Mimi Hanaoka is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Richmond, where she is a scholar of history and religion. Her areas of specialty include: Islamic thought, history, and historiography; pre- and early modern Persianate history; inter-Asian connections between West Asia, South Asia, and East Asia; the history of Iran-Japan relations; Islam and modernity; Asia and modernity; global history; Sufism; dream theory; theories and methods in the study of religion; Persian local histories; authority in the Islamic world; center-periphery power dynamics; genealogies; sacred space.
Syed Ross Masood (1889-1937), grandson of the Muslim modernist Syed Ahmad Khan and former princip... more Syed Ross Masood (1889-1937), grandson of the Muslim modernist Syed Ahmad Khan and former principal of Osmania University, traveled in 1922 from India to Japan as Director of Public Instruction for Hyderabad to assess Japan’s educational system. In Japan and Its Educational System, a report published in 1923, Masood concluded that education had been key to Japan’s rapid modernization and recommended that Hyderabad follow the country’s model of modernization and educational reform: transmit Western knowledge through widespread vernacular education, and focus on the imperial tradition, freedom from foreign control, and patriotic nationalism. Masood sought to use mass vernacular education to create in Hyderabad a nationalist subject, loyal to the ruling Muslim dynasty, who absorbed modern scientific knowledge with its Western epistemic foundations but who remained untainted by Western norms. This study contextualizes and historicizes Masood’s attempt to create in Hyderabad a new nationalist subject, focusing on his 1923 report about Japan.
Authors of local histories composed in Persia during the 10th-15th centuries deftly wove their la... more Authors of local histories composed in Persia during the 10th-15th centuries deftly wove their lands and their communities into Islamic narratives rooted in the Islamic heartlands of Iraq, Syria, and Arabia. They positioned their communities to better fit into the scope of Islamic history and claimed privileged connections to Mohammad and divine or prophetic authority in various ways. City and regional histories from Persia challenge and reconfigure notions of what constitutes “central” or “peripheral” in the medieval Islamic world and articulate identities that are simultaneously deeply local yet enmeshed within the broader Muslimomma. Authors and compilers used several literary strategies that, amongst other things, “centered” their cities and regions by including narratives about thesayyedsandsharifsassociated with the region; incorporating narratives of legitimating dreams and visions; associatingsahābawith the land; highlighting sites of pious visitation (ziārat) and other sour...
Medieval Persianate local histories form a heterogeneous genre, but a trait these diverse texts s... more Medieval Persianate local histories form a heterogeneous genre, but a trait these diverse texts share is that they perform a balancing act: they simultaneously respond to and challenge assumptions about the centrality of Arabs, Arabic, Arabia, Iraq, Syria, the ṣaḥābah (Companions of the Prophet), tābiʿūn (Successors of the Companions), Alids, sayyids, and sharīfs while at the same time claiming their own importance within these frameworks. Authors of Persianate local histories composed during the fourth/tenth- to ninth/early-fifteenth centuries argued for the legitimacy and centrality of their communities on the peripheries of empire by including narratives about descendants of the Prophet associated with the region addressed in the history, be it a city, town, or province; incorporating narratives of legitimating dreams and visions; associating ṣaḥābah with the land; highlighting sites of pious visitation (ziyārāt) and other sources of blessing or sacred power (barakah); and incorp...
Syed Ross Masood (1889-1937), grandson of the Muslim modernist Syed Ahmad Khan and former princip... more Syed Ross Masood (1889-1937), grandson of the Muslim modernist Syed Ahmad Khan and former principal of Osmania University, traveled in 1922 from India to Japan as Director of Public Instruction for Hyderabad to assess Japan’s educational system. In Japan and Its Educational System, a report published in 1923, Masood concluded that education had been key to Japan’s rapid modernization and recommended that Hyderabad follow the country’s model of modernization and educational reform: transmit Western knowledge through widespread vernacular education, and focus on the imperial tradition, freedom from foreign control, and patriotic nationalism. Masood sought to use mass vernacular education to create in Hyderabad a nationalist subject, loyal to the ruling Muslim dynasty, who absorbed modern scientific knowledge with its Western epistemic foundations but who remained untainted by Western norms. This study contextualizes and historicizes Masood’s attempt to create in Hyderabad a new nationalist subject, focusing on his 1923 report about Japan.
Authors of local histories composed in Persia during the 10th-15th centuries deftly wove their la... more Authors of local histories composed in Persia during the 10th-15th centuries deftly wove their lands and their communities into Islamic narratives rooted in the Islamic heartlands of Iraq, Syria, and Arabia. They positioned their communities to better fit into the scope of Islamic history and claimed privileged connections to Mohammad and divine or prophetic authority in various ways. City and regional histories from Persia challenge and reconfigure notions of what constitutes “central” or “peripheral” in the medieval Islamic world and articulate identities that are simultaneously deeply local yet enmeshed within the broader Muslimomma. Authors and compilers used several literary strategies that, amongst other things, “centered” their cities and regions by including narratives about thesayyedsandsharifsassociated with the region; incorporating narratives of legitimating dreams and visions; associatingsahābawith the land; highlighting sites of pious visitation (ziārat) and other sour...
