political culture Persian

This article is based on a contrastive analysis of three decrees dealing with the administration of nomadic pastoralists in twelfth-century Iran, two issued by the Saljūq sultan Sanjar and one by a dynasty of slave emirs (the Atabegs of Azarbaijan). The starting hypothesis is that the differences between these contractual documents should not be reduced simply to differences in formulation, but may highlight a difference between two types of rule. The respect, empathy and leniency shown toward the nomad elites by the Saljūq sultan is the product not only of a particular situation (the conjuncture of the geographic situation of the nomads and the military context), but also more especially of the close relationship between the Saljūqs and the Türkmens, who considered themselves as having a common ancestry. On the basis on this analysis, the very identity of the Saljūq kingship can be reassessed.

"Like all multi-lingual computing, Arabic computing is now firmly in the domain of Unicode. Unicode is an industrial protocol with the status of international agreement. It is designed to encode the elements of all known script systems in such a way that they become interchangeable between programs and operating systems. Its implementation is well underway.

Unicode eliminates the need to tamper with fonts to get special characters, but it is not a font. For legible text on screen and paper, Unicode depends on compatible fonts with the required characters, where necessary with additional dedicated font technology."

The current article deals with Achaemenid imperial policy in fourth century BCE southern Levant, as is evident by the historical sources and the archaeological data. It is suggested that following the Egyptian rebellion of 404–400 BCE, southern Palestine underwent major transformation as a result of becoming the southwestern frontier of the Persian Empire. An attempt to reconstruct the political history and its social and economical manifestation is been offered, while focusing on the inland regions of Judah and Edom. One of the major consequences of this new geo-political reality has resulted
in the canonization of the Torah. Thus, its inception should no longer be viewed as an outcome of inner-societal compromises between different Judahite groups, but rather as a conscious response of Jerusalem’s priestly circles to early fourth century BCE Zeitgeist of the southern Levant, when Egypt was no longer a part of the Persian Empire.

SCHOLARSHIP ON THE VISUAL CULTURES of ancient and early medieval Eurasia has recently benefited from art history’s renewed interest in questions that transcend political and cultural boundaries.1 Issues of cross-cultural interaction, however, have not enjoyed from art historians working on the ancient and early medieval worlds a level of critical attention commensurate with the number of problems arising from the material. As a result, many of those who work in the arts and cultures of the Mediterranean, Near East, and Asia have found themselves drawn closer together, but without a common vocabulary or debate with which to engage.

The organizing goal of this volume is to highlight these theoretical considerations and provide a forum where art historians of the ancient and medieval worlds can explore these problems of cross-cultural interaction with greater rigor. It does not intend to provide a comprehensive theoretical overview or art historical survey of Eurasian artistic interchange, nor an overarching theory. Rather, it aims to contribute critical perspectives drawn from premodern visual cultures to the wider theoretical conversation. The papers contained herein critically evaluate some of the most important problems encountered in the material: the cross-continental movement and selective appropriation of objects and motifs through trade; the impact of new ways of seeing, being seen, and acting introduced by these objects; the role of art and ritual in negotiations of power among empires; and representations and self-portrayals of ethnicity and gender within and beyond dominant visual cultures.

To order: http://www.asia.si.edu/visitor/arsorientalisVolumeOrder.htm

Money as a means of coordinating human decisions and economic exchange is a complex social invention. It must always adjust to the prevailing economic, political and juridical conditions. Seen from another angle, its design and evolution reveal much about the societies creating it.
The history of coinages within the Islamic Empire is outlined from the 7th to the 11th century.
Keywords; Numismatics, Economic History, Umayyads, Abbasids, Buyids, Samanids

Maps were the coincidental locus of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II's most passionate interests: war and art. So far, the focus has been upon the famed conqueror (Fâtih) of Constantinople's interest in, and demand for, European maps without mention of his patronage of classical Islamic cartographic material. In this article, I expand the perspective on Mehmet's cartographical milieu by inserting into the historical picture consideration of a recension of cartographically illustrated manuscripts, those of al-Istakhri's Kitab al-Masalik wa-al-Mamalik [Book of Roads and Kingdoms], dating from 1474 onwards and made in post-conquest Ottoman Constantinople. I also set out the circumstances under which this ‘cluster’ of manuscripts may have been copied and, by focusing on the world maps in particular, suggest ways in which the maps can be interpreted as cultural artefacts. I conclude by indicating how this particular group of manuscripts provides insights into map audience, patronage and propaganda in fifteenth-century Anatolia.

