Textual History and Scribal Culture of Shāhnāma in Shiraz of the 14th Century: Interactions between the courts and literary society and the national epic text

I began my PhD research with review of literature, and then a case study on one of the Shahnama manuscripts (MS Cairo Dar al-Kutub 6006, dated 741/1341). There is not much literature for the reception of the Shahnama based on its own textual content (mostly in its copies but also quotations in other works). However, the review of literature significantly helped me improve my understanding of Ilkhanid and post-Mongol Iran by gathering information from different disciplines, including comparative literature, philology, historiography, art history and intellectual history. This gave me a firm grip on how to see my data in a broader context.

The case study demonstrated the identity of the scribe of the MS Cairo (MS Q in the study) as the son of one of the scholars related to the famous Ilkhanid vizier Rashid al-Din Fazlullah, and the grandson of a decorated Shafi’i scholar in the 13th century, Shams al-Din Muhammad Qarashi Kishi. I established that the scribe modified the text heavily to omit anything problematic from a critical Islamic viewpoint. Later I found out that he has also modified the preface of the Shahnama. This preface – which is a later addition and not an initial part of the Shahnama – was edited based on the MS Cairo by Muhammad Amin Riyahi in 1993, and the scribe’s additions have been considered a fundamental part of it ever since. Together with the evidence in the Shahnama’s own text, the preface helped me demonstrate that the scribe was indeed a Shi’a, which raises new questions about sectarian movements and expansion of Shiism in Ilkhanid and post-Mongol Iran.

Further survey shows that the scribes tended to modify the additions to the text more freely. this turned my attention to the prose prefaces. Consulting a manuscript copied almost a decade after the MS Cairo (and both in the same city: Shiraz), I found the original form of a preface, of which only a much later – presumably early 17th century – version had been identified before. Thanks to a travel grant by BIPS, I found the opportunity to travel to Istanbul and consult another manuscript of 14th century Shiraz which contains yet another version of the prose preface. I am currently working on the relationships between the prose prefaces, to find out where, when, how and why they were created and evolved. This takes my study to the Seljuq period and beyond the textual history of the epic itself. Subsequently, I hope to be able to contextualise these findings in the broader picture of intermingling and interacting identities and ideologies of the medieval Middle East

The PhD thesis study has also lead to some by-products; a paper about the so-called “Freer Small Shahnama” which proposes it was created in north-western Iran, possibly Tabriz, and in the early-fourteenth century (and as a result, not in Baghdad, Herat, or Shiraz, as suggested before). The paper will be published in the Digital Philology Journal by Johns Hopkins University. I also presented a paper in the 10th ECIS (European Conference of Iranian Studies) on the possibility and benefits of re-creating the archetypes of the Shahnama manuscripts, which was a subsidiary question raised and answered during the textual study of the thesis. Meanwhile, I got a full scholarship to attend a summer school in the CEU, Vienna, titled “thinking with Islamicate manuscripts”, which proved very fruitful indeed. I also finalised a paper, presented in 2021, on preparation of new texts in Baysunghur’s library, which deals with the Baysunghuri Shahnamas but also consults other manuscripts produced for him and discusses the concept of edition and textual scholarship in early 15th century Timurid Herat. The paper will be published in an Edited book about Baysunghur’s atelier by Brill. I translated of a review (written by Francois de Blois) into Persian and wrote a review myself, both of which were published in Iran during the last year.

I was awarded the 2021 A. H. Morton memorial scholarship to facilitate research into UK manuscript collections in support of my PhD thesis “Connecting the Plateau: Evolving socio- economic networks across the Central Iranian Deserts during the Early Seljuq period”. To try and turn the Covid situation of the summer of 2021 into an opportunity, I proposed to take advantage of the relatively empty reading rooms of the British Library, Wellcome Trust Library, and the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, identifying understudied manuscripts in their collections with a view to comparing them with others held abroad once international travel again became feasible.

Rather than focus on a single text or genre, my approach was to find texts and manuscripts in Arabic and Persian which related in some way to the area around Iran’s Dasht-i Lut and Dasht-i Kavir in the 11 th  and 12 th centuries. While our corpus of prose histories which relate to the Seljuq presence in Iran is now fairly well established, thanks in part to publications like A. H. Morton’s translation of Zahir al-Din Nishapuri’s Saljuqnama, my hope was that a broader bibliographical investigation beyond the histories might better illuminate the social and cultural dynamics at play.

