Introduction

Thibaut d’Hubert and Alexandre Papas

This book is the outcome of a project that started with an informal discussion between both editors in a Parisian restaurant in June 2010. Having reached the dessert, common questioning and nascent friendship encouraged us to contin- ue the conversation in more depth, so much so that a year later we decided to engage in a collective venture that we called A Worldwide Literature: Jāmī in the Dār al-Islām and Beyond. We aimed at filling a massive lacuna in modern scholarship on the cultural history of Eurasia by studying the reception of the works of the polymath ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī and, through him, the Timurid intellectual legacy. We also hoped to provide a template for philologically grounded studies of trans-regional and cross-linguistic trends in the Muslim world. The project gathered specialists of literary traditions that, in spite of their common recourse to the renewed canonical corpus produced during the Timurid period, had never been studied in a connected way before. We called upon book historians, philologists, experts in various languages and literatures, and Islamicists to reconnect the different parts of a cross-cultural process. Specifically, we brought together specialists of various languages such as Persian, Arabic, Turkish (Ottoman and Chaghatay), Sanskrit, Pashto, Urdu, Bengali, Chinese, Malay, and Georgian, in order to study the impact of Timurid literature on intellectual history on a global level. First, we organized in October 2012 a symposium at the University of Chicago, in order to introduce one another to the material available in each tradition and define guidelines for a common analysis of this complex subject. Then, after a year of further research, an international conference was held in November 2013 in Paris to present the outcome of this collaborative work. While the symposium organized in Chicago allowed us to map the field of the diffusion and reception of Jāmī’s works, the goal of the second event was to delve into the specifics of each contribution. As one might expect, getting closer to the texts and paying attention to specific contexts highlighted compelling transversal issues and fostered discussions that became more substantial in terms of treatment of the sources. In April 2014, a smaller workshop took place in Chicago to discuss the conception of a specific book for Brill’s Handbook of Oriental Studies se- ries that would make public this international teamwork in a stimulating way. Following months of writing and editing, not without intense commensality, the final act of the project is the present volume gathering the contributions of almost all of the participants. The twenty-two essays comprising this book

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004386600_002 2 d’Hubert and Papas are divided into three parts corresponding to the main paths by which Jāmī’s works left a deep imprint on the intellectual landscape of the Muslim world from the early modern period up until the beginning of the twentieth century.

1 Collective Studies on Jāmī and the Reception of the Works: Previous and Current Contributions

Interestingly, we find in the past scholarship done on “Jāmīana” a similar, though implicit and not presented as such, three-tier understanding of the polymath’s reception. This is particularly true for two conference proceedings published respectively in Kabul in 19651 and in Dushanbe in 1973.2 Both sym- posia had been organized in 1964 on the occasion of the 550th anniversary of Jāmī’s birth. Largely forgotten today, probably because of the nationalist ac- cents or heavy propaganda of that time and perhaps equally because of the very limited accessibility of such publications, many papers written by Afghan, Tajik, Iranian, Uzbek, Georgian, and Azerbaijani contributors to these volumes appear, nevertheless, as pioneering writings.3 In this regard, our collective en- deavor is both an homage paid to our Central Asian colleagues, in a sort of dialogue through space and time, and an attempt to provide an innovative reference book. Instead of summarizing the successive chapters of our three-part

1 Tajlīl-i pānṣad u panjahumīn sal-i tavallud-i Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥman-i Jamī (mutawaffa 898): Shamil-i payamha va bayaniyyaha (Kabul: Vizarat-i Maṭbūʿat, 1344/1965). The foreword gives some reminders on the life and works of Jamī. It also describes with photographs the speeches given in Kabul by Afghan and foreign officials, including the head of the Cairo Public Library, and the visit of the main Timurid monuments of Herat by a delegation of thirty scholars. 2 Abdurahmoni Jomi: Majmuoi materialhoi jashni 550-solagi (Dushanbe: Nashriyoti Donish, 1973). Celebrating also the 40 years of the foundation of the Soviet Tajik Republic in 1924, the introduction to the volume presents Jamī as a progressive thinker and a poet whose legacy is found in contemporary Tajik poets, such as Sadriddin Ayni, Abulqosim Lohuti, Mirzo Tursunzoda, and Mirsaid Mirshakar. 3 After this period, the situation in Afghanistan interrupted most of the academic activities. Significantly, the Afghan philologist Najīb Māyil Haravī, who worked extensively on Jāmī, migrated to Iran in 1971–2. In Tajikistan, a volume has been published on the occasion of the 575th anniversary of Jāmī’s birth, but was deprived of research contributions. It is mainly a listing of 1270 publications about the poet from the Soviet republics, written in languages as diverse as Tajik, Russian, Uzbek, Azeri, even Armenian and Lithuanian. The reference is: L.A. Balueva and N.G. Sherbakova, Abdurahmoni Jomi. Fehristi asarhoi dar borai u, ki dar SSR az chop baromadaand (solhoi 1917–1988) (Dushanbe: Nashriyoti Donish, 1989). Jāmīana has been essentially carried out by the philologist Aʿloxon Afsahzod who died in 1999.