Download PDF | (The Early and Medieval Islamic World) Ryan J. Lynch - Arab Conquests and Early Islamic Historiography_ The Futuh al-Buldan of al-Baladhuri-I.B. Tauris (2020).
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Introduction
The high estimation in which Balādhurī is held also by modern research may be due to his not suppressing the pro-Umayyad tradition. It is this circumstance that makes his rendering such a valuable historical source to us; but it cannot replace a real historiographical appraisal of his works.
Among the most vital sources of our information on the late antique and early Islamic Middle East are the works of the Muslim author Aḥmad b. Yaḥyā b. Jābir b. Dāwūd al-Balādhurī (d. ca. 892 CE/AH 279).2 While among the earliest surviving Islamic sources, al-Balādhurī’s two extant works – Kitāb Futūḥ al-buldān (The Book of the Conquest of Lands) and Ansāb al-ashrāf (The Lineage of Nobles) – are treasure troves of information on the Islamic conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries CE/first and second centuries AH, on early Islamic society, and on the formation and development of governance under Islamic rule. Both texts have played a crucial role in the modern reconstruction of the early Islamic period, although as will be discussed below, the attention that each text has garnered has been variable. Beyond this, both have immense value in enlightening readers on the development of early Arabic historical writing, early Muslim authorship, and the scholarly culture of the court in the time of the author’s life, in addition to any actual historical insight they contain.
The present research will focus solely on the smaller of al-Balādhurī’s works, Futūḥ al-buldān (which will henceforth be referred to primarily as the Futūḥ). When considering the available sources for Islamic history between the seventh and eighth centuries CE, there are few which can claim greater importance than al-Balādhurī’s Futūḥ. Written in Arabic by a ninth-/third-century Muslim scholar working at the court of the ‘Abbāsid caliphs, the Futūḥ’s content considers many important matters at the beginning of Islamic history. It details the major events of the early Islamic conquests, the settlement of Muslims in the conquered territories and their experiences therein, and the establishment and development of the early Islamic state under the first two dynasties of Islam, the Umayyads (661–750 CE/AH 41–132) and early ‘Abbāsids (750–1258 CE/AH 132–656).
That a source from the ninth century CE is so vital to the reconstruction of events in the first two Islamic centuries is telling in itself, and yet few would doubt the importance of the Futūḥ for our understanding of early Islamic history. In addition to the Futūḥ’s important content as well as its (relatively) early date of composition, there are practical reasons for its widespread and near ubiquitous use by modern scholars of late antiquity, early Islamic history, and the medieval Mediterranean more generally, aside from just the rarity of contemporary sources.3 Its popularity greatly benefitted from the efforts of Arabists Philip Hitti and Francis Murgotten, who in 1916 and 1924 translated the full text into English as The Origins of the Islamic State. 4 With the field of late antique studies established later and with the text’s availability in a western language for researchers without a knowledge of Arabic, it became a vital datamine for historians seeking easily accessible information – for comparison or otherwise – on the region during and immediately following the Islamic conquests.
It has become commonplace to turn to the Futūḥ for information on a specific location or topic. Despite the undoubted significance of the Futūḥ, there has been little attention paid to the nature of the text itself – its sources, genre, manner of composition, forerunners, and successors – as well as the identity of its author – his occupation, cultural background, colleagues, and students. For so long, these grander and, in many ways, more straightforward questions concerning the Futūḥ’s creation have been almost completely disregarded. The present research looks to fill these gaps of knowledge by investigating the construction, content, form, and early reception history of al-Balādhurī’s Futūḥ in medieval Islamic history. First, it attempts to illuminate the background of the author and his access to sources, correcting some of the previous incorrect assumptions about his life and training. It situates the author and his text in the ninth-/third-century milieu in which it was constructed, a transitional period for the ‘Abbāsid state while also the infancy of the early Arabic historical tradition’s commitment to writing.
It discusses his role at the court of several ‘Abbasid caliphs, including the influence his location had on both the inclusion of material in his text and his overall access to informants. This research has, at its centre, a desire to answer many of the questions of purpose and audience surrounding the Futūḥ through an analysis of not only its content and its author, but its legacy in the medieval Muslim world. Overall, it hopes to expand our knowledge of early Arabic historiography and, crucially, our understanding of the value and limitations of the earliest surviving ninth-/third-century Arabic sources and the use of the Futūḥ’s material altogether.
