An Agenda for Persian Studies (original) (raw)

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On welcoming participants from many parts of the world to our conference at Sydney, and in opening its proceedings, I intend in this introduction to suggest a working agenda for Persian Studies, that is, for studies of the kinds of culturo-religious issues we are addressing in our presentations. I do so, not as a Westerner presuming to dictate what cultural studies should entail for every thinker working in this field, but primarily in response to the range of topics being tackled by those reading papers to this seminar, and then also by imagining what a worldwide gathering of scholars might pose as key questions about the Persian heritage, for their better understanding of a rich and highly influential tradition. I will hereby reflect, in fact, on key issues that are hoary enough always to require rethinking by those within the arena of Persian scholarship, yet at the same time basic enough for non-specialists who seek clarification of Persia's importance in world history and affairs. I do not hesitate to orient this working agenda chronologically, and it seems natural to begin with linguistics and religious foundations. Right from the start, however, we are forced to ask questions about the nature of scholarship itself. As a globalist working in a Western-originated Australian University far from central Asia, I am bound to be strongly affected by the European tradition of comparative, critical and phenomenological studies. Yet I do not want to be blinkered by this inheritance, and in an intellectual ambience at Sydney pressed to be 'post-modern' and 'postcolonial', let alone in the company of this symposium's eminent Persian participants, I seek to honour, learn from, and ask questions about traditions of high-level scholarship that have been established in Iran itself (and among the 'expatriate' Persians, from Indian Parsees onwards). To secure our bearing on questions of lingual and socio-religious antiquity, though, I will first defer to Western critical insights. Since Friedrich Max Muller, a founding father of both comparative philology and religion, cautiously postulated the separation of northwestern and southeastern branches of Indo-European language family at ca. 3,000 BCE, it has always been of interest as to how close our earliest specimens of the ancient Avestan Language are to the as yet unplaced "original home of Aryan speech". 1 At the time Franz Bopp was working on a comparative grammar (during the 1810s), placing Sanskrit and Avestan in the same family as Greek and Latin and the Slavonic, Baltic, Teutonic and Celtic language groups of Europe,2 an extraordinary amount of German philological and cultural attention became focussed on ancient India, and this was reflected in Muller's own career (and as a result the course of comparative religious studies generally).3 Certain German scholars were to make important contributions to the study of older Persian materials (consider von Spiegel, Haug and Geldner),4 but from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, it was not Berlin but Paris where Persia received more spotlighting. Abraham Anquatil-Duperon was earliest in