PERSIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY AND ISLAMIC HISTORIOGRAPHY

This study aims at putting early Persian historical writing back on the map of Islamic historiography. Scholarship in this field has traditionally privileged works written in Arabic; one has only to look, for example, at Franz Rosenthal's A History of Muslim Historiography (1952; revised edition 1968) to see how few Persian historians figure therein. In a 1962 essay entitled 'The Evolution of Persian Historiography' Bertold Spuler wrote that 'historiography seems to have been of no great importance to pre-Islamic Iranians' and that therefore the only prototypes that Persian historians of Islamic times had to draw upon were Arabic; this despite the fact that it had long been known that the Sasanians, in particular, possessed a variety of historical traditions (ranging from 'official' royal or priestly histories to more popular works on the heroic deeds of great Iranians), and that these traditions had not disappeared with the coming of Islam, but influenced both Arabic and subsequent Persian historical writing.Spuler wrote further that 'it is a well-known fact' to specialists in the field 'that hardly any work written in Persian exists which deals with the history of Persia until the beginning of the Mongol period', that is, between about 20/642 and 653/1255 (1962: 126-7). Most of the texts to be considered in this study had been published by the time Spuler wrote; all of them treat history, whether preor post-Islamic, from a 'Persian' perspective, that is, they focus chiefly on events in the East. Yet such assumptions as these have undoubtedly contributed to the general neglect of early Persian historiography; and it is only relatively recently that historical writing of the pre-Mongol period (4th/10th to 6th/12th centuries) has begun to arouse serious interest.

Another cause of this neglect has been the view that Persian historiography is somehow inferior to its more serious, scholarly, and religiously motivated early Arabic counterpart. In 1938, in an article originally published in the Supplement to the Encyclopaedia of Islam, H. A. R.