The purpose of this study is to bring together previous research on Futūḥ al-buldān, the available information on al-Balādhurī the author, and these previously unconsidered questions about the text. At its core, it is hoped this research will provide some use to two different and distinct audiences: On one hand, non-Arabists or students who are engaging with al-Balādhurī’s text for the first time or only tangentially as a part of their own larger research questions. On the other, it is hoped it will serve specialists of the Arabic historical tradition and early Arabic historiography who may find some benefit in a fuller discussion of a single early Muslim author and the processes, pressures, biases, and ambitions that were likely involved in the creation of a well-known and well-connected text. As the narrative of Islamic origins continues to be questioned and with our access to new sources of information – especially the material culture of much of the Middle East – unlikely to expand significantly in the near future,5 confronting the challenges of the surviving Arabic sources is more necessary than ever before.
The early Arabic historical tradition and the problematic nature of the ‘narrative sources
There was an eruption of interest among Orientalist scholars in the history and traditions of the Middle East during the nineteenth century that resulted in prodigious work in the field of Arabic historiography. But it was a process, and one which many would argue was long overdue. The techniques of biblical and literary criticism were already hundreds of years old by the time that scholars began to apply similar techniques to the early Islamic historical tradition. The hazards of working with and within Muslim tradition have proven to be many. At times, the early Islamic tradition surrounding topics such as the codification of the Qur’ān, the transmission of ḥadīth (the sayings and actions of the Islamic Prophet Muḥammad and his Companions relied on as a major body of Sunnī Islamic law), and the beginning of the historical writing process seemed to be nearly impenetrable. In one camp, what Fred Donner referred to as the ‘descriptive approach’, many scholars of the early modern period proved unwilling to be overly critical of the sources they possessed, and, crucially, of the processes which bore them; they were all that was available, and western scholarship on Islam from the high medieval period through to the early modern had largely been driven by polemic that needed to shift.6 To challenge the Muslim sources’ problematic nature was to admit we knew very little.
On the other hand, and spurred on by the works of those such as Ignaz Goldziher7 and Joseph Schacht8 in what Donner called the ‘tradition-critical approach’, fabrications of material within the early Islamic tradition by later generations became discernable – so what could be trusted? What could be said about texts like those of al-Balādhurī? The entire process was turned on its head in the late 1970s thanks to the group who have come to be known as the Banū Wansbrough, which included John Wansbrough and his students Michael Cook and Patricia Crone. The publication of such works as Quranic Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation,9 The Sectarian Milieu: Content and Composition of Islamic Salvation History,10 Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World, 11 Early Muslim Dogma: A Source-Critical Study,12 and Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam,13 did not simply shake up the field of Islamic studies, which had long begun to stagnate up to that point; it completely broke the previous model and forced even devout opponents of these new works, including the outspoken R.B. Serjeant, to eventually re-evaluate the state of the field and their own contributions within it.14 This group and the subsequent generations they foaled – either directly or indirectly through their innovation and reinterpretation of Islamic history – came to derogatively be referred to as revisionists for applying the techniques of scepticism and source-criticism to the tradition. Yet, a revision of how these sources were being utilized and how the Islamic tradition as a whole should be navigated was exactly what was necessary. Although the reality was that the contributions of the Banū Wansbrough and their successors may have been viewed as merely modest in other fields of scholarship, their challenge and methodology proved to be revolutionary in a landscape ripe for intellectual change.15 Why was any form of revolution necessary when working with the earliest sources for Islamic history? Islamic tradition and the methods which had codified and canonized the most important historical sources, among them the ‘narrative’ histories, ḥadīth, sīra (biography, specifically of the Islamic Prophet Muḥammad), and the Qur’ān itself, had proven remarkably resilient to modern criticism or commentary.
