The First Arabic Annals: Fragments of Umayyad History

136 Pages·2021·0.663 MB·English

by  Zychowicz-Coghill, Edward

EdwardZychowicz-Coghill
TheFirstArabicAnnals
Studies in the History
and Culture of the Middle East
Edited by
Stefan Heidemann, Gottfried Hagen, Andreas Kaplony,
Rudi Matthee, and Kristina L. Richardson
Volume 41
Edward Zychowicz-Coghill
The First Arabic
Annals
Fragments of Umayyad History
ISBN978-3-11-071265-0
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Acknowledgements
Thisisnotthethesisbook,butIfirstranintowhatIthoughtwasprobablyal-
Layth’s -Taʾrīkh during my doctoral research. As such, gratitude is due to all
thoseinvolvedinthethesis.ThoughIcouldn’tpossiblylistthemallhere,main
thanksmustgotomysupervisors,RobertHoylandandMarkWhittow.Whileit
may be impossible to guess where Robert is physically at any given time, he
has always been both good-natured and incisive from the other end of an
email.Mark,ontheotherhand,couldinevitablybefoundinBeamHall,grind-
ing coffee, or Holywell Street, flipping omelettes. Tragically, he is harder to
reach now. Though this book is not really his sort of thing, I hope to dedicate
something more flamboyant to him in future. James Howard-Johnston set me
down this path as an undergraduate and has commented valuably on every-
thing I have written since, acting as an extra supervisor despite his defuncti-
tude,ashehasdoneforsomanyinOxford.Allsplitinfinitivesaremyown.
Warmest thanks go to Michael Cook for convening the Holberg Seminar,
where this work was first presented, and the other participants that year, who
read and commented on an early draft of this work: Theo Beers, Lale Behzadi,
Antoine Borrut, Sébastien Garnier, Lidia Gocheva, Matthew Keegan, Pamela
Klasova,ChristianMauder,NajahNadi,KhaledEl-Rouayheb,andJackTannous.
ThosewhosuggestedIworkitintoabookturnedouttoberight.
IwouldalsothankStefanHeidemann,theboardofDerIslam,andthetwo
anonymousreviewers,bothfortheirsuggestionsandforencouragingthepubli-
cationofthisworkasabook.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110712896-202

