Review of: Mana Kia, Persianate Selves

International Journal of Middle East Studies (2022), 1–3 doi:10.1017/S0020743821001148 BOOK REVIEW Persianate Selves: Memories of Place and Origin Before Nationalism. Mana Kia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020). Pp. 312. $35.95 cloth, $30.00 paper. ISBN: 9781503611955 Reviewed by Prashant Keshavmurthy, Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada (prashant.keshavmurthy@mcgill.ca) No past is worth studying for its own sake. Nor is it even available independently of the human subject who takes it up. And this taking up must take the form, if it is to be responsible to present ethical commitments rather than an exercise in antiquarianism, of a dynamic and dialogical relation with those commitments, not the mechanical application of philological, natural scientific, or other methods. The truths of humanistic scholarship would thus be relational, not absolute, feeding the cold shades of the past warm blood to make them speak to us in ways relevant to our always particular life-situations. This was the crux of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s 1960 Truth and Method, arguably one of the most extensive modern justifications of the humanities. And yet, it is not often that one sees Gadamerian hermeneutics in action in the study of the Persianate. Interrupting the historical claims of the Europe-derived “blood logic of racialized descent” and Europe-derived territorial nationalism in Iran, the Iranian diaspora and contemporary South Asia, Mana Kia’s Persianate Selves: Memories of Place and Origin Before Nationalism recovers the multiple “aporetic” logics by which Persians made places and claimed origins in the eighteenth century just before nationalism, appropriated from European colonizers, obscured these logics. The book explicates these aporetic logics in the forms of—and in formal differences between—“commemorative texts” by three generations of authors who lived between the late Safavid period to the early nineteenth century between Iran and India. Through subtle, contextually embedded explications of formulations of place and origin across a rich range of tazkirihs, travelogues, and topographical literature, Kia makes the argument that “Instead of Persian as an identity, we can consider adab as the mode by which Persians identify” (174). This is the book’s axial argument: that the non-exclusionary, mutually permeable logics of hierarchical inclusion that constituted adab was what allowed “Persians” to recognize each other. Crucially, this means that “Persians” are not just Iranians or Muslims but anyone across the vast geography of Persographia who was affiliated with the forms of sociality in which the Persian language was embedded. This recovery of minimally shared ways of being transregionally Persian on the cusp of colonial modernity makes this book complementary to Nile Green’s 2019 edited volume, The Persianate World. The book falls into two parts dealing with the meanings of places and “the meaning and labor of origin among Persians in Safavid Iran and Timurid India” (25). Each part comprises three chapters followed by a seventh chapter drawing the foregoing conclusions together and then a coda that revisits the stakes of the book’s interventions. Framing the book’s arguments is a distinction between modern interpretations of pre-colonial Persianate pasts and a pre-colonial Persianate hermeneutic of adab, which allowed for interpretations of Persianate pasts irreducible to modern ones. Kia characterizes modern interpretations as informed by European positivism, territorial nationalism, and the blood logics of descent, persuasively and richly disclosing the impoverishment of these interpretations in relation to the hermeneutics of adab. And yet, it is openings within the modern—Judith Butler’s theorizations of © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Barnard College Library, on 10 Feb 2022 at 15:34:50, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020743821001148 2 Book Review gender construction, Jacques Derrida’s theorization of aporias, the still-current practice of divination by the Divan of Hafiz—that work as points of departure for Kia’s historical critique. She persuasively shows how the hermeneutics of adab entailed a formally embedded perspectivalism specific to the author’s social, temporal, and political location, involving aporetic or mutually non-contradictory if hierarchical ways of place-making and multiple logics of descent (parental lineage, pedagogical lineage, geographical itinerary, pilgrimage itinerary, and individual and familial history of service) that were irreducible to modern logics of blood descent or territorial belonging. All of these latter shared the “hermeneutic ground” of adab even when they allowed disagreements. But what was adab? We can infer that it was a set of semi-consciously held aesthetic-moral values—a habitus—that had been consciously inculcated in the course of an education in the Persian language, its literary canon and its ancillary disciplines, and in the forms of sociality these were embedded in. This habitus was a minimal ground, as it were, that all Persians shared regardless of religious, regional, pedagogical, and linguistic differences. Even women, as Kia notes at different points in the book, were members of adab though distinguished by their gender as a lower limit of adab. But was adab peculiar to Persian and Persianate languages? Training in Arabic rhetoric, albeit to different degrees, formed a standard part of a Persianate education, and adab was a feature of Arabic literary culture before it became a feature of its Persian counterpart. All of Kia’s demonstrations of the aporetic ways of place-making and