At the British Library, one of the focuses of my research was to be the numerous diwans and anthologies relating to poets in my period of study. While the work of such poets has been typically published in modern editions if they wrote in Persian, only a handful of these editions can really be considered critical. If one is to use poems as a historical source, then it becomes essential to divest the versions in published editions from any additional lines they may have acquired in the process of their transmission, lines which are often not present in the oldest manuscripts. At both the British Library and the Wellcome Trust, I particularly benefited from the number of rare manuscripts they held attributed to the Seljuq poet, vizier and alchemist al-Tughra’i. Previous scholarship had recorded his whole of extantoeuvre as being in Arabic, but I discovered a short alchemical epistle attributed to him in a manuscript of North African origin in Persian.

During my period of research at the Bodleian Library, I continued recording relevant poetic diwans but my focus shifted to their manuscripts from the early Persian-language encyclopaedia tradition. My best find here was undoubtedly an uncatalogued manuscript of Shahmardan ibn Abi al-Khayr al-Razi’s Nuzhat-nama-yi’Ala’i, one of the first Persian encyclopaedias. While defective, disordered, and undated, on palaeographic grounds it would appear to be one of the oldest if not the oldest copy of this text in existence. The fact that such a significant manuscript should appear in neither the printed nor digital catalogues of the Library’s holdings nor be recorded elsewhere attests to the how much unexplored material remains in UK collections.

In the University of Cambridge Library, I found a number of useful manuscripts which fell within my scope in the fields of astrology, encyclopaedia, and medicine. But the standout manuscript I came across was an excellent copy of the dream interpretation text Tuhfat al-
Muluk fi Ta’bir al-Ru’ya. The text is attributed to Khalaf ibn Ahmad, the last Saffarid Amir of Sistan before Mahmud of Ghazna’s conquest, while the manuscript was produced in the 14th-century for the Mamluk Amir Yalbugha al-Umari. I presented on this manuscript at the Sufi Manuscript Cultures workshop at the University of St Andrews in September 2021.

Subsequently, I found further copies of this text at Princeton University and in Iranian and Turkish collections, and I plan to use this text in a future article on literary patronage and the transmission of knowledge under the Saffarid dynasty.

The Major Shrines in Iran and Iraq during Fath Ali Shah’s reign

In the last sixth months, I have made considerable progress with my thesis, despite the continuing challenges of restricted access to libraries and workspaces. Following the feedback I received on my submission for my confirmation of status, I have been able to hone the emphasis of my research further. My thesis is now focused on an exploration of the role of the major Shiʿi shrines of Iran and Iraq in Fath ʿAli Shah’s efforts to shape his image as a legitimate Perso-Islamic ruler.
In terms of the outline of the thesis, I have reworked the layout of the chapters. It begins with a short introduction to present the scope and aims of the project, as well as my methods and to appraise the existing scholarship. The four main chapters which follow each address a different site, while also supporting a chronological progression through Fath ʿAli Shah’s reign. Chapter One explores pilgrimage of and patronage to the shrine of Fatima Maʿsuma in Qom – the shrine with which the Shah had the closest relationship. Chapter Two analyses patronage of the shrines in Irāq-i ʿarab, with a detailed study of the Shah’s response to the Saudi-Wahhabi sack of Karbala in 1802. Chapter Three discusses patronage of the shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad, particularly in the context of the almost continuous state of unrest in Khurasan and the concomitant Qajar military operations. With Chapter Four, we return to Qom, for an examination of the tomb which the Shah commissioned for himself within the shrine of Fatima Maʿsuma, to end the thesis with his death. Having submitted Chapter Three for my confirmation of status, I have received extensive and valuable feedback which I am now implementing, before my examiners look at the chapter once more. Shortly, I will move on to completing the remaining three chapters, which are all partially written – I currently have c.35,000 words of an estimated 80,000 total. My deadline for submission is currently still October 2021, but I expect to receive a one term grace-period, which is being given to all students due to the ongoing disruption to our studies, and I will be aiming to submit in January 2022.
So far this academic year, I have presented my research in two online lectures. I gave a lecture to the Virtual Islamic Art History Seminar Series on Fath ʿAli Shah’s patronage of the shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad. In December 2019, I was invited to give a lecture to the Royal Asiatic Society, which I titled ‘Fath ʿAli Shah Qajar and the Shrine of Fatima Maʿsuma, Qom’. Around 70 members of the Society attended the talk and my research was well-received. Alongside my studies, I have been teaching Persian Literature for Islamic Art and Architecture for the MPhil in Islamic Art and Architecture here in Oxford. I have also had a chapter (‘Religious Rituals and Cholera in the Shrine Cities of 19th-Century Iran’) accepted for publication in the edited volume Epidemic Urbanism. Looking ahead to the 2021-2022 academic year, I plan to complete the full DPhil process. I also hope to continue teaching Persian Literature in Oxford, while applying for any other available research, curatorial, or teaching positions.
The funds I have received so far from the Gibb Memorial Trust have contributed to my living costs, in conjunction with my other partial scholarship from the Middle East Centre, St Antony’s College, Oxford. The remainder of the scholarship will continue to help me support myself through the rest of the academic year.

