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HISTORY WRITING IN THE TIME OF ISLAM’S BEGINNINGS Robert Hoyland For those wishing to investigate Islam’s emergence and evolution it is particularly unfortunate that history writing across the Near East would appear to falter at the crucial moment, just as the Arab conquests begin. The genre of secu...

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History Writing in the Time of Islam's Beginnings Robert Hoyland

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HISTORY WRITING IN THE TIME OF ISLAM’S BEGINNINGS Robert Hoyland

For those wishing to investigate Islam’s emergence and evolution it is particularly unfortunate that history writing across the Near East would appear to falter at the crucial moment, just as the Arab conquests begin. The genre of secular classicizing history in Greek, which had had a continuous tradition stretching all the way back to Thucydides, finds its last exponent in Theophylact of Simocatta, whose narrative ends with the death of Emperor Maurice in ad 602. Church history in Greek, which was initiated in the early fourth century by the venerable Eusebius of Caesarea, though it had a promising start, found no continuator after John of Ephesus, who died in 595. In Syriac it did still find a voice, but none that were composed in the seventh and eighth centuries have survived intact and they live on only in excerpts cited by twelfth and thirteenth-century authors. Chronicles fared much better, but even here we possess no texts that were written in the period between the composition in the 630s of the Greek Chronicon Paschale and the Syriac chronicle of Thomas Presbyter on the one side, and the appearance in the 770s of the Syriac Chronicle of 775, the Syriac Chronicle of Zuqnin and the Greek Brief History of Patriarch Nicephorus at the other end.1 The situation might appear to be better when we turn to the Islamic sphere, since the coverage is very full, but the earliest extant chronicle dates only from the 840s, that of Khalifa ibn Khayyat (d. 845),2 and so again there is a surprising absence of texts written during the seventheighth centuries. This has puzzled many outsiders to the field, and one has recently put the matter very bluntly: Over the course of almost two hundred years the Arabs … composed not a single record of their victories, not one, that has survived into the present day. How could this possibly have been so when even on the most barbarous fringes of civilisation … books of history were being written during this same period?3 1. For all these texts and further discussion of the problem see my Seeing Islam as Others Saw It: A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian Wrings on Early Islam (Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam 13; Princeton, 1997), pp. 387–453. 2. Carl Wurtzel, Khalifa ibn Khayyat’s History on the Umayyads (Liverpool, 2015). 3. Tom Holland, In the Shadow of the Sword (Abacus, 2013), p. 39.

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Holland does not mention that we also lack Christian historical texts from the same period, but that does not solve the problem; what we need is a solution that can explain the dearth in both traditions. To put it crudely, we have to assume either that nothing was written or that everything was destroyed. The fact that many extant ninth-century histories relay much information about the seventh and eighth centuries means that the former option is unlikely, though it may well be that material was sparse. In the Byzantine case, the loss of many of their provinces, the waging of almost constant warfare and the enormous financial costs of both phenomena meant that there was little positive news to celebrate and little patronage for would-be historians. In the Islamic case, the fact that most Arab Muslims were soldiers and most non-Arab Muslims were prisoners-of-war for the first few decades after the death of Muhammad meant that a Muslim civilian society, from which history writing might arise, was slow to emerge. We must then assume the second option to be true, that everything was destroyed. I do not mean, though, deliberate and total destruction; rather, seventh- and eighth-century works were subjected to censure and revision. In the light of the momentous changes to political and religious life in the Near East in the seventh and eighth centuries, authors felt a need to rework these earlier accounts, which now seemed out of synchrony with present circumstances and values. We get an explicit indication of this from Ibn Hisham (d. 832), who, faced with the wide-ranging biography of the prophet Muhammad written by Ibn Ishaq (d. 767) some decades earlier, decides that he will omit ‘what does not pertain directly to the messenger of God and what does not find a place in the Qur’an and what I have seen none of the scholars recount’.4 This means that extant works from the seventh and eighth centuries do not survive in their original form, and the material that is quoted from them by later historians is likely to have been heavily redacted. Is it at least possible, though, to identify who was writing in these times and recover the substance of what they wrote? Though it is difficult to be certain, we do receive some tantalizing hints. Who Was Writing The Christian Tradition Very occasionally a chronicler may himself give us a hint about his aims and activities, as, for example, does George Syncellus, who in 4. Ibn Hisham, al-Sira al-nabawiyya (Dar Ibn Hazm; Beirut, 2009), p. 8.

