The Case of Al-Tabara

Journal of Islamic Studies 16:3 (2005) pp. 287–331 doi:10.
1093/jis/eti152
DISCOURSE AND HISTORICAL

ANALYSIS: THE CASE OF AL-FABAR>’S
HISTORY OF THE MESSENGERS AND
THE KINGS
U L R I K A M Å RT E N SS O N *
Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Early Islamic historical writings do not readily yield the kind of

information modern historians seek, such as figures on trade and
agriculture, or explicit analysis of social organization and change. It is
even debated to what degree they constitute primary sources.1 Since
the late nineteenth century scholars have been discussing how best
to engage with them, and three approaches can be distinguished: to
evaluate the factuality of the information, to analyse how the
information fits into the context of each particular historical work, or
to combine the two. Stephen Humphreys, who represents the combined
approach, has asked how historians might ‘devise any reliable strategies
through which the information in these texts can be disengaged
from its original matrix and turned to our purposes’.2 The question
implies that each work must be analysed in its own terms before we can
draw historical conclusions from it. This is what I will try to do with
* The author expresses her sincere thanks for invaluable comments at various
stages of this work to Abbas Vali, David Wasserstein, Bernard Wasserstein,
Håkan Rydving, Gerd Marie Aadna, Dirk Hartvig, Torsten Blomkvist, and
Torsten Hylén.
1
Regarding the problems surrounding the sources, see R. Stephen
Humphreys, Islamic History: A Framework for Inquiry (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1991), 128 f. See also: Albrecht Noth and
Lawrence I. Conrad, The Early Arabic Historical Tradition: A Source-Critical
Study (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1994), 59.
2
Humphreys, Islamic History 129. For attempts along these lines, cf. Noth
and Conrad, Early Arabic Historical Tradition 59, and Marshall G. S. Hodgson,
‘Two Pre-Modern Historians: Pitfalls and Opportunities in Presenting Them to
Moderns’, in John U. Nef (ed.), World Academy of Art and Science 5: Towards
World Community (The Hague: W. Junk, 1968), 53–68.
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288 u l r i k a m å r t e n s s o n
one of the most frequently consulted historical texts, Ta8r;kh al-rusul
wa-l-mul<k (the Ta8r;kh), by Ab< Ja6far MuAammad b. Jar;r al-Fabar;
(839–923 CE).
The aim is to develop a methodological and conceptual framework
for interpreting its historical information, inspired by the French
historian and discourse theoretician Michel de Certeau.3 Focus is on
two specific issues: the khabar-form and the religious content. While
there is an ongoing debate about the implications of the khabar-form,
there is virtual consensus over those of the religious content, namely
that it precludes any historical analysis beyond the morality of individual
actors. My interpretation is based on a materialistic conception of
religion, and I will argue that Fabar; made an historical analysis which
is expressed by means of the religious symbols themselves.
Discourse theory
Michel de Certeau’s discourse theory is grounded in a distinction
between historical events and historical knowledge. Knowledge about
historical events is produced through practices of writing history, or
discourses. Although events themselves are independent of discourse,
they can only be represented in this form and therefore historical
knowledge is necessarily discursive.4 Discourse organizes historical
events along lines of causality, and therefore defines the ways in which
we can and cannot conceive of the past; in this sense, discourse is a
‘mode of intelligibility’.5
Discourse is produced in a kind of power-field generated through the
interaction of three factors: a social institution of scholarly knowledge,
a discipline or tradition of knowledge within the institution, and a
subject. ‘Subject’ here has the specific meaning of a dialogical relation-
ship between the scholar as subjective being and his or her subject-
matter. This relationship engenders ‘subject’ as the third entity, which
interacts with ‘discipline’ and ‘institution’ to produce the discourse. Thus
a historical discourse expresses identity on the three levels of institution,
discipline, and subject, and should consequently also be interpreted
in relation to these three levels, beginning with the institution, which
de Certeau refers to as the ‘place’ in society where historical writing
is practised.6
3
L’Écriture de l’histoire (1975), English trans. by Tom Conley, The Writing
of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).
4
Ibid. esp. 58–69.
5
Ibid. 21.
6
Ibid.
A L - FA B A R >’ S H I S T O R Y O F T H E M E S S E N G E R S A N D T H E K I N G S 289
By distinguishing between historical events and historical knowledge,
de Certeau rejects the positivistic assumption that there is an objectively
existing history, with objective laws of causality, which can be deduced
and known through appropriate empirical evidence. De Certeau locates
historicity not in ‘history itself’, but in history as a discipline and practice
of writing, in ‘the movement which links an interpretive practice to a
social praxis. History thus vacillates between two poles. On the one
hand, it refers to a practice, hence to a reality; on the other, it is a closed
discourse, a text that organizes and concludes a mode of intelligibility.’7
And since the interpretation of a historical discourse is as much a
practice as the interpreted discourse, there is an irreducible difference
between the interpreter and the interpreted, which results from the
difference of identities of institution, discipline, and subject, with
concomitant difference in praxis.8
De Certeau does not define praxis. But since his discourse theory
is grounded in Karl Marx’s materialism, it can be assumed that he
follows Marx’s definition. In Thesen über Feuerbach, Marx conceives
of praxis as the human sensorial activity that creates ideas, sense
perceptions, and material objects, none of which exists objectively
outside of human activity. As creative activity, praxis takes place and is
conditioned by mode of production and organization of property and
labour, as well as by subjective identities and class. However, praxis
is not only conditioned, but through its creativity changes conditions.
For de Certeau, then, the writing of history is praxis. It is part of the
subjective and collective creative activity that is human society and
reality, and its ‘place’ is the knowledge-producing institution, which in
its turn is related in specific ways to society’s dynamic organization of
property and labour.
De Certeau’s subject-matter is modern French discourse on religious
history, which expresses the transition from pre-modern to modern
society and the ensuing intense struggle over the balance of power
between religious and secular institutions. In pre-modern society, the
Church was the main producer of ideology and scholarship, but in
the modern order it was assigned the role of society’s moral guide.
Scholarship was transferred to the secular universities and disciplines,
7
Ibid.
8
These epistemological arguments are deduced from de Certeau’s general
discussions of subject–object relations in The Writing of History, 2 ff., 26, 45 f.
and Jeremy Ahearne’s reading of de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life,
trans. Steven Rendall (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press,
1984), in Michel de Certeau: Interpretation and its Other (Oxford: Blackwell,
1995), 172 f.
whose secular identity is expressed in discursive constructions of
religious thought as ‘the other’ of modern scholarship, i.e. as in decisive
ways different from it and therefore ‘not scholarly’. On the premiss that
discourse is a mode of intelligibility expressing praxis, this construction
of religious thought as unscholarly corresponds to the praxis that
religion is moral guidance, not scholarship.9
However, the practice of separating religious from secular thought
can be done only by continuously relating them to each other, for
without comparisons, their differences would not emerge. Thus while the
practice of writing implicitly relates the two to each other, the explicit
discourse separates them from each other. With de Certeau’s terminol-
ogy, this practice of writing is a kind of archaeology. Religious thought
is conceived of as ‘past’ in relation to secular thought, but is simulta-
neously made into its ‘origins’ (arché). As origins, it has a genealogical
relationship to modern secular thought. This argument implies that
the meaning of religion is constructed in secular discourse. From this
follows a general methodological point: if the meaning of religion is
not a timeless given but constructed in discourse just like historical
knowledge in general, religion must be explicitly defined in each
individual study, according to the overall theoretical approach.10
From the viewpoint of de Certeau’s arguments, I conceive the debates
on Islamic history as parts of modern historical discourse. Most recently,
Chase Robinson acknowledges the general validity of the argument
that modern historiography constructs pre-modern history as its ‘other’.
In the section ‘The Alterity of Medieval Islam’, however, he claims that
the argument is not relevant for medieval Islamic history, because it is
so different from modern that to liken them to each other would mean
forcing Islamic history into an alien mould and violating its specific
character.11 And the specificity consists in its religious and moral
character. I shall discuss Robinson’s work further below, but it is worth
presenting in summary form the other points that he claims characterize
Islamic medieval history as opposed to modern: Muslim historians
lacked (a) the aim to explain history, (b) a theory of society through
which history could be explained in terms of the complex interaction
between different social sectors and actors, and (c) originality of
thought. Again, these traits can all be attributed to the religious character
of this history. Where my interpretation differs from Robinson’s, it
depends on a different concept of religion.
9
De Certeau, The Writing of History, 1–14, esp. 2 ff.; 45 f.
10
Ibid. 131, 137 ff.
11
Islamic Historiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003), 127.
Khabar-history
The term khabar-history refers specifically to histories from the eighth
and ninth centuries CE, while the Ta8r;kh is usually classified as
‘annalistic’ or ‘universal’ history.12 Nonetheless, its form is khabar-
history, since the narrative is pieced together by individual reports
(khabar, pl. akhb:r) about historical events, authorized by isn:ds, or the
chains of authorities who have transmitted the information about
the events to the recording of the report in the historical work in case.13
Let us first see how Fabar; conceives of the khabar-form as he stated it in
the introduction to his history:
The reader should know that with respect to all I have mentioned and made
it a condition to set down in this writing of ours (kit:bin: h:dh:),14 I rely
upon traditions and reports which I have transmitted and which I attribute to
their transmitters. I rely only very exceptionally upon what is learned through
rational arguments and deduced by internal thought processes (d<na m: udrika
12
For these classifications, see Frantz Rosenthal, A History of Muslim
Historiography (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1968), 66–86, 133–50.
13
For studies of the khabar, see e.g. Geo Widengren, ‘Oral Tradition
and Written Literature Among the Hebrews in the Light of Arabic Evidence,
With Special Regard to Prose Narratives’, Acta Orientalia 22 (1955), 201–62;
6Abd al-6Az;z D<r;, The Rise of Historical Writing Among the Arabs (Beirut: n.p.,
1960), trans. L. I. Conrad (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983);
Erling Ladewig Petersen, 6Al; and Mu6:wiya in Early Arabic Tradition: Studies
on the Genesis and Growth of Islamic Historical Writing Until the End of the
Ninth Century (Copenhagen: Scandinavian University Books, 1964); Hodgson,
‘Two Pre-Modern Muslim Historians’; Rosenthal, A History of Muslim
Historiography, 66–71 (on Fabar;, see 71, 134 f.); Patricia Crone, Slaves on
Horses: The Evolution of the Islamic Polity (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1980), 3–17; Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1987), 203–30; Joseph B. Roberts, Early Islamic
Historiography: Ideology and Methodology (Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio State
University, 1986); Aziz al-Azmeh, Arabic Thought and Islamic Societies
(London: Croom Helm, 1986), 161–7; Humphreys, Islamic History, 71–91;
Stefan Leder, ‘The Literary Use of the Khabar: A Basic Form of Historical
Writing’, in A. Cameron and L. I. Conrad (eds.), Studies in Late Antiquity and
Early Islam 1, The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East I: Problems
in the Literary Source Material (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1992) 277–315;
Tarif Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought in the Classical Period (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994), 17–82; Noth and Conrad, The Early Arabic
Historical Tradition; Fred M. Donner, Studies of Late Antiquity and Early
Islam 14: Narratives of Islamic Origins: The Beginnings of Islamic Historical
Writing (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1998); Robinson, Islamic Historiography,
18–54, 83–102.
14
Rosenthal translates kit:b as ‘book’, the usual rendering, but I prefer
‘writing’, which connotes the practice of writing history.
bi-Aujaji-l-6uq<l wa-stunbi3a bi-fikari l-nuf<s ill: l-yas;r al-qal;l minhu). For no
knowledge of the history of men of the past and of recent men and events is
attainable by those who were not able to observe them and did not live in their
time, except through information and transmission provided by informants and
transmitters. This cannot be brought out by reason or deduced by internal
thought processes (d<na l-istikhr:j bi-l-6uq<l wa-l-istinb:3 bi-fikari-l-nuf<s). This
writing of mine may [be found to] contain some information, mentioned by us
on the authority of certain men of the past, which the reader may disapprove
of and the listener may find detestable, because he can find nothing sound and
no real meaning in it. In such cases, he should know that such information
has come to him not from us, but from those who transmitted it to us. We have
merely reported it as it was reported to us.15
Fabar;’s method is first to present authoritative reports on a given
issue, then give variants to them, and then proceed to evaluate which
ones are the most reliable, his main criteria of evaluation being
soundness of the isn:d, and reference to God and His Messenger.16
The exception is reports from 6Abbasid history, where the isn:ds are
inexplicably dropped.17 If the prophetic reports are contradictory,
Fabar; measures them against the Qur8:n, which he interprets to fit
his preferred version.18
The khabar-form has appeared problematic to modern scholars, for
two reasons in particular: (a) its underlying principles of authority and
epistemology, and (b) its simultaneously unimpeachable documentation
and contradictory historical information. Regarding the first point,
Robinson has taken Fabar;’s statement cited above to express an
15
The English translation of Fabar;’s history, The History of al-Fabar;, is
henceforth abbreviated as HT, with the number of the volume in Roman
numbers. Each reference will include reference to the Arabic text, Annales
quos scripsit Abu Djafar Mohammed ibn Djarir at-Tabari, ed. M. J. de Goeje
(Leiden: Brill, 1879–81), henceforth abbreviated as Leiden; hence, HT
i. 170/Leiden i, 6 f. The last part of the second last sentence reads fa-l-ya6lam
annahu lam yu8ta f; dh:lika min qibalin:, wa-innam: utiya min qibal ba6di
n:qil;hi ilayn:; I have modified Rosenthal’s translation ‘he should know that it
is not our fault that such information comes to him, but the fault of someone
who transmitted it to us’.
16
See e.g. reports on the order of creation, HT i. 198–203/Leiden i. 29–33.
17
Tayeb El-Hibri, ‘The Unity of Tabari’s Chronicle’, al-6UB<r al-Wus3: 11:1
(Apr. 1999), 1–3.
18
One example of this (HT ii. 82/Leiden i. 290) is the case of contradictory
reports attributed to the Prophet about which of Abraham’s sons, Ishmael or Isaac,
was to be sacrificed. Fabar; does not weigh the authenticity of these reports;
he chooses among them on the basis of his interpretation of the Qur8:n, which he
understands as indicating Isaac. (We should point out that the majority Muslim
view has long been that the Qur8:n indicates Ism:6;l as the commanded sacrifice.)
emerging ‘culture of traditionalism’, where knowledge was authoritative
only when attributed to a scholarly collective, but not to individual genius:
Put very schematically, traditionalist cultures such as medieval Islam and
Rabbinic Judaism hold that knowledge is better conserved than it is created.
In particular, they hold that the best kind of knowledge is the wisdom of pious
and inspired forefathers, which, whether recorded in their day or generated
retrospectively by subsequent generations, can validate and guide the experience
of the present. As distrustful of creativity as they are convinced of the inerrancy
of those who came before them, traditionalists are generally critical about the
present and nostalgic about a ‘golden age’ when men, acting in accordance with
fresh truths, accomplished great things. They do not revere the past; they revere
a past, and although the length and character of this past differ from culture
to culture, there is always an ever widening gap between the time of inspiration
(or revelation) on the one hand, and the present time of decay, on the other.19
I do not agree that Fabar;’s statement reflects ‘traditionalism’ in
Robinson’s sense. The term traditionalism (naqliyya) refers to the
hermeneutical school which posits revelation (Scripture) as primary
source of knowledge about the principles of the law, and tradition as the
guiding instance for deducing these principles from Scripture, as opposed
to rationalism (6aqliyya), which posits reason as the primary source
of knowledge to which both revelation and tradition are subjected.20
Neither position has any necessary bearing on originality. Indeed,
medieval Eanbalite traditionalism obliged each jurist to exercise ijtih:d,
or adjudication based on independent reasoning, instead of imitating
the traditional interpretations of the law schools (taql;d).21 Fabar;
himself practiced ijtih:d and held theological positions, later defined as
Ash6arite,22 which constituted a synthesis between traditionalism and
19
Islamic Historiography, 85 f. See also 83–102, and 95: ‘Indeed, the logic
of traditionalism meant that being authoritative generally meant being dead.
Schools of thought typically formed after their eponyms passed away, a good
example being none other than the ‘Jar;r;’ school of law, which followed the
teachings of Ibn Jar;r al-Fabar; . . . . Originality was as uncomfortable as
emulation was natural, and this explains why the very traditionalists who shied
away from championing contemporaries were the same traditionalists who
claimed to transmit, rather than compose. What could they possibly have to offer?’
20
Richard C. Martin and Mark R. Woodward with Dwi S. Atmaja, Defenders
of Reason in Islam: Mu6tazilism from Medieval School to Modern Symbol
(Oxford: OneWorld Publications, 1997), 16.
21
Ibid. 16–21.
22
Claude Gilliot, Exégèse, langue, et théologie en Islam: L’Exégèse Coranique
de Tabari (m. 311/923), (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1990), 36, citing
Ibn Eazm (d. 1064), al-FiBal f; al-milal wa-l-ahw:8 wa-l-niAal, i. 35, iv. 67
(Beirut: n.p., 1975), 67.
rationalism. Rather than reflecting an Islamic scholarly culture hostile to
individual originality, then, I regard Fabar;’s statement as a theory of
historical knowledge: the only way to know what happened in the past
is through statements or other kinds of documentation pertaining to
that particular time and event. This is what we call primary sources.
Everything else, and especially deduction, pertains to the writing histo-
rian. As for Robinson’s argument, I see it as a discursive construction
of medieval Islamic scholarship as authoritative, collective, and
‘different’ from modern scholarship and modern history, which are
characterized by individuality and originality.
The second problematic point is whether or not the isn:ds transmit
reliable historical information, in spite of their unimpeachable chains
of transmission. Certain scholars (sometimes called ‘revisionists’) have
argued that isn:ds are fabricated because the earliest extant written
khabar-histories date from the late eighth century CE, while the events
they describe took place about a century earlier. Since no written
material existed between these two points in time, the historical reports
must be late constructs, which represent past events according to the
present views of their authors.23 In support of this argument they point
to reports about the first Muslim generation containing points of Islamic
doctrine and law that are supposed to have evolved only by the second
or even third centuries—and if a report’s contents (matn) reflect late
opinions, its isn:d must also be a late construction. Hence, both matn
and isn:d would date at the earliest to the time of compilation of the
first written histories, i.e. the late eighth century onwards, because that
was the time when Islamic doctrine and law began to take shape.24
23
For statements of this problem, see e.g. Patricia Crone and Michael Cook,
Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1977), 3; Crone, Slaves on Horses, 3 et passim; Meccan Trade, 215;
Michael Morony, Iraq After the Muslim Conquest (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1984), 572–5; Humphreys, Islamic History, 69 et passim;
Robinson, ‘The Study of Islamic Historiography: A Progress Report’, Journal
of the Royal Asiatic Society 7 (1997), 199–227, 209; Islamic Historiography,
18–54; Donner, Narratives, 203.
24
This position is based on Joseph Schacht’s famous theory of the backward
growth of isn:ds, applied primarily to Eadith, but extended also to khabar;
‘A Revaluation of Islamic Traditions’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society
(1949), 143–154; Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1950), 138–59. Scholars following Schacht’s theory of backwards growth
(although not in all details) are Crone and Cook, Hagarism; Crone, Slaves on
Horses; Meccan Trade; Norman Calder, Studies in Early Muslim Jurisprudence
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 147–52, 236–241; Gerald R. Hawting, The
Idea of Idolatry and the Emergence of Islam: From Polemic to History
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Accordingly, histories like the Ta8r;kh would consist of late opinions
about historical events in the first Muslim generation, rather than
historical facts. Aziz al-Azmeh has reached the same conclusion but
framed it slightly differently, namely that khabar-history was never even
intended to convey historical facts, only to authorize the institution
of the 6ulam:8 by presenting its view of reality as historical givens:
‘although veracity was put forward as the cause and guardian of
authority, it appears in fact that authority is the main ground for the
assertion of veracity’.25 The way al-Azmeh and the revisionists frame the
argument that khabar-history was written retrospectively, it appears as a
peculiarity of Islamic history, rather than a precondition for all historical
writing, as a theoretician like de Certeau would have it. Again, this
makes sense within a discourse that opposes Islamic history to modern
history: the former fabricating historical facts for the sake of authority
and legitimacy, and the latter searching facts for the sake of disinterested
knowledge.
The fact that khabar-historians occasionally give different versions of
the same event, or that the same event is presented differently in different
histories, has been taken as further evidence that there is no transmis-
sion of real facts, only of fabricated ones. Because of the absence of a
harmonized, consensual historical narrative, Humphreys, among others,
has concluded that: ‘The historian’s task was decisively not to interpret
or evaluate the past as such; rather, he was simply to determine which
reports about it were acceptable and to compile these reports in a
convenient order.’26 Thus, the khabar-form is seen as incongruous with
historical analysis.
Scholars who practise literary criticism approach the texts in search
of narrative meaning instead of facts.27 Recently, Fred Donner has
developed a method intended to subsume historical and literary issues.
Departing from theories of historical narrative, he argues that reports are
memories of historical events that were significant in slightly different
25
Arabic Historical Thought, 163; cf. 161–7.
26
Humphreys, Islamic History, 74; cf. Noth and Conrad, The Early
Arabic Historical Tradition, 5, 9 f.; Leder, ‘The Literary Use of the Khabar’,
279 ff., 314 f.
27
See e.g. Marilyn Waldman, Towards a Theory of Historical Narrative:
A Case Study in Perso-Islamicate Historiography (Columbus: Ohio State
University Press, 1980); Hodgson, ‘Two Pre-Modern Muslim Historians’;
Roberts, Early Islamic Historiography; Humphreys, Islamic History; ‘Qur8anic
Myth and Narrative Structure in Early Islamic Historiography’, in F. M. Clover
and R. S. Humphreys (eds.), Tradition and Innovation in Late Antiquity
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 271–90; Tayeb El-Hibri,
Reinterpreting Islamic Historiography; ‘The Unity of Tabari’s Chronicle’.
ways to different sub-communities within the Islamic umma; hence, the
isn:d couples memory to sub-community, and this information about
the sub-community’s view of an event was transmitted from the event
itself to the present-day historian.28 Since sub-communities were related
to the emerging juridical and theological schools, historical memories
were shaped along lines of scholarly subject-matters and terminology
during the course of transmission.29 Compared to the revisionist view
that reports about historical events are late and express late opinions,
Donner assumes an unbroken transmission of information which,
although shaped by the sub-community that transmitted it, nonetheless
contains information pertaining to the historical event.
Donner’s conception of khabar could also explain for us why Fabar;
cited several versions of the same event: if reports represent the views of
the major sub-communities and schools, they are all constituent parts of
the history of the Muslim community.30 The purpose of khabar-history
would thus be to present history in a form which allows readers to see
how the sub-communities had developed their points of law, doctrine,
and administrative praxis. For this purpose, presumably, Fabar;
recorded the transmitters’ genealogical, regional, and scholarly affilia-
tions in an appendix to his history, Dhayl al-mudhayyal (‘The
Supplement to the Supplemented’).31 Thus the isn:ds appear like a
28
Narratives of Islamic Origins, 138–41. Donner’s approach is a development
of Noth and Conrad’s theory of literary topoi reflecting historically significant
social concerns, although Donner pushes it in a more optimistic direction, in
terms of both the historicity of events and our possibilities of reconstructing
Islamic history from these reports; cf. Morony, Iraq After the Muslim Conquest,
572; and, following Noth and Conrad, Ella Landau-Tasseron, ‘From Tribal
Society to Centralized Polity: An Interpretation of Events and Anecdotes of the
Formative Period of Islam’, Jerusalem Studies of Arabic and Islam 24 (2000),
180–216. For a positive review of Donner, see Amikam Elad, ‘Community of
Believers of ‘Holy Men’ and ‘Saints’ or Community of Muslims? The Rise and
Development of Early Muslim Historiography’, Journal of Semitic Studies
47:1 (2002), 241–308. Concerning Aad;th on the Prophet’s mission, Uri Rubin
argues along lines similar to Donner, viz. that Aad;th from the first generation
express opinions of sub-communities from that period; Studies in Late Antiquity
and Early Islam 5: The Eye of the Beholder: The Life of Muhammad as Viewed
by the Early Muslims: A Textual Analysis (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1995),
234–60.
29
Ibid. 203 et passim.
30
Cf. Leder, ‘The Literary Use of the Khabar,’ 315. It should be noted,
however, that Fabar; also excluded reports.
31
Translated as HT xxxix, Biographies of the Prophet’s Companions, by
Ella Landau-Tasseron. For a discussion of its relation to the Ta8r;kh, see
the ‘Translator’s Foreword’, and Franz Rosenthal, HT i. 89 f.; Bosworth, s.v.
‘al-Fabar;’, EI2 2nd edn.; for the use of biographical records in readings of
vast system of research surveys and references which help the reader to
identify the positions expressed in reports. Therefore I suggest that
khabar-history and the isn:d highlight the contributions of individual
scholars, rather than obscure them. I also suggest that the form
corresponds to the epistemological position that historical knowledge
is constructed in discourse. Thus there is no contradiction between
Fabar;’s statement that historical knowledge is based on eyewitness
accounts, and his presenting contradictory reports on the same event.
Assuming that Fabar; held the epistemological position that different
eyewitnesses perceive the same thing differently, the point with citing the
different versions might be to make the reader reflect on why they saw
things differently, and what consequences these different perceptions
might have had.
The khabar-form not only exposes the transmitters, but also conveys
the personal opinions of the historian who is writing. Studies of Fabar;’s
sections on specific historical events, e.g. the second fitna,32 the murder
of 6Uthm:n b. 6Aff:n,33 and the Battle of the Camel,34 show that his
views come through in his arrangement and evaluation of reports, and
his interspersed comments. Tayeb El-Hibri has shown that the whole
Ta8r;kh is a narrative unit with elliptical lines of correspondence between
pre-Islamic and Islamic sections, so that the full meaning of reports on
6Abbasid history can be comprehended only in relation to their pre-
Islamic or early Islamic counterparts.35 Thus it seems Fabar; selected
and arranged his reports according to a message he intended to com-
municate to his readers concerning the history of the Islamic community
and sub-communities.
Salvation history?
The second problem-area is the religious contents of the Ta8r;kh, e.g. God
creates the world, and God’s messengers (angels and prophets) are active
jurisprudential literature, see Christopher Melchert, The Formation of the Sunni

