HISTORY WRITING IN THE TIME

OF ISLAM’S BEGINNINGS
Robert HoYLAND

For those wishing to investigate Islam’s emergence and evolution it is

particularly unfortunate that history writing across the Near East would
appear to falter at the crucial moment, just as the Arab conquests begin.
The genre of secular classicizing history in Greek, which had had a con-
tinuous tradition stretching all the way back to Thucydides, finds its last
exponent in Theophylact of Simocatta, whose narrative ends with the
death of Emperor Maurice in aD 602. Church history in Greek, which
was initiated in the early fourth century by the venerable Eusebius of
Caesarea, though it had a promising start, found no continuator after
John of Ephe- sus, who died in 595. In Syriac it did still find a voice,
but none that were composed in the seventh and eighth centuries have
survived intact and they live on only in excerpts cited by twelfth and
thirteenth-century authors. Chronicles fared much better, but even here
we possess no texts that were written in the period between the
composition in the 630s of the Greek Chronicon Paschale and the
Syriac chronicle of Thomas Presbyter on the one side, and the
appearance in the 770s of the Syriac Chronicle of 775, the Syriac
Chronicle of Zuqnin and the Greek Brief History of Patriarch Nicephorus
at the other end.1
The situation might appear to be better when we turn to the
Islamic sphere, since the coverage is very full, but the earliest extant
chronicle dates only from the 840s, that of Khalifa ibn Khayyat (d. 845),2
and so again there is a surprising absence of texts written during the
seventh- eighth centuries. This has puzzled many outsiders to the field,
and one has recently put the matter very bluntly:
Over the course of almost two hundred years the Arabs … composed not
a single record of their victories, not one, that has survived into the
present day. How could this possibly have been so when even on the most
barbarous fringes of civilisation … books of history were being written
during this same period?3
1. For all these texts and further discussion of the problem see my Seeing Islam as
Others Saw It: A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian Wrings on
Early Islam (Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam 13; Princeton, 1997), pp.
387–453.
2. Carl Wurtzel, Khalifa ibn Khayyat’s History on the Umayyads (Liverpool, 2015).
3. Tom Holland, In the Shadow of the Sword (Abacus, 2013), p. 39.

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 110 r. HOYLAND
Holland does not mention that we also lack Christian historical texts
from the same period, but that does not solve the problem; what
we need is a solution that can explain the dearth in both traditions. To put
it crudely, we have to assume either that nothing was written or that
eve- rything was destroyed. The fact that many extant ninth-century
histories relay much information about the seventh and eighth
centuries means that the former option is unlikely, though it may well
be that material was sparse. In the Byzantine case, the loss of many of
their provinces, the waging of almost constant warfare and the
enormous financial costs of both phenomena meant that there was
little positive news to celebrate and little patronage for would-be
historians. In the Islamic case, the fact that most Arab Muslims were
soldiers and most non-Arab Muslims were prisoners-of-war for the
first few decades after the death of Muhammad meant that a Muslim
civilian society, from which history writing might arise, was slow
to emerge.
We must then assume the second option to be true, that everything was
destroyed. I do not mean, though, deliberate and total destruction;
rather, seventh- and eighth-century works were subjected to censure and
revision. In the light of the momentous changes to political and religious
life in the Near East in the seventh and eighth centuries, authors felt a
need to rework these earlier accounts, which now seemed out of
synchrony with pre- sent circumstances and values. We get an explicit
indication of this from Ibn Hisham (d. 832), who, faced with the wide-
ranging biography of the prophet Muhammad written by Ibn Ishaq (d.
767) some decades earlier, decides that he will omit ‘what does not
pertain directly to the messenger of God and what does not find a place in
the Qur’an and what I have seen none of the scholars recount’.4 This
means that extant works from the sev- enth and eighth centuries do not
survive in their original form, and the material that is quoted from them
by later historians is likely to have been heavily redacted. Is it at
least possible, though, to identify who was writing in these times and
recover the substance of what they wrote? Though it is difficult to be
certain, we do receive some tantalizing hints.

