A History of Persian Literature Volume X Volumes of A History of Persian Literature I General Introduction to Persian Literature II Persian Poetry in the Classical Era, 800–1500 Panegyrics (qaside), Short Lyrics (ghazal); Quatrains (robâ’i) III Persian Poetry in the Classical Era, 800–1500 Narrative Poems in Couplet Form (mathnavis); Strophic Poems; Occasional Poems (qat’e); Satirical and Invective Poetry; shahrâshub IV Heroic Epic The Shahnameh and its Legacy V Persian Prose VI Religious and Mystical Literature VII Persian Poetry, 1500–1900 From the Safavids to the Dawn of the Constitutional Movement VIII Persian Poetry from Outside Iran The Indian Subcontinent, Anatolia, Central Asia after Timur IX Persian Prose from Outside Iran The Indian Subcontinent, Anatolia, Central Asia after Timur X Persian Historiography XI Literature of the Early Twentieth Century From the Constitutional Period to Reza Shah XII Modern Persian Poetry, 1940 to the Present Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan XIII Modern Fiction and Drama XIV Biographies of the Poets and Writers of the Classical Period XV Biographies of the Poets and Writers of the Modern Period; Literary Terms XVI General Index Companion Volumes to A History of Persian Literature: XVII Companion Volume I: The Literature of Pre-Islamic Iran XVIII Companion Volume II: Oral Literature of Iranian Languages Kurdish, Pashto, Balochi, Ossetic, Persian and Tajik Anthologies: XIX Anthology I: A Selection of Persian Poems in English Translation XX Anthology II: A Selection of Persian Prose in English Translation A History of Persian Literature General Editor—Ehsan Yarshater Volume X Persian Historiography Edited by Charles Melville Sponsored by Persian Heritage Foundation (New York) & Center for Iranian Studies, Columbia University Published in 2012 by I. B.Tauris & Co Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com Distributed in the United States and Canada Exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 Copyright © 2012 The Persian Heritage Foundation The right of The Persian Heritage Foundation to be identified as the originators of this work has been asserted by The Persian Heritage Foundation in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. A History of Persian Literature: X ISBN: 978 1 84511 911 9 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall from camera-ready copy edited and supplied by The Persian Heritage Foundation A History of Persian Literature Editorial Board Mohsen Ashtiany J. T. P. de Bruijn (Vice-Chairman) Dick Davis William Hanaway, Jr. Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak Franklin Lewis Paul Losensky Heshmat Moayyad Ehsan Yarshater (Chairman) Late Member: Annemarie Schimmel To the memory of Iraj Afshar (1925–2011) Contents Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xix Introduction (Charles Melville) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxv 1. Some Preliminary Observations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxv 2. The Writing of Persian History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxxi 3. Previous Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxxv 4. The Scope of the Volume . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxxviii Synopsis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xl 5. Themes in Persian Historiography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xliii Mastery of Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xliii The Historian and the Truth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . li Bibliographical Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . lv Chapter 1: History as Literature (Julie S. Meisami) . 1 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 2. The Rise of Persian Historiography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 3. The Triumph of Enshâ’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 4. Texts and Analyses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 The Murder of Abu-Moslem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 The Murder of a Vizier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 5. Concluding Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 Chapter 2: The Historian at Work (Charles Melville) 56 1. Bureaucrats, Historians, and Littérateurs . . . . . . . . . . . 57 2. Aims and Means . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 3. Bureaucratic Crises and Military Conflicts . . . . . . . . . . 73 Civilian Casualties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 The Ruler at War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 4. The Measure of Success . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 vii Persian Historiography Chapter 3: The Rise and Development of Persian Historiography (Elton L. Daniel) . . . . . . 101 1. Abu-Ali Bal’ami and the Genesis of Persian Historiography 103 2. Other Arabic to Persian Translations . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114 3. Gardizi and the Zeyn-al-akhbâr . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120 4. Abu’l-Fazl Beyhaqi and his Târikh . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126 5. The Mojmal-al-tavârikh . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136 6. Provincial and City Histories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139 7. Saljuq Dynastic Histories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 Chapter 4: The Mongol and Timurid Periods, 1250–1500 (Charles Melville) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155 1. A Sense of Place . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 A World on the Move . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176 A Sacred Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179 Small is Beautiful: Local Histories . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182 2. History as Propaganda . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185 3. An Epic Age . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192 4. Past and Present . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198 Morals and Memorials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199 Patronage and Audience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202 5. Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206 Chapter 5: Safavid Historiography (Sholeh Quinn and Charles Melville) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209 2. The Safavid Chroniclers: A Brief Overview . . . . . . . . . 211 The First Generation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211 The Second Generation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212 The Era of Shah Abbâs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214 Late Safavid Chronicles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 216 3. Patronage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 222 4. Universal and Dynastic Histories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224 5. Organization and Dating Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227 6. Content and Themes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229 The Safavid Genealogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232 Safavid Origins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 236 The Coronation of Shah Esmâ’il . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240 7. Methods of Composition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 244 Safavid Prologues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 244 viii Contents Imitative Writing: Late Safavid Chronicles . . . . . . . . . 248 Narrating the Present . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251 8. Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 254 Chapter 6: Persian Historiography in the 18th and early 19th Century (Ernest Tucker) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 258 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 258 2. The Main Chronicles of the Afsharid Era . . . . . . . . . . . 259 Mirzâ Mahdi Khan Astarâbâdi’s Târikh‑e Nâderi . . . . 261 The Târikh‑e Nâderi in the Safavid Historiographical Tradition . . . . . . . . . 262 Astarâbâdi’s Works as Epitomes of the Ornate Style . 265 The Last Section of Astarâbâdi’s Work and Uncertainties in its Patronage . . . . . . 266 Mohammad Kâzem Marvi’s Portrait of Nâder’s Errors . . 267 The Long Twilight of Safavid Historiography . . . . . . . 269 3. Chronicles of the Zand Interlude . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 270 4. Non-Chronicle Genres of Historiography during the 18th Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273 5. Qajar Historiography after the Turn of the 19th Century . . 