Course name: Autobiography in the Muslim World (ISLA 739)

Term: Fall 2017

Location: Morrice Hall, Room 313

Times: Tuesday, 9.35 to 11.25 AM

Professor: Prashant Keshavmurthy

Institute of Islamic Studies

Office 311, Morrice Hall

Office hour: Wednesday 3.00 –4.00 or by appointment

In accord with McGill University’s Charter of Students’ Rights, students in this course have the right to submit in English or in French any written work that is to be graded.

McGill University values academic integrity. Therefore all students must understand the meaning and consequences of cheating, plagiarism and other academic offences under the Code of Student Conduct and Disciplinary Procedures (see Academic Integrity for more information).

L'université McGill attache une haute importance à l’honnêteté académique. Il incombe par conséquent à tous les étudiants de comprendre ce que l'on entend par tricherie, plagiat et autres infractions académiques, ainsi que les conséquences que peuvent avoir de telles actions, selon le Code de conduite de l'étudiant et des procédures disciplinaires (pour de plus amples renseignements, veuillez consulter le site Academic Integrity.

Description: This course addresses the rhetoric of selfhood. That is, rather than only ideas of the self, it is the linguistic forms of such ideas that will mainly preoccupy us. This emphasis on how language informs the ways in which the self was understood in the past will keep our attention focused on the wider cultures of rhetoric – courtly speech-situations, intimate circles of Sufi adepts, royal harems, trans-national print-communities, modern political parties – in which apparently abstract ideas of selfhood circulated.

1 We will read both biographies and autobiographies to pose the following questions among others: does the act of writing play a constitutive or representative role in the telling of a life? Is the self in question conceived of as unique or as transpersonal? Is it gendered and, if so, how? What are the articulations of individual and public memory? In answering these questions aspects of narrative design, the interplay of poetry and prose, the uses of painting embedded in writing and the logics of genre will form only some of our foci of attention.

The text for every week will be paired with an essay or two on it or on the general field or genre it belongs to.

Method of Evaluation: 25% of the final grade will depend on your participation in class discussions, including attendance. A further 25% will be based on a 20 to 25 minute class presentation on one of the prescribed texts. You are welcome to make more than one presentation. The remaining 50% will be assigned on the basis of your final paper.

Texts to be purchased: If you do not already possess the following books you will need to buy them from the McGill University bookstore: 1. Interpreting the Self: Autobiography in the Arabic Literary Tradition; ed. Dwight F. Reynolds (Berkeley: University of California P, 2001) 2. Babur, Baburnama; trans. Wheeler Thackston (paperback) (Modern Library Classics, 2002) 3. Zikr-e Mir: the autobiography of an eighteenth century Mughal poet; trans. C.M. Naim (paperback) (Oxford University Press, 2002) 4. Farid ad-Din ʻAttār, Memorial of God’s Friends: Lives and Sayings of Sufis; translated and introduced by Paul Losensky; preface by Th. Emil Homerin (New York: Paulist Press, 2009).

2 Weekly readings

Weeks 1 and 2: Reynolds’s introduction and selections from Interpreting the Self: Autobiography in the Arabic Literary Tradition; ed. Dwight F. Reynolds (University of California Press, 2001).

Week 3: Al-Ghazali, The Deliverer from Error, translated by Montgomerry Watt as The Faith and Practice of Al-Ghazali (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1953). With a) Kenneth Garden, “Coming Down from the Mountaintop: Al- Ghazālī ’s Autobiographical Writings in Context,” The Muslim World 101, no. 4 (October 1, 2011): 581–96; and b) Eric Ormsby, “The Taste of Truth: Structural Analysis of Al-Munqidh Min Al-Dalal,” in Islamic Studies Presented to Charles J.Adams, ed. Wael Hallaq and Donald P. Little (Leiden: Brill, 1991). There is an extensive list of scholarship on Ghazali as well as his autobiography that you should feel free to use. I have listed much of it in the bibliography below.

Week 4: Naser Khosrow, Safar Nameh Trans. W. M. Thackston (New York: Bibliotheca Persica, 1986). With Mostafa Sedighi, Laleh Atashi, “Semiotics of Power and Knowledge in Nasir Khusrow's Travelogue”, Persian Literary Studies Journal, Volume 3, Issue 4, Summer 2014, Page 1-29.

