7

Khurasani Historiography and Identity in the Light of the Fragments of the Akhbār Wulāt Khurāsān and the Tārīkh-i Harāt

A.C.S. Peacock

Early medieval Khurasan was home to a vibrant tradition of historical writing. In contrast to later periods and other regions, very little of the pre-Mongol historiographical production of Khurasan was stimulated by patronage on the part of rulers or political elites. The most notable exception is Bal‘amī’s famous translation of Ṭabarī’s Arabic History of Prophets and Kings, composed at the behest of the Samanid ruler Manṣūr b. Nūḥ (c. 352/963). Yet Bal‘amī had nothing whatsoever to say about the Samanids themselves, and his work’s agenda was probably broadly piety-minded. While three historical works did emerge from the Ghaznavid court milieu, ‘Utbī’s al-Yamīnī, Bayhaqī’s Tārīkh-i Mas‘ūdī, and Gardīzī’s Zayn al-Akhbār, and these do deal with the dynasty, the first two were composed on the initiative of their authors, at least in part for their own factional purposes, and the third (admittedly incomplete) is surprisingly laconic on Ghaznavids. The Seljuq court in Khurasan seems to have had few if any historical works composed for it.¹

In contrast to this poverty of dynastic history, Khurasan was home to a vibrant tradition of local historiography. In this it was not unique: local histories are attested from all over the medieval Islamic world, and over the tenth to twelfth centuries quite a number were composed in western Iran too, especially Isfahan,² while some of the earliest extant Persian historical works are local in focus. However, the Khurasani tradition does appear to have been exceptionally rich. In his history of the town of Bayhaq, composed in the second half of the twelfth century, Ibn Funduq lists no fewer than fifteen separate histories of Khurasani cities known to him. There were histories of Marw, Nishapur, Balkh and earlier ones of Bayhaq, and two on the history of Herat.³ We know from other sources such as Yāqūt’s Mu‘jam al-Udabā’ of other city histories lost to us – of Abiward and Nasa, for instance⁴ – and there were others, not mentioned by Ibn Funduq, which have come down to us, most notably the Tārīkh-i Sīstān. Indeed, it seems that virtually every major town of Khurasan was the subject of at least one local history before the thirteenth century.⁵

The surviving works can be divided into several categories. Some were biographical dictionaries of scholars, such as the various histories of Nishapur. Information on local scholars and religious figures was also provided by works on the virtues (faḍā’il or mafākhir) of a given locality. There were also books which tended more towards narrative history, discussing the coming of Islam, local rulers, and unusual events which had affected a given place. Of this type, the history of Bukhara by Narshakhī is perhaps the most famous example.⁶ Some works, such as Ibn Funduq’s own Tārīkh-i Bayhaq, may be said to combine elements of all these types. In addition, there were works which concentrated more on a region, not just a town – the Persian Tārīkh-i Sīstān and, from western Iran, the Fārsnāma being our earliest examples, dating from the mid eleventh and early twelfth centuries respectively. Analysing these early works is made problematic not just by the fact that what survives is clearly just the tip of the iceberg, but also because the extant works very frequently only exist in later translations which are evidently quite different from the original texts – whether by abridgement, interpolation or addition. Nonetheless, the fact that there evidently was such a market for these works in later times is indicative of the enduring interest of their themes.

The tradition of local historiography both in Khurasan and the Iranian world more generally has been the subject of a considerable body of scholarship. The biographical dictionaries of Nishapur have been probed for the insights they can offer into Islamisation, religion and politics in the town;⁷ the Faḍā’il Balkh, dealing with the holy men of Balkh, has been the subject of a recent monograph;⁸ and the histories of Bayhaq, Bukhara and Samarqand have received detailed attention in a number of works.⁹ Whatever their utility to the historian, and however great their differences in style and approach, such works were, as Ann Lambton argued, an expression of local patriotism to the author’s town or region.¹⁰ They provide important evidence for how people in early medieval Khurasan thought about their identity. Research on the Iranian world in the seventh to eleventh centuries has suggested that Iran and ‘Iranianness’ did not feature very prominently – if at all – as categories by which people – or at least Muslims – defined their identity; rather, they thought largely in local or regional terms.¹¹

In addition to the city histories mentioned above, there were also numerous historical or biographical works concerned with Khurasan itself, and these have received less scholarly attention owing to their imperfect preservation. Indeed, the fact of their loss may reflect how in later periods a sense of Khurasani identity was supplanted by other loyalties, such as the idea of Iran itself. This essay addresses two such imperfectly preserved histories: the tenth-century Akhbār Wulāt Khurāsān (History of the Governors of Khurasan), which is preserved only in later quotations, and a recently discovered, albeit fragmentary, twelfth-century history of Herat, which, however, is concerned as much with Khurasan as a whole.¹² These works suggest that local allegiances to one’s town could co-exist with a broader sense of Khurasani patriotism. The Tārīkh-i Harāt, however, is also characterised by a distinct anti-Iraqi sentiment, testimony not just to the political and cultural fissures that rent the Seljuq empire but also to this distinct sense of Khurasani identity that had developed since the region’s incorporation into the Arab empire and evidently survived to the eve of the Mongol invasions.

The emergence of local historiography in the Islamic east

The origins of Khurasani historiography can be traced back almost to the beginnings of Arabic historical writing itself, to the period of the Arab conquests in the seventh and eighth centuries. The conquest of Khurasan is especially well attested in the sources preserved, much better than even major regions of the Middle East such as Egypt.¹³ In particular, the reports compiled in Iraq by al-Madā’inī (d. c. 255/869), although lost in their original forms, are a vital source for the conquests in the east. The bibliographer Ibn al-Nadīm attributes to him a Kitāb Futūḥ Khurāsān, dealing with the Umayyad governors of Khurasan Junayd b. ‘Abd al-Raḥmān, Rāfi‘ b. al-Layth b. Naṣr b. Sayyar and Quṭayba b. Muslim.¹⁴ He also wrote separate works on Qutayba, the Kitāb Nawādir Quṭayba b. Muslim bi-Khurāsān, on Naṣr b. Sayyār and on the conquest of various other regions of the mashriq: the Kitāb Fatḥ Kābul wa-Zābulistān, Kitāb Futūḥ Sijistān, and the Kitāb Futūḥ Jurjān wa-Ṭabaristān. It must be said that these Khurasani works represented only one part of al-Madā’inī’s interests – he also wrote extensively on the conquest of western Iran, Syria, Egypt, and even India (Kitāb Thaghr al-Hind and the Kitāb ‘ummāl al-Hind), but his Iranian, and especially Khurasani, works seem to have been preserved much more extensively – doubtless nonetheless in heavily edited and revised form – in the histories of al-Ṭabarī and al-Balādhurī.¹⁵

