Beginning in the nineteenth century and gaining momentum in the early twentieth century, there was a proliferation of publications in a new genre calling itself Persian literary history. Writing the history of Persian literature was not solely an Iranian project – at least, not yet. These first literary histories appeared not only in Persian but also in German, Italian, English, Urdu, and other languages. Writing the preface to one such book, Shibli Nuʿmani’s Urdu-language Shiʿr al-ʿAjam (Poetry of the Persians, 1920), the author’s protégé Sayyid Sulayman Nadvi expressed his surprise at the publication of two other Persian literary histories nearly contemporaneous with Shiʿr al-ʿAjam – Muhammad Husayn Azad’s Sukhandan-i Fars ([On the] Poets of Persia, 1907) in Urdu, and the second volume of E. G. Browne’s Literary History of Persia (1902, 1906) in English. Shibli, the author, concluded that Azad’s Sukhandan-i Fars “did not even touch” his Shiʿr al-ʿAjam and dismissed Browne’s work in even stronger terms: “Without exaggeration or embellishment, I say that I felt great regret upon seeing Browne’s book. It is extremely common and plebeian.”Footnote ²

Amidst the boasting and opprobrium, these literary historians were engaged in a shared project, drawing on the same sources and responding to one another’s work. The early literary historians responded in particular to Majmaʿ al-Fusahaʾ (Assembly of the Eloquent), a Persian biographical anthology or tazkirah by the Iranian courtly litterateur Riza-Quli Khan Hidayat, completed in 1871. They relied on this tazkirah as a source yet were critical of it; its innovations opened up new possibilities, while its shortcomings invited correction and response. Iranians, Indians, and Europeans alike developed literary history through both appropriating this text and distancing themselves from it.

A model for this kind of exchange can be found in Persian poetry in the form of javab-guʾi, which Paul Losensky translates as “speaking in reply,” where one poet may respond to a poem by another poet, retaining some of the original’s structure but reworking its theme, for example. As Losensky explains, in javab-guʾi “the model poem becomes a question that calls for an answer or a problem that demands solution …. Instead of an antagonistic opposition [between the model poem and its response], we now have the image of a careful and reasoned debate across time.”Footnote ³ This chapter shows how Persian literary histories emerged through modernizers speaking in reply to the tazkirah, a premodern genre of biographical anthology. The contradictions posed by using tazkirahs served as an invitation for modernizers to produce modern prose through literary history, in opposition to what they saw as deficiencies in the premodern tradition. Modernizing literary historians were transforming understandings of history’s enterprise. Building on the changing notions of nation and identity explored in the Introduction, this chapter examines how premodern Persian literature is made national and indeed appropriated in the service of nationalism, and how the “great men” of history are transformed through modern literary histories into national figures.

Considering literary history as an important and overlooked site for the modernization of literature, I treat Persianate modernity as a shared discourse produced through scholarly exchange between Iranians and Indians reworking their shared literary heritage. I examine how these figures used premodern materials – namely tazkirahs – for their modernizing projects and make an argument for a verbal as well as textual discourse of modernization shared between early twentieth-century Iranian and Indian intellectuals. In this way, Persian literary histories in the early twentieth century can be brought into larger debates about literary modernization.

Foucault offers a useful way of conceptualizing modernity: not (only) as an epoch, but as an attitude, an ethos, which sets one apart from the contemporary.Footnote ⁴ It is a discourse about what it means to be modern, which, for early twentieth-century Iranian and Indian modernizers, often included what the modernizers thought of as the adoption of scientific principles and their application to tasks such as the writing of history, as well as a set of moral and aesthetic considerations about sexuality, which are dealt with in the following chapter. In other words, modernization as it is used here means quite simply participating in that discourse and considering oneself modern. As Henri Lefebvre put it, modernity involves continually repeating the old and refashioning it as “new,” which describes how twentieth-century litterateurs refashioned the premodern tazkirah genre into modern literary history (tarikh-i adabiyat)Footnote ⁵ and repurposed Firdawsi’s epic eleventh-century poem, the Shahnamah, into a source for modern historiography.Footnote ⁶

As Iranians writing in Persian and Indians writing in Urdu began to write for emergent national and communal readerships, respectively, they drew on the past in similar ways, seeking local models like tazkirahs or the Shahnamah that could be used to reform, revitalize, and preserve heritage, whether “national” heritage in Iran or “Islamic” heritage in India. This modernizing process of appropriating the past and reforming it ultimately produced modern literary history. It involved engagement with the tazkirah tradition, inclusion of extraliterary “national” figures alongside poets, and use of a shared set of Orientalist references and Persianate sources. This was not a uniform process across different contexts; Iranians and Indians differed in the importance they gave to the so-called great men of history, as it became important for nationalist reasons for Iranians to attach them to Persian literary history, but irrelevant to the writing of Persian literary history in India. At the same time, this chapter challenges nationalist assumptions that treat modernization in Iran and India as separate, revealing them to be even more intimately connected than scholarship has heretofore acknowledged. This chapter examines the emergence of some of the earliest literary histories of Persian, from Shibli Nuʿmani’s pioneering efforts in Urdu, to E. G. Browne’s influential contributions in English, and, ultimately, to the first textbook for the doctoral program in Persian literature at the University of Tehran, by Muhammad-Taqi Bahar. All of these figures were speaking in reply to each other and to the “last” Persian tazkirah, Majmaʿ al-Fusahaʾ (Assembly of the Eloquent), by Riza-Quli Khan Hidayat.

1.1 Tazkirahs and Literary History

Modernizing litterateurs found a useful genre that could be reworked into literary history in the tazkirah tradition. The tazkirah, akin to a biographical dictionary or anthology, was often supported by and produced through courtly patronage.Footnote ⁷ The earliest Persian tazkirahs were collections of hagiographies of prominent Sufis, or biographical notices about princes, scholars (ʿulamaʾ), or poets. The latter consisted of short biographies of various poets along with selections of their poetry. Seminal early tazkirahs, such as Muhammad ʿAwfi’s Lubab al-Albab (The Piths of Intellects, 1221) and Dawlatshah Samarqandi’s Tazkirat al-Shuʿaraʾ (Memorial of the Poets, 1487), were largely uncritical, whereas later tazkirahs written in the Indian subcontinent during the Mughal era, such as Siraj al-Din ʿAli Khan-i Arzu’s Majmaʿ al-Nafaʾis (Assembly of Subtleties, 1751) and Azad Bilgrami’s Khazanah-yi ʿAmirah (Royal Treasury, 1763), followed the same biographical anthology format, but also contained poetic criticism and analysis. Such criticism is limited and typically does not identify itself as such; instead, sprinkled throughout biographical descriptions of poets, the modern reader can find poetic judgments and comments on taste that can be categorized as literary criticism. Criticism was otherwise relegated to separate genres of writing outside of the tazkirah tradition. For example, in addition to his tazkirah titled Majmaʿ al-Nafaʾis, Arzu offered literary criticism avant la lettre in Tanbih al-Ghafilin (Admonition to the Heedless, ca. 1744), his treatise on the poetic works of Hazin Lahiji. Whereas Iranian tazkirahs of the period were far less critical than those produced in India, the abovementioned early modern tazkirahs from India remained largely unknown in Iran until the latter part of the twentieth century.

