Download PDF | Tarif Khalidi - Islamic Historiography_ The Histories of Mas'udi-State University of New York Press (1975).
206 Pages
INTRODUCTION
This work is a study of al-Mas'üdî, a major figure in Muslim historical writing of the Middle Ages. It was motivated in part by the high regard in which the Muslim scholarly community has held him and by the relatively small number of studies on Muslim historiography in general. Mas‘üdï was an Iraqi historian of the tenth century who lived in Egypt for the greater part of his working life and traversed the length and breadth of the Muslim empire and beyond. He belonged to a new school of historiography which numbered among its ranks men like al-Mutahhar ibn Tahir al-Maqdisï and Ibn Miskawayhi.
This school of historians was concerned with the broader theoretical implications of their field of study and may be said to have in part prepared the way for Ibn Khaldün. some four centuries later. From its earliest origins, Muslim historiography had maintained a close relationship with the other religious sciences in Islam, particularly Tradition or Hadïth. The two disciplines fed from the same source, that is, the early history of the Muslim community, so that the work of some of the early historians of Islam is at times almost indistinguishable from Tradition. But Tradition soon became technical in the sense that it came to concentrate increasingly upon the sayings and doings of the Prophet, whereas historiography expanded its domain in both space and time. This parting of the ways may be dated roughly to the early ninth century, when the newly founded cities of Iraq began to prosper in the heart of a vast Abbasid Empire and a commercial network linked this empire eastward to China and westward to the British Isles. This multinational Empire bred problems on a new scale to both the scholar and the administrator.
The Muslim scholar was faced with cultures, nations and creeds which challenged him, sometimes tacitly and sometimes explicitly, to justify the truth of his faith. In fact, the ninth century may be called the Age of the Great Debate in Muslim intellectual history. The sources of the period preserve some of these debates between the Muslims and the non-Muslims. At every turn, the Muslim scholar had to refine his polemical skills, to delve into the history and dogma of his enemies and, of course, to answer the critics of his own community. The administrator, on the other hand, wanted guidance in the increasingly complex affairs of state, and history itself was often the only guide to precedent. For both scholar and administrator, secular history was essential. Tradition, however, became the preserve of the more conservative Muslim scholars. Working within the logic of their own discipline, with time they concerned themselves less with polemics and cultural challenges and more with the transmission of an accurate record of the res gestae of the Prophet, whose status was enhanced by the passage of years.
Polemical theology became suspect to this type of scholar, and philosophy and science were, at best, irrelevant. The resulting tension between the Traditionists and their opponents, the “Modernists,” is reflected in Mas‘öd! as well as other scholars of the Middle Ages. Many of the Modernist historians, theologians and scientists felt that Tradition was a field which lacked logical rigor. It was, so to speak, the soft underbelly of the Muslim faith, through which atheists, charlatans, and other enemies of Islam could infiltrate the minds of the simple folk and corrupt their hearts. It was precisely from this standpoint that a historian like alMutahhar ibn Tahir al-Maqdisï wrote his Kitab al-Bad3 wa'l Ta’rikh. He wanted to establish as accurate a record as possible of the history of the community and of near-by nations and to provide his reader with a rational theological guide which would enable him to protect himself against dangerous allegorization of, or insidious attacks upon, the cosmology and eschatology of the faith.
The Modernists strove to come to terms with “wisdom,” that is the Greek, Indian, and Persian corpus of philosophy and science, and to adapt therefrom whatever was suitable for the strengthening of the rational foundations of Islam. The historians among them dropped not only the methodology and style of Tradition but also its horizons. New themes were broached, such as Byzantine and Indian history. New ways were sought to present an accurate and readable account of the external physical world as well as its history. For this reason, some combined geography with history and felt that the history of man could not be completed without at least some account of the environment in which this history unfolds. It is not unlikely that some, Ya‘qüb! for example, fell under the influence of the Greek classification of the sciences and therefore gave a portrait, roughly historical in character, of each of these sciences to round out the history of man himself. It is to this category of Modernist historians that Mas‘udl belongs, and his work grew out of the intellectual turmoil of the Age of the Great Debate. Historians may be studied meaningfully in either of two ways. One can either determine their general reliability as sources or one can, as in the present study, attempt to determine their view of history and its theoretical foundations, to rethink their thoughts, as R.G. Collingwood1 might phrase it.
