The Origins of the Idea of Ethnogenesis

The Persians’ prophetic genealogies were first and foremost an extension of Muḥammad's own genealogy and represented the development of ideas surrounding the history of his countrymen, the Arabs; the relationship of Muḥammad and his people to the history of monotheism; and the signif-icance of blood ties for securing bonds within and among peoples. The parallels between biblical traditions and those of Islam have been noted, as have the ways in which Muslims developed these in their narratives about the Prophet's life and the origins of their faith. To summarize: just as the Bible traced the ancestries of patriarchs, prophets, and Jesus back to Adam, Muḥammad was shown to descend from Adam through a series of prestigious ancestors including Noah, Abraham, and Ishmael. Jesus’ genealogy in the gospel of Matthew shows, in the words of one Bible scholar, that “the entire history of Israel finds its fulfillment in Jesus Christ.”² Muḥammad's genealogy, likewise, shows that Muḥammad was the fulfillment of prior monotheisms: he completes the prophecy especially of Abraham, from whom the Arabs, as sons of Ishmael, descend – in parallel to Jewish prophets, who descend from Abraham's other son, Isaac. The biography of Muḥammad by Ibn Isḥāq (d. ca. 150/767) – transmitted by Ibn Hishām (d. 213/828 or 218/833) in the edition dominant today – begins with the Prophet's genealogy and runs through key Arab eponyms and Arabized biblical figures back to Adam: “Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh b. ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib…b. Kaʿb…b. Fihr…b. Muḍar b. Nizār b. Maʿadd b. ʿAdnān…b. Nābit b. Ismāʿīl b. Ibrāhīm [Ishmael, son of Abraham]…b. Arfakhshadh b. Sām b. Nūḥ [Arpachshad, son of Shem, son of Noah]…Shīth b. Ādam [Seth, son of Adam].”³ As Daniel Martin Varisco has written, it is in the generation after Abraham, with Ishmael, that the line is Arabized at the joining point of the biblical with the Arab genealogy that continues through Muḥammad himself.⁴

Traditionists extended these ideas by elaborating Muḥammad's ances-tors. For the Arab part of his ancestry, this yielded a schematized map of Arab tribes. For the biblical part, it resulted in different peoples, all linked by blood ties to Noah or Abraham, and implicitly to Muḥammad himself. Such a genealogy was supported by a discourse according to which Muḥammad belonged to a prophetic family. He was remembered to have referred to his fellow prophets using familiar terms, suggesting a shared kinship. In one Hadith, Muḥammad is quoted as saying that the prophets are sons of one father by different mothers. In another version, he refers to them as brothers.⁵ God bestowed His favor not just on previous prophets but on their progeny as well, or at least on those of their progeny who believed.⁶ This family knew islām, or the monotheistic submission to God that He revealed throughout the ages to particular prophets and their peoples. Every time God sent a prophet, “a window onto the unseen was opened up and a glimpse of ultimate reality was transmitted to the earth.”⁷ The Qurʾan therefore refers to Abraham and his sons Ishmael and Isaac as muslims, or “submitters” to the one God.⁸

The Persians’ genealogies were, equally, an attempt to account within an “Islamic” model for Iranian ways of explaining the origins of the world and the course of human history. These ways posed a challenge to a history centered on prophets, as they proposed their own accounts of the origins of humanity, its development into distinct peoples, and the overall diversity of human relations. They were related in tales within which chronology typically moved according to a different rhythm, that of a history of kingship. Most importantly, they featured ideas of “Īrān,” sovereignty, topography, and heroes and villains going back, with some interruptions, at least to Sasanian times if not further. They also featured noble Iranian families and their descendants in the present, which, insofar as prophetic history was concerned, could be reckoned, theoretically, as merely late offshoots.

Iranian accounts of the past attracted the early interest of Muslims (including Persian Muslims), who responded to them by translating them from Middle Persian into Arabic, debating their ideas, reworking them into their own narratives, and otherwise engaging with them. Such rewriting occurred within what scholars have called Iranian “national” history. Its best-known representative, the “Book of Kings,” known in Middle Persian as the Xwadāy-nāmag (in Arabic written as Khudāy-nāma, -nāmaj, or -nāmak), covered Iranian history from its beginnings until the last Sasanian monarch to rule Iran, Yazdagird III (r. 631–51 CE), though a final chapter seems to have been added after that monarch's death.⁹ The work seems to have been compiled at different stages, but it was fixed in a coherent form by the end of the reign of Khusraw Parvīz (r. 590–628 CE). It was first translated into Arabic in the ʿAbbasid period by the prolific courtier ʿAbd Allāh b. al-Muqaffaʿ (d. 139/756) and retranslated several times later. In Arabic, it served as a major source for Arabic traditionists and in some fashion as one of the likely sources for Firdawsī's Persian Shāh-nāmah (completed ca. 400/1010).¹⁰ On the other hand, Muslims ignored, or were unaware of, much of Iranian historical knowledge. This was particularly true of Iranian “religious” history, namely, Zoroastrian ideas about the past; these received highly selec-tive attention in Muslim historical works.

The greatest challenge to studying how Muslims took account of such history lies in the nature of the surviving sources, nearly all of which postdate the rise of Islam. This does not allow for a stable point of comparison, that is, a “pure” pre-Islamic national or religious historiography against which to measure interpretations by Muslims. No historical books have survived intact from Seleucid, Parthian, or Sasanian times that could chronicle Iranian national history, although there is some non-narrative evidence of it in the Avesta, Achaemenid inscriptions and tablets, Middle Iranian inscriptions, ostraca, papyri, graffiti, coins, and the Arabic and Persian Muslim sources themselves.¹¹ This has had the odd result that attempts to describe the Xwadāy-nāmag have relied on Firdawsī's epic or on al-Ṭabarī's History of Prophets and Kings (Taʾrīkh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk). Likewise, Zoroastrian Middle Persian texts, while containing much old material, came into their current forms in the eighth century CE and afterward, when Zoroastrians had been interacting with Muslims for some time.¹² A further challenge arises from the fact that while one can speak of Zoroastrian historiography, elements of Iranian national and religious history are often merged in the Arabic sources.¹³ Other times, what once may have counted as Zoroastrian history is “nationalized,” becoming part and parcel of the history of all Persians. Whatever the heuristic value of a religious/national distinction, the state of our sources should cause misgivings about any rigid categorization of contents as simply either “national” or “religious,” since although it may be true that such a division held once upon a time, as the two types of history were produced and first consumed, the distinction softens in Arabic and Persian, as traditionists make use of a variety of sources.

