Persian Literature from Outside Iran - the Indian Subcontinent, Anatolia, Central Asia, and in Judeo-persian ― A History of Persian Literature

After the fall of the Sassanian Empire and with it the gradual decline of Middle Persian as a literary language, New Persian literature emerged in Transoxiana, beyond the frontiers of present-day Iran, and was written and read in India even before it became firmly established in cities such as Isfahan on the Iranian plateau. Over the course of a millennium (ca. 9001900 CE), Persian established itself as a contact vernacular and an international literary language from Sarajevo to Madras, with Persian poetry serving as a universal cultural cachet for literati both Muslim and non-Muslim. The role of Persian, beyond its early habitat of Iran and other Islamic lands, has long been recognized: European scholars first came to Persian via Turkey and British orientalists via India. Yet the universal popularity of poets such as Sa'di and Hfez of Shiraz and the ultimate rise of Iran to claim the centre of Persian writing and scholarship led to a relative neglect of the Persianate periphery until recently. This volume contributes to the scholarship of the Persianate fringe with the aid of the abundant material (notably in Tajik, Uzbek and Russian) long neglected by Western scholars and the perspectives of a new generation on this complex and important aspect of Persian literature.

Ehsan Yarshater is the Director of the Center for Iranian Studies and Professor Emeritus of Iranian Studies, Columbia University and the Founding Editor of the Encyclopaedia Iranica.John R. Perry is Professor of Persian (emeritus) at the University of Chicago. He previously taught at St. Andrews University (Scotland) from 1968-71 and held visiting fellowships at Columbia and Jawaharlal Nehru University (Delhi). He has travelled and researched widely in the Middle East and Central and South Asia and is a consulting editor for Encyclopaedia Iranica. His publications include translations from Arabic, Persian and Tajik; A Tajik Persian Reference Grammar (Leiden, 2005); and more than forty articles, principally on aspects of the linguistic and cultural connections among Arabic, Persian and adjacent languages and societies. Perry studied Arabic and Persian at Cambridge University (PhD, 1970), supplemented by a year at Tehran University and further research in Iran on his dissertation topic, a history of Karim Khan Zand. This was later published twice in book form and in Persian and Kurdish translations