Following the success of the first four series on 'The Idea of Iran', the London Middle East Institute, SOAS (LMEI) and the British Museum with the support of the Soudavar Memorial Foundation are pleased to announce the fifth series of lectures, which will be held as a one day symposium. Contributions by seven eminent scholars will cover aspects of the early Isamic period in Iran. Please see details below and the attached programme.
The Idea of Iran:
the early Islamic period
Venue: Brunei Gallery Lecture Theatre, Brunei Gallery, SOAS
Date: Saturday 2 February 2008
Time: 9.55am-4.30pm (Registration from 8.45am)
Admission: £15.00; conc. (OAPs & LMEI Affiliates) £10.00; Students free (to include lunch and refreshments).
Enquiries & Bookings: Vincenzo Paci: E vp6@soas.ac.uk; T 020 7898 4490; F 020 7898 4329
Keynote Speaker:
Iranian Identity after Conversion to Islam
Professor Ehsan Yarshater, Director, Center for Iranian Studies, Columbia University
Speakers:
Why is Iran not an Arab Country
Professor Hugh N Kennedy, Professor of Arabic, SOAS
The Persistent Older Heritage in the Mediaeval Iranian Lands
Professor C. Edmund Bosworth, Former Professor of Arabic Studies, University of Manchester and Honorary Professor, Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter
Social and Economic Life in Early Islamic Iran
Professor Richard W. Bulliet, Professor of Middle Eastern History, Columbia University
Quiddities, algorisms, oranges—Iran in Islamic science and beyond
Professor Lutz Richter-Bernburg, Professor in Islamic Studies, University of Tübingen
The Cross and the Lotus: An Armenian Miscellany
Professor James R. Russell, Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies, Harvard University
What happened to the Sasanian hunt in Islamic art?
Professor Robert Hillenbrand, Professor of Islamic Art, University of Edinburgh
Cheques should be made payable to the ‘London Middle East Institute’
Please note that although you will be able to register on the day itself from 8.45am onwards we are unable to guarantee that seats will be available and advise that in order to secure a place you register in advance.
London Middle East InstituteM110School of Oriental & African StudiesRussell SquareLondonWC1H 0XG
E-mail: vp6@soas.ac.ukTel. No: 0207 898 4490Fax: 0207 898 4329Web: www.lmei.soas.ac.uk
The Idea of Iran: the early Islamic period
The fifth in the series ‘The Idea of Iran’ will be held as a one day symposium at which contributions by seven eminent scholars will cover aspects of the early Islamic period. Both the London Middle East Institute, SOAS and the British Museum remain indebted to the Soudavar Memorial Foundation for its continued support without which the series would not be possible.
9.30 Registration
9.55 Welcoming remarks
10.00-10.45 Speaker 1 - Keynote
Iranian Identity after Conversion to Islam
Professor Ehsan Yarshater, Director, Center for Iranian Studies, Columbia University.
Islam, like Zoroastrianism, is a religion that concerns itself not only with the spiritual aspects of life, but embraces and legislates for all other aspects of life. Therefore, conversion to Islam brought profound changes, social, cultural or otherwise, in Iranian society. One could easily expect that Persia, fully occupied and ruled by the Arabs for at least 200 years after the Arab conquest, would change its identity from Persian to Arab as all other countries in the Middle East and North Africa such as Iraq, Syria, and Egypt, each of which were heirs to brilliant ancient civilizations. But this did not happen. Persia while adopting the Islamic religion kept its Persian identity, primarily through tenaciously sticking to its language and thereby to the canons of its distinct culture. Three hundred years after the Arab invasion, the poet Ferdowsi crystallized the Iranian true sentiment with regard to the Persian identity in his immortal Shahnameh, a reminder to Persians of their long and glorious history, their splendid kings, their outstanding warriors, and the great nation that the Iranians had been. His work became symbolic of a dichotomy that characterizes Persian history. The question is why Persia proved an exception to the norm?
10.45-11.30 Speaker 2
Why is Iran not an Arab Country
Professor Hugh N. Kennedy, Professor of Arabic, SOAS, London.
This paper discusses the reasons for the survival of the cultural and political identity of Iran through the Muslim conquests of the 7th century. A contrast will be drawn with Syria and Egypt where the pre-Islamic culture was marginalised and the pre-Arabic languages effectively disappeared from common use. It will show how "Iranianness" survived both in the semi-independent principalities which survived the conquests and among the officials and bureaucrats of the Islamic caliphate. It will finish by considering the Shahnameh as a sign of the emergence of New Persian as a language of high culture.
11.30-12.00 Coffee
12.00-12.45 Speaker 3
The Persistent Older Heritage in the Mediaeval Iranian Lands
Professor C. Edmund Bosworth, Former Professor of Arabic Studies University of Manchester and Honorary Professor, Institute of Arab and Islamic Studie, University of Exeter.