Finally, there is every reason to believe that historical knowledge of a more local nature also served as a source for genealogies featuring the prophets and for Muslim historiography more generally, though identifying its original, pre-Islamic forms is fraught with difficulties. Some of this evidence is circumstantial: Jews and Christians, who may have served as sources of such knowledge, inhabited Iranian towns such as Hamadhān, Nihāwand, and Jayy, from which we also have testimony about prophetic genealogies. Other support is derived from pure conjecture: Iraq with its Jewish and Christian populations would have provided a fertile ground for discussions of the prophets’ ancestries.¹⁴ Local histories contain much material relating to pre-Islamic times, and they even take archaic forms, such as the Pahlavi treatise on the “Wonders and Magnificence of Sīstān.”¹⁵ Although their first audiences resided in Iranian localities, they circulated widely and transmitted their ideas about ancient history, and other matters, to wider horizons.

When Muslims tried to account for Persians in prophetic history, they therefore had on offer a complex network of traditions from which to choose: those preoccupied with Islam's biblical heritage; those reflecting native Iranian knowledge in different forms, including that produced for particular localities and disseminated widely; and ideas originating with longstanding local Jewish and Christian populations.

The Inheritance of Noah

Let us look at the most commonly mentioned prophet-forefather for the Persians, Noah, and at the various ways in which descent from him could connect them to prophetic and Islamic history. The story of the Flood that destroyed all peoples except Noah's family has required those who subscribe to its mythology of ethnogenesis to trace their ancestries to one or another of his sons, Shem, Ham, or Japheth. This has been accomplished in a variety of ways. Although early European Christians, for example, were not mentioned in the Genesis 10 account of Noah's progeny, they traced their lines to Japheth.¹⁶ Jewish traditions supported this ancestry, but details proved difficult to work out¹⁷ and, in some cases, involved the recasting of a former god as a royal figure.¹⁸ According to an unusual tradition circulating in ninth-century England, the Anglo-Saxon royal line of Wessex descended from an ark-born son of Noah named Sceaf.¹⁹ In the complex search for roots that took place in Reformation era Germany, Christians identified Ashkenaz, a grandson of Japheth, as their forefather.²⁰

In adopting the ancient Near Eastern idea of the Flood, Muslims inherited its ethnogenic imperative as well: if all other peoples perished at that time, then Muslims and their ancestors, whatever their origins, must de-scend from Noah, too. There could be no autochthons. For Arabs, this was quickly addressed. The early biographers of Muḥammad, as mentioned, constructed for him a lineage that went back to Noah (and before him, to Adam). The Arabian prophets – Hūd, Ṣāliḥ, and Shuʿayb – were also given lineages. The eponyms of Arab tribes, such as Qaḥṭān, also became Noah's progeny, conferring this ancestry upon the tribes generally and upon the individuals within them.

Scholars of the genealogical sciences placed non-Arab peoples in a great number of segmented lineages that showed more than one line of descent from a given ancestor. Such lineages contain multiple branches, and are therefore well suited for different purposes. For many scholars, no matter what their own locale, a clear primary concern was the way in which kinship to Noah provided a biological explanation for the Arabs’ relations with other peoples, especially the “Children of Israel” (Banū Isrāʾīl).²¹ For others, genealogy reflected a salvific hierarchy of peoples (in which, for example, Ham's descendants tended to fare poorly), or it could root in primordial times devolution from an original Islam and therefore serve as part of a critique (as I discuss in Chapter 4).

Persians were considered in some of the earliest schemes that gave an anthropology of the world's peoples. For example, traditions attributed by al-Ṭabarī to ʿAbd Allāh b. ʿAbbās (d. 68/687 or 688) or Wahb b. Munabbih (d. 110 or 114/728 or 732) would have the Persians descend from Shem or Japheth. Ibn ʿAbbās reportedly named Shem's descen-dants as Moses's people (qawm Mūsā, i.e., the Children of Israel), the Arabs, the Persians (al-Furs), the Nabat (al-Nabaṭ, that is, the Aramaic-speaking population of Syria and Mesopotamia, not the Nabateans of Petra familiar to modern readers), and the people of India and Sind (al-Hind wa-l-Sind).²² Wahb, meanwhile, specified Persians, Arabs, and the people of Byzantium as Shem's descendants, thus rendering the Arabs kin to the two major imperial powers they conquered. For him, “the Blacks” (al-Sūdān) descended from Ham and the Turks (al-Turk) and Gog and Magog from Japheth.²³

The Accommodation of al-Ṭabarī

The most systematic attempt to account for translocal Iranian historiography was undertaken by al-Ṭabarī in his History of Prophets and Kings. For al-Ṭabarī, the Persians’ genealogies, including Noah as a forefather, were part of a larger project of narrating the history of Islam and the Muslim community upon the premise that knowledge of true monotheism, islām, came into the world with the first prophet, Adam, and was reinforced by all prophets after him. In al-Ṭabarī's work, Persians play a major role in this early history, which prepares audiences to spot them in the narratives that follow and lead to the early fourth/tenth century. By this logic, it would not be too far-fetched to view Islam as an indigenous religion, forgotten and then recovered.

