“Fiction and the Formation of Love: Reading Nizāmī Ganjavī in Islamicate India” presented by Aqsa Ijaz – an online presentation hosted by CSRS

Fiction and the Formation of Love: Reading Nizāmī Ganjavī in Islamicate India
Aqsa Ijaz

Thursday, November 3
5:00-6:00 p.m. PT
David Turpin Building A110
Join via Zoom at uvic.ca/csrs/events

Nizāmī Ganjavi’s Persian love poem, Khusrau u Shīrīn is one of the most widely circulated romances in the Islamic world, yet its rich re- ception in premodern India has been surprisingly ignored by modern scholars. Why did this particular romance persist through the ages? What makes Nizāmī’s story still relevant, such that it exists in the most revered spaces of material culture on the Indian subcontinent? I exam- ine the poetic principles that Nizāmī employs to generate a timeless resonance on the theme of love, as well as the ways he radically chal- lenges the mediaeval Islamic articulations of passionate love (‘ishq).

Aqsa Ijaz is a doctoral candidate at the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University, and specializes in classical Persian literature and its reception in medieval and early modern North India.

https://www.uvic.ca/research/centres/csrs/