34 FRONTIER WITH THE HOUSE OF GOLD
primary source. Mada'ini is reported to have written his futuh from
detailed firsthand accounts of the participants in the campaign. He is
the only one of the early historians to have dealt directly with the con-
quest of Sind. The greatest amount of his material (as well as tlirect
quotations) appears in the work of Baladhuri, who is the only one of the
three historians to have a section devoted to the conquest of Sind.
Since no other historian from the period-notably neither Tabari nor
Ya'qubi-offer greater detail on the account provided by Baladhuri, I
can conjecture that his text is the chief source on the campaigns in
Sind for Chachnama, and we can retrace the historiographical roots
of Chachnama's account by examining Baladhuri.
Baladhuri's Account of Sind
Baladhuri lived and died in Baghdad during the ninth century. The
probable date for his birth is in the 8ros. Persian by birth, he came from
a scribal family (his grandfather Jabir was also employed as a scribe and
a secretary). It is said that he traveled widely in Iraq and Khurasan. He
studied directly with Mada'ini. He found work as a translator from Per-
sian into Arabic in the courts of the 'Abbasid caliphs Wathik (d. 847)
and Mutawakkil (d. 86r). He became a close confidant of the latter. He
authored two of the greatest surviving works in early Muslim histori-
ography: Kitab Futuh al-Buldan (Book of Conquest of Lands) andAnsab
al-Ashraf (Genealogy of the Nobles). The conquest of Sind is described
in his Kitab Futuh al-Buldan, which also carries the title of Kitab al-
Buldan al-Kabir (Book of Great Lands). It begins with Muhammad's
migration to Medina and continues to describe battles and conquests
during the Prophet's lifetime. After Arabia, Baladhuri has chapters on
the conquest of Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Spain, Persia, and at the very end, a
short section on the conquest of Sind. Baladhuri begins that section
with a direct transmission from Mada'ini as his primary source for the
entire section.^32
Baladhuri's history, produced for the 'Abbasid court, is removed
from the earliest historical events it narrates by more than two hun-
dred years and is thus itself an act of imagining the past. Yet it is not
the facticity or empirical truth of his account that concerns us here.
Rather, it is the way .in which this historiography is repurposed by