Avis de soutenance - doctorat - Roghayeh EBRAHIMI

A Persian Window onto early Modern Southeast Asia: Edition, translation and annotation of the Jāmʿa al-bar waʾl-baḥr A Persian Window onto early Modern Southeast Asia: Edition, translation and annotation of the Jāmiʿ al-barr waʾl-baḥr The engagement of Persians with the maritime world of Southeast Asia rose to new levels in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with the rise of the Safavid state in Iran, bringing them into increased contact not only with unfamiliar societies of the region, but also with expanding European interests. As a window on to this world, my research explores a previously unpublished Persian text of the early seventeenth century, the Jāmiʿ al-bar waʾl-baḥr “Compendium of the land and the sea” by Maḥmūd b. ʿAbdullāh Nīshābūrī. My research on this text opens up a new view on to how global process of the spread of Islam encountered European maritime expansion in the early modern period, revealing perceptions, imaginations, and interactions across diverse cultural and religious frameworks. It opens up conversations on processes of knowledge production and literary composition in Persian during a period of significant social transformation. It also may make a contribution to the study of pre-modern Malay literature, and the role of Persian influence on the formation of vernacular textual traditions.