Generally, premodern tazkirah writers arranged the poets they discussed alphabetically, geographically, chronologically, or according to other factors; some of the chronologically ordered tazkirahs grouped poets into ancient (mutaqaddimin), middle (mutavassitin), and later (mutaʾakhkhirin) periods, but beyond that, the narrative about the historical development of Persian poetry was quite limited.Footnote ⁸ In some tazkirahs, entries for individual poets did not even mention when the poet lived. Differing from modern European literary histories, the premodern tazkirahs also restricted their literary scope. The latter genre limited itself to those poets deemed to belong to the nation-state, whereas the boundaries of tazkirahs were not necessarily political and, instead, could cover only those poets known to the author, those the author considered significant, or those selected through a variety of other sensibilities and arrangements. Beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, some tazkirahs from the Indian subcontinent began to cover Urdu poetry as well, first in Persian-language works dedicated primarily to Persian poetry; later, in the nineteenth century, Urdu grew in importance as a prose language, and Urdu-language tazkirahs emerged, which solely addressed Urdu poetry.

Modern literary history writing was not simply invented in Europe and then exported to Asia, where it was imitated by local scholars. Instead, the genre of literary history – in particular Persian literary history (regardless of the language in which it is written) – developed through Persianate litterateurs and European Orientalists speaking in reply to one another.Footnote ⁹ That developmental process begins with the earliest Persian tazkirahs, which merely functioned as hagiographies and biographical anthologies, as discussed previously. Later tazkirahs, especially those produced in India under the Mughals, introduced some elements of literary criticism, namely expressions of taste and stylistics. In the nineteenth century, European Orientalists wrote the first texts intended as “literary histories” of Persian, though, by necessity, they relied heavily on tazkirahs as sources. For example, the Austrian Orientalist Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall (1774–1856) based his Geschichte der schönen Redekünste Persiens (History of the Beautiful Oratory of Persia, 1818) on Dawlatshah Samarqandi’s fifteenth-century Tazkirat al-Shuʿaraʾ.Footnote ¹⁰ Like the coeval tazkirahs of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, early literary histories introduced elements of literary criticism in their prefaces. Although the early European literary histories do not diverge significantly from the format of the tazkirah, they attempt to treat all of Persian literature as a single, continuous whole structured by a sense of time that is particular to capitalist modernity. Unlike the earlier tazkirah writers, the European Orientalists understood time as a linear chain, continually impacted by political developments and human agency rather than cosmic machinations, and literature as a product of its particular temporal circumstances.Footnote ¹¹

Elements of the premodern tradition as well as new innovations can both be observed in what is often identified as the last Persian tazkirah: Riza-Quli Khan Hidayat’s Majmaʿ al-Fusahaʾ, which was commissioned first by Muhammad Shah and later by Nasir al-Din Shah. Hidayat (1800–71) was a poet, administrator, and man of letters in the Qajar court. His life, like his tazkirah, bridged the gap between the court and the modern educational institution. Hidayat had been an important fixture in Qajar courts, tutoring shahs and crown princes and composing poetry for important occasions. In addition to these traditional roles, he was made principal (nazim) of Iran’s first modern educational institution, the polytechnic college Dar al-Funun.

Consider this entry for the thirteenth-century Persian poet Saʿdi in Majmaʿ al-Fusahaʾ:

The biographical entry is followed by forty pages of samples of Saʿdi’s poetry. Hidayat provides copious biographical details about Saʿdi, though not all of them are accurate. Entries on lesser poets could sometimes be as short as a single line, followed by a sample of their work in the form of a couplet or two of poetry. For Hidayat, like other tazkirah writers, important details included Saʿdi’s lineage, his contemporaries, and stories of his travels and experiences. Absent from this biography is historical time – the sense of Saʿdi’s place in a historical chronology, or the idea that Saʿdi’s poetry reflects developments in a poetic continuum that precedes as well as follows him.

While Hidayat did not depart from the tazkirah tradition structurally – that is to say, he adhered to the same biographical dictionary format as that of all of his predecessors – he was innovative in introducing pre-Islamic Iranian languages to the tazkirah tradition through his preface to Majmaʿ al-Fusahaʾ. It is here that a sense of linear, progressive time made it possible to introduce and apply Orientalist philology (connecting the New Persian language and literature to its Middle Persian predecessor, for example), something that was without precedent in premodern tazkirahs. Traditionally, Persian tazkirahs had only addressed New Persian (i.e., post-Islamic) literature, but Hidayat was exposed to nascent Orientalist philology that had demonstrated the relationship between New Persian and pre-Islamic languages. As elaborated in Chapter 3, Orientalist philologists considered these languages to be part of a single trajectory extending over thousands of years, including the language of the Achaemenids (ca. 700–330 bce, described as “Old Persian”), the Middle Persian languages associated with the Sasanian era (224–650 ce), and the post-Islamic Persian language (“New Persian”). Though a tradition of philology and lexicology also existed in the premodern Persianate context, these subjects were considered in works belonging to separate genres, like dictionaries and linguistic treatises, rather than being addressed within tazkirahs. For example, over a century before Hidayat, the Indian litterateur Siraj al-Din ʿAli Khan-i Arzu had written about the connections between Persian and its predecessors in his linguistic treatise Musmir (Fruitful), yet he did not address pre-Islamic languages at all in his later tazkirah, Majmaʿ al-Nafaʾis.Footnote ¹³ Hidayat’s innovation, therefore, was dealing with pre-Islamic literature within the tazkirah genre.

Hidayat’s discussion of pre-Islamic Iranian literature is limited to the preface of Majmaʿ al-Fusahaʾ and the rest of the work concerns only New Persian poets, yet this preface paves the way for the later writing of modern, nationalist literary histories. Modern literary history was generically unprecedented in Persianate writing by engaging literary criticism, philology, and lexicology alongside literary history and biography in the same text. Notably, these literary histories construct an Iranian literary canon, wherein Old, Middle, and New Persian literatures came to be understood as belonging to a singular, “Iranian” trajectory. Indian and Iranian litterateurs both adopted the paradigm of an Iranian national literature, including Avestan and Middle Persian. Interestingly, the Indian litterateurs did not challenge this Iran-centric model of Persian literary history, nor did they suggest an Indian national literature in which Persian could be included, but instead elevated Iran’s place in their literary histories. In fact, they sometimes even shared and underscored their Iranian contemporaries’ prejudices against the Persian literature of South Asia.Footnote ¹⁴ The Indian scholars Muhammad Husayn Azad and Shibli Nuʿmani both wrote Iran-centric accounts of Persian poetry, which followed their Iranian counterparts in disparaging the Persian poetry of India. Azad’s tazkirah of Persian poets, titled Nigaristan-i Fars (Picture-Gallery of Persia, 1922), was published posthumously and received scant attention, but Shibli’s Shiʿr al-ʿAjam (Poetry of the Persians) was influential and circulated widely. Like many of the Persian literary histories written across the border from Shibli in Iran, Shiʿr al-ʿAjam was written as a textbook for new educational institutions, but Shibli had a communal readership (Muslims) rather than a national one (Iranians) in mind.Footnote ¹⁵

