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L U C I S C O N F E R E N C E

A N T I NOM IA N MOV E M E N T S I N I SL A MI d e a s o f V i o l e n c e a n d N o n - V i o l e n c e i n I s l a m i c M y s t i c i s m

LUCISLeiden University Centre forthe Study of Islam and Society

W E D N E S D A Y 3 & T H U R S D A Y 4 J U N E 2 0 1 5M A I N C O N F E R E N C E R O O M U N I V E R S I T Y L I B R A R Y ( W I T T E S I N G E L 2 7 , L E I D E N )

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Registration via lucis@hum.leidenuniv.nl

Convened by Asghar Seyed-Gohrab

Antinomian Movements in Islam

Ideas of Violence and Non-Violence in Islamic Mysticism

Programme

Day One: Wednesday, 3 June 2015

9:15 Coffee/tea

9:45 Welcoming address: Asghar Seyed-Gohrab

Chair: Leonard Lewisohn

10:00-11:00 Alan Williams – Antinomianism as a Mystical Trope in Rumi’s Masnavi

11:00-12:00 Ahmet Karamustafa – The Abdals of Rum in the Mirror of Hagiography

12:00-13:30 Lunch (Only for speakers and invitees)

Chair: Asghar Seyed-Gohrab

13:30-14:30 Leonard Lewisohn – The Spiritual Reality, Social Significance and

Poetic Topos of the Wildman (Qalandar) in 14-15th Century Persian

Poetry

14:30-15:30 Rokus de Groot – Qalandar transformation in Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's

performances

15:30-16:00 Break

16:00-17:00 Mohammad-Reza Shafi’i-Kadkani – Qalandar: a Definition

Dinner (Only for speakers and invitees)

Day Two: Thursday, 4 June 2015

9:00-9:30 Coffee/tea

Chair: Rokus de Groot

9:30-10:30 Jan Schmidt – From heretic revolutionaries to intriguing courtiers; the

role of mystics in Ottoman history

10:30-11:30 Mathew Thomas Miller – The ‘Rogue Lyrics’ of Medieval Persian Poetry:

The Qalandariyyat as Heterotopic Countergenre of the Sufi Carnival

11:30-12:00 Break

12:00-13:00 Michiel Leezenberg – Antonomianism among the Kurds: Language,

Law, Religion

13:00-14:30 Lunch (Only for speakers and invitees)

Chair: Jan Schmidt

14:30-15:30 Alireza Korangi – Qalandar, Qalandarī and ‘Ayyarī in Indo-Persian

Literature: A case of Proto-“Indian Style” Bū Alī Qalandar and His

Muhammadan Poetics

15:30-16:30 Asghar Seyed-Gohrab – The Reception of the Qalandars in the

Caucasus? Nizami Ganjavi and Other Poets of the Region

16:30-17:00 Final remarks

Titles, Abstracts and Biographies

Alan Williams (University of Manchester and British Academy)

این ثنا گفتن ز من ترِک ثناست کین دلیِل هستی وهستی خطاست

Antinomianism as a Mystical Trope in Rumi’s Masnavi

Whereas Rumi’s ghazals are full of extravagances of expression that often appear to

be antinomian and anti-shariʿa, they are in fact extended shaṭḥhā, ecstatic

utterances. The Masnavi on the other hand is known as a more sober text,

extravagant perhaps only in its great size and depth. However there are indeed

passages in the Masnavi that seem to extol unreason, unbelief and antinomian ideas

as preferable to mundane wisdom, conventional belief and everyday morality. In

this paper I explore the notion that antinomianism for Rumi is a mystical (ʿerfāni)

trope. It is one of the major weapons in his arsenal of combat in the greater struggle

against the double entrapment of sensualist conformity and dualistic thinking. The

shackles of religious literalism enable the nafs to continue to dominate the ruḥ and

dogmatism to triumph over true piety. Rumi’s antinomian tropes resemble

explosives that de-centre conventional forms of thought: neither practical , nor

theoretical nor purely literary in type, his antinomianism is didactic of a mystical

understanding. Evasive of intellectual formulation, they thrive in the live

environment of poetry, fed by metaphor, hyperbole and imagination. But they

become desiccated and shrivelled when prised out onto the cold ground of prose

philosophy and theology.

