Books by Fabrizio Speziale
Culture persane et médecine ayurvédique an Asie du Sud
Culture persane et médecine ayurvédique an Asie du Sud, Leiden – Boston, E. J. Brill, 2018.
Cet ... more Culture persane et médecine ayurvédique an Asie du Sud, Leiden – Boston, E. J. Brill, 2018.
Cet ouvrage traite des interactions entre l’Ayurveda et la culture médicale persane en Asie du Sud. Il présente, pour la première fois, une étude du mouvement de traduction en persan des sources ayurvédiques qui a eu lieu à partir du XIVe siècle. L’image de la culture ayurvédique reflétée par les traités persans offre un nouvel éclairage sur l’histoire de l’Ayurveda à l’époque de l’hégémonie politique musulmane en Asie du Sud. Les traités persans appliquent de nouvelles catégories à l’analyse des matériaux traduits et ils transforment les modalités de présentation du savoir ayurvédique. En parallèle, l’ouvrage de Fabrizio Speziale aborde le phénomène symétrique de persanisation de l’univers intellectuel des médecins hindous qui, à travers l’apprentissage du persan, s’approprient des connaissances médicales de la culture musulmane.
This book looks at the interactions between Āyurveda and Persian medical culture in South Asia. It presents, for the first time, a study of the translation movement of Ayurvedic sources into Persian, which took place from the 14th century onwards. The image of Ayurvedic culture emerging from Persian texts provides a new insight into the history of Āyurveda under Muslim political hegemony in South Asia. Persian treatises apply new categories to the analysis of translated materials and transform the way Ayurvedic knowledge is presented. At the same time, Fabrizio Speziale's book deals with the symmetric phenomenon of Persanization of the Hindu physicians who, through the learning of Persian language, appropriated medical knowledge of Muslim culture.
Soufisme, religion et médecine en Islam indien
The book explores the Muslim religious milieu’s role in the transmission of medical knowledge in ... more The book explores the Muslim religious milieu’s role in the transmission of medical knowledge in India. The scholars affiliated to Sufi orders, in particular, played a relevant influence in the establishment in India of both the Avicennian medical tradition of Greek origin (yūnānī ṭibb) as well as the religious medical tradition of Islam, known as Medicine of the prophet (ṭibb-i nabī). As shown in the first part of the book, an important part of the Indo-Persian medical and pharmacological literature produced during the Sultanate (1200-1526) and the Mughal’s ages (1526-1858) was composed by authors who shared close connections with the mystic and religious circles. The Sufis offered also a relevant contribution to the process of adaptation into Persian language of medical and pharmacological knowledge of Indian origin; the one from Sanskrit into Persian being probably the most important process of medical translation realised in the Muslim world during the Early-Modern period.
The second part focuses on the Deccan and the city of Hyderabad. The introductory chapters describe the role of the Sufi-religious class in the medical scene of the Deccan, from the early Bahmanī’s age (1347-1518) and during the Quṭb Shāh’s period (1518-1687) until the phase of the reform and modernisation of yūnānī ṭibb under the Niẓāms (1719-1948). The others chapters describe in details some Sufi shrines of Hyderabad that still nowadays offer various forms of healing assistance and which are very popular among both Muslims and Hindus. The healing rituals of these shrines adapt the symbols of the Sufi saint’s cults and reveal the assimilation of elements of Indian origin, while another chapter is dedicated to the healing dreams that occur to the ailed pilgrims of these shrines. The sources, the doctrines and the methods of the medical art of the Indian Sufis are outlined in the last part of the book.
Perso-Indica. An Analytical Survey of Persian Works on Indian Learned Traditions
Perso-Indica is a research and publishing project that will produce a comprehensive Analytical Su... more Perso-Indica is a research and publishing project that will produce a comprehensive Analytical Survey of Persian Works on Indian Learned Traditions, encompassing the treatises and translations produced in India between the 13th and the 19th century. Perso-Indica intends to become the first major reference work for this domain of studies and will offer a unique and innovative contribution to our understanding of the history of Persianate and Indic Asian intellectual and literary traditions and their cross-cultural interactions, as well as of modern South Asian identity construction.
Hospitals in Iran and India, 1500-1950s.
