This famous work from the Royal Asiatic Society is an indispensable tool for all serious students of Persian literature, history and culture, and a welcome companion to Persian literature in its most glorious period. This volume is the second, revised edition of three parts published in 1992 and 1994.
At publication date, a free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Persian is one of the great lingua francas of world history. Yet despite its recognition as a shared language across the Islamic world and beyond, its scope, impact, and mechanisms remain underexplored. A world historical inquiry into pre-modern cosmopolitanism, The Persianate World traces the reach and limits of Persian as a Eurasian language in a comprehensive survey of its geographical, literary, and social frontiers. From Siberia to Southeast Asia, and between London and Beijing, this book shows how Persian gained, maintained, and finally surrendered its status to imperial and vernacular competitors. Fourteen essays trace Persian’s interactions with Bengali, Chinese, Turkic, Punjabi, and other languages to identify the forces that extended “Persographia,” the domain of written Persian. Spanning the ages expansion and contraction, The Persianate World offers a critical survey of both the supports and constraints of one of history’s key languages of global exchange.
This book may be considered to be Volume II of the Hikayat Muhammad Hanafiyyah, the text edition which appeared in 1975 as number 12 in the same series. When mention is made of "Volume I", it is the latter which is referred to. The present publication contains first and foremost an abbreviated translation of the Malay text. With regard to the rather repetitious and cliche-ridden character of the latter, it was believed that little was to be gained by a literal word-for-word translation. I hope that little essential has been left out and that the flavour of the original has percolated through to the English rendering ! For this purpose I have especially endeavoured to render many dia logues as 'verbatim' as feasible. The translation has been accompanied by notes whose main purpose it is to enable a running comparison with the Persian original. Copious quotations of the Malay and Persian texts should enable the expert reader to reach his own conclusions. Another feature of this second volume is the commentaries that follow some of the chapters trans lated. Their purpose is to determine the position of the account of the H. M. H.