Thesis (M.A.)--Trinity International University, 2000. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 91-120).

Thesis (Th. M.)--Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 80-87).

Thesis (M.A.)--Trinity International University, 2000. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 91-120).

Thesis (M.A.)--Trinity International University, 2000. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 91-120).

<p>My research concerns intertwined issues of religio-political legitimacy and panegyric poetry during the Safavid dynasty (r. 1501 ? 1722). I explore ways that ideology and dominance were enacted and reproduced through the Safavid panegyrics in qa??deh and masnav? form. This research specifically examines how court poets responded to Safavid ideology for legitimizing kingship. Panegyric poetry has been one of the chief forms of political propaganda in praise of rulers and other holders of political authority from pre-Islamic times until modern days. Panegyric poems, especially qa??deh and masnav?, were the production of a court system and they were dominantly produced when a king was in power. By considering the nature of panegyric, as written for receiving a reward, the poets? portrayal of kings is traditionally ?assumed? to be the closest to the kings? self-image. The Safavid Persian panegyric, especially the qa??deh form, has heretofore received little scholarly attention. Scholars have usually investigated the literary value of this poetic genre and dismissed the role it could play in the promotion of Muslim rulers. This dissertation explores the ways in which religio-political legitimacy was produced and transmitted through the qa??deh and masnav? forms during the Safavid period and emphasizes the significance of investigating the panegyric genre of poetry not only from a literary perspective, but through a historical lens. While other cultural materials of the time emphasized the role of Safavid kings in the propagation of Twelver Shi`ism and portrayed the kings in a subservient position to the Shi`i Imams, I demonstrate that the Safavid court poetry highlighted the idea of ?sacred? in Sufi discourses and in notions that invoke pre-Islamic forms of Persian kingship to legitimize the Safavid rulership. From the time of Shah `Abb?s I (r. 1588 ? d. 1629), these two forms of representation were established more profoundly in Safavid panegyrics and stood in contrast to traditional notions of Shi`ism that were predominant in other cultural materials that issued in the name of the Safavid rulers. This dissertation, on the one hand, serves historians of the Safavid period, who investigate the Safavid courts and ideology in kingship. It demonstrates how the poets worked differently from the other sources through which the legitimization of the Safavid kingship was established. On the other hand, my study serves scholars of religion, who study Safavid religious treatises in order to shed light on the development of Shi?ism, Sufism, and other religious traditions of the time. By demonstrating the differences between the representation of a Shi`i Safavid king in cultural materials of the time and panegyrics, my research invites these scholars to examine non-religious sources more extensively to investigate Safavid ideology because these sources give a sense of how the religio-political ideology of the kings was perceived among the public and how it developed through time.

Cronica Sarracina was one of the most widely read books of its time. It was very popular, and contemporary historians considered it a proper historiographic work. Despite this fact, later opinion believe it to be stylistically poor. It was also considered to be a fictional work because it used myth, legend, and dream material. In order to clarify this discrepancy, the present work focuses on three fundamental points: the nature of the historical discourse, the role of the narrative in historiographic writing, and the literary conventions of the Middle Ages. In order to be considered a proper historiographic work, the work must represent the actual facts, that is to say, the facts that exist outside of the author's consciousness. The traditional historical discourse starts from this premise, but concentrates on accumulating referentiality to affirm the existence of the external reality that is independent from the discourse that announces it. However, the most recent theories hold that the events and the realities represented in a historiographical work are not independent from the discourse that announces them. The story mechanism is inseparable from the way in which we perceive and represent our world. Taking as a starting point the instability of the boundaries established among the principal forms of discourse, especially in the case of the discourses produced prior to the nineteenth century when the rules of their formation were different, this document asks whether Cronica Sarracina is a proper historiographical work. It examines the criteria of the truth and objectivity in force at the time of the Cronica's writing, the literary conventions that govern its narrative structure, and if its narrative structure contributes to the representation of the truth. The document explores the role of those aspects historically least acceptable, that is to say, those concerning chivalry and those that were traditionally labeled as myth, and how these contribute to the representation of the truth.

