A Book of Conquest The Chachnama and Muslim Origins in South Asia
NOTES TO PAGES 72-73 203
- Ibid., p. 19. The distance unit, yo;ana, is five to eight miles.
- Satish S. Misra, Muslim Communities in Gu;arat (Baroda: University of
Baroda Press, 1964), p. 7. For more on the continuation of these communi-
ties after the thirteenth century, the best account is in Samira Sheikh,
Forging a Region: Sultans, Traders and Pilgrims in Gu;arat, r200-r500
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2oro).
- See V. A. Janaki, Gu;arat as the Arabs Knew It {A Study in Historical Geog-
raphy) (Baroda: Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda Press, 1969).
- See the discussion in Travis Zadeh, Mapping Frontiers across Medieval
Islam: Geography, Translation and the 'Abbasid Empire (London: I. B. Tauris,
20n), pp. 22-25. A useful correction to dominant historiographic readings
of Arab geographers is in J. T. Olsson, "The World in Arab Eyes: A Reassess-
ment of the Climes in Medieval Islamic Scholarship," Bulletin of the School
of Oriental and African Studies 77 1 3 (Oct. 2014), pp. 487-508.
- Ibn Khurradadhbih noted that he relied on the report of an anonymous em-
issary of Yal;lya bin Khalid Barmaki (d. 805), who was sent to Hind to inves-
tigate religion in 800 CE. Though the report itself is not extant, its presence
is heavily felt in the Arab historiographic tradition centuries after it was
written. One can surmise that the consistent invocation of the report in sub-
sequent writings on India is due to the-emphasis on chains of transmission
in Arab historical writings. See Bruce B. Lawrence, Shahrii.stii.ni on the In-
dian Religions (The Hague: Mouton, 1976), p. 21. In Ibn Khurradadhbih, we
see the rules of the geographical genre: the accounts are framed in climes
and regions, and then they list each city or settlement, with a description of
its main trade and its people. In addition to this nodal alignment of space,
the geographies gave a lot more space to ethnographic descriptions of inhab-
itants and less space to the political conditions. There is no mention in Ibn
Khurradadhbih of the political climes in Hind. He does not mention that a
key polity was established by the Saffarid brothers Ya'qub and Amr bin Layth,
who threatened Baghdad itself in the 870s and were given a grant by the
'Abbasid caliphs over Fars and Sind. These Saffarids took over many cities that
Ibn Khurradadhbih catalogs, such as Ghazna, Qusdar, Kikan, Qandabil, and
even Multan, holding them until 900 CE. See C. E. Bosworth, "Rulers of
Makran and Qusdar in the Early Islamic Period," in Studia lranica vol. 23
(1994), pp. 199-209; and M. S. Khan, "The Five Arab States in South Asia,"
Hamdard Islamicus vol. 15, no. 2 (1992), pp. 5-28.
Similarly, though Ibn Khurradadhbih catalogs the religions of Hind, he
does not mention the rebels and anti-'Abbasid missionaries who populated
Sind. For Hind and Sind, there is also a special emphasis on-capturing de-
scriptions of wonders and marvels. It is notable that in the prodigious schol-
arship on Ibn Khurradadhbih (and on the later geographers), there is little
thought \iven to how space on the Indic frontier is imagined and presented
or on what the temporal and empirical lags say about the political and cul-
tural constructions in 'Abbasid textual traditions. See, for instance, Zayde
Antrim, Routes and Realms: The Power of Place in the Early Islamic World
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); and James E. Montgomery, "Ser-
endipity, Resistance, and Multivalency: Ibn Khurradadhbih and His Kitab
