Т. 1. «Азия и Африка: Наследие и современность»

106 Азия и Африка: Наследие и современность. Т. 1 Секция II. Источниковедение и историография Афганистана и Ирана Historiography of Iran and Afghanistan: Cancian Alessandro (The Institute of Ismaili Studies, London) The Niʿmatullāhī Writings as a Source for the Intellectual History of Early Modern Iran The social, political, religious, and intellectual history of Iran in between the late 18th and early 20th centuries presents us with a rich picture of trends, a wealth of debates and a variegated palette of influential thinkers whose influence would be felt well into the 21st century. In spite of this thriving environment, however, the sources historians have traditionally used remain limited, as they have not kept up with the dramatic proliferation of new written documents. Among the ‘new sources’ that are currently being looked at, one should mention works written in the vernacular languages of India that have an uninterrupted dialogue with their counterparts in Persia; diplomatic sources from the Russian, British, French and Ottoman archives; the travelogues ( safarnāma ) redacted by the Shiʿi clerics and Sufis; the polemic literature represented by, among other genres, the ‘refutation of Henry Martyn’ ( radd-i pādrī ), British missionary to Iran; the waqf (endowment) documents. To the list, far from being comprehensive, one should add the voluminous literature produced by the Perisan Sufi masters, with particular reference to the Niʿmatullāhi ones, who gave birth to a veritable renaissance of Sufism in the 19th century. Not limited to strictly religious themes, the works in question span from travel literature, philosophy, exegesis and include a hitherto unexplored number of epistolary exchange. In this presentation, I intend to illustrate the main themes and areas of enquiry that this literature opens up to the scholar, its contribution to the intellectual and social history of Shiʿism, Sufism, and Iran, and the role the writings of the Niʿmatullahi master Sulṭān ʿAlī Shāh (d. 1909) play in this picture.