WHO WAS WRITING

The Christian Tradition
Very occasionally a chronicler may himself give us a hint about
his aims and activities, as, for example, does George Syncellus, who in
4. Ibn Hisham, al-Sira al-nabawiyya (Dar Ibn Hazm; Beirut, 2009), p. 8.

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 HISTORY WRITING IN THE TIME OF ISLAM’S BEGINNINGS 111
his youth lived as a monk in the region of Jerusalem before going to
Constantinople to become personal assistant to the patriarch Tarasius of
Constantinople (784–806). At the end of his life he set his mind to com-
posing a world chronicle, which in the end he did not live to complete,
but he explains his original intention in his introduction:
From them [‘divinely inspired scriptures and the more illustrious
historians’], I have extracted the greater part of this work, with the
exception of a few things that have taken place in our own times. And I
shall endeavour to make a kind of synopsis, always alert to combining
continuity with accu- racy, and maintaining correspondence in the
sequence of events: I mean about the various kings and the numbering of
priests, as well as prophets and apostles, martyrs and teachers …, culling
everything from the afore- mentioned historians, to the extent that I am
able. And finally, I shall treat the covenant, abominable to God, that
has been made against Christ and our nation both by ‘the tents of the
Idumaeans and by the Ishamaelites’ (Psalms 82.6), who hound the people of
the Spirit and by the judgement of God also practise the apostasy that was
prophesied by the blessed Paul for the end of days (2 Thess. 2.3). These
things I shall describe to the best of my ability up to the current year,
the 6300th from the creation of the universe, the first year of the
indiction (808).5
More commonly we have to rely on later compilers to give us infor-
mation about their sources for seventh- and eighth-century history. For
example, Michael the Syrian, a twelfth-century patriarch of the West
Syrian Church, helpfully tells us that for the period up to AG 1021 (AD
709) he relied heavily on the chronicle of Jacob, bishop of Edessa (684–
88). In fact, says Michael, ‘the whole of Jacob’s chronicle pertinent to
this sub- ject is utilized here, for he methodically reported in his book
the cal- culations of the years elapsed since Adam, that is, since the
creation of the world’. Thereafter, continues Michael, ‘we have found
no one who undertook these tabulations and computations of years,
which show very clearly the passage of time’.6 What Michael means here
is that the Eusebian style of chronology, setting out the events
pertaining to differ- ent kingdoms in parallel columns, was not taken
up by anyone after Jacob, and so this particular method of marking
time died out at this point.

5. For this quotation and discussion of George see W. Treadgold, ‘The Life and Wider
Significance of George Syncellus’, in M. Jankowiak and F. Montinaro (eds.), Studies
in Theophanes (T&MByz 19; Paris, 2015), pp. 9–30.
6. Michael the Syrian, Chronicle, ed. J.-B. Chabot (Paris, 1899–1924), pp. 450, 482–83.
Michael notes that though Jacob is said to have died in AG 1019 (707/708), the text of the
chronicle he is using goes up to 1021, which he accounts for by assuming the intervention
of a disciple of Jacob or an error in the reporting of Jacob’s death.