origin-claiming in Persianate lands also apply to Arabic-using lands (like al-Andalus, Syria, and Egypt) where the Persian language played little to no part. We need only recall the example of the fourteenth century Maghribi jurist Ibn Battuta who was comfortable in the vast geography he moved in as long as his Arabic learning was esteemed, even pursuing a career as a judge in the Delhi Sultanate. We may extend this claim to literary cultures such as that of Latin that lacked a concept corresponding to adab but whose literary canon and systems of geography and physiology bound roving intellectuals who spoke other languages as their first language. Comparably to the identification of Persian with Iran in modern Persian literary history, modern Latin literary history, until Christopher S. Celenza’s revisionist The Lost Latin Renaissance: Humanists, Historians and Latin’s Legacy (2004), had paid little attention to Renaissance Latin because of the anachronistic nationalist assumption that European vernaculars were more “native” and thus the true repositories of national spirit. If, in this sense, the aporias of adab were not peculiar to the “Persianate,” are Kia’s reconstructions of prenationalist ways of place-making and belonging not also true of other cultural zones, offering a model for Renaissance Europe while explicating the adab implicit in Muhsin J. al-Musawi’s The Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters: Arabic Knowledge Construction (2015)? How much does Kia’s understanding of adab as aporetic or permeable to contradictory differences in the experience of place and origin depend on the fact that her archive is late-Safavid and late-Timurid and thus assumes a context where central imperial courts had lost their power over regions? Insofar as she presents her claims about the aporias of adab as true for all adab, how might we understand the place-making of Abu al-Fazl, chief ideologue of the Timurid emperor Akbar? His Aʾin-i Akbari lists domains of Akbar’s empire by sometimes rehearsing the origin myths of regions, in this sense accommodating difference. But it was composed between 1589 and 1598 after Akbar crushed all opposition to his imperial claims on these regions, thus excluding alternative narratives legitimating regional dynasties.1 Are texts from earlier contexts of central imperial control less aporetic? Kia argues that Persianate adab could accommodate languages other than Persian, citing the cases of Urdu and Joseph Emin’s Persian- and adab-mediated English: “Shared Persianate forms gave it texture, but its adab also encompassed vernaculars, such as Urdu” (166). But 1 For a discussion of such Mughal imperial appropriation and exclusion with reference to Kashmir, see Chitralekha Zutshi, “Past as Tradition, Past as History: The Rajatarangini Narratives in Kashmir’s Persian Historical Tradition,” Indian Economic Social History Review 50 (2013): 201. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Barnard College Library, on 10 Feb 2022 at 15:34:50, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020743821001148 International Journal of Middle East Studies 3 does this not signal yet another limit to adab, namely that it was necessarily its association with Persian and its literary genres that conferred adab status on another language? For all that Muslims composed literature in Gujarati, this language was never considered part of adab by even pre-colonial Persianate literary cultures. But literature composed by Muslims in Gujri, a dialect spoken by Muslims in Gujarat, was considered part of adab because it was composed, like most literature in Rekhta/Urdu, in the ghazal and other Persianate genres. Adab may have conferred intelligibility on regions as distant as China, as Kia says, but Chinese literature and Chinese forms of sociality could not be elements of adab any more than the Telugu literature patronized by the Qutb Shahi Sultans because its genres were not Persianate. Kia speaks of “the epistemology of Persianate adab” as allowing Shafiq, a Kayasth Hindu man of letters to accommodate both Hindus and Muslims and Rekhta/Urdu and Persian within his tazkirih . But wasn’t Shafiq, who speaks of having read Ṭusi’s Akhlaq-i Nasiri with a teacher, also drawing on a Peripatetic epistemology irreducible to Persianate adab? The trans-human constant of reason (ʿaql), recognized by Muslim philosophers as different and chronologically far apart as al-Biruni (973–ca.1052) and Fazl-i Haqq Khayrabadi (1796–1861), was the centerpiece of this epistemology. It is not clear from Kia’s book whether adab included what Muslim scholarship called “the rational sciences” (maʿqūlāt) though she shows how commemorative texts drew on both rational and transmitted kinds of truth-claims. When al-Biruni argued that India’s Brahmans were monotheists who deceived gullible Hindus into idolatry, he was criticizing them for perverting the application of the universally held human capacity for reason. Fazl-i Haqq would do the same when he argued that idolaters betrayed their God-given capacity to reason. These are but two examples of scores of Islamic philosophers who invoked an Aristotelian universalism irreducible to adab by which to hierarchically include non-Muslims. But the foregoing remarks only suggest historical, linguistic, and disciplinary limits to the aporetic ways of adab, Persianate or otherwise. Within these limits, Kia’s subtle reconstructions of eighteenth-century Persian ways of belonging should provoke anyone engaged with the textual legacies of adab to read with eyes unblinkered by nationalism. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Barnard College Library, on 10 Feb 2022 at 15:34:50, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020743821001148