Al-Madā’inī’s main informants were members of the conquering Arab elite who settled in Khurasan;¹⁶ their reports, as so often with early Arabic historiography, doubtless had practical purposes such the assertion of primacy in the inter-tribal disputes that bedevilled early Arab society in Khurasan, and priority regarding the financial privileges to which the conquerors were entitled. Nonetheless, these were not the sole motives. Hugh Kennedy has identified in al-Ṭabarī what he has described as a ‘saga’ recounting the deeds of Mūsā b. ‘Abdallāh b. Khāzim, an El Cid-like warrior hero and son of the Arab governor ‘Abdallāh b. Khāzim. The prose epic of Mūsā, uninterrupted by the isnāds and variant accounts that usually characterise al-Ṭabarī’s reports transmitted from al-Madā’inī, recounts his adventures doing battle with legendary-sounding characters such the Knight of Soghdia [fāris al-ṣughd], and his capture by wile of the fortress of Tirmidh that was to become his base. Mūsā is depicted as something of an outcast from Arab society:

The people of Khurasan used to say, “We have never seen the like Mūsā b. ‘Abdallāh b. Khāzim, nor have we heard of anyone like him. He fought his father for two years than he went out travelling through the land of Khurasan until he came to a king, whose city he conquered from him and expelled him from it. Then Arab and Turkish troops advanced on him, and he fought the Arabs in the morning and the non-Arabs (‘ajam) in the afternoon. He resided in his fortress [at Tirmidh] for fifteen years, and Transoxiana came under the control of Mūsā and no could overcome him.”¹⁷

Mūsā is thus depicted as something of an authentic local hero, battling both Arab and Turkish invaders, of whom popular stories circulated among the Khurasanis.

The early Islamic Khurasani historiographical tradition thus comprised two main oral elements of which we know: akhbār dealing with the circumstances of the conquest, circulated by men who formed the sources for al-Madā’inī’s account, and heroic epics such as that of Mūsā. There is no clear evidence, however, that these were ever put into writing in the east at the time. The first indications of written historiography in Khurasan are roughly contemporary with al-Madā’inī. A certain mawlā, Abū Ṣāliḥ Sulaymān b. Ṣāliḥ al-Laythī, known as Sulayma, in the third/ninth century apparently wrote three works: a Futūḥ Khurāsān, a Kitāb al-Dawla dealing with the Abbasids and Khurasan, and a work on Marw.¹⁸ Another city history of Marw was written in the mid-third/ ninth century by Abū l-Faḍl ‘Abbās b. Muṣ‘ab b. Bishr al-Marwazī.¹⁹ Yet we know little of the contents of most of the fourteen works on Khurasani local history thought to have been composed between c. 250 and 350AH.²⁰ Most seem to have been city histories, and most probably constituted biographical dictionaries in some form. However, some certainly had a broader agenda, as is suggested by the Akhbār Wulāt Khurāsān.

The Akhbār Wulāt Khurāsān and Khurasani historiography in the fourth/ tenth and fifth/eleventh centuries

While scholarship has traditionally ascribed authorship of the Akhbār Wulāt Khurāsān to a single individual, Abū ‘Alī al-Ḥusayn al-Sallāmī, more recent research has suggested it was a composite work written by three members of the same family: Abū l-Ḥusayn ‘Alī al-Sallāmī, d. c. 300/912, his brother Abū ‘Alī al-Ḥusayn b. Aḥmad, and his nephew the muḥaddith Abū l-‘Abbās Aḥmad b. Ḥusayn) who lived in the late third/ninth and early fourth/tenth centuries.²¹ Although the Akhbār Wulāt Khurāsān has not come down to us intact, substantial quotations have been preserved by later authorities writing in Arabic and Persian, including Ibn al-Athīr, Gardīzī, and ‘Awfī, to name but a few. Muḥammad ‘Alī Kāẓim Bīkī, the scholar who has assembled and edited the extant fragments of the work, believes that the Sallāmīs had direct access to Khurasani sources, unlike Ṭabarī, who could only consult them through the accounts preserved by al-Madā’inī.²² Although for the Umayyad and earlier Abbasid periods the evidence for this is rather indistinct, a passage found in Ibn al-Athīr, dealing with the reign of the Samanid Nūḥ b. Naṣr and the revolt of his general Abū ‘Alī Ṣaghānī, does confirm the impression of a distinctive Khursani historiographical school:

This is what the Khurasani historians (aṣḥāb al-tawārīkh min al-khurāsāniyyīn) have related. The Iraqi historians have related these events in a different fashion (‘alā ghayr hādhihi al-siyāqa), and the people of every country are more knowledgeable of their own circumstances.²³

The extant fragments of the Akhbār Wulāt Khurāsān serve to give some impression of its contents. It seems to have been arranged around the tenure of governors or rulers of Khurasan from the Arab conquest down to Samanid times, and there is no evidence it contained the isnāds and variant accounts of al-Ṭabarī. Although written in a relatively plain Arabic, judging by the extant quotations, it contained frequent quotations from Khurasani Arabic poets – indeed, there is an elegy by Abū ‘Alī al-Ḥusayn al-Sallāmī himself on the death of his patron Abū ‘Alī Ṣaghānī.²⁴ A few, very fragmentary references to hadith on, for instance, the date of birth of the Prophet and the deeds of the ṣaḥāba suggests that the Akhbār Wulāt Khurāsān did occasionally range beyond the theme of Khurasani governors, although Kāẓim Bīkī believes this is a result of the final compiler, Abū l-‘Abbās Aḥmad al-Sallāmī, who was a muḥaddith, imposing his own alterations on the work.

What is almost certainly the introduction (or a part of it) to the Akhbār Wulāt Khurāsān was preserved in an abridgement by Yūsuf b. Aḥmad b. Maḥmud al-Yaghmurī, itself now lost, but seen and recorded by the Mamluk historian al-Sakhāwī.²⁵ Abū l-Ḥusayn ‘Alī al-Sallāmī wrote:

One of the leading sciences is the science of history, for it is a way to indicate the names of famous men of every age, to distinguish the events which occurred in it, the reports [relating to them] that have been, and to show their causes. By making use of knowledge of the time of events and the circumstances of the days of the notables in every period, the historian [ṣāḥibuhu] should be safe from making or causing mistakes with regard to what he says about them and what he reports concerning them. We see people who relate things, but they do not know the period of their occurrence, and they date as early what happened recently and vice versa, especially those from the land of Khurasan (siyyamā man kāna min arḍ Khurāsān). Its people experienced great events,²⁶ which no other people did. It is incumbent upon scholars from among its people [ṣāḥib al-ma‘rifa min ahlihā] to know all its history [jumal anbā’ihi], and to preserve [the memory of] the days of its rulers [umarā’ihā]. There is nothing more contemptible than ignorance of the history of one’s land [akhbār arḍihi].²⁷