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 112 R. HOYLAND

The Islamic Tradition

In the sphere of Muslim historiography we would appear to be particu-
larly fortunate, for whereas Christian historians only rarely divulge their
sources, many Muslim historians give a full list (isnad) of the authori-
ties allegedly responsible for transmitting their material to them. Some
Islamicists will accept these isnads without question, which permits them
to present a lively picture of numerous seventh- and eighth-century Muslim
scholars busily seeking out historical reports and carefully recording them
in books.7 Since no such texts survive, however, Islamicists of a
skeptical bent either refuse to accept the validity of these isnads or take
the view that, even if valid, they do not help us, since by the time it
reaches its final form in extant ninth-century books the material has been
substantially transformed in the course of its transmission.8
It is possible, however, that the lists of authorities, even if the
individual names in them cannot be linked to specific texts, may be able
to provide us with useful information. For example, a recent study of
the extant ninth-century book entitled ‘The Conquests of Syria’
(Futuh al-Sham) composed by al-Azdi reveals that it has twenty-one
informants in com- mon with the work of the same title by the scholar
Abu Mikhnaf (d. 774), which, though it does not survive, was much quoted
by later chroniclers.9 The conclusion drawn from this by the author of
the study is that al-Azdi is reliant upon Abu Mikhnaf’s text. There are
other possible scenarios, but it is certainly evident that the two works
are very closely related.
It has also been suggested that we can use these lists to tell us more
about the social and political background of those engaged in
writing history. For example, a study by Edward Coghill of the
informants cited in the Egyptian history of Abu ‘A mr al-Kindi notes
that twenty-three of the thirty-nine Egyptian scholars mentioned are
freedmen (mawlas, prisoners-of-war who were subsequently
manumitted and converted to Islam). Of these twenty-three freedmen
scholars, twelve, over half, are said to be affiliated to Quraysh, and
five of these belonged to the ruling Umayyad clan. Therefore it appears
that among those involved in trans- mitting historical knowledge about
early Islamic Egypt freedman status was the norm and that Quraysh
surpassed the other tribes in terms of
7. For example A.A. Duri, The Rise of Historical Writing among the Arabs, trans.
Lawrence Conrad (Princeton, 1983); Amikam Elad, ‘The Beginnings of Historical Writing
by the Arabs: The Earliest Syrian Writers on the Arab Conquests’, JSAI 28 (2003), pp.
65– 152.
8. Still the best presentation of the skeptical view is to be found in Patricia Crone,
Slaves on Horses (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 3–17.
9. Suleiman Mourad, ‘On Early Islamic Historiography: Abu Isma‘il al-Azdi and his
Futuh al-Sham’, JAOS 120 (2000), pp. 577–93.

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 HISTORY WRITING IN THE TIME OF ISLAM’S BEGINNINGS 113
patronage of freedmen scholars. The disproportionate extent of patron-
age by Quraysh is crucial to understanding how this elite Meccan tribe
maintained their status in the very different circumstances of the early
Islamic caliphate. This can be seen in the accounts of the first Arab
civil war in Ibn ‘Abd al-Hakam and al-Kindi. All the freedmen of the
first two generations of transmitters are freedmen of Quraysh, and it
seems reasonable to suppose that their clientage to Quraysh allowed them
access to this elite, which could provide them with sources of direct,
albeit biased, historical information. Appointments also point toward
close con- tacts between these scholars and the ruling class. For example,
the freed- man Yazid ibn Abi Habib was appointed a judge of Egypt by
the caliph ‘Umar II, and he directly passed on his historical knowledge
to Ibn Lahi‘a, a judge of Egypt for the caliph al-Mansur, and
Layth ibn Sa‘d, who served as head of the financial administration
for al-Mansur. Thus the history recorded in Ibn ‘Abd al-Hakam and al-
Kindi’s works appears to be his- tory written by the senior religio-
legal figures in the late Umayyad and early Abbasid establishment, whose
status was bound up with official and institutional recognition.10

WHAT THEY WROTE

If we want, however, to get a sense of what was written in the seventh
and eighth centuries and not just who was writing, then we need to do
some detective work. The most tried and trusted method is to look
for material that is cited by multiple writers, since this is a reasonable
indica- tion of dependence upon an earlier source.