More than having a role as marks of faith and theology, much of this body of work also presents the reader with its credentials and expects to be accepted without demur: It purports to tell us where that information on the past came from, on whose authority it was transmitted, and why we should find it acceptable. The author (or compiler) expects the reader to understand and, importantly, accept these rules which the tradition itself has borne. These sources have had an essential role in explaining ‘what really happened’ during the foundational period of Islamic history, a period which saw not just the rise of the new religion of Islam, but the greater Arab-Islamic conquests, the establishment of the earliest Islamic state, and the communal dynamics which surrounded the later conversion of the majority of the population of the Middle East and North Africa to Muḥammad’s message. A fundamental issue regarding the Arabic sources like those of al-Balādhurī’s, with the exception of the Qur’ān itself, is that while their role in the reconstruction of these processes has been essential, their commitment to writing dates from, in the best case, some 150+ years after the events they purport to describe.16 The problematic late nature of these sources was at times noted by early Orientalist scholars of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,17 but there was never the full inquiry that these problems required. The long-standing impenetrability of Muslim tradition did not properly give way until the publication of Crone and Cook’s Hagarism, which argued that the late date of these sources and their religious partiality made them inadequate and unacceptable for a reconstruction of the early Islamic period. Instead, they advocated that the Islamic sources largely be discarded in favour of the limited non-Muslim contemporary evidence which survived from the region. While Hagarism failed to create a convincing narrative for Islamic origins, its impact in instigating greater analysis of the problematic early Arabic historical material cannot be understated. Crone went on to famously write of early Islamic history that ‘one can take the picture presented or one can leave it, but one cannot work with it’.18 There have been very convincing recent contributions to the field of memory studies within the Islamic world which have demonstrated that the oral transmission of history – within which the early Islamic tradition resided during the bulk of the first two centuries – is far more reliable and interpretable than might have been previously imagined,19 but the roles that time and circumstance play in the compilation of this material should not be underestimated, either. The building-blocks which make up the Arabic historical and legal traditions, akhbār and ḥadīth, need to be fully parsed, and the works in which they survived must be fully evaluated in an attempt to understand as much about their creation as possible. To demonstrate the great problems of the pre-revisionist approach to early Arabic historical sources, one only need look to the scholarship surrounding al-Balādhurī’s Futūḥ al-buldān itself. Philip Hitti, to whom we owe the longutilized translation of the first part of the Futūḥ, was an extremely talented Arabist who, it can be noted, did not just lack scepticism of the sources he engaged with but was, at times, snide in his appreciation for Islamic historiography. Hitti’s lifelong commitment to the study of classical Arabic literature should not go unappreciated, but nor can we simply pass over Orientalist comments like this one, concerning Arabic historians and their style: ‘Once the words supposed to have been uttered by a contemporary or eyewitness are ascertained, the author feels his duty fulfilled, and his function as a historian degenerates into that of a reporter … the intellect is not brought to bear on the data.’20 Throughout his preparation of the Futūḥ, he appears uncritical not just of who the author was, but of any of his processes in the creation of the text.
The quotation above is indicative of an author writing before the postmodern revolution of Michel Foucault, Hayden White, and others, but as the introduction to arguably the most utilized form of the Futūḥ, it must be recognized as outdated. We read here an ignorance of the role the very selection of some material at the expense of others played in creating al-Balādhurī’s narrative, which provides the fingerprints of the author’s intentions that both Hitti and Francis Murgotten paid no heed to. While there are some who still believe that the problems of the sources of the early Islamic tradition cannot be surmounted,21 there are plenty of those in the field with a belief ‘that conclusions reached about their usefulness, by the sanguine or the sceptical, have less to do with the evidence than with the approach’.22 To this question, it is hoped the current research will contribute fully. While our textual evidence for the foundational period of Islamic history is unlikely to be further augmented by the revelation of great new narrative sources of information, this research hopes to provide a critical analysis and re-evaluation of one of the most vital Arabic sources on the early Islamic period by asking the key questions which have hitherto been ignored. In doing so, it is hoped that it will provide the greatly needed context for the Futūḥ and its author, al-Balādhurī, and make it a more useful source for any of those who hope to use it as evidence for the early Islamic Middle East.
Ansāb al-ashrāf and Futūḥ al-buldān
As for al-Balādhurī specifically, a number of scholarly works are attributed to him in the biographical record, of which only two survive into the modern period: Ansāb al-ashrāf, and Futūḥ al-buldān. 23 The two books are very different texts in their form and, likely, their function, and both represent a unique synthesis of historical information from the first two centuries of Islamic history. While the Futūḥ has benefitted from a longer history of availability to scholars in M. J. de Goeje’s edition, the Ansāb has far more often been the focus of modern scholarly analysis of the text itself. The Futūḥ has more often served as a data-mine for historical titbits and been employed for historical reconstruction.
