Books by James White
A wealth of scholarship has highlighted how commercial, political and religious networks expanded... more A wealth of scholarship has highlighted how commercial, political and religious networks expanded across the Arabian Sea during the seventeenth century, as merchants from South Asia traded goods in the ports of Yemen, noblemen from Safavid Iran established themselves in the courts of the Mughal Empire, and scholars from across the region came together to debate the Islamic sciences in the Arabian Peninsula's holy cities of Mecca and Medina. This book demonstrates that the globalising tendency of migration created worldly literary systems which linked Iran, India and the Arabian Peninsula through the production and circulation of classicizing Arabic and Persian poetry. By close reading over seventy unstudied manuscripts of seventeenth-century Arabic and Persian poetry that have remained hidden on the shelves of libraries in India, Iran, Turkey and Europe, the book examines how migrant poets adapted shared poetic forms, imagery and rhetoric to engage with their interlocutors and create communities in the cities where they settled. The book begins by reconstructing overarching patterns in the movement of over a thousand authors, and the economic basis for their migration, before focusing on six case studies of literary communities, which each represent a different location in the circulatory system of the Arabian Sea. In so doing, the book demonstrates the plurality of seventeenth-century aesthetic movements, a diversity which later nationalisms purposefully simplified and misread.
Table of Contents
Part I: Distant Readings in Seventeenth-Century Migration
Introduction: Connected Literary History
Chapter 1: Society in Motion
Part II: Close Readings of Literary Networks
Chapter 2: Hyderabad: Ibn Ma'sum
Chapter 3: San'a': al-Sarim al-Hindi
Chapter 4: Mashhad: al-Hurr al-'Amili
Chapter 5: Hyderabad: Faraj Allah al-Shushtari and Salik Yazdi
Chapter 6: Kabul and North India: Sa'ib, Ilahi, Ahsan and Ashna
Chapter 7: Isfahan: Salim, Darvish Yusuf, and Akbar
Conclusions
Manuscript Sources: Sigla, Bibliographical References, and Descriptions
Notes
Bibliography of Print Works
Index
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Peer-reviewed Articles by James White
Iran, 2021
Until now, the textual history of the poetry transmitted in Persian literary anthologies has sole... more Until now, the textual history of the poetry transmitted in Persian literary anthologies has solely been the concern of editors preparing works for print publication. This article contends that an investigation of variance is also of relevance for writing the cultural history of how anthologists encountered, manipulated, and published poems in the manuscript age. While a shortage of independent textual witnesses makes it difficult to undertake this kind of study for the earliest periods of Persian literary history, such research can be conducted for later eras, including the eleventh/seventeenth century, the time-frame covered by the biographical anthology of Muhammad Tahir Nasrabadi (d. ca. 1110/1698). In order to sample the degree of variance present in Nasrabadi's anthology, his recensions of the verse of twenty poets are compared here with the available manuscript copies of the same twenty poets' collected works. Instead of judging Nasrabadi's accuracy in reproducing each fragment, I evaluate what variance can tell us about paths of textual transmission between Mughal North India, the Deccan Sultanates, and Safavid Iran. The evidence presented here reinforces the supposition that anthologies are fundamentally shaped by the social networks out of which they arise.
*****Link to 50 free copies of the publisher's version*****
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/NNQVAP7JNVT8X473HR26/full?target=10.1080/05786967.2021.1911762
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Using newly discovered materials, this article introduces readers to the career and poetry of Mir... more Using newly discovered materials, this article introduces readers to the career and poetry of Mir Zeyn al-Din ʿEshq, a now forgotten poet who was connected to many prominent political and literary figures in India during the eighteenth century. The primary source for the research is John Rylands Library, Persian MS. 219, a holograph copy of the poet’s divān, which he presented to John Macpherson, acting Governor-General of the Presidency of Fort William, in May 1785. The divān contains a considerable amount of contextual commentary which allows us to reconstruct Mir Zeyn al-Din’s biography and working practices, casting light on how his verse was produced and consumed. An Iranian émigré, he circulated throughout the Punjab, North India and Bengal, accompanying the Afghan ruler Ahmad Shāh Dorrāni on his Indian campaigns, participating in professional symposia with some of the leading literary personages of Delhi, Lucknow and Patna, and entering the ambit of colonialist British patrons in Kolkata.