Marginal Literary Movements and Transformation in Classical Persian Poetry: Reconsideration of the History of Transformations in the Forms and Functions of Persian Poetry in the 18th, 19th and Early 20th Century

The proposed research project is to rewrite the history of Persian poetry during the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which, unlike what is illustrated in previous literary histories, does not follow a linear course of development in terms of transformation. In fact, there are numerous, simultaneous groups and individuals representing various angles of literary modernisation that undermined, ignored, or suppressed by the mainstream. In other words, almost in every period of the history of early modern Persian poetry, there are several parallels or crossing poetic movements, having a polemical dialogue with the bold line representing the mainstream. The marginal lines have always been narrow and formed by less-known but highly innovative poets while the mainstream contains a considerable number of activists whose popular works are relatively conservative.

The primary aim of this project is to identify, analyse and explore the influences of marginal lines on shaping the poetry of the young generations during the Literary Return Movement (Maktab-e Bazgasht) in mid-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries until the post-constitutional era in the early 20th century. Indeed, this thesis demonstrates how these marginal, pioneer poems initiated the so-called literary revolution of the modern era. Therefore, this research investigates in transforming literary forms as a rebellion against the domination of literary traditions of classical poetry.

In order to analyse these literary movements which in turn are means of resistance against the hierarchical structure of power in society I have used the ideas of political philosophers such as James C. Scott, Jacques Rancière as well as literary theoreticians such as Richard Sheppard, Ahmad Karimi Hakkak and Reza Barahani.

To obtain works of marginal poets of each era I have conducted research in a variety of libraries and archives from the University of Arizona in the US to the University of Tehran, the Iranian Parliament Library and the National Library of Iran. I have also researched in a considerable number of private collections and archives to find some of these rare materials.

This research focuses on the developments of the form and function of Persian poetry in works of marginal pioneers and their impact on the following generations of poets.

In the first era, the Literary Return Movement, topical poems of Abolqasem Qaim Maqam Farahani and Fathollah Khan Sheybani are studied. Also, Abolhasan Yaghma Jandaghi’s experiments in new forms of socio-political poetry are discussed. I argue that Yaghma’s works are the most innovative poems of the era which criticise the form and function of Return Movement poetry. Yaghma adopted folklore literary forms such as Ta’zie passion plays and Nowhe (laments) to publicise the hidden and subordinate voice of ordinary people. He uses popular forms in which, because of the relative freedom in terms of language and poetics, the poet is able to convey the message of resistance to subordinates.

