The Abbasid-era chronicles have heavily shaped our understanding of Arab-Islamic historiography. Judging from these chronicles’ sources, Medinese and Iraqi scholars dominated the realm of history writing, as well as the production of knowledge more generally, in the eighth and ninth centuries. In contrast, Syria and the scholars who resided there are almost completely absent from the picture. This absence is compounded by the fact that there are a limited number of extant texts from Abbasid Syria. Historians have addressed this lacuna by turning to the Arab-Islamic biographical dictionaries. As Wadad al-Qadi noted, this rich corpus provides an alternative history of the Muslim community from the scholars’ perspective. In doing so, biographical dictionaries such as Ibn ʿAsākir’s (d. 571/1176) "Taʾrīkh Madīnat Dimashq" provide invaluable insight into generations of earlier Syrian scholars and their works. What we are left with, therefore, are questions of methodology. How can historians effectively utilize Arab-Islamic biographical dictionaries to shed light on scholarly activity in Abbasid Syria? And what other texts can orient our investigations into this immense collection of biographical literature? As a case study, my paper will utilize Abū Zurʿa al-Dimashqī’s (d. 281/894) "Kitāb al-Taʾrīkh" as a window into the scholarly milieu of Abbasid Syria. In his "Taʾrīkh," Abū Zurʿa collected and organized an array of information from earlier generations of Syrian scholars that is otherwise lost or scattered throughout later sources. As such, the text provides us with invaluable insight into Abū Zurʿa’s scholarly predecessors. My paper will analyze the text’s isnads and reports to create a list of Abū Zurʿa’s most frequent sources. By combining this information with the biographical literature available for these scholars, my paper aims to construct a basic prosopography of the scholars involved in the production and transmission of knowledge in Abbasid Syria.

It is notoriously difficult to write the history of Egypt with the so-called classical Abbasid sources, best exemplified by the famous al-Tabari (d. 301/923). Indeed, both the pre-Islamic Egyptian past and the first centuries of Islam are usually poorly documented in non-Egyptian narrative sources (the conquest of the province being the most notable exception). Yet, the reasons behind this dearth of information have never been properly addressed. Why is Egypt so absent from the grand narrative offered by Muslim chronicles? Does this reflect a lack of available material to work with or rather a deliberate attempt at silencing the past? This problem is all the more vexing if one considers the central role of the province under the Umayyads and the early Abbasids, or if one looks at the abundant evidence offered by the documentary sources and chiefly the papyri. Such an investigation is important because this historiographical situation reinforces the notion of Egyptian’s exceptionalism. It thus prevents us from adopting a less centralized view of the first Islamic Empire under the first two dynasties of Islam. My paper will suggest that a different approach to the source material, from a history of memory perspective, can help us make sense of the limited place devoted to Egypt in classical Abbasid-era historiography. It invites us to move away from the quest of historical “truth”, to rather focus on how Abbasid-era scholars (chiefly in the 3rd/9th and 4th/10th centuries) wished to remember their own past and the new meanings they granted to it by putting it into new written contexts. Looking at Muslim and non-Muslim sources, my paper thus aims to investigate the circulation of historical information and the construction of the past in (and about) early Islamic Egypt. Such an investigation forces us to consider memory and oblivion in the medieval sources themselves, in order to shed light on the making of a “cultural memory” of early Islam.

