James Howard-Johnston

A. Cameron & L.I. Conrad (eds), The Byzantine and EarlyIslamic Near East, I. Problems in the Literary Source Material,1992In: Topoi, volume 5/2, 1995. pp. 675-685.

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Howard-Johnston James. A. Cameron & L.I. Conrad (eds), The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East, I. Problems in theLiterary Source Material, 1992. In: Topoi, volume 5/2, 1995. pp. 675-685.

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Averil CAMERON and Lawrence I. CONRAD, eds., The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East. I, Problems in the Literary Source Material, Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam. I, Princeton (1992), xiv + 428 pages.

A project which was conceived in 1986 and came into being with a workshop held in autumn 1989 now makes a first durable contribution to scholarship. The proceedings of that workshop are published in what is intended to be the first of a series of publications devoted to the transitional age at the end of antiquity and focused geographically on the Near East. The general objective of the project is to promote communication between specialists currently at work in traditionally separate fields as well as between those dealing with different aspects of the same field, and thereby to encourage a synthesis of methods and ideas or at any rate a fruitful interaction between them. So far four workshops have been held, each attended by some fifty scholars and graduate students with very diverse interests and expertise. Discussions, which were always lively, have proved remarkably successful both in conveying information across disciplinary divides and in opening up fresh approaches to issues, familiar and unfamiliar. The proceedings of the second and third workshops, dealing with « Land Use and Settlement Patterns » and « States, Resources and Armies » will be published in the near future.

It is fitting that the first volume to be published deals with basic questions concerning the written source material. The principal issues are raised in the course of the editorial introduction, which both summarises the thrusts of the eight published papers and places them in a wider historiographical and literary context. II may be a truism to say that no written text should be used for historical purposes until it has been properly appraised, but it is one well worth hammering home. First of all, questions of authenticity must be answered satisfactorily. Then each text must be understood for what it is, the product of a particular milieu, constrained to a greater or lesser extent by the requirements of genre, reflecting to a greater or lesser degree the interests and quirks of an author or authors, serving to a greater or lesser degree a cause or causes. Above all its own internal structure must be delineated, its linguistic and intellectual level gauged, and the effects of literary artifice identified and appreciated. All of these points are made quite rightly by the editors, who are also concerned to concentrate attention on the interaction between oral and written modes of communication and to ensure that the full range of extant texts, however far removed in form and substance some may be from conventional histories and chronicles, be treated as the raw materials of history.

Topoi 5 (1995) p. 675-685

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The papers deal with two distinct subjects. Five and part of a sixth deal with literary production in Christian societies, extending from the mid sixth century to the beginning of the eighth. Two and the major part of a third confront the central issue which fertilises or bedevils early Islamic studies in the late twentieth century, that of authenticity — how much faith, if any, should be placed in the voluminous written materials dealing with the life of the Prophet, the conquest by the umma which he created of the whole Near East in so short a time, and the complex, turbulent history of the Umayyad Caliphate ? A lone contributor adheres to what is termed a « positivist » approach and argues for the authenticity of one important dossier of documentary material. She encounters formidable opponents of the sceptical tendency, who seem to have won the editorial team over to their side since the arguments of the lone « positivist » are characterised as « precarious » (p. 16).

Michael Whitby (« Greek Historical Writing after Procopius : Variety and Vitality ») presents a magisterial survey of historical writing in Greek, covering the works of high-style classicing history written by Procopius' three successors (Agathias, Menander Protector and Theophylact Simocatta), chronicles (chiefly Malalas' and the Chronicon Paschale) and the ecclesiastical history of Evagrius (with a side reference to that of John of Ephesus, written in Constantinople but in Syriac). He then turns to the following phase of historiographical depression, extending from the 630s to the late eighth century, and suggests that the reasons for it are to be found in a diminishing inflow of ambitious provincials with intellectual pretensions out to make their mark in the capital, a contracting radius of collective historical memory, a distate for recording failures rather than successes abroad, and a shift into other, non-historical modes of discourse (theological disputation and apocalyptic futurology). He concludes with a summary of what can be gleaned from East Roman sources about the Arabs before the coming of Islam.

