Muslim historiography produced no national histories, only universal and dynastic ones

Evidence

In the Islamic world, we do not find histories of nations. There is no history of the Arabs and no history of the Turks, very remarkable omissions. We do not find many histories of countries, and when we do, it is really city history. A history of Egypt usually means a history of Cairo; a history of Syria, Sha¯m, usually means a history of Damascus. One will find local histories of a city and a province, mostly biographical, but no histories of countries in the sense that, further west, people were writing the history of England and the history of France. What we have is universal history, which of course for Muslims means Islamic history, sub-divided into dynastic histories, and to some extent regional histories, but only of the very large regions. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1942

Categorization

• XREF: The absence of national/territorial history as an organizing category connects to how Islamic civilization became legible to European observers through dynastic and universalist frames rather than nation-state ones — relevant to the Said-adjacent cluster about how the region was narrativized before nationalism.
• QUESTION: Why did city-level biographical local history flourish while territorial national history never emerged — what social or political formation does that reflect?