Persian Documents

PERSIAN DOCUMENTS After the Mongol period, Persian was the official written language in Iran, Central Asia and India. A vast amount of documents relating to administration and social life were produced and yet, unlike Ottoman and Arabic documents, Persian historical resources have received very little critical attention. This book is the first to use Persian documents as the sources of social history in Early Modern Iran and Central Asia. The contributors examine four distinct elements of the documents: . the formal aspects of the sources are initially inspected . the second part focuses on newly discovered sources . the most abundant documents of the period – waqf deeds – are individually studied In this way the reader is led to realize the importance of Persian documents in gaining an understanding of past urban and rural societies in the Middle East. Up until now our understanding of historical Islamic and Middle Eastern societies has been based mainly on Arab and Ottoman documents. In contrast, this book foregrounds other historical “Islamic” societies that employed different systems and practices. By using a wide range of sources, including sale deeds, waqf endowment deeds, tax registers and sufi documents, the contributors highlight the rewards of researching hitherto neglected material. KONDO Nobuaki is Associate Professor at the Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. NEW HORIZONS IN ISLAMIC STUDIES Series Editors: Professor SATO Tsugitaka PERSIAN DOCUMENTS Social history of Iran and Turan in the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries Edited by KONDO Nobuaki PERSIAN DOCUMENTS Social history of Iran and Turan in the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries Edited by KONDO Nobuaki First published 2003 by RoutledgeCurzon Published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright Cbfbbdsjhfreuahbf#poC2003 Islamic Area Studies Project Typeset in Times New Roman by LaserScript Ltd, Mitcham, Surrey The Open Access version of this book, available at www.tandfebooks.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercail-No Derivatives 4.0 license. 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 A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 978-0–415–30274–6 (hbk) CONTENTS List of figures vii List of maps ix List of tables xi Notes on contributors xiii Preface xv PART I Formal aspects 1 1 A commentary on the the closing formula found in the Central Asian waqf documents 3 ISOGAI Ken’ichi 2 Formal aspects of Qajar deeds of sale 13 Christoph WERNER PART II New sources 51 3 About a scroll of documents justifying Yasavi rituals 53 Bakhtiyar BABAJANOV \ 4 Majmu¯ ah’ha¯: Important and unknown sources of historiography of Iran during the last Safavids – \ \ the case of Majmu¯ ah-i Mı¯rza¯ Mu ¯ına¯ 73 Mansur SEFATGOL v CONTENTS PART III Waqfs 85 5 The waqf of a Timurid amir – the example of Chaqmaq Shami in Yazd 87 IWATAKE Akio \ 6 The waqf of Ustad Abbas – rewrites of the deeds in Qajar Tehran 106 KONDO Nobuaki PART IV From cities to villages 129 7 Irrigation examined through documents of Qajar Iran 131 Hashem RAJABZADEH 8 Urban–rural relations in early eighteenth-century Iran – a case study of settlement patterns in the province of Hamadan 147 YAMAGUCHI Akihiko Index 186 vi FIGURES \ 2.1 Sale of the Bagh-i Mirza Zahid – muba¯ya ah dated 1186/1772 16 2.2 Abstract layout sketch of a private deed 18 2.3 Sale deed from 1279/1863 19 2.4 Endorsement from a deed of sale dated 1255/1840 34 2.5 Remark on the number of issued copies 37 2.6 Outward appearance of an early Safavid and a late Qajar deed of sale 39 3.1 Documents 1–3 55 3.2 Documents 4 and 5 58 3.3 Document 10 62 3.4 Document 11 64 \ \ 4.1 Majmu¯ ah-i Mı¯rza¯ Mu ¯ına¯ 77 6.1 Composition of endowed properties in Document 1 111 6.2 Composition of endowed properties in Document 2 111 \ 6.3 Shares in the hamma¯m of Abbas-abad 115 7.1 Document 1˙ 138 7.2 Document 2 140 7.3 Document 3 142 7.4 Document 4 144 8.1 TT907, 112–113 152 8.2 Village size distribution in Hamadan province 158 8.3 Village landholding size distribution in terms of çift numbers 161 8.4 Distribution of taxpayers per çift 162 vii MAPS \ 6.1 Abbas-abad quarter in the map of 1309/1891 109 \ 6.2 The city of Tehran and Takyah of Abbas-abad in 1275/1857 110 7.1 River system of Iran 132 7.2 Nahr-i Mustajdah-i Gha¯za¯nı¯ 133 7.3 Nahr-i Mustajdah-i Rashı¯dı¯ 134 8.1 Rural and urban settlements in Hamadan province 172 8.2 Large villages, towns and assumed main trade routes 173 ix TABLES 2.1 Text edition, first part, of the model deed of sale from 1186/1772 21 2.2 Text edition, second part, of the model deed of