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Authority and Identity in Medieval Islamic Historiography
Intriguing dreams, improbable myths, fanciful genealogies, and suspect etymologies. These were all key elements of the historical texts composed by scholars and bureaucrats on the peripheries of Islamic empires between the tenth and fifteenth centuries. But how are historians to interpret such narratives? And what can these more literary histories tell us about the people who wrote them and the times in which they lived? In this book, Mimi Hanaoka offers an innovative, interdisciplinary method of approaching these sorts of local histories from the Persianate world. By paying attention to the purpose and intention behind a text’s creation, her book highlights the preoccupation with authority to rule and legitimacy within disparate regional, provincial, ethnic, sectarian, ideological, and professional communities. By reading these texts in such a way, Hanaoka transforms the literary patterns of these fantastic histories into rich sources of information about identity, rhetoric, authority, legitimacy, and centre–periphery relations.
Mimi Hanaoka is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Richmond, where she is a scholar of history and religion. Her publications include scholarly journal articles on Persian and Islamic history and historiography. Her work as a social and cultural historian focuses on Iran and the Persianate world from the tenth to fifteenth centuries, concentrating on issues of authority and identity. In the field of global history, she concentrates on interactions between the Middle East and East Asia, focusing on the history of Iran–Japan relations
Preface
The primary sources used in this study are written in Arabic, Persian, and are often bilingual to varying degrees. I follow the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (IJMES) transliteration system for Arabic transliterations, and consequently I do not indicate the final tāʾ marbu_ ta, nor do I distinguish between the alif mamdūda and alif maq_ sūra. For Persian terms, I use a modified IJMES transliteration system. In bilingual Arabic-Persian sources, I generally prioritize the Arabic transliteration. Due to the bilingual nature of the texts and the accompanying challenges in transliteration, I hope I will be forgiven for any inconsistencies and preferences. Place names appear without transliteration (e.g., Tabaristan, Bukhara, Qum).
When technical terms and place names used in English are part of a proper noun, such as the title of a work (e.g., Tārīkh-i Tabarist ̣ ān), I include diacritical marks. Therefore, the title of the work Tārīkh-i Bukhārā includes diacritical marks, as does historical personage alBukhārī, but Bukhara as a place does not. Proper names of people and the names by which they are known, including titles, are supplied with diacritical marks (e.g., Fā _ tima, Fā _ tima al-Maʿ _ sūma, Mu _ hammad). Commonly used technical terms appear without transliteration. With the exception of Imam, Shiʿa, Shiʿi, Shiʿism, Sunni, and Sunnism, the terms are italicized (e.g., Ahl al-Bayt, Allah, amir, Baraka, dinar, fatwa, fiqh, fuqaha, hadith, imam, isnad, madrasa, Mahdi, matn, muhaddith, qadi, sayyid, sharif, shaykh, Shuʿubiya, sunna, Sura, ulama, umma, waqf, wazir). I have referenced the IJMES Word List for guidance on which terms and names are Anglicized.
I do not transliterate technical terms and titles that are commonly used in English, including Anglicized terms of Arabic origin (e.g., Abbasid, Alawi, ʿAlid, Ashʿari, bazaar, Buyids, caliph, Daylami, Fatimid, Ghaznavid, Ghurid, Hanafi, Imam, Ismaʿili, Jahiliya, Mamluk, Qurʾan, Safavid, Saffarid, Sasanian, Seljuq, shah, Sufi, sultan, Tahirid, Talibi, Umayyad, vizier, Zaydi, Ziyarid). I have included diacritical marks on less commonly used technical terms (e.g., abdāl, akhbār, awliyāʾ, awqāf, aʿyān, dāʿī, fa_ dāʾil, ghulām, ijāza, khabar, khāngāh, khawārij, ma_ dhāhib, madh_ hab, mash_ had, mawlā, mi_ hna, mazār, miʿrāj, rāwī, riwāyah, Rūm, _ sa_ hāba, Sạ _ hī _ hayn, _ tabaqāt, tābiʿūn, tafsīr, tarīqa,ʿumarāʾ, ziyārat). For proper names, I retain the definite article “al-” at the beginning of a name only at the first mention of the proper name but exclude the definite article on subsequent mentions of the proper name (e.g., the name is rendered as al-Qummī on first mention and then subsequently as Qummī). I do not consider the “al-” for bibliographic purposes (e.g., Ḥasan ibn Mu _ hammad al-Qummī appears al-Qummī, Ḥasan ibn Mu _ hammad, under “Q”). I generally give the Common Era (CE) dates for events. Whenever relevant, I also give the hijrī dates in the form of hijrī/CE dates (e.g., 613/1217, third/ninth century). When there are disagreements or disputes about dates, I attempt to note the range of possible dates and generally follow the dates used in the Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd edition. For the Qurʾan, I principally reference the English translation by Ahmed Ali, final revised edition (Princeton University Press, 2001).
