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Alexander and the Persian Cosmopolis, 1000-1500 Owen Cornwall

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Alexander and the Persian Cosmopolis, 1000-1500 Owen Cornwall Alexander and the Persian Cosmopolis, 1000-1500 Owen Cornwall Submitted in partial fulfillment of the of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2016 ©2015 Owen Cornwall All rights reserved ABSTRACT Alexander and the Persian Cosmopolis, 1000-1500 Owen Cornwall The Alexander romance—a heroic narrative loosely based on the life of Alexander the Great—was one of the most widely copied texts throughout premodern Europe and the Islamic world. In premodern Persian histories and literature, Alexander was an archetypal Persian king, who conquered the world and united "East and West." Four Persian Alexander epics were composed between 1000 and 1500 CE by some of the most famous authors of the Persian literary tradition: Firdausi (d.1020), Nizami (d.1209), Amir Khusrau (d.1325) and Jami (d.1492). Despite the importance of these epics to premodern Persian literature, this dissertation is the first monograph in any European language to compare all four canonical versions of the Persian Alexander epic in depth. My analysis focuses on the ways in which Persian Alexander epic tradition provides insight into the development of the Persian cosmopolis, a trans-regional cultural phenomenon extending from the Balkans to the Bay of Bengal. Table of Contents List of Images ii Introduction 1 King, Prophet, or Both? 3 Culture-Power and the Cosmopolis 7 Epics and Theory 13 Ethnicity and its Literary Doubles 22 Chapter 1. Epic: Firdausī's Alexander Epic (1010) and the Arabic Cosmopolis 29 The Birth of an Inter-Nation? 32 Between Persian and Arab: His Persian Name and His Mother’s Smell 36 The Critique of Group Feeling 42 The Persian Cosmopolis: Group Feeling and Literature 46 The Arabic Shadow Cosmopolis 54 Chapter 2. Allegory: Niżāmī's Alexander Epic (1194) and the Caucasus 62 Niżāmī and Newness 64 Epic and Romance 76 Ascetics and Power 80 Two Horns, a Thousand Faces 83 The First Ṣāḥib-Qirān, Bringing the World Together 91 Chapter 3. Science: Amīr Khusrau's Alexander Epic (1302) and North India 100 Amīr Khusrau and the Empire of Things 105 The "Re-Production" of Alexander’s Astrolabe 126 Jain Translators 142 Chapter 4. Death: Jāmī's Alexander Epic (1485) and Central Asia 152 Jāmī in the Graveyard: Humanism at Death's Door 158 Between Persian and Turk: A Critique of Legitimation 166 Conclusion 180 Bibliography 192 i List of Images Figure 1: Alexander constructs the iron rampart. From the "Great Mongol Shāh-nāma" (ca. 1330s) 108 Figure 2: Amīr Khusrau's Mirror of Alexander copied and illustrated at the court of the Mughal emperor Akbar 109 Figure 3: Alexander's mechanical iron cavalry against the Indian army of Porus. From the "Great Mongol Shāh-nāma" (ca.1330) 110 Figure 4: Alexander in a glass bell jar venturing into the ocean 111 Figure 5: Alexander harnesses the magic power of an idol by beating a drum at the entrance of a river 112 Figure 6: An astrolabe made by Muḥammad Qā'im Lāhorī Photo credit: author. Courtesy of Nadwat al-ʿUlamā' in Lucknow, India 114 Figure 7: Two views of the Delhi-Topra pillar in Delhi. Photo credit: author 115 Figure 8: Miniature paintings of ship transporting the Aśokan pillar 121 ii Acknowledgements Many people have helped me along the way. First and foremost is my advisor, Allison Busch, who made my graduate experience deeply rewarding by inspiring me with her own distinctive scholarship and challenging me with her trademark rigor. My second largest debt is to Michael Barry, whose passion for knowledge is enduringly irresistible. Next I thank Fran Pritchett, whose genius for detail and friendship make her the ideal collaborator. Sheldon Pollock's scholarship and editorial direction at the Murty Classical Library of India have been an inspiration. Barry Flood has been generous with his brilliant insight and feedback. Many of my teachers at Columbia have been exceptional. Hossein Kamaly has been unstinting with his astonishing expertise. Marwa Elshakry has a preternatural ability to anticipate where my research will take me, sometimes months or years down the road. She has also taught me to discern where a different perspective can be an asset rather than a liability. Hamid Dabashi was kind to chair my dissertation committee and to run our small but proud reading group. I thank Stefano Pello for introducing me to the pleasures of reading Amir Khusrau and other Indo-Persian literary gems. James Pickett has been a conversation partner of first and last resort. Prashant Keshavmurthy provided valuable feedback on the first three chapters. Andrew Ollett has helped me re-think key analytical concepts. Nathanael Shelley read two chapters and provided much intellectual grist for the mill over the last few years. Pasha Mohamad Khan has been a generous friend and interlocutor. Anand Taneja reminds me