Author: Shervin Farridnejad

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Events

Myths on the Origin of Language or on the Plurality of Languages

Thinking in Many Tongues Reading Seminar

Myths on the Origin of Language or on the Plurality of Languages

08.02-09.02.2017, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin

Pieter Bruegel the Elder – The Tower of Babel, 1563 (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna)

Programm:

Session 1: The Tower of Babel

  • Hindy Najman: “The origin of language and the Tower of Babel”
  • Florentina Geller: “The Tower of Babel from parabiblical sources”

 Session 2: Ancient Greece and Rome

  • Filippomaria Pontani: “Greek and Roman materials”
  • Comments by Glenn Most.

Session 3: Iran and India

  • Shervin Farridnejad: “The Language of the Gods: Some Reflections on the Origin of the Language in Zoroastrianism”
  • Roy Tzohar: “Language originated in dreams: Why Indian Buddhists do not have (almost) any myths about the creation of Languages”
  • Comments by Sonja Brentjes

Session 4: China and Inner Asia

  •  Wolfgang Behr: “Some Ideas on the Origin of Language in Late Imperial China,” with a few words on early China”
  •  Mårten Söderblom Saarela: “Accounts of the invention of scripts in Inner Asia”
  • Comments by Dagmar Schäfer

About the working group:

This working group brings together around a dozen historians and philologists with diverse kinds of linguistic expertise to discuss the relation between plurilingualism and the creation and reception of monolingual and plurilingual texts in various Eurasian societies. Through joint readings and translation the group explores how the text is affected by its origin in a plurilingual society and, conversely, the effect plurilingualism has on reading practices and on a “polyglot’s” understanding of the text (its concepts and ideals). In the past – as much as in the present – the majority of people in the world, and most probably most elite communities, were enmeshed in plurilingual practices. Elites from India to the Central Asia plains, Bengali Zamindars, Parsi businessmen, and scholarly travellers and the politically privileged inhabitants around the Mediterranean or the East Asian seas used two or more languages on a daily basis. Plurilingualism was widespread and a common response to the phenomenon of great linguistic diversity, not necessarily in the sense of language mastery, but rather in the form of effective negotiation of the immediate exigencies of communication. Seeking to better understand this dynamic, the seminar investigates topics such as the impact of filtering information through varied languages; the interplay between declarative and procedural knowledge; methods and means of classification; covert translations and covert multilingualism in monolingual texts; and scholarly ideals regarding reading, writing, and linguistic media, be they purportedly perfect or original languages or newly minted would-be rational or universal languages.

The working group is conducted and organized by Glenn W. Most, Dagmar Schäfer and Mårten Söderblom Saarela.

Categories
Books

A Compendium of Zoroastrian Life & Culture

Cama, Shernaz (ed.). 2016. Threads of continuity: Zoroastrian life & culture. New Delhi: Parzor Foundation.
Threads of Continuity Focuses on the philosophy and cultur of the ancient Zoroastrian faith from its origins i Central Asia, tracing a geographical and chronological continum till the present. This philosophy became a part of the lived heritage of the Zoroastrian community — both in India and Iran.
Of dpecial interest are the cross-cultural influences of the comunity in India. To highlight these, Gujarat and the Deccan will be examined in detail for the first time.
A part of this compendium also studies the contribution of the community to the making of modern India. The programme envisaged, attempts to explain the Zoroastrian philodophy of a sacred thread linking all creation.
 Table of Contents:
Continue reading “A Compendium of Zoroastrian Life & Culture”
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Books

