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INTRODUCTION
The precursor of this present book, The Islamic Dynasties: A Chronological and Genealogical Handbook, was published by Edinburgh University Press in 1967 as no. 5 in the Islamic Surveys series, and speedily established itself as a convenient reference work for the chronology of Islamic dynasties of the Middle Eastern and North African heartlands and of Central and South Asia and for their historical backgrounds. It has proved useful not only for Islamic historians but also for Islamic art historians and numismatists.
Nevertheless, all these groups of scholars remain much less well provided with such Hilfsmittel as chronologies of events, genealogical tables, historical atlases, etc., than their colleagues in the fields of British or European history.1 Some of the subsequent writers of general histories of the Islamic world or its component regions and peoples, and writers of reference works covering the world in general or the Islamic lands in particular, who have given lists of dynasties and rulers, have obviously drawn upon the original Islamic Dynasties - sometimes with due acknowledgement,2 sometimes not.
To my knowledge, four translations into East European and Middle Eastern languages have been made. In 1971, there appeared in Moscow an authorised translation by P. A. Gryaznevich, under the overall editorship of I. P. Petrushevskiy, Musulmanskie dynastii.
Spravochnik po khronologii i genealogii, Izdatel'stvo «Nauka» Glavnaya Redaktsiya Vostochnoi Literaturi, 324 pp., to which I contributed a Preface. The text is a straight translation, but the bibliographical indications at the end of each dynasty's entry have been enriched by references to works in Russian, obviously valuable for such regions as the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Iranian world in general. In 1980, there appeared in Istanbul Islâm devletleri tarihi (kronoloji ve soykütügü elkitabi), Oguz Press, xxvii + 385 pp., an authorised Turkish translation by Erdogan Merçil and Mehmet Ipgirli. This has additional material in that Dr Merçil appended an additional, eleventh chapter 'Anadolu beylikleri' dealing in detail with the principalities of Anatolia during the interim between the decay of the Rüm Seljuqs and the rise of the Ottomans. I have, in fact, drawn upon this useful additional chapter for my own, widely expanded Chapter Twelve 'The Turks in Anatolia'. In 1371/1982 there appeared Silsilahâ-yi Islam!, an unauthorised Persian translation by one Farïdün Badra’ï, Mu’assasa-yi Mutâla'at wa Tahqïqât Farhangï, 358 pp. In 1994, there appeared at Kuwait an authorised Arabic translation by the late Husayn 'All al-Lubûdi, under the general supervision of Dr Sulaymân Ibrâhîm al-'Askarï, al-Usar al-hâkima fi ’1-lslâm. Dirâsa fi ’1-ta’rîkh wa ’1-ansâb, Mu’assasat al-Shirâ' al-'Arabî, 293 pp.
The original book is thus still proving useful in these parts of the world through translations, although the Edinburgh University Press original is now out of print in both the original hardback and the paperback versions (the latter, of 1980, contained some slight corrections, all that the process of largely verbatim reproduction allowed). But well before the book became finally out of print, I had been noting corrections and gathering fresh information for a new, considerably expanded version. It would be strange if the explosion of knowledge over the last thirty years had not brought much fresh information for the Islamic chronologist and genealogist, from such disciplines as historical research, epigraphy and numismatics. Much of the relevant information is, however, scattered, and, in regard to epigraphy and numismatics in particular, often appears in the local publications of the countries concerned and is not easily accessible in Britain and Western Europe. I have nevertheless endeavoured, with assistance and advice from specialist colleagues and friends (who are detailed and appropriately thanked at the end of this Introduction), to incorporate as much of this new information as possible, though certain periods and areas remain - and perhaps always will remain - dark.
Most obvious to the reader of this present book will be the fact that it is much bigger than the 1967 book. There are now seventeen chapters, covering 186 dynasties, whereas the original Islamic Dynasties had only ten chapters, covering 82 dynasties. The new or vastly expanded chapters include ones dealing with Muslim Spain, with much more detailed coverage of the Mulûk al-Tawâ’if (Chapter Two); the Arabian peninsula, again with much greater detail (Chapter Six); West Africa, and East Africa and the Horn of Africa, both entirely new chapters (Chapters Seven and Eight); the Turks of Anatolia, now with detailed coverage of the Beyliks there (Chapter Twelve); Central Asia after the Mongols, a substantially new chapter which includes the Khanates arising there out of the Turco-Mongol domination of Inner Asia and persisting until the extension of Russian imperial power through Central Asia (Chapter Fifteen); Afghanistan and the Indian Subcontinent, with increased coverage of, for example, the Sultanates of the Deccan and the Indian dynasties of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Chapter Sixteen); and South-East Asia and Indonesia, again dealing with an entirely new region (Chapter Seventeen). But apart from these ones specifically mentioned, virtually all chapters are enlarged to some extent or other.
