Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T07:19:56.713Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

To Preserve and Protect: Husayn Vaᶜiz-i Kashifi and Perso-Islamic Chancellery Culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Colin Paul Mitchell
Colin Paul Mitchell*
Affiliation:
Dalhousie University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

It is Generally Agreed that the Beginning of the Persian Literary Renaissance of the tenth–eleventh centuries was concomitant with the emergence of a bureaucratic tradition that had its roots in pre-Islamic Sasanian Iran. The avatars of these bureaucratic principles in medieval Perso-Islamic history—Nizam al-Mulk, Rashid al-Din, Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, to name the most famous—were trained in Arabic and Persian, wrote scholarly treatises on a wide array of religious, philosophical, and scientific topics, and advocated, among other things, the need for responsible rule and consistent administration according to Islamic law and custom. These admonitions were generally directed at their Turkic and Mongol dynastic patrons whose steppe traditions were often at cross-purposes with the running of a sedentary society that depended on irrigated agriculture, commerce, public works, and systems of taxation. Prominent Persian bureaucrats and their descendents undertook these duties and were able to accrue considerable power and wealth, but often at a high cost when we read of the fates of Rashid al-Din, Saᶜd al-Dawla and Juvayni.

Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 36 , Issue 4: Husayn Vaᶜiz-i Kashifi , December 2003 , pp. 485 - 507
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for Iranian Studies 2003

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. On the intrigue and insecurity involved in serving as a Persian administrative official in Saljuq and Mongol times, see Lambton, Ann K. S., Continuity and Change in Medieval Persia: Aspects of Administrative, Economic and Social History, 11th–14th Century (Albany, 1988), 63–67Google Scholar.

2. Lambton, Continuity and Change, 221–24; Barthold, W., Turkestan Down to the Mongol Invasion (London, 1928), 227Google Scholar.

3. Kafadar, Cemal, Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State (Berkeley, 1995), 18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. See Lentz, Thomas and Lowry, Glenn, Timur and the Princely Vision: Persian Art and Culture in the Fifteenth Century (Los Angeles, 1989)Google Scholar; and Subtelny, Maria Eva, “The Timurid Legacy: A Reaffirmation and a Reassessment,” Cahiers d’Asie Centrale 3–4 (1997): 9–19Google Scholar. See also Lentz, Thomas, “Dynastic Imagery in Early Timurid Wall Painting,” Muqarnas 10 (1993): 253–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. Lentz and Lowry, Timur and the Princely Vision, 160; Losensky, Paul, Welcoming Fighani: Imitation and Poetic Individuality in the Safavid-Mughal Ghazal (Costa Mesa, 1998), 135Google Scholar.

6. Losensky, Welcoming Fighani, 112.

7. Quinn, Sholeh, Historical Writing during the Reign of Shah Abbas: Ideology, Imitation, and Legitimacy in Safavid Chronicles (Salt Lake City, 2000)Google Scholar.

8. Losensky, Welcoming Fighani, 136.

9. Losensky, Welcoming Fighani, 136.

10. H. R. Roemer, “Inshāᵓ,” EI 2, 3: 1241.

11. Qutaybah, Ibn, Adab al-kātib, ed. Grünert, M. (Leiden, 1900)Google Scholar.

12. al-Suli, Muhammad b. Yahya, Adab al-kuttāb, ed. Cheikho, L. (Beirut, 1921)Google Scholar.

13. Sadan, Joseph, “Nouveaux documents sur scribes et copistes,” Revue des Études Islamiques 45 (1977): 41–87Google Scholar; Gacek, Adam, “Technical Practices and Recommendations Recorded by Classical and Post-Classical Arabic Scholars Concerning the Copying and Correction of Manuscripts,” in Les Manuscrits du Moyen-Orient: Essais de codicologie et de paléographie (Actes du Colloque d’Istanbul, 26–29 mai 1986), ed. Déroche, F. (Paris, 1989), 51–60Google Scholar.

