Abu Talib was born in 1752. His father was a Turk from Isfahan who fled to India and later from India to Bengal. He died in Murshidabad in 1768, and left young Abu Talib to care for his family. Abu…
Abu Talib was born in 1752. His father was a Turk from Isfahan who fled to India and later from India to Bengal. He died in Murshidabad in 1768, and left young Abu Talib to care for his family. Abu…
In deciding to focus only on Joseph Emin’s early days in England, I am obviously leaving out large parts of his life as an intellectual and liberation activist. I may return to this, perhaps to incorporate one of his many…
Joseph Emin (1726-1809) was born in Hamadan, Persia, in an Armenian family that, according to his memoirs, were uprooted from Armenia, a few generations before Joseph’s birth, by one of Shah Abbas’s campaigns. When he was a child of five,…
[updated 08/05/2014 with additional sources] Although Sampsonia (also spelled Sanpsonia), a Circassian woman who married Robert Sherley and went to Europe with him is not the first Persian in Europe, she is the first woman whose name is mentioned in…
[Show slideshow] Born in 1844 to a Circassian woman in the harem of Sultan of Zanzibar and Oman, Sayyida Salme got involved in palace politics and succession wars at the age of 15. Later, while she was living in Zanzibar…
Passages from Shigarfnamah (also spelled as Shigurfnamah) that will be included in all the upcoming posts are my own translations based on the Farsi original, a draft of which was kindly sent to me by Professor Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi. The Farsi…
I’m currently culling material from different sources for the performance script focusing on Mirza I’tisam al-Din. My aim is to have a full draft for this persona by the end of this week. From translator’s introduction in: Mirza Sheikh I’tesamuddin.…