More than mere polemic: The adventure of the Risālah-i Ḥusniyah in the Safavid, Ottoman and Indian lands

Abstract

This thesis explores the historical adventure of a Shī‘ī polemical work, Risālah-i Ḥusniyah, which appeared in Persian in Safavid Iran probably in the sixteenth century when the conversion of Iranian populace from Sunnīsm to Shī‘ī Islam was in full swing. It seeks to analyze how this anti-Sunnī polemical work played a role in popularizing Shī‘ī theological principles and consolidating a distinctive Shī‘ī identity among its audience in Iran and beyond. Next, it studies the translations and circulation of the Risālah into Ottoman Turkish and Urdu in the late Ottoman Empire and India. In connection with this, the censorship policies of the political authority of the time and religious rebuttals written by the Sunnī Ottoman scholars against the Risālah are of particular interest for this study. Last but not least, by making brief inroads into the adventure of Ḥusniyah in modern Turkey, this study demonstrates that the Risālah is one of the significant components of the Alevi literary corpus and popular religion after all the censorship policies and religious resistance against it in the late Ottoman Empire and early republic. One of the important contributions of this study is that it demonstrates that confessional polemical texts might have very colorful biographies, the exploration of which would provide important vistas and insights into the time in which they ‘live’, therefore their journey, reception, circulation, and translation warrant detailed historical investigation.