The Christian Tradition

For the history of the seventh and eighth-century Near East the most
discussed common source is the one used by the chroniclers Theophanes
the Confessor (d. 817), Dionysius of Tel-Mahre (d. 845) and Agapius
of Menbij (wr. 940s). Its existence was inferred more than two centuries
ago from the large number of events that are recorded in similar manner
and in similar order by all three writers across the period 630–750.11
Certain
10. This paragraph draws on the findings of my doctoral student Edward Coghill in
his M.A. thesis: Qurashi Clientage and Egyptian Historical Knowledge: A First Look at the
Affiliations of a Local Egyptian Historiography (Chicago, 2014).
11. Much has been written on this putative source; most recently see the articles by
myself, Marek Jankowiak, Muriel Debié and Maria Conterno in Jankowiak and Montinaro,
Studies in Theophanes.

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 114 R. HOYLAND

of these events, particularly those treating warfare and diplomacy

between the Arab and Byzantine rulers, are recounted in considerable
detail, with a strong narrative style and a distinctively pro-Byzantine
slant. A few describe victories for the Byzantines: their triumph in the
naval battle of Phoenix in 654/55 off the coast of southwest Anatolia,
the thwarting of a revolt by the general Shabur against Emperor
Constans, the stalling of an Arab naval advance on Constantinoplecirca
670, the successful launch of incursions by guerrillas in the mountains
of Lebanon circa 680, and Leo III’s breaking of the Arab siege of
Constantinople in 717–18, which would appear to conclude this set of
narratives. Other reports concern Byzantine defeats, but even here a pro-
Byzantine note is struck: there is the heroic figure of the patrician
Sergius, who sought to defend Palestine against the Arabs in 634 and who,
having fallen off his horse, brushes aside offers of help from his
soldiers, selflessly advising them rather to run and save themselves from
the pursuing Arabs. Then there is the loyal chamberlain Andrew who
courageously stands his ground against the caliph Mu‘awiya and
lectures him on noble conduct. By contrast, Arab victories are often
explained away by recourse to adverse conditions (for example wind and
sand at the battle of Yarmuk) or the deceitful cunning of the Arabs, and
Arab leaders are often portrayed in a negative light; thus Mu‘awiya is
depicted as greedy and base in his decision to support the rebel Shabur
instead of Andrew the Chamberlain, and he is said to have been
frightened at the news of the Mardaite incursions.12
The original language of these accounts is uncertain. Greek or Syriac
are the obvious contenders, but the language is so simple and unadorned
that, even when we can discern direct correspondence in wording in
the citations of the later chroniclers, making a firm judgment between
the two is difficult. A good example occurs in the encounter between
the Arabs and Manuel, the new commander-in-chief of Egypt, who
refuses to hand over to respect the tribute agreement that the patriarch
Cyrus had arranged:13
Theophanes: At the end of the year the Saracen tribute collectors came to
receive the gold (πληρωθέντος τοῦ χρό νου οἱ τῶν Σαρακηνῶν πράκτορες
παρεγένοντο λαβεῖν τὸ χρυσί ον), but Manuel drove them away saying
that ‘I am not unarmed like Cyrus that I should pay you tribute. Nay, I
am armed’.

12. For references and further discussion see my Theophilus of Edessa’s Chronicle and
the Circulation of Historical Knowledge in Late Antiquity and Early Islam (Liverpool,
2011), pp. 23–29.
13. Hoyland, Theophilus, pp. 109–13.