Schools of Law, 9th–10th Centuries CE (Leiden: Brill, 1997). For a general
study of biography and the transmission of knowledge in professional sub-
communities, see Michael Cooperson, Classical Arabic Biography: The Heirs of
the Prophets in the Age of al-Ma8m<n (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000), 1–23.
32
Petersen, 6Al; and Mu6:wiya.
33
Hodgson, ‘Two Pre-Modern Muslim Historians’.
34
Roberts, Early Islamic Historiography.
35
El-Hibri, Reinterpreting Islamic Historiography; ‘The Unity of Tabari’s
Chronicle’; ‘A Note on Biblical Narrative and 6Abb:sid History’, in N. Yavari
(ed.), Views from the Edge: Essays in Honor of Richard W. Bulliet (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2004), 63–9; see also Humphreys, ‘Qur8anic Myth’.
agents in the histories of Israel, Persia, and the Arabs. Moreover, the
Qur8:n is cited throughout, and many reports on the prophets appear
also in Fabar;’s Qur8:n commentary J:mi6 al-bay:n 6an ta8w;l :y
al-Qur8:n (the Tafs;r). This relation to Scripture has had consequences
for how some scholars conceived of the view of history expressed in the
Ta8r;kh and the prophetic material contained in it.36
Franz Rosenthal defined all history that draws on the biblical and
prophetic tradition as ‘salvation history’, in the sense of ‘all-inclusive’
(God-centred and holistic) and essentially nostalgic, because it views
history as a process of decline from a golden age, which will be halted
only by eschatological redemption.37 John Wansbrough developed
Rosenthal’s points about salvation history and nostalgia in his study of
the Prophet’s biography (s;ra), by emphasizing the historical relation
between the s;ra as composed by the 6ulam:8 and rabbinic halakha. Both
use the notion of an ideal saving event in the past to legitimize social
status quo and maintain their own authority.38 Claude Gilliot has taken
a different course in his study of Fabar;’s exegetical use of traditions
derived from the Hebrew Bible, while using the same concepts as
Rosenthal and Wansbrough. Gilliot concludes that the Tafs;r and the
Ta8r;kh share a moral programme of restoring God’s absolute Lordship,
or ‘the faith of olden days’, which he understands as an activist rather
than a nostalgic agenda.39 Following Gerhard von Rad’s definition of
Old Testament salvation history, Gilliot sees it as a history that
maximizes theology, as distinct from ‘critical’ (modern) history, which
aims at historical veracity.40 Marshall Hodgson and Stephen Humphreys
also conceive of the Ta8r;kh as principally concerned with moral issues,
but, like Gilliot, they take it to express an activist agenda. Hodgson
sees the development of legal ethics as Fabar;’s motivation for writing
36
In addition to the studies surveyed here, see also D<r;, The Rise of
Historical Writing, 150; and Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought, 1–16. Khalidi
posits the Qur8:n as the starting point of all Arabic historical thought, although
he points out that it is only from the ninth century that its ‘historiographical
challenge’ is fully exploited, p. 13.
37
Rosenthal, ‘The Influence of the Biblical Tradition on Muslim
Historiography’, in B. Lewis and M. Holt (eds.), Historical Writings of the
Peoples of Asia, 4: Historians of the Middle East (London: Oxford University
Press, 1962) 35–45; 39.
38
The Sectarian Milieu: Content and Composition of Islamic Salvation
History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 49 f., 71 f, 87–97, 109–19.
39
‘Mythe, récit, histoire du salut dans le commentaire coranique de Fabar;’,
Journal Asiatique 282 (1994), 237–70; 246.
40
Ibid. 263 f., reference to Gerhard von Rad, Théologie de l’Ancien
Testament I: Traditions historiques (Geneva, 1963).
his history, while Humphreys brings out the significance of covenant.41
Robinson, again, departs from Rosenthal and Wansbrough and the
relation they established between medieval Islamic history and rabbinic
writings.42 I cite Robinson at length, because his is the most recent and
detailed specification of the difference between a religious, holistic view
of society and history, and a modern, complex one:
Equipped with a vocabulary of social description that derives from an
economically industrialized, politically liberal and secularising western world
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we now see the economy, society, and
government (whatever its precise form) as conceptually separate spheres, each of
which is given to operate according to principles or patterns that history (or other
kinds of social analysis) has tried to discern, and which come together in
conditioning the experience of men—that is, autonomous and more or less free-
thinking men. The subject the [modern] historian chooses to write about
invariably suits the model he has chosen, either implicitly or explicitly, to follow.
Those historians who hold a materialist understanding of historical change, for
example, privilege economic processes over political ones, seeing élite politics
and ideology as a function of competition over material resources . . . And
although different historians emphasise different spheres to explain historical
change, the point is that they do try to explain, and this by constructing
(or following) models of how these spheres relate and interact, and by adducing
more or less proximate causes for the events in question. At least for the
professional historian, it no longer suffices to speak of Fate, Providence or
Progress, indeed any other universal that, in failing to reflect the segmented
world of factors, influences and models we construct to make sense of the world,
relieves him of the task of explaining men’s actions. Medieval Muslim
historians . . . naturally lacked our modern terms of social description. They
generally conceived of the world in more monolithic . . . terms. Neither the
economy nor society was clearly distinguished from the political order, and the
laws of politics, which usually boiled down to acting justly or unjustly, were
understood to determine economic and social life. This political order was God’s
design. It had been established to effect His will, first in broad strokes under
Muhammad’s small polity in Medina, and then elaborated more fully by his
successors, the ‘four Rightly Guided caliphs’. At its apex sat one of his (real or
41
Hodgson, ‘Two Pre-Modern Muslim Historians’. Robinson wrongly claims
that Hodgson in this article applied the term ‘salvation history’ to the Ta8r;kh, in
a sense similar to Wansbrough; although Hodgson did use the term ‘godly
history’, it carries none of the implications of Wansbrough’s ‘salvation history’;
see Robinson, Islamic Historiography, 134, n 10. See also Humphreys, ‘Qur8anic
Myth’, who adds that the designation of Islamic historiography as ‘nostalgic’
is a typical Orientalist theme.
42
Ibid. 85 f.
figurative) descendants, the Abbasid caliph (or sultan), who, in the very act of
holding office, enjoyed what has been aptly called the ‘presumptive satisfaction
of God’ . . . and who, by appointing governors, commanders and judges,
legitimised the activities of the state.43
Finally, Roberto Tottoli likewise characterizes Fabar;’s history as
essentially religious and ‘remote from the modern concept of the
discipline of history’.44
In spite of subjective differences, then, all scholars presented above
construct the history expressed in the Ta8r;kh as primarily religious
and aimed at moral guidance, as distinct from modern fact-seeking and
analytical history.
Definition and method

