Zikr-i Elahi

"If we accept the idea that “Father Abraham” (who is considered as being the father of all the monotheistic religions, including Judaism, Christianity and Islam) was actually the same “Brahma” of the Indians and the Zoroaster of the Persians, the story becomes even more interesting and eligible for some further research and more intellectual debates." This paper by Prof. Tajar is about prayer, worship and devotions in Persian literature.

Undergraduate course syllabus, 2024

This course is intended to introduce you to classic texts in English translation from the millennium of pre-19th century literature in Persian. You will read Rūmī, Firdawsī, Hāfiz and other famous poets with attention to questions salient to them and to us: how did poetry perpetuate or undercut father-son relations? Why and how did Persian (and Arabic) literatures celebrate their own origins in and as translation? How did the courtly panegyric fuse Islamic and pre-Islamic values, put moral pressure on its addressee and displace the speaker's desire? How can proverbs and wise sayings obscure life decisions rather than clarifying them? Does Rūmī's poetry need its readers to be scholars? What kinds of reading competencies do texts like his assume? Why and how do ghazals eroticize a cruelly distant beloved? How did a ghazal or masnavī relate to prior, present and future ghazals or masnavīs? What kinds of social spaces-the court, the Sufi hospice, the coffee house, the madrasa, the home-did these texts circulate in, assume and help produce? What gender ideals did they assume and prescribe? What genre logics do they obey and disobey? How did Persian literary culture understand emotion and how does this understanding differ from our own?

Journal of Abbasid Studies, 2018

ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī (d. 471/1078 or 474/1081) wrote in his Asrār al-balāgha that he had translated a line of Persian poetry, and he used that Arabic translation to illustrate the rhetorical figure of ḥusn al-taʿlīl. He did not provide the Persian original, but when the Asrār was integrated, via al-Sakkākī (d. 626/1229) and al-Qazwīnī (d. 739/1338), into al-Taftazānī's (d. 793/1390) Muṭawwal, a number of Ottoman readers wrote a Persian verse in the margin. This paper investigates al-Jurjānī's translation theory, other translations of Persian poetry, the marginalia, and Perseo-Arabic-Turkic multilingualism, while comparing al-Jurjānī's attitude to language and translation with some European and Anglophone discussions.

Proceedings of the 8ᵗʰ European Conference of Iranian Studies. Held on 14–19 Sep. 2015 at the State Hermitage Museum and Institute of Oriental Manuscripts, Russian Academy of Sciences, in St Petersburg. Edited by Pavel B. Lurje. Vol. 1, pp. 16–29. St. Petersburg: The State Hermitage Publishers., 2019

The Zand ī Wahman Yašt is a Zoroastrian text belonging to the apocalyptic genre, which is centered on questions and answers through which Ahura Mazda interprets prophetic visions of Zoroaster, and explains the catastrophic events of the times to come. The present paper introduces and analyzes the much-neglected New Persian version of the text and compares it to the Middle Persian and the Pāzand versions of the text. It also talks about the Rivāyat context, in which the NP version often appears, surveys the manuscript tradition of the text, and tries to date the New Persian version. Then follows a summary of the contents of the text. The NP version, while claiming to be derived from the Pāzand, differs significantly from the Pāzand version of the text that has come down to us. The author believes that a critical edition of the New Persian ZWY, which is being prepared by himself, will shed light on the vague passages in the Pahlavi and Pāzand versions. Alimoradi, Pooriya. “Zand-i Wahman Yašt: The New Persian Version,” Proceedings of the Eighth European Conference of Iranian Studies. Held on 14–19 September 2015 at the State Hermitage Museum and Institute of Oriental Manuscripts, Russian Academy of Sciences, in St Petersburg. Vol. 1: Studies on Pre-Islamic Iran and on Historical Linguistics, edited by Pavel B. Lurje, pp. 16–29. Saint Petersburg: The State Hermitage Publishers, 2019.

In Translating Esotericism, ed. Wouter J. Hanegraaff and Mriganka Mukhopadhyay, special issue of Correspondences 11, no. 1 (2023): 103-12

Kritika Kultura, 2022