1 Mediaeval and Early Modern Times

In contrast to Ibn Aʿtham's biography, which, as we have seen in the previous chapter, stood at the forefront of interest in previous scholarship, the reception history of his Kitāb al-futūḥ has never been systematically scrutinised. The single notable exception is Qays al-ʿAṭṭār, who, in the introduction to his partial edition of the Kitāb al-futūḥ, discussed more than twenty authors who quoted Ibn Aʿtham's book. However, the main objective of al-ʿAṭṭār's survey was to explore Ibn Aʿtham's religious denomination to cross-check Yāqūt's famous characterisation of Ibn Aʿtham as a Shīʿī. In line with this focus, rather marginal attention was paid to other matters, which will be thus explored in detail in the present chapter.

Since very little information on Ibn Aʿtham was available to previous researchers, and what is known comes from a limited number of sources (mostly from al-Sahmī and Yāqūt), some of which have been discovered for the field only quite recently, one could easily get the impression that Ibn Aʿtham was hardly a well-known historiographer. Another factor led to the same effect: given that, as we shall see in section 2.3, the discovery of the Kitāb al-futūḥ's Arabic manuscripts was a slow and gradual process, which did not result in the emergence of a large number of manuscripts, Ibn Aʿtham's mediaeval and early modern importance was by no means suggested by an unmistakable proliferation of interest in his book. The overall image of the author and his book was thus that his oeuvre exercised merely a marginal influence on later sources, and he was hardly counted among the betterknown and frequently consulted Muslim historiographers.

The present chapter sets out to collect and briefly describe those Arabic and Persian writings which make mention or use of Ibn Aʿtham and his Kitāb al-futūḥ in order to qualify this image. My search resulted in the identification of almost thirty works by more than twenty authors covering the timespan from the mid- 4th/10th to the 19th century. During the compilation of this list, I did not strive for completeness, but I hope that this dataset is large enough to draw some solid conclusions from it. In view of the fact that a sizeable portion of the works consulted for my survey has only been published relatively recently, we have good reason to expect the discovery of further references in sources already published and those waiting for publication in manuscript form.

Despite the vast historiographical composition authored by Ibn Aʿtham, surprisingly little is known of his person and biography. Later Muslim scholars were not entirely reluctant to consult his only surviving book, but, perhaps unsurprisingly, the only aspect of Ibn Aʿtham's life that seemed interesting to them was locating him along the Shīʿī-Sunnī divide. What appears to be quite certain based on the little we know of his biography is that he was active, at least in certain periods of his life, in the northeastern peripheries of the Muslim world, that is, in Ḥarrān (today Harran, South Türkiye) and Jurjān (today, Gorgan, North Iran). His nisba al-Kūfī, relating to the city of al-Kūfa, where many Shīʿites lived, taken together with a few of his authorities mentioned in the work's first collective isnād, could also point towards his connection to al-Kūfa. After reviewing the available sources, including the data obtained from the Kitāb al-futūḥ's manuscripts and the scholarly publications of the past more than two centuries, I have arrived at the conclusion that his date of death can be placed, in all likelihood, between c. 925 and 945. On this basis, his floruit is to be dated between c. the 880s and the 930s, which also indicates the Kitāb al-futūḥ's time of composition. While a date in the first half of the 4th/10th century proposed for Ibn Aʿtham's time of death is not entirely new, unlike previous studies, I have established these dates on the basis of a detailed analysis of all pieces of information known to me, alongside the in-depth critical scrutiny of previous suggestions. It is also to be stressed that while scholarly inertia over the past two centuries might make it appealing to maintain the 314/926 date, first suggested by Christian Fraehn in 1834 and accepted in a large number of subsequent publications, it should now be definitely rejected because it has been proven to be unfounded.

Unlike the oeuvres of Ibn Aʿtham's famous predecessors and contemporaries, including al-Balādhurī, al-Yaʿqūbī, and al-Ṭabarī, his Kitāb al-futūḥ sparked no genuine interest in modern Arabic studies for an exceptionally long time. The Arabic historiographical tradition coincided with modern scholarly prejudices at this point. The small number of the Kitāb al-futūḥ's Arabic manuscripts and the fragmentary coverage of the surviving ones apparently reflect the former, while the lack of a modern printed edition until the late 1960s and early 1970s reflects the latter prejudice.

In the following, Arabic texts necessary for the descriptions of the single manuscripts will be given in diplomatic transliteration, that is, in Arabic characters and without correcting even the most obvious mistakes marked with (sic). The latter is also employed to call the reader's attention to unusual features. Words and signs written in coloured ink in the manuscripts will be marked with red in the transliterated texts. Symbols used in the following are identical to the ones employed and explained in the Editorial Principles (see Volume II). The double dagger ‡ marks illegible characters; their number equals the (supposed) number/length of the illegible characters/section. A slash shows the change between lines.

