Qiṣaṣ al-anbīyāʾ in the Islamic Heritage: An Unknown Medieval Manuscript in the Ganjbakhsh Library, Pakistan

Within Islamic historical and narrative traditions, the genre of qiṣaṣ al-anbīyāʾ occupies an intermediate position between historiography, tafsīr, and sīra. Despite this, the genre has not yet been comprehensively examined within the broader framework of Islamic historiography. This article, adopting an analytical approach combined with manuscript studies, reviews the formative stages and consolidation of the genre in the early Islamic centuries and highlights its most significant thematic and structural features—such as its didactic and moral function, its ties with Jewish and Christian heritage, and its transformation from a report-oriented to a narrative-oriented discourse. Through the critical study of well-known works of this type, the article argues that qiṣaṣ al-anbīyāʾ should be considered distinct not only for its narrative content but also for its methodological and literary dimensions as a historical genre. The study then introduces an unknown manuscript of this type preserved in the Ganjbakhsh Library in Pakistan and situates it within the broader corpus of extant works. Examination of the manuscript reveals that some of its reports diverge from conventional accounts. In the final section, selected passages from the manuscript are analyzed in order to illustrate its narrative style and historiographical method. By reassessing the place of qiṣaṣ al-anbīyāʾ within the trajectory of Islamic historiography, the article underscores the necessity of attending to neglected manuscripts for a more comprehensive comparative analysis of this genre.