The Muslim Conquest of Iberia

The Muslim Conquest of Iberia
Medieval Islamic society set great store by the transmission of history: to edify,
argue legal points, explain present conditions, offer political and religious
legitimacy, and entertain. Modern scholars, too, have had much to say about the
usefulness of early Islamic history-writing, although this debate has traditionally
focused overwhelmingly on the central Islamic lands.
This book looks instead at local and regional history-writing in medieval Iberia.
Drawing on numerous Arabic texts – historical, geographical, and biographical –
composed and transmitted in al-Andalus, North Africa, and the Islamic east
between the ninth and fourteenth centuries, Nicola Clarke offers a nuanced and
detailed analysis of narratives about the eighth-century Muslim conquest of Iberia.
Comparing how individual episodes, characters, and themes are treated in different
texts, and how this treatment relates to intellectual debates, literary trends, and
socio-political conditions at the time of writing, she shows how competing priori-
ties shaped myriad variations on a single story and how the scholars and patrons
of a corner of the Islamic world distant from Baghdad viewed their own history.
Offering a framework in which historians of Christian Iberia (and of Christian
Europe more generally) can approach and make sense of culturally-significant
texts from Muslim Iberia, this book will also be relevant to broader debates about
the historiography of early Islam. As such, it will be of great interest to scholars
of historiography, world history, and Islamic studies.
Nicola Clarke is a Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford, UK, and teaches
in the history department at Lancaster University, UK.
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The Muslim Conquest of Iberia
Medieval Arabic narratives
Nicola Clarke
First published 2012
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© 2012 Nicola Clarke
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Clarke, Nicola, 1980-
The Muslim conquest of Iberia : medieval Arabic narratives / Nicola
Clarke.
p. cm. — (Culture and civilization in the Middle East ; 30)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-415-67320-4 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-203-18089-1
(ebook) 1. Spain—History—711-1516—Early works to 1800. 2.
Spain—History—711-1516—Historiography. 3. Muslims—Spain—
History—Early works to 1800. 4. Muslims—Spain—
Historiography. 5. Manuscripts, Arabic—Spain. 6. Manuscripts,
Arabic—Africa, North. I. Title.
DP103.C58 2011
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2011022788
ISBN: 978–0–415–67320–4 (hbk)

ISBN: 978–0–203–18089–1 (ebk)
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Contents
Acknowledgements xi
Abbreviations xiii
List of authors and rulers xvii
Introduction 1
The conquest of Iberia: outline of events 5
1 Conceptualizing conquest: the late antique

historiographical backdrop 8
The rise of providential history 8
The coming of Islam 11
Iberian models and Islam 16
Conclusion 21
2 Successors, jurists, and propagandists: reconstructing

the transmission history of Spanish conquest narratives 23
Seeking origins, or problems in Islamic historiography 25
Egypt: legends, law, and loot 29
Isnād extrapolation and the question of the tābiʿūn 35
The Cordoban Umayyads and issues of land ownership 40
3 Accommodating outsiders, obeying stereotypes: mawālī and

muwalladūn in narratives of the conquest 47
Walāʾ: accommodating outsiders and reinforcing hierarchy 47
How walāʾ operated in early Islamic society 49
Non-Arabs in al-Andalus: mawālī and muwalladūn 54
Mawālī in the conquest narratives 62
Conclusion 68
x Contents
4 To the ends of the earth: extremes of east and west in
Arabic geographical and ʿajāʾib writings 69
The view from Baghdad: aspects of medieval
Muslim geography 70
Expressing conceptual boundaries: distinguishing
internal from external 73
Liminal spaces 77
Constructing al-Andalus 81
5 The Table of Solomon: a historiographical motif and

its functions 84
The Temple of Jerusalem and its artistic and
historiographical afterlife 86
Royal treasure hoards and the question of
Visigothic legitimacy 89
Solomon’s Table in the Muslim historiographical
tradition 92
Conclusion 100
6 Excusing and explaining conquest: traitors and

collaborators in Muslim and Christian sources 102
Literary devices in historical writing 103
Traitor type 1: the plot device 104
Traitor type 2: the rogue insider 106
Traitor type 3: the romantic antihero 108
Traitor type 4: the disaffected faction 111
Conclusion 116
7 On the other side of the world: comparing narratives of

contemporary Islamic conquests in the east 118
The basic stories of the eastern narratives 121
Texts for the eastern narratives 121
The major themes of the eastern narratives 126
Conclusion: points of correspondence 144
Conclusion: history on the margins 147
Notes 156
Bibliography 209
Index 238
Acknowledgements
I have been living with the tales of the Muslim conquest of Iberia for so long, now,
that it is hard to know where to begin in acknowledging the help and inspiration I
have received over the years. The biggest debt of gratitude is owed to my inesti-
mable doctoral supervisor, Chase Robinson (not least for teaching me the value of
lengthy conclusions . . .). During my undergraduate years at the University of St
Andrews, and as a graduate at the University of Oxford, I have been lucky enough
to be encouraged, supported and challenged by a host of brilliant teachers and
scholars: including, but not limited to, Hugh Kennedy (with whom I began serious
study of medieval Iberia, and who has been unstintingly generous with his time
ever since) and Chris Given-Wilson at the former, and Adam Silverstein (who
examined the thesis and offered advice on publishing it), Judith Pfeiffer (a
thoughtful and exacting reader of my work in my early years as a graduate
student), Jeremy Johns, Nadia Jamil, and Christopher Melchert at the latter.
Finally, no graduate student’s life would be complete – or bearable – without
fellow students with whom to share ideas (and fears) over coffee and/or beer; I am
thinking chiefly of Harry Munt and Pascal Held, here, but they stand for many
more.
Maribel Fierro and Eduardo Manzano Moreno offered bibliographical advice at
an early stage, and more recently Ann Christys gave me some invaluable sugges-
tions on Cordoba. Almost invariably, Oxford’s libraries – especially that of the
Oriental Institute – supplied whatever I asked for, and much more besides. Petra
Sijpesteijn, Andrew Marsham, Alex Woolf, Javier Martinez, Graham Barrett, and
Robert Portass all invited me to speak at various conferences and seminars, and
the finished article is much the better for these opportunities to present my work
in progress and have conversations about it. Parts of chapters three and six have
previously appeared in my article, ‘Medieval Arabic accounts of the conquest of
Cordoba: creating a narrative for a provincial capital’, Bulletin of the School of
Oriental and African Studies 74 (2011), pp. 41-57; thanks to Elizabeth Gant and
the reviewers of that journal for extremely useful feedback, and to Cambridge
University Press for the permission to reprint the material. Staying with permis-
sions: thanks to Kenneth Wolf for allowing me to use several substantial passages
from his translations collected in Conquerors and Chroniclers of Medieval Spain
(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999).
xii Acknowledgements
While revising the manuscript for publication, I have also benefitted greatly
from the enthusiasm and spontaneous generosity of my own graduate students:
Edward Zychowicz-Coghill turned up a PhD thesis on Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam; Joshua
Olsson read Chapter 4 and pointed me towards E. J. van Donzel and Andrea B.
Schmidt’s Gog and Magog in Early Christian and Islamic Sources (Leiden: Brill,
2010), although unfortunately I did not have time to incorporate their findings
here; and, most significantly, Ryan Lynch volunteered – quite out of the blue – to
compile the index.
An army of proofreaders gave their time selflessly just before submission of the
thesis: Anne Clarke, Angharad Fenton-May, Niall Harrison, Lucy Kershaw, Harry
Munt (who spotted an embarrassing mistake, and pointed me towards the carpet
in al-Ṭabarī), Ian Snell (who, astonishingly, read the whole thing), Chris Wareing,
and Shana Worthen. For their expert help in turning the thesis into a monograph,
I must thank Suzanne Richardson, Joe Whiting, Ian Netton and all at Routledge;
Donna White and Heather Cushing for typesetting; and Eileen Power for sharp-
eyed (and rapid) copy-editing. Mistakes, inconsistencies, and general wronghead-
edness that remain are, of course, my own. In some cases, stubbornly so.
Finally, thanks to Guy Kay, whose novel The Lions of Al Rassan is in many
ways ultimately responsible for all of this. Thank you to my parents, Anne and
Howard, and my brother Mike, for support and (affectionate) mockery in roughly
equal measure.
This is for Niall ‒ for making sure I continued to eat and sleep, and for
everything else.
Abbreviations
Journals and series

AQ Al-Qanṭara
BSOAS Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies
DI Der Islam
EI2 Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn.
EOBA Estudios onomástico-biográficos de al-Andalus
IJMES International Journal of Middle East Studies
JAOS Journal of the American Oriental Society
JESHO Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient
JNES Journal of Near Eastern Studies
JSAI Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam
SI Studia Islamica
Arabic texts
Items marked with an asterisk are multiple-volume texts with continuous pagina-
tion or paragraph notation throughout; references in the notes are therefore given
without a volume number.
Ansāb Al-Balādhurī, Ansāb al-ashrāf, ed. S.N. Mārdīnī,

Damascus: Dār al-Yaqazah, 1996–, 25 vols.
Al-Bakrī * Al-Bakrī, Kitāb al-masālik wa-al-mamālik, ed. A.P. van
Leeuwen and A. Ferre, Beirut: Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī,
1992, 2 vols.
Al-Balādhurī Al-Balādhurī, Futūḥ al-buldān, ed. M.J. Goeje, Leiden:
Brill, 1866.
Al-Dīnawarī Al-Dīnawarī, Kitāb al-akhbār al-ṭiwāl, ed. V.F. Girgas,
Leiden: Brill, 1888, 2 vols.
AM Akhbār Majmūʿa, ed. E. Lafuente y Alcántara, Madrid:
Rivadeneyra, 1867.
FA Fatḥ al-Andalus, ed. L. Molina, Madrid: Consejo Superior
de Investigaciones Científicas, 1994.
xiv Abbreviations
FM Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam, Futūḥ Miṣr, ed. C.C. Torrey, New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1922.
Ibn Aʿtham Ibn Aʿtham, Kitāb al-futūḥ, Hyderabad: Matbaʿat Majlis
Dāʾirat al Maʿārif al-ʿUthmānīyah, 1968–75, 8 vols.
Ibn al-Athīr Ibn al-Athīr, al-Kāmil fī al-taʾrīkh, ed. C.J. Tornberg,
Beirut: Dar Sādir, 1965–7 (rpt), 12 vols.
Ibn al-Faqīh Ibn al-Faqīh, Kitāb al-buldān, ed. M.J. de Goeje, Leiden:
Brill, 1885.
Ibn al-Faraḍī * Ibn al-Faraḍī, Taʾrīkh ʿulamāʾ al-Andalus, ed. I. Ibyari,
Cairo: Dār al-Kutub al-Islāmīyah, 1983–4, 2 vols.
Ibn Ḥabīb Ibn Ḥabīb, Kitāb al-taʾrīkh, ed. J. Aguadé, Madrid:
Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1991.
Ibn Ḥajar Ibn Ḥajar, Tahdhīb al-tahdhīb, Hyderabad: Matbaʿat
Majlis Dāʾirat al-Maʿārif al-Nizāmīya, 1325–7/1907–9,
12 vols.
Ibn ʿIdhārī Ibn ʿIdhārī, Kitāb al-bayān al-mughrib, ed. G.S. Colin and
E. Lévi-Provençal, Leiden: Brill, 1948–51, 2 vols.
Ibn Khurdādhbih Ibn Khurdādhbih, Kitāb al-masālik wa-al-mamālik, ed.
M.J. de Goeje, Leiden: Brill, 1889.
Ibn al-Qūṭīya Ibn al-Qūṭīya, Taʾrīkh iftitāḥ al-Andalus, in J. Ribera (ed.),
Historia de la conquista de España, Madrid: Tipografía de
la ‘Revista de Archivos’, 1926.
Ibn al-Shabbāṭ Ibn al-Shabbāṭ, Ṣilāṭ al-simṭ, in Taʾrīkh al-Andalus li-Ibn
al-Kardabus wa-waṣfuhu li-Ibn al-Shabbāṭ, ed. A.M.
al-ʿAbbādī, Madrid: Maʿhad al-Dirāsāt al-Islāmiya, 1971.
Al-Idrīsī * Al-Idrīsī, Opus Geographicum, ed. E. Cerulli, F. Gabrieli,
G. Della Vida, L. Petech, and G. Tucci, Naples and Rome:
Istituto universitario orientale di Napoli, 1970–84, 3 vols.
Al-Maqqarī Al-Maqqarī, Nafḥ al-ṭīb, ed. I. Abbas, Beirut: Dār Sādir,
1968, 8 vols.
Al-Masʿūdī * Al-Masʿūdī, Murūj al-dhahab, ed. C. Pellat, Beirut, 1966–
79, 7 vols.
Al-Ṭabarī Al-Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh al-rusul wa-al-mulūk, ed. M.J. de
Goeje, Leiden: Brill, 1879–1901, 15 vols.
Al-Yaʿqūbī Al-Yaʿqūbī, Taʾrīkh, ed. M.T. Houtsma, Leiden: Brill,
1883, 2 vols.
Yāqūt Yāqūt, Muʿjām al-buldān, Beirut: Dār Sādir, 1955–57,
5 vols.
Al-Zuhrī * Al-Zuhrī, Kitāb al-jaʿrafīya, ed. M. Hadj-Sadok, Bulletin
d’Études Orientales 21 (1968), pp. 9–310.
Persian texts
References will be given in the format ‘pp. [page number of translation]/[page
number of text]’. Quotations come from the translations.
Abbreviations xv
Chachnāma Fathnamah-i Sind, ed. N.A. Baloch, Islamabad: Islamic
University, 1983; tr. by M. Kalichbeg Fredunbeg as The
Chachnama: an ancient history of Sind, Delhi: Idarahī
Adabiyatī Delli, 1979 (rpt).
Al-Narshakhī Al-Narshakhī, Tārīkh-i Bukhārā, ed. M. Razavī, Tehrān:
Bunyād-i Farhang-i Īrān, 1973; tr. by R.N. Frye as The
History of Bukhārā, Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener
Publishing Inc, 2007 (rpt).
Texts in other languages

Items marked with an asterisk are multiple-volume texts with continuous pagina-
tion or paragraphing throughout; references in the notes are therefore given
without a volume number. Where details are supplied, quotations come from the
translations.
Biclaro (= John of Biclaro, Chronicle) Juan de Biclaro, Obispo de

Gerona: su vida y su obra, ed. J. Campos, Madrid: Consejo
Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1960; tr. K.B.
Wolf, Conquerors and Chroniclers of Early Medieval
Spain, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999.
CAIII (= Chronicle of Alfonso III) Crónicas Asturianas, ed. J. Gil
Fernández, tr. J.L. Moralejo, Oviedo: Universidad de
Oviedo, 1985; tr. K.B. Wolf, Conquerors and Chroniclers
of Early Medieval Spain, Liverpool: Liverpool University
Press, 1999.
Chr754 (= Chronicle of 754) Crónica Mozarabe de 754, ed. and tr.
J.E. Lopez Pereira Zaragoza: Anubar, 1980; tr. K.B. Wolf,
Conquerors and Chroniclers of Early Medieval Spain,
Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999.
Chr1344 Crónica de 1344, ed. D. Catalán and M.S. de Andrés,
Madrid: Gredos, 1971.
CMR Crónica del Moro Rasis, ed. D. Catalán and M.S. de
Andrés, Madrid: Gredos, 1975.
DRH (= Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, De Rebus Hispaniae)
Historia de los hechos de España, tr. J. Fernández
Valverde, Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1989.
Fredegar J.M. Wallace-Hadrill (ed. and tr.), The Fourth Book
of Fredegar, with Its Continuations, London: Nelson,
1960.
Herodotus Herodotus, The Histories, tr. A. de Selincourt, London:
Penguin, 1996.
Isidore (= Isidore, History of the Kings of the Goths) in tr. K.B.
Wolf, Conquerors and Chroniclers of Early Medieval
Spain, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999.
xvi Abbreviations
Isidore, Etymologies S.A. Barney, W.J. Lewis, J.A. Beach, O. Berghoff (trs),
The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006.
John Bar Penkāyē S.P. Brock (tr.), ‘North Mesopotamia in the late seventh
century: Book XV of John Bar Penkāyē’s Rīš Mellē’,
Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 9 (1987).
Orosius Seven Books of History against the Pagans, tr. A.T. Fear,
Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010.
Procopius * Procopius, History of the Wars, tr. H.B. Dewing, London,
1914–1940, 7 vols.
Sebeos The Armenian History attributed to Sebeos, tr. R.W.
Thomson, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999,
2 vols.
Thucydides Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, tr. R.
Warner, London: Penguin, 1972 (rev. edn).
Zuqnīn The Chronicle of Zuqnīn, Parts III and IV: A.D. 485–775,
tr. A. Harrak, Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval
Studies, 1999.
Authors and rulers
Authors
Andalusī Non-Andalusī
Ibn Ḥabīb – d. 852 Ibn Aʿtham – d. early 9th c.

Aḥmad al-Rāzī – d. 955 al-Wāqidī – d. 823
Ibn al-Qūṭīya – d. 977 Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam – d. 870
ʿArīb b. Saʿīd – d. 980 al-Balādhūrī – d. 892
Ibn al-Faraḍī – d. 1013 al-Dīnawarī – d. c. 895–900
Ibn Ḥazm – d. 1064 al-Yaʿqūbī – d. c. 900
Ibn Ḥayyān – d. 1076 Ibn Khurdādhbih – d. c. 911
al-Bakrī – d. 1094 al-Ṭabarī – d. 923
Ibn Khallikān – d. 1282 al-Masʿūdī – d. 955
al-Maqqarī – d. 1632 Yāqūt – d. 1229
Ibn al-Athīr – d. 1234
Ibn ʿIdhārī – d. 1307
Rulers of al-Andalus (selected)

ʿAbd al-Raḥmān I – r. 756–88
ʿAbd al-Raḥmān II – r. 822–52
Muḥammad I – r. 852–86
ʿAbd Allāh – r. 888–912
ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III – r. 912–61
Al-Ḥakam II – r. 961–76
Introduction
The conquest of Iberia in 711, by an Arab and Berber force under the banner of
Islam, was a source of endless fascination for medieval chroniclers, whether they
were writing fifty years after the event, or five hundred.1 Christian or Muslim, in
Latin or Arabic, within Iberia or beyond it, authors and editors set out their stalls
– ideological, theological, political, juridical – in the way they wrote about the
conquest, painting it variously as a dreadful calamity, an act of God, high adven-
ture, or the careful foundation of later administration. For most, it was the start of
a new era – destiny, or its subversion – and for all concerned, its significance lay
in its presentation and interpretation: in what might be done with it.
The central aim of this study is to carry out a contextualization and close reading
of medieval narratives of the Islamic conquest of Iberia, in order to explore how
the story of the conquest was told and retold for a variety of audiences and a
variety of purposes, together with the ways in which some of the key elements of
the narratives functioned in support of these purposes. The focus will be on the
conceptual and propagandistic currents at work in the narratives, whether actively
invoked by historians – using the material to make juridical points, for example,
or to extol the greatness of al-Andalus (Muslim Iberia) and its Umayyad rulers –
or implicit in their methods and means of retelling, such as formulaic descriptions
of sieges, or the use of a providential framework within which to understand the
success of the conquest armies. The texts under examination are primarily Arabic
works that were compiled or composed within the Muslim historiographical tradi-
tion, with selected examples from Latin and Castilian. They range in date from the
mid-eighth century to the fourteenth, although limited use will be made of certain
later writers, including al-Maqqarī (d. 1632), a Maghribi émigré to the east whose
nostalgia for al-Andalus drove him to preserve large parts of earlier works that are
otherwise lost.
Scholarly approaches to the early Islamic historical tradition have in recent
years tended to come from two angles, which might be characterized as ‘opti-
mistic’ and ‘sceptical’. Proponents of the first view hold that while some elements
of the texts may be implausible and anachronistic, and most of our extant exam-
ples come from well after the events described, we can nonetheless reconstruct a
factual core of material if we reject obvious miracles and compare different
chronologies of events; furthermore, the techniques and priorities of transmission
2 Introduction
within the tradition were such that accuracy and preserving the words of revered
predecessors were prized, militating against forgery or careless memorization.2
The sceptical view, meanwhile, expressed most compellingly by Patricia Crone,
holds that the tradition of early Islamic history as it stands is largely useless, repre-
senting nothing more ‘authentic’ than the late (that is, ninth- and tenth-century)
crystallisation of furious debates on issues alien to the seventh century, built upon
imaginary ideas of the past, and subject to systemic if not systematic forgery – a
stance that has been supported recently by scholars, such as Stefan Leder, who
take a more literary approach to the chronicles.3 My own thinking is, as will be
obvious, rather closer to the second than the first; Albrecht Noth’s work on topoi
(recurring motifs or clichés) in accounts of the seventh-century Islamic conquests,
and the way formula shaped how medieval chroniclers wrote the world, was a
formative influence on the way I approach medieval Islamic historical texts.4
Nevertheless, I hope to demonstrate that an analysis like Noth’s, however
illuminating it is for the seventh century and the early Islamic heartlands of
Arabia, Syria, and Iraq, cannot be translated straightforwardly to conquest
narratives from other parts and periods of the Islamic tradition. Firstly, the circum-
stances of the eighth century, when the conquest of al-Andalus took place, were
different. Simply because conquest narratives are formulaic does not mean that
they have no correspondence whatsoever with the real world; as Chase Robinson
has recently demonstrated, a topos can be a topos and still have a basis in events.5
Secondly, the later writers’ approaches to this period were different. To assume
that conquest accounts are all formulaic in exactly the same way and for the same
reasons is to take the medieval Islamic tradition at its word when it claims to be
composed entirely of disinterested vessels for the insights of the past. As Matthew
Innes noted with regard to Europe in this period, we underestimate the sophistica-
tion of medieval authors at our peril; they were not blank slates, nor did they
operate in cultural and political vacuums.6 To dismiss the Arabic sources almost
out of hand, moreover, as Roger Collins does, is to ignore what the writing of
history on the margins of the Islamic world – that is, in regions like al-Andalus –
has to offer us.7
There can be no doubt that the Arabic and Latin accounts of the conquest of
Iberia are highly programmatic productions, born of cultural imperatives and
ideologies that gave preference to many things ahead of facts. Like all historical
narratives, these texts alter their subject simply by the act of retelling it. (So,
unavoidably, will I, when I attempt to contextualize the circumstances of their
composition.8) These texts’ content is drawn from a shared pool of remembrance:
ideas about past events sufficiently important – ‘true’, if not always factual – to
the identity of the community that they were preserved within its collective
memory by repeated debate and discussion.9 Putting such events into a narrative
is necessarily part of both oral and written retellings; even such atomized chunks
of collective memory as the ḥadīth, reports of the Prophet Muḥammad’s words
and deeds, are frequently given a narrative context, to aid understanding or to
enhance their air of authenticity: ‘the day before the battle of X, suchabody asked
the Prophet . . .’.10 But narrativisation imposes a structure and pattern on a past
Introduction 3
that in reality lacked such order11 – a structure that, as a rule, was in line with the
self-identity that the community, or the individual author, wished to preserve or
promote, since it offered a narrative of the past against which the present could be
interpreted.12
But as Ruth Morse has argued cogently in the context of the medieval Latin
west,13 the use of structural formulae and clichéd content in the composition of
texts does not inherently choke off all particularity, creativity, or even factuality.
The texts do, it is true, construct and distort the past in line with a series of implicit
and explicit goals, many of which can be detected, explored and accounted for,
and which might, indeed, be more interesting than learning ‘what actually
happened’, at least to this scholar: entertainment, edification, explanation, legal
argumentation, a providential and triumphal view of history, the creation of
provincial identity distinct from the centre. Yet historical texts are not purely
literary – they are, as Rosamund McKitterick comments, at least a memory of
reality14 – and even literary construction is context-specific. Writing history is
fundamentally exegesis of the past for the present and, contrary to Noth’s conten-
tion, topoi are not, always, used in the same ways and for the same reasons.15
A tenth-century, deeply-traditionalist jurist based in Baghdad, such as al-Ṭabarī
(d. 923), manifestly approached his Taʾrīkh (‘History’) in a very different way
than did, say, Cordoba-based grammarian Ibn al-Qūṭīya (d. 977). They may have
been educated in similar ways, shared many of the same assumptions, and built
their work largely from the reports of those who came before them – which in turn
were undoubtedly composed of many of the same outline stories with the names
and a few details changed – but the results of their endeavours hint at very
divergent aims and display very different takes on the material. Whereas al-Ṭabarī
apparently considered Iberia so peripheral as to be worth no more than a
handful of lines in his account – a distraction from key themes such as the
pre-Islamic prophets, the career of Muḥammad, and the trajectory of the
caliphate and its opponents – for Ibn al-Qūṭīya, al-Andalus and its rulers were
central. He was a western writer whose patrons, the Umayyad dynasty, were the
losers in al-Ṭabarī’s history, and whose ancestors, the Visigothic kings, were
losers in his own polity; his advocacy was thus for another set of heroes in
another part of the world, and the terms in which he expressed his advocacy were
tailored to his environment.
This is not to say that any single text is wholly and indisputably the product of
an identifiable author with a unified vision. Virtually all works in the late antique
and medieval periods, in both the Christian and the Islamic world, are in some
senses palimpsests. Compilers and authors drew on their predecessors and were
reworked by their successors, promiscuously and sometimes without acknow-
ledgement, such that even pinning down a broad context for composition can be
difficult.16 This, coupled with the fact that many compilers juxtaposed divergent
stories without necessarily passing judgement on them, means that Arabic
conquest narratives contain numerous and conflicting viewpoints. Often these
viewpoints can be identified, however, and neither they nor their context(s) are
completely obliterated by the use of conventional stereotypes or formulae of
4 Introduction
narrative progression; rather, the forms can mean different things in different
contexts, even when they look the same. A siege narrative topos applied to both
Damascus and Cordoba, in texts written centuries apart, is not the ‘same’ story,
even if many elements are shared and the reality of the situation is long lost.17 For
example, a common feature of such narratives, routine emphasis on the central-
ized control of the caliph, can function differently when the caliph placed in that
formula, by an Andalusī writer, is an ancestor of the usurped Umayyad dynasty
ruling in diminished provincial splendour in Cordoba, than when it is, say, ʿUmar
b. al-Khaṭṭāb (r. 634–44) and the writer is a Baghdādī subject of the ʿAbbāsids,
secure in the glittering capital of an empire. For the Andalusī writer in this case,
the topos is a context-specific statement about provincial identity and politics,
rather than – as for the Baghdādī – the abstract ideal of a paradigmatic figure
doing paradigmatic things (although it might be that as well).
In order to set the scene, chapter one will discuss how the first wave of Muslim
conquests, most of which took place in the mid-seventh century, were understood
and conveyed by their earliest non-Muslim chroniclers; that is, within a providen-
tial, polemical, and at times apocalyptic framework that fed into the way Muslims
themselves conceived of, and wrote about, their history. In the second chapter I
shall look at how the historiographical tradition developed in the Islamic world,
how it shaped the ways in which events such as the conquest of Iberia could be
described, and how information about, and constructions of, that particular
conquest were transmitted to those writers whose works we can still access. Of
particular interest, here and in subsequent chapters, will be the question of how far
the formal conventions and expectations of history-writing dictated what was
said, and how, about the conquest of Iberia, against the particularities of what
Andalusī authors and audiences might wish to remember differently.
The key elements, those symbols and narrative strategies that both stand out
from these texts and make the story what it is, may be divided into two types: the
broad themes that influenced what was included in the texts, and the motifs
through which these themes are expressed. Chapter three deals with the first of
two selected themes: how Islamic society imagined, and coped with, ‘outsiders’.
In the Andalusī context outsiders largely meant mawālī (non-Arab clients, usually
converts to Islam, or their descendants) and muwalladūn (freeborn converts or
‘indigenous’ Iberian Muslims), which had important implications for the ethnic
composition of al-Andalus and for state and society’s frequently problematic rela-
tionship with the peoples conventionally known as the Berbers. This issue lies in
the background of the whole story, but finds narrative dramatization in the conflict
between the two main figures in the Muslim conquest army: Mūsā b. Nuṣayr,
conqueror and governor of the Maghrib, and Ṭāriq b. Ziyād, his Berber mawlā
who launched the Spanish expedition. Chapter four, meanwhile, explores the
Iberian Peninsula’s position on the periphery of the Islamic world, as a locus for
legend, danger and all manner of ʿajāʾib (marvels) at the western edge of civiliza-
tion, the place where the sun disappears and the Ocean lurks. Such preoccupations
of the historical, and to some extent geographical, tradition about the periphery
shaped how al-Andalus was described and the anecdotes that were accepted as
Introduction 5
information about the conquest, producing a layer of more overtly-fantastical
causation than is generally seen in Muslim historiography for this period.
The first of my chosen motifs, and the subject of chapter five, exemplifies the
operation of both these themes. This is the ‘Table of Solomon’, an artefact from
Solomon’s Temple supposedly found in the course of the invasion. That the Table
should turn up during the conquest of Toledo is, almost without exception,
accepted unquestioningly by a tradition wherein such objects of wonder and pres-
tige abound at the edge of the world. That it is also an object of great value, and
one found by the Berber rather than by his patron, makes it a battleground and a
symbol of Arab–Berber relations, or of Berber relations with ‘authority’ more
generally; furthermore, its story provides a display of Umayyad authority and
justice, and a juridical lesson about permissible looting. The second motif – found
in chapter six – is that common topos of invasion narratives, the traitor who
causes or enables conquest, and its close cousin, the kidnapping of women as a
provocation to war. On one level, anecdotes of treachery in Arabic sources share
conceptual ground with the classical and late antique convention of locating single
causes grounded in human virtue or vice for great events; depending on one’s
perspective, they serve as either explanation or justification for the conquest. On
another level, in the Islamic tradition such stories are often concerned not only
with the act of treachery or collaboration, but also with its grounding and
protection in law – usually marked in the text by the formal device of a treaty or
an amān (a grant of safe-conduct) – and with the capacity in which the collab-
orator joins Islamic society. Finally, the traitor also provides commentary on the
issue of proper authority raised by the Table of Solomon, although here the
implications are, as so often elsewhere in the sources, for the taxation status of
the land in question during the period when the history was being recorded.
The final chapter applies all of these themes and questions to the historiography
of contemporary conquests in Transoxania (central Asia) and Sind (northern
India), in an attempt to see if shared historical problems – the greater distance for
communications, the autonomy of commanders in the field, the large amounts of
plunder, and the changing of the guard in the provinces that ensued when Sulaymān
succeeded his brother al-Walīd as Umayyad caliph – are reflected in shared his-
toriographical frameworks and topoi. Are there distinctively eighth-century
themes in these conquest narratives, and, if so, are they purely the result of how
the history was written in later centuries, or do they reflect some genuine early
Islamic circumstance?
The conquest of Iberia: outline of events

As will be seen in the coming chapters, there is much variation among the Arabic
conquest narratives: in length and level of detail, in emphasis and analysis, and in
content, itinerary, and characters. Arriving at a firm reconstruction of events in
Iberia in 711, based on the textual evidence, is not among the aims of this study.
All but the very barest facts are irretrievable, in any secure way; much of the detail
being, as is so often the case in early Islamic history, later accrual to a thin core
6 Introduction
tradition, the best that might be attempted is a truncated account with a degree of
plausibility. Other scholars have, in the context of broader histories of Muslim
Iberia, made headway with this difficult task, most recently – and making use of
the material evidence – Eduardo Manzano Moreno.18 But, following the work
of Gabriel Martinez-Gros and Janina Safran on historiographical image-making
of the Umayyads, I am less interested in whether elements of the various narra-
tives are ‘true’ or ‘false’, than in how they are presented and put to use.19 For
reference and the sake of clarity, however, the episodes that feature most
commonly and the narrative framework in which they tend to appear, together
with some historical background, are as follows.
The invasion of the Iberian Peninsula formed part of an eighth-century ‘second
wave’ of Islamic expansion, after the explosive early conquests of the mid-seventh
century and, more recently, the completion – under Ḥassān b. al-Nuʿmān
al-Ghassanī and his successor as governor of the province, Mūsā b. Nuṣayr20 – of
the long, drawn-out campaign in North Africa. This latter conquest had begun in
the late 640s, but it had been conducted in fits and starts and, just as the Romans
had found, the fierce resistance of certain Berber groups – predominantly those
who lived in more isolated, mountainous regions, and had been less affected by
the twin acculturative influences of Rome and Christianity – had rendered it a
torturous process.21 Like the army that would later be led into Iberia, the military
force employed in North Africa, particularly in the latter stages, was composed
overwhelmingly of Berbers who had allied themselves with the Muslims.22 Mūsā
was especially active in recruiting; he established ties of walāʾ (clientage) with
Berbers on such a large scale that, in some quarters, he was later credited with the
complete conversion of North Africa by 709.23 When Tangiers was taken, in 708,
Mūsā installed his mawlā Ṭāriq b. Ziyād as its governor, left him there with a
Berber force, and returned to his seat of power in Qayrawān (modern-day
Tunisia).24
Two years later, the Visigothic King Witiza died in Iberia, leaving behind him
a succession crisis – not because he lacked an heir, but precisely because he had
designated his son, Akhila, to succeed him, a deeply unpopular move in a polity
still firmly wedded to elective monarchy.25 Much of the aristocracy moved to head
off the possibility of dynastic succession by declaring for another candidate,
Roderic,26 but Witiza’s sons retained some support, and more importantly lost
none of their ambition. Civil war – or enough low-level endemic political violence
to destabilize the region and leave it vulnerable to invasion – ensued. It is in this
context of political unrest and disunity that we can place Ṭāriq and the Muslim
conquest, and where, in most accounts, our traitor topos invariably appears. Still
stationed in Tangiers, Ṭāriq is said to have been contacted by a disaffected indi-
vidual or faction with inside information about Iberian weaknesses. In the sources,
this role is played by the vengeful figure of ‘Count Julian’, the thwarted sons of
Witiza, or both.27 Ṭāriq leapt at the opportunity presented by a weakened Iberia to
launch an invasion, using the troops from Tangiers and – in some versions of the
story – barely pausing to notify Mūsā. Crossing the Straits on ships contributed by
Julian, Ṭāriq’s force landed at Gibraltar – named for him, we are told28 – and was
Introduction 7
met in battle by Roderic’s army, which, already beleaguered from fighting the
Basques and exhausted from the forced march south, duly crumbled.29 Thereafter,
Ṭāriq met with little resistance, conquering a number of cities and taking vast
amounts of plunder – including, in most accounts, the Table of Solomon.
The only false note sounded the following year, when a displeased Mūsā elected
to join in, carrying out his own conquests and catching up with his recalcitrant
mawlā at Toledo in 713. Ṭāriq was arrested, and reprimanded strongly for his
unacceptably-independent actions. Worse was to follow for Mūsā himself, who,
upon being recalled to Damascus by the caliph, al-Walīd, found himself disgraced
and stripped of much of the profit of the venture.
1 Conceptualizing conquest
The late antique historiographical
backdrop
The rise of providential history

A touchstone of the world into which Islam emerged was universalism. In politics
and religion alike, late antiquity was saturated with the conviction that there was
a sole truth, and that its elites – governmental, ecclesiastical, or both – could be
possessors and protectors of it.1 The belief that the existent religious and political
establishment had the authority of divine right behind it paved the way for the
development of ‘integrated ecumenical empires’, as Robert Hoyland has put it.2
Political opposition had a religious character, since authority was divinely-
ordained, and religious disagreements had political consequences; difference was
division, and division was a harmful affront to the divine order of things.3 Equally,
elites conducting religion or politics in a way perceived as wrong were a source of
grave concern. Championing the correct ideology and putting it into practice was
crucial, since both welfare in the here and now and salvation in the hereafter
depended on it. At the same time, and particularly in the Byzantine world, reli-
gious doctrine, vocabulary, and practice came increasingly to infuse social and
intellectual life.4 Icons and saints became objects of enormous popular and elite
veneration, no longer on the margins but firmly in civic life; Christian ritual
shaped imperial display, like Heraclius’ early seventh-century victory processions
during the wars with Persia, and the calendar more generally.5 Christian escha-
tology provided the language and set the terms of official propaganda and secret
dissent alike,6 Byzantine churches were modelled after Biblical examples,7 and
theological writings such as those of Eusebius of Caesarea (d. c. 339) imagined
heavenly hierarchies after the model of the Byzantine court.8
The historiographical corollary of this ‘liturgification’ was a move towards a
conception of history ordered by Providence, in which divine will and the super-
natural were ever-present, and played a pivotal role in human affairs. Classicizing
historians including Procopius (d. c. 565) and his Antioch-based continuator
Agathius (d. 594) followed the example of the famous Athenian Thucydides (d. c.
395 BCE) and kept largely to contemporary political, military and diplomatic
happenings, leaving the more distant past to their less-respected cousins the
antiquarians.9 But this type of history-writing faced a challenge for patronage and
audience from the growth of two newer forms of reconstructing the past, the
The historiographical backdrop 9
ecclesiastical history and the world chronicle. These forms had different targets in
their sights and were more in step with changing fashions. The deeds of holy men
and church affairs, such as combating heresies and forging orthodoxy, were the
domain of Evagrius (d. c. 594) and other ecclesiastical writers;10 chroniclers,
meanwhile, looked further outwards, seeking to encompass the history of the
entire world, from creation to their present day, in a single unified narrative that
foregrounded a theological reading. Since God was eternal, so there was an
essential continuity running through human history.11 This providential trend had
its roots in anti-Pagan polemic and an urgent practical purpose in the help it gave
to Biblical exegesis, but it really began to take shape with Eusebius, whose work
was the first to provide a full annalistic accounting from Adam to his own time,
without a break.12 In such narratives, everything happened to a divine plan, and
tended towards one end: the triumph of Christianity in the salvation of the faithful.
Miracles, portents, and angelic or saintly intercessions became fodder for history-
writing, and perfectly acceptable causation even for secular historians like
Procopius.13 This is not to say that classical Latin historiography eschewed the
supernatural – it did not, as the lists of omens supplied in, say, Suetonius’ Twelve
Caesars attest – but rather that attention to such things reached a much higher
pitch in the late antique and medieval periods; miracles and portents were clues to
God’s plan for the world, and vital for this exegetical approach to the past.14
All three types of history were still written, largely, by men of similar educa-
tional backgrounds and for similar audiences.15 But it was the assumptions – and,
after a hiatus of some one hundred and fifty years, the formal characteristics – of
the newer types, especially the chronicle, that were to persist during and after the
crisis of the late sixth and seventh centuries. The severe disruptions to Byzantine
political and economic life during this period, coupled with and partly caused
by the long wars with Persia and the swift shock of the Arab conquests shortly
thereafter, were mirrored by a decline in long-form historical writing for its own
sake. With a ruptured educational system, a shrinking of audience and patronage,
and above all the lack of anything particularly cheering to write about, the writing
of history fell to other pens, and for other purposes – grounded in the new provi-
dential model of understanding. Increasingly, from the end of the sixth century,
the past was retold in many different genres – sermons, saints’ lives, disputations,
polemics, apocalypses16 – and it was, if anything, more significant and contested
than ever. There was a strong tradition in the Mediterranean world of moralizing
history, of the past presented as a series of edifying lessons, that went back at least
to Cicero’s day.17 But in late antiquity – especially in light of the Christological
controversies and manifold schisms of the fifth and sixth centuries, and the various
crises of the sixth and seventh – the need to learn from the patterns of history and
the examples of past figures was made more urgent by what was believed to be at
stake: individual and communal salvation, through successful navigation of the
imminent End Times. Marshalling past examples to argue one’s case against
Jews, Muslims, Pagans, and misguided fellow Christians was also essential, and a
challenge that Christianity’s opponents took up with equal vigour, a practice that
has left many traces in the Islamic sources.18
10 The historiographical backdrop
A streak of apocalypticism – that is, the belief that Biblical eschatological
predictions could be seen coming true in contemporary events – was common in
Near Eastern religious writings. As a genre, ‘apocalypse’ may be defined as a
literary form, usually constructed as an otherworldly vision granted to a noted
wise figure from the past, that mingles history (disguised as ex eventu prophecy19)
with eschatology in what purports to be a divine message about the end of the
world. Broadly speaking, apocalypses are attempts to describe the relationship
between, and conflation of, transcendent and human reality; the world, in this
framing, is the battleground in an on-going struggle between good and evil, which
good will eventually win.20 The Hellenistic era produced a number of apocalypses,
and so did late antiquity. Some – but by no means all21 – of the most prominent in
the former period were Jewish, such as the book of Daniel, which was probably
originally written in Aramaic during the mid-second century BCE, in the context of
persecution of the Jews by the Seleucid, Antiochus IV (r. 168–165).22 Like many
apocalypses, it is an expression of hope during desperate times: a promise that
present suffering is only temporary, and part of a divinely-ordained schema that
will culminate in the triumph of the oppressed. The parallel dreams described in
Daniel – the first of a statue made of four metals, the second of four beasts, both
interpreted within the text as corresponding to the successive rule of four histor-
ical kingdoms, brought down by God at the end of their allotted times – envisage
the passage of world history as a divine plan.
And there shall be a fourth kingdom, strong as iron; just as iron crushes and
smashes everything, it shall crush and shatter all these. [. . .]
And in the days of those kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that
shall never be destroyed, nor shall this kingdom be left to another people.23
Suffering will be the lot of believers until a fifth kingdom, triumphant through
God’s favour, emerges to rule until the end of time. The identity of this fifth
kingdom, as of the previous four, was repeatedly revised by later writers to suit
the circumstances of their time; for the Jews, for example, the fifth kingdom
was to be their own, but for early Christians it was the Church, or the Christian
Roman Empire.
History, for late antique writers, showed God at work in the world, rewarding
those who believed and acted correctly and punishing those who did not. It could
therefore provide guidance and succour to the faithful in difficult times, and serve
as ammunition in the intensive inter-denominational theological debate that
convulsed the Christian world – and, likewise, Christian relations with Pagans,
Jews, and eventually Muslims – in this period. The techniques of history-writing
could, moreover, be employed to verify or denounce arguments of more dubious
authority,24 in a manner that foreshadows Muslim interest in biography and history
for the purposes of assessing ḥadīth (traditions about the Prophet). Into the seventh
century and beyond, the mode of engagement and the language of expression was
firmly oriented by religion, just as its writers were now educated not in the
classical system of old, but through monasteries and with the aid of libraries
that combined classical and Christian teachings. At the root of all this was the idea
that history showed a war of finite duration between good and evil: it had a clear
beginning, at creation, and would also have a clear end; until then, the believer
had to be on guard against those who would tempt him away, and continually
aware that everything happened for a divine reason. Accordingly, the influence
of the supernatural – whether beneficent or ill-intentioned – became increasingly
pronounced in later writings; the ‘other world’ and how it interacted with humanity
in the battle for souls was continually on these writers’ minds.25
A recurring theme in the following chapters will be that Islamic historiography,
too, undoubtedly partook of this providential worldview, in which human history
moved on a religious trajectory and was part of cosmic history.26 The influence of
this ran from the basic, but fundamental, level of understanding the conquests as
the fulfilment of the Prophet Muḥammad’s revelations – and the coming of the
Prophet as the beginning of a new era, to which all previous history had been
merely prelude27 – to a more generalized sense of the supernatural at work. While
Islamic historiography, aside from Prophetic biography (sīra), rarely seems to
have gone in for the sort of interventionist miracles beloved of Christian chron-
icles and saints’ lives,28 a strand of the otherworldly can be seen in the Iberian
conquest narratives: Mūsā’s familiarity with astrology and his ability to foretell
triumph or disaster,29 Ṭāriq’s dream of the Prophet assuring him that Iberia was
destined for Islam,30 and anecdotal tales of magical statues and forbidding cities.31
The coming of Islam

As might be expected, the arrival of Muslim armies on the scene in the seventh
century was treated by Christian writers very much in the light of providential
history. These writers were unshaken by the religious claims of the invaders,
because initially they understood Muslims within the schema of Christian history:
not as a separate, exceptional religious community, but as a heresy, one in a long
series of threats to Christianity.32 Within this framework, however, there was a
considerable diversity of response, subject to the forms in which they were
couched and the decades in which they were composed. I divide these into four
groups, according not to the period in which they were written, but to their level
of engagement with the subject and the centrality of Islam to their purposes; the
groups overlap, of course, and do not represent a linear, chronological develop-
ment of literary forms and concepts, since the circumstances were not identical for
all writers in any given period. The first and second type of response came from
early chronicle writers, or those writing a long way from the Near East, both of
which tended to treat the Islamic conquests as part of the natural, divinely-ordained
cycle of human history: as an unremarkable series of barbarian raids (type one), or
as a temporary scourge to punish the afflicted Christian communities for their
undoubted sins of heterodoxy (type two). As the decades wore on and the supposed
raiders began to look increasingly like conquerors and rulers, it clearly became
harder to maintain equanimity. From the mid-seventh century, apocalypses and
polemics became increasingly common and strident; the former, like the early
chronicles, were uninterested in the Muslims’ motivations compared with the vast
eschatological implications of their coming (type three), whereas the polemicists
demonstrated increasingly sophisticated, if heavily biased, knowledge of Islamic
belief, tradition and practice (type four).
The quintessential example of the first type of response comes from the
Burgundian chronicle conventionally attributed to Fredegar.33 The identity of
‘Fredegar’ has been much debated. The chronicle up to the year 642 seems to have
been composed by two (or more) separate, unknown authors, and finished in the
650s;34 this work was supplemented and revised by at least two continuators, who
took the chronology into the later eighth century.35 In a neat demonstration of how
chronicle-writing worked in this period, the Fredegar chronicle is itself an
expansion of the work of Jerome (d. 420) – who translated into Latin, and supple-
mented, Eusebius – with borrowings from Isidore of Seville (d. 636) and others.36
It is misleading to think solely in terms of fixed texts and individual authors in late
antiquity and the early medieval period, whether in the Christian world or, as we
shall see in later chapters, the Islamic. Books were not ‘published’, nor were they
necessarily inviolate texts when (if ever) completed. Some were preserved, and
well; but authors frequently went back and reworked their own words, and it was
accepted practice for later scholars to use earlier texts as they wished, often
without acknowledging that any alteration had taken place. Copyists, too, could
act as revisers as well as preservers – whether for much-needed (but hardly
disinterested and neutral) clarity in a post-classical world,37 or for more overtly
ideological purposes, as Rosamund McKitterick’s recent work on manuscript
production has shown.38 All of this considerably complicates the process of
reading a text through the author’s intentions or context.39
In any case, for ‘Fredegar’, the Muslim conquests are simply an instance of
barbarians doing what barbarians sometimes do: causing havoc in more civilized
lands. They were just one in a long line of threats to Christianity, part of a violent
shared history that united the community.40 Unlike many Christian writers,
Fredegar does not directly attribute the Muslim conquests to Christian backsliding
– rather, there is a hint of population pressures when he notes that the Arabs began
raiding because they had ‘grown so numerous’41 – although supernatural forces
are clearly at work in his vision of history:
[D]uring that very night the army of Heraclius was smitten by the sword of
the Lord: 52,000 of his men died where they slept. When, on the following
day, at the moment of joining battle, his men saw that so large a part of their
force had fallen by divine judgement, they no longer dared advance on the
Saracens but all retired whence they came. The Saracens proceeded – as was
their habit – to lay waste the provinces of the empire that had fallen to them.
They were already approaching Jerusalem. Heraclius felt himself impotent to
resist their assault and in his desolation was a prey to inconsolable grief. The
unhappy king abandoned the Christian faith for the heresy of Eutyches [i.e.,
Monotheletism] and married his sister’s daughter. He finished his days in
agony, tormented with fever.42
The conquests, in this account, are simply something to be endured: they are part
of an inscrutable divine plan (‘the sword of the Lord’), a consequence of the
nature of barbarians (‘as was their habit’), and a test of humankind, which
Heraclius fails when he abandons orthodoxy out of despair. This attitude is carried
over into the eighth-century continuations of the narrative, although there the
tone is more triumphal since the events being described – and explicitly paralleled
with the Biblical story of Jericho – are Charles Martel’s (d. 741) successful
campaigns against the Muslims (‘with Christ’s help, who alone gives victory and
salvation’).43
The self-absorption of the Fredegar chroniclers, in which anything that Arabs
do is only of importance insofar as it is an expression of the will of the Christian
God and has an impact on Christian life, is full-blown solipsism in many works of
the second type of response to Islam. Often these predate Fredegar, but they give
greater weight to events, tending to have been written by people in the thick of
them. In type two, the Muslims are only an instrument of divine will, and allowed
no agency; chroniclers and apocalypse writers alike assume that Christian commu-
nities have brought the conquests on themselves through sin, or that their
theological opponents did so through heresy. An early member of the former
camp was Sophronius, patriarch of Jerusalem, whose sermons in the mid-630s,
ahead of the city’s fall in 638, were peppered with statements like ‘the Saracens
who, on account of our sins, have now risen up against us’, and ‘[w]e are ourselves,
in truth, responsible for all these things and no word will be found in our defence.’44
The only deliverance from the Arabs and other such trials lies in ‘liv[ing] as is
dear and pleasing to God’.45
Others blamed rival churches, or Byzantine ecclesiastical policy. John of Nikiu,
writing in the late 640s in Coptic – although his work survives only via a late
Ethiopic translation of an Arabic translation – was typical when he said that the
Byzantines’ defeat and expulsion from Egypt by the Muslims was ‘due to the
wickedness of the emperor Heraclius and his persecution of the orthodox through
the patriarch Cyrus’.46 Like many Christian writers in the early and mid-seventh
century, John found a number of approving things to say of Arab rule; although he
wheeled out the Biblical hyperbole at times (‘The yoke they [the Muslims] laid on
the Egyptians was heavier than that which had been laid upon Israel by Pharoah’),47
he also praised their respect for churches and how certain governors used taxes
for civic building works.48 The Nestorian Catholicos Ishoʿyahb (d. 659), whose
church was in a contest for souls with the Monophysites in northern Mesopotamia
and who clearly enjoyed a mutually-beneficial relationship with the new Muslim
authorities, spoke rather pointedly of how well the Arabs treated Christians and
their clergy, as a way of criticizing those who fell away from true belief under
what he characterizes as minor financial pressure.49 Again, Ishoʿyahb construed
the conquests as part of a divine plan, and its perpetrators as ‘the Arabs, to whom
God has at this time given rule over the world’.50
The Armenian chronicle attributed to Sebeos, written a few decades later,
described the Muslim conquests – and the civil wars in which the Muslims subse-
quently turned upon each other – as ‘the fulfilment of the command of the Lord’s
anger against the whole world’.51 The chronicler shows more interest in the Arabs
qua Arabs, basing some of his account on the reports of eyewitnesses and escaped
prisoners-of-war, and noting details from Muslim tradition:
At that time, a certain man from among those same sons of Ismael whose
name was Mahmet, a merchant, as if by God’s command appeared to them as
a preacher [and] the path of truth. He taught them to recognize the God of
Abraham, especially because he was learned and informed in the history of
Moses. Now because the command was from on high, at a single order they
all came together in unity of religion. Abandoning their vain cults, they turned
to the living God who had appeared to their father Abraham. So Mahmet
legislated for them.52
Nevertheless, the chronicler blames the Antichrist for an Armenian prince’s decision
to conclude a peace treaty with the Muslims – in language that points to the traitor
topos – and his conclusion is that all this happened ‘rightly, because we sinned against
the Lord and we angered the Holy One of Israel’.53 He also invokes at length the four
beasts schema from Daniel, interpreting the fourth and worst as ‘the kingdom of
Ismael’54 – a departure in the use of Daniel, which others would soon follow.
In the 690s, the Nestorian John Bar Penkāyē, writing in Syriac in Fenek,
northern Mesopotamia, provided a much more systematic exploration of these
ideas, making the paradigm of testing and punishment a central theme of his
chronicle. For John, the divine plan was a rigorous one, and its warning signs
clearly detectable to anyone paying attention. He describes the Arabs in dismissive
terms as barbarians, ‘a people that is not open to persuasion, which acknowledges
no treaty or agreement’, ‘whose comfort lies in blood that is shed without reason’.55
But their success, he says, is the fulfilment of Biblical prophecy: not ‘something
ordinary, but [. . .] due to divine working’;56 the Arabs treat non-Muslims under
their rule well because they have been preconditioned by God ‘to hold Christians
in honour’.57 God has given Christians every chance, but they ignored the portents
and continued to succumb to the backsliding ways of heretics.58
While we were mixed up in all these evil and foul practices, which we have
related above, God looked on in sorrow, and He began, in His accustomed
compassion, to arouse our minds little by little to repentance: there were
earthquakes in various cities, but our stubbornness looked on in silence [. . .]
He brought on various kinds of locusts, which stripped the field and vine-
yards, but there was no one among us who asked the question ‘why?’.59
As a result, John finds himself ‘obliged to disclose everything, in order that we

may realize [. . .] we have been punished as we deserved, and in accordance with
what we have done’.60 Demonstrating the warnings of recent times and their
connection to past history is his duty, although it is now a lost cause, since all the
prophecies have been fulfilled except the appearance of the Antichrist, and
therefore ‘the end of the ages has arrived for us’.61 Indeed, the 690s seem to have
occasioned particular wailing and gnashing of teeth among Christian writers of
all stripes, bringing as they did greater Islamic self-assertion in opposition to
Christianity – seen for example in the anti-Trinitarian Qurʾānic slogans on the
Dome of the Rock62 – and a reformed, stringent new tax system, both at the behest
of the caliph ʿAbd al-Malik (r. 685–705). The later eighth-century author of the
Chronicle of Zuqnīn, looking back over this period and probably with the still-
greater upheavals of his own time fresh in his mind, saw a clear break in the
fortunes of Christians under Islamic rule – and, of course, Biblical parallels:
From this time, the poll-tax began to be levied on the male heads, and all the
calamities began to emerge against the Christian people. Previously, kings
used to levy tribute on land, not on men. From this time onward the sons of
Hagar began to reduce the Sons of Ārām to Egyptian slavery. But woe unto
us! Because we sinned, the slaves ruled over us!63
This fatalistic sense that the end was most definitely nigh was accompanied by an
upsurge of the third type of response to Islam, apocalyptic writing. The sentiment
was not new; in 634, the writer of the Greek Doctrina Jacobi had asserted that the
Muslim conquests were a precursor to the Antichrist,64 and John Bar Penkāyē’s
work contained strong apocalyptic overtones. Nor was he the only one to cata-
logue signs and portents of God’s rage as evidence for the causation of the events
he described.65 Where apocalypses differed, however, was in how they wove the
notion that current suffering was unprecedented (and prophesied) into a vision of
the end that was savagely hopeful. The eschatological problem, from the perspec-
tive of the late seventh century, was that Muslim dominion had persisted rather
longer, and looked more secure, than fit comfortably into customary schemae. Far
from functioning as a temporary, divinely-appointed scourge to punish Christians
for their sins, the Muslims were now ruling. The old model of understanding the
conquests, therefore, had to be reinvented,66 something the chronicle attributed to
Sebeos had begun by placing the Muslims into the book of Daniel’s framework as
the fourth beast. There had been a brief flare of hope with a revival in Byzantine
military fortunes, symbolized by the humiliating terms under which ʿAbd al-Malik
had been forced, in the 680s, to pay tribute to that empire. The Syriac Pseudo-
Methodius apocalypse, probably written in the early 690s, captured this mood and
answered these challenges with a revenge fantasy centred on the figure of the
‘Last Emperor’. The Last Emperor was a variant on the fifth, final kingdom
from Daniel, a figure from the triumphant Roman Empire who would vanquish all
those who stood against the Christian community, and then surrender his rule to
God, thus bringing to an end man’s need for structures of temporal power.67 In
Pseudo-Methodius, he is the ‘king of the Greeks’ who will bring down the ‘sons
of Ishmael’ just when the world is most oppressed by them – not only liberating
the Christian lands but also taking the fight to the Arabs:
[S]uddenly the pangs of affliction as [those] of a woman in travail will be

awakened against them and the king of the Greeks will go out against them in
great wrath [. . .] and will cast desolation and destruction in the deserts of
Yathrib and in the habitation of their fathers. [. . .]
And Egypt will be laid waste and Arabia will burn. [. . .] And all the wrath
and anger of the king of the Greeks will be vented upon those who had denied
Christ.68
Fifty years later, Pseudo-Athanasius also invoked Daniel’s four beasts in a screed
that mixes the temporal – complaints about taxation and coinage – with End
Times abstraction. Angry at Christological heresy, God will divide the Roman
Empire ‘in return for their having divided His great Might into two natures’, and
send ‘a mighty people, numerous as the locusts. This is the fourth beast which the
prophet Daniel saw [. . . .] The name of that nation is Saracen, one which is from
the Ishmaelites.’69
The universalizing impulse of late antique Christian writing shows through in
the terminology used by many of these writers, in all languages. ‘Saracen’ was
a Ptolemaic ethnic designation, reinterpreted by Christians as a reference to
Abraham’s wife Sarah. Fredegar, meanwhile, never uses ‘Muslim’, or any other
designation indicating the conquerors’ religious separateness. Instead he opts to
assimilate them into Biblical history with ‘[t]he race of Hagar’,70 a lineage first
mooted for them by Eusebius,71 and used by most of our writers.72 Similarly,
Fredegar’s lack of interest in – or, seen another way, uncomfortable silence about
– these Arabs’ self-definition, or the religious beliefs they held, was a common
non-response. Things changed somewhat towards the end of the seventh century,
when theological polemic – the fourth type of response to Islam – started to be
thrown around more frequently between Christians and Muslims. This happened,
arguably, in the context of ʿAbd al-Malik’s drive towards a more ebullient self-
definition and display of Islam. But Christians’ engagement with Islam, while
now garlanded with references to and quotations from the Qurʾān, still tended
towards the superficial, and both sides, where they mentioned each other at all,
traded largely in stereotypes.73 John of Damascus (d. c. 750) set the tone with
accusations of idolatry and sensuousness.74 A disaffected former official of ʿAbd
al-Malik’s government, John was evidently familiar with Islamic tradition,
ridiculing specific Qurʾānic passages and aspects of the sīra.75 The judgement of
the Zuqnīn chronicler was along similar lines; accounts of peace treaties76 and
Muḥammad’s role as law-maker for his community sit alongside dismissive state-
ments such as ‘[t]his nation is very lascivious and sensual’.77 The emphasis on
decadence rivalled, and to some extent replaced, earlier characterizations more
obviously born of the upheaval of the conquest period, including that of the
Doctrina Jacobi, in which Muḥammad and the Arab conquerors are uniquely
violent – and illegitimately so, since ‘prophets do not come armed with a sword’.78
Iberian models and Islam

Iberian Christians had a substantial literary tradition to draw upon when it came to
understanding and explaining barbarian conquests. In 590, the year after Reccared
(r. 586–601) converted the Visigothic ruling elite of Iberia from Arianism to
Catholicism, John of Biclaro (d. 624/5) wrote a Eusebian Chronicle that accepted
the Visigoths into Christian history.79 Now that the barbarians were no longer
heretics, their king could be compared with such figures as Constantine,80 bringing
unity and Christian glory to Iberia,81 and their conquest of the peninsula could be
reconfigured as the operation of a divine plan, and celebrated:
In this battle divine grace and the Catholic faith – which King Reccared along
with the Goths had faithfully taken up (fideliter adeptus est) – were at work,
since it is not a difficult thing for our God to give victory to a few over
the many.82
Isidore of Seville, whose mother may have been a Goth and who had strong ties
of patronage with the Visigothic court,83 took this a step further. In his History of
the Kings of the Goths, he interprets the Goths’ military success, so impressive
and ‘glorious’ that it even gave them victory over the Roman Empire (which
‘submitted to the yoke of captivity and [. . .] served them like a handmaid’),84 as a
sign that they are God’s chosen people. Their rule was thus an adornment and
compliment to Iberia, safely pure of the heresy that tainted Constantinople:85
Of all the lands from the west to the Indies, you, Spain, O sacred and always
fortunate mother of princes and peoples [. . .] now it is the most flourishing
people of the Goths, who in their turn, after many victories all over the world,
have eagerly seized you and loved you: they enjoy you up to the present time
amidst royal emblems and great wealth, secure in the good fortunes of
empire.86
But when the author of the Chronicle of 754 – so called because its concluding
chapter begins with a reference to the year 754 ‘which has now begun’87 – came
to write his own continuation of Eusebius’s providential world-history, neither of
these models worked for the new situation in Iberia. The Goths were manifestly
no longer God’s chosen people. Nor could stunning military success be taken as a
sign of divine favour, now that it was the Christians’ turn to be defeated, and by
avowed non-Christians. Not that the anonymous chronicler was able or willing to
discuss just what the Muslims did believe. Despite occasional glances at religion
– ʿUmar praying or a reference to Mecca and Abraham88 – he overwhelmingly
favours ethnic appellations such as mauri (seemingly to refer to the Berber contin-
gent) and arabes, rather than the Biblical ‘Hagarene’ and ‘Saracen’.89 Indeed, this
non-engagement is the keynote of the chronicle. It is possible that his circumspec-
tion was prompted by a fear of reprisals for a Christian writing about Islam in
Muslim-ruled Toledo or Cordoba;90 it seems more likely, however, that it is
simply another manifestation of the lack of interest shown by many Christian
writers, as discussed above. Not until the ninth century did Spanish Christian
writers begin to express alarm about Islam as a religion, and then primarily
because of fears of acculturation and the attrition caused by growing numbers of
conversions.91 From the perspective of the mid-eighth century, however, the
Islamic conquest was primarily important as a Christian crisis – a stunning event,
but not more important than doctrinal wrangling within the church hierarchy,
which the chronicler spends much time on – and the 754 chronicler laments it as
such. Often this is done in formulaic terms:
Who can enumerate such grievous disasters? Even if every limb were trans-
formed into a tongue, it would be beyond human capability to express the
ruin of Spain and its many and great evils.92
This passage, in the way it falls back on rhetorical questions to convey the
indescribable, echoes strongly the hyperbole of the Christian chronicle tradition
elsewhere, such as John Bar Penkāyē’s, ‘Who can relate the carnage they effected
in Greek territory, in Kush, in Spain and in other distant regions, taking captive
their sons and daughters and reducing them to slavery and servitude.’93 The
Zuqnīn chronicler, meanwhile, writing of the mid-eighth-century plague in
phrasings largely borrowed from John of Ephesus’s (d. 586) account of the sixth-
century bout, says: ‘[T]he human tongue is incapable of describing the horrors
and wonders that happened in the land.’94 The 754 chronicler also takes care to set
Iberia’s plight in a suitably grand context, comparing its downfall with a number
of famed historical and Biblical examples:
Leaving aside all of the innumerable disasters that this cruel, unclean world
has brought to its countless regions and cities since the time of Adam – that
which, historically, the city of Troy sustained when it fell; that which
Jerusalem suffered, as foretold by the prophets; that which Babylon bore,
according to the scriptures; that which finally Rome went through, martyri-
ally graced with the nobility of the apostles – all this and more Spain, once so
delightful and now rendered so miserable, endured as much to its honour as
its disgrace.95
This effort to aggrandize the position of Iberia – geographically and culturally

the fringe of both the Christian and Muslim worlds – by playing up invented
legendary and scriptural connections and making it the site of mythic-scaled
occurrences, became a pronounced trend in Muslim writings about the conquest,
as we shall see in chapters four and five.
Elsewhere, the chronicler puts forward some typical providential causation for
the eastern conquests; Heraclius, we are told, was punished for his pride in ‘the
praise of his people who heaped the honour of victory [over the Persians] not on
God but on Heraclius himself’, and received visions warning him of the doom to
come.96 But he takes a different route when it comes to Iberia. Avoiding the one
big battle story usually told by the Arabic narratives, and in marked contrast to the
Chronicle of Alfonso III (written in the 880s in Christian-ruled northern Iberia)
with its obsessive dwelling upon the sins, heterodoxy and treachery of the
Christians as the reason for their downfall,97 the 754 chronicler notes that there
were Muslim raids prior to Ṭāriq’s arrival, and gives a much more nuanced picture
of the political situation on the eve of the conquest:
Roderic rebelliously (tumultuose) seized the kingdom of the Goths at the

instigation of the senate. He ruled for only one year. Mustering his forces, he
directed armies against the Arabs (Arabas) and the Moors (Mauros) sent by
Musa, that is against Tariq ibn Ziyad and the others, who had long been
raiding the province consigned to them and simultaneously devastating many
cities. In [712] [. . .] Roderic headed for the Transductine mountains to fight
them and in that battle the entire army of the Goths, which had come with him
fraudulently and in rivalry out of ambition for the kingship, fled and he was
killed.98
Roderic is defeated not by the sword of the Lord, or by his decadence, but by the
fragility of Visigothic royal authority and his doomed efforts to put out too many
fires at once. This analysis is supported by archaeological evidence, including a
coin record that shows two rival kings – Roderic and Witiza’s son Akhila – making
claims to rule in 711; indeed, Akhila continued issuing coins in Narbonne until as
late as 719.99 The factionalism alluded to here, endemic in the elective system of
Visigothic kingship, is in all likelihood the extent of the ‘treachery’ that was
developed as a topos with such enthusiasm in later Christian and Muslim accounts
alike, as we shall see in chapter six.
Furthermore, the chronicler gives no indication of apocalyptic hopes of deliver-
ance, hostility to the ways of the newcomers, or being worried by putative converts
from Christianity to Islam. This is very unlike later Christian reflections on the
conquest of Iberia. These included out-and-out dislike, like the scurrilous,
probably early ninth-century Istoria de Mahomet,100 or Paul Alvarus’ mid-ninth-
century condemnation of apostasy.101 There was also the more hopeful – if still
hostile – note sounded by the Chronicle of Alfonso III, with its propagandistic
millenarian expectations of a (re-)unified Christian Iberia:
Christ is our hope that through this little mountain, the well-being of Spain
and the army of the Gothic people will be restored (Gotorum gentis exercitus
reparatus). I have faith that the promise of the Lord which was spoken
through David will be fulfilled in us: ‘I will visit their iniquities with the rod
and their sins with scourges; but I will not remove my mercy from them’.102
Indeed, what emerges from the Chronicle of 754, along with the lamenting and the
relatively-mundane causation, is an image of a post-conquest settlement that
matches the one seen in some of the eastern commentary, such as the Catholicos
Ishoʿyahb’s: some upheaval, new overlords, but on the whole life continuing
much as before. It is not welcomed, but it is apparently not unbearable enough – in
the early stages – to prompt apocalypticism. Although we are told that Mūsā
imposed ‘an evil and fraudulent peace’ (pace fraudifica male)103 on the region
around Toledo, and the usual complaints are made about excessive taxation
demands,104 the tone is for the most part dispassionate, and it is made clear that
many of the old institutions have been left in place; of a later governor, ʿUqba,
the chronicler says, ‘He condemned no-one except according to the justice of his
own law.’105
The archaeological evidence points to a significant shift in the patterns of urban
life in Iberia during the sixth century, along familiar late antique lines – declining
levels of imported ceramics, monumental buildings repurposed or abandoned, and
the rise of churches as the focus of civic space – but this took place well before
711;106 moreover, while there is evidence of demographic decline and urban
abandonment in the early medieval period, this trend is not universal across Iberia,
and it began, again, in the sixth rather than the eighth century.107 There are a few
glimpses of the Muslim state’s (or its representatives’) efforts to communicate
with the local populace, in the form of coins bearing a Latin version of the shahāda
(the Islamic declaration of faith),108 but there is little sign on a material level of
sweeping changes in the immediate aftermath of the conquest. It may have been
relatively easy in the eighth century, therefore, to ignore the invaders’ religious
leanings and assume that their presence in Iberia was simply another one of those
temporary trials that God was so fond of sending against the faithful.
The usual – and expedient, given the small numbers involved in the conquest
armies – Muslim way of conquest in this period was limited military action,
minimal interference in structures of governance, and locally-concluded surrender
treaties, guaranteeing peace in return for tribute. This, certainly, is what Egyptian
papyri show us of conquest arrangements there sixty years previously,109 and
while the evidence for Iberia is not nearly as immediate and reliable, there is
some.110 There are references to treaties existing for towns such as Pamplona111
and Huesca,112 and a brief but problematic text dated to 759.113 A fuller and more
reliable one, for Murcia, survives in several different versions, the earliest of
which is a purportedly verbatim interpolation into a tenth-century manuscript of
the Chronicle of 754.114 This is the so-called ‘Treaty of Tudmīr’, named for local
potentate Theodemir, who concluded the treaty with one of Mūsā’s sons in 713. It
begins with a basmala,115 then proceeds to the terms:
[This is] a document (kitāb) from ʿAbd al-Azīz b. Mūsā b. Nuṣayr, to Tudmīr
b. Ghabdush, [to signify] that he has yielded to peace (nazala ʿalā al-ṣulḥ),
and that he has the covenant (ʿahd) and protection (dhimma) of God, and the
protection of his Prophet (God bless him and grant him salvation!). [ʿAbd
al-Azīz pledges] that he will not introduce anything new regarding him or any
one of his followers, nor obstruct nor take away his kingdom. [Tudmīr’s
followers] will not be killed, nor cursed, nor parted from their sons or their
wives; they will not be forced [to go against] their faith, nor will their churches
be razed, nor will that which he worships be taken away from his kingdom,
[provided that] he acts in good faith and fulfils that which we have imposed
upon him. [. . .] Furthermore, [he has agreed] that he will not shelter either
runaway slaves or our enemies from us, nor frighten [one who is] under our
protection; nor will he conceal information he learns of the enemy. It is
incumbent upon him and his followers [to pay] one dīnār every year, together
with four dry measures (mudd) of wheat, four bushels of barley, four meas-
ures (qist) of thickened grape juice, four measures of vinegar, two measures
of honey and two measures of oil; slaves [must pay] half of that [amount].116
It concludes with a list of witnesses and a hijrī date. Scepticism has been expressed
about the veracity of the treaty,117 along similar lines to those laid out – for the
‘treaty’ form as a whole – by Noth.118 That is, embedded treaty documents are
frequent, and frequently improbable, occurrences in Arabic texts, usually written
formulaically to legal standards that did not pertain in the conquest period, but
were rather the products of juridical wrangling some centuries later, applied
retrospectively. Nonetheless, it is not unknown for treaties to be preserved from
the early period,119 and this example deserves to be treated more seriously than
most; it does not, for example, bear the name of the caliph among its signatories,
which is one of the prime markers of a later creation, being meant to indicate the
full force of the state behind a treaty. Rather, it fits with what we know of
the pattern of Islamic expansion in its early days: it is an arrangement made in the
field between a local ruler and a Muslim commander, bargaining a truce in return
for items that an army on the ground could use immediately, rather than showy but
cumbersome precious metals, useful mainly to the central government.120 Further-
more, it features in the Arabic literary tradition not as part of a historical narrative
of the events of the conquest, but in biographical dictionaries, where it is adduced
as evidence for the deeds of one of the witnesses; its survival looks, in other
words, more like chance than an argument. How long the treaty remained in
operation is another matter, although it seems to have broken down by the reign
of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān II (r. 822–52).121
Conclusion
It is in works such as the Chronicle of 754, or in glimpses of a life like Ishoʿyahb’s,
that we can see a context for some of the developments that shaped so much of
early Islamic historiography: conquerors and conquered trying to find a modus
vivendi that would keep the peace and meet the requirements of both sides. Many
writers in lands that were annexed by the Muslims soon began rationalizing, and
seeking accommodation within, the fledgling Islamic state; others, including John
Bar Penkāyē and John of Damascus, resented their situations, and condemned
compromise in Biblical and eschatological terms. When the Chronicle of 754
referred to Mūsā’s ‘fraudulent peace’ or noted a governor returning to Christians
land that had been taken during the conquest,122 when the Chronicle of Zuqnīn
complained of discriminatory laws,123 or when Ishoʿyahb justified his standing
among his fellow ecclesiastics by looking back to arrangements made with the
Arabs, we can see how writers were beginning to marshal the events of their
particular conquest, real or imagined, in order to make points about their present
state.124 Whether they looked to the past for examples of God’s hand in events or
for precedents for the contemporary status quo, thence to argue their particular
cases, the project of reconstructing history and putting it to work was central to the
purpose of conquest narratives in Christian and Muslim sources alike. The ‘Treaty
of Tudmīr’, meanwhile, perhaps shows us something of the arrangements as they
actually stood, before subsequent bargaining and the imposition of literary forms
brought other readings to bear upon conquest events.
This overview of the late antique historiographical background was intended to
illuminate some of the attitudes and formal features of pre-Islamic texts, and how
those things influenced responses to – and the understanding of – the coming of
Islam in both east and west. I have also, in the brief discussion of treaties and
references to coinage, suggested a few areas where the Christian literary accounts
clash or chime with what limited material and documentary evidence we have on
pre-Islamic and conquest-era Iberia. Many of the issues raised – providential ideas
of history shaping narrative, stereotypical portraits of the Other competing with
actual knowledge, the impact of polemical interfaith interactions, and the unfixed
nature of authorship and texts in this period – bear upon any consideration of the
Islamic tradition. Islamic historiography also presents its own set of problems, of
course, and it is to these that we shall now turn.
2 Successors, jurists, and
propagandists
Reconstructing the transmission
history of Spanish conquest narratives
At first glance, the prospects for recovering authentic history from the traditions
surrounding the conquest of Iberia appear relatively bright: sources include the
Latin Chronicle of 754, written in the Peninsula within forty years of the conquest,
and the arguably contemporary Treaty of Tudmīr, both discussed in the previous
chapter; there is even papyrological evidence from the year before the conquest
for Mūsā’s presence in North Africa, commanding a raiding fleet.1 The Arabic
historical tradition, too, offers extant, and in some cases extensive, commentary
written one hundred and fifty years or less after the events, sourced in transmitters
of two generations’ remove. Two surviving ninth-century chronicles – one by an
Egyptian, Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam (d. 870), and one by an Andalusī, ʿAbd al-Malik b.
Ḥabīb (d. 852), both based in large part on reports from Egypt – appear to
constitute, together with snippets in a number of other works, a body of conquest
information of relatively early provenance, at least by the standards of the early
Islamic historiographical tradition. In the tenth century, meanwhile, the task of
writing conquest narratives was taken up – supplemented, re-examined, and
subjected to new standards of historical inquiry – by a number of historians
working under the patronage of the Umayyad court in Cordoba, writers with a
vested interest in al-Andalus as more than just a sideshow to the history of the
rest of the Islamic world.
Upon further examination the picture is, of course, rather less encouraging,
despite one scholar’s slightly delirious assertion that Andalusī historiography was
‘perhaps the most minute ever written by any people’.2 Names and dates are
consistent because most of the accounts are not independent; the detail is often
spurious and tendential, or even outright legendary, the result of glossing by a
diverse array of interests during transmission; all the tropes of Islamic conquest
narratives are present and correct, and frequently appear to have been borrowed
from their original, eastern contexts for purposes quite unrelated to authenticity in
the modern historian’s sense. For example, the story of how the ruler of Murcia
(Tudmīr) tricks the Muslims into giving him a favourable surrender agreement –
he gets the women of his city to ‘bind up their hair’ and pose as defenders on the
walls, so as to make the city appear less of an easy target for conquest – bears
striking resemblance in detail and phrasing to a seventh-century, Arabian
occasion when Musaylima confounds Khālid b. al-Walīd.3 Likewise, the careful
24 Reconstructing the transmission history
itineraries of the conquerors’ progress through the cities of Iberia entered the
histories only later, once it became politically and legally important to establish
what was conquered when, and how.4
History, it becomes apparent, was only the medium, a vehicle for whatever
message a given writer – or his sources – chose to impart. As Michael Chamberlain
has demonstrated in his study of the social role of literary works in medieval
Damascus, recording events was only one dimension to writing about the past, and
in many ways the formulaic elements were the point.5 Political scores could be
settled, social conflicts engaged, juristic points explained, and audiences entertained
with an appeal to shared values and cultural references made through the inclusion
of conventional, and often entirely legendary, anecdotes. Take an episode related in
the anonymous Akhbār Majmūʿa compilation, for example, in which the ʿAbbāsid
caliph al-Manṣūr (r. 754–75) asks his courtiers, ‘Who is the hawk of Quraysh?’
After rejecting several suggestions – famed Umayyads such as Muʿāwiya and ʿAbd
al-Malik – al-Manṣūr declares his hero to be ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Muʿāwiya, who
escaped from the ʿAbbāsid coup of 750, alone and with much derring-do, to refound
his dynasty in al-Andalus.6 It is doubtful if contemporary readers believed that – or
even cared whether – such an event had actually taken place; its purpose, rather,
was to offer a rallying cry from the way-it-should-have-been section of Andalusī
collective memory.7 It was a shameless championing of Umayyad resilience and
Andalusī independence: so great that even the usurping ʿAbbāsids had to admire
them. In medieval Muslim Iberia, just as we have seen in other late antique
historiography, the message took precedence: it provided the historical narrative,
rather than the other way round. This is not to say that the tradition should be
discarded, out of hand, as entirely useless or fictional; simply that what it has to tell
us may not be what we go looking for in it, and in all likelihood has little to do with
the events of the early eighth century.
In its broadest terms, the story of the conquest of Iberia by the Muslims in 711
is a very simple one, particularly when seen through eastern eyes. As the Baghdad-
based jurist and historian al-Ṭabarī (d. 923) puts it, under the entry for 91 A.H.
(711 CE) in his vast annalistic Taʾrīkh al-rusul wa-al-mulūk (‘History of the
Prophets and the Kings’):
In [this year], Mūsā b. Nuṣayr carried out raids (ghazā) [in] al-Andalus. By
his hands, cities and fortresses were conquered.8
This is not quite the sum total of what al-Ṭabarī, though notoriously uninterested
or uninformed about Andalusī history,9 has to say about the conquest; (a little)
more appears in his entries for subsequent years.10 Yet most writers offer consid-
erably more, often by combining the accounts of their numerous predecessors;
one of the most voluminous, that of al-Maqqarī (d. 1623), a Maghribi who
composed his exhaustive work in exile for a Syrian audience, runs to some sixty
pages.11 Taken together, the various texts of the tradition elaborate a great deal
upon the framework outlined in the Introduction to this book. Some accounts,
especially those composed within al-Andalus, expended most of their ink over the
Reconstructing the transmission history 25
fates of a host of Iberian cities. Others dwelt upon legendary anecdotes and ʿajāʾib
(marvels), a theme taken up with gusto in geographical works. Some elevated the
role of Ṭāriq, the conquest’s initiator, making him into a heroic mawlā (client) and
paradigmatic mujāhid (holy warrior); others championed Mūsā in the face of
the unreasonable demands of the caliph Sulaymān. Some works did all of these
things at once. None of this was unusual for classical and medieval Islamic
historiography, which had a marked tendency to gather detail as contemporary
scholarly and political attitudes demanded it.
In this chapter, I shall explore some of the possibilities for reconstructing the
various transmission paths of historical material on the conquest of Iberia, from
this material’s hypothetical origins in the tales of tābiʿūn (‘Successors’ to the
Companions of the Prophet, the generation following that of the Islamic commu-
nity’s foundation) and others who were directly involved in the conquest, to the
distorting effects of the many subsequent uses to which it was put: in history, in
law, in dynastic propaganda, in geography, and in biography.
Seeking origins, or problems in Islamic historiography

