Orientador: Milton José de Almeida / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Educação / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-19T01:29:43Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Sousa_JoaoFranciscoDielde_M.pdf: 25973911 bytes, checksum: f1d8c215e48e0353d7adfc63a5ec9594 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011 / Resumo: Tradução e comentário do Livro dos Reis, Shahnameh, de Ferdowsi, seguido de comentários sobre interpretação, imaginação e estudo de imagens, permeados por anotações sobre gnose, sobre mística persa e sobre tradução. / Abstract: Translation and commentary of the Book of Kings, Shahnameh, by Ferdowsy, followed by commentaries about interpretation, imagination and the study of images, permeated by notes about gnosis, persian mystique and about translation. / Mestrado / Educação, Conhecimento, Linguagem e Arte / Mestre em Educação

Since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, a distinct female voice has emerged in Persian fictional literature which has ventured beyond the established feminine stereotype of male literary tradition, and remarkably valorized female identities through focusing on interests and concerns of Iranian women, from feminist issues to social and political problems to cultural and moral dilemmas. This body of literature that has been gradually developed, tries to reflect realistic depictions of female protagonists with emotional, intellectual, and moral complexity. To study this progressive process, this research has focused on characterization of seven female protagonists that have been created by different generations of Iranian female authors in the genre of novel.

This dissertation is a study of the composition and reception of two chronicles written in Arabic in the first decades of the fourth century of the Islamic hijrī era (the tenth century of the current era). They were written by a little-known scholar usually called Abū Muḥammad Aḥmad ibn A‘tham al-Kūfī. Although no complete copy of the Arabic histories survives, the history was widely circulated in Persian. In other words, unlike most authors, Ibn A‘tham became somewhat more famous as his text circulated further. This work sets out to explain how this came to happen in two parts. The first part examines the composition of Ibn A‘tham’s history, arguing on biobibliographical, paleographical, and textual evidence that Ibn A‘tham must have belonged to the first decades of the fourth/tenth century. This argument serves as prelude to the second part, in which I show how Ibn A‘tham’s history developed over time, watching as selective readings and manuscript damage led to reduced engagements with Ibn A‘tham. Here, by examining how other historians quoted Ibn A‘tham, I track the logics of writing and reading that guided their encounters. The dissertation culminates in the sixth chapter, in which I provide a conceptual history for the Persian translation, showing how Ibn A‘tham’s history was re-imagined and prepared for its yet-bright future as a work of Persian historiography. Ultimately, I try to show the critical place filled by the culture of writing shared between Arabic and Persian: Rather than a firm boundary between two distinct languages, in the lens of Ibn A‘tham’s history, we observe a zone of interaction and innovation.

