So, yes, thanks for this kind introduction and good morning, ladies and gentlemen, good evening to others.
Good afternoon, colleagues and friends.
I'm delighted to be here today and grateful for the very kind invitation by the Bodleian to speak this morning at the Persian Art of the Conference.
So I came to the podium as a Baha'i fellow, which started in September 2019 and lasted until February 2020,
just before covered the covered pandemic really in.
I had identified the Berlin manuscript ouseley 2017 entitled Ashboro by my count on the catalogue's for this study,
because I had spent a long time researching the history of battle in Afghanistan, which is where the Obama family came from.
And the Obama kids, of course, were the subject of this of this text there.
A famous family of administrators in the early Islamic caliphate of the 8th century,
Abbasids and their ancestors has had in turn served as administrators of the
immensely rich Buddhist monastery temple and the state of Nevada and Backwood,
which is in today's Afghanistan. I didn't really know what to expect from the mass from the manuscript.
But judging from the previous historiography on the barricades,
which consisted mostly of tourists historical accounts written in Arabic, I imagine perhaps more of the same, only written in Persian.
But I was wrong. The book turned out to be not only far more entertaining and fantastical that they
were the Obama kids really feature as the superheroes and these heroes were rich,
they were chic, and they were ultimately badly betrayed by the California Rashied in the 8th century.
But it also turned out the manuscript filled important gaps in our knowledge on what is probably one of the most important
best-known families in early Islamic history of the caliphate in Iraq and Syria and before that in pre Islamic Afghanistan.
So I'm going to show you now very briefly, in the short 15 minutes, I have, I think, three three important things.
One is it's important to take home how manuscripts evolve and change over time, change a text over time.
It is the scribe who tells the story just as much as it is the original author.
No text is static or frozen in time. Editions are often a snapshot of a text in its during this evolution.
And I think scholars and readers, general readers of these texts, need to appreciate this point.
Secondly, there is immense value that I think what will come out of this of this is that there's immense value
in studying specifically Persian manuscripts as a way for understanding early Islamic history.
It has become almost a truism in the field that Arabic alone is enough for the study of early Islam, while Persian and other languages are secondary.
But the study of manuscripts such as this show how?
Well, almost misguided this is, but certainly it's not quite correct.
Thirdly, there's wonderful entertainment value in these manuscripts for young and old and has
been in the past and I think continues to be and can continue to be in the present.
I think these are valuable material for public history and I think they are still unu an unused resource and in that regard.
So during my Baha'i fellowship, my point of departure obviously was the manuscript.
And my first question was what was it about the Alabama Kyun that interested the Muslims who had purchased it?
And eventually it's how they came to the Bodleian was through the Rosalie's.
So what interested people in 18th century England in this text?
It had no stunning imagery, like some of the other important manuscripts that Wasleys had brought to the Bodleian,
such as this well-known, finally illustrated Shahnameh epic.
It could be that the text simply found itself included as a miscellaneous amongst the more prised and famous manuscripts.
But when not consulted, Lucien Bovis excellent 1912 study library masey historians.
A happy person. I realised there seems to have been an 18th and 19th century obsession.
You could almost call it in Europe with the Obama kids, which is, I now think probably why the Muslims were interested in their contracts written.
But the Obama kids became the subject of romance novels and dramatic plays written in French, Spanish and German and more.
The notoriety of the Obama kids at this time can probably be attributed to
the popularity of the Arabian Nights in which the Obama kids feature as well.
They were powerful, erudite, clever administrators and very, very rich and generous.
They became embroiled in intrigues and illicit love affairs.
What's not to love about them? And all wonderful fodder for 18th century European fascinations with the East.
One only needs to think of Verdi's Opera Toronto or Mozart's unfillable costumes.
Putting European interests aside, the next question is sorry there.
Who did this? Who had this manuscript been made for and how well known or widely circulated was it in its time?
There were no fine illuminations, as I said, but the manuscript had a wonderfully executed frontispiece,
which I'm showing you here, with lapis lazuli and gold coloured painting and golden dividers between the lines on one sheet.
And lastly, the script penned by a transcribe the manuscript like to call upon,
however, and the binding is new, which gives us no clues as to stating.
But inside the flyleaf there were plenty of seals.
It seems that perhaps we think this might this might be the yellow circle isn't circling a text that reads as palms rupee.
It seems five rupees might have been paid for it.
I'm not exactly sure what that equates to, but imagine it wasn't literal given the fine execution of the manuscript.
The SEALs are readable and the Bodleian cataloguer had deciphered them already.
But at least now we have Terminus Post KWEM. The manuscript was written before the earliest SEAL, which is dated to 1712 of the Gregorian calendar.
So it's probably produced sometime in the latter half of the 17th century when the Mongols were still in power.
But after the golden age of ACBAR and you see the owners were Muckle officials, the authorship was the next question.