that good scholarship and a good life are mutually enriching. And Modit Trivedi is simply the best. Many thanks as well to the members of the MESAAS graduate dissertation colloquium and particularly the following people for their written feedback: Neda Bolourchi, Casey Primel, Haroon Moghul, Cheryl Leung, Abeer Shaheen, and Veli Yashin. Joel Lee provided helpful feedback on chapter one. Subah Dayal and Scott Kugle were generous iii hosts in Hyderabad. A number of fine evenings in Delhi were spent talking with Tyler Williams, Manpreet Kaur, Liza Oliver, Sara Hakeem, Arthur Dudney and Abhishek Kaicker. In Düsseldorf, S.R. Sarma and Renate Sarma were generous hosts, gently guiding my research into the astrolabe in Chapter Three. At Aligarh, R.A. Ansari was a friendly interlocutor and liaison with the Ibn Sina Institute. In Paris and Bonn, Fabrizio Speziale and Eva Orthmann's Perso-Indica project has been an excellent venue for sharing ideas and meeting scholars. In Delhi, Georges Khalil was kind enough to invite me to participate in the Zukunftsphilologie winter school, from which I benefitted greatly. After a chance encounter at the Hauz Khas gate, Barry Flood provided one the intellectual highlights of my year in India by inviting me to attend a joint tour of the Qutb Minar complex with Sunil Kumar. I thank Felicity Scott for her generous donation of her Aeron chair, which saved my back from certain doom. I would also like to thank Dr. Deogracias Martinez and Mrs. Carmen Martinez and whose generous supply of adobo, sinigang, longannisa, bistek, tapa, ube halaya, bibingka, and turron, sustained me through long hours at my desk. Fatima and Basma are my guardian angels. My parents, John and Judy, have always given me strength, happiness, and support. Mark, Ian, and Jamie are the best brothers in the world. And finally, I am deeply grateful for Diana, the most brilliantly amazing person I have ever known. I can't believe how fortunate I am to have you in my life and to have such a perfect role model for Zoë Frances. iv Introduction In modern Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan, the Shāh-nāma (The Persian Book of Kings) (1010 CE) is revered as a national epic, the story that most fully articulates the shared history of the Persian people and their ancient heritage. But before the nineteenth century and the ruptures wrought by European colonialism in the Middle East and South Asia, the Shāh-nāma had a much larger and more diverse readership in a massive geographical area covering the Balkans, Anatolia, Iraq, the Iranian plateau, Central Asia, Kashmir, the Punjab, North India, the Deccan, the Bay of Bengal, and parts of the Malay peninsula. In these places, among dozens of religions and ethnicities, educated denizens shared a common language, Persian, and an imagination of Persian Empire based on models in the Shāh-nāma. Histories of premodern Persian language are scattered with workable categories for its quasi-universal status: lingua franca1, koiné2, pidgin3, and passe partout,4 come to mind. Other categories defining the cultural space shaped by Persian have had some success in academic writing: Persophonie5, the Persianate world,6 the Iranian world, Turko-Persia,7 and Turko-Iranian world. Part of the problem with these categories is that each works, but not everywhere and not all the time. More importantly, none of them gives a sense of Persian literature's unique position in the imagination of 1 Arjomand 2008, 2. 2 Chelkowski 1975, 19; Spooner and Hanaway 2012. 3 Spooner and Hanaway 2012, 411. 4 Pello 2014. 5 Paul 2002; Canfield 1992. My thanks to James Pickett for referring me to Canfield 1992. 6 Spooner, Hanaway, et al. 2012. 7 Canfield 1992. 1 Islamicate empire as well as the central position of Persian literary forms in the development of vernacular literatures in the Islamicate world. A flexible term is needed that captures the grand breadth of the phenomenon without necessarily assuming its depth. Recently, some scholars have taken Sheldon Pollock's term, the Sanskrit cosmopolis, and posited a corollary, the Persian cosmopolis—a concept that this study takes up and develops.8 Pollock's Sanskrit cosmopolis powerfully challenges modern historical narratives that yoke the spread of Sanskrit to vectors of race, religion, caste, or conquest. Instead, for the first millenium CE, Sanskrit literature was produced and enjoyed by a range of religions and ethnicities, providing a model of political power in the Sanskrit epics of the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa that extended from polities in Gandhāra (modern day Afghanistan and Central Asia) through South and South-East Asia. No silver bullet explanation has been found for such a large and complex historical phenomenon as the spread of Sanskrit. But two things are clear: conquest and race had almost nothing to do with it. And equally importantly, imaginative literature had a lot to do with it.
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