14. al-Baghdadi, Bahaᵓ al-Din ibn Muᵓajjad, al-Tawassul ilā al-tarassul, ed. Bahmanyar, Ahmad (Tehran, 1936)Google Scholar.

15. The famous Delhi Sultanate poet wrote a work in 1319 on epistolography entitled Rasāᵓil al-iᶜjāz (Lucknow, 1876).

16. Bayhaqi's inshā work, the Zīnat al-kuttāb, has unfortunately been lost.

17. Muᶜin al-Din Muhammad Zamchi Isfizari, Risāla-i qavānīn (or Inshā-yi Muᶜīn Zamchī), Ms., Lahore, Punjab University Library, Pe II Li 2324/231; Ms., Tehran, Kitabkhanah-i Majils-i Sina, no. 318.

18. al-Vasiᶜ, Nizam al-Din ᶜAbd, Manshāᵓ al-inshā, vol. 1 (Tehran, 1978)Google Scholar.

19. Ahmad Jami, Nur al-Din ᶜAbd al-Rahman, Nāmah-hā va munshaᵓāt-i Jāmī, ed. Urunbayif, ᶜIsam al-Din and Rahmanof, Asrar (Tehran, 2002)Google Scholar (henceforth Jami, Munshaᵓāt).

20. Roemer, Hans R., Staatsschreiben der Timuridenzeit: Das Šaraf-nāmä des ᶜAbdallāh Marwārīd in kritischer Auswertung (Wiesbaden, 1952)Google Scholar.

21. Husayn Vaᶜiz-i Kashifi, Makhzan al-inshā, Ms., Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, ancien fonds persan 73 (henceforth Kashifi, Makhzan). I relied primarily on the French manuscript since it was one of the earliest copies (1543), and came from the personal library of the great French Renaissance statesman, Jean-Baptiste Colbert. In all likelihood, this copy came originally from the Ottoman empire since Colbert had sent men like the Marquis de Nointel and Antoine Galland to the Levant in the 1670s and 1680s for the purposes of, among other things, collecting Oriental manuscripts. I also consulted a seventeenth-century copy in the British Library, Ms. Add. 25,865. A lithographed abridgment is available under the title Ṣaḥīfa-i shāhī. For a description of the Paris manuscript, see Richard, Francis, Catalogue des manuscrits persans, vol. 1: Ancien fonds (Paris, 1989), 101Google Scholar.

22. Rypka, J., History of Iranian Literature (Dordrecht, 1968), 313CrossRefGoogle Scholar; G. M. Wickens, “Aḵlāqe Moḥsenī,” EIr, 1: 724.

23. Browne, E. G., A Literary History of Persia (Cambridge, 1964), 3: 438Google Scholar; Subtelny, Maria E., “Scenes from the Literary Life of Timurid Herat,” in Savory, R. and Agius, D. A., eds., Logos Islamikos: Studia Islamica in Honorem Georgii Michaelis Wickens (Toronto, 1984), 145Google Scholar.

24. Ghiyas al-Din b. Humam al-Din Khvandamir, Ḥabīb al-siyar fī akhbār-i afrād albashar, ed. Dabirsiyaqi, M. (Tehran, 1984), 1: 346Google Scholar.

25. Rumlu, Hasan, Aḥsan al-tavārīkh, ed. and trans. Seddon, C. N. (Baroda, 1934), 2: 37Google Scholar.

26. Browne, A Literary History of Persia, 3: 504Google Scholar.

27. Rypka, History of Iranian Literature, 433–35.

28. Jami talked of Anvari as “almost a miracle,” and later Abu al-Hasan Husayni Farahani wrote an extensive commentary, Sharḥ-i mushkilāt-i Dīvān-i Anwārī in 1015/1606. Rypka, History of Iranian Literature, 198; de Bruijn, “Anwārī,” EIr, 1: 143.

29. Kashifi, Makhzan, fol. 7a. See Anvari, Awhad al-Din, Dīvān-i Anvārī, ed. Nafisi, Safᶜd (Tehran, 1958), 199Google Scholar.

