Download PDF | (Culture and Civilization in the Middle East) David James - A History of Early Al-Andalus_ The Akhbār majmū’a-Routledge (2011).
209 Pages
A History of Early Al-Andalus
The Akhbār majmū‘a, or ‘Collected Accounts’, deal with the Muslim conquest of the Iberian peninsula in 711 and subsequent events in al-Andalus, down to and including the reign of ‘ Abd al-Ra h mān III (912–961), founder of the Umayyad caliphate of al-Andalus. No Arabic text dealing with the early history of al-Andalus has aroused more controversy, and its contents and origin have occupied the attention of leading scholars of Islamic Spain since its publication in 1867. This book gives the fi rst complete English translation of this key contemporary text, together with notes, comments, appendices and maps. It is introduced by a survey of scholarly opinion on the text from the nineteenth to the twenty-fi rst centuries in which all the – often heated – arguments around the text are explained.
The translator concludes his introduction with an in-depth examination of the manuscript containing the only surviving copy of the text and presents some interesting new evidence provided by a scribe which has gone unnoticed until now. Providing new insights into this signifi cant Arabic text, this book will be of great interest to scholars of the history of Spain and Portugal, Islamic history and Mediaeval European history. David James was Special Lecturer in Arabic Studies at University College Dublin, where he taught a course on Islamic Spain. He is the author of Early Islamic Spain, The History of Ibn al-Qūtīya and several books on the art of the Islamic manuscript.
Acknowledgements
This is the second of what I hope will be three translations of works dealing with the early history of al-Andalus (Islamic Spain and Portugal). Each deals with roughly the same period, from the arrival of the Arab and Berber armies in 92/711 to the rule of the last emir and the fi rst Andalusī Umayyad caliph, ‘Abd al-Rah.mān III (300–350/912–961). The same events and many of the same people appear in each work, but the story is told from a different point of view. The Akhbār majmū‘a or ‘Collected Accounts/Anecdotes’ is an anonymous work written some time after the death of ‘Abd al-Rah.mān III. About half of the contents appears nowhere else.
Perhaps no other work dealing with history of the fi rst two centuries of Muslim rule in the peninsula has aroused more heated argument among scholars, including several of the greatest twentieth-century historians of the mediaeval Iberian peninsula. The reasons for the controversy are explained to the reader in the Introduction to this translation. The text was initially edited and translated into Spanish in 1867 by Emilio Lafuente y Alcántara, one of a gifted group of Spanish scholars who often worked together to translate and study the then virtually unknown and largely ignored Arabic writings on the history and culture of al-Andalus. This is the fi rst English translation and is done on the basis of a fresh look at the only surviving manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Arabe 1867 and the Arabic editions of Lafuente y Alcántara, the Egyptian scholar Ibrāhīm al-Abyārī and the Spanish translation of the former.
The Akhbār majmū‘a has been the subject of more discussion, argument and theorizing than any other Arabic text dealing with the history of al-Andalus. I have tried to summarize this in the Introduction and I hope I have given a fair account of all points of view. In preparing this study and translation I acknowledge my debt to the scholarship of Emilio Lafuente y Alcántara, Claudio Sánchez Albornoz, Pedro Chalmeta, Luis Molina and Dolores Oliver in particular; to the judicious comments of Pierre Guichard; and to the late Évariste Lévi-Provençal who in the course of having the shortest lines written on the subject, threw a stone into the waters of Akhbār majmū‘a studies which has caused academic ripples ever since his comments fi rst appeared in Volume One of the Encyclopedia of Islam .
Much of the work on this volume was done in the course of several summer stays at my brother Peter’s house in Galicia. My thanks are due both him and his wife Linda. My researches have taken me to London, Paris and Montreal, and I thank Geoffrey and Daphne Roper in London, François Déroche in Paris and Adam Gacek in Montreal for their help. My thanks are also due to Geoffrey Roper and Adam Gacek for reading and commenting on parts of the text. My thanks also to my old friend Fadil Bayati for his help with some of the obscure passages and verses in the Arabic text. I have benefi tted from the comments of those scholars who read the draft at the request of the publisher and wherever possible I have incorporated their suggestions. Any opinions expressed and errors detected are however all mine. My thanks to Ian Netton, general editor of the series in which this publication appears and to Joe Whitting and Suzanne Richardson of Routledge.
I would also like to thank the staff of the Islamic Institute Library, McGill University, Montreal for their patient assistance during my work there in 2009 and 2010. I am very grateful to Marie-Geneviève Guesdon of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France for answering several questions on the text and physical characteristics of the Akhbār majmū‘a. My thanks also to Barbara and family for their support. David James Ronda 1431/2010
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