My argument is that Fabar; analysed history in terms of a complex view
of society, and that the religious symbols are guides to this analysis. In
the following, I have summarized statements about God’s function in
history which Fabar; made in his introduction, and I have arranged
them so as to show how they relate to the other theoretical and
methodological issues he raises there:
. A section on historical causality, where Fabar; states that God is the One,
the Eternal and Non-contingent Creator of the contingent universe. God is
All-powerful and knows the course and end of history and of each individual,
but he has conferred authority to rule on men, so that human history is
given its observable course through each ruler’s or authority’s wielding of
power. God has conditioned authorities to be grateful or ungrateful towards
God, and their actions in this respect constitute the history Fabar; intends
to study.45
. A statement of the aim of the history, namely to describe history by observing
how those whom God blessed (‘messengers, kings, and caliphs’) have wielded
power. The section also contains principles of selection and limitation, e.g.
he will treat their succession to power, their rule, and their death, followed
by a new successor, etc.46 Thus both rule and succession are of prime interest
to Fabar;.
. Declaration to consistently apply source-criticism by evaluating the isn:ds.47
43
Robinson, Islamic Historiography, 127 f.
44
Biblical Prophets in the Qur8:n and Muslim Literature (Richmond, Surrey:
Curzon Press, 2002), 129.
45
HT i. 165–8/Leiden i:1–5.
46
HT i. 168 ff./Leiden i: 5–6.
47
HT i. 170/Leiden i: 6.
. The theory of historical knowledge discussed above, which is a logical
sequence of the source-critical approach.48
. Definitions of time, the basic category for the writing of history. Fabar;
proceeds to discuss how long the world has existed, and points out that each
community has its own time measure depending on its specific creation
myth.49
After this introduction follows Genesis or the unfolding of history
from God’s creative act, which is the specific Islamic creation myth. With
creation are founded the most important Islamic rituals (Bal:t al-jum6a
and Aajj) and state institutions (the caliphate), and man is created as
God’s khal;fa, ‘vicegerent’ in government. These references to Islam
imply that the focus of analytical interest is the caliphate, with the rest of
history serving as its analytical framework.
Against this background we can proceed to define religion. This
definition is strictly operational, that is, it has meaning only for the sake
of analysis in this particular study. Since my interpretation derives from
de Certeau’s notion of ‘place’, the definition also refers to it; hence,
religion is the symbolic expression of a historical reflection on praxis,
practised in a ‘place’. From this particular perspective, the difference
between a religious and a secular historical discourse is that the former
uses symbols referring to transcendental spheres or beings, whereas
the latter refers to transcendent beings only as objects of study, and
expresses its reflection and analysis in purely inner-worldly terms, as a
consequence of the different institutional identities.
Following this definition, God could symbolize objectivity. As the
eternal and non-contingent Creator, His knowledge is objective. God’s
knowledge is thus different from human and historical knowledge
which, as Fabar; states in the same introduction, is subjective because
it is derived from different eyewitnesses. As a symbol of objectivity,
God also symbolizes reason and the capacity to deduce and analyse,
which the historian applies secondarily to the historical information.
Thus where historical knowledge is discursive and subjective, rational
knowledge is objective in the sense that it concerns theory, which is the
precondition for analysis. Therefore Fabar;’s statement, that he relies
only exceptionally upon rational deduction and argumentation, means
that he uses them to transcend from the subjective to the objective level
of theory.
48
HT i. 170/Leiden i, 6 f.
49
HT i. 179–86/Leiden i: 7–17. This seems to be another instance of Fabar;’s
sensitivity to the significance of identity: even a universal category like time is
subject to definition, and definition is necessarily subjective.
When I say that religious symbols express historical reflection, I mean
that Fabar; also conceived of them this way, which includes their having
a material frame of reference. On the premiss that discourse expresses
also disciplinary and subjective identities, the same ‘institutional’
symbols could mean different things to different historians, as well as
to scholars from different disciplines. There could also be a difference on
the level of subject-matter, e.g. the Ta8r;kh and the Tafs;r contain the
same symbols but have different purposes, the former explaining
historically the community’s present state, and the latter guiding the
community morally. They are closely interrelated in that moral
guidance presupposes a clear vision of historical direction founded on
historical analysis, but one is primarily analytical, and the other
primarily ethical.
I will treat mainly reports about prophetical and Sassanian history.
Concerning transmission, the possibility of institutional continuity
should be considered. Assuming that Islam developed in continuity
with existing institutions, doctrinal and legal points in reports about the
first generation may in fact have been part of the ‘pre-Islamic’ identity
of the sub-community transmitting the report in question, so that
transmission goes further back even than the first Muslim generation.50
Thus I conceive of Fabar;’s khabar-history as part of a continuous
discourse from pre-Islamic to Islamic times.
50
On problems following from the assumption that Islam meant institutional
discontinuity, see al-Azmeh, Muslim Kingship: Power and the Sacred in Muslim,
Christian, and Pagan Politics (London: I. B. Tauris, 1997), p. xv; cf. Calder,
review of Patricia Crone and Martin Hinds, God’s Caliph: Religious Authority
in the First Centuries of Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)
in Journal of Semitic Studies 32 (1987), 375–8. The Uppsala school and its
comparative studies of sacral kingship consistently approached Islam as a
continuum of regional traditions, not as a breach; cf. Geo Widengren,
Muhammad, the Apostle of God, and His Ascension (King and Saviour V)
(Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksells, 1955); ‘Oral Tradition and Written Literature’;
Helmer Ringgren, ‘Some Religious Aspects of the Caliphate’, in The Sacral
Kingship: Contributions to the Central Theme of the VIIIth International
Congress for the History of Religions (Rome, April 1955) (Leiden: Brill, 1959),
737–48. Other important studies placing Islam in continuity with pre-Islamic
institutions are Shlomo Dov Goitein, Studies in Islamic History and Institutions
(Leiden: Brill, 1966); F. E. Peters, Allah’s Commonwealth: A History of Islam in
the Near East 600–1100 A.D. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973); Marshall
Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 3 vols.; Garth Fowden, Empire to
Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1993).
Place and praxis
When it comes to defining mode of production and praxis expressed in
Fabar;’s history, one is drawn into a debate about contemporary Islamic
societies and possibilities of social change.51 With Hodgson’s terminol-
ogy, the economy of medieval Islamic societies was ‘agrarianate’,
meaning that land was the principal form of property and source of
income of ‘crucial classes’, even though the economy became increas-
ingly urban and mercantile.52 Scholars who follow the social theories
of Karl Marx and Max Weber conceptualize the medieval Islamic
social system as either ‘Asiatic mode of production’ or ‘patrimonialism’,
respectively, which (it is assumed) conditions contemporary societies.
Both Marxians and Weberians construct the Islamic medieval system
as politically and economically different from Western European
dynamic ‘feudalism’, which produced modern rational capitalism and
democracy:
1. Economic difference: the Islamic ruler had absolute ownership of the
land he assigned to his clients, which precluded private ownership of
land, whereas the Western vassals owned their lands.
2. Political difference: the Islamic ruler had absolute power over his
‘clients’, and their relations were characterized by arbitrariness and
strong centralization, whereas the Western monarch shared power
with his vassals and their relations were contractual.53
Abbas Vali, in a critique of both Weberian and Marxist theory, defines
the same economy as a ‘system of vassalage’.54 It had developed fully
only in the Saljuq sultanate, but drew upon a late Sassanian royal
ideology which made legal ownership of land exclusive to the shah,
who assigned land to vassals, who were in turn obliged to send in tax
revenue and provide military defence of the imperial territory.55 Two of
51
For general statements on the debate, see Hodgson, Venture of Islam,
i. 26–53, esp. 34–9; for statements of the debate in relation to the historiography
of Iran, see Abbas Vali, Pre-capitalist Iran: A Theoretical History (London:
I. B. Tauris, 1993), Preface; ch. 1; and esp. 16 f.; cf. the general characterization
by Yahya Sadowski, ‘The New Orientalism and the Democracy Debate’, in
J. Beinin and J. Stork (eds.), Political Islam: Essays from Middle East Report
(London: I. B. Tauris, 1997), 33–50.
52
Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, i. 107 ff., 111–37.
53
Vali, Pre-Capitalist Iran, 16 f.
54
Ibid. esp. ch. 6. See also Hodgson, Venture of Islam, i. 107 ff., for an
ideological and methodological critique of Weber’s conceptual apparatus.
55
Vali, Pre-Capitalist Iran. It must be noted that this was a theory designed
to legitimize the emergency praxis of reclaiming and redistributing the lands
of disloyal vassals; thus it did not in practice prevent buying and selling of land.
Vali’s points are important here: (a) relations between the shah and
the vassals were contractual, not arbitrary; and (b) one cannot equate
theory with reality. The theory expresses an ideal of a centralized state
with all power concentrated in the hands of the ruler, whereas in reality,
the empires were highly decentralized. Because of the widely stretched
imperial territory, the centre depended on vassals to control the
provinces, and its only check on their power was its legal ownership
of the land, on the grounds of which it could withdraw assignments,
should the vassals breach their contracts. In the Sassanian period as
well as later in Islamic history, the religious institution was integrated
into the same system, with churches and temples being assigned lands
cultivated by peasants, whom they taxed for tithe, in return for ritual
and administrative services.56 In the following I adopt Vali’s terminology
and conception of the system of vassalage.
In this system, again, land was the material source of the tax revenue
produced by peasants’ labour, and which sustained the state and the
central administration, the religious institution, and the military.
According to Hugh Kennedy, the structure of the pre-modern state was
determined by the way in which taxes were collected for the specific
purpose of paying the army. The structures range from a centralized
system where the central authorities collect and distribute the payment,
over a decentralized one where this is administered by provincial
authorities, to the extreme case where the military pays itself by taking
direct control over the lands. Among these, the centralized system
obviously gives the greatest scope to the civil administration.57 During
Fabar;’s professional life, the 6Abbasid administration, headed by the
viziers, went through two different phases in a struggle to reverse
processes of political disintegration. The first phase (c. 870–908) was
a brief success: factional strife amongst the caliphate’s Turkish troops
ceased and they came to identify with the aims of the central adminis-
tration, and the income of the central treasury was increased through
new measures to collect land tax.58 The second phase begins with the
succession of a boy caliph, al-Muqtadir (908–932), under whose reign
the forces of decentralization eventually triumphed.
In al-Muqtadir’s caliphate, two vizieral families vied for power,
who in different ways sought to recover the strength of the central
56
Ibid.
57
Hugh Kennedy, ‘The Financing of the Military in the Early Islamic State’, in
Averil Cameron (ed.), Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam 1: The Byzantine
and Early Islamic Near East III: States, Resources and Armies, (Princeton, NJ:
Darwin Press, 1995), 361–78; 361 f.
58
Kennedy, The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates: The Islamic Near
East from the Sixth to the Eleventh Century (London: Longman, 1986), 175 ff.
administration. The Ban< al-Fur:t, a merchant family, resorted to tax-
farming, i.e. the granting of tax revenues from a piece of land to an
appointed individual in return for a fixed sum to the central treasury.59
As Kennedy points out, this left the peasants at the mercy of the tax-
farmer, who could extract as much as he wanted after having paid the
stipulated sum to the exchequer.60 The Ban< al-Fur:t had a policy of
separating the budgets of the civil administration and the military, and
favouring the former, and they created a private purse for the caliph.61
The Ban< al-Jarr:A, on the other hand, were an old scribal family of
Nestorian Christian origins. Nestorianism was the officially recognized
Christian state church in Sassanian Persia, in which religious heads of
church acted as the state’s administrative deputies in relation to their
communities.62 6Al; b. 6>s: of the Ban< al-Jarr:A was aligned with the
military commander of Baghdad and adopted a policy of keeping the
civil administration and the military on the same budget, while
prioritizing payment of the latter from the central treasury, with
corresponding cuts in courtly allowances and expenditure. Instead of
tax-farming, he favoured centrally administered collection of the land
tax (khar:j).63 His characteristic traits were piety, austerity, and a hot
temper, and he went down in history as ‘the good waz;r’, presumably in
contrast to the Ban< al-Fur:t.64 Dominique Sourdel points out that he
invested also in the public religious sector, restoring mosques and
hospices, and improving conditions for the Aajj.65
As for Fabar;, he was an 6:lim or scholar within the institution
that produced 6ilm, or scholarly knowledge, in the 6Abbasid caliphate.
His principal discipline was fiqh, or jurisprudence. The biographical
sources66 inform us that he lived off his own family lands in
Tabaristan;67 that his principal affiliation was with the Shafi6ite
madhhab, although he mastered the fiqh of all madh:hib of his time,
59
Ibid. 177, 182, 188–91; on tax-farming, see esp. 182 and 191.
60
Ibid. 191.
61
Ibid. 182. For a more unfavourable picture of the Ban< al-Fur:t, see
Dominique Sourdel, Le Vizirat 6Abbaside de 749 à 936 (132 à 324 de l’Hégire).
Troisième Partie: La Grande Époque du Vizirat (296/908 à 324/936) (Damascus:
Institut Français de Damas, 1960), 391 f.
62
Morony, Iraq After the Muslim Conquest, 324, cf. 337 f.
63
Kennedy, The Prophet, 182, 188, 190.
64
Ibid. 188 f.
65
Sourdel, Le Vizirat 6Abbaside, 403.
66
For compilations and critical assessments of biographical and bibliogra-
phical information on Fabar;, see Bosworth, ‘al-Fabar;,’ EI2, Rosenthal, HT i.
General Introduction; Claude Gilliot, Exégèse, langue, et théologie, 19–68.
67
Bosworth, ‘al-Fabar;’.
along with Hadith, kal:m, tafs;r, Arabic language and poetry,
oneiromancy, and basic medicine; that he was a proponent of ijtih:d
and founded his own Jar;r; madhhab;68 that he belonged to the
rationalist theologians;69 and that he had close relations with viziers,
e.g. he tutored MuAammad b. 6Ubayd All:h b. al-Kh:q:n, the son and
heir of al-Mu8tamid’s vizier 6Ubayd All:h b. YaAy: b. Kh:q:n (d. 877),
who initiated the struggle for centralization,70 and he knew 6Al; b. 6>s:
who seems to have supported him in theological controversies with
the Eanbalites, and even took a personal interest in his health.71 Hence,
Fabar; put his scholarship at the service of the central administration,
although he remained financially independent.
Hodgson observed that the Ta8r;kh reflects Fabar;’s work to develop
legal ethical standards against arbitrariness in government and admin-
istration.72 I assume that Fabar; was favourably disposed towards
6Al; b. 6>s:’s policy to centralize taxation and payment of the military in
order to strengthen the central power, and that this policy corresponds
to Hodgson’s observation. It could be argued that tax-farming was a
system more liable to arbitrariness in that it made the landlord
all-powerful in relation to his farmers, and limited the sphere of
influence of the central administration and its servants. Thus the subject-
matter of Fabar;’s history would be to explain causes for strong and
weak imperial government, within the wider frame of rulers and
succession. In terms of praxis, the discourse would express the activity
of the central administration to shape a different future for the caliphate,
through a centralized system of taxation, and within the system of
vassalage.
The discourse
The title of Fabar;’s history is, ‘The history of the messengers and the
kings’ (Ta8r;kh al-rusul wa-l-mul<k). Fabar; himself referred to it as
either MukhtaBar ta8r;kh al-rusul wa-l-mul<k wa-l-khulaf:8 (‘The
abridged history of the messengers, the kings, and the caliphs’), or
MukhtaBar ta8r;kh al-rusul wa-l-mul<k. Other versions are Kit:b al-rusul
wa-l-anbiy:8 wa-l-mul<k wa-l-khulaf:8 (‘Discourse on the messengers
68
Rosenthal, HT i. 55, 63 f.; Bosworth, ‘al-Fabar;’; Gilliot, Exégèse, langue,
et théologie, 30–3.
69
See above, n. 24.
70
Rosenthal, HT i. 14, 22, 36 ff., 50, 73; on the Ban< al-Jarr:h, see Sourdel,
Le Vizirat 6Abbaside, III, and Kennedy, The Prophet, 175 ff.
71
Rosenthal, HT i. 50; 73, ref. Y:q<t’s Irsh:d, VI, 461f; in Rif:6;’s edn.
xviii. 94.
72
Hodgson, ‘Two Pre-Modern Muslim Historians’, 55.
and the prophets, the kings, and the caliphs’), and Ta8r;kh al-rusul
wa-l-mul<k wa-akhb:ruhum wa-man k:n f; zam:n kull w:Aid minhum
(‘The history of the messengers and the kings and the reports about
them and those who lived in the time of each one of them’).73 Among
these versions, messengers and kings are the two constant categories,
while prophets and caliphs appear to be their subcategories. The same
categories appear in Fabar;’s stated aim:
In this writing of mine, I shall mention whatever information has reached us
about kings throughout the ages from when our Lord began the creation of
His creation to its annihilation. There were messengers sent by God, kings placed
in authority, or caliphs established in the caliphal succession. God had early
on bestowed His benefits and blessings (ni6am) upon some of them. They were
grateful for his blessings (fa-shakara ni6amahu), and He thus gave them more
blessings and bounty in addition to those bestowed by Him upon them in their
fleeting life, or He postponed the increase and stored it up for them with Himself.
There were others who were not grateful for His blessings (man kafara minhum
ni6amahu), and so He deprived them of the blessings He had bestowed upon
them early on and hastened for them His revenge. There were also others who
were not grateful for His blessings; He let them enjoy them until the time of their
death and perdition.74
The criterion of distinction among messengers and kings is moral,
i.e. gratitude (shukr) or ingratitude (kufr) for God’s blessings (ni6am, sing.
ni6ma). The same theme appears further on in the narrative when God
is about to create man, who is the morally responsible agent in history.75
Here Fabar; repeats his purpose: ‘to mention the history of kings and
tyrants (al-jab:bira), those who disobeyed their Lord and those who
were obedient to Him, as well as the times of the prophets and
messengers’.76 Then he mentions Ibl;s,
73
Rosenthal, HT i. ‘Introduction’, 130 f.
74
HT i. 168/Leiden i, 5.
75
Ibn Eazm (d. 1064) described Fabar; as a rationalist, together with
the Ash6arites (Gilliot, Exégèse, langue, et théologie, 36). On that basis,
Fabar; may have subscribed to what was later to be identified as the
Ash6arite synthetic position on the issue of predestination and free will; applied
to history, the result would be that God predestined history on the level
of primary causality and truth, whereas on the human level, each individual
acquires both causality and moral responsibility. Cf. Robinson, Islamic
Historiography, 129.
76
HT i. 248/Leiden i, 78. According to Widengren, prophets are sent to a
particular people, whereas messengers are sent to all of mankind; thus every
messenger is also a prophet, but not every prophet is a messenger; Muhammad,
the Apostle of God, 77 f.
who was the first to be given royal authority (mulk) and be blessed by God but
was ungrateful for it (wa-an6ama 6alayhi fa-kafara ni6matahu).77 Having denied
God’s divine Lordship, he was proud and overbearing toward his Lord (wa at:
al: rabbihi wa-stakbara) and was therefore deprived by God of His divine favour
and shamed and humiliated. We shall continue and mention those who adopted
his ways and followed in his footsteps and were therefore subjected by God to
His divine revenge. Counted among the partisans of Ibl;s, they were made to
share in his shame and humiliation. There were also their counterparts and
successors among kings and messengers and prophets who obeyed their
Lord and left praiseworthy memories. God willing, we shall mention them, too.78
The choice between gratitude and ingratitude would be what Hodgson
referred to when he suggested that Fabar;’s history focused ‘in
particular on the personal decisions of individuals who bore particular
responsibility for the fate in the successive choices that faced the
community—setting down how well or how poorly they fulfilled their
responsibility’.79 Accordingly, to follow God and be grateful is to assume
full moral responsibility, especially for authorities in their wielding of
power, while to follow Ibl;s is to abuse power, and both choices have
historical consequences. In the model below, we can see how Fabar;
through these categories integrated the histories of Israel, Persia, and the
Arabs, with Islamic history:80
Model 1
Messengers Prophets Prophets & kings Kings
Noah Noah David Israelite kingship
Lot Lot Solomon Iranian kingship
Ism:6;l Abraham MuAammad Arab kingship
Moses Ism:6;l The Mad;na (Syrian Ghass:n,
Jesus Isaac caliphate Mesopotamian
H<d Jacob Lakhm, Yemenite
4:liA Joseph Eimyar)
(continued ...)
77
Awwal man a63:hu All:hu mulkan wa-an6ama 6alayhi fa-kafara
ni6matahu; I have substituted Rosenthal’s ‘shown favor’ for ‘be blessed’; HT i.
249/Leiden i, 78.
78
HT i. 249/Leiden i, 78. On recognition or non-recognition of God’s
sovereign Lordship as the oppositional driving forces of history in Fabar;’s Tafs;r,
see also Gilliot, ‘Mythe, récit, histoire du salut’, 246.
79
Hodgson, ‘Two Pre-Modern Muslim Historians’, 55 f.
80
See Rosenthal, A History of Muslim Historiography, 135; cf. Khalidi: ‘The
umma was thus shown to be the prophetic heir of Biblical tradition and the
temporal heir of Persian dominion,’ Arabic Historical Thought, 79. Regarding
the lists of messengers and prophets, I assume that Fabar; follows the Qur8:n’s
order; see Tottolli, Biblical Prophets, 72 f.
Shu6ayb Moses Umayyads
MuAammad Aaron 6Abbasids
David
Solomon
Idr;s
Job
Jonah
Elijah
Elisha
Zechariah
John the Baptist
Jesus
MuAammad
Messengers and prophets are religious symbols because they com-
municate with God. For the Islamic parts of history, the institution they
refer to is that of the 6ulam:8, who in their turn represent d;n (‘religion’),
that is, the beliefs, ethics, rituals, and legal theory pertaining to Shar;6a,
which was put to the service of the kings, i.e. the state, or dawla. This
relationship between the institutions of d;n and dawla is expressed
in reports where the caliphate is depicted as inaugurated in creation
and thus founded on a divine wisdom embodied in the revelation and
Scripture periodically sent down to messengers and prophets.81 The
model (above, no. 1) shows that David, Solomon, the Prophet, and the
Mad;na caliphs are exceptional in combining prophethood and kingship.
Their dual authority functions as a microcosmic and ideal representation
of a state under direct prophetic guidance, whereas in the macrocosmic
and historical order of the imperial caliphates, authority was divided
between the two institutions of d;n and dawla, with prophetic guidance
mediated through the 6ulam:8 in the institution of d;n.82 As 6:lim,
Fabar;’s institutional and disciplinary identities fall under the category
of messengers/prophets in relation to kings/caliphs. However, his
discourse does not legitimize political power in any simplistic way.83
81
See Fabar;’s reports on the creation of Adam as God’s khal;fa; HT i. 253
passim/T i. 82 passim. For the meaning of divine aspects of kingship, cf. studies
of sacral kingship, e.g. Widengren, King and Saviour I–V; more recently, Fowden,
Empire to Commonwealth; al-Azmeh, Muslim Kingship; Cristiano Grottanelli,
Kings and Prophets: Monarchic Power, Inspired Leadership, & Sacred Text in
Biblical Narrative (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
82
On relations between religious and political power in the caliphate, see
Dale F. Eickelman and James Piscatori, Muslim Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1996), 46 ff.; Sami Zubaida, Law and Power in Islamic
Societies (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003).
83
Cf. Hodgson, ‘Two Medieval Muslim Historians’, for a critique of scholars
who treat Muslim historical writing as nothing more than legitimization of
political power.
Rather, as already argued above, it provides guidance for those in
power in the practical form of a specific administrative policy and
system of taxation.
The covenant
Humphreys has observed that the Ta8r;kh is structured according to
cyclically recurring themes of covenant, betrayal, and redemption, which
are derived from the Qur8:n and refer to the Hebrew Bible’s prophetic
narratives.84 Proceeding from this observation I have made two
assumptions: first, that covenant is a symbol connected to messengers
and kings which expresses a contract between the institutions of state
and religion; second, that the symbol occurs in the Hebrew Bible, the
Qur8:n, and the Ta8r;kh because all three discourses refer to similar
contracts. Hodgson’s periodization makes it possible to place the
Hebrew Bible, the Qur8:n and the Ta8r;kh within the same agrarianate
economy that spans both the first millennium BCE and all of medieval
Islamic history.85 From this perspective the cycles Humphreys observed
would refer to contract relations (covenant), breaches of contract
relations (betrayal), and their restoration in the renewal of covenant
(redemption).
I shall now outline an interpretation of the Hebrew Bible, which
will serve as a model to analyse covenant in the Ta8r;kh. The model
presupposes conceiving of parts or even all of the Hebrew Bible as
a coherent unit composed during and after the Babylonian exile of
586 BCE, related to the institution of the Levite priesthood.86 Christiano
Grottanelli in particular argues that the view of the past Israelite
institution of kingship expressed in the historical and prophetic books
of the Hebrew Bible is the view of Levites, who represented the past
kingship in a way that cast themselves as the only rightly guided
authority after the good kings David, Josiah, Hezekiah, and Solomon.
84
Humphreys, ‘Qur8anic Myth and Narrative Structure,’ 278 ff.; the structure
of covenant is found also in al-Ya6q<b; and al-Mas6<d;, ibid. On Fabar;’s view
of Israelite covenant in the Tafs;r, see Camilla Adang, Muslim Writers on
Judaism and the Hebrew Bible: From Ibn Rabban to Ibn Hazm (Leiden: Brill,
1996), 151; on covenant in the S;ra, see Wansbrough, The Sectarian Milieu.
85
Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, i. 111–17.
86
This is the position of, among others, John Van Seters, In Search of History:
Historiography in the Ancient World and the Origins of Biblical History
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983) 1–7, 209–48, 359–61;
and R. N. Whybray, The Making of the Pentateuch: A Methodological
Study, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series, 53
(Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1987), 230–35, 242; Grottanelli, Kings
and Prophets, 4–9.
The medium of representation is the prophets, who express Levite
concerns through God YHWH’s critical voice. The discourse expresses
a time and place in which Judah was a vassal state under the
Persian Achaemenid Empire.87 Thus the Achaemenid rulers assigned
the land of Judah to the Israelites under the authority of the Levites,
who collected tithe for themselves from the peasants. From this
viewpoint, the biblical discourse expresses Levite historical reflections
on what brought about the fall of Israelite kingship, the exile, and
the return. Presumably, loyalty to the Achaemenid power was thought
to be a crucial factor for the return and avoidance of future political
disasters.
This history is represented symbolically as cycles of covenant. First
there is the covenant of Noah, which is a universal covenant between
the creator God and humanity. Abraham’s covenant is defined as a
special contract between God and His chosen people: the people are
obliged to serve God alone, and God sustains the people by assigning
to them the Promised Land. Moses’ Sinai covenant is the central one:
it provides the divine guidance (Torah) without which life in the land
is impossible, which signifies the institution of Levite priesthood.88 The
Sinai covenant is fulfilled when Joshua conquers the land. David’s
covenant signifies the addition of kingship to the Sinai covenant, and
Solomon as founder of God’s Temple and Josiah as reformer of the
Temple cult are portrayed as righteous renewers of David’s covenant,89
in contrast to the subsequent idolatrous kings of Israel and Judah. By
worshipping images of other gods they brought on God’s punishment in
the form of Nebuchadnezzar’s destruction of Jerusalem’s Temple and the
Babylonian exile. According to the great prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah,
redemption implies return to the Promised Land. Isaiah foresees how
God uses Cyrus the Achaemenid (‘His anointed one’; Is. 45) to repatriate
the exiles to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple, in preparation for
His long-term goal of establishing Torah’s universal rule.90 Jeremiah
prophesies that Davidic kingship will be restored and safeguarded by
a new covenant, engraved not on stone tablets but upon the people’s
87
Grottanelli, ibid. 3–7, 36 ff.
88
On significances of Moses’ covenant, see e.g. ibid. 4–9, 185–201;
Widengren, ‘King and Covenant’, Journal of Semitic Studies 2 (1957), 1–32;
Van Seters, In Search of History, esp. 359 ff.; Whybray, The Making of the
Pentateuch.
89
Widengren, ‘King and Covenant’.
90
Peter Ross Bedford, Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism
65, Temple Restoration in Early Achaemenid Judah (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 77
et passim.
heart (Jer. 31: 33).91 In the book of Ezra, the people have returned on
Cyrus’ command and covenant is renewed in the land through the
reading of the Torah, and here the symbolic and historical levels
coincide in the sealing of a contract between the imperial centre and its
vassal state.
Covenant in the Ta8r;kh is an interpretation of the biblical discourse.
Reports on the subject-matter were transmitted by, among others, the
Prophet’s cousin and Companion Ibn 6Abb:s (d. 690), and the Prophet’s
biographer and Successor MuAammad b. IsA:q (d. 767). Ibn 6Abb:s, an
ancestor of the 6Abbasid house, plays a central part in 3afs;r as the
first authority in Qur8:n exegesis. In this capacity, he confers authority
on the 6Abbasids as rulers, grounding their power in a tradition of
knowledge about the Qur8:nic revelation.92 Ibn IsA:q was of Christian
origins.93 His grandfather was a convert from 6Ayn al-Tamr in southern
Iraq, close to al-E;ra, the residential city of the Christian family
Ban< Lakhm who were the Sassanians’ Arab vassals. Ibn IsA:q himself
was born and grew up in Mad;na, where he learned reports on the
Prophet’s biography and the history of the four Mad;na caliphs. After a
scholarly journey to Egypt, he settled in Baghdad. Here he composed
the S;ra under the patronage of the caliph al-ManB<r, and he tutored
his son, the heir al-Mahd;, teaching him the S;ra and the history of
the Mad;na caliphate.94 In Baghdad Ibn IsA:q also learned reports
on the subjects of creation and the Israelite prophets (al-mubtada8,
91
Ibid.
92
Gilliot, ‘Portrait ‘‘mythique’’ d’Ibn 6Abb:s’, Arabica 1985 (32), 127–84;
Jacob Lassner, Islamic Revolution and Historical Memory: An Inquiry into
the Art of 6Abbasid Apologetics, American Oriental Series 66 (New Haven:
American Oriental Society, 1986); ‘The 6Abbasid Dawla: An Essay on the
Concept of Revolution in Early Islam’ in Clover and Humphreys (eds.), Tradition
and Innovation in Late Antiquity, 247–70; El-Hibri, ‘A Note on Biblical
Narrative and 6Abbasid History’; see also Fabar;’s reports on the order of
creation; HT i. 198 et passim/Leiden i, 29 et passim.
93
For biographical and bibliographical information on Ibn IsA:q, see Alfred
Guillaume, The Life of Muhammad: A Translation of Ibn Ish:q’s S;rat Ras<l
All:h [1955] (Lahore: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. xiii, xiv; ‘The
Biography of the Prophet in Recent Research,’ The Islamic Quarterly 1:1 (1954),
5–11; Nabia Abbott, Studies in Arabic Literary Papyri. I: Historical Texts,
Oriental Institute Publications 75 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957),
87–99; Gordon D. Newby, The Making of the Last Prophet: A Reconstruction of
the Earliest Biography of Muhammad (Columbia: University of South Carolina
Press, 1989), 1–32.
94
Ibid. 7. For a detailed study of the S;ra and its relation to the 6Abbasid
caliphate, see Rudolf Sellheim, ‘Prophet, Chalif und Geschichte: Die
Muhammed-Biographie des Ibn Ish:q’, Oriens 18–19 (1967), 3–91.
‘The Beginning’), and pre-Islamic Sassanian history. Some of his sources
were other converts.95
The first mention of covenant is in reports about the creation of
Adam, commenting on Qur8:n 7. 172:
According to AAmad b. MuAammad al-F<s; ! al-Eusayn b. MuAammad ! Jar;r
b. E:zim ! Kulth<m b. Jabr–Sa6;d b. Jubayr ! Ibn 6Abb:s ! the Prophet: God
took the covenant (al-m;th:q) from Adam’s back at Na6m:n—meaning 6Araf:t.
He brought forth from his loins his progeny, which He multiplied. He scattered
them in front of Him like tiny ants. Then He talked to them face to face saying:
‘Am I not your Lord? They said: Yes. We [so] testify’ . . .96
As Joseph van Ess has pointed out, Qur8:n 7. 172 expresses the
doctrine of predestination (qadar).97 Ibn Abb:s’ presence in the isn:d
relates the report to the 6Abbasids, thus making it a double prophecy:
that the Prophet will renew the primordial covenant, and that his cousins
the 6Abbasids will be the custodians of his covenant. The setting—the
pilgrimage station of 6Arafa—signifies that Aajj is the central ritual of
covenant renewal.98 Moreover, the report defines the fundamental
covenant obligation as exclusive worship of God: ‘Am I not your Lord?’
And in a report from Ibn IsA:q on Nebuchadnezzar’s destruction of
Jerusalem and the people’s exile, God explains to the prophet Jeremiah
what it means to breach His covenant:
Ibn Eumayd ! Salama (b. al-Fa@l) ! Ibn IsA:q ! an unquestionable authority !
Wahb b. Munabbih: . . . Their rabbis and monks took My worshippers as
servants, and the people worship them, not Me, and they [the rabbis and monks]
95
The converts were mainly Jewish, e.g. 6Abd All:h b. Sal:m and Ka6b
al-AAb:r in the Companion generation, and Wahb b. Munabbih among
the Successors. See: Bernard Chapira, ‘Légendes Bibliques Attribuées à Ka6b
al-Ahb:r’, Revue des Études Juives 69 (1919), 86–107; Guillaume, The Life of
Muhammad, Introduction; Abbott, ‘Wahb b. Munabbih: A Review Article,’
Journal of Near Eastern Studies 36 (1977), 103–12; Newby, The Making, 10 ff.;
Tottolli, Biblical Prophets, 128–37.
96
HT i. 304/Leiden i, 134; Qur8:n 7. 172.
97
Zwischen Ead;t und Theologie: Studien zum Entstehen prädestina-
tianischer überlieferung, Studien zur Sprache, Geschichte und Kultur des
islamischen Orients 7 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1975), 32 ff. Cf. other reports
in the Ta8r;kh on the same verse, e.g. HT i. 305 ff./Leiden, i, 135 ff.
98
The scene depicted in the report, where God personally addresses mankind,
seems to be a mythical model for the encounter between God and man that takes
place in the Aajj, as expressed in the labbayka-formula. In another report on
creation, the Ka6ba is described as the intersection between heaven and earth,
and an earthly replica of God’s throne in paradise; HT i. 293 f./Leiden i, 122 f.
Hence, at the Ka6ba, God presides over the pilgrimage and meets every pilgrim
face to face, as a re-enactment of the primordial covenant.
judge them not in accordance with My scripture. They made the people ignore
Me, forget Me. Their princes and leaders disregard My blessing (ni6ma), believe
they are safe from My cunning, spurn My scripture, forget My covenant (6ahd;),
alter My procedure (sunnat;), and My creatures believe in them with the loyalty
due only to Me. The people obey the leaders in disobeying Me, and follow
them in heresy against My religion (6al: l-bid6a allat; yabtadi6<na f; d;n;) and in
insolence, heedlessness, and deception toward Me and My messengers. . . . Their
readers and legists practise devotion in sanctuaries, and display religiosity in
erecting them for a deity other than Myself, as they seek worldly advantage in
religion. They study there not for knowledge, and learn not for deed.99
Hence, to breach the covenant is to worship religious authorities
instead of God. It is significant that Jeremiah is the one who receives
this divine explanation, since in the Hebrew Bible it is he who prophesied
the covenant of the heart as preparation for the restored Davidic
kingship. In a similar vein, Isaiah prophesied the instituting of Torah on
a universal level. Now, keywords from both Jeremiah and Isaiah, the
great prophets of redemption, appear in one of Ibn IsA:q’s reports about
the Prophet’s mission and first revelation:
Model 2
The Hebrew Bible: Isaiah 40: 6 The Ta8r;kh: Ibn IsA:q
A voice says, ‘Proclaim!’ and [Gabriel] said, ‘Recite!’ and [the
another said, ‘What shall I Messenger of God] said, ‘I said,
proclaim?’ (Qsl 8smur qer8: ‘What shall I recite?’ ‘ (Q:l [ Jibr;l]
we8:mar m:h 8aqr8:?) iqra8 q:l [Ras<l All:h] qultu m:
aqra8?) (HT vi: 71/Leiden i. 1150)
The Hebrew Bible: Jeremiah 31: The Ta8r;kh: Ibn IsA:q
26, 33
Thereupon I [Jeremiah] awoke I [the Messenger of God] woke up,
and looked, and my sleep was and it was as though these words had
pleasant to me. . . . But this is the been written on my heart. (Ibid.)
covenant which I will make with
the house of Israel after those
days, says the Lord: I will put
my law within them, and I will
write it upon their hearts.
These keywords make the Prophet’s mission into the inception of

