Arabic Historical Thought in the Classical Period.

• Author: Meisami, Julie Scott

Over the past decades scholars have turned increasingly to examining how classical and medieval historians in the West thought about the past. A number of important studies (too many to name here) have shown how early historians constructed meaningful visions of the past. Tarif Khalidi's Arabic Historical Thought is a welcome effort in the same direction, one long overdue in a field still largely preoccupied with questions of reliability of sources, of influences, of "schools" of history, and less often addresses broader issues; but the book is not without its problems.

Most Arab historians were not "specialists," but came from various disciplines or professions, and their writing of history was colored by disciplinary or occupational concerns. These concerns inform the four epistemic "modes" (also termed "canopies" or "umbrellas") that Khalidi discerns in Arabic historiography, each seen to be dominant in a specific period: Hadith (7th-10th centuries), Adab (9th-11th), Hikma (10th-11th), and Siyasa (12th-15th); although he hastens to add that there is much overlapping between modes, and that the classification is intended primarily as a framework for exposition (p. xii).

Khalidi begins (ch. 1) with a brief discussion of views of the past in pre-Islamic poetry and in early Islam. Sadly, his treatment of the former is superficial, based largely on secondary studies, and betrays common misconceptions about the Jahiliyya (typical comments: "where future time is unknowable, past time holds no moral lessons" [p. 3]; "in an environment without code of law or ethical system, jahili poetry supplied much of the wisdom and the practical moral standards handed down from one generation to the next" [p. 4]). In fact, Jahili poetry both conveyed information about the past and drew moral lessons from it; it is marked by ideas of historical recurrence and of time found throughout the Mediterranean and the eastern lands which come to be expressed in the topos umam khaliya and inform the semantic field of dawla.

"The Arabs learnt a new history when they acquired a new religion," Khalidi argues. In the Koran, that religion's "axial text," "Islam and history are coeval.... time is less a chronology than a continuum" which ends with the last Prophet (pp. 7-8). "A providential scheme of history had thus been formulated in an environment where no textual tradition prepares us for its arrival" (p. 13). Providential history is, however, a feature both of Biblical historiography and Church history (as it is of Zoroastrian writings); and it can be argued that neither is a purely textual tradition a necessary condition for such a formulation, nor were the Arabs on the eve of Islam a tabula rasa upon which the Koran (and only the Koran) was inscribed. Khalidi notes arguments to this effect (e.g., by Franz Rosenthal, John Wansbrough, and M. M. Bravmann) but fails to engage with them - a basic weakness of his approach throughout.

Nor can the view that the rise of the early Islamic empire was "the single most important motive for the emergence of Islamic historiography" and that "Islamic-Arabic scholarship [began] in earnest in the seventy years following the death of the Prophet" (pp. 13, 14) be supported by evidence from later sources or by anecdote (e.g., that Mu??awiya was "the first systematic patron of Islamic historiography" [ibid., and cf. p. 84], which, as Khalidi himself admits, is in all likelihood a retrospective fabrication). It was not until ??Abd al-Malik (r. 685-705) that (largely for political motives) any systematic effort was made to collect and preserve either "knowledge" (??ilm) or "history," in the form of Hadith (discussed in ch. 2). But it if is true that, "At about the same period when [??Abd al-Malik] was standardizing the imperial coinage, Hadith was becoming the basic 'coinage' of Islamic scholarship and the isnad an essential aspect of its 'circulation'" (p. 22), neither the process involved, nor its political implications, are sufficiently explored. Khalidi does not seriously address either the tangled problem of the authenticity of Hadith (discussed briefly on pp. 25-27) or the larger historical issue, namely, that both the science of Hadith and the writing of history were the products of the circumstances surrounding the rise of the Abbasids.

Khalidi sees Hadith as giving rise to "sacred history," formalized in the Sira and Maghazi of ??Urwa ibn al-Zubayr (d. 94/712) and his pupil al-Zuhri (d. 124/742), whose accounts - known only from citations in later works - are said to display "the consciousness ... of a history being made by a community and arranged in accurate sequence to serve as moral and legal precedents. The transition from Hadith to history is the transition from providential to communal history" (p. 34). Wansbrough has suggested that Sira and Maghazi preceded the systematic collection of Hadith, and that the former is "providential," or salvation, history, the latter "communal" and a source of precedential example. One might also argue that there is no clear "transition," that Hadith and history serve different, if related, functions, and proceed in...