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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2022
Persian authors couched claims to the religio-political authority and legitimacy of their cities through dream narratives in local histories written between the tenth and thirteenth centuries. Persians did not always fit neatly into genealogical claims to legitimacy like the Arab descendants of Muḥammad and his clan, and dreams form alternate avenues that sanctify and legitimate specific Persian cities and individuals. Dream narratives embedded in Tārīkh-i Bukhārā and Tārīkh-i Ṭabaristān are literary devices that bring the prestige of religious authority to their city and province and to specific persons. These dream narratives are not only windows into understanding the broader social, political, and religious contexts of local histories but also the particular anxieties and priorities of the authors.
1 Ismāʿīl Bukhārī, Muḥammad ibn, Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī (Vaduz, Liechtenstein, 2000), vol. 3, Kitāb 92 al-taʿbīr, Bāb 10, hadith 7080, p. 1415Google Scholar. On this hadith that dreams are part of prophecy, see Kister, M.J., “The Interpretation of Dreams: An Unknown Manuscript of Ibn Qutayba's “ʿIbārat al-Ruʾyā,” Israel Oriental Studies 4 (1974): 71Google Scholar; see also Lamoreaux, John C., The Early Muslim Tradition of Dream Interpretation (Albany, NY, 2002), 83Google Scholar.
2 Narshakhī describes Muḥammad as wearing a “kulāh-e safīd,” and kulāh is the general Persian term for a cap, though it could also more specifically mean a high or medium-high soft cap. The kulāh and the qalansuwa—a cap worn either under a turban or by itself—were both part of a typical medieval Persian costume. Both items are distinct from the turban (ʿimāma or dulband). EI2, “Libās”; “Tulband”; “Ḳalansuwa.”
3 The female camel is known as al-Qaswāʾ, al-Jadʿāʾ, or al-ʿAdbāʾ. Jarīr b. Yazīd al-Ṭabarī, Abū Jaʿfar Muḥammad b., The History of al-Ṭabarī, vol. IX : The Last Years of the Prophet, translated and annotated by Poonawala, Ismail K. (Albany, NY, 1990), 150–51Google Scholar.
4 See the works of C.E. Bosworth, A.K.S. Lambton, J. Paul, and C. Melville.
5 Melville, Charles, “Persian Local Histories: Views from the Wings,” Iranian Studies 33, no. 1/2 (Winter–Spring, 2000): 7–14Google Scholar.
6 Pioneering work by the late Albrecht Noth and recent contributions by Stefan Leder are characterized by their literary-critical methodology and drive to distinguish what is ostensibly fact from fiction in medieval Islamic historical writing by paying close attention to literary devices, including topoi and schema, to identify fictive or unreliable portions of narrative.
7 Lamoreaux, Early Muslim Tradition of Dream Interpretation; Marlow, Louise, ed., Dreaming Across Boundaries: The Interpretation of Dreams in Islamic Lands (Boston, MA, 2008)Google Scholar; Felek, Ozgen and Knysh, Alexander, eds., Dreams and Visions in Islamic Societies (Albany, NY, 2012)Google Scholar.
8 Melville, Charles, “The Caspian Provinces: A World Apart Three Local Histories of Mazandaran,” Iranian Studies 33, no. 1/2 (Winter–Spring, 2000): 45–91Google Scholar.
9 Operating from a related premise that al-Ṭabarī's (d. 310/923) medieval chronicles, including the various dream narratives embedded within them, should be read as unified narratives, El-Hibri reads the texts as incorporating commentary—as opposed to pure reportage—about the events that transpired. See El-Hibri, Tayeb, Parable and Politics in Early Islamic History: The Rashidun Caliphs (New York, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; El-Hibri, , Reinterpreting Islamic Historiography: Hārūn al-Rashīd and the Narrative of the ‘Abbasid Caliphate (Cambridge, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Cooperson rightly notes that “dream-stories concede from the outset that they can never be verified. Having solicited a judgment based on a lower standard, they place themselves beyond (or below) dispute. A story about seeing al-Khidr in sleep is therefore acceptable … while a claim to have seen him in reality is not.” Cooperson, Michael, “Probability, Plausibility, and ‘Spiritual Communication’ in Classical Arabic Biography,” in On Fiction and Adab in Medieval Arabic Literature, ed. Kennedy, Phillip F. (Wiesbaden, 2005), 73Google Scholar.