The work’s composition thus seems to have been inspired above all by a sense of Khurasani patriotism – the need to preserve the memory of the rulers of Khurasan. There are a few hints of the Sallāmīs’ political connections: Abū ‘Alī al-Ḥusayn al-Sallāmī had been secretary to the Samanid generals Bakr b. Muḥammad Ilyasa‘, the governor of Jurjan, and Abū ‘Alī Ṣaghānī. It has been suggested that the account of the latter’s rebellion against his Samanid overlord is distinctly partisan towards Ṣaghānī,²⁸ while citations from the work preserve fragments of a qaṣīda by Abu ‘Alī al-Ḥusayn mourning the death of Bakr b. Muḥammad b. Ilyasa‘.²⁹ Yet as far as we can gather the composition of the Akhbār Wulāt Khurāsān was entirely a personal initiative by members (or a member) of the Sallāmī family, and there is no evidence that the work was ever commissioned by a Khurasani ruler, nor constituted in any sense an ‘official’ history.³⁰

This sense of a distinctive Khurasani identity was probably propagated by several other works known to have been composed in the tenth to eleventh centuries. Al-Ḥadīthī’s survey of Khurasani local historiography lists a further seven works dealing with Khurasani history in the period, some evidently biographical dictionaries, others probably more general in scope.³¹ These were, in rough chronological order:

• Mafākhir Khurāsān, by Abū’l-Qāsim b. Aḥmad b. Maḥmud al-Ka‘bī al-Balkhī (d. 319/929)³²

• Maḥāsin Ahlihā (i.e., Maḥāsin Ahl Khurāsān), by Abū Zayd b. Sahl al-Balkhī (d. 322/933)³³

• The Mazīd al-Ta’rīkh, a continuation of the Akhbār Wulāt Khurāsān by Abū’l-Ḥasan Muḥammad b. Sulaymān (circa second half of fourth/tenth century)³⁴

• Akhbār ‘Ulamā’ Khurāsān, by Ibn al-Bay‘, Abu ‘Abdallāh Muḥammad b. ‘Abdallāh al-Ḥākim al-Naysābūrī (d. 405/1014)

• Akhbār ‘Ulamā’ Khurāsān, by Abū Naṣr al-Marwazī (probably d. 484/1091–2)³⁵

• Ta’rīkh Khurāsān, by Abū’l-Muẓaffar Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Abīwardī (d. 507/1113)

Of uncertain date is:

• Title unknown, by ‘Abbās b. Muṣ‘ab³⁶

However, unlike the Akhbār Wulāt Khurāsān, too little of these works – apart from their titles – has survived to give us much idea of their contents, although the very fact of their composition is suggestive of the growing interest in a specifically Khurasani identity. This is reflected in other works of the tenth and eleventh centuries that have come down to us. For instance, the Arab conquest of Khurasan and early Islamic rule there occupies a central place in another Samanid work, Bal‘amī’s translation of al-Ṭabarī’s history (although admittedly, the imperfect preservation of Bal‘amī’s text makes any assertions regarding the work’s contents in Samanid times somewhat speculative). This apparent interest is perhaps natural given that Bal‘amī’s Samanid patrons were known as the ‘kings of Khurasan’ (mulūk Khurāsān).³⁷ In one passage which has no parallel in the Arabic original, and which illustrates the emergent sense of Khurasan as a realm in its own right, the appointment of the Arab governor Naṣr b. Sayyār is described as ‘receiving kingship over Khurasan’ (pādshāhī yāft bar Khurāsān) from the Umayyad Caliph Hishām.³⁸ Later historical works reinforce the same idea of Khurasan as a distinctive kingdom. In Gardīzī’s Zayn al-Akhbār written in the mid-eleventh century and drawing heavily on the Akhbār Wulāt Khurāsān, rule over Khurasan as ‘amir’ is depicted being transferred from the Umayyad and Abbasid governors on behalf of the Caliphs down to the Samanids and on to the Ghaznavids – even if, in reality, the Ghaznavids had lost all of their Khurasani territories at the time of writing (c. 440/1049–443/1052).³⁹ Ibn Funduq’s Tārīkh-i Bayhaq, composed around 563/1168, goes so far as to omit any account of the Arab governors, and starts his list of the rulers of Khurasan with the first prominent local dynasty, the Tahirids.⁴⁰ However, the clearest indication of the enduring appeal of this Khurasani identity is in another local history, the twelfth-century Tārīkh-i Harāt.

Khurasani identity in the Tārīkh-i Harāt

In 2008, the fragments of history of Herat, written in Persian in the reign of the Great Seljuq sultan Sanjar, came to light in an antique shop in Yazd in the form of some 80 folios written in a seventh/thirteenth century naskh script. Although published in facsimile by Mīrāth-i Maktūb in Tehran,⁴¹ the work does not yet seem to have attracted much attention outside of Iran. No author’s name is given in the text, but it is most likely the same work as that quoted by Isfizārī in his Timurid history of Herat (composed 875/1470–1) and attributed by him to Shaykh Thiqat al-Dīn ‘Abd al-Raḥmān Fāmī,⁴² who is also mentioned by various medieval sources as the author of a history of Herat.⁴³ According to internal evidence, it was written sometime after 521/1127, but when Sanjar was still alive (i.e. before 552/1157).⁴⁴ The authorship of the work has been debated at some length by Iranian scholars.⁴⁵ There are clear parallels between passages attributed by Isfizārī to Fāmī and those in the Yazd manuscript, a fact which strongly supports the attribution.⁴⁶ On the other hand, there is some doubt as to Fāmī’s dates and the contents of his text. Subkī gives Fāmī’s dates as Dhū’l-Ḥijja 472/1079-Dhū’l-Ḥijja 546/1151,⁴⁷ and praises him as a leading hadith scholar (muqaddam al-muḥaddithīn bi-Harāt). Paul has therefore suggested that his work was an Arabic biographical dictionary of Herati ulema.⁴⁸ This leads to objections against the identification of the author as Fāmī on two counts.

