Program
Conference Schedule and Session Descriptions:
The full conference schedule, including specific session details, topics, and speakers will be released in this section well before the start of the conference. We understand the importance of planning your attendance, and we want to provide you with ample time to organize your arrival and make the most of your conference experience.
Scientific Committee Members
Keynote Speakers
Keynote Lecture by Professor Lloyd Ridgeon (University of Glasgow, United Kingdom)
Time: 14:30 – 15:30 hrs
Interpretations of the Hejab in Iran: From Mandatory to Desirability and Free-choice
This paper examines the issues and interpretations that lie behind the contentious policies of veiling in contemporary Iran. The interpretations of three modern religious scholars have been chosen specifically because they offer different conclusions. For Ayatollah Mutahhari veiling (covering the hair of a woman) is absolutely necessary, Ahmad Qabel (d. 2012) – a little-known student of Ayatollah Montazeri – claimed it was desirable, whilst Mohsen Kadivar believes that veiling is neither necessary nor desirable. These debates and perspectives pre-date the current anti-veiling movement, and they give an indication that the issue has remained problematic for the state authorities since the creation of the Islamic Republic. The three different perspectives rely on sacred scripture, which suggests that the variety of interpretation is a result of the different contexts and socio-political dynamics in the lives of the scholars. Mutahhari’s writings date to Iran from the late 1960s, Qabel’s to the early 2000s, and Kadivar’s to the mid-2010s. Of course, it would have been interesting to study works by female, clerical scholars who have written on the hejab, but unfortunately, I was unable to locate any. The presentation here is therefore a very male discourse, and it is to be wondered if such jurisprudential writings on “female” topics have any relevance for females inside Iran.
Bio: Lloyd Ridgeon is Reader in Islamic Studies, in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies, University of Glasgow, UK. He focuses his research on medieval Persian Sufism, and also politics, religion and culture in modern Iran. He has published extensively in both areas. He is also the chief editor of the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies.
Keynote Lecture by Professor Carlo Giovanni Cereti (Sapienza – University of Rome \ University of California Irvine)
Time: 17:30 – 18:30 hrs
Writing culture under the Sasanians
Once the Achaemenid Empire had fallen under the blows of Alexander the Great, regional chanceries gradually adapted the Aramaic system to their languages: Middle Persian, Parthian, Chorasmian, and Sogdian. The process was pervasive, to the extent that only two of the known Middle Iranian languages are written otherwise: Bactrian uses Greek, witnessing to the Greco-Bactrian heritage, while the two closely related Saka dialects, Khotanese and Tumshuqese, spoken far to the east in what eventually came to be an Indian cultural context, employ Brāhmī script. In other words, Walter Bruno Henning was substantially right in writing that the unity of Middle Iranian languages comes first from their sharing a common writing system given the typological similarity of the different scripts deriving from Aramaic in the paragraph entitled “Die Schrift als Symbol der Einheit des Mitteliranischen” of his foundational contribution on Mitteliranischen (Henning 1958). The lecture will focus on the development of writing in the Sasanian world and, therefore, the longue durée process that led to the establishment of Persian as the lingua franca of the Eastern Islamic world as brilliantly outlined by Bert Fragner, the first director of the then newly created Institut für Iranistik of the Austrian Academy in his Die “Persophonie”: Regionalität, Identität und Sprachkontakt in der Geschichte Asiens. (Series ANOR 5, Berlin: Das Arabische Buch, 1999). To this end, I will discuss the main attestations of writing in a secular and popular context, tackling both the synchronic and the diachronic dimension of literacy in the Sasanian Empire.
Keynote Lecture by Professor Homa Lessan Pezechki (Aix-Marseille University, IREMAM, France)
Time: 12:00 – 13:00 hrs
Evidential categories in Persian: The core categories of inferential and hearsay.
Evidentiality is defined as a linguistic category whose primary meaning is to indicate the source of information (Aikhenvald, 2004). More precisely, it can be defined as the representation of the source and access to information according to the speaker’s perspective and strategy (Tournadre & LaPolla, 2014).
The notion of médiativité (mediativity) or ‘evidentiality’ in Persian has not been the subject of many studies. The term médiatif (mediative) was proposed by Gilbert Lazard in 1956 in an article on Tajik. Before this, the Iranian grammarian Kasravi who died in1946 proposed the term nâ-did-e “non-witnessed” (litt. un-seen) to designate these forms in Farsi.
