Download PDF | (Modem Classics in Near Eastem Studies) Abd Al Duri, Fred M. Donner, Lawrence I. Conrad - The Rise of Historical Writing Among the Arabs-Princeton University Press (1983).
215 Pages
Introduction
The study of early Islamic history, more perhaps than most historical fields, has been plagued by uncertainties about the reliability of its written sources. No branch of history is, of course, entirely free of such historiographical controversy; but the disagreement and debate over sources for early Islamic history and their reliability have hung like an ominous cloud over the field almost from the moment scholars began scientifically to work it in the mid-nineteenth century, and show litde sign of dispersing even today.
The persistence of this problem is doubtless in part due to the fact that the scientific study of early Islam is still a very young subject, scarcely a century old; it is also partly attributable to the relatively small number of scholars who, in any given generation, choose to dedicate themselves to this study. As a result of these factors, it is fair to say, the field as a whole remains poorly developed; vast areas have never been worked at all, or have only been touched on superficially, and much fundamental spadework remains to be done before the full outlines of early Islamic history will begin to emerge clearly. Under such circumstances it is hardly surprising that drastic reinterpretations both of early Islamic history itself, and of the role of various sources for it, should periodically arise. In this case, however, the historiographical debate is more than just a reflection of the efforts of a fairly young historical field to define itself; rather, it also derives in large measure from the nature of the sources themselves. For the great majority of the information about early Islamic history on which modern historians rely is derived not from contemporary doc-uments, but from literary compilations that only attained their present form a century or even two centuries or more after the events they purport to describe.
The relatively late date of the sources does not necessarily make them fraudulent, of course, and it became generally accepted by modern historians that some of the information in these sources—perhaps most of it—is considerably older material that was preserved and transmitted until it found its way into the literary compilations now available to us. But the lateness of the sources does, at least, mean that the existence of anachronistic and tendentious accounts of a spurious character that might be woven in with more authentic older material cannot be dismissed out of hand. As a result, sharp disagreement has persisted among historians of Islam on what and how much material in the extant sources is older, as it has on the question of how old this "older" material actually is and what interests and attitudes it reflects. Finally, it has been asked how—and even whether—scholars can discriminate between "authentic" older material and tendentious, fabricated, or anachronistic accounts of more recent provenance.
As already noted, this debate in modern scholarly circles goes back virtually to the beginnings of Western historiographical studies. M. J. de Goeje, in his Memoire sur la conquete de la Syrie (first edition, Leiden, 1864), decided that many of the contradictory historical accounts about the conquest of Syria were unreliable, and concluded that only a certain fraction of them—he favored those purveyed by the historian al-Waqidl—could be accepted as trustworthy. Similarly, Julius Wellhausen, in his Prolegomena zur dltesten Geschichte des Islams (Berlin, 1899), tried to demonstrate that the accounts about the conquests of Iraq transmitted by Sayf ibn cUmar were romanticized, filled with evidence of tribal chauvinism, chronologically absurd, and in other ways gave an appearance of unreliability. For a time such studies seemed to provide the desired critical basis on which the historian could rely when evaluating the historical traditions with which he had to work in studying the early Islamic period; and for many years (and, to a certain extent, even today) "critical method" in working with these sources came to mean, for many, simply rejecting accounts derived from Sayf ibn tUmar5S collections and relying on other early authorities, such as al-Waqidl, instead.
In the meantime, however, there appeared Ignaz GoldziIier1S classic Muhammedanische Studien (Halle, 1888-90), which first demonstrated that among the collections of hadiths (sayings) attributed to the prophet Muhammad—even in those collections that had been most carefully screened by Muslim scholars to sift out forgeries—there were many hadiths that careful analysis of content revealed certainly to be products of a later period and not authentic utterances of the prophet at all. Because the methods used by medieval Arab scholars to transmit and verify hadiths were in many respects similar to those they used to deal with historical accounts, Goldziher5S conclusions cast a shadow of doubt on the reliability of all historical accounts. Far more than the studies of de Goeje and Wellhausen, therefore, Goldziher5S critique was disturbing in its implications for historians of early Islam—or, at least, should have been; and ever since his day, scholarship in the field of early Islamic history has suffered from what might be called a collective schizophrenia, a profound division over the assumptions that should properly underlie efforts at historical reconstruction. Some scholars have treated the Arabic sources as fully reliable, adopting only those criticisms that they could not in good conscience ignore (e.g., Wellhausen's rejection of Sayfs traditions) and picking their way through the remaining material according to their own (often not explicit) criteria for determining what was and what was not "authentic."