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This article investigates aspects of mise-en-page in British Library Add. MS. 27261, an anthology... more This article investigates aspects of mise-en-page in British Library Add. MS. 27261, an anthology of twenty-three texts on mixed subjects produced for Eskandar Soltān (d. 818/1415), grandson of Timur and self-styled ruler of territories in southern Iran during the early fifteenth century. It examines the juxtaposition of literary and scientific texts together with images in Add. MS. 27261, and explores the correlations that these juxtapositions create. It concludes that the London anthology should be seen as a coherent intellectual enterprise, and as an interpretative project designed to feed Eskandar’s experiments with different forms of knowledge.
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One kind of reader’s note that has received minimal attention in scholarship to date is the poem.... more One kind of reader’s note that has received minimal attention in scholarship to date is the poem. This article suggests that the verses added by readers to manuscripts can reveal information concerning the social and intellectual history of reading communities, the history of collecting, and the reception of literary works. I examine an appendix of unattributed poems that were added by a group of readers to a holograph copy of Ibn Sūdūn al-Bashbughāwī’s (d. 868/1464) Nuzha (Bodleian Library MS. Sale 13), most probably in northern Syria in the seventeenth century. I identify the poems and their authors, study their manipulation in the Sale manuscript, and offer some initial conclusions as to what they can tell us about the social and intellectual contexts in which MS. Sale 13 was stored before it came to England.
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A considerable amount of scholarship has been produced on just over sixty paintings of humans and... more A considerable amount of scholarship has been produced on just over sixty paintings of humans and demons, many of which bear ascriptions to the unidentified artist Mohammad-e Siāh Qalam, and which are now mostly housed in albums H.2153 and H.2160 in the Topkapı Palace Library. Although methods of formal comparison have led to general agreement that the paintings can be dated to either the fourteenth century or the fifteenth, strikingly little attention has been paid to the question of what these images depict. This paper studies the paintings within the context of documentary, legal and literary material in Persian and Arabic, and identifies a set of common motifs shared between the Siāh Qalam paintings and a number of later images. While it has been supposed by several scholars that the paintings document life in a marginal geographical environment and faithfully reflect the practices of a syncretic culture, this paper suggests that they engage with a field of satirical ideas which were widespread in the Islamic world in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and which parodied common types of behavior that were deemed by some observers to be illicit or absurd.
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Studies of visual culture in the Persian-speaking world of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries ... more Studies of visual culture in the Persian-speaking world of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries frequently discuss the literary contexts in which painting was often produced, yet scant attention has been paid to understanding how the visual can engage with the verbal beyond representing a sequential narrative. Arguing that paintings and literary texts are autonomous, yet can engage with similar ideas, this article focuses on a painting in the album TSMK H.2153 that is generally perceived to lie outside the frameworks of narrative poetry: ‘The Monastery’ (f.131b). The article investigates how the painting employs techniques of representation similar to those used in lyric and panegyric poetry, to connect individual motifs and thereby explore ideas. An engagement with the continuities between literary and visual cultures reveals a chronogram, giving the year in which ‘The Monastery’ was produced, and allows us to understand how it constructs a vision of unorthodox kingship.
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Book Reviews by James White
BSOAS, 2020
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BSOAS, 2020
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PhD Abstract by James White
This thesis offers the first detailed study of publishing culture in the medieval eastern Islamic... more 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-Thaʿālibī’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 ʿAwfī’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
examining how al-Thaʿālibī and ʿAwfī 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.
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Conference Programmes by James White
Programme of a one-day workshop held on 25th October 2019.
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Blogs by James White
Magdalene College Library Blog, 2023
Pepys Library 1281 is a curious manuscript. Its spine is gilded and decorated to conform with the... more Pepys Library 1281 is a curious manuscript. Its spine is gilded and decorated to conform with the other volumes in the collection, and so a visitor to the great diarist’s library might not have given it a second glance. On removing it from the shelf and examining it more closely, however, their interest might have been piqued. The binding, which is original and in excellent condition, is of maroon leather on pasteboard, with an envelope flap – an additional piece of board attached by a flexible join to the back cover, which sits between the front cover and the fly-leaf to protect the codex. This is a common feature of Islamicate bookbinding. The front and back covers are also atypical for the library, being decorated with a central mandorla and detached pendants containing floral motifs in relief, while the flap has a single pendant. On opening the volume, one sees Pepys’ bookplate, and his inscription: “Diwân i Anwarèe, i.e. Collectio Poematum ab Anwaree Poetâ Persico scr[ipta]” (‘The dīvān of Anvarī, i.e. a collection of poems written by the Persian poet Anvarī’).