A work such as Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam’s Futūḥ Miṣr – and its title indicates where the
focus lies, with Iberia only a sidebar to a much fuller treatment of the author’s
native Egypt12 – is only ‘history’ in the mid-ninth-century sense of the term. The
primary cultural and intellectual value placed upon historiography in early Islam
was not so much what it recorded of past events, but how those events might be
used to explain present issues and settle present debates; like any society, medi-
eval Islam remembered, selectively, what mattered to it.13 Preservation of the past
was central to medieval Arabic and Islamic culture because it was considered to
provide the best possible guide to conduct in the present – something that was
debated extensively in any given ‘present’, and especially during the first two or
three centuries of Islam.14 Of course, past examples did not offer a single, unified
orthodoxy, but a host of competing ideas – overlaid by generations of subsequent
discussion, obfuscation, and confusion – of what correct conduct might be. Nor
could these examples possibly cover all the new challenges that had arisen since
the time of the Prophet Muḥammad. As the Islamic world grew and developed
from a tribute-gathering confederation to a centralizing bureaucratic empire, past
examples – and the debate over which of them took precedence – became corre-
spondingly more religiously, politically and legally significant. The need for reli-
able reports of the past – that is, for eyewitness reports passed down by individuals
judged reliable, by the scholars of such matters – became ever more urgent.
This trend was intensified and formalized during the late ninth century, with
the ‘crystallisation of a fluid oral tradition’ into written histories, as Stephen
Humphreys has put it.15 Two centuries’ worth of the Islamic community’s collec-
tive memory – or, applied to the topic in hand, the one hundred and fifty years of
popular legends that had by then become attached to the conquest of Iberia – was
arranged and systematized for the first time into coherent narratives and compila-
tions of anecdotes.16 Since this practice was both driven by the requirements of
jurists (many of whom were historians too) and imitative of their techniques, the
results could not help but reflect contemporary interests and attitudes as much as
they did the historical events they purported to recount, for all that the ideal of the
past as inviolate paradigm – assembled from the words of those who were there
and left un-interpreted by later compilers – emerged triumphant.17 These interests
could be juridical, as in the case of Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam; prophetic, as for Ibn
Ḥabīb; or genealogical, as for the Andalusī court historian Ibn al-Qūṭīya (d. 977).
Attempts to answer the questions that arose from these later interests – questions
that may never have occurred to those who actually experienced the events –
manifested as an almost maniacal attention to detail and desire to fill real or
perceived lacunae, regardless of whether or not such detail had to be invented.18 It
was this tendency that gave rise to the oft-observed, and entirely illusory, chrono-
logical precision displayed by many Arabic texts dealing with the earliest
periods;19 likewise, it explains the ‘onomatomania’ of a tradition that provided
names for everyone and everything,20 from Ṭāriq’s slave girl21 to a mule ridden by
Mūsā.22 Unsurprisingly, given that both traditions had strong roots in poetic oral
storytelling, this was a preoccupation that Islamic history-writing shared with the
likes of Greek epic.23 Nor were these names necessarily conjured out of thin air.
The long-standing Arab interest in genealogy – born of the intricate kinship ties
that governed pre-Islamic society, and undoubtedly boosted, in the early Islamic
period, by the practice of determining army pay, and descendants’ rewards, by the
registration of soldiers’ names and lineage in the dīwān24 – afforded a pool of
notable names to choose from and an incentive to use them. Linking historical
individuals to an event enhanced both their descendants’ prestige and (if the indi-
vidual was notable) the importance of the event or the place where it occurred.25
The most obvious formal aspect of these trends is the proliferation of akhbār
(sing. khabar) – reports of past events, varying in length from brief statements to
dialogue exchanges or even whole narratives,26 of which the ḥadīth are a special,
Prophetic subset – and isnāds, the transmitter chains attached to them. The akhbār-
isnād unit was both an outgrowth of the way information was stored and shared
within the community’s collective memory, and an attempt to combat the inherent
risks of these techniques. In a context that continued to privilege oral transmission
– even after early stigma against writing memory had been overcome, teaching
the past orally remained the ideal27 – it was a way to encode authority within the
narrative.28 Medieval Muslim scholars were well aware that the system could be,
and was, abused.29 New standards of legal scholarship were thus developed during
the late eighth and early ninth centuries; these held that a suitable isnād – that
is, one containing the names of reliable transmitters – was an essential marker of
authenticity and antiquity for reports about the past. An isnād became the link
between the account as passed down and the report of the original eyewitness: a
guarantee that it had retained its truthfulness as a representation of how things
were done in the exemplary past, and thus how they should be done in the present.
Jurisprudence came to rely very much on an ability to ‘prove’ the antiquity of
traditions, since older and more securely-attested reports – or the legal pronounce-
ments of respected teachers of the past, such as Mālik b. Anas (d. 795)30 – were
now taken to be the most authoritative. But the isnād was subject to the same
pressures as the reports themselves – the need to provide usable information about
the past – and it did nothing to combat the selectivity of the way in which
the historical tradition was transmitted and reported. Inevitably, isnāds, too,
underwent systemic falsification; they proliferated to meet demand, ‘growing’
backwards as compilers and redactors used them to attach certain reports to early,
authoritative figures, in order to lend significance to their argument.31
What emerged from this process could be anything but authentic or antique.
Ninth- and tenth-century jurists and historians – often, like al-Ṭabarī or Ibn Ḥabīb,
the same people – tackled akhbār with ninth- and tenth-century priorities,
reflecting the legal norms of their time. While this did not affect historical akhbār
to the same extent that it did legal reports – the isnād, for example, never became
a historiographical standard as it did for law32 – the priorities of the latter filtered
through into the conduct of the former,33 most notably the idealization of the
‘untouched’ history represented by the khabar. The reports of old were often
frustrating to later scholars in their incompleteness and strange preoccupations,
and had to be modified to fit their new purposes; with the past, especially the early
conquests, elevated to exemplary status by jurists, the record had to be recast to
conform to, or provide arguments for, later legal standards. For example, a
compiler – or his source – expecting a surrender agreement to impose certain
customary conditions and follow a universal style, might impose that expected
literary form upon it when he reproduced it in his work, thus formalizing or
obscuring the more ad hoc original. This principle appears to be at work in the
narrative of Qutayba b. Muslim’s (d. 715) conquest of Samarqand by early-ninth-
century writer Ibn Aʿtham al-Kūfī. Here, a short summary of the surrender – peace
in return for emptying the city of combatants, paying tribute, laying on a feast for
Qutayba and, in the longer term, building a mosque – is followed by the text of a
formal treaty, complete with basmala, signatories, and the chain of correctly-
designated authority under which Qutayba was authorized to conclude the said
treaty.34 It is repetitive and, moreover, it is suspiciously perfect, with all the hall-
marks of a vaguer, earlier tradition – still visible, perhaps, in the preceding
summary – tidied into classical form.35
This is not to imply secret cabals of scholars, rubbing their hands together with
evil glee as they deliberated on how best to alter history. Much of this process was
a natural consequence of the tradition evolving with the needs of the Islamic
community: since the shared past was one of the main things that held the commu-
nity together, it was fiercely contested, and subject to divergent readings,36 both
good and bad will. What later scholars considered important could be quite
different from the perceptions of those who told the earliest tales; the significance
of events and statements could change over time. Similarly, information and argu-
ments that scholars wished to emphasize were often absent from the accounts they
received, whether by accidental omission or perhaps because such issues – for
example, as we shall see, whether a city was conquered outright by force or
through a treaty – were less important, or less important to classify, at the time
they happened. In some such cases all that was needed was a simple gloss; in
others, elements of the story might have to be played up or down, or extra infor-
mation (whether real or spurious) introduced, to make the point.37 The counter-
weight to this was that, in a tradition which placed a premium on, simultaneously,
the practice of teaching through orality and the antiquity of the lessons being
taught, there was an obvious need for transmission considered reliable. The
khabar was, wherever possible, presented as entirely and unalterably the words of
its original transmitter: the witness to, or participant in, the event or statement
being reported. Akhbār thus made frequent and extensive use of direct speech; the
appearance of objectivity and non-interference on the part of later transmitters
was achieved by avoiding external focalisation – that is, commentary from the
point-of-view of someone not in the ‘scene’ – and placing analysis into dialogue,
or the voice of the narrator.38 The same principle could then be applied for the
insertion of additional found or invented material.39 Equally, scholars could subtly
redirect the thrust of the historical narratives they reproduced by dropping certain
akhbār from them, or juxtaposing them with contradictory reports, of which there
were plenty.40 Thus, even if they were ‘only’ compiling the akhbār of others,
rather than – like al-Yaʿqūbī (d. c. 900) – seeking to synthesize them into coherent,
integrated narratives, medieval Islamic historians could still make far-reaching
choices as to the arrangement of their material and the ‘emplotment’ of their facts;
like any history-writing, it was an inherently literary undertaking, not disinter-
ested record-keeping.41 But such was the allure of an ostensibly authentic past,
accessed through the words of those who were there, that transmitters had to find
ways to remove themselves from the equation entirely, even when they were
substantially altering that past.42
With all this to be borne in mind, what chance do we have of reconstructing the
origins of any part of the tradition, much less any information about the events
themselves? Recent work on early Islamic historiography, often using, for corrob-
oration, sources from outside the tradition, strongly suggests that early accounts
and ‘facts’ were obscured, but certainly not uniformly annihilated, by these
processes.43 Within surviving Spanish conquest material, the Chronicle of 754 –
while not itself untouched by Muslim attitudes44 – confirms the broad outline
and chronology of the Arabic narratives, the identities of the major individuals
involved, and even more detailed stories like the fate of Mūsā’s son ʿAbd
al-ʿAzīz.45 Nonetheless, ‘what actually happened’ is not my primary interest,
since the events portrayed in these narratives – whether factual, fictional or
(more usually) somewhere in between – were not the main concern of their
composers, but rather a means to a variety of ends. The key to understanding these
ends, and thus to reading the narratives in the spirit in which they were intended,
lies in detailed analysis of the content and treatment of available conquest
material, and of the backgrounds and priorities of those who reproduced it. In
turn, only an examination of the tangled course of the narratives’ transmission –
on which much valuable work has been done by Luis Molina and Mahmoud
Makkī, among others – can give some indication of how different contexts
affected their presentation.46 For this, we must turn to Egypt, and the origins of
the written tradition.
Egypt: legends, law, and loot
While Prophetic ḥadīth, and the exacting transmission standards that went with
them, did not become dominant in Andalusī scholarly circles until a century after
they did in the east,47 akhbār filtered into the earliest writing of Andalusī history
through juristically-inclined transmitters in Egypt. As has been said, the extant
written Arabic sources date back no further than the work of Ibn Ḥabīb and Ibn
ʿAbd al-Ḥakam in the mid-ninth century, both of whom took their material largely
from Egypt.
Ibn Ḥabīb was a jurist and courtier, and an important figure in the rise to prom-
inence of Mālikī thought in al-Andalus, during the reign of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān II
(822–52).48 His Taʾrīkh, which survives in a single, thirteenth-century manuscript,
is a universal history with a large legendary component;49 despite his profession,
it is concerned more with fate and prophecy than with jurisprudence. His juridical
work – much of which is devoted to regulating contact between Muslims and
non-Muslims50 – was very influential on later generations,51 but his history was for
a long time summarily dismissed by modern scholars for its mythical and
impressionistic cast.52 It was, furthermore, subject to a number of redactions and
interpolations in the centuries after it was completed, such as the apparent
references to events like the ruinous reign of the amīr ʿAbd Allāh (888–912), or
the fall of Toledo, in the form of visions and omens.53 Some of these are the legacy
of later glosses upon the text, but others may rather be little more than generalized
portents of doom, of a type the author found appealing,54 as shown in his obvious
penchant for ‘historical’ tales warning of the results of moral decay or foolish
curiosity. It is Ibn Ḥabīb who provides our earliest versions of anecdotes like the
‘House of Locks’ and the ‘City of Copper’, on which more below;55 he also
peppers his work with prophecies.56 The extension of the list of Andalusī amīrs
beyond the date of his death, however, was most likely the work of one of his
students towards the end of the ninth century.57
Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam, meanwhile, was also a jurist, but his Futūḥ Miṣr demon-
strates his professional training much more overtly than does Ibn Ḥabīb’s work. If
Ibn Ḥabīb’s stories tend to be vaguely-defined illustrations of fate at work, Ibn
ʿAbd al-Ḥakam’s are precisely-targeted accounts of the consequences of greed for
Muslims on campaign. He was an Egyptian, of Mālikī training, operating in a
predominantly Mālikī environment – albeit one with local idiosyncrasies58 – and
wrote his history largely for the purposes of illustrating points of fiqh,59 as well as
to reminisce about the glory days of Egypt’s Arab conqueror class, and argue the
case for Egypt’s right to control its own revenues without undue caliphal interfer-
ence.60 Thus, to treat the Futūḥ Miṣr as a straightforward history, as some have
tried, is to be seriously misled.61 Facts were incidental to the author’s primary
purpose, which was to explore legal issues and religious practices through the
exemplary legends of local folk heroes (and villains);62 the inclusion of these
heroes, which is particularly pronounced for the conquest of North Africa, may
indicate a tradition of ‘popular’ legend feeding into the legal one. This is not to
say that Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam set out to write a tendential history, simply that
history in and of itself was irrelevant to his considerations. If this were not made
clear enough in the main narrative, the final section of his text is composed entirely
of Prophetic and Companion ḥadīths.63 In his Iberian conquest narrative, his
priorities are most obviously seen in the parallel accounts he gives of a boatload
of Muslim soldiers drowning in a supernatural storm. The first version is as
follows:
ʿAbd al-Malik b. Maslama reported to us [that] Mālik b. Anas, on the authority

of Yaḥyā b. Saʿīd, said: When al-Andalus was conquered, the army (al-nās)
obtained excessive spoils (ghanāʾim) there. Greedily, they took from it a
great deal of plunder (fa-ghallū fī-hā ghulūlan kathīran), carried it to the ships,
and sailed away in them. When they reached the middle of the sea, they heard
a voice, crying out, ‘O God, sink them!’ They called upon God, and girded
themselves with copies of the Qurʾān (maṣāḥif).64 He said: [But] a stormy
wind (rīḥ ʿāṣifa) stuck them, and the ships were forced against each other
until they shattered, and sank with them inside.65
That this anecdote may be more of a morality fable than a factual report is
suggested by its strong similarity to the following Qurʾānic verses:
[10:22] It is He Who makes your journey on land and on sea; so that when
you are in the ships and they sail with them driven by a fair wind, and they
rejoice in it, a stormy wind (rīḥ ʿāṣif ) comes upon them and waves surge over
them from every side, and they think that they are being overwhelmed. Then
they call upon God, professing submission to Him sincerely: ‘If You save us
from this, we shall be truly thankful.’
[10:23] But when He saves them, they resort to aggression in the land
wrongfully (bi-ghayr al-ḥaqq). O people, your aggression shall recoil upon
yourselves.66
These verses come in the middle of a discussion of God’s (im)patience with those
who obey him only in extremis. Some of the panicked penitents, like these, receive
mercy; others do not. But the subverted Qurʾānic allusion of Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam’s
passage has a more specific purpose than just an admonition to obedience.
Tellingly, the second version of the tale that he includes names two individuals
who showed more restraint in their behaviour: they did not take illegal booty
(ghulūl, loot that has not first been handed over to the appropriate authorities for
redistribution among participants in a campaign).67 Thus they, like the sailors in
Q. 10:22–3, were miraculously spared by God’s mercy.
There are grounds to think that undeclared looting was indeed a problem during
the conquest of Iberia, and not merely a projection of Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam’s Mālikī
theorising, even if his choice to report and discuss it was, and the examples he
gives are more likely to be figurative representations of the practice than true
reports. The Chronicle of 754, for example, tells us that al-Ḥurr (governor
716–18), in the course of what seems to be a more general fiscal overhaul,
punished the Moors, who had long been dwelling in Spain, on account of
the treasure they had hidden (thesaurus absconsos). He imprisoned them in
sackcloth, infested with worms and lice, and weighed them down with chains.
He tortured them as he interrogated them.68
Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam’s use of the two drowning anecdotes, together with a number
of other stories about people suffering misfortune on account of ‘hiding’ loot,
paves the way for the climax of his conquest narrative, in which Mūsā b. Nuṣayr
is made to answer to the caliph for misappropriating spoils.69
Both Ibn Ḥabīb and Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam drew their historical reports mostly
from Egypt-based informants.70 There were several reasons why this was
necessarily the case. Until the tenth century, al-Andalus lagged behind the rest of
the Islamic world in intellectual pursuits.71 Legal scholarship got under way earlier
– a study of biographical dictionaries shows a significant increase in the number
of scholars who died during the ninth century who were linked with one or more
students, compared with the eighth72 – but beyond Ibn Ḥabīb’s work, no original
historical account was produced in Iberia prior to the great wave of scholarship
under Umayyad caliphal patronage after 929.73 Indeed, there is every indication
that there was no historiographical tradition within al-Andalus about Andalusī
history. A century and a half after the events, Andalusīs not only did not write and
transmit their own conquest history, but they actually had to leave al-Andalus, and
travel eastwards, simply to learn of it.
The prestige traditionally attached to all matters eastern (that is, primarily,
Syrian, Iraqi, and Medinan) was such that western (legal) scholars routinely
travelled east to learn from the great jurists there, without whose teaching their
own qualifications would have meant little. En route, they naturally stopped off in
Egypt,74 which had its own thriving scholarly community at the time. Ibn Ḥabīb
was no exception; he spent three years travelling in Egypt and the east.75 As we
have seen, the grand sweep of the eastern Islamic tradition paid little attention to
al-Andalus, whether because it was too insignificant a topic, far away and outside
the grand sweep of ʿAbbāsid history, or because of the inconvenient fact of
Umayyad power persisting there after the ‘Revolution’ of 750. It was left, there-
fore, to Egypt to produce the first narratives of Muslim Iberia. Why the Egyptians
should have taken an interest in such an unfashionable subject is difficult to say.
Egypt would seem a logical staging-post for troops heading westwards, and some
three thousand Egyptians, led by Balj b. Bishr, apparently took part in the conquest
of Iberia;76 but, whatever the veracity of these numbers, it nonetheless expresses
the cultural links between the two countries in the early period. Egypt certainly
became associated in popular legend with the later lives of many of the prominent
conquerors of Iberia.77 In addition, some of Mūsā b. Nuṣayr’s sons remained in
North Africa after their father’s return to Damascus, and his descendants were
prominent in Egyptian jurisprudence and administration at least until the ʿAbbāsid
Revolution, when they fell foul of the change of regime;78 they do not appear in
any isnāds on the conquest of Iberia that I have seen, but it is not too much of a
stretch to imagine that they might have told tales of their father’s exploits.
Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam’s circle of informants consisted primarily of individuals
known to be Egyptian Mālikīs. They include his father, also known as Ibn ʿAbd
al-Ḥakam (d. 829), who was a student of Mālik b. Anas, and went on to lecture on
his teacher’s legal statements.79 The elder Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam did not confine
himself to jurisprudence, but also taught on ʿAmr b. al-ʿĀṣ’s role in the conquest
of Egypt,80 and he is named as one of the sources for the ‘House of Locks’ story.81
Other Egyptians are cited more frequently. ʿUthmān b. Ṣāliḥ (d. 834)82 is attached
to reports about Ṭāriq’s battle against Roderic, a brief mention of the finding of
the Table of Solomon83 – both without isnāds – and the caliph Sulaymān’s attempt
to appropriate the booty from Iberia.84 In the latter case, an ostensible eyewitness
is quoted on the matter, one ʿĪsā b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Ṭawīl, who reprimands the
caliph for his own greed; this may, however, simply be the usual akhbarī trick of
putting words in another’s mouth, to make a moral judgement upon a caliph sound
more authoritative and less like personal interpretation. ʿUthmān was taught by
ʿAbd Allāh b. Wahb (d. 812),85 al-Layth b. Saʿd (d. 791),86 Ibn Lahīʿa (d. 790)87
– all Egyptian jurists linked with Mālikī teachings, and all of whom ʿUthmān cites
as authorities for ḥadīths in a relatively early literary papyrus88 – and Mālik
himself. The bibliographer Ibn al-Nadīm (d. after 995) credits al-Layth with two
books, including a Kitāb al-taʾrīkh;89 nothing is now extant, but the Egyptian
al-Kindī (d. 961) cites al-Layth for several dates, in one case without a supporting
isnād, perhaps as if he took the information from a book.90
This same group of teachers are common to most of the other transmitters used
by Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam on al-Andalus. Yaḥyā b. Bukayr (d. 845)91 is cited for
another version of the Table of Solomon story (which does not take place in
Toledo), an account of the tension between Ṭāriq and Mūsā,92 and a few simple
chronological statements;93 in all of these cases he is transmitting reports
stemming from al-Layth. Another authority on al-Layth’s anecdotes is ʿAbd
al-Malik b. Maslama; reports from him are almost exclusively concerned with the
proper conduct of Muslim armies with regard to booty, and include the stories of
a fantastically jewelled carpet that is hacked in two because it is too heavy to
carry,94 a buried cache of treasure,95 and a looter who tries to hide his ill-gotten
gains in some pitch.96 Ibn Maslama also transmits a version of the drowning
sailors anecdote from Mālik; the isnād for this stretches back to Yaḥyā b. Saʿīd
(d. 762), making it the oldest in Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam’s conquest narrative,
theoretically. Finally, Saʿīd b. ʿUfayr (d. 840),97 who was also taught by Mālik,
among others,98 provides the alternative version of this story, placing it in Sardinia
rather than al-Andalus and prefacing it with a long account of the locals’ efforts to
hide their wealth from the Muslim looters; there is no additional isnād for this,
although he is said to be in agreement with ‘the people of Egypt’.99 Ibn ʿUfayr is
supposed to have written a history of al-Andalus, now lost.100
As Gorge Aguadé has shown, (J) many of the same authorities appear in Ibn
Ḥabīb’s isnāds. Al-Layth is the source for several parts of the narrative, including
the Table of Solomon tale;101 Ibn Ḥabīb’s version of the latter, transmitted from
al-Layth by Ibn Wahb rather than (as in the Futūḥ Miṣr) Yaḥyā b. Bukayr, is much
shorter than Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam’s.102 The story of the jewelled carpet comes this
time from one Abū Shayba, who also features as the authority of an earlier
report.103 The other names Ibn Ḥabīb gives in his isnāds reveal where his influ-
ences diverged. They are not Andalusī; indeed, in the whole of Ibn Ḥabīb’s
history, only three names can be securely linked to Andalusīs, and – significantly
– none of them feature in the conquest narrative, another indication of the lack of
historical transmission about these events within al-Andalus itself.104 Regarding
al-Andalus, his main informant aside from al-Layth was ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd (b. Abī
Uways, d. 845);105 like many of the non-Egyptian sources in Ibn Ḥabīb’s text,
ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd was a Medinan Mālikī. This is in contrast to Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam,
whose teachers were all of the Egyptian strand of Mālikī thought – although, as
we have seen, many of his teachers were themselves taught by easterners. ʿAbd
al-Ḥamīd provides details on Mūsā’s progress through al-Andalus, Mūsā’s fabu-
lous wealth, and a rather convoluted story involving Sulaymān and a washbasin.106
He also gives a detailed description of the Table of Solomon from his father’s
alleged eyewitness testimony:
ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd said: I asked my father for a description of the Table, since he
had seen it, and looked at it [closely].107
This transmission of this particular description shows isnād-massaging at work,

apparently for the sake of emphasizing antiquity. When the description is repeated
by ʿArīb b. Saʿīd (d. 980) – preserved by Ibn al-Shabbāṭ (d. 1221) – it is reworded
so that ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd is effaced (as, indeed, is Ibn Ḥabīb), and the father
foregrounded. We are told that the description was requested (but not by whom)
from ‘Abū [ʿAbd al-]Ḥamīd’, who is glossed here – but not by Ibn Ḥabīb – as
rajul min aṣḥāb Mūsā (‘a man from the followers of Mūsā [b. Nuṣayr]’). Evidently
the appearance of ‘first-hand’ information was more important than accurate
transmission by the tenth century.
Case study: the House of Locks

Our two Mālikī historians, then, were working from many of the same informants,
within a broadly Mālikī tradition located in Egypt and, to a lesser extent, in
Medina. To find Andalusī history, in other words, one needed to leave Iberia.
One way to explore the differences between the authors, and the information
they received, is to examine a shared anecdote in more detail: that of the House
of Locks in Toledo. Ibn Ḥabīb’s report on this is attributed to al-Layth
via Ibn Wahb;108 Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam’s is not, although his stated source – his
own father – was taught by al-Layth. The divergences between the two reports
may be the result of distortions that crept in during the different transmission
paths from al-Layth to our two writers; alternatively, they are indicative of
the different approaches that the authors took to their material, even when
that material (apparently) came from the same person, and the accounts were
written down a few decades apart. In the Futūḥ Miṣr, the story is short and to
the point:
He said: In al-Andalus there was – as my father ʿAbd Allāh b. ʿAbd al-Ḥakam
and Hishām b. Isḥāq reported to us – a house with locks upon it. No king of
theirs ruled without adding a lock of his own to it, until the king who was
[ruling] when the Muslims invaded. [His advisors] sought to induce him to
place a lock upon [the house], as the kings before him used to do. But he
refused, saying, ‘I won’t put anything on it until I know what is inside it.’ So
he ordered that it be opened; inside [were] pictures (ṣuwar) of the Arabs,
and [the following] writing: ‘If this door is opened, these people will invade
this land.’109
The treatment of this anecdote stands in contrast to that of other, similarly self-
contained stories in the Futūḥ Miṣr; the drowned looters and the tug of war over
the Table of Solomon are vividly rendered with all the spurious detail that the
Islamic tradition was prone to producing, but here not even the king is named.
Perhaps this is because the story comes from a more folkloric than juristic strand
of the tradition; it packs a moral punch, about the dangers of hubris and dabbling
in the forbidden, but carries no legal point on conduct expected of contemporary
Muslims. Compounding this is the fact that it deals with the period prior to the
Muslim conquest, by definition of limited interest to (most) medieval Muslim
writers.
Ibn Ḥabīb’s version spins the tale out with extra dialogue, richer description,
and an aside about the power of fate:
Next to the house in which [Ṭāriq] found the crowns [of the Visigothic kings]
there was another house, upon which were twenty-four locks. Whenever a
[new] king came to power, he put a lock upon it, as those before him had
done. [This went on] until the accession (wilāya) of Roderic, under whose
reign (dawla) al-Andalus was conquered. In the calm days before the conquest
of al-Andalus, Roderic said, ‘By God, I will not die while this house [remains]
concealed; there is no alternative (lā budda min) [but] for me to open it, to
find out what is in it.’ He assembled the Christians and the archbishops and
the bishops. They said to him, ‘What do you mean by [trying to] open this
house? [. . .] Accept [this advice] from us and do not break with our tradition.
Not one of the kings who came before you spoke about it. They were learned
people, and understood what they had to do.’ He insisted on opening it, as
was destined (li-al-qadar al-muqaddar). He found there a chest of wood,
inside which were images of the Arabs, their likenesses turbaned and
[carrying] Arabic bows; they had girded themselves [with] ornamented
swords. They [also] found in the house documents on which [was written]: ‘If
this house is opened, and entered, then those who are depicted here will enter
these lands in the same manner; they will take possession of it, and plunder
it.’ The invasion of the Muslims was in that year.110
Ibn Ḥabīb, or his informant(s), here employs the story in a number of different ways
that fit with the themes of his work. With its implication that al-Andalus was destined
to be conquered for Islam, the story echoes the frequent references to omens and
supernatural causation elsewhere in the narrative. Along with a number of other
legends that were collected by Ibn Ḥabīb but not by Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam, such as a
mysterious copper fortress, jars containing jinn imprisoned by Solomon, and idols
that fire arrows at intruders,111 it also establishes al-Andalus as a place filled with
strangeness, a theme that the geographers, in particular, would take up with
enthusiasm. Finally, Ibn Ḥabīb also uses it to flesh out the character of Roderic. The
moral sting in the tale remains from the basic version, but in this setting it represents,
schematically, the internal disorder that left Visigothic Spain so vulnerable to
invasion in 711, with the suggestion that Roderic brought the conquest upon himself
through his own rash behaviour – bringing to mind the sorts of scapegoat explana-
tions we saw in Christian sources in the previous chapter. The story does not appear
in the Spanish Christian chronicles, although hints at the characterization do; in the
Chronicle of 754, we are told that Roderic was a rebel who ‘seized the kingdom’.112
For his part, Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam makes brief reference to Roderic’s questionable
conduct in another context, his relations with Count Julian, whose daughter he
rapes;113 Julian does not feature in Ibn Ḥabīb’s account at all.
As we shall see in chapter six, it was this second example of Roderic’s bad
behaviour that the Andalusī tradition – and the later Christian chronicles that
depended upon it – was to take up, enthusiastically and with increasing elabora-
tion. The House of Locks story, meanwhile, changed little.114 There is a possibility
that the Iberian House of Locks was, if not quite a topos, then at least inspired by
stories of a Sasanian treasure-house in Iṣṭakhr; the prolific, unfailingly curious
travel-writer and historian al-Masʿūdī (d. 955/6),115 in an account of a visit he
made to the city, describes how one building contained images of the Sasanian
kings, in their war finery.116 Still further back in time, the ancient Greek historian
Herodotus (d. 425 BCE) relates a story about Babylon that has a similar ring to it.
One of the city’s gateways contained a tomb of an ancient queen, with an
inscription promising wealth within but warning that the tomb should only be
opened in direst need; when Darius lost patience and decided to take the treasure,
he opened the tomb to find only a corpse inside, and another message, mocking
him for having given in to greed.117
Isnād extrapolation and the question of the tābiʿūn

What we have, then, is a tradition that goes back to the late eighth century, to
al-Layth b. Saʿd and a handful of mostly Egyptian contemporaries, and which
underwent considerable divergence, both before and afterwards, under the pres-
sure of transmitters’ and compilers’ interests. There may be room for some opti-
mism, as al-Layth and his ilk were only one or two generations removed from
events; however, the transmitter chains end with these Egyptians, who do not
name their own sources. We are left with a gap of perhaps six or seven decades
between events and attributed accounts. In an important article, Mahmoud Makkī
suggested that the ‘missing link’ might be found in tābiʿūn, a number of whom are
said to have taken part in the conquest of Iberia and later settled in Egypt.118
Tābiʿūn were the ‘Successors’ to the Companions of the Prophet, with a corre-
sponding prestige and exemplary status in later tradition. In classical Islamic
scholarship, it became crucial to put an argument into the mouth of a figure
regarded by tradition as exemplary and authoritative, such as the caliph ʿUmar II
(r. 715–17), or other prominent Companions – the closer to the Prophet in time the
better. By the same token, associating such figures with the negotiation of a
surrender treaty, the conquest of a city, or the apportioning of booty, gave those
episodes a significance and legal import that could outweigh mere fact. Accounts
of later periods of history, such as the conquests of North Africa and Iberia, had to
make do with tābiʿūn, rather than Companions, but authors and compilers were
not slow to include the former whenever and as numerously as possible; the
prestige that this association brought helped the conquests in the west to compete
with the halcyon days of the eastern conquests, and any hint of tābiʿūn was
seized upon by Andalusī historians keen to put their western backwater on the
map.119 Al-Andalus, conquered by Berber armies, could claim few tābiʿūn save
Mūsā b. Nuṣayr himself;120 clearly, more were required.
There was a social dimension to this, too. As we shall see in the next chapter,
competition for status and rewards in early Islamic society was overwhelmingly
framed in terms of (real or invented) lineage and the deeds of one’s ancestors;
amid the inequities and tensions surrounding the waves of settlement and
immigration during the eighth century, many must have claimed tābiʿūn descent
to get ahead. Ibn Ḥabīb says that twenty tābiʿūn entered al-Andalus, and names
four of them, praising them for their correct conduct in not plundering;121 as a
jurist and traditionist, Ibn Ḥabīb undoubtedly had an interest in demonstrating that
such potential ḥadīth transmitters had been to al-Andalus. Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam has
two tābiʿīs in his narrative: the pair whose virtue saved them from drowning. In
both cases, the tābīʿūn set good examples, but they are not yet invoked as
transmitters. Later scholars, predictably, offer many more names;122 the end result
of the twin demands of historiography and social competition was, as so often, a
precision and profusion of detail that grew as the events themselves receded ever
further into the past.
One individual has been singled out by Makkī as a potential avenue of trans-
mission: ʿAlī b. Rabāḥ (d. 723), supposedly a confidant and associate of Mūsā b.
Nuṣayr,123 who settled in Egypt and is said to have transmitted (rawā) from ʿAmr
b. al-ʿĀṣ (d. 663).124 Makkī contends that his son, Mūsā (d. 779),125 may have
provided our Egyptians with information gleaned via his father’s involvement in
the conquest;126 and so al-Maqqarī, at least, claims, without attribution.127 Coming
in such a late source, this statement cannot be accepted alone; but support for it is
thin. ʿAlī is not in Ibn Ḥabīb’s list of the tābiʿūn who entered al-Andalus – except,
suspiciously, when Ibn Ḥabīb is quoted by al-Maqqarī.128 The works that do name
ʿAlī b. Rabāḥ as a tābiʿī, including a geographical text by the Andalusī al-Bakrī
(d. 1094) and the Fatḥ al-Andalus, an anonymous twelfth-century compilation,
are all significantly later than Ibn Ḥabīb,129 whom the Fatḥ’s compiler used only
at several removes.130 Other texts include ʿAlī b. Rabāḥ in the conquest action at
pivotal moments: bearing news of victory to the caliph,131 signing a treaty, and
helping divide booty.132 Unfortunately for Makkī’s case, none of these appear-
ances are compelling evidence in themselves; most of them are late, and all are
situations when the Islamic tradition is prone to providing names for the sake of
names, as discussed above.
Similarly, there is little compelling evidence from our texts of ʿAlī b. Rabāḥ as
a transmitter. Although he is late, al-Ghassānī (d. 1707), a Moroccan ambassador
at the court of Charles II in 1690–1, must be mentioned here because his account
of Mūsā’s arrival in al-Andalus is preceded by this isnād:
ʿAbd al-Malik b. Ḥabīb said – ascribing it to (yarfaʿuhu ilā) ʿAlī [b.] Rabāḥ,
the tābiʿī entering (al-dākhil) with Mūsā, who was one of the best of the
tābiʿūn – that when [. . .]133
The report that follows is identical to one found in the Fatḥ al-Andalus, but the
latter phrases the opening slightly differently:
ʿAbd al-Malik [b. Ḥabīb] said: Mūsā was one of the best of the tābiʿūn.134
In the version of Ibn Ḥabīb’s History that survives, the author says nothing of the
sort. It has been argued that al-Ghassānī used the same eleventh-century source
text as the anonymous Fatḥ compiler,135 and that, further, al-Ghassānī’s is a ‘más
correcta’ version of the isnād.136 It is by no means clear that this is the case. It is
surely equally possible, and indeed much more likely, that the inclusion of ʿAlī b.
Rabāḥ (who, after all, appears nowhere in the extant version of Ibn Ḥabīb’s work)
is a confused interpolation on al-Ghassānī’s part, akin to his near-contemporary
al-Maqqarī’s determination to spuriously insert ʿAlī into Ibn Ḥabīb’s tābiʿūn list:
a nostalgic effort to burnish the image of lost al-Andalus, like so much that was
written after 1492.
Mūsā b. ʿAlī b. Rabāḥ, meanwhile, appears even less frequently. Here he is in
the Bayān of the North African Ibn ʿIdhārī (d. 1307):
Al-Rāzī said: al-Wāqidī related, on the authority of Mūsā b. ʿAlī b. Rabāḥ,

who, on the authority of his father, said: Mūsā b. Nuṣayr went out (kharaja)
at the head of 10,000 men from Ifrīqiya, angry with (mughḍaban ʿalā) Ṭāriq,
and he marched in the direction of al-Andalus.137
This is strongly reminiscent of the following, in Ibn Ḥabīb:
Then Mūsā b. Nuṣayr set out (kharaja) in the direction of al-Andalus [and]
his mawlā Ṭāriq in Rajab, having grown extremely angry at him (wa-kāna
qad ghaḍaba ʿalayhi ghaḍaban shadīdan). He went (sāra) to al-Andalus at
the head of 10,000 [men].138
It is possible that Ibn Ḥabīb did get this from Mūsā b. ʿAlī b. Rabāḥ, but did not
bother with an isnād; the minor differences in phrasing may be down to the
intermediaries. But this seems to me wishful thinking, for two reasons. The first is
that the isnād in this form is unsupported in any other text I have seen. Aḥmad
al-Rāzī (d. 955) was an Andalusī historian whose seminal work survives only
through quotations in later texts – primarily al-Maqqarī’s – and a pair of problem-
atic Castilian adaptations, the Crónica del Moro Rasis and the Chronicle of
1344.139 The latter text contains a version of the passage in question, credited to
Ibn Ḥabīb alone, with no sign of Mūsā b. ʿAlī b. Rabāḥ;140 it also appears, worded
a little differently and again without an isnād, in the Akhbār Majmūʿa,141 an
anonymous compilation of disputed date.142 Al-Maqqarī does not have the passage,
nor does he have al-Rāzī mentioning Mūsā or his father at any point.
The second reason that this is wishful thinking is that Ibn ʿIdhārī’s version is
only part of a longer report, which goes on to describe Mūsā’s consultation with
Christian guides to find a route through Iberia that would take him to cities Ṭāriq
had not already conquered. (It may also continue through Mūsā’s conquest of
Sidonia and Carmona.) This is not in Ibn Ḥabīb, although it is in the Akhbār
Majmūʿa and (modified) in the Chronicle of 1344.143 The Islamic tradition of
Ṭāriq and Mūsā pursuing separate conquest itineraries appears no earlier than
tenth-century Andalusī texts,144 especially – as Luis Molina has shown – that of
al-Rāzī.145 These itineraries are not a feature of Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam or Ibn Ḥabīb,146
and thus presumably were not of interest to their Egyptian informants, which casts
further doubt on the notion of ʿAlī b. Rabāḥ or his son retelling such tales in
Egypt. Gabriel Martinez-Gros has argued, further, that these itineraries have a
symbolic value that ties into the Umayyad ideological agenda: each city that is
listed represents a different sort of authority overcome by the Muslim conquerors
in Iberia: Visigothic (Toledo), ecclesiastical (Merida), Roman (Seville), and
Biblical (Toledo again, via the Table of Solomon).147 The report in Ibn ʿIdhārī’s
Bayān, then, looks like the work of al-Rāzī – a synthesis of Ibn Ḥabīb and
uncredited sources such as al-Wāqidī, perhaps, or his own invention – with Mūsā
b. ʿAlī b. Rabāḥ’s name inserted, as a piece of creative extrapolation, at a still later
date. This practice was, as noted above, all too common among Muslim historians
and legal scholars of the classical period in the east; it seems entirely reasonable
to assume that it happened also in the west.
What about the notorious al-Wāqidī (d. 823)?148 A Medinan historian and fiqh
scholar at the court of the ʿAbbāsid caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd (r. 786–809), al-Wāqidī
appears in the isnāds of several later chronicles, and may have penned an account
of his own, but it no longer survives.149 As an authority on Iberia, his reports seem
to have been unknown to the earliest western writers; at any rate, he is not named
in their Iberian conquest narratives, although Ibn Ḥabīb mentions him on other
subjects.150 In the east, however, it was a different matter: al-Balādhurī (d. 892)
and al-Ṭabarī both cite him as an authority for a very condensed report. Here is
al-Balādhurī’s:
Al-Wāqidī said: Ṭāriq b. Ziyād, ʿāmil of Mūsā b. Nuṣayr, raided (ghazā)

al-Andalus in the year 92. He was the first to raid it. Julian (Ulyān) – ruler of
the straits (majāz) of al-Andalus – met him. Ṭāriq granted him protection
(āmanahu) on the condition that he would transport him and his followers to
al-Andalus by ship. When he arrived there, [Ṭāriq] waged war upon its
people, and conquered it; that was in the year 92. Its king, as they claim, was
from [the people of ] al-Ishbān, whose origins (aṣl) are from Iṣbahān. Then
Mūsā b. Nuṣayr wrote a rude (ghalīẓan) letter to Ṭāriq, regarding his endan-
germent of the Muslims, and his falling into error (iftitān) over it, by carrying
out the raid on his own initiative (raʾy); he ordered that he [was] not to go
beyond Cordoba. Mūsā went to Cordoba, in al-Andalus. Ṭāriq came to terms
with him, and [Mūsā] was pleased with him [again]. [Then] Ṭāriq conquered
the city of Toledo, it being the [capital] city of the kingdom (mamlaka) of
al-Andalus, [which] borders (yalī) the land of the Franks. He obtained there a
great table [which] Mūsā b. Nuṣayr presented to al-Walīd b. ʿAbd al-Malik in
Damascus, when he returned in the year 96, [while] al-Walīd was ill. When
Sulaymān b. ʿAbd al-Malik came to power, he took 100,000 dīnārs from
Mūsā b. Nuṣayr.151
Al-Ṭabarī’s is even shorter – the second half appears, credited to al-Wāqidī (as
Muḥammad b. ʿUmar), under a separate year – although it carries extra detail on
certain points (Roderic is named; the table is described, and linked with
Solomon).152 But in essence it is very similar, most notably in the rather tortured
aetiological connection drawn between Iṣbahān and the Visigothic kings. If it is
possible to trace al-Wāqidī’s involvement anywhere, Iṣbahān could be the key.
Al-Yaʿqūbī, while he does not credit al-Wāqidī, clearly has much the same
report,153 as does Ibn Ḥabīb (‘Roderic was from Iṣbahān, and Iṣbahān was known
in al-Andalus as Ishbān. They were the Goths, barbarian kings of al-Andalus’).154
Al-Masʿūdī uses al-Wāqidī’s explanation, too, in a different context.155 Al-Bakrī
has two versions: one citing both al-Wāqidī and eastern geographer Ibn
Khurdādhbih (d. 911),156 and another that is almost a word-for-word translation of
Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies.157 Several centuries later, Ibn ʿIdhārī also
discussed Iṣbahān,158 which he claims to have from al-Wāqidī via al-Rāzī; Ibn
ʿIdhārī has much more from al-Wāqidī than any of our ninth- and tenth-century
Andalusīs, usually through al-Rāzī.159 Ultimately, we cannot be certain if al-Rāzī
consulted al-Wāqidī’s putative lost Taʾrīkh, drew upon Ibn Ḥabīb, or used a
geographical tradition derived from Isidore; however, neither al-Maqqarī nor the
Castilian translations have al-Wāqidī isnāds for their al-Rāzī material.
Whether ʿAlī b. Rabāḥ and his son were genuinely part of this transmission, or
whether their names were simply co-opted to add a ring of authenticity-through-
antiquity to existing reports, is difficult to say. The information on the conquest
itinerary of Mūsā, supposedly derived from him by al-Rāzī and al-Wāqidī, does
not feature in the Egyptian strand of the historical tradition – that is, Ibn Ḥabīb’s
and Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam’s accounts, based on al-Layth and the other Mālikīs.
Makkī’s suggestion – that ʿAlī b. Rabāḥ might also be the hidden source behind
al-Layth’s stories – is neat and appealing, but aside from al-Maqqarī’s unsourced
assertion, there is little to support it. Rather, I would argue that it is a misleading
consequence of the tradition’s obsession with placing prominent figures at
prominent moments, a piece of meddling from perhaps as late as the thirteenth
century. Furthermore, the fact that ʿAlī b. Rabāḥ might have been ultimately
responsible for tales such as the ‘House of Locks’, or the fate of the jewelled
carpet, hardly suggests sober reliability on his part. Finally, given that Ibn ʿAbd
al-Ḥakam (if not Ibn Ḥabīb) was well-versed in the practice of ḥadīth-transmission,
in the style of the mid-ninth century, it seems unlikely that he would not himself
have placed (Mūsā b.) ʿAlī b. Rabāḥ in his isnāds, if he considered the attribution
to be secure.
The Cordoban Umayyads and issues of land ownership

Certain other factors contributed to the growth and development of the tradition
from its Egyptian roots, influencing both the type of information that was selected
and retained, and the style in which it was couched. The single most important factor
was the explosion of interest in conquest narratives among the Andalusīs them-
selves during the tenth century, particularly in the reigns of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III
(912–61) and al-Ḥakam II (961–76). From its proclamation in 929,160 after the final
victory over the Ḥafṣūnid rebels of Bobastro, the newly-(re)constituted Umayyad
caliphate was bent on a propagandistic quest for political and religious legitimacy.
This was both to boost its case at home among its own subjects, and to counter the
claims made in North Africa by the Ismāʿīlī Fāṭimids – a real military threat that sent
missionaries to, and sponsored uprisings in, Umayyad territory.161 The Fāṭimid
example had shown that political autonomy from the ʿAbbāsid caliphate might be
expressed by turning its own conceptual and ideological basis against it, and laying
claim to a ‘truer’ caliphate. The Umayyads chose a course in opposition to both of
their rivals. Their message, which often appropriated Fāṭimid iconography,162 was
one of continuity: the Umayyads were and had always been caliphs, whose right
and duty it was to defend the people of Islam from religious and political threats of
all types.
The ramifications of this were twofold. Firstly, and as for all dynasties that
claimed caliphal status, any and all enemies of the Umayyads, including rebels,
were recast as apostates and enemies of God.163 Secondly, it meant that links were
made continually between the Umayyad past in Damascus and their present in
Cordoba.164 The Umayyads’ divinely-sanctioned power, and its roots in the past,
were expressed variously, and publicly. Court and public ceremony were filled
with it: at the court, guests at festival celebrations were placed in the room according
to their standing, with those further up the hierarchy allowed to be closer to the
caliph;165 in public, defeated enemies were required to make displays of submission
to the caliph,166 and the heads of the executed, including the rebel Ibn Ḥafṣūn’s
sons, were displayed on the walls of Cordoba pour encourager les autres.167 In
architecture, it could be seen in the likes of the Great Mosque of Cordoba, which
blended the styles of al-Andalus and Umayyad Damascus, including a minbar built
to the old Umayyad template (which was itself, as Maribel Fierro has highlighted,
designed to hark back to the Prophet’s)168 and a qibla wall that indicated the direc-
tion of Mecca from the old Umayyad capital rather than the new one.169 That the
latter was deliberate, not accidental, has been confirmed by excavations, which
show that the orientation was carried across to the new qibla wall of ʿAbd
al-Raḥmān II’s expansion.170 When al-Ḥakam II rebuilt the qibla after a further
expansion, he followed his Damascene forebears in seeking out Byzantine mosai-
cists to create its decoration.171 The link with the past is also present in the stories
that tenth-century writers attached to the mosque’s foundation, drawing parallels
between the church of St John in Damascus, which had been shared for a time
between Muslims and Christians before being converted into a mosque, and the
church of St Vincent in Cordoba that underlay the mosque there.172
The link between past and present was also expressed in literature. The drive
for legitimacy, together with a new cultural self-confidence, created a new demand
for court-patronized history-writing: writing that emphasized the Andalusī
Umayyads’ eastern caliphal past and the continuity of their authority through the
peninsula’s conquest under their auspices,173 and placed al-Andalus within the
grand scheme of the historical tradition. It was writing that, above all, aimed to
answer the east in its own terms, and with its own techniques.174 This is evidenced
by ʿArīb b. Saʿīd’s (d. 980) continuation and expansion of al-Ṭabarī,175 an annal-
istic work of which only the years 904–32 survive, together with some quotations
in later texts such as the Tunisian Ibn al-Shabbāṭ’s (d. 1221).176 The central figures
in this literary movement were: ʿArīb b. Saʿīd, who also, perhaps in collaboration
with a Christian bishop, composed the almanac and agricultural compendium
known as the ‘Calendar of Cordoba’;177 Aḥmad al-Rāzī (d. 955); and Ibn al-Qūṭīya
(d. 977), whose Taʾrīkh was a remarkable and unique attempt to weave the
biographies of his Christian Visigothic ancestors into Andalusī history and thereby
create a different type of legitimacy for the Cordoban Umayyads.
It is rarely clear whether references to ‘al-Rāzī’ in the texts mean Aḥmad, or his
son ʿĪsā (d. 989), although it seems likely to have been the former. Aḥmad al-Rāzī
was born in al-Andalus but of Persian heritage;178 among his teachers was a fellow
Umayyad mawlā (client), Qāsim b. Aṣbagh (d. 951), who took part in the Arabic
translation of Orosius’ (d. after 418) History Against the Pagans and had travelled
extensively, collecting reports in Iraq, Mecca, and Egypt.179 It has often been said
that Aḥmad marked the beginning of a transition within al-Andalus from akhbār
to taʾrīkh, or the writing of integrated historical narratives. He was said by his son
to have been ‘the first to codify the rules of historical composition in Spain’ and
seek out old reports on the early period,180 while the biographer Ibn al-Faraḍī (d.
1013) credits him with ‘many books (muʾallafāt) on the akhbār of al-Andalus and
the tawārīkh of the dynasties (duwal) of its kings’.181 In truth, such of al-Rāzī’s
work as survives looks as much like isolated anecdotes stitched together as
anything else on the conquest, but it is his work, and to an extent ʿArīb’s, that
marks the beginning of a distinctively Andalusī tradition about the conquest of
Iberia.182 ʿArīb came from a recently-converted muwallad family,183 and was a
kātib under al-Ḥakam II – a role that involved him dealing with the caliphal
household paperwork and correspondence,184 and thus gave him access to official
archives for his history – before falling out of favour in court reshuffles during the
regency of Ibn Abī ʿĀmir al-Manṣūr, from 976.185 Ibn al-Qūṭīya will be discussed
in chapters three and six. All of these tenth-century scholars were products of, and
got many of their akhbār from, an environment centred on Cordoba and fuqahāʾ
of largely muwallad and mawlā (Muslim non-Arab) backgrounds;186 they wrote
their histories as clients of the dynasty, in service of the dynasty. The fact that
many were also government officials only enhanced their capacity for this; literary
knowledge and techniques were central to administrative training.187
The desire of medieval Muslim writers to reconcile complicated historical
events with later legal, political, and cultural standards has already been noted.
The historical tradition regarding the early Muslim community was the product of
fierce, long-running debates – debates that were nevertheless made to look, in
later writings, as much as possible like the foregone conclusions of a unified
community from the time of the Prophet – and the slow formation of self-
identity.188 In the mid-eighth century, when traditions about early Islamic history
were first being collected and organized by scholars on any sort of scale, contro-
versy also surrounded more immediate concerns, namely administration and
taxation. These are complex issues, which I can only summarize here; in essence,
the ownership of land and the level at which it could be taxed depended – in
theory – on how it had been conquered. During the eighth century, both the criteria
by which the ‘how’ was determined, and what a given determination meant in
administrative practice, were subject to much revision. In Baghdad, this revision
produced a number of literary works on the subject, including Abū Yūsuf’s
(d. 798) Kitāb al-kharāj, a compilation and analysis of traditions relating to
conquest and tax, written for the ʿAbbāsid caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd, and the
Kitāb al-amwāl of Abū ʿUbayd (d. 838), son of a Byzantine mawlā. But the
writing of history more generally – that is, competing attempts to codify the past,
and thus settle controversy about present arrangements – was also central.
Land judged to have been conquered ʿanwatan – ‘by force’ or more simply
‘without a surrender agreement’ – was part of the fayʾ (booty) of the conquest.189
At issue in the eighth century, however, was whether fayʾ land belonged to the
community as a whole, held in trust by – and earning yield and kharāj (land tax)
for – the caliphate, or whether only a fifth (khums) of it went to the state,190 and the
rest could be divided up among the conquerors, as private property that could be
passed on to descendants.191 Land so divided had, in the early period, produced
much less taxation revenue for the state, being subject to only a one-tenth tithe
(ʿushr).192 Alternatively, as we saw in chapter one, conquest might be achieved by
conditional surrender – cessation of hostilities in return for a fixed tribute – set
down in the form of a peace (ṣulḥ) agreement, or a grant of safe-conduct (amān).
These agreements – provided they could be upheld – determined the legal status of
the non-Muslim recipient, their property and land, and in some cases their descend-
ants. As with ʿushr land, treaties limited the state’s ability to extract the levels of
revenue it wished.193 Preferable, for the state, was land left to its non-Muslim
inhabitants without a treaty (or with a treaty that did not stipulate a fixed tribute),
because it was then subject to whatever level of kharāj the state chose to set.194 In
the second and third decades of the eighth century, the caliphal administration
set about increasing tax revenues by adjusting the status of rich territories like
Egypt and the Sawād along exactly these lines, backed by tendentious and anach-
ronistic traditions about their conquest.195 Even with kharāj land, however, there
were further complications that became increasingly urgent during the eighth
century,196 such as what happened to the land’s tax liability when its non-Muslim
inhabitants converted, or whether kharāj land bought by a Muslim remained
subject to the kharāj, or only to the ʿushr.197 Under the ʿAbbāsid caliphate, this was
settled when al-Manṣūr issued an edict retroactively imposing the kharāj on any
land bought by Muslims from the beginning of the second Islamic century, and an
annual tribute on land owned by dhimmīs.198
Which areas of land fell under which heading could have a significant impact on
government revenues, especially as the payment of tribute by subject peoples
was formalized and incorporated into a taxation system. Resolving this and other
controversies in the relationship between state and subjects was a complex process,
one requiring negotiation and the marshalling of evidence by all sides. As Chase
Robinson has demonstrated with regard to northern Mesopotamia, the evidence
adduced, increasingly, was conquest narrative, and its sieges, pacts, and treaties.199
Just as Muslim scholars like Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam looked to the past for examples of
correct conduct in warfare and religious practice, so too did state qāḍīs, and other
elites from both the conquerors and the conquered, invoke arrangements made
during the conquests as precedents and guides to what should be done in the present.
The problem was that, as we have seen, the arrangements made during the conquest
were often unknown, or inaccessible: the tradition, even in oral form, simply did
not go back that far, or did not yield the information that was needed.200 Instead,
eighth- and ninth-century Muslim scholars – assuming that their present must be
the result of their exemplary forebears’ actions – imposed contemporary legal
norms, and the administrative structures they saw around them, on the past, imbuing
the status quo with the aura of antiquity. In east and west alike, this process produced
either improbably streamlined narratives or confused compromises,201 and
ninth- and tenth-century conquest narratives filled with embedded treaties of
varying – but mostly indeterminate – levels of authenticity, like Ibn Aʿtham’s
Samarqand text.202 At the same time, governed communities put forward their own
construction of the past, in support of demands over taxation and church repair.
How charged a debate this could be, in al-Andalus, is reflected in passages like this
from the Latin Chronicle of 754:
[A] Saracen by the name of Yahya succeeded [in 727] [. . .] With bitter deceit,
he stirred up the Saracens and Moors of Spain by confiscating property that
they were holding for the sake of peace and restoring many things to the
Christians.203
The choice of ‘restoring’ (restaurat) makes clear where our chronicler’s sympa-
thies lie, even as he reflects unrest among the Muslims by attributing Yaḥyā’s
actions to ‘bitter deceit’ and calls him a ‘terrible despot’ (terribilis potestator).
It was clearly in a state’s interest if the status of land could be ‘proven’ by
historical anecdote, and this was the case in al-Andalus just as much as anywhere
else in the Islamic world.204 The evidence of the conquest narratives is that serious,
state-led efforts in this direction happened later in al-Andalus – that is, during the
tenth century, when the emergent caliphate began centralizing the government, and
patronizing history-writing, on a hitherto unseen scale. In the previous century,
under ʿAbd al-Raḥmān II (822–52) and Muḥammad I (852–86), moves had been
made to broaden the reach and function of the Andalusī state: the development of
a formal (and formally-educated) kitāba, the expansion of its tax-related duties,
and an increase in the number of wazīrs and other officials with a large amount of
delegated authority.205 All this was expanded greatly, however, in the caliphal
period.206 ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III, having begun his reign with campaigns to regain
territory lost to the state during the rebellions of the later ninth century,207 then set
about consolidating state control, with increased centralization, an expansion of
territorial administration,208 and a discourse of caliphal authority rooted in the
traditional past. In this context, not only taxation but also central control of the
government and resources of al-Andalus were significant issues. He and his succes-
sors turned to their scholars to provide solutions for them: precedents for the control
they wished to exercise, securely sourced in conquest history. As in the east in the
mid-eighth century, those who wrote history in al-Andalus in the tenth century had
to demonstrate that a proper chain of command had been in operation during the
conquests209 – that, in other words, the caliphs in Damascus had had full strategic
and logistical control of matters, as classical legal and historical thought anachro-
nistically assumed,210 and that as much conquered territory as possible could be
designated ʿanwatan, or otherwise at the Cordoban caliphs’ disposal.211 This meant
demonstrating that properly-designated authority to carry out the conquest had to
have been given to Mūsā – and especially to Ṭāriq, the mawlā who got the invasion
under way.212 In the narratives, this was achieved in two ways: through omens and
prophetic dreams, showing that the conquest was divinely-ordained; or, increas-
ingly, through correspondence between Ṭāriq and Mūsā – and often, too, between
Mūsā and al-Walīd – either ordering or confirming the plan to invade.
The former type of authorization is very important in Ibn Ḥabīb’s narrative:
Ṭāriq and Mūsā do write to each other, and Ṭāriq acts with his commander’s
permission, but this authorization is contingent upon certain omens proving correct,
rather than Mūsā’s authority as an amīr.213 There is no sign of the caliph, al-Walīd,
until much later in the narrative; no-one on the frontier feels that he must write to
the caliph to clear the mission with the central government. Similarly, there is no
consultation – not even an exchange between Ṭāriq and Mūsā – prior to the
invasion in Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam’s account, although part of the chain of command
is later made clear when Ṭāriq calms Mūsā’s anger by telling the latter upon his
arrival, ‘I am your mawlā, and this conquest is yours.’214 Another early writer, the
Iraqī Khalīfa b. Khayyāṭ (d. 854), has Mūsā write to Damascus with the news only
after the event, and send the caliphal khums.215 Things changed in the tenth century,
and Ibn ʿIdhārī preserves several reports from that period on the matter. After a
discussion about earlier raids – ‘in the name of (nusiba) Mūsā b. Nuṣayr, following
the custom that attributes the deeds of the subordinate (maʾmūr) to [his] amīr’ – by
the aetiological Ṭarīf, who gave his name to an island,216 we are told:
ʿArīb [b. Saʿīd] said: The barbarian (ʿilj) Julian, master of Algeciras, allowed
Mūsā b. Nuṣayr, master of Ifrīqiya, to enter in the year 91, through the agency
of Ṭāriq b. Ziyād, Mūsā’s ʿāmil over Tangiers and environs. Julian corre-
sponded with Mūsā, presenting the [prospect of the] invasion of al-Andalus
to him in a favourable light.217
An unattributed (‘it was said’) rival tradition, saying that Ṭāriq ‘set out over the
sea of his own accord’ and only later joined forces with Julian, gets a single
sentence, but it is overshadowed by the precise and proper terminology of the first
version. Ibn ʿIdhārī continues with Mūsā getting al-Walīd’s permission to send a
raiding party, and notes that, ‘All have agreed that Ṭāriq b. Ziyād was responsible
(mutawallī) for the greatest part of the conquest of al-Andalus.’218 He concludes
with a similar passage from al-Rāzī:
Al-Rāzī said, on the authority of al-Wāqidī: Al-Walīd b. ʿAbd al-Malik

appointed Mūsā b. Nuṣayr as governor over Ifrīqiya, and Mūsā b. Nuṣayr
appointed Ṭāriq b. Ziyād over Tangiers. Julian was near him at Algeciras
[. . .] Ṭāriq reached an agreement with him, and Julian promised to give him
and his soldiers a way into al-Andalus. 12,000 Berbers had rallied to Ṭāriq.
He resolved upon the raiding of al-Andalus, after he gained his mawlā Ibn
Nuṣayr’s permission (idhn) for that.219
Another excerpt from al-Rāzī has Ṭāriq continuing his correct behaviour by
sending the khums to the caliph after the defeat of Roderic, and dividing the rest
of the fayʾ among his men;220 Mūsā does the same in North Africa.221
Ibn al-Qūṭīya, as we shall see in the next chapter, was more interested in
locating his caliphs’ legitimacy in the interactions of Visigothic nobles and the
Damascene Umayyads than in letters between the commanders and al-Walīd. Yet
he is still careful to establish the chain of command, even if there are extra indi-
viduals in his version of it; he makes one of Witiza’s sons enquire as to whether
Ṭāriq had the standing to be making alliances and granting amāns. Note, again,
the formal language:
When they reached him, they said to him, ‘Are you your own commander
(amīr), or is there another over you?’ He replied to them, ‘Of course! There
is a commander over me, and over him is yet another.’ He gave them permis-
sion to join Mūsā b. Nuṣayr in Ifrīqiya to affirm [this.] [. . .]222 [They met him]
near the land of the Berbers, with the letter from Ṭāriq, in which [was
recorded] their consent to submission, and what he had stipulated for them.
So Mūsā b. Nuṣayr sent them on to al-Walīd b. ʿAbd al-Malik; [when] they
reached him, he implemented the agreement of Ṭāriq b. Ziyād for them, and
he concluded a written contract (sijill)223 with each of them on that matter.224
The tenth-century preoccupation with chains of command was taken up in later

historiography,225 although Ibn al-Qūṭīya’s version remained a minority report.
Ibn al-Qūṭīya also shows how closely linked such ‘clarification’ was to the issue
of land ownership; in the correspondence between Ṭāriq and the Visigothic defec-
tors that precedes the above passage, Witiza’s sons request an amān and ‘that he
sign over to them the estates (ḍiyāʿ) of their father in al-Andalus, comprising three
thousand villages, named thereafter “the kings’ portion” (ṣafāyā al-mulūk).’226
The theme is pursued in the story of Sara the Goth, Witiza’s granddaughter and
Ibn al-Qūṭīya’s ancestor, who even travels to Damascus to have her sons’ land
ownership confirmed.
All this goes some way to explaining why, in Andalusī accounts written by
court-sponsored historians after 929, there was abruptly such a proliferation of
city-by-city narratives of Mūsā’s and Ṭāriq’s itineraries after the defeat of Roderic.
The early works had, as we have seen, next to nothing to say about the conquest
beyond its single decisive battle, against Roderic. Where cities are mentioned by
Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam or Ibn Ḥabīb, they are almost always the backdrop to the story
being told – lessons on the laws of plunder, or allegorical tales about the workings
of fate. On only one occasion does Ibn Ḥabīb use something like the legal termi-
nology, noting that the people (ahl) of Galicia sued for peace (ṣulḥ), and were
granted it.227 More typical are vague statements such as this one:
ʿAbd Allāh b. Wahb related to us, on the authority of al-Layth b. Saʿd, that
Mūsā b. Nuṣayr, when he conquered al-Andalus, accomplished his goal,
conquering cities left and right until he came to Toledo.228
Whether such material was gathered from local traditions found in now-lost
earlier historical works, taken from a Medinan book by al-Wāqidī brought to the
west (and ignored in the east) only after the ninth-century accounts had been
written without him, or the result of systemic, propagandistic falsification, the
tradition’s shift in focus cannot be denied. Because examples from the past
trumped all arguments, the legal status of the Umayyads’ lands and their claims to
authority in al-Andalus could only be confirmed if the cities’ past – the narrative
of how they fell, or surrendered – was clarified by historians. Sometimes this was
a straightforward matter of changing the language to reflect the more precise legal
terminology;229 sometimes, however, conflicting accounts arose, and the resulting
complications had to be dealt with, by smoothing away the unacceptable parts or
‘finding’ acceptable ones. In the eastern tradition, this seems to have happened in
the case of Damascus, which is the subject of an apparently-unified – but in fact
very contradictory – conquest narrative that attempts to explain away why there
should have been both fighting and a surrender treaty, something that was not
permissible once the legal norms of military conduct had been established.230 In
the historiography on al-Andalus, similar confusion exists over the fall of
Seville.231 If we are interested in what actually happened, it makes for unsatisfying
history; if we wish to know something of how the tenth-century court and courtiers
interpreted and reinterpreted history, it is invaluable.
3 Accommodating outsiders,
obeying stereotypes
Mawālī and muwalladūn in narratives
of the conquest
The purpose of this chapter is to explore issues associated with the integration of
outsiders – that is, for the most part, non-Arab converts to Islam – into Muslim
society, in order to establish how and why such issues left traces in narratives of
the conquest of Iberia. I shall begin with a discussion of the institution of walāʾ
(clientage), in terms of its classical form and its suggested origins, and a consid-
eration of anthropological theory on the social and political role of clientage and
exchange. I will then consider the social and historiographical implications of
clientage in both east and west, looking at presentations of the role of mawālī in
the early Islamic conquests, and at how walāʾ functioned – or did not – in Andalusī
society. I shall also touch upon the broader, related issues within medieval Islamic
Iberia that shaped the environment in which the sources were composed and
received: conversion, ethnic tension, social organization, and certain incidents of
what have sometimes been called ‘nativist’ reaction to Arab-Muslim rule. Finally,
I shall explore how these themes played out in the conquest narratives, as seen in
the roles of Ṭāriq b. Ziyād, Mughīth al-Rūmī and Sara, the Visigothic ancestor of
Andalusī historian Ibn al-Qūṭīya (d. 977). I am primarily concerned, here, with
contextualizing; the case studies of chapters five and six will return to these
themes in the course of a closer reading of the texts.
Walāʾ: accommodating outsiders and reinforcing hierarchy

The term mawlā (pl. mawālī) – which may be translated as ‘client’, although for
the sake of avoiding oversimplification,1 it will be left in the Arabic hereafter –
had many nuances of meaning in the early Islamic world, even if such nuances are
rarely clear in the chronicles. Ibn al-Athīr lists some sixteen different types.2 It
could apply variously to Arab ‘outsiders’ – that is, those seeking to join, or take
refuge with, a tribe not their own – or to non-Arab converts, freed slaves, and
associates of various kinds, although generally such distinctions are clear only
from supporting material in an individual’s biography. The status it implied varied
according to context. It could even be taken to mean ‘patron’, although this usage
is much less common than in the sense of ‘client’.
In the broadest possible sense, a mawlā is someone who has entered into a
relationship of walāʾ with another individual or (increasingly, in the later period) with
48 Outsiders and stereotypes
a ruler standing in for a state. Two types of walāʾ are mentioned in classical Islamic
legal writings. The first, and most commonly accepted, is walāʾ al-ʿitq, a compact
between master and ex-slave upon the latter’s manumission.3 All of the classical law
schools, with the exception of the Mālikīs, considered such walāʾ to be both automatic
and obligatory,4 although – as so often in legal matters – this was not always the case
in practice.5 The second type of walāʾ, rejected by all schools bar the Ḥanafīs, but
clearly widely practised before the classical period, was walāʾ al-muwālāt, or contrac-
tual walāʾ, entered into voluntarily by already-free men. Both types of walāʾ conferred
certain rights and obligations: a patron was expected to pay any blood money (ʿaql)
incurred by his mawlā and in return he had the right to inherit his mawlā’s property, as
the last agnate, and to oversee the marriages of his mawlā’s female relatives.6 The
mawlā, for his part, was expected to provide loyalty, and often also financial7 and
military support;8 in return, he had a recognized place in Islamic society, and a
protector within it. Mawālī generally also took the tribal nisba of their patron, whether
this nisba was the patron’s by birth, or one gained through his or her own adoptive
membership of a tribe as a mawlā; very quickly, it became common for Arab and non-
Arab mawālī to take on their own mawālī. Mūsā b. Nuṣayr, the patron of our Andalusī
conqueror Ṭāriq and numerous others, was himself a mawlā, by descent.9
Under classical law, walāʾ was inheritable and inalienable: in theory, a ficti-
tious kinship tie that was passed down through the generations. Prophetic ḥadīth
were, naturally, adduced to link this aspect back to the earliest Islamic times,
although doubt has been cast upon this as evidence. There are, for example, traces
of a long-running early controvery over whether the sale of walāʾ was permis-
sible; a ḥadīth in which the Prophet forbids such a sale, thus sealing the matter by
classical standards, did not enter the debate until the second half of the eighth
century.10 The debate over the precise origins and nature of walāʾ is a complex –
and surprisingly highly-charged11 – one, which I shall not attempt to tackle
fully here, since my interest lies in its social, political, and historiographical
ramifications. Nonetheless, a brief glance at the background is necessary.
On one level, walāʾ seems to fit into the tribal context of pre-Islamic Arabia: in
a society where an individual’s identity, rights, and safety were entirely derived
from membership of a larger social group (the tribe or clan), a mechanism was
needed to accommodate newcomers, temporary allies, and those whose birth
clans had been scattered by warfare, migration, or other social change. Indeed,
walāʾ as it is seen in the later legal sources has much in common with other
methods of attaching outsiders to tribes, notably ḥilf, a contract for mutual aid, and
this has often been suggested as the precursor of classical walāʾ.12 However,
Patricia Crone has pointed out that such walāʾ-type practices as did exist in
pre-Islamic times were conducted between groups, not individuals, except perhaps
in the case of freedmen. Furthermore, ḥilf was a transaction reserved for
Arab tribesmen, and was not used for non-Arabs.13 Arguably, the true successor to
pre-Islamic contracts of this nature was not walāʾ at all, but the dhimma
agreement made with non-Muslims: through a mutual pact, an outsider group is
made a protected but subordinate satellite – rather than a full member – of the
main social body. Walāʾ aided assimilation; dhimma encoded separateness.
Outsiders and stereotypes 49
Patricia Crone has suggested that walāʾ, as it was used in the early Islamic
centuries and later codified as part of classical law, came instead from late Roman
law in the Near East, introduced by mid-seventh-century caliphs and overlaid with
tribal assumptions. Further, she says that it is best understood as a type of clientage,
an unequal relationship that presupposed dependence, while also serving as a
method of accommodating newcomers and marginal people.14 In bestowing
protection, the patron also enhanced his prestige, and not simply in such tangible
ways as gaining an impressive honour guard for his governorship: walāʾ was a
power relationship rationalized by an idea of exchange, binding mawlā to patron
through gifts and resultant obligations, and reinforcing the mawlā’s lower status
through his inability to fully reciprocate.15 Clientage in any society is very much
bound up in the operation of hierarchy and the distribution of power; patron–client
relations are at heart an exchange of resources, cutting vertically across existing
social boundaries while at the same time reinforcing them, by confirming limita-
tions upon access to such resources. Clientage requires the client to surrender a
portion of his autonomy, such as it is, to the patron in return for gaining this access
by proxy, allowing the patron to act as a power-broker,16 and mediate in his rela-
tions with society at large.17 It is also an institution of ritual kinship, reinforcing
and expressing the ideals of the social system in which it takes place through the
interactions of the individuals.18 In the early Islamic world, walāʾ – like dhimma
status – gave some protection to the socially-disadvantaged, while at the same
time enshrining the very power structures that created the circumstances of their
disadvantage, formalizing the social and political clout of higher status individ-
uals and the dependence of the lower. It was also, as we shall see, a major tool for
the acculturation of converts.
In the spirit if not quite the form of pre-Islamic ḥilf, walāʾ was a means of
building a power base (for patrons), or joining one’s fortunes to the more powerful
(for clients).19 Yet like dhimma regulations, walāʾ entailed an unequal relation-
ship. The mawlā adopted a passive role: that of the one being permitted into
society, on sufferance, rather than – as in pre-Islamic ḥilf – an ally embraced for
the military support offered,20 although mawālī could, and did, bring military
support. It was in the existing elite’s interests, after all, to discourage others from
joining them and, in doing so, potentially diluting the rewards to be had.21 Thus
there was little or no active religious proselytizing, and the conditions under
which a newcomer could join were kept markedly restrictive. Walāʾ was, for early
Islam, an unavoidable side-effect of gaining an empire, a way of according the
conquered a place in society and making use of them, while keeping them at arm’s
length in a dependent relationship that emphasized the humiliation of the defeated,
and the superiority of the victorious Arabs. Ultimately, it made honorary Arabs
out of conquered non-Arabs.
How walāʾ operated in early Islamic society

The Qurʾān provided no guide for ethnic relations, not even in the limited, rather
opaque way it did for interfaith ones.22 Its religious message was egalitarian – several
sūras declare that piety, not birth or wealth, should be the only marker of status23 –
but this message provoked continual disagreements over how, or whether, it might
be applied to daily life. For all its universalism, the Qurʾān had, after all, been
revealed in Arabic to Arabs, offering a strong case for thinking of the peninsular
tribes as a chosen people; in addition, the elite of early Islamic society, in both
conquest and settlement, was an Arabic one, accustomed to tribal ways. It soon
became necessary, however, to make space for newcomers, at least while Islam was
in transition to a more ethnically-diverse society, such as it became from the late
seventh and early eighth centuries. Walāʾ was one of the tools by which space
was made, and a limited, unequal accommodation achieved. What did this accom-
modation look like in practice, and how did outsiders actually live in early Islamic
society?
Wael Hallaq has attempted to counter the (unequal) accommodation model by
claiming, perplexingly, that the accommodation provided by walāʾ was unneces-
sary, since groups such as dhimmīs were already fully integrated into Islamic
society.24 Yet this – quite apart from ignoring converts and freedmen, the major
recipients and beneficiaries of walāʾ – misses the point of what is meant by
‘accommodation’, and proceeds from an over-optimistic image of the place of
dhimmīs. There were various levels of belonging – sometimes overlapping,
frequently not – within early Islamic society, which were bound up with markers
of status, including lineage, ethnicity, participation in conquest, and how early
one (or one’s kin) had converted. Simply living under Muslim rule, or even – as
we shall see – converting to the faith of the conquerors, was not enough to wholly
belong;25 it was necessary to forge recognized links, and thus change one’s social
and legal status. A dhimmī did have a protected status in law, but this was not
unqualified; increasingly, a degree of acculturation to Arab-Muslim norms of
behaviour was required to function fully in urban, and especially elite, society.
From the late seventh-century reforms of ʿAbd al-Malik, for example, knowledge
of Arabic was essential for those who wanted to gain or retain posts in most
administration; it would be logical to suppose that non-Arab subjects soon
came to need, at a minimum, an Arabic-speaking intermediary in dealings with
imperial or local government.26 A dhimmī’s status could be enhanced, and social
or economic fortunes improved, by greater contact with the Arab-Muslim elite
(or their better-placed mawālī). Non-Arabs, whether they converted or not, had to
Arabicize.
A freedman or a free non-Arab convert, meanwhile, was engaged in a still more
complex process, that of leaving behind an old status and seeking to attain a new
one. Conversion is a complex issue in itself. In some schools of thought all it
required was a recitation of the shahāda before a witness.27 A fatwā from the reign
of the Andalusī amīr ʿAbd Allāh (888–912), found in an eleventh-century collec-
tion by David Wasserstein, illustrates that it was not always so straightforward,
however: Ibn Lubāba (d. 926), a source and teacher of some of the tenth-century
courtly historians we met in the previous chapter,28 rules that a boy who appar-
ently converted by reciting the shahāda following an argument with his parents,
should be allowed to return to his old faith if it is adjudged that he was not old
enough to have made the conversion in full understanding.29 A whim or a fit of
pique, in other words, would not do. What is also notable about this fatwā is that
both the conversion and its renunciation involve physical relocation; in converting,
the boy runs away from home and moves in with his witness (the individual who
writes requesting Ibn Lubāba’s judgement), while a ‘return to his religion’ means
being able to ‘return [. . .] to his parents’. In the conditions of the early period,
conversion was more a social act than a spiritual one. In a world where religious
categories shaped much of social life,30 converting usually meant leaving one’s
birth community and joining a new one. In the days of the garrison towns this was
a literal move: a hijra, or emigration, to the ranks of the conquest elite through a
physical relocation to their living-space, often by joining the army.31 In the rest of
the Islamic world, not least in early medieval al-Andalus, it was also a figurative
one, a transition to a new legal and social sphere, wherein lay nearly all access to
power and resources; it transformed an individual’s status and marriage prospects,
and the cultural and linguistic skills they needed for daily life.32 Converts, both
individually and collectively, had to be accommodated into this sphere, and – at
least in the early period – this happened largely through walāʾ, the symbolic
joining of the Arab-Muslim ‘tribe’.
Richard Bulliet is undoubtedly correct in his assertion that walāʾ was not –
contrary to the sources’ implication – the sole means by which free conversion
happened. There are obvious problems of communication to be overcome before
a budding convert could even know about walāʾ, particularly in the early Muslim
state, when Muslims tended to keep to themselves in the garrison towns, and may
not have shared a language with the conquered populace.33 Yet in much of the
Muslim world, for a long time, it seems that walāʾ served as the means by which
conversions took place, for those who interacted regularly with the state: that is,
the type of conversions that conveyed, at least in theory, the full legal and fiscal
benefits of Muslim status. As Crone has put it, albeit metaphorically, ‘A client is
a man whose papers were in order’;34 a convert was only legally a convert in the
eyes of the authorities when he found a patron willing to accept and introduce him
into Muslim society in his new identity as a mawlā, with a changed social and
legal status. But Bulliet’s comment that there were no records kept of such things,
and his consequent blanket dismissal of walāʾ as a means for conversion and
change of status, is belied not only by the issue of the dīwān – which, admittedly,
would certainly not apply to all converts at all times – but also by the survival of
papyri containing just such records, indicating that the practice must have been
significant enough to warrant keeping them.35
Yet even with their new identities, mawālī remained between communities,
having left that of their birth without receiving full acceptance in their adoptive
one. In eighth-century Kūfa, mawālī prayed in their own mosque; mawālī status
was often recorded on tombstones.36 The operation of this principle may be
demonstrated by examining the fortunes of two main social groups during the
early period: participants in conquest expeditions and frontier-defence, and rural
peasantry seeking to leave their land and join urban Islamic society. Members of
both these groups needed walāʾ because they needed a patron to stand surety
before the authorities for their changed legal status. Newly-converted or allied
warriors were present in the conquest armies in considerable numbers, from an
early stage, often on the frontiers.37 Examples range from individual mawālī38 to
whole divisions – sometimes en masse defectors, including groups of elite fighters
from Sasanian Persia,39 and sometimes units of ex-captives, including Berber
clans,40 assembled by prominent patrons41 – that were in turn often led by mawālī.
In the east, Persian converts manned a number of frontier posts and garrisons.42 In
the west, mawālī enjoyed authority and autonomy, as the positions of both Mūsā
and Ṭāriq at the start of the Spanish conquest narratives demonstrate: a provincial
governor and a frontier sub-commander, respectively, each with sizeable fighting
forces at their disposal.43
It is not always clear that such people were Muslims, but they had certainly
thrown in their lot with the Muslims, and were able to do so largely through
patron–client relationships. The fighting non-Arabs, whether mawālī converts or
not, required a nisba,44 and recognized membership of a tribal group, to ensure
their place in the dīwān and thus their receipt of the ʿaṭāʾ. Although passages in
certain sources claim that mawlā soldiers went unpaid in the early years,45 due –
predictably – to the perfidious Umayyads’ pro-Arab chauvinism,46 on balance it
seems that many were in the dīwān from early on.47 Their pay levels did not match
the Arabs’,48 nor were they free from opposition and controversy; Abū ʿUbayd
al-Thaqafī (d. 634) is said to have provoked a riot in Kūfa by paying his mawālī
division the same as their Arab counterparts.49 Joining the army was thus the
road to a regular (if unequal) income, a role in the developing society, and even
land ownership. It also led to tax exemption – or so, at least, was the hope – as a
marker of integration into privileged Arab-Muslim society. The battle over
whether this ought to be the case left traces in the historical tradition, with the
ever-unpopular governor al-Ḥajjāj (d. 714) ranged against ʿUmar II (r. 717–20) in
indirect, schematic debate.50
These hopes of exemption, understandably, were both a lure to conversion and
a strong incentive for the conquest elite to limit it, since fewer tax-payers meant
smaller state stipends. The lure seems to have operated most strongly among the
rural peasants of Persia and Iraq, who apparently fled the land and flocked to
cities, much to the irritation of Muslim governors, who tended to send them
straight back again. Complaints recorded in the histories that these converted
masses were forced to pay the jizya are probably not just the work of anti-Umayyad
propaganda, although ʿUmar I serves as a mouthpiece for later disapproval of
the practice. These complaints point up Crone’s conclusions, again: conversion
was not simply a personal matter, but had to be recognized and acknowledged if
it was to have any legal utility in early Islamic society. It is unsurprising that rural
refugees, unlike their military counterparts – who, whether defectors or later-freed
captives from battle, came bearing useful skills that the peasants simply did
not – found it much harder to find patrons willing to take them on. Furthermore,
peasants had homes to be sent back to; manumitted slaves, as a rule, did not.51
There can be no doubt that mawālī met a great deal of prejudice and institution-
alized opposition in the first few centuries of Islam. Walāʾ, though clearly used by
free converts as well as for manumission, tended to be associated with servile
origin – an interpretation that is particularly pronounced in the written accounts,
coming as they do from a post-eighth-century milieu in which the classical law
schools had largely eradicated walāʾ al-muwālāt. Mawlā appears in our sources as
a pejorative term at times, synonymous with ‘slave’ and ‘ʿajamī’ (non-speaker of
Arabic, often with overtones of ‘barbarian’), even though – as will be seen – a
select pool of mawālī came to be a high-status group in certain later courtly
milieux. Arab chauvinism can be seen in debates regarding the permissibility of
marriage between Arab women and mawālī men.52 In the early eighth century, a
governor of Mecca dissolved just such a marriage and punished its participants,
drawing praise from an Arab poet (‘For what right is more just for the mawālī than
the right of slave to join in marriage with slave?’).53 The picture is, in other words,
a complex one, with great variations at different times and in different regions. As
the tales of peasant refugees suggest, there must have been a great gulf between
mawālī experiences in urban and rural environments; mawālī in cities might
find it easier to integrate themselves into service and intellectual circles, going
some way to concealing their origins.54 In the area of Islamic law, non-Arabs –
sometimes mawālī, sometimes not – were soon active and numerous participants,
already matching their Arab counterparts during the eighth century.55
But the early prejudice against non-Arabs was reflected even in written works
that come from a much later and less Arab-dominated environment – indeed, even
in works that were themselves written by mawālī. There are several possible
reasons for this. Firstly, as we saw in chapter two, our conquest narratives crystal-
lized in the mid- to late-eighth century; attitudes to mawālī, or to non-Arab
outsiders more generally, were to an extent fixed and fossilized in them, still
transmitted along with the rest of the material even though their relevance had
declined. Secondly, the portrayal of non-Arabs in general, in conquest accounts
and elsewhere, was undoubtedly governed by literary conventions;56 we should
therefore expect the treatment of non-Arab Muslims to be much the same across
the tradition, unless the writer had a specific interest or motive to do otherwise.
Finally, it seems likely that terms like mawlā, ʿajamī, or Berber carried different
overtones in some contexts, or for some audiences; Andalusī writers of the elev-
enth century had particular reason to dislike Berbers, associated as they were with
the fall of the caliphate. Some later, Arabicized mawālī descendants viewed their
predecessors’ lack of culture – or their contemporaries’ pretensions to same – with
disdain. One such was Ibn Mann Allāh al-Hawwārī (d. c. 1102), a Berber from
Qayrawān, who poured scorn upon his fellow non-Arabs’ efforts to claim them-
selves superior to the Arabs who had so thoroughly defeated them in battle.57
The general literary prejudice against non-Arabs did not go unchallenged in the
Islamic world. A ninth-century intellectual movement known as the shuʿūbīya –
or, if it was not so cohesive as to warrant the term ‘movement’, the collection of
shared ideas, promoted primarily by those of Persian heritage – set out to assert
cultural equality between Arabs and non-Arabs, or even the supremacy of the
latter. The appellation was taken from a Qurʾānic phrase often cited in debates
regarding Islamic social hierarchy:
We have made you into groups (shuʿūb) and tribes (qabāʾil) that you may
come to know one another; truly, the noblest among you before God is the
most righteous among you.58
Shuʿūbīya were writers without an Arabic tribal heritage who produced literary
works – in Arabic – extolling both the present virtues and the past glories of their
non-Arab forebears. There were shuʿūbīya polemicists at work for many of the
different cultures that made up the Islamic world – Coptic, Syrian, Daylamite,59
and, later, the European ‘Slavs’ of al-Andalus – but the strongest current came
from ethnically-Persian court circles in and around Baghdad. Such writers – oper-
ating in a context that was above all urban, de-tribalized, and literary – celebrated
the Persian past, the intellectual achievements and the superior (as they saw it)
literary style of non-Arabs, while mocking the culturally-impoverished origins of
their supposed social betters’ camel-herding ancestors. They also denigrated the
Arab fascination with genealogy, which – together with the financial administra-
tion of the early conquests, under which income had been dependent upon some
form of Arab identity, even if adopted through walāʾ – ensured tribal lineage
remained one of the major markers of identity and status in Islamic society, to the
detriment of those who lacked it.60
The shuʿūbīya’s aims and methods were literary and intellectual, not political –
the stakes were, as Gibb put it, the cultural orientation of Islam,61 not nationalism
or social justice – but they provoked a strong backlash among ‘pure’ Arabs and
from critical non-Arabs, like Ibn Mann Allāh. Al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 869) (who was of East
African descent) remarked that the logical extension of the shuʿūbī argument was
apostasy, since Islam came from the Arabs;62 al-Jāḥiẓ was never one to shy away
from hyperbole, but his tone is typical of the debate. Polemic like this may have
kept divisions between Arabs and non-Arabs a live issue, intellectually, long after
mass conversions and the more even-handed policies of the ʿAbbāsids had largely
denuded such a division of significance in everyday life. To an extent, it is in this
intellectual context that we may place Andalusī writers such as Ibn al-Qūṭīya,
whose attempts to provide an alternative reading of non-Arabs’ role in the conquest
saw him move beyond the more obvious stereotypes and use non-Arab participants
to legitimize the past and present reality of Muslim power in al-Andalus.
Increasingly, however, mawālī came to signify not so much low-status freedmen
and converts, but a pool of individuals personally loyal to, and rewarded and
elevated by, the caliph – a precursor of the slave soldiers who would come to
dominate the state’s centre from the later ninth century. This was also happening
in al-Andalus.
Non-Arabs in al-Andalus: mawālī and muwalladūn
The (in)significance of walāʾ in Andalusī society