sale from 1186/1772 23 2.3 Text edition, third part, of the model deed of sale from 1186/1772 30 2.4 Text edition, fourth part, of the model deed of sale from 1186/1772 33 \ 4.1 Contents of the Majmu¯ ah-i Findiriski 75 4.2 Contents of Jung-i Ahmad-i Ghula¯m 76 \ ˙ \ 4.3 Contents of Majmu¯ ah-i Mı¯rza¯ Mu ¯ına¯ 78 \ 4.4 Comparative table of contents of the three word majmu¯ ahs81 5.1 Chronology of Chaqmaq’s activities 88 5.2 Buildings constructed by Chaqmaq and Bibi Fatimah 91 5.3 Duties and salaries of the officers 96 6.1 List of the waqf properties found in various sources 112 8.1 Inhabited and uninhabited villages in Hamadan province 150 8.2 Villages having specific crops or apiculture as tax items in Hamadan province 156 8.3 Villages with gardens and vineyards in Hamadan province 156 8.4 Sheep tax per naˆhiye in Hamadan province 157 8.5 Classification on population size of rural settlements in Hamadan province 159 8.6 Resm-i çift and taxes on primary grains (akçe)159 8.7 Taxpayers and çifts per naˆhiye in Hamadan province 163 8.8 Taxpayers in towns of Hamadan province 164 8.9 Manufacturers in towns of Hamadan province (akçe)167 8.10 Commercial activities in towns of Hamadan province 168 8.11 Agricultural production in towns of Hamadan province 168 xi CONTRIBUTORS Bakhtiyar BABAJANOV Senior Researcher, Biruni Institute of Oriental Studies, the Academy of Sciences, Uzbekistan ISOGAI Ken’ichi Research Fellow, International Research Institute for Studies in Languages and Peace, Kyoto University of Foreign Studies, Japan IWATAKE Akio Associate Professor, Department of History, Kwansei Gakuin University, Japan KONDO Nobuaki Associate Professor, Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Japan Hashem RAJABZADEH Visiting Professor, Department of Iranian Studies, Osaka University of Foreign Studies, Japan Mansur SEFATGOL Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of Tehran, Iran Christoph WERNER Assistant Professor, Department of Islamic Studies, University of Freiburg, Germany YAMAGUCHI Akihiko Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of the Sacred Heart, Japan xiii PREFACE This book is the first collection in the Western academic world of articles on Persian historical documents. Persian documents are essential sources for the historical study of Iran and Central Asia (Turan); in those regions, most administrative and legal documents were written in Persian after the Mongol period. Compared to Ottoman documents, however, Persian documents have not been fully studied by researchers. The reason is obvious. The study of these particular historical documents has been hindered by huge obstacles, in particular lack of access. For years, native researchers were permitted to access archives. Foreign researchers were obliged to use published documents, which were limited in number and in theme. For this reason, historical study of the region stagnated somewhat until recently. Now that the archives are more accessible than before, investigation of the documents is bringing many new discoveries in historical studies, especially in the field of social history. The documents dealt with in this volume are all related to the social history of the region, but vary greatly in form and content, being waqf deeds, sale deeds, documents on Sufi rituals, and more. They were produced within a vast geographical area. At first glance, the reader may wonder how we can define the term “Persian documents.” But if the reader looks closely, many common elements appear. The variety and unity of the documents open the way to a comparative study, which is an important point of this volume. For example, one can compare the form of waqf deeds from Central Asia with that of Iranian waqf deeds. Of course, it is also possible to compare them with Ottoman counterparts, which were studied long before us. Sometimes we tend to consider Ottoman examples “Islamic,” but the “Islamic” examples in this volume differ from Ottoman ones. In the Eastern part of the Islamic world, a different tradition did exist, and to clarify that tradition will certainly be useful for understanding the whole of Islamic history. This volume was first intended to be the proceedings of the workshop on Persian archival sources, sponsored on December 4, 1999 at the Institute of Oriental Culture, University of Tokyo, by the Islamic Area Studies Project. This project, headed by Sato Tsugitaka, was set up in 1997 with a five-year Grant-in- Aid for Scientific Research from the Japanese Ministry of Education, Science xv PREFACE and Culture, to develop new methods for understanding the Islamic World.

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