In the next period, the thesis illustrates how the conflict with the state led a group of poets during the constitutional revolution to protest not only against the power of the state but also against solidified Persian poetic traditions. A considerable number of scholars in this field recognised classical poets such as Malek al-shoar Bahar and Iraj Mirza as influential figures on the constitutional revolutionary poetry because of their fine and well-structured poems. However, I show how some lower quality but innovative works of Aref Qazvini and Mirzadeh Eshqi are more successful to make the veiled wishes of society public. In fact, one may argue that having a strong sense of reconstructing the literary traditions in comparison to traditional ones, these experimental poets play a more significant role in provoking the society to break free from hierarchical social structures. Besides, the radical changes made in classical poetry by these pioneer poets led to a literary revolution in the next generation that in time transformed the forms and functions of Persian poetry entirely.

In the prominent literary histories, this young generation are mostly mentioned as those who constantly fought with classical authors and academics as well as gradualist moderate poets of the time. Although the historians of Persian literature condemn this group as illiterate and unfamiliar with the capacities of the classical Persian poetry, they were the first ones who experienced in the main aspects of traditional poetic, such as rhyme patterns and prosodic meters. The leading poets of this movement are Abolqasem Lahuti, Taqi Rafa’t, Shams Kasmaei and Ja’far Khamenei. These poets’ experiments can be seen as the root of avant-garde poetic movements in later periods, mid-20th-century. Avant-guard poets who were not as involved in political activities as the previous generations; however, they rebel against the literary mainstream which reproduces the power relation in the structure of autocrat governments.

This research will propose some changes to the canon of the conventional Persian literary history where modernism is defined through the gradual reformation of classical poetry by moderate reformists. Indeed, this thesis highlights the superiority of some marginal, radical poets over the gradualist mainstream paving the path of modernisation for Persian literature.

Singing Sus in Text: Indo-Persian Music and Su Poetics ca. 1250-1600

My research thesis, titled “Singing Sus in Text: Indo-Persian Music and Su Poetics ca. 1250-1600”, currently being conducted in the School of Arts at SOAS, traces the history of performance practices between Su networks and the courts of the Delhi Sultanates and early Mughal Empire.

By scrutinising Persian archival material relating to Sus, poets, and courtiers, I seek to interrogate the historiography concerning the study of music and performance practices of the Sultanate period in the environs of Delhi, Gujarat, and the Deccan.

The historical narrative concerning the development of Indian classical music is largely based on uncritical readings of 17th and 18th century texts produced in Mughal courts, which focus on the role played by 13th century Sus and courtiers of the Delhi Sultanates. My research foregrounds primary sources of cultural and political history from the 13th to 16th centuries, delving into contemporary accounts of cultural practices to understand how these figures understood and wrote about their own world. By doing this I also consider more modern historiographical approaches to the music of this period, which often describe its development as a product of ‘Indo-Persian synthesis’ or hybridity. These approaches are often simplistic and essentialist understandings of the complex and nuanced processes of cultural ow and exchange.

My thesis also brings into question the notion of ‘Indo-Persian’, engaging with recent work on the idea of the Persianate World. While recent scholarship has sought to extend the boundaries of what the term ‘Persianate’ means, it is often in view of the Mughal patronage of Persian literature and art, or considers the ‘sabk-e hind’ of Indo-Persian poetry. A handful of scholars, including Sunil Sharma and Thibaut D’Hubert, have looked at the Sultanate Period and vernacular performance traditions, yet the period remains largely overlooked.

I also engage with current historiographical conversations regarding South Asian history, after Richard Eaton and Aditya Behl, looking at Su aesthetic practices and their role in cultural and political history beyond its isolation into religious studies. It is through this lens that I investigate the connections between Sus, political actors, and courts, and the ways in which religious art and courtly politics influenced the history of music and elite culture. My work takes into account performance practices between various frontiers and spaces of interaction – the ‘frontiers’ of the Persian world in the 13th century (Multan, Lahore, and Delhi), and Sus moving between and within the spaces of the khanqāh, or Su hospice, and the Sultanate courts.

By utilising sources of religious, social, and political history for information on music and sound practices, I explore various traditions of music-making, what they meant for the performers and the audience, and how memory was constructed around these practices.

Amir Khusrāw Dehlavi (b. 1245 – d. 1325) is particularly remembered within Mughal texts as being the originator of the khayāl and qawwālī genres, as having introduced the qawl and tarāna forms to Su samā’, or audition, and having composed music and Hindavi-language poetry in Indian song-genres. However, scholars such as Katherine Schoeld and Sunil Sharma have shown how his role may have been more complicated: the khayāl and qawwālī genres developed with musicians performing in the ravīsh, or ‘way’, of Khusrāw, while his Hindavi-language verses are later creations, yet much imbued with the poetic word-play and cosmopolitanism for which he is remembered.

