The Early Arabic Historical Tradition: A Source Critical Study.

• Author: El-Hibri, Tayeb

By ALBRECHT NOTH. With the collaboration of LAWRENCE CONRAD. Translated by MICHAEL BONNER. Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam, 3. Princeton: DARWIN PRESS, 1994. Pp. xi + 258. $27.50.

The collaboration of Lawrence Conrad and Albrecht Noth in updating and expanding Noth's 1973 study, Quellenkritische Studien zu Themen und Tendenzen fruhislamischer Geschichtsuberlieferung, marks a critical development in the study of early Islamic historiography. Gratitude is due Dr. Michael Bonner at the outset for rendering this updated version of the German work into English, thus making it accessible to a wider audience.

Early Islamic historiography has received renewed attention by medieval Islamic historians recently as scholars try to reconstruct a coherent synthesis of the transition from the world of late antiquity to that of early Islam. In the absence of sizable historical sources on the momentous changes that took place in the seventh century, the later Islamic chronicles of the ninth and tenth centuries remain the primary focus for specialists. How one reads these sources, however, is a question on which many are still divided. The authors of this study, focusing primarily on evidence drawn from the period of the early Arab conquests (especially the reigns of Abu Bakr and Umar), highlight problems of textual reliability and authenticity in the sources, and suggest a set of new directions for distilling fact from fiction.

Problems include the variety of narratives describing events, the occasional element of hagiography, and the inevitable tendentiousness of a history finally transferred from oral to written form two centuries after the rise of Islam. Most scholars have continued to write synthetic history without providing sufficient explanation of the criteria used in selecting certain information from the texts or for relying on certain sequences of narratives chosen from a variety of narrative versions. Conventional wisdom dating to the age of Wellhausen, de Goeje, and Caetani had it that the historical narratives can be divided into two "schools," the Hijazi and the Iraqi, on the basis of the identity of compilers. And, in light of the fact that the Iraqi school shows greater inconsistencies, scholars were generally inclined to see the Hijazi school as more reliable (p. 15).

The authors correctly break with that view, arguing instead that the compiled texts of individual authors in any given school often include material attributed to another school. Ya qubi, for example, often labeled a Shi i, provides a historical outline that is essentially Sunni. Neither the so-called "schools," nor the individual compilers should be taken as the primary criteria for evaluating the veracity of the statements in each. Rather, Noth and Conrad propose a wider framework for reading the historical texts as a collection of narratives that underwent over time a process of emulation and variation according to stylistic and thematic considerations. This idea is immensely significant in a field that has long been primarily familiar with isnad-based approaches, which gave rise to the construct of "schools." While it is difficult to ascertain the point of origin of specific stories, reports over time underwent embellishment and stylistic systematization that resulted increasingly in mirroring and uniformity. And in support of this view, the authors catalog numerous incidents that they show are tied together by a common stylistic thread or thematic motif, which is too regular and occurs too frequently to make all the narratives historically plausible.

As part of the attempt to find these common threads, Noth and Conrad apply a two-tiered approach, based on content and style, that shows patterns of repetition. In chapter 1, they outline what they consider to be the major themes around which the historical text was composed or developed. They divide these into primary and secondary themes. Primary themes are considered topics such as futuh (conquests), ridda (the apostasy), fitna (sedition), ansab (genealogies), and administration. These are themes that are said to have some roots in historical reality. Secondary themes, however, are said to be derived from the primary ones, and therefore provide less-reliable information to the historian (p. 27). Secondary themes are noted in such topics as: gharat (raids), dating according to Hijra, arrangement according to the caliphates,' and a slew of issues relating to law and administration, and the nature of central government - the idea here being that these themes guide much of the textual information (the topoi) that is examined later in the book. In chapter 2, Noth and Conrad analyze the frequent use of set literary forms, such as documents, letters, and speeches, as typical historical texts and point out how difficult it is to take...