Persian Historiography

A History of Persian Literature

Charles Melville

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780857736574
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Persian literature is the jewel in the crown of Persian culture. It has profoundly influenced the literatures of Ottoman Turkey, Muslim India and Turkic Central Asia and been a source of inspiration for Goethe, Emerson, Matthew Arnold and Jorge Luis Borges among others. Yet Persian literature has never received the attention it truly deserves. "A History of Persian Literature" answers this need and offers a new, comprehensive and detailed history of its subject. This 18-volume, authoritative survey reflects the stature and significance of Persian literature as the single most important accomplishment of the Iranian experience. It includes extensive, revealing examples with contributions by prominent scholars who bring a fresh critical approach to bear on this important topic. In this volume the Editors offer an indispensable overview of Persian literature's long and rich historiography. Highlighting the central themes and ideas which inform historical writing, "Persian Historiography" will be an indispensable source for the historiographical traditions of Iran and the essential guide to the subject.

CHAPTER 1

HISTORY AS LITERATURE

JULIE S. MEISAMI

1. Introduction

A work of history, like any other composition (written or oral) is, first and foremost, a construct of language. The events recorded, the actors in those events, the circumstances and locations in which the events took place, and the cultural, societal, or political or religious details which surrounded them, are filtered not only through the writer’s sensibility, bias, or agenda, but, most importantly, through the medium of language. Thus historical works are not merely records of the past, but literary texts that may be approached through literary analysis.

The historian’s implicit contract with his audience is that he is providing a true record of events. Writers of history routinely stress their truthfulness, their use of reliable sources, their rejection of unreliable, unverifiable, or fantastic materials. Such affirmations are part of that implicit contract, as well as part of the historian’s persona. But despite these avowals of truthfulness, history was not, either for those who wrote it or for their audiences, a mere record of facts, but an act of interpretation. For facts were bearers of meaning (and most particularly of moral meaning); and history was, in the main, conceived of as exemplary. Its intent, in large part, was ethical, and its means rhetorical.

In the pre-modern Islamic world there were no professional historians as such. Those who wrote history came from many different walks of life. Some were religious scholars; others were attached to a court; still others wrote independently of patronage. Many also wrote on a wide variety of other subjects.¹ But in all cases they were highly educated, and well schooled in the devices and techniques of literary discourse that characterized their respective disciplines. Thus historical writing took various forms. Although the word târikh (Arabic ta’rikh) originally connoted chronology, this was never the main objective of most historical writing, although it did lead to an important form of history, that is, annalistic history, which is well represented in Arabic by such writers as Tabari (d. 923), Ebn-al-Jowzi (d. 1201), and Ebn-al-Athir (d. 1233), but which never achieved popularity in Persian historiography.

Despite the ubiquity of historical writing, history, as a discipline with a specific object and a distinctive methodology, held no established place in classifications of the sciences;² nor was it part of the curriculum of public education in the mosque or, later, the madrasa.³ It did, however, play a major part in private education, and was considered essential to the education of princes, officials and secretaries, military leaders, and royal boon-companions,⁴ all of whom were meant to benefit from its knowledge when advising rulers as to which examples from the past to emulate and which to avoid.

The literary analysis of historical texts has long held a place in scholarship on pre-modern Western historiography. Literary analysis of Islamic historical texts, however, began not as an effort towards understanding such texts in their literary context, but rather as an attempt to separate ‘fact’ from ‘fiction’ for the benefit of scholars seeking to reconstruct an accurate view of early Arabic history. A pioneer in this field was Albrecht Noth, who in his seminal Quellenkritische Studien zu Themen, Formen und Ten-denzen frühislamischer Geschichts überlieferung (1973) concluded that the presence of recurrent topoi, themes, motifs, and so on was indicative of the “fictivity” of historical accounts, and maintained “that the presence of literary devices … indicated an account’s [historical] unreliability (or at least its unusability).”⁵ Thus literary analysis was put to the service of ulterior motives: the disentanglement of ‘fact’ from ‘fiction.’

Stefan Leder, who has devoted many studies to the literary analysis of early Arabic historiography, has written: “When literary criticism is applied to historical narrative, it may seem to erode, even destroy, the foundations of historiography.”⁶ Leder does not make clear what the “foundations of historiography” might be; but his “may seem to” supplies an important caveat, and his following remarks clarify his position. He asserts,

[T]he hermeneutical effort fosters a better understanding of literary communication and may help to elucidate the wider context of signification. There still seems to be a taboo which prohibits literary criticism of the historical narrative, especially where Islamic tradition is concerned. Any approach to textual analysis, which disregards the meaning of a text as it was defined and maintained by tradition tends … to become the target of traditionalist polemic. On the other hand, philological study which is clinging to the letter of the text can not counterbalance the dominating attitude of denying that fiction and narrative art exist in this literature. Consequently, we find the vast territory of classical Arabic narrative texts, especially in the field of historical narration, abandoned to the petrified vision of Islamic tradition.⁷

Addressing the issue of the “fictivity” of historical accounts, Leder writes elsewhere:

