Reading across Borders: Afghans, Iranians, and Literary Nationalism

By Aria Fani

The dynamic and interconnected ways Afghans and Iranians invented their modern selves through literature.

Contrary to the presumption that literary nationalism in the Global South emerged through contact with Europe alone, Reading across Borders demonstrates how the cultural forms of Iran and Afghanistan as nation-states arose from their shared Persian heritage and cross-cultural exchange in the twentieth century. In this book, Aria Fani charts the individuals, institutions, and conversations that made this exchange possible, detailing the dynamic and interconnected ways Afghans and Iranians invented their modern selves through new ideas about literature.

Fani illustrates how voluntary and state-funded associations of readers helped formulate and propagate "literature" as a recognizable notion, adapting and changing Persian concepts to fit this modern idea. Focusing on early twentieth-century periodicals with readers in Afghan and Iranian cities and their diaspora, Fani exposes how nationalism intensified—rather than severed—cultural contact among two Persian-speaking societies amidst the diverging and competing demands of their respective nation-states. This interconnected history was ultimately forgotten, shaping many of the cultural disputes between Iran and Afghanistan today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Release date: Apr 9, 2024
• ISBN: 9781477328835

Book preview

Connected Histories of the Middle East and the Global South

Afshin Marashi and Houri Berberian, Series Editors

Also in the series

Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Across the Green Sea: Histories from the Western Indian Ocean, 1440–1640

READING ACROSS BORDERS

Afghans, Iranians, and Literary Nationalism

ARIA FANI

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS

Austin

Copyright © 2024 by the University of Texas Press

Excerpts of chapters 1 and 4 were previous published in Iranian Studies.

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First edition, 2024

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Fani, Aria, author.

Title: Reading across borders : Afghans, Iranians, and literary nationalism / Aria Fani.

Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023029350 (print) | LCCN 2023029351 (ebook) ISBN 978-1-4773-2881-1 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-4773-2882-8 (pdf) ISBN 978-1-4773-2883-5 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Persian periodicals—Afghanistan—History and criticism—20th century. | Persian periodicals—Iran—History and criticism—20th century. | Nationalism and literature—Afghanistan—History—20th century. | Nationalism and literature—Iran—History—20th century. | Persian literature—Afghanistan—History and criticism—20th century. | Persian literature—Iran—History and criticism—20th century.

Classification: LCC PK6427.6.A3 F36 2024 (print) | LCC PK6427.6.A3 (ebook) | DDC 891/.55—dc23/eng/20230728

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023029350

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023029351

doi:10.7560/328811

To my role model, Kevin L. Schwartz

Contents

Note on Transliteration

Preface: Why I Wrote This Book

INTRODUCTION: What Literature? Which World?

CHAPTER 1: The Formation of a Modern Discourse of Literature (1860–1960)

CHAPTER 2: Afghan-Iranian Literary Connections and Romantic Nationalism (1920–1944)

CHAPTER 3: Anjomans and the Proliferation of Adabiyāt in Iran (1916–1947)

CHAPTER 4: Institutionalizing Persian Literature in Afghanistan (1930–1956)

CONCLUSION: National Pilgrims and the Myth of Greater Iran

EPILOGUE: Who Needs Literature Today?

Acknowledgments

Appendix of Biographies

Notes

Index

Note on Transliteration

This book adheres to the transliteration guidelines used in the journal Iranian Studies. I make slight modifications to this system to more accurately reflect the Afghan variation of Persian (e.g., ah instead eh at the end of words, w instead of v in certain words). Although doing so creates inconsistency, it is more ideal than subjecting Dari Persian to the norms of standard Iranian Persian. I have refrained from using diacritics on place-names and well-recognized terms (e.g., Qajar, shah, madrasa) except to make a differentiation (e.g., the city of Kabul, the journal Kābol). The mark ʿindicates the letter ʿayn, and ʾ marks the hamzeh. To see how vowels are represented in this transliteration scheme, see table 0.1.

Any transliteration system inevitably includes certain shortcomings, but it is hoped that the system adopted here will combine ease of reading with orthographical precision. I have followed the IJMES system for the transliteration of Arabic, Urdu, Turkish, and Pashto words. Proper names with an established spelling in English will not be modified (e.g., Munshi).

All translations, unless otherwise indicated, are my own.