Alan Williams (b.1953, Windsor, England) was educated at the universities of

Oxford and SOAS, London. He is Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative

Religion at the University of Manchester and concurrently British Academy Wolfson

Research Professor. His research interests span the literatures and cultures of pre-

Islamic and Islamic Iran, with published studies of Pahlavi, Classical and Modern

Persian texts. His most recent books are Spiritual Verses (Masnavi I), Penguin

Classics, 2006 and The Zoroastrian Myth of Migration … Qeṣṣe-ye Sanjān, Brill, 2009.

He is currently working on a new study and complete translation of Rumi’s Masnavi.

***

Ahmet T. Karamustafa (University of Maryland)

The Abdals of Rum in the Mirror of Hagiography

What is nowadays called the Alevi-Bektaşi tradition in Turkey is definitely not a

unitary tradition, and the outlines of its early history, especially before the sixteenth

century, are fuzzy at best and obscure at worst. Turkish speakers clearly benefited

from multiple sources in fashioning their religious thought and practice, and my aim

in this talk is to direct attention to one of those wellsprings they drew from, namely

dervish piety as represented by a nebulous group that historians of Anatolia and the

Balkans refer to as abdalan-ı Rum, following the example of the chronicler

Aşıkpaşazade (d. 889/1484). Whether or not the abdals of Rum may have been

interconnected as a loose social grouping through master-disciple relationships,

regional attachments, distinctive practices and the like remains a matter of

conjecture, but it is likely that what led contemporary observers such as

Aşıkpaşazade to subsume them under a single heading was their linguistic practice:

as opposed other dervish groups like the Qalandars, Ḥaydarīs, Jāmīs, and Shams-i

Tabrīzīs, who most probably spoke Persian (at least during the thirteenth and

fourteenth centuries), the abdals of Rum spoke Turkish. The richest historical

sources for this Turkish dervish piety are, of course, hagiographical texts in Turkish

that begin to proliferate during the second half of the fifteenth century, and my talk

will be an attempt to tap this sizeable hagiographical corpus for what they can

reveal to us about abdal piety, its salient features and its social as well as cultural

context.

Ahmet T. Karamustafa is Professor of History at the University of Maryland,

College Park. His expertise is in the social and intellectual history of Sufism in

particular and Islamic piety in general in the medieval and early modern periods.

His publications include God’s Unruly Friends (University of Utah Press, 1994) and

Sufism: The Formative Period (Edinburgh University Press & University of California

Press, 2007). He is currently working on two book projects titled The Flowering of

Sufism and Vernacular Islam: Everyday Muslim Religious Life in Medieval Anatolia.

***

Leonard Lewisohn (University of Exeter)

The Spiritual Reality, Social Significance and Poetic Topos of the Wildman (Qalandar) in

14-15th Century Persian Poetry

The type of radical Sufi who could combine the contraries of both faith and infidelity

within himself was represented by several pivotal terms in Persian poetic symbolism.

References in Persian poetry to these terms—such as qalandar (‘wildman’ – a roving

mystic unattached to religious formalities, the Persian version of the Hindu Saddhu)

rind (rogue) and qallāsh (rascal)—as J.T.P. de Bruijn has noted, “were traditionally

subsumed under the heading kufriyyāt [‘Songs of Infidelity’].”1

Although the qalandariyyāt genre of poetry (‘Wild-man Poetry’) featured blasphemous

poetic images, and was literally antinomian, its authors were usually themselves “pious

Muslims who put much emphasis on the obedience to God’s will as it was laid down in

the sharī‘at.’2 Typically, the qalandar’s abode was the kharābāt, the Tavern of Ruin

which ubiquitously encompassed good, evil, beauty, ugliness, and every kind of faith

and infidelity. Consequently, in the literary genre of kufriyyāt and qalandariyyāt, the

true ‘infidel’ is beheld as the poet’s (and by extension, the reader’s) own ego. To

expound the subtleties of Sufi antinomian theology and elaborate the paradoxical faith

sustaining such mystical infidelity, chapters of books and sometimes whole treatises

were composed by some of the major Persian Sufi masters from the 13th to 16th

centuries.

