Maʼmūn's Haftkhān: The visit paid by Maʼmūn to Khusraw I's tomb

The story of the visit paid by ʽAbd-allāh Maʼmūn as an ʽAbbasid caliph (814-834 CE) to Khusraw I's tomb (531-579 CE) has been told in a great many historical sources at least since the eleventh century. Aware of the Persian ruler's fairness and sagacity, the caliph pays a visit out of curiosity to the tomb, and begins to extol his virtues upon seeing Khusraw's corpse and the moral themes there. In an account provided by Tārikh-e Banākatī written by Dāwūud b. Moḥammad Banākatī (d. 730/1329), Maʼmūn's effort to find the tomb is narrated as though a hero goes through the arduous stages of a quest to achieve a predetermined end. The process resembles a leitmotif called haftkhān, or literally 'seven stages'. Notwithstanding a large number of studies discretely dealing with the leitmotif and the quest, the visit by Maʼmūn has never been analyzed in terms of the leitmotif. We will try to examine the embed it, regardless of whether it is real or imaginative, in a wider perspective which involves the Abbasids' emulation of the Sasanian and Persian culture through the good offices of the cultured Persian agents working in the caliphate establishment in Baghdad. This will probably reveal who were behind the narrating or fabricating of what we may designate as Haftkhān-e Maʼmūn, and why the caliph of the Muslim world set out to visit the tomb of a Persian Zoroastrian king.