274 The Târikh‑e Mohammadi of Mohammad-Taqi Sâru’i . . 274 The Târikh‑e Mohammadi in its Historiographical Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275 Sâru’i, the Afsharid Legacy, and Questions of Royal Legitimacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275 6. Historiographical Trends during the Early Qajar Period (1797–1848) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 280 7. Nâser-al-Din Shah and the Twilight of the Court Chronicle Tradition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283 8. Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291 Chapter 7: Legend, Legitimacy And Making A National Narrative In The Historiography Of Qajar Iran (1785–1925) (Abbas Amanat) . . . . . . . . . . 292 1. Reshaping Court Chronicles and Universal Histories . . . . 296 2. Towards Greater National Awareness . . . . . . . . . . . . . 308 3. The Publication of State-Sponsored Histories . . . . . . . . 314 4. The Decline of Chronicles and New Approaches to History 324 5. In Search of Ancient Iran . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 327 6. Translations and the Rediscovery of the Past . . . . . . . . . 333 ix Persian Historiography 7. Discourse of Decline and Renewal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 337 8. History as Awakening . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 344 9. Shaping a Nationalist Discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 346 10. Forgotten Narratives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351 11. Local Histories and a National Narrative . . . . . . . . . . . 357 12. Popular Histories and Memoirs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 361 13. Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 364 Chapter 8: Historiography in the Pahlavi Era (Fakhreddin Azimi) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 367 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 367 2. Hasan Pirniyâ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 370 3. Abbâs Eqbâl-Âshtiyâni . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 377 4. Ahmad Kasravi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 384 5. Fereydun Âdamiyat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 399 6. Men of Letters and “Iranologists” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 413 7. Institutional, Political and Cultural Context . . . . . . . . . 423 8. The Constraints of Conventional History . . . . . . . . . . 429 Chapter 9: Ottoman Historical Writing in Persian, 1400–1600 (Sara Nur Yıldız) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 436 1. Introduction: Ottomans and the Persian Tradition . . . . . 436 2. Ideological Experimentation in Early Ottoman Historical Writing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 441 Shokr-Allâh’s Persian Bahjat-al-tavârikh (1459): Universal Islamic History and the Cosmological Underpinnings of Ottoman Ghâzi Ideology . . 443 3. Versified Persian Historical Writing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 450 Mo’âli’s Khonkâr-nâme (1474): A Defense of Mehmed II’s Imperial Power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 450 Malek Ommi (T. Melik Ümmi)’s Shâhnâme, or the Bâyazid-nâme (1486) . . . . . . . . . . . . 456 Versifying Selim I’s Conquests: Adâ’i’s Shâhnâme-ye mohârebe-ye Soltân Salim (ca. 1520–21) . . . . . 462 4. Ottoman Court Shahname-composers under Süleyman and his Successors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 469 5. Persian Epistolary Histories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 480 Ottoman Dynastic History and Epistolary Composition 480 Edris‑e Bedlisi’s Hasht Behesht (ca. 1506) . . . . . . . . . 483 x Contents Prose and Epistolary Historiography in the Süleyman and Post-Süleyman Era . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 496 6. Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 499 Chapter 10: Historiography in Central Asia since the 16th Century (R. D. McChesney) . . . . . . . . . 503 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 503 2. Hâfez‑e Tanish b. Mir-Mohammad of Bukhara . . . . . . . 508 3. Soltân-Mohammad Motrebi of Samarqand . . . . . . . . . . 514 Motrebi’s Works . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 521 4. Mahmud b. Amir Vali of Balkh . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 524 5. Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 530 Chapter 11: Historiography in Afghanistan (R. D. McChesney) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 532 1. Mohammad Yusof ‘Riyâzi’: The Making of an Historian . . 534 2. Feyz-Mohammad Hazâra ‘Kâteb’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 541 The Making of the Serâj-al-tavârikh . . . . . . . . . . . . 552 The Publication Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 552 The Sources of the Serâj-al-tavârikh . . . . . . . . . 553 The Style and Contents of the Serâj-al-tavârikh . . . 554 3. Hâjj Mirzâ Abd-al-Mohammad Khan Pur Alizâde Esfahâni Irâni ‘Mo’addeb-al-Soltân’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 557 4. The Beginning of a New Historiographic Tradition . . . . . 562 Chapter 12: Indo-Persian Historiography (Stephen F. Dale) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 565 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 565 2. Early Persian Historiography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 568 3. The Delhi Sultanate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 570 4. The Afghan Interregnum: 1451–1526 and 1540–55 . . . . . . 576 5. The Mughals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 579 Mughal Autobiographical Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . 581 Histories of the Mughals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 586 Bâbor and Homâyun . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 586 Akbar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 588 Jahângir . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 593 Shâh Jahân . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 594 Owrangzib . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 597 Bahâdor Shâh and the Later Mughals . . . . . . . . . 598 xi Persian Historiography 6. The British and Indo-Persian Literature . . . . . . . . . . . 602 7. Provincial Histories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 605 8. Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 609 Bibliographical Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 610 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 611 1. Persian and Arabic Texts (manuscripts and printed editions) and Translations . . . . . . . . . 611 2. Turkish Works (manuscripts, editions, translations) . . . . . 630 3. Secondary Studies, Modern Histories . . . . . . . . . . . . . 630 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 669 xii Contributors Abbas Amanat is Professor of History and International Studies at Yale. Among his publications are Resurrection and Renewal: The Making of the Babi Movement in Iran, 1844–1850 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1989; 2nd ed. Los Angeles, 2005); Pivot of the Universe: Na- sir al-Din Shah and the Iranian Monarchy, 1831–1896 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1997; 2nd ed. London, 2008); and Apocalyptic Is- lam and Iranian Shi’ism (London, 2009). He is the editor of Cit- ies and Trade: Consul Abbot on the Economy and Society of Iran, 1847–1866 (London, 1984) and co-editor of Imaging the End: Vi- sions of Apocalypse from Ancient Middle East to Modern America (London and New York, 2002); Shari’a in the Contemporary Con- text (Stanford, 2007); and US-Middle East: Historical Encounters (Gainesville, Fla., 2007). He has two forthcoming publications: Facing Others: Iranian Identity Boundaries and Political Cul- ture (New York, 2011), and In Search of Modern Iran: Authority, Memory and Nationhood (New Haven, Conn., 2011). He was the Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Iranian Studies (1992–98) and is a Consulting Editor and contributor to Encyclopedia Iranica since 1984. He chaired the Council on Middle East Studies at Yale (1992–2005) and was a Carnegie Scholar (2006–2008). He is cur- rently working on skepticism, nonconformity and toleration in the Persianate world. Fakhreddin Azimi is Professor of History at the University of Connecticut. His research interests include the history, politics and culture of modern Iran; as well as the epistemological un- derpinnings of historical enquiry and the conceptual and theo- retical contribution of the social sciences to historiography. He is the author of The