Literature in Persian Language Pedagogy: Lessons from the Age of ‘Ajam

Coinciding with the turn of the Islamic millennium, the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries arguably represent the high watermark of Persian’s history as a transregional, cosmopolitan lingua franca. What can this rich period of the language’s history teach students today about Persian and the stories Persian speakers tell themselves (and others) about their language?

In this talk, I will draw attention to insights and ideas about the Persian language circulating in the seventeenth century, hoping to create some critical distance between modern students and certain long-standing totems of Persian’s linguistic ideology. Drawing on a variety of sources that discuss the grammar, geography, aesthetics, origins, and cosmic destiny of the Persian language itself, such as dictionaries, literary treatises, and occult literature, I will historicize and contextualize some of the stereotypical claims and attitudes students might encounter when learning the language today. For example, the sources under consideration will help answer some of the following questions: what do Persian speakers mean when they claim Persian to be an exceptionally poetic and idiomatic language? What explains Persian speakers’ sometimes fraught relationship with Arabic? How did notions of Persian’s primordial connection to a place called “Iran” become established? Why are some Persian speakers considered more “authoritative” than others? In partially answering such questions, I will discuss the pedagogical advantages of sensitizing students of Persian to the political, social, and cultural contexts of the seventeenth century out of which much of the language’s modern identity has emerged.