the heart’s covenant, and in fact, a bit further on in the same report, the
Christian Waraqa b. Nawfal identifies the revelation as ‘the law of
99
HT iv. 57/Leiden i, 659 f.
Moses’,100 which makes it plausible that the words written on the
Prophet’s heart actually refer to ‘the law’ mentioned in Jeremiah 31: 33.
Hence, the heart’s covenant of the Prophet is the final renewal of Moses’
Sinai covenant.101 This interpretation seems to be supported by other
reports, mainly from Ibn IsA:q, which establish a special relationship
between Moses and the Prophet:
Model 3
Moses Moses The Prophet
in the Hebrew Bible in the Ta8r;kh in the Ta8r;kh
Of priestly Levite line- Of priestly Levite line- Of priestly Qurayshite/
age (Ex. 2: 1–2) age (HT iii: 30/Leiden i: H:shimite lineage
442 f.) (HT vi. 16 ff/Leiden
i. 1088 ff.)102
Orphan (Ex. 2: 2–6) Almost orphan (ibid. Orphan (ibid. 44 f./
34 f./448 f.) 1123 f.)
Wet-nursed (Ex. 2: 7–9) Almost wet-nursed (ibid. Wet-nursed (HT v. 272
35/448 f.) ff./Leiden i. 970 ff.)
Persecuted by Pharaoh Persecuted by Pharaoh Persecuted by Jews,
(Ex. 2: 14) (ibid. 33 ff./446 ff.) Byzantines, and Quraysh
(HT vi. 45 f.; 93 ff./
Leiden 11244 ff.;
1174 ff.)
Shepherd (Ex. 3:1) Shepherd (ibid. 49 ff./ Shepherd (ibid. 47/1126;
464 ff.) HT v. 282/Leiden i. 979)
Addressed by a bush Addressed by a bush Addressed by trees and
(Ex. 3: 4) (ibid. 50 f./465) stones (HT vi. 63f./
Leiden i. 1143)
Receives law in desert Receives law in desert on Receives law in desert on
on mount Sinai mount Sinai (ibid. 76 ff./ mount Hir:8 (ibid. 67 ff./
(Ex. 19 ff.) 493 ff.) 1146 ff.)103
Ascends to God (Ex. Ascends to God (ibid.) Ascends to God (ibid.
19: 20) 78 ff./1157 ff.)
(continued ...)
100
Wa-laqad j:8ahu al-n:m<s al-akbar alladh; j:8a il: M<s:; HT vi, 72/Leiden
i, 1151 f.; n:m<s is an Arabicized version of Greek nomos and Aramaic n:m<s,
i.e. ‘law’; cf. Wansbrough, The Sectarian Milieu, 132 f.
101
Depicting the Prophet as restorer of the Sinai covenant means that he
abrogates not only Ezra but also Christ in this role, as Christ is portrayed in
Hebrews 8: 1–13; cf. Newby, The Making, Introduction.
102
On Quraysh as a priestly clan, see Moshe Sharon, ‘Ahl al-Bayt—People of
the House’, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 8 (1986), 179 f., with
references to Qur8:n 2. 125, 127, 158; 3: 97; 5: 2, 97; 8: 35; 22: 26, 29, 33; 52: 4;
and 106: 3.
103
See above, n. 102.
Redistributes meat, Redistributes meat, Redistributes meat,
cereal, water, law cereal, water, law (ibid.) cereal, milk, law (ibid;
(Exodus) HT vi. 90/Leiden i.
1171 f.)
Emigrates (Exodus) Emigrates (ibid.) Emigrates (ibid. 145 ff./
1234 ff.)
Founds community Founds community gov- Founds community gov-
governed by the law erned by the law (ibid. erned by the law
(Ex. 19 ff.; Lev.; Num.; 78 ff./495 ff.) (HT vii. 1–5/Leiden i.
Deut.) 1256–1261)
Combats idol worship Combats idol worship Combats idol worship
(Ex. 32) (ibid. 73 ff./490 ff.) (HT vi. 46 f.; 88 f.; viii.
187 f./Leiden i. 1126 f.;
1169 f.; 1648 f.)
Brother Aaron helper Brother Aaron helper Cousin 6Al; helper
in ritual and against in ritual and against in ritual and against
Pharaoh (Ex. 4: 14–16; Pharaoh (ibid. 52 ff./ Quraysh (HT vi. 80 ff.;
27–31) 467 ff.) 142 ff.; ix. 51; 110 f./
Leiden i. 1159 ff.; 1232
ff.; 1696; 1752)
Raids against inhabi- Raids against inhabi- Raids against the inha-
tants of the promised tants of the promised bitants of the holy land
land (Num. 21: 1–3, land (ibid. 94/511 f.) (HT vii. 26–69/Leiden
21–35; 31) i. 1281–1341)
Buried outside of the Buried outside of the Buried outside of the
promised land (Deut. promised land (ibid. promised land (HT ix.
34: 5–6) 85 ff./501 ff.) 163–209/Leiden i. 1794–
1837)
Successor Joshua con- Successor Joshua con- Successor 6Umar con-
quers the promised quers the promised land quers the promised land
land (Joshua) (ibid. 85–98/501–16) (HT xii. 84, 122–161/
Leiden i. 2289, 2335–77)
In the Hebrew Bible, Jeremiah’s heart’s covenant implies restoration