Quest for Democracy in Iran: A Century of Struggle against Authoritarian Rule (Cambridge, Mass., 2008), xiii Persian Historiography which won the Mossadegh Prize of the Mossadegh Foundation, and the Saidi-Sirjani Award, International Society for Iranian Studies; Iran: The Crisis of Democracy, 1941–53 (New York and London, 1989), Persian translation (rev., with a new introduction, Tehran 1994, 3rd ed., 2008); Hâkemiyat-e melli va doshmanân-e ân (National Sovereignty and its Enemies: Probing the Record of Mosaddeq’s Opponents, Tehran 2004, 2010); and Ta’ammoli dar negâresh-e siyâsi-ye Mosaddeq (Reflections on Mosaddeq’s Politi- cal Thinking; in press). Azimi’s article on Fereydun Adamiyat’s political and intellectual odyssey entitled “Âfâq-e Âdamiyat: seyri dar soluk-e fekri-siyâsi-ye Fereydun Âdamiyat,” Negâh-e Nou 78 (July–August 2008), won the Mahtâb Mirzâie Prize in 2009. Stephen F. Dale is Professor of South Asian and Islamic History at Ohio State University. He has published a variety of books and articles directly or indirectly connected to Indo-Muslim history. These include: Islamic Society on the South Asian Frontier: The Māppilas of Malabar 1498–1922 (Oxford, 1980); Indian Merchants and Eurasian Trade 1600–1750 (Cambridge, 1994); The Garden of the Eight Paradises: Babur and the Culture of Empire in Central Asia, Afghanistan and India 1483–1530 (Leiden, 2004); and The Muslim Empires of the Ottomans, Safavids and Mughals (Cam- bridge, 2010). He is currently writing a study of the philosophical Arab Muslim historian, Ebn-Khaldun. Elton L. Daniel is Professor of History (Islamic and Middle East- ern) at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He is also a member of the Middle East Studies Association of North America, the Inter- national Society of Iranian Studies, and Middle East Medievalists, as well as a member of the Board of the Association for the Study of Persianate Societies and Associate Editor of the Encyclopaedia Iranica (1997–2001). His primary research interests are focused on Iran in the early Islamic (pre-Saljuqid) period. Major publications include Qajar Society and Culture (editor, 2002); The History of Iran (2000); Al-Ghazzali’s Alchemy of Happiness (1991); A Shi’ite Pilgrimage to Mecca (1990, with Hafez Farmayan); and The Po- litical and Social History of Khurasan under Abbasid Rule (1979). xiv Contributors He is the author of numerous journal articles and contributions to the Encyclopaedia Iranica and the Encyclopaedia of Islam (third edition). R. D. McChesney is Emeritus Professor of Middle Eastern and Is- lamic Studies and History at New York University. His area of re- search is the early modern Persianate world including Safavid Iran, Chengisid Central Asia, and Afghanistan. He is the founder and director of the Afghanistan Digital Library (http://afghanistandl. nyu.edu) and author of Waqf in Central Asia (1991); Central Asia: Foundations of Change (1996); Kabul Under Siege (1999); and nu- merous articles and book chapters, most recently chapters in The Cambridge History of Inner Asia and The New Cambridge His- tory of Islam. He is editor, annotator and co-translator (with M. Mehdi Khorrami) of The History of Afghanistan: Fayz Muham- mad’s Sirāj al-tawārīkh (forthcoming). Julie Scott Meisami taught English Literature and Comparative Literature (1971–1980) in Tehran, chiefly at the University of Teh- ran, where she was instrumental in forming the MA program in comparative literature. From 1980 to 1985, she taught courses in comparative literature in California, while continuing with her in- dependent research. From 1985 until her retirement in 2002, she was the University Lecturer in Persian at the University of Ox- ford. In 2002–2003 she held an Aga Khan Fellowship in Islamic Architecture at Harvard University, where she pursued her art his- tory research. She is the author of Medieval Persian Court Poetry (Princeton, 1987); Persian Historiography to the End of the Twelfth Century (Edinburgh, 1999), and Structure and Meaning in Medi- eval Arabic and Persian Poetry: Orient Pearls (London, 2003). She co-edited (with Paul Starkey) the Encyclopedia of Arabic Litera- ture (2 vols., London, 1998); and has translated the (anonymous) Sea of Precious Virtues (Baḥr al-Favā’id), a 12th-century mirror for princes (Salt Lake City, 1991); and Nizami Ganjavi’s Haft Paykar (Oxford, 1995). Her most recent research involves several ma- jor projects: a verse translation of Nizami’s Khosrow and Shirin; depictions of Majnun in illustrated Persian manuscripts (a paper xv Persian Historiography on which was presented to the Cordoba symposium on colors in I slamic art, and will be published in the Proceedings); a reevalua- tion of the so-called “Gazelle Mosaic” at Khirbat al-Mafjar; and an exploration of writings on love in Persian literature. Charles Melville is Professor of Persian History at the University of Cambridge. He has been a long-serving member of the Council of the British Institute of Persian Studies and has also served on the Board of the Societas Iranologica Europaea (1995–2003). Since 1999, he has been Director of the Shahnama Project, and since 2006 he has been President of The Islamic Manuscript Associa- tion (TIMA), both based in Cambridge. His main research inter- ests are in the history and culture of Iran in the Mongol to Safavid periods and the illustration of Persian manuscripts. In addition to numerous articles on Il-Khanid history and Persian historiogra- phy, recent publications include edited volumes of Safavid Persia (1996); Shahnama Studies (2006); and “Millennium of the Shah- nama of Firdausi” (Iranian Studies, 2010, with Firuza Abdullaeva); The Persian Book of Kings. Ibrahim Sultan’s Shahnama (2008, also with Firuza Abdullaeva) and Epic of the Kings. The Art of Fer- dowsi’s Shahnameh (2010, with Barbara Brend). Sholeh A. Quinn is Associate Professor of History at the Univer- sity of California, Merced. Her scholarly interests include the his- tory of Safavid Iran and Persianate historical writing in the early modern period. She is the author of Historical Writing during the Reign of Shah ‘Abbas: Ideology, Imitation, and Legitimacy in Safa- vid Chronicles (2000). She co-edited, with Judith Pfeiffer, History and Historiography of Post-Mongol Central Asia and the Middle East: Studies in Honor of John E. Woods (2006). She has also pub- lished several articles on aspects of Safavid and Persian historiog- raphy. She has served as Council member for the International So- ciety for Iranian Studies (2005–2007), and is currently a member of its Committee for Intellectual and Academic Freedom. Dr. Ernest Tucker has taught in the history department at the U.S. Naval Academy since 1990. His dissertation at the University xvi Contributors of Chicago studied the impact of Nâder Shah on Middle Eastern and South Asian history. He published a monograph on this top- ic in 2006. He is also co-author of a volume on the 19th-century Russian-Muslim conflict in the Caucasus region, published in 2004. His textbook, The Middle East in Modern World History, will be published next year by Pearson/Prentice-Hall. Tucker has led sev- eral groups to the Middle East. He was twice a Fulbright Scholar in Turkey, most recently in 2005–2006 to investigate the history of the Ottoman Red Crescent Society. The latter topic remains his current research focus, and he is writing a subsequent monograph on the Society, as a window on the period of transition between the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic. Sara Nur Yıldız wrote this chapter during her post-doctoral fel- lowship at the Orient-Institut Istanbul while on research leave from the history department of Istanbul Bilgi University. A historian of medieval and early Ottoman Anatolia, with interests in empire- building and frontier politics, political culture and historical writ- ing, she received her Ph.D from the Department of Near Eastern Languages at the University of Chicago in 2006. She is complet- ing a monograph based on her doctoral dissertation, Mongol Rule in Seljuk Anatolia: The Politics of Conquest and History Writing, 1243–1282, as well as working on a general study of Seljuk Anato- lia, The Seljuks of Anatolia: A Muslim Empire on the Frontier. xvii Foreword In the 1990s, I gradually became convinced that the time had come for a new, comprehensive, and detailed history of Persian literature, given its stature and significance as the single most important ac- complishment of the Iranian peoples. Hermann Ethé’s pioneering survey of the subject, “Neupersische Litteratur” in Grundriss der iranischen Philologie II, was published in 1904, and E. G. Browne’s far more extensive A Literary History of Persia, with ample dis- cussion of the political and cultural background of each period, appeared in four successive volumes between 1902 and 1924. The English translation of Jan Rypka’s History of Iranian Literature, written in collaboration with a number of other scholars, came out in 1968 under his own supervision. Iranian scholars have also made a number of significant contri- butions throughout the 20th century to different aspects of Persian literary history. These include B. Foruzânfar’s Sokhan va sokhan varân (On Poetry and Poets, 1929–33); M.