"The seventeenth century is well known as a time of entanglement and mobility, during which the Arabian Sea acted as a highway of communication. Merchants sailed from Arabia to Iran and India in order to ply their trade, pilgrims journeyed the other way in order to make the ?ajj in Mecca, and poets and scholars migrated in all directions in their search for careers, knowledge and patronage. Yet the small amount of modern scholarship about the literature that was produced in the region during this period has tended to study authors in isolation. This book makes the case for a connected literary history of the Arabian Sea littoral. It examines how the movement of authors created two literary communities, one Arabic and one Persian, sometimes running in parallel and sometimes intersecting, which linked Iran, India and the Arabian Peninsula in a system of exchange. Digging into a wealth of seventeenth-century literature that remains in manuscript, the book brings to light how the mobility of human actors made the poetry and prose of this period into an interconnected corpus, where writers used cognate forms, imagery and rhetoric to connect with one another across vast distances. The book combs through biographical anthologies of seventeenth-century poetry, reconstructing the overarching patterns in movement followed by the literary classes, before focusing on six case studies, which each represent a different location in the circulatory system of the Arabian Sea. For the first time, the book shows how the literary texts produced at this time in places such as Yemen, the Deccan and Iran were in dialogue with one another. It demonstrates that migration was multidirectional and multilingual (and so more widespread than is generally appreciated) and it connects the findings of cultural history with material philology."--

A wealth of scholarship has highlighted how commercial, political and religious networks expanded across the Arabian Sea during the seventeenth century, as merchants from South Asia traded goods in the ports of Yemen, noblemen from Safavid Iran established themselves in the courts of the Mughal Empire, and scholars from across the region came together to debate the Islamic sciences in the Arabian Peninsula's holy cities of Mecca and Medina. This book demonstrates that the globalising tendency of migration created worldly literary systems which linked Iran, India and the Arabian Peninsula through the production and circulation of classicizing Arabic and Persian poetry. By close reading over seventy unstudied manuscripts of seventeenth-century Arabic and Persian poetry that have remained hidden on the shelves of libraries in India, Iran, Turkey and Europe, the book examines how migrant poets adapted shared poetic forms, imagery and rhetoric to engage with their interlocutors and create communities in the cities where they settled. The book begins by reconstructing overarching patterns in the movement of over a thousand authors, and the economic basis for their migration, before focusing on six case studies of literary communities, which each represent a different location in the circulatory system of the Arabian Sea. In so doing, the book demonstrates the plurality of seventeenth-century aesthetic movements, a diversity which later nationalisms purposefully simplified and misread.

This groundbreaking work studies the Arabic literary culture of early modern Southeast Asia on the basis of largely unstudied and unknown manuscripts. It offers new perspectives on intellectual interactions between the Middle East and Southeast Asia, the development of Islam and especially Sufism in the region, the relationship between the Arabic and Malay literary traditions, and the manuscript culture of the Indian Ocean world. It brings to light a large number of hitherto unknown texts produced at or for the courts of Southeast Asia, and examines the role of royal patronage in supporting Arabic literary production in Southeast Asia.

In the seventeenth century, the Persian city of Isfahan was a crossroads of international trade and diplomacy. Manuscript paintings produced within the city’s various cultural, religious, and ethnic groups reveal the vibrant artistic legacy of the Safavid Empire. Published to coincide with an exhibition at the Getty Museum, Book Arts of Isfahan offers a fascinating account of the ways in which the artists of Isfahan used their art to record the life around them and at the same time define their own identities within a complex society.

Writing in the eighteenth century, the Persian-language litterateurs of late Mughal Delhi were aware that they could no longer take for granted the relations of Persian with Islamic imperial power, relations that had enabled Persian literary life to flourish in India since the tenth century C.E. Persian Authorship and Canonicity in Late Mughal Delhi situates the diverse textual projects of ‘Abd al-Qādir “Bīdil” and his students within the context of politically threatened but poetically prestigious Delhi, exploring the writers’ use of the Perso-Arabic and Hindavi literary canons to fashion their authorship. Breaking with the tendency to categorize and characterize Persian literature according to the dynasty in power, this book argues for the indirectness and complexity of the relations between poetics and politics. Among its original contributions is an interpretation of Bīdil’s Sufi adaptation of a Braj-Avadhi tale of utopian Hindu kingship, a novel hypothesis on the historicism of Sirāj al-Din ‘Alī Khān “Ārzū”s oeuvre and a study of how Bindrāban Dās “Khvushgū" entwined the contrasting models of authorship in Bīdil and Ārzū to formulate his voice as a Sufi historian of the Persian poetic tradition. The first book-length work in English on ‘Abd al-Qādir “Bīdil” and his circle of Persian literati, this is a valuable resource for students and scholars of both South Asian and Iranian studies, as well as Persian literature and Sufism.

The first book-length study to examine Turko-Persian culture as an entity.

This multicultural reference work on Jewish folklore, legends, customs, and other elements of folklife is the first of its kind.