The three editors of this volume, Mohsen Ashtiany, Mahnaz Moazami, and I, enjoyed the pleasure of working closely with Professor Elton L. Daniel for several years at the Ehsan Yarshater Center for Iranian Studies at Columbia University. In this volume, we celebrate Professor Daniel’s wide-ranging erudition as a scholar of Iran, and the Middle East in general. In decades of meticulous research, he has covered almost every era and a range of topics: most notably, he has been engaged in the study of Islamic historiography, medieval Iran and Central Asia, Qajar Iran, and the perennial relationship between religion and social change. Fittingly therefore, this offering of essays brings together a selection of contributions on an array of topics, reflecting Professor Daniel’s own multifaceted scholarship. It is with great pleasure that we present this Festschrift to him on the occasion of his 75th birthday.
Elton Lee Daniel was born on July 5, 1948 in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, and graduated from William R. Davie High School there in 1966. He subsequently attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and graduated with an A.B. and Highest Honors in English and History in 1970. Shortly after receiving his bachelor’s degree, he married Ethel Harrison in July 1970, and the couple went on to have three children, and twelve grandchildren.
Professor Daniel’s interest in Islamic and Middle Eastern history was first sparked by stories about his father’s experiences in North Africa during World War II; and later, after the dramatic events of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, he decided to take a course at the University of North Carolina on Islam and the Middle East. Fascinated with the subject, and inspired by the teaching of Professor Herbert L. Bodman, Jr. (1924–2011), he decided to pursue graduate studies in the same field. He attended New York University (1970–1971), the American University in Cairo (1972–1973), and the University of Texas at Austin (1971–1978). Initially, he was most interested in Ottoman history, but later he was attracted to Persian studies under the influence of Professor Hafez Farmayan (Farmānfarmāyān, 1927–2015), a distinguished historian of Iran and Islam, who had moved from Tehran University to the University of Texas. In 1978, under Professor Farmayan’s supervision, he received a PhD in history after presenting his dissertation, titled “Iran’s Awakening: A Study of Local Rebellions in the Eastern Provinces of the Islamic Empire, 126–227 AH (743–842 AD).” The dissertation analyzed the many revolts in the eastern Iranian provinces, most notably Khorasan, in the aftermath of the Abbasid Revolution with a perceptive review of the historical developments during the tempestuous early Islamic times. His first monograph, The Political and Social History of Khurasan under Abbasid Rule, 747–820 AD, which drew on his dissertation, was published a year later and was translated a decade later into Persian by Masʿud Rajabniā. It remains one of the more frequently quoted secondary sources for the history of eastern Iran in the early Middle Ages.
With Professor Hafez Farmayan. London, 1986
From a wider theoretical perspective, he began his study of the medieval era of the region with the question of what is meant geographically and politically by the word and concept of “Iran,” which, as he pointed out in his dissertation, is “an admittedly imprecise term which is loaded with many secondary connotations.” He goes on to add, “The Westerner tends to think only in terms of a specific nation-state, but Iran for the Iranian is a kind of mystical combination of land and idea not linked to any one transitory state or dynasty. Could one doubt that the imperial legacy which constitutes Iran in this sense lacked a vivid reality for, say, Ferdowsi simply because the political entity was fragmented?” In his dissertation, he observed how these provincial revolts and their revolutionary spirit transformed the region by leading to the establishment of local, autonomous dynasties, while at the same time furthering “social struggles whose sources extended deep into Iran’s past, and whose effects would reach far into Iran’s future.”
He wrote these words in 1978, in the momentous months leading inexorably to the upheaval of the Islamic Revolution, a defining event of historical transformation of Iran in the twentieth century. The question of what defines and constitutes Iran, and how the relevant notions that evolved and transformed over centuries continue to have far-reaching effects on its future was, and remains, a perennial concern in Professor Daniel’s scholarly inquiries, while avoiding the common reductionist tendencies apparent with some modern commentators who tend to essentialize the concept of Iran by conjuring up timeless mindsets.