-T. Bahâr’s Sabk-shenâsi (Varieties of Style in Prose) in three volumes (1942); and a number of monographs on individual poets and writers. The truly monu- mental achievement of the century in this context was Dh. Safâ’s wide-ranging and meticulously researched Târikh-e adabiyyât dar Irân (History of Literature in Iran) in five volumes and eight parts (1953–79). It studies Persian poetry and prose in the context of their political, social, religious, and cultural background, from the rise of Islam to almost the middle of the 18th century. Nevertheless, it cannot be said that Persian literature has received the attention it merits, bearing in mind that it has been the jewel in the crown of Persian culture in its widest sense and the stan- dard bearer for aesthetic and cultural norms of the literature of the eastern regions of the Islamic world from about the 12th century; and that it has profoundly influenced the literatures of Ottoman xix Persian Historiography urkey, Muslim India and Turkic Central Asia—a literary corpus T that could inspire Goethe, Emerson, Matthew Arnold, and Jorge Luis Borges among others, and was praised by William Jones, Tag- ore, E. M. Forster, and many others. Persian literature remained a model for the literatures of the above regions until the 19th century, when the European influence began effectively to challenge the Persian literary and cultural influence, and succeeded in replacing it. Whereas Persian art and architecture, and more recently Persian films, have been written about extensively and at different levels, for a varied audience, Persian literature has largely remained the exclusive domain of specialists. It is only in the past few years that the poems of Rumi have drawn to themselves the kind of popular attention enjoyed by Omar Khayyam in the 19th century. A History of Persian Literature (HPL) was conceived as a com- prehensive and richly documented work, with illustrative examples and a fresh critical approach, written by prominent scholars in the field. An Editorial Board was selected and a meeting of the Board arranged in September 1995 in Cambridge, UK, in conjunction with the gathering that year of the Societas Europaea Iranologica, where the broad outlines of the editorial policy were drawn up. Fourteen volumes were initially envisaged to cover the subject, including two Companion Volumes. Later, two additional vol- umes devoted to Persian prose from outside Iran (the Indian sub- continent, Anatolia, Central Asia) and historiography, respectively, were added. The titles of the volumes are listed in the beginning of this volume. Of the Companion Volumes, the first deals with pre- Islamic Iranian literatures, and the second with the literature of Iranian languages other than Persian, as well as Persian and Tajik oral folk literature. It is hoped that the multi-volume HPL will provide adequate space for the analysis and treatment of all aspects of Persian literature. The inclusion of a volume on Persian historiography is justified by the fact that Persian histories, like the biographical accounts of mystics or poets, often exploit the same stylistic and literary features and the same kinds of figures of speech that one encoun- ters in Persian poetry and belles-lettres, with skilful use of bal- xx Foreword anced cadences, rhyme, varieties of metaphor and hyperbole, and an abundance of embellishing devices. This was considered to im- part a literary dimension to the prose, enhance its esthetic effect, and impress the reader with the literary prowess of the author. The study of Persian historiography should therefore be regarded as a component of any comprehensive study of Persian literary prose and the analysis of its changing styles and contours. Moreover, in pre-modern times, “literature” was defined more broadly than it is today and often included historiography. As is evident from the title of the volumes, A History of Persian Literature’s approach is neither uniformly chronological nor en- tirely thematic. Developments occur in time and to understand a literary genre requires tracing its course chronologically. On the other hand, images, themes, and motifs have lives of their own, and need to be studied not only diachronically but also synchronically, regardless of the time element. A combination of the two methods has therefore been employed to achieve a better overall treatment. Generous space has been given to modern poetry, fiction, and drama in order to place them in the wider context of Persian liter- ary studies and criticism. About the present volume The two major literary histories of Persia written in the last cen- tury, in English by Edward G. Browne, and in Persian by Zabih ollâh Safâ, are commendably comprehensive in their broad vision. Rather than focusing on a narrow definition of literature and de- voting their pages solely to the biographies of poets and prose writers and an analysis of their work, they included chapters de- picting different historical eras with wide brush-strokes, placing Persian literature firmly in the context of the turbulent history of Persian speaking lands. Their work can be summed up as cultural histories in which alternating chapters on writers and their time offer a narrative of the interplay between history and literature through centuries. xxi Persian Historiography However, as Julie Meisami and Charles Melville explain in de- tail in their respective chapters, the very concepts of literature and history have been the topic of much debate in the past decades. The study of the cross-fertilization of the two disciplines has opened up new approaches. Interdisciplinary studies on the notions of power, patronage and transmission of knowledge, as well as, clos- er to home, the publication of editions of many Persian historical manuscripts in recent years, necessitate a timely reevaluation of the available material, and a closer look at its literary underpinnings. The evolving nature of the social classes and the formative edu- cation of historians and other writers is a case in point. Persian historians very often rose from scribal ranks. The profession re- quired a solid training in Arabic and in Islamic humanities; and its members were well versed in the use of rhetorical devices, which at times they exploited to excess. Persian histories are seldom straight narrations of events; more often they are also an exercise in artistry of expression; frequently citing verses from the Qor’an and pro- phetic traditions (Hadith) to display their erudition and buttress their authority. As in the West, where Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Buffon’s writings on natural history have long been admired and commented upon as much for their style as for their substance, in Iran too, style and the manner in which the past is invoked have been equally important. Abu’l-Fazl Beyhaqi’s deployment of dramatic techniques and frequent juxta- position of exempla from the past with events he had himself wit- nessed, or Atâ-Malek Joveyni’s Târikh-e Jahângoshâ, where the chaos and cruelty of the age appear, in a closer reading, even more brutal when retold in the restrained manner of an erudite histo- rian steeped in an ancient and sophisticated culture, are masterly works of human imagination, and hence literature in its widest sense. On behalf of Charles Melville, the Editor of the volume, and my- self as the General Editor, I would like to express our profound gratitude to Mohsen Ashtiany for his valuable suggestions and comments on the earlier drafts of the volume. xxii Foreword This volume is dedicated to the memory of my old colleague and dear friend Iraj Afshar, a noted historian and biographer, and an outstanding bibliographer. I greatly benefited from his vast knowl- edge of Iranian Studies. He published a considerable number of historical texts, medieval and modern, some of them, such as the diary of Eʿtemâd al-Saltane (ruznâme-ye khâterât) are of utmost importance. The frequency with which his name appears through- out this volume, in the text as well as in the footnotes, bears wit- ness to his unique and wide-ranging contribution to Iranian cul- ture and history. He wrote a number of significant contributions for the Encyclo- paedia Iranica as well as two fine chapters for the first volume in these series, on “Printing and Publishing” and on “Libraries and Librarianship.” Ehsan Yarshater General Editor xxiii Introduction Charles Melville It would be a wearisome and unprofitable task to enumerate the many Persian historical works composed during the last four centu- ries. (E.G. Browne, A Literary History of Persia, IV, p. 444) If an ignorant critic […] objects that the majority of chronicles are the inventions, [dubious] subjects and myths of the ancients, mixing truth with falsehood, emaciation with corpulence, and right with wrong […], his misgivings can be refuted by this, that the Imams of the past and the great men of later times erected the building of this science [history] on truth and veracity. It is impossible that such men took calumny and lying as their standard, and would dare to pass down forgeries and fictions. Ev- erything continuously handed down by them will of course be preserved from defect and deficiency. […] And if (God forbid!)