Acknowledgments This book has been supported and enriched by many people, and I am grateful and indebted for all of the help I have received. I owe much to the insights, support, and suggestions of my mentors, peers, friends, and colleagues, but all faults, deficiencies, and defects in scholarship are entirely my own. I bear full responsibility for this book’s shortcomings. At Columbia University, where I completed the dissertation out of which this book grew, I benefited from the mentorship and training of many exceptional faculty. Peter Awn and Richard Bulliet were ideal guides on this journey, and they saw the project through all its iterations, from the kernel of an idea to a completed dissertation. Hossein Kamaly at Barnard College, Mehdi Khorrami at NYU, and Masoud Jafari Jazi at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton University expertly shared with me the nuances and rigors of classical Persian literature. In the field of Arabic language and literature, I benefited from the expertise of Taoufik Ben-Amor, George Saliba, and George El-Hage at Columbia University. At the Center for Arabic Studies Abroad (CASA) at the American University in Cairo, I enjoyed the superb training and unflagging patience of Zeinab Taha, Hebatalah Salem, Azza Hassanein, Raghda El-Essawi, Shereen El-Ezabi, Nevenka Korica, Mahmoud Al-Batal, and Abbas Al-Tonsi. Elizabeth Castelli and members of the Departments of Religion at Columbia University and Barnard College generously shared their expertise and advice on my research. Neguin Yavari at The New School provided consistent encouragement during my graduate training. Members of Columbia University’s Middle East and North Africa (MENA) workshop offered thoughtful critiques, insights, and a space to share works in progress. The staff of the Columbia University Libraries enabled much of the research necessary for this project. The Jacob K. Javits Fellowship and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Columbia University supported my doctoral work at Columbia University. The CASA and the American Institute of Iranian Studies provided financial support for training in Arabic and Persian. Friends and colleagues have allowed me to present works in progress, and they have challenged me to refine and rethink my work. Kazuo Morimoto at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, The University of Tokyo, generously invited me to present part of my research on dreams in 2012. Michael Pregill at Boston University was a thoughtful colloquium interlocutor for an early version of Chapter 4. I explored part of my research on dreams in my 2013 article in Iranian Studies and a limited version of the ideas presented in Chapter 2 in my 2015 article in the Journal of Persianate Studies. The audience and panelists at the annual meetings of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) and American Academy of Religion (AAR) provided valuable feedback. I am grateful to fellow CASA alumna Kate Swearengen, who read through a manuscript draft in its entirety, efficiently and thoroughly, and offered thoughtful comments. At the University of Richmond, my colleagues both within and beyond the Department of Religious Studies encouraged this project. The Office of the Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences and the Faculty Research Council of the School of Arts and Sciences provided financial support for this project. The staff of Boatwright Memorial Library, and especially the Inter-Library Loan department, enabled me to access many materials necessary to develop and complete this work. At Cambridge University Press, William Masami Hammell gave me the opportunity to transform my manuscript into a book, an endeavor that Maria Marsh brings to fruition. The anonymous readers who read my manuscript and generously offered valuable comments and critiques greatly improved this work. In Tokyo, I received extraordinary support and kindness from Machiko Romaine and Kazuko Nishikawa, as well as Tim Thornton and the faculty and staff of the American School in Japan. At home, Shahan Mufti has been a well of kindness: loving, helpful, and supportive. Through challenges and in happiness, he has been there throughout. With their unlimited love, Totoro and Mochi bring joy to every day.
I owe my deepest debt of gratitude to my parents, Shoichiro Hanaoka (1945–2014) and Iola Price Hanaoka (1942–2014). They supported every aspect of my life with unconditional love, boundless generosity, and tireless encouragement. There is a Japanese proverb (sode furi au mo tashō no en), which states that those whose sleeves so much as brush against each other in this life have been bound together in many previous lifetimes. I hope that I will have the good fortune to meet them in future lifetimes, too. I dedicate this book to them.
