Narrative Construction of Tärikh-e Bayhaqi and its Encounter with Iranian Thought

Document Type : scientific-research

Author

Assistant Professor of Persian Language and Literature University of Kurdistan, Kurdistan, Iran.

Abstract

Narrativity is an essential feature to ‘history’. Narrative, with such features as being systematic and structured, has a cohesive and regulatory function, as it brings together selected facts from specific innumerable historical facts under specific structures and plots. The structure and cohesion of the narrative provide the ground for semantic and even structural signification, as well as for finding ideological contexts and the predominance of particular discourse systems (and consequentially the emergence of selections, omissions, and rejections). The sum of these issues, in addition to relying on sequence, causal relations, change of status, and having an ultimate goal, are all narrative and consequently non-historical components involved in reporting historical events and could ultimately construct a ‘story’ or forms of a story. On the other hand, discourses, ideologies, and power structures play an important role in constructing the historian's historical understanding and, subsequently, in his historical narration, just as “historical narrative” is constructed in the epistemological system and the dominant valuations of the historian's life span. Tarikh-e Bayhaqi like other historical texts, is a selected narrative from countless historical events of a particular era, and Bayhaqi as a subject in his era had been influenced by discourses, ideologies, and special identity origins in his historical narrative, more particularly when we see special encounters in discourse and identity in Bayhaqi's era. Accordingly, in this study based on New Historicism, we investigate the narrative construction in Tärikh-e Bayhaqi and Bayhaqi's encounter with influential discourses in his time; moreover, we examine its impact on the formation of Bayhaqi's “historical narrative” in order to further scrutinize the subjectivity of Bayhaqi in his era. The findings of this study show the inter-constructional encounter between historical and metahistorical aspects in Bayhaqi's historical narrative, which signals a significant relationship with the discoursive encounters prevailing in his time. Among such encounters is the Iranian-oriented-identity-seeking current against the court-supported-identity-seeking currents that plays a pivotal role in the formation of these inter-constructional encounters.

Keywords

Main Subjects

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History

  • Receive Date: 18 September 2020
  • Revise Date: 04 March 2021
  • Accept Date: 09 May 2021

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