of Davidic kingship. Al-Azmeh has pointed out that ‘heart’ is a homol-
ogous symbol of royal power: the heart gives life to the human body,
and kingship to the social body.104 By analogy, Ibn IsA:q’s version
of the Prophet’s covenant of the heart also refers to kingship, i.e. the
caliphate. In the following report about the primordial covenant from
Ibn 6Abb:s, David is given pride of place, which implies a referential
relation between covenant, Davidic kingship and the caliphate:
MuAammad b. Sa6d ! his father ! his paternal uncle ! his father ! his
father ! Ibn 6Abb:s, who said, commenting on ‘And your Lord took from the
104
Al-Azmeh, Muslim Kingship, 119.
backs of the children of Adam their progeny’ to ‘They said: ‘‘Yes, we [so]
testify’’’(Q. 7: 172): When God created Adam, He rubbed his back, and
extracted all his progeny, like tiny specks. He gave them speech so that they
could communicate, and ‘He had them testify against themselves’ (Q. 7: 172).
He made light shine forth from one of them, and then He said to Adam: ‘They
are your progeny with whom the covenant (m;th:q) has been made that I am
their Lord, lest they associate anything to Me, and I am obligated to provide for
their sustenance’. Adam said: ‘Who is the one with the light?’ and God replied:
‘David’. Adam said: ‘O my Lord! How long a term have you written down for
him?’ God replied: ‘Sixty years’. Adam said: ‘How long a life have you written
down for me?’ and God replied: ‘One thousand years. For every one of your
progeny I have written down how long he will live’. Adam said: ‘O my Lord!
Give David a longer life!’ God said: ‘This writing is put down (h:dh: al-kit:b
maw@<6),105 but if you wish, give him some years from your own life!’ Adam
agreed, and although the Pen was dried for the rest of Adam’s children, [God]
wrote down for [David] forty years from Adam’s lifespan, so that David’s
lifespan became one hundred years.106
That the religious institution is included in the covenant is presumably