—we are resigned to fate—some stories of the chronicles are fictitious, their profitable con- tents can be taken into account, such as the stories of Kalile va Demne and others. Although they are fabrications, which neither the authors nor the listeners believe ever actually happened, they provide incalculable profits and advantages. (Mirkhwând, Rowzat-al-safâ, pp. 14–15) Obviously, few events in medieval society were as transparent as the chroniclers’ narratives suggested. Indeed, the very simplicity of the chronicle’s representation of contemporary reality alerts us to its ide- ological function. (Gabrielle Spiegel, Romancing the Past, p. 222) 1. Some Preliminary Observations The decision to include a volume on historiography in A History of Persian Literature might not seem entirely obvious. The writ- ing of ‘history’ might be regarded as a ‘science’ and indeed has xxv Persian Historiography been approached as such in some of the discussion surrounding the nature of history, focusing on the ideal of an objective and dispas- sionate presentation of ‘facts,’ and even deriving from them basic ‘laws.’ History is usually designated by Muslim writers as elm-e târikh, the standard translation of which would be ‘the science of history,’ or at least ‘the study of history,’ implying an academic or scholarly pursuit, although the place of history among the Islamic sciences has been somewhat ambiguous.1 As a disinterested record of ‘events,’ it is true, the most basic form of chronicle, such as originated in the medieval West in the Easter Tables or calendars of saints’ days—on which other occur- rences might be noted—could hardly be classified as ‘literature,’ any more than notes in a family Bible of details of personal impor- tance, such as the birth of children, or local disasters. A celebrated text such as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (dating in its final form to ca. 1154) contains sequences of statements like: 607. In this year Ceowulf fought the South Saxons. 611. In this year Cynegils succeeded to the kingdom in Wessex and ruled 31 years. 614. In this year Cynegils and Cwichelm fought at Beandum, and slew 2,065 Welsh. These chronicles surely have no pretension to being a ‘literary’ composition, though later periods receive a fuller coverage and certainly cannot be considered artless.2 In the Middle Eastern context, an equivalent of these rudimen- tary records were the Babylonian king-lists, noting various events that took place ordered according to the year of the reign.3 This aspect of recording events, both past and present, has had a long history, from the earliest examples of annalistic writing in 1 For starting points, e.g. E. H. Carr, What is History? 2nd ed. (London, 1987), ch. 3, ‘History, science, and morality;’ Hayden White, “The burden of his- tory,” in idem, Tropics of Discourse. Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, 1978), pp. 27–50; and F. Rosenthal, A History of Muslim Historiography (Leiden, 1968), esp. pp. 30–53. 2 The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, tr. G. N. Garmonsway, 2nd ed. (London, 1972), p. 23 (from the Laud Chronicle). 3 Jean-Jacques Glassner, Mesopotamian Chronicles (Atlanta, 2004), e.g. pp. 17, 37–8. xxvi Introduction Persian, such as passages by Ebn-Fondoq (d. 1169), to a work like Mohammad-Hasan Khan Sani’-al-Dowle’s Montazam-e Nâseri (1883) which gave way—or marked the transition to—official pub- lications of annual facts and figures, the Sâlnâmes or Yearbooks.4 What historians would give now, to have such information available for any year or series of years in the medieval period! But would they include such documents in a literary history, and indeed, are government Yearbooks now discussed as examples of modern literature? Yet in fact, there is rather little of this annalistic treatment of history in the Persian case, and even when a chronicle is structured wholly or in part on an annalistic basis, a strong narrative element usually predominates (one feature that distinguishes Persian his- torical writing from most Arabic works). In the case of European historiographical studies, this distinction is reflected in the sub- stantial body of discussion about the difference between a chroni- cler and an historian, or a ‘chronicle’ and a ‘history,’ only partly depending on the title given to the works in question at the time of composition, and implicating also the somewhat unsatisfacto- ry concept of a distinction between the mere recording of events (facts) and their interpretation: unsatisfactory, because the two are not so easily separated.5 The variety and fluidity of the formal as- pects of Persian historiography, from the outset, anyway makes it unnecessary to pursue such generic distinctions here. Nevertheless, there is also a certain ambiguity in the term ‘his- tory’ itself, denoting as it does both the past and the academic study of the past, as well as the recording of events. The same is so with the Arabic term employed also in Persian: ta’rikh > târikh, the ba- sic meaning of which is ‘date’ or ‘era.’ The historian (movarrekh, târikh-nevis) can be both a student of history and a chronicler of contemporary life.6 The two activities are different and require dif- ferent skills, though both imply the need for access to sources of 4 See Chapter 7. 5 See also below. 6 Rosenthal, Muslim Historiography, pp. 11–17, for a brief semantic history of ta’rikh. The commonly used term for historian and historiography, târikh- negâr(i), is of recent origin. xxvii Persian Historiography information, and neither is immune from subjectivity in the choice of what to record, or how to determine what is important and why. Modern English dictionary definitions of ‘history’ emphasize the past, yet what we value most in history writing is the record of the chronicler’s own times, that is, as a primary (first hand) source of history. The value we attach to the contemporary record of events has little or nothing to do with some perceived notion of the literary quality of the work. The dichotomy becomes particularly apparent when we move from the historiography of the past (e.g., the corpus of medieval and early modern chronicles), to the examination of modern historical writing, as is the case in the present volume. It is clear that Persian historiography of the 20th century is approached from a different vantage point (modern, mainly ‘Western’ notions of academic standards of historical research), reflecting of course the impact of Europe on this as many other aspects of Persian cul- ture from the 19th century onwards.7 The ‘literary’ or rhetorical aspects of the work of modern Iranian or Afghan historians are not regarded as relevant to their quality. To some extent, this is merely a parallel to the distinction between the study of history ‘proper’ and current affairs, or politics, which is still ‘history’ in the making. Such questions are as much about the nature of literature as the nature of history. The concept of ‘literature’ could equally be viewed as rather ambiguous. On the one hand, we can speak comfortably enough about the ‘scientific literature’ on a given sub- ject, or having got up to date with ‘the literature’—referring to the available documentation about the topic in question. On the other hand, the term implies writings that have artistic value or merit; one wouldn’t expect the Nobel Prize for Literature to go to the author of a Yearbook. The