Historical writing in makes its appearance in the tenth century, under the Samanid dynasty, and continues to develop under their successors, the Ghaznavids, in the eleventh century. From the outset two narratives of history may be observed: one is Iranian, focusing on pre-Islamic Iranian monarchy up to the Islamic conquest; the other is Islamic, and this model gives rise, in turn, to dynastic history. The presence of two competing models raises many questions concerning the relation of historiography to dynastic and regional politics, the use of for historical writing, and changes in literary taste. Some of these questions will be explored in this paper, which compares Firdawsi's Shahnama, based on the Iranian narrative of history, with Abu al-Fazl Bayhaqi's Tarikh-i Mascudi, exemplifying the Islamic model. While these works share many common concerns, they differ markedly in both style and outlook; a comparison between them sheds light on the complex question of the development of historiography. Each age's vision of the past is formed by its present concerns. It is from the standpoint of the present that we look back on the past to tell us who we are, where we came from, how we became as we are today, where we may be going; but in this questioning, this effort at recollection, it is the present which is given, the past which is vague and amorphous. Hence each age rewrites the past in the image of its present. It has become commonplace to maintain that medieval writers had no historical consciousness, no interest in the past as past; that they Poetics Today 14:2 (Summer 1993). Copyright ? 1993 by The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics. CCC 0333-5372/93/$2.50. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.147 on Sun, 07 Aug 2016 07:10:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 248 Poetics Today 14:2 merely interpreted the past in the context of the present, appropriated and assimilated it to their own experience, and derived from it universal moral lessons (see Von Grunebaum 1955: 169; cf. Coleman 1992: 275-76, 297-324). This view oversimplifies that confrontation with the past which characterizes crucial periods and which often gives rise to conflicting narratives as history is rewritten (see Ward 1985: 103). Such rewriting may be seen not as indifference to the past, but as an exercise in selective memory (or perhaps in selective amnesia), as the historian determines what is to be remembered and transforms, or excises, what is not. The problem of conflicting visions, or versions, of the past arises when we compare two medieval works of history: Abu alQasim Firdawsi's Shahnama, a lengthy poem which chronicles the Iranian monarchy from its origins to its end with the Arab conquest (see Firdawsi 1962-71), and Abu al-Fazl Bayhaqi's Tarikh-i Mas'udi, the surviving portion of a longer history of the Ghaznavid dynasty, encompassing the reign of Mas'ud I (1030-1041) and ending with his defeat by the Seljuks in 1040 (see Bayhaqi 1971). Firdawsi wrote between 975 and 1010, Bayhaqi between 1042 and 1077; and while both writers share many preoccupations of their age-notably, an interest in the nature of the transfer of power and in the related issue of kingly ethics-the marked differences in their works raise broader questions relating to the development of new literature, and of historical writing in Persian, in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Both developments are closely linked to the rise of local dynasties during the ninth and tenth centuries in the eastern Abbasid empire, whose rulers, although in most cases nominally subject to the caliphate, were in fact virtually autonomous. The Tahirids in Nishapur (822873) and the Saffarids in Sistan (867-1003) ultimately gave way to the most long-lived and powerful of these houses, the Samanids in Khurasan (874-997), toward the end of whose hegemony Firdawsi began his Shahnama; before its completion, the Samanids were supplanted by the Ghaznavids, their former generals and governors, to whose ruler Mahmud (999-1030) Firdawsi dedicated his epic and whose fortunes were later chronicled by Bayhaqi. The Tahirids, ethnically but almost wholly assimilated to the dominant Arabic culture, paid but slight attention to letters, the Saffarids substantially more;' but it was the Samanids, who encouraged as well as (and along with) Arabic letters, who are 1. On literature under the Tahirids and the Samanids, see Rypka (1968: 135-36); on the Tahirids, see also Bosworth (1969b), who refutes later allegations of their hostility to literature and culture; on the Saffarids, see also Stern (1971). This content downloaded from 157.55.39.147 on Sun, 07 Aug 2016 07:10:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Meisami * Medieval Persia 249 considered the initiators of the Persian literary renaissance. A discussion of the conditions which favored the rise of literature is beyond the scope of this paper; but while among the peoples conquered by Islam the Persians possessed perhaps the strongest sense of national identity and of their pre-Islamic past, it would be a mistake to see the flowering of as purely, or even primarily, an expression of anti-Arab (or anti-Arabic) national feeling. Certainly, conditions in the east, remote from the centers of Arabic culture and with large segments of the population (notably, the dihqans, the Persian-speaking native aristocracy, and the Turkish military) having no particular attachment to that culture, facilitated the rise of new (Dari) and its spread as the lingua franca of the region as well as encouraging literary composition in that language.2 The appearance of historical writing in in the last halfcentury of Samanid rule is a similarly complex phenomenon. It is marked from the outset by the existence of two separate and distinct narratives of the past: one, pre-Islamic and Iranian; the other, Islamic. The first, focusing on the history of the ancient Iranian kings, informs the prose Shahnama of Abu Mansur Ma'mari, composed in the reign of cAbd al-Malik ibn Nuh (954-961) at the behest of the governor of Tus (later of Khurasan), Abu Mansur Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Razzaq, in 957-58, of which only the preface (perhaps the oldest surviving example of prose) remains.3 The second, dealing primarily with Islamic history, is seen in the translation from Arabic of Muhammad ibnJarir Tabari's universal history, the Ta'rikh al-rusul wa-al-muluk (History of prophets and kings), commissioned by Mansur ibn Nuh (961-976) and carried out by his vizier Abu 'Ali Balcami.4 These two narratives are, at least to some extent, mutually exclusive; how they were (or were not) accommodated to each other will be considered