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The Cradle of Dari”: the Question of ”Origins” in Modern Literary Historiography in Afghanistan Wali Ahmadi

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The Cradle of Dari”: the Question of ”Origins” in Modern Literary Historiography in Afghanistan Wali Ahmadi ”The Cradle of Dari”: The Question of ”Origins” in Modern Literary Historiography in Afghanistan Wali Ahmadi To cite this version: Wali Ahmadi. ”The Cradle of Dari”: The Question of ”Origins” in Modern Literary Historiography in Afghanistan. Slovo, Presses de l’INALCO, 2020. hal-02485189 HAL Id: hal-02485189 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02485189 Submitted on 24 Feb 2020 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. “The Cradle of Dari”: The Question of “Origins” in Modern Literary Historiography in Afghanistan Wa l i Ahmadi University of California, Berkeley “In our time literary history has increasingly fallen into disrepute, and not at all without reason,” writes Hans Robert Jauss in his celebrated essay Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory. Its greatest achievements all belong to the nineteenth century. To write the history of a national literature counted [. .] as the crowning life’s work of the philologist. The patriarchs of the discipline saw their highest goal therein, to represent in the history of literary works (Dichtwerke) the idea of national individuality on its way to itself. This high point is already a distant memory. 1 The reference of Jauss’s remarks is, of course, to European literatures. He makes no mention of the remarkable relevance and use of literary history in the genealogy of national imaginaries in most of the rest of the world, where the enterprise of literary historiography is by no means a “distant memory.” As the case of Persian clearly indicates, non‑European literatures have possessed indigenous traditions of writing literary history. Nevertheless, the initial task of imbuing a literature such as Persian with “the idea of national individuality” fell, not surprisingly, to Western Orientalists, who were trained in European philological scholarship but who also studied Persian literature intensely and with interest, 1. Jauss, 1982, p. 3. SLOVO 42 Comment penser l’histoire littéraire au xxie siècle dans l’espace euro‑asiatique ? – no 50 wrote about it with authority, and, more importantly, helped chart the subsequent disciplinary contours of Persian literary studies. Notwithstanding the Orientalist contributions to Persian literary historiography, the concurrent emergence of Persian literature, both as a scholarly discipline and a national institution in the first half of the 20th century, resulted, among other things, in a serious turn towards the exploring and studying of Persian literary history from a decidedly “modern” perspective, this time by Persian‑speaking scholars themselves. Significant endeavors were undertaken to produce comprehensive histories of Persian literature as an essential component of a broad “national” cultural heritage. Thus, simultaneous with the emergence of a powerful national imaginary during this period, scholarly compositions and compilations of Persian literary history to broadly reflect the continuity of “the idea of national individuality” turned into a project of singular importance. It is important to point out that influential modern works of Persian literary historiography by Iranian scholars (or by Western/Orientalist scholars of Persian literature) nearly uniformly applied the term “Persian” in a restricted and restrictive sense. They reducedPersian literature to Iranian literature, with little consideration of the fact that “Iranian”—in its present-day rendering—has had a spatially limited, notoriously nationally bound, definition, while “Persian” has historically referred to a vast linguistic and literary tradition as well as to an expansive cultural heritage that exceed the modern boundaries of any specifically demarcated nation‑state. Needless to say, precisely for the complications involved in writing Persian literary history from a nationally restrictive perspective, modern historiography of literature in Afghanistan, for its part, directly engages the implications, practical or otherwise, of the rather problematic use of “Persian” and/as “Iranian.” Whereas the “patriarchs of the discipline” (to use Jauss’s term) in Iran, as well as their Western Iranologist colleagues, were consistently using of the terms “Iranian literature” and “Persian literature” interchangeably, in Afghanistan elaborate efforts were undertaken to actively contest this claim and, instead, to produce histories of Persian literature that, while in structure