chapter 3 Thieves and Arab History

Al-Maqrīzī inserted his chapter on the ‘Arab Thieves’ in volume 5 of his al- Ḫabar ʿan al-Bašar. As noted in our Introduction, the work was conceived as a history of humanity from Creation to Muḥammad’s prophecy, and the aim of the book, in al-Maqrīzī’s words from his introductory preamble was to tell history from its beginnings,

such that the can be known and distinguished from all other peo- ples, and in order to explain how Arab society was united in the distant past, and how they afterwards split into peoples, tribes, sub-tribes, clans, and kin groups.1

Al-Maqrīzī then elaborates that because the Prophet Muḥammad was an “Arab Prophet” and because God selected the Arabs to carry the final message of His guidance, it is further incumbent that “the Arabs’ right to be cherished, vaunted, glorified and honoured must be known.”2 The tenor is thus set for a laudatory history of the Arabs, and of the six volumes of al-Ḫabar, part of vol- ume 1, all of volumes 2, 3 and 4 and half of volume 5 are devoted to the history of Arabia before Islam. The ‘Arab Thieves’ chapter is the penultimate section on the Arabs. It constitutes the first substantive part of volume 5,3 and pre- cedes the lengthy final Arab chapter on the pre-Islamic “Battle Days” (Ayyām al-ʿArab). The entirety of al-Maqrīzī’s Arab history discourse in al-Ḫabar is not

1 Al-Maqrīzī al-Ḫabar, MS Aya Sofya 3362, fols. 4b–5a. 2 Al-Maqrīzī al-Ḫabar, MS Aya Sofya 3362, fol. 5a. 3 Prior to the opening of the Luṣūṣ chapter, there are two short sections on the Religions of the Arabs before Islam (diyānāt al-ʿArab) and the ‘Arab Hussies’ (mufāḥašāt al-ʿArab), contained on one leaf of the Aya Sofya MS 3365, p. 246. The volume to which these sections rightfully belong is unclear: the chapter on the ‘Arab Thieves’ in the holograph starts with a full quin- ion, and the leaves upon which the above two sections were written was not part of that quire. Thus, these two chapters were written separately from al-Luṣūṣ, but they were bound into volume 5, presumably during al-Maqrīzī’s lifetime (the titlepage of volume 5 is signed by al-Maqrīzī’s nephew and inheritor suggestive that he inherited the volume with the two chapters included). This issue is considered further in Chapter 5.3, below. I am indebted to Frédéric Bauden for discussing this with me: his knowledge of the manuscripts was crucial in exploring this situation.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004386952_005 thieves and arab history 59 yet available in a reliable critical edition,4 so at present it is difficult to be pre- cise about how the ‘Arab Thieves’ fit into his conception of the Arab past; our exploration here will accordingly posit suggestions based on the traditions of telling Arab history prior to al-Maqrīzī, and from indications that can be drawn from his treatment of the Luṣūṣ and the Ayyām al-ʿArab. Given al-Maqrīzī’s explicit aim to present Arab history in a positive light, and the Arabs as the rightful recipients of God’s divine guidance, it seems at first blush that a chapter on thievery would be rather counterproductive. Out- law narratives are often tinged with subaltern discourses and sentiments of resistance, all of which are ill-suited to an avowed God-fearing and thoroughly traditionist defence of Arab character and institutions,5 but we have noted in Chapter 1, above, that outlaw traditions in other languages can shift into estab- lishment circles and even high literature, and if that were also the case for the ‘Arab Thieves’, the stories’ functions need not necessarily degrade the memory of the Arab people, and they could serve manifold alternative discourses. To investigate the status of the corpus further, we will ask pre-modern his- toriography a simple, yet crucial question: did one need to tell stories about ‘Arab Thieves’ in order to tell Arab history? I.e., from the perspective of a Mus- lim historian of pre-Islamic Arabia, were thieves salient characters whom the historian needed in order to memorialise the pre-Islamic Arab past? Akin to the meanings of the terminology about outlaws explored in the pre- vious Chapter, the answers to our present question fluctuate over time and between texts, and as is the case with a number of the complex issues raised in this volume, more detailed analysis will be the subject of a separate mono- graph, but salient findings across the major historiographical texts on Arabness prior to al-Maqrīzī’s day will be imparted here.

3.1 Outlaws and Arabness in the Third/Ninth Century

To begin at the earliest textual records of Arabian history in the late sec- ond/eighth and early third/ninth century, it seems that one could answer our question in the negative: the corpus of literature evidences that outlaws

4 For a justified critique of the only edition of al-Ḫabar published to date, see Bauden (forth- coming). 5 Al-Maqrīzī’s historical writings betray a traditionist view of the legitimacy of (see his introduction in al-Sulūk, 1.1:13–22); and in his sympathies, al-Maqrīzī supports those who embodied righteous rule in the tradition of the Prophet (Cobb (2003): 78; Van Steenbergen (2016): 97).