ABSTRACT

H istory as a chronicle from day-to-day of the battles fought and kingdoms won, or a genuine and truthful record in the biographical form of conquests, catastrophies and vicissitudes in the life of an illustrious personality in a ruling hierarchy is comparatively an ancient and popular form of Persian literature. Post-Islāmic contribution to the language and literature of Persia was directly inspired by the religio-cultural language of the Muslims, viz., Arabic, a cursory perusal of whose literature reveals the preponderance of history and tradition over other literary forms. In fact, amongst the earlier literary works that marked the doom of the age of ignorance and the rise of Islām, some works of history and biography were believed to have played a prominent part. Due to a vigilant and zealous endeavour to discover with positive certainty every detail in the life of the founder of Islām and about his traditions, the sense of historicity or the consciousness of history had sufficiently developed in the cultured Muslims at a very early stage and history therefore came to assume a distinctive importance in Islāmic literature.