Averil Cameron (« New Themes and Styles in Greek Literature : Seventh- Eighth Centuries ») then broadens the field of inquiry to include a wide range of texts composed without a primary historical purpose — polemics, homilies, patriographic literature, quaestiones, disputations, florilegio, and miracula. She draws attention to an increasing element of orality and to the large scale of cross-cultural communication forced on Christendom at a time of disaster, when large numbers of refugees were flowing westward. She concurs with Whitby's view that there was a dramatic contraction of historiography in seventh-century Byzantium and a no less dramatic fall in standards which allowed legendary figures increasingly to populate the past. Many of the same themes are taken up by John Haldon (« The Works of Anastasius of Sinai : A Key Source for the History of Seventh-Century East Mediterranean Society and Belief »), who adds that the decline of the city, the basic cultural as well as social, economic and administrative unit of the late Roman World, was responsible for much of the

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depression of literary activity evident in the seventh and eighth centuries. His main concern, though, is with a particular text, the Quaestiones of Anastasius of Sinai, for which he defines a context (in terms of the author's career which just reached the beginning of the eighth century, the development of the genre, the compromises forced on Christian communities in the Caliphate, the transition from oral to written form, and the evolving thought-world of the author's milieu).

It has long been recognised that the unprecedented losses suffered by the Roman state in the middle years of the seventh century induced a profound transformation of its institutions. What else was to be expected when an empire accustomed to bestriding the Near East was reduced in half a generation to a modest power struggling to maintain its independence on the edge of the Caliphate ? The three contributors who deal with Byzantine literary culture are agreed that this plunging of political fortune with all its structural consequences also had a historiographical analogue. The change was indeed a drastic one, as they demonstrate. It can be illustrated most graphically by reference to the reign of Constans II (641-668). When, over a century later (probably in the 780s), a first attempt was made to bridge the gap between the early years of the seventh century and his own time, by the future patriarch Nicephorus, writing a short, consciously classicising history, he had no information about Constans II to hand and simply leapt over what was probably the most critical period in the history of Byzantium, the period when a new defensive system was devised and the whole social order was put on a war footing. His younger contemporary, the more scholarly Theophanes, who amassed a considerable library at the monastery which he had founded, fared little better when, a quarter of a century later, he confronted the reign of Constans II. He too could find no Byzantine source dealing with secular affairs, and had to make do with the scanty materials pertaining to Byzantium supplied by an eastern chronicle.

It would, however, be surprising if the Syriac- speaking former provincials of the East Roman Empire had suffered a lesser cultural shock than those of Asia Minor who had not been subjected to Muslim rule. The scale of the shock is registered by GJ. Reinink (« Ps.-Methodius : A Concept of History in Response to the Rise of Islam ») and Han J.W. Drijvers (« The Gospel of the Twelve Apostles : A Syriac Apocalypse from the Early Islamic Period ») who examine a small group of apocalyptic texts emanating from the occupied lands around the year 700. Both conduct delicate dissections of the texts in question, that of Reinink yielding the more interesting results since the ps. -Methodius Apocalypse which he studies is the most innovative and influential of the texts. The time and place of its composition are established relatively easily — namely Singara on the margin of the desert and the sown, at the junction of the western and eastern segments of the Fertile Crescent, and 690 or 691, when Abd al- Malik's successes in the second great round of civil war in the Caliphate had

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extinguished lingering Christian hopes of recovery. Hope was now transferred to the apocalyptic plane. Ps.-Methodius conjures up a Christian hero, a composite figure to which memories of Alexander, Constantine and, above all, Jovian contribute. He will destroy Muslim rule, now identified with the time of troubles preceding the End, will re-unite all Christians and will then hand over his crown to Christ at Golgotha. Reinink argues persuasively that the author's reaction to the evident signs that Muslim rule would be permanent (above all the building of the Dome of the Rock in 691) was to abandon the customary sectarian stance of Christian confessional groups and to urge instead a general, united resistance to a menacing, alien form of monotheism.