30. No less than seven of the model verses provided on fol. 7b are from previous classical Persian poets, including four from Anvari. See Kashifi, Makhzan, fols. 7a, 7b. See Anvari, Dīvān-i Anvārī, 159, 151, and 155.

31. Anvari, Dīvān-i Anvārī, 92.

32. Kashifi, Makhzan, fol. 25a; Nizami, Haft paykar (Lucknow, 1934), 51Google Scholar.

33. Kashifi, Makhzan, fol. 25a; Nizami, Kulliyāt-i Khamsah (Tehran, 1958), 12Google Scholar.

34. Kashifi, Makhzan, fol. 7b; Nizami, Kulliyāt-i Khamsah, 690.

35. Kashifi, Makhzan, fol. 25a; Nizami, Kulliyāt-i Khamsah, 507.

36. Kashifi, Makhzan, fol. 7b.

37. Kashifi, Makhzan, fol. 7b.

38. Kashifi, Makhzan, fol. 81a; Hafiz, Dīvān, nos. 33 and 489.

39. Kashifi, Makhzan, fol. 28b; Khaqani, Afzal al-Din Shirvani, Dīvān, ed. Sajjadi, Ziya al-Din (Tehran, 1960), 60Google Scholar and 261.

40. “Everywhere and every time is prosperous and civilized/With the emperor of the earth and the king of the age.” Kashifi, Makhzan, fol. 7b.

41. Kashifi, Makhzan, fol. 25a.

42. Kashifi, Makhzan, fol. 81b; Jami, Munshaᵓāt, 112.

43. Kashifi, Makhzan, fol. 81a; Jami, Munshaᵓāt, 275.

44. Jami, Munshaᵓāt, 239; also ᶜAbd al-Husayn Navaᵓi, Asnād va mukātabāt-i tārīkhī-i Īrān az Tīmūr tā Shāh Ismāᶜīl (Tehran, 1963), 446. For a reference to it see, Woods, John, The Aqquyunlu: Clan, Confederation, Empire, rev. ed. (Salt Lake City, 1999), 89Google Scholar.

45. See Szuppe, Maria, Entre Timourides, Uzbeks, et Safavides: Questions d’histoire politique et sociale de Hérat dans la première moitié du XVIe siècle (Paris, 1992), 69–77Google Scholar.

46 Yusuf ibn Muhammad, Badāyiᶜ al-inshā, Ms., London, British Library, I.O. Islamic 1972.

47. Marshall, D. N., Mughals in India: A Bibliographic Survey of Manuscripts (London, 1967), 495–96Google Scholar.

48. Khvandamir, Nāmah-i nāmī, Ms., Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, Suppl. persan 1842, fol. 8.

49. Kashifi, Makhzan, fol. 6b.

50. Yusuf ibn Muhammad, Badāyiᶜ al-inshā, fol. 2b.

51. Kashifi, Makhzan, fol. 27a.

52. Yusuf ibn Muhammad, Badāyiᶜ al-inshā, fol. 3a.

53. Kashifi, Makhzan, fol. 27a.

54. Mohiuddin, M., The Chancellery and Persian Epistolography under the Mughals (Calcutta, 1971), 176Google Scholar.

55. Islam, Riazul, A Calendar of Documents on Indo-Persian Relations, 2 vols. (Tehran, 1979), 1: 35.Google Scholar

56. Alam, Muzaffar, “The Pursuit of Persian Language in Mughal Politics,” Modern Asian Studies 31 (1998): 324Google Scholar.

57. Watson, G., “Interpretations of Central Asian Influences on Mughal India: The Historical Debate,” South Asia 18 (1995): 1–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

58. ᶜAbd al-Husayn al-Nasir al-Tusi, Munshaᵓāt al-Ṭūsī, Ms., Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, Suppl. persan 1838, fol. 213b.

59. ᶜAbd al-ᶜAli Tabrizi, Munshaᵓāt-i nāẓir al-mamālik al-sulṭāniyya Ḥājjī ᶜAbd al-ᶜAlī Tabrīzī, Ms., London, British Library, Add. 6600, fol. 3a.