Leiden - Boston, E. J. Brill - Institut Français de Recherche en Iran, 243 p.., 2012
This volume looks at hospitals in the post-medieval Indo-Iranian world from various perspectives.... more This volume looks at hospitals in the post-medieval Indo-Iranian world from various perspectives. During the Safavid-Mughal periods hospitals were still tied to Avicennian medicine. However, in Qajar Iran and British India hospitals became important instruments for the spread of modern Western medicine. The papers in this volume present a significant panorama on the history of medicine and medical institutions in Iran and India during the early modern and the modern periods. The portrait that emerges is not homogeneous, but instead shows ambivalent and contrasting images. Hospitals can be seen as powerful symbols of the Muslim scientific civilization and then of modern medicine, nevertheless, they remained institutions relegated to the fringes of society – regarded with suspicion and usually reserved for the poor.
Muslim Cultures in the Indo-Iranian World during the Early-Modern and Modern Periods,
Berlin, Klaus Schwarz Verlag (collection Islamkundliche Untersuchungen, vol. 290) - Institut Français de Recherche en Iran (Bibliothèque iranienne, vol. 69), 596 pp. (avec Denis Hermann)
The volume inquires into the intellectual and religious features of Muslim cultures in Iran an... more The volume inquires into the intellectual and religious features of Muslim cultures in Iran and India during the early-modern and modern periods. Important transformations occurred in the Indo-Iranian world in these periods, beginning from the Safavids' coming to power in Iran and the Mughals' ascent in India, which occurred almost contemporaneously during the first half of the sixteenth century. The Safavids' conversion of the Iranian plateau to Shi'ism had a decisive influence on Iran's religious and political identity. However, the emergence of a Shi'i power in Iran that was opposed to the Sunni Islam that prevailed on the Indian sub-Continent did not lead to a cultural isolation of the two regions. Muslim scholars and texts circulated widely among these countries, and the cultural scene in Safavid Iran was bound to exercise a significant influence on the Muslim intellectual milieu of India.
This volume is a collection of essays by scholars working in this field who investigate these topics from varying perspectives. Some essays explore in particular the contacts achieved in this epoch between the Muslim and the Indian traditions.
The articles of the first chapter deal with the politics and society during the Safavid-Mughal period. The second chapter investigates the Shi'i legacy in the Deccan region. The essays of the third chapter focus on activities in Indian and Iranian mystical circles. The fourth chapter explores the Muslim reformist trends of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The fifth chapter looks into philosophical and scientific studies. The last chapter discusses the encounters between the Muslim and the Hindu traditions.
La congiunzione dei due oceani (Majma‘ al-baḥrayn) de Muḥammad Dārā Šikōh
Milan, Adelphi, 169 p., 2011
It is a well-known fact that Indian thought burst on the European philosophical scene following t... more It is a well-known fact that Indian thought burst on the European philosophical scene following the enthusiasm aroused in Schopenhauer by the first Western translation of the Upaniṣads, published by Anquetil-Duperron at the turn of the 19th century. What is less known is that Anquetil-Duperron had based his Latin rendering on a former Persian translation, completed in 1657 and sponsored by the Mughal prince Muḥammad Dārā Šikōh (1615-1659). The Muslim dynasty of the Mughals, who ruled over much of India from 1526, had already shown remarkable interest and open-mindedness towards Indian knowledge, particularly during the reign of emperor Akbar, but his great-grandson Dārā Šikōh pushed himself even further. A member of the Sufi order of the Qādiriyya and a follower of the doctrines of the great Muslim mystic Ibn ‘Arabī, Dārā Šikōh, through his daily association with Hindu yogis and pundits, reached the conclusion that «there is no difference whatsoever, except verbal, in their way of understanding and realizing the Truth» with respect to the Sufis. In support of his view, in 1655 he wrote The Confluence of the Two Oceans, where he tries to show the close correspondence between the concepts and principles of the Hindu and Muslim spiritual traditions. It was a bold and dangerous stance: a few years later, when his brother Aurangzeb seized the throne and put an end to the long tradition of religious tolerance of the Mughal emperors, the enlightened syncretism of this book cost Dārā Šikōh his head.
