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work.

Inscribing Difference: The Death of 'Uthman in Tabari's History of Prophets and Kings

by

Matthew L Keegan

William Darrow, Advisor

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the

Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Religion

WILLIAMS COLLEGE

Williamstown, Massachusetts

May 7,2007

Al-Tujibi went in to ('Uthman) and wounded him with a broad iron-tipped arrow, and his blood dripped on this verse [2: 1371: "God will suffice you for them; He is the All-Hearing, the All-Knowing." (The blood) is still on that copy of the Qur'an and has not been scraped off.

-- The History of al-Tabari, 205-206 (According to the account besides that of Abu Sa'id)

If they believe what you have believed, they will be well- guided: but if they turn away, they are indeed dissenting: and Allah will protect you against the; for He is All-Hearing, Omniscient.

-- Qur'an 2 : 137

They say: "If you become Jews or Christians, you shall be well-guided." Say: "Rather, we follow the religion of Abraham, who was upright and no polytheist."

Say: "We believe in Allah, in what has been revealed to us Abraham, Isma'il, Isaac, Jacob, and the Tribes, and in what was imparted to Moses, Jesus, and the other Prophets from their Lord, making no distinction between any of them, and to Him we submit."

-- Qur'an 2 : 135 - 36

Introduction

Narrative, Law, and the Tmth about (the) History

There was once a time when historians assured us that they could tell us the truth about

the past. That certainty - that faith - has largely been supplanted by a postmodern

awareness of narrativity and its operations. History is a story whose meaning is

contained not merely in "facts" but rather in a narrative that claims to somehow represent

the past according to certain conventions. Facts, as such, have little meaning outside of

their narrative matrix and, perhaps, outside of their original cultural context. The

interpretive process has now taken a linguistic turn that focuses on the unresolved and

unresolving nature of meaning.

In this context, the narrative of Tabari's Ta'rikh al-rusul wa-1-mulfik or "The

History of Prophets and Kings," is of particular interest. While Western historians of the

origins of Islam have made many attempts to recover the truth about the past, sources like

Tabari remain uncooperative, which is to say that Tabari's narrative conventions do not

conform to the narrative conventions of modern Western historiography. Instead,

Tabari's monumental story of the world tells many stories regarding any single event,

providing a chronicle of the uncertainties and fallibilities of human memory even in a

textual form. The more dramatic and important the event in the teleological framework

of Tabari's source material, the more ink Tabari expends on that event. The death of

'Uthman, which seems to have sparked a civil war over the future of the Islamic

Community of Believers (umma), is one such important event, and the uncertainties over

this event that Tabari inscribes in his History provide my own point of entry. Does

Tabari provide his readers with a guide to adjudicate between the various accounts of the

past that they encounter in his narrative? What is the purpose of such a contradictory

narrative in the context an Islamic umma about three hundred years after its foundation in

Medina? Tabari's purpose in writing his History may never be known, but its function as

a foundational text in the formative period of Islam should draw our attention to the way

in which it operates to imagine a unified history of the Community of Believers.

* * *

In Tabari's Ta 'rikh al-rusul wa-1-mulfik,' referred to here as the History, Tabari

portrays the history of the world fiom the creation to the time just before his death in 3 10

AH1923 AD.^ The History constructed the history of the Community of Believers in a

particular manner, and it is this textual construction of the past that I will be dealing with

in this study. I will focus on Tabari's narrative of 'Uthman b. 'Affan's murder and on the

possible implications his textual representation of the past both in its content and its

narrative structure.

Tabari was a polymath whose writings ranged from legal theory (fiqh), to the

documentation of disagreements amongst legal scholars (ikhtilaj), to Qur'anic

commentary (tafiir), to history (ta'rikh). These disciplines were in their formative stages

during Tabari's lifetime, and Tabari's role in shaping these discourses resulted in a

1 Tabari apparently referred to it in his own work as MuktaSar ta 'rikh al-rusul wa-1-muliik wa-I-khuliifa or 'The abridgedlshortened history of the prophets, the kings, and the caliphs.' This could only be an act of modest, since his History was monumental in size and scope. In this study, I shall refer to The History of al-Tabari, ed. Ehsan Yarshater (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989). References will consist of an abbreviation (HT), a volume number in lower case roman numerals, followed by a page reference. In the case of forewords or Rosenthal's immense "General Introduction," these references will be included between the volume and page numbers. For a full discussion of Tabari's life and works see HT i, Rosenthal, "General Introduction," 5-1 34.

This foundational event was the Hijra and the Islamic calendar is the Hijricalendar. We will refer to dates by their Muslim AH (After Hijra) dates alongside the more familiar Christian calendar dates. For a full compendium of Muslim dates see Freeman-Grenville, The Muslim and Christian calendars, which provide tables for the conversion of Muslim and Christian dates from the Hijra to the year A.D. 2000. See also the online "Tarek's Universal Converter v8.5," www.fortunecity.comhennyhills/elfman/454/calindex.h~1.

certain freedom to innovate and, to a certain extent, to alter disciplinary boundaries.

These categories of thought and disciplines of study remained unstable as Tabari forged

his historical narrative.

Furthermore, Tabari's History and his Commentary as well as his study of law all

shared a common literary form as their material basis . During the formative period that

seems to have mostly preceded Tabari's works, this anecdotal literary form called khabar

seems to have been divided into more precise categories that each acquired their own

connotations. While khabar seems to refer both the literary form as a whole as well as to

the historical-literary anecdotes regarding events after the Prophet's death, those

particular khabar referring to the words and deeds of the Prophet became hadith,.3

These khabar - defined generically as narrative anecdotes that carry with them a

genealogy of their transmission (isnad) - have a complicated development during which

their status as accurate representations of the past was contested and negotiated in

different ways. Tabari's stated views regarding these discursive entities claiming to

represent the past are important to understanding his construction of an historical

narrative. Tabari's differing treatment of khabar in history and hadith in law suggests

that his approach to an historicizing legal system was fundamentally different from his

approach to history as a reconstruction of the Islamic Community from the death of the

Prophet to the present.

Khalidi discusses the issue of literary origins and the linguistics of the terms in his chapter on "Hadith as History." I do not pretend to know enough about the linguistic developments of the terms "hadith" and "khabar" but have gleaned these working definitions from the secondary literature. However, I depart from Khalidi's later analysis of Tabari's understanding of history in important ways. Khalidi, Tarif, Arabic Historical Thought in the Classical Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Furthermore, the retrojection to the Prophet himself of isnads containing Companions of the Prophet means that this uncertain boundary between hadith and khabar is even more fluid. See Hallaq, Wael, The Origins and Evolution ofIslamic Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) 69-73.

Tabari's History, in its universal scope from the creation of the world to the

present, covers a vast period of time, but Tabari expends most of his ink on the story of

the Community of Believers, beginning with the career of the In general, when

referring to the History, I will be referring to Tabari's treatment of the Islamic period

because, as I will argue below, the pre-Islamic material is complex and should be treated

separately as a scriptural-exegetical history. Thus, the khabar history in the annalistic

framework that covers the period -&om the death of the Prophet Muhammad until eight

years before Tabari's death will be the focus of my attention. It is this construction of the

Islamic Community that confers a sort of historical identity on that community. Unless

otherwise stated, my claims about the History and the khabar form should therefore be

taken to refer to the portion of Tabari's history that deals with the Islamic Community,

since his pre-Islamic material produces a certain stylistic and interpretive discont in~i t~.~

Regardless of these complexities, the majority of the History that is under

consideration here is constructed from khabar placed in an annalistic f rarne~ork.~

Because Tabari acts as a compiler and transmitter of khabar anecdotes, the content of the

historical narrative is not authorial material. For the period under consideration in my

study, Tabari draws mainly from two previous compilers of khabar whose isnads - that

4 In the SUNY translation, volumes 1 through 5 cover history before Muhammad while volumes 6 through 39 cover the three hundred or so years after Muhammad.

Any totalizing claim about the History as a whole is bound to be gravely misleading. See Martensson, Ulrika, "Discourse and Historical Analysis: The Case of Al-Tabari's History of the Messengers and the Kings," Journal of Islamic Studies 16:3 (2005) 287-331. See 292 for a highly problematic assessment of Tabari's methodology in the History as a whole. The historiographically constructed discontinuity in Tabari is in itself interesting and deserves further study. Some scholars have accused their peers of reproducing this historiography of discontinuity with the Islamic past in their own histories, but the narratological construction of that supersessionary logic would be fascinating in its own right.

Leder, Stefan, "The Literary Use of the Khabar: A Basic Form of Historical Writing," in Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam, Vol I : Problems in the Literary Source Material, ed. Averil Cameron and Lawrence I. Conrad (Princeton, NJ: The Darwin Press, 1992). For unavowed authorship see 284-291. For the paradigmatic division between khabar historians and annalistic historians, see Rosenthal, A History of Muslim Historiography (Leiden; Brill, 1968).

is, how the anecdote was transmitted from the purported eyewitness to the compiler -

Tabari also records. In fact, Tabari also includes extensions of those isnads that traces

the transmission of Sayf s compilation to hmself. By relying on the eyewitness reports

and their authorizing isnads, Tabari's authorial voice rarely makes its presence felt.

Problematically, these authorizing isnads were susceptible to alteration,

retrojection, or invention. Since Ignaz Goldziher, the skeptical view of hadith, a

particular category of khabar that relate specifically to the words and deeds of

Muhammad, has undermined the assumption of "authenticity" in Muslim historical

sources. Because the hadith constituted the sunna or "normative practice" of the Prophet,

these reports became the basis for Islamic law in the Sunni tradition. The hadith acquired

a position in Islamic law second only to the Qur'an and thus achieved an aura of "sacred

truth" that the mere khabar form never acquired.'

However, since its early development, the isnad provided the early Muslim hadith

collectors and isnad scholars with only degrees of likelihood rather than any certainty

about their veracity. Fabrication was a well-known problem in the collection of hadith

and a complex science of isnads developed to cope with this problem. The isnad was

rated as somewhere along a spectrum between strong and weak. Eventually those that

were less strong were weeded out until six canonical books of hadith became the arbiters

of the Prophet's sunna.' History, by contrast, did not have the same methodological rigor

' For a further discussion of hadith and their role as a basis for Islamic law, see below chapter one. 8 The problem of dating the collection of the six canonical books is unresolved It isn't the date of collection that is at issue, but the date of what was collected. See Burton, John An Introduction to the Hadith (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994), Bulliet, Richard W., Islam: The Viewpom the Edge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) and Hallaq, Origins. The canonical books that constituted the textual sunna certainly received their canonical status some time after Tabari's death. Particularly enlightening is Bulliet's discussion of the collection of "rare" hadith by certain traditionists, a practice that declined in the face of hadith's rising status as the arbiter of Islamic law or better the authoritative status of the six collections.

regarding isnad before Tabari who introduced a more rigorous hadith-like method to the

recording of isnads for the khabar in his ~ i s t o r y . ~ Despite Tabari's increased rigor in

inscribing isnads when putting forth khabar history, Tabari included reports and indeed

relied upon transmitters like Sayf and Waqidi who had questionable reputations for

reliable transmission, of which Tabari would have been aware. Indeed, neither Sayf nor

Waqidi seem to have been beyond embellishing their sources.1°

Thus, while history and law were based on similar transmitted materials, it is

suggestive'that Tabari relied on these questionable transmitters for something as

important as the death of 'Uthman without any authorial intervention other than his

methodological rigor in recording those isnads. Though both history and law were based

on transmitted materials with similar origins and formal qualities, Tabari approached the

interpretation of hadith and the use of historical khabar very differently, treating hadith

akin to scripture in that its meaning was to be gained through interpretation, well

exemplified in his commentary on the Qur'an.

Tabari discusses his theoretical relationship with transmitted knowledge in what I

shall refer to as his "programmatic statement." Coming at the beginning of his History,

before he begins with an account of the Biblical creation myth, Tabari waxes skeptical

about the ability of transmitted knowledge to provide true knowledge about the past.

However, he is even more skeptical of any internal thought processes that attempt to

produce historical knowledge. Instead, transmitted knowledge is the only way to know

Donner, Fred, Narratives ofIslamic Origins (Princeton: The Darwin Press Inc., 1998), 258. ' O Their willingness to embellish, attested to by Humphreys, "Translator's Foreword" in HT xv, suggests to the present writer that Sayf and Waqidi's generation conceived of the role of the transmitter quite differently than Tabari's generation. The evolution of this relationship between oral and written, between literalism and embellishment, as well as between story-telling and law is dealt with variously in Leder's "Literary Use," Hallaq's Origins, and Schoeler's The Oral and Written in Early Islam (London; Routledge, 2006).

about the past and thus helps us understand the always somewhat secondary status of

historical studies in the Islamic sciences. This expressed view regarding the status of

historical knowledge will provide a point of departure for my argument about Tabari's

purpose in constructing an historical narrative with its particular formal qualities.

I will argue that Tabari7s reason for writing history and for presenting a history

that highlights disagreement and inscribes controversy is quite contrary to any sort of

totalizing, unified narrative of the past. Such an approach alienates those who hope to

gain access to the "truth" about the Community of Believers and its past just as it

undercuts any claim to historical certainty. I argue that Western interpreters have often

projected their expectation of a unified vision of the past onto Tabari. Western

interpreters have sought out the author's preferred version of events from a complex

narrative that contains so many cross-currents and flat-out contradictions that any single

version of the "truth" must be, in my opinion, a construction of the reader rather than the

author-compiler.

Instead, I argue that Tabari inscribes a variety of historical memories about a

single event that are literary constructions in their own right1' and that have the effect of

authorizing a whole host of variant interpretations while simultaneously undermining any

claim to a privileged "truth" that could lead to sectarian historiographies. In the

proliferation of possible interpretations, Tabari highlights differences and disagreements

'l HT xv, Humphreys "Translator's Foreword" suggests that these are literary constructions that represent various memories about a single event. The idea that the variant versions are representative of different interests is not new. Donner, Peterson, and Hodgson have all suggested similar strategies for understanding the different versions of any given event. In my opinion, the "historicizing legitimation" of Donner comes the closest to describing the historical literature of early Islam, but Donner seems to refer to historicizing legitimation only in reference to the sunna. Thus, the effect of inscribing these different versions in historical writing has not been dealt with extensively enough.

rather than minimizing or rationalizing that diversity and, in doing so, produces

something that is quite unexpected to us in what we might call a "sacred history."12

As modern readers of this early Islamic text, we find ourselves presented with

debates that are not resolved. Nonetheless, Tabari omitted some accounts because, in

Tabari's words, "I find them offensive"13 or "we have avoided mentioning many others

that should not be included here."14 In my view, Tabari's History does not establish the

prominence of one interpretation over the other. Any attempt to argue for the

prominence of one version as the "real" or the "authorial" version is therefore artificial.

Rather, Tabari inscribes the boundaries of the acceptable interpretations of the past in all

their diversity and contradiction in an attempt to unify the Community through an

acceptance of variation in historical memory.