11 See Mohammad Mahallati, “The Significance of Dreams,” in Dreaming Across Boundaries (see note 7), 156.
12 Sholeh Quinn, “The Dreams of Shaykh Safī al-Dīn in Late Safavid Chronicles,” in Dreaming Across Boundaries (see note 7), 222.
13 Moin, A. Azfar, “Partisan Dreams and Prophetic Visions: Shīʿī Critique in al-Masʿūdī's History of the Abbasids,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 127, no. 4 (Oct–ober–December 2007): 415Google Scholar. This is not to say that scholars have turned a blind eye to dreams and their uses. An early example is the collection of essays in Grunebaum, G.E. von and Caillois, Roger, eds., The Dream and Human Societies (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 1966)Google Scholar.
14 Kinberg, Leah, “Literal Dreams and Prophetic Hadith in Classical Islam—A Comparison of Two Ways of Legitimation,” Der Islam 70, no. 2 (1993): 288Google Scholar.
15 On dreams and saints, see Renard, John, Friends of God: Islamic Images of Piety, Commitment, and Servanthood (Berkeley, CA, 2008)Google Scholar, esp. chap. 3.
16 Kinberg, Leah, “The Individual's Experience as it applies to the Community: An Examination of Six Dream Narrations Dealing with the Islamic Understanding of Death,” al-Qantara 21 (2000): 425–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
17 It is the composite nature of how akhbār reports are used and incorporated into broader narratives that make these akhbār reports so malleable. Stefan Leder, “The Use of Composite Form in the Making of the Islamic Historical Tradition” in On Fiction and Adab (see note 10), 125–48.
18 Hoyland, Robert G., “History, Fiction, and Authorship in the First Centuries of Islam,” in Writing and Representation in Medieval Islam: Muslim Horizons, ed. Bray, Julia (London, 2006), 21–2Google Scholar.
19 Julie Meisami, “Masʿūdī and the Reign of al-Amīn: Narrative and Meaning in Medieval Muslim Historiography,” in Fiction and Adab (see note 10), 152.
20 Both Kinberg and Kister address the various interpretations and uses of dreams, and both have documented the use of dreams as a tool to confirm the veracity of a hadith.
21 In the Sira of the Prophet, al-Zuhrī reports on the authority of ʿUrwa b. Zubayr that one of the first signs of prophethood that Muḥammad received from God were “true visions, resembling the brightness of daybreak, which were shown to him in his sleep.” Ibn Hishām, ʿAbd al-Malik (d. 834), The Life of Muhammad; A Translation of Isḥāq's Sīrat rasūl Allah, Translated, with Introduction and Notes by A. Guillaume (Lahore, 1967), 105Google Scholar.
22 Ibn Hishām, The Life of Muhammad, 106.
23 Variant traditions place dreams as 1/90, 1/70, 1/50, 1/44, 1/60, 1/49, 1/44, 1/45, 1/24, 1/25, 1/76, 1/40 1/46, 1/76, 1/26 part of prophecy. Kister, “Interpretation of Dreams,” 71.
24 For a discussion of this tradition, see Kinberg, “Literal Dreams.”
25 al-Bukhārī, Saḥīḥ, Kitāb 92 al-ta‘bīr, Bāb 10, hadith 7079, pp. 1415. Alternate interpretations suggest that if this hadith refers to contemporaries of the Prophet who have not emigrated to Medina, then they will see the Prophet in Medina, and that if it refers to generations after the Prophet they will see him in the next world.ʿAbd Allāh Khaṭīb al-Tibrīzī, Muḥammad ibn (fl. 1337), Mishkāt al-Masābīh; English Translation with Explanatory Notes by James Robson (Lahore, 1975), Book XXIII (Visions), Chapter 1, p. 962Google Scholar.
26 Kister, “Interpretation of Dreams,” 73–4.
27 ʿĪsā Tirmidhī, Muḥammad ibn, Sunan al-Tirmidhī (Vaduz, Liechtenstein, 2000), vol. 2, Kitāb 30 al-ruʾyā, Bāb 8, hadith 2452, p. 587Google Scholar. Such prohibitions also appear in the other canonical collections. See Wensinck, A.J., Concordance et Indices de la Tradition Musulmane (Leiden, 1936–88), I: 504Google Scholar (h.l.m.) and V: 549 (k.dh.b.).
