Ibn Shihab al-Zuhri (d. 124/742) was a central actor in the transmission of knowledge during the Umayyad period. His importance stems both from the volume of material attributed to him and from the controversies about methods of transmission in which he played a pivotal role. Later scholarship on al-Zuhri has focused almost exclusively on his influence on the field of hadith. A. A. Duri’s 1957 article, “Al-Zuhri, A Study on the Beginnings of History Writing in Islam,” (BSOAS 19: 1957) is the only work dedicated to al-Zuhri’s impact on historical writing. This work is narrowly focused on sira and maghazi and does not address al-Zuhri’s connections to the Umayyad court, despite the centrality of those connections in controversies about his hadith corpus. This paper examines al-Zuhri specifically as an historian. It begins with an appraisal of al-Zuhri’s significance for later historical texts, outlining the volume and nature of the reports attributed to him in later sources. It then turns to reports found in al-Isfahani’s Kitab al-aghani that suggest that al-Zuhri was hired by Khalid al-Qasri (and possibly others) to write their genealogies. I will attempt to uncover traces of these lost works in later sources to determine whether they can be reconstructed. Finally, the paper turns to al-Zuhri’s close association with the Umayyad caliphal court, focusing on the question of whether al-Zuhri’s historical writing can be considered as “official,” or at least caliphally sanctioned, versions of the earlier Islamic past. This exercise will offer a more nuanced understanding of al-Zuhri as a scholar and courtesan, and will provide insights into the role the Umayyad court itself played in shaping the past.

The first century of Islamic history is (in)famous for the formidable challenges posed by the paucity of incontestably reliable source material to have survived into the modern era. In order to unearth and reconstruct, say, the imperial ideologies and governing practices of various Umayyad dynasts, resourceful and intrepid historians of this period have mined source material as diverse as the epistles of caliphs and their scribes, courtly or tribal panegyric and invective, papyri and inscriptions, and numismatic and material evidence. A hitherto undervalued source for retrieving such ideologies, I argue, is also one of the most familiar to historians of early Islam: the maghazi accounts putatively narrating events from the life of the Prophet Muhammad. Within recent decades, new methods for dating and tracing the literary evolution of hadith and sira-maghazi materials have considerably expanded our ability to reliable date a select body of these materials to the Umayyad period or, more precisely, the early 8th century C.E. (cf. the work of Juynboll, Motzki, Schoeler, et al.). However, such scholarship has predominately focused on dating and/or authenticating the transmission of said materials rather than situating them in the Sitz am Leben that accounts for their existence in the first place. Taking a selection of materials attributed to the most influential pioneer of the maghazi genre, Ibn Shihab al-Zuhri (d.742), this paper interrogates accounts of al-Zuhri--as transmitted by one of his most prominent pupils, Ma‘mar ibn Rashid, and preserved in the Musannaf of ‘Abd al-Razzaq al-San‘ani--as potential sources for early Islamic imperial ideology. In doing so, I seek to answer the following questions: 1) do Zuhri’s maghazi traditions exhibit any trace of the Umayyad courtly patronage which he famously received, 2) can the origins and articulation of these accounts be best situated in a Syrian or Medinan geographic milieu, and 3) do any of Zuhri’s maghazi traditions proffer insights into Umayyad caliphal ideology and/or propaganda?

This paper explores the historical corpus of al-Walid b. Muslim (d. 194 or 5/810), who in addition to being a major hadith scholar and the main collector and preserver of the corpus of Syrian scholarship (imam ahl al-Sham), was a particularly central node in the historical reports on the maghazi, the conquest of Syria and frontier warfare. While his reputation as a hadith scholar, especially as a transmitter of al-Awza’i’s tradition, was tainted by the accusation of tampering with his isnad chains (tadlis), Muslim scholars of the ilk of Abu Zur’a, al-Fasawi and much later Ibn Asakir, had no qualms about using him as one of their main sources, especially in reports on the conquests and wars in Syria. This paper avoids trying to reconstruct lost texts of an extinct Syrian historical school. There have been recent attempt among scholars to rebuild the “lost school” of Syrian history by imaginatively reconstructing books through the collection and collation of strands of reports from diverse sources. Here a different approach is taken. Rather than an historiographical reconstruction, this paper offers a study of a particular historical individual in the context of his life and his scholarship. The emphasis of this study is al-Walid b. Muslim as an individual and as a scholar. Having started as a slave ( min raqiq al-imara) belonging to the Umayyad household, al-Walid b. Muslim and his family moved to the household of Salih b. ‘Ali with the advent of the Abbasids. It is only during the Abbasid period that al-Walid b. Muslim was first manumitted by his Abbasid patron and he subsequently purchased his freedom from his Umayyad patron. The paper will explore the question of whether his life such as his status as an ex-slave, the fact that he lived under both Umayyad and ‘Abbasid patronage and his participation in maritime expeditions left a trace in his scholarship.

This paper will focus on court astrologers in early Abbasid Baghdad and argue that historical writing was largely delegated to them early on, before the subsequent rise of religious scholars who ultimately replaced them. This shift clearly reveals a profound turn in historical causality, as astrological histories were eventually rejected to the benefit of theocentric histories, and unveils the competition at work between scholarly circles. Such an inquiry will also shed new light on the thorny question of lost sources. Solid evidences show that astronomers/astrologers (the two categories overlap for the period under consideration) were heavily involved in historical writing during the early Abbasid period, and many of them produced astrological histories, i.e., historical narratives where planetary conjunctions (especially between Saturn and Jupiter) were the main engine fueling history. In so doing, they were largely following a Sassanian model. A large number of these astrological histories are unfortunately lost, but this paper will focus both on the extant sources and suggest fresh methodologies to get an access to lost texts. Special attention will be devoted to some of the key figures among those astrologers/historians as well as to the question of their legacy. Finally, this paper will also try to shed some light on the implications of such an astrological approach of history.