As a quasi-Sufi antinomian movement, the antinomianism of the qalandar dervishes

had basically three characteristics:

By eschewing ritual obligations, they contravene the Sharī‘a “in spirit if not

always in letter, by adopting patently scandalous and antisocial practices.”3

They were constantly engaged in music-making, using tambourines, drums,

dancing and singing in public ceremonies.4

They were radical dissenters from established religion. “The [qalandar]

dervishes negated the existing social structure in all its dimensions…They

cheerfully proceeded to replace the prescriptive and proscriptive of the sharī‘ah

by another code of behaviour, in which deliberate eschewal of the religious law

played a role.”5

1“The Qalandariyyāt in Persian Mystical Poetry, from Sanā’ī Onwards,” in Leonard Lewisohn (ed.), The

Heritage of Sufism, vol. 2: The Legacy of Mediæval Persian Sufism (1150-1500), (Oxford: Oneworld 1999), p.

85. 2 J.T.P. de Bruijn, Persian Sufi Poetry: an Introduction to the Mystical Use of Classical Poems (London:

Curzon 1997), p. 75. 3 Ahmet Karamustafa, God’s Unruly Friends: Dervish Groups in the Islamic Later Middle Period, (Salt Lake

City: University of Utah Press 1994), p. 18. 4 Ibid, p. 19.

5 Ibid, p. 22.

In this lecture, I will explore the spiritual reality, social significance and poetic topos of

the wildman (qalandar) in classical Persian poetry in general, focusing in particular on

the lyrical poems (ghazal) of six less-known Persian poets of the fifteenth century:

Luṭfu’llāh Nīshabūrī (d. 812/1409), Shāh Ni‘matullāh Walī (d. 835/1431), Kamāl

Ghiyāth Shīrāzī (d. 847/1443), Khiyālī Bukharā’ī (d. 850/1446), Shāh Dā‘ī Shīrāzī (d.

870/1465), Muḥammad Lāhījī (d. 913/1507).

Leonard Lewisohn has written extensively on Persian Sufism. He is the author of

Beyond Faith and Infidelity: The Sufi Poetry and Teachings of Mahmud Shabistari

(London: Curzon Press 1995), and The Wisdom of Sufism (Oxford: Oneworld 2001).

He is the editor of The Heritage of Sufism (Oxford: Oneworld Publications 1999), vol.

1: The Legacy of Medieval Persian Sufism, vol. 2: Classical Persian Sufism from its

Origins to Rumi Classical Persian Sufism from its Origins to Rumi, vol. 3 (with David

Morgan): Late Classical Persianate Sufism: the Safavid and Mughal Period covering a

millennium of Islamic history. He is also editor (with Christopher Shackle) of The

Art of Spiritual Flight: Farid al-Din Attar and the Persian Sufi Tradition (London: I.B.

Tauris and the Institute of Ismaili Studies, forthcoming 2006) His articles have

appeared in the Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd Ed., The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2nd

Ed., The Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd Ed., Encyclopedia Iranica, Iran Nameh, Iranian

Studies, Journal of the American Oriental Society, Bulletin of the School of Oriental &

African Studies, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, British Association for the Study of

Religion Bulletin, African Affairs, and Temenos.

He was Research Associate in Esotericism in Islam at the Department of Academic

Research and Publications of the Institute of Ismaili Studies (London) from 1999-2005.

Since 2004 he has been Lecturer in Persian and Iran Heritage Foundation Fellow in

Classical Persian and Sufi Literature at the The Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, at

the University of Exeter in England.

***

Rokus de Groot (University of Amsterdam)

Qalandar transformation in Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's performances

The figure of the qalandar received worlwide renown in the 1980s and 1990s

through the performances of the Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (1948-

1997) on world music stages and in films. His most famous song was Dam mast

Qalandar, relating to Muhammad Uthman Marandi, nicknamed Lal Shahbaz

Qalandar (1177-1274), a saint from Sindh. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's renderings of

this song were ecstatic, and the public, especially in Pakistan, responded likewise.

As the source of his own performances, he referred to the qawwali practice at Sufi

dargahs (tombs) in Pakistan and India, at which the praise of saints is sung, This

presentation will concentrate on the shift of qawwali practice from the sacred space

of the tomb to public halls by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, his justification to do so, while

assuming a spiritual role as a singer, and the role of Dam mast Qalandar in this

process.