And he has actually identified on the first line right under the Frontispiece.
And he is Ziauddin. Apparently, he's a well-known figure.
A number of his texts have survived.
And he was serving in the 14th century court of Sultan Theros Shah, who was the sultan of the Delhi sultanate and is identified here.
But then the next question for me was how a representative or how well known was was this manuscript?
And this required me to look at other manuscripts or find other manuscripts of this text.
And my colleague, Pejman Firooz Basche, was immensely helpful in that regard.
So we were able to identify two versions of of this text.
So the Bodleian version falls into what we've called version two.
There's no hierarchy here as to what's Wallner, what's true.
And here we have a few others that were all produced in India that seem to fall within that second version.
And then we also identified a another version, which we call version one.
And there are still at least seven more manuscripts.
We need to study in more detail in Persian, most of them in Iran.
One of them is currently in the British Library, had been previously been at the British Museum in London.
And we have now found there are Arabic manuscripts as well from this period,
one which is held in Istanbul in the FATA library, which we have just started to look at as well.
So there are more and more cropping up. What was the author's aim was was another question for us and Barony, the author of the manuscript,
but actually in not the Bodleian version, but in another manuscript of this second version explains the aim was that.
And here Bertani, the author, refers to the great Mahmoud Abbas of the of the 11th time.
Tree that who apparently had said that he loved the stories of the prophets and the first signs,
but in the next tier of importance to him were the stories of generous people.
And then Barony adds that he's writing this because it needs to serve as advice to rulers,
presumably the Daily Times, for whom he was writing not to kill the generous people such as the Obama kids.
It was Grace, the lady who made the film for the Bodleian.
And there's a number of films and one of them I feature and I talk about my work with this manuscript who asked me for images.
She said, do you have any manuscript illustrations of the Obama kids?
And I was looking and looking and I didn't find any.
And the only one I could find, which appears in the film, was this plaque that I had photographed during a visit in Mazar in Afghanistan,
Mazar being the capital of Kabul from which the kids are set to become.
The other image I could think of was Disney's rendering of this important last Obama kid, Jafa.
But the Disney characters a far cry from what we read about him in the sources.
Of course, I showed you the 18th century Spanish drawing in a previous slide, which only found a few days ago.
But I wondered whether there must be something from from the region itself and illustrated manuscripts.
And just recently I chanced on on an image that was depicted in my colleague ploughers new book
that just came out with Cambridge University Press on called In the Mirror of Persian Kings.
And it said that it was at the art museum in Toronto.
So with Blast's help, who mentioned to me that he only knew that a number of other sheets from from this manuscript
had been sold in the 1960s and later by Sotheby's and also by CalEnergy art dealers.
So we started searching Pejman and I, and we managed to find a number of other illustrated manuscripts which we now realise come from what is
now a dispersed illustrated manuscript from circa fifty nine to five in the time of the Emperor Akbar.
And so here we then found another one, which is now at Harvard University Library.
We found another one, which is at San Diego Museum of Art.
We found two and Sotheby's sites and and one the last one here that I just came across in the Twitter Twitter exchange,
probably held at the San Diego Museum of Art. And it seems very possible that these are all from the same manuscript,
which we can tell from the from the script, from the bordering, from the paint and so on.
And so this is the question for us is what happened with the sheets that only have text on them,
but at least from the lines that have survived and by comparing them, we can recognise that they belong to this first version.
So they are quite a few variations with what's in the bottom in the script.
But all in all, the general, the stories appear in both.
The same stories appear in both.
So I'm now going to conclude that the only flag that the personalisation of the story of the Obama kids was only a static.
The content of the text itself was different and important.
40 or so tales that we find in the Bodleian manuscript.
We find lots of things that you don't that don't appear in the Arabic, in the Arabic mentions, but that seem to be authentic.
Once we start to track down the ravis, the people who have passed on these accounts.
And the research continues as we are preparing our translation into English of this important text.
Much of the western of historiography contends that the Obama kids are remembered in a, quote, Arabic tradition.
But the Persian tradition has preserved their memory to and through accounts,
as I said, that have been often lost in the Arabic and are quite different as such.
Texts such as this one are at critical historical data for historians.
And I will end it here just to say that this is why we are translating the.
Techs were providing a critical addition, it's far more extensive than I had seen when I initially applied for the Baha'i Fellowship,
but I think that's also the idea of the fellowship,
is that hopefully what looks like possibly a small project can actually grow into something bigger.
And it's thanks to the invisible E programme that we're able to now dedicate more time to producing this book that,
well, we've got a number of publishers interested in and we are still deciding who we will go with.
And with that, if you'd like to follow us, go to our Twitter account.
I'll be giving a talk in two days time on more of the content of this manuscript at the School of Abbasid Studies on Thursday.
And you can see the details of it on our account later today. Thank you very much.