Arabic historical sources contain elements that may be deemed literary, sometimes in vast quantities: Historical texts are infused with poems and speeches attributed to historical figures. However, the question of authenticity has dominated Western discussions about Islamic history, and consequently these literary elements in historical writings have generally been disregarded as fictional embellishments.
Yet, any absolute separation between the literary and the historical constitutes a false dichotomy, for even “non-fictional” historical writings employ narrative and literary strategies to achieve their various goals. Islamicists have recently started interrogating the boundaries between history and literature and applying literary analysis to this historical writing, leaving aside the obsession with ‘what really happened’ and focusing on how the past was represented (Leder, el-Hibri).
For even those texts most strictly seen as literary contribute to Arab historical memory, and scholars have used such sources successfully in their attempts to reconstruct history and grasp Muslim understandings of their own past (Stetkevych, Hoyland, Drory, Toral-Niehoff).
This panels builds on the work of these scholars, reading historical writings with an eye for the literary and examining various literary genres and narrative strategies found within them for historical and historiographical purposes. The first panelist focuses the genre of ayyām al-ʿarab in al-Iṣfahānī’s Kitāb al-Aghānī and, by using Bakhtinian literary theories of chronotope and epic, examines al-Iṣfahānī’s reconstruction of al-Jāhiliyya. The second panelist takes the long khabar of Ka‘b b. Mālik's absence from the raid of Tabūk (and his subsequent ostracism at Medina) as an occasion to explore the relationship between commemorative poetry and discursive narration in prose--mimetic vehicles whose formal differentia and relative historiographic value co-align in unexpected ways. The third panelist examines the story of the first fitna through the lenses of Ibn al-‘Adīm's biographical dictionary of the city of Aleppo showing how the chosen genre influences the historical narrative. The fourth panelist focuses on the speeches (khuṭab) of al-Ḥajjāj b. Yūsuf, aims to provide their typology and shed light on their function in Arab historical and adab works, and on the reasons why they were preserved.
Together, the papers of this panel aim to problematize the strict division between literature and history, to overcome the obsession with facts, and to strive for more innovative approaches towards these literary elements and strategies in Arabic historical writing.
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Dr. Peter Webb
Arab history and the genesis of Arab historical consciousness are traditionally believed to emanate from memories of Arabian tribal battles fought during the two centuries before Islam. These wars, the ‘Arab Battle Days’ (ayyām al-ʿarab), are both the most detailed corpus of stories constituting the lore of Arab pre-history, and the reference points for the chronology of pre-Islamic Arabia itself. Muslim historians did not articulate a ‘before hijra’ dating-system, and Arabian history accordingly unfolds via the memorialisation of a sequence of violent days winding backwards through the era of pre-Islam, labelled by Muslim writers as al-Jāhiliyya (the ‘Age of Passion’). The ayyām’s significance in Muslim accounts of Arab history contrasts the silence in documentary evidence and contemporary non-Arabic pre-Islamic writings where details of the battles are scarcely perceptible. We are accordingly left with a large body of Muslim-era texts to understand the pre-Islamic al-ayyām today, and given this situation, the interpretation of al-ayyām calls particularly for the methods of narratological historiography. Analysis sensitive to literary devices, prosimetrum and narrative techniques is key for modern scholarship to read the Arabic poetry and prose tales which grew around the edifice of Arab pre-history. Leaving aside searches for ‘kernels of truth’, instead we can ask why Muslim writers were so interested in the battle stories and for what purposes they narrated the lore. This presentation will discuss initial findings related to the narratives of al-ayyām in Arabic literature – part of a major research project I am undertaking about the Muslim reconstructions of al-Jāhiliyya. Focusing on the fourth/tenth century al-Iṣfahānī’s Kitāb al-Aghānī, I seek to understand how pre-Islamic Arabian battles are narrated, and, by marshalling literary methods informed by Bakhtinian theories of chronotope and epic, I will reveal how al-Iṣfahānī (akin to similar litterateurs of his era) crafted al-Jāhiliyya history through the building blocks of space (the desert) and time (Arabian battle days), and thereby transformed scattered verses into a corporeal world through which their audiences could conceptualise Islam’s formative milieu. This approach hopes to reveal how works assumed to be ‘literary’ structurally and crucially interact with ‘history’, and reconnoitres new methodologies which we can employ to grasp Muslim senses of their pre-Islamic past.
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Dr. David Larsen
Some historiographical preference for prose sources over poetic ones is justifiable. The narrative content of Classical Arabic poetry is largely determined by occasion and convention, and its formal constraints clash with the “unvarnished” texture of veridical discourse. Conversely, prose’s mimetic nearness to unrhymed speech (the default vehicle for eyewitness testimony) lends it a certain epistemic privilege. Prose too is artifice, though, and for the purposes of simulating, enhancing and otherwise representing real-life experience it is notoriously apt. Its historiographical value relative to poetry’s is therefore an open question, and for raising it one useful figure is Ka‘b b. Mālik (d. ca. 50/670). A Medinan companion of Muḥammad, Ka‘b not only commemorated the Prophet’s military affairs through the medium of poetry, but was a much-quoted source of prose ḥadīth of the post-Emigration period (beginning with the second oath of ‘Aqaba, for which he was present).
