Our understanding of the history of the Near East between 600 and 1050 is derived essentially from chronicles and other literary works and archaeological and numismatic sources, but with rare exceptions the latter have not been integrated into the treatment of the general history which is still almost exclusively based on narrative sources. Recently, historians have begun to explore the documentary evidence, mostly from Egypt, which is much more prolific than was previously realized but there is still much work to be done in this area. This point is important because the nature of the evidence determines the type of history we can write.
In the last two decades, there has been an increasing interest among scholars in the materiality of the book, that is how books were physically produced, marketed and how they survived the vicissitudes of time. Although there had been research in this area before, the recent discussion was essentially begun by Jonathan Bloom in his Paper before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World (New Haven, Yale U.P., 2001) in which he argued that paper, as a cheaper and more efficient writing support than either parchment or papyrus, had a transformative effect on books production. Shawkat Toorawa’s, Ibn Abī Ṭāhir Ṭayfur and Arabic Writerly Culture: And Ninth-Century Book-man in Baghdad (London, Routledge, 2005) discussed the reality behind the production, copying and selling of books, themes further developed by Beatrice Gruendler in her The Rise of the Arabic Book (Harvard, Harvard University Press, 2020) in which she examines the role of stationer and the whole business of creating and publishing books in Abbasid Baghdad. Marina Rustow, meantime, published her The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue (Princeton, Princeton UP, 2020), a wide-ranging and scholarly survey of documentary and archiving practices in the early Islamic and Fatimid periods. These, and other works, have transformed the way we look at the huge volume and variety of Arabic literary production in the first four centuries of Islam.
We are extremely fortunate in the vast range of literary evidence available, from brief annals which may do little more than contribute a missing name or date to great compilations like al-Ṭabarī’s Ta’rīkh al-rusul wa’l-mulūk (History of the Prophets and Kings) or al-Balādhurī’s Ansāb al-ashāf (Genealogies of the Nobles) which contain a vast amount of anecdotal and circumstantial details to fill in the bare facts and give life and substance to the names. By no means, all the literary sources are chronicles; there are also administrative geographies and travel books, collections of poems (which for the early period are an important if somewhat intractable form of historical evidence), collections of letters and other sorts of adab (an Arabic term which means, roughly, essays on literary, social, historical or ethical themes). Most of the chronicles are in Arabic, but there are also Greek writings and a substantial corpus of Syriac literature which sheds light on some obscure aspects of the subject. There is also a body of writing in the New Persian language which appeared from the third/ninth century onwards but which sometimes, as with the translation of al-Ṭabarī by the Persian Bal‘amī and the anonymous Ta’rīkh-i Sīstān (History of Sīstān), contains much older material not to be found in any of the Arabic sources.
The literary material is so good, lively and interesting, often written by men of great intelligence and discernment that it can blind us to the fact that it tends to limit the sort of historical approaches which can be used, and there are whole areas of Islamic history which will forever remain obscure. Take the issue of landownership, for example. We know from literary sources that many high officials, generals and even successful poets had ḍiyā‘, that is to say landed estates which they were given or into which they invested the salaries or gifts they had received. In some cases, we are even given overall figures for the revenues they received from these estates, which were considerable. But if we try to go further than that, to ask questions like: How were the estates administered? Who collected the owner’s share of the crops? What proportion of the revenues were taken by the owner? Was there a village headman and if so, what was his role? – we are met by an almost impenetrable wall of silence. Even in the case of the Ṣawāfī, the estates owned by the Umayyad and ‘Abbasid caliphs, we have only the vaguest ideas about their extent or the proportion of government revenue which was raised from them. Only in Egypt, as shown in much recent scholarship, most importantly Petra Sijpesteijn’s Shaping a Muslim State: The World of a Mid-Eighth Century Muslim Official (Oxford, Oxford UP, 2013), can we see how these issues were worked out at a local level.
The strength of the Arabic material lies in its grasp of narrative and its portrayal of character: individuals loom large in the account. They are also fully in control of their behaviour. Divine intervention works in a more distant fashion than in much Western medieval, or indeed, Syriac and Byzantine literatures. Rarely is the hand of God directly and immediately involved in punishment of sinners; there is rather a strong sense of human responsibility, coupled with the idea that man is ultimately subject to God’s will. The crimes which bring men low are foolish incompetence or, above all, arrogance and overconfidence. Fate strikes at those who feel that they have reached a position of eminence and security, but it is rarely a reward for moral failings or wickedness. The judgements of the Muslim historians are based on the premise that man is a free agent who determines his own actions and, despite the deep religious faith of many of the authors, their writing is much more “humanist” than much of the historical tradition of the medieval West.
The historiography of the early Islamic period is immensely full and rich. In many ways, we have more information about it than any subsequent period before the appearance of documentary sources in late Mamluk Egypt and the Ottoman Empire. But this historiography also presents a unique and baffling problem, or series of problems which have been the subject of a wide-ranging scholarly debate. The substance of the debate is that while the accounts we have are very full and detailed, frequently including verbatim eyewitness reports, there is a significant time lag between the events they describe and the dates by which we know that they were written down, that is, in the decades after the ‘Abbasid revolution of 132/750. Thus in the case of events surrounding the life of the Prophet and his immediate successors, over a century had elapsed between the events and the first written record we have. Questions naturally arise as to the means by which these accounts were passed down in the interval and thence to the question of whether they are in fact genuine at all or invented later to justify a position or establish a usage. Were those who purported to record them simply those who made them up?
The problem would exist even if the events concerned were of no more than antiquarian interest, but there is an additional complicating factor. The events of the Prophet’s life and, to a lesser but still important extent, those of his immediate successors were, and still are, normative for the behaviour of the Muslim community. Thus what Muḥammad did on a certain occasion, his last “farewell” pilgrimage to Mecca, for example, has determined the correct way of performing the pilgrimage ever since and hence it is of vital importance for the Muslims that the accounts of the farewell pilgrimage be accurate. The historicity of some incidents is extremely controversial. The question as to whether Muḥammad designated ‘Alī b. Abī Ṭālib as his successor, for example, is one such issue; Shī‘īs argue strongly that he did so, and that the accounts were deliberately suppressed by supporters of Abū Bakr, ‘Umar and the Sunnīs. Sunnī tradition, by contrast, insists that no such designation was ever made.
Early Muslim authors were themselves very conscious of the problem of authenticity and aware that false traditions, especially about the life of the Prophet, were liable to creep into, or be inserted in, the corpus. In an effort to solve this problem, they took to citing their sources in the form of isnāds. The isnād, which introduced each section of the narrative, consisted of the name of the narrator from whom the author had taken it followed by those from whom he had taken it and so back to the original eye- or ear-witness in the form “I was told by x who was told by y who was told by z that he heard the Prophet saying…”. In this way, the authors attempted to establish the reliability of their information. To do this, they worked to establish the dates and general character of the narrators. If the narrators in each stage of the isnād overlapped chronologically and if they were known to be of good character and not given to lying, then the account could be considered trustworthy. It is not hard to see the limitations of this approach as a method of historical criticism, but it did mean that Muslim authors, even after the formal isnād system had been largely abandoned in later centuries, tended to be much more careful to acknowledge their sources than were their contemporaries in the medieval West.
In the last three decades of the twentieth century, the reliability and historicity of the Arabic sources for the first century of Islam were the subject of a lively and sustained polemic. The debate was effectively opened with the publication of Albrecht Noth’s Quellenkritische Studien zu Themen, Formen und Tendenzen frühislamicher geschichtsüberlieferung (Bonn; this should now be used in the revised English edition by Lawrence Conrad, The Early Arabic Historical Tradition [Princeton, 1994]) in 1973. Noth argued that many of the apparently detailed accounts of the events of the early Islamic period were essentially topoi, anecdotes and themes which appeared in different contexts as the author saw fit, and his conclusions call into question many of the apparently realistic details of the history of the early Muslim conquests.
A much more radical critique of the early Muslim sources was advanced by J. Wansbrough with the publication of Qur’ānic Studies, Oxford, 1977 and The Sectarian Milieu, Oxford, 1978. His ideas were developed and popularized by P. Crone and M. Cook in their Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World, Cambridge, 1977. The argument advanced by Cook and Crone rests on the fact that the sources on which we rely for our knowledge of early Islam are in their present form all much later than the events they purport to describe. Instead of being historical narratives, they are accounts generated in the ‘Abbasid period to give validity and identity to the emerging religion of Islam and, especially, to differentiate it from Judaism and Christianity. From this premise, it is possible to argue that the whole story of Muḥammad’s life is a fiction, elaborated to provide the religion with a convincing historical origin. The authors argued that we should disregard the Muslim testimony concerning the life of Muḥammad, since this could be fabricated and is in any case full of internal contradictions, and look at non-Muslim accounts of the origins of Islam, particularly those given by contemporary Christian authors. Here, we find no mention of a new religion or to events referred to in the sīra but rather a collection of accounts, usually very short, often confused, which clearly give no impression that Islam was, at that stage, a separate entity. There may be genuine historical information in the early Muslim accounts but it is impossible to separate from later polemic accretions.
The publication of Cook and Crone’s work gave rise to a storm of controversy. Both Muslim scholars and some non-Muslims were affronted that the whole basis of our understanding of early Islam could be challenged in this way, and for a time the academic community was polarized into two opposing camps. Gradually, however, scholars have attempted to move forward and to reach a new synthesis, or at least to develop new approaches. F. M. Donner’s Narratives of Islamic Origins (1998) opens with a useful account of the whole debate and goes on to argue that the Muslim tradition should be used bearing in mind the purposes for which it was compiled: “the underlying purpose of the narratives of Islamic origins was to articulate the validity of the Muslims’ communal identity” and that “[n]ot by rejecting the whole Islamic tradition as ‘opaque’, but rather by patiently unravelling the strands and layers of the complex traditional material, will the Islamic origins story finally come, at least partially to light”.
A different perspective is offered in Robert Hoyland’s Seeing Islam as Others Saw It (1997). As the title suggests, this is an examination of the non-Muslim sources for the earliest Islamic period. He argues that non-Muslim sources are more supportive of the Islamic narratives than the sceptics have suggested and that
the testimony of Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian writers can be used alongside that of Muslim authors to furnish us with an enriched and expanded vision of the history of the Middle East in early Islamic times, to offer us new perspectives on its character and to suggest to us new directions for study.
