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This lecture focuses on the female characters who are at the centre of love poems written in Persian between the 10th and 15th centuries. I argue that these women, such as the ruthless Vis, the clever Shirin, the artful Fitna, the meticulous Layla, the glorious Zulikha, and even the notorious Absal, to name but a few, are distinctively modern, especially with regard to their attitudes and occupations. They engage with the physical world in different ways, and project radically distinct forms of selfhood and emancipation. They do so through their roles as lovers, beloveds, daughters, mothers, wives, queens, servants, messengers, and wet nurses, and sometimes by combining these roles together in new and exciting ways. My work increases our understanding of this rich literary history, for it reveals just how complex and just how modern some of these women appear. This revelation, in turn, raises important questions about the relevancy of feminism and modernity in the study of pre-modern cultures of the Persianate world.
Parwana Fayyaz is a scholar and teacher of Persian literature written between 1000 and 1600, specializing in long narrative poems (masnavi). Her work reveals a world of textual, cultural, linguistic, and religious exchanges that has important ramifications for the way we understand the relationships between East and West, between Islam and the Greco-Roman and Christian worlds. Her upcoming book, Persian Neoplatonism: The Eye and the Vision in Jami’s Poetry, explores the complexities that result from the integration of Neoplatonic philosophy and mysticism in Jami’s poems. In her current research, she studies other intersections gone largely unnoticed, such as the reception of classical Persian romance in the colonial period and the role of nursing women in romantic Persian poetry.
Parwana was born in Kabul, Afghanistan, and raised in Pakistan as a refugee. She studied at Stanford and then at Trinity College, Cambridge, where she completed her doctorate in 2020. Shortly thereafter, she was elected to a four-year research fellowship at Peterhouse, Cambridge, where she currently lives, teaches, and writes. Parwana is also a poet herself and a translator working with multiple languages. Her first collection of poetry, Forty Names, inspired by the Afghan-Persian storytelling tradition, was published in 2021 and named a New Statesman Book of the Year and a White Review Book of the Year. It was later translated and published in Italian; Hebrew and German translations are also in the works. Parwana’s poems have been honoured with prizes from the Forward Arts Foundation and the World Poetry Academy.