This Italian translation of Dārā Šikōh’s treatise – based on a new critical edition of the text – dramatically improves on the existing translations in Western languages, also owing to the comparison of the original Persian text with its Sanskrit rendering. It is further enriched by a long introduction where the editors sketch the fascinating history of the intense cultural exchanges between the Hindu and Muslim worlds.
Palerme, Officina di Studi Medievali, collection Machina Philosophorum, 2009, 169 p. (avec Giorgio Giurini)
The Risāla al-dahabiyya fī uṣūl al-ṭibb (Golden treatise on the principles of medicine) is the me... more The Risāla al-dahabiyya fī uṣūl al-ṭibb (Golden treatise on the principles of medicine) is the medical treatise attributed to the eight Shi‘ite imam ‘Alī al-Riḍā (m. 818), and supposed to be composed by the imam at the request of the caliph al-Ma’mūn.
Articles by Fabrizio Speziale
History of Science in South Asia, 12, 2024
The Ma‘dan al-šifā’-i Sikandar-šāhī is an extensive Persian handbook of Ayurvedic medicine made f... more The Ma‘dan al-šifā’-i Sikandar-šāhī is an extensive Persian handbook of Ayurvedic medicine made for Miyān Bhuwa ibn Ḫawāṣṣ Ḫān, a vizir of Sultan Sikandar Lōdī (r. 1489-1517) to whom the book was dedicated. This treatise was thought to provide Indian Muslim physicians, unfamiliar with Sanskrit, with a comprehensive manual of Ayurvedic medicine and therapy. Miyān Bhuwa allocated considerable resources to achieving this translation project and hired scholars to translate the many parts of Ayurvedic books used to compile the Persian text. This article explores the reasons behind the production of the Ma‘dan al-šifā’ and proposes a new reading of this book. It argues that Miyān Bhuwa’s project was part of a broader process of incorporation of Ayurvedic materials within Persian texts which had already started about two centuries earlier and which allowed Muslim physicians to master new forms of interpretation, classification and treatment of diseases when compared with earlier Arabic and Persian medical books. It looks at the epistemic and the practical issues raised in the preface of the Ma‘dan al-šifā’, which directly questions the adequacy of how Greco-Arabic thought understood body temperament in the Indian environment. It inquires into the authorship of this Persian Ayurvedic handbook and suggests that probably Miyān Bhuwa only assembled the translations made from Sanskrit texts. The last part of the article looks at the conceptual structure of the Ma‘dan al-šifā’ and how the Sanskrit sources and their models shaped the organization of the sections of the Persian book. Moreover, it suggests that the overall framework of the book relied on the overlap of models of presentation of medical knowledge, a device meant to negotiate between the models of the Sanskrit sources and those of the Muslim readers.
Hippology Between Indic and Persianate Textual Traditions: The Śalihotra of Gulbarga
Journal of Persianate Studies, 17, Special Issue: Persian Translation and Textual Production in the South Asian Multilingual Context, ed. P. Shahbaz, 2024
This article looks at the translation of Indian sources on horses in the Persianate culture of So... more This article looks at the translation of Indian sources on horses in the Persianate culture of South Asia. Horses were an essential tool of Muslim armies and their military hegemony in South Asia. In the regional sultanates, local rulers competed in making Indian sources on hippology available in the Persian language. This contribution focuses on the Tarjoma-ye Sālutar (The Translation of Śalihotra, 1407–8), a translation of an Indian text on hippology produced in Gulbarga for Ahmad I Shāh Vali (r. 1422–35). The Tarjoma-ye Sālutar was rendered into Persian by ʿAbdollāh b. Safi via an intermediate translation in a vernacular language made by a local scholar named Durgadāsa. The use of intermediate translations has often been considered a practice that developed at the court of the Mughal emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605). Yet the method of translation used for the Tarjoma-ye Sālutar shows that this practice goes back to the Sultanate period. This article explores the contents of the book, including sections dealing with omens taken from horses and veterinary medicine. Furthermore, it explores the way translated materials were adapted to render them more suitable for the new Muslim readership.
