Al-Hira and its histories.

• Author: Wood, Philip
• Position: Essay

This study considers the production of history-writing in the Nasrid kingdom of al-Hira at the end of the sixth century. It argues that Hiran history-writing encompassed king-lists, stories of tribal migration, and episcopal histories for the see of Hira, and that the majority of these were composed in the era of the last Nasrid king, al-Nu'man III. It goes on to argue that the Hiran material embedded in later sources such as al-Tabari reflects the politics of the Hiran court in the period ca. 590-610, the last generation of Hiran independence.

The city of al-Hira in southwestern Iraq was famous in the Islamic period as a center for the production of Arab poetry and as the capital of Arab kings. (1) It can probably be identified with Hirta d-Nu'man of the Syriac sources, the capital of the "Persian Arabs" whose armed forces were a lynchpin of the western policy of the Sasanian shahs. (2)

In spite of its impressive military performance, however, we should remember that the success of the kings of al-Hira was brittle. Its power was based on a divide-and-rule policy among the tribes of inner Arabia whom it threatened, cajoled, and rewarded, just as the kings themselves demanded rewards from their Persian masters. The kings of al-Hira received landed estates and military support from the shahs, and in turn they appointed tribesmen as kings, military leaders, and tax collectors elsewhere in Arabia. (3) M. J. Kister suggested that some of these tribes actually pastured their flocks in the city's vicinity, while others represented an "outer circle" of allies who participated in mutually beneficial trade treaties. (4) Yet much of this system was the result of changeable and temporary treaty-building. Later Muslim authors would revel in the seizure of Persian equipment given to the king's allies or in the expansion of Mecca's trading interest, in the wake of al-Hira's decline, by men resentful of its haughty kings. (5)

Greg Fisher has emphasized that the kings of the Persian Arabs, like their rivals in Roman Syria, were examples of interstitial powers that inhabited the borderlands between Rome and Persia. (6) The kings of al-Hira themselves were, in M. B. Rowton's terminology, "dimorphic," able to play a role as Sasanian courtiers as well as leaders of an Arab federation. (7) This ability to adapt to different political situations and to act as channels for Sasanian influence explains both their success in this borderland and the suspicion with which these poachers-turned-gamekeepers were held in some early Muslim sources, who were sympathetic to their enemies in the Banu Tamim or Banu 'Awf. (8)

The "interstitial" position of the kings of the Persian Arabs in great power politics was mirrored in their capital city of al-Hira. Most of the kings were pagans, (9) yet the archaeological surveys of the early twentieth century have highlighted the Christian character of the border city. (10) The city hosted a bishop (Hosea) who signed the attendance lists of the 410 synod of Ctesiphon. (11) And Christianity was identified by Islamic-era sources as a defining feature of the 'Ibad, the elite stratum that co-existed with more recently settled migrants. (12) Still, it was only under the last independent ruler, al-Nu'man III, that the city's kings embraced the religion of its aristocracy.

Al-Hira in late antiquity was thus a Sasanian client state with a prominent Christian population. Syriac (a dialect of Aramaic), Arabic, and Persian must have all seen common use in the city. (13) Each of these language groups had its own traditions of historical memory, focused on the Christian church and holy men, (14) on tribal deeds of valor, (15) and on the reigns of the Sasanian kings, respectively. (16) It will be argued here that each of these traditions had a part to play in the creation of a distinctive set of Hiran histories centered on the reigns of its kings, almost all of whom were thought to stem from a single dynasty, the Nasrids. (17)

THE MEMORY OF AL-HIRA

Most of our information on al-Hira, and certainly our information for histories composed in al-Hira, is derived from Arabic sources from the ninth century and beyond, compiled by both Muslims and Christians. Much of this has passed through three, now lost, works of Hisham ibn al-Kalbi (d. 819), whose monumental volume on Arab tribal geneaology remains extant. (18) Several modern commentators have attempted to comb these Islamic-era accounts to write histoires evenementielles of the city and its kings in the Sasanian period. The foundational work of reconstruction in this school is Gustav Rothstein's late nineteenth-century monograph on the "Lakhmid" dynasty, which was succeeded in the twentieth century by the works of Irfan Shahid and J. S. Trimingham. (19) Much of this secondary material is very useful and thought-provoking, but it is has proceeded without source-critical treatment of the full range of the Arabic material.

