (Tehran: Nashr-i Chishma, 2004). 42 Mir‘ābidīnī further neglects the larger circulation and reproduction of tuberculosis in popular culture including film, literature, and painting across the globe, from the 19th century to the present. The following are just a few examples of popular art which have characters with tuberculosis: Puccini’s opera La Boheme, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1956), and Bergman’s The Bell’s of St. Mary’s (1945). Today every once in a while Hollywood films include characters with tuberculosis, when they want to capture the feel of the early 20th century (see for example There Will be Blood, Moulin Rouge, Winter’s Tale). The diseased character in early novels cannot be understood in terms of imitation. Rather circulation is a better way to conceive of it.

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43 Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, Conceiving Citizens: Women and the Politics of Motherhood in Iran (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 73–95. 44 Kashani-Sabet. 45 Dūbshān, Syphilis wa mukhtasāt-i intishār-i ān dar Iran (Tehran: Matba’a-yi majlis, 1930). 46 Sūrīn Tūmāniyāns, Chirā sūzāk wa syphillis mu‘ālijah nimīshavad (Tehran: Barādarān-i bāghirzādah, 1309/1930), 75. 47 Many of the origin stories of syphilis inscribed a close affiliation between prostitution and armies. For instance, Muhammad Kirmānshāhī’s (1829-1908) narrative of the outburst of syphilis told the story of Italians who poisoned some prostitutes and sent them over to the French army. As a result, syphilis spread all over Europe. See Muhammad Kirmānshāhī, Amrāz-i Muqāribatī, (n.p: n.p, 1895). 48 Jalīli, Man ham girya kardam, 174–5. 49 Ibid., 175. 50 Ibid., 37. 51 I am borrowing phrases “feeling for” and “feeling with” from Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). I follow her model of contagion of emotions, which advances the idea that we can in fact catch others’ emotions. However, catching others’ emotion is dependent upon how one imagines the other and her feelings. Although Ahmed finds the model of contagion of affect helpful, she is also critical of its limitations as it might “underestimate the extent to which affects are contingent” upon bodies that catch them. 52 For a more detailed discussion on literary techniques that aim at transferring emotions see Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 53 Mirzā Nādirī Fereydun, Man Fāhisha Nabūdam (Tehran: Bungāh-i matbūati-yi afshāri, 1946). 54 Jalīlī, Man ham girya kardam, 8. 55 He writes: “I hope this book is accepted as a warning and a bitter truth [ . . . ] I dedicate this to innocent birds, whose unawareness has trapped them in merciless claws of vultures [ . . . ] I hope they are shaken a little [by this book].” Mirzā Nādirī Fereydūn, Chigūna Fāhisha Shudam (Tehran: Afshārī, 1975). 56 I use the term “Affective Economy” following Sara Ahmed in “Affective Economies,” Social Text 22, no. 2 (2004): 117–39. She juxtaposes affect with economy to draw attention to the fact that emotions are commodified and as they circulate their affective intensity accumulates. Her use of economy in understanding affect stems from a larger shift of attention from what emotions are to what work they do. Similarly, in this analysis, I am interested in exploring the work that emotions do in popular literature. 57 Khalīli, Rūzgār-i siyāh, 96. 58 Mehdi Mashāyikhī, Ghurūbī dar mahalla-yi badnām (Tehran: Ilhām, 1954), 13. 59 Mashāyikhī, Ghurūbī dar mahalla-yi badnām, 30. 60 Firaydūn Mirzā Nādirī, Man fāhisha nabūdam (Tehran: Bungāh-i matbūati-yi afshāri, 1946), 9. 61 Sara Ahmed in The Promise of Happiness points to the role of affect in creating communities. She notes: “To be affected in a good way by objects that are already evaluated as good is a way of belonging to an affective community.” She further argues that affect creates shared orientations. 62 Hakīmilāhī is a professional muckraker journalist and an activist, born in 1917 and educated in the UK in Oxford. He actively wrote letters of appeal to the Department of Justice, against different government offices, including the Office of the Prime Minister, and the National Bureau of Planning and Budget. In his journalistic career he wrote prolifically throughout the 1940s–1960s and turned most of his serialized publications into independent books. His muckraking account of the red-light district of Tehran called Come with Me to Shahrinaw (Bā man bi Shahrinaw Biyāyīd) belongs to his exposé series, which is the collection of his visits to and observations of different sites

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64 65 66

67

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in Tehran and includes the following volumes: Come with Me to Shahrinaw (Bā man bi Shahrinaw bī-yayīd, 1946), Come with Me to the Mental Asylum (Bā man bi dār al-majānin bī-yayīd, 1947), Come with Me to Tehran (Bā man bi Tehran bī-yayīd 1947), Come with Me to the Military (Bā man bi artish bī-yayīd, 1948), and Come with Me to Schools (Bā man bi madāris bī-yayīd, 1948). The most vivid example of charitable gestures that he draws on includes “rescuing” a little girl named Khurshīd from a brothel in Shahrinaw. In the second volume of Come with Me to Shahrinaw, 50, he claims that he and a Dr. Kalāntarī together arranged for the girl to be moved to Ītām orphanage run by Mr. Bishārat. I have not been able to validate his claims in relation to charity works he and his followers have done in Shahrinaw. Nevertheless, the strong gesture towards action is analytically significant. The author notes that young boys and girls who are too young to have intercourse, engage in oral sex instead. Hidāyat Hakīmilāhī. Bā man bi Shahrinaw bī-yāyīd, vol. 2 (Tehran: n.p., 1947), 15. Sianne Ngai in Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), aptly notes that philosophers have always conceptualized disgust as an alternate or negated form of desire. According to her, even Kristeva’s account of the abject as the ultimate object of disgust, conceptualizes disgust “in libidinal terms of ‘want’ and ‘primal repression’,” 332. Ngai’s framework is well fitted with this literature since diseased bodies are not treated as object of desire, neither can they be read as radical de-sublimated bodies since sexual attraction is never signaled. I have refrained from conceptualizing repugnance in terms of desire then, as it would be reading desire forcefully into the text. Lauren Berlant unpacks the role of compassion, as an emotion and a social technology that creates a shared sense of community and belonging. See Lauren Gail Berlant, ed., Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion, Essays from the English Institute (New York: Routledge, 2004), 4. Paul Rozin and April Fallon, “A Perspective on Disgust,” Psychological Review 94, no. 1 (1987): 23–41. Sādiq Chūbak, “zir-i chirāq-i qirmiz,” in Khaima shab bāzī (Tehran: Nilūfar, 1955/1945), 45.

Bibliography NEL sources ʻĀbidīnī, Hasan. Sad sāl dāstānʹnivīsī-i Īrān. Tehran: Nashr-i Chishma, 2004. Āriyanpūr, Yahyā. Az Sabā tā Nīmā: tārīkh-i sad va panjāh sāl adab-i Farsi, 2 vols., 5th ed. Tehran: Shirkat-i sahāmī-yi kitāb-hā-yi jībī, 1978. Āriyanpūr, Yahyā. From Nimā to Our Time, 1st ed. Tehran: Zavvar, 1995. Dashti, Ali. Fitnah. Tehran: Ibn Sīnā, 1944. Dūbshān. Syphilis wa mukhtasāt-i intishār-i ān dar Iran. Tehran: Matba’a-yi majlis, 1930. Farsād, Manūchihr. “Nazarī bi tārikh va dars-i ‘ibrat.” Kāwa, February 28, 1907, 2–7. Fāzil, Javād. Fāhishah. Tehran: Ma’rifat, 1953. Fereydūn, Mirzā Nādirī. Chigūna fāhisha shudam. Tehran: Afshārī, 1975. Fereydun, Mirzā Nādirī. Man fāhisha nabūdam. Tehran: Bungāh-i matbūati-yi afshāri, 1946. Gulshīrī, Hūshang. Nīma-yi tārīk-i māh. Tehran: Nilūfar, 1380. Habibi, Muhsin. Az shar ta shahr: tahlili tarikhi az mafhum-i shahr va sima-yi kalbudi-i an: tafakkur va tassur. Tehran: Danishgah-i Tehran, 2006. Hakamīzādah, Akbar. “Maqsūd-i man.” Humāyūn, no. 8 (January 31, 1314): 1–12. Hakimfar, Abdullah. “Vafāyiyāt-i mu‘āsir: ustād Muhammad Hijāzī (Muti‘ al-dawlah).” Gawhar 1, no. 2 (January 4, 1353): 89–93.

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Hakīmilāhī, Hidāyat. Bā man bi Shahrinaw bī-yāyīd, vol. 1. Tehran: n.p., 1946. Hakīmilāhī, Hidāyat. Bā man bi Shahrinaw bī-yāyīd, vol. 2. Tehran: n.p., 1947. Hashemi, Zakariyyā. Tūti. Tehran: Hadaf, 1969. Hijāzi, Muhammad. Zībā. Tehran: Ibn Sīnā, 1932. Hukmī-zādah, Akbar. “Tablīgqāt (Cinamā, Rumān, Girāmāfūn).” Humāyūn 1, no. 6 (1935): 29–30. Jalilī, Jahangīr. Man ham giryah kardam. Tehran, 1328. Jalīli, Jahāngīr. Man ham giryah kardam. Tehran: Khāvar, 1933. Kāzimi, Mushfigh. Tehran-i makhouf. Tehran: Ittihād, 1924. Khalīli, Abbas. Rūzgār-i siyāh. Tehran: Iqdām, 1342/1963. Kirmānshāhī, Muhammad. Amrāz-i muqāribatī, 1895. Mashāyikhī, Mehdi. Ghurūbī dar mahalla-yi badnām. Tehran: Ilhām, 1954. Masūd, Muhammad. Tafrīhāt-i shab. Tehran: Telāvāng, 2006. Mir-abedini, Hasan. Hundred Years of Writing Literature in Iran, 4 vols., Vol. 1, 2nd ed. Tehran: Chishmah Publishing House, 2008. M.M. Chirā bi fāhishah khānah raftam!: tajziyah va tahlīl-i ba‘zī az masa‘il-i zindigi dar partaw-yi Islam. Tehran: Mu‘assisah-yi intishārāt-i Dānish, 1333. Nādirī, Firīdūn-mirzā. man fāhisha nabūdam. Tehran: Ibn-i sīnā, 1951. Parsinejad, Iraj. ʻAlī dashtī va naqd-i adabī. Tehran: Intishārāt-i Sukhan, 1387. Safā, Zabīh Allāh. Nasr-i Fārsī. Tehran: Kitābfirūshī-i Ibn-i Sīnā, 1968. Shahbāzī, ‘Abdullah. “Zindagī va zāmāna-yi Ali Dashti.” Mutāli‘āt-i tārīkhī 2, no. 1 (April 2, 1383): 8–137. Shuujā‘-Kayhānī, Ja‘far. “‘Abbās Khalīlī, Pishru-yi sabkī jadīd dar jūrnālīsm.” Nāmah-yi farangistān 9, no. 53 (June 1, 1394): 120–6. Tūmāniyāns, Sūrīn. Chirā sūzāk va syphillis mu‘ālijah nimīshavad. Tehran: Barādarān-i bāghirzādah, 1930/1309.

EL sources Ahmed, Sara. “Affective Economies.” Social Text 22, no. 2 (2004): 117–39. Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Berlant, Lauren Gail, ed. Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion. Essays from the English Institute. New York: Routledge, 2004. Bornstein, Erica and Peter Redfield, eds. Forces of Compassion: Humanitarianism between Ethics and Politics. Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press, 2011. Ditmore, Melissa Hope. Encyclopedia of Prostitution and Sex Work. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006. Fassin, Didier. Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Ghanoonparvar, Muhammad Reza. “Iranian Novel.” In Encyclopedia of the Novel, vol. 2 edited by Paul E. Schellinger, Christopher Hudson, and Marijke Rijsberman, 608–12. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998. Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989. Kashani-Sabet, Firoozeh. Conceiving Citizens: Women and the Politics of Motherhood in Iran. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Marashi, Afshin. Nationalizing Iran: Culture, Power, and the State, 1870–1940. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2008.

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Prasad, Madhava. “Realism and Fantasy in Representations of Metropolitan Life in Indian Cinema.” Journal of Moving Image 1, no. 2 (2001). Rozin, Paul and April Fallon. “A Perspective on Disgust.” Psychological Review 94, no. 1 (1987): 23–41. Talattof, Kamran. The Politics of Writing in Iran: A History of Modern Persian Literature. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000. Tavakoli-Targhi, Mohamad. “From Jinns to Germs: A Genealogy of Pasteurian Islam.” Iran Nameh 30, no. 3 (Fall, 2015): IV–XIX.

7

Classical Persian canons of the revolutionary press Abū al-Qāsim Lāhūtī’s circles in Istanbul and Moscow* Samuel Hodgkin

In a 1937 newspaper article, the Turkish writer Vâ-Nû (alias of Ahmet Vâlâ Nureddin) recounted for Istanbul readers a crucial moment in the modernization of Persian poetry. As he recalled, in 1923 he and the famous Turkish modernist poet Nâzım Hikmet were studying at the Communist University for Toilers of the East (KUTV) in Moscow, and they met there the revolutionary fighter and poet Abū al-Qāsim Lāhūtī, whom he calls, in the article’s title, “[the] Persian [language]’s Most Modern Poet.”1 He continues: At that time Nâzım Hikmet was just trying out his well-known free verse. One day, the three of us were together, and he recited. We said, “Let’s see you try out that style [ṭarz] in Persian too!” Lāhūtī thought. We watched his eyes as he planned, saying, “Is it possible or not?” As if suddenly rendering his verdict, he said, “Let’s see!” And the next day, he approached us in joy. During his political revolts, he’d experienced such joy when he captured a fortress: [now] it seemed he had been victorious in a literary revolt. I myself was first to hear the first Persian modern poem from the mouth of the poet himself!2 In a memoir that Vâ-Nû wrote in 1965 to commemorate Nâzım, he repeats the story, but with a different ending: “[Lāhūtī] wanted to write [Nâzım’s] sort of poems in Persian. After a few experiments, he said, ‘The classical is strong in Persian. The modern can’t get rid of it, I give up.’”3

* This chapter benefited from conversations with Holly Shissler, Saeed Ghahremani, and Claire Roosien, and from comments on drafts by Katerina Clark, Harsha Ram, Abdukholiq Nabavi, the Harvard Workshop for New Directions in History of Central & Inner Asia, the anonymous reviewers, Arshavez Mozafari, and Hamid Rezaei Yazdi. Materials were gathered with the kind assistance of Mohsharif Qabarova, Shaǐdo Abdulloev, Rifat Bali, and the staffs of the University of Chicago Library, New York Public Library, and Iranian State Library. All transliteration follows the LOC system for the language and script of the version cited. For Arabic-script Uzbek, I have used the system for Chaghatay provided here: Eric Schluessel, “Transliteration,” last modified June 12, 2011, https://wiki.harvard.edu/confluence/display/turkic/Transliteration.

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The truth of Lāhūtī’s poetic sensibility may be found in both versions. His contribution to the 20th-century expansion and transformation of Persian poetry has long been recognized.4 His formal experiments were numerous and daring, beginning with new stanzaic forms and use of caesuras in the Iranian Constitutional period (1905–1907) and extending even to syllabic metres in some of his late translations of European poetry.5 In his own time, however, he received more praise for his ability, in Vâ-Nû’s words, “to successfully instil the newness of modern currents into Iranian poetic form, which had continued for thousands of years and almost become calcified.”6 In Soviet contexts, this achievement was often celebrated in terms of Stalin’s famous formulation for the non-Russian republics, “national in form, socialist in content.”7 Ṣadr al-Dīn ‘Aynī, the founding figure of Tajik Soviet literature, echoed this formula in his praise of Lāhūtī, noting that “to [classical] modes [uslūb], in place of their traditional feudal content, he gives socialist content.”8 As Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak has shown, to separate form from content is to distort the history of modern Persian poetry, by missing those fundamental shifts that took place within traditional poetic genres.9 For Vâ-Nû, who had adopted a modernist teleology of poetic development, the weight of the classical tradition’s prestige held a Persian poet back from the pinnacle of that development: free verse. In Soviet eulogies of Lāhūtī, too, his success in establishing a modern, socialist poetry is described as particularly remarkable given the stages of literary development over which he had to leap. To speak of “literary modernity” instead of “modernism” allows us to see Lāhūtī’s accomplishments, and those of Persian poetry in the early 20th century, more clearly. His sense of poetry’s functions emerged from an ideological commitment to the modern, but not to an aesthetic program resembling any historically specific contemporary “modernism,” “futurism,” or “avant garde.” To the contrary, from the mid-1930s on, Lāhūtī was a leading exemplar of socialist realism, which was promulgated as an explicit critique of an alternative to artistic modernism.10 But the Soviet Union was an exemplary project of modernization, and the transformation of Transcaucasian and Central Asian cultures and literatures did emerge from the aspirations to modernity of Russians and non-Russians alike.11 Accordingly, modernist models from European literature, French and Russian, contributed to his criteria for a Persian poetry suited to his time and politics. If we take seriously the role of literature in projects of radical language reform, as interwar Soviet, Iranian, and Turkish intellectuals did, then Lāhūtī’s contribution to the creation of the Soviet Tajik language makes him an exemplary figure of Persian literary modernity.12 By developing new Persian and Tajik modes of expression in his poetic speech, he performed a kind of “self-surgery,” as Nergis Ertürk describes literary writers’ work on language in Kemalist Turkey; after all, the Tajik language reform project was the most radical reconstruction of Persian in the early 20th century.13 Furthermore, even at his most formally conservative, Lāhūtī sees a Persian poetics defined by its becoming rather than its being.14 As the Russian literary theorist Viktor Shklovskiǐ wrote in a journalistic profile, also in 1937, “In Tajikistan, everyone knows Lāhūtī’s poems, and they’ve become proverbs. Proverbs, like the poems of Ḥāfiz̤ , usually speak about the future. Lāhūtī’s poems are [ . . . ] for today and tomorrow.”15

Persian canons of the revolutionary press 187 Lāhūtī’s uncertain conversation with Nâzım points towards another context for Persian poetic modernity. Kamran Rastegar, in his work on Middle Eastern literary modernity, has emphasized the role of “textual transactions” not only with European literatures, but among Middle Eastern literatures.16 To understand Lāhūtī and Nâzım’s simultaneity we must examine the place of Persian language and literature in the literary modernity of the wider Persianate zone that had been, until the early 20th century, Persian-bilingual or deeply engaged with Persian literature.17 Many episodes of Iranian or Persian literary modernity have clear analogues in Persianate South and Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Anatolia, and furthermore, aspects of the Iranian experience only become clear with reference to the whole cosmopolis. As national or nationalist cultural figures reified and elevated local languages, attempting to purify or vernacularize them (goals that were often at odds), they located backwardness in Persian language and literature.18 By the end of the First World War, there is a less obvious counter-story. Persian literature had been a reference point for fin-de-siècle European and American writers’ challenges to cultural conservatism.19 Particularly Europe-savvy writers and critics within the Persianate zone made use of this fashion to enter European conversations as experts and reframe the Persian tradition for their new national audiences.20 Another countercurrent may be found in the Soviet Union, where Persianate poetics and aesthetics ultimately contributed to the canons of multinational socialist realism, albeit in new nationalized languages.21 Classical Persian poetry, then, functioned as a threat and resource in several overlapping internationalist visions, a third term between international European languages and local or national languages.22 The transfer of strategies for the renovation of the Persian canon from Iranian Constitutionalist and late Ottoman to Soviet circles can be traced in the literary activities of an ensemble of writers and critics who collaborated with Lāhūtī between 1921 and 1924, between Istanbul and Moscow. Through a literary prosopography and publishing history with Lāhūtī at its centre, I trace how political radicals and advocates of modernization, operating in the space between three failing empires and a host of new national formations, laid claim to a select canon of premodern as well as modern Persianate writers.23 Furthermore, I explain why such writers placed classical Persian and Persianate literature, their bête noire, at the centre of that new internationalist canon. These writers, I will argue, made their Persianate canon the basis for an “Eastern” genealogy of modernity, whether broadly positivist or specifically Bolshevik. In so doing, they completed the replacement of a Persianate canon, a set of literary practices and model texts, with the Persian canon, a pantheon of heroic writers and a discursive “heritage” defined in relation to the broader field of world literature.24 The externalization of the Persian canon as a distant object of reverence ironically expanded possibilities for poetic practice. In this transition, Lāhūtī played less of a pivotal role in Iran than other writers such as Muḥammad-Taqī Bahār or Nīmā Yūshīj.25 Unlike Bahār or Nīmā, however, Lāhūtī gives us the entire shift in a single career, and much of it in a short time. Two enterprises bookend Lāhūtī’s move to the Soviet Union: the journal Pārs, which he co-edited in 1921 in Istanbul, and the Soviet Central Press of the East

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(TSentral’noe vostochnoe izdatel’stvo), where he first worked in Moscow. After introducing the two institutions, I will examine two specific canon-building projects that Lāhūtī and his colleagues brought from Istanbul to Moscow, and show how the transfer affected the modern writers’ conception of the literary tradition in each case.

Pārs When Lāhūtī founded the journal Pārs together with the Swiss-educated Iranian critic and playwright Ḥasan Muqaddam in the spring of 1921, he already had experience in literature and publishing, from participation in his father’s Ni‘matallāhī Sufi milieu to editorship of a newspaper during the Iranian Constitutional Revolution.26 Pārs comprised a Persian section managed by Lāhūtī and a French section managed by Muqaddam. The journal ran approximately biweekly, in six issues, from April to July of 1921, when the censors closed it. Lāhūtī left for Tabriz shortly thereafter.27 Pārs was, for its brief run, much discussed in the Istanbul Iranian community. Produced with the support of Aḥmad Malik Sāsānī, a diplomat at the Iranian embassy, it had a constituency among the European-educated members of Muqaddam’s “Young Iran” club, and among Lāhūtī’s fellow radical writers.28 It also had a base of readers and even contributing writers among intellectual Turks, some of whom were fallen stars of Ottoman politics. These included Abdullah Cevdet, a founding secularist intellectual of the Ottoman Empire’s ruling Committee of Union and Progress (CUP, in power 1908–1918), and Rıżâ Tevfiḳ, a politician and professor who collaborated in studies of Persian poetry with the British orientalist E.G. Browne and the Iranian scholar Ḥusayn Dānish.29 Soon after Pārs folded, Rıżâ Tevfiḳ and Dānish were forced out of their professorships at Istanbul University. In a public discussion, Dānish had claimed that the 16th-century Oghuz poet Fużûlî was not a Turk, but an ‘acem (a term that suggested a capacious, shared Persianate culture); Tevfik concurred, “[even] if he’s a Turk, so what [ne çıḳar]?” and the resulting student protests led to the ouster of both.30 Rıżâ Tevfiḳ, unlike Cevdet, contributed to the Persian half of the journal, providing comment on the soul and race (‘irq) of Iran. The Persian half sometimes contained more political items, advocating Persian education for Iranian émigré youth or providing an internationalist view with articles like “Mexico is the Iran of America.”31 Initially, the editors intended an exchange, in which they would inform Western and Eastern readers about the premodern and contemporary poets of Iran, while also “bring[ing] into print for the Eastern world the literary works of the West.”32 This latter goal fell by the wayside, and the journal only conveyed Western scholarship and culture insofar as it reflected on Persian literature and art. At the same time, Lāhūtī devoted the Persian side to ever more essays on neglected contemporary poets, particularly from northwestern Iran. In his desire to protect such writers “from the catastrophe of oblivion,” he urged “the enlightening youth of today to send in accounts of the writers and poets they know, with samples of their works.”33

Persian canons of the revolutionary press 189 On the French side, Pārs offered critiques of misleading travelogues and orientalist mistranslations or misinterpretations of Persian poets, alternating with freeverse translations of metered Persian ghazals and rubā‘īyāt by Lāhūtī and other contemporary poets. Each issue closed with a collection of aphorisms by Mīrzā Ḥasan, the only writer who played the role of the indolent Persian (although by way of rehashed Wildean dandyism). But it is the journal’s analyses of Persian literature, often framed by Muqaddam’s “Nouvelles lettres persanes,” that drew the most correspondence from French readers. André Gide wrote to declare that though he regretted his reliance on translations of classical Persian poets, “enough light still gets through from these stars to let us judge their greatness.”34 Beyond the broader preoccupation with exile as a modern condition in comparative literature and postcolonial studies, exilic Istanbul has recently received much attention in the historiography of comparative literature and the “world literature” idea. As Kader Konuk and others have shown, for Jewish literary scholars such as Erich Auerbach who left Nazi Germany to take up positions at Turkish universities, the modernizing and universalizing project of Kemalist Turkey provided a dramatic case of the descent of Weltliteratur from diversity into homogeneity.35 Lāhūtī’s early career, however, partakes of a different kind of exilic modernity, for which Istanbul functioned as a key node, drawing together inter-imperial networks of Eurasian radical politics and culture.36 From 1914 to 1922, although Lāhūtī wrote numerous poems mourning his exile from Iran, he operated in the continuous space of overland revolutionary activity between the Ottoman Empire, Iran, and Russia. When he fled to first Soviet Azerbaijan and then Moscow after his failed officers’ coup in 1922, he, like other students at KUTV, initially viewed the Soviet Union as a fulcrum from which to move a broadly conceived “East.”

