From the Persianate World to Multiple Worlds of the Persianate

ABSTRACT This article fleshes out two future directions for Middle Eastern studies as it puts the recent scholarship in Ottoman studies in dialogue with Alexander Jabbari’s The Making of Persianate Modernity. First, like Jabbari, who interpreted the sexual puritanism in modern Persian literary histories as a convention of Persianate modernity, the author notes that critics can analyze key claims in texts of Arabic and Turkish modernity as generic conventions rather than as facts that capture sociopolitical transformations of modernity. Second, the author argues that The Making of Persianate Modernity, which examines the “form that the Persianate takes” in modern Iran and South Asia, can serve as a point of departure for studying the diverse forms that the Persianate takes in other Middle Eastern contexts, which do not have to be subsumed to a single Persianate world. While the term “Persianate world” has served as a useful heuristic concept, critics can shift their focus to “the multiple worlds that the Persianate has taken” as they analyze communities, such as the Ottoman literati, who do not self-identify as members of a cosmopolitan Persianate community. The Persian textual heritage can cultivate multiple worlds that uphold different, and even contradictory, political ideals and aesthetic norms.