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 HISTORY WRITING IN THE TIME OF ISLAM’S BEGINNINGS 115
Dionysius: When a year had passed, the emissaries of the Arabs came to
Egypt as usual to receive the gold ( ‫ܕܐ̈ ܐܝܙܓ ܐܬܘ ܫܢܬܐ ܫܠܡܬ ܟܕ‬
‫ܐ ܕܛܝ‬ ̈ ‫ ܝ‬... ‫ )ܠܕܗܒܐ ܕ ܢ ܣܒܘ ܢ‬and they found Manuel encamped at
Fustat. He replied to them: ‘I am not Cyrus, who used to give you gold.
He did not wear armour, but a woollen tunic, whereas I wear
armour’.
Possibly the original language was Greek, and this collection of secular
narratives on Arab-Byzantine encounters in the seventh-century was then
translated into Syriac by Theophilus of Edessa (d. 785), court astrologer
in Baghdad, and incorporated into his broader history of the Near East
up until the coming to power of his patrons, the Abbasids. However, this
remains speculative.
What is clear, though, is that this text had an enormous reach,
circulat- ing far and wide around the Middle East, crossing
confessional bounda- ries as it went. For example, it appears in East
Syrian/Nestorian circles in north Mesopotamia:14
Theophanes: Oumaros started to build the temple at Jerusalem, but the
structure would not stand and kept falling down. When he enquired after
the cause of this, the Jews said: ‘If you do not remove the cross that is
above the church on the Mount of Olives, the structure will not stand’. On
this account the cross was removed from there and thus their
building was consolidated. For this reason Christ’s enemies took
down many crosses.
Chronicle of Seert: ‘Umar ordered that there be built in Jerusalem a mosque
on the place of the tomb of Solomon … When they had built what
‘Umar ordered, it fell down. They did it again, but when they had built it
a second time, it fell down again. The Jews were asked about the reason for
it and they said that if the cross placed on top of the Mount of Olives,
opposite Syria, was not removed, then the building would not stay up. The
Christians were asked to remove it; they obligingly took it down and the
building stabilised.

The Muslim Tradition

On the face of it one might think that Muslim histories provide ample
scope for recovering earlier lost sources. Firstly, Muslim historians fre-
quently name their informants, so one could – and some Islamicists do
– simply collect all the quotations of a particular author and publish
them as a distinct text of that author.15 Secondly, Muslim historians
narrate
14. Hoyland, Theophilus, pp. 126–27.
15. This is a very common practice of Middle East scholars. An example by a
Western scholar is Gordon Newby’s attempt to recover the first part of Ibn Ishaq’s Life of
Muhammad (The Making of the Last Prophet: A Reconstruction of the Earliest Biography of
Muhammad [Columbia SC, 1989]); see the review by Lawrence Conrad in JAOS 113 (1993),
pp. 258– 63.

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 116 R. HOYLAND

many of the events of early Islamic history in very similar ways with very
similar phrasing, and one might think that by comparing all the different
versions of an event one should be able to get back to the original or at
least to an earlier version. However, matters are not quite so simple. In
particu- lar, the compilers of histories, though they often gave the
impression that they were faithfully citing their sources, evidently felt
free to refashion them and to combine them without acknowledging
this activity.
Modern scholars have demonstrated this time and time again, and I
will present here just one example, taken from the classic study of Stefan
Leder on the downfall of Khalid al-Qasri, who was governor of Iraq
and the eastern provinces under the caliph Hisham for more than a
decade (724–37).16 An ‘Account of the Killing of Khalid al-Qasri’ was
composed by al-Haytham ibn ‘Adi (d. 207/822), and this survives in
fragments excerpted by later writers. Two episodes present Khalid in
conversation first with ‘Uryan ibn Haytham and then with Bilal ibn Abi
Burda, two of his close subordinates. The essential plot in both consists
in the subordi- nates’ vain attempt to warn Khalid of the ‘evil
intentions’ of the caliph’s tribe of Quraysh. Both conclude with a
prediction. ‘Uryan remarks: ‘It is as if he were already dismissed,
everything taken from him, and accused of what he did not do, and
having nothing at his disposal – and so it came to pass’; and Bilal
says: ‘It is as if with this man (Khalid’s successor) there were sent a man
unkind, of odious character, deficient in piety and shame, who set upon
him with malice and vindictiveness – and so it came to pass.’ Both
episodes depict the historical situation in very general terms, the
operative factors in it being the envy of Quraysh and the caliph’s power
to dispose. The main focus is rather on the character of Khalid, stubborn
and proud, maintaining until the end: ‘Never shall I give in out of
meekness/compulsion.’
Haytham remains withdrawn from the narrative, so lending it an
aura of objectivity. He provides isnads which go back to ‘Uryan and
Bilal, and presents these two as telling their own story in their own
words, he him- self being no more than a copyist. It is nevertheless
clear that there is a single narrator who, though apparently distant
from the world of the characters, is very much in charge. The concluding
prediction, for exam- ple, is retrospective, and so can only be the work
of someone acquainted with the outcome, and its function is evidently to
connect the present incident to future events. It also contains an
interpretation of the dialogue, drawing our attention to the meaning
and consequences of Khalid’s

