This paper addresses Farid al-Din ʿAttār’s views on social and kingly ethics as espoused in the Elāhināma. It offers a holistic reading of its stories, which are suffused with the tenets of Sufism, to illustrate the myriad ways that the Elāhināma adopts and adapts the characteristics and tropes of practical ethics and Sufi hagiogr…[Read more]

Review of Michael M.J. Fischer’s Mute Dreams, Blind Owls, and Dispersed Knowledges: Persian Poesis in the Transnational Circuitry

Review Essay of Patricia Crone’s The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran: Rural Revolt and Local Zoroastrianism

This article examines the ways in which Iranian mytho-history was woven into the narratives of Islamic history. It argues that the inclusion of narratives such as the ones that equate several of the earliest Iranian mytho-historical kings to the earliest Koranic prophets or claim that Persian was the language of the prophets from Ādam to…[Read more]

The paper reconsiders the apocryphal stories regarding the Shahnama’s initial reception to propose that it was only after long narrative poems gained currency that the Shahnama was recognized as a masterpiece. The paper analyzes the structure and themes of several histories written before and during the Samanid period and compares them with the S…[Read more]

This paper seeks to contribute to the field of reception and audience studies by ana- lyzing ʿAttār’s Elāhināma. Little studied, the Elāhināma offers an opportunity to un- derstand better ʿAttār’s attitudes towards socio-religious issues, as well as the types of audiences that the text seeks, how it addresses them, and what possible ai…[Read more]

The present paper focuses on the socio-cultural and religio-political conditions of early Islamic Iran that would have conduced the circulation of the Ardā Wiraz narrative among the eighth-tenth century Persian and Arab historians and theologians. Furthermore, the paper presents and analyses parallel structures and motifs between the Ardā W…[Read more]