dictionary definitions exemplify these shades of meaning of the term literature, yet even if we eliminate the secondary senses of documentation, we are still left with the difficulty of questioning who decides on the artistic value or merit of a ‘literary’ work, and according to which criteria? As in the case of history, it takes a long-term perspective to identify what is last- 7 Iraj Afshar, “L’historiographie persane,” Luqmān 10/2 (1994), pp. 57–72. xxviii Introduction ing, or significant, in the greater scheme of things. Furthermore, as noted in the introductory volume of this series, there is in fact no term in Persian for ‘literature,’ the word adabiyyât (‘polite letters’) being a modern invention originating in Turkey.8 It is not the purpose of this Introductory chapter to embark on a lengthy debate on the nature of history or historical writ- ing, which has attracted so much attention elsewhere (though con- siderably less with respect to historical writing in Persian).9 Such a debate will perhaps not lead us very far, in the present context, and with so few secondary studies of individual historians to draw upon. No more will we attempt to explore the definitions of litera- ture itself. Any work such as this, however, devoted to the body of historical texts in the context of Persian literature, cannot avoid acknowledging that neither the concept of ‘history’ and ‘literature,’ nor the relationship between them, is as straightforward as a pas- sive acceptance of the terms might imply. This is particularly so in view of the application of literary critical theories to histori- cal texts, which has provoked such a debate in Western scholarly work in recent decades. The ‘deconstruction’ of historical writing, though aimed primarily at the modern discipline of history, neces- sarily implicates past authors also, although they had less trouble than contemporary historians in establishing the value of the study of the past, not as an end in itself, but as a way of providing perspectives on the present that contribute to the solu- tion of problems peculiar to [their] own time.10 The result is at least recognition that we need to regard the writing of history as more than the simple recording of ‘facts,’ and to read the historical texts as more than mere sources of information about past events.11 Indeed, the concept of the medieval chronicle as a 8 J. T. P. de Bruijn, in HPL I, pp. 2–3. 9 Marilyn Robinson Waldman, Toward a Theory of Historical Narrative (Columbus, Ohio, 1980), esp. pp. 6–19, gives some useful reflections on the topic. 10 Hayden White, “The burden of history,” p. 41. 11 J. S. Meisami, “History as literature,” Iranian Studies 33 (2000), esp. pp. 15–18; see also below, Chapter 1. xxix Persian Historiography literary artefact can be embraced wholeheartedly in the current e ndeavour, especially in the context of exploring the writing of his- tory, rather than the study of history itself.12 For our purposes, then, the question of definition has been ap- proached sufficiently in the first volume of this series in the chapter on ‘The History of Literature.’ Hanaway observes that Literary works were produced in an elevated register of language that was quite distinct from the language of everyday speech and popular literature. […] it follows that literature included almost ev- erything written that strove to make an aesthetic impression and was not of a narrowly scientific or technical nature.13 Although this formulation begs a few questions, it emphasises the crucial point that literary works are written products in a largely illiterate milieu, and draws attention to the use of ‘literary’ lan- guage. Although neither Hanaway nor de Bruijn are specifically concerned with historical literature, both refer to the fact that “lit- erature responded to, and upheld, traditional social and religious values,” (Hanaway) and that “writers and poets who participate in a [literary] tradition of this kind create their works, either con- sciously or unconsciously, according to a set of artistic norms” (de Bruijn).14 It is in this spirit, of regarding historical writing as part of the literary tradition of Persian culture, that historiography finds its rightful place in a volume in this series, echoing the fact that it is a chronicle, Bal’ami’s translation of Tabari’s History, that is almost the earliest surviving “monument of Persian prose.”15 12 Hayden White, “The historical text as literary artifact,” in Tropics of Dis- course, pp. 81–100. 13 W. Hanaway, in HPL I, pp. 72–73. 14 Hanaway, p. 73; de Bruijn, p. 1. 15 G. Lazard, La langue des plus anciens monuments de la prose persane (Paris, 1963), pp. 38–41. Cf. Zabihollâh Safâ, Ganjine-ye sokhan (5 vols., Tehran, 1974), for the same assumptions; Waldman, Toward a Theory, p. 16. xxx Introduction 2. The Writing of Persian History The history of Iran is rather a well-cultivated field, though some patches lie fallow for long periods. If the recent past is currently ploughed over the most often, previous formative eras, such as the rule of the Mongols, Safavids, or Qajars, continue to be nur- tured by individual scholars, and progress is steady, if slow, across the wide plains and jagged peaks of Persian history. Nevertheless, there is much still to accomplish if we are to do justice to the whole range of topics that arise from the detailed study of Iran’s rich and ancient past. One such topic is to consider what we know and how we know it. The ‘facts’ of Persian history have been recorded, or some of them at least, in ‘sources’ written close to the time of the events concerned (though this is not always an advantage). Few nowadays would imagine this to be a neutral process. Even supposing an abso- lute impartiality and desire to record ‘everything’ without discrim- ination, we might wonder how the historians of the past acquired their own knowledge of what was happening around them or had happened elsewhere. How would an author writing in 10th-century Khorasan be informed of events in Shiraz, or an historian in 14th- century Tabriz know what had happened in Yazd two hundred years earlier? Indeed, how might a writer in 18th-century Mashhad know what was happening in Mashhad itself, let alone elsewhere in Khorasan? Even more so, therefore, how can we ‘know what hap- pened,’ let alone ‘why’? It is clear that what we know and what we don’t know is the product of choices made much earlier, not neces- sarily impartially, and is shaped entirely by the way it is recorded. To borrow Joachim Knape’s lucid turn of phrase, “Whenever we interpret [the memorialized traces of the past] today, we interpret traces which have already been interpreted culturally.”16 Modern historians of Iran, still justifiably struggling to deter- mine the shape and order the events of the past from the sources available, have seldom paused to question seriously the basis of the 16 “Historiography as rhetoric,” in Erik Kooper, ed., The Medieval Chroni- cle II (Amsterdam and New York, 2002), pp. 117–18. xxxi Persian Historiography evidence they provide. As it happens, despite a voluminous pro- duction of historical literature, the nature of this evidence is rather restricted. As in medieval Europe, the main narrative sources of history are chronicles. This is a term that in its strictest applica- tion refers to simple telegraphic lists of events in chronological order, generally arranged in annals (and in practice admitting the possibility that no events are recorded for certain years, when we must conclude that ‘nothing happened’), but came also to cover more general histories—that is, works of connected argument or explanation of a completed period of time. The significance of the terms ‘chronicle,’ ‘annal,’ and ‘history’ (and other words used as titles for historical works), has generated a long discussion in Eu- ropean studies.17 This debate, however interesting, is fortunately of limited relevance to Persian historical writing, and not least because the single term târikh (Ar. ta’rikh)—like its equivalent in English—embraces the meaning both of ‘date’ or ‘chronology’ and the writing or study of history, and is reflected as such in the title of historical works. More importantly, in contrast with medieval Europe, not only did the production of chronicles continue, in a generally very con- servative manner, for much longer, but until the 15th century or so, they are also almost the only historical sources at our disposal. Missing are the archives, official documents, and records of the royal household, the church and the landed estates that contrib- ute so much additional information on government and society in Britain