STUDIES IN LATE ANTIQUITY AND EARLY ISLAM “ NARRATIVES OF ISLAMIC ORIGINS THE BEGINNINGS OF ISLAMIC HISTORICAL WRITING FRED M. DONNER. THE DARWIN PRESS, INC. PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY 1998Copyright © 1998 by THE DARWIN PRESS, INC., Princeton, NJ 08543. Al rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval sys- ‘tem, or transmitted, in any form, by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without. the prior permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Donner, Fred McGraw, 1945- Narratives of Islamic orgins : the beginnings of Islamic historical writing / Fred M. Donner, p. em, ~~ (Studies in late antiquity and early Islam ; 14) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-87850-127-4 (hard cover) 1, Islanuic Empire-~622-661--Historiography. 1. Title IL. Series. DS38.16.D66 1998 909'.097671/0072-—de21 ‘The paper in this book is acid-free neutral pH stock and meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. Second Printing, 1999 Printed in the United States of America, CONTENTS Preface Introduction 1 ‘The Problem of Sources 1 Approaches to the Sources . coeeeee > Critique of the Skeptical Approach we B PART ‘The Intellectual Context of Early Islamic Historical Ws 1, The Date of the Qur’anic Text 35 The Problem . : 35 Qur'an and Hadith on Religious and Political Authority 40 Qur'an and Hadith on the Prophet's Contemporaries 46 Anachronisms in Qur'an and Hadith 7 Qur'an and Hadith on Earlier Prophets 49 Qur'an and Hadith on Muhammad Qur'an and Hadith on Prayer Qur'an and Hadith on Intercession and the Deceased 53 The Lexicon of Qur’an and Hadith ........- 55 Conclusions ........ 60 Appendix: Some Documentary Evidence «... 62 2. Barly Islamie Piety Qur'anie Piety : : ‘The Qur’an and History coecceseeeeseeees TS Survival of the Pious Tradition - 85 Documentary Evidence a os 85 Literary Evidence oo 89 ‘The Pious Tradition and History votes 4 8. Styles of Legitimation in the Early Islamic Community of Believers 98 Piety as a Form of Legitimation sieeee 9BContents Genealogical Legitimation ....... coves 104 ‘Theocratic Legitimation (Appeal to Divine Will) m Historicizing Legitimation: General Considerations 12 Historicizing Legitimation in the Islamic Tradition 14 PART II ‘The Emergence of Early Islamic Historical Writing The Contours of the Early Islamic Historiographical Tradition cotsesteteesennee 125 Introduction 125 ‘Thematic Balance in al-Tabar’s Annals 127 Other Historians’ Master Narratives 132 Memory and History + 138 ‘Themes and Issues in the Barly Islamic Narrative Tradition .. 141 ‘Themes of Prophecy _ M7 Nubiwa ... vee teeeeneee 9 Qur’an-Related Narratives . 154 ‘Themes of Community 160 Umma ~ 160 Cult and Administration ~ 166 Taxation 17 ‘Themes of Hegemony 174 Putith oes. 174 Khilafa (Caliphate) -. 182 ‘Themes of Leadership ...... cee o 184 Fitna viene ces ceeeeenee 184 Sivat al-khulafa’ ceceeees 190 Pre-Islamic Arabian History vitceeeeeeeeess 196 Pre-Islamic¢ Tran . - 198 Ridda 200 Authenticity, Transformation, and Selection of Historiographical Themes ........2...2.+. coceee 208 Contents ‘The Narrative Tradition: Themes, Continuities, and Authenticity ‘The Narrative Tradition: Historicization and Hybridization Marginal Themes and Local Historiographical Schools Medina Mecca al-Kiifa al-Bagra Yemen Egypt . Syria... : Other Marginal Themes: Apocalyptic 10. Chronology and the Development of Chronological Schemes ..... Appendix: Table of Named Years 11. Some Formal and Structural Characteristics of Early Islamic Historiography ‘The Hadith Format .... Problems of Context . Problems of Transmission ‘Topoi and Schematizations ..... Appendix: Ibn Ishiq’s Account of the Conquest of Fibl and Damascus — 12, Conclusions . [An Overview of the Growth of Barly Islamic Historiography ‘The Pre-Historicist Phase (to ca. 50 Ait) . ‘The Proto-Historicist Phase (ca. 25 Atl to ca. 100 AH!) ‘The Barly Literate Phase (ca. 75 att-ca, 150 AH) ‘The Late Literate Phase ("Classical Islamic Historiography,” ca. 125 AH-ca. 300 AN) : Some General Reflections on Early Islamic Historiography The Question of Multiple Orthodoxies Epilogue: What Became of the Classical Historiographical Tradition? Chronological List of Early Texts 203 - 209 24 219 221 222 223 223 204 26 28 230 249 255, 255, 260 263 266 272 275 275 276 276 280 et) 282 285 291 297viii Contents - 307 345, Bibliography and Abbreviations Index ... For ElviraPREFACE THERE 1S ALREADY an extensive scholarly literature on early Islamic historical writing. Much of this literature is very learned, but it always left me unsatisfied. It offered, to be sure, much factual information (and a lot of common-sense speculation) on the early development of historical writing among Muslims, but despite this, the outlines of this development never seemed to me to be sharply defined; even more important, the forces that drove this development remained murky and mysterious. After wrestling with the subject for several years, it finally dawned on me that the existing scholarship never asked why Muslims began to write history, but rather started from the assumption that even the earliest Believers had “naturally” wanted to write history, and proceeded to explain (largely on a priori grounds, since little evidence exists) how this evolution might first have begun in the early decades of the Islamic era. The more I thought about this assumption, however, the less I was inclined to agree with it, and the more I realized that ‘making it blinds us to evidence that, I believe, suggests a somewhat different picture than that usually drawn. ‘This book therefore strives to answer two questions. 