Biographies of Rulers in the Premodern Islamicate World

While biographies of rulers have long been examined as essential sources on the history of the Islamicate world, individual texts of this type have been primarily studied in isolation from each other. Consequently, the field of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies lacks not only a proper understanding of the origin and shared characteristics of this type of texts but also foregoes much of the potential that these sources have for the transregional, diachronic, and comparative study of premodern Islamicate political cultures and concepts of good governance. By developing a comparative toolkit for the examination of premodern Islamicate biographies of rulers, this workshop will bring both the study of specific examples of such texts and our knowledge about the genre they belong to an entirely new level, thereby laying the ground for the publication of an edited volume on Biographies of Rulers in the Pre-modern Islamicate World and Beyond that promises to redefine the state of the field on this type of sources.