This paper traces the historical memory of an early Muslim named Abu Bakra, who began his life in obscurity and ended up centuries later lionized as a model of Sunni piety. Despite his liminal origins as a slave of unknown paternity, early Arabic-Islamic authors sought to categorize Abu Bakra in more familiar terms; specifically, they tried to determine whether he was a mawla of the Prophet Muhammad or, on the other hand, a member of the Arabian tribe of Thaqif. By interrogating why authors categorized Abu Bakra in these ways, we can better understand how they shaped his memory to convey particular ideological lessons about Islamic history. For those historians who view Abu Bakra as a mawla, such as Ibn Sa'd and Baladhuri, this designation is more than a neutral description of Abu Bakra's legal station. It also serves to bolster his connection to the Prophet Muhammad and thus undergirds his authority as a historical informant and behavioral model. Moreover, his mawla identity contrasts him sharply with his half-brother, Ziyad ibn Abihi, who infamously "adopted" a Qurashi lineage for political gain. Against the foil of Ziyad, Abu Bakra's proud self-identification as a mawla becomes a badge of moral rectitude and signals his preference for piety over power. On the other hand, hadith specialists such as Ibn Abi Shayba and al-Bukhari viewed Abu Bakra as an Arabian tribesman from Thaqif. They likely used a particular hadith, "The child belongs to the master of the bed," to determine Abu Bakra's legal identity. By doing so, these scholars located a standardized, hadith-based criterion for determining identity, but they also erased the symbolic meaning of Abu Bakra's mawla identity in many historical sources—his agency, authority, and integrity. Ultimately, this analysis reveals that seemingly neutral categories such as mawla and Thaqafi are not always straightforward, but shed light on the shaping of historical memory and provide insight into the development of different historical genres with their own unique symbols, methodologies, and value systems.

The Sasanian King Bahram V Gur (r. 420-438 CE) is a hero of Persian lore, celebrated for his legendary exploits as a hunter and warrior. According to the Islamic historiographical tradition, Bahram’s father, Yazdagird I, commissioned the Sasanian client state, the Lakhmids, to raise his son in the salubrious environment of their kingdom’s capital of Hira. The Muslim chroniclers describe in vivid detail Bahram’s upbringing under the Arabs, emphasizing the pivotal role the Lakhmid sovereign Mundhir I (Nu‘man I in some sources) played in Bahram’s early life, instructing the prince in the adab (knowledge) of the Arabs and assisting him in reclaiming his royal birthright when the Persian nobles crowned another member of the Sasanian family in his absence. The picture that emerges of Bahram in their accounts is that of a Persian prince who is totally immersed in the ways of the Arabs, exhibiting prowess in their martial skills, while developing a thorough knowledge of their culture and customs, and mastering the Arabic language, becoming an eloquent poet in his own right. This paper demonstrates that the legendary Bahram Gur, a Persian prince who grows up amongst the Arabs, serves as a bridge in the Islamic historiographical canon between the Persian and Arab traditions. I argue that the account of his life is a watershed in a broader historiographical process in which early Muslim historians endeavored to reconcile the conflicting identities of their own contemporaneous societies by merging the histories of the pre-Islamic Arab and Persian peoples into a universal Islamic historiographical narrative that is built on both traditions. To this end, Bahram Gur stands out as a Sasanian royal whose Arab upbringing had an indelible impact on his own character and identity, shaping him, quite ironically, as a quintessential “Arab” hero. At the same time, the role of the Lakhmid ruler Mundhir I (Nu‘man I) as the guardian of the prince is emphasized to underline the importance of the Arab peoples in the Sasanian state. The Arabic and Persian sources under consideration in this paper include the historical chronicles of Tabari, Bel‘ami, Ibn Qutayba, Firdawsi, Mas‘udi, Ya‘qubi, Dinawari, Hamza al-Isfahani, Miskawayh, and the anonymous Nihayat ‘Arab fi Akhbar al-Furs wa’l-‘Arab.

