Little attention has been paid to the intertextual relationships between H?fez’s ghazals and the divans of his contemporaries. Most of the studies are devoted to the individuation of parallel imagery and thoughts, without considering direct contacts set by literary strategies such as imitation and response (esteqb?l and jav?b) taking place on the ground of textual formal aspects. This is the case for the literary relationship between H?fez and the Sufi poet Sh?h Ne‘matollah Vali (1330-1431), which has been uncritically accepted as the archetype of H?fez’s struggle against religious hypocrisy. One of the most famous ghazals by H?fez (?n?n ke kh?k r? be nazar kimiy? konand, “Those who transmute dust in alchemy with a glance /could they ever glimpse at us with their eyes?”) is commonly considered to be an ironical and derisive response to Sh?h Vali’s spiritual leadership. The aim of this paper is to argue that: 1) H?fez’s source is not the ghazal by Sh?h Vali, but two poems by Sa‘di; 2) Hafez has never mentioned Shah Vali either directly or indirectly; 3) rather, it is his ghazal that may be the source for Sh?h Vali’s response. 4) Finally, H?fez’s ghazal can be read as a praise poem addressed to a member of the Mozaffarid court, probably Turansh?h, Sh?h Shoj?‘’s most famous minister. Apart from the close reading of the internal textual evidence (and the divergences reported by the first 34 manuscripts recording H?fez’s ghazal), the demonstration of the above proposal is based on arguments conducted around the analysis of the following documents: a. An ambiguous passage in the biography of Sh?h Vali by ‘Abd al-Razz?q Kerm?ni’s, which is the first historical source (1501) suggesting a relationship between the two ghazals by H?fez and Sh?h Vali. b. The explication of “?n?n ke kh?k r?” delivered by the two most important commentators of H?fez’s div?n: Sudi Bosnavi (Istanbul, 1595) and Khatmi L?huri (Lahore, early XVII century). c. All ghazals composed by H?fez’s contemporaries which imitate both “?n?n ke kh?k r?” (see: the poet-princess Jah?n Malek Kh?tun, Kam?l Khojandi and Bosh?q At‘eme Shir?zi) and Sa‘di hypotext (‘Obeyd Z?k?ni). d. A ghazal by Sh?h Vali explicitly conceived as an imitation of Rumi and displaying the same rhetorical pattern of the re-elaboration of H?fez’s poem.

In his pioneering work 'Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism, and Nationalist Historiography,' Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi explores how the role of Persianate India in producing Iranian ‘modernity’ and national identity has been written out of history by Iranian and Indian nationalist narratives. He ends with a call for other scholars to engage with the questions he has raised, but in the decade since the publication of Refashioning Iran, not enough have done so. Current scholarly work such as Tavakoli-Targhi’s addresses the impact of intellectual developments in India, such as neo-Zoroastrianism and the fascination with pre-Islamic Iranian culture, on the social milieu of late 19th- and early 20th-century Iran. However, the role of the ‘Indian style’ (sabk-e hendi)— with its use of innovative vocabulary and popular language, attention to economic and social reality, and emphasis of content over style— has been under-analyzed or ignored. In analyzing Iranian intellectual and literary trends at the turn of the 20th century, the function of the ‘Indian style’ as emblem of what lies outside the fold of the Iranian nation-state deserves a place alongside and within the revolutionary currents of socialism and nationalism that have received far more academic attention. This paper expands upon Tavakoli-Targhi’s work and examines how turn-of-the-century Persian literary scholarship of Iran dealt with the ‘Indian style’ as a symbol of once-Persianate India. Following Derrida’s ‘hauntology,’ I demonstrate that the recently-erased history of Persianate India haunts literary critics of the age such as Mohammad-Taqi Bahar; for them, the 'Indian style' marks a decline in Persian literature and has no place in the newly-imagined Iranian nationalist modernity, yet, contradictorily, I will explore how the 'Indian style' also may serve as an early prototype of the very kind of modernism promoted by its Iranian critics. My paper demonstrates that India cannot be erased from Iran’s turn-of-the-century literary and intellectual scene, despite the best attempts of nationalists to the contrary.