The first known Persian tazkirah, Lubab al-Albab, was written in Sindh in the thirteenth century, so perhaps it is fitting – however coincidental – that the first literary histories should also emerge in South Asia, more than half a millennium after Lubab al-Albab. Frances Pritchett calls Muhammad Husayn Azad’s Ab-i Hayat, or Water of Life, published in 1880, both “the last tazkira and the first literary history” of Urdu poetry.Footnote ¹⁶ Ab-i Hayat takes up the task of tazkirah writing, that is, providing a biographical anthology of Urdu poets and their poetry, but, under the mostly indirect influence of English writing, it brings a narrative structure and a sense of time that were unprecedented for a tazkirah.Footnote ¹⁷ In its more than five hundred pages it covers a wide expanse of Urdu poetry from Vali Dakkani in the seventeenth century to Azad’s in the late nineteenth century. Shibli Nuʿmani’s Shiʿr al-ʿAjam also can be understood with the framework Pritchett used for conceptualizing Ab-i Hayat, as a text that has both elements of tazkirah and of literary history, straddling the divide between the two genres.

Shiʿr al-ʿAjam is a monumental work on Persian poetry spanning over 1,500 pages, written in Urdu and published in five volumes between the years 1908 and 1918. It was translated into Persian on two separate occasions, first by a series of Afghan translators in Kabul, beginning in 1925, and later by Fakhr-i Daʿi Gilani (d. 1964) in Tehran, completed in 1948. Shibli was an Islamic scholar, educator, and reformer from Azamgarh, India. Like Hidayat in Iran’s Dar al-Funun, Shibli played an important role in some of South Asia’s earliest modern Urdu-language educational institutions: the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College (now Aligarh Muslim University) in Aligarh, Osmania University in Hyderabad, and Nadwat al-ʿUlama seminary in Lucknow. His life’s work was to develop Islamic education in South Asia – and ultimately develop an approach to Islam – that could be compatible with colonial modernity, using the new European methodologies to revitalize Islam.Footnote ¹⁸

Shibli was straightforward in his assessment of historical methodology. Explaining why he considered Turkish historical writing superior to Arabic, he noted that:

Shibli saw Europeans as having perfected historiography, and admired the Turks for mastering European methods and applying them to the writing of Islamic history. Shibli’s own writings included scholarly biographies of the early Muslim jurist Abu Hanifa, the caliph ʿUmar, and the prophet Muhammad; his extensive biography of the latter, titled Sirat al-Nabi (The Life of the Prophet), is his best-known work. The late scholar of Islam Sheila McDonough described Shibli’s methodology in writing these religious biographies: “Historical method he understands to mean careful scrutiny of primary sources, sifting of materials for anachronisms and other improbable forms of evidence, and in general moving away from the hagiographical qualities of the medieval biographies.”Footnote ²⁰ In writing Shiʿr al-ʿAjam, he employed the same methodology, making careful and meticulous use of all the sources at his disposal, such as Persian tazkirahs and divans. Unlike later Iranian nationalist literary historians such as the poet laureate Muhammad-Taqi Bahar, who almost exclusively made use of Iranian tazkirahs, Shibli did not discriminate in his use of tazkirahs produced in Iran and those produced in South Asia. He also acknowledged Orientalist scholarship, claiming that the Europeans have given more attention (iʻtina) to Persian literature than Muslims, and lamented the latter’s utter ignorance of pre-Islamic Iranian languages such as Avestan.Footnote ²¹ Ab-i Hayat had already become extraordinarily popular, widely read, and circulated by the time Shibli was writing Shiʿr al-ʿAjam. For this reason, it is highly likely that Shibli succumbed to what Pritchett called “the all-pervasive influence of Ab-e hayat, with its naive and ruthlessly Westernizing notions of literary history.”Footnote ²²

The first three volumes of Shiʿr al-ʿAjam resemble the format of the majority of Ab-i Hayat, as well as the older Persian tazkirahs. In these volumes, Shibli outlines periods of Persian poetry, offering biographies of the major poets of each period and selections of their poetry. His entry on Saʿdi, for example, begins quite similarly to the entries in Hidayat’s Majmaʿ al-Fusahaʾ or in other representative tazkirahs:

The entry goes on to cover more of the same ground as in Hidayat’s Majmaʿ al-Fusaha, but in much greater detail; where Hidayat spent a single paragraph providing biography, Shibli elaborated and penned fifteen pages, interspersed with biographical details about other figures pertinent to the life of Saʿdi. The difference is not merely one of length, however. In his critical discussion of the alleged dates of Saʿdi’s birth and death, Shibli applied the logic and reason he had mastered in his studies of the Islamic rational sciences to the task of historiography. Ever critical, he goes on to question other claims about Saʿdi found in tazkirahs, and offers a biography of the poet as a figure grounded in, and responding to, the political and historical circumstances of his time.

The fourth and fifth volumes of Shiʿr al-ʿAjam offer literary history and criticism of a kind that cannot be found in the tazkirah genre. Moving entirely beyond the biographical anthology format which is still intact in the first three volumes, the fourth volume is divided into three main sections: “the reality and nature of poetry” (shaʿiri ki haqiqat aur mahiyat), “a general history of Persian poetry and the influence of civilization and other factors” (farsi shaʿiri ki ʿam tarikh aur tamaddun aur digar asbab ka asar), and “praise and criticism” (taqriz va tanqid). The fifth volume deals exclusively with the development of poetic forms (qasidah and ghazal) and of poetic genres or themes, covering romantic, Sufi, ethical, and philosophical poetry. Particularly in the last two volumes, Shibli provides an account of Persian poetry guided by a continuous, progressive sense of time. Rather than merely discussing a series of individual poets, each discretely bound within separate biographical entries as in traditional tazkirahs, in the fourth and fifth volumes of Shiʿr al-ʿAjam Shibli discusses poetic movements which build on literary and historical developments that precede them.Footnote ²⁴

Shibli’s innovations indicate that Shiʿr al-ʿAjam, like Ab-i Hayat before it, should be seen as a hybrid, transitional text between the tazkirah and the modern European-style literary history. While much of the format, especially of the first three volumes, belongs to the tazkirah genre, its critical methodology, engagement with Orientalist scholarship, and sense of linear time set it apart. Notably, the title pages of various editions of Shiʿr al-ʿAjam reflect this ambiguity, as it seems that publishers were unsure of how to label the text: tazkirah, or tarikh (history). The change of terms is especially interesting given that tarikh in fact predates tazkirah as a genre and has its own long history of generic conventions; yet it appears that by the early twentieth century the word tarikh had come to be understood as the direct equivalent of the word history in English and its equivalents in other European languages, thus connoting modern European-style historiography, with its secular, linear chronology.Footnote ²⁵