This dissertation is a study of Arabic narrative forms and writing practices on the cusp of modernity. It is set in and around the Ottoman provinces of Mount Lebanon, and spans the period from the late-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century. Through the study of four maqāma collections composed between the 1770s and 1856, this project offers a microhistory of a literary form before and during its earliest encounter with the Nahḍa, or Arab renaissance in the mid-nineteenth century. These highly self-reflexive maqāma collections not only shed light on practices of textuality prior to the spread of print journals and the “new” reading public in the mid-nineteenth century, but also provide an empirical basis for furthering the critique of the centrality of the novel to the definition and periodization of Arabic literary modernity. In its broadest ambition, however, this project is a search for a new theoretical language to describe this maqāma corpus and, through it, key facets of the genre in the modern period.

During the early-modern period, Persian was the language of the imperial court and a prestigious literary medium in South Asia. Not only did Persian connect the Subcontinent with intellectual and cultural trends across western and central Asia, but during the early-modern period, India--even compared with Iran--was arguably the world's main center for the patronage of Persian literature and scholarship. However, our understanding of the societal role of Indo-Persian (that is, Persian used in South Asia) is still hazy in part because the end of Persian as a language of power in India has been so historiographically over-determined. Colonial intellectuals and nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalists in Iran and India have claimed that by the eighteenth century Indo-Persian had become an artificial, ossified tradition in decline, symptomatic of a political system in decline, whose ineluctable destiny was to be replaced by supposedly more democratic and properly Indian languages like Hindi and Urdu. The present study seeks to nuance and in some cases to completely revise this declinist narrative through an examination of eighteenth-century primary sources. This dissertation traces the development of philology (the study of literary language, known in Persian under several names including 'ilm-i lughat) within the Indo-Persian tradition, concentrating on its social and political ramifications, and the modes by which Indo-Persian writers smoothed the way for the adoption of the vernacular in contexts formerly reserved for Persian. The eighteenth century is a hinge between the pre-modern and the colonial modern, and yet our understanding of the intellectual history of that century is much poorer than for the colonial period. The most prolific and arguably most influential Indo-Persian philologist of the early-modern period was Siraj al-Din 'Ali Khan (1687/8-1756), whose nom de plume was Arzu. Besides being a much-admired poet in Persian and Urdu, Arzu was a rigorous theoretician of language. Arzu's conception of language accounted for literary innovation and historical change, a project whose newness he acknowledges and which was necessary in the face of the tazah go'i [literally, "fresh speaking"] movement in Persian literature. Although later scholarship has tended to frame this debate in anachronistically nationalist terms (Iranians versus Indians), the primary sources complicate the picture. The present study draws an analogy to the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns in Europe to show that the contemporary concern had far less to do with geography than with the question of how to interpret innovative "fresh speaking" poetry (just as in Europe the concern had been over assessing the value of texts not modeled on the Classics). Arzu used historical reasoning to argue that as a cosmopolitan language Persian could not be the property of one nation and be subject to one narrow kind of interpretation. In doing so he carefully defined the differences in usage within the Persian cosmopolis, and concluded that Indo-Persian usage was within the norms of Persian usage generally, meaning that properly educated Indians had as much right as Iranian native speakers to innovate in Persian. An intervention offered by the present research is the recognition that Arzu's theories, which superficially seem to concern only Persian, apply to language more generally. A study of his work can therefore elucidate the mechanisms that allowed Urdu to gain acceptance in elite literary circles in northern India during his lifetime. An often-overlooked aspect of intellectual history, both in India and in the West, is that advances in vernacular literary culture have usually come about not through a repudiation of the classics and their language but rather through a sustained engagement with them by bilingual writers. By changing attitudes about rekhtah, a Persianized form of vernacular composition that would later be renamed and reconceptualized as Urdu, Arzu defined and systematized vernacular literary production. Furthermore, this study presents a challenge to the persistent misconception that Indians started writing Urdu because they were ashamed of their poor Persian.