Typical examples of this approach are W. Montgomery Watt's studies of the life of the prophet, Muhammad at Mecca and Muhammad at Medina (Oxford, 1953 and 1956). Other scholars have adopted a much more skeptical attitude toward the sources in the light of Goldziher's conclusions, and have come to denounce more and more of the received corpus of historical traditions as spurious or otherwise unreliable, sometimes eschewing the study of early Islamic history altogether for studies of Islamic law or other phenomena that took definitive form only in later centuries. We might see in the works of Joseph Schacht, Goldziher's main successor in the study of Islamic law, the first culmination of this trend. It proved much more difficult, however, to find a middle ground between these two extremes—a position that neither embraced the sources too credulously, nor adopted a sweeping and (because unexamined) unwarranted skepticism toward them. Leone Caetani, in his compendious Annali deWIslam (10 vols., Milan, 1905-1926), tried to examine early Islamic history with a critical eye to the sources. But many practicing historians who dealt with the early Islamic period in the years after World War I either saw no need to defend the sources, or seemed for one reason or another at a loss to do so, and hence chose to pass in silence over the issues at stake. One reason for such attitudes was probably the fact that it was simply easier to proceed on the assumption that the "standard" interpretation of early Islamic history was essentially sound than it was to undertake the arduous, and perhaps threatening, task of reconsidering the sources; for to do the latter might well require a radical revision of one's view of early Islamic history as well.
There was, however, a reason why historians of early Islam could not mount a serious or coherent defense of their sources during the first half of the twentieth century, even had they wanted to do so. That reason was the generally poor grasp of the historiographical tradition itself and of how it had evolved; for in order to judge or to comment on the historicity of these sources, one had first to understand clearly how, and why, they had come into existence in the first place. Yet at the beginning of the century few detailed studies of important Arab historians or of the growth of the historiographical tradition had yet been undertaken. True, the latter nineteenth century had seen the appearance of Ferdinand Wiistenfeld's Die Geschichtschreiber der Araber und ihre Werke (Gottingen, 1882), and at the turn of the century had appeared the first edition of Carl Brockelmann's monumental Gesehiehte der arabischen Litteratur (Weimar, 1898-1902), but both of these essentially provided merely a list of the main early Arab historians and their works, with no attempt to examine the interrelationship of various writers, the historicity of their work, or the growth of the historiographical tradition as a whole. More penetrating syntheses of Arabic historiography were simply not yet feasible in the absence of a full supply of detailed studies.
Thus we find that even those general works from the early twentieth century that were explicitly devoted to Arabic historiography, such as David Margoliouth's Lectures on Arabic Historians (Calcutta, 1930), have only very vague and general things to say about how the historiographical tradition evolved, and represent very litde progress over Wiistenfeld's essay of fifty years earlier, which had been published before the appearance of most of the early critiques of the Arabic sources that had generated the historiographical debate in the first place. The first wave of historiographical critiques had not fallen entirely on deaf ears, however; there was a flurry of interest in historiographical research during the first quarter of the twentieth century, when such scholars as Josef Horovitz, C. H. Becker, and Johann Fiick attempted to unravel in a painstaking and systematic way how particular aspects of the historiographical tradition had developed, or tried to present a fuller picture of some of the early Arab historians and their relation to other writers before and after them.
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Into this category can be placed such researches as Horovitz's essay on the use of isnads or chains of authorities, Becker's examination of the Slra (the standard biography of the prophet Muhammad) and its relation to the hadith and other material, and Fuck's monograph on Ibn Ishaq (Frankfurt, 1925). The motivating assumption underlying this work was the idea that the general reliability of the Arabic historiographical tradition, in the face of the criticisms raised against it, could only be demonstrated by showing that the tradition itself was something that had evolved naturally, and was not merely a composite of spurious and tendentious fragments pasted together at a much later date. In order to show this, however, one had to understand the historiographical tradition much more fully, and the object of these researches was to help meet this need. For reasons that are far from clear, the pace of such detailed historiographical research slowed in the period following World War I—perhaps because the war itself had left in a shambles the European academic establishment, particularly that of Germany, which had led the van in these historiographical studies.
