TEHRAN -- The University of Cambridge in collaboration with the Dutch University of Leiden are to hold the conference “The Persian Presence in the Ottoman Empire” in July 2008 at Cambridge.

The conference will focus on the reception of Persian culture at the Ottoman courts, on poetic literature and historiography, on statehood and the relations between the Ottoman Empire and Iran.
This is part of the five-year program of the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, and Leiden to stimulate research in different aspects of Persian culture, such as literature, mysticism, linguistics, art and history, and to disseminate knowledge in these fields.
Persian was the chief cultural and literary language of a great part of the extended Ottoman Empire. Literati at the Ottoman courts were usually versed in Arabic, Persian and Turkish. While Arabic was the language of religion and science, and Turkish the everyday language, Persian functioned as the language of art, especially in the first centuries of Ottoman rule.