A Holy Heretical Body Ala B. Ubayd Al

ADAM BURSI
Hill Museum and Manuscript Library
A Holy Heretical Body

T ̣alh ̣a b. ʿUbayd Allāh’s Corpse and Early Islamic Sectarianism
ABSTRACT Between the seventh and ninth centuries C.E., different Muslim sectarian groups
fashioned their respective communal identities through differing rituals, narratives, and concep-
tions of Islamic history. This article explores these early Islamic divisions through the lens of
literary depictions of, and rituals involving, a strongly potent object within the late antique world:
a holy person’s corpse, in this case that of the prominent early Muslim Ṭalh ̣a b. ʿUbayd Allāh.
A Companion of the Prophet Muh ̣ammad, Ṭalh ̣a had a contested legacy among different
Muslim groups, being venerated by Sunnīs and vilified by the Shīʿa and Khārijīs. These contesting
conceptions of Ṭalh ̣a are reflected in the variable images of T ̣alh ̣a’s body after his death that
appear within early Islamic texts: while some stories portray T ̣alh ̣a as a saintly martyr whose
body lay incorrupt in his grave, others depict T ̣alh ̣a as a decaying corpse disintegrating in the dirt.
Standing in vivid contrast to one another, these variant representations of T ̣alh ̣a’s body exemplify
early Muslims’ usages of the foundational narratives of Islamic history to make competing claims
about politico-religious leadership and community. Yet the sectarian significance of T ̣alh ̣a’s body
was exhibited not only in texts, but was also ritually enacted through worship at T ̣alh ̣a’s grave.
A site of prayer and miracles, T ̣alh ̣a’s grave emerged as a proto-Sunnī counterpoint to the tombs
of other holy persons visited and venerated by the Shīʿa and Khārijīs. The stories and rituals
involving Ṭalh ̣a b. ʿUbayd Allāh’s body demonstrate how Islamic communal identity was mapped
onto this Companion’s corpse. KEYWORDS Early Islam, hagiography, relics, tombs, sectarian
communities
At the end of his epochal “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late
Antiquity,” Peter Brown cites a papyrus text that “sums up both the late antique
This paper was presented at the  Annual Meeting of the American Oriental Society and at the
University of Tennessee’s Late Antiquity Seminar. I thank both groups for their suggestions and am
grateful to Kim Haines-Eitzen, David S. Powers, Tina Shepardson, Alison Vacca, and the anonymous
reviewers for their comments on previous versions. All errors are my own.
Studies in Late Antiquity, Vol. , Number , pps. –. electronic ISSN -. ©  by the Regents
of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or
reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page,
www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/./sla.....
147
revolution and its untold consequences.”1 This document—a bilingual Greek
and Arabic protocol from the late first/seventh century—includes the Islamic
shahāda, the assertion both of the oneness of God and of Muh ̣ammad’s identity
as God’s messenger.2 As Brown seems to imply, this emphasis on both “One
God and His man” well situates early Islam within the larger world of Late
Antiquity, a period characterized by diverse forms of veneration of holy persons.
Similar to the saints of other late antique monotheistic traditions, the Prophet
Muh ̣ammad emerged within early Islam as a holy person par excellence, “a kind
of supersaint.”3 In addition to his identity as the recipient of the Qur’anic reve-
lation and the model (sunna) for Islamic ritual performance,4 Muh ̣ammad’s
holiness was enacted by early Muslims in the stories of miracles that appear in
his earliest biographies,5 visitations to his tomb and related spaces in Mecca
and Medina,6 and rituals involving his corporeal and non-corporeal relics.7
Veneration of Muh ̣ammad was central to early Islamic sacred history and
. Peter Brown, “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity,” Journal of Roman
Studies  (): –.
. C. H. Becker, “Das Lateinische in den arabischen Papyrusprotokollen,” Zeitschrift für Assyriologie
und verwandte Gebiete  (): –. Dates given correspond to the Islamic Hijrī calendar and to
the Common Era.
. Frederick M. Denny, “Prophet and Walī: Sainthood in Islam,” in Sainthood: Its Manifestations
in World Religions, ed. Richard Kieckhefer and George D. Bond (Berkeley: University of California
Press, ), .
. Joseph E. Lowry, “The Prophet as Lawgiver and Legal Authority,” in The Cambridge Companion
to Muh ̣ammad, ed. Johnathan E. Brockopp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –.
. M. J. Kister, “The Sīrah Literature,” in Arabic Literature to the End of the Umayyad Period, ed.
A. F. L. Beeston, T. M. Johnstone, R. B. Serjeant, and G. R. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, ), –; Gordon E. Newby, “Imitating Muhammad in Two Genres: Mimesis and Problems
of Genre in Sîrah and Sunnah,” Medieval Encounters . (): –.
. Miklos Muranyi, “The Emergence of Holy Places in Early Islam: On the Prophet’s Track,”
Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam  (): –; Harry Munt, The Holy City of Medina: Sacred
Space in Early Islamic Arabic (New York: Cambridge University Press, ); Leor Halevi,
Muhammad’s Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society (New York: Columbia University
Press, ); Finbarr B. Flood, “Light in Stone: The Commemoration of the Prophet in Umayyad
Architecture,” in Bayt al-Maqdis: Jerusalem and Early Islam, ed. Jeremy Johns (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, ), –.
. Brannon M. Wheeler, Mecca and Eden: Ritual, Relics, and Territory in Islam (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, ), –; Josef W. Meri, The Cult of Saints Among Muslims and
Jews in Medieval Syria (New York: Oxford University Press, ); Finbarr B. Flood, “Bodies and
Becoming: Mimesis, Mediation, and the Ingestion of the Sacred in Christianity and Islam,” in
Sensational Religion: Sensory Cultures in Material Practice, ed. Sally M. Promey (New Haven: Yale
University Press, ), –; Adam Bursi, “A Hair’s Breadth: The Prophet Muhammad’s Hair as
Relic in Early Islamic Texts,” in Religious Competition in the Greco-Roman World, ed. Nathaniel P.
DesRosiers and Lily C. Vuong (Atlanta: SBL Press, ), –; Tayeb El-Hibri, “The Abbasids
and the Relics of the Prophet,” Journal of Abbasid Studies  (): –.
148 STUDIES IN LATE ANTIQUITY SUMMER 2018

practice in ways comparable to the roles of sacred persons within other late
antique monotheisms.8
However, Muh ̣ammad was far from the only saintly figure pivotal to early
Islamic narrative and ritual. Veneration of the caliph ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib and his
descendants, especially his martyred son al-Ḥusayn, were defining traits within
emergent Shīʿī Islam, with pilgrimage to al-Ḥusayn’s tomb at Karbalāʾ in Iraq
developing as a central sign of Shīʿī identity already in the second/eighth
century.9 Within proto-Sunnī Islam,10 the early followers of the Prophet
Muh ̣ammad—his “Companions” (sah ̣ ̣āba)—similarly emerged as figures who,
“not divine themselves, were nonetheless holy people.”11 As with Muh ̣ammad
and the Shīʿī imāms, veneration of the Companions manifested in several
forms, including in hagiographical literature that portrayed them as “saintly and
military heroes,” and in visitation of their tombs throughout the Near East.12
Positive conceptions of the Prophet’s Companions were not, however, uni-
versally shared among early Muslims, and questions of individual Companions’
holiness or uprightness were tied to definitions of, and divisions within, the
Islamic community. Describing the formation of sectarian groups within early
Islam, Scott Lucas writes that the divisions between these groups “arose out of
. On veneration of holy persons in late antique Judaism, see: Raʿanan Boustan, “Jewish Veneration
of the ‘Special Dead’ in Late Antiquity and Beyond,” in Saints and Sacred Matter: The Cult of Relics in
Byzantium and Beyond, ed. Cynthia Hahn and Holger A. Klein (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks,
), –.
. Najam Haider, The Origins of the Shī‘a: Identity, Ritual, and Sacred Space in Eighth-Century
Kūfa (New York: Cambridge University Press, ), –; Antoine Borrut, “Remembering
Karbalāʾ: The Construction of an Early Islamic Site of Memory,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and
Islam  (): –.
. On the term “proto-Sunnī” and the emergence of Sunnism, see: Muhammad Qasim Zaman,
Religion and Politics under the Early ʿAbbāsids: The Emergence of the Proto-Sunnī Elite (Leiden: Brill,
), –; W. Montgomery Watt, The Formative Period of Islamic Thought (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, ), –; A. Kevin Reinhart, “On Sunni Sectarianism,” Living Islamic History:
Studies in Honor of Professor Carole Hillenbrand, ed. Yasir Suleiman (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, ), –; Matthew J. Kuiper, “The Roots and Achievements of the Early
Proto-Sunni Movement: A Profile and Interpretation,” Muslim World  (): –.
. Nancy Khalek, “‘He Was Tall and Slender, and His Virtues Were Numerous’: Byzantine
Hagiographical Topoi and the Companions of Muh ̣ammad in al-Azdī’s Futūh ̣ al-Shām,” in Writing
‘True Stories’: Historians and Hagiographers in the Late Antique and Early Medieval Near East, ed.
Arietta Papaconstantinou, Muriel Debié, and Hugh Kennedy (Turnhout: Brepols, ), .
. Khalek, “He Was Tall,” ; Nancy Khalek, Damascus after the Muslim Conquest: Text
and Image in Early Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –; Nancy Khalek, “Medieval
Muslim Martyrs to the Plague: Venerating the Companions of Muhammad in the Jordan Valley,” in
Hahn and Klein, Saints and Sacred Matter, –. Compare this with the opposition to such practices
that later emerged among Sunnīs: Meri, Cult of Saints, ff.
Bursi | A Holy Heretical Body 149

irreconcilable historiographies rather than theologies.”13 In large part these dif-
ferent historiographies hinged upon divergent interpretations of, and narratives
about, the Companions’ actions in the years following the Prophet’s death,
the events of which were core to “the distinctive identities of various groups
(parties, sects) within the Islamic community.”14 Indeed, utilizing Margaret
Somers’ work, Adam Gaiser and Thomas Sizgorich have drawn attention to the
important part that these foundational narratives played in early Muslims’ def-
initions of their communal identities, in terms both of intra-Muslim sectarian
debates and of early Muslims’ (dis)identification with Jews and Christians.15
In this article, I explore the effects of these sectarian disagreements on early liter-
ary representations of a Prophetic Companion about whom early Muslim groups
distinctly disagreed: Ṭalh ̣a b. ʿUbayd Allāh, a Meccan convert to Islam who immi-
grated with the Muslim community to Medina in /. For Sunnīs, Shīʿīs, as well
as Khārijīs, Ṭalh ̣a was a controversial figure. Alongside the Prophet’s wife ʿĀʾisha bt.
Abī Bakr and the Companion al-Zubayr b. al-ʿAwwām, Ṭalh ̣a launched a challenge
to the caliphate of ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib, an uprising that culminated in the Battle of
the Camel near Basrạ in southern Iraq in /, at which Ṭalh ̣a and al-Zubayr
were both killed.16 Within Islamic historiography, this rebellion—known as the
First Fitna or Civil War—appears as a central point of contestation and embarrass-
ment, as it found the Prophet’s Companions battling against one another over
the right to lead the Islamic community. As Josef van Ess summarizes, “The crux in
explaining the events was that those who had killed each other during the first
Fitna gradually became, as sah ̣ ̣āba, the model for future generations. They had
sinned. How should one put up with this fact?”17
Reflecting the different answers to this question reached by Sunnīs, Shīʿīs, and
Khārijīs, Ṭalh ̣a’s reputation within Islamic biographical and historical texts is a
mixed and complicated one, with his alternating rehabilitation and vilification by
different Muslim groups. I suggest that these sectarian perspectives manifest
. Scott C. Lucas, Constructive Critics, Ḥadīth Literature, and the Articulation of Sunnī Islam: The
Legacy of the Generation of Ibn Saʻd, Ibn Maʻīn, and Ibn Ḥanbal (Leiden: Brill, ), .
. Fred M. Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins: The Beginnings of Islamic Historical Writing
(Princeton: Darwin Press, ), .
. Adam Gaiser, “A Narrative Identity Approach to Islamic Sectarianism,” in Sectarianization:
Mapping the New Politics of the Middle East, ed. Nader Hashemi and Danny Postel (New York:
Oxford University Press, ), –; Thomas Sizgorich, Violence and Belief in Late Antiquity:
Militant Devotion in Christianity and Islam (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ).
. Encyclopaedia of Islam, rd ed., s.v. “Camel, Battle of the” (Najam Haider).
. Josef van Ess, “Political Ideas in Early Islamic Religious Thought,” British Journal of Middle
Eastern Studies . (): .