28 al-Bukhārī, Saḥīḥ, vol. 1, Kitāb 3 al-ʿilm, Bāb 38, hadith 110, pp. 29–30.
29 Muḥammad ibn Yazīd Ibn Mājāh, Sunan Ibn Mājāh (Vaduz, Liechtenstein, 2000), Kitāb 36 taʿbīr al-ruʾyā, Bāb 5, hadith 4045, p. 562. Muslim's Ṣaḥīḥ includes various hadith in which the Prophet states that one should not tell others of bad dreams, which are the caused by Satan. Muslim, Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, Kitāb 43 al-ruʾyā, Bāb 3, p. 980. The term “aḍghāth aḥlām” appears in Q 12: 44 and Q 21: 5.
30 Multiple manuscripts of Tārīkh-i Ṭabaristān have been incorporated into Iqbāl and Browne's respective editions. Of the four main and two supplementary manuscripts that Browne used in his abridged translation 1905, all date from the eleventh to thirteenth century. Iqbāl based his 1941 Persian edition primarily on two manuscripts, one from the tenth century and another from the eleventh century.
31 ibn Ḥasan ibn Isfandiyār, Bahā al-Dīn Muḥammad, Abridged Translation of the History of Tabaristān Compiled about A.H. 613 (A.D. 1216) by Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan b. Isfandiyār, Based on the India Office Ms. Compared with Two Mss. in The British Museum, by Edward G. Browne (Leiden and London, 1905), 3–4Google Scholar.
32 Isfandiyār, Ibn, Tārīkh-i Ṭabaristān, ed. Iqbāl, ʿAbbās, 2 vols. (Tehran, 1941), 1: 165Google Scholar. See also Browne, Translation, 109.
33 Ibid.
34 P.M. Cobb, “ʿUmar (Ii) b.ʿAbdal-ʿAzīz,” EI2.
35 Isfandiyār, Ibn, Tabaristān, 1: 164Google Scholar; Browne, Translation, 108.
36 Isfandiyār, Ibn, Tabaristān, 1: 165Google Scholar; Browne, Translation, 109.
37 Newman, Andrew, The Formative Period of Twelver Shiʿism: Hadith as Discourse Between Qum and Baghdad (Richmond, 2000), 35Google Scholar.
38 M.S. Khan traces the beginning of Alid claimants taking refuge in Daylaman to Yaḥyā b. ʿAbd Allāh b. Ḥasan, a great-grandson of al-Ḥasan b. ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib, who took refuge in Daylaman in 175/791 to escape Abbasid persecution after two of his brothers were executed. More Alid sayyids migrated to Tabaristan in the mid to late second/eighth century from the Hijaz, Syria, and Iraq. Khan argues that Alid rulership in Tabaristan was critical to spreading the Zaydī madhhab in the south Caspian regions and that Zaydism was already introduced in the South Caspian by the mid ninth century. Khan, M.S., “The Early History of Zaydī Shīʿīsm in Daylamān and Gīlān,” in Mélanges offerts à Henry Corbin, ed. Hossein Nasr, Seyyed (Tehran, 1977), 257–60, 263, 264Google Scholar.
39 Abū Hātim converted Asfār b. Shirawahy (d. 319/931) to Ismāʿīlīsm. Abū Hātim also converted Mardāwīj b. Ziyār (d. 323/935), who rebelled against Asfār b. Shirawahy and then founded the Ziyarid state with his capital at Rayy. Daftary, Farhad, Ismāʿīlīs: Their History and Doctrines (Cambridge, 1990), 120–21, 165Google Scholar.
40 During this period the Nizari Ismāʿīlīs (or Eastern Ismāʿīlīs), led by Ḥasan-i Sabbāḥ (d. 518/1124), established themselves in the Caspian region and “founded a vigorous state,” with its center located in the mountain fortress of Alamūt in the Caspian region, but the Nizārī state collapsed in the mid seventh/thirteenth century. After about a century of underground developments, Ismāʿīlī movement clearly appeared after the middle of the third/ninth century. Daftary, Ismāʿīlīs, 2, 105.
