Bābā Siyar and the Soul of the Unbeliever: Mapping the Persian Poetic Territories of Kāfiristān from Costantinople to Madaklasht

I introduce here a research on the Persian poetic territories of Kāfiristān, showing how much literary conventions on Kāfiristān may overlap with historical observations and “ethnographic” descriptions. More specifically, I discuss how the conventional poetic ethno-geographical tropes of kāfir and kāfiristān interact with “historical” Kafir peoples and cultures in the Hindukush. I will do this by analysing, in the first part of the contribution, a few cases from the Persian (and Ottoman) hypertext and focusing, in the second part, on the lyrical poetry of Chitral master poet Bābā Siyar (ca. 1770-ca. 1840). Some of these sources, including Bābā Siyar’s bayts from his dīwān, are studied here from the first time ever