After obtaining his PhD, he spent time in Iran teaching social studies and Islamic history at the American Community School in Tehran in the fall of 1979. He has said the courses were some of the most enjoyable he ever taught, but they were cut short soon after by the momentous turn of events in November 1979: the seizure of the American embassy and the hostage crisis. In 1981, he started his long and productive academic career at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, as an Assistant Professor in history. He would go on to teach at the University of Hawaii for the next three decades in the Department of History, becoming an Associate Professor in 1985, before being promoted in 1992 to a full Professorship of Middle Eastern and Islamic history, a position he held until his retirement in 2011. While at the University of Hawaii, he taught courses on Historiography, Introduction to Islam, Crisis and Conflict in the Middle East, the Modern Middle East, World Civilizations to 1500, Islam and Asia, and Islamic Civilization.
Throughout his career, Prof. Daniel also held visiting positions and fellowships at the University of Pennsylvania (1976), the University of Chicago (1980–1981), the American University in Cairo (1988), and Oxford University, at its Centre for Islamic Studies (1994–1995), as well as research fellowships in Damascus, Istanbul, and Tehran. From 1997 to 2001, during periods of academic leave, he served as Associate Editor of the Encyclopaedia Iranica at Columbia University. He also has traveled extensively throughout the Middle East and has conducted research in Iran, Turkey, Syria, and Egypt, as well as France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, including as a recipient of Fulbright and National Endowment for the Humanities grants.
Although his research, writings, and teaching cover a range of topics on Iran, his abiding interests throughout the years have focused on the history of early Islamic Iran; Islamic historiography in Persian and Arabic; medieval Iran and Central Asia, particularly the Abbasid period and Samanid history and culture; Iran in the nineteenth century; Persian travel literature of the Qajar period; and the relation between religion and social change.
In addition to his early studies of the Abbasid Revolution and its aftermath in eastern Iran, he has authored, co-authored, and edited numerous volumes including A Shiʿite Pilgrimage to Mecca (1990, with Hafez Farmayan), an annotated translation of a Qajar travel narrative; and al-Ghazzali’s Alchemy of Happiness (1991), a revised version of Claud Field’s translation with new notes and introduction intended as a supplementary reading for undergraduate courses. In 2002, Prof. Daniel served as editor of a collection of works paying tribute to Hafez Farmayan, Society and Culture in Qajar Iran: Studies in Honor of Hafez Farmayan, which explores the history of nineteenth-century Iranian society, including its interactions with Western and neighboring countries. His subsequent publications include Culture and Customs of Iran (2006, with Ali Akbar Mahdi), and, most notably, The History of Iran (2nd ed., 2012), a balanced and perceptive overview of 2,500 years of Iranian history, beginning with the pre-Islamic era and continuing through the turn of the twenty-first century. In this book’s eleven chapters, he answers the question he first posed with his doctoral dissertation of what is meant by the concept of “Iran,” by chronologically showing its evolution, centrality, and continuity through every era from prehistory to the formation of the modern nation-state.
His books and volumes have been accompanied by numerous articles and book reviews, including regular contributions to the Encyclopaedia Iranica, the Encyclopaedia of Islam, the Encyclopedia of Asian History, Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature, and the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. He was also a contributor to The New Cambridge History of Islam and to Hanes’ World History. He served on the Editorial Board of the Journal of World History. He currently serves as the Series Editor of the multi-volume A History of Persian Literature.
His extensive knowledge of primary sources, particularly in Islamic historiography, and the diligence of his research, is complemented by his knowledge of languages, including Persian, Arabic, French, and Turkish. He translated the sections on Baghdad, Samarra, and the eastern provinces from Ibn al-Wāḍiḥ al-Yaʿqubi’s ninth-century Arabic work of geography, The Book of Countries (Ketāb al-boldān), in the collaborative volume of translations, The Works of Ibn Wāḍiḥ al-Yaʿqūbī (2018). His investigations into questions of historiographical interest, particularly from the Samanid period, are often cited by scholars. In his articles analyzing the Persian translations of al-Ṭabari’s works in the Samanid period, such as by the vizier Abu ʿAli al-Balʿami whose book Tārikh-nāma eclipsed that of the original Arabic text in the Persian-speaking world, Prof. Daniel showed how the translation reshaped al-Ṭabari’s texts and appropriated them to redefine concepts of political and cultural legitimacy of the Samanid polity. Being a true historian’s historian, he was one of the first to address the textual problems of the al-Ṭabari translations and showed they were not just simplified and abridged Persian translations for the masses but entirely new works, or as he argued, “the al-Ṭabari translations hijacked al-Ṭabari’s name and reputation in order to put them at the service of an agenda all their own.”1 His work on the rise and development of Persian historiography beginning with al-Balʿami and its differentiation from the models established by Arabic historiography compels the reader to ask an array of difficult questions on what exactly constitutes a work of history.