Non-Mainstream Religion in Persianate Societies

Raei, Shahrokh (ed.). 2017. Islamic Alternatives; Non-Mainstream Religion in Persianate Societies. (Iranica, GOF III/NF 16). Göttingen: Harrassowitz Verlag.
Islamic Alternatives are the proceedings of a symposium which was held in April 2014 within the framework of a research project entitled The Khāksār Order between Ahl-e Ḥaqq and Shiite Sufi Order, funded by the German Research Foundation.
The tradition and belief system of the Khāksār is closely connected to several cultural and religious traditions across a vast geographical area in the Orient: the territory of Persianate societies, which might also be called ‘the territory of wandering dervishes’. The extensive historical and cultural relations and associations, the similarities between the Khāksār Order and the Futuwwa tradition or religious communities (such as the Ahl-e Ḥaqq (Yārsān) and Bektashi order in different geographical territories), the relationship between this order and Dervish groups in Pakistan and Central Asia on the one hand and its connection with the official orthodox Shia on the other hand are the main topics dealt with in the present book.
The commonalities and cultural relations of these numerous and diverse cultural traditions as well as the heterodox movements in this region are so substantial that understanding the related aspects of each helps us gain a deeper knowledge of the whole subject matter. This symposium and the present proceedings attempt to gather as many specialists of these diverse but associated themes as possible in order to achieve a better understanding of these concepts.
Table of Contents (PDF):
Early Shiʿism and Futuwwa
  • Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi: “New Remarks on Secrecy and Concealment in Early Imāmī Shiʿism: the Case of khatm al-nubuwwa – Aspects of Twelver Shiʿi Imamology XII
  • Mohsen Zakeri: “From Futuwwa to Mystic Political Thought: – The Caliph al-Nāṣir li-Dīn Allāh and Abū Ḥafṣ Suhrawardī’s Theory of Government

Ahl-e Ḥaqq (Yāresān)

  • Philip G. Kreyenbroek: “Some Remarks on the Early History of the Ahl-e Ḥaqq”
  • Martin van Bruinessen: “Between Dersim and Dālahū – Reflections on Kurdish Alevism and the Ahl-e Ḥaqq Religion
  • Yiannis Kanakis: “Yāresān Religious Concepts and Ritual Repertoires as Elements of Larger Net-works of Socio-Political ‘Heterodoxy’ – Some Thoughts on Yāresān , Shiite and Qizilbash/Bektashi Sources and Symbolism
Cultural Anthropological Analysis
  • Jürgen Wasim Frembgen: “Beyond Muslim and Hindu – Sacred Spaces in the Thar Desert of Pakistan
  • Alexandre Papas: “Dog of God: Animality and Wildness among Dervishes”
  • Thierry Zarcone: “Sacred Stones in Qalandariyya and Bektashism”
    Khāksār
  • Mehran Afshari: “Quṭb al-Dīn Ḥaydar-e Tūnī and his Connection to the Ḥaydariyya and Khāksāriyya”
  • Shahrokh Raei: “Some Recent Issues and Challenges in the Khāksār Order”
Folk Sufism
  • Razia Sultanova: “Female Folk Sufism in the Central Asian Space-Time Continuum”
 About the Editor:
Shahrokh Raei is an scholar of Sufī and Khāksār Order and lecturer at the Institute of Oriental Studies, University of Freiburg.
Categories
Events

Persian Manuscripts in Balkans and Central Europe

<AryanicCMS:tags:77>Persian Manuscripts in Balkans and Central Europe

Center for Iran, Balkans and Central European Studies

Bulgarian National Library “St, Cyril and Methodius’’

Sofia University ‘’St. Kliment Ohridski’’

23-24 February 2017

Center for Iran, Balkans and Central European Studies in partnership with the Cyril and Methodius National Library of Bulgaria, the “St. Kliment Ohridski” Sofia University, and Allameh Tabataba’i University are going to convene the international conference on “Persian Manuscripts in the Balkans and Central Europe”. The conference will be held in Sofia, with the contributions of scholars and researchers from 16 countries, expert in codicology. Scope of the topics to be discussed in this conference includes: Persian manuscripts; Persian documents; manuscripts about Iran in other languages; documents about Iran in other languages; and exploring Eastern manuscripts. Allameh Tabataba’i University (ATU) will publish the approved papers. Along with the conference, a workshop on “Codicology” will also be held.