Despite the undoubted cultural significance and social role of walāʾ in balancing
the ethnic divisions of early Islamic society, it would seem that it was not used
anything like as widely in al-Andalus, at least for the purposes of conversion.63
Rather, as Maribel Fierro has convincingly and meticulously demonstrated,64 the
remit of walāʾ in al-Andalus was from the beginning that which it only gradually
became in the east: a term applied to the retinue of the Umayyad amīr or caliph.
Non-Arab (specifically, Hispano-Roman or ‘indigenous’) converts were more
usually called muwalladūn,65 a term meaning non-Arabs who have been raised as
Arabs – indicating, once again, the inescapable social and cultural aspects of
conversion – but apparently used in the plural form in al-Andalus alone of the
Islamic world, from c. 820.66 A study of fifty-nine Berber lineages in al-Andalus
found that only five were definitely linked to an Arab tribe in a clientage relation-
ship, or remembered to be so.67 Nonetheless, al-Andalus had its own ethnic
divisions, being a mosaic of different cultures – Arab, Berber, Hispano-Roman,
Basque, together with increasing numbers of northern and eastern European
captives and freedmen – in which the Arabs were very much outnumbered, and
revolts were common. After the fall of the Umayyad caliphate at the start of the
eleventh century, many of the ṭāʾifa successor states were ruled by non-Arabs,
sparking off a new round of ethnic theorizing and stereotyping, both in contem-
porary political exchanges and in the written works produced under these rulers’
auspices. Thus, when the word mawlā appears in the narratives of the Spanish
conquest, it carries the conceptual and linguistic baggage of centuries of debate
and denigration in the eastern intellectual tradition, but it also speaks to the
particular situation in al-Andalus.
There are a variety of reasons why walāʾ was not so commonly used in
al-Andalus. The first is that the conquerors who extracted revenue from, and took
up residence in, al-Andalus were much less homogeneous than those of the early
conquests. Even if the low proportion of Arabs to Berbers has been exaggerated
by the sources,68 and even bearing in mind that extra waves of Arabs arrived in the
subsequent decades, there can be little doubt that the bulk of the army was made
up of Berbers who had allied themselves – with or without walāʾ – with the forces
of Islam during the protracted conquest of North Africa.69 Although this conquering
class was far from united, its diverse ethnic make-up made the adoption of a
specifically Arab identity through an institution such as walāʾ much less desirable
or necessary for the purposes of ‘fitting in’ – particularly in the rural areas
where the Berbers tended to settle and where the bulk of the Hispano-Roman
populace lived – although there was undoubtedly greater pressure to acculturate
on those joining the cultural and political elite, especially in large urban centres
like Cordoba, as we shall see. Additionally, if we follow (some of) Bulliet’s
reasoning – that is, the necessity of person-to-person contact – the relative paucity
of Arabs in the province might have hampered the chances of walāʾ becoming the
norm. In short, Arabs still held all the political power, but for this minority to try
to impose its cultural will upon a majority of militarily-ready fellow-conquerors
– as opposed to a majority of the conquered – would have surely been suicidal, so
far from reinforcements.70
The second reason, related to the first, is that the garrison towns seen in the
Islamic heartlands to the east, founded for the Muslim armies and functioning to
keep them separate from the conquered masses, were not a feature of the conquest
in Iberia, where the conquerors generally settled in existing towns, or took up
herding or cultivation.71 Patterns of Muslim-conqueror settlement in Iberia are
worth considering in detail. Arab Muslims were clearly in the minority in the
peninsula,72 and seem to have taken to urban life very readily, being seen rarely in
the more rural areas of their domain. The Berbers, initially, tended to settle in
more remote areas (Extremadura, Valencia), away from urban centres; so, at least,
the Arabic sources maintain,73 and modern scholars have, more or less tentatively,
agreed with them.74 Although the Berber language died out quite quickly in Iberia
for the most part,75 Berber–Arabic bilingualism persisted in some places rather
later than might be expected,76 and while references to clans do decline from the
eleventh century, Berbers are still associated with revolts in Valencia, a region
that they had previously dominated.77 There is also some doubt over the extent to
which Arabs and Berbers intermarried with the conquered. Paul the Deacon,
writing at the time of Charlemagne, describes the Arabs arriving with their
families in tow,78 something Pierre Guichard has taken as evidence for his thesis
that Andalusī tribal communities – particularly the Arabs – practised endogamy,
as part of a wider set of ‘oriental’ cultural norms that preserved their identity and
shaped society in al-Andalus.79 Recent research by Manuela Marín, however, has
been unable either to confirm or to deny extensive endogamy, and this picture has
been challenged as an oversimplification.80
Nevertheless, the fact that Muslims and non-Muslims generally shared the
same urban spaces meant that potential converts among the conquered populace
in the west were physically and symbolically closer to the elite group they wished
to join than were their eastern counterparts. Ironically, this fact means that walāʾ
was both more possible in al-Andalus than under Bulliet’s scenario of ivory-tower
garrison cities, and at the same time less necessary, since there was less of a gap
to bridge between Muslim society and a would-be convert. Conversion among the
indigenous population still entailed a change of community and social status –
there were different laws, clothing and religious practices prescribed (if not always
enforced) for the various socio-religious groups – but the impetus to seek fictitious
kinship ties through formal Arab clientage was much diminished, compared with
the east. There may have been fewer cultural and social gatekeepers to facilitate
and regulate contact between Muslims and non-Muslims, but there were also
fewer gates keeping the groups apart.
The final reason that walāʾ was less important for conversion is that the Iberian
Peninsula was a comparatively late conquest, meaning that its settlement and
reshaping to the normative patterns of Islamic society arguably post-dated the most
urgent and experimental phase of dealing with non-Arab newcomers. A legal
framework – if not in its fully-developed classical form – was clearly in place by
the early eighth century; the Berber mawālī in the conquest armies were a relic of
it. But the framework had become less relevant and necessary even as it had
been formalized. Elsewhere in the Islamic world, converts were much more
common by the early eighth century, and walāʾ had already begun to lose some of
its generalized utility, with walāʾ al-muwālāt almost completely fading from view.
Furthermore, the dominance of the Mālikī law school under the Umayyads presum-
ably meant that walāʾ al-ʿitq was seen as the only acceptable form of clientage
from an earlier stage in the society’s legal development, thus shaping images of the
conquest period. It might be argued that, in the more self-confident, post-ʿAbd
al-Malik Islamic empire, al-Andalus’ tiny new Arab elite did not need to reinforce
the victory of Islam and the Arabs through individual links like walāʾ. Arabic iden-
tity no longer required rigid, person-to-person protection against contact with
outsiders, because Arabic chauvinism was now enshrined in administrative prac-
tices and social trends. In addition, Islam was more important as an element of
group identity. Unlike during the seventh-century conquests, when fear of assimi-
lation into non-Arab conquered cultures was apparently rife,81 the framework for
Arabicization – of both converts and Mozarabs82 – was already in place for the
conquest of Iberia, or was at least growing strongly. Administration was conducted
entirely in Arabic and Andalusī coinage eschewed bilinguality for Qurʿānic inscrip-
tions within ten years.83 This broader culture had an irresistible impact. During the
following century, Andalusī Christian literature in anything but Arabic died out.84
A collection of tenth-century Latin charters, recording land grants given to Mozarab
Christian immigrants to León, shows a large proportion of Arabic names among
the men, suggesting that a high degree of acculturation and bilinguality was neces-
sary, or unavoidable, for them in the social and work spheres – but not for the
women, who all have Romance names.85 People were, clearly, Arabicizing with or
without walāʾ. What we see in the Andalusī conquest narratives is a concept in
transition: Iberia was conquered at a time when walāʾ in its tribal form was of
decreasing relevance, and walāʾ in its courtly form had yet to take root fully.
Yet, if anything, there is evidence that the idea of Arabic descent retained much
of its power and prestige, as in the east. Genealogy, especially Arabic, was an
enormously popular genre in al-Andalus.86 The proportion of people with Arabic
nisbas – including non-tribally specific ones – actually grows in later biographical
dictionaries,87 although how many indicate the descendants of endogamous Arabs,
and how many are the legacy of mawālī ties being forgotten, missed, or deliber-
ately hidden by later descendants, is an open question. Examples abound of
individuals and families who faked their lineages for the sake of appearing to be
Arab, or hiding mawālī roots with their servile overtones.88 Two Berber dynasties
during the ṭāʾifa period, at Badajoz and Toledo, laid false claim to Arab ancestry:89
in a society so in thrall to tribal language, genealogy still counted. Above and
beyond the ambitions of individuals, the growth of tribal nisbas illustrates
broadening acculturation to Arabic norms, which were inseparable, conceptually
and traditionally, from Islam – even as al-Andalus was striving to mark itself off
from the trends of the rest of the Islamic world, and even though, as we have seen,
it may well have been a polity in which relatively few ethnic Arabs lived.
Ethnic conflict
To the end of the caliphal period, and beyond, al-Andalus was – to use Guichard’s
term – a ‘segmentary’ society.90 Guichard and the sources alike characterize
conflict within al-Andalus as tribal in nature, conducted between endogamous
clan groupings, but the real root of it seems to have been factionalism,91 expressed,
as was customary and expedient, in tribal language.92 Al-Andalus was certainly
divided – not just between clans, but variously by religious, economic, regional,
and political differences. Unrest and conflict were endemic. It was not simply a
case of Arabs against Berbers, although it often looks that way, particularly in the
eighth century and the first half of the ninth, before there were enough muwalladūn
to constitute a substantial demographic force.93 Each ethnic group, while sepa-
rated to a greater or lesser degree – legally and socially, in the case of Arabs and
the conquered non-Arabs, and often geographically in the case of the Berbers –
from the others, was also internally divided along political and factional lines.
Thus, for example, the Arabs were split into fractious groupings like the baladīs
(earliest settlers) and the Syrian junds (settlers of the 740s wave);94 they also
included powerful, semi-autonomous old families competing among themselves,95
and against the centralizing plans of the regime in Cordoba. A prominent example
of the latter is the revolt of Seville in the late ninth century, led by a Lakhmid clan,
the Banū Ḥajjāj, which resulted briefly (899–913) in an autonomous amirate.96 A
number of Arab lineages also intermarried with powerful non-Arab families. The
Banū Khaṭṭāb – a clan from the Syrian junds – numbered a daughter of conquest-
era potentate Theodemir among their ancestors,97 while the Banū Ḥajjāj had a
Visigothic royal, Witiza’s granddaughter Sara, among theirs.98 These divisions
among the Arabs held until the early tenth century, when the campaigns of ʿAbd
al-Raḥmān III (r. 912–61) consolidated power in the Cordoban government;
ethnic conflict during and after the fall of the caliphate was of a different nature.
Berber clans, for their part, seem to have kept more to themselves. They, too,
could be locally powerful: in the late ninth century, one clan, the Banū Tajīt, ruled
Guadiana.99 The frequent and extensive involvement of Berbers in revolts,
particularly Khārijite ones, is a testament to the cohesion of their shared identity100
– although by no means all Berbers took part in all revolts – and to their frustration
at being disenfranchised by continued Arab political domination in al-Andalus.
Rebelling in the name of sectarian movements gave religious legitimacy to both
their separateness and their opposition to Arab rule. The best known of these is the
revolt of 740, which spread from North Africa, saw the Andalusī amīr replaced
with a Berber imām,101 and left fearful traces in apocalyptic literature in Egypt and
Syria, in which a vast Berber insurrection in the Maghrib was presented as a
precursor to the End Times.102 There were numerous other Berber-centred upris-
ings, some of them Shīʿite, like that of 768–77 – led by one Shaqyā, who claimed
ʿAlid descent103 – or Ibn al-Qiṭṭ’s messianic army of 901.104
Claims – on the basis of Arabic accounts, possible toponym survivals, material
remains of household organization, and patterns of irrigation – that the Berbers
maintained hermetically-sealed, essentially anarchic clan groups, in areas like
Valencia,105 have yet to be borne out by archaeological investigations in any
conclusive way.106 The so-called ḥiṣn-qarya model of land ownership107 – that is,
a fortified building (ḥiṣn) to protect or oversee a neighbouring agricultural
settlement (qarya) – points to decentralized, segmentary social organization along
tribal lines,108 but there is nothing to indicate that such arrangements were the
province of Berbers (or Arabs) only, nor that they were truly autonomous. The
ḥiṣn seems to have functioned differently in different times and places; some
examples date from the ninth century, but most are from the tenth to the thirteenth
centuries, and their primary purposes seem to be defence in frontier zones109 or
the protection of shared irrigation sources.110 There is now increasing acceptance
that the qāʾid who controlled the ḥiṣn was an agent of the central government, not
an independent ‘lord’ or clan head.111
Other cleavages in Andalusī society were clearly political – increasingly, and
especially with the institution of the caliphate from 929, Umayyad family members
and their mawālī tended to get the best governmental jobs, leaving old Arabs and
the bulk of the muwalladūn out in the cold112 – and economic, with professions
apparently tending to run along ethnic lines.113 Anti-mawālī (and anti-muwallad)
prejudice still existed, as the lively biographical record of Cordoban Arab scholar
Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Salām al-Khushanī (d. 899) demonstrates.114 Other
prominent Hispano-Roman converts suffered too, their non-Arab origins and the
contingent suggestion of half-hearted piety proving convenient targets for their
rivals to aim at. Convert ʿAmr b. ʿAbd Allāh was a qāḍī during the reign of
Muḥammad I, but leading Arab families objected to him leading the Friday
prayers, claiming that it was unacceptable for them to pray behind – and thus
show deference to – a non-Arab.115 Another such, in the same reign, was Ibn
Antonian, a Christian who converted to Islam in order to win a promotion to
al-kātib al-aẓīm (chief administrator), reflecting the fact that, in this period, it was
becoming increasingly hard for non-Muslims to rise high in government service.
His enemies sought to discredit him – and, after his death, disinherit his family –
with claims that he was a crypto-Christian.116 Muwallad families, like their Arab
and Berber counterparts, also engaged in revolts, as we shall see.
Similarly, the Berbers were subject to extensive hostile stereotyping, as
heterodox, violent, and untrustworthy; they were widely seen as ‘the most
contemptible of peoples (akhass al-umam)’, notes the preamble to the anonymous
post-caliphal (and ebulliently pro-Berber) Kitāb mafākhir al-barbar,117 although
this work only gave the label of Berber to tenth-century and later arrivals.118
Al-Ḥamdānī’s comment that the Berbers had received nine-tenths of the world’s
violent character was far from uncommon.119 The very name ‘Berber’ could be
used as an insult;120 speculations on the origins of the Berbers emphasized their
lack of close kinship with the Arabs,121 or gave them very barbarian roots,122 and
Andalusī geographical works as late as the eleventh century discussed their past
paganism and present heterodoxy.123 Even the Chronicle of 754 appears to have
picked up on the Arab antipathy.124 Ibn Ḥabīb’s conquest narrative ends with
Mūsā b. Nuṣayr being questioned by Sulaymān on a variety of topics related to
his expedition, including the following:
[Sulaymān] said, ‘Tell me about the Berbers.’ [Mūsā] replied, ‘They are the
non-Arabs who most resemble the Arabs (hum ashbah al-ʿajam bi-al-ʿarab)
[in their] bravery, steadfastness, endurance and horsemanship, except that
they are the most treacherous people (al-nās) – they [have] no [care for]
loyalty, nor for pacts.’125
This trend, although always visible, became more pronounced after the fall of the
caliphate amid a fitna (1009–31) that many blamed on the more recent Berber
immigrants: the mercenaries introduced into al-Andalus by al-Ḥakam II from the
970s.126 Various post-tenth-century mawālī historians were not well inclined
towards Berbers, and employed customary non-Arab stereotyping against them.
Ibn Ḥayyān (d. 1076), for example – whose Muqtabis, although only partially
extant, greatly shapes our picture of the disorder surrounding the fall of the
caliphate – was, like many of his generation, bitter at the Berbers for their role in
the ruinous fitna, in which he lost everything.127 Ibn Ḥazm (d. 1064) likewise
castigated the more recently-arrived Berbers for their lack of assimilation to polite
Andalusī – that is, Arabic and Islamic – norms.128
Mawālī at court: the Umayyad inner circle

In the midst of this tension and conflict, a succession of Umayyad amīrs sought to
create their own, personally-loyal power base, in a similar – if less militarily-
focused – policy to that of the ʿAbbāsids with their Turkic slave-soldiers and
mercenaries in Baghdad and Samarra.129 This was another dimension of gift-
giving and clientage: using mawālī for state-building, by bestowing favours upon
an inner circle, through which authority can then be channelled.130 The tradition
stemmed from ʿAbd al-Raḥmān I (r. 756–88), who survived the massacre of his
family at the hands of ʿAbbāsid partisans in the year 750, and fled to al-Andalus,
where he took control of the government and established a new, independent
Umayyad amirate. By way of a base of support, he gathered the surviving
Umayyad mawālī (those clients that he inherited from his family), and established
ties with a number of others.131 In this, he maintained the pattern of his family,
whose administration had been increasingly staffed by mawālī in the decades up
to 750.132
Fifty mawālī associated with him or his children have been traced by Maribel
Fierro. The proportions of old and new clients among ʿAbd al-Raḥmān I’s mawālī
are roughly equal. Of the twenty-two new mawālī he accepted, several can be
spoken of in more detail: two joined him through walāʾ al-muwālāt, seven through
walāʾ al-ʿitq, and at least one was not a convert at all.133 These mawālī became his
personal followers and formed the core of his regime, monopolizing official roles
and the attendant financial rewards. It was a policy continued by his successors,
largely in partnership with descendants of these same mawālī, such as the Banū
Ḥudayr.134 The subsequent decades of Umayyad rule saw a contraction in
the meaning of mawālī and – from the reign of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān II (822–52) – the
social group to which the term applied.135 A small number of mawālī families
dominated the administration,136 and they were present in huge numbers in
scholarly circles.137 By the tenth century, when the Umayyads declared them-
selves caliphs again under ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III, mawālī had come to signify both
the dynasty’s honorary kin – its clients and their descendants – and lesser branches
of the ruling family.138 They took the Umayyad nisba,139 and some of the conquest
narratives show this later practice being projected backwards onto the earlier
period:
[Al-Walīd] summoned Mūsā b. Nuṣayr, client of the Umayyads (mawlā banī

Umayya) and descended from barbarians (ʿulūj).140
Whether of Arab descent or not – frequently, not – their status as Umayyad clients
made them second only to the ruler’s immediate family in the political pecking
order. Mawālī descent could, at least in court circles, be a badge of pride. ‘Arab’,
meanwhile, became a less favourable term in Umayyad historiography, signifying
the old families who maintained their local power bases and resisted centraliza-
tion.141 Most of the revolts recorded during the eighth and early ninth centuries
centred on ambitious or discontented configurations of Arabs or Berbers,142 but as
the ninth century wore on the muwallads became involved in the increasingly
tight competition for power.143 Again, the rebels were often prominent families
with a regional power-base, such as the Banū Qasī, who dominated Aragón until
the ninth century.144
One well-known figure – thanks to the survival of the portion of Ibn Ḥayyān’s
Muqtabis that deals with the period of his activity, and to that writer’s later imita-
tors – was ʿUmar b. Ḥafṣūn, a muwallad rebel of the late ninth and early tenth
centuries,145 whose motives have been much discussed, in large part because he
was once used as an example of ‘nativist’ reaction to Arab-Muslim rule. That idea
comes from his mid-career conversion to Christianity, accompanied by a gene-
alogy detailing no fewer than seven generations of his non-Muslim ancestors –
undoubtedly fabricated, probably around the time of his conversion for the very
purpose of portraying himself as a Christian hero, and thus gaining Christian
support.146 The fact that, ten years later, Ibn Ḥafṣūn returned to Islam, throwing in
his lot with the Fāṭimids, suggests that he was essentially an opportunist. He has
also been characterized as an exemplar of a wider trend, in which the muwalladūn
imitated Arab/Berber tribalism,147 and as a ‘pure blood’ survival of Visigothic
nobility trying to impose a feudal regime on the territories he annexed.148 While
Ibn Ḥafṣūn certainly extracted revenue from the cities under his control during his
extended revolt,149 it seems unlikely that he was anything more than a local
‘parvenu’,150 ambitious and resentful at having to pay taxes to the centre. Excluded
from participation in government by the nepotistic employment policies of the
Umayyad regime, he set out to amass what power he could during the disordered
reign of the weak ʿAbd Allāh. Yet he is an example both of how the bulk of non-
Arabs felt disenfranchised during the ninth century, and of how assumed lineage,
even non-Arab, might be put to use for political ends.
With the caliphate’s fall – largely through a failure to maintain the balance of
ethnic and factional tensions in al-Andalus in the face of a new Berber influx –
non-Arab ethnicity took on a renewed significance during the ṭāʾifa period, as
multiple competing statelets ruled by non-Arabs sprang up in the power vacuum
left behind.151 True to their Andalusī roots, they did not bow to the ailing ʿAbbāsid
caliphate;152 nor did they enjoy particularly easy relations with each other. It was
in this period that al-Andalus had its own shuʿūbī episode, two centuries after that
of the Islamic heartlands. Little survives of it besides a risāla written by one
Abū ʿĀmir b. Gharsiya al-Bashkunsī – who, as his name suggests, was a first-
generation muwallad of Basque origin. He was active in the ṭāʾifa court at Denia,
during the reigns of Mujāhid (d. 1045) and his son ʿAlī (d. 1076), non-Arabs of
‘Slavic’ origin (that is, descended from northern or eastern European slaves). The
risāla was a reaction against a panegyric written for a rival ṭāʾifa ruler, which
praised the Arab ancestry of its subject and criticized those who falsely claimed
such lineage. While Ibn Gharsiya’s work – and the various refutations directed
against it during the century that followed153 – was born of the later eleventh-
century Andalusī context of combative city-states, it would hardly be apparent
from a simple reading of the texts. For, in a further example of the hold that
Baghdadī literary traditions had over the Andalusī intellectual world, the original
risāla is firmly in the eastern shuʿūbī tradition; the glorious non-Arab past and
intellectual achievements that it celebrates are unequivocally Persian as well as
(and more locally-relevant, we might imagine) Byzantine.154 The decentralization
of power and culture in the ṭāʾifa period may have given non-Arabs a profusion
of small stages on which to express themselves,155 but the idiom to which
they resorted was a traditional, eastern Islamic one. Like his earlier, eastern
counterparts, Ibn Gharsiya’s concern is to open up wider Arab-Muslim culture to
non-Arabs such as himself, rather than to champion al-Andalus specifically.156
Mawālī in the conquest narratives

Where mawālī – and non-Arabs allied with Muslims more generally – appear in
the conquest narratives, they are the expression of several intellectual, political,
legal, and literary trends. Some of these issues had, as we have seen, less signifi-
cance in Andalusī history and society than they had elsewhere in the Islamic
world, but nonetheless they found their way into the historiographical tradition
because of the cultural weight still borne by the eastern past. Examples of these
mawālī (or mawālī-esque) figures are Ṭāriq b. Ziyād, the more nebulous Mughīth
al-Rūmī, and Sara the Goth.
Ṭāriq b. Ziyād
The story of the rivalry between Ṭāriq and Mūsā will be discussed more fully in
chapter five, but it bears consideration here. Arriving in al-Andalus after Ṭāriq has
done much of the work, Mūsā proceeds to appropriate his hard-earned plunder –
in the shape of the Table of Solomon – on the basis that Ṭāriq is only a disobedient
mawlā. Ṭāriq, however, tricks him by changing one of the Table’s legs, and the
whole thing culminates (usually) in the arrogant and greedy Mūsā getting his
comeuppance before the caliph in Damascus, where he cannot explain why the
legs are not identical. Given the initially-low status of mawālī in the early Islamic
world, it seems likely that the tale represents, schematically, a real rivalry between
commanders sent from the centre and subordinate local Berbers during the North
African and Spanish conquests and in the post-conquest settlement.157 Although
Mūsā was himself of non-Arab, mawālī descent, this aspect of his status is rarely
alluded to in the Spanish conquest narratives.158 Even in the exception quoted
above,159 Mūsā is positioned as a mawlā banī Umayya, a mawlā in the courtly
rather than the lowly, classical sense. Overwhelmingly, however, his mawlā iden-
tity is effaced and he appears as an archetypal member of the Arab elite, as seen
through shuʿūbīya eyes – doing none of the work but taking all of the credit160 –
and his conflict with Ṭāriq is presented not as an ethnic conflict, but as one between
patron and mawlā, or legal-Arab versus legal-non-Arab.
The narratives (riwāyāt) disagree on why Mūsā was so angry with Ṭāriq. It
was said: It was due to outrage at him, and rivalry; such may be deduced from
[his] falsely claiming (bi-iddiʿāʾ) the successes of Ṭāriq as his own, and the
seizure of the Table. [. . .] Among those who excused him, [it was] said: He
did that to him [to reinforce] his precedence (taqaddum) under his authority,
Ṭāriq being his mawlā, and because [Ṭāriq] had penentrated deeply into
[al-Andalus], endangering the Muslims [with him].161
There are three factors at work here. The first, as we saw in the previous chapter,
is a legal one: from a classical legal (and literary) standpoint, all historical
conquests ought to have been conducted under caliphal authority, since the early
caliphs were idealized as the heart of the Islamic world, and the later legal status
of a town or a population was dependent on how it had been conquered, and
by whom.162 Properly-delegated authority had to be demonstrated retrospectively
in the literary accounts: Mūsā had to write to the caliph for permission, and
Ṭāriq had to be shown to be under the proper control of his patron, Mūsā, who
was responsible for his actions. Thus, Ṭāriq is rebuked at Toledo for having
overstepped his remit – including temporarily assuming an expedition leader’s
prerogative in taking the pick of the spoils for himself163 – and must apologize for
his presumptuousness, in order to restore the proper balance of power between
Arab patron and non-Arab client. As Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam puts it:
[Ṭāriq] wrote to Mūsā b. Nuṣayr, briefing him about the conquest of

al-Andalus, and what spoils he had acquired. Mūsā, in turn, wrote to al-Walīd
b. ʿAbd al-Malik, recounting that but ascribing it (naḥalahu) to himself.
[Mūsā] also wrote to Ṭāriq, [instructing him] not to go beyond Cordoba until
he reached him, and he reprimanded him strongly. [. . .] Then he went to
Cordoba, where Ṭāriq received him and appeased him, telling him, ‘I am your
mawlā, and this conquest is yours.’164
The second factor is that, even if al-Andalus had few mawālī of its own, old
attitudes from the east remained potent. The relationship of al-Andalus with the
Islamic east was a complex one, expressed in ebullient political rivalry but also a
sense of cultural deficit. Al-Andalus was seen as something of a backwater, where
intellectual developments and literary forms arrived late and were mere imitations
of the greatness of the east.165 Despite the political and social changes, this
greatness remained conceptually linked with Arabic culture. Historians were
keenly aware of this, frequently borrowing eastern tropes to make their western
histories look more prestigious – just as a shuʿūbī writer such as Ibn Gharsiya did.
Thus all converts must have come to Arab society through walāʾ, and all mawālī
are assumed to be Muslims. In part, this probably comes from ninth-century and
later reworking of the histories, which were made to conform more closely to
classical legal norms, under which this was how walāʾ was supposed to work;
furthermore, as history-writing was an activity in which non-Arabs had an
increasing role, and prestige continued to be attached to Arab lineage, it could
signal attempts by later mawālī to smooth away the less classically-acceptable
edges of their own origins.166 But old Arab parochialism and disdain for mawālī
still had a voice, too, even after they had ceased to operate as true social forces in
either east or west.
This adds another dimension to the apparent anxiety about a non-Arab client
winning more prestige (and loot) than his patron. Could a mawlā – in classical legal
terms, usually a former slave, and a Berber, at that – legitimately make conquests at
all? Interestingly, it is apparent that not everyone conceived of Ṭāriq in such prob-
lematic terms: apparently without irony, al-Qarawī – responding to Ibn Gharsiya’s
shuʿūbī letter – called Ṭāriq an Arab hero.167 Conversely, there are signs of unease
over the activities of Mūsā, too, even though it tends not to be expressed in explicit
connection with his mawlā status; Mūsā is an ambitious independent player, a
parvenu amassing enormous wealth together with what could be read as a small
private army of mawālī.168 During the second wave of eastern conquests in the later
seventh and early eighth centuries, concerns arose at the spectre of over-mighty
generals and governors with large retinues of mawālī soldiers.169 Ninth-century
al-Andalus had seen a great many ambitious individuals attempt to carve out power
for themselves, separate from the state; the state, in turn, sponsored the writings of
many of the earliest conquest narratives that sought to hide or criticize this.
The final factor, somewhat at variance with the others, is a pro-mawālī one.
This is a heroic tale of a wily Berber outwitting an Arab – or someone coded as
such in the narrative – and receiving caliphal approbation for his defiance. It fits
with the Arab–Berber cultural rivalry that was a live issue in al-Andalus and North
Africa for a long time, whether because of periodic influxes of newly-converted
Berbers from the south, or in the language used to express contemporary faction-
alism and social tensions. In addition, many of those writing the histories were the
descendants of non-Arab converts who spent their professional careers facing
literary snobbery from both the heartlands and perhaps, as the shuʿūbī exchange
demonstrates, from closer to home, too. They might thus be expected to enjoy a
tale that poked fun at certain Arab cultural pretensions, or that upset the conven-
tional balance of social and political power. Finally, Ṭāriq – in having his case
taken up by an Umayyad caliph during the tale – also functions as a prototype of
high-status, personally-loyal courtly mawālī in caliphal al-Andalus, a link between
past and present practice. It is arguably this final reading that, in the conclusion to
the tale, wins out.
Mughīth al-Rūmī
A less common mawālī character in the conquest narratives is Mughīth al-Rūmī.
Mughīth seems to have been a late addition to the corpus of stories, as he appears
only in the anonymous compilations Akhbār Majmūʿa and Fatḥ al-Andalus,170 Ibn
ʿIdhārī (d. c. 1307), and – with a citation of al-Rāzī (d. 955) – al-Maqqarī (d.
1632).171 His main role is to carry out the conquest of Cordoba.172 Cordoba, for all
its significance in later Andalusī history, is overshadowed by Toledo in accounts
of the conquest and features infrequently, especially in pre-eleventh-century texts.
Ibn Ḥabīb mentions Cordoba only as part of an isolated anecdote in which Mūsā
prophesies the city’s destruction in two hundred years’ time;173 Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam
has two lines about its people insulting Ṭāriq and being ‘routed’ for their pains;174
Ibn al-Qūṭīya lists it in Ṭāriq’s itinerary without comment, and elsewhere repeat-
edly refers to it as though it were the capital city at the time of the conquest.175
Where Cordoba is given a siege narrative, it takes two distinct forms. The earliest
extant example of the short form is that of Ibn al-Shabbāṭ (d. 1221),176 who credits
Ṭāriq with taking the city, helped by a shepherd who points out a gap in the south
wall, and has the Muslim invaders intimidate the defenders into fleeing with the
strength of their cries of ‘Allāhu akbār!’177 (Both elements are common topoi.)
The citation for this tale (‘He said’) gives no obvious help as to sources, but Ibn
al-Shabbāṭ cites one of our tenth-century authors, ʿArīb b. Saʿīd (d. 980), else-
where in what survives of his work, and a convincing case has been made by Luis
Molina that the qāla here represents a continuation of this usage of ʿArīb’s
account.178 The Fatḥ al-Andalus, which again uses ʿArīb, has the same story in
more or less the same phrases.179 Ibn al-Shabbāṭ’s close contemporary, the east-
erner Ibn al-Athīr (d. 1234), has a single line summary: ‘As to the cavalry that
went to Cordoba: a shepherd pointed out to them a gap in its wall; they entered its
territory this way, and took possession of it.’180
The Akhbār Majmūʿa, Ibn ʿIdhārī, and al-Maqqarī share – with only minor
differences of detail and emphasis – a second, more elaborate form of the story.181
The basic outline is the same as the first. The Muslims hide in a thicket in the
vicinity of nearby Secunda (Shaqunda), where they meet a local who points
out the gap (thughra) in the wall of Cordoba; they use it to make a surprise
attack on the city, whose survivors flee and take refuge in a church. Some details
are absent (the takbīr), and new ones replace them (the gap is very hard to spot,
the Muslims use their turbans to climb up to the gap, the ‘king’ of the city has
only four hundred followers left to him). More significantly, for current purposes,
the story has a new Muslim hero: Mughīth, mawlā of ʿAbd al-Malik.182 Unlike
Ṭāriq, Mughīth’s designation aligns him firmly with the later type of Andalusī
mawlā, the courtly Umayyad loyalist; it also echoes later developments in the
ʿAbbāsid state, where mawlā amīr al-muʾminīn became an honorific bestowed
upon Turkish generals.183 Al-Maqqarī confirms that this designation for Mughīth
was current by at least the eleventh century, saying that Ibn Ḥayyān (d. 1076)
and ʿAbd Allāh b. Ibrāhīm al-Ḥijārī (d. 1188) ‘add him to the walāʾ of al-Walīd’.184
The Akhbār Majmūʿa and al-Maqqarī also give him the nisba al-Rūmī, suggesting
a Christian origin, like so many Andalusī converts. Al-Maqqarī notes that
Mughīth’s descendants continued to be linked with Cordoba, although a few
pages later he quotes a conflicting account that says he returned to the east after
the conquest.185 As Molina has shown, both al-Maqqarī and Ibn ʿIdhārī made
extensive use of Aḥmad al-Rāzī in their histories,186 although in each case it is
difficult to be sure if the source for the Cordoba episode is al-Rāzī. We have
support, however, from the Castilian Chronicle of 1344. This adaptation of al-Rāzī
contains a variant of the longer narrative, in which the shepherd is given a much
longer speech praising Spain in general and Cordoba in particular.187 Since there
is no sign of a siege narrative for Cordoba before al-Rāzī, it can therefore be
concluded that he originated it in the tenth century – and, furthermore, that he
chose to place a mirror of himself and his fellow Umayyad mawālī at the centre of
it. ʿArīb’s shorter version, in turn, is a variant composed later in the same century.
Mughīth plays no other role in Ibn ʿIdhārī’s account, beyond a brief mention
among Mūsā’s retinue upon the departure from al-Andalus;188 he may have been
used again by al-Rāzī but, lacking a full text, we cannot tell. In the Akhbār
Majmūʿa, Mughīth has some further interaction with Ṭāriq and Mūsā: it is Ṭāriq
who dispatches him to Cordoba,189 and later he echoes Ṭāriq’s complaints to the
caliph about Mūsā’s conduct190 – another example of a mawlā taking his patron to
task for domineering and greedy behaviour. Mughīth is also reprimanded by ‘a
messenger of al-Walīd’ for overstepping his bounds in designing a balāṭ (country
villa or estate) for himself in Cordoba: ‘This balāṭ is not appropriate for you.
Rather it is suitable for the governor of Cordoba.’191 Although in the eleventh
century there did exist an estate known as the Balāṭ Mughīth, in the thriving
western suburb of Cordoba,192 it is more than likely that the origins of this partic-
ular anecdote lie in aetiology, not in history: that is, it is an attempt to map conquest
narrative onto the present layout of the city.193
In the Fatḥ al-Andalus, the image of Mughīth as an Umayyad agent is made
even stronger, as he is presented not as the conqueror of Cordoba – although he
does later make a raid into Galicia – but rather as someone sent to al-Andalus by
his patron (al-Walīd, in this version) to reprimand Mūsā.194 He is given land near
Cordoba, out of the fifth.195 Part of this story perhaps has an earlier origin; in the
Futūḥ Miṣr, Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam names as Ṭāriq’s messenger to the caliph,
reporting Mūsā’s injustices, one Muʿattib (or Mughīth; without diacritical dots,
the names are identical in Arabic script196) al-Rūmī, ‘a slave (ghulām) of al-Walīd
b. ʿAbd al-Malik’.197 Given that earlier in the same text we are also told this
Muʿattib ‘marched in the direction of Cordoba’ (though never what he actually
did there),198 it looks likely that the Akhbār Majmūʿa compiler conflated the two
similar names into one individual when he combined the various traditions,
producing a new character almost as prominent as Ṭāriq and Mūsā, or that a
tenth-century writer had access to the Futūḥ Miṣr and decided to ‘complete’
Muʿattib/Mughīth’s story with a Cordoba conquest narrative.
Sara the Goth
Like many of the historians of the amirate and caliphal periods in al-Andalus, as
we saw in the previous chapter, Ibn al-Qūṭīya came from a long line of prominent
and high-status Umayyad mawālī;199 his father, as well as being the qāḍī of
Ecija,200 had played an important role in settling the revolt of Seville (899–913) in
favour of the Umayyads.201 Ibn al-Qūṭīya is unusual among Andalusī historians in
that he devotes a portion of his work to the exploits of his Christian ancestor, our
third mawlā-type figure: a Visigothic noblewoman named Sara, granddaughter of
the penultimate king, Witiza. But this interest of his is linked with the tenth-
century boom in creatively reinterpreting genealogy. ‘Proof’ that one’s family
had converted early, or, in the case of mawālī, that they were associated with
higher-status Arabic families, went a long way towards boosting prestige.202 Ibn
al-Qūṭīya’s history falls into this second category: in opening his work with an
account of how his ancestors had formed pacts with, and received justice from,
the Damascene Umayyad caliphs, he was undoubtedly setting out his stall as a
rightfully-prominent member of the caliphal court.
In the tale, Sara journeys to Damascus to petition the caliph over her rights to
land-ownership, after her uncle Arṭūbas203 seizes estates – in the west of al-Andalus,
the text tells us – that her sons inherited from her late husband:
[Sāra] sailed to Syria with her brothers, landing at Ascalon. She proceeded
until she reached the gate of Hishām b. ʿAbd al-Malik. She made known her
business [there], [invoked] the agreement (ʿahd) concluded between her
father and al-Walīd, and made a complaint against her uncle Arṭubās.
[Hishām] received her, and she saw ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Muʿāwiya, a boy in
his presence. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān would [later] remember that incident in
al-Andalus, and when [Sāra] came to Cordoba he permitted her to enter the
palace to [see] the family [of the amīr]. Hishām wrote on her behalf to
Hanẓala b. Ṣafwān al-Kalbī, governor (ʿāmil) of Ifrīqīya, regarding the execu-
tion of the agreement of al-Walīd b. ʿAbd al-Malik [. . .] Thereafter, the
caliph Hishām gave her in marriage to ʿĪsā b. Muzāḥim. Arriving in al-Andalus
with her, [ʿĪsā] recovered (qabaḍa) her estates. He is the ancestor of [the
Banū] al-Qūṭīya, and they had two sons, Ibrāhīm and Isḥāq.204
Sara plays on what is essentially a walāʾ relationship, established between her father
and al-Walīd, to get what she wants. The caliph gives her back her land, and in
return is able to exercise a quintessential patron’s right: choosing a husband for her
(another Umayyad mawlā).205 She even sees the future ʿAbd al-Raḥmān I, further
strengthening the ties between her family and that of the Umayyads in Iberia.
Although Ibn al-Qūṭīya has been claimed for Spanish nationalism,206 Maribel
Fierro has elucidated a more convincing goal for his work: he is championing
the special relationship between the Umayyads and their mawālī.207 He boosts the
dynasty’s claim to rule by anchoring their conquest in co-operation between Arab
and Berber conquerors, Islamic central authority, and the Hispano-Roman
populace: a message of unity after the endemic ethnic conflict of the previous
century, and perhaps a shuʿūbī style riposte to those who identified Islamic solely
with Arabic. As Ann Christys has argued, Sara appears in his work as a symbolic
legitimation of the Muslim conquest, willingly accepting her subordinate status
while also receiving the proper protection from it. She is also – like Ṭāriq – a
precursor to the personal clients of the writer’s own time; furthermore, the names of
the resulting children ring with religious import.208 The Chronicle of 754 does not
discuss Sara, but does allude to a similar early marriage alliance between a member
of the Christian elite (in this case, Eudo of Aquitaine’s daughter) and an Umayyad
(one of Hishām’s sons) – in the context of Muslim campaigns in the Pyrenees.209
Conclusion
Patronage in the medieval Islamic world took a number of different forms, from a
highly codified mechanism of social integration, to a more informal but powerful
system of political control. In al-Andalus, it was used less for generalized social
integration and Arabicization, and more as a political and cultural tool of the
court: both because it was less necessary in the eighth century when the state was
so geared towards Arabicization anyway, and because the conquest elite was
never as homogeneously Arab in al-Andalus as it was elsewhere. The creation of
a corps of personally-loyal mawālī gave the ruling Umayyad dynasty, in theory,
families who followed them generation after generation, in counterbalance to the
many prominent Arab, Berber, and muwallad families that resisted, undermined,
and actively revolted against their rule. Mawālī derived their influence from their
relationship to the Umayyads, while the rest of the Andalusī elite jostled for power
through rivalry and revolt. Arabicization of this diverse society – which was well
advanced by the tenth century – came about not through walāʾ, but through
already well-developed administrative systems, literary culture, and less formal
patronage networks. All of these things privileged facility with Arabic – and, from
the mid-ninth century, Islamic cultural norms and faith – as a means to communi-
cate and advance in government and society.
Furthermore, the ideology of clientage, and the literary conventions surrounding
it, was sufficiently elastic to accommodate diverse forms, and sufficiently enduring
to shape historical consciousness long after its social reality. So, too, were
attitudes to non-Arabs moulded by literary forms and received ideas; while
circumstances did sometimes lend impetus to the prejudice seen in the literary
sources, more often they are simply reflecting the static nature of transmission
within Islamic historiography, based as it was upon stereotypical framings of
events passed down with little alteration even when their relevance had declined.
This makes it more striking when innovations appear in the tradition, like Ibn
al-Qūṭīya’s efforts to make the conquest look more co-operative than coercive, or
the late emergence of Mughīth, as a representative of a mawlā type that matched
the authors’ reality – if not that of the conquest – rather more closely. At times,
Islamic historiography could, and did, break its own conventions.
4 To the ends of the earth
Extremes of east and west in Arabic
geographical and ʿajāʾib writings
This chapter will set the scene for a study of how and why the literary presentation
of eighth-century Muslim conquests differed from those of the seventh century.
One aspect of, and explanation for, this different treatment lies in the geography
of these later conquests; places such as Iberia, West Africa, Hind, and the Indian
Ocean lay long distances from the central Islamic lands, and from central Islamic
government. Their cultural and political ties to the centre of the empire often
remained loose, in some cases for many centuries after their conquest – insofar as
they were conquered in the eighth century at all, much less ruled in any systematic
sense. From the perspective of writers patronized by the caliphal court of Baghdad,
and of later scholars who drew upon their work, such places could appear unruly
and unfamiliar, and thus a source of unease. Their perceived otherness from
Baghdad – and other centres of learning where traditions about them were
traded – invited explanation and attracted legends. The mark of both explanation
and legend may be seen upon the narratives of their conquests.
I shall begin with a broad discussion of the conceptual division of ‘known’ and
‘unknown’ space that developed in medieval Muslim geographical thought,
and the position of ‘peripheral’ territories – such as, viewed from certain angles,
al-Andalus – that did not easily fit into either category. Peripheral areas might be
under Muslim rule, or they might lie on Islam’s borders, but in either case they
might be considered disordered and dangerous because of their proximity to chaos
– that is, to the great ‘Ocean’ that was believed to surround the safe, inhabited
world. The peripheries marked the limits of human civilization, and also its weak
points; boundaries could blur, and chaos bleed through. This idea opened up much
wider and more fantastical possibilities for what a Muslim raiding party or
conquest army might encounter in such regions. It fostered narratives focused on
confronting otherness, and battling with it: whether overcoming that otherness
and imposing order – which, as we shall see, Alexander the Great often does in the
Islamic tradition – or being overcome by its strange powers, as occurs in certain
conquest-related legends, like that of City of Copper.
This discussion will be followed by case studies of how medieval writers illu-
minated the themes of geographical otherness and chaos versus order through
motifs collectively and generically known as ʿajāʾib. These ʿajāʾib included
fantastical lands and cities, islands, and statues and idols that mark the edges of
70 Extremes of east and west
the known world. This is not to say that ʿajāʾib were only present on the edges of
the world; as signs of the wonder of creation, of God at work, and of the miracles
associated with prophets, ʿajāʾib could be very much ‘mainstream’.1 But a writer
such as al-Yaʿqūbī (d. c. 900), whose Kitāb al-buldān deals almost entirely with
the lands of Islam, avoided ʿajāʾib in his work,2 and in general they were far more
common in accounts of the periphery – the far north and south as well as the east
and west, although here I shall concentrate on the latter pair, given the location of
the eighth-century conquests. When placed on the periphery, ʿajāʾib carried a
different, or additional, meaning: not just wonder but threat.
A great deal of research has been done on tracing the traditional and mythic
roots of these legends – most recently, and substantively, by Julia Hernández
Juberías3 – and I shall draw upon this work in what follows. But the central
argument of this chapter concerns the literary employment of such myths – their
presentation, and the ways in which authors used them to express their thematic
interests – rather than their origin or transmission as such.
The view from Baghdad: aspects of medieval

Muslim geography
The Islamic geographical tradition was born of the intellectual pursuits of the
ninth- and tenth-century caliphal court, infused with older received wisdom
from a number of different channels.4 The fields of history and of adab (the
diverse anecdotal knowledge that a well-mannered courtier should have at his
fingertips), and classificatory genres like ṭabaqāt, were created or re-cast in an
atmosphere of enthusiasm for encyclopaedic learning. This fashion for wide-ranging
– if not particularly deep – knowledge lent itself to, and created a demand for,
geographical compendiums.5 Similarly, the techniques and frameworks – along
with, arguably, the adabī belief that learning could be a source of moral improve-
ment6 – used to showcase such learning were taken up also by geographical writers.
Fuelling, and fuelled by, this enthusiasm was the late eighth- and ninth-century
translation movement, an intellectual and antiquarian enterprise centred on – if
not exclusively led by – the caliphal court and administration in Baghdad. Intellec-
tual curiosity, caliphal propagandizing and courtiers’ desire for prestige brought
selected works from Pahlavi, Greek (often via Syriac), and Sanskrit firmly into the
Arabic orbit for the first time, making pre-Islamic geographical knowledge – along
with astronomy, mathematics, medicine and, a little later, philosophy – accessible to
a wider audience of scholars and officials.7
There were pragmatic reasons for such translation: Ibn Khurdādhbih (d. 911),
who wrote his Masālik wa-al-mamālik as part of his duties as the director of the
caliphal postal service, used newly-available Sasanian texts for information on
the topography of the Persian east.8 But the impact of the translated material
went far beyond surveys of tax districts and calculations of the quickest routes
between towns;9 Muslim geographical writing was thus enabled to supplement
the Qurʾānic conception of the world with theoretical models drawn from a variety
of antecedents.10 These models included the Greek division of different territories
Extremes of east and west 71
into ‘climes’, as explored in Ptolemy’s (d. 168) Almagest among others,11 the
Persian typology of rings as used by Ibn Khurdādhbih (himself the grandson of a
Persian convert),12 and the idea that the world was entirely bounded by an
enormous sea, the Ocean.13 This surrounding Ocean – often called baḥr al-muḥīṭ
or baḥr al-ẓulūmāt (‘sea of shadows’) by Muslim writers – features frequently in
Arabic and other writings, usually as a forbidding space.14 It is the unknown – and
therefore dangerous – region lying outside the known world, continually threat-
ening to turn the order of the internal to the chaos of the external.15 In pre-Islamic
Jewish tradition, the Ocean is a wilful entity, appearing as a would-be rival to God
and often associated with the Leviathan.16 In medieval Islamic tradition, the
danger it poses is to human beings rather than to God;17 territories lying close to
the Ocean, it followed, were marginal and filled with risk.18 The earliest of
our Andalusī chroniclers, Ibn Ḥabīb, writes of Mūsā conquering the whole of
Iberia until he reaches the shore of the Ocean ‘which no-one had ever sailed
across’, where his journey ends.19
The Ocean was also the domain of mythic heroes. This aspect is particularly
strong in the complex corpus of Arabic tales surrounding Alexander the Great,
who is portrayed as spending much time exploring – and taming or confining –
these dangerous peripheral territories.20 Stories probably originating in Christian-
ized versions of the Alexander Romance have the hero journeying westwards (or
eastwards) in search of the Land of Darkness and the Water of Life, both of which
were supposed to lie in or beyond the Ocean; in some versions he ultimately
ascends to the celestial realms.21 Just as different geographical models of the
world were taken up by different Muslim writers, however, the various cultural
traditions that fed into Islam’s Alexander produced many different images of him,
from Graeco-Roman conqueror and builder of cities to the brutal usurper of
Persian accounts.22 Unsurprisingly – given the fondness of medieval writers for
co-opting semi-legendary figures to the greater glorification of their subjects,
however tenuous the grounds for it – references to Alexander’s Andalusian
adventures abound in the geographies,23 and this was not the only connection the
Arabic tradition made between Alexander and al-Andalus, as will be seen below.
On a broader scale, Islamic writers throughout the period did their best to write
Alexander into scriptural history, speculatively assigning him a lineage from
patriarchs including Noah and Abraham.24
Contrary to Xavier de Planhol’s contention, there was no abrupt or decisive
shift in geographical writing towards the marvellous, and away from the factual,
during the tenth century;25 the two aspects co-existed all along. Medieval Muslim
geographies were not, after all, technical writing, but work written for patrons –
often rulers – by secretaries and courtiers, subject to the conventions and demands
of adab and bureaucracy alike.26 These writers had to provide information, but
they also had to – indeed, wished to – educate and entertain;27 thus could Ibn
Khurdādhbih compose a work in which detailed itineraries of postal stations and
provincial revenues sat alongside a supposed eyewitness narrative of a journey
into the domain of scriptural villains Gog and Magog. Central to depictions of
al-Andalus and other less-familiar lands was the evocation of distance and strange-
ness through attention to fantastical anecdotes and ʿajāʾib. ʿAjāʾib is a term that
first turns up in tafsīr, derived from a Qurʿānic verb signifying man’s proper
response – wonder – to the world that God has created.28 It applied to things that
had to be accepted by man without any assumption of understanding.29 In histor-
ical and – more particularly – in geographical and cosmological works, it came to
signify anything in the world that was beyond man’s normal experience. The term
was applied to a host of unusual places and monuments, usually but not always
with some link to the ancient world,30 as well as – to paraphrase André Miquel – to
anything prodigal and unnatural within nature.31 ʿAjāʾib were a favourite with
adab-inclined writers, bringing a level of aesthetic exaggeration and metaphor
into their accounts, and were undoubtedly crowd-pleasers.32 But they also served
to reinforce distance and dislocation, contrasting describer and described, past and
present, Islam (civilized, homogeneous, ordered) and Elsewhere (chaotic, diverse,
infidel).33 Geographical writing was engaged in affirming Islamic identity,34 and
ʿajāʾib carried an implicit judgement upon the lands in which they were found: a
cultured frisson of danger and disdain for these regions that were, after all, not
fully under Baghdad’s control or in its cultural orbit. Al-Andalus, as the edge of
the known world and the place where the sun set, is portrayed as an unsettling
region in many medieval works.35 As a result, it accumulated more than its fair
share of weird tales and strange sights – traditions that were even reproduced in
the work of Andalusī writers such as Ibn Ḥabīb, who presumably knew that his
homeland was not, in fact, the province of man-eating ants or enchanted cities.
Similar ideas and stories were attached to other peripheries, such as the West
African coast,36 China,37 and the islands of the Indian Ocean.
Ultimately, unknown lands could be feared – even or perhaps especially when
they were at their most fascinating – precisely because they were unknown, except
through legend and eschatology. In this, the translated material enriched the
Islamic tradition without necessarily making it better informed. The furthest
reaches of east and west were on the fringes of the world known to the various
geographers upon which medieval authors drew, and thus were similarly Other to
the medieval authors themselves; received, fantastical images became literary
fixtures despite all evidence to the contrary. Iberia had been a ‘wild west’ for the
Greeks, and so it was for the Muslims, too;38 a frontier zone on the edge of
the supernatural that was, if not lawless, then certainly insufficiently controlled.
Travel-writing added some nuance to the picture,39 notably when – as in the
case of al-Masʿūdī (d. 955/6) – it was undertaken as part of a conscious programme
to learn the world.40 Yet even for al-Masʿūdī, personal experiences were only a
supplement to the information that might be gleaned from books, or from learned
individuals found in the places to which one travelled. On the whole, travel-
writing had generic and conceptual models to obey (and an audience, we might
assume, with certain expectations of the weird and wonderful to be met).41
Travel-writing, too, was part of a long Graeco-Roman and late antique tradition
of the more-or-less fantastic couched as, or inescapably mixed with, mimetic
observation – adventure on the edges of the civilized world, sometimes with
polemical purpose.42 It would be astonishing if it did not contain at least
something of the marvellous, and indeed what we find is – as in the geography –
an inseparable blend of practical information and campfire tales. Furthermore, as
with many medieval Arabic genres, pre-existing material was continually
reshaped, rather than invented or re-researched, to bring out themes pertinent to
the present.43 Travel was rarely – at least in the earlier centuries of Islam – under-
taken with exploration in mind.
Expressing conceptual boundaries: distinguishing internal

from external
Holding back the external: Yājūj wa-Mājūj

The Qurʾānic figure of Dhū al-Qarnayn – ‘the Two-Horned’ – is usually, but not
exclusively,44 identified with Alexander the Great. Some medieval writers theo-
rized that he gained the epithet because he ruled both of the ‘horns’ of the world,
the extremes of east and west,45 and tales of both the Alexander(s) of romance and
the Alexander of scripture sit alongside each other in classical and medieval
historical writings. But, since Dhū al-Qarnayn’s primary claim to inclusion and
praise in the Qurʾān is not as a conqueror of overweening ambition but as a
properly-pious imposer of order, creative readings were required to reconcile
the two images into a single, historicized figure.46 In the latter capacity, he is
said – in various eastern versions of Pseudo-Callisthenes’ lost third-century BCE
Alexander romance, as well as in the Qurʾān – to have been responsible for the
construction of a vast wall between two mountains in the far east, to prevent a pair
of tribes called Yājūj wa-Mājūj (the ‘Gog and Magog’ of Jewish tradition) from
over-running the world.47 This wall, or gate, will hold until the end of time, when
God will open the barrier and set them loose – a theme that became very popular
in Christian apocalypses from the fifth century, especially in Syriac,48 and was
taken up also in Muslim apocalyptic.49
This act also accorded Dhū al-Qarnayn a starring role in geographical accounts
of the ‘extreme’ east. The earliest versions of this are those of Ibn Khurdādhbih, 50
and the Persian Ibn al-Faqīh51 – who was writing c. 903, although his heavily
adab-inflected Kitāb al-Buldān only survives now in an abridgement by ʿAlī
al-Shayzanī (d. 1022)52 – both of whom reproduce (in part or, in the latter case, in
apparent whole) the supposed eyewitness account of an appropriately-named
envoy to the east, one Sallām al-Turjumān (‘the Interpreter’, a name bestowed to
fit a role if ever there was one). Ibn Khurdādhbih’s fuller version was in turn used
as the basis of the descriptions of Yājūj wa-Mājūj by many other authors, including
al-Muqaddasī (d. after 990).53 In a framing scene reminiscent of that which usually
opens a parallel fantastic journey to the west, the City of Copper story, the
traveller (in this case, Sallām) journeys to distant lands (China) at the behest of a
caliph (al-Wāthiq) who is fascinated by the deeds of a mythic hero (Dhū
al-Qarnayn) in a distant land (north-eastern Asia). The account most likely
represents knowledge of the Great Wall of China filtered through an expectation of
Qurʾānic marvels; it is notable in this context that the wall is described as
being adorned with copper (nuḥās), a material that occurs again and again in ʿajāʾib
tales. The account also highlights the anxieties surrounding places so
far away as to be considered wholly alien. The phrasing is revealing; the caliph, we
are told, requested a report on ‘The wall which Dhū al-Qarnayn built between us
and Yājūj wa-Mājūj.’54
The tribes of Yājūj wa-Mājūj are usually described as subhuman or at least
incredibly ugly.55 They threaten not only their immediate neighbours, the
quotation indicates, but ‘us’: the caliphal envoy narrating the tale, the caliph, the
author, and their audience in the Islamic heartlands. Within the world, just,56
but external to the part of it that mattered – Islam – Yājūj wa-Mājūj had to be kept
out; civilization had to be shielded from such disordered elements. Their escape,
after all, would signal the beginning of the End.57 The Ethiopic version of the
Alexander romance, which seems to have been heavily coloured by the Islamic
tradition58 – Alexander is referred to as ‘the Two-Horned’ almost throughout,59
and many of his letters ‘quoted’ therein begin with phrasings strongly reminiscent
of the basmala60 – has the same story. This text goes into considerable detail about
the chaotic danger represented by the peoples of Gog and Magog, recounting such
disturbing inversions of decency among them as the ritual cooking of babies, and
– the horror – women who are fiercer and stronger than their menfolk.61 The same
elements are present, with the same implications, in descriptions of remote –
marginal, non-Islamic – Indian Ocean lands, such as Buzurg b. Shahriyār’s
account of the ‘Isle of Women’, as we shall see. It is presumably no coincidence
that writers working in the eleventh century, and later, after large parts of the
Islamic world had come under the dominion of Turkic peoples, tended to fore-
ground a supposed genealogical link between Yājūj wa-Mājūj and the Turks
through a shared descent from Yapheth, son of Noah.62
The Andalusī geographer al-Zuhrī makes the same link, but adds the Berbers (and
the Slavs) to the family.63 In this, he is of his time and place. Little is known of
al-Zuhrī except that he was writing in the latter half of the twelfth century, and thus
presumably part of the literary tradition that still recalled the early eleventh-century
fitna with bitterness directed at the Berbers; to judge from the large number of
surviving manuscripts, his work enjoyed wide diffusion. A short, anonymous Arabic
version of the Alexander romance found in Iberia even transplants Yājūj wa-Mājūj
and Dhū al-Qarnayn’s wall-building to the west. During an encounter with a tribe
‘beyond the islands (jazāʾir) of al-Andalus’, the hero hears the distant sound of
Yājūj wa-Mājūj plotting their attack upon the world from the other side of a nearby
mountain, and promptly sets about building a wall to keep them contained.64 This
does not seem to be an avenue that other Andalusī writers chose to pursue, however;
al-Zuhrī and others leave Yājūj wa-Mājūj in the east, where they mention them at
all, preferring other stories of Dhū al-Qarnayn’s protectiveness instead.
Protecting the internal: statues, lighthouses, and other warnings

The conflation of Alexander with Dhū al-Qarnayn gave the former, as has been
said, the thematic role of being not just conqueror and ruler but also the protector
of civilization against the chaos that was assumed to lie outside it. He is often seen
fulfilling this role in Islamic geographical writings, whether raising the wall in the
east, or setting up statues in the west, to prevent the unwary from venturing too near
to the Ocean or to protect them against what might come out of it.65 Al-Masʿūdī, in
his account of Alexander’s construction of Alexandria, makes it clear that part of
the function of its lighthouse was to protect the city against enemies; it was adorned,
he says, with copper tamāthīl (images or statues) each holding out a forbidding
hand.66 Both Alexander and Solomon are also credited with founding a string of
cities – perhaps the most obvious shorthand for the establishment of civilization,
and security for its inhabitants – in the further reaches of east and west.67
Such a mission was particularly pointed and necessary in al-Andalus. The
Iberian Peninsula is surrounded, on three and a half sides, by sea; in medieval
Islamic terms, this made it all too close to the Ocean.68 This is perhaps reflected in
the toponymy of the area. The Arabic name for Algeciras is al-jazīra al-khaḍrāʾ,
‘the green island’; this may be a reference to its proximity to the Ocean, which
was sometimes called the baḥr al-akhḍar.69 The Fāṭimid partisan70 Ibn Ḥawqal
(wr. 977), who visited al-Andalus in the mid-tenth century, puts it in typically
stark terms:
Al-Andalus [has] two frontiers (ḥaddāni): one frontier with the lands of
unbelief (dār al-kufr), and one with the Ocean (baḥr al-muḥīṭ).71
Even sympathetic writers apparently saw al-Andalus – just like eastern Asia – as
an edge of the world, where by definition anything might happen. Order had to be
imposed, and this Alexander – among others – is duly shown to do, most expli-
citly through accounts that credit him with building a bridge across the Straits
of Gibraltar, an exercise of (super)human will over the Ocean,72 and a clear
and surely not coincidental parallel with his scriptural wall-building exploits in
the east.73 He is also sometimes credited with creating the lighthouse, and/or an
idol (ṣanam), said to have stood at Cádiz (Qādis). The Andalusī traveller and
ʿajāʾib-collector al-Gharnāṭī (d. 1169), whose Tuḥfat al-albāb was the first Arabic
work dedicated solely to marvels, says this ṣanam was the work of Dhū al-Qarnayn;
he emphasizes this association by following that description with an account of
the lighthouse of Alexandria.74
A more common, and earlier, version of the Cádiz lighthouse and its copper
‘idol’ – variously, ṣanam75 or ṭilasm76 (more usually ‘talisman’ or ‘seal’) – links
them with Hercules rather than Alexander, but the import and purpose are largely
the same. The first surviving account is that of al-Masʿūdī, whose description of
the lighthouse echoes the one he gives of Alexandria’s: it is decorated with many
tamāthīl, their hands outstretched, and an inscription warning that none shall pass
this way between the Mediterranean and the Ocean (referred to earlier in the
passage as the baḥr uqyānus).77 His Andalusī contemporary Aḥmad al-Rāzī (d.
955) – to judge, as usual, from quotations elsewhere – had a similar version of the
story,78 and he gives some clues as to its source. He mentions an idol at Cádiz
twice in the course of his introductory geographical sketch of ‘triangular’
al-Andalus79: once in reference to Cádiz, and once comparing a similar structure
in Galicia to it.80 In a more detailed description of the town he talks of Hercules
building a column there, and beginning one in Galicia that was later finished by
our old friend Ishbān.81 Al-Rāzī took much of his geographical information about
Iberia from Orosius’ (d. after 418) History Against the Pagans, which was written
c. 415–17. The Latin text was, according to Ibn Khaldūn, sent to Cordoba as a
diplomatic gift from Constantinople. It was translated into Arabic in the mid-tenth
century by Qāsim b. Aṣbagh (d. 951) – whom we met in chapter three, teaching
al-Rāzī and others – and an unnamed ‘Christian qāḍī’, at the behest of the future
al-Ḥakam II,82 an enthusiastic collector of non-Arabic scholarship.83 Al-Rāzī’s
conception of al-Andalus as triangular comes from Orosius,84 and is a keystone, in
turn, of many subsequent works, both geographical and historical, that drew on
either al-Rāzī or the Orosius translation directly.85 Orosius, however, only
mentions a lighthouse in Galicia, not at Cádiz,86 suggesting that al-Rāzī
introduced this element into the description himself; along with the triangle, this
addition persisted in the subsequent tradition.
Like Dhū al-Qarnayn’s wall that blocked off Yājūj wa-Mājūj, the lighthouse/
idol(s) anecdote probably represents an ʿajāʾib-ification of ancient geographical
knowledge, which had long placed the ‘pillars of Hercules’ at the Straits,87 or even
of genuine material remains. A Roman lighthouse still stands today in La Coruña
in Galicia. This has been most commonly associated with Hercules, although
attempts to claim it for other traditions are not unknown; an eleventh-century
compilation of Irish legendary history credited it to one King Breogán.88 Regarding
Cádiz, al-Zuhrī describes a humanoid statue (timthāl, ṣanam) atop the lighthouse
there; in the course of refuting what he considers the fallacious detail of it holding
a key in its hand, he says, ‘I have seen it several times’.89 As with the polemical
links made between the Turks and Yājūj wa-Mājūj, there was a change of focus in
how the Cádiz statue was framed, in the light of later political catastrophe at the
hands of non-Arab outsiders – in this case, due to the eleventh-century fitna and
the subsequent Berber conquests in Iberia. Yāqūt (d. 1229), an enormously influ-
ential encyclopaedia geographer, and a convert of Greek origin, says that the idol
was built – by a suitor competing for a local woman’s hand – with the aim of
protecting Iberia by warding off the Berbers;90 drawing on Yāqūt, like so many
subsequent writers,91 the eastern cosmographer al-Qazwīnī (d. 1283) concurs.
This legend, which recalls one that the Graeco-Roman tradition associated with
Sicily,92 was evidently constructed with hindsight, like that of the House of Locks
in Toledo, since al-Zuhrī reports that the statue was destroyed in 1145–6, during
the rebellion (al-fitna al-thāʾira) of ʿAlī b. ʿĪsā b. Maymūn. He adds:
The people of al-Andalus used to think that it was a talisman (ṭilasm),

[protecting] activity (ʿamal) in the sea, and that if it was destroyed no-one
would be able to enter the sea. But when it was destroyed, nothing changed.93
There are plenty of other statues in accounts of east and west; they are usually
copper, a prestige material – particularly when inlaid94 – second only to gold and
silver.95 Like the idol of Cádiz in its various incarnations, statues protect, or warn;
they mark the edges of the world, and provide ambiguous reminders of the past.
Ibn al-Faqīh, apparently on the basis of a report by ʿAbd Allāh b. ʿAmr b. al-ʿĀṣ,
numbers among the four wonders of the world ‘a copper horse bearing a copper
rider’ in al-Andalus; on the rider’s outstretched hand is written a warning that
anyone venturing beyond it will be ‘swallowed by ants’.96 His contemporary Ibn
Khurdādhbih has a similar piece about a copper horse and rider, the latter again
with an outstretched forbidding arm, although no message.97 Al-Bakrī (d. 1094)
provides a ‘context’ – during the conquest of Iberia, he says, Mūsā encountered
one in the far north of the peninsula – presumably to explain the Muslim armies’
lack of steady success north of the Pyrenees.98 But the growth of this story did not
stop there; by the twelfth century, the Andalusī al-Gharnāṭī could offer a version
that dramatized the bizarre consequences of ignoring the warning:
They found [. . .] a statue of a man, with a copper tablet in his hand. On the
tablet was written, ‘There is no way beyond [here]. Turn back, and do not
enter this land, or else you will be destroyed.’ The amīr [Mūsā] said, ‘This is
an uncultivated land, abundant of trees, vegetation, and water. How will
anything here destroy the army?’ He ordered a party of his slaves to enter that
land. From behind the trees, ants the size of ferocious lions dashed at them.
They dismembered those men and their horses. They bore down on the army,
numerous as clouds – until they reached the statue, where they halted, and did
not come beyond it. [The army] marvelled at that, and left.99
‘Idols’ in the east, although sometimes presented with sinister overtones or a lack
of comprehension, are more easily explicable as genuine cult objects; such, at any
rate, seems to be the case with a copper bird on a column described by Ibn
al-Faqīh,100 statues of the Buddha,101 or the temple of Multān, which appears in
both the historical and geographical traditions, as we shall see in chapter seven.
Liminal spaces
Islands
De Planhol’s contention that the sea was seen as uniquely inimical and dangerous
to all Islamic communities at all times has been demolished, convincingly, by
Lawrence Conrad.102 Early and medieval Muslims were by no means land-bound;
there were plenty of military campaigns in the first few centuries of Islam, notably
against Constantinople, that made extensive use of maritime transport, and there
is no evidence of alarm regarding the ordinary, non-Ocean sea in any historio-
graphical account of Ṭāriq’s voyage to Iberia. The detailed, practical information
on long-distance seafaring contained in a tenth-century compilation like Abū
Zayd al-Sīrāfī’s Akhbār al-Ṣīn wa-al-Hind – from winds and tides to the type of
paperwork required for trading in China103 – undoubtedly comes from a context in
which it was useful and necessary.104 The fact that the same text also contains
warnings about a wind that sets the seas to boiling,105 or notes that the island of
Sri Lanka (Sarandīb) was where Adam descended from Eden, and has a mountain
with his footprint on its summit,106 does not mean that all medieval Muslims,
everywhere, lived in continual fear that the sea was out to get them. Rather, it
indicates that literary conventions and folklore combined to shape what was
written about the sea, and that – as we have seen, repeatedly, within the historio-
graphical corpus – the ‘real’ and the ‘fantastic’ were not opposed but on a
continuum. Examples of each were included in geographical and historical works
not because (or not only because) they were considered to be factual, but because
they were meaningful in some way to author and audience; like Ibn Ḥawqal’s
dismissive remarks about Andalusīs, ʿajāʾib were invoked for their rhetorical
effect as much as for their observational truth.
Within this literary schema, then, land – at least within the dār al-Islam –
represents safety and civilisation, and the sea the chaotic and dangerous Ocean.
Islands, meanwhile, exist somewhere in between the two extremes: they are
liminal space, surrounded by the sea.107 Often, therefore, islands functioned as
repositories for the ʿajāʾib and other oddities discomforting, or titillating, to a
geographer’s audience.108 Ibn Ḥawqal’s reservations about al-Andalus’ proximity
to the Ocean have already been noted.109 Besides al-Andalus itself, however, there
is little said of islands (or similar) in the western Ocean or its tributaries. One
exception is positive, if still deeply mythical: the Islands of the Blessed (jazīratāni
. . . al-khālidāt, in al-Idrīsī’s [d. 1165/6] terms110), which are associated, naturally,
with Alexander, and which sometimes contain statues of their own marking the
end of the world.111 The historiographical tradition suggests that there were earlier
tales of such islands, however; Ibn Ḥabīb, once again displaying his taste for the
fantastic, has Mūsā reach one such, where he finds jars containing jinn, sealed up
by Solomon.112
Further east, especially the Indian Ocean, has much more to offer: a volcano
that always shows flame by night and smoke by day, rarely pinpointed with
any geographical precision, suggesting that it is a topos;113 islands with strange
flora and fauna;114 islands populated by cannibals.115 The island of Arīn – in
Sanskrit astronomical thought, the navel of the world – has another lighthouse,
which is again likened to that of Alexandria, and a magical ṭilasm.116 The Andaman
Islands were supposed to contain Adam’s tomb.117 One island story with all the
hallmarks of forbidding, transgressive Otherness and edge-of-the-world weird-
ness is recounted by Buzurg b. Shahriyār, a tenth-century nākhudā (ship’s
captain) who collected sailors’ tales mostly relating to the Indian Ocean in his
book ʿAjāʾib al-Hind. The story goes that a Muslim ship is blown off course
shortly after its crew sights an ill-omened star (Canopus) and glimpses a strange
fire on the eastern horizon; the ship is then wrecked on the shores of an island
inhabited entirely by women, who, upsetting the natural order of things, prove so
sexually aggressive that they kill all the ship’s crew, bar (of course) the story’s
narrator. The narrator survives by converting one of the women to Islam, teaching
her Arabic, and – once she is thus safely civilized – settling down with her. She
later explains to him that the fire that the crew saw on the horizon is an island,
worshipped locally as the place where the sun sleeps overnight before rising
each morning.118
One of the most ubiquitous islands in these accounts is named Wāqwāq (or
Wāq Wāq). We may leave aside the vexed, and for present purposes irrelevant,
issue of what real territory it may or may not correspond to,119 except to note that
it is always located in proverbially out-of-the-way places, such as the east coast of
China or the southern tip of Yemen.120 Al-Masʿūdī, who sailed in what he was told
was its vicinity, places it at the edge of the Zanj lands.121 Wāqwāq is yet another
example of the strangeness attached to marginal places in Arabic geography: in
some versions it gets its name from a fruit growing there, which, when ripe, is
shaped like a human head122 and emits a cry of ‘wāq wāq’ as it falls from the tree.
Like Ibn Ḥawqal in discussing Yājūj wa-Mājūj, al-Idrīsī treats this island as part
of the usual networks of exchange. Only a page or two after discussing its forbid-
ding Ocean surroundings, he describes the inhabitants of Wāqwāq exporting and
importing goods: once again, this is a world where the fantastical exists alongside
the mundane, and both are equally likely to be encountered.123 Similarly, Buzurg
b. Shahriyār tells a variety of tales about the ‘Wāqwaq islands’; some of these
concern flying scorpions or human-shaped fruit, but others tell of tit-for-tat
sea-raiding between the people of Wāqwāq and their (not so near) neighbours.124
Cities of copper
The last of the motifs to be explored in the geographical accounts is the ‘City of
Copper’ (madīnat al-nuḥās,125 or sometimes of brass, ṣufr126). It takes its name, we
are usually told, from its striking aspect, being either built entirely of copper or
fronted with copper columns. Although cities are usually presented in geograph-
ical writings as positive and safe spaces, as symbols of civilization, this one is
marginal and mysterious. It is usually placed – without any precision – some-
where in a desert in North Africa or al-Andalus.127 It is extremely difficult to find,
and the ill-defined route there takes travellers past all manner of preternatural
statues and columns, usually with legendary links. Often there is also a lake or sea,
by the shores of which live a people, sometimes said to be virtuous survivors of
the Flood, who are unexposed to Islam – illustrating just how remote al-Andalus
was conceptualized as being. In al-Masʿūdī’s concise rendering of the tale:
[This area] adjoins deserts of sand, in which is the city known as the City of
Copper (nuḥās), with domes of lead (qibāb al-raṣāṣ), to which Mūsā b.
Nuṣayr travelled in the days of ʿAbd al-Malik b. Marwān, and saw marvels
(ʿajāʾib) there. That was related in a book (kitāb) [that] the people (nās)
passed around; it was said that it was in the deserts bordering the bilād of
al-Andalus.128
The fact that there are no deserts in the Iberian Peninsula, or that most narratives
have Mūsā travel there overland from Qayrawān (modern-day Tunisia), apparently
did not daunt our geographers.129 It is not a motif exclusive to al-Andalus – other
cities of copper or brass are mentioned by writers in passing, located in the east and
the south130 – but rather another transferable topos of the edge of the known world,
emphasizing boundaries and liminality. The Arabic Alexander tradition likewise
uses cities to mark the limits of the world, and of Alexander’s travels; the twin
cities of Jābalqā (in the east) and Jābarṣā (in the west) make explicit the parallel
between the eastern and western extremes in the medieval Arabic worldview.131
This particular City, however, is more usually associated with Solomon, who in
some accounts built it to store his treasure,132 and Mūsā b. Nuṣayr, who takes on
the adventuring Alexander role. The earliest surviving version of the story is that
of Ibn Ḥabīb, who discusses the impenetrable city alongside an account of certain
treasures of Solomon – vessels made to imprison jinn – and establishes a number
of elements that became central to the story, such as the failed attempts to enter
the city.133 Yet it was the geographical rather than the historical tradition that took
up the story with enthusiasm; I have yet to find another historian who mentions it.
While it is tangential at best to the body of conquest narrative – beyond Ibn
Ḥabīb’s particular interest in fate and the alien landscape of al-Andalus, it would
not obviously further the thematic preoccupations of later historians, let alone fit
into events – it slots perfectly into the conventions of geographical writing, which
expect the inexplicable and sinister from the landscape at the extremes of east and
west. It is a journey to the uttermost west, and the framing story given by Ibn
al-Faqīh and others echoes – or is echoed by – that of Sallām the Interpreter’s
expedition to the limits of the east134:
Among the wonders (ʿajāʾib) of al-Andalus is al-Baht. The city is in one of

its deserts (mafāwiz). When word of this [place] reached ʿAbd al-Malik b.
Marwān, and the fact that there [were] treasures (kunūz) there, he wrote to
Mūsā b. Nuṣayr, who was his governor over the Maghrib, ordering him to
journey there.135
As befits its role as a manifestation of the fundamentally confounding nature of

the edges of the world, it is a city with a single large surrounding wall but not a
door in sight. As Mūsā is made to narrate:
I sent a man from among my followers at the head of one hundred

cavalrymen, and I ordered him to circle the wall of the city, to learn for us the
location of its gate. He was away from us for two days. Then he came to us
on the morning of the third day, and reported that it [was] a city without a
gate, nor any [other] way in.136
The City is silent and unyielding, rumoured to contain great wealth but offering
no entrance to our adventurers. The atmosphere is a suspenseful one, and soon
becomes suggestive of the supernatural. When Mūsā’s men attempt to scale the
wall with ladders, they are picked off one by one: peering over the top of the wall,
each in turn is abruptly convulsed with laughter or terror, and throws himself into
the city, presumably to his death. As might be expected, ʿajāʾib collector
al-Gharnaṭī’s version is particularly, and unusually, graphic in this respect. He
describes at some length the shrieks that emanate from the city after each man’s
plunge within, and has the third man climb the wall with a rope tied around his
waist – presumably to prevent him from throwing himself in, but which in fact
results only in his being brutally dismembered in a bizarre tug-of-war between
those holding the rope below, and the unseen force above dragging him in.137
In all cases, Mūsā wisely opts for retreat, and the mystery goes unsolved – until,
that is, the story’s late adoption into the collection of the Thousand and One
Nights,138 whereupon the new audience, and the different expectations it held of
literary stories, required there to be a climactic moment and an identifiable moral
to the tale (that worldly wealth and arrogance should be shunned in favour of
spiritual credit through obedience to God).139 Here, Mūsā’s men attain their goal
and enter the city – only to discover the glittering remains of a dead civilization,
and for their greed to prove a costly mistake. The message is made even clearer by
a coda in which Mūsā repents of the avarice that led him into the city, and ends his
life in pious retreat, thus reaffirming the values of his society through the encounter
with that which is outside.140
Constructing al-Andalus
Using a variety of anecdotes and motifs drawn from legend, historiography, and
personal observation, eastern and western geographers created and supported an
image of al-Andalus that could be considered unwelcoming at best, and hostile at
worst – but which was entirely in keeping with the peninsula’s conceptual posi-
tion as a territory at the edge of the world, occupying an uneasy space between the
order and solidity of land-based civilization, and the chaotic danger of Ocean and
of life outside its bounds. Information and imaginings of al-Andalus were filtered
through theoretical models, generic conventions, an Islam-centric worldview,
and a mythical past; all these things shaped how the image of the peripheries
was constructed, particularly in the early, adab-inflected geographical tradition,
as the comparable presentation of the world in the furthest reaches of the east
corroborates. Al-Andalus was a place where stranger things could happen, and
legendary heroes could be adopted into the geographical, or historical, narrative to
increase the region’s prestige – and where neither seemed out of place, because
that was simply what was expected, and enjoyed.
That all these statues, door-less cities, and giant man-eating ants remained
useful, even though they had little to do with the observable reality of al-Andalus,
is reflected in the fact that our earliest example of historical writing by an Andalusī,
Ibn Ḥabīb’s, is saturated with such material, and so is our last, al-Maqqarī’s. Just
as the Akhbār al-Ṣīn wa-al-Hind, or Buzurg ibn Shahriyār, could juxtapose tidal
information with islands of cannibals without any apparent qualm or contradic-
tion, so the high adventure of Mūsā being confronted by a statue that barred the
way into Francia could be slotted alongside more ordinary – if, at times, only
marginally more plausible or accurate – accounts of battles, sieges, and caliphal
dispatches. Some regions the Muslims were destined to conquer and civilize,
others they were not, whether it was God’s will or the caliph’s. What was included
was a matter of form, audience expectation, and taste: as we saw in chapter two,
Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam, although drawing on many of the same Egyptian sources as
Ibn Ḥabīb and writing in a similarly anecdote-driven mode, tended to opt for
stories of moral failing and fiqh rather than inexplicable ʿajāʾib. A magical
statue was just another storytelling device, a way to create a mood: a topos both
causative, like a conveniently-disaffected nobleman living in a strategic place on
the coast, and illustrative.
There are some clear differences between the construction of al-Andalus in
geography and in history. I have already noted that, Ibn Ḥabīb aside, the City of
Copper is something that is confined to the former. References to pre-Islamic
mythical heroes, too, are overwhelmingly concentrated in works of geography
and related genres; unlike Solomon, Alexander is largely absent even from
descriptive passages in the historical narratives about al-Andalus.141 This suggests
either different concerns or different sources – and perhaps a lack of any direct
borrowing of material – between the two traditions, at least on this subject.
Hercules, meanwhile, is confined to those strands of the historiographical
tradition that draw on the Orosius translation, directly or indirectly, and even then
is referred to only within the geographical overview derived from that writer, not
within the conquest narratives. Thus, even when geographical and historiograph-
ical sources were used in the same works by the same writers, the material they
offered was kept largely separate.
It is generally difficult, given the loss of the earliest accounts and attendant
issues, to tell where particular stories originated from. Statues are a good example
of this. Several of the major early historians, such as Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam, are
silent on the subject and do not include the ‘idol’ of Cádiz; Ibn Ḥabīb mentions
two warning statues in his conquest narrative,142 but, Cádiz and al-Rāzī aside, this
thread was not picked up by the historical tradition, either Andalusī or external,
until the end of the eleventh century.143 Instead it thrived, as we have seen, with
the early eastern geographers, travellers, and ʿajāʾib collectors, such as Ibn
Khurdādhbih, Ibn al-Faqīh, and al-Masʿūdī,144 probably reflecting a general enthu-
siasm within the genre for this particular type of marvel. The eleventh century
seems, more or less, to mark the beginnings of geography as a separate discipline
in al-Andalus – from this period onwards, Andalusī geographical writing abounds
with statues, and so (presumably not coincidentally) does historiography about
conquest-era al-Andalus.145 Nor were these always a simple reusing of old tales;
Andalusī geography was a living tradition, incorporating new information
alongside the familiar forms. We saw above how al-Zuhrī (perhaps informing
the easterner Yāqūt) retold the Cádiz story as one that concluded within his own
lifetime. Similarly, an anecdote from the Almerian geographer al-ʿUdhrī (d. 1085)
shows how topoi could be seen anew in a post-fitna context:
It was related that, in the vicinity (nāḥiya) of the city of Elvira (Ilbīra), [there
was] an image (ṣūra) of a horseman of stone (ḥajar), which children used to
ride. Part of it was broken. It was said that in the year when the ṣūra was
broken, the fitna overwhelmed Elvira, and the Berbers entered it. That was
the first year of its ruin (kharāb).146
The topos here has elements of geographical and historiographical tradition, being
both an enchanted statue and a House of Locks-type causative device: it explains
why the caliphate-destroying fitna of the early eleventh century came to afflict
this particular part of al-Andalus.
The transmission of the Cádiz story offers a tangible demonstration of how
Andalusī attention to geography both flowered in the tenth century and – at least
within historiographical works – atrophied almost immediately into the practice of
recycling al-Rāzī’s material. Al-Rāzī’s tenth-century efforts, and the patronage
surrounding him that fostered such learning, encouraged the scouring of older
and non-Islamic texts for material on al-Andalus; some writers, such as al-Bakrī,
continued this. But later historians, including Ibn al-Athīr, Ibn ʿIdhārī, and
al-Maqqarī, all reflect a historiographical image of al-Andalus in which its
conquest-era geography has once more crystallized, into a realm composed of both
enchanted statues and the detailed practical knowledge (and polemical agendas)
that produced the conquest itineraries discussed in chapter two. As with so much
else regarding the geographical construction of the peripheries, ‘fact’ and ‘fantasy’
were maintained together, even long after al-Andalus had come under the control
of a regime that patronized history and geography from within the very land
imagined as Other.
5 The Table of Solomon
A historiographical motif and
its functions
In the previous chapter, we saw how geographies of al-Andalus are filled with
legend. So, too, are Arabic narratives of its conquest. One of the most interesting
is the tale of an artefact invariably referred to as māʾidat Sulaymān ibn Dāʾūd: the
‘Table of Solomon’. As a literary motif, this Table fulfils numerous functions
integral to the interests and concerns of Muslim writers, and of their audiences. It
exemplifies the conflict between the protagonists (Mūsā and his mawlā Ṭāriq),
expresses the expected Otherness of a territory on the edge of the world, demon-
strates caliphal justice, and carries an ethical sting regarding plunder and the
proper conduct of a Muslim army in times of conquest. As a historiographical
topos, it shows how far an idea could travel, and how a single symbol could appeal
to – and be adapted to fit – many different cultural and historical contexts,
becoming embedded in multiple Mediterranean traditions.
From the earliest extant written account, that of Ibn Ḥabīb, the tale takes a
broadly similar form across the Arabic tradition. There are, however, small
variations in detail and emphasis – the location in which the Table is found, the
materials it is made of and adorned with – which M. Jesús Rubiera Mata has taken
to indicate two different strands in its transmission, characterized as Egyptian and
Andalusī.1 The former tends to be precise on the Table’s physical description
and its role in the conquest, but rather less so on where it was found, often
inventing a settlement – usually called Madinat al-māʾida, or simply al-Māʾida
– solely for this incident.2 The latter usually places the Table in the context of
descriptions of Toledo, and is less concerned with its role in the conquest
narrative.3 In reality, the distinction is not so clear-cut – Ibn Ḥabīb, despite his
Egyptian sources, places the Table in Toledo4 – and the two strands frequently
merge within the same account, as in Ibn al-Athīr’s.5
The outline of the story is maintained across the majority of chronicles, and
certain details almost invariably appear. In the course of the conquest, Ṭāriq –
never Mūsā6 – finds a table made of gold and precious stones either in or near
Toledo. Ṭāriq and Mūsā, already on poor terms, come to blows over the object,7
but at length their conflict is diffused, at least until they are recalled to Damascus.
Some accounts simply mention that the Table was given to the caliph – sometimes
al-Walīd, sometimes his successor, the appropriately-named Sulaymān – without
noting any further dispute.8 Others recount that Mūsā was punished for excessive
The Table of Solomon 85
looting, and stripped of his booty, but do not mention the Table at all in this
context; their main thrust is caliphal politics, as will be discussed below. A concise
example of this second version, containing most of the major elements, comes
from the easterner al-Yaʿqūbī (d. c. 900):
Al-Walīd appointed Mūsā b. Nuṣayr as governor of al-Andalus in this

year, which was the year 91, and he dispatched with him (fa-wajjaha
maʿahu) Ṭāriq, his mawlā. He encountered the king (malik) of al-Andalus.
[. . .] They fought a fierce battle, and [Ṭāriq] conquered al-Andalus. Then
Mūsā b. Nuṣayr launched his own invasion of the land. He had become
furious with Ṭāriq, his mawlā, because [news of the] events had reached
him. Ṭāriq met him, and made efforts to appease him; eventually [Mūsā]
became pleased with him, and sent him to the city of Toledo, which is
one of the greatest cities of al-Andalus, twenty days away. From there,
[Ṭāriq] made off with (aṣāba) a table of gold, covered with jewels. It was
said that it [was] the Table of Solomon son of David. He broke off a
leg, which he took, and sent [the Table, without the leg] to Mūsā b. Nuṣayr.9
[. . .]
Sulaymān was displeased with Mūsā b. Nuṣayr al-Lakhmī, the governor
(ʿamil) of Ifrīqiya who conquered al-Andalus and its surrounding territory.
Mūsā travelled to al-Walīd. He found him very ill. [. . .] Ṭāriq, mawlā of
Mūsā, slandered his patron to Sulaymān (saʿā Ṭāriq . . . bi-mawlāhu ilā
Sulaymān); so Sulaymān confiscated [Mūsā’s] wealth, and took 100,000
dīnārs [from] him.10
Other writers go further, recounting Mūsā’s attempts to claim credit for the
Table’s discovery, and for the conquest more generally. This results in a final
showdown between commander and mawlā in Damascus, in which the signifi-
cance of the missing leg referred to in passing in al-Yaʿqūbī’s account is made
clear. The most concise example of this comes from Ibn al-Faqīh:
Ṭāriq b. Ziyād and Mūsā b. Nuṣayr conquered [al-Andalus]. He made off

with the Table of Solomon (peace be upon him) there; it contained jewels
beyond description. Ṭāriq took off one of the feet (qāʾima) of the Table, and
put another, unlike it, in its place. When they reached al-Walīd b. ʿAbd
al-Malik with it, Mūsā sent it to him. Ṭāriq said, ‘I [am the one who] made off
with it.’ Mūsā accused him of lying, so Ṭāriq said to al-Walīd, ‘Send for the
Table.’ [The caliph] looked at its foot; it was not the same as the others. Ṭāriq
said, ‘Ask him about it.’ So [al-Walīd] asked [Mūsā], and he replied, ‘I got it
like this.’ Ṭāriq brought the [real] foot to him, and al-Walīd realised that he
had been telling the truth. The Table was valued at 200,000 dīnārs. Among
the wonders that were found in al-Andalus during its conquest were two
houses in the city of the kings, in one of which was a number of crowns of its
kings. It was in this house that the Table of Sulaymān b. Dāʾūd (peace be
upon him) was found.11
One element that is present almost consistently is the association of the Table
with Solomon.12 In comparison with the space lavished upon the rivalry between
Ṭāriq and Mūsā, or the involvement of the caliph, most writers make no effort
to explain or understand the nature of this association, accepting it without
comment. There are a few exceptions to this; Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam notes, with a
certain scepticism, that,
Ṭāriq left for Toledo. He entered [the city] and asked about the Table; it was
his only concern, it being the Table of Sulaymān b. Daʾūd, as the People of
the Book claim (yazʿumu ahl al-kitāb).13
ʿArīb b. Saʿīd, quoted by Ibn al-Shabbāṭ, meanwhile, is less willing to give

credence to the story, concluding that the ‘Table’ had nothing to do with Solomon,
but was most likely a Visigothic artefact, perhaps a lectern to hold the Gospels
during church rituals.14 He is an exception; Solomon is by far the most popular
choice. ʿArīb is one of the few Muslim writers – usually those whose interests go
beyond the immediate events of the conquest, into a broader exposition of Spanish
and universal history – to make a link between the Table in the conquest narratives
and the Roman conquest of Jerusalem in the year 70, and the looting of the Temple
there. As we shall see, they offer a number of different ways by which an item
from the ruined Temple might have ended up in the Iberian Peninsula.
The Temple of Jerusalem and its artistic and

historiographical afterlife
The Temple of Jerusalem had remained indelibly linked with Solomon, said to
have been its first builder, long after the version attributed to him was destroyed.
Later generations of Temple architects apparently exerted considerable effort to
emulate the ideal from the past.15 Jewish accounts of the Temple’s furnishings
contain a clear candidate for the Table of our Arabic anecdote. Exodus 25.23–30
mentions, among the instructions given to Moses for the building of the Taber-
nacle, the dimensions of a wooden table overlaid with gold for the purpose of
displaying the ‘bread of the Presence’ (leḥem pānîm), an offering considered to be
left permanently in the presence of God, separated from the Holy of Holies by a
curtain.16 At length, Solomon carried out this task:
Solomon made all the vessels that were in the house of the Lord: the golden
altar, the golden table for the bread of the Presence, the lampstands of pure
gold. . . .17
Other passages, and Talmudic glosses on them, expand upon this; we are vari-
ously told that Solomon made three tables,18 or ten.19 The subsequent history of
the Temple vessels – that is, the furnishings of the inner Sanctuary, usually consid-
ered to include the altar, lampstand and table – was a turbulent one. The Temple
itself was sacked on several occasions before its final destruction at the hands of
the Romans. There were many layers to the meaning of the Temple, both during
and after the period when it was a physical reality: in times of Israelite political
success, it was an expression of religious identity and political legitimacy, as well
as a storehouse for the polity’s wealth;20 in more difficult eras, it was a symbol of
continuity and focus for messianic hopes.21
One of the ways in which memory of the Temple and its vessels was kept alive
after the year 70 was pictorial representation. This was a tradition stretching from
Classical-period frescoes, such as those of Dura Europos in the Near East, to medi-
eval illuminated Bibles in Mediterranean Europe. Representations of the Temple,
and in particular of its vessels, featured heavily, although the objects of the
wilderness-era Tabernacle were initially more popular;22 so, too, did images of the
synagogue layout, particularly the Torah shrine (Aron ha-Qodesh), whose iconog-
raphy probably developed from depictions of the Temple.23 The practice seems to
have begun as an illustrative and pedagogical one, springing from the Jewish oral
(and later written) tradition of ‘historiated bibles’, narrative compilations of legend-
infused scripture. It has been suggested that the mid-third-century Dura Europos
images, which form a narrative cycle, were drawn from illustrated Pentateuch
manuscripts,24 as an aid to understanding scripture.25 In medieval Biblical manu-
scripts, both Hebrew and Latin, this illustration generally took the form of a double-
page spread before the main text, showing the layout of the Temple furnishings,
labelled and modelled on the dimensions given in Exodus.26 Exegesis and other
related texts also existed in illustrated forms in the early medieval period. The late
seventh-century Anglo-Saxon Codex Amiatinus, the earliest surviving complete
Vulgate, contains a plan of the Tabernacle that includes an image of the table.27 The
calligraphic style comes from the Codex Grandior of Cassiodorus (d. 585), an offi-
cial at the Ostrogothic court in Italy; in his Commentary on the Psalms, Cassiodorus
mentions seeing illustrations based on the texts of the Jewish historian Josephus
(d. c. 100), who wrote extensively on Jewish history and sacred monuments.28
Most extant Spanish examples come from the thirteenth century: the earliest
Toledan Bible dates to 1277,29 and from Aragón there is a 1299 Hebrew manu-
script whose illustration include the table,30 its bread laid out according to the
directions of Maimonides in his Mishneh Torah.31 There are some earlier paral-
lels. The sixth-century Ashburnham Pentateuch, possibly of Spanish origin, has
a frontispiece depicting a book-chest – containing volumes labelled with the
Pentateuch’s Hebrew titles transliterated into Latin – inside a curtained alcove,
which is strongly reminiscent of a synagogue interior from the sixth-century Beth
Alpha mosaic.32 The images from this Pentateuch manuscript were used to create
the eleventh-century frescoes at the Church of St Julian in Tours.33 Jewish influ-
ences, filtered through and adapted to Christian theology, are also visible in other
illustrations within the text.34 Later Christian examples altered the iconography
still further, eventually transforming the Temple vessels into a picture of a scribe
copying a manuscript.35 All of this, coupled with the strong Jewish presence in the
Iberian Peninsula, and the Jewish scholarship and literature produced there, gives
a plausible iconographic and legendary context to the continued concern with a
Temple object in the ninth- and tenth-century Arabic accounts.
A recurring theme in later Jewish legend is the vessels being held hostage and
used sacrilegiously by aggressors against the Jews,36 or hidden – through a
miracle37 or by human intervention38 – before such a fate can befall them, and
recovered intact once the danger is past. Belief that the Temple vessels carried
some inherent power to bring misfortune to those who abused them seems to have
long persisted, at least as a literary motif. Sixth-century Byzantine historian
Procopius, discussing Belisarius’ victory over the Vandals, and the plunder that
he extracted from them, appends a cautionary tale; among the plunder, he says,
were certain items from the Temple in Jerusalem, which the Vandals had earlier
looted from Rome:
And one of the Jews, seeing these things, approached one of those known to
the emperor and said, ‘These treasures I think it inexpedient to carry into the
palace in Byzantium. Indeed, it is not possible for them to be elsewhere than
in the place where Solomon, the king of the Jews, formerly placed them. For
it is because of these that Gizeric captured the palace of the Romans, and that
now the Roman army has captured the Vandals.’39
Justinian, we are told, took the hint and dispatched the items back to Jerusalem.
The Temple, and everything in it, was clearly far from forgotten by later
generations.
As I discussed in chapters one and four, late antique and medieval perceptions
did not make a sharp distinction between past and present, or mundane and super-
natural; there was no conceptual barrier to long-dead heroes (and villains) acting
upon the world.40 One manifestation of this blurring of the historical and the
contemporary was the appearance of fantastical objects, through which their
former owners operated. If relics of Christian saints abounded, so too did fantas-
tical accounts of their discovery, recovery,41 and subsequent displays of power.
The maphorion (robe or girdle) of the Virgin Mary, for example, was credited
with saving Constantinople from siege on several occasions.42 Narrative associa-
tion with a relic not only conferred protection but also brought prestige to all
concerned: the place where it had been hidden, the one(s) who found it, and the
place to which it was removed. Divergent and even overtly competing narratives
of their discovery often emerged, attempts to better fit a relic’s backstory to the
political and theological demands of the day, or to boost the standing of, say, a
new church built to house it.43
The Table of Solomon, as one of the ʿajāʾib (‘marvels’), is a Muslim echo of
these relics. Similarly, an impetus to provide narratives explaining the existence
of ʿajāʾib can also be seen; the Table is an excellent example. Aḥmad al-Rāzī
seems to have been one of the earliest to explicitly link the Table of the conquest
narratives with the sack of Jerusalem by the Romans under Titus, claiming that the
Table was among the plunder taken from the Temple on this occasion.44 Al-Rāzī,
and those who followed him, link it with the mythical pre-Islamic king, ‘Ishbān’.
His name derived, as we saw in chapter two, from etymological attempts to
explain the name of the peninsula,45 but in the context of the Table he evolved into
a character in his own right. Ishbān – sometimes ‘Ishbān b. Ṭiṭūs’, no less – is said
to have taken part in the Roman conquest of Jerusalem, bringing home marble and
other wealth for his capital. His haul included a host of items associated with
figures from scriptural history, such as the staff of Moses, and the golden Table of
Solomon.46 Others likewise number the Table among this wealth.47 Ibn al-Athīr,
using unspecified Andalusī works, puts it as follows:
Then God allowed Roman barbarians, whose king was Ishbān b. Ṭiṭūs, to fall
upon [the inhabitants of Iberia] (arsala ʿalayhim). He carried out raids upon
them. [. . .] He had them build [him a city named] Ishbānīya, [otherwise
known as] Seville, and he used it as the capital (dār) of his kingdom. [. . .] He
raided Jerusalem (bayt al-maqdis), plundering what was in it, and killing
100,000 [people] there. He removed its marble to Seville and other [cities].
He also looted the Table of Sulaymān b. Dāʾūd (peace be upon him), which
was the same one Ṭāriq took from Toledo when he conquered it.48
For his part, Ibn ʿIdhārī, while agreeing that Ishbān fought in Jerusalem,49 outlines
a more circuitous, accidental route for the Table’s journey to Toledo. His account
– without any obvious citation of sources, and unparalleled elsewhere in the tradi-
tion – has the Table given to the people of Egypt by the Roman ‘king’ in reward
for their aid in the Jerusalem campaign, rather than resting among his spoils. In
the face of the Muslim advance, it is smuggled across North Africa and ultimately
into Iberia.50
Elements of this tale – if not the whole – may not be quite as improbable as they
appear; Rubiera Mata has traced many of the possible stops in its itinerary.51 The
Arch of Titus, built to commemorate the Romans’ victory over the Jews in 70 CE,
is decorated with a frieze showing a procession carrying the looted furnishings
from the Temple – including an object identifiable as a table.52 Josephus, an
eyewitness to the events, lists a table among the loot taken by the Romans:
The spoils in general were borne in promiscuous heaps; but conspicuous

above all stood out those captured in the temple at Jerusalem. These consisted
of a golden table, many talents in weight. . . .53
Royal treasure hoards and the question of

