James Pickett
University of Pittsburgh, History, Faculty Member
- Austrian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Iranian Studies, Department Memberadd
- James Pickett is an associate professor of Eurasian history at the University of Pittsburgh. His first book, "Polymat... moreJames Pickett is an associate professor of Eurasian history at the University of Pittsburgh. His first book, "Polymaths of Islam" (Cornell University Press, 2020), explores transregional networks of Turko-Persian exchange among elite families of religious scholars and their military patrons in eighteenth and nineteenth century Bukhara. Related articles also trace the cultural memory of this era as a subsequent influence on Soviet propaganda in Iran and language ideology in Central Eurasia. His next research project exploits chancellery archives to compare Bukhara's transformation into a Russian protectorate with the political economy of Muslim princely states in British India. James received his PhD in history from Princeton University.edit
Polymaths of Islam analyzes the social and intellectual power of religious leaders who created a shared culture that integrated Central Asia, Iran, and India from the mid-eighteenth century through the early twentieth. James Pickett... more
Polymaths of Islam analyzes the social and intellectual power of religious leaders who created a shared culture that integrated Central Asia, Iran, and India from the mid-eighteenth century through the early twentieth.
James Pickett demonstrates that Islamic scholars were simultaneously mystics and administrators, judges and occultists, physicians and poets. This integrated understanding of the world of Islamic scholarship unlocks a different way of thinking about transregional exchange networks. Pickett reveals a Persian-language cultural sphere that transcended state boundaries and integrated a spectacularly vibrant Eurasia that is invisible from published sources alone.
James Pickett demonstrates that Islamic scholars were simultaneously mystics and administrators, judges and occultists, physicians and poets. This integrated understanding of the world of Islamic scholarship unlocks a different way of thinking about transregional exchange networks. Pickett reveals a Persian-language cultural sphere that transcended state boundaries and integrated a spectacularly vibrant Eurasia that is invisible from published sources alone.
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This essay argues that recent theoretical literature on the archive contains critical insights for studies of Islamic documents, while also pushing to move beyond some of the core assumptions of that same literature. There is no question... more
This essay argues that recent theoretical literature on the archive contains critical insights for studies of Islamic documents, while also pushing to move beyond some of the core assumptions of that same literature. There is no question that the fundamental concerns of an "archival turn" are every bit as relevant to studies of Islamic societies, past and present, as they are to European-dominated ones. Yet investigating Islamic "archives" presents the challenge of coming to terms with a concept-the archive-and an attending set of assumptions and theoretical baggage derived almost exclusively from European history. To address this challenge, we propose that employing the term "cultures of documentation" offers a way of having one's cake and eating it too. In deploying this expression, we signal that there existed multitudes of textual practices and record-keeping activities in the pre-industrial Islamic world, and that it is possible to move away from "archive" as a term without abandoning the core insights and questions of the historical literature built around it.
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The Central Asian city of Shahrisabz has long been a historical footnote, widely regarded as an unruly “province in rebellion” plaguing its more powerful overlords in Bukhara during the seventeenth through late nineteenth centuries. In... more
The Central Asian city of Shahrisabz has long been a historical footnote, widely regarded as an unruly “province in rebellion” plaguing its more powerful overlords in Bukhara during the seventeenth through late nineteenth centuries. In fact, it was an autonomous city-state in its own right, and the mechanisms through which it has been written into submission in the historiography reveal much about historical methodology and premodern logics of sovereignty. To recover Shahrisabz’s story, this article pursues a non-hegemonic reading of hegemonic Persian writing (a strategy more frequently applied to colonial sources) and pieces together scattered textual fragments composed in the city itself. In doing so, it illustrates the ways in which variegated forms of symbolic submission and coercive power intersected to create complexes not easily mappable to modern binaries. Seemingly contradictory forms of sovereignty routinely coexisted within a single polity, and greater specificity is necessary to capture a kaleidoscope of permutations. Thus source methodology and sovereignty stand as two conceptual domains intrinsically intertwined, with insights into the latter possible only with careful attention to the former.
