Download PDF | Blain H. Auer - Symbols of Authority in Medieval Islam_ History, Religion and Muslim Legitimacy in the Delhi Sultanate-Tauris Academic Studies (2012).
255 Pages
Blain H. Auer is Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies at Western Michigan University, Michigan. He specializes in Islam in the context of pre-modern South Asia. In particular, he studies the representations of Islamic authority exhibited through the use of the Qur'an, Hadith, exegesis, and history writing produced during the Delhi Sultanate. A second area of research focuses on modern ritual, pilgrimage, and relics connected with the burial places of the special dead in Islam.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
After having reached the end of a long road of research and writing it is a great pleasure to look back and acknowledge those who have made the journey less arduous and in some cases, dare I say, pleasurable. This book began as a doctoral dissertation completed in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. I would like to show my deep appreciation to the scholars there who supported and offered valuable advice at many points along the way. Ali Asani, Sunil Sharma, Roy Mottahedeh, Cemal Kafadar, Baber Johansen, David Carrasco, Wheeler Thackston, and Kimberley Patton were all influential in making this book a reality.
Ideas for this project began even earlier while I was pursuing a Master’s degree in the Department of Languages and Cultures of Asia at the University of Wisconsin. While there I benefited from the instruction of André Wink, Michael Chamberlain, Velcheru Narayana Rao, Charles Hallisey, and Muhammad Umar Memon. In addition to those individuals there are a number of friends and colleagues who have shared their valuable time and energy commenting on various portions of this work, and wittingly or unwittingly influenced it along the way to its conclusion. Recep Guptas, Christian Lange, Travis Zadeh, Greg White, Supriya Gandhi, Martin Nguyen, Aliya Iqbal-Naqvi, Charles Stang, Licsi Szatmari, Luis Girdén-Negron, Eric Beverley, Mana Kia, Chanchal Dadlani, Michael Grossman, Dan Sheffield, and Hussein Rashid. Allen Webb and Brian Wilson, two Western Michigan University colleagues, provided valuable edits of the manuscript at the end of the project.
A major thanks goes to one of my oldest friends, Phong Tran, who applied his refined librarian’s skills to realign each crooked punctuation mark, jumbled phrase, and misplaced word. I would also like to thank my copyeditor Valerie Joy Turner who helped bring this book into its final form and Jess Zimmerman for producing the maps that appear in the book. Finally, none of this would have been possible without the support of family. I would particularly like to thank Howard and June Straiton as well as Linda and Bruce Matthews. My deepest appreciation goes to my wife, Amy Auer, for her unwavering support, unbounded optimism, and loving affection.
A Note on Transliteration, Translation, and Terminology On the whole I have followed the Library of Congress system of transliteration for Persian and Arabic, with the exclusion of the use of the prime that has been substituted with a hyphen, along with other minor changes. Unless noted otherwise all translations are mine. There are two terms used in the book with a sense of discretion. One is premodern. Even with all its follies, the “modern world” implies that everything is advanced. It is the challenge of scholars to provide a picture of premodern societies that do not fall into the trap of broad comparisons across different times, comparisons that fail to capture the unique qualities of earlier ages. I retain the term in its most general sense to refer to the time prior to the mid-thirteenth/nineteenth century, marking the change created by the second industrial revolution and the consolidation of British colonial historiography, a development significant for this study.
The second term, equally problematic, is medieval, which has long carried the negative burden of the Dark Ages. It also has a particular weakness as a term applied most frequently to European contexts. This creates the predicament that developments across the Muslim world, geographically and demographically more diverse than Europe, are often seen in comparison to events that have no relation. To the degree possible I have avoided the use of the term, being persuaded by Daniel Martin Varisco who argues that when it is used in relation to Islamic history, the term is “anachronistic, misleading, and disorienting.”
PREFACE
At times tracing the narratives found in Islamic historiography is like documenting history from the work of Jorge Luis Borges. This struck me as I thumbed through the pages of Borges’ first collection of short stories evocatively titled Historia universal de la infamia. I was particularly captivated because the work appears, on the surface, to deal with “historical” subjects. Most intriguing is a story titled “Hakim, the Masked Dyer of Merv,’ first published in Critica in 1934. The form of this fanciful yarn is unusual because it is a short story structured as a biographical entry to a reference work, something akin to what you find in the Encyclopedia Britannica and the Encyclopaedia of Islam.