There were a few noteworthy exceptions, of course, notably some of the studies by Brockelmann, Horovitz, and Robert Brunschvig—but by and large the detailed study of historiographical issues seems to have fallen into neglect after about 1925, and few new names were to take up the challenge for some decades. Evidence of this attitude of neglect can even be found in the first edition of the Emydopaedia of Islam, which appeared in Leiden between 1913 and 1934. This massive reference work did feature biographies of a number of important early Arab historians (e.g., Ibn Ishaq, al-Waqidl, Sayf ibn 1Umar, al-Zuhri, al-Mada'inl, Abu Mikhnaf, TJrwa ibn alZubayr, etc.), but some of these were rather spare first attempts; and of the articles on fundamental historiographical topics, such as isnad, hadith, or ta'rikh (dating, history), many were very brief and displayed the general lack of sophistication of this branch of Islamic studies. Readers had to await the appearance of the Supplement to the first edition, which appeared in 1938, to read the pioneering article on "Ta'rikh" (History) by H.A.R. Gibb, one of the relatively few scholars to take up the question of historiography in earnest during the inter-war period. Among practicing historians dealing with the early Islamic period, the general attitude seems to have remained, for the most part, one of benign neglect of historiography. Few took up Caetani's lead, and even as late as the 1970s some authors still found it possible to construct novel interpretive histories of early Islam without any reference to historiographical issues or methods. M. A. Shaban's Islamic History, 600-750 A.D./132 α,Η.^Α New Interpretation (Cambridge, 1971), can be cited as a case in point. It was only after World War II that the pace of research on early Arabic historiography again quickened and concern for the subject spread. Shortly after the war appeared two articles that focused attention anew on the relation between Arabic legal and historical texts: Brunschvig's "Ibn 'Abdalhakam et la conquete de TAfrique du Nord par Ies Arabes" (Faculte des Lettres de PUniversite d'Alger, Annates de I'Institut d'Etudes Orientales 6 [1942-1947], pp. 108-155), and J. Schacht's "A Revaluation of Islamic Traditions" (JRAS, 1949, pp. 143-154). But the main impetus to the accelerated pace of historiographical study was provided by the appearance of three books. The first was Franz Rosenthal's A History of Muslim Historiography (first edition, Leiden, 1952). Its purpose was not to address the debate over the historicity of the sources that most concerned historians, an issue that Rosenthal deliberately and explicitly sidestepped: ". . . we are not concerned here with the value of historical works as source material for the writing of the history of a particular period" (p. 6). The author intended, rather, to examine the conception of history held by Muslim scholars and to trace the development of history as a branch of Arabic literature and science. Nevertheless, Rosenthal's contribution provided a fuller treatment of the origins of Arabic historiography than had Gibb's brief survey of the subject in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, and began the process of synthesizing the rather large number of isolated studies of detailed aspects of Arabic historiography that had accumulated over the preceding decades. A further step, and one of greater importance for practicing historians, was taken with the appearance of the second book, Nabia Abbott's splendid Studies in Arabic Literary Papyri, I. Historical Texts (Chicago, 1957). This work provided an even more detailed survey of the crucial earliest phases of Arabic historiography, and did so in a manner that emphasized, on the basis of papyrological evidence, the generally reliable character of the process by which historical accounts were transmitted. The book thus provided strong, if still somewhat general, support for the view that the Arabic accounts were as a whole reliable as historical sources, even if some distortions and spurious material may have crept in. The third work, however, really represented the culmination of the long series of diverse efforts to trace the evolution of early Arabic historiography in such a way as to be useful to the historian. It was 'Abd al-tAzIz al-Duri's The Rise of Historical Writing Among the Arabs (Bahth ft nash'at 'ilm alta'rikh 'inda l-'Arab), which appeared in Beirut in 1960. Dim's book was, and remains, noteworthy for several reasons. First, it provided the most comprehensive overview of the growth of early Arabic historiography that had yet appeared. Drawing in part on the results of many scattered critical studies and monographs devoted to individual traditionists and historiographical issues, the author was able to sketch out a much clearer and more highly nuanced picture than had previously existed of the rise of various schools of Arabic historical writing and of their methods. But Duri did not merely synthesize the work of others; he also relied heavily on his own independent researches into early Arabic historiography, efforts that became manifest not only in this book, but also in a number of studies of more restricted aspects of the subject that appeared over the years. Among them were his articles on "The Iraq School of History to the Ninth Century—A Sketch" (1962), and "Al-Zuhri: A Study of the Beginnings of History Writing