The Ansāb al-ashrāf is a massive genealogical compendium, which begins with a discussion of the lives and careers of the prophets and continues along a largely biographical organization into the reign of the mid-eighth-/secondcentury ‘Abbāsid caliphs. While it includes headings for certain major historical events during this period, the majority of information on early Islamic history is contained in genealogical entries on individuals and familial groups. Its substantial size and coverage of a period where little Islamic historical material survives in a written form has brought it considerable attention, but its publication in a proper edition was a very long time in the making. It was partially published in the early twentieth century by a team of researchers at the University of Jerusalem including S. D. Goitein and Max Schloessinger; only much later in the century was it published in a complete form, but by an entirely different team. For the Ansāb, a complete manuscript is held in the Süleymaniye in Istanbul, with several other partial manuscripts more recently discovered in Morocco.24 Despite the gradual appearance of these editions, however, the Ansāb has benefitted from a great number of modern comparative studies and analyses of smaller sections of it.25 In reality, more in-depth studies of the literary aspects of the Ansāb and its traditions have been conducted than the Futūḥ in spite of the latter’s long-standing availability, but much more can still be done. Because of the Ansāb’s immense size and different form compared to the Futūḥ, it will only occasionally be referenced in this present research when it can shed more light on al-Balādhurī’s general technique as an author or on the Futūḥ specifically. An exhaustive study of the complete Ansāb is yet to appear because of these issues surrounding its publication, but it is similarly deserving of the great attention that al-Ṭabarī’s History has received in recent scholarship.26 The centre of this present research, Futūḥ al-buldān, is a much more condensed text, which is primarily organized geographically into chapters, and then chronologically within those chapters. The vast majority of the Futūḥ’s attention is occupied with the conquest period, especially the reigns of the first four ‘rightly guided’ (rāshidūn) caliphs following the death of the Prophet Muḥammad, as well as the reign of their successors, the Umayyads. Early Islamic tradition usually credits these first four caliphs with the consolidation of the Muslim community’s control over the Arabian Peninsula and the entire Middle East, and the establishment of the institutions that constituted the earliest Islamic state. Al-Balādhurī’s Futūḥ provides an image of this period which conforms to this idea. While al-Balādhurī was writing from the court of the second Islamic dynasty, the ‘Abbāsids, who had overthrown their predecessors the Umayyads in a civil war known as the ‘Abbāsid Revolution, the very large majority of al-Balādhurī’s attention is focused on the rule of the Umayyads and not on the dynasty which employed him. While historical traditions from the ‘Abbāsid period and from al-Balādhurī’s own lifetime are found in the Futūḥ, they are very limited in comparison to this material on the rāshidūn and the Umayyads. At a glance, the title of the Futūḥ – The Book of the Conquest of Lands – might suggest a strong focus on historical reports discussing the success of Muslim armies and the defeat of the Byzantine and Sasanian states which had existed in the region. Such an explanation asserts only a part of its story, however. Al-Balādhurī includes an ample quantity of this information, but the narratives of conquest found at the opening of most of his chapters often serve as a context for the types of information the book tends to primarily focus on: the Islamization of the Middle East and the institutions and legal precedent surrounding the earliest Islamic state. In many ways, the title of the Futūḥ has served as a bit of a red herring for readers for some time, especially as it appears the book either did not have a formal title given to it by the author or, perhaps more likely, the title was simply Kitāb al-Buldān (The Book of Lands). Additionally, the author references himself several times in the Ansāb, making it seem fairly certain that the Futūḥ was completed before his larger genealogical work. Thus, we can speculate that al-Balādhurī is likely to have completed Futūḥ al-buldān before turning his attention to the work that would come to be known as Ansāb al-ashrāf. 27 Because of the importance of the information contained within the Futūḥ on the conquests and the early Islamic period more generally, modern readers seem to have often passed over what was likely al-Balādhurī’s original intention in creating the text. It will be argued here that al-Balādhurī was bringing together previously disparate traditions concerning the administration of the conquered lands that came to constitute the Islamic Empire, from both muḥaddithūn and akhbāriyyūn. He hoped to serve a version of that state which was undergoing a great deal of challenges during his own lifetime. He was creating, in essence, an ‘administrator’s handbook’,28 a synthesized text to be read by the secretaries working within the ‘Abbāsid capital. This ‘synthesized text’ contained material from a variety of sources – both written and oral – and from texts which would later be classified in a variety of different genres, including conquest literature, legal texts, and geographies. Al-Balādhurī’s Futūḥ, in both its content and its form, shared many common features with texts contemporary and near-contemporary to it, and yet, with almost no direct correspondence.29 Its synthesized nature also means that we find material from the Futūḥ in texts across time periods and across genre classifications. The form al-Balādhurī’s text takes was likely born from a unique time and particular need by its audience of secretaries. This is likely a large part of the reason why – although its traditions remained relevant through to the present day – no other authors would imitate the style of the Futūḥ in succeeding generations.