expressed in the following commentary on Qur8:n 7. 172 in the Tafs;r,
where it is represented by the prophets:
Al-Q:sim ! al-Eusayn ! Eajj:j ! Ab< Ja6far ! al-Rab;6a ! Ubayy b. Ka6b.
He said: . . . And among them that day were the prophets, peace be upon them,
[shining] like lamps, and He selected them for another covenant; as God said:
‘And remember We took from the prophets their covenant as We did from thee:
from Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus the son of Mary: We took from them
a solemn covenant (m;th:q ghal;C) [Q. 33. 7];’ and as He said: ‘So set thou
thy face steadily and truly to the religion (d;n): [establish] God’s handiwork
according to the pattern on which He has created mankind: [let there be] no
change in the work of God’ [Q. 30. 30]; and concerning this He said: ‘This is
a warner, of the series of warners of old!’ [Q. 53. 56] which means: I took his
covenant together with the first warner; from that derives His words: ‘Most
of them We found not men (true) to their covenant: but most of them We
found rebellious and disobedient’ [Q. 7. 102]; ‘Then after him We sent (many)
messengers to their peoples: they brought them clear signs, but they would
not believe what they had already rejected’ [Q. 10. 74]. On the day they
105
Cf. Rosenthal: ‘The book here is all done’; HT I:329/T I:158.
106
Q:la na6am wa-qad jaffa al-qalam 6an s:8ir ban; :dam fa-kataba lahu min
ajli :dam arba6;na sanatin fa-s:ra ajluhu mi8ata sana, cf. Rosenthal: ‘Adam
agreed, although the Pen was dry for all the other of Adam’s children. Thus,
[God] wrote down for David [an additional] forty years for Adam’s sake, so
that David’s term was a hundred years’; HT I: 329/T I: 158.
established [the covenant], He already knew who would be faithful to it and
who would denounce it.107
Provided prophets represent the religious institution, the report
accredits it a great historical responsibility. However, since the report
is from the Tafs;r, the terms are principally moral, although the message
is the same as in Ibn IsA:q’s report about Jeremiah in the Ta8r;kh, where
‘rabbis and monks’ are singled out above worldly rulers as responsible
for historical disasters by corrupting God’s law. Thus within the
Ta8r;kh al-rusul wa-l-mul<k (‘history of the messengers and the kings’),
Ibn IsA:q’s and others’ reports constitute al-s;ra al-nabawiyya (‘the
prophetic course of action’), which runs from creation, through the
Israelite prophets and messengers, the Prophet and his Companions
and Successors, to the 6ulam:8 of Fabar;’s days.108 The Prophet’s mission
is constructed as the turn of a historical cycle of covenant: in preparation
for righteous kingship, he restores the s;ra nabawiyya from which
Jewish and Christian religious authorities had strayed, and which
Muslim counterparts must follow if they want to avoid the mistakes
of past generations.109
The Promised Land

In the Hebrew Bible, covenant from Abraham onwards is centred
on the land God promised His people in return for exclusive worship.
According to Gerhard von Rad, the five books of Moses and Joshua
constitute salvation history, a summary of God’s purpose for His
people, and a prologue to ‘real’ history.110 If one compares the Ta8r;kh’s
107
J:mi6 al-bay:n 6an ta8w;l :y al-Qur8:n (Beirut: Dar al-Fikr, 1995), vi. 154 f.
108
Newby argues that Ibn Hish:m abridged Ibn IsA:q’s S;ra and excised the
biblical material associated with the Prophet because such associations had
become ideologically impossible by the early ninth century, when al-Sh:fi6;’s
‘reform’ elevated the Prophet to a supreme position above all other prophets as
source of Islamic law. This argument is contradicted by the fact that these
associations were made in the Shafi6ite Fabar;’s history, which is about a century
later than Ibn Hish:m’s rescension; although Newby uses Fabar;’s history as one
of the sources from which he reconstructed Ibn IsA:q’s S;ra, he does not address
this fact; ibid. 12 ff. On Ibn IsA:q’s history as structure in the Ta8r;kh, see also
Tottolli, Biblical Prophets, 129 f.; on the oneness of prophetical mission in the
Ta8r;kh, see D<r;, The Rise of Historical Writing, 69 f.
109
Cf. Humphreys, who suggests that the Qur8:n’s admonitions on the theme
of Betrayal are addressed to the Muslim community as the last renewers of
Covenant before the Day of Judgement, wherefore their responsibility is greater
than that of any previous community, hence the urgency of the Qur8:nic
language; ‘Qur8:nic Myth’, 277 ff.
110
Von Rad, Old Testament Theology. Volume One: The Theology of Israel’s
Historical Traditions ([1957] London: SCM Press Ltd., 1975), esp. part 2.
basic historical outline with that of the Hebrew Bible, the following
pattern appears:
Model 4
The Hebrew Bible The Ta8r;kh
Genesis: creation and ancestry (the Pre-Islamic history: creation and
patriarchs and Joseph the minister) ancestry of kingship and prophet-
hood (Israel, Iran, and the Arabs)
Exodus–Deuteronomy: Moses’ Sinai The Prophet’s covenant, revelation,
covenant, revelation, foundation of foundation of community
community
Joshua: Conquest of the Promised The Mad;na caliphate of 6Umar:
Land of Canaan conquest of the Promised Land(s) of
Palestine and the Saw:d
Judges: Just leadership in the Remainder of the Mad;na caliphate:
Promised Land just leadership in the Promised Land
Kings, Chronicles, Prophets: royal The Umayyad caliphate: caliphal
justice and oppression, prophetic justice and oppression, Ahl al-bayt
guidance of kings and Companion guidance
Ezra and Nehemiah: restoration of The 6Abbasid caliphate: restoration
Moses’ covenant in the promised of the Prophet’s covenant in the
land of Canaan under universal promised land of the Saw:d under
Persian kingship Islamic universal kingship
In von Rad’s scheme, Joshua’s conquest of the Promised Land is

the event which connects salvation history to real history.111 Now,
consider one of Fabar;’s reports about 6Umar’s conquests of
Mesopotamia:112
In writing from al-Sar; ! Shu6ayb ! Sayf [b. 6Umar] ! MuAammad, FalAa, and
Ziy:d by their isn:d: On that day Sa6d [b. Ab; Waqq:s] addressed those who
were under his command. It was on a Monday in the month of MuAarram
in the year 14, . . . Having praised God and extolled Him, He said: ‘God is
the Truth. He has no partner in His dominion and His words will never go
unfulfilled. God has said: ‘‘For We have written in the Psalms, after the
Remembrance, ‘The land113 shall be the inheritance of My righteous
111
Von Rad, ibid. 135.
112
For studies of reports on 6Umar on the Temple Mount, see Heribert Busse,
‘6Omar b. al-Ea33:b in Jerusalem’, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 5
(1984), 73–119, esp. 91 f., ‘on 6Umar and the image of Joshua’; and ‘6Omar’s
image as the conqueror of Jerusalem’, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam
8 (1986), 149–68.
113
Arberry’s English translation for al-ar@ is ‘earth’.
servants.’’114 This land is your inheritance and the promise of your Lord
(inna h:dh: m;r:thukum wa-maw6<d rabbikum).’115
The historical context is the Muslims’ preparations for the Battle of
al-Q:disiyya, their decisive victory over the Sassanians through which
they gained control over the Mesopotamian farmlands called the Saw:d.
By translating the Qur8:n’s al-ar@ as ‘the land’ instead of ‘the earth’, we
get the same meaning of ‘promised land’ as in the Hebrew Bible, namely
the land upon which the political and economic community depends;
thus when God said to Adam: ‘They are your progeny with whom the
covenant (m;th:q) has been made that I am their Lord, lest they associate
anything to Me, and I am obligated to provide for their sustenance’,
sustenance refers to this land. The difference from the Hebrew Bible is
that Promised Land in Fabar;’s discourse refers to the Saw:d, rather than
Palestine.116
The historical significance of the conquest is implied also by its
relation to time. Fabar; structured pre-Hijra history according to the
reigns of Persian kings, which he synchronized with Israelites and Arabs.
This was a practical measure since there was no universal time measure
for that period because, as he points out in the introduction, each
community has its own time measure and creation myth. The Hijra
marks the introduction of an Islamic time measure after which history
is structured in Hijra-years. But Fabar; also informs us that Hijra-time
was not institutionalized until 6Umar had conquered the Saw:d and his
troops entered Mad:8in Kisr:, the Sassanian royal city, and distributed
its treasures:
Ibn Ab; 4abra ! 6Uthm:n b. 6Ubayd All:h b. Ab; R:fi6 ! Ibn al-Musayyab: The
first to write the date (kataba al-ta8r;kh) was 6Umar, at two and a half years
114
Qur8:n 21. 105.
115
HT xii, 84/Leiden i, 2288 f.
116
Robert Hoyland has suggested that ‘promised land’ is a juristic term which
legitimized the Muslim conquests by claiming that the lands—including the
Saw:d—were their inheritance by divine right; Seeing Islam as Others Saw It:
A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian Writings on
Early Islam Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam 13, (Princeton, NJ: Darwin
Press, 1997), 130 f. Cf. Jan Olof Blichfeldt, Early Mahdism: Politics and Religion
in the Formative Period of Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1985), who also reads this report
as a reference to the Saw:d. Uri Rubin reads the report and the verse as referring
to the biblical Promised Land of Palestine, although he notes that that context is
the Persian front; Between Bible and Qur8:n: The Children of Israel and the
Islamic Self-Image Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam 17, (Princeton, NJ:
Darwin Press, 1999), 57 f.
of his caliphate. He wrote it to (kataba li) sixteen [years] from the Hijra, on
recommendation from 6Al; b. Ab; F:lib.117
6Abd al-RaAm:n b. 6Abd All:h b. 6Abd al-Eakam ! Na6;m b. Eamm:d !

