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Refashioning Persianate Historiography in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Periods

In the late medieval and early modern period, Persianate historiography witnessed a large scale reevaluation and reorganization of earlier Islamicate historiographical models and genres. In this process, while the old forms were revised and refashioned, new genres were invented to reflect new views of the past. These new forms reflected a wider horizon, both genealogically and spatially, combining the Islamic, Turco-Mongol, and Iranian political and cultural contexts. Universal historiography acquired a refreshed prominence at the hands of such renowned historians as Rashid al-Din (d. 1318) and Hafiz-i Abru (d. 1430), and for the first time in Islamicate historiography, rulers became the subject of individual chronicles thanks to the creativity of such historians as ‘Ata’-Malik Juvayni (d. 1283) and Nizam al-Din Shami (d. ca. 1409). Furthermore, this period was also a time when the historical depth of communal self-perceptions was reflected in hagiographies and genealogies. It is indeed no coincidence that the Muslim intellectuals seriously reflected upon the vocation that is called history writing in a very serious manner for the first time in the late medieval period. The earliest works on historiography were composed in this period. Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406) and Muhammad Kafiyaji (d. 1474) are the most prominent names to be mentioned in this regard. The papers in our panel aim at discussing these transformations in the forms of historical writing under the backdrop of the overall political and intellectual developments in the late medieval and early modern periods. The panel suggests that the idea of patronage, which has dominated the study of historiography in the secondary scholarship in the 20th century, needs to be balanced with the studies emphasizing the intellectual autonomy and creativity of individual historians. Individual papers in the panel study the transformation of historical thought and the ways in which it was expressed and articulated in connection to the overall cultural, political, and intellectual developments, and trace the emergence of a new sense of individuality and intellectual personality in the late medieval and early modern periods.

Presentations

The Intellectual Self between the Mamluks and the Timurids: Ibn al-Jazari and His Autobiographical Writings
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Almost twenty-five years ago, Stephen Dale hailed Zahir al-Din Muhammad Babur’s Baburnama as a singular example of the rise of humanism in the early modern Islamic world. In his autobiography, Dale observed, Babur not only provided an intimate account of his own life, achievements, and in some cases failures, he also gave life, individuality, and character to his contemporaries. In this paper, I will discuss the autobiographical writings of a much earlier figure, Ibn al-Jazari, whose eminence and fame as a scholar of the Qur’an recitation continued until today. A native of Damascus, Ibn al-Jazari achieved prominence and attained high office in the Mamluk sultanate, but eventually, sometime in 1396, he escaped to the Ottoman lands after he was accused of embezzling the revenues of a waqf that he was involved in administering. After serving the Ottoman sultan Bayezid I for some six years, he entered Timurid service after the Battle of Ankara in 1402 and went to Transoxiana. After Timur’s death, he moved to Shiraz and continued his life there as the qadi of the city until his death in 1429. Ibn al-Jazari’s autobiography allows us to observe how an intellectual with a tainted reputation sailed so easily through three Muslim empires of the fifteenth century. While the intimate, yet often self-absorbed style that Ibn al-Jazari uses in describing himself highlights his own self-perception, his depictions in the three empires populate the fifteenth century intellectual life by giving them life beyond chronicles, biographical dictionaries, and hagiographies. Ibn al-Jazari’s use of historical references in his autobiography gives historical depth to his self-perception, and identity to his intellectual network.