and method varying little from the works of their Iranian counterparts, nevertheless maintained the centrality and originality of the area that now constitutes Afghanistan in the creation of the grand corpus of literary writings in Persian (institutionally termed “Dari” in Afghanistan). Afghan and Iranian scholars, albeit from contrasting ideological and discursive perspectives, considered literary historiography to epitomize the magnificence and splendor of a culture whose enduring legacies can be successfully and conveniently utilized to further institutionalize literature and literary studies. The overall efforts (and general success) of Iranian scholars in this respect, as well as in claiming Persian literature in its entirety as Iranian literature, have been largely acknowledged. “The Cradle of Dari”: The Questions of “Origins” in Modern Literary Historiography in Afghanistan 43 Wa l i Ahmadi However, some important contributions to Persian literary historiography by scholars from Afghanistan have remained mostly unexplored. As a crucial component in the process of institutionalization of literature in Afghanistan, literary historiography has had to tackle the question of the origins and early development of Persian as a linguistic and literary tradition. In other words, how to deal with the question of the origin(s) of Persian language (and literature) has informed the discursive composition of the project of literary historiography in Afghanistan. But this question is pertinent as much to perceived historical beginnings as to geographical and spatial origins of Persian literature. It is significant not only to discoverwhen Persian literature, as is conventionally known today, came into being; it is equally (if not more) important to find outwhere it started to flourish in the first place. Modern literary historians from Afghanistan have produced valuable panoramic overviews consisting of compendia of names, titles, styles, genres, periods, etc., that are deemed important for their projects. In this regard, they differ little from conventional works of literary historiography. Nevertheless, they have been determined, almost uniformly, to demonstrate and elaborate the undeniable centrality of the land that is Afghanistan in the rise and expansion of Persian literature during the formative first few centuries after the advent of Islam in the region. The implications—whether political, ideological, epistemological, or even aesthetic—of such a contention can be enormous, as the present article attempts to illustrate. What follows presents a critical perspective on one of the principal works of Persian literary historiography produced in Afghanistan: Muhammad Haidar Zhubal’s influential Tarikh-i Adabiyat-i Afghanistan [History of literature of Afghanistan] (1336/1957). 2 It deals specifically with the early segments of the book, where various dimensions of the genealogy of Persian/Dari literary efflorescenceafter the advent of Islam are discussed. Zhubal was born in Kabul in 1304/1925 and, upon graduation from secondary school, attended the then newly established Faculty of Letters at Kabul University. He later enrolled in graduate studies courses in the humanities and philosophy at Princeton University. He was a member of the Aryana Encyclopedia [Da’irat al-Ma’arif] and served as the editor‑in‑chief of such influential journals as‘Irfan and Aryana. His extensive oeuvres included Adabiyat az khilal-i rawanshinasi [Literature through [the lens] of Psychology], Naqd-i adabi wa rawabit-e an ba tarikh-i adabiyat [Literary criticism and its relation to literary history], Tarikh-i adabiyat-i Afghanistan [History of literature of Afghanistan], the book under consideration here, Nardban-i asman [A Ladder to the sky], on the life 2. Zhubal, 1336/1957. SLOVO 44 Comment penser l’histoire littéraire au xxie siècle dans l’espace euro‑asiatique ? – no 50 and poetry of Mawlana Jalal al‑Din Balkhi or Rumi, Nigahi ba adabiyat-i mu’asir-i Afghanistan [A Glance at contemporary literature of Afghanistan], Zaban-i Farsi va rawish-i tadris-i nawin wa mu’asir‑i an [The Persian language and new, contemporary methods of teaching it], and several shorter treatises, comparative literary investigations, translations, and short stories. Muhammad Haidar Zhubal was killed in a tragic airplane accident over the skies of Beirut, Lebanon, in fall of 1338/1959. Throughout his brief, but very productive, period of literary scholarship, especially in the pages of Tarikh-i Adabiyat-i Afghanistan, Zhubal— relying on historical, literary, and linguistic sources, as well as utilizing rhetorical and discursive strategies that characterize Afghan literary
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