tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20659588086956332792011-12-27T19:32:57.120-05:00Research on Mir 'Ali Shir Nawa'i, Islamic Central Asia (1500-1800), and other things relating to the study of history in generalNickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16093152534018467180noreply@blogger.comBlogger191100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2065958808695633279.post-49141916153518783842011-06-06T12:00:00.005-04:002011-06-06T12:10:57.704-04:00

I've accumulated a short list of "to do" projects over the summer, which I need to somehow fit in around my Uyghur language programme; these include:1) MESA conference presentation;2) CESS conference presentation;3) Revise and submit paper for publication.Of these, the first two are green-lighted; the third is more of a shot in the dark, but since I'm working on my advisor's recommendation - and

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16093152534018467180noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2065958808695633279.post-17535870260339035892011-04-28T23:01:00.006-04:002011-04-28T23:10:49.278-04:00

Hmmm. That didn't take long. Still, since no-one actually *blogs* anymore, I don't suppose anyone noticed. Life has been busy, but I've become involved in a Wiki project based out of Harvard, established by my friend Eric (the man behind Who was Du Tong?, which aims to provide an online chrestomathy for Chaghatay Turki (and variants of).Called nothing more grand than TurkicWiki, it's still in its

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16093152534018467180noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2065958808695633279.post-80783238141842581582011-03-16T21:42:00.015-04:002011-03-16T22:30:15.779-04:00

It is Spring Break Break. Let joy be unconfined. Wandering around campus and downtown today I am reminded just how wonderful Bloomington can be when a) the weather is mild, and b) most of the students have left. Lest I be accused of misanthropy or academic snobbery on account of the latter point, I should point out that I happen to think Bloomington fairly lovely - if not outright wonderful -

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16093152534018467180noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2065958808695633279.post-41899728080624424332011-01-24T13:50:00.012-05:002011-01-25T15:01:51.193-05:00

I've reached that point in my preliminary research where I've exhausted most of the published English-language source material, and I'm moving into the realms of Uzbek and Russian publications, more particularly, academic journals.The initial phase has been to tootle around the stacks of IU Wells Library, plucking volumes, issues or parts of journals from the shelves, flicking through the tables

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16093152534018467180noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2065958808695633279.post-79212274355667042972011-01-05T15:54:00.010-05:002011-01-05T16:09:14.695-05:00

In one of the December issues of the London Review of Books last year, the historian Sheila Fitzpatrick recalled her experiences as one of the lucky few foreign researchers allowed into the Soviet archives in the 1960s ('A Spy in the Archives').It's a wonderful account of the dualities and binaries that seem to have underlain her encounters. On the one hand, there was official suspicion, both

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16093152534018467180noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2065958808695633279.post-33513149591542487072011-01-04T18:44:00.009-05:002011-01-04T19:03:03.698-05:00

The New York Times Sunday Book review recently elicited responses from six writer/critics to the question, 'Why criticism matters.' One of the writers canvassed was Elif Batuman, an American writer from a Turkish family, whose wonderful book on the the study of Russian literature and the ups and downs of graduate student life, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16093152534018467180noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2065958808695633279.post-35772563325384276062011-01-03T01:54:00.005-05:002011-01-03T17:26:16.537-05:00

As noted in an earlier post, for the student whose first language is English, the absence of dictionaries and lexicons defining and explaining Chaghatay Turki words and phrases is frustrating.Another useful aide I've (re)discovered is Cagataische Sprachstudien: grammatikalischer Umriss und Chrestomathie, enthaltend zwoelf Original-Auszuege mit Uebersetzung, nebst Woerterbh dieser ost-tuerkischen

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16093152534018467180noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2065958808695633279.post-7446463690262493622010-12-29T13:12:00.011-05:002010-12-30T02:25:07.561-05:00

'What role for theory in historiography?' is a question historians constantly ruminate on. When I was at school in the UK, there were generally reckoned to to be four "schools" of historiography through which historians interpreted British history, namely Whig/Liberal, Marxist, Revisionist, Post-Revisionist.For the uninitiated Whig/Liberal (as I understand it ...) meant the teleological

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16093152534018467180noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2065958808695633279.post-88535884333169817752010-09-26T21:25:00.003-04:002010-09-26T21:58:00.742-04:00

Part of the process of researching Nawa'i includes, of course, engaging with previous scholarship. It is an onerous task: major monographs and articles have appeared in Russian, Uzbek, Turkish, Persian, German, French, Tajik ... and so on. Curiously, little is available in English - it's a similar situation that alluded to in an earlier post, when I was bemoaning the paucity of English-language

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16093152534018467180noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2065958808695633279.post-64456549966075423892010-09-19T20:59:00.007-04:002010-09-19T21:21:48.783-04:00

part of my research ... well, *part* of it now - probably most of it in the near future - involves examining how successive generations of poets engaged with and responded to Nawa'i's literary legacy. Quite simply, it means reading reams of late medieaval Turkic poetry (Central Asian or Ottoman) and identifying occasions on which poets either responded directly to Nawa'i - usually through the

