Alireza Korangy Knihy

The articles in this volume are dedicated to Professor Ahmad Mahdavi Damghani for the breadth and depth of his interests and his influence on those interests. They attest to the fact that his fervor and rigorously surgical attention to detail have found fertile ground in a wide variety of disciplines, including (among others) Persian literature and philology; Islamic history and historiography; Arabic literature and philology; and Islamic philosophy and jurisprudence. The volume has brought together some of the most respected scholars in the fields of Islamic studies and Islamic literatures, all his prior students, to contribute with articles that touch on the fields Professor Mahdavi Damghani has so permanently touched with his astonishing scholarship and attention to detail.

This collection of essays explores women's martyrdom across various cultures and historical periods, including Russia, Iraq, Iran, Canada, and Greece. Each essay examines the representation of women's sacrifice, focusing on the 'how' of martyrdom rather than just the 'what.' The authors analyze the rhetoric, narrative strategies, and structures involved, providing a rigorous exploration of the nature and function of women's sacrifice. The essays draw on a wide range of theoretical and philological frameworks, offering fresh insights into cultural crises and gender construction. Case studies include Pussy Riot and the film Everybody Dies But Me, war propaganda in early to mid-twentieth century Canada, women's oratory in early Islamicate culture, and the imagery of women and children in Iranian history, among others. While each essay stands alone with its specific focus, the collection presents a transnational and transhistorical panorama of women's sacrifice as depicted in both official and unofficial discourse. The contributors are leading experts in their fields, ensuring that the analyses are current and rigorous.

This set of essays highlights the state of the art in the linguistics of Iranian languages. The contributions span the full range of linguistic inquiry, including pragmatics, syntax, semantics, phonology/phonetics, lexicography, historical linguistics and poetics and covering a wide set of Iranian languages including Persian, Balochi, Kurdish and Ossetian. This book will engage both the active scholar in the field as well as linguists from other fields seeking to assess the latest developments in Iranian linguistics.

This volume is a collection of twenty-three articles dedicated to one of the most distinguished philologists and linguists in Near Eastern Studies and one of the most prolific teachers and translators of Near Eastern languages and literatures, Wheeler McIntosh Thackston, Jr. (Harvard University), on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. The essays, written by Thackston’s students, colleagues, and friends, each interacting with his intellectual legacy individually, are divided into four sections: Persian Literature; Linguistics, Philology, and Religious Studies; Middle Eastern, Central Asian, and South Asian History; and History of Art and Architecture. Reflecting Thackston’s scholarly attention to the translation of primary sources, many of the essays bring to light never-before-translated texts, ranging from Persian letters from the Qing archive in Beijing to early Arabic sources on sorcery and magic to commentaries on classic works of Persian literature. The volume also devotes significant space to art historical contributions by several of Thackston’s collaborators, and it also features essays from Thackston’s colleagues in fields including Semitic Philology, Biblical Studies, and Classics. The volume is completed with a bibliography of Thackston’s publications and biographical reflections on his scholarly life.

Ghazal is the most important poetic genre in the Persian-speaking world, but also extremely prevalent in South Asia. The inter-regional influences of the ghazal are immense, both in terms of prominence and culturally nuanced themes and rhetoric, especially when considering Indo-Persian studies. Afḍal al-Dīn Khāqānī Shirvānī (12th c.), who is arguably the most difficult prose writer and poet in the Persian-speaking world, stands as a harbinger to the development of the ghazal, in terms of both theme and language. His ghazal poetry foreshadows the many literary schools that follow, most specifically, the fifteenth-century Sabk-i Hindi (the Indian Style). The book by Alireza Korangy treats, specifically, the ghazal poetry of Iran and its development as a genre. It also treats the influences of Khāqānī as a focal point of divergence in ghazal’s linguistic and thematic development. The embryonic stages of ghazal in classical Persian verse, from the ninth to the twelfth century, are examined from the point of view of theme, rhetoric, and prosody under the rubric of historicity and cross-linguistic correlation. This is an in-depth analysis and interpretation of more than fifty Arab and Persian poets in order to examine the thematic borrowings prevalent in the early and eventually later stages of ghazal development.

The Iranian languages are one of the world's major language families. With an estimated 150 to 200 million native speakers, these languages constitute the western group of the larger Indo-Iranian family, which represents a major eastern branch of the Indo-European languages. Geographically, the Iranian Languages are spoken from Central Turkey, Syria and Iraq in the West to Pakistan and western edged of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of China in the east. Iranian languages have long been among the major interests of the philologists and general linguists, and European scholars have made tremendous contributions to the study of this language family. In light of such efforts, now we know that the Iranian languages can be historically divided into three phases, that are old, middle and new Iranian languages, and the new Iranian languages may be generally grouped as Eastern and Western. In recent years, the orientation towards typology has led to the appearance of somewhat more ponderance on the subject but the work has not included description of some of the very important languages of the Caspian, and or of the religious minorities (such as those of the Zoroastrians or the Jewish community), of the four-fold Central Plateau dial.