GREEN BOUGHS ON THE GRAVES

UNMOORING HERAT FROM IMPERIAL TIME

TANVIR AHMED

History and Theory 62, no. 3 (2023)

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 Waʿiz 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.

Image by Min An.