GREEN BOUGHS ON THE GRAVES: UNMOORING HERAT FROM IMPERIAL TIME |
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| Authors: | TANVIR AHMED |
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| Institution: | Occupied Narragansett lands (Providence, Rhode Island)
I am grateful to Carolina-María Mendoza and Sabauon Nasseri for conversations during this work's conceptualization and feedback on its early drafts. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers of this work and the editorial board of History and Theory for their insightful and generous comments, from which I have benefited greatly in both the present context and beyond it. |
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| Abstract: | The aim of this article is to explore how popular historical knowledge disrupts the spacetimes produced by imperial power. To this end, I present my reading of a shrine guide that was composed by Asil al-Din Wa?iz in 1460 and that documents the city of Herat's blessed dead. This work, the Maqsad al-Iqbal, anchors Herat to space and time by both the graves of the city's myriad saints and the tales told about them locally. I investigate the ways in which the popular historical knowledge recorded in the Maqsad al-Iqbal offers a counterpoint to the ideas of Herat's past that have been generated by dynastic chronicles, luxurious visual arts, and the grandeur of royal construction projects. I am interested not only in alternative historical visions themselves but in how nonelite productions of history resist easy adaptation into a hegemonic scheme and how the dead themselves are constantly at work in our narratives, breaking down every attempt at a singular, coherent past. |
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| Keywords: | historiography grave visitation temporality popular knowledge Herat Afghanistan |
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