Continuity of tradition with the pre-Islamic past can be traced in governmental attitudes and practices and, in some instances, a continuity of personnel from Zoroastrian past to Islamic present in the post-conquest period (i.e. after the 7th century A.D.). Despite a tradition amongst Muslim rigorists that “Islam cancels the past”, there was in several Iranian ruling lines an attempt to establish links, real or imagined, with the pre-Islamic past. Thus the Samanids of Transoxania and Khurasan, sprung from the dehqan class, had a genealogy provided for them that went back to the father of the Sasanid-period emperor Bahram Chubin; various petty dynasties of the Caspian coastlands and the Elburz mountains interior, themselves comparatively late Islamised, traced their roots back, with considerable plausibility here, to local pre-Islamic families; eulogists of the Daylami Buyids connected them with the Sasanid ruling institution; even a power in as late as the 12th-13th centuries, the Ghurids, coming from an obscure and backwards part of central Afghanistan, managed to find roots in the past of the heroic, legendary, national Iranian past.
12.45-1.30 Speaker 4
Social and Economic Life in Early Islamic Iran
Professor Richard W. Bulliet, Professor of Middle Eastern History, Columbia University.
The three-and-a-half centuries that followed the Arab conquests of the 7th century C.E. witnessed profound changes in the social and economic circumstances of the region that is today circumscribed by the boundaries of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Conversion to Islam is the most obvious of these changes, but conversion was directly linked to economic changes and to urbanization. Economically, the growth of a cotton industry gave Iran for the first time in history a major export product. This presentation will describe the evidence for a cotton boom in early Islamic Iran and show how it was linked to the spread of Islam, the growth of cities, and a cultural efflorescence that made Iran the most important region of the Islamic caliphate. It will also show how this economic dynamism waned in the eleventh century, partly due to climatic deterioration, leading within a century to a significant shrinkage in Iran’s economic and cultural importance.
1.30-2.15 Lunch
2.15- 3.00 Speaker 5
Quiddities, algorisms, oranges—Iran in Islamic science and beyond
Professor Lutz Richter-Bernburg, Professor in Islamic Studies, University of Tübingen.
In the course of a few centuries, a pluriethic and plurireligious civilization of extraordinary vibrancy developed under the aegis of, initially, Arabian Islam in the vast swath of territories encompassing Western Asia and North Africa. Not the least achievement of this civilization was the pursuit of science and learning beyond any utilitarian consideration and shared among all religious, linguistic and ethnic segments of population. Thus it is of little wonder that the people of Iran, one of the most numerous constituent groups among caliphal subjects, were notably involved in related activities as well. Indeed, several of the most prominent figures of a wide range of disciplines, including but not limited to, medicine and auxiliary fields, mathematics and astronomy, philosophy, and even Arabic grammar, hailed from Iran. Some of them became household words even beyond the boundaries of their own cilivilization. Names that spring to mind include Sibawayh, al-Khwarizmi, Rhazes, Haly Abbas, Avicenna, al-Biruni, to mention but a few, and where applicable, in their medieval Latin form. In the presentation here to be introduced, these and numerous others will be situated in their respective cultural and disciplinal context, not omitting the subsequent reception of Islamic learning in the Latin West.
3.00-3.45 Speaker 6
The Cross and the Lotus: An Armenian Miscellany
Professor James R. Russell, Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies, Harvard University.
The medieval Armenian collection of didactic tales and precepts, Zroyc' plnje k'alak'i, "Tale of the City of Brass", which exists in MSS and in numerous printed editions even down to recent years, includes such Persian and Islamic material as the counsels of Anushirvan and the legend of King Bahlul, as well as the Wisdom of Ahiqar and local hagiographies. In various respects the book's organization, literary form, and unifying themes suggest a close analogy to the Buddhist Saddharmapundarika sutra (Lotus Sutra of the Good Law). This text in its turn reflects the conventions of storytelling and aesthetics of Iranian Central Asia.
3.45-4.30Speaker 7
What happened to the Sasanian hunt in Islamic art?
Professor Robert Hillenbrand, Professor of Islamic Art, University of Edinburgh.
The lecture focuses on a textile which can be shown to be no later than the early 9th century and which re-uses a familiar theme of Sasanian court art - the royal hunter. It is a test case of the many ways in which early Islamic artists copied, grappled with, misunderstood and popularised the Sasanian heritage. Analysis will reveal how the original meaning is gradually lost as the image shrinks in size, is duplicated or even quadrupled, acquires extra detail or suffers crucial iconographic degradations. A similar process of transition can be demonstrated in other media, such as metalwork and pottery, but costly textiles travelled across wider distances and with greater ease; hence echoes of this theme can be found as far afield as China and Western Europe. Such textiles document the busy afterlife of Sasanian themes in the most unexpected guises.