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Research Interests: Soviet History, Postcolonial Studies, History of Science, Magic, Shamanism, and 45 moreColonialism, Post-Colonialism, Sufism, Persianate Sufism, Timurids (Islamic History), Central Asia, Western Esotericism (History), Occultism, Persian Culture, Turco-Iranian World, Nineteenth Century Occultism, Islamic Intellectual History, Ahmad ibn ‘Ali ibn Yusuf al-Buni, Encyclopedism, Jadidism, Uzbekistan, Superstitions and Superstitious Belief, Orientalism, Positivism, History of magic, Qadis, Bukhara, Anti-Colonialism, Miscellanies and commonplace books, Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics: Ethnopolitics, Occult Sciences in Islam, Ulama and their impact, Islamic Occult Sciences, Ars notoria, Lettrism, Soviet Central Asia, Iran and the Persianate World, Tashkent, Biographical Dictionaries and Local Histories In the Islamic World, Russian Colonialism, Whiggism, Soviet Ethnography, Soviet Nationalities Policy, Bukhara Khanate, Collection of Biographies (Tazkirahs), The Classifications of Sciences, Manghits (Islamic History), Scripturalism, High Persianate, and Multiple temporalities (historiography)
Persian language manuals uniformly adopt national categories such as Persian/Farsi (Iran), Dari (Afghanistan) and Tajik (Tajikistan). These categories at once impose an imagined contrast between the languages at the high register that is... more
Persian language manuals uniformly adopt national categories such as Persian/Farsi (Iran), Dari (Afghanistan) and Tajik (Tajikistan). These categories at once impose an imagined contrast between the languages at the high register that is in fact marginal, while occluding profound linguistic variation within these nation-states at colloquial registers. Similar schemas apply to Central Asian Turkic languages such as Uyghur and Uzbek, which are closely related at the formal/literary register, but regionally diverse at lower registers. This dominant instructional approach ill prepares language learners for engaging the region on its own terms, rather than through the lens of nationalist aspirations. Students would be better served by an integrative method that teaches a transnational high language (in the case of Persian) while introducing a diverse range of dialects. This article was also adapted for a general audience in “On Language: The Many Flavors of Persian in Eurasia,” EurasiaNet, October 11, 2017.
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Over the course of the 18th–early 20th centuries, a curious narrative emerged in Central Asia wherein the Turko-Persian monarch Nadir Shah Afshar was converted from Shiʿism to Sunnism by a group of Islamic scholars outside of Bukhara.... more
Over the course of the 18th–early 20th centuries, a curious narrative emerged in Central Asia wherein the Turko-Persian monarch Nadir Shah Afshar was converted from Shiʿism to Sunnism by a group of Islamic scholars outside of Bukhara. While this legend was rooted in Nadir Shah's theological ambitions to bring Shiʿism back into the Sunni fold as a fifth school of canonical law, the memory of that event in the subsequent two centuries was intimately tied to the establishment of several scholarly dynasties, which managed to perpetuate themselves all the way to the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. This article engages the memory of this mythological conversion to explore sharpening conceptions of sectarian divisions and the role of genealogy in projecting spiritual authority. Most broadly, it argues that—far from a passing depredation—the Afsharid Empire profoundly shaped the geopolitical and social landscape of Persianate Asia.
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The khanates of Bukhara and Khiva had much in common, but depictions of their relationship with one another vary dramatically between historical sources. Some accounts convey deep rivalries between them, while in other sources they... more
The khanates of Bukhara and Khiva had much in common, but depictions of their relationship with one another vary dramatically between historical sources. Some accounts convey deep rivalries between them, while in other sources they appear as easily traversable sub-regions within a broader, socially and culturally integrated landscape. How might we explain these wildly divergent images? This essay considers a wide range of sources to forward one simple argument: our understanding of the relationship between Bukhara and Khiva is fundamentally shaped by textual genre. Some genres – such as chronicles and legal writing – were well equipped to articulate rivalry and difference. Others – such as Sufi hagiography or chancellery documents – contained the tools for transcending these two polities. Since all of these genres were predominantly written by a single social group (the ulama), this contradictory imagery was not the product of discrete constituencies with different viewpoints, but rather a single milieu performing diverse genres.
