An innovative exploration of the local histories of the Persianate world and its preoccupation with identity, authority, and legitimacy.

Mimi Hanaoka is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Richmond, where she is a scholar of history and religion. Her publications include scholarly journal articles on Persian and Islamic history and historiography. Her work as a social and cultural historian focuses on Iran and the Persianate world from the tenth to fifteenth centuries, concentrating on issues of authority and identity. In the field of global history, she concentrates on interactions between the Middle East and East Asia, focusing on the history of Iran-Japan relations.

1. Introduction; 2. Methodologies for reading hybrid identities and imagined histories; 3. Contexts and authorship; 4. Dreaming of the prophet; 5. Holy bloodlines, prophetic utterances, and taxonomies of belonging; 6. Living virtues of the land; 7. Sacred bodies and sanctified cities; 8. Prophetic etymologies and sacred spaces; 9. The view from Anatolia; 10. Lessons from the peripheries.