An important aspect of personality cults in the modern era is its appeal to mass populism combined with a paradoxically topdown propagandistic reinforcement of the cult through the instruments of the state. Premodern imperial cults provide some interesting contrasts to this model. This paper will analyze some aspects of the formation and the functioning of the impe rial cult of personality in Mughal India. I will argue that this process was not merely a topdown invention and imposition. Rather, in the absence of mass media, a substantial part of the task was delegated to the subjects of the empire. In order to argue this point, I will study the Baharistan-i Ghaybi the memoirs of a seventeenthcentury Mughal officer, Mirza Nathan, who served in the Bengal frontier as a disciple of the imperial cult of the emperor Jahangir (d. 1627). The events described in the memoirs fall between 1607 and 1624 and mainly revolve around the conquest and administration of the province by a participating officer.

Предлагаем вашему вниманию второй выпуск журнала Tartaria Magna (Тартария Магна), в котором мы продолжаем тему противостояния и компромисса между "своим" и "чужим". В этом выпуске представлены исследования авторов, так или иначе касающиеся вопросов конструирования и разрушения социальных границ религиями. Второй выпуск Tartaria Magna носит название "Мир "своих" и "чужих": Духовные братья, священные враги" ( www.tartaria-magna.ru ). Как и круг поднимаемых проблем, исследовательская география выпуска традиционно широка - от Прибалтики до Тибета, от Закавказья до Забайкалья. В выпуске представлены исследования авторов из разных стран, занимающихся изучением различных народов и культур, но всех их объединяет высокий исследовательский уровень, проблематика номера и... журнал Tartaria Magna.

This article purports to offer new insights into the longue durée of the late medieval Islamic sultanate that once dominated the area between the Eastern Mediterranean and the Arabian Sea: the Syro-Egyptian Mamlūk Sultanate (1250-1517). The argument presented here endeavours to make more historical sense of recent research findings on Mamlūk socio-political history by developing and applying the revisionist conceptual framework of the early Mamluk sultanate as a military patronage state. Breaking free from the heuristic reins imposed on Mamluk studies by the paradigm of the Mamluk political elite as defined by the normative exclusivism of elite military slavery —the so-called ‘Mamluk System’—, it is demonstrated that the apparent royal, dynastic attitudes of early Mamluk politics were no mere façade for that Mamluk System, but rather powerful discursive, institutional and practical representations of a long-standing political culture of military leadership, patronage ties, household bonds, and unsteady devolved authorities, coalescing between 1279 and 1382 in the Qalāwūnid sultanate of Egypt and Syria.

The end of the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad during the Mongol wars of the 13th century was one of the decisive events of Islamic history. Das Aleppiner Kalifat (AD 1261) deals with the fate of the institution from the Mongol sack of Baghdad through the short-lived Aleppine caliphate to its restoration, in Mamluk Cairo.
The often parallel developments and motivations of the historical figures are analyzed step-by-step. The author explores the relations between the events, revealing the contingent character of the restoration. The key for the new interpretation is the Aleppine caliphate. Emphasis is given to the changing patterns of legitimization and of representation of political power. An extensive political chronography and a detailed numismatic corpus for all major towns in the regions (Egypt, Syria, Northern Mesopotamia, Iraq) and period concerned (1257-1262) serve as reference.

This article recounts the judicial innovations that developed in Egypt during the early Abbasid caliphate, through an analysis of qāḍī-s who were the first to adopt a legal practice. The Egyptian legal milieu, which was critically committed to the Medinese school, had some influence in the middle of the 2nd/8th century as far as the Abbasid court, which developed partly its centrality by assimilating provincial models. In return, the attraction of several prominent jurists or qāḍī-s to Bagdad caused the adoption, in Fusṭāṭ, of new judicial practices inspired by Iraqi models. Centralisation of judgeship under al-Manṣūr and his successors, who send in Egypt a series of qāḍī-s trained in Iraq, increased even more the influence of Iraqi practices on the court of Fusṭāṭ. As a paradox, the reinforcement of central authority on the Egyptian judgeship set also in motion a dynamic of local innovations: the designation in Fusṭāṭ of non-Egyptian qāḍī-s caused a reorganisation of the court at the turn of the 3rd/9th century, in particular by the creation of new networks and the setting up of a body of professional witnesses, an institution which spread in other provinces of the caliphate.

