Iranica Heirloom: Persian Literature

As WE ENTER A NEW CENTURY AND MILLENNIUM, WE TEND TO VIEW MORE entities as forged, made up, invented-constructed is the more professional term in scholarship-than we did at any time in the past. Not only poems, paintings and other artifacts, but a whole range of phenomena, from an individual's sense of identity, to categories of knowledge or scientific disciplines, to feelings of belonging to professional, ethnic, or national entities, are thought of not as "natural" or "given" but as imagined, constructed. Languages and cultures themselves are said to be constructs, more or less fictional occurrences set forth as real by the force of massive belief in their "realness." Under such circumstances we might well once again raise the question of how one conceptualizes-or evaluates, to move the matter on to the axiological plane-those epitomes of collective cultural construction, namely culture-specific encyclopedias, works of scholarship that were once thought of, rather naively, simply as "research tools"? Like other specialized reference works, culture-specific encyclopedias are conceived variously and cover a variety of grounds. Some tend to organize, systematize or otherwise frame a specific culture among other recognized culture clusters. In doing so, they attempt to present "the whole circle of knowledge" (to hark back to the Greek etymology of the word "encyclopaedia") relevant to a particular culture. Others aim additionally at making visible the dynamics-diachronic as well as synchronic-at work within a given culture, thus making the movement of the culture through time comprehensible to their readers. Naturally, each approach arises from specific, complex sets of needs and responds to similarly specific complexes of desires in the human endeavor for gaining recognition, itself an entity that may undergo change in the course of time. However they are conceived, though, culture-specific encyclopedias are ultimately sustained through collective endeavors and stand as monuments to collective, communal perceptions, ideas, and aspirations. Like the cultural body they represent or the language (or languages) that constitutes its throbbing heart, they are products of many hands and minds. As they inspect the various phenomena or systems of thought, the myriad mindsets and monuments of the culture in question, they themselves are sustained by the force of collective belief in their authenticity and objectivity. Just as they strive to capture and hold up a more or less complete image of the whole culture through viewing its fragments, their own shape, scope, and quality reflect those time-bound and culture-specific tendencies that have made all of its contributors, as well as its editorial staff, members of a single community at a particular period in time. The Encyclopaedia Iranica is a case in point. As the brainchild of its editor, arguably the most erudite living scholar in the field of Iranian studies, it was