4.30 Closing remarks
4.35 Tea
the early Islamic period
Venue: Brunei Gallery Lecture Theatre, Brunei Gallery, SOAS
Date: Saturday 2 February 2008
Time: 9.55am-4.30pm (Registration from 8.45am)
Admission: £15.00; conc. (OAPs & LMEI Affiliates) £10.00; Students free (to include lunch and refreshments).
Enquiries & Bookings: Vincenzo Paci: E vp6@soas.ac.uk; T 020 7898 4490; F 020 7898 4329
Keynote Speaker:
Iranian Identity after Conversion to Islam
Professor Ehsan Yarshater, Director, Center for Iranian Studies, Columbia University
Speakers:
Why is Iran not an Arab Country
Professor Hugh N Kennedy, Professor of Arabic, SOAS
The Persistent Older Heritage in the Mediaeval Iranian Lands
Professor C. Edmund Bosworth, Former Professor of Arabic Studies, University of Manchester and Honorary Professor, Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter
Social and Economic Life in Early Islamic Iran
Professor Richard W. Bulliet, Professor of Middle Eastern History, Columbia University
Quiddities, algorisms, oranges—Iran in Islamic science and beyond
Professor Lutz Richter-Bernburg, Professor in Islamic Studies, University of Tübingen
The Cross and the Lotus: An Armenian Miscellany
Professor James R. Russell, Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies, Harvard University
What happened to the Sasanian hunt in Islamic art?
Professor Robert Hillenbrand, Professor of Islamic Art, University of Edinburgh
Cheques should be made payable to the ‘London Middle East Institute’
Please note that although you will be able to register on the day itself from 8.45am onwards we are unable to guarantee that seats will be available and advise that in order to secure a place you register in advance.
London Middle East InstituteM110School of Oriental & African StudiesRussell SquareLondonWC1H 0XG
E-mail: vp6@soas.ac.ukTel. No: 0207 898 4490Fax: 0207 898 4329Web: www.lmei.soas.ac.uk
The Idea of Iran: the early Islamic period
The fifth in the series ‘The Idea of Iran’ will be held as a one day symposium at which contributions by seven eminent scholars will cover aspects of the early Islamic period. Both the London Middle East Institute, SOAS and the British Museum remain indebted to the Soudavar Memorial Foundation for its continued support without which the series would not be possible.
9.30 Registration
9.55 Welcoming remarks
10.00-10.45 Speaker 1 - Keynote
Iranian Identity after Conversion to Islam
Professor Ehsan Yarshater, Director, Center for Iranian Studies, Columbia University.
Islam, like Zoroastrianism, is a religion that concerns itself not only with the spiritual aspects of life, but embraces and legislates for all other aspects of life. Therefore, conversion to Islam brought profound changes, social, cultural or otherwise, in Iranian society. One could easily expect that Persia, fully occupied and ruled by the Arabs for at least 200 years after the Arab conquest, would change its identity from Persian to Arab as all other countries in the Middle East and North Africa such as Iraq, Syria, and Egypt, each of which were heirs to brilliant ancient civilizations. But this did not happen. Persia while adopting the Islamic religion kept its Persian identity, primarily through tenaciously sticking to its language and thereby to the canons of its distinct culture. Three hundred years after the Arab invasion, the poet Ferdowsi crystallized the Iranian true sentiment with regard to the Persian identity in his immortal Shahnameh, a reminder to Persians of their long and glorious history, their splendid kings, their outstanding warriors, and the great nation that the Iranians had been. His work became symbolic of a dichotomy that characterizes Persian history. The question is why Persia proved an exception to the norm?
10.45-11.30 Speaker 2
Why is Iran not an Arab Country
Professor Hugh N. Kennedy, Professor of Arabic, SOAS, London.
This paper discusses the reasons for the survival of the cultural and political identity of Iran through the Muslim conquests of the 7th century. A contrast will be drawn with Syria and Egypt where the pre-Islamic culture was marginalised and the pre-Arabic languages effectively disappeared from common use. It will show how "Iranianness" survived both in the semi-independent principalities which survived the conquests and among the officials and bureaucrats of the Islamic caliphate. It will finish by considering the Shahnameh as a sign of the emergence of New Persian as a language of high culture.
11.30-12.00 Coffee
12.00-12.45 Speaker 3
The Persistent Older Heritage in the Mediaeval Iranian Lands
Professor C. Edmund Bosworth, Former Professor of Arabic Studies University of Manchester and Honorary Professor, Institute of Arab and Islamic Studie, University of Exeter.