What happened in Mughal India in the quarter century after Akbar’s death? Nothing that really mattered – according to received wisdom. Through a complete re-examination of the reign of the fourth Mughal emperor Jahangir, this book upends that traditional view.

Rather than provide a linear history of this relatively neglected monarch, Lefèvre analyses a wide range of imperial and non-imperial texts, as well as vestiges of material culture, to reveal major transformations involving imperial authority, ethno-religious diversity, and state centralism.

The book begins by questioning the historiography that categorises the monarch as a political lightweight. By contrast, Lefèvre shows us an intellectually complex, astute, and multi-faceted Jahangir who managed a tightrope act between self-indulgence and the serious business of kingship. More important than looking at the king, she says, is examining the nature of the empire under his reign. To that end, she moves the focus onto the Mughal military, administrative, and religious elites, and highlights how they readjusted to the changing imperial ethos.

The book closes with an exploration of relations between the Mughal empire and two other major polities of early modern Muslim Asia – Safavid Iran and the Chingizid khanate of Central Asia.

This is a political theology for the Bahai Faith, and a philosophy for personal orientation in our globalising, postmodern society.

The functional differentiation of society means that government, religion, commerce, art, education and science are increasingly independent, have different social functions, relate differently to one another, and that their lived meanings for us are different. Functional differentiation also drives the pluralism and relativism, global scope and individualisation that characterise postmodern society. In a society in which religious ritual is the mirror of individual distinctiveness, not of collective identity, in which permanent pluralism means that no one religion can provide common norms and values (and no ideology should try), and in which the norms of one sphere of life are not transferred to other spheres, religion must find a new understanding of itself, and a new job description for its role in society. The 20th century has taught us that economic affairs cannot be governed by political ideologies, that science must be free of doctrine and political agendas, that church and state must be separated. But it has not provided us with a new world view that explains the postmodern world that we actually experience. This book draws on the Bahai scriptures, and the Bible and Quran, to show that the differentiation and globalisation of postmodern society are signs that the Kingdom of God is growing in the world.

The central lands of the Abbasid empire suffered a severe decline in the 10th and 11th century due to the collapse of its political, fiscal and military structures. In the 11th century, the relief came with the Seljuqs who subsequently laid the political foundation for a new economic prosperity.
The Seljuqs relied, however, on taxes and dues illegitimate according to Islamic law to build up their state, including tolls on long-distance trade, mukus, and intra-urban market dues, haqq al-bay<, dara>ib, or rusum; the coinage in circulation was also far from being in compliance with Islamic law either. Gold and silver coins of various alloys were in circulation and coin fragments (qurada) were valued differently than the same amount of gold within a complete coin (sahih). This monetary situation allowed for illicit riba profit gained from exchanges of the same amount of precious metal at different prices.
Most prominently al-Ghazali (d. 505/1111), head of the Nizamiyya School in Baghdad, protested against the tax and monetary systems of his time, and the famous ascetic and mystic al-Wa<iz al-<Abbadi (d. 496/1102-3) preached against riba and the use of fragments of gold coins.
The Seljuq authorities were in a dilemma: on the one hand they propagated the Sunni revival and on the other hand they had to rely on a tax system and a currency which was not compliant with Islamic law.

Key words:
Seljuqs, al-Ghazali, economic history, monetary system, Baghdad, taxes, coins, Islamic law.

The Register of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, which contains many valuable documents of the period 1315-1402, is one of the most important sources for the (church) history of this time of renewed Muslim expansion at Byzantium's cost. In this paper it will be analyzed how Islam is being described in those documents in regard to the terminology and the framework of traditional Byzantine polemics. A further topic is the reaction of the Byzantine laymen but also of the lower and high clerics to the Islamic expansion - whether in form of confrontation, collaboration, or even conversion. (The slides for the presentation of the paper are in the talks section of my academia.edu-website).