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During the Second World War and its immediate aftermath the Soviet All-Union Society for Cultural Ties Abroad (VOKS) engaged in an aggressive campaign of cultural outreach in Iran to promote socialist modernity amongst Iranian leftists.... more
During the Second World War and its immediate aftermath the Soviet All-Union Society for Cultural Ties Abroad (VOKS) engaged in an aggressive campaign of cultural outreach in Iran to promote socialist modernity amongst Iranian leftists. Iran represented VOKS’ first serious effort outside of Europe and one for which the Soviet Union was uniquely poised to exploit. VOKS tapped into the Soviet Union’s orientalist scholarly establishment inherited from the Russian Empire to pitch the argument that not only were Iran and the Soviet Union geographically continuous, they were both inheritors of the same Persianate cultural legacy – ironically a legacy that the Soviet Union had actively displaced in favor of Turkic national SSRs. Meanwhile, Iranian leftists were not passive receivers of Soviet propaganda. They exploited VOKS resources to found the Perso-Soviet Cultural Relations Society and establish regional branches throughout the country. In particular, Iranian intellectuals fixated on Soviet Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan as evidence of the abundant possibilities for a specifically Persianate articulation of socialist modernity. This paper leverages both Russian archival sources and Farsi periodicals and interview transcripts to explore this unique confluence of Soviet and Iranian ambitions.
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For the better part of a millennium — roughly from the tenth century to the early twentieth — a continuum of Perso-Islamic high culture sustained intellectual exchange across much of Eurasia. A shared language, corpus of texts, and loose... more
For the better part of a millennium — roughly from the tenth century to the early twentieth — a continuum of Perso-Islamic high culture sustained intellectual exchange across much of Eurasia. A shared language, corpus of texts, and loose pedagogy integrated this territory, which in turn facilitated human migration. Wealth and power attracted literati from Isfahan to Delhi, religious networks pulled pilgrims from Sarajevo to Konya, and educational infrastructure lured students from the Volga-Urals to Bukhara. And when fortunes turned sour, this high cultural zone offered a safety net for exiles and refugees. Thus, this chapter traces the contours of Persianate migration — not migration writ large within the Persianate world, which could in principle imply any kind of movement within a territory where Persian language and literature circulated.
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Central Asia’s 18th and 19th centuries marked the definitive end of the nomadic empires that characterized the region’s geopolitics for over three millennia before the advent of colonialism. Although it is open to debate which polity was... more
Central Asia’s 18th and 19th centuries marked the definitive end of the nomadic empires that characterized the region’s geopolitics for over three millennia before the advent of colonialism. Although it is open to debate which polity was the last “empire of the steppe,” a strong case can be made for the Junghar confederacy, which contested the Qing Empire of China for dominance in Eurasia in the 17th and 18th centuries—ultimately unsuccessfully. The Junghars owed their early success to a combination of new gunpowder technology and nomadic military organization, and the fragmented city-states that emerged from Nadir Shah Afshar’s empire (1736–1747)—such as Bukhara, Khiva, and Khoqand—relied even more on musketeer infantry units composed of individuals without ties to the local Turkic military elite. The emergent fiscal-military states that characterized Central Asia on the eve of colonial conquest were thus quite novel in terms of structural power dynamics, yet thoroughly Turko-Perso-Islamic in terms of symbolism, law, and patrimonialism.
This period also witnessed what was in many ways the apex of Persianate high culture, building on traditions with roots stretching back to the Timurid period and earlier. Sufism in all of its forms became mainstream. Intellectual elites were polymathic, simultaneously mastering jurisprudence, poetry, medicine, occult sciences, and more. Vernacularization, particularly in literary Central Asian Turki, deepened these currents and carried them to new audiences. The new city-state dynasties competed with one another to build up educational centers to support all of these cultural forms.
Many of these cultural, social, and even political forms persisted under colonialism, even as the pace of change sped up. Some of the precolonial dynasties persevered under indirect colonial rule. Sufi brotherhoods and Islamic learning expanded, only to be snuffed out or transformed in the Soviet period. Only at the very end of the 19th century did colonial modernity—in the form of large-scale cotton cultivation, new understandings of national identity, print culture, and steam-propelled transport—begin to make significant inroads.
