tarikh-e beyhaghi

Tarikh-e Beyhaghi (Beyhaghi’s History) is a seminal work in Persian literature and historiography. Fayyaz dedicated his life to correcting and improving this text. In 2009, a revised edition of the work edited by Yahagghi and Seyyedi was published. The primary advantage of this new edition was the detailed introduction, annotations, and supplementary materials, which greatly facilitated the work of readers and researchers. However, the editors had made numerous unjustified interventions in the text, to the extent that this benefit was largely overshadowed by the distortion of the original work of such great significance. It was anticipated that after more than a decade since the initial publication and appearance of numerous scholarly articles on the topic, many of the problems would have been addressed in the new edition. Regrettably, the 2022 edition, which claimed to incorporate "complete revision, additions, and corrections", failed to live up to these expectations as only a few of the numerous issues were rectified. Due to the impracticality of addressing all the flaws of this editorial effort in a single article, the present work examined select problems under the following headings: "Departure from the normative contextual meaning", "Disregard for Bayhaghi's stylistic features", "Ignoring the frequency of evidence", "Unjustified textual changes", "Unsupported readings of the text", and "Neglect of literary sensibilities in text correction".

"Khvarenah" is an outstanding mythological concept that has survived in the post-Islamic Iran among the public and written works. Passing through a transformation process, from ancient times onwards, various changes have occurred to the quality and function of this concept and has made it an interesting and useful area of research with historical, sociological, psychological and even great rhetorical values. The present study, therefore, is to investigate the most important conscious and unconscious aspects of belief in "Khvarenah" by going through one of the most prominent Persian prose works of both historical and literary nature, i.e. Tarikh-e Beyhaghi. The aim of this study is to describe and analyze the details of belief in "Khvarenah" (Farreh) as manifested in both form and meaning of the mentioned work so as to clarify the largely half-hidden contribution of this ancient belief to the interpretation of events and the understanding of events and characters, and to indicate the evolution of its function up to the Qaznavid era. The findings showed that belief in "Khvarenah" is mostly manifest in the great events related to the kings, as well as, in some of their characteristics and behaviors. Rituals such as Mehregan also contribute highly to this manifestation. Deterministic approaches to Tarikh-e Beyhaghi in issues such as enthronement of the kings are reflections of this belief as well. Various manifestations of this concept in the form and content of this work reflect deviation in the function of "Khvarenah" from a mythological to a courtly and political function, and reveals the differences between some of its details and its ancient and genuine form.

In Beyhaghi’s history, the artistic as well as literary devices, allegories in particular, are not simply intended for their aesthetic appeals or as embellishments. They are rather employed to serve the author’s purposes. In other words, sometimes the author is compelled, given his own social and political position or the social and political position of the real characters in his work, to convey his thoughts to the reader by employing indirect methods of expression such as using allegories and anecdotes. Thus, the reader, by penetrating the underlying layers of the text would explore fresh and compelling meanings, which due to their literariness are more effective. This paper aims at analyzing some allegories as well as anecdotes used in Tarikh-e Beyhaghi as indirect methods of expression employed by Abolfazl-e Beyhaghi in order to demonstrate how they helped him to bring to picture the turmoil of the time and the atmosphere of distrust in the court of Masoud Ghaznavi.