HISTORICAL WRITING

The term ta˒rikh is presently used in languages such as Arabic, Turkish, and Persian for "history." Similar to the connotations of the term in the major European languages it refers, on the one hand, to the past itself and, on the other hand, to the writing of history. Narrative texts (chronicles, biographical dictionaries, etc.), written with the explicit purpose to be preserved, have been of particular importance for studying the history of the Islamic lands. Even more than in the European and the Chinese contexts, substantial documentary and archival evidence of history for regions such as the Arabic-speaking lands is practically nonexistent for the period prior to the fourteenth century. Hence, most of our knowledge of the regions' past depends on its representation in Islamic historiography.

In contrast to the modern study of historical writing for other regions such as the European lands, the study of Islamic historical writing is to a large degree still characterized by predominantly philological concerns. It is only since the 1990s that an interest into the wider societal context of the production of historical knowledge has taken a significant place in works such as Tarif Khalidi's Arabic Historical Thought in the Classical Period (1994). Approaches taking up the challenges and possibilities arising out of the linguistic turn in the second half of the twentieth century are rare except isolated examples such as Aziz al-Azmeh's Histoire et Narration (1986).

Historiography, in the sense of reflecting on the writing of history itself, was restricted to short references in the introduction of historical works in the Islamic lands until the fourteenth century. The Persian religious philosopher al-˓Iji (d. after 1381/82) composed in Arabic the first reflection on the technique and methodology of writing history, the Gift of the Poor Man. This and similar treatises of the following century were partly translated by Franz Rosenthal in A History of Muslim Historiography (1968). The famous North African scholar and official Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406) developed in his Introduction a theoretical pattern to classify events of the past, well beyond mundane considerations of technique and methodology.

Similarly, history gained only over time an independent place in the Muslim canon of disciplines. Philosophical classifications of sciences such as those by al-Farabi (d. 950) did not refer to history as an independent field of knowledge, emulating the tradition of the Hellenistic classifications. However, educational classifications included it as a discipline in its own right from the tenth century onward, although it was rarely taught as such in madrasas. At the same time, introductions to chronicles show that the authors considered themselves, among others, as historians (mu˒arrikh)—a term also often encountered in medieval biographical entries.

Historical Writing in the Central Islamic Lands—Premodern Period

Islamic historiography, in the sense of recording history, started with texts written in Arabic, but its early development is still largely unknown. The Greek and Persian literary traditions of the newly conquered lands were not adopted as direct models to build upon. It was rather the oral pre-Islamic Arabic tradition that shaped early Islamic historiography to a certain degree. The focus on genealogy and the authentication of reports by means of chains of transmitters were remnants of this heritage. However, the concrete forms of this historiography developed very much within the dynamics of early Islamic history, that is, through the interplay between the different Near Eastern cultural traditions

Early Islamic historical writing was intimately linked to immediate theological concerns. The first writings, which might be labeled as being historical, treated the life of the prophet Muhammad and his Companions. These writings were recorded mainly as hadiths, that is, as reports on the deeds and sayings of the Prophet. For later historiography this beginning was of importance: The outwardly isolated character of each single report (khabar) proved to be influential in shaping longer narratives. This early material has engendered a major ongoing debate in present-day scholarship about its authenticity as its dating has posed manifold problems. One of the earliest reliable examples is the sira by the hadith scholar Muhammad Ibn Ishaq (d. 761), a biography of the Prophet.

In the following centuries historiography found two main forms of expression: chronicles and biographical dictionaries. The religious scholar al-Tabari (d. 923) composed in Baghdad the typical example of the former category: the universal chronicle History of Prophets and Kings, which dealt with events from the creation of the world until his time. "Universal" referred here obviously to Islamic history and what was perceived to be its predecessor(s). At the same time, chronicles were produced with a more limited geographical focus on towns (e.g., Damascus) and regions (e.g., Syria). The writing of history in the form of chronicles is similar to the writings produced in Latin Europe or Early and Middle Imperial China.