Journal of Asian and African Studies, 2024
The Ā’īn-i Akbarī is a voluminous work dealing with the institutions (ā’īn) of the Mughal Empire ... more The Ā’īn-i Akbarī is a voluminous work dealing with the institutions (ā’īn) of the Mughal Empire under the reign of Akbar. The text contains an extensive description of Hindu culture and society seen through the eyes of a Muslim writer and is a unique work in the history of Persian textual culture that deals with the intellectual and natural environment of India. Abū al-Fażl was among the Muslim writers of his time that possessed the most accurate knowledge of Hindu culture. His encyclopedic treatise covers a broad range of fields including the geography of South Asia, the Mughal army, the economy of the Empire, the agriculture and fauna, the calendars, Hindu intellectual traditions, religious beliefs, literature, biographies of notable persons, and more. The Ā’īn-i Akbarī is a crucial work for understanding the political, economic, and intellectual history of Mughal India, and it exerted a vast influence over later historians and writers in India until the colonial period. Although the Ā’īn-i Akbarī has attracted the attention of many scholars, many features of this text and its overall structure deserve more detailed study. The sixth Perso-Indica conference aimed to bring together researchers examining the wide-ranging descriptions contained in the Ā’īn-i Akbarī from novel perspectives.
Elephants and mahouts in the Persianate society of India
Rylands Special Collections Blog, 2023
The Genealogy of the Mahout is a distinctive Persian text on the elephant composed in South Asia ... more The Genealogy of the Mahout is a distinctive Persian text on the elephant composed in South Asia that features an elaborate Islamic narrative about the origin of the elephant keeper, the mahāwat (mahout). The composition and readership of this apocryphal text most likely stems from the guilds of mahouts which emerged as a new professional group in South Asian Muslim society. One manuscript held in The John Rylands Research Institute and Library (Persian MS 882, ff. 1b-8a) contains a copy that features simply coloured illustrations.
Rediscovering Forgotten Indo-Persian Works on Hindu- Muslim Encounters
The Wire, 2019
Iran, Journal of the British Institute of Persian Studies
Historians of sciences in the Muslim world have often overlooked the role of religious circles as... more Historians of sciences in the Muslim world have often overlooked the role of religious circles as places for the production and circulation of scientific materials. By focusing on the case of Muhammad Karim Khan Kirmani (d. 1288/1871), this article explores how scientific learning is dealt with in the work of a leading master of the Shaykhi school. This article looks in particular at the Daqa’iq al-‘ilaj, an extensive medical treatise written in the years which saw the founding of the Dar al-Funun in Tehran. The main feature of this work is its eclecticism. It deals chiefly with Avicennian medical knowledge and is structured according to the patterns of Avicennian medical texts. In parallel, it set forth a theory of human constitution that incorporates the concepts of spagyric medicine originated from the work of the Renaissance scholar Paracelsus (d. 1541). Muhammad Karim Khan Kirmani did not just translate Paracelsus’ ideas, he domesticated them in the epistemic framework of the receiving culture. Furthermore, the Daqa’iq al-‘ilaj includes a number of traditions on medical issues drawn from the collections of the imams’ hadith. The author uses the hadiths as a flexible device: they are quoted to endorse Avicennian medical and hygienic notions; moreover, they are also used in the part which introduces the Paracelsian concept of tartar.
« Medical practices and cross-cultural interactions in Persianate South Asia »
Routledge Handbook on the Sciences in Islamicate Societies: Practices from the 2nd/8th to the 13th/19th Centuries, Sonja Brentjes, ed., Londres, Routledge, 2023
This chapter looks at how physicians’ practices and experiences were recorded, gathered, and inte... more This chapter looks at how physicians’ practices and experiences were recorded, gathered, and interpreted in the Persianate medical culture of South Asia. Its main aim is not to describe Islamicate medical practices themselves, a subject dealt with by previous studies as well as by other chapters in this book; it rather aims to investigate the status assigned to experience by authors of Persian texts and the influence of physicians’ practical experience on the formation of new features of medical knowledge and medical texts. In parallel, it looks at how the interaction with their new environment shaped Muslim physicians’ efforts to adapt their therapeutic knowledge for practice in South Asia.
