Demonic Descents: Contests in Islamic Tribal Etiology

Abstract

This essay explores the theme of demonic descent in etiologies assigned to Lurs, Kurds, Afghans, and the Baloch across the past millennium. In it, I parse the imputation of nonhuman beginnings to these peoples while also examining retorts to that same accusation. While agents of premodern empires used the narrative of demonic descent to racialize peoples on the peripheries of sovereignty, demonized peoples replied with sacralizing genealogies that bound them to early nodes in Prophetic and Iranian history. I argue that we must attend to demonizing practices in Islamic historiography not only to write the historical struggles of dispossessed peoples, but to examine our own inheritances as narrators of the Islamic past today.