Al-Ṭabarī was born in 224 or 225/839 in the city of Āmul in the Persian province of Ṭabaristān on the Caspian Sea, which developed loyalties to Islam rather late and whose control was contested at the time of al-Ṭabarī's birth.²⁴ His own family may well have had Arab roots, though he discouraged speculation about his ancestry.²⁵ He left home at the age of twelve and finally settled in Baghdad when he was about thirty, funding his studies with income from the rent of properties in his home town.²⁶ He was well acquainted with Iran's cultural and literary heritage but at some remove, and he was certainly no chauvinist. Rather, he likely wanted to preserve an Iranian historiographical tradition, to make other Muslims aware of it, and to give it a certain pride of place, but also to urge Iranians to see their history as part of a wider Muslim history. And so, in his book, al-Ṭabarī presents a wealth of possible ways in which Persians might be related to prophets and other Qurʾanic figures – including Adam, Seth, Noah, Dhū al-Qarnayn, al-Khiḍr, Solomon, Abraham, and Isaac – whose lines intertwined with, and spawned, many possible Persian ones. The Persian lines include those of Gayūmart – about whom we will have much to say in this study – as the father either of the human race as a whole or of the Persians in particular; Hūshang, as the first king of the so-called Pīshdādian dynasty; Mashī and Mashyāna, figures of Zoroastrian cosmogony; Jamshīd, Farīdūn, and Manūshihr, all known from the Persian epic tradition; Kay Qubādh, who features in al-Ṭabarī's account as the first Kayanid ruler; and Yazdagird III, the last Sasanian ruler of Iran. He identifies many different advocates of varying views of Persian genealogy: Muslim akhbārīs, Arab and Persian genealogists, poets, and Zoroastrian priests, as well as Persians, Zoroastrians, and Jews (the Children of Israel) in general.

As a whole, al-Ṭabarī's volume presents its readers with a range of possibilities relating to the origins of humanity, its branching out, its ancient history of prophets and kings, especially in Palestine, Arabia, and Iran, and its religious and ethnic forms in his own day. The possibilities address problems in merging what al-Ṭabarī likely saw as a Qurʾanic vision of history with the Iranian views he apparently knew quite well. The thrust of his inquiry is earnest, searching, and literal, if not philosophically systematic, in its mode of thinking: With whom does the human race start? When did the major communities we know today come into existence? What role did the Flood, its devastation of humanity, and its aftermath have in shaping humanity in the present? Genealogically speaking, what are the origins of the key figures of the Persian epic tradition – especially Jamshīd, Farīdūn, and Manūshihr?

It was once held that al-Ṭabarī was unoriginal in his presentation because of his extensive citation of authorities, his reproduction of substantial portions of earlier texts, often without attribution, and the general discourse of learning in his day that was based on faithful reproduction through both memorization and scrupulous note taking. Although one still finds some adherents to such a view, the consensus of scholars now begins with the premise of al-Ṭabarī's intervention and looks for his own position in his comments on reports, his references to sources in different, distinguishing ways, and his choices regarding emplotment (how he structures his text, and with what narrative economy), weighting (by length, chiefly), and assumptions within and across portions of the text. In his general introduction to the translation of al-Ṭabarī's History, Franz Rosenthal went so far as to assert that “the most remarkable aspect of Ṭabarī's approach is his constant and courageous expression of ‘independent judgment (ijtihād).’”²⁷ While this is surely an overstatement, as al-Ṭabarī rarely speaks in his own “voice,” it is often possible to discern his perspective.²⁸

His view of the Persians’ genealogy runs something like this and emerges out of the various contradictory details. The Persians’ history begins with famous figures whose lineages run deep into prophetic history: they begin either at creation or, more likely, after the Flood, probably with Noah's son Shem. Afterward, pre-Islamic Persian history, particularly dynastic history, runs mostly on its own track, independent of prophetic history. It provides a useful and stable point of reference for prophetic history but is also part of prophetic history, both because it originates in the latter and because it is part of a broader narrative and telos leading to Muḥammad, the final prophet, and Islam in Iran itself.

Three aspects of al-Ṭabarī's position deserve special comment. First, he treats Zoroastrian opinions as plausible; reports them, he says, di-rectly from Zoroastrians; and uses them to flesh out the early history of the Persians. For him, such opinions are not disqualified by the religious identity of their proponents and may even be a valid source of information, at least insofar as the Persian branch of humanity is concerned. Most interestingly, al-Ṭabarī singles them out as representing the native “Persian” view with which a history of Islam must come to terms. He does not describe them as Sasanian, nor as expressly part of the heritage of an imperial Iran.

