Muhammad 'Awfi di Bukhara e il tempo: la storia come fotogramma in un'enciclopedia narrativa indo-persiana del XIII secolo

These are some scattered remarks focusing on the narrative regimes of historicity in the Jawami‘ al-hikayat wa lawami‘ al-riwayat by Muhammad Sadid al-Din ‘Awfi, a Persian-writing author who was active between Central Asia and India in the first thirty years of the 13th century. An oceanic collection of anecdotes and stories dealing with multiple subjects, the JH can be easily understood as a sort of narrative encyclopaedia of history: a literary building functioning as an archive of the human dymension, organized as a huge ensemble of photograms. Ours is, quite surprisingly, one of the very rare modern contributions on the text, which is, then, also summarily described and inserted in the Eurasian context of its time, across the end of the late Seljukid classicity and the Mongol expansion.