Introduction Whosoever sees me in a dream sees me in waking life, because Satan does not take my appearance.1 Nearly 200 years after the Prophet Mu _ hammad died, he reappeared in the city of Bukhara in present day Uzbekistan. Mu_ hammad wore a white cap2 on his head as he rode his camel al-Qaswāʾ into the central bazaar of Kharqān.3 A large crowd gathered around Mu_ hammad, overjoyed that the Prophet of Islam had come to their city located on what was then the far eastern fringe of the Islamic empire. Mu _ hammad, the seal of the Prophets and the last of God’s messengers, to whom God transmitted the final revelation in the form of the Qurʾan through the Angel Gabriel, had come to their city. The Bukharans were delighted. The assembled multitude decided to lodge the Prophet in the home of a certain Khwāja Imām Abū Ḥaf_ s al-Bukhārī, a pious and praiseworthy man who was a prominent denizen of the city. Khwāja Imām Abū Ḥaf_ s was a learned ascetic who had pursued his religious studies in Baghdad. After returning from Iraq to Bukhara, he had become one of the honored teachers in his home city. Khwāja Imām Abū Ḥaf_ s hosted Mu _ hammad in his home. In a fitting tribute to his illustrious guest, he recited the Qurʾan for Mu _ hammad for three days and three nights. In fact, it is unknown if he did anything else during those three days when he hosted the Prophet. The Prophet listened in silence. Mu _ hammad never once corrected Khwāja Imām Abū Ḥaf_ s, since his recitation of the revelation was flawless. The events in the preceding story read like fantasy. But they are real, in so far as they occurred within someone’s dream, which was then recounted in Tārīkh-i Bukhārā, a medieval Central Asian book of local history.4 Such dream narratives, which appear in various forms of historical writing in the medieval Islamic world, are an overlooked thread in a gauzy gossamer web of references, one of myriad tensile cultural strands that reinforced and reflected one another in the once glistening and now dusty web of early Islamic historical writing. The fantastical nature of this encounter with the Prophet did not make it any less significant for the author, al-Narshakhī, who included this episode in his history about the city of Bukhara. Mu _ hammad ibn Salām Baikandī, the man who is credited with dreaming the encounter, lived in a milieu in which pious dreams – especially those involving Mu _ hammad – were as real and as significant as events that occurred during waking life. But what do we – as historians, scholars, and modern readers – do with such a history penned more than a millennium ago, which records events that may be imagined or may never have transpired? Positivist history has been the dominant trend over the past century in scholarship on the history of Islam. Scholarship on the political, military, economic, legal, and social history of the Islamicate world has traditionally placed a high premium on ascertaining the names, dates, facts, and figures that allow us to reconstruct history and what precisely happened.
This line of scholarship has been invaluable in providing a narrative history of the emergence and development of Islam as a social, military, political, legal, and religious phenomenon. It has allowed us to contextualize the early Islamic community within its Late Antique milieu and to trace the expansion of Islam over vast expanses of land during the early centuries of Islamic rule. This traditional positivist approach forms the bedrock from which to further investigate the various and complex dimensions of the Islamicate world that have developed during the past 1400 years. As we move beyond the questions of “what happened, and why?” we are able to engage with the thorny, more open-ended questions of “how did these communities perceive themselves and the others around them, and how did they crystallize and express these understandings?” Following the latter, more openended line of research, this project pays close attention to the purpose and intention behind a text’s creation and what the texts reveal about how their authors perceived themselves and the world around them. These are insights that can be gleaned, in significant part, from the themes, claims, references, and strategies evident in the texts themselves. Over the past three decades, scholars have paid increasingly closer attention to the political and literary dimensions of Islamicate historical writing produced in the medieval Middle East. These scholars include Stephen Humphreys, Stefan Leder, Albrect Noth, Fred Donner, Jacob Lassner, Chase Robinson, John Wansbrough, Patricia Crone, Michael Cook, Richard Bulliet, Tayeb El-Hibri, Julie Meisami, and Christopher Melchert, all of whom have pioneered fruitful methodological approaches to Islamic history and place a premium on considering why medieval authors presented themselves and their histories in that way that they did. In line with this turn in scholarship away from primarily positivist history, this project builds on existing scholarly assumptions and proposes an innovative method of approaching local histories of the Persianate world written in Arabic and Persian. This approach – freed from the reconstruction of events as the primary goal of scholarly endeavor – allows the sources to be read and used in new ways to understand how these Perso-Muslim individuals and communities understood and expressed their hybrid identities, perched on the fringes and peripheries of the Islamic empire. The intriguing dreams, fanciful genealogies, and suspect etymologies are transformed from data-poor curiosities into rich sources of information about identity, rhetoric, authority, legitimacy, and center-periphery relations.