Second, Zoroastrian ideas, though treated seriously, cannot be accept-ed as plausible if they contradict basic tenets of Muslim belief about the past, chiefly about human origins and the Flood. Adam, not Gayūmart, was father to the human race, whatever the relationship between the two. There was a Flood. The Zoroastrians, al-Ṭabarī notes, say there was no Flood, or they say there was, but it did not cover their lands or interrupt their genealogies, as they “assume that it took place in the clime of Babylon and nearby regions, whereas the descendants of Gayūmart had their dwellings in the East, and the Flood did not reach them.”²⁹ Al-Ṭabarī points to the error of this view: “The information given by God concerning the Flood contradicts their statement,” he says, citing Qurʾan 37:75–7, in which the Qurʾan describes Noah and his offspring as “survivors,” saved by God.³⁰ God therefore indicates that “Noah's offspring are the survivors, and nobody else.”³¹ Al-Ṭabarī repeats this assertion amid a discussion of the mythic tyrant Ḍaḥḥāk, as he notes that “some people” (baʿḍahum) claim that Noah lived during his reign.³² For him, it is clear that there is in reality no uninterrupted and independent Persian line that preceded the Flood and continued after it. He goes on to discuss various theories about the Persians’ genealogies that may explain the Zoroastrians’ errors regarding their origins. One theory is based on a simple confusion of names: he reports that the Magians of his day believed Gayūmart to have been the same person as Adam, with 3,139 years passing between Gayūmart's lifetime and the hijra of Muḥammad.³³ He also notes that Persian scholars – whom he does not describe specifically as Zoroastrians but rather as members of a scholarly class (ʿulamāʾ al-Furs) – assume that Gayūmart was Adam.³⁴ A second explanation relies on genealogical sublimation through the depiction of Gayūmart as “the son of Adam's loins by Eve.”³⁵ Al-Ṭabarī also reports a combination of these two methods of reconciliation with regard to Hūshang on the authority of “some Persian genealogists” (baʿḍ nassābat al-Furs). This theory takes the equation of Gayūmart with Adam as its starting point and further assumes that Hūshang descends from Gayūmart through Gayūmart's son Mashī, grandson Siyāmak, and great-grandson Afrawāk (Frawāk). Thus Gayūmart would be Adam, Mashī would be Seth, Siyāmak would be Enosh, Afrawāk would be Kenan, and finally Hūshang would be Mahalalel – perfectly reflecting Adam's biblical descendants.³⁶ Al-Ṭabarī puzzles over whether the equations would plausibly permit Hūshang to be a contemporary of Adam, as Mahalalel was, and concludes that it would be possible.³⁷

A third important aspect of al-Ṭabarī's position is his belief that the Persians were born early in the history of humanity, whether at its inception, with Gayūmart, or more likely afterward, from Noah's sons. They are among its original stock, their history emerging before that of either Jews or Arabs. An alternative genealogy, which al-Ṭabarī also mentions, traces the lineage of the Persians to the later figure of Abraham and his son Isaac (through Manūshihr, a claim considered below), and so places them chronologically on a par with the Jews and Arabs. However, al-Ṭabarī discounts this theory; he credits it to an unnamed source or sources (baʿḍ ahl al-akhbār); he notes that this is a view not shared by the Persians themselves; he quotes a good Muslim source that contradicts it (Ibn al-Kalbī, d. ca. 204/819 or 206/821); and in a subsequent mention of Manūshihr, al-Ṭabarī casually refers to him as Manūshihr b. Īraj. He thus dispenses with the possibility that the Persians descend from Abraham.³⁸

The cumulative result of these features of al-Ṭabarī's discussion is the placement of Persians within the story of Islam at an early stage, and in ways that respect and preserve some of their native traditions, for which Persians, and even Zoroastrians, are given significant credit. Genealogical autonomy, after a point, paves the way for autonomy in other realms. Persian history sets the pace for, and is part of, prophetic history. Toward the beginning of the History al-Ṭabarī remarks that pre-Islamic Persian history, beginning with Gayūmart, is the most reliable benchmark for measuring history. That is, “the history of the world's bygone years is more easily explained and more clearly seen based upon the lives of the Persian kings than upon those of the kings of any other nation (ghayrihim min al-umam).” Indeed, “a history based upon the lives of the Persian kings has the soundest sources and the best and clearest data.”³⁹ This history shares much of the same Near Eastern geography as other narratives of prophetic history, overlaps in dramatic content, and runs toward the lifetime of the Prophet and the Muslim conquests, including of Iran itself.

In al-Ṭabarī's writing, one gets a sense of the challenge the author probably first encountered when, as a youth, he moved south from Āmul to Rayy, located near modern Tehran and a major center of the empire in his day, to study Muslim traditions, including Ibn Isḥāq's biography of the Prophet and Kitāb al-Mubtadaʾ, which treats prophetic history prior to Muḥammad's lifetime, with major figures such as Muḥammad b. Ḥumayd (d. 248/862).⁴⁰ While there and afterward in Baghdad, he certainly recognized the problem of reconciling prophetic history with knowledge otherwise available in Iran. When he sat down to write the History, which he finished in 302/915,⁴¹ he ostensibly had a full range of Islamic and older Iranian materials at his disposal, and he chose to address the conflicts that they presented by assembling them in this partic-ular way.

In contrast to his general precision in citing sources in his History, it is remarkable that al-Ṭabarī describes the sources of his knowledge about Gayūmart, Hūshang, Farīdūn, and Jamshīd and these very first chapters of prophetic history in such general terms, as owing to Zoroastrians or to Persians in general. He does not specify Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, the Xwadāy-nāmag, or a Siyar al-mulūk (as Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ's translation of the latter is sometimes called), nor does he otherwise name his informants, unless they are Muslims (including Ibn al-Kalbī). Instead, he employs the passive voice (dhukira, “it is said that”) and generally speaks ambiguously. Modern scholars have persuasively argued, however, that al-Ṭabarī's knowl-edge of Iran's pre-Islamic history derived in significant measure from the Xwadāy-nāmag, if not through a copy of Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ's translation, then through another channel.⁴² His way of citing contrasts sharply with that of later traditionists writing outside of Iraq, who seem to have felt much more comfortable identifying Iranian sources by name. These other reporters include Ḥamza al-Iṣfahānī (d. after 350/961) – a particularly strong point of contrast, surely – who spent most of his life in Iṣfahān and who begins his work by listing eight sources for knowledge about Iran's pre-Islamic history, first on the list being Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ's Kitāb Siyar mulūk al-Furs. Ḥamza mentions a Zoroastrian priest named Bahrām who claimed to have collected more than twenty copies of the Xwadāy-nāmag in order to establish the correct dates of the reigns of Persian kings.⁴³ The other reporters also include Balʿamī (d. ca. 363/974), who was, until the studies by Elton L. Daniel and Andrew C. S. Peacock, widely regarded as al-Ṭabarī's “translator” into Persian.⁴⁴ In his adaptation of al-Ṭabarī's work, produced under the autonomous Samanid governate of Khurāsān and Transoxiana and considered the earliest work of Persian historical writing, Balʿamī mentions a far more varied list of sources that also features Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, a Shāh-nāmah-yi buzurg (attributed to the Samanid era Persian poet and writer Abū al-Muʾayyad Balkhī), and “the book of Bahrām b. Mihrān Iṣfahānī,” perhaps referring to some version of what Ḥamza had on hand – among several other works.⁴⁵