Firstly, Isfizārī and his predecessor Sayfī (d. after 721/1321) quote a Persian poem which they both specifically state comes from Fāmī’s history, composed by the author in praise of ‘Izz al-Din ‘Umar Marghānī, who was vizier to the Ghurid rulers, Ghiyāth al-Dīn Muhammad and his son Maḥmud.⁴⁹ As Marghānī, who was effective ruler of Herat in the later sixth/twelfth century, died in or after 598/1203,⁵⁰ it seems quite unlikely there would have been much of an overlap between his career and Fāmī’s if the latter did indeed die in 546/1151. The most likely explanation is that Fāmī’s work, which continued in circulation in Herat to the ninth/fifteenth century when Isfizārī consulted it, accreted additional material on the way. The poem on ‘Izz al-Dīn al-Marghānī may represent one of these later interpolations, probably by an author writing under the Kartid dynasty (ruled Herat 643/1245–791/1389). The Kartids claimed descent from Marghanī’s brother, and indeed, the poem may even have been attributed to Fāmī by Sayfī (or his source) to enhance the respectability of his patrons by associating them with Herat’s most famous scholar and historian.⁵¹ Nonetheless, we cannot exclude the possibility that Subkī’s dates are simply wrong, and that Fāmī was active a good half century later than he indicates, and later than our text.

Our second problem is that of contents and language. It does not seem especially likely that a Persian poem in praise of a local amir would be incorporated into an Arabic biographical dictionary of ulema; where poetry occurs in the Arabic biographical dictionaries, it is invariably in Arabic, and the focus tends to be fairly tightly restricted to ulema, not to other social strata (compare, for instance, Nasafī’s al-Qand fi Dhikr ‘Ulamā’ Samarqand). Furthermore, none of the extant quotations from Fāmī’s work in Isfizārī look as if they come from a biographical dictionary.

For the purposes of this essay, I shall refer to the author as Fāmī, although accepting there is a question mark over the attribution. The extant fragments are as follows:

• [Chapter Four, beginning and chapter heading missing missing] Account of the governors and rulers of Khurasan down to Mahmud of Ghazna, including the Tahirids,⁵² Saffarids,⁵³ Samanids⁵⁴ and Simjurids.⁵⁵

• Chapter Five. Unusual events which happened in Herat (Bāb-i panjum dar ḥawādith-i nādir kih bi-Harāt būda-ast].⁵⁶

• Chapter Six. The honour and merits of Herat (Bāb-i shishum dar sharaf wa fadīlat-i Harāt).⁵⁷

Chapter Four draws heavily on the Akhbār Wulāt Khurāsān and is for the most part attested in other well-known sources like Gardīzī, and Chapter Six is largely ahistorical, so from the point of view of the historian looking for new information, the most interesting section is Chapter Five. Although some of the material is already known from Isfizārī’s reuse of it in the Rawḍat al-Jannāt,⁵⁸ there are new details in the manuscript, which offers some nice vignettes of everyday life in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, especially their tribulations – famines, fires, and prices.⁵⁹ We learn, for instance, of the Turkmen in the vicinity of the city being obliged by famine to come and sell their own children into slavery in the market. There is also some valuable detail dealing with earlier periods, such as the description of the disputes over the construction of a new mosque to replace the Zoroastrian ātishkada (fire-temple) at the village of Karijird, which is of interest from the perspective of the establishment of Islam in Khurasan.⁶⁰ However, the purpose of this essay is to examine the extant fragments from the historiographical rather than the historical point of view for the light they shed on notions of identity in pre-Mongol Khurasan and Herat in particular.

The contents of Chapter Four in particular provoked Kāẓim Bīkī to doubt whether this was a history of Herat at all (and therefore the attribution to Fāmī), and admittedly, Herat features rather rarely in this section. Although Sallāmī is only mentioned directly once,⁶¹ comparison of the text, especially common lines of verse, with the extant fragments of Sallāmī shows beyond doubt that the Akhbār Wulāt Khurāsān was the main source of this part of our text. Elsewhere, there are inconsistencies which suggest that the text we have has been cobbled together rather clumsily from a variety of sources. For instance, at the end of Chapter Four Maḥmūd of Ghazna is lavishly praised;⁶² but in Chapter Five, his oppression of the people of Herat is condemned.⁶³ Among the sources mentioned specifically are Ḥākim Abū ‘Abdallāh Ḥāfiẓ’s Ta’rīkh Naysābūr,⁶⁴ the Kitāb al-Ru’asā’ wa-l-Ajilla of Abū’l-Ḥusayn [Ibn] Fāris,⁶⁵ and the fifth-century muḥaddith Shaykh al-Ḥāfiz al-Ḥasan b. Aḥmad al-Samarqandī.⁶⁶ Another source Isfizārī tells us that Fāmī used is a history (kitāb-i tārīkh) by a certain Ḥāfiz Abū Isḥāq Aḥmad b. Muḥammad b. Yāsīn.⁶⁷ The latter, known in full as Ḥāfiz Abū Isḥāq Aḥmad b. Muḥammad b. Yāsīn al-Harawī al-Ḥaddād, most probably died in 334/945–6 and was the author of a history of Herat, presumed to be a biographical dictionary.⁶⁸

The text, if it has one overarching theme so far as can be judged from the surviving fragments, focuses on the place of Herat in Khurasani history. This is true of Chapter Four, dealing with Khurasani history, as much as Chapter Six, which concentrates on the virtues of Herat. Although in Chapter Four Herat rarely takes a central place, the author is careful to relate events to Herat where possible, a feature which becomes increasingly evident in the later parts of the text. For instance, praise of Abū Muslim’s reign of justice is specifically put into the mouth of a Herati, while the account of the Saffarids starts with Ya‘qūb b. Layth’s pursuit of the Kharijite ‘Abd al-Raḥīm in Herat.⁶⁹ Fāmī goes into considerable detail on the rebellion of Aḥmad b. ‘Abdallāh al-Khujistānī against the Saffarids. The reason for this interest was probably the fact that, as Fāmī tells us, Herat was a strong-hold of the revolt and the descendants of the rebel’s main allies still lived around Herat in his day, where they seem to have occupied prominent positions in local society.⁷⁰ When dealing with Samanid history, Fāmī notes the separate Samanid line in Herat, descendants of the Tahirid-appointed governor Ilyās b. Asad b. Sāmānkhudā. The Samanid ruler Naṣr b. Aḥmad came to Herat to marry Ilyās’s daughter, and Ilyās’s grandson Mansur revolted and had the khuṭba proclaimed in his own name as ruler in Herat in 306/918–9.⁷¹

Although Chapter Six as a whole purportedly deals with the virtues of Herat, in fact the first part of it is devoted to Khurasan, with the start of the section on the Faḍā’il-i Harāt marked in red ink as a separate sub-chapter.⁷² The first half of the chapter consists largely of hadith on the merits of Khurasan and Khurasanis. For instance, Bū Ṣāliḥ Salmūya cites the Prophet that, ‘When you send a group on an important mission, strive that it should be made up of Khurasanis’.⁷³ One of Fāmī’s sources was a book on the ‘glories of Khurasan’ (Dhikr Mafākhir Khurāsān) which has not come down to us but which seems to have comprised such hadith.⁷⁴ The subsection on Herat deals not merely with the city’s virtues, but with its vital place in Khurasan. For instance, a hadith is cited to the effect that