Ka‘b’s unrhymed narrations include a long, emotional report of a fifty-day period of ostracism he underwent at Medīna, consequent upon his abstention from the campaign of Tabūk in the summer of 9/630. Throughout the iterations of Ka‘b’s report in ḥadīth, sīra and tafsīr (with reference to Sūrat al-Tawba 9:117-8), the stability of its wording points to a common source in the written notes of Ibn Shihāb al-Zuhrī (d. 124/742), who took it down from Ka‘b’s grandson. Ibn Shihāb is known to have made his notebooks available to his students, including Muḥammad ibn Isḥāq (d. 150/767), author of our earliest extant source for Ka‘b’s ordeal.
This paper’s correlation of Ka‘b’s report with the poems of his dīwān (in addition to his other unrhymed contributions to ḥadīth and sīra) is one paradigm for a recorrelation of commemorative poetry and discursive narration in prose – mimetic vehicles whose formal differentia co-align variously with relative historiographical value.
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Dr. Aaron Hagler
Ibn al-'Adim's biographical dictionary of the city of Aleppo, Bughyat al-Talab fi Ta'rikh Halab (“Everything Desirable about the History of Aleppo,” or the Bughya), presents a description of the life and careers of notables who are connected to the city of Aleppo (which is defined rather broadly to include much of Syria). In this work of history, focused as it is on such people rather than on events, the standard well-known synthetic narrative of the first fitna becomes essentially homeless within the text, and appears only in a form that is fragmented, dispersed across multiple entries, and slanted (where it does appear) towards each individual's experience of events in the fitna. The narrative space thus shifts from the "main action" to what may be termed the backstage scenes—conversations between characters before and after key events, or Ibn al-'Adim's own commentary on those characters, rather than the overviews that are common in more standard narrative forms. This paper will explore how changing the space of the presented action from the fitna’s events to its participants creates a unique picture of the fitna, one in which Ibn al-'Adim deploys characters as parables in the service of arguing his take on political and sectarian issues contemporaneous to him. Drawing upon the pioneering methodology of James Lindsay and others (who examined Ibn 'Asakir's Ta'rikh Madinat Dimashq, a major source for Ibn al-'Adim), as well as the work of Khoury (on Ibn al-‘Adim’s autobiography), Morray (on the Bughya), and Humphries (on the histories of Aleppo and Damascus), this study will scour the Bughya for reference to the fitna, paying special attention to its discussion surrounding individual experience of critical narrative moments, including the election of ‘Uthman; his assassination; the Battle of the Camel; the Battle of Siffin; and the ascension of Mu’awiya ibn Abi Sufyan as the first Umayyad Caliph. This study will demonstrate Ibn al-‘Adim’s narrative strategies; the contemporaneous concerns that motivated his narrative choices; and some of the methodological difficulties that arise when dealing with a source approximately 75% of which is lost.
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The art of public speaking (khaṭāba) has been a source of pride and identity for Arabs for over a thousand years. Already in the ninth century, al-Jāḥiẓ singled out Arabs as the only people to master the art of extemporaneous speech. Khuṭab feature prominently not only in adab texts but also historical works. The neglect that these texts face in modern scholarship belies their prominence the Arabic literary and historical landscape. While literary scholars have tended to focus on Arabic poetry, historians have largely disregarded the khuṭab as inauthentic “fictions from the beginning to the end” (Noth). As a result, khaṭāba remains, as el-Azmeh has noted, “a topic yet requiring a basic research.” This paper aims to help remedy this lacuna through a case study of the khuṭab of al-Ḥajjāj b. Yūsuf al-Thaqafī, the fearsome Umayyad governor of Iraq across history and adab works (e.g. al-Jāḥiẓ, al-Mubarrad, al-Ṭabarī, Ibn Qutayba, Masʿūdī, Ibn Athīr). Through an analysis of these khuṭab, both as independent units and parts of larger texts, this paper aims to shed light on their function within Arabic historiography and adab as well as the purposes for which they were preserved.
Al-Ḥajjāj’s khuṭab range from short matter-of-fact statements to long-winded pieces of prosimetrical persuasive art. Building on the work of Qutbuddin, Dähne, and Heinrichs I will classify them and argue that there are two main categories of al-Ḥajjāj’s khuṭab: While some seem to be literary devices following the late antique tradition of placing words into the mouths of historical figures, others—based on their literary and rhetorical qualities and their profuse appearance in many versions across genres—appear to drive the narrative. These are self-sustaining narrative units, which historians more likely collected rather than invented.
I suggest that these latter khuṭab were collected first for their rhetorical value, and later preserved both as historical documents and proofs of the eloquence of the Arabs. The preservation of the khuṭab of al-Ḥajjāj—one of the most vilified figures of Arabic history—within adab texts alongside, for instance, the Prophet or imām ͑Alī, is somewhat puzzling and refines our understanding of adab's edifying nature and of the values that later Muslim historians attached to their “classical age”. Finally, I aim to show how historians and udabā’ used both categories of al-Ḥajjāj’s khuṭab to dramatize their accounts of the past and provide insights that otherwise would not have been preserved.
