Authority and Identity in Medieval Islamic Historiography: Persian Histories from the Peripheries

by Mimi Hanaoka

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781107565838
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	04/26/2018
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	319
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 8.98(h) x 0.67(d)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

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.

Editorial Reviews

'… Hanaoka’s book is a monumental piece of scholarship that will open important conversations among scholars of the medieval Islamic Persianate world. … Hanaoka’s study of Persian local histories does much to further the scholarly debate on identities and mentalities within the medieval Perso-Islamic world and will provoke further discussion for the conceivable future on this topic. Her book should appear on every bibliography of medieval Islamic history or literature.' American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences

From the Publisher