Research Methods (3)

A week or so ago I attended a workshop organized by the recently-established Catapult Center for Digital Humanities & Computational Analysis at IUB. The workshop was on Omeka, a digital publishing platform tailored for librarians, archivists and humanists who want to curate collections and research materials online. I attended because I'm becoming more and more interested in possible ways of being to present aspects of my research online, ways that require more sophisticated storage and hosting options than are available through (admittedly, pretty good) blog platforms like Blogspot or Wordpress.

Omeka is becoming increasingly popular with humanists whose research incorporates strongly visual components: manuscripts, photographs, paintings, illustrations &c. The attractions for someone like me, who is interested in the rich world of  medieval and early-modern Central Asian manuscript traditions, are obvious; moreover, it brings me into synch with developments in online curation that are currently impacting upon my own research: thanks to digitization initiatives such as Islamic Manuscripts at Michigan, Islamic Heritage Project at Harvard University, and Walters Arts Museum Islamic Manuscripts, I've been able to acquire research materials that once would have required sensitive negotiation and not insubstantial travel costs and copying fees to acquire.

In fact, I learned about the latter goldmine as a direct result of the Omeka workshop: the Walters Art Museum has made publicly available the metadata of its Islamic manuscripts, and the workshop convenors used it as an example of how spreadsheets can be imported (with the aid of a plug-in) into your Omeka site and used to generate new metadata fields.

Not previously aware of the Walters Art Museum (ignorant me!), or its precious collection of Islamic manuscripts, I was delighted to find that it has a fine Safavid copy of نوائی's خمسه, attributed to the 16th cent. As I begin to construct my my research agenda and schedule for the dissertation, the easy availability of such a fine work - unthought of 10-15 years ago - drives home to me the transformational nature of the digital humanities and its benefits to the researcher.

Nawa'i Editions (2)

In one of my earliest posts I noted the lack of both critical text editions and translation of the works of نوائی. Therefore, I was very excited when I was in Tashkent back in August to pick up a copy of a recently-published Arabic-script edition of the نسایم المحبَه, his biographical dictionary of Sufi saints, based largely on three of the earliest known manuscripts: 1) Topkapi MS. Rivan 808; 2) St. Petersburg IVAN MS. 97a; and 3) Sulaymaniyya MS. Fath 4056.

These three MSS. are all copied in a small hand, with 27 lines on each page, so the editors have consulted a pair of later MSS. copied in a larger hand. Incidentally, The editors appear not to be aware of another MS. which arguably belongs to the older family, namely MS. Tk. 1069 III Coll., Asiatic Society of Bengal, Kolkata. This MS. of 116 fols, which I've been able to examine on microfilm, is copied in a small hand, with 27 lines on each page. Many parts of the text are obscured by water damage, but with a little patience and the power of Adobe Acrobat, it's mostly possible to read.

The publishing of (on the face of it) a reasonably reliable text edition will, I hope, make this important source of Central Asian hagiography available to a much wider audience. As I've found out to my delight on numerous occasions, it has a lot of valuable material not found in other sources. For example, according to a friend of mine working on Isma'ilis in Central Asia, it contains one of the earliest references to the traveller and poet ناصر خسرو in a specifically hagiographical context i.e. as a religious personality (p.371)

Most importantly, though, it contains one of the earliest outlines of the group of Turkish shaykhs (ترک مشایخی) 'from the time of احمد یسوی' i.e. the Yasaviyya. While earlier sources had alluded to the co-called 'Turkish shaykhs,' and یسوی was an important figure in the cosmology of Central Asian Sufism, it is only in this work of نوائی that we see the first a full-developed outline of the Yasavaiyya generations, based on initiatory and hereditary linkages.

Q&A session

It was a busy summer: a couple of pre-dissertation research trips, one to the UK and one to Uzbekistan; a French readings class; work at the research institute; class preparation for the Fall; and  reading for Quals. It was probably *too* busy, but I achieved a couple of major goals, namely finally fulfilling my coursework requirements, and then taking - and passing - my Qualifying exams, which means - paperwork aside - I am essentially ABD (all but dissertation).

This semester I'll be working with our professor of Persian literature on a study of نوائی's Persian divan, and specifically his responses (جواب) to the غزلs of, inter alia, جامی، خسرو دهلوی and حافظ. The responses usually fall within the categories of مخمس or تتبع, and I'm hoping that a deeper understanding of the mechanics and aesthetics of the جواب will help me understand نوائی's place within  late-Classical Persian poetry and how it seeped into his Turkic work.

This in turn is part of my broader mission to investigate نوائی as a literary and intellectual phenomenon. Among North American and European historians of the Timurid period, the study of نوائی has tended largely to focus on his activities as a politician and patron of the arts, and his literary importance has become axiomatic, without actually being the subject of wide-ranging and deep scholarly investigation. It is, of course, a different story in Central Asia, where - because of his prominence as a culture hero - literary critics have long engaged with his works (though there too there are interpretive issues, largely deriving from the still strong influence of Marxist ideology, coupled with post-independence nationalist ideologies).

