Medieval Persianate cultures have been greatly influenced by the genre of poetic verse romance that is seen as a kind of mirror for princes aiming to define the nature of kingship and qualifications making up an ideal sovereign. While scholars have focused on the ways the romance poem Haft Paykar, written by Nizami Ganja, 12th-century medieval poet from the Seljuk Empire functions as a "mirror for princes" and how Bahram Gur’s romantic relationships with the women he meets help him achieve kingship, much less has been focused on the ways Haft Paykar also functions as a "mirror for princesses" that teaches women how to be good rulers from a feminine if not female perspective. I am interested in exploring Nizami’s use of ambiguous characterization embodied by his female characters: a qiyan (singing slave girl) named Fitna, alongside seven princesses coming from India, Byzantine Rome, Tatar, and Slavic regions as well as Maghreb, Persia and China. I argue that these ambiguous female characters not only defy traditional, hegemonic definitions of concepts like fitna and javanmardi for us to reperceive the centrality of queenship and female power vital for empire-building in the medieval Persianate world. Most importantly, these ambiguous female characters, by embodying commensurate concepts to javanmardi such as futuwwa, junzi, and bogatyr from the Arabic, Chinese and Slavic traditions, allow us to rethink how women contributed to the construction of Persianate cosmopolitanism in a medieval context.

This paper examines the aesthetics of Yusuf al-Shirbini’s (d. after 1686 CE) Hazz al-quhuf bi-sharh qasid Abi Shaduf in relation to its social, cultural, and historical contexts. As an Arabic text from Ottoman Egypt in the 17th century, it was produced during the period that modern thinkers labeled ‘asr al-inhitat (period of decadence/decline/decay). Although recent scholarship has deconstructed the assertion that there indeed was a period of cultural decline between the 13th and 18th centuries CE, this scholarship has often focused on the rhetoric of decline—classifying it as Orientalist—rather than considering the cultural production of this so-called decadent period. As such, this paper seeks to bridge this gap by paying attention to the aesthetic qualities of Hazz al-quhuf, including its use of the colloquial Egyptian and its transgression of various genres. In the first part, drawing on the work of Nelly Hanna, Konrad Hirschler, and Thomas Bauer, this paper attempts to make a connection between the text’s aesthetics and socio-political context. What is the significance of Shirbini’s parodying of the sharh (commentary) genre? What does one make of the text’s focus on peasants as the “protagonists” of this text? What do the text’s intertexts—from Abu Nuwas’s (d. 814 CE) poetry and the 1001 Nights to Ibn Sudun’s poetry (d. 1464 CE) and al-Safadi’s (d. 1363 CE) commentaries—tell us about the text’s purpose and audience? In asking these questions, this paper argues that we must reassess our aesthetic sensibilities and read this text, and others from the same period, on their own terms, and it suggests how we might do so. In the second part, this paper draws on recent scholarship on premodern vernaculars in the Middle East, by Michiel Leezenberg and others, and situates Hazz al-quhuf within the history of this precolonial “vernacular revolution.” How can one assess the aesthetics of the text’s vernacular elements? What does the liberal use of the vernacular in the text tell us about Ottoman Egypt in the seventeenth century? This paper shows that the aesthetic qualities discussed in the first part are reflective of social and political shifts during this early modern period that are only now beginning to be studied by literary and cultural historians. This paper concludes by revisiting the inhitat paradigm in light of the discussion of the text’s aesthetic qualities, as well as its historical, social, and political milieu.

Critiques of the poetics associated with Tāza Gū’ī (Speaking Afresh), which spread in Persian poetry starting in the sixteenth century, often focus on the alleged difficulty of poetry composed in this mode. Related critiques are that the difficulty of Speaking Afresh poetry is excessive, unnecessary, and often unrewarding: that one may struggle through a poem, only to find that it has, in the end, no clear or definite meaning. Shawkat Bukhari (d. 1695) is one of the poets whom critics of the difficulty of Speaking Afresh may cite as a particularly difficult poet, one said to have composed poetry in the notorious ṭarz-i khayāl (manner of the imagination), as opposed to the earlier and less obscure ṭarz-i tams̱īl (manner of exemplification). A growing body of modern scholarship has worked to demonstrate how the poetics of Speaking Afresh functioned on its own terms, including by arguing against the notion of difficulty (or related concepts) as necessarily indicative of poetic weakness or decline. This paper aims to both draw on and contribute to this recent scholarly work by raising the question: what are the explicit and implicit understandings of meaning-making in Shawkat’s poetic collection (dīvan), and how might these resonate with a poetics that eludes fixed, straightforward, and unambiguous readings? In relation to Shawkat’s dīvan, I note connections to two broader emphases in Speaking Afresh poetry. The first is the poetic practice of maintaining multivalences within a single verse, often by retaining the literal meanings of metaphors alongside their figurative meanings; due to the resultant ambiguity, this practice may be subsumed under the category of difficulty. The second broader emphasis of interest is a concern with the question of the relationship between unchanging divine unity (vaḥdat) and variable worldly multiplicity (kis̱rat). While these two emphases may seem separate, I argue that the cultivation of multivalences in Shawkat’s dīvan resonates with and in fact models a certain understanding of the need to be comprehensive of worldly multiplicity, as a form of orientation toward unity.