Al-Mu afa b. Imran and the beginnings of the tabaqat literature.

AuthorRobinson, C.F.

In a recent volume of the Cambridge History of Arabic Literature, al-Mu afa b. Imran al-Mawsili (d. ca. 185 A.H.) is credited with a Kitab Tabaqat al-muhaddithin, which is said to be the earliest biographical dictionary in Arabic.(1) No authority is cited, but this view does not seem to have entered the literature until relatively recently,(2) with an article that Hafsi wrote in 1976,(3) in which he explicitly states his debt to the first volume of Sezgin's Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums.(4) Sezgin identified al-Mu afa among the earliest city historians of the Abbasid period,(5) arguing that Ibn Hajar used al-Mu afa's Ta rikh al-Mawsil; he also suggested that Yazid b. Muhammad al-Azdi (d. ca. 330) may have used it as well, but under a different title, the Kitab Tabaqat al-muhaddithin.(6) It is apparently this attribution that lies behind Hafsi's view. Now, it is worth noticing that the case for giving al-Mu afa pride of place in the tabaqat genre has been asserted rather than formally argued, and this is surprising when one considers not only that Heffening discussed several references to tabaqat works that are not only contemporaneous with or even precede Ibn Sa d's (d. 230) - and, according to Hafsi, al-Mu afa's -(7) but also have the virtue of coming from the centers of early Islamic learning; for regardless of how one cares to describe the inspiration for the genre,(8) one would expect its birth to have occurred in the south, among the Basrans and Kufans, rather than on the empire's periphery on the north. This said, it is certainly not impossible that a Mosuli such as al-Mu afa could have anticipated his more celebrated colleagues in the south, for as we shall shortly see, al-Mu afa studied in Iraqi circles, and in any case Syria seems to have produced a fairly early tabaqat work;(9) all we need is the evidence to demonstrate that he did. In these brief remarks I intend to show that although al-Mu afa was a significant figure in late Umayyad and early Abbasid Mosul, there is in fact no firm evidence that he authored a history of Mosul - under any title.

Sezgin adduces two pieces of evidence in support of his view. The first comes from Ibn Hajar's tarjama of Umm Abd Allah bint Aws al-Ansariyya, a companion of the Prophet who transmitted a hadith that Ibn Hajar then cites. The passage in question reads: la-ha hadith akhra-jahu Ahmad fi al-zuhd wa'l-Tabarani wa-Ibn Manda wa'l-Mu afa b. Imran fi ta rikh al-Mawsil wa'l-lafz la-hu thin turuq an Hamza b. Habib an Umm Abd Allah ukht Shaddad b. Aws annaha ba athat ila al-nabi ....(10) The crucial part might be translated as: "A hadith that is credited to her is cited by Ahmad [b. Hanbal] in [his book on] asceticism,(11) al-Tabarani,(12) Ibn Manda,(13) and al-Mu afa b. Imran in the Ta rikh al-Mawsil." Although it is certainly reasonable to take this passage as an allusion to a book authored by al-Mu afa b. Imran, (14) here it says nothing at all about the authorship of the Ta rikh al-Mawsil; it simply identifies the source in which the reader will find al-Mu afa's citation of the hadith. Ibn Hajar did not think of mentioning the author of the Ta rikh in question simply because any attentive reader of either his Isaba or Tahdhib knew it well. It is the Ta rikh al-Mawsil of Yazid b. Muhammad al-Azdi, which here, as in many other cases, is the name given to a now lost tabaqat work. In his Tahdhib, Ibn Hajar cites al-Azdi's biographical work at least eleven times, and there it appears both as a ta rikh and a tabaqat.(15) In his Isaba and Lisan al-mizan it seems to appear less frequently, but in both cases Ibn Hajar also cites it as a ta rikh and a tabaqat.(16)

The water is muddied somewhat by the fact that Ibn Hajar occasionally refers to al-Azdi himself as "Abu Zakariya al-Mu afa al-Mawsili,"(17) a name which is not otherwise attested, and which in at least one case has apparently been misread by an inattentive scribe as "Abu al-Mu afa."(18) But this has no significance for the question of the ta rikh's (or tabaqat's) authorship. The tarjama of Utba b. Farqad, which Ibn Hajar credits in his Isaba to Abu al-Mu afa fi ta rikh al-Mawsil,(19) is much the same tarjama that he credits in his Tahdhib to Abu Zakariya sahib ta rikh al-Mawsil,(20) and a variant of the same tradition is credited by Ibn al-Athir to al-Azdi as well.(21) Ibn Hajar's practice is therefore significant only in that it means that we should be on the lookout for scribal confusion about information credited to al-Mu afa b. Imran by al-Azdi, and information provided directly by "Abu al-Mu afa" al-Azdi himself. Be that as it may, none of these passages demonstrates that al-Mu afa b. Imran wrote a ta rikh or a tabaqat; they tell us only that al-Azdi did. This is why the multitude of tarjamas that concern al-Mu afa does not yield a single reference to a tabaqat work in his name.

Keeping in mind the two titles given to al-Azdi's work - the ta rikh and tabaqat - we can now examine the second piece of evidence cited by Sezgin. For this he turned to E Rosenthal's A History of Muslim Historiography, where Rosenthal, working only from a Cairo copy of al-Azdi's yet unpublished Ta rikh, noted a passage that he translated thus: "We gave a full account of the history (akhbar) of al-Mu afa (b. Imran) in the Kitab tabaqat al-muhadditin";(22) the Arabic reads: waqad dhakarna akhbar al-Mu afa fi kitab tabaqat almuhaddithin [dhikr.sup.an] [mustaqs.sup.an].(23) Although Sezgin seems to have taken this to mean that al-Azdi used a tabaqat work from al-Mu afa's pen, once again the passage refers only to al-Azdi's tabaqat of the learned men of Mosul. This should hardly surprise us. Unlike his city chronicle that has survived only in part, al-Azdi's tabaqat was widely available in the medieval period,(24) and its popularity may have stemmed from its thoroughness, for al-Azdi's tarjama of al-Mu afa impressed al-Dhahabi, who remarked that al-Azdi wrote over twenty leaves (waraqa) on him.(25) It is almost certainly from this lengthy tarjama that both Ibn Hajar and al-Dhahabi drew for much of their information on al-Mu afa; in his Siyar a lam al-nubala al-Dhahabi explicitly acknowledges his reliance on this tarjama, citing from it.(26) Since Ibn Hajar frequently draws on al-Azdi for material that is absent in al-Mizzi's Tahdhib,(27) it is also reasonable to assume that he was drawing directly on al-Azdi's work.

If we assume that al-Azdi had completed his tabaqat work when he cited it in his chronicle, we can date it to before 321, since this is when the latter broke off.(28) Of course we have moved several generations' distance from al-Mu afa, and if al-Azdi has now gained a tabaqat work, Mosul has lost pride of place in the development of the genre. In any case, we are probably better off looking for early tabaqat works in the south.

The precise lineage of Abu Mas ad,(29) al-Mu afa b. Imran, was a matter of some confusion,(30) but he was around sixty years old...

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