A Book of Conquest The Chachnama and Muslim Origins in South Asia

NOTES TO PAGES 18-23

35. I am specifically thinking here of Georg Simmel's essay on ruin as an "ob-
    ject infused with our nostalgia." See Georg Simmel, "Two Essays: 'The
    Handle' and 'The Ruin,"' The Hudson Review n(3), 1958, pp. 371-85. It is
    not the "imperial ruin" that forms the foreground of Ann Stoler's interven-
    tion in landscapes of imperial formations. See Ann Laura Stoler, "Imperial
    Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination," Cultural Anthropology vol. 23,
    no. 2 (2008), pp. 191-219.


36. Another reason, outside of the question of ruins, is that unlike the work of
    Gibbon or Momigliano, my investigation of the medieval past is spatially
    limited; I cannot easily access sites located in Rajasthan and Gujarat (India),
    which were parts of the medieval world I am investigating. Tqe historian of
    Rome, whether during the interwar period or after World War II, could travel
    to sites and archives from Italy to France to Germany to Greece to Spain,
    unencumbered by passport regimes-restrictions or hindrances emanating
    from the facts of their birth.


37. See Walter Benjamin, "Paris, Hauptstadt des XIX Jahrhunderts," Illumina-
    tionen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1977), pp. 170-184, and Berliner
    Kindheit um neunzehnhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag,
    1987). I also draw upon,Robert T. Tally's intervention in his discussions of
    "geocriticism" by humanities scholars involved in the spatial sciences of tex-
    tual hermeneutics. See Robert T. Tally Jr. Spatiality (New York: Routledge,
    2013).


38. As Benjamin inscribes and reinscribes a montage (dialektischen Bildes) in
    his effort to see the city, he reads these insights .back into Baudelaire's text.
    See Georges Didi-Huberman, "The Suppositiop of the Aura: The Now, the
    Then, and Modernity," in Walter Benjamin and History, ed. Andrew. Ben-
    jamin (New York: Continuum, 2005), pp. 3-19.


39. On the relationship between Sufis from Uch and sultans, see Siiμon Digby,
    "Before Timur Came: Provincialization of the Delhi Sultanate through the
    Fourteenth Century," Journal of the Economic and Social History of the
    Orient vol. 47, no. 3 (2004), pp. 298-356. On Jahanian, see Amina M. Stein-
    fels, Knowledge before Action: Islamic Learning and Sufi Practice in the Life
    of Sayyid Jaliil al-din Bukhari Makhdiim-i Jahii.niyii.n (Columbia, SC: Uni-
    versity of South Carolina Press, 2012).


40. Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," in Language,
    Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Ithaca, NY: Cor-
    nell University Press, 1977), pp. 139-165.


41. Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics: Regarding Method (Cambridge:
    Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 125.


42. Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft, trans. Peter Putman (Manchester: Man-
    chester University Press, 2008), pp. 24-29.
    " I. FRONTIER WITH THE HOUSE OF GOLD
    r. For an exposition of Sufi miracles, including flying on walls, see Simon
    Digby, "To Ride a Tiger or a Wall? Strategies of Prestige in Indian Sufi
    Legend," According to Tradition: Hagiographical Writing in India, ed.