Author: Arash Zeini

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Books

Trust Matters

Vevaina, Leilah. 2023. Trust matters: Parsi endowments in Mumbai and the horoscope of a city. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Although numbering fewer than 60,000 in a city of more than 12 million people, Mumbai’s Parsi community is one of the largest private landowners in the city due to its network of public charitable trusts. In Trust Matters Leilah Vevaina explores the dynamics and consequences of this conjunction of religion and capital as well as the activities of giving, disputing, living, and dying it enables. As she shows, communal trusts are the legal infrastructure behind formal religious giving and ritual in urban India that influence communal life. Vevaina proposes the trusts as a horoscope of the city—a constellation of housing, temples, and other spaces providing possible futures. She explores the charitable trust as a technology of time, originating in the nineteenth century, one that structures intergenerational obligations for Mumbai’s Parsis, connecting past and present, the worldly and the sacred. By approaching Mumbai through the legal mechanism of the trust and the people who live within its bounds as well as those who challenge or support it, Vevaina offers a new pathway into exploring property, religion, and kinship in the urban global South.

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Articles Journal

Slavery & Abolition

Volume 44, issue 4 (2023), of the journal Slavery & Abolition has just been published. This special issue, entitled Slavery in Byzantium and the Medieval Islamicate World: Texts and Contexts, is edited by Jelle Bruning and Said Reza Huseini. It features two articles of particular interest to Iranian Studies. One by Said Reza Huseini on Slavery Represented in Bactrian Documents, and one by Nazanin Tamari on Zoroastrian Fire Foundations: A Portrait of Slaves and Slaveholders.

This special issue of Slavery & Abolition presents six studies on the history of slavery in the greater Mediterranean basin, the Near East and the Iranian world during the second half of the first millennium CE. The articles cover a large area that stretches from the Iberian Peninsula in the west to Bactria in the east, an area that was at that time largely controlled by East and West Roman emperors, Sasanian shahs and, later, Muslim caliphs. Despite the widely varying nature of the various historical environments brought together in this special issue, they combine to tell a common story.

From the editors’ introduction
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Books

The Central Asian world

Féaux de la Croix, Jeanne & Madeleine Reeves (eds.). 2023. The Central Asian world (The Routledge Worlds). London & New York: Routledge.

This landmark book provides a comprehensive anthropological introduction to contemporary Central Asia. Established and emerging scholars of the region critically interrogate the idea of a ‘Central Asian World’ at the intersection of post-Soviet, Persianate, East and South Asian worlds. Encompassing chapters on life between Afghanistan and Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Xinjiang, this volume situates the social, political, economic, ecological and ritual diversity of Central Asia in historical context. The book ethnographically explores key areas such as the growth of Islamic finance, the remaking of urban and sacred spaces, as well as decolonising and queering approaches to Central Asia. The volume’s discussion of More-than-Human Worlds, Everyday Economies, Material Culture, Migration and Statehood engages core analytical concerns such as globalisation, inequality and postcolonialism. Far more than a survey of a ‘world region’, the volume illuminates how people in Central Asia make a life at the intersection of diverse cross-cutting currents and flows of knowledge. In so doing, it stakes out the contribution of an anthropology of and from Central Asia to broader debates within contemporary anthropology.

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Books

Der Manichäismus

Hutter, Manfred. 2023. Der Manichäismus. Vom Iran in den Mittelmeerraum und über die Seidenstraße nach Südchina. Anton Hiersemann Verlag.

Das erste umfassende deutschsprachige Handbuch der unterschiedlichen religionsgeschichtlichen Ausformungen des Manichäismus seit 1961.

Der in der Mitte des 3. Jahrhunderts u.Z. entstandene Manichäismus war die erste „weltweit“ verbreitete Religion. Mani (216-277) präsentierte seine aus biblisch-gnostischen und iranisch-zoroastrischen Vorstellungen schrittweise entwickelte Lehre als den älteren Religionen überlegen, um die Lehre Jesu im Westen, Zarathustras im Iran und Buddhas in Indien abzulösen. Dieser Überlegenheitsanspruch wurde jeweils lokal spezifiziert, was von christlichen Theologen, zoroastrischen Priestern und chinesischen buddhistischen Gelehrten nicht unkommentiert blieb. Dadurch lässt sich diese Religion durch religionsinterne Quellen sowie externe Fremdbeschreibungen facettenreich rekonstruieren.

