Confronting the Caliph: ʿuthmān B. ʿafffān in Three ʿabbasid Chronicles
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Studia Islamica 106 (2011) 25-48 brill.com/si Confronting the Caliph: ʿUthmân b. ʿAfffân in Three ʿAbbasid Chronicles Heather Keaney American University of Cairo, Egypt Until relatively recently medieval Islamic chroniclers were viewed by mod- ern historians in much the same way that Muslims view Muhammad—as transmitter rather than author. While Muslims view the disjointed nature of the Qurʾan as one of the proofs of its divine origin, scholars regarded a chronicle’s collection of disparate historical accounts from earlier authori- ties (khabar, pl., akhbâr) as evidence that chroniclers were not writing their own narratives or imbuing their texts with contemporary concerns. Con- sider, for example, Franz Rosenthal’s assertion in his work on Islamic histo- riography: “History was not used as a means for the propagation of ideas, or, more exactly, historians as a rule did not consciously intend, in writing their works, to reinterpret historical data so as to conform to the ideas they might have wished to propagate.”1 And although this perspective was at the time coming under attack by the work of Marshall Hodgson and Albrecht Noth, it would be several years, if not decades, before Islamic historiogra- phy fully embraced the idea of chroniclers as authors.2 The very structure of Islamic chronicles that made them resistant to tra- ditional historiographical analysis, made them particularly receptive to 1 Franz Rosenthal, A History of Islamic Historiography, 2nd ed. (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1968), 61. 2 Marshall Hodgson, “Two Pre-Modern Muslim Historians: Pitfalls and Oppor- tunities in Presenting Them to Moderns,” in Towards World Community, ed. John Nef, World Academy of Arts and Sciences Publication, vol. 5 (The Hague: Dr. W. Junk N.V. Publishers, 1968), 53-69. Noth’s theories were fijirst published in 1973 and then further developed in collaboration with Lawrence Conrad and translated into English by Michael Bonner and published as The Early Arabic Historical Tradition: A Source-Critical Study (Princeton: The Darwin Press, Inc., 1994). Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/19585705-12341251 26 H. Keaney / Studia Islamica 106 (2011) 25-48 new approaches in literary criticism.3 For example Hayden White’s work on “form-as-message” seems especially applicable to medieval Islamic chronicles. He observes, “once we are enlivened to the extent to which the form of the text is the place where it does its ideologically signifijicant work, aspects of the text that a criticism unsensitized to the operations of a form- as-message will fijind bewildering, surprising, inconsistent, or simply offfen- sive . themselves become meaningful as message.”4 Such insights have borne much fruit in Islamic historiography leading established scholars such as Fred Donner to marvel at what is revealed about a text and its author by focusing on “strategies of compilation.”5 In particular Donner mentions the strategies of selection, placement, repetition and mani- pulation and concludes his article by asserting that coming to grips with these strategies “must be at the top of our agenda when examining such compilations.”6 This article contributes to this important growing fijield by analyzing and contextualizing the strategies of compilation of three ninth century chron- iclers’ treatment of verbal and written confrontations between the Caliph ʿUthmân ibn ʿAfffân (d. 656/35) and his critics. Through a close comparative reading of these confrontations we can see the relationship between how an author constructed his account and how he construed the causes and contemporary consequences of the conflict. An author’s interpretive and literary construction is most easily detected through focusing on particularly contentious events. The third Râshidûn (rightly guided) caliph and successor to Muhammad, ʿUthmân b. ʿAfffân, is certainly one of the most controversial fijigures in early Islamic history. While a close companion of the Prophet Muhammad and an early convert to Islam, his caliphate ended with a revolt against his rule which culmi- nated in ʿUthmân being besieged in his home and brutally murdered. 3 An early and ground breaking application of these new methods to medieval Islamic historiography is Jacob Lassner, Islamic Revolution and Historical Memory: ʿAbbasid Apologetics and the Art of Historical Writing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). 4 Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 204. 5 Fred Donner, “ʿUthman and the Râshidûn Caliphs in Ibn ʿAsâkir’s Târîkh madînat Dimashq: A Study in Strategies of Compilation,” in Ibn ʿAsâkir and Early Islamic History, Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam 20, (Princeton: The Dar- win Press, 2001), 44-61. 6 Ibid., 61..