within early texts in the variable guise of a highly potent symbol: Ṭalh ̣a b. ʿUbayd
Allāh’s dead body.18 Following his death at the Battle of the Camel, Ṭalh ̣a’s
corpse was buried in Basra, ̣ where its narrativized experience was nearly as variable
as were the perspectives on his character. Some reports (akhbār, sing. khabar)
draw upon late antique hagiographic topoi to present Ṭalh ̣a as a martyr whose
saintly body lay undecayed in his grave; conversely, other reports depict the decay
of Ṭalh ̣a as he disintegrates in the dirt. I argue that these variant representations
of Ṭalh ̣a’s corpse embody the politico-religious divisions among the Muslims
who composed and transmitted these histories in the second/eighth and third/
ninth centuries. The divergent reports about Ṭalh ̣a b. ʿUbayd Allāh’s death, burial,
and afterlife demonstrate how sectarian arguments about Islamic sacred history
and communal identity were narratively mapped onto this Companion’s corpse.
These differing conceptions of Ṭalh ̣a and his role in Islamic communal his-
tory were not only embodied in narratives, but were also enacted by early
Muslims through ritual performances of sectarian identity and memory.
Stories of the discovery and reburial of Ṭalh ̣a’s miraculously undecayed corpse
overlap in our sources with reports of second/eighth- and third/ninth-century
Muslims praying and receiving miracles at Ṭalh ̣a’s grave in Basra. ̣ Here—much
like at other late antique pilgrimage locations—narrative, ritual, and space inter-
acted in the creation of an early Islamic “site of memory” that commemorated
the death and burial of one of the Prophet’s prominent Companions.19 Yet the
narrative offered by Ṭalh ̣a’s tomb was a potentially divisive one: I suggest that
Ṭalh ̣a’s symbolic value as a participant in the Civil War against ʿAlī allowed his
tomb to stand as a proto-Sunnī counterpoint in Basrạ to the devotional spaces
of other early Islamic sects that emerged in second/eighth-century Iraq. Just as
Shīʿīs and Khārijīs memorialized their sacred histories at ritual sites in Iraq,
. A classic exploration of the ways that “symbols based on the human body are used to express
different social experiences” is: Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (New
York: Vintage, ), vii. Examples of these insights used in the study of martyrdom and saints’
bodies in Late Antiquity include: Judith Perkins, The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation
in the Early Christian Era (London: Routledge, ); Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of
the Body in Western Christianity, – (New York: Columbia University Press, ); Elizabeth
A. Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (New York: Columbia
University Press, ); Sizgorich, Violence and Belief. For an overview of scholarship, see: Elizabeth
A. Castelli, “The Body,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Mediterranean Religions, ed.
Barbette Stanley Spaeth (New York: Cambridge University Press, ).
. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les lieux de mémoire,” Representations  ():
–; Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, trans. Francis J. Ditter, Jr. and Vida Yazdi Ditter
(New York: Harper Colophon, ), –; Maurice Halbwachs, La topographie légendaire des
évangiles en terre saint. Étude de mémoire collective (Paris: PUF, ).

proto-Sunnīs developed Ṭalh ̣a’s tomb in Basrạ to practice their own version of
Islamic communal history and memory.
Ṭ A L Ḥ A ’ S I N C O R R U P T I B L E B O D Y A N D L A T E A N T I Q U E H A G I O G R A P H I C
DISCOURSE
Developing in closely adjacent oral, literary, and cultural environments to those

that produced late antique stories of Christian and Jewish holy men and
women, early Islamic texts exhibit clear engagement with the ideas about, and
characterizations of, sacred figures that circulated among these other late an-
tique religious communities.20 Early Islamic literary representations of prophets,
imāms, and martyrs often exhibit clear echoes of the hagiographic characteris-
tics displayed within Jewish and Christian texts by saints, patriarchs, and rabbis.
Among such shared manifestations of holiness is the incorruptibility of holy
persons’ dead bodies: within late antique texts, the holy person’s corpse often
shows no signs of death, looking as though it is simply sleeping and exuding
sweet odors rather than the stench of death.21 A notable adaptation of these late
antique topoi occurs in several descriptions of the discovery of Ṭalh ̣a b. ʿUbayd
Allāh’s corpse, uncovered free from decay following his death at the Battle of
the Camel. Drawing upon several features of the late antique hagiographic dis-
course, these narratives create an early Islamic version of a relic invention, “an
important aspect of the developing cult of the saints.”22
. On the relationship between late antique hagiography and early sīra and h ̣adīth literature, see:
Gordon D. Newby, “An Example of Coptic Literary Influence on Ibn Ish ̣āq’s Sīrah,” Journal of Near
Eastern Studies . (): –; Khalek, “He was Tall”; Richard Bell, The Origin of Islam in Its
Christian Environment (London: Cass, ), ; Josef Horovitz, “The Growth of the Mohammed
Legend,” Muslim World  (): .
. For studies of this phenomenon not specific to late antique evidence, see: Michel Bouvier, “De
l’incorruptibilité des corps saints,” in Les miracles, miroirs des corps, ed. Jacques Gélis and Odile Redon
(Paris: Presses et Publications de l’Université de Paris-VIII, ), –; Caroline Walker Bynum,
“Bodily Miracles and the Resurrection of the Body in the High Middle Ages,” in Belief in History:
Innovative Approaches to European and American Religion, ed. Thomas Kselman (Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, ), –; Bynum, Resurrection of the Body, –; Cynthia
Turner Camp, “The Temporal Excesses of Dead Flesh,” postmedieval  (): –; Robert
Bartlett, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the
Reformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), –. For late antique debates on the
(in)corruptibility of Christ’s body, see: Yonatan Moss, Incorruptible Bodies: Christology, Society, and
Authority in Late Antiquity (Oakland: University of California Press, ). On the pleasant aromas
of saintly corpses, see: Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the
Olfactory Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, ).
. Paul C. Dilley, “The Invention of Christian Tradition: ‘Apocrypha,’ Imperial Policy, and Anti-
Jewish Propaganda,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies  (): .

Christian texts from across the late antique Mediterranean world include
descriptions of saints’ bodies that display no decay after their deaths. In his
homily On Theodore, for example, the fourth-century bishop Gregory of
Nyssa states that Theodore’s martyred body “is in many respects different from
other bodies: it was not dissolved by the death that happens to everybody,
though it is composed from similar matter.”23 The special nature of saintly bod-
ies is often dramatically conveyed by the discovery (or inventio) of a holy person
who, though long dead, looks “as though he had died that very day” (ὡς σήμερον
τελειωθείς).24 An early example appears in the fifth-century Latin Life of
Ambrose, which describes the discovery of the ancient martyr Nazarius’s body,
covered in blood “as fresh as if it had just been shed,” with his decapitated head
“entire and incorrupt [integrum atque incorruptum], still with its hair and
beard.”25 In a later case, the Syriac biography of the seventh-century bishop of
Qartmin Mār Gabriel relates that when Gabriel’s corpse was uncovered some
 years after his death, “The hair of his body, his flesh, and his beard were all
preserved.”26 Descriptions of similarly uncorrupted bodies are found in the biog-
raphies of many other famous Christian holy men from across the Mediterranean
world, such as Symeon Stylites in Syria,27 Sabas in Palestine,28 and Cuthbert in
England.29
. Gregory of Nyssa, In Theodorum; Johannes P. Cavarnos, Gregorii Nysseni Opera Vol. X, Tomus
. Sermones Pars II (Leiden: Brill, ), ; trans. in Johan Leemans, Wendy Mayer, Pauline Allen, and
Boudewijn Dehandschutter, ‘Let Us Die That We May Live’: Greek Homilies on Christian Martyrs from
Asia Minor, Palestine and Syria (c. AD –AD ) (London: Routledge, ), .
. Pratum spirituale ,  (Patrologia Graeca :); John Moschos, The Spiritual Meadow,
trans. John Wortley (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, ), , .
. Paulinus of Milan, Vita Ambrosii,  (Patrologia Latina :).
. Life of Gabriel of Qartmin, ; ed. and
trans. in Andrew N. Palmer, “A Critical Edition and Annotated Translation of the Qartmin
Trilogy,” microfiche supplement to Monk and Mason on the Tigris Frontier: The Early History of Ṭur
ʿAbdin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), xci. On the text’s date, see: Palmer, Monk
and Mason, , –.
. Evagrius Scholasticus, Historia ecclesiastica .; trans. Michael Whitby, The Ecclesiastical History
of Evagrius Scholasticus (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, ), ; H. Lietzmann, Das Leben des
heiligen Symeon Stylites (Leipzig: Hinrichs, ), ; trans. Robert Doran, The Lives of Simeon Stylites
(Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, ), .
. Cyril of Scythopolis, Vita Sabae, –; Eduard Schwartz, Kyrillos von Skythopolis (Leipzig: J.C.
Heinrich, ), –; trans. R. M. Price, Lives of the Monks of Palestine (Kalamazoo: Cistercian,
), –.
. Vita sancti Cuthberti auctore anonymo, ; Bede, Vita sancti Cuthberti, ; Bertram Colgrave,
ed. and trans., Two Lives of St. Cuthbert: A Life by an Anonymous Monk of Lindisfarne and Bede’s
Prose Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), – and –.

Late ancient Jewish sources also refer to the incorruptible bodies of several
holy personages.30 Rabbinic midrash presents invulnerability to decay as part of
the paradisiacal state of humanity’s original creation “in God’s image”: for exam-
ple, in a list of the changes that Adam experienced with his expulsion from Eden,
the Abot de Rabbi Nathan states that one of Adam’s new attributes is that “the
worm and maggot will have power over him” ( ).31 Several
biblical patriarchs and matriarchs’ bodies are similarly characterized in a tradi-
tion of the Babylonian Talmud, which states that “our rabbis taught that there
were seven over whom the worms had no power, and they were Abraham,
Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Aaron, Miriam, and Benjamin son of Jacob.”32 In Sifre
Deuteronomy, Rabbi Eliezer b. Jacob maintains that Moses’ undecayed state
continues into the present, saying that “if anyone should touch the flesh of
Moses, its natural force would even now spring forth in all directions.”33
While rabbinic sources most often associate such corporeal incorruptibility with
biblical figures, some stories also depict Rabbi Eleazar b. Rabbi Shimon’s corpse
similarly surviving for years impervious to “the worms” and even producing fresh
blood when hair is plucked from the rabbi’s head.34
. It is possible that these rabbinic representations are related to the emergence “toward the end of
late antiquity, of a new legal (halakhic) principle that the bodies of Israel’s deceased ‘righteous’ do not
confer impurity,” a development itself seemingly connected to Jewish-Christian dialogues: Boustan,
“Jewish Veneration,” –; Israel M. Ta-Shma, “The Righteous Do Not Defile – On Halakha and
Aggada,” Jewish Studies, An Internet Journal  (): – (Hebrew).
. Abot R. Nat. (Version B) ; Salomon Schechter, ed., Aboth de Rabbi Nathan (Hildesheim and
New York: Georg Olms, ), –; trans. Anthony J. Saldarini, The Fathers According to Rabbi
Nathan (Abot de Rabbi Nathan) Version B: A Translation and Commentary (Leiden: Brill, ),
. Alternatively, Genesis Rabbah asserts that humanity continued to exhibit invulnerability to decay
for one more generation after Adam, for it was only in the time of Enosh that “the dead began to
beget worms” ( ). Genesis Rabbah ., .; J. Theodor and Ch. Albeck, Bereshit
Rabba mit kritischem Apparat und Kommentar, nd printing,  vols. (Jerusalem: Wahrmann Books,
), , ; trans. H. Freedman, Midrash Rabbah: Genesis,  vols. (London: Soncino, ),
:, . I thank Steven Fraade for these references.
. b. B.
Bat. a. This is the text found in MS Paris Bibliothèque nationale de France, Suppl. Heb. , fol. r
and (with slight variants) in MS Vatican, Bibliotheca Apostolica , Ebr. , fol. v and MS Munich,
Cod. Hebr. , fol. v.
. Sifre Deut. . L. Finkelstein, Siphre ad Deuteronomium H. S. Horovitzii schedis usis cum variis
lectionibus et adnotationibus (Berlin: Abteilung Verlag ), ; trans. Reuven Hammer, Sifre: A
Tannaitic Commentary on the Book of Deuteronomy (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), .
A similar tradition appears in D. Hoffman, Midrasch Tannaim zum Deuteronomium aus der in
Königlichen Bibliothek zu Berlin befindlichen Handschrift des “Midrasch haggadol” gesammelt und mit
Anmerkungen versehen,  vols. (Berlin: Druck von H. Itzkowski, –), :.
. b. B. Mes. ̣ b–b; Pesiqta de Rab Kahana :. See: Jeffrey L. Rubenstein, “A Rabbinic
Translation of Relics,” in Crossing Boundaries in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity: Ambiguities,

Emerging in dialogue with these late antique conceptions of holy persons’
sanctity, early Islamic texts similarly present the unchanging corpses of certain
persons as evidence of the righteousness and sacred status of these individuals.
Paralleling the Talmud’s ascription of invulnerability to the biblical patriarchs,
a h ̣adīth from the Prophet Muh ̣ammad states, “God has forbidden the earth to
eat the bodies of the prophets,” “prophet” being the category in which Islamic
tradition places many of these same biblical figures.35 A concrete example of this
doctrine appears in a story set in the period of the Islamic conquest of Iraq and
Persia in the s/s: inside the treasury of the city of Tustar, the Muslim
conquerors discover the body of the biblical prophet Daniel. Daniel’s corpse
exhibits no decay, “except for some little hairs on the back of his neck, for the
earth does not decay the flesh of the prophets nor do wild beasts eat them,”36
the latter being another hagiographic characteristic known among late antique
saints.37 Similarly, when John the Baptist’s decapitated head is found during the
construction of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus in the early second/eighth
century, “the flesh and hairs upon his head had not changed.”38 In addition to
these more ancient figures, Muh ̣ammad’s own body displays his blessed pro-
phetic status in stories about the preparation of his corpse for burial. Dressing
Complexities, and Half-Forgotten Adversaries: Essays in Honor Alan F. Segal, ed. Kimberly B. Stratton
and Andrea Lieber (Leiden: Brill, ), –.
. . Abū Bakr Ibn Abī Shayba, al-Musannaf,̣ ed. Ḥamad ibn
ʿAbd Allāh al-Jumʿa and Muh ̣ammad ibn Ibrāhīm al-Lah ̣īdān,  vols. (Riyadh: Maktabat al-Rushd
Nāshirūn, ), : (no. ); Ibn Mājah, Sunan, ed. Muh ̣ammad Fuʾād ʿAbd al-Bāqī,  vols.
(Cairo: ʿĪsā al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī, ), : (no. ), : (no. –); ʿAbd Allāh b. ʿAbd
al-Rah ̣mān al-Dārimī, Musnad al-Dārimī, ed. Ḥusayn Salīm Asad al-Dārānī,  vols. (Riyadh:
Dār al-Mughnī li-’l-Nashr wa al-Tawzīyaʿ, /), : (no. ); Abū Bakr Ah ̣mad b.
al-Ḥusayn al-Bayhaqī, Ḥayāt al-anbiyāʾ baʿda wafāti-him, ed. Ah ̣mad b. ʿAtiyya ̣ al-Ghāʾirī (Medina:
Maktabat al-ʿUlūm wa-’l-Ḥikm, /), –; Muh ̣ammad b. al-Ḥasan b. Farrūkh al-S ̣affār,
Basāʾir
̣ al-darajāt fī fad ̣āʾil āl Muh ̣ammad, ed. al-Sayyid Muh ̣ammad al-Sayyid al-Ḥasan al-Muʿallim,
 vols. (Qom: Maktabat al-Ḥaydariyya, /), : (no. ); Ibn Bābawayh al-Qummī,
Kitāb Man lā yah ̣d ̣uru al-faqīh, ed. Ḥ usayn al-Aʿlamī,  vols. (Beirut: Muʾassasat al-Aʿlamī
̣
li-’l-Matbūʿāt, /), : (no. ).
. . Muh ̣ammad Ibn Ish ̣āq (attrib.), Kitāb
al-Siyar wa-’l-maghāzī, ed. Suhayl Zakkār (Damascus: Dār al-Fikr, ), –; Ibn Abī Shayba,
̣
Musannaf, :– (nos. –). On this story, see: Chase F. Robinson, “The Conquest of
Khūzistān: A Historiographical Reassessment,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies
 (): –.
. Acts of Saint Anastasios the Persian, ; ed. and trans. in Bernard Flusin, Saint Anastase le Perse et
l’histoire de la Palestine au début du VIIe siècle,  vols. (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche
Scientifique, ), :–.
. ʿAlī b. Muh ̣ammad al-Rabaʿī, Fad ̣āʾil al-Shām wa Dimashq, ed. S ̣alāh ̣ al-Dīn al-Munajjid
(Damascus: Matbaʿat ̣ al-Tarraqī, ), – (no. ).