The narratives surrounding the Battle of al-Qādisiyyah in the Islamic annals present an excellent case study for examining the rôle of narrative in fashioning early Islamic historiography. By reading between the lines, I contend in my paper that we can uncover complex and fully-developed characters that challenge the stereotypical depictions of early Muslim heroes. In addition, more than simple history or even didactic lessons, I argue that the texts represent literary texts that must be examined in terms of general mythical archetypes. The commander of the Arab-Muslim army at al-Qādisiyyah was Saʿd b. Abī Waqqāṣ, one of Muḥammad’s closest Companions and one of the ‘ten promised paradise’. Yet, in a curious and wholly extraordinary situation, Saʿd never set foot on the battle-field, allegedly due to a humiliating and debilitating illness. Instead, the historical sources focus their attentions on a minor poet-warrior named Abū Miḥjan, whose awe-inspiring acts of bravery in combat restored the confidence of his fellow fighters. Nevertheless, Abū Miḥjan himself was a controversial figure—a drunkard and a coward who pursued a debaucherous life of bacchanalia and chasing women. The utterly unorthodox nature of these two individuals—discerned through a close and careful reading of the texts—stands in stark contrast to their ‘official’ biographies and the efforts by later historians to whitewash the past. Indeed, what emerges is a rare opportunity for the modern historian to observe remarkably-human portraits of these early Muslims. Furthermore, a broader look at the narrative can identify these and other figures in the historical annals according to mythical archetypes—here, Saʿd is the Hero and Abū Miḥjan is the Trickster. Ultimately, I suggest that the texts represent a partially-developed prose epic, which failed to coalesce into a proper epic due to the very literate nature of early Islamic civilisation. While the emphasis on written Arabic accounts may have forestalled the emergence of an Arab-Islamic epic, the half-historical and half-literary nature of the sources tells us much about the processes of creating and constructing narratives in the first centuries of Islamic society and the identity and self-conception of those fashioning its formative texts.

This paper explores memory of Iran's pre-Islamic past at different stages in historiography. It begins with a discussion of the Khudāy-nāmag and the obscure circumstances of this late Sasanian history’s transmission into Arabic and Persian. Muslim sources such as al-Ṭabarī (d. 310/923) rarely acknowledge it even though they seem to have plundered its contents. The paper then explores the very different citation patterns under the Buyids, when, for example, the historian Miskawayh (d. 421/1030) claimed that he had on hand an extract in Arabic from a work attributed to Khusraw Anūshirvān (r. 531–79 CE), and quoted the Sasanian monarch in his own voice, followed by twenty pages of anecdotes displaying the king’s wisdom The paper’s primary argument is two-fold: first, patterns of citation changed in the tenth and eleventh centuries as historians started identifying their sources, whereas previous historians had generally not done so. Such changes occurred with the support of the Buyids and other Iranian dynasties, and when Muslim identity (Persian Muslim, especially) had become more firmly established in Iran. Second, historians such as Miskawayh did indeed have on hand fragments of texts that predated their own times. Scholars working in Arabic often broke down and reconstituted works. The difference with Iran’s pre-Islamic past lay in its different epistemological standing. Whereas in the first two or three centuries of Islamic history, one claimed memory of Islam’s founding moments, one did not do so for Iranian history. That is what makes the revival so interesting. The paper relies heavily on new, cutting edge work on “text-reuse,” i.e., the way that texts were copied into other texts. Computer scientists are developing software that can detect common passages between Arabic and Persian texts, and also paraphrase (much as the current anti-plagiarism program TurnItIn does). This means that, within five years or so, we will be able to trace in wholly new ways patterns of repetition, fragmentation, and mobility. Such questions are the subject of the author’s ongoing research. She will use digital methods, especially, to compare the histories of al-Ṭabarī and Miskawayh. This comparison, in and of itself, is valuable since it has long been held that Miskawayh relied heavily on al-Ṭabarī’s History, especially for the first sections of the work. Judging by what Miskawayh took from the History, he seems, instead, to have belonged to a very different era, one that – while more remote in time – felt a deeper connection to Iran’s pre-Islamic past.