2 - Methodologies for Reading Hybrid Identities and Imagined Histories

Summary

Chapter Two uses theories and methods in historiography, social history, rhetoric, material culture, and literary criticism to identify ways in which authors of Persian local histories employed diverse but interrelated themes, strategies, and literary devices to portray the virtues of their cities. These virtues bound the region or city to key moments and characters in Islamic history. By embedding the city deep into the fabric of Islamic history, authors of local histories fostered regionally specific and locally differentiated Persian Islamic identities in ways that “centered” these histories written on the ostensible “peripheries” of empire. Chapter Two establishes the conceptual framework that provides the intellectual scaffolding for this project. It situates this project within the literature and argues that the methodology proposed here is a compelling new way of reading narrative local histories. A shift away from positivist history opens up new possibilities of how to understand identity, rhetoric, and center-periphery relations, with strong implications for medieval European history. This chapter assesses the genre of Islamic local historical writing, which lies on a spectrum from biographical dictionaries at one end to narrative chronicles on the other, and explains why this project’s methodology is ideally suited for narrative local histories.