Dynamics of Transmission: Families, Authority and Knowledge in the Early Modern Middle East (15th-17th centuries)
Final Report Abstract
The Franco-German research project Dynamics of Transmission: Families, Authority and Knowledge in the Early Modern Middle East, 15th-17th centuries (DYNTRAN) has been jointly led by the CNRS research group Mondes iranien et indien and the University of Marburg, with the partnership of the Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale (IFAO). The work has been developed along two main lines of inquiry in order to interrogate the concept of “family” in the Mediaeval and Early Modern Middle East by examining issues such as the terms of language employed to refer to the family, among others, and to explore the relation between family networks and the transmission of knowledge and authority, be it political, spiritual, artistic, economical or professional. By initiating an interdisciplinary dialogue between history, textual studies, and art history, and by bringing together Mamluk, Ottoman, Persian, and Central Asian area studies, the project sought to identify these networks and their social and economic environment on the larger scale of the Muslim Middle-East. Further, it aimed not only at analysing the objects and the frameworks of the transmission, but also at examining the means, practices and strategies essential to this process in their historical context. Finally, the project has been particularly interested in investigating the adaptation and development of lineages striving to assure their permanence through time and space. A major result of the DYNTRAN project was in uncovering the depth and breadth of the family, spiritual, and professional networks that bound together the region of focus during the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries and beyond. These networks clearly linked together groups of people over geographically distant spaces as well as temporal ones (i.e. generations) in transferring knowledge and physical objects. The networks helped to facilitate trade and knowledge transfer throughout the region but also served as a mechanism for training and skills transfer (in the arts and otherwise). Another result was in seeing the ways in which knowledge and authority transfer occurred, both directly and indirectly. Direct transmission is clear in family networks of father-son, masterapprentice, master-novice (Sufi context), etc. However, indirect transfer also occurred in less easily discernible ways. Things like independent reading and study or the movement of an individual into a new social/religious/professional network reshaped the indirect nature of transfer in non-traditional or non-linear ways. Finally, another subset of transmission mechanisms occurred in official or institutionalized ways versus informal mechanisms. These institutionalized forms included the madrasa/khanaqah setting as well as through vehicles such as waqf, ateliers, law courts, etc. Informally, transmission occurred within the home or through trade in ways that are more difficult to qualify using historical sources.
Publications
- “Legitimacy through Female lineage? The Role of in-Laws (aṣhār) in the Royal Mamluk Households of the Fifteenth Century”, Eurasian Studies 15 (2017), 200-221
Fuess, Albrecht
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1163/24685623-12340036) - “Making Tools for Transmission: Mamluk and Ottoman Cairo’s Papermakers, Copyists, and Booksellers,” Eurasian Studies 15, (2017), 304-319
Quickel, Anthony
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1163/24685623-12340040) - “Muslim-Christian Polemics and Scriptural Translation in Safavid Iran: ʿAli Qoli Jadid al-Eslām and his Interlocutors,” Iranian Studies 50,2 (2017), 247-269
Tiburcio, Alberto
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1080/00210862.2016.1233806) - “Some Aspects of Conversion Narratives in Late Safavid Iran and their Circulation: The Case of ‘Alī Akbar Armanī,” Eurasian Studies 15 (2017), 350-372
Tiburcio, Alberto
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1163/24685623-12340042) - „The Kujujī Poets. Families, Poetry and Forms of Patronage in Azerbaijan and beyond (Fourteenth to Seventeenth Centuries)", Eurasian Studies 15 (2017), 250-279
Werner, Christoph
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1163/24685623-12340038)