Chase Robinson’s survey Islamic Historiography (Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 2003) argues that a work like Ibn Hishām’s Sira may tell us more about the attitudes and concerns of the early ‘Abbasid period than about the facts of the Prophet’s life, but he does not reject the historicity of the entire corpus.
The debate is certainly not over, but certain issues seem to have been clarified. Few would now support the extreme sceptic position which says that we do not and cannot know anything about the early history of Islam. However, the old certainties have disappeared, and it is clear that early Islamic sources have to be read with a much keener awareness of when, why and for whom they were composed.
The formation of the Muslim accounts of the life of the Prophet (the Sīrat al-Nabī, hereafter referred to simply as the sīra) and the account of the conquests and the early caliphate was essentially a two-stage process. The first stage was represented by the development of short narratives, either oral or written, of incidents each with its own isnād. These were referred to as khabar (pl. akhbār) or, especially, if they referred to words or deeds of the Prophet as Ḥadīth (tradition). These soon began to be collected, sometimes by the emerging class of religious scholars in Medina or Iraq, sometimes among tribes or families wishing to preserve the memory of the great deeds of their ancestors, or at the Umayyad court where caliphs from Mu‘āwiya onwards encouraged the retelling and collection of akhbār both about the Prophet and about secular subjects and poetry. The second stage was the attempt to fit such akhbār into an orderly chronological framework. This seems to have been begun in the Umayyad period; the form of the sīra may have been fixed as early as the time of ‘Urwa b. al-Zubayr (d. 94/712) and his pupil Muḥammad b. Muslim al-Zuhrī (d. 124/741). The earliest account of the sīra to have survived in its original form, however, is that of Muḥammad b. Isḥāq (d. 151/761), by which time we can be sure that the main outlines of the Prophet’s life were established. The basic chronology of the Islamic conquests was established a generation or two later, possibly at the time of Muḥammad b. ‘Umar al-Wāqidī (d. 207/823), although we know that there were earlier accounts, like those of Ibn Isḥāq and Abū Mikhnaf (d. 157/774), which may have attempted to determine the sequence of events. These second/eighth-century compilers were faced with the formidable task of attempting to put the numerous, often very detailed akhbār at their disposal into a chronological framework. It is hardly surprising if different compilers sometimes came to different conclusions about the ordering of events which had happened a full century before their time.
The question as to how far the early akhbār were written down and how much they were simply passed on by oral tradition is a complex one, still unresolved. The Muslim sources often use verbs of speech like dhakara (he mentioned) or qāla (he said) to describe the early accounts, but this does not necessarily mean that they were not written down; Arabic, like English, uses the metaphor “he says in his book…” when no suggestion of speech is intended. In addition, there was a halfway stage between oral and written transmissions which was common in Islamic intellectual life whereby a scholar would expound or dictate his work to his pupils, who would copy it down from his spoken words. The work of Gregor Schoeler in The Oral and the Written in Early Islam (London, Routledge, 2006) has shown how the process is not a simple story of oral narratives being recorded in writing but a more complex one in which written texts are expounded orally and then rewritten in a slightly different form and context. The complex nature of this reiterative process probably accounts for much of the apparent confusion to be found in these narratives. The evidence of surviving Arabic papyri shows that the keeping of Arabic written records was commonplace in the first century of Islam, and we should probably be right to think that many akhbār were written down at this time in collections which were then used by the collators of the second century to produce their chronological narratives. The loss of this first generation of Muslim historical literature need not surprise us, since when it had been incorporated in later compilations, the original was essentially redundant, just as the compilation of a cartulary meant that the monks of a medieval Western religious house could dispense with the bulky and inconvenient original charters. It should be remembered that the rate of loss among later Islamic historical writing has been depressingly high, and many of the surviving classics, the Ta’rīkh (History) of Khalīfa b. Khayyāṭ for example, are only represented by a single manuscript, so the disappearance of the original texts is no indication that they did not exist.
The Life of the Prophet Muḥammad poses further and unique historical problems. Our understanding of the Life is essentially based on the written work of four compilers:
The material of the sīra is extremely impressive, as regards both its bulk and the detailed information it provides. The account of Ibn Isḥāq runs to something over 300,000 words in the English translation (compared, for example, with the Gospel according to St Matthew, which recounts the life of Jesus in less than 30,000). We are given a vast amount of information, especially about the last part of Muḥammad’s life from the Hijra (AD 622) onwards when he was leading the Muslim community in Medina and the names of numerous people who met him. We are also given a great deal of circumstantial anecdote to enliven the story and give context to events; for all its great length, the sīra makes very interesting reading.
As already noted, the reliability of the sīra as a historical source has been challenged by some modern scholarship. A particular problem stems from the complex relationship between the sīra and the Qur’ān. From the earliest time, there has been a debate as to the interpretation of some passages in the Qur’ān and the historical events to which they refer. At least some of the sīra material seems to be exegetical, that is to say that the narrative was developed to explain the context of a part of the Revelation rather than as a straightforward historical account, and it should not be treated as such. In some cases, this may be true, although it is impossible to say which passages are historical, and simply because a passage explains the context of part of the Qur’ān, this does not mean that it is not at the same time a record of a historical event.
As with the life of Muḥammad, so the story of the first four caliphs of Islam is largely derived from a limited number of chronicles, although the problems concerned with using them change somewhat. Of the four major sources for the sīra discussed above, two are no longer of any use: the works of Ibn Isḥāq and al-Wāqidī effectively come to an end with the Prophet’s death. Ibn Sa‘d gives biographies of numerous early Muslims, but of the four, only al-Ṭabarī systematically continues his work beyond this period. This does not mean, however, that there is any dearth of records, for other writers appear who had either not treated the sīra at all, or who had given an abbreviated account which added little new material. In the main, these writers lived in the third/ninth century and continued their narratives up to their own times, so it is perhaps acceptable to discuss their entire works at this point.
For the period of the Rāshidūn, the Umayyads and the coming of the ‘Abbasids, all these authors seem to have drawn, directly or indirectly, on a generation of historians whose original works are lost but whose writings survive in the books of later scholars. Among the most important of these were Abū Mikhnaf (d. 157/774), ‘Awāna b. al-Ḥakam (d. 147/764), Sayf b. ‘Umar (d. 180/796), al-Haytham b. ‘Adī (d. 206/821) and al-Madā’inī (d. 225/839). Of these works, only fragments of Sayf b. ‘Umar’s Kitāb al-Ridda wa’l-Futūḥ (ed. Qasim al-Samarrai, 2 vols, Leiden, 1995) survive in their original form. All these sources essentially use the isnād technique for establishing the genuineness of the material and their work takes the form of vivid but disjointed narrative accounts of incidents. Their works were composed in a number of different forms: collections of stories (akhbār) about individual incidents, studies of broader themes like the conquests or the Ridda wars, studies of the history of one area or city and even books about a whole era, like the Umayyad period. In later years, annalistic historiography (that is to say the arrangement of events under the years in which they took place) was to be the most important single form in Arabic historical narrative. How far that was the case among these earlier historians is not entirely clear; it has been suggested that the annalistic frame was developed by the end of the second/eighth century. It is possible, too, that this was a legacy of the Greek and Syrian historical tradition, where, as in medieval Western historiography, the annalistic form had been developed in late antiquity.
Apart from the problems of transmission and apparent contradiction in the sources, a further problem is raised by the issue of deliberate bias and distortion. Factions and political groups soon emerged in early Islam and later authors certainly looked back to the formative years of the Islamic world for justification of their attitudes. In the first/seventh century, there are perhaps two major issues on which Muslim opinion was divided: the battle of Ṣiffīn and the subsequent arbitration agreement, and the death of al-Ḥusayn b. ‘Alī. The historiography of Ṣiffīn has been discussed by E. L. Petersen (‘Alī and Mu‘āwiya in Early Arabic Tradition, Copenhagen, 1964), who disentangled the various versions and layers of narrative. The main points of difference concern basic and clearly stated moral issues such as whether ‘Alī was betrayed at the arbitration which followed Ṣiffīn, or indeed whether the arbitration was held at all, and the historiography has certainly been deeply influenced by later debates about the claims of the Umayyads, ‘Alids and ‘Abbasids to be considered as rightful caliphs. In the case of the death of al-Ḥusayn b. ‘Alī, there is little dispute about the main facts. No one denied that al-Ḥusayn had been killed on the orders of the Umayyad governor of Iraq, that the Umayyad forces were vastly superior to his and that the people of Kūfa, on whom he had relied for help, took no action to save him. Authors allow their opinions to show in the way in which they embellish the story: pro-‘Alid or Shī‘ī authors will recount anecdotes to show the blameless nature of al-Ḥusayn’s death, the sufferings he and his family underwent and the cruelty of the Umayyad soldiers. For the searcher after religious inspiration and moral example, these passages are of great importance; for the historian, they are marginal except insofar as they illustrate the thinking of later commentators. In both these key incidents of early Islamic history, the main outlines of the events are not really in dispute. When it comes to circumstantial details and opinions, the author’s feelings are usually apparent. If we understand the sources, how and why they were compiled, the question of deliberate bias becomes much less of a problem: of course, the authors have opinions about the past – that is what makes them so interesting.
The issue of reliability has another dimension. It is easy to assume that eyewitnesses or participants in events must necessarily be accurate guides to what took place, but a moment’s reflection will show clearly that that is not so. Many of the reports we have of the incidents at Ṣiffīn must have been based on rumour, second-hand information and partly understood manoeuvres. The importance of this to the historians is that, obviously, we should not place uncritical trust in the narratives, however good the isnād may be, but it also points to another moral: we should not imagine that contradictions and confusions are the results of deliberate bias or of a conscious scheme to distort the truth. They are rather part of the very nature of oral testimony. They require a very different approach therefore from the careful sifting of deliberate chronicle evidence, an approach more similar to that of the police officer trying to reconstruct the exact details of a fast-moving crime from those who only witnessed a portion of the action.