the body, ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib exclaims, “How fragrant you are, both alive and
dead!” and it is narrated that “nothing was observed on the Messenger of
God of what is usually observed on the dead.”39
In addition to prophets, several martyrs and Companions are also discov-
ered lying in their graves in an undecayed state in Islamic stories strongly
reminiscent of Christian inventio narratives. For example, in the days of the
caliph ʿUmar b. al-Khatṭ āḅ (r. –/–), a corpse is discovered in
southern Arabia: it is identified as ʿAbd Allāh b. al-Thāmir, one of the
Christian martyrs of the sixth-century massacre at Najrān. Miraculously,
ʿAbd Allāh’s body is like new, with blood flowing from a still-fresh wound on
his head that—like the blood-soaked bodies of long-dead Christian martyrs dis-
covered in late antique inventiones—demonstrates “the continued potency of
the martyred body.”40 Several Companions martyred at the Battle of Uh ̣ud
(/) are similarly unearthed during the rule of the Umayyad caliph
Muʿāwiya b. Abī Sufyān (r. –/–), some forty years after their
deaths. The martyrs’ bodies are brought out undecayed and so fresh that, when
a shovel strikes the foot of one of them, blood flows from the new wound.41
. . ʿAbd al-Malik

Ibn Hishām, Kitāb Sīrat Rasūl Allāh, ed. Ferdinand Wüstenfeld,  vols. (Göttingen: Dieterichsche
Universitäts-Buchhandlung, –), –. Translation here adapted from Krisztina Szilágyi,
“A Prophet Like Jesus? Christians and Muslims Debating Muh ̣ammad’s Death,” Jerusalem Studies in
Arabic and Islam  (): –.
. Gillian Clark, “Bodies and Blood: Late Antique Debate on Martyrdom, Virginity and
Resurrection,” in Changing Bodies, Changing Meanings: Studies on the Human Body in Antiquity, ed.
Dominic Montserrat (London: Routledge, ), ; Abū Muh ̣ammad al-Ḥasan al-Hamdānī, al-
Iklīl: al-juzʾ al-thāmin, ed. Nabīh Amīn Fāris (S ̣anʿāʾ: Dār al-Kalima; Beirut: Dār al-ʿAwdat, n.d.),
–; trans. Nabih Amin Faris, The Antiquities of South Arabia (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, ), –; Ibn Ish ̣āq (attrib.), Kitāb al-Siyar, ; Ibn Hishām, Kitāb Sīrat Rasūl Allāh, ;
ʿAbd al-Razzāq b. Hammām al-S ̣anʿānī, al-Musannaf, ̣ ed. Ḥabīb al-Rah ̣mān al-Aʿzamī,
̣  vols.
(Beirut: Maktab al-Islāmī, ), : (no. ).
. ʿAbd al-Razzāq, Musannaf,
̣ : (no. ), : (no. ); ʿAbd Allāh Ibn al-Mubārak,
Kitāb al-Jihād, ed. Nazīh Ḥammād (Jeddah: Dār al-Matbūʿāt ̣ al-Ḥadītha, /),  (no. );
Muh ̣ammad b. ʿUmar al-Wāqidī, Kitāb al-Maghāzī, ed. Marsden Jones,  vols. (London: Oxford
University Press, ), :–; ʿUmar Ibn Shabba, Taʾrīkh al-Madīna al-munawwara, ed.
Fuhaym Muh ̣ammad Shaltūt,  vols. (Beirut: Dār al-Turāth, ), :; Ibn Abī Shayba, Musannaf, ̣
:,  (nos. , ); al-Hamdānī, Iklīl, ; Ibn Saʿd, Kitāb al-Ṭabaqāt al-Kabīr, ed.
Eduard Sachau et al.,  vols. (Leiden: E.J. Brill, –), /i:, /ii:; W. M. Watt, trans., The
History of al-Ṭabarī. Volume : The Foundation of the Community (Albany: State University of New
York, ), –. On these and similar reports, see: Etan Kohlberg, “Medieval Muslim Views on
Martyrdom,” Mededelingen van de Afdeling Letterkunde  (): –; Michael Lecker, “On the
Burial of Martyrs in Islam,” in The Concept of Territory in Islamic Law and Thought, ed. Yanagihashi
Hiroyuki (London: Kegan Paul, ), –.

When one these martyrs, ʿAbd Allāh b. ʿAmr b. Ḥarām, is uncovered, his son
Jābir finds ʿAbd Allāh lying in his grave “as though he were sleeping, with noth-
ing having changed in his condition, either large or small.”42 Alternatively, in a
version that echoes the description of the Prophet Daniel’s corpse having lost
some “small hairs on the back of his neck,” ʿAbd Allāh is said not to have changed
at all “except for some little hairs in his beard that were near the ground.”
Several of these hagiographic characteristics also appear in stories about the
uncovering of Ṭalh ̣a b. ʿUbayd Allāh’s corpse. One such report is recorded in
ʿAbd al-Razzāq’s (d. /) h ̣adīth collection, al-Musannaf,
̣ where Ṭalh ̣a’s sta-
tus as a martyr is indicated by his story’s placement in the “chapter regarding
prayer upon, and washing of, a martyr” ( ).43
There ʿAbd al-Razzāq reports:
A family member of Ṭalh ̣a b. ʿUbayd Allāh saw Ṭalh ̣a in a dream saying,
“You’ve buried me in a place where water has come in. Move me from it!” So
they moved him. When they removed him from the grave, which was like an
aqueduct [ (silqa)], nothing had changed upon him except some small
hairs of his beard.44
Here, the flooding of Ṭalh ̣a’s grave necessitates a message to one of his relatives,
asking them to fix the situation. When the grave is uncovered, it is found to be
full of water, a veritable aqueduct: but like the Christian saints who look as
though they had “died that very day,” and the Islamic prophets whose bodies
cannot be consumed by the earth, Ṭalh ̣a’s holy body is not affected by time or
the water that seeped into his grave. Even the small parts of him that do exhibit
some change, the “small hairs of his beard,” echo stories about the corpses of the
prophet Daniel and the martyr ʿAbd Allāh b. ʿAmr, both said to have lost some
“small hairs.”
In addition to Ṭalh ̣a’s undecayed body itself, other narrative features of its
discovery also echo late antique hagiography. Within the variant versions of this
narrative found across several texts, Ṭalh ̣a’s exhumation is almost invariably
. Ibn Saʿd, Kitāb al-Ṭabaqāt, /ii:.

. The Prophet Muh ̣ammad had called Ṭalh ̣a a “walking martyr” and one who had “fulfilled his
pledge” to God through his fierce fighting at the Battle of Uh ̣ud and elsewhere. Ibn al-Mubārak, Kitāb
al-Jihād,  (no. ); al-Wāqidī, Kitāb al-Maghāzī, :; Ibn Saʿd, Kitāb al-Ṭabaqāt, /i:–; Ibn
Mājah, Sunan, : (no. ); Muh ̣ammad b. Ah ̣mad b. Tamīm al-Tamīmī, Kitāb al-Mih ̣an, ed. Yah ̣yā
b. Wahīb al-Jabbūrī (Beirut: Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī, /), .
. ʿAbd al-Razzāq, Musannaf,
̣ :– (no. ), :– (no. ). A slightly variant
̣
version appears in: Abū Nuʿaym al-Isbahānī, ̣ ̣āba, ed. ʿĀdil b. Yūsuf al-ʿAzzāzī,  vols.
Maʿrifat al-sah
(Riyadh: Dār al-Watan ̣ li-’l-Nashr, /), : (no. ).

occasioned by his appearance in a dream. This dreamer sometimes goes un-
named, as in ʿAbd al-Razzāq’s report of a nameless relative of Ṭalh ̣a receiving
a visit from Ṭalh ̣a. Often, however, Ṭalh ̣a’s daughter ʿĀʾisha is specified as the
one who receives Ṭalh ̣a’s message and who, as a result, unearths her father’s
body. For example:
ʿĀʾisha bt. Ṭalh ̣a b. ʿUbayd Allāh saw her father—Ṭalh ̣a b. ʿUbayd Allāh—
in a dream. He said to her, “O daughter, remove me from this place! The
moisture has annoyed me.” She reported this thirty years or so after [his
death]. She removed him from that place and he was fresh ( ) with
nothing changed upon him.45
In another version, an unnamed man describes his dream of Ṭalh ̣a complaining
about his flooded grave to ʿĀʾisha bt. Ṭalh ̣a, who uncovers the body and finds
that “he had not changed, except for some little hairs on one side of his beard or
head.”46 While the dreamer varies, all these versions depict Ṭalh ̣a’s body being
uncovered as a result of his appearance in a dream, demanding that he be moved
to a new location.
This recurrent theme strongly recalls late antique relic inventiones, in which a
deceased holy person commonly appears in a dream or vision to guide someone
to his or her relics in order to translate them to a new location.47 For example, the
Passio of the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste recounts how—after their charred remains
. Abū Bakr Ah ̣mad b. Marwān al-Dīnawarī, al-Mujālasa wa jawāhir al-ʿilm, ed. Abū ʿUbayda
Mashhūr b. Ḥasan Āl Salmān,  vols. (Beirut: Dār Ibn Ḥazm, /), :– (no. );
Similar traditions appear in: Ah ̣mad b. Yah ̣yā al-Balādhūrī, Ansāb al-ashrāf, vol. , ed. Ih ̣sān ʿAbbās
(Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, ), ; ʿAbd Allāh b. Muslim Ibn Qutayba, al-Maʿārif, ed. Tharwat
ʿUkāsha, th ed. (Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif, /), ; Ibn Qutayba, Taʾwīl mukhtalif al-h ̣adīth,
ed. Muh ̣ammad Muh ̣yī al-Dīn al-Asfar ̣ (Beirut: Maktab al-Islāmī, /), –; Ibn Qutayba
(attrib.), al-Imāma wa-’l-Siyāsa, ed. Muh ̣ammad Mah ̣mūd al-Rāfiʿī (Cairo: Matbaʿat ̣ al-Nīl
/), ; ʿAlī b. al-Ḥasan Ibn ʿAsākir, Taʾrīkh madīnat Dimashq, ed. Muh ̣ibb al-Dīn Abū
Saʿīd ʿUmar b. Gharāma al-ʿAmrawī,  vols. (Beirut: Dār al-Fikr: –), :–.
. ʿAbd Allāh b. Muh ̣ammad Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, Kitāb al-Manāmat, ed. ʿAbd al-Qādir Ah ̣mad
ʿAtạ̄ (Beirut: Muʾassasat al-Kutub al-Thaqāfiyya, /), – (no. –); ʿAbd Allāh b.
Muslim Ibn Qutayba, Kitāb al-Taʿbīr al-ruʾyā, ed. Ibrāhīm S ̣ālih ̣ (Damascus: Dār al-Bashāʾir, ),
– (no. ); Ibn ʿAsākir, Taʾrīkh, :–; Abū ʿUmar Yūsuf b. ʿAbd Allāh b. Muh ̣ammad Ibn
ʿAbd al-Barr, al-Istīʿab fī maʿrifat al-asḥ ̣āb, ed. ʿAlī Muh ̣ammad al-Bajāwī,  vols. (Beirut: Dār al-Jīl,
), :.
. Pierre Maraval, Lieux saints et pèlerinages d’Orient: histoire et géographie des origines à la conquête
arabe (Paris: Cerf, ), –; Guy G. Stroumsa, “Dreams and Visions in Early Christian Discourse,”
in Dream Cultures: Explorations in the Comparative History of Dreaming, ed. David Shulman and Guy
G. Stroumsa (New York: Oxford University Press, ), ; Andrew S. Jacobs, “The Remains of the
Jew: Imperial Christian Identity in the Late Ancient Holy Land,” Journal of Medieval and Early
Modern Studies . (): –, n.; Rubenstein, “A Rabbinic Translation,” –.