Though Tabari's voice is largely absent fiom the historical narrative of the death

of 'Uthrnan, Tabari was an interpreter extraordinaire in many other fields. His approach

to hadith andfiqh suggests that Tabari found authorial interpretation to be absolutely

necessary for many issues of concern to the piety-minded ~us l ims . l5 In attempting to

live the life of the pious Muslim - that is, following the example of the Prophet - an

interpretive act was necessary that actually gave prominence to one interpretation of an

12 Momigliano argues that, in ecclesiastical history, unity is essential: "The very continuity of the institution of the Church through the centuries makes it inevitable that anything which happened in the Church's past should be relevant to its present. Furthermore-and this is most essential-in the Church conformity with the origins is the evidence of truth." The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 136-37. I believe that there is a certain set of assumptions informing Western historians of "sacred history" derived from Christian ecclesiastical historiography in its perceived emphasis on unity or on minimizing difference. In Momigliano's essay, I find him slipping easily between ecclesiastical history and claims with a more general applicability to religious historiography and to historiography in general. l 3 HT xv, 170. ' 4 ~ ~ x v , 181. l5 For Tabari's proclivity for interpretation, see HT i, Rosenthal "General Introduction," generally and particularly 55: "The most remarkable aspect of Tabari's approach is his constant and courageous expression of 'independent judgment' (ijtihad)."

historical account of the Prophet's deeds. The purpose of the History was not piety

because piety, rooted in the study of law and the sunna embodied in hadith, did not

require "belief' in a certain diachronic development of the cornmunity.16 Instead,

Muslim piety, as it developed in the first several centuries, required a knowledge of the

synchronic "Golden Moment" of the Prophet's life, which, through interpretive skill,

could make the Prophet present in an age that had lost its conduit to ~ 0 d . l ~

* * *

The relationship between Tabari's role as a jurisprudent and his role as an

historian discussed in chapter one will illuminate the difference between the treatment of

the synchronic and diachronic historical narratives. Furthermore, the narrative strategies

employed in the History before the death of Muhammad are quite different from the

strategies employed in the majority of the History. In chapter two, I discuss the

traditional approach to interpreting Tabari's Histo y. My focus will be on three historians

who write about the death of 'Uthrnan in particular. The encounter with these

interpretations will highlight the differences between the traditional approach and my

own approach while also introducing the reader to Tabari's narrative of the death of

'Uthrnan in broad strokes. Chapter three provides an extensive reading of the complex

cross-currents in Tabariys narrative of 'Uthman's murder, documenting the complicated

-- - --

l6 This emphasis on knowledge ('ilm) of the "Golden Moment" as defined by a rising class of scholars ( 'ularna) is quite different from authority derived from the synchronic historicizing legitimacy found in something like apostolic succession. The textually-based diachronic account of that "Golden Moment" differs from access to the past that is gained through lived practice. According to Hallaq, the "sunnaic practice" of Medina vied for a position as the authenticator of questionable hadith over and above isnad. The isnad became the final arbiter of authenticity, despite the Medinese claim that isnads had nothing to speak for their legitimacy but themselves. See Hallaq, 69-73. A comparison of apostolic succession, caliphal succession, and hadith interpretation could yield interesting results regarding the nature of religious authority. l7 Bulliet, Richard W., Islam: The Viewfiom the Edge (Columbia University Press; New York, 1994). Chapter entitled "Orality and Authority," particularly 17-19. "The teacher [of hadith] was standing before [the student] in the persona of the Prophet himself."

ways in which the contradictory narratives undermine each other to produce a synthesis

of historical memory. But this production of a synthetic codex that contains

contradictory accounts is a synthesis that embraces difference and frustrates any attempt

to disassociate one account from the others. Tabari's Histo y forces us to rethink the

nature of historical narrative and the process of synthesizing a tradition.

Chapter 1

Between History and Law Tabari and His World

In 3 101923, Abu Ja'far Muhammad b. Jarir al-Tabari died and, legend has it, was buried

at night in his own courtyard to avoid a confrontation with the irate Hanbalis who had

stoned his house years earlier.'* He was one of the foremost scholars of his day,

becoming the founder of a legal school (madhab)19 that did not survive as did others to

become the four acceptable Sunni legal schools.20 The reasons for the failure of his legal

school and the truth about his death are likely to remain shrouded in mystery forever.

However, we may suppose that the wounds that Tabari inflicted on the eponymous

founder of the Hanbali legal school might have caused a stir among his followers.

Tabari claimed that Ahrnad Ibn Hanbal (d. 2411855) was not in fact a legal

scholar but rather a highly talented collector of hadith. Tabari left Hanbal out of his work

on the "Disagreements of the Jurisprudents," apparently regarding him as an important

hadith scholar but not worthy of mention in a discussion of law.21 In what could not have

been an accident for such a thorough scholar, Tabari also failed to report Ibn Hanbal's

death in the is tor^.^^

18 Melchert, The Formation of the Sunni Schools of Law, 9 ' h - ~ ~ ' h Centuries C.E., 192. Also HT i, Rosenthal "General Introduction," 73,77-78. Rosenthal dismisses this story since it is so unlikely that a man with the stature of Tabari could have been allowed to be buried at night. 19 Melchert, xiv-xv. The definition of madhab and its use in scholarly literature to refer to 'schools' can be somewhat confusing, but here we refer to legal schools as those entities with well-defined methodologies and theories regarding the interpretation of legal texts. 20 Melchert, 190-7. 21 HT i, Rosenthal, "General Introduction," 70. For a full discussion of the issues between Tabari and Ibn Hanbal see 69-80. 22 Shoshan, Boaz, Poetics of Islamic Historiography: Deconstructing Tabari's Histoly (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 145. Joel Kraemer observes that "[hlis silence is eloquent" and could not be accidental in HT xxxiv, "Translator's Foreword," xx-xxi.

By the measure of the Muslim lunar calendar, 3 10 years had passed between the

foundation of the Community in Medina and Tabari's death.23 Many things changed

between that foundational moment and time when Tabari put his pen to paper.24 The

capital city, the seat of the caliph, had moved from Medina to Damascus and then to

Baghdad, where Tabari lived and worked. The fust dynasty of Islam ruled over by the

banu umayyah, the Umayyad clan, had risen and fallen. The Abbasid Revolution of

132/750 had replaced the Umayyads with a new dyansty. Our knowledge of these events

like the History comes from the literary output of the Abbasid period. We must attempt to

understand, to the extent that it is possible, the cultural and political context of Tabari's

History as well as the literary milieu that produced it.25

Despite Tabari's more established reputation in his day as a legal jurisprudent,

Tabari's contemporaries recognized the unique value of his History. It was Tabari's

History that was arguably Tabari's most important contribution to the textual life of the

Medieval Muslim world and beyond. Franz Rosenthal has argued that for Muslims in

later generations, Tabari was "the historian of Islam [and] when it was necessary to

distinguish him from other Tabaris, it was as Tabari the

Based on my review of Tabari's ~ornrnentary~~ and the accounts of Tabari's other

works recorded by the medieval biographers:* Tabari's approach to history and the

hadith were quite different. The key to this difference is his view of "rational argument,"

- - -

23 Only 301 solar years had passed. I would like to note the similarity between Tabari's foundational historical study, coming about three hundred years after the founding of his Community of Believers and the Ecclesiastical Histoly of Eusebius, which also came about three hundred years after the birth of Christ. 24 Invention of the term "Islam" or "Muslim" to define "Believers." The similarities do not stop there and the differences are illuminating, requiring further study. 25 Humphreys "Qur'anic Myth," 278. 26 HT i, "General Introduction," 136. 27 Tabari, The commentary on the Qur'an; Vol 1, (incomplete) trans. J. Cooper (London: Oxford University Press, 1987). 28 HT i, Rosenthal, "Life and Works," 5-134.

which I associate with Tabari7s interpretation, mediation, and theoretical discussion that

allow him to arrive at an opinion. Whereas Tabari rejected Ibn Hanbal as merely a

talented hadith collector, the true jurisprudent was he who offered an opinion regarding

the meaning of that hadith.

Whereas Tabari's collection of hadith used these texts as a point of departure for

detailed discussions of the philology and legal theory, Tabari's historical analysis insisted

that the historian only employ rational argument in the rarest of instances.29 Unlike

Tabari's approach to hadith in his role as jurisprudent, his History is a collection of

khabar literature placed in a chronological framework where he generally refuses to

employ rational arguments to arrive at "historical knowledge." He does not mediate

between the conflicting reports but rather leaves certainty deferred.

The story of intrigue between Tabari and Hanbal in the intellectual ferment of

Baghdad during the late third and early fourth centuries AH (ninth-tenth centuries AD)

reflects a serious debate over the legal methodology and the place of juridical

interpretation with regard to hadith. These hadith had, in the course of the thirdlninth

century, become the source of Islamic law second only to the Qur'an. However, it was

not until after Tabari's death that a synthesis was achieved between what might be called

the literalist and interpretive approaches.

29 HT i, Rosenthal, "General Introduction," 128-9 as compared to HT i, 170, where Tabari's the "programmatic statement" claims to rely only rarely on "rational argument." For a detailed discussion, see below chapter one.

The Poetics of Truth -Law and Literalism in the Literary Milieu

While Tabari was called a "rationalist," this term was rather contested and unstable. We

may follow Melchert in referring to Tabari as a semi-rati~nalist.~' The true "rationalists -

the ah1 al-ra 'y of the early thirdhinth century - did not seem to care for hadith but seem

to have relied on the rational application of societal norms. They relied on some

combination of knowledge ( 'ilm) of the Qur'an, discretionary opinion (ra 'y) and the lived

norms and practices of their community (sunnaic practice).31 By the time of Tabari,

hadith had secured an almost scriptural status for itself with another camp -the

"traditionalists" or ah1 al-hadith - arguing for strict literal readings of hadith despite the

uncertainties surrounding transmitted knowledge and the hadith provided secure access to

the sunna of the only community that now mattered, the early community of Medina

under the Prophet Muhammad.

The ah1 al-hadith claimed that the textual authority of the hadith was superior to

sunnaic practice, which could vary amongst the different regions, and fwthermore

superior to juridical opinion, which could also vary.32 A single, Prophetic voice was

superior because it was not prone to the differences in practice or opinion. There seems

to have been a universalizing, unifying goal in the traditionalist claim to textual authority

over regional authority. For these traditionalists, ra 'y was redefined in a negative light:

what was once "careful reasoning" was now "rational reasoning."33

30 Melchert, 19 1-92. 3 1 Hallaq, 76-77. 32 Hallaq, 76. 33 Hallaq, 76. "Later competing categories of traditionalists/rationalists are often projected backwards onto early sources and narratives, thereby producing anachronistic accounts of the emergence of traditionist/traditionalist activity."

Thus, the terms sunna and ra 'y were not stable categories but rather contested

categories that were redefined through the discursive "challenge" of the traditionalists.

Their challenge was one over authority that resulted in the attachment of a scriptural aura

to the hadith. In the "Great Synthesis" between "rationalism" and "traditionalism," the

interpretive strategies of the rationalists were recuperated, albeit under different

in order to "account for the rising tide of Prophetic hadith and for the hermeneutical

implications of this new phenomenon."35 In the triumph of traditionalism, hadith

emerged as the second source of Islamic law. However, while the followers of Ibn

Hanbal and Dh t id b. Khalaf al-Ziihiri (d. 2701883) propounded literalism, others, like

Tabari, attempted to recuperate interpretive strategies that nevertheless grounded their

interpretations in Quryan and hadith.

By 400/1000, the "Great Synthesis" had brought radical traditionalism and its

rigid literalism to an end. The literalist ZSihiri school was left behind, while the later

Hanbalis adopted interpretive strategies abhorred by Ibn Hanbal himself.36 "It was the

midpoint between the two movements that constituted the normative position of the

majority; and it was from this centrist position that Sunnism, the religious and legal

doctrine of the majority of Muslims, was to emerge."37

By the time of Tabari, the ah1 al-ra 'y had been defeated and all jurisprudents

accepted the centrality of the hadith, but clearly not all jurisprudents had accepted the

recuperated interpretive strategies. It was this conflict that resulted in Tabari's slighting

of the Hanbalis. The ah1 al-hadith had been successful in positing hadith over and above

34 Hallaq, 102-121. 35 Hallaq, 123. Here he is referring to the project of Shafi'i and its signaling a need for readjustment. 36 Hallaq, 127. 37 Hallaq, 124.

sunnaic practice or juridical common sense as the arbiter of Islamic law beyond the

~ u r ' a n . ~ ~

When Tabari wrote his "Disagreements of the Jurisprudents," his text clearly

participated in the debate over proper legal methodology. Tabari treated hadith as a

staging point from which to launch philological and legal arguments about a particular

issue. Legal knowledge, derived fiom hadith, required analysis, interpretation, and, in the

end, a legal opinion. Rosenthal describes one of Tabari's work in contrast with Ibn

Hanbal's collection of hadith. In his Tahdhjb al-athar or al-Tahdhib, Tabari did not

merely collect traditions, as Ibn Hanbal had done in his ~ u s n a d . ~ ' Instead, Tabari's

"singular conception was to provide an exhaustive and penetrating analysis of the

philological and legal implications of each hadith mentioned and to discuss its meaning

as well as its significance for religious practice and theory. Thus, it contains what

amounts to monographs on a number of important topics."40

In Tabari's lifetime, the rules governing legal thought had not reached a

crystallized, authoritative consensus. It was still a time when Tabari could become the

founder of a legal school - albeit an ephemeral one. Passions obviously ran high in the

negotiations over these issues, and these negotiations should heighten our awareness that

fixed terms and categories in "Islam" as we might be familiar with it fiom one time

period do not necessarily apply to a different time period. Much had changed in Islamic

thought since Muhammad and more change was to come.

The more or less fixed categories of hadith and the interpretive strategies

employed by jurisprudents had not yet acquired the stable, canonical status they were to

38 Hallaq, 124-27. 39 HT i, "General Introduction," 128. 40 HT i, "General Introduction," 128.

obtain later. However jurisprudents had apparently reached a consensus regarding the

importance of hadith. That is, historical anecdotes of the Prophet's words and deeds were

now beated with strategies similar to those employed for the Qur'an.

Tabari's willingness to enact individual judgment in hadith interpretation was

remarkable in teleological terms. So too was his willingness to discount the Hanbali

legal school that would later become one of the four canonical schools. However, the

methodology of interpretation that Tabari applied to hadith was not reflected at all in his

approach to history. Rather than provide "monographs" on each anecdote about the past,

Tabari's voice is nearly absent from much of the History.

Though khabar and hadith arose fiom the same literary milieu and in fact had

once been synonymous,41 Tabari's treatment of khabar in the History is quite different

from his treatment of hadith in his Tadhib. Unlike Tabari's approach to hadith in his role

as jurisprudent, his History is a collection of khabar literature placed in a chronological

framework where he generally refuses to employ rational arguments to arrive at

"historical knowledge." He does not mediate between the conflicting reports but rather

leaves certainty deferred.

The interpretive strategies - the "monographs" - found in Tabari's study of hadith

must have been necessary to reach some conclusion regarding the legal significance of

that particular hadith. There is therefore a clear distinction between the piety-defining

synchronic "Golden Moment" of the Prophet's life - that is, the sunna - and the

diachronic historical narrative - that is, the History. In my view, the synchronic,

historicized accounts of the hadith, because of their importance for the pious Muslim,

required interpretation in order to apply the sayings of the Prophet to the practices of the

41 Khalidi, 73.

living, pious Muslim. Rather than genealogy and diachronic movement like we find in

the annalistic format, Tabari's interpretation of hadith makes the past immediately

relevant.

As for history, even this semi-rationalist jurisprudent seems to be a semi-literalist

or a traditionalist when it comes to knowledge about the past. His programmatic

statement informs us of his theoretical relationship to historical knowledge.

The reader should know that with respect to all I have mentioned and made it a condition

to set down in this writing of ours, I rely upon traditions and reports which I have

transmitted and which I attribute to their transmitters. I rely only very exceptionally upon

what is learned through rational arguments and deduced by internal thought processes.