Of course, the editors of these accounts, from Abū Mikhnaf onwards, exercised their judgement in deciding which accounts they would include and which they would omit and this sort of censorship allowed them to attach weight to traditions which reflected well on ‘Alī or vice versa if they so wished, but it would seem that they did so within the limits of the material available, rather than simply inventing a more favourable version of events. In early ‘Abbasid Iraq, it would have been effectively impossible for any one man to produce a “cover-up”; there were clearly too many others who would be aware that traditions had been falsified or important arguments omitted. Propaganda, if there is such, is developed by a selective choice of traditions, allowing them to speak for themselves; there are few, if any, of the passionate denunciations and attacks which are met with so frequently in Christian historiography, both Eastern and Western. The question of reliability in the Arabic sources is then very complex and this rich and tightly interwoven texture of narrative rarely allows one to say “Fulān’s chronicle is pro-‘Alī or pro-Mu‘āwiya”. Similarly, attempts to differentiate different “schools” of historical writing, notably a Medina school and an Iraqi school, have not been entirely convincing. We must conclude that most of the early Islamic historiographical material is not tendentious propaganda, aimed to push a particular point of view, but is rather the work of serious historians attempting to recover the truth, as they saw it, from a mass of different traditions, some written, some still in oral form, and to arrange them into a convincing narrative and chronological structure.
Not all early Islamic historiography is made up of akhbār introduced by isnāds – indeed, the first work on Islamic history to survive in its entirety, the Ta’rīkh (History) of Khalīfa b. Khayyāṭ (d. 240/854–855), ed. Akram Ḍiyā’ al-‘Umarī, Najaf 1967, is brief and selective, often using abbreviated isnāds. His work is entirely annalistic, events being recorded under the year in which they took place, marking the coming of age of this genre of historical literature in Arabic. Slightly more discursive is the Ta’rīkh of Aḥmad b. Wāḍih. al-Ya‘qūbī (d. 284/895), ed. M. Houtsma, 2 vols, Leiden, 1883 and 2 vols, Beirut, 1960, which is arranged not annalistically but according to reigns of caliphs, and is almost entirely without isnāds. He is often described as pro-Shī‘ī, but what this really amounts to is that he gives considerable space to the sayings and deeds of some of the descendants of ‘Alī. Al-Ya‘qūbī’s work is useful in that it provides a check on the fuller chronicle of al-Ṭabarī, and sometimes, when establishing the names of governors of distant provinces like Armenia or Sind, for example, he supplies information unobtainable from al-Ṭabarī’s much longer work. Contemporary with al-Ya‘qūbī was the Iranian author Aḥmad b. Dāwūd al-Dīnawarī (d. 282/895). His Akhbār al-ṭiwāl, ed. V. Guirgass and I. I. Krachkovskii, Leiden, 1912; ed. ‘Abd al-Mun‘im ‘āmir and Jamāl al-Dīn al-Shayyāl, Cairo, 1960, is a general history to the early ‘Abbasid period in which the early Islamic sections are dealt with under the reigns of the caliphs and which has a pronounced interest in Iranian affairs. The text is confused and full of strange omissions, which suggest that what has come down to us is a mukhtaṣar (abridgement) of the original.
Apart from al-Ṭabarī himself, the greatest figure in early Islamic historiography was Aḥmad b. Yaḥyā al-Balādhurī (d. 279/892). He wrote two major works, both of which appear to have survived in their entirety. The Futūh. al-buldān, ed. M. J. de Goeje, Leiden, 1866; ed. Ṣalāh al-Dīn Munajjid, Cairo, 1957; English trans. Hugh Kennedy, A History of the Arab Invasions London, 2022 is the shorter and more accessible work, having been edited in its entirety. It is an account of the Islamic conquest of the different areas of the Muslim world, paying special attention to whether they were taken by force or by treaty, since this affected their fiscal status. Most of the material relates to the period of the Rāshidūn caliphs, but he also includes events in the later Umayyad and early ‘Abbasid periods which concern areas like the Byzantine frontier, where there were still conquests to be made. He is also important in that he was one of the few authors to discuss the possession and history of landed estates, and much that we know of the estates of the Umayyad family, for example, comes from his work. A full and complete edition of his other work, the vast Ansāb al-ashrāf, has been published in ten volumes under the auspices of the Deutsche Morgenlandische Gesellschaft in the series Bibliotheca Islamica in Beirut from 1979 to 2008. None of it is available in English translation. The Ansāb is arranged according to genealogies, but the biographies of the caliphs are expanded to include lengthy discussions of events in their reigns. The wealth and importance of this vast work can hardly be exaggerated, and it is a major source for early history of the Islamic community.
The history of the Rāshidūn and the Umayyad caliphs is dominated by the Ta’rīkh al-rusul wa’l-mulūk (History of the Prophets and Kings) by al-Ṭabarī. His account is based on the work of earlier traditionists and compilers like Abū Mikhnaf and Sayf b. ‘Umar already mentioned. The presentation is that of a vast collection of akhbār, each introduced by its appropriate isnād. Al-Ṭabarī often gives different, sometimes conflicting, accounts of the same incidents; only rarely does he make a judgement between them. In some ways, his history of the Umayyad period is simply a compendium of sources, a sort of Rolls Series or Monumenta Germanicae Historica of the Islamic world, only compiled by a tenth-century Muslim rather than a team of nineteenth-century scholars. The question of how far al-Ṭabarī edited his material remains an open one; the issue is whether he selected the akhbār he used in order to develop and illustrate major themes about the history of the Islamic state or incorporated into his text the available material, and his presentation simply reflects the weight of the sources at his disposal. The picture is further complicated because there is no ancient copy of the whole of the Ta’rikh. Sometime after the thirteenth century, the complete text was lost and only some sections survived and the text was reconstructed from a number of partial manuscripts by the team of editors led by M. J. de Goeje in Leiden in the late nineteenth century, in itself one of the great achievements of orientalist scholarship. However, we do have some early witnesses of the text, notably the sections edited into his Tajārib al-umam by Abū ‘Alī Miskawayh around the year 1000 (ed. Sayyid Kisrwai Hasan, Beirut, Dar Kutub al-Ilmiya, 2002) and the edition incorporated in his Kāmil fi’l-ta’rīkh by the great Mosuli historian Ibn al-Athīr (ed. C. J. Tornberg, Leiden, Brill, 1867) in the early thirteenth century. These texts suggest that the version we use today is very close to al-Ṭabarī’s original. His work remains absolutely central to any discussion of early Islamic history, and its full potential has hardly yet been investigated.
The Rāshidūn and Umayyad caliphs also receive extensive coverage in the Kitāb al-futūḥ (Book of Conquests) of Aḥmad b. A‘tham al-Kūfī (d. 314/926), ed. Muḥammad ‘Abd al-Mu‘īd Khan et al. (8 vols, Hyderabad, Osmania Oriental Publications Bureau, 1968–75). Despite the similarity of title between Ibn A‘tham’s work and the Futūh. al-buldān of al-Balādhurī, the form of the work is different. While al-Balādhurī arranges his material by regions, Ibn A‘tham’s approach is broadly chronological. He also devotes very considerable attention to internal military affairs, like the revolt of al-Mukhtār against the Umayyads, as well as external conquests. He belongs to the classical school of Islamic history writing, basing himself firmly on akhbār introduced by their isnāds. He uses many of the same sources as al-Ṭabarī but seems to edit and abridge them with more freedom to emphasize religious and pietistic themes and motivations.
While these are the principal historical sources for the period of the Rāshidūn and the Umayyads, there are other works of a more literary kind which are nonetheless important for the general history. Perhaps the most important of these is the Murūj al-dhahab (Meadows of Gold) of the polymath ‘Alī b. al- Ḥusayn al-Mas‘ūdī (d. 345/956), ed. with French trans. C. Barbier de Meynard and A. Pavet de Courteille, 9 vols, Paris, 1861–77, ed. C. Pellat, 4 vols, Beirut, 1973, which is an anecdotal history of the early caliphate. Al-Mas‘ūdī was one of the most wide-ranging of the intellectuals of the fourth/tenth century, and his work reflects a cultured mind and a broad range of interests.
Of great value is the magnificent Kitāb al-aghānī of Abū’l-Faraj ‘Alī b. al- Ḥusayn al-Iṣfahānī (d. 365/975), ed. I–XX, Būlāq, 1867, XXI, ed. Brünnow, Leiden, 1888 with index tables by I. Guidi, Leiden, 1895–1900; ed. in 24 vols, Beirut, 1955. The Kitāb al-aghānī (Book of Songs) is essentially a book about poets and singers of the pre-Islamic, Umayyad and ‘Abbasid periods. For the historian, however, its value is much greater than the title would suggest, since the biographies are full of interesting and lively details and allow us a rare glimpse into the underworld of early Islamic society. Many of the poets were men of obscure origin and disreputable behaviour, the sort of people who make little impression on the general narrative of political events, and the Aghānī provides a useful corrective to the general histories. By the same author is another important work, also very much sui generis, the Maqātil al-ṭālibiyīn, ed. Aḥmad Ṣaqr, Cairo, 1949. This is a more sombre work, giving an account of the circumstances of the killing of members of the ‘Alid family who met violent deaths in Umayyad and early ‘Abbasid times. It is full of direct and vivid narrative and a source of major importance for the history of the pro-’Alid movements of the time.
Another work which reflects a pro-‘Alī viewpoint is the Waq‘at ṣiffīn of Naṣr b. Muzāḥim al-Minqarī (d. 212/827), ed. ‘Abd al-Salām Hārūn, Cairo, 1962. Naṣr was himself active in the ‘Alid cause and he selected traditions concerning the conflict between ‘Alī and Mu‘āwiya which reflected that point of view. He is also a traditional historian who was careful to quote traditions in full with their appropriate isnāds, and his work is an important source for the limited period it covers.
In many ways, the coming of the ‘Abbasids marks the end of what might be called the classic phase of Arab historiography, the period when historical writing is dominated by compilation of ancient akhbār, introduced by their own isnāds. Some authors who had been extremely important sources for Umayyad and earlier history now ceased to be important if only because, like Abū Mikhnaf, for example, they do not seem to have concerned themselves with the events of their own lifetime. Of the compilers, some of whose records were very important up to this point fade out. Most importantly, al-Balādhurī soon ceases to be a major source, although his Ansāb has a good deal to say about al-Saffāh. and al-Manṣūr, and the Futūḥ is important for the history of frontier regions. Likewise, Ibn A‘tham’s account of the ‘Abbasids, although it includes events as late as Bābak’s rebellion in the early third/ninth century, is much thinner than the comparable section on the Umayyads. Neither al-Dīnawarī nor Khalīfa b. Khayyāt. devoted as much time to the ‘Abbasids as they did to the Umayyads and their works become increasingly brief and factual. The two works of al-Iṣfahānī, the Aghānī and the Maqāātil al-ṭālibiyīn, continue to be of great importance in the early ‘Abbasid period.
