17 - History writing

Summary

The two Arabic words most commonly associated with ‘history’, taʾrῑkh and khabar (pl. akhbār), reveal conflicting ideas regarding writing about the past. Derived from ancient Near Eastern roots, taʾrῑkh conveys a sense of dating, whereas khabar, meaning ‘story, anecdote’, bears no notion of fixation of time at all. Earlier historical reports were known as akhbār, whereas taʾrῑkh came later to acquire a wider definition of ‘history’ and ‘historical interpretation’. By the end of the second/eighth century most of the works written on history bore the title taʾrῑkh. It was later uniformly adopted into other Islamic languages: Persian, Turkish and Urdu. A massive corpus under the rubric of taʾrῑkh – chronicle, biographical dictionary, administrative geography – was produced over the period in question. Of these, only chronicles will be surveyed here.

The ‘classical’ period (c. 710–1150 CE)

The beginning: ḥadῑth scholars and akhbārῑs

In many ways Islamic history writing began with a ‘clean slate’. While pre-Islamic Arabian inscriptions, poetry and the ayyām al-ʿarab folklore reflect a nostalgic curiosity about the past, the rise of Arabic-Islamic historiography stemmed from a more practical and immediate motivation. Its genesis lay in the early akhbār-reports, which were mostly short and introduced by an isnād, similar to that of the ḥadῑth.