For no knowledge of history of men of the past and of recent men and events is attainable

by those who were not able to observe them and did not live in their time, except through

information and transmission provided by informants and transmitters. This cannot be

brought out by reason or deduced by internal thought processes. This writing of mine

may [be found to] contain some information, mentioned by us on the authority of certain

men of the past, which the reader may disapprove of and the listener may find detestable,

because he can find nothing sound and no real meaning in it. In such cases, he should

know that such information has come not from us, but from those who transmitted it to

us. We have merely reported it as it was reported to

By eschewing "rational argument" and "internal thought processes," Tabari claims that

no historical knowledge can be gained except by transmitted information from informants

who observed those events. As such, Tabari notes that the information he presents did

not, as a result, come from him but rather fiom his sources.

Whether Tabari is merely hedging or not, the lack of overt interpretation in

Tabari's History suggests that he was unable to mediate between different historical

memories without the scriptural resources of hadith or the Qw'an. Tabari seems to have

viewed quite differently the study of the hadith as a source for law as opposed to the

study of khabar as a source for hstory. Some scholars have attempted to elide these

differences and to suggest that, for Tabari, hadith were a "subset of global Islamic

history." Tabari's "habit of meticulously, not to say obtrusively providing alternative

versions of events even at the apparent cost of destroying narrative clarity and

undermining psychological plausibility" suggests to some that he valued khabar as

hadith.43

According to Khalidi, Tabari "composed what was by far the most explicit

defense of the Hadith method in historical writing, while his annalistic arrangement

enshrined a style that lasted until modern times."44 Khalidi quotes the programmatic

statement and then suggests that this view of khabar as a form of transmitted knowledge

(naqliyya) as opposed to one of the rational science ( 'aqliyya) is indicative that "Tabari

sought to place history squarely in the [category of naqliyya], making it into a branch of

~ a d i t h . " ~ ~

By assuming that Tabari's view of khabar tells us precisely his view of history

itself, Khalidi slips between the source of knowledge and the usage of that knowledge.

While Tabari did apply more methodological rigor to his History than his predecessors by

applying "strict attention to the isnads," this tells us only about his method of citation,

43 M.G. Carter review in Iranian Studies, 22 (1989): 140. 44 Khalidi, 73. 45 Khalidi, 74.

which borrowed from the more rigorous study of hadith.46 However, this tells us nothing

of his view of history itself but only that he viewed his sources as somehow similar,

which is unsurprising since both khabar and hadith had derived from the same literary

form. Both were anecdotes with content (matn) and transmission history (isnad), and

thus Tabari's statement about the khabar form tell us that nothing about history can be

known through rational argument.

However, his programmatic statement is useful precisely in that it links his view

of historical knowledge to a particular treatment of his source material. Tabari claims

that one ought to avoid rational argument in dealing with khabar because historical

knowledge can only be gained through transmitted information. Hadith and khabar were

both transmitted forms of knowledge and thus prone to uncertainty, but Tabari was not

trying to establish historical knowledge in his use of hadith but rather to establish correct

practice or law.

Historical knowledge could not be gained except through those who had been

there and the transmission of their reports. However, Tabari was well aware of the

uncertainties surrounding transmitted knowledge and the problems facing the

authentication of hadith through isnads. The fabrication of isnads and of hadith was well

known. Tabari nevertheless felt quite able to provide a juridical opinion regarding hadith

because, in my opinion, the ah1 al-hadith had been successful in defining hadith as the

correct lens through which to view scripture. It had acquired a scriptural association. In

fact, Tabari offers his opinions in the History only when the Qur'an or the hadith could

be referenced to provide a basis for that opinion.

46 Donner, 258. Tabari does not analyze in the main text of his History the strength or weakness of the isnad, and indeed his main sources for the death of 'Uthman: Sayf, Waqidi, and Ishaq, have bad or mixed reviews as transmitters of hadith. This does not disqualify them from transmitting khabar.

The Exegetical in the Histo y

When Tabari offers an interpretation in his jurisprudence, he reveals a sort of

independent, rational judgment that copes with the continuing uncertainty of transmitted

material. Though the traditionalists brought hadith into its role as the secondary source

for Islamic law, the hadith were not, at least in Tabari's estimation, suficient without the

juridical interpretation. However, as was mentioned in the previous chapter, the segment

of the History dealing with pre-Islamic history was not composed of khabar in the sense

of purportedly eyewitness reports transmitted to the compiler. While we have been

speaking of the History as if it were some monolithic entity (and so often this is the case

in scholarly literature), it in fact consists of at least two discrete stylistic and interpretive

approaches. Whereas I have written at some length about the khabar-annalistic form of

the History, the early, pre-Islamic "proto-history" is founded on a sort of scriptural-

exegetical approach to history where many issues of interest to the scholar can be

"verified through an interpretive comparison to the Qur'an or to hadith. This

categorization into a "scriptural-exegetical" History and a "khabar-annalistic" is by no

means tidy and does not account for the ways in which each category participates in the

formal and interpretive strategies of the other. It is nevertheless important to highlight

the contrasting approaches Tabari employs to deal with the creation of the world on the

one hand and the death of 'Uthrnan on the other.

The scriptural-exegetical History contains a much more complex combination of

hadith, mythological materials fkom a variety of religions and regions, extensive Qur'anic

material, and other opinions from early Muslim scholars that seem to reflect a knowledge

of Jewish Haggadic and Midrashic material. In some instances, Tabari attempts to align

the chronologies of Iranian, Arabian, Christian, Jewish, and Islamic accounts with

varying degrees of success. On the other hand, Tabari also allows himself to insert his

juridical opinion on matters of scriptural or exegetical importance. In fact, much of

Tabari's account of Iblis, Adam, Noah, and other Prophets who figure in the Qur'an is

derived from Tabari's massive Tafsir or Commentary. When relating the "Story of

Adam," Tabari defers to his Commentary: "We have reported a number of [statements

on this subject] in our book entitled The Complete Clarification of the Interpretation of

the Verses of the Qur 'an. We hate to add to the length of our book by mentioning (all of)

that here.'*7

Tabari's strategies in compiling and interpreting this vast array of materials are

likewise diverse.48 In the context of issues on which the Qur'an or hadith might speak,

Tabari seems quite willing to offer his own interpretation and even to defend his own

interpretation against some predicted rebuttal. Thus, even in the History where Tabari

claims to avoid rational argument, he is willing to offer an opinion based on his reading

of revealed scripture and transmitted hadith. With this understanding of Tabari's pre-

Islamic material as derived, at least partially from his Commentary, this interpretive voice

is not as surprising, but it is certainly much more restrained than in his Tadhib.

47 HT i, 258. 48 Martensson, 292 presents a flawed, overly simplistic description of the History as a whole but referring only to the first volume. The theoretical complexity of Tabari's introductory materials and his attempt to incorporate traditions from Christian, Jewish, Iranian, and Arab sources requires further study.

In some circumstances, particularly regarding such theoretical questions as "What

Is ~ i m e ? " ~ and "What Was Created ~irst?"~' Tabari offers his own opinion in the

context of a series of available interpretations. For instance, he offers two traditions, one

that claims the authority of Ibn 'Abbas, supported by various differing chains of authority

and stating that the first thing created was the Pen. Tabari then writes "Others said:

Rather, the first of the created things created by God is light and darkness."51 and states

that "Abu Ja'far (al-Tabari) says: In my opinion, of the two statements the one most

likely to be correct is that of Ibn 'Abbas. That is because of the report, mentioned by me

earlier, from the Messenger of God who said: The first thing created by God is the

In these theoretical cases, Tabari lays out opinions by various scholars before

offering his own judgment and sometimes defending that judgment against certain

questions or refutation^.^^

In other cases that deal with "story" subjects such as "The Story of ~ b l i s " ~ ~ and

"The Story of dam,"^^ Tabari begins the section with a summarizing narrative in his

own voice of the main points, which in itself provides a sort of interpretation. He then

delves into the authorities on which he seems to have based this initial, authorial story.

Within the record of his sources, Tabari will from time to time assert his own opinion, but

these seem to be only in cases where judgment concerns matters of scripture and hadith.

In some cases, Tabari asserts his own opinion, but again these seem to be in line with his

scriptural concerns. Much of the material concerning Iblis, Adam, and other pre-Islamic

49 HT i, 171. 50 HT i, 198. " ~ ~ i , 2 0 1 . 52 HT i, 200- 1. 53 e.g., Tabari's "answer" to those who would question his judgment about the Pen. HT i, 201-2. 54 HT i, 249-57 etpassim. 55 HT i, 257-74 etpassim.

figures that are mentioned in the Qur'an find their fullest expression in Tabari's Tafsir or

Commentary.

Much of the pre-Islamic scriptural-exegetical history is actually found in his

Commenta y where Tabari has no qualms about inserting his expert opinion regarding

philological or theoretical issues, though he is relatively restrained, sometimes placing his

opinions in the third person and limiting their discussion of legal and philological issues.

Because Tabari's History deals with a large amount of scriptural material, juridical

interpretation is possible and even necessary. The contradictory information found in the

anecdotes about Iblis, Adam, Time, and the Pen highlight the uncertainty of transmitted

knowledge that can be tamed through close analysis of these contradictions in light of

revealed scripture and through hadith.

Tabari interprets his source material and argues for a particular interpretation

against imagined adversaries through a process of logical deduction and comparison

between the transmitted materials at hand and the revealed scripture, as well as through

judicious isnad criticism. Similarly, Tabari's approach to the life of Muhammad requires

further study in its complex relationship between exegesis, hadith, and history. It very

well may be that we should think of Tabari's Histo y as a tripartite entity of pre-Islamic,

prophetic and post-prophetic materials where the boundaries are sometime blurred. For

instance, there is a moment in the "Story of Iblis" where Tabari inserts a story about "the

occasion of re~elat ion."~~ That is, there is a story about the circumstances surrounding

the Prophet's revelation of a particular verse having to do with Iblis. Shoshan also points

out the "uncertain boundary between history and exegesis in the Prophet's ~ i r a , " ~ ~

56 HT i, 254. '' Shoshan, 98.

though the boundary between "history" and exegesis is why I have termed the pre-

Islamic material "exegetical history."

There is a complicated stylistic and interpretive shift between this exegetical

framework and its use of khabar, hadith, and scripture to the employment of the khabar

form in the historical period. The exegetical style of proposing an event or subject and

then discussing its intricacies through conflicting transmitted material seems to continue

on and inform the construction of the narrative of 'Uthman7s death. The ordering of

material into subjects like "An Account of the Egyptians," "The Account of the Murder,"

"The Conduct of 'Uthman," and "The Reason Why 'Uthman Ordered 'Abdallah b.

'Abbas to Lead the Pilgrimage in This Year," suggests that the broad strokes of narrative

construction remain the same. However, as we shall see in the next chapter, Tabari rarely

interferes in the narrative with his own authorial voice.

Whereas Tabari seems more than willing to offer interpretation and logical

deduction cum rational argument in the case of scriptural events; when he is dealing with

the memories of his own Community in the way it developed after that "Golden

Moment," Tabari seems unwilling to offer any of the deductive, rational conclusions that

he offers in his other works and earlier in the History. By presenting contradictory,

mutually undermining accounts and by leaving out others, Tabari defines the boundaries

of the acceptable by forging a synthesis of uncertainty.

Long after his legal school had disappeared, his History lived. Tabari's History

did not simply define Tabari for later generations, Tabari's History defined history for

later generations. The work was never superseded, and it became "the unique source for

the period it covered, even when other sources for it were still a~ai lable ."~~ Later

historians would often abridge Tabari's account and then continue the story where Tabari

left off. For instance, Ibn al-Athir (d. 63011233) copied and shortened Tabari's History

and then Ibn Khaldun (d. 80811406) apparently accessed Tabari's material on the early

period through Ibn al-Athir's abridgement.59 As one might expect, such an important

Muslim source for the early period is also the central text through which Western

historians have constructed their own narratives of Islamic origins.60 This has been done

without much regard for Tabari's narrative strategies of inscribing difference and with

more interest in accessing the "real" story. It is to this that we now turn.

Ibid., 136. 59 HT i, "General Introduction," 136-37. The copying over of Tabari meant that his original work receded from view while remaining the source for Ibn al-Athir and Ibn Khaldun. 60 As Hodgson has it, "It is no accident that it is only since the discovery of Tabari's work (as Gibb pointed out) that modern historians have begun to be able to reconstruct the periods he dealt with. Tabari meant it that way." Hodgson, The Venture ofIslam, Vol. I (Chicago, 1974) 356-7 fh. 14.

Chapter 2

Tabari in the W e s t I n S e a r c h of Lost Cer ta inty

The traditional goal of Western history is to discover wie es eigentlich gewesen61 As a

result, Western historians of early Islam have typically mined the complicated and

contradictory narrative of Tabari's Histo y for factual data with which to construct a

unified narrative of their own that is recognizable in the conventions of Western

historical writing. This new narrative purports to be the truth about the past that is behind

the text. Western historians of Islam such as Marshal Hodgson, Stephen Humphreys, and

Wilfred Madelung have attempted to dismiss the accounts of one of Tabari's sources in

favor of another. Madelung dismisses Sayf, one of the two main sources for Tabari's

narrative of 'Uthman's murder, as a "fiction write?"' whose version of events is "a most

blatant representative of early Sunni tendentious historiography."63

This yearning for the truth about the past, though it has been contested by (post)-

modern Western historians, is clearly still at issue for Wilfked Madelung who writes his

story of the early Caliphate in 1997. The debate over the ability to recover an "authentic"

record of Islamic origins began with Ignaz Goldziher (d. 1921 AD) who questioned the

authenticity of hadith. The problematization of Muslim sources for the Prophet's

Leopold von Ranke felt that the historian must "penetrate the causal nexus." See George G. Iggers, The German Conception of History: The National Tradition ofHistorica1 Thoughtfrom Herder to Present (Wesleyan University Press; Middletown, CT, 1968) 64. For a discussion of its implications in the study of history in the American academy in particular, see Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: the objectivity question and the American academy (Cambridge University Press; Cambridge, 1988). 62 Madelung, Wilfred, The Succession to Muhammad: a study of the early Caliphate (Cambridge, 1997), 50 fn. 60. 63 Shoshan, Boaz, Poetics of Islamic Historiography: Deconstructing Tabari's History (Boston, 2004), 176-76, fn. 12. The notion of a knowable "early Sunni historiography" prior to Tabari, that is to say recognizable in one of Tabari's sources, seems to me tendentious at best. Without a clear "Sunnism" in the more fluid legal milieu of Tabari's day, the project of "Sunni" historiography assumes a stable orthodox historiography which was, according to my argument about Tabari, still under construction and whose goal, if we take Tabari as a guide, was not totalizing or unifying at all.

biography begat a line of skeptical thinking in the Western tradition about the life of the

Prophet. With the similar literary antecedents of hadith and historical sources, this

questionable certainty of the information found in hadith caused uncertainty regarding the

foundations of the Western study of early Islamic history in general.64

Attempts to "solve" this problem of sources has focused largely on an attempt to

recover some kernels of truth about the past from imperfect sources, though the

"imperfection" is surely a value judgment of the Western historian. Rather than study

these texts as productive participants in a cultural discourse, as I shall attempt to do,

Stephen Hurnphreys has suggested that the question facing historians of early Islam is

how they might "devise any reliable strategies through which the information in these

texts can be disengaged from its original matrix and turned to our purposes."65 I would

argue that it is this "original matrix" itself that is most interesting and most often ignored

in the historical text of Tabari's History rather than some autonomous "information"

divorced from that matrix.