peripheries and empires Texts composed by scholars and bureaucrats on the peripheries of Islamic empires during the tenth to early fifteenth centuries provide, along with the hard facts of history, richly imagined histories of their local towns and cities. Prophets, saints, Companions and descendants of the Prophet Mu _ hammad, and other devout Muslims populate these sprawling literary worlds. Local histories are interested in dynastic history and the events of successive dawla – or the reigns of dynasties and rulers – but they also describe the physical and spiritual contours of regional landscapes, including sacred sites and graves of the pious, while toponyms boast extraordinary and magical etymologies. These histories also record the human capital – teachers of religious sciences, holy men, and pious women – that the authors believed would place their city on the map of the Islamic world as a bona fide Muslim community of significance. Trimmed like frivolous fat off the real meat of history that historians so often crave – names, dates, facts, and figures – accounts of dreams, myths, improbable etymologies, and dubious stories have generally been disregarded as fabulist embellishments created for literary effect. This historiographical study turns its attention to precisely such narratives that appear in local histories written about provinces and cities on the peripheries of Islamic empires that had their heartlands in Arabia, Syria, and Iraq. On close examination, these events and myths, which may have been fabricated or occurred only in the dream world, express profound truths about the people who wrote the histories and the times in which they lived.
reading local histories as social history Fantastical historical narratives are especially useful for elucidating how Muslims on the peripheries of Islamic empires positioned themselves in relation to the central powers in the Middle East during critical periods between the tenth and early fifteenth centuries. Persian local histories composed during the tenth through early fifteenth centuries evidence a preoccupation with authority to rule and legitimacy as distinct religio-political communities. In so doing, these local histories participate in a discourse of authority and legitimacy.5 For example, Tārīkh-i Bukhārā, the book written by Narshakhī in the tenth century and then translated into Persian, extended, and then abridged during the twelfth century, relates Mu _ hammad’s pronouncement that on the Judgment Day angels and martyrs will adorn the city of Bukhara in Khurasan, which is located in present day Uzbekistan. It will be resplendent with rubies and coral and will be the most exalted of all cities. Tārīkh-i Bayhaq, composed about the city of Bayhaq and its environs in Khurasan in the mid-twelfth century, tells us that descendants of a particular Companion of the Prophet Mu _ hammad lived and taught hadith in the city, despite evidence to the contrary in biographical sources. Other similar narratives of cities and regions, from Qum to Tabaristan (both located in modern-day Iran) bind specific cities to pivotal moments and characters in Islamic history. What literary strategies did Persian writers use to weave these narratives into their histories and legitimate themselves within structures of authority in medieval Islam that were predominantly Arab and based largely on genealogies into which they did not fit? Following the Arab conquests, these individuals and communities had to forge new Muslim identities. This was a multi-layered process, since “to change overt religious identification was symbolically to die in one community and be reborn in another.”6 How did Persians balance their multiple identities as Persians, Muslims, and members of various regional, provincial, ethnic, sectarian, ideological, and professional communities while writing these histories? Patterns within Islamo-Persciate writing from the peripheries of Islamic empires enable us to explore local structures of authority and legitimacy. The literary patterns that authors employed to bring the sanction and prestige of religious authority and importance to their respective cities and provinces are, in turn, vehicles through which to understand the more subtle societal conversations and anxieties that would have given rise to them in the first place.