al-Dar:ward; ! 6Uthm:n b. 6Ubayd All:h b. Ab; R:fi6 ! Sa6;d b. al-Musayyab:
6Umar b. al-Kha33:b assembled the people and asked them: ‘From which day
shall we write (min ayyi yawmin naktub)?’ 6Al; said: ‘From the day the
Messenger of God migrated and left the land of idolatry (wa-taraka ar@
al-shirk)’.118
Kataba al-ta8r;kh is here translated as ‘to write the date’, but it also
means ‘to write history’. Thus the reports imply that the Hijra is the
religious precondition for the material conquest, representing the
passage from idolatry to monotheism and the instituting of the Islamic
community. According to the terms of covenant, God has promised
the land and the covenanters are obliged to conquer it, and therefore
the conquest itself signifies the realization of the heart’s covenant that is
incipient in the Prophet’s community.
Historical analysis
I have assumed that the subject of Fabar;’s history corresponds to
6Al; b. 6>s:’s policy to strengthen 6Abbasid power by centralizing taxation
and payment of the military. However, explicit references to 6Al; b. 6>s:
are very scarce and provide no information whatsoever on his policy.119
Therefore I looked for implicit references in sections treating imperial
power and its preconditions. There are two obvious such instances:
the Sassanian empire under Khusraw An<shirw:n (531–79), and the
caliphate under the great conqueror 6Umar b. al-Kha33:b, and Fabar;
connected them to each other through a particular cadastral system.
In a long narration without isn:d, Fabar; accounts for a cadastral
reform undertaken by Khusraw An<shirw:n. The narrative is attributed
to the Mazdean convert and political theoretician Ibn al-Muqaffa6
(d. 757) and his Siyar mul<k al-6ajam (‘The Persian kings and their
course of action’), which in its turn is an Arabic translation of
Khwad:yn:mag, a Pahlavi chronicle composed in the reign of
Yazdagird III (632–51) but subsequently lost.120 Fabar; relates that
117
Beirut edn., 476.
118
Ibid.
119
See HT xxxviii, 80, 118, 199, 200, 204.
120
The report is cited in HT v. 255–62/T i. 960–4; on its sources, see
Bosworth, HT v. p. 258, n.624, who refers to Zeev Rubin, ‘The Reforms of
Khusro An<shirw:n’, in Cameron (ed.), The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near
before Khusraw’s reform, the Persian rulers instituted a system of
sharecropping (muq:sama) where the landlord determined the land tax
(khar:j) from case to case, according to water supply, area of cultivation,
and size of harvest, and complemented it by a fixed poll tax.121 Zeev
Rubin points out that while it appears as just to consider factors affecting
the actual produce, muq:sama in practice subjected peasants to the
arbitrary estimations of landlords, who often in practice made no
allowances at all for destroyed or diminished crops. Moreover, they took
every opportunity to withhold collected tax revenue from the state
treasury.122
Khusraw’s cadastral reform was initiated by his brother and
predecessor K:vad, with the aim of fixing tax rates for each specified
type of land, area, and crop. His reform was interrupted, however, and in
this sequel the Mazdakite revolt broke out, with peasants leaving their
lands to join the movement. When Khusraw succeeded to the throne,
he set about implementing the reform, beginning by restoring agriculture
in the Saw:d.123 In order to extract as much revenue as possible from
the Saw:d lands, Khusraw instituted a system called mis:Aa. The total
of cultivated land should be measured, and rates should be fixed after
land area and crop, but not after the size of the harvest. A poll tax
was also imposed. Taxes should be paid in three annual instalments
which, together with the fixed rates, would secure a steady income to
East, 227–97. Rubin argues both for the Sassanid identity of Ibn al-Muqaffa6’s
translation of Khwad:yn:mag, and for it being the principal source of reports on
Khusraw’s tax reform, against M. Grignaschi, who claims that all extant
accounts of the reform (including Fabar;’s) originate in the shu6<biyya period
within which Ibn al-Muqaffa6 was working, but with a ‘Pseudo-Ibn al-Muqaffa6’,
and therefore do not transmit authentic Sassanian information on the subject;
see Rubin, op cit., 237 ff. Grignaschi’s works are ‘Quelques spécimens de la
littérature sassanide conservée dans les bibliothèques d’Istanbul’, Journal
Asiatique, 254 (1966), 1–142 ; ‘La Nih:yatu l-6arab f; akhb:ri-l-Furs wa-l-
6Arab (Première partie)’, Bulletin d’Études Orientales, 22 (1969), 15–67 ; ‘La
riforma tributaria di Hosro I e il feudalesimo sassanide’, Accademia Nazionale
dei Lincei: Problemi attuali di scienza e cultura, Atti del convegno internazionale
sul themo La Persia nel medioevo (Roma, 31 marzo-5 aprile 1970) (Rome,
1971), 87–138; ‘La Nih:yatu l-arab f; akhb:ri l-furs wa-l-6arab et les Siyaru
mul<ki l-6Ajam du Ps. Ibn al-Muqaffa6’, Bulletin d’Études Orientales,
26 (1973–4), 83–102. Rubin also demonstrates that in spite of variations in
the report in the different historical works in which it is cited, there is a
kernel in common to all of them, a fact which speaks in favour of the
view that the reform itself consisted in a defined set of principles. I follow
Rubin’s approach.
121
HT v. 255/T i. 960.
122
Rubin, ‘The Reforms’, 248, 261, 293.
123
HT v. 156 f./T i. 897 f.
the central treasury for the imperial defence.124 Another important
innovation was that assessment and collection of taxes was transferred
from the landlords to the central administration and its bureaucrats,
to ensure that revenue actually ended up in the treasury.125 Hence the
administrators were responsible for upholding the reform, which is
represented as just, in spite of its apparent harshness:
Kisr: [Khusraw] chose some men of sound judgement and wise counsel, and
ordered them to investigate the various types of crops the cadastral survey had
revealed for him, the numbers of date palms and olive trees, and the numbers of
heads of those liable for the poll tax. On that basis, they were to fix the rates
of taxation by the yardsticks of what they perceived would ensure the well-being
of his subjects and ample means of sustenance for them. They were to report the
results of this to him. . .126
Kisr: ordered the new tax assessments to be written down in several copies. One
copy was to be kept in his own chancery close at hand; one copy was sent to
the land-tax collectors (6umm:l al-khar:j) for them to collect taxes on its basis;
and another copy was sent to the judges of the administrative divisions (qu@:t
al-kuwar). The judges were charged with the duty of intervening between the
tax collectors and the people if the tax collectors in the administrative districts
attempted to raise an additional sum above the amount laid down in the master
copy of the tax assessment in the chancery, of which they had received a copy.
Also, the judges were to exempt from land tax those whose tillage or other tax-
attracting produce had been damaged or badly affected in any way, according to
the seriousness of that damage or defect. Regarding those persons liable for the
poll tax who had died, or who had passed the age of 50, collecting the taxation
was likewise suspended; the judges were to write back to Kisr: about the tax
exemptions here which they had granted, so that Kisr: might issue appropriate
instructions to his tax collectors. Furthermore, the judges were not to let the tax
collectors levy taxation on persons aged less than 20.127
The centralizing move of the cadastral reform was followed up by a
reform of the army. Previously the great landlords had equipped armies
as part of the system where they were also in charge of tax collection, but
now Khusraw created special cavalry units, equipped and paid from
the treasury.128 Both reforms were briefly successful. However, it seems
124
HT v. 255 et passim/T i. 960 et passim; see also R. N. Frye, The History
of Ancient Iran (Munich: Beck, 1984), 324 et passim; Rubin, ‘The Reforms’,
239 ff., 242 ff., 293.
125
Cf. Frye, The History of Ancient Iran 325.
126
HT v. 257/T i. 961.
127
HT v. 261 f./T i. 963.
128
Frye, The History of Ancient Iran, 326; Rubin, ‘The Reforms’, 294.
revenues did not suffice to pay the new cavalry units, so commanders
were assigned villages for tax-farming, which gave rise to a new class
of small military landowners (dihq:ns).129 Thus the centripetal force
inherent in the system of land assignments could not be checked in
the longer term. In addition, Turkic peoples on the eastern frontier and
Arabs on the south-western challenged Sassanian power.130 Fabar;,
however, points out that Khusraw’s empire was unthreatened so long as
he upheld justice:
In the land of Persia there were no jackals, but some of them infiltrated into
Persia from the land of the Turks during the reign of Kisr: An<shirw:n. News of
this reached Kisr:, and caused him anguish. He summoned the Chief Msbadh
and told him, ‘We have heard about the appearance of those wild beasts in our
land, and it has distressed the people. We are, however, astonished that they
consider such an insignificant occurrence as so portentous; tell us what you think
about all this.’ The Chief Msbadh replied, ‘O King—may God grant you long
life—I have heard our scholars learned in the divine law say that, so long as
justice does not overlay tyranny in a land and itself become obliterated, the
people of that land will be afflicted by incursions of their enemies against them,
and all sorts of unpleasant things will gradually come upon them. I have become
afraid lest the infiltration of these wild beasts into your land is connected with
what I have just told you.’ Very soon afterward, the news reached Kisr: that a
band of Turkish youths had raided the furthest boundaries of his land. He
ordered his ministers and provincial governors not to go beyond what was just in
the course of their official duties and not to act in any way during the course of
those duties except justly. Because of this policy of acting justly, God deflected
that enemy from Kisr:’s land without him having to make war on them or
undertake great trouble in repelling them.131
The analysis of Khusraw’s government appears to stop short in the
reference to God’s decree. But according to my definition of religion—
that religious symbols express historical analysis as reflection on
praxis—‘God’ expresses an analysis. There are three discernible levels
of organization of property and labour which constitute the praxis
expressed in this discourse: (a) the system of vassalage, (b) the mis:Aa
cadastral system within the system of vassalage, and (c) the adminis-
trative practice of central levying and collecting of taxes. From this
viewpoint, the symbol ‘God’ and the justice He approves of signify all
three levels, and covenant signifies the contractual relations underlying
it. Thus the statement that God deflected the enemy from Khusraw’s
129
Frye, The History of Ancient Iran, 326; Rubin, ‘The Reforms’, 294 f.
130
Ibid. 294.
131
HT v. 265/ T i. 965 f.; italics added.
land because he upheld justice means that Khusraw upheld all three
levels. The symbol of God draws the reader’s attention to praxis and
to the responsibility of rulers and administrators to uphold it. In terms
of causality, God responds to human actions, and it is the actions that
constitute the object of historical analysis.
Fabar; ends his account of Khusraw An<shirw:n by stating that the
Messenger of God was born in his reign.132 On the night of his birth,
Khusraw’s palace shook, and several other omens occurred, all signifying
imminent Arab political ascendance.133 After this event, Khusraw died
and was succeeded by his son Hurmuz (579–90). Fabar; portrays him
as initially well-meaning and intent on justice, but unfortunately he
strayed into populism:
He removed the nobles [from his court and entourage] and killed 13,600 men
from the religious classes and from those of good family and noble birth. His sole
aim was to win over the lower classes and to make them favourably disposed
towards him. He imprisoned a great number of the great men, and degraded
them and stripped them of their offices and ranks. He provided well for the mass
of the troops (al-jund), but deprived the cavalrymen (as:wirah) of their resources.
Hence a great number of those in his entourage became evil intentioned
toward him, as a consequence of the fact that God wished to change their [i.e.
the Persians’] rule and transfer their royal power to someone else. Everything
has its own particular cause.134
On the basis of the example of Khusraw An<shirw:n above, which
shows that God does not wish to end the imperial power as long as
justice prevails, God’s wish to transfer Sassanian power to the Arabs is
here correlated to Hurmuz’s politics, which deviate from Khusraw’s
praxis. The concluding statement ‘everything has its own particular
cause’ is thus ambiguous, since the cause can be both human and divine.
For Fabar; as historian, it is the human cause that is of interest.
Hurmuz was succeeded by his son Khusraw Parv;z (591–628). Fabar;
synchronized Khusraw Parv;z’s decline with the Messenger of God
and the Hijra, which marks the inception of the Muslim community.135
This correlation between Persian imperial decline and the emergence of
Islam is also evident in a report from Ibn IsA:q under the heading
‘Mention of the account of the events that happened when God wished
to take away from the people of Persia rule over Persia, and the Arabs’
132
HT v. 266/T i. 966.
133
HT v. 285 et passim/T i. 981 et passim.
134
HT v. 297 f./T i. 990; italics added: lim: ar:da All:hu min taghy;r
amrihim wa-taAw;l mulkihim wa-li-kulli shay8in sabab.
135
HT v. 330/T i. 1009.
overrunning it by means of God’s favouring them with His Prophet,
involving the prophethood, the caliphate, the royal power, and the
dominion, in the days of Kisr: Abarw;z’:
This includes what has been related to us from Wahb b. Munabbih, which is
what was related to us by Ibn Eumayd ! Salama ! MuAammad b. IsA:q, who
said: This account of Kisr: is what one of my colleagues related to me from
Wahb b. Munabbih: That Kisr: constructed a dam on the ‘Blind Tigris’ (Dijla
al-6Awr:8) and expended on it sums of such magnitude that no one knew their
extent. Also, the throne room of his palace (3:q majlisihi) was built [with such
splendour] as had never been seen before. He used to suspend his crown and sit
on his throne when he was in public audience. He had 360 men who were
prognosticators, these being learned scholars (6ulam:8), including soothsayers,
magicians, and astrologers. He related: Among these was a man from the Arabs
called al-S:8ib who used to draw omens from the flight of birds in the manner of
the Arabs and who was seldom wrong. . . . Whenever Kisr: was disturbed by
some matter, he would order his soothsayers, magicians, and astrologers to be
gathered together and would tell them, ‘Look into this matter and see exactly
what it is’.
Now when God sent His prophet MuAammad, Kisr: woke up one morning and
found that the arched roof of his royal palace (3:q mulkihi) had collapsed in the
middle without any weight having been put upon it; also, that the [dam on the]
‘Blind Tigris’ had been breached. When he saw all that, he became filled with
grief and said, ‘The arched roof of my royal palace has collapsed in the middle
without any weight being put upon it, and the [dam on the] ‘Blind Tigris’ has
been breached: Sh:h bishikast,’ meaning [in Arabic] ‘the king has been
overthrown (literally, ‘broken’).’ Then he summoned his soothsayers, magicians,
and astrologers, and summoned al-S:8ib with them, too. He told them . . . ‘Look
into this matter and see exactly what it is.’ . . . Al-S:8ib spent the whole of a dark,
overcast night on a hillock, where he saw a lightning flash that arose from the
direction of the Eij:z, flew across the heavens, and reached as far as the East.
The next morning, he looked at what was beneath his feet, and behold, there was
a green meadow. He then made a pronouncement in his role as diviner: ‘If what I
was seeing is true, there will arise from Eij:z a dominion (sul3:n) which will
reach the East and from which the earth will grow green and fertile—much more
so than from any previous kingdom.’136
In this report, then, God reveals His intention of transferring imperial
power to the Arabs. The fertile meadow described in the last sentence
symbolizes the cultivated land as mainstay of empire, and the breaching
of the dam, which served the purpose of irrigating the lands, is
136
HT v. 331 f./T i. 1009 ff.
a symbolic statement that Khusraw has lost his empire. The omen is
followed by accounts of political developments leading up to the Battle
of Dh< Q:r, the first Arab victory over the Sassanians.137 Khusraw
Parv;z had appointed the Lakhmid al-Nu6m:n b. al-Mundhir as his
vassal against the Byzantine vassals of Ghass:n. Events develop so that
Khusraw eventually incarcerated al-Nu6m:n, who died in prison.138
At the end of the report, Fabar; gives his own analysis: ‘[al-Nu6m:n]
dies at Kh:niq;n, just a short while before the coming of Islam. Soon
afterward, God sent His prophet; al-Nu6m:n’s fate was the cause of
the battle of Dh< Q:r’.139 Fabar; thus correlates God’s sending of the
Prophet to Khusraw Parv;z’s breach of his contractual vassal relations
to al-Nu6m:n, or, symbolically, his violation of the covenant, which
caused the battle that marked the beginning of the end of Persian empire.
But there were other causes, too. The nobility rose against Khusraw
Parv;z, and one of his sons by a Byzantine princess cooperated in
bringing him to trial on a catalogue of charges, here narrated in the son’s
address to an envoy to his father:
Off you go to our father the king and tell him in our name that we have not
been the cause of the unhappy state into which he has fallen, nor is any member
of the subject population responsible, but God has condemned you to His divine
retribution in return for your evil conduct. [First,] your crime against your father
Hurmuz, your violence toward him, depriving him of the royal power . . ., and
the great burden of guilt you have brought upon yourself by injuring him.
[Second,] your bad treatment of us, your sons, by keeping us from all access to
and participation in good things, and from everything which would have brought
us ease of life, enjoyment, and happiness. [Third,] your bad treatment of those
whom you condemned to perpetual imprisonment, to the point that they suffered
hardship from extreme deprivation, wretched living conditions and food, and
separation from their homelands, wives, and children. [Fourth,] your lack of
consideration for the women whom you appropriated for yourself; your failure
to show them any love or affection and to send them back to live with those men
by whom they already had children and progeny; and your keeping them
confined in your palace against their wills. [Fifth,] what you have inflicted on
your subjects generally in levying the land tax and in treating them with
harshness and violence. [Sixth,] your amassing a great amount of wealth, which
137
Reports on these events are narrated in HT v. 338 et passim/T i. 1015 et
passim.
138
HT v. 352–8/T i. 1024–9.
139
HT v. 358/T i. 1029. Bosworth, the translator, comments: ‘This could be
considered as true in an indirect way, in that the end of the Lakhmids does
seem to have facilitated increased depredations by Bedouin tribes like the Bakr
on the now less strongly defended desert fringes of Iraq’, p. 358 n. 855.
you extracted from the people with great brutality so that you drove them
to consider your rule hateful and thereby brought them into affliction and
deprivation. [Seventh,] your stationing the troops for long periods along the
frontiers with the Byzantines and on other frontiers, thereby separating them
from their families. [Eighth,] your treacherous behaviour toward Mawr;q
(Maurice), the king of the Byzantines and your ingratitude for his praiseworthy
actions on your behalf . . . Moreover, you regarded your rightful obligations to
him lightly and refused to grant his request of you regarding the return of the
wooden [True] Cross, to which neither you nor any of your fellow countrymen
had any entitlement or need.140
Among the actions for which God condemned Khusraw, then, are
oppressive measures in collecting tax, and amassing of wealth, which
comes out as the opposite of Khusraw An<shirw:n’s praxis, where
fiscal administrators were just in their proceedings and revenue was
redistributed for the benefit of the empire and all its inhabitants. Thus
accumulation of wealth appears as the opposite of redistribution. But
Khusraw Parv;z defends himself:
Know, O ignorant one, that after God, it is only wealth and troops that can
uphold the royal authority of monarchs, this being especially the case with the
kingdom of Persia, whose lands are surrounded by enemies with gaping mouths
ready to gulp down what the kingdom possesses. The only thing that can keep
them from it and fend them off from those lands they avidly desire to seize for
themselves is numerous troops and copious quantities of weapons and war
material. Now numerous troops and everything necessary for these can be
acquired only by having a great deal of wealth and ample quantities of it; and
wealth can only be amassed and gathered together, for any contingency which
may arise, by strenuous efforts and dedication in levying this land tax. We are not
the first ones to have gathered together wealth; on the contrary, we have merely
imitated here our forefathers and our predecessors in past times. They collected
wealth just as we have, and amassed great quantities of it, so that it might
constitute a firm backing for them in strengthening their armies, in upholding
their authority, and in [making possible] other things for which wealth must
inevitably be amassed.141
Although God is mentioned initially, the actual analysis again
concerns military and land tax. What is described here is the principle
underlying Khusraw An<shirw:n’s reform, except that wealth is
amassed, rather than redistributed. Now, An<shirw:n’s praxis was
just. Justice (6adl) connotes ‘balance’, presumably in the sense of the
140
HT v. 382 f./T i. 1046 f.; italics added.
141
HT v. 392/T i. 1055.
central administration’s balancing the financial needs of the court, the
military, the landlords, the religious institution, and the peasants.
Hurmuz and Khusraw Parv;z were ‘oppressive’ because they tipped the
balance, either by favouring the soldiers and commoners like Hurmuz, or
amassing revenue in the court like Khusraw Parv;z. The same critique
could be levelled against them as in Ibn IsA:q’s report about Jeremiah
and religious authorities: whoever seeks personal gain over the common
good of the system as represented by God has breached the covenant.
In 6Abbasid history, the caliph al-Mahd; had introduced muq:sama
which remained praxis, with the addition of tax-farming in Fabar;’s
days.142 Presuming again that Fabar; was favourable to 6Al; b. 6>s:’s
policy, Khusraw An<shirw:n’s mis:Aa system serves as its discursive
model: a centrally administered system of levying and collecting taxes,
based on fixed rates, and designed to strengthen the centre militarily
without creating social unrest—the covenant. It has its Islamic counter-
part in 6Umar’s caliphate:
It was these tax assessments 6Umar b. al-Kha33:b followed when he conquered
the Persian lands and levied taxation on the protected peoples (ahl al-dhimma)
there, except that he levied taxation on every uncultivated piece of land
according to its potential yield, at the same rate as he levied on sown land.
Also, he levied on every jar;b of land growing wheat or barley from one to two
additional qaf;Cs of wheat; this he used for feeding his army. But in the specific
case of Iraq, 6Umar did not make any arrangements contrary to those of Kisr:
regarding the jar;bs of land and regarding the date palms, olive trees, and the
heads [of those liable to the poll tax], and he excluded from liability to taxation
the people’s means of daily sustenance, as Kisr: had done.143
6Umar is also the paragon of caliphal frugality:

