Through a study of Muhammad Mufid Bafqi’s 17th-century, local history of Yazd, Jami’-i Mufidi, this paper explores commemorative writing as a major feature of local, urban, historiography in the early modern Persianate world. I explore the ways in which inhabitants of Yazd conceptualized the connection between their hometown’s physical spaces and the communities (contemporary and past) who populated them. Further, for Yazdis, these sites possessed a certain temporal quality, for they indexed knowledge of the past in the form of oral narratives of illustrious predecessors who had founded or frequented these places. Following Henri Lefebvre’s thought, which posits that space is produced through social practice, I regard the act of commemorating the city’s past as a key practice through which the social and the spatial elements of the city came into being simultaneously, as a single phenomenon. Ultimately, in giving rise to an imagined “community-dwelling,” these “acts of memory” consequently also gave shape to a particular local sensibility among the city’s residents, a particularly Yazdi strategy of orientating in space and time. In the course of his remembrance of Yazd, Mufid not only presents descriptions of the city’s spaces and legendary benefactors; as an integral part of these representations, he carefully describes local commemorative practices themselves, urban rituals that both perpetuated the rhythm of contemporary life in his city and fused urban spaces with their history. These commemorative acts were essentially rituals of visitation: inhabitants regularly visited sites around the city, such as tombs, mosques, orchards, and cisterns, which had been charged with traces of the great benefactors of the past. There, visitors would perform acts of devotion and then consume the benefits these places afforded—blessings, fruits, fresh water, beauty. Meanwhile, the presence of epigraphic signs, and orators would help prompt visitors’ recollection of these places’ histories. Visits were successful exchanges only when spaces had the power to evoke stories about their founders and benefactors; for the wellbeing of the city depended on the capacity for its inhabitants to make present the benefits and stories of the past. In this regard, Mufid’s tour of the city’s spaces, which he composed from Hindustan, functions much like the commemorative visitations he describes. This paper explores the interplay between commemorative social practices themselves and the author’s literary representation of them with an eye to understanding the role of narrative practices in the welfare of the city.

This paper uses four Persian poetic biographical dictionaries produced in Iran and India in the mid-18th century to argue for the importance of these sources for cultural and social history. Though ostensibly about poets, the authors and subjects of these texts were merchants, scholars, statesmen, military leaders, religious figures or some combination, and imbricated in a skein of political loyalties and social ties beyond that of poetic circles. Because they are usually mined for facts, the primary concern of the few scholars outside of literary studies who do use these texts as sources is their reliability. One of the major reasons they are deemed unreliable is the way in which the author’s social ties and political loyalties pervade the text. Understood as subjective and thus partial and lacking in objectivity, scholars either try to read the objective truth around the author’s prejudices, thus erasing the very practices of commemoration which tell us the most about a particular historical moment, or discard the text all together. This paper proposes to read biographical dictionaries in a different way, considering the features of the text as a whole - how their biographical narrations were shaped by the political loyalties and social ties of their authors, and animated by particular cultural anxieties or historical conditions. All four texts demonstrate a shared idea of what constituted the source material of reliable information, overwhelmingly characterized by personal acquaintance. The scope of biographical dictionaries was in part determined by the scope of their authors’ social circles, themselves dependent on personal itineraries, relationships and access to circulating texts and correspondence. This access to information was in turn shaped by the broader political events of the 18th century, such as the fall of the Safavids, the rise of Nadir Shah and the fragmentation of political power in Mughal India, which affected the circulation of people, correspondence and texts. Biographical dictionaries also reflected particular political loyalties. Positions of affiliation under monarchs, patrons or teachers demanded that authors negotiate certain sentiments of loyalty in their narrations. This historically specific notion of reliability determined how authors incorporated previous biographical dictionaries, as well as anecdotes and poetry transmitted orally or through correspondence in their texts. In exploring these topics, this paper seeks to highlight the methodological issue of what kinds of questions maybe asked of texts constituted by ideas of reliable truth different from those that inform modern historical scholarship.