In the first part of a massive historiographical analysis of one episode in the Arab conquest of the Near East (« The Conquest of Arwäd : A Source-Critical Study in the Historiography of the Early Medieval Near East »), Lawrence I. Conrad demonstrates that there was a contraction of historical interest in the Syriac world no less marked than that documented for Byzantium. For a single, mid eighth-century historian, identified as Theophilus of Edessa, supplied, via various intermediaries, virtually all the narrative material on the seventh century and the first half of the eighth which appears in the two best-known Syriac chronicles, both composed in the thirteenth century (that of Michael the Syrian and an anonymous chronicle ending in 1234). Theophilus' work, now lost, is also shown to have been the eastern source used by Theophanes to supplement his Byzantine material for the period (it had reached him in the form of a Greek translation) and to have made its way into Arabic in an abridged form in the tenth-century chronicle of Agapius.

There could be no greater contrast between this dearth of Christian historical narratives and the extraordinary abundance of material in Arabic dealing with the seventh century. But what value should be attributed to the latter ? If allowance is made for literary artifice, vested interest, fertile imagination, oral transmission and transition from oral to written form, how much trustworthy information has been left and how is it to be distinguished from that which has mutated ? These are the dominant concerns of the last three papers in the volume. In the second part of his paper, Conrad confronts Arab accounts of the conquest of Arwäd, a minute island off the Syrian coast, which capitulated around 650, with that of the various derivatives of Theophilus of Edessa, which he is inclined to trust. The fullest Arab version, that of Ibn A'tham al-Kufi (written in the mid ninth century), is then shown to be a sham, a fanciful concoction of familiar narrative motifs, topoi and other schematic features (p. 363). A second stage of narrative elaboration, which led to major distortion (confusion of Arwäd and Rhodes, displacement of the episode to the 670s) is then identified in the account of al-Waqidi which was recycled later by al- Tabari.

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The lesson to be drawn from Conrad's paper is that caution, the utmost caution, must be shown in handling Arab accounts of the earliest phases of Muslim history. It is rammed home yet more forcefully by Stefan Leder (« The Literary Use of the Khabar : A Basic Form of Historical Writing »). He defines khabar (p. 279) as « a self-contained narrative unit which depicts an incident or a limited sequence of occurences or conveys sayings ». He views the khabar as a basic component of early Islamic historical writing, but one which is detachable from a specific context, ubiquitous and malleable. Originating partly in tribal story-telling (as qissa) it infiltrates historical narrative, carrying in topoi, pithy sayings, striking illustrations of character ; then feeding off the interest of the story teller/writer and listener/reader, it grows in a process of elaboration which introduces a great deal of fiction ; before long, these khabar growths break down the structures of their host narratives and destroy them as useful historical sources.

The voice of Wadäd al-Qädi (« Early Islamic State Letters : The Question of Authenticity ») seems to be sounding in a wilderness, arguing that a dossier of mainly official correspondence dating from the late Umayyad period can be reconstituted from texts reproduced in later, often much later, sources. She deploys several mutually reinforcing arguments in favour of the authenticity of the letters in question : she indicates a likely line of early transmission in the caliphal secretariat, identifies the large, only partially preserved anthology of Ibn Tayfur (d.893) as the principal repository of the letters and the main source from which they were quarried by later authors, argues from internal evidence against a theory of wholesale fabrication, and demonstrates that changes introduced by copyists were modest and almost entirely stylistic. Although her thesis has considerable tensile strength and convinces this reviewer, all she can do is to make one fairly substantial addition to the category of the demonstrably authentic. The category may be growing, but it constitutes only a very small proportion of the total volume of early Islamic historical material.

The first workshop on Late Antiquity and Early Islam was an informative and exciting experience for participants. Cumulatively the eight papers which were delivered then and are now published make a substantial contribution to knowledge. The wide-ranging discussion which they provoked did much to broaden and deepen understanding of the Near East at a crucial phase of its history. The task of reviewing is made all the more pleasurable by memories of the occasion and of many pertinent oral contributions, only some of which have been caught and fixed in writing by the editors or by individual authors in the course of revising their papers. No respectable library can afford to miss this book, and such is its modest price that individual scholars can buy their own copies without strain.

