City As Anthology Book Review

Book Review, 2023

Scholars interested in exploring Safavid Iranian society are faced with a number of challenges, not least of which is the paucity of documentary and archival sources. While neighboring empires to the east and west, notably the Mughals and Ottomans, left behind relatively rich archival legacies around social, cultural, economic, and legal history in both the center and the periphery, those of us working in the Safavid area often struggle to locate textual material whose provenance is not a highly-placed bureaucrat-chronicler, popular court poet, or jurist-cum-philosopher. Put another way, how we understand the Safavid historical past has been largely framed by a prescriptive, court-sanctioned agenda that allows for little in the way of alternate or contradictory perceptions of how people understood their social and cultural environments; this is only more so when we consider important issues of gender, sexuality, and sexual orientation. For these reasons, Kathryn Babayan's new study, The City as Anthology: Eroticism and Urbanity in Early Modern Isfahan, is a very welcome addition and, as such, will have significant impact on how we conceive of Isfahan, and Safavid society in general, at such a crucial juncture in early modern Islamicate history. Babayan is principally drawn to an underutilized genre of historical material: seventeenth-century anthologies (majmu`ahs, muraqq`as) containing a wide array of documents-short treatises on sundry topics (piety, liturgy, love, etc.), poems, portraits, maps, endowment deeds, almanacs, personal letters, and so on-that were copied and kept in family archives. Working with the semiotics of Barthes et al., Babayan's objective is to use this wealth of Isfahan-centric archival material to read the city as text, thus providing a fresh take on the notion of "adab as urbanity" and how denizens fashioned friendships and relationships at a time of great flux in Safavid society. To be accurate, this is not the only source material that Babayan utilizes in The City as Anthology; she also looks at, for instance, the famous wall paintings at Chihil Sutun and different types of epigraphic evidence situated on Isfahani monuments. Thus, we encounter a greater economy of adab in seventeenthcentury Isfahan, whereby "the culture of adab had to be learned and performed in the elite, artisan, and merchant sectors of a society in the making" (p. 12). While there was a broader, state-sanctioned "adab-izing project," Babayan is also drawn to the interpersonal world of adab-represented well in the genre of ikhwani letters (personal correspondence)-and how notions of love and friendship were also framed through a lens of homoeroticism and homosociality. We are introduced to the broader strokes of Babayan's "adab-izing project" in Chapter 1 ("Imperial Visions of Sovereignty"), which demonstrates that Shah Abbas saw the urban landscape of Isfahan as a palimpsest of sorts, whereby textual and visual prescriptions of

International Journal of Persian Literature, 2023

Stanford University Press eBooks, 2021

The Introduction defines the main terms of the book: household anthology (majmuʿa, muraqqaʿ), adab, eroticism, love, and urbanity. It places the anthologizing of Isfahan within a critical genealogy of city reading to argue that urban practices related to seeing, reading, desiring, and writing were intimately related and mutually coconstitutive, thus informing both the lived experience of the city and its (re)assembly as household anthologies. A reader’s guide to the anthologies outlines the unfolding of the narrative, which begins with the imperial Safavi project and moves to the urban media of household anthologies through eight resident authors who act as city guides.

Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 2018

This article explores a corpus of literary works in verse and prose that deal with the city of Isfahan, the capital of the Safavid dynasty in seventeenth-century Iran. Following a brief overview of the formats and conceptions of city description in medieval Persian literature, the essay examines seventeenth-century topographical works as verbal expressions of emergent modes of urban experience in early modern Isfahan. Seen together, these works bespeak the formation of a novel arena of literary production—a social terrain nourished by the city and largely independent of courtly circles. The corpus reveals the ways in which seventeenth-century Isfahan became intertwined with the emergence of new expressions of subjectivity and new modes of fashioning the self. Markets, gardens, urban spaces, and coffeehouses were represented in various narratives integrating subjective experiences into the urban landscape.

Penn State University Press, 2024

Middle Eastern Studies , 2019

By using the heuristic device of transpatialization and the methodology of urban cultural studies, this article argues that the 1922 serialized novel Tehrān-e Makhuf (Dreadful Tehran) by Seyyed Mortaza Moshfeq-e Kazemi (1902-1978), with its distinctly urban modes of imagination and production, at once reflected and propelled a process that can be termed the urbanization of the Iranian public. The article analyses the literary techniques with which Moshfeq contributed to this process; the circumstances and context in which the novel was produced; and the ideological change reflected in the author and his work. The article thus sheds light on a crucial stage in modern Iranian history by unravelling some of the socio-spatial intertwinements that made that history.

Nizar F. Hermes and Gretchen Head, Eds., The City in Arabic Literature: Classical and Modern Perspectives. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018., 2022

While most current scholarship in the field of Arabic literature focuses solely on premodern or modern perspectives, Nizar F. Hermes and Gretchen Head's edited volume brings together contributors to explore city tropes in both classical and modern Arabic literature in the form of "an evolving continuum" (viii). With 16 chapters and 15 illustrations, this thought-provoking collection presents readers with a rich, approachable, and fascinating study of the city as represented in "more traditional literary genres, like the maqāma, poetry, and more recently the novel" (ix). Moreover, the volume's publication is certainly timely: Interest in studies of cityscapes in Arabic literature continues to grow, not only because of the significant Middle Eastern, North African, and Andalusi histories, cultures, and civilizations they represent, but also as a result of the current geopolitical climate in the Arab world, and the often uneven and conflictual relationship between the Global North and Global South. Consequently, the need for interdisciplinary comparative scholarly works such as this, accessible to both general readership and specialists, cannot be overstated. This volume stands as an innovative collective work in Middle Eastern and North African Studies, comparative literature, and Arabic studies. In co-editing this collection, Hermes and Head draw from their substantial knowledge of Arabic literary tradition and their extensive work on the "place of the city within the Arabic literary heritage" (ix). Hermes is the author of The [European] Other in Medieval Arabic Literature and Culture, Ninth-Twelfth Century AD (The New Middle Ages), published with Palgrave-Macmillan in 2012, and Of Lost Cities and the Poetic Imagination in the Premodern and Precolonial Maghrib: 9th-19th Centuries AD, a forthcoming monograph with McGill University Press. He is also the author of numerous articles and book chapters on the poetics and aesthetics of Arab cities. Head has published extensively on social, cultural, and political issues about urban space, identity, exile, transgender issues, sociopolitical revolutions, and the poetics of inversion in the Arab world, and has examined the pedagogy of teaching Arabic literature in translation. She is currently studying a host of Moroccan prosaic texts, genres, and styles from the 19th to the 21st century. Hermes and Head's collection fosters an understanding of the evolution that the Arabic literary tradition has seen since the 7th century and traces the development of the literary representation of cities

2018

EURASIAN Studies , 2018

What can the history of books tell us about Iranian cities and their histories? This article introduces the manuscript of a multi-text compilation (majmūʿa) for the purpose of illustrating its potential usefulness as a source for studying the social and cultural history of Shiraz in the turbulent period that followed the collapse of Mongol rule in the area. We specifically seek to show that Köprülü 01589, now housed in Istanbul, helps us to see how books were produced and consumed, and provides insight into the operations of a busy workshop for copying texts. Despite the rarity and historical significance of several of the pieces that it contains, the availability of images of the manuscript for some time in Istanbul and Iran, and attention to it in catalogues, it has not received scholarly attention as a whole.1 Although this article is only a preliminary study of a single manuscript, we believe it is important for the current volume in showing what manuscripts can reveal of the social world that produced them, the networks of people and ideas that animated city life, and the cultural resources of specific times