Our digital age has produced resources and methods which call for a significant change in how historians work with their sources. Advances in text-mining allow to work with “big data,” i.e. practically limitless amounts of text, and to ask research questions which have been unthinkable before. A number of historians working with “big data” in English are actively exploring these techniques trying to establish basic principles of digital analysis of historical documents of different kind. The field of pre-modern Islamic history still largely remains outside of digital history, to a certain extent because of the technical problems posed by the Arabic script. Yet, the historians of pre-modern Middle East are blessed (and probably cursed as well) to have a huge number of chronicles and biographical dictionaries. Because of their quite formulaic language, these sources can be effectively studied with scripting programming languages commonly employed in text-mining (e.g., Python). Using “Regular Expressions” --- a powerful tool that allows to manipulate pieces of text that conform to specific patterns, these sources can be mined for specific kinds of information (names, dates, secular professions, religious specializations and affiliations, toponymic data etc.), creating rather detailed profiles from each biographical entry. Sociological analysis of such biographical profiles in large quantities will allow to take a novel look at the social history of pre-modern Muslim world. Spatial and temporal analysis of even a rather limited amount of biographical characteristics will allow to trace a number of significant historical developments in time and space, e.g., the formation and spread of legal schools, development of different disciplines of religious learning, correlations between “secular” occupations of the learned and their geographical origins, the formation and shifting of centers of religious learning, etc. My paper will address some important theoretical issues of such digital analysis and will be focused on preliminary results of my analysis of al-Dhahabi’s Ta’rikh al-Islam, one of the biggest historic-biographical works, which covers 700 years of Islamic history and contains over 25,000 biographical entries.

“They swept through the city like hungry falcons attacking a flight of doves, or like raging wolves attacking sheep, with loose reins and shameless faces, murdering and spreading terror,” writes David Morgan in his description of the Mongol capture of Baghdad in The Mongols. If most historical accounts of the fall of the so-called “capital of light” converge on matters linked to the destructions or the consequences of the fall, they show dissimilar and conflicting views as to the responsibility for this event. This paper will analyze a sample of historical accounts on the fall of Baghdad and compare their narratives in both form and content. It will look at critical questions in the treatment of this event by the historians under scrutiny: Who was responsible for the fall of the city? Was it primarily due to the mishandlings of the last Abbasid Caliph al-Musta‘sim bi-Allah? What role did the entourage of the Caliph play? Did the Shi‘i wazir Ibn al-‘Alqami betray the Caliph by plotting with Hulegu against him? What was the role of the Shi‘i-Twelver astronomer Nasir al-Din al-Tusi? In order to answer these questions, the paper will consider a number of accounts: first, the earliest accounts available- contemporary to the fall (Rashid al-Din al-Hamadani, Al-Jujzani, Ibn al-‘Ibri, Nasir al-Din al-Tusi); second, later accounts written in the 14th and 15th centuries (Ibn al-Tiqtaqa, Ibn Taymiyya, Al-Dhahabi, Al-Kutubi, Al-Safadi, Ibn Kathir, Ibn Khaldun, Al-Maqrizi, Al-Taghribirdi); third, the modern treatment and adoption of the previous accounts (H. Howorth; G. Le Strange; B. Spuler; D. Nicolle, K. ‘Ali). Through this analysis, the paper will make possible a mapping of the evolution of historical writing on a specific event in Islamic history, from the earliest sources available and the controversies they raised, to later formulations, adoptions and rewriting of these accounts. While the existence of a ‘debate’ is obvious in the early accounts between the “pro-Mongol” historians and the other writers attempting to “correct” Mongol history writing, later historians writing under the Mamluks tended to adopt a narrative that matched their inner beliefs: the Mongol invasion was the outcome of a plot or Shi‘i-Mongol alliance. Modern historians tend to focus their analyses on a limited number of sources without acknowledging the existence of problematic controversies. Unveiling political agendas and sectarian belongings, this study is a demonstration of the difficulty to deal with historical sources as well as the complexity of historical writing.

The conventional narrative of Islamic history divides the age of the caliphates into three successive dynasties: the R?shid?n caliphs, the Umayyads, and the ?Abb?sids. Prevalent in both modern and classical scholarship, this categorization is not entirely accurate for it neglects the period of the Second Fitna and the role played by ?Abd All?h b. al-Zubayr b. al-?Aww?m, perhaps the greatest challenger to dynastic succession in his time and any other. Recognized by a significant number of his contemporaries as the legitimate caliph, Ibn al-Zubayr was the key figure in the second Islamic civil war, which ended with his death in 73/692 after his open proclamation of the caliphate for a period of nine years. The early period during which Ibn al-Zubayr lived and pressed his claims for authority was a time of great flux as political, religious, and social conventions were still being formed. Thus, although he is often viewed as the anti-caliph, rebelling against the established Umayyad dynasty, it is arguable that there was no contemporary conception of the Umayyad dynasty as such. Leading members of the Umayyad family exerted every effort to maintain their grip on authority, but nonetheless, at times Ibn al-Zubayr conceivably had a greater claim to the caliphate than his Umayyad rivals because he enjoyed greater support in the Islamic empire. Ibn al-Zubayr’s movement presented a challenge for Islamic historians and scholars from ?abar? and Mas??d? to Dhahab? and ?uy??? and Ibn ?As?kir. It is worth examining the classical Islamic sources, including historical narratives and biographical dictionaries, and analyzing how such scholars, among others, dealt with the question of Ibn al-Zubayr’s legitimacy. What role did factors such as his piety, his family background, his opposition to the Umayyad house, and his control of the holy cities and leadership of the pilgrimage play in determining their views regarding the acceptability of Ibn al-Zubayr’s rule, and how did scholars’ positions evolve over time? Examining their treatment of Ibn al-Zubayr could help us reassess Islamic concepts of communal leadership and spiritual legitimacy, and move us towards a more accurate periodization of the earliest period of Islamic history.