A privileged connection to Mu _ hammad is important and occurs in various forms: Mu _ hammad and other prophets visit the city in waking life or in dreams, hadith transmitters live and teach in the city as living virtues or merits (fa_ dāʾil) and custodians of the faith, and Imams, Companions (_ sa_ hāba), and descendants of the Prophet live and die in the region. These medieval authors also claim their territory as sanctified and hallowed ground in ways that are simultaneously localized and yet resonate with overarching notions of the Muslim umma. These texts evidence the dynamic of local histories making the global – the Muslim umma – locally and regionally differentiated. Local and regional histories are avenues that illustrate the formation of Muslim identity along the peripheries of medieval Islamic empires. sources The central project of this book is to examine these rich and mysterious portions of early Islamic historical writing that involve dreams, prophets, saints, tangled genealogies, and fabulous etymologies and offer a new framework for considering them. It focuses most closely on annalistic Persian city and regional histories from the tenth to early fifteenth centuries. It also considers histories produced in another notable periphery, Anatolia, as a heuristic device to flesh out a comparative perspective. The political and social situations in Persia and Anatolia were distinct, and the two regions were Islamized at different times, in some areas centuries apart. Comparing Persia and Anatolia allows us to consider the underlying issue of how early medieval local histories on the peripheries framed and presented what constituted authority to rule, legitimacy as a Muslim, and legitimacy as political and religious communities with distinct practices and identities who nevertheless had an integral role in the broader umma. The Persian local histories from the tenth to early fifteenth centuries analyzed in this book are Tārīkh-i Bukhārā, Tārīkh-i Bayhaq, Tārīkh-i Qum, Tārīkh-Sīstān, and Tārīkh-i Tabaristān.7 This study extends to Anatolian sources the questions and methodologies applied to Persian histories to explore al-Avāmir al-ʿalāʾiyya fī al-umūr al-ʿalāʾiyya, Musāmarat al-akhbār va musāyarat al-akhyār, Tārīkh-i Āl-i Saljūq dar Ānātūlī, Saljūqnāma, and Abū Muslim-nāmah. These texts were written in Persian or Arabic or both. Some sources were originally written in Arabic and later translated into Persian, some only surviving in this later translation. The term author includes editors, authors, compilers, translators, and individuals who made any substantive change – in content, form, order, or language – to a text. In this sense, all of these texts have multiple authors and are the product of many hands over the centuries, only some of whom are known and identifiable. These texts are not simply histories but are also works of commemorative literature that evidence the dynamics, both rhetorical and physical, of the construction of authority to rule and legitimacy as a Muslim. Local histories are not only manifestations of “local pride,” as Rosenthal claims, but also express a deeply felt desire and need to embed a place into the global umma while simultaneously expressing a specifically local identity.8 This wealth of previously underutilized sources illustrates the ways in which authors bind cities and regions to key moments and figures in Islamic and cosmic history and to prophetic authority. They also provide an opportunity to compare and contrast iterations of Islam that varied along and across lines of ethnicity and language in the medieval Islamic world. Local and regional histories from Persian and Anatolian areas exhibit a tendency to articulate an identity that is simultaneously local yet enmeshed within the broader Muslim umma, with its perceived heartlands in the Arab realms of Iraq, Syria, and Arabia.
conceptual frameworks This project draws on theories and methods in historiography, social history, rhetoric, material culture, and literary criticism to identify the ways in which the authors of Persian local histories employed diverse but interrelated themes, strategies, and literary devices to portray the virtues of their cities. This in turn bound the region or city in question to key moments and characters in Islamic history. By embedding the city deep into the fabric of Islamic history and its continued development, the authors of these local histories fostered a sense of regionally specific and locally differentiated Persian Islamic identity in ways that “centered”
these histories written on the ostensible “peripheries” of empire. Chapter 2 establishes the conceptual framework that provides the intellectual scaffolding for this project. structure and chapter summaries This book traces and explains the emergence and use of themes and literary strategies that “centered” texts from “peripheral” regions from a variety of angles. The following chapters address ways in which authors of local histories composed in Persia during the tenth through early fifteenth centuries wove their lands and their communities into Islamic narratives rooted in the perceived Islamic heartlands of Iraq, Syria, and Arabia. Authors “centered” their cities and regions by including narratives about descendants of the Prophet associated with the region; incorporating narratives of legitimating dreams and visions; associating _ sa_ hāba with the land; highlighting sites of pious visitation (ziyārat) and other sources of blessing or sacred power (baraka); and incorporating sacralizing etymologies. Authors positioned their communities to better fit into the scope of Islamic history and claimed privileged connections to Mu _ hammad and divine or prophetic authority in various ways. Consequently, local histories from Persia both respond to and challenge assumptions about