Denis Hermann – Mathieu Terrier, eds., Shi‘i Sufism in Modern Times, London, I. B. Tauris – Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2020
This article looks at the history of the Ni‘matullāhiyya in the Deccan region of India and at the... more This article looks at the history of the Ni‘matullāhiyya in the Deccan region of India and at the ni‘matullāhī center which is established in Hyderabad by ‘Imād al-Dīn Maḥmūd al-Ḥusaynī (m. 1100/1689), a Shi’a of Iraqi origin who was initiated at Bidar. The development of this branch and of its new line of masters represents the main element of renewal of the order in the Deccan during the early modern period. At Hyderabad the ni‘matullāhī did not receive the support of the Shiite dynasty of the Quṭb Šāh, in spite of the relation of its founder with the ni‘matullāhī of Iran. They enjoyed later the devotion of several noblemen of the city during the period of the Niẓām, such as Ma‘ṣūm ‘Alī Šāh Dakanī (m. 1211/1797 ca), who was sent to restore the order in Iran. His master Šāh ‘Alī Riżā (m. 1215/1801) is considered the architect of the plan aiming to restore the order in Iran, however, the biographies of the Deccan Sufis give us a portrait of this personage that is quite different from the one given by the Iranian sources.
Beyond the “wonders of India” (‘ajā’ib al-hind): Yogis in Persian medico-alchemical writings in South Asia
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 2022
This article looks at the translation and circulation of yogis’ learning in Persian medical and a... more This article looks at the translation and circulation of yogis’ learning in Persian medical and alchemical texts produced in South Asia. I suggest that looking at the non-religious environment allows for a more accurate understanding of the overall circulation of yogic knowledge and techniques in the Muslim society of South Asia. Furthermore, I suggest that the assimilation of yogis’ learning in Persian sources concerned not only Yoga but also other types of knowledge associated with yogis. Muslim physicians’ interest in yogis’ knowledge focused on one specific aspect: rasaśāstra “alchemy” and the mastery over the production of mercurial and metallic drugs. The technical and pragmatic focus of Persian medico-alchemical writings contributed to give views of yogis beyond the exotic and foreignizing category of the wonders of India. Medical writings helped to develop views of yogis as a socio-economic group involved in the transmission of a specific body of knowledge. This was an important shift away from the perspective of the ‘ajā’ib al-hind “wonders of India” as well as from the ways in which yogis were perceived in Sufi texts. New perspectives on yogis emerged when Persian-speaking scholars and readers in India needed more pragmatic representations of local groups, such as the physicians who were in the process of appropriating alchemical notions that were closely associated with the yogis.
Yoga, l’encyclopédie, Ysé Tardan-Masquelier, éd., Albin Michel, Paris, 2021
Yoga, l’encyclopédie, Ysé Tardan-Masquelier, éd., Albin Michel, Paris, 2021
La circulation des connaissances sur le yoga, en dehors des milieux hindous et des autres religio... more La circulation des connaissances sur le yoga, en dehors des milieux hindous et des autres religions originaires de l’Inde, est souvent considéré comme un fait récent qui se développe principalement dans le monde occidental, au cours du XXe siècle. En fait, dans le monde musulman, la connaissance du yoga est un phénomène plus ancien qui débute à la période médiévale et perdure jusqu’à nos jours, où la pratique du yoga compte des milliers d’adeptes dans de nombreux pays musulmans, du Maroc jusqu’à l’Indonésie.
Journal of South Asian Intellectual History, 2020
This article examines the translation of foreign materials into post-Abbasid Muslim medical cultu... more This article examines the translation of foreign materials into post-Abbasid Muslim medical culture by looking at the production of Persian works dealing with Ayurvedic medicine. From the 14th century onwards, the composition of Persian texts on Āyurveda emerged in South Asia as a new genre of writing, which was actually a composite genre including various kinds of texts. The Muslim physicians incorporate the other’s learning not by rejecting the principles of their receiving culture but rather by empirically applying the logic of their principles in understanding the foreign environment and the receiving culture. The composition of new texts on Āyurveda in Persian constitutes a prominent aspect of this engagement as well as a central element of the creation of a Persianised version of Ayurvedic treatment more likely to be circulated among Indian Muslim physicians. The Persian treatises apply new linguistic and cognitive categories to the analysis of the translated material; the interpretation based on the criteria of the receiving culture is added to, and sometimes replaces, the criteria of the source culture.