are dumped in a river—the forty martyrs appear to a bishop and tell him, “Our
relics are hidden in the river: come at night and get us out!”48 In the Syriac life of
the Mesopotamian monk Benjamin of Nehardea, Benjamin visits the famous
monasteries of Mount Izla, where the buried saint Mār Awgin (the traditional
founder of Mesopotamia monasticism) appears to him in a vision, saying:
The foul heresy of Nestorius and Bar Sawma—servants of men, not of
God—will, in the future, hold rule over our monastery and the land of the
east. So take my body and the bodies of the ten blessed ancients that lay
buried with me in my monastery on Mount Izla. Take them and place them
in the monastery of Mār Solomon, below the monastery of Notpo, ̣ near
Mardin, towards the east.49
The saints’ expressed reasons for wanting to be moved vary in these different texts,
ranging from the Forty Martyrs’ desire to be saved from a watery grave to Mār
Awgin’s heresiological concern about who might have control of his burial place.
In all these cases, the movement of the saint’s relics is precipitated by a dream or
vision, demanding that a new location be found for the endangered saintly
remains.
Like the stories about the incorruptible corpses of the Prophet Muh ̣ammad
and other early Islamic figures, these narratives about Ṭalh ̣a b. ʿUbayd Allāh
utilize late antique hagiographic topoi in order to illustrate his status as a holy
man in the mold of saints, patriarchs, prophets, and martyrs. A comparable
engagement with late antique traditions occurs in Islamic narratives about the
discovery of John the Baptist’s head during the construction of the Umayyad
Mosque in Damascus: noting the strong affinities with Byzantine literary and
iconographic representations of the head’s discovery, Nancy Khalek writes, “the
transmitters of these reports or the authors who complied their narratives were
drawing upon the visual cues in Christian imagery in order to, rather literally,
illustrate their own Islamized version of the event.”50 The Muslim raconteurs
of Ṭalh ̣a’s story, too, were literate in the late antique hagiographic koine and
drew upon its symbols in creating an early Islamic inventio narrating the uncov-
ering of Ṭalh ̣a’s blessedly undecaying body.
. Εἰσὶν πεφυλαγμένα τὰ λείψανα ἡμῶν ἐν τῷδε τῷ ποταμῷ, ἐλθὲ οὖν διὰ νυκτὸς καὶ ἔκβαλε ἡμᾶς ἀπὸ
τοῦ ποταμοῦ. Oscar von Gebhardt, ed., Acta martyrum selecta. Ausgewählte Märtyreracten und andere
Urkunden aus der Verfolgungszeit der christlichen Kirche (Berlin: Alexander Duncker, ), .
. Jean Vincent Scheil, “La vie de Mar Benjamin. Texte syriaque,” Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und
verwandte Gebiete  (): –; Paul Peeters, Bibliotheca Hagiographica Orientalis (Brussels: Société
des Bollandistes, ),  (nos. –).
. Khalek, Damascus after the Muslim Conquest, .

UNDECAYED, OR FACELESS AND GREEN: SECTARIAN DEPICTIONS OF
Ṭ A L Ḥ A ’ S C O R P S E
In other accounts of Ṭalh ̣a’s exhumation, a very different description of his

corpse appears. While these accounts closely parallel the narratives about
Ṭalh ̣a’s unearthed body just discussed, instead of depicting a perfectly preserved
corpse, they describe, in often morbid detail, the corpse’s rot and decay. Standing
in contrast to one another, these divergent representations of Ṭalh ̣a’s corpse of-
fer a window, I suggest, into early Islamic intra-religious debates in the sectarian
environment of Iraq in the second/eighth and third/ninth centuries. In this pe-
riod, different politico-religious groups used the foundational history of Islam
as a vehicle to articulate their arguments about more contemporary political and
religious leadership and community, “shaping an identity by reconstructing its
past.”51 As different early Muslim groups and individuals created and/or related
these stories, they used Ṭalh ̣a’s corpse to illustrate their differing conceptions of
the sacred history (and present) of the Islamic community.
In one widely attested report, a brief description of Ṭalh ̣a’s death and burial
during the Battle of the Camel is followed by a narrative flash forward to the
time of his exhumation:
A family member of Ṭalh ̣a saw him saying, “Won’t you deliver me from this
water? I have sunk!” Three times he said this. They excavated him from his
grave, which was green, as though it were chard [ (silq)], and they drained
the water from it. Then they brought out Ṭalh ̣a and, behold, the earth had
consumed his beard and face.52
Like the narratives studied above, Ṭalh ̣a comes to a family member (seemingly
in a dream) and requests that they remove him from his moist grave. The family
member complies, but what is then found inside Ṭalh ̣a’s grave is rather different
from the body uncovered in the previously examined versions of the story.
While those narratives mention the water that filled the grave like an aqueduct
(silqa), here the text emphasizes the brackishness of the water, saying it is green
( ) like a leafy vegetable (silq).53 Moreover, the earth and water have eaten
. Jan Assman, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, ), .
. Ibn Saʿd, Kitāb al-Ṭabaqāt, /i:; Ibn Abī Shayba, Musannaf,
̣ :– (no. ); al-
Balādhūrī, Ansāb al-ashrāf, :; Ibn ʿAsākir, Taʾrīkh, :; Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr, al-Istīʿab, :.
This threefold appearance within dreams is a common trope in inventio narrations: Maraval, Lieux
saints et pèlerinages, .
. While translating silq as “aqueduct” here is possible, the meaning “chard” is favored by
comparison to other texts. For example, when the phrase “green like silq” ( ) appears in

away Ṭalh ̣a’s face and beard: Instead of the miraculously preserved body of a
saint, prophet, or martyr, Ṭalh ̣a here is a moldering corpse, falling apart in the
process of decay.
A similarly unflattering image of Ṭalh ̣a appears in a version in which Ṭalh ̣a
appears in the dreams not of a family member, but of a mawlā (servant/client)
of his.54 Reversing the traditional patron-client relationship, Ṭalh ̣a here seeks
the aid of his former dependent and “complained to him of the cold” that
he feels in his grave. After three consecutive nights sending this message, the
mawlā finally exhumes Ṭalh ̣a and “found that the parts of his body near the
earth had turned green and that his hair had fallen out.” Here it is Ṭalh ̣a’s body
itself—rather than the water filling the grave—that displays a brackish green
color, ravaged by the process of decay. Additionally, all of his hair has fallen out
of his head as his body falls apart. Ṭalh ̣a’s appearance here is miserable, his green
flesh and loss of hair standing in stark contrast to the traditions in which holy
people’s bodies lay undecayed and lose only a few “small hairs,” if any at all.
Indeed, begging his mawlā for help and complaining of the cold in his grave,
Ṭalh ̣a further signals his torment after death.
These variant representations of Ṭalh ̣a’s corpse recall the warring histo-
riographic images of other hotly debated late antique figures, such as Nestorius
of Constantinople or the Prophet Muh ̣ammad. Nestorius and Muh ̣ammad—
both of whom were alternatively venerated as foundational figures and vilified
as heretics by different late antique religious communities—are represented in ei-
ther hagiographic or horrific forms in the different literary descriptions of their
dead bodies.55 While East Syrian (Nestorian) texts present Nestorius as a “martyr
of Christ” who died peacefully in his monastic cell and delivered miracles from
al-Isṭ akhrī’s
̣ fourth/tenth-century Arabic geographical text, a Persian translation of this passage gives
“like chard” ( ). See: Abū Ish ̣āq al-Fārisī al-Isṭ akhrī,
̣ Kitāb Masālik al-mamālik, ed.
M. J. de Goeje (Leiden: Brill, ),  with footnote f. In one version of the story of Ṭalh ̣a’s
corpse, it is said that his grave is “green as though it were herbs” ( ), referencing
another vegetable. Abū Nuʿaym, Maʿrifat al-sah ̣ ̣āba, : (no. ).
. Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr, al-Istīʿab, :.
. In all these cases, the decaying corpse is well situated within the much larger late antique literary
tradition depicting the miserable deaths of villains and heretics. On these traditions, see: Ellen
Muehlberger, “The Legend of Arius’ Death: Imagination, Space and Filth in Late Ancient
Historiography,” Past & Present  (): –; Jennifer Barry, “Diagnosing Heresy: Ps.-Martyrius’s
Funerary Speech for John Chrysostom,” Journal of Early Christian Studies . (): –; Shari L.
Lowin, “Narratives of Villainy: Titus, Nebuchadnezzar, and Nimrod in the Ḥadīth and Midrash
Aggadah,” in The Lineaments of Islam: Studies in Honor of Fred McGraw Donner, ed. Paul M. Cobb
(Leiden: Brill, ), –. I thank Jennifer Collins-Elliott for these references.

beyond the grave,56 Chalcedonian and Monophysite texts instead depict
Nestorius as a heretic who died on the toilet with his internal organs leaking from
his anus or with his tongue falling off as his mouth was devoured by worms.57
Similarly, while we saw above the stories about the Prophet Muh ̣ammad’s bless-
edly undecaying body, other early traditions in both Christian and Islamic texts
depict the putrid decay of the Prophet Muh ̣ammad’s corpse.58 The polemical
value of a founder’s saintly body—or a heretic’s rotting corpse—meant these
stories could easily slip into the differing historiographies of different religious
communities.59
Much as the variant representations of Nestorius reflect the competitions
and differing self-understandings of late antique Christian sects, the different
images of Ṭalh ̣a can similarly be understood as propaganda in the historio-
graphical polemics of rival Muslim groups of the second/eighth and third/ninth
centuries. During this period, early Muslim scholars used narratives about the
period of the Prophet Muh ̣ammad and his Companions “as a means of justify-
ing one’s claims to status or leadership in the community.”60 As noted above,
the events of the Civil War were particularly significant foundational stories,
drawn upon by early Muslims to burnish their respective group’s version of
events and, thus, conception of the Islamic community, “link[ing] the question
of legitimacy directly to particular historical events, by means of a narrative.”61
Due to Ṭalh ̣a’s place in these acrimonious events, the fate of his corpse func-
tioned as a charged symbol for later Muslim storytellers to draw upon in making
arguments about the nature of Islamic communal history and leadership.
While precisely dating these historical traditions is difficult, their isnāds—the
lists of oral transmitters that precede the actual narrative of each report—offer
clues into where, when, and among whom these historiographic debates were
. Barh ̣adbeshabba ʿArbaya, Historia ecclesiastica ; François Nau, ed. and trans., La seconde partie
de l’Histoire de Barh ̣adbešabba ‘Arbaïa et Controverse de Théodore de Mopsueste avec les Macédoniens, in
Patrologia Orientalis . (): ; The Letter to Cosmas ; François Nau, ed. and trans., Documents
pour servir à l’histoire de l’église nestorienne, in Patrologia Orientalis . (): –; Rafał
Kosiński, “The Fate of Nestorius after the Council of Ephesus in ,” Sakarya Üniversitesi Fen
Edebiyat Dergisi  (): –.
. Theodore Nissen, “Unbekannte Erzählungen aus dem Pratum Spirituale,” Byzantinische
Zeitschrift  (): –; John Moschos, Spiritual Meadow, ; Socrates, Historia ecclesiastica ..
. On these texts, see: Szilágyi, “A Prophet like Jesus.”
. Kosiński, “The Fate of Nestorius,” ; Szilágyi, “A Prophet like Jesus,” –.
. Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins, .
. Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins, –.

occurring.62 As Khalid Keshk has observed, the transmission history of akhbār
indicates that “early narrators of akhbār material were the ones who shaped
(‘colored’ if you will) the story according to their interest.”63 Indeed, the isnāds
for the reports about Ṭalh ̣a’s corpse offer an interesting example of this phenom-
enon (see Figure ). In several of the reports cited above, the first two tradents are
identical, with Qays b. Abī Ḥāzim (d. ca. –/–),64 the earliest narrator,
transmitting this tradition to Ismāʿīl b. Abī Khālid (d. –/–).65 After
Ismāʿīl, however, the line of transmission splits in three directions: () the version
with Ṭalh ̣a’s unchanged body is reported from Sufyān b. ʿUyayna (d. /–);66
() the version with Ṭalh ̣a’s decayed face and beard is reported from Abū Usāma
Ḥammād b. Usāma (d. /–);67 and () the version with Ṭalh ̣a’s green and
hairless body is reported from ʿAlī b. Mushir (d. /).68 Based on the dif-
ferent narrative details present in each of these reports, one or more of these
transmitters seemingly either “misheard” what Ismāʿīl b. Abī Khālid said or
(more likely) deliberately altered the narrative to fit his ideological preferences,
“shaping” or “coloring” the story through slight variations.
While it is impossible to tell which version of the story came first, this
branching of the isnād indicates that very different narratives were being trans-
mitted about Ṭalh ̣a’s body by the late second/eighth century. The impetuses for
these diverging stories can perhaps be deduced from examining the backgrounds
of the stories’ various narrators. As noted, the versions describing Ṭalh ̣a’s de-
cayed corpse are reported by Abū Usāma and ʿAlī b. Mushir, who were both
Kūfan h ̣adīth transmitters of the late second/eighth century. Kūfa was a Shīʿī
stronghold in this period, with the Muslim scholars there often characterized as
displaying Shīʿī proclivities, most prominently reverence for ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib
. Regarding analysis of historical akhbār, see: Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins, –; Stefan
Leder, “The Literary Use of the Khabar: A Basic Form of Historical Writing,” in The Byzantine and
Early Islamic Near East I: Problems in the Literary Source Material, ed. Averil Cameron and Lawrence
I. Conrad (Princeton: Darwin Press, ), –; Chase F. Robinson, Islamic Historiography (New
York: Cambridge University Press, ).
. Khaled Keshk, “The Historiography of an Execution: The Killing of Ḥujr b. ʿAdī,” Journal of
Islamic Studies  (): .
. Ibn Saʿd, Kitāb al-Ṭabaqāt, :; Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muh ̣ammad b. Ismāʿīl b. Ibrāhīm al-Jaʿfī al-
Bukhārī, Kitāb al-Tārīkh al-Kabīr,  vols. in  (Hyderabad: Matbaʻat ̣ Jamʿiyyat Dāʾirat al-Maʿārif
al-Uthmāniyya, –/–), /i: (no. ).
. Ibn Saʿd, Kitāb al-Ṭabaqāt, :; al-Bukhārī, al-Tārīkh al-Kabīr, /i:– (no. ).
. Ibn Saʿd, Kitāb al-Ṭabaqāt, :–; al-Bukhārī, al-Tārīkh al-Kabīr, /ii: (no. ).
. Ibn Saʿd, Kitāb al-Ṭabaqāt, :; al-Bukhārī, al-Tārīkh al-Kabīr, /i: (no. ).
. Ibn Saʿd, Kitāb al-Ṭabaqāt, :; al-Bukhārī, al-Tārīkh al-Kabīr, /ii: (no. );
Christopher Melchert, “The Early Ḥanafiyya and Kufa,” Journal of Abbasid Studies  (): .