Dating the text
The discussion of the unique form of Futūḥ al-buldān raises the problematic question of when exactly al-Balādhurī was likely writing his book. It is an important issue, and Chapter 2 will demonstrate that the Islamic world was a very different place at the beginning of al-Balādhurī’s lifetime than at his death. To this point, there has never before been an attempt to definitively date the compilation of the Futūḥ within the lifetime of the author. It has therefore been accepted as a ‘ninth-/third-century text’ without much further thought aside from a brief mention by Norman Calder.30 Yet, the likely date of creation of the text is of vital importance for deciphering precisely why al-Balādhurī created the Futūḥ, explaining why the work shares common features with works of kharāj and amwāl, and yet takes such a different form from others which came both before and after it. The context in which the work was created is vital to understanding both its form and content, and for positing an answer to why it was actually written. Among the most important pieces of biographical information which survives to describe al-Balādhurī is his placement within the ‘Abbāsid Caliph al-Mutawakkil’s (r. 847–861 CE/AH 232–247) courtly retinue at some point during his reign. The reign of al-Mutawakkil itself would prove to be a watershed moment in the history of the ‘Abbāsid state, as the caliph and the court more generally struggled to maintain its grip over the burgeoning military, which had begun to consume a significant proportion of the state’s attention (and influence) between the middle and the end of the ninth/third century. The death of al-Mutawakkil ushered in the so-called ‘Anarchy at Sāmarrā’’ and the power and influence of the ‘Abbāsid caliphs was stretched even thinner. And yet, the state and its institutions still needed to be maintained. In these extraordinary circumstances and during what was likely the prime of al-Balādhurī’s life, it seems that the author began the process of shaping Futūḥ al-buldān. There are several signposts within the text that help to focus precisely on when the work was completed. Unsurprisingly, al-Mutawakkil is among the most regularly invoked ‘Abbāsid caliphs within the Futūḥ, reinforcing the idea of a close relationship between the two, which is stated by a number of biographical sources. The caliph appears within a mix of information, with al-Balādhurī providing a number of events that occurred during his reign, important decisions the caliph made in various parts of the realm, and even an instance in which al-Mutawakkil himself was the informant for al-Balādhurī’s information – the only ‘Abbāsid caliph who appears as such.31 With all of this said, however, the Futūḥ cannot have been completed during al-Mutawakkil’s reign. Within the work is a direct reference to al-Mutawakkil’s death in Shawwāl 247 (December 861–January 862), followed immediately by a mention of his successor al-Muntaṣir’s ascension and subsequent death within the year.32 The latest explicit date that appears in the text is the year AH 253 (867 CE), where al-Balādhurī pens the following account: When the year 253 came,33 the Commander of the Believers, al-Mu‘tazz bi-llāh, sent Mūsā b. Bughā al-Kabīr, his mawlā, against the Ṭālibiyyūn who had appeared in al-Daylam and the regions of Ṭabaristān.34 No other caliph after al-Mu‘tazz (r. 866–869 CE/AH 252–255) is mentioned in the text, nor is any explicit date provided later than 867 CE/AH 253. Elsewhere, al-Mu‘tazz, his Turkic mawlā, and the problem of the Ṭālibiyyūn are mentioned again at the end of the Futūḥ’s section on Qum.35 While it is impossible to definitively state that al-Balādhurī concluded the text during the reign of al-Mu‘tazz, the fact that there are no mentions at all of his short-lived successor al-Muhtadī, or the twenty-three-year reign of al-Mu‘tamid which followed, convincingly lends itself to the belief that al-Balādhurī made no major revisions to the work after the 860s. Interestingly, this leaves a considerable length of time between the completion of the work and his speculated date of death ca. 892 CE/AH 279.