Several Western scholars have attempted to devise some such reliable strategy in

their reading of Tabari's History. Hodgson, Hurnphreys, and Shoshan in particular have

dealt specifically with the death of 'Uthman. However, as I shall argue, these are

reductive readings that impose a totalizing pattern or that privilege one of Tabari's

sources over another, while ignoring the immense complexity of the cross-currents and

contradiction of Tabari's History.

64 Donner, 20-47 for a survey the problem of early Islamic sources. Humphreys, Stephen, Islamic History: A Framework for Inquiry (Princeton, 1991), 128.

I. Hodgson - The Humanist and the Historian

The paradigmatic reading of Tabari's account of the death of 'Uthman comes

from Hodgson contained in his article on "Two Pre-Modern ~ is tor ians . ' '~~ Hodgson

begins by establishing that there are two main transmitters, Sayf and Waqidi. According

to Hodgson, Tabari was well aware that one of his sources was more unreliable than the

other. Sayf had "a very poor reputation" for reliable transmission, as opposed to Waqidi

who merely had a "not altogether favorable reputation."67 As a hadith scholar, Tabari

would have been aware of the isnads and the reliability of the transmitters in those isnads

in order to decide which hadith were more reliable evidence for the utterances and actions

of the Prophet.

It was not only his expertise in isnad but also, according to his contemporaries, his

knowledge of the law in general that gave Tabari a better grasp on his historical material.

In fact, Mas'udi, who wrote history contemporaneously but in a more literary mode,

claimed that Tabari's History was "superior to all other historical works because of the

abundant information it ~ontained."~~ Mas'udi concluded that Tabari's role as a religious

scholar made it possible for him to know everything there was to know about history.69

Hodgson claims that, beyond this difference in their reliability, many accounts

transmitted by Sayf "seem staged or are humanly quite incredible." The whole story

unambiguously aligns the 'good guys,' who defended 'Uthrnan, against the 'bad guys'

who fought him, and therefore cannot be historically "true."70 Waqidi's transmissions,

66 Hodgson, "Two Pre-Modern Historians: Pitfalls and Opportunities in Presenting them to Moderns," in Towards World Community, John Nef ed. (Dr. W. Junk N.V. Publishers; The Hague, 1968). 67 Hodgson "Historians," 56-57.

Mas'udi, Muruj, I, 15 f., ed. Pellat, I, 15 in Rosenthal's "The Histov and Its English Translation," HT i, 135. 69 HT i, Rosenthal, "The History and Its English Translation," 135. 70 Hodgson "Historians," 56-57.

by contrast, "are mostly quite humanly credible in themselves, and present a realistically

ambiguous picture of the moral responsibility of the various parties in what was a rather

complex affaireV7' This imposition of the standards of Hodgson's humanism and his

criteria for what is "realistic" and "humanly credible" seems to suggest that Hodgson has

entered the mind of Tabari and found, to his muted surprise, a Western humanist with a

taste for moral ambiguity and historical complexity.

Hodgson assumes that these two accounts appeal to two different readerships. On

the one hand, there is the good but simplistic Sunni Muslim who would read Sayf s story

of moral clarity and, inexplicably, either not read or reject the moral complexity of

Waqidi's account." On the other hand, the "perceptive reader" would consider the

murky and complex picture presented by Waqidi that "is equally orthodox, but on a

totally different level." This narrative alternative would "force him to see the far-

reaching problem of power which lay at the heart of the Muslim This same

perceptive reader, who is "sensitive" would see Sayf as a crude thinker and due to his

"sense of the human and of the dramatic" would find Sayf's account as a rude

interruption to an otherwise good story.74

Hodgson's assumptions are deeply problematic because they rely on humanist

tastes and a modern literary judgment regarding what makes "the dramatic" different

from the "staged." Are we to believe that Waqidi tells the "truth" because he also tells

what Hodgson believes is a good story? It requires a strange vanity to assume that the

" Ibid., 56. 72 In the programmatic statement (HT i, 170), Tabari invites his reader to find objectionable the material he presents but excuses himself since he only writes what was transmitted to him. This does not suggest, however, that the reader would simply reject contradictory material. 73 Hodgson "Historians," 57. 74 Hodgson "Historians," 57. Emphasis added.

loth century Muslim historian has the same taste as the 2oth century Western one, and it

requires a strange sleight of hand to equate a sense of the human with a sense of the

dramatic. By eliding the differences in time, place, and the purpose of history between

Tabari and himself, Hodgson arrives at a resolution that is comfortable. It is certain, and

it is resolved. It is also an illusion.

11. Humphreys - The Skeptical Humanist

Stephen Humphreys tends to follow Hodgson's judgments regarding Sayf and

Waqidi, but he presents a more nuanced view of the possible appeal of the Sayf narrative.

Humphreys writes about Tabari's narrative of 'Uthman's death in an essay entitled

"Qur'anic Myth and Narrative Structure in Early Islamic Historiography" and deals with

the topic again in the "Translator's Foreword" to the fifteenth volume of the English

translation of Tabari's History. Both essays dismiss Sayf and assume that his narrative

appealed to a particular segment of the population but that Tabari himself would have

rejected it as suspect.

In "Qur'anic Myth," Hurnphreys argues that there was a particular interpretive

framework governing Islamic historiography and that "certain structural features in this

literature do point to a consciousness of the past which has been decisively shaped by the

~ur'an."" This Qur'anic paradigm is one that emphasizes covenant, betrayal, and

redemption. God sends man a series of messengers who bind their communities to God

through a covenant with a promise-and-obligation: the obligation to worship God alone is

tied to the promise of salvation. There are constant temptations to stray from this path

and to betray the covenant. The fact that Muhammad was believed to be the last of the

75 Humphreys "Qur'anic Myth," 274.

messengers heightened the importance of this drama.76 Humphreys sees this pattern as

"the kernel of a powerful myth informing the whole body of early Islamic historical

writing."77

Humphreys argues that Tabari presents two irreconcilable versions of the events

surrounding 'Uthrnan's death, each of which presents its own interpretation version?? of

the myth of Covenant, Betrayal, and Redemption. While on the one hand claiming that

the "studied ambiguity" of Tabari is one that forces readers to come to their own

conclusions about the problems of the death of the third Caliph 'Uthman, Humphreys

also claims that Tabari means to reject Sayf. Tabari "seems to use [Sayfl as a kind of

idealized core account, which he flanks with selected reports from other traditions

(especially those of Waqidi and Ibn Ishaq) which both are far more realistic in tone and

contradict Sayf on almost every point."7g This claim that Sayf is the core account flanked

by "selected reports" misrepresents the length of Waqidi's narratives and covers over the

complex movements between Sayf and Waqidi. Furthermore, it is unclear how the

"studied ambiguity" can be resolved by Humphreys or anyone else for that matter.

This interpretive framework reads a particular pattern of Covenant-Betrayal-

Redemption into both versions of events in 'Uthrnan's death, while at the same time

suggesting that in Sayf's account the covenant was not betrayed at all but rather argued

that the community had remained whole and unbroken. There seem to me to be far too

many exceptions to the pattern to firmly establish the prominence of this pattern.

Furthermore, Tabari's narrative of 'Uthman's death does not address the issue of

redemption. To solve this problem, Humphreys logically concludes that Tabari, who

76 Ibid., 274-275. "Ibid., 275.

Ibid., 280.

must have rejected Sayf's reading of the unbroken covenant, would "have accepted the

notion that the community's sin was not irrevocable [because oltherwise, his own life's

work as a jurist and Qur'anic exegete would have been a sham."79

Leaving the differences between Tabari's project as a jurisprudent and an

historian aside for now, it seems strange that Humphreys might attempt to read Tabari as

one who leaves judgment up to the reader and who simultaneously (privately?) rejects the

"unrealistic" reading. If Tabari's view is kept private, fiom whence does Humphrey's

discovery of this view come? If it is merely a hidden authorial preference and if it is so

difficult to find, then why is it so important for the historian? It seems that the search for

resolution and certainty drives Humphreys in search of Tabari's personal views.

Humphrey's positing of the Covenant-Betrayal-Redemption myth identifies an

"original matrix" and then uses Hodgson's humanism to disengage the more realistic

account, presumably so that it can be turned to "our purposes" as historians. No doubt

there are heavy Qur'anic influences in Islamic historiography. But the aforementioned

exceptions to the Convenant-Betrayal-Redemption myth - those explained away with the

apparent logic of Tabari's profession and those that explain the differences between Sayf

and Waqidi - are far too problematic to prove the rule.

* * *

In his "Translator's Foreword" to his volume of Tabari's History, Humphreys

seems to take a somewhat skeptical stance when he argues on the one hand that the

accounts transmitted in Tabari should be seen as "literary constructions that tell us not

what actually happened, but rather what 'Uthman meant to men living a century or more

after him."" However, he then proceeds to the problem he himself posed to the Western

historian: "it is not at all clear that we can penetrate to core of fact that lay behind these

~tories."'~ Hurnphreys describes Sayf s version as the "Sunday school" interpretation

that intends to maintain the harmony of the community and assumes that men with such a

close connection to Muhammad and to the Islamic polity could not have been motivated

by worldly ambition or greed. Instead, "conflicts are illusory" and instigated by

outsider^.'^

Sayf s version of events is, according to Hurnphreys, ndive and "no doubt Tabari

perceived that [ndivete] as clearly as we do [but] it served a useful function for ~ a b a r i . " ~ ~

By using Sayf as the "visible framework" for his narrative, Tabari was free to "slip in the

much less flattering interpretations" of Waqidi and Ishaq that challenged the

f r a m e ~ o r k . ~ ~ "Ordinary readers" would dismiss the more murky and problematic

versions as "irrelevant" while "only a few critical readers would catch his hint and pursue

the issues raised by such secondary accounts."85 According to this reading of Tabari7s

narrative structure, pride of place is given to the simplistic interpretation that offered an

escape from cynicism and allows Tabari to tell both the story of sentimental piety and the

story that was more "real."

Despite the pro-'Alid bias, despite the fact that medieval Muslim commentators

did not find Waqidi to be wholly reliable, and despite the fact that Waqidi "was not above

HT xv, Humphreys, "Translator's Foreword," xv. 8 1 Ibid., xv. The language of penetration is one characteristic of Rankean historical analysis that attempts to " enetrate the causal nexus." "lbid., xvi. 83 Ibid., xvi. 84 Ibid., xvi-xvii. As we shall see, there is almost equal time given to Sayf narrative and Waqidi's narrative. 85 Ibid., xvii. Humphreys is, of course, one of those who takes the hint.

elaborating on older and more austere narrative^,"^^ Waqidi continues to be viewed as the

account that appeals to the more sensitive reader. It would apparently appeal to those

willing to confront the problems facing the Muslim polity and willing to counteract the

sentimental piety of Sayf.

I would argue that this dismissal of Sayf s stories and the assumption that Muslim

readers either then or now would do the same is a mistaken one. For one thing, to the

"sensitive reader" or "thoughtful Muslim" living under Abbasid rule, Sayf s narrative

would seem to be far from unproblematic. The reader would have to confront Sayf's

valorization of Marwan, Mu'awiya, and the Umayyad clan in general, a view that would

be contrary to the official Abbasid historiography. The Abbasid revolution overthrew the

Umayyad dynasty and the official interpretation propounded by the Abbasid court was

one that laid the blame on the worldly Umayyads and particularly at the feet of "the

tyrant and usurper ~ u ~ a w i ~ a . ' ' ~ ~ Sayf s account, though it may be "Sunday school"

material for some vaguely defined Muslim of some vaguely defined period, would not

have been presented in any Friday school supported by the Abbasids.

Tabari himself recorded the official Abbasid decrees that cursed Mu'awiya and

his clan in a later volume the History, which means that Sayf could hardly be proto-Sunni

as it would later be defined under the Abbasid caliphate. An account that clearly favors

the Umayyads would be highly problematic for any Muslim faced with Abbasid

propaganda. Given the success of the Abbasid version of events in its denigration of the

Umayyads, Sayf s elevation of Marwan and Mu'awiya to heroic positions would be

86 HT xv, Humphreys, "Translator's Foreword," xvi. 87 Humphreys "Qur'anic Myth," 278. "The official 'Abbasid version is developed in the formal edict calling for the cursing of Mu'awiya which was issued by the 'Abbasid caliph al-Mu'tadid in 897 (d.902). This statement was allegedly based on a far older versions issued by Ma'mun (regn. 813-33), whose own pro-'Alid bent was well-known." See HT xxxviii, 48-63.

troubling even in the context of popular preaching after the official Abbasid curse. How

could Sayf be associated with "popular preaching" if he was so sympathetic to the

Umayyads? Why would Tabari give "pride of place" to such a reading while writing

under the Abbasid regime? Would not the "ordinary reader" be corrupted by Sayf s

valorization of Umayyad clansmen or by Waqidi's portrayal of an already-corrupted

community? In my view, there is no pride of place for one transmitter or the other.

Waqidi's anecdotes are not mere interjections but rather present a fully articulated

alternative narrative of the events. Furthermore, both Sayf and Waqidi contain internal

tensions and each provides a variety of versions for any given event. Dismissing one

account in favor of the other seems to be a flawed project, whether it is by Western

interpreters, by the Western version of Tabari, or by the Western version of Tabari's

myriad Muslim readers.

111. Shoshan - The Reluctant Deconstrwctivist

Boaz Shoshan devotes the whole of his monograph to the study of Tabari's

History, and it is the first study to my knowledge to do so. It is entitled Poetics of Islamic

Historiography: Deconstructing Tabari 's History, though his commitment to

deconstruction and to his own project as a strictly textual analysis seems questionable.

Whereas previous interpreters have uniformly treated Tabari in articles or under the

broader topic of "Islamic Historiography," Shoshan claims to deal with Tabari's History

as a text. That is, he focuses on the literary aspects of the work. Though Tabari was in

some sense the Islamic historian of the early period, little has been said about the source

itself except as it relates to the factual content or its recovery.88 While the literary aspects

of the source have been noted, their appreciation has largely been a mere way station in

pursuit of factual content.89 The attempts to disengage the factual data from the original

matrix have obscured the original matrix, and Shoshan claims to reject this obfuscation.

The formal qualities define the quality, content, and meaning of the text itself and

problematize any disengagement of the facts from the matrix. Shoshan's interest is in the

textual representation of the past rather than in the past behind the text.90 Indeed, though

Shoshan holds out hope, we may doubt that such a thing exists.

Histories, claims Shoshan, "need to be examined for their narratological

conventions and rhetorical strategies, the modes in and through which the historical

'facts' are portrayed, for emplotment as much as for arguments and ideologies, for the

way in which language serves as a creative medium."91 Shoshan therefore deals with

flashbacks (analepsis), foreshadowing (prolepsis), and various forms of mimesis in order

to examine the literariness of Tabari's History.

Most important for our purposes, Shoshan deals explicitly with Tabari's inclusion

of multiple versions of events that "repeat, supplement, overlap, or flatly contradict one

another."92 While this is not a new insight and has been pointed out before, Shoshan deals

with this contradictory evidence in a different way. Rather than attempt to gain access to

the truth about the past with un-confessed humanistic criteria, Shoshan claims that

88 Donner Narratives, 126. Shoshan, xxvii. 89 Shoshan notes some exceptions (xxv-xxvi), and I would highlight Fedwa Malti-Douglas, "Texts and Tortures: The Reign of al-Mu'tadid and the Construction of Historical Meaning," Arabica 46 (1999): 313- 36. 90 Shoshan, xxiv-xxv. "I am less concerned with what we can embrace or reject as factual - the past behind the text - although, to some extent, the "past" may well be a byproduct of my analysis. Rather, my interest is in the text about the past.. . It is the narrative that the particular facts sustain that my attention is here drawn."