Visigothic legitimacy
The spoils from the Temple were taken back to Rome, where they were eventually
housed in the specially-built templum pacis.54 They appear in the historical record
again several centuries later. Procopius recounts how the Visigoths were besieged
at their capital Carcassonne,
[. . .] because [their enemies] had learned that the royal treasure was there,
which Alaric the elder in earlier times had taken as booty when he captured
Rome.55 Among these were the treasures of Solomon, the king of the Hebrews,
a most noteworthy sight. For the most of them were adorned with emeralds;
and they had been taken from Jerusalem by the Romans in ancient times.56
The Visigoths’ royal treasure mentioned here changed hands several times, for
example being taken to Ravenna in 511 for ‘safekeeping’ by the Ostrogoths;57
Athaulf (r. 410–16) gave some of the plunder from Rome to Placidia as a wedding
gift.58 In this context it is important to note the function of treasure hoards in the
social, political, and ideological life of the Visigoths and other western ‘barbarian’
confederations, a function that reached a high point during the fifth century and
never quite lost its allure thereafter, particularly in chronicles, sagas, and other
narratives of the past.59 Visible – and, for preference, transportable – wealth
equalled prestige and thus legitimacy.60 A successful leader was one who had
treasure – tribute or plunder – to show for his military campaigns, and thus had the
wherewithal to be generous to his followers, in order that they in turn could use
his gifts to retain the loyalty of their own adherents.61 Treasure was integral to
political and social exchange. It was the king’s credit rating and his means of
maintaining suitable splendour.62 It could serve as dowry,63 tribute, or diplomatic
tool;64 as an inheritance portion, it signified valid succession;65 when used as grave
goods, meanwhile, it was a posthumous expression of identity and earthly status
intended partly for the next world.66 Above all, it was hoarded.
Royal treasure was held in such high regard that formally viewing it was part of
the king’s public routine. Sidonius Apollinaris, writing c. 455 to his brother-in-
law – a former royal tutor – says, in the course of his description of Theoderic II
(453–66)’s daily life,
The second hour arrives; he rises from the throne to inspect his treasure-chamber
or stable.67
Taking someone’s treasure from them – as punishment for a crime, or through

warfare – was a powerful symbolic gesture, conveying one’s dominance over the
defeated party.68 The Frankish king Clovis set considerable store by capturing the
treasure of his rivals, for example taking Alaric’s from Toulouse when his army
defeated the Goths at Vouillé in 507.69 His countryman Childebert likewise carried
away loot when he invaded the Visigoths’ Spanish territories in revenge for the
ill-treatment of his sister.70 Royal treasure, and its redistribution within the
community, played a large part in collective identity, signifying past group
victories. This was the case even when the raiding period was over, and the
Visigoths had settled in Iberia. When Sisenand (r. 631–6) attempted to make a
diplomatic gift of a gold missorium from the royal treasury to his Frankish
counterpart Dagobert, his nobles objected so strongly that Sisenand was eventu-
ally forced to send its weight in gold instead.71
Examples of Visigothic royal treasure survive. The Guarrazar hoard contains a
series of votive crowns, which were donated to the cathedral of Toledo by kings
and high-ranking nobles.72 They are adorned with precious stones – mostly pearls
and sapphires – and golden letters, suspended from the crowns’ bases, which spell
out the names of the kings offering them, Suinthila and Recceswinth.73 Here we
have some tangible correspondence between reality and the Arabic literary
accounts. Ibn Ḥabīb tells us:
ʿAbd Allāh b. Wahb related to us, on the authority of al-Layth b. Saʿd, that
Mūsā b. Nuṣayr, when he conquered al-Andalus, accomplished his goal,
conquering cities east and west until he came to Toledo, the city of the kings
(mulūk). He found a house (bayt) there, named the house of the kings. [He
opened it, and] found inside it twenty-five crowns, adorned (mukallalatan)
with pearl (al-durr) and sapphire (al-yāqūt) – [twenty-five] being [the number
of the kings] who had governed al-Andalus. Whenever one of their kings
died, his crown was placed in that house, and on the crown was written the
name of its owner (ṣāḥib).74
The suggestion here is that the crowns were commemorative rather than donated as
alms, although this may be an incidental difference, since in the passage as a whole
Ibn Ḥabīb is more concerned with the endings than the ordinary practices of the
Visigothic kings.75 We can only speculate whether the bayt was a royal chapel, or
something closer to the treasure houses that the Goths of old had used to store their
royal treasures in.76 For present purposes, however, more interesting is the fact that
a detail of the decoration of both the extant crowns and their literary counterparts
– in pearls and sapphires77 – echoes a description of the Table of Solomon in the
same account.78 Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam – who, like Ibn Ḥabīb, makes his report on the
authority of al-Layth b. Saʿd, but via a different intermediary, Yaḥyā b. Bukayr –
mentions a single crown, but only as part of the episode in which Ṭāriq finds the
Table, not as a separate incident; here, the decorative jewels (jawhar) are not speci-
fied. The crowns are echoed by al-Maqqarī, when he notes that, ‘Some of the
barbarians claim (zaʿama) that [the Table] was not Solomon’s, but rather its origin
[lay in] the days of their kings’ – specifically, in the kings’ practice of leaving their
wealth to the Church when they died, from which the clergy fashioned pedestals or
cradles (k-r-s) to carry the Gospels on feast-days.79 A shorter version of this expla-
nation appears in Ibn al-Shabbāṭ, with the gloss: ‘This strange (gharīb) report
[came] from ʿArīb [b. Saʿīd], and is mentioned by no-one else.’80
If holding the Visigothic royal treasure conferred legitimacy, losing it was a
grave blow to a king’s standing. During the seventh century, a second factor
gained similar symbolic significance with regard to the kingship: the city of
Toledo. Toledo had been chosen as the royal seat in the 540s – perhaps for its
strategic location, given the continued presence of the Byzantines in the south –
and was considerably embellished to befit its new status during the reign of
Leovigild, who seems to have (re)built a peninsular Visigothic state from the
ground up after 572.81 Its church became the centre of Spanish ecclesiastical
life; in 610 it was made the metropolitan seat of Iberia, in place of Byzantine-
controlled Cartagena. It was a centre of learning, and played host to the periodic
Church Councils, which determined doctrine and held sway over the monarch.
St Ildefonsus calls Toledo ‘glorious’, and sums up its spiritual position thus:
[A]mong those who fear God it is considered both a terrible place for the
unjust and a place worthy of all veneration for the just.82
The city’s political role also carried much weight; it was declared the urbs regia
by the Seventh Council of Toledo in 646, while the Eighth Council in 653 stipu-
lated that kings could thenceforth only be anointed there, or else where the
previous king had died.83 This last measure was likely to have been a palliative
one, however. The Visigothic monarchy was not hereditary; succession was rarely
a foregone conclusion, and as such it could frequently become a source of disorder
in the kingdom.84 Material evidence supplies the names of three individuals in the
seventh and eighth centuries who, although not listed in literary regnal lists,
nevertheless held enough power to issue coinage in their own names as rivals to
the incumbent kings.85 Theoretically, the position was elective,86 the incumbency
agreed by – and rotating among – a small elite consisting of an estimated twenty-
four families.87 The reality, as has been observed, was that it was more usually
‘occupative’88 – that is, it belonged to whoever made the most convincing claim,
backed by possession of Toledo and the royal treasure, the latter symbolizing the
ideological continuity of the community that had sacked Rome under Alaric.89
Solomon’s Table in the Muslim historiographical tradition

Thus stands the (theoretical) historical context of the Table of Solomon in Toledo:
a prestige item of plunder taken from the Temple in Jerusalem, passing from
triumph to treasure horde on its way westwards. I shall turn now to the historio-
graphical context: firstly, how the motif of the Table found its way into the Arabic
tradition; and, secondly, what role it played there.
Sources
As effectively as the spoils of Jerusalem, or rumours about their possession, fit
into a Visigothic milieu of treasure hoarding for prestige and collective identity,
explicit expression of these rumours is mostly lacking in our sources prior to
the appearance of the Arabic narratives. Procopius seems to be alone in his asser-
tion that Alaric carried the Jerusalem treasures away when he sacked Rome in
410 – and the Byzantine historian is himself confused on the matter, later attrib-
uting the same gains to the Vandals.90 While it has been argued that the former is
more likely,91 it is otherwise unsupported, even as a rumour, before Ibn Ḥabīb.
Gregory of Tours (d. 594), in whose History of the Franks the use and abuse of
treasure hoards loom large, does not mention it. He was hostile to the Goths, but
the rumour goes similarly unaired even in pro-Visigothic chronicles. Two of
these omissions, both within works composed in the Iberian Peninsula itself, are
particularly glaring. Rumours that the Visigoths held vessels from the Temple
might reasonably be expected to be touched upon in Isidore’s Goth-rehabilitating
History, whether as a means to further distinguish the Visigoths from their
contemporaries, or as something to be strenuously denied, as the tales of brutality
associated with the sack of Rome are (‘the frightfulness of their savagery was
nonetheless restrained’). But the closest that Isidore comes to our story is to tell
how one of the Gothic invaders met ‘a consecrated virgin of advanced years’ and
politely requested any gold or silver she might have. She duly handed over certain
vases in her possession, but not without a warning:
While he was marvelling at the form and beauty of the vases, a product of the
ancient opulence of the Romans, the virgin said, ‘These vases were entrusted
to me from the sanctuary of the Apostle Peter: take them, if you dare.’ [. . .]
Terrified at the mention of the Apostle’s name, the Goth reported the incident
to his king through a messenger. The king immediately ordered everything to
be returned with the greatest reverence to the sanctuary of St Peter, saying
that he was waging a war against the Romans, not the Apostles.92
This is closely based on a much longer passage in Orosius, in which the vases in
question are returned with a full ecclesiastical procession.93 The similarity of these
excerpts to Procopius’ account of Justinian sending the Temple vessels back to
Jerusalem indicates that the episode is a topos, a floating literary motif presum-
ably meant to demonstrate in both cases the intrinsic mythic power of the objects
concerned, and the cautious piety of the ruler faced with the temptation of taking
them. The notion of antiquities possessing the occult powers to punish those who
did not treat them with proper reverence or caution became a common one in the
medieval Byzantine Near East – a corollary, perhaps, to the benevolent influence
of relics and icons – particularly with regard to Constantinople’s surviving
classical statuary. The eighth-century antiquarian compendium Parastaseis
Syntomoi Chronikai is filled with tales of malevolent, demon-possessed sculp-
tures preying upon unsuspecting citizenry. One chapter tells how a certain
Himerius is killed by a falling statue after making a chance remark about its
creator; the statue proves indestructible, and only burial neutralizes its effects.
‘[P]ray that you do not fall into temptation,’ the author of the passage warns his
readers, ‘and take care when you look at old statues, especially pagan ones.’94
Apparently-inanimate objects could be dangerous, if they had history behind
them. The fact that, unlike Procopius, neither Orosius nor Isidore used Alaric’s
supposed looting of the Temple vessels to evoke this theme – either as approba-
tion, by denying the rumour, or as censure, by confirming it – strongly counts
against its currency in the environments in which they wrote.
Finally, we saw in chapter one that the anonymous author of the Chronicle of
754 compared Iberia’s fall to the Muslims with that of Jerusalem. Jerusalem, as
has already been noted, had a long history of falling to invaders; moreover, the
Temple vessels had achieved a status in Jewish legend of the guarantors of the city
and Temple’s continuity despite the repeated setbacks. Once again, this would
seem a perfect venue in which to air the rumour, either for dramatic effect or to
provide hope for the future, but there is no sign of it.
The story of the sojourn of Solomon’s Table in Toledo seems, then, to be an
eastern rather than a western one, at least insofar as it turns up only in Procopius
and the (eastern, or eastern-sourced) Arabic writers. Even with a number of
Hispano-Roman scholars and ecclesiastics travelling to Constantinople and
returning with books, or North African bishops armed with Greek texts moving to
Iberia,95 the story apparently did not travel. John of Biclaro spent almost two
decades studying in Constantinople, arriving (c. 559)96 just as Procopius’ Wars
had been published, but his Chronicle begins in the later sixth century, and
displays more interest in the Visigoths’ religious history than in any treasure they
may or may not have had. Likewise, the tale does not appear in post-conquest
Iberian Christian sources until well into the medieval period, although it seems to
have become a potent myth once it did. Alfonso X’s (r. 1252–84) rebellious son
Sancho (later Sancho IV, r. 1284–95) is said to have been obsessed with Solomon,
and apparently staged a confrontation with his father in Alcalá de Henares, near
Toledo, specifically because of its association with the Table.97 This association
appears in Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada’s De Rebus Hispaniae, written in the 1240s:
the Table was found by Ṭāriq at Alcalá, and is described as having no fewer than
three hundred and sixty-five legs.98 This strange number is echoed in a couple of
later Arabic texts; in both cases it probably came from al-Rāzī, whether directly or
via later quotations (for the Arabic texts), or via a Romance translation (for de
Rada).99 It need not even have been al-Rāzī; from the twelfth century, Toledo was
the centre of a programme to translate Arabic texts into Latin, and while most of
these were scientific works,100 they also included translations of the Qurʾān.101 It is
not impossible to imagine histories among them. Some Arabic historical works
were in circulation for use – if not translation – by Latin writers,102 and as the
Archbishop of Toledo, de Rada was well placed to draw upon these. It is plausible
that de Rada would have taken particular interest in the Table of Solomon.
Elsewhere in his account, de Rada compares the ‘restoration’ of the Visigothic
monarchy – in the creation of a post-conquest kingdom centred on Oviedo – to the
Jews’ return to Jerusalem after the rebuilding of the Temple. He underlines the
parallel with an anecdote about a chest of relics from Jerusalem, brought to Oviedo
via Toledo.103
Two final points should be made on the transmission history of the Table anec-
dote. The first concerns description. Ibn Ḥabīb’s description of the Table as
adorned with pearls and sapphires, matching the Guarrazar crowns, has already
been mentioned.104 This comes from al-Layth b. Saʿd; Ibn Ḥabīb also supplies an
alternative description from Abū ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd, this time including emeralds
(zumurrud).105 Interestingly, the only non-Arabic source to mention emeralds in
the context of the Temple vessels is Procopius.106 The second note is one of termi-
nology. Most accounts of the Table describe the material from which it was made
simply with the phrase min al-dhahab (wa . . .), ‘[made] from gold (and . . .)’.107
Ibn Ḥabīb, however, supplies participles:
When Ṭāriq, mawlā of Mūsā b. Nuṣayr, conquered Toledo he obtained

there the Table of Sulaymān b. Dāʾūd (upon them be peace), adorned
(mukallalatan) with jewels [and] inlaid (mansūjatan) with gold, neatly
arrayed (manẓūma) with pearls and sapphires; nothing of similar value has
ever been heard of. And [there was] another table [made] of onyx (jazʿ), like-
wise beyond value.108
It may be nothing more than a stylistic point, or a coincidence, but it is interesting

that mansūjatan (more usually meaning ‘woven’) turns up elsewhere in the cata-
logues of spoils – in descriptions of the golden carpet that gets hacked in two,
where the term makes considerably more sense:
Abū Shabba al-Ṣadafī said: I saw two men carrying a carpet (ṭanfasa) woven
(mansūjatan) of gold and silver and pearls. When it became too burdensome
for them, they put it down, then laid into it with an axe (ḥamala ʿalayhi
al-faʿs), and cut it into two halves. They took half, and left [the other] half.109
Function
The Table of Solomon – numbered as it was among the Temple vessels – was
clearly a recurring image in both Jewish and Greek tradition, in the context of the
sack of Jerusalem and to a lesser extent that of Rome. The vessels served as a
shorthand for these cities’ fall, bywords for untold riches and/or greedy plun-
dering; and, in some cases, symbols of hope of a possible restoration.110 In its
move to the Arabic tradition, the Table – now stripped of its fellows – gained a
new chapter in its history and new layers of significance and symbolism. Born of
eastern histories, it found a resonance in the themes of western historiography,
and was taken up with enthusiasm. It was not simply a colourful addition to a
writer’s repertoire for recounting the conquest of al-Andalus, or spicing up
geographical works, but a motif conferring symbolic and literary legitimacy,
oriented both eastwards – towards the Arab-Muslim historiographical tradition –
and westwards – towards al-Andalus itself, and its pre-Islamic past.
Regarding the pre-Islamic Iberian orientation of the Table as a literary device,
possession of Toledo and the royal treasure had come to mean, as discussed above,
the measure of rightful rulership in Visigothic Iberia; when it is placed in the
conquest narratives, al-Andalus is therefore won on Visigothic terms as well as on
later Muslim ones. The blurring of the line, in some accounts, between the votive
crowns and the Table may be connected to this sense of authority through plunder.
The Dome of the Rock mosaics suggest that crowns may have carried connota-
tions of power and conquest for the Umayyads at the turn of the first Islamic
century;111 there was also pre-Islamic precedent, attested in poetry, for the crown
(tāj) – or at least pearl strings wrapped around a turban (ʿamāma) – as a symbol of
authority for a tribal malik.112 The tenth-century mosaic decoration of the Great
Mosque of Cordoba included an image of a suspended crown, on an axis with the
miḥrāb.113 It is therefore possible that the Visigothic royal language of crowns
found some resonance in early Islamic tradition.
The eastern orientation is more complex. In chapter two I discussed how a
combination of the drive for Umayyad legitimacy and the condescension with
which the classical Arabic east viewed the history and culture of al-Andalus
prompted a flowering of Andalusī history-writing about al-Andalus in the tenth
century. Muslim Iberia existed as an Islamic polity independent of the caliphate in
Baghdad, but the ideology of its rulers had nevertheless to be formulated and
expressed in conventionally-Islamic, eastern terms if it was to have any political
or propagandistic value either at home – against Arab and muwallad dynasties –
or in the wider world. Military ascendancy might convey authority, but legitimacy
could only be achieved through the language of precedent and antiquity – of
tradition – and these things the Umayyads, Islam’s first dynasty, had on their side.
While their rivals the Fāṭimids made the ʿAlids central to their ideology, the
Umayyads elevated their own history – as previous, usurped holders of the caliphal
throne – for theirs.114
The Umayyads remained enamoured of eastern culture;115 they adopted eastern
legal practices and modelled court fashions after the example of Baghdadī poet
Ziryāb.116 This deference to eastern tropes carried through into the history that was
produced. Andalusī court writers sought to compete with the Islamic heartland on
its own terms, emulating the works of their Baghdad-based counterparts and using
eastern models and motifs – including its heroes.117 Only by working to the same
standards could they claim to compete, culturally, with the east,118 just as the
Umayyad rulers of al-Andalus could only claim legitimacy if they did so in terms
comprehensible within the wider Islamic tradition. All of this applies in the case
of the Table of Solomon. The connection of the campaign’s plunder with Solomon
lent al-Andalus a mythical past of its own, and made its conquerors – and thus its
present – part of that tradition, striking another blow for Andalusī culture versus
the east. Framed as one of the ʿajāʾib, the Table also fitted very much into eastern
historiographical methodology and genre.
The late antique and medieval fascination with saints’ relics and foundation
stories was echoed in Muslim tradition. While traces of great figures from the
Islamic and pre-Islamic past were more likely to be expressed in the form of
phrases and deeds attributed to them and passed down by oral and written
transmission, real or imaginary objects and locales also feature. As we saw in the
previous chapter, the Table is only one of a host of Andalusī, and more generally
western, stories linking Solomon and other notable figures with the area.119 The
Islamic historiographical tradition associated Solomon, as it did Alexander, with
monuments and towns across the world.120 In the Qurʾān Solomon is a prophet
who commands the wind, knows the speech of birds, builds palaces, and writes
letters with the basmala.121 He was also, again like Alexander, considered one of
the four great pre-Islamic rulers, and the tradition – apparently drawing upon
Rabbinic material – frequently attributed occult learning to him, including power
over demons.122 He was associated with a profusion of borderline-magical items,
including a seal or a ring,123 a collection of jinn-imprisoning jars,124 and the
Table. Rubiera Mata is not quite correct to say that the Table only appears in
descriptions of al-Andalus or its conquest.125 It also features in certain eschato-
logical ḥadīth, as do the treasures of Jerusalem collectively;126 Muslim apoca-
lyptic prophecies adopted the Temple vessels from Jewish tradition, predicting
their eventual return to the Jews when Constantinople was conquered for Islam.127
Such stories may have their origins in early Yemeni transmitters, who specialized
in tales of Biblical characters,128 and Jewish converts such as Kaʿb al-Aḥbār
(d. c. 656).129
There was an enthusiasm for Solomonic and other Jewish tradition around the
time of the Iberian conquest, too. Contemporary papyri, among them the letters of
the Egyptian governor Qurra b. Sharīk (d. 714), attest that al-Walīd was, like his
father, much involved with construction in and around Jerusalem such as the
Dome of the Rock;130 Sulaymān, meanwhile, apparently received the bayʿa (the
ritual oath of allegiance for a new caliph) in the Dome of the Rock upon his acces-
sion, and built a significant site at Ramla, just west of the city.131 The poet
al-Farazdaq (d. 732) invoked David and Solomon in a panegyric celebrating
al-Walīd’s succession to ʿAbd al-Malik; he did the same to support Sulaymān’s
(failed) bid to ensure his son Ayyūb’s succession.132 Several of the Umayyad
quṣūr – the agricultural estates and hunting lodges where Umayyad princes used
to meet key tribal leaders and project their claims to power for elite audiences133
– also make reference to Solomon in their decoration. Khirbat al-Mafjar contains
a significant decorative schema centred around Solomonic iconography, perhaps
intended to associate incumbent Umayyads with Solomon’s attributes, particu-
larly his authority.134 Further to the east, Quṣayr ʿAmra’s fresco of an enthroned
prince is capped with an inscription that links the amīr who built it – probably
al-Walīd II – with ‘David and Abraham and the people of his community’.135 The
latter also contains the famous Six Kings fresco, which includes Roderic of Spain
among the world monarchs whom the Islamic empire had defeated (or in a few
cases still aspired to defeat).136 In short, Solomon was very much a part of the
legitimizing language and imagery of the eighth-century Umayyads’ claims to
empire; it is hardly surprising that tales like the finding of the Table of Solomon
should have attached themselves, or been attached, to campaigns that happened
under their watch.
An important Yemeni transmitter of the Umayyad period was Wahb b.
Munabbih (d. 732),137 an interpreter of Biblical tales for the caliphs and a major
source for pre-Islamic history and qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ (stories of the prophets) for the
likes of Ibn Isḥāq (d. 767).138 He is credited in the tradition with anecdotes about
ancient Yemeni heroes such as Shaddād b. ʿĀd,139 as well as Dhū al-Qarnayn,140
and the building of the Temple.141 He is quoted at great length in Ibn Hishām’s (d.
833) Kitāb al-tījān, and he is the ultimate source of much of the material in a book
of qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ by ʿUmāra b. Wathīma (d. 902).142 Only the second part of this
work, the oldest extant collection of Biblical legends and folklore in Arabic,143
survives: some in a manuscript that cites Wahb in its isnāds, and a smaller section
in a literary papyrus roll, which is identical to the manuscript except that (tell-
ingly?) it has no isnād, only an uncredited qāla (‘he said’).144 The manuscript was
apparently part of the library of Ibn Lahīʿa (d. 790), who was, of course, one of
Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam’s teachers. Unfortunately for Khoury’s optimistic belief that
this work represents the preserved wellspring of early eighth-century Biblical
tales, its impact on the Egyptian tradition does not seem to have been great; neither
ʿUmāra (nor, for that matter, Wahb) is ever cited by Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam, on
Solomon or anything else. Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam does cite ʿUmāra’s father, Wathīma
b. Mūsā, and on the right thematic area – but only for very brief statements, with
no indication that these came from longer tales, or that they went back to Wahb.145
Manifestly, Yemeni and Biblical folktales were part of the teaching repertoire in
ninth-century Egypt, but we cannot pin down where they came from.
Fabulous riches
The Table of Solomon fitted al-Andalus into an expected mould of Otherness, and
gave it a mythical status to rival the east; but it is also a part of the catalogue of
fabulous riches that the historical narratives associate with the conquest of
al-Andalus and other western territories.146 Other plunder includes the golden
carpet mentioned above, Ṭāriq’s crowns, the golden armour of defeated king
Roderic,147 a collection of Gospels decorated with gold, a mirror of Solomon and
his books on alchemy,148 and vast amounts of gold, silver, and gems. The discovery
of hidden treasures was another topos of late antique historiography. Gregory of
Tours, for example, tells how the Byzantine emperor Tiberius (r. 574–82) found a
famous cache of wealth that an Italian named Narses had hidden in a cistern.149
The tale probably grew up to explain the emperor’s fabled generosity.150 There are
a number of stories of this type in the Arabic conquest narratives.151 One of the
more generic is found in Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam: an unnamed man comes to Mūsā
and offers to lead him to treasure; Mūsā sends troops with him, whose reaction to
what they dig up (more sapphire) is simply ‘Mūsā will not believe us!’152
In part, such tales, like the references to Solomon, add to the stature and pres-
tige of the conquest; they may stem ultimately from self-aggrandising tales told by
those involved, or their descendants, although the transmitter chains do not allow
us to trace this. As we saw in chapter two, another aspect of their value lay in the
ethical and legal messages that could be derived from them, as with the anecdote
of the men drowned for illicit looting.153
Patrons and clients

The function of the ‘action’ of the tale – the finding of the Table, and more partic-
ularly the subsequent squabbling over it – is best viewed in terms of early Islamic
society and its attitudes to non-Arabs, especially mawālī. I discussed in chapter
three how, in the early period, non-Arabs could only be admitted to Muslim
society by adopting an Arab identity, usually through the fictitious kinship tie of
walāʾ, and how pro-Arab parochialism persisted in the written sources, even once
walāʾ had fallen out of use as a tool of conversion. Indeed, as we have seen, walāʾ
was never really used in its eastern sense in al-Andalus; in the everyday political
life of al-Andalus, mawlā and mawālī implied a high court status, rather than the
second-class citizens of old. Yet the terms often retained a more conventional
meaning in the conquest narratives, and some treatments of the power struggle
between the two thus have a tenor that can be read in an eastern context rather than
a western one. The patron bullies and abuses his non-Arab mawlā, and tries to
take all the credit for his mawlā’s hard work; but the day ends in victory and vindi-
cation for the non-Arab. In this, it is an example of western writers using eastern
motifs to lend their accounts gravitas, recalling some presentations of the ʿAbbāsid
revolution of 750, which helped non-Arab converts secure a more
politically-elevated and financially-beneficial role in Muslim society. It had more
specifically western dimensions too, stemming from the real ebb and flow of
ethnic tension in Andalusī society, and the literary and folkloric stereotypes of the
uncivilized, untrustworthy Berber.154 A strong case may be made for a reading of
the status of Ṭāriq and Mūsā in a context closer to home for Andalusī writers of
the tenth century, as the most influential and lucrative government roles were
parcelled out among Umayyad family members and their mawālī, while Arabs
and Berbers alike found themselves out in the political cold, even as the relevance
of ethnic terminology declined. Ṭāriq’s status as a mawlā, therefore, and his
protection by the caliph, can be read as an allegory of contemporary caliphal
political organization, coming into conflict with non-caliphal Arab/Andalusī
ambitions (Mūsā), rather than as a statement of ethnic rivalry.
At the heart of all of this is competition for resources and prestige. The same is
apparent in other conquest historiography, eastern and western, which displays a
marked concern both for the proper division of spoils and apportioning of finan-
cial benefits in the immediate term, and for issues that had an impact upon the
longer-term – that is, contemporary to the writers – fiscal status of land and
peoples.155 In the earlier period, individual remuneration – in the form of the mili-
tary stipend, ʿaṭāʾ, or simply a share of the booty – was a major issue for those
who joined the conquest armies. Accounts of mawālī involvement in the military
activity of the seventh and eighth centuries frequently focus upon the conditions
under which they fought, including their freedom of action,156 and the right to
financial rewards. Even though mawālī participated in the conquests from an early
date, there was much opposition to the notion of sharing the prize.157 The tension
between Ṭāriq and Mūsā, therefore, reflects real debates that went on during the
conquest period – debates made all the more urgent in al-Andalus by the unusu-
ally high proportion of non-Arabs involved. It may also, like the attempts in
ʿAbbāsid historiography to discredit the Umayyads for their alleged illiberality
towards non-Arabs, reflect a later, fictionalized image of the real issues facing
mawālī in the early period, exaggerated for rhetorical effect. In the story, Mūsā
sponsors Ṭāriq’s entry into the Muslim armies, but his mawlā’s success can hardly
be allowed to outstrip his own; at the same time, Ṭāriq needs Mūsā’s patronage to
maintain his position in the conquest army and thus his income. This is one of the
themes that lie behind episodes such as the tug-of-war over the Table, and Ṭāriq’s
initial capitulation to Mūsā’s unreasonable demands:
Most [of the transmitters] agree that the meeting of the two of them was at
Toledo. [. . .] Al-Rāzī related that Ṭāriq went out from Toledo when he heard
that [Mūsā] was coming to him. He met him in the vicinity of Ṭalabīra. [. . .]
Ṭāriq went out to him, flattering him (muʿaẓẓaman lahu) and pledging his
obedience. Mūsā reprimanded him, and was angry with him. It was said that
he gave him a blow to the head with his whip. It was said that he lashed him
many times, and shaved his head. Then he went with him into Toledo, and
said to him, ‘Bring me what you looted, including the Table!’ [Ṭāriq] brought
it to him; he had broken one of its legs. [Mūsā] said to him, ‘Where is the
[missing] leg?’ [Ṭāriq] replied, ‘It is as I found it.’158
Ṭāriq’s position at this point in the narrative is not secure enough for him to defy
Mūsā. It is only later, in light of the denouement and the receipt of caliphal
support, that Ṭāriq can be free of his patron, and – we might infer – receive an
income in his own right.
Another layer at work is the structuring of the tale: the personal rivalry between
the two protagonists is used to thread the broader conquest narrative together –
particularly with the addition of the tenth-century motif whereby Mūsā’s conquest
itinerary is launched with the expressed aim of finding a different route than
Ṭāriq’s – and give it a denouement in Damascus, after which both characters exit
the histories. This structure serves two contrasting but complementary purposes.
The first is the back-projection of an idealized past. The legalistic need to establish
a chain of command, which we saw in chapter two, is here in Mūsā’s reprimand
and the portrayal of the caliph as being at the heart of everything happening in the
early Islamic world. The usual formulaic correspondence is also here; Mūsā and
Ṭāriq exchange letters, and Mūsā even writes to the caliph (falsely) claiming
credit for finding the Table.159 But the caliph’s role is also to right injustices, and
having him support the wronged non-Arab in the showdown between Ṭāriq and
Mūsā at Damascus is only one example of a trend in post-ʿAbbāsid Revolution
historiography towards making old caliphs ‘enlightened’ with regards to mawālī.160
The fact that Ṭāriq is awarded caliphal approbation for his actions via the Table of
Solomon incident was part and parcel of later attempts to shape the conquest to
classical legal norms. The second purpose was a literary one, giving characters
personalized motivations for their actions, as well as the contextual ones discussed
above: Mūsā is the greedy authority figure and Ṭāriq is the clever underdog, who
wins a well-deserved moral victory. As in a Cantar de Geste, the hero suffers
injustice – one that has implications for the wider community – but he is ulti-
mately vindicated, often with the help of a third party.161 Ṭāriq, cheated and abused
by his arrogant patron, Mūsā, has the last laugh when his trick with the Table leg
exposes Mūsā’s dishonesty in front of al-Walīd, who duly punishes Mūsā and
rewards Ṭāriq. As Ibn al-Athīr puts it, ‘Thus al-Walīd knew that Ṭāriq was truthful,
and that he had done this because [Mūsā] had obstructed him and hit him.’162
Conclusion
The preceding suggests that the Table of Solomon was a concern of the eastern
tradition that passed into the western historiographical vocabulary through the
agency of Egyptian sources, such as al-Layth b. Saʿd (d. 791). The Table repre-
sents a distillation of an older concern with the fate of the sacred vessels from the
Temple in Jerusalem, and their attendant themes of plunder, and the fall of great
cities. The vessels retained a symbolic currency through the tradition of their
visual representation in fresco and mosaic, another eastern tradition with Jewish
roots that ultimately made its way westwards, this time through manuscript
illumination. In the Islamic tradition, the Table resonated with a number of other
themes of interest to early writers – the legality of plundering, the distribution of
conquest rewards, and the social, political, and economic balance of power
between Arab and non-Arab in the post-conquest lands.
It was also a good story, an entertaining heroes-and-villains dramatization of
the real events surrounding the conquest of Iberia: political upheaval upon the
accession of a new caliph, with a different circle of favourites seeking access to
the rewards of conquest, and Sulaymān’s desire to replace his brother’s appointees
with individuals personally loyal to him. This is seen in the much blander, but
perhaps more realistic, alternative version of events given by Ibn al-Athīr:
[Mūsā] went to Syria, taking with him the wealth that he had plundered from
al-Andalus, and treasures, and the Table, and 30,000 of the firstborn children
of the Gothic kings and courtiers, and priceless jewels and objects (amtiʿa)
beyond counting. He arrived in Syria [to find that] al-Walīd b. ʿAbd al-Malik
had died, leaving as his successor Sulaymān b. ʿAbd al-Malik, who was
ill-disposed towards Mūsā b. Nuṣayr. He took (ʿajala) all his wealth away
from him, and dismissed him, imprisoned him, and fined him.163
These issues, and how they played out similarly on the eastern frontiers, will be
addressed in chapter seven.
6 Excusing and explaining conquest
Traitors and collaborators in Muslim
and Christian sources
The second of our emblematic motifs from the conquest narratives is that of
the traitor among the defenders: the individual, or faction, presented as having
enabled the victory of the invaders, whether by concluding a secret surrender pact,
opening a city’s gates by night, or simply bringing down God’s wrath through sin.
Manifestations of this motif, and the reasons for their inclusion, vary. Some are
pure topoi, entertaining intertextual anecdotes used to introduce variety into a list
of conquests, to move the plot from one point to another, or to show off the
author’s learning; others are expressions of old or new political and social
rivalries, a justification from the past of a jostling for position in the present; still
others derive, however schematically, from the circumstances of the Muslim
campaigns, conducted as they were through local surrender treaties much more
commonly than outright conquest. Co-operation and collaboration were undoubt-
edly the watchwords of many a populace’s experience of the Islamic conquests,
and it is important not to ignore this reality when adjudging the narrative function
of traitors as literary devices; the names may be incorrect, the language may be
intemperate or stereotyped, but that does not mean that a tale of a traitor is not at
least symbolic of past experience, or that it had no more meaning for writer or
audience than a simple linking phrase. Comparison of Muslim and non-Muslim
traditions regarding the conquest of Khūzistān, for example, strongly suggests
that the city of Tustar did fall because of a traitor.1 Still, at its core this motif is
about causation. While some examples of it are more grounded in reality than
others, the presence of a traitor or a collaborator in the narrative always signals
explanation or excuse: a testament to the fact that the how and why of a conquest
mattered to the self-identity of those who remembered it, and continued to have an
impact on the societies that produced the historical accounts.
After a broader discussion of literary devices in Islamic historiography, and the
traitor topos in other historical traditions, this chapter will consider four major
types of the traitor motif. The first is the causative topos in its simplest form,
common in the self-contained and often interchangeable narratives of cities under
siege by Muslim forces:2 the often-unnamed individual with local knowledge,
who turns up to point out a key weakness at the right moment, and then disappears
from the story. The second is the prominent pre-conquest authority who turns
coward and flees at the first sign of trouble, or stays to work with the enemy. The
Traitors and collaborators 103
third type – seen in the Iberian conquest narratives in the form of the mysterious
‘Count Julian’ – broadens the scope of the traitor’s actions, from the betrayal of a
single city to that of the whole peninsula. It also develops the motivation of the
traitor, giving them a backstory and suggesting the circumstances surrounding
their defection. In Julian’s case this story was progressively embroidered, until
it became the full-blown romance of a wronged, noble man seeking redress, and
the courage under fire of his virtuous daughter. Sometimes Julian is present in
the narrative only for his immediate function of inviting the Muslims to invade
Iberia, but in some later accounts he is woven in to the story of the conquest as a
whole, travelling with Ṭāriq to guide his route. The fourth and final type of
traitor – the disaffected, disinherited sons produced by the factional strife of the
Visigothic regime – is both closer to the political reality of Iberia on the eve of its
conquest, as discussed in the previous chapter, and more clearly the site of repeated
re-interpretation for propagandistic ends. This final type was fertile ground for
Christian and Muslim writers alike, whether they presented the conquest as a
result of opportunism among disunited defenders, a victory on behalf of the
unjustly usurped, or a terrible betrayal of Iberia for sinful, short-term gain.
Literary devices in historical writing

The deeply problematic and unreliable nature of the Arabic tradition about the
conquest of Iberia – and, indeed, of all traditions regarding the early Islamic world
– was discussed at length in chapter two, and will be recapitulated only briefly
here, since the aim is to move beyond a list of drawbacks. The main issue to be
borne in mind is that Islamic historical writing – like any sort of recording of
the past, but especially in narrative form – was about binding the community
together by encoding a collectively-acceptable past.3 It was all part of an on-going
conversation. Writers and compilers of history created their works to present
an understanding of how their world came to be, to satisfy patrons, entertain
audiences, and settle disputes of legal, religious, social, and political natures,
categories which overlapped, significantly and inextricably.
Whether they were creating dynastic paeans to the Umayyads in the tenth
century,4 screeds against the Berbers in the eleventh,5 or jihād-promoting fictions
for ‘moral rearmament’ in the twelfth,6 Andalusī writers were no exception to the
Islamic norm. History-writing was for a purpose, and that purpose was creating
and disseminating an understanding of the world through an image of its past. It
was written in an overtly factual style, in anecdotal forms such as the khabar and
with devices such as isnāds that were meant to protect and advertize the accounts’
adherence to truth, but this history was placed in a literary framework, that of
narrative, for ease of retelling and by the very rules of the game.7 If past events are
to be remembered, they must have meaning for those remembering; recollection
is aided – and meaning brought out – if those events are arranged into a familiar
story.8 But recounting history as a narrative inevitably prioritizes reductionist
interpretative methods – emplotment, causation, and their close cousin, moraliza-
tion9 – and with the khabar the Islamic historiographical tradition turned this
104 Traitors and collaborators
inevitability into an art. The khabar as a form foregrounded literary – variously
described as fictionalizing10 or rhetorical11 – techniques and devices, such as the
use of dialogue and the narrative ‘voice’ to conceal analysis and reshaping, which
led to systemic, if not deliberate or conscious, distortion of even genuine accounts
in service to these literary devices.
Akhbār became, fundamentally, building blocks: discrete, atemporal units that
came easily adrift from their original settings,12 whether through accidental
misplacement and miscopying, careful arrangement and juxtaposition with other
akhbār to tell larger stories, the creation of variant versions to make different
points, or the transplantation in whole or in part of a khabar from one chrono-
logical and geographical setting to another, with a few name changes to make it fit
its new home.13 It is at this point that a historical report becomes a topos, a
narrative motif used to elaborate upon content, or a schema (one used to organize
the content).14 Both elaboration and organization, under such circumstances, are
more symbolic and conventional than factual, and so it was in much of the Islamic
tradition. Naming the first man to be killed at the battle of Badr – partly for the
sake of form, partly as a relic of an older Arabic passion for inserting ancestors
into significant events – was more important than whether his identity was reliably
known.15 But we should not take this to imply that our medieval authors were
automata, parroting nonsense without thought, or liars out to trick both present
and posterity; rather, topoi were used precisely because they were familiar tropes,
which added meaning for author and audience through the resonance they created
with other events from other times.16
It is in light of these considerations that we should approach instances of
treachery in the Spanish conquest narratives; they may have truth behind them
but, first and foremost, they are serving a purpose. Attributing the ‘cause’ of a
conquest to a passer-by helpfully pointing out a gap in the wall provided a siege
narrative with both an invented causation and a clichéd, stolen, or folkloric bit of
‘detail’.17 It personalized history – particularly in those instances in which
the traitor takes a bigger role in events – making it into an epic about great
individuals, or divine will at work, rather than a story about messy battles or the
long wait for defenders’ water supplies to run out. For any historical tradition
that valued a decisive battle as the definitive conclusion to a story – a tendency in
both Christian and Muslim sources on the Iberian conquest, together with, as we
shall see, Graeco-Roman narratives on similar topics – it functioned as an identifi-
able turning-point, a moment when the battle was won, or lost. It comes as little
surprise, then, that the traitor motif featured with such frequency in accounts of
early Islamic history.18
Traitor type 1: the plot device

The most basic form of the traitor motif, that of the individual who shows the
Muslims a secret way into a besieged city and is never heard from again, is also
the one most obviously a topos. The narrative of the Muslim conquest of
Cordoba – a late entry into the tradition, as we saw in chapter three,19 and thus
already suspect – contains one such character. This story bears all the hallmarks
of one inspired by siege narratives about eastern cities in earlier periods, following
a formulaic sequence of events familiar from elsewhere in the historical tradi-
tion.20 Here is Ibn al-Shabbāṭ (d. 1221) with the more concise version, taken from
ʿArīb b. Saʿīd (d. 980):
He said: When he drew near to it, he sent a scout, who hid in a field of rice,
near Secunda.21 A shepherd passed by them, so they grabbed him, and ques-
tioned him about the city and its people. He showed them a gap (thulma) in
its south wall, marked by a picture of a lion, with a fig tree [nearby]. The
Muslims climbed [across] from it, and entered the city, and they cried, in
unison, ‘Allāhu akbar!’ When the people of the city heard their takbīr, they
left through the gate of Seville, which is the place of the perfume-makers
today. They took refuge in a great, fortified church of theirs to the west of
the city; they made themselves secure in it, and locked themselves inside
it. The Muslims took possession of the city of Cordoba, and they looted
everything that was inside it.22
This is also in the Fatḥ al-Andalus,23 with essentially identical wording, bar a
concluding note that some say Cordoba was conquered ṣulḥan (by treaty), on
account of the survival of its church – another example, presumably, of the tradi-
tion attempting to reconcile information that was problematic and contradictory
by later legal standards. Aḥmad al-Rāzī’s (d. 955) longer version, found in the
anoymous Akhbār Majmūʿa and Ibn ʿIdhārī (d. c. 1307),24 marginally increases
the role of the shepherd, who informs the Muslims that most of the people of
Cordoba have fled, leaving behind only the ‘king’ (Akhbār Majmūʿa) or a
nobleman (Ibn ʿIdhārī) with a force of four hundred.25 The picture of the lion is
also absent; instead, the Muslims have to return to the shepherd to ask him to
repeat his directions, as they are unable to find the gap. In all cases, the shepherd’s
only role is as a passer-by, informant, and plot device; his motivation for the
betrayal is never explored, and his allegiance goes unstated. As noted in chapter
three, both of these accounts of Cordoba’s conquest come from the tenth-century
caliphal court, and express the writers’ and their patrons’ desire to demonstrate
some level of co-operation between conquerors and conquered.
An example of this siege narrative template in another context is al-Balādhurī’s
(d. 892) account of the conquest of Caesarea in 640:
The reason for its conquest was that a Jew named Yūsuf came to the Muslims
one night. He guided them to a way in via a conduit (sarab) through which
water flowed to [the height of a] man’s waist, on the condition that they would
grant him and his people an amān. Muʿāwiya fulfilled that, and the Muslims
entered it in the night, shouting ‘Allāhu akbar!’ in it. The Byzantines wanted
to escape through the conduit, [but] they found the Muslims inside it. The
Muslims opened the gate. So Muʿāwiya, and those who were with him, went
inside.26
In light of the role often attributed to Jews as a group in the Iberian conquests – on
which more below, in the discussion of category three – it is possible to speculate
that something larger is being implied here. However, within this khabar Yūsuf is,
like the shepherd in Cordoba, purely a vehicle for causation. Within a city of
Byzantines, he is an outsider, but he is given no story of his own because his
motives are irrelevant; his function is only to let the Muslims in.27
The traitor as plot device is seen in other historiographical traditions,28 most
notably Herodotus’ (d. 425 BCE) account of the Battle of Thermopylae in his
Histories:
How to deal with the situation Xerxes had no idea; but just then, a man from
Malis, Ephialtes, the son of Eurydemus, came, in hope of a rich reward, to tell
the king about the track which led over the hills to Thermopylae – and thus he
was to prove the death of the Greeks who held the pass.29
Like Yūsuf, or the shepherd at Cordoba, Ephialtes plays no other role in the tale,
before or afterwards – although we are told, as part of the same capsule story, that
a price was put on his head and he was later killed. While Herodotus does then
describe the path in question, having walked it himself, and recount a brief
history of past treachery at the site – notably associated, apparently, with those
dreadful people of Malis – it is the ubiquitous motif of such an act, rather than
the specificity of this incident, that stands out. This is reflected in the fact that,
as Herodotus tells us, he encountered rival traditions as to the identity of the
traitor, while collecting information for his book.30 The Herodotean use of this
motif, or other later examples, need not have inspired Muslim writers directly –
although the Islamic tradition did pick some Greek and Latin topoi up, through
mawālī.31 Rather, its employment in unrelated traditions is indicative of similar
needs – quick, entertaining, human-level causation – producing similar literary
solutions, each grounded more than a little in the techniques of epic and oral
storytelling.
Traitor type 2: the rogue insider

The various Christian historical traditions about the Muslim conquests are brim-
ming with collaborators: individuals, often ecclesiastical or temporal authority
figures, from within the conquered communities who accept and work with the
invaders on behalf of their people. This reflects, undoubtedly, the seventh- and
eighth-century conquest experience of many Christian communities. We have
seen that, in Iberia and elsewhere, the Muslim armies advanced, and gained
tribute-yielding territory, as much by pact and treaty as they did by outright
conquest, and here must lie the reason why so many of this second type of traitor
are high status: authority was needed to sign such treaties. Prominent figures
including the Nestorian Catholicos Isho‘yahb wrote openly of the many virtues
and few hardships of welcoming the new religious overlords, with whom he and
his church enjoyed a more privileged status than they had previously.32 In the late
640s, John of Nikiu described how the Arab governor of Alexandria worked with
local advice, and ‘had the canal drained in accordance with the instructions given
by the apostate Theodore’.33 In the late seventh century, John Bar Penkāyē noted
that some churches took advantage of the new balance of power to spread their
teachings.34 To many, however, collaboration with the conquerors was unwonted,
cowardly, and un-Christian. The Armenian chronicle attributed to Sebeos is firmly
convinced it was the path of sin:
[The Armenians] submitted to the king of Ismael. T‘ēodorus, lord of Rshtunik‘,

with all the Armenian princes made a pact with death and constructed an alli-
ance with hell, abandoning the divine covenant. [. . .] In this manner the
servant of Anti-Christ split them away from the Romans.35
Accusations of collaboration were rife. One of the Fredegar continuators blames

early eighth-century Muslim incursions into Frankish territory on bad-apple Chris-
tians: ‘With the base, craven collaboration of the heretical Maurontius and his
friends, the Saracens attacked in force the city of Avignon strongly fortified on her
rock; and they laid waste the countryside.’36 Even Pope Martin I (d. 655), some way
from the front line, came under fire, as he indicated in private correspondence:
At no time did I send letters to the Saracens nor, as some say, a statement as to
what they should believe, neither did I ever dispatch money, except only to
those servants of God travelling to that place for the sake of alms, and the little
which we supplied to them was certainly not conveyed to the Saracens.37
Whether individual accusations, made either at the time or in the chronicles,

were true or false, what they represented was a store of future anger, and an
excuse; Christian cities and countries had not been defeated by the Muslims, but
sold out by their own failed leaders. This helped to efface the shame of the past,
placing blame on the shoulders of long-dead scapegoats, and sometimes also
serving present political agendas.38 As time, demographics, and increasing Muslim
political confidence made the rule of the conquerors less an ad hoc partnership
and more of an open religious threat (and, not insignificantly, a regular tax burden),
it must have become harder for chroniclers looking back on the conquests to
excuse the pragmatic decisions of their forebears. Tales of treachery provided
hope that the forces of Islam were not so invincible, after all: a propagandistic
possibility that the Christian kings of northern Iberia would come to exploit.
Within Iberia, the author of the Chronicle of 754, who for the most part writes
about Arab rule with equanimity, has withering words for those either actively or
passively responsible for aiding the conquest. He notes that Sindered, a bishop of
Toledo once ‘renowned for the zeal of his sanctity’, ‘lost his nerve and, like a
hireling (mercennarius) rather than a shepherd (pastor) [. . .] he deserted Christ’s
flock and headed for his Roman homeland’.39 Those responsible for protecting the
people failed; meanwhile, others participated directly in securing the conquerors’
hold over the territory:
[Mūsā] decapitated on a scaffold those noble lords who still remained,
arresting them in their flight from Toledo with the help of Oppa, King Egica’s
son. With Oppa’s support, he killed them all with the sword.40
In many cases, then, narrative collaborators of this type, while still literary crea-
tions, may have corresponded to actual collaborators; others are pure posthumous
hachet jobs. But within the texts, these traitors are not faceless characters created
solely for the purpose of resolving a siege, but named individuals assigned motives
– even if often derogatory ones – and, frequently, are more thoroughly woven into
the story. Again, there are examples of this type of traitor – socially or politically
prominent insiders, whose motives are the subject of greater interest, or invention,
to authors – in conquest narratives from other periods.41 Olympiodorus, writing
about the Goths’ sack of Rome, notes an endearing – if unlikely – alternative story
in which,
Proba, a woman of the highest repute among the Roman senatorial class for
her wealth and fame, felt pity for the Romans who were being killed off by
starvation and who were already turning to cannibalism. Seeing that all hope
of successful resistance had gone, since the river and the harbour were
blocked by the enemy, she ordered her servants at night to open the gates.42
Traitor type 3: the romantic antihero

The next category of traitor is a still more fully developed character, the star of his
own capsule biographical adventure. An early example of the type, in Herodotus’
account of the conquests of Darius, is Zopyrus. Zopyrus is a Persian soldier who
is so dedicated to his scheme – to pose as a Persian deserter in order to trick his
way into Babylon, thence to open the gates to the Persian army from the inside –
that he mutilates himself to make his cover story more convincing.43 It is a very
rich report, full of detail, dialogue and even a remark about the lasting fame his
self-sacrifice attracted. It remains, however, a causative topos, a self-contained
episode with only a minimal relationship to the narrative as a whole; for all its
possible folkloric, oral origin, it fits certain expected forms for this type of story,
like the opening of the gates.
In the Iberian conquest narratives this role is occupied by Julian. Not only does
he get a significant speaking role, but his reason for betraying Iberia to the Muslims
has the structure of a romance or a cautionary moral fable: he is a wronged man,
seeking redress for the dishonour done to him by King Roderic, who raped Julian’s
daughter while she was at his court. He writes to Mūsā,44 or Ṭāriq,45 inviting them
to invade Iberia – in one case persuading them with a description of Iberia’s
virtues46 – and then transports them across the sea to do it. There are, of course,
doubts over whether he represents a real person or a figurative character,47
although it appears that at least one tenth-century Andalusī family claimed descent
from him.48 The causative trope of kidnapped and dishonoured women as a
provocation to, or excuse for, warfare had a long and venerable historiography, in
many ancient and late antique cultures.49 Even if Julian did exist, it is impossible
to say whether he was a Byzantine, a Visigoth,50 or a Christian Berber51 – a confu-
sion arising from the fact the Arabic sources do not, on the whole, care enough to
differentiate one type of Christian from another, opting for ʿajam,52 or ʿilj,53 with
the exception of the Fatḥ al-Andalus, which calls him a Rūmī (Byzantine).54 They
generally place him in Ceuta on the North African coast, and portray him as being
of high status.55
Julian does not appear in all texts. The truncated summaries of al-Yaʿqūbī (d. c.
900) and al-Ṭabarī (d. 923) have no place for him, nor – unusually among those
writers who provide longer accounts – does our earliest surviving Arabic source,
Ibn Ḥabīb. Indeed, the traitor motif does not appear in Ibn Ḥabīb’s conquest
narrative in any form; the only Spanish noble we see, Tudmīr, far from betraying
his country to Ṭāriq, actually warns Roderic of the Berber’s advance.56 In Ibn
Ḥabīb’s account, Ṭāriq’s plan to invade is prompted not by an invitation to do so,
but – characteristically for this writer – from a chance encounter with an old,
learned man, who relays a prophecy that a Berber will conquer Iberia.57 The
Chronicle of 754, likewise, makes no mention of Julian.58 His absence from
the latter two works indicates that Julian’s story is not Andalusī or Spanish but
Egyptian in origin,59 and only made its way to Iberia in the later tenth century. The
origin of Ibn al-Qūṭīya’s version as a self-contained khabar – a causative topos
that does not even fit with the rest of his own account, which is focused over-
whelmingly on his own ancestors, the sons of Witiza – is evident in its opening
line, which begins, ‘the reason for [Ṭāriq’s] invasion of al-Andalus was . . .’ (kāna
sabab dukhūlihi al-andalus . . .), before launching into Julian’s story.60 Ibn ʿIdhārī
has versions from both ʿArīb b. Saʿīd and al-Rāzī, the first of which is so cursory
as to fit better into category one,61 and the second of which is suspiciously
scrupulous about establishing the chain of command.62 In contrast to Ibn al-Qūṭīya,
neither ʿArīb nor al-Rāzī – in the quotations that we have – establish a motivation
or mention the daughter, although Ibn ʿIdhārī has another account that does, and
it may be that he omitted similar details from ʿArīb and al-Rāzī so as to avoid
repetition.63 Among the Christian sources, there is nothing until the high medieval
period, and all come, without doubt, from the Arabic tradition – with the gloss, in
De Rebus Hispaniae, that Julian’s betrayal was the reason for the ruin of the
Goths and Iberia.64 The Chronicle of 1344, based on al-Rāzī, has the longest
account of all.65
Compiled less than a generation after Ibn Ḥabīb’s, Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam’s version
already has all the major elements of the story:
Julian had been a vassal of (kāna Yuliyān yuʾaddī al-ṭāʿa ilā) Roderic
(Ludhrīq), king (ṣāḥib) of al-Andalus, who lived in Toledo. Ṭāriq corre-
sponded with Julian, and treated him generously, until the two of them
exchanged gifts (tahādayā). Julian had sent a daughter of his to Roderic, king
of al-Andalus, so that he might educate and train her; but instead he had made
her pregnant. Word of this had reached Julian, whereupon he said, ‘There is
no punishment nor recompense that I can think of [sufficient] for [his crime],
except bringing the Arabs against him.’ He wrote to Ṭāriq, ‘I am your way
into al-Andalus (innī mudkhaluk al-Andalus).’66
The account continues with Julian sending his daughters as hostages to Ṭāriq, to
seal the bargain. Both this and the earlier exchange of gifts are ways of formal-
izing the alliance, and it is interesting that the jurist Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam, unlike
other writers of the same period or later – and indeed unlike himself, in other parts
of the text – did not choose precise legal terminology, such as amān or ʿahd, to
describe the relationship.67 Julian then provides the ships to transport Ṭāriq and
his troops, under cover of trade expeditions between Iberia and North Africa. Ibn
al-Qūṭīya casts Julian in the role of a merchant, trading in horses and hunting
birds, rather than as a ruler;68 this is unique to Ibn al-Qūṭīya, as far as I am aware,
and is probably due to a confusion in the transmission,69 although it is possible
that Julian was promoted to the nobility by other writers, through a desire within
the Islamic tradition to make him and his offer appear more weighty. In Ibn ʿAbd
al-Ḥakam, and most other accounts, Julian takes no further part in the campaign,
although there is an isolated example – during the siege of Carmona in the Akhbār
Majmūʿa – of him playing a more category-one traitor, posing as a defeated
refugee to gain access to the city and act as the Muslims’ Trojan Horse.70
The passing reference, in Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam’s account, to the fact that Julian’s
daughter was in Toledo for her education, is based on the social practices of the
Visigothic nobility.71 It receives much greater attention in the Andalusī strand of the
Julian tradition, and in Islamic and Christian works that drew upon it, as part of an
elaboration upon the theme of Julian discovering his daughter’s dishonour and
outwitting Roderic prior to the betrayal. Of those under consideration, all are essen-
tially variations on the same account, which must be the product of the tenth-century
explosion of court-patronized historiography, although their sources are not stated.
Except for the much longer Chronicle of 1344,72 they all begin in the same way:
All of the nobles (mulūk) of al-Andalus used to send their sons and daughters
to the palace of the king (malik) in Toledo, it being in those days the capital
city of al-Andalus and the residence (dār) of its king, [so that they might]
serve the king as his only attendants, and become educated (yataʾaddubūna).
When eventually they came of age, he arranged marriages between them.73
It was the custom of the barbarians (sīrat ʾl-ʿajam) that anyone of rank had to
send his daughters [to] the high king’s castle, to become educated
(yataʾaddabūna), and be taught sciences and crafts. Then the king selected
marriage partners from among his noblemen’s sons.74
It was the custom (ʿāda) of the nobles (mulūk) of al-Andalus to send

their sons and daughters to the city of Toledo, to serve the king as his only
attendants, and to be educated (yataʾaddabūna) through that [service]. Then,
when they reached puberty, they were given in marriage to each other, and
[the king] had the power of deciding their marriages.75
It was the custom (sunna) in al-Andalus for the Christian kings to foster the
children of the patricians (baṭāriqa) and the eminent men.76
In those days, the custom existed amongst the Goths that the sons and daugh-
ters of the nobles were brought up in the king’s palace.77
This is not something Ibn al-Qūṭīya includes, perhaps because his Julian is only a
merchant, and his daughter therefore is not eligible to be a lady-in-waiting; in his
retelling, villainous Roderic orders her brought to the castle when Julian – in
Toledo on trade – unwisely mentions her in his presence. But the second part of
Ibn al-Qūṭīya’s story, of how Julian learns what has happened and what he then
does, matches the rest of the Andalusī tradition.78 In all these accounts, Julian’s
daughter writes to her father – or tells him on his next visit to the court – in secret,
and Julian swears revenge.79 In those versions where he is in Toledo, however, he
hides his rage and returns to North Africa on a pretext: either that his wife is ill,80
or that he is going in order to fetch for Roderic, as Ibn al-Qūṭīya has him say,
‘horses and falcons such as you have never seen’.81 The Fatḥ al-Andalus and Ibn
ʿIdhārī use almost exactly the same wording for this statement, with the added
explanatory gloss, in case we had missed his cunning, that this is all dramatic
irony at Roderic’s expense – when Julian talks of bringing birds of prey to Iberia,
what he really means is the Arabs. He then makes his bargain with Mūsā.
Traitor type 4: the disaffected faction

The final category of traitor is the disaffected faction, usually but not always
located within the elite of the community being betrayed. This type is simultane-
ously more grounded in the political and social circumstances, and more prone to
propagandistic manipulation, either by an author or his sources. In pre-Islamic
historiography, one of the clearest examples of this is Thucydides’ History, in
which both sides of the conflict take a number of city-states through secret deals
with one or other political faction within the walls.82 Undoubtedly this was a
common occurrence in ancient Greek warfare, but Thucydides’ retelling schema-
tizes events, presenting political divisions in a number of very different cities as a
reflection of those in Athens – between Athenian-sympathizing democrats and
Spartan-leaning oligarchs – and as a vehicle for staged, artificially-balanced debates
about ethical and political issues of interest to him.83 Moreover, such debates, and
the viewpoints that the factions represented, were still active when Thucydides was
writing, only a little after the events; it would not be surprising if some of Thucy-
dides’ information was therefore skewed by contemporary political concerns.84
The same applies in the Iberian conquest narratives. We have seen in previous
chapters that Iberia was going through a period of severe – if not unprecedented
– political instability at the time of the conquest;85 therefore, those sources that
reflect this appear to be more accurate, rather than those that portray the Islamic
conquest as complete after a single battle in which a unified Visigothic army is
defeated and Roderic is killed.86 We saw in chapter two, however, that a vision of
the conquest as not one but a series of battles – in the form of an itinerary of
self-contained siege tales – is not necessarily any more reliable, since this sort of
narrative was produced long after the event, out of a desire to clarify land status
arrangements through the rhetorical lens of conquest. Likewise, the most obvious
pushing of agendas, when it comes to the conquest of Iberia, actually takes place
within accounts that correctly acknowledge the factionalism and disorder of
the early eighth century. This is because the objective of these accounts is not
factuality; veracity or its appearance is a stylistic tool in the greater purpose of
achieving a collective definition of the past so as to shape or explain the present.
Indeed, within the Islamic tradition – as the hands-off khabar technique shows –
the greater the appearance of truth, the better a writer could make his case. This
category of traitor is seen in three main places: the early Christian response
from within al-Andalus, the Asturian tradition represented by the Chronicle of
Alfonso III, and the Andalusī tradition of court-patronized historians and their
successors.
The attitudes expressed in the Chronicle of 754 – with its fascinating combina-
tion of a western chronicle form, eastern-sourced Islamic historical data, fiery
lamenting over the fate of Iberia, and the minutiae of Iberian ecclesiastical disputes
– have already been explored in depth. For the chronicler, the notion that Iberia’s
downfall was due to a combination of human weakness and the workings of Prov-
idence was, manifestly, deeply attractive. The ‘long plundered and godlessly
invaded’ Iberian Peninsula is betrayed, in some senses, by its own geography; as
Musa approaches, we are told that the pillars of Hercules ‘reveal the entrance to
the port like an index to a book, or like keys unlocking the path to Spain’.87 That
domestic strife contributes to the crisis is, therefore, only to be expected. No-one
specific is to blame for the whole disaster; rather, all of the political, military, and
ecclesiastical elite are culpable, for letting ambition and cowardice trump their
sense of duty. Roderic created problems because he seized power, but he did so ‘at
the instigation of the senate’; nor does anyone else else behave better: his troops
fight out of ambition rather than loyalty, and they swiftly leave him to die.88 At the
same time there is a divine hand at work, as when we are told of Zaragoza ‘which
was now, by the judgement of God, openly exposed to the sword, famine, and
captivity’.89 The factionalism is as much a symptom as it is a cause of the
affliction; Iberia has joined the long list of other great civilisations that were
fated to fall.90
A little over a century later, the Chronicle of Alfonso III – commissioned, and
perhaps even written, by Alfonso III in the 880s,91 and thus a more overtly and
harmoniously on-message piece of propaganda than any single work in the
Muslim tradition – took a different view. This text is entirely happy to place
personal blame. Oppa, whom we met earlier helping in the execution of nobles
(and here a son of Witiza rather than Egica), is the one ‘on account of whose
treachery the Goths had perished’ (ob cuius fraudem Goti perierunt).92 Roderic’s
predecessor Witiza is the sinful source of all disaster, who brings God’s wrath
down on the country by his questionable ecclesiastical policies. The sense that
kings and clergy have a duty to protect their subjects’ spiritual and physical life,
seen in the Chronicle of 754, is once again present, but here the problem is not so
much neglect as deliberate misdeeds – a sort of spiritual treachery:
[Witiza] was a reprobate and was disgraceful in his habits. He dissolved the
councils. He sealed the canons. He took many wives and concubines. And to
prevent any council from being convened against him, he ordered the bishops,
priests, and deacons to take wives.93 This, then, was the cause of Spain’s
ruin. Thus says the scripture [. . .] ‘If the people sin, the priest prays, but if
the priests sin, there will be a plague upon the people’. [. . .] And because the
kings and priests forsook (derelinquerunt) the Lord, all of the armies of Spain
perished.94
The tone becomes even more strident when discussing the invasion. How Roderic
got the throne is not mentioned, only that ‘[i]n his time Spain grew even worse in
its iniquity’ and the legacy of past sins doomed the defence before it even began:
But, weighed down (oppressi) by the quantity of their sins and exposed by the
treachery of the sons of Witiza, the Goths were put to flight. [. . .] Because
they forsook the Lord and did not serve him in justice and truth, they were
forsaken by the Lord so that they could no longer inhabit the land that they
desired (ne auitarent terram desiderauilem).95
Like so many of the Christian responses to conquest that were discussed in the
Introduction, the Chronicle of Alfonso III was both an explanation of what had
gone wrong and a vision of hope for the future. It was the product of increased
confidence and aggression in the Christian north during the second half of the
ninth century – a time when, emboldened by the uprisings and political chaos in
al-Andalus, the Asturian kingdom pushed further into Andalusī territory than ever
before, with military raids and a far-reaching programme of resettlement, particu-
larly in the Duero valley.96 The Chronicle is an enthusiastic record of this policy,
past and present;97 it was also part of a broader cultural shift towards redefining
the Asturian monarchy as the unbroken continuation of the Visigothic regime, and
their capital at Oviedo as the second coming of Toledo.98 That this was a new
development during the ninth century can be seen in the different ways the
monarchy’s founder Pelayo is treated at either end of the century. In a foundation
charter for an Oviedo church, dated 812, Pelayo is simply a man with no special
connections or status;99 in the Chronicle of Alfonso III, however, Pelayo is ‘the
swordbearer of the kings Witiza and Roderic’ and the one good Christian left in
Iberia. His stand against the Muslims in a mountainous recess of the peninsula is
presented as a heroic foundation myth for the kingdom, a serious headache for the
Muslim authorities – provoking ‘an insane fury’ and the sending of ‘a very large
army drawn from all over Spain’ to Asturias in retaliation100 – and a promise that
the church and ‘the army of the Gothic people’ will rise again.101 Alongside such
lofty sentiments, the dishonoured woman topos gets another airing; a Muslim
(Berber) regional governor named Munnuza contrives to send Pelayo – who had
apparently, at first, accepted Muslim rule and continued to serve the conquerors
– away on a diplomatic mission, so that he can marry Pelayo’s sister in his absence.
On Pelayo’s return, ‘he by no means approved of it. Since he had already been
thinking (iam cogitauerat) about the salvation of the church, he hastened to bring
it about with all of his courage.’102
Pelayo’s position resembles, schematically, that of some of the ‘Martyrs of
Cordoba’. The martyrs were a group of forty-eight Christians – many of whom
knew each other, or were connected through an anti-acculturation clergyman
named Eulogius103 – who, in the course of the 850s, were executed by the Muslim
authorities in the capital. Almost all the deaths were self-invited; their crimes
were, variously, insulting the Prophet in public or apostasy.104 Like Pelayo, some
of the martyrs had made a career of working in the Islamic administration, but
had, for various reasons, come to find the compromises this required to be
intolerable, and so took drastic action.105 This connection is made more tangible
by the fact that in 883, Alfonso III sent as his envoy to Cordoba one Dulcide, a
Mozarab immigrant at his court in Oviedo who returned with relics of the martyrs
and some of Eulogius’ writings.106 Whether or not, as some have suggested, the
example of the martyrs, specifically, inspired the Asturians to greater efforts in
raiding and colonisation,107 the Chronicle was certainly written at a time of
increasing expectation, and a degree of militancy, among Christians in both
north and south.108 It is plausible that, as propaganda, it was aimed not only at the
home audience but also at the potential Mozarab migrants in al-Andalus, a
significant demographic force during the ninth century.109
As we saw in chapter three, the ‘sons of Witiza’ so derided for their treachery
in the Chronicle of Alfonso III, had a different significance for Ibn al-Qūṭīya in the
following century, and for other writers in the Andalusī tradition. Through his
granddaughter Sara, Witiza was an ancestor of Ibn al-Qūṭīya; the king’s sons,
therefore, were also an important historical precursor to those Christians who
acculturated, and in increasing numbers converted to Islam, in the 250 years after
the conquest. In their special relationship with the Muslim authorities in the
form of Ṭāriq, Mūsā, and the caliphs in Damascus, they echo and explain the
status of Ibn al-Qūṭīya and his fellow muwalladūn at the Cordoban court. Not
that this saved their story being framed as a traitor topos – note the final line of
the passage below – or hedged about with legal terminology and the proper chain
of command110:
When the two armies were facing each other, Alamundo (Almund) and his
brothers resolved upon treachery (ghadr) against Roderic. That night, they
wrote to Ṭāriq, transferring their allegiance to him (awṣalū [. . .] ʿalā ṭāriq),
informing him that Roderic was no better than one of their father’s dogs, and
his vassal (atbāʿ); they requested an amān so they could go to him in the
morning, and that he sign over to them the estates (ḍiyāʿ) of their father in
al-Andalus, comprising three thousand villages, named thereafter ‘the kings’
portion’ (ṣafāyā al-mulūk). [. . .] Thus they were the cause of the conquest
(fa-kānū sabab al-fatḥ).111
If the sons of Witiza lacked the personal resonance for others that they had for Ibn
al-Qūṭīya, they were still a popular choice for causation in later conquest narra-
tives. The fact that Roderic was a usurper, and his rule therefore illegitimate, was
a source of fascination to some Muslim writers. Ibn ʿIdhārī calls him ‘a tyrant
(jabbār) [and] oppressor (ṭāghiya)’,112 and had apparently read some of the
Christian historiography that was more positive about Witiza than the Chronicle
of Alfonso III,113 since he says he ‘found in one of the books of the ʿajam’ that
Witiza (Wakhshandash) was the ‘last of the kings of al-Andalus’, known for his
strength, adherence to custom (sunna), and championing of Christian piety.
Roderic, a bastard (zanīm) not of the royal house (mamlaka), ‘fell upon this
Wakhshandash and killed him’; it was Roderic, according to Ibn ʿIdhārī’s
Christian source, who ‘changed the law (ḥukm), and destroyed the customs of the
kingdom’.114 These statements read as an interesting mix of late antique and
medieval Iberian Christian concerns, and Christian concerns translated into an
Islamic idiom. Not being a proper royal heir did not disqualify a candidate for
the kingship in elective Visigothic Iberia, but would have been frowned upon in
the more dynastic later medieval world. Christian piety in a king presumably went
down well in any age, but the emphasis on custom as a separate thing sounds
Islamic. The charge of murder is not one that appears elsewhere.
Others explained Roderic’s ‘usurpation’ in terms reminiscent of the Chronicle
of 754: the Akhbār Majmūʿa and Ibn al-Athīr both comment that Roderic was
chosen because Witiza’s sons did not meet with general approval.115 This part of
the story was, in any case, more of a jumping-off point for the tale of the traitorous
faction. Al-Rāzī appears to be the source for this (more widely circulated) non-Ibn
al-Qūṭīya version.116 Unlike Ibn al-Qūṭīya, who was only interested in Witiza’s
sons and their amān from Ṭāriq, the other writers who used this story emphasized
the broader opposition to Roderic, led by Witiza’s sons but not consisting entirely
of them. In true khabar (or Thucydidean) form, the Akhbār Majmūʿa presents the
issues surrounding the nobles’ decision to desert Roderic in the form of an
invented speech, placing all analysis in the mouths of the characters.
When word reached them of the number of the Muslims and of their progress,
they had a meeting amongst themselves. One of them said to another, ‘This
son of evil has overcome our authority (ghalaba ʿalā sulṭāninā). Yet he is not
from [the higher ranks of] his people, but from [a] lower [rank]. This rabble
(qawm)117 has no need to occupy our land – they only wish to fill their hands,
then they will leave us alone. Let us desert the son of evil when we encounter
the rabble.’ [. . .] The sons of the king Witiza, who was king before him,
[were] at the head of those who caused the defeat of [Roderic].118
The major variant of this final category of traitor in the Iberian conquest narratives
is the idea of the fifth-column Jewish community, letting the Muslim invaders into
a city or holding it for them afterwards.119 This became a common trope, gradually
overtaking all other types of traitor in Christian works;120 it is seen relatively early
on in Christian accounts of the eastern Islamic conquests,121 and has even achieved
some currency in modern scholarship.122 But it was a late entry into the pool of
Iberian conquest material, despite the fact that Jews had periodically been viewed
with considerable suspicion by the Visigothic kings, and long scapegoated in
Christian tradition more generally, along exactly these lines.123 In the Arabic tradi-
tion, the idea of Jewish treachery appears no earlier than the post-tenth-century
Akhbār Majmūʿa:
Whenever they found Jews in a town, they joined forces (ḍamma) with them
[. . .] and left with them a small garrison (ṭāʾifa) of Muslims. [. . .] They
did that in Granada, city of the well, but did not in Malaga, city of the water-
source, because they found no Jews there.124
Al-Maqqarī, crediting Ibn Ḥayyān, has the Muslims join forces with Jews in
Toledo.125 This is picked up by Ibn al-Athīr (in Toledo and Seville),126 Ibn ʿIdhārī
(in Toledo),127 and in the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Christian works that
drew on the Andalusī tradition.128 It also found expression in later medieval anti-
Semitic civic ritual, as in Toulouse, which re-enacted the city’s supposed eighth-
century betrayal with a ceremony centred on abuse of its Jewish inhabitants.129
The emergence of this version of the traitor topos may have been tied to the
deteriorating status of the Jews in the period.130 Alternatively, Fred Astren has
argued that this may be an example of the Andalusī Jewish community making
history, rather than having one imposed upon it: that the community created
such tales, portraying its forebears as comrades in arms of the Islamic armies, to
improve its position in medieval Muslim society.131 Either way, it is a testament
to the enduring power of historiographical myths in popular as well as literary
imagination.
Conclusion
The aim of this chapter was to take a detailed look at one aspect of the conquest
narratives in which the interplay of reality and retelling is particularly apparent –
and particularly knotty. Through the gradations of the different types of traitor, we
can see ways in which the retellings were constructed, and how they reflected and
interacted with the circumstances of compilation. Those in the first and second
categories are the most cursory, often being little more than shorthand to smooth
the transition between ‘siege’ and ‘conquest’ in the way most entertaining to an
audience. The character of the traitor is created and named for the immediate
purpose alone, and disappears as soon as its function is fulfilled. But even this
level of the topos displays variations that could be used to encode messages – like
a stereotyped image of the inhabitants of a given city as treacherous by nature –
about the story being retold.
The third type, including the stories of Julian or Zopyrus, turns the focus on the
traitor himself. The traitor is still a self-contained narrative unit, with no other
impact on the broader narrative, but his actions are no longer confined to the act
of treachery itself. This type of traitor, in short, gets some characterization – even
if the nature of it is largely shaped by what lesson is being conveyed by his story
– and his motives are not opaque, but central to his plotline, and have become a
subject for elaboration and invention in their own right. Again, which elements
are embroidered – such as the quiet suffering and cleverness of Julian’s daughter,
which grows down the centuries – reflect later interest in the tale. The fourth type
is the most well developed, and well integrated into the narratives, of all. It is
expanded from the third to encompass much broader points about the society
under discussion – and thus, of course, the society that produced the narrative. Its
extra scope is reflected in the fact that the traitor is not an individual but a group;
indeed, in this category the identity of any one individual is a lot less important
than what they represent. Backstory for characters is pared down in favour of
the political points to be made, or implied. It is this combination of scope and
flexibility – within its literary framing – that made this type of traitor so attractive
as a propaganda vehicle in both the Christian and Muslim traditions. The first
three traitor types provide narrative causation; the fourth gives an explanation for
the event as a whole, locating the society’s flaws, or the operation of divine will,
in the deeds of one section of the populace.
7 On the other side of the world
Comparing narratives of contemporary
Islamic conquests in the east
In chapter four, I discussed the ways in which medieval Arabic geographers

and collectors of ʿajāʾib framed and described the western and eastern extremes
of the Islamic world. In line with the intellectual traditions of antiquity, these
areas were viewed, in some respects, as a single continuous category. The
periphery was a liminal, dangerous space in which events and sights that would be
strange in the civilized Islamic heartlands were common.1 In more concrete terms,
it was also a place far from central political authority, a military frontier zone
brimming with people to raid and recruit; a place where armies could be raised,
and fortunes made, out from under the eye of the caliph. In this chapter, I shall
examine what narratives of the conquest of al-Andalus have in common with
those of contemporaneous campaigns on the eastern periphery, as it was at
the time – specifically, Central Asia, Sind, and Hind. I shall be looking for two
things: firstly, for themes and tropes that are common to treatments of the early
eighth-century conquests, whether due to standardization imposed upon the period
by later historiographical processes and expectations, or to the shared conditions
of the time; secondly, for treatments of the material that diverge from the classical
Arabic-Islamic historiographical tradition, and the use of conquest material for
local purposes.
Classical is here used to signify those works of general or universal history
of the period from the later eighth century until the middle of the tenth, exempli-
fied by writers such as al-Ṭabarī (d. 923), whose selection of materials came to
dominate later historiography, in part because he superseded the works he
drew upon and caused them to fall out of circulation through under-use. Despite
the common use of the term ‘universal’ to describe them, however, these works
in fact tended to focus on the political, legal, and cultural perspectives of the
heart of the early Islamic empire (areas such as Syria and Iraq) and its elite,
the ʿAbbāsid caliphate and its court.2 Such works have the effect of marginalizing
provincial concerns while apparently recording the history of the early
Muslim conquests. Local histories, meanwhile, are understood in contrast to this
classical tradition. ‘Local’ will be applied to anything where there is a clear
and systematic prioritization of the regional or civic over the (avowedly or
apparently) imperial or universal: attempts to provide legitimacy for local dynas-
ties and group identity for the people of the provinces, for example, or the use of
The eastern narratives 119
historical events and individuals to explain and justify the circumstances of
contemporary local social life. Whereas most of the classical writers came from a
background of – and indeed, were primarily interested in – jurisprudence and
centralized imperial government, local histories tended to be written by scholars
born or based in the region, or bureaucrats whose career centred on local dynastic
courts and their administration; the latter group had juridical training too, of
course, but their priorities and audiences were on a different level. We have
already seen, in Ibn al-Qūṭīya’s (d. 977) focus on local history and localized legit-
imacy, how political ambitions centred on al-Andalus went hand-in-hand with the
rise of history-writing there. The development of this type of writing, therefore,
was linked to the fragmentation of the ʿAbbāsid empire in the tenth century, and
the rise of a plurality of more or less autonomous polities, especially in the far east
and west.
‘Local history’ is, however, a very broad category rather than a genre of
writing as such, and it included biographical dictionaries of local religious
scholars as well as chronicles of local events.3 For present purposes, only the
latter will be considered. These further subdivide into narratives of a locality,
where the emphasis is on events of various periods as they affect and have
affected a town and its hinterland, often in combination with descriptions of
the locality’s topography, monuments, etc.; and narratives of a local ruler or
dynasty, where the net is cast more widely, over the region or province
corresponding to that ruler’s or dynasty’s sphere of influence, and the emphasis is
on the military and political history of a bounded chronological period,
with glances at earlier history only to serve the immediate portrait. These
categories are not, of course, hard and fast; many works share elements of both
types. All also retain an awareness of their locality’s or dynasty’s place within the
Islamic world as a whole; explicitly or implicitly, most local histories, like the
Andalusī ʿArīb b. Saʿīd’s (d. 980) continuation of al-Ṭabarī, seek to put their
subject on the universal map.
Seen through the lens of classical Islamic historiography, the focus of which
was on Muḥammad and the territorial expansion he and his immediate successors
set in train, the early eighth-century conquests of such provincial areas appear
marginal. They were second-wave conquests, which took place long after the
first, paradigmatic burst of expansion and also after the exemplary leadership of
the Rāshidūn (the first four or ‘rightly-guided’ caliphs) and the Companions
of the Prophet, and perhaps their Successors. Given the central role that historical
narratives later played in determining legal issues such as the tax status of
conquered lands and peoples, and as a source of exemplary anecdotes about
many areas of proper conduct for Muslims,4 this raised difficulties. As I have
discussed in terms of the conquest of al-Andalus, the identity and remit of
the conqueror mattered. Properly-delegated authority for conquest had to be
demonstrable, and the more prestigious the conqueror, the more prestigious the
conquest. The fact that the expansion on the periphery is most likely to have
been carried out by provincial governors and their appointees, acting with consid-
erable and necessary autonomy – given the great distances between them
120 The eastern narratives
and central control or its agents – did not fit comfortably into the schema in which
conquests were usually narrated, which was predicated upon continual caliphal
oversight.5 Just as for the first-wave conquests of the seventh century, later
historians thus had to erect a framework of correspondence – orders from the
caliphs to undertake expeditions, regular updates from commanders in the field on
successful campaigns – over their conquest narratives, so as to make it appear that
the conquests were led from the centre rather than the periphery. If these exchanges
read to us as anachronistic and improbably swift for the first-wave conquests, the
effect is even more pronounced when it comes to the far-flung locations, and
manifestly autonomous commanders, of the second wave. Although documentary
evidence suggests that an early version of the barīd, the imperial postal system,
was in place by the early eighth century,6 it is difficult to be sure how far it
stretched in this period – in the west, certainly not to Iberia until the later eighth
century – or how effectively regional variations in infrastructure and management
on the periphery at this time allowed it to function.7 At its fastest, well into the
Umayyad period, an urgent message could apparently get from Jurjān to Baghdad
in thirteen days.8
Furthermore, these conquests took place in areas that were peripheral to the
Islamic heartlands in a political as well as a conceptual sense. Just as al-Andalus
was a part of the early Islamic empire for less than fifty years, before breaking
away under Umayyad rulership, so Transoxania was soon the site of numerous
break-away polities under local dynasties, while parts of Hind were not properly
conquered until at least the thirteenth century.9 The historical trajectories of
these territories did not fit easily into the triumphalist narrative of divinely-
inspired conquest leading to a seamless Islamic world. Yet for these areas’ elites,
the circumstances of their conquests continued to be of pressing concern, as
a way to explain and justify current circumstances – the status of Hindus under
Muslim governance in Sind, for example – and to help in the formation of a
group identity that combined Islamic and local traditions, through the celebration
of locally-important heroes (or the castigation of locally-important villains). So,
too, for the rulers of these areas, particularly when they had broken away
from the caliphate, a conquest narrative might – together with devices such as
glorifying genealogies – highlight the uniqueness of their territory, champion
their claim to legitimate, autonomous power, and express grievances against the
caliphate in Iraq.
I shall begin with a brief description of the key details of the eastern conquest
accounts, followed by an overview of the authorship, context, and tone of the texts
under consideration. Most of the chapter will be devoted to a thematic exploration
of the accounts, through a discussion of concerns and motifs they have in common
with accounts of al-Andalus, and to a consideration of what they can tell us about
the writing of provincial history. The intention is to further explore the ways in
which narratives of the Iberian conquest are conventional and typical – of either
the historiography of the early eighth century or provincial historiography more
generally – and also to emphasize the ways in which they were the unique prod-
ucts of their environment and their authors’ choices.
The basic stories of the eastern narratives
Transoxania
In 705, the governor of Iraq, al-Ḥajjāj b. Yūsuf, appointed Qutayba b. Muslim
al-Bāhilī as the governor of Khurāsān. For the next ten years, Qutayba carried out
seasonal campaigns in Transoxania, conquering a number of cities, including
Bukhārā and Samarqand, and defeating or allying with many local rulers. Although
he did not have things entirely his own way, he had a great deal of success, and
attracted a large and enthusiastic following of Arabs, local allies and mawālī;10 his
family, in particular his numerous brothers, are also portrayed as providing
staunch support throughout. His fortunes changed with the death in 714 of his
patron al-Ḥajjāj, and with that of the caliph al-Walīd in 715. With the accession of
Sulaymān, Qutayba – who suddenly found himself on the wrong side of the polit-
ical divide, and about to be replaced by his rival Yazīd b. al-Muhallab – attempted
to raise a revolt in Khurāsān. This failed when his own followers turned against
him. He was killed, along with his family, in 715.
Sind
The leader of the campaigns in Sind and Hind was, from 710, Muḥammad b.
al-Qāsim al-Thaqafī, another of al-Ḥajjāj’s appointees, and also his nephew. Like
his fellow conquerors in Central Asia and Iberia, Muḥammad b. al-Qāsim led a
campaign that was composed of sieges and peace treaties, and sometimes both,
together with large amounts of plundering and many encounters with the indige-
nous religious traditions. He also fought one pitched battle with a local king,
Dāhir. He is often portrayed as something of a prodigy, being only seventeen
years old at the time of his first (and only) command. In 715 he was arrested and
killed, under confused circumstances, by agents of Sulaymān, and replaced as
governor of Sind.
Texts for the eastern narratives