Literary hubs in twentieth-century Iran and Afghanistan. (Map created by Kaley Hegeman)

PREFACE

Why I Wrote This Book

In 2017, I received multiple emails from Afghan and Iranian friends passionately asking me to sign a petition against the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). My first reaction was Oh no, what have the British done this time? The BBC had created a Facebook page called BBC Dari, separate from their BBC Persian page. This move angered many Persian-speaking Afghans, who argued that Persian and Dari are one language and as such the use of Dari was a deliberate effort to further isolate and disconnect them from Persian-speakers living outside the borders of Afghanistan. ʿAbdol Latif Pedrām, a member of Afghanistan’s parliament, condemned this move as conspiratorial and divisive.¹ According to Reuters’s reporting, Meena Baktash, the head of the BBC’s Afghan service, pushed back against the accusation and reminded critics like Pedrām that the Afghan Constitution specifically names Dari—and not Farsi or Persian—as one of the country’s two official languages and that the BBC was merely following protocol.²

My Afghan friends insisted that the BBC had sought to exploit and intensify Afghanistan’s ethnic tensions by siding with the Pashtun ruling class. One friend wrote in an email that since the day Afghanistan was created in the eighteenth century, Pashtuns have always ruled over our country, disregarded its linguistic diversity, and forced the Pashto language on the entire population.³ An Iranian friend, on a different wavelength, said, We need to support our Afghan brothers and sisters by signing this petition, not too long ago they used to be a part of greater Iran; they were a part of us. There was a kernel of truth to both arguments, but both of these friends were largely invoking a past invented in the twentieth century, when Iran and Afghanistan took form as modern nation-states.

At the time, I was in graduate school, writing a dissertation about how early twentieth-century Afghan and Iranian intellectuals set out to transform Persian literature into a key element of their respective national patrimonies. This was my moment to shine. I wrote them a nerdy email with a detailed historical explanation and many citations, nuancing and challenging their views. I invited them to read my 2015 essay published on the Ajam Media Collective website (as academics do), in which I critiqued the romantic language with which Iranian scholars often speak of linguistic and cultural unity among Persian speakers while ignoring glaring inequities in the way Persian language pedagogy and literary studies are structured in both Iran and North America.⁴ As contentious disagreements online always go, both were fully convinced and wrote me a thankyou note for my time and energy.

I grew up in Shiraz, Iran, in the 1990s. Persian literature was a cherished component of my schooling and cultural upbringing. My family lived near the mausoleum of Ḥāfez, and we would go there several times a year either with out-of-town visitors or on occasions like Nowruz. I would listen to recitations of his melodic poems, and sometimes to animated debates about how to interpret them. Yet, I never developed the awareness that this celebrated literary tradition, enshrined through textual, oral, and architectural practices, did not belong to Iranians alone. It was not until my family and I immigrated to California in 2004, after I had finished high school, that I began to realize that Persian literature also belonged to Tajiks, Azeris, Bosnians, Indians, Uzbeks, and yes, to Pashtuns and many other ethnicities.

When I immigrated to California, I knew very little about Afghanistan and Afghans. My only cultural association had to do with physical laborers, Afghan residents in Shiraz who had been displaced by the Soviet occupation of their country in the 1980s. They were often maligned, accused of stealing jobs from Iranians and making neighborhoods unsafe. In graduate school at Berkeley, I began to develop a more transnational awareness of the vast and varied nature of Persian literary culture, through studies with my adviser, Wali Ahmadi, and travel to cities like Istanbul, Sarajevo, and Tbilisi. The titular phrase reading across borders is not only a reference to early-twentieth-century intellectuals who worked in dialogue with one another in Iran and Afghanistan but also a poetic nod to the many borders and readings involved thus far in my own intellectual growth. Yet graduate school was not solely responsible for the cultivation of my curiosity toward Afghanistan. It was a beloved member of the Persian-speaking community in San Diego, Aslam Kazimi, who opened my eyes to the beauty, diversity, and complexity of Afghanistan.

We bonded over our shared love for Persian poetry. I could listen to Mr. Kazimi, a deeply learned man, for hours. In Kabul, he had owned a bookstore called Sobh-e omid, or the Dawn of Hope, which was frequented by many of Afghanistan’s writers at the time. The Kazimi family had a complicated relationship with the Iranian community of San Diego. During religious gatherings, Mr. Kazimi’s powerful recitations of prayer and poetry would delight Iranians, many of whom would then ignorantly ask him if he had learned how to recite Persian poetry in Iran or from an Iranian. Many Iranians would correct Mr. Kazimi’s accent, teaching him, in their minds, how to properly (read: in modern Tehrani parlance) pronounce various words. Over the years, Mr. Kazimi learned to ignore these paternalistic encounters. In the course of our contact, a more complex and varied picture of Afghans began to take form in my mind, creating a discordance with my past assumptions about Shiraz’s Afghan residents.