This period also witnessed what was in many ways the apex of Persianate high culture, building on traditions with roots stretching back to the Timurid period and earlier. Sufism in all of its forms became mainstream. Intellectual elites were polymathic, simultaneously mastering jurisprudence, poetry, medicine, occult sciences, and more. Vernacularization, particularly in literary Central Asian Turki, deepened these currents and carried them to new audiences. The new city-state dynasties competed with one another to build up educational centers to support all of these cultural forms.
Many of these cultural, social, and even political forms persisted under colonialism, even as the pace of change sped up. Some of the precolonial dynasties persevered under indirect colonial rule. Sufi brotherhoods and Islamic learning expanded, only to be snuffed out or transformed in the Soviet period. Only at the very end of the 19th century did colonial modernity—in the form of large-scale cotton cultivation, new understandings of national identity, print culture, and steam-propelled transport—begin to make significant inroads.
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A review of James Pickett, “The Persianate Sphere during the Age of Empires: Islamic Scholars and Networks of Exchange in Central Asia 1747-1917” (Princeton University, 2015) by Rian Thum (Loyola University)
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The Persianate Sphere during the Age of Empires: Islamic Scholars and Networks of Exchange in Central Asia, 1747-1917
June 2015
Advisor: Stephen Kotkin
Committee: Michael Cook, Jo-Ann Gross, Michael Reynolds
June 2015
Advisor: Stephen Kotkin
Committee: Michael Cook, Jo-Ann Gross, Michael Reynolds
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David Brophy's superb new translation of Muḥ ammad Ṣ adiq Kashghari's In Remembrance of the Saints (Taẕ kira-i ʿAzızan) brings an important source on eighteenth-century Central Asian and Chinese history to a general audience.
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First 50 downloads from the link are free.
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A period of commercialization, imperial decentralization, and colonial consolidation, South Asia’s long eighteenth century (c. 1680–1815) witnessed the fragmentation of India's Mughal empire, the formation of several provincial “successor... more
A period of commercialization, imperial decentralization, and colonial consolidation, South Asia’s long eighteenth century (c. 1680–1815) witnessed the fragmentation of India's Mughal empire, the formation of several provincial “successor states,” and the rapid transformation of the British East India Company into a subcontinental power. This workshop examines how multiple strands of Persianate political thought in the late-Mughal world responded to and contoured these far-reaching changes. In particular, it considers how evolving and emerging ideas of sovereignty and statehood, norms of political ethics, and what might be termed competing imperial constitutions accommodated deep political and socio-economic change and laid critical conceptual foundations for Britain’s nineteenth-century Asian empire. In so doing, it offers a framework not only for comparing South Asia’s imperial reconfigurations with those taking place elsewhere in Eurasia but also for problematizing more precisely the meaning and substance of political modernity in a global age of revolutions.
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Paperwork is everywhere. Scholars have long emphasized the importance of bureaucratic practices for enhancing the coercive reach of the modern state, and even constituting its authority. Today we take the production and preservation of... more
Paperwork is everywhere. Scholars have long emphasized the importance of bureaucratic practices for enhancing the coercive reach of the modern state, and even constituting its authority. Today we take the production and preservation of administrative writing for granted, but surviving pre-colonial chancery archives in the Islamic world are astonishingly few (particularly outside of the Ottoman Empire). The faint administrative residue that has survived provides an unparalleled glimpse into the inner workings of the pre-colonial state. However, those documents languish in untapped archives, and our understanding of the writing and archiving of documents in the Islamic world remains in its infancy. This proposed symposium charts a new field of inquiry into the cultural practices of Islamic documentation and situates what has traditionally been a highly technical discipline in a broader historical dialogue on the relationship between state power and the archive.
While most studies of pre-colonial Islamic bureaucracies focus on the administrative practices of a single state, this symposium traces the contours of a continuum of shared practices not reducible to any single polity or region. State officials from western China to India to Turkey and beyond wrote in the same forms of calligraphy using a common repertoire of genres and tapping into shared Islamic imagery and language. How did uniform cultures of documentation spread across such immense distances? When and why did pre-colonial states come to adopt “modern” bureaucratic practices? What was the role of the state archive in projecting the image of a sovereign state against competing claims to authority? Can we detect any lingering traces of these Islamic documentary cultures in the modern bureaucracies of Eurasia?
