This article connects the Delhi Sultanate historian Ẓiyāʾ al-Dīn Baranī (ca. 684–758/1285–1357) and his thinking on the knowledge of history (ʿilm-i tārīkh) to the broader intellectual milieu developing across South Asia and the Middle East during the seventh/thirteenth and eighth/fourteenth centuries. It situates his contributions within intense debates to define knowledge and the various fields of knowledge traditionally divided between the al-ʿulūm al-naqliyya, the ‘transmitted fields of knowledge,’ and the al-ʿulūm al-ʿaqliyya, the ‘rational fields of knowledge’. Here Baranī is shown to classify historiography within the al-ʿulūm al-naqliyya and to defend history writing against its critics. Understanding his efforts to integrate historiography within the transmitted fields of knowledge sheds new light on the intellectual history of Islamic South Asia and wider debates about the knowledge of history in the Middle East.
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