Why does al-Ṭabarī not give credit where it was likely due? It could be that such knowledge was diffusely held, with al-Ṭabarī gaining it di-rectly from Persians, especially Zoroastrians, so it deserved the general attributions he gave to it; he also may have known it to be part of a Persian corpus already heavily filtered by the Arabic sources. But there may be more to his silence. His reluctance to name the work represents a way of dealing with two possible historical visions identified by Julie Scott Meisami in Persian-language historical texts: one is “Iranian, focusing on pre-Islamic Iranian monarchy up to the Islamic conquest,” whereas the other is “Islamic,” and gave rise to dynastic history. Meisami traced these visions to the emergence of Persian historical writing in the last half-century of Samanid rule (the second half of the fourth/tenth century).⁴⁶ It seems more likely, however, that these visions existed in tension much earlier and in Arabic, from the moment of Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ's translation, as can be seen in a complaint of the ʿAbbasid litterateur al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 255/868 or 869), who said that his contemporaries were overly impressed by old models.⁴⁷ In the early days extending to those of al-Ṭabarī, the conflict was often resolved with little acknowledgment of the pre-Islamic and Iranian strand. It is significant that even Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ's own Arabic translation was eventually lost – a fate that would have seemed shocking from the perspective of other fields of knowledge where the past was meticulously (if differently) recorded, such as Hadith study. The result can be seen in the fourth/tenth century, when Ḥamza cites a Mūsā b. ʿĪsā al-Kisrawī, who bemoans the instability of the Xwadāy-nāmag's textual tradition. Mūsā notes that all of the copies of the Arabic text differ, and he could not find even two copies agreeing in content.⁴⁸

Generally speaking, al-Ṭabarī's History played a large role in shaping the historiographical tradition that followed him, so much so that a Buyid amir was once chastened by Maḥmūd of Ghazna for having failed to read his al-Ṭabarī.⁴⁹ Besides all of the other topics al-Ṭabarī treats in his work, we have him to thank for a considerable amount of our knowledge of Iran and its pre-Islamic history. But whatever he and other giants of Arabic or Persian letters give us, we should not underestimate the significance of the fact that first the Pahlavi and then the Arabic texts are so quietly absorbed into other texts, a process that we explore in the second half of this book. Contents cannot survive unchanged regardless of the structures in which they are encased; nor can the memories they encapsulate, especially when their origins date back to a conquered empire. And quiet absorption suggests less fidelity to an original text than diligent attribution.⁵⁰

Abraham and a New Divine Election

A further theory regarding the Persians’ genealogy enjoyed currency in the third/ninth and fourth/tenth centuries. This theory, briefly mentioned earlier, held that the Persians descended from Abraham through his son Isaac. In ancient times, Persians even made their way to Mecca for the pilgrimage that Abraham first established. In his Murūj al-dhahab, the historian and litterateur Abū al-Ḥasan al-Masʿūdī (d. 345/956) describes the visits: “the Persians’ ancestors (aslāf al-Furs) would betake themselves to the Sacred House [i.e., the Kaʿba] and circumambulate it to honor their grandfather Abraham, to hold fast by his way, and to preserve their genealogies.”⁵¹ The last pre-Islamic Persian to perform the pilgrimage was Sāsān, the dynasty's eponym: “When Sāsān came to the House, he circumambulated it and mumbled prayers (zamzama) over the well of Ishmael. It is named ‘Zamzam’ only on account of his and other Persians’ mumbling prayers over it. This indicates the frequency of their practice over this well.”⁵² Al-Masʿūdī cites two poets, whom he does not name, attesting to this “mumbling.” The first states: “The Persians mumbled prayers over Zamzam (zamzamat al-Furs ʿalā Zamzam). That was in their most ancient past.”⁵³ Al-Masʿūdī also cites this line in his Tanbīh, noting there that the Persians would bring to the Kaʿba offerings to show respect for Abraham and his son: “it is, according to them, the greatest of the seven great temples (hayākil) and the world's noble houses of worship.”⁵⁴ The second poet al-Masʿūdī cites in the Murūj “boasted after the appearance of Islam” because of the Persians’ ancient practices, saying:

The topos of pilgrimage to the Kaʿba before Islam is found elsewhere in Arabic historiography.⁵⁶ In genealogical terms, the significance of the idea lies in the ties it establishes with Arabs and Muḥammad, of whose genealogy the Arab portion, as noted above, begins with Abraham's son Ishmael. In this manner, Persians become Muḥammad's kin and, as is more often emphasized, kin to the Arabs; see, for example, the following poem that was recited by Jarīr b. ʿAṭiyya (d. ca. 110/728–9), an Umayyad-era Arab poet, and circulated widely:

The “sons of Isaac” whom Jarīr so proudly claims as kin were both worldly leaders and prophets. They included “Caesar,” the usual Arabic name for the Roman and Byzantine emperors, and the Children of Israel as Solomon's descendants. More unusually from a biblical perspective, they included the “Ispahbadhs,” a reference to the Persian title for army chiefs of pre-Islamic Persian empires;⁶⁰ “Kisrā,” referring to the Sasanian rulers collectively; and “al-Hurmuzān,” referring to a famous Persian general who was defeated by Caliph ʿUmar (r. 13–23/634–44) but who later was said to have converted to Islam. Isaac's sons were kings of Iṣṭakhr in the province of Fārs, the religious center of the Sasanian kingdom and its capital. They were also kings of Tustar, a town in southwestern Persia in the province of Khūzistān, where al-Hurmuzān was captured.⁶¹ All of Isaac's sons benefited from their ancestry with Abraham, who was a “father guided [by God],” “a purified prophet,” and “the Friend of God” (khalīl Allāh, Abraham's common epithet).