Week 5: The translator’s preface and selections from Farid ad-Din ʻAttar, Memorial of God’s Friends: Lives and Sayings of Sufis; translated and introduced by Paul Losensky; preface by Th. Emil Homerin (New York: Paulist Press, 2009). If everyone in class reads Persian at an adequate level we might also read a portion of ‘Abd al-Qadir Bedil’s (1644 -1720) autobiography, Chahar ‘unsur, which recounts a reading session of ‘Attar’s

3 text; and another portion which models two of Bedil’s Sufi teachers on ‘Attar’s accounts of Junayd of Baghdad and Abu Yazid al-Bistami respectively.

Week 6: Babur, (selections from) Baburnama: Memoirs of Babur, Prince and Emperor; trans. Wheeler M. Thackston (Modern Library, 2002). Azfar Moin, “Peering Through the Cracks in the Baburnama”, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 49 (4) 2012: 493-526.

Week 7: Jahangir, (selections from) The Jahangirnama: Memoirs of Jahangir, Emperor of India (Washington, D.C.: Freer Gallery of Art, Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution ; New York ; Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1999). With Corinne Lefèvre, “Recovering a Missing Voice from Mughal India: The Imperial Discourse of Jahāngīr (r. 1605- 1627) in His Memoirs”, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, Vol. 50, No. 4 (2007), pp. 452-489

Week 8: Gulbadan Begum, “Humāyūn-Nāma” in Three Memoirs Of Humayun (Bibliotheca Iranica, Intellectual Traditions Series, 2009), 1-68. Trans. W. M. Thackston. With Rebecca Gould, “How Gulbadan Remembered: The Book of Humāyūn as an Act of Representation”, Early Modern Women: an Interdisciplinary Journal, 2011, Vol. 6.

Week 9: Zikr-i Mir: the autobiography of the eighteenth century Mughal poet Mir Muhammad Taqi Mir; trans. C.M. Naim (Oxford University Press, USA, 2002). With a) the translator’s introduction; b) Prashant Keshavmurthy, “Bidil’s Portrait: Asceticism and Autobiography”, Philological Encounters 1 (2015) 1-34; c) Zahra Sabri, “Mir Taqi Mir’s

4 Ẕikr-i Mīr An Account of the Poet or an Account by the Poet?”, Medieval History Journal, November, 2015.

Week 10: Sadriddin Aini, The Sands of Oxus: Boyhood Reminiscences of Sadriddin Aini Trans. John R. Perry and Rachel Lehr (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda, Bibliotheca Iranica, 1998). With http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/ayni-sadr-al-din

Week 11: Tahmas Khan, Tahmas Nama: the Autobiography of a Slave; abridged and translated by Setu Madhav Rao (Mumbai: Popular Prakashan, 1967). With Indrani Chatterjee, “A Slave’s Quest for Selfhood in Eighteenth Century Hindustan”, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 37, 1 (2000) 53-86.

Week 12: Bibi Khanum Astarabadi, “The Vices of Men,” in The Education of Women and The Vices of Men: Two Qajar Tracts. Trans. Hasan Javadi and Willem Floor (Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2010). With Afsaneh Najmabadi’s introduction to Bibi Khanum Astarabadi's Ma'ayib al-Rijal: Vices of Men (Midland Printers, Chicago, 1992).

Week 13: Taj al-Saltanah, Crowning Anguish: Memoirs of a Persian Princess from the Harem to Modernity, 1884-1914, Trans. Anna Vanzan and Amin Neshati; Ed. Abbas Amanat (Washington, DC: Mage Publishers, 1993). With a) Abbas Amanat’s introduction to this volume, “The Changing World of Taj al-Saltana” b) Afsaneh Najmabadi, “A Different Voice: Tāj os- Salṭana,” in Women’s Autobiographies in Contemporary Iran, ed. Afsaneh

5 Najmabadi, Cambridge, Mass., 1990, pp. 17-31. You will find more studies of this text and its milieu listed in Afsaneh Najmabadi, “Taj al-Saltaneh” at http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/taj-al-saltana

Week 14: Yet to be decided. We may need this week as extra time for one of the earlier texts. Alternatively, if we all read Urdu fluently we could read Mullā Vāhidi, Merey Zamāne ki Dilli which has not been translated into English (Karachi: Anjuman-i Taraqqi-i Urdu Pakistan, 2000); or Banarasi Das, Ardhakathanak: A Half Story (Penguin Classics, 2009), the famous Braj verse autobiography of a Jain merchant traversing the Emperor Akbar’s empire. Though by a non-Muslim, the text merits our attention as an autobiography from the Islamic world.