How do the environment and center-periphery power dynamics influence constructions and articulations of Muslim identity? This comparative historiographical paper examines the construction and expression of Muslim identity in two important physical peripheries: Persia and Anatolia. Prior to becoming important foci of Muslim piety and Islamic learning, Persia and Anatolia were considered physical and spiritual peripheries of the Islamic umma. This paper considers the effect environment, broadly construed – built, social, spatial, cultural, literary, and linguistic – on the construction and articulation of Muslim identities in Iran and Anatolia. This study also considers the impact of center-periphery relations on the construction and articulation of Muslim identities in what were originally the peripheries of the early Muslim empire. This paper assesses whether the tendencies so clearly seen in the Persian local histories, which articulate a spatio-communal identity centered on the twinned virtues of piety and religious authority, are also seen in Anatolian texts. Specifically, this project tests in Anatolian sources a hypothesis about differences of Muslim character of Arab and Persian cities. This hypothesis suggests that the ancientness of the Arab cities, coupled with their sizeable minority religious populations made the newer, smaller, Iranian cities seem more Muslim in comparison. This paper explores the character of the city in Anatolia, which is neither Arab nor Persian and forms a physical as well as metaphorical bridge between Central Europe and Western Asia. The advantage of considering these two regions for a comparative historiographical picture is because the process of Islamization occurred in Anatolia roughly 500 years after it happened in Iran. Anatolia serves as a testing ground for hypotheses about earlier Persian developments. This comparative historiographical project uses Arabic and Persian local and regional histories as well as chronicles of dynasties and the genre of literature about the Companions of the Prophet Muhammad. This paper builds on earlier research about the Islamization of Iranian cities during the 10th-13th centuries. These Persian sources include local and regional histories, such as Tarikh-i Sistan, Tarikh-i Tabaristan, Tarikh-i Bukhara, Tarikh-i Bayhaq, and Tarikh-i Qum, while Anatolian sources include local and regional histories as well as chronicles of dynasties and the genre of literature about the Companions of the Prophet Muhammad. This paper also problematizes the very notion of Iranian cities and Persian historiography, given the broad geographical range of texts that fall under the rubric of Persian cultural production.

Students of medieval Arabic Islamic history have available for use an extensive array of Arabic medieval sources: historical and biographical sources, collections of the Prophet Muhmmad's Tradition Hadith, belles-lettres adab (poetry and prose), religious and ethical writings, geographical, and a variety of other materials. The richness of the medieval Arabic sources, which is at times intimidating, severely tests the capability of the students of this history to use this vast resource. These students should be envied not only for this richness, but also for the abundance of modern scholarship discussing these sources in particular, and Arabic historical thought in general. The problem, however, is not the availability of the material, rather in reading it in a way that contradicts clear evidence in the sources. The danger in reading the sources wrong for once will result in reading all related issues. A good example for this is the characterization of the army of the Abbasid caliph al-Mu‘tasim (833-42). For the last half century, and up till now, al-Mu‘tasim and his reign are connected with military slavery, changing the balance of power in the Islamic Caliphate in favor of the Turks. This paper, argues that such reading for the sources is at best inaccurate. This will be demonstrated by analyzing texts related to the establishment of the city of Samarra’, the two terms ghulam and istana‘a on which the above reading is built. In arguing the establishment of Samarra’, a comparison, the first of its kind between Kufa, the garrison established by the second Caliph ‘Umar b. al-Khattab, and Samarra’, will prove that Samarra’ was not a new system in establishing cities or garrisons. As for the terms of ghulam and istana‘a, the paper will present different types of texts using these terms to demonstrate that they were not used at the time as indicating the meaning of “slave” for ghulam or “training slave soldiers” for istana‘a. The discussion will include a table on the use of these terms in Early and Medieval Arabic sources. This table shows that none of the sources consulted refers to ghulam as a trained slave soldier. The paper demonstrates, and thus concludes that the role of slaves has been misread and overstated, and that the sources do not support the assumption that the Islamic State during the time of al-Mu‘tasim was run by slaves.