Persian and Arabic Literary Communities in the Seventeenth Century: Migrant Poets between Arabia, Iran and India

The book explores how commercial, political, and religious networks expanded across the Arabian Sea in the 17th century, linking Iran, India, and the Arabian Peninsula through the production and circulation of classicizing Arabic and Persian poetry. It examines over seventy unstudied manuscripts of seventeenth-century Arabic and Persian poetry from libraries in India, Iran, Turkey, and Europe to understand how migrant poets adapted shared poetic forms, imagery, and rhetoric to engage with their interlocutors and create communities in the cities where they settled.

Format: Hardback
Length: 272 pages
Publication date: 13 July 2023
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Shortlisted for the 2024 British-Kuwait Friendship Society Book Prize, this book explores the globalising tendency of migration and its impact on literary systems in the Arabian Sea region during the seventeenth century. It highlights how merchants from South Asia traded goods in the ports of Yemen, noblemen from Safavid Iran established themselves in the courts of the Mughal Empire, and scholars from across the region came together to debate the Islamic sciences in the Arabian Peninsulas holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Through a close reading of over seventy unstudied manuscripts of seventeenth-century Arabic and Persian poetry, the book examines how migrant poets adapted shared poetic forms, imagery, and rhetoric to engage with their interlocutors and create communities in the cities where they settled. The book begins by reconstructing overarching patterns in the movement of over a thousand authors and the economic basis for their migration, before focusing on six case studies of literary communities, which each represent a different location in the circulatory system of the Arabian Sea. By doing so, the book demonstrates the plurality of seventeenth-century aesthetic movements, a diversity which later nationalisms purposefully simplified and misread.

Dimension: 234 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780755644568