Research Lecture - Job Talk
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Inter-religious debates in the wake of the Arab conquest. The case of Škand Gumānīg Wizār
Dr. Mihaela Timuş, a candidate for the FEZANA Professorship in Zoroastrian Languages and Literature
Škand Gumānīg Wizār is the single Zoroastrian polemical treatise we have access to. It is considered to have been composed by the 9th c., under the Abbasid rule in Iran, possibly in Baghdad. Originally written down in Middle Persian, later on it was transcribed into Avestan characters (Pāzand version), translated into Sanskrit, Gujarati and New Persian.
While the Middle Persian version was lost, the main original text one works with is the Pāzand one. Its author, Mardānfarrox, was the single layman author of a Zoroastrian treatise, who obviously had access to two types of education : traditional and encyclopaedic.
The present paper addresses the following questions : 1. Questions of transmission of the text from Iran to India, in the light of the investigation of the manuscripts the author had access to, in Europe ; 2. A survey of some samples of polemical tools this unique treatise uses. Some of them betray influences from other areas (Syriac, Muslim) as concerns the literary genre of polemics. This second type of investigation aims at better defining the context out of which this treatise emerged. It aims at identifiying traces of intelectual circles to which converted Zoroastrians to Islam could have belonged, mostly beginning with the 9th c CE.
To attend, click the zoom link on Thursday, March 10 at 2 PM
Meeting ID: 881 7583 4560
Passcode: 156790