al-Ṭabarī

al-Ṭabarī (born c. 839, Āmol, Ṭabaristān [Iran]—died 923, Baghdad, Iraq) was a Muslim scholar, author of enormous compendiums of early Islamic history and Qurʾānic exegesis, who made a distinct contribution to the consolidation of Sunni thought during the 9th century. He condensed the vast wealth of exegetical and historical erudition of the preceding generations of Muslim scholars and laid the foundations for both Qurʾānic and historical sciences. His major works were the Qurʾān Commentary and the History of Prophets and Kings (Taʾrīkh al-Rusūl wa al-Mulūk).

Life

The young al-Ṭabarī demonstrated a precocious intellect and journeyed from his native town to study in the major centres of learning in Iraq, Syria, and Egypt. Over the course of many years he collected oral and written material from numerous scholars and libraries for his later work. Al-Ṭabarī enjoyed sufficient financial independence to enable him to devote the latter part of his life to teaching and writing in Baghdad, the capital of the ʿAbbāsid caliphate, where he died in 923. The times in which he lived were marked by political disorder, social crisis, and philosophical-theological controversy. Discontent of diverse cause and circumstance brought open rebellion to the very heart of the caliph’s empire, and, like all movements of socioeconomic origin in medieval Islam, sought legitimacy in religious expression directed against the official credo of Sunni orthodoxy.

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Al-Ṭabarī rejected out of hand the extreme theological positions of these opposition movements, but at the same time he also retreated from the embrace of the ultraorthodox Sunni faction, the Ḥanbalī (a major school of Islamic law), which was represented most powerfully in the capital itself. An independent within orthodox ranks, he established his own school of jurisprudence, which did not long survive his own death. He nevertheless made a distinct contribution to the consolidation of Sunni thought during the 9th century. What al-Ṭabarī accomplished for historical and Qurʾānic studies consisted less in the discovery and initial recording of material than in the sifting and reorganization of it. His achievement was to condense the vast wealth of exegetical and historical erudition of the preceding generations of Muslim scholars (many of whose works are not extant in their original form) and to lay the foundations for both Qurʾānic and historical sciences.

Major works

His life’s labour began with the Qurʾān Commentary and was followed by the History of Prophets and Kings. Al-Ṭabarī’s History became so popular that the Sāmānid prince Manṣūr ibn Nūḥ had it translated into Persian (c. 963).

In the Commentary, al-Ṭabarī’s method of composition was to follow the Qurʾān text word by word, juxtaposing all of the juridical, lexicographical, and historical explanations transmitted in reports from the Prophet Muhammad, his companions, and their followers. To each report (hadith) was affixed a chain of “transmitters” (isnād) purporting to go back to the original informant. Divergent reports were seldom reconciled, the scholar’s only critical tool being his judgment as to the soundness of the isnād and not of the content of the Hadith. Thus plurality of interpretation was admitted on principle.

The History commenced with the Creation, followed by accounts regarding the patriarchs, prophets, and rulers of antiquity. The history of the Sāsānian kings came next. For the period of the Prophet’s life, al-Ṭabarī drew upon the extensive researches of 8th-century Medinan scholars. Although pre-Islamic influences are evident in their works, the Medinan perspective of Muslim history evolved as a theocentric (god-centred) universal history of prophecy culminating in the career of Muhammad and not as a continuum of tribal wars and values.

The sources for al-Ṭabarī’s History covering the years from the Prophet’s death to the fall of the Umayyad dynasty (661–750 ce) were short monographs, each treating a major event or the circumstances attending the death of an important person. Al-Ṭabarī supplemented this material with historical reports embodied in works on genealogy, poetry, and tribal affairs. Further, details of the early ʿAbbāsid period were available to him in a few histories of the caliphs that unfortunately have come down only in the fragments preserved by al-Ṭabarī. Almost all of these accounts reflected an Iraqi perspective of the community; coupled with this is al-Ṭabarī’s scant attention to affairs in Egypt, North Africa, and Muslim Spain, so that his History does not have the secular “universal” outlook sometimes attributed to it. From the beginning of the Muslim era (dated from 622, the date of the hijrah—the Prophet Muhammad’s migration from Mecca to Medina), the History is arranged as a set of annals according to the years after the hijrah. It terminates in the year 915.

Views of history

Obviously, al-Ṭabarī could not sustain his preference for reports originating with the Prophet and the pious scholars of the early community known as al-salaf. His judgment of a report’s reliability was now based upon the largely theoretical criterion that it should originate with either an eyewitness or a contemporary informant. This posed a problem for which al-Ṭabarī had no practical solution. Oftentimes he placed separate accounts of an event side by side without editorial comment. He saw no relevance in searching for the nature and causes of events, for any ultimate explanation lay beyond history itself and was known to God alone. Prophetic tradition, like the Qurʾān, provided positive commands and injunctions from God. History pointed to the consequences of heeding or ignoring him. For al-Ṭabarī, therefore, history was the divine will teaching by example.