This paper examines the presence of Persian in printed French texts of the seventeenth-century. It focuses on a unique copy of Jean Thévenot’s third volume of his Relation d’un voyage (1684), which describes his travels to Mughal India. Held in the Rochegude Collection in Albi, France, this copy includes what appears to be authentic Persian documents—Shah ‘Abbas II’s seal, translated into French, and a handwritten letter. A note on the title page indicates that François Pétis de la Croix, King Louis XIV’s interpreter and owner of the book in 1692, added these documents to Thévenot’s text. This paper, thus, interrogates the inclusion, by a reader and peer familiar with Oriental languages, of Persian realia in a travelogue written in French and meant for a literate European audience who understood little Persian, Arabic, and Ottoman Turkish. As the study of Persian emerged in France with the publication (in Amsterdam by the French Carmelite Ange de Saint Joseph) of the first Latin-Italian-Persian dictionary, what does the insertion of Arabic script and of Persian documents within a French text reveal about the knowledge and the exoticism of the Persian language and of Safavid Persia at the end of the seventeenth century? What do these additions say about the author of the Relation, his collaborators—printers and illustrators—, literary executors, and readers? What does the visual quality of the Arabic script in a French text add to or subtract from Thévenot’s overall literary, cultural, and political project? How does the text differ from previous travel narratives attempting to convey and translate languages written with an alphabet other than the Roman alphabet, and for which there was no movable type in France? To what extent are these political documents in Persian translated in the French travelogue under consideration and why? To what extent is the translation of Persian a tool of empire in de la Croix’s copy of Thévenot’s text? Are Thévenot and de la Croix themselves agents of empire? Following Laura Doyle’s approach of inter-imperiality, this paper examines how early modern Eurasian (Safavid, Mughal, and French) empires collide and meet through languages in print.

The period between the First and Second World Wars brought structural changes to Iranian society. The First Pahlavi state (1925-1941) began social projects to transform traditional Iranian society into a modern westernized one. On the one hand, the establishment of a powerful central government, development of the state bureaucracy, nationalization of the education system, and state-sponsored industrialization produced a modern middle class, which could follow the desired Western lifestyle. On the other hand, the state systematically attempted to transform the traditional lifestyle of the other social groups by banning their social practices and regulating their spaces. This paper focuses on the spatial transformations of Tehran during the period between the two World Wars. It shows that the transformation of the city should be examined through the framework of the conflict between the modern and traditional middle classes. By examining social lives of the traditional and modern middle classes and their social spaces, this paper demonstrates how the policies of the state promoted one and abolished the other. Through the discourse analysis of Iranian periodicals and municipality’s regulations of the era, the paper argues that spatial policies of the state were effective tools for the transformation of Iranian society. In another word, the codification of spaces was a means of subjectification; the state was able to (re)produce its desired subjects through the subtle control of spaces. In this process, the modern middle class played a decisive role in the production of a power relation in which the traditional strata and their social spaces were depicted as backward, obsolete, traditional, religious, unhealthy, and sad and the modern middle class as progressive, European, secular, healthy, scientific, and happy. This paper argues that the First Pahlavi state utilized the social power of space as an instrument for social control and change, and the transformation of Tehran should be examined through this framework of the instrumental use of spaces and the conflict between the modern and traditional classes.