Shoshan, xxiv. 92 Shoshan, 124. Humphreys, Islamic History, 73.

literary narratives employ certain strategies to achieve a "reality effect." That is, there

are rhetorical conventions and tropes of mimesis that govern culturally specific discursive

representations.93 By conforming to the cultural rules governing representation, what

may seem like insignificant minutiae or tired repetition may in fact heighten the "reality

effect" of a particular discursive entity that claims to be an authentic representation of the

past. The fictional and symbolic aspects of narrative may be important elements of

Islamic historiography,94 but it is equally important that historical narratives contain

assertions about the past and attempt to tell us some truth about what took place.95 By

including certain minute details, quoting characters verbatim, including seemingly

extraneous contextualization, or by foregrounding a lineage of transmission like isnad,

narratives claim legitimacy for themselves.

Shoshan does attempt to reckon at certain points with the ways in which the

multiple accounts seem not simply to represent different interests but the way in which

the juxtaposition of contradictory events constitutes a particular effect.96 However, it is

difficult to ascertain if Shoshan has a particular argument about the effect of such

juxtaposed accounts other than to point out that "the editor of the History has performed a

most significant job of contrasting two totally different opinions." The mutually

undermining claims of two perspectives, Shoshan suggests, could not have gone over

Tabari's head, but Shoshan leaves unanswered how contradiction itself might constitute a

trope of mimesis. Coexisting contradictions are, in my view, an integral narratological

strategy and perhaps the most ever-present one in this section of the history.

93 Shoshan, 19. 94 El-Hibri, Reinterpreting Islamic Historiography. (Shoshan 4-6). 95 Norman, "Telling it Like It Was," 130 (in Shoshan, 6). 96 Shoshan, 124-131.

In his analysis of 'Uthman's murder, Shoshan suggests that the view of those like

Humphreys that Tabari's History as a collection of mere "literary constructions" does

injustice to the medieval Muslim historian by disregarding the aims of the historian and

his sources. The historian claims to tell us something about the past.97 Shoshan claims

that Tabari does not leave the reader at an impasse with the contradictory reports but

rather that "a close reading of the text brings to the surface our historian's own view."98

This claim seems to run counter to Shoshan's project of "deconstruction."

Shoshan claims that in the deconstructivist vein, he does not intend to construct his own

narrative but rather to deal "with the ambiguous effect that the historical stories create or

with the effect created against the narrator's best intention^."^^ The recovery of the

historian's personal views regarding 'Uthman's murder does not fit comfortably with his

project as a whole. While Shoshan offers a truly excellent summary and analysis of

Tabari's account of 'Uthman's death that sheds light on the narrative movement achieved

by Tabari's editorial maneuvers,100 his final analysis of Tabari's narrative of 'Uthrnan's

murder seems to contradict his project of examining Tabari's History as a text. By

searching for a hidden authorial intent that is exposed in some cryptic and heretofore

undiscovered narratological device, Shoshan acts not as an interpreter of some clear

rhetorical effect but rather as a cryptographer who recovers "our historian's own view."

Shoshan claims that because Tabari adds a section entitled "The Conduct of

'Uthman" that does not fit the chronological progression, a certain effect is achieved that,

to the careful reader, reveals Tabari's intent. The juxtaposition of 'Uthman's cruel death

'' Shoshan, 174. 98 Shoshan, 177. 99 Shoshan, xi. loo Shoshan, 177-1 94.

with a eulogy that highlights his generous rule and his benevolence shifts the reader's

sympathies to ' ~ thman . '~ ' Thought both Sayf and Waqidi "competed on the same terrain

of historical reality," Shoshanys Tabari sides with Sayf in condemning 'Uthman's

murderers and praising the caliph.102 This rhetorical analysis brings Shoshan to a

conclusion diametrically opposed to Hodgson and Humphreys, but it is still an argument

that assumes the authorial intent was one that favored one interpretation over the other

and that this judgment of favor is somehow the most central issue in the interpretation of

Tabari's History and its portrayal of 'Uthrnan.

Shoshan's analysis seems flawed to me not only by assuming a particular

modality of authorial intent but also in the reading of "The Conduct of 'Uthman." The

refutation of Shoshanys claim requires a more detailed refutation that delves into a short

textual analysis of the movement from 'Uthman's murder to the account of his

"Conduct." As we shall see in more detail in chapter three, the climax of the narrative

regarding the murder of 'Uthman is not, as Shoshan claims, his gruesome murder but

rather a reasoned debate between the rebels and the caliph. Rather than adduce

sympathy, the first ten anecdotes on 'Uthman's "Conduct" suggest that 'Uthrnan brought

schism upon himself. The juxtaposition between cruel murder and sympathetic portrayal

is exaggerated by Shoshan and, as we shall see in chapter three, the movement of the

narrative is not from cruelty to beneficent reign but rather back and forth between these

two poles in such a way that the hfferences between them are continually emphasized

and reinscribed.

lo' Shoshan, 194. '02 Shoshan, 207.

The first anecdote in this retrospective discourse on 'Uthrnan's reign is a simple

and short statement that tells of 'Uthman judging between two water carriers having a

dispute, but there are absolutely no details of the content or outcome of the dispute.lo3 In

the second anecdote, one of Sayf s authorities tells us that 'Umar b. al-Khattab, the

second caliph, had "forbidden the notables of Quraysh who were Emigrants to go out into

the conquered territories except with his permission, and [then only] for a set period of

time. People complained [that 'Uthman did not restrain them l ike~ise . ] " '~~ 'Uthman, in

reaction to these complaints, compares Islam to a camel who has reached maturity and

from whom one can only expect decline. He then accuses the Quraysh of corruption and

attempting to exclude God's other servants of God's wealth. 'Uthman then ends his

speech in an obscure but troubling way that is far fiom benign: "Is Ibn al-Khattab alive?

He is not. I shall stand outside the pass of a l -~arrah"~ and grip the throats and waist-

wrappers of Quraysh so that they tumble into ell fire.^^'^^

This threatening stance toward Quraysh, the tribe of the Prophet that includes

both the Hashimite clan and the Umayyad clan, suggests that the core of Islam is corrupt

- a view that all our Western sources attribute to the "simple" Sayf. Whereas Sayf s

authorities normally portray the Medinese and the Companions as the purest people and

the true Muslim people, this report suggests the opposite: that the founders of Islam are

corrupt and unsalvageable. Instead, they must be killed.

'03 HT xv, 223. 104 HT xv, 223. 105 "The Harrah is a broken lava field northeast of Medina, through which one must pass to get to Syria, Egypt, or Iraq. It was the site of the famous battle between the Medinese and an expeditionary force sent by Yazid b. Mu'awiyah." HT xv, 223 fn. 400. 106 HT xv, 223.

The third anecdote in the "Conduct" section is even more troubling, suggesting

that allowing the notables of Quraysh to wander throughout the conquered lands, a policy

begun with 'Uthman, caused "those who were obscure and without power or privilege in

Islam [to attach] themselves (to the notables of Quraysh), forming factions around

them."lo7 Because these Quryashis aroused the hopes of the people by attracting factions

around their high status, they acquired precedence over the other servants of God. This

third anecdote concludes that the formation of factions around famous Qurayshi's was the

direct result of 'Uthrnan's policy. According to Sayf s authorities, the splitting into

factions "was the first flaw to enter Islam, and the first discord (f2tnah) to appear among

the common people (al- 'amrnah) was none other than this.""* In my estimation, finding

that the first flaw to enter Islam was the cause of 'Uthman's policies would hardly

produce sympathy for him but rather give credence to the rebels' concerns. Coming from

Sayf, this anecdote seems quite damning.

In the fourth anecdote, also transmitted by Sayf, we find that the Qurayshis had

tired of 'Umar and preferred 'Uthman because he freed them from these restrictions on

their movement in the conquered territories "where the people attached themselves to

them."lo9 This supports the previous anecdote's claim that division in the urnrna was a

result of 'Uthman's policies regarding the Qwayshi notables. Far from drawing our

sympathy, these anecdotes place the blame for his murder clearly on 'Uthman's

shoulders.

The fourth, fifth, and sixth anecdotes in the "Conduct" section also deal

specifically with schism. It seems unlikely to me that such a prominent place would be

107 HT xv, 224. lo8 HT xv, 224. log HT xv, 224.

given to schism so early on if the sympathetic rhetorical effect was meant to be achieved

through the ''juxtaposition" of 'Uthman's cruel murder with his benevolence. Indeed, the

foregoing account of the murder could easily be seen as the result of the schismatic

pressures in Islam that 'Uthman - according to other anecdotes from Sayf and Waqidi -

brought upon himself through his lenient policies.

Furthermore, Shoshan's analysis gives the impression that Tabari's narrative of

'Uthman's reign and murder closes with this retrospective look at 'Uthman's "Conduct."

In fact, his "Conduct" is followed by a section entitled "The Reason Why 'Uthman

Ordered 'Abadallah b. 'Abbas to Lead the Pilgrimage in This year,"' lo which is itself

followed by a whole host of other events and topics. The anecdotes contained under each

of these events or topics reintroduce the tensions surrounding the caliph's death and the

pressing question of how the succession will be resolved in the context of such a horrible

murder.

The final section on 'Uthman before Tabari moves on to the investiture of 'Ali

follows the typical pattern of gathering poetry putatively written at the time and allows

for reprise of the issues. It begins with an introduction that, like many other authorial

interjections by Tabari, highlights the disagreements: ''After his murder the poets spoke

about him-some in praise, some in derision, some in tearful lamentation, some in

gleeful joy."'" With this reinscription of difference, the rhetorical resolution that

Shoshan posits is undone.

The sections following Tabari's section directly describing the murder of

'Uthman do not, in my opinion, incite the reader to sympathy. Nor should the fact that

'lo HT xv, 236. "' HT xv, 2.58.

they produce sympathy in a certain Boaz Shoshan suggest that this was the intent of

Tabari. It seems to me that Shoshan claims to have access to "authorial intent" through a

"close reading" of rhetorical strategies. Such putative rhetorical strategies should either

strike the reader's sympathies, leaving no question as to the rhetorical goal of the author.

Otherwise they are not rhetorical strategies at all but rather subliminal messages that can

only be teased out through clever decoding. One ought not to find such decoding

necessary if it was the author's intent to produce a sympathetic response. Looking

behind or beyond the text is not a strategy of "deconstruction" but rather a process of

imaginative reconstruction. This is not an examination of the text as a text as Shoshan

claims, but rather a cryptographer's approach to recovering authorial intent.

The trajectory and the units of the text deny resolution. By reintroducing the

problematic issues in the sections that follow "The Conduct of 'Uhnan," we are left with

a more murky picture of what a reader might experience if he were to read the whole

account from start to finish. A reader with prejudices for or against 'Uthrnan or 'Ali

might be able to find support for his opinions. But he would also find, no matter what his

sympathies, anecdotes that fundamentally undermine any fixed sympathies or any

factional orthodoxy. Tabari's account of the year 35 is more deconstructivist - that is,

unstable and denying finality - than any of his Western interpreters have been

comfortable admitting l2

The final sections of year 35 that deal with 'Uthman's death re-introduce the

problems of the murder rather than allow for a resolution to emerge. Shoshan7s claim to

have discovered a rhetorical shift that causes sympathy is not quite so simple an effect as

Even Shoshan whose title claims to offer a "deconstruction" of Tabari's History searches for finality and resolution.

Shoshan would like it to be. Such a finalizing effect is complicated by the continuing

reminders of contradictions in the complex cross-currents that exist in Tabari's records of

'Uthman's murder. By placing these contradictory accounts next to each other, Tabari

intertwines the contradictions so that they are impossible to separate from their matrices.

A resolved, totalizing, "orthodox" story of the death of 'Uthman is impossible to glean

from this montage of texts.' l3 Neither authorial intent nor some arbitrary criteria for

human reality can save us from confronting the inscription and reinscription of

conflictual differences in Tabari's narrative of 'Uthman's murder.

IV. Binding the Community - Islamic Identity and Historical Memory

The search for resolution has not yielded a satisfactory harvest. We must now

turn our attention to a search for meaning rather than waste ow efforts in the search for

resolution, whether through claims to allusive or illusive authorial intent or through

claims to an accessible historical reality behind the text.

What has been ignored even in Shoshan's work are the ways in which Tabari's

narrative, through constructing a past, constructs a certain historical identity for his

Islamic Community. That is, while responses to Muhammad's message engendered

multiple Islams, Tabari participated in the intellectual life of a period that, like every era,

grappled with the question of identity. However, Tabari's discursive milieu found itself

in a position to collect and to synthetically organize these multiple Islams in order to

form a unified, mainstream Islam. This seems to have led to a synthesis of interpretive

legal strategies, as we shall find in the next chapter. In my opinion, this search for unity

113 Even in Sayf, there is no knowable "early Sunni orthodoxy," since SayPs narratives often conflict with themselves and produce pronounced sympathies for the Umayyads. Special thanks to Bill Darrow for the phrase regarding "montage."

led to the construction of a text that inscribed differences in a codex that could not be torn

apart. The cross-currents and contradictions in the narrative of Islamic origins are not

resolved but rather lead to a synthesis of the historical memories that neutralizes their

conflictual effects through mutually undermining claims to a totalizing "truth." The

boundaries of the community are literally found in the binding of the codices of Tabari7s

History so that the omitted memories lie outside the bounds of an historically defined

umma.

In the discourse surrounding hadith andjqh, this historicized identity was dealt

with in a particular way that focused on correct practice, but in Tabari's History, there is

an accentuation of difference and disagreement that nevertheless coexist through their

contingent claims to historical truth. Unlike the resolution found in legal opinion and in

Tabari7s Qur7anic Commentary, the History leaves judgment not up to the reader who

must confront the contradictory claims in a text that cannot be unbo~nd."~ Judgment is

left deferred to the Final Judgment. While particular historical memories fall outside of

Tabari's tolerance such that he finds them "offensive," the inclusion and exclusion of a

variety of historical memories inscribe the boundaries of the Islamic Community and

bind those differences together into a unified textual entity.

In the following chapters, I will argue that Tabari's role in constructing an

historical identity does not posit a unified, totalized version of the past but rather

conceives of the past as a place of contingency and conflicting interpretations and not of

certainty. Without such mutually undermining claims, the past can in fact be a downright

dangerous place where certain historical figures rise above others through the

' I 4 Cf. The hadith "My community will never agree on an error." Thank you to Bill Darrow for pointing out to me the more widespread tolerance of difference in the broader Islamic traditions.

valorization of their actions and the denigration of the actions of others. By avoiding a

finalizing, authorial judgment that favors one transmitted account over another, Tabari's

structural approach to constructing his History produces a knowledge of Islamic origins

that is quite opposed to the common Western approaches to history that generally

foreground authorship and a tendency to tell the "real" story. In fact, knowledge of the

past found in the narrative complexity in the History resists Western attempts to know the

past. Tabariys past is contingent, uncertain, and far too complex to easily enable a

totalizing historiography to emerge.

