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What do “folk” tales have in common with mystical treatises and advice literature for rulers? And why did a learned author at a medieval royal court decide to compile these seemingly unrelated literatures in one work for his educated, elite audience? The themes and linguistic styles of what is generally known as folk tales, at least in an Iranian context, are generally understood to be suitable for the taste and understanding of the uneducated people, not the members of the elite, who are usually presented as advocates of high culture. If these tales were meant for pure entertainment, why did the author present them in the same work that contains not-for-entertainment materials, such as the counsels of ʿAli b. Abi Ṭālib, the son-in-law and cousin of prophet Mūḥammad, to his son Ḥusayn? Compiled by Abū Bakr b. Khusrau al-Ustād and dedicated to the Eldigüzid atabeg of Azerbaijan Nuṣrat al-Dīn Abū Bakr (r. 1191–1210), the Mūnis-nāma blurs the lines traditionally drawn between Persian “folk” and “elite” literature and provides a fascinating source for studying the two realms as parts of a larger whole. In this lecture, Nasrin Askari discusses the possible logic of the compiler in the organization of the seventeen chapters of the work and calls for a designation and defining criteria for a body of works that occupies the zone between the high and low ends of the wide spectrum of Persian literature.
Nasrin Askari is the author of The Medieval Reception of the Shāhnāma as a Mirror for Princes (Brill, 2016), which won the World Award for Book of the Year in Iran. She is also the editor of the Mūnis-nāma, a twelfth-century Persian work compiled at the royal court of the Eldigüzid atabegs of Azerbaijan, which was published by Afshar Foundation in Tehran in May 2022. She is currently working as Research Fellow and Translator on the Persian segment of the “Global Literary Theory: Caucasus Literatures Compared” project, funded by European Research Council and based at the University of Birmingham. Her primary areas of research specialization and teaching are classical Persian literature, the history and culture of late antique and medieval Iran, the Perso-Islamic literature of wisdom and advice, and Persian popular literature. She has taught courses on the Shāhnāma, Classical Persian Literature in English Translation, History of Iran, and Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema at the University of British Columbia and University of Toronto. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Toronto and has held Postdoctoral Fellowships in Canada and the UK.