The change in the nature of historiography is most clearly apparent in the case of al-Ṭabarī. Unlike the other authorities on early Islamic history, al-Ṭabarī did not abandon interest when he came to the affairs of the ‘Abbasid caliphs, but his methods and approach are significantly different, the change becoming apparent not at the moment of the ‘Abbasid revolution in 132/750, but rather at the death of the Caliph al-Saffāh. in 136/754. From this point, al-Ṭabarī begins to abandon the classic technique of giving different akhbār about each event, but concentrates on giving a single narrative, sometimes from a named source, sometimes simply introduced by the phrase “Abū Ja‘far (al-Ṭabarī) said”, or no introduction at all. This does not mean that there was a total change; as before, he sometimes includes the works of earlier historians verbatim; the use of ‘Umar b. Shabba’s account of the rebellion of the ‘Alid Muḥammad the Pure Soul in 145/762 is a case in point. On controversial issues like the events which surrounded the death of the Caliph al-Hādī in 170/786, he continues to give different versions. But the practice is no longer general and a linear narrative comes to replace the mosaic of individual akhbār.
There is also something of a change in the background of al-Ṭabarī’s informants. The early collectors of akhbār, Ibn Isḥāq and Abū Mikhnaf, for example, seem to have been men with a background in religious scholarship and essentially of independent means, not directly connected with the caliphal court or dependent on official patronage. Such men continued to exist; al-Ṭabarī himself seems to have been one such independent author. Increasingly, however, his sources were men connected with government and with the bureaucracy, the kuttāb class. While the heroes of early Islamic history are warriors and men of action, the heroes of ‘Abbasid history tend to be the great administrators, the most famous of them being the Barmakids. And just as the memory of the great tribal warriors of early Arabia and the Islamic conquests was kept alive by their tribesmen, anxious to bask in their reflected glory, so the memory of the Barmakids and their successors were kept alive among the kuttāb of Iraq and it was on such sources that al-Ṭabarī, who was writing in Baghdad during the period when such wazīrs as Ibn al-Furāt and ‘Alī b. ‘īsā enjoyed great power and prestige, drew. In the third/ninth century, he seems to have had access to government-sponsored accounts of military expeditions, especially the campaigns of al-Mu‘taṣim’s reign and the war against the Zanj, which take the form of straightforward linear accounts of the achievements of the ‘Abbasid armies. To say that al-Ṭabarī is biased in favour of the ‘Abbasids is misleading. He certainly did not want to deny the legitimacy of the ‘Abbasids or to incur the wrath of the ruling dynasty, but the Baghdad in which he wrote permitted a great variety of intellectual activity to take place and he did not rely on government funds or gifts from the caliph to ensure the author’s livelihood. On the contrary, he made sure of his economic independence by working as a scribe, copying forty pages of manuscript a day and living on the revenues of the family estates in his native Ṭabaristān. It was rather that his information for the early ‘Abbasid period reflected a certain point of view, bureaucratic, metropolitan and keenly interested in the affairs of Iraq. Some of his history too seems to have been based on official government records of the appointment of governors and other detailed administrative matters. The compilers on whom he relied for the Umayyad sections of the Ta’rīkh were more varied in occupation, geographical distribution and the range of their contacts than his ‘Abbasid sources. This perhaps accounts for a certain myopia in al-Ṭabarī’s vision which allows little time for events away from Iraq and the capital. Nonetheless, his achievement remains astonishing and it is impossible to read even the later stages of his chronicle without being full of admiration for his care and understanding.
While the old sources dry up or change their character, the coming of the ‘Abbasids also witnessed the development of new types of history. In one case, this was a direct product of the ‘Abbasid movement itself. The anonymous Akhbār al-‘Abbās, ed. ‘Abd al-‘Azīz al-Dūrī, Beirut, 1972, was written to commemorate the various stages by which the ‘Abbasid da’wa had emerged from obscurity to take over the Muslim world and to record the names of those who had served it. The material in it is detailed and allows us some insight into the processes by which the ‘Abbasids came to power. Other new writing developed out of the bureaucratic tradition; the most famous of these is the Kitāb al-wuzarā’ (Book of Viziers) of Muḥammad b. ‘Abdūs al-Jahshiyārī (d. 331/942), ed. Muṣtafā al-Sayqa et al., Cairo, 1938. Written at a time when the position of the kuttāb was being undermined by the decay of the Iraqi economy and the growing threat of military takeover of the ‘Abbasid state, al-Jahshiyārī’s work is a monument to the bureaucratic tradition. It is not clear how long the original was or was intended to be; the surviving sections deal with the ‘Abbasid wazīrs up until the time of al-Ma’mūn (d. 218/833). The tradition of writing biographies of the kuttāb was continued by Hilāl al-ṣābī (d. 448/1056), but only a fragment of his Ta’rīkh al-wuzarā’, covering the early years of the reign of the Caliph al-Muqtadir, has survived, ed. H. Amedroz, London, 1904; ed. ‘Abd al-Sattār Farrāj, Cairo, 1958. Besides biographical information, this work also contains the text of documents, especially valuable for the financial history of the caliphate. Court ceremonial is dealt with in another work of Hilāl’s, the Rusūm dār al-khilāfa (Customs of the Caliph’s Palace), ed. Mīkhā’īl ‘Awwād, Baghdad, 1964; trans. Elie A. Salem, Beirut, 1977.
The bureaucratic milieu is reflected in the development of a tradition of administrative geography which detailed the various provinces, the routes between different centres and, frequently, the amount of tax revenue (kharāj) which could be expected from each one. The earliest of these to survive is Kitāb al-masālik wa’l-mamālik of ‘Ubayd Allāh b. Khurdādhbih, ed. M. J. de Goeje, Leiden, 1889, of which the first edition was probably produced in 232/846, although it was subsequently revised by the author. This was followed in about 276/889–890 by the Kitāb al-buldān of al-Ya‘qūbī, ed. M. J. de Goeje, Leiden, 1892, already mentioned for his history. Ya‘qūbī’s Buldān is especially important as the main primary source for the design and population of the great ‘Abbasid capitals of Baghdad and Sāmarrā. The bare bones of administrative geography were increasingly used as a framework for items of curious or entertaining information which can often be of great use to the historian; the most notable of the early geographers in this respect was Ibn al-Faqīh al-Hamadhānī whose Kitāb al-buldān was completed around 290/903. It survives in a slightly abbreviated form, ed. M. J. de Goeje, Leiden, 1885, which still, however, contains useful historical information on subjects such as the history of Ṭabaristān and the origins of the Barmakids. Another important geographical source is the Kitāb al-a‘lāq al-nafīsa (The Book of Precious Objects) of Aḥmad b. Rusta, part of a general encyclopaedia, the rest of which has been lost, which dates from around 290/903, ed. M. J. de Goeje, Leiden, 1892. Ibn Rusta’s account of the Jibal province survives and is notable for the information he gives about the countryside he passed through. Perhaps the most useful of all the geographical works of the period is the Kitāb al-kharāj (Book of Taxes) of Qudāma b. Ja‘far (d. 337/948), partial ed. M. J. de Goeje, Leiden, 1889, full ed. Muḥammad ḥusayn al-Zubaydī, Baghdad, 1981, which is the most important single source for the taxation of various areas of the caliphate.
Part of Qudāma’s work along with the Kitāb al-kharāj of Yaḥya b. ādam (d. 203/818) and the Kitāb al-kharāj of the qāḍī Abū Yūsuf Ya‘qūb b. Ibrāhīm al-Anṣārī (d. 182/798) have been translated into English with introductions and notes by A. Ben Shemesh, 3 vols, Leiden, 1967–69. All three authors are concerned with the legal basis of taxation and incorporate many traditions of the Prophet and the early caliphs. Abū Yūsuf, and to a lesser extent Qudāma, also deals with more practical aspects of tax gathering. Also important for the law of taxation and the history of coinage is the Kitāb al-amwāl of Abū ‘Ubayd b. Sallām (d. 224/838) ed. Muḥammad Khalīl Harrās, Beirut, 1988 with an English translation, The Book of Revenue by I.A.K Nyazee (Reading, 2003).
Both the histories of the wazīrs and the economic geographies show how much the development of Arabic culture owed to the bureaucratic élite which was attached to the ‘Abbasid court. The disintegration of the court in the fourth/tenth century meant the loss of this sort of cultural along with political unity but, by way of compensation, it did allow the development of regional centres which produced their own historiographical tradition. Despite its misfortunes, however, Baghdad continued to be surprisingly vital as a centre of intellectual activity and this is reflected as much in the writing of history as in any other sphere.
The last entry in al-Ṭabarī’s Ta’rīkh concerns an attack on the Ḥajj by the supporters of the Qarāmiṭa in 302/915. The finish of this great work left a major gap in Islamic historiography, but the annalistic tradition continued to flourish, and a variety of authors emerged to fill the gap which the ending of the great man’s work had caused. Some of these were avowedly continuations of al-Ṭabarī, notably the Ṣilat ta’rīkh al-ṭabarī of the Spanish Muslim ‘Arīb b. Sa‘d al-Qurṭubī (d. c. 365/975), ed. M. J. de Goeje, Leiden, 1897, which in fact starts some years earlier in 291/903 and continues until 320/932. Despite his distance from the scene of events, ‘Arīb was astonishingly well informed about the affairs of the ‘Abbasids and his work is a major contribution to the understanding of the very well-documented crisis-ridden reign of the Caliph al-Muqtadir (295–320/908–932).
The most lasting continuation of al-Ṭabarī, however, is contained in the work of five authors whose chronicles seem to have been among the most impressive in the entire corpus of Arabic historical writing. This chronicle tradition was described by C. H. Becker as the Reichschronographie, because the centre of its interest lay in the caliphal capital of Baghdad. Four of these authors came from a family of Sabians, that is to say pagans from Ḥarrān in the northern Jazīra, who served successive caliphs as physicians. They were therefore in an excellent position to observe events without themselves being involved. The first member of the family to write history was Thābit b. Qurra (d. 288/901) who was asked by the Caliph al-Mu‘taḍid (279–289/892–902) to write an official history of his reign. This was a new and original departure in Islamic historiography. Hitherto historians had worked in religious or bureaucratic circles but they do not seem to have enjoyed direct government patronage for their work. This work (now lost) seems to have begun the tradition of historical writing in the family.