[N]arration which contains fiction in an envelope of not only realistic, but factual disguise dominates in narrative literature. The disentangling of fiction, i.e., the feigned reality represented in the narrative, from the concept of factuality can be a toilsome task. As long as the fictional character of narratives is not assigned by convention, the reader is generally inclined to receive it as a factual report … The use of this kind of narration as a historical documentation thus prevails, whereas the reading of these texts as modes of literary creation is neglected.⁸

Leder’s arguments are relevant to the study of Persian historiography insofar as they provide a warning against the simple mining of historical texts for ‘facts’ and summon us to consider such texts in the context of the literary conventions of the tradition in which they were produced. If medieval writers of history had recourse to what modern literary criticism considers to be ‘literary’ or ‘novelistic’ devices, such as narrative plotting, the use of direct speech, the dramatic and/or moralistic depiction of characters, this need not imply that historical accounts take leave of factuality and approach the realm of fiction; but it does emphasize the importance of analyzing historical texts as literature. Leder further calls attention to the importance of storytelling as being at the heart of historical writing, whether in the form of the isolated transmitted account (khabar)—the compilation of which accounts forms the basis of much of early Arabic historiography—or in that of the continuous narrative which characterizes some later Arabic historiography (e.g. Balâdhori [d. 892], Ya’qubi [d. 897], Dinavari [d. 902], and others), and most of Persian historiography.⁹

The literary analysis of Persian historiography is still in its infancy. M. T. Bahâr, in his Sabk-shenâsi (1932), discussed early Persian prose, including chronicles, from the point of view of “the lexical, morphological, and syntactic peculiarities of the language,” and identified two styles (nathr-e sâde and nathr-e fanni), but neglected, for example, to analyze the use of figures of speech, divorced “the form of the narrative from its contents and ideas,” and “ignored the traditions that influenced the development” of Persian prose style.¹⁰ In 1980, Marilyn Waldman published a study devoted to Beyhaqi’s History, in which she stressed the importance of literary context and literary analysis. She stated:

However suggestive previous studies of the rhetoric of formal historical writing may have been, they have not forced today’s historians to view or to use historical narratives from the past in new and different ways … In the field of Islamicate history, where scholars have tended to use historical narratives almost exclusively as unstructured, uninterpretive mines of factual information, the handling of sources has been particularly problematical.¹¹

E. A. Poliakova, building on studies by both Russian and western scholars, has advanced the idea of a “literary canon” in regard to medieval Persian historiography. She observes,

The first step in the literary criticism of medieval chronicles is to distinguish the elements that make up a naturalistic reflection of reality from those that represent literary etiquette.¹²

K. Allin Luther devoted a number of studies to analyzing the style of both early and, especially, later Persian historiography, in which he underlined the necessity of studying literary style in terms both of its rhetorical content and of its literary and socio-political context.¹³ Stephen Humphreys, writing on Islamic historiography in the “middle periods” (that is, before 1500, and perhaps even later), reminds us that historical texts “are not neutral repositories of information but consciously shaped literary structures.”¹⁴ Julia Rubanovich has argued for the existence of a “literary canon” favoring the “artificial” enshâʾ style but also valuing stylistic variety in prose works.¹⁵ The present author has discussed the literary aspects of historiography in several publications.¹⁶ With these studies in mind, we will now turn to a discussion of Persian historical texts, with an emphasis on literary/stylistic analysis, and basically ignoring issues of ‘factuality’ versus ‘fictivity.’

2. The Rise of Persian Historiography

The reasons for, and the motives behind, the rise of historical writing in Persian in the 10^th century have been widely discussed;¹⁷ there is no need to rehearse these discussions here, as they have little bearing on the literary analysis of historical texts. It has been argued that political patronage (both by, and opposed to, the reigning Samanid dynasty), as well as ‘nationalistic’ impulses to revive the Persian language, led to what has been called the ‘Persian literary renaissance,’ as well as to the rise of historical writing in Persian.¹⁸ While it is true that the 10^th century seems to have seen a significant increase in writing in Persian, this impression may be due to accidents of survival and preservation; and impulses to ‘revive’ Persian were probably more ‘separatist’ than ‘nationalist,’ as local rulers sought independence from the Abbasid caliphate, to which, however, they remained allied, even if in name only. Moreover, the so-called ‘Per...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction (Charles Melville)
• Chapter 1: History as literature (Julie S. Meisami)
• Chapter 2: The historian at work (Charles Melville)
• Chapter 3: The rise and development of persian historiography (Elton L. Daniel)
• Chapter 4: The mongol and timurid periods, 1250–1500 (Charles melville)
• Chapter 5: Safavid historiography (Sholeh quinn and charles melville)
• Chapter 6: Persian historiography in the 18th and early 19th century (Ernest tucker)
• Chapter 7: Legend, legitimacy and making a national narrative in the historiography of qajar iran (1785–1925) (Abbas amanat)
• Chapter 8: Historiography in the pahlavi era (Fakhreddin Azimi)
• Chapter 9: Ottoman historical writing in persian, 1400–1600 (Sara Nur Yıldız)
• Chapter 10: Historiography in central asia since the 16th century (R. D. McChesney)
• Chapter 11: Historiography in afghanistan (R. D. McChesney)
• Chapter 12: Indo-persian historiography (Stephen F. Dale)
• Bibliography