Persian in Documents (PersDoc): Language and Islamisation in the pre-Mongol Eastern Islamic Lands

This project is a groundbreaking new study, based on the earliest known Persian documents written in the Islamic East's Bamiyan Valley. For the first time, we will study the earliest form of Persian writing provided in ca. 200 Afghan geniza documents, which were purchased in 2013 and 2016 and are now held in the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem. Pre-Islamic Bamiyan, together with Balkh, were the centres of Buddhist monastic and temple activity in late antique Afghanistan. Bamiyan's giant buddhas were the largest standing buddhas built in antiquity, and became the symbols of Islamic fundamentalist violence when the Taliban bombed them in 2001. While much of the public attention has been on the question of why the buddhas were so tragically bombed, our fascination is with their survival for 1400 years prior; that is, since the arrival of Islam to the Balkh-Bamiyan area. Thus, through an in-depth study of the 'Afghan geniza' documents, PersDoc offers major new insights in two key areas: 1) the development of written Persian and its importance in the creation of a cultural identity, and 2) the consolidation of Islam and Islamization in the eastern Islamic lands.

While a significant number of these documents were written by Jews, and within a particular family archive, it is, in fact, highly unlikely that they belonged to any sort of geniza, i.e. storage site for documents and written sources at a synagogue. However, they are now identified as such, and the term Afghan geniza has entered scholarly parlance. The documents as a whole more likely belonged to various family archives, some of which belonged to non-Jews as well. They are delightfully varied, including personal letters, business notes, loan receipts, and literary extracts. Many are dated, ranging between the 11th to the early 13th century C.E. The documents attest to the daily economic, political, judicial and cultural lives of residents in the Bamiyan Valley. This is completely new, matchless, and eye opening.

The story that the Afghan geniza documents tell is one of cooperation and collaboration on economic and business transactions between Jews and Muslims, and one of adoption and adaptation in religions and legal matters. Their story is one we never hear: a story of a multicultural society, in which people of different religions thrived and collaborated, adopted cultural ideas and practices from one another, and underwent dynamic changes.

These documents deserve attention and analysis: they must be identified in detail, systematically categorised (in rubrics of content, form, date, and style), and analysed by language and historical content. For the latter, we will cross-reference with the literary record in medieval Islamic and Chinese historiography, as well as with recent archaeological survey findings in the Bamiyan Valley (including radio carbon dating of the paintings in the niches behind the Bamiyan buddhas, which point to the continued patronage of the Buddhist site long after the Islamic conquests). The documents also need to be made as widely available as possible to maximise dissemination about their rich significance: that Muslims and non-Muslims co-existed and thrived together, and that multiculturalism is possible and positive in the Islamic world. Thus the project has as its tertiary aim the facilitation of dialogue between scholars and wider public circles to counter the very sustained campaign by neo-conservative essayists and polemicists to discredit the Islamization narrative as solely one of violence and intolerance, and inhibit any serious discussion of it. We will do this by producing short videos with scholars, by designing an educational tool for adults and young adults worldwide that will be made publically accessible through our website, and by engaging with major media outlets to discuss our project and its findings.

Users and beneficiaries of the PersDoc research who are outside the academic research community can be grouped into five:

1. Policy-makers and bilateral partners and donors that are interested in supporting cultural heritage work in Afghanistan and the region with a peacemaking and development agenda. They will see how an interdisciplinary project on the history of religion in Afghanistan can send positive messages and counter neoconservative narratives that stymie any serious discussion of Islam and Islamization.

2. International organisations, such as UNESCO, can report how their conservation efforts in Bamiyan are enabling historical research, and thus acquire more support for their efforts to maintain funding for cultural heritage work in Bamiyan.

3. Cultural heritage practitioners and professionals in Afghanistan and Bamiyan can better understand the historical relevance of their work, and link it into a contemporary narrative and make it relevant to present political debates.

4. The media will run stories on topics related to the Project, drawing on our recorded interviews, but also interviewing PersDoc team member live for commentary on the historical findings and questions of the project.

5. The wider public in general will include MOOC learners worldwide (we are targetting 10,000) who register to take our MOOC and learn about the history of Bamiyan, Buddhism and Islamisation at an important crossroads of medieval cultural and trade routes about which little was known prior to PersDoc. We also aim to draw our net widely to users of our web pages in Europe and the West, but also Afghanistan and the wider Persian-speaking world (through the Persian language entries on our web pages), and beyond.

All five audiences will benefit in largely similar ways, but by different means (see Pathways to Impact). This research challenges scholarly, official and popular perceptions that Islam and Islamization is 'un-European' and incompatible with 'western ideals' because it is inherently violent and culturally intolerant. By drawing attention to the everyday interactions between diverse actors in a pre-modern Islamicate region, we raise the idea that religions widely regarded as fundamentally distinct may have been more similar and inter-connected than we thought. We provide important historical context for a present-day situation in which neoconservative rhetoric finds limited push-back from a balanced, academically-sound discussion. Our work suggests, for instance, more nuanced approaches to reports of the Bamiyan's buddhas as being part of "Buddhist history" (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/mar/03/afghanistan.lukeharding) when they are a part of Islamic and Afghan history. Such events are routinely presented by Islamic fundamentalists and western media as a religious conflict between Muslims and 'the infidel' non-Muslims. Articles including images of buddhas in Afghanistan invoke preconceived notions about Buddhism as Far Eastern and Islam as "Arab" and may even suggest that this is a conflict between western (Hellenistic) and eastern (Muslim) worlds. Our activities with all of our audiences will show the value of reducing the emphasis on issues such as religion and Arabism and competing ways of life, and instead considering a combination of other dimensions, including government policy, inter-religious cooperation and collaboration, and economic factors. The impact of our work will be to highlight that people of different cultures, languages and ethnic identities, and practising different economic activities, engaged in a complex set of interactions that is reflected in documentary and material remains even though it is stereotyped in the written record.