My presentation will look into a vexed problem: when and how did Arabic historical and ḥadīth writing become separate fields of scholarship (or did they ever)? That is, who was responsible for the idea that ḥadīths, “Prophetic traditions” and khabars, “historical reports” were different? These two intertwined genres of Arabic literature (historiography and Prophetic dicta) developed during the second/eighth centuries. Of major importance were such early authorities as ʿUrwa ibn al-Zubayr (d. 94/712), al-Zuhrī (d. 124/742), and Ibn Isḥāq (d. ca. 150/767), who form, in fact, a neat chain of teacher-student relationships. None of their works are extant but their material survives in quotations in later Arabic works. The possibilities – and problems – of reconstructing their works has been explored by Nicolet Boekhoff-van der Voort, Andreas Görke, Harald Motzki, and Gregor Schoeler, so we have rather clear idea what these works might have included. It must be noted, however, that none of them wrote books with fixed forms but rather transmitted their material in lecture-based environment. Of significance are also those early authorities whose enmity Ibn Isḥāq aroused, namely, Mālik ibn Anas (d. 179/795) and Hishām ibn ʿUrwa (d. 146/763). By probing the interdependence and tension between the writers of the historiography and Prophetic traditions genres (if we can call them separate genres), I hope to explain the nature of the relationship among these genres and their historical provenance. An angle that I will provide and that has been often ignored is to look at a form of Arabic historical writing that was independent of Islamic sacred history: the Siyar al-mulūk works. They were translations (or adaptations) into Arabic of the Middle Persian Khwadāy-nāmags, “Books of Kings.” The Arabic versions were composed by such authors as Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ (d. ca. 139/757) and al-Kisrāwī (d. third/ninth c.?). The Siyar al-mulūk genre flourished in the second–third centuries AH but their contribution to Arabic historiography has usually been forgotten. The works (mostly lost) were more or less isnād-less, continuous narration in which mythical Persian history was synchronized with Biblical history. It will be claimed that the Siyar al-mulūk works affected Ibn Isḥāq and later authors profoundly in their search for the form of Islamic historiography. The role of the early ʿAbbāsid dynasty, which first supported Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ but afterwards had him killed, and started supporting Ibn Isḥāq’s scholarly efforts instead, will also be underlined in my presentation.

The Syriac historical tradition presents a valuable resource for Islamic history, a fact that is reflected by the growing number of historians who have drawn upon it in their studies of the early Islamic period. The Syriac tradition, however, is not immune to the long acknowledged historiographical complications in Arab-Islamic sources for this period. This reflects the state of Syriac source material in Islamic studies today: increasing popularity, but deficiency in source criticism. Several important Syriac chronicles only exist through later dependents and efforts to recover these lost chronicles have emerged as particularly important. My paper will introduce a methodology for reconstructing the lost Syriac chronicle of Dionysius of Telmaḥrē (d.845) based on both Arab-Islamic accounts and Dionysius’ dependents: Michael the Great (d.1199) and the anonymously authored Chronicle 1234. The chronicle of Dionysius is particularly valuable, beyond what it would contribute to the history of the ninth century, because it preserves the even earlier Syriac chronicle of Theophilus of Edessa (d.785). Robert Hoyland, in Theophilus of Edessa’s Chronicle, attempted to reconstruct the lost chronicle of Theophilus by translating the common material in Theophilus’ dependents: Dionysius (Syriac), Theophilus (Greek), and Agapius (Arabic). This impressive contribution, however, did not solve two major problems facing the Syriac tradition and Islamic history: how do we approach material that is not in both of Dionysius’ dependents? And when did the Islamic material enter the Syriac tradition? My project will address both of these problems by abandoning the search for a single source of all the Arab-Islamic material in the Syriac tradition along with the presupposition that a single Syriac author introduced all of the Arab-Islamic material. Rather, I will seek to demonstrate that Syriac historians introduced Arab-Islamic material at multiple times during a number of redactions. As a part of this process, the Syriac chroniclers incorporated Arab-Islamic material that reflected a uniquely Syriac sectarian perspective instead of haphazardly adopting the interpretation of their Arab-Islamic sources. This highlights the value for Syriac sources in two specific ways: first, even though later redactions of earlier chroniclers contain additions and or revisions, there is evidence that they preserve a distinct (and early) Syriac interpretation of Islamic history. Second, if Syriac chroniclers incorporated Arab-Islamic material that reflected their own interpretation, it suggests a context where the exchange of intellectual knowledge was dynamic and adaptable.