Three sets of reflections which occurred to me in the course of the workshop seem worth fleshing out now by way of general comment on the

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historiographical issues at the centre of its discussions. The first concerns historical writing in Byzantium over the century or so which followed the first, shocking Arab victories in Palestine and Syria. There is a paradox in the contention that there was a rapid shrinkage in historical activity at a time when historical understanding of the neighbouring world was essential to the struggle for survival. Indeed it can be argued, from Byzantium's remarkable military and political performance between the 630s and the 750s, that no developed society had hitherto shown so sure and penetrative a grasp of past and present circumstance, that never before had the whole governing elite of a state been so imbued with historical understanding as that of Byzantium at that time. For knowledge was as vital as effective military organisation in the struggle to maintain an independent existence on the margins of the Caliphate. Hence the question posed by all three Byzantinist contributors as to why there was so great a dearth of historical writing takes on added significance. The answer must surely be sought in a general change of intellectual atmosphere at a time when the war effort was the dominating concern of a governing apparatus which had always incorporated within it both writers, including historians, and their patrons. There was no question of a general decline in the level of intellectual activity — theological debate first between Monotheletes and Chalcedonians, then between Iconoclasts and Iconophiles, was conducted on a dauntingly high conceptual plane, and the sudden surge of scientific and mathematical activity in the first half of the ninth century began from a high, though non- visible base. It is therefore wrong to extrapolate from the ignorance and superstition displayed by the author of the late eighth-century Parastaseis (on which see most recently I. Seväenko, « The Search for the Past in Byzantium around the Year 800 », Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 46 [1992], pp. 289-93). Rather he should be assigned to that never negligible category of fairly well-educated cranks, working in the intermediate or upper reaches of a bureaucracy.

But if the governing and intellectual elite of Byzantium was compelled to remain historically alert, if it continued to operate at a high cerebral level, why has it left so exiguous a historical deposit in writing ? Whitby, Cameron and Haldon are surely right first to point to a contraction in its size as a crucial factor (itself a consequence of the massive loss of territory to the Arabs and of widespread urban decline within the rump of empire under imperial rule) and second to a re-orientation of its interests. Essential practical concerns dominated the lives of officials. We may envisage them gathering and processing information about neighbouring peoples, planning, organising logistics etc. Much documentation of a historical character (notably position-papers) would have been produced by the bureaucracy, just as much vital paperwork betraying a fine grasp of theological niceties was generated in the vital intellectual struggle for doctrinal purity. It is then simply fortuitous that the former has vanished (with the loss of Byzantine state archives) while a fair amount of the latter has survived in ecclesiastical and monastic libraries.

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Such a view is touched on by Haldon (pp. 126-28) only to be rejected, as well it might be, were it a conjecture unsupported by tangible evidence. Evidence does, however, exist. A handful of texts which must be classified as historical have survived. Some were officially sponsored such as the Liber Pontificalis (ed. L. Duchesne, 2 vols, Paris [1886-92]), production of which was resumed in the seventh century when Rome was most exposed to Byzantine influence, and book II of the Miracula of St. Demetrius (ed. P. Lemerle, Paris [1979]), dealing with seventh-century events more in the manner of a local chronicle than a hagiographie text. Others were unofficial in character. Dissident circles composed and circulated a dossier of materials connected with the trials of Pope Martin and Maximus Confessor (on which see most recently J.F. Haldon, Byzantium in the Seventh Century, Cambridge [1990], pp. 306-12). Some individuals did make the time to write history in their leisure hours : a great deal of material from three such works lies embedded in the texts of Nicephorus (ed. C. Mango, Washington, D.C. [1990]) and Theophanes (ed. C. de Boor, Leipzig [1883]). The first of these lost works was written by a continuator of John of Antioch in the 640s and chronicled inter alia the first explosive phase of Arab expansion. The second two covered successively the period from 668 to 769 and paid special attention to Byzantine-Bulgar relations. To these should be added certain bio-degradable elements — polemical pamphlets, either encomiastic or psogic in character, which had a short lifespan but have left many traces in Byzantine historical writings. Two, dating from the beginning of the eighth century, have left a clear imprint on extant texts, an account of Justinian II's dealings with Cherson in the Crimea (unfavourable — Theophanes, pp. 372-74 & 377-81 and Nicephorus, cc. 42 & 45) and a narrative of the Caucasian adventures of the young officer who later became the Emperor Leo III (favourable — Theophanes, pp. 391-95).