Three of the authors I intend to draw upon in this chapter sit firmly within the clas-
sical Islamic historiographical tradition, and all have been used and discussed in
previous chapters for their comments on the conquest of al-Andalus. The earliest
of these is al-Balādhurī (d. 892), whose Futūḥ al-buldān is divided up by region
rather than year, and so groups all the material on Central Asia and Sind together.
A limited amount of additional narrative is to be found in the same author’s vast
Ansāb al-ashrāf, a compendium of biographical anecdotes of significant early
Arabs, organized by tribal lineages. The kātib al-Yaʿqūbī (d. c. 900), who wrote a
geography governed by administrative needs,11 provides a summary version of
events in a (relatively) concise Taʾrīkh shaped similarly for use rather than orna-
ment. It is a shorter and less colourful – but also markedly less confused – account
than al-Balādhurī’s, stripped of much of the detail and with only a handful of
paragraphs on Sind. He is also more prone to using formulaic or legalistic conquest
narrative terms, such as dhimma12 and ʿanwatan13: necessary, clarifying shorthand
in such an abbreviated work. The view that al-Yaʿqūbī constructed his history
according to some sort of Shīʿī ‘bias’ – as if somehow the (proto) Sunnī tradition
were an objective and original default setting – has been undermined significantly
in recent years by Elton Daniel.14
The last of the classical three is al-Ṭabarī, whose annalistic Taʾrīkh represents
the most exhaustive and authoritative account of many subjects – subjects that do
not include al-Andalus or Sind, to which territories he devotes a matter of a few
lines each, although he certainly has much to say about Central Asia. In a work so
large it is impossible to expound with certainty on the author’s central theme, but
one of al-Ṭabarī’s recurring concerns is conflict between ruling authority and its
detractors; Marshall Hodgson has suggested that al-Ṭabarī seeks above all to
champion the value of law to provide impersonal judgement in such disputes,15
which would not be an unexpected claim from a jurist by profession in a period
where independent law was moving into the ascendancy. By far his most
frequently-cited source is Abū al-Ḥasan al-Madāʾinī, a prolific and much-quoted
author – a fraction of whose work survives – who died in 820.16 Although it is
always tricky to be sure how much the sources of our classical compilations
altered their material – as opposed to the classical compilers themselves who, it is
becoming increasingly clear, certainly did – a later classical writer like al-Masʿūdī
(d. 955/6), at least, considered al-Madāʾinī purely a transmitter. (Adab enthusiast
that he was, al-Masʿūdī thought this a failing.)17 It is harder to be specific, inciden-
tally, about al-Balādhurī and al-Yaʿqūbī’s sources; neither cite al-Madāʾinī by
name during these conquest accounts, although both describe many of the events
that al-Ṭabarī attributes to him,18 al-Yaʿqūbī names him among his sources in his
introduction,19 and al-Balādhurī on one occasion mentions ʿAlī b. Mujāhid,20
whom al-Ṭabarī cites as a link in a number of isnāds finishing with al-Madāʾinī.21
Al-Balādhurī cites Abū ʿUbayda Maʿmar b. al-Muthannā (d. 824–5) on four occa-
sions,22 more than anyone else in this section of his work; al-Ṭabarī uses Abū
ʿUbayda elsewhere on Central Asia,23 but not in his narrative about Qutayba. In
his section on Muḥammad’s conquest of Sind, meanwhile, al-Balādhurī does cite
al-Madāʾinī,24 but no-one else.25
In later centuries, another practitioner of this style of historiography was Ibn
al-Athīr,26 who used selections from earlier writers including al-Ṭabarī, together
with material down to his own time, to produce a cohesive narrative without
isnāds, and with fewer of the conflicting reports that pepper al-Ṭabarī’s account.
While, as we have seen, Ibn al-Athīr is conscientious about drawing upon other
sources of information for his account of the Iberian conquest,27 he relies almost
exclusively on al-Ṭabarī when it comes to Transoxania, although he is more
concise, choosing to summarize certain of al-Ḥajjāj’s letters to Qutayba, where
al-Ṭabarī quotes them in ‘full’, or the formulaic appearance of same;28 for Sind, he
seems to have followed al-Balādhurī’s fuller version of events, presumably out of
necessity since al-Ṭabarī had so few details on the region. Where Ibn al-Athīr is
more valuable is on the Ghaznavids’ campaigns in India – insofar as he was able
to obtain satisfactory information29 – the narratives of which provide some inter-
esting parallels and contrasts with those of the early eighth century, and with both
earlier and later local histories about the area.
The three major classical historians and their medieval heir Ibn al-Athīr, there-
fore, present broadly similar pictures, differentiated largely by issues of emphasis
and style: in other words, by how much space they gave to shared information. I
have also selected two texts that have received less attention as examples of
conquest history. For Central Asia, Ibn Aʿtham al-Kūfī’s account of Qutayba’s
campaigns runs to almost eighty pages. Little is known about Ibn Aʿtham, beyond
the fact that he operated in ʿAbbāsid literary circles, allegedly had Shīʿī inclina-
tions, completed two recensions of his Futūḥ – the first, not extant, dealing with
events up to 680, the second to 809 – and probably died in the first or second
decade of the ninth century.30 He was thus writing considerably earlier than any of
the more commonly-used authors, much closer in time to the source he seems to
have had in common with them, al-Madāʾinī.31 Ibn Aʿtham’s approach to the
Transoxanian material – as an integrated narrative of events in a single region – is
closer to al-Balādhurī’s than those of the other writers mentioned. Ibn Aʿtham,
however, does not generally use dates, although his ordering of events follows that
used by everyone else, and thus presumably al-Madāʾinī’s arrangement of the
material. He very rarely cites his sources,32 and has no isnāds at all, reflecting the
era in which he was writing, before the use of isnāds had caught on for historical
writing. Ibn Aʿtham’s focus, in this part of the Futūḥ, is on Qutayba in Transoxania
– and, where immediately relevant to the story, episodes set elsewhere – and his
tone is decidedly larger-than-life. Like all accounts of the Central Asian conquests
I have seen, however, Ibn Aʿtham’s account generally lacks the fantastical elements
that we have encountered in the narratives for al-Andalus, bar occasional
incidences of prophecy, which will be discussed below. Instead, the Otherness of
the frontier is expressed through its lawlessness; Khurāsān and Transoxania are a
prize fought over by a succession of powerful individuals and their retinues, a
situation that allows figures like Qutayba to kill and plunder unchecked – until,
with caliphal intervention, they are killed and plundered in their turn.
Al-Dīnawarī (d. c. 895–900), another classical-era writer who eschews isnāds
and akhbār in favour of a synthesized narrative, was a contemporary of the big
three; but his work, like Ibn Aʿtham’s, never enjoyed anything like the reputation
or popularity of al-Balādhurī’s Futūḥ. Al-Dīnawarī has little to say on this period
of history in Central Asia, despite his interest in Persian history more generally.
What he does say, however, is tonally more of a piece with anecdotes about
al-Andalus: a self-contained siege narrative with clear antecedents in epic story-
telling, specifically the Trojan Horse-esque plot device by which Qutayba tricks
his way into Samarqand. This appears nowhere else that I have seen, meriting its
discussion here.
On to the local histories. An important local text for Central Asia is the Tārīkh-i
Bukhārā, written for the Samānid amīr Nuḥ b. Naṣr in 943 by al-Narshakhī (d.
960). Surviving in a thirteenth-century version – which was considerably revised
and chronologically extended by diverse later hands, and in 1128 translated from
Arabic into Persian to make it more accessible to a local audience better acquainted
with the latter33 – this work shows the early eighth-century conquests from a local
perspective, that of the city and district of Bukhārā. Here, the personality of
Qutayba is less important – as is illustrated by the fact that his death at the hands
of his own troops is passed over in a few lines, compared with the elaborate down-
fall shaped for him by the likes of al-Ṭabarī34 – than a pair of siege narratives
centred on Bukhārā and nearby Baykand, and the effects of his actions upon the
locality. While the account of the former largely matches that found elsewhere, in
the latter al-Narshakhī – or a later reviser – takes pains to sketch Qutayba’s post-
conquest settlement of the city, and how its inhabitants responded, down to the
detail of why the doors of the mosque there have (defaced) figural decorations: it
is said that they were stolen by the Muslims from the villa of a rich family who
refused to attend the mosque Qutayba built in the city.35
The historiographical tradition for Sind is generally much thinner, both within
the classical tradition and without. Even the Ghaznavid period, during which Sind
was an important theatre of campaigning, offers only a small amount of eighth-
century conquest material. Al-Bīrūnī (d. 1050) has some brief comments on
Muḥammad b. al-Qāsim’s conquest in his Kitāb fī taḥqīq mā liʾl-Hind, an Arabic
compendium of the religious, cosmological, and cultural traditions of India. A
member of the Ghaznavid court by dint of geopolitical realities overtaking him –
he was swept up by Maḥmūd’s conquest of his previous home, Khwārazm, in
1017 – al-Bīrūnī travelled extensively in the Ghaznavid corner of India between
1017 and 1030, and he writes with learning and at length about regional topog-
raphy and Hindu beliefs and practices.36 But al-Bīrūnī was markedly uninterested
in military history, at least in this work; the little conquest detail he has comes
under the rubric of reasons why non-Muslim Indians are hostile to Islam,37 and he
conflates aspects of the eighth-century raids with those of his Ghaznavid patron,
as will be seen below. He does, however, share many of the ideological and tech-
nical touchstones of contemporary writers of local history in the various Persian
successor states, identified by Julie Meisami as markers of those writing in a
Perso-Islamic tradition:38 namely, the providential Islamic framework in which he
views history, his distaste for ‘storytelling’ as opposed to ‘history’, and his caution
about the veracity of his sources.39 Demonstrating that local history in the east was
not necessarily anti-Arabic or parochial, in another of his works al-Bīrūnī – a
native Persian speaker – extolled the superiority of Arabic as an intellectual
language, disdaining Persian as ‘unsuitable for anything except the akhbār of the
[pre-Islamic] Persian kings (kusrawīya) and evening storytelling (asmār
al-laylīya)’.40 Another Ghaznavid writer, al-ʿUtbī (d. 1036), who was employed
by the first dynast Sebuktigin but fell out of favour during his son Maḥmūd’s
reign, does not touch upon the eighth century at all. His Yamīnī is a dynastic
history in heavily rhetorical Arabic that is largely focused on Maḥmūd and his
Indian campaigns, which were a regular undertaking for Ghaznavid sultans,
necessary both for the appearance of strength to maintain support, and for the rich
temple spoils that paid for their standing army to hold off the Turks on the eastern
border.41 These accounts are drawn largely, it has been suggested, from Maḥmūd’s
own official pronouncements on the various raids, using the ruler’s self-promoting
language,42 and they cast a little indirect light on the post-classical presentation of
the early Muslim conquests in Sind and Hind.
A fuller narrative for the eighth-century conquests is the subject of a heavily
romanticized local history of Sind. This is the thirteenth-century Persian work
known as the Chachnāma by ʿAlī b. Ḥamīd al-Kūfī, an account of the kings and
towns of Sind in the decades immediately prior to the Muslim conquest, and the
dynasty’s downfall at the hands of Muḥammad b. al-Qāsim. Al-Kūfī claims in his
preface to have been translating an earlier – although how much earlier is never
stated – Arabic original, allegedly obtained from a qāḍī of Thaqafī descent in the
city of Alor, ancient capital of Sind and an important location in the text. Like
al-Narshakhī’s history of Bukhārā, the rationale for the Persian translation is
accessibility: since the Chachnāma ‘was hidden under the veil of the Arabic
language, it had not come to the notice of the people of Persia and other coun-
tries’.43 Questions have been raised regarding the character and reliability of the
Chachnāma, a fascinating text that was available in English translation for several
decades before it received a critical Persian edition. Some scholars have dismissed
it as a late embroidery of al-Balādhurī’s version, useless because of its profusion of
spurious detail,44 some have embraced it rather over-enthusiastically (its translator
declares that it ‘was at one time thought a romance, but ever since Elphinstone
rehabilitated its real character, there has been no doubt as to its being a history’),45
and others sit somewhere in the middle.46 Yet the Chachnāma is more interesting
when viewed as a thirteenth-century provincial vision of the past than it is as a
good or bad source of information about eighth-century conquest events; it is a
product of a later local historiographical tradition, left to flower outside the glare of
the ‘mainstream’, with a taste for romance and heroics, as well as a providential
framework of history in which Islamicization is Sind’s destiny. Al-Kūfī’s preface,
in which he praises the work’s intended recipient – al-Ashʿarī, the Arab wazīr of
Nāṣir al-Dīn Qabacha47 – makes the impulses behind it quite clear:
[A]ll men attain advancement to perfection by acknowledging as true the

belief of the people of Arabia and professing the faith of the possessors of
sound principles. [I was thus anxious to dedicate] this book of conquest,
which treats of the accounts of valour and bravery of the people of Arabia and
Syria, to this great and noble family which is by descent and lineage an
Arabian family.48
The Chachnāma was proof that Arabo-Islamic heroism in the classical mode (that
is, the display by exceptional individuals of both martial prowess and Muslim
piety) could take place even in the most distant provinces – and under the rule of
former slaves, one assumes – as well as a celebration of the coming of Islam to
transform Sind. Yet the organisation of the text – which gives great weight to pre-
Islamic politics, and to the thoughts and deeds of non-Muslim kings even during
the conquest – brings out something else, which is only implied in the dedication:
an enthusiasm for local historical traditions and figures. The picture that emerges
from the Chachnāma is of an acculturation that runs both ways, a process common
in the adaptation of heroic folktales for different environments.49 On the one hand,
there is an effort to Islamicize the Indian past, by showing it giving way to the
Islamic present via the narrative framework of inexorable Islamic conquest; on
the other, Muslim figures are made relevant to an Islamic audience in north-west
India because they share a narrative with the heroes of local tradition and the
images of local culture. This is particularly prevalent in the presentation of
Muḥammad b. al-Qāsim’s interaction with Hindus and Hindu temples. As will be
seen below, in the correspondence between al-Ḥajjāj and Muḥammad b. al-Qāsim,
and the details of the post-conquest settlement, the Chachnāma – like many local
histories in the Persian successor-states – is profoundly concerned with what
Meisami calls ‘kingly ethics’.50 Its author seeks to impart lessons of good govern-
ment, championing balance and fairness, to his patron and the wider audience.51
The major themes of the eastern narratives
Communication and the chains of command

One area in which conquest accounts for all three peripheral regions – al-Andalus,
Sind, and Central Asia – show distinct similarities, and close correlation between
form and purpose, is the theme of authorization for conquest. This is expressed
through the voluminous correspondence that our authors – usually with verbatim
quotations – claim was exchanged between commanders in the field and their
superiors. Improbably swift and frequent exchanges of letters are hardly unknown
in the accounts of the seventh-century conquests, but when it came to the eighth
century this device was more pertinent and the incentive to use it presumably
more urgent, because the circumstances in which the campaigns had been carried
out were less clear-cut, or less easy to present as such. The second-wave conquests
took place in areas much further afield than those of the seventh century, outside
routine communication range and thus beyond the ordinary purview of central
control. This distance from central authority was important for two related reasons,
one contemporary with the conquests, and one with its written records.
The importance of the distance at the time of the conquests lay with the factional
politics of the day and the way that frontier campaigning was conducted. Factional
politics had a considerable effect on the lives of those on campaign. Qutayba and
Muḥammad, together with their kinsman and patron al-Ḥajjāj, are said to have
been deeply involved in the manoeuvrings surrounding the succession to al-Walīd
(r. 705–15), supporting – or even initiating – the latter’s efforts to undo ʿAbd
al-Malik’s (d. 705) arrangements, and replace heir-designate Sulaymān
(r. 715–17) with al-Walīd’s son ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz.52 When this failed, and Sulaymān
acceded, he in turn moved to eliminate Qutayba and Muḥammad as quickly as
possible. Surviving panegyrics gathered by Andrew Marsham indicate that tension
between caliphs’ sons and their uncles over the succession was a recurring theme
in later Umayyad politics;53 in the absence of any clear principle of succession, the
question of which branch of the family might control the throne and thus the
resources of Syria was never a settled matter.54 In light of this, it would be
surprising if Qutayba and Muḥammad were not involved in moves to ensure the
succession of their patron’s son, since that was the scenario most likely to result
in continued favour and careers for them. Sulaymān’s swift change of frontier
personnel hints at how important it was to have one’s own supporters in key posi-
tions on the frontier, so far away and with such lucrative rewards of land and
spoils on offer.
The potential dangers of individuals operating unchecked in the eastern frontier
region had been demonstrated as recently as the previous decade, when Ibn
al-Ashʿath and his ‘Peacock Army’ – funded by al-Ḥajjāj for the purposes of
keeping order in Transoxania55 – launched a revolt that lasted for several years.56
Even if frontier commanders were not disaffected, merely ambitious, they still
represented a threat to state revenues and control in the relatively-unsupervized
east, carving out for themselves territory – and thus an income independent of the
state – and personally-loyal followings, whether of kinsmen, mawālī, or people
paid out of their own pockets.57 The latter can certainly be seen in the case of
Qutayba, whom the tradition portrays as being possessed of a virtually-limitless
supply of brothers to lead flanks of the army or look after newly-conquered
cities,58 together with the army (nās or ʿaskar) and – most significantly – what
several writers call Qutayba’s qawm.59 Al-Balādhurī distinguishes between
Qutayba’s qawm and the ‘people of his house’ (ahl baytihi), suggesting a differ-
entiation between kin and other close followers.60 In this period, qawm had come
to mean a personal military retinue rather than a kinship clan,61 and this is how I
understand the references to Qutayba’s qawm, although Ibn Aʿtham does still use
it in a tribal sense as well,62 and al-Balādhurī for delegations from Central Asian
cities. These delegations, notably, are generally offering alliance, and fight along-
side Qutayba thereafter.63
While Khalid Blankinship has argued that the opening up of a second wave of
conquest during and after the reign of ʿAbd al-Malik was part of a deliberate
caliphal policy of letting the armies’ energy dissipate on the frontier, with the
wealthy ‘targets’ of Sind and al-Andalus chosen at the expense of other regions
because they offered the state the best possible return on its investment, this is not
a picture that even the generally caliph-centric historical tradition supports.64 One
need not go far beneath the topoi of the surface story to find that the caliphs’
control over their frontier forces looks fragile indeed. For the most part, caliphs
such as al-Walīd seem to have been content to give their supporters free rein on
such matters. The fate of Qutayba and Muḥammad – and of Mūsā b. Nuṣayr in the
west – appears to be part of a natural cycle in centre–periphery relations in the
early eighth century, in which a new ruler at the centre reeled in the over-powerful
beneficiaries of his predecessor’s patronage and appointments, and rewarded his
own supporters in their places.
The distance of the frontiers from the centre had a second, related significance
for the later historiographical tradition, which was that it undermined the histor-
ical accounts’ utility for juridical purposes, or their correctness when read through
the assumptions of the later juridical tradition. Not only did the eighth-century
conquests take place far from central, caliphal authority, but – to a much greater
extent than the first wave – they were also carried out by provincial governors and
their subordinates, some of whom were not even Arabs, rather than by Compan-
ions of the Prophet, or by people who knew the Companions. Yet, as discussed in
chapter two, by the time our accounts were being written down in the ninth and
tenth centuries, paradigmatic legitimacy – in the sense of having enough weight in
the historical and legal tradition to be credited with making arrangements that
were binding upon later generations as juristic precedents – belonged largely to
the Prophet, caliphs, and Companions. In the later historical tradition, it was
harder to see eighth-century provincial governors’ authority as inherent; rather, it
was preferable that it be delegated to them by the aforementioned figures.65 We
have already seen that the Andalusī narratives, especially from the tenth century,
increasingly showed Mūsā and Ṭāriq corresponding with each other and the caliph
before they do anything. Provincial governors could not be seen to innovate or
make the ad hoc judgements in the field that we might expect of commanders a
long way from home, but had to conform to later legal principles decided from the
examples of the seventh century, or laid down by central authority.
As discussed in chapter two, establishing the circumstances of a conquest was
crucial: by which of the two accepted means (ṣulḥan or ʿanwatan) the city had
been taken, and whether it had been done under properly designated authority.
How could a city surrender and receive the immunity of a treaty when it had
already put up military resistance?66 Was a peace treaty concluded with a subordi-
nate governor or even a mawlā legally binding? It may or may not have been so at
the time, but the case was stronger in the eyes of later generations if it could be
shown that the caliph had explicitly permitted them to conclude it, or if the new
allies were passed up the chain of command, as in Ṭāriq b. Ziyād’s negotiations
with the Visigothic king Witiza’s sons.67 Such issues were important when
retelling the story of the seventh-century conquests, too, but for those of the eighth
they were more pressing and trickier to navigate because of the changed circum-
stances. Proving the provenance of land for tax purposes was a live issue – not
necessarily at the time of the conquests themselves, but rather as rulers and ruled
sought to find ways of living together, continually challenging and re-negotiating
the terms and expectations of their relationship. It was also important when the
narratives of the conquests were being compiled, in accordance with classical
legal norms and the fiscal priorities of the time, since these narratives came out of
this process of negotiation.68
In these eighth-century conquest narratives we can see, arguably, where the jurid-
ical terminology of ʿanwatan and ṣulḥan began to filter into the historical narratives,
which in turn indicates when these terms had become widely accepted as legal
classifications. The earliest of the writers under consideration here, Ibn Aʿtham,
does not use either word in the course of his narrative at all, instead choosing phrases
with similar – but descriptive rather than precisely legal – meanings. These include
fataḥahā bi-al-sayf (he conquered it by the sword),69 yasʾaluhu al-ṣulḥ (he asked for
peace),70 and – most interesting of all, since it makes explicit that Qutayba was
doing this under his own steam – waqaʿa al-ṣulḥ bayna Qutayba wa-bayna ahl
Balkh (peace fell between Qutayba and the people of Balkh).71 Both of these last
two are preceded by fighting, so there is not the simple either/or of the juridical
tradition. It is only later writers, like al-Balādhurī72 and al-Yaʿqūbī, who – although
working from the same source as Ibn Aʿtham (al-Madāʾinī, whether directly or at a
remove) – actually employ ʿanwatan and ṣulḥan:
Muḥammad b. al-Qāsim left; he overran (ghalaba) every balad that he passed,

and conquered (fataḥa) every city, by peace (ṣulḥan) or by force (ʿanwatan).73
In al-Andalus, as we have seen, the Umayyads in the ninth and tenth centuries
patronized history-writing at least in part for this reason, so that they might expand
their body of state-owned lands and therefore their revenues – while at the same
time, the descendants of those who had surrendered during the conquest composed
narratives of their own to emphasize their claims to land, and to social and political
respect, on this basis, as we saw in chapter three.74 These principles were at work
when it came to the presentation of the eighth-century conquests in the east. In
reality, it seems likely that provincial governors had a great deal of autonomy; it is
difficult to imagine how they could have operated on the distant frontiers without
it. But almost all the conquest narratives that we have for Sind and Transoxania
take great pains to establish the chain of command and the lines of communica-
tion, just as the Andalusī narratives do when they ensure that Ṭāriq is seen to have
obtained permission from al-Walīd via Mūsā to launch the invasion of Iberia.
In Sind, according to the tradition, al-Ḥajjāj and Muḥammad b. al-Qāsim
exchanged a small forest’s worth of correspondence. This is particularly pronounced
in the Chachnāma, which reproduces a great many of the letters – twenty-six are
quoted in whole or in part, with at least twenty-seven others paraphrased or referred
to – most of which, on al-Ḥajjāj’s side, are composed of a mixture of non-specific
platitudes and stating the obvious.75 On one occasion, for example, al-Ḥajjāj
finishes a letter – in a reply to a question about something else entirely – by
suggesting to Muḥammad, ‘When you advance in a body for battle, see that you
have the sun behind your backs, as [then] its glare will not prevent you from having
a full view of the enemy.’76 We can probably assume that this, and other pieces of
sage micromanagement like it, were more for the audience’s edification than
Muḥammad’s – part of the work’s advice on good conduct for leaders – or a story-
telling device to flesh out the characters and their relationship (promising young
star, wise old counsellor); Muḥammad may have been young, but he was surely not
stupid or else he would not have been put in command of the campaign. The high
point of this tendency comes when al-Ḥajjāj is credited with writing,
In the name of God, the most merciful and gracious. This is a letter from the
majlis77 to Muḥammad Qāsim. [. . .] let it be known that your enemies have
vanity in their heads. Never fear them, for victory is reserved for you. I give
you discretion to make peace if an amicable settlement (mosālehe) is made on
favourable terms (ahd) after solemn promises, and tribute (māl) is sent to the
treasury of the caliph. As for the permission to cross the river and to fight with
Dāhir, you have already been informed that you may cross it from that point
where you expect the least trouble and loss to your men. Or rather draw a
sketch map on paper showing the length and breadth of the portion of the
river within about four leagues above and below the crossing-points, which
should be marked on the bank on which they are situated. I may then select
one point and you must cross the river from there, so that no harm may be
done to the troops.78
It would be easy to dismiss this, were it not so clearly in the text to serve a purpose
– rather than claim literal truth – and meet the needs of later audiences. Indeed, it
had likely met the needs of several audiences in several periods, the tradition
having accrued detail as it was transmitted and adapted in different environments.
On the one hand, the net effect of all these letters is to create something like a
mirror for particularly dim princes. On the other hand, in this specific instance, the
wording of the authorization is too deliberate to be anything other than a retro-
spective attempt to clarify the chain of command and tidy up the legalities, and
speaks of a period when such distinctions were vital. The generic exhortation of
the rest of the letter might have suited a writer looking to play up the rightness of
the conquests and the Islamic destiny of India. The idea that Muḥammad would
want or need to wait for a consultation from al-Ḥajjāj in Iraq rather from than an
adviser with him in the field is, at first glance, just ridiculous; but even this had its
purpose, perhaps to flesh out the characters and make the action more vivid. There
are many more examples like this in the Chachnāma. The other accounts do not
contain anywhere near as many ‘verbatim’ letters for Sind, this being at least one
reason why they are so much shorter, but al-Yaʿqūbī and al-Balādhurī do allude to
the tradition of the correspondence. Al-Yaʿqūbī gives us a prime example of the
authorization type, noting that Muḥammad, after capturing Daybul, ‘wrote to
al-Ḥajjāj, asking his permission to advance. He replied to him, “Go. You are amīr
over what you have conquered.” ’79 Al-Balādhurī, meanwhile, has something
closer to the Chachnāma, commenting that Muḥammad sent reports and queries
to al-Ḥajjāj ‘every three days’, and received regular responses; he also quotes a
few lines of al-Ḥajjāj’s instructions to Muḥammad on how to use the ʿarūs cata-
pult – despite the mentioned presence among Muḥammad’s troops of at least one
man trained for that very purpose – and what to aim it at.80
In the Transoxanian narratives, al-Ḥajjāj appears as a slightly less prolific
correspondent, but still something of a busybody. He is consulted almost every
time Qutayba ponders granting an amān, or marching on a city, and less often
gives unprompted instructions on where Qutayba should proceed next;81 some-
times, the arrival of these letters is greeted with a stock phrase or two describing
how Qutayba calls his forces together and reads the letter aloud to them.82
Al-Ḥajjāj is also on hand with more of his patented helpful advice; as Qutayba
prepares to re-fight a particular battle in 708, having failed on his previous attempt,
al-Ḥajjāj requests, with some asperity, a sketch map of the terrain, so as to advise
him on strategy.83 Qutayba obliges, gets his instructions, and attacks successfully.
On an occasion when Qutayba does not get his manoeuvres pre-approved – in
709, when he deputizes the conquest of Bukhārā to his brother, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān
– al-Ḥajjāj is outraged. As al-Ṭabarī describes it, he only calms down when an
eyewitness sent by Qutayba assures him that the chain of command is intact:
‘Qutayba is the amīr, and he sent ʿAbd al-Raḥmān to command them. So the
conquest belongs to him, and to the head of the army (nās).’84 In the Kitāb
al-Futūḥ, Qutayba – or Ibn Aʿtham – is meticulous about writing a report to
al-Ḥajjāj after every conquest, to send along with the khums.85 He obtains permis-
sion for everything from the conquering of Samarqand to the killing of his erst-
while ally, Nīzak. In the latter case, Qutayba captures Nīzak and then faithfully
waits forty days for the written go-ahead to execute him (which reads, quite
simply, ‘Kill him. He is a bad, treacherous man, and an enemy of the people of
Islam.’)86 This speaks to later debate among the descendants of those concerned.
Ibn Aʿtham devotes several pages to extended dialogues on the topic of whether
or not Nīzak had been granted an amān by Qutayba; al-Yaʿqūbī gives a different
version. This will be discussed further below.
Letters have other purposes in the narratives. In a number of the Andalusī
accounts, al-Walīd – upon being asked, by Ṭāriq and Mūsā, for permission to
cross the straits to conquer Iberia – expresses fear for the safety of the Muslims in
such distant lands. This caution is a topos of caliphal correspondence, a kind of
shorthand for the caliphs’ position as protectors of the Muslims, and the inherent
dangers of peripheral lands; al-Walīd is also initially reluctant to let the expedition
to Sind take place, citing cost and probable high casualties.87 This may stem from
a story about a previous generation: ʿUmar I is also credited with reluctance to see
the Muslims go off on naval expeditions to Hind, having been convinced that it
was too dangerous and hardly worth the bother,88 and elsewhere cautions the
Muslims against campaigning in the mountains.89
Plunder and the khums

Just as it was thought necessary to confirm the circumstances of conquest, there
were also moralizing legal points to be made when writing these histories. As we
have seen in the Andalusī conquest narratives, many historians were also jurists,
and their interest in writing history arose in part from its usefulness as a source of
examples and anecdotes, demonstrating both what should and what should not be
done. The obvious lessons to be drawn from conquest narratives concerned the
conduct of soldiers in wartime: how they should be rewarded and with what they
might reward themselves. I have previously noted several admonishing tales in the
Andalusī narratives, centring on troops receiving divine punishment for greed and
excessive looting.90 There is an instance of this trend in the Central Asian material,
where there are recriminations over the looting that takes place after Qutayba’s
death,91 but in general it seems to be less common in the eastern conquest accounts,
perhaps because the traditions were less overtly shaped by the agenda of a single
legal school, as the Egyptian traditions regarding al-Andalus were by the Mālikīs.
Likewise, fewer rich and fantastical artefacts feature in these conquests than
they do in Iberia. Central Asia is particularly devoid of marvels; here, the rewards
of victory are almost invariably sums of money, often obtained as tribute rather
than plunder – always in dirhams, unlike in Iberia where the cash is reckoned in
dinars – and often slaves. Gold and jewels are few and far between.92 There are
more riches associated with Sind, at least partly because the accounts have
Muḥammad b. al-Qāsim finding temples with statues of the Buddha and caches of
gold in them, or in one case seven hundred richly-adorned women.93 One espe-
cially wealthy example is a building in Multān called the ‘House of Gold’ (bayt
al-dhahab), which was filled with riches – offerings left by pilgrims who had
come to see the city’s golden ‘idol’ (budd) – that were regularly deposited there
through a window in the roof.94 Here, perhaps, we can see the influence of later,
Ghaznavid-era events on what some accounts tell us about the eighth century,
since Multān continued to be an important prize, and its temple a matter of conten-
tion, into that period.95 Al-Bīrūnī, while ostensibly discussing Muḥammad b.
al-Qāsim’s dealings with Multān, describes the idol as being made of wood and
covered with red leather,96 details that only enter the tradition with al-Iṣṭakhrī (d.
957/8),97 prior to which the idol was always said to be golden; this may indicate a
conflation of the historical anecdote with what al-Bīrūnī saw on his own travels
with Maḥmūd.98 The wealth of India, and the riches available to those who raided
it, became a key theme in Ghaznavid historiography: it has been complained that
al-ʿUtbī can barely write about one of Maḥmūd’s campaigns without empha-
sizing, formulaically, the fabulous riches involved,99 and even al-Bīrūnī, although
he does not as a rule relate military history, mentions several examples (and often
their conquests) in passing.100
The only example of an apparently supernatural item comes with the temple at
Daybul, a twin seaport-riverport on the coast of Sind.101 In the Chachnāma,
Muḥammad b. al-Qāsim is told by a local Brahmin that the temple is guarded by
a talisman that must be destroyed before it can be conquered;102 in earlier render-
ings of the story, however, there is no talisman but a flagpole or mast (daqal) on
the top of the temple, which has no magical properties beyond the effect its
destruction has on the morale of the city’s inhabitants, and in al-Balādhurī’s
account it is al-Ḥajjāj, in a letter, who suggests to Muḥammad that targeting it
with the catapult would be a wise move.103
More common than marvels in the eastern accounts, with regard to loot, are
formulaic phrases noting that the commander in question sent the khums (a one-
fifth share of the booty) to the proper authorities, this usually being al-Ḥajjāj. In
Ibn Aʿtham’s account, these phrases often function as a formal ending to the siege
or battle narrative just passed. This, after a battle in Sijistān, is typical:
He took the fifth out of it, and sent it to al-Ḥajjāj. He divided the remainder of
it between the Muslims.104
The separation out of the khums was not simply later legalistic hair-splitting, but
may have come from concerns contemporary to the conquests. Two provincial
governors – Yazīd b. al-Muhallab and Maslama b. ʿAbd al-Malik – were dismissed
from their posts for failing to properly calculate and send home the khums during
the years 718–21.105 However, the explicit, repeated use of the term in the Central
Asian narrative seems to be peculiar to Ibn Aʿtham. Both he and al-Ṭabarī discuss
the treatment of booty after the conquest of Baykand, but only Ibn Aʿtham
mentions the khums; al-Ṭabarī’s khabar on the subject focuses entirely on how the
gold idol was melted down and shared among the troops, and also (unlike Ibn
Aʿtham) says that the task of sharing it out was delegated to another, named,
man.106 This most likely indicates different lines of transmission for the story,
with different priorities and interests.
The division of spoils, and their sending home, is mentioned less in Sind,
perhaps because Muḥammad b. al-Qāsim simply does less conquering. There are
some examples in the Chachnāma,107 but no reference elsewhere in the tradition
that I have seen.108 Revenue for the state was undoubtedly a major aim, however.
There is a striking episode in the Chachnāma in which al-Ḥajjāj writes to al-Walīd
about Sind, urging an expedition there on the basis of religious duty (certain
Muslims are being held prisoner in Daybul) and the fact that – specifically counter
to one of al-Walīd’s objections – such an undertaking would cost the caliph
nothing; indeed, it would pay for itself, and turn a profit.109 Al-Yaʿqūbī recounts
how al-Ḥajjāj passed this pressure on to his subordinate:
Then al-Ḥajjāj wrote to him, ‘I have written to the Commander of the Faithful,
al-Walīd, guaranteeing to him (aḍmanu lahu) that I will bring back to the
treasury (bayt al-māl) the equivalent (naẓīr) of what I spent. So send me
(akhrijnī) [something] in the way of a surety for me (ḍamānī).’110
Several accounts describe al-Ḥajjāj’s satisfaction upon reckoning up the total

earnings of Muḥammad’s campaigns in Sind, implying that Muḥammad did his
duty in this area, doubling the amount (sixty million dirhams) spent on him.111 It
is interesting that equal weight is given in the letter to religious and financial
reasons for conquest, although this may simply be a reflection of al-Ḥajjāj’s rapa-
cious reputation in the historical tradition.
Relations with the locals, 1: infidels, traitors, idols, and

other excuses for conquest
In both Transoxania and Hind, the Muslim armies were entering lands populated
not by ‘Peoples of the Book’, whose protected status was laid down in the Qurʾān,
but by Pagans, Buddhists, and Hindus. This affects the presentation of the Muslims’
conduct towards their enemies, during and after battle, but not to the extent that
might be expected. Certainly there are a number of instances where the local
people are referred to as ‘unbelievers’ (kuffār) and ‘polytheists’ (mushrikūn) in the
narratives112 – although words such as mushrikūn and ʿilj (a derogatory term for a
non-Muslim non-Arab) were apparently not restricted to non-Peoples of the Book,
being sometimes used of Spanish Christian enemies in Andalusī accounts, too.113
Campaigns against these people are occasionally referred to as jihād, but more
often as ghazws (‘raids’).114 Qutayba is portrayed as destroying a number of
temples and melting down idols.115 Muḥammad’s actions are more variable, as will
be seen below, but he is certainly destructive at Daybul, attacking the temple and
its statue with a catapult,116 and kidnapping its women; in al-Bīrūnī’s brief account
of the conquest of Multān, Muḥammad is also said to have hung the flesh of a cow
(laḥm baqar) around the neck of the ‘idol’ (ṣanam) in the temple there, to desecrate
it.117 This story appears nowhere else, however, and it has the ring of a later, hostile
addition to the tradition, particularly since al-Bīrūnī had an interest in the ways in
which Hindus had come to hate Muslims, and it indicates a level of awareness of
Hindu sensibilities that only al-Bīrūnī and the Chachnāma – in other words, Indian
local histories – ever attribute to Muḥammad.
In several accounts, the reason for Muḥammad’s expedition into Hind and Sind
is, like Ṭāriq’s in Iberia, presented as the familiar trope of kidnapped and ill-
treated women, an insult to male honour. The ruler of Daybul captures a Muslim
ship in the waters off his coastline; hearing of this, al-Ḥajjāj in his outrage entreats
the caliph to allow him to send a party to rescue them, and perhaps carry out a
little raiding along the way. At the moment of their capture, we are told, one of the
women on board cries out for al-Ḥajjāj. In al-Balādhurī’s version:
One of the women, of the Banū Yarbūʿ, cried out, ‘O Ḥajjāj!’ [Word of] that
reached al-Ḥajjāj (balagha al-Ḥajjāj dhālika), and he said, ‘Here I am!’118
In the longer Chachnāma version, the woman is identified as being from the Banū
ʿAzīz instead, and the entreaty and the response happen twice – the second time
prefaced by an explanation that a survivor from the ship had brought the story to
al-Ḥajjāj. The exclamation is also slightly longer (‘O Ḥajjāj! O Ḥajjāj! Hear us
and help us!’, to which the response is also repeated, ‘I am here! I am here!’),119
presumably for greater dramatic effect. The difference between the two versions
may be evidence for Friedmann’s contention that the Chachnāma’s writer did not
pad his text but rather reproduced his source more fully than al-Balādhurī did;120
it could have been that al-Balādhurī was summarizing. But it seems equally likely
that the addition of a messenger was an attempt to rationalize an otherwise poten-
tially confusing report – with the explanation fending off the implication that
al-Ḥajjāj had superhuman hearing – or to expand it to flesh out the story, in the
manner of the abundant extra detail elsewhere in the Chachnāma. The woman’s
name change seems to point to a more arbitrary changing of the text.
As discussed in the previous chapter, the traitor within the defenders’ ranks is a
common literary way of explaining conquest. There are several examples of this
topos in the eastern conquest narratives. In Central Asia, this happens in
Khwārazm, when the brother of the ruler writes to Qutayba, offering him over-
lordship of the bilād if he is installed as (vassal) monarch and his brother over-
thrown;121 Qutayba, after consultation with al-Ḥajjāj, accepts the offer. Al-Yaʾqūbī
gives a different explanation for the conquest of Khwārazm, although it also fits
the definition of an excuse: he says that Qutayba attacks after an ʿāmil (governor)
of his is killed there.122 Muḥammad b. al-Qāsim benefits from two traitors. At
Multān, a traitor shows Muḥammad how to cut off the city’s water supply to force
an end to the siege, or – in the Chachnāma – where to tunnel under the wall in
order to undermine it.123 At Daybul, meanwhile, Muḥammad is approached by a
Brahmin from inside the temple, who points out the talisman that protects the
building, and explains that Muḥammad must shoot it to break the magic. He does
so, and the Muslims are victorious.124 In the centuries after the Chachnāma was
composed, anti-Muslim traditions grew up blaming a supposed Buddhist fifth-
column for the Islamic conquest of India125 – just as was later claimed of the Jews
in Iberian Christian and Andalusī Muslim sources alike.
Relations with the locals, 2: treaties, auxiliaries, marriages, and

reaffirming the status quo
To the extent that there is reality behind this scenario, as has been discussed, it is
not the individual secretly opening the city gates, but the phenomenon of local
auxiliaries fighting alongside the Muslims, either as conquered opponents or as
independent allies, or being deputed to help with the day-to-day bureaucracy. In
the narratives, this is usually represented as an arrangement formally concluded
through an ʿahd or amān, or through the clientage relationship of walāʾ.126 There
are examples, often representative rather than strictly realistic, of auxiliaries in
these and other texts. The Chachnāma mentions a man from Daybul who converts
to Islam on the spot, and is awarded an administrative post there;127 a little later, we
are told that a group of people in Maoj learn about the practice of the amān, and
journey to the Muslims to offer their surrender.128 We also read that Muḥammad’s
forces were supplemented by 7000 Zutts (an ethnic or lowest-caste group called the
Jats in the Chachnāma, about whom more below) near Sīwīstan, and that Bukhārāns
and Khwārazmians fought with Qutayba’s Muslim forces at Samarqand.129
Ibn Aʿtham in particular discusses such alliances and agreements a great deal.
But he gives perhaps the most space to an extremely problematic ally, Nīzak,130
who double-crosses Qutayba and evades his wrath for some time. At length,
Qutayba succeeds in tricking him – via an intermediary named Sulaym al-Nāṣiḥ
– with the promise of an amān, which draws Nīzak out to meet him, whereupon he
is seized and, eventually, killed. Qutayba crows over the fact that Nīzak has no
amān, and despite Nīzak’s protests and offers to pay a ransom – to which Qutayba
replies that Nīzak’s wealth belongs to him anyway – he executes him, and no fewer
than 700 men along with him.131 Al-Yaʿqūbī, on the other hand, says that Nīzak
was a convert, who did have an amān – although it was Nīzak who started the fight:
When Qutayba had conquered Bukhārā and al-Ṭālaqān, Nīzak Ṭarkhān –

who had become a Muslim (aslama), and was named ʿAbd Allāh – asked for
permission to return to his bilād. [Qutayba] permitted him, so [Nīzak]
returned to Tukhāristān. [There,] he rebelled, exchanging letters with the
barbarians (al-aʿājim), and gathering troops. Qutayba marched against him,
and sent Sulaym al-Nāṣiḥ to him, to [act as] a friend to him. He continued to
deceive him [. . .] until he rebelled against (kharaja ilā) Qutayba, in violation
of (ʿalā) the amān.132
Breaking the promise of safe conduct was not the done thing. Even in Ibn Aʿtham’s
account, although the lack of an amān is explicitly stated, and the killing of Nīzak
is authorized by al-Ḥajjāj and acclaimed as correct by his followers, the whole
episode has the tone of excess, of a man heading for a fall.133 Towards the end of
the narrative, when al-Ḥajjāj is dead, Qutayba’s followers progressively turn
against him, since he has grown increasingly paranoid and prone to the arbitrary
execution of any who go against him. This is presented even more starkly in
al-Ṭabarī’s account, as will be seen. The same tactic of a falsely-promised amān
is attempted again near the end of the story, this time without success, to lure
Wakīʿ, who is instrumental in Qutayba’s downfall.134
Another subset of the conquered with whom the conquerors interact are the
wives and daughters of defeated local rulers. For some, this is not an edifying
experience. Ibn Aʿtham recounts – through, inevitably, an exchange of letters –
Qutayba’s abortive attempt to marry Nīzak’s widow. The woman in question
writes back to him, splendidly:
‘O amīr! You are not the caliph, nor are you al-Ḥajjāj. Rather, you are one of
the amīrs of Khurāsān, like Yazīd b. al-Muhallab and the others. You killed
my husband and my children, and devastated my wealth. And then you send
to me [saying] that you want to marry me? Are you not afraid that I will plot
to kill you, and take my blood vengeance from you?’ Qutayba knew that she
had told the truth in her words, and [that] she was just and correct.135
Qutayba’s abject failure here linked with the questionable circumstances

surrounding Nīzak’s death, and with the more general portrayal of Qutayba as a
man quick to anger and unreasonable violence. The suggestion from this letter is
also that he was disdained in some quarters as a parvenu, lacking legitimate
authority or the aura of power. In the Andalusī accounts, Mūsā b. Nuṣayr’s son
ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz also runs into difficulties. He marries the dead king Roderic’s
widow, who proceeds to lead him astray:
Then [Mūsā’s] son ʿAbd al-Azīz married the wife of Roderic, named Umm
ʿĀṣim, with whom he was much preoccupied. She said to him, ‘Kings who
have not been crowned do not have mastery; let me make you a crown from
what jewels and gold I still have.’ He said to her, ‘This is not in our religion.’
She said to him, ‘How will the people of your faith know what you have on
when you’re alone?’ She continued in this vein until he did [what she asked].
Then one day, when he was sitting with her, wearing the crown, a woman –
[another] daughter of the [Visigothic] kings, whom Ziyād b. al-Nābigha
al-Tamīmī had married – entered, and saw him with the crown on his head.
She said to Ziyād, ‘Why don’t I make you a crown?’ He replied, ‘Such
dress is not permitted in our religion.’ She said, ‘By the religion of the
Messiah, it is for your imām.’ Ziyād told Ḥabīb b. Abī ʿUbayda b. ʿUqba b.
Nafīʿ of that. Then the two of them spread the news of it, until the leaders of
the jund knew of it. He devoted himself to exposing that, until he saw it with
his own eyes and his people (ahl) saw the truth. They said, ‘He has become a
Christian.’ Then they attacked him, and killed him, in the latter part of the
year 98 [717].136
Signalling the more folkloric dimension of his tale, Muḥammad b. al-Qāsim has
better luck in this regard, marrying the widow of Dāhir, the Indian king he defeated
in battle in 713.137 The invading hero marrying a local woman to symbolize his
(dominating) embrace of the culture he has conquered is a familiar trope;138 again,
foundation myths are at work. This story only appears in the late local history of
the Chachnāma; likewise, only in the Chachnāma is she even named (as Lādī
or Bai), reflecting her greater importance in the local narrative. In the classical
narratives – bar al-Ṭabarī’s, which has almost nothing to say about Sind – things
turn out differently. In two cases, Dāhir’s widow burns herself and her possessions
alive, rather than be captured by the enemy;139 in the third, she puts in an
appearance as a traitor/collaborator after Dāhir’s death, persuading the people of
al-Rūr to ask for an amān (that is, to surrender) rather than resisting the Muslim
army.140 Both these episodes, the burning141 and a version of the collaboration,142
also appear in the Chachnāma – confusingly, since she apparently burns herself to
death before allying with the Muslims. These are supplemented by three other
anecdotes about her: the aforementioned marriage, which comes from local
tradition (‘It is related by Muḥammad Hindī, who heard it from Abū Mushir ʿAbd
al-Aʿlā, who heard it from the ahl al-Hind . . .’)143 and is followed by a supposed
eyewitness account by Lādī of her capture; an alternative version of the burning
story, in which she is prevented from carrying out her intent, again sourced locally
(from ‘the people of Brahminabad’, this time);144 and finally a brief story in which
she intercedes with Muḥammad on behalf of the defeated people of Nawbhār,
whom he had planned to kill.145
In marrying Lādī, Muḥammad is adopted into the Chachnāma’s schema of
Indian heroes, joining a local lineage – the deeds of whose previous generations
occupy much of the text up until that point – while also representing its apogee in
a new, Islamicized form. Other, earlier Muslim conquerors did the same, such as
Ziyād b. Abīhī’s union with a Sasanian princess;146 Ibn al-Qūṭīya’s royal ancestor
Sara was on the receiving end of such a marriage when, as he tells us, the caliph
picked a husband for her from among his retinue, again symbolizing the
acculturation of the two elites to each other, with the Arab Muslims presiding.
Similarly, in her intercessions to spare her people the conqueror’s wrath,
Lādī fulfils her expected role as the mediating influence, softening the impact
of change.
The portrayal of acculturation was important, to make conquering and
conquered cultures mutually acceptable and comprehensible to each other, and
often to provide an explanation from the heroic past for the social and political
organization of the audience’s present. This is very pronounced in the Chachnāma,
much more so than in any of the classical histories, and there are three possible
reasons for this. The first is the social conditions of the periphery: like al-Andalus,
Sind was a region where the Arab-Muslim elite were vastly outnumbered by their
non-Arab subjects, presumably making smoother ethnic relations a necessity. The
second and third reasons have to do with the literary purpose of the work: rela-
tions between the characters and the examples they set are significant because the
Chachnāma was composed or adapted in the heroic romance mould, and because
of its apparent advice-literature ambitions to demonstrate that good government
lies in fairness and compromise.147 It contains long sections, heavy on improbable
exemplary dialogue, describing Muḥammad b. al-Qāsim’s post-conquest settle-
ment, giving an Islamic patina to essentially Hindu, caste-based social structures.
He leaves intact the elevated status, and right to collect alms, of Brahmins,148 and
he confirms the lowest-of-the-low status of the Jats/Zutts.149 Many temples are
likewise left intact, including that of Multān; it is explained – in a letter from
al-Ḥajjāj, of course – that since ‘they have become dhimmīs’, the people of India
and their property should be left alone:
With regard to the request of the chiefs of Brahminabad about the building of
the Buddh temples, and toleration in religious matters, I do not see (when
they have done homage to us by placing their heads in the yoke of submission
(tāʾat āvardand), and have undertaken to pay the fixed tribute for the Caliph
and guaranteed its payment), what further rights we have over them beyond
the usual tax.150
Multān, as we have seen, was proverbially rich; several writers, including Ibn
al-Jawzī and al-Masʿūdī, maintain that its temple was preserved as a hostage to
good behaviour of the part of the conquered, and that the Muslims received a third
of its income.151
There is a similar retrospective justification at work in al-Narshakhī’s local
history of Bukhārā. Al-Narshakhī’s narrative of the city’s conquest departs radi-
cally from those in the classical texts,152 focusing on the post-conquest settlement
rather than the fighting: the level of tribute to be paid,153 the tribally-organized
settlement of the Arabs,154 and the strengthening of loyalty to the new regime
through the building of a mosque:
Qutayba ibn Muslim built a grand mosque inside the citadel of Bukhara in the
year 94/712–13. That place (formerly) had been a temple. He ordered the
people of Bukhara to assemble there every Friday, for he had it proclaimed
that, ‘Whosoever is present at the Friday prayer, I will give him two dirhams.’
The people of Bukhara, at the beginning of (their conversion to) Islam, during
prayer, read the Qurʾan in Persian [sic], for they were unable to understand
Arabic. [. . .] [O]utside the city were seven hundred villas where the rich people
lived and they were very arrogant. Most of them did not come to the grand
mosque. The poor wanted the two dirhams but the rich had no need for them.155
How much of this was actually done by Qutayba during his busy campaigning
schedule, and how much was the work of a deputy or a later governor, is impossible
to say; but the attribution of it all to Qutayba gives it the feel of a foundation myth,
so often central to local histories.156 As Harry Munt has noted in his discussion of
Ibn al-Azraq’s (d. 1181) history of his home town of Mayyāfāriqīn (south-east
Turkey), the story of the Muslim conquest could function as a second foundation
myth for a city, a break between its Christian past and its Muslim present.157 The
division of the city between the Arabs and the Bukhārāns, under which terms half
of the inhabitants’ houses were granted to Arabs (‘so that the Arabs might be with
them and informed of their sentiments’, as al-Narshakhī rather disingenuously puts
it),158 may again be a schematized representation of what happened: the flight of the
mobile rich to the hinterland, as we see them in the quotation above, leaving the
urban poor to live under Muslim rule. Mention is also made of a dihqān whose
descendants were able, in 767, to reclaim property, lost at the time of the conquest,
that they should have inherited from him,159 suggesting that at least some of the
local sources that went into this history were produced in the context of a smaller-
scale version of the sort of land ownership disputes discussed above.
Prophecies and legends

While ʿajāʾib are little to be seen in the eastern narratives, there are episodes of
prophecy and some allusions to legendary figures. I have already mentioned that
the description of Hind in ʿUthmān’s time is from an Alexander romance. In Ibn
Aʿtham’s account, al-Ḥajjāj devotes his final letter to Qutayba to praise and
encouragement for the continuation of the conquests, invoking Qurʾānic state-
ments about Dhū al-Qarnayn’s journey to the west.160 Dhū al-Qarnayn’s wall to
keep out Gog and Magog is also mentioned in a poem by Qutayba. Overall,
however, the parallels between the various conquerors on the edge of the world
are left largely unsaid. This stands in contrast to – and is presumably a result of the
different circumstances of – a later writer such as Balʿamī, who wrote his adapta-
tion and continuation of al-Ṭabarī’s history for the Sāmānid dynasty in the mid-
tenth century. Balʿamī links the Turks and the Slavs with Gog and Magog when
he discusses Dhū al-Qarnayn’s wall, in clear reflection of contemporaries’ fear of
these Pagan peoples on their borders.161
Ibn Aʿtham recounts one tale of prophecy set during the siege of Samarqand. In
front of the city, Qutayba meets a small group of Soghdians, who reveal, smugly,
that the city is safe, since according to their books it can only be conquered by a
hunchback man with a particular name. Triumphantly, Qutayba realizes that this
is a description of him, and goes on to defeat them.162 This episode is very remi-
niscent of an encounter linked with Ṭāriq in the Andalusī narratives (and of
descriptions of Muḥammad in the sīra): an old wise man (in some versions a
woman) recognizes him as the destined conqueror, because of a distinguishing
mark, in that case a mole on his shoulder.163 Prophecy also attends Muḥammad in
Sind. Al-Ḥajjāj, when casting about for a suitable leader of the expedition, is
informed by astrologers that Muḥammad will be the conqueror of Hind, and
despite the latter’s youth he decides to give him the command.164 In Daybul, ‘one
of the soothsayers’, who has seen the ultimate victory of Islam over Hind written
in his books and has ‘consoled and comforted the Muslim prisoners and women in
the fort with the news of the advent of the army of Islam’, gets an amān for
himself and his family from Muḥammad in return for his foreknowledge.165
Finally, one of the rare incidences of divine intervention in the eastern narratives
– Muḥammad leads his troops in prayer to overcome a terrible drought166 – has a
parallel in the Andalusī tradition, concerning Mūsā b. Nuṣayr travelling through
Ifrīqīya on his way back to Damascus.167
A tangential addition to this category is al-Dīnawarī’s epic-flavoured tale of
Qutayba’s conquest of Samarqand.168 Qutayba lays siege to the city for some
months, fruitlessly, and the dihqān inside informs the invader that only a man
named Bālān can conquer the city, according to his books of prophecy. With his
men growing tired of the wait, Qutayba comes up with a plan: he gets some large
chests and fits them with false bottoms. Then, inside each chest he stations one of
his men, with a sword. He places the chests in front of Samarqand, telling the
dihqān that he is going to al-Ṣaghāniyān, and leaving some his treasure behind
since there is too much for him to transport; would the people of Samarqand, he
asks, look after the chests while he is away? The people of Samarqand readily
agree, of course, and take the chests inside. As we would expect, the armed men
emerge from the chests during the night, kill the guards and open the city gates to
Qutayba and his army, who have sneaked back into the area, and the city is
conquered.
Power struggles and downfalls

The final theme common to the traditions is the shared fate of the frontier
conquerors. Both Qutayba b. Muslim and Muḥammad b. al-Qāsim, just like Mūsā
b. Nuṣayr in al-Andalus, fall foul of central authority, and are punished for it.
This, as has been discussed above, appears to be a reflection of genuine early
eighth-century circumstance: the heavily-factionalized politics of the day coupled
with unease about frontier commanders’ freedoms and ambitions, often expressed
in the sources through the schematic, emotive language of tribal rivalry. Upon his
accession, Sulaymān almost immediately set about removing his brother
al-Walīd’s supporters, and replacing them with his own. This was partly a power-
play, but may also have been personal; as noted above, more than one writer says
that al-Ḥajjāj had supported al-Walīd’s (failed) efforts to replace Sulaymān in the
line of succession with his son, ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz. Al-Ṭabarī further adds that Qutayba
had followed al-Ḥajjāj in this, and that al-Ḥajjāj had written to Muḥammad b.
al-Qāsim urging him to do the same.169 I have seen no evidence that Mūsā b.
Nuṣayr was similarly implicated in the opposition to Sulaymān, and it seems
likely that Mūsā was simply swept up in the more general changing of the guard
that took place in 715: he was one of al-Walīd’s appointees, and so he had to go.170
More interesting is how this political manoeuvring came to be represented in
the histories. I have described the situation in al-Andalus at length in chapters two
and three, and the resonance of Ṭāriq’s story as both a protest against parochial
Arab attitudes to Berbers and an indirect lauding of the Cordoban Umayyads,
showing as it does a forebear of theirs setting all to rights and ensuring justice is
done. But in some versions, all of them coming from transmitters in al-Andalus or
North Africa, the sentiment is more pro-Mūsā and anti-central Islamic govern-
ment, and the structure and tone have more the feel of a romantic folktale: Mūsā’s
journey home becomes an epic, his sufferings are dwelt upon, he delivers proph-
ecies thanks to his knowledge of the stars, and Sulaymān’s extreme hostility is
emphasized.171 In one version Mūsā even repents of his greed and ends his days as
a pilgrim in Jerusalem. This strand is closer to the eastern narratives.
Muḥammad b. al-Qāsim’s arrest and death in 715, at the hands of agents of
Sulaymān, are comparatively poorly served by the sources. Among the classical
writers, al-Baladhūrī has by far the most to say, but his section on Muḥammad’s
end shows confusion over where he was imprisoned, and why.172 Al-Yaʿqūbī
confines himself to noting that Muḥammad’s army began to desert him in the
wake of the deaths of al-Ḥajjāj and al-Walīd, and that Sulaymān sent out his crea-
ture Ḥabīb b. al-Muhallab, who ‘dressed [Muḥammad] in sackcloth, and shackled
and imprisoned him’.173 Ibn al-Athīr is similarly brief, although Sulaymān’s agent
in this instance is said to be Yazīd b. Abī Kabasha, who in the Ansāb is named as
al-Walīd’s appointee, not Sulaymān’s.174 Al-Ṭabarī does not even mention
Muḥammad’s death.
The Chachnāma, like the works of writers such as Ibn Ḥabīb or Ibn al-Qūṭīya
in al-Andalus, illustrates the way local tradition gradually fleshed out this bare
story. It concludes, also as in the Andalusī and Egyptian accounts of Mūsā, with a
very romantic version of Muḥammad’s downfall that elides factional politics in
favour of an elaborate tale of deception and revenge – and which, in so doing,
lionizes the founder of Muslim rule in Sind. Two daughters of Dāhir travel to see
al-Walīd (rather than Sulaymān) in Baghdad (later synonymous with caliphal
authority, but at the time yet unbuilt). They accuse Muḥammad b. al-Qāsim of
rape. Outraged, the caliph has Muḥammad arrested and executed. The daughters
then confess that their accusation was false, and that they made it up in order to
get their revenge on Muḥammad, who killed their father. The caliph, outraged
afresh, has the duplicitous damsels walled up, and there the story ends.175
Qutayba’s downfall is the most straightforward of the three, although it still
contains certain doubtful conventions of even the most sober Arabic historiog-
raphy, such as extensive speeches. Al-Ṭabarī lavishes no fewer than twenty-two
pages on this part of the story,176 Ibn Aʿtham twenty-seven.177 At Sulaymān’s
accession, we are told, Qutayba was well aware that he was unlikely to be in
favour with the new regime. In both accounts, Qutayba writes several letters at
once to the new caliph (three in al-Ṭabarī, four in Ibn Aʿtham). These range in
tone somewhat, from the first, respectful missive – which consoles Sulaymān on
the loss of his brother and reminds him of Qutayba’s loyal service to previous
caliphs – to a blunt parting shot in which Qutayba effectively announces his rebel-
lion. He sends all these with a single messenger, whom he instructs to deliver
whichever one seems appropriate to Sulaymān’s intentions. Naturally, this does
not go to plan, although there are contradictory accounts as to what precisely goes
wrong, with Sulaymān appearing particularly devious and intent on provoking
Qutayba in Ibn Aʿtham’s version.178
The outcome in al-Ṭabarī is that Sulaymān sends someone to kill Qutayba, and
Qutayba removes himself to Samarqand to stir up revolt. Unfortunately Qutayba’s
persuasive skills here prove rather lacking: when his tribal followers do not
respond well enough to his rousing litany of the ways in which previous governors
treated them much worse than he has, in a fit of temper he insults their ancestry,
makes mocking puns out of their names, and suggests that they could not defeat a
single goat even if they all ganged up on it at once.179 This alienates everyone –
although not before they have engaged in a rather formal, Thucydidean debate
about the merits and otherwise of denouncing Qutayba as a rebel180 – and Qutay-
ba’s own men do Sulaymān’s work for him. In Ibn Aʿtham’s version, Qutayba
delivers a speech that touches on similar themes, in particular the contempt for
certain sections of the Arabs:
And you, O tribe of the Azd, you have exchanged the reins of well-bred
horses (ḥuṣun)181 for the ropes of ships, spears for punt-poles,182 and swords
for oars.183
Here, though, the disintegration of Qutayba’s support is much slower; the set-
piece speech is just one of many outbursts and ill-calculated displays of paranoid
violence that gradually drive most of his allies away, as more and more of them
see their kinsmen treated badly. The killing of Qutayba and his family is also
played out more slowly, although this seems to be because of the author’s, or his
sources’, desire to name as many individuals as possible; Qutayba’s family
members are picked off one-by-one by bow-wielding malcontents (in several
cases, mawālī), named once but never to appear again. Both of these writers do, at
least, give Qutayba a dramatic death; in al-Balādhurī’s narrative, Qutayba meets a
more ignominious end, being struck down by the pole of a collapsing tent, and
then beheaded.184
The shared narrative about Qutayba is, as already stated, more straightforward
and less obviously romantic than some of the equivalents for al-Andalus and Sind.
This is perhaps because classical Arabic historiography was more interested in
Transoxania, and turned out a great deal more pages about it – which was perhaps,
in turn, because a lot of the said classical writers came from Khurāsān and parts
east. But ‘more straightforward’ does not mean simple, and the narrative func-
tions in several ways that have nothing to do with fact and everything to do with
constructing frameworks in which these events could make sense to later readers
and writers. One of these is the tribal interpretation of factional politics, which
placed al-Walīd and his protégés in the Qaysī camp – that is, expansionist and
parochially pro-Arab – and Sulaymān with the Yamanīs, that is, preferring consol-
idation to expansion, and favouring social inclusion of non-Arab converts. So Ibn
Aʿtham tells us that when Qutayba took up office, ‘there was not a Qaysī in
Khurasān who was not overjoyed, nor a Yamanī who did not hate it.’185 Qutayba’s
great rival, Yazīd b. al-Muhallab, was from the Azd, and the Azdīs – as well as
coming in for excoriation in Qutayba’s rage-filled speech – are referred to by Ibn
Aʿtham as acting in a group on several occasions.186 It is notable, furthermore, that
al-Ṭabarī names the ringleader of those former followers who conspire to kill
Qutayba as Ḥayyān al-Nabaṭī, who commanded Qutayba’s mawālī auxiliaries.
Ibn Aʿtham, on the other hand, has an altogether messier picture, with a number
of figures whose prominence may be measured by the size of their retinue and the
willingness of the disaffected among Qutayba’s followers to turn to them for help.
As discussed earlier in this chapter, both Qutayba’s successes in the region, and
the forces that gather for his downfall, seem to represent developments in, and
fears about, Khurāsān and Transoxania at the time, in terms of the dangers posed
by ambitious men in the relatively unsupervized east.187 The caliph Sulaymān may
sanction Qutayba’s removal and replacement, but Ibn Aʿtham’s account in partic-
ular makes the manoeuvrings that result look more like over-mighty magnates
jostling for control than a caliphal police action.
Once again, we also have an issue of competing narratives: both Qutayba and
his patron al-Ḥajjāj are the targets for a great deal of hostile commentary in the
sources, and at certain points al-Ṭabarī and others note that there are alternative
versions of certain events that provide a more sympathetic picture. In Qutayba’s
case, as previously noted, most of this tends to come from, as al-Ṭabarī puts it,
‘the Bāhilīs’, presumably indicating descendants of Qutayba seeking to improve
his reputation.188 Furthermore, both al-Ṭabarī and Ibn Aʿtham quote large amounts
of poetry about these events, suggesting that Qutayba was an important figure in
the literary imagination, but with certain points of disagreement excepted – like
the issue of Nīzak’s amān – the story is broadly similar in all accounts. For the
tales of Mūsā b. Nuṣayr and Muḥammad b. al-Qāsim, however, we can see the
alternative narratives much more easily, because the lack of classical attention
they received meant that competing voices could not be drowned out as they
apparently were for Qutayba.189 The romances surrounding Mūsā and Muḥammad
are vibrant expressions of these figures’ significance on a local scale, as founders
of autonomous Islamic polities that – thanks to their distance from the centre, and
the tenacity of their rebellious rulers – were able to retain some links to their pre-
Islamic cultural past, albeit transfigured by the coming of Islam.
This type of history was not only entertaining but also politically useful for
successor dynasties in these regions, such as the Sāmānids, Ghaznavids, and
Buyids in the east, or the Umayyads in the west, who took an interest in the writing
of history in part to promote themselves as legitimate rulers within both indige-
nous and Islamic cultural traditions, for the eyes of their subjects and their rivals.190
Such dynasties patronized historiography extensively, and influenced or even
directly controlled what was written. Many of the Umayyads’ court historians
belonged to the family’s mawālī; the Buyid ruler ʿAḍud al-Dawla (d. 983), mean-
while, took a rather more hands-on approach, imprisoning the historian al-Ṣābiʿ
and forcing him to write, in the now-lost Kitāb al-Tājī, a glowing description of
how the Buyids represented the culmination of Iranian tradition.191 In customary
flowery terms, al-ʿUtbī compared himself and his panegyric-historical enterprise
in honour of Maḥmūd of Ghazna to al-Ṣābiʿ’s undertaking – in the full know-
ledge, it would seem, of al-Ṣābiʿ’s lack of volition, and thus apparently with some
irony.192 Yet he did so knowing that such a work, although delivered through the
written equivalent of gritted teeth, was the best way of regaining his standing
at court: in the fragmentary Islamic world of the tenth and eleventh centuries,
glorifying a provincial dynastic history – even its distasteful aspects – was the
key to advancement. Although they took different forms, these histories were
embroidered locally to similar purposes. The narratives thus produced were
often – as in some versions of Mūsā’s or Muḥammad’s downfalls – accounts of
outrage at the overweening power of the centre, of glorification for territories
that were overlooked or stamped upon by centralization, and of legitimization
for later pretensions to sovereignty, separate from the caliphate in the heartlands.
Conclusion: points of correspondence

These are some of the themes that are treated similarly in surviving texts, indi-
cating points of correspondence in circumstances and in later conceptualization of
the early eighth-century conquests in the east. The parallels are far from exact –
each conquest was subject to much local reshaping of its essential narrative, and
there are many differences between the two historiographical traditions. Nor are
either of these traditions the cohesive units that may be inferred from my analysis;
our picture of the Sind material is notably partial, since it received so little medi-
eval attention. But the various areas of thematic overlap offer insights into how
medieval Muslims understood – and continued to battle over – the narrative of
these events. They also illustrate how – given the freedom that came, especially in
the case of Sind, with being largely ignored in the historiography – epic and
romantic memorialization, dressed up as history, might flourish, creating local
traditions that provincial powers could be proud of.
All of this is interesting in itself, but what light does this eastern material shed
upon narratives of the conquest of al-Andalus? What do these eastern and western
provincial histories have in common, and what do their commonalities tell us
about the way historiographical traditions developed? Were narratives of the early
eighth-century conquests, wherever the conquests took place and regardless of
historical circumstance, assembled from – or otherwise substantially shaped by –
a shared pool of motifs, themes, and frameworks, such that their individuality was
lost to the demands of later debates?
The answer is both yes and no. There are, indeed, many aspects of these narra-
tives that point to common ideas about, and constraints upon, what a conquest
account should look like and what messages it should convey. Certain details of
the accounts are so standard as to be topoi, motifs included more for effect than
fact. The kidnapping of women that provokes the conquest, the prophecies and
portents that guarantee its success, the traitor who enables it to succeed, the stag-
gering amount of booty that is amassed: all of these are touchstones and figurative
expressions of the type of story being told, rather than of the particularity of
events. Other areas of commonality, as we have seen, have a broader impact on
the shape of the narratives. Commanders in the field had to be shown to be doing
things properly by later legal standards – that is, taking orders and making reports,
abiding by safe-conducts, monitoring the troops’ conduct, apportioning plunder,
and so on. Where they did not, a clear moral lesson had to be brought out; divine
justice had to be served. All of this was conveyed, symbolically and schemati-
cally, through reported speech, whether dialogue or public address, and letters.
Some of Noth’s contentions – that the categorization of conquests into ʿanwatan
or ṣulḥan was a later imposition, for example – are borne out by the fact that only
the later narratives employ these terms or make these distinctions. Likewise, all
three of these conquest narratives pivot on the rise and fall of an individual figure;
in each case, military activity is bounded by the fortunes of the narrative’s (anti)
hero, and the campaign is presented as a self-contained historical event in which
the central individual’s drama can play out.
Yet there were other forces at work in the conceptualization and writing of
these provincial histories that have mitigated the demands of writing conquest
history. Often, this is simply because other genres have left their mark on versions
of the narratives. For example, the trajectories of both Mūsā b. Nuṣayr and
Muḥammad b. al-Qāsim clearly owe much to heroic romance. While many of the
same notes are sounded in both tales (arrogance, deceit, unjust ill-treatment at the
hands of authority), and both are much embroidered with dramatic showdowns
and reported speech, the details are not so generalized, chiming with what appear
to have been issues of local significance in the provinces concerned. Thus Mūsā’s
story is concerned with the status of Berbers in al-Andalus, as well as with the
more general legal issues of plunder and delegation; Muḥammad’s downfall,
meanwhile, is entwined with his dealings with the local non-Muslim rulers during
the conquest, and its outcome is that his actions and his post-conquest settlement
are sanctioned by a local non-Muslim ruler. This would be an important legiti-
mising feature in any conquest narrative, but is deeply significant for Sind since
the tradition devotes much space to Muḥammad’s decisions on local religious
matters, such as awarding dhimmī status to Hindus. Another example of a genre
other than conquest history at work is seen in the Andalusī tradition’s preoccupa-
tion with ʿajāʾib, the scale and tone of which have no parallel in either of the
eastern provincial historiographies. Here, it seems that the narratives were influ-
enced by cosmological, geographical, and legendary images of the Iberian penin-
sula as the edge of the world, whose symbolic power was such that even a writer
such as Ibn Ḥabīb, who lived in al-Andalus, could compile an account of his
native landscape that owed little to direct observation and everything to received,
conventional ideas.
Moreover, aspects of the narratives come from historical circumstance rather
than just later projections. The fact that all three of our early eighth-century
commanders ended up as more or less deserving victims of Sulaymān may have
given rise to romanticized stories of their downfalls, but the new caliph’s changing
of the guard was not just a literary or juridical trope. Above, I have pointed to
circumstances under which these events, if not necessarily the forms in which
they are told, look very plausible indeed: factional politics, personal grudges, and
the concern on the part of a new caliph to monopolize the resources and opportu-
nities of these rich frontiers for his own supporters. Similarly, the profusion of
letters that are associated with the two eastern campaigns often ring untrue on an
individual basis, but it is very likely that the correspondence as a whole reflects
the concerns of the time in which the expeditions took place, as well as that in
which it was written up. Later generations wanted assurance that the chain of
command was always clear, but an early eighth-century governor such as al-Ḥajjāj
had a similar stake in such a display of control, given the chance – as has been said
– that eastern raiding expeditions might turn into personal, rebellious armies in
this period.
The persistence of these reflections of local concerns and other genres, amid
literary techniques and material that were otherwise common to and expected in
conquest narratives, might be explained by the fact that these provincial narratives
received less attention than did other areas of the historiographical tradition. By
this, I mean history written about the more widely significant, and more strin-
gently debated, events of paradigmatic importance to the Muslim world as a
whole: the deeds of the Prophet Muḥammad and the conquests of the Islamic
heartlands (Arabia, Syria, and Iraq) – the areas that were under direct caliphal
control, fiscally and administratively, for the longest time. There was less at stake
in peripheral history, particularly in areas like al-Andalus and Sind, and thus less
need for its recounting to do everything that was conventionally expected – and,
at the same time, less chance that someone as influential in the shaping of histori-
ography as al-Ṭabarī would bother to expend the energy to close down diver-
gences. The lack of classical attention to the histories of Sind and al-Andalus left
space in which local traditions might flourish – and, at various times, be exploited
for legitimacy by local dynasties. For al-Andalus we can arguably see the before
and after of a tradition being reshaped to fit the model of conquest narrative, once
there was a local dynasty that had an interest in exploiting – and normalizing – it.
It is very marked that, after the Umayyad Caliphate’s patronage of history-writing
in the tenth century, the conquest history that fills the pages of Andalusī historians
contains much more conventional material and terminology – itineraries of
conquest, descriptions of sieges, ʿanwatan and ṣulḥan – than it does those of
earlier writers such as Ibn Ḥabīb or Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam. The fantastical ʿajāʾib
material, meanwhile, is often toned down – but never entirely removed.
Conclusion
History on the margins
Early Islamic history is a rich field for a social historian; not because we have
much information from the period itself, but because Muslims of subsequent
centuries loved nothing more than to write, think and argue about it. History-
writing – as polemic, edification, entertainment, but always with some guiding
purpose – was central to how medieval Muslims conceived of themselves and
their world, and understanding their texts tells us much about them and what they
valued, if not always about the events they purported to describe. Their historical
tradition is a window onto medieval Muslims’ intellectual and imaginary worlds,
because it is filled with the stories they wanted to tell and retell, of heroes and
marvels, patrons and clients, battles and treasure: a past that was sometimes
glorious and sometimes misguided, but which always held up a mirror to the
present.
On the surface, the Muslim conquest of Iberia is a very simple story. There are
only a handful of named characters, most of whom, by its conclusion, are dead,
disgraced or far from al-Andalus, never to return; there are few – in many versions
only one – battles of note, and little in the way of feats of arms. The whole thing
is over quickly, and while it changed history within Iberia itself, it barely caused
a ripple in the course of the Islamic empire. There is little disagreement between
the major Arabic narratives, certainly not on anything like the scale that there is
over the seventh-century conquests, although some accounts provide substantially
more detail than others. Nevertheless, the tradition that grew up around the
Spanish conquest is filled with complex, charged layers of significance and
nuance. There may not be multiple different dates for Ṭāriq’s arrival, or three
mutually-contradictory siege narratives for Toledo alone, but those works and
fragments that survive testify to the many subtle ways in which the same basic
framework and a pool of shared motifs could be shaped by the priorities, interests,
and understanding of individual scholars and their sources.
Even two contemporaries such as the Andalusī Ibn Ḥabīb (d. 852) and the
Egyptian Ibn ‫ٴ‬Abd al-Ḥakam (d. 870), drawing on many of the same informants
and intellectually-moulded by many of the same teachers, produced strikingly
different narratives even as they shared many common elements. Both narratives
feature fabulous plunder and friction between patron and client commanders; both
recount the stories of the House of Locks and the finding of the Table of Solomon.
148 Conclusion
But Ibn ʿAbd, al-Ḥakam’s conquest narrative is not just an account of events but
a meta-illustration of fiqh, his main scholarly concern and that of those around him
in Egypt. The conflict between Ṭāriq b. Ziyād and Mūsā b. Nuṣayr is one of correct
versus incorrect conduct for Muslims at war. The whole narrative is structured
around Ṭāriq’s successful campaigning, Mūsā’s greedy, illicit efforts to take a
slice off the top, and the latter’s eventual comeuppance, punctuated by a series of
shorter anecdotes – the drowning, the carpet, the pitch – that echo this central
juxtaposition. These anecdotes not only deal with the same theme but they do so
according to the same basic pattern: an initial triumph (conquest and spoils)
devolves into greed (people take too much loot, or fall out over how to share it, or
horde more than they can carry), which results in ruin and loss (an overladen boat
sinks, a rich carpet is hacked to pieces, horded loot cannot be found again). The
portrayal of the Visigothic king Roderic as a man who is not satisfied unless he is
taking more than he already has – raping his vassal Julian’s daughter, insisting
that the House of Locks be opened despite his advisors’ urging that he follow
custom – fits this template. Having turned out for battle wearing his crown and
‘the finery in which all the kings before him had dressed’, conveyed on a throne
carried between two mules – in contrast to Ṭāriq and his followers, who we are
told were humbly on foot rather than riding – Roderic is ‘struck down’ by God.1
At the conclusion of the narrative, Mūsā’s wrongdoing and ruin are presented
twice. Firstly, from ʿUthmān b. Ṣāliḥ and others’, the legalistic judgement
is given in the form of a dialogue between the new caliph Sulaymān and a
previously-unseen interlocutor, establishing that Mūsā failed to extract the khums
(the caliphal ‘fifth’, for the good of the community), and which of the plunder is
ḥalāl (permitted) and which ḥaram (forbidden). Secondly – the source this time
being ‘it is said, rather’ – we get the Cantar de Geste ending, with a showdown in
front of the previous caliph al-Walīd in which Ṭāriq’s honesty over the loot, and
his cunning, pay off.2
Ibn Ḥabīb, by contrast, appears much less interested in finding any particular
moral in his story. The Table of Solomon, in his account, is not the centrepiece of
a power struggle, just another strange and legendary thing in a land defined by
strangeness and legend. He tells us that Ṭāriq found it, but writes no clash with
Mūsā over ownership of it; later, Mūsā hands the Table over to al-Walīd without
incident, and it is broken up, without a showdown or indeed any further mention
of Ṭāriq at all. Ibn Ḥabīb’s isnād for the finding of the Table shares its ultimate
source (al-Layth b. Saʿd) with Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam’s, although the two writers
credit different intermediaries (Ibn Wahb and Yaḥyā b. Bukayr). Ibn ʿAbd
al-Ḥakam’s addition, or Ibn Ḥabīb’s omission, of the second part to the story
results in two versions that are completely divergent in tone. The keynotes in Ibn
Ḥabīb’s narrative, shown through his selection of anecdotes, are not greed and its
punishment, but destiny, the marvellous, and the injustice suffered by Mūsā. Here,
the Table has no role in the story other than to be one ʿajīb (marvel, pl. ʿajāʾib) of
many; it is of a piece with the City (or qalʿa, ‘fortress’) of Copper, the jinn,
the shore of the Ocean, and the various idols, all of which are encountered by
Mūsā, not Ṭāriq. We saw in chapter two that Ibn Ḥabīb had Medinan, as well as
Conclusion 149
Egyptian, sources, but not even this fully accounts for the differences; the author
attributes his copper fortress story, for example, to ‘one of the shaykhs of the
people of Egypt’.3 The Medinan who appears most regularly, ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd,4
contributes only a small proportion of the narrative; his akhbār, which are brief
and usually centred around dialogue, are far from constituting the whole of the
account’s preoccupation with ʿajāʾib or partiality for Mūsā.5
Ibn Ḥabīb cites no informants for most of the lengthy denouement to his
account, but its focus, too, is quite different: the disproportionate anger and humil-
iating treatment that Sulaymān directs at Mūsā, and an enumeration of Mūsā’s
vast wealth.6 Ibn Ḥabīb includes some tales of greed elsewhere in his account: a
very brief summary of the drowning episode, and a version of the pitch anecdote
of similar length.7 But Mūsā’s wealth is catalogued with more of a sense of wonder
than condemnation. ‘Even my lowliest mawālī,’ Mūsā says, when Sulaymān
shows him a thousand-strong herd of sheep, ‘have double that.’8 It is an ʿajīb that
al-Andalus and the west held such rewards for Muslims, even non-Arabs, who
fought in the path of God. Mūsā, moreover, dies a pilgrim in Medina; the villain
of the piece here is the persecutor Sulaymān, who turns on Mūsā as soon as his
protector and supporter al-Walīd is dead, arresting him, and keeping him out in
the hot sun until he falls unconscious and can resist Sulaymān’s extortion no
longer. So weighted in Mūsā’s favour is this account that no lesser a person that
ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz (the exemplary caliph ʿUmar II, r. 717–20) is wheeled on
to praise the erstwhile conqueror: ‘Not a day passes that I am not filled with grief
[at the memory of] his goodness, and [what came] after it in the path of God
(wa-baʿda . . . fī sabīl Allāh), and what God conquered through his hands.’9
Ibn al-Qūṭīya (d. 977), as we have seen, is another example of a writer
who, even while compiling the words of others, was able to pick and choose his
material to tell the story that most interested him. The reports he heard and the
reports he retold are a reflection of the milieu in which he lived and worked: a
tenth-century caliphal court, dominated by mawālī of Hispano-Roman or Visi-
gothic descent, which sought to boost its authority (and base of taxation) by estab-
lishing a firm basis for Umayyad control through conquest history. Thus it is
unsurprising that Ibn al-Qūṭīya’s account spends as much or more time on the
non-Muslim allies of the conquerors – more specifically, the allies of the Umayyads
– than it does on Mūsā and Ṭāriq. Julian, Sara, and the sons of Witiza all have their
time in the narrative spotlight; each comes forward to offer support and request
that of the Muslims in return, and in the case of Witiza’s sons and Sara they also
travel to Damascus to make a formal agreement (ʿahd, amān, and in Sara’s case
something very like walāʾ) with the incumbent Umayyad caliph. Roderic, by
contrast, is only a lowly usurper: so Witiza’s sons call him, and so he proves when
he opens the House of Locks:
It was said that the kings of the Goths had a house at Toledo in which [was]
a chest, and in the chest [were kept] the four gospels [. . .] They used to revere
that house, never opening it, and when one of their kings died, his name was
written in it. When the kingdom fell to (ṣāra al-mulk ilā) Roderic, he took the
150 Conclusion
crown, [although] Christianity frowned upon that. Then he opened the house
and the chest, [even] after Christianity forbade him from opening it, and he
found in it pictures of the Arabs, with bows at their shoulder and turbans on
their heads. Underneath [was] written, ‘If this house is opened and these
pictures are moved, the people (qawm) in these pictures will enter al-Andalus,
and they will overcome it.’10
What is interesting in this passage is the repetition of ‘Christianity’ (al-naṣrānīya).11

