Includes bibliographical references (pages 205-218) and index.
Contents:
List of figures -- Acknowledgements -- Note on transliteration -- Introduction -- 1. From inscriptions to texts : locating the history of Muslim migration and settlement -- 2. State, settlement, texts : the beginnings of community and history making in Gujarat -- 3. Texts and tombs : the creation of a sacral geography -- 4. Networks of community formation -- 5. Seventeenth-century historiographical resolutions : Ahmad Khattu and the Suhrawardi contemporaries in Sad Hikayat -- Conclusion -- Appendix : Shaykh, Ahmad Khattu and his Suhrawardi contemporaries in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Tazkirat -- Bibliography -- Index -- About the author.
Summary:
"Narrative Pasts retrieves the social history of a Muslim community in Gujarat, a region that has one of the earliest records of Muslim presence in the Indian subcontinent. By reconstructing the literary, social and historical world of Sufi preceptors, disciples, and descendants from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, the book reveals the importance of learned Muslim men in imparting a distinct regional and historical identity to Gujarat. The prominence of Gujarat's maritime location has often oriented the study of Gujarat towards the commercial world of the western Indian Ocean world. Narrative Pasts demonstrates that Gujarat was also an integral part of the historical and narrative processes that shaped medieval and early modern South Asia. Employing new and rarely used literary materials in Persian and Arabic, this book departs from the narrow state-centered visions of the Muslim past and integrates Gujarat's sultanate and Mughal past to the larger socio-cultural histories of Islamic South Asia"--Amazon.com
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.