The portrayal of Abraham as the common ancestor linking the Arabs and the Persians played a crucial role in enabling the latter to be integrated into the communal world view of Muslims. Recent work on ethnicity and nationalism has emphasized the importance of ideas of divine election for social mobilization and national coherence. The work of Anthony D. Smith, in particular, has drawn attention to the ways in which myths of divine election both promote sociocultural survival and serve as a stimulus for ethnopolitical mobilization. For Smith, divine election signifies a community's shared belief in its special destiny. Ethnic election is not ethnocentrism in a simple sense, but far more demanding:

For Smith, there are two basic types of myths of ethnic election. “Missionary” election myths exalt their community “by assigning them god-given tasks or missions of warfare or conversion or overlordship.”⁶³ The community believes itself to be chosen to preserve and defend the true faith. This is the most common type of ethnic election and has been invoked by, among others, Armenians, Franks, Orthodox Byzantines, Russians, Catalans, and Catholic Poles. “Covenantal” election, by comparison, is contractual and conditional upon compliance with the will of God. This type of election has been seen less often, but it has surfaced among certain Protestant communities that have seen themselves as the heirs of the ancient Israelites (including the Puritan settlers of New England, the Ulster Scots, and Afrikaners).⁶⁴

From an early date, the Arabs often espoused a missionary sense of chosenness when they sought new converts, first among other Arabs and then among their neighbors.⁶⁵ Arabic literature is filled with claims representing them as a people of religion, set apart from others. A common identity, documented through tribal genealogies, was nurtured, and it was also their election that made Arabs out of former non-Arabs. An ideol-ogy of election was supported by the Prophet as well as by the supreme importance of the Arabic language in Muslim religion and ritual. It is a mature sense of Arabness that is reflected in the statement of al-Jāḥiẓ:

As their kinsfolk, Persians were given a share in the Arabs’ ethnic election through reference to the most antique source of this chosenness, Abraham. As Jarīr said: “Our father is the father of Isaac; A father guided [by God] and a purified prophet unites us.” The idea may well have orig-inated in pre-Islamic times, as extensions to Abraham's genealogy were made by eastern Jews, who were also Isaac's descendants. In any event, by ʿAbbasid times, the view was credible to Arabs because they knew it to have been voiced by earlier Arabs, who claimed kinship with Persians as a point of pride. The Arab tribal context for such claims is alluded to by al-Masʿūdī and other traditionists. Al-Masʿūdī explains to his readers that Jarīr was directing his poem against Qaḥṭān, the name given to the southern Arabian tribal alliance.⁶⁷ Jarīr, as a “northern” Arab, thus boasted of his noble kinsmen against a southerner.⁶⁸

In ʿAbbasid times, the clearest (but by no means only) rhetorical context in which ideas about the Persians and Isaac were articulated was that of the Shuʿūbiyya movement. The name of the movement's “Shuʿūbī” proponents derived from a Qurʾanic verse they were fond of quoting, which includes the statement: “We have created you male and female and made you peoples (shuʿūb) and tribes so that you may know one another. The most noble among you before God is the most God-fearing” (Qurʾan 49:13).⁶⁹ The movement had its roots among the Persian court secretaries and was mainly centered in Baghdad; its members were overwhelmingly Persians. It took issue with the idea of Arab election, based on what the movement's adherents saw as the egalitarian ideals of Islam, the ill-conceived idea of a chosen people, and the failures of Arabs generally in the realms of culture and social manners. The Shuʿūbīs belittled the Arabs as the sons of a slave, since Ishmael, their father, was born of the slave woman Hagar, whereas the Shuʿūbīs’ “mother” was Sarah, Abraham's wife. Shuʿūbīs even referred to Arabs as “sons of the unclean woman” because of Hagar's lowly origins. Ibn Qutayba (d. 276/889), whose own lineage went back to Khurāsān, responded to the Shuʿūbīs by noting that not all slaves are unclean and that many great figures of Islamic history had been born of slave women. Is it allowable, he asked, for an apostate (mulḥid), let alone a Muslim, to describe Hagar as unclean?⁷⁰

The idea that the Persians descend from Isaac is attested after the Shuʿūbiyya and, in the rarefied world of ʿAbbasid Baghdad, involved assertions about hierarchy, social status, and privilege, and would appear to assert the chosenness of Persians, alongside Arabs. After the fourth/tenth century, the idea of Isaac as a father persists, though it is hard to say how widely it was held. A few cases suggest that it endured in wider circles than Iranians might imagine today. Abū Nuʿaym al-Iṣfahānī (d. 430/1038), in his history of Iṣfahān and its scholars, cites a Hadith in which Abū Hurayra quotes Muḥammad as saying that “Persia is the Children of Isaac (Fāris Banū Isḥāq).”⁷¹ In seventh/thirteenth-century Baghdad, Ibn Abī al-Ḥadīd (d. 656/1258) in his commentary on the Nahj al-balāgha – an anthology of speeches, letters, testimonials, and opinions traditionally attributed to ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib – cites a report in which ʿAlī puts an Arab woman belonging to the Banū Ismāʿīl on a par with a woman from the ʿAjam belonging to the Banū Isḥāq.⁷² An early folio of a local history of Nīshāpūr (the Kitāb-i Aḥvāl-i Nīshāpūr) from the ninth/fifteenth century or later cites a Hadith in Arabic and then translated into Persian in which Ibn ʿAbbās reports that “Fāris” was mentioned in the presence of the Prophet. The Prophet stated that Fāris, that is, Persia, was “our paternal relations” and part of the ahl al-bayt (“people of the house,” that is, the Prophet's family). When prodded for an explanation, the Prophet said: “Because Ishmael was the paternal uncle of the descendants of Isaac, and Isaac was the paternal uncle of the descendants of Ishmael.”⁷³