16. Stefan Leder, ‘Features of the Novel in Early Historiography: The Downfall of
Xalid al-Qasri’, Oriens 32 (1990), pp. 72–96.

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 HISTORY WRITING IN THE TIME OF ISLAM’S BEGINNINGS 117
attitude. For when coupled with the comment, which appears in
both episodes, that Khalid owed all his present wealth and high rank to
the caliph, it is hinted that, by his refusal to comply, Khalid is at least
partly responsible for his own fall from grace.
Haytham’s account was taken up and reworked by subsequent
transmit- ters. That these ‘transmitters’ did indeed actively rework it
is immedi- ately evident from a comparison of the versions in the
histories of Tabari (d. 314/923) and Baladhuri (d. 279/892). The latter’s
is much shorter, but this is not just the result of abridgement. In the
‘Uryan episode, for exam- ple, the dialogue is very simple in Baladhuri’s
version. ‘Uryan openly speaks his mind, and Khalid interjects only twice:
once to say that he does not suspect ‘Uryan of malice, nor anticipate
any danger, and a second time to aver that he will never humiliate
himself by making concessions. In Tabari’s rendering, however, the
format is much more complex. The two men are made to have much more
of a conversation, with Khalid responding five times to the advice
proffered by ‘Uryan. This means that, though we know the outlines of al-
Haytham ibn ‘Adi’s account, we cannot be sure of its details. Was it
closer to the version of Baladhuri or of Tabari or have both of these
later writers developed it in substantially different directions?

The Christian and the Muslim Tradition

We have so far dealt with the Christian and Muslim traditions of his-
tory writing separately, but they were in fact not sealed off from each
other, and there is quite a lot of material that circulates across the
two traditions in the seventh and eighth centuries. It is often not clear
by what means material crossed geographical and confessional
boundaries, but that it did so is abundantly clear. Since this
phenomenon has not been much remarked upon, it is worth giving a
few examples here.
My first instance of shared material comes from the Sasanian Persian
Empire. Sadly we have no extant historical narratives emanating directly
from this realm, and for the purposes of this paper I shall accept the
widespread assumption that there was an official Persian historical tradi-
tion and that it was taken up and further developed by Muslim historians
(such as Tabari, cited here):17
Chronicle of Khuzistan (circa 660): The Persians entered it (Jerusalem),
seiz- ing the bishop and the city officials, torturing them for (information
on) the wood of the Cross and the contents of the treasury … They revealed
to them the wood of the Cross, which lay hidden in a vegetable
garden.