and elsewhere in Europe, from an early date. Apart from the varied evidence of coins, archaeology and inscriptions, there is little to supplement the information provided by the chroniclers, particularly for Iran (it is less true of Central Asia and India). This 17 Bernard Guenée, Histoire et culture historique dans l’Occident médiéval (Paris, 1980), esp. pp 203–7; idem, “Histoire et chronique: nouvelles re- flexions sur les genres historiques au Moyen Âge,” in D. Poirion, ed., La chronique et l’histoire au Moyen Âge (Paris, 1986), pp. 3–12. John Ward, “Memorializing dispute resolution in the twelfth century: Annal, history and chronicle at Vézelay,” in E. Kooper, ed., The Medieval Chronicle (Am- sterdam and Atlanta GA, 1999), pp. 269–84; David Dumville, “What is a chronicle?,” in Kooper, ed., Medieval Chronicle II, pp. 1–27. xxxii Introduction applies more or less equally to administrative, economic and social history. Thus the narrative sources occupy an even more central place in our knowledge of Iran’s past than their counterparts in the West—and for much longer. After around 1500, the chronicles can be supplemented by the accounts of foreign travellers and increas- ingly for later periods, records of benefactions to shrines (vaqfi- yyes) and collections of decrees (enshâʾ). Persian chronicles enjoyed a long heyday, from Abu-Ali Bal’ami’s Târikh-nâme and, one could argue, Abu’l-Qâsem Ferdowsi’s Shah- name in the 10th century, right down to annalistic compilations such as the Eyn-al-vaqâye’ of Mohammad Yusof Riyâzi (d. 1916). Al- though these works took a number of forms, and were often of very mixed contents, they demonstrate a remarkable continuity of outlook and emphasis. This is very largely due to the fact that the constitution of Persian government and society (that is, the context in which they were written) remained along traditional lines, despite major political upheavals, till the full impact of the West was felt in the course of the 19th century. This society, it is hardly necessary to recall, was pre- dominantly rural, pastoral and illiterate, with widely scattered ur- ban centers of cultural and economic activity, dominated by princely courts and their bureaucratic personnel. Provincial and imperial courts alike were controlled by autocratic rulers and their military forces. It was on such patrons that the historians chiefly depended, and with their activities that they chiefly occupied themselves. This volume on Persian historiography is thus concerned with the writing of history in Persian, by authors whose aim was to re- cord and narrate the events of the past and of their own times. As we shall see, the ‘events’ are understood to be the public affairs of state, as part of the history of the Islamic community in general, or of a particular dynasty, ruler, city or province. The volume covers the lifetime of the ‘chronicle,’ that is until this traditional genre of historical literature gave way to more ‘scientific’ forms, closer to the models of Western scholarship, around the start the 20th cen- tury. The final chapters chart the rise and progress of this modern historical writing, thus allowing a more complete and up-to-date survey of Persian historiography and highlighting contrasts and continuities between older and more recent methods. xxxiii Persian Historiography Although historical information can, of course, be retrieved from a number of different types of work, this volume is not intended pri- marily as a survey of the sources available for the study of Persian history. The main area of writing omitted here is biography, un- less (as is often the case) biographical sections are included in more general historical works.18 Hagiography, whether the life of an indi- vidual saint or of a whole class of holy figures, is only mentioned in passing, as the main impulse for writing such works was evidently different from that of the chroniclers, though this relationship de- serves closer scrutiny, as it has recently received elsewhere.19 Nor do we include geography books in this volume, but several historians also wrote geographies, and geographical awareness is an important dimension of historical writing (see especially Chapters 4 and 7). As biography and geography are both close to the particular form of local history writing, an important part of the Persian corpus of historiography, they are not lost entirely from view. However, neither has it been possible to give systematic attention to other forms of historically useful texts, such as travelogues, partly on the grounds of space but also because travel literature is a distinct liter- ary genre, together with the diary and autobiography, which share some obvious features. Among other works that purvey historical information (or purport to do so), we may mention ‘Mirrors for Princes,’ a type of writing particularly associated with Persian wis- dom (andarz) literature and the role of which was essentially taken over by the chroniclers themselves after the Saljuq period. Finally, the volume seeks to address the writing of history in Persian, not just within Iran and its larger historical borders, but in neighbouring territories too. Once established as the official lan- guage of the bureaucracy and the vehicle par excellence for the cre- ation and transmission of high culture, Persian was written by choice in the courts of Central Asia, India and the Ottoman Empire and Persian works of history and other literature were emulated there. 18 A. K. S. Lambton, “Persian biographical literature,” in Bernard Lewis and P. M. Holt, eds., Historians of the Middle East (London, 1962), pp. 143–48. 19 Dominque Barthélemy, Chevaliers et miracles. La violence et le sacré dans la société féodale (Paris, 2004). For Iran, see Jürgen Paul, EIr, s.v. Hagio- graphic literature. xxxiv Introduction 3. Previous Work This volume was conceived several years ago, at a time when very little had been written about Persian historiography other than in the way of descriptive surveys.20 There was (and still is) hardly a monograph devoted to the work of a single Persian historian, in contrast, for instance, with several fine studies of the major chroni- clers of European history, such as Matthew Paris, Ranulf Higden, William of Tyre or Jean Froissart. Even the general surveys offer nothing to approach the magisterial work of Antonia Gransden, whose Historical Writing in England sets out a solid base for the further investigation of the different chronicles and the writers who produced them, from the 6th to the 16th century, and could not have been achieved without a very substantial body of earlier research, not to mention critical editions of most of the texts.21 By comparison, this volume was built on shallow but progres- sively deepening foundations, as its contributing authors have in many ways been obliged to stake out the ground for their chapters for themselves. Thus in the course of the long preparation of this volume, important books have appeared by Julie Meisami, Sholeh Quinn and Andrew Peacock.22 This is not to say, of course, that nothing had been done before, as a glance at the bibliography at the end of this book will show. Nevertheless, the treatment of ‘Muslim’ or ‘Islamic’ historical writing has tended to focus on Arabic works, and to be informed by a more or less dismissive attitude to Persian writing, perhaps consciously reflecting Biruni’s contemptuous view of the ‘night-time stories and fables’ of the Persians.23 20 See for example, Felix Tauer, “Persian learned literature from its beginnings up to the end of the 18th century,” in Karl Jahn, ed., Jan Rypka, History of Iranian Literature (Dordrecht, 1968), pp. 438–54. 21 Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England (2 vols., London, 1974, 1982). 22 Julie S. Meisami, Persian Historiography to the End of the Twelfth Century (Edinburgh, 1999); Sholeh A. Quinn, Historical Writing during the Reign of Shah ‘Abbas (Salt Lake City, 2000); A. C. S. Peacock, Medieval Islamic Histo- riography and Political Legitimacy. Bal‘amī’s Tārīkhnāma (London, 2007). 