Rokus de Groot (*1947 Aalst, Netherlands), musicologist and composer, conducts

research on music of the 20th and 21st centuries, especially about aesthetics and

systems of composition, about the interaction between different cultural and

religious traditions, and about musical concepts as a metaphor (polyphony,

counterpoint). He is Professor Emeritus of Musicology at the University of

Amsterdam. Among his publications are: 'Rumi and the Abyss of Longing', in The

Mawlana Rumi Review Vol. 2, ed. L. Lewisohn, Cyprus: Rumi Institute, Near East

University, and Exeter: the Rumi Studies Group of the Institute for Arab and Islamic

Studies, University of Exeter, 2011, p. 60-93; 'Edward Said and Polyphony', in A.

Iskandar and H. Rustom (eds.), Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and

Representation, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010, p. 204-228; 'Music,

Religion and Power: Qawwali as Empowering Disempowerment', in M.B. ter Borg

and J.W. van Henten, Powers, Religion as a Social and Spiritual Force, New York:

Fordham University Press, 2010, p. 243-264. He composes music theatre for singers,

musicians and dancers from different traditions, such as Song of songs: The Love of

Mirabai (New Delhi 2005), Layla and Majnun: A Composition about the Night

(Amsterdam 2006), ShivaShakti (Chennai, 2009) and Hosgeldin (Ankara and Burdur,

2014). These are examples of mutual learning and intercultural polyphony.

***

Mohammad-Reza Shafi’i-Kadkani (Tehran University)

Qalandar: a Definition

Mohammad-Reza Shafi’i-Kadkani is a Persian writer, poet, literary critic, editor,

and translator. Born in Nishapur in 1939, Shafi’i-Kadkani graduated from Tehran

University with a doctorate degree in Persian literature. He was a student of

prominent figures as Badi’ al-Zaman Foruzanfar, Mohammad Mo’in, and Parviz

Natel-Khanlari. He is currently professor of literature at Tehran University. He is

known for his works on history of Sufism, literary criticism and modern Persian

poetry. He has published more than hundred articles and many books on a wide

range of topics.

***

***

Jan Schmidt (Leiden University)

From heretic revolutionaries to intriguing courtiers; the role of mystics in

Ottoman history

The paper discusses some aspects of the all-pervading presence of mystics and

mysticism in Ottoman society and literature. From the beginning dervish sheiks also

played an important role in Ottoman politics. In early days they sometimes were

able to act as local chieftains, in the ‘classical age’ and afterwards they had often a

remarkable power over ruling sultans. The suppression even of the Bektashis in the

early 19th century or the closure of the tekkes under Atatürk in the 1920s did not

end the pervasive influence of the dervish tradition in some circles in Turkish

society.

Jan Schmidt is lecturer of Turkish studies at Leiden University. His teaching and

research is primarily concerned with the history and culture of the Ottoman Empire.

He compiled a catalogue of the Turkish manuscripts kept in Dutch public libraries

and museums. His latest publication is an edition of the correspondence of the

assyriologist Fritz Rudolf Kraus during his exile in Istanbul (1937-1949).

***

Matthew Thomas Miller (University of Maryland)

The ‘Rogue Lyrics’ of Medieval Persian Poetry: The Qalandariyyat as Heterotopic

Countergenre of the Sufi Carnival

Although scholars of Sufism frequently discuss qalandari poetry in their treatments

of antinomian modes of Sufi piety, these “rogue lyrics” (qalandariyyāt) have

received little attention to date from literary scholars. Building on J.T.P. de Bruijn’s

preliminary study of Sanā’ī’s qalandariyyāt, in this paper I will map the generic

contours of the qalandari poetry of Sanā’ī,‘Attār, and ‘Erāqī and adumbrate a new

(heuristic) typology of the qalandariyyāt. Moving from the generic to intergeneric

level of analysis, I will then position the qalandariyyāt within the broader generic

landscape of early medieval Persian poetry and argue that it should be read as a

heterotopic countergenre that parodies for spiritual effect medieval panegyric court

poetry (madh/madhiyyāt) and religious-homiletic poetry (e.g. zuhdiyyāt, mawe’zeh).

Matthew Thomas Miller is currently a Roshan Institute Research Fellow (2014-

2015) at University of Maryland, College Park and consultant for Roshan Institute's

Digital Project in Persian Humanities (2014-2015). He is also a PhD student in the

Program in Comparative Literature and graduate certificate program in Women,

Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) at Washington University in St. Louis, where

he is completing his dissertation entitled “The Poetics of the Sufi Carnival: The

‘Rogue Lyrics’ (Qalandariyyāt) of Sanā’ī, ‘Attār, and ‘Erāqī.” Previously, he was

dissertation fellow at Washington University in St. Louis (2013-2014), a Roshan

Cultural Heritage Institute Fellow (2012-2013), and a Mellon Sawyer Doctoral

Fellow (2011-2012). He is the author of the forthcoming (2015) “Fakhr al-Dīn ‘Irāqī:

Poet and Mystic,” in Religious and Mystical Literature (Volume VI of A History of

Persian Literature Series).