Medieval Persianate local histories form a heterogeneous genre, but a trait these diverse texts s... more Medieval Persianate local histories form a heterogeneous genre, but a trait these diverse texts share is that they perform a balancing act: they simultaneously respond to and challenge assumptions about the centrality of Arabs, Arabic, Arabia, Iraq, Syria, the ṣaḥābah (Companions of the Prophet), tābiʿūn (Successors of the Companions), Alids, sayyids, and sharīfs while at the same time claiming their own importance within these frameworks. Authors of Persianate local histories composed during the fourth/tenth- to ninth/early-fifteenth centuries argued for the legitimacy and centrality of their communities on the peripheries of empire by including narratives about descendants of the Prophet associated with the region addressed in the history, be it a city, town, or province; incorporating narratives of legitimating dreams and visions; associating ṣaḥābah with the land; highlighting sites of pious visitation (ziyārāt) and other sources of blessing or sacred power (barakah); and incorp...
Intriguing dreams, improbable myths, fanciful genealogies, and suspect etymologies. These were al... more Intriguing dreams, improbable myths, fanciful genealogies, and suspect etymologies. These were all key elements of the historical texts composed by scholars and bureaucrats on the peripheries of Islamic empires between the tenth and fifteenth centuries. But how are historians to interpret such narratives? And what can these more literary histories tell us about the people who wrote them and the times in which they lived? In this book, Mimi Hanaoka offers an innovative, interdisciplinary method of approaching these sorts of local histories from the Persianate world. By paying attention to the purpose and intention behind a text's creation, her book highlights the preoccupation with authority to rule and legitimacy within disparate regional, provincial, ethnic, sectarian, ideological and professional communities. By reading these texts in such a way, Hanaoka transforms the literary patterns of these fantastic histories into rich sources of information about identity, rhetoric, authority, legitimacy, and centre-periphery relations.
"The Routledge Encyclopedia of Ancient Mediterranean Religions is the first comprehensive single-... more "The Routledge Encyclopedia of Ancient Mediterranean Religions is the first comprehensive single-volume reference work offering authoritative coverage of ancient religions in the Mediterranean world. Chronologically, the volume’s scope extends from pre-historical antiquity in the third millennium B.C.E. through the rise of Islam in the seventh century C.E. An interdisciplinary approach draws out the common issues and elements between and among religious traditions in the Mediterranean basin." Edited by Eric Orlin; Associate Editors: Lisbeth S Fried, Jennifer Wright Knust, Michael L Satlow, Michael E Pregill. https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Encyclopedia-of-Ancient-Mediterranean-Religions/Orlin-Fried-Knust-Satlow-Pregill/p/book/9780415831970
Review of The World in a Book: Al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition by Elias Muhanna... more Review of The World in a Book: Al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition by Elias Muhanna (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, Vol. 35, No. 3 (Summer 2018): 72-76.
Review of Turkestan and the Rise of Eurasian Empires by Ali Anooshahr in The American Historical... more Review of Turkestan and the Rise of Eurasian Empires by Ali Anooshahr in The American Historical Review, Volume 125, Issue 4 (October 2020), pp. 1407–1408.
My article is featured on the HEQ&A is a podcast produced by History of Education Quarterly, the ... more My article is featured on the HEQ&A is a podcast produced by History of Education Quarterly, the official journal of the History of Education Society (USA).
Dr. Mimi Hanaoka featured on the "Podcasts@Boatwright" University of Richmond Boatwright Library ... more Dr. Mimi Hanaoka featured on the "Podcasts@Boatwright" University of Richmond Boatwright Library podcast: “Views of the Asian Other: Educational Reform and Models of Modernity for Japan and Muslim Reformers, 1851-1925.” Podcast link is available here: https://boatwrightpodcasts.urlibraries.org/dr-mimi-hanaoka-as-sabbatical-fellow/
"New Books in Middle Eastern Studies" podcast series, 2019
Professor Mimi Hanaoka's book is featured on the "New Books in Middle Eastern Studies" podcast se... more Professor Mimi Hanaoka's book is featured on the "New Books in Middle Eastern Studies" podcast series. Host Professor Aaron Hagler speaks with Professor Mimi Hanaoka about her book, Authority and Identity in Medieval Islamic Historiography: Persian Histories from the Periphery (Cambridge University Press, 2016).
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Papers by Mimi Hanaoka
Edited by Eric Orlin; Associate Editors: Lisbeth S Fried, Jennifer Wright Knust, Michael L Satlow, Michael E Pregill.
https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Encyclopedia-of-Ancient-Mediterranean-Religions/Orlin-Fried-Knust-Satlow-Pregill/p/book/9780415831970
Podcast link is available here:
https://boatwrightpodcasts.urlibraries.org/dr-mimi-hanaoka-as-sabbatical-fellow/
Conversation and podcast link:
https://newbooksnetwork.com/mimi-hanaoka-authority-and-identity-in-medieval-islamic-historiography-persian-histories-from-the-periphery-cambridge-up-2017/