The study of the classical Islamic heritage remains something central not just for specialists of medieval history but also for those who study the modern Islamic world. Topics such as the caliphate, the division between Shī‘ī and Sunnī, and the overall relevance of events and contentions that happened nearly fourteen centuries ago once again form crucial areas for reexamination and introspection. Even the casual reader of introductory writings on Islam can suddenly find himself forced to go beyond understanding the Qur’ān and the story of the Prophet to having to know about the reigns of the first four caliphs (Abū Bakr, ‘Umar, ‘Uthmān, and ‘Alī), who succeeded him in the years 632–661, the period known as the Rāshidūn caliphate (lit. “the Rightly Guided Rulers”). The narrative of the expansion of the Islamic state into Sasanid Persia and the Byzantine empire, the idealized ascetic profiles of the early caliphs (who were also once companions of the Prophet), and the story of the sudden onset of succession crisis and civil war that followed the assassination of the third caliph, ‘Uthmān, and the accession of ‘Alī are not mere political transitions folded in time but topics that continue to stir both passionate reverence and deep division in modern Islamic society.
The triumphant political careers of the Prophet and his successors, unlike the situation of Judaism and Christianity, have given this history a life of its own, and almost added understanding it in a particular way as an article of faith. Hence the Shī‘a sect would have no identity without its advocacy for the higher stature of the Hāshimite family of the Prophet generally, and ‘Alī and the line of imāms among his descendants more particularly, when compared to the other companions of the Prophet and their descendants, while for the Sunnīs the faith would equally be diminished without the high reverence accorded to the first two caliphs specifically, Abū Bakr and ‘Umar, and the collective importance of all the companions as a symbol of the collectivity of the community (the jamā‘a) more generally later. To debate the biographies of the early caliphs is therefore not analogous to writing the history of Roman Caesars but more like tracking the careers of the apostles of Jesus had they ever gone on to experience a cycle of political rise and decline. The dynasties of the Umayyads (661–750), based in Damascus, and the ‘Abbāsids (750–1258), based in Baghdad, would each lay claim to the titles of caliph and Commander of the Faithful, but a convention of religious authenticity among Sunnīs defines only the Rāshidūn—and for the Shī‘a only ‘Alī—as the true caliphs. All later rulers are monarchs who had become removed from the utopian lifestyle of the early society of Medina.
Each of the two Islamic sects has long approached this history with firm conviction regarding one or the other of the two versions of how the dispute over the succession began and developed. The Shī‘a believe that ‘Alī was deliberately wronged by the other companions when he was repeatedly passed over for the succession and later given the chance only after leadership of the community became a thankless task on the eve of a brewing conflict. To the Shī‘a this was not only an affront to a more erudite and puritanical individual—a veritable imām—but almost a deliberate conspiracy against the very family of the Prophet (the Hāshimites) to prevent them from holding leadership. And ‘Alī’s tragedy would only accelerate later, when he had to deal with overzealous followers, the Khārijites, who turned against him and became some of his staunchest opponents.
Sunnīs, however, believe that this Shī‘ī version of events falls somewhere between an exaggeration of ‘Alī’s importance and a complete conspiracy fantasy. The first two caliphs are viewed by Sunnīs as having been more senior than ‘Alī, with their own other important ties to the Prophet, and as crucial framers of the sunna (tradition) of the Prophet (sometimes sunna is directly associated with the Prophet, but at other times just with the first caliphs and the companions—and thus only indirectly recognized as authoritative custom). The first caliphs, and to an even greater extent their more junior associates, such as Ibn ‘Abbās and ‘Abdallāh b. ‘Umar, are equally viewed as crucial for the frame of ḥadīths (lit. “sayings of the Prophet”) that underlie the Sharī‘a.
A lot of the divergence in the religious concepts and institutions of Sunnīs and Shī‘īs therefore emanates from that initial disagreement over who should have succeeded the Prophet and what really happened on the eve of his death—debates that created such a sudden rift in the community afterward. The present study revisits this original issue in religious and historical sources and argues for an alternative reading of this history as a largely parabolic cycle of literary narrative. Despite the seeming fragmentation of accounts about the first four caliphs, whether in ḥadīths or in historical stories, it is shown that these once formed a unified story with a particular plot line, with intertextual connections that conveyed a variety of allusive meanings about a political, polemical, or moralizing issue. These meanings would have been challenging but still accessible to an audience of the early Islamic period, which was steeped in the techniques of rhetorical argumentation and evocation. Such audiences were conscious of the potential layers of meaning in discussing issues and equally in command of learning across different cultures and their frames of presentation (Judaic, Christian, Arabic, Persian, folkloric, etc.). This awareness about the literary potential of caliphal history would gradually recede in importance in the ninth century with the emergence of different orthodoxies, Sunnī and Shī‘ī, that narrowed the use of history to a mere factual reporting to support one official version or another. As the subsequent chapters will show, however, the partisan Sunnī and Shī‘ī depictions of history or of historical characters both basically drew on the same collection of narratives. The emergent picture in this study will be that of an originally well-structured drama of strong and weak points for each central character—rather than one of a completely favorable or unfavorable image for one character over another.
