Please join us for our upcoming seminar on: "Cultural Brokerage in the Arabic and Persian Mirrors for Princes Literature (10th-12th Centuries)" by Prof. Louise Marlow, Fellow (Wellesley College, Massachusetts, USA)

Monday, January 4, 2021, from 17:30 to 19:00 (Israel time) via zoom.

Please contact Alon Ben Yehuda, the Research Group assistant, to receive the Zoom link: alon.ben-yehuda@mail.huji.ac.il

ABSTRACT

For over a millennium and across vast and varied geographical terrains, the courts of Muslim rulers generated, consumed and disseminated a voluminous literature of political advice. Partly because of its longevity and its broad distribution, the mirror-for-princes literature – appearing first in Arabic, and soon afterwards in Turkish and Persian as well – offers rich material for the study of cultural brokerage. In this presentation I shall consider some of the modes of brokerage evident in the mirror literature at different moments in the first four centuries of the Islamic period, with a focus on the 10th-12th centuries.

In the 8th and 9th centuries, translators and copyists, as well as their patrons and readers participated in the transmission and adaptation of concepts, maxims, metaphors and political imaginings from one linguistic milieu (Middle Persian, Greek, Syriac, Sanskrit) to another – expressed in Arabic. Among the most striking examples of this era’s partly intentional, partly accidental brokerage are the immensely popular collections Kalīla wa-Dimna and Sirr al-asrār, the ancient, remote and ‘other’ provenances of which their presenters specifically highlighted in their Arabic versions. I shall suggest, however, that the transmission, transformation and dissemination of the political wisdom of the ‘other’ continued through the 10th-12th centuries, the period which saw the appearance of many of the best-known Arabic, Persian and Turkish mirrors (for example, Yūsuf Khāṣṣ Ḥājib, Kutadgu bilig; Kaykāʾūs b. Iskandar, Qābūsnāmeh; Niẓām al-Mulk, Siyar al-mulūk; al-Ghazālī/Pseudo-Ghazālī, Naṣīḥat al-mulūk; al-Ṭurṭūshī, Sirāj almulūk). Just as Kalīla wa-Dimna and Sirr al-asrār continued to pass from location to location and from language to language, the Qābūsnāmeh, Siyar al-mulūk, Naṣīḥat al-mulūk and Sirāj al-mulūk, to name only the best-known examples, also continued to move from place to place and from language to language (Persian into Arabic and Turkish; Arabic into Persian and Turkish); and as they passed from one milieu to another, the intermediaries involved in the transfer – copyists as well as ‘translators’ – intervened in their meanings. I shall consider some of the networks that facilitated these transfers, and the points at which they sometimes converged.

But mirrors were not only products of cultural brokerage; they were also vehicles for it. Apart from their textual and conceptual contents, mirror-books, as material objects or artefacts, provided a means of connecting previously separate individuals within and beyond courtly milieux. Within the courtly environment, mirror-books were objects for presentation, emblems of legitimation, part of courtly ceremonial. They could secure an introduction for an author-outsider to a new hoped-for patron, whether the ruler, a ruler-to-be or (perhaps more likely) his vizier, who might be prevailed upon to initiate ties of iṣṭināʿ, to bestow a reward or offer the benefit of employment. In this mode of brokerage, mirrors became actants (von der Höh et al.) – tokens of exchange (the frequent practice of rededicating mirrors points to this function) in networks of courtiers, administrators, writers and scholars, mobile populations who also conveyed the contents of the mirror literature to constituencies well beyond the confines of the court.

Louise Marlow is Professor of Religion and former Director of Middle Eastern Studies at Wellesley College. She received her undergraduate degree from Cambridge University, where she studied Persian and Arabic, and her doctoral degree from Princeton University, Near Eastern Studies Department. In much of her research, she has concentrated on the pre-modern Arabic and Persian literatures of political advice, often referred to as ‘mirrors for princes’. She is the author of Counsel for Kings: Wisdom and Politics in Tenth-Century Iran (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), and Hierarchy and Egalitarianism in Islamic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). She is the editor of The Rhetoric of Biography: Narrating lives in Persianate societies (Boston: Ilex Foundation and Washington, D. C.: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2011), Dreaming across Boundaries: The interpretation of dreams in Islamic lands (Boston: Ilex Foundation and Washington, D. C.: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2008), and, with Beatrice Gruendler, Writers and Rulers: Perspectives on their relationships from Abbasid to Safavid times (Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag, 2004). Currently completing a set of translations to appear in an anthology of political advice (Medieval Arabic and Persian Mirrors for Princes: An Anthology of Political Advice), she is also interested in translations of Arabic texts into Persian.