The central press of the East As it transpired, in the early 1920s it was Moscow where an Iranian writer could become indispensable as a representative of the Persian canon. More than thirty years before Auerbach’s seminal article “Philology and Weltliteratur,” the Russian writer Maxim Gorky attempted to revive Goethe’s dream of Weltliteratur with a publishing series entitled World Literature (Vsemirnaia literatura) under the auspices of the new Bolshevik state.37 From 1919 to 1924, Gorky oversaw the translation of approximately 120 works of literature, in accordance with Marx’s anticipation of world literature as a progressive force.38 The preponderance was European and American, but already in the first year, two volumes in Gorky’s series presented a scholarly survey of “Eastern literature.”39 In 1922, with the South Caucasus and most of Central Asia under Bolshevik control, a similar enterprise was initiated for the readerships of the Eastern nationalities themselves.40 The state-sponsored Central Press of the East (hereafter, Press of the East) was established under the directorship of the Kazakh commissar Nǎzīr Tȯrǎqūlov. In addition to numerous translations of agronomy textbooks and political pamphlets aimed at farmers, herders, and oil workers, the press published a literary series managed by the Volga Tatar critic Zinnǎtulla Naushirvan.41 It was

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here that Lāhūtī worked as a typesetter, establishing his Bolshevik credentials and finding opportunities for publication while studying at KUTV. In 1924 the press was folded into the Central Press of Peoples of the USSR (T͡ Sentral’noe izdatel’stvo narodov SSSR), which more carefully maintained the distinction between Soviet national literatures and those beyond the border, in keeping with a reduced focus on world revolution.42 In the short time of its operation, the literary and critical works printed by the Press of the East sketched out a revolutionary Persianate canon. In addition to journals and multi-author anthologies, it produced the following works by 1923: 1) Tatar and Azerbaijani anthologies of Khayyām’s rubā‘īyāt, each with critical essays and interlinear prose translations; 2) a Tatar volume on the philosophy and literary works of the 10th–11th-century Arab polymath Abū al-‘Alā’ al-Ma‘arrī; 3) a collection of verse and prose by the late Ottoman reformist poet Tevfik Fikret, with an introduction and glossary for Azerbaijani readers; 4) a dialogue in Uzbek by the Bukharan reformist poet ‘Abd al-Ra‘ūf Fiṭrat in which the characters discuss the poetry of the 17th–18th-century Indo-Persian poet Bīdil; and 5) a TurkishAzerbaijani-Persian volume replying in verse and prose to a poem by the 12th-century Caucasian Persian poet Khāqānī, on which Lāhūtī, Naushirvan, and Nâzım collaborated.43 This series’ canonic synthesis echoed previous trans-imperial Muslim reformist canons, and, though some of its specifics would change by the emergence of the 1930s socialist realist canon of world literature, it set a precedent for that canon, and for the national literary canons of Soviet Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. As such, all the press’s publications, including books in whose production Lāhūtī probably played no role, help to elucidate the role of Persian literary canons in revolutionary Istanbul and Moscow.

Khayyām and the materialist canon Lāhūtī’s first Soviet anthology, printed in 1924, rewrote the most blasphemous of the Khayyām rubā‘īyāt, turning them into exhorting slogans and building a materialist cosmology in which “labour is religion, and the factory its [holy] book.”44 In producing it, he embraced the title that Nâzım had given him in a poem the previous year: “Communist Khayyām.”45 Khayyām’s role as a positive classical model for Persophone and Turcophone literary modernizers was not a Soviet innovation. Alexander Jabbari, examining the development of modern Persianate literary historiography, has shown how considerations of national pride informed Iranian scholars’ importation into literature of “extraliterary figures” such as Khayyām.46 But there is a specific genealogy for the protomodernist Khayyām imagined by radical modernizers, one that links early Soviet works on Khayyām to Istanbul precedents. In particular, both literary communities defended a select canon of Persian classics as useful and inspiring to young positivists. In late Ottoman Istanbul and early Soviet Moscow, critics and poets sought after an indigenous “Eastern” genealogy of modernity, especially literary modernity, and found it in the verse of earlier models such as ‘Umar Khayyām and Bīdil.

Persian canons of the revolutionary press 191 The portrait of radical Khayyām owes much to the Ottoman thinker and politician Abdullah Cevdet, a key transmitter of 19th-century German popular materialism and fin-de-siècle neopositivism to the CUP milieu and, as we have seen, a one-time contributor to Pārs.47 Already in 1914, Cevdet had published an essay in the secularist journal İctihat and a volume of Khayyām translations with commentary.48 In these works he provides a succinct summary of orientalist scholarship and Western literary and popular interest in Khayyām. Describing the debate between those who consider Khayyām an atheist materialist and those who find Sufi mysticism in his works, he argues for the former, comparing the poet to Epicurus and Lucretius. In an Ottoman positivist discourse frequently hostile to poetry as useless or pernicious, and classical “divan” poetry doubly so, Cevdet stood out as a defender of poetry, which could instil positivist ethics and convey the full imaginative scope of materialist truth. Indeed, the essay that he contributed to Pārs (first published a month before in İctihat) belongs to his late phase, in which he updated his materialism with the early 20th-century French philosopher Henri Bergson’s vitalism, incongruously combined with the aestheticism of the 19th-century French philosopher Jean-Marie Guyau.49 Here, he gives these philosophies an Eastern pedigree, interpreting a couplet from al-Ma‘arrī on the origin of man from matter as an anticipation of Darwin’s evolution and Bergson’s new monism. Cevdet further bolsters the revelatory role of poetry by setting Guyau’s oceanic vision of nature alongside a similar metaphor from Khayyām.50 Muqaddam likewise highlights Khayyām’s atheism in Pārs, applauding a new translation’s textual rigour: “Nothing comes to cloud my joy, none of that disturbing mysticism and reconciliation with good God that some excessively zealous believers have [ . . . ] added to the poet’s works, so frankly pagan.”51 For Muqaddam, more attuned to the European Khayyām, the poet’s atheism is that of a pessimist aesthete, an interpretation that the more famous Iranian writer Ṣādiq Hidāyat would also make in his works on Khayyām, beginning in 1924.52 The Istanbul scholars Rıżâ Tevfiḳ and Ḥusayn Dānish, in their own scholarly selection and translation of Khayyām’s rubā‘īyāt that they published in 1922/1340 hq., muddled materialism with pessimism and extended the range of philosophical and literary points of comparison, adding Shakespeare to Lucretius and al-Ma‘arrī, and Schopenhauer to Bergson.53 The 1922–1924 Moscow editions drew on Rıżâ Tevfiḳ and Ḥusayn Dānish’s scholarly apparatus.54 The Azerbaijani edition borrowed their translations of many rubā‘īyāt, as well as photographs and illustrations.55 However, it was Cevdet’s first, more straightforwardly polemical and materialist use of Khayyām and al-Ma‘arrī that set the hectoring tone. Khayyām becomes “the East’s merciless critic of the life of human society of his time and a mocker of all its vain dogmas,” compared favourably as a “great revolutionary” to his (supposed) schoolmate Ḥasan Ṣabbāḥ.56 Naushirvan undertakes the instrumentalization of Khayyām’s legacy quite consciously, writing, “to make use of their works to spread our own revolutionary atheist thought among the masses of young people [ . . . ] is our duty and our right.”57 He sums up the cross-temporal and international canon that he has

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assembled: “Lucretius, ‘Umar Khayyām, Abū al-‘Alā’ al-Ma’arrī and Tevfik Fikret, these are each society’s [ . . . ] precious craftsmen and militant thinkers.”58 The ease with which Ottoman positivism could be integrated into a Soviet context should not be surprising. CUP and the Bolshevik cadres emerged from similar processes of the peripheral reception of German positivist thought, often in popularized form, and shared similar aspirations as vanguard parties hoping to hurry their publics from backwardness to modernity. For several years after the revolution, Muslim reformists across the former Russian Empire who had looked to Istanbul for inspiration considered the Soviet project to be the continuation of their project of modernization, and enthusiastically embraced the new means put at their disposal for the project.59 A scholar named ‘Aliyūf [Russ: Aliev], whose essays accompany the Azerbaijani Khayyām edition, draws together class warfare with anticolonial and cultural struggle, connecting ignorance of Khayyām’s verses in “the Caucasus, Afghanistan, India, or even Iran itself” to the machinations of imperialists, capitalists, and clergy (rūḥānīlar).60 Khayyām entered this new canon from Europe, as Turkic and Persian-speakers attempted to ensure that an “Eastern” poet who garnered respect at the new literary metropolises would be, in Pascale Casanova’s formulation, “credited to [their] account in the international literary market.”61 However, this is not a case of a hegemonic, European modern canon emanating to a periphery. In fact, Khayyām’s rubā‘īyāt are a perfect illustration of what the historian Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi has called “the significance of heterotopic experiences” – in particular the ways that Europe and the Persianate world each projected possible reconfigurations of society onto the other – “in the formation of the ethos of modernity.”62 For Europeans, the reconfigured Rubá‘iyát of Fitzgerald gave decadent scepticism a pedigree in an imagined Iranian past.63 The heterotopic significance of Khayyām’s rubā‘īyāt precedes this adoption, however. Modern textological research, beginning at the end of the 19th century, has shown that most (if not all) of the poetic corpus of “Khayyām” is a series of later, anonymous accretions in a genre whose sceptical blasphemies were authorized by its putative author, a master of the “foreign” sciences. That is, the mediaeval Persian authorial persona Khayyām, like Fitzgerald’s Khayyām, was the mythical founder of a collectively authored heterotopia.64 The Press of the East’s literary series, unlike Pārs, did not gather and package the Persian literary legacy for an international (Western) public, but rather, like the Jadid press, it facilitated literary exchange and consolidation within a Soviet press community whose readers were presumed to be somewhat competent in both Turkic and Persian. The Bukharan reformist and former Istanbul student Fiṭrat bridged a canonic divide in that cosmopolis with Bīdil at One Gathering (Bīdil bir majlis-dä), his contribution to the Press of the East series.65 Azerbaijanis and Iranians, unlike Central Asians, were heirs to a Persian poetic canon shaped by the 18th- and 19th-century literary “return” (bāzgasht) movement, which cast out post-Timurid Persian literature, and particularly Indo-Persian verse, as tastelessly overwrought, incomprehensible, and un-Persian, none more

Persian canons of the revolutionary press 193 so than Bīdil.66 Fiṭrat, in his dialogue between an enlightened young Bukharan Westernizer and his sceptical interlocutors, brings together Bīdil’s Persian verse and prose with explications in an Uzbek peppered with Ottoman verbs and idioms.67 As Adeeb Khalid has shown, in Transoxiana the post-Revolution “explosion of Turkism [ . . . ] meant a disavowal of Persian and the heritage it represented,” and specifically its displacement by Uzbek as a more suitable language for modernization.68 Fiṭrat had been one of the most committed Turkists before his exile from Uzbekistan to Moscow in 1923, but as his dialogue shows, Persian literary prestige remained a resource for vernacular modernity.69 Fiṭrat performs much the same rereading of Bīdil as Cevdet had for Khayyām. A rubā‘ī on the transformation of ape into man proves that Bīdil discovered Darwinian evolution, and Bīdil’s description of human societies becomes a narration of the Marxist modes of production.70 Like Cevdet and his successors, Fiṭrat treats atheism, materialism, monism, and pantheism as interchangeable world-views.71 Fiṭrat, however, needed a non-colonial genealogy for specifically Bolshevik modernity. Although debates in Central Asia and Moscow about Bīdil’s suitability continued until the 1950s (it is difficult to interpret his abstruse poetry as a vector for any clear message except Persian literary prestige), Bīdil’s place in the Soviet canon survived the execution of Fiṭrat in the Stalinist purges in 1938. The modern heterotopia of classical materialist poetics merits particular attention because it shaped not only radical literary historiography, but also poetic practice. Some of the most famous rubā‘īyāt associated with Khayyām describe a potter’s workshop where pots irreverently question the existence and omnipotence of their maker. While this subset of the rubā‘īyāt draws clay vessels and humans together by playful allegory, they may have gained resonance from other Khayyām rubā‘īyāt in which the reader is reminded that the dust or clay of mausoleum bricks comes from human bodies. Modernizers who sought to emphasize the materialism of Khayyām’s verses blurred together these two poetic uses of clay, one figural and the other literal. Lāhūtī closely pastiches one of these Khayyām rubā‘īyāt in his 1924 collection: dar kārgah-i tavāngarī būdam dūsh: dīdam dū hazār dīg dar jūsh-u khurūsh. dar har dīgī, bi-chashm-i ‘ibrat dīdam: khūn-i du hazār kārgar būd bi-jūsh! Last night, I was in a rich man’s workshop I saw two thousand cauldrons in an uproar In each pot, with heedful eyes, I saw Two thousand workers’ blood was at a boil!72 Lāhūtī brings Khayyām’s image of the human body into relation with more recently established figures of speech: the capitalist vampire familiar from revolutionary rhetoric, whose factory runs on the workers’ blood, and the “boiling blood” of rage about to explode into violence. Taken as a commentary on the

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Khayyām rubā‘ī, the image’s amplitude increases. What appears to be a realistic image, a factory full of boiling vats, comes into focus as a nightmare vision of production. If the vessels are humans, here filled with blood instead of wine, the workers are the factory’s product, brought to a boil by the industrial process.

Khāqānī and the ruins of the classical edifice We have seen how the moderns deployed the most suitable canonical figures to indigenize projects of modernization. But what were they to make of the canonical corpus as a whole? Some Persianate literary reformers, before and after Lāhūtī’s generation, have regarded the majority of classical Persian poetry as a hindrance to modernization.73 This was one position expressed within the circle of Press of the East contributors, but it was not Lāhūtī’s position on the Persian canon, and ultimately, it would not be the orthodox Soviet position. One of the Press of the East’s publications stands out for its critical distance from the classical Persian poet it invokes. This trilingual volume presents Lāhūtī’s Persian-language qaṣīdah “Kremlin” (“Krimil”), which is a formal poetic response (istiqbāl or naẓīrah) to Khāqānī’s famous “Madā’in qaṣīdah,” together with an introduction and interlinear translation in Azerbaijani by Naushirvan and a prefatory Turkish free-verse ode to Lāhūtī by Nâzım.74 In Khāqānī’s poem, a visit to the ruins of the pre-Islamic Sassanian palace at Madā’in in Iraq inspires a pious memento mori.75 Lāhūtī’s reply uses the original’s metre, rhyme, and themes to alternately challenge and appropriate the Persian heritage, a strategy that Naushirvan and Nâzım carry further in their contributions. The resulting volume provides an interpretive key to the role of the classical Persian canon in Persianate literary modernity. The classical Persian canon comes to function, in this work’s rhetoric, as a ruin. At the same time, all three writers’ polemics with nationalist cliché and their declarative turn towards new themes are complicated by the actually existing poetic practice on display, and specifically the gap between Nâzım and Lāhūtī. In 1935, Lāhūtī described how he came to compose the poem, visiting the Kremlin when he first arrived in Moscow in 1923: Not knowing a word of Russian yet, I was looking at its halls one by one, and the ruins of the palace of Anushirvan, of which Khāqānī had sung, came to mind. I was struck by this great historical contrast. Two royal palaces. Both built on the blood of the workers. But the first collapsed, burying under itself the power of the nation, while the second revived and became a fortress of internationalism and communism. With one stroke of the pen I wrote the poem “Kremlin.”76 Lāhūtī’s account, from a moment when his prominence allowed the poem to stand alone, erases the poem’s intertextuality with more immediate predecessors, but the poem’s rhetorical force comes from its attack on the Iranian nationalist discourse of Madā’in. In the 1923 Press of the East edition, that engagement is the subject

Persian canons of the revolutionary press 195 of Naushirvan’s introduction, which discusses Lāhūtī’s poem in relation to Ḥusayn Dānish’s strophic musaddas built around Khāqānī’s poem, published in 1912/1330 hq. with an introduction and interlinear Turkish translation by Rıżâ Tevfiḳ.77 Dānish transformed many of Khāqānī’s images in ways that Lāhūtī would reuse, and established the Iranian nationalist reading of the original poem by his choice of couplets from the original and the new lines with which he introduced them. In the years that followed, Madā’in and other pre-Islamic ruins inspired diverse visions of Iranian national renewal. The Istanbul Iranian émigré poet ‘Ishqī’s 1915–16/1294 hs. opera, “The Resurrection of Persian Kings in the Ruins of Madā’in,” popular among émigrés, was not an explicit touchstone for “Kremlin,” but established its redemption motif.78 In a 1918 essay for his literary journal Dānishkadah, the constitutionalist poet and scholar Bahār defended literary continuity by comparing Iran’s linguistic and literary resources to the incomparable bricks of Madā’in.79 Lāhūtī himself drew on the architectural imagination of Iranian nationalism in his pre-1923 poetry. When he produced a nationalist history textbook for the Istanbul Iranian émigré school in 1920, it included poetic descriptions and engravings of the ruins at Persepolis.80 The orientalist ruin, a figure for civilizational decline, was repurposed in Iranian nationalist discourse as a marker of civilizational continuity and the possibility of resurrection on the old, monumental foundation.81 Lāhūtī evokes the orientalist and nationalist ruin, but repurposes it again. The poem’s site is not Madā’in but the Moscow Kremlin, blamed, in an anticolonial line, for the division of Iran. Its rescue from the ruinous fate of all palaces is described in terms drawn from the poetics of popular materialism. The classical Persian commonplace of bodies in bricks becomes an aetiology of social relations once the bricks are labourers’ dust. When Khāqānī’s or Dānish’s bricks speak, they give voice to the fallen kings who are the reader’s point of identification, but Lāhūtī’s bricks describe the injustices they witnessed and establish a different solidarity: “Just like you, some time ago, we were workers.” They warn the new proletarian dictators: “Beware after this victory – don’t sheath your sword, beware/ So that after this, an enemy won’t come springing out on top of us.” The contrast between old and new tropings of the oriental ruin may be seen from the Press of the East edition’s two illustrations. The back cover (Figure 7.1) displays an exotic jungle ruin adapted (via Dānish and Tevfik’s edition of Khayyām) from a plate in the famous 1909 edition of Fitzgerald’s Khayyām, originally painted by Edmund Dulac. The ruin’s implicit site, at least before the image moved from London to Istanbul to Moscow, was colonial India, where colonizers could contemplate the ruin of generically Eastern empires. On the same volume’s front cover (Figure 7.2), however, the Kremlin itself is shown to be composed of bones and skulls, and a writhing mass of bodies pushes out from beneath it. If the back cover is a tasteful imitation of orientalist fantasy, the front shifts from architectural illustration into violent modernist scribble. The volume’s contents share the illustration’s duality. The Soviet Persianist E. E. Bertel’s identified “Kremlin” as a turning point for the literary language: “In this poem, for the first time we see the possibility of a revolutionary artistic style

Figure 7.1 [Artist unknown], back cover illustration, Abū al-Qāsim Lāhūtī, Krimil, trans. Nâzım Hikmet (Moscow: Markazi sharq nashriyati, 1923). Adapted, via Ḥusayn Dānish and Rıżâ Tevfiḳ’s edition, from Edmund Dulac’s illustration in Edward Fitzgerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (New York and London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1909), plate 7.

Figure 7.2 [Artist unknown], cover illustration, Krimil.

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in Persian poetry.”82 But Lāhūtī’s experiment seems quite modest beside Nâzım’s poem, with which he introduces “Kremlin”: Sa‘dî ṣoñ sözünü söyledi. diñlemek istemiyoruz artıḳ onuñ Şirvan şallarınıñ âhu naḳışlarıyla qıvrılan ahengini!. bir şa‘ir lazım ki bize çizsin gözümüze ṣınıfımızıñ ḳan!. ve alın teri ḳoḳan rengini!. *** ey “Krimil’i” yazan adam eyḳomünist “Ḫayyam” işte sen farisi’niñ ilk bolşevik şa‘irisiñ! behey Lâhuti yoldaş! tek ḳalma çoḳlaş! . . Sa‘dī has spoken his last. We don’t want to hear any more of his tune entwined with images of gazelles on Shervan shawls! We need a poet who will scratch across our class’s eyes blood! And their scent, stinking of forehead-sweat! *** O “Kremlin”-writing man! O communist Khayyām! Now you are Persian’s first Bolshevik poet! Hey, comrade Lāhūtī! Don’t be alone multiply! . . .83 Lāhūtī’s qaṣīdah lacks the sensual immediacy that Nâzım demands here. The shock of the poem “Kremlin” results mostly from the incongruences of its diction. Much

Persian canons of the revolutionary press 199 of the poem seems artificially neoclassical or archaic in relation to the neologisms it introduces into the poetic system. But here we must recall Shklovskiǐ’s characterization of Lāhūtī as a forger of new proverbs. The goal was to amplify an existing message, and at his best Lāhūtī is a master of al-sahl al-mumtani‘, inimitable simplicity. In transforming a new idea into natural common sense, genres and structures internalized by the listener – the couplet, the rubā‘ī – are useful, as the Persian wisdom literature tradition confirms. The risk that Lāhūtī runs with this style is cliché. “Kremlin,” however, confronts a body of pietistic and nationalist cliché, and gives the familiar tune new words. If Lāhūtī’s earlier works often parody classical genres, this is not a parody but an impudent détournement, comparable to the 1973 French Situationist redubbed kung-fu film, “Can Dialectics Break Bricks?” Poets of other languages could symbolically cast out the conservative element from their poetic traditions with the scapegoat of Persian genres and vocabulary, but this was not an option for Persian poets of Lāhūtī’s generation. Instead, Lāhūtī enters the sanctum of courtly Persian poetics (as Situationists entered mass culture) and repurposes it.84 His reworking of classical aphoristic style, which did indeed “multiply” among the Central Asian poets who imitated him, made him a “communist Khayyām.” In its relationship with the Persian canon, “Kremlin” is a transitional work. In his introduction, Naushirvan explains that because of Khāqānī’s “spiritual conservatism,” his poem, “however rich and elevated [ . . . ] in terms of the linguistic arts,” fails where Lāhūtī’s poem succeeds: “In order for a work to be great from a literary standpoint, it must be elevated in terms of content [ma‘naviyat], inner meaning [‘irfān], and morality [adab].”85 Naushirvan’s moral and “content”-based criteria for canonicity are not new, but echo the judgements of Fatḥ-‘Alī Ākhūndzādah and his late-19th-century heirs. Lāhūtī began experimenting with a more accommodating stance toward classical literature after he travelled to Tajikistan in 1925 as a representative of the Soviet cultural bureaucracy. In Lāhūtī’s first Central Asian poem, “The Palace of Civilization” [“Sarāy-i tamaddun”], he wanders through another ruined building. The edifice’s fragments are “strewn on the ground,” a disorder reflected in the poem’s stanzas, in a classical metre broken by caesuras:86 dar sar-sutūn-u sar-dar-u ayvān-u shaqf-i ān, bā khaṭṭ-i zar nivishtah hazārān katībah’hā, ammā siyāh gashtah-u yaksar shudah nihān, dar zīr-i dūd. ān hamah ās̱ ār-i pur-bahā! . . . ** hā?! yak kitāb-i pārah! . . . bikhvānīm: az īn kitāb, shāyad shavad padīd kih īn khānah mulk-i kī-st! pūshīdah! . . . āh! balkih buvad chashm-i man bi-khvāb . . . īn khaṭṭ . . . bidūn-i shubhah, balá, khaṭṭ-i fārsī-st! . . .