All was not a fictional construct, however. While the pivotal political events and polarizations that happened in the Rāshidūn caliphate are true as told, it is in the description of the details of this history (dealing with the motives of characters, argumentations, or portrayals of strategy, to name but a few areas) that we find the literary construction. One could almost read the story of ‘Alī’s career within this frame, for example, to resemble that of a poetic Moses, where the image of the biblical character is adapted to a political context, and adjusted to confront new challenges. ‘Alī is therefore similarly challenged in dealing with a mix of wavering lieutenants and with a feisty community of followers. His quest to consolidate his caliphal control, while political, is also infused with strong arguments (or interpretations, according to Sunnīs) for the religious legitimacy of his actions.
The sources on which Muslim narrators drew in crafting these historical stories, best exemplified in the Chronicle of Ṭabarī, were varied. Sometimes they drew directly on precursor biblical accounts, at other times they worked with modified versions of these accounts, and in other instances they crafted their compositions in intense rhetorical dialogue within the already formed Islamic textual tradition (including the growing collection of legal dicta or commentaries that spanned ḥadīth as much as the Qur’ān). Dialogue in the historical texts, however, did not happen only in response to a previous episode in ancient legend but sometimes in response to events that happened forward in time (in the eighth and ninth centuries—during the Umayyad and ‘Abbāsid periods when the chronicle narratives were taking their final literary form). The Rāshidūn caliphs were always being depicted and judged in complex networks of relations to other monarchal characters, showing how different leaders addressed similar questions about the tensions between the imperatives of religious law and ideals from secular principles. The present study accomplishes this revisionist reading of the early medieval Islamic chronicles in a way that challenges both the traditional versions of Sunnī and Shī‘ī Islam and the established academic synthesis of early Islamic history.
The background of research for this study rests on a variety of contributions from books and articles that laid the foundations in Islamic studies for traditional and revisionist scholarship. I have indicated all of these in the bibliography, but special credit must go to revisionist studies done within the past two to three decades, more often in religious studies than in Islamic history and frequently outside the latter field altogether. The beginning of the inquiry, however, was historical and undertaken with the aim of making the task of Islamic historical writing a more credible one for other potential specialists. Making use of conclusions in the fields of religious and literary studies and bridging these methods to the timid overviews composed about early Islamic history will be an increasingly necessary task in the future for making more credible judgments about a chronicle such as Ṭabarī’s and other historical writings around his time more generally. This study differs from other revisionist writings in another respect as well, in having begun with the ‘Abbāsid period and moved backward in time to the caliphate of the Rāshidūn, unlike many which have traditionally addressed the Rāshidūn period without attention to the narratives outside of its chronological frame. The fact that most of the classical writers dealing with early Islamic history began their first documented work in the middle of the eighth century has long been known, but few have ever bothered to take into account the political, cultural, and religious interests of the ‘Abbāsid period, especially between 750 and 861, in projecting a certain type of historical representation on the earlier period of Islamic history. It is hoped that here as well this study will provide an alternative path of revisionist research that will invite others who work on the history of the early period or on issues of Islamic law or Arabic literature to better explore and incorporate issues of historical context.
Research for this project spanned a variety of digressions over the past several years. I am first and foremost indebted to the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, for having provided the time, funding, and availability of books that made this study possible. Specific credit is due to the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research Development, the dean of the faculty of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts, and to John Mullin and Nigar Khan, the dean and associate dean respectively of the Graduate School. I am also grateful for a membership in 2003 at the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, which provided additional support during a sabbatical year as well as access to the library collections of Princeton University. Various scholars there and elsewhere were encouraging about the reliable prospects for such research—if only one were able to find the evidence from the texts. It is hoped that readers will find sufficient proof in this study for why I believe it more worthwhile to study the Islamic chronicles as texts of representation than as factual testimonies preserved in time.