The limitations of the Futūḥ and this research
While the present research hopes to contribute to the greater study of early Islamic history and of Arabic historiography, there are a number of caveats and limitations that must be stated regarding my methodological approach in this endeavour. First, al-Balādhurī was almost certainly writing from a privileged position at the court of the ‘Abbāsid caliphate and, in this way, we see only a limited subset of early Islamic history. Even if we accept the idea that al-Balādhurī made efforts to travel to a number of scholarly centres of the Islamic world in his day to compile the information that was included in the Futūḥ and the Ansāb, he was still learning primarily from an educated elite within these communities.
To those who already rely on the early Arabic tradition for discussions of this period, however, this will be of no surprise. As Konrad Hirschler and Sarah Bowen Savant have written: The sources that serve as the basis for dynastic histories, for example, tend to privilege the outstanding cultural and intellectual works of a narrow band of courtiers, jurists, and orthodox religious authorities. Such works may have served as classical references for their contemporaries’ living, collective memory – but what of society beyond elite circles?36 Such is the case with regards to al-Balādhurī’s writing. While the author may have worked particularly hard to take advantage of a wide variety of sources which informed the creation of his own work, the reader never sees more than a small glimpse of the actualities of Islamic history in those earliest centuries. Directly linked to this issue of al-Balādhurī’s privileged position in the creation of the Futūḥ is the lack of detailed discussion of the ‘on the ground’ realities in the rural, resource-producing portions of the Islamic world. This particular issue only continues to grow clearer, as modern research on the surviving papyrological material – primarily from Egypt – continues to demonstrate that taxation in the provinces was never nearly as black and white as the courtly sources would have us believe.37 In terms of this research, comparisons between the Futūḥ and a variety of early Arabic sources contemporary and near-contemporary to its writing will be regularly invoked, but the focus will remain firmly fixed on the Futūḥ itself. Furthermore, the comparative analysis of the Futūḥ will consider almost exclusively Arabic texts, and the reason for this is twofold. First, this research will be absorbed with the early Islamic historical tradition which developed in the first three centuries of Islamic history; Persian and Turkish narrative sources dating from as early as the ninth/third century either never existed or are nonextant. While the work of al-Balādhurī has not hitherto had any form of in-depth comparison to Muslim works from the middle or later periods and might prove a fruitful vein for future analysis, it would provide little insight for one of the main efforts of this research: a greater understanding of the use and limitations of the early Islamic historical tradition. Second, the comparison of non-Muslim sources (from the Syriac and Greek traditions especially), while having already proven to be of great value to our understanding of the interconnected nature of the Muslim and non-Muslim traditions, still has many unanswered questions of its own that would similarly take us far beyond the source-critical inspired goals of analysing the Futūḥ. These questions are worthy of entire studies on their own, and remain only tangential issues for a discussion of al-Balādhurī and his text.38
Additionally, there are several important assumptions this research makes about the Futūḥ that deserve further note. First and foremost, it is assumed here that the Futūḥ al-buldān had a written form within the lifetime of al-Balādhurī. There are a great number of reasons this seems almost certain to have been the case: For one, and as will be discussed at length in Chapter 2, al-Balādhurī is remembered in the biographical record as having been a secretary (kātib), a professional class whose chief responsibility was writing. Added to this is the time that al-Balādhurī was living and working: While the early written Arabic historical tradition was still in an early development stage and the Futūḥ is among the earliest Arabic historical sources which survives, at least two generations had passed already since we can be certain Arabic texts were being committed to writing.39 While the idea of publishing scholarship was still fairly young and not completely accepted within all disciplines of the Islamic sciences yet, al-Balādhurī was not the first to be doing it. Additionally, we have already by the lifetime of Ibn al-Nadīm (d. 987–988 CE/AH 377), mention of al-Balādhurī’s oeuvre,40 and the benefit of a very early manuscript, which will be discussed below. And then, as will be discussed in Chapter 6, there is the definitive reuse of portions of al-Balādhurī’s compiled and/or authored accounts, which are found in a wide variety of sources and in the works of a plentiful number of authors, already by the time of Ibn al-Faqīh al-Hamadhānī (fl. late 800s CE/AH late 200s) and Qudāma b. Ja‘far (d. 948 CE/AH 337), and possibly by the time of Ibn Khurradādhbih (fl. late 800s CE/AH mid-200s). Al-Balādhurī’s traditions seem, by the beginning of the tenth/end of the third century, to have had a remarkable stability as demonstrated by their reuse in these other early texts. Finally, we have mention by the Andalusi scholar Ibn al-Abbār (d. 1260 CE/ AH 658) that he used an autographed copy of the author’s Ansāb as a source for his own work.41 Thus, in the worst case, it seems likely that the Futūḥ could not have been committed to writing on his behalf by anyone even a full generation removed from his death,42 and it seems very likely that it was completed by the author himself before his death.