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Modern scholarship associates the period in which the Safavid dynasty ruled in Iran (1501-1722) with two major developments in the Persianate. One is sectarian rupture between Iran under the Shi‘i Safavids, and other Persianate regions - including Turan (Central Asia) - under Sunni dynasties. The other is a roughly contemporaneous (late sixteenth-eighteenth century) movement in Persian poetry, which has long been designated in modern scholarship as sabk-i Hindī (the Indian style); I refer to this movement as the poesis of freshness. Through the assumption that India is outside the proper or natural home of Persian poetry, modern scholarship has tended to characterize the Indian style in terms of decline. The accounts of both sectarian rupture and the Indian style rely on assumptions about difference on the basis of anachronistic categories including sect, nation, and ethnicity. This dissertation shifts focus from modern assumptions about difference, to ways in which participants in the poesis of freshness made sense of kas̱rat (multiplicity), understood to indicate creation as that in which difference and determinacy inhere. What were ways of gleaning the presence of vaḥdat (unity) – including, but beyond, divine unity – in multiplicity, and of engaging with multiplicity so as to bring about unity? Given the association of verbal expression (lafẓ) with multiplicity, I understand poesis as one means of effecting the imaginative transformation of multiplicity and the cultivation of unity. A major emphasis in modern critiques of the so-called Indian style is that it was unnecessarily difficult to the point of meaninglessness. However, I argue that emphases in the poesis of freshness that may be related to difficulty – subtlety, intricacy, ambiguous polysemy, and the generation of new metaphorical equations – are meaningful, including as ways of honing verbal form to write multiplicity against itself and bring about unity. This dissertation has two parts: the first is centered on Persian poetry, and the second, on taẕkiras (biographical dictionaries of poets). While setting their works in conversation with others, I focus on Shawkat Bukhari (d. 1695 or 1696)’s poetic collection, and Maliha Samarqandi (d. after 1692)’s taẕkira, which includes a laudatory entry on Shawkat. Shawkat and Maliha both came from Turan (Bukhara and Samarqand respectively) and spent a significant amount of time in Iran, where they met; their transregional lives lend support to recent critiques of the narrative of sectarian rupture between Turan and Iran. Moreover, they do both describe and enact ways of encompassing and bringing together religiously-marked forms of differences (including the polarity between Sunnism and Shi‘ism). However, I demonstrate the need to interpret discussions of religiously marked differences through the matrix of the relationship between multiplicity and unity. Attention to unity and multiplicity in Shawkat and Maliha’s works makes it possible to intervene in modern assumptions about sectarian rupture and Indian poetic decadence without reifying their principal analytical terms. In doing so, it points to a more pressing concern: how to engage with creation – including language itself – without taking its forms of difference or determinacy as fixed or final, instead bringing out unity’s subtle and destabilizing presence in multiplicity.

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<p>This dissertation is an attempt to understand and map the development of Persian writings on music, focusing on their various approaches and variations of topics from the beginning of the 11th century to the end of the 15th century which can be called the classical period of Persian writing on music. </p><p>The rise of Persian musical literature as a part of Persian learned literature was a result of the political and cultural decentralization of the Abbasid Caliphate. Like most other genres of learned literature in Persian, translation and abridgements of and commentaries (<i>šarhs</i>) on Arabic works played a crucial role in the rise and es-tablishment of Persian musical literature.</p><p>The most important conclusions to be drawn from the present study are that we can distinguish between two main approaches in Persian writings on music, viz the religious and non-religious approaches, and that there is a pattern in the development of Persian writings on music which provides us with a periodization of the develop-ment of this literary genre. According to the macro periodization of Persian writings on music which is presented in this study, we can identify five different stages in the development of the genre; 1) the initial period: <i>ca</i> 1000-1110; the first intermezzo: <i>ca</i> 1110 up to 1175; 3) the period of establishment: <i>ca</i> 1175-1299; 4) the first Golden Age of the genre: <i>ca</i> 1300-1435; 5) the second intermezzo: <i>ca</i> 1435-1500.</p>

This dissertation is an attempt to understand and map the development of Persian writings on music, focusing on their various approaches and variations of topics from the beginning of the 11th century to the end of the 15th century which can be called the classical period of Persian writing on music. The rise of Persian musical literature as a part of Persian learned literature was a result of the political and cultural decentralization of the Abbasid Caliphate. Like most other genres of learned literature in Persian, translation and abridgements of and commentaries (šarhs) on Arabic works played a crucial role in the rise and es-tablishment of Persian musical literature. The most important conclusions to be drawn from the present study are that we can distinguish between two main approaches in Persian writings on music, viz the religious and non-religious approaches, and that there is a pattern in the development of Persian writings on music which provides us with a periodization of the develop-ment of this literary genre. According to the macro periodization of Persian writings on music which is presented in this study, we can identify five different stages in the development of the genre; 1) the initial period: ca 1000-1110; the first intermezzo: ca 1110 up to 1175; 3) the period of establishment: ca 1175-1299; 4) the first Golden Age of the genre: ca 1300-1435; 5) the second intermezzo: ca 1435-1500.