According to Ibn Eumayd ! al-Eakam b. Bash;r ! 6Amr [b. MuAammad]:
6Umar b. al-Kha33:b used to say: ‘There are four matters connected with Islam
that I shall never neglect or abandon for anything: the strength in God’s wealth
and collecting it so that, when we do collect it, we place it where God orders us,
and remain, family of 6Umar, with nothing of it in our hands at all . . .’144
In the discourse, this report could serve as a critique of caliphs who
‘amassed wealth’, like Khusraw Parv;z in history, and the caliphal
private purse instituted by Ibn al-Fur:t in Fabar;’s present days. 6Umar
142
On the muq:sama system, see Frede Lökkegaard, Islamic Taxation in the
Classic Period with Special Reference to Circumstances in Iraq (Copenhagen:
Branner & Korch, 1950), 113, 115; cf. Rubin, ‘The Reforms’, 249.
143
HT v. 260 f./T i. 962 f.
144
HT xiv, 142/T i. 2775.
would thus represent the kind of frugality and redistribution which
6Al; b. 6>s: strove to make the caliph accept in order to balance the
finances.
The arguments made above modify Norman Calder’s conclusion
regarding Fabar;’s accounts of 6Abbasid courtly finances around 870,
that ‘Fabar; is not particularly interested in tax-collecting initiatives’.145
Indeed, Fabar; was generally very interested in tax-collecting, but he
treated the subject-matter in Sassanian and early Islamic rather than
6Abbasid history. This is in line with El-Hibri’s observation that Fabar;
used the pre-Hijra sections of his history as models for Islamic history
and that the Ta8r;kh therefore must be read in its entirety, since reports
reflecting upon 6Abbasid history may be placed in earlier sections.146
If we read these accounts of Sassanian cadastral reform from the
perspective of 6Abbasid reform, a historical analysis appears, namely
that the only way to create a strong imperial central power is to apply the
mis:ha system as instituted by Khusraw An<shirw:n and reinstituted
by 6Umar b. al-Kha33:b. Hence, the decline of 6Abbasid central power
is explained in terms of their not having instituted and upheld the
mis:Aa system.
Different discourses
To recapitulate Robinson’s discourse, Fabar; as medieval Muslim
historian had none of the following characteristics of modern history:
(a) the aim to explain history, (b) a theory of society through which
history could be explained in terms of the complex interaction of
different social sectors and actors, (c) originality of thought.
Furthermore, to try to ascribe these traits to Fabar;’s history would
be to violate its true character or ‘alterity’, as compared to modern
Western history.
Needless to say, Fabar;’s religious symbolism is alien to modern
historical discourses, and he knew neither modern society, with its
high degree of complexity and specialization, nor modern socio-
logical theories like those deriving from Karl Marx, Max Weber, and
Émile Durkheim. But I would still argue that Fabar;’s history has
145
Calder, Studies in Early Muslim Jurisprudence, 148.
146
El-Hibri, Reinterpreting Islamic Historiography; for the method, see esp.
14 ff.; cf. ‘The Unity of Fabar;’s Chronicle’; ‘A Note on Biblical Narrative
and 6Abbasid History’; and see Gilliot regarding the Tafs;r: ‘Le plus souvent,
il [Fabar;] donne les clefs qui permettent de saisir son opinion personnelle.
Ces clefs ne se trouvent pas toujours immédiatement dans le commentaire
du verset étudié, il faut les chercher avant ou même après’; Exégèse, langue,
et théologie, 278.
significant things in common with the best modern ones: he had a stated
aim to explain history in terms of the actions of religious and political
authorities, he had a theory of historical knowledge, and a system of
references (the khabar-form) that matches the theory of historical
knowledge; and he also had a theory of society, i.e. the system of
vassalage as expressed in the symbol of covenant. Although the theory
corresponded to his society’s comparatively low degree of complexity,
it nevertheless reflected a mode of production (the system of vassalage),
institutionalized professional groups (state, administration, religion,
military, and peasants); and praxis (a cadastral reform, a tax system,
and its administration). Furthermore, Fabar; referred to this theory to
explain the fall of the Sassanian Empire, the success of the early
caliphate, and the weakening of the 6Abbasid central power, and thus he
explained history in terms of a theory of society rather than moral
dilemmas, as the majority of scholars would have it. Morality enters
on the level of explaining how the just praxis could be abandoned:
certain authorities saw to their own interests instead of the good of the
whole system, e.g. caliphs, courtiers, and some civil servants favoured
Ibn al-Fur:t’s policy which gave them short-term benefits over that of
Ibn al-Jarr:A; in symbolic terms, they belong to the followers of Ibl;s
instead of God.
Fabar; achieved this analysis by using two kinds of material. First,
there are the symbolical reports transmitted by (among others) Ibn
6Abb:s and Ibn IsA:q, which describe the Prophet and the caliphate as
the fulfilment of biblical prophecies of redemption and the Heart’s
Covenant. These reports establish a relationship of meaning between
the symbol of covenant and the caliphate, and notify the reader that
the caliphate is the subject-matter in this history. Second, there are the
accounts from the Khwad:yn:mag about the system of vassalage and
cadastral reform and administration, transmitted by Ibn al-Muqaffa6.
These two kinds of reports are two sides of the same coin: the Sassanian
information concretizes the systems and ideal praxis by historical
examples, and the religious symbols transform the historically specific
information into a reflection generally valid for the caliphate.

The Case of Al-Tabara

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Journal of Islamic Studies 16:3 (2005) pp. 287–331 doi:10.

DISCOURSE AND HISTORICAL

Early Islamic historical writings do not readily yield the kind of

jurisprudential literature, see Christopher Melchert, The Formation of the Sunni

Definition and method

These keywords make the Prophet’s mission into the inception of

In the Hebrew Bible, Jeremiah’s heart’s covenant implies restoration

That the religious institution is included in the covenant is presumably

The Promised Land

In von Rad’s scheme, Joshua’s conquest of the Promised Land is

6Abd al-RaAm:n b. 6Abd All:h b. 6Abd al-Eakam ! Na6;m b. Eamm:d !

6Umar is also the paragon of caliphal frugality:

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