Drawing of Elton L. Daniel by Zeev Rubin. St. Andrews, Scotland, 1996
Such contributions to the field of Iranian studies extend beyond his writings, teachings, research, and translations, and are reflected by his professional endeavors, including serving on the Board of Directors of the Association for the Study of Persianate Societies, and the board of the Persian Heritage Foundation.
Professor Daniel’s expertise and distinction in the field of Iranian history led Professor Ehsan Yarshater (1920–2018), the legendary pioneer of Iranian studies in America, to invite Prof. Daniel as an editor of his vast reference work, the Encyclopaedia Iranica, to which Professor Daniel had already contributed entries since 1983. His involvement as an editor came at two crucial moments in the Encyclopaedia’s progress, first from 1997 to 2001, when, as an Associate Editor, he helped fill gaps in its coverage, and later at the end of Prof. Yarshater’s career, when he asked Prof. Daniel to be his successor as Editor-in-Chief. Prof. Yarshater had initially requested Prof. Daniel to assume the editorship in 2015, to which he declined, having entered retirement. At Prof. Yarshater’s insistence, he eventually accepted the offer in 2017. With Encyclopaedia Iranica being the world’s most renowned and comprehensive English-language reference work on Iranian history and culture, covering a region stretching from Iran to the Middle East, Anatolia, the Caucasus, Central Asia, Afghanistan, and the Indian subcontinent, its editorship requires extensive knowledge across a range of subjects, from pre-history to the present day. When Prof. Yarshater contacted him about returning to the Center for Iranian Studies at Columbia University, he emphasized that he was needed to enhance the editorial quality and especially to improve the rate of publication of print fascicles of the Encyclopaedia Iranica. In accordance with Prof. Yarshater’s wishes, as soon as the position of Editor-in-Chief was ceded to him, Prof. Daniel expedited print publication, reduced a backlog of unedited articles, and helped launch a new website. Upholding Prof. Yarshater’s vision for the project, he ensured during his six years as Editor-in-Chief that the print version was not overshadowed by the online edition, by publishing six new print fascicles up through Volume XVII, and a revised and expanded Volume XVI. Despite the challenges of producing the Encyclopaedia Iranica, Prof. Daniel’s work was essential in ensuring its scholarly objectivity, impartiality, factual correctness, and the high academic standards his predecessor set for such a monumental project.
With Professor Ehsan Yarshater. San Francisco, 2018
Steven Gregory Photography
Such dedication to academic integrity and scholarly objectivity in commemorating, interpreting, and preserving history are rare traits in present-day academia, and ones the editors and contributors to this volume are grateful to have encountered. He achieves it all with steadfast dedication, honesty, courteous professionalism, a quick humor, and a quiet humility. Now at 75 years of age, as Prof. Daniel returns to a well-deserved retirement, he is wished continued health, happiness, longevity, and further productivity in his scholarly inquiries, ones that have already enriched our understanding of Iran by addressing the recurrent question posed throughout his work of what constitutes Iran—whether as a region, an empire, a nation, a state, a country, or that “mystical combination of land and idea.”
Elton Daniel’s encyclopaedic knowledge of Iran and its history and culture is reflected by the diversity and range of themes critically explored in the eleven articles in this volume—from topics on historiography (from those of Persian and Arabic manuscripts’ translation sources to the ethics of historical disclosure), to religion (from Sufi saints to Qurʾanic Mary to the role of demons in Zoroastrianism), to Persian poetry and literature (from the significance of the pen to the study of a lost manuscript), to the Qajar era (from its political governors to its indigo trade to its high art), and to the pre-Islamic-Revolution era (Khomeini’s discourse against capitulations). However, rather than place the essays into narrow categories, we present them in alphabetical order by their authors, so as to offer the readers an appreciation into their subjects’ interdisciplinary dimensions to the study of Iran’s history, culture, literature, and historiography, dimensions which have featured in the work of Elton Daniel. We hope this Festschrift will become our small commemoration of his work and a large token of gratitude for his enduring contributions to the field of Iranian studies.
