حالنامه عارفی مشهور به گوی و چوگان

The maṯnawī of Ḥāl Nāmah, known as Gūy va Chawgān (The Ball and the Polo-Stick), was written in the year 1438 C.E/842 H. by refī Heravi, a contemporary of the Timurid Shāhroḵ, when the poet was fifty years old. It is a short versified discourse, running to 510 verses in the same meter as Neẓāmī’s Laylī va Maǰnūn. It’s about a dervish’s pure love for a Chinese prince which ends in the dervish’s self-immolation at the prince’s feet. The work in this article is based on a manuscript produced in 1468 C.E./872 H., only thirty years after the death of the poet. In Conceiving Citizens: Women and the Politics of Motherhood in Iran, Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet examines the history of maternalism in Iran, and the ways in which it intersected with, and was appropriated by, discourses of Iranian modernity and nationalism. Drawing on an impressive body of archival documents, memoires, and travel writings that span the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Kashani-Sabet shows how debates over a range of issues, including hygiene, marriage, reproductive politics, education, and suffrage, relied on evolving notions of patriotic motherhood. She argues that the politicization and idealization of motherhood and the maternalist policies that it promoted served to place a severe burden on Iranian women’s lives, while also creating new opportunities for them. Her work explores these simultaneous yet contradictory effects, while maintaining a critical eye on the impetus behind state sponsored gender reforms.