This dissertation examines the convergence of ruins and memory. It is an inquiry into the role ruins play in indexing, impeding and enabling memories of war through literary and non-literary media. My analysis is informed by a classical Arabic literary tradition of contemplating ruins. I question the nexus between the ruins motif and contemporary Arabic literature and culture by analyzing how the motif is reworked in the contemporary Lebanese prose, poetry and memorial sites under study. At the heart of this study is an attempt to explore the multivalent nature of war memories in Lebanon--their inscription, mediation, and transformation--through the framework of ruins. Drawing on the classical Arabic literary tradition of contemplating ruins allows me to analyze the way ruins are interpreted and represented in contemporary Lebanese vernacular, literary, museological and poetic matrixes of memory. I argue that these modern works invite us to contemplate ruins in new and challenging ways that exceed the classical regard and longing for an ephemeral past. This is to suggest that the classical Arabic ruins motif in its modern guise is not an organic offshoot of its pre-Islamic predecessor. Through their evocation of the past via its ruin-traces, the modern works under examination effectively transform the poetics of nostalgia to new affective and alternative imaginary spaces. It is precisely in the creative tension between the traditional and the modern, the real and the imagined ruins, where a contemporary poetics of memory lies. Central to my analysis, then, is the issue of memorialization in its aesthetic, textual and material dimensions as it informs the critical practices of writers, artists, poets, museum curators and inhabitants of war. Ruins emerge as a major trope that ties together divergent artistic, literary and cultural and oral practices, constituting complex forms that generate public and private memories of war. Hence ruins as temporal anchor, is both the portal and the substance of my inquiry into the dialectics of war and memory in Lebanon. How are ruins, in their material and aesthetic dimensions, enfolded into the discourses of textual, vernacular and literary landscapes of memory? This question is answered by commencing a textual and ethnographic journey through museum sites, derelict spaces, narrative and poetic constructions of memory.

Mehdi Akhavan Sales (1928-1990) is one of the most important figures in modern Persian literature. However, his poetry is little known in the West. Even in Iran, though held in high regard, his work is considered hermetic. There is no unambiguous message, no identifiable political or aesthetic doctrine. Still, his poems exert a strange, haunting power. What do they tell us, now, two decades after the poet's death? What do they mean outside their homeland? What is their voice in world literature? These are the questions my dissertation seeks to answer. Chapters on rhythm, metaphor, time and - lyrical and epic - voice aim to place Akhavan in the comparative context of the 20th century literary movements. Following the philosophical hermeneutics of, above all, Paul Ricoeur, I attempt to tease out layers of meaning and bring Akhavan's poems to life for a contemporary reader. Aspects of time and presence throughout serve to structure my argument. In parallel, time and presence are traced as motifs that weave through Akhavan's writing. Through close readings of a wide range of poems I seek to understand Akhavan's texts as crystallisations of a historical moment. However, I also argue that his poems can no longer be explained within the linear evolution of Persian literary history: in their language and imagery, they point to an elsewhere that has not yet been mapped. Akhavan avoids ideological statements and political imperatives. All the same, an ethical stance is manifest in his poetry. Form itself takes on significance. Chapter 1 examines how Ahkavan makes the human time of rhythm converge with the time of the poem. Chapter 2 explores how definitions of metaphor affect the belief in literature's potential to describe and refigure reality. Chapter 3 elucidates the processes by which time is imagined as an unattainable space. Hope and desire belong elsewhere, as does salvation. Chapter 4 treats the genres of lyric and epic as distinct configurations of time. Akhavan's love poetry is a poetry of absence, reaching out to an elusive Other, while his narrative poems adumbrate the possibility of a different, gladder history in the interstices of language.