The people of Khurasan will enjoy good things, prosperity and happiness as long as the people of Herat exist. If ill appears in Herat, afterwards no good can be hoped for in Khurasan.⁷⁵

Another hadith is quoted praising Herat as the best region of Khurasan, and condemning Sistan as the worst.⁷⁶

All this fits in well with what we know from Isfizārī of Fāmī’s agenda, which seems at least in part to have consisted of asserting the centrality of Herat in Khurasan:

The late Shaykh Thiqat al-Din ‘Abd al-Rahman Fāmī related in his book that, ‘I have seen in the histories that the governors and rulers of Khurasan resided in Herat, and sent their deputies and appointees to other towns and places. The abode of kingship (dār al-mulk) and royal residence in ancient times was also Herat.’⁷⁷

One of Fāmī’s most striking concerns is to denigrate Khurasan’s rivals, especially Iraq. For instance, Khurasan’s town were captured by sulḥ , not by force (jang), unlike those of Iraq and Syria:

One of the glories of Khurasan is that most of its towns were not conquered by war, so its people are free (aḥrār), and control their own bodies and lands (mālik-i tan-i khwīsh wa zamīnhā-yi khwīsh). They are not like the people of Iraq and Syria, whose lands were conquered by war. Were it not for ‘Umar b. al-Khattab’s judgement and his disagreement with some of the ṣaḥāba over the people of those provinces [Syria and Iraq], they would all be slaves.⁷⁸

In a similar vein, Fāmī cites the transmitter Ibn al-Quṭāmī relating a hadith from the muḥaddith al-Waṣṣāfī that ‘We came to the king of Khurasan [shāh-i Khurāsān, a name for Herat],⁷⁹ and everything we found there was better than what we had left in Iraq’.⁸⁰ One amir is even quoted as denigrating his Iraqi troops:

One amir who held both Khurasan and Iraq said in an address (khuṭba) which he gave, speaking of the Iraqis in his army: ‘O troops of women and helpers of cattle (yā jund al-mar’a wa-a‘wān al-bahīma), when the [battle] cry goes out you respond, but when you get wounded you flee … Alas that it should be a group of Khurasanis that help us and by their aid we arrive at our aim and desire and defeat the army of Satan.’⁸¹

Sometimes the sentiment is explicitly anti-Arab. On one occasion, ‘Arabs’ are contrasted negatively with ‘Muslims’ – the local Herati population. In the reign of Ma’mūn, Fāmī tells us, ‘there was a group of Arabs in Herat who oppressed the Muslims (bar musulmānān ẓulm mīkardand)’; the Tahirid governor, an Arab of the same tribe as this group named Aḥmad b. Khālid allowed them to persecute the righteous qadi who tried to intervene on the oppressed Heratis’ behalf.⁸² Elsewhere, Fāmī reports that people of Nishapur complained,

‘Why does the fortune of the Arabs [Āl Ma‘add] – remain intact when their state is collapsing under its utter corruption, but the fortune of the Tahirids has not been passed on to their descendants despite their absolute justice?’

To this they were told by their ra’īs Abū ‘Amr Aḥmad b. Naṣr al-Khanaf that it was ‘because of the extent of the Tahirids’ justice and nobility and the [Arabs’] utter oppression’.⁸³

While local histories are of course generally intended to promote the superiority of a given locality, Fāmī’s work stands out by this explicit denigration of rival regions as well as by virtue of its insistence on Herat’s place within a broader Khurasani identity. For instance, the virtues of Balkh sung by the Faḍā’il-i Balkh are comparable to those mentioned in the chapter entitled the Faḍā’il-i Harāt in Fāmī’s work. There is the same insistence on the town as a seat of governors and kings,⁸⁴ and comparable hadith stressing Balkh’s unique virtues.⁸⁵ However, there is no criticism of rivals either within Khurasan or outside, and the sense of identity expressed in the text is overwhelmingly Balkhi rather than specifically Khurasani. The Tārīkh-i Sīstān is another text infused with a sense of local patriotism, but it merely notes Sistan’s virtues in general terms, in particular Sistan’s [i.e. Zarang’s] imposing castle.⁸⁶ Herat is mentioned in passing as one of the eastern towns with which Sistan is advantageously compared, but there is no parallel to Fāmī’s vaunting of Herat over Sistan, the ‘worst [part] of Khurasan’.⁸⁷ Our other main surviving works of Khurasani local history, Narshakhī’s history of Bukhara and Ibn Funduq’s Tārīkh-i Bayhaq, evince a similar pride in their localities but rarely explicitly relate them to a broader Khurasani context in the way that Fāmī’s Tārīkh-i Harāt does.

Conclusion

Fāmī’s Tārīkh-i Harāt thus represents something of an anomaly within the tradition of local historiography as attested by its surviving examples. Yet if we consider it in the broader context of Khurasani historiography, exemplified by the Akhbār Wulāt Khurāsān on which it drew, the sense of Khurasani patriotism it evinces is clearly not unique, even though this has generally been disregarded in scholarship to date. Another example of this tendency was doubtless the Dhikr Mafākhir Khurāsān which Fāmī cites. It is also telling that histories of Khurasani cities evidently circulated quite widely within Khurasan. As mentioned above, Fāmī of Herat evidently had access to Ḥākim Abū ‘Abdallāh Ḥāfiẓ’s Ta’rīkh Naysābūr, while Ibn Funduq tells us he used histories (probably biographical dictionaries) of Nishapur and Khwar in his work. Although it is not clear to how many of the fifteen Khurasani city and regional histories he mentions he had access, it is striking that he refers to none from outside Khurasan, with the exception of Baghdad, even though numerous works on other major centres of western Iran such as Isfahan, Qumm and Fars certainly existed at this point.⁸⁸ The circulation of local histories within Khurasan, but not ones from outside it, is suggestive. Identity could exist simultaneously at both a city and regional level, but feelings of belonging to Khurasan were evidently much more real than ones of belonging to Iran. The term Iran occurs not once in Fāmī’s work, while in the Tārīkh-i Sīstān Iranshahr is used to mean the west, in contrast to the quite distinct and independent Khurasan.⁸⁹ The regional identities that Sarah Savant, on the basis of works down to the eleventh century, observed as pre-eminent, continued to dominate into the twelfth century. However, even to describe them as regional is somewhat misleading: these texts give no sense that Khurasan was part of a larger Iran.

Supposing that medieval Khurasanis imagined Khurasan as a distinct country, not merely as ‘Eastern Iran’, how do the sentiments of anti-Arab hostility exhibited by Fāmī fit into this? At first glance the attacks on the Arabs’ injustice do appear strikingly reminiscent of the shu‘ūbiyya trends, the Arab-Persian rivalry that played such a vital role in Abbasid literary and cultural politics. However, the importance of shu‘ubism in post-conquest Iran has been questioned,⁹⁰ and it is certainly true that little evidence points to much Khurasani interest in the questions of Persian versus Arab superiority that were hotly debated in second/eighth and third/ninth century Baghdad.