Conference Program

  • Akbar Irani “Mirase Maktub, Twenty-three years in the revival of Iranian culture and Civilization”
  • Shervin Farridnejad: “Zoroastrian Manuscripts in Classical New Persian. The Manuscripts of Ṣad Dar in Central European Libraries: A Work in Progress”
  • Davood Esparham: “Advantages and disadvantages of different methods of editing manuscripts”
  • Mohammad Hassan Hassanzadeh Niri: “ Catalogues of Persian Manuscripts in Turkey“
  • Iván Szántó: A Kashmiri Manuscript of the Shahname of Ferdowsi in Budapest”
  • Shiva Mihan: “An unidentified Timurid Manuscript: the Musibat-nama of ‘Attar Nishapuri from Prince Baysunghur’s library”
  • Zahra Parsapour: “Ghanun Al- Adab a treasure from Asia minor”
  • Dariush Zolfaghari: “The importance of rhetoric in edition of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh”
  • Maryam Mavadda: “Âdâb Al-Nesvân , Verses In Writing Of The ¼ Aqayed Al-Nesâ’,“
  • Zohre Allahyari Dastjerdi: “Tradition of making collection and anthology in Persian language by focus on index of manuscript”
  • Nigar Gozalova/Akram Bagirov: “On Bahman-Mirza’s Azerbaijani Collection”
  • Fariba Jabbari: “Maqazi Al-Nabi Verse narrative of the life of Prophet”
  • Katerina Venedikova: “Persian texts and Persian elements in manuscripts and epigraphic monuments from the Ottoman times”
  • Alireza Hoseini: “Parvardeie khial, a Manuscript from Mahmood Mirza Qajar”
  • Mahmood Heidari: “Omdatol Bolaqa va Eddatol Fosaha, A manuscript from Rashid aldin Vatvat”
  • Elham Malekzadeh: “The geography of the Caucasus, Almanak, survivor from the era of the Naseraldin  King of Qajar”
  • Yashar Abdolselamoghlu: “Story of occupation of Bulgaria by Ottomans- Edris Bitlisi“
  •  Namir Karahalilovic: “An Overview of the Persian Manuscript Collections in Bosnia-Herzegovina”
  • Nermin Hodzic: “A Copy of the “Sahifa al-Sajjadiyya” from Gazi Husrev-Beg Library in Sarajevo”
  • Ahmed Zildzic: “Two Copies of the Bahjat al-Tawarikh in the Balkans”
  • Saeid Abedpour: “Tradition of Masnavi-khani in Bosnia-Herzegovina”
  • Sabaheta Gačanin,: “Poetic Manuscripts of Islamic Canon as Cultural Memory”
  • Miklos Sarkozy: “Persian Manuscripts in the Oriental Collection of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences“
  • Mojdeh Mohammadi: “Persian Manuscript in Hungarian Academy of Science”
  • Saeed Safari: “The introduction to Persian manuscripts in the Central Library of the University of Belgrade”
  • Tatjana Pai -Vukic: “Persian Manuscripts in Croatian Collections”
  • Stoyanka Kenderova: “Persian book in the library of Osman Pazvantoglu in Vidin / 1837”
  • Nematollah Iranzadeh: “A manuscript from Vahid Tabrizi in Bulgarian National Library”
  • Ivo Panov: “Diwan-e Hafez Manuscripts in National Library”
  • Elisaveta Mousakova: “The Illumination of Manuscript Catalogues“
  • Nona Petkova: “Accepting and Respecting the Traditions of Others – Examples of Coexistence“
  • Morteza Nouraei: “The Evaluation of Iranian studies through Ottoman Turkish Documents preserved in the National Library of Sofia- Bulgaria”
  • Anka Stoilova: “The work with manuscript fragments before their cataloguing”
  • Hatije Berber: “Presentation of textbooks for teaching Persian language in  Ryushdiye schools”
  • Sheyda Rahimi: “An Overview of the Persian Manuscript Catalogue in Bulgarian National Library”
Categories
Books

