The Shadow of the Palace: Power Relations and the Construction of Historical Truth in Islamic Historiography
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.58524/smartsoc.v6i3.1269Keywords:
Islamic Historiography, Orthodoxy., Political Legitimacy, Power Relations, Regime of truthAbstract
The relationship between political power and religious knowledge production has long been contested in Islamic intellectual history, yet its significance for understanding authority, legitimacy, memory, and narrative formation in classical Islamic historiography remains insufficiently examined. This article examines how political authority shapes the construction of religious narratives in classical Islamic historiography, with particular focus on the Umayyad and Abbasid periods, and how such patterns persist into the modern era. Employing Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge as the overarching methodological framework, with Critical Discourse Analysis as its analytical strategy for examining how power, knowledge, and historical meaning are articulated in texts, this study analyzes primary historiographical sources, including the works of Al-Tabari, Al-Baladhuri, Al-Ya'qubi, and Al-Mas'udi, alongside contemporary scholarship on Islamic political thought. The findings reveal three dominant patterns: the sacralization of rulers, the systematic marginalization of opposition narratives, and the standardization of orthodoxy through selective textual transmission. These findings demonstrate that classical Islamic historiography functioned not merely as a factual record, but as an instrument of power legitimization that constructed and maintained religious orthodoxy. This study contributes a deconstructive framework to Islamic historiography scholarship by integrating the concepts of raison d'état and selected collective memory, offering a more critical and nuanced reading of the power-knowledge nexus in the Islamic historical tradition. The implications of this study extend to contemporary debates on the politics of memory, the formation of religious identity, and the relationship between political authority and religious doctrine in Muslim societies.
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