'Let go of the madrasa and the khaneqah'

One of the highlights of the annual conference of the Association of Central Eurasian Students (ACES) at Indiana University, which was held at the beginning of this month, is the booksale. Consisting mainly of donations from publishers and cast-offs from faculty-members' personal libraries, it can be a hit or miss affair. However, this year (as with last), it was beefed-up by the remnants of the personal library of the late, great Denis Sinor, who died at the beginning of last year. In his will, he left most of his books (15,000+ volumes, I believe) to two institutions in his native Hungary. What was left was first picked over by us at the Sinor Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies, and then put out at the booksale.

Consequently, I was able to pick up a few interesting items. Of most immediate interest is a Soviet-era study on medieval Central Asian Turkic poetry (Э. Р. Рустамов, Узбекская поезия в первой половиние XV veka. Taшкент: 1963). Anachronistic usages of 'Uzbek' aside, it's a hugely useful survey of the Turkic poets of Central Asia who effectively constitute 'Alī Shīr Navā'ī's immediate predecessors, one of whom - اتایی - is the subject of a paper I'm writing this semester on the Yasavī sufi presence in Khurasan.

Only one copy of his divan is known to exist, and is held at the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Oriental Studies in St. Petersburg. A descendant of one of the successors of احمد یسوی, his poetry reflects some sufi themes and ideas (although I want avoid as far as possible simply labelling him as a 'sufi' poet). One couplet quoted by Рустамов caught my eye:

قویغیل اتایی مدرسه و خانقاه
معنیدا قولی صادق و صوفیدا حال یوق

As usual, I'm struggling with a translation that is both literal and lyrical. This is my best attempt to date:

Ata'i: let go of the madrasa and the khaneqah;
Spirituality is an expression of devotion and a Sufi has no means.

The first line is fairly self-explanatory; it's trying to clarify how اتایی elaborates upon that statement in the second line that causes me to stumble. My best guest is that formal study in the مدرسه is not necessary because an 'expression of devotion' (I'm guessing that for metrical purposes قولی صادق is an inversion of the Possessive construction in Turkic) is all that is required to achieve spirituality, and that because a 'Sufi has no means' i.e. has foresworn worldly goods, then a خانقاه is also not necessary.

Regarding this last part, if that is indeed what اتایی is saying, then this would strike one as peculiar because if there is one thing we associate with sufis in this period, it is affiliation with the institution of the خانقاه. It may be an elaboration of a 'rejectionist' stance (similar to the one described by Ahmet T. Karamustafa, God's Unruly Friends: Dervish groups in the Islamic later middle period, 1200-1550. Сalt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1994.), and thus we may consider the poetic voice in this case representative not of sufis, but of dervishes. Just a thought.

Color me amazed ...

Among projects I keep in the slow-lane is an attempted translation of a pair of verse histories that belong to the clutch of Persian and Turkic works collectively referred to as the Kokand Chronicles. Produced in the 19th century, these works offer various perspectives on the history of the Ming dynasty, the Khanate of Kokand, and the Ferghana valley after 1720. Timur K. Beisembiev is at the forefront of current scholarship on these works, and has produced much that is useful (including the now indispensable Annotated Indices to the Kokand Chronicles) but a lot of work remains to be done. (This is the story, alas, for much of Central Asian history between the Mongol and Russian conquests.)

The works in question are the شهنامهٔ دیوانهٔ عندالیب and the شهنامهٔ دیوانهٔ مطریب and exist in two copies at the Beruni Institute of Oriental Studies in Tashkent. The copy I am working from is Ms. 696/I-II, and is described in volume five (publ. 1960) of the institute's catalogue of manuscripts (q.v. nos 3532 and 3534, p. 49). Both works are concerned with the reign of Muḥammad 'Alī Khan (r. 1237/1822-1258/1842). Nothing is known of the authors.

A pair of stiches caught my eye in شهنامهٔ دیوانهٔ عندالیب (fol. 5b l.15-fol.6a l.1):

خان نی اوروغیدین ایرمیش اول ایر
حم آتی انینگ ایرور علی شیر

که رنگی اوجوب گحی قیزاردی
که سرغاریبان گحی کوکاردی

My best translation thus far of this quite literally colorful pair of stiches goes something like this:

'There was a man from the khan's kinfolk,
Also called 'Alī Shīr,

Who turned pale and sometimes red;
Who turned yellow and sometimes blue.'

The translation is a bit literal, and maybe the depth of meaning can be more accurately rendered in a metaphorical sense:

'There was a man from the khan's kinfolk,
Also called was 'Alī Shīr.

Sometimes he blanched and sometimes he blushed;
Sometimes he yellowed and sometimes he turned blue in the face.'

I'm still working on it; suggestions welcome.

Write on!

One of the things that inevitably slows down my blog-posting is the fiddly and persnickety process of correctly transliterating non-Latin scripts. Hence, if you look at some of my past posts, you'll see I've transliterated titles of books and whatnot originally published in, say, Russian or Uzbek, into Latin.

I've now decided this not a helpful process ... both intellectually dishonest and - what with developments in OCR and the non-Latin script search capabilities of Google - no longer necessary on my part to transliterate or transcribe Cyrillic or Arabic-script titles and sources into Latin. As more and more libraries (mine own, IU, for example) are calibrating search functions for non-Latin scripts, it actually means we now no longer have to worry quite so much about how we transliterate the given title of a Russian or Persian work, since interested parties can now simply type the relevant text in the orginal scripts and let nature - I mean, teh interwebs - work it's magic.