This World and the Next in Religious Belief and Practice

Hintze, Almut & Alan Williams (eds.). 2017. Holy wealth: Accounting for this world and the next in religious belief and oractice. Festschrift for John R. Hinnells (Iranica 24). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag.
 This volume, presented to John R. Hinnells on his 75th Birthday, focuses on the interface between material and spiritual wealth, a theme that runs across many religions and cultures and that incorporates a major strand of John R. Hinnells’s particular fascination with the Zoroastrians of ancient and modern times, and his more general interest in the positive and life-affirming aspects of religious traditions across many domains. The volume includes seventeen studies by leading scholars exploring ideas of and attitudes to material wealth and its use for promoting spiritual benefits in Zoroastrian, Mithraic, Christian, Buddhist and Islamic traditions.
Table of Contents (PDF):
Continue reading “This World and the Next in Religious Belief and Practice”
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Books

Persian Religion in the Achaemenid Period

Henkelman, Wouter & Céline Redard (eds.). 2017. Persian religion in the Achaemenid period (Classica et Orientalia 16). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag.
Including twelve English, French, and German papers originally presented at a colloquium convened by Jean Kellens at the Collège de France (2013), this volume addresses a range of issues relating to Persian religion at the time of the Achaemenid Empire (550-330 BCE). Moving away from the reductive question whether the Achaemenid kings were Zoroastrians or not, the contributors have tried to focus either on newly identified or recently published sources (Central Asian archaeological finds, Elamite texts and seal impressions from the Persepolis Fortification Archive, Aramaic texts from Bactria, the Persepolis Bronze Plaque), or on current (and ongoing) debates such as the question of the spread of the so-called long liturgy to western Iran. In doing, different perspectives are chosen: whereas some have stressed the Iranian or Indo-Iranian tradition, others have pointed out the importance of the Elamite and Assyro-Babylonian contexts. At the same time, the volume shows a broad agreement in its insistence on the essential position of primary sources, problematic as they may be, and on the important role the Achaemenid rulers and the imperial project played in the evolution of Iranian religion.
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Books

Medicine in the Avesta

Delaini, Paolo. 2017. La medicina nell’Avesta. Widēwdād 7, 20, 21, 22. Studio filologico, traduzione e commento dei testi avestici e medio-persiani. Con un saggio sugli studi sulla medicina zoroastriana dal Settecento ad oggi. I. I Pahlavi Widēwdād 7.1 – 7.44. Sesto San Giovanni: Mimesis.

The present volume offers a philological study of various passages from the Wīdēwdād pertaining to medicine.

Abou the Author
Paul Delaini, is an scholar of Iranian studies at the University of Bologna, Ravenna. His research deals mainly with the history of pre-Islamic medicine in Iran, with particular emphasis on the development and circulation of medical knowledge on the body and the physiology of birth evolved from the ancient world on the late ancient and medieval tradition.
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Books

From Sasanian Mandaeans to Ṣābians of the Marshes

van Bladel, Kevin. 2017. From Sasanian Mandaeans to Ṣābians of the Marshes. Leiden: Brill.
This historical study argues that the Mandaean religion originated under Sasanid rule in the fifth century, not earlier as has been widely accepted. It analyzes primary sources in Syriac, Mandaic, and Arabic to clarify the early history of Mandaeism. This religion, along with several other, shorter-lived new faiths, such as Kentaeism, began in a period of state-sponsored persecution of Babylonian paganism. The Mandaeans would survive to become one of many groups known as Ṣābians by their Muslim neighbors. Rather than seeking to elucidate the history of Mandaeism in terms of other religions to which it can be related, this study approaches the religion through the history of its social contexts.
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction
1. Early Contacts between Arab Muslims and Aramaean Mandaeans and the Date of Zazay
2. Theodore bar Konay’s Account of Mandaean Origins (circa 792)
3. Three Sixth-Century References to Mandaeans by Name
4. On the Kentaeans and Their Relationship with the Mandaeans
5. The Account of al-Ḥasan ibn Bahlūl (Bar Bahlul), second half of tenth century
6. Identifying Abū ʿAlī
7. The Marshes of the Ṣābians
8. Other Reports on the Mandaeans after Abū ʿAlī
9. Back to the Question of Origins
10. Pre-Mandaean Nāṣoraeans
11. The Religious Environment of Sasanian Iraq
12. Mandaeism as a Changing Tradition
Appendix 1. Bar Konay on the Kentaeans, Dostaeans, and Nerigaeans, in English
Appendix 2. Ibn Waḥšīya on Aramaic Dialects
Bibliography
Kevin T. van Bladel (Ph.D. 2004, Yale University), is Associate Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at The Ohio State University.
Categories
Events

