Licit Magic — GlobalLit Working Papers 19. The Birth of Comparative Religion in Persian?
Introduction and Partial Translation of the Bayān al-Adyān
The comparative study of religions in European universities was developed by Helmuth van Glasenapp and Mircea Eliade, among others, and the methodology of their discipline was based on the intellectual scaffolding of Émile Durkheim and Max Weber. However, long before the birth of this modern academic discipline, the roots of similar intellectual pursuits began to sprout in geographical regions often neglected by modern research. The Explanation of Religions (Bayān al-Adyān, c. 1091–1092) is one such intellectual enterprise sponsored by the Ghaznavid dynasty whose members, in the first half of the eleventh century, connected vast swathes of Central Asia, South Asia and the Iranian world.
Eleventh-century historians, intellectuals and poets writing in Persian (e.g. Gardīzī, Bayhaqī, ʿUnṣurī, Farrukhī, etc.) and Arabic (e.g. al-Bīrūnī) commemorated, praised and, at times, lampooned the cataclysmic changes brought about by the frequent military incursions into South Asia of Maḥmūd of Ghazna (d. 1030). The rhetoric of religious and military conquest honed and widely disseminated by the above historians and poets was so powerful that even today, many would be surprised to learn that members of the same dynasty took a serious and precociously open-minded interest in the study of different religions and cultural practices. The first two chapters of the Bayān al-Adyān devoted to comparing the names of God in different ethnic and religious communities (Arabs, pre-Islamic Persians, Indians, Turks, Africans, Christians, etc.). This eleventh-century work shows the extent of the author’s interest in the study of diverse ethno-religious communities, and his efforts to systematically examine the doctrinal, linguistic, calendrical, liturgical and other practices of non-Islamic communities.
The first chapter of Bayān al-Adyān, featured in the Licit Magic — GlobalLit working paper series, argues that despite doctrinal, cultural and linguistic differences, all the pre-Islamic and non-Islamic groups examined by the author Abū al-Maʿālī Muḥammad universally recognized the existence of God. However, while the inter-religious debates held later at the court of the Mughal emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605) have received considerable scholarly and public attention, the universalist features of the Bayān al-Adyān have attracted relatively little interest. The Explanation of Religions is perhaps the most systematic and comprehensive Persian-language work of the Ghaznavid period on the study of different religions and sects, but it is not the only such work. The 11th-century historian Gardīzī, as Vladimir Minorsky has demonstrated in his trailblazing study published over half a decade ago, also took a keen interest in the study of the specificities of different non-Islamic ethnic and religious groups. In addition, scattered references in Persian and Arabic poetry of the period also offer a more complex and less monolithic portrait of interreligious and intercultural encounters in this period.
Beyond the comparative study of religions, the Bayān al-Adyān is our earliest source on the travelogue writer Nāsir Khusraw and is of particular importance to the worldwide Ismaili community. It’s also worth mentioning that the book contains a reference to a unique copy of the now-lost picture book (Persian: Arzhang) of the third-century religious figure Mānī, who was considered the best painter of his age. To find out more about this intellectually diverse medieval text, please visit GlobalLit Working Papers №19.
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