Commonly held perceptions by Iranians toward Afghans oscillate between denigration and exoticization. Consider, for instance, contradictory assertions like this: literature produced in Afghanistan is largely derivative, and Afghans speak a more pure and authentic form of Persian because their language has not been as polluted by Arabic.⁵ I could see how such ill-informed binary thinking, expressed by Iranians of various educational backgrounds, would negatively impact Afghans. As is often the case, those most hurt by bigotry and discrimination carry the emotional and intellectual burden of educating others about its harms. As someone in the business of education, I take my platform seriously. The question of diversity and representation is on my mind whether designing courses, inviting speakers to campus, assigning articles to reviewers, or starting new collaborations. Persian and Iranian studies as a field has been moving in a similar direction, taking preliminary steps toward addressing diversity, equity, and inclusion. However, structural change will not happen automatically; it will require time, resources, and commitment.

Working on this project has been deeply personal. In many ways, I wrote this book so I could better identify and address the gaps in my cultural education that obscured non-Iranian contributions to a shared, transnational Persian literary culture.⁶ Even when it came to my own country, my education problematically represented an Iran where other languages, ethnicities, and religions did not matter as much. We study what we value, and what we value is necessarily shaped by power. My journey since moving to the US has significantly nuanced my relationship with Persian language and literature, affording me critical distance with which to rethink the cultural legacy of nationalism unpacked in this book. Ultimately, I recognize how wrongheaded and toxic romantic nationalism—the idea that each nation has a singular language, religion, and race that define its essence across time and space—has been for all societies and for our warming planet. Imposing a monolingual and ethnocentric vision on any region of our unequal earth cannot be done without suppressing diversity, both cultural and ecological.

Forging a new connection with Persian has generated new ideas and curiosities for me. Specifically, disavowing the modern idea of the native or mother tongue has enabled me to see how dynamic and multilayered the human relationship with language is and helped me to offer my students a more critical outlook on Persian language and literature. Ultimately, like my students, I had to act on my newly formed curiosities. I devoted summer 2021 to the study of Pashto. I was routinely asked by colleagues whether I planned to incorporate Pashto-language sources into my book. In reality, studying Pashto for me has been about something more basic yet far more challenging than academic research: taking a first step toward removing the toxicity of modern nationalism from my mind and body; it was about finding beauty and value in a linguistic community of which I was ignorant.

That studying Pashto has been generative for me ultimately reflects my own positionality as a diaspora Iranian living in the US. For many of Afghanistan’s diverse linguistic communities, Pashto represents the language of political domination, an instrument of cultural erasure. In fact, the term Afghan, which has historically referred to Pashtun peoples, has increasingly become contested, particularly in Persian-language cyberspace. Many have embraced the much newer and inclusive national designation Afghanistani, popularized by the poet Mohammad Kāzem Kāzemi, in reference to all inhabitants of Afghanistan.⁷

The use of Afghan in these pages is by no means an endorsement of it. This study focuses on two generations of literary intellectuals at a time when the term Afghan represented an ambitious—albeit a precarious—project of creating a multiethnic nation-state (see fig. 0.1). Outside of this historical context, I address my friends and colleagues from Afghanistan only as they wish to be called. The idea that some of them might take offense to this choice weighs on me. Ultimately, I hope my analysis of literary nationalism in this book provides a set of tools with which to better understand and combat the harmful obsessions and anxieties that it has generated, regardless of my readers’ national origins or disciplinary background.

Figure 0.1 The first page of the elementary history textbook written by ʿAbdol Ghafur Ahmadi (1947). The text reads: Afghanistan is our dear homeland. Anyone who is from Afghanistan is Afghan. We are all Afghans. We love Afghanistan very much. We are from Afghanistan and Afghanistan belongs to us. Long live our Afghanistan. (Courtesy of US Library of Congress)

Now, I reflect on how else I might have handled my friends’ requests to sign that petition rebuking the BBC. At the time, I wished for my friends to understand that they had invested so much emotion and zeal in the matter that their strong feelings prevented them from critically examining the issue. I failed at communicating my thinking because my explanation made them feel that I was above emotions of national pride and cultural partisanship—when in reality I was not. In retrospect, I would rather have led with questions, asking my Afghan friend how he had personally experienced discrimination on the grounds of language and ethnicity. I learned that discussing a subject as fraught as cultural representation requires not only academic rigor but also empathy. And I would have asked my Iranian friend to define what she meant by us when writing Afghanistan used to be a part of us. Have we always been Iranian? Were subjects of the Qajar dynasty already Iranian in the same vein as the residents of Pahlavi Iran (or the Islamic Republic)? Now that this book is published, I am eager to engage with old answers and new questions, raised by my friends and readers alike.