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Samuel Hodgkin On capital and lintel, on portico and ceiling, Thousands of inscriptions are written in golden script. But they’ve darkened, they’re completely hidden Under soot, all these estimable works! . . . ** What?! A scrap of a book! . . . Let’s read: from this book, Perhaps it will become clear whose home this was! Hidden! . . . Ah! Perhaps my eyes are still asleep . . . This script . . . without a doubt, yes, it’s Persian script! . . .87

He concludes, “this structure was Tajik civilization/ The house that cast a light out on creation,” and resolves that it must be renewed. The rhetoric of resurrection echoes the nationalist aspirations of Bahār or ‘Ishqī, to rebuild the classical. The poem’s concern with illegibility, though, makes for a more alienated experience of the edifice to be rebuilt. The ambiguous word “ās̱ ār” means traces left behind, and its semantic range includes ruins as well as literary works, such as a writer’s “collected works.” Following the violent rejection of classical aesthetics among Lāhūtī’s cohort, reclamation of classical Persian literature has entirely different ramifications for ongoing poetic practice, as the form of “Palace of Civilization” illustrates. Lāhūtī makes clear the degree of rupture, as well as the transformation of the classical Persian canon into a distant fetish object, in his 1934 speech to the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers. He explains: [T]o usher in a new, Soviet, Bolshevik literature [ . . . ] at a high ideological level, imbued with a Marxist-Leninist worldview, in the first place it was necessary to study Russian Soviet literature. On the other hand, the Tajiks have such a rich artistic heritage, classical Persian poetry. The poets of the 9th, 10th, and 11th centuries, Daqīqī, Rūdakī, Bū-‘Alī Sīnā (Avicenna), Firdawsī, Sa‘dī, Ḥāfiz̤ [sic], ‘Umar Khayyām, and tens of other brilliant masters of words, enjoying world-wide renown, wrote in the native language of the Tajiks, in a language that down to the present day is clear and close to the broad masses of Tajikistan.88 Following Lenin’s call, Tajik writers must critically assimilate and use these treasures of the past [ . . . ] Recently, a number of selected classical works have been scheduled for publication by the Tajik State Press.89 By the time of Lāhūtī’s speech, the incomprehensibility of Persian script foreseen in “Palace of Civilization” was a reality in Tajikistan, following the adoption of first Latin script in 1928, then Cyrillic in 1940.90 The linguistic nearness of the canon receded as the canon came into focus as a discursive object. For both the

Persian canons of the revolutionary press 201 rupture and the canon, the more ambivalent Turco-Persian reformist network of the early 1920s had laid the groundwork. In an essay for Pārs entitled “Iran and its Writers,” Lāhūtī contrasts the bad condition and consequent effacement of poets in “Iran’s poet-producing soil” with the encouragement that Western poets receive: “There are few cities that don’t have a few large boulevards named after famous poets of that district.” He describes statues, bookstores, and literary societies and concludes, “in all these steps, the local government gives material and moral support.”91 The state’s recognition of writers as a vanguard of cultural modernization fulfilled young Turco-Persian reformers’ expectations for literary modernity. It did not seem superficial to them that the Soviet Union ultimately provided such signs of progress, canonizing writers like Lāhūtī along with the Persianate classics that they had reframed. To be modern, in the Soviet sense that Lāhūtī embraced, was not to “get rid of” such classics, but to recanonize them, albeit within a totalized canon of Soviet world literature. The generic features of literary modernization in the Soviet East become visible when we take the Persianate world as a unit of analysis. The making of an official classical Persian canon was strikingly similar in Riz̤ ā Shah’s Iran.92 For Turcophone writers in the Soviet Union, as in the late Ottoman Empire, and the early Turkish Republic, figures such as Khayyām played a supplementary role, helping to mediate between (Western) universality and national specificity with a third term, the progressive tradition of the Persianate “East.”93 For Persophone writers such as Lāhūtī, it was necessary to translate the canon as a whole through a process of creative response (istiqbāl) to prestigious but troubling works. The fact that this new canon was confirmed by a new Kremlin autocracy, and enforced on writers and readers by an escalation of bloodshed, was an irony that remained unspeakable as Lāhūtī’s “Kremlin” entered the new canon in the decades that followed. Classical Persian models and forms, as ruin or as heterotopia, would continue to provide building materials for Soviet Persian literary modernization, even as the admonitions of the bodies in the bricks became difficult to interpret in public, and perhaps even inscrutable.

Notes 1 For the history of KUTV, Masha Kirasirova, “The Eastern International: The ‘Domestic East’ and the Foreign East’ in Soviet-Arab Relations, 1917–1968” (PhD diss., New York University, 2014), 32–251.On Iranian students specifically, Lana Ravandi-Fadai, “‘Red Mecca’: The Communist University for Laborers of the East (KUTV): Iranian Scholars and Students in Moscow in the 1920s and 1930s,” Iranian Studies 48, no. 5 (2015): 713–27. 2 Vâ-Nû (Ahmet Vâlâ Nureddin), “Benim görüşüm: Farisî’nin ilk modern şairi,” Haber Akşam Postası (February 15, 1937). 3 “Farsça’nın klasiği kuvvetli. Modernlik kaldırmıyor, vazgeçtim.” Vâ-Nû, Bu dünyadan Nâzım geçti (Istanbul: Cem yayınevi, 1980), 298. 4 Cf. Muḥammad Riz̤ ā Shafī‘ī Kadkanī, Advār-i shi‘r-i fārsī az mashrūṭiyat tā suqūṭ-i salṭanat (Tehran: Ṭūs, 1980/1359 hs.), 57–8, 115; Sa‘īd Nafīsī, Bih rivāyat-i Sa‘īd Nafīsī: khāṭirāt-i sīyāsī, adabī, javānī, ed. ‘Alī-Riz̤ ā I‘tiṣām (Tehran: Nashr-i markaz, 2002/1384 hs.), 307. However, the narrative that places poets such as Lāhūtī and ‘Ishqī at the origin of modern Iranian literature, in both Soviet and some Iranian scholarship,

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was criticized by some post-war poets as a tacit undervaluation of Nīmā’s importance. For Mahdī Akhavān S̱ ālis̱ , for example, Lāhūtī as an innovator was associated primarily with syllabic verse, which he regarded as a dead end. Girdhari Tikku and Alireza Anushiravani, eds., A Conversation with Modern Persian Poets (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2004), 10–11, 51, 59 (Pers.); ibid., 10–11, 44, 49 (Eng.). S. Davronov, Vazni ash‘ori Abulqosim Lohutī (Dushanbe: Donish, 1974). Vâ-Nû, “Benim görüşüm.” For an explication of what this formula meant in the literary sphere, see Kathryn Douglas Schild, “Between Moscow and Baku: National Literatures at the 1934 Congress of Soviet Writers” (PhD diss., UC-Berkeley, 2010), 11–19. Sadriddin Aǐnī, “She’ri tojikistonī,” in Kulliët, vol. 11, bk. 1 (Dushanbe: Irfon, 1969), 220. Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, Recasting Persian Poetry: Scenarios of Poetic Modernity in Iran (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1995), 6. Cf. Régine Robin, Socialist Realism: An Impossible Aesthetic (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 27–31. Some critics have compared socialist realism’s “eclectic, citational” nature with postmodernism: Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, trans. Charles Rougle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 108; and Mikhail Epstein, After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture, trans. Anesa Miller-Pogacar (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 359. Such an argument is less applicable to Central Asian and Azerbaijani socialist realists because critiques of “formalism” usually refer to excessive Persian classicism rather than avant-garde modernism, but this interchangeability is telling in itself. In emphasizing the generically modernizing features of the Soviet Union and in particular the Soviet “East,” I follow Adeeb Khalid, “Backwardness and the Quest for Civilization: Early Soviet Central Asia in Comparative Perspective,” Slavic Review 65, no. 2 (2006): 231–51. His approach is particularly fruitful here in that he emphasizes similarities between Soviet Central Asia and the Turkish Republic in the 1920s and 1930s, some of which could be extended to Iran under Riz̤ ā Shāh. In the Soviet Union and the Turkish Republic, and to a lesser degree in Riz̤ ā Shāh’s Iran, the 1920s and 1930s saw a sharp spike in state concern for writerly language as a potential engine of language reform. Complementarily, in polemics about style, writers increasingly assumed that their choices had consequences for the cultural advancement of society as a whole: cf. Özlem Berk, “The Turkish Language Reform and Intralingual Translation,” in Tradition, Tension and Translation in Turkey, ed. Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar, Saliha Paker, et al. (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2015), 165–80; Adeeb Khalid, Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 261–6. Both of these positions had particularly deep roots among Turkic-writing intellectuals between the Ottoman and Russian empires: cf. Geoffrey Lewis, The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 12–24. Nergis Ertürk, Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), xi. Serguei Oushakine has argued that “the void subject of Soviet modernity” whose present is perpetually erased by “self-production” should stand “as yet another figure of modernity”: “The Flexible and the Pliant: Disturbed Organisms of Soviet Modernity,” Cultural Anthropology 19, no. 3 (2004): 394–5. Viktor Shklovskiǐ, “Gasem Lakhuti,” Literaturnaia gazeta, October 15, 1937, 5. The divan of Ḥāfiz̤ , a 14th-century Persian poet, has often been used for bibliomancy in the Persianate world. Kamran Rastegar, Literary Modernity between the Middle East and Europe: Textual Transactions in Nineteenth-Century Arabic, English, and Persian Literatures (New York: Routledge, 2007).

Persian canons of the revolutionary press 203 17 The first study in this direction, on which the present chapter follows, is Alexander Jabbari, “The Making of Modernity in Persianate Literary History,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 36, no. 3 (2016): 418–34. For the category of the “Persianate”: Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 293–4. 18 Frances W. Pritchett, Nets of Awareness: Urdu Poetry and Its Critics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 34; Tadeusz Swietochowski, Russia and Azerbaijan: A Borderland in Transition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 55; Erol Köroğlu, Ottoman Propaganda and Turkish Identity: Literature in Turkey during World War I (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 41–2; Lewis, Turkish Language Reform, 27–56; Adeeb Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 208–14, 291–3; A. Holly Shissler, Between Two Empires: Ahmet Aǧaoǧlu and the New Turkey (London: I.B. Tauris, 2002), 119–20. 19 Encyclopaedia Iranica, s.v. “Khayyam, Omar xi. Impact on Literature and Society in the West,” by Jos Biegstraaten, last modified December 15, 2008, www.iranicaonline. org/articles/khayyam-xi; Aleksis Rannit, “Iran in Russian Poetry,” The Slavic and East European Journal 17, no. 3 (1973): 266–9; see also numerous articles in Ali Asghar Seyed-Gohrab, ed., The Great ‘Umar Khayyām: A Global Reception of the Rubáiyát (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2012). 20 Cf. Peter Balakian, “Poet from Kars: Yeghishe Charents and Armenia’s Modern Age,” in Vise and Shadow: Essays on the Lyric Imagination, Poetry, Art, and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 106–9; and Sean Pue, I Too Have Some Dreams: N.M. Rashed and Modernism in Urdu Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). 21 For some discussion of this argument (as yet incompletely elaborated in print): Samuel Hodgkin, “Revolutionary Springtimes: Reading Soviet Persian/Tajik Poetry, from Ghazal to Lyric,” Iranian Languages and Literatures of Central Asia from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, ed. Evelin Grassi and Matteo De Chiara (Paris: Studia Iranica, 2016), 273–305. 22 I borrow this conceptual model from Annette Damayanti Lienau’s description of Arabic’s role in anticolonial West African literature, “Reframing Vernacular Culture on Arabic Fault Lines: Bamba, Senghor, and Sembene’s Translingual Legacies in French West Africa,” PMLA 130, no. 2 (2015): 419–29. 23 For the idea of a “republic of letters” bridging the gap between writers under state socialism and sympathetic “socialists without a state,” see Rossen Djagalov, “The People’s Republic of Letters: Towards a Media History of Twentieth-Century Socialist Internationalism” (PhD diss., Yale, 2011). Djagalov emphasizes the novel as a dominant form in both the “Old-Left” and decolonizing communities of committed writers. In the Persianate literary international of the first half of the 20th century, poetry often played a more important role. 24 The making of the Persian canon as a discursive object was a much longer process. But before the late 19th century, whether in Niẓāmī ‘Arūz̤ ī’s 12th-century allusion to the aspiring poet’s reading list, the canonic consolidation of the 15th century, or the 18th–19th-century literary “return” [bāzgasht], the Persian classics were primarily a set of texts that the poet emulated or answered. In the period under consideration here, for writers such as Lāhūtī or Nâzım, the canon’s primary function shifted; it became a set of canonic figures, a “heritage” to be rhetorically evoked. Here I adopt a weaker version of William L. Hanaway’s position in “Is There a Canon of Persian Poetry?,” Edebiyât 4, no. 1 (1993): 3–12. See also Shaahin Pishbin, “Forugh Farrokhzad and the Persian Literary Canon,” Iran Namag 1, no. 4 (2017): 24–51. 25 Bahār (1884–1951) was a relatively classicist poet whose unfinished project of periodizing Persian prose and verse was the foundational work of modern Iranian literary historiography; Nīmā (1895–1960) is generally regarded as the founding figure of “new poetry” [“shi‘r-i naw”] in Iran.

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26 On Lāhūtī’s early milieu and writings, Tat’iana Aleksandrovna Schetchikova, “Tvorcheskaia biografiia Abul’kasima Lakhuti: nachal’nyi etap” (Thesis, Russian State University for the Humanities, 2010); on his newspaper, Muḥammad Ḥusayn Shīriyān, Tārīkh-i maṭbū‘āt-i ustān-i Kirmānshāh (Kirmanshah: Idārah-i kull-i farhang va irshād-i islāmī-’i ustān-i Kirmānshāh, 2013/1392 hs.), 39–52. 27 For Muqaddam’s limited participation in Lāhūtī’s coup, Isma‘īl Jamshīdī, Ḥasan Muqaddam va “Ja‘far-Khān az farang āmadah” (Oakland, CA: Jahān, 1984), 8–12. 28 These included Sa‘īd Nafīsī and Mīrzādah ‘Ishqī. [Aḥmad-]Khān Malik Sāsānī, Yādbūdʹhā-yi sifārat-i Istānbul (Tehran: Sahāmī, 1966/1345 hs.), 143–4, 209–11; Jamshīdī, Ḥasan Muqaddam, 8; Nafīsī, Bih rivāyat-i Sa‘īd Nafīsī, 286. Sāsānī, Muqaddam’s cousin, also contributed to Pārs under the pen-name Mihr-Ispand. 29 Cevdet had left the CUP in 1908 and wrote for Pārs in the midst of a phase in which he was particularly interested in Persian poetry, and shortly before one of his periodic blasphemy trials. Abdullah Djevdet, “Omar Khayyam et J.M. Guyau,” Pārs 6 (1921/1339 hq.): 81–3 (the journal’s two languages are numbered separately). In this year see also Abdullah Cevdet, Dil’mestî-i Mevlânâ ve Ġazzâlî’de marifetüllah: ruba‘iyât-iĠazzâlî, Örfî’de şiir ve irfân (Istanbul: Orḥanîye maṭba‘ası, 1921); on the trial, Necati Alkan, “‘The Eternal Enemy of Islām’: Abdullah Cevdet and the Baha’i Religion,” Bulletin of SOAS 68, no. 1 (2005): 1–20. Cevdet, like Lāhūtī, came from a Kurdish family, likely a contributing factor for both writers’ cosmopolitan conceptions of Persianate culture. Rıżâ Tevfiḳ, a member of the Bektāshī sufi order and long-time persophile, had been one of the signatories of the ignominious Treaty of Sevres by which the Ottoman Empire surrendered to the Entente after the First World War, and for that betrayal, he would be expelled from Turkey in 1922 following Kemalist victory in the Turkish War of Independence. Peter Chelkowski, “Edward G. Browne’s Turkish Connexion,” Bulletin of SOAS 49, no. 1 (1986): 25–34. Farzin Vejdani has shown that the “Persian republic of letters” of Browne and his Iranian and Indian collaborators developed an anti-imperialist critique of orientalist literary historiography: Making History in Iran: Education, Nationalism, and Print Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 147–56. 30 Kazım İsmail Gürkan, Darülfünun grevi (Istanbul: Harman Yayıncılık, 1971). 31 Lāhūtī, “Ḥikāyat,” Pārs 3 (1921/1339 hq.), 41; Mihr-Ispand, “Mikzīk Īrān-i Āmrīkā ast,” Pārs 1 (1921/1339 hq.): 13–16. 32 “Majallah-’i Pārs,” Pārs 1 (1921/1339 hq.): 1–2. By comparison, the French mission statement promises to “work for the diffusion of occidental culture in the Orient”; la redaction, “Notre but,” Pārs 1 (1921/1339 hq.): 1–2. 33 Lāhūtī, “Īrān va udabā-yi ān,” Pārs 4 (1921/1339 hq.): 53. 34 La rédaction, “Nos collaborateurs,” Pārs 3 (1921/1339 hq.): 34. 35 Kader Konuk, East West Mimesis: Auerbach in Turkey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). 36 For recent historical studies of Eurasian inter-imperial networks that inform my approach to this question, see James H. Meyer, Turks Across Empires: Marketing Muslim Identity in the Russian-Ottoman Borderlands, 1856–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Robert D. Crews, Afghan Modern: The History of a Global Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); and David Brophy, Uyghur Nation: Reform and Revolution on the Russia-China Frontier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). 37 Erich Auerbach, “Philology and Weltliteratur,” trans. Maire and Edward Said, Centennial Review 13, no. 1 (1969): 1–17. 38 Katalog izdatel’stva “Vsemirnaia literatura” pri Narodnom komissariate po prosveshcheniiu, Introduction by Maxim Gorky (St. Petersburg: “Vsemirnaia literatura,” 1919). Marx’s brief remark on world literature in the Communist Manifesto has drawn extensive commentary: cf. S.S. Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 138–65; Aijaz Ahmad, “The Communist Manifesto and ‘World Literature’,” Social Scientist 28, nos. 7/8 (2000): 3–30.

Persian canons of the revolutionary press 205 39 S.F. Ol’denburg et al., Literatura vostoka (St. Petersburg: “Vsemirnaia literatura,” 1919). 40 For a useful discussion of translated Persianate poetry and the Soviet project of world literature, see Rebecca Gould, “World Literature as a Communal Apartment: Semyon Lipkin’s Ethics of Translational Difference,” Translation and Literature 21 (2012): 402–21. 41 Naushirvan had written for the CUP-oriented pan-Turkist journal Turkish Hearth (Türk Ocaǧı) during the First World War and fought in Anatolia with the leftist Green Army during the Turkish War of Independence: Erden Akbulut, ed., Millî Azadlık Savaşı Anıları: Affan Hikmet, Ahmed Cevat Emre, Kazım Kip, Cemile Selim Nevşirvanova, Ziynetullah Nevşirvanov (Istanbul: Tüstav, 2006), 107–8. Almost all of the Tatars, Azerbaijanis, and Central Asians involved with the Press of the East had spent time in Istanbul and written for periodicals there. On the broader milieu, see Emin Özdemir and Mehmet Yusüf Çelik, “Osmanlı’dan Cumhuriyet’e Türkleri Konulu Haber ve Makaleler Bibliografyası (1908–1923),” Turkish Studies 8, no. 11 (2013): 247–77. 42 The continuity between the two presses is evidenced by the presence of the Central Press of the East seal on the back of several publications from Central Press of the Peoples of the USSR from 1924: cf. Lāhūtī, Rubā‘īyāt (Moscow: TSentral’noe izdatel’stvo narodov SSSR, 1924). 43 In addition to works cited below, Tevfiḳ Fikret, Muntaḫab-ı parçalar, ed. ‘Ali-Ejdar Sa‘idzade (Moscow: TSentral’noe vostochnoe izdatel’stvo, 1923), which also cites Rıżâ Tevfiḳ’s writings. This Communist defence of a “bourgeois” poet returned to Turkey with Nâzım’s 1930 essay, “Tevfik Fikret,” in Sanat, edebiyat, kültür, dil, ed. Güven Turan (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2002), 47–9. 44 Lāhūtī, Rubā‘īyāt, 21. 45 Abū al-Qāsim Lāhūtī, Nâzım Hikmet, and Ziynätullāh Nawşirvān, Krimil (Moscow: TSentral’noe vostochnoe izdatel’stvo, 1923), 2. 46 Jabbari, “The Making of Modernity in Persianate Literary History,” 422–5. 47 M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, “Blueprints for a Future Society: Late Ottoman Materialists on Science, Religion, and Art,” in Late Ottoman Society: The Intellectual Legacy, ed. Elisabeth Özdalga (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005), 37–64. 48 Abdullah Cevdet, Rubâ‘iyât-i Ḫayyâm ve türkçeye tercumeleri (Istanbul: Kütüpḫane-yi ictihat, 1926); 1st ed. 1914; Abdullah Cevdet, “Ömer Hayyâm,” İctihat 91 (1914/1329 hq.): 2031–36. 49 Hanioğlu, 43–7. 50 Cevdet’s argument is punctured, however, by Pārs co-editor Ḥasan Muqaddam’s scholarly footnote denying that the rubā‘ī in question was actually Khayyām’s. See also Nazım İrem, “Bergson and Politics: Ottoman-Turkish Encounters with Innovation,” The European Legacy 16, no. 7 (2011), 873–82. It is Cevdet’s mention of al-Ma‘arrī, based on orientalists’ comparisons between him and Khayyām, that accounts for the anomalous inclusion of one Arabic poet in the otherwise Turco-Persian Press of the East series, although it also speaks to a broader imagined community of Islamic free-thinkers. 51 Ali No-Rouze (pen-name of Muqaddam), “Nouvelles lettres persanes: À propos d’une traduction d’Omar Khayyam,” Pārs 2 (1921/1339 hq.): 19. 52 Iraj Parsinejad, A History of Literary Criticism in Iran, 1866–1951: Literary Criticism in the Works of Enlightened Thinkers of Iran: Akhundzade, Kermani, Malkom, Talebof, Maraghe’i, Kasravi and Hedayat (Bethesda, MD: IBEX, 2003), 201–10. 53 Ḥüseyin Daniş, Rubâ‘iyât-i Ömer Ḫayyâm (Istanbul: İḳbal, 1927) [1st ed. Evḳaf, 1922]. Rıżâ Tevfiḳ was a co-author and editor, but is not credited on the 1927 edition’s title page. 54 [‘Ayn].‘Aliyūf, ‘Ömar Xayyām ve rubā‘īyātı, intro. “Z. N.” (Moscow: T͡ Sentralnoe vostochnoe izdatel’stvo, 1924). The author may be the Bukharan activist ‘Abbās ‘Aliyūf, whose family was of Iranian origin and who studied at KUTV while in Moscow exile (like Fiṭrat) in the early 1920s. Khalid, Making Uzbekistan, 304. For the Tatar edition, written exclusively by Naushirvan, I relied on descriptions in the Azerbaijani edition.

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55 Ibid., 83. ‘Aliyūf acknowledges the source but points out that Dānish and Tevfik had themselves taken them from an English edition of Fitzgerald’s version. 56 Ḥasan Ṣabbāḥ was the 11th–12th-century leader of an Isma‘ili Muslim group that has subsequently been referred to as the Assassins. The myth that Khayyām and Ḥasan were classmates, attested quite early but revived by Fitzgerald’s introduction, had already been debunked when the Soviet volume was published: Edward Granville Browne, “Yet More Light on ‘Umar-i Khayyām,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (1899): 409–16. 57 The Press of the East’s efforts to bring Khayyām to the masses may be contrasted with Muqaddam’s account of the canon in an article that he published in 1927 in Alexandria. Sa‘dī, Firdawsī, and Ḥāfiz̤ belong to every Iranian but, Muqaddam writes, “the true Khayyām has only survived in the heart and spirit of an independent elite and in the admiration of profligates.” No-Rouze (see n. 51), “Omar Khayyam,” Messages d’orient 1 (1926): 149. Nâzım similarly found Khayyām’s addressees to be a limited elite in his rubā‘īyāt of the 1940s, though for him this was a fault. In one rubā‘ī, he imagines a shoeless man replying to Khayyām: “I don’t have enough money to buy bread, let alone wine.” Nâzım Hikmet, Kuvâyi milliye, ed. Güven Turan (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2002), 219; translation from Nazim Hikmet, Rubaiyat, trans. Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk (Providence, RI: Copper Beech Press, 1985), 27. 58 ‘Aliyūf, ‘Ömar Xayyām, 3–4. 59 Cf. Khalid, Making Uzbekistan. 60 ‘Aliyūf, ‘Ömar Xayyām, 6. 61 Casanova is referring specifically to Hidāyat’s scholarship on Khayyām: Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M.B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 239. 62 Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism and Nationalist Historiography (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001), 3. 63 Afshin Marashi has observed a similar use of Khayyām in Iran in the 1930s, as part of an attempt “to uncover, select, and emphasize the elements of tradition that were deemed most compatible with the culture of modernity. The presence of European orientalists at the tomb of Omar Khayyam [ . . . ] was a tacit, public sanctioning of the suitability of Iran’s culture – or some part of that culture – for membership in the new universalism.” Marashi, Nationalizing Iran: Culture, Power, and the State, 1870–1940 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), 114. 64 The literature is summarized by A.A. Seyed-Gohrab, “Khayyām’s Universal Appeal: Man, Wine, and the Hereafter in the Quatrains,” in The Great ‘Umar Khayyām, 12–13. M. Aminrazavi makes a strongly stated argument for the Khayyam corpus as a premodern counter-canon in “Reading the Rubā‘iyyāt as ‘Resistance Literature’,” in The Great ‘Umar Khayyām, 39–53. 65 Fiṭrat, Bīdil bir majlis-dä (Moscow: T͡ Sentralnoe vostochnoe izdatel’stvo, 1924), facsimile in Edward Allworth, Evading Reality: The Devices of ‘Abdalrauf Fitrat, Modern Central Asian Reformist (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 282–329. My interpretation of this work largely coincides with Khalid, Making Uzbekistan, 247–9. On Fiṭrat’s intellectual and press milieu in Istanbul, quite different from Lāhūtī’s, see Zaynabidin Abdirashidov, “Known and Unknown Fiṭrat: Early Convictions and Activities,” Acta Slavica Iaponica 39 (2016): 103–18. 66 Rajeev Kinra, “Make It Fresh: Time, Tradition, and Indo-Persian Literary Modernity,” in Time, History and the Religious Imaginary in South Asia, ed. Anne Murphy (New York: Routledge, 2011), 12–39; Kevin Schwartz, “The Local Lives of a Transregional Poet: ‘Abd al-Qâder Bidel and the Writing of Persianate Literary History,” Journal of Persianate Studies 9, no. 1 (2016): 83–106. 67 Allworth, Evading Reality, 109. 68 Khalid, Making Uzbekistan, 295.

