Paper abstract:

This paper explores the female oral transmission of hikmats, i.e., words of wisdom, in the Divani Hikmat (Compendium of Words of Wisdom), attributed to the Central Asian Sufi leader Kho'ja Ahmad Yassavi (d.1166) and his followers, like Sulayman Baqirghani (d.1186). Little scholarly attention has been given to the topic of promulgation of Sufi literature, specifically hikmats, by women in Central and Inner Asia. This research focuses on how Uzbek, Uyghur and Tatar women orally transmit hikmats, a tradition mainly performed in religious gatherings such as Gap, Bibi Seshanba, Mushkul Kushod and Mavlud, where female teachers, i.e., otin-bibi (Uzbek) or Buwi (Uyghur) relay hikmats to all-female audiences. Orally passed hikmats are not always congruous with the ones found in the Divani Hikmat, discovered in the 17th century and published in 1872 in Kazan. The paper relies on the memories of Distinguished Writer of Uzbekistan Muhammad Ali of his grandmother Hosiyat Otin-Bibi's teachings, first-hand experiences of the author of this paper and interviews with Muslim women living in Uzbekistan, and published studies on Central and Inner Asian women's religious customs. This research also examines the Uzbek editions of the Devoni Hikmat (1992) edited by Rasulmuhammad Ashurboy o'g'li and the first edition of the recent hikmats published in 2004 by Nodirkhon Hasan, and the Boqirg'on kitobi (1991), compiled by Ibrohim Haqqul and Sayfiddin Rafiddionv. It is hoped that the current study will encourage other scholars to contribute and elaborate about the female transmission of Sufi literature, i.e., hikmats, in Central and Inner Asia.

Paper abstract:

After the creation of Khaza’in al-ma‘ani, which included most of the poetic heritage of ‘Alishir Nawa’i, Selected Divans began to appear as a selection of his poems. In the main fund of the Al Biruni Institute of Oriental Studies Uzbekistan Academy of Sciences there are 9 manuscripts of the Selected Divans of Nawa’i dating back to the 16th century. This article compares poetic genres, in addition to ghazals, which are part of four out of nine divans. The results are compared with the Khaza’in al-ma‘ani divans. It also shows the dynamics of changes in the literary process associated with poetic genres over a period of time associated with the manuscripts of the Selected Divans. In conclusion, the views of the author are given: each of the copies of the Selected Divans was created in its original order; determining the reasons for the creation of such collections of poetry.

Paper abstract:

The most famous scene in Haft Paykar, a twelfth century Persian romance epic by Neẓāmī Ganjavī (1141–1209), is that of Fitna, a Chinese musician slave girl lifting up a full-grown bull as she walks up sixty flights of stairs towards Sasanian King, Bahrām Gūr. Fitna, whose ambiguous name means ‘rebellion’ in Persian, refuses to let Bahrām Gūr bully her for her honesty. Instead, she uses her bull-lifting performance to assert her ability to embody javānmardī (young-manliness) to challenge patriarchal kingship. Javānmardī is an ethical concept of human perfection that genders Persianate subjectivity and may be translated into ‘chivalry’. The scholarly consensus has been that the chivalric ideal of Persianate masculinity pertains to the sexed male body only. However, javānmardī’s influence on the female body, and specifically the important role it plays in the shaping of a feminine identity during the medieval period with Fitna being a prime example, points to a lesser understood history of medieval Persianate gender, race, and class relations in which bodies sexually shapeshift in the act of storytelling. By uncovering how Haft Paykar functions as a “mirror for princesses” that remembers women as models of javānmardī with their ability to embody and redefine virtues associated with this chivalric ideal ranging from virtuous trickstery, gift-giving, ‘glamor politics’, and gender-bending, this article shows how the medieval Persianate world understood ādāb and kingship as female-led enterprises. Most importantly, with Haft Paykar celebrating Fitna as the standard of javānmardī regardless of her ethnicity as Chinese and her social status, we are able to understand how China, specifically the ‘enslaved’ Chinese female body, played an important role in the driving of a medieval Persianate imagination and new ways of use romance and chivalry to understand the intersections of gender, class, and race from a medieval Persianate perspective. Javānmardī becomes what Joan Scott calls an analytical category pushing us to re-think, from a feminine perspective, the cosmopolitan extent of the medieval Persianate world, specifically how its ‘frontiers’ went beyond an Indo-Iranian border and extended all the way to China and even the Arab world. Indeed, Bahrām Gūr himself is depicted as a Persian-born and Arab-raised king. I locate in Haft Paykar’s depiction of ‘love between strangers’ the different tensions that governed the ‘frontiers’ of the Persianate world as the patriarchal concept of Persian kingship was being called into question by the elite literati.

Paper abstract:

Nizami provides collective humanity a resplendent path for progress and material development in balance with moral rectitude and spiritual transcendence—his Khamsa, the 5 epics, from the twelfth century have become an enduring beacon – they arrive from an ethnic and cultural past and resonate with normative values and aspirations of our contemporary existence in East and West, North and South.

Writing in the expansive socio-cultural linguistic convention of Persian, “the sage for humanity” Nizami Ganjavi (1140-1202/1209) endures as a major literary icon in Iran and Azerbaijan, together with Persianized regions of Afghanistan, Kurdish terrain, Tajikistan, and Farsi inspired Indian-Islamic literature. In Iran, Nizami is connected to multitude of sages and intellectuals, scholars and literary savants who embellished global civilization with erudition in Farsi as the dominant language for several centuries. In Azerbaijan, with the terrain of his birth in Gangja, he is celebrated with intensive national pride. Admired thereby as symbol for progress and development, education and learning, art and aesthetics, fine conventions and precepts – coins, stamps, libraries, bridges, schools, roads, museums, institutions of higher learning, and much more, serve to disburse the nationalistic pride for this epitome of knowledge and erudition.

In the celebrated 5 epics, with creative genius, Nizami skillfully combines humor and pathos, mirth and acuity, pleasure and erudition – juxtaposing profound deliberations within idioms of facile and elegant discourse. Dissemination of wisdom was enhanced via popular and widespread narratives to channel salient perspectives. Centuries later, Jami stated that “although most of Nizami's work on the surface appear to be romance, in reality they are a mask for the essential truths and for the explanation of divine knowledge.” Popular romance accounts of Khusraw and Shirin, Layla and Majnun, Haft Paykar, together with the didactic narratives of Makhzan al-asrar and Iskandar-nama provide a light entertaining colloquial style and clarity of diction for transmission of empyrean sagacity.

In this paper, 6 examples demonstrate the encasement of wisdom in frames of romance and heroism, mirth and pleasure-- thus entwining colloquial enunciation with sagacity. In our contemporary world, we would do well to temper and balance the quotient of entertainment with the normative ethics and lofty values of a time past, as yet available to direct pathways of our luminous humanistic potential. As our entertainment industry becomes increasingly dissipated —the possibility of tempering our leisure with the stated objectives of rectitude becomes a distinctive paradigm to emulate.