This rejection of a totalizing historiography seems to me to act as a way of

undermining sectarianism and factions. We have found in Sayf the suggestion that

'Uthman's policy of allowing the Qurayshi notables to go to the provinces provoked the

people to gather around them and form factions. A historiography such as Tabari's

History seems to construct an Islamic past that denies the validity of any totalizing

narrative that demonizes or valorizes any one member of the umma around whom a

faction could form. The historiography of 'Uthman's death that Tabari's History

provides is one that lays the foundation for an Islamic identity based around a broad

synthesis of competing views regarding certain events. The authorial voice in the History

acknowledges and accentuates disagreements and uncertainties rather than ignoring or

explaining them away. Different memories of the past retain their significance for their

differences. The omission of certain accounts is Tabari's tool for setting up an Islamic

identity that includes and excludes. But Tabari does not reconcile the differences

between his sources to create a unified narrative. Instead, the unity of the Muslim

Community comes from its recognition of competing memories and the acceptance of

their equal status in a work that constructs and simultaneously deconstructs the Islamic

past.

The construction of a contingent, irresolvable narrative and the differing strategies

employed in law and history should warn us against attempts to read Tabari's History as

a text that intentionally produces a preference for one historical narrative over another.

Tabari's textual productions in the fields of Qur'anic commentary and hadith

interpretation show that he was no shrinking flower when it came to giving his own

opinion on scriptural and legal matters. His reticence in the History suggests that the

hadith, though they produce knowledge of the deeds and words of the Prophet, are not

treated in the unanalyzed way that Tabari treats the khabar anecdotes in the History

Chapter 3

Inscribing Uncertainty Producing Knowledge of 'Uthman's murder

The uncertainty created by Tabari's account of the death of 'Uthrnan is not haphazard but

rather reflects a careful inscription of competing accounts of the circumstances that deny

the reader any consistent interpretation or unified movement. I mean by this that the

narrative tells the same event several times and retells mutually contradictory stories,

providing competing versions of the moral rectitude of each of the main characters. The

movement of the text is not toward resolution but rather back and forth between

competing truths.

Of particular concern is the relationship between 'Uthman, 'Ali, and the Egyptian

rebels. To a lesser extent, al-Zubayr and Talhah are also an issue of importance. By

mapping the relationship between these characters and groups in different ways, I do not

mean to suggest that 'Uthrnan and 'Ali come off as moral equals. 'Ali seems to come off

as more respected and more free of stain. But by inscribing a variety of "historical

memories," Tabari that claims that both 'Uthrnan and 'Ali are both pure and impure;

corrupt and incorruptible. In much of Sayf s narrative, 'Uthman, 'Ali, al-Zubayr, and

Talhah are so pious that their responses to rebellion are literally identical. In alternate

"historical memories," 'Uthman is presented as malicious, treacherous, or too weak to

avoid manipulation by conniving Umayyads. 'Ali is sometimes presented, albeit

somewhat backhandedly, as desiring the caliphate for himself or having, at the very least,

become so tired of the caliph that he could no longer bring himself to come to his aid

when he was threatened.

The death of 'Uthrnan in the year 35 AH (655-56 AD) marked the beginning of the

first civil war Wtnah) and, in Tabari's historical construction of the early Islamic

imaginary, the end of Islamic unity. 'Uthman's kinsmen, the Umayyads, as well as

Talhah, al-Zubayr, and 'Ali all participated in the civil war. This conflict did not truly

end until the death of 'Ali and the investiture of Mu'awiyah as caliph, which began the

Umayyad caliphate. Tabari avoids placing the blame consistently on any one party but

instead blames each party in turns, thus avoiding both unqualified valorization as well as

unqualified denigration. Tabari's History brings the emotionally charged issue of

'Uthman's murder to stalemate. Furthermore, the narrative inscribes diverse positions

regarding 'Uthman and 'Ali. This both appeals to multiple constituencies but also binds

these contradictory views in a codex that cannot be so easily tom apart. By representing

the Islamic past as a text, Tabari's synthetic historiography juxtaposes contradictory

views that satisfies a variety of constituencies while simultaneously undermining any

attempt to construct a sectarian historiography.

In this chapter, I will attempt to avoid making Tabari into a crypto-humanist as I

have argued Hodgson and Hurnphreys have done. I will avoid trying to read one of his

sources as his preferred source. Instead, I hope to show how Tabari's narrative operates

as a textual representation of the past and indeed of the historical identity of the umma.

As its reception history suggests, this text became the central historical text in the proto-

Sunni and Sunni world. As such, the synthesis and its inclusive approach to the

construction and production of historical knowledge must have reflected an appealing

self-identity to contemporaneous ~us l ims . ' l5 - - --

'I5 As I have suggested already, the historical mode (as opposed to the legal mode) of self-definition seems to have been much weaker in the present context than in the West. As such, though I am informed by

Tabari's narrative concerning the events of the year 35 AH (July 11, 655 - June

29, 656) is occupied almost exclusively with the murder of 'Uthrnan and the events

leading up to that murder. In fact, this one year takes up almost the same amount of text

as the other eleven years of his reign. The majority of the anecdotal material in the year

35 AH was transmitted to Tabari through either Sayf or Waqidi. Additional khabar are

transmitted by the famous Prophetic biographer Ibn Ishaq.

In fact, Tabari specifically identifies Sayf and Waqidi as his key sources when he

says, for instance, that "[hlere the narrative reverts to the account of Sayf and his

authorities." This suggests that Tabari worked with a collection of Sayf s khabar.'I6

When introducing a section of the narrative that contains anecdotes from Waqidi, Tabari

likewise i~ltroduces and thereby highlights that it is Waqidi who has compiled a series of

accounts, although Tabari also notes his refusal to record some of what Waqidi was

willing to record because he finds the material offensive.ll7

Far from presenting one coherent narrative in Sayf and then the confused reports

of Waqidi, Tabari organizes his narrative of the year of 'Uthman's murder around

specific issues or events.l18 In the frst event, which tells the story of a gathering siege,

Tabari presents the story first according to Sayf and then according to Waqidi with a

short interlude from other authorities between the two. In the second event, describing

the murder of 'Uthrnan itself, Tabari presents the narrative of Waqidi first, followed by a

similar interlude from other authorities, followed by a section dominated by the account

Anderson's Imagined Communities, I think that there are diverse strategies of self definition that interact and coexist. The importance of a common, communitarian historical memory is nonetheless important but it operates quite differently in the early Islamic context.

HT xv, 153. 'I7 HT xv, 170.

This organizational structure is quite similar to his organization in the exegetical history and in the Commentary.

of Sayf before returning to Waqidi's account before moving on to the "Conduct" section.

This interweaving of Sayf and Waqidi about each of the events or themes, such as the

aforementioned "Conduct of 'Uthman," reveals that there is no central narrative.

As Donner points out, there is a certain agreement about the course of events in

the narratives assembled by Tabari. What differs is the interpretation or significance of

these events.''' The preoccupations of Tabari's sources, in this case Sayf and Waqidi,

determine to a large degree the subjects and themes that Tabari can record.12' Tabari

indeed organizes his narrative into subjects and themes, recording the disagreements of

his sources in all their complexity. The authorial hand, juxtaposing these contradictory

narratives again and again, creates a movement between contradicting accounts rather

than a movement toward resolution. The authorial voice seems to be highlighting the

existence of differences rather than pointing the reader to any resolution of these

differences.

As I've said, there are two main "events" in the year 35, the mission from Egypt

and the murder of Uthman, but the interrelatedness of the events frustrates any tidy

separation between the two. It is clear from the first even - the gathering siege - that

'Uthman is going to be murdered. The narrative units provided by Tabari find their

boundaries transgressed by the khabar they attempt to contain. The intertwining nature of

the khabar anecdotes cause the discrete "events" to bleed into one another.

The first event is entitled "An Account of the Egyptians Who Went to Dhu

Khushub, and the Reason Why Certain Iraqis Went to Dhu al-~arwah." '~ ' The second is

' I 9 Donner, 286. lZ0 Donner, 28 1. 12' HT xv, 145.

called "The Account of the Murder [of ' ~ t h m a n ] . " ' ~ ~ The clear interrelatedness of these

two events allows Tabari to build up to a narrative climax twice within the first section

alone. By the climax of the siege, it is well known that 'Uthman will be murdered, but

Tabari begins yet another account of an additional event.. The structure of his narrative

is complex and mutually contradictory, and Tabari's intervention in that structure suggest

that Tabari claimed that the role of the compiler was one that applied certain standards of

propriety to define his material as acceptable or unacceptable.

I. Occasions for Authorial Intervention - Structure and Voice

The ordering of his sources and his authorial interventions are the places where

Tabari actually asserts authorial control over his text, while the content is defined by their

khabar sources. Thus, the overall structure and the authorial interventions should suggest

something of the narrative strategies employed by Tabari rather than by his sources.

Tabari begins the year 35 by saying, in his authorial voice, that "[almong these

[the events of the year 351 was the encampment of the Egyptians at Dhu ush hub."'^^ He

then cites two different authorities to confirm that Dhu Khushub did indeed take place in

the year under discussion. Tabari then provides the eventltheme heading, which I will

refer to by a shortened title: "An Account of the Egyptians."

After introducing the event under discussion, Tabari's authorial interjections are

limited to leading us through his movement from one account of this event to another and

then again to announce a new event. After laying out the narrative of the gathering at

Dhu Khushub through Sayf and his various authorities, Tabari inserts his voice to say that

we are now dealing with accounts that do not come from Sayf: "As to (authorities) other

than Sayf, some of them say that the dissidents' dispute with 'Uthman and the reasons

why they besieged him are correctly described in the account related to me by [this

certain chain of authorities] ."Iz4

Rather than simply assume that the reader will notice the change in isnad, Tabari

often highlights the changing authority of his narrative. After a rather short interlude that

comes from neither Sayf nor Waqidi, Tabari again alerts the reader to the change of

authority. "As for Waqidi, he has recounted many things concerning the reasons why the

Egyptians went to 'Uthman and made camp at Dhu Khushub. Among these things are

things that I have already mentioned, and there are others that I have refused to mention

because I find them ~ffensive." '~~

In the "Account of the Egyptians," Tabari lays out two narratives. One is from

Sayf and the other is from Waqidi, while the interlude in the middle merely presents

some alternative versions of the dissidents' reasons for gathering. The narratives of Sayf

and Waqidi both conclude with a story of 'Uthman standing in the pulpit with certain

members of the congregation throwing things at him until he falls unconscious. In Sayf,

the congregation throws "stones."126 Waqidi's version concludes with "pebbles" being

thrown at the caliph "until the sky could not be seen" and he fell unconsci~us. '~~

After Waqidi's final anecdote under the heading of "An Account of the

Egyptians," in which 'Ali finds the Umayyad clan gathered around 'Uthman and asks the

unconscious caliph "Why, 0 Commander of the Faithful, have the Banu Umayyah drawn

124 HT xv, 1 67. HT xv, 170. HT xv, 165-6.

127 HTxv, 181.

round you like a belt?" to which the Umayyads reply "0 'Ali, you have destroyed us and

have brought ill on the Commander of the Faithful. Yea, by God, if you achieve your

aims, then this world will surely become a bitter place for In the face of this

lament cum threat cum prophecy, 'Ali "rose up full of anger."'29

Coming on the heels of this poetically descriptive confrontation between 'Ali and

the Umayyads over the unconscious caliph, Tabari statement introducing the next topic is

striking for its succinct simplicity: "In this year, 'Uthman b. 'Affan was killed."130 The

abrupt ending is not unique to this circumstance. Short introductions of the next topic

often come at the end of the previous topic. However, there seems to be a certain drama

in the shift from the detailed description of 'Ali and the unconscious 'Uthman to the

sparse prose of the authorial voice.

The introduction of this new subject, entitled "The Account of the Murder [of

'Uthman]" is followed by a rare citation of Tabari by Tabari. Whereas this is a common

occurrence in his Commentary and in what we have referred to as the "exegetical

history," it seems to be quite rare in this section of the History. The isnad introduction is

simply a reference to himself, which then restates verbatim what concluded the last

segment. It is as if Tabari is citing his previously stated opinion in the next section.

According to Abu Ja'far (al-Tabari): In this year, 'Uthman 6. m a n was killed. We have

mentioned many of the reasons that his murderers cited as an excuse for killing him, and

we have avoided mentioning others that should not be included here. We will now

describe how he was killed, how and through whom it began, and who was the first to

treat him audaciously before he was murdered.13'

128 HTxv, 181. 129 HTxv, 181. 130 HT xv, 181. l3' HT xv, 18 1. Emphasis added.

It is fascinating that Tabari presents this chronological data as a matter of his own

judgment opinion and then follows this by reminding the reader of the interconnectedness

of the first and second event topics and also of his role as a filter for propriety's sake. His

initial judgment about the dating of 'Uthrnan's murder seems to be an analysis of data he

presents later in a section entitled "The Date of Uthman's ~ u r d e r . " ' ~ ~

However, highlighting the existence of Tabariys own opinion at this juncture

seems to me to act as an emphatic reminder of the presence of the author's interpretive

voice. Tabari immediately follows his chronological judgment by coding as "excuses"

the "reasons" for gathering at Dhu Khushub. By noting again that he has presented the

acceptable versions of the story and has left out unacceptable versions, Tabari reinscribes

himself as the gatekeeper of propriety.

Even though many of the anecdotes seem to excuse the murderers or at least act

as apologetics for their cause, Tabari nonetheless tells us that there are versions too

offensive to record. This knowledge that there is an unknown lying behind the text is at

once terrifying and titillating. We are left to our own devices to fathom the excuses for

killing 'Uthman that would have been improper.

I do not intend to put too much interpretive weight on Tabari's coding of the

"reasons" for the siege as also the "excuses" for his murder. This would require a deeper

linguistic engagement with the material that is impossible at this time. However, this

insertion of the authorial voice seems to lean toward the view that the death of the caliph

is unacceptable no matter what the reason. Unlike the structural elements, the seemingly

132 HT xv, 250-52.

negative coding provides a certain level of authorial intervention and interpretation

regarding the previous and pending ~ec t i 0ns . l~~

* * *

Tabari's section entitled "The Account of the Murder" begins with a series of

accounts from Waqidi in which the desperate situation of 'Uthman is emphasized by

telling of the willingness of people to confront him openly without fear of retaliation.

Four out of the first five khabar anecdotes contain people who threaten 'Uthman.

Without the same authorial highlighting of a change in sources that we found in the

previous section, Tabari moves from anecdotes not deriving from neither Sayf nor

Waqidi back into a solidly Waqidi storyline without any intervention.

Tabari inserts here a particularly interesting account from Waqidi that purportedly

originates with Muhammad b. Maslamah who, together with 'Ali, plays a key role in

negotiating between the rebels and 'Uthman in certain versions. His account records a

story that echoes the story of 'Ali's interaction with 'Uthman. 'Uthman asks both

Maslamah and 'Ali to go out to the rebels on his behalf to send them away and both find

that 'Uthman's promises to change his ways are left unfulfilled.

