The Zoroastrian myth of migration from Iran and settlement in the Indian diaspora : text, translation and analysis of the 16th century Qeṣṣe-ye Sanjān 'The story of Sanjan' /
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The Qesse-ye Sanjān is the sole surviving account of the emigration of Zoroastrians from Iran to India to form the Parsi ('Persian') community. Written in Persian couplets in India in 1599 by a Zoroastrian priest, it is a work many know of, but few have actually read, let alone studied in depth. This book provides a romanised transcription from the oldest manuscripts, an elegant metrical translation, detailed commentary and, most importantly, a radical new theory of how such a text should be "read", id est not as a historical chronical but as a charter of Zoroastrian identity, foundation myth and justification of the Parsi presence in India. The book fills a lacuna that has been acutely felt for a long time.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references (p. [239]-242) and indexes. :
9789047430421 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
The expansion of prophetic experience : essays on historicity, contingency and plurality in religion /
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Abdulkarim Soroush is known primarily for his epistemological/hermeneutical theory, the "Contraction and Expansion of Religious Knowledge," and its application to Islamic political theory and religious pluralism. While his Reason, Freedom and Democracy in Islam applies that theory to plurality and the historicity of understanding and interpretation of religion, this book captures some of his original theories about religion itself. The Expansion of Prophetic Experience treats the historicity of the Prophet Muhammad's revelatory experience, including human and contextual influences on the genesis of the sacred Text. It presents substantial aspects of Soroush's Neo-Rationalist hermeneutical project for an Islamic reformed theology and ethics, systematically leading Islamic reformation beyond conventional projects of piecemeal adjustments to the Shariʿah or selective re-interpretations of the Qurʾān.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references (p. [345]-348) and index. :
9789047424369 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
The genesis of the Bábí-Baháʼí faiths in Shíráz and Fárs /
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The Bábí and Baháʾí Faiths represent two of the most important religious movements of modern times. This book relates the story of the evolution of the Bábí-Baháʾí community, beginning with the birth of its founder, Siyyid ʾAlí-Muhammad, known as the Báb, in 1819 and then traced over the next century and a half in the city of his birth, Shíráz. Its author, Mírzá Habíbuʾlláh Afnán, was himself born in the house of the Báb, reared by the widow of the Báb, who shared with him many stories of the Báb's life, then spent nearly a year with Baháʾuʾlláh in the ʾAkka-Haifa area, and some ten years in close proximity to Baháʾuʾlláh's son ʾAbduʾl-Bahá. He served for the next half century as the hereditary custodian of the house of the Báb, and as such was uniquely qualified to tell the story of the Bábí-Baháʾí Faiths in the city of Shíráz in remarkable and moving detail.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references (p. [381]-384) and indexes. :
9789047442349 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Muqarnas : an annual on the visual cultures of the Islamic world.
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Muqarnas is sponsored by The Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Muqarnas 26 contains articles on a variety of topics that span and transcend the geographic and temporal boundaries that have traditionally defined the history of Islamic art and architecture. Contributors include Robert McChesney, Mattia Guidetti, Marcus Schadl, Christian Gruber, Katia Cytryn-Silverman, Doris Abouseif, Olga Bush, Emine Fetvaci, Moya Carey, Bernard O'Kane, Hadi Maktabi, Nadia Erzini and Stephen Vernoit.