The 15th Century Ottoman Reception of Rashīd al-Dīn’s Kitāb al-Sulṭāniyya
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Rashīd al Dīn (d. 718/1318) is well known as a historian – his Jāmiʿ al tavārīkh has been hailed as the first true world history ever written. Since Étienne de Quatremère’s first attempt in 1836, the entirety of the Jāmiʿ al tavārīkh has been edited, re-edited, translated, and studied by scholars almost without interruption.
His so-called theoretical works, by contrast, while treated in a comprehensive, albeit concise, survey by Josef van Ess more than three decades ago, are less well known. To date, they remain only partially published and poorly studied. While some modern historians of political history have mined Rashīd al Dīn’s theoretical works for the historical facts contained in them, the few historians of thought who have dedicated studies to them have mostly done so without much attention to their historical context or the vision expressed in them. As far as their reception history is concerned, these works have remained entirely unknown territory.
By zooming in on just one of Rashīd al Dīn’s theoretical works and its reception in the late 15th century Ottoman Empire, this paper discusses both the historical vision deployed in one of the theoretical works contained in his theological majmūʿa, and queries the ways in which we modern scholars have conceptualized ‘the historical’ and ‘the theological’ in our modern approach to such works, pleading for a more holistc, and contextual, reading – extending to and including their reception in later centuries.

History in the Making: Zayn Khwafi’s Tabaqat-i Baburi
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In this paper, I will discuss Zayn al-Din Khwafi’s Tabaqat-i Baburi as an exceptional window into the historian’s craft as practiced in the late Timurid period. Sometimes billed as a partial translation of Babur’s personal memoir, this work was composed by a literateur, bureaucrat, and member of a famous Sufi family who accompanied Babur from Kabul to Hindustan in 1525 CE. Although the work does follow the narrative order of Babur’s work (and cites the original Chaghatay Turkic on occasion), it is not a straightforward translation. Shaykh Zayn was himself present at the events he describes spanning the period 1525-27 and the work adds to Babur’s representations. Moreover, the author was thoroughly familiar with the Timurid historiographic tradition and is self-conscious about incorporating passages from earlier works such as Sharaf al-Din Yazdi’s Zafarnama to justify Babur’s claims as well as show him as a hero who surpassed the accomplishments of his forebears. Overall, a close reading of this work provides us a condensed view into matters such as translation across languages, the role of literary and historiographic precedents in the production of chronicles, and conventions regarding the relationship between human experience and its narration. The work is a remarkable venue for observing the past being made into an object of knowledge in Persianate societies and can guide us in broader explorations involving the production of chronicles in the late medieval to early modern period.

The Works of Badr al-Dīn Kashmīrī: Historicizing Hagiography in the 16th Century
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This paper examines the works of Badr al-Dīn Kashmīrī as examples of the new styles of hagiographical writing emerging in Central Asia during the 16th century. Though clearly linked with important developments in the organization and competitive activity of the Sufi communities that typically sponsored hagiographical production, the emergence of these new styles was also marked by the imprint of individual authors with a distinctive vision, and plan, for deploying their literary and intellectual talents. Such is the case with Badr al-Dīn Kashmīrī, who left his native land and came to Central Asia in the early 1560s, attaching himself to the famous ‘dynasty’ of Naqshbandī masters and landholders, the Jūybārī shaykhs of Bukhārā; he produced a substantial body of works, lauding his Jūybārī patrons as well as ʻAbdullāh Khān b. Iskandar, the monarch linked with them, and these works are distinctive for blurring, or ignoring, the boundaries between historical and hagiographical writings of earlier times. Chief among them are the Rawżat al-riżvān, a hagiography devoted to the Jūybārī shaykhs; the Sirāj al-ṣāliḥīn, the life of another saint linked initiatically with the Jūybārī house; and what appear two redactions (with shifting titles) of a still larger hagiographical compendium also focused on his Jūybārī masters and patrons. These works share the broader trend, evident in other hagiographies from this era, of devoting entire large works to individual Sufi leaders, but they are marked also by the distinctive historical consciousness of the author; he portrayed the saints he memorialized as figures intimately engaged with the political, economic, and social life of their times, bolstering his presentation not only with rich narrative material, but with a ‘documentary’ foundation as well. The paper will situate Badr al-Dīn’s works in the context of other hagiographies of this era that display some of the same features, and will highlight the elements, of structure and content, that distinguish his works from others.