It may therefore be hazarded, in opposition to the consensus of the Byzantinist contributors, that historical interest rose to a new height in seventh- and eighth-century Byzantium, precisely because it was an era of disaster. For it was absolutely essential to try to explain what had happened and what might still happen, in order to cope with present circumstance and to survive. Political failure or cultural decline should not be undervalued as a force motivating historians to write, as Whitby (pp. 71-73) and Cameron (p. 84) appear to do.

The non-Islamicist may perhaps use his vantage point outside the subject to offer, in the second place, some general comments on the historiographical debate which consumes so much of the energies of Islamicists at this time.

The rise of historical writing in Islam is extraordinarily impressive. Within three generations or so of the Prophet's death, a new type of historiography evolved which was quite independent of that developed in the Graeco-Roman world and, in several respects, markedly its superior. Narratives of tribal exploits, genealogies, poetry, both celebratory and polemical, provided a pre-

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Islamic base upon which members of Muhammad's umma, surely no less tenaciously memoried than their fellow-Arabs then and since, built over the following generations. It was — and this surely should be self-evident — in origin an earnest saving after the truth. From the early eighth century the search widened in scope and took on a scholarly character. Rival historical entrepreneurs developed distinctive styles of history in different centres, but they were engaged in a common task — the recording of a chain of events which had transformed Arabia and the known world in an astonishingly short time. Between them they amassed a huge volume of information and set about the laborious work of compilation and critical scrutiny. Of course there were many vested interests, competing or conflicting with each other, which either had or wished to have a stake in the extraordinary story of Islam's rise. Of course the compendia which took shape, concerning the deeds of the Prophet (the sïra), the conquests (the futüh) and subsequent events, were huge, unwieldy, ramshackle affairs. There are inevitably a multitude of inconsistencies as well as a basic shared storyline. But the outside observer cannot fail but be impressed by the scale of the enterprise, by the volume of materials gathered, by the insistence on citation of sources, by the care often taken in reproducing different versions rather than conflating them and by the apparent prizing of accuracy of record above literary elegance. Much of this was in marked contrast to traditional Graeco-Roman historiography in which style took precedence over scholarship.

A majority of Islamicists, however, now views this early Islamic scholarly enterprise with deep scepticism. They suspect that the political, legal and, above all, religious concerns of a later age were brought to bear upon transmitted historical traditions and affected a massive transmutation. The vested interests of tribes, clans and individual families are seen a second set of destructive agents, reshaping the past to enhance or maintain their standing in the present. Finally — and this is the main thrust of the sceptical tendency in this volume — it is argued that the imaginations of beduin and settled story-tellers were so fertile that qisas and akhbar were poured into once genuine traditions in huge quantities, at a relatively early stage. The episode of the capture of Arwäd, an island 2 kilometres off the Syrian coast, measuring 800 by 500 metres, is taken to be typical of conquest narratives in the almost entirely fictional treatment which it has received.

There is, of course, no reason to suppose that early Islamic historiography was impervious to distorting influences. Muslims could not escape the limitations of individual experience and the vagaries of individual memory, which make it hard, in any culture, to reconstruct a full, accurate and coherent picture of complex, confusing sets of events. There is plenty of evidence of the working of these processes in the earliest extant narratives of Muhammad's life and the conquests, but, for the most part, the divergences and inconsistencies (large though they may be) are not such as to suggest that other, historiographically more sinister forces were influential in the formation of the

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corpus of historical traditions before the end of the eighth century. As for vested interests, it must be remembered that there were many of them and that they were in competition with each other. It was hard, in a free historiographical market of this sort, for any particular group to impose a radically reshaped or fabricated version of the past on its rivals, especially as it would have to overcome a coalition of well-established interests, with genuine stakes in the shared past.

Much more serious, though, is the charge that later debates about religious and legal matters and related political conflicts exercised a profound influence on the learned world's view of the past, providing an interpretative framework within which information was assembled, arranged and understood. There is no doubt that this did happen, that polemics between rival parties (sectarian, scholarly and political) led to a debasement of scholarship, to a lesser regard for the painstaking deployment of evidence, to tendentious reworkings of the past. But it is implausible to present this narrow piety of parties as a prime motivating force behind the early Islamic historical enterprise. The main corpus of historical traditions had already taken shape (the sira) or was taking shape (the futüh) before it took serious hold (in the second half of the eighth century). A more inclusive piety, looking back with awed respect at the achievements of the Prophet and the Companions, seems to have guided the work of the scholars of earlier generations.