Author, editor, compiler: The many professions of an early Muslim writer
Moreover, there is an issue of how al-Balādhurī and other early Islamic writers and their texts should be described and categorized.43 The early Arabic historical and legal tradition relied almost exclusively on oral/aural transmission of information during the majority of the first two centuries of Islamic history. In recording the details of the past and crucial legal precedent relied upon throughout the medieval period, the Muslim scholars working with this material – both narrative historical accounts (akhbār) and the ḥadīth, which became the vehicle for legal material – began a process of compilation and codification. This material, transmitted from teacher to student in both formal and informal settings through recitation, repetition, and imitation, was passed down from the seventh/first century through the oral/aural chain until the end of the eighth/second and early ninth/third centuries.44 Then, the process of selecting, organizing, and committing this information to writing had begun in earnest and, as mentioned, not without criticism. But what do we call the individuals who took up the pen (or employed others to do so on their behalf)? The narrative that they chose to weave into their own unique creations was known and long in circulation in one form or another. And so, while compiling and codifying this pre-existing historical information may make them seem to many as little more than compilers of what came before – al-Ṭabarī said so himself at the outset of his own History45 – this is only a part of their role. In selecting this material, these compilers were breathing life into new creations – their very selection of material on the authority of some transmitters necessitated omitting others. Where and how they chose to organize (and reorganize) and deploy this material was one major act of agency. The amalgamation of older, established traditions into new shapes was the ultimate form of Arabic authorship. It was, as Hirschler has coined, ‘authors as actors’,46 and what Stefan Leder has termed ‘unavowed authorship’.47 It is impossible to divorce this process of compilation of a vast historical tradition from the act of authorship – of creation – that was undertaken by those in the classical Islamic period who set about to give this material new form. Thus, while the process of compilation will be discussed at length here, so, too, will these individuals be recognized and described as authors of distinct books.
The deliberate intention of the author: Historical analysis through textual analysis
In the field of Islamicate history, where scholars have tended to use historical narratives almost exclusively as unstructured, interpretive mines of factual information, the handling of sources has been particularly problematic. The criteria of validity for the facts obtained from historical narratives are largely external; rarely are they related to the internal dynamics of the work from which the facts have been taken or to the interaction of the author’s mind with the material he has presented, matters that have long been important in European and American historiography. Systematic methods and categories of analysis through which such questions could be approached are virtually nonexistent. The usefulness of facts mined from historical writings is thus reduced and the relevance of the whole source to the history of ideas entirely neglected. Instead of asking what a premodern Muslim author was trying to do as a historian and how he accomplished his goals, the scholar of Islamicate history has usually been content to ask what information the source provides that can be useful in solving his own problems.48 Targeted studies on individual works in Islamic studies/ history largely went out of style over the last half-century, and contributions such as those on al-Mas‘ūdī,49 Khalīfa b. Khayyāṭ, 50 and al-Bayhaqī, where Marilyn Robinson Waldman’s statement above comes from, have become rarer. Returning to this narrow focus on individual texts and authors, however, can provide essential insight for modern readers working with these and similar texts, and there has been a recent return to this form that will hopefully prove greatly beneficial for continued work on medieval Islamic history.51 This is especially the case if we hope to address the integral and linked issues surrounding the intention of an author in the creation of his text and the audience he likely had in mind when he set his pen to parchment. This question of audience and of al-Balādhurī’s deliberate intention as an author in the creation of the Futūḥ is at the very heart of this particular study, and each of the chapters of this work will be presenting a portion of evidence in an attempt to fully address these issues. Chapter 1 begins with a brief discussion of the available Arabic scholarly editions of the Futūḥ, before providing a definitive manuscript history of the text. It discusses the process involved in the creation of the two primary academic editions and the two manuscripts used in their publication: one manuscript held at the University of Leiden, and another now held in the collection of the British Library. It also discusses an as-yet unpublished manuscript purchased at the beginning of the twentieth century by Yale University, which proves to be the oldest of the world’s surviving Futūḥ manuscripts. Chapter 