***

Michiel Leezenberg (University of Amsterdam)

Antonomianism among the Kurds: Language, Law, Religion

The recent, near-genocidal persecution of the Yezidis once again brings home the

distinct place of the Kurds in the Middle Eastern religious landscape. Kurdish

communities like the Yezidis, the Haqqa, and the Kakais or Yaresan have often been

accused of antinomianism or heresy; but these claims generally come from hostile

sources. The members of these communities themselves reject such accusations;

and some of their apparently most deviant behavior turns out to have a background

in Sufi ideas about blame (malâmat), or about the devil (Iblîs) despite appearances

being God’s most loyal servant.

After a brief discussion of legalism and antinomianism among these heterodox

groups, I will turn to a seemingly unrelated phenomenon: the emergence of

language-based nationalism among the Kurds. The emergence of nationalism among

Middle Eastern peoples is often described as resulting from the import of Western

European ideas assumed to be alien to local realities; but it was prepared by local

processes of vernacularization that occurred especially in Sufi-inspired medrese

circles. These processes, moreover, involved qualitative changes in the perceived

relations between language, religion, and law. I will discuss these interrelations, first

by discussing Evliya Çelebi’s doctrines of the vernacular languages spoken in the

Ottoman empire and, second, on discussing the linguistic and religious dimensions

of Kurdish vernacularization. One of the biggest innovations implicit in works like

Elî Teremaxî’s eighteenth-century Tesrîfa Kurmancî, the first-ever grammar of

Kurdish, turns out to be the belief that any language other than Arabic can have

rules or laws of grammar (sarf). Early modern vernacularization thus involved

major rearticulations of language, law and religion, and turns out to have significant

– if generally tacit – political implications.

Michiel Leezenberg teaches in the Philosophy department and in the MA

programme "Islam in the Modern World" of the University of Amsterdam. In 2001,

he published Islamic Philosophy: A History (in Dutch), which won the Socrates cup

for the best Dutch-language philosophy book of the year. His current research

interests focus on the intellectual history of the modern Islamic world, the history

and philosophy of the humanities, and the Kurdish question. He has given guest

lectures at various universities, at think tanks and at policymaking institutions. He

regularly contributes to the Books section of the nationwide daily NRC Handelsblad.

***

Alireza Korangy (University of Virginia)

Qalandar, Qalandarī and ‘Ayyarī in Indo-Persian Literature: A case of Proto-“Indian

Style” Bū Alī Qalandar and His Muhammadan Poetics

In Persian literature, the notions of lover and beloved have gone through a myriad

of changes when concerning post-Safavid poetics. Within the poetic paradigm of the

lover as prescribed by a long history of Persian verse, the idea of qalandarī has been

one of value on so many levels, most important of which being how it creates the

poets’ desired ambiguity as concerns malāmatī and Sufi ideas and ideals regarding

love and forgoing the self. In what is now post-rationalized as “Indian Style”

literature, qalandar and all that is thematically bound to it in terms of poetic and

philosophical ethical observances are treated in accordance with a new

understanding of the lover and the beloved and the newly found geo-political

nuances that necessarily were influential in creating a new understanding. What are

missing from the prescribed formula for the “Indian Style” in terms of historicity are

the Indian poets who were writing Persian poems long before the Safavids and long

before any notion of Bahar’s coinage of the “Indian Style” in the subcontinent. That

said, this talk aims to discuss the religious motif of qalandarī and ‘ayyārī (and by

extension the time immemorial lover-beloved relationship) in the poetry of Bū Alī

Qalandar who is the first to write lionizations of the prophet in the subcontinent and

had a very strong element of tafrīd in his other poetry. What is of particular

importance is how such a poet treated ‘ayyārī and qalandarī at a time when poets in

India who wrote in Persian were hardly ever discussed or even known. Did they

deviate from a path already set for them or did they pave a distinct path of

individuality when it came to the idea of qalandar or ‘ayyār? How did religion

influence the notion of the qalandar and was this influence, if any, lessened in the

post-Safavid period?