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his youth lived as a monk in the region of Jerusalem before going to Constantinople to become personal assistant to the patriarch Tarasius of Constantinople (784–806). At the end of his life he set his mind to composing a world chronicle, which in the end he did not live to complete, but he explains his original intention in his introduction: From them [‘divinely inspired scriptures and the more illustrious historians’], I have extracted the greater part of this work, with the exception of a few things that have taken place in our own times. And I shall endeavour to make a kind of synopsis, always alert to combining continuity with accuracy, and maintaining correspondence in the sequence of events: I mean about the various kings and the numbering of priests, as well as prophets and apostles, martyrs and teachers …, culling everything from the aforementioned historians, to the extent that I am able. And finally, I shall treat the covenant, abominable to God, that has been made against Christ and our nation both by ‘the tents of the Idumaeans and by the Ishamaelites’ (Psalms 82.6), who hound the people of the Spirit and by the judgement of God also practise the apostasy that was prophesied by the blessed Paul for the end of days (2 Thess. 2.3). These things I shall describe to the best of my ability up to the current year, the 6300th from the creation of the universe, the first year of the indiction (808).5

More commonly we have to rely on later compilers to give us information about their sources for seventh- and eighth-century history. For example, Michael the Syrian, a twelfth-century patriarch of the West Syrian Church, helpfully tells us that for the period up to ag 1021 (ad 709) he relied heavily on the chronicle of Jacob, bishop of Edessa (684–88). In fact, says Michael, ‘the whole of Jacob’s chronicle pertinent to this subject is utilized here, for he methodically reported in his book the calculations of the years elapsed since Adam, that is, since the creation of the world’. Thereafter, continues Michael, ‘we have found no one who undertook these tabulations and computations of years, which show very clearly the passage of time’.6 What Michael means here is that the Eusebian style of chronology, setting out the events pertaining to different kingdoms in parallel columns, was not taken up by anyone after Jacob, and so this particular method of marking time died out at this point. 5. For this quotation and discussion of George see W. Treadgold, ‘The Life and Wider Significance of George Syncellus’, in M. Jankowiak and F. Montinaro (eds.), Studies in Theophanes (T&MByz 19; Paris, 2015), pp. 9–30. 6. Michael the Syrian, Chronicle, ed. J.-B. Chabot (Paris, 1899–1924), pp. 450, 482–83. Michael notes that though Jacob is said to have died in ag 1019 (707/708), the text of the chronicle he is using goes up to 1021, which he accounts for by assuming the intervention of a disciple of Jacob or an error in the reporting of Jacob’s death.

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The Islamic Tradition In the sphere of Muslim historiography we would appear to be particularly fortunate, for whereas Christian historians only rarely divulge their sources, many Muslim historians give a full list (isnad) of the authorities allegedly responsible for transmitting their material to them. Some Islamicists will accept these isnads without question, which permits them to present a lively picture of numerous seventh- and eighth-century Muslim scholars busily seeking out historical reports and carefully recording them in books.7 Since no such texts survive, however, Islamicists of a skeptical bent either refuse to accept the validity of these isnads or take the view that, even if valid, they do not help us, since by the time it reaches its final form in extant ninth-century books the material has been substantially transformed in the course of its transmission.8 It is possible, however, that the lists of authorities, even if the individual names in them cannot be linked to specific texts, may be able to provide us with useful information. For example, a recent study of the extant ninth-century book entitled ‘The Conquests of Syria’ (Futuh al-Sham) composed by al-Azdi reveals that it has twenty-one informants in common with the work of the same title by the scholar Abu Mikhnaf (d. 774), which, though it does not survive, was much quoted by later chroniclers.9 The conclusion drawn from this by the author of the study is that al-Azdi is reliant upon Abu Mikhnaf’s text. There are other possible scenarios, but it is certainly evident that the two works are very closely related. It has also been suggested that we can use these lists to tell us more about the social and political background of those engaged in writing history. For example, a study by Edward Coghill of the informants cited in the Egyptian history of Abu ‘Amr al-Kindi notes that twenty-three of the thirty-nine Egyptian scholars mentioned are freedmen (mawlas, prisoners-of-war who were subsequently manumitted and converted to Islam). Of these twenty-three freedmen scholars, twelve, over half, are said to be affiliated to Quraysh, and five of these belonged to the ruling Umayyad clan. Therefore it appears that among those involved in transmitting historical knowledge about early Islamic Egypt freedman status was the norm and that Quraysh surpassed the other tribes in terms of 7. For example A.A. Duri, The Rise of Historical Writing among the Arabs, trans. Lawrence Conrad (Princeton, 1983); Amikam Elad, ‘The Beginnings of Historical Writing by the Arabs: The Earliest Syrian Writers on the Arab Conquests’, JSAI 28 (2003), pp. 65– 152. 8. Still the best presentation of the skeptical view is to be found in Patricia Crone, Slaves on Horses (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 3–17. 9. Suleiman Mourad, ‘On Early Islamic Historiography: Abu Isma‘il al-Azdi and his Futuh al-Sham’, JAOS 120 (2000), pp. 577–93.

