The Earliest Social History in Persian? A Preliminary Study of the ʿAẕb al-Bayān (1865)

An in-person talk by Dr. Kioumars Ghereghlou about the nineteenth-century Persian history writings of Muhammad Husayn Afshar Qiriqlu, an India-based Iranian merchant and historian. This lecture was organized on November 30, 2023. Nineteenth-century Persian history writing has attracted surprisingly little attention in modern scholarship despite the profound formalistic and substantive transformations that informed its evolution under the Qajars (r. 1796-1925). National awareness emerges in scholarly literature as the commonplace umbrella term encompassing several disparate creative trends that, from the late 1820s onwards, led Persian-language historians and writers to adopt untraditional and critical approaches in their reconstructions and interpretations of social change and political action. This talk concentrates on theʿAẕb al-Bayān (Refreshing Discourse), a little-known historical account by Muhammad Husayn Afshar Qiriqlu, an India-based Iranian merchant, historian, and literary scholar, examining the importance of the text as a milestone in the evolution of history writing in nineteenth-century Iran. Completed in 1872 and published only partially in 1924 in Rampur, India, Muhammad Husayn’s account of the life and experiences of ordinary people in nineteenth-century Iran stands out as one of the most intriguing experiments in social history in Persian.Dr. Kioumars Ghereghlou is the Curator for Middle East Collections at the Stanford University Libraries. His most recent book is a critical edition of Hayati Tabrizi’s (d. after 1554) newly-found chronicle of the early Safavids and the opening years of the reign of Shah Isma’il I (New Haven, Conn.: American Oriental Society, 2018).