In this story, the reader is surprised by the way Borges sets forward his scholarship and erudition. He begins his sketch meticulously detailing the Arabic textual sources utilized to retrieve the life of the mysterious figure of Hakim.' Of those sources he lists “The History of Caliphs” by Baladhuri, the “Manual of the Giant,’ or Book of Precision and Revision” by the ‘Abbasid historian Ibn Abi Tahir Tayfur, and an Arabic codex titled “Annihilation of the Rose.” Aside from a slight, guarded curiosity about these works, I did not pay much attention to them at first. On second reading, it was not so easy to skip past them without a little investigation. That was when I discovered the cause of my initial skeptical twinge.
Borges fabricated these historical sources. Early on, a few literary critics were suspicious, but the hoax was only discovered in 1971, when Norman Thomas di Giovanni was producing the first English translation in consultation with Borges. Without success, di Giovanni tried to find the original sources to the story of Hakim so that he could provide an accurate English translation. He could not find any sources, so he confronted Borges, who then admitted his literary invention saying, “We mustn't spoil the joke by letting the cat out of the bag.”” Borges’ intention becomes clear with this casual admission: history is an act of writing.
Amir Khusraw, an author who, in fanciful fashion, could be considered the Borges of a different time and place, further drove this simple point home. Indisputably one of the greatest Persian authors of the seventh/thirteenth and eighth/fourteenth centuries, Amir Khusraw produced some of the most enduring literary masterpieces of his era. He frequently blurred the lines between history and fiction, a fact that has confounded both historians and scholars of comparative literature. The story that drew my attention to the meaning of “history” comes from his work Nuh sipihr [The nine spheres]. In it, Amir Khusraw documents Adams first days on earth, which were spent, not incidentally, in India, a land Khusraw identifies as Paradise (jannah). According to Amir Khusraw, one of the proofs (s. hujjah), which he demonstrates with delightfully circular logic, that India was akin to Paradise is that it was Adam's first abode on earth. From this genesis he describes the events of Adam's departure from India, saying:
On this new journey he travelled for two or three days, and had no food until he was inside the border of Syria. ‘The delicacies of Paradise which filled his stomach poured out onto that barren country. That which flowed out from him came down, and rose up like a tall mountain. It became the oasis of Damascus (Ghiitah-yi sahra’-i Dimashq),* as is known by everyone since that time. Even though it was the delicacies of Paradise, it did not fall in the land of India. There is no doubt that it is a second Paradise, it would be evil to deposit such a ripe sign. Tf all India were not a Paradise, then why not leave that encumbrance within its borders?*
Khusraw humorously depicts Adam as setting out on a journey from India to Syria with a full belly. When he arrives in Syria he relieves himself and the remains of his bodily waste fertilize the desert region. In his mythological retelling of Adam’s first days on earth, Khusraw, in witty and inventive fashion, wanted to convey something special to his readers about his understanding of India. India is Paradise on earth and as such it cannot be denied a central place in the sacred history of Islam, a place that had been claimed by Arabs (Khusraw was just about as far from being Arab as a Muslim could be for his time and place).
The confluence of discoveries brought on by an unexpected reading of Borges and Khusraw instigated my inquiry into the relationship between religion, history, and historiography. Both authors are acutely aware of the irony in the “fictions of factual representation.” What I discovered in Borges and Khusraw’s retellings of sacred history was that the problem of fact and fiction is not a problem at all; it is rather a problem of history, or at least a particular understanding of history. The struggle over history is more about meaning and narrative than fact. Historiography in India is first and foremost about the centrality and originality of India’s place in Islamic history. This fact is of consequence to any “historical” reading of the subcontinent of the seventh/thirteenth and eighth/fourteenth centuries. In light of the deeply entwined enterprise of Muslim historians of the Delhi Sultanate, the current volume attempts to navigate the waters of writing and representation and take up the challenge of understanding the peculiar relationship between history and historiography.
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