While most studies of pre-colonial Islamic bureaucracies focus on the administrative practices of a single state, this symposium traces the contours of a continuum of shared practices not reducible to any single polity or region. State officials from western China to India to Turkey and beyond wrote in the same forms of calligraphy using a common repertoire of genres and tapping into shared Islamic imagery and language. How did uniform cultures of documentation spread across such immense distances? When and why did pre-colonial states come to adopt “modern” bureaucratic practices? What was the role of the state archive in projecting the image of a sovereign state against competing claims to authority? Can we detect any lingering traces of these Islamic documentary cultures in the modern bureaucracies of Eurasia?
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Over the last decade, scholars have taken renewed interest in the "in-between" cases of colonialism: protectorates, princely states, treaty-ports, and other instances of gradated sovereignty. Yet such polities remain underexplored and... more
Over the last decade, scholars have taken renewed interest in the "in-between" cases of colonialism: protectorates, princely states, treaty-ports, and other instances of gradated sovereignty. Yet such polities remain underexplored and fragmented between area studies. This workshop aims to put scholars working on thematically similar topics, but geographically disparate areas, in dialogue with one another. It targets the interstices of intellectual history, political theory and everyday practices, and their evolution from the early modern to the modern.
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States enact themselves through paper, leveraging the written word to project coercive authority outward – or the illusion of control. Producing, collecting, and cataloguing are simultaneously administrative acts and performative ones,... more
States enact themselves through paper, leveraging the written word to project coercive authority outward – or the illusion of control. Producing, collecting, and cataloguing are simultaneously administrative acts and performative ones, shaping both the nature of the state and the historian’s perception of it. Over the past decade scholars of the Muslim world, and the Middle East in particular, have conferred greater epistemological significance on textual genres that conventionally go under the rubric of “documents.” However, the burgeoning field of Persianate studies remains overwhelmingly oriented toward literature – despite the existence of vast, largely untapped, repositories of documents. Can we speak of a common Persianate culture of documentation stretching from the Kazakh steppe to the Deccan, from Sarajevo to Kashgar?
Studies of Islamicate documentation outside the Ottoman Empire have been few and far between until very recently. The result is that most of the available studies on archives and documents in the Muslim world are based on legal sources, i.e. texts the documentary attributes of which reflect either a probative or a precedential value alone. The problem with this approach is that it predicates on a reified meaning of document thereby misidentifying other possible uses of the written word and overlooking other principles behind the preservation of texts. A number of recent studies begun to revise this status quo by historicising the production and preservation of certain texts in an effort to complicate a dominant (yet untenable) narrative predicated upon the purported absence of archives and the ostensibly limited patterns of textual consumption prior to the early modern period – illuminating, for instance, the existence of chancery practices and dynastic archives under the Abbasids and the Mamluks. While a great effort has been made to prove that in the early Islamic and medieval period Muslim states did in fact rely on central administrative apparatuses, little has been done to reflect on what we may term coeval cultures of documentation, by which we mean the assumptions that informed the functionality of writing and governed the preservation of texts in a certain period. By ignoring such questions, historians of the Islamicate world have risked their superimposing a commonsensical understanding of the documentary attributes of texts onto historical material that may well require a different hermeneutical approach.
We contend that a solution to this problem demands that we expand our informational basis and take a larger number of compositional genres into our purview. To achieve this goal, we propose to reflect on the meanings of documentation across a larger historical area of the Muslim world, which is termed “the Persianate”. With this symposium we thus bring together scholars who work on material either in Persian or in languages directly influenced by Persian such as Urdu, Chaghatay, Marathi, Ottoman, Tatar, and Uyghur across the early-modern and modern period.
By addressing the following questions, the symposium sets for itself the task of outlining a comparative history of documentation early modern and colonial periods across the Middle East, Central and South Asia:
• What makes an archive in the Persianate world, and what are the practices of documentation therein?
• Should we distinguish between archives and private collections?
• Why did dynasts preserve certain texts and how did they use them?
• Was the creation and the preservation of archives reflective of a certain historical consciousness?
• Did the preservation of texts alter their original meaning? How do we take stock of the aspirational aspect of recordkeeping?
• What was the relationship between archival practices and public knowledge?
