This is a study of an eleventh-century Islamic historian's conception of history. Abu'l-Fazl Bayhaqi's work Tarikh-i Bayhaqi, written in Persian, is an anomaly in the pre-modern historical literature that has been written in Persian or Arabic. Many scholars have written about the historical/historiographical importance of this text. The present study, however, offers a new, more accurate, and textually supported approach in studying this historical text. For this reason, chapter one provides an introduction to the subject. Chapter two explains the author's religious outlook and adherence to principles of morality, both of which provide the appropriate context to his historical thought. Chapter three, then, attempts a line-by-line analysis of a theoretical section Bayhaqi appended to the first "Preface" in the text. A careful analysis of this section has been overlooked by all Bayhaqi scholars. Finally, chapter four shows how ideal kingship, one of the major and much-discussed themes of the text, should be understood, not in isolation from the other themes of the text, but in light of Bayhaqi's understanding and presentation of history, which are equal to his understanding of the human being and his experience as an individual and an element in society.
It is the central argument of this thesis that though on the surface Bayhaqi's understanding of history is similar to some other intellectuals and historians who were contemporaneous with him, a careful study of the section appended to the first "Preface" coupled with an analysis of his practice in writing history indicate that on a deeper level his conception of history was quite distinct from most medieval historians and intellectuals. His method, which is of his own making, calls for a philosophical understanding of the use of history in setting didactic examples from human experience. This concept of experience, which Bayhaqi emphasizes on numerous occasions and is understood properly only in the context of the section appended to the first "Preface," is the basis of his conception of history and a key to the understanding of his text. This same concept, however, is the most misapprehended theme in the modern scholarship on Bayhaqi.