Roderic’s fault here is not greed or over-active curiosity, or even resistance to the
march of Islam, but an act that betrays the land’s pre-Islamic cultural traditions;
he is illegitimate even within the terms of his own religion. This is implicit in the
anecdote as told, which dispenses with the argument – and thus the characteriza-
tion of rashness – seen in Ibn Ḥabīb’s version,12 even though Ibn al-Qūṭīya
mentions just before this that he had access to a ‘kitāb . . . fī fatḥ al-Andalus’ by
Ibn Ḥabīb.13 The point is also made in how the anecdote is arranged, alongside the
exploits of a cast of mostly Christian characters, all of whom are the victims of
abuses at the hands of Christians who overstep their legitimate power: Witiza’s
sons lose their birthright to the usurping general Roderic, Sara’s uncle steals the
land left to her and her sons by her father, and Julian’s daughter is raped by
Roderic.14 These abuses are redressed by the intervention of Muslim authority
figures. Echoing the repetition of al-naṣrānīya in the House of Locks story is the
fact that Sara’s offspring by her caliphally-arranged marriage, to an Umayyad
mawlā named ʿĪsā b. Muzāḥim, are the Biblically-monickered Ibrāhīm and Isḥāq.
The conquest is thus framed as an episode in which the Umayyads and their proxy
commanders are invited in to restore the Christian patrimony of their supporters,
while also conquering the Iberian Peninsula for Islam.
There are faint traces, in this emphasis on setting out Umayyad legitimacy in
Christian as well as Islamic terms, of the search – discussed in chapter two – for a
modus vivendi on issues such as land ownership, taxation, and religious practice
in the relations between Muslim rulers and the majority Christian population. The
fluctuations and negotations in these relations, and the appeals to the precedent of
the conquest events that underpinned them, can be seen throughout the Chronicle
of 754, with its references to governors who demanded more or less onerous levels
of tax, or made rulings on land ownership.15 It is notable that Ibn al-Qūṭīya’s book,
in its extant form, finishes with the death of the apostate and sometime ally of
Alfonso III, ʿUmar b. Ḥafṣūn, in 917,16 marking a symbolic end to the rebellions
against Umayyad authority that had plagued the reign of ʿAbd Allāh and the
beginning of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III’s, as well as a temporary respite to northern
Christian incursions. These issues, it is implied, are now settled: this is how it was,
and therefore how it will be; caliphs and Christians alike benefit from collabora-
tion, not antagonism. At the same time, Ibn al-Qūṭīya’s legitimization strikes
Islamic chords for the contemporary audience too. Roderic’s usurpation of the
throne is expressed through the seizure of Cordoba rather than of Toledo, and the
Umayyads are shown to be closely involved at every stage, including the fact that
Sara sees the young ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Muʿāwiya – the future ʿAbd al-Raḥmān I
Conclusion 151
of al-Andalus – during her audience with the caliph Hishām. This gives the
Umayyads a foreshadowed link with the Iberian peninsula, and an authoritative
role within it, even before the events of the 750s, and reminds the reader of the
continuity between the Damascene and the Cordoban Umayyads. The end of Ibn
Ḥafṣūn, a Fāṭimid partisan when he was not dabbling in apostasy, is likewise a
victory for the Umayyad brand of orthodox Islam, and for Umayyad territorial
claims against various Muslim rebels.
There are many more examples of accounts that bear the stamp of their time and
their authors’ interests. What survives of Aḥmad al-Rāzī’s (d. 955) narrative in the
Chronicle of 1344 and elsewhere shows different priorities again. This time the
House of Locks is not about Visigothic kingship but is said to have been built by
Hercules. It has a message of warning on its outside – echoing the inscription on
the wall of al-Baht, the City of Copper, in Ibn al-Faqīh’s account,17 and numerous
other thundering edicts from the past, like Shaddād b. ʿĀd’s at Alexandria.18
When opened, it is found to contain a palace as well as the customary chest.19 We
know from the geographical description in the Crónica del Moro Rasis translation
and adaptation of his work that al-Rāzī drew strongly upon Graeco-Roman
learning and was particularly keen – as his Latin source Orosius (d. after 418) had
been20 – to connect Hercules with ancient Iberia.21 Quotations in other Arabic
texts, meanwhile, suggest that al-Rāzī produced an account that was both much
more detailed than his ninth-century predecessors’, and more concerned with the
wider legalities of conquest than was Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam with his individual
morality tales. On the former, for example, he tells a fuller account of events
leading up to Roderic’s battle with Ṭāriq,22 and adds colourful but needless details
to episodes like the confrontations between Ṭāriq and Mūsā (Mūsā strikes Ṭāriq
repeatedly with his whip) and between Mūsā and al-Walīd’s messenger (the
messenger grabs the reins of Mūsā’s horse as he delivers the caliph’s rebuke).23
On the latter, al-Rāzī states explicitly that Ṭāriq got Mūsā’s permission (idhn) for
the invasion, and he appears to be the earliest source for the idea that Mūsā set out
purposefully on a conquest itinerary different from Ṭāriq’s, so as to conquer more
cities; notably, of all al-Rāzī’s passages preserved by Ibn ʿIdhārī (d. c. 1307),
these are the only ones where he gives his authority for the information (al-Wāqidī,
in the second case based on ʿAlī b. Rabāḥ).24 As we have seen, assertions regarding
the conquest of cities needed authority from antiquity, if they were to hold weight
in the present.
After the tenth century, many elements of the conquest narrative became fossil-
ized, giving less scope for innovation by individual authors; we saw in chapters
two and four how long al-Rāzī’s shadow stretched over subsequent conquest
narratives and geographical descriptions, freezing in place for future accounts
many of his details and choices of emphasis, including the Orosian overview of
the triangular peninsula. The anonymous post-tenth-century Andalusī compila-
tions, Akhbār Majmūʿa and Fatḥ al-Andalus, both display the increasing trend
towards extra narrative threads and the expansion of existing ones; both, like so
many later works that draw directly or indirectly upon al-Rāzī, have multiple
siege narratives and much fuller accounts in general.25
152 Conclusion
These observations may be supplemented by two points arising from the discus-
sion in chapter seven. The first is that much of the framework of conquest narra-
tives, wherever they took place, was governed by the literary and legal conventions
that developed for these narratives across the Islamic historiographical tradition.
By this I mean both the parameters of a conquest’s operation – the delegation of
authority, the behaviour of commanders, the formalization of alliances and peace
agreements – and the terminology applied to actions taken within those param-
eters (ʿanwatan, ṣulḥan, ʿahd). The formative period for this framework was the
eighth and early ninth centuries: thus Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam could still have Ṭāriq
raid Iberia and topple Roderic without even informing Mūsā until after the event,
or Ibn Aʿtham (d. early ninth century) could say that Qutayba made peace with
Balkh with no reference to the caliph. But by the tenth century, historians such as
Ibn al-Qūṭīya on Iberia, or al-Ṭabarī (d. 923) on Transoxania, were much more
precise and careful about hitting the right notes in what they recorded: Ṭāriq was
ordered in by Mūsā, Qutayba acknowledged al-Ḥajjāj’s oversight of his campaign.
The second point is that it is possible, through these narratives, to see issues that
were important at the time of the conquests, as well as ones that were only in the
air when the accounts were written down. Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam’s akhbār of various
individuals discovering the consequences of undeclared plunder are undoubtedly
schematic morality tales, points of fiqh given anecdotal life, often with names
attached. But they also, as the Chronicle of 754’s reference to the governor al-Ḥurr
torturing people to recover ‘hidden treasure’ indicates, reflect a concern from the
conquest period itself. The fear that individual conquerors might choose to profit
rather than share with the community was evidently a serious one, inspiring
enough comment to leave traces in Arabic and Latin texts, of both the 750s and
the 850s. Similarly, the notion that commanders on these distant eighth-century
frontiers might stop listening to central authority and build up their own private
armies of non-Arab auxiliaries, based on the profits of war and their personal
leadership, was represented in the tradition by the increasingly unhinged figure of
Qutayba in Transoxania, and by the likes of Ibn al-Ashʿath, a decade or so before
Qutayba’s campaigns began. Finally, Mūsā’s ill-treatment by Sulaymān, seen
mainly in Andalusī versions of the conquest of Iberia, looks like a topos of misused
authority (or just punishment for greed) when viewed in isolation, and as it
survives may indeed be largely the work of descendants and storytellers. But
when it is compared with the narratives of Sind and Transoxania, a pattern shows
through the literary construction of the characters in question: a change in the
balance of power and influence at the centre, leading a new caliph to reward his
followers at the expense of his predecessor’s. It is history shaped by the demands
of romance, but at some level it is still history.
It is history, of course, shaped by the stories and themes that later generations
still wanted to tell, and herein the real interest lies. Albrecht Noth, Lawrence
Conrad and others are undoubtedly correct that classical and medieval Islamic
history compilations are made up of many different formulaic reports, from many
different sources, with conflicting or outright contradictory agendas. But Noth is
wrong, I would argue, to say that all this rules out any possibility of discerning the
Conclusion 153
guiding hand behind a given work. All of the authors discussed in the past few
pages were reproducing, to a greater or a lesser extent, the reports of others. But
this did not prevent them from pursuing their own interests, or subtly presenting
their own or their patrons’ cases, through what they chose to include or discard, or
which reports they set against each other. Thus Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam collected
morality tales and constructed Mūsā as a greedy liar, all in aid of Mālikī fiqh,
while Ibn Ḥabīb championed Mūsā as a stranger in a (very) strange land, fitting
the Table of Solomon into a schema not of plunder but of wonder and imagining
the eastern caliphate a grasping place that destroyed Mūsā for his western wealth.
Thus Ibn al-Qūṭīya pared back Mūsā and Ṭāriq’s exploits to the episodes where
they interacted with disaffected Christians, giving an honourable history to
himself and fellow non-Arab mawālī and avowing their loyalty to the Umayyads,
while al-Rāzī wrote expansively of the interaction between the two Muslims and
drew on tenth-century translations of Graeco-Roman knowledge for al-Andalus’
legendary past.
The comparison with the historiographical traditions surrounding the eastern
conquests, particularly that of Sind, makes the point still more clearly: writing
history about the provinces may have been less fashionable, and taken longer to
get started, but this makes the inner workings of these provincial traditions easier
to see. Precisely because such history was less popular, less extensive, and less
extensively debated – because, we might say, al-Ṭabarī did not care enough to
give it a narrative form that would become definitive and render everything else
obsolete – it was a more flexible body of material, and writers had many more
options to make it their own. We can see, because only so many texts were
produced, when the conquest of al-Andalus started to become a subject for official
storytelling, or when non-Arab voices began to make themselves heard through it.
We can see the traces of negotiation between different ethnic and religious groups
within the population, in Ibn al-Qūṭīya and the Chronicle of 754, or for that matter
in al-Narshakhī or the Chachnāma. Because these stories were being told in envi-
ronments where an official version was less aggressively pursued – or where those
who might pursue an official version did not exercise enough power for enough
time to stamp out the alternatives – and because their settings and characters were
not significant enough to have been the subject of the most intense legalistic
discussion, there was less pressure than there was in the heartlands to reach
consensus and streamline the material. What survives is, correspondingly, not as
smoothed over or artificially harmonized as the conquest histories of Syria or Iraq.
Some stories were endlessly adaptable: the motif of the traitor, as we have seen,
could be many different things to many different writers. Some stories were more
or less fixed, but changes in emphasis were still possible: the House of Locks
never has another outcome or involves anyone other than Roderic, but the inclu-
sion or exclusion of dialogue, or the other anecdotes about Roderic that accom-
pany it, give it different meanings; likewise, the Table of Solomon really only has
two variants, with or without the struggle for control of it, but alterations could
and did make it pro-Mūsā or pro-Ṭāriq, or even – as for for al-Rāzī and ʿArīb b.
Saʿīd (d. 980) – offer a way into discussing pre-Islamic Spanish history and
154 Conclusion
putting Iberia on the map of Roman and Biblical history. Other stories were appar-
ently less useful to the burgeoning tradition: the City of Copper fell out of the
historiographical tradition after Ibn Ḥabīb, being taken up instead by the geograph-
ical and ʿajāʾib fields, probably because it was less adaptable to historians’
changing needs, and – as an oddity that went unconquered and untamed – fit less
easily into a land that, in tenth-century eyes, was meant to be under the control of
Umayyads. A piece of strangeness like the City is less problematic in a geograph-
ical than in a historical work, because the former need only be a descriptive list of
a region’s features, whereas in the latter the anecdote has to serve a narrative
purpose, or convey a message, something the City only does once it gets its Alf
layla wa-layla ending.26 Put another way, in geographical and ʿajāʾib writings
al-Andalus could simply be strange; in history, there had to be a reason for it.
There are several possible avenues for broadening this picture of provincial
historiography; I shall discuss two here. The first is a more exhaustive investiga-
tion of the Andalusī context. The painstaking demographic research published in
Spain under the rubric of the Estudios Onomasticos-biográficos de al-Andalus
over the past twenty years shows that profitable use can be made of biographical
dictionaries, to trace scholarly families, transmission connections and patronage,
and thus to build up a more complete picture of the elite milieux of Andalusī
history-writing. There has been some excellent work done on related topics:
Maribel Fierro’s insight into Andalusī Umayyad mawālī and Eduardo Manzano
Moreno’s discussion of tenth-century courtly historians are only two examples.
But combining isnād analysis of surviving histories with a systematic scholarly
prosopography of this restricted political and geographical area might give us a
better idea of how extensive the historiographical ‘industry’ was within al-Andalus
– who was writing or lecturing, and where – and what proportion of it survives.
We know that al-Rāzī was greatly influential in his own time and later, even
though only parts of his work survive; how many other important teachers are
visible only in biographical dictionaries, perhaps because they lectured rather than
wrote, or were more usually concerned with law than history, or were not active
in Cordoba? Individuals like Qāsim b. Aṣbagh were evidently central to tenth-
century Umayyad scholarly circles, even if they did not produce histories. Such a
study would also offer insight into how historiography overlapped with other
fields and professions, in terms of personnel, patronage and conceptualization.
We know that historians tended to be jurists, that geographers might also be state
officials, but can we quantify this and how did it affect the development of each
field? To what extent were different types of information transmitted through
different channels? Of course, these questions can be answered more securely for
some periods of Andalusī history than others; we have less information on, say,
the ninth century than we do on the tenth and beyond.
The second avenue, of which I have only scratched the surface in my final
chapter, is a broader comparative approach: how did provincial elites elsewhere in
the Islamic world formulate and make use of history? There are many more texts
that touch upon Sind and Transoxania that were not included in chapter seven’s
limited sampling. Equally, there has not been space to explore much about how
Conclusion 155
history was written outside the Cordoban ‘mainstream’ in al-Andalus, or during
the ṭāʾifa period – or to look at North Africa, or eastern lands conquered after the
eighth century. It would be fascinating to try to discover how far the above conclu-
sions – that provincial history-writing displays local concerns, and that history-
writing shows greater idiosyncrasy when it gets less ‘official’ attention – hold true
for other regions, and to track how developments in local historiographical tradi-
tions reflect the political and cultural fortunes of the locality, like the way the
Andalusī tradition sprouted conquest itineraries when the Umayyad government
became more centralized. Furthermore, while I have concentrated thus far on
conquest history – because of its possibilities as foundation myth, associated as it
is with foreign invasion and Islamicization – any future investigation need not be
limited to this. Some local dynasties placed their origins in other historical
moments; most obviously, one would imagine that the Fāṭimid caliphate cared
more about the fortunes of the ʿAlids – the blood descendants of the Prophet –
than they did about the invasion of Egypt. Identifiying which incidents and char-
acters were of most interest to a given province, therefore, could alter the way we
read its history. At the same time, one could also continue to trace the impact of
centrally-‘Islamic’ (especially Baghdadī) themes and forms on local writing: the
places where the imperatives of Islamic law, or the conventional story structures
and cultural reference points of seventh-century conquest narratives, shape or
even trump local knowledge and experience, like the Andalusī shuʿūbīya we saw
in chapter three, praising Berber and Slavic patrons in Persian terms.
Provincial historiography has much to offer us, both as enlightening contrast
with the classical likes of al-Ṭabarī, and as a fascinating topic of study in its own
right. Attention to diversity and marginality brings nuance to the whole picture.
Precisely because it was less important to Islamic culture as a whole – and there-
fore written by fewer people, and less subject to refinement and systematization
– provincial history-writing allows us to access an earlier draft of the historio-
graphical tradition. We can see the tools and touchstones of narrative history –
akhbār, isnāds, topoi, causation, legal terminology – in a new light, because they
were employed in different contexts, and by individual writers and compilers
given more scope for creativity, or under less pressure to turn out history that met
everyone’s standards. As I have attempted to demonstrate in these pages, while
the classical conventions of Islamic historiography frequently triumphed, some-
times a locality such as al-Andalus could produce a history of its own.
Notes
Introduction
1 Nor, indeed, did the fascination end there. Much the same may be said of writers in the
early modern period and down to the present – on which see J.N. Hillgarth, ‘Spanish
historiography and Iberian reality’, History and Theory 24 (1985), pp. 23–43 – although
those debates are largely outside the scope of this study.
2 Key examples include W.M. Watt, Muhammad: prophet and statesman, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1964, and H. Kennedy, The Prophet and the Age of the
Caliphates, Harlow: Longman, 1986, both of which treat the sources in this way; more
recently, see F.M. Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins: the beginnings of Islamic
historical writing, Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1998.
3 P. Crone, Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1987. See also A. Noth and L.I. Conrad, The Early Arabic Historical Tradition: a
source-critical study, Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1994 (2nd edn); R.S. Humphreys,
Islamic History: a framework for enquiry, London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 1991 (rev.
edn); S. Leder, ‘The literary use of the khabar: a basic form of historical writing’, in A.
Cameron and L.I. Conrad (eds), The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East, i: problems
in the literary source material, Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1992, pp. 277–315.
4 Noth and Conrad, Early Arabic Historical Tradition, ch. 3.
5 C.F. Robinson, ‘The conquest of Khūzistān: a historiographical reassessment’, BSOAS
67 (2004), pp. 30–7, discusses how even the traitor topos, though treated in terms of the
literary conventions of the conquest form, can be grounded in reality.
6 Or, as he puts it, the period was not a ‘Prelapsarian Heritageland’; M. Innes, ‘Introduc-
tion: using the past, interpreting the present, influencing the future’, in Y. Hen and
M. Innes (eds), The Uses of the Past in the Early Middle Ages, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000, p. 8.
7 R. Collins, The Arab Conquest of Spain, 710–797, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989,
pp. 2–4, 31–6.
8 Cf. G.M. Spiegel, ‘History, historicism, and the social logic of the text’, The Past as
Text: the theory and practice of medieval historiography, Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1997, pp. 21–22.
9 J. Fentress and C. Wickham, Social Memory, Oxford: Blackwell, 1992, pp. 2–4, 6–8.
On the importance of individual memory in the process of composing a historical text,
see M. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: a study of memory in medieval culture,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008 (2nd edn), pp. 1–4, 237, 240–57.
10 On which see, for example, D. Beaumont, ‘Hard-boiled: narrative discourse in early
Muslim traditions’, SI 83 (1996), pp. 5–31.
11 N. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: four essays, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1957, p. 76; H. White, The Content of the Form: narrative discourse and historical repre-
sentation, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987, pp. 4–6, 13–14, 20.
Notes 157
12 T. Sizgorich, Violence and Belief in Late Antiquity: militant devotion in Christianity
and Islam, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009, pp. 7–12,
15–17.
13 R. Morse, Truth and Convention in the Middle Ages: rhetoric, representation, and
reality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 8, 107–24.
14 R. McKitterick, History and Memory in the Carolingian World, Cambridge: Cambridge
15 Noth and Conrad, Early Arabic Historical Tradition, for example,. p. 20.
16 Leder, ‘Literary use’, pp. 71, 79; McKitterick, History and Memory, p. 85; see also
below, p. 19.
17 Noth and Conrad, Early Arabic Historical Tradition, p. 19.
18 E. Manzano Moreno, Conquistadores, emires y califas: los omeyas y la formación de
al-Andalus, Barcelona: Crítica, 2006, pp. 32–64, 122–6, and (on the longer-term effects
as reflected in the archaeology) 244–78.
19 G. Martinez-Gros, L’idéologie omeyyade: la construction de la légitimité du Califat de
Cordoue (X e-XI e siècles), Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 1992, and J.M. Safran, The
Second Umayyad Caliphate: the articulation of caliphal legitimacy in al-Andalus,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
20 H. Kennedy, Muslim Spain and Portugal: a political history of al-Andalus, London:
Longman, 1996, p. 5.
21 J.M. Abun-Nasr, A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1987, p. 28; E. Manzano Moreno, ‘Beréberes de
al-Andalus: los factores de una evolucion histórica’, AQ 11 (1990), pp. 410, 417.
22 Whether either clientage or entry into the army ‘presupposed’ conversion to Islam
(Abun-Nasr, History of the Maghrib, p. 34), and what conversion meant in this period,
will be discussed in chapter three.
23 H. Djaït, ‘Le wilāya d’Ifrīqiya au IIe/VIIIe siècle: étude institutionelle’, SI 27 (1967),
pp. 106–7; Abun-Nasr, History of the Maghrib, pp. 34–5; T. Lewicki, ‘Les origines de
l’Islam dans les tribus berbères du Sahara occidental: Mūsā ibn Nuṣayr et ʿUbayd Allāh
ibn al-Ḥabḥāb’, SI 32 (1970), pp. 209–10.
24 L. Molina, ‘Ṭāriḳ b. Ziyād’, EI2 X, Leiden: Brill, 2000, p. 242.
25 J.F. O’Callaghan, A History of Medieval Spain, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1975, p. 52.
26 B.F. Reilly, The Medieval Spains, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993,
pp. 33–5, 47–9.
27 See chapter six.
28 For example, FM, p. 205. It is difficult to tell how early (or late) this appellation is; a
century earlier, Chr754, § 54, mentions only the ‘straits of Cádiz’ and the ‘pillars of
Hercules’ (on which see chapter four).
29 Reilly, Medieval Spains, p. 52.
1 Conceptualizing conquest: the late antique historiographical backdrop

1 G. Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth: consequences of monotheism in late antiquity,
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993, pp. 3–8; with slight reservations,
Fowden includes the Sasanian empire under this rubric, but given the texts with which
I deal in this chapter I shall concentrate on the Byzantine world and the former Roman
lands in western Europe.
2 R.G. Hoyland, Arabia and the Arabs: from the Bronze Age to the coming of Islam,
London: Routledge, 2001, p. 27.
3 R.G. Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It: a survey and evaluation of Christian,
Jewish and Zoroastrian writings on early Islam, Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1997,
pp. 13–15.
158 Notes
4 R.D. Scott, ‘Malalas, The Secret History, and Justinian’s propaganda’, Dumbarton
Oaks Papers 39 (1985), pp. 105–6.
5 P. Magdalino, ‘The history of the future and its uses: prophecy, policy and propa-
ganda’, in R. Beaton and C. Roueché (eds), The Making of Byzantine History: studies
dedicated to Donald M. Nicol, Aldershot: Variorum, 1993, pp. 13–15.
6 Scott, ‘Malalas’, pp. 107–9, shows how both Justinian’s official notices, as reflected in
Malalas’ Chronicle, and Procopius’ dark mutterings in the Secret History reflect the
same preoccupations (Biblical, millennial, eschatological) from opposite sides.
7 For example, St Polyeuktos, funded by a private citizen, was built according to the specifi-
cations in 2 Kings 6 for Solomon’s Temple; Magdalino, ‘History of the future’, pp. 11–12.
8 Ibid., p. 14.
9 A.D. Momigliano, ‘The place of Herodotus in the history of historiography’, in idem,
Studies in Historiography, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966, pp. 130, 135.
10 M. Whitby, ‘Greek historical writing after Procopius: variety and vitality’, in
A. Cameron and L.I. Conrad (eds), The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East, i:
problems in the literary source material, Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1992, pp. 54–8.
11 M. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: a study of memory in medieval culture, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008 (2nd edn), p. 239.
12 B. Croke, ‘The origins of the Christian world chronicle’, Christian Chronicles and
Byzantine History, 5th–6th Centuries, Aldershot: Variorum, 1992, pp. 120, 124–6.
13 A. Cameron, ‘History as text: coping with Procopius’, in C. Holdsworth and
T.P. Wiseman (eds), The Inheritance of Historiography 350–900, Exeter: University of
Exeter, 1986, pp. 57–8.
14 C. Given-Wilson, Chronicles: the writing of history in medieval England, London:
Hambledon, 2004, pp. 21–3, 29–33, 56; D. James, ‘The world and its past as Christian
allegory in the early middle ages’, in Y. Hen and M. Innes (eds), The Uses of the Past
in the Early Middle Ages, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 102.
15 Whitby, ‘Greek historical writing’, p. 61.
16 A. Cameron, ‘New themes and styles in Greek literature: seventh–eighth centuries’, in
Cameron and Conrad, Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East, i, pp. 84–89.
17 T.P. Wiseman, ‘Introduction: classical historiography’, in Holdsworth and Wiseman,
Inheritance of Historiography, pp. 1–2.
18 For example, the shared Near Eastern assumption that forty was the age of men’s
maturity influenced the Islamic genre of sīra (Prophetic biography), as Muslim
writers sought to bolster their religion in this polemical milieu by ‘proving’ that
Muḥammad had been forty at the time of his first revelation; L.I. Conrad, ‘Abraham
and Muḥammad: some observations apropos of chronology and literary topoi in the
early Arabic historical tradition’, BSOAS 50 (1987), pp. 232, 237.
19 That is, a retelling of history (to the audience) as a prophecy about the future (from the
in-narrative perspective of the vision’s recipient) – in other words, ‘prophecy’ that has
already come true by the time of writing; J. Collins, ‘Introduction: towards the
morphology of a genre’, Semeia 14 (1979), pp. 6–7.
20 Hoyland, Seeing Islam, pp. 257–8.
21 J.J. Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination: an introduction to Jewish apocalyptic liter-
ature, Grand Rapids, MI, and Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans, 1998 (2nd edn), p. 36,
discusses an Egyptian apocalypse that imagined the imminent overthrow of Greek rule,
and the restoration of Egypt to glory, by a king sent from the sun by Isis.
22 Collins, Apocalyptic Imagination, pp. 87–9; J.W. Swain, ‘The theory of the four monar-
chies: opposition history under the Roman Empire’, Classical Philology 35 (1940), p. 1.
23 Daniel 2:40, 2:44.
24 Cameron, ‘New themes and styles’, pp. 93–4.
25 J.N. Hillgarth, ‘Eschatological and political concepts in the seventh century’, in
J. Fontaine and J.N. Hillgarth (eds), Le septième siècle: changements et continuités,
London: Warburg Institute, 1992, pp. 212–13, 220–1.
Notes 159
26 P. Chalmeta Gendrón, ‘Historiografía medieval Hispana: Arabica’, Al-Andalus 37
(1972), p. 359; T. Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought in the Classical Period,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 8–11.
27 R.S. Humphreys, ‘Qurʾanic myth and narrative structure in early Islamic historiog-
raphy’, in F.M. Clover and R.S. Humphreys (eds), Tradition and Innovation in Late
Antiquity, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989, p. 274.
28 C. Melville and A. Ubaydli, Christians and Moors in Spain, III: Arabic sources
(711–1501), Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1992, p. xiii; for examples of sīra miracles,
see al-Ṭabarī, i.3, pp. 1467–9 (Muḥammad strikes a rock three times, producing light-
ning and visions of future victory), and 1485 (Gabriel visits Muḥammad on the battle-
field, and goes ahead to frighten his opponents, the Banū Qurayẓa).
29 Ibn Ḥabīb, pp. 137 (triumph) and 146 (disaster).
30 FA, p. 17 (Ṭāriq dreams of the Prophet); Ibn al-Athīr, iv, p. 562, has another version.
31 On which see chapter 4.
32 K.B. Wolf, ‘Christian views of Islam in early medieval Spain’, in J.V. Tolan (ed.),
Medieval Christian Perceptions of Islam, London and New York: Routledge, 1996,
pp. 85–6. R.W. Bulliet, Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: an essay in
quantitative history, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979, p. 41, notes that
Arabic and Muslim cultural identities were so closely linked in the early period that it
is not surprising outside observers conflated the two, or missed the second.
33 Another example of this type is Bede, who gave only a few sentences to the events;
R.W. Southern, Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages, London and Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1978, pp. 16–17.
34 The earliest surviving manuscript dates to 715; R. Collins, ‘Fredegar’, Authors of the
Middle Ages: historical and religious writers of the Latin West, 4/12–13, Aldershot:
Variorum, 1996, pp. 1–3.
35 Fredegar, editor’s introduction, p. xxv; Collins, Fredegar, pp. 11–16, 33–6 (believes
there to have been only one continuator); McKitterick, p. 139 (finds the stylistic diver-
gences indicative of two).
36 Croke, ‘Christian world chronicle’, p. 116; Collins, Fredegar, pp. 5–8, 25–6.
37 M.B. Parkes, ‘Reading, copying and interpreting a text in the early middle ages’, in
G. Cavallo and R. Chartier (eds), A History of Reading in the West, Oxford: Polity
Press, 1999, pp. 90, 94–9, 101–2.
38 See, for example, McKitterick, History and Memory, pp. 121–9, on revisions to the
St Amand Codex designed to further Carolingian political agendas.
39 M. Innes, ‘Introduction: using the past, interpreting the present, influencing the future’,
in Hen and Innes, Uses of the Past, pp. 3–4.
and Islam, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009, pp. 9–12, 53–66.
41 Fredegar, p. 54.
42 Fredegar, p. 55.
43 Fredegar, p. 95.
44 A letter of 634 and a 636/7 Epiphany address, quoted in Hoyland, Seeing Islam, pp. 69
and 73, respectively.
45 Christmas address, 634, quoted in ibid., p. 71.
46 Quoted in ibid., p. 154.
47 Quoted in ibid., p. 154. This sort of Biblical imagery became a trope of writing about
the conquest, as we shall see.
48 Ibid., pp. 154–5.
49 S.P. Brock, ‘Syriac views of emergent Islam’, in G.H.A. Juynboll (ed.), Studies on the
First Century of Islamic Society, Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1982, pp. 15–16.
50 Quoted in Hoyland, Seeing Islam, p. 181.
51 Sebeos, i, p. 13.
160 Notes
52 Sebeos, i, p. 95–6.
53 Sebeos, i, p. 132.
54 Sebeos, i, p. 105.
55 John Bar Penkāyē, p. 60.
62 J. Johns, ‘Archaeology and the history of early Islam: the first seventy years,’ JESHO
46 (2003), pp. 428–9.
63 Zuqnīn, pp. 147–8; the word used for ‘poll-tax’ is an Arabism, derived from (the reli-
giously-discriminatory) jizya.
64 Hoyland, Seeing Islam, p. 57.
65 For example, Zuqnīn, p. 142 (shooting stars in 625 give the Romans ‘a terrible premo-
nition of defeat and of the conquest of their territories by the Arabs. This was in fact
what happened to them almost immediately afterwards’); The Chronicle of Theophanes
Confessor: Byzantine and Near Eastern history A.D. 284–813, tr. C. Mango and R.
Scott, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997, p. 467 (an earthquake in 631/2).
66 F.J. Martinez, ‘The apocalyptic genre in Syriac: the world of Pseudo-Methodius’, in
H.J.W. Drijvers et al. (eds), IV Symposium Syriacum 1984: literary genres in Syriac
literature, Rome: Pont. Institutum Studiorum Orientalium, 1987, pp. 341–2.
67 P.J. Alexander, The Byzantine Apocalyptic Tradition, ed. D.deF. Abrahamse, Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 1985, pp. 151–3.
68 Quoted in G.J. Reinink, ‘Ps.-Methodius: a concept of history in response to the rise of
Islam’, in Cameron and Conrad, Byzantine and early Islamic Near East, i, pp. 151–2.
70 Fredegar, p. 54.
71 Brock, ‘Syriac views’, p. 15.
72 Whether in the formulation ‘Hagarenes’ (for example, John Bar Penkāyē, p. 57; Zuqnīn,
p. 148) or as ‘Ishmaelites’ (for example, Sebeos, i, p. 98; Theophanes, p. 464).
73 Muslims traded in stereotypes, that is, where they deigned to notice Christians at all.
On occasions when Andalusī writers had to discuss their Christian neighbours, stock
literary images, such as a lack of hygiene, were duly rolled out; A. Al-Azmeh, ‘Mortal
enemies, invisible neighbours: northerners in Andalusī eyes’, in S.K. Jayyusi (ed.), The
Legacy of Muslim Spain, Leiden: Brill, 1992, pp. 259, 266–7.
74 D.J. Sahas, John of Damascus on Islam: the ‘heresy of the Ishmaelites’, Leiden: Brill,
1972, pp. 133, 137.
75 Ibid., pp. 41–3, 135, 139, 141. Like many writers, John interpreted Islam as a Christian
heresy rather than a separate religion.
76 Zuqnīn, p. 143.
77 Zuqnīn, p. 142.
79 Writing barbarian regional histories had become fashionable in the previous century;
W. Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History (A.D. 550–800): Jordanes, Gregory of
Tours, Bede, and Paul the Deacon, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988,
pp. 3–8, 15–16.
80 Biclaro, p. 98 (tr. § 92).
81 J.N. Hillgarth, ‘Historiography in Visigothic Spain’, Settimane di studio del centro
italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo 17: la storiografia altomedievale (1970), pp. 270–3.
82 Biclaro, p. 97 (tr. § 91).
83 K.B. Wolf, Conquerors and Chroniclers of Early Medieval Spain, Liverpool: Liver-
pool University Press, 1999, introduction, pp. 12–13.
Notes 161
84 Isidore, § 67.
85 Hillgarth, ‘Historiography’, pp. 298–9.
86 Isidore, pp. 79–80.
87 Chr754, § 95.
88 Chr754, §§ 12 and 34, respectively.
89 Wolf, Conquerors, p. 36. The chronicler also makes the caliph’s title secular: ‘Walid
(Ulit), the Amir Almuminin – a term of royalty which in their language means:
“carrying out all things prosperously (omnes prospere gerens)” ’; Chr754, § 57.
pp. 62–3, suggests Toledo on account of the author’s evident facility with ecclesias-
tical history, pp. 57–9; Wolf, Conquerors, pp. 26–7, offers Cordoba, since the text
shows the influence of Muslim attitudes, for example in his praise of ʿUmar II, § 67.
91 K.B. Wolf, ‘Muḥammad as Antichrist in ninth-century Cordoba’, in M.D. Meyerson
and E.D. English (eds), Christians, Muslims and Jews in Medieval and Early Modern
Spain: interaction and cultural change, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame
Press, 2000, pp. 4, 89–94.
92 Chr754, § 55.
94 Zuqnīn, p. 171.
95 Chr754, § 55.
96 Chr754, § 6.
97 On which see chapter six, esp. pp. 197–201. CAIII, § 5: Witiza makes priests marry
(‘This, then, was the cause of Spain’s ruin’ [istut namque Spanie causa pereundi
fuit]); § 7: the Goths ‘forsook the Lord’ and were ‘forsaken by the Lord’ as a result.
98 Chr754, § 52.
99 G.C. Miles, The Coinage of the Visigoths of Spain: Leovigild to Achila II, New York:
American Numismatic Society, 1952, pp. 40–2, 444–6.
100 In which ‘the heretic Muḥammad, seal (sigillus) of the false prophets of the
Arabs, forerunner of the Antichrist’ is a lust-crazed liar who is eaten by dogs after his
death instead of being resurrected as promised; quoted in Hoyland, Seeing Islam,
p. 513.
101
At the time when the savage rule of the Arabs miserably laid waste all the land of
Spain with deceit and imposture, when King Mohammad with unbelievable rage
and unbridled fury determined to root out the race of the Christians [. . .] Many by
denying Christ threw themselves into the abyss.
J. Gil (ed.), Corpus Scriptorum Muzarabicorum, Madrid: Instituto Antonio de Nebrija,

1973, i, p. 337; tr. from O.R. Constable (ed.), Medieval Iberia: readings from Chris-
tian, Muslim and Jewish sources, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1997, p. 51.
102 CAIII, § 9.
103 Chr754, § 54. The fact that rule is imposed piecemeal, and regionally, rather than in
one clean sweep as in the earliest Arabic sources, is again an indication that this narra-
tive is – here at least – less tidy and therefore more believable, even if it is not without
its own formal and ideological biases elsewhere.
104 Chr754, § 74.
105 Chr754, § 82. It has been suggested that this law code, for the Christians, was the
Liber Judiciorum, which continued to be the Christians’ law long after the initial
phase of Muslim rule in al-Andalus (B.F. Reilly, The Medieval Spains, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 35–7), and which – ironically – had been
promulgated by Recceswinth in 654 in a bid to end the judicial distinction between
conquerors and conquered in Visigothic Spain (J.F. O’Callaghan, A History of Medi-
eval Spain, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975, pp. 48–9).
162 Notes
106 M. Kulikowski, Late Roman Spain and Its Cities, Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2004, pp. 289–94.
107 So while Tarragona was abandoned after the conquest (P. Reynolds, Hispania and the
Roman Mediterranean, AD 100–700: ceramics and trade, London: Duckworth, 2010,
p. 135), Zaragoza saw a continuity of residential use into the eleventh century;
Kulikowski, Late Roman Spain, pp. 294–5.
al-Andalus, Barcelona: Crítica, 2006, p. 57, fig. 2.2. This measure represents some-
thing of a throwback, echoing early (non-state) experiments with a Pahlavi shahāda
on Arab-Sasanian coins in Persian territories; in the rest of the Islamic world, gold and
silver coinage had gone entirely epigraphic in the 690s.
109 P. Sijpesteijn, ‘New rule over old structures: Egypt after the Muslim conquest’,
Proceedings of the British Academy 136 (2007), pp. 187–191.
110 P. Chalmeta, Invasión e islamización: la sumisión de Hispania y la formación de
al-Andalus, Madrid: Editorial Mapfre, 1994, pp. 213–20, collects references to such
pacts in the sources.
111 Collins, Arab Conquest, p. 40.
112 A.D. Ṭāha, The Muslim Conquest and Settlement of North Africa and Spain, London:
Routledge, 1989, p. 98.
113 Text and translation in A.-A. El-Hajji, Andalusian Diplomatic Relations with Western
Europe, Beirut: Dar al-Irshad, 1970, p. 61; M. Fierro, ‘La falsificación de la historia:
al-Yasaʿ b. Ḥazm y su Kitāb al-Mugrib’, AQ 16 (1995), pp. 20–6, points out the prob-
lems in this text, including the anachronistic use of Qashtāla (Castile?) and the oddly
high level of tribute (in precious metals!) it sets for a relatively poor, mountainous area.
114 A. Christys, Christians in al-Andalus (711–1000), Richmond, VA: Curzon, 2002,
pp. 175–6.
115 Formulae such as the basmala do not in themselves guarantee authenticity, often the
opposite; C.F. Robinson, Empire and Elites after the Muslim Conquest: the transforma-
tion of northern Mesopotamia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 7–8.
116 Translation mine, based on the text – taken from al-Ḍabbī’s (d. 1203) biographical
dictionary, under the entry on one of the signatories – in Melville and Ubaydli,
Christians and Moors, pp. 10–12.
117 Christys, Christians, pp. 175–6.
118 A. Noth, and L.I. Conrad, The Early Arabic Historical Tradition: a source-critical
study, Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1994 (2nd edn), pp. 64–70.
119 Robinson, Empire, pp. 9–10, notes that copies of treaties would be kept by all parties
(for example, in church archives), indicating their perceived importance if not neces-
sarily their reliability.
120 W. al-Qāḍī, ‘Population census and land surveys under the Umayyads (41–132/661–
750)’, DI 83 (2008), pp. 378–9, discusses the extant contemporary documents
P. Ness.92 and P. Ness.93.
Longman, 1996, p. 47.
122 Chr754, § 64.
123 In the 720s; Zuqnīn, p. 155.
124 Robinson, Empire and Elites, p. 20.
2 Successors, jurists, and propagandists: reconstructing the transmission

history of Spanish conquest narratives
1 H.I. Bell, ‘Translations of the Greek Aphrodito papyri in the British Museum’,
D. I. 2 (1911), p. 279; number 1350 is a letter in Greek, dated to the 15th of Mecheir
in the eighth indiction (= late February 710), from Qurra b. Sharīk, governor of Egypt
709–14. It includes the following:
Notes 163
We do not know the number of sailors who returned home to your administrative
district of those who went out to the raiding fleet of Africa with ʿAṭā b. Rāfiʿ, whom
Mūsā b. Nuṣayr despatched, and of those who remained in Africa.
2 S.M. Imamuddin, Muslim Spain 711–1492: a sociological study, Leiden: Brill, 1981,
p. 137.
3 AM, pp. 12–13; al-Ṭabarī, i.4, p. 1951. It may, indeed, be a cross-cultural trope; it is
reminiscent of an episode collected in Plutarch on Sparta, tr. R.J.A. Talbert, London:
Penguin, 1988, pp. 141–2.
4 See below, pp. 65, 72–80. The flowering of geographical writing from the mid-tenth
century, and the expansion of provincial administration that required improved
geographical information, were also factors; see chapter four.
5 M. Chamberlain, Knowledge and Social Practice in medieval Damascus, 1190–1350,
6 AM, pp. 118–19; see also the discussion of this in J.M. Safran, The Second Umayyad
Caliphate: the articulation of caliphal legitimacy in al-Andalus, Cambridge, MA.:
Harvard University Press, 2000, pp. 129–31.
7 Cf. P.J. Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: memory and oblivion at the end of the first
millennium, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994, pp. 3–12: a neat little
example of how a made-up historical anecdote could be accepted for its parochial
appeal.
8 Al-Ṭabarī, ii.2, p. 1217.
9 An omission that led Ibn al-Athīr (d. 1233), iv, p. 556, to gloat over his own superior
learning.
10 92 A.H.: Ṭāriq fights and defeats Roderic, conquering al-Andalus at a stroke (al-Ṭabarī,
ii.2, p. 1235); 93: Ṭāriq finds the Table of Solomon in Toledo; Mūsā confronts his
wayward mawlā (pp. 1253–4); 95: Mūsā leaves al-Andalus (p. 1267).
11 Al-Maqqarī, i, pp. 229–90.
12 Of the edition used, only pp. 183–225 deal with events west of Egypt.
13 Geary, Phantoms, pp. 19–20, 115–16.
14 C.F. Robinson, Islamic Historiography, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003, p. 85.
15 R.S. Humphreys, Islamic History: a framework for inquiry, London and New York:
I.B. Tauris, 1991 (rev. edn), pp. 69–70.
16 J. Schacht, ‘On Mūsā b. ʿUqba’s Kitāb al-Maghāzī ’, Acta Orientalia 21 (1953), p. 288.
17 Robinson, Historiography, pp. 94–6.
18 Schacht, ‘Mūsā b. ʿUqba’, p. 300.
pp. 24–5.
20 A. Noth and L.I. Conrad, The Early Arabic Historical Tradition: a source-critical
study, Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1994 (2nd edn), p. 126.
21 FM, p. 208.
22 Ibn Ḥabīb, p. 146.
23 L.I. Conrad, ‘The mawālī and early Arabic historiography’, in M. Bernards and
J. Nawas (eds), Patronate and Patronage in Early and Classical Islam, Leiden: Brill,
2005, pp. 398–401.
24 Conventionally dated to the reign of ʿUmar I; al-Ṭabarī, i.5, pp. 2411–18.
25 H.T. Norris, The Berbers in Arabic Literature, London: Longman, 1982, p. 48. For an
example of a medieval Islamic historian co-opting famous figures to aggrandize his
town’s past, see H. Munt, ‘Ibn al-Azraq, Saint Marūthā, and the foundation of
Mayyāfāriqīn (Martyropolis)’, in A. Papaconstantinou (ed.), Writing ‘True Stories’:
historians and hagiographers in the late antique and medieval Near East, Turnhout:
Brepols, 2010, esp. pp. 156–7.
26 Examples of all three can be found in Ibn Ḥabīb, pp. 139–40.
164 Notes
27 M. Cook, ‘The opponents of the writing of tradition in early Islam’, Arabica 44 (1997),
pp. 437–8, 446–76, 482–9; cf. G. Schoeler, The Oral and the Written in Early Islam, tr.
U. Vagelpohl, ed. J.E. Montgomery, London and New York: Routledge, 2006,
pp. 29–32, 41–2. This is typical in societies making the transition from primarily-oral
to literate; J. Fentress and C. Wickham, Social Memory, Oxford: Blackwell, 1992,
pp. 9–11; Geary, Phantoms, p. 124.
28 Even when writing was widely used and books (with the introduction of paper around
750) readily available, oral transmission was still considered more reliable, a face-to-
face transaction between known and respected individuals; F. Rosenthal, ‘ “Of making
many books there is no end”: the classical Muslim view’, in G.N. Atiyeh (ed.), The
Book in the Islamic World: the written word and communication in the Middle East,
Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995, pp. 33–55.
29 As noted by, for example, T. Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought in the Classical
Period, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 17, although Khalidi does
little to engage with secondary scholarship on this matter.
30 C. Melchert, The Formation of the Sunni Schools of Law, 9th–10th centuries CE,
Leiden: Brill, 1997, p. 39. Mālik was particularly important to Andalusī law.
31 That is, falsification was a consequence of the process, rather than deliberate or systematic;
Noth and Conrad, Arabic Historical Tradition, p. 6; S. Bashear, ‘Abraham’s sacrifice of
his son and related issues’, DI 67 (1990), esp. pp. 248 and 262, gives an example – a piece
of Qurʾānic exegesis on Abraham’s sons, with implications for later ritual practice – of
how isnāds grew backwards, frequently contradictorily, to serve positions in later debate.
32 Al-Ṭabarī uses isnāds, for example, but his contemporary al-Yaʿqūbī (d. after 900)
does not, opting instead for a bibliographical essay (al-Yaʿqūbī, ii, pp. 2–4).
33 R.G. Hoyland, ‘History, fiction and authorship in the first centuries of Islam’, in J. Bray
(ed.), Writing and Representation in Medieval Islam: Muslim horizons, London:
Routledge, 2006, pp. 19–20.
34 Ibn Aʿtham, vii, pp. 243–6. Both the writer and Qutayba himself will be discussed in
more detail below, chapter seven.
35 See general discussion in Noth and Conrad, Arabic Historical Tradition, pp. 66–73.
and Islam, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009, pp. 66–8.
37 S. Leder, ‘Al-Madāʾinī’s version of Qiṣṣat al-Shūrā: the paradigmatic character of
historical narration’, in A. Neuwirth, et al. (eds), Myths, Historical Archetypes and
Symbolic Figures in Arabic Literature: towards a new hermeneutic approach, Beirut:
In Kommission bei F. Steiner, 1999, pp. 387–97, explores how al-Ṭabarī and his source
al-Madāʾinī modified narratives of the council that elected the caliph ʿUthmān (d. 656).
Both writers inserted bridging episodes and extra dialogue, to make the account more
cohesive as a story and – through careful emphasis and juxtaposition – to invite judge-
ment upon those involved without appearing to pass it themselves.
38 S. Leder, ‘The literary use of the khabar: a basic form of historical writing’, in
A. Cameron and L.I. Conrad (eds), The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East, i:
problems in the literary source material, Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1992, pp. 284,
307–8; D. Beaumont, ‘Hard-boiled: narrative discourse in early Muslim traditions’, SI
83 (1996), pp. 7–8, 13–16.
39 S. Leder, ‘The use of composite form in the making of the Islamic historical tradition’,
in P.F. Kennedy (ed.), On Fiction and Adab in Medieval Arabic Literature,
Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2005, p. 129.
40 S.C. Judd, ‘Narrative and character development: Al-Ṭabarī and al-Balādhurī on
late Umayyad history’, in S. Günther (ed.), Ideas, Images, and Methods of
Portrayal: insights into classical Arabic literature and Islam, Leiden: Brill, 2005,
pp. 209–10, 211–13, 225, demonstrates how reports from a single transmitter could
be arranged by al-Ṭabarī and al-Balādhurī (d. 892) to give different characterisations
of al-Walīd II.
Notes 165
41 H. White, The Content of the Form: narrative discourse and historical representation,
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987, pp. 4, 9–10; A. Munslow,
‘Authority and reality in the representation of the past’, Rethinking History 1 (1997),
pp. 78, 82.
42 S. Leder, ‘Authorship and transmission in unauthored literature: the akhbār attributed
to al-Haytham b. ʿAdī’, Oriens 31 (1988), pp. 79, 81.
43 See, for example, C.F. Robinson, ‘The conquest of Khūzistān: a historiographical
reassessment’, BSOAS 67 (2004), pp. 14–39; M. Lecker, ‘The Constitution of Medina’:
Muhammad’s first legal document, Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 2004.
44 For example, Chr754, § 67 (in praise of ʿUmar II, an interesting early example of a
trope of the later Arabic tradition).
45 On which see below, pp. 239–40.
46 See L. Molina, ‘Un relato de la conquista de al-Andalus’, AQ 19 (1998), pp. 39–65, and
idem, ‘Los itinerarios de la conquista: el relato de ʿArīb’, AQ 20 (1999), pp. 27–45;
M.A. Makkī, ‘Egypt and the origins of Arabic Spanish historiography: a contribution
to the study of the earliest sources for the history of Islamic Spain’, in M. Fierro and J.
Samsó (eds), The Formation of al-Andalus, Part 2: languages, religion, culture and the
sciences, Aldershot: Ashgate Variorum, 1998, pp. 173–233.
47 I. Fierro, ‘The Introduction of ḥadīth in al-Andalus (2nd/8th–3rd/9th centuries)’, DI 66
(1989), pp. 71–3, 76–8.
48 Ibn al-Faraḍī, § 814; E. Manzano Moreno, ‘Los fuentes árabes sobre la conquista
de al-Andalus: una nueva interpretación’, Hispania 59/2 (1999), p. 393; Melchert,
Formation of the Sunni Schools, p. 158.
49 Ibn Ḥabīb also gives the conquest of Spain (pp. 136–56) almost as much space as he
does the Prophetic sīra (pp. 75–97).
50 J.M. Safran, ‘Identity and differentiation in ninth-century al-Andalus’, Speculum 76
(2001), pp. 581–4.
51 D. Urvoy, ‘The ʿulamāʾ of al-Andalus’, in S.K. Jayyusi (ed.), The Legacy of Muslim
Spain, Leiden: Brill, 1992, p. 853.
52 A trend launched by R. Dozy, Recherches sur l’histoire et la literature de l’Espagne
pendant le moyen âge, Leiden: Brill, 1860 (2nd edn), ii, pp. 32–7.
53 Makkī, ‘Egypt and the origins’, pp. 207–8.
54 Ibn Ḥabīb, editor’s introduction, pp. 81, 88–99; Safran, Second Umayyad Caliphate,
pp. 143–4, 147.
55 On the former, see below, pp. 56–60 and 263–4; on the latter, see chapter four.
56 Ibn Ḥabīb, pp. 136–7 (an old man tells Ṭāriq that a Berber is destined to conquer Spain,
and Mūsā reads the same in the stars); pp. 145–6 (augury, with eagles); p. 146 (Mūsā
prophesies future ruin for Cordoba).
57 Yūsuf b. Yaḥyā al-Maghāmī, who spread Ibn Ḥabīb’s work in the east; J. Aguadé,
‘De nuevo sobre ʿAbd al-Malik b. Ḥabīb’, in Actas de las II jornadas de cultura arabe
e islamica (1980), Madrid: Instituto Hispano-Árabe de Cultura, 1985, pp. 11–12.
58 The distinctively Egyptian tenor of FM can be seen, for example, in a discussion –
regarding a treaty with a Berber group in North Africa – of enslaving the children of ahl
al-ṣuḥl. Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam declares this permissible, opting for an earlier, Egyptian
opinion (that of al-Awzāʿī [d. 773]) over accepted Mālikī doctrine; R. Brunschvig, ‘Ibn
ʿAbdalHʾakam et la conquête de l’Afrique du Nord par les Arabes: étude critique’,
Annales de l’Institut d’Etudes Orientales 6 (1942–7), pp. 116–17. Al-Awzāʿī’s legal
pronouncements were favoured in al-Andalus in the late eighth century, before being
superseded by (more fashionable?) classical Mālikī thought in the 820s; Melchert,
Formation of the Sunni Schools, p. 157.
59 Brunschvig, ‘Ibn ʿAbdalHʾakam’, pp. 135, 152–5.
60 FM, pp. 157–61 (on ʿAmr b. al-ʿĀṣ’s spat with ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb). See also the
discussion in Y. Hilloowala, ‘The History of the Conquest of Egypt, being a partial
translation of Ibn ʿAbd al-Hakam’s Futuh Misr and an analysis of this translation’,
166 Notes
Ph.D. dissertation, University of Arizona, 1998, pp. 230–1, 237–45; I am grateful to
Edward Zychowicz-Coghill for bringing this thesis to my attention.
61 As does A.D. Ṭāha, The Muslim Conquest and Settlement of North Africa and Spain,
London: Routledge, 1989, pp. 86–7, regarding where in North Africa Ṭāriq set sail from.
62 Brunschvig, ‘Ibn ʿAbdalHʾakam’, pp. 152–5.
63 Ibid., p. 109.
64 Raising copies of the Qurʾān to signal righteousness is a gesture familiar in the tradi-
tion; see, for instance, the events surrounding the call for arbitration during the first
civil war (656–61); al-Ṭabarī, i, pp. 3329–49, and cf. G.R. Hawting (tr.), The History of
al-Ṭabarī xvii: the first civil war, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press,
1996, p. 78, n. 319.
65 FM, pp. 208–9.
66 Q. 10:22–23; tr. from M. Fakhry, An Interpretation of the Qurʾān: a bilingual edition,
New York: New York University Press, 2000.
67 FM, p. 209; Brunschvig, ‘Ibn ʿAbdalHʾakam’, pp. 130–1. This will be discussed further
in chapter five.
68 Chr754, § 64.
69 FM, p. 211.
70 On Ibn Ḥabīb: Makkī, ‘Egypt and the origins’, p. 205; on Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam:
Brunschvig, ‘Ibn ʿAbdalHʾakam’, p. 109.
71 C. Pellat, ‘The origin and development of historiography in Muslim Spain’, in B. Lewis
and P.M. Holt, Historians of the Middle East, London: Oxford University Press, 1962,
pp. 118–19.
72 Seventy-five in the ninth century, compared with ten during the eighth; M. Marín, ‘La
transmisión del saber en al-Andalus (hasta 300/912)’, AQ 8 (1987), p. 89.
73 G. Martinez-Gros, L’idéologie omeyyade: la construction de la légitimité du Califat de
Cordoue (X e-XI e siècles), Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 1992, p. 19.
75 Manzano Moreno, ‘Los fuentes árabes’, p. 394.
76 Makkī, ‘Egypt and the origins’, p. 175.
77 Ibid., p. 181.
78 Especially his grandson ʿAbd al-Malik, a qāḍī and then amīr of Egypt: al-Kindī, Kitāb
al-wulāh wa-Kitāb al-quḍāh, ed. R. Guest, Leiden: Brill, 1912, pp. 93, 98, 101; Ibn
Taghrībirdī, al-Nujūm al-zāhira, Cairo: Matbaʿat Dār al-Kutub al-Misrīyah, 1929, i,
pp. 316–17, 324–5.
79 J.E. Brockopp, Early Mālikī Law: Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam and his major compendium of
jurisprudence, Leiden: Brill, 2000, p. 2. His son sometimes quotes him as an authority
on Mālik’s words, for example, FM, p. 228.
80 Brockopp, Early Mālikī Law, p. 2.
81 FM, p. 206.
82 Ibn Ḥajar, vii, § 264.
83 FM, pp. 206–7.
84 FM, p. 209.
85 Ibn Ḥajar, vi, § 140; A. Gateau, ‘Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam et les sources arabes relatives à la
conquête de l’Afrique du nord et de l’Espagne’, Revue Tunisienne (1936), p. 70;
al-Kindī, Kitāb al-wulāh, editor’s introduction, p. 28.
86 Ibn Ḥajar, viii, § 832. Al-Layth was born in Qalqashanda and travelled to the east
on several occasions, although there does not appear to be any evidence that he
visited al-Andalus; R.G. Khoury, ‘Al-Layth b. Saʿd (94/713–175/791), grand maître et
mécène de l’Egypte, vu à travers quelques documents islamiques anciens’, JNES 40
(1981), pp. 190–1.
87 Ibn Ḥajar, v, § 648.
88 R.G. Khoury, ‘L’importance dʾIbn Lahīʿa et de son papyrus conservé à Heidelberg dans
la tradition musulmane du deuxième siècle de l’Hégire’, Arabica 22 (1975), pp. 12–13.
Notes 167
89 Ibn al-Nadīm, Kitāb al-Fihrist, ed. G. Flügel, Leipzig: F.C.W. Vogel, 1871–2, p. 199.
90 Al-Kindī, p. 75 (without isnād); p. 336 gives al-Layth as the authority, at the end of
an isnād, for an embedded letter purportedly written by ʿUmar II.
91 Ibn Ḥajar, xi, § 387.
92 Both FM, p. 207.
93 FM, p. 211.
94 FM, p. 208. This is similar to an episode involving another rich carpet in ʿUmar I’s
reign. Al-Ṭabarī, i.5, pp. 2452–5, gives three versions, each more direct than the last
in its message: Muslims should give up riches to the common good, and the caliph
should have the disposal of them. While the Andalusī carpet is destroyed by greed,
ʿUmar’s cutting-up of his displays his even-handedness.
95 FM, p. 208.
96 FM, p. 209.
97 Ibn Ḥajar, iv, § 129.
99 FM, p. 209.
101 For example, Ibn Ḥabīb, pp. 139–41 (several separate reports, all regarding loot and
the taking of prisoners).
102 Ibn Ḥabīb, p. 141. It takes place in Toledo, and lacks the detail about Ṭāriq secretly
removing one of the Table’s legs – with which, in the FM, he later proves Mūsā’s
dishonesty to al-Walīd, an incident not related by Ibn Ḥabīb. See chapter five.
103 Ibn Ḥabīb, pp. 141, 139.
104 Two of these are known to have been Mālikīs; Ibn Ḥabīb, editor’s introduction, pp. 71–2.
105 Ibn Ḥajar, vi, § 237.
106 Ibn Ḥabīb, pp. 142, 149 (again from his father), and 143, respectively.
108 This follows an account of Ṭāriq finding Visigothic crowns in Toledo, accompanied
by an isnād naming Ibn Wahb and al-Layth. I thus take it to come from the same
source, since there is no fresh qāla or similar signifier, although the editor has placed
a paragraph break between the two stories, implying that they are to be taken sepa-
rately; Ibn Ḥabīb, p. 140. Makkī, ‘Egypt and the origins’, pp. 213–14, notes that Ibn
Ḥabīb did not travel outside al-Andalus until ten years after Ibn Wahb’s death, which
casts some doubt on the isnād.
109 FM, p. 206.
111 Ibn Ḥabīb, pp. 143–4.
112 Chr754, § 52. In CAIII Roderic is largely ignored in favour of Witiza’s sons; see
chapter six.
113 FM, p. 205; see also chapter six.
114 FA, pp. 12–13, and Ibn al-Faqīh, p. 83 (the earliest non-western source to carry it),
both have versions with dialogue; Ibn al-Qūṭīya, p. 7, Ibn ʿIdhārī, ii, p. 3, and Ibn
al-Athīr, iv, p. 567, all have shorter versions. There is reason to believe that it also
lasted outside the history books; two marble caskets, made for the Dhū al-Nūnid ṭāʾifa
dynasty in the eleventh century, and subsequently taken as spoils of war by Christian
armies, bear carved decorations whose iconography (bows, turbans) is both typical of
hunting scenes and identical to the imagery of Muslim triumph in the House of Locks
story; A. Shalem, ‘From royal caskets to relic containers: two ivory caskets from
Burgos and Madrid’, Muqarnas 12 (1995), pp. 32–5. In his version of the House of
Locks story, the biographer Ibn Khallikān (d. 1282), Wafayāt al-aʿyān, ed. I. Abbās,
Beirut: Dār al-Thaqāfah, 1968–77, v, p. 328, mentions that the images of the Arabs
were painted on the sides of the chest, not inside.
115 On whom see A.M.H. Shboul, Al-Masʿūdī and His World: a Muslim humanist and his
interest in non-Muslims, London: Ithaca Press, 1979, pp. 1–17.
168 Notes
116 Al-Masʿūdī, Kitāb al-Tanbīh, ed. M.J. de Goeje, Leiden: Brill, 1894, p. 106.
117 Herodotus, The Histories, tr. A. de Selincourt, London: Penguin, 1996 (rev. edn), p. 74.
118 Makkī, ‘Egypt and the origins’, pp. 180–5. This, of course, assumes that there was
something to link to, of which I am by no means convinced.
119 M. Marín, ‘Ṣaḥaba et tābiʿūn dans al-Andalus: histoire et legende’, SI 54 (1981), pp. 5–9.
121 Ibn Ḥabīb, pp. 138–9, 142.
122 FA, p. 28, and al-Maqqarī, i, pp. 277–8, 287–8, among others, collate what was known
or claimed (zaʿama) of the tābiʿūn. This was often wishful thinking: al-Ḥimyarī, for
example, includes ʿAmr b. al-ʿĀṣ (d. 663); Marín, ‘Ṣaḥaba et tābiʿūn’, pp. 11–12.
123 Abū al-Arab al-Tamīmī, Ṭabaqāt ʿulamāʾ Ifrīqiya wa-Tūnis, Tunis: al-Dār
al-Tūnisīyah lil-Nashr, 1968, p. 82.
124 Ibn Saʿd (d. 845), Ṭabaqāt al-kubrā, Beirut: Dār Sādir, 1957–68, vii, p. 512.
125 Labelled a trustworthy transmitter (thiqa) by Ibn Saʿd, ibid., p. 515.
126 Makkī, ‘Egypt and the origins’, pp. 182–3, 186.
127 Al-Maqqarī, i, p. 279: discussing ʿAlī b. Rabāḥ, he notes, ‘Al-Layth transmitted on the
authority of his son Mūsā b. ʿAlī’ (rawā al-Layth ʿan ibnihi Mūsā b. ʿAlī).
128 Al-Maqqarī, i, p. 278.
129 Al-Bakrī, § 1505 (whose work survives only in partial form: J.F.P. Hopkins,
‘Geographical and navigational literature’, in M.J.L. Young, J.D. Latham, and R.B.
Serjeant (eds), Religion, Learning and Science in the ʿAbbasid Period, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 317–18); FA, p. 28.
130 FA, editor’s introduction, pp. XXVIII-XXX, argues that the text is a redaction of an
eleventh-century work by Ibn Muzayn, prince of the ṭāʾifa of Silves; Ibn Muzayn
drew upon Ibn Ḥayyān (d. 1076), who in turn had used Ibn Ḥabīb, al-Rāzī, and others.
FA, p. 120, gives a terminus ad quem for the compilation with a reference to Yūsuf b.
Tashufīn (d. 1106) as if he is still alive.
131 Kitāb al-imāma wa-al-siyāsa, in J. Ribera (ed.), Historia de la conquista de España,
Madrid: Tipografía de la ‘Revista de Archivos’, 1926, pp. 126–7. This text has long
been attributed, wrongly, to Ibn Qutayba; Makkī, ‘Egypt and the origins’, pp. 223–6,
while rejecting Ibn Qutayba’s authorship, still prefers a ninth-century date for its
conquest section, though admits that it is an incoherent compilation. I believe it
contains much later material: for example, Ṭāriq’s speech, Kitāb al-imāma, pp. 122–3.
A lengthy and anachronistically phrased bayʿa for ʿUmar II – see discussion in
A. Marsham, Rituals of Islamic Monarchy: accession and succession in the first
Muslim empire, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009, pp. 148–9 – is typical.
G. Lecomte, Ibn Qutayba (mort en 276/889): l’homme, son œuvre, ses idées, Damascus:
Institut français de Damas, 1965, pp. 175–6, says that it is the work of Ibn al-Qutiya,
but the strong differences between it and the Taʾrīkh iftitāḥ make this doubtful; my
thanks to Christopher Melchert for drawing my attention to this reference.
133 Al-Ghassānī, Riḥlat al-wazīr fī-iftikāk al-ashīr, in Ribera, Historia de la conquista,
p. 194.
134 FA, p. 25.
135 FA, editor’s introduction, p. XXVII.
136 La conquista de al-Andalus, tr. M. Penelas, Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investiga-
ciones Científicas, 2002, p. 18, n. 46.
137 Ibn ʿIdhārī, ii, p. 13.
139 Both fourteenth century: CMR is based on an earlier Portuguese translation, and all
extant MSS of it contain only al-Rāzī’s famous geographical description of Spain (on
which see chapter four) and the pre-Islamic history; Chr1344 is largely based on
CMR, and preserves that text’s Andalusī history.
140 Chr1344, p. 143.
Notes 169
141 AM, p. 15.
142 L. Molina, ‘Los Ajbār Maŷmūʿa y la historiografía árabe sobre el periodo omeya en
al-Andalus’, AQ 10 (1989), p. 513, notes the impossibility of pinning it down, since it
contains such a variety of reports and styles; E. Manzano Moreno, ‘Oriental ‘topoi’ in
Andalusian historical sources’, Arabica 39 (1992), p. 43, suggests that there is at least
a substantial amount of tenth-century material in it.
143 AM, p. 15; Chr1344, p. 145.
144 Ibn al-Qūṭīya, pp. 9–10 (both); AM, pp. 9–15 (Ṭāriq), 15–8 (Mūsā). All the later
Arabic and Spanish Christian sources containing itineraries are derived from tenth-
century material: FA, pp. 20–4 (Ṭāriq), 24–9 (Mūsā); Ibn al-Athīr, iv, pp. 563–4
(Ṭāriq), 564–5 (Mūsā); Chr1344, pp. 134–5 and 139–42 (Ṭāriq), 142–53 (Mūsā).
E. de Santiago Simón, ‘The itineraries of the Muslim conquest of al-Andalus in the
light of a new source: Ibn al-Shabbāṭ’, in M. Marín (ed.), The Formation of al-Andalus,
Part 1: history and society, Aldershot: Ashgate Variorum, 1998, pp. 5–9, compares a
number of itineraries, all late.
145 Molina, ‘Un relato’, pp. 42–3, 49. It is presumably not a coincidence that al-Rāzī
was also responsible for the first major Andalusī description of the geography of the
peninsula; see chapter four.
146 Neither account is structured around itineraries of named cities, as are all narratives
from the mid-tenth century onwards. Both mention Algeciras, Toledo, and Cordoba
(Ibn Ḥabīb uses the latter in the context of Mūsā’s prophecy only, not as a conquest).
FM adds Carteya, Narbonne (pp. 206 and 208, neither as conquests), and Sidonia
(pp. 206–7, the site of the battle with Roderic) and Ibn Ḥabīb, p. 142, Zaragoza.
147 Martinez-Gros, L’idéologie, p. 63.
148 Al-Wāqidī had a reputation for untrustworthiness among later traditionists:
al-Dhahabī, Siyār aʿlām al-nubalāʾ, ed. S. Amāʾūt and H. Asad, Beirut: Muʾassasat
al-Risālah, 1981–88, ix, § 172; Ibn Ḥajar, ix, § 604; S. Leder, ‘al-Wāḳidī’, EI 2 XI,
Leiden: Brill, 2002, p. 102. He is suspected by modern scholars of having embellished
his compilations with spurious detail; M. Cook, Muhammad, Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1983, pp. 63–6 (though cf. M. Lecker, ‘The death of the Prophet
Muḥammad’s father: did Wāqidī invent some of the evidence?’, Zeitschrift der
Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 145 [1995], pp. 9–27).
149 Ibn al-Nadīm, Fihrist, pp. 98–9, lists only a Kitāb al-taʾrīkh al-kabīr and some eastern
regional studies; Leder, ‘Al-Wāḳidī’, p. 103, notes that the attribution to him of a
surviving monograph on the conquest of Egypt is a false one.
150 Ibn Ḥabīb, pp. 136, 149.
151 Al-Balādhurī, pp. 230–1.
152 Al-Ṭabarī, ii.2, pp. 1235 (summarising al-Wāqidī) and 1253–4.
153 Al-Yaʿqūbī, ii, p. 341; notably, he includes the detail of Ṭāriq removing one of the
Table’s legs, even though he never follows up on this part of the story.
154 Ibn Ḥabīb, p. 138, possibly via Ibn Wahb, as he is cited two pages previously.
155 Al-Masʿūdī, § 747 (commenting on the Spanish origins of Theodosius).
156 Al-Bakrī, § 505; Ibn Khurdādhbih, p. 90. L.A. García Moreno, ‘Spanish Gothic
consciousness among the Mozarabs in al-Andalus (VIII–Xth centuries)’, in A. Ferreiro
(ed.), The Visigoths: studies in culture and society, Leiden: Brill, 1999, p. 313, argues
that the presence of ‘Ishbān’ in Arabic texts demonstrates a continuing Hispanic iden-
tity among the inhabitants of al-Andalus, although this does not explain why it appears
in eastern (or eastern-sourced) works long before it turns up in Andalusī ones.
157 Al-Bakrī, § 1487; Isidore, Etymologies, IX.ii.109; J. Vallvé Bermejo, ‘Fuentes latinas
de los geógrafos árabes’, Al-Andalus 32 (1967), pp. 252–3. Ibn al-Athīr, iv, p. 556,
has another variant (‘They said: [. . .] The Christians called al-Andalus “Ishbānīya”
after the name of a strong man there, called Ishbānus’).
159 For example, Ibn ʿIdhārī, ii, pp. 7–8.
170 Notes
160 The text of the address appears in Una crónica anónima de ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III
al-Nāṣir, ed. and tr. E. Lévi-Provençal and E. García Gómez, Madrid: Consejo Supe-
rior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1950, p. 79, and the surviving fragment of ʿArīb b.
Saʿīd: J. Castilla Brazales (tr.), La Crónica de ʿArīb sobre al-Andalus, Granada:
Impredisur, 1992, pp. 205–6.
161 Safran, Second Umayyad Caliphate, pp. 10–13; Martinez-Gros, L’idéologie, p. 20.
162 M. Fierro, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III: the first Cordoban caliph, Oxford: One World, 2005,
pp. 56–7.
163 Safran, Second Umayyad Caliphate, p. 22.
164 Their court ceremonies, for example, were claimed as better than the ʿAbbāsids’,
because they were older; M. Meouak, Pouvoir souverain, administration centrale et
élites politiques dans l’Espagne ummayade (II e-IV e/VIII e-X e siècles), Helsinki:
Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1999, p. 23.
165 M. Barceló, ‘The manifest caliph: Umayyad ceremony in Córdoba, or the staging of
power’, in Marín, Formation, Part 1, pp. 426–7, 433–4.
166 J.M. Safran, ‘Ceremony and submission: the symbolic representation and recognition
of legitimacy in tenth-century al-Andalus’, JNES 58 (1999), p. 191; the same was true
of new allies, including Jaʿfar b. ʿAlī al-Andalusī, whose defection from the Fāṭimids
was framed as a ‘return’ to submission, pp. 193–7. On Ibn Ḥafṣūn, see below,
pp. 106–7.
167 M. Fierro, ‘Violencia, política y religión en al-Andalus durante al s. IV/X: el reinado
de ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III’, in M. Fierro (ed.), EOBA xiv: De Muerte Violenta: política,
religion y violencia en al-Andalus, Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones
Científicas, 2004, pp. 44–6, 50–1.
168 M. Fierro, ‘The mobile minbar in Cordoba: how the Umayyads of al-Andalus claimed
the inheritance of the Prophet’, JSAI 33 (2007), pp. 153–61.
169 N.N.N. Khoury, ‘The meaning of the Great Mosque of Cordoba in the tenth century’,
Muqarnas 13 (1996), pp. 80, 83–4. This was also common practice in early North
African mosques, for example, in Fez; V.J. Cornell, Realm of the Saint: power and
authority in Moroccan Sufism, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1998, p. 297 n.
32.
170 A. Fernández-Puertas, Mezquita de Córdoba: su studio arqueológico en el siglo XX,
Granada: Universidad de Granada, 2009, pp. 296–9.
171 Ibid., p. 380; Ibn ʿIdhārī, ii, p. 237 (al-Ḥakam sent to Constantinople for decorative
materials, again as had been done for the Damascus mosque); M. Fierro, ‘En torno a
la decoración con mosaicos de las mezquitas omeyas’, Homenaje al Prof. Jacinto
Bosch Vilá, Granada: Universidad de Granada, 1991, i, pp. 135–39, 143–4.
172 Ibn ʿIdhārī, ii, p. 229 (quoting al-Rāzī).
173 Safran, Second Umayyad Caliphate, pp. 45–7, 190–5.
174 J.T. Monroe, ‘The historical arjūza of Ibn ʿAbd Rabbihi, a tenth-century Hispano-
Arabic epic poem’, JAOS 91 (1971), pp. 70–3, notes that the titular narrative poem – a
florid honouring of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III’s rise, complete with angels – was based on
one written by the (not very successful) ʿAbbāsid Ibn al-Muʿtazz.
175 Ibn ʿAbd al-Malik al-Marrākushī (d. 1303), al-Dhayl wa-al-takmila, ed. I. Abbās,
Beirut: Dār al-Thaqafa, 1955–73, v.i, pp. 141–3; A.C. Lopez, ‘Vie et oeuvre
du fameux polygraphe de Cordoue, ʿArīb ibn Saʿīd (Xe siècle)’, in R. Barkai (ed.),
Chrétiens, musulmans et juifs dans l’Espagne médiévale: de la convergence à
l’expulsion, Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1994, pp. 88–9.
176 In turn, Ibn al-Shabbāṭ’s description of the cities of al-Andalus, based upon a twelfth-
century compendium of non-extant earlier accounts, is the only surviving fragment of
his writings; de Santiago Simón, ‘Itineraries’, pp. 1–4.
177 ʿArīb b. Saʿīd, Le Calendrier de Cordoue, ed. R. Dozy, tr. C. Pellat, Leiden: Brill,
1961.
178 Manzano Moreno, ‘Los fuentes árabes’, p. 398.
Notes 171
179 Ibn al-Faraḍī, §§ 135, 1068.
180 ʿĪsā quoted in a fragment from Ibn Ḥayyān (d. 1076); Arabic text in E. Lévi-
Provençal, ‘Sur l’installation des Rāzī en Espagne’, Arabica 2 (1955), p. 230.
181 Ibn al-Faraḍī, § 135.
182 Manzano Moreno, ‘Los fuentes árabes’, pp. 398–401.
183 Castilla Brazales, Crónica de ʿArīb, tr.’s introduction, pp. 9, 19–20.
184 M. Meouak, ‘Histoire de la kitāba et des kuttāb en al-Andalus umayyade (2e/VIIIe-4e/
Xe siècles)’, Orientalia Suecana 41/42 (1992–3), p. 167.
185 Castilla Brazales, Crónica de ʿArīb, tr.’s introduction, pp. 41–2, 72.
186 E. Manzano Moreno, ‘El “medio cordobés” y la elaboración cronística en al Andalus
bajo la dinastía de los omeyas’, in G.I. García (ed.), Historia social, pensamiento
historiográfico y edad media, Madrid: Ediciones del Orto, 1997, pp. 74–5, 83–4. Ibn
al-Qūṭīya’s teachers, for example, included Qāsim and Ibn Lubāba (d. 926) (Ibn
al-Faraḍī, §§ 1187, 1316), and he cites the latter as a source on his Christian ancestors;
Ibn al-Qūṭīya, pp. 36–40.
187 B. Soravia, ‘Entre bureaucratie et literature: la kitāba et les kuttāb dans l’administration
de l’Espagne umayyade’, Al-Masāq 7 (1994), pp. 166–7.
188 L.I. Conrad, ‘ʿUmar at Sargh: the evolution of an Arabic tradition on flight from
the plague’, in S. Leder (ed.), Story-telling in the Framework of Non-Fictional Arabic
Literature, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1998, p. 490.
189 A. Noth, ‘On the relationship in the caliphate between central power and the prov-
inces: the “Ṣulḥ”–“ʿAnwa” traditions for Egypt and Iraq’, in F. Donner (ed.), The
Expansion of the Early Islamic State, Aldershot: Ashgate Variorum, 2008, p. 181.
190 As laid down in Q. 8:41.
191 Abū Yūsuf, Kitāb al-kharāj, Būlāq: al-Matbaʿah al-Mīrīyah, 1302/1884, pp. 14–15;
al-Ṭabarī, i.4, p. 2154 (among others); A. Noth, ‘Some remarks on the “nationalisa-
tion” of conquered lands at the time of the Umayyads’, in T. Khalidi (ed.), Land
Tenure and Social Transformation in the Middle East, Beirut: American University
of Beirut, p. 225; F. Løkkegard, ‘Fayʾ’, EI2 II, Leiden: Brill, 1965, p. 869; Noth,
‘ “Ṣulḥ”–“ʿAnwa” traditions’, pp. 181–6.
192 N. Calder, Studies in Early Muslim Jurisprudence, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993,
p. 112.
193 Abū ʿUbayd, Kitāb al-amwāl, ed. M.K. Harrās, Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmīyah,
1986, § 42.
194 Calder, Studies, p. 112.
195 G. Frantz-Murphy, ‘Conversion in early Islamic Egypt: the economic factor’, in
Y. Rāġib (ed.), Documents de l’Islam medieval: nouvelles perspectives de recherche,
Paris: Institut français d’archéologie orientale, 1991, pp. 11–12. Examples: al-Ṭabarī,
i.4, p. 2062; Abū ʿUbayd, al-Amwāl, §§ 146–53, who concludes that Muḥammad
favouring distribution and ʿUmar I forbidding it was not a contradiction, but came about
because they followed different Qurʾānic verses: 8:41 and 59:7–10, respectively.
196 The so-called ‘fiscal rescript of ʿUmar II’ suggests it was an issue in the early eighth
century, or considered sufficiently important later to be projected onto the (legally and
historiographically) exemplary Umayyad caliph; H.A.R. Gibb, ‘The fiscal rescript of
ʿUmar II’, Arabica 2 (1955), pp. 10–11, 14.
197 Abū Yūsuf, Kitāb al-kharāj, pp. 39, 49 (unsurprisingly, favouring the solution that
gave the caliphs more tax, i.e. ruling that it remained kharāj land); Abū ʿUbayd, Kitāb
al-amwāl, pp. 194–205; T. Sato, ‘ʿUshr’, EI 2 X, Leiden: Brill, 2000, pp. 917–18.
198 A. Guessous, ‘Le rescrit fiscal de ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz: une nouvelle appréciation’,
DI 73 (1996), p. 114.
199 C.F. Robinson, Empire and Elites after the Muslim Conquest: the transformation of
northern Mesopotamia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 1–15.
200 See discussion above, and, for other examples: ibid., pp. 2–6; L.I. Conrad, ‘The
conquest of Arwād: a source-critical study in the historiography of the early medieval
172 Notes
Near East’, in Cameron and Conrad, Byzantine and early Islamic Near East, i,
pp. 362–3.
201 A. Noth, ‘Futūḥ-history and futūḥ-historiography: the Muslim conquest of Damascus’,
AQ 10 (1989), pp. 453–8 (on Damascus).
202 See above, pp. 45–6.
203 Chr754, § 75; see also §§ 74 (721: taxes on Christians increased), 91 (747: recently-
deceased Christians are removed from the tax rolls, presumably decreasing the
collective liability of the community, although this is characterized negatively).
al-Andalus, Barcelona: Crítica, 2006, pp. 37–8.
205 Soravia, ‘Entre bureaucratie et literature’, pp. 170–1; M. Meouak, ‘Histoire de la
ḥiğāba et des ḥuğğāb en al-Andalus umayyade (2e/VIIIe-4e/Xe siècles)’, Orientalia
Suecana 43/44 (1994–95), pp. 159–61, notes that the caliphal ḥājib was an important
agent of central control in the provinces, vested with military and diplomatic powers.
206 Meouak, ‘Histoire de la kitāba’, pp. 166–7, 170.
207 J. Vallvé, El Califato de Córdoba, Madrid: Editorial Mapfre, 1992, pp. 132–58.
208 Manzano Moreno, Conquistadores, pp. 423–8.
209 Robinson, Empire, p. 22.
210 F.M. Donner, ‘Centralised authority and military autonomy in the early Islamic
conquests’, in A. Cameron (ed.), The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East, iii:
states, resources and armies (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1995), pp. 338–42.
211 Manzano Moreno, Conquistadores, p. 40.
212 Ṭāriq is almost always called a mawlā. Ibn ʿIdhārī, ii, p. 5, notes dispute over Ṭāriq’s
kunyā and origin, but concludes that most agree he was a Berber mawlā. He quotes
(ibid.) a Berber lineage for Ṭāriq running to eight names, in which his grandfather’s
name is given as ‘ʿAbd Allāh’, the first overtly Islamic appellation, suggesting that
Ṭāriq was not the first to convert; cf. R.W. Bulliet, ‘Conversion stories in early Islam’,
in M. Gervers and R.J. Bikhazi (eds), Conversion and Continuity: indigenous Chris-
tian communities in Islamic lands, eighth to eighteenth centuries, Toronto, ON:
Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1990, pp. 128–9. This genealogy may, of
course, be a fabrication on the part of later descendants or partisans, to bolster Ṭāriq’s
Islamic credentials. FM, p. 204, calls him ‘Tāriq b. ʿAmr’, which may represent
confusion with a mawlā of the caliph ʿUthmān (cf. Ansāb, vi, pp. 218–19).
213 Ibn Ḥabīb, pp. 136–7; cf. above, n. 59.
214 FM, p. 207; cf. similar phrasings in the eastern conquest narratives, pp. 225–6, below.
215 Khalīfa b. Khayyāṭ, Taʾrīkh Khalīfa b. Khayyāṭ, ed. A.D. al-ʿUmarī, Damascus: Dār
al-Qalam, 1977, p. 306.
216 Ibn ʿIdhārī, ii, p. 4, concluding, ‘Thus he was dependent upon Mūsā, and the report of
al-Ṭabarī is true; the report of al-Rāzī agrees with him.’
217 Ibn ʿIdhārī, ii, pp. 4–5.
222 The ellipsis represents an insertion in the edition which is not present in the surviving
manuscript; D. James, Early Islamic Spain: the History of Ibn al-Qūṭīya, London:
Routledge, 2009, p. 54 n. 7.
223 In the early eighth century, a sijill was a document carried by someone who had to
travel between tax districts, which identified them, their reason for travelling, and
their tax status; a complete example (APEL 174) survives from 722, issued by ʿUbayd
Allāh b. Ḥabḥāb, a high-status provincial official; W. al-Qāḍī, ‘Population census and
land surveys under the Umayyads (41–132/661–750)’, D. I. 83 (2008), p. 400. The
use of the term here, however, almost certainly indicates nothing more than a desire
for some official-sounding language.
Notes 173
224 Ibn al-Qūṭīya, pp. 3–4.
225 For example, FA, pp. 16–17; Ibn al-Athīr, iv, p. 561. Illustrating how historical mate-
rial crossed genres, the biographer Ibn al-Faraḍī, § 1316, quotes Khalīfa b. Khayyāṭ’s
account. Ibn Khallikān, v, p. 320, meanwhile, had imbibed the preference for prop-
erly-delegated authority to the extent that he credited Mūsā with all the initiative:
‘[Mūsā] wrote to Ṭāriq, who was in Tangiers, ordering him to raid (yaʾmuruhu
bi-ghazw) the land of al-Andalus [. . .] So Ṭāriq obeyed (imtathala) his order.’
226 Ibn al-Qūṭīya, p. 3; in classical law, ṣafāyā were items of loot claimed by an expedi-
tion leader, in addition to the khums.
229 Al-Maqqarī, i, pp. 259–64: a long passage from al-Rāzī, filled with ʿanwatan and
ṣulḥan. Ibn ʿIdhārī, ii, p. 13: a report supposedly from ʿAlī b. Rabāḥ, saying Sidonia
was conquered ʿanwatan; cf. FM, p. 206, which mentions Sidonia without saying
anything about the manner of its conquest.
230 Noth, ‘Futūḥ-history’, pp. 457–8.
Longman, 1996, p. 9; Ibn ʿIdhārī, ii, p. 15, shows an attempt to reconcile this.
3 Accommodating outsiders, obeying stereotypes: mawālī

