Final reflections on the meaning of the transformation of ancient Persian, from Old to Middle Persian, put these events in the context of growing human mobility, migration, and population contact from the first millennium BCE until today, with its effects on language. This study has also unexpectedly shed light on the role of conquered people, particularly enslaved people in the domestic spaces of the Persians. Such people have left very little trace otherwise, but their role in the shaping of the Persian language and culture is remarkable. Their effects on Persian culture are still evident in the reduced morphology of Persian until toay. Prospects for new research linguistic history along these lines come into view.

This investigation of Ghazālī’s life and thought is contextualized within the social and intellectual dynamics of the expanding Abbasid Empire of the philosopher’s lifetime. This close contextualization refutes prevailing Islamist and postmodernist readings of Ghazālī that decontextualize his thought in the service of ideological predilection. We use Persian sources to show how Ghazālī’s Islam revolutionized language, creating an accessible discourse intended to transcend the narrow ulema and madrasa milieu that had been in Arabic. Ghazālī’s Islam created an autonomous space for nonreligious sciences, notably logic and mathematics, as part of a reformist project responding to the Abbasid crisis of governance. This reformist discourse, based on the din/donya duality, helped to create an Islamic worldview suited to an expanding multi-civilizational society that depended on new economic and technological ensembles to flourish and survive.

“Origin Myths,” explores how literary historians narrated the origins of Persian and Urdu languages and literary traditions. I challenge the nationalist narratives around these traditions, of Iranian continuity and Indo-Muslim rupture, which remain dominant today. Tracing the reception of evolutionary theories and Orientalist philology in Iran and India, I analyze fundamental differences in nationalist thought in the two contexts. Iranians articulated a vision of linear language history, emphasizing continuity with pre-Islamic precursors to modern Persian which the addition of an Arabic element did not fundamentally change. On the other hand, Indian Muslims offered a contrary account of Urdu’s origins, emphasizing rupture with the pre-Islamic past and the constitutive role of Persian, Arabic, and Turkish in Urdu’s formation. Through a comparative reading of these "origin myths" I demonstrate how historically contingent the dominant narratives around Persian and Urdu were.