In a 1920 edition of Shiʿr al-ʿAjam, both tarikh-i ʿajam (history of the Persians) and tazkirah appear on the title page, though not on the same line. A Persian advertisement from 1936 describes it as an “unparalleled” book on “the philosophy of Iranian literary history” (dar falsafah-yi tarikh-i adabiyat-i iran).Footnote ²⁶ A 1940 edition classifies the work tazkirah-i Shiʿr al-ʿAjam without the word tarikh, whereas a 1947 edition omits the word tazkirah and adds a clarifying subtitle: yaʿni farsi shaʿiri ki tarikh (that is to say, the history of Persian poetry). Various editions of the Persian translations are also similarly divided between identifying the text as a tazkirah or tarikh.Footnote ²⁷

By the early twentieth century, publications in the new genre of Persian literary history proliferate. In his preface to the fifth volume of Shiʿr al-ʿAjam, republished in 1920, Shibli’s protégé Sayyid Sulayman Nadvi (1884–1953) registers his surprise at the publication of two other Persian literary histories nearly contemporaneous with Shiʿr al-ʿAjam: E. G. Browne’s Literary History of Persia in England (1902, 1906), and Muhammad Husayn Azad’s Sukhandan-i Fars in Lahore (1907).

Shibli’s work emerges in parallel to these early European national literary histories rather than in response to them. The majority of his exposure to English literature was through indirect means such as translation, and while Shibli was well aware of the contemporary Orientalist scholarship on Persian literature, much of it – such as the pioneering works on Persian literary history in German and Italian – was inaccessible to him.Footnote ²⁸ To a certain extent, Shibli used similar sources and employed similar methodology to those of the European Orientalists, and thus it is no surprise that their works are so similar. The genre of Persian literary history continued to develop with the publication of E. G. Browne’s Literary History of Persia which appeared in English from 1902 to 1924 and in Persian and Urdu translations in the following decade.Footnote ²⁹

Browne was in many ways an English equivalent of his Iranian and Indian counterparts. While Hidayat and Shibli received traditional Muslim educations but came to be involved in European-style modern institutions, Browne was a Cambridge-educated Orientalist who mastered Persian poetry and the traditional literary sciences. If Azad, the “ruthless Westernizer,” was a South Asian Victorian, Browne was an Iranian nationalist who happened to be a Victorian Englishman. He was a great supporter of the Constitutionalist movement in Iran, and often deferred to his Iranian friends on matters of literary taste.Footnote ³⁰

Browne’s Literary History did not share the generic ambiguity of Shibli’s Shiʿr al-ʿAjam; Browne envisioned his book from the start as a national literary history. While he was aware of earlier European histories of Persian literature, namely Hammer-Purgstall’s Geschichte der schönen Redekünste Persiens (1818, itself based closely on a fifteenth-century Persian tazkirah) and the Italian Orientalist Italo Pizzi’s Manuale di letteratura persiana (1887) and Storia della poesia persiana (1894), these were not important models for Browne.Footnote ³¹ Having been invited to contribute to the publisher T. Fisher Unwin’s series The Library of Literary History, he modeled his A Literary History of Persia on the earlier volumes in the series, especially Jean Jules Jusserand’s A Literary History of the English People (1893), as well as another national history, John Richard Green’s A Short History of the English People (1874). As Jusserand described his task, the book is not “a ‘History of English Literature,’ but rather a ‘Literary History of the English People.’”Footnote ³² Following these models, Browne wrote a literary history of the Persians, not just of poets who wrote in Persian – he was interested in religion, philosophy, and science as much as in literature, and he included Iranians who wrote in other languages while excluding Indians who wrote in Persian from the scope of his book. Like Jusserand, Browne relates a story in which the protagonist is the nation, unlike tazkirahs which treat each poet separately through independently bounded entries. In modern, national literary histories like Browne’s, the nation is an autonomous entity, developing as it moves through linear time.

Consider Browne’s section on Saʿdi, which comes from a chapter discussing ʿAttar, Rumi and Saʿdi as “Three Great Mystical Poets” of the earlier Mongol period:

Browne does, of course, also provide the biographical details about Saʿdi which could be found in the tazkirah tradition, including his lineage and patronage, the dates of his birth and death, and so on. However, like Shibli, Browne grounds his analysis of Saʿdi in historical and political circumstances. Going beyond the biography of an individual poet, he describes Saʿdi’s position in the Iranian nation, as well as in the poetic trends of his era and his influence on later poets. Browne identifies several verses where Hafiz quotes from Saʿdi through tazmin (“insertion” or “inclusion” of another poet’s verse in one’s poem), another form of poetic response related to speaking in reply.

Browne himself was developing the genre of literary history and synthesizing the nationalist model of Jusserand and Green with the source criticism of Shibli. He cited Shiʿr al-ʿAjam numerous times and expressed his admiration and respect for Shibli’s work; later Orientalists such as Jan Rypka (1886–1968) also made use of Shiʿr al-ʿAjam.Footnote ³⁴ Thus, Shibli’s text not only reflects European influence, but also influences European literary thought and contributes significantly to the development of Persian literary history.Footnote ³⁵ Browne, in turn, influences later Iranian literary historians like Muhammad-Taqi Bahar, thereby passing some of Shibli’s ideas and approach on to Iranians. These new literary histories relied heavily on tazkirahs as sources – just as the earlier tazkirahs had often cribbed or borrowed directly from one another – and responded directly to them. Some have considered tazkirahs and literary histories to belong to the same tradition, if not the same genre.Footnote ³⁶ I suggest instead that the tazkirah tradition provided early twentieth-century literary historians with a useful local form they could repurpose, and ultimately transform, for use in their modernizing projects.