Persian canons of the revolutionary press 207 69 On Fiṭrat’s enthusiastic Turkification of Persian-speakers during his tenure as education minister, see ibid., 299. That he produced the bilingual Bedil bir majlisda within a year of his departure suggests some kind of shift. 70 Fiṭrat, Bīdil bir majlis-dä, 34–49. 71 In fact, Fiṭrat’s Bīdil differs little from that presented by the South Asian Islamic revivalist writer Muhammad ‘Iqbal, in an unpublished essay probably written in 1915–1917: ‘Allama Muhammad ‘Iqbal, Bedil in the Light of Bergson, ed. Tehsin Feraqi (Lahore: Iqbal Academy Pakistan, 1988). Elsewhere, ‘Iqbal claims Tevfik Fikret had used Bīdil for anti-religious propaganda sent to South or Central Asia: Mohammad Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, intro. Javed Majeed (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 6. 72 Lāhūtī, Rubā‘īyāt, 35. The rubā‘ī is metrically irregular: the first two and fourth hemistiches are in akhrab metre, while the third is in akhram. 73 Cf. Mohammad Ali Jazayery, “Ahmad Kasravi and the Controversy over Persian Poetry: 1. Kasravi’s Analysis of Persian Poetry,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 4, no. 2 (1973): 190–203. 74 Lāhūtī et al., Krimil. 75 Khāqānī was himself replying, less formally, to the Arabic poet al-Buḥturī’s 9th-century qaṣīdah on Madā’in. Jerome Clinton, “The Madaen Qasida of Xaqani Sharvani I,” Edebiyat 1 (1976), 153–70; Clinton, “The Madaen Qasida of Xaqani Sharvani, II: Xaqani and al-Buhturi,” Edebiyat 2 (1977), 191–206. 76 Abulqosim Lohutī, “Dar borai tajribai ejodīi khud,” in Kulliët, vol. 6, ed. M. Mirshakar, R. Hoshim et al. (Dushanbe: Nashriëti davlatīi Tojikiston, 1963), 237 (Tajik translation). Original Russian of this passage qtd. in Z.G. Osmanova and M. Sh. Shukurov, eds., Ocherk istoriǐ Tadzhikskoi Sovetskoi literatury (Moskva: Izd. Akademii nauk SSSR, 1964), 291. 77 Hüseyin Daniş, Medâyin ḫarabeleri, intro. Rıżâ Tevfiḳ (Istanbul: Cem‘î kitapḫanesi, 1912). 78 Riz̤ ā Mīrzādah ‘Ishqī, Kullīyāt-i musavvar, ed. ‘Alī Akbar Mushīr Sālimī (Tehran: Zībā, 1965/1344 hs.), 231–41. 79 Karimi-Hakkak, Recasting Persian Poetry, 114. 80 Lāhūtī, Īrānnāmah (Istanbul: Shams, 1920/1338 hq.). 81 On ruins in orientalist discourses, cf. Linda Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient,” in The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 38–9; on the pre-Islamic Iranian ruin topos in the Indian Parsi community, which may be a source for the topos in Iranian nationalism, Daniel J. Sheffield, “Iran, the Mark of Paradise or the Land of Ruin? Approaches to Reading Two Pārsi Zoroastrian Travelogues,” in On Wonders of Land and Sea, ed. Sunil Sharma and Roberta Micallef (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 14–43. 82 E. E. Bertel’s, “Introduction,” in Lohutī, Devon (Moscow: Nashriëti davlatīi adabiëti badeī, 1939), 21–2. 83 Lāhūtī et al., Krimil, 2. Sa‘dī was the 13th-century author of two of the most important classical Persian textbooks and literary models, the Gulistān and Būstān. The ellipsis and idiosyncratic punctuation is Nâzım’s. 84 In the 1935 speech to Tashkent writers, Lāhūtī explains: “Sometimes it has happened that I directly use the old literary heritage in my own creation. I do it in such a way that I overcome the outdated works completely, and insert my own contemporary truth into it.” Lohutī, “Dar borai tajribai ejodīi khud,” 236. 85 Lāhūtī et al., Krimil, 17. 86 Lāhūtī’s “Palace of Civilization” shows a closer engagement with Mayakovsky’s formal experiments than Nâzım’s free verse. Mayakovsky’s lines, like Lāhūtī’s, usually break up metred verse into segments, while Nâzım frequently does away with metre altogether. This is unsurprising: Nâzım claimed he was impressed by Mayakovsky’s print presentation and declamatory performances but properly read his works only late in life. Babayev, “Nâzım Hikmet kendi şiirini anlatıyor,” in Konuşmalar, ed. Güven Turan

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(Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2002), 188–90; Saime Göksu and Edward Timms, Romantic Communist: The Life and Work of Nazım Hikmet (London: Hurst & Co., 1999), 46–7. By contrast Lāhūtī (who was equally familiar with vers libre from French translations of his own poems in Pārs) experimented with possibilities for “an appropriate form for translating Mayakovsky’s works” throughout his Soviet career. Ts. Bonu, “Ëddoshthoi mukhtasar,” Sharqi surkh 12 (1957): 79. Lāhūtī, Adabīyāt-i surkh (Samarqand, Dushanbe: Nashrīyāt-i dawlatī-’i Tājīkistān, 1927), 22. All ellipses are from the original. Rūdakī and Daqīqī were 9th–10th-century poets who composed some of the earliest extant Persian verse in Central Asia; in the late 10th–early 11th century, Firdawsī built on Daqīqī’s work to write the preeminent Persian epic, the Shāhnāmah. Bū-‘Alī Sīnā, born near Bukhara, was one of the most important philosophers of the mediaeval Islamic and Christian world. The inclusion of Ḥāfiz̤ is surprising, as he wrote in the 14th century. Parentheses are from the original. Lakhuti, “Doklad G.A. Lakhuti o literature Tadzhikskoǐ SSR,” in Pervyǐ vsesoiuznyǐ s’ezd sovetskikh pisateleǐ 1934: stenograficheskiǐ otchet (Moscow: “Khudozhestvennai͡ a literatura,” 1934), 142. John Perry, “Script and Scripture: The Three Alphabets of Tajik Persian, 1927–1997,” Journal of Central Asian Studies 2, no. 1 (1997): 2–18; John Perry, “Tajik Literature: Seventy Years Is Longer Than the Millennium,” World Literatures Today 70, no. 3 (1996): 571–88. Lāhūtī, “Īrān va udabā’-i ān,” 49. On that process in Iran, Wali Ahmadi, “The Institution of Persian Literature and the Genealogy of Bahar’s ‘Stylistics’,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 31, no. 2 (2004): 141–52. Following the height of Turkish linguistic nationalization in the early 1930s, Persian literature was welcomed back in the 1940s as almost the exclusive “Eastern” component of the Ministry of Education series of “translations from world literature.” By 1950, the government had published translations of Firdawsī, Ḥāfiz̤ , Jāmī, Niẓāmī, Sa‘dī, and Rūmī, Translations from World Literature Published by the Turkish Ministry of Education (Ankara: Millî eǧitim basımevi, 1950), 8.

Bibliography NEL sources Aǐnī, Sadriddin. Kulliët, vol. 11, bk. 1. Dushanbe: Irfon, 1969. Akbulut, Erden, ed. Millî Azadlık Savaşı Anıları: Affan Hikmet, Ahmed Cevat Emre, Kazım Kip, Cemile Selim Nevşirvanova, Ziynetullah Nevşirvanov. Istanbul: Tüstav, 2006. ‘Aliyūf, [‘Ayn]. ‘Ömar Xayyām ve rubā‘īyātı. Introduction by “Z.N.” Moscow: T͡ Sentralnoe vostochnoe izdatel’stvo, 1924. Bonu, Ts. “Ëddoshthoi mukhtasar.” Sharqi surkh 12 (1957): 79. Cevdet, Abdullah. Dil’mestî-i Mevlânâ ve Ġazzâlî’de marifetüllah: ruba‘iyât-i Ġazzâlî, Örfî’de şiir ve irfân. Istanbul: Orḥanîye maṭba‘ası, 1921. Cevdet, Abdullah. “Ömer Hayyâm.” İctihat 91 (1914/1329 hq.): 2031–6. Daniş, Hüseyin. Medayin harabeleri. Introduction by Rıza Tevfik. Istanbul: Cem’i kitaphanesi, 1912. Daniş, Hüseyin. Rubâ‘iyât-i Ömer Ḫayyâm. Istanbul: İḳbal, 1927. Davronov, S. Vazni ash‘ori Abulqosim Lohutī. Dushanbe: Donish, 1974. Fikret, Tevfiḳ. Muntaḫab-ı parçalar. Edited by ‘Ali-Ejdar Sa‘idzade. Moscow: TSentral’noe vostochnoe izdatel’stvo, 1923. Fiṭrat. Bīdil bir majlis-dä. Moscow: T͡ Sentralnoe vostochnoe izdatel’stvo, 1924.

Persian canons of the revolutionary press 209 Gürkan, Kazım İsmail. Darülfünun grevi. Istanbul: Harman Yayıncılık, 1971. Hikmet, Nâzım. Konuşmalar. Edited by Güven Turan. Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2002. Hikmet, Nâzım. Kuvâyi milliye. Edited by Güven Turan. Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2002. Hikmet, Nâzım. Sanat, edebiyat, kültür, dil. Edited by Güven Turan. Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2002. ‘Ishqī, Riz̤ ā Mīrzādah. Kullīyāt-i muṣavvar. Edited by ‘Alī Akbar Mushīr Salīmī. Tehran: Chāpkhānah-i zībā, 1965/1344 hs. Jamshīdī, Ismā‘īl. Ḥasan Muqaddam va “Ja‘far-Khān az farang āmadah.” Oakland, CA: Jahan, 1984. Katalog izdatel’stva “Vsemirnaia literatura” pri Narodnom komissariate po prosveshcheniiu. Introduction by Maxim Gorky. St. Petersburg: Vsemirnaia literatura, 1919. Lāhūtī, Abū al-Qāsim. Īrānnāmah. Istanbul: Shams, 1920/1338 hq. Lāhūtī, Abū al-Qāsim. Rubā‘īyāt. Moscow: TSentral’noe izdatel’stvo narodov SSSR, 1924. Lāhūtī, [Abū al-Qāsim]. Adabīyāt-i surkh. Samarqand, Dushanbe: Nashrīyāt-i dawlatī-’i Tājīkistān, 1927. Lāhūtī, Abū al-Qāsim, Nâzım Hikmet, and Ziynätullāh Nawşirvān. Krimil. Moscow: TSentral’noe vostochnoe izdatel’stvo, 1923. Lāhūtī, Abū al-Qāsim and Ḥasan Muqaddam, eds. Pārs 1–6 (1921/1339 hq.). Lakhuti, G.A. “Doklad G.A. Lakhuti o literature Tadzhikskoǐ SSR.” In Pervyǐ vsesoiuznyǐ s’ezd sovetskikh pisateleǐ 1934: stenograficheskiǐ otchet , 141–5. Moscow: Khudozhestvennai͡ a literatura, 1934. Lohutī, Abulqosim. Devon. Moscow: Nashriëti davlatīi adabiëti badeī, 1939. Lohutī, Abulqosim. Kulliët, vol. 6, edited by M. Mirshakar, R. Hoshim, et al. Dushanbe: Nashriëti davlatīi Tojikiston, 1963. Nafīsī, Sa‘īd. Bih rivāyat-i Sa‘īd Nafīsī: khāṭirāt-i siyāsī, adabī, javānī. Edited by ‘Alī-Riz̤ ā I‘tiṣām. Tehran: Nashr-i markaz, 2002/1384 sh. No-Rouze, Ali [pseud. Ḥasan Muqaddam]. “Omar Khayyam.” Messages d’orient 1 (1926): 149. Ol’denburg, S.F. et al. Literatura vostoka. St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Vsemirnaia Literatura, 1919. Osmanova, Z.G. and M.Sh. Shukurov, eds. Ocherk istoriǐ Tadzhikskoi Sovetskoi literatury. Moskva: Izd. Akademii nauk SSSR, 1964. Özdemir, Emin and Mehmet Yusüf Çelik. “Osmanlı’dan Cumhuriyet’e Türkleri Konulu Haber ve Makaleler Bibliografyası (1908–1923).” Turkish Studies 8, no. 11 (2013): 247–77. Sāsānī, Khān Malak. Yādbūdhā-yi sifārat-i Istānbūl. Tehran: Sahāmī, 1966/1345 hs. Schetchikova, Tat’iana Aleksandrovna. “Tvorcheskaia biografiia Abul’kasima Lakhuti: nachal’nyi etap.” Thesis, Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow, 2010. Shafī‘ī Kadkanī, Muḥammad Riz̤ ā. Advār-i shi‘r-i fārsī az mashrūṭiyat tā suqūṭ-i salṭanat. Tehran: Ṭūs, 1980/1359 hs. Shīriyān, Muḥammad Ḥusayn. Tārīkh-i maṭbū‘āt-i ustān-i Kirmānshāh. Kirmanshah: Idārah-i kull-i farhang va irshād-i islāmī-’i ustān-i Kirmānshāh, 2013/1392 hs. Shklovskii, Viktor. “Gasem Lakhuti.” Literaturnaia Gazeta, October 15, 1937, 5. Vâ-Nû (Ahmet Vâlâ Nureddin). “Benim görüşüm: Farisî’nin ilk modern şairi.” Haber Akşam Postası, February 15, 1937. Vâ-Nû (Ahmet Vâlâ Nureddin). Bu dünyadan Nâzım geçti. Istanbul: Cem yayınevi, 1980.

EL sources Abdirashidov, Zaynabidin. “Known and Unknown Fiṭrat: Early Convictions and Activities.” Acta Slavica Iaponica 39 (2016): 103–18.

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Ahmad, Aijaz. “The Communist Manifesto and ‘World Literature’.” Social Scientist 28, no. 7/8 (2000): 3–30. Ahmadi, Wali. “The Institution of Persian Literature and the Genealogy of Bahar’s ‘Stylistics’.” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 31, no. 2 (2004): 141–52. Alkan, Necati. “‘The Eternal Enemy of Islām’: Abdullah Cevdet and the Baha’i Religion.” Bulletin of SOAS 68, no. 1 (2005): 1–20. Allworth, Edward. Evading Reality: The Devices of ‘Abdalrauf Fitrat, Modern Central Asian Reformist. Leiden: Brill, 2002. Auerbach, Erich. “Philology and Weltliteratur.” Translated by Maire and Edward Said. The Centennial Review 13, no. 1 (1969): 1–17. Balakian, Peter. “Poet from Kars: Yeghishe Charents and Armenia’s Modern Age.” In Vise and Shadow: Essays on the Lyric Imagination, Poetry, Art, and Culture, 94–119. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Berk, Özlem. “The Turkish Language Reform and Intralingual Translation.” In Tradition, Tension and Translation in Turkey, edited by Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar, Saliha Paker, et al., 165–80. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2015. Biegstraaten, Jos. “Khayyam, Omar xi. Impact on Literature and Society in the West.” Encyclopaedia Iranica. www.iranicaonline.org/articles/khayyam-xi. Last updated December 15, 2008. Brophy, David. Uyghur Nation: Reform and Revolution on the Russia-China Frontier. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Browne, Edward Granville. “Yet More Light on ‘Umar-i Khayyām.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (1899): 409–16. Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Translated by M.B. DeBevoise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Chelkowski, Peter. “Edward G. Browne’s Turkish Connexion.” Bulletin of SOAS 49, no. 1 (1986): 25–34. Clinton, Jerome. “The Madaen Qasida of Xaqani Sharvani I.” Edebiyat 1 (1976): 153–70. Clinton, Jerome. “The Madaen Qasida of Xaqani Sharvani, II: Xaqani and al-Buhturi.” Edebiyat 2 (1977): 191–206. Crews, Robert D. Afghan Modern: The History of a Global Nation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. Djagalov, Rossen. “The People’s Republic of Letters: Towards a Media History of TwentiethCentury Socialist Internationalism.” PhD diss., Yale, New Haven, CT, 2011. Epstein, Mikhail. After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture. Translated by Anesa Miller-Pogacar. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995. Ertürk, Nergis. Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Göksu, Saime and Edward Timms. Romantic Communist: The Life and Works of Nâzım Hikmet. London: Hurst & Co., 1999. Gould, Rebecca. “World Literature as a Communal Apartment: Semyon Lipkin’s Ethics of Translational Difference.” Translation and Literature 21 (2012): 402–21. Groys, Boris. The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond. Translated by Charles Rougle. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. Hanaway, William L. “Is There a Canon of Persian Poetry?” Edebiyât 4, no. 1 (1993): 3–12. Hanioğlu, M. Şükrü. “Blueprints for a Future Society: Late Ottoman Materialists on Science, Religion, and Art.” In Late Ottoman Society: The Intellectual Legacy, edited by Elisabeth Özdalga, 37–64. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005.

Persian canons of the revolutionary press 211 Hikmet, Nâzım. Rubaiyat. Translated by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk. Providence, RI: Copper Beech Press, 1985. Hodgkin, Samuel. “Revolutionary Springtimes: Reading Soviet Persian/Tajik Poetry, from Ghazal to Lyric.” In Iranian Languages and Literatures of Central Asia: From the 18th Century to the Present, edited by Matteo De Chiara and Evelin Grassi, 273–305. Paris: Association pour l’Avancement des Études Iraniennes, 2015. Hodgson, Marshall G.S. The Venture of Islam, vol. 2: The Expansion of Islam in the Middle Periods. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974. ‘Iqbal, ‘Allama Muhammad. Bedil in the Light of Bergson. Edited by Tehsin Feraqi. Lahore: Iqbal Academy Pakistan, 1988. ‘Iqbal, ‘Allama Muhammad. The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam. Introduction by Javed Majeed. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012. İrem, Nazım. “Bergson and Politics: Ottoman-Turkish Encounters with Innovation.” The European Legacy 16, no. 7 (2011): 873–82. Jabbari, Alexander. “The Making of Modernity in Persianate Literary History.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 36, no. 3 (2016): 418–34. Jazayery, Mohammad Ali. “Aḥmad Kasravī and the Controversy Over Persian Poetry: 1. Kasravī’s Analysis of Persian Poetry.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 4 (1973): 190–203. Karimi-Hakkak, Ahmad. Recasting Persian Poetry: Scenarios of Poetic Modernity in Iran. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1995. Khalid, Adeeb. “Backwardness and the Quest for Civilization: Early Soviet Central Asia in Comparative Perspective.” Slavic Review 65, no. 2 (2006): 231–51. Khalid, Adeeb. Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015. Khalid, Adeeb. The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Kinra, Rajeev. “Make it Fresh: Time, Tradition, and Indo-Persian Literary Modernity.” In Time, History and the Religious Imaginary in South Asia, edited by Anne Murphy, 12–39. New York: Routledge, 2011. Kirasirova, Masha. “The Eastern International: The ‘Domestic East’ and the Foreign East’ in Soviet-Arab Relations, 1917–1968.” PhD diss., New York University, New York, 2014. Konuk, Kader. East West Mimesis: Auerbach in Turkey. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. Köroğlu, Erol. Ottoman Propaganda and Turkish Identity: Literature in Turkey During World War I. London: I.B. Tauris, 2007. Lewis, Geoffrey. The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Lienau, Annette Damayanti. “Reframing Vernacular Culture on Arabic Fault Lines: Bamba, Senghor, and Sembene’s Translingual Legacies in French West Africa.” PMLA 130, no. 2 (2015): 419–29. Marashi, Afshin. Nationalizing Iran: Culture, Power, and the State, 1870–1940. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008. Meyer, James H. Turks across Empires: Marketing Muslim Identity in the Russian-Ottoman Borderlands, 1856–1914. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Nochlin, Linda. “The Imaginary Orient.” In The Politics of Vision: Essays on NineteenthCentury Art and Society, 38–9. New York: Harper & Row, 1989. Oushakine, Sergei Alex. “The Flexible and the Pliant: Disturbed Organisms of Soviet Modernity.” Cultural Anthropology 19, no. 3 (2004): 392–428.

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Parsinejad, Iraj. A History of Literary Criticism in Iran, 1866–1951: Literary Criticism in the Works of Enlightened Thinkers of Iran: Akhundzade, Kermani, Malkom, Talebof, Maraghe’i, Kasravi and Hedayat. Bethesda, MD: IBEX, 2003. Perry, John. “Script and Scripture: The Three Alphabets of Tajik Persian, 1927–1997.” Journal of Central Asian Studies 2, no. 1 (1997): 2–18. Perry, John. “Tajik Literature: Seventy Years Is Longer than the Millennium.” World Literatures Today 70, no. 3 (1996): 571–88. Pishbin, Shaahin. “Forugh Farrokhzad and the Persian Literary Canon.” Iran Namag 1, no. 4 (2017): 24–51. Prawer, S.S. Karl Marx and World Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976. Pritchett, Frances W. Nets of Awareness: Urdu Poetry and Its Critics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Pue, Sean. I Too Have Some Dreams: N.M. Rashed and Modernism in Urdu Poetry. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. Rannit, Aleksis. “Iran in Russian Poetry.” The Slavic and East European Journal 17, no. 3 (1973): 265–72. Rastegar, Kamran. Literary Modernity between the Middle East and Europe: Textual Transactions in Nineteenth-Century Arabic, English, and Persian Literatures. London: Routledge, 2007. Ravandi-Fadai, Lana. “‘Red Mecca’: The Communist University for Laborers of the East (KUTV): Iranian Scholars and Students in Moscow in the 1920s and 1930s.” Iranian Studies 48, no. 5 (2015): 713–27. Robin, Régine. Socialist Realism: An Impossible Aesthetic. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992. Schwartz, Kevin. “The Local Lives of a Transregional Poet: ‘Abd al-Qâder Bidel and the Writing of Persianate Literary History.” Journal of Persianate Studies 9, no. 1 (2016): 83–106. Schild, Kathryn Douglas. “Between Moscow and Baku: National Literatures at the 1934 Congress of Soviet Writers.” PhD diss., UC-Berkeley, 2010. Seyed-Gohrab, Ali Asghar, ed. The Great ‘Umar Khayyām: A Global Reception of the Rubáiyát. Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2012. Sheffield, Daniel J. “Iran, the Mark of Paradise or the Land of Ruin? Approaches to Reading Two Pārsi Zoroastrian Travelogues.” In On Wonders of Land and Sea, edited by Sunil Sharma and Roberta Micallef, 14–43. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Shissler, A. Holly. Between Two Empires: Ahmet Aǧaoǧlu and the New Turkey. London: I.B. Tauris, 2002. Swietochowski, Tadeusz. Russia and Azerbaijan: A Borderland in Transition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Tavakoli-Targhi, Mohamad. Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism and Historiography. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave, 2001. Tikku, Girdhari and Alireza Anushiravani, eds. A Conversation with Modern Persian Poets. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2004. Translations from World Literature Published by the Turkish Ministry of Education. Ankara: Millî eǧitim basımevi, 1950. Vejdani, Farzin. Making History in Iran: Education, Nationalism, and Print Culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015.