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Cambridge University Library Special Collections Blog, 2023
Among the many important Arabic manuscripts that are held in Cambridge University Library, those ... more Among the many important Arabic manuscripts that are held in Cambridge University Library, those prefixed ‘Qq.’, forming the collection of the Swiss adventurer Johann Ludwig (anglicized to ‘John Lewis’) Burckhardt (1784-1817), deserve special mention. Burckhardt travelled extensively in the Levant, Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula between 1809 and his sudden, early death in 1817, developing a remarkable degree of fluency in Arabic and a profound knowledge of medieval and early modern Arabic texts.[i] He started purchasing Arabic manuscripts very quickly after arriving in Syria, and continued his collecting activities after moving to Egypt, regularly shipping trunks full of the books which came into his possession back to England.[ii] His collection concentrates on adab texts (works of premodern literary culture), spanning fields such as historiography, poetry, literary criticism, biography, geography, genealogy, and rhetoric. There is a particular focus on philological works, such as commentaries which unpack and explain the language of classical Arabic poetry.
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Cambridge University Library - Special Collections Blog, 2023
Most readers will associate the plague with the Black Death, which ravaged Eurasia in the mid-fou... more Most readers will associate the plague with the Black Death, which ravaged Eurasia in the mid-fourteenth century. Having spread from Inner Asia, possibly aided by the transregional conquests of the Mongols, the Black Death arrived in the Mediterranean in 1347, and swiftly began to decimate the populations of major cities such as Alexandria. Between a third and a half of the population of the Middle East is thought to have succumbed to the plague in the following years. Society
was devastated – economically, politically, emotionally – in ways which are hard to comprehend, even with our own, contemporary experiences of a pandemic.
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Talks by James White
FAMES, Cambridge University, 2022
This talk explores the Arabic literary network of Ibn Maʿṣūm al-Madanī (1052/1642 - before Ramada... more This talk explores the Arabic literary network of Ibn Maʿṣūm al-Madanī (1052/1642 - before Ramadan 1119/November 1707), a philologist, biographer and Shiʿi exegete who grew up in Mecca, and then emigrated to the Qutbshahi sultanate of south India, where his father, Niẓām
al-Dīn Aḥmad (d. 1085/1674), had been appointed prime minister. My focus lies on reconstructing the community in which Ibn Maʿṣūm found himself in India, and on examining how he and his father used Arabic texts to build links with their peers around the littoral of the Arabian Sea. I begin by bringing together a corpus of previously unstudied holograph and
autograph manuscripts of Ibn Maʿṣūm’s works, which allow us to pinpoint the periods in his life when his participation in a transoceanic Arabic literary community was at its most dynamic. I then show the uses of emulative intertextuality in the poems which were produced by members
of Ibn Maʿṣūm’s circle at the Qutbshahi court and his correspondents overseas, before contrasting this period in Ibn Maʿṣūm’s life with the years following the fall of the Qutbshahi sultanate, which he spent as a provincial bureaucrat under Mughal rule. Despite the dramatic change in Ibn Maʿṣūm’s circumstances, which saw him go from being a patron to a protégé, I show how his texts still found audiences in India, as he created a form of Arabic literature that resonated with multilingual readers.
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Warburg Institute, 2022
Much like their contemporaries in Europe, the scholarly classes of sixteenth-century Iran were in... more Much like their contemporaries in Europe, the scholarly classes of sixteenth-century Iran were interested in creating a universal form of knowledge, the foundations of which rested on rhetoric. In this talk, I introduce a sixteenth-century encyclopaedic miscellany, the Kashkul (Begging-Bowl) of the jurisprudent Bahaʾ al-Din al-ʿAmili (d. 1030/1621), examining how and why the compiler tessellates religious, literary, mathematical and astronomical knowledge together in his text. I also focus on a number of features, including al-ʿAmili’s multilingualism and the dissemination of his work in manuscript, which invite comparison and contrast with coeval European attempts at encyclopedism.
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A collaboration of Cluster of Excellence 2020 «Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global... more A collaboration of Cluster of Excellence 2020 «Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective»-Research Area 3, «Future Perfect» and the ERC funded project Kalīla and Dimna-AnonymClassic. This series of events invites discussions on how to theoretically engage with the concept of narrative framing in premodern Arabic literature and adjacent literary traditions. Our aim is to develop a comprehensive definition of «framing narratives» beyond a merely descriptive perspective and to interrogate its function within textual production. The events will be held in English. The workshop will be held online.