The present study is not concerned so much with the life and works of Mas'üdï as with rethinking his thoughts. He is in many respects the most readable and fascinating of Muslim historians. His easy style and frequent digressions have led many of his readers, both ancient and modern, to regard him as little more than a delightful raconteur. This study, on the contrary, was undertaken in the belief that Mas‘üdï was one of the earliest Muslim historians to reflect thoughtfully on the method and purpose of history. The most frustrating obstacle which faces the student of Mas‘üdï is the loss of his more theoretical works on history and the sciences, where his observations are set forth in greater detail, and to which he so frequently refers his reader. But this obstacle has been set aside in this study in the belief that, in his extant works, Mas‘üdï provides his reader with enough clues to his thinking to warrant the attempt to understand and analyze it. Intellectually, Mas'üdî was encyclopaedic. A reconstruction of the contents of his lost works from the references he makes to them (see Appendix B) reveals him to have been interested in almost all the sciences of his day, both philosophic and natural.
He was also a tireless traveller who seems to have taken a keen interest in all that he saw and heard of the marvels of the world, so much so in fact, that some later books of marvels were fathered upon him. To many of these marvels and physical phenomena he attempted to apply some of the scientific principles and explanations which he had learnt from the Graeco-Muslim philosophical and scientific tradition. But Mas‘üdî was also a sectarian Muslim, a Twelver Shï‘ite who seems to have accepted at face value the theosophical theology and cosmology of Shï‘ism which taught, among other things, the continuity of divine inspiration among the Prophet’s progeny, the twelve imams. Theology co-existed peacefully with Greek and Indian philosophy and science. To explain this co-existence, one would need to review the history of the relationship between Reason and Revelation in Islam, a task beyond the scope of this study. How a Muslim historian like Mas‘üdî tackled this problem needs a brief explanation. Historians like Ya‘qübï, Dînawari, Maqdisi and Mas‘üdî faced a corpus of history, both pre-and non-Islamie, to which they had to evolve a certain attitude, particularly since some of this preIslamic history was found in the Koran. To one side stood the Traditionists who, while practising an inner criticism of matn and isnady often allowed into the corpus of Hadïth, and thus into the religion itself, stories and commentaries which were of a legendary or supernatural character.
This laxity was not mental laziness but was born of the desire to stress the omnipotence of God or the miraculous nature of prophecy. To another side stood the small circle of Muslim philosophers and scientists, best represented in this context by Muhammad ibn Zakariyyâ al-Râzï, who continued the Greek philosophical and scientific tradition and often came close to denying prophecy itself, certainly its miraculous aspect. In the middle stood the polemical theologians, primarily the Mu‘tazilites, who attempted, in general, to steer a middle course between faith and philosophy, to find rational grounds for belief in God and prophecy but to limit the sphere of the miraculous within the narrower confines of the laws of nature. Maqdisi, a Mu‘tazilite historian, condemns Räzi in one place for his rejection of miracles but refers his readers to the works of Râzï for a better understanding of the natural characteristics of the physical universe. Mas‘üdï too, while not, strictly speaking, a Mu‘tazilite, would have found no necessary contradiction between a belief in the theosophy of Shï‘ism and the “miraculous” intervention of God on behalf of the family of ‘All on the one hand and a belief in the systematic and rational ordering of the universe understobd within the Graeco-Indian philosophical tradition on the other.
The charge of credulity levelled so often against Mas‘üdï must also be seen in this light, viz. that belief in natural law did not necessarily exclude belief in the Divine breaking of that law, often for reasons known only to the Divinity. These are some of the major themes of this study. The study itself is divided into five chapters. In chapter 1, an attempt is made to describe Mas'üdï’s literary affinities, sources and style. Mas‘üdï used his sources carefully and criticized or commended previous historians for reasons which had to do with his own conception of a historian’s responsibilities : accuracy, originality, and concision. This reflects itself in his views on belles lettres ( adab) where he championed the “moderns” in their fight against the supremacy of the “ancients” because he recognized that the moderns represented an originality of thought which was not confined to the realm of belles lettres.
In chapter 2, an attempt is made to describe his reflections on historical method and the bases of these reflections and views. Mas'üdî was influenced by the method of the natural scientists and consequently emphasized the importance of continued research and critical inquiry •into the causes of events. But some attention will also be devoted to the limitations of this method and to the question of fables and natural oddities, which have often disturbed his critical readers. In chapter 3, I try to discover how Mas‘üdï dealt with such issues as man’s place in the universe, the activity of God in history and the growth and development of societies. Certain themes and patterns recur which seem to indicate that Mas‘üdï chose an encyclopaedic form for his histories because he believed that man could not be studied meaningfully except within the context of his place in his environment.
Chapters 4 and 5, devoted respectively to the pre-Islamic nations and Islam, seek to apply the conclusions reached earlier to his treatment of these two subjects. Appendix A provides the fragments of a biography, while Appendix B seeks to reconstruct the contents of his lost works from references and citations found in Mas'üdî’s extant works. Muslim historiography of the Middle Ages is a field of immense richness which has received little attention from Arabists and Islamicists. It is hoped that this study of a major Muslim historian would, with all its short-comings, prove to be of some interest in a terra which is, in many respects, almost incognita.
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