al-Tabarī

Arab historian

• Born: c. 839
• Birthplace: Āmol, Tabaristan (now in Iran)
• Died: 923
• Place of death: Baghdad (now in Iraq)

The premier historian of the first century of the Islamic Empire and a renowned commentator on Qur՚ānic tradition, al-Ṭabarī established a model of universal history and a corpus of religious tradition crucial to the development of later Islamic theology and scholarship.

Early Life

Al-Ṭabarī (ahl-tah-BAHR-ee) was born to a moderately wealthy family. He demonstrated all the traits of a child prodigy and began formal study at an extremely early age. Legend has it that he memorized the entire Qur՚ān by the time he was seven. Al-Ṭabarī’s father, realizing the extent of his son’s talents and the limitations of his hometown, provided financial support for the travel so crucial to a broad education in those days.

After visiting centers of learning in northern Iran, al-Ṭabarī, while still a teenager, set out for Baghdad in hopes of studying under the great Muslim jurist Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal, who, unfortunately, died just before al-Ṭabarī’s arrival in the city. Nevertheless, the youth remained briefly in Baghdad and also visited the important traditional Iraqi Muslim centers of Basra and Al-Kūfa. There followed a trip to Syria to study Hadith, the traditions attributed to Muḥammad. Al-Ṭabarī also spent some time in Egypt before returning to Baghdad around 872, where he would pass the remaining half century of his long life as an increasingly renowned scholar, teacher, and writer.

Al-Ṭabarī’s Baghdad career was one of modest means and stupendous productivity. Despite his family’s largesse in providing travel money in his early life, al-Ṭabarī endured what some have described as a life of extreme poverty in Baghdad. There is a story that he was once reduced to selling the sleeves of his shirt in order to buy bread. To some extent, al-Ṭabarī placed himself in these dire straits by rejecting several lucrative offers of government posts and commissions. His independence may have helped free him from official drudgery, making possible his voluminous literary output. Some early writers claim that al-Ṭabarī customarily wrote or copied forty manuscript pages each day.

There was, however, one brush with politics and notoriety. After breaking with the uncompromising literalism of Hanbali religious law, al-Ṭabarī attempted to form his own school of Muslim jurisprudence. This enterprise brought a pro-Hanbali mob to his door and required police intervention to ensure his safety. Little of the nature of al-Ṭabarī’s legal essays is known, since these works are among a considerable number of his writings that have been lost. (Some scholars have concluded that his proclivity for iconoclastic thinking and the catholic nature of his works a quality that probably made them less attractive to specialists may have been responsible for the disappearance of so much of his output.)

Life’s Work

Al-Ṭabarī’s career spanned many fields of study, including history and Qur՚ānic commentary, poetry, lexicography, grammar, ethics, mathematics, and medicine. He was an unparalleled collector of Hadith, devoting most of his early years to gathering and copying material wherever he went. His commentary on the Qur՚ān was the first to bring together sufficient material from different regions of Islam to make it a standard work, on which later generations of commentators could draw. Even for modern scholars, al-Ṭabarī is an important source of information on Qur՚ānic tradition. Although he was concerned with the structure and syntax of oral traditions, al-Ṭabarī seldom introduced his own conclusions or opinions on religious or historical questions.

The most important surviving work of al-Ṭabarī is his world history, Ta՚rīkh al-rusul wa al-mulūk (872-973; The History of al-Ṭabarī, 1985-1999, 39 vols.). It is an enormous work; a late nineteenth century edition fills thirteen volumes, and numerous authorities assert that in its final form Ta՚rīkh al-rusul wa al-mulūk was ten times that long. (Some scholars, however, doubt this claim, noting that the language of the work does not lead one to suspect large amounts of missing material or any sort of abridgment, and that, in any case, a work of such dimensions would have been beyond the capacity of a single person in the ninth century.)

The History of al-Ṭabarī is more than simply a history of Islam . By al-Ṭabarī’s time, Islam was a vast aggregation of civilizations and cultures, and the work considers the pre-Islamic history of many of them. It begins with a history of the patriarchs, prophets, and rulers from early Semitic cultures, followed by a history of Persia and Iraq during the Sāsānid period (third to seventh centuries). Then comes the era of Muḥammad and the first four caliphs (570-661), the Umayyad Dynasty in Damascus (661-750), and, finally, the ՙAbbāsid period in Baghdad. The coverage stops in 915.

The style of the annals changes from a somewhat disconnected narrative for pre-Islamic times to a yearly chronology of events for the Muslim era. The source material came from both oral traditions and written accounts. Throughout The History of al-Ṭabarī, a connected narrative is sacrificed in the interest of compiling accounts of the same events from a variety of sources. Not surprisingly, the work is full of contradictions. In declining to make judgments between variant accounts, al-Ṭabarī may perhaps be subject to criticism from modern historians. On the other hand, The History of al-Ṭabarī provides an unsurpassed record of primary sources on given events, to be winnowed by later scholars.