Thābit’s grandson, Thābit b. Sinān, continued the work of al-Ṭabarī until his death (probably 363/974), when it was continued in great detail by his relative Hilāl b. al-Muḥassin al-Ṣābī until his own death in 448/1056 when the chronicle, by now something of a family business, was continued by his son, Ghars al-Ni‘ma Muḥammad. Of this great work, only a fragment of Hilāl’s writing covering the years 389–393/999–1003 survives in its original form, ed. with English trans. H. Amedroz and D. S. Margoliouth, The Eclipse of the Abbasid Caliphate, Oxford, 1921, III, 334–460; trans. VI, 359–489, translation reprinted The Eclipse of the Abbasid Caliphate London, I. B. Tauris, 2015, III, 359–489, and this shows it to have been an extremely rich source, virtually an annotated diary of the political and social events in Baghdad. In this, it differs greatly from earlier Islamic writing since it seems to be a meticulous record of contemporary events rather than a reconstruction of the past by means of traditions and akhbār. The loss of this chronicle is not entirely surprising; its vast length must have made copying it extremely expensive and time-consuming, and it is possible that it was among the works destroyed when the Mongols sacked Baghdad in 656/1258.
The chronicle survived for long enough to be, either directly or at second hand, the foundation of later accounts of the fourth/tenth and fifth/eleventh centuries. Notable among these are the Kāmil fi’l-ta’rīkh of Ibn al-Athīr, ed. C. J. Tornberg, 14 vols, Leiden, 1851–76, and the Mir’at al-zamān of Sibt. Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 654/1256), of which the section dealing with the years 345–447 (956–1055) was edited by Jalāl Jamīl al-Hamawundi (Baghdad, 1990). Ibn al-Qalānisī, the great twelfth-century chronicler of Damascus, also used Hilāl’s work, and his own writing is modestly entitled “Continuation (dhayl) of the History of Hilāl al-Ṣābī”. In this way, the shadow of the Sabian chronicle is visible in most later accounts of the period; it is extremely frustrating not to have more of the substance.
The closest we can come to the work of Thābit b. Sinān is through the Tajārib al-umam of Abū ‘Alī Miskawayh (d. 421/1030), ed. H. Amedroz and D. S. Margoliouth, Eclipse, I–II, trans. III–IV. There is now a reprint of the English version of this chronicle with a new introduction by H. Kennedy, London, 2015. Miskawayh’s work is a history of Islam down to 369/980 when he was a young man in the service of the Buyid bureaucracy. As already mentioned, the early sections are an edition of al-Ṭabarī with many of the isnāds and alternative versions omitted, and it is only after the end of al-Ṭabarī’s chronicle that his work becomes an original source of great importance. His account of the fourth/tenth century seems to be based on Thābit b. Sinān’s chronicle with the addition of other information and accounts which seemed relevant. As such, it is by far the most important source for the history of the ‘Abbasids and Buyids in this period as well as for the bedouin dynasties like the ‘Uqaylids and Mazyadids. But there is more to Miskawayh’s work than useful historical facts. He imposes on his material a strong ethical and philosophical point of view. It is very much a secular, bureaucratic view of history, and the author, cautious, humane, tolerant and sympathetic, represents the best of the ideals of the kuttāb class. His heroes are the great administrators, ‘Alī ī b. ‘īsā, “the good wazīr”, Mu‘izz al-Dawla’s wazīr al-Muhallabī, Rukn al-Dawla’s wazīr Ibn al-‘Amīd the Elder and above all the Buyid prince ‘Aḍud al-Dawla, the ideal bureaucrat-king. The villains are those who he felt had betrayed the traditions of the kuttāb, Bakhtiyār’s wazīr Ibn Baqiyya and the younger Ibn al-‘Amīd. His vision goes beyond personalities, however, and his work is as much a treatise on good government as it is a historical record. He constantly laments the passing of the old bureaucratic traditions, and Ibn Muqla, the ‘Abbasid wazīr and calligrapher, brutally tortured to death in 328/940, becomes a tragic figure in his account. He is also very critical of administrative abuse, the unrestricted granting of iqṭā‘s, for example. With his vision of good government and high ideals of the responsibility of rulers, Miskawayh’s work rises above the level of simple annals and distinguishes him, along with Ibn Khaldūn, as a real philosopher of history.
The work of Miskawayh was continued by Abū Shūjā‘ al-Rūdhrawārī, a wazīr of the Seljuks, but his work, ed. H. Amedroz and D. S. Margoliouth, Eclipse, III; trans. VI, although extremely useful, has little of the depth of his great predecessor and it is considerably briefer and more limited in scope. This continuation, in turn, ends in 393/1003 where the manuscript breaks off. Thereafter, we are dependent on later compilers like Ibn al-Athīr and Sibt. Ibn al-Jawzī working from Hilāl b. al-Muḥassin’s lost chronicle and other sources. We are fairly well informed about the main outlines of the history of Iraq and Baghdad in the first half of the fifth/eleventh century, but our information lacks the depth and interest of the fourth/tenth-century material.
In addition to the great chronicles, there are a number of other historical works which emanate from Baghdad circles during this period. Among these is the Kitāb al-awrāq of the courtier Abū Bakr al-Ṣūlī (d. 335/946), partially published. The section on the caliphs from al-Wāthiq to al-Muhtadī (227–256/842–870) has been edited by A. B. Khalidov, St Petersburg, 1998 and the account of al-Rāḍī and al-Muttaqī (322–333/934–944), as Akhbār al-Rāḍī wa’l-Muttaqī, ed. J. Heyworth-Dunne, Cairo, 1935; French trans. M. Canard, 2 vols, Algiers, 1946, 1950. A complete edition remains a major desideratum. It is essentially a picture of life at the caliphs’ court during the reigns of al-Rāḍī and al-Muttaqī. It is entertaining, gossipy and much concerned with poetry and other literary themes. At the same time, it is entirely devoid of the political understanding we find in Miskawayh. A typical example of this concerns the appointment of Ibn Rā’iq as amīr al-umarā’ in 324/936; as Miskawayh (and probably Thābit b. Sinān before him) saw, this represented the real end of the political power of the ‘Abbasid family. For al-Ṣūlī, however, it is simply another incident in court life, the same as the appointment of any other official. If the ‘Abbasid caliphs were surrounded by courtiers with al-Ṣūlī’s narrowness of vision and essentially frivolous attitudes, it is not, perhaps, surprising that they lost their political power.
From a rather different milieu come the anecdotes of the qāḍī Abū ‘Alī al-Tanūkhī (d. 384/995). He belonged to the court circle of ‘Aḍud al-Dawla and may easily have met Miskawayh there but the perspectives of the two men were very different. Al-Tanūkhī composed two collections of anecdotes, the Nishwār al-muḥāḍara, ed. with English trans. D. S. Margoliouth, 2 vols, London, 1922, and the Faraj ba’d al-shidda, ed. ‘Abbūd al-Shālijī, 5 vols, Beirut, 1971–73, the first part of which has been translated by Julia Bray, Stories of Piety and Prayer in Library of Arabic Literature (New York University Press, 2019). These are essentially anecdotes of social life mostly based on the theme of escapes from difficult situations and impending disasters. They are important for social history as well as giving some insight into the personalities of prominent political figures. While Miskawayh’s contacts and outlook are those of a secular administrator, al-Tanūkhī’s are those of a religious scholar and qāḍī; the distinction even applies to their literary style: al-Tanūkhī is careful to provide his information with isnāds in the classical style, while Miskawayh only names his sources when it seems relevant.
“Official” historiography of the Buyids seems to be represented by the Kitāb al-tājī of yet another member of the Ṣābī family, Ibrāhīm b. Hilāl, grandfather of the chronicler Hilāl b. al-Muḥassin. This work only survives in an epitome made in Yemen in the seventh/thirteenth century, ed. with English trans. M. S. Khan, Karachi, 1995. Ibrāhīm was a kātib in the service of the unfortunate Buyid Bakhtiyār, and when his master was dispossessed and killed by ‘Aḍud al-Dawla in 367/978, he was in disgrace, and the writing of the Kitāb al-tājī may have been the price for being restored to favour. It seems to have been a sustained attempt at propaganda on behalf of the Buyid family with a determination to show that they could claim descent from the Sasanid prince and legendary hero, Bahrām Gūr. The material which survives in the epitome mostly concerns the activities of the ‘Alids in Ṭabaristān at the time of the rise of the Buyid dynasty, since it was this, rather than details of the military and political history of the Buyids themselves, which interested the Yemeni editor.
The Buyid period also saw the flourishing of the art of official letter writing, and three important collections survive, those of the Ṣāḥib Ibn ‘Abbād (d. 385/995), ed. ‘Abd al-Wahhāb ‘Azzam and Shawqī Ḍayf, Cairo, 1947, Ibrāhīm b. Hilāl al-Ṣābī, partial ed. Shakīb Arslān, Ba‘abda, 1898, mentioned above, and ‘Abd al-Azīz b. Yūsuf al-Shīrāzī (d. 388/998), which has not been edited. The Ṣāḥib was wazīr to the Buyid rulers of al-Jibāl and central Iran Mu’ayyid al-Dawla and Fakhr al-Dawla; Ibrāhīm served Bakhtiyār and then ‘Aḍud al-Dawla and al-Shīrāzī succeeded Ibrāhīm in charge of the chancery of ‘Aḍud al-Dawla. These three figures then were contemporaries and sometimes corresponded with each other. Their letter collections concern all sorts of diplomatic and political events and give considerable insight into the politics of the time as well as throw light on subjects not mentioned by the chronicles; the correspondence of Ibn ‘Abbād, for example, contains the patent for the appointment of the local governor of Qazvīn, which gives us information available nowhere else about the government of this small but important city. In the main, however, this correspondence has not been sufficiently utilized by historians.