This paper explores how “the poor” is constructed as a distinct category with social, ethical and cosmological valences in the discourse of Sasanian Iran’s Zoroastrian elite (this narrow focus does not reflect any intentional “elitism,” of course; this is simply the only level of Sasanian society whose views on this topic can be recovered in any depth), and suggests how this discourse might fit into a broader context of interaction and conversation with non-Iranian states, non-Zoroastrian religious communities and non-elites. In general, my analytic framework and guiding questions follow those laid out in Peter Brown’s Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire (2002) which traces the idea of the “poor” (and particularly the “care for the poor”) as a historical phenomenon in Sasanian Iran’s western neighbor; to work toward an even more comprehensive and nuanced picture of late antique social imaginations is the main aim here. On the Iranian side, this treatment draws mainly on the methodologies and findings of Werner Sundermann’s Commendatio Pauperum (1976) and Iris Colditz’s Zur Sozialterminologie der iranischen Manichäer (2000). The main source base is the Book Pahlavi corpus, but other texts that reflect Sasanian ideologies on some level (whether due to Sasanian provenance or influence) in Avestan, Arabic, New Persian, Armenian and Syriac, as well as some sigillographic and epigraphic evidence, are drawn on as well, as I show how discussions of (what is generally translated as) “the poor” or “poverty” participate in larger conceptual systems of social structure, ethical obligations and cosmology. In particular, I focus on three characterizations of the “poor,” each corresponding to a specific Pahlavi adjective associated with words for “poor” (mainly driyōš and škōh) in the sources: “content” (hunsand), “deserving [of advocacy, provisions, etc.]” (arzānīg) and “noble” (ahlaw). The first two reflect an ideal of social harmony and mutual obligation; the latter may point toward a more problematic blurring of foundational social boundaries, as there are indications that some within the Zoroastrian community conceived of material “poverty” as an absolute virtue and sought it out for themselves (this perhaps reflecting contact with Indic or Christian asceticism). Insofar as discourse and “reality” are in constant dialogue, and given the fact that many of the authors and audiences of our sources actually influenced state policies, these conclusions have implications that extend beyond “abstract” discourse into the “real life” of Sasanian Iran (and, by extension, the Islamic world that directly succeeded it).

Islamic sources from the seventh to eleventh centuries refer to Berbers, Vikings, Qadariyya, and Hindus as “Zoroastrians” (majūs). Previous scholarship attempted to explain this curious practice through some purported link between these groups and actual Zoroastrians. Such links are tenuous at best. Other scholars interpreted the term as a legal category for non-Muslims who did not meet the Qur’anic standard of People of the Book (ahl al-kitāb). However, that does not explain its use with regard to Muslims or groups that remained beyond the reach of Islamic law. This paper argues that Muslims used the term “Zoroastrians” rhetorically, applying it toward any group deemed unfamiliar, pagan, or heretical. When Viking raiders harried the coasts of Spain in the ninth century, Andalusi Muslims called them “Zoroastrians” because they were unfamiliar. Andalusi Muslims continued to identify Vikings primarily as Zoroastrians even after adopting more accurate terminology, like Urdumāniyyūn (Northmen). Yet Muslims from further east, like Ahmad ibn Fadlan, did not use this misnomer because they had experience with Zoroastrians from Iran. In Medina, early Islamic philosophers dismissed their antagonists as “Zoroastrians.” The Jabriyya, proponents of predestination, deemed the Qadariyya, proponents of free will, to be such, although not because their philosophy bore a resemblance to Zoroastrian beliefs. Rather, according to heresiographical literature like ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Baghdadi’s Farq bayn al-Firāq, Jabriyya should limit their association with the heretical Qadariyya in the same way that Muslims were supposed to limit their association with Zoroastrians. The comparison was figurative, not literal. Shi‘i Muslims also adopted this term. In the tenth century, the Fatimid caliph al-Mu‘izz removed an Isma‘ili missionary (dā‘ī) from his post in India after the man allowed recent converts to Islam to observe their previous dietary customs, which the court found objectionable. The Fatimid jurist al-Nu‘man, in a letter to his subordinates in Sind, labeled these lapsed Muslims “Zoroastrians” in order to emphasize their heterodoxy. Indeed, elsewhere in the text he simply calls them mushrikūn. In each of these cases—drawn from across the early Islamic world—the best interpretation of the available evidence is that Muslims applied the term “Zoroastrians” to groups that were unfamiliar, pagan, or heretical. All were rhetorical Zoroastrians; these groups had no plausible connection to Iranian Zoroastrianism. Therefore, this nomenclature sheds light on the process of identity formation among Muslims, as well as lingering ambivalence about Zoroastrians, in early Islamic history.