A FOUNDATION FOR HISTORY 53claims. The gathering of luminaries at court, the grants, and the com-
mission of histories and poetic works were attempts to situate these
itinerant warlords within Muslim pasts. Along with the panegyrists
and historians, the warlords also tried to ally with the Sufi mystics.
Both Iltutmish and Qabacha tried vigorously to gain favor with the
great Sufi Sheikh Bah'auddin Zakariya in Multan. Juzjani's Tabaqat-i
Nasiri, a universal history that begins with the fall of Adam to earth,
is itself one key example of the work of cultural capital undertaken by
Muslim authors in the service of these warlords. Tabaqat-i Nasiri was
completed around 1260, long after the claims of Yildiz and Qabacha
for Multan and Lahore.
For Juzjani, Illtutmish completed the flow of Muslim history. He
was the one who unequivocally linked the frontier of. Hind to Islam's
cosmology, to the sunna of the Prophet, and to Islam's dynastic histo-
ries. Other works also furthered the conception of Islam's past com-
fortably ensconced in ~he hands of the frontier kings. These works,
completed in the first half of the thirteenth century, include Hasan
Nizami's Taj ul-Ma'athir, Fakhr-i Mudabbir's Bahr ul-Ansab and Adab
Harb wa'l Shaja'a, 'Awfi's f awami al-Hikayat, Ibn Athir's Kamil fi'l
Ta'rikh, Barani's Fatawa-yi f ahandari, and 'Isami's Futuh as-Salatin.
Most importantly, these histories, biographies, and advice manuals
were all consistently rooted in the Indic soil. This tumultuous geog-
raphy of the early thirteenth century gave rise to a series of historical
and poetic texts that addressed Muslim past in Sind and in India. The
three authors attached to the court in Uch served through changes in
political regimes and represented continuities across the transitions of
political order.
Juzjani was a historian, poet, educator, and jurist who served in Uch
and then later in Delhi. His grandfather, father (born in Lahore), and
other relatives had served courts in Ghazna, Ghur, and Lahore as ju-
rists, theologians, and diplomats. Juzjani came to Uch in 1227 and was
made the principal of the school Madrasa-i Firuzi by Qabacha. After
Qabacha's d'eath, he was employed by Iltutmish as a scholar at court.
Iltutmish charged him with giving weekly addresses from the threshold
of the royal chambers before he returned to Delhi. Juzjani was there
when the robes of investiture arrived from Baghdad t6 congratulate the
new ruler, and he was there at the death of Iltutmish and the crowning