The period which followed the disintegration of the caliphate produced a new generation of geographers. While in some cases they still retained the framework of the administrative geographies of the previous generation, they tend to be much fuller and in many cases to include firsthand personal observations which make them extremely useful for the general historian. The most useful authors are Ibn Ḥawqal (along with the closely related text of al-Iṣṭakhrī) and al-Muqaddasī. Ibn Ḥawqal, whose Kitāb ṣūrat al-ard., ed. M. J. de Goeje, Leiden, 1873; ed. J. Kramers, Leiden, 1938–39; French trans. J. Kramers and G. Wiet, 2 vols, Paris, 1964, was finished in about 378/988. He gives vivid and useful accounts of the areas through which he passed and is especially useful in his comments on trade and taxation. He gives us a full, and none too optimistic, picture of the Jazīra under Hamdanid rule, including details of the otherwise entirely obscure taxation system, and he gives us a full account of the government system of the Qarāmiṭa in Baḥrayn, which is a useful corrective to the generally negative reports we receive about these people from other sources. His contemporary al-Muqaddasī, whose Aḥsan al-taqāsim, ed. M. J. de Goeje, Leiden, 1906, English trans. B. Collins, Reading, 2001, was composed around 380/990, came from Jerusalem and was a notable local patriot, but he provides fresh and interesting information based on personal observation of many areas of the Muslim world. He came from a family of architects and his descriptions of buildings are of especial interest. With their enquiring minds, their originality and the simple elegance of their Arabic prose, both these authors are typical of the best of the writing of this period.
In the next century, travel writing is represented by the Safar nāma of Nāṣir-i Khusrau (394–c. 465/1003–4/1072), ed. with English trans. by W. M. Thackston. His work is a travel diary rather than a work of geography. He himself came from eastern Iran and wrote in Persian but he was a convert to Isma‘ilism and came west to visit the Fatimid court. He gives a glowing description of the wealth and magnificence of Cairo but also gives more general information about the condition and economy of the country he passed through. Perhaps the most striking feature of this is the contrasts he draws between the prosperity of the towns of Egypt and coastal Syria and the poverty of much of the eastern Islamic world. He is an important source for the increased commercial activity of the Syrian ports at the time.
Before leaving the field of general history, attention should be drawn to two late compilations which are essential research tools for anyone seeking to understand the early Islamic period. The first is the great geographical dictionary, the Mu‘jam al-buldān of Ya‘qūb b. ‘Abd Allāh al-Yāqūt al-Ḥamawī (d. 626/1229), ed. F. Wüstenfeld, 6 vols, Leipzig, 1866–73. This work is a mine of information, partly because it identifies most places whose names appear in the classical Arab sources and partly because it incorporates extracts from geographers whose original work is lost. The second compilation is the Wafayāt al-a‘yān, a biographical dictionary by Ibn Khallikān (d. 681/1282), ed. F. Wüstenfeld, 4 vols, Göttingen, 1835–50; ed. M. M. Abd al-Hamid, 6 vols, Cairo, 1948; English trans. Wm. McGuckin de Slane, 4 vols, Paris and London, 1842–71. Like al-Yāqūt’s work, Ibn Khallikān’s dictionary contains material from sources now lost. While it is not of great importance for the Umayyad and early ‘Abbasid period, it is extremely useful for the fourth/tenth and fifth/eleventh centuries.
The sources described so far belong to what might be called the metropolitan, in effect Iraqi, school of writing, connected either with the caliphal court and bureaucracy or with religious circles in Iraq. With the growing rate of conversion, and the increasing literacy in Arabic which resulted from it, there developed local schools of historical writing, moved by the desire to establish their hometowns as centres of political importance and religious learning. Among the oldest of these is the Ta’rīkh al-Mawṣil (History of Mosul) of Abū Zakariyyā al-Azdī (d. 334/945), the surviving section of which has been edited by ‘Alī Ḥabība, Cairo, 1968, and covers the years 101–224/719–839. It is an extremely full and mature piece of historical writing, skilfully interweaving local history with events from the wider context of the Islamic world. It is lively, full of firsthand accounts quoted verbatim and contains many precious details about life in Mosul and its countryside. After al-Azdī, the Mosul tradition seems to have been maintained by ‘Alī b. Muḥammad al-Shimshāṭī. Al-Shimshāṭī was a courtier and poet at the court of Abū Taghlib, the last Hamdanid ruler of Mosul, and he seems to have continued in the service of their successors the ‘Uqaylids, for he composed a history of Mosul which he dedicated to Qirwāsh b. al-Muqallad al-‘Uqaylī (391–442/1001–50). Unfortunately, his work only survives in fragments incorporated by later writers – a sad loss because we are very badly informed about Mosul in this period.
From the little town of Mayyāfāriqīn, on the southern fringes of the Anatolian uplands, we have the Ta’rīkh Mayyāfāriqīn of the local historian, Ibn al-Fāriqī (d. 572/1176). The early sections of his work Ta’rīkh al-Fāriqī, ed. B. A. ‘Awaḍ, Cairo, 1959, are the fullest source for the Marwanid dynasty and, like the best local histories, it contains much incidental topographical and social history, which makes it a precious source not only for the doings of the dynasts but also for urban life and culture.
Damascus produced a vast biographical dictionary, the Ta’rikh madīnat Dimashq by Ibn ‘Asākir who died in 571/1175, ed. ‘Umar al-Amrawī, 80 vols, Beirut, 1995–98. This contains an enormous range of historical traditions about people from the Prophet down to the author’s own time who had some connection with Damascus. It incorporates material from earlier, now lost sources which makes it especially valuable. Only recently published in full, it is a source which has yet to be fully exploited by historians. For a useful discussion of the importance of this text for early Islamic history, see J. E. Lindsay (ed.), Ibn ‘Asakir and Early Islamic History, Princeton: Darwin Press, 2002.
Aleppo also produced a continuing school of local history which reached its climax in the works of Kamāl al-Dīn Ibn al-‘Adīm (d. 660/1262), who incorporated earlier sources now lost. Ibn al-‘Adīm left two works; the larger of these is a biographical dictionary, the Bughyat al-Ṣalab fī ta’rīkh ḥalab, ed. Suhayl Zakkār, 12 vols, Damascus, 1988, which begins with a geographical introduction and then continues with the biographies of famous and worthy people connected with Aleppo and northern Syria. Much shorter is his chronological history of Aleppo, the Zubdat al-ḥalab, which gives an outline history of the city from the coming of Islam to 641/1243. Like the other great compilers of the seventh/thirteenth century, Ibn al-Athīr and Sibt. Ibn al-Jawzī, Ibn al-‘Adīm had access to a wealth of records which are now lost. His chronology of Aleppo under the Umayyads and ‘Abbasids, although brief, is still valuable, and the author fills out his text as it gets nearer his own time. His discussion of the Mirdasids and the troubled fifth/eleventh century in Aleppo is an essential source.
From early Islamic times, Egypt developed a parallel but separate historical tradition from the metropolitan Iraqi one. So far, the distinctively Egyptian historiography of the early Islamic period has received little scholarly attention but see now Ed. Zychowsky-Coghhill, “How the West Was Won: Unearthing an Umayyad History of the Conquest of the Maghrib”, in Andrew Marsham (ed.), The Umayyad World (Routledge: London, 2020).
The surviving tradition begins with the Futūh. Miṣr (Conquest of Egypt) by Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam (d. 257/871) ed. C. Torrey, New Haven, 1922, part narrative history and part legal text; it reflects the viewpoint of a member of an old Islamic élite family at a time when he and his class were losing their position to the newly arrived Turkish military. The next main sources for the history of Egypt are the two parallel works of Muḥammad b. Yūsuf al-Kindī (d. 350/961), Kitāb al-wulāt (Book of Governors) and Kitāb al-quḍāt (Book of Judges). These survive in the same British Museum manuscript and have been edited in the same volume by R. Guest, Gibb Memorial Series (GMS), XIX, London, 1912, repr. 1964. Al-Kindī came from an old-established Arab family in Egypt and seems to have access to a wealth of local tradition and government records in the country; his work is not in any way dependent on the Iraqi historians like al-Ṭabarī, and he provides a useful check on them. He does not provide much in the way of social history or of topographical detail, but he is very strong on basic chronology and the outline of political events, and his work is a worthy beginning to the great tradition of historical writing in Egypt. The Book of Governors goes up to 334/946, while the Book of Judges stops earlier in 246/861.
The period from the end of al-Kindī’s chronicle to the death of the first Fatimid caliph of Egypt al-Mu‘izz in 365/975 was covered in the now entirely lost chronicle of al-Ḥasan b. Zūlāq al-Laythī (d. 385/997). He wrote a history which included full biographies of both the Ikhshidid Muḥammad b. Ṭughj and the Fatimid Caliph al-Mu‘izz. This work forms the basis of the accounts of this period in later annals, like the work of al-Maqrīzī (on which see below, p. 370) and the Nujūm al-zahira of Ibn Taghrī Bardī, ed. Cairo, 1963–72, 16 vols, which explicitly acknowledges Ibn Zūlāq and quotes from him directly. Thereafter, the history of Fatimid Egypt is based on more complex sources. As with contemporary Iraq, the historiography of this period is dominated by the ghost of a lost chronicle, in this case the work of Muḥammad b. ‘Ubayd Allāh al-Musabbiḥī (d. 420/1029), which recounted the history of the Fatimids to 415/1025. Like his younger contemporary Hilāl al-Ṣābī in Iraq, al-Musabbiḥī was close to the centre of events at the Fatimid court, being the director of the Dīwān al-tartīb (payments office), and wrote a very detailed account of events which is as much an official diary as a work of history. It was a vast work, running apparently to 40 volumes of 26,000 pages. Like Hilāl’s also, two years of his work, 414 and 415 (1023–1025) have been preserved in the original, thus giving us a glimpse of the fullness and richness of the material it contained. The surviving portion has been edited from the unique Escorial Manuscript by Ayman Fu’ād Sayyid and T. Bianquis, as vol. XIII in the series Textes Arabes et études Islamiques of the Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale du Caire, Cairo, 1978.
