The Great Arab Conquests Read Online Free Page B

interpretation of the Koran and the history of Islam. He seems to have lived a quiet bachelor life, subsisting off the revenues of his family estates, which were brought to him by pilgrims from his homeland as they came through Baghdad on their way to Mecca and Medina. He made it his task to collect as much as he could of the writings of his predecessors and edit them into one mighty compilation. He also attempted, with considerable success, to order it. He adopted an annalistic framework in which the events of each year were recorded under the number of the year. He was not the first Arab writer to use this method, which may in turn have been inherited from the Greek tradition of chronicle writing, but no one else had used it to present such a vast amount of information. In many ways, his work made the individual publications of his predecessors redundant and virtually all later accounts of the history of the early Islamic world in general, and of the Muslim conquests in particular, were based on his mighty opus.
     
    Much of the material found in these early Arabic narratives of the conquests takes the form of vivid stories about events. These are not recounted in a continuous prose, as a modern historian would present them, but rather in short anecdotes known in Arabic as akhbr (singular khabr ). Tabarī, and other editors of the ninth and tenth centuries, made no effort to streamline this formula and produce a single linear account. Each of these akhbr is a distinct self-contained account, sometimes only a few lines long, sometime three or four pages, but seldom more. The several anecdotes are often grouped together, discussing the same event, or very similar events, but the details are changed: events happen in different orders; different people are credited with the same heroic deeds; the names of the commanders of Arab armies in the great battles of the conquests are not the same. The editors of the ninth and tenth centuries usually avoided making judgements about which of these accounts might be correct. They are frustratingly undecided in their approach and often seem to be simply presenting all the evidence and implicitly inviting the reader to make up their own mind.
     
    In many cases the editors give their sources in some detail in the form of an isnd , ‘I was told by X who was told by Y who was told by Z who was an eyewitness’. This device was really the equivalent of footnotes in modern academic writing, citing reputable sources. This isnd was designed to prove that the material was genuine, and to do that it was important that all the names in the list were men (or occasionally women) of good standing who would not appear to be the sort of people who might sink to making things up. It was also important to show that the people in the chain of information had lived at the right times, so that it would have been possible for them to have communicated this information to the next generation. By the tenth century a whole academic discipline had developed, producing vast biographical dictionaries in which one could look up the details of all the individuals in the chain to check on their credentials.
     
    Modern readers will note immediately that there are some obvious problems with this procedure because it provides few ways of ensuring the reliability of the material, problems of which the people at the time were very well aware. There was clearly a mass of fabricated material about these events in circulation, but the editors of the ninth and tenth centuries had exactly the sort of problems we do in trying to sort out truth from things that were simply invented.
     
    The authors of the original anecdotes of the conquests and the editors were extremely interested in certain sorts of information, annoyingly uninterested in other things. They include numerous verbatim speeches, supposedly made by great men, often before battle is joined. These are reminiscent of the speeches put into the mouths of Greek and