COSMOPOLITAN PHILOLOGY AND SACRED GRAMMAR

Alexander Jabbari

History and Theory 64, no. 4 (2025)
“Philology Now” Theme Issue

Persian developed a formal grammatical tradition comparatively late in its thousand-year history as a lingua franca. This article takes up the emergence of Persian grammar within the larger trajectory of Persian philology. It explores questions about why and when such a tradition developed in Persian by closely analyzing the earliest formal grammar of Persian in the language: Minhaj al-Talab (Program of Study; ca. 1660), which was written by a Hui Muslim scholar in eastern Qing China. This text is contrasted with a more mature later work of Persian philology from Mughal India: Musmir (Fruition; 1750s). Through comparative study of these texts and by drawing comparisons to Arabic, Sanskrit, Chinese, and other languages, the article complicates characterizations of Persian and the Persianate as cosmopolitan and explores the complex relationship between cosmopolitan and vernacular and between Persian and Islam. Persian has a sacred dimension for many Chinese Muslims, despite its primarily cosmopolitan function in Mughal India. This article concludes with a historical materialist analysis of the role of philology in general, arguing that the discipline is neither fundamentally reactionary nor colonial but rather a tool that can be used for multiple ends.