Most of our knowledge of the work of al-Musabbiḥī, however, is gained from the later abbreviation of it made by the ninth/fifteenth-century Egyptian historian Aḥmad b. ‘Alī al-Maqrīzī in his history of the Fatimids entitled Itti‘āz. al-Ḥunafā’, ed. Muḥammad Ḥilmī and Jamāl al-Dīn al-Shayyāl, 3 vols, Cairo, 1967–73. Al-Maqrīzī, a famous historian in his own right, produced a condensation of the work of al-Musabbiḥī which is greatly superior to epitomes of the work of Hilāl al-Ṣābī which were produced in Iraq and Syria; while we must regret the loss of the original, we can only be grateful to al-Maqrīzī for having preserved so much. His account of the early Fatimids in north Africa and Egypt, as well as digressions on the Qarāmiṭa, is well written and full of interesting information. From the end of al-Musabbiḥī’s work in 415/1025, al-Maqrīzī seems to have depended on the chronicle of Muḥammad b. Yūsuf b. Muyassar (d. 677/1258), which was, in turn, probably based on al-Musabbiḥī and from 415/1025 on a now entirely lost work of the fifth/eleventh century. Ibn Muyassar’s work, ed. Ayman Fu’ād Sayyid, Textes Arabes et études Islamiques, XVII, Cairo, 1981, was necessarily not as full as al-Musabbiḥī’s, but in the surviving sections, which cover some of the reign of al-Mu‘izz and the period of the later Fatimid caliphate 439–553/1047–1158, it is revealed as a full and comprehensive chronicle. Interestingly, we know that al-Maqrīzī knew the work of Ibn Muyassar partly by comparison of his text with the surviving portions of Ibn Muyassar’s work and partly because the unique manuscript of it is based on a copy made by al-Maqrīzī himself. This complex annalistic tradition means that we are very well informed about Fatimid politics despite the loss of most of the firsthand sources. Al-Musabbiḥī was probably an Ismā‘īlī sympathizer, but neither Ibn Muyassar nor al-Maqrīzī was. Nonetheless, both of them respected the Fatimids as rulers who had brought great prosperity to their country, and the accounts they give are not significantly biased against the rulers they must have regarded as heretics. The limitations of this tradition are more geographical than ideological. Attention is concentrated on the activities of the Fatimid court and therefore mostly on Egypt. To get a fuller perspective on Fatimid policy in Palestine and Syria, it is necessary to turn to local sources like Ibn al-Qalānisī of Damascus and Ibn al-‘Adīm of Aleppo.
By the end of the fourth/tenth century, there had developed in Iran the beginnings of a Persian-language Muslim historiography, one of whose first achievements was the translation of al-Ṭabarī by Muḥammad al-Bal‘amī, which exists in a number of manuscripts, ed. Muḥammad Taqī Bahār, Tehran, 1974, French trans. H. Zotenberg, 4 vols, Paris, 1867–74. Bal‘amī edited al-Ṭabarī’s work into a continuous narrative by removing most of the critical apparatus. He also added new material from Iranian sources, notably on the ‘Abbasid revolution and the story of Abū Muslim. For the history covered in this book, however, the Persian sources are not of very great value compared with those in Arabic. The reason for this is largely that the new Persian literature was developed farther east at the courts of the Samanids and Ghaznavids, while Arabic remained the language of administration and literature in the Buyid-controlled areas of western Iran. Miskawayh, for example, a bureaucrat of Iranian origin, might easily have followed the example of his young contemporary Bayhaqī (d. 470/1077), who wrote his history of the Ghaznavids in Persian (Muḥammad Bayhaqī, Ta’rīkh-i Bayhaqī, ed. ‘Alī Fayyād, Mashhad, 1971 and now brilliantly translated into English by C. E. Bosworth, History of Beyhaqi 3 vols., Cambridge, Mass., 2011). Miskawayh, however, being firmly within the Buyid sphere, wrote in Arabic. The Persian historical tradition is mostly of use in giving details of areas of Iran which tend to be neglected by the more general historians. Among such works are the anonymous Ta’rīkh-i Sīstān, ed. Malik al-Shu’arā Bahār, Tehran, 1935, the Ta’rīkh-i ṭabaristān of Ibn Isfandiyār (d. after 613/1217), ed. ‘Abbās Iqbāl, Tehran, 1944; abridged English trans. E. G. Browne, London, 1905, which fills in gaps in our knowledge of events in the mountainous areas at the south end of the Caspian Sea, and the Fārs-nāma of Ibn al-Balkhī, ed. G. Le Strange and R. Nicholson, GMS, London, 1927, which, although written in Seljuk times, is an important source for Fārs under the Buyids. Persian material can also be useful when it preserves, in part, lost Arabic chronicles. Among these are Muḥammad b. Ja‘far al-Narshakhī’s History of Bukhara, English trans. R. Frye, Cambridge, Mass. 1954, which is useful for Transoxania in ‘Abbasid times, and the Ta’rīkh Qumm of al-Ḥasan b. Muḥammad al-Qummī, which is interesting on taxation and the settlement of members of the ‘Alid family in the Qumm area (where they are still prominent) in the third/ninth century.
Most of the sources mentioned so far, whether in Arabic or Persian, were written by Muslims. There was, however, a strong indigenous Christian historical tradition which, although by no means as elegant or as full as the Muslim one, is nonetheless of value. In one sense, it is somewhat artificial to class these non-Muslim sources together, since they vary greatly in language, scope and content – from Syriac monastic chronicles written by monks whose acquaintance with the outside world hardly extended beyond the walls of their monasteries to sophisticated Arabic products of courtiers like Yaḥyā b. Sa‘īd of Antioch. In the main, the Syriac-language works tend to be more concerned with religious affairs and the internal affairs of the Christian community, while the Arabic ones are more secular in tone and pay more attention to political history. There was no tradition of historical writing in Greek in Muslim lands, but some Byzantine authors are of importance.
There are a number of Christian sources which date from the period of the Islamic conquests and throw some light on them. Many of the Syriac sources have been collected and translated in A. Palmer, The Seventh Century in the West-Syrian Chronicles. From Egypt, we have the Chronicle of the Copt John of Nikiou, which survives only in an Ethiopic version, ed. Zotenberg, Jean de Nikiou, Chronique, in Notices et extraits des MSS. de la Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, 1883; English trans. R. H. Charles, 1916, an important source for the Arab conquest of Egypt. Another contemporary source, The Armenian History Attributed to Sebeos, has been translated by R. W. Thomson, Liverpool, 1999. The only Greek account, that of Theophanes, ed. De Boor, Berlin, 1883–85; English trans. The Chronicle of Theophanes by C. Mango and R. Scott, was written almost two centuries after the event and certainly depends not on independent Greek traditions but on Arabic or Syriac ones.
For the early ‘Abbasid period, there is an important Syriac Monophysite history which used to be known as the Chronicle of the Pseudo-Dionysius of Tell-Mahré, but is now known as the Chronicle of Zuqnīn after the monastery in which it was composed. This can now be consulted in the translation by A. Harrak, Toronto, 1999. It gives a vivid and sometimes harrowing picture of rural life in the Jazīra and campaigns on the Byzantine frontier up to 157/774. It is of considerable interest for the information it gives on the practical effects of ‘Abbasid taxation on a rural community; the picture painted is not an optimistic one. Thereafter, the Syriac tradition has a large gap which is only filled by the Chronicle of Michael the Syrian (who died in 595/1199), ed. with French trans. by J.-B. Chabot, 3 vols, Paris, 1899–1910. While much of this is concerned with theological controversy and church affairs, the section dealing with the civil wars after the death of Hārūn al-Rashīd (193/809) seems to be based on the real chronicle of Dionysius of Tell-Mahré (d. 850) and is a historical source of considerable importance for the period. After the mid-third/ninth century, Michael’s account becomes very thin, mostly concerned with church affairs, and not until the coming of the Seljuks does he again provide useful evidence.
Christian writing in Syria and the Jazīra is also represented by the Arabic Kitāb al-‘unwān of Agapius (Maḥbūb) of Manbij, ed. with French trans. by A. Vasiliev in Patrologia orientalis, VIII, Paris, 1911, 399–550, which covers Islamic history to around 158/775 and is especially good on the early ‘Abbasid period, describing the ‘Abbasid revolution and the subsequent disturbances from a non-Muslim viewpoint.
While the Christian historical tradition in Syria was intermittent, historical writing among the Christians of Egypt continued. In Egypt, the ancient liturgical language of Coptic ceased to be used for historical work, unlike the Syriac of the Jacobite Christians, which continued to be an important literary language for that community down to the time of Bar Hebraeus at the end of the seventh/thirteenth century. In Egypt, Christians, both Monophysite (Coptic) and Diophysite (Melkite or Greek Orthodox), wrote in Arabic. Indeed, it is an indication of the spread of the language, even in the Christian communities, that the two leading Christian writers of the fourth/tenth century, Sa‘īd b. Biṭrīq and Severus b. al-Muqaffa’, should have chosen to express themselves in Arabic.
The Coptic tradition was represented by the History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria, ed. and trans. B. Evetts in Patrologia Orientalis I, 99–215; V, 1–216; X, 357–553, and ed. C. F. Seybold, CSCO Scriptores Arabici vols 8–9, Leiden, 1962, a series of lives which may have traditionally been ascribed to the theologian Severus b. al-Muqaffa‘ (fl. 955–987) bit which have been shown to be the work of an eleventh-century layman, Mawhūb Ibn Manṣūr Ibn Mufarrij. He treats the history of the patriarchs by reigns and is essentially concerned with ecclesiastical history, touching on secular affairs only when they impinged on the well-being of the church but shedding an interesting light on the lives of non-élite members of society.
The Greek Orthodox tradition begins with the Ta’rīkh (also known as the Naẓm al-Jawhar) of Sa‘īd b. Biṭrīq, ed. L. Cheikho, Leipzig, 1906–09. He was a doctor who took the name of Eutychius when he entered the church, where he became a patriarch of Alexandria from 933 to 940. Like his Melchite (Orthodox) contemporary, Agapius of Manbij, Eutychius was more concerned with secular history than the Monophysites of Syria or Egypt. His chronicle deals with history from the creation of the world until his own time. The information on Muslim politics is abbreviated from Muslim accounts and presents little original material, but the work was of importance in being one of the first accounts of the Muslim world available in the West, being translated into Latin during the seventeenth century by Edward Pococke, the first professor of Arabic at Oxford, as Contextio Gemmarum, sive Eutychii Patriarchae Alexandrini Annales, 2 vols, Oxford, 1658–59, and it was used by, among others, Edward Gibbon in his account of the early Muslim state.