Ibn Abd al-Barr
Ibn Asākir Ibn Abd al-Barr
Abū Nu aym
Abd al-Wārith b. Sufyān
Ahmad
. b. Muhammad
. b. Jabala
Qāsim b. Asbagh
.
Muhammad
. b. Ishāq
. al-Sarrāj al-Balādhūrī
Ahmad
. b. Zuhayr
Muhammad
. Abd al-Razzāq al-Husayn b. Alī
Ibn Sa d Ibn Abī Shayba . Abd al-Salām b. Sālih
. . [Abū al-Salt]
.
b. al-Sabbāh
. .
Sufyān b. Uyayna Abū Usāma [Hammād

. b. Usāma] Alī b. Mushir
Ismā īl b. Abī Khālid
Qays b. Abī Hāzim

.
FIGURE 1. Isnād Diagram for Stories of Ṭalh ̣a’s Decayed and Undecayed Body
and preference for him over his caliphal predecessors, especially ʿUthmān b.
ʿAffān (d. /).69 Perhaps, then, Abū Usāma’s and ʿAlī b. Mushir’s reports
convey a Kūfan and/or Shīʿī-leaning version of the story of Ṭalh ̣a’s body:
Ṭalh ̣a’s decay would be satisfying for a Shīʿī audience that regarded him (and
the other participants in the Battle of the Camel) as rebels whom the caliph
ʿAlī’s forces rightfully fought and killed.70 Indeed, the fourth/tenth-century
Shīʿī scholar al-Shaykh al-Mufīd would come to cite precisely this image of
Ṭalh ̣a’s decaying body in his book on the Battle of the Camel.71
Moreoever, reports within prosopographical literature suggest that the trans-
mitter Abū Usāma may have favored just such a defamatory representation of
Ṭalh ̣a. Although generally portrayed as a proto-Sunnī in biographical sources,
. al-Nāshīʾ al-Akbar (attrib.), Masāʾil al-Imāma,  (no. ) in Josef van Ess, Frühe
muʿtazilitische Häresiographie: Zwei Werke des Nāšiʾ al-Akbar (gest.  H.) (Beirut: Ergon Verlag,
); Ah ̣mad Ibn Ḥanbal, Kitāb al-ʿIlal wa maʿrifat al-rijāl, ed. Wasị̄ Allāh b. Muh ̣ammad ʿAbbās,
nd ed. (Riyadh: Dār al-Khānī, /), : (nos. –); Shams al-Dīn Muh ̣ammad b.
Ah ̣mad al-Dhahabī, Siyar aʿlām al-nubalāʾ,  vols., ed. Shuʿayb al-Arnāʾūt ̣ et al. (Beirut: Muʾassasat
al-Risāla, –), :.
. Ḥasan b. Mūsā al-Nawbakhtī, Kitāb Firaq al-shīʿa, ed. Hellmut Ritter (Istanbul: Matbaʿat ̣
al-Dawla, ), , –; Lucas, Constructive Critics, ; Etan Kohlberg, “Some Imāmī Shīʿī Views on
the S ̣ah ̣āba,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam  (): –; Etan Kohlberg, “Some Zaydī
Views on the Companions of the Prophet,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 
(): –.
. al-Shaykh al-Mufīd, al-Jamal wa-’l-nusra ̣ ed. al-Sayyid ʿAlī Mīr
̣ li-sayyid al-ʿitra fī h ̣arb al-Basra,
Sharīfī (Qom: Maktab al-Iʿlām al-Islāmī, /), –.

there are occasional indications that Abū Usāma—a mawlā of the Banū
Hāshim, the clan of ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib—harbored some Shīʿī leanings. Such
ideological proclivities are well displayed in the report that:
Abū Usāma said, “One who gives precedence to ʿUthmān over ʿAlī—may
God be pleased with them both—is a fool.” Abū Usāma also said, “My
mother was one of the Shīʿa.”72
This report attributes to Abū Usāma the trademark Shīʿī preference of the
caliph ʿAlī over ʿUthmān (though notably not a complete rejection of
ʿUthmān), and suggests that Abū Usāma had inherited this sectarian incli-
nation from his mother. In another report, Abū Usāma purposefully carries
some of this ideology into his transmission of h ̣adīth: “Whenever Abū
Usāma saw ʿĀʾisha [bt. Abī Bakr’s name] in a text, he would scrape it and
obscure it.”73 Here Abū Usāma executes a sort of damnatio memoriae
against one of Ṭalh ̣a’s fellow rebels at the Battle of the Camel, altering texts
to mar ʿĀʾisha’s name. Perhaps Abū Usāma similarly altered the story of
Ṭalh ̣a’s corpse to delegitimize another enemy of ʿAlī.
The narrative depicting Ṭalh ̣a turning green and losing his hair likewise
appears to have been transmitted by at least one person with a strong affiliation
with Shīʿism. The individual who received this tradition from Ismāʿīl b. Abī
Khālid—ʿAlī b. Mushir—was a Kūfan scholar appointed as judge over
Mosul. While ʿAlī b. Mushir is not reported to have had any particular Shīʿī
inclinations, the person to whom he reported the tradition about Ṭalh ̣a,
ʿAbd al-Salām b. S ̣ālih ̣ (d. /), certainly did.74 ʿAbd al-Salām b. S ̣ālih ̣ stud-
ied with both proto-Sunnī and Shīʿī teachers,75 but is remembered within Shīʿī
. Yah ̣yā Ibn Maʿīn, Yah ̣yā Ibn Maʿīn wa kitābu-hu al-Taʾrīkh, ed. Ah ̣mad Muh ̣ammad Nūr Sayf,
 vols. (Mecca: Jamiʿat al-Malik ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz, /), : (no. ). The positions of ʿUthmān
and ʿAlī are reversed but the statement about Abū Usāma’s Shīʿī mother is retained in: Ibn ʿAsākir,
Taʾrīkh, :. Only the statement about Abū Usāma’s mother appears in: ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Mughaltāy ̣
b. Qilīj b. ʿAbd Allāh, Ikmāl tahdhīb al-kamāl fī asmāʾ al-rijāl, ed. ʿĀdil b. Muh ̣ammad and Usāma
b. Ibrāhīm,  vols. (Cairo: al-Fārūq al-Ḥadītha li-’l-Ṭibāʿa wa-’l-Nashr, /), :.
. al-Fasawī, Kitāb al-Maʿrifat wa-’l-ta’rīkh, ed. Akram Ḍiyāʾ al-ʿUmarī,  vols. (Medina:
Maktabat al-Dār, /), :; Mughaltāy, ̣ Ikmāl tahdhīb, :. On Shīʿī vilification of
ʿĀʾisha, see: Denise A. Spellberg, Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past: the Legacy of ‘A’isha bint Abi
Bakr (New York: Columbia University Press, ).
. Ibn Mushir’s h ̣adīth are said to “resemble the h ̣adīth of the asḥ ̣āb al-h ̣adīth
), suggesting a proto-Sunnī perspective. Ibn Ḥanbal, Kitāb al-ʿIlal, : (no. ).
. Abū Bakr Ah ̣mad b. ʿAlī al-Khatīḅ al-Baghdādī, Taʾrīkh Madīnat al-Salām, ed. Bashshār
ʿAwwād Maʿrūf,  vols. (Beirut: Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī, /), :– (no. );
Encyclopaedia of Islam, rd ed., s.v. “Abū l-S ̣alt al-Harawī”(Michael Cooperson); Michael Cooperson,

sources as a close follower of the Shīʿī imām ʿAlī b. Mūsā al-Rid ̣ā (d. /)
and the author of a book on the latter’s death.76 Indeed, while ʿAbd al-Salām
is mentioned positively in Sunnī biographical texts, this praise appears with
the caveat that he is “reliable and honest, except for his Shīʿism”
( ).77 While Sunnī sources claim that ʿAbd al-Salām was not exces-
sive in his Shīʿism and spoke of the Prophet’s Companions positively, they also
describe him secretly relating traditions of a Shīʿī cast unpalatable to Sunnī ears.
The transmission of a tradition critical of ʿAlī’s enemy at the Battle of the Camel
certainly seems to match the purported activities of this Shīʿī believer.
Finally, in contrast to the grotesque images of Ṭalh ̣a reported by these schol-
ars, the last of the three transmitters from Ismāʿīl b. Abī Khālid—Sufyān b.
ʿUyayna—instead reported a tradition about Ṭalh ̣a’s undecayed body. While
details of Ibn ʿUyayna’s life are limited, biographical sources strongly associate
him with the proto-Sunnī “Ḥadīth party” or “Traditionalists” (asḥ ̣āb al-
h ̣adīth) of the second/eighth century.78 Unlike the negative image conveyed in
the stories of Ṭalh ̣a’s decaying corpse, Ibn ʿUyayna’s report of an incorruptible
Ṭalh ̣a well reflects the proto-Sunnī veneration of the Prophet’s Companions.
While membership in the asḥ ̣āb al-h ̣adīth was relatively politically and ideolog-
ically varied in this early period, what characterized the group as a whole was
their basing their legal views on traditions (i.e., h ̣adīths or akhbār) about the ac-
tions of the Prophet Muh ̣ammad, related through the testimony of the
Companions. Due to their role in transmitting traditions about the Prophet, as
well as the assumption that they themselves embodied the Prophet’s sunna, the
Companions came to be considered by the asḥ ̣āb al-h ̣adith as collectively right-
fully-guided.79 Emergent Sunnī groups thus excused the participants in the Civil
Classical Arabic Biography: The Heirs of the Prophets in the Age of al-Maʾmūn (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, ), –.
. Abū al-ʿAbbās Ah ̣mad b. ʿAlī al-Najāshī, Fihrist asmāʾ musannifī
̣ al-Shīʿa al-mushtahar bi-Rijāl
̣
al-Najāshī (Beirut: Shirkat al-Aʿlamī li-’l-Matbūʿāt, /),  (no. ); Abū Jaʿfar Muh ̣ammad
b. al-Ḥasan al-Ṭūsī, Rijāl al-Ṭūsī, ed. Jawād al-Qayyūmī al-Isfahānī
̣ (Qom: Muʾassasat al-Nashr al-
Islāmī, /),  (no. ).
. On accusations of Shīʿism among Sunnī h ̣adīth critics, see: Josef van Ess, Theology and Society
in the Second and Third Century Hijra: A History of Religious Thought in Early Islam, trans. John
O’Kane,  vols. (Leiden: Brill, ), :–.
. Encyclopaedia of Islam, nd ed., s.v. “Sufyān b. ʿUyayna” (Susan Spectorsky); Abū al-Faraj
Muh ̣ammad b. Ish ̣āq Ibn al-Nadīm, Kitāb al-Fihrist mit Anmerkungen, ed. Gustav Flügel,  vols.
(Leipzig: F. C. W. Vogel, –), ; trans. Bayard Dodge, The Fihrist of al-Nadīm: A Tenth-
Century Survey of Muslim Culture,  vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, ), .
. On attitudes towards the Companions among the asḥ ̣āb al-h ̣adīth and proto-Sunnīs, see: Lucas,
Constructive Critics, –, –; Patricia Crone, God’s Rule: Government and Islam (New York:

War such as Ṭalh ̣a and al-Zubayr, with explanations ranging from agnostic sus-
pensions of judgement on the Companions’ actions80 to claims of deathbed re-
pentances over their sinful acts.81 By the late second/eighth century, this
apologetic effort among proto-Sunnī groups led to a narrative of the Civil
War in which, rather than infighting among the Companions, it was the devi-
ous machinations of Shīʿī schismatics and other uncouth elements that actually
sowed this discord within the early Islamic community.82
The attractiveness of stories about Ṭalh ̣a’s undecayed body for proto-Sunnīs
like Ibn ʿUyayna is confirmed by examining who else transmitted reports about
Ṭalh ̣a’s undecayed body (see Figure ). As noted above, several reports describe
the uncovering of Ṭalh ̣a’s undecayed body after his appearance in a dream, re-
ported on the authority of either ʿĀʾisha bt. Ṭalh ̣a herself or another witness to
the disinterment, an unidentified woman named Āmina.83 Notably, many of
the individuals who transmitted these narratives are from Basra: ̣ in contrast to
Shīʿī-leaning Kūfa, the sectarian environment of Basrạ in the second/eighth
century contained a strong current of “ʿUthmāniyya,” i.e. adherence to the righ-
teousness of the caliph ʿUthmān over (and sometimes to the exclusion of) that
of ʿAlī.84 In some circumstances, members of the ʿUthmāniyya appears to have
been loyal to the Umayyad caliphate (r. –/–) and thus directly
Columbia University Press, ), –; Zaman, Religion and Politics, , –; Watt, Formative
Period, , , ; al-Nawbakhtī, Firaq al-shīʿa, , , ; al-Nāshīʾ al-Akbar (attrib.), Masāʾil
al-Imāma, – (nos. –).
. al-Nawbakhtī, Firaq al-shīʿa, –.
. al-Nāshīʾ al-Akbar (attrib.), Masāʾil al-Imāma,  (no. ); Lucas, Constructive Critics,
–.
. Van Ess, “Political Ideas,” ; Sean W. Anthony, The Caliph and the Heretic: Ibn Sabaʾ and the
Origins of Shīʿism (Leiden: Brill, ), –.
. This differentiates these reports from those that cite Qays b. Abī Ḥāzim and Ismāʿīl b. Abī
Khālid, studied above. On the identity of Āmina, see: Ella Landau-Tasseron, trans., The History of
al-Ṭabarī. Volume : Biographies of the Companions and Their Successors (Albany: State University
of New York, ),  with notes.
. On ʿUthmāniyya in Basra, ̣ see: Encyclopaedia of Islam, nd ed., s.v. “ʿUthmāniyya” (Patricia
Crone); Charles Pellat, Le milieu Basrien ̣ et la formation de Ğāh ̣iz ̣ (Paris: Librairie d’Amérique et
d’Orient Adrien-Maisonneuve, ), –; Erling L. Petersen, ʿAlī and Muʿāwiya in Early Arabic
Tradition: Studies on the Genesis and Growth of Islamic Historical Writing until the End of the Ninth
Century, trans. P. Lampe Christensen (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, ), –; Ignaz Goldziher,
Muslim Studies, trans. C. R. Barber and S. M. Stern, ed. S. M. Stern,  vols. (London: Allen and
Unwin, –), :. For Basra’s ̣ ʿUthmānī reputation, see: ʿAbd Allāh b. Muslim Ibn
Qutayba, Kitāb ʿUyūn al-akhbār,  vols. (Beirut: Dār al-Kitāb al-ʿArabī, /), :; Akhbār
al-dawla al-ʿabbāsiyya, ed. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Dūrī and ʿAbd al-Jabbār al-Mutṭ alibī ̣ (Beirut: Dār
al-Ṭalīʿa li-’l-Ṭibāʿa wa-’l-Nashr, ), ; Ah ̣mad b. Muh ̣ammad Ibn ʿAbd Rabbihi, al-ʿIqd al-
farīd, ed. ʿAbd al-Majīd al-Tarh ̣īnī,  vols. (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, /), :.

