The term Persianate was coined nearly fifty years ago by Marshall Hodgson in his monumental three-volume The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization (University of Chicago Press 1975, to indicate traditions (literary, artistic, political) influenced by Persian language and culture Despite the expansion and continuation of the term’s use, particularly in the study of Islam and in area studies, only recently has scholarship sought to more precisely map the contours of the influence of the Persian language. Nile Green’s The Persianate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca is a leading voice in the scholarly conversation on the cultural, literary, and historical insights made possible by the term Persianate (most recently, Mana Kia, Persianate Selves:Memories of Place and Origin Before Nationalism (Stanford University Press, 2020); Abbas Amanat and Assef Ashrat, eds., The Persianate World: Rethinking a Shared Sphere (Brill, 2019)—seeking new ways of conceptualizing the textual, political, and affective networks that made up what is often referred to as the Eastern Islamic world, “drawing together linguistic and area-based expertise to document the multiplicity of interactions that created and maintained the much-vaunted ‘Persianate world’ that stretched unevenly from the Balkans to Bengal, or even China” (xiv).
An edited volume made up of twelve essays, The Persianate World positions itself as “a problem-solving exercise focused on identifying the limits of Persian’s usage and usefulness over the four centuries or so that marked the maximal extent and then retraction of Persographia” (50). By Persographia Green means the “written contact language” (5) as opposed to its spoken registers, since it was in writing that Persian developed its greatest geographic reach and cultural influence in medieval and early modern Eurasia. “If scholars now take for granted the notion that Persian was a shared lingua franca,” Green notes in his introduction, “it is important to identify more precisely who shared it, and for what (and indeed whose) purposes they did so” (1).
The constituent essays are chronologically divided in groups of four, but geographically diverse within each designated time period. After Green’s lengthy introduction laying out both the history of scholarship on the question of the Persianate world and a history of the Persian language from 800–1930, the chapters in “Part I: Pan-Eurasian Expansions, ca. 1400–1600,” explore the Ottoman Empire to rural Bengal and imperial China to inner Asia: Murat Umut Inan on how Persian functioned as a language of “imperial intentions and mystical aspirations” (76); Thibaut d’Hubert on the overlooked spread of Persian texts in rural Bengal, and the popular literature that would be “instrumental in the making of Bengali Muslim identity” (107); Graeme Ford on instances of translations between Persian and Chinese, mostly for diplomatic purposes, at the Ming court; and Devin DeWeese on the “remarkable continuation of Persian literary culture” (138) well into the 19th century in central Asia, the Volga-Ural region, and western Siberia.
“Part II: The Constraints of Cosmopolitanism, ca. 1600–1800” presents Purnima Dhavan on the extent to which Persian “shape[d] ideas of self and community” in multilingual literary circles in 17th-century Punjab; David Brophy on the institutional and societal levels of Persian in the Qing dynasty, particularly in Sufi networks; Alfrid Bustanov on the Muslim regions of imperial Russia, which constituted “a common cultural sphere across which Persian acted for centuries as a written lingua franca” (202); and Alexandre Papas on Persian talismanic scrolls in Xinjiang/eastern Turkistan, illuminating a dimension of popular religiosity that “refines our understanding of the literary economy [of Persian] as it operated on the level of the masses across the frontiers of Eurasia” (219).
In “Part III: New Empires, New Nations, ca. 1800–1920,” Michael H. Fisher writes about Britain as a frontier of the Persianate world, and examines the life of D.O. Dyce Sombre (d. 1851), an Anglo-Indian prince whose “identification with Indo-Persian culture—by himself and by Britons” (239) demonstrates the social benefits and costs of Persian in the era of British imperial ascendancy; Marc Toutant on the “de-Persifying” of court culture in the Khiva khanate (region ruled by a khan, a Mongol or Turkic tribal leader) to promote instead Chagatai Turkish, which “reflected a new way of ordering the political universe” (254); Rebecca Ruth Gould on the importance of Persian literary cultures in the Caucasus, in particular colonial Daghestan and the tensions of Russian-Iranian political relations in the early 20th century; and Abbas Amanat on Adib Pishawari (d. 1930), “probably the last Indo-Persian scholar-poet to cross not only the geographical but also the sectarian divides between the Sunni Indo-Afghan world and Shi’i Iran” (279). An epilogue, “The Persianate Millennium,” by Brian Spooner, wraps up this impressive collection.
Taken together, these twelve essays range widely across geographic, temporal, linguistic, and generic divides, but—much like the practices and practitioners of Persian writing they describe—celebrate the notion of the Persianate as a means of highlighting the remarkable diversity of textual traditions in an area of the world so often flattened by monolithic representation. The decentering of the Arabophone Middle East is also a welcome and significant contribution of this volume to the study of the Islamic world, whose supposed frontiers can be drawn quite differently depending on whether the view is from Baghdad, Bukhara, or Bengal.
Scholars of religion will perhaps be interested here in Green’s rejection of the idea that Islam was the major factor in the rise of the Persianate world. He identifies strains of “both explicit and implicit methodological nationalisms” (2)—Iranian nationalist and Islamic particularism—in the extant scholarship on the role of Persian, and positions this book as a remedy: “Iran . . . was never the perpetual reference point, let alone the ‘epicenter,’ of the Persianate world, any more than Islam was the whole story” (7). While Islam may not, of course, have been the whole story behind the rise and spread of Persian textual culture in a deterministic sense, it does form an important subplot running through all of the essays: while those who produced and consumed Persian texts were not necessarily Muslims themselves, the association of Persian with an Islamic—especially Sufi—establishment, whether literary, scriptural, ethical, institutional, or ritual, affected the manner of its reception.
Because of its world-historical scope, The Persianate World will be of interest to scholars of any region reached by Persographia, especially those where it is initially unexpected, such as China, the Caucasus, and Britain. The individual chapters are perhaps best suited for specialists (and, while translations are provided for texts under discussion, having a reading knowledge of Persian is a helpful prerequisite). However, the introduction and epilogue provide summary overviews useful for undergraduate or graduate students wishing to get a sense of both the history of Persian as a language and the current scholarly conversations around the idea of the Persianate.
Francesca Chubb-Confer is a postdoctoral teaching fellow at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
Francesca Chubb-Confer
Date Of Review:
December 27, 2021