While Christianity has existed in Iran/Persia since the 4th Century, if not earlier, at the middle of the 20th Century almost all Iranian Christians belonged to an ethnic minority, especially the Assyrians and the Armenians. Ethnic Iranians were almost all Muslims, and then mostly Shi’a Muslims. Since the Revolution of 1979 hundreds of thousands of ethnic Iranians have left Islam for evangelical Christianity, both within and outside of Iran. This paper seeks to explore the multifaceted factors—political, economic, technological—that have helped to create an environment wherein increasing numbers of ethnic Iranians have apostatized from Islam and become evangelical Christians. A concluding section outlines Steven Lukes’ theory of power and analyzes the growth of Iranian Christianity in the light of his theory.

بررسی تصویر، تصویرشناسی و تصویر دیگری از اهمیت بسیاری برخوردار است. اهمیتش بیشتر به
علت نقش آن در شناسایی ملتها به همدیگر و زدودن تصویر کلیشه ای و تحریف شده است که یک
ملت دربارۀ ملتی دیگر دارد. از آنجایی که ادبیات میتواند ملل مختلف را با هم آشنا و نزدیک سازد
پس، از آن انتظار میرود شکاف حاصل شده میان ملل نزدیک به همدیگر را از میان ببرد. در حقیقت
حاکمیت آموزه های اسلامی، دو عضو پیکرۀ امت عرب و ایرانی را به هم نزدیک میساخته است و زمانی
که این آموزه ها در نظر گرفته میشده اند، شاهد دید باز و پذیرفتن دیگری بوده ایم و هنگامی که
شرایط، آنها را از هم دور میکرده، اشتراکات آنان نادیده گرفته میشده و جستجوی ذره بینانۀ تفاوتها
و تلاش برای بزرگ نمایی آنها و گاه تحریف و تزویر حقایق، صورت میگرفته است. این مطلب را میتوان
در آثار منثور فارسی از طریق بررسی سیمای عرب در آن مشاهده کرد. پژوهش پیش رو در پی یافتن
پاسخ به این پرسش است که تصویر دیگری )عرب( در نثر فارسی چگونه است؟ آیا نگاه نویسندگان
ایرانی به عربها از دیرباز تاکنون یکسان و یا همسان بوده است؟ و اگر تغییری در آن صورت گرفته،
عوامل تغییر چه بوده است؟ نتیجۀ این پژوهش تفاوت بسیاری بین نگاه به عرب پیش از قرن نوزدهم
و پس از آن را نشان میدهد. نثر کلاسیک تصویر منصفانه ای از عرب به نقش کشیده است، ولی این
تصویر در نثر معاصر تغییر کرده و بیشتر منفی بوده است. عوامل بسیاری در این تغییر نگاه نقش
داشته اند که پژوهش به آنها پرداخته است.

K. Maḥāsin Iṣfahān (Beauties of Isfahan) was written by Māfarrūkhī under the reign of sultan Malik-Shāh (465-485/1073-1092). The book, which belongs to the adab literature, is for the historian of a disconcerting use. However, it constitutes an important – and rare – source on the Saljuq domination in Isfahan. This article analyzes the way Māfarrūkhī has used sources at his disposal. A comparison with the introduction of Abū Nu‘aym’s Dhikr Akhbār Iṣfahān shows that Māfarrūkhī has sorted out, rewritten and left aside a great deal of anecdotes (especially those unfavorable to Isfahan) transmitted in the ‘Abbasid and Buyid period. Those choices are not innocent and inform us about the two main functions of the book: on the one hand, to glorify Isfahan to the Khurasanis who ran the Saljuqs state (and first and foremost the Niẓām al-Mulk’s family), on the other hand, to kill the idea of a transfer of the capital towards Baghdad.