the centrality of Arabs, Arabic, Arabia, Iraq, Syria, _ sa_ hāba, tābiʿūn, ʿAlids, sayyids, and sharifs while at the same claiming their own centeredness and importance within these same frameworks. These sources simultaneously accommodate, challenge, and reconfigure notions of what constitutes “central” or “peripheral” in the medieval Islamicate world. Each chapter provides a prism through which to understand how authors “centered” their cities and regions by integrating specific themes and literary strategies into their works. Reading local histories with an eye to these literary strategies and how these local histories accommodated and challenged traditional structures of authority brings into the foreground the hybrid identities – globally Muslim and locally unique – of these communities on the peripheries of empire. Each chapter provides depth by exploring how the theme and literary strategy is reflected in local and regional histories. Each chapter also provides breadth by placing these specific claims to authority within their broader social and political contexts. Chapter 2, Methodologies for Reading Hybrid Identities and Imagined Histories, situates this project within the literature and argues 8 Introduction that the methodology proposed here is a compelling new way of reading narrative local histories. The long trajectory and strong influence of positivist history in scholarship on Islam has yielded many valuable insights, but it has failed to fully make use of the ostensibly data-poor aspects of histories, such as etymologies and dream narratives. Building on existing scholarly assumptions and insights gained from positivist history, this project demonstrates how a shift away from positivist history that has gained traction in recent decades opens up new possibilities of how to understand identity, rhetoric, and center-periphery relations. The methodology applied to Islamicate history has strong implications for medieval history, particularly European history. This chapter also assesses the genre of local historical writing, which lies on a spectrum from biographical dictionaries at one end to narrative chronicles on the other, and explains why this project’s methodology is ideally suited for the narrative local histories examined here. Chapter 3, Contexts and Authorship, brings into one cohesive chapter the contexts of the production of the five main texts analyzed in this study: Tārīkh-i Bukhārā, Tārīkh-i Bayhaq, Tārīkh-i Qum, Tārīkh-Sīstān, and Tārīkh-i Tabaristān. There are three levels of context that are integral to any discussion of these texts: relevant events that occurred during the texts’ production at the level of the caliphate; events that occurred in the local area during the texts’ production; and what we know about the author or translator, including whether the text was commissioned or written for a patron. Chapter 4, Dreaming of the Prophet, examines dreams as tools of legitimation and offers a typology of dreams that emerges in Persian local histories. It contextualizes dreams in the framework of Persian and Arabic historical writing as well the Qurʾan and hadith. Persian local and regional histories evidence a move to bypass genealogical affirmation and instead claim affirmation through dreams as an alternative investment of power. Claims of investments of power by pivotal characters – including the Prophet Mu _ hammad, pre-Islamic prophets, and holy men – create alternative avenues to genealogical legitimacy gained through descent from the ahl al-Bayt (family of the Prophet) and Companions of the Prophet and the subsequent generation (_ sa_ hāba and tābiʿūn). Such connections to divine or prophetic authority occur through dreams or waking visions. The dreamscape of the city’s denizens was a vibrant dimension of the medieval city, and dreams formed a liminal space where information about the sacred was transmitted. This chapter engages with the arguments, evidence, and theoretical Structure and Chapter Summaries 9 frameworks about sainthood and dreams proposed by scholars of mysticism, who have generally been more attuned to the literary significance of dream narratives than positivist historians. Chapter 5, Holy Bloodlines, Prophetic Utterances, and Taxonomies of Belonging, moves from dreams about the Prophet to his descendants and utterances. It demonstrates how descendants of the Prophet functioned as legitimating devices in Persian local histories. Following Kazuo Morimoto and Theresa Bernheimer, this book defines as descendants the wide array of cross-sectarian individuals and families who claimed and were believed by their communities to enjoy kinship with the Prophet, a phenomenon that was both biological and socially constructed.9 ʿAlids (al-ʿAlawī), Hasanids, Husaynids, Talibids, sayyids, and sharifs are all ambiguous terms and phenomena, and the terms are used flexibly and with wide variation in the medieval sources themselves, especially in the medieval Islamic east of Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Central Asia.10 These descendants – including but not limited to sayyids and sharifs – constitute the living virtues, or fa_ dāʾil, of the land and become integral to the discourse of legitimation that these local histories construct through their form and content. This section also analyzes how hadith attributed to the Prophet or his descendants function as legitimating devices. It explains the significance in local histories of legitimating hadith, sometimes uttered by descendants of Mu _ hammad. A discussion of Moroccan shurafāʾ adds a comparative dimension to the consideration of how the family of the Prophet is portrayed and integrated in Persianate histories. Chapter 6, Living Virtues of the Land, charts the roles of the Companions of Mu _ hammad and the subsequent generation (_ sa_ hāba and