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"Sponsored by the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts." :
1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references. :
9789047429333 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
A catalogue of the Turkish manuscripts in the John Rylands University Library at Manchester
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During the six hundred years of its existence, innumerable of manuscripts with, mostly, Turkish texts were produced in the Ottoman Empire. These are mainly preserved in libraries in the countries that once were part of that extended empire; a lesser number of such manuscripts had their origin in central Asia, Persia and India. From the sixteenth century in particular, interest for these handwritten books increased in Europe and found their way to the libraries of scholars, book collectors and universities. The John Rylands University Library is one such repository of Turkish manuscripts of both Ottoman and wider Asian provenance. Most of these manuscripts, among which a number of unique, rare and luxuriously produced items, were originally gathered by a rich mine owner, the 25th Earl of Crawford. In this book, the collection is for the first time described in a detailed and systematic way.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004201316 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
The Arabic version of Tusi's Nasirean ethics : with an introduction and explanatory notes /
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Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī's (d. 672/1274) Nasirean Ethics is the single most important work on philosophical ethics in the history of Islam. Translated from the original Persian into Arabic in 713/1313, the present text was primarily intended for the Arabic-speaking majority of the people in Iraq. A fine example of medieval Persian-to-Arabic translation technique, this first edition carefully reproduces Middle Arabic elements that can be found throughout the text.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004307506 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
The sea of chronicles (muḥīṭ al-tavārīkh) /
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"The Sea of Chronicles is an English translation of the ninth and tenth chapters of the historiographical work entitled Muḥīṭ al-tavārīkh by Muḥammad Amīn b. Mīrzā Muḥammad Zamān Bukhārī. The work is a valuable source in particular for the study of the late seventeenth-century Central Asian political, cultural and religious history. The ninth chapter offers accounts of the Timurid, Abulkhayrid/Shaybanid and the first four Ashatrkhanid khans. The tenth chapter which is the most original and important chapter of the work presents a detailed account of the life and time of the last great Ashatkhanid ruler, Subḥān QulīKhān (r. 1682-1702), revealing historical information essential for the study of the period and region".
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004415287
Universal Science : An Introduction to Islamic Metaphysics.
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The Universal Science ( ʿIlm-i kullī ) by Mahdī Ḥāʾirī Yazdī , is a concise, but authoritative, outline of the fundamental discussions in Islamic metaphysics. For many years used as a textbook in Iran, this short text offers English readers a readily accessible, lucid, and yet deeply learned, guide through the Sadrian, Avicennan, and Illuminationist schools of thought, whilst also demonstrating how the 'living tradition' of Shīʿī philosophy engages with central ontological, epistemological, aetiological, and psychological questions. Discussions include the primacy of existence; the proper classifications of quiddity; and the manifold properties of causality and causal explanation. This is the first of the various influential works authored by this leading Shīʿah intellectual to have been translated into English from the original Persian.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004343115 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
Bilawhar wa Buyūdhasf /
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Bilawhar and Būdhāsaf are the main characters of an ancient Arabic work called Bilawhar wa-Būdhāsaf , a text whose core narrative derived from the biography of Gautama Buddha, the founder of Buddhism. The original Sanskrit text on which it was based was translated into Middle Persian and from there into Arabic, besides Old Turkish and New Persian. It is from this lost ancient Arabic translation that later versions, adaptations or summaries derive, whether in Arabic, Persian, Georgian, Hebrew, or Greek. The Persian work published in this volume is Niẓām Tabrīzī's (fl. late 8th/14th cent.) summary of an anonymous Persian translation of an equally anonymous Arabic commentary on Bilawhar wa-Būdhasaf , both lost. As such, it provides new material for further study into the history of transmission of this text, both from a philological point of view and as a complex narrative issuing from a progressive intermixture of elements from different times and cultures.
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1 online resource. :
9789004402966
9789646781702
Dīwān-i Hātif-i Iṣfahānī /
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Persian poetry of the pre-modern era is divided into three successive styles, each belonging to a different period: Khurāsānī, ʿIrāqī and Hindī. The Hindī style is called such because in Safavid times, during which it developed, poets no longer enjoyed the shah's patronage so that many of them went to India, where Persian poetry had flourished since Ghaznavid times (11th-12th century CE). The Hindī style is often regarded as a lesser style, but has the merit of having put a halt to the decline that Persian poetry was suffering from at the time and also, by its accessible language and subject matter, of having brought poetry within reach of the ordinary man. The poetry of Hātif Iṣfahānī (d. 1198/1783) published here was written in the latter half of the 12th/18th century, at the beginning of the neo-classical period of return ( bāzgasht ) to the poetical styles of the pre-Safavid era.