The thesis aims to address a lack of scholarship regarding the period in question, from the actual performance practices of Khusrāw and his contemporaries, to Sus and courtiers composing music and poetry in Persian and early Hindavi around the turn of the 15th century. While Su literature from this period has been excavated for its religious, social, and literary history, the musical component has often been overlooked.

The texts I look at are contemporary, or near-contemporary, records of the cultural lives of Sus and courtiers, including religious discourse collections, biographical dictionaries, music-theoretical texts, and local political histories. A number of texts feature some of the earliest Hindavi-language poetry and song-texts meant for performance within the Su environment, yet have been largely ignored within music history. They tell us about a shifting world of performance practices and meaning-making in the Indo-Persian environment, from the performance of Perso-Arabic song and poetic genres to the accommodation of vernacular traditions. By locating these texts and traditions in their contemporary context but also within Mughal historiography, we stand to gain a better understanding of the ways in which techniques of Mughal ‘self-fashioning’ re-ordered their cultural environment. This self-fashioning also informed the writing of later, post-colonial musical history and became crucial in national identity formation through cultural practices.

By focusing on a hitherto overlooked period of musical history, I hope to uncover and unpack the numerous strands of historiography which informed both Mughal conceptions of music-making as well as modern, post-colonial discourse.

Politics of Biographical Dictionaries in the Safavid Period

The Safavid dynasty (1501-1722) has been the focal point of the myriad of studies in various fields
such as literary, political, economic, and religious historical studies. One of the popular topics
among these studies has been the process of mass conversion of the people from Mesopotamia in
the West up to the northern frontiers of Khurāsān. The mainstream narrative proposes that the
predominantly Sunni Persian territory became dominantly Imamite Shiʿi under the rule of the first
Safavid Shah Ismāʿīl (r. 1501-1524), and during a process of conversion that took a few decades.
This conversion was ideologically fed, it is argued, by the Shiʿi ʿulamā who migrated from Jabal
ʿĀmil in Southern Lebanon, and were appointed by the Safavid authority in charge of religious
offices in Safavid state(1). From the mid-1990s onward, the aforementioned narrative has been
subject to several modifications instigated by nuanced studies of the documents and sources that
have been published in recent years(2).
The Safavid era, similar other phases in the pre-modern periods in Iranian history, suffers from a
lack of official archival documents. As a result, the main sources that have been utilized for
historical studies were court chronicles and biographical dictionaries devoted to the learned
members of the scholarly class and their works in various fields. The court chronicles and
biographical dictionaries have been treated as a factual basis for the historical writing of this
transformative period of Iranian and Islamic history. While many scholars have found these
narrative sources problematic, thus far scant attention has been paid to the technics and methods
these sources deployed in order to narrate the past(3).
Sholeh Quinn was the first scholar who turned to court chronicles in order to scrutinize these texts
and the context within which they were written during the reign of Shah Abbas (1588-1629) (4). Her
main aim is to examine the methods and organization of the historiographical works of this forty-year period(5). Quinn’s research has attempted to reveal the ideological and intellectual premises of
these historiographical works and is keen to contextualize them in the grand narrative of the
Islamicate historiographical writings.(6)
I would ask the similar set of questions Quinn raised concerning Safavid historical writings, but
instead of directing them at court chronicles I will explore them in regards to the biographical
dictionaries written in the same period: “Finally, how did Safavid historians represent the past and
the present in their historical narratives? It is curious that no one has asked this very basic question
since scholars of Safavid Iran have relied primarily on narrative sources in their studies.”(7)
The first step in the study of biographical dictionaries in Safavid era is Majālis al-Muʾminīn by
Nūr Allāh Shūshtarī (1019/1610). Shūshtarī originally from Persia migrated to India probably to
seek patronage there, wrote this book there in Persian. The book in the 17th century became famous
in both Persia and India and resulted in the fluorescence of the genre among Shiʿi ulama during
Safavid era. My intention is to study this significant text in detail as the first case study of the
research.
A close study of this genre of text, i.e. biographical dictionaries, and other related materials, in
addition to contextualizing the content of these texts in the period in which they were written,
would reveal the methods and organization that the authors used in order to present the past as the
main source of religious legitimacy and claims for religious authority.
This scholarship will help me to extend my study more into Persian materials, besides the Arabic
texts of the same period. It also gives an opportunity to extend my studies to the Persian documents
of the local archives in Mashhad and other Iranian archives to elucidate the social and political
context of the texts.