Two supplementary bibliographies:

More autobiographies from the Muslim world:

Banarasi Das, Ardhakathanak: A Half Story (Penguin Classics, 2009).

Muhammad ʻAli Jamalzadah, Isfahan is Half the World: Memories of a Persian Boyhood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).

Said Sayrafiezadeh, When Skateboards Will Be Free: A Memoir of a Political Childhood (New York: Penguin, 2009).

Fadwa Tuqan, A Mountainous Journey: a Poet’s Autobiography (Greywolf Press, 1990).

6 Scholarship on autobiographies from the Muslim world:

Bargeron, Carol. “Sufism’s Role in Al-Ghazali’s First Crisis of Knowledge.” Medieval Encounters 9, no. 1 (2003): 32–72.

Kenneth Garden, “Coming Down from the Mountaintop: Al-Ghazālī ’s Autobiographical Writings in Context,” The Muslim World 101, no. 4 (October 1, 2011): 581–96

———. “Duncan Macdonald’s Pioneering Study of Al-Ghazālī: Paths Not Taken.” MUWO The Muslim World 104, no. 1–2 (2014): 62–70.

———. “Revisiting Al-Ghazālī’s Crisis through His Scale for Action (Mizān Al-ʿAmal),.” In Islam and Rationality: The Impact of Al-Ghazālī, Papers Collected on His 900th Anniversary, edited by Georges Tamer, I:207–28. Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2015.

———. The First Islamic Reviver: Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali and His Revival of the Religious Sciences. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Josef Van Ess, “Quelques Remarques Sur Le Munqid Min Aḍ -ḍalāl,” in Ghazālī La Raison et Le Miracle (Paris: Éditions Maisonneuve et Larosse, 1987), 57–69.

Eric Ormsby, “The Taste of Truth: Structural Analysis of Al-Munqidh Min Al-Dalal,” in Islamic Studies Presented to Charles J.Adams, ed. Wael Hallaq and Donald P. Little (Leiden: Brill, 1991).

7

Stephen Menn, “The Discourse on the Method and the Tradition of Intellectual Autobiography,” in Hellenistic and Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Jon Miller and Brad Inwood (Cambridge, U.K.; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 141–91.

Griffel, Frank. “Al-Ghazālī’s Use of ‘Original Human Disposition’ (Fiṭra) and Its Background in the Teachings of Al-Fārābī and Avicenna.” The Muslim World 102, no. 1 (January 1, 2012): 1–32.

———. ed. Islam and Rationality: The Impact of Al-Ghazali: Papers Collected on His 900th Anniversary. Volume 2. Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2016.

———. The Philosophical Theology of Al-Ghazālī: A Study of His Life and His Cosmology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Kukkonen, Taneli. “Al-Ghazālī on Accidental Identity and the Attributes.” The Muslim World 101, no. 4 (October 1, 2011): 658–79.

———. “Al-Ghazālī on Error.” In Islam and Rationality: The Impact of Al- Ghazālī, Papers Collected on His 900th Anniversary, 2:3–31. Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2016.

Nakamura, Kojiro. “An Approach to Al-Ghazali’s Conversion.” Orient 21 (1996): 77–94.

8 Indrani Chatterjee, “A Slave’s Quest for Selfhood in Eighteenth Century Hindustan”, Indian Economic and Social History Review 2000: 37-53.

Kathryn Babayan, “The Topography of Travel in Early Modern Persianate Landscapes”, Harvard Library Bulletin, Vol. 23, No. 1 – 2, Spring-Summer 2012, 25 – 34.

Martin Kramer, Middle Eastern Lives: the Practice of Biography and Self- Narrative (Syracuse University Press, 1991)

Stephen F. Dale, The Garden of the Eight Paradises: Babur and the Culture of Empire in Central Asia, Afghanistan and India (1483 - 1530).

