‘The fruits of meanness and baseness': Early modern Persian texts on the necessity to defend one's dignity

Abstract

The paper deals with the concept of human dignity in the Persian-speaking world under the last Timurids and under the Safavid dynasty (15th–18th centuries). The concept is reconstructed on the basis of written sources from that time. I will try to defne the meaning of ‘dignity' and its place in the value system of the ‘men of the pen'. Two types of dignity can be distinguished in texts originating from the Persian-speaking region of the period. There is personal dignity, mainly concerning piety and professional skills and characteristics, and corporate dignity, concerning family and household members, place of origin, religious beliefs, spiritual leader, patron etc. Different kinds of threats to one's dignity and ways of defending oneself offered in the texts will be discussed in my paper.