The World of Persian Literary Humanism

THE WORLD OF PERSIAN LITERARY HUMANISM THE WORLD OF PERSIAN LITERARYq HUMANISM HAMID DABASHI HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, Massachusetts London, En gland 2012 For the memories of my mother’s lullabies, and the whispers of the woman I love: For Golbarg. For Good. Copyright © 2012 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Dabashi, Hamid, 1951– The world of Persian literary humanism / Hamid Dabashi. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978- 0-674- 06671-7 1. Persian literature—History and criticism. 2. Humanism in literature. I. Title. PK6412.H86D33 2012 891'.5509—dc23 2012022225 q Contents Preface vii Introduction The Making of a Literary Humanism 1 1 The Dawn of an Irani an World in an Islamic Universe The Rise of Persian Language and Literature (632– 750) 42 2 The Persian Presence in the Early Islamic Empires Resisting Arabic Literary Imperialism (750– 1258) 70 3 The Prose and Poetry of the World The Rise of Literary Humanism in the Seljuqid Empire (1038–1194) 98 4 The Triumph of the Word The Perils and Promises of the Mongol Empire (1256– 1353) 131 5 The Lure and Lyrics of a Literature The Center and Periphery of the Timurid Empire (1370– 1506) 165 vi Contents 6 The Contours of a Literary Cosmopolitanism Treading over Multiple Empires (1501– 1732) 191 7 The Dawn of New Empires Literary Humanism in Search of Itself (1736– 1924) 224 8 The Final Frontiers New Persian Literary Humanism (1906 to the Present) 263 Conclusion Literary Humanism as an Alternative Theory to Modernity 301 Notes 329 Ac know ledg ments 359 Index 361 q Preface The Karun River runs through the Khuzestan province in southern Iran, where I was born and raised, like an immortal serpent whose head and tail are lost in the subterranean sinews of the earth or else deleted from the terrain of history. All that has remained and fl owing is the body— bold, braving the elements, corporeal, canonic, mythic— as if it began in the infi nity of a nowhere and is headed toward the immortality of somewhere else. Karun is some 450 miles long on the map and the only navigable river in my homeland. It originates in the Zard Kuh mountain range of the Bakhtiari region in the Zagros Mountains, and after receiving many tributaries it fl ows through my hometown of Ah- vaz on its way to the Persian Gulf. The blood of our homeland in southern Iran is brown, you might say, by the commanding color that Karun so convincingly projects in and of itself. Karun is the color and convic- tion of faraway mountains— invisible, imagined, dormant in the twists and turns of the silent river. It is ponderous, meditative, and confi dent, knows where it is going, minds its own business—all the while gener- ously nourishing us as if entirely unbeknownst to itself. Is it because of the enduring memories of Karun, the invisible ma- trix of its time and space mapped repeatedly on the dawning of its visible aspects, now all carved with confi dence and assurance into the rhythm and fl ow of my being, that I also have an atemporal and yet tactile sense of my mother tongue, and the literature, prose, and poetry that goes with it, at once fl owing and stationary, timeless and timely, evident and effusive— the enduring music of a language and literature that I began sensing and then learning from my mother’s lullabies, continued learning viii Preface until the day I decided what quatrain from Omar Khayyam should be carved on her gravestone, and then learned again in the nights I sang the same lullabies to my own children in New York or taught Persian literary masterpieces to my students at Columbia University, and will continue to learn until the day that they will be lost but still palpable to me in the invisibility of my own death and dying, and from there to the memories that my children will carry from me? But helpless pieces in the game He plays Upon this chequer- board of Nights and Days He hither and thither moves, and checks . and slays Then one by one, back in the Closet lays. I write this book on Persian literary humanism (Adab) as it has emerged and spread over the last 1,400 years, like a mighty and magnifi - cent river, from Bengal to Istanbul and from central Asia to the eastern coasts of Africa, and with the contemporary map of Iran as its epicenter, by way of a historical retrieval of an otherwise ahistorical phenomenon code- named “literature.” What you will see and sense is a river running under your feet, like Karun under mine, while what you will feel and form in your mind is the abiding presence of where it has been and where it is headed: that is the paramount image in my mind as I begin to tell my story of Persian literature, a river whose mighty and majestic aspect will soon dawn on you and you will have