Ibn Asākir Ibn Abd al-Barr Ibn Asākir Ibn Asākir Ibn Asākir Ibn Asākir
Abd al-Wārith b. Sufyān

al-Dīnawarī
Qāsim b. Asbagh
. Muhammad
. b. al-Husayn
. al-Za frānī
Ibn Abī al-Dunyā al-Husayn
. b. Fahm Ibn Abī al-Dunyā
Ibn Abī Khaythama

Muhammad
. b. Salām al-Jumahī
.
* Abū Khaythama
* Abū Maslama Abū Mu āwiya al-Darīr Īsā b. Yazīd Ahmad b. Ᾱsim

.
* Abd al-Rahmān
. b. Mahdī * Mūsā b. Ismā īl [Sa īd b. Yazīd]
* Hammād
. b. Salama * Muhammad
. b. Maysara al-Mas ūdī * Sa īd b. Ᾱmir
* Alī b. Zayd * Mālik b. Dīnār * al-Muthannā b. Sa īd
Ᾱmina Ᾱ isha bt. Talha

. .
FIGURE 2. Isnād Diagram for Stories of Ṭalh ̣a’s Undecayed Body.

Scholars from Basrạ are marked with an asterisk.
opposed to Shīʿī claims of the ʿAlid family’s right to the caliphate.85 By the mid-
second/eighth century, ʿUthmānīs appear to have advocated a politically
quietist stance that harmonized the differences between the Companions and
accepted all of them as religious and legal authorities, a proto-Sunnī position
closely related to that of the Ḥadīth Party.86
Such a point of view is ascribed to several of the Basranṣ who transmitted
the traditions about Ṭalh ̣a’s undecayed body, including Ḥ ammād b. Salama
(d. /) and ʿAbd al-Rah ̣mān b. Mahdī (d. /). These and other
̣ h ̣adīth transmitters are described as being among those who “adhere
Basran
to all of the Companions of the Prophet and do not disassociate from any
of them.”87 This conciliatory perspective on the Companions appears in
other traditions transmitted by Basran ̣ scholars that explicitly absolve of
guilt the participants in the Civil War. For example, Basrans ̣ transmitted the
story of a prayer uttered by the Companion Burayda b. al-Ḥusayb ̣ asking
God to forgive ʿUthmān, ʿAlī, Ṭalh ̣a, and al-Zubayr and stating they were “a
. Steven C. Judd, Religious Scholars and the Umayyads: Piety-Minded Supporters of the Marwānid
Caliphate (New York: Routledge, ), –.
. Zaman, Religion and Politics, –; Encyclopaedia of Islam, nd ed., s.v. “ʿUthmāniyya” (Patricia
Crone); Watt, Formative Period, –.
. al-Nāshīʾ al-Akbar (attrib.), Masāʾil al-Imāma, – (no. ). On Ḥammād b. Salama as a
proto-Sunnī, see: Zaman, Religion and Politics, –.

people concerning whom God had a preconceived plan. If he wishes to forgive
them for what was preconceived for them, he will do so.”88 A similar message is
conveyed in a story told by ʿAlī b. Zayd b. Judʿān (d. / or /)—one
̣ whose name appears in the isnād of a tradition about Ṭalh ̣a’s un-
of the Basrans
decayed body—in which God miraculously changes the face of a man insulting
Ṭalh ̣a, Zubayr, and ʿAlī.89 These apologetic traditions advocate that the partic-
ipants in the Civil War not be judged or insulted: Such a positive understand-
ing of Ṭalh ̣a certainly would have allowed, and encouraged, his portrayal as a
person whose holiness manifested in his body’s lack of decay.
A proto-Sunnī—and perhaps more specifically anti-Shīʿī—impetus likely
also informed the two Baghdādī h ̣adīth scholars who transmitted the stories of
Ṭalh ̣a’s undecayed corpse from the Basranṣ just discussed. Abū Khaythama
Zuhayr b. Ḥarb (/-) and his son Ibn Abī Khaythama Ah ̣mad b.
Zuhayr (/) were ʿUthmānī scholars, with the father mentioned among
those Baghdādīs who “do not consider ʿAlī’s rule to have been correct . . . they
reject him and maintain that his rule was civil war ( fitna).”90 This anti-ʿAlid
tendency appears in traditions narrated by, and about, the two of them, such as
their avoidance of ʿAlī’s name when enumerating the righteous caliphs.91
Traditions about the body of Ṭalh ̣a—who fought ʿAlī at the Battle of the
Camel—lying undecayed in the grave may have been useful in opposing pro-
ʿAlid currents. Perhaps for this reason, Abū Khaythama and his son appear as
central nodes in the transmission of these traditions, receiving them from the
̣
Basrans and reporting them onwards to other h ̣adīth scholars.
. Ibn Saʿd, Kitāb al-Ṭabaqāt, /i:. See: van Ess, Theology and Society, :–; Cook, Early
Muslim Dogma, . A similar statement is ascribed to the Companion Abū Saʿīd al-Khudrī, again
̣
transmitted through Basrans: ̣
Ibn Abī Shayba, Musannaf, : (no. ); Nuʿaym b. Ḥammād,
Kitāb al-Fitan, ed. Samīr b. Amīn al-Zuhayrī (Cairo: Maktabat al-Tawh ̣īd, /),  (no. ).
. Ibn Saʿd, Kitāb al-Ṭabaqāt, :; ʿAbd Allāh b. Muh ̣ammad Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, Kitāb Mujābī
al-daʿwa, ed. Ziyād Ḥamdān (Beirut: Muʾassasat al-Kutub al-Thaqāfiyya, /), – (no. );
Ibn ʿAsākir, Taʾrīkh, :. Notably, the Basran
̣ who transmits this tradition from ʿAlī b. Zayd—
Ḥammād b. Zayd—was known as an ʿUthmānī: Ibn Saʿd, Kitāb al-Ṭabaqāt, /ii:; Ibn Qutayba,
al-Maʿārif, .
. al-Nāshīʾ al-Akbar (attrib.), Masāʾil al-Imāma,  (no. ); Zaman, Religion and Politics, ;
Petersen, ʿAlī and Muʿāwiya, –.
. Ibn ʿAsākir, Taʾrīkh, :; Abū Yaʿlā Ah ̣mad b. ʿAlī al-Muthannā al-Tamīmī, Musnad Abī
̣ ed. Ḥusayn Salīm Asad al-Dārānī,  vols. (Beirut and Damascus: Dār al-Maʾmun li-’l-
Yaʿlā Mawsilī,
Turāth, –), : (no. ); ʿAbd Allāh b. Ah ̣mad b. Ḥanbal, Kitāb al-Sunna, ed.
Muh ̣ammad b. Saʿīd b. Sālim al-Qah ̣tānị̄ (al-Dammām: Dār Ibn al-Qayyim, /),  (nos.
–); Abū Bakr Ah ̣mad b. Muh ̣ammad al-Khallāl, al-Sunna, ed. ʿAtiyya ̣ al-Zahrānī,  vols.
(Riyadh: Dār al-Rāya, –/–), : (no. ).

As these different stories attest, Ṭalh ̣a’s body was a useful symbol for early
Muslims, displaying either his holiness or his villainy, depending on the version
of the story told. Due to Ṭalh ̣a’s status as an enemy of ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib, the
versions of the story favored by transmitters with Shīʿī affinities depicted
Ṭalh ̣a as a decaying, bloated corpse. Conversely, the stories of Ṭalh ̣a’s incorrupt-
ible body provided a useful image of his virtuous status that fit within the proto-
Sunnī reverence for the Companions. It is likely for this reason that proto-
Sunnī scholars such as Sufyān b. ʿUyayna, Ḥammād b. Salama, and Ibn Abī
Khaythama transmitted reports describing the exhumation of Ṭalh ̣a’s fresh
body: indeed, as we will see below, proto-Sunnī scholars appear to have been
keenly interested in Ṭalh ̣a’s reinternment in Basra.̣
MEMORY AND TRADITION AT A PROTO-SUNNĪ SHRINE
The hagiographic stories of Ṭalh ̣a’s undecayed body may have participated
in a broader agenda than the positive representation of one of the
Prophet’s Companions: these narratives appear to have been used in culti-
vating Ṭalh ̣a’s gravesite within Basra
̣ as a place of veneration and, perhaps,
a proto-Sunnī “site of memory.” Ṭalh ̣a’s grave in Basra
92
̣ offered a memorial
to a particular conception of the Islamic past: his body in the tomb—still
pristine, despite his death in a fratricidal battle—offered a useful representa-
tion of the virtuous Islamic community that, in the imagination of proto-
Sunnīs, had existed among the Companions. Yet this idea of the past
Islamic community was also an implicit rejection of the alternative historical
memories that other Muslim groups within the sectarian milieu of second/
eighth- and third/ninth-century Iraq themselves held.93 Similar to the ways
that Shīʿī and Khārijī groups physicalized their own sacred histories in space
through the commemoration and veneration of their own sacred figures,
proto-Sunnīs commemorated a particular understanding of Islamic sacred
history through veneration of Ṭalh ̣a’s grave.
In several versions of the uncovering of Ṭalh ̣a’s undecayed body, the corpse’s
discovery is connected to the location of Ṭalh ̣a’s grave. For example, a report in
. On early Islamic “sites of memory,” drawing upon Pierre Nora and Maurice Halbwachs, see:
Antoine Borrut, Entre mémoire et pouvoir: L’espace syrien sous les derniers Omeyyades et les premiers
Abbassides (v. –/–) (Leiden: Brill, ), –.
. On the Battle of the Camel in pre-modern Islamic historiography, see: Tarif Khalidi, “The
Battle of the Camel: Trauma, Reconciliation and Memory,” in Crisis and Memory in Islamic
Societies, ed. Angelika Neuwirth and Andreas Pflitsch (Beirut: Ergon, ), –.

the third/ninth-century historian Ah ̣mad b. Yah ̣yā al-Balādhūrī’s Ansāb al-
Ashrāf states:
Abū al-Yaqzāṇ and other Basrans
̣ say: Ṭalh ̣a was buried near the Qurra
̣ After thirty years, ʿĀʾisha bt. Ṭalh ̣a saw him complaining of
bridge in Basra.
the moisture and ordered that he be taken out: he was found like new. ʿAbd
al-Rah ̣mān b. Salāma al-Tamīmī was in charge of taking him out. He was
buried among the hijriyyīn and his grave is well-known there.94
Here al-Balādhūrī reiterates the story of the discovery of Ṭalh ̣a’s body and pro-
vides further details about his reburial, including that he was buried “among the
hijriyyīn” (i.e., those who had made the hijra from Mecca to Medina with the
Prophet Muh ̣ammad) and that his grave there is “well-known” ( ).95 A
note of officialdom is added with the mention of the individual credited with
the exhumation, a man named ʿAbd al-Rah ̣mān b. Salāma al-Tamīmī.96
Ascribed to Abū al-Yaqz ̣ān, a Basran ̣ scholar who reportedly died in /,
al-Balādhūrī’s report suggests that the tomb may have been venerated already by
the late second/eighth century.97
The early fourth/tenth-century Andalusian scholar Ibn ʿAbd Rabbihi’s
al-ʿIqd al-Farīd gives a more detailed image of what veneration of Ṭalh ̣a’s grave
at Basrạ may have entailed. In the version of the inventio recorded here, after
uncovering her father’s perfectly preserved corpse, ʿĀʾisha bt. Ṭalh ̣a “bought
an open lot in Basra, ̣ buried him there, and built a mosque/prayer space
[ (masjid)] around it.” It is then reported:
I have seen a woman of Basrạ carry a long-necked bottle of ben tree oil and
pour it upon the grave until she emptied it. She did not cease from doing that
until the soil of the grave reeked of musk.98
This iteration of the story makes explicit how the site of Ṭalh ̣a’s burial has be-
come a sacred space, with a religious building placed over the grave. Moreover,
. al-Balādhūrī, Ansāb al-ashrāf, :. Related traditions are in: Ibn Qutayba, al-Maʿārif, ; Ibn
Qutayba, Taʾwīl mukhtalif al-h ̣adīth, –; al-Dīnawarī, al-Mujālasa, :– (no. ).
. Alternatively, “hijriyyīn” here may refer to those who had immigrated to garrison cities such as
̣ See: Patricia Crone, “The First-Century Concept of Hiğra,” Arabica  (): –.
Basra.
. I have been unable to identify this person, but the Banū Tamīm was a prominent tribe in Basra. ̣
See: Encyclopaedia of Islam, nd ed., s.v. “Tamīm b. Murr” (Michael Lecker).
. See: Encyclopaedia Islamica, s.v. “Abū al-Yaqz ̣ān” (Mohammad Ali Kazem Beigi and Daryoush
Mohammad Poor); Dodge, Fihrist of al-Nadīm, :–. Compare Pellat, Milieu Basrien, ̣ –, who
suggests that the cult is unattested before the fourth/tenth century.
. Ibn ʿAbd Rabbihi, al-ʿIqd al-Farīd, :–.