Hermansen, Marcia K. “Introduction to the Study of Dreams and Visions in Islam”, Religion, Vol. 27,1997, pp. 1–5.

A. Azfar Moin, “Peering Through the Cracks in the Baburnama: the Textured Lives of Mughal Sovereigns”, Indian Economic Social History Review 2012 49: 493

Arab Women’s Lives Retold: Exploring Identity Through Writing, Nawar Al- Hassan Golley, ed. (Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2007).

Al-Hassan Golley, Nawar. Reading Arab Women’s Autobiographies: Shahrazad Tells Her Story (Austin: Texas UP, 2003).

Many Ways of Speaking about the Self: Middle Eastern Ego-documents in

9 Arabic, Persian and Turkish (14th-20th Century), Ralf Elger and Yavuz Köse, eds. (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz Verlag, 2010).

Barbara Stocker-Parnian, “An Unusually Long Way to the Kaaba: Reflexions in the Safarna ma-ye Makka of Mehdi qoli Hedayat,” 103-116.

Women’s Autobiographies in Contemporary Iran, Afsaneh Najmabadi, ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, 1990).

Writing the Self: Autobiographical Writing in Modern Arabic Literature, Robin Ostle, Stefan Wild, eds. (London: Saqi Books, 1998).

Hülya Adak, “Suffragettes of the empire, daughters of the republic: women auto/biographers narrate national history (1918-1935)”, New Perspectives on Turkey: Special Issue on Literature and the Nation, No.36, May 2007, 27- 51.

------, https://research.sabanciuniv.edu/289/1/3011800000903.pdf

------, “An epic for peace (Introduction to Halide Edib’s Memoirs)”, Memoirs of Halidé Edib, Istanbul: Gorgias Press, 2004, pp. 5-28.

Margot Badran, Harem Years: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist, Huda Shaarawi as translator, editor, and introducer, London: Virago, 1986.

------, “Expressing Feminism and Nationalism in Autobiography: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Educator”, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, eds., De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women's

10 Autobiography, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992.

Afshan Bokhari, Masculine Modes of Female Subjectivity: Jahan Ara Begum’s (1614-1681) Patronage, Piety and Self-Fashioning in 17th C. Mughal India, London: I.B. Tauris, forthcoming (February 2012).

Marilyn Booth, “‘A’isha ‘Ismat bint Isma’il Taymur” and “Zaynab Fawwaz al-‘Amili” in Roger Allen (ed.), Essays in Arabic Literary Biography 1850- 1950, Weisbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2010, pp. 93-8, 366-76. Critical Feminist Biography, Special Double Issue of the Journal of Women’s History (edited with Antoinette Burton), 21: 3 and 4 (2009).

------,“Who Gets to Become the Liberal Subject? Ventriloquized Memoirs and the Individual in 1920s Egypt” in Christoph Schumann (ed.), Liberal Thought in the Eastern Mediterranean, Late 19th Century until the 1960s, Leiden: Brill, 2008, pp. 267-92.

------,“From the Horse’s Rump and the Whorehouse Keyhole: Ventriloquized Memoirs as Political Voice in 1920s Egypt,” Maghreb Review 32:2-3 (2007): 233-61.

------,“Quietly Author(iz)ing Community: Biography as an Autobiography of Syrian Women in Egypt,” L’Homme: Zeitschrift für Feministische Geschichtswissenschaft 14. Jg. Heft 2 (2003): 280-97.

------,“‘She Herself was the Ultimate Rule’: Arab Women’s Biographies of their Missionary Teachers”, Islam and Christian- Muslim Relations 13:4 (October 2002), pp. 427-48.Missionary Transformations,ed. Eleanor Doumato. May Her Likes Be Multiplied: Biography and Gender Politics in Egypt. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,

11 2001.

------,“Infamous Women and Famous Wombs: Biography, Gender, and Islamist Concepts of Community in Contemporary Egypt” in Mary Ann Fay (ed.), Auto/Biography and the Creation of Identity and Community in the Middle East from the Early Modern to the Modern Period, New York: St. Martin’s, 2001, pp. 51-70.

------,“Reflections on Recent Autobiographical Writing in an Arab Feminist Vein,” Middle East Women’s Studies Review 15:4/16:1 (Winter/Spring 2001), pp. 8-11.