Thus the coverage of the new book approaches much more closely to coverage of the whole Islamic world, from Senegal to Borneo, than did the 1967 book, since it has often in the past been noted that works purporting to deal with Islam or the Islamic world have tended to concentrate on the Arab-Persian-Turkish heartlands to the neglect of the fringes, even though such peripheral regions as South and South-East Asia and Indonesia now contain the majority of Muslim peoples. Yet somewhat in extenuation of this concentration in the past on the heartlands, it must be admitted that the historian and chronologist of the peripheries is on much shakier ground. The heartlands have been long Islamised; many of their lands possess ancient historiographical traditions, with reliable dynastic histories and clearly-dated coins inscribed with a plethora of information on names and titulature. Whereas in regions far from the heartlands such as sub-Saharan Africa, South-East Asia and Indonesia, there may well be a care for local tribal or dynastic traditions, their recording in clearly-dated written form has nevertheless been patchy, and the task of making such records has often been complicated by attempts, of a mythic nature, to prove the ancient reception of the Islamic faith by families and classes ruling over lands and subjects which remained largely pagan for lengthy periods subsequently.
The coinage of such ruling strata is nearly always much less complete in dated series, and in actual information on the coins, than for the Islamic heartlands and the Indian Subcontinent. The difficulties involved in constructing king-lists and chronologies in such circumstances may be discerned below, with reference to, for example, the kings of Songhay (no. 59), the rulers of Kanem and Bornu (no. 60), the Sultans of Kilwa (no. 62) and the Sultans of Brunei (no. 186).
Even so, the position in such a region, comparatively near to the heartlands, as early Islamic Central Asia is far from crystal-clear. Zambaur confessed seventy years ago regarding the Qarakhanids of Transoxania and eastern Turkestan that this was 'la seule grande dynastie musulmane dont la généalogie est restée obscure' [Manuel, 206 n. 1). Much elucidation has meanwhile come from such scholars as Omeljan Pritsak and Elena A. Davidovich, but significant problems remain; the substantially increased numbers of coins now finding their way from Central Asia and Afghanistan to the West since the demise of the ussr may possibly resolve some of these remaining obscurities.
In the Introduction to the 1967 book, I traced the development of Islamic chronological and genealogical studies and listings from Stanley Lane-Poole's seminal The Mohammadan Dynasties ( 1893 ), through the more specific work of F. Justi in his Iranisches Namenbuch (1895) and the expansions and improvements upon Lane-Poole by W. Barthold in his Musulmanskiy dynastii (1899), E. Sachau in his 'Ein Verzeichnis Muhammedanischer Dynastien' (1923), and Khalil Ed’hem in his Diiwel-i Islamiyye (1345/1927), to E. de Zambaur's almost entirely new and monumental Manuel de généalogie et de chronologie pour l’histoire de l’Islam (1927).3 It does not seem necessary to repeat here all these details, except to note that no-one has attempted since the publication of Zambaur's work to update it as a whole; although a stupendous work for its time, its inaccuracies and erroneous renderings of names appear more and more obvious with the lapse of time.
I opined in 1967 that such an updating and rewriting could probably only be done as a cooperative effort by historians who are specialists in various sectors of the Islamic world, aided by epigraphists and numismatists. The prospects of such a collaboration seem no nearer in 1995 than they did twenty-nine years ago. Hence my New Islamic Dynasties, here presented to the scholarly world, does not aim at such overall completeness as Zambaur essayed (although he did not in fact achieve it; his attempts at covering dynasties in sub-Saharan Africa, the Indian Ocean islands and Indonesia were fragmentary and feeble to the point of uselessness); but I think I may venture to say that it represents as extensive a coverage of Islamic dynasties as one person is likely to achieve in our present day. I have endeavoured to cover what might be termed the first, second and third ranks of dynasties and to give as up-to-date and accurate information on them as possible. There remains the fourth rank and beyond, and readers may well have pet dynasties and ruling houses in which they are especially interested and which they consider ought to have been included. I can only plead that one must draw the line somewhere, and that I have left plenty of opportunities for other researchers; such readers might, for instance, care to get their teeth into elucidating the Sudûr of Bukhara, the Walls of Badakhshan, the Khans of Sibir, the sultans of the Sulu archipelago and the Moro rulers of Mindanao in the southern Philippines, etc. Moreover, an extensive field remains open for future scholars, one which Zambaur tackled valiantly and to some extent successfully, namely that of elucidating the lines of viziers to the rulers of such dynasties as the 'Abbâsids, the Fâtimids, the Büyids, the Great Seljuqs and their related branches, and the Ottomans. Zambaur also set forth the series of provincial …
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