Download PDF | Najam Haider - The Rebel and the Imam in Early Islam_Explorations in Muslim Historiography-Cambridge University Press (2019).
320 Pages
The Rebel and the Imam in Early Islam
Engaging with contemporary debates about the sources that shape our understanding of the early Muslim world, Najam Haider proposes a new model for Muslim historical writing that draws on late antique historiography to challenge the imposition of modern notions of history on a premodern society. Haider discusses three key case studies the revolt of Mukhtar b. Abi 'Ubayd (d. 67/687), the life of the Twelver Shi'i Imām Mūsā al-Kazim (d. 183/799), and the rebellion and subsequent death of the Zaydi Shi'i Imām Yahya b. 'Abd Allah (d. 187/803) in calling for a new line of inquiry which focuses on larger historiographical questions. What were the rules that governed historical writing in the early Muslim world? What were the intended audiences for these works? In the process, he rejects artificial divisions between Sunnī and Shi'i historical writing.
NAJAM HAIDER is a professor in the Department of Religion t Barnard College, Columbia University. He is the author of The Origins of the Shi'a (2011), focusing on the role of ritual and sacred space in the formation of Shi'i identity, and Shri Islam (2014), which examines three branches of Shi'i Islam Zaydi, Twelver, and Ismaili through a framework of memory. He has travelled extensively in the Middle East, including Syria, where he was a Fulbright scholar, and Yemen, where he studied with traditional Zaydi scholars.
Modeling Islamic Historical Writing To what extent do contemporary approaches to the study of Islamic historiography reflect the presuppositions that informed the writing of early Muslim historians? A proper answer to this question requires a consideration of the classical and late antique periods. Numerous studies over the last fifty years have shown that Muslim political, social, and intellectual structures appropriated (and further elaborated) preexisting models.1 This claim is not universally applicable, but it seems to hold in areas ranging from coinage and court culture to legal codes and literature.2
A similar dynamic likely governed the relationship between late antique and early Muslim historical writing. At the very least, an approach that highlights such continuity promises a better understanding of the source material than does the current propensity to utilize categories drawn from a modern European context.3 In order to properly understand early Muslim historical works, it is useful to first examine the contours of historical writing in late antiquity. Contemporary scholars document the prevalence of two types of historiography in this period.4 The first valued dry readings of the past that minimized personal commentary and were informed by “research.”5 Historians of this variety, such as Thucydides (d. 395 BCE), sought verifiable information through eyewitness accounts and drew on documentary evidence such as letters or official decrees.
The second (and dominant) form of late antique historiography relied on highly stylized elements and often included wondrous and fantastical details.6 This type of material is often referred to as “rhetorical historiography” because it developed under the influence of the classical schools of rhetoric.7 Historical works of this type placed primacy on narrative logic, credibility devices, and emotive persuasion.8 It was this second category of historical writing that may have exerted a particular influence on early Muslim historical writing. Before turning to the historiographical tradition, however, the narrative materials preserved in the Qur’a¯n merit some discussion. Bear in mind that the Qur’a¯n, despite its status as one of the few extant sources on early Islam datable to the seventh century CE, is not a book of history.
Its relationship to and influence on historical writing lies outside the scope of the present study.9 Even so, it is worth noting that the Qur’a¯n’s engagement with biblical stories (e.g. Abraham’s interactions with God prior to the destruction of Sodom)10 presupposes an audience’s knowledge of the larger narrative and utilizes subtle changes to make theological points (e.g. a different conception of God). In other words, the Qur’a¯n engages biblical narratives in a manner reminiscent of the rhetorical historiography of late antiquity. The example of the Qur’a¯n, though not decisive, is suggestive of the larger thesis of this book: namely, that authors of the early Muslim world held presuppositions about historical writing that resembled those of late antiquity. The identification of these presuppositions, which are never explicitly mentioned, requires a close examination of the source material.
This is, in fact, the only means for reconstructing the parameters that governed the scholarly output of early Muslim historians. It is noteworthy, then, that these historians employed literary devices and stylistic elaborations that both made a story more edifying and conveyed some type of moral lesson.11 At the same time, they wove stories into interpretive frameworks that inscribed meaning onto an event or biography. This suggests that the literary characteristics of the material – often the sole focus of modern historical studies – were only one component of a larger historical project mainly centered on interpretation.12
Early Muslim historians were influenced by classical and late antique “rhetoricized”13 historiography in a number of ways.14 First, they composed narratives with the assumption that audiences15 knew the broad contours of a given event or episode. This mirrors the approach of many late antique historians, who, for example, assumed their audience’s familiarity (in broad strokes) with certain historical narratives, such as the biography of Julius Caesar or the outline of the Punic Wars. This familiarity then allowed them to construct accounts with subtle differences that the audience could discern without difficulty. Second, historians felt authorized to endow narratives with significance and present them in an edifying form.
In other words, they produced not merely dry timelines but embellished accounts that highlighted the importance of an event through the use of literary devices such as anecdotes, poetry, letters, or speeches. The result was a meaningful rendering of the past that was deemed more truthful than a documentary recitation of figures or events.16 The key dynamic here centers on the relationship between the author’s text and the audience’s expectations. This, of course, first requires us to identify the audience for a particular text. There is scant material available on this topic for the early period but, at the very least, it is reasonable to assume an elite, educated audience from a privileged socioeconomic background potentially familiar with a shared set of source materials. Building on this assumption, Michael Cooperson argues that audiences (presumably of biographical material in the early period) authorized the embellishment of historical narratives as long as this process (i) did not disguise the narrative as a Prophetic tradition (h ˙ adı¯th) and (ii) remained within the bounds of plausibility.17 The historian remained faithfully within the epistemological borders of the discipline when he altered details, elaborated speeches, and related encounters that could have occurred in order to make a larger point.
This was an integral and accepted component in the vocation of historical writing. The description of rhetoricized historical writing presented here is not a revelation to scholars of other periods and regions. A number of studies have documented, for example, the prevalence of rhetorical elements and moralizing in premodern European historical writing.18 The most interesting parallel, however, is found in South Asian historiography, where Rao, Shulman, and Subrahmanyam have proposed an analytic model that highlights a reader’s ability to sense the “texture” of a source and thereby differentiate factual elements from interpretive embellishment based on internal markers.19 Such embellishment does not constitute an attempt at willful distortion, as the audience is perfectly capable of decoding the author’s intentions.
In other words, the audience recognizes the text not as an exact reproduction of the past, but rather as a historical narrative that plays with time, form, and content in a readily decipherable manner. Rao and his collaborators note that such historical texts are best referred to as myths “in the sense of being more deeply saturated with meaningfulness and also more creative of the reality that they purpose to describe than are other expressive modes.”20 In their discussion of the early eighteenthcentury conflict between Desingu Raja and the Nawab of Arcot, for example, they note the fluidity of a historical narrative that “may realign itself with a template of patterned mythic recurrence” which requires a “creative movement within the awareness of the observer.”21 The account retains a strong notion of “fact,” which is central to the endeavor, while remaining open to transformation.22
Many contemporary scholars of early Islam, by contrast, continue to employ literary approaches that, while revealing important structural insights, largely ignore governing presuppositions (see section II on rhetorical approaches to historical writing).
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