Hundreds of years before habitus became a full-fledged sociological concept in the modern West, the polymath Ibn Khaldun (d. 808/1406), a champion of nurture over nature, demonstrated brilliantly how indispensable the acquisition of a suitable habitus was for successful functioning of humans in their social environment. Ibn Khaldun goes so far as to argue that acquired dispositions replace humans’ natural dispositions to make them who they are, in both thought and behavior. He shows how to become knowledgeable or skilled in whatever field, craft, competence, or language requires the acquisition of a suitable habitus. The old and perennial question of ‘nature versus nurture’, or the balance between nature and environment in the human character, has been questioned ceaselessly since antiquity. The habitus concept, originally used by Aristotle (in Greek: hexis), has played an important role throughout its long history in discussions probing this question. The concept, especially for its role in Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice, has gained considerable currency in the social sciences and humanities since the 1970’s. Yet, it is hardly known that through the translation of Greek texts, habitus, malaka and hay`a in Arabic, was appropriated and naturalized by thinkers in the medieval Islamic world. In fact, the concept was developed and integrated in various intellectual systems and environments since its introduction to the Islamic world in the 3rd/9th century. As other concepts, habitus crossed religious boundaries to be used in medieval Hebrew works as qinyan. This paper focuses on the habitus concept as it was known and used in the Islamic world. It discusses important landmarks in its development starting in the 3rd/9th century and ending in the 19th century, with an emphasis on its employment by al-Farabi, Miskawayh, Avicenna, Ibn Khaldun, and Muhammad ?Abduh. One of the interesting findings of this paper is that in the Islamic tradition of habitus, unlike the Western tradition until the early 20th century, the concept has been applied to analyze social and cultural phenomena. In other words, the concept was not limited to abstract philosophical discourse, but served as a sociological analytic tool by philosophically-informed scholars to make observations on their society.

This paper analyzes early Islamic historical accounts of the Sasanian monarch Khusraw II Parviz’s (d. 628 CE) multiple dealings with the Arab tribes and states of the Arabian peninsula and Iraq, including the Lakhmids of Hira, the Banu Tayyi’, and towards the end of his reign, the embryonic Muslim community. The sources under consideration include the works of Tabari, Bel‘ami, Mas‘udi, Yaq‘ubi, Dinawari, Tha‘alibi, Ibn 'Abd Rabbihi, and Abu’l-Faraj al-Isfahani. These chroniclers’ reports of Parviz’s treatment of and meetings with the Arabs bare telltale signs of anachronistic embellishment. They highlight conspicuous examples of the Iranian sovereign’s hubris, decadence, and disdain for Arab culture, which contrast starkly with illustrations of the Arabs as embodying idealistic values and characteristics associated with the rugged lifestyle and traditions of the Bedouin. My paper asks how contemporaneous attitudes and biases of the early Islamic world have been projected onto the historical portrayal of Parviz in the context of his dealings with the Arabs, and to what end. I argue that in the Islamic sources, Parviz and the Arabs he encounters serve as anachronistic protagonists of the Shu‘ubiyya debate, which pitted the proponents of Iranian civilization (the Shu‘ubis) against the defenders of the Arab cultural heritage (the anti-Shu‘ubis). This controversy reached its height between the 8th and 10th centuries in the urban centers of Iraq and Iran. By emphasizing his predilection for luxury, oppression, his haughty disregard of the Arabs, and finally his self-righteous rejection of the message of the Prophet, Parviz is made, in these highly formulaic accounts, to exemplify the anti-Shu‘ubis’ defaming critiques of the culture and imperial legacy of Iran. In contrast, by demonstrating their munificence, steadfastness, and eloquence in the face of the Iranian sovereign, the Arabs whom Parviz comes across in the course of his reign conform to ideals of Arab culture circulated among the nostalgic defenders of the Arab tradition. Furthermore, I argue that the reports of these encounters form part of a broader didactic narrative contained within the Islamic historical tradition explaining the rise of the Arabs under the banner of Islam, and the fall of the Sasanian dynasty. In this way, evocative themes, symbols, and arguments drawn from the Shu‘ubiyya controversy that have been projected onto these historical adversaries serve to both foreshadow and legitimize the Arabs’ conquest of Iran.