60. Khvandamir, Ḥabīb al-siyar, 4: 507; Khurshah ibn Qubad al-Husayni, Tārīkh-i īlchī-i Niẓāmshāh, ed. M. R. Nasiri and K. Haneda (Tehran, 2000), 54. See also Szuppe, Entre Timourides, 79–97, and Jean Aubin, “Révolution chiite et conservatisme: Les soufis de Lâhejân, 1500–1514,” Moyen Orient et Océan Indien 1 (1984): 1–40.

61. Both are available in Fekete, Lajos, Einfμhrung in die persische Paläographie (Budapest, 1977), 383–94Google Scholar.

62. Fekete, Einfμhrung, 384, and 390.

63. Kashifi, Makhzan, fol. 6b; Fekete, Einfμhrung, 384.

64. Kashifi, Makhzan, fol. 28b; ᶜAbd al-Husayn Navaᵓi, Shāh Ṭahmāsp Ṣafavī: Majmūᶜa-i asnād va mukātabāt-i tārīkhī hamrāh bā yāddāsht-hā-yi tafṣīl (Tehran, 1971), 462.

65. ᶜAbd al-Husayn Navaᵓi, Shāh ᶜAbbās: Majmūᶜa-i asnād va mukātabāt-i tārīkhī hamrāh bā yāddāsht-hā-yi tafṣīl, (Tehran, 1987), 3: 338.

66. Kashifi, Makhzan, fol. 27a; al-Tusi, Munshaᵓāt, fol. 160a.

67. al-Tusi, Munshaᵓāt, fols. 242b–43a.

68. Anonymous, Maktūbāt, Ms., London, British Library, I.O. Islamic 379, fols. 113a-114a; Kashifi, Makhzan, fol. 6b.

69. Sharaf al-Din Hasan Shifaᵓi, Ms., London, British Library, Munshaᵓāt-i Shifāᵓī, fol. 91a. This work is included on fols. 67–97 in Anonymous, Majmūᶜa, Ms., London, British Library, Or. 13215.

70. See Nawzad, F., Nāmah-hā-yi Khān Aḥmad Khān Gīlānī (Tehran, 1994)Google Scholar. A number of Gilani documents have also been transcribed and edited by Navaᵓi. See Navaᵓi, Shāh Ṭahmāsp Ṣafavī, 102–41.

71. Navaᵓi, Shāh Ṭahmāsp Ṣafavī, 127.

72. Navaᵓi, Shāh Ṭahmāsp Ṣafavī, 476.

73. al-Tusi, Munshaᵓāt, fol. 254a.

74. ᶜAbd al-Ghaffar Siddiqi Husayni Haravi, Ṣaḥīfat al-ikhlāṣ, Ms., Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Suppl. persan 1061, fols. 2a and 4a.

75. Abu al-Qasim Haydar Ivughli, Nuskha-i jāmiᶜ-i murāsalāt-i ūlū al-albāb, Ms., London, British Library, Add. 7688, fols. 83a-84a.

76. Kashifi, Makhzan, fol. 22a.

77. Ivughli, Nuskha-i jāmiᶜ-i murāsalāt-i ūlū al-albāb, fols. 84a–84b.

78. Kashifi, Makhzan, fol. 2b.

79. Kashifi, Makhzan, fol. 3a.

80. Kashifi, Makhzan, fol. 3a.

81. Kashifi, Makhzan, fol. 3b.

82. Kashifi, Makhzan, fol. 3b.

83. Sadan, “Nouveaux documents sur scribes et copistes,” 56. Specifically, see Muhammad Nakhjuvani, Dastūr al-kātib fī taᶜyīn al-marātib, 2 vols. in 3, ed. A. A. Alizade (Moscow, 1964–76), 1: 5–8, and Nizami, Manshaᵓ al-inshā, 3–5.

84. Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, Akhlāq-i Nāṣirī (Tehran, 1960), 210.

