Author
Associate Professor, Department of History and Civilization of Islamic Nations, University of Tehran
Abstract
The missing Iranian local histories are not few, though studies on historiography in Iran have focused on the existing local histories as well as their genres. The present work aims to examine Tārīkh Khwarazm, the lost local history of Khwārazm in Arabic by Maĥmūd ibn Muĥammad alKhwārazmī (d.1173/568A.H.), of which, besides citations, a brief abridgement (MS) is still available. This article, including the edited abridgement, shows that in addition to those known genres of local histories (i.e. religious and secular), another type could also be identified as religiocultural local history. The latter, of which Tārīkh Khwārazm is a good sample, contrary to the mere religious local histories, embodies biographies of scholars in subjects other than Hadith as well. Therefore, Maĥmūd ibn Muĥammad al-Khwārazmī on account of this characteristic of his work might be considered amongst the pioneer local historiographers of medieval Iran. The findings also reveal that the pattern of quoting hadith and other Islamic narratives in Iranian local histories in order to praise certain locality does not necessarily mean the acceptance of those citations by the readers.
Keywords
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