tābiʿūn) in local histories. Persian local histories claim connections with divine authority that tie the city or region to prophetic authority, which can occur in the form of _ sa_ hāba and tābiʿūn living, teaching, or dying and being buried in the city. Companions and descendants of Mu _ hammad appear in Persian local histories as living virtues of the city and custodians of the faith who are tied to a particular place. This chapter also argues that while categories like ulama, sainthood/wilāya, _ sa_ hāba, and tābiʿūn are useful, they can also misleadingly suggest that these categories are mutually exclusive or fixed when they are in fact fluid. Chapter 7, Sacred Bodies and Sanctified Cities, explores how local histories bind their cities to prophetic authority through sites of pious visitation (ziyārat) and other sources of blessing or sacred power (baraka). It assesses the impact of physical interment of sacred bodies as sites of pious visitation (ziyārat) or other manifestations of blessing or sacred power (baraka). Pious visitations take Muslims to the burial places of saints, the Prophet’s descendants, and other pious individuals whose tomb, home, or former prayer cells are sources of baraka. These types of visitation all tie the prophetic legacy to a specific place. This chapter analyzes the sacred in the urban landscape and places local histories and their claims to prophetic authority, piety, and sanctity in the context of broader scholarship on the urban environment in the Islamic world. This section also situates the discussion of pious visitation and sacred power within the framework of material culture in the medieval Islamicate world and in the context of scholarship in cognate fields, such as early Christianity and medieval European Christianity. This chapter analyzes pious visitation and sacred power from the perspectives of material culture, memory, power, metanarrative, semiotics, and hybrid identities. If the body of a saint made a place sacred through his or her interment there, then etymologies also assert sacred and prophetic origins for the city. Chapter 8, Prophetic Etymologies and Sacred Spaces, examines how authors incorporate etymologies of their cities and regions as one way of claiming a privileged connection with the Prophet and sacred space. Some etymologies incorporate Mu _ hammad and a paradigmatic event, such as the miʿrāj. This section argues that analysis of etymologies in local histories and micro-historical accounts based on them is a fresh angle from which to approach local historical writing. This methodology builds on earlier generations of scholarship as well as recent developments in historiographical research. Chapter 9, The View from Anatolia, extends the historiographical study of Persian local and regional histories to sources produced in and about Anatolia. The purpose of this chapter is heuristic. It argues for the broader theoretical implications of a functionally skeptical reading of local history attuned to a metanarrative constructed by authors for audiences with hybrid Perso-Muslim identities. This fleshes out the comparative historiographical approach of the book, since the process of Islamization occurred in Anatolia roughly 500 years after it did in Iran. Structure and Chapter Summaries 11 In order to test, in Anatolian sources, hypotheses about the distinctive features of Persian local histories, this chapter compares sources produced in and about Anatolia from the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries against earlier and contemporary Persian local histories. In contrast to the Persian texts, which use myriad literary strategies to bring legitimacy and authority to their lands and evidence highly localized hybrid Perso-Muslim identities, the few Anatolian examples of local history that exist from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries focus on the construction of dynastic and specifically Seljuq legitimacy and tend to couch claims to legitimacy in terms of military success, genealogy, and the virtues of kingly rule. This chapter not only challenges, stretches, and extends prevailing theoretical assumptions but also validates this book’s argument about the distinctive themes in local Persian historiography by testing it against Anatolian samples. Chapter 10, Lessons from the Peripheries, draws together the themes from the preceding chapters and presents the differences between Persicate local histories and their Anatolian counterparts. This chapter outlines the factors that may account for the notable differences in the literary strategies that Persian and Anatolian sources use to assert religious authority and legitimacy as a bona fide Muslim community and integral part of the umma. This chapter tackles the question of whether the literary tendencies and strategies for legitimation seen in Persian texts may be characteristic of writing on the peripheries of the contiguous Arab heartlands of the Islamic empire. This conclusion underscores how the findings and methodologies of this project are in conversation with scholars of the medieval Islamicate world and the sibling field of medieval Christianity in Europe. It emphasizes the strides to be made in scholarship on Persian and Islamic historiography, local history, sainthood, sanctification of place, semiotics, and material culture by harnessing innovative ways of approaching local histories. There are immense gains to be made if we are attuned to the ways in which authors of local and regional histories in Persia embedded their communities into Islamic narratives rooted in the heartlands of Iraq, Syria, and Arabia through myriad literary strategies and themes that simultaneously challenged, accommodated, and reflected dominant structures of authority and legitimacy.
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