Papers by Michael Bednar
Islam, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism, 2018
Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 2017
The life of a Mongol named Mahimāsāhi underwent a series of transformations in Persian and Sanskr... more The life of a Mongol named Mahimāsāhi underwent a series of transformations in Persian and Sanskrit texts. Mahimāsāhi was born a Mongol, became a New Muslim, and died a Kshatriya Rajput warrior in 1301. With time, he moved from history into historical memory. This historical memory was further transformed by literary conventions in Sanskrit and Persian texts. While Mahimāsāhi represents a Mongol threat in Persian texts, he embodies the warrior’s duty in the Sanskrit Hammīra-Mahākāvya and serves as an example for others on how to become Rajput.
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 2013
Modern scholars approach Amīr Khusraw's Duval Rānī va Khiẓr Khān as either a historical maavī... more Modern scholars approach Amīr Khusraw's Duval Rānī va Khiẓr Khān as either a historical maavī that relates Delhi Sultanate conquests or as a romantic maavī that combines the love story between the crown prince and a Hindu princess with tragedy resulting from their fate. While the content of the Duval Rānī va Khiẓr Khān is well known, the form of the text and its implications for reading both history and romance remains unexplored. Reading the form inverts the historic and romantic division of the text. It reveals the historical elements as romantic panegyric created by Khusraw in praise of the Delhi Sultanate and the romance as a source-based historical biography.
Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 2017
The life of a Mongol named Mahimāsāhi underwent a series of transformations in Persian and Sanskr... more The life of a Mongol named Mahimāsāhi underwent a series of transformations in Persian and Sanskrit texts. Mahimāsāhi was born a Mongol, became a New Muslim, and died a Kshatriya Rajput warrior in 1301. With time, he moved from history into historical memory. This historical memory was further transformed by literary conventions in Sanskrit and Persian texts. While Mahimāsāhi represents a Mongol threat in Persian texts, he embodies the warrior’s duty in the Sanskrit Hammīra-Mahākāvya and serves as an example for others on how to become Rajput.
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 24 no. 1 (Jan 2014): 17-35
Khusraw's Duval Rānī va Khiz . r Khān as either a historical mas̱ navī that relates Delhi Sultana... more Khusraw's Duval Rānī va Khiz . r Khān as either a historical mas̱ navī that relates Delhi Sultanate conquests or as a romantic mas̱ navī that combines the love story between the crown prince and a Hindu princess with tragedy resulting from their fate. While the content of the Duval Rānī va Khiz . r Khān is well known, the form of the text and its implications for reading both history and romance remains unexplored. Reading the form inverts the historic and romantic division of the text. It reveals the historical elements as romantic panegyric created by Khusraw in praise of the Delhi Sultanate and the romance as a source-based historical biography.
Book Reviews by Michael Bednar
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 2017
Encyclopedia Entries by Michael Bednar
Conference Presentations by Michael Bednar
The poet Amir Khusraw composed a Persian narrative poem, Duwal Rani wa Khizr Khan, in 1316 commem... more The poet Amir Khusraw composed a Persian narrative poem, Duwal Rani wa Khizr Khan, in 1316 commemorating the marriage between the heir-apparent to the Delhi Sultanate throne, Khizr Khan, and a Hindu princess, Duwal Rani. Scholars often divide this poem into two sections. The first third of the text, or the historical part, praises Sufis, sultans, and military victories of the Delhi Sultanate. The remaining two-thirds of the text describes the courtship and marriage of Khizr Khan to Duwal Rani and the couple’s unfortunate fate. In this talk I present the general framework of the text with a few key passages, particularly on whether Khusraw followed an outline provided by his patron, Khizr Khan. I then demonstrate how an alternate reading arises if one approaches the text in terms of historiography instead of history. This alternate reading inverts the traditional categories of the historical and literary. The historical part of the text becomes panegyric invented by Khusrau, while the romantic part is show to be biography written according to Khizr Khan’s outline. This inversion holds serious implications for historians. This difference in approach, history versus historiography, calls into question what is ‘history’ and what is ‘literary’ when reading Indo-Persian poetry. Most importantly, it questions whether scholars label texts as history based on the degree to which the narrative conforms to modern expectations of history rather than reading history and historiography within the context of the period.
Invited Talks by Michael Bednar
The American Broadcasting Company (ABC) broadcast a seven-part mini-series, Amerika, in February ... more The American Broadcasting Company (ABC) broadcast a seven-part mini-series, Amerika, in February of 1987. The main character, Devin Milford, ran as a presidential candidate in 1987 when the Soviet Union overtook America in a bloodless coup. After spending a decade in a reeducation camp before returning to find Amerika, a country that has come to accept communist rule, he begins to lead a Second American Revolution. The mini-series Amerika built upon fears of Cold War and communist invasions found in movies such as Red Dawn (1984). Alarm about an over imagined “sharia law” subverting constitutional law has led to a spate of bills. Twenty-two state legislatures have introduced 109 bills over the last three years attempting to ban sharia law. The notion that the American legal system would succumb to sharia law today seems as preposterous as a communist takeover in the 1980s. The fear of communists and sharia law reflects an internal fear rather than an external threat. Michael Bednar connects these points in his talk, linking sharia law to the resurrection of a Cold War narrative rather the threat of a international movement.
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Papers by Michael Bednar
Book Reviews by Michael Bednar
Encyclopedia Entries by Michael Bednar
Conference Presentations by Michael Bednar
Invited Talks by Michael Bednar
Amir Khusrau, a poet in ‘Ala’ al-Din Khalji’s royal court, commemorated these military campaigns in the Khaza’in al-Futuh (Treasury of Victories). Amir Khusrau composed the text in 1311 as the last of the Delhi Sultanate armies returned from the battlefield. He wrote the text in a form of prose panegyric that combined poetical panegyric (qasida) with prose victory reports (fathnama). This combination makes the Treasury of Victories a highly ornate literary text and one of the more difficult texts of the Sultanate period (1206–1526). It is perhaps due to the literary imagery and difficulty of the text, even in translation, that most scholars excerpt passages rather than engage in a study of the text as a whole. Yet, this piecemeal reading transforms the text from a treasury of victories to a depository of military exploits.
Approaching the text as a coherent work, recognizing the combination of both rhetoric and reality, produces a reading different from the current scholarly view. Scholars treat the Treasury of Victories as a collection of military victories largely disconnected with each other. Amir Khusrau, however, shows an acute awareness and rhetorical use of different styles of military warfare. When describing Mongol warfare, which occurred on horseback on large open plains, Khusrau employs a set of imagery that stress a fluidity of movement corresponding to the Mongols’ rapid military style. The Hindus, in contrast, used fortifications in an attempt to outlast the Sultanate siege. In describing the fortifications of the Hindus and the Delhi Sultanate, Khusrau utilizes a different set of imagery that stressed the grandeur of the fortifications (that brushed the heavens or rivaled the falcon’s flight). Amir Khusrau, however, goes beyond the reality of Mongol and Hindu warfare to use the imagery of warfare as rhetoric in describing the Delhi Sultanate itself. This appears most clearly in the imagery of grandeur (loftiness) as well as submission of the Delhi monuments and ramparts. All of this suggests that Amir Khusrau is describing warfare more than war, and that his depiction of warfare goes beyond the field of battle to describe the landscape of Sultanate society.