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patronage of freedmen scholars. The disproportionate extent of patronage by Quraysh is crucial to understanding how this elite Meccan tribe maintained their status in the very different circumstances of the early Islamic caliphate. This can be seen in the accounts of the first Arab civil war in Ibn ‘Abd al-Hakam and al-Kindi. All the freedmen of the first two generations of transmitters are freedmen of Quraysh, and it seems reasonable to suppose that their clientage to Quraysh allowed them access to this elite, which could provide them with sources of direct, albeit biased, historical information. Appointments also point toward close contacts between these scholars and the ruling class. For example, the freedman Yazid ibn Abi Habib was appointed a judge of Egypt by the caliph ‘Umar II, and he directly passed on his historical knowledge to Ibn Lahi‘a, a judge of Egypt for the caliph al-Mansur, and Layth ibn Sa‘d, who served as head of the financial administration for al-Mansur. Thus the history recorded in Ibn ‘Abd al-Hakam and al-Kindi’s works appears to be history written by the senior religio-legal figures in the late Umayyad and early Abbasid establishment, whose status was bound up with official and institutional recognition.10

What They Wrote If we want, however, to get a sense of what was written in the seventh and eighth centuries and not just who was writing, then we need to do some detective work. The most tried and trusted method is to look for material that is cited by multiple writers, since this is a reasonable indication of dependence upon an earlier source. The Christian Tradition For the history of the seventh and eighth-century Near East the most discussed common source is the one used by the chroniclers Theophanes the Confessor (d. 817), Dionysius of Tel-Mahre (d. 845) and Agapius of Menbij (wr. 940s). Its existence was inferred more than two centuries ago from the large number of events that are recorded in similar manner and in similar order by all three writers across the period 630–750.11 Certain 10. This paragraph draws on the findings of my doctoral student Edward Coghill in his M.A. thesis: Qurashi Clientage and Egyptian Historical Knowledge: A First Look at the Affiliations of a Local Egyptian Historiography (Chicago, 2014). 11. Much has been written on this putative source; most recently see the articles by myself, Marek Jankowiak, Muriel Debié and Maria Conterno in Jankowiak and Montinaro, Studies in Theophanes.