and muwalladūn in narratives of the conquest
1 D. Pipes, ‘Mawlas: freed slaves and converts in early Islam’, in R. Hoyland (ed.),
Muslims and Others in Early Islamic Society, Aldershot: Ashgate Variorum, 2004, p.
278.
2 I. Goldziher, Muslim Studies, ed. S.M. Stern, Chicago, IL: Aldine, 1966, p. 101.
3 Manumission was a complex issue, dependent on the type of slavery involved, and the
law school; C. de la Puente, ‘Entre la esclavitud y la libertad: consecuencias legales
de la manumisión según el derecho Mālikí’, AQ 21 (2000), pp. 340–4, looks at the
school dominant in al-Andalus.
4 U. Mitter, ‘Origin and development of the Islamic patronate’, in M. Bernards and
2005, p. 121.
5 For example, in mid-eighth-century al-Andalus, a slave of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān I, named
Ubbā, was freed without walāʾ; M. Fierro, ‘Árabes, Beréberes, muladíes y mawālī.
Algunas reflexiones sobre los datos de los diccionarios biográficos andalusíes’, in M.
Marín and H. de Felipe (eds), EOBA vii: Homenaje a José Ma. Fórneas, Madrid:
Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1995, p. 52.
6 M. Fierro, ‘Mawālī and muwalladūn in al-Andalus (second/eighth–fourth/tenth
centuries)’, in Bernards and Nawas, Patronate, p. 199.
7 J. Judah, ‘The economic conditions of the mawālī in early Islamic times’, in M.G.
Morony (ed.), Manufacturing and Labour, Aldershot: Ashgate Variorum, 2003, p. 175.
8 In the eighth century, mawālī increasingly appear in the sources as private military
retinues for prominent figures; M. Zakeri, Sāsānid Soldiers in Early Muslim Society:
the origins of ʿAyyārān and Futuwwa, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1995, p. 181. See
also chapter seven.
9 His father was a guard captain under Muʿāwiya: Ibn Ḥabīb, pp. 138–9; AM, p. 3;
Ansāb, xviii, p. 306. His nisba is given as al-Lakhmī.
10 P. Crone, Roman, Provincial and Islamic Law, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1987, pp. 31–2.
11 Cf. the more general methodological critique of ibid. in W.B. Hallaq, ‘The use and
abuse of evidence: the question of provincial and Roman influences on early Islamic
law’, JAOS 110 (1990), pp. 79–91.
174 Notes
12 Crone, Roman, Provincial and Islamic Law, p. 53; Mitter, ‘Origin and development’,
p. 72.
13 P. Crone, ‘Mawlā’, EI 2 VI, Leiden: Brill, 1991, pp. 874–5.
14 Crone, Roman, Provincial and Islamic Law, pp. 43–4.
15 Cf. S. Silverman, ‘Patronage as myth’, in E. Gellner and J. Waterbury (eds), Patrons
and Clients in Mediterranean Society, London: Duckworth, 1977, pp. 13–15;
M. Mauss, The Gift: forms and functions of exchange in archaic societies, tr. I.
Cunnison, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969, pp. 2, 37–9.
16 E. Gellner, ‘Patrons and clients’, in Gellner and Waterbury, Patrons and Clients,
pp. 4–5.
17 S.N. Eisenstadt and L. Roniger, Patrons, Clients and Friends: interpersonal relations
and the structure of trust in society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984,
pp. 48–9, 181–3.
18 J. Pitt-Rivers, ‘Honour and social status’, in J.G. Peristiany (ed.), Honour and Shame:
the values of Mediterranean society, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1974,
pp. 38, 58.
19 E. Landau-Tasseron, ‘Alliances in Islam’, in Bernards and Nawas, Patronate, p. 14.
20 I believe Crone overstates her case, as will be seen in the discussion of mawālī in the
conquests, below.
21 Pipes, ‘Mawlas’, pp. 289–90.
22 For example, Q. 9:29.
23 For example, Q. 4:95, 32:18, 49:13.
24 Hallaq, ‘Use and abuse’, p. 85.
25 M. García-Arenal, ‘Jewish converts to Islam in the Muslim west’, U. Rubin and
D. Wasserstein (eds), Israel Oriental Studies 17 (1997), pp. 230–1.
26 Egyptian papyri show that, for the first fifty years or so of Islamic rule, Egyptian Chris-
tians outside Fusṭāṭ were insulated from contact with Arabs and Arabic by the new
government’s hands-off approach, which left much administration to the figure of the
Christian pagarch and conducted its business in bilingual documentation (the earliest
Greek–Arabic example extant is from 643); P. Sijpesteijn, ‘New rule over old struc-
tures: Egypt after the Muslim conquest’, Proceedings of the British Academy 136
(2007), pp. 187, 193–5. ʿAbd al-Malik’s reforms replaced the pagarchs with Arab offi-
cials, and put administration into Arabic; no Greek–Arabic administrative documents
have been found from after 724.
27 Although even this was a more complex process than it appears; Y. Friedmann, ‘Condi-
tions of conversion in early Islam’, in A. Destro and M. Pesce (eds), Rituals and Ethics:
patterns of repentance – Judaism, Christianity, Islam; Second International Confer-
ence of Mediterraneum, Paris: Peeters, 2004, pp. 98–101.
28 See above, n. 186 (chapter two).
29 D.J. Wasserstein, ‘A fatwā on conversion in Islamic Spain’, in R.L. Nettler (ed.),
Studies in Muslim–Jewish Relations 1, Reading: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1993,
p. 178.
30 P. Brown, The World of Late Antiquity, London: Thames and Hudson, 1971, pp. 184–7.
31 C. Cahen, ‘Socio-economic history and Islamic studies: problems of bias in the adapta-
tion of the indigenous population of Islam’, in Hoyland, Muslims and Others, p. 264;
P. Crone, ‘The first-century concept of Hiğra’, Arabica 41 (1994), pp. 364–8.
32 J.A. Coope, ‘Religious and cultural conversion to Islam in ninth-century Umayyad
Córdoba’, Journal of World History 4 (1993), pp. 48, 56.
33 R.W. Bulliet, ‘Conversion-based patronage and onomastic evidence in early Islam’, in
Bernards and Nawas, Patronate, pp. 248–50; much the same may be said about conver-
sion itself, of course, which idem, Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: an
essay in quantitative history, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979,
pp. 28–9, presents as a form of technological diffusion, requiring contact to spread.
34 P. Crone, ‘The pay of client soldiers in the Umayyad period’, DI 80 (2003), p. 298.
Notes 175
35 K. Morimoto, The Fiscal Administration of Egypt in the Early Islamic Period, Kyoto:
Dohosha, 1981, pp. 130–1, has a simplified table derived from one such papyrus, listing
mawālī registered for the ʿaṭāʾ (state-granted stipend) along with the name of the patron
sponsoring them, their birthplaces, and so forth.
36 Goldziher, Muslim Studies, p. 114.
37 D. Ayalon, ‘Preliminary remarks on the Mamlūk military institution in Islam’, in V.J.
Parry and M.E. Yapp (eds), War, Technology and Society in the Middle East, London:
Oxford University Press, 1975, p. 44.
38 For example, Khalīfa b. Khayyāṭ, p. 335 (in 687); I. Hasson, ‘Les mawālī dans l’armée
musulmane sous les premiers Umayyādes’, JSAI 14 (1991), p. 180 (non-Arab convert
mawālī at the battle of Badr, 624).
39 For example, the Asāwira and the Ḥamrāʾ; al-Ṭabarī, i.5, p. 2463; al-Balādhurī, pp.
280, 372–4 (in the latter discussing the Asāwira’s close association with first the Tamīm
and then the Banū Saʿd).
40 For example, the Waḍḍāḥiyya; Crone, ‘Client soldiers’, pp. 286–7.
41 Such as Bishr b. Safwān al-Kalbī, who took a mawālī army to Sardinia in 724 (Judah,
‘Economic conditions’, p. 185).
42 Al-Ṭabarī, i.5, pp. 2485 (Muslim b. ʿAbd Allāh of the Asāwira is left in control of
Mosul), 2497 (a series of probable converts – nearly all of them are ‘ibn ʿAbd Allāh’
– in company with miscellaneous Asāwira; the latter may not have been converts, since
there is a comment that they will be excused jizya in return for their service). Qutayba
b. Muslim’s army in Transoxania, in the same period as the conquest of Spain, had a
7000-strong mawālī division led by Ḥayyān al-Nabaṭī; Ibn al-Athīr, v, p. 15 (see also
chapter seven).
43 Ibn Ḥabīb, p. 136; FM, p. 205. Cf. n. 393, on Mūsā’s father.
44 M.J. Kister and M. Plessner, ‘Notes on Caskel’s Ğamharat an-Nasab’, Oriens 25–6
(1976–7), pp. 50–1.
45 Unsurprisingly, it is ʿUmar I who is said to have set the mawālī on equal footing in the
dīwān with the rank-and-file ‘pure’ Arabs (ṣarīḥ); al-Balādhurī, p. 455.
46 Leading some scholars to repeat it as fact, for example Zakeri, Sāsānid Soldiers,
pp. 203–4 (although Zakeri later contradicts this assertion by quoting, p. 242, ʿUmar’s
resolve to raise the ʿaṭāʾ of mawālī and Arabs alike, something surely impossible if the
former were not being paid at all).
47 Hasson, ‘Les mawālī dans l’armée’, pp. 178–9.
48 Judah, ‘Economic conditions’, pp. 191–2.
49 Ibid., p. 195.
50 On which see chapter seven.
51 Crone, ‘Client soldiers’, pp. 297–8.
52 Something the Ḥanafīs explicitly forbade; the Mālikīs, the dominant school in
al-Andalus, permitted it: L. Marlow, Hierarchy and Egalitarianism in Islamic Thought,
53 Quoted in R.P. Mottahedeh, ‘The shuʿūbīyah controversy and the social history of
early Islamic law’, IJMES 7 (1976), pp. 174–5.
54 L.I. Conrad, ‘The mawālī and early Arabic historiography’, in Bernards and Nawas,
Patronate, pp. 370–1, 378–9.
55 J.A. Nawas, ‘The contribution of the mawālī to the six Sunnite canonical Ḥad īth
collections’, in S. Günther (ed.), Ideas, Images, and Methods of Portrayal: insights into
classical Arabic literature and Islam, Leiden: Brill, 2005, pp. 146–8.
56 J. Waardenburg, ‘Muslim studies of other religions: the medieval period’, in Hoyland,
Muslims and Others, pp. 216–18, 220.
57 H.T. Norris, The Berbers in Arabic Literature, London: Longman, 1982, p. 9.
58 Q. 49:13.
59 Goldziher, Muslim Studies, pp. 144–8.
60 Mottahedeh, ‘Shuʿūbīyah controversy’, p. 171.
176 Notes
61 H.A.R. Gibb, ‘The social significance of the shuubiya’, in Studies on the Civilization of
Islam, ed. S.J. Shaw and W.R. Polk, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962,
pp. 62–3.
62 Goldziher, Muslim Studies, pp. 159–61.
63 M. Fierro, ‘Los mawālī de ʿAbd al-Raḥmān I’, AQ 20 (1999), p. 66.
64 At greatest length in Fierro, ‘Mawālī and muwalladūn’, but see prior and subsequent
notes in this chapter for further references.
65 M. Shatzmiller, Labour in the Medieval Islamic World, Leiden: Brill, 1994, p. 340,
suggests that mawālī may have been used only by new converts, recently migrated
from hinterland to city. This is possible, but goes unsupported, and conflicts with other
uses of the term (see below).
66 Fierro, ‘Mawālī and muwalladūn’, p. 220.
67 Ibid., pp. 202–3.
68 Although probably not to the extent suggested by J. Vallvé (El Califato de Córdoba,
Madrid: Editorial Mapfre, 1992, pp. 58–9), who questions whether the ‘Berbers’ of the
literary sources were actually Berbers at all. Still, the numbers are suspiciously precise;
for example, Ibn Ḥabīb, p. 137, claims that there were a total of sixteen Arabs in the
initial conquest party.
69 Ibn al-Athīr, iv, p. 561.
70 This would be borne out by subsequent Berber revolts; see below. The slow progress
towards dominance in places such as Egypt, moreover, shows how cautiously the
Arabs were obliged to move even against the conquered.
71 Fierro, ‘Mawālī and muwalladūn’, pp. 201, 206–7.
72 An estimated 30,000 Arabs and Berbers, ruling an indigenous populace of perhaps
three million; P. Guichard, ‘The social history of Muslim Spain from the conquest to
the end of the Almohad regime (early 2nd/8th–early 7th/13th centuries)’, in S.K.
Jayyusi (ed.), The Legacy of Muslim Spain, Leiden: Brill, 1992, p. 682.
73 For example Al-Yaʿqūbī, Kitāb al-buldān, ed. M.J. de Goeje, Leiden: Brill, 1892,
pp. 354–5, who also notes how given clans stood in relation to the government: Toledo,
p. 354, all hostile; Valencia, p. 355, Berbers who ‘do not offer obedience to the
Umayyads’.
74 M.C. Hernández, ‘The social structure of al-Andalus during the Muslim occupation
(711–55), and the founding of the Umayyad monarchy’, in M. Marín (ed.), The Forma-
tion of al-Andalus, Part 1: history and society, Aldershot: Ashgate Variorum, 1998,
p. 61; P. Guichard, Structures socials ‘orientales’ et ‘occidentales’ dans l’Espagne
musulmane, Paris: Mouton, 1977, pp. 251–3, has sound suggestions (such as the idea
that the Berbers might have sought to stay away from centralized control as much as
from urban life) but he extends his argument from toponymy too far to be entirely
convincing; H. Kennedy, Muslim Spain and Portugal: a political history of al-Andalus,
London: Longman, 1996, pp. 16–18.
75 J. Vallvé, ‘Libertad y esclavitud en el califato de Córdoba’, in Actas de las II jornadas
de cultura arabe e islamica (1980), Madrid: Instituto Hispano-Árabe de Cultura, 1985,
p. 569.
76 For example, mountainous areas such as Teruel; T.F. Glick, Islamic and Christian
Spain in the Early Middle Ages, Leiden: Brill, 2005 (2nd edn), pp. 203–4.
77 P. Guichard, ‘Les Arabes ont bien envahi l’Espagne. Les structures sociales de
l’Espagne musulmane’, Annales 29 (1974), p. 1510.
78 AM, p. 167 (appendix, with extracts from Christian sources in Latin).
79 Guichard, Structures socials, pp. 140–1 (although this is less applicable to the Berbers),
249–50.
al-Andalus, Barcelona: Crítica, 2006, p. 139.
81 M.J. Kister, ‘ “Do not assimilate yourselves . . .”: Lā tashabbahū . . .’, JSAI 12 (1989),
pp. 324–9, 340.
Notes 177
82 People who remained Christian; see further D. Urvoy, ‘Les aspects symboliques du
vocable “mozarabe”: essai de réinterpretation’, SI 78 (1993), pp. 117–53.
83 J. Zozaya, ‘The Islamic consolidation in al-Andalus (8th–10th centuries): an archaeo-
logical perspective’, in R.-P. Gayraud, Colloque international d’archéologie
islamique, IFAO, Le Caire, 3–7 février 1993, Cairo: Institut français d’archéologie
orientale, 1998, p. 246.
84 R. Wright, ‘The end of written Ladino in al-Andalus’, in M. Fierro and J. Samsó (eds),
The Formation of al-Andalus, Part 2: languages, religion, culture and the sciences,
Aldershot: Ashgate Variorum, 1998, pp. 34–5.
85 J. Rodríguez Fernández, El Monasterio de Ardón: estudio histórico sobre los centros
monásticos medievales de Cillanueva y Rozuela, León: Consejo Superior de Investi-
gaciones Científicas, 1964, has numerous examples, including pp. 223–4 (Abuhab
and Vistrildi), 232 (Zuleiman and Loba), 253–4 (Iahia and Filauria).
86 Indeed, several of the Andalusī scholars mentioned in the previous chapter wrote one,
including Ibn Ḥabīb and Qāsim b. Aṣbagh; E. Teres, ‘Linajes árabes en Al-Andalus
según la “Yamhara” de Ibn Ḥazm’, al-Andalus 22 (1957), pp. 56–7.
87 Fierro, ‘Árabes, Beréberes’, pp. 42–3.
88 Such as Yaḥyā b. Yaḥyā, a Maṣmudī Berber of the Banū Abī ʿĪsā (Mālikī scholars
with close ties to the Umayyads); Fierro, ‘Mawālī and muwalladūn’, pp. 204–5. More
famously, Ibn Ḥazm (d. 1064), himself the author of a major genealogical work, the
Jamharat ansāb al-ʿarab, also faked his ancestry to make it appear that his family had
converted much earlier than they did: J.T. Monroe, The Shuʿūbiyya in al-Andalus: the
Risāla of Ibn García and Five Refutations, London and Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1970, pp. 7–8; A. Christys, ‘The History of Ibn Ḥabīb and ethno-
genesis in al-Andalus’, in R. Corradini, M. Diesenberger, and H. Reimitz (eds), The
Construction of Communities in the Early Middle Ages, Leiden: Brill, 2003, p. 342.
89 Guichard, ‘Social history’, p. 686.
90 Guichard, ‘Les arabes’, pp. 1504–5; Vallvé, Califato, p. 57, agrees. Ibn Ḥazm’s
Jamhara divides Arab clans into southern and northern lineages, centuries after any
of them had lived in Arabia.
91 M. Fierro, ‘Four questions in connection with Ibn Ḥafṣūn’, in Marín, Formation, Part
1, pp. 301–2.
92 Manzano Moreno, Conquistadores, pp. 133–5.
93 Muwalladūn are thought to have been in the majority, ethnically, from the tenth
century; T.F. Glick, ‘The ethnic system of premodern Spain’, Comparative Studies in
Sociology 1 (1978), pp. 160–1.
94 Who had such poor relations that the state had to settle them in designated separate
areas; E. Manzano Moreno, ‘The settlement and organisation of Syrian junds in
al-Andalus’, in Marín, Formation, Part 1, pp. 86–8.
95 Families such as the Banū Shuhayd (not only Arabs, but from the Arab elite of
Quraysh) had a monopoly on the administration until increased mawālī participation
of the tenth century, particularly al-Manṣūr’s regime; Vallvé, ‘Libertad y esclavitud’,
p. 576; Vallvé, Califato, pp. 64–6.
96 J.M. Carabaza, ‘La familia de los Banū Ḥaŷŷāŷ (siglos II–VII/VIII–XII)’, in
M. Marín and J. Zanón (eds), EOBA v: Familias Andalusíes, Madrid: Consejo
Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1992, pp. 41–3; Guichard, ‘Social history’,
pp. 683–4; Guichard, Structures socials, pp. 225–6 (on the Banū ʿAbbād, another
Yemeni clan that ruled Seville in the ṭāʾifa period).
98 Carabaza, ‘Banū Ḥaŷŷāŷ’, p. 40–1.
99 Guichard, Structures socials, p. 198.
100 J. Aguadé, ‘Some remarks about sectarian movements in al-Andalus’, SI 64 (1986),
pp. 73–4; Glick, Islamic and Christian Spain, p. 205.
101 Aguadé, ‘Remarks’, pp. 64–5.
178 Notes
102 W. Madelung, ‘The Sufyānī between tradition and history’, SI 63 (1986), pp. 13–14,
20–1.
103 M. Fierro, La Heterodoxia en al-Andalus durante el period omeya, Madrid: Instituto
Hispano-Arabe de Cultura, 1987, pp. 28–9; Aguadé, ‘Remarks’, p. 65; E. Manzano
Moreno, La frontera de al-Andalus en época de los Omeyas, Madrid: Consejo Supe-
rior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1991, pp. 238–48. The Valencia Berbers were not
involved in this revolt; P. Guichard, ‘The population of the region of Valencia during
the first two centuries of Muslim domination’, in Marín, Formation, Part 1, pp. 167–8.
104 This allegedly attracted some 60,000 Berbers: Guichard, ‘Social history’, p. 684;
Fierro, Heterodoxia, pp. 106–11; Manzano Moreno, Frontera, pp. 56, 181.
105 Guichard, ‘Population of Valencia’, pp. 148–9, 151–5; Guichard, Structures socials,
pp. 223–5, 249–50.
106 T.F. Glick, ‘Berbers in Valencia: the case of irrigation’, in P.E. Chevedden, D.J.
Kagay, and P.G. Padilla (eds), Iberia and the Mediterranean World of the Middle
Ages. Essays in honor of Robert I. Burns S.J., Leiden: Brill, 1996, pp. 193–9, who also
makes the excellent point that any community engaging in irrigation must have at
least some contact with its neighbours up- and downriver, pp. 201–4; A. Bazzana,
Maisons d’al-Andalus: habitat medieval et structures du peuplement dans l’Espagne
orientale, Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 1992, pp. 187–202, finds some cultural paral-
lels in material evidence including large communal serving dishes, or the organisation
of living space in Andalusī houses, such as large central courtyards, but notes that
there is no sign of, for example, the separation of male and female space within this.
107 On which see P. Sénac, La frontière et les hommes (VIIIe–XIIe siècle): le peuplement
musulman au nord de l’Ebre et les débuts de la reconquête aragonaise, Paris: Maison-
neuve et Larose, 2000, pp. 187–231.
108 A. Bazzana, ‘Le hiṣn: modèle d’organisation du peuplement rural dans al-Andalus’,
in Gayraud, Colloque international, pp. 222–3, 232–3.
109 For example, in La Mancha; ibid., pp. 228–9.
110 T.F. Glick, ‘Tribal landscapes of Islamic Spain: history and archaeology’, in J. Howe
and M. Wolfe (eds), Inventing Medieval Landscapes: senses of place in Western
Europe, Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2002, pp. 116–20.
111 J.L. Boone and N.L. Benco, ‘Islamic settlement in North Africa and the Iberian penin-
sula’, Annual Review of Anthropology 28 (1999), pp. 61–2.
112 B. Soravia, ‘Entre bureaucratie et literature: la kitāba et les kuttāb dans l’administration
de l’Espagne umayyade’, Al-Masāq 7 (1994), p. 180.
113 Shatzmiller, Labour, pp. 330–7, citing a document from a fifteenth-century Moroccan
chronicle as her primary evidence. With that reservation in mind, however, her
conclusions on how conservatism in economic life reinforces ethnic boundaries in
other areas seem broadly (theoretically) convincing.
114 L. Molina, ‘An Arab among muwallads: Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Salām al-Khushanī’,
in Marín, Formation, Part 1, pp. 115–6.
115 Coope, ‘Religious and cultural conversion’, pp. 63–4.
116 On the latter count, at least, they failed: Ibn al-Qūṭīya, pp. 82–3; Christys, Christians,
pp. 178–9; Coope, ‘Religious and cultural conversion’, pp. 64–6.
117 Tres textos árabes sobre beréberes en el occidente islámico, ed. M. Yaʿla, Madrid:
Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1996, pp. 125–6.
118 Vallvé, Califato, p. 59.
119 Glick, Islamic and Christian Spain, p. 208.
120 E. García Gómez, Andalucía contra Berbería: reedición de traducciones de Ben
Ḥayyān, Šaqundī, y Ben al-Jaṭīb, con un prólogo, Barcelona: Publicaciones del
Departamento de Lengua y Literatura Árabes, 1976, p. 10.
121 Often they were said to be descended from Noah’s son Ham, not Shem like the Arabs;
H. de Felipe, ‘Leyendes árabes sobre el origen de los Beréberes’, AQ 11 (1990),
pp. 380–4; Norris, Berbers, pp. 33–4.
Notes 179
122 FM, p. 170, has the Berbers migrate to North Africa from Palestine after the death of
their ancestor Goliath (Jālūt).
123 Al-Bakrī, §§ 1092 and 1102 (idols), 1274 (a note on the proximity of Khārijites).
124 In a skirmish during the Berber revolt, an Arab cavalry charge ‘recoiled instantly due
to the colour of the Moors’ skin’; Chr754, § 84.
125 Ibn Ḥabīb, p. 148; the same passage appears some 450 years later in Ibn ʿIdhārī, ii,
p. 21.
126 P.C. Scales, The Fall of the Caliphate of Córdoba: Berbers and Andalusis in conflict,
Leiden: Brill, 1994, pp. 68–73, 165.
127 Ibid., p. 3.
128 E. Manzano Moreno, ‘Beréberes de al-Andalus: los factores de una evolución
histórica’, AQ 11 (1990), p. 425.
129 Although the Cordoban Umayyads had military mawālī families too; M. Meouak,
‘Los Banū Yaʿlà, una familia de la elite militar al servicio de los Omeyas de Córdoba’,
EOBA vii, pp. 285–93.
130 H. Orenstein, ‘Asymmetrical reciprocity: a contribution to the theory of political
legitimacy’, Current Anthropology 21 (1980), pp. 79–80.
131 New mawālī included a manumitted slave, Bazīʿ, whose family maintained the ties of
dependence with the Umayyads even when they became governors; M. Fierro, ‘Bazīʿ,
mawlà de ʿAbd al-Raḥmān I, y sus descendientes’, AQ 8 (1987), pp. 100, 105–6; Ibn
al-Faraḍī, §§ 1127, 1134; M. Fierro, ‘Los mawālī’, pp. 65, 89–92; Manzano Moreno,
Conquistadores, pp. 232–3.
132 A. Marsham, Rituals of Islamic Monarchy: accession and succession in the first
Muslim empire, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009, pp. 159–61.
133 Fierro, ‘Los mawālī’, p. 89.
134 Descendants of the eponymous mawlā of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān I, including a treasury
official under ʿAbd al-Raḥmān II, and a poet-historian under ʿAbd Allāh; L. Molina,
‘Familias Andalusias: Los datos del Taʾrīj ʿulamāʾ al-Andalus de Ibn al-Faraḍī (I)’, in
M.L. Ávila (ed.), EOBA ii, Granada: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas,
1989, pp. 38–9.
135 D. Oliver Pérez, ‘Sobre el significado de mawlā en la historia omeya de al-Andalus’,
AQ 22 (2001), pp. 329–30.
136 Guichard, ‘Social history’, pp. 690–1, gives examples.
137 The aforementioned Bazīʿ’s lineage produced several notable figures: Ibn al-Faraḍī,
§§ 1127, 1134.
138 Fierro, ‘Mawālī and muwalladūn’, pp. 216–17.
139 This is reflected in biographical dictionaries; ibid., p. 198.
140 AM, p. 3.
141 Fierro, ‘Mawālī and muwalladūn’, p. 218.
142 In addition to those discussed above, revolts of this period included two in Cordoba
(806 and 814) and one in the notoriously-fractious Toledo (807); R. Marín-Guzmán,
‘The causes of the revolt of ʿUmar ibn Ḥafṣūn in al-Andalus (880–928): a study in
medieval Islamic social history’, Arabica 42 (1995), p. 186. The author attributes the
frequency of revolt to economic discontent, but her arguments are not always
convincing; see p. 218, on the supposed higher cost of living in al-Andalus in contrast
with the rest of the Islamic world, based upon a comparison of wheat prices in Egypt
and Spain, in which she fails to take into account that Egypt would naturally be
cheaper in this area, since it produced the wheat, and that the price disparity may
therefore not be typical of other commodities.
143 Guichard, Structures socials, pp. 306–7.
144 Guichard, ‘Les Arabes’, p. 1508; Sénac, Frontière, pp. 94–9. They became embroiled
in the disorder of Toledo’s final rebellion (c. 870s–900) before it was brought to heel
by ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III; Kennedy, Muslim Spain, pp. 69–72; CAIII, §§ 175–6.
145 Ibn al-Qūṭīya, pp. 90–4, 103–15.
180 Notes
146 D.J. Wasserstein, ‘Inventing tradition and constructing identity: the genealogy of
ʿUmar ibn Ḥafṣūn between Christianity and Islam’, AQ 23 (2002), pp. 270, 288–93.
147 D. Oliver Pérez, ‘Una nueva interpretación de “árabe”, “muladí” y “mawla” como
voces representivas de grupos socials’, in Proyección histórica de España en sus tres
culturas, Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León, Consejería de Cultura y Turismo, 1993,
pp. 143–55.
148 M. Acién Almansa, Entre el feudalismo y el Islam: ʿUmar Ibn Ḥafṣūn en los historia-
dores, en las fuentes y en la historia, Jaén: Universidad de Jaén, 1994, pp. 87, 111–13.
149 Ibid., pp. 76–7.
150 Fierro, ‘Mawālī and muwalladūn’, pp. 224–5.
151 G. Larsson, Ibn García’s Shuʿūbiyya Letter: ethnic and theological tensions in
medieval al-Andalus, Leiden: Brill, 2003, pp. 2–3.
152 Kennedy, Muslim Spain, p. 130.
153 Five survive, of at least seven known to have existed; the dateable ones are: two from
the eleventh century, one from the twelfth, one from the thirteenth; Monroe,
Shuʿūbiyya, pp. 15–17. Like al-Jāḥiẓ, the hostile respondants accuse Ibn Gharsiya of
heresy/apostasy (al-Balawī, translated in ibid., p. 93). Ibn Mann Allāh, mentioned
above, was another critic.
154 Ibn Gharsiya, translated text in Monroe, Shuʿūbiyya, for example, pp. 24–7.
155 Kennedy, Muslim Spain, p. 133.
156 Monroe, Shuʿūbiyya, pp. 12–13, 20–1.
158 For example, Ibn Ḥabīb, pp. 138–9, mentions Mūsā’s father without noting that he
was a mawlā.
159 See above, p. 106.
160 Shatzmiller, Labour, pp. 327–8.
162 By the state and for the state meant that revenues went to the state; see above,
pp. 42–6.
163 F. Løkkegard, ‘Fayʾ’, EI 2 II, Leiden: Brill, 1965, p. 869.
164 FM, p. 207.
165 R. Hillenbrand, ‘ “The ornament of the world”: medieval Cordoba as a cultural
centre’, in Jayyusi, Legacy, p. 117; N.N.N. Khoury, ‘The meaning of the Great
Mosque of Cordoba in the tenth century’, Muqarnas 13 (1996), pp. 80–1.
166 Bulliet, ‘Conversion-based patronage’, p. 262.
167 Translated text in Monroe, Shuʿūbiyya, p. 78.
168 Questioned about the numbers of his mawālī and his household (presumably including
slaves acquired during the conquest) on his journey from al-Andalus to Damascus,
Mūsā shrugs and says several thousand; Ibn Ḥabīb, p. 148. His interlocutor here is one
Yazīd b. al-Muhallab, himself associated with amassing fortunes in the provinces; we
shall meet him in chapter seven.
169 Hasson, ‘Les mawālī dans l’armée’, p. 183.
170 As discussed in chapter two, the first of these is tenth century or later, the latter is early
twelfth.
172 In addition to the discussion here, see also below, pp. 184–5; for a more focused and
detailed account, see N. Clarke, ‘Medieval Arabic accounts of the conquest of
Cordoba: creating a narrative for a provincial capital’, BSOAS 74 (2011), pp. 41–57.
173 Ibn Ḥabīb, p. 146. Ibn ʿIdhārī, ii, p. 18, and FA, p. 34, contain very similar versions of
this. Ibn ʿIdhārī does not cite his source; FA credits it to Ibn Ḥabīb.
174 FM, p. 206.
175 Ibn al-Qūṭīya, pp. 2–5; likewise, Ibn ʿIdhārī, ii, pp. 7–8, and Ibn Kathīr (d. 1373),
al-Bidāya wa-al-nihāya, Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmīyah, 1994, ix, p. 83, both have
Cordoba as Roderic’s capital. Cordoba became the capital of al-Andalus under the
Notes 181
governor al-Ḥurr; P. Chalmeta, Invasión e islamización: la sumisión de Hispania y la
formación de al-Andalus, Madrid: Editorial Mapfre, 1994, p. 256.
176 See below, p. 105, for the full passage.
177 Ibn al-Shabbāṭ, pp. 143–4.
178 Molina, ‘Los itinerarios’, pp. 32–3 (argument), 34–8 (the extracted account). Ibn
al-Shabbāṭ’s other main sources are clearly distinguished within the text; two of them,
al-Rushāṭī (d. 1147) and Ibn al-Kharrāṭ (d. 1186) are collected in Al-Andalus en el
Kitāb iqtibās al-anwār y en el Ijtiṣār iqtibās al-anwār, ed. E. Molina López and J.
Bosch Vilá, Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1990.
179 FA, pp. 20–1; this account is followed, p. 21, by a rival tradition (from ‘other works’)
saying only that Cordoba was conquered ṣulḥan, with the fact that a Byzantine church
still stands there adduced as proof.
181 AM, pp. 10–14; Ibn ʿIdhārī, ii, pp. 9–10.
182 AM, p. 9; Ibn ʿIdhārī, ii, p. 10. See also discussion (with reference to the Akhbār
Majmūʿa) of Mughīth in G. Martinez-Gros, L’idéologie omeyyade: la construction de
la légitimité du Califat de Cordoue (X e–XI e siècles), Madrid: Casa de Velázquez,
1992, pp. 57–60, which concentrates on the legitimating symbolism surrounding
Mughīth’s conquest of Cordoba, including the fig tree.
183 Crone, ‘Mawlā’, pp. 880–1.
184 Al-Maqqarī, iii, p. 14.
185 Al-Maqqarī, iii, pp. 12 and 14. A certain ʿAbd al-Karīm b. Mughīth was active in the
service (usually military) of the amīrs Hishām (r. 788–96) and al-Ḥakam I
(r. 796–822): Ibn al-Athīr, v, pp. 309, 426; Ibn ʿIdhārī, ii, pp. 64–5, 75. While he was
presumably – given the timespan involved – not the son his name would suggest, this
may indicate a genuine historical Mughīth, or at least a figure with descendants
prepared to embellish his memory.
186 Molina, ‘Un relato’, pp. 63–4 (etc.).
187 Chr1344, pp. 136–9.
189 AM, p. 10.
190 AM, p. 29.
191 AM, p, 21; cf. FA, p. 30.
192 It was the former home of Ibn Ḥazm’s family, as he discusses in his Ṭawq al-hamāma,
Cairo: al-Maktaba al-Ḥusaynīya al-Miṣrīya, 1975, pp. 102–3, 120–1, 127–8. After its
ruin during the fitna that brought down the Umayyads, he lamented it as a symbol of
all that was lost.
193 R. Castejón, ‘Nuevas identificaciones en la topografía de la Córdoba califal’, in Actas:
Primer Congreso de Estudios Arabes e Islámicos, Córdoba, 1962, Madrid: Comite
Permanente del Congreso de Estudios Arabes e Islámicos, 1964, p. 374 n. 15, suggests
that the balāṭ occupied by Mughīth was a Roman foundation; D. Fairchild Ruggles,
Gardens, Landscapes, and Visions in the Palaces of Islamic Spain, University Park,
PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000, pp. 39–40, expresses scepticism
at this, and notes that while there was a prosperous suburb to the west of Cordoba in
the tenth century, it was an undeveloped area in the Visigothic and immediate post-
conquest period. For an overview of the literature on Umayyad-period Cordoban
country estates, see G.D. Anderson, ‘Villa (munya) architecture in Umayyad Córdoba:
preliminary considerations’, in G.D. Anderson and M. Rosser-Owen (eds), Revisiting
al-Andalus: perspectives on the material culture of Islamic Iberia and beyond, Leiden:
Brill, 2007, pp. 53–79.
194 FA, pp. 29–30.
195 FA, p. 30.
196 As Torrey notes in his edition of FM, p. 207, n. 2.
197 FM, p. 210.
182 Notes
198 FM, p. 207.
199 Ibn al-Faraḍī, § 1316; Christys, Christians, pp. 160, 162.
200 Ibn Ḥayyān, Muqtabis V, ed. P. Chalmeta, Madrid: al-Maʿhad al-Isbānī al-ʿArabī
lil-Thaqāfah, 1979, p. 81.
201 Ibn Ḥayyān, Muqtabis, pp. 69–81; Carabaza, ‘Banū Ḥaŷŷāŷ’, pp. 41–3; Fierro, ʿAbd
al-Raḥmān, p. 119.
203 One of the sons of Witiza, who defected to the Muslims and formed an agreement
with the conquerors that confirmed their land rights; Ibn al-Qūṭīya, p. 2. See chapters
two and six.
205 Of ʿUmar II; Ibn al-Faraḍī, § 1316.
206 L.A. García Moreno, ‘Spanish Gothic consciousness among the Mozarabs in
al-Andalus (VIII–Xth centuries)’, in A. Ferreiro (ed.), The Visigoths: studies in
culture and society, Leiden: Brill, 1999, pp. 311–12 (who sees Ibn al-Qūṭīya as a
spokesman for muwallads on the basis of shared Hispanic identity); Martinez-Gros,
L’idéologie, p. 73.
207 M.I. Fierro, ‘La obra histórica de Ibn al-Qūṭiyya’, AQ 10 (1989), pp. 502, 511.
209 Chr754, § 79; Wolf, Conquerors, p. 144, n. 154.
4 To the ends of the earth: extremes of east and west in

Arabic geographical and ʿajāʾib writings
1 M. Rodinson, ‘La place du merveilleux et de l’étrange dans la conscience du monde
musulman médiéval’, in L’étrange et le merveilleux dans l’Islam medieval: actes du
colloque tenu au Collège de France à Paris, en mars 1974, Paris: Editions J.A., 1978,
pp. 168–70.
2 P.L. Heck, The Construction of Knowledge in Islamic Civilization: Qudāma b. Jaʿfar
and his Kitāb al-kharāj wa-ṣināʿat al-kitāba, Leiden: Brill, 2002, pp. 118–19.
3 J. Hernández Juberías, La península imaginaria: mitos y leyendas sobre al-Andalus,
Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1996.
4 A. Silverstein, ‘The medieval Islamic worldview: Arabic geography in its historical
context’, in KA. Raaflaub and R.J.A. Talbert (eds), Geography and Ethnography:
perceptions of the world in pre-modern societies, Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell,
2010, pp. 273–9.
5 S.A. Bonebakker, ‘Adab and the concept of belles-lettres’, in J. Ashtiany, T.M. John-
stone, J.D. Latham, R.B. Serjeant, and G.R. Smith (eds), ʿAbbasid Belles-Lettres,
6 Heck, Construction of Knowledge, pp. 139–44.
7 D. Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: the Graeco–Arabic translation movement
in Baghdad and early ʿAbbāsid society (2nd–4th/8th–10th centuries), Abingdon:
Routledge, 1998, esp. pp. 53–60, 107–50.
8 A.J. Silverstein, Postal Systems in the Pre-Modern Islamic World, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 64. Al-Masʿūdī, § 9, singles out Ibn Khurdādhbih
for praise, for his preservation of knowledge of the Persian past.
9 Heck, Construction of Knowledge, pp. 14, 94–6.
10 A. Miquel, La géographie humaine du monde musulman jusqu’au milieu du 11e
siècle, Paris: Mouton, 1973–5 (2nd edn), i, pp. 1–8, 32.
11 J.F.P. Hopkins, ‘Geographical and navigational literature’, in M.J.L. Young, J.D.
Latham, and R.B. Serjeant (eds), Religion, Learning and Science in the ʿAbbasid
Period, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 303–4; Hopkins notes that
it is unclear whether Ptolemy’s Geographia was among the translations, although
Notes 183
al-Masʿūdī (or one of his informants) does seem to have been familiar with the work
(Shboul, Al-Masʿūdī, p. 43); Gutas, Greek Thought, p. 174, mentions an Arabic transla-
tion carried out in the early Ottoman period, but is uncertain whether one existed before
this time.
12 Hopkins, ‘Geographical and navigational literature’, pp. 308–9.
13 An idea reflected in late antique works such as Isidore, Etymologies, XIII.xv.1, and
Orosius, I.ii.1; in the Arabic translation of the latter (Kitāb Hurūshiyūsh, ed. M.
Penelas, Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2001, p. 21) addi-
tional detail is included about the peoples of Europe and Africa, namely their descent
from Noah.
14 Al-Idrīsī, p. 87 (full of savage peoples and terrible winds); Ibn Saʿīd al-Andalusī (geog-
rapher, d. 1286), Nashwat al-ṭarab, ed. N. ʿAbdul-Rahman, Amman: Maktabat al-Aqsá,
1982, p. 114.
15 M. Eliade, Images and Symbols: studies in religious symbolism, tr. P. Mairet, London:
Harvill Press, 1961, pp. 37–9.
16 A.J. Wensinck, The Ocean in the Literature of the Western Semites, Amsterdam:
J. Müller, 1919, pp. 1–3.
17 Al-Masʿūdī, § 789, for example, talks of the continual, sinister encroachment of the
Ocean upon the land.
18 Al-Masʿūdī, § 404, speculates that the Viking attacks on al-Andalus were made
possible by secret channels feeding between seas, linked with the Ocean.
20 L’abrégé des merveilles, tr. C. de Vaux, Paris, 1898, pp. 46–7, has him killing a dragon
and visiting a crystal palace on islands in the Green Sea, i.e. Ocean. De Vaux thought
the text was the work of al-Masʿūdī, but more recently it has been attributed to Ibrāhīm
b. Waṣīf Shāh (d. c. 1209). Cf. Orosius, III.xix.1–6 (Alexander goes east to the edge of
the Ocean, imitating Hercules); Kitāb Hurūshiyūsh, pp. 186–8.
21 M. Marín, ‘Legends on Alexander the Great in Moslem Spain’, Graeco-Arabica 4
(1991), pp. 73–4; F. de Polignac, ‘Alexandre entre ciel et terre: initiation et investiture’,
SI 84 (1996), pp. 135–8. This also appears in Syriac poetry: R. Macuch, ‘Pseudo-
Callisthenes Orientalis and the problem of Du l-qarnain’, Graeco-Arabica 4 (1991),
pp. 239–41.
22 Fr. de Polignac, ‘L’image d’Alexandre dans la literature arabe: l’Orient face à
l’hellénisme?’, Arabica 29 (1982), pp. 297–9; al-Masʿūdī, §§ 546–58.
23 For example, Ibn Saʿīd al-Andalusī, Nashwat al-ṭarab, p. 114; Yāqūt, iv, p. 40 (Alex-
ander is said to have visited Toledo, as is the equally ubiquitous Solomon).
24 Al-Masʿūdī, §§ 670–1.
25 X. de Planhol, L’islam et la mer: la mosque et le matelot, Paris: Perrin, 2000, p. 100.
26 Hopkins, ‘Geographical and navigational literature’, p. 307; J.E. Montgomery, ‘Seren-
dipity, resistance, and multivalency: Ibn Khurradādhbih and his Kitāb al-Masālik wa-l-
mamālik’, in P.F. Kennedy (ed.), On Fiction and Adab in Medieval Arabic Literature,
Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2005, pp. 180–4.
27 Heck, Construction of Knowledge, pp. 113–14.
28 R. Tottoli, ‘La scienza popolare delle ʿağāʾib: breve introduzione a un genere letterario
tra cosmografia e geografia’, Scienza e Islam: Quaderni di Studi Arabi 3 (1999), p. 48.
Related terms appear in, for example, Q. 15:9 (ʿajaban).
29 R.P. Mottahedeh, ‘ʿAjāʾib in The Thousand and One Nights’, R.G. Hovannisian and
G. Sabagh (eds), The Thousand and One Nights in Arabic Literature and Society,
Giorgio Levi della Vida conference xii, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997, pp. 35–6.
30 R. Arié, ‘Le merveilleux dans la literature hispano-musulmane au bas moyen age’, in
idem, Etudes sur la civilisation de l’Espagne musulmane, Leiden: Brill, 1990, p. 239.
31 Miquel, Géographie humaine, ii, pp. 484–5.
32 Rodinson, ‘Place du merveilleux’, pp. 179–80.
184 Notes
33 Arié, ‘Le merveilleux’, pp. 239–40.
34 Heck, Construction of Knowledge, p. 136.
35 Hernández Juberías, La península imaginaria, p. 21.
36 H.T. Norris, Saharan Myth and Saga, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972, p. 6.
37 M. Hartmann and C.E. Bosworth, ‘Al-Ṣin’, EI 2 IX, Leiden: Brill, 1997, p. 618.
38 J.M. Safran, ‘From alien terrain to the abode of Islam: landscapes in the conquest of
al-Andalus’, in J. Howe and M. Wolfe (eds), Inventing Medieval Landscapes: senses of
place in Western Europe, Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2002, p. 139.
39 Silverstein, ‘Worldview’, pp. 283–4.
40 Al-Masʿūdī, §§ 7–8; see also Shboul, Al-Masʿūdī, pp. 31–8.
41 Cf. E. Weber, ‘Construction of identity in twelfth-century Andalusia: the case of travel
writing’, Journal of North African Studies 5 (2000), pp. 3–4.
42 D. Graf, ‘Early Hellenistic travel tales and Arabian utopias’, Graeco-Arabica 5 (1993),
pp. 111–12.
43 J. Bray, ‘A caliph and his public relations’, in W.-C. Ouyang and G.J. van Gelder (eds),
New Perspectives on Arabian Nights: ideological variations and narrative horizons,
44 Wahb b. Munabbih (on whom see chapter five) had a Yemeni Dhū al-Qarnayn, travel-
ling west to spread Abrahamic monotheism; Marín, ‘Legends on Alexander’, p. 74. Ibn
Ḥabīb, p. 68, citing Ibn Isḥāq, says he was Egyptian.
45 For example, al-Zamakhsharī; D. Pinault, Story-telling Techniques in the Arabic
Nights, Leiden: Brill, 1992, p. 182. More is made of this by Ibn Saʿīd al-Andalusī,
Nashwat al-ṭarab, pp. 112–13. Al-Masʿūdī, § 671, has it too, noting also the alternative
theory that Alexander got the epithet due to his descent from angels; he ascribes the
rival speculations to ʿUmar I and ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib.
46 This tended to take the form of giving Dhū al-Qarnayn/Alexander an extremely long
life – as long as 1600 years – into which all the facets of his legend might be fitted.
E. García Gómez (ed. and tr.), Un texto árabe occidental de la Leyenda de Alejandro,
Madrid: Impr. de E. Maestre, 1929, editor’s introduction, p. xl.
47 Q. 18:83–100; García Gómez, Un texto árabe, pp. 32–3, is an example of this in an
Arabic Alexander romance; T. Fahd, ‘La version arabe du Roman d’Alexandre’,
Graeco-Arabica 4 (1991), pp. 27–8, notes that it is also in the Syriac version. Josephus,
The Jewish War, tr. H.St.J. Thackeray, London: Heinemann, 1927–8, VII.245, gives
what might be an earlier form of the myth: Alexander closes a mountain pass against
the Scythians with ‘iron gates’.
48 B. McGinn, Visions of the End: apocalyptic traditions in the middle ages, New York:
Columbia University Press, 1998, pp. 57–9, has excerpts from a sixth-century homily
on the subject; Pseudo-Methodius also discusses the same event as a precondition for
the coming of the Last Emperor, ibid., pp. 73–5.
49 See discussion in D. Cook, Studies in Muslim Apocalyptic, Princeton, NJ: Darwin
Press, 2002, pp. 182–8, who notes, pp. 183–4, that many of the details came from
Pseudo-Methodius.
50 Ibn al-Faqīh, pp. 298–301.
51 Hopkins, ‘Geographical and navigational literature’, pp. 311–12; Miquel, Géographie
humaine, i, pp. 154–8. Yāqūt quotes Ibn al-Faqīh extensively, for example, on the City
of Copper (see below), and some of his citations may come from an original version of
the work; A.B. Khalidov, ‘Myth and reality in the K. Akhbār al-buldān by Ibn al-Faqīh’,
in A. Neuwirth et al. (eds), Myths, Historical Archetypes and Symbolic Figures in
Arabic Literature: towards a new hermeneutic approach, Beirut: In Kommission bei
F. Steiner, 1999, pp. 481–2.
52 Ibn Khurdādhbih, pp. 162–70.
53 Al-Muqaddasī, Kitāb aḥsan al-taqāsīm, ed. M.J. de Goeje, Leiden: Brill, 1902, pp.
362–5, who says that he read (qaraʾtu) Ibn Khurdādhbih’s account; al-Bakrī, §§ 761–3.
54 Ibn Khurdādhbih, p. 162.
Notes 185
55 Miquel, Géographie humaine, ii, p. 507.
56 In a neat illustration of the blurred boundaries between the ‘real’ and the ‘fantastical’
in medieval Islamic thought, Ibn Ḥawqal, p. 482, discusses how the Rūs and other
peoples of the region used to trade for silk with the two tribes.
57 Cook, Muslim Apocalyptic, p. 187.
58 Itself grounded in Syriac Christian legends of Alexander; García Gómez, Un texto
árabe, pp. xxxiii–v.
59 The Alexander Book in Ethiopia, tr. E.A. Wallis Budge, London: Oxford University
Press, 1933, p. 25 is the first occasion.
60 Ibid., p. 38.
61 Ibid., pp. 138–41.
62 For example, al-Bakrī, § 567, who adds the Franks to the family; Ibn Ḥawqal, p. 110,
who also emphasizes how close the eastern part of the Ocean is to this area. Postulating
scriptural forefathers for earthly tribes was popular, as we saw in the previous chapter
with the Berbers (see ch. 3, pp. 121–2); Yāqūt, iii, p. 267, notes that the peoples of Sind
and Hind were descended from another of Noah’s sons, Ḥam. The Yapheth link to Gog
and Magog was in other traditions (without the Turks), for example, Isidore, Etymolo-
gies, IX.ii.27; The Book of the Cave of Treasures, tr. E.A. Wallis Budge, London: The
Religious Tract Society, 1927, pp. 265–6. Not everyone agreed that Yājūj wa-Mājūj
were connected with the Turks; Cook, Muslim Apocalyptic, p. 84.
63 Al-Zuhrī, § 161.
64 E. García Gómez, Un texto árabe, p. 15; a second version within the same work,
pp. 32–3, is more conventional and peppered with Qurʾānic quotations.
65 Ibn Hishām, Kitāb al-tījān, Hyderabad: Matbaʿat Majlis Dāʾirat al-Maʿārif
al-ʿUthmānīyah, 1347/1928–9, pp. 89–93 (setting up statues and a lighthouse against
the Ocean).
66 Al-Masʿūdī, §§ 836–7.
67 Al-Masʿūdī, § 491 (Dhū al-Qarnayn in Sijistān), §§ 828–35 (Alexandria); al-Zuhrī,
§ 224 (Cordoba’s name is linked with Solomon); Miquel, Géographie humaine, i,
p. 166; F. Roldán Castro, ‘El Oriente de al-Andalus en el Ātār bilād de al-Qazwīnī’,
Sharq al-Andalus 9 (1992), p. 37. There is a precedent for this in Orosius, for example,
III.xix.4 and III.xix.6 (Kitāb Hurūshiyūsh, p. 187), with Hercules and – following his
example – Alexander founding three cities between them on the eastern shore of the
Ocean in India. They were not alone in this practice; several ancient Yemeni kings
were likewise said to have travelled to the west and founded cities there, for example,
al-Dīnawarī, i, p. 17, al-Masʿūdī, § 1086.
68 M.I. Gerhardt, The Art of Storytelling: a literary study of The Thousand and One
Nights, Leiden: Brill, 1963, p. 204.
69 For example, al-Masʿūdī, § 273.
70 Arié, ‘Le merveilleux’, p. 75.
71 Ibn Ḥawqal, p. 109; he goes on to disparage Andalusīs military tactics and riding skills,
ibid., p. 113.
72 Al-Masʿūdī, § 789.
73 Marín, ‘Legends on Alexander’, pp. 78–9, 83.
74 Al-Gharnāṭī, Kitāb Tuḥfat al-albāb, ed. G. Ferrand, Journal Asiatique 207 (1925),
pp. 69–70 (idol), pp. 70–2 (lighthouse).
76 Yāqūt, iv, p. 290.
77 Al-Masʿūdī, §§ 272–3.
78 E. Lévi-Provençal (tr.), ‘La “Description de l’Espagne” d’Aḥmad al-Rāzī’, al-Andalus
18 (1953), pp. 51–106, is an attempt to reconstruct al-Rāzī’s account from quotations
in other works.
79 Quoted in al-Maqqarī, i, p. 128.
80 CMR, p. 13; Lévi-Provençal, ‘Description’, p. 60.
186 Notes
81 CMR, pp. 101–2, 126–7; Lévi-Provençal, ‘Description’, pp. 96–7. Cf. above, p. 39.
82 Ibn Khaldūn, Kitāb al-ʿibar, Būlāq: Dār al-Tibāʿah al-Khidīwīyah, 1284/1867–8, ii,
p. 88; L. Molina, ‘Orosio y los geógrafos hispanomusulmanes’, AQ 5 (1984),
pp. 67–71, spends a lot of time trying to rationalize what he takes to be conflicting
accounts of when the translation took place, when the simplest solution seems to me to
be that al-Ḥakam began patronising scholarship before his accession to the throne. The
translation is cited by al-Bakrī, § 1494.
83 Al-Masʿūdī, § 914, mentions that he has seen a copy of a book that the bishop of
Gerona gifted to al-Ḥakam in 940, and that this is where he got his Frankish history;
S.M. Stern, ‘A letter of the Byzantine Emperor to the court of the Spanish Umayyad
caliph al-Ḥakam’, al-Andalus 26 (1961), pp. 38–9, provides the text and translation of
a partially surviving letter to al-Ḥakam, which accompanied a copy of a philosophical
text that he had requested. Like Molina – as discussed in the previous note – Stern
agonizes over how al-Ḥakam and ‘the caliph’ can be referred to as different persons
within the letter, without ever entertaining the idea that al-Ḥakam might have had such
interests while he was only the heir-apparent. The letter’s use of the title amīr to refer
to the heir-apparent had venerable Umayyad precedent, going back to al-Walīd’s
inscription in Qaṣr Burquʿ in 700–1; A. Marsham, Rituals of Islamic Monarchy: acces-
sion and succession in the first Muslim empire, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2009, pp. 126–7.
84 Orosius, I.ii.69 (Kitāb Hurūshiyūsh, p. 28).
85 For example, Ibn ʿIdhārī, ii, p. 1, al-Idrīsī, p. 535, al-Bakrī, § 1494; Molina, ‘Orosio’,
pp. 72, has more.
86 Orosius, I.ii.70–1.
87 Orosius, III.xix.6 (Kitāb Hurūshiyūsh, p. 21); Isidore, Etymologies, XIV.vi.7; Chr754,
§ 54. Al-Rāzī repeatedly associates Hercules with al-Andalus: CMR, pp. 80–1, 126–30;
Lévi-Provençal, ‘Description’, pp. 93–4 (pillars at Seville).
88 Lebor Gabála Érenn: The Book of the Taking of Ireland, tr. R.A. Stewart Macalister,
Dublin: Educational Co. of Ireland, 1938–56, ii, §§ 117, 132.
89 Yāqūt, iv, p. 290 has this; al-Zuhrī, § 239; Norris, Saharan, p. 44, argues the statue was
of Hercules, although it is not clear whether this attribution is secure.
90 Yāqūt, iv, p. 290; al-Qazwīnī, Kitāb āthār al-bilād, ed. F. Wüstenfeld, Wiesbaden:
Martin Sändig, 1967, pp. 369–70.
91 Hopkins, ‘Geographical and navigational literature’, pp. 319–21.
92 Olympiodorus in The Fragmentary Classicising Historians of the Later Roman
Empire: Eunapius, Olympiodorus, Priscus and Malchus, ed. and tr. R.C. Blockley,
Liverpool: Cairns, 1981–3, ii, p. 177 (Alaric cannot make the crossing to Sicily because
of a magical statue that was built to ward off both barbarians and ‘the fires of Etna’;
once destroyed, its protection is removed and Sicily is ravaged). A cache of silver
statues with a similar purpose were apparently taken out of Thrace in the time
of Constantius, leaving the province open to hordes of Huns, Sarmatians, etc.; ibid.,
p. 191.
93 Al-Zuhrī, § 239; he also notes other protective talismans at Granada and Merida, § 249.
94 J.W. Allan, ‘The survival of precious and base metal objects from the medieval Islamic
world’, in M. Vickers (ed.), Pots and Pans: a colloquium on precious metals and
ceramics in the Muslim, Chinese and Graeco-Roman worlds, Oxford 1985, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1986, pp. 60, 68.
95 Miquel, Géographie humaine, ii, pp. 490–1. The 1001 Nights version of the City of
Copper/Brass story notes that Andalusī copper has a value equal to gold; The Book of
the Thousand Nights and a Night, tr. R.F. Burton, London: H.S. Nichols, 1897, v,
pp. 26–7. (This tale was a late entry into the Nights, and as such does not appear in
M. Mahdi’s edition.) Medieval metal terminology could, of course, be ambiguous and
misleading, and it is likely that ‘nuḥās’ may not always refer to copper, but instead to
alloys such as brass or bronze, which had the appearance of gold and thus presumably
Notes 187
some of the status as a decorative material; M. Aga-Oglu, ‘A brief note on Islamic
terminology for bronze and brass’, JAOS 64 (1944), pp. 218, 222.
96 Ibn al-Faqīh, p. 72.
98 Al-Bakrī, § 1532.
99 Al-Gharnāṭī, Tuḥfat al-Albāb, p. 64. Giant ants chase camels in Herodotus, pp. 215–16.
101 G. Ferrand (ed. and tr.), Relations de voyages et textes géographiques arabes, persans,
et turks relatifs à l’extrême-orient du VIIIe au XVIIIe siècles, Paris: E. Leroux,
1913–14, pp. 123–6, quoting Abū ʾl-Farāj (d. 996).
102 de Planhol, L’islam et la mer, pp. 13–19, 41–6, 50; L.I. Conrad, ‘Islam and the sea:
paradigms and problems’, AQ 23 (2002), pp. 123–54.
103 Abū Zayd al-Sīrāfī, Aḫbār aṣ-Ṣīn wa l-Hind: relation de la Chine et de l’Inde, ed. and
tr. J. Sauvaget, Paris: Belles Lettres, 1948, §§ 13–16, 17 and 43.
104 The text – which comprises a mid-ninth-century work as well as the early tenth-
century additions of Abū Zayd, an informant of al-Masʿūdī – survives in a single
manuscript, discovered in Aleppo in the seventeenth century: Shboul, Al-Masʿūdī, pp.
154–5; Aḫbār aṣ-Ṣīn, editor’s introduction, p. xv.
105 Aḫbār aṣ-Ṣīn, § 10.
106 Aḫbār aṣ-Ṣīn, § 5.
107 Miquel, Géographie humaine, ii, p. 511.
108 L’Abrégé des Merveilles, p. 31, has Iblīs imprisoned on an island.
109 Al-Yaʿqūbī, Kitāb al-buldān, p. 353; al-Idrīsī, p. 535. This is not a completely unusual
use of the term, but is an interesting reflection of perceptions.
110 Al-Idrīsī, pp. 17, 103 (Dhū al-Qarnayn is Alexander, and he visited these isles).
111 Wensinck, ‘Ocean’, p. 65; al-Bakrī, § 1319, calls them ‘jazāʾir . . . furṭanātish’ and
places them ‘west of the balad of the Berbers’, near Tangiers. They are another idea
with Graeco-Roman roots: Isidore, Etymologies, XIV.vi.8; Orosius, I.ii.11 (Kitāb
Hurūshiyūsh, p. 22).
113 Al-Qazwīnī, Kitāb āthār, p. 112.
114 Ibn al-Faqīh, p. 10 (‘Rāminī’, near Sri Lanka); Orosius, I.ii.13 (Kitāb Hurūshiyūsh,
p. 22), says Sri Lanka is on the Ocean’s edge.
116 Al-Masʿūdī, § 837, whom al-Zuhrī, § 46, follows.
117 Al-Ṭabarī, i.1, p. 60.
118 Buzurg ibn Shahriyār, ʿAjāʾib al-Hind, Beirut: Dār al-Qāriʿ, 1987, § 14.
119 S.M. Toorawa, G.R. Tibbetts, and G. Ferrand, ‘Wāḳwāḳ’, EI 2 XI, Leiden: Brill, 2002,
pp. 103–9; cf. de Planhol, L’islam et la mer, p. 108 (who is convinced ‘sans doute’
that Wāq wāq is Japan).
120 Or sometimes both: Ibn al-Faqīh, p. 7. FM, p. 19, presents it as the edge of the known
world.
121 Al-Masʿūdī, § 246 (qad rakibtu hādhā al-baḥr). This trip took place in 916–17:
Shboul, Al-Masʿūdī, pp. 7–8.
122 Or a woman; S.M. Toorawa, ‘Wāq al-wāq: fabulous, fabular, Indian Ocean (?)
island(s) . . .’, Emergences 10 (2000), pp. 393–4.
123 Al-Idrīsī, p. 92.
124 Buzurg ibn Shahriyār, ʿAjāʾib, §§ 29, 36, 129, 134 (the latter two give quite precise meas-
urements for the islands’ location, although with the inevitable adjunct that ‘God knows’).
125 In addition to those quoted below, accounts may be found in Yāqūt, v, pp. 80–2, and
al-Qazwīnī, Kitāb āthār, pp. 375–7 (both are versions of Ibn al-Faqīh’s, below,
although Yāqūt’s contains substantially different wording). Both of these writers,
together with al-Gharnaṭī, incorporate Alexander into the tale; elsewhere it is entirely
Mūsā’s and/or Solomon’s domain. Marín, ‘Legends on Alexander’, p. 86.
188 Notes
126 Al-Masʿūdī, § 1423.
127 Al-Bakrī, § 518, has one in the North African desert.
129 Gerhardt, Art of Storytelling, pp. 218–9, tries to explain this away by suggesting that
‘al-Andalus’ once also referred to the Maghrib, but this seems unnecessarily compli-
cated (not to say overly trusting); a simpler explanation would surely be that the city
was associated with Mūsā, and Mūsā was associated with al-Andalus, hence the city
had to be in al-Andalus.
130 Al-Masʿūdī, § 1424, places one in Hind. Paykand, in Transoxiana, is another;
W. Barthold, Turkestan down to the Mongol invasion, London: Luzac, 1968
(3rd edn), p. 117, n. 10. Ibn al-Faqīh, p. 37, connects the Yemeni city of Wabār with
Solomon, under similar circumstances.
131 Wensinck, ‘Ocean’, p. 31.
132 Al-Dīnawarī, i, p. 25.
135 Ibn al-Faqīh, p. 88; other versions are more elaborate, noting the caliph’s desire to
obtain some of the vessels of Solomon. This also, of course, reflects literary conven-
tions regarding the central role of the caliph in any potential conquering event.
137 Al-Gharnaṭī, pp. 61–4.
138 Pinault, Story-telling Techniques, p. 10.
139 Ibid., pp. 22–3; A. Hamori, ‘An allegory from the Arabian Nights: the City of Brass’,
BSOAS 34 (1971), pp. 14–16; R. van Leeuwen, ‘Space as a metaphor in Alf laylah
wa-laylah: the archetypal city’, in Neuwirth, Myths, p. 503.
140 R. van Leeuwen, The Thousand and One Nights: space, travel and transformation,
Leiden: Brill, 2007, p. 88.
141 An exception being Ibn ʿIdhārī, ii, p. 17, who mentions in passing a sapphire belonging
to Dhū al-Qarnayn found among the treasures plundered during the conquest.
143 FA, p. 29.
144 Al-Masʿūdī, Tanbīh, p. 68.
145 In the thirteenth century, Ibn ʿIdhārī, ii, pp. 1, 17, and Ibn al-Athīr, iv, p. 565.
146 Al-ʿUdhrī, Nusūs ʿan al-Andalus min tarṣīʿ al-akhbār wa-tanwīʿ al-āṭār, ed.
ʿA.A. al-Ahwānī, Madrid: Matbaʿat Maʿhad al-Dīrāsāt al-Islāmīyah, 1965, p. 88.
5 The Table of Solomon: a historiographical motif

and its functions
1 M.J. Rubiera Mata, ‘La mesa de Salomon’, Awrāq 3 (1980), pp. 26–7.
2 For example, FM, pp. 207, 210–11.
3 For example, al-Maqqarī, i, p. 161.
5 Ibn al-Athīr, iv, pp. 557, 564.
6 Ibn Ḥabīb, p. 140, initially links the conquest of Toledo with Mūsā, and likewise the
discovery of treasure (including the crowns – about which see below – but not the
Table) in the bayt al-mulūk there. This may just be a slip of the pen, since in the very
next section (p. 141), and based on the same authority (ʿAbd Allāh b. Wahb via
al-Layth b. Saʿd), he attributes both this and the looting of the Table to Ṭāriq.
7 In some versions, Mūsā strikes Ṭāriq with his whip.
8 For example, al-Balādhurī, p. 231 (for the full passage, see above, p. 38–9).
9 Al-Yaʿqūbī, ii, p. 341.
Notes 189
11 Ibn al-Faqīh, pp. 82–3.
12 The one account I have seen where the link is not made is al-Balādhurī, pp. 230–1 (see
above, p. 38–9).
13 FM, p. 207.
14 Ibn al-Shabbāṭ, p. 149.
15 C.L. Meyers, ‘The elusive temple’, The Biblical Archaeologist 45 (1981), p. 39.
16 Ex. 26.35.
17 1 Kings 7.48–9.
18 Two of marble, one of gold; The Babylonian Talmud: Menaḥoth, tr. E. Cashdan,
London: Soncino Press, 1948, pp. 605–7.
19 2 Chr 4.8.
20 C.L. Meyers, ‘Temple, Jerusalem’, in D.N. Freedman et al. (eds), The Anchor Bible
Dictionary, New York: Doubleday, 1992, vi, pp. 359–61.
21 Ibid., p. 367.
22 J. Gutmann, ‘The messianic temple in Spanish medieval Hebrew manuscripts’, XVI,
Sacred Images: studies in Jewish art from antiquity to the middle ages,
Northampton: Variorum Reprints, 1989, p. 125.
23 J.C. Sloane, ‘The Torah shrine in the Ashburnham Pentateuch’, The Jewish Quarterly
Review (n.s.) 25 (1934–35), p. 6.
24 K. Weitzmann and H.L. Kessler, The Frescoes of the Dura Synagogue and Christian
Art, Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1990, p. 11.
25 G. Sed-Rajna, ‘Hebrew illuminated manuscripts from the Iberian peninsula’, in V.B.
Mann, T.F. Glick, and J.D. Dodds (eds), Convivencia: Jews, Muslims, and Christians
in medieval Spain, New York: G. Braziller, 1992, pp. 147–8.
26 Ibid., pp. 137–8.
27 S. Ferber, ‘The Temple in early Christian and Byzantine art’, in J. Gutmann (ed.), The
Temple of Solomon: archaeological fact and medieval tradition in Christian, Islamic
and Jewish art, Missoula, MN,: Scholars Press, 1976, fig. 10 (labelled ‘MENSA’).
28 Although the earliest extant Josephus illustrations are in the ninth-century Sacra Paral-
lela, a compendium of his and others’ works on the subject; J. Gutmann, ‘Josephus’
Jewish antiquities in twelfth-century art; renovatio or creatio?’, IX in Sacred Images,
pp. 434, 439–40.
29 Sed-Rajna, ‘Hebrew illuminated manuscripts’, p. 137.
30 Gutmann, ‘Messianiac temple’, pp. 126–7 and figs. 34 and 35.
31 The Code of Maimonides, Book Eight: the book of Temple service, tr. M. Lewittes,
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957, pp. 267, 345 (and elsewhere).
32 C. Roth, ‘Jewish antecedents of Christian art’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld
Institutes 16 (1953), pp. 34–5, plate 9b.
33 Weitzmann and Kessler, Frescoes, p. 6.
34 D.H. Verkerk, ‘Exodus and Easter vigil in the Ashburnham Pentateuch’, The Art Bulletin
77 (1995), pp. 94–6; the author considers Italy a more likely location for this manu-
script’s production, p. 94. Note, too, that Jerome’s Vulgate text, which the Ashburnham
Pentateuch reproduces, was formulated in a Jewish milieu (Bethlehem) a century prior
to the creation of the Beth Alpha mosaic; Sloane, ‘The Torah shrine’, pp. 2–3.
35 Roth, ‘Jewish antecedents’, pp. 41–4.
36 L. Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, iv, Bible times and characters from Joshua to
Esther, Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1968, pp. 343–4.
37 Ibid., p. 322.
38 L. Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, iii, Bible times and characters from the Exodus
to the death of Moses, tr. P. Radin, Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society of
America, 1968, p. 161.
39 Procopius, IV.6–8.
Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1996, p. 246.
190 Notes
41 C. Mango, ‘The origins of the Blachernae Shrine at Constantinople’, Acta XIII
Congressus Internationalis Archaeologiae Christianae, Split: Arheološki muzej, and
Rome: Pontificio Istituto di Archeologia Cristiana, 1998, ii, p. 67.
42 B.V. Pentcheva, ‘The supernatural protector of Constantinople: the Virgin and her
icons in the tradition of the Avar Siege’, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 26
(2002), p. 2.
43 Mango, ‘Origins’, pp. 74–5.
44 CMR, pp. 135–7 (and taken to Merida, not Toledo); Hernández Juberías, La península
imaginaria, p. 241. Al-Masʿūdī, § 726, discussing the sack, says he has read that the
people of Rome have been cursed ever since, but he makes no mention of the Table, or
of a link with al-Andalus.
45 See above, p. 39.
47 Al-Bakrī, § 1514; al-Maqqarī, i, pp. 135, 161 (his authority for this is ‘one of the
historians’, unnamed).
51 Rubiera Mata, ‘La mesa’, pp. 26–31.
52 L. Yarden, The Spoils of Jerusalem and the Arch of Titus: a re-investigation, Stockholm:
Svenska Institutet i Rom, 1991, pp. 83–4; plates 2, 5 and 44. As is pointed out in F.S.
Kleiner’s review (American Journal of Archaeology 96 [1992], p. 776), Yarden’s
attempts to match exactly the symbolic depiction of a table on the Arch with its Biblical
dimensions is problematic. For present purposes, the fact that a tradition existed is enough.
53 Josephus, The Jewish War, tr. H.St.J. Thackeray, London: Heinemann, 1927–8,
VII.148.
54 Josephus, Jewish War, VII.158–62.
55 In the year 410; A. Cameron, The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity, AD 395–600,
56 Procopius, V.42.
57 P.C. Díaz, ‘Visigothic political institutions’, in P. Heather (ed.), The Visigoths from the
Migration Period to the Seventh Century: an ethnographic perspective, Woodbridge:
Boydell, 1999, p. 335.
Liverpool: Cairns, 1981–3, ii, pp. 187–9.
59 K. Randsborg, ‘The migration period: model history and treasure’, in R. Hodges and
W. Bowden (eds), The Sixth Century: production, distribution and demand, Leiden:
Brill, 1998, pp. 61–3.
60 Díaz, ‘Visigothic political institutions’, p. 329.
61 R. Collins, Visigothic Spain, 409–711, Oxford: Blackwell, 2004, p. 40.
62 H. Wolfram, History of the Goths, tr. T.J. Dunlop, Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1988, p. 221.
63 Gregory of Tours, The History of the Franks, tr. O.M. Dalton, Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1927, ii, p. 277.
64 Ibid., ii, p. 274; M. Hardt, ‘Royal treasures and representation in the early Middle
Ages’, in W. Pohl (ed.), Strategies of Distinction: the construction of ethnic communi-
ties, 300–800, Leiden: Brill, 1998, pp. 277–8.
65 Hardt, ‘Royal treasures’, pp. 261–4.
66 G. Ripoll López, ‘Symbolic life or everyday symbolism: the limits of the question and
the definition of the subject’, in Heather, Visigoths, p. 407.
67 Sidonius Apollinaris, The Letters of Sidonius, tr. O.M. Dalton, Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1915, i, p. 4.
68 Gregory of Tours, History, ii, p. 255.
Notes 191
69 Hardt, ‘Royal treasures’, p. 259; Gregory of Tours, History, ii, pp. 77–8. It was later
recovered but, as mentioned above, subsequently spent fifteen years in Ravenna as a
condition of Ostrogothic protection.
70 Gregory of Tours, History, ii, pp. 92–3.
71 Fredegar, pp. 61–2.
72 Ripoll López, ‘Symbolic life’, pp. 425–6.
73 P. de Palol and G. Ripoll, Los Godos en el Occidente Europeo: Ostrogodos y Visigodos
en los siglos V-VIII, Madrid: Ediciones Encuentro, 1988, pp. 262–275 (note especially
plates 208–11, and 214–15).
75 Official commemoration, at least, seems unlikely, as Visigothic kings did not receive
state funerals, being buried privately by their families; Collins, Visigothic Spain,
p. 105.
76 Hardt, ‘Royal treasures’, pp. 275–6.
77 Palol and Ripoll, Los Godos, plate 215.
78 Ibn Ḥabīb, p. 141; Ibn al-Shabbāṭ, p. 149, likewise supplies several variant descrip-
tions, two of which mention the same jewels.
80 Ibn al-Shabbāṭ, p. 149.
81 Díaz, ‘Visigothic political institutions’, p. 336; M. Kulikowski, Late Roman Spain and
Its Cities, Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004, pp.
272–81, 284–6.
82 St Ildefonsus, ‘On the lives of famous men’, in Lives of the Visigothic Fathers, ed. and
tr. A.T. Fear, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997, pp. 107–8.
83 Collins, Visigothic Spain, pp. 88–9.
84 The confusion and intrigue surrounding the succession to Wamba is only one example:
CAIII, § 2.
85 G.C. Miles, The Coinage of the Visigoths of Spain: Leovigild to Achila II, New York:
American Numismatic Society, 1952, pp. 30 (Iudila), 37–8 (Suniefred), 40–2 (Akhila);
Collins, Visigothic Spain, pp. 71–2.
86 This was enshrined at the Fourth Council, in 633; P. Grierson, ‘Election and inherit-
ance in early Germanic kingship’, Cambridge Historical Journal 7 (1941), p. 14.
88 Grierson, ‘Election’, p. 14.
89 Díaz, ‘Visigothic political institutions’, p. 331; R. de Abadal y Vinyals, Del Reino de
Tolosa al Reino de Toledo, Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1960, p. 55.
90 Procopius, IV.6–8, quoted above. A. Cameron, Procopius and the Sixth Century,
London: Duckworth, 1985, p. 141, notes this as typical of the tangents that the writer’s
personal enthusiasms sometimes led his History into.
91 D. Claude, ‘Beiträge zur Geschichte der frühmittelalterlichen Königsschätze’, Early
Medieval Studies 7: Antikvariskt arkiv 54 (1973), pp. 8–9.
92 All quotations from Isidore, § 16.
93 Orosius, VII.xxxix.3–10.
94 A. Cameron and J. Herrin (eds), Constantinople in the early eighth century: the
Parastaseis Syntomoi Chronikai, Leiden: Brill, 1984, pp. 89–91.
96 K.B. Wolf (tr.), Conquerors and Chroniclers of Early Medieval Spain, Liverpool:
Liverpool University Press, 1999, p. 1.
97 P. Linehan, History and the Historians of Medieval Spain, Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1993, p. 485.
98 Ibid., p. 485.
99 On one of the occasions when he mentions the Table, de Rada’s contemporary (albeit
one writing a long way from Spain) Ibn al-Athīr mentions a figure of 360 for its legs
(iv, p. 564); al-Maqqarī, i, p. 288, gives 365.
192 Notes
100 B.F. Reilly, The Medieval Spains, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993,
pp. 126–8.
101 Robert of Ketton’s twelfth-century effort was a ‘paraphrase’ rather than a translation,
but it was widely used until the seventeenth century; N. Daniel, The Arabs and
Medieval Europe, London: Longman, 1975, p. 241. Mark of Toledo produced a
more accurate but less influential one in the thirteenth century; D. Raizman, ‘A
rediscovered illuminated manuscript of St. Ildefonsus’s De Virginitate Beatae Mariae
in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid’, Gesta 16 (1987), p. 46.
102 They were considered an aid to polemic, as in the case of Ramon Marti’s Fourfold
Condemnation, which drew upon al-Bukhārī and Ibn Isḥāq, among others; Daniel,
Arabs and Medieval Europe, p. 242.
103 J.N. Hillgarth, ‘Spanish historiography and Iberian reality’, History and Theory 24
(1985), p. 27.
104 Others echo this: Ibn ʿIdhārī, ii, p. 18; Ibn al-Shabbāṭ, p. 149 (for the most part).
105 Ibn Ḥabīb, p. 141; this is shared by al-Maqqarī, i, pp. 161, 288. Others, such as Ibn
al-Athīr, combine all the jewels. See al-Masʿūdī, §§ 887–8, for the different types of
emeralds known to medieval Islam.
106 See pp. 89–90, above. There is, however, no evidence I am aware of that Procopius’
work was known in Iberia, before or after the conquest, suggesting a commonly-heard
rumour rather than a direct link.
107 For example, FM, p. 207.
109 Ibn ʿIdhārī, ii, p. 17. A slightly different version, from another authority, appears in FM,
p. 208, and (unattributed, but with virtually identical wording) al-Maqqarī, i, pp. 288–9;
again, the major elements in the decoration of the artefact are gold, pearls, and sapphires.
FM uses only jawhar, in contrast to the effusive gem-vocabulary in several other
accounts; perhaps the two stories became conflated over time. See also above, p. 33.
110 There is surely an element of this in Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, tr. H.St.J. Thack-
eray, R. Marcus, and L.H. Feldman, London: Heinemann, 1957–65, XI.331–39:
Alexander proves what a good egg he is (on a spurious visit to Jerusalem) by being
suitably deferential to the priests and sacrificing in the Temple. (He is also shown the
Book of Daniel, as a predictor of how he will defeat the Persians.)
111 N.N.N. Khoury, ‘The Dome of the Rock, the Kaʿba, and Ghumdan: Arab myths and
Umayyad monuments’, Muqarnas 10 (1993), p. 62.
112 K. ʿAthamina, ‘The tribal kings in pre-Islamic Arabia’, AQ 19 (1998), pp. 20–3, 27–8.
113 A. Fernández-Puertas, Mezquita de Córdoba: su studio arqueológico en el siglo XX,
Granada: Universidad de Granada, 2009, pp. 381–2.
114 J.M. Safran, ‘The command of the faithful in al-Andalus: a study in the articulation of
caliphal legitimacy’, IJMES 30 (1998), p. 189.
115 A.G. Chejne, ‘Islamization and Arabization in al-Andalus: a general view’, in
S. Vryonis Jr (ed.), Islam and Cultural Change in the Middle Ages, Wiesbaden:
Harrassowitz, 1975, p. 72.
116 R. Hillenbrand, ‘ “The ornament of the world”: medieval Cordoba as a cultural
centre’, in S.K. Jayyusi (ed.), The Legacy of Muslim Spain, Leiden: Brill, 1992, p. 117.
117 E. Manzano Moreno, ‘Oriental “topoi” in Andalusian historical sources’, Arabica 39
(1992), pp. 49–56 (a topos of Arabian history applied to the massacre at Toledo), 58.
118 D.J. Wasserstein, ‘The library of al-Ḥakam II al-Mustanṣir and the culture of Islamic
Spain’, Manuscripts of the Middle East 5 (1990/1991), p. 102.
119 Al-Maqqarī, i, p. 161, notes a number of famous visitors to Toledo, including
Solomon, Jesus, and Alexander; al-Dīnawarī, i, pp. 23–4, talks of Solomon raiding
al-Andalus, Ifrīqiya and the land of the Franks, as well as travelling all over the east
(Persia, Central Asia) and south (Yemen).
120 Ibn al-Faqīh, pp. 73 (a column in Alexandria), 110 (Tadmur/Palmyra, in Syria); FM,
p. 40 (a masjid in Alexandria); al-Dīnawarī, i, p. 24 (three ḥuṣūn in Yemen);
Notes 193
al-Masʿūdī, § 1403 (Solomon built a masjid in Iṣṭakhr/Persepolis, later made into a
temple of idols, aṣnām).
121 Q. 6:84, 34:12, 27:16, 27:30.
122 J. Walker and P. Fenton, ‘Sulaymān b. Dāwūd’, EI 2 IX, pp. 822–3. On the Jewish
tradition of Solomon’s ring and his power over demons, D.C. Duling, ‘Solomon,
exorcism and the Son of David’, Harvard Theological Review 68 (1975), especially
p. 248.
124 The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, tr. R.F. Burton, London: H.S.
Nichols, 1897, v, p. 1.
125 Rubiera Mata, ‘La mesa’, p. 28.
126 Nuʿaym b. Ḥammād al-Khuzāʾī (d. 843), Kitāb al-fitan, ed. S. Zakkar, Mecca:
al-Maktabah al-Tijārīyah, 1991, pp. 246 and 249 (Jerusalem’s treasures taken from
Rome, including the Table), 252 (treasures found in Hind; Table unmentioned).
127 D. Cook, Studies in Muslim Apocalyptic, Princeton, NJ: The Darwin Press, 2002,
pp. 54–8. This of course suggests that at least one strand of Islamic tradition about
the Table assumed it to have remained in Roman hands all along.
128 H.T. Norris, ‘Fables and legends in pre-Islamic and early Islamic times’, in A.F.L.
Beeston (ed.), Arabic Literature to the End of the Umayyad Period, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp. 384–5.
129 R. Tottoli, Biblical Prophets in the Qurʾān and Muslim Literature, Richmond:
Curzon, 2002, pp. 89–90.
130 A. Elad, Medieval Jerusalem and Islamic Worship: holy places, ceremonies,
pilgrimage, Leiden: Brill, 1995, p. 36.
131 A. Marsham, Rituals of Islamic Monarchy: accession and succession in the first
Muslim empire, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009, p. 135.
132 Ibid., pp. 122–4.
133 G.R.D. King, ‘Settlement patterns in Islamic Jordan: the Umayyads and their use of
the land’, Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan 4, Amman: Department
of Antiquities, 1992, pp. 369–71.
134 P.P. Soucek, ‘Solomon’s throne/Solomon’s bath: model or metaphor?’, Ars Orien-
talis 22 (1993), pp. 109, 122–3. Al-Masʿūdī, § 106, associates Solomon’s Temple
with his dominion over the world.
135 G. Fowden, Quṣayr ʿAmra: art and the Umayyad elite in late antique Syria, Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 2004, pp. 116, 127.
136 Ibid., pp. 197–214; E. Drayson, ‘Ways of seeing: the first medieval Islamic and
Christian depictions of Roderick, last Visigothic King of Spain’, al-Masāq 18 (2006),
pp. 115–26.
137 Ibn Saʿd, Ṭabaqāt al-kubrā, Beirut: Dār Sādir, 1957–68, v, p. 395.
138 Tottoli, Biblical Prophets, p. 139.
139 Ibn Hishām, Kitāb al-tījān, Hyderabad: Matbaʿat Majlis Dāʾirat al-Maʿārif
al-ʿUthmānīyah, 1347/1928–9, p. 74; Shaddād is also associated with Alexandria,
for example, al-Masʿūdī, § 827.
140 Ibn Hishām, Kitāb al-tījān, pp. 91 (throne), 98 (at the river of sand); al-Masʿūdī,
§ 124, cites Wahb as the source for a mystical explanation of the Dhū al-Qarnayn
epithet: it came from a dream he had about nearing the sun in his conquests; he also
says that Alexander lived ‘after the Messiah’.
142 R.G. Khoury, Les légendes prophétiques dans l’Islam: depuis le Ier jusquʾau IIIe
siècle de l’Hégire, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1978, p. 147. Of the Arabic text, pp.
127–80 are about Solomon; the material on the Temple comes from Wahb. ʿUmāra’s
work may be a redaction of his father’s (d. 851); Tottoli, Biblical Prophets, p. 144.
143 H. Schwarzbaum, Biblical and Extra-Biblical Legends in Islamic Folk-Literature,
Walldorf-Hessen: Verlag für Orientkunde Dr. H. Vorndran, 1982, p. 61.
194 Notes
144 R.G. Khoury, ‘Wahb b. Munabbih’, EI 2 XI, Leiden: Brill, 2002, pp. 34–5.
145 FM, pp. 12 (Abraham in Egypt), 37 (‘Al-Iskandar huwa Dhū al-Qarnayn’), 39
(‘Dhū al-Qarnayn was a king and a peaceful man’), and two others.
146 Solomon’s Temple was often described in terms of its wealthy decoration,
for example, al-Dīnawarī, i, p. 21; Khoury, Les légendes prophétiques, pp. 168 (more
emeralds, sapphires, and copper), 171–2.
147 AM, p. 9.
148 1001 Nights, pp. 224–5.
149 Gregory of Tours, History, ii, p. 194.
150 Gregory of Tours, History, ii, editor’s n., p. 543.
151 In other contexts, too: al-Masʿūdī, § 838, notes tales (in al-Walīd’s time) of treasure
under Alexandria’s lighthouse.
152 FM, p. 208; there is a more complex tale on p. 209: the people of Sardinia conceal
their wealth inside a hollow ceiling within their church, which the Muslims stumble
upon when one of their number shoots at a bird sitting in the rafters, breaking the fake
ceiling and bringing all the wealth down on their heads.
154 H.T. Norris, The Berbers in Arabic Literature, London: Longman, 1982, p. 7.
155 A. Noth and L.I. Conrad, The early Arabic historical tradition: a source-critical
study, Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1994 (2nd edn), pp. 48–50.
156 For example, al-Balādhurī, p. 230, in which Ṭāriq is rebuked for leading a raid under
his own steam (see above, p. 39); this is represented figuratively in the Andalusī
conquest narratives by the conditions extracted by Witiza’s sons for their defection
(see above, pp. 45–6, and below, pp. 114–15).
157 H. Kennedy, The Armies of the Caliphs: military and society in the early Islamic state,
159 FM, p. 207.
160 P. Crone, ‘Mawālī and the Prophet’s family: an early Shīʿite view’, in M. Bernards
and J. Nawas (eds), Patronate and patronage in early and classical Islam, Leiden:
Brill, 2005, pp. 182–3.
161 M.J. Rubiera, ‘Estructura de “Cantar de Gesta” en uno de los relatos de la conquista
de al-Andalus’, Revista del Instituto Egipcio de Estudios Islámicos en Madrid 23
(1985–6), p. 66.
162 Ibn al-Athīr, iv, p. 566. A much more sympathetic portrait of Mūsā appears in the
problematic Kitāb al-imāma wa-al-siyāsa, in J. Ribera (ed.), Historia de la conquista
de España, Madrid: Tipografía de la ‘Revista de Archivos’, 1926, pp. 144–53. (For
more on this text, see above, chapter two, n. 131.)
6 Excusing and explaining conquest: traitors and collaborators