The terms evidential and mediative are close but the latter is often used in a narrower sense than evidential to refer to a distinct source of information (i.e à reported speech) or an inference.
In Farsi and Tajik, the evidential paradigm or vajh-e bardāšti ‘inferential mood’ (Pezechki, 1997) is essentially restricted to the past where it is opposed to the indicative mood, vajh-e exbâri. The opposition between evidential and non-evidential is attested for 4 paradigms in both languages: simple past, the imperfect, the pluperfect and the past progressive.
This presentation is also motivated by the fact that the notion of evidentiality remains largely absent from school grammar and the teaching of these languages in Iran, Tajikistan and Afghanistan. This is all the more surprising, given that evidential forms are not only widespread in colloquial language, but also in journalistic style and historical texts.
Neo-Persian-derived languages such as Farsi, Dari and Tajik, as well as other Iranian languages such as Kurdish, have all grammaticalized evidentiality in their verbal systems.
As mentioned by (Yazdanian, 1978), citing A. Kasravi (1890-1946), the past tense in ancient and classical Persian comprised 13 forms, and had already grammaticalised certain mediativity forms (but not the progressive, which is a recent construction). This category has therefore existed for over a millennium, practically since the appearance of Neo-Persian. These forms are attested in ancient texts (Shâh-Nâme, Safar nâmeh, Asrâro tohid, Târikhe Beyhaghi, Golestân, etc.).
In my presentation, I will show, with specific examples, the 4 evidential functions in Farsi:
a) Indication of reported speech (corresponding to a distinct source)
b) Sensory or logical inference directly made by the speaker.
c) Distancing from the speaker and not taking responsibility for his or her words.
d) Assumption
Bio: Currently a professor at Aix-Marseille University, Homa Lessan Pezechki defended her thesis in 1997 in France after a bachelor’s and master’s degree at the University of Teheran. She defended her HDR, Habilitation à diriger des recherches in 2013 at Aix-Marseille. She has taught at Kanun-e zabun-e iran, Azad islamique, Azzahra and Allameh Tabatabaï universities, and was an Associate Professor in the French language and literature department at Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran. Since 2003, she has taught at Aix-Marseille University, first as a lecturer and since 2015 as a professor. She has also taught under the ERASMUS program at Galatasaray University and Yerevan State University in Armenia.
She has taken part in several research projects, including Panorama linguistique du Tadjikistan, Carrefour de langues indo-européennes : iraniennes, indo-aryennes et slaves, which is currently being written. She has published several articles and books, including two on historical Persian literature.
– Les Turcs seldjoukides d’Anatolie du XIe au XIVe siècle. Une anthologie des sources premières, volume 1, Les sources persanes, Ibn Bîbî, Traduction et commentaire, with Michel Balivet and René Mounier, 2016, PUP, Presses Universitaires de Provence, 490 p.
– Histoire du sultanat seldjoukide de Konya sous domination mongole (1246-1280) D’après la chronique persane d’Ibn Bîbî, Traduction et commentaires, with Michel Balivet and René Mounier, 2021, ISIS, Istanbul.
She has edited two books, including a sub-press for Editions Geuthner
– Échange et voyages Perse, Byzance et Empire ottoman, (dir) avec Philippe Gardette, Geuthner, 2023, 536p.
Invited Speakers
The history of Iranology in Spain. Some research lines
The study of Iranian culture, literature, and history (which we can call Iranology) is a part of the humanities with a long tradition in several European countries, but not in Spain. Throughout the 19th century, there were very interesting precedents that developed their work in Spain, with good results, but that did not allow them to enter the University.
Already late in the 20th century, different scholars developed their work in Spain on this field of study, but its implementation in official degrees is still very insignificant. In this communication, we are going to try to present the starting points from which we took the first step in the course, and we will try to structure possible lines of development that allow these studies to be implemented in our academic system.
Bio: Fernando Escribano Martín is a professor of ancient history at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Specialist in the ancient Near East, he has studied travelers and the precursors of this branch of History. At the beginning of this year he curated the exhibition “The Persian Manuscripts of the National Library of Spain”.