To some extent, the histories of al-Hira pose the same set of problems for the modern commentator as the sources for seventh-century Islam; that is, they may tell us much more about the context in which they were transmitted and composed than they do about the events that they relate. (20) M. J. Kister and M. Plessner analyzed the work of Ibn al-Kalbi in just this light. They show how his genealogical analysis fits into the Abbasid construction of the jahiliyya, whereby prominent Baghdadis sought to prove their Arabness in a multi-ethnic environment whose connections to the Arab peninsula and its history had become unclear. (21) Such claims build on the earlier assertions of nobility and prowess by different tribal groups, some of which may have stressed a Hiran connection (whether real or imagined) for its associations with lineage, wealth, and Arab culture. (22) Furthermore, for a later Muslim audience, the Christian associations of al-Hira may have also been attractive. As Thomas Sizgorich observed, some of Ahmad b. Hanbal's Muslim correspondents understood Arabian Christians such as the martyrs of Najran to have been proto-Muslim. (23) In an environment where early conversion to Islam was highly prestigious, a monotheist ancestry that predated Muhammad may have been a desirable characteristic for tribal history. (24)

Rather than focusing on the context of their compilation or the third- to sixth-century realities they purport to describe, here I attempt to use the Hiran histories to investigate the period of their written composition. In other words I intend to investigate the patterns and agendas of the Hiran material preserved in the Arabic compilations to make some initial statements on how and why this material was created. The later universal histories such as that by al-Tabari draw on the work of earlier collectors, of whom one is Ibn al-Kalbi; these in turn produced unified histories of al-Hira by drawing on a series of disparate source traditions--the genealogies of the kings; reports (akhbar) about specific kings; divergent narratives of the Arab settlers of al-Hira; tales of the foundation of its monasteries; and accounts of the deeds of its bishops. I focus my inquiry on this earlier layer of sources, many of which were composed in the last generation before the Sasanian collapse. (25)

TALES OF THE FOUNDATION OF AL-HIRA

The richest of the compilations that discuss al-Hira is that of al-Tabari (d. 923), and I will use the material he preserved as a chief example of the complex and varied histories of the city and its kings. Al-Tabari presented Hiran history in a series of excursus from his narratives of the Sasanian shahs. (26) He gave numerous different "foundational" moments for the city, its royal dynasty, and the wider confederation that it ruled.

One of these stories is devoted in particular to the royal foundation of the city and the role of the 'Ibad. Al-Tabari draws on Ibn al-Kalbi to describe the flight of the Tanukh from Iraq during Ardashir I' s reign (224-241), the settlement of al-Hira, and the subsequent division of the city and its environs between three groups: the 'Ibad, who dwelled in fortified houses in the city proper; the Tanukh, who lived in hair tents across the river; and the ahlaf, more recent migrants from the south. (27) These events serve as a "social charter" for al-Hira, whereby these three different groups are demarcated by their behavior and their individual histories. The 'Ibad were allegedly the original migrants to the city, the companions of the first Nasrid king, 'Amr ibn 'Adi, while the ahlaf were bound to them by a treaty (hilf) of mutual protection and may have gradually assimilated into the settled population. (28)

Ibn al-Kalbi's account of the social charter does not provide any further information on the composition of the 'Ibad, but it is clear from other sources that membership in this group was prestigious and monitored through genealogical lists. (29) Although the 'Ibad's Christianity was obviously an important feature of their identity, (30) it does not seem to have been a sufficient criterion; Ibn al-Kalbi's account maintains that membership was limited to the companions of 'Amr. (31) Yet it should also be recognized that this social charter was probably invoked to protect the status quo for a privileged group and that its image of a changeless political order, legitimated by events in the past, is likely to be a retrojection of the situation at the time of composition. (32)

My chief concern here is with the Hiran kings and the 'Ibad. Space does not allow a survey of the many contradictory accounts of al-Hira's foundation in full, but we should always bear in mind that there were other ways of telling al-Hira's story that gave a much greater role to those who preferred to represent it as part of Arabian tribal history, to "Bedouinize" al-Hira. (33) We might speculate that they formed part of the oral histories of Tanukh or of the ahlaf who dwelt near al-Hira and participated in...