Equally damaging is the very different charge (the principal one levelled in this volume) that the irreverent or irresponsible imaginings of story-tellers not only created a mass of more or less fictional embellishments to sober history but also managed to exercise a pervasive influence on the scholarly historical enterprise. This is rather hard to accept, for two main reasons. First it presupposes an extraordinary lack of discrimination and judgement on the part of the scholars at work amassing and sorting historical material. And second it explains the sucess of akhbar by postulating that they began life as small entities which could insinuate themselves into existing historical narratives and then, in a second phase of life, start growing and causing serious damage. The life-cycle ascribed to the khabar, on this hypothesis, does not accord with commonsense. A process diametrically opposed to that envisaged by Leder seems more likely in most cases : initially long stories breaking apart and fragmenting with time, leaving a residue of remembered sayings, punch lines, illustrations of character, topoi and longer fragments to be scattered over more soundly based historical narratives.

Nor is it safe to draw general conclusions from the treatment of the Arwäd episode. It is hard to accept Conrad's argument (pp. 389-90) that it can be taken as a typical example of futüh reporting. The island was surely too small to have had real strategic importance, and the episode of its capture was less likely to have lodged in individual or collective memories than other more significant conquests. It should therefore probably be viewed as an unrepresentative event,

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as a minuscule tabula rasa onto which a fictional, stereotypical story could be inscribed.

It may therefore be posited that there was more continuity in the build-up of traditions about the life of the Prophet and the conquests and that they were less malleable than the sceptics suppose. Wholesale embellishment and invention on the scale envisaged by Leder or that demonstrated for the Arwäd episode would be a yet more extraordinary historical phenomenon than the rise of Islam itself.

It seems to me that it is the lone « positivist » voice in this volume which should be heard and that it is the sceptics who must continue to beat a retreat. The definitive test, though, as all parties recognise, will come when the main strands in the history of the Islamic conquests (the futüh) are compared, episode by episode, with what is recorded in non-Islamic sources. Perhaps the most useful procedure will be to bring into play the richest written historical tradition of early medieval Christendom, that of Armenia.

This prompts a third and final reflection, concerning the geographical scope of the Late Antiquity-Early Islam Project. It is confined to the inner core of Arabia, the Fertile Crescent which envelops it to the north, and Byzantium, its north-west outlier. Iran remains in the wings, to make a brief entry in the third workshop (on States, Resources and Armies). Armenia, a zone of interaction between the two great powers in Late Antiquity and of intensifying conflict between Byzantium and Islam in the mid seventh century, makes no appearance at all.

Admittedly boundaries have to be drawn somewhere, sometimes arbitrarily, but it is a pity that Armenian historical writing was excluded from the field of inquiry of the first workshop. For three texts contain high-grade material on the history of the Near East in the seventh and eighth centuries : the chronicle attributed to Sebeos which was brought to completion during the first Arab civil war (tr. F. Macler, Histoire d'Héraclius par l'évêque Sebêos, Paris [1904]), that of Lewond written at the end of the eighth century (tr. Z. Arzoumanian, History of the Lewond, The Eminent Vardapet of the Armenians, Philadelphia [1982]), and The History of the Caucasian Albanians of Movsês Dasxurançi, dating from the tenth century but incorporating earlier material of importance (tr. C.J.F. Dowsett, London [1961]). Their absence inadvertently gives the impression that there are no trustworthy Christian sources (the material derived from Theophilus of Edessa being by no means immune to criticism) which throw light on Christian-Muslim relations in the critical middle decades of the seventh century. It thus appears to license doubt for the forseeable future about the value of the corresponding tranche of Arab historical traditions.

In reality, the Armenian sources, which have a demonstrably impressive record of historical accuracy in their coverage of the first thirty years of the seventh century, provide a fixed framework within which to evaluate Islamic

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traditions about the conquests. There are grounds for reasonable optimism. The results of this grander experiment will, I believe, justify historians in making considerable but critical use of the huge volume of historical material generated within Islam about its own origins and early history.

James HOWARD- JOHNSTON Corpus Christi College, Oxford