On the contrary, the second major form of historical writing, biographical dictionary, was in its importance and elaboration unique to Islamic historiography. Reflecting pre-Islamic genealogical interests and Islamic concerns of tracing the reliability of transmitters, the genre experienced an important development from early times onward. An early example of this genre, Ibn Sa˓d's (d. 845) Grand Book of the Generations, reflects its exclusive theological concern by focusing on transmitters of hadith. This focus changed over the centuries, and in the thirteenth century the jurist Ibn Khallikan (d. 1282), for example, included in his dictionary individuals from more varied backgrounds. More specialized works started to be limited to specific towns or specific professions, such as the Generations of Physicians by Ibn Abi Usaybi˓a (d. 1270).

This development was an expression of the gradual change in the social identities of authors of historical works. From the eleventh century onward important parts of the ulema started to interact more closely with court circles and rulers. Typical examples in this regard are Saladin's biographer Ibn Shaddad (d. 1234), who was the ruler's judge of the army, and Ibn al-˓Adim (d. 1262), the author of a local chronicle of Aleppo, who served the ruler of the town as a secretary, judge, and wazir. Nevertheless, authors of historical works continued to belong almost exclusively to the elusive group of the ulema. Authors, being part of the military elite, continued to be rare, while authors belonging to the commoners remained nonexistent.

Toward the end of the tenth century Arabic lost its position as the exclusive literary language in the Islamic lands. The regionalization of political power also found its expression in the rise of Persian historiography. This development was not only of linguistic nature. Persian historiography gained specific characteristics, such as stronger efforts to offer an explicit unified narrative, a more limited focus on events linked to courts and, initially, a near-absence of biographical works. Rashid al-Din (d. 1318) produced with his Collection of Chronicles a Persian universal history unmatched in its breadth. This chronicle was written for the Mongol ruler and was outstanding as it included the history of all known people, instead of only those of the Islamic lands.

Historical Writing Beyond the Central Islamic Lands—Premodern Period

Persian historiography spread subsequently also to newly Islamized regions like South Asia. There, Muslim historiography was from its outset in the thirteenth century almost exclusively written in Persian. Early Indo-Persian historical writings reflected closely the outlook of its Persian models, such as its intimate links with court life. It is only during the Mogul period (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries) that Muslim South Asian historiography developed distinct characteristics, like the genre of memoirs written by members of the royal family or private persons.

The life of Nur al-Din Raniri (d. 1658), a South Asian scholar with a partly Arab genealogy, might serve as an example for the close links between the historiographical traditions of the different predominantly Muslim regions. After moving to the sultanate of Aceh (Northern Sumatra) he composed a Malay chronicle striving to mirror the classical historiographical style (e.g., al-Tabari) and drawing simultaneously heavily on the Malay Annals. The Malay Annals are one of the early examples of Southeast Asian Muslim historiography, written around 1500. Here, an anonymous author writing in Malay had cautiously aimed at harmonizing indigenous traditions and Islam, that is, Raniri's text reflected a bundle of different regional historiographical traditions. This interaction within the Muslim world via members of its literary elites might not be sufficient to legitimize the use of the single term "Muslim historiography" for such diverse traditions. Nevertheless, it shows at least that texts shifted easily from one region to the other and were reworked during this process.

Central Asia and sub-Saharan Africa are further examples of how texts and genres were transferred and adopted. Muslim troops conquered the western lands of Central Asia during the early eighth century. Therefore, the region's historiography was part of the Arabic and later Persian and Turkic traditions as well. However, in regions beyond these initial conquests, the development of a Muslim historiography was more complex. Here, the interplay between local oral traditions and written Muslim works was more accentuated. For example, the earliest surviving history for the Volga-Ural area, the Turkic Collection of Chronicles, completed in 1602 by ˓Ali Jalayiri, derived not only from Rashid al-Din's fourteenth-century work with the same name but also to a large degree from oral folklore sources circulating among the Muslim nomads.