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16093152534018467180noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2065958808695633279.post-52903112960766593382010-09-08T22:25:00.007-04:002010-09-08T22:59:49.548-04:00

Contrary to popular opinion, I'm not reading/studying Mir 'Ali Sir all the time - just most of it ... but that's by the by. By way of distraction, and in order to hone my reading and translating skills vis à vis Chaghatay Turkic, I've been working through some materials available online at Harvard University's Islamic Heritage Project.One is Janāb-i Ba-davlatnī hikāyātlārī ('Tales of the Blessed

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16093152534018467180noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2065958808695633279.post-64054782717217545982010-09-05T11:20:00.008-04:002010-09-05T11:54:49.441-04:00

Earlier posts alluded to a) the lack of English translations of Nawa'i's works, and b) the production of scholarly editions in (mostly) Uzbekistan and Turkey. However, as libraries and archives get stuck into the arduous process of digitizing their collections, it is to be hoped that the manuscript copies themselves will become accessible online - preferably without having to pay for the

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16093152534018467180noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2065958808695633279.post-64485069506088146302010-09-04T13:21:00.000-04:002010-09-04T13:21:32.897-04:00

Earlier this year I compiled for the purposes of a term paper an initial handlist of Nawa'i MSS worldwide. I identified over 680 copies of Mir 'Ali Shir's Persian and Turkic works in libraries and archives throughout Europe, Russia, the Middle East, Caucasus and Central Asia. The oldest dated from his lifetime (i.e. the 2nd half of the 15th cent.) and the most recent from just before WWII (1939,

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16093152534018467180noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2065958808695633279.post-79864339240446014082009-12-26T22:38:00.009-05:002009-12-29T14:34:31.302-05:00

Maria Subtelny at University of Toronto is supreme among English-language scholars who focus on this period. Her most recent work, Timurids in Transition: Turko-Persian Politics and Acculturation in Medieval Iran (Leiden: Brill, 2007), is effectively a summation of her life's work, combining both new and previously published scholarship on the latter years of the Timurid dynasty, with particular

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16093152534018467180noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2065958808695633279.post-57622810223912539342009-12-15T21:35:00.003-05:002009-12-17T13:31:19.675-05:00

In the absence of a Chaghatay-English dictionary/lexicon/glossary and so on, the reader of Mir 'Ali Shir is forced to consult a number of different reference sources to make either head or tail of his works which, transgressing on the territories of religion and poetry, often contain a lot of oblique or obscure words and phrases, many of them loans from Arabic and Persian.A good starting point is

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16093152534018467180noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2065958808695633279.post-21792228686750007432009-12-11T00:54:00.000-05:002009-12-11T01:20:26.862-05:00

While we lack for accessible translations of Mir 'Ali Shir's works, there are no shortage of sources on him, his life and times available in English translation (and other languages). An obvious starting point is the Makarim al-Akhlaq, a panegyric written by Khwandamir in Mir 'Ali Shir's honor, listing his virtues and literary achievements. Significantly, it gives details of the institutions

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16093152534018467180noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2065958808695633279.post-22840156597694394612009-12-09T21:30:00.000-05:002009-12-09T22:15:44.101-05:00

For the non-linguist, accessing Mir 'Ali Shir is a sisypheaen task. As far as I am aware, only one of his works has been translated into English, the famous Mughamat al-Lughatain (composed AH 905/AD 1499), his treatise on the superiority of Chaghatay Turkic to Persian as a literary language. It's an interesting work, but imho has more novelty value than anything.If it's critical and/or published

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16093152534018467180noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2065958808695633279.post-87714468591819358482009-12-08T22:21:00.000-05:002009-12-08T23:54:13.358-05:00

One of the main problems facing the researcher of Mir 'Ali Shir is that manuscripts of his works, whether copied during his own lifetime or after, are dispersed across innumerable countries. Naturally, some institutions have more mss than others; of particular importance is the manuscript collection at the Biruni (Oriental) Institute of the Uzbek Academy of Sciences in Tashkent. There are also

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16093152534018467180noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2065958808695633279.post-9793220186598869652009-12-07T22:08:00.000-05:002009-12-07T22:54:39.643-05:00

The title of Mir (from the Arabic amir, 'Prince' or, sometimes, 'Commander') was not inherited, as is still regularly stated - for example, on the relevant wikipedia article - but awarded. The idea that Mir 'Ali Shir came by the title because he belonged to the aristocracy is erroneous - unfortunately, because this assertion was first made by the otherwise magisterial V. V. Bartol'd, it has stuck

Nickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16093152534018467180noreply@blogger.com0