The Grammar of Persianate Islam: Science, Sociability, and the Sacred in the Early Modern Muslim East
In this project, I approach early modern Persian-language philological production—works on grammar, lexicography, rhetoric, and related subjects—from three directions. First, I consider the place of such works in the history of science. Persian works on language anticipated scientific discoveries made later by European scholars. While some attention has been paid to the Persianate antecedents to modern historical linguistics and the possible influences of the former on the latter, I aim to study Perso-Islamic understanding of language much more deeply and strive to grasp it on its own terms, not merely in relation to European philology. Secondly, I consider what grammar does, or at least historically did. The study of grammar was the basis of a madrasa education, so what forms of sociability, ways of knowing, and ways of being in the world are produced or shaped by such study? This question, tied up as it is with Islamic education, leads me to the third and largest question of this project: how does grammar mediate the place of Persian within Islam?