8

Pneumatics of Blackness Nāṣir Taqvā’ī’s Bād-i Jin and modernity’s anthropological drive Parisa Vaziri

Thrashing waves disrupt a calm sea in the first few seconds of Naṣir Taqvā’ī’s Bād-i Jin (Wind of Jinn 1969), an enigmatic 20-minute black-and-white ethnographic documentary shot on 16 mm that chronicles a zar spirit ritual in the harbor of Bandar Lingih.1 The sound of the swells continues to rise and fall: “Man’s tolerance is due to the amount of pain he bears. But when pain becomes unbearable, Southern blacks perform zar,” utters modern Iranian poet Ahmad Shāmlū (1925–2000) in a Persian voiceover whose lyricism this English translation fails to achieve. Taqvā’ī’s initial choice of medium shot and slightly high angle intensifies the disorienting pull of tall waves spraying the camera lens, even though the shot remains constant, anchored to the deep tenor of Shāmlū’s somber voice. The tropological traction of the sea, as filmmaker John Akomfrah notes,2 bears a particular heaviness in the black filmic imagination, intimating African peoples’ violent forced migrations throughout the world since antiquity. Caused by winds blowing over the water’s surface, the initial waves in Bād-i Jin thus embed layers of the film’s theme in its very first shot: the “infidel winds” that menace the ahl-i havā3 and spoil the Iranian landscape; their connection to the history of African slavery in Iran; and the relationship between a burgeoning anthropology and modernist form. The superimposition of Shāmlū’s poetic verse onto the ethnographic images imbues these tropes – the afflicting winds, their victims, and the terrestrial and psychic trauma of slavery allegorized in the image of waves – with a softly historical connection incommensurable with historiographic testimony or closure, just as it complicates the traditional ethnographic procedure, appearing to fulfill instead the fantasy of an experimental ethnography that is also an alternative, if warped and benighted historiography.4 Dilating Taqvā’ī’s film in context thus reveals a complex of divergent, dizzying levels of meanings and tensions. Through a reading of the film that magnetizes contiguous artifacts and trends, I explore Bād-i Jin’s aesthetic procedures for pursuing and producing what has been canonized as a modernist form – the Iranian New Wave film – through a distinctly ethnographic gaze that refracts and abstracts historical information. In doing so, I position the film as an exemplary moment within a larger movement undergirding the co-constitution of Iranian literary and filmic modernity5 and the development of Iranian anthropology.6 This exemplarity pivots around a question about the

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aesthetic dimension of historicity: namely, its ethical implications. Focus on the anthropology of African slave descendants in Taqvā’ī’s documentary, finally and crucially, underlines a doubt about the concept of the modern as an adequate heuristic for comprehending the meaning of historical forms. Although its inspiration from Italian Neorealismo and the French Nouvelle Vague receives ample emphasis in film studies of the Iranian Mawj-i naw, it is no exaggeration to state that the New Wave movement developed out of and concomitantly with an ethnographic impulse that was particular to the Iranian intellectual environment of the early to mid-20th century. While highly informative scholars of Iranian film certainly intuit the magnitude of such impulses, the various but often stringently formalist, encyclopedic or ideological approaches to the study of Iranian film have so far prevented a deeper understanding of the possible meanings of this anthropological impulse to come to fruition. Moreover, the unexplored bond between ethnographic film and ethnographic literature in the early to mid-20th century leaves dormant an entire genealogy of literary-filmic connections that would clarify an understanding of Iranian literary modernity as deeply ethnographic.7 Ethnography, as we know, is perennially troubled by its history of obscuring a position dissymmetry that is its condition of possibility.8 It is also beholden to certain naturalized assumptions about the meaning of the human whose connection to hierarchized difference informs the entire history of the concept of race. It is within, through and to these interred and uncomfortable connections that any iteration of modernity – including its aesthetic dimensions – finds itself responsive. Mid-20th century ethnographic filmmaking in Iran by Iranian filmmakers grows out of a tension-riddled history colored by the Cold War.9 Although British, Russian and American embassies all vied between 1945 and 1950 to distribute political propaganda through mobile cinema units situated in Iranian cities and towns, only the United States developed direct involvement in locally producing films and training Iranians in film production, leaving in its wake a “nucleus” of Iranian directors whose work would later flourish under patronage of the newly developed Ministry of Culture and Arts and National Iranian Radio and Television under Muhamad Rizā Shāh Pahlavī’s regime.10 Such varicose, politically ambiguous connections attest to the fraught relation between the institutional support for “salvage ethnography” (a form of cultural preservation for indigenous forms of life deemed to be decaying in the throes of modernization), anti-Communist sentiment, and the ongoing project of constructing an Iranian nationalism that would buttress the country’s international image to stimulate foreign investment and tourism, while curtaining dire internal structural inequalities and mitigating through myriad distractions the unextraordinary durability of royal corruption.11 For example, various measures taken by Iranian governmental powers during the 20th century to bolster institutional anthropology forcefully belied ongoing efforts to homogenize all ethnic tribes and instances of socio-geographical fragmentation and antagonism into a unified Persian identity that would surrender to administrative hold.12 Beyond its formidable aesthetic achievements, Furūgh Faruḵhzād’s abysmally melancholic Khānah Sīyāh Ast (The House is Black 1962), often cited as precursor of the Iranian New Wave, was in essence an ethnographic documentary

Pneumatics of Blackness 215 of a small leper colony in northern Iran.13 Its ethnographic undercurrent is not only reconcilable with its experimentalism but constitutive of it, for avant-gardeism and documentary, surrealism and ethnography have historically shared common roots;14 the fact that the very earliest films were ethnographic works lends further support to this claim.15 The figure of the primitive Other incarnates modern human alienation, because the category of the primitive denotes childhood, a premodern intimacy with nature, innocence from mass industrialized culture and an altered relation to pain.16 In practice, the alienation of a less figural, more literal Other lent material substance to this fantasy.17 In Taqvā’ī’s work this figure is the black slave described by a poetics of abstraction. Chronicler of Iranian ethnography Humāyūn Imāmī qualifies this period to emphasize that most of these mid-century pieces did not quite adhere to the strictures of ethnographic documentary;18 Hamid Naficy similarly coins the term “ethnographic-lite” to signal the fact that although many of the films of the period communicated with ethnographic themes, none of the filmmakers attached to the moniker were seriously affiliated with a coherent and institutionalized anthropology. Poetic realism, a favored term among critics for describing works such a Faruḵzād’s, captures this detachment from scientificity which Iranian ethnographic films never claimed with any earnestness in the first place.19 Such detachment could not, however, fully filter out the dubious effects of even scientificity’s aesthetically charged emulation. Though Taqvā’ī’s film appears, at a superficial level, to take on some of the architectonic postures of the kinds of ethnographic film outlined by scholars of the field,20 specifically one long sequence shot from a hole in the wall of the zar ceremony room,21 upon closer scrutiny, strict filmic continuity never materializes, suggesting a reluctant disbelief in neutral archiving and expressing a position closer to what Simon Gikandi and others see as the defining feature of geographically disparate modernisms: a desire to “merge with the other.”22 This impulse finds expression in Taqvā’ī’s own remarks about his strange experiences in Lingih and release of conviction in transmission of verisimilitude while filming there: “In Bād-i Jin I let go of absolute objectivity and allowed my presence as a filmmaker to be felt.”23 The film, as critic Javād Mujābī noted at the time (albeit with the exigency of attributing a value judgment) elicits attention to its own strange relation, or irreverence for traditional narrative temporality, the hallmark of derealization so central to modernist style.24 If the visual description of zar ceremonial culture occupies the focal point of Bād-i Jin, the audiovisual compilation of nebulous messages that precede this second, more stationary half of the film disquiet expectations for ethnographic precision. This is true especially because of the degraded quality of the film’s preservation, which deprives images of sharpness and shape. The grainy shot of ships docked ashore (Figure 8.1) builds the theme of maritimity incited by the initial scene of waves, and the various connections to esotericism, the inhuman, and violence it conjures: “The curses of the departed kaffir jin winds in the south are many,” Shāmlū narrates as the camera draws in focus on three dhows, while waves slap a stone dock; the whistle of wind and waves infiltrate a break in the voiceover. A moribund spectrality haunts the film from start to finish; music punctuates its points

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Figure 8.1 Still from Bād-i Jin

of intensification. The melancholic drawl of a folk acapella accompanies a twominute montage following a woman kneeling before a tombstone. The camera chooses arbitrary objects on which to rest: a ceramic pot, the open windows of an abandoned mosque, a minaret, a close-up of a crack on the wall. Bād-i Jin’s piecemeal transition to the zar ritual occurs through a simple drum beat, as film shots remain oriented toward exteriors. Following a veiled figure through a sandy landscape the camera rests on a disfigured tree, bent, as if due to the wind, at an extreme angle: “This tree at the corner of the night is a jin hive; and in the South there are many jin-stricken. Behind this desert-town is another,” recites Shāmlū, as the camera cuts to a brick fortress in the distance and the drum’s rhythm fades into whistling wind. “And behind that desert town there’s a holy house,” he continues, the camera settling on an extreme long shot of a dome structure. Panning right toward a shadow, the frame concludes its movement with a close-up of a wall. Shāmlū ends his prelude, “The ahl-i havā in the room behind this wall rejects the jin from his body.” The camera’s subtle actions phantasmatically suggest traversal of time and space, translating exteriors into interiors and recapitulating the prototext’s findings: that the ahl-i havā imagine winds to occupy the most interior corridors of the human body. The drumming picks up again as the camera cuts to two tambūr hanging from the wall of a room, and then to an obscure painting on another wall, slowly tilting down to reveal the heads of a group of seated women veiled in black and clapping in time to the rhythm. The camera stabilizes at a downward tilt, contributing to the slightly voyeuristic, disorienting quality of the scene. Though Naṣir Taqvā’ī made at least thirteen documentaries throughout his early career, including a second, more realist ethnographic documentary about zar, Mūsīqī-’i Jūnūb: Zar (Music of the South: Zar 1970) discussed below,

Pneumatics of Blackness 217 Bād-i Jin is worth singling out as exemplary. First, it foregrounds the anthropological unconscious25 sustaining the robust connection between ethnographic filmmaking and the Iranian New Wave,26 a connection whose implications I draw out further below when I turn to his first feature film, Ārāmish dar Huzūr-i Dīgarān (Tranquility in the Presence of Others 1970). Second, Bād-i Jin was itself foundational to the surge in Iranian ethnographic film, inspiring a slew of religion and spirituality-themed ethnographic filmmaking that would come to follow it, such as Abulqāsim Rizā’ī’s film on the hajj to Mecca, Khānah-’i Khūdā (The House of God 1968); Manūchihr Tayyāb’s Iran: Sarzamīn-i Adīān (Iran: The Land of Religions 1970); Manūchihr Tabarī’s Lahazātī Chand bā Darāvish-i Qādirī (A Few Moments with Qadiri Dervishes 1973); Parvīz Kīmīāvī’s Yā Zamin-i Ahū (O’ Deer Savior 1971), and Āṣghar Āṣgharīān’s Shabīh-i Shahādat (The Taziyeh of Martyrdom 1976). Ghulām Husayn Tāhirīdūst’s Azar Surkh (Red Fire 1971), also about the spirit healing ritual zar, and directly inspired by Taqvā’ī’s work, would be deemed the “Iranian Les Maîtres Fous” by his mentor, Jean Rouch.27 Third, Bād-i Jin attests to the potent relation between the history of modern Iranian film and literature, as is reflected in the close resemblance between Ghulām-Husayn Sā‘idī’s 1966 ethnographic monograph Ahl-i Havā and Taqvā’ī’s filmic rendition, and then in Taqvā’ī’s subsequent adaptation of another of Sā‘idī’s works for his first feature film.28 Fourth, it romanticizes a founding anthropological object (spirit possession and trance), quintessentializing a crucial aspect of anthropology’s connection to modernity’s racialized philosophical preoccupations regarding the figures of subjectivity and interiority. And finally, Bād-i Jin participates in a long history of using blackness as an allegory for universal suffering while ultimately naturalizing the history of African slavery, suppressing its role in modernity’s material, epistemological and aesthetic formations.29 In this sense the film maintains the kind of “idealized knowledge” of slavery characteristic of Middle Eastern societies30 and reflected in the paucity of historiographical sources for Iran’s long history of it.31 And yet, if this idealization bears roots in a paucity of historiography, I am interested in the ways in which the evolution of Taqvā’ī’s oeuvre demonstrates that idealization exceeds mere absence of information. As I will show in my reading of Taqvā’ī’s more realist Mūsīqī-i Jūnūb: Zar (Music of the South: Zar), which chronicles an identical phenomenon but prefers limpid, rather than tenebrous articulation of fact, abstraction and artistic mediation perform enigmatic processual functions for historical transmission that are both necessary and aporetic. Necessary because “pure fact” is always already abstract, conditioned by the possibility of its communication, and thus, dependent upon language in its broadest sense. But because the boundary between abstraction and erasure cannot in advance be adjudicated, its ethical implications generate boundless turmoil. Appearing just three years after Ghulām Ḥusayn Sāʻidī’s ethnographic monograph Ahl-i Havā and Taqi Modarressi’s32 essay “The Zar Cult in Southern Iran,” Taqvā’ī’s documentary on zar forms part of a mid-20th century surrealist and anthropological infatuation with trance and possession that both transcends and is yet highly specific to the Iranian frame.33 In fact, Taqvā’ī accompanied Sāʻidī for

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portions of his fieldwork, acting as a kind of conduit for southern culture, with which he was familiar because of his own upbringing in the capital of Iran’s southwestern province of Khūzistān – Abādān. Zar names34 the belief in rambunctious and malignant spirits that circulate in the intestines of humans and penetrate the skeletal frame, as well as the associated rituals “meant to shake the spirits from the skeleton.”35 Because variations on zar are found throughout Africa36 and primarily amongst African slave descendants in the Middle East, this ritual is thought to constitute a trace of Sub-Saharan and Indian Ocean World slavery, for which concrete archival material is not only chaotically dispersed and often absent, but for some, chronically undesirable.37 Despite the many interpretations of zar throughout the Middle East and even within the south of Iran itself,38 what is common to the tradition is the ubiquitous presence of a large drum called duhul.39 As Sāʻidī details in his ethnography, this particular drum awakens the wind spirits from the body of the afflicted40 and is also evidence of the celebratory, community-oriented character of zar. The introduction to the rhythmic drumming of duhul in Taqvā’ī’s film accompanies Shāmlū’s first insinuation of the zar ritual as a form of covert community: “One ‘hava’ girl, bamboo in hand, wanders around Lingih, searching for jinn-stricken to gather.” Among the features the zar cult in Iran shares with other Middle Eastern countries is its emphasis on exclusivity and secrecy, which contrasts with the public accessibility of zar ceremonies practiced in African regions.41 The distinction strengthens G.P. Makris’s thesis that the exclusivity unique to zar in the Middle East is related to the feeling of subordination those who engage in these practices feel in general society, tying its presence to the experience of slavery, dishonor and exclusion from mainstream society that slave legacy brings with it. Though Africans have not been the only enslaved people in Iran, their discernible difference from the majority of Iranians bears the most palpable mark of this slave legacy.42 More significantly, the global history of African slavery throughout time and space, its integrality to the emergence of modernity on a planetary scale, encrypts or hieroglyphs a relation between blackness and slavery that undermines the purported privilege and self-evidence of numerical logic. The techniques Taqvā’ī employs to illustrate zar for the viewer suggest why it might be the consistent object of anthropological fascination: possession here visually indexes the Man’s modern philosophical problem of the meaning of interiority and exteriority (how to define the self or individual in relation to the body and to the surrounding world; how to formulate a theory of subjectivity and objectivity). Evoking the absence of a distinction, the absence of a will and, “by extension, the figure of the slave,”43 Taqvā’ī’s film operates the thematic of slavery to elaborate modern concerns about human alienation in an increasingly industrialized and nascently modernizing Iran. In the meantime, the sociohistorical experience of slavery, and all that is encompassed in the cultural distribution of zar with relation to the experience of slavery in Southwest Asia, is itself muffled or discarded as a problem for or of Iranian modernity. In its place, the abstraction of the slave’s suffering (interchangeable in the film with “Man’s” suffering) is exalted into form, abstraction passing through the evacuation of subjectivity or the

Pneumatics of Blackness 219 visualization of an interiority free for claim. This exaltation, which I detail below, continues to accrue remoter levels of abstraction through Taqvā’ī’s subsequent work. In the first few minutes after the drumming achieves uniform pace and conjoins the participants’ vocal chanting, the camera draws close to the ahl-i havā – the afflicted man in white turban, slumped in the corner of the room, his eyes closed and head tilted forward as if asleep. As the camera draws in even closer, the man swerves his head from side to side in collusion with the rhythm. Cryptically responding, both the music and camera suddenly cut away from the scene to an image of a broken ceramic window, revealing darkness between the shattered pattern of its intricate grill, and evoking nighttime with the sound of crickets. When the camera cuts back to the drooping man in the corner, the diegetic music of duhul and singing recommence; a second cut away with the same strange crickets effect this time reveals a similar radius top window pane, but bare and grill-less – opening onto black empty space, suggesting absence in the place of where character depth, or interiority, might otherwise be elaborated (as in the traditional shotreverse-shot which simulates dialogue between characters or effects an imagistic monologue through flashback or free association). As the camera cuts back to the man and the zar ceremony again, the ahl-i havā awakes, strokes his face and opens his eyes with slight surprise, indicating the arousal of zar in his body. When rhythm and music suddenly die and Shāmlū’s voice returns, the ahl-i havā halts his erratic dancing, and the participants quiet down. Everyone remains seated, as if attending to Shāmlū’s ethereal voice: The winds have been attributed to the blacks from Africa. Prior to the arrival of the blacks for the cost of dates [the Persian reads literally, bīsh az an kih siyāh bih bahā-‘i khurmah biyāyad], the winds were there on the border of the coast; but, like the vital force sustaining a sick body, oil under the seafloor, and intelligence in the mind of a savage, it remained unrecognized. The black tradition, with its experience of hunger, detected the resemblance and brought healing. Gratuitous African labor peaked in the Persian Gulf in the late 19th century due to the growing demand for commodities like dates and pearls for global markets,44 but African slaves manned the fields of the Iranian South long before that. References to black slaves cultivating sugar cane in Khūzistān, or Sūsa, date back to the Sasanian period.45 The awkward “bahā-‘i khurmah” refers to this deep historical sedimentation; its untranslateability reflects Shamlū’s poeticization of a buried historical fact. The placement of this narrative fragment toward the end of the film imbues this moment with climactic sense, as if emphasizing the ambivalence of such poetics. When the music ends a final time, it is unclear why; the participants communicate in a cacophony of Gulf dialect, which would have been inscrutable to the majority of Iranian audiences. One of the afflicted appears cured, as he stands up to embrace his fellow ahl-i havā. The other one remains covered, his hands bracing his head, and begins screaming while the camera cuts back to the initial ocean

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waves of the film. Though this would seem like a plausible ending, imbuing the film with a satisfying circular structure, the camera returns once more to the ahl-i havā, but this time, with the acapella music first heard during an early montage sequence. It is not clear if the music emanates from within the ceremony room, or is meant to evoke another invisible space from the past. The abrupt and inscrutable ending, as if “cut with scissors,” Mujabī wrote in his review, draws a thin yet palpable line between viewers and filmed subjects.46 The arguably erratic linguistic, mental and physical behavior the film displays allows the Persian-speaking spectator to disidentify, drawing a limit to and for the modern Iranian national identity undergirding the very project of salvage ethnography, and the ethnographiable referents – patois-speaking (and therefore originally nonIranian) port inhabitants the film chronicles.

Fīlmfārsī and Mawj-i naw The theme of madness that sustains Taqvā’ī’s focus on the psychic contagion and terrestrial destruction of African-transmitted zar penetrates his contemporaneous and subsequent work, even as Africa dissolves in the repetitious movement of this abstraction. Madness reinvigorates Iranian cinema, minting a new stage of filmmaking which would later become recognizable under the too capacious term, the Iranian New Wave, Mawj-i naw. Criticism of the New Wave generally clashes over the precise definition of the movement, whether the movement existed in fact or in a fantasy fulfilled retroactively by critics: “Reviewing the works on the New Wave, either before or after the Revolution, in English or Farsi, we find a sort of confused, disordered, and ambiguous perception,” writes Jāhid.47 In comments, Ibrāhīm Gulistān, whose Khisht va Āyinah (1965) many critics consider part of the movement’s inception, sometimes eschews the concept of a New Wave altogether. The lack of theoretical precision in its criticism and in its practice reflects the spontaneity, contingency and ephemerality of the Mawj-i naw, whose underlying unifying feature, if such existed, was above all resistance to the complacency and political impotence of mainstream film culture, a culture generally encompassed by the derogatory neologism fīlmfārsi.48 Taqvā’ī’s first feature film, produced and released almost simultaneously with Bād-i Jin, Ārāmish dar Hūzur-i Digarān (Tranquility in the Presence of Others 1970), breaks with the status quo of fīlmfārsi’s revered happy Hollywood ending by delving into the existential depths of human degeneration (Figure 8.2). Like Ghulām-Husayn Sāʻidī’s more famous screenplay, adapted by Dāriyūsh Mihrjui in Gav (Cow 1969) Tranquility explores mental disintegration and the funereal darkness of modernity’s alienating forces. If fīlmfārsī’s affinity for hybridized melodrama trafficked in cabaret scenes, gratuitous sexual imagery and stilted narratives, Mihrjūī and Taqvā’ī’s work were remarkably novel for the period, and, importantly, bridged by the literary figure of Sāʻidī. About a retired, recently remarried, mentally disturbed colonel who comes to visit his two daughters in the city, Tranquility derives from a short story of the same name by Sāʻidī’ collected in his 1967 anthology, Vāhamahʹhā’i bī nām va Nishān

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Figure 8.2 Still from Tranquility in the Presence of Others

(Unnameable and Invisible Fears). Like his films to come, Taqvā’ī’s feature Tranquility in the Presence of Others responds to the theme of madness in recognizably modernist ways: through figures of urban disquietude marked by a predominance of closed-form aesthetics: dark interiors, hospital corridors and nighttime, counterbalanced by foreboding outdoor scenes, such as the memorable sequence of Akbar Mishkīn (the colonel) marching along a barbed-wire fence in the midday sun, hallucinating the rhythmic music of a military salute. Two long outdoor tracking sequences outside the hospital overwhelmed by the clamor of cawing crows establishes a certain fidelity to the original text and exemplifies the extent to which, as in Bād-i Jin, landscape and interiority disquiet and translate one another. Simultaneously playing into and recoiling from the period’s demand for sexually exploitative films, the colonel’s daughters Malīhih (Parto Nouri) and Mahlaqā (Leila Baharan) live alone, command their own household, and date and sleep around.49 In Taqvā’ī’s version, the film opens with a nihilistic conversation between Mahlaqā and her boyfriend about the futility of monogamy, followed by a vivid scene of their lovemaking. The daughters exemplify the dangers of women’s liberation in the degenerate but resolute edifice of Iranian patriarchy. His aging alienates the colonel from this edifice, to which he longs to remain relevant. “Everyone would freeze in their places when the Colonel would walk in,” he tells his young wife, Manījih (Surayā Ghāsimī). “Now, even the servant doesn’t listen to me.” Patriarchy’s degeneration and its fantasized destruction of women are dramatized in the film adaptation when Malīhih commits suicide as a result of her devolution into depression after a hollow romance ends in betrayal (a somewhat radical interpretation of Sāʻidī’s less sensational ending, which is marked by a journey to an unnamed abroad). The

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film’s depiction of the infiltration of Western pop culture, the corruption and decrepitude of modern medicine practices, and the trite intellectual clashes characterizing the contemporary middle class are all carried out with a uniform white cast of Persian-speaking actors clad in European fashion and coifs. When asked why he chose Sāʻidī’s short story for his first feature-length film, Taqvā’ī admits he was attracted to the mystery inside the story, “the feeling one gets throughout the story . . . something like the ineffable.”50 That sense of the transcendent present in Ārāmish and Bād-i Jin delineates an undeniable, if unlikely, relation between them. As Taqvā’ī mentions in a 1986 interview in in the Iranian film journal Sitārih Sīnamā, Bād-i Jin was one of his “dearest” films, specifically because of the novelty of its subject and the “strangeness of its theme.”51 At a private viewing of Tranquility in 1971. Taqvā’ī discussed his intense experience of the desolation and ruination of the “jin-ridden” city of Lingih, hinting at a transmutation of atmospheric elements between the two films and affirming Taqvā’ī’s esteem of atmosphere and spatiality as the ground of art and of history: “Without atmosphere, art is meaningless. . . . Without geography there is no history. . . . The South for me is a very far-reaching geography.”52 The close temporal proximity in both films’ productions and identity of the author of both prototexts more obviously strengthens the bizarre affinity between them. Though released in 1970, Ārāmish was immediately banned upon its exhibition and a third of its footage censored;53 it thus lacked the opportunity to achieve a level of fame analogous to Cow, generally prized as the “first” New Wave film.54 If, as Jāhid observes, “the sad fate of the villager” in Cow is transposed to the family and entire society in Tranquility, the shift in setting from rural to urban sharpens a vexed disjunction between Tranquility and Taqvā’ī’s earlier work, between the New Wave film and its ethnographic supplement.55 The difference between the quality and kind of madness conjured by Bād-i Jin’s thematization of the archaic and ritualistic and Tranquility’s avail of anxiety impresses a difference in levels or depths of subjectivity. This difference in levels stands in for a spatio-temporal rupture that dissimulates the conceptual function of the modern. In both its aesthetic decisions and sobriety, Tranquility marks a distinct moment in Taqvā’ī’s oeuvre. And yet, its gravity and circumscribed social awareness, which distinguishes it from the fīlmfārsī formula of other films of the period, infects Taqvā’ī’s other feature films from this decade, such as Sadiq the Kurd (Sādiq Kurdih 1972) and The Curse (Nifrīn 1973). Both Sādiq Kurdih and Nifrin take place in southern provinces, Khūzistān and Hurmuzgān respectively, bearing subtle and conspicuous traces of Bād-i Jin’s subject: zar. In Sādiq Kurdih, for example, a woman sings a lullaby identical to the one performed during the montage scene in Bād-i Jin described above. Sādiq (Saīd Rād)’s wife has just been raped and murdered by a truck driver, launching the protagonist into a murderous rampage in search of vengeance for his wife’s true killer. Apart from literalizing it in its title, Nifrīn (Figure 8.3) elevates the theme of wind-affliction to its narrative core. In the film, a construction worker (Bihrūz Vūsūqī) moves to a small village in Bandar Abbas to help a woman (Fakhrī Khurvash) repair and repaint her home. During his visit, the worker observes the dysfunctional

