Persian Printing in Comparative Context

Abstract:

When the first Persian text was printed in Iran, it coincided with the wider on-set of printing in other Arabic-script languages around 1820, whether Arabic in Cairo or Persian and Urdu in Lucknow. All three cases involved typography rather than lithography. Yet whereas the Arabic- and Turkish-using regions of the Middle East retained typography as their main method of printing, from the 1830s both Iran and India opted for lithography. This lecture places Iran, and Persian, into this larger comparative context of the development of Muslim printing elsewhere – not only in the Middle East and India, but also in the Volga-Ural region, Central Asia, and the Indian Ocean. This lecture shows the larger patterns that emerge by viewing these separate developments together via the rubric of three technological diffusion zones. But this comparative approach also highlights both consistencies and divergences in the trajectory of Iranian lithography.

Bio:

Nile Green is· a professor of history at UCLA with expertise in Islamic modernism. Green is a historian of Islamic thought and practice, with a particular emphasis on the encounters of Islam with modernity and the West. He has traveled and lived in more than 20 Muslim countries. Green’s books have explored the forms of Islam which evolved among the tribal societies of early modern Afghans to the intersection of religion and colonial service among the Muslim soldiers of the British Empire and the emergence of industrialized. religious economies in the nineteenth century Indian Ocean, Atlantic and Pacific arenas. His latest book, Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of lkbal and Idries Shah (Norton, 2024), traces how Afghanistan became a place of projected fantasies _across the 20th century. It has been reviewed in the WSJ, NYT, Spectator, and elsewhere.