Majid Montazer Mahdi
University of Exeter, Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies

1 Edward Granville Browne, A Literary History of Persia (London: T. F. Unwin, 1902), vol. 4, p. 406-7; Jean Aubin,
‘La politique religieuse des Safavides’ in Jean Aubin, ed., Le Shiʿisme Imamite (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1970) (especially 239); Roger M. Savory, Iran Under the Safavids (Cambridge University Press, 1980), 28–
30; Mohammad-Ali Amir-Moezzi and Christian Jambet, Qu’est-Ce Que Le Shî’isme ? (Paris: Fayard, 2004), 299–
300. The latest work that can be identified in line with these work is: Rula Jurdi Abisaab, Converting Persia: Religion
and Power in the Safavid Empire (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004). Although Abisaab subscribes to the mass migration of
ulama from Jabal ʿĀmil, even her account revealed a more intricate picture in regard to the formation of the religious
hierarchy.
2 For example these works have critical approaches: A. J. Newman, “The Myth of the Clerical Migration to Safawid
Iran: Arab Shiite Opposition toʿAlī Al-Karakī and Safawid Shiism,” Die Welt Des Islams, New Series Vol. 33, no. 1
(1993): 66–112; D. J. Stewart, “Notes on the Migration of ʿĀmilī Scholars to Safavid Iran,” Journal of Near Eastern
Studies 55, no. ii (1996): 81–103; K. Babayan, “The Safavid Synthesis: From Qizilbash Islam to Imamite Shiʿism,”
Iranian Studies 27, no. i– iv (1994): 135–61.
3 For examples with regard to the issue of ethnicity in religious hierarchy, see: “The Myth of the Clerical Migration
to Safawid Iran: Arab Shiite Opposition toʿAlī Al-Karakī and Safawid Shiism,” passim; “Notes on the Migration of
ʿĀmilī Scholars to Safavid Iran,” 87. Also for critical treatment of an specific narrative, see: Devin J. Stewart, “The
Ottoman Execution of Zayn Al-Dīn Al-ʿĀmilī,” Die Welt Des Islams 48, no. 3/4 (2008): 289–347.
4 Sholeh A. Quinn, Historical Writing During the Reign of Shah ʿAbbas: Ideology, (Salt Lake City, UT: University of
Utah Press, 2000).

5 ibid, 5-6.
6 ibid, 7-8.
7 ibid, 5.

Memories of Ahvazi Mandaean women

Thanks to the generous help of the Gibb Memorial Trust, I was able to undertake one year of ethnographic fieldwork in Ahvaz, Khuzestan’s biggest city, among the smallest ethno-religious community able to preserve itself and its rituals intact for millennia even after an officially Islamic Republic was installed: Iranian Mandaeans, or Subbi, as they are called by their Muslim neighbours, mostly inhabited and still live along the banks of the river Karun to be able to perform their baptist rituals and to be near their sometimes enormously extended families.

My doctoral thesis will be focused on Mandaean women as teachers of ritualistic practices to their children and as carriers of many different cultural traditions. In fact, Khuzestan is an oil border region where the war with Iraq is still in the memories of everybody born before the end; here Mandaeans are traditionally silver and goldsmiths; Bakhtiari and other nomads, still living according to their traditions, descend from their mountains to sell their animals and goods; Lurs and Iranian Arabs communicate here in a broken Persian, and the flows of Iraqi and Pakistani refugees gave name to specific sections of the bazaar. Mandaeans have never been understood in the context of this cultural mixture and mutual exchanges of goods and ideas; therefore their variety of cultural practices has never been reported, not even seen.