INTRODUCTION

What Literature? Which World?

Believe me [when I say] I love Afghanistan almost as much as I love Iran. Even though Iranians and Afghans have politically formed two independent states, I believe that we are essentially one nation in the form of two countries, one soul in two bodies.

—Mahmud Afshār, Kābol

It is a self-evident lesson of history that the people of Iran and Afghanistan are members of the Aryan nations.

—ʿAbdol Karim Ahrāri, Herāt

Research for Reading across Borders began with an inquiry into a single word: adabiyāt, the Persian term for literature. In spite of its omnipresence in our world today, literature’s (adabiyāt’s) origins appeared intriguingly—even mysteriously—unclear. When did adabiyāt enter the cultural and institutional vocabulary of Afghans and Iranians? Where did it come from? Has it always denoted the idea of literature? The initial answers were simple enough. Adabiyāt accrued its modern meaning as literature in late-nineteenth-century Iran and early-twentieth-century Afghanistan, in large part through contact with European forms of knowledge. But the process of finding the answers to these questions was only the beginning. As earlier studies have critically shown, the genealogy of the English term literature is unmasked only when its mythic status is denaturalized.¹ Then, I ask here, how did the notion of literature become thinkable in the Persian literary tradition? It is this question of how that animates this study.

Reading across Borders traces the emergence of literature as a modern concept in Afghanistan and Iran, two neighboring countries that set out to create a national culture simultaneously and in interaction with one another. In the late nineteenth century, adabiyāt was a malleable and context-dependent notion. By the mid-twentieth century, Persian-language intellectuals had brought adabiyāt into close alignment with the European notion of literature: a corpus of prized writings that embodies the national character and civilizational achievements of a unitary people, enshrined through socially pervasive and culturally authoritative institutions. The account of the transition from context dependency and malleability to self-referentiality and stability is, in one word, one of institutionalization.

The conceptual realignment of adabiyāt belies a whole slew of historical developments and intellectual currents, beginning with the premise that adabiyāt is not a rearticulation of a borrowed and static category of knowledge. Adabiyāt, like many other modern categories, defies clearcut and self-evident translations. The making of adabiyāt as a modern discourse of literature marked a monumental cultural and political undertaking, particularly if one considers the fact that the language in question was—and still remains—distinctly transregional and international.

The centers of New Persian literature, which emerged in the ninth century, have constantly shifted. The Persian literary tradition had no natural homeland. Its genres, aesthetic norms, textual practices, and modes of sociability were not native to any people. In fact, Persian only accrued homelands as it spread into other regions, coming in contact with the cultural zones of Sanskrit, Turkic, and many other languages. Such a history is contrary to the ethos of romantic nationalism of the early twentieth century: the notion that each nation is in possession of a singular language, race, and religion. Romantic nationalism posits that intellectuals had direct access to the past through the use of modern methods, enabling them to make sense of texts and objects both synchronically and diachronically. The idea of native readers (or speakers) as inheritors of a national patrimony—with unmediated access to its riches—is a byproduct of this modern discourse. As we will see, the adaptation and translation of this nationalizing project to the multilingual and polycentric cultures of Afghanistan and Iran was dynamic and uncertain, rather than modular or straightforward.²

Adabiyāt derives from adab, a discourse of proper social and aesthetic form.³ The ethos of adab was based on the acquisition of ethics and aesthetics, though its main subject was often male, property-owning, and Muslim. Counterposed to this ethos is the modern concept of adabiyāt, built on the assumption of nativeness, on being as opposed to becoming. Adab enabled urban cultural actors to operate within a large cosmopolis as munshis, or imperial secretaries, scholars, and poets. The historical transition from the multilingual cosmopolis to a nation-state based on ethnicity and race as a modern unit of political sovereignty required the radical reconfiguration of adab into literature.⁴ This shift had a profound impact on what counts as literature (and what does not).

