Today, in the popular imagination, the vast and pivotal region that stretches from eastern Iran to Tibet, known to some as the Islamicate East, is notorious as the cradle of terrorism, violence, and war. And yet, the region witnessed a mixing of cultures since antiquity that was both unique and extraordinarily influential on neighbouring societies. Invisible East is the first single, coherent research programme dedicated to the study of the Islamicate East.
Supported by an advisory board of the most distinguished scholars in the field worldwide, a team of Go.Local researchers based at the University of Oxford is led by the PI, Dr Arezou Azad.
Go.Local is part of the Invisible East programme led by the PI Arezou Azad which fills major gaps in research on the Islamicate East, notably on the social, cultural, and documentary history of the region based on evidence from a variety of Iranian and Arabic language sources.
Until now, most historical accounts have told us about life at royal and sultanic courts and provided little information on the lives of ordinary people. Go.Local also sheds a light on the private and public lives of ordinary people: cobblers, artists, policemen, farmers, women, children, etc; on what they ate, whose orders they followed, how they paid their taxes, and much more. For the first time, we can reconstruct evidence-based social history from the grassroots.
The team works on a set of 500-1,000 documents written in seven languages and six scripts across the eastern Islamicate world in the medieval period. These documents are now becoming known to the academic and non-academic worlds, largely because many have only become publicly available in the past five to ten years. Of these, the Persian documents are the newest and most extraordinary as they make up the largest set of the earliest Persian original writing in the world.
After a rigorous team-based quality control process, with input from disciplinary and subject specialists around the world, the team codes each document in digital format to ultimately make it available through an online, open-access database.
The research goals are broadly threefold:
1. To understand the roles played by political, religious, legal, and financial stakeholders in the construction of multicultural communities and societies across the Islamicate East;
2. To ascertain how texts and material culture help us understand relations between Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Christians, and adherents of other faiths in the Islamicate East; and
3. To establish how the Persian language developed and interacted with other languages, such as, Arabic and Hebrew, in the multicultural Islamicate East.