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Figure 8.3 Still from Nifrīn

relationship between the woman and her husband (Jamshīd Mashayikhī), who he later learns is the son of the village’s deceased sheikh. (None of the film characters receive fictional names, so I refer to the characters through the names of their corresponding actors.) An alcoholic and opium addict, Mashayikhī, the village landowner, has squandered his family wealth, leaving his wife to manage the estate. Vūsūqī also learns that the villagers believe the landowner is “jin-zadih,” or ahl-i havā. An old man (Muhamad Taqī Kahnimūī) who lives with Mashayikhī and Khurvash remains one of the last of the village land workers. He attributes the desertion of the village by the farmers and the destruction of the village’s date palms to the malignant force of Mashayikhī’s wind-affliction. Hamoun, of whom all we ever learn is his name, has ascertained it, Kahnimūī promises. “Well it was Hamoun. He would know,” the old man tells an incredulous Vūsūqī. “He would just know . . . from the air [havā]. From the way the wind swishes through the leaves at night.” Vūsūqī laughs. The causal relationship between winds and destruction is thus borrowed and repeated from Bād-i Jin, but the winds’ African origins are displaced onto a negligible detail, a fleeting, meaningless moment in the film. Africanness, its historical relationship to the zar complex as it is framed by Bād-i Jin and its counterpart (Mūsīqī-i Jūnūb, discussed below) is absorbed by other articulations of blackness that are no less evocative and ambiguous. Throughout Nifrīn, the sheikh’s son Mashayikhī repeatedly disappoints his wife, Khurvash; his separate bedroom, where he sleeps alone, displays walls papered with images of naked women

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(evoking a detail from Taqvā’ī’s collection of eight short stories, Tābistān-i Hamān Sāl); he steals money from Vūsūqī’s bag to purchase alcohol from a group of youths playing on a dock – strangely shot, the sequence ends in a clothed orgy. The sheikh’s son commits his greatest sin when he steals the household income from his wife and disappears to smoke opium with a group of addicts. Livid upon hearing the news, Kahnimūī vows to kill and storms off, accompanied by Vūsūqī. From various long shots, the camera tracks the two men marching through a path lined with palm trees as stormy music their intensifies mission. At a point along their journey the distance between the camera and the men is cut off by the length of a thatched hut. The camera’s momentum continues, then stops on two small black boys crouched behind crates of fruit. A private and codeless color symbolism thus permeates the film. Vūsūqī paints the walls of the home white, which causes Khurvash increasing bouts of dizziness; Vūsūqī’s charisma infects her. The night he paints her bedroom he warns her not to sleep in it because of the smell of the fumes. As Khurvash gazes out over the light speckled night harbor from her makeshift outdoor bed, she gets up, trancelike, and walks toward Vūsūqī’s room. It is the first night they sleep together. In the final scene, Khurvash and Vūsūqī make love on the beach and are overcome by a wave, which covers them in mud. “Mawj!” (“Wave!”) yells Khurvash as they laugh, two blackened figures running away from the shore. Vūsūqī is suddenly shot and falls to the ground. Khurvash spots her husband sitting with a gun under a tree. She stands over him, her body and face still covered in mud, takes his rifle and strikes him in the head. After placing a coiled cloth under Vūsūqī’s head as a cushion, she walks back over the pebbly shore to her husband’s corpse. The mud on her skin now dry; it appears white instead of black. She cradles her husband’s bloody head and screams “Khudah!” (God!), ending the film. Although definite outliers, Tranquility in the Presence of Others, Sadiq the Kurd and The Curse are all haunted by and borne out of the expectations of the predominant genre of the time period. Yet their distinction is marked by an ethnographic tendency. For instance, if the cabaret trope of fīlmfārsī gathered striking force in the 1970s, Sādiq Kurdih transforms the sexualized dancing female body through an ethnographic translation. A dance sequence toward the middle of the film shows a tribal woman dancing amidst a circle of mostly male onlookers by a fire. Unlike the typical “sweeps” of the dancer’s gyrating body which Kavūsī decried in his excoriation of fīlmfārsī, the camera’s gaze assimilates an ethnographic curiosity in the detail:56 a montage of close shots showing hands drumming neutralizes the focus on the dancing body, which is fully clothed in the anomaly of a long shimmery dress. The drunk man who loudly goads on the dancer is abruptly killed by Sādiq when he leaves the circle to get more alcohol from his truck, an avenged misogyny. Taqvā’ī’s more famous and critically acclaimed Captain Sun (Nākhudā Khurshīd 1987) takes place in the same port as Bād-i Jin (Bandar Lingih), adapts tropes such as belief in jin as the source of Lingih’s destruction, thematizes creolized Persian identity in the South, pearling and the smuggling of human beings on dhows, thus resonating much more obviously with Bād-i Jin in content, if less so in style. As Malūl leads Farhan (Alī Nasīrīān) through the town to his hostel,

Pneumatics of Blackness 225 Farhan looks out over a deserted building foundation: “What calamity has befallen this city? An earthquake?” Malūl replies, “Can earthquakes cause such destruction?” The city has become a jin-hive, he whispers. One could thus single out and closely read any of Taqvā’ī’s feature films as fictionalized extensions and abstractions of Bād-i Jin. If I insist on Tranquility’s privilege, it is due to its uncanny proximity to the production of Bād-i Jin; because it marks another film adaption of a text written by Sāʻidī; because it was chosen by the Ministry of Culture and Art for the “Week of Iranian Movies” in Paris as a representative of the modern Iranian filmic imagination – thus expressing a conscious articulation of what Iranian (filmic) modernity might look like to the world; and is retroactively recognized by critics as a crucial milestone in the New Wave movement. Despite the handicap of its notorious banning, it was one of the first films commissioned for national television and formed part of the resistance movement to fīlmfārsī. (Jāhid suggests that Taqvā’ī was “forced” to make Sādiq Kurdih and Nifrīn in the wake of Tranquility’s banning: Taqvā’ī “could probably be called the most important victim of the New Wave; a director that made the most important New Wave film . . . yet failed to continue on the path . . .”57) It is tempting to attribute Tranquility’s distinction to Sāʻidī’s authorly presence. For, although the variation in approaches to character “depth” in Taqvā’ī’s two films can be explained away through recourse to genre distinction – one an experimental documentary and the other a feature-length narrative film – the discrepancy is curiously mirrored in Sāʻidī’s two collections of short stories, Fear and Trembling (Tars va Larz) and Unnameable and Invisible Fears (Vāhamah’hā-yī bī nām va nishān). Both collections were published just subsequent to Sāʻidī’s period of field travel and exposure to village life throughout the Iranian South and countryside. As in his other works, dialogue largely dominates the stories of Fear and Trembling – dialogue that is muted, flat and utile, delivered for the relay of information about events and actions, rather than revelatory of thoughts and feelings. The sentence construction of his prose is predominantly short, matter-of-fact and functional. Though anxiety thematically overwhelms both series of stories, in Fear and Trembling, anxiety emanates from a naturalized fear of preternatural forces radiating out from physical elements like the sea and air. “Tranquility” and the larger collection of which it is a part, psychologizes anxiety; it surfaces from human stress about the perceived dissolution and loss of traditional social hierarchies and structures. Thus, for example, the colonel’s development of post-traumatic stress disorder results not from any empirical war but ensues from his dwindling sense of self-significance. In an early scene in Taqvā’ī’s film, the colonel stares out through the living room window pane into the darkness: “Now it’s time for strange thoughts.” In the textual form of Tranquility, the reader gleans details about each character’s interior life through free-indirect discourse and long, winding sentences overflowing with copulas and testifying to the anxiety inherent in a thinking, speaking consciousness: “All the characters in the story could conceivably be the patients of their creator, a psychiatrist as well as a creative writer,” writes Rivanne Sandler of the text, indicating a roundedness to the story’s

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characters, who are constituted by multiple layers of psychic substance.58 In Taqvā’ī’s adaptation, the interior life of Saī'dī’s characters plays out through extensive and nuanced dialogue, complex facial expressions and lingering close-ups. Released just one year earlier, Bād-i Jin’s subjects are spectral characters. Broken window panes perform the work of depth; they communicate just once in a language unintelligible to the mainstream Iranian public, and live in a dying, miasmic past; one whose African origins bestow the ultimate profundity to the modernness of the film’s form.59 Modernness thus emerges as an effect of displacement, extracted from the figures who are necessarily denied the forms of coherence they produce. Superstitious and dreaming, Bād-i Jin’s subjects sacrifice their primordial suffering to abstraction. The content of sexual difference never emerges in their sleep, and subjectivity feels too ripe a term to describe what the viewer learns of the windridden. As suggested, ruined interiority frequently pours out into the landscape, accompanied by an archaic godly monovocalism endowed with the responsibility of poeticizing history. For, though Taqvā’ī’s choice of a famous poet to narrate the film imbues the ethnographic content of the film with reflexivity, in another sense, it is completely aligned with the state-ordained mandates of the period that ethnographic films appoint for voiceover narration a “‘person with a recognizable high-class or good Persian accent,’ not a person with a minority accent.”60 To clarify, absence of depth does not correspond in any degree to writerly sophistication. The notion of depth, like “character development,” belies an antiquated theory of literary subjectivity which reveals less than it obscures. The absence of depth can sometimes point toward the elusiveness of the subject, or the difficulty of defining the features of a self, and in this sense, bears the potential to say much more, much more convincingly about interiority than the piling up of psychological details, as the genre of modernism in its canonized Anglo-European sense shows. The foremost figure connected to the formalization of Persian literary forms, Muhamad-Taqī Bahār, championed simplicity over intricacy (though racializing his recommendations by associating clarity with ancient Persian poetics and decadence with the corruption of Arab literary influence), suggesting a registration of concision’s potency.61 But nondimensionality accrues particular meaning when flat characters reference former slaves; it gains a further meaning when situated next to a work that fills in and activates the interiority of urban Iranian subjects with psychology, sexual agency, and consciousness of historical and social change. Iranian cultural production dilutes the complex history and variegated origins of enslaved African populations into homogenized stereotypes like the sīyāh of blackface theater (rūhuzī and sīyāh bāzī)62 or the peripheral servant in modernist fiction,63 and has done so for centuries. In Taqvā’ī’s film, the black stereotype is characterized by an occult, at times evil, at times fetishized healing experience which has ruined Bandar Lingih. In this case, the peculiar difference sustained between the absence and presence of psychologized consciousness and historical awareness in Bād-i Jin and Ārāmish, Tars va Larz and Vāhamahʹhā, built from similar ethnographic experiences, is itself suggestive of a preconceptual space of

Pneumatics of Blackness 227 possibility that allows the modern to cohere as a concept structured by the telic fantasy of a full, feeling subject. When the modern is elaborated through forms that correspond to differences in degrees of subjectivity (as it has been at least since Hegel, the author of modernity’s epochalism) it is a racialized concept.64 This is particularly so when such differences perpetuate the naturalization of uneven power relations, a naturalization both Taqvā’ī and Sāʻidī, like the majority of Iranian intellectuals of the time period, opposed in theory and in intent. The funding impetus for Taqvā’ī’s films, prompted by the Iranian government’s investment in New Wave filmmakers’ ability to draw international acclaim in awards circuits, describes the complicity of his films in the manufacture of a desired “modern” Iranian identity – despite Taqvā’ī’s own and other filmmakers’ reluctance, and sometimes outright hostility to, such underlying motivations.65 It is possible that Taqvā’ī’s Bād-i Jin and certain that Tranquility in the Presence of Others never received enough exposure to be privileged with the notoriety of actually succeeding in fulfilling these aspirations. Though Bād-i Jin was screened in the capital and a few other cities, the NIRT, who had funded it, ultimately maintained control of its rights and distribution. Tranquility was banned for six years and finally released domestically for just eleven nights, when Taqvā’ī agreed to enter the film at the behest of the Ministry of Culture and Art for the “Week of Iranian Movies” in Paris as a work tellingly parading Iran’s modern filmic imagination. The film subsequently received permanent ban status.66 Hamid Reza Sadr estimates that this was due to Taqvāī’s daring depiction of “men’s alienation and women’s sexual freedom [which] had no precedent in Iranian cinema.”67 But the historical paucity of domestic distribution and audience reception do not suffice as criteria for assessing the conditions of possibility for the imagination and coming to fruition of a film’s initial premise in the first place. Taqvā’ī’s ethnographic film and his feature were not mere anomalies, but reflections of both contemporary national and global trends of filmmaking, as Fatimah Tobing-Rony has shown.68 And despite express intentions, at the very least because of the institutional matrix of state-funded cinema in which Taqvā’ī found himself suspended, his films cannot simply or fully be detached from the connection to the desires of necessarily racializing state nationalism they seem to escape when unmoored from context.

Mūsīqī-i Jūnūb Part of his locally specific body of cultural influences, zar absorbed Taqvā’ī. After filming Bād-i Jin, he returned to the South to produce another ethnographic documentary about it, this time in the island of Qishm. Unlike Bād-i Jin, Music of the South: Zar relinquishes ellipticism for a scientistic candidness disavowed in his previous documentary. The film mimics universal ethnographic styles of the period. Taqvā’ī’s voice narrates the prosaic geographical and spatial features of the island. We learn, for example, that it is the largest island in the Persian Gulf, that the primary forms of livelihood include sailing between Persian Gulf ports, net weaving, rope braiding, fishing and shrimp baiting. Still harmonizing with the esoteric subject matter, poetic embellishments mystify more straightforward lines

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of narration. Framing the sea, then revolving to reveal a leftward pan of the distant port structures’ desolate angularity, Taqvā’ī’s voice relates: The jetty is the beating heart of Bandar Qishm. If the jetty is empty, the town is quiet and serene and until another day, until the coming of another dhow, there is no sound but the sound of the breathing sea. Only at night sometimes the sound of the ahl-i havā’s duhul cuts through the sea’s breath. Silence neutralizes the droning wind, replacing the pathos-saturated acapella lullaby that accompanied the oneiric montages of Bād-i Jin (and that travels into the nursing scene from Sādiq Kurdih). A lengthy continuous shot of a zar ceremony tightens the homology between Bād-i Jin and Mūsīqī-i Jūnūb, both of which ultimately concern the phenomenon of zar. However, contrasting with his orchestrated non-interference in Bād-i Jin, Taqvā’ī’s narration guides the viewer through the zar ceremony in Mūsīqī-i Jūnūb. In Bād-i Jin confusion ensues when the drumming first stops; in Mūsīqī-i Jūnūb, the audience takes reprieve in Taqvā’ī’s explanation: the zar will not leave the woman’s body, the narration informs. “The zar speaks with Baba Darvish.” Baba Darvish shows the woman a ring: “This ring must pay for the ceremony so that the wind will leave the body.” In comparison to Bād-i Jin’s audiovisual thaumaturgy, Mūsiqī-’i Jūnūb delivers an understated but aboveboard narrative about zar. At times, certain lines appear lifted straight from Sāʻidī’s monograph. Thus, we learn that “the zar winds have mostly come from Africa and most of its sufferers are blacks whose long-ago ancestors came to be slaves” (“Bih ghulāmī va kanīzī omadand”), a description which conforms to the black subjects of Mūsīqī-i Jūnūb. This statement’s facticity clearly contrasts with the more poetically embroidered “they came for the price of dates,” or, “they came for dates,” that Shāmlū recites at the climax of Bād-i Jin. Whether Music of the South’s prosaic forthrightness cost it its success, or whether there were additional causes for its doom to oblivion, the film falls among Taqvā’ī’s unmemorable works. Unlike Bād-i Jin, Tranquility in the Presence of Others and Arb’aīn, all of which were selected as Iranian entries to the 1972 Venice film festival, Music of the South: Zar left no lasting imprint, evidenced in the near impossibility of its retrieval today and the unfamiliarity of its title. The success of abstraction within the ethnographic film genre (as opposed to its position within anthropology, where facts still bear a measure of hegemony) is worth remarking and has not, one might argue, yet received its full exploration in either film studies, nor in the anthropology-based scholarship on experimental ethnography. Does the valorization of abstraction express a desire for remove from facts or simply inflate facticity’s least understood condition of possibility? Facts, that is, are never purely unmediated, passing through, or more accurately, absorbing some form of language and space of possibility for intersubjectivity. Where and how this absorption becomes aestheticization – an eternal problem for the history of art, its self-definition and self-criticism – the resultant artifact seems to exceed the possibilities for ethical evaluation. If Bād-i Jin, and not Mūsīqī-i Jūnūb, its more factic

Pneumatics of Blackness 229 counterpart, influenced later filmmaking and made a palpable mark upon the cinematic history of Iran, its loss of facticity in comparison to Mūsīqī-i Jūnūb seems partially responsible. One might hazard such a conclusion based on the evidence: prior to his “comeback” with the television series Dear Uncle Napoleon (1976), all of Taqvā’ī’s subsequent works abstracted and fictionalized dimensions of the subject of zar; wind possession would return again in 1986. “Malūl, azizam, jūnam, dast var dar az in jin va pari,” (“Malūl, my dear, let go of this jin and fairy nonsense,”) one of the characters in Captain Khurshid pleads. If the transmission of fact in general depends upon some form of abstraction, the irresolution of boundaries bears recursively on the facticity of fact. The increasingly complex layers of fictionalization begin simply with a redacting translation: “The zar winds have mostly come from Africa and most of its sufferers are blacks whose long-ago ancestors came to be slaves,” to “They came for dates.” Redaction in this context embodies a poetics that cannot simply be described as erasure, but nor can it be so easily celebrated, for it bodes a tendentious repression that characterizes Iran’s relationship to its own history of slavery. Taqvā’ī and the artistic cohort to which he belonged regarded film as a means to both connect with and reflect the societal issues of the Iranian people. Ethnographic documentary appeared to Taqvā’ī a form of democratic history-writing or archiving: in an interview he reveals not only his preference for documentary to feature film form, because the former could most accurately represent his life experiences, but that his experiences – presumably of life in the South of Iran – were indeed worthy of inscription. It would be “a shame if they weren’t recorded.”69 That Taqvā’ī and filmmakers like him were eager in the first place to collude with a political regime that they opposed ideologically testifies to certain hopes and investments in national television’s potency as a medium for mass communication. In the same interview Taqvā’ī expresses resentment about the fact that the NIRT refused to televise his works, despite having ordered some of them to be made and offering him funding to make them in the first place: “The films I made about the traditional livelihoods of the people were in order to produce knowledge and familiarity with this wonderful society.” If the Censorship Bureau foreclosed distribution of his films in Iran, he lamented, why wouldn’t they at least allow the films to flourish outside the country?70 Just as it has developed sophisticated critiques of the historiographical method and its latent biases and ideologies, a postcolonial or anticolonial impulse implicitly inspires studies which seek to displace the European locus of that structure of periodization called modernism. While the “globalist turn” to modernism studies developed largely subsequently to the postcolonial moment in the Western academy, pushing for research on transnational exchanges and alternative models of analysis, the debate about the formation of Persian modernism predates this more general academic trend, occurring cotemporaneously and thus constituting modernist discourse itself. A major aspect of the debate about Iranian literary modernity traditionally revolved around the question of influence – the commonplace idea that, like so many other non-Western literary movements, Persian modernism

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owes an existential debt to European modernism.71 Detractors of the influence theory underscore the turn to Iranian folk themes and pre-Islamic mythology in the works of such seminal modernist writers as Sādiq Hidāyat to emphasize the indigeneity of modern Persian prose.72 This revival of folklorist themes and premodern clarity is impossible to extract from a larger movement of anthropological impetus institutionally braced, pro-modernist and alternatively anti-imperialist energies, even where its agenda departs from these. To exemplify this contradiction, the Persian anticipation of Edward Said’s Orientalism – Jalāl al-i Ahmad’s Westoxification (Qarbzadigī 1962) – took inspiration from his ethnographic writings, such as Awrazān and Jazīrah-’i Kharg.73 As Menahem Merhavi points out, these ethnographic works also influenced al-i Ahmad’s fiction.74 The Iranophilia characteristic of early 20th century Iranian literati was largely motivated by efforts to rehabilitate the early history of Iranian culture, preserved, it was imagined, in the oral traditions of rural Iranians. Muhammad Alī Jamālzādah’s position on the potential for anthropological strategies to serve the project of democratizing Persian literature by reviving authentic Iranian themes testifies to this initial modernist desire, as did Hidāyat’s pioneering initiatives to embrace Persian folklore.75 The first Iranian to collect, systematically analyze and compose methodological guidelines for the study of folk material, encouraging young writers to follow suit, Hidāyat’s endeavors were unambiguously charged with racially taxonomic impulse. (His Nayrangistān divided folklore between the practices of early Indo-Iranian races and non-Iranian ones, for instance.)76 These approaches to indigenizing modernism bordered on a desire for purification present in much 19th-century reform discourse. Riven with contradiction, and like other authors and artists from the global south, the authors of Iranian literary and filmic modernity shared doubled ambitions to exhibit political grievances through their creations, however varied and diverse their political agendas. (Geeta Kapur documents the political and ideological strategies of canonical Indian New Wave filmmakers through a compelling argument about the force of contradiction in self-proclaimed modernist works that resonates with the present analysis.)77 Taqvā’ī and Sāʻidī were among the group of authors who understood themselves as committed to sociopolitical change and journalistic revelation, and doubtlessly their forays into rural Iran formed part of an intent to chronicle the injustices spawned by Pahlavi era dysfunction and oppression. Taqvā’ī’s earlier involvement with a collective of writers of Southern origin who endeavored to articulate Gulf impoverishment in the publication Gāhnāmah Hunar va Adabīyāt-i Jūnūb affirms such intent: Haydarī insists that Taqvā’ī’s Tābistān-i Hamān Sāl (The Summer of That Year 1968) informed the nascent trend in modern Iranian literature oriented toward working class life.78 Taqvā’ī seems to heighten the impetus toward literary democratization that characterized the modernity of Iranian 20th-century literature. If Jamālzadeh could lament the Iranian literati’s disregard for mass audiences in favor of a sequestered elitism symbolized by baroque language,79 Taqvā’ī moves this complaint further, relinquishing prose altogether in favor of filmmaking: “There were things in the lives of the people from my birthplace that I saw that I wanted to

Pneumatics of Blackness 231 communicate to others. Story writing wasn’t appropriate for these experiences, and this is why I chose cinema.”80 Generically positioned to do so, Ahl-i Havā airs political ambition even more explicitly than Taqvaī’s collection of stories. After providing detailed descriptions of various aspects of zar belief in the south, Sāʻidī declares that zar deserves more research, thought and attention and should not be homogenized or collapsed into the myriad other forms of dealing with spirits; in this region zar “may have an economic and sociological dimension.”81 Sāʻidī’s descriptions of the black communities in the south detail desolation, poverty and segregation, summoning up the reader’s moral indignation at reading such anecdotal information as the following. Narrates Sāʻidī of the village of Kalāt, “A man with a white beard said to an old black man who was sitting near us, ‘he’s from the jungle, like an animal.’ The black man replied ‘Yes, I’m from the jungle, like an animal,’ and laughed.” And “during a circumcision gathering, a few black fishermen were standing nearby watching, and a peddler pointed to them and said, ‘They are cows.’ And the blacks nodded.”82 Whatever possible motivations one might attribute to Sāʻidī’s inclusion of these blatantly antiblack incidents in his monograph, the sparks of indignation and small bids of sympathy collection present in his text get lost in the transformation of his experiences into his fictional short story writing based upon these very encounters. Sāʻidī’s fictionalized depiction of blackness is one of terrorizing and radical otherness. The first story of Fear and Trembling opens with the main character, Salam Ahmad, who hears his name called out from the sea prior to glimpsing a “strange black man sitting next to a fire with his wooden leg stretched out in a parlor.” Upon perceiving the figure of the black man – whose name we never learn – Salam Ahmad immediately believes himself to be possessed by an evil wind and runs to his neighbor for help. The villagers, exemplifying the irrationality and superstition of the characters in Fear, stone the black man to death in response to Salam Ahmad’s accusation. Salam Ahmad finally heals from his curse in the concluding scene of the story when the villagers thrust him near the dead black man’s pyre of ashes. The black man whose life is sacrificed in exchange for Salam Ahmad’s salvation remains the flattest character of all in this opening story. The author describes only his bizarre literal and figural voraciousness: “Even if we kill him, he’ll turn up somewhere else,” said Zahed. “His kind won’t stop until the end of time.” “He keeps coming closer. Look at him!” said Zakariya. The black man was very close. His face was quite flat, as if his nose and lips had been gnawed away . . . “I’m hungry, I’m hungry,” the black man pleaded. The men each picked up a rock and hurled it at the black man.83 Latent and obscurely articulated anxiety about color and otherness problematizes modernist authors’ purity of political intent in announcing the predicament of the Iranian poor and destitute. In Sāʻidī’s fiction black characters are

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impoverished, but they are also devious and dangerous, unwarranting of the reader’s sympathy and stimulating fears surrounding sorcery and remnants of traditional Iranian society that modernizers and their advocates were eager to either eradicate or taxonomize and distance for contemplation, appreciation or exhibition. In Taqvā’ī’s Bād-i Jin, an occult, at times evil, and fetishized healing experience characterizes blackness and its relation to Bandar Lingih’s deterioration. Taqvā’ī remarks that though “winds wound through the streets of Bandar Lingih since time immemorial, they were not the zar kinds” – “the blacks” brought these latter with them from the “deep jungle interior.”84 The subtle and inadvertent displacement of the burden of blame for Lingih’s destruction on the black population, most of which constituted coerced migration and labor, is remarkable. It echoes the strange hierarchization of winds modeled in Sāʻidī’s Āhl-i Havā: the winds come from far off shores; “the Indian and Persian winds, though frightening, do not compare to the enormous and very black winds that come from the coast of Africa.”85 According to Sāʻidī, non-Muslim winds are far more dangerous and unpredictable. How does one understand taxonomy of the metaphysical or cosmological in relation to taxonomy of the body – the bedrock of the history of race? Ethnography inspired and constituted Iranian literary and filmic modernity. Rendering longstanding indigenous cultural practices objects worthy of visual taxonomy and radically poetic aesthetic innovation, Iranian ethnography participates in and produces the very dichotomy and desired return to the archaic to which it seems to appear as response. Bād-i Jin shows how the fetishization of the “pre” – the primitive, the pre-subjective, pre-linguistic – that colors the modern with its charm also occludes the problematic material realities that constituted such poignantly arcane, premodern or nonmodern ways of life ethnographic film believed itself merely to be preserving. Rather than a subject for analysis, or the articulation of social grievance, as was the putative goal of much of the committed modern art of the era, historical suffering quietly sinks into a subtheme of Bād-i Jin, a subject for abstraction and experiential intuition (as in the initial shot of the waves; the cut from the close-up of ships to the “destruction” of Bandar Lingih carried over in Shāmlū’s narration), than of critical reflection. Barely forming a coherent horizon for an exploration of social redress, the film relegates it, like the actors in the film itself, to an ancient unknowable past: they came “for the price of dates,” goes the euphemistic Persian. The lost history of African slavery in the Persian Gulf – as captured by the modern form of Iranian ethnographic experiment – exemplifies the way in which the modern both enables and impoverishes historical recovery as it silently imprints a racializing telic vision of the subject upon the constellation of objects that enables its own recognition. Studies that attempt to shatter the category of modernism into localizable fragments, or to rearticulate the category with attention to its geographically dispersed iterations do so without adequate explanation for the problem of race at modernity’s core, and its relation to histories of African slavery that resist full dissolution. I have tried to show that modernity’s production of racial blackness, transcends the geographical and temporal terms by which it has traditionally been framed. Mired in the

Pneumatics of Blackness 233 ambiguity of fascination with the past, the modern compensates its strategies of burial with new lines of creation. But navigating the tolls and boons of such forms, and the relations that constitute, subsume and project them, remains as precarious as drawing clear distinctions between them. The crescendo of abstraction tracked through Naṣir Taqvā’ī’s oeuvre describes the pneumatics of blackness as a modern poetics, a repository of the past whose conditions of reception is also a participatory forgetting.