The formation of literature as a conceptual category led to the rise of irreconcilable tensions between a mobility-based affiliation and a subjectivity based on ethno-nationalism as well as between adab as an aesthetic form of ethical conduct and literature as a bounded category of aesthetically valued texts. In premodern periods, adabiyāt was a plural designation for adab-based sciences such as rhetoric and prosody. In the first half of the twentieth century, it became parochially refined to denote a singular and totalizing designation for the European notion of literature. But the transformation of adabiyāt into literature would not have been possible without the transfiguration of both the concept of adab and its valences. Even in the age of modern nationalism, as chapter 1 argues, adab endures, albeit with a catch. Adab was partitioned: adabiyāt inherited its aesthetic form but not its ethical one. The epilogue meditates on this partition, and the enduring tension between adab and adabiyāt more broadly, in the context of literary studies today.

While this study focuses on the formation of adabiyāt as a conceptual category, Persian as a linguistic category must not be taken as stable or fixed across time and space. Integral features that constitute a language—orthography, phonology, grammar, writing conventions, and so forth—were still in flux in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With the rise of new technologies such as print, radio, and television, the modern state set out to regulate and stabilize these features.⁵

Since the nation-state as a political model is tied to nineteenth-century Europe, most academic studies have focused on West-East or North-South encounters. As a result, there is a presumption that national literature in the East, or the Global South at large, was birthed through contact with the West alone.⁶ Reading across Borders challenges this accepted truth by demonstrating how Afghans and Iranians worked alongside one another at the intersection of the Persian literary heritage and the demands of romantic nationalism. Articulating the nation’s place within universalist cultural and political forms required not only grappling, reconfiguring, reinventing, and institutionalizing one’s own tradition but often doing so in conversation and exchange with non-Western others. By exploring questions related to literature’s conceptual realignment, this book acts to transform the narrative syntax of a modern discourse of literature passively borrowed by two Eastern nations into a story of active and complex negotiations. Europe is not entirely absent from this book; it lurks in the background as one source of technological and discursive knowledge. Relegating Europe to the background will enable this study to gesture beyond diffusionist models of West-led modernization and their insistence on universal categories such as literature.

The global resonance of literature across geographies and languages is rooted in the universalized imperatives of the nation-state. Much like adab-derived formulations of literature in Turkish, Arabic, Urdu, Pashto, and Persian, the Latinate term literature generates similar ideas: a proprietary relationship with a nation-state’s culture and history, an enshrined canon safeguarded by modern institutions, and educational organizations and teacher-student relations. But this global intelligibility should not obscure the deeply uneven, complex, and idiosyncratic processes by which literature became thinkable and institutionalized both across and within different cultures. Reading across Borders insists on the specificity of non-European cultures and concepts, but not through the tired and essentializing model of untranslatability.⁷ Instead, it brings the sensibilities and semantics of Persian terms into academic English, underlining the ways in which new intellectual approaches are undertaken by non-Anglophone literary cultures.

In order to relativize the category of literature in light of its historical contingencies and linguistic and discursive specificities, one must attend to the ways in which the local, transnational, and global are mediated. That means addressing the ways in which the local and the global have helped to reify and solidify one another. As Nile Green has recently argued, the spread of ‘transnational’ and ‘global’ connections was very much a ‘regional’ development that shaped material and intellectual trajectories in Iran and Afghanistan alike.⁸ While the concern of the literary intellectuals studied here was primarily national, defined by the nation-state as a unit of belonging, the circulation of their ideas, their readership, and the repertory of their methods were decidedly global. The project of literary nationalism in both countries sought to straddle both domestic and global audiences. The bottom line here is clear: national distinction could only be produced in company and conversation. The analytic term transnational brings into view an intermediate scale, demonstrating how Afghans and Iranians engage, incorporate, and contest their nationalizing visions of one another. As such, adabiyāt by default exceeded its entanglement with the nation-state as its unit of belonging. As Golbarg Rekabtalaei has recently shown, the same can be said about the rise of cinema in late Qajar and early Pahlavi Iran.⁹

The remainder of the introduction serves as a foray into the book’s two guiding questions: First, how did the conceptual realignment of adabiyāt into literature emerge within the different institutional contexts of Iran and Afghanistan, through the terms and trajectories of the Persian literary tradition and the multilingual ecosystem that it inhabited? Second, how can the experience of two non-European countries grappling with the European discourse of literature highlight the lingering impact of extranational geographies on literary epistemologies? The next section highlights and disentangles the three elements that lie at the core of Reading across Borders: individuals, institutions, and mediums. The introduction then provides a brief account of the connected literary histories of Iran and Afghanistan, an overview of language policies in twentieth-century Iran and Afghanistan, and a critique of nation-state-oriented historiography in Persian studies. The concluding section situates this study in the field of comparative literature, with a focus on recent books that deal with the implications of Orientalism, colonial modernity, and philology for our understanding of complex cultural phenomena like literary nationalism. At the heart of this introduction is the belief that in order to gain some space from the discursive logic of the nation-state, we must train our attention on alternative bodies of literary and cultural analysis.