85. Tusi, Akhlāq-i Nāṣirī, 209.

86. Walzer, Richard, ed., Al-Farabi on the Perfect State: Abu Nasr al-Farabi's Mabādiᵓ ārāᵓ ahl al-madīna al-fāḍila (Oxford, 1985), 359Google Scholar.

87. Kashifi, Akhlāq-i Muḥsinī (Lucknow, 1878), 4–5Google Scholar. See the article by Maria Subtelny in this volume, 604ff.

88. Kashifi, Risāla al-ᶜaliyya fi’l-aḥādī al-nabawiyya, ed. Muhaddis, Jalal al-Din Husayni (Tehran, 1965), 31Google Scholar.

89. Tusi, Akhlāq-i Nāṣirī, 243; Walzer, Al-Farabi on the Perfect State, 437, n. 629.

90. Tusi, Akhlāq-i Nāṣirī, 239.

91. Marlow, Louise, Hierarchy and Egalitarianism in Islamic Thought (Cambridge, 1997), 57Google Scholar.

92. Marlow, Hierarchy and Egalitarianism, 50.

93. Dabashi, Hamid, “Khwajah Nasir al-Din al-Tusi: The Philosopher/Vizier and the Intellectual Climate of his Time,” in Nasr, S. H. and Leaman, O., eds., History of Islamic Philosophy (London, 1996), 1: 558Google Scholar. See also Badie, Bertrand, “La philosophie politique de l’Héllénisme musulman,” Revue française de science politique 28 (1977): 290–304CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

94. Marlow, Hierarchy and Egalitarianism, 141.

95. For some of these views, see Marlow, Hierarchy and Egalitanarianism, 135 and 169–70.

96. Kashifi, Makhzan, fol. 66a.

97. Maria Eva Subtelny, “ᶜAlī Shīr Navāᵓī: Bakhshī and Beg,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 3–4 (1979–80), pt. 2: 805.

98. Ando, Shiro, Timuridische Emire nach dem Muᶜizz al-ansāb: Untersuchung zur Stammesaristokratie Zentralasiens im 14. um 15. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1992), 235–36Google Scholar.

99. Khvandamir, Nāmah-i-nāmī, fols. 20–21a; Roemer, Staatsschreiben der Timuridenzeit, 155–56, 163–77.

100. Nakhjuvani, Dastūr al-kātib, 1: 135–48.

101. Kashifi, Makhzan, fol. 4a.

102. Nakhjuvani, Dastūr al-kātib, 1: 9.

103. Nakhjuvani, Dastūr al-kātib, 1: 47–48.

104. Morton, A. H., “The Letters of Rashid al-Din: Ilkhanid Fact or Timurid Fiction?” in Morgan, D. and Amitai-Preiss, R., eds., The Mongol Empire & its Legacy (Leiden, 2000), 199Google Scholar.

105. See Robinson, Francis, “Ottomans-Safavids-Mughals: Shared Knowledge and Connective Systems,” Journal of Islamic Studies 8 (1997): 151–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also Subtelny, Maria Eva and Khalidov, Anas, “The Curriculum of Islamic Higher Learning in Timurid Iran in the Light of the Sunni Revival under Shāh Rukh,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 115 (1995): 210–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

106. McChesney, R. D., “‘Barrier of Heterodoxy’?: Rethinking the Ties Between Iran and Central Asia in the Seventeenth Century,” in Melville, C., ed., Safavid Persia: The History and Politics of an Islamic Society (London, 1996), 231–68Google Scholar.

107. Chancellery dynamics in the Ottoman empire can be examined in a number of studies: Matuz, Josef, Das Kanzleiwesen des Sultan Sμleymans des Prächtigen (Wiesbaden, 1974)Google Scholar; Fleischer, Cornell, “Between the Lines: Realities of Scribal Life in the Sixteenth Century,” in Heywood, C. and Imber, C., eds., Studies in Ottoman History in Honour of Professor V. L. Ménage (Istanbul, 1994), 45–62Google Scholar; Woodhead, Christine, “From Scribe to Litterateur: The Career of a Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Kātib,” British Society for Middle Eastern Studies 9 (1982): 55–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.