Waqidi's sources also tell of the moment of 'Uthman's death, but unlike Sayf s

sources that we shall encounter in a moment, Waqidi's sources do not tell us of the

physical murder of the caliph. Instead, there are statements telling us that 'Uthman was

killed. Sometimes the reports conclude with the narrator's memory of the moment he

found out about 'Uthman's death: "no sooner had I reached my house than I heard the cry

L33 Though many Western scholars have attempted to uncover Tabari's opinion (see above), this passage has strangely not played into their interpretation at all.

that 'Uthman had been killed."134 Elsewhere in Waqidi, it is stated simply, meticulously

and almost mathematically: "They sustained the siege for forty-nine days, until at last he

was killed on Friday, eighteen nights having passed in Dhu al-Hijjah, in the year 35."13'

Compare such notices of 'Uthrnan's death with the account that sits between the

Waqidi storyline of 'Uthman's death and the sayf ~ t o r ~ l i n e . " ~ The account according to

Abu Sa'id places the reader in the room where 'Uthrnan's murder took place. In one of

Sa7id's accounts, an intruder slices 'Uthman's hand with his sword and the blood of

'Uthman drips on the Qur'an. In another of Sa'id's versions, 'Uthman is wounded by an

arrow and his blood dripped on a particular verse of the Qur'an that reads "God will

suffice you for them; He is the All-Hearing, the ~ l l - ~ n o w i n ~ . " ' ~ ~ The full verse reads

"And if they believe in the like of that you believe in, then they are truly guided; but if

they turn away, then they are clearly in schism; God will suffice you for them," and thus

refers directly to the schism and error of those who murder the caliph.

In this account Say id tells us that one of the murderers made sexually suggestive

comments regarding 'Uthman's wife. This confirmed for Say id that "the enemy of God

desired only the things of this In the symbolic and dramatic value of the blood

of the caliph who compiled the Qur'an dripping onto the Qur'anic verse about schism, we

are given access to a dramatic vision of 'Uthman's death. This vision seems to adduce

sympathy for 'Uthman and concludes that the murderers were in error for their

introduction of schism.

134 HT xv, 198. 13' HT xv, 199. 136 HT XV, 202-206. 13' HT xv, 205. '38 HT xv, 206.

Sayf also provides dramatic testimony of the battle between the defenders of

'Uthrnan and the rebels that took place, according to some anecdotes, in the caliph's

residence itself. These battle stories glorify Marwan, the hated Umayyad, while at the

same time letting the important actors off the hook for defending 'Uthrnan. 'Ali, al-

Zubayr, and Talhah all react to the news of 'Uthrnan's murder by saying "May God have

mercy on ' ~ t h r n a n . " ' ~ ~ Some curse the rebels while others hope for his vengeance.

This is not to suggest that only those anecdotes that recount the visual

descriptions of the moment of 'Uthrnan's death are dramatically effective.l4' There are

multiple vivid accounts of sources recalling the very minute that they knew of 'Uthman's

death. Take for instance an account transmitted fiom Waqidi about the wife of a certain

Manzur b. Sayyar al-Fazari who "used to say: We had gone on the Pilgrimage, and we

did not learn of 'Uthrnan's murder until, while we were at al-'Arj, we heard a man

singing in the darkness: 'Yea, the best of people, save three, is the one murdered by al-

Tujibi who came from Egypt. 77,141

While Sayf takes us there for the battle itself and the physical confrontation of

'Uthman with his adversaries, Waqidi tells us the psychological story of the realization of

that murder. Sayf s "reactionyy to the killing consists of 'Ali, Zubayr, and Talhah all

reacting in the most pious manner possible to the death of the caliph, while the reaction

of Waqidi's narrators are more often associated with a scene of realization.

* * *

' 3 9 ~ ~ x v , 217. 140 Cf. Hodgson, 57. "But for readers who have a sense of the human and of the dramatic, Sayf appears as an unwelcome interruption." l4' HT xv, 219.

Just before moving on to "The Conduct of 'Uthrnan," Tabari returns to an account

by Waqidi after a long string of accounts from Sayf. Shoshan and Hodgson point out the

"somewhat satirical side of 'Uthman's death (not in real life, in the text, that is) is that the

caliph dies several times over."142 The culmination of this satire is that 'Uthman has died

multiple times, being brought back to life (textually speaking) only to die again when

finally he is brought back to life one last time. However, the final anecdote in the

"Account of the Murder" is not of a murder at all but rather presents a reasoned debate

between the caliph and the besieging rebels. There is no reminder of the killing here but

rather a synthesis of opposing views. This final anecdote records a civil discussion

regarding the legality of the murder that is both about to take place in the context of the

narrative anecdote and that has also already taken place in the context of Tabari's

narrative as a whole.

There is no chronological logic to this, nor does it follow any logical pattern by

providing a final death scene. The debate apparently took place "while he was under

siege,"143 and not in some dramatic endgame between villain and victorious hero. It is a

well-developed logical argument that, though my mind is not that of a tenth century

Muslim legist, seems convincing on both sides. Interestingly, the arguments provided by

the caliph and the rebels both seem to cede ground. That is, 'Uthman defends himself by

saying that, while he may not have acted perfectly, all of his actions were preordained by

God and were known by Him when He guided the Community to choose ' ~ t h r n a n . ' ~ ~

The rebels, rather than discount every word of 'Uthman or accuse him of

disingenuous dealings or of treachery, take each of his points and turn it against him.

142 Shoshan, 124. Also Hodgson, Venture I, 353. '43 HT xv, 22 1. '44 HT xv, 22 1.

"Truly all God's acts are the best acts, but God - glory be to Him! - has made your case a

test for His ser~ants ." '~~ This turns the caliph's predestination argument around by

relocating God's will and by emphasizing the need for the pious to remain watchful.

Both sides accept a common premise and appeal to piety and the supremacy of

God's will. Both appeal to the law and what constitutes la&ul homicide, but the rebels

appeal to the existence of exceptions to the rules 'Uthrnan lays out by pointing to people

in the Qur'an who are killed despite not fulfilling 'Uthrnan's rules. Both sides abhor

schism and wish to keep the Community together, but the rebels claim that it is more

important "to uphold truth" despite the fear of discord. 'Uthrnan warns the rebels not to

kill him lest they "never pray together again," but the rebels suggest that 'Uthrnan could

abdicate for his failings in order to make his defenders depart without shedding Muslim

blood.

By placing this rather sophisticated discussion of law that cuts to the heart of the

problematic relationship between earthly power and God's law, the narrative of

'Uthman's death ends not with a bloody murder but rather with the community having a

civil and thoughtful debate. Whereas many anecdotes sympathize with one side or the

other, this particular anecdote seems to sympathize with both and shows that the rebels

and the caliph can speak to each other in the same language. There is broad agreement

about what the disagreement is about, but each side comes to different conclusions. The

debate, placed as it is at the culmination of the narrative, almost seems to act as a

synthesizing analysis of the foregoing stories. The complexity of the contradictory

memories and interpretations are compressed into a single debate that ends without a

resolution and without a murder. Indeed, the "Account of the Murder" in Tabari seems to - -

145 HT xv, 222.

reflect a paradigmatic example of the way in which competing historiographical claims

can cause bloodshed and also how careful construction can draw the sides to a mutually

contradictory but irresolvable stalemate.

Neither side is granted a final victory in this final anecdote, and neither side is

granted the final word in the broader narrative. That is, by concluding with a legal

discussion that remains unresolved, we are led to the resolution that is unresolved. I do

not mean to suggest that Tabari "agrees" with Waqidi's line of transmission, as Hodgson

and Humphreys have argued based on Waqidi's more "human" sources. Instead, I would

suggest that this debate neutralizes any valorization of one side over the other.

Rather than attribute to Tabari the aims of the humanist historian, the stalemate

and mutually undermining claims may have a practical value in that the text gives an aura

of acceptability to a wide range of historiographical claims that, given the existence of

fully-developed isnads, have the appearance of long-standing controversies, floating in

the historical memory of Tabari's milieu.

The inscription of differences between members of the umma with a restrained

authorial voice that always defers judgment produces a narrative in which uncertainty

remains ever-present. Rather than making a judgment about which of the anecdotes

presented the most likely version, Tabari lays out contradictions in the events themselves

and emphasizes, through authorial voice and construction of a specific narrative structure,

the Community7 s disagreements over the moral implications of the events.

In key places, Tabari inserts his authorial voice to emphasize that he has left out

those accounts that were unacceptable, which may allow the reader to assume the

converse - that all those interpretations that were inscribed in the text are indeed

acceptable. This approach of emphasizing difference and admitting omission is quite

different from a strategy that might minimize or explain away differences between

competing historiographical memories.

* * *

After "The Account of the Murder," there are several other topics relating to the

murder, but before moving on to the investiture of 'Ali, Tabari ends the reign of 'Uthman

with "The Threnodies Composed for ' ~ t h m a n . " ' ~ ~ In introducing these poems, Tabari's

authorial voice again reinscribes the differences in the community regarding the death of

'Uthman.

In the authorial voice, Tabari states that "After his murder the poets spoke about

him - some in praise, some in derision, some in tearful lamentation, some in gleeful

joy."147 A statement like this is normally followed by Tabari's sources that disagree.

However, we find only poems that lament 'Uthman's death, hence the title. However, in

spite of the title, Tabari still emphasizes that there were others whose poetry rejoiced at

the death of 'Uthman. Should we read the omission of those poems of te&l joy as

Tabari's subtle suggestion that rejoicing over the death of the third caliph would be

"offensive?" If so, the omission seems to be overly subtle in view of Tabari's inscription

of differences between the poets.

It also seems possible that though Tabari insists on movement between

contradictory accounts in his structuring of the narrative, he prefers to end the reign of

'Uthman with an attempt to tame the subversive material found in the account of the

murder itself. However, this taming through censorship not only reminds the reader of

'46 HT xv, 258. Translation of "Threnodies" forthcoming. '47 HT xv, 258.

the existence of those other poems but also serves as a mere interlude between the violent

death of the caliph and the violent clash of 'Ali, al-Zubayr, Talhah, and 'Aisha in the first

civil war. The narrative does not move definitively from an explosive, subversive

account of 'Uthman to one that is more tame but rather fluctuates between these two

poles. If anything, the final debate between 'Uthman and the rebels that seems to end in

stalemate is the most accurate representation of the overall textual effect of 'Uthman's

murder in Tabari's History.

Whenever we think for a moment that Tabari has moved into authorial mode by

presenting a final, authoritative version of events or by condemning the rationale of the

rebels as "excuses" for murder, the fluctuating structure undermines continually this

finality. Rather than provide a stable picture of history in his account of 'Uthman's

death, the text is instead full of intertextual complexity within itself. This complexity, in

my opinion, reflects the contingent relationship to certainty. This contingency and these

various versions of historical memory reveal a sort of historical "truth" that is multiple

rather than unified. In this late evening between the end of His Final Revelation and the

beginning His Final Judgment, only revelation can only be interpreted through rational

argument. Even here, the jurisprudent may only arrive at legal decisions that aim for

degrees of likelihood. Real certainty, coming only fiom God, will arrive at the Final

Judgment and not a moment earlier.

11. The Letter - Multiple Memories

I turn now to the content of the anecdotes found in Tabari's year 35 AH. There

are certain issues like that of the letter that Tabari's sources mention time and again in

different versions. The story of the letter always finds the rebels returning to Medina

after deciding to go back home, claiming to have found a letter that caused them to

return.

In Sayf s version, the rebels decide to make a show of going home in order to

make the Medinese - that is, 'Ali, Talhah, and al-Zubayr, disperse. This plan succeeded

and allowed them to wheel around and to take the Medinese by surprise and occupy the

encampments previously held by 'Ali, Talhah, and al-Zubayr, thereby surrounding the

caliph.

Sayf's narrative goes on to have 'Ali go out to the Egyptians, who had previously

asked for his support which he rejected. 'Ali asks the rebels what brought them back, and

they say "We seized a letter [ordering] us to be killed from an official currier."14*

However, 'Ali accuses them of a conspiracy woven before they left from Medina because

the Kufans and Basrans - the allies of the Egyptians who traveled home in a different

direction - returned simultaneously and could not have known that their allies had been

threatened. This accusation, from the mouth of 'Ali, is what "truly" happened according

to the claims made by this anecdote. The return of the Egyptians and their Kufan and

Basran allies is a ruse to make the Medinese defenders - in particular 'Ali, al-Zubayr,

Talhah - withdraw their defense of 'Uthman, allowing the rebels to occupy the

encampments of those three. This explains, through the devious machinations of the

outsiders, why rebel armies encamped in what had been 'Ali's camp. What might appear

to be treachery is explained away.

An alternate version, transmitted neither by Sayf nor Waqidi, has the Egyptian

delegation is overtaken by a rider as they leave Medina who claims to be an envoy from

148 HT xv, 162.

'Uthman to the governor of Egypt. The Egyptians interrogate him and discover a letter

that orders for their crucifixion or their slaughter by mutilation. When this delegation

returns, before they go to 'Uthrnan to demand an answer for the letter, they go to 'Ali to

ask him to rise up with them. 'Ali thoroughly rejects their entreaties, which confuses the

Egyptian delegation. "So why did you write us?" the Egyptians ask.

"By God, I never wrote anything to you at all." Then they looked at one another, some

saying to others, "Is it for this man that you are fighting, or on his account that you are

angered?" So 'Ali departed and left Medina for a certain village.'49

After this bizarre encounter with 'Ali, this story has the delegation confronting 'Uthman

who suggests that the letter the Egyptians discovered had been forged. Apparently not

believing him, the Egyptians laid siege to 'Uthman. This story presents the possibility

that the Egyptians have been misled by letters. That is, they have believed in the

authorship of a particular piece of writing because it claims to be a letter from that

person. When they confront the purported authors - both 'Ali and 'Uthman - the two

claim to have written no such things. While the rebels believe 'Ali, they refuse to believe

'Uthman. This anecdote not only highlights the uncertainty of textual authorship but also

seems to place the blame for tensions between 'Uthman, 'Ali, and the rebels upon some

allusive trouble-making letter writer. On the contrary, the denials given by 'Uthman and

'Ali emphasize the deniability of letters and the possibility that those denials might not be

believed.

While these first two accounts come during the "Account of the Egyptians," the

third version of the story of the letter comes from the "Account of the Murder" and is

14' HT xv, 168-69.

from Ibn Ishaq, the famous biographer of the ~ r o ~ h e t . ' ~ ~ According to this story,

'Uthrnan repents and then writes a letter to the governor of Egypt -this version actually

quotes from the letter itself - which the dissidents discover in an empty waterskin of a

suspicious traveler riding one of 'Uthrnan's camels. "Upon examining the letter, they

discovered that some of them were to be executed and others were to be punished in their

persons and property. When they saw this they returned to Medina," and laid siege to

'Uthman. Those Medinese who heard their story also rose up in rebellion. This anecdote

is followed by one by yet another series of transmitters that shows the confrontation of

the returning Egyptians with 'Uthrnan, where he denies any knowledge of the letter.

There are, in fact, several other accounts of the letter, but these three show the

way in which a single event - the discovery of a letter and the return to Medina of a large

group of dissident-rebels - can be interpreted in myriad ways. The veracity and morality

of either side is questioned or reinforced. However, the memory of this event is so firmly

entrenched that multiple independent, partisan sources interpret or reinterpret the event

on their own terms. Rather than simply deny the story or make an effort to forget, the

story has been told and retold to be acceptable to a certain faction's worldview. Tabari

combines these worldviews without offering his judgment as to which provides the more

accurate picture.

***

The story of the letter brings up the problematic roles of 'Ali, al-Zubayr, and Talhah.

These three characters, 'Uthrnan, and the Umayyads are the central figures in the

narrative of the year 35. Their actions are difficult to untangle, but none escapes free of

stain. While Sayf s authorities generally support the Umayyads while getting 'Ali, al- --

150 HT xv, 183 fn. 328.

Zubayr, and Talhah off the hook, I have already mentioned the problematic reports from

Sayf that blame 'Uthman for the policies that led to factions in Islam. Waqidi's

authorities, by contrast, tend to present 'Uthman as either a tyrant or a weakling who is

merely the plaything of the Umayyad clan. In reaction to 'Uthman's denials regarding

the letter, the rebels put 'Uthman in a double bind.

