Making Mongol History

This book examines the life and work of Rashid al-Din Tabib (d. 1318), the most powerful statesman working for the Mongol Ilkhans in the Middle East. It begins with an overview of administrative history and historiography in the early Ilkhanate, culminating with Rashid al-Din's Blessed History of Ghazan, the indispensable source for Mongol and Ilkhanid history. Later chapters lay out the results of the most comprehensive study to date of the manuscripts of Rashid al-Din's historical writing. The complicated relationship between Rashid al-Din's historical and theological writings is also explored, as well as his appropriation of the work of his contemporary historian, `Abd Allah Qashani.

“The core of this impressive study of Rashid al-Din's oeuvre is the minute analysis of the manuscript witnesses of his celebrated 'world history' and the stages through which the author's writing of history and sense of himself evolved, requiring a radical revision of most previous studies of Mongol-era historiography.”

For anyone using Rashid al-Din - and that means pretty much anyone working on the thirteenth and fourteenth century Iranians, Turks, or Mongols - Making Mongol History is simply a must-have. Kamola's work supersedes all previous work on the manuscript history of the Jami' al-Tawarikh. His new classification of the manu-scripts into recensions will be the framework for all future study of the text. His teasing out of how the Jami' al-Tawarikh "bleeds" into and in turn is "bled into" by works from many other authors is a vital reminder of the gap between the conceptions of "work" and "authorship" in manuscript cultures and print cultures. His synthesis of manuscript history with intellectual history is a bravura demonstration of the continuing significance of philology for understanding the human past.--Christopher Atwood "Central Asiatic Journal 62.2"
-- "Charles Melville, Pembroke College, Cambridge"

Stefan Kamola is Assistant Professor of History at Eastern Connecticut State University. He received a Ph.D. in History from the University of Washington in 2013 and then spent three years as a post-doctoral fellow at the Princeton Society of Fellows. Stefan has published an article in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society and a chapter in Sussan Babaie, ed., Iran After the Mongols. The Idea of Iran, Volume VIII (I.B. Tauris, 2019)

'The core of this impressive study of Rashid al-Din's oeuvre is the minute analysis of the manuscript witnesses of his celebrated "world history" and the stages through which the author's writing of history and sense of himself evolved, requiring a radical revision of most previous studies of Mongol-era historiography.'Charles Melville, Pembroke College, CambridgeExplores Rashid al-Din's impact on seven centuries of historical writingThis book examines the life and work of Rashid al-Din Tabib (d. 1318), the most powerful statesman working for the Mongol Ilkhans in the Middle East. It begins with an overview of administrative history and historiography in the early Ilkhanate, culminating with Rashid al-Din's Blessed History of Ghazan, the indispensable source for Mongol and Ilkhanid history. Later chapters lay out the results of the most comprehensive study to date of the manuscripts of Rashid al-Din's historical writing. The complicated relationship between Rashid al-Din's historical and theological writings is also explored, as well as his appropriation of the work of his contemporary historian, 'Abd Allah Qashani.Key Features A narrative of early Ilkhanid history accessible to students and useful to scholars A new approach to the biography of one of the most influential figures in medieval Islamic history Includes appendices describing the structure, sources and illustrative programs of the Jami? al-Tawarikh and cataloguing all known manuscripts of the work Shows the relationship between early modern Persian and modern European structures of knowledge about the Mongol worldStefan Kamola is Assistant Professor of History at Eastern Connecticut State University.

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