17. References given in Hoyland, Seeing Islam, p. 42.

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 118 R. HOYLAND

Tabari (d. 923): The Persians came to Jerusalem and seized its bishop, the
clergy in it and the rest of the Christians for (information on) the wood
of the Cross, which had been put in a golden casket and buried in a
garden with vegetables planted over it.
The presence of material ultimately of Christian origin in Tabari’s
account reflects the increased influence of Christians in the Persian
realm during the reigns of Hormizd IV (579–90) and Khusrau II (591–
628). The latter was particularly important, for not only was he married
to a Chris- tian, Shirin, but was for a time, by virtue of his conquest
of Egypt and the Levant, the ruler of many Christians. And in the
eleventh century Chronicle of Seert, which is an Eastern Christian
compilation in Arabic of earlier histories, most of which were originally
composed in Syriac, we can observe a marked change in focus with the
reign of Hormizd IV: much more material on the politics of the
Persian emperor’s court and his relationship with a range of Christian
elites, both lay and ecclesiasti- cal. The entry on Hormizd IV in the
Chronicle of Seert begins with a note taken, it says, from the “royal
annals” (akhbār al-mulūk), implying that the narrative in this section,
with its international scope and concern for the relationship between the
church and its leadership, was seen as bound up with official Persian
history (as recorded in the putative ‘Book of Lords’, Xwadāy-Nāmag).
A similar argument could be made for the Syriac Khuzistan Chronicle,
cited above, which also begins with the reign of Hormizd IV and
continues to focus on the Sasanian realm up to its collapse in 652.
There are reasons to think that Christian history writing contributed
much to Persian historiography at this time. In particular, the portrayal
of Persian kingship gets a Christian makeover in the Persian/Islamic
narratives as well as in the Christian ones. For example, a speech attrib-
uted to Hormizd IV has him reprimand some Zoroastrian priests
who had urged him to persecute the Christians, counselling them to
bolster Zoroastrianism by the practice of virtue rather than by the
exercise of coercion. He reminds them, in a passage frequently cited, that
the religions of the empire are like the legs of the royal throne: they
are crucial to the maintenance of equilibrium and balance.18 The image
presented here is not of a Christian emperor, but of an emperor who
is the defender of religious pluralism against wily Zoroastrian
advisers seeking to establish

18. Most recently see Scott McDonough, ‘The Legs of the Throne: Kings, Elites and
Subjects in Sasanian Iran’, in J.P. Arnason and K.A. Raaflaub (eds.), The Roman Empire in
Context (Chichester–Malden MA, 2011), p. 308; M. Stausberg, ‘From Power to
Powerless- ness: Zoroastrianism in Iranian History’, in A.N. Longva and A.S. Roald
(eds.), Religious Minorities in the Middle East (Leiden, 2012), p. 175.

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 HISTORY WRITING IN THE TIME OF ISLAM’S BEGINNINGS 119
a religious monopoly. This may or may not reflect Hormizd’s actual
thinking, but what is important is that it reveals to us how Christians
living under Persian rule envisaged their relationship with the imperial
office and their strategy for tackling their Zoroastrian opponents, por-
traying them as inimical to the stability of the empire in contrast to
the Christians, who were loyal subjects of the emperor with a keen
interest in the success and continuity of his rule. In Ṭabari’s account,
this positive image of Hormizd is augmented by his portrayal as defender
of the down- trodden. For instance, after the court scene with the
Zoroastrian priests, Ṭabari narrates how the emperor rebuked the future
Khusrau II when he tramples the crops of a farmer, ordering that the
prince’s horse’s tale be docked in punishment.19
As a second example, I would like to draw attention to a degree of
similarity in the portrayal of a number of different aspects of Umayyad
history in Syria. It is often not so close that one can argue for direct
copying from one source to another, but the same basic ingredients
are present in much the same order so that one suspects at least some
indirect linkage. The account of the Mardaite raids in northern Syria, for
instance, follow much the same format in both the Eastern source (see
above) and Baladhuri: the Mardaites set off from the Byzantine capital,
ascend Mount Lebanon and capture territory from the Black Mountain
southwards, joined by prisoners-of-war and natives:20
Agapius [Theophanes]: The Romans boarded ships and set off in them on
the sea until they came to the coast of Tyre and Sidon. Then they
disembarked and seized Mount Lebanon and took refuge in it. People
called them Jarajima. Having seized Mount Lebanon they spread from
the Mountain of Galilee to the Black Mountain [The Mardaites entered
Mount Lebanon and made themselves masters from the Black Mountain as
far as the holy city and captured the peaks of Lebanon. Many slaves,
captives and natives took refuge with them so that in a short time they
grew to many thousands].
Ibn ‘Asakir [Baladhuri]: The Byzantine Emperor sent Plqt the patrician at
the head of a group of Byzantines by sea; he led them until they anchored
at Wajh al-Hajar. He advanced with his men until he had ascended Mount
Lebanon and dispersed his commanders throughout the mountain range
until they reached Antioch and other places by the Black Mountain. [A large
number of the Jarajima, the anbāṭ (native Aramaeans) and the runaway