In this year spent in Ahvaz, not only was I able to collect an immense amount of voice recordings and interviews, but I also became a part of this increasingly endangered group of people. I lived in what is called “The Subbi Alley” (kuce ye subbiha), in the very centre of Ahvaz, and near the river. I rented a small room on the upper floor of a very old house, with a Mandaean family of four downstairs and three geese on the rooftop. My neighbours in the alley and in the mahalle (quarter) all had incredibly interesting life stories, that I collected, and written in Persian anonymising them. I translated the most significant interviews into English and I am in the process of incorporating them inside the main structure of my work. All of them will be safely stored in the University of Exeter digital archive when I hand out my first draft.

Due to the length of my fieldwork I am now in the process of dismantling the data I have gathered and recomposing them in structured chapters and subchapters. Not only my interviews have to be placed in the right position but also an immense amount of participant observation memories has to transfer from my brain to a screen of a laptop, and I am currently finding this late chore a painful one. I can fully understand (but I do not dare to make a comparison) why, after coming back from years of fieldwork, anthropologists in the past faced difficulties in writing their celebrated books. If my life changed in a year, if my cultural values where challenged, if my feminist approach gave way to a highly relativistic one, I cannot imagine what six or seven years might have done. This is an example taken from one of my notebooks, not edited:

I am in a falafel shop in Lashkarabad, Ahvaz. The police has closed the road because they are afraid of trafic jams and of the amount of people gathering here every night. The air is warm, we are near the Persian New Year and people are cheerful and happy to enjoy the night with their families. The temperature just cooled down and reached a bearable 30 degrees. Lashkarabad is one of the predominantly Arab quarters, like many in Ahvaz and many in Khuzestan. I hear Arabic spoken everywhere, words that still I cannot understand shouted loud at the crowd. It is past midnight and the city is more alive than ever. The selling of felafel is getting frenetic, like here an eternal Ramadan was present, forbidding people to eat and have fun during the day and reserving the night to enjoy these earthly pleasures.

The Mandaean community belongs to this place like this place of cultural melting pot belongs to the Mandaeans, themselves victims and at the same time cultural and social products of this marvellous Babel of languages, cultures and traditions. Here the Arab patriarchal structure overcomes everything, it is not even imaginable for a woman to go out alone, especially at night, without taking on herself the risk of being harassed or pointed by the same neighbours. It is not praiseworthy to go alone to the bazaar after 7 pm or to go alone, without a male escort, out of your house after 11 pm. All this was told me by my neighbour, she does not want me to get in trouble and she is very protective of me despite the fact I am four years older than her. She has the idea that since I do not have a husband, yet, I am the one to protect, and to feel worried about.

What I achieved so far is: a life-changing experience; an impressive collection of first hand data on a topic that no scholar before has ever examined; learning Ahvazi Arabic; a half way through doctoral thesis which will be the frame to collocate the things I saw and felt as well; at least two papers written and due to be published soon, the first in cooperation with Professor Arabestani from the Anthropology department of the University of Tehran; several public presentations of my findings and public discussions on a variety of topics concerning Iranian Mandaeans, from food prohibitions to marriage rituals; presenting my research in the BRISMES Conference held in Edinburgh University, in the Social Science department of Tehran University, and in the University of Malaysia for the Food and Society Annual Conference.

My scheduled date for the completion of my doctoral thesis is this next September, if all goes as planned. I hereby would like to thank with all my heart my first supervisor Christine Robins, who patiently supported me during sandstorms and still encourages me when I lose my compass. Of course, all these adventures and experiences and brand new discoveries would not have been realised if I had not had the economic support of the prestigious scholarship honouring Professor Morton. I felt and keep feeling blessed by the pioneering vision of all the members of the Gibb Memorial Trust, who believed in my peculiar research project. You believed in me as a fieldworker, I will not disappoint you as an academic.

Yours sincerely,

Marta Marsano

A trip to Iran in November marked the ending of my fieldwork travels. Since December, I have been cataloguing the 172 pages of the album; this process involves in identifying the text that has been penned on the elaborately illuminated folios of the album. While most of the textual pages of the album are verses from lyrical poems, some are written in prose with specific historical references. This close reading of the album’s text made me realise that, while most of the painted pages of the album were produced in India, the calligraphic folios were added in Iran in the nineteenth century. This preliminary finding was presented at the  College Art Association Conference, in California, in February 2018. Later on, in May 2018, I also presented my research at the British Institute of Persian Studies.

