INTRODUCTION 15
in the preface that he translated an older Arabic account of the Muslim
campaigns of the eighth century into Persian in order to gain favor at
the court of Nasiruddin Qabacha (r. 1206-1226). Chachnama was
written in Uch, the then capital of Qabacha's polity in northern India.
Why did 'Ali Kufl. imagine a distant past in the early thirteenth
century? What is the articulated and transformational life of this text?
How is this text to be understood as participating in the history of
thought in the thirteenth century?^31 I make two essential claims in
this book: that Chachnama, central to the origins myth of Islam in
South Asia, is not a work of translation, and it is not a.book of conquest.
Rejecting the origins narrative allows me to also jettison the hegemonic
reading of this text, opening up the possibility to read it as a text of po-
litical theory.
The work of rereading Chachnama begins with the understanding
that Chachnama needs to be examined in its entirety, and its varied
genres and registers need to be untangled, to understand the political
vision of the text. The reading of the text as a whole. is a necessary
methodological step because Chachnama entered the archive for
British Orientalists and historians miscataloged, mistaken, and
missing the full body of its text. Starting with Alexander Dow in 1782,
segments of the text mainly concerning its "Muslim" portions, were
translated and reproduced in antiquarian articles and broad histories.
These excerpts were labeled as "history" and were read at face value,
solely to answer the question of what happened in the early eighth
century. Such was the radical consequence of reading Chachnama
as a translation and a text foreign to India that an inquiry into Is-
lam's origins could summarily disregard any "pre-Islamic" portion
of this text.
So it occurred that in the work of British Orientalists and the his-
torians who followed (specifically the nationalist and social schools),
Chachnama became the social, philological, and historical foundation
for a unitary understanding of Islam's origins. Scholars did the careful
work of Ar'Abic philology to ascertain the urtext. They were guided
by the unerring belief that the historical truth is clearest when it is
closest to the historical time of the event. Modern scholarship scanned
sentences for "facts" that were then compiled in relation to other tex-
tual facts and were made to stand in for the truth of the origins. The