1) Why (and, therefore, when) did Muslims first decide or feel impelled to write his- tory? 2) How did they proceed to elaborate their tradition of historical writing, once they had decided to undertake doing so? These two ques- tions form the basis of the two parts of the beok; Part I attempts to identify the intellectual context in which Muslims began to think and ‘write historically, while Part IT tries to sketch out the issues, themes, and (more briefly) forms of the early Islamic historiographical tradition. ‘Addressing these two questions has also required that I devote serious consideration to the value of some radically revisionist interpretations of early Islam that have appeared over the past two decades—to the extent that doing so has become a third central agenda of the book. T started research for this topic over fifteen years ago, and can only hope that readers will find the results worth the wait. (From my point of view, seeing it finally finished after so long is worthwhile almost re- gardless of the results.) ‘The long delay was partly the result of thexi Preface ‘usual complications of life and partly due to my own tendency to com- mit myself to too many things. But a more important cause of the delay was the fact that early versions of some opening chapters, drafted as Tong ago as 1982, lay idle on the shelf for years because I sensed—more subconsciously than consciously—that they were somehow not “right.” It was only many years later, around 1988, that I saw that I had ap- proached the problem from the wrong angle, alter which it became possible to make more rapid progress. I discarded the old chapters and pursued a completely new approach, one that resulted in the effort to place the rise of Islamic historiography in its intellectual context that constitutes Part I. Tam sure, of course, that even this new approach is still not exactly, and in all ways, “right”—an army of eminent reviewers will doubtless remind me of just where it falls short—but at least I feel more comfortable with this approach to the genesis of Islamic historical writing art II of this study attempts to lay out the main themes of early Islamic historical writing, following in many places the trail blazed by Albrecht Noth in his pioneering work Quellenkritische Studien zu The- ‘men, Formen, und Tendenzen frithislamischer Geschichtsiberlicferung (Bonx, 1973)—now available in a revised English translation (with Law- rence I. Conrad) as The Barly Arabic Historical Tradition: @ Source- Critical Study (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1994). However. forcing any of the products of human creativity, such as the historical accounts treated here, into neat categories is at best an inexact science; some- times, indeed, it is so much so, and so possibly misleading, that one questions whether the undertaking is worth the effort. Inevitably, the categories one chooses turn out to be fuzzy around the edges, or bleed into one another, or viewed in a different light can be seen to be in some ways variants of one another. I have tried to confront this prob- Jem head-on in various ways, particularly by introducing the concept of “hybridization” in Chapter 9, but frankly this seems to me to offer only an indifferent remedy to the problem. I can only hope that; read- crs will keep in mind the taxonomic indeterminacy of much of life and human endeavor, and be charitable, It goes without saying that in a number of places my categorizations and those of Noth, the only other person who has attempted such a categorization, do not always tally. While some of this may be simply a matter of differing perceptions, Preface xiii I think that Noth has based his categories (themes) more strictly on {formal considerations, whereas my themes are defined mainly by the ‘motivations or interests that, I believe, contributed to the articulation of each. Over the long time that I have been working on this book, I have been assisted in various ways by many individuals and organizations. My most basic debt is to countless colleagues with whom, over the years, I discussed some aspect of the problem of early Islamic historical ‘writing, and from whom I have learned much; I despair of recalling, ‘a; one time, all their names, and beg the forgiveness of those whom I ‘unfairly slight by neglecting to mention them here, but wish to men- tion at least Lawrence I. Conrad (The Wellcome Institute, London), Patricia Crone (formerly Oxford and Cambridge, now at the Insti tute for Advanced Study, Princeton), Maribel Fierro (CSIC, Madrid), Gautier Juynboll (Leiden), Walter E. Kaegi (University of Chicago), Ella Landau-Tasseron (The Hebrew University, Jerusalem), Chase F. Robinson (Oxford University), Wadad al-Qadi (University of Chicago), Ridwan al-Sayyid (Lebanese University), and Donald Whitcomb (Uni- versity of Chicago). Inevitably, I Jearned of some recent publications too late to incorporate them in the present work; readers should note especially the valuable long review essay by Chase F. Robinson, “The Study of Islamic Historiography: a Progress Report,” JRAS (1997), and the volume of essays edited by Hugh Kennedy, Al-Tabari: the Life and Works of a Medieval Muslim Historian (Princeton: Darwin Press, forthcoming). I thank Dr. Robinson for sending mea copy of the proofs of the former. Talso owe a great debt to many colleagues, at the University of Chicago and elsewhere, who over the past several years have read drafts of various chapters or of the whole book and offered valuable sugges- tions for improvement, or who have listened to me talk about it and offered the encouragement that is often the decisive factor in whether a book is written or not. Among these I should like to give pride of place to a number of fine doctoral students (or former students) at the University of Chicago: Paul M. Cobb (now at Wake Forest Univer- sity), Marion H. Katz (now at Mt. Holyoke College), Khaled Keshk, Kathryn M. Kueny (now at Lawrence University), Katherine H. Lang (now at University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire), Stuert D. Sears (now at