1.2 The Last Persian Tazkirah

One Persian tazkirah that was used ubiquitously as a source by literary historians, whether in Iran, India, or Europe, was Hidayat’s Majmaʿ al-Fusahaʾ. Its preface, bridging the gap between pre-Islamic languages and New Persian literature as previously discussed, is not the text’s only innovative feature; Hidayat’s biographical entries are also worthy of note. Some of Hidayat’s biographies of poets are unique, such as his claim that Hafiz authored a commentary (tafsir) on the Qurʾan, a claim most likely not repeated elsewhere, and one that Browne tactfully described as “of doubtful authenticity.”Footnote ³⁷ It is unclear where this claim originates, and quite possible that Hidayat simply fabricated it to add some flavor to his entry on Hafiz, or to emphasize the poet’s piety. Of especial relevance to the present study is another of Hidayat’s seemingly eccentric stories: his account of the origins of Abu al-Qasim Firdawsi’s eleventh-century epic poem, the Shahnamah (Book of Kings). Hidayat begins by stating that the Shahnamah originated long before the time of Firdawsi as a history of the ancient kings of Iran, continuing until the reign of Yazdgird III (d. 651), but here Hidayat’s account starts to diverge wildly with what can be observed elsewhere in the traditional accounts of the Shahnamah found in other tazkirah sources.Footnote ³⁸ Hidayat claims that at the time of the Arab-Islamic conquest of Iran, the Shahnamah fell into the hands of the Arabs, and as Iran’s bounties were being divided up the book made its way to Abyssinia (habashah), where it was translated into “Abyssinian” (habashi). According to Hidayat’s account, it then traveled from Abyssinia to the Deccan and Hindustan, where it circulated until Yaʿqub-i Lays Saffar (840–79), the founder of the Saffarid dynasty, sent someone to Hindustan to bring the manuscript to Firdawsi’s native Khurasan.

Though he does not specifically cite his Firdawsi sources, it seems likely that Hidayat’s story comes from the preface to the Baysunghuri Shahnamah manuscript, an illuminated, gilded manuscript of the Shahnamah which was commissioned under the Timurid dynasty in the fifteenth century.Footnote ³⁹ The Baysunghuri Shahnamah is one of the lengthiest extant Shahnamah manuscripts due to the number of extra verses and other details added to it. Its preface contains a strikingly similar story about the history of the Shahnamah, not to mention a good detail of other historical inaccuracies about the text, its author, and other relevant figures.Footnote ⁴⁰ Qajar prince Farhad Mirza Muʿtamad al-Dawlah owned this manuscript, and since it is known that he inherited some of his other manuscripts from Hidayat (such as a treatise by ʿAbd al-Rahman Jami), it seems likely that either the Baysunghuri manuscript was originally in Hidayat’s possession, or that Hidayat was at least able to access Muʿtamad al-Dawlah’s copy. According to the Iranian literary scholar Ahmad Gulchin-Maʿani, Hidayat had the only manuscript of Taqi Awhadi’s ʿArafat al-ʿAshiqin in Iran, and Gulchin-Maʿani criticizes him for “plagiarizing” from this earlier tazkirah without citing his source, so it is not at all unlikely that Hidayat would borrow from the Baysunghuri Shahnamah without citing it, despite the fact that he does sometimes cite his sources elsewhere.Footnote ⁴¹

What is noteworthy in Hidayat’s account of the history of the Shahnamah is not that it is historically inaccurate, but that it is unique; other tazkirah writers, many of whom likely did not have access to the Baysunghuri manuscript, do not include these details in their biographies of Firdawsi. Hidayat can thus be credited for introducing this story from the Baysunghuri Shahnamah; however fallacious it might have been, it became something that later literary historians would have to engage with, even if only to negate it. For example, the story is reproduced in full in the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica’s entry on Firdawsi, which concludes by noting that this story “is rejected by modern scholars.”Footnote ⁴²

Browne, one such modern scholar, wrote that tazkirahs “contain few trustworthy biographical details, and consist for the most part of anecdotes connected with certain verses of … poems, and probably in most cases, if not all, invented to explain or illustrate them.”Footnote ⁴³ Browne’s contemporary, the German Orientalist Hermann Ethé (1844–1917) similarly warned in his Neupersische Literatur (New-Persian Literature) that the Persians have “no special love of truth” and that the greatest caution must be exercised when reading tazkirahs.Footnote ⁴⁴ He then went on to list fifty “indispensable” Persian tazkirahs in chronological order, ending with Majmaʿ al-Fusahaʾ. Despite his warning, he called this source “the latest, but in every respect richest and most valuable of all the general tazkirahs.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Ethé explained that Hidayat had consulted all the relevant works, from ʿAwfi’s Lubab al-Albab (a rare manuscript) to contemporary sources, and this made Majmaʿ al-Fusahaʾ a valuable resource. Indeed, it is for this very reason that Hidayat’s work earned its stature, such that later literary historians and Orientalists – European, Iranian, and Indian alike – had no choice but to use it as a source even as some grumbled about its inaccuracies and exaggerations.

As one of the latest tazkirahs in the genre’s history, Majmaʿ al-Fusahaʾ contains a wealth of information about Hidayat’s contemporaries, Qajar-era poets who were not covered by earlier sources. It was not only by virtue of being the latest great tazkirah that Majmaʿ al-Fusahaʾ gained its particular value as a source on Qajar poetry, but also thanks to Hidayat’s stature as poet and administrator which put him into personal contact with a great number of his literary contemporaries. Abbas Amanat repeats the clichés that Majmaʿ al-Fusahaʾ was “the last and most comprehensive tadhkera [tazkirah] in the long tradition of Persian biographical dictionaries,” yet “suffer[ed] from … inaccuracies and distortions,” and describes it as promoting the literary revival in Persian poetry contemporary to the author, and Qajar cultural renewal more generally. In this way, Amanat argues, Hidayat makes a place for Qajar-era poetry in the millennium-old Persian literary tradition.Footnote ⁴⁶

Later literary histories all seem to agree that Majmaʿ al-Fusahaʾ, despite being the most comprehensive and latest tazkirah, was riddled with inaccuracies, errors, and embellishments. Why, then, did it become such a ubiquitous source? Perhaps it was such a popular source not in spite of its errors, but partly because of them. Its great expanse as a comprehensive general tazkirah (as opposed to the more specific tazkirahs which narrowed their focus to a particular region, time period, or the like) made it a model worthy of appropriation for modern literary histories with their universal scope. Working through its many errors and contradictions proved to be a productive exercise, with the faults of Majmaʿ al-Fusahaʾ serving for later scholars as a kind of invitation to comment and assert corrective narratives. Like poets replying to one another through response poems (javab), modernizing literary scholars found in Majmaʿ al-Fusahaʾ an entry point where they could insert themselves into a conversation by correcting Hidayat’s mistakes, without writing his work off altogether.