This paper explores memory and representation of the past in geographical writings about distant places, in particular, a description of China by an otherwise unknown merchant, written in Persian, with the form and content of a political treatise, dedicated and presented to the Ottoman sultan, Selim I in 1516 (and then to Suleyman I in 1522). This and other Ottoman texts commemorate certain notions of China, asserting in the process both imperial claims, and criticisms of Ottoman governance. The claims and the critiques both appeal to an understanding of history in which the Ottoman Empire is the culmination of desires for a just society, referring to both recent and distant, legendary pasts. While a sense of time and history is crucial for locating one's self and one's community in larger webs of meaning, anyone wanting to describe or understand a distant and culturally foreign community faces an additional challenge: there may not be a shared framework of meanings and historical referents in which that community's self-understandings and sense of history are mutually intelligible with one's own. The fact that a traveler's view is a mere a snapshot of a distant, foreign society at the time of the voyage puts any deeper, historical understanding of that society at the mercy of both its own, particular agendas of self-presentation, and the mirage of stasis. Thus, representations of Chinese history in Persian texts written for or reproduced by the Ottoman state during the late 15th and early 16th centuries, situate the ascendant Ottoman Empire, now based in Constantinople, the former capital of “Rome”, within a canonical geographical-political framework, alongside other monumentalized empires. In this act of legitimizing by memorializing, our texts draw not only on (relatively) local textual traditions of commemoration, but on the commemorative/memorial practices and more recent historical memory of China's own Muslim diaspora, who, by means of a shared social technology of commemoration, both established their place in and connection to the larger 'ummah, and effectively mediated the Chinese and Anatolian Muslims' historical memories. That this possibility existed for our main author suggests not only a significant institutional and cultural continuity between Muslim communities in China and Anatolia, but also effective channels of communication, which may be said to constitute part of a far-flung Islamicate public sphere.

Since their arrival in India in the 8th century AD, the landscape of Iran has played a special role in the Parsi Zoroastrian community’s topography of memory. After links between the Zoroastrians of Iran and India were renewed in the 15th century, the priests of Iran conferred legitimacy to the Indian community by arbitrating religious debates. But by the 18th century, this system had begun to break down, causing significant rifts within the community as some groups began to question the authority of the Iranian priests and particularly their connection to the ancient pre-Islamic traditions. In this talk, I will be comparing two travelogues of Indian Zoroastrians who visited Iran during the 18th and 19th centuries: the Persian Din-khirad (Wisdom of the Religion) of Mulla Firuz b. Ka’us (1786), and the Gujarati Ezhar-e Siat-e Iran (Exposition of Travels in Iran) of Manekji Limji Hataria (1865). While these two journeys occurred within a century of each other, the depiction of Iran and of the Zoroastrian communities in Yazd and Kerman differs drastically between them. For Firuz, Iran was a land of prosperity and learning, where the rituals and teachings of the Zoroastrians had been continuously taught and practiced without corruption. On the other hand, Manekji described Iran as ruined, where the glory of Zoroastrianism had been practically extinguished after centuries of oppression. While Mulla Firuz’s travelogue has largely been forgotten, Manekji’s description became the foundation of most subsequent historiography describing Iranian Zoroastrianism. In my presentation, I will situate these texts within the contemporary debates concerning religious authority. Following sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel’s notion of a mnemonic community to describe Zoroastrianism, a group of communities connected in their social construction of shared memory through common narratives, commemoration of sacred places, and through shared, periodically repeated activities, I will demonstrate how the mnemonic landscape of Iran itself became a locus of the controversies of the 18th and 19th century, controversies which ultimately split the Parsi community into two groups, only one of which continued to recognize the authority of the Iranians. By reading these texts alongside an examination of these contemporary debates and the anxieties which constitute them, I will explore the complexity of these texts, and demonstrate some ways in which they reflect the tensions within the Indian Parsi community in their very depictions of landscape and peoples of Iran.