You are either truthful or a liar. If you are lying, you deserve to be deposed because you

have unjustly ordered our blood to be shed. If you are telling the truth you deserve to be

deposed because of your weakness and neglect, as well as the wickedness of your

entourage [that is, the entourage that was responsible for the letter behind your back].15'

This attack on 'Uthman and his tyranny or his inability to rule puts the caliph in a double-

bind. While tyranny was to be feared, the results of an overly lenient caliph's rule could

be disastrous for life and property when seen from the point of view of those living under

governors who were, perhaps, not sufficiently controlled by 'Uthman's guiding hand.

When a simple letter written from a corrupt advisor could end your good name or your

life, the consequences of tyranny were equal and indistinguishable from incompetence.

111. Constructing the Community - The Omitted Outsider?

Despite the aforementioned tendencies of Sayf and Waqidi regarding their

portrayal of 'Ali or 'Uthman, the internal contradictions are also suggestive. Waqidi

allows the 'Uthmani point of view to come through in his account of 'Uthman's defense

in the debate that concludes "The Account of the ~ u r d e r . " ' ~ ~ And although many of

Waqidi's anecdotes align 'Uthman with a corrupt and manipulative Umayyad clan, the

account of Maslarnah that comes through Waqidi is clearly sympathetic to 'Uthan 's

15' HT xv, 195. 152 HT xv, 221-223.

cause, calling the gathering against the caliph "evil itself."153 Maslamah's account also

expresses the frustration of Maslamah himself who, like 'Ali does in other anecdotes

from Waqidi, assures the rebels that 'Uthman will change his ways in order to send them

away but finds that 'Uthman does not do so.

The pattern does not seem to follow a strict glorification of one character or

another. Rather, it seems that Sayf and Waqidi disagree over the source of the evil. Sayf,

particularly in the narrative given by Tabari in "An Account of the Egyptians" and in

"The Account of the Murder," tends to place the onus upon outsiders. Waqidi, by

contrast, tends to present the insiders as corrupt and corrupting - the Community is

collapsing at its core. The sum effect of this is that all the key actors in the story end up

appearing virtuous, villainous, and ambivalent at turns. Let us examine the insider-

outsider representations in the year 35 AH, in particular the way in which Ali, al-Zubayr,

and Talhah are presented in relationship to 'Uthrnan and the rebels.

* * *

Tabari's first anecdote in the year 35 AH after the establishment of dating is from

Sayf and his authorities. Tabari places Sayf s identification of 'Abdallah b. Saba' at the

front of his narrative where Sayf gives an unflattering genealogy for this obscure but

apparently powerful outsider who intentionally bred dissension in the umma.

'Abdallaah b. Sabaa' was a Jew from San'aa', and his mother was a black woman. He

converted in the time of 'Uthman, then roamed about the lands of the Muslims attempting

to lead them into error. He began in the Hijaaz, and then [worked] successively in

lS3 HT xv, 193.

Basrah, Kufah, and Syria. He was unable to work his will upon a single one of the

Syrians; they drove him out and he came to ~ g y ~ t . ' ~ ~

By clearly identifying this newly converted outsider as the cause of error, Sayf s narrative

posits the existence of a pure Muslim umma that was only corrupted by the actions of this

Yemeni Jew whose disciples were disingenuous and whose "real aim was different from

the one that they proclaimed in Saba7 is portrayed as the fabricator of several

well-known heresies that have certain resonances with Shi'a doctrine. Sayf credits this

outsider with suggesting that there would be a Return of Muhammad, which is normally

an idea associated with the Return of 'Ali or of the seventh or twelfth imam. The

doctrines fabricated by Saba' are characteristic of what has been referred to as ghulat or

"extremist" positions associated with Shi'ism. By claiming that "every prophet has an

executor (wasi) and 'Ali is the seal of the executors," Saba' is portrayed as the founder of

a line of "corrupt" thinking that undermines the unity of the Believers. The source of this

heresy disassociates 'Ali from the formation of these schisms and makes the entire

rebellion the cause?? of fabricated beliefs. This denies, of course, that there could be

multiple responses to the message of the Prophet Muhammad that engendered these

disagreements and instead posits an "authentic" Islamic Community that is corrupted

from the outside.

However, the positing of such a pure umma is problematized even in Sayf s

sources by trying to locate where that pure Community might be found. Most of Sayf s

authorities seem to claim that purity is to be found in Medina, but Mu'awiyah warns

'Uthman of impending danger if he stays there and suggests that he seek protection with

lS4 HT xv, 145. 155 HT xv, 147.

the ultra-loyal ~ ~ r i a n s . ' ~ ~ Sayfs narratives certainly reflect a fear of outsiders, as is

exhibited in Sayf s accounts in the section entitled "The Conduct of 'Uthman." In these

anecdotes, 'Uthman's failure to keep the Qurayshi Companions in Medina causes them to

gather factions around themselves, which Sayfs authorities posit as the beginning of

corruption. This obviously undermines the legend of the Yemeni Jew as being the cause

of the the dissention.

The need to keep the Companions in Medina in order to maintain Muslim purity

suggests that Sayf wanted to reinforce Medinan Islam over all others. However, Sayf

notes that Ibn Saba' "was unable to work his will upon a single one of the ~ ~ r i a n s , " ' ~ ~

Despite the warning from Mu'awiyah of the dangers of his surroundings, Sayf s 'Uthman

seems to refer to the Medinese as the only possible arbiter of upright conduct despite his

sending a letter to the garrison towns in his time of need to ask for their aid.lS8 Thus,

despite 'Uthman's tendency to elide Medinese with Muslims in Sayf s narratives, there is

a definite problem of Medinese purity if the Syrians are needed to protect 'Uthman.

This problem is partially solved by having 'Uthman let his Medinese

Companions off the hook. He tells the "men of Medina" to return to their homes on the

pretext of wishing to allow the rebels "no pretext that they can use against you to damage

God's religion or [the affairs ofl this world, until Almighty God disposes of this as He

wishes."'59 In a way, if we were to read Sayf to the exclusion of the other transmitters,

he leaves open the possibility of a pure caliphate after Uthman's demise by sending the

HT xv, 153. 157 HTxv, 145. lS8 HT xv, 163. "They have blamed me

HT xv, 207.

Medinese away and asking God to restore the caliphate to thern.l6O Thus, Sayf s narrative

distances the key figures to some degree but not so much so as to consider their

inheritance of the caliphate as a function of discontinuity. This can be somewhat

strained, as when Sayf records that the rebels cut off 'Uthrnan from everything including

water, though "'Ali had been bringing some of what he wanted."161

As if directly undermining any possible attempt to associate the rebels with one of

the key figures of thefitnu, Sayf s narration describes the Egyptians and their garrison

town allies yearning for the support of one of the leading Companions rather than the

other way around. Sayf lists their yearnings:

As for the Egyptians, they yearned for 'Ali [as caliph], while the Basrnas desired Talhah

and the Kufans al-Zubayr. They all set out [for Medina] simultaneously. The people had

disparate [aims], and every faction was certain that it would obtain complete success to

the exclusion of the other two.16'

The regional support for the three candidates seems to presage (or teleologically

construct the innocent back story to) the incipient civil war. But in this narrative from

Sayf, the Companions are kept pure by their refusal to join with the rebels. In all three

cases, Sayf and his authorities employ almost the exact same phrasing for their rejection

of their supporters. All three include that "He shouted at them and drove them away" as

well as an invocation of the upright, the Believers, or the Muslims for knowing that the

armies gathered around Medina "have been cursed by the tongue of ~uha rnmad . " '~~

160 HT xv, 207. HT xv, 207.

16' HT xv, 160. HTXV, 161.

Waqidi presents a picture in which it is the Medinese who, in one anecdote, react

to 'Uthman's actions by writing to the Companions who had scattered about the

provinces. The anecdote quotes from the letter, saying

"You have gone forth but to struggle in the path of Almighty God, for the sake of

Muhammad's religion. In your absence the religion of Muhammad has been corrupted

and forsaken. Come then and reestablish Muhammad's religion." Thus, they came from

every direction until they killed ( ' ~ t h m a n ) . ' ~ ~

This suggests that dissension brewed from within. Not that corruption was not found in

Medina among the Companions but rather that it existed in the heart of the caliph

himself. In Waqidi, we find several instances where 'Uthman repents his misdeeds and

even tells 'Ali that if he will subdue the people, "Then I shall defy them [Marwan,

Mu'awiya, and other Umayyads] and heed you [ ' ~ l i ] . " ' ~ ~ He even repents in fiont of the

congregation!'66 But Waqidi's sources vary as to the authenticity of 'Uthman's

repentance. Both 'Ali and Maslamah eventually tire of making excuses for 'Uthman in

front of the people and he is left, according to Waqidi's sources, with only the Umayyad

clan to support This is a far different view of how support and dissent distributed

amongst the Muslim community.

Waqidi also presents some evidence that 'Ali, Talhah, and al-Zubayr may have

been waiting for 'Uthman's death. In one case, Talhah seems to be giving orders to the

rebels to keep 'Uthman in his ho~seho ld . ' ~~ In another, 'Ali explains to Abu Habibah

that he had hied to defend 'Uthman until he was full of shame and felt that he had been

sent away in favor of other, less worthy advisors. This seems innocent enough but then,

HT xv, 184. HT xv, 174. HT xv, 176.

167 HT XV, 192-93. HT xv, 199.

according to the anecdote, Habibah sees Muhammad b. Abi Bakr enter and whisper to

'Ali who stands, saying "What good is his repentance now?'It seems that 'Ali was

waiting for news of the caliph's death.169 Furthermore, Muhammad b. Abi Bakr is one of

the men blamed for 'Uthman's murder.170 A less veiled reference comes when a man

runs fiom the murder site yelling "Where is Talhah b. 'Ubaydallah? We have killed Ibn

'~ f fan!" '~ '

Even Sayf s authorities seem to suggest that 'Ali, al-Zubayr, and Talhah are

waiting for their own turn at the caliphate. Early in his narrative, Sayf describes a

caravan leader who, strangely enough, sings a song about the succession to the caliphate:

The lean camels knew.. .

That the arnir after him would be 'Ali;

in al-Zubayr there is a worthy successor,

And the fiery Talhah is an heir thereto.'72

Following this lyric, there is some discussion of whether it is instead Mu'awiya who will

be the next successor. With all these four mentioned as possible caliphs, Mu'awiyah

meets the other three by chance and gives them a lecture, leaning on his bow. "You

know that this situation has come about because the people are struggling among

themselves to achieve supremacy for certain men," Mu'awiyah tells them before

launching into a sermon about the undoing of old hierarchies that Islam brought about

and urging them to respect the aging caliph.'73 In reaction to his lecture against earthly

ambition, 'Ali and al-Zubayr decide that Mu'awiyah has no good in him and is

distressing to them. Ambition is clearly in the air and the leading members of the

169 HTxv, 198. I7O HT xv, 219. l7' HT xv, 200. 17' HT xv, 150. '73 HT xv, 151-52.

Community have, according to this anecdote, already concerned themselves with what

comes after 'Uthman.

Some tacit criticism comes only after the main events of the year in a section

entitled "The Reason Why 'Uthman Ordered 'Abdallah b. 'Abbas to Lead the Pilgrimage

in This Year," which I discussed briefly in chapter two. A significant anecdote from

Waqidi tells of the return of Ibn 'Abbas to Medina after the pilgrimage. Ibn 'Abbas

discovers what has taken place in his absence and warns 'Ali that if he takes the oath of

allegiance, he will be suspected of 'Uthman's blood. 'Ali nevertheless takes the oath,

causing an inflammation of tensions over the blood of 'Uthman because now the new

caliph is suspected of being responsible for the m~rder ."~ This problem of the blood of

'Uthman haunts the end of Tabari's narrative of the year 35 AH, both in the poetry

lamenting 'Uthrnan's death and in the section regarding the ascension.of 'Ali to the

caliphate.

The incredible complexity described above frustrates any attempt to resolve

blame or to exact justice. One of the poets who laments 'Uthman's death yearns for

historical knowledge.

Very soon you will hear in their lands,

"God is great! Vengeance for 'Uthman!"

Would that I knew, would that the birds would inform me,

what went on between 'Ali and ('Uthman) Ibn ' ~ f fan . '~ '

This poem exemplifies the very yearning for certainty that Tabari's narrative intends to

frustrate.

'74 HT xv, 238. '75 HT xv, 26 1.

Epilogue

"I wish a bird would tell me.. ."

The scholarly literature tends to view Tabari's History as a source to be mined for facts.

However, the Tabari's narrative denies any resolution or certainty about the past, and

reinscribes and emphasizes the unresolved differences in the C o m i t y of Believers at

every turn. The synthesis this creates - as exemplified in the debate between 'Uthman

and the rebels - is one that explicitly avoids factions.

Schism is obviously one of the central issues concerning Tabari's sources and so

it should not surprise us that it was also a concern for Tabari and his generation's

discursive milieu . The production of a narrative that painstakingly undermines any

fixed, sectarian position should therefore not be at all unexpected except in the context of

Western understandings of historical narratives. We expect religious historians to act like

the paradigmatic ecclesiastical historian such as Eusebius. We expect the author to take a

side as Eusebius does - on the side of apostolic succession and against the so-called

"Gnostics," those "savage wolves." Rather than create an "other" against which to define

his Commmunity, Tabari omits what we might call the "heretical" accounts.

However, though Tabari arranges his sources to achieve a stalemate when it

comes to 'Ali, 'Uthman, al-Zubayr, and Talhah, Tabari does actually disclose some

unacceptable "others." In the account of the Yemeni Jew convert, we find an account of

heretical doctrines that Tabari does not redeem. The fabrications of Ibn Saba' confnm

the heretical status of certain doctrines. The "Return" is explicitly linked to Christian

contamination by Saba' himself. The character of Ibn Saba' is imbued with

unquestionably bad characteristics. His motives are always purely evil and his doctrines

are therefore fabricated solely to tempt good Muslims away from the true path. Because

Saba' claims that 'Ali is the "seal of the executors" that doctrine must necessarily be a

fabrication that only a Yemeni Jew could invent. By finding - one might say fabricating

- an unknown outsider without a history and therefore without any supporters, Tabari's

sources have reintroduced the heretics into their inscription of "acceptable"

disagreements.

In an article Fedwa Malti-Douglas describes the various literary representations

of al-Mu'tadid. By examining historical works such as classical Arabic chronicles,

biographical compendia as well as literary collections known as adab, Malti-Douglas

came to the conclusion that, in this case, "History, the way a culture understands its past

lay in the literary intertext, in the space between the conceptions embodied by distinctive

literary forms."176 Indeed, Tabari is not dealing here with distinctive literary forms but

Tabari's source material is certainly diverse and irreconcilable without the aid of

reductive, misguided readings. Instead, I prefer to agree with Malit-Douglas that "we

may find in this a distinctive characteristic of the medieval Islamic genius: a preference

for truth in diversity over truth in unity."177

The presumption of a single truth is flawed. The birds are not mute but rather

sing too many tunes to discern a melody. Tabari does not present multiple truths.

Instead, the truth about the past that Tabari offers us is itself multiple.

17' Malti-Douglas, Fedwa, "Texts and Tortures: The Reign of al-Mu'tadid and the Construction of Historical Meaning," Arabica 46 (1999): 313-36,336. '77 ]bid., 336.