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Books

Three Persian Martyr Acts

Harvey, Susan Ashbrook, Reyhan Durmaz, Michael L. Payne, Daniel Picus & Noah Tetenbaum. 2023. Three Persian martyr acts (Persian Martyr Acts in Syriac: Text and Translation 9). Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press.

This volume brings together the texts and translations for three Syriac martyr acts, set in Sasanian Persia during the reign of Shapur II (309-379 CE). These texts offer compelling witness to the challenges of a community’s need to honor memory and experience, and evidence towards the formation and sustenance of Christian identity in the midst of Persian society and culture.

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Books

Babylonian Jews and Sasanian Imperialism

Gross, Simcha. 2024. Babylonian Jews and Sasanian imperialism in late antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

The new publication date for this book is now February 2024.

From the image offered by the Babylonian Talmud, Jewish elites were deeply embedded within the Sasanian Empire (224-651 CE). The Talmud is replete with stories and discussions that feature Sasanian kings, Zoroastrian magi, fire temples, imperial administrators, Sasanian laws, Persian customs, and more quotidian details of Jewish life. Yet, in the scholarly literature on the Babylonian Talmud and the Jews of Babylonia , the Sasanian Empire has served as a backdrop to a decidedly parochial Jewish story, having little if any direct impact on Babylonian Jewish life and especially the rabbis. Babylonian Jews and Sasanian Imperialism in Late Antiquity advances a radically different understanding of Babylonian Jewish history and Sasanian rule. Building upon recent scholarship, Simcha Gross portrays a more immanent model of Sasanian rule, within and against which Jews invariably positioned and defined themselves. Babylonian Jews realized their traditions, teachings, and social position within the political, social, religious, and cultural conditions generated by Sasanian rule.

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Articles

On Middle Persian hassār and hassārīh

Fattori, Marco. 2023. A note on Pahlavi lexicography: Middle Persian hassār, hassārīh. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies. 1–12.

This article deals with the identification and interpretation of two rare Middle Persian words. Firstly, some attestations of the as yet unrecognized word <hs’lyh> hassārīh are discussed, showing that it means “direction”. Then, a semantic analysis of its underived counterpart hassār is carried out, as a basis for an etymological proposal. Finally, it is argued that hassār descends from Old Persian *haçā-sāra- “(having the head) in the same direction”, and a possible reconstruction of the semantic development of the word is provided.

Article’s abstract
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Articles

‘The Coals Which Were His Guardians…’:

Vevaina, Yuhan Sohrab-Dinshaw. 2022. ‘The coals which were his guardians…’: The hermeneutics of Heraclius’ Persian campaign and a faint trace of the ‘Last Great War’ in Zoroastrian literature. In Phil Booth & Mary Whitby (eds.), Mélanges: James Howard-Johnston (Travaux et mémoires 26), 467–490. Paris: Association des Amis du centre d’histoire et civilisation de Byzance.

We had previously announced the volume. This article is now available from the author’s academia page.

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Events Online resources

The 9th Ratanbai Katrak Lectures

Prof. Dr. Alberto Cantera (Freie Universität Berlin) will deliver the final three Ratanbai Katrak Lectures this autumn in Oxford.

These lectures are convened by Prof. Yuhan Sohrab-Dinshaw Vevaina for the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies.

The talks will also be on Zoom.

Continue reading “The 9th Ratanbai Katrak Lectures”
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Events

Zoroastrian Conversations

Prof. Yuhan Vevaina will be hosting the 3rd ‘Zoroastrian Conversations’ with Dr. Céline Redard, Lecturer for the Institute of History of Religions at the University of Strasbourg, France.

Saturday, 07 October 2023; 12 Noon Eastern time; 9 AM Pacific time; and 5pm UK time.

Zoom Info: https://fezana.org/conversations/