an abiding sense of where it has been and where it is headed. I will have you sail on that river— claiming, naming, feeling, sensing it. Persian literature is a living organ- ism, just like a river, and telling its story requires a fl uidity of narrative that comes to terms with its existential immediacy, as if it had no history, and yet is fully aware of the expansive history that it tacitly fl aunts. Like the Karun River, Persian literature is fl owing from an infi nity of historical sources, comes to you with the massive volume of its abiding presence, and leads to the immortality of a yet-to- be- named sea. Adab is one of the richest and aesthetically most provocative words in Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and Turkish. In all of these languages, with slight variations in both pronunciation and connotations, it suggests a commanding allusion to proper etiquette, fi nesse, fl air, grace, or the art of living gracefully— a grace that extends from the way you speak and think, to the manner in which you clothe and carry yourself, to the disposition of your character and culture. The German Bildung is probably Preface ix the closest word in any Eu ro pe an language to what Adab means in Per- sian and its adjacent languages. But Adab, at the same time, categorically relates to literature as belles- lettres, literature as the summation of all linguistic arts that are beautiful and make for equally beautiful living, an art that informs a literature that becomes a testimony of your having achieved (not inherited) a living grace. It is this rich range of the connotations of Adab, which I translate as “literary humanism,” that I wish to convey in this book as the running leitmotif of Persian literary imagi- nation, and thereby the Irani an cultural heritage. Adab is apt for the literary disposition of the writing we call “literature,” because it embraces life and letters, body and book, manners and matters, society and soli- tude, wish and will, code and character. What I ultimately plan to demonstrate in this book is that the literary subconscious of a civilization is its paradoxical undoing, which may in fact account in part for the active hostility of the masculinist aspect of the dominant Arabic culture early in Islamic history against the con- sistently feminized Persian language and literature, character and culture, “accusing” Persians not only of effeminate delicacy and sexual misconduct (as now aptly demonstrated by Joseph Massad in his Desir- ing Arabs) but also of scientifi c and philosophical inaccuracy— a charge that may in part at least account for such leading Ira ni an scholars and scientists as al-Biruni, Ibn Sina, and al- Ghazali opting to write most of their important and canonized work in Arabic. This theological, philosophical, and scientifi c shunning of the Persian language (to which, of course, there are a number of exceptions), ipso facto posited Persian literary humanism as the modus operandi of a mode of being, writing, and reading safely distanced from the sanctifi ed language of the Quran and the masculinist rectitude of Islamic scholasticism that it had his- torically occasioned. This historic condition thus ascribes to Persian literary humanism an effectively feminine disposition, even as it remained in a by-and-large male-dominated domain. That effectively feminine subconscious of a decidedly masculinist civilization has given Persian literary humanism a subversive disposition by being ipso facto narrated from a hidden and denied, repressed, and thus paradoxically fl amboyant and defi ant vantage point. The proposition of Adab as the literary subconscious of a masculinist civilization posits the subject that it invokes as creatively unstable and always already somewhere else, beyond the command and control of any sacred certitude. x Preface The name Karun is probably a modern corruption of Kuhrang, which means “the color of mountain.” A river that looks like a mountain in motion and carries the memories of its mountainous origins in the running fl uency of its color is the image that Persian literature has projected of itself throughout its long and generous history. Karun is also identifi ed with the Biblical river of Pishon, which along with the Tigris, Euphrates, and Karkheh (“Gihon”) constitutes the four rivers of Eden. To think that the river that runs quietly through my hometown and over which I traveled all my childhood and adolescent years was also one of the four rivers that ran through Eden! The idea radically compromises one’s sense of time and space, rhythm and harmony, and sense and sensibility, and teaches you, above all, humility, as you pick up your proverbial pen, dip it into Karun, and write the aleph that an- ticipates the beh, dreaming of the sea with no name.

Load more