The History of al-Tabari, vols. 34-38.

• Author: Irwin, Robert

The period covered by the volumes under review runs from A.H. 227/841-42 A.D. to 302/914-15, that is, from the accession of the Caliph al-Wathiq to the early years of al-Muqtadir. Tabari's history, entitled the Tarikh al-Rusul wa'l-Muluk, began with the creation and, in the present edition, it takes 27 volumes to reach the beginning of the Abbasid period. Al-Tabari, who was born in 225/839, was an infant when al-Wathiq came to power. The Zanj revolt took place while al-Tabari was in his early thirties. He continued to lecture on history until 294/907. Copies of the history were allegedly put on the market in 302/915. He died in 310/923. He wrote in the same century as the Carolingian historian, Einhard.

For the most part, al-Tabari's Arabic and the Arabic of the sources he quotes is plain and easy to read. However, in almost every section of his work, one encounters passages of almost impenetrable obscurity, textual corruptions, rare words, and symbolic actions the symbolic meaning of which has been forgotten. Therefore the appearance of an accessible English translation (undertaken by the Center for Iranian Studies, Columbia University) is to be commended, for it makes a consideration of some of the general issues raised by al-Tabari's history much easier.

The earlier volumes in this series offered a vision of history as well as demonstrating a methodology. Al-Tabari narrated the story of the passage of humanity through the centuries and, from the seventh century onwards, more narrowly the Islamic community. God's people are at first warned and guided by prophets, then more latterly by the caliphs. History is the story of the testing of the umma by God. Al-Tabari named and collated his sources and used chains of transmitters and authorities to authenticate the contents of his history. However, by the time he came to write of events in his own times, he seems to have lost his way. In part, fear of giving offence to the palace may have cramped his style as a historian. He remarks at one point that he dares not write all that he knew about the murder of the Caliph al-Mutawakkil in 247/861. But a politic discretion cannot explain the sketchy and perfunctory nature of much of the latter part of his history. It is true he was curiously obsessed with the story of the Zanj and their prolonged guerilla war against the central authority in the marshlands of lower Iraq, and he provides a lot of detail about this struggle, but despite the detail and the frequent recourse to official communiques and eyewitness accounts, the story he tells is shapeless and confusing. Thereafter, al-Tabari's great history tails off into faits divers and gleanings from official bulletins. When al-Tabari records the death of a singing girl, Bidah, in 302/915, Franz Rosenthal comments in the accompanying footnote that it "is worth noting that this trivial item in fact concludes a majestic work that deals with events that are among the greatest in world history." The broad horizons have been reduced to what is for the most part a scrappy account of parish-pump Muslim politics in Baghdad. Khurasan, Syria and Egypt were lost to the caliphate while al-Tabari engrossed himself in the intrigues of Turkish generals in Samatra and the revolt of the Zanj. Writing in the Times Literary Supplement (14 March 1986), Dr. Hugh Kennedy, translator of one of the earlier volumes in the Tabari project, observed that "Tabari was, perhaps, a recognizable type of bachelor don, translated into the environment of bourgeois Baghdad a thousand years ago. . . ." Those who have read al-Tabari and have been infuriated by the man's noncommittal presentation of variant accounts of past events will instantly see what Kennedy means, and up to a certain point, it is a persuasive view of the...