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1 online resource. :
9789004407244
9786002031167
The Eight Books : A Complete English Translation /
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The Eight Books: A Complete English Translation is the first complete translation of the collected poems of Sohrab Sepehri (1928-1980), a major Iranian modernist poet and painter and yet under-translated into English. The introduction takes up Sepehri's famously difficult if languidly beautiful style to explain it as a series of appropriations of global modernisms in poetry and painting. It offers close readings of how Sepehri's modernism follows and breaks with the jagged rhythms of Nima Yushij (d.1960), Iran's inaugural modernist poet. In keeping with this modernist framing, the translations replicate Sepehri's rhymes where possible, his fluctuations between formal and colloquial registers, his syntactic distortions, and his embeddings of governmental and other jargons. It also includes Sepehri's autobiography.
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1 online resource :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004472389
9789004472372
Az nuskhahā-yi Istānbūl : Dastnivīshā-ī dar falsafah, kalām, ʿirfān /
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For those working with Islamic manuscripts the libraries of Istanbul have always been a treasure-trove. New discoveries are frequently reported and of many texts, the oldest or only copy is kept in some library in Istanbul. Since the publication of the defters of the Istanbul libraries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, many more catalogues and handlists have been produced in an effort to render the immense amount of material more accessible. Even if the bulk of this work is done by Turkish specialists, foreign scholars, too, do their part. The present collection of research notes is a case in point. They describe a number of important Arabic and Persian manuscripts in philosophy, theology and mysticism selected for publication by the Written Heritage Research Centre in Tehran. Some of these manuscripts are in the hand of, or contain marginalia by, Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī (d. 672/1274), Najm al-Dīn Kātibī (d. 675/1276), and others.
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1 online resource. :
9789004406018
9786002030399
Tārīkh-i Rashīdī /
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In the history of Islam, royal courts and other centers of wordly power played a major role in the survival and development of the sciences and the arts. And many rulers and high ranking officials themselves, too, often engaged in one or several of these. By way of example one may, for the Persianate world, mention Sultan Bayqārā (d. 911/1506), the Timurid ruler of Herat, and Ẓahīr al-Dīn Bābur (d. 937/1530), founder of the Mughal empire in India. Another example is the author of the present work, Mīrzā Muḥammad Ḥaydar Dūghlāt (d. 957/1551). Coming from a family of Chagatai generals and high administrators, he served a whole series of rulers in various parts of east Asia, mostly as a general and lastly as the ruler of Kashmir. Though wider in scope, the Tārīkh-i Rashīdī is above all a unique source of information on Chagatai history, full of personal reflexions on religion, culture, and the arts.
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1 online resource. :
9789004404083
9789646781870
Jangnāma-yi Kishm wa Jarūnnāma /
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For over a hundred years, between 1507 and 1622, the island of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf was in the hands of the Portuguese. It was only under Shāh ʿAbbās I that the Safavids were able to recapture Hormuz and the neighbouring island of Qishm, under the leadership of general Imām Qulī Khān and with the unexpected help of some forces of the British East India Company that happened to be in the area at the time. The two epic poems from the 11th/17th century published in this volume, one by an otherwise unknown 'Qadrī' and the other by an anonymous author, deal with the recapture of Qishm and Hormuz under Imām Qulī Khān. While not of high literary quality, the poems show some interesting local and historical features, especially the longer one on Hormuz whose author had a great admiration of Imām Qulī Khān, whom he appears to have known personally.
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1 online resource. :
9789004404663
9789648700046
Dīwān-i ashʿār-i Fahmī Astarābādī /
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This is a collection of poems, mostly ghazals, by the otherwise little-known 10th/16th century poet Fahmī Astarābādī. All that the available sources tell us about him is that he was talented and intelligent, that (as a young man?) he went to India, that he earned a living in business, and that he died in Delhi. Thanks to the research of the editor of his divan, we now know somewhat more. First, that Fahmī spent a certain time in the entourage of Rustam Rūzafzūn (d. 917/1511), ruler of Mazandaran and that he also wrote poetry in praise of some of the other members of that family; that he lived in Yazd for two years and lost his fortune there, returning broke to Mazandaran; that he travelled to Najaf, Mecca and Mashhad; and that he was in India when Sultan Bābur died in 937/1530. Alive in 948/1541, is not known when or where he passed away.