41 On the Alid influence and Caspian Zaydī community in the region, see Madelung, Wilferd, “Abū Isḥāq al-Ṣābī on the Alids of Tabaristān and Gīlān,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 26, no. 1 (January 1967): 17–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the geography of the Tabaristan region, see LeStrange, G.E., The Lands of the Eastern Caliphate: Mesopotamia, Persia, and Central Asia, From the Moslem Conquest to the Time of Timur (Cambridge, 1930), 7, 173, 175, 368–76Google Scholar.
42 C.E. Bosworth, “KhWĀrazm,” EI2.
43 The Qārinid prince Wandād-Hurmuzd, along with the Ispahbad Sharwīn the Bāwandid, revolted against the caliph's armies in 165/781. The armed confrontation began during the reign of the third Abbasid caliph Muḥammad ibn Manṣūr al-Mahdī (r. 158–169/775–85) and continued, as we see in this story, through and even after the reign of Harūn al-Rashīd (r. 170–93/786–809). Ibn Isfandiyār recounts that the unruly people of Tabaristan, galvanized and organized by Qārinid prince Wandād-Hurmuzd and his ally in this venture, Sharwīn Bāwand, revolted against the caliph's forces and killed his governors. Isfandiyār, Ibn, Tabaristān, 1: 196Google Scholar; Browne, Translation, 140–41.
44 Ṭabarī (d. 923), The History of al-Ṭabarī vol. XXX, 174–5.
45 ibn Jaʿfar Narshakhī, Abū Bakr Muḥammad, The History of Bukhara, translated from a Persian abridgement of the Arabic original by Narshakhī, , ed. and trans. Frye, Richard N. (Cambridge, MA, 1954), xiiGoogle Scholar.
46 The dāʿī credited with this is Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Nasafī (or al-Nakhshabī). He was executed by Nūḥ ibn Naṣr in Bukhara in 332/943 soon after Nūḥ became Amir following his father's death. Daftary, Ismā‘īlīs, 122–3.
47 Treadwell, Luke, “Shāhānshāh and al-Malik al-Muʾayyad: The Legitimation of Power in Sāmānid and Būyid Iran,” in Culture and Memory in Medieval Islam: Essays in Honour of Wilferd Madelung, ed. Daftary, Farhad and Meri, Josef W. (London and New York, 2003), 318–19Google Scholar.
48 Narshakhī, , Tārīkh-i Bukhārā, ed. Razavī, Mudarris (Tehran, 1972), 3–4Google Scholar; Frye, History, 3–4.
49 Narshakhī, Bukhārā, 7; Frye, History, 6.
50 Narshakhī, Bukhārā, 77–81; Frye, History, 56–9. Mudarris Razavī notes that another manuscript lists the imam's name as Muḥammad Ḥusayn Shaibānī.
51 Frye, Bukhara, 139–40, notes 203–5.
52 Narshakhī, Bukhārā, 79–80; Frye, History, 58.
53 See Frye, History, 139–40, note 212.
54 Narshakhī, Bukhārā, 79.
55 This is Frye's translation. Frye, History, 57–8; Narshakhī, Bukhārā, 79–80.
56 The legend of the codex is that it belonged to the third caliph ʿUthmān and was the Qurʾan he was reading when he was murdered. However, other codices also boast the same pedigree, all purportedly showing ʿUthmān's blood on its pages. The codex was given as a gift to a discipline of Khōja Akhrār—who apparently lived in Tashkent during the second half of the fifteenth century and was perhaps a Naqshabandī pīr, and whose name was Ubaidallah—when his disciple cured an unspecified caliph in Constantinople with a prayer taught to him by Khōja Akhrār. The codex was moved from Tashkent to Samarqand when Khōja Akhrār built his mosque in Samarqand. Jeffery, A. and Mendelsohn, I., “The Orthography of the Samarqand Qur'ān Codex,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 62, no. 3 (September 1942): 175–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
57 Jeffery and Mendelsohn, “The Orthography of the Samarqand Qur'ān Codex,” 175–95. Jeffery and Mendelsohn compare the orthography of the Samarqand Codex against a study published by Shebunin in 1901 of an ancient Qurʾan codex in Cairo.
58 Mendelsohn, I., “The Columbia University Copy of the Samarqand Kufic Qur'an,” The Moslem World 30, no. 4 (October 1940): 375–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