In a supplement, al-Ṭabarī provides biographical information on most of his informants, evidently to aid the reader in discerning the true versions of events. This method is closely related to the early Muslim technique of testing the veracity of Hadith by examining the character and known biographies of individuals who transmit them. Early Muslim legists used this system to determine authentic Hadith and to arrive at a codified Muslim system of law. Al-Ṭabarī does the same, or rather invites the reader to exercise such discretion, by providing the necessary data.

The structure of al-Ṭabarī’s historical work, confusing though it may be to a general reader, is especially helpful for scholars, since there is relatively little trustworthy material on the first century of Muslim history, a century in which Islam grew from a local system in western Arabia into a monumental imperial organization. Most other Arabic sources on this period, in fact, were produced much later, after religious and political divisions had led to civil war and competitive dynasties in Islam. Many Islamicists regard these later histories, which are far more interpretive and judgmental than al-Ṭabarī’s annals, as untrustworthy because their information often was selected for political or sectarian ends. It is unfortunate that The History of al-Ṭabarī deals mainly with Iraq and Iran and has only scant material on Syria, center of the area ruled by the Umayyad Dynasty, or other parts of the Muslim west.

Many later Muslim historians emulated al-Ṭabarī’s method of presentation. They not only depended heavily on his work for the early period but also often extended the annalistic coverage into their own eras. As a result, numerous “Tabariesque” works that recount Islamic history, and often events in other civilizations, were produced into the early thirteenth century. Some of these historians attempted to reconcile variant accounts in al-Ṭabarī’s annals, and they occasionally supply additional information of which al-Ṭabarī himself apparently was not aware.

The value of The History of al-Ṭabarī as a universal history, not a record of Islamic developments only, is evident in the fact that it was translated into Persian shortly after it was completed.

Significance

Al-Ṭabarī’s voluminous collections of Qur՚ānic and Hadith commentary are crucial to the modern understanding of the evolution of Muslim thought in its formative period. He epitomizes the early Muslim practice of seeking exemplary truth and Qur՚ānic exegesis through a careful examination of genealogical and historical components. Though a traditionalist in this sense, al-Ṭabarī also represents a break in the Islamic tradition of regarding history as a simple dichotomy between the pre-Islamic “days of ignorance” and the era of Muḥammad and his community, or between Muslims and non-Muslims. He took a major step toward the development of world history by transcending these early limitations in the Muslim worldview. Al-Ṭabarī also appreciated the importance of source preservation and criticism. His career was that of a pioneer on the road that would lead to modern historical scholarship. No other early Muslim historian would be so widely imitated by students and successors.

Bibliography

Butler, Alfred Joshua. The Treaty of Miṣr in Ṭabarī: An Essay in Criticism. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1913. Reprinted as an addendum to the author’s The Arab Conquest of Egypt and the Last Thirty Years of the Roman Dominion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). A brief essay concerning the sources used by al-Ṭabarī in forming his account of the Arab conquest of Egypt. Focuses on the textual problems presented by such early materials. Brief bibliography and index.

Dahmus, Joseph. Seven Medieval Historians. Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1982. Contains an excellent synopsis of the career and intellectual antecedents of al-Ṭabarī. The discussion incorporates some lengthy translated passages of his work as illustrative material. Bibliography, index.

Dodge, Bayard, ed. and trans. The Fihrist of al-Nadīm: A Tenth-Century Survey of Muslim Culture. 2 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1970. Contains a brief biography of al-Ṭabarī in traditional Muslim form, also listing some of the scholars associated with him, by a tenth century chronicler. A good example of biographical treatment at the time, it provides a sense of the intellectual environment in which al-Ṭabarī lived and worked. Bibliography.

Donner, Fred M. Narratives of Islamic Origins: The Beginnings of Islamic Historical Writing. Princeton, N.J.: Darwin Press, 1998. A study of the early years (around the seventh century) of Islamic historiography. Extensive bibliography, index.

Hodgson, Marshall G. S. The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization. Vol. 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974. This volume includes one of the best descriptions in English of al-Ṭabarī’s methods and technique, exemplified by his account of the murder of the caliph ՙUthmān in 656. Shows how the study of history and that of Qur՚ān and Hadith intermingle in al-Ṭabarī’s thought. Bibliography, index.

Marin, Elma, trans. The Reign of al-Muՙtasim (833-842). New Haven, Conn.: American Oriental Society, 1951. This book, volume 35 in the American Oriental series, includes a rare translation into English of a small portion of al-Ṭabarī’s annals.

Robinson, Chase F. Islamic Historiography. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. An introduction to the writing of history in Arabic, with a focus on the sociopolitical functions of historiography from the eighth to the sixteenth century. Written especially for those with little or no background in Islamic history or in Arabic. Bibliography, index.

Tayob, Abdelkader I. “Ṭabarī on the Companions of the Prophet: Moral and Political Contours in Islamic Historical Writing.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 119, no. 2 (April-June, 1999). An examination of an early motif in the writing of Islamic history, that of the status and roles of the Prophet’s companions. Shows how al-Ṭabarī considers the companions’ involvement as moral, and not political, beings.