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

FRONTIER WITH THE HOUSE OF GOLD 33

emerged in the ninth century out of the the older sira texts, which de-

scribed the life of the Prophet. In sira texts, accounts of the Prophet's

military campaigns laid the foundation for the development of futuh.

However, futuh had both a historiographical and a political function

to play in early Islam, as Fred Donner argues:

The Umayyads, who from the time of'Abd al-Malik (685-705) on seem

to have supervised an increasingly clear articulation of the Muslim

community as a distinct monotheist confession, began to encourage

the recounting and collection of reports about how the conquest had

been organized and how they had proceeded. Their purpose was to

establish what we might call a narrative weapon to bolster their

claims to hegemony over their vast non-Muslim populations, by re-

lating the conquests' apparently miraculous successes.^30

The futuh narratives, which, served the purpose of legitimizing
political authority or genealogical claims of supremacy and validation,
developed into a crucial source on a range of external issues: conver-
sion, taxation,, administration, and-most importantly-Muslim en-
counters with diverse communities. The futuh narratives began as
testimony from participants in the military campaigns or from second-
hand narrators. These were accounts of personal or tribal bravery and
·valor augmented by information about military appointments and de-
cisions into a narrativized history of the conquest of a specific reg~on.
The genre held onto its internal motifs (letters between commanders,
instructional lists, etc.) even as it developed the usage of isnad (chains
of transmission) and a divinely inspired teleology. During their d!!vel-
opment in the ninth and tenth centuries, the futuh narratives also
emerged as key informants for the works of geographers, the universal
historians, and the compilers of biographical dictionaries. The ear-
liest extant futuh-such as the Ta'rikh Futuh al-Sham (conquest of
Syria) by Azdi Basri (d. 810)-illustrate the regional focus as well as
the narrative drive of Islam's preordained eminence.
Based l\Il the citations offered by later historians, the earliest futuh
that dealt specifically with Hind and Sind were written by Mada'ini
(d. 843).^31 Baladhuri (d. 892), Ya'qubi (d. 905), and Tabari (d. 923) were
three universal historians of the tenth century who all incorporated
Mada'ini's books into their accounts on Hind and cited him as ~he