Previous research has exaggerated the scale and significance of fire temple desecration in early Islamic Iran. There were only half a dozen or so well-substantiated instances of fire temple desecration between the seventh and twelfth centuries C.E. Nevertheless, tales of fire temple desecration pervade both the Zoroastrians’ lachrymose narrative of their history and modern scholars’ explanations for the slow decline of Zoroastrianism as a world religion since the Islamic conquest of Iran in the seventh century. As a result, it is an enduring theme in studies of Muslim-Zoroastrian relations. Scholars have inflated the scale of fire temple desecration by uncritically accepting the unsubstantiated claims of Muslim sources that a particular mosque was built on the site of a fire temple. At the same time, historians have misinterpreted the significance of even well-documented instances of desecration by considering them out of context. Yet Iran, of all places in the early Islamic world, is relatively well endowed with local histories, meaning that the context of individual instances of fire temple desecration is quite apparent in sources like Tarikh-i Bukhara, Tarikh-i Qumm, Tarikh-i Kirman, and Kitab-i Ahval-i Nishapur. The desecration of Zoroastrian fire temples in these regions usually occurred within a century of the Muslims’ arrival, often in the course of the conquest or during the construction of the community’s first mosque. While some instances of fire temple desecration were intended to demonstrate the Muslims’ superior standing in the social hierarchy or the supersession of Islam over Zoroastrianism, others were a consequence of intra-Muslim affairs that had little to do with Zoroastrians. Moreover, local Zoroastrians successfully petitioned the Muslim authorities on several occasions to spare their fire temples or to compensate for the destruction of them. When considered in context, the Muslim accounts of fire temple desecration do not seem to match the Zoroastrian lament. In sum, scholars have exaggerated the scale and significance of fire temple desecration in early Islamic Iran by reading the sources naively and taking individual episodes out of context. It seems that to some extent the whole notion of fire temple desecration--as a phenomenon, as a category of religious violence, or even as an object of study--has been invented by those who study it, as they consciously or unconsciously adopt the Zoroastrians’ lachrymose narrative of history in an attempt to explain the relative decline of Zoroastrianism in the modern world.

Local histories from medieval Persia remain a largely untapped resource from which to draw nuanced understandings of how local communities conceptualized religion, identity, and community in ways that simultaneously challenge and complement the dominant historical narrative based on universal histories and chronicles. This paper examines center-periphery power dynamics in 10th – 14th century Persian local histories and the various strategies that authors employed to "center" their cities or regions located on the "peripheries" of the Islamic empire. Etymologies, dream narratives, past or present notables such as prophets, saints, teachers associated with the region, and descriptions of pious visitation sites all embed these ostensibly peripheral places into a central Islamic narrative and legitimate local practices. Trimmed like frivolous fat off the real meat of history that historians so often crave –names, dates, facts, and figures– accounts of dreams, myths, improbable etymologies, and dubious stories have generally been disregarded as fabulist embellishments created for literary effect in local histories. This historiographical study turns its attention to precisely such narratives and argues that, on close examination, these local sources express profound truths about local communities and the times in which they were composed. This research is informed by recent theoretical insights into sacred space, the built environment, the Islamic city, Arabic and Persian historiography, and articulations of communal and sectarian identity. This paper explores 10th – 14th century Persian local histories including Tarikh-i Bukhara, Tarikh-i Bayhaq, Tarikh-i Qum, Tarikh-i Sistan, Tarikh-i Tabaristan, Fada?il-i Balkh, Farsnama, Tarjama-i Mahasin-i Isfahan, Tarikh-i Ruyan, and Shiraz-namah. Dream narratives are one type of literary device that authors use to legitimate and “center” their regions by describing how dreams, in certain cases, bring the Prophet Muhammad to a city on the physical periphery of the Islamic empire. Notables including Companions of the Prophet and subsequent generations (sahaba and tabi?un), pre-Islamic prophets, saints, and scholars associated with peripheral regions of the empire “center” these regions by linking them to Muhammad and the prophetic legacy. Some pious notables taught hadith, while others lived, died, and were buried in the region. Authors bind their cities to prophetic authority through local sites of pious visitation (ziyarat) and other sources of blessing or sacred power (baraka). Local and regional histories from Persia challenge and reconfigure notions of what constitutes “central” or “peripheral” in the medieval Islamic world and articulate identities that are simultaneously deeply local yet enmeshed within the broader Muslim umma.