In Europe, following the rise in the number of books, magazines, and scholarly journals in early 19th century, literary magazines and reviews also began to flourish. As periodicals broadly concerned with literary products, these literary magazines often publish short stories, poetry, and essays, book announcements, and biographies, and literary criticism. In Iran, on the contrary, such journals were initially the prime vehicle for reform and the promotion of new and western ideas. Substantial reports and reviews about Persian literary works began to appear in the journals of the late Qajar (1779-1925) period. Even though none of these early journals can be classified as a literary journal per-se, a great majority of them featured issues and topics related to literature. Even if they did not proclaim any literary interest, many of their articles written about politics, civilization, and modern issues were accompanied and supported by poetry. This paper argues that the rise of journals and criticism, weather literary or social, in fact coincided with the call for social change and modernization of the country by intellectuals who had come into contact with western thoughts whether in Europe, Caucasia, the Ottoman territories, India, or elsewhere. In fact, these journals were published not only in Iran but also in diasporas across the globe. Even if they were published in provincial cities in Iran, they also showed an astonishing tendency toward addressing an international audience beyond the Iranian borders. To be sure, a good number of these publications, particularly those in newspaper format, were bilingual or even trilingual. Finally, very much like the literary activities in general, literary journals had a close affinity to the dominant discursive paradigms of their times whether religious, modernist, nationalist, or Marxist causing some of sort of inconsistency in pursuing their goals. Based on archival research as well as content and historical analyses, this paper sets to study the literary, political, and universal aspects of this body of journalistic works focusing on a number of prominent publications such as Tarbiyat, Pars, Adab, Nasim-e Shomal, Armaghan, and Daneshkadeh. The paper also benefits from a number of relevant seminal works by such scholars as R. Sadr, Y. Arianpur, and M. T. Bahar.

Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh is an epic that has captured the imagination of readers for the last millennium. This is a work essentially about the Iranian nation, and it focuses mainly on kings and their exploits. Nevertheless, this nation seems ungrounded in specific geographical realities. In other words, the epic is relatively disengaged with defining or describing cities in which members of a royal family live, traverse, destroy, or construct. When cities are mentioned, however, one may characterize them in relation to the tripartite division the text follows, relating cities to the mythical, heroic, and historical ages. In the Shahnameh, the way a city is posited in relation to a particular member of the royal class suggests evolving ideas about kingly responsibility to subjects. There is a discernable break between the mythical, heroic, and historical ages in terms of rulers or princes as civilizing agents. The mythical kings do not relate to their kingship by establishing cities, but they bring civilization to their subjects by teaching them how to prepare food, make fire, domesticate animals, and so forth. Later, members of royal families in the heroic age destroy and establish cities, which function mainly as pawns in various power struggles. Finally, the historical kings pride themselves on taking over or establishing cities with abundant natural provisions. In these cities, subjects may work, live, and flourish independently of the king, but his generosity is ultimately what allows them to do so. While the epic maintains a certain geographical imprecision, Ferdowsi highlights the changing nature of cities to provide readers with a palpable sense of a developing urban consciousness, giving the Iranian nation a heightened claim to urbanizing and civilizing tendencies. While this paper focuses heavily on the literary aspect of the Shahnameh, I hope to incorporate some visual elements through a discussion of relevant paintings in an effort to address the following questions: does the visual component of Shahnameh studies correlate with the way that cities, towns, and other sites are portrayed in the text? What kinds of liberties do artists take in their depictions that the writer perhaps did not take? These are just a few questions related to the visual aspect of the Shahnameh that I will address in this paper, which will ultimately add a great deal to understanding its literary approach to urban organization.