Orthmann, Eva - Speziale, Fabrizio, "Tarjuma-yi Sālōtar", Perso-Indica. An Analytical Survey of Persian Works on Indian Learned Traditions, F. Speziale - C. W. Ernst, eds., available at http://www.perso-indica.net/work/tarjuma-yi_salotar., 2020
The Tarjuma-yi Sālōtar is the earliest Persian adaptation of Indic sources on hippology (aśvaśāst... more The Tarjuma-yi Sālōtar is the earliest Persian adaptation of Indic sources on hippology (aśvaśāstra) produced in South Asia that is known so far. Sālōtar (sometimes written as Sālhōtar) is the Persianized form of Śalihotra, which is the title of treatises dealing with aśvaśāstra. The Tarjuma-yi Sālōtar was prepared by ‘Abd Allāh ibn Ṣafī who writes in the preface that he did the translation (tarjuma) in the city of Gulbarga by order (farmān, in one manuscript ḥukm) of Sultan Aḥmad Walī (r. 1422-1435) of the Bahmanī dynasty, who was well known for his patronage of the arts.
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Books by Fabrizio Speziale
Cet ouvrage traite des interactions entre l’Ayurveda et la culture médicale persane en Asie du Sud. Il présente, pour la première fois, une étude du mouvement de traduction en persan des sources ayurvédiques qui a eu lieu à partir du XIVe siècle. L’image de la culture ayurvédique reflétée par les traités persans offre un nouvel éclairage sur l’histoire de l’Ayurveda à l’époque de l’hégémonie politique musulmane en Asie du Sud. Les traités persans appliquent de nouvelles catégories à l’analyse des matériaux traduits et ils transforment les modalités de présentation du savoir ayurvédique. En parallèle, l’ouvrage de Fabrizio Speziale aborde le phénomène symétrique de persanisation de l’univers intellectuel des médecins hindous qui, à travers l’apprentissage du persan, s’approprient des connaissances médicales de la culture musulmane.
This book looks at the interactions between Āyurveda and Persian medical culture in South Asia. It presents, for the first time, a study of the translation movement of Ayurvedic sources into Persian, which took place from the 14th century onwards. The image of Ayurvedic culture emerging from Persian texts provides a new insight into the history of Āyurveda under Muslim political hegemony in South Asia. Persian treatises apply new categories to the analysis of translated materials and transform the way Ayurvedic knowledge is presented. At the same time, Fabrizio Speziale's book deals with the symmetric phenomenon of Persanization of the Hindu physicians who, through the learning of Persian language, appropriated medical knowledge of Muslim culture.
The second part focuses on the Deccan and the city of Hyderabad. The introductory chapters describe the role of the Sufi-religious class in the medical scene of the Deccan, from the early Bahmanī’s age (1347-1518) and during the Quṭb Shāh’s period (1518-1687) until the phase of the reform and modernisation of yūnānī ṭibb under the Niẓāms (1719-1948). The others chapters describe in details some Sufi shrines of Hyderabad that still nowadays offer various forms of healing assistance and which are very popular among both Muslims and Hindus. The healing rituals of these shrines adapt the symbols of the Sufi saint’s cults and reveal the assimilation of elements of Indian origin, while another chapter is dedicated to the healing dreams that occur to the ailed pilgrims of these shrines. The sources, the doctrines and the methods of the medical art of the Indian Sufis are outlined in the last part of the book.
This volume is a collection of essays by scholars working in this field who investigate these topics from varying perspectives. Some essays explore in particular the contacts achieved in this epoch between the Muslim and the Indian traditions.
The articles of the first chapter deal with the politics and society during the Safavid-Mughal period. The second chapter investigates the Shi'i legacy in the Deccan region. The essays of the third chapter focus on activities in Indian and Iranian mystical circles. The fourth chapter explores the Muslim reformist trends of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The fifth chapter looks into philosophical and scientific studies. The last chapter discusses the encounters between the Muslim and the Hindu traditions.
This Italian translation of Dārā Šikōh’s treatise – based on a new critical edition of the text – dramatically improves on the existing translations in Western languages, also owing to the comparison of the original Persian text with its Sanskrit rendering. It is further enriched by a long introduction where the editors sketch the fascinating history of the intense cultural exchanges between the Hindu and Muslim worlds.
Articles by Fabrizio Speziale