in an explicit act of veneration, a woman anoints Ṭalh ̣a’s grave with fragrant oil,
a ritual act of the late antique cult of the saints evidenced within both hagiog-
raphy and material evidence.99
Other rituals reportedly were carried out at Ṭalh ̣a’s grave by Basrans ̣ in
the second/eighth and third/ninth centuries. The prominent Basran ̣ scholar
al-Ḥ asan al-Basrị̄ (d. /) describes how, among water carriers, “his
grave is a place of refuge . . . one of them will place his water skin by the grave
and his wish is fulfilled,” seemingly indicating that the container is then mi-
raculously filled. Al-Ḥ asan notes, “I have never seen anything more marvel-
ous than these people!”100 A report from another Basran, ̣ Abū Bakr Ibn Abī
ʿĀsiṃ (d. /), states:
I have seen many of the people of knowledge and the people of excellence—
when one of them considers a matter—turn towards [Ṭalh ̣a’s] grave, wish peace
upon him, and call upon his presence. After this, he knows the answer.101
The report indicates that scholars ( ) made ritual usage of
Ṭalh ̣a’s grave, turning towards it as a place of special significance when making
decisions. Commenting further, Ibn Abī ʿĀsim ̣ states that “our shaykhs report
that they have seen those from long before them do this,” claiming that this is a
practice rooted in Basran ̣ precedent.
Why did Ṭalh ̣a’s tomb become a place of veneration within Basra? ̣ On the
̣
one hand, it is fitting that Basran Muslims transmitted narratives of the uncov-
ering and reburial of Ṭalh ̣a’s miraculously preserved body decades after his death,
as well as stories of the rituals and miracles associated with the space. This cele-
bration of a local shrine is comparable to tomb and relic cults found in other late
antique environments, what Richard Payne describes as “the Christian construc-
tion of holy places through narrative, ritual, and cultic buildings that took place
. Harvey, Scenting Salvation, ; Gary Vikan, Early Byzantine Pilgrimage Art, revised ed.
(Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, ), . I plan on exploring the topic of the scents of
sacred spaces in early Islam in a future paper.
. al-Shaykh al-Mufīd, al-Jamal, . Oddly, this report is only found (to my knowledge) in this
Shīʿī text. Though al-Shaykh al-Mufīd cites extensively from Sunnī sources, this nonetheless seems like
an oddly positive portrayal of Ṭalh ̣a’s grave for Mufīd to quote. This might be explained by word play
possible with the phrase “his wish is fulfilled” ( ), which can, with slightly different voweling
of the Arabic text, instead be read as “he urinates,” creating a damning portrayal of disrespect towards
Ṭalh ̣a’s grave.
. Abū Bakr Ah ̣mad b. ʿAmr Ibn Abī ʿĀsim ̣ al-Ḍah ̣h ̣āk al-Shaybānī, al-Āh ̣ād wa-’l-mathānī, ed.
Bāsim Faysaḷ Ah ̣mad al-Jawābira,  vols. (Riyadh: Dār al-Rāya, /), :; Abū Nuʿaym, Maʿrifat
̣ ̣āba, : (no. ).
al-sah

throughout the Near East and the Mediterranean from the late fourth cen-
tury.”102 As Payne notes, narrative, ritual, and place often interacted in the crea-
tion of such sacred spaces, including in the circulation of stories celebrating the
site. Indeed, the stories of Ṭalh ̣a recall narratives of the recovery of the bodies of
Christian (and, later, Islamic) saints that were often used to provide mandate for
the saint’s veneration in a particular place.103 Evidence suggests that, by and large,
veneration of saints was of a highly local nature in late antiquity, with most pil-
grims coming from the shrine or tomb’s immediate vicinity.104 We might explain
the proliferation within Basrạ of traditions about Ṭalh ̣a’s body within the con-
text of the presence of his tomb there and the support for a local shrine.
On the other hand, Ṭalh ̣a’s tomb may have functioned not only as a local
̣ holy space, but also as a site of proto-Sunnī (and, perhaps, specifically
Basran
ʿUthmānī) memory, similar to the memorial sites and veneration practices that
were emerging among other Muslim sects in second/eighth-century Iraq.
Najam Haider has drawn attention to the ways in which “a distinct Imāmī
[Shīʿī] identity was increasingly reflected in a practice that combined ritual and
space, specifically pilgrimage to sites of religious importance.”105 Over the course
of the second/eighth and third/ninth centuries, pilgrimage to and rituals at
al-Ḥusayn b. ʿAlī’s shrine in Karbalāʾ were defined as central components of
Shīʿī practice, identified as part of the “specific characteristics that distinguish
an Imāmī from the wider mass of Muslims.”106 The tomb of ʿAlī in Kūfa
similarly became the object of Shīʿī pilgrimage, as did the shrines of other
ʿAlid family members and sites associated with Shīʿī sacred history in both
Iraq and Arabia.107
Another early Islamic sect—the Khārijīs—similarly developed the tombs of
their own martyrs in Iraq as sites of sectarian memory. Distinct from both the
. Richard Payne, A State of Mixture: Christian, Zoroastrians, and Iranian Political Culture in
Late Antiquity (Oakland: University of California Press, ), .
. Hippolyte Delehaye, Les origines du culte des martyrs (Brussels: Bureaux de la Société des
Bollandistes, ), ff.; Khalek, Damascus after the Muslim Conquest, ; Mimi Hanaoka,
Authority and Identity in Medieval Islamic Historiography: Persian Histories from the Peripheries (New
York: Cambridge University Press, ), –; Meri, Cult of Saints, .
. Arietta Papaconstantinou, “The Cult of Saints: A Haven of Continuity in a Changing
World?” in Egypt in the Byzantine World, –, ed. Roger Bagnall (Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press, ), –.
. Haider, Origins of the Shīʿa, .
. Haider, Origins of the Shīʿa, –; Borrut, “Remembering.”
. Haider, Origins of the Shīʿa, –; Yaron Friedman, “‘Kūfa is Better’: The Sanctity of Kūfa
in Early Islam and Shīʿism in Particular,” Le Muséon  (): –.

Shīʿa and the proto-Sunnīs, the Khārijīs tied their origins to the events of the
Civil War: like the Shīʿa, the Khārijīs saw Ṭalh ̣a and his fellows at the Battle
of the Camel as rebels but, unlike the Shīʿa, the Khārijīs came to see ʿAlī as a
disbeliever to be fought as well.108 Over the first/seventh and second/eighth
centuries, different Khārijī groups rebelled against the ruling authorities in
Iraq and the tombs of some of these Khārijī fighters emerged as powerful
Khārijī communal spaces. Khārijīs preparing for battle would reportedly travel
to the tomb of S ̣ālih ̣ b. Musarrih ̣ (d. /) near Mosul in northern Iraq,
where they would then ritually shave their heads, a distinct Khārijī identity
marker.109 When another Khārijī leader was buried in Basrạ in the late first/
seventh century, the cemetery’s owners reportedly “hated this . . . fearing that
the Khārijīs would make the grave into a place of pilgrimage” ( ).110
These and other reports suggest that the tombs of Khārijī leaders were signifi-
cant spaces in Iraq for Khārijīs’ performance of their specific sectarian identity.
Just as the formation of late antique Christian communities was facilitated
in part by pilgrimage to the tombs of martyrs and other foundational figures of
Christian history, visitation of Shīʿī and Khārijī tombs and remembrance of the
lives of the primordial leaders buried there were aspects in the creation of dis-
tinct early Islamic communities. Catherine Bell notes that commemorative rit-
ual of the sort that the Shīʿa performed at Karbalāʾ “turns the events of a
historical narrative into a type of cyclical sacred myth . . . generating powerful
images and activities of corporate identity.”111 Intimately connected with the
sense of community created by these spaces and their attendant rituals, however,
there was “another, rather obvious, component of pilgrimage and, particularly,
of pilgrimage places: namely, the formulation of communal identity vis-à-vis
another group, a real or created ‘collective other.’”112 Pilgrimages to the shrine
of the martyred Shīʿī imām or Khārijī rebel leader thus function as “a polemic
. Patricia Crone and Fritz Zimmermann, The Epistle of Sālim ibn Dhakwān (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, ), .
. Ibn Qutayba, al-Maʿārif, ; Adam R. Gaiser, Shurāt Legends, Ibād ̣ī Identities: Martyrdom,
Asceticism, and the Making of an Early Islamic Community (Columbia: University of South Carolina
Press, ), .
. al-Mubarrad, The Kāmil of El-Mubarrad, ed. William Wright,  vols. (Leipzig: F. A.
Brockhaus, –), :; Gaiser, Shurāt Legends, .
. Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Perspectives (New York: Oxford University Press,
), .
. Jacob N. Kinnard, Places in Motion: The Fluid Identities of Temples, Images, and Pilgrims (New
York: Oxford University Press, ), .

[sic] device to construct boundaries of identity and exclusion.”113 Through both
ritual and narrative, these spaces materialized imagined boundaries: incorporat-
ing those within, while excluding those without.
Like the Shīʿa and the Khārijīs that utilized the graves of their heroes in craft-
ing their sectarian communities, proto-Sunnīs may have used Ṭalh ̣a’s grave as a
space for the articulation of their own Islamic sectarian identity. In his study of
early Arabic historiographical texts about the Civil War, Erling Petersen suggests
that the Companion al-Zubayr “appears to have become a kind of Uthmanite
patron saint of Basra.”114 While the evidence is patchy, Ṭalh ̣a b. ʿUbayd Allāh
similarly appears to qualify as an ʿUthmānī Basran ̣ “patron saint.” The circula-
tion within Basrạ of inventio narratives (complete with a dream apparition and
a miraculously undecayed body), a grave among the hijriyyīn, and even (accord-
ing to some reports) a mosque surrounding the grave all suggest the significance
of Ṭalh ̣a’s burial site. The reports of a woman scenting the grave, water carriers
receiving miracles there, and scholars turning to the grave for aid indicate that
rituals were taking place at the gravesite. Moreover, there are strong indications
that people were performing pious travel there by at least the fourth/tenth cen-
tury, when the Sunnī scholar Ibn Ḥibbān al-Bustī (d. /) describes Ṭalh ̣a’s
grave as “famous and visited” ( ) and the Shīʿī historian al-Masʿūdī (d.
/) similarly says “his grave and his mosque in Basrạ are famous up to to-
day” ( ).115
Due to Ṭalh ̣a’s role in the Civil War, any visitors to his grave were almost
certainly proto-Sunnīs, who understood Ṭalh ̣a as one of the Prophet’s righ-
teously guided Companions: a perspective rejected by both Shīʿa and
Khārijīs. An incident in fourth/tenth-century Baghdad dramatically illustrates
the sectarian valence of veneration of Ṭalh ̣a and the other participants in the
Battle of the Camel. In / during the month of Muh ̣arram—the month
. Liyakat Takim, “Charismatic Appeal or Communitas? Visitation to the Shrines of the Imams,”
Journal of Ritual Studies . (): –. Conversely, some recent scholarship has instead
highlighted “inter-sectarian” worship at shrines of the family of ʿAlī: Teresa Bernheimer, “Shared
Sanctity: Some Notes on the Ahl al-Bayt Shrines in the Early Ṭālibid Genealogies,” Studia Islamica
 (): –; Stephennie Mulder, The Shrines of the ʿAlids in Medieval Syria: Sunnis, Shiʿis and
the Architecture of Coexistence (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ).
. Petersen, ʿAlī and Muʿāwiya, .
. Muh ̣ammad b. Ah ̣mad Ibn Ḥibbān al-Bustī, Mashāhīr ʿulamāʾ al-amsār, ̣ ed. Majdī b. Mansūṛ
b. Sayyid al-Shūrī (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, /), ; Ibn Ḥibbān, Kitāb al-Thiqāt, ed.
Muh ̣ammad ʿAbd al-Muʿīd Khān,  vols. (Hyderabad: Matbaʿat ̣ Dāʾirat al-Maʿārif al-ʿUthmāniyya,
–/–), :; ʿAlī b. al-Ḥusayn al-Masʿūdī, Les Prairies d’or, ed. and trans. C. Barbier
de Meynard and J. B. Pavet de Courteille,  vols. (Paris: L’Imprimerie Impériale, –), :.

in which the Shīʿa commemorate al-Ḥusayn’s martyrdom at Karbalāʾ—some
Sunnīs in Baghdad held a counter-memorial:
A group of Sunnīs placed a woman on a camel and called her ʿĀʾisha, while
someone took the name Ṭalh ̣a and another took the name al-Zubayr. They
said, “We are going to battle the followers of ʿAlī!” As a result of this, many
from both sides were killed.116
According to this account, a group of Baghdadi Sunnīs ( ) seem-
ingly responded to the Shīʿa’s tribute to a foundational event of their sectarian
identity with the commemoration of a distinctly non-Shīʿī event, the Battle of
the Camel, leading to a “great riot between the Sunnīs and the Shīʿa” that left
many dead. While there is no evidence that this was a regularly occurring cele-
bration, the Sunnī commemoration of the Battle of the Camel described here
indicates how divisive—and useful for sectarian identity—this history was for
Iraqi Muslims in a slightly later period than that studied in this paper.
Within the sectarian swirl of Iraq in the second/eighth and third/ninth cen-
turies, an anti-Shīʿī impetus similarly may have informed proto-Sunnī cultiva-
tion of Ṭalh ̣a’s grave as a site that memorialized the fight against ʿAlī.117
Indeed, we find that ʿUthmānī proto-Sunnīs were some of the vocal propo-
nents of Ṭalh ̣a’s grave. For example, Ibn ʿAbd Rabbihi’s al-ʿIqd al-Farīd cites
the story of the woman anointing Ṭalh ̣a’s grave from the second/eighth-century
Iraqi h ̣adīth scholar Sufyan al-Thawrī (d. /).118 Such a report celebrating
the tomb of Ṭalh ̣a fits the ideology ascribed elsewhere to al-Thawrī, who is
often portrayed as having been pro-Umayyad and opposed to the Shīʿa.119 In
several reports, Sufyān al-Thawrī is said to have criticized Shīʿī devotion to
. Ibn Kathīr, al-Bidāya wa-’l-nihāya,  vols. (Beirut: Maktabat al-Maʿārif, /), :;
trans. (adapted here) in Ali J. Hussain, “The Mourning of History and the History of Mourning: The
Evolution of Ritual Commemoration of the Battle of Karbala,” Comparative Studies of South Asia,
Africa and the Middle East  (): .
. Sunnī patronage and visitation of Companions’ tombs in Syria in the fourth/tenth and
following centuries “occurred in counterpoint to the increasingly consolidated Shīʿī veneration of
members of the Prophet’s family.” Khalek, “Medieval Muslim Martyrs,” , –.
. Sufyan al-Thawrī’s h ̣adīth collection—called his Jāmiʿ—was known in Andalusia, so Ibn ʿAbd
Rabbihi’s citation may be a citation from this second/eighth-century source. Walter Werkmeister,
Quellenuntersuchungen zum Kitāb al-ʿIqd al-farīd des Andalusiers Ibn ʿAbdrabbih (/ –
/): Ein Beitrag zur arabischen Literaturgeschichte (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz, ), –. This
story is also cited from al-Thawrī in another Andalusian text: Ibn Badrūn, Sharh ̣ qasīdat ̣ Ibn
ʿAbdūn, ed. Reinhart P. A. Dozy (Leiden: Luchtmans, ), .
. On Sufyān al-Thawrī’s advocacy for the Umayyads and opposition to Shīʿism, see:
Encyclopaedia of Islam, nd ed., s.v. “Sufyān al-Thawrī” (H.P. Raddatz); Judd, Religious Scholars, –.