The Iranian literary scholar Jalal al-Din Humaʾi (1900–80), who like Hidayat was affiliated with the Dar al-Funun in Tehran, was perhaps the best example of this: an entire book of nearly 300 pages was compiled and published from Humaʾi’s notes in the margins of Majmaʿ al-Fusahaʾ on Hidayat’s errors, as well as poets Hidayat left out; yet in his book’s introduction Humaʾi praises Majmaʿ al-Fusahaʾ and says that if he has stumbled upon anything worthwhile, it is all because of Hidayat (a double entendre as hidayat means “guidance”). After acknowledging that to err is human, and only God does not make mistakes, Humaʾi defends Hidayat, saying “if a learned man like Hidayat in this work suffers from mistakes, it should not come as a surprise at all” and says that those who would dismiss his work on the basis of such errors are very short-sighted and unfair.Footnote ⁴⁷

1.3 Expanding the Scope of Literature

A development peculiar to the modern Persian literary histories produced in Iran was the expansion of scope from poets (the subject of tazkirahs) to writers of all genres, including scientists, who were not traditionally considered belletristic writers.Footnote ⁴⁸ This may appear on first blush to be a minor innovation of little consequence, but it is in fact indicative of the broadening scope required by Persian literary histories changing to accommodate a burgeoning Iranian national identity. While premodern tazkirahs also included extraliterary figures for a variety of reasons, those figures were still integrated on the basis of their Persian poetry. Mana Kia provides the example of the entry on Safavid Shah Ismaʿil I in Azar Baygdili’s Atashkadah (Fire Temple, 1760), suggesting that “this shah is most important for who he was, rather than his poetry, most of which was written in Turkish.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Yet even this Safavid shah appears under his poetic nom de plume “Khataʾi,” and his brief biography is followed by one of his Persian couplets, indicating that despite the shah’s great importance, he still must qualify as a poet to be included in a tazkirah. The modern logic of nationalism, however, made possible the inclusion in literary histories of scientists who had little or no literary significance, especially as Persian poets; they could be integrated instead on the basis of their status as national heroes. The absence of this development among the Persian literary histories from India is therefore understandable, as writing Persian literary history had a more nationalist valence in Iran than in India. As Farzin Vejdani illustrates, modern Iranian “history textbooks were a nationalist genre par excellence,” written for modern educational institutions that strove to promote a national canon of Iranian, rather than Persian, literature.Footnote ⁵⁰ Kia argues that eighteenth-century tazkirahs functioned to produce a cultural community of litterateurs, comprising past and present poets.Footnote ⁵¹ Her reading demonstrates how modern literary histories are at once continuous with the older tazkirah tradition and distinct from it: continuous in that literary histories also imagined a community comprising figures from across time, but distinct in that the basis for inclusion in the community became ethnicity rather than poetry. Notably, the treatment of Ibn Sina and ʿUmar Khayyam in Persian literary histories exemplifies this point.

Scientists, in particular, became especially important for inclusion in literary histories. One such scientist was Abu ʿAli ibn Sina (henceforth “Ibn Sina”), or “Avicenna” (980–1037), a polymath known primarily for his works on medicine and philosophy.Footnote ⁵² He was traditionally known as a scholar rather than a poet (though of course the two categories are not mutually exclusive) and he wrote mainly in Arabic rather than Persian. Ibn Sina was from Bukhara, located in today’s Uzbekistan, but he later settled in what is present-day Iran. The earliest known Persian tazkirahs, Lubab al-Albab and Tazkirat al-Shuʿara, do not mention Ibn Sina at all. Hidayat includes Ibn Sina and attributes some poetry to him in his Majmaʿ al-Fusahaʾ, which is generally considered to be the last tazkirah produced in Iran, as previously discussed. Like most tazkirahs that precede it, the entry on Ibn Sina in Majmaʿ al-Fusahaʾ focuses on his role as a poet rather than as a scientist.Footnote ⁵³ Shibli – positioned outside the Iranian nationalist discourse, as an Indian – does not mention Ibn Sina at all except as an occasional reference, whereas the Iranian Muhammad-Taqi Bahar deals with Ibn Sina because of the importance of his prose style.

Bahar (1886–1951), poet laureate, literary scholar, and politician, was another litterateur associated with the nascent University of Tehran. The university was established in 1935 as a successor to institutions like the Dar al-Funun and the Tehran Teachers’ Training College, incorporating much of its predecessors’ faculty and departments.Footnote ⁵⁴ Bahar’s Sabkshinasi (Stylistics, 1942) was commissioned by Iran’s Ministry of Culture in 1937 as a textbook for the university’s inaugural doctoral program in Persian literature. Its inclusion of Ibn Sina, along with other figures important to Iran who wrote in Arabic rather than Persian, belies the subtitle of the book: “or, the history of the evolution of Persian prose” (ya tarikh-i tatavvur-i nasr-i farsi).Footnote ⁵⁵ Bahar’s canon, like that of Browne, was a national one comprising Iranian literature, rather than a linguistic canon of Persian literature, as the subtitle implies.Footnote ⁵⁶ This is why Wali Ahmadi suggests that “it is necessary … to situate and examine Sabk-shinasi precisely within the context of a literary history bound to a national imaginary order and the institutional politics of literary studies.”Footnote ⁵⁷ It is literary modernity, especially its particular understanding of the nation and narrative time, that makes such a national canon possible and imaginable.

Ibn Sina was also taken up by Badiʿ al-Zaman Furuzanfar (1903–70), another Iranian literary scholar who taught at some of Iran’s first modern institutions of higher learning, including the Dar al-Funun and later the University of Tehran.Footnote ⁵⁸ His interest in Ibn Sina is primarily for his significance as a scientist and an important Iranian national figure rather than a poet; evidently the latter qualification is of secondary importance to his inclusion in Furuzanfar’s work (which, like Bahar’s, also covers Arabic works by Iranian writers in general). Furuzanfar merely notes that some have attributed Arabic and Persian poetry to Ibn Sina, and he quotes an Arabic qasidah (panegyric) attributed to him.Footnote ⁵⁹ Browne claims that “of all the scientific writers of the time, none were greater than Avicenna (Abu ʿAli ibn Sina).”Footnote ⁶⁰ He provides a biography of Ibn SinaFootnote ⁶¹ wherein Browne considers him a poet of Arabic as well as Persian and quotes (in translation) the same Arabic qasidah cited by Furuzanfar.Footnote ⁶² Browne later quotes a Persian quatrain “ascribed” to Ibn Sina.Footnote ⁶³ Interestingly, Browne holds Ibn Sina up as a moral standard in his discussion of the poet Anvari, whom he describes as “longing to follow in the steps of Avicenna, yet living the life of [the famously debauched poet] Abu Nuwas.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Ibn Sina was not the only scientist to be featured in literary histories of Persian; perhaps even more important was ʿUmar Khayyam.