Continuity of tradition with the pre-Islamic past can be traced in governmental attitudes and practices and, in some instances, a continuity of personnel from Zoroastrian past to Islamic present in the post-conquest period (i.e. after the 7th century A.D.). Despite a tradition amongst Muslim rigorists that “Islam cancels the past”, there was in several Iranian ruling lines an attempt to establish links, real or imagined, with the pre-Islamic past. Thus the Samanids of Transoxania and Khurasan, sprung from the dehqan class, had a genealogy provided for them that went back to the father of the Sasanid-period emperor Bahram Chubin; various petty dynasties of the Caspian coastlands and the Elburz mountains interior, themselves comparatively late Islamised, traced their roots back, with considerable plausibility here, to local pre-Islamic families; eulogists of the Daylami Buyids connected them with the Sasanid ruling institution; even a power in as late as the 12th-13th centuries, the Ghurids, coming from an obscure and backwards part of central Afghanistan, managed to find roots in the past of the heroic, legendary, national Iranian past.
12.45-1.30 Speaker 4
Social and Economic Life in Early Islamic Iran
Professor Richard W. Bulliet, Professor of Middle Eastern History, Columbia University.
The three-and-a-half centuries that followed the Arab conquests of the 7th century C.E. witnessed profound changes in the social and economic circumstances of the region that is today circumscribed by the boundaries of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Conversion to Islam is the most obvious of these changes, but conversion was directly linked to economic changes and to urbanization. Economically, the growth of a cotton industry gave Iran for the first time in history a major export product. This presentation will describe the evidence for a cotton boom in early Islamic Iran and show how it was linked to the spread of Islam, the growth of cities, and a cultural efflorescence that made Iran the most important region of the Islamic caliphate. It will also show how this economic dynamism waned in the eleventh century, partly due to climatic deterioration, leading within a century to a significant shrinkage in Iran’s economic and cultural importance.
1.30-2.15 Lunch
2.15- 3.00 Speaker 5
Quiddities, algorisms, oranges—Iran in Islamic science and beyond
Professor Lutz Richter-Bernburg, Professor in Islamic Studies, University of Tübingen.
In the course of a few centuries, a pluriethic and plurireligious civilization of extraordinary vibrancy developed under the aegis of, initially, Arabian Islam in the vast swath of territories encompassing Western Asia and North Africa. Not the least achievement of this civilization was the pursuit of science and learning beyond any utilitarian consideration and shared among all religious, linguistic and ethnic segments of population. Thus it is of little wonder that the people of Iran, one of the most numerous constituent groups among caliphal subjects, were notably involved in related activities as well. Indeed, several of the most prominent figures of a wide range of disciplines, including but not limited to, medicine and auxiliary fields, mathematics and astronomy, philosophy, and even Arabic grammar, hailed from Iran. Some of them became household words even beyond the boundaries of their own cilivilization. Names that spring to mind include Sibawayh, al-Khwarizmi, Rhazes, Haly Abbas, Avicenna, al-Biruni, to mention but a few, and where applicable, in their medieval Latin form. In the presentation here to be introduced, these and numerous others will be situated in their respective cultural and disciplinal context, not omitting the subsequent reception of Islamic learning in the Latin West.
3.00-3.45 Speaker 6
The Cross and the Lotus: An Armenian Miscellany
Professor James R. Russell, Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies, Harvard University.
The medieval Armenian collection of didactic tales and precepts, Zroyc' plnje k'alak'i, "Tale of the City of Brass", which exists in MSS and in numerous printed editions even down to recent years, includes such Persian and Islamic material as the counsels of Anushirvan and the legend of King Bahlul, as well as the Wisdom of Ahiqar and local hagiographies. In various respects the book's organization, literary form, and unifying themes suggest a close analogy to the Buddhist Saddharmapundarika sutra (Lotus Sutra of the Good Law). This text in its turn reflects the conventions of storytelling and aesthetics of Iranian Central Asia.
3.45-4.30Speaker 7
What happened to the Sasanian hunt in Islamic art?
Professor Robert Hillenbrand, Professor of Islamic Art, University of Edinburgh.
The lecture focuses on a textile which can be shown to be no later than the early 9th century and which re-uses a familiar theme of Sasanian court art - the royal hunter. It is a test case of the many ways in which early Islamic artists copied, grappled with, misunderstood and popularised the Sasanian heritage. Analysis will reveal how the original meaning is gradually lost as the image shrinks in size, is duplicated or even quadrupled, acquires extra detail or suffers crucial iconographic degradations. A similar process of transition can be demonstrated in other media, such as metalwork and pottery, but costly textiles travelled across wider distances and with greater ease; hence echoes of this theme can be found as far afield as China and Western Europe. Such textiles document the busy afterlife of Sasanian themes in the most unexpected guises.
4.30 Closing remarks
4.35 Tea
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