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Freemasons of word and fame: The pre-ancient past of Indo-Iranian ritual discourse
A successful reconstruction of Indo-Iranian ritual poetry cannot base its sole claim on the overwhelming comparative evidence for commonalities in the Avestan and Vedic ritual structures and nomenclatures. In order to yield a satisfactory outcome, it also needs to account for the idiosyncrasies of singular ritual players. To judge from the extant poetic record – even in its partial dependency on the testimony of a single player or poetic lineage (Zarathustra [?]) – Indo-Iranian ritual was premised on the exchange of services and commodities between competing ritual professionals and local chieftains. Unbound by any definite strictures of canon, it must have once flourished on an open ritual market. Hence, in order for these ritual professionals (or poet-sacrificers) to effectively promote their services, they had to present them as uniquely valuable (as opposed to the less valuable [or even harmful] ones of their competitors). As I intend to demonstrate in this paper with a few distinct examples, it is only by paying close attention to this rhetoric of ritual craftsmanship – to its mythical underpinnings, its unexpected turns and inversions, and its conceptual inventiveness – that we may begin to fully appreciate the inherent dynamic of Indo-Iranian and (by extension) Indo-European ritual culture.
My aim is to provide a synthesis of two sets of comparanda, the first of which is designed to grasp a specifically Indo-Iranian rhetoric involving the depreciation of ritual competitors, and the second of which pays brief attention to the perfection of the ritual craft through the poetic realization of what could be tentatively termed (building on Austin’s terminology) perlocutionary sites. References to such poetically realized “abodes” (e.g. Avestan -šiti- [hušiti-] [Y. 30.10] and Vedic kṣétra [RV 10.33.6; 4.33.7 {sukṣétra}]) are made both in Gāthic and Vedic poetry, either more abstractly to an abode of truth, or more concretely to a delightful dwelling designed to satisfy the desires of the poet’s patron.
Bio: Peter Jackson Rova is Professor of the History of Religions at Stockholm University, Sweden. He specialises mainly in the religions of ancient India and Iran, the religions of the Mediterranean world, and Germanic religions with an additional interest in the theory, methodology, and conceptual development of the history of religions. His recent publications include the co-edited volumes Philosophy and the End of Sacrifice: Disengaging Ritual in Ancient India, Greece and Beyond (with Anna-Pya Sjödin, 2016) and Transforming Warriors: the Ritual Organisation of Military Force (with Peter Haldén, 2016) as well as the monograph Devotion and Artifice: Themes of Suspension in the History of Religions (2023).
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Resurrection of ‘Esghqi in India: On the Translation of the First Persian Operetta into English
Seyyed Mohammad-Rezā Kordestāni, better known as Mirzādeh ‘Eshqi (1893-1924), is considered as one of the pioneers of pure Iranian nationalism, and the first Iranian to have composed both opera and operetta in Persian. His play, named Rastākhiz-e Salātin-e Irān (Resurrection if the Iranian Kings, 1915) is the very first Persian text which can be deemed an opera, which was termed “nāmāyesh-e tamām-āhangi” (full musical performance) by ‘Eshqi himself. This work of ‘Eshqi’s is considered his best, where his nationalistic ideology finds a voice through the European (mainly French and German) dramatic genres. The performance of this play was a great success in Iran, and famous literary figures such as Mohammad Taqi Bahār and ‘Ali Dashti praised the work. However, this fame was not limited solely to Iran. This work was later on translated into English in India, and was published at the year of ‘Eshqi’s death. Soon after, the Gujarati translation of this work also appeared in India, and stablished ‘Eshqi as a playwright outside Iran. This translation, unfortunately, has not been well addressed; and most of the resarchers of the Iranian drama were unaware of its existence. The current research tends to introduce this work, in the hopes to fill one of the missing gaps of the history of Persian drama translation into English.
Bio: Behrooz Mahmoodi-Bakhtiari is an Associate Professor of Linguistics and Persian at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Tehran. His major fields of work are Persian linguistics and Iranian dialectology, as well as discourse analysis of drama and fiction. He is the author of the books Tense in Persian (2002), Fārsi Biyāmuzim/Let’s Learn Persian (2003), Persian for Dummies (2015), Pand-e Pārsi/Listening Comprehension of Persian (2016), and Salām Doktor/Dialogue Activities of Persian(2018) and Evidentiality in Sa’di’s Poetry and Prose (2023), together with several articles in journals and reference books, such as World’s Major Languages (2006), and Oxford Handbook of Persian Linguistics (2018).