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.

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.

The Historic Nawa'i (1)

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 medium of often through the poetic form known as mukhammas, a five-line poem usually written in response to another - or by alluding to him in their poetry.

An example of the latter can be found in the poetry of the noted Khorezmian historian Shīr Muhammad Mīrāb bin ‘Awaḍ Biy Mīrāb al-Khīwaqī (1192/1778-1244/1829), or simply (and more commonly) Mu’nis. Nawa'i's works are known to have been on the curriculum (such as it was) in Central Asian madrassas by the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Examples of Nawa'i's works copied by Munis himself today survive in Central Asian collections.

References

V. A. Abdullaev, O’zbek Adabiyoti Tarixi II: XVII asrdan XIX asrning ikkinchi yarimgacha [History of Uzbek Literature, II: From the 17th Century to the Second Half of the 19th Century], (Tashkent: O’qituvchi, 1967).

Q. Munirov, Munis, Ogahiy va Bayonining Tarikhiy Asarlari [The works of history by Munis, Agahi and Bayani], (Tashkent: Uzbekistan SSR Academy of Sciences, 1960).

Gerhard Schoeler and Munibar Rahman, ‘Musammaṭ’, EI², VII (1993), pp. 660-2.

Nawa'i MSS (3)

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 privilege, but we can but hope.

One good example is the University of Michigan, which has made available for download (courtesy of the excellent Islamic Manuscripts at Michigan project)an early 19th-century copy of the Khamsa-i Nawa'i. Composed during 888-890 AH/AD 1483-85, this is a quintet of mathnawīs modeled on Persian works by Niẓāmī, Amīr Khusraw and Jāmī; Nawa'i's was the first in the genre to be written in Chaghatay Turkic. The five parts are:

I.) Ḥayrat al-Abrār
II.) Farhād va Shīrīn
III.) Laylī va Majnūn
IV.) Sab‘a-yi Sayyār
V.) Saddi Iskandarī

This particular copy comes from the Abdulhamid Collection at UM, so-called because it belonged to the Ottoman Sultan, Abdulhamid II (r. 1876-1909). The name of the copyist and the date of copying is given at the end of the text: Sahib Shaykh Khatib, 1245 AH (AD 1829/30).

I haven't had much of an opportunity yet to examine the ms., but on the face of it, it is a very good copy, made in a clear and tidy hand, with relatively few blemishes or major lacunae.

Nawa'i MSS (2)

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, to be precise). As the focus of the survey was on handcopied mss, I excluded lithographic and printed editions of his works.

The survey revealed two trends: first, that his works rapidly spread as far afield as the Ottoman Empire, India and eastern Moghulistan (counterminous to modern-day Xinjiang) within a couple of decades of his death, facilitated by diplomatic and cultural exchanges between the Ottomans, Safavids, early Mughals and rulers of eastern Turkestan; abd second, that there appears to have been a huge increase in the copying of his works from around 1800 - or, to put it another way, we have more copies of his works made between 1800 and 1900 than were made between 1500 and 1800 put together.

I'm still working on the handlist, as I missed several major collections and archives in Turkey, and also did not cover India or China in my survey, so for the moment I'll offer up a few readings which explore the cultural exchanges between Central Asia and neighbouring regions from 1500 onward.

Suggested Readings

Beisembiev, T. K., ‘Farghana’s Contacts with India in the 18th and 19th Centuries (According to the Khoqand Chronicles)’, Journal of Asian History, vol. 28, no.2 (1994), pp. 124-35.

Birnbaum, E., ‘The Ottomans and Chaghatay Literature’, Central Asiatic Journal, vol. 20, no. 3 (1976), pp. 157-190.

Dale, S. F., ‘The Legacy of the Timurids’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, series 3, vol. 8, no. 1 (1998), pp. 43-58.

Foltz, R., ‘Cultural Contacts between Central Asia and Mughal India’, Central Asiatic Journal, vol. 42, no. 1 (1998), pp. 44-65.

Schimmel, A., ‘Some Notes on the Cultural Activity of the First Uzbek Rulers’, Journal of the Pakistan Historical Society, vol. 8, no. 3 (1960).

Soucek, P., ‘Persian Artists in Mughal India: Influences and Transformations’, Muqarnas, vol. 4 (1987), pp. 161-181.

Subtelny, M. E., ‘Art and Politics in Early 16th Century Central Asia’, Central Asiatic Journal, vol. 27, nos 1-2 (1983), pp. 121-148.

Tanindi, Z., ‘Additions to Illustrated Manuscripts in Ottoman Workshops’, Muqarnas, vol. 17 (2000), pp. 147-161.

Nawa'i MSS (1)

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 important items at libraries in Kazan (Tatarstan) and St Petersburg (Russia).

Outside of the countries of the former Soviet Union, the Bibliothèque Nationale du France in Paris and the British Library in London are arguably of primary importance. It should be pointed out that Nawa'i's works exist in both Persian and Chaghatay Turkic, but because of my language training I am initially focusing on identifying and accessing mss written in the latter language.

There are two ways of identifying mss: 1) scholarship based on mss and published critical editions; 2) published catalogues. In terms of the latter, a limited list looks like this ...

Ethé, H., Catalogue of the Persian Manuscripts in the India Office Library, repr. (London: India Office Library & Records, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 1980).

Kut, G., Supplementary Catalogue of Turkish Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library: with reprint of the 1930 catalogue by H. Ethé, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

Meredith-Owens, G. M., Handlist of Persian Manuscripts [acquired by the British Museum] 1895-1966, (London: British Museum, 1968).

Parlatir, İ., Hazai, G., and Kellner-Heinkele, B., Catalogue of the Turkish Manuscripts in the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Oriental Manuscripts in the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 2 (Budapest: Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 2007).

Rieu, C., Catalogue of the Persian Manuscripts in the British Museum, 3 vols (London: British Museum, 1879-83).

—, Catalogue of the Turkish Manuscripts in the British Museum, (London: British Museum, 1888).

—, Supplement to the Catalogue of the Persian Manuscripts in the British Museum, (London: British Museum, 1895).

Smirnow, W. D., Manuscrits Turcs de l’Institut des Langues Orientales [St Petersburg], Collections scientifiques de l’Institut des Langues Orientales du Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, 7 (Amsterdam: Celibus, 1971).

Sobranie Vostochnykh Rukopisei Akademii Nauk Uzbekskoi SSR [catalogue of oriental manuscripts at the Uzbek SSR Academy of Sciences], 11 vols (Tashkent: UzSSR Academy of Sciences, 1952–1987).

Volin, S. L., ‘Opisanie rukopisei proizvedeniy Navoi v Leningradskikh sobraniyakh' [A description of Navoi manuscript items in the Leningrad collections], in Alisher Navoi, ed. by A. K. Borovkov (Moscow/Leningrad: USSR Academy of Sciences, 1946).

Waley, M. I., Supplementary Handlist of Persian Manuscripts, 1966-1998, (London: British Library, 1998).