• How did the culture of the spoken affect archival practices?
• What was the nature of interaction between manuscripts and practical documents – in terms of authorship, worldview, functionality and genre conventions?
Proposals should include paper abstracts of up to 500 words and a short CV (no more than 2 pages) of each speaker. Please send your proposal to paolo.sartori@oeaw.ac.at by 1 December 2015 at the latest. Travel and accommodation costs for invited speakers will be covered by the Institute of Iranian Studies within the framework of the Seeing Like an Archive Project https://seeinglikeanarchive.wordpress.com/. As a publication on the basis of the workshop is envisaged, please be prepared to circulate paper drafts in advance.
Studies of Islamicate documentation outside the Ottoman Empire have been few and far between until very recently. The result is that most of the available studies on archives and documents in the Muslim world are based on legal sources, i.e. texts the documentary attributes of which reflect either a probative or a precedential value alone. The problem with this approach is that it predicates on a reified meaning of document thereby misidentifying other possible uses of the written word and overlooking other principles behind the preservation of texts. A number of recent studies begun to revise this status quo by historicising the production and preservation of certain texts in an effort to complicate a dominant (yet untenable) narrative predicated upon the purported absence of archives and the ostensibly limited patterns of textual consumption prior to the early modern period – illuminating, for instance, the existence of chancery practices and dynastic archives under the Abbasids and the Mamluks. While a great effort has been made to prove that in the early Islamic and medieval period Muslim states did in fact rely on central administrative apparatuses, little has been done to reflect on what we may term coeval cultures of documentation, by which we mean the assumptions that informed the functionality of writing and governed the preservation of texts in a certain period. By ignoring such questions, historians of the Islamicate world have risked their superimposing a commonsensical understanding of the documentary attributes of texts onto historical material that may well require a different hermeneutical approach.
We contend that a solution to this problem demands that we expand our informational basis and take a larger number of compositional genres into our purview. To achieve this goal, we propose to reflect on the meanings of documentation across a larger historical area of the Muslim world, which is termed “the Persianate”. With this symposium we thus bring together scholars who work on material either in Persian or in languages directly influenced by Persian such as Urdu, Chaghatay, Marathi, Ottoman, Tatar, and Uyghur across the early-modern and modern period.
By addressing the following questions, the symposium sets for itself the task of outlining a comparative history of documentation early modern and colonial periods across the Middle East, Central and South Asia:
• What makes an archive in the Persianate world, and what are the practices of documentation therein?
• Should we distinguish between archives and private collections?
• Why did dynasts preserve certain texts and how did they use them?
• Was the creation and the preservation of archives reflective of a certain historical consciousness?
• Did the preservation of texts alter their original meaning? How do we take stock of the aspirational aspect of recordkeeping?
• What was the relationship between archival practices and public knowledge?
• How did the culture of the spoken affect archival practices?
• What was the nature of interaction between manuscripts and practical documents – in terms of authorship, worldview, functionality and genre conventions?
Proposals should include paper abstracts of up to 500 words and a short CV (no more than 2 pages) of each speaker. Please send your proposal to paolo.sartori@oeaw.ac.at by 1 December 2015 at the latest. Travel and accommodation costs for invited speakers will be covered by the Institute of Iranian Studies within the framework of the Seeing Like an Archive Project https://seeinglikeanarchive.wordpress.com/. As a publication on the basis of the workshop is envisaged, please be prepared to circulate paper drafts in advance.
Translation of a source referenced in James Pickett, “Written into Submission: Reassessing Sovereignty through a Forgotten Eurasian Dynasty,” The American Historical Review 123, no. 3 (June 2018): 817–45.
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Is Tajik a dialect of Persian? Or a language in its own right? What differentiates it from varieties prevalent in Afghanistan and Iran? There is no easy answer to these questions because the very categories we use to think about language... more
Is Tajik a dialect of Persian? Or a language in its own right? What differentiates it from varieties prevalent in Afghanistan and Iran? There is no easy answer to these questions because the very categories we use to think about language in Central Asia, and elsewhere, are insufficient.
Adapted from: James Pickett, “Categorically Misleading, Dialectically Misconceived: Language Textbooks and Pedagogic Participation in Central Asian Nation-Building Projects,” Central Asian Survey 36, no. 4 (December 2017): 555–74.