ʿUmar Khayyam’s inclusion as a poet in literary histories may be slightly less of an innovation than the inclusion of Ibn Sina, as there is more precedence for Khayyam’s poetry; although he is absent from early tazkirahs like Lubab al-Albab and Tazkirat al-Shuʿaraʾ,Footnote ⁶⁵ he does appear in some later tazkirahs.Footnote ⁶⁶ Khayyam (1048–131) was a polymath, scientist, and ostensibly a poet, hailing from Neyshabur, a city located within the confines of what is now the modern nation of Iran.Footnote ⁶⁷ Shibli evidently took Khayyam seriously as a poet. He begins his extensive section on Khayyam with a detailed biography, followed by a deep analysis of his poetry.Footnote ⁶⁸ As Khayyam is famous for the religious skepticism and hedonism expressed in the poetry attributed to him, it is perhaps surprising that he would be the subject of praise by Shibli, a Muslim religious scholar and cleric (ʿalim). Yet it is precisely Khayyam’s criticism of the clerisy (ʿulamaʾ) and pious ascetics (zuhhad) that Shibli appreciates. He provides detailed, precise information on translations of Khayyam’s poetry into European languages and the broader impact of these translations in Europe, where he rightly notes that Khayyam has found greater popularity as a poet than in Asia.Footnote ⁶⁹

Shibli may have taken some of this information from Browne, who mentions that “ʿUmar Khayyam, who is not ranked by the Persians as a poet of even the third class, is now, probably, better known in Europe than any of his fellow-countrymen as a writer of verse.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Browne later reiterates his point, stating that Khayyam, “thanks to the genius of FitzGerald, enjoys a celebrity in Europe, especially in England and America, far greater than that which he has attained in his own country, where his fame rests rather on his mathematical and astronomical than on his poetic achievements.”Footnote ⁷¹ Browne also notes that Khayyam appears in the Chahar Maqala (Four Discourses, a famous twelfth-century Persian prose work by Nizami ʿAruzi Samarqandi) “not in that section of the work which treats of Poets, but that which treats of Astrologers and Astronomers.”Footnote ⁷²

Furuzanfar’s treatment of Khayyam, like his treatment of Ibn Sina, primarily considers Khayyam’s importance as a scientist and “great man” of Iranian history, whereas his poetry seems to be of secondary importance even in a work on Persian literary history.Footnote ⁷³ In fact, Furuzanfar dismisses Khayyam’s importance as a poet quite unsentimentally: “The quatrains that have been published in Khayyam’s name, the number of some of which has reached up to 1200, are a collection of the philosophical thoughts of [various] different people and have been blindly attributed to Khayyam.”Footnote ⁷⁴ The inclusion of such national figures while dismissing their literary significance altogether would have been completely out of place in the earlier tazkirah tradition.

1.4 New Readings of Old Texts

At the same time that the older genre of tazkirah is refashioned into the new genre of literary history (tarikh-i adabiyat), new ways of reading old texts also appear, emblematized by modernizing literary historians’ increased attention to Firdawsi’s Shahnamah and their reading of it as tarikh, or history in the modern sense.Footnote ⁷⁵ Though labeling the Shahnamah as history is nothing new in the Persianate tradition, here what is meant by history is distinct from premodern uses of the word. The Shahnamah is an eleventh-century epic poem that narrates Iran’s pre-Islamic history and mythology; the modernizers read it as a source for a modern approach to history, dedicating significant space to historical analysis of the text and praising it for its precision and historical accuracy. Premodern Persianate historians, however, were interested “less in recording the ‘facts’ of history than in the construction of a meaningful narrative.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Indeed, Julie Scott Meisami argues that, in the Persian historiography of Firdawsi’s period, style and rhetoric came to take precedence over content or truth, and “message and style [were] inseparable.”Footnote ⁷⁷ She also suggests that premodern Persian historiography sought to represent the past “in terms of its meaningfulness for the [historiographers’] present,” in contrast with the modern concern with recovering an image of the past as it was.Footnote ⁷⁸ As Nasrin Askari shows, when medieval historians referenced the Shahnamah, they did so primarily for its poetic erudition, often citing verses containing maxims or eloquent turns of phrase, rather than as a means of retrieving information.Footnote ⁷⁹

Pasha M. Khan claims that the Shahnamah was indeed understood as history – in addition to romance – in nineteenth-century India, but what kind of history was meant must also be clarified. Khan proposes that a methodological split between naqli (transmission-based) and ʿaqli (intellect-based) approaches to historiography allowed for the former to accommodate a text with romantic and apparently supernatural elements such as the Shahnamah. Naqli historians judged the soundness of a history’s chain of transmission (from the informants who witnessed the original event, to the transmitters to whom the information was relayed before their reports reached the historians), without necessarily considering the rationality of the historical narrative (which was the prerogative of ʿaqli historians); thus they could treat the Shahnamah as a historical work on that basis. As Khan explains, “Once it has been established that the testimony [witnessing the original event] was sincerely given and properly transmitted, the report is not to be sifted by reason.”Footnote ⁸⁰ By focusing on naql (transmission of the story) rather than ʿaql (intellect), an eleventh-century epic that includes tales of demons and dragons still can be seen by modernizers as recuperable for historiographical purposes.

While premodern historians may have read the Shahnamah as a kind of history, for modernizers it became the history, and in the early twentieth century it can be seen everywhere: in Shibli Nuʿmani’s history of Persian literature (1918),Footnote ⁸¹ in a speech given by the German Orientalist Ernst Herzfeld to the Iranian Society for National Heritage (1926),Footnote ⁸² in the Iranian scholar Jalal al-Din Humaʾi’s Tarikh-i Adabiyat-i Iran (History of the Literature of Iran, 1929),Footnote ⁸³ and in the Iranian scholar Muhammad-Taqi Bahar’s introduction to his critical edition of the Tarikh-i Sistan (History of Sistan, 1935),Footnote ⁸⁴ to name only a few examples. Rather than reading the text as history per se, the Iranian historian Hasan Pirniya (1871–1935) took a different, albeit also innovative, approach to the Shahnamah in his Iran-i Qadim (Ancient Iran, 1928), treating the text as “an artifact … rather than a source of knowledge.”Footnote ⁸⁵ In other words, for Pirniya the Shahnamah could be appreciated as a work of art and studied as a relic of particular historical circumstances rather than being read at face value as a source of accurate historical information.

In the reading of the Shahnamah as history in the modern sense, it can be seen how the tropes of ancient modernity (locating Iranian modernity in the pre-Islamic past rather than the present) and Shahnamah as modern circulated not only textually, but also orally.Footnote ⁸⁶ Textual influence was often more one-sided, as many more Iranian intellectuals were reading French texts than vice versa, and more Urdu speakers read Persian texts than the reverse. However, when examining how these ideas traveled verbally, a different dynamic – one of mutual exchange – can be observed.Footnote ⁸⁷ Looking at interpersonal relationships between Iranians, Indians, and Europeans can give us a sense of that verbal exchange.