Still, in the long term, the theory of the Persians’ descent from Isaac convinced neither al-Ṭabarī nor Iranians generally, likely because it was so thin on supporting mythology. The lineage seemed forced, as when al-Masʿūdī notes a claim that Manūshihr was the son of a man by the name of Manushkhūrnar b. Manūshkhūrnak b. Wīrak, with Wīrak being the very same person as Isaac, the son of Abraham.⁷⁴ According to the claim, Manushkhūrnar (Manūshihr's father) went to the land of Persia, where he married the Persian queen, a daughter of Īraj named Kūdak, who bore Manūshihr, whose descendants multiplied, “conquering and ruling the earth.”⁷⁵ With their rise, the “ancient Persians disappeared like past nations and the original Arabs (al-ʿArab al-ʿāriba).”⁷⁶ Al-Masʿūdī does not bother to follow through by, for example, reconciling the relationship between Isaac's known sons and the person of Manūshkhūrnak. And although he says that Persians “are led to this” opinion and do not deny it, he admits that the genealogy was offered by Arab savants.⁷⁷ Nor does the idea have a narrative to accompany it that would explain the Persians’ origins, describe the lives of exemplary forebears, and connect this history to the Persians in their own day. By comparison, Arabs, Persians, and Muslims in general knew the detailed history of the Jewish people, beginning from Isaac and Abraham.

Instead, it is probably best to view the advocates of this idea, al-Masʿūdī among them, as seeking to offer the Persians a prominent place in prophetic history in lieu of older Iranian genealogies. They were losers in an ideological contest, insofar as their model was not accepted. Al-Masʿūdī was almost certainly aware of the sentiments of the Shuʿūbiyya, Ibn Qutayba, and al-Ṭabarī regarding the Persians’ puta-tive link to Isaac since he was educated in Baghdad by some of the city's most respected scholars; indeed, al-Masʿūdī listed al-Ṭabarī's History as one of the many sources he consulted for the Murūj, though he did not share his predecessor's judgment on Isaac's progeny.⁷⁸ Al-Masʿūdī traveled widely, including throughout Iran, and extensively documents more Iran-centric accounts in the Murūj and Tanbīh.⁷⁹ Still, he gives no sense of the controversies or polemics surrounding the Isaac claim. It may well be that al-Masʿūdī, an Arab of reputable stock himself, simply wished to provide the Persians with a way of viewing their history and genealogy as inseparable from those of the Arabs.⁸⁰ But in another, more fundamental sense al-Masʿūdī was part of a successful campaign to get Iranians to see themselves as part of a broader prophetic history.⁸¹

A Creative License

It was not just the collective category of Persians that was swept into prophetic history, but also individual localities. Consider the cases of Hamadhān and Nihāwand, two towns of ancient standing in the medieval province of Jibāl, which are located less than fifty miles apart as the crow flies. Hamadhān had been the capital of the Medes, the summer capital of the Achaemenids, and under the Seleucid, Parthian, and Sasanian dy-nasties, an important city on the trading route from Mesopotamia to the East. It is mentioned throughout antiquity as a wealthy city renowned for its architecture.⁸² Nihāwand has a somewhat less documented and illustrious heritage, although in Sasanian times it seems to have played a role in the politics of the Sasanian state, and its Zoroastrian associations were reportedly strong.⁸³ By the ʿAbbasid period, however, both cities were traditionally associated with the figure of Noah. A widely cited late ninth/early tenth-century geography by Ibn al-Faqīh gives some sense of the association. In it, there is a report that Hamadhān – the possible birthplace of Ibn al-Faqīh – was named for a descendant of Noah named Hamadhān, who was a son of Peleg (in Arabic al-Falūj) b. Shem b. Noah and the brother of a certain Iṣfahān, who built his own eponymous city: “and so, each of the cities was named after its builder.”⁸⁴ Nihāwand, however, was built by Noah himself and was called Nūḥ awand (the awand suffix signifying a possessive relationship).⁸⁵

Ibn al-Faqīh also furnishes such founding fathers for other locales and peoples; the Hephthalites of Central Asia, for example, descended from a certain Hayṭal, who was a great-grandson of Noah who moved eastward after languages became confused (in Babylon, as the story goes).⁸⁶ The northwestern province of Azarbaijan provides a particularly interesting case. Throughout the Sasanian period Atropatene/Āturpātakān, as it was then known, was an important religious center and home to one of the empire's most sacred fires, that of Ādur Gushnasp, whose hearth was in the town of Shīz (see Figure 1.1). Legend has it that every newly crowned Sasanian king had to visit it on foot. There was also a royal palace in the province.⁸⁷ Muslims acknowledged this Zoroastrian heritage, with a good number believing the region to be the birthplace of Zoroaster himself.⁸⁸ However, Ibn al-Faqīh quotes Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ as tracing the name of the province back to a prophetic eponym, one Āzarbādh b. Īrān b. al-Aswad b. Shem b. Noah.⁸⁹ This is a bold attribution, especially since Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ was a major transmitter of Iran's pre-Islamic Sasanian heritage and seems an unlikely advocate of such an idea.

The shape and contours of the earliest history writing connected to lo-calities are still debated among today's historians, in large measure because so few sources survive, but the problem is also partly terminological.⁹⁰ Whatever its earliest forms, starting approximately in the second half of the fourth/tenth century, we have local histories for Iranian territories that are filled with descriptions of towns and regions, geography, topog-raphy, biographies of notable residents (especially the ʿulamāʾ), and political history and that reflect the density of religious learning, at least among elites. Such works were composed for many of the major centers of Iranian Islam, including old cities such as Hamadhān and Iṣfahān and new ones such as Shīrāz, as well as places where wide-scale conversion and Islamization appear to have occurred at a slower pace and where significant Zoroastrian communities lived on, including the provinces of Fārs in the southwest of Iran, Yazd in central Iran, and Ṭabaristān.