Adapted from: James Pickett, “Categorically Misleading, Dialectically Misconceived: Language Textbooks and Pedagogic Participation in Central Asian Nation-Building Projects,” Central Asian Survey 36, no. 4 (December 2017): 555–74.
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Although Islamic traditions are generally associated with the Middle East, the vast majority of the world's Muslims live in the Asia-Pacific region. Countries such as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Indonesia are home to vibrant and... more
Although Islamic traditions are generally associated with the Middle East, the vast majority of the world's Muslims live in the Asia-Pacific region. Countries such as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Indonesia are home to vibrant and diverse Islamic traditions. This course introduces students to Asian Muslim communities and their histories, tracing the development of Asian Islamic traditions from their early roots in the medieval period through the age of colonialism and until the current day.
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Course Objective: This course seeks to impart an understanding of the Islamic tradition by exploring the religion’s formative period. The first centuries of Islam are fascinating for many of the same reasons they are complex and even... more
Course Objective: This course seeks to impart an understanding of the Islamic tradition by exploring the religion’s formative period. The first centuries of Islam are fascinating for many of the same reasons they are complex and even controversial: our primary sources are fragmented, partisan, and often retrospective; a tremendous range of voices competed to define the new religion; and nearly all subsequent Muslim thinkers would harken back to this period to legitimize their own positions. In other words, the history of the formation of Islam remains dynamic, charged, and relevant to the present day. We will endeavor to develop an understanding of the diversity of voices in this early period and consider why certain conceptualizations of theology, law, and philosophy displaced others; and then follow those voices beyond the Arabian origins of the new religion to examine its manifestation in the North African and Central Asian borderlands.
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Course Objective: The Russian Empire was among the largest in world history, spanning the entire Eurasian continent. This course explores the factors that made Russia so powerful at its height, only to collapse in the world's first... more
Course Objective: The Russian Empire was among the largest in world history, spanning the entire Eurasian continent. This course explores the factors that made Russia so powerful at its height, only to collapse in the world's first socialist revolution – an event that shaped the twentieth century and reverberates through global politics still today. Coverage is comprehensive, beginning in the eighteenth century, but focusing on the latter half of the nineteenth century and early twentieth. Geographically, the course ranges far beyond the capitals of Moscow and St. Petersburg to consider questions of colonialism, ethnicity, and religious pluralism, from Poland to Siberia. Considerable attention will also be given to ideology, literature, serfdom, and underground revolutionary movements.
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Course Objective: Over the last several centuries, Eurasia’s millennia-long domination by successive nomadic steppe empires (stretching from Europe to China) was displaced by new imperial challengers from the periphery (notably Russia,... more
Course Objective: Over the last several centuries, Eurasia’s millennia-long domination by successive nomadic steppe empires (stretching from Europe to China) was displaced by new imperial challengers from the periphery (notably Russia, China, and Britain). This course examines the nature of that transition by charting the history of Eurasian empires from the Mongols (thirteenth century) to the present day. From Genghis Khan to Tamerlane to Stalin; between Russian spies, Viking berserkers, and the Taliban; across silk roads, great games, and more.
(Revised for spring 2019 semester.)
(Revised for spring 2019 semester.)
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This essay argues that recent theoretical literature on the archive contains critical insights for studies of Islamic documents, while also pushing to move beyond some of the core assumptions of that same literature. There is no question... more
This essay argues that recent theoretical literature on the archive contains critical insights for studies of Islamic documents, while also pushing to move beyond some of the core assumptions of that same literature. There is no question that the fundamental concerns of an "archival turn" are every bit as relevant to studies of Islamic societies, past and present, as they are to European-dominated ones. Yet investigating Islamic "archives" presents the challenge of coming to terms with a concept-the archive-and an attending set of assumptions and theoretical baggage derived almost exclusively from European history. To address this challenge, we propose that employing the term "cultures of documentation" offers a way of having one's cake and eating it too. In deploying this expression, we signal that there existed multitudes of textual practices and record-keeping activities in the pre-industrial Islamic world, and that it is possible to move away from "archive" as a term without abandoning the core insights and questions of the historical literature built around it.