Chachanama by Mannan Asif

- Post-modern book
- Narrative story of Chach and his son Dahar and Muhammad Ibn Qāsim… 712
- Chachnama – 1226 – Persian
- Genealogical study of this text …
- Focault’s genealogy of ideas…
- Auto-ethnography – putting self-back in ethnography …including self-reflection in
discussing what others are doing… another meaning is document own society, own
ethnos…
- Daybūl – port
- Brahmanabad
- Aror
- Ucch
- Multan
- Qāsim was son in law of Hajjāj bin Yusuf (first Arab Muslim dynasty…)
- Ali Kufi the author of Chachnama –
- Muhammad Ghuri
- Qutub al din Aibak
- Nāsir al Din Qabacha – Chachnama was written as a gift for one of his daughters…
- Razia sultan – daughter of Shas al-Din Iltutmish
- Razia Sultana was overtaken by Balbān
- Delhi Sultanate by Sunil Kumar
- Al Hind by André Wink
- When Qāsim conquered Sindh – jāts, gujars, and meads were in Sindh…
- Jāt tribes may have adopted Buddhism later on…
- Ahl- e kitāb (people of the book) – Quran says they are protected.
- Zoroastrians in Iran were considered people of the book… and were referred to as
“Dhimmi” – non-islamic groups, accepted as subjects under a muslim ruler. They have to
pay jizya – tax. Non-muslims have to give taxes … they had Avesta…and a prophet.
- Coming to Sindh they met people who were worshiping statues and images – they
referred to them as budd, budh, but. Hajjāj asked Qāsim to consider everyone as people
of the book. Not to destroy their religious places as long as they did not revolt. And not to
convert them. Islamic law was not imposed on them. Islamic law had a place for them
people of the book. They were expanding the notion of the people of the book. If these
people were people of the book, they were to be respected. Quran itself gives 26 names of
prophets. All people had prophets. Some of their names are known. Some of their names
are not known to you.
That non-Muslims can be brought under Muslim rule without strife and with full accommodation
under Islamic law. P.120

Mannan Asif reads - Chachnama as a text on political theory, p.15

Arguments - 16 However, I argue that Chachnama is not a conquest narrative about Islam's
origins on the Indian subcontinent. Rather, it is a prescriptive text advocating for a dialogical
present for its thirteenth-century world and a political system that encompasses diversity in that
present. It does so by drawing upon rich textual traditions from Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian that
were available to the learned audiences of the time.
Methodology 
My field of inquiry thus encompassed the text, the afterlife of the text, and the method of the
historian. I saw that an examination of Chachnama and its afterlife puts into stark relief the limits
of how we conceive of the past. Understanding how an unreading of the origins narrative, and a
reading of its political purpose, opens up historical questions is the main work of this book. p.17 

p.20. I approach the construction of this narrative by arguing that the text at the heart of
Chachnama is misread, mischaracterized, and misplaced.

p.26 Instead of narratives of arrivals, we need a consistent history of being Muslim in

India.

The futuh narratives, p.32 Is chachnama a future narrative?

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 Chachnama. p.35
Why did the Caliph Umar rebuke the governor of Bahrain?p.35
Afghanistan was invaded before?
the king of jazīrat Yāqūt (land of diamonds. Sri Lanka) p.36 1
Jat/zutt people, p.37 – still ruffians.
Mīd -
Who are the Budd? p.40 world. He
uses the term budd to denote the local religious structure in Sind, but
this term should be read more broadly as polytheism. 

What is Umayyad ? 
History books styles, attention to dates details… Juzjani — p.53 notion of historian…
Iltutmish crowned his daughter Razia as the new sultan, p.54
Persianate cosmopolis, sanskrit cosmopolis, p54
Such close ties among the political,
sacral, and knowledge elite meant that power and prestige infused their
textual productions.54
Significant institutionalization of Persian as a courtly and political language happened first under
the Ghaznavid, then under the Delhi sultans, and finally under the Mughal regime in the
sixteenth century. p.55
the process of Persianization was a force
of assimilation for the elite of a post-Mongol Islamic world, accentuating
a more secular ethos over the sacral Arabic. p.55
these texts are commonly understood to be translations (tarjuma), I follow A. C. S. Peacock in
approaching them as transcreations or commentarial interpretations. p.56
Shi’ite sensibilities as performance of an ethical paradigm, p,56

Broadly, three types of claims are evident in the network of Persian texts surrounding the
Chachnama: the Arab descent of the author, the Arabic origins of the text, and the Arab descent
1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_the_Jewel
of the patron of the text. I argue that these claims are an assertion of the right to produce texts, to
interpret them, and to present them to an elite ruling class. This elite class-itself diverse
ethnically and linguistically-is also the audience best endowed with skills to understand the
moral and ethical lessons in these textual productions. p.56

In his preface to the text, 'Awfi presents his humble offering to Qabacha, saying that "a beautiful
bride who was hiding behind the Arabic script" can now be revealed "to the eyes of the learned
Persianate betrothed.lllThe metaphor of the conjugal relatibnship was a common one with which
to frame "translation" as an act of transcreation. P.57

In form or in theory, Chachnama cannot be considered a text in

the genre of conquest literature. Instead, it is political theory that is
deeply ingrained in the physical geography and spatial constructS" of
the thirteenth century. p.67
Beyhaqi, written during the reign 0£ the
Mas'ud of Ghazna (r.  1030-1041). p.67 ?

Jay Singh gives donation to mosques, p.75

The invocation of trade goods, of travel lodges, and of vibrant cities in
Sind and Hind during the time of Chachnama is a forceful corrective
to both the later British imagination of Sind and contemporary scholarship's
focus on conquest and devastation (whether of Mongols or of
Delhi's sultans) as the primary lens for seeing the thirteenth century.

Chachnama is a text
containing advice, it is a text that creates a moral genealogy for rule,
it is a text that argues for a framework for understanding difference
(most critically, religious difference), and it is a text that demonstrates
five hundred years of interconnected lives in the Sind-Gujarat-OmanYemen
world. p.76

In the following sections, I discuss two sets of letters and the way
in which they lay out key features of the political theory of Chachnama:
the role of advisors, the role of divine will, the importance of human
agency, and the need to be just toward others. These letters need to be
read in pairs because they represent the working out of a dialogic relationship
between actors in Chachnama. They are the conversation
through which one can see difference being narrated, asserted, and
negotiated. p.82

 Because there are

four ways in which a kingship is acquired: first, through consultation,
alliances and treaties, and relation; second, through expenditure
of wealth and grants; third, by knowing and understanding the ways
and means of one's enemies; and fourth, by dominance, terror, magnificence,
bravery, power, and strength (r'ub  o mahabat  o shahamat
 o quwat  o shaukat). p.88

In linking the Chach and Qasim cycles narratively, and by making

Chach the exemplar for Qasim, Chachnama creates an equivalence between
the Muslim and non-Muslim histories, thus cementing its case
for accommodation. p.90