Authority and Identity in Medieval Islamic Historiography: Persian Histories from the Peripheries (Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization)
Cambridge University Press, 9/9/2016
EAN 9781107127036, ISBN10: 1107127033
Hardcover, 316 pages, 23.5 x 15.6 x 2 cm
Language: English
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.
1. Introduction
2. Methodologies for reading hybrid identities and imagined histories
3. Contexts and authorship
4. Dreaming of the prophet
5. Holy bloodlines, prophetic utterances, and taxonomies of belonging
6. Living virtues of the land
7. Sacred bodies and sanctified cities
8. Prophetic etymologies and sacred spaces
9. The view from Anatolia
10. Lessons from the peripheries.