Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Books
  3. Authority and Identity in Medieval Islamic Historiography
  • Cited by 14
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
August 2016
Print publication year:
2016
Online ISBN:
9781316411506
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316411506
Series:
Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization
Subjects:
Middle East Studies, Islam, Area Studies, History, Religion, Middle East History
Information

Book description

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.

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.'

Source: American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences

Refine List

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

Contents

Contents

Metrics

Altmetric attention score

Full text views

Total number of HTML views: 0
Total number of PDF views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

Book summary page views

Total views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

* Views captured on Cambridge Core between #date#. This data will be updated every 24 hours.

Usage data cannot currently be displayed.