19. In these two paragraphs I draw freely from Philip Wood, ‘The Christian Reception
of the Xwadāy-Nāmag: Hormizd IV, Khusrau II and Their Successors’, JRAS 26
(2016),
pp. 407–22; I am grateful to Philip for allowing me to see an advance copy of this
insight- ful article.
20. Hoyland, Theophilus, pp. 169–70 (Agapius and Theophanes); Ibn ‘Asakir, Ta’rīkh,
ed. ‘A. Shibri (Beirut, 1995–98), XX, p. 145; Baladhuri, Ansāb al-Ashrāf VI, ed. K. Athamina
(Jerusalem, 1993), p. 141.

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 120 R. HOYLAND

slaves of the Muslims followed them.] The Jarajima captured all the moun-
tains of Lebanon and the Anti-Lebanon (Snir), Mount Hermon and the
mountains of the Golan.
The best illustration of this phenomenon is provided by the siege of
Constantinople. The accounts of this event in a number of Muslim and
Christian texts have many of the same themes: Maslama contacting
Leo, Leo deceiving Maslama with promises of aid, the role of the Bulgars
in harrying the Muslims, extreme deprivation suffered by the Muslim
troops, the attempt of Maslama to hide the accession of ‘Umar II and the
latter’s calling off of the siege, and ‘Umar’s measures to help Muslim
troops get home. Occasionally we encounter passages where the wording
is close enough to claim a common source, even if via an indirect
route:21
Dionysius of Tel-Mahre (d. 845): King ‘Umar sent reinforcements to support
those who were returning by land with more than 20,000 mules and some
horses, for all the Arabs were without mounts when they left because all
their livestock had perished of starvation… He also sent instructions
throughout his empire that everyone who had a brother or other relative in
the army under Maslama’s command should go out to escort him home,
taking provisions for the journey.
Ibn Khayyat (d. 854): In this year (99/717–18) ‘Umar ibn ‘Abd al-‘Aziz
had food and mounts brought to Maslama ibn ‘Abd al-Malik in the lands
of the Byzantines. He ordered that everyone who had relatives there go
to them, and he also sent troops with them to relieve the people. Then he
gave them permission to return.
Very likely underlying all this shared material is a contemporary account
of the Arab siege of Constantinople that was composed in Syria
and circulated widely.

CONCLUSION
The answer to the question that I posed at the beginning of this paper
is yes, history was still being written in the seventh and eighth
centuries, but it has largely not survived because, besides the
unfavourable socio- political conditions, ninth century authors, living in
a very different world, felt the need to revise these earlier works.
Another point that I would like to make is that no clear confessional
divides exist among historians or among audiences. Writers and readers
seem willing to turn to works of those belonging to a different religious
or ethnic community to themselves.
21. Hoyland, Theophilus, p. 215 (Dionysius of Tel-Mahre); Wurtzel, Khalifa ibn Khayyat,
p. 196.

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 HISTORY WRITING IN THE TIME OF ISLAM’S BEGINNINGS 121
They may perhaps have had an esprit de corps of their own – thus the elite
freedmen of Egypt seem a tight-knit bunch, but this is often not the
simple sectarian, ethic and class ties that modern historians frequently
ascribe to them. For example, modern scholarship has often attributed
group solidar- ity to all freedmen vis-à-vis the Arab rulers, but one
cannot imagine the likes of Layth ibn Sa‘d and Yazid ibn Abi Habib
preferring the company of peasant converts from Upper Egypt to the
circles of the Arab governors and caliphs.

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