in Islam" (1957), as well as his monograph Dirasafi strat al-nabi wa-mu 'allifiha Ibn Ishaq (Baghdad, 1965) on Ibn Ishaq and his biography of the prophet. The Rise if Historical Writing Among the Arabs is especially noteworthy because Duri is himself a practicing historian, with many fine publications on early Islamic history to his credit (see Bibliography). It was therefore natural that in approaching the problem of historiography he should do so with the question that historians always want most to have answered uppermost in his mind—namely, how reliable are the sources under scrutiny as evidence for reconstructing "what actually happened"? This concern Duri wove together with his analysis of the earliest historical accounts according to the genre to which they belonged (popular story, genealogical tradition, tribal "battle-day" narrative, etc.) and according to the methods used by the various local schools of historical writing that emerged in Medina, Iraq, and elsewhere. The result was not only a more detailed and sophisticated analysis of the rise of early Arabic historiography in general, but also the elaboration for the first time of a set of general guidelines for assessing the reliability of a given account on the basis of its origin and its formal characteristics. This made the book particularly useful to historians, and also provided more support for those who viewed the Arabic sources as essentially reliable for reconstructing history, since the lack of consistent criteria for weeding spurious and tendentious material out of the Arabic historiographical tradition had all along been one of the main factors leading skeptics to reject the whole tradition as essentially useless for historians. The importance of Dun's book was quickly recognized by most serious students of early Islamic history, and its utility has endured and doubtless will endure for some time to come. Since its appearance in 1960, a great number of additional historiographical studies have been undertaken, and the subject has in some respects changed so greatly that it can hardly be considered the same field that Duri worked in the 1950s. Some scholars, such as Fuat Sezgin, Ursula Sezgin, Raif Khoury, and others, have provided us with highly detailed studies of individual transmitters or—in the case of Fuat Sezgin and his massive Geschichte des arabisehen Sehrifttum (Leiden, 1967—)—with an extensive catalog and summary of the whole historiographical tradition for the first four Islamic centuries. The thrust of their work clearly follows that of Abbott and Dun, in that they take the historiographical tradition as a whole to be an organic development that can be used by historians if it is sufficiently well understood. On the other hand, scholars imbued with a more skeptical attitude have also been active, producing new studies asserting that the historiographical tradition is at best highly suspect, and at worst, useless. Albrecht Noth's Quellenkritische Studien zu Themen, Formen, und Tendenzen friihislamischen Geschichtsiiberlieferung (Bonn, 1973) rejects the notion that the different historiographical "schools" of which Duri (and his predecessors) spoke used fundamentally different methods of handling material, thereby calling into question the notion that one school's view of the past might be, in general, more "accurate" than that of another. He also develops a much more detailed form-critical analysis of the content of early Arabic historical accounts than had Duri, emphasizing as he does so the view that the historicity of material displaying highly formalized characteristics is questionable. More recendy still, a radical source criticism has been put forward by several English scholars. In Hagarism (Cambridge, 1977), Michael Cook and Patricia Crone present the view that the Arabic sources for early Islamic history are late, full of contradictions, and essentially useless for reconstructing the religious concepts of early Islam; while John Wansbrough's The Sectarian Milieu (Oxford, 1978) goes even further, arguing that the sources represent later religious polemic and can tell us nothing about the history of the early Islamic era. That is, the authors assert explicidy and uncompromisingly the skeptical thesis that had been implicit since the late nineteenth century, but had only been rather timidly embraced by practicing Islamic historians. The debate over the historicity of the Arabic sources thus continues to rage, and it is yet too early to tell what the issue of the debate will be. Pending its outcome, however, 'Abd al-'AzIz al-Durl's The Rise of Historical Writing Among the Arabs will certainly continue to hold an important place in the literature as the clearest and most historically useful exposition of the general development of Arabic historiography, even if certain details in the picture he has drawn must be modified by more recent research. And, if it turns out that those who argue for the general historicity of the Arabic sources are ultimately vindicated in their debate with the skeptics, it will be in no small part because of the convincing picture Duri has drawn. It is therefore a pleasure to welcome the appearance of this book, so useful as an introduction to the Arabic historiographical tradition and so important as a contribution to the long-standing debate, in English translation. Fred M. Donner
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