Sa‘īd’s work was continued by the most accomplished of the Christian Arabic historians, Yaḥyā b. Sa‘īd, who may have been a relative of his. Like Thābit b. Sinān in Iraq and Sa‘īd himself, Yaḥyā was a physician of some importance at the Fatimid court, but unlike Sa‘īd, he never entered the church. He was probably born around 370/980 and was thus a fairly young man when, in 405/1014–1015, he, like many other Christians, was obliged to leave Egypt because of the increasingly hostile behaviour of the Caliph al-Ḥākim. He went to settle in Antioch, which the Byzantines had captured from the Muslims just over thirty years previously and where his Melkite faith would cause no problems. Antioch at this time must have been a very cosmopolitan city, where Greeks and Arabs rubbed shoulders, and it was here that he lived until his death in about 458/1066. His Ta’rīkh, ed. ‘Umar ‘Abd al-Salām Tadmurī, Tripoli (Lebanon) 1990, takes over where Eutychius left off, and the surviving portions go up to 425/1034, but originally it seems to have continued beyond that date. Yaḥyā is an important primary source for the reign of al-Ḥākim, for events in Syria in Hamdanid times and later and for Arab–Byzantine relations. He breaks away from the strictly annalistic formula used by most of his Muslim contemporaries, and his approach is more thematic and discursive. Much of what he wrote was based on personal experience, especially the account of al-Ḥākim, but he also had access to a number of other Arabic sources, notably the Reichschronographie tradition in the work of Thābit b. Sinān and the work of al-Musabbiḥī, whom he must have known personally. Yaḥyā’s career and writing illustrate the best of the historiographical culture of the period, with his access to a wide variety of written sources and his skill at integrating them with his own experience.
One of the most important changes in our perception of the source material for early Islamic history in recent years comes from the study of documentary sources. Until recently, it was an accepted and largely unchallenged view that the early Islamic world provided very few documentary sources compared with the wealth of charters, account books, bills and letters we find for western European Medieval history. In her recent book, The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue, Marina Rustow challenges this perception straight on: “For the period before 1100, the Near East has in fact far more original documents than Europe, whether they’ve been stored in limbo or recovered archaeologically” and she goes on the argue, “The medieval Middle East possessed a robust culture of written documentation. State officials produced records, including decrees, memoranda, order, accounts, registers, and receipts and they form a corpus so coherent in their graphic presentation that anyone with a modicum of exposure to them can recognize them at first sight, Courts of law and government offices produced written acts and maintained constant procedures for authenticating them; their personnel had an interest in ensuring that rights claims depended on more than personal whim – the ruler’s or anyone else’s. Scribes developed diverse technical specialisations in the art of record keeping. And along with those came division of labour among administrative and legal personnel. And along with those, in turn, came systems of document organization and retrieval”.1 The evidence is partial but compelling and these are important perspectives to born in mind when we read of court intrigues and violent clashes: it was all going on in the background. Having said that, the evidence is very patchy geographically. The vast bulk of the evidence comes from Egypt. There are much smaller but very important collections in Bactrian, Pahlavi (Middle Persian) and Arabic from central and eastern Iran, but apart from a few tiny fragments, nothing survives from Iraq and the documentation of the Abbasid caliphate, which must have been vast, is completely lost to us.
Until the fourth/tenth century, when it was largely supplanted by paper, papyrus was the medium for most administrative correspondence of Egypt, as it had been in classical times. Papyrus has a much better rate of preservation than paper, and a considerable volume of Arabic papyri, and papyri written in Greek after the Islamic conquest, has been preserved. The most important of these from the point of view of administrative history date from the Umayyad period and, despite their fragmentary condition, give a real insight into the day-to-day administration of the province. They can also be useful for establishing dates of governors and official titles of caliphs and others, points about which chroniclers writing in a later period may make mistakes. A. Grohmann, From the World of Arabic Papyri, Cairo, 1952, remains a good introduction. The papyri – Greek, Coptic and Arabic – relevant to early Islamic history are detailed by P. M. Fraser in his edition of A. J. Butler, The Arab Conquest of Egypt, Oxford, 1978, lxxvi–lxxxiii. See also Y. Raghib, Marchands d’étoffe du Fayyoum, 4 vols, Cairo, 1982–96, for the use of papyri in the economic history of early Islamic Egypt. For a small but important collection from southern Palestine in the early Umayyad period, C. J. Kraemer, Excavations at Nessana, vol. 3, Non-Literary Papyri, Princeton, 1958. P. Sijpesteijn’s Shaping a Muslim State: The World of a Mid-Eighth-Century Egyptian Official Oxford, 2013) shows how this material can be used to illuminate the functions of government at a local level.
Papyri also preserve the oldest texts of Arabic historical writing, albeit in very fragmentary form. They are nonetheless useful for our understanding of the growth of the historiographical tradition; texts have been published, with translation and a very important introduction in N. Abbott, Studies in Arabic Literary Papyri I: Historical Texts, University of Chicago Oriental Institute Publications, LXXV, Chicago, 1957.
The other source of documentary material is the Cairo Geniza. The Geniza documents are the correspondence, contracts and legal decisions of the Jewish community of Fusṭāt. during the Fatimid times. Although paper documents, they were preserved because it was felt that any writings containing the name of God could not be thrown away but rather put in a storeroom above the synagogue. In this way, a mass of material was preserved, much of it of an ephemeral nature, not the sort of thing that archivists normally preserve but fascinating for the historian. The Geniza material concerns all aspects of the life of the community, including extensive commercial and personal correspondence. It is also extremely difficult to use; this is only partly because of the language, which is mostly Arabic written in Hebrew characters, but because it was stored in a chaotic condition, as a dump, not a reference collection. Furthermore, it has passed in fragments to a large number of different libraries in Europe, including Russia, and America, distributed at random without any regard for the subject matter. The best introduction to the geniza and its importance for the study of Islamic history see Marina Rustow, The Lost Archive Princeton, 2020. The classic account of the society revealed in the Geniza documents is S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 6 vols, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967–93. Goitein’s magisterial work is almost an original source in itself, a gold mine for anyone interested in the history of the Islamic world in the Fatimid period. For examples of the documents themselves, G. Khan, ed. and trans., Arabic Legal and Administrative Documents from the Cambridge Genizah Collection, Cambridge, 1993.
Recently, a new collection of documents has emerged from northern Afghanistan. From the point of view of Islamic history, the most important of these come from what seems to be a family archive of the Ru’b-khān, the local ruler of Ru’b and Samangan. These Arabic documents, written on parchment, date from the period from 138/775 to 160/777 and are mostly concerned with tax receipts and other contracts. They show clearly how the ‘Abbasid government’s administrative systems were broadly the same in this far eastern corner of the caliphate as they were in contemporary Egypt as revealed by the papyri. The documents are published with English translation and commentary in G. Khan, Arabic Documents from Early Islamic Khurasan, London, The Nour Foundation, Studies in the Khalili Collection V, 2007.
Recently too, a series of Pahlavi language documents, apparently from the Qumm area and probably dating from the early Islamic period, have been published. More cryptic and difficult to interpret than the Arabic documents from Khurasan, they give some insight into local administration. Some of the texts have been published with German translation and commentary as well as photographs of the originals in D. Weber, Berliner Pahlavi-Dokumente: Zeugnisse spatsassanidischer Brief-und Rechskultur aus fruhislamischer Zeit, Wiesbaden, Harrossowitz Verlag, 2008.
Islamic coinage from the period covered by this book is abundant and much of it has been catalogued in many different places. There is as yet no handbook or synthesis to which the historian can turn for an overview of the material. After the time of the Umayyad Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik, Islamic coinage is almost entirely epigraphic in design, with inscriptions rather than pictures on its surfaces. It is useful, as the papyri and inscriptions on stone and textiles (ṭirāz) are useful, for establishing names, dates and titles not only of rulers but of governors and indeed of rebels who were powerful enough to issue their own coins. The right to mint coins (sikka) was a government monopoly in early Islamic society and there was no equivalent to the private coinage of western Europe; the mention of a caliph or other ruler’s name on the coinage was, along with the mention in the sermon or khuṭba at Friday prayers, one of the ways in which sovereignty was acknowledged. Apart from its epigraphic uses, coinage can also shed light on general economic trends, although the evidence must be used with care; coinage of low intrinsic value does not necessarily point to economic decline. Nonetheless, we can be reasonably sure that, for example, the extreme fineness of Fatimid dīnārs reflects the wealth and stability of the state. The bibliography of Muslim coinage is very scattered. The classic account of the earliest Islamic coinage remains J. Walker, A Catalogue of Muḥammadan Coins in the British Museum, vol. i, The Arab-Sassanian Coins, London, 1941; vol. ii, The Arab-Byzantine and Post-reform Umaiyad Coins, London, 1956, but this should now be supplemented by the critique of M. Bates, “History, geography and numismatics in the first century of Islamic coinage”, Revue Suisse de Numismatique, 65, 1986, 231–65. See also S. Heidemann, “The merger of two currency zones in early Islam”, Iran, 36, 1998, 95–112. For the early coinage of Palestine, see I. Ilisch, Sylloge Numorum Arabicorum Tübingen Palastina IV, Tübingen, 1993. ‘Abbasid coinage has been much less fully studied; for an introduction, see T. S. Noonan, “Early ‘Abbasid mint output”, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, xxix, 1986, 113–75. See also L. Treadwell, “Notes on the mint at Samarra”, in C. F. Robinson (ed.), A Mediaeval Islamic City Reconsidered and T. El-Hibri, “Coinage reform under the ‘Abbāsid caliph al-Ma’mūn”, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, xxxvi, 1993, 58–83. G. C. Miles’s Numismatic history of Rayy, New York, 1938 is an important regional study and the article “Numismatics” by the same author in R. N. Frye (ed.), Cambridge history of Iran, IV, 1975, 364–77 contains useful references. On the coinage of Egypt, see W. C. Schultz, “The monetary history of Egypt, 642–1517”, in C. Petry (ed.), Cambridge History of Egypt, i, 318–38. Also dealing with Egyptian coinage is J. Bacharach, Islamic History through Coins: An Analysis and Catalogue of Tenth Century Ikhshidid Coinage, Cairo, American University in Cairo, 2009 which also includes an interesting general discussion about the use of coins as historical evidence. There is a useful discussion of the literature on Sasanian and early Islamic coins in M. Morony, Iraq After the Muslim Conquest, Princeton, 1984, 548–53 and a bibliography of material on later coins in H. Busse, Chalif und Grosskönig, Beirut, 1969, 543–6. The fifth/eleventh-century coinage of the Jazīra is discussed in S. Heidemann, Die Renaissance der Stadte in Nordsyrien und Nordmesopotamien, Leiden, 2002. For monumental and other non-numismatic inscriptions, see the Thesaurus d’Epigraphie Islamique curated by the Fondation Max van Berchem.