In seventy-four couplets, the famous Anatolian poet Sheykhi (d.1431) composed a poem, Harname (The Story of the Donkey), narrating the story of a donkey that, after seeing the oxen comfortably grazing in the meadow while he was under the burden of carrying a heavy load, aspires to change the conditions in which it lives. Found by its master resting on the fields that he ruined, the donkey is punished by its master who beats it and cuts off its ears and tail. Sheykhi presented this poem to his patron, the Ottoman sultan Murad II. This story, commonly considered comic, violent, and unusual, is at the same time referred as the example par excellence of Ottoman satire. However, there are many questions with regards to its reception: Why would a renowned poet present such an uncommon poem to the sultan? How did this short and unusual literary work acquired an uninterrupted acknowledgement by readers and scholars at the same time? Already in the sixteenth century Ottoman biographical dictionaries of poets regarded Sheykhi as the founder of Anatolian lyric poetry and attempted to explain the rationale behind his unusual composition. Yet, the answers given in these biographical dictionaries differ considerably from each other. In this paper I argue that different and at times contradictory evaluations of Sheykhi's controversial poem signifies diverging forms of interpretation produced by vested interests of the sixteenth century Ottoman biographers. This paper first presents a brief account of the poem, its composition, language, and imagery. Then it considers and evaluates how the three most renowned Ottoman biographical dictionaries explained the imagery and plot of the Harname in relation to Sheykhi's life story. Finally, I propose a new methodology to study the sixteenth century Ottoman literary critical tradition through a detailed analysis of controversies developed around an unusual fifteenth century work of literature.

The tazkira – or biographical dictionary of poets – has always been one of the basic sources for Persian literary history. E.G. Browne was heavily reliant on the tazkiras at his disposal while writing his Literary History of Persia. No scholar of Persian cultural history has been able to ignore the tazkira sources. These are texts that tell us who were the most prominent literary figures in given places and time periods, and provide us with examples of their work, which is sometimes only extant in such anthologies. We can use tazkiras to reconstruct cultural trends; to learn about courtly patronage networks; and so forth. In recent years, scholars such as Paul Losensky and Ertugrul Ökten have made innovative use of tazkiras to enhance our understanding of literary history in the late Timurid and early Safavid-Mughal periods. Fortunately for aspiring students, there remain a number of these sources that have barely been utilized in the secondary literature. In this paper, I will discuss one such text: the Tuhfa-yi Sami. Completed in 1550 CE, the Tuhfa-yi Sami is a fascinating work in several respects. Its author, Sam Mirza, was one of the brothers of the Safavid Shah Tahmasp I (r. 1524-76). Sam Mirza was a poet in his own right, in addition to being an avid collector of literary information. Beyond the unique position of its author, the Tuhfa-yi Sami stands out as perhaps the only major tazkira written in Iran during Tahmasp’s reign. While this text is a rare contemporary source on Iran in the mid-16th century CE, it has been utilized sparsely in both historical and literary scholarship. I will provide an overview of this tazkira and begin to address some of the basic questions surrounding it, such as: What can we tell about Sam Mirza’s goals in the compilation of this work? How does he view himself in relation to previous tazkira authors and literary figures? What are his aesthetic priorities when assessing the work of other poets? Finally, how is the text organized; and in particular, what are some of the difficulties that it presents to readers who hope to glean historical data from it? My aim, consistent with current trends in Persian literature scholarship, is to probe the ways that the Tuhfa-yi Sami might be used to learn more about the cultural history of the early Safavid period, which remains poorly understood.