A much more real political and cultural cleavage around the time Fāmī was writing was that between the eastern and western parts of the Seljuq empire – or, to use the terminology of the day, Khurasan and Iraq (Iraq in its medieval sense comprising most of western Iran). Despite the title of al-sulṭān al-a‘ẓam and his acknowledgement as ruler throughout the Seljuq lands, in practice Sanjar was unable to exert his authority west of Rayy on the ground. To solidify Seljuq rule over newly conquered territories in the fifth/eleventh century, Khurasani bureaucrats and ulema had been imported to the west to staff the senior ranks of the Turks’ administration. These were much resented in Iraq and Syria, and sources from the western bureaucracy such as the eleventh-century Baghdadi Ghars al-Ni‘ma exhibit a bitter hostility to the Khurasanis.⁹¹

It is obvious why the old elites of the conquered west – Iraq – should have resented the Khurasanis who displaced them. Although Iraqi elites regained their old importance in the sixth/twelfth century, the wounds must have remained painful, for ‘Imād al-Dīn al-Iṣfahānī (born Isfahan, died in Syria in 598/1201) exhibits a similar hostility to easterners, caustically remarking of the Seljuq vizier Muḥammad Jūzqānī that he was appointed ‘for being a Khurasani, not for any human characteristics’.⁹² Fāmī’s text casts new light on this phenomenon, suggesting that this antagonism was not merely a consequence of western resentment. By holding up Iraq as the antithesis of Khurasan, as a reluctantly Islamised province inhabited by cowards, Fāmī offers a rare insight into Khurasani views of Iraq. Both the contents of the Tārīkh-i Harāt itself, and the vibrant but independent tradition of Khurasani historiography, underline the fact that when we are dealing with the pre-Mongol period, the political map of the Seljuq empire comprising a sort of greater Iran is profoundly misleading. While poets might make reference to a shared pre-Islamic Iranian past, vaunting rulers like Maḥmūd of Ghazna as shāhanshāh-i Īrān,⁹³ the evidence of local histories suggests these concepts did not have much currency outside court circles. Rather, as the fragments of Fāmī suggest, Khurasan was a much more viable political concept for contemporary needs and for the coalescence of a sense of identity than Iran.

Notes

1On this poverty of political history see the discussion in A.C.S. Peacock, ‘Court historiography of the Seljuq Empire in Iran and Iraq: Reflections on authorship, content and language’, Iranian Studies xlvii (2014), pp. 327–45; on Bal‘amī’s agenda, see idem, Mediaeval Persian Historiography and Political Legitimacy: Bal‘ami’s Tārīkhnāma (London, 2007).

2For a list of books dedicated to Isfahan written in the pre-Mongol period, most of which are lost to us, see David Durand-Guédy, Iranian Elites and Turkish Rulers: A History of Iṣfahān in the Saljūq Period (London, 2010), pp. 317–8. See also Jürgen Paul, ‘The histories of Isfahan: Mafarrukhi’s Kitāb maḥāsin Iṣfahān’, Iranian Studies xxxiii (2000), pp. 117–32.

3Ibn Funduq, Tārīkh-i Bayhaq, ed. Aḥmad Bahmanyar (Tehran n.d.), pp. 21; cf. Jürgen Paul, ‘Herat.v. Local histories’, EIr, xii, pp. 217–9.

4Yāqūt, Mu‘jam al-Udabā’: Irshād al-Arīb ila Ma‘rifat al-Adīb, ed. Iḥsān ‘Abbās, (Beirut, 1993), v, p. 2364.

5For a listing of these works see Qaḥtān ‘Abd al-Sattār al-Ḥadīthī, al-Tawārīkh al-Maḥaliyya li-Iqlīm Khurāsān (Basra, 1990).

6See the translation by Richard N. Frye, The History of Bukhara, translated from a Persian abridgement of the Arabic original by Narshakhi (Cambridge MA, 1955).

7Richard Bulliet, The Patricians of Nishapur: A Study in Medieval Islamic Social History (Cambridge MA, 1972); idem, Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: An Essay in Quantitative History (Cambridge MA, 1979).

8Arezou Azad, Sacred Landscape in Medieval Afghanistan: Revisiting the Faḍā’il-i Balkh (Oxford, 2013).

9Parvaneh Pourshariati, ‘Local historiography in early medieval Iran and the Tarikh-i Bayhaq’, Iranian Studies xxxiii (2000), pp. 133–64; Jürgen Paul, ‘The histories of Samarqand,’ Studia Iranica xxii (1993), pp. 62–92; for further references consult Azad, Sacred Landscape, p. 22, n. 2; also Julie Scott Meisami, Persian Historiography Down to the End of the Twelfth Century (Edinburgh, 2000), pp. 108–36, 162–88, 209–229; Sarah Bowen Savant, The New Muslims of Post-Conquest Iran: Tradition, Memory, and Conversion (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 109–28. For a different approach to local histories see Mimi Hanaoka, ‘Visions of Muhammad in Bukhara and Tabaristan: Dreams and their uses in Persian local histories’, Iranian Studies xlvii (2014), pp. 289–303.

10Ann K.S. Lambton, ‘Persian local histories: The tradition behind them and the assumptions of their authors’ in Biancamaria Scarcia Amoretti and Lucia Rostagno (eds), Yad-nama in memoria di Alessandro Bausani (Rome, 1991), i, pp. 228–9. Further on local histories in Persian, consult the special issue of Iranian Studies xxxiii (2000) edited by Charles Melville.

11Savant, The New Muslims of Post-Conquest Iran, pp. 9–11, 233–4.

12This work was discovered only after Jürgen Paul published his study of medieval Herati historiography, ‘The Histories of Herat’, Iranian Studies xxxiii (2000), pp. 93–115.

13Hugh Kennedy, The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In (London, 2007), p. 226.

14Ibn al-Nadīm, al-Fihrist, ed. Yūsuf ‘Alī Ṭawīl (Beirut, 2002), pp. 165–6.

15However, recent research has challenged the idea that al-Madā’inī actually wrote anything down himself. See Ilka Lindstedt, ‘The transmission of al-Madā’inī’s historical material to al-Balādhurī and al-Ṭabarī: A comparison and analysis of two akhbar’ in Sylvia Akar, Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila & Inka Nokso-Koivisto (eds), Travelling through Time: Essays in honour of Kaj Öhrnberg, Studia Orientalia cxiv (2013), pp. 41–63.