The volume opens with an article by Denise Aigle (École Pratique des Hautes Études, emerita), “The ‘Remarkable Deeds’ (Manāqeb) of the Qattāli Sufis Viewed as Historical Sources,” a major contribution to the history of lesser-studied Sufi branches in Iran, particularly the Qattāli sect, and the wider issue of how to explore hagiographical sources and manuscripts in a historical context.
Anna Livia Beelaert (Leiden University), in “‘It is a Bird, and What a Wondrous Bird!’: On the Description of the Pen in Classical Persian Poetry,” presents Persian poems and qaṣidas from the eleventh to the seventeenth centuries showcasing the significance of the pen motif, a topic that has received little attention in the study of Persian literature. Beelaert illustrates in detail how the pen is brought into action in profane as well as ethical contexts, and associated with concepts of life and death, such as in panegyrics touching upon the beneficial or lethal effects of a mamduḥ’s writings, or in its Qurʾanic links.
Mansour Bonakdarian (New York University), in “The Ethics of Historical Disclosure: Yaḥyā Dawlatābādi and British Freemasonry, 1911–1914,” discloses hitherto publicly unknown information about the early-twentieth-century Iranian educator, parliamentarian, and author, Yaḥyā Dawlatābādi, and his membership in a British Masonic lodge. In making this revelation about a personality whose legacy remains contested in Iranian history, particularly since Freemasonry continues to be the subject of much speculation and controversy inside and outside Iran—including in the historiography of the British Empire, as well as in connection with Western imperialist intervention in Iran in general—the essay also probes the ethics of historical disclosure and historians’ responsibility toward both their potential audiences and their subject matter.
Layla S. Diba (independent scholar and curator, New York), in “‘Poste Persan’: Qajar Court Art at Olana,” explores a hitherto unrecorded episode of cultural history of the Qajar era by investigating the historical and cultural processes and the confluence of personalities involved in the formation of the collection of Persian decorative arts of the Qajar era at Olana in upstate New York by the American art collector, Frederic Church. Drawing on the Olana Museum’s important archives including correspondence, invoices, and Church’s library, as well as nineteenth-century Persian photographs, Diba unpacks the circumstances of this relatively unmediated encounter between the American Orientalism art movement and Qajar Iran, leading to a reconsideration of Orientalism in nineteenth-century art and highlighting the differences between its American and European manifestations.
Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila (University of Edinburgh), in “The Section on Pre-Islamic Iran in Rashid-al-Din Fażlallāh’s Jāmeʿ al-tavārikh: Sources and Translation,” studies the relation between the Persian text of Rashid-al-Din’s Jāmeʿ al-tavārikh and its Arabic translation. In one of the first comparative studies of these texts, Hämeen-Anttila analyzes the various manuscript sources purporting to be Rashid-al-Din’s section on pre-Islamic Iran, and their relations to each other.
Mahnaz Moazami (Columbia University), in “The Seductress Wadag as a Hamartiological Symbol,” focuses on different aspects of the malevolent female Zoroastrian figure of Ōdag/Wadag and elucidates her role in Zoroastrian discourse by examining Sasanian Zoroastrian texts pertaining to this demoness and other evil characters.
Paola Orsatti (Sapienza University of Rome), in “The Piruz-nāma: A Lost Source of the Mojmal al-tavārikh,” discusses how an unknown work titled Piruz-nāma, “The Book of Piruz” or “The Book of the Victorious,” is cited as a source in the Mojmal al-tavārikh va’l-qeṣaṣ—an anonymous work of general history begun in 520 AH/1126 CE. Orsatti analyzes six quotations from this lost work—all contained in a Mojmal chapter devoted to the history of the kings of Persia—with the aim of discovering some information about the date of this lost source, and its character.
John R. Perry (University of Chicago, emeritus), in “A Christmas Carol and a Qurʾanic Confirmation,” compares the folk carol “The Cherry Tree” with the legend of a miraculous palm tree encountered by Mary during the nativity of Jesus. Perry explores the common Christian and Islamic source of these narratives, braiding together the shared threads found in the Qurʾan’s Sura 19 (Maryam) and the Christian apocryphal gospels, such as that of Pseudo-Matthew and the Syriac Infancy Gospel, while touching on the historical context of the source texts, the role of Mary in both religious traditions, and the global transmission of these stories over time.