2 serves as a discussion of who the author al-Balādhurī was, based on both the surviving biographical material and an analysis of the text itself. This material suggests that al-Balādhurī was both a secretary (kātib) and a boon companion (nadīm) working from the court of the ‘Abbāsid caliphs in Baghdad. It highlights that the text was created during a particularly tumultuous period in early Islamic history, a period where the power (both political and financial) of the central ‘Abbāsid government was being seriously eroded away. With administrators in Baghdad tasked with the maintenance of the state’s central infrastructure despite the turmoil of the era, I suggest al-Balādhurī created his text as an ‘administrator’s handbook’; full of legal and historical precedent, the author intended it to serve as a reference work for bureaucrats at the court who were attempting to keep the state running amid this upheaval. Chapter 3 discusses the construction of the text through an analysis of its chains of transmission (asānīd, sing. isnād) and al-Balādhurī’s selection of material. It identifies the background and training of his primary teachers, providing further insight into al-Balādhurī’s own education and the resources he had at his disposal. It argues that the author of the text had access to a variety of different sources – both oral and written – and that he consciously chose to differentiate his use of this material based on the particular introductory words he uses at the beginning of each tradition. Furthermore, despite his training as a secretary, the analysis of his teachers demonstrates that a significant proportion of his informants were jurists with no particular secretarial background. It suggests that al-Balādhurī was intending to create a text which bridged the traditional training of the secretaries and the jurists on the issues of common interest to both – the administration of the state based on seventh-century precedent. Chapter 4 discusses the overall foci/themes of the Futūḥ by considering the authorial hand of al-Balādhurī in the compilation of the text. As the text consists of a substantial amount of material transmitted verbatim from a variety of different informants without personal commentary, the primary means of seeing ‘al-Balādhurī the author’ within the text is through an evaluation of the material he chooses to include and that which he omits. This is accomplished not simply by evaluating and comparing the traditions, stories, and chapters within the text itself, but also by comparing these accounts with the work of contemporaries in order to identify potential exclusions which did not fit his thematic focus. Furthermore, the text’s key themes are discussed, among which are the issues over ownership rights concerning state-held/community land; the importance of seventh-century precedent and conquest settlement agreements in the financial expectations of the ninth-century ‘Abbāsid state over its outlying provinces; the qualities of adab in the Futūḥ which helped to make this relevant for an audience of administrators, including al-Balādhurī’s use of poetry; and the overall role and purpose of the Futūḥ as a site of memory (lieu de mémoire) for the unified and authoritative Islamic state of the past.
Chapter 5 considers the purpose of the Futūḥ against the backdrop of previous scholarship and classification of the text. It challenges many of the preconceptions that have developed surrounding its genre, and discusses the issue of medieval genre theory more generally. It looks at the intersection of the Futūḥ’s interests with the genres of conquest literature (futūḥ), judicial texts on fiscal administration (kharāj, amwāl), geographical texts, and secretarial texts (bureaucratic/grammatical works) by comparing the text to similar contemporary (and near-contemporary) works of these types. In particular, it discusses the problems associated with considering the text solely in the genre of ‘conquest literature’, as has been done by much of modern scholarship. It advises that genres did not yet have firmly established boundaries in the ninth-/thirdcentury Arabic tradition, and it questions the validity of attempts to characterize early Arabic historical works fully within the confines of categories, which were not well defined until a later period. Finally, it identifies that while al-Balādhurī’s text shares many common features with texts usually classified within different genres, there are no other texts which provide a one-to-one comparison, suggesting again that the Futūḥ was created in a unique time and place and to fill a specific need for its audience. Chapter 6 focuses on the reception of the Futūḥ within the medieval period through a comparison of the quotation and reuse of al-Balādhurī’s traditions in later sources. Six texts which include a large amount of reused material from al-Balādhurī’s texts are discussed, as are the forms this reuse could take and the techniques involved in emplotting al-Balādhurī’s traditions in texts of different styles and genres. This chapter briefly identifies some of the types of material later scholars valued, reused, and/or augmented from al-Balādhurī’s work, while confirming that the high esteem al-Balādhurī is held in by modern historians of the Islamic world was also an opinion held by his peers throughout the medieval period.
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