ABSTRACT
Perhaps no other monarch in Perso-Islamic historiography embodies the role of the ‘ghazi king’ as incontrovertibly as Mahmud of Ghazna. Mahmud’s legacy became almost legendary, and this was no coincidence; a great deal of care and effort went into crafting the image of the Ghaznavid ruler. The fact that one of the earliest surviving dynastic histories in Islamic historiography as well as the foundational courtly panegyrics in Persian were written during his reign is highly relevant. The present chapter will analyze Mahmud’s personification of the image of ghazi king as an amalgam of numerous textual prototypes – indeed, as a web of countless literary threads. But in addition to this, evidence will be sought to test the hypothesis that Mahmud was himself involved in this imagemaking, and that he might have in fact acted them out publicly. In other words, Chapter 3 will also try to challenge the artificial boundary between text and hors-texte.