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Books by James White
Table of Contents
Part I: Distant Readings in Seventeenth-Century Migration
Introduction: Connected Literary History
Chapter 1: Society in Motion
Part II: Close Readings of Literary Networks
Chapter 2: Hyderabad: Ibn Ma'sum
Chapter 3: San'a': al-Sarim al-Hindi
Chapter 4: Mashhad: al-Hurr al-'Amili
Chapter 5: Hyderabad: Faraj Allah al-Shushtari and Salik Yazdi
Chapter 6: Kabul and North India: Sa'ib, Ilahi, Ahsan and Ashna
Chapter 7: Isfahan: Salim, Darvish Yusuf, and Akbar
Conclusions
Manuscript Sources: Sigla, Bibliographical References, and Descriptions
Notes
Bibliography of Print Works
Index
Peer-reviewed Articles by James White
*****Link to 50 free copies of the publisher's version*****
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/NNQVAP7JNVT8X473HR26/full?target=10.1080/05786967.2021.1911762
Book Reviews by James White
PhD Abstract by James White
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
examining how al-Thaʿālibī and ʿAwfī 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.
Conference Programmes by James White
Blogs by James White
was devastated – economically, politically, emotionally – in ways which are hard to comprehend, even with our own, contemporary experiences of a pandemic.
Talks by James White
al-Dīn Aḥmad (d. 1085/1674), had been appointed prime minister. My focus lies on reconstructing the community in which Ibn Maʿṣūm found himself in India, and on examining how he and his father used Arabic texts to build links with their peers around the littoral of the Arabian Sea. I begin by bringing together a corpus of previously unstudied holograph and
autograph manuscripts of Ibn Maʿṣūm’s works, which allow us to pinpoint the periods in his life when his participation in a transoceanic Arabic literary community was at its most dynamic. I then show the uses of emulative intertextuality in the poems which were produced by members
of Ibn Maʿṣūm’s circle at the Qutbshahi court and his correspondents overseas, before contrasting this period in Ibn Maʿṣūm’s life with the years following the fall of the Qutbshahi sultanate, which he spent as a provincial bureaucrat under Mughal rule. Despite the dramatic change in Ibn Maʿṣūm’s circumstances, which saw him go from being a patron to a protégé, I show how his texts still found audiences in India, as he created a form of Arabic literature that resonated with multilingual readers.
Table of Contents
Part I: Distant Readings in Seventeenth-Century Migration
Introduction: Connected Literary History
Chapter 1: Society in Motion
Part II: Close Readings of Literary Networks
Chapter 2: Hyderabad: Ibn Ma'sum
Chapter 3: San'a': al-Sarim al-Hindi
Chapter 4: Mashhad: al-Hurr al-'Amili
Chapter 5: Hyderabad: Faraj Allah al-Shushtari and Salik Yazdi
Chapter 6: Kabul and North India: Sa'ib, Ilahi, Ahsan and Ashna
Chapter 7: Isfahan: Salim, Darvish Yusuf, and Akbar
Conclusions
Manuscript Sources: Sigla, Bibliographical References, and Descriptions
Notes
Bibliography of Print Works
Index
*****Link to 50 free copies of the publisher's version*****
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/NNQVAP7JNVT8X473HR26/full?target=10.1080/05786967.2021.1911762
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
examining how al-Thaʿālibī and ʿAwfī 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.
was devastated – economically, politically, emotionally – in ways which are hard to comprehend, even with our own, contemporary experiences of a pandemic.
al-Dīn Aḥmad (d. 1085/1674), had been appointed prime minister. My focus lies on reconstructing the community in which Ibn Maʿṣūm found himself in India, and on examining how he and his father used Arabic texts to build links with their peers around the littoral of the Arabian Sea. I begin by bringing together a corpus of previously unstudied holograph and
autograph manuscripts of Ibn Maʿṣūm’s works, which allow us to pinpoint the periods in his life when his participation in a transoceanic Arabic literary community was at its most dynamic. I then show the uses of emulative intertextuality in the poems which were produced by members
of Ibn Maʿṣūm’s circle at the Qutbshahi court and his correspondents overseas, before contrasting this period in Ibn Maʿṣūm’s life with the years following the fall of the Qutbshahi sultanate, which he spent as a provincial bureaucrat under Mughal rule. Despite the dramatic change in Ibn Maʿṣūm’s circumstances, which saw him go from being a patron to a protégé, I show how his texts still found audiences in India, as he created a form of Arabic literature that resonated with multilingual readers.