16Sallāmī, Akhbār Wulāt Khurāsān, ed. and introduced by Muḥammad ‘Alī Kāẓim Bīkī (Tehran, 2011), Introduction, pp. 44–7.

17al-Ṭabarī, Ta’rīkh, ed. M.J. de Goeje, (Leiden, 1893–1903), ii, pp. 1160.

18See Sallāmī, Akhbār, Introduction, pp. 29–31. A Kitāb al-Dawla is also mentioned among al-Madā’inī’s works (Ibn al-Nadīm, al-Fihrist, p. 166).

19Sallāmī, Akhbār, Introduction, p. 32.

20Ibid, p. 33.

21See, for instance, C. E. Bosworth, ‘al-Sallāmi, Abū ‘Alī al-Ḥusayn’, EI², viii, pp. 996–7.

22Sallāmī, Akhbār, Introduction, pp. 49, 54.

23Ibid, p. 213; Ibn al-Athir, al-Kāmil fī l-Ta’rīkh, ed. C. Tornberg, 13 vols, (Beirut, 19657), viii, p. 464.

24See, for instance, Sallāmī, Akhbār , pp. 99, 103, 183, 184.

25Sakhāwī, al-I‘lān bi-Tawbīkh li-Man Dhamma al-Ta’rīkh, ed. Franz Rosenthal (Beirut, n.d.), p. 262 on this.

26Reading, as suggested by Rosenthal (see n.25), al-ḥawādith al-‘iẓām rather than the nonsensical al-wājib al- ‘iẓām of the ms.

27Ibid, pp. 79. Unfortunately Kāẓim Bīkī’s edition contains several misprints in this passage. Consult instead his source, Sakhāwī, al-I‘lān, pp. 73–6.

28W.L. Treadwell, ‘The Political History of the Samanid State’, Unpublished DPhil thesis, Oxford, 1991, p. 213.

29Sallāmī, Akhbār , pp. 193–4.

30For the biography of the Sallāmīs see Sallāmī, Akhbār, Introduction, pp. 10–23; on the lack of official patronage, ibid, pp. 50–1.

31Al-Ḥadīthī, al-Tawārīkh al-Maḥaliyya, pp. 30–1. The main primary sources on which al-Ḥadīthī drew were: Sakhāwī, al-I‘lān, pp. 261–2; Ḥājjī Khalīfa, Kashf al-Ẓunūn, ed. Şerefettin Yaltkaya, (Istanbul, 1941), i, p. 292; Ṣafadī, al-Wāfī bi’l-Wafāyāt, ed. Hellmut Ritter, (Wiesbaden, 1974), i, p. 48.

32Ibn Funduq, Tārīkh-i Bayhaq, pp. 138, 154.

33Sakhāwī, al-I‘lān, p. 262. This work may be a confusion with Abū Zayd al-Balkhī’s book on Balkh (or vice versa); see further Azad, Sacred Landscape, p. 47.

34On this work see Yāqūt, Mu‘jam al-Udabā’, ii, p. 923; also Sallāmī, Akhbār, Introduction, pp. 10, n. 3; Ibn Funduq, Tārīkh-i Bayhaq, p. 132. Al-Ḥadīthī gives the title as Farīd al-Ta’rīkh fī Akhbār Khurāsān, but farīd is most likely just a misprint for mazīd.

35Although Hajjī Khalīfa, Kashf al-Ẓunūn, i, p. 292 is the only source to mention this work, a specialist in Qur’anic sciences named Abū Naṣr al-Marwazī who died in 484 is named by Yāqūt, Mu‘jam al-Udabā’, v, pp. 2358–60, and it seems likely he is identical with our author.

36Ḥājjī Khalīfa, Kashf al-Ẓunūn, i, p. 292.

37Muqaddasī, Aḥsan al-Taqāsīm fi Ma‘rifat al-Aqālīm, p. 260.

38Bal‘amī, Tārīkhnāma, ed. Muḥammad Rawshan (Tehran, 2003), p. 1000; cf. Tabari, Ta’rīkh, ii, pp. 1659, 1764–5.

39Meisami, Persian Historiography, pp. 66–8, 72–4, 78–9.

40Ibn Funduq, Tārīkh-i Bayhaq, p. 65ff.

41Shaykh ‘Abd al-Raḥmān Fāmī Harawī, Tārīkh-i Harāt (dastnawīs-i naw-yāfta), facsimile prepared by Muḥammad Mīr Ḥusaynī and Muḥammad Riḍā Mihrīzī, preface by Īraj Afshar, (Tehran, 2008). An edition of this work is currently in preparation (David Durand-Guédy, pers. comm.)

42Mu‘īn al-Dīn Muḥammad Isfizārī, Rawḍat al-Jannāt fi Awṣāf Madīnat Harāt, ed. Muḥammad Kāẓim Imām, (Tehran, 1338), i, pp. 42, 87, 88, 94, 252, 378, 383, 403.

43Sayf b. Muḥammad b. Ya‘qūb al-Harawī [Sayfī], Tārīkhnāma-i Harāt, ed. Ghulāmriḍā Ṭabaṭabā’ī Majd, (Tehran, 1383), p. 63. For further references and the various forms of the Fāmī’s name given in the sources see, Paul, ‘Histories of Herat’, pp. 99–100.

44For the date of 521, see Fāmī, Tārīkh-i Harāt, pp. 125. For references to Sanjar see ibid, pp. 133. A couple of mistaken dates, where much earlier events are accidently put in the sixth century hijri, suggests this too. Fāmī, Tārīkh-i Harāt, p. 19 puts the defeat of the sons of the Umayyad governor Muhallab in 502; ibid, p. 159, the Abbasid governor Faḍl b. Yaḥyā comes to Khurasan in 598.

45Ibid, Introduction, pp. 27–33; see also the objections of Kāẓim Bīkī in his Introduction to the Akhbār Wulāt Khurāsān, pp. 57–8. The debate has focused largely on the presumed contents of Fāmī’s work and their relationship to the extant fragments; the problem of the poem on Marghanī discussed below has not as far as I am aware been raised previously.

46See Fāmī, Tārīkh-i Harāt, Introduction, p. 29. Further, compare for instance Isfizārī, Rawḍat al-Jannāt, i, p. 94, where Fāmī is cited as quoting Wahb b. Wahb al-Qarshi on the virtues of Herat, and Fāmī, Tārīkh-i Harāt , p. 147, where the same passage from Wahb is quoted. See also Isfizārī, Rawḍat al-Jannāt, i, p. 90 where the ‘Shaykh-i marḥūm’ (i.e. Fāmī) is quoted as citing an unattributed book on the virtues of Khurasan, and Fāmī, Tārīkh-i Harāt, p. 140, where the same work is mentioned. For another example, compare Isfizārī, Rawḍat al-Jannāt, i, p. 87, and Fāmī, Tārīkh-i Harāt, p. 136. See also n. 57 and 58 below.