In the Path of the Prophet: Medieval and Early Modern Narratives of the Life of Zarathustra in Islamic Iran and Western India is a historical study of the discursive practices by which Zoroastrians struggled to define their communal identity through constructions of the central figure of their religion. I argue that Zoroastrians adopted cosmopolitan religious vocabularies from the Islamicate and Sanskritic literary traditions for a world in which they were no longer a dominant political force. Contrary to much scholarship, which characterizes medieval Zoroastrian thought as stagnant, I contend that literary production in this period reveals extraordinary intellectual engagement among Zoroastrians endeavoring to make meaning of their ancient religious traditions in a rapidly changing world. The essays of my dissertation focus on four moments in Zoroastrian intellectual history. I begin with an analysis of the thirteenth century Persian Zarātushtnāma (The Book of Zarathustra), examining interactions between Zoroastrian theology and prophetology and contemporary Islamic thought, focusing on the role that miracles played in medieval Zoroastrian conceptions of prophethood. In my next essay, I explore questions of identity, orthodoxy and heterodoxy by investigating a group of Zoroastrian mystics who migrated from Safavid Persia to Mughal India around the seventeenth century. Influenced by the Illuminationist school of Islamic philosophy, they left behind a body of texts which blur religious boundaries. In my third essay, I examine the earliest literary compositions in the Gujarati language about the life of Zarathustra, employing theoretical discussions of literary cosmopolitanism and vernacularization to trace how Zoroastrian stories were reimagined by Indian Zoroastrians (Parsis) to fit Indo-Persian and Sanskritic discursive conventions. Finally, I look at the ways in which Zoroastrian prophetology was transformed through the experience of colonial modernity, focusing especially on the role of the printing press and the creation of a literate public sphere. I argue that the formation of a Parsi colonial consciousness was an experience of loss and recovery, in which traditional Persianate forms of knowledge were replaced by newly introduced sciences of philology, ethnology, and archaeology, fundamentally reshaping the Parsi conception of their religion and religious boundaries. / Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations

This thesis offers the first detailed study of publishing culture in the medieval eastern Islamic world by examining how two influential anthologists active in Central Asia mediated between authors and their audiences. It analyses the contents of al-Tha'ālibī's (d. 429/1037-8) Yatīmat al-dahr, a biographical anthology of Arabic poetry and prose concerned with the literature of the 4th/10th and the early 5th/11th centuries, comparing them with the material found in 'Awfī's (d. 640/1242 or before) Lubāb al-albāb, a biographical anthology of Persian poetry focused on verse produced between the late 3rd/9th and the early 7th/13th centuries. Yatīmat al-dahr and Lubāb al-albāb are approached as ventures which aimed to render the high culture of Arabic and Persian literature accessible to readers by presenting hitherto unpublished texts in a pedagogical fashion. The thesis contributes to a current wave of research that is concerned with the history of the book in the Islamic world, but it moves the focus of such scholarship onto literary texts and their manipulation. Its principal findings can be summarised as follows: Firstly, it revises the prevalent idea that literary culture was entirely dependent on patronage, by demonstrating how market demand influenced the kinds of writing produced in the different regions of the Arabic- and Persian-speaking worlds. Patronage emerges as a force that was intertwined with the book trade, which had already begun to define conceptions of authorship. Secondly, it shows that anthologies are more than collections of exemplary texts, by uncovering how al-Tha'ālibī and 'Awfī pursue the study of society, literary history and literary theory. The anthologists did not simply reproduce extracts, but edited them in accordance with their broader intellectual projects. Lastly, it reconstructs the cosmopolitan literary culture which existed in Khurasan and Transoxiana between the 4th/10th and 7th/13th centuries, showing that many authors worked in bilingual Arabic-Persian environments, moved between Arabic and Persian spheres, and read books in both languages. The thesis is accompanied by an index of circa eight thousand poems catalogued by genre, and by an appendix which lists the material that the anthologists drew from their sources.