Literacy in the Persianate World: Writing and the Social Order

2. Secretaries, Poets, and the Literary Language

2 Secretaries, Poets, and the Literary Language william l. hanaway INTRoDuCTIoN: THe LITeRATI AND THe WRITTeN LANguAge Iwill try to show in this chapter that the formal, written, courtly language of the Persian-using courts, at least up to the 13th or early 14th century, was created and developed as result of the dynamic interaction of the work of the secretaries and the poets, with an increasingly important contribution from the lexicographers. Poets and secretaries interacted with each other in their work and in their social life, and with other adibs in the intellectual and artistic circles of the courts. Many secretaries wrote divans of poetry in Persian and Arabic in addition to their official prose, and at least one, Rashid al-Din Vatvāt, became better known as a poet than as the secretary that he was. Poets, on the other hand, knew the epistolary terminology and style and wrote letters in verse, even saying that they were letters. In their ease with, and mastery of, the written language, poets and secretaries borrowed devices of language and meaning freely from each other or from the common pool. They also shared a literary form, the tripartite structure of many qasidas. The early Persian courts provided the setting or the matrix from which emerged a written language that became standard throughout the Persianate world, which later included the Ottoman court, many Central Asian courts, and the Mughal courts of the Indian subcontinent. Many aspects of formal written Persian and its history need to be isolated and examined before we can begin to see more clearly the reasons and implications of its stability and seeming resistance to change over a 96 William L. Hanaway millennium. John Perry discusses in this volume the evidence necessary to describe the transition of the language from the written Middle Persian of the late Sasanian period to the early New Persian of the Islamic period. The main source of written Persian from the 7th to the early 10th century AD, the period from which the earliest written texts survive, was the courts of sovereigns and provincial officials where the work of governing was carried out, and particularly the chancelleries of these courts, where there was the greatest concentration of educated, literate men and the greatest need for a standard written language. Much additional research will be necessary before we can describe the development of written Persian in any significant detail. Broadly speaking, the courts remained the main source of written Persian at least until the end of the Seljuq period (1038–1194), when Sufi establishments and the schools called nizāmiyyas (see below) began to play a more significant role in the production and standardization of written Persian . This chapter focuses on two problems: first, the role of the literati in the creation and development of the formal written language of the courts in the Persianate world from the 10th through the 15th century; second, possible reasons for the relative stability of this written language over so many centuries and across a wide geographical area. The courts of the Persianate world, from the Sasanian period onward, were the milieux of the ahl-i qalam (men of the pen), or the literati. The literati comprised all those who used written, formal Persian in the course of their professional work and, in many cases, in their leisure-time activities as well. They would have been the viziers, other administrators and bureaucrats , secretaries and scribes, poets, accountants, historians and chroniclers, jurisprudents, lexicographers, other scholars and adibs (cultivated men of letters). The core of the literati were the secretaries—the munshis, dabirs, or kātibs—for it was they who were most instrumental in the transition in the use of Pahlavi in the pre-Islamic courts to the use of Arabic and then New Persian in the Islamic courts.1 They were also the transmitters of the bureaucratic and administrative skills and traditions from the Zoroastrian regime of the Sasanians to the regimes of the Muslim rulers. Munshi retained its basic meaning of “secretary” throughout the Persianate world until at least the 18th century, occasionally being used to mean “author,” as it was by the Il-Khanid-period ruler Muhammad Zangi Bukhāri.2 In Persian -using South Asia, the meaning of munshi began to evolve during the 18th century and gradually assumed the sense of “translator” or “language Secretaries, Poets, and the Literary Language 97 teacher” in addition...