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This book analyzes how early Muslim historians merged the pre-Islamic histories of the Arab and Iranian peoples into a didactic narrative culminating with the Arab conquest of Iran. Through an in-depth examination of Islamic historical accounts of encounters between representatives of these two ethnicities taking place in the centuries prior to the coming of Islam, this book uncovers anachronistic projections of contemporaneous Islamic discourses. It shows how the formulaic placement of such embellishment within the context of the narrative served to justify the Arabs' rise to power while explaining the fall of the Iranian Sasanian Empire. By so doing, this book sheds new light on how historians of the early Islamic era both perceived and constructed pre-Islamic history.
List of contents
1. Introduction 2. Shifting Patterns of Identity and Early Islamic Historiography in Context 3. The Opening of the Drama: Shāpūr and the Sheikh 4. Bahrām V Gūr, the Lakhmids, and the Hephthalite Disaster 5. The Twilight of Sasanian Power: Khusraw I Anūshirvān and the Saga of Ḥimyar 6. The Buildup to the Confrontation: Khusraw II Parvīz and the Rise of the Arabs 7. The Climax: The Islamic Victory over the Sasanians 8. Conclusion
About the author
Scott Savran obtained his PhD from the University of Wisconsin in 2011. Dr Savran's research focuses on identity-based discourses in early Islamic historiography.
Summary
This book provides an in-depth examination of Islamic historical accounts of the encounters between representatives of these two peoples that took place in the centuries prior to the coming of Islam. By doing this, it uncovers anachronistic projections of dynamic identity and political discourses within the contemporaneous Islamic world.