ʿAlī, saying, “Whoever gives precedence to ʿAlī over Abū Bakr and ʿUmar
makes a mockery of the Companions of the Messenger of God.”120 Similarly,
when discussing the righteous caliphs, “Sufyān al-Thawrī would say, ‘Abū
Bakr, ʿUmar, and ʿUthmān’ and then fall silent,” leaving ʿAlī off the list.121
From the opposing side, Shīʿī historical memory is equally antagonistic towards
al-Thawrī, presenting him as a liar and a member of the oppressive Umayyad
police force (shurta) ̣ that killed the Shīʿī martyr Zayd b. ʿAlī in /.122
This anti-Shīʿī image of Sufyān is complicated by reports that state that he
“preferred ʿAlī over ʿUthmān” or explicitly classify him as a Shīʿī.123 Yet what-
ever Shīʿism Sufyān may have harbored was reportedly weakened by time in
Basrạ later in his life:
Sufyān used to follow the opinion of the Kūfans, giving precedence to ʿAlī
over Abū Bakr and ʿUmar [the first two caliphs]. But when he arrived in
̣ he turned away from that and preferred Abū Bakr and ʿUmar over
Basra,
ʿAlī.124
Thus, while Sufyān had earlier held the Kūfan position of celebrating ʿAlī over
̣ moving
the other caliphs, his stand on this issue is said to have changed in Basra,
125
in a proto-Sunnī direction. Indeed, according to another report, Sufyān’s en-
counter with two Basran ̣ proto-Sunnīs—ʿAbd Allāh b. ʿAwn (d. /) and
Ayyūb al-Sakhtiyānī (d. /–)—explicitly caused him to “leave Shīʿism”
. Yah ̣yā Ibn Maʿīn, Maʿrifat al-rijāl, ed. Muh ̣ammad Kāmil al-Qasṣ ār, ̣  vols. (Damascus:
̣
Matbūʿāt Majmaʿ al-Lugha al-ʿArabiyya, /), : (no. ), cf. also no. . Similar reports
appear in: al-Fasawī, Kitāb al-Maʿrifat, :; Ibn ʿAsākir, Taʾrīkh, :, :; Abū Nuʿaym al-
̣
Isfahānī, ̣
Ḥilyat al-awliyāʾ wa tabaqāt ̣
al-asfiyāʾ,  vols. (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya,
/), :–, ; al-Dhahabī, Siyar, :–; al-Khallāl, Sunna,  (nos. –),  (no.
).
. al-Fasawī, Kitāb al-Maʿrifat, :, cited in Encyclopaedia of Islam, nd ed., s.v. “ʿUthmāniyya”
(P. Crone).
. Abū Jaʿfar Muh ̣ammad b. al-Ḥasan al-Ṭūsī, Ikhtiyār maʿrifat al-rijāl al-maʿrūf bi-Rijāl al-
̣
Kashshī, ed. Jawād al-Qayyūmī al-Isfahānī (Qom: Muʾassasat al-Nashr al-Islāmī, /), –
(no. ); Muh ̣ammad b. Jarīr b. Rustam al-Āmulī al-Ṭabarī al-Imāmī, al-Mustarshid fi imāmat amīr
al-muʾminīn ʿAlī bin Abī Ṭālib, ed. Ah ̣mad al-Mah ̣mūdī (Qom: Muʾassasat al-thaqāfa al-islāmiyya li-
’l-Kūshānbūr, /), .
. al-Dhahabī, Siyar, :, ; Ibn Qutayba, al-Maʿārif, ; Judd, Religious Scholars, –;
van Ess, Theology and Society, –, –.
. Abū Nuʿaym, Ḥilyat al-awliyāʾ, :.
. Even with his acceptance of Abū Bakr and ʿUmar, Sufyān nonetheless reportedly continued to
prefer “ʿAlī over ʿUthmān.” This would accord with the position ascribed to the Batrī Zaydīs, with
whom Sufyān is sometimes associated. See: al-Nawbakhtī, Firaq al-shīʿa, , , –; Dodge, Fihrist
of al-Nadīm, :–; van Ess, Theology and Society, :–; Encyclopaedia of Islam, rd ed., s.v.
“Batriyya” (Najam Haider).

( ).126 Perhaps related to this change of heart, Sufyān reportedly said,
“The Shīʿī extremists ( ) have left me, and I am loath to mention the mer-
its of ʿAlī.”127 The association of al-Thawrī’s “conversion” with his time in
Basrạ points to the dominant presence there of non-Shīʿī voices in this period.
Indeed, the Basran ̣ scholars who “converted” al-Thawrī away from Shīʿism both
appear to have had extensive Umayyad connections.128
Proto-Sunnism of an ʿUthmānī cast is likewise found among several other
individuals interested in Ṭalh ̣a’s grave. Ibn Abī Khaythama—one of the anti-
ʿAlid Baghdādī scholars who transmitted stories of Ṭalh ̣a’s undecayed body—
notes that he personally visited Ṭalh ̣a’s grave in Basra,
̣ suggesting his patronage
of the site.129 The third/ninth-century Syrian historian Abū Zurʿa al-Dimashqī
(d. /) mentions that “the scholars maintain that Ṭalh ̣a’s and al-Zubayr
are buried in Basra” ̣ and cites this information about Ṭalh ̣a’s and al-Zubayr’s
“martyrium” ( ) from individuals associated with the Umayyads in Syria,
including Ibn Shihāb al-Zuhrī (d. /) and Yūnus b. Yazīd al-Aylī
(d. /).130 Finally, Ibn Abī ʿĀsim, ̣ who reported that scholars would look
to Ṭalh ̣a’s grave when making decisions, was a member of the “people of sunna
and h ̣adīth” and is said to have composed a book on the merits of Muʿāwiya b.
Abī Sufyān, the progenitor of the Umayyad caliphate and enemy of the Shīʿa.131
Thus, in several cases the individuals most vocal in our sources about Ṭalh ̣a’s
grave are not only proto-Sunnīs, but also anti-Shīʿa. This suggests that the grave
may have functioned as a counterpoint, or at least alternative, to the Shīʿī me-
morial sites elsewhere in Iraq. Because the Civil War was such a touchstone of
. Muh ̣ammad b. Jarīr al-Ṭabarī, al-Muntakhab min kitāb dhayl al-mudhayyal min tārīkh al-
̣ ̣āba wa-’l-tābiʿīn, in Dhuyūl tārīkh al-Ṭabarī, ed. Muh ̣ammad Abū al-Fad ̣l Ibrāhīm (Cairo: Dār
sah
al-Maʿārif, ), ; trans. Landau-Tasseron, History of al-Ṭabarī, :; al-Dhahabī, Siyar, :;
Mughaltāy, ̣ Ikmāl tahdhīb, :.
. al-Dhahabī, Siyar, :. Compare the reports of Sufyān’s reporting fad ̣āʾil and manāqib
traditions: al-Dhahabī, Siyar, :; Abū Nuʿaym, Ḥilyat al-awliyāʾ, :–.
. On Ibn ʿAwn and Ayyūb, see: Judd, Religious Scholars, – and –.
. Abū Bakr Ah ̣mad b. Abī Khaythama Zuhayr b. Ḥarb, al-Taʾrīkh al-Kabīr al-maʿrūf bi-taʾrīkh
Ibn Abī Khaythama, ed. S ̣alāh ̣ b. Fath ̣ī Halal,  vols. (Cairo: al-Fārūq al-Ḥadītha li-’l-Ṭibāʿa wa-’l-
Nashr, /), : (no. )
. ʿAbd al-Rah ̣mān b. ʿAmr b. ʿAbd Allāh b. S ̣afwān, Tārīkh Abī Zurʿa al-Dimashqī, ed. Shukr
Allāh b. Niʿmat Allāh al-Qawjānī,  vols. (Damascus: Majmaʿ al-Lugha al-ʿArabiyya, ), : (no.
). On al-Zuhrī and Yūnus b. Yazīd al-Aylī, see: Michael Lecker, “Biographical Notes on Ibn Shihāb
al-Zuhrī,” Journal of Semitic Studies . (): –
. al-Dhahabī, Siyar, :; Aram A. Shahin, “In Defense of Muʿāwiya ibn Abī Sufyān: Treatises
and Monographs on Muʿāwiya from the Eighth to the Nineteenth Centuries,” in The Lineaments of
Islam: Studies in Honor of Fred McGraw Donner, ed. Paul M. Cobb (Leiden: Brill, ), –.

ideological conflict between different Muslim groups, veneration of the grave of
one of the war’s participants—and, according to some, one of its martyrs—was
likely an ideologically charged act. Within the hodgepodge of Muslim groups
present in Basrạ (and Iraq more generally), the veneration of Ṭalh ̣a likely stood
as a visible ritual performance of proto-Sunnī and perhaps ʿUthmānī identity.
CONCLUSION
The different images of Ṭalh ̣a b. ʿUbayd Allāh offered by the narratives of his
exhumation demonstrate early Muslim groups’ usages of late antique literary to-
poi in illustrating their alternative perspectives on this divisive figure. As noted
above, the image of the decaying body was drawn upon by late antique groups
to vilify their enemies: Christians, for example, portrayed the Prophet
Muh ̣ammad’s body decaying to illustrate what they saw as Muh ̣ammad’s false
prophecy and, thus, Islam’s falseness as a tradition. For some early Muslims—
especially the Shīʿa, who regarded Ṭalh ̣a as a betrayer of ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib—the
stories of Ṭalh ̣a’s body being eaten by the dirt or turning green likely fulfilled a
similar polemical function, with Ṭalh ̣a’s immorality viscerally embodied by his
corpse’s decay. In contrast, other reports of Ṭalh ̣a’s corpse are steeped in the lan-
guage of late antique hagiography, with his story reading like an inventio of a
long-lost saint, prophet, or patriarch. These reports were almost certainly spread
by proto-Sunnī Muslims, for whom Ṭalh ̣a’s incorrupt body testified to his sta-
tus as a sacred figure and embodied an understanding of Islamic history friendly
to the Companions, such as Ṭalh ̣a, who were elsewhere vilified by Shīʿī and
Khārijī polemics.
In combination with these hagiographic stories, Ṭalh ̣a’s grave became a space
for the performance of a proto-Sunnī understanding of Islamic communal
history. Performed by Muslims of the second/eighth and third/ninth centuries
who understood Ṭalh ̣a as a righteous Companion of the Prophet Muh ̣ammad,
the rituals at his grave were avenues for the remembrance of a specifically proto-
Sunnī holy person, rejected by other Muslim sectarian groups of this period.
Like veneration at the shrines of Shīʿī and Khārijī martyrs—as well as at those
of Christian and Jewish martyrs among these other late antique communities—
worship at Ṭalh ̣a’s grave offered an opportunity to perform membership in a
specific religious community. At this location, proto-Sunnīs could remember
the contentious history of the First Civil War in such a way as to unite their
own community around a sacred figure, even as these rituals and stories simul-
taneously rejected the memories of other early Muslim groups.

A Holy Heretical Body Ala B. Ubayd Al

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ADAM BURSI

Hill Museum and Manuscript Library

A Holy Heretical Body

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Bursi | A Holy Heretical Body 149

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Developing in closely adjacent oral, literary, and cultural environments to those

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. . ʿAbd al-Malik

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. Ibn Saʿd, Kitāb al-Ṭabaqāt, /ii:.

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In other accounts of Ṭalh ̣a’s exhumation, a very different description of his

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Sufyān b. Uyayna Abū Usāma [Hammād

Ismā īl b. Abī Khālid

Qays b. Abī Hāzim

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Abd al-Wārith b. Sufyān

Ibn Abī Khaythama

* Abū Maslama Abū Mu āwiya al-Darīr Īsā b. Yazīd Ahmad b. Ᾱsim

* Alī b. Zayd * Mālik b. Dīnār * al-Muthannā b. Sa īd

Ᾱmina Ᾱ isha bt. Talha

FIGURE 2. Isnād Diagram for Stories of Ṭalh ̣a’s Undecayed Body.

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MEMORY AND TRADITION AT A PROTO-SUNNĪ SHRINE

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