In his Muhammad and the Believers, Fred Donner identifies a critical gap in early Islamic historiography. Donner judiciously observes that the prophet’s military campaigns (maghāzī) against Dūmat al-Jandal are “especially poorly understood.” The elusive strategy behind Muhammad’s northern campaigns against Dūma is a complex and deeply entrenched problem in maghāzī historiography. Classical and modern historians of the maghāzī have long wrestled with the northern question. Although in tacit agreement that “the road north had a prominent place in Muhammad’s strategic thinking,” historians such as W. Montgomery Watt are completely at variance with one another about what precipitated the first invasion in 5/626. Fraught with chronological inconsistencies and contradictions, it is evident that the northern question cannot be treated in isolation. In the case of Dūma, the literary character of the maghāzī reports further compounds the problem. For instance, although al-Wāqidī’s account is rich in narrative detail, the fact that “al-Wāqidī outstrips Ibn Isḥāq,” leads Donald P. Little to adopt the view that motifs in al-Wāqidī deliberately function “to give his expanded narration of events some degree of thematic unity.” In point of fact, Alois Musil concludes that “interwoven into the account of al-Wāqidī is a legend heedful neither of the topographical nor of the chronological circumstances.” As the present study demonstrates, the solution to the northern problem requires a closer inspection of the topography of these campaigns, as well as the narrative structure of the extant maghāzī-material. This article’s multi- and interdisciplinary approach combines history, topography, archaeology, and narratology to shed light on this complex problem that has proven to be remarkably resistant to conventional analysis. To this end, the present work gathers and analyzes every available primary and secondary source on Dūma from the ancient, classical, and late antique periods. Framing the problem in terms of the economic realities of first/seventh century Arabia, the present study calls into question the prevailing scholarly view that Dūma fell in 9/630-31. For this purpose, the final and decisive expedition against Dūma in 12/633 is reconstructed. These research findings confirm Musil’s claim that Abū Bakr’s “expedition to Dūma was imperative because of military and commercial policy,” the precedent for which had been well established by Muhammad. Through a thorough analysis, this study carefully unravels the tangled strands of early Islamic historiography to expose the strategy behind the northern maghāzī.

Not long after the ʿAbbasid Revolution, an Armenian priest named Łewond wrote a history of the Caliphate from the death of the Prophet Muḥammad to his own times. He includes a lengthy passage about the activities of Muḥammad b. Marwān in Armenia: the Armenians, Georgians, and Albanians had rebelled during the fitna of Ibn al-Zubayr and the caliph al-Walīd sent Muḥammad to the North to bring the provinces back into the fold of the Umayyad Caliphate. Muḥammad made promises to the Armenians and called them to come together so that he could enter their names into the dīwān. When they gathered in churches in the cities of Naxčawan and Xram, Muḥammad then gave the order to extract the nobles and to burn the others alive. Łewond’s rendition describes martyrs, praying to God for relief and evoking Old Testament examples of divine protection. This event clearly reverberated throughout the Near East. We have descriptions of “the year of the fire,” as Khalīfa b. Khayyāṭ calls it, in Arabic, Armenian, Syriac, and Greek sources. The purpose of this paper is not to decide “what really happened” in the fires in Armenia, but rather to examine closely the discrepancies, such as the date (sometime in the first decade of the 700s), reigning caliph (ʿAbd al-Malik or al-Walīd), and toponyms (Naxčawan/al-Nashawā, Xram, Xlat‘/Khilāṭ, and Vaspurakan/al-Basfurrajān). In doing so, this paper focuses on two main goals. First, it considers the ties between historiographical traditions. There have been several significant studies of the ties between Muslim and Christian historical writing recently, especially those relevant to the relationship between Arabic, Greek, and Syriac literature. This paper is one attempt to pull Armenian sources to the fore and to hypothesize about the transmission of traditions across linguistic divides. Second, this paper considers the fires from the perspective of built memory, questioning the place of the episode in the agendas of later historians and the goals of transmitters as they adapted the story.

The wars of the Ridda or “apostasy” (11-12/632-33) resulted in the unification of Arabia under vigorous Muslim leadership. According to the modern scholarly consensus (e.g., Shoufani, 1973), these events weren’t actually all about apostasy, as some of the “apostates” had never converted to Islam, while the rebellion of some others consisted of refusing to pay a tax, identified (for reasons still not entirely clear) as “alms,” sadaqa or zakat. In any case, historians have focused on the nascent Islamic community and state. Here we try to view these events from an East Arabian perspective, aided by al-Askar (2002, 2012) and others. Puzzling questions remain, and we may ask in what sense we can identify an East Arabian perspective at all. We find such a perspective in a historical tradition on “the markets of the Arabs before Islam,” describing the peninsula around 600 CE. Here the Hijaz matters mainly because of the annual fair at ‘Ukaz. East Arabia, meanwhile, shows flourishing diversity in its politics and commerce. This information has been transmitted through what we may call a “tribal tradition.” Next we recall that ridda, together with futuh (conquests) and fitna (internal strife) was a “primary theme” of early historical writing (Noth, 1994, Samji, 2013). Can we relate any “tribal traditions” to this primary theme? Out of the early sources for ridda—including Waqidi, Wathima, Baladhuri, Tabari and Balansi—we focus on the famous (or infamous) Sayf b. ‘Umar, with the help of Landau-Tasseron (1990) and Cameron (2001). It emerges that Sayf didn’t show bias for his own tribe of Tamim, as Wellhausen (1899) and Brockelmann (1943) thought. Rather, he maintained a sense—however vague—of the collective outlook of a confederation that had played an important role in Arabia before Islam (Kister, 1965). The East Arabian understanding of sadaqa/zakat corresponded roughly to most monotheist thinking at the time. (Hijazi) Islam, by contrast, presented something new, in its connection between acts of generosity to the poor and the equipping of warriors, at least since the expedition to Tabuk (9/630). Furthermore, the East Arabians did not have a project of unifying Arabia or conquering other regions. They did, however, have a vivid sense of interconnection among themselves, in their markets and fairs and in their notions of generosity and justice. Finally, the notion of “tribal tradition” needs more attention in the study of early Islamic historiography.

