The Political Status of Caliph and Sultan as Reflected in Persian Historical Texts (From Early Islamic Centuries to the Fall of Abbasid Caliphate)

This paper deals with a challenging concept in Perso-Islamic medieval politics: the political status of caliph and sultan as maintained by Iranian cultural elite in medieval periods. To give an explanation of the concept, it has concentrated on the Iranian medieval history writers and the historical texts produced by them during early and medieval Islamic periods. As the author put it, the first generation of these Iranian historians mostly concerned with the concept of Islamic caliphate and who would be qualified to enjoy this authority. But in later periods historians tried to set a distinction between the concepts of caliphate and sultanate. In other words, they begin to make a new definition of caliphs’ ubiquitous authority through dividing it into two parts: political and religious. Then, they gradually transmitted a part of the political part to the sultans and emirs who managed the country’s material sources as actual governors. In this theoretical manipulation they employed a vast and divers range of sources including Islamic law and traditions and pre-Islamic Persian political thought which reflected mostly in the Persian genre of mirrors for princes. The main purpose of this paper is to show how Iranian medieval history writers affected by the social and intellectual context in which they has been writing and the ways through which this mentality expressed in their texts.