The centuries after the fall of Constantinople to the Crusaders in 1204 were characterized by the political fragmentation of the former imperial sphere of the Byzantine Empire; especially in the period between 1250 and 1453, attempts to establish hegemony by one of the local powers (Byzantium, Bulgaria, Serbia) were followed by phases of disintegration of these polities until the Ottoman State restored “imperial unity” in the region. While political border zones frequently changed, religious denominations (the orthodox Patriarchate of Constantinople, the autocephalous orthodox Churches of Bulgaria and Serbia, the Catholic Church, Islam) tried to preserve or expand their spheres of influence within the entire Balkans; furthermore, local and regional trading networks criss-crossed the region and integrated it in the late medieval “Worldsystem”, which was dominated in the Mediterranean by the cities of Venice and Genoa, which also possessed colonies in the Aegean.
The concepts of network analysis allow us to understand these relations between different communities and authorities in a novel way; Michael Szell, Renaud Lambiotte and Stefan Thurner from the Vienna Complex Systems Research Group argued in a recent paper:
“Human societies can be regarded as large numbers of locally interacting agents, connected by a broad range of social and economic relationships. (…) Each type of relation spans a social network of its own. A systemic understanding of a whole society can only be achieved by understanding these individual networks and how they influence and co-construct each other (…) A society is therefore characterized by the superposition of its constitutive socio-economic networks, all defined on the same set of nodes. This superposition is usually called multiplex, multi-relational or multivariate network.” (2)
We will demonstrate the application of this “multiplexity”-approach for the analysis of various political, religious and mercantile networks which connected individuals and communities from the local and regional level to the level of the competing political, religious and economical centres in the late medieval Balkans within an across border zones. (3) We will present how we obtain relational data from our sources, such as the Register of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, which contains more than 700 documents for the years 1315 to 1402, and the integration of these data into networks of various scales; we will demonstrate how smaller networks can be connected to larger ones and how this influences the characteristics and topologies of networks. Finally, we will illustrate the applicability of this network analytical “toolkit” for other historical disciplines.
Our paper is strongly connected to the study of Mihailo St. Popović, who will present historical-geographical aspects of these phenomena for one specific region.

(

The previously unidentified manuscript, MS Cod. 366/262a, which is preserved in the private library of the Dominican Priory in Vienna, is a defective copy of Kamāl al-Dīn Ḥosayn Vāʿeẓ Kāšefī’s (d. 910/1504-05) Aḫlāq-e moḥsenī. Transcribed before 978/1570, this copy belongs among the early extant manuscripts of Kāšefī’s treatise on ethics and governance, originally composed at the Timurid court in Herat. The textual variations that appear in this manuscript when collated with one of the earliest existing copies, MS Diez A quart. 77 (dated 908/1503) held by the Berlin Staatsbibliothek, suggest that the text underwent several revisions which should be taken into account for any future edition that may be envisaged.

Drawing upon the pioneering analyzes of Cahen (1958-9) and Paul (1996), this article tries to establish whether and how the urban populations could play a military role in Saljuq Iran. While subjects (ra‘āyā) were not supposed to fight (except in very limited occasions such as jihād), the case of Isfahan shows a whole different picture. The local elites could rely on the best fortifications of Western Iran, but also on their urban militias. Besides, the different factions inside the city did not hesitate to make alliance with Turkish contenders to defend their interests and/or override their rivals. Instead of a “Turkish domination” over the “Iranian society”, the history of Isfahan shows in fact two levels of struggle (one opposing the Turks, the other rival Iranian networks) between which connections could be set up in function of the interests of the actors.

This article aims to spatialize Saljūq rule on the basis of a detailed analysis of the reign of Mas‘ūd b. Muḥammad (r. 1134-52). The sultan, highly mobile, practised a kind of ‘political nomadism’ which enabled him to maintain the loyalties essential to his rule. At the end of his reign, the pattern of travel became more complex as Mas‘ūd attempted to regain direct control of Ādharbayjān in addition to Jibāl and Iraq.  At another level, the sultan remained outside the cities proper, preferring to stay with his emirs in a military camp at a variable distance from the inhabited areas. Finally, palaces were probably used only for ceremonial purposes, while the tent remained the sultan’s permanent dwelling place. Thus, a century after the Saljūq conquest of Iran, Mas‘ūd’s lifestyle was still very close to that of his forefathers the Great Saljūqs, which means that at least in this regard, the acculturation of the dynasty was very limited.