Currently, in my fourth, and final year of PhD I’m finishing my dissertation three body chapters. Chapter one will argue that in order for the calligraphers and painters of the early modern Persianate world to stay bīqarīna—or unique—practitioners invented styles and techniques that allowed the artists to exercise creativity within the framework of traditions. Chapter two discusses single-page paintings that are composed of a central panel of a painted figure, surrounded by cutout pieces of paper with calligraphy. While exploring the relationship between text and image in a series of case studies, I will discuss the importance of reading both text and image in order to understand the intention behind the creation of each page. Chapter three explores three separate groups of single-page compositions of text and image; each one of these groups was created for compilation within an album. In
examining each grouping, either still bound together, or found in separate collections, it is evident that calligraphy is considered as a device to bring the collected pages together as a single unit. Precisely the calligraphy that has been written on cutout paper pieces and pasted around the central panel of each folio is the concern of this chapter. A careful reading of the calligraphy shows that words do not complement the visual content of the pages they are glued on; however, their meanings intertwine the pages together. These three groups of folios have been selected for this chapter mainly because it can be determined with certainty that they were made to be compiled together as an album. Furthermore, each album shows three possible approaches to using calligraphy for making meaning and uniting the individual folios together as an assemblage of artworks with varied subjects and techniques.

The age of digitisation and accessibility of online catalogues has been a great aid to scholarship in general and to the field of codicology in particular. Searching the databases of different libraries, along with extensive fieldwork to delve into catalogues of archives in Istanbul in September last year, helped me to discover a few previously unknown Baysunghuri productions, which shed a new light on Baysunghur’s library and court staff. The result of this discovery was recently presented in a one-day seminar organised by the British Institute of Persian Studies and an article that will be published in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society in the coming year.

After completing my fieldwork by the start of the academic year in October, I started writing my dissertation and have prepared a first draft of three chapters:

Chapter I: The Patron

This chapter first gives a chronology of Baysunghur Mirza’s life including all related events with a specific date that is recorded in historical primary sources, and then investigates his talents and the artistic aspect of his life, as well as his role and taste in the organisation of royal library-workshop, according to art historical sources. It also discusses his calligraphic oeuvre in detail to clarify the authenticity of some of the works attributed to him, such as the Baysunghuri Qur’an and the inscription on the Gauhar Shad Mosque in Mashhad.

Chapter II: The Library-workshop

The second part of my dissertation is about the structure of Baysunghur’s royal library, which also functioned as an atelier or workshop to produce manuscripts and other exquisitely artistic objects. Apart from art historical sources, the data used in this phase is based on a contemporary document written by the head of Baysunghur’s library. It is a fragment of a regular report on the progress of projects at hand addressed to the prince and is called the ‘Arzeh-dasht’. This document not only presents valuable information on the performance of the workshop, but also contains several technical terms that have long been ambiguous to scholars and require explanation. The rest of the chapter accumulates the information about calligraphers, artists, poets and other staff of the royal library and court, extracted from all the available primary sources.

Chapter III: The Productions

The first part of the third chapter presents an updated list of all so-far-known productions, comprising of 30 dated and 5 undated manuscripts associated with Baysunghur’s library. This expands the latest number of 22 manuscripts listed by Roxburgh in 2014. The rest of the chapter concentrates on each production and discusses codicological and stylistic aspects of all the manuscripts, some of which have been previously studied in Thomas Lentz’s PhD dissertation (1985) or in different monographs; I also give a complete study of my recently discovered manuscripts.

The last six months have also seen the completion of three articles that contribute to the topic of my dissertation and have helped me clarify my ideas and the development of my research. A further short paper is also nearly ready for publication.

In the coming half of the year I need to make a field trip to Herat (where Baysunghur maintained his atelier), for which I have obtained a grant from the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, before devoting the rest of my time to finishing my thesis. I am hoping to submit it in early 2017.