The Fall of the Barmakids in Historiography and Fiction: Recognition and Disclosure

Abstract

This study traces a centuries-long development in, transformation of, and argues for a variegated rapport between a group of disparate texts, some historiographical, some fictitious. Classical historiographies recounting the Barmakid debacle (al-Ṭabarī through Ibn Khallikān), late medieval and pre-modern popular accounts of the Barmakid tragedy, tales that accompany these accounts, and others in the Arabian Nights that mention Jaʿfar the Barmakid and related ones that do not, are all analyzed by appealing to Aristotle’s concept of anagnorisis (recognition or discovery). Anagnorisis makes narrative and historiography read like fiction and is a structuring device in these texts, a window into narrative hermeneutics, and specifically, the feature that indicates significantly that these various texts are of a piece, according to both conscious and subliminal design. Anagnorisis reverberates with calamitous recognition built into the Barmakid story — one which unveils hard and tragic truths, and just as importantly preserves malignant secrecy, a secrecy that the Arabian Nights unconsciously transforms into felicity.