------,“The Egyptian Lives of Jeanne d’Arc” in Lila Abu Lughod (ed.), Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998, pp. 171-211; published in Arabic as “al- Hayawat al-misriyya li-Jan dark”, trans. ‘Abd al-Hakim Hassan, in Lila Abu Lughod (ed.), al-Haraka al-nisa’iyya wa-al-tatawwur fi al-Sharq al-awsat, Cairo: al-Majlis al-a‘la lil-thaqafa, 1999, pp. 189-234.

------,“Exemplary Lives, Feminist Aspirations: Zaynab Fawwaz and the Arabic Biographical Tradition,” Journal of Arabic Literature 26:1-2 (March-June 1995), pp. 120-46.

------,“Biography and Feminist Rhetoric in Early Twentieth-Century Egypt: Mayy Ziyada's Studies of Three Women's Lives,” Journal of Women's History 3:1 (Spring 1991): 38-61.

------,“Prison, Gender, Praxis: Women's Prison Memoirs in Egypt and Elsewhere,” Middle East Report (MERIP) 149 (November‑December1987), pp. 35‑41.

12 Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, Atiya’s Journeys: A Muslim Woman from Colonial Bombay to Edwardian Britain (with Sunil Sharma), Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010.

------, A Princess’s Pilgrimage: Nawab Sikandar Begum’s A Pilgrimage to Mecca, Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2007; London: Kube, 2007; Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2008; Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008.

------, “Introduction: A Princess Revealed” in Abida Sultaan, Memoirs of a Rebel Princess, Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. xiii-xxxix.

Farzaneh Milani, “On Walls, Veils, and Silences: Writing Lives in Iran,” The Southern Review 38:3 (summer 2002).

------,“Yeki Bud, Yeki Nabud,” Autobiographical Themes in Turkish Literature: Theoretical and Comparative Perspectives, eds. Olcay Akyidiz, Halim Kara, Borte Sagaster (Istanbul: Oriental-Institut, 2007), pp. 219-225.

------, “Veiled Voices: Women's Autobiographies in Iran”, in Women's Autobiographies in Contemporary Iran, ed. Afsaneh Najmabadi, Cambridge, Mass.: Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University, 1990, pp. 1- 16; reprinted as “Foreign Autobiographies” in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Thomas J. Schoenberg and Lawrence J. Trudeau, Project Editors, Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, 2010, pp. 355-361.

------, “Disclosing the Self”, in Veils and Words: The Emerging Voices of Iranian Women Writers, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1992 and 1994 (16th printing); and London: I.B. Taurus, 1992 and 1994.

13 Gail Minault, “Foreword,” to A Woman of Substance: The Memoirs of Begum Khurshid Mirza, ed. by Lubna Kazim, New Delhi: Zubaan, 2005, pp. ix-xxv.

Mildred Mortimer, “Assia Djebar's Algerian Quartet: A study in Fragmented Autobiography”, Research in African Literatures: Autobiography and African Literature 28.2 (Summer 1997), pp. 102-17.

Sylvia Vatuk, “Hamara Daur-i Hayat: An Indian Muslim Woman Writes her Life,” in Telling Lives in India: Biography, Autobiography, and the Life History, ed. David Arnold and Stuart Blackburn, New Delhi: Permanent Black and Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004, pp. 144-174.

Amina Yaqin, “Truth, fiction and autobiography in the Urdu novel tradition” (Special issue: ‘Novelization in the Islamic World’, ed. Mohamed-Saleh Omri), Comparative Critical Studies 4:3 (2007).

Writing the Self: Autobiographical Writing in Modern Arabic Literature, Robin Ostle, Stefan Wild, eds. (London: Saqi Books, 1998).

A bibliography of philosophical studies of selfhood and the soul would be longer than is pertinent for the purposes of this course. However, the following two books will serve as comprehensive and critical introductions to the range of philosophical interest in questions of selfhood and the soul. The first book, by Sorabji, covers these topics with reference to multiple civilizational contexts, including the Islamic, while the second, by Charles Taylor, confines itself to a Euro-American canon:

14 Richard Sorabji, Self: Ancient and Modern Insights about Individuality, Life, and Death, The University of Chicago Press, 2006, 400pp., $30.00 (cloth), ISBN 0226768252.

Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: the Making of the Modern Identity (Harvard University Press, 1992).

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