The political history of the Delhi Sultanate, the term commonly used to categorize the succession of Muslim states that ruled large swaths of northern India from 1206 to 1398, has rarely exerted much appeal on historians of the broader Islamic world or those of South Asia. Apart from the fact that few records have survived from the Indo-Muslim states of this era, most of their rulers exhibited unpalatable aspects of military autocracies so common to this era of sultanates, which became the political norm in the Islamic world following the deterioration of the ‘Abbasid Caliphate in the tenth century CE and the Caliphate's extinction by the Mongols in 1258. Peter Jackson, Iqtidar Husain Siddiqui, Sunil Kumar, and others have published important works on the political and military history of the Sultanate regimes, but these studies are rare, especially when compared with the lavish historiography of the Mughal Empire. The religious life of the Sultanate period is another matter, and far more scholars have produced and continue to produce valuable studies of Indo-Muslim religious practices, institutions, and ideology. Sufism has attracted some of the greatest interest, as attested by the works of Aziz Ahmad, Khaliq Ahmad Nizami, Simon Digby, Carl Ernst, Aditya Behl, and Raziuddin Aquil, to name just a few of the many individuals who have studied this topic. Partly associated with the role of Sufis is one other aspect of Indo-Muslim history that continues to attract attention in an era when the nature of political Islam has become a major issue, the religious nature of the Sultanate regimes.

In Blain Auer's new book, Symbols of Authority in Medieval Islam, he considers this question through a study of the historiography. Auer introduces his study, subtitled “History, Religion and Muslim Legitimacy in the Delhi Sultanate,” by remarking about the era of the Delhi Sultanate, “Historiography in India is first and foremost about the centrality and originality of India's place in Islamic history” (p. xix). He states his goals in two, not entirely consistent terms. While he initially indicates in the first chapter on Delhi that he intends to analyze the “relationship between religion and power” of the Delhi Sultans (p. 5), he subsequently says, “This work seeks to understand the Islamic modes of legitimacy that Sultanate historians used to craft their images of the sultans…” (pp. 16–17). This latter purpose is the central theme and the principal value of the book, which Auer demonstrates in his conclusion, when he states that Indo-Persian historiography in “premodern South Asia . . . is as much an enterprise in representation and identity construction as it is a record of dynastic action,” then remarking, “Ultimately we will never know if the Delhi sultanate was ninety percent image or action” (p. 160). That is, Auer draws no conclusion about the ways in which the Delhi Sultans used religion to strengthen their power. What he does accomplish is an analysis of the different religious themes Indo-Persian historians invoked to justify the rule of their patrons.

Auer's work ought to be seen as a continuation of the historiographical analysis of Indo-Persian Sultanate histories, which Peter Hardy initiated with his slim but seminal work Historians of Medieval India. Inspired by his mentor, R. G. Collingwood (d. 1943), a historian and philosopher of history, Hardy dismissed British scholars’ uncritical mining of Indo-Persian histories for “facts” about precolonial India. In his analysis of Ziya al-Din Barani's works, among others, Hardy argued that such works were written with religious or literary agendas rather than as balanced, analytical works whose sole purpose was to establish “what really happened,” Ranke's “wie es eigentlich gewesen.” Auer cites Hardy's work, and his own critique of “traditional,” largely nineteenth-century British use of Indo-Persian sources echoes Hardy's in most respects. Reiterating his fundamental purpose, Auer states, “This study proposes to apply historical-critical methods to historiography of the Sultanate period in order to interpret the religious representations and Islamic ideologies of rule” (p. 9).

What he proceeds to do in the book then is to analyze the ways in which three major Indo-Persian Sultanate historians invoked Islamic religious culture to legitimize the rule of the rough and ready Delhi Sultans, most of whom needed all the ideological help they could employ to prop up their brittle regimes. These historians are three individuals who worked as officials in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Delhi: Minhaj Siraj Juzjani, Ziya al-Din Barani, and Shams al-Din Siraj. Put simply, Auer demonstrates how these men manipulated the idea of Muhammad as the Perfect Ruler, invoked Sufi traditions legitimizing the authority of sultans, argued that the Delhi rulers functioned as caliphs, and stressed how certain rulers piously emphasized the application of the shari‘a in their realms. Auer's careful, lucid analysis of these complex Persian works significantly expands Hardy's work as well as that of other scholars, who are acutely conscious of the rhetorical or purposeful, intentional nature of any historical text, medieval or modern.