47Subkī, Ṭabaqāt al-Shāfi‘iyya al-Kubrā, ed. Maḥmūd Muḥammad Tanāḥī and ‘Abd al-Fattāḥ Muḥammad Ḥulw, 7 vols, (Cairo, 1964), vii, pp. 105–6

48Paul, ‘Histories of Herat’, p. 101.

49Sayfī, Tārīkhnāma-i Harāt, p. 177; Isfizārī, Rawḍat al-Jannāt, i, p. 403.

50Laurence Potter, ‘The Kart Dynasty of Herat: Religion and Politics in Medieval Iran’, PhD thesis, Columbia University, 1992, pp. 34–7. ‘Izz al-Dīn ‘Umar b. Muḥammad al-Marghanī is first mentioned by Ibn al-Athīr sub anno 567/1171–2 as ‘amīr Harāt’ (Ibn al-Athīr, al-Kāmil, xi, p. 384). Potter’s source for Marghanī’s death is not entirely clear, but the last reference to him in Ibn al-Athīr comes sub anno 598, see ibid, xii, p. 177.

51Fāmī’s reputation may be judged by the fact that he was known to the authors of biographical dictionaries in Mamluk Egypt and Syria, see Paul ‘Histories of Herat’, p. 100.

52Fāmī, Tārīkh-i Harāt, pp. 42–5

53Ibid, p. 46ff.

54Ibid, p. 66ff.

55Ibid, p. 100ff.

56Ibid, pp. 115–136.

57Ibid, pp. 136–60. Parts of this section were incorporated more or less verbatim into Isfizārī, Rawdat al-Jannāt, pp. 94–100.

58The material relating to the Seljuq period has been studied by Jürgen Paul in his ‘Histories of Herat’ on the basis of Isfizārī’s version, which as noted in n. 57, is very close to Fāmī’s text and therefore does not warrant separate investigation here.

59Fāmī, Tārīkh-i Harāt, pp. 116–7, 125.

60Ibid, pp. 120–1. The mosque was built next to the ātishkada in a village outside Herat, but, fired up with religious enthusiasm, one night the inhabitants destroyed the firetemple. The majūs appealed to the governor of Khurasan ‘Abdallāh b. Ṭāhir, who sent a deputy to investigate. However, all the Muslims bore false witness that no firetemple had ever existed, although eventually the story came out through the investigations of the qadi. Presumably the reader is meant to be impressed with the Heratis’ zeal for Islam.

61Ibid, p. 31.

62Ibid, p. 114.

63Ibid, p. 124.

64Ibid, p. 43

65Ibid, p. 36. Presumably Abū’l-Ḥusayn Aḥmad Ibn Fāris (d.395/1004 in Rayy) is meant, a noted philologist who also wrote on a wide variety of other subjects. See further H. Fleisch, ‘Ibn Fāris’, EI^2, iii, pp. 764–5.

66Fāmī, Tārīkh-i Harāt, pp. 136. On this individual, who spent his life in Samarqand and Nishapur and wrote a work on hadith called the Baḥr al-Asānīd, see al-Imām al-Ḥāfiz Abū ’l-Ḥasan al-Fārisī, al-Mukhtaṣar min Kitāb al-Siyāq li-Ta’rīkh Naysābūr, ed. Muḥammad Kaẓim al-Maḥmūdī, (Tehran, 1384), pp. 21–3 (no 1722).

67Isfizārī, Rawḍat al-Jannāt, i, p. 378.

68See Paul, ‘Histories of Herat’, pp. 99–100; Ibn Funduq, Tārīkh-i Bayhaq, p. 21.

69Fāmī, Tārīkh-i Harāt, pp. 36, 46. On ‘Abd al-Raḥīm (also known as ‘Abd al-Raḥmān), see C. E. Bosworth, The History of the Saffarids of Sistan and the Maliks of Nimruz (247/861 to 949/1542–3) (Costa Mesa, 1994), pp. 81–2, 115–6.

70Fāmī, Tārīkh-i Harāt, pp. 54, 64–66. On Khujistānī see Bosworth, The History of the Saffarids of Sistan, pp. 126–34, 184–5, 194–200, and for a detailed analysis of his revolt and its association with Herat, see D.G. Tor, ‘A numismatic history of the first Saffarid dynasty (AH 247–300/AD 861–911),’ The Numismatic Chronicle clxii (2002), pp. 300–305.

71Fāmī, Tārīkh-i Harāt, pp. 66–7, 71.

72Ibid, p. 148

73Ibid, p. 136.

74Ibid, p. 140: dar kitābī dīdam kih bi-kasī mansūb nabūd Dhikr-i Mafākhir-i Khurāsān.

75Ibid, pp. 155–6.

76Ibid, p. 150.

77Isfizārī, Rawḍat al-Jannāt, i, p. 387.

78Fāmī, Tārīkh-i Harāt, p. 146.

79See ibid, p. 146 for Herat as shāh-i Khurāsān.

80Ibid, p. 147.

81Ibid, p. 139.

82Ibid, p. 118.

83Ibid, p. 44

84Abū Bakr ‘Abdallāh b. ‘Umar Wā‘iẓ Balkhī, Faḍā’il-i Balkh, ed. ‘Abd al-Ḥayy Habībī, (Tehran, 1350), p. 52.

85For example, ibid, pp. 24–5.

86Tarikh-i Sīstān, ed. Muḥammad Taqī Bahār, (Tehran, 1381), p. 56.

87Ibid, p. 68. The Tārīkh-i Sīstān’s definition of Sistan includes Isfizar, in the Herat region, suggesting that Sistani insistence on a grandiose definition of the region might have been one reason for irking Herati sensibilities and provoking the condemnation of Sistan found in Fāmī. See ibid, p. 66.

88Ibn Funduq, Tārīkh-i Bayhaq, p. 21.

89Tārīkh-i Sīstān, p. 68: ‘har chih ḥadd-i mashriq ast Khurāsān gūyand wa har chih ḥadd-i maghrib ast Īrānshahr.’

90Savant, The New Muslims of Post-Conquest Iran, pp. 27–8.

91See the discussions of this phenomenon in Durand-Guédy, Iranian Elites and Turkish Rulers, pp. 111ff, 191; A.C.S. Peacock, The Great Seljuk Empire (Edinburgh, 2015), Chapter 5.

92al-Bundarī, Zubdat al-Nuṣra, ed. M.T. Houtsma in Recueil de textes relatifs à l’histoire des Seldjoucides, Vol. II: Histoire des Seldjoucides de l’Irâq (Leiden, 1889), p. 101.

93See the paper by Roy Mottahedeh in this volume.

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