Contents
Acknowledgements V
Introduction:AnArabicHistoryfrom8th-CenturyEgypt 1
1 UsingisnādstoIdentifyQuotationsofBooks 5
2 Repeatedriwāya-isnādstoal-Layth’s–TaʾrīkhPresentingCommon
Information 8
3 FiveIndependentWitnessestoIbnBukayr’sRecensionofal-Layth’s
-Taʾrīkh 13
WitnessOne:IbnʿAbdal-Ḥakam 13
WitnessTwo:Yaʿqūbb.Sufyānal-Fasawī 15
WitnessesThreeandFour:Baqīb.MakhladandḤarmalab.Yaḥyāal-
Tujībī 20
WitnessFive:AbūʿUmaral-Kindī 23
4 Al-Layth’s–TaʾrīkhorIbnBukayr’s? 25
5 TheScopeandContentofal-Layth’s–Taʾrīkh 30
Campaigns 32
PilgrimageNotices 34
GovernorNotices 35
DeathNotices 38
BattleandConquestNotices 40
CaliphalSuccessionNotices 41
NarrativeandOtherMaterial 42
SurvivalRate 43
Discussion 44
6 Al-LaythandIbnBukayr 51
Conclusions 57
Methodology:Riwāya-cum-matn 57
Al-Layth’s-Taʾrīkh 59
FurtherStudy 60
VIII Contents
EditionandTranslation 63
PrinciplesoftheEditionandTranslation 63
Al-Layth’s-Taʾrīkh 66
UndatedNotice 116
Bibliography 117
IndexofNamesandPlaces 123
Introduction: An Arabic History from 8th-Century
Egypt
Theaimofthisbookistodemonstratethatitispossibletoreconstructmuchof
thecontent,scope,andevenformofapieceofArabichistoricalwritingfromthe
mid-8th-centuryCE,the-Taʾrīkhofal-Laythb.Saʿd(d.175H/791CE).Iwillargue
that it is most plausibly a piece of late Umayyad annalistic historical writing
whoseexistencehas,tomyknowledge,notpreviouslybeendiscussed,substan-
tial amounts of which can be identified through its quotation in later texts. We
haveaccesstoveryfewfirmlyattributablesamplesof8thcenturyArabichistory-
writing.Yet,asPatriciaCronehasnoted,anUmayyadtraditionofchronography
andlistsofoffice-holdingmustunderlietheArabichistoricalrecord’sremarkable
ability to preserve names of early political actors, which can be confirmed
throughnon-literarysources.1Al-Layth’s-Taʾrīkhisapartofthattraditionwhich
wearenowabletoinspect.
Historical annals have not featured heavily in discussions of early Islamic
historiography, which have tended to focus on the more Arabic-specific type of
isnād-khabar historical writing: compilations of short, discrete narrations of
events written in a vivid, even ‘hard-boiled’ style.2 Duri’s traditional account of
theemergenceofArabichistoricalwriting,forexample,views‘[events’]classifi-
cationinchronologicalorder’asagiveninArabichistoricalthoughtfromthein-
vention of hijrī dating onwards and characterises the two strands of Arabic
historical writingas, on the onehand, maghāzī arising from religious traditions
of ḥadīth and, on the other, akhbār arising from tribal traditions of ayyām. Yet
despite his insistence on chronological ordering from the outset, Duri seems to
presentannalistichistoryasaculmination,arelativelylatefeatureofArabichis-
torical writing associated with the universalising historians of the 3rd and early
4th centuries.3 FranzRosenthaldevoted rathermoreattention tothe forminhis
1 Crone1980,17.IamgratefultoMehdyShaddelforrecentlybringingtomyattentionanother
piece of evidence for this: the manuscript survival, in the hand of Ibn ʿAsākir himself, of a
copyofayear-by-yearlistoftheleadersoftheḥajjfromtheaccessionofʿAlītothefallofthe
Umayyads,also notingthe successionsof caliphs.Originallycompiled bythe KūfanQurʾān
reciterAbūBakrIbnʿAyyāsh(b.97H/715-6CE,d.193H/809CE)itwasincorporatedwholesale
intothe-TaʾrīkhofAbūBishrHārūnb.Ḥātim(d.249H/863–4CE).Shaddelisworkingona
projectinvestigatingthisandothertextsofrelevancetotheriseoftheArabicannalistictradi-
tion.IbnʿAyyāsh’stext,withreferencestothemanuscript,canbefoundinal-Shihābī1978.
2 OnwhichseeLeder1992,Beaumont1996.
3 Duri1983,21for‘chronologicalorder’,pp.22–50formaghāzīandakhbār,p.75forannalistic
historyasalatedevelopment.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110712896-001
2 Introduction:AnArabicHistoryfrom8th-CenturyEgypt
survey of Muslim historiography, stating that the earliest surviving histories or-
ganised by date were penned by authors who died in the mid-9th century, and
that the earliest known annalist was Haytham b. ʿAdī (d. c.206–209 H/821–825
CE),conclusionsthathavebeenreiteratedrecentlybyRobinson,Andersson,and
Marsham.4InthisbookIwillargueratherthatannalisticrecordsofeventswere
apartofthedevelopingtraditionofArabichistoricalwritingfromitsinceptionin
the Marwānid period, that we have the material to trace the development of
Arabic annalistic history before our earliest extant examples of it, and that al-
Layth’slost-Taʾrīkhisanimportantpartofthatstory.
Wewillseethatal-Layth’sTaʾrīkhisaprettyscantdatingrecordofevents.
Assuch,itmightnotbeviewedasaparticularlypromisingtopicforthehisto-
rian.HaydenWhite,however,longsincedemonstratedthepossibilityforread-
ing even the barest annalistic record as a representing a particular notion of
reality.5 The stories which we tell about early Islamic history are responses to
the stories which early Muslims chose to write about themselves, stories in
whichmemoriesofthepast–betheylivingorpreservedthroughtechnologies
of remembrance such as writing or oral instruction and memorisation – were
mademeaningfulthroughinclusioninparticularnarrativestructures.Thelaconic
account of historical annals might seem like a disinterested provision of neutral
data, but in their brevity they are if anything even more selective and program-
matic than other types of historical writing, constructing a remembered past
which privileges as significant particular categories of information and historical
processes.Assuch,al-Layth’s-TaʾrīkhisanimportantwitnesstohowIslamichis-
toryandtimewereenvisagedinoneoftheearliestArabichistorieseverwritten.
Furthermore,whileArabicannalswerenotasvoluminousasthemorelively
khabarswhichmakeupmostofthetextofourextantearlyArabichistories,they
ultimately did provide one of the key frameworks through which historians such
as al-Ṭabarī presented the rich data of the Arabic historical tradition. Al-Ṭabarī
himselfmakesitclearthatheisreliantonearlierauthorswhohaddevelopedchro-
nologiesofeventsbasedonthehijrīcalendar,repeatedlyinvokingthesameisnāds
totheminordertoprovidebriefdatingnotices.6Thetwomostcommonly-citedare
4 Rosenthal1968,71–86,pp.71–73ontheearliestworks,whereheplacesal-Wāqidīalongside
al-Haythamasayoungercontemporaryannalist.HisconclusionsarerestatedbyAndersson/
Marsham2017,24,andRobinson2003,30(‘al-Haythamb.ʿAdī. ..[was]thefirsttowritean
annalisticworkofhistory’),thoughatibid.,19,Robinsonsuggestsanearlierpointforannalis-
tichistoryalongsidecaliphalhistoryandpropheticbiographywhichwouldbetterfitthetime-
scalewhichIpropose.
5 White1987,6.
6 AsbrieflynotedbyRosenthal1968,73,forthecaseofal-Wāqidī,followingHorovitz.