This working paper presents a 16th- or 17th-century Ottoman translation-cum-commentary of the preface and introduction of one of the classics of Islamicate rhetoric, al-Qazwīnī’s Talkhīṣ al-Miftāḥ (The Key’s Digest), a 14th-century work on rhetoric based on al-Sakkākī’s 13th-century seminal Miftāḥ al-ʿUlūm (The Key of Sciences). This part…[Read more]

The Cairo Genizah is well known as a repository for hundreds of thousands of manuscripts that the Jewish residents of Fustat (Old Cairo) produced and consumed in the premodern period. Foreign “collectors” acquired most of these manuscripts for European libraries in the second half of the nineteenth century, with the majority arriving at the Cam…[Read more]

The translation of a short treatise on paranomasia, simile, and metonymy, by the foremost Persian-Turkish lexicographer of the 15th century, Lütfu’llāh el–Ḥalīmī. The text combines a rather dense and elliptic prose style with a remarkably lucid and clear-cut typology of seven types of tajnīs, seven types of tashbīh, and nine types of majāz, ofte…[Read more]

Through the case of Emerson’s appropriation of Persian poetry this volume provides a thought-provoking example of how the literary founding father of a nation is cosmopolitan and receptive of foreign cultures in what might seem a purely “nationalistic” agenda. It will appeal to those in the field of Persian literature, comparative liter…[Read more]

In celebration of the tenth anniversary of the second centennial of Ākhūndzade’s birth, three Azerbaijani texts in translation by the Molière of Azerbaijan. The texts—one poem, one letter, and one prose text—reflect Ākhūndzāde’s sharp, sometimes vitriolic, take on Rūmī ’s teaching (a dangerous, incomprehensible word jumble), most poetry and po…[Read more]

First translated into Persian in 1949, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is among the most popular works of American fiction in Iran. Although the anti-US policy of the post-1979 political system has tried to erase the manifestations of the previous period’s American influence, Iranian interest in Huckleberry Finn has been inc…[Read more]

The “Spanish influenza” pandemic that struck Egypt in fall 1918 resulted in the death of eleven out of every one thousand people. Despite the mass suffering caused by the pandemic, it has been largely ignored by historians. I describe how the Egyptian public health service was unprepared for a major health crisis because resources were red…[Read more]

Are you tripping over your own feet, incapable of advancing even a single metre, when it comes to understanding the technicalities of the feet and metres of pre-modern Islamicate poetry? Then you should probably not consult Nevāʾī’s Meter of Meters, since you are better off with the works of a Wheeler Thackston or a Finn Thiesen… If, howe…[Read more]

This article examines the unpublished memoirs of Sevim Sertel O’Brien, a journalist and daughter of prominent journalists and intellectuals Sabiha and Zekeriya Sertel. The memoirs, written in English and told as bedtime stories to O’Brien’s Turkish-American children in the 1950s and 1960s, provide a unique lens on the early history of the Turkish…[Read more]

With the introduction of the horse-drawn tramway in 1871, the citizens of Istanbul were forced to reckon with a new type of public space—the crowded confines of the tramcar. This article focuses on the removal of a curtain that separated men and women on public transit in 1923, analyzing the discourses that shaped the decision and the way in w…[Read more]

پروین اعتصامی (۱۲۸۵ـ ۱۳۲۰)، شاعر نامدار معاصر، در شعرهایش از منابع متعددی بهره برده‌است؛ اما نکته­ جالب توجه این است که او در تمام این برداشت‌های ادبی، اشعار خود را کاملاً از آثار پیشین متمایز می‌کند. پروین عناصری را که از آثار دیگران وام گرفته ­است‌ هنرمندانه با عناصر شعر خود و سنت ادبی فارسی درمی‌آمیزد و آن را از آن خود می‌کند؛ به ­گ…[Read more]

Parvin Iʿtisami (1907–1941), the first important twentieth-century woman poet of Iran, was well versed in classical Persian poetry. Her knowledge of English language and education at the American school for girls as well as her father’s translations from foreign literature contributed to her appreciation of modern ideas, including women’s rights…[Read more]

Purportedly in response to a request by his unnamed beloved one, the late 18th-century Ottoman poet Ḥasan-i Yāver wrote Poetry’s Artistry, a 441-verse mathnawī that offers some hands-on advice for trying one’s hand at poetry. As tashbīh, jinās, kināya, taḍādd, taḍmīn, ilmām, iltifāt, tardīd, ishtibāh, tawriya, īhām, takhmīs, tarkīb-band,…[Read more]

Through offering an ethnography of a group of educated, middle-class women who “had been attending weekly Qur’an and classical poetry classes for years” (xii), the volume shows that poetry and prayer are companions in the cultural history of Iran. It attempts to answer the question, “What does this companionship mean for forms of religio…[Read more]

Building on the author’s PhD thesis on “the British cultural and imaginative engagements with Persia in the nineteenth century” (vi), the volume charts “the diversity of perceptions associated with Persia in Victorian literary culture” (2). It focuses on poetry as the medium through which to survey the Victorian conception of Persia. It consists…[Read more]

The Cairo Genizah is a repository of texts spanning more than a millennium of Jewish history, including thousands of Hebrew and Judaeo-Arabic manuscripts now held in collections around the world. Among these are fragments from at least 25 separate Qur’an manuscripts in Arabic script, all of which lack any traces of Hebrew writing. Their…[Read more]

Drawing on archival research, this article introduces several Russian poems by the Arabic mahjar poet and writer Mikhail Naimy (Mīkhāʿīl Nu’aymah) (1889-1988) for the first time to scholarship. By examining the influence of Russian literature on Naimy’s literary output, we shed light on the role of multilingualism in generating literary identit…[Read more]

This article compares three key texts in Daghestani Islamicate literature by Persian Azeri writer Bākīkhānūf (d. 1847), Lezgi polymath al-Alqadārī (d. 1910), and Qumyq (Turkic) biographer al-Durgilī (d. 1935), with a view to understanding how their authors conceptualized their role as chroniclers of times past. I draw in particular on Italia…[Read more]