Individuals

At the center of literary nationalism in Iran and Afghanistan is a cadre of individuals bound together in shared experiences and who came of age in a transformational time. Many of them found their way to Tehran and Kabul, increasingly emerging as modern capital cities, in pursuit of higher education and work opportunities. Badiʿ ol-Zamān Foruzānfar (d. 1970), a distinguished professor of Persian literature, moved to Qajar Tehran in the early 1920s, leaving his small town of Boshruyeh in Khorasan, almost a thousand miles from Tehran.¹⁰ This was also true of Mahmud Afshār, Jalāl ol-Din Homāʾi, ʿAli Asghar Hekmat, and Mohammad Taqi Bahār, who all moved to Tehran from Yazd, Isfahan, Shiraz, and Mashhad, respectively; or Salāh ol-Din Saljuqi and Khāl Mohammad Khastah, who moved from Herat and Bukhara to Kabul, respectively. There was a strong sense among these intellectuals that by moving to Tehran and Kabul, they were enlisting in the cause of national progress.

In Khorasan, Foruzānfar had received a madrasa-style education, with its characteristically strong emphasis on Qur’anic studies, Arabic rhetoric and logic, and works of Persian poetry and prose. He was taught by two learned men, Adib Neyshāburi and Adib Pishāwari, both of whom bore the epithet adib, marking their capacious training as polymaths in aesthetic, ethical, and religious education. Today, this type of training is more closely associated with religious seminaries, a discipline that was recreated and regulated by the state in the Pahlavi period.¹¹ In the early twentieth century, however, an Arabic-based education was common. Homāʾi, like Foruzānfar, was trained in Arabic. Typically, once such intellectuals moved to Tehran and assumed positions in modern institutions of learning like Tehran’s Teachers’ Training College, they soon realized that their livelihood and professional advancement chiefly depended on preoccupation with teaching, researching, and promoting the national language: Persian.¹²

Knowledge of Arabic letters was undoubtedly indispensable to their understanding of Persian literature, but with the rise of a national reading public, thanks in large part to the proliferation of modern education and print culture, early-twentieth-century adibs had to adapt to the demands of the new milieu. For example, early in his career, Homāʾi composed a manual on Islamic rhetoric that drew heavily on his knowledge of Arabic balāgha. It was expected of a savant like him to provide the upcoming generation of poets, munshis, and scholars with the tools to compose and critique poetry and facilitate literary production. But soon after, amidst the national climate of the 1920s, Homāʾi began composing a major literary history of Persian that framed Persian literature as a perennial fixture of Iranian national identity. His scholarly output was now meant to target students, educators, and professionals associated with the state, with a primary function of enabling the literary consumption of native subjects. These groups were the target audience of literary history as a modern genre. Learning how to produce within distinctly new genres like literary history required a great deal of unlearning and retraining. The primary function of balāgha, or rhetoric, was to facilitate literary production for poets, whereas literary history’s main function was to cultivate native subjects versed in their country’s singular literary tradition.

The process of intellectual and pedagogical remolding was not straightforward, nor did it always succeed. In fact, many resisted and paid the price by losing their place and relevance. Abbas Amanat’s article on Adib Pishāwari’s (d. 1930) career is particularly instructive here.¹³ Born in India, Adib Pishāwari belonged to a generation of highly mobile Sufi savants who traveled in pursuit of learning and livelihood from one urban center to another, in his case, from Peshawar to Kabul to Mashhad and, eventually, to Tehran. In 1882, he moved to the Qajar capital to serve as a member of a newly established literary association at the court. In the early twentieth century, as associations became public-facing and more concerned with Western philology and nationalist ideology, Adib Pishāwari’s Perso-Arabic–based education could no longer function as a cross-regional medium.¹⁴ He was erudite and well connected, but the world of adabiyāt had no place for a scholar who remained adamantly loyal to the older itinerant Persianate mode of learning.¹⁵

The generation that managed