Ritual and Ritual Tradition in Zoroastrianism

“Homo Ritualis: Ritual and Ritual Tradition in Zoroastrianism”

A talk by Shervin Farridnejad (Berlin/Vienna).

Monday, 23 January 2016, 06:30 PM, Österreichische Orient-Gesellschaft Hammer-Purgstall Dominikanerbastei 6/6, 1010 Wien.

This talk is the third and last of a talk series “Kulturwissenschaftliche Iranforschung“,  organized as joint events by the Institute of Iranian studies (IFI) at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) and the Österreichischen Orient-Gesellschaft Hammer-Purgstall, Vienna. The talk will be in German.

Abstract

Rituals play a prominent role in Zoroastrianism, one of the oldest continuous religions of humanity. The importance and practice of the Zoroastrian rituals extend over a wide range of social and local environments, from houses to fire temples as well as from antiquity to modernity. While the sources for exploring Zoroastrian rituals in pre-modern times are predominantly confined to traditional and priestly texts, we have a broader set of sources for modern and contemporary times, including the living ritual tradition of priests and laities. The lecture deals with the presence and importance of the rituals as well as the ritualistic traditions in Zoroastrianism.

You can download the whole program of this talk series here.

Shervin Farridnejad is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Lecturer at the Institute of Iranian Studies (IFI) at the Academy of Science (ÖAW) in Vienna and at the Institute of Iranian Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin.

Categories
Events

Achaemenian Palaces and the Zoroastrian Ritual Surfaces

Cylinder seal impression from Daskyleion with royal audience scene, inscribed “Artaxerxes.” Drawing by B. Mussche of Daskyleion inv. no. Erg. 55. After AMI 22, 1989, p. 147, fig. 1 © Encyclopædia Iranica Online

“The Old Iranian Absolute Frame of Reference.
To the Orientation of Achaemenian Palaces and the Zoroastrian Ritual Surfaces“.

A talk by Kianoosh Rezania (Bochum).

Monday, 9 January 2016, 06:30 PM, Österreichische Orient-Gesellschaft Hammer-Purgstall Dominikanerbastei 6/6, 1010 Wien.

This talk is the first of a talk series “Kulturwissenschaftliche Iranforschung“,  organized as joint events by the Institute of Iranian studies (IFI) at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) and the Österreichischen Orient-Gesellschaft Hammer-Purgstall, Vienna.

Abstract

For the orientation in space and the linguistic expression of spatial relations of objects, different coordination systems can be used. One of these systems utilizes fixed cardinal directions. The four compass points north, south, east and west constitute the cardinal directions of our absolute frame of reference. Did the Old Iranians employ the same frame of reference likewise with these compass points?
After the representation of different coordination systems, absolute, intrinsic and relative, the paper addresses the Old Iranian absolute frame of reference. By means of the orientation of Achaemenian palaces, the order of countries in the Old Persian list of nations as well as Avestan linguistic evidence, it will be demonstrated that the Old Iranian people did not used our todays compass points for their orientation in space, but employed a different absolute frame of reference. The paper will present the cardinal directions of this system.

You can download the whole program of this talk series here.

Kianoosh Rezania is a professor of Western Asian Religious Studies at the Center for Religious Studies (CERES) of the Ruhr-Universität Bochum.