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Poems. :
1 online resource. :
9789004405608
9789648700930
Rubāʿiyyāt-i Ḥakīm Khayyām /
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The rubāʿī or quatrain is a short Persian poem in a special metre with a rhyme suitable to its form. Its use is not bound to any specific field, there being philosophical, satirical, romantic, lyrical and other types of quatrain. In the past, it was believed that the rubāʿī was a special form of the hazaj metre of Arabic poetry. Meanwhile, it has been established that it is in fact Iranian, its origin being the pre-Islamic tarānah or song for feasting and wine. In the West the quatrain was rendered immortal through the work of ʿUmar al-Khayyām (d. ca. 517/1123). A native of Nishapur, he was a respected mathematician and astronomer, as well as a recognized expert in poetry. Many of the quatrains ascribed to him are, however, spurious. This volume contains a reprint of Yār Aḥmad Rashīdī's selection (dated 867/1460), first published in 1953, followed by two other works in Persian, also by Khayyām.
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Includes facsimile text originally published in Istanbul, 1953. :
1 online resource. :
9789004404885
9789648700374
Rāhnamā-yi dastnivishthā-yi Mānavi-yi Tūrfān (ravish shināsi-yi vīrāyish va bāz sāzī) /
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After its foundation by Mani in the third century CE, Manicheism spread quickly from Iran through the ancient world, from North Africa to Europe and from Central Asia to China. Mani wrote seven works, six in Syriac and one in Middle Persian. The spread of Manicheism led to the emergence of Manichean writings in a number of other languages, and also of texts in criticism or description of this religion by non-Manichean authors in some of these same languages, among them Greek, Latin, Coptic, Arabic, Soghdian, and Chinese. From among the archeological findings involving Manichean texts, one of the most exciting ones was the discovery, in the early nineteen hundreds, of many Manichean fragments in Turfan, in Xinjiang province, China. These are in Middle Persian, Parthian, Soghdian and Manichean New Persian, besides material in Uygur, Bactrian and Kuchean. The present work is a Persian manual for the interpretation, reconstruction and edition of these Turfan texts.
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1 online resource. :
9789004408074
9786002031372
Majlis dar qiṣṣa-yi rasūl (ṣalawāt Allāh ʿalayhi) /
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In Persian literature, so-called ' majālis ' works typically evoke the atmosphere of a religious gathering. In such a gathering, a chronicler relates parts of the history of Islam and the lives and times of its prominent representatives, often referring to trustworthy sources. Besides, questions may be asked, while teachings or sermons may also be given. Examples are Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī's (d. 672/1273) Majālis-i sabʿa and Saʿdī's (d. 691/1292) Majālis-i panj-gānah . Judging by its title, the present work by an unknown author from the 5th/12th century-it is not known if it was originally written in Persian or translated from Arabic-would seem to belong to this same type of writings. Only, on closer inspection this is not the case. Being mostly inspired by Ibn Isḥāq's (d. 150/767) al-Sīra al-nabawiyya and Abū Ḥātim al-Rāzī's (d. 322/933-4) Aʿlām al-nubuwwa , only its last five chapters are called majlis , but then lack the characteristics of a typical majālis work.
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1 online resource. :
9789004405769
9786002030122
Risāla-yi Ḥātimiyya /
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Ḥātim al-Ṭāʾī, a pre-Islamic poet from the late sixth century CE, is especially known for his chivalry and magnanimity. A member of the tribe of Ṭayy in Yemen, he is mainly associated with the court of the Lakhmids in Ḥīra in Mesopotamia under king Nuʿmān b. Mundhir (reg. ca. 580-602). His poetry centers around the qualities that earned him his fame, even if part of the poems ascribed to him may be later inventions. Legend has it that his grandfather, who was his guardian, abandoned him when he saw that his grandson's generosity was incurable. Four mourning girls, hewn in stone, lined his grave, together with the cooking pots from which he had served his guests. A popular character in medieval Arabic literature, no separate work was ever dedicated to him, unlike the Persian tradition. The present text on his life and deeds by Wāʿiẓ Kāshifī (d. 910/1504-5) is the oldest to exist in Persian.
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1 online resource. :
9789004407299
9786002031297