Notes 1 Bandar Lingih is a harbor city in the Iranian province Hormuzgan in the Persian Gulf. 2 John Akomfrah, “Stuart Hall documentary” (talk presented at Yale University, 24 September 2014). 3 The Persian term for “wind-afflicted” refers to all the individuals who belong to a zar cult and have established life-long relationships with the winds. The ambiguity caused by the lack of a differentiation between the singular and plural terms of ahl-i havā will be clarified by context. 4 For example, one not premised on bureaucratic documents and statist foundations, the traditional paradigm of modern historiography nurtured in the European 19th century and developed and debated in Iran in the 20th. Michael Fischer has this particularly optimistic view of Iranian film as alternative historiography. Michael Fischer, Mute Dreams, Blind Owls, and Dispersed Knowledges: Persian Poesis in the Transnational Circuitry (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 12. For an exploration of the debate about modern historiography in Iran, see Abbas Amanat, “The study of history in postrevolutionary Iran: nostalgia, illusion, or historical awareness?” in Politics of Modern Iran. vol. 1, ed. Ali Ansari (London: Routledge, 2011): pp. 67–82. 5 In this paper, I treat the term “filmic modernity” as an extension of “literary modernity” due to the deep collusion between Iranian filmmakers, screenwriters, short story writers, novelists and poets throughout the history of Iranian cinema, and in particular, from the 1960s forward. Parvīz Jāhid sees the connection between cinema and literature exemplified by Ibrahim Gulistan’s Khesht va Ayeneh, “which is most likely a reflection of his unique narrative style and storytelling” (Directory, 85). It is well known that many Iranian writers and filmmakers collaborated during the period where Iranian film was first beginning to achieve renown; for exempla, see note 28. Today, it is sometimes argued that Iranian film has subsumed Iranian prose fiction as a modern artform, a thesis that draws its energy from the infinitely greater popularity of Iranian film internationally. While the differences between Iranian film and literature are obviously many and warrant a study of their own, here I am less concerned with elaborating a theory of their difference than of articulating the meaning of the relationship of both to Iranian anthropology. 6 By “Iranian anthropology” I mean not simply anthropology’s institutional development in Iran, but a widening and increasingly politicized interest in the problem of otherness. 7 Allusions to this ethnographic connection often miss the mark, particularly when compelled to ascribe value-judgement to the phenomenon. For example, in a minor article from the early 1980s, Michael Hillman notes the discrepancy between the modern Iranian literati’s putative audience (millat) and the literati’s actual cognitive distance from the latter, positioning this discrepancy as part of the failure of modern (particularly committed) Iranian literature to effect social change. But despite impressive readings from an array of modern prose works and poetry describing an urgent political desire to portray the destitution of the masses, Hillman neglects the history of ethnography that in fact produced an actual (if artificial) proximity between the literati and their subjects, and further, does not analyze the meaning, nature or effects of such proximity. Michael

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Hillman, “The Modernist Trend in Persian Literature and Its Social Impact,” Iranian Studies 15 (1982): 7–29. Other notations of the relationship between the aesthetic and the anthropological in modern Iranian cultural forms are generally rooted in field surveys of Iranian anthropology, the upshot being a somewhat condescending assessment of Iranian anthropology as remaining unscientifically bound to its roots in the literary and in amateur fieldwork. See for example, Nasser Fakouhi, “Making and Remaking an Academic Tradition: Towards an Indigenous Anthropology in Iran,” in Conceptualizing Iranian Anthropology: Past and Present Perspectives, ed. Shahnaz R. Nadjmabadi (New York: Berghahn, 2009). See also the chapter on Iranian anthropology’s genetic convergence with literary studies in Nematollah Fazeli’s Politics of Culture in Iran: Anthropology, Politics and Society in the Twentieth Century (London: Routledge, 2006). A milestone reading of anthropology’s recourse to asymmetrical spatio-temporal functions informs Johann Fabian’s famous thesis in Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). There is, of course, an earlier tradition of ethnography in Iran that was heralded by foreign anthropologists who popularized the study of nomadic tribes in Iran. The American filmmakers Merian Cooper, Ernst Schoedsack and Marguerite Harrison filmed the nomadic Bakhtiari tribe in the 1920s in their film Grass – one of the first ethnographic films made in Iran, and often cited by anthropologists as an archetype of the ethnographic film genre. Ali Issari, Cinema in Iran: 1900–1979 (Metuchen: Scarecrow Press, 1989), 164–93. Close relatives of both the Shah and his wife Farah headed both the MCA and NIRT, ensuring tight political surveillance. Hamid Naficy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema: Vol. 2: The Industrializing Years, 1941–1978 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 69. As George Stocking notes, historically ethnography and anthropology have been used in non-European contexts in the service of nationalism. See Stocking, “Afterword: A View from the Center,” Ethnos (1982): 172–86. Stephanie Cronin, Tribal Politics in Iran: Rural Conflict and the New State, 1921–1941 (New York: Routledge, 2007). Farroḵzād (1935–67) is commemorated as one of Iran’s preeminent poets of the 20th century. This film is almost always read with an emphasis on its breathtaking poeticism. I would insist that attention to the work’s ethnographic component does not detract from its allure, but rather, complicates and nuances what is almost uniformly celebrated about it. For film, see Scott Macdonald, Avant-Doc: Intersections of Documentary and AvantGarde Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). In literature, the relationship between the development of anthropology and the ascendency of modernism (particularly with regard to surrealism) has also been explored. See for example, James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Surrealism,” in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988). Contemporary studies on this moment reflect upon the very boundedness of present genre distinctions, asking how the once less rigidly defined fields of literature and anthropology informed each other in the late 19th and early 20th century. See Paul Peppis, Sciences of Modernism: Ethnography, Sexology, and Psychology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Many film scholars and visual anthropologists go so far as to claim that the cinema was invented for anthropological purposes, that is, to observe the physical behavior of men. David MacDougall, “Beyond Observational Cinema,” in Principles of Visual Anthropology, ed. Paul Stockings (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003). Lumière’s earliest short films, for example, featured Ashanti women and children engaging in daily activities, dancing and participating in tribal parades, while Edison’s earliest studies pictured Native Americans, African American dancers, Kanakan divers and Hopi snake dancers. See Assenka Oksiloff, Picturing the Primitive: Visual Culture, Ethnography, and Early German Cinema (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). Catherine Russel explains that “fascination with possession is bound up with the fundamental ambivalence of primitivism in the modernist imagination” productive of the

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fantasy in which modernity overcomes its alienation in rejoining its primitive past. Catherine Russel, Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 194. David Marriott, “Response to Race and the Poetic Avant-Garde,” Boston Review, March 10, 2015, http://bostonreview.net/poetry/david-marriott-response-race-and-poetic-avant-garde. Humayūn Imamī, Sīnimā-yi Mardum Shinakhtī-i Īran (Tihran: Nashr-i Afkār, 2006). See Dominic Parviz Brookshaw and Nasrin Rahimieh, eds., Forugh Farrokhzad, Poet of Modern Iran: Iconic Woman and Feminine Pioneer of New Persian Poetry (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010) and, for a more ideologically oriented critique, Hamid Dabashi, Masters & Masterpieces of Iranian Cinema (Washington, DC: Mage, 2007). Crawford and Durton in Film as Ethnography describe one of the core practices of filmmaker ethnographers as preserving sequences in their entirety. Hamid Naficy, Fīlm-i Mustanad, vol. 2, Tarīkh-i Sīnema-yi Mustanad (Tihrān: Intishārat-i Dānishgah-I Āzād-i Iran), 325. Simon Gikandi, “Africa and the Epiphany of Modernism,” in Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity, ed. Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005). Gikandi’s analysis resonates with testimonies of avant-garde ethnographic filmmakers like Jean Rouch. In “On the Vicissitudes of the Self: The Possessed Dancer, the Magician, the Sorcerer, the Filmmaker, and the Ethnographer,” Rouch shows how his role as a filmmaker almost mirrored that of the possession dancers through his participation and transformation: “For the Songhay-Zama, who are now quite accustomed to film, my ‘self’ is altered in front of their eyes in the same way as is the ‘self’ of the possession dancers: it is the ‘film-trance’ (ciné-transe) of the one filming the ‘real trance’ of the other” (100). Rouch fortifies the link between modernism and ethnography when he notes that, at the time of his writing, French theater schools had already been using ethnographic information about possession to extract methods for training actors for the past twenty years. Ghulām Haydarī, ed., Muʻarrifī va Shinākht-i Nāsir Taqvā‘I (Tihrān: Nashr-i Qatrah, 2002), 204. “Successful but Short,” in Haydarī, Muʻarrifī, 145. Naficy, A Social History, 101. Naficy, who is regarded as the authoritative commentator on the subject, periodizes the Iranian New Wave from 1969 through, roughly, 1979. These films, like much of the literature of the time period, were critical of the social conditions promulgated by the Pahlavi regime’s domestic modernization policies, even as they were informed stylistically by modernist forms of cinema abroad. Haydarī writes that Ghulām-Husayn Taheridoust’s Azar Sorkh (1971) was explicitly inspired by Āhl-i Havā and Bād-i Jin (31). The list of collaborations between New Wave directors and modernist authors is endless. For instance, Davūd Mulāpūr’s Ahu’s Husband (1966) was based on a story by the same name written by the novelist ‘Alī Muhamad Afghānī; the New Wave film script for Dāriyūsh Mihrjūi’s Cow (1969) was based off of a short story from Ghulām Husayn Sā‘idī’s Mourners of Bayal; Bahman Farmānārā’s Prince Ehtejab (1974) and his The Tall Shadows of the Wind (1978) were both based on stories by the modern novelist Hūshang Golshīrī; Mas‘ūd Kīmiyā‘ī’s Dash Akol (1974) was based on a short story by the same name by Sādiq Hidāyat; Kīmiyā‘ī’s Earth (1973) was based on a story by contemporary author Mahmūd Dawlat‘ābādī; Amīr Nādirī’s Tangsir (1973) was written by modern author Sādiq Chūbak; etc. A comprehensive account of the meaning of such collaborations and adaptations in relation to a theory of literary modernity has, to my knowledge, yet to be written. Numerous theorists have demonstrated that the history of African slavery disrupts the universal narrative of history upon which any concept of modernity is sustained. See Lindon Barrett, Racial Blackness and the Discontinuity of Western Modernity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014). Slavery’s material centrality to the development of

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modern economic infrastructure is compounded by the way in which its history is entangled with the construction of the universal values (freedom; autonomous subjectivity; private property) undergirding modernity’s epistemological ground. See also Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982); Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); and Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History (New York: Verso, 2014). Area studies’ generally myopic historical frameworks have meant oblivion or indifference to these important developments in modernity studies or misrecognition of their conclusions as parochial. However, because African slavery reached the same magnitude in the Indian Ocean world as in the Atlantic (albeit over a much longer time-span) black studies’ interventions have implications for global theories of modernity. Bernard Freamon, “Straight, No Chaser: Slavery, Abolition, and Modern Islamic Thought,” in Indian Ocean Slavery in the Age of Abolition, ed. Robert Harms, Bernard K. Freamon, and David W. Blight (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 62. Absence of established and authoritative written records, the abyssal duration of millennia-long trade involving slaves and the fact that there were rarely specialized slave cargos in the Indian Ocean World region render quantification difficult to assess. And yet, quality, and not quantity, is at stake in the present analysis. While the historiography of African slavery in Iran remains sparse, a few recent studies attend to this gap, although these studies remain mired in the limits of social science. See for example, Behnaz A. Mirzai’s recently published History of Slavery and Emancipation in Iran, 1800–1929 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017); Mirzai, “African Presence in Iran: Identity and Its Reconstruction,” Outre-Mers: Revue d’histoire 336 (2002): 229–46; Thomas Ricks, “Slaves and Slave Trading in Shi’i Iran AD 1500–1900,” Journal of Asian and African Studies 36 (2001): 407–18; Ronald Segal, “The ‘Heretic’ State: Iran,” in Islam’s Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 119–27. Modarressi (1931–1997) was a Persian novelist and psychiatrist. Maurice Nadeau, “The Period of Trances,” in History of Surrealism, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Collier Books, 1967). Though it is often assumed that surrealism was cultivated primarily in Europe, Nadeau emphasizes that no artistic movement previous to surrealism shared its international scope and that it was in fact surrealism’s burgeoning life in Asia and Africa that sustained its life as one of the most significant movements of the 20th century. Taghi Modarressi takes up a quirky etymological argument for the Persian origins of the term zar. Though his thesis is usually considered invalid by contemporary zar scholarship, Modarressi claims that the introduction of zar into Iran dates back to the 16th century Portuguese invasion of the islands of Kisham, Hingum and Hurmuz, where the African crew of the Portuguese viceroy Alphonso d’Albuquerque stayed behind once King Abbas and the English burned the Portuguese vessels and forced them out of the islands. These African sailors remained more or less endogenous, practicing and transmitting the tradition of zar to future generations in relative isolation. As this theory of “African sailors” telescopes, the relationship between zar and slavery is obscure in traditional Iranian scholarship. Taghi Modarressi, “The Zar Cult in Southern Iran,” in Trance and Possession States, ed. Raymond Prince (Montreal: R. M. Bucke Memorial Society, 1968). This obscurity is inevitably compounded by theories of black presence in Iran that emphasize the existence of blacks in Iran since antiquity, such as Iraj Afshār’s Khūzistān va Tamaddun-i Dīrīnah-yi Ān, vol. 1 (Tihrān: Sazmān-i Chāp va Intishārāt-i Vizārat-i Farhang va Irshād-i Islāmī, 1373/1994), 462. Sā‘idī 5. Sāʻidī notes that the only studies of zar in Iran prior to his had focused on the dance aspect of the ritual, but not penetrated the meaning of the illnesses and ceremonial remedies. In Africa, the term zar-bori is often used, bori constituting a separate cult that is prevalent in West Africa and related to a similar form of spirit possession. Historically

Pneumatics of Blackness 237

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40 41 42

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46 47 48

zar-bori is the largest and most widely distributed indigenous spirit healing cult in Africa. Ioan M. Lewis, Ahmed Al-Safi, and Sayyid Hurreiz, eds., Women’s Medicine: The Zar-Bori Cult in Africa and Beyond (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), 2. Ehud Toledano notes that in general, work on the slave trade in the Middle East has proceeded slowly not due to the lack of its history or longevity, but because of “attitude hurdles.” For the case of the Ottoman Empire, for example, Toledano writes “The study of slavery . . . has suffered from the lack of an interested, engaged constituency, namely . . . there are no self-conscious descendent communities.” Ehud R. Toledano, As If Silent and Absent: Bonds of Enslavement in the Islamic Middle East (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 9. Zar rituals have been observed in Southern Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Oman, Bahrain, Sudan, Somalia and Ethiopia (all areas touched by slavery). Richard Natvig, “Oromos, Slaves, and the Zar Spirits: A Contribution to the History of the Zar Cult,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 20, no. (1987): 669–89. The protagonist instruments vary widely from region to region. In stambeli, a spirit possession ceremony similar to zar but practiced by Sub-Saharan slave descendants in Tunisia, a three-stringed lute called gumbri “speaks” to the spirits. See Richard C. Jankowsky, “Black Spirits, White Saints: Music, Spirit Possession, and Sub-Saharans in Tunisia,” Ethnomusicology 50, no. 3 (2006): 373–410. Jankowsky argues that the music’s “ontology is predicated on . . . exclusion” (386). “The remedy for winds are not drugs and shots,” but drums (duhul) and tambourines (tambire), Baba Ayud – a zar exert – informs Sā‘idī in his ethnography (Ahl-i Havā, 32). Raymond Prince, ed., Trance and Possession States (Montreal: R. M. Bucke Memorial Society, 1968), 36; and Jean Rouch, Cine-Ethnography, trans. Steven Field (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 88. The white slave source from the Caucasus was more or less permanently cut off after the 1828 Treaty of Turkmenchai, after which African slavery experienced a large-scale revival. The historically lower monetary cost of black slaves and confined capacity for social mobility compared to white slaves exemplifies the distinction in their social value, and the compounded abjection of African slaves compared to their nonblack counterparts post-manumission. Bernard Lewis, “The African Diaspora and the Civilization of Islam,” in The African Diaspora: Interpretive Essays, ed. Martin L. Kilson and Robert I. Rotberg (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976.) Paul Christopher Johnson, ed., Spirited Things: The Work of ‘Possession’ in Afro-Atlantic Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 5. Mathew S. Hopper, “Slaves of One Master: Globalization and the African Diaspora in Arabia in the Age of Empire,” in Indian Ocean Slavery in the Age of Abolition, ed. Robert Harms, Bernard K. Freamon, and David W. Blight (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 225; and Hopper, “African Presence in Eastern Arabia,” in The Persian Gulf in Modern Times: People, Ports, and History, ed. Lawrence G. Porter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Barbara L. Solow. “Capitalism and Slavery in the Exceedingly Long Run,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 17, no. 4 (1987): 712; Maurice Lombard, The Golden Age of Islam (Princeton: Markus Wiener, 2004), 167; and William D. Phillips, Jr., “Sugar in Iberia,” in Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450–1680 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 299. Mujabī, Muʻarrifi, 145. Jāhid, Directory, 85. Fīlmfārsī, literally Persian language films, refers to a genre of so-called “B-grade” commercial melodramas, comedies and musicals prevalent in Iran between approximately 1950 and 1980. Hūshang Kāvūsī coined the term in the 1950s in the Iranian film journal Firdūsī (Muʻazzizīʹniyā, Fīlmfārsī Chīst?, 8), and the neologism is generally attributed to him. However, as Pedram Partovi points out, its usage probably dates earlier in the promotion of foreign features dubbed in Persian (Popular Iranian Cinema, 4).

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49 Blake Atwood, “When the Sun Goes Down: Sex, Desire and Cinema in 1970s Tehran,” Asian Cinema 27, no. 2 (2016): 127–50. 50 Haydarī, Muʻarrifi, 207. 51 Ibid., 203 52 Ibid., 37. 53 Issari, Cinema in Iran, 216. 54 Explains Naficy, “Temporally, the new wave lasted for about a decade. Specifically, the movement began with Mehrjui’s The Cow in 1969” (A Social History, 349). 55 Jāhid, Directory, 103. 56 Kāvūsī calls this kind of action sweeping (jārū kardan) the dancer’s body. Jamāl Umīd, Tārīkh-i Sīnamā-yi Īrān: 1279–1357 (Tehran: Intishārāt-i Rawzanah, 1998), 308. 57 Jāhid, Directory, 105. 58 Rivanne Sandler, “Literary Developments in Iran in the 1960s and the 1970s Prior to the 1978 Revolution,” World Literature Today 60, no. 2 (1986): 248. 59 Achille Mbembe argues that discourses and narratives about Africa contain an “appealing depth,” one which marks Africa as the epitome of the archaic philosophical and psychological problem of otherness. Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 1. 60 Naficy, A Social History, 73. 61 Muḥammad Taqī Bahār, Sabkʹshināsī, yā, Tārīkh-i taṭavvur sheʻr- Fārsī: baraye tadris-i karshenasi-e arshad, reshteh-e zaban va adabiyyat-e Farsi (Tehran: Tūs, 2001). 62 New Wave filmmaker Farukh Ghafāry is one of the few commentators on the history of theater in Iran who avows the relation between the figure of the sīyah and African slavery in Iran. Farrokh Ghafāry, “Evolution of Rituals and Theater in Iran,” Iranian Studies 17, no. 4 (1984): 361–89. 63 In her study on the relationship between the legal discourse on marriage in Iran and the trope of companionate marriage in modern Iranian literature, Amy Motlagh argues that the literary figure of the female servant (usually rural, uneducated, of African ancestry, antimodern, sexually or racially impure) threatened “the achievement of a modern state founded on companionate marriage” of which the Iranian, Persianspeaking woman was to become the prototypical agent. The demonization of the African slave or rural servant in fiction and in constitutional discourse normalized monogamous heterosexual marriage relations thought to be integral to Iranian modernity. Amy Motlagh, “Ain’t I a Woman: Domesticity’s Other,” in Burying the Beloved: Marriage, Realism, and Reform in Modern Iran (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012). 64 Barnor Hesse, “Racialized Modernity: An Analytics of White Mythologies,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 30 (2007): 643–63. See also Rei Terada, “Hegel and the Prehistory of the Postracial,” European Romantic Review 26, no. 3 (2015): 289–99. 65 Hamid Naficy, “Cinema as a Political Instrument,” in Politics of Modern Iran, vol. 3, ed. Ali Ansari (London: Routledge, 2011), 202. 66 Naficy, A Social History, 371. 67 Hamid Reza Sadr, Iranian Cinema: A Political History (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006): 153. 68 Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996). 69 Haydarī, 202. 70 Ibid., 200. 71 On the relevance of influence on Persian modernism by European literary movements see for example, Michael Beard, Hedayat’s Blind Owl as a Western Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); for views which emphasize the indigeneity of modern Persian prose, see Christophe Balay, Michel Cuypers, Aux Sources de la Nouvelle Persane (Paris: Editions Recherche sur les civilisations, 1983); and Mohammad Mehdi Khorrami, Modern Reflections of Classical Traditions in Persian Fiction (Lewiston: Edwin Mellon Press, 2003).

Pneumatics of Blackness 239 72 In his seminal text periodizing Persian literary forms, Taqī-Bahar argued for the premodern modernism of Iranian poetry in works such as Sa‘di’s Gulistān from the 13th century, celebrating its simplicity of prose. 73 These ethnographic works earned al-i Ahmad a reputation as an ethnographer. He was invited to supervise the publications of the Social Research Institute of the Faculty of Letters at the University of Tehran and to attend the Seventh International Conference of Anthropology in Moscow as a representative of Iranian anthropology (Fazeli, Politics of Culture, 114). 74 Menahem Merhavi, “True Muslims Must always Be Tidy and Clean: Exoticism of the Countryside in Late Pahlavi Iran,” in Constructing Nationalism in Iran: From the Qajars to the Islamic Republic, ed. Meir Litvak. (London: Routledge, 2017), 164. 75 Fazeli, Politics of Culture, 67. 76 Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, “Narrative Identity in the Works of Hedayat and His Contemporaries,” in Sadeq Hedayat: His Work and His Wondrous World, ed. Homayun Katouzian (New York: Routledge, 2008). 77 Geeta Kapur, When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (New Delhi: Tulika, 2000). Thanks to Anirban Gupta-Nigam for drawing this connection. 78 Haydarī, Muʻarrifi va naqd, 5. 79 Nasrin Rahimieh, “Four Iterations of Persian Literary Nationalism,” in Litvak, 44. 80 Haydarī, Muʻarrifi va naqd, 46. 81 Sāʻidī, Ahl-i Havā, 10. 82 Ibid., 6–7. 83 Ghulām Husayn Sāʻidī, Fear and Trembling, trans. Minoo Southgate (Washington, DC: Three Continents, 1984), 12. 84 Haydarī, Muʻarrifi va naqd, 29. 85 Sāʻidī, Ahl-i Havā, 22.