Alireza Korangy received his Ph.D. from the Department of Near Eastern

Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. His field of research is Classical

Persian and Arabic philology with a special emphasis on poetics, rhetoric, and

linguistics. He has also done extensive research on the contemporary linguistics of

Iran and its corresponding folkloric traditions (Sorani Kurdish, Kurmanji Kurdish,

Gilaki, Lori, Baluchi, etc.). His first book discussed the development of ghazal poetry

in Iran, by highlighting the extensive influences of the pre-Islamic Arabic poetry and

Classical Arabic poetry on the birth of ghazal poetry. Currently he is editing

numerous volumes of essays dealing with a myriad of subjects such as Persian and

Arabic philology, Islamic philosophy, Islamic historiography, the beloved and Urdu

poetics. His next two monographs discuss martyrdom in Iran and Gilaki literature

respectively. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Middle

Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Virginia where

he teaches Classical Persian literature, Iranian languages, and other courses on the

Middle East and Near East. Previously he taught at the University of Colorado at

Boulder. He is one of the editors in chief (with A.A. Seyed-Gohrab) of International

Journal of Persian Literature published by Penn State University Press.

***

Ali-Asghar Seyed-Gohrab (Leiden University)

The Reception of the Qalandars in the Caucasus?

Nizami Ganjavi and Other Poets of the Region

The antinomian dervishes became popular in Persia from around the 12th Century.

These mystics celebrated wine and gambling, had piercings in their ears, noses and

genitals, indulged in the pleasures of homo-erotic love. While criticizing Islam, they

praised other religions such as Zoroastrianism and Christianity. Their urge to reject

society and outward piety of the clerical class made them choose nudity, rejection of

marriage, shaving all facial hair, and using narcotics. While provoking the clergy

with their irreligious behaviour, they craved for rejection and criticism, which they

used as a shield to protect their piety. They were afraid that admiration of their

followers would become a source of hypocrisy, and that they would believe in their

own saintly status. In this paper, I will analyse how these mystics and their ideas

were received in the Caucasus and Central Asia, investigating why several of their

ideas were rejected while certain tenets became popular in a wide area both in

literature and arts.

Ali-Asghar Seyed-Gohrab is Associate Professor at Leiden University. His

publications include Soefism: Een levende traditie, (Amsterdam: Prometheus / Bert

Bakker, 2015); Literature of the Early Twentieth Century: From the Constitutional

Period to Reza Shah (ed., Volume XI of A History of Persian Literature, London / New

York: I.B. Tauris 2015), Layli and Majnun: Love, Madness and Mystic Longing in

Nizami’s Epic Romance, (Leiden / Boston: Brill, 2003), Mirror of Dew: The Poetry of

Ālam-Tāj Zhāle Qā'em-Maqāmi, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Ilex

Fundation Series 14, 2015), Courtly Riddles: Enigmatic Embellishments in Early

Persian Poetry, (Leiden: LUP, 2008, 2010); The Treasury of Tabriz: the Great Il-

Khanid Compendium, (West Lafayette, Indiana, Purdue University Press, ed. together

with S. McGlinn, 2007); (2007) Seyed-Gohrab, A.A. & Gog and Magog: The Clans of

Chaos in World Literature, (West Lafayette, Indiana, Purdue University Press,

together with F. Doufikar-Aerts & S. McGlinn, 2007); One Word – Yak kaleme: A 19th-

Century Persian Treatise Introducing Western Codified Law (Leiden: LUP, 2008, 2010,

together with S. McGlinn); Conflict and Development in Iranian Film, ed. together

with K. Talattof, (Leiden: LUP, 2013). He has translated several volumes of modern

Persian poetry into Dutch, including the poetry of Sohrâb Sepehri, Forugh

Farrokhzâd, Mohammad-Rezâ Shafi’i-Kadkani, and (together with J.T.P. de Bruijn)

Ahmad Shâmlu, Nâder Nâderpur, and Hushang Ebtehâj. He headed the project Of

Poetry and Politics: Classical Poetic Concepts in the New Politics of Twentieth Century

Iran, financed by a five-year research grant from the Netherlands Organization for

Scientific Research (NWO). He is the founding general editor of the Iranian Studies

Series at Leiden University Press and the Modern Persian Poetry Series.