Abstract
This paper analyzes early Islamic historiographical memory of two prominent South Arabian soothsayers of the Jahiliyya, Satih b. Rabi‘a and Shiqq al-Yashkuri. These mysterious old fortunetellers, whose accounts are heavily steeped in lore, are reported by Muslim akhbaris to have predicted major historical events leading up to and including the rise of Islam. For example, in a tradition stemming through Ibn Ishaq, they foretold to the South Arabian chieftain and progenitor of the Lakhmid dynasty, Rabi‘a ibn Nasr, of the Abysinian conquest of Yemen, its subsequent reconquest by a native Yemeni dynasty, and the rise of Islam. Another tradition has Satih predicting the fall of the Sasanian empire to occur under his successors.
I hope to highlight two important roles played by these dynamic personages from the perspective of Islamic historiography. First, through both their predictions and ubiquitous presence at different times and places in the early Islamic canon of the pre-Islamic period, they function as connectors, harmonizing ancient and contemporaneous traditions and diverse peoples into a logical, flowing account; and synchronizing disparate historical traditions of the Arabian peninsula itself, as well as of the non-Arabs, into a universal Islamic master narrative. Second, from the standpoint of identity construction, these two soothsayers must be viewed through the lens of “rediscovery” of Jahiliyya culture demarcating scholarship of the early ‘Abbasid period. That is, as Muslim philologists and historians endeavored to build a unified Arab culture that could compete with the world’s other major civilizations, these soothsayers (along with other old Arab predictors) served moralizing akhbaris as legitimizing agents for the Arabs. For through the propagandistic subtext in the accounts of the soothsayers, that lying underneath the polytheism dominating the society of the Jahiliyya was a deeper current of foreknowledge of the coming of Islam, as well as a respect for monotheistic values and Abrahamic traditions, the akhbaris were in effect, justifying the place of the Arabs as the bearers of the divinely revealed faith under whose banners the non-Arabs would be conquered. In this context, the Arab Satih’s prediction of the fall of the Sasanian dynasty is a statement of changing power dynamics, foreshadowing the Arabs’ replacing of the Persians as the leaders of a world civilization and a glorious empire.
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