al-Narshakhi

Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Ja'far ibn Zakariyya al-Narshakhi was a historian of the Samanid period. ¹ The Encyclopaedia of Islam says he was presumably from Narshakh, in the vicinity of Bukhara, and adds that nothing is known of his life beyond his one book. ¹

He wrote a history of Bukhara and presented it to the amir Nuh ibn Nasr in 332/943-4. This is the only book of his known to the article. ¹

The article explains that the surviving Persian text is not the original. It was translated from Arabic by al-Qubawi, from Quba in Farghana, in 522/1128, because, the translation itself says, people did not want to read the Arabic. Al-Qubawi left out passages he found tedious and carried the history down to 365/975-6. ¹ In 574/1178-9 Muhammad ibn Zufar abridged this version, added material from other works and presented it to Burhan al-Din Abd al-Aziz II ibn Muhammad, head of the Hanafis of Bukhara. Finally an unknown author added details on the Mongol conquest of Bukhara. ¹ The article therefore concludes that the Persian Tarikh-i Bukhara is much altered from its original form and supplemented by other hands. ¹

The article calls the Tarikh-i Bukhara very valuable for the early Islamic history of Central Asia and for the Tahirid and Samanid periods there. It contains many details from local traditions reaching back to pre-Islamic times, and information from works now lost, among them a book by Abd al-Rahman ibn Muhammad al-Nayshaburi, the Fasl al-khitab of Muhammad ibn al-Hamadhani, and the history of al-Mada'ini on the Arab conquest of Transoxania and the rise of the Samanids. ¹ The article lists editions by Schefer (Paris 1892) and Mudarris Radawi (Tehran), a Russian translation, and R. N. Frye's English translation with commentary (Cambridge, Mass. 1954). ¹

The article gives no dates of birth or death for al-Narshakhi, and the museum records none. The pages read for this entry are partly damaged in the local scan, so details of the early part of the article were taken only where legible. ¹