23 See J. S. Meisami, “Why write history in Persian? Historical writing in the Samanid period,” in Carole Hillenbrand, ed., Studies in Honour of Clifford Edmund Bosworth (2 vols., Leiden, 2000), p. 356. xxxv Persian Historiography Thus both H. A. R. Gibb and Franz Rosenthal, who wrote im- portant studies of historical literature in the Muslim world, largely ignored or downplayed the Persian contribution. Even much more recently, Chase Robinson’s attractive book, Islamic Historiography, quickly identifies itself, somewhat apologetically it is true, as con- cerned exclusively with Arabic historians, despite the illustration from a Persian chronicle used for the cover.24 That there is an un- deniable connection between Arabic and Persian writing, that the latter started only after the former had already achieved some ma- turity and was able to provide a working model, and that both are ultimately addressing the same task in chronicling the development of the Muslim community (omma), is not in doubt. It is also well known that much early Islamic historiography in Arabic was writ- ten by Iranians.25 Nevertheless, the Persian literature quickly be- came quite distinct and deserves a more thorough (not to say sym- pathetic) treatment than it had received before the appearance of Julie Meisami’s book. The only historians of any note to have con- sistently commanded attention are Rashid-al-Din (d. 1318), whose life and work was commemorated in various volumes in the 1970s, and Abu’l-Fazl Beyhaqi (d. ca. 1077), the subject of a pioneering study by Marilyn Waldman that took into account more sophisti- cated approaches to historical literature that had long animated the discussion of European historians.26 Ironically, both these authors are, in different ways, exceptional, and reveal the need for detailed studies of more run-of-the-mill historians. Many of the main Persian chronicles were introduced by E. G. Browne in his monumental A History of Persian Literature, and Browne also has the credit for publishing and supporting the publication of editions and translations of several key texts in the 24 H. A. R. Gibb, EI1, s.v. Ta’rikh; Franz Rosenthal, A History of Muslim His- toriography (Leiden, 1968); Chase F. Robinson, Islamic Historiography (Cambridge, 2003), pp. xx–xxii. 25 C. Edmund Bosworth, “The Persian contribution to Islamic historiogra- phy in the pre-Mongol period,” in Richard G. Hovannisian and Georges Sabbah, eds., The Persian Presence in the Islamic World (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 223–30. 26 Toward a Theory of Historical Narrative (Columbus, 1980), pp. 3–25. xxxvi Introduction E. J. W. Gibb Memorial Series (such as Mostowfi’s Târikh-e goz- ide and Ebn-Esfandiyâr’s Târikh-e Tabarestân). Felix Tauer, who wrote so much invaluable textual criticism on the works of Hâfez-e Abru, contributed a brief and bald survey of historical writing in Jan Rypka’s History of Iranian Literature.27 These works served their purpose well at the time, but times have moved on, and with them concepts of the nature of investigation appropriate for study- ing historical writing. An earlier initiative should be mentioned, by Denise Aigle of the CNRS in Paris, in 1993, to form a research group to investigate ‘Comment les Iraniens écrivent l’histoire.’ The most concrete out- come of this was a special issue of Iranian Studies (volume 33/1–2, 2002) devoted to local histories. Most of the contributors to the present volume have collaborated in various combinations on pan- els at four successive meetings of the Society for Iranian Studies in Bethesda, from 1998 to 2004, at the Societas Iranologica Europaea conferences in Paris in 1999, and Ravenna in 2003, and at three ‘Medieval Chronicle’ conferences at Utrecht in 1999 and 2002, and Reading in 2005. The latter, in particular, were with a view to gain- ing valuable insights into the much more developed state of research on European historiography, observing parallels and contrasts with Persian historical writing and identifying fruitful lines of enquiry. At the same time, the various sections on ‘Historiography’ were being commissioned and produced for the Encyclopaedia Iranica, which gave several of the contributors to this volume the opportu- nity to survey the sources for their respective assignments. In both the Encyclopaedia and the History of Persian Literature, therefore, Professor Yarshater’s initiatives have provided not only a stimulus to research on Persian historical writing, but also the outlet for its publication, to the advantage of this somewhat neglected field.28 27 See above, n. 5. 28 EIr, s.v. Historiography. xxxvii Persian Historiography 4. The Scope of the Volume Apart from the chronological and geographical scope of the vol- ume, noted above, the authors have had a free hand in how they approach their chapters, which are conceived partly as a survey of the period, but equally as discrete essays on aspects of the histori- cal writing of different times, with a focus on the most important works. We have not attempted to conform to a standard formula requiring the same topics to be addressed in each case—not least because this would quickly lead to a very monotonous and re- petitive work, since the continuities between periods (as defined largely by political developments, such as dynastic change) are gen- erally much more marked than the differences. All authors have been encouraged not simply to produce a catalogue of books in the ‘literary history’ style, but to address various issues and themes as appropriate. Among these might be questions of genre, style and language; the context of the work, patronage, and audience; the authors’ theory of history, aim of writing, and use of sources; the organization and contents of the works; and their scope and their influence on later historians. In short, historical literature opens a window onto various aspects of Iranian intellectual life: not just a factual record of events, it provides an insight into mentalities, expectations, the transmission of knowledge and the political and social role of history in Persian culture. Constraints of space preclude a very developed exploration of most of these issues. Furthermore, such investigations remain a rel- atively straightforward approach to Persian historiography, which has been almost entirely unaffected by the deconstructionist and postmodernist debate that has so wracked and traumatised literary studies in Europe. Few of the contributing authors have taken a very theoretical position with regard to the texts they discuss, yet none has also been untouched by the critical perspectives opened up by these debates, even if only at a subconscious level. The per- ception that an historical text is both a record and a product of the past, shaped by the very social realities that it attempts to portray, is hardly a novel one. It has become impossible to discuss historio xxxviii Introduction graphy without taking account of the historians’ use of the past and their complex relationship with the present. Gabrielle Spiegel, who has weathered the postmodernist storm better than many, re- marks that the historian of texts is a ‘writer’ in his or her function of compos- ing the historical narrative, but a ‘reader’ of the already materially extant text. The task facing one is broadly constructive, the other broadly deconstructive, and it is not hard to understand why few literary critics or historians of texts have given equal attention to both undertakings.29 In recognizing the medieval chronicle as a literary artefact, within a volume dedicated to the history of Persian literature, the con- tributors are in the fortunate position of not having to attempt to reconstruct the history of the past from the texts they are dissect- ing (although they may have done so elsewhere). Nevertheless, the obvious conceptual dilemma remains, in relating the literary text to its historical context, when what we know of the latter is what the former tells us. It would be unreasonable to expect this volume to resolve the problem of an adequate epistemology for history, the “semiotic challenge” that Spiegel herself regards as “simply unsolvable.”30 That would require a far closer engagement with individual texts than has been undertaken previously, and a wholly new approach to the subject, which is not our task here. More realistically, it of- fers an account of the way Persian authors of the past set about recording their own history. These works are not chiefly consid- ered as sources of information, though as noted, their relationship to the events they record cannot be overlooked. It covers only a fraction of the output of Persian historical literature—the full ex- tent of which can more clearly be appreciated in the bibliographical handbooks of Charles Storey, Yuri Bregel and Ahmad Monzavi, 29 Romancing the Past. The Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography in Thir- teenth-Century France (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1993), p. 9; idem, “Theory into practice: Reading medieval chronicles,” in Kooper, ed., The Medieval Chronicle, p. 9. 30 “Theory into practice,” p. 10. xxxix
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