The Berber Revolt that took place between 739-743 stands out in the history of the Middle East as the first of the major uprisings of non-Arabs against Arab privilege in the Umayyad Caliphate. I will be examining this uprising as the precursor to the Abbasid Revolution a decade later. As one of the driving forces behind the Abbasid Revolution was largely an armed rejection of Arab privilege, then the Berber Revolt a decade earlier rose out of those same frustrations. In examining the ongoing tensions between Berbers and Arabs, I will be examining the formation of a Berber identity within a larger Islamic World. While Berber rebels were consistently labeled as Kharajite supporters, I will look to differentiate those that ascribed to Kharajite theology, and those that are being labeled as such to dismiss their concerns, and delegitimize the uprising itself. Thus the Berber Revolt not only was the culmination of decades of resentment aimed at Arab privilege under the Umayyad Caliphs, the way in which was characterized allowed for the Umayyads to dismiss the very real grievances of non-Arabs in the caliphate. The overall failure of the Berbers to seize the major centers of power in the western reaches of the Caliphate allowed the Umayyads to dismiss the concerns of those who rose up, it blinded them to the concerns of peoples much closer to home, resulting in the Abbasid Revolution.

Did early Islamic Iran experience a process of dramatic urbanization, a general process that would finally culminate in the emergence (and eventual collapse) of several mega-cities in the wake of the Muslim conquests? While the hypothesis of a radical change of the urban landscape of early Islamic Iran seems to have been widely accepted, and several explanatory models have been offered, the evidence for an “urban revolution” of post-conquest Iran remains challenging. In the light of new archaeological evidence and re-readings of textual sources this paper critically reviews the evidence and methodologies that have been used to support the hypothesis of an early Islamic mega-urbanization. It then takes a closer look at two cities, Bukhara in Transoxiana and Darabgerd in Fars, weighing the archaeological and textual evidence against generalizing models of late antique and early Islamic urbanization. The complicated urban history of these two cities supports the impression of the first centuries of Islam as a period of experimentation framed in long-term developments, and it underscores the importance of taking regional and local factors and differences fully into account when studying the effects of the implementation of Muslim rule in Iran. As so often, taking the Muslim conquests as the beginning of something completely new, and completely different, may obscure rather than illuminate the broader picture. The hypothesis of a general dramatic urban growth strongly tied into the process of Islamization needs to be reconsidered and perhaps abandoned. Rather than a narrative of Islamic urbanization, the urban history of early Islamic Iran should rather be read as many stories of various and flexible adaptations of an already diverse urban landscape to a changing general framework. The paper will conclude with a brief outlook on how various narrative sources from the period of the transition from Sasanian to Muslim rule down to the Saljuq and even post-Mongol period may be used to gain a more differentiated picture of early Islamic Iran’s changing urban landscapes.

This paper will examine how a particular set of values informed and structured the practice of hadith scholarship in the late second/eighth and early third/ninth centuries. Corresponding roughly to the century prior to the production of the “canonical” works of Sunnī hadith, this period witnessed the emergence of a community of specialists devoted to the collection and critical examination of hadiths. In spite of the formative influence of this period, much of the scholarship on this milieu has been focused on broadly diachronic questions of historicity, examining either the extent to which the milieu is faithfully portrayed in later biographical sources or more commonly the extent to which it was successful in preserving and transmitting authentic memories of Muhammad’s words and actions. Much less attention has been devoted to the synchronic question of the milieu’s internal dynamics and the shared values that bound its participants together in a common scholarly venture as they developed the methods and terminology for a newly emergent field of specialization. Through a wide-ranging examination of biographical literature on hadith narrators, this paper identifies and examines five values essential to the internal dynamics of this milieu: 1) the commodification of hadith, which came to be viewed as an increasingly valuable “possession” that one might go to great lengths to obtain and to guard; 2) intense competition for authority among hadith transmitters; 3) a high degree of student autonomy vis-à-vis teachers; 4) the increasing premium placed on accurate transmission; 5) attempts to define the parameters of acceptable belief and practice with varying degrees of stringency. Like any set of values, the logical extensions of the values identified here occasionally clashed with one another and particular values had to be either prioritized or subordinated, resulting in different practical outcomes. For example, a narrator who had learned hadith from a teacher who held beliefs that he deemed heretical faced the question of whether to prioritize boundary enforcement and abandon his hadiths or prioritize the value of the hadiths themselves and ignore his teacher’s heresy. Likewise, students were frequently caught between the dictates of deference to their teachers’ and peers’ assessments of other narrators and their desire to learn and transmit as many hadiths as possible. In conclusion, the paper shows how tensions between these competing values and the dominant approaches that developed to navigating them shaped classical theories of hadith scholarship as articulated in the fourth/tenth and fifth/eleventh centuries.