The interplay between oral and written historical traditions was also a salient feature in sub-Saharan Africa. While historiography written by indigenous authors came into existence around 1500, these narratives continued to circulate simultaneously in a context of oral culture. The first written texts appeared in those regions that had previously been strongly Islamized and Arabized: the Sudan Belt and the East African Swahili coast. Consequently, chronicles such as the East African Kilwa Chronicle, written around 1530, or the West African Ta˒rikh al-Sudan, written by the Timbuktu historian al-Sa˓di in the seventeenth century, were generally composed in Arabic. West African Muslim historiography developed also the genre of biographical dictionaries, such as Ahmad Baba's (d. 1627) work on the learned men of the Western Sudan. During the nineteenth century, authors switched increasingly to indigenous languages such as Hausa and Fulfulde written first in Arabic and subsequently in Latin script. In combination with the developing dominance of European languages, Arabic ceased to be the literary elite's prime means of expression.

Historical Writing in the Central Islamic Lands: Ottoman and Modern Periods

During the fifteenth century Ottoman Turkish emerged as a major literary language in Anatolia and in parts of the Arabic-speaking Middle East. Ottoman historiography started in the fourteenth century with rather short appendixes to existing chronicles. It was only in the fifteenth century that independent historical works in Ottoman Turkish were composed. These works were mainly chronicles written by individuals close to court circles. Other genres (e.g. biographical dictionaries) did not play a significant role in Ottoman historiography. History of Events, a work by the officially appointed imperial historian Mustafa Na˓ima (d. 1716), enjoyed considerable popularity. His recourse to Ibn Khaldun's patterns in order to describe the perceived decline of the empire was typical for this period's historiography. With the Ottoman period the importance of narrative historiography for modern day scholarship decreases. The large amounts of surviving archival and documentary material for the central Islamic lands allow more varied venues to the history of this and the following periods.

Persian, Ottoman, and Arabic historiographies witnessed significant changes during the late nineteenth century. This process culminated for the Arabic context in works such as the History of Islamic Civilization by the Syrian Christian Jurji Zaydan (d. 1914), published in Egypt between 1902 and 1906. Here a distinct shift in form and content becomes visible, especially as he drew heavily on European works dealing with Arab or Islamic history. Nevertheless, these "modern" works were still to a large degree embedded in traditional historiography, visible in a similar use of poetry. Contrary to traditional assumptions, which refer the nineteenth century developments exclusively to the modernizing impact of the West, recent scholarship such as Crecelius (2001) has stressed the vivacity of Arabic historiography also in the "declining" eighteenth century.

The changes led in the late nineteenth century to a reorientation of historiography toward narratives of Ottoman and Arabic national origins. In the early twentieth century the Ottoman narrative was Turkified and with the rise of Arab national states the Arabic version started slowly to be supplemented and ultimately replaced respectively by national narratives. This universal trend toward national identities was also visible in other Muslim regions. The politician and writer Muhammad Yamin (d. 1962), for example, integrated the Malay Annals into his narrative of an Indonesian national history dating many millennia back.

The dominant second trend during the twentieth century was the professionalization of the writing of history. The general expansion of higher education in the Middle East, especially after World War II, led also to a significant rise in the number of university history departments. This has changed the general pattern of the first half of the century when Middle Eastern historians generally took their degree from Western universities. However, historical research remains a difficult task because of limited material resources and the variant political conditions, which are not always favorable for dealing with certain topics.

See alsoArabic Literature ; Biography and Hagiography ; Heresiography ; Ibn Khaldun ; Tabari, al- .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Azmeh, Aziz al-. "Histoire et Narration dans l'Historiographie Arabe." Annales ESC 41 (1986):411–431.

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Konrad Hirschler