Daniel T. Potts (New York University), in “‘The Jackal Dipped Himself in Indigo, and Then Thought He Was a Peacock’: The Cultivation and Masculine Cosmetic Use of Indigo in Pre-Modern Iran,” draws attention to the domestic cultivation of indigo in Iran during the pre-modern era, a subject largely overlooked by historians, and its principal use as a cosmetic dye during this period. Although India remained the most important source of the indigo used in the Persian textile industry, Potts surveys the history of the domestic indigo industry by using a wealth of references from pre-modern sources, to showcase how deeply embedded indigo for male cosmetics and beautification was in the pre-modern Persian imagination.
Yann Richard (Sorbonne Nouvelle—Paris, emeritus), in “From ‘Capitulation’ to Confrontation: Extraterritoriality, the Rise of Khomeini, and Anti-Americanism in Iran, 1963–1964,” analyzes the history of capitulations in Iran, particularly in regards to those that granted diplomatic immunity to American military personnel stationed in Iran and their dependents in 1963–1964. By cross-referencing Iranian and American sources, Richard examines Ayatollah Khomeini’s denunciation of the capitulations law and his anti-American discourse at that time, detailing how Khomeini’s role in leading the 1978–1979 Islamic Revolution was not accidental and how even Majles’ deputies of the shah’s regime shared with him strong nationalist feelings against the “return of capitulations.”
Farzin Vejdani (Toronto Metropolitan University), in “Eat, Pray, Petition: The Daily Life and Travels of a Nineteenth-Century Iranian Deputy Governor,” explores a previously unstudied archival source of a Qajar cleric’s remarkable travelogue documenting his journey to central and western Iran. Through a micro-historical analysis, the essay reconstructs the cleric’s lifeworld by examining his daily habits and interactions with a vast cross-section of Iranian society, offering a unique perspective on the multiple social worlds, status ranks, and power relations in late-Qajar Iran.
My fellow co-editors, Mohsen Ashtiany and Mahnaz Moazami, and I would like to express our heartfelt thanks to all the contributors who helped make this volume possible with exceptional articles and who have dealt graciously with delays on our part. The volume includes a chapter by the late Professor Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila, an eminent and prolific scholar in Persian, Arabic, and Islamic studies in general, who sadly and unexpectedly passed away in December 2023 while the Festschrift was being prepared for publication. His untimely loss was grievous for Prof. Daniel and all of us, as we had the pleasure of personally working with him on his Encyclopaedia Iranica contributions. We are grateful to have his article and especially want to thank his widow Dr. Virpi Hämeen-Anttila for her gracious approval and permission to publish it.
Thanks also go to other colleagues who have worked with Elton Daniel over the years but who were not able to contribute to the volume because of time constraints or other reasons but who also express their appreciation and send best wishes to him: Ervand Abrahamian (Baruch College-CUNY), Hamid Algar (University of California, Berkeley), Christopher Brunner (Columbia University), Stephen Dale (Ohio State University), Maryam Ekhtiar (Metropolitan Museum of Art), and Sergio La Porta (California State University, Fresno).
We are also grateful to Mrs. Ethel Daniel for her assistance and for providing some of the photos in the introduction as well as the drawing of her husband by Zeev Rubin. We would also like to thank Paul Angelini, our fellow colleague at the Ehsan Yarshater Center for Iranian Studies at Columbia University, for his support and assistance with the preparation of the book. Finally, it is a pleasure to thank Maurits van den Boogert and Abdurraouf Oueslati, and the editors at Brill for their invaluable help bringing the book to publication, as well as their friendship over the years while seeing through the publication of Encyclopaedia Iranica in print and online from 2018 to 2023, under Elton Daniel’s editorship.
Columbia University
New York City
“The Sāmānid ‘Translations’ of al-Ṭabarī,” in Al-Ṭabarī: A Medieval Muslim Historian and His Work, ed. Hugh Kennedy, p. 297 (Princeton: Darwin Press, 2008).