ABSTRACT
When in 1021 CE Abu Nasr al-‘Utbi wrote his Yamini – a rhetorical tour de force in Arabic and one of the earliest dynastic histories in Islamic historiography – he railed in his preface against legendary tales which aimed at ‘exaggeration, frightening, mystification, and provoking astonishment, without any truth that the eye might witness, or that might be proven by demonstration’.1 Yet, a few pages later, when he began his narrative of the rise of his patron’s house (the Ghaznavids r. 994-1186 CE) on the frontiers of Muslim-controlled land and non-Muslim India (roughly in southeastern modern Afghanistan as well as Pakistan), he included the following description about the bizarre event that brought victory to the Emir Sebüktegin against the Indian king Jaipal:
There was in the vicinity of those battlefields, near the infidels, a mountain called mount Ghuzak, from which the eagle would cast down his gaze, and lower still, the army of clouds would assemble. Within it lay swells and hollows, bends and curvatures. In one of its ravines there was a clear fountain of water, pure as by Hanafi law,2 in which there was no dirt or impurities. If any filth were thrown into it, the sky would blacken, great storms would rage, the elevations and depths would grow dark, and the neighborhood would be filled with horrible cold blasts, until one should see before his eyes red death and the greatest chastisement truly and clearly. The emir commanded that filth of some kind be thrown into it on purpose. Immediately, there arose the horrors of the day of resurrection upon the licentious infidels, and thunderbolts and blasts followed relentlessly. Violent wind closed in on them from every side, and the sky spread the canopy of hailstone and cold upon them. Windstorms of the ages and dust clashed upon them, and [the Indians] could not see the path by which to fly.3
