Persian and Arabic Literary Communities in the Seventeenth Century: Migrant Poets between Arabia, Iran and India (I.B. Tauris Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Persian Literature)

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. "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."-- Provided by publisher Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Contents Figures Acknowledgements A note on transliteration and dates A note on geographical terminology Map A summary list of key historical figures Part I: Distant Readings in Seventeenth-Century Migration Introduction: Connected literary history Chapter 1: Society in motion: The prosopography and economics of seventeenth-century migratory networks across the Arabian Sea Part II: Close Readings of Literary Networks Chapter 2: Hyderabad: Ibn Maʿsum Chapter 3: Sanʿaʾ: Al-Sarim al-Hindi Chapter 4: Mashhad: Al-Hurr al-ʿAmili Chapter 5: Hyderabad: Faraj Allah Al-Shushtari and Salik Yazdi Chapter 6: Kabul and North India: Saʾib, Ilahi, Ahsan and Ashna Chapter 7: Isfahan: Salim, Darvish Yusuf and Akbar Conclusion Manuscript sources Notes Bibliography of print works Index