Shibli Nuʿmani was one of the first modernizers to write at length about the importance of the Shahnamah as a historiographic source. In the first and fourth volumes of his Shiʿr al-ʿAjam, he dedicated several sections to reading the Shahnamah as a historiographic source and praising Firdawsi as a historian. Shibli was exposed to European thought and writing primarily through his friendship with the British Orientalist T. W. Arnold (1864–1930), his colleague at the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College. Their friendship was based on mutual exchange, as they taught each other Arabic and French, respectively. Muhammad-Taqi Bahar was unable to read Urdu, the language in which Shibli wrote about Firdawsi, but he learned about Shibli through conversation with Urdu-speaking friends like Daʿi al-Islam Isfahani.Footnote ⁸⁸ Bahar also may have discussed these ideas with his friend and Middle Persian tutor, Ernst Herzfeld (1879–1948), an archaeologist and philologist who delivered a speech in French before the Iranian Society for National Heritage titled “The Shahnamah and History.” In his speech, Herzfeld groups Firdawsi together with premodern historians such as Tabari (839–923), Abu Hanifa Dinawari (828–96), and others and, like Shibli before him, considers the Shahnamah as an important source for Iranian pre-Islamic history.Footnote ⁸⁹

Bahar’s model of Persian literary history and Herzfeld’s model of Iranian art history also bear striking resemblance to one another. Bahar’s division of Persian literature into periods follows the tripartite model (ancient, middle, and later) that had developed throughout the history of the tazkirah genre and was adopted by Shibli as well. However, one of Bahar’s innovations was to add ethnogeographic and linguistic characteristics (“Khurasani style,” “Iraqi style,” and “Indian style”) to what had been a vaguely defined and largely temporal periodization, as well as to identify a fourth period of literary renaissance (bazgasht-i adabi or literary return). Similarly, Herzfeld divides Iranian art into dynastic periods, beginning with the Achaemenid period, when “Iran was the center of the known world,” followed by the Sasanian period, the “period of Iran’s modernity,” then the Seljuq period, when Iran was leading the Muslim nations and Europe had just begun to emerge from savagery, and finally the Safavid period, when Iranian art “was especially glorious.”Footnote ⁹⁰ While Herzfeld’s model does not map directly onto Bahar’s, the two still share many similarities: four periods, the issues of center and periphery,Footnote ⁹¹ and the decline model of history that locates Iranian modernity in the past rather than the present or future.Footnote ⁹² These similarities indicate that Bahar and Herzfeld were both contributing to and participating in the same discourse of modernization, a discourse that traveled as much verbally as textually.

In addition to sharing a modernizing approach to Firdawsi, there is significant overlap in Shibli and Bahar’s respective Persian literary histories, and in Herzfeld’s speech “The Shahnamah and History,” in terms of other figures they referenced as early (premodern) historians as well as contemporary Orientalists worthy of note. As can be expected, Shibli and Bahar both rely heavily on tazkirah sources (sharing most of their Iranian sources) and speak critically about the genre, particularly about its earliest and most prominent examples (ʿAwfi’s Lubab al-Albab and Samarqandi’s Tazkirat al-Shuʿaraʾ). However, Shibli also cites a number of contemporary European Orientalists: his friend and French tutor T. W. Arnold, the French scholar James Darmesteter, the German Theodor Nöldeke, and the Russian Valentin Zhukovskii.

Similarly, Bahar cites Herzfeld, his Middle Persian tutor, as one of the masters of the “new science” of Iranian philology (calling to mind Foucault’s description in The Order of Things of the modernizing trend toward the fragmentation of traditional knowledge production into distinct new sciences which organize knowledge into increasingly specific categories). Herzfeld also refers to the “new sciences” early in his speech to the Society for National Heritage.Footnote ⁹³ Bahar and Herzfeld’s shared use of this term reveals their common orientation as modernizers. They are also engaged with the same references, both premodern and contemporary. In addition to citing Herzfeld, Bahar also cites several premodern historians, including Tabari and Abu Hanifa Dinawari. Meanwhile, Herzfeld shares with Bahar his citation of Tabari and Dinawari, among others, and shares with Shibli his citation of the Orientalists Darmesteter and Nöldeke. This shared set of references further indicates that Shibli, Bahar, and Herzfeld, despite writing in different languages and in different contexts, drew on the same sources (and on each other). They were active participants in the same intertextual discourse that made use of premodern Iranian and Islamic sources as well as contemporary Orientalist sources in the writing of modern Persian literary history.

Bahar engaged critically with the work of his contemporaries and immediate predecessors. Just as the first generation of literary historians, like Shibli and Browne, had found in the deficiencies of the tazkirah genre an invitation to respond and produce literary history, so did Bahar a generation later, explaining that the history of Iranian literature is a story that has not yet been written, as what had been recorded in tazkirahs was incomplete and erroneous, not truly the history of Iranian literature. He identified the European and Indian literary historians who preceded him as similarly insufficient. “We don’t have literary history” in the true meaning of the genre, Bahar proclaimed in a 1938 essay on the Persian translation of the fourth volume of Browne’s Literary History of Persia. Browne’s work had not done Persian literature justice, because in Bahar’s view it lacked soul; nevertheless, he saw it as an “introduction” to his own project. Bahar also lauded Shibli as the first person outside Iran to manage to write a “critical history” of Persian literature, but faulted Shibli’s Shiʿr al-ʿAjam for not addressing enough of the corpus of Persian poetry, especially the poets of India (indeed, it is true that Shibli neglected much of the Persian poetry of the subcontinent).Footnote ⁹⁴ To do justice to Persian literary history, Bahar argued, one must research the rites, religion, customs, history, language, and politics of the Persianate world, and combine this knowledge with access to the great libraries of both Europe and Asia, as well as philological mastery of pre-Islamic Iranian languages like Avestan, Old Persian, and Middle Persian.Footnote ⁹⁵ Bahar’s manifesto in his review of Browne, laying out what he views as necessary for literary history, closely resembles the introduction to his later textbook Sabkshinasi.Footnote ⁹⁶ In addition to these scholarly qualifications, Bahar added one more: the scholar must be a Persian speaker (ahl-i zaban). He thereby positioned himself as uniquely qualified to complete the project begun by Shibli and Browne, to take advantage of their accomplishments and surpass their shortcomings. Bahar would write the “unwritten history” of Persian literature, treating it as neither Islamic inheritance nor Orientalist curiosity, but rather as the national heritage of Iranians.

1.5 Conclusion

At the turn of the twentieth century, Iranians, Indians, and Europeans “converged in the writing of a comprehensive literary history without making a complete break with the tazkira tradition.”Footnote ⁹⁷ By viewing these texts as part of a larger genre of Persian literary history, a genre written not only in Persian, but in Urdu, English, German, Italian, and other languages, it can be seen that the genre of Persian literary history writing has developed through European Orientalists and Indian and Iranian litterateurs speaking in reply to one another, and has served as a vehicle for literary modernization, which was a verbal as well as textual discourse, sharing a particular set of boundaries and references. Literary modernization, while considered by its proponents to be novel, was more accurately a method of preserving tradition. This is best exemplified by a text like Shiʿr al-ʿAjam, which negotiates the encounter with colonial modernity by using European methodologies in order to preserve, reform, and promote the best of what Shibli viewed as Islamic civilization, including Persian literature. Likewise, while later Iranian textbooks appear fully modern, they are part of a trajectory that stretches back to the premodern tazkirah tradition, and they preserve some elements of that tradition even as they refashion them as a vehicle for nationalist modernization. Lefebvre’s claim that modernity consists of endless repetition and refashioning of the old into the new rings true. Nevertheless, modernizers did not deem all of the premodern Persianate tradition salvageable. The next chapter will address their efforts to deal with Persian literature’s homoerotic heritage.