These works also took up ideas about the prophets, and they suggest the importance of the earlier, schematizing sources, such as those of Ibn al-Kalbī and Ibn al-Faqīh. Whatever the paths that such knowledge traveled, perhaps including transmission by Jews and Christians, the legacy of ʿAbbasid Iraq is visible in works such as the early sixth/twelfth-century Fārs-nāmah, which cites al-Ṭabarī as one of its authorities for Iran's earliest history. The Persian-language text is attributed to a little-known author whose ancestors hailed from Balkh and who is consequently known as Ibn al-Balkhī. The work treats Gayūmart as the first king to rule the world and faintly echoes al-Ṭabarī's reporting on theories about him as well as ideas about his kingly successor Hūshang, including that Hūshang fathered the biblical prophet Enoch, also known as the Qurʾanic Idrīs.⁹¹ This was a well-traveled proposal and an apparently fitting way to start a text that, while containing abundant detail on Fārs, also constitutes an important source on Iran's pre-Islamic rulers.⁹²

A result of this transmission of ideas was the gradual conversion of Iranian sites of great antiquity into ones with Muslim associations. In this transformation, the prophet Solomon, with his extensive travels and his association with major sites of antiquity, played an important role. Solomon was recognized as ruler over Greater Syria and associated with several sites of its antique heritage, including Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, Baalbek, and Palmyra,⁹³ but Iran also figured prominently in his itinerary.⁹⁴ A good example relates to the abovementioned sacred fire of Ādur Gushnasp. While the name of Azarbaijan came to be linked to Noah, the fire and its temple became folded into a set of ruins surrounding a clear blue lake and known as the Takht-i Sulaymān (“Throne of Solomon”). The ruins’ name pointed to a belief that the buildings were a royal palace built and used by Solomon during his travels.⁹⁵

Another case is that of Persepolis (Takht-i Jamshīd) in the province of Fārs, an enormous complex of columned halls, palaces, gates, and a treasury created by Darius the Great (r. 522–486 BCE) and his successors that covers some 125,000 square meters and was one of the five royal capitals of the Achaemenid empire. The site was founded on a promontory above the plain of Marvdasht, and the natural drama surely served it well in Achaemenid times for royal and religious occasions, as it did in the Sasanian era and in 1971, when Mohammadreza Shah Pahlavi celebrated the 2,500th anniversary of Iran's monarchy (reckoned by Iran's solar hijri calendar). The term Takht-i Jamshīd signaled the role that the great king of Persian legend, Jamshīd, was meant to have played in the site's founding.⁹⁶ After Alexander the Great sacked Persepolis, the city of Iṣṭakhr grew up a short distance away, and the ruins of Persepolis served as a quarry for the new city. Sāsān, the eponym of the Sasanian dynasty and sometimes remembered as the grandfather to its founder, Ardashīr, was reportedly the superintendent of the Fire Temple of the goddess Anāhīd in Iṣṭakhr. Muslims appropriated Persepolis's charisma for prophetic history through traditions that conflated it with nearby Iṣṭakhr and associated it to Solomon. The geographer Abū Isḥāq al-Fārisī al-Iṣṭakhrī (d. mid-fourth/tenth century), for example, said of the town whose name he bore:

In his Fārs-nāmah, Ibn al-Balkhī vividly described a carved figure at Persepolis that he took to represent Burāq, the horse upon which Muḥammad reportedly made his night journey to heaven: “The figure is after this fashion: the face is as the face of a man with a beard and curly hair, with a crown set on the head, but the body, with the fore and hind legs, is that of a bull, and the tail is a bull's tail.”⁹⁸

The path by which such ideas about prophetic history came to be accepted among Iranian Muslims was surely complicated. In weighing evidence, though, Muslims appear to have frequently recognized as authoritative Arabic traditions from earlier centuries that wrote Iranian locales into prophetic history.

Conclusion

To sum up, genealogies were important ingredients for stories about the origins of the Persians that circulated at least from the third/ninth century onward. Ramón d’Abadal i de Vinyals, John Armstrong, and Anthony D. Smith have termed such stories mythomoteurs, and much of what they say about these stories applies to the Persian case.⁹⁹ At the center of every ethnic community and its view of the world lies a “distinctive complex of myths, memories, and symbols” that advance claims about the community's origins and lineages. These are the engines that distinguish one ethnic group from another, and much of their emotional pull is nostalgic. As they describe origins, the Persians’ genealogies are schematic, positioning Persians relative to other groups and notable ancestors relative to one another. Blood ties in the remote past create filiations that explain relationships and recover and present other filiations for consideration. These bonds, in turn, inspire and encourage recognition of particular loyalties, even as they also represent antagonisms. Traditionists saw the Persians’ descent in different ways, which reflects both the layering of traditions and, more profoundly, different appeals for modes of social definition. This is to be expected in a community in transition. But the divergent accounts also offer a picture of primordial continuity. Since the Persians were written into prophetic history as descendants of either Noah or Abraham, the subsequent historical trajectory that yielded the arrival of Islam in Iran represents a process of recovering the initial, collective state of fiṭra into which every child is born, as mentioned in the Prophetic tradition cited at the beginning of the chapter. This process also provided a license to appropriate monuments of Iran's antique history and to integrate these creatively into a narrative about Persians. And so we have a glimpse into the conflictual understandings of what it meant to be a Persian during the period of Iran's conversion to Islam.

Figure 1.1. Ādur Gushnasp. Azarbaijan (Iran). Photo by Wahunam.

Map 1.1. Fārs