“Local histories” and “city histories” have long been historical sources for the study of medieval Islamic societies yet rarely are these texts approached as coherent arguments for local sanctity. Analyzing a 16th century history of a Damascus neighborhood written by the scholar Ibn ??l?n (d. 1546), this paper considers how this local history is not merely a repository for historical data but is itself an attempt to “spatialize” memory and cultivate in the reader a particular relationship with his or her local space. The work, entitled al-Qal?’id al-Jawhar?ya f? T?r?kh al-??li??ya, includes not only brief accounts of local institutions and descriptions of their architecture but also miraculous reports of the neighborhood’s origins and numerous biographies of the saints, scholars, and notables whose graves fill the ??li??ya neighborhood. Drawing upon Henri Lefebvre’s theory on the production of space, this paper suggests that Ibn ??l?n’s text goes beyond simple evocation of an Islamic geography. In both its structure and its content, al-Qal?’id al-Jawhar?ya actively works to imagine the ??li??ya as the very epitome of Islamic notions of blessedness. Towards this end, Ibn ??l?n presents the ??li??ya as the location where the prophet H?b?l’s blood was spilt and continues to be seen into the 16th century. While H?b?l’s blood is the most vivid manifestation of prophetic time and space spilling into Ibn ??l?n’s account of the ??li??ya, the presence of the blood is but one articulation of an argument woven throughout al-Qal?’id al-Jawhar?ya: the Salihiya is a place of refuge, a place where prayers are met, and a place not on the periphery of an Islamic cosmos but at its very center. The intersection of memory, text, space, and religious imagination found in al-Qal?’id al-Jawhar?ya holds important implications for scholarly conceptualizations of “Muslim cities” and “Muslim spaces.” Rather than determining a place to be a “Muslim city” based upon formal criteria such as the proximity of mosque and bazaar, Ibn ??l?n’s work reveals that the ??li??ya becomes a “Muslim space” through his textual effort and his willingness to consistently reconfigure center-periphery dynamics. In conclusion, this paper argues that ignoring the imaginative work of local histories in creating Muslim space results in essentialized and reified understandings of medieval Muslims’ envisioned geography.

Throughout the twentieth century, various instantiations of the Nimatullahi Sufi Order of Iran adhered to a policy of “secrecy” in regard to the dissemination of their ideas, done largely to protect against the “misunderstanding” or “misappropriation” of mystical concepts by the uninitiated. This policy, dating back to the medieval origins of the order, was made evident in the contemporary era through such practices as closed meetings, lengthy initiation practices, secret handshakes, the circulation of weekly “secret” words, and the safeguarding of any written work from non-members. Regarding the latter, such careful maintenance and preservation of textual materials by individual members—materials including hagiographies and other stories of prominent members of an Order’s silsilah (chain of succession), medieval poetry collections, personal notes taken during sermons, handwritten advice from sheikhs, and more—led to the development of what I am calling here a “personal” or “private” archive. Rather than trace the socio-political history of a Sufi Order from the perspective of the reigning governing body, it might be argued that such archives emphasize the intellectual and organizational history of a group instead. In addition, while the entire Order followed a single quotb (highest spiritual authority or, literally, axis), each city’s chapter possessed a number of Sufi sheikhs and it was ultimately these figures who delivered the weekly sermons and shaped the discourses and debates of the specific order. Thus, through the examination of such personal archives, the local histories of individual chapters may also be revealed, compared, and contrasted. As a group who attempted to remain as distant from the socio-political realm as possible, much of the activities of the Nimatullahi Sufi Order go undocumented within national and municipal archives. In addition, the majority of any official documentation remains in the hands of prominent Sufi elders and family members, and thus outside of the reach of most scholars. What exists instead are these smaller, more scattered archives which ultimately offer a form of local history based more on poems and sermons than facts and figures. Based on ethnographic, archival, and literary research, this paper will hence explore the contents of such collections, the relationship between mystical practices of secrecy and the cultivation of private archives, and finally the use of such archives as an alternative source for local history.