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Pneumatics of Blackness 241 Lewis, Bernard. “The African Diaspora and the Civilization of Islam.” The African Diaspora: Interpretive Essays, edited by Martin L. Kilson and Robert I. Rotberg. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976. Lewis, Ioan M., Ahmed Al-Safi, and Sayyid Hurreiz, eds. Women’s Medicine: The Zar-Bori Cult in Africa and Beyond. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991. Litvak, Meir, ed. Constructing Nationalism in Iran: From the Qajars to the Islamic Republic. London: Routledge, 2017. Lombard, Maurice. The Golden Age of Islam. Princeton: Markus Wiener, 2004. Macdonald, Scott. Avant-Doc: Intersections of Documentary and Avant-Garde Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. MacDougall, David. “Beyond Observational Cinema.” In Principles of Visual Anthropology, edited by Paul Hockings. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003. Marriott, David. “Response to Race and the Poetic Avant-Garde.” Boston Review, March 10, 2015. http://bostonreview.net/poetry/david-marriott-response-race-and-poetic-avant-garde. Mbembe, Achille. On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Mirzai, Behnaz A. “African Presence in Iran: Identity and its Reconstruction.” Outre-Mers: Revue d’histoire 336 (2002): 229–46. Mirzai, Behnaz A. A History of Slavery and Emancipation in Iran, 1800/1929. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017. Modarassi, Taghi. “The Zar Cult in Southern Iran.” In Trance and Possession States, edited by Raymond Prince. Montreal: R.M. Bucke Memorial Society, 1968. Motlagh, Amy. Burying the Beloved: Marriage, Realism, and Reform in Modern Iran. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012. Nadeau, Maurice. “The Period of Trances.” In History of Surrealism, translated by Richard Howard. New York: Collier Books, 1967. Naficy, Hamid. “Cinema as a Political Instrument.” In Politics of Modern Iran, vol. 3, edited by Ali Ansari. New York: Routledge, 2011. Naficy, Hamid. A Social History of Iranian Cinema, vol. 2: The Industrializing Years, 1941–1978. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Natvig, Richard. “Oromos, Slaves, and the Zar Spirits: A Contribution to the History of the Zar Cult.” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 20, no. 4 (1987): 669–89. Oksiloff, Assenka. Picturing the Primitive: Visual Culture, Ethnography, and Early German Cinema. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. Partovi, Pedram. Popular Iranian Cinema before the Revolution: Family and Nation in Filmfarsi. New York: Routledge, 2017. Peppis, Paul. Sciences of Modernism: Ethnography, Sexology, and Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Phillips, Jr., William D. “Sugar in Iberia.” In Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450–1680. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Porter, Lawrence G., ed. The Persian Gulf in Modern Times: People, Ports, and History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Ricks, Thomas. “Slaves and Slave Trading in Shi’i Iran AD 1500–1900.” Journal of Asian and African Studies 36 (2001): 407–18. Rouch, Jean. Cine-Ethnography. Translated by Steven Field. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Russel, Catherine. Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. Sadr, Hamid Reza. Iranian Cinema: A Political History. New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006.

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Index

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate figures. Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan, The (Morier) 57–8 affective economy 181n56 al-Afghānī, Sayyid Jamāl al-Dīn 146 African slavery 232, 235–6n30, 236n32, 237n43 Afsānah-i Mahjūr u Maghrūr (Ansārī) 48, 76n100 Ahmad, Salam 231 Ahmed, Sara 181n51, 181n56, 181n61 Ahrīman (the demonic) 4; see also demonic Akhavān-Sālis, Mahdī 142, 143, 148–9, 150, 153 Akomfrah, John 213 ‘Alavī, Buzurg 85; Dīv!...Dīv! 88–91 Āl-i Aḥmad, Jalāl 4, 10n30, 142 Amīn’pūr, Qayṣar 4, 13–14n52 Amīr Kabīr, Mirza Muhammad Taqī Khan 36, 74n57, 74n62 Amjad, Hamid 73n46 Ansārī Jābirī , Muhammad Hasan 37, 39–41 anxiety of influence, explaining poetic novelty 130, 137n99 Armaghān (journal) 85, 86 artistic value 3, 13n46 Aryanism 78n129 Ataturk, Mustafa Kemal 94n3 Auden, W. H. 6n9 Auerbach, Erich 189 authorial intention 142, 155n19 ‘Aynī, Sadr al-Dīn 186 Bād-i Jin (documentary) 213, 215–17, 216, 220–8, 232 Bahār, Muhammad Taqī 141, 154n5, 187, 226

Bākhtarī, Wasif 148, 151–3 Bakhtin, Mikhail 67n2 baqqāl bāzī (grocer’s play) 33, 73n47 Barāhinī, Rizā 9n28, 143, 145 Baudelaire 113, 116, 128 Berlin Circle 48–50 Bertel, E. E. 195 Beyk, ‘Abdul Razzāq 32 Book of Sajjād, The 32 Bowles, Henry M. 4 Browne, E. G. 188 Būf-i kūr (Hidāyat) 112 capitalism: bourgeois 64; development in Iran 100n40, 103n40; disasters of 176 Casanova, Pascale 112, 192 Cevdet, Abdullah 188, 191, 193, 204n29, 205n50 Chaikin, Konstantin Ivanovich 26 Chūbak, Sādiq 177 Cinema Civilization 65, 80n172 cinematic genre 66, 80n174 civilization: Europe 2, 6n11; Iran 2 classicism 62, 112, 202n10 coexistence 67n3 Cold War 214 colonial appropriation 7n17 committed literature (engagé) school, viewing literary history 2–3 Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) 188, 204n29 Communist University for Toilers of the East (KUTV) 185, 189–90, 201n1, 205n54 comprehensive law 36 Conrad, Joseph 103n46 consciousness 115, 135n17

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constitution, text of 37, 74n69 constitutionalism 47 Constitutional Revolution 34, 73n50, 145, 168, 188 Cooper, Merian 234n10 cosmopolitanism 2, 85 Crashaw, Richard 116 cultural appropriations 95n3 Curzon, George 36 Cuypers, Michel 70n19 Dāghistiānī, Wālih 126 Dānish, Husayn 188, 191, 195 Dark Times (Khalīlī) 165, 172, 175 Dashtī, ‘Ali 166–8 Dastgirdī, Vahīd 86 Dear Uncle Napoleon (television series) 229 debate see munāzirah (debate) demonic 4; Alavī’s anti-statist and anticapitalist discourse 85, 100–103n40; Alavī’s Dīv!...Dīv! 88–91; awareness of presence 89, 103–4n46; Firdawsī consciousness 86–7; Hidāyat’s Parvīn Dukhtar-i Sāsān 87–8; highly saturated form of demonisation 85, 96–7n8, 103n40; intermingling of amorism and 85–6; measurement of 86, 97–8n9; moment of embodiment 104n50; obtuse love of 85; racialised works 86, 98n12; Satan’s love 92n2; truth of signs 89, 104n50 dialogism 25, 53, 67n2 Dihkhudā, ‘Ali Akbar 27 al-Dīn Shah, Nāsir 33 discontent 146, 150; articulation of 153; expression of 5, 141; popular 95 Dīv!...Dīv! (Alavī) 88–91 Donne, John 116 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 3 Duma, Alexander 172 Enlightenment 124, 133 ethnography 214, 215, 233–4n8 Europeanized dandies 29, 70n21 evil, measurement of 86, 97–98n9 Fardīn, Muhammad ‘Ali 80n174 Fārīyābī, Zahīr 50 Farrukhī 127 Farukhzād, Furūgh 143, 214, 215 Fātimī, Nizām 80n174 Fāzil, Javād 166, 168 Fayḍī 113 Fighānī 126

fīlmfārsī 220–7, 238n49 film see pneumatics of blackness Firdawsī (Shāhnāmah) 86, 98n12, 147, 157n61 Firdawsī Millenium Celebration 86, 99n15 first contact 1, 5n1 First World War 187, 204n29; Berlin Circle 48–50 Flammarion, Camille 54 formalism 114, 202n10 Fouchécour, C.-H. de 127 founding father, making of 25–9 French Code law 32–3 French words 42, 76n90 Furāt-Yazdī, ‘Abbās 85, 86, 96n7 futurism 186 Gahan, Jairan 5 Ganjīnah-i Ansār yā Rumān-i Shaykn u Shūkh (Ansārī) 37, 38, 39–41; archetypal Shaykh and Shūkh 38 genre 71n28; Islamic fiction 4; novel 3; Persian fiction 3 Ghafāry, Farukh 238n63 al- Ghazzālī, Muhammad 146 Gide, André 189 Gigolos and Gigolettes of Tehran, The (Hakīmullāhī) 30 Gikandi, Simon 215 Gladstone, William 36 Gorky, Maxim 189, 204n38 Gūlshīrī, Hūshang 177, 178n2 Guyau, Jean-Marie 191 Hakamīzādah, ‘Alīakbar 166 Hakīmullāhī, Hidāyatullāh 30, 176–7, 181–2n62 Hamidānī, Mushfiq 66 Harrison, Marguerite 234n10 Hasan, Mīrzā 189 Heinrichs, Wolfhart P. 128 heterodoxy in humanities 95n3 Hidāyat, Riẓā Qulī 115 Hidāyat, Sādiq 27, 64, 85, 112; mentor in literary circles 99n21; Parvīn Dukhtar-i Sāsān 85, 87–8 Hijāzī, Muhammad 166, 167 Hikmet, Nâzim 185 Hillman, Michael 233–4n8 History of Peter the Great, The (Voltaire) 32 History of Russo-Iranian Relations (Qazvīnī) 28–9 History of the Nineteenth Century, The (Meilleur) 36

Index Hitchcock, Alfred 65 Hodgkin, Samuel 5 Hugo, Victor 172 Humāyūn (weekly publication) 166 hybrid (shutur-gāv-palang) 29–31 hylomorphism 119, 125 ibn Burd, Bashshār 113 ideology 42, 67n2, 78n129; Islamic 14n53; issue of language 47; Persianist 179n4; popular literature 165 Imāmī, Humāyūn 215 Industrial Revolution 133 inshā’ 53–4, 77n121 Intiẓār (‘Alavī) 102–3n40 Iran: avatar of evil 86; capitalist development 100–101n40; interbellum 85; interwar secular nationalism 85, 92–5n3; introduction of literary masterpieces 1–2; literary history of 2, 8n26; modern literary experience 3, 9n28; nationalism 98n12; power brokers in modernising state 94–5n3; reform initiatives 93–4n3; Turkey and Egypt influencing 2, 6n10 Iranian cinema 66, 80n174, 220, 227, 233n6 Iranian New Wave 214, 217, 220, 225, 235n27; film 213–14, 222, 225; filmmakers 227, 230, 238n63; Mūj-i Nū 220–7; script 235n29 Iranian Revolution 100n40 Iranian studies scholarship, first contact 1, 5n1 Iranian Writers’ Association 143, 144 Iran-Iraq War 3 Irānshahr, Husayn Kāzimzādah 48–50 Iran Today (journal) 167 Islamic fiction 4 Ismāl dar Nīyu Yurk (Madanī) 65, 66 I’timādī, Rajab ‘Ali 66 I’tisāmī, Parvīn 71n29 Jalīlī, Jahāngīr 165, 168 Jamālzādah, Muhammad ‘Ali 25–9, 49, 53–5, 58–62, 79n148, 230 Jambet, Christian 125 Jameson, Fredric 112 Javādī, Fattānah Ḥaj Sayyid 4 Johnson, Samuel 116 Joyce, James 3 Kāshānī, Murtazā Mushfiq 63 Kāzimī, Mushfiq 166

245

Kafka, Franz 3 Karimi-Hakkak, Ahmad 142, 186 Kasravī, Ahmad 146–7 “Katībah” (Akhavān-Sālis) 148–9, 153 Khalīlī, ‘Abbās 165, 172, 180n39 Khalid, Adeeb 193 Khānlarī, Parvīz Nātil 26 Khāqānī 190, 194–5, 199 knowledge, self-illumination 118 Konuk, Kader 189 “Krimil” (Lāhūtī) 194–5, 198–201; back cover 196; cover illustration 197 Lahūrī, Muhammad Iqbāl 147 Lāhūtī, Abū al-Qāsim 5, 185–8, 203n24; back cover illustration 196; cover illustration 197; founding Pārs (journal) 188–9; “Krimil” (“Kremlin”) 194–201; “Palace of Civilization” 199–200, 207–8n86 language 112; blackness of discourse 129; individual and 118; inner truth 114; invention of 132–3; as psychic mirror 115–21; realism of 121–3; shared philosophy of 134n13; unmaking and remaking world 127–8 legal codes, texts of 34, 36 light of Isfahbad 118 literary democracy 54, 179n5 literary diffusion 112 literary history 2, 8n26 literary modernity 27, 186; development in Iran 2; understanding Iranian 25 literature: artistic value 3, 13n46; reading for self-improvement 166; tension between politics and 2–3, 9n28; tradition/modernity chasm 3, 10n30; see also popular literature love poetry 85, 91–2n2 lūtī-jāhil 66, 80n174 Mārmūlak (film) 66 Madanī, Husayn 65 magical realism 3 Makhmalbāf, Muḥsin 4, 14n53 Makris, G. P. 218 Malcolm, John 36 Malik Motī’ī, Nāsir 80n174 Malkum Khan, Mirza 31, 37, 72n34 Mallarmé 112, 113, 120, 133 Manuchihrī 127 Marāghahī, Zayn ul-‘Ābidīn 27 Marvell, Andrew 116 Mashāyikhī, Mehdi 175

246

Index

Mawj-i Naw (New Wave), fīlmfārsi and 220–7 Merhavi, Menahem 230 messianism 150 Mir‘ābidīnī, Hasan 179n21 Mirzā-Nādirī, Firaydūn 174 modern 25 modernization, heterodoxy in humanities 95n3 modernism 112, 186; Persian influence on poetry 113; Suhrawardī and language as psychic mirror 115–21 modernity: Mullā Sadrā and illocutionary will 121–6; psychology of 115; realism and 113; Riẓā Shāh’s Iran 95n3; Sā’ib and linguistic resurrection of world 126–32; Sadrā’s psychocentrism 122; untiming literary 112–15 modern literature 27; historiography of Iranian 168, 179n22; ideology 179n4; literary democracy 179n5; taxonomies of 165 Montazeri, Fateme 5 moral provincialism, notion of 85 Moretti, Franco 112 Morier, James 36, 57 Motlagh, Amy 238n64 Mozafari, Arshavez 4 Mujābī, Javād 215 Mukālimah-i-Sayyāh-i Īrānī bā Shakhs-i Hindī (The Dialogue between an Iranian Traveler and an Indian Person), munāzirah 34–6, 73–4n50 Mukhtārī, Muhammad 145 al-Mulk, Lisān 32 munāzirah (debate) 4, 25, 30–1, 67n2; competing discourses 66–7; discursive dialogism 53, 77n118; discursive formation 31–48; omnipresence in writings 76n101 Muqaddam, Hasan 27, 63, 188 Musaddiq, Hamīd 144 Mushīr al-Dowlah, Mirza Husayn Khan 33 Mūsīqī-yi Jūnūb (film) 227–33 Musta’ān, Hussein-Qulī 168 Mustashār al-Dawlah Tabrīzī, Mirza Yûsif Khan 32, 73n44 Mu’tamin, Zayn al-‘Ābidīn 4 Naficy, Hamid 215 al-Nakatī 126 Nakhshabī, Rasūl 100n40 Napoleon, France’s 32, 72n40 nāriz̤ āyatī 5, 141; see also discontent

National Consultative Assembly 49 National Iranian Radio and Television 214 nationalism: ideology 179n4; Iranian 195, 207n81, 214; Mongols, Turks and Arabs 98n12; romantic 78n129, 103n40, 112; secular 92n2, 92n3, 95n3; strict 167 Naushirvan, Zinnătulla 189, 190, 191, 194, 205n41 Navā’ī 126, 128 Naẓīrī 113 New Literature 141, 147, 154n3 New Poetry 10n30, 112, 203n25; see also Shi‘r-i Naw (New Poetry) novel genre 3 Nūsh Dārū, Tahzībul Akhlāq (Ansāri) 41–2; dialogue between characters 41, 47–8; parallel texts 42, 43–6 Nuwās, Abū 113 Once upon a Time (Yakī Būd u Yakī Nabūd) (Jamālzādah) 26–9, 53–5, 68n5, 69n7, 69n9 Orientalism (Said) 230 Orwell, George 6n9 Ottoman Empire 188–9, 201, 202n12, 204n29, 237n38; constitution 36; law 34, 36; politics of 189; positivism 191–2; Turkey 2 Pārs (journal) 188–9 Pahlavī Iran, ruling 92–5n3 pan-psychicism 125 parodisation 95–6n6 Parvīn Dukhtar-i Sāsān (Hidāyat) 85, 87–8 Pasha, Midhat 36 passive imagination 117 periodization 26–7, 68n5, 229 Persian Is Sugar (Jamālzādah) 49, 63; dialogue 55; figures 56, 78n132; narrative features 57, 58; re-reading 50–3 Persian literary history: love/reason dichotomy 146, 157n47 Persian literary modernity 112–15 Persian love poetry 85, 91–2n2 Peter the Great, Russia’s 32, 72n40 phantastic etiology 118, 131, 132 Plato 118, 119, 125 pneumatics of blackness: Bād-i Jin (documentary) 213, 215–17, 220–8, 232; fīlmfārsi and Mawj-i Naw 220–7, 238n49; Mūsīqī-yi Jūnūb (film) 227–33; Nifrīn (film) 222–4; Tranquility in

Index the Presence of Others (film) 220–2, 224–5, 227 Poe, Edgar Allan 3 poetic: anxiety of influence 130, 137n99, poetic realism 112; poetic syllogism 115 poetry: classical Persian 187; early Abbasid period 113, 123; intermingling amorism and demonic 85–6, 95–6n6; “Koran of Satan” 95n6; radical novelty 135n18; social symbolic 142, 155n16 politics: Berlin Circle 48; culture and 95n3; identity formation 64, 95n3; international relations 92n3; Ottoman 188; paternalistic 94n3; Persian poetry in 186; progressive 103n40; radical 143, 189; socio-moral reform 167, 177; tension between literature and 2–3, 9n28 popular literature 13n50; affect in modern Iranian 177–8; concept of disgust 176–7, 182n66; contagion of emotions 171–7; genealogy of moral 166–9; literary humanitarianism 171–7; morality in 170–1; prostitutes in 165–6, 171–7; serialized novels 165, 168–9, 172, 178n2; sexual geography in 169–71 Pūrdāvūd, Ibrāhīm 49 predestination: classical 145–6; debate of free will vs 5, 141, 146–7; historical 147–54; predestinationism 147 predeterminism 146–7, 149 Prison Days (Ayyām-i mahbas) 167, 168 prophecy 118–21, 150 prose narrative 53–4 Prostitute, The (Fāzil) 167, 171 prostitutes: in popular literature 165–6, 171–7; sex-work and 178n1 psyche 117; actualized 123–4; elevation of psychic life 124–5; Enlightenment 124; human psychology 118–19; prophecy 120–1; unbounded 123 psycho-fiction 11n36, 68n6 psychologisation 3 Qā‘ānī 55 Qazvīnī, Muhammad 28–9, 48–51, 70n20 Quran 36, 74n64, 117 radical aloneness (tajarrud) 4, 118 Rafīq u Vazīr (Malkum Khan) 31 Rastegar, Kamran 187 realism 27, 62; of language 121–3; modernity and 113; Mullā Sadrā and illocutionary will 121–6 Red Twilight, The (journal) 165, 167–8

247

Reformation 133 revolutionary press 185–8; Central Press of the East 189–90, 192, 205n42, 206n57; Khāqānī and ruins of classical edifice 194–5, 198–201; Khayyām rubā‘īyāt and materialistic canon 190–4, 206n63; Pārs (journal) 188–9 Rezaei Yazdi, Hamid 4 Rilke, Rainer 3 Rimbaud, Arthur 13n46 Riẓā Shāh, Iran’s 92–5n3 romanticism 62 romantic nationalism 78n129 Rouch, Jean 217, 235n23 rubā‘īyāt (Khayyām) 190–4, 206n56, 206n63 Rūdakī 127 rule of colonial difference 1, 5n2 Ruskin, John 6n9 Russian law 34, 36 Sadr, Hamid Reza 227 Safavid-Mughal poets 126, 128, 130–1, 133 Sahbā, Ibrāhīm 167 Sā’ib 115; linguistic resurrection of world 126–32 Said, Edward 230 Sā‘idī, Ghulām-Husayn 217–18, 220–1, 225, 231 Sāsānī, Ahmad Malik 188 Saint-Exupery, Antoine de 66 Salmān, Mas‘ūd Sa‘d 126 al-Saltanah, Sharīf 86 Sultānpūr, Sa’īd 143, 144 Samanids 127, 137n82 Sandler, Rivanne 225 Sarḍvar, Hamzah 66 Schimmel, Annemarie 128 Schoedsack, Ernst 234n10 scholarship 1, 4, 147, 228; conventional 25–6, 53; Hidāyat 206n61; Iranian 201n4, 236n35; notion of “first contact” in 1, 5n1; orientalist 191; orthodox 54; Qazvīnī 49; Western 91n2, 188; zar 236n35 School of Iṣfahān 114 “Scientific and Literary Conversations” 48–9 secular nationalist norms 85, 92–5n3 secular psychocentrism 115, 125–6, 133 self: actualization 123–4; autonomy of consciousness 117; -awareness 117; knowledge of 116–17; presence and knowledge 121–2; relationship between individual and language 118

248

Index

Shādmān, Sayyid Fakhruddīn 63 Shah, Nādir 74n57 Shāhnāmah (Firdawsī) 86, 98n12 Shamīsā, Sīrūs 142 Shāmlū, Ahmad 143, 148, 150–1, 213, 215–16, 219 Sharia law 34–6 Shīrāzī, Mirza Hidāyat Allah 71n22 Shīrāzī, Sadra al-Dīn Muhammad 114–15, 121–6, 134n16 Shi‘r-i Naw (New Poetry) 5; historical predestination 147–54; history of 144–6; introduction of 141; limits of Sufi predeterminism 146–7; Nīmāic poetics and leftist critique 141–4; Nīmā Yūshīj as father of 141 shutur-gāv-palang (hybrid) 29–31 Sipānlū, Muhammad ‘Alī 144 Sipīd u Sīyāh (journal) 65 Sipihrī, Suhrāb 9n28, 143 social novel 179n5, 179n22: category of 167; genre 165, 169 social realism 26, 61 social symbolic poetry 142, 155n16 story-telling: modern 60–2; narrative style 69n9, 233n6; traditional 54–5, 70n19, 72n40 story writing 48, 60–2, 69n7, 231 stream of consciousness 3 Sufi predeterminism 146–7 al-Suhrawardī, Shihāb al-Dīn Yahyā 114–15, 134n16; language as psychic mirror 115–21 surrealism 11n35, 55, 215, 234n15, 236n34 swift accommodation, pitfall of 3 symbolic poems 142, 155n16 symbolism 13n46, 55, 62, 113, 224 synthesis 4, 67n2, 67n3; canonical 190; dialogical 25; of perspectives in narration 37

tajarrud (radical aloneness) 4, 118 Tālibov, ‘Abdul Rahīm 27, 48, 76n100 Tammām, Abū 113 Taqī Zādah, Sayyid Hasan 48–9, 61, 98n12 Taqvā’ī, Nāṣir 213–3; Bād-i Jin (documentary) 213, 215–17, 216, 220–8, 232; Mūsīqī-yi Jūnūh (film) 227–33; Tranquility in the Presence of Others (film) 220–2, 224–5, 227; see also pneumatics of blackness Tarbīyat, Muhammad ‘Ali 48, 50 Tavakoli-Targhi, Mohamad 192 Tevfik, Riżâ 188, 191, 195, 204n29 Theology of Aristotle 118, 125 Tihrān-i Makhūf (Kāshānī) 63 Toledano, Ehud 237n38 Tolstoy, Leo 6n9 tradition/modernity debate 2–3, 9n28 transformative appropriations 2

Tabarī, Manūchihr 217 Tabrīzī, Kamāl 66 Tāhir, Bābā 58

Ẓaḥḥāk, avatar of evil 86 zar: rituals 216–18, 237n39; scholarship 236n35

ūlūm-i kasbī (acquired knowledge) 74n69 University of Tehran 68n4, 68n5, 79n148, 239n75 ‘Unsurī 127 ‘Urfī 113 Vā‘iz Isfahānī, Sayyid Jamāl ad-Dīn 61 Vâ-Nû (alias of Ahmet Vālā Nurendin) 185–6 war literature 4, 12n45, 14n54 Wilde, Oscar 6n9 Yak Kalimah (Mustashār al-Dawlah) 32–3, 73n44 Yakī Būd u Yakī Nabūd (Once upon a Time) (Jamālzādah) 26–9, 53–5, 68n5, 69n9 Young Iran Association of Comedy 63 Yūshīj, Nīmā 10n30, 141–4, 187 Yūsifī, Ghulām Husayn 70n19