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of these events, particularly those treating warfare and diplomacy between the Arab and Byzantine rulers, are recounted in considerable detail, with a strong narrative style and a distinctively pro-Byzantine slant. A few describe victories for the Byzantines: their triumph in the naval battle of Phoenix in 654/55 off the coast of southwest Anatolia, the thwarting of a revolt by the general Shabur against Emperor Constans, the stalling of an Arab naval advance on Constantinoplecirca 670, the successful launch of incursions by guerrillas in the mountains of Lebanon circa 680, and Leo III’s breaking of the Arab siege of Constantinople in 717–18, which would appear to conclude this set of narratives. Other reports concern Byzantine defeats, but even here a pro-Byzantine note is struck: there is the heroic figure of the patrician Sergius, who sought to defend Palestine against the Arabs in 634 and who, having fallen off his horse, brushes aside offers of help from his soldiers, selflessly advising them rather to run and save themselves from the pursuing Arabs. Then there is the loyal chamberlain Andrew who courageously stands his ground against the caliph Mu‘awiya and lectures him on noble conduct. By contrast, Arab victories are often explained away by recourse to adverse conditions (for example wind and sand at the battle of Yarmuk) or the deceitful cunning of the Arabs, and Arab leaders are often portrayed in a negative light; thus Mu‘awiya is depicted as greedy and base in his decision to support the rebel Shabur instead of Andrew the Chamberlain, and he is said to have been frightened at the news of the Mardaite incursions.12 The original language of these accounts is uncertain. Greek or Syriac are the obvious contenders, but the language is so simple and unadorned that, even when we can discern direct correspondence in wording in the citations of the later chroniclers, making a firm judgment between the two is difficult. A good example occurs in the encounter between the Arabs and Manuel, the new commander-in-chief of Egypt, who refuses to hand over to respect the tribute agreement that the patriarch Cyrus had arranged:13 Theophanes: At the end of the year the Saracen tribute collectors came to receive the gold (πληρωθέντος τοῦ χρόνου οἱ τῶν Σαρακηνῶν πράκτορες παρεγένοντο λαβεῖν τὸ χρυσίον), but Manuel drove them away saying that ‘I am not unarmed like Cyrus that I should pay you tribute. Nay, I am armed’.

12. For references and further discussion see my Theophilus of Edessa’s Chronicle and the Circulation of Historical Knowledge in Late Antiquity and Early Islam (Liverpool, 2011), pp. 23–29. 13. Hoyland, Theophilus, pp. 109–13.

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Dionysius: When a year had passed, the emissaries of the Arabs came to ̈ Egypt as usual to receive the gold (‫ܐܝܙܓܕܐ‬ ‫ܟܕ ܫܠܡܬ ܫܢܬܐ ܐܬܘ‬ ̈ ‫ ܕܢܣܒܘܢ ܠܕܗܒܐ‬... ‫ )ܕܛܝܝܐ‬and they found Manuel encamped at Fustat. He replied to them: ‘I am not Cyrus, who used to give you gold. He did not wear armour, but a woollen tunic, whereas I wear armour’.

Possibly the original language was Greek, and this collection of secular narratives on Arab-Byzantine encounters in the seventh-century was then translated into Syriac by Theophilus of Edessa (d. 785), court astrologer in Baghdad, and incorporated into his broader history of the Near East up until the coming to power of his patrons, the Abbasids. However, this remains speculative. What is clear, though, is that this text had an enormous reach, circulating far and wide around the Middle East, crossing confessional boundaries as it went. For example, it appears in East Syrian/Nestorian circles in north Mesopotamia:14 Theophanes: Oumaros started to build the temple at Jerusalem, but the structure would not stand and kept falling down. When he enquired after the cause of this, the Jews said: ‘If you do not remove the cross that is above the church on the Mount of Olives, the structure will not stand’. On this account the cross was removed from there and thus their building was consolidated. For this reason Christ’s enemies took down many crosses. Chronicle of Seert: ‘Umar ordered that there be built in Jerusalem a mosque on the place of the tomb of Solomon … When they had built what ‘Umar ordered, it fell down. They did it again, but when they had built it a second time, it fell down again. The Jews were asked about the reason for it and they said that if the cross placed on top of the Mount of Olives, opposite Syria, was not removed, then the building would not stay up. The Christians were asked to remove it; they obligingly took it down and the building stabilised.

The Muslim Tradition On the face of it one might think that Muslim histories provide ample scope for recovering earlier lost sources. Firstly, Muslim historians frequently name their informants, so one could – and some Islamicists do – simply collect all the quotations of a particular author and publish them as a distinct text of that author.15 Secondly, Muslim historians narrate 14. Hoyland, Theophilus, pp. 126–27. 15. This is a very common practice of Middle East scholars. An example by a Western scholar is Gordon Newby’s attempt to recover the first part of Ibn Ishaq’s Life of Muhammad (The Making of the Last Prophet: A Reconstruction of the Earliest Biography of Muhammad [Columbia SC, 1989]); see the review by Lawrence Conrad in JAOS 113 (1993), pp. 258– 63.

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