in Muslim and Christian sources
1 C.F. Robinson, ‘The conquest of Khūzistān: a historiographical reassessment’, Bulletin
of the School of Oriental and African Studies 67 (2004), pp. 30–3.
study, Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1994 (2nd edn), p. 167.
and Islam, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009, pp. 66–8; see
also above, Introduction and pp. 25–8.
4 E. Manzano Moreno, ‘El “medio cordobés” y la elaboración cronística en al Andalus
bajo la dinastía de los omeyas’, in G.I. García (ed.), Historia social, pensamiento
historiográfico y edad media, Madrid: Ediciones del Orto, 1997, pp. 83–4.
Notes 195
5 See above, p. 23.
6 M. Fierro, ‘La falsificación de la historia: al-Yasaʿ b. Ḥazm y su Kitāb al-Mugrib’, AQ
16 (1995), pp. 35–7.
7 R. Hoyland, ‘History, fiction and authorship in the first centuries of Islam’, in J. Bray
(ed.), Writing and Representation in Medieval Islam, London: Routledge, 2006, pp.
17–18.
8 J. Fentress and C. Wickham, Social Memory, Oxford: Blackwell, 1992, pp. 73, 87–8.
9 A. Munslow, ‘Authority and reality in the representation of the past’, Rethinking
History 1 (1997), pp. 82–4; G.M. Spiegel, The Past as Text: the theory and practice of
medieval historiography, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997, pp.
20–1; H. White, The Content of the Form: narrative discourse and historical represen-
tation, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987, pp. 21–4.
10 B. Gruendler, ‘Verse and taxes: the function of poetry in selected literary akhbār of the
third/ninth century’, in P.F. Kennedy (ed.), On Fiction and Adab in Medieval Arabic
Literature, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2005, p. 89.
11 J.S. Meisami, ‘Masʿūdī and the reign of al-Amīn: narrative and meaning in medieval
Muslim historiography’, in Kennedy, On Fiction and Adab, pp. 149–51.
12 Manzano Moreno, ‘El “medio cordobés” ’, pp. 63–4.
13 S.C. Judd, ‘Narrative and character development: Al-Ṭabarī and al-Balādhurī on late
Umayyad history’, in S. Günther (ed.), Ideas, Images, and Methods of Portrayal:
insights into classical Arabic literature and Islam, Leiden: Brill, 2005, pp. 209–10
(etc.); Hoyland, ‘History, fiction’, pp. 30–2; E. Manzano Moreno, ‘Oriental “topoi” in
Andalusian historical sources’, Arabica 39 (1992), p. 42.
14 Noth and Conrad, Arabic Historical Tradition, pp. 109–10.
15 Al-Ṭabarī, i.3, p. 1321. This ‘onomatomania’ is discussed above, p. 26.
16 R. Morse, Truth and Convention in the Middle Ages: rhetoric, representation, and
reality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 3–8.
17 L.I. Conrad, ‘The conquest of Arwād: a source-critical study in the historiography
of the early medieval Near East’, in A. Cameron and L.I. Conrad (eds), The Byzantine
and Early Islamic Near East, i: problems in the literary source material (Princeton, NJ:
Darwin Press, 1992), p. 394.
18 Noth and Conrad, Arabic Historical Tradition, p. 167.
20 Noth and Conrad, Arabic Historical Tradition, pp. 19–20, 167–8.
21 A Roman-founded suburb to the south-east of the city; A. Christys, ‘The meaning of
topography in Umayyad Córdoba’, in C. Goodson, A. Lester, and C. Symes (eds),
Cities, Texts, and Social Networks, 400–1500: experiences and perceptions of medi-
eval urban space, Farnham: Ashgate, 2010, p. 109.
22 Ibn al-Shabbāṭ, pp. 143–4.
23 FA, pp. 20–1.
24 AM, pp. 10–4; Ibn ʿIdhārī, ii, pp. 9–10.
25 AM, p. 10; Ibn ʿIdhārī, ii, p. 10. ‘King’ is perhaps an anachronistic attempt to boost the
importance of Cordoba in the invasion; the figure of 400 is a topos.
26 Al-Balādhurī, p. 141.
27 See also the discussion in F. Astren, ‘Re-reading the Arabic sources: Jewish history and
the Muslim conquests’, JSAI 36 (2009), p. 98.
28 For example, John of Biclaro: Biclaro, p. 81 (tr. § 17): ‘King Leovigild seized Sidonia,
the strongest of cities, by night through the treachery of a certain Framidaneus.’ Isidore,
p. 94, portrays Leovigild negatively but does not record this, although he does say that
Narbonne was handed over to Theodoric to court favour with the Goths.
29 Herodotus, The Histories, tr. A. de Selincourt, London: Penguin, 1996 (rev. edn), p. 441.
30 Herodotus, Histories, pp. 442–3.
31 Treachery also, of course, looms large in the fall of Troy, and some Hellenistic retell-
ings – including that of the late first-century pseudo-Dictys, in whose account Aeneas
196 Notes
betrayed Troy to its doom – made this explicit; L.I. Conrad, ‘The mawālī and early
Arabic historiography’, in M. Bernards and J. Nawas (eds), Patronate and Patronage
in Early and Classical Islam, Leiden: Brill, 2005, pp. 383–5, 394.
32 R.G. Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It: a survey and evaluation of Christian, Jewish
and Zoroastrian writings on early Islam, Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1997, p. 181.
33 Quoted in ibid., pp. 154–5.
35 Sebeos, i, p. 136.
36 Fredegar, pp. 93–4.
38 For example, Fredegar, pp. 90–1, skews his account of events surrounding the Battle
of Poitiers with a false accusation of treachery on the part of Eudo of Aquitaine, whose
descendants were resisting Charles Martel’s attempts to annexe them at the time of
writing; R. Collins, ‘Deception and misrepresentation in early eighth-century Frankish
historiography: two case studies’, in J. Jarnut, U. Nonn, and M. Richter (eds), Karl
Martell in Seiner Zeit, Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1994, pp. 236–40. Cf. chapter six, n.
102, below.
39 Chr754, § 53. Zuqnīn, p. 150, although mostly inclined to blame the conquests on
communal sin and resultant divine wrath, makes a similar charge about the Byzantine
Emperor Theodosius III. Faced with a Muslim campaign against Constantinople in
716/17, ‘his heart quaked and his hands shook. He resigned the empire, put down the
crown and shaved his head.’
40 Chr754, § 54.
41 Including seventh-century Islam; al-Ṭabarī, i.5, pp. 2653–5 (al-Zīnabī and the conquest
of al-Rayy).
Liverpool: Cairns, 1981–3, ii, p. 169. This may be a later interpolation; ibid., p. 214, n.
32.
43 Herodotus, pp. 213–16.
44 AM, p. 5; Ibn al-Athīr, iv, p. 561; FA, p. 15; Ibn ʿIdhārī (citing ʿArīb), ii, pp. 4–5.
45 FM, p. 205; al-Balādhurī, p. 230. Ibn ʿIdhārī, ii, pp. 6–7, presents three variant akhbār,
the first of which is from al-Rāzī. The second is attributed to one ʿĪsā b. Muḥammad b.
Abī al-Muhājir, and unlike any other I have seen: Julian sails to Tangiers to petition
Ṭāriq in person, delivering a breathless speech on the seashore about his father’s death
and Roderic’s injustice; I suspect a conflation with the tale of Witiza’s sons.
46 FA, p. 15.
47 M.A. Makkī, ‘The political history of al-Andalus (92/711–897/1492)’, in S.K. Jayyusi
(ed.), The Legacy of Muslim Spain, Leiden: Brill, 1992, p. 7 (‘There is no doubt that
Julian [. . .] was a historical personage’); but J. Vallvé, ‘Nuevas ideas sobre la conquista
árabe de España. Toponimia y onomástica’, AQ 10 (1989), p. 138, suggests that the
name Julian come from the generic title comes julianus, derived from Julia Transducta,
the Roman name for Tarifa.
48 Ibn al-Faraḍī, §§ 188, 268, 564 (the last non-Muslim name in their lineage is Julian’s
son). There was also, at least in the eleventh century, a qaṣr Ilyān near Tangiers;
al-Bakrī, § 1317.
49 Herodotus, pp. 3–5, locates all conflict between the Greeks and the Persians in a long
series – beginning, of course, with Helen of Troy – of stolen women. A variant on this
appears in Thucydides, pp. 110–1: a Spartan offers to betray Greece to Xerxes in return
for marriage with Xerxes’ daughter. Gregory of Tours, The History of the Franks, tr.
O.M. Dalton, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927, ii, p. 92, gives an example of what might
even be a conscious manipulation of the meme: Clotild, (Catholic) wife of the (Arian)
Visigothic king Amalaric, sends her brother Childebert, the Frankish king, a blood-
stained handkerchief as a signal of her mistreatment at the former’s hands, which
Notes 197
Childebert promptly uses as an excuse for a raid in Visigothic territory; there is no
happy ending for Clotild, however, since she dies en route for home in 531. We shall
see another example in the next chapter.
50 Vallvé, ‘Nuevas ideas’, p. 121.
51 J.F. O’Callaghan, A History of Medieval Spain, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1975, p. 52.
52 FM, p. 205; Ibn al-Qūṭīya, p. 7.
53 AM, p. 4; Ibn ʿIdhārī, ii, p. 4.
54 FA, p. 13.
55 FM, p. 205, has the full complement (the other sources have only the first, and some-
times the second): ṣāḥib of Ceuta and/or Algeciras, ruler of the Straits (al-majāz)
between North Africa and Spain, and a former vassal of Roderic.
57 Ibn Ḥabīb, pp. 136–7; elsewhere, Mūsā reads the stars, p. 137, and delivers his own
prophecy, p. 146.
58 Although Chr754 § 57, does contain a line that some scholars have taken as a reference
to Julian or a similar figure: ‘Musa, on the advice of Urban – that most noble man
(nobilissimi viri) of the African region, reared under the doctrine of the Catholic faith,
who had accompanied him throughout Spain – opted to pay the fine.’
59 A conclusion also reached in E. Manzano Moreno, ‘Los fuentes árabes sobre la
conquista de al-Andalus: una nueva interpretación’, Hispania 59/2 (1999), p. 400.
60 Ibn al-Qūṭīya, p. 7.
62 Ibn ʿIdhārī, ii, p. 6: ‘[Ṭāriq] resolved upon raiding al-Andalus, after he gained his
mawlā Ibn Nuṣayr’s permission (idhn) for that.’
63 Although the khabar with the daughter in it is relayed last; Ibn ʿIdhārī, ii, pp. 6–7.
64 DRH, p. 144.
65 Chr1344, pp. 97–102, 106–19.
66 FM, p. 205.
67 FM, p. 207, during an ‘It was said’ alternative account of the Table of Solomon’s
discovery: Ṭāriq hears that the Table is in a citadel near Toledo, held by Roderic’s
nephew; Ṭāriq is given the Table in return for an amān granted to the nephew and his
people. Cf. al-Balādhurī, p. 230; AM, pp. 5 (Julian concludes an ʿahd for himself and
his followers with the Muslims) and 16 (Julian is named among the ʿulūj ‘to whom
[Mūsā] had granted an amān, and those who requested one’); Ibn al-Athīr, iv, p. 561:
Julian writes to Mūsā offering obedience (bi-al-ṭāʿa), and Mūsā extracts oaths of
loyalty to himself (akhadha alayhi al-ʿuhūd); and Ibn ʿIdhārī, ii, p. 10: every ‘king’ of
al-Andalus negotiated (ʿaqada) an amān for himself or fled to Galicia, except the ‘king’
of Cordoba captured by Mughīth.
69 FM, p. 206, distinguishes between ‘Julian and those with him from among the
merchants of Algeciras’, but it is easy to see how the two could be conflated.
70 Other exceptions: FA, p. 22 (an unclear report implying Julian fought in the battle that
killed Roderic); AM, p. 10 (Julian travels to al-Andalus, points Ṭāriq in the direction of
Toledo, then goes home, leaving some of his followers as guides).
71 P. Riché, Education et culture dans l’occident barbare. VIe-VIIIe siècles, Paris:
Éditions du Seuil, 1962 (2nd edn), p. 302.
72 Chr1344, pp. 97–101.
73 AM, p. 5.
74 FA, p. 13.
77 DRH, p. 144 (my translation of the Spanish translation).
198 Notes
79 In some versions Roderic has taken steps to prevent word from reaching Julian,
forcing her to be cunning: FA, p. 14 (shut away from her father, she gets the message
out symbolically, by sending her father a bad egg among a selection of gifts); Ibn
ʿIdhārī, ii, p. 7 (she has to ‘smuggle’ out a letter).
80 DRH, p. 144; Ibn ʿIdhārī, ii, pp. 14–5 (taking his daughter away with him); in Ibn
al-Qūṭīya’s version, p. 7, Julian’s wife has already died when the story begins.
82 Thucydides, pp. 303–9 (Megara), 326–9 (Amphipolis), 344–5 (Mende), 565–6
(Athens itself), among other examples. The exploits of the notorious Alcibiades – who
at various times held influential positions among the Athenians (both democratic and
oligarchic), the Spartans, and the Persians – form into a sort of larger-than-life proto-
type of a category-three traitor.
83 Famously, Thucydides wrote in his preamble that he created the speeches in his work
according to ‘what, in my opinion, was called for by each situation’. An example of
this technique in action is the Mytilene Debate, pp. 212–23.
84 Unlike Herodotus, however, Thucydides tends not to provide alternative versions.
85 Something that Julian’s function in the texts hints at, albeit schematically; H. Kennedy,
Muslim Spain and Portugal: a political history of al-Andalus, London: Longman, 1996,
p. 10. I have seen no textual support for the contention (Makkī, ‘Political history’, p. 7)
that Julian was in league with other disaffected factions in Spain (on whom see below).
86 As do Ibn Ḥabīb and Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam.
87 Chr754, § 54.
88 Chr754, § 52; see also above, p. 19.
89 Chr754, § 54.
90 Chr754, § 55.
91 An argument made on the basis of CAIII, § 7: ‘in our own unrefined times, when the
city of Viseo and the suburbs were being settled on our order (iussum nostrum esset
populatus)’.
92 CAIII, § 8.
93 This had been completely outlawed since the Fourth Council of Toledo, in 633;
J.E. Salisbury, Iberian Popular Religion 600 B.C. to 700 A.D.: Celts, Romans and
Visigoths, New York: E. Mellen Press, 1985, pp. 83–5.
94 CAIII, § 5. The antipathy to Witiza is echoed in later Christian works, for example,
DRH, p. 142. A different sentiment is expressed in Chr754, § 47, which talks of the
‘joy’ (gaudio) of Spain under this king – although this may be a device to make the
conquest seem even worse by contrast.
95 CAIII, § 7.
96 Makkī, ‘Political history’, p. 30.
97 For example, CAIII, §§ 13–4, 25.
98 J.N. Hillgarth, ‘St Julian of Toledo in the middle ages’, Journal of the Warburg and
Courtauld Institutes 21 (1958), p. 12. This was a theme that continued in later medi-
eval Spanish literature, such as DRH, and the political self-projection of monarchs
like Ferdinand and Isabella; J.N. Hillgarth, ‘Spanish historiography and Iberian
reality’, History and Theory 24 (1985), p. 27.
99 Hillgarth, ‘Spanish historiography’, p. 27. This said, Alfonso II did claim to be
Pelayo’s grandson around the same time; P. Linehan, History and the Historians of
Medieval Spain, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993, p. 104.
100 An army with Oppa in it; see following note. CAIII, § 8. Needless to say, Pelayo
looms much less large in the Arabic sources, where he is mentioned at all (for example,
FA, p. 48).
101 CAIII, § 9; this section, a long dialogue in which the collaborator Oppa tempts Pelayo
to give up his resistance, ‘enjoy the partnership of the Chaldeans and take advantage
of many benefits’ – again demonstrating more hardline, later attitudes to conquest-era
compromises and the subsequent modus vivendi – is substantially different in the two
Notes 199
versions of the chronicle, and may be a popular legend inserted into the text; Wolf,
Conquerors, p. 167, n. 35. Contemporary with the writing of CAIII, there were
prophecies circulating in Granada of the Gothic kingdom’s return; L.A. García
Moreno, ‘Spanish Gothic consciousness among the Mozarabs in al-Andalus
(VIII–Xth centuries)’, in A. Ferreiro (ed.), The Visigoths: studies in culture and
society, Leiden: Brill, 1999, pp. 316–17.
102 CAIII, § 8. This may be an adaptation or imperfect memory of an episode discussed in
Chr754, § 79, in which Eudo of Aquitaine allies with Munnuza, a rebel against
Cordoba, by marrying his daughter to him; after his defeat the daughter is shipped off
to the caliph in Damascus as a prize.
103 As discussed in chapter three. For more on Eulogius’ role as both apologist and inciter,
see K.B. Wolf, Christian Martyrs in Muslim Spain, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1988. J. Gil (ed.), Corpus Scriptorum Muzarabicorum, Madrid: Instituto Antonio
de Nebrija, 1973, ii, pp. 475–95, is the text of Eulogius’ Apologeticus Martyrum.
104 Presumably owing to the different spheres in which the sexes lived, the former course
was generally adopted by men, the latter by women. ‘Apostasy’ in this context could
mean simply a child of a marriage between a Muslim and a non-Muslim, legally a
Muslim, proclaiming themselves to be a Christian (or Jew); this was the case for at
least nine of the martyrs. J.A. Coope, The Martyrs of Córdoba: community and family
conflict in an age of mass conversion, Lincoln, NE, and London: University of
Nebraska Press, 1995, pp. 11–13, 23–31.
105 Two such were Isaac and Argimirus; Coope, Martyrs, pp. 19–21.
106 M.C. Díaz y Díaz, ‘La circulation des manuscrits dans la Péninsule Ibérique du VIIIe
au XIe siècle’, in Vie chrétienne et culture dans l’Espagne du VIIe au Xe siècles,
Aldershot: Variorum, 1992, pp. 221, 224–5; R. Collins, ‘Poetry in ninth-century
Spain’, Papers of the Liverpool Latin Seminar 4 (1983), pp. 187–8; Linehan, History
and the Historians, p. 89.
107 A. Cutler, ‘The ninth-century Spanish martyrs’ movement and the origins of western
Christian missions to the Muslims’, Muslim World 55 (1965), pp. 329–33; J. Waltz,
‘The significance of the voluntary martyrs of ninth-century Córdoba’, Muslim World
60 (1970), pp. 232–3.
108 P. Linehan, ‘Past and present: the posthumous history of the Third Council of Toledo’,
Past and Present in Medieval Spain, Aldershot: Variorum, 1992, pp. 4–5.
109 Díaz y Díaz, ‘La circulation’, p. 223; cf. p. 104, on the Ardón monastery charters.
Both Eulogius and Alvarus were certainly writing for the Andalusī Christian
audience, which Alvarus famously complained was losing touch with its Latin roots;
Gil, Corpus, i, pp. 314–15.
110 The subsequent exchange (Ibn al-Qūṭīya, pp. 3–4), clarifying the extent of Ṭāriq’s
authority and its subordination to Mūsā’s, was discussed in chapter two.
113 This more positive strand is also seen in CMR, pp. 275–8, whose author reserves his
dislike for Egica (r. 687–c. 703).
115 AM, p. 5 (noting the general disorder this caused); Ibn al-Athīr, iv, p. 561 (the people
of al-Andalus agreed upon, or came to terms over [tarāḍaw bi], Roderic).
116 Manzano Moreno, ‘Los fuentes árabes’, pp. 412–13; L. Molina, ‘Un relato de la
conquista de al-Andalus’, AQ 19 (1998), pp. 61–2, finds evidence that, at least for
some material, Ibn al-Athīr and DRH got al-Rāzī via Ibn Ḥayyān’s Muqtabis.
117 The use of qawm (clan or military retinue) here rather than nās (army) – although
perhaps unintentional – may indicate the author’s inference that the Visigoth nobles
underestimated the Muslim force, assuming a lack of discipline or purpose.
118 AM, pp. 7–8; Witiza’s sons duly desert at a critical moment, pp. 8–9. FA, pp. 18–19,
has a shorter version, and Ibn al-Athīr, iv, p. 562, a more succinct expression of the
200 Notes
nobles’ attitude: ‘If the Muslims fill their hands with plunder, they will return to their
lands, and the kingdom [will] remain ours.’
119 Astren, ‘Re-reading’, pp. 99–106.
120 Linehan, History and the Historians, pp. 75–6.
121 Zuqnīn, p. 161, on Maslama’s conquest of Neocaesarea in 728/9:
He took all its citizens into captivity and sold them into slavery like cattle, except
for the Jews who surrendered the city. For they went out secretly to Maslama, made
an agreement with him, and treacherously directed him to the entrance of the city.
These he took into captivity and did not sell them.
The translator, p. 161 n. 4, suggests this might be a confused transposition of

al-Balādhurī’s report about Caesarea (see above, pp. 105–6), but in any case it presum-
ably resonated with contemporary Christian attitudes, arising from perennial fears of
Judaising given extra weight by the fact that the Islamic conquests had placed Jews
and Christian at the same status; K.B. Wolf, ‘Christian views of Islam in early medi-
eval Spain’, in J.V. Tolan (ed.), Medieval Christian Perceptions of Islam, London and
New York: Routledge, 1996, p. 91.
122 S.M. Imamuddin, Muslim Spain 711–1492: a sociological study, Leiden: Brill, 1981,
p. 14, imagines the Jews of Visigothic Spain waiting for the Muslims to come and
rescue them.
123 Astren, ‘Re-reading’, pp. 104–10; S. Katz, The Jews in the Visigothic and Frankish
Kingdoms of Spain and Gaul, Cambridge, MA: The Mediaeval Academy of America,
1937, pp. 115–17.
124 AM, p. 12; the same thing is said to have happened at Merida and Seville, p. 16.
128 DRH, pp. 154 (Cordoba) and 155 (Toledo); Chr1344, pp. 141–2 (Toledo).
129 Katz, The Jews, p. 117.
130 In brief, this was due, it is theorized, to a combination of Christian triumphalism on
the back of the Crusades, ethnic segregation, economic envy, and fears for communal
purity; see R.I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: power and deviance
in Western Europe, 950–1250, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987, pp. 4–5, 66, 99, 106–8;
M.R. Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross: the Jews in the middle ages, Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1994, pp. 77–82.
131 Astren, ‘Re-reading’, pp. 110–12.
7 On the other side of the world: comparing narratives

of contemporary Islamic conquests in the east
Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1996, pp. 21–2, 25.
2 C. Melville, ‘Persian local histories: views from the wings’, Iranian Studies 33 (2000),
pp. 10–11.
3 R.S. Humphreys, Islamic History: a framework for inquiry, London and New York:
I.B. Tauris, 1991 (rev. ed.), pp. 131–2.
4 This was discussed above, in chapter two, and will receive further attention below.
study, Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1994 (2nd edn.), pp. 77–81.
6 A.J. Silverstein, Postal Systems in the Pre-Modern Islamic World, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 59.
7 Ibid., pp. 61, 63–4.
8 Ibid., p. 193.
Notes 201
9 A. Wink, Al-Hind: the making of the Indo-Islamic world, Leiden: Brill, 1991, i, p. 17.
10 H.A.R. Gibb, The Arab Conquests in Central Asia, London: The Royal Asiatic society,
1923, p. 29.
11 P.L. Heck, The Construction of Knowledge in Islamic Civilization: Qudāma b. Jaʿfar
and his Kitāb al-kharāj wa-ṣināʿat al-kitāba, Leiden: Brill, 2002, pp. 100, 117–19.
14 E.L. Daniel, ‘Al-Yaʿqūbī and Shīʿism reconsidered’, in J.E. Montgomery (ed.),
ʿAbbāsid Studies: occasional papers of the School of ʿAbbāsid Studies, Cambridge,
6–10 July 2002, Leuven: Uitgeverij Peeters, 2004, pp. 210–15 (on the modern debate),
221–7 (on the lack of in-text evidence).
15 M.G.S. Hodgson, ‘Two pre-modern Muslim historians: pitfalls and opportunities in
presenting them to moderns’, in J. Nef (ed.), Towards World Community, The Hague:
W. Junk, 1968, pp. 55–6.
16 C.F. Robinson, Islamic Historiography, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003, p. 28.
17 He much prefers the challenging and creative al-Jāḥiẓ, he says, digressions and all;
al-Masʿūdī, § 3146.
18 In al-Balādhurī’s case, usually prefaced only by ‘they said’, if by anything.
20 Ibn Ḥajar, vii, § 612.
21 Al-Balādhurī, p. 421, on the cities of Khwārazm; al-Ṭabarī, ii.2, pp. 1236–7, also about
Khwārazm.
22 Al-Balādhurī, p. 420 (regarding Qutayba’s entry to Bukhārā, which contradicts other
versions; cf. below, pp. 138–9), p. 422 (twice, one of which is a simple list of conquered
cities), p. 425.
23 For example, al-Ṭabarī, ii.2, p. 1134.
24 Al-Balādhurī, p. 439 (on the burning of Dāhir’s wife, on which see below, p. 137).
25 Two other authorities are mentioned, both in connection with events postdating this
conquest.
26 He also wrote a local history, al-Bāhir, about the Zanjīs of Mosul, illustrating that these
categories are not exclusive.
27 See above, chapter two, n. 9.
28 Cf. Ibn al-Athīr, iv, p. 533 and al-Ṭabarī, ii.2, p. 1199, for example; this is discussed
further below.
29 C.E. Bosworth, The Later Ghaznavids: splendour and decay. The dynasty in Afghani-
stan and Northern India, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1977, p. 111.
30 M.A. Shaban, ‘Ibn Aʿtham al-Kūfī’, EI 2 III, p. 723; L.I. Conrad, ‘Ibn Aʿtham al-Kūfī’,
in J.S. Meisami and P. Starkey (eds), Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature, London:
Routledge, 1998, i, p. 314.
31 Z.V. Togan, ‘Ibn Aʿtham al-Kufi’, Islamic Culture 44/i (1970), p. 250. G. Schoeler,
The Oral and the Written in Early Islam, tr. U. Vagelpohl, ed. J.E. Montgomery,
London and New York: Routledge, 2006, p. 28, claims that Ibn Aʿtham ‘exclusively’
used Abū Mikhnāf, but I have seen no indication to support this in the Transoxania
section; al-Ṭabarī, who cites Abū Mikhnāf elsewhere, mentions him only once in the
course of his early eighth-century Central Asian narrative, ii.2, p. 1276.
32 Al-Madāʾinī is mentioned at the very end of the narrative (Ibn Aʿtham, vii, p. 278), as
a source for the fate of Wakīʿ, the ringleader of Qutayba’s killers. Aside from poetry,
which is unfailingly attributed to its composer, this is the only occasion in Ibn Aʿtham’s
narrative when a source is named.
33 Al-Qubavi, its translator, notes in his preface that, ‘Since most people do not show a desire
to read an Arabic book, friends of mine requested me to translate this book into Persian’;
al-Narshakhī, pp. 2/4. (See Abbreviations, p. xiii, for a note on referencing of Persian texts.)
34 Al-Narshakhī, pp. 78/80.
202 Notes
35 Al-Narshakhī, pp. 67–8/67–8. The story of the doors came in for some later revision;
al-Narshakhī is cited by a third party for the description of the doors, but the story
appears to be the third party’s explanation of this description.
36 M.S. Khān, ‘Al-Bīrūnī and the political history of India’, Oriens 25 (1976), pp. 90–1.
37 Al-Bīrūnī, Kitāb fī taḥqīq mā li-ʾl-Hind, ed. E. Sachau, Hyderabad: Council of the
Uthmaniyah Encyclopedia, 1958 (rev. ed.), p. 16.
38 J.S. Meisami, ‘The past in service of the present: two views of history in medieval
Persia’, Poetics Today 14 (1993), p. 264.
39 Khān, ‘Al-Bīrūnī’, pp. 87–8.
40 Al-Bīrūnī’s Book on Pharmacy and Materia Medica, ed. H.M. Said, Karachi: Hamdard
Academy, 1973, p. 12.
41 C.E. Bosworth, The Ghaznavids: their empire in Afghanistan and Eastern Iran,
994–1040, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1963, pp. 77–9.
42 A. Anooshahr, ‘ʿUtbi and the Ghaznavids at the foot of the mountain’, Iranian Studies
38 (2005), pp. 287–8.
43 Chachnāma, pp. 7/6–7 (translation modified).
44 F. Gabrieli, ‘Muḥammad ibn Qāsim ath-Thaqafī and the Arab conquest of Sind’, East
and West 15 (1964–5), p. 281.
45 ‘History’ here meaning, of course, reliable and factual; Chachnāma, tr.’s introduction,
p. v.
46 Y. Friedmann, ‘The origins and significance of the Chach Nāma’, in Y. Friedmann,
(ed.), Islam in Asia, Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1984, i, pp. 27–8, is almost certainly too
optimistic about the utility of the Chachnāma as a source when he comments that its
author may simply have been using al-Madāʾinī more fully than al-Balādhurī did,
rather than supplementing the former with his own imagination and local traditions.
47 Wink, Hind, p. 195. Qabacha (d. c. 1228) was a former slave who had carved out his
own territory in the Punjab during the 1220s, during the period of regional dominance
of the short-lived Ghurid dynasty, which had replaced the rule of the Ghaznavids in
India.
48 Chachnāma, pp. 8–9/7–8.
49 J. Renard, Islam and the Heroic Image: themes in literature and the visual arts,
Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1993, pp. 15–16.
50 Meisami, ‘Past in service’, p. 248.
51 P. Hardy, ‘Is the Chach Nama intelligible to the historian as political theory?’, in
H. Khuhro (ed.), Sind Through the Centuries, Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1981,
pp. 112–15.
52 Ansāb, vii, pp. 28, 44 (the statement that the scheme was the suggestion of al-Ḥajjāj and
Qutayba is in the second reference).
53 A. Marsham, Rituals of Islamic Monarchy: accession and succession in the first Muslim
empire, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009, pp. 113–14, 122–4.
54 Ibid., pp. 118–19.
55 Al-Ṭabarī, ii.2, p. 1046; they were to fight a fractious local potentate.
56 Al-Ṭabarī, ii.2, pp. 1052–77, 1085–1125.
57 I. Hasson, ‘Les mawālī dans l’armée musulmane sous les premiers Umayyādes’, JSAI
14 (1991), p. 183.
58 Most ubiquitously ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, who will be discussed below, but also Ṣāliḥ (Ibn
Aʿtham, vii, p. 273; al-Balādhurī, p. 420; Ibn al-Athīr, iv, p. 544; al-Ṭabarī, ii.2, p. 1180
and elsewhere), ʿAmr (Ibn Aʿtham, vii, p. 232), Bashshār, ʿUbayd Allāh (both in
al-Balādhurī, pp. 420, 421) and ʿUmar (Ibn al-Athīr, iv, p. 549). Further brothers, some
previously unmentioned, die in the plot against Qutayba: Ibn Aʿtham, vii, pp. 274–5,
Ibn al-Athīr, v, p. 17.
59 For example, al-Yaʿqūbī, ii, pp. 354–5 (noting Qutayba’s qawm’s loss of faith in him,
immediately prior to his downfall).
Notes 203
61 P. Crone, Slaves on Horses: the evolution of the Islamic polity, Cambridge: Cambridge
62 Ibn Aʿtham, vii, p. 273 (of an Azd sub-group).
63 Al-Balādhurī, p. 422, ‘a qawm from the people of Samarqand’ approach Qutayba; later
on the same page, a qawm from al-Shāsh are among Qutayba’s forces in the siege of
Samarqand.
64 K.Y. Blankinship, The End of the Jihâd State: the reign of Hishām Ibn ʿAbd al-Malik
and the collapse of the Umayyads, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press,
1994, pp. 29–33.
65 Hence, perhaps, al-Rāzī’s emphasis upon the Umayyad mawlā Mughīth as the
conqueror of Cordoba; see above, chapter three.
66 A. Noth, ‘Futūḥ-history and Futūḥ-historiography: the Muslim conquest of Damascus’,
AQ 10 (1989), pp. 457–8.
67 Ibn al-Qūṭīya, pp. 3–4; see also above, p. 45.
68 Noth and Conrad, Arabic Historical Tradition, pp. 48–9.
69 Ibn Aʿtham, vii, p. 221.
72 For example, Al-Balādhurī, p. 420: Bukhārā ʿanwatan, Nasaf ṣulḥan.
74 So, at least, I infer from Ibn al-Qūṭīya’s narrative of his ancestor Sara’s quest to have
her land ownership confirmed by al-Walīd; see above, p. 67.
75 Of these, thirty-four are by al-Ḥajjāj (twenty-one are quoted, thirteen others refererred
to) and nineteen by Muḥammad (five quoted, fourteen refererred to); the balance of
whose words we hear shows quite clearly that the tradition is one of an elder statesman
educating his young protégé, and it is notable that Muḥammad writes more letters of his
own – to rivals and allies in Hind and Sind – as the text goes on.
76 Chachnāma, pp. 82/77. This is also one of the few occasions on which we are given an
idea of how long letters took to go back and forth; al-Ḥajjāj’s reply apparently arrives
‘on the ninth day’ after Muḥammad’s query.
77 An oddly impersonal choice of noun, meaning ‘council’ or ‘court’, which supports the
idea that this forms part of a general body of mirror for princes-type advice, framed as
a historical story.
78 Chachnāma, pp. 114–15/107–8.
83 Al-Ṭabarī, ii.2, pp. 1198–9; in an alternative version, p. 1198, attributed to ‘the Bāhilīs’
(pro-Qutayba, or at any rate of the same lineage as he is), Qutayba manages to work
this out without al-Ḥajjāj’s help.
84 Al-Ṭabarī, ii.2, pp. 1203–4.
85 Ibn Aʿtham, vii, pp. 223 (after a battle with the Turks and the Soghdians), 235 (Balkh),
246–7 (Samarqand), among many examples.
86 Ibn Aʿtham, vii, p. 228. Al-Ṭabarī, ii.2, p. 1222, and Ibn al-Athīr, iv, p. 551, both refer
to this but do not quote it.
87 Chachnāma pp. 73/68; similar reservations are expressed by al-Walīd over going to
Spain.
88 Wink, Hind, p. 201. During the reign of his successor ʿUthmān, a similarly discour-
aging report of India reached the ears of the caliph. Here the reference is different; the
description of the bad soil and brackish water is very reminiscent of negative reports
that were traditionally received by Alexander prior to invading India. H.T. Lambrick,
Sind: a general introduction, Hyderabad: Sindhi Adabi Board, 1964, p. 152.
89 Al-Ṭabarī, i.5, p. 2545.
204 Notes
92 In the treasury at Baykand, Qutayba finds a golden idol and two enormous pearls –
said to have been dropped there from the beaks of a pair of birds. The pearls are sent
to al-Ḥajjāj, and, of course, prompt a letter in response: Ibn Aʿtham, vii, p. 221;
al-Narshakhī, pp. 61–3/61–3, although here the idol is silver rather than gold;
al-Ṭabarī, ii.2, pp. 1185–9 (from al-Madāʾinī), mentions general plunder but not the
treasury, and the same goes for Ibn al-Athīr, iv, p. 528, who is clearly summarising
him here.
93 Chachnāma, pp. 84/79.
94 Al-Balādhurī, p. 440; al-Masʿūdī, § 153; Ibn al-Athīr, iv, p. 539, who links the associ-
ated idol with Job/Ayyūb; Chachnāma, pp. 189–91/182–4.
95 Al-ʿUtbī, Al-Yamīnī, ed. I.D. Thāmirī, Beirut: Dār al-Talīʿah lil-Tibāʿah wa-al-Nashr,
2004, pp. 282–5, describes with great ceremony how Maḥmūd recaptured the
city in the early eleventh century, a victory the author compares favourably with
those of Dhū al-Qarnayn (p. 285), and says caused Sind to ‘tremble with fear’. This
invocation of legendary heroes, in order to claim that present-day Muslim rulers
have surpassed them, is typical of local history; Meisami, ‘Past in service’, pp. 263–4.
Ibn al-Athīr, ix, p. 186, has a much simpler version of the same tale, but retains
the detail about its ruler fleeing before defeat, taking all his wealth with him to
Sarandīb.
96 Al-Bīrūnī, Taḥqīq, p. 88.
97 Al-Iṣṭakhrī, Kitāb al-masālik wa-al-mamālik, ed. M.J. de Goeje, Leiden: Brill, 1870,
p. 174.
98 S.M. Latif, The Early History of Multan, Lahore: Syed Muhammad Minhaj-ud-Din,
1965, p. 4.
99 M. Nazim, The Life and Times of Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna, New Delhi: Munshiram
Manoharlal, 1971, p. 4; examples include al-ʿUtbī, Al-Yamīnī, p. 281, and Ibn al-Athīr,
ix, p. 244.
100 Al-Bīrūnī, Taḥqīq, pp. 429, 431–2. He also says that Muḥammad ‘penetrated deeply
into’ (awghala) al-Hind, a characteristic, or clichéd, phrasing of al-ʿUtbī about
Maḥmūd’s campaigns; ibid., p 16.
101 It is hard to say if the wooden statue was a replacement for a real golden one carried
off by Muḥammad b. al-Qāsim (or later), or whether the original ‘gold’ was simply an
inflated tale representing wealth; there is support for the former option in the fact that
the Chinese traveller Hiuen Tsang, who visited Multān in 631, also said the statue was
of gold. S.Q. Fatimi, ‘The twin ports of Daybul: a study in the early maritime history
of Sind’, in Khuhro, Sind, p. 103.
102 Chachnāma, pp. 81–2/77.
103 Al-Balādhurī, pp. 436–7; neither Ibn al-Athīr, iv, p. 537, nor al-Yaʿqūbī, ii, p. 346,
mentions if al-Ḥajjāj was consulted. The latter also misses out the detail of the daqal,
and has the catapult firing directly at the budd.
104 Ibn Aʿtham, vii, p. 234: akhraja minhu al-khums fa-wajjaha bihi ilā al-Ḥajjāj,
wa-qasama bāqiya dhālika fī al-muslimīn. Minor variations on this appear frequently
(he uses khums nine times during the narrative); on the following page, regarding
Balkh, we get the same phrase, with dhālika al-māl substituted for hu.
105 Al-Ṭabarī, ii.3, pp. 1334–5 and 1350 (Yazīd), 1432 (Maslama).
106 Al-Ṭabarī, ii.2, p. 1188, Ibn Aʿtham, vii, p. 221.
107 Chachnāma, pp. 85–6/81, 95/89.
108 That is, beyond exceptional items like the pearls that are sent to al-Ḥajjāj after the
conquest of Baykand (see above, n. 1056); but the word khums does not appear.
Al-Narshakhī adds that, when the people of Baykand rebelled, Qutayba retook the city
and ‘made their blood and property (māl) free’, pp. 62/61.
109 Chachnāma, pp. 73–4/68–9.
Notes 205
110 Unlike the Chachnāma, he does not record any exchange with the caliph that prompted
this; al-Yaʿqūbī, ii, p. 347. kh-r-j IV is the verb Ibn Aʿtham uses whenever Qutayba
sends the khums to al-Ḥajjāj.
111 Al-Balādhurī, p. 440; Ibn al-Athīr has the same, iv, p. 539; Chachnāma, pp. 191/184,
has 60,000 dirhams instead.
112 For example, Ibn Aʿtham, vii, pp. 234, 241; al-Ṭabarī, ii.2, p. 1250 (‘God killed a
large number of the polytheists’).
113 AM, p. 9 (mushrikūn).
114 Note Chachnāma, pp. 71/65–6, 75/70: gh-z-w is used, not j-h-d. The former, of
course, was the word used overwhelmingly by the Ghaznavids in describing their own
martial exploits, and appears too in others’ accounts, for example, Ibn al-Athīr, ix, p.
169. Ibn Aʿtham prefers qitāl or (especially) ḥarb, although he uses jihād on four
occasions (usually in Qutayba’s rousing speeches).
115 Al-Ṭabarī, ii.2, p. 1246 (at Samarqand).
116 Al-Yaʿqūbī, ii, pp. 345–6.
117 Al-Bīrūnī, Taḥqīq, p. 88.
118 Al-Balādhurī, p. 435. The other ‘mainstream’ texts do not have this part of the story.
119 Chachnāma, p. 70/65.
120 See above, chapter seven, n. 46.
121 Ibn Aʿtham, vii, pp. 235–7; al-Balādhurī, pp. 420–1.
123 Al-Balādhurī, pp. 439–40; Ibn al-Athīr, iv, p. 539; Chachnāma p. 189/182.
124 Chachnāma, pp. 81–2/76–7. There is another example at Brahminabad, ibid.,
pp. 162/155–6.
125 Y. Friedmann, ‘A contribution to the early history of Islam in India’, in M. Rosen-
Ayalon (ed.), Studies in Memory of Gaston Wiet, Jerusalem: Hebrew University of
Jerusalem, 1977, pp. 325–8.
126 M. Zakeri, Sāsānid Soldiers in Early Muslim Society: the origins of ʿAyyārān and
Futuwwa, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1995, pp. 116–17; Hasson, ‘Les mawālī dans
l’armée’, pp. 176–211; see also above, chapter three.
127 Chachnāma, pp. 84–5/80.
128 Chachnāma, p. 93/88.
129 H. Kennedy, The Great Arab Conquests, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007,
pp. 269, 301. See above, p. 127, for al-Balādhurī’s comments on auxiliary qawms.
130 Ibn Aʿtham, vii, pp. 225–30.
133 Much the same may be said of some executions he carried out shortly afterwards,
which involve crucifixion, coating in tar, and burning; Ibn Aʿtham, vii, p. 232.
135 Ibn Aʿtham, vii, p. 233; cf. al-Yaʿqūbī’s duller version, ii, pp. 342–3, in which
Qutayba lets her go after a brief period of captivity, whereupon – or because, the text
is unclear – she delivers a much milder denunciation, minus the comments about his
status or the threats of vengeance, and verbally rather than in writing. She is not the
only non-Muslim in the eastern narratives to get involved in the correspondence
frenzy; the Indian king Dāhir writes to Muḥammad b. al-Qāsim, in a letter that rather
suspiciously begins with a basmala: Chachnāma, pp. 86–7/82.
136 AM, p. 20. Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam’s version of this (FM, pp. 211–12) makes the sticking
point not a crown but ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz’s desire for his fellow Muslims to prostrate them-
selves before him; in an echo of the caliph ʿUthmān’s (r. 644–56) death, he is killed
in the mosque while reading from the Qurʾān.
138 Or sometimes unity; Renard, Heroic Image, p. 23.
139 Al-Balādhurī, p. 439; Ibn al-Athīr, iv, p. 538.
206 Notes
140 Al-Yaʿqūbī, ii, pp. 346–7.
141 Chachnama, pp. 153–4/147.
142 Chachnama, pp. 176/169–710 (at al-Rūr; a longer version than al-Yaʿqūbī’s, with
speeches and an additional prefatory restatement of the fact that Muḥammad married
her).
143 Chachnāma, pp. 146/140 (with modifications).
146 Zakeri, Sāsānid, p. 116.
147 Hardy, ‘Chach Nama’, passim.
148 Chachnāma, pp. 165–8/158–61.
149 Chachnāma, pp. 169–71/163–4.
150 Chachnāma, pp. 168–9/162.
151 Y. Friedmann, ‘The Temple of Multān: a note on early Muslim attitudes to idolatry’,
Israel Oriental Studies 2 (1972), pp. 178–9.
152 Ibn Aʿtham, vii, p. 224, says surprisingly little, seeming to have been more interested
in the saga of Nīzak at this stage of Qutayba’s career. Al-Balādhurī, p. 420, likewise,
has little; he tells a story about Qutayba tricking his way into the city by claiming that
all he wants is to perform two prostrations in prayer (rakʿatayn), something that both
al-Yaʿqūbī (ii, p. 344) and Ibn Aʿtham (vii, pp. 243–4) say happened at Samarqand.
Al-Ṭabarī (ii.2, pp. 1201–4) and, following him, Ibn al-Athīr (iv, pp. 535–6, 542–3)
focus on tribal rivalries and the collecting of heads for rewards; the latter do at least
share with al-Narshakhī the detail that Qutayba carried out several raids. Al-Dīnawarī,
i, p. 330, mentions Bukhārā only to note that its king fled to al-Ṣaghāniyān, leaving
the city to Qutayba.
153 Al-Narshakhī, pp. 73/73.
154 Al-Narshakhī, pp. 73–4/73–4: this section in particular describes the author’s own
Bukhārā as much or more than Qutayba’s, for example noting the name of the quarter
first seen ‘when you enter the city’.
155 Al-Narshakhī, pp. 67/67–8.
156 Melville, ‘Persian local histories’, pp. 12–13.
157 H. Munt, ‘Ibn al-Azraq, Saint Marūthā, and the foundation of Mayyāfāriqīn (Martyr-
opolis)’, in A. Papaconstantinou (ed.), Writing ‘True Stories’: historians and hagiogra-
phers in the late antique and medieval Near East, Turnhout: Brepols, 2010, pp. 165–6.
158 Al-Narshakhī, pp. 66/65–6.
159 Al-Narshakhī, pp. 74/74–5. The language of this passage reads as if it is excerpted
from a legal document; the careful delineation of the limits of the property (‘the first
boundary . . .’, ‘the secondary boundary . . .’, etc.) is reminiscent of the tenth-century
texts in N. Abbott, The Monasteries of the Fayyūm, Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 1937, pp. 6–11.
161 A.C.S. Peacock, Medieval Islamic Historiography and Political Legitimacy:
Balʿamī’s Tārīkhnāma, London: Routledge, 2007, pp. 114–17.
162 Ibn Aʿtham, vii, p. 240. Cf. al-Ṭabarī, i.5, pp. 2564–5 (the people of Sūs say they have
read that only the Antichrist can defeat them; it avails them little).
163 FA, pp. 17–18. Cf. al-Ṭabarī, i.4, pp. 1790–1 (the Prophet is said to have had a growth
on his shoulder).
164 Chachnāma, pp. 72–3/68. Cf. al-Ṭabarī, i.3, pp. 1565–7 (Heraclius is told that books
in Rome have prophesied the Muslims’ victory; a bishop is lynched for telling his
neighbours the same thing).
165 Chachnāma, pp. 82/77–8.
166 Chachnāma, pp. 91/85–6.
168 Al-Dīnawarī, i, p. 330.
Notes 207
169 Al-Ṭabarī, ii.2, pp. 1274–5. His source for this seems to be Ansāb, vii, p. 28, as noted
above, but he inserts Muḥammad b. al-Qāsim’s name among the conspirators. Ibn
al-Athīr, v, p. 12, says that this plotting ‘was the reason for [Qutayba’s] killing’.
170 When Mūsā’s son ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz was killed (see above, pp. 136–7), we are told that
his murderer carried the young man’s head to Sulaymān as proof of the deed (al-Ṭabarī,
ii.3, p. 1306). This is an interesting echo of the eastern narratives, in which severed
heads – never seen in the Andalusī conquest histories otherwise – seem to be regular
currency; Ansāb, vii, pp. 53–4.
171 Ibn Ḥabīb, pp. 146–9, and (following him) Ibn ʿIdhārī, ii, pp. 20–3; Kitāb al-imāma
wa-al-siyāsa, in J. Ribera (ed.), Historia de la conquista de España, Madrid:
Tipografía de la ‘Revista de Archivos’, 1926, pp. 144–7, 155–64.
174 Ibn al-Athīr, iv, p. 588; Ansāb, vii, p. 53. Presumably something got lost along the way:
Ibn Aʿtham (vii, p. 249) and al-Ṭabarī (ii.2, pp. 1267–8) place this Ibn Abī Kabasha in
Central Asia rather than Sind: al-Walīd sends him to Iraq after al-Ḥajjāj’s death, where-
upon he writes to Qutayba encouraging him to continue conquering despite his patron’s
demise. In Ibn al-Athīr, iv, p. 583, this letter is written by al-Walīd himself.
175 Chachnāma, pp. 193–7/187–90.
176 Which is twenty-one and a half more than he spends on Spain and Sind combined;
al-Ṭabarī, ii.2–3, pp. 1283–1305. Ibn al-Athīr, v, pp. 12–20, gets this down to eight.
179 Al-Ṭabarī, ii.2, pp. 1287–9.
180 Al-Ṭabarī, ii.2, pp. 1289–90.
181 Cf. al-Ṭabarī, ii.2, p. 1288, where the same phrase is used with the addition of al-khayl,
presumably a clarification of the previous term’s meaning that was not needed in Ibn
Aʿtham’s day.
182 I am grateful to Clive Holes for pointing out that the same insults are still levelled at
eastern Arabians today.
186 For example, Ibn Aʿtham, vii, p. 276, where the murdered Qutayba’s head is cut off
by one ʿAbd Allāh b. Ḥawdhān al-Azdī, and ‘left with the Azd’.
187 Hasson, ‘Les mawālī dans l’armée’, p. 183.
188 For example, al-Ṭabarī, ii.2, p. 1240 (via al-Madāʾinī); Gibb, Arab Conquests,
pp. 12–13.
189 Interestingly, Ibn Aʿtham, vii, p. 276, refers to a report written about Qutayba’s overthrow
as a ‘tale’ (qiṣṣa), suggesting some epic/romantic overtones in the author’s own mind.
190 Peacock, Medieval Islamic Historiography, p. 2; J.S. Meisami, Persian Historiog-
raphy to the End of the Twelfth Century, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
1999, pp. 19, 24ff.
191 J.S. Meisami, ‘Rulers and the writing of history’, in B. Gruendler and L. Marlow
(eds), Writers and Rulers: perspectives on their relationship from Abbasid to Safavid
times, Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2004, pp. 73–4.
192 Anooshahr, ‘ʿUtbi and the Ghaznavids’, pp. 282–3.
Conclusion: history on the margins

1 FM, pp. 207–8.
2 FM, p. 211.
208 Notes
4 See above, p. 33.
5 Ibn Ḥabīb, pp. 141 (second Table description), 142 (Mūsā pushes towards Francia;
Mūsā expresses his determination to go on), 143 (a perfume-seller with treasure), 149
(Mūsā and Sulaymān talk about sheep).
7 FM, p. 210, has this from al-Layth, who suggests a name for the plunderer but says only
that the incident happened ‘in the west’, whereas Ibn Ḥabīb, p. 142, places it and its
anonymous subject in Spain.
8 Ibn Ḥabīb, p. 149; this self-contained episode is the only part of pp. 146–9 with a cited
source, ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd.
11 This seems unusual, although I have seen al-Ṭabarī, i.4, pp. 2091, 2100, use the noun
in a similar way.
12 Ibn Ḥabīb, p. 140; see discussion above, pp. 34–5.
14 Ibn al-Qūṭīya, pp. 2, 4, and 7–8, respectively.
15 See discussion above, p. 43.
16 Ibn al-Qūṭīya, p. 115 (the text ends on p. 117).
17 Ibn al-Faqīh, pp. 90–1; Ibn ʿIdhārī, ii, p. 17, has Mūsā find a statue with a warning
inscription.
19 Chr1344, pp. 94–7, 103–6.
20 Orosius, I.ii.7; Kitāb Hurūshiyūsh, M. Penelas (ed.), Madrid: Consejo Superior de
Investigaciones Científicas, 2001, p. 21.
21 CMR, pp. 80–1, 101–2, 126–9.
23 Both Ibn ʿIdhārī, ii, p. 16.
24 Ibn ʿIdhārī, ii, pp. 6 and 13, respectively.
25 AM, pp. 18–19, shares the details that Ibn ʿIdhārī, ii, p. 16, has from al-Rāzī.
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Index
ʿAbd Allāh, amīr (r. 888–912) 29, 50, 61, ʿāmil (governor) 38, 45, 67, 85, 134
150. 179n.134 ʿAmr b. ʿAbd Allāh 59
ʿAbd Allāh b. Wahb 32, 46, 91, 188n.6 ants, man-eating 72, 77, 81
ʿAbd al-Azīz b. Mūsā b. Nuṣayr 20, 136 ʿanwatan (conquest by force) 42, 44, 122,
ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd 33, 94, 149 128–9, 145–6, 152, 173n.229
ʿAbd al-Malik, caliph (r. 685–705) 15–16, Apocalypse 9–11, 13, 15, 73
24, 50, 57, 65, 79–80, 97, 126–7 Arabs 1, 5, 9, 12–16, 19, 21, 26, 29, 34,
ʿAbd al-Malik b. Maslama 30, 32 47–59, 61–4, 67–8, 95–6, 98–9, 101,
ʿAbd al-Raḥmān I, amīr (r. 756–88) 24, 107, 110–11, 121, 125, 128, 137–40,
60, 67, 150, 173n.5, 179n.134 142, 150
ʿAbd al-Raḥmān II, amīr (r. 822–52) 21, ʿArīb b. Saʿīd (d. 980) 33, 41, 65, 86, 105,
29, 41, 44, 60 109, 119, 153
ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III, caliph (r. 912–61) authority 5, 8, 10, 19, 26–7, 44, 63, 67,
40, 44, 58, 60, 150, 170n.174, 179n.144 95–7, 102, 106, 115, 118–19, 122, 126,
Abraham, patriarch 14, 16–17, 71, 97 128, 136, 140, 141, 145, 149–52,
Abū Shayba 32–33 173n.225; of mawālī 52, 60, 149; Mūsā
acculturation 17, 49–50, 57, 126, 137; and Ṭāriq 52, 63, 100, 140, 152;
anti- 17, 114 Umayyad 5, 38, 41, 44, 46, 95–7, 150
adab (manners, approach to literary work)
70–3, 81, 122 Badajoz 57
ʿahd (covenant) 20, 67, 110, 135, 149, Baghdad 3, 24, 42, 54, 60, 69–70, 72, 96,
152; Julian’s 110, 197n.67 120, 141, 155
ʿajāʾib (marvels) 4, 25, 69–70, 72, 74–6, al-Bakrī (d. 1094) 36, 39, 77, 83,
78–80, 82, 88, 96, 118, 139, 145–6, 186n.82
148–9, 154 al-Balādhūrī (d. 892) 38, 105, 121–3, 125,
ʿajam (non-Arab, i.e. barbarian) 53, 59, 127, 129–30, 132, 134, 141–2
109–10, 115 Balʿamī 139
Akhbār Majmūʿa 24, 38, 65–66, 105, 110, barbarians 11–14, 16–17, 39, 45, 53,
115–16, 151 59, 61, 89–91, ++110, 135, see also
Akhbār al-Ṣīn wa-al-Hind 77, 81 ʿajam, ʿilj
Alexander the Great 69, 71, 73–5, 78, 80, battles 2, 7, 12, 17–19, 32, 46, 53, 81, 85,
82, 96, 139, 192n.110. 192n.119, 104, 106, 111–12, 121, 129–30, 132–3,
193n.140, 203n.88, see also Dhū 137, 147–8, 151
al-Qarnayn Berbers 1, 4–6, 17, 45, 52–3, 55–61, 63–4,
ʿAlids 58, 96, 155 67–8, 74, 76, 83, 99, 103, 109, 113, 140,
ʿAlī b. Rabāḥ 36–40, 151 145, 155, 165n.56, 165n.58; abused or
amān (safe-conduct) 5, 39, 42, 45–6, 105, stereotyped 58–60, 74, 99, 103, 140; and
110, 114–5, 130–1, 135–7, 140, 149, conflict with others 5–6, 53, 56, 58–9,
197n.67; Nīzak’s 130–1, 135–6, 143 61, 68; in the conquest armies 6, 36, 45,
Index 239
52, 55–6, 63–4, 67, 109; as governors Chronicle of 754 17, 19–21, 23, 28, 30, 35,
57–8; settlement 56, 58 43, 59, 68, 93, 107, 109, 112–13, 115,
bilād (territory) 79, 134–5 150, 152–3
al-Bīrūnī (d. 1050) 124, 132, 134 Chronicle of 1344 38, 66, 109–10, 151
Blankinship, K. 127 Chronicle of Alfonso III 18–19, 112–15
Buddhists 133, 135 Chronicle of Zuqnīn 15, 21
Bukhārā 121, 123–5, 131, 135, 138–9, churches 8, 13, 20, 41, 43, 65, 87–8, 91,
201n.22 105, 107, 113
Bulliet, R. 51, 55–6 cities 13, 18, 23, 27, 35–6, 38–9, 46, 62,
Byzantine 8, 41–2, 105–6, 109 65–6, 75, 80–2, 85–6, 89, 91–3, 97,
Byzantine Empire 8–9, 13, 15, 62, 91, 93 102–7, 110–11, 115–16, 124–5, 128–30,
132, 134–5, 138–40 see also sieges
Cádiz 75–7, 82–3 City of Copper 29, 69, 73, 79–82, 151, 154
caliph 4, 5, 21, 31, 32, 40, 49, 62, 73, 74, civil war, 6, 13 see also fitna
82, 101, 114, 126, 129, 133, 134, 136, client, see mawlā
141, 149, 161n.89, 171n.97, 186n.83, clientage, see walāʾ
188n.135, 199n.102, 205n.110; authority coinage 16, 19–20, 22, 57, 92
of 29, 31, 36, 42, 44–5, 60, 62–4, 66, Collins, R. 2
67–8, 84, 85–6, 99–100, 118, 120, comeuppance 62, 148 see also downfall
127–8, 131, 138, 143, 152, 167n.94, conquest itineraries 38, 83, 155
patronage of 31, 41–2, 54–5, 67–8, Conrad, L. 77, 152
69–70, 96, 97, 105, 145–6, 149–50 Constantinople 17, 76–7, 88, 93–4, 96
caliphate, ʿAbbāsid 4, 24, 31, 38, 40, conversion 17, 47, 50–2, 55–6, 61, 71, 98;
42–43, 54, 60, 62, 65, 99, 118–19, 123; to Islam 6, 18–19, 41, 43, 47, 49–52,
revolution 31, 99–100 54–6, 59, 66–7, 71, 78, 97–8, 114, 135,
caliphate, Fāṭimid 40, 61, 75, 96, 138; and taxation 43, 51–2
151, 155 converts 4, 19, 41, 47, 49–57, 59–60, 64,
caliphate, Umayyad 1, 5, 24, 31, 40, 46, 66, 71, 76, 97, 99, 135, 142, see also
52, 65–67, 95–7, 99, 120, 149–51; of mawlā, muwallad
Cordoba 4–6, 23–4, 31, 38, 40–1, 46, copper 35, 74–7, 79–80, see also ‘City of
55, 57, 59–61, 65–8, 95–6, 99, 103, 120, Copper’
129, 140, 143, 146, 149–51, 153–5; of Cordoba 3–4, 17, 23, 39, 40–2, 44, 55,
Damascus 1, 3, 5, 24, 31, 40, 45–46, 52, 58–9, 63, 65–7, 76, 95, 104–6, 114, 140,
64–8, 95–7, 99, 120, 126, 149–51 150–1, 154–5; calendar of 41; conquest
captives 18, 52, 55 of 63, 65–6, 104–6; Great Mosque
Cartagena 91 40–1, 95
Castilian (language) 1, 38–9, 66 correspondence 41, 46, 107, 126, 144, 146,
Central Asia 5, 118, 121–3, 126–7, 131, 205n.135; between Ṭāriq and Mūsā 44,
133–4, see also Transoxania 100; with caliphs 100, 120, 126, 131;
Chachnāma 125–6, 129–30, 132–5, 137–8, with governors 126, 129–30
141, 153 Crone, P. 2, 48–9, 51–2
chain of command 44–5, 100, 109, 114, Crónica del Moro Rasis 38, 151
128–31, 146 crowns 34, 85, 91, 94–5, 98, 136, 148, 150
Chamberlain, M. 24
Characterisation 16, 35, 116, 150, Damascus 4, 7, 24, 31, 39–41, 44, 46, 62,
164n.40 67, 84–5, 100, 114, 140, 149
Christianity 3, 6, 8–13, 15, 18–19, 87, 115, Daniel, Book of 10, 14–6
139, 150 Daybul 130, 132–5, 139
Christians 1, 9–17, 21, 34, 38, 41, 43, 57, de Planhol, X. 71, 77
59, 61, 66–8, 76, 88, 106–7, 109, De Rebus Hispaniae 94, 109
113–15, 117, 133, 137, 150, 153; decentralisation 58, 62
authors and sources 12–13, 15–19, 22, dhimma (pact of protection, for non-
35, 57, 71, 73, 94, 102–4, 106, 109–10, Muslims under Muslim rule) 20,
112–13, 115–16, 135 48–9, 122
240 Index
dhimmī (person in receipt of dhimma) 43, ḥadīth (tradition of the Prophet
50, 138, 145 Muḥammad) 2, 10, 26, 29–30, 32, 36,
Dhū al-Qarnayn 73–6, 97, 139, see also 40, 48, 96
Alexander the Great al-Ḥajjāj, governor of Iraq (d. 714) 52,
al-Dīnawarī (d. c. 895–900) 123, 140 121–2, 126–7, 129–134, 136, 138–41,
dīwān (register of troops entitled to state 143, 146, 152; is a busybody 126,
payment) 26, 51–2 129–31, 134, 140
Doctrina Jacobi 15–16 al-Ḥakam II 40–1, 60, 76
downfall 18, 112, 124–5, 136, 140–1, Hallaq, W. 50
143–5, see also comeuppance Ḥanafīs 48, 175n.52
dreams 10–11, 44, 193n.140 heads, chopped off 40, 108, 142
Heraclius, emperor 8, 12–13, 18,
Egypt 13, 15–16, 20, 23, 25, 28–9, 31–3, 206n.164
35–6, 38, 41, 43, 58, 89, 98, Hercules 75–6, 82, 112, 151, 183n.20
148–9, 155 heresy 11–13, 16–17
Egyptians 13, 15, 20, 31–2, 97; sources 23, Herodotus 35, 106, 108
29, 31–3, 35–6, 38–40, 82, 84, 100, 109, heroes 3, 24–5, 29, 61, 64–5, 71, 73–4,
131, 141, 147, 149 81–2, 88, 96–7, 100–1, 120, 125–6, 137,
Elton, D. 122 145, 147; anti- 108–111
End Times 9, 16, 58, see also Hindus 120, 126, 133–4, 138, 145
Apocalypse Hishām b. ʿAbd al-Malik 67
ethnic conflict 47, 57–8, 61, 63, 68, 99, History Against the Pagans, see Orosius
see also shuʿūbīya House of Locks 29, 32–3, 35, 40, 76, 83,
ethnicity 4, 16–17, 49–50, 54–5, 57–9, 61, 147–53
63, 99, 135, 138, 153 Hoyland, R. 8
Eusebius of Caesarea (d. c. 339) 8–9, 12, hubris 34
16–17 Huesca 20
Evagrius (d. c. 594) 9 al-Ḥurr, governor 30, 152
Extremadura 56
Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam (d. 870) 23, 25–6,
factionalism; under Umayyads of 29–33, 35–6, 38–40, 43–4, 46, 63, 65–6,
Cordoba 58, 61, 64, 112; under the 82, 86, 91, 97–8, 109–10, 146, 151–3
Umayyads of Damascus 112, 126, 140, Ibn Abī ʿĀmir al-Manṣūr 41
141–3, 145; under the Ibn Aʿtham (d. early 900s.) 27, 43, 123,
Visigoths 19, 103, 112 127–9, 131–3, 135–6, 139,
fate 29, 34, 46, 80, 112 141–3, 152
Fatḥ al-Andalus 36–7, 65–6, 105, 109, Ibn al-Athīr (d. 1234) 47, 65, 83–4, 89,
111, 150–1 100–1, 115–6, 122–3, 141
Fierro, M. 40, 55, 60, 67, 154 Ibn al-Faqīh (fl. c. 903) 73, 77, 80, 82,
fitna 60, 74, 76, 82–3 see also civil war 85, 151
foundation myths 113, 137–9, 155 Ibn al-Faraḍī (d. 1013) 41
‘Fredegar’ 12–13, 16, 107 Ibn Gharsiya 62, 64
frontier 44, 51–2, 59, 72, 75, 101, 118, Ibn Ḥabīb (d. 852) 23, 26–7, 29, 31–40,
123, 126–7, 129, 140, 145, 152 44, 46, 59, 65, 71–2, 78, 80–2, 84,
91–2, 94, 109, 141, 145–50,
Galicia 46, 66, 76, 197n.67 153–4
genealogy 26, 54, 57, 61, 67, 172n.212 Ibn Ḥafṣūn 40, 61, 151
genre 9, 10, 57, 70, 73, 82, 96, 119, Ibn Ḥayyān (d. 1076) 60–1, 66, 116,
145–6 Ibn Ḥazm (d. 1064) 60
geography 25, 70–73, 79, 82–3, 121 Ibn ʿIdhārī (d. 1307) 37–9, 44–5, 65–6, 83,
Ghaznavids 122, 124, 132, 143 89, 105, 109, 111, 115–16, 151
Gibraltar 6, 75 Ibn Khurdādhbih (d. 911) 39, 70–1, 73,
Gog and Magog 71, 73–4, 76, 79, 139 77, 82
Guichard, P. 56–7 Ibn Lahīʿa (d. 790) 32, 97
Index 241
Ibn Lubāba 50–1 khums (fifth, proportion of conquest loot
Ibn Mann Allāh al-Hawwārī 53 belonging to caliph) 42, 44–5, 66,
Ibn al-Qūṭīya (d. 977) 3, 26, 41, 45–7, 54, 131–3, 148
65, 67–8, 109–11, 114–5, 119, 137, 141, Khwārazm 124, 134–5
149–50, 152–3 kidnapping 5, 108, 134, 144
Ibn al-Shabbāṭ (d. 1221) 33, 41, 65, 86, al-Kindī 32
91, 105 Kitāb mafākhir al-barbar 59
idols 35, 69, 75–7, 82, 132–4, 148 see also
statues, talisman Latin language 1–3, 9, 12, 20, 23, 43, 57,
Ifrīqiya 37, 45, 67, 85, 140, see also North 76, 87, 94, 106, 151–2
Africa law 5, 16, 20–1, 25, 29, 46, 49–50, 53, 56,
ʿilj, pl. ʿulūj (barbarian) 45, 61, 109, 133 115, 122, 154–5
India 5, 122, 124, 126, 130, 132, 135, al-Layth b. Saʿd (d. 791) 32–3, 35, 46, 91,
137–8 94, 100
Innes, M. 2 Leder, S. 2
insults 59, 65, 114, 134, 142 legitimacy; political 40–1, 45, 87, 89–91,
Iraq 2, 41, 52, 118, 120–1, 130, 95–6, 118–19, 128, 146, 150; religious
146, 153 40–1, 45, 58, 95–6, 128, 150
irony 64; dramatic 111; sarcastic 143 León 57
ʿĪsā b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Ṭawīl 32 letters, see correspondence
Ishoʿyahb III, catholicos 13, 19, 21 local history 119, 124–5, 137, 201n.26
Isidore of Seville (d. 636) 12, 17, 39, loot 5–7, 29–32, 34, 46, 62, 64, 84–6,
92–3 88–90, 92, 95–6, 98, 100, 105, 131–2,
islands 44, 69, 72, 75, 77–9, 81 144–5, 147–8, 152–3 see also khums
isnād (transmitter chain for historical
reports) 26–7, 31–3, 35, 37–9, 40, 97, McKitterick, R. 3, 12
103, 122–3, 148, 154–5 al-Madāʾinī (d. 820) 122–3, 129
Istoria de Mahomet 19 Maghrib, 4, 58, 80, see also North Africa
Maḥmūd of Ghazna 143
Jesús Rubiera Mata, M. 84 Makkī, M. 28, 35–7, 39
Jews 9–10, 87–9, 94, 96–7, 105–6, 116, Mālik b. Anas (jurist and legal theorist,
135; and their tradition 10, 71, 73, 87–8, d. 795) 26, 30, 32
93, 95–7, 101; depicted as traitors Mālikīs 29–30, 32–3, 39, 48, 57, 131, 153
115–16 al-Manṣūr, caliph (r. 754–75) 24, 43
jihād 103, 133 al-Maqqarī (d. 1632) 1, 24, 36–9, 65–6, 81,
jizya (poll tax) 52, see also taxation 83, 91, 116
John of Biclaro (d. 624/5) 17, 94 Manzano Moreno, E. 6, 154
John of Damascus (d. c. 750) 16, 21 Marín, M. 56
John of Nikiu (fl. 640s) 13, 107 Marsham, A. 126
John Bar Penkāyē (fl. 690s) 14–15, 18, Martinez-Gros, G. 6, 38
21, 107 martyrs 18, 114; of Cordoba 114
Julian 6, 35, 38–9, 45, 103, 108–11, 116, Maslama b. ʿAbd al-Malik 132
148–9; and his daughter 35, 103, al-Masʿūdī (d. 955/6) 35, 39, 72, 75, 79,
108–11, 117, 148, 150 82, 122, 138
junds (army units) 58, 136 mawlā, pl. mawālī (client) 4, 6–7, 25, 37,
jurists 3, 23–4, 26–7, 29, 31–2, 36, 110, 41–2, 44–5, 47–68, 84–5, 94, 98–100,
122, 131, 154 106, 121, 127–8, 142–3, 149–50,
153–4
khabar, pl. akhbār (historical report/ Mecca 17, 40–1, 53
anecdote) 26–9, 41–2, 103–4, 106, 109, memory 3, 26, 87, 149; collective 2, 24–6
112, 115, 123–4, 133, 149, 152, 155 Merida 38, 190n.44
Khālid b. al-Walīd 23 Molina, L. 28, 38, 65–6
Khalīfa b. Khayyāṭ 44 Moors 19, 31, 43 see also Saracens
kharāj (land tax) 42–3, see also taxation Morse, R. 3
242 Index
mosques, 27, 51, 124, 138; Great Mosque 41, 53–4, 62; history 123–5; language
40–1, 95 124–5, 138, 155
Mughīth al-Rūmī 47, 62, 65–6, 68 Persians 18, 52–4, 71, 73, 108, 124–5
Muḥammad, Prophet 2–3, 11, 16, 25, 119, plunder, see loot
139, 146 portents 9, 14–15, 29, 144
Muḥammad I, amīr of Cordoba (r. 852–86) prayer 17, 51, 59, 113, 138, 140
44, 59 precious stones 84, 90; emerald 90, 94;
Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Salām al-Khushanī pearl 90–1, 94–5; sapphire 90–1, 94, 98,
59 188n.141
Muḥammad b. al-Qāsim 121–2, 124–7, Procopius (d. c. 565) 8–9, 88–9, 92–4
129–35, 137–41, 143–5 propaganda 1, 8, 19, 25, 40, 46, 52, 70, 96,
Multān 77, 132, 134, 138, 103, 112, 114, 117
Murcia 20, 23 prophecy, 10, 14, 29, 109, 123, 139–41,
Mūsā b. ʿAlī b. Rabāḥ 37–8 158n.19
Mūsā b. Nuṣayr 4, 6–7, 11, 19–21, 23–6,
31–3, 36–9, 44–6, 48, 52, 59, 61–6, 71, qawm 115, 127, 150
77–81, 84–6, 91, 94, 98–101, 108, Qayrawān 6, 53, 79
111–2, 114, 127–9, 131, 136, 140–1, Qurʾān 15, 16, 30, 49–50, 53–4, 57, 70, 72,
143–5, 148–9, 151–3 73, 94, 96, 133, 138, 139, 164n.31,
muwallad, pl. muwalladūn (non-client 171n.190, 171n.195, 185n.64, 193n.121,
converts to Islam) 4, 41–2, 47, 54–5, 205n.136
58–62, 68, 96, 114 Qutayba b. Muslim 27, 121–4, 126–31,
133–6, 138–43, 152; insults delivered
naming 6, 20, 23, 26, 34, 36–9, 44, 46, 57, by 141–2
59, 66, 73, 75, 79, 84, 88, 102, 104, 108,
116, 139–40, 142, 147, 152; aetiology al-Rāzī, Aḥmad (d. 955) 37–9, 41, 45,
66; in isnād 33, 35, 38; of non-Arabs 65–6, 75–6, 82–3, 88, 94, 99, 105, 109,
after Arabs 57, 62; onomatomania 26, 115, 151, 153–4
37, 39, 108, 152; of Sara’s sons 68 Reccared 16–17
nisba (part of name denoting tribal rhetoric 18, 78, 99, 104, 112, 124
affiliation, home town/region, etc.) 48, Robinson, C. 2, 43
52, 57, 61, 66 Roderic 6–7, 19, 32, 34–5, 39, 45–6, 97–8,
Nīzak 131, 135–6, 143, 206n.152 108–15, 136, 148–53
North Africa 6, 23, 29, 31, 36, 40, 45, 55, Roman Empire 6, 10, 15–17, 38, 49,
58, 64, 79, 89, 110–11, 141, 155 86–90, 93, 107–8, 154
Noth, A. 2–3, 21, 145, 152 Rome 6, 18, 88–90, 92–3, 95, 108
Ocean 4, 69, 71, 75, 77–9, 81, 148 Safran, J. 6

omens 9, 29, 35, 44, 78 Sāmānids 123, 139, 143,
Orosius (d. after 418) 41, 76, 82, 93, 151 Samarqand 27, 43, 121, 123, 131, 135,
Oviedo 94, 113–14 139–40, 142
Sara 46, 58, 62, 67–8, 114, 137,
pagans 9–10, 59, 93, 133, 139 149–50
Pamplona 20 Saracen, 12–13, 16–17, 43, 107
patron 3, 5, 47–9, 51–2, 63–4, 66–7, 71, Sebeos 13, 15, 107,
85, 98–100, 103, 105, 121, 124, 126–7, settlement; post-conquest 19, 63, 126,
143, 147, 153, 155 138, 145
patronage 9, 17, 41, 68, 99, 154; of Seville 38, 46, 58, 67, 89, 105, 116
scholarship 8, 23, 31, 41, 44, 69, 83, Shīʿite 58, 122–3
110, 112, 129, 143, 146 shuʿūbīya (pro-Persian – usually – literary
Paul the Deacon (fl. 700s) 56 movement) 53–4, 62–4, 68, 155
Pelayo 113–14 sieges 1, 4, 43, 65–6, 81, 88–9, 102,
periphery 4, 70, 118–20, 127, 137 104–5, 108, 110, 112, 116, 121, 123,
Persian 8–9, 52, 70, 71, 123, 126; heritage 124, 132, 135, 139–40, 146–7, 151
Index 243
sin 11, 13–15, 18–19, 102, 107, 113 translation 13, 39, 41, 70, 76, 82, 94, 125,
Sind 5, 118, 120–34, 137, 139, 141–2, 151–3
144–6, 152–4 transmission 1, 23, 25–6, 28–9, 33, 36,
Solomon 35, 75, 78, 80, 82, 86, 88, 91, 94, 39–40, 68, 70, 83–4, 94, 96, 110, 133,
96–8; Table of 5, 7, 32–4, 38–9, 62, 154
84–6, 88–98, 100, 147–8, 153; Temple Transoxania 5, 120–3, 127, 129–30, 133,
of 5, 86–9, 92–7, 100 142–3, 152, 154, see also Central Asia
speech 28, 66, 141, 145; dialogue 26, 28, treasure 31–2, 35, 80, 88–92, 94–6, 98,
34, 104, 108, 115, 131, 138, 145, 148–9, 101, 140, 147, 152, see also loot
153; public addresses, 141–2, 145 treaty 5, 14, 20–3, 27, 36, 42, 46,
statues 10, 11, 69, 74–9, 81–3, 93, 132 106, 128
see also idols, talisman Treaty of Tudmīr 20, 22–3
Sulaymān (caliph, r. 715–17) 5, 25, 32–3, Trojan Horse, by any other name 110, 123
39, 59, 84–6, 97, 101, 121, 126–7,
140–3, 145, 148–9, 152 ʿUmar I, caliph (r. 634–644) 4, 17,
ṣulḥan (conquest by treaty) 105, 128–9, 52, 131
145–6, 152, see also amān ʿUmar II, caliph (r. 717–720) 36, 52, 149
sunna 111, 115 al-ʿUtbī (d. 1036) 124, 132, 143
ʿUthmān b. Ṣāliḥ (d. 834) 32, 148
al-Ṭabarī (d. 923) 3, 24, 27, 38–9, 41, 109,
118–19, 122, 124, 131, 133, 136–7, Valencia 56, 58
139–43, 146, 152–3, 155 Visigoths 17, 35, 38, 41, 45–6, 61, 89–92,
Tābiʿūn (‘Successors’ to the Companions 94, 109–11, 149; kings 3, 6, 19, 34,
of the Prophet) 25, 35–7 38–9, 90–2, 94, 103, 113, 115–16, 128,
Table of Solomon, see Solomon 136, 148, 151
ṭāʾifa period 55, 57, 61–2, 155
takbīr (cry of ‘Allāhu akbār!’) 65, 105 walāʾ (clientage) 6, 47–52, 54–7, 60, 64,
talisman 75–6, 132, 135, see also idols, 66–8, 98, 135, 149; al-ʿitq 48, 57, 60;
statues al-muwālāt 48, 53, 56, 60
Tangiers 6, 45 al-Walīd, caliph (r. 705–715) 5, 7, 39,
Ṭāriq b. Ziyād 4, 6–7, 11, 19, 25–6, 32, 34, 44–5, 61, 63, 66–7, 84–5, 97, 100–1,
37–9, 44–8, 52, 62–6, 68, 77, 84–6, 89, 121, 126–7, 129, 131, 133, 140–2,
91, 94, 98–100, 103, 108–10, 114–15, 148–9, 151
128–9, 131, 134, 139–40, 147–9, 151–3; walls 23, 65, 73–6, 80–1, 104–5, 111, 135,
as a mawla 4, 6, 25, 37, 44–5, 48, 52, 139, 141
62–6, 68, 84–5, 94, 99–100, 153 al-Wāqidī (d. 823) 37–9, 45–6, 151
taxation 5, 13, 15–16, 19–20, 42–4, 52, 61, Wasserstein, D. 50
70, 107, 119, 128, 138, 149–50 see also Witiza 6, 67, 112–15; sons 19, 45–6, 109,
kharāj 112–15, 128, 149–50
temples 77, 124, 126, 132, 134–5, 138; of women 23, 48, 57, 108, 132, 139,
Solomon 5, 86–9, 92–7, 100 119n.104; endangered 5, 108, 134, 144,
Thucydides 8, 111 196n.49; married 48, 53, 67–8, 110,
Toledo 5, 7, 17, 19, 29, 32–3, 38, 57, 63, 136, 137, 150, 196n.49; strong 74, 78,
76, 84–6, 89–95, 99–100, 107–11, 113, 137; troublesome 74, 78, 136–7, 141
116, 149–50; conquest of 5, 38–9, 46,
65, 86, 89, 91, 94, 147 Yaḥyā b. Bukayr (d. 845) 32, 91, 148
topos (pl. topoi) 2–6, 14, 19, 35, 65, 78, Yājūj wa-Mājūj, see ‘Gog and Magog’
80, 82–3, 84, 93, 98, 102, 104, 106, al-Yaʿqūbī (d. c. 900) 28, 39, 70, 85, 109,
108–9, 113–14, 116, 127, 131, 134, 144, 121–2, 129–31, 133, 135, 141
152, 155 Yazīd b. al-Muhallab 121, 132, 136, 142
traitors 5–6, 14, 102–17, 133–4, 137,
144, 153 al-Zuhrī (fl. 1100s) 74, 76, 82

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PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED BY CURZON

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