1 Arabic Manuscripts Preserving the Chapters on the Ridda

1.1 MS Patna

Location: Patna (India, Bihar), Khudā Bakhsh Oriental Public Library.

Shelfmark: HL. No. 1042.

Description/catalogue: Nadwi, Catalogue, 108–110.

Date: Sunday (yawm al-aḥad), 24 Rabīʿ II 1278/29 October 1861.

Length: ff.1r–44v.

Section covered in the other MSs: MS Gotha ff.Iv,2,113,III,V,IV,II,6,4,3,5,1,7–16,19–

27,112v,112r (see Table 11).

Section covered in the Ḥaydarābād edition: I/25:5–96:6.

Method of examination: coloured digital copy, not seen personally.

Main Characteristics of the Codex

According to the library's manuscript catalogue, published in 1929, two separate works were bound together in the codex catalogued under ‘Cat. No. 1042’: a fragment of the beginning of Ibn Aʿtham's Kitāb al-futūḥ (ff.1r–44v), and a much longer work which is said to be a version of the ‘Kitāb Futūḥ al-Shām’ attributed to ‘al-faqīh Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad b. ʿUmar al-Wāqidī’ (ff.44–234 according to the foliation and the catalogue, but there are two ‘44’). Based on the photocopies made available to me by the library, the two works seem to have been separated at one point and rebounded into two volumes. The two works seem to be written with the same hand. Each of them begins with a simple, undecorated title page without ornamentation. The texts in the upper mid-section of the two folios read as follows:

In addition, below the above title on f.1r, the words ‘Kitāb al-ridda’ are written separately by a different hand and material (most likely with pencil).

Before concluding the present book, a last chapter is dedicated to the three remaining composite isnāds (Isn 2–4) of the Kitāb al-futūḥ. While their study leads well beyond the main chronological unit selected for analysis, as I have argued in Chapter 5, no correct interpretation of Isn 1 was possible without considering the parallel attestations of certain names in the three other collective isnāds. This drove me to prepare the first critical edition of these sections of the work, which are also accompanied in the present chapter by my interpretative English translations. It also became quite clear at an early stage of this work that due to the presence of several corrupted name forms, a proper edition would require identification of the authorities mentioned by the isnāds. The results of the detailed scrutiny of Isn 1 and the recurrence of a few key names in more than one collective isnāds suggest that a closer comparative look at all four chains of transmitters may provide further clues to understand both Isn 1 and the general roles that these elements play in the Kitāb al-futūḥ. As we shall see at the end of this chapter, the conclusions yielded by the following analysis neatly confirm what we have found in the previous chapters of this book, and thus, I consider it appropriate to present the following results in the framework of the present volume.

Due to the main aim and the nature of the present survey, the study of Isn 2–4 does not strive for completeness. Instead, it restricts itself to providing the reader with the critical texts in Arabic, their English translations, a set of explanatory commentaries, the identifications of the quoted authorities, and the graphic representations of the isnāds in different renderings. Finally, I summarise the major insights gained from the study of all four chains.

1 The Kitāb al-futūḥ's Second and Third Collective Isnād

Isn 2 and Isn 3 are quite similar to each other. In fact, the two isnāds might be the same once, given that all their present differences can easily be the results of copyists’ mistakes. Therefore, these two collective isnāds will be dealt with together.

This chapter explores Ibn Aʿtham's biography. Firstly, the remarkably diverse dates proposed for Ibn Aʿtham's life in the scholarly literature since the 1790s are reviewed (1.1). Secondly, it scrutinises selected data of chronological implications provided by the Kitāb al-futūḥ itself to propose a new date for Ibn Aʿtham's floruit and possible date of death (1.2). Thirdly, it analyses the available Arabic biographical sources referring to Ibn Aʿtham alongside their possible network of connections to each other (1.3). In doing so, I will dedicate separate discussions to all those arguments from previous scholarly literature that have a crucial role in dating Ibn Aʿtham but have not been studied thoroughly.

1 Arguments in Favour of a 2nd/8th-, a 3rd/9th- and a 4th/10th-Century Date

As emphasised above, modern scholarship had a long way to go until finding a key piece of evidence which finally opened a new avenue for ascribing Ibn Aʿtham to the 4th/10th century. In describing the main line of evolution, I decided to follow the chronology of the appearances of given dates in modern scholarly studies. In this, I made an exception when discussing Ferdinand Wüstenfeld's proposed date, published in 1882, before entering into a detailed treatment of the one suggested by Christian Fraehn in 1834. The reason for doing so was the various levels of their impact. As none of Ouseley's nor Lees's dates gained currency, I lumped them together at the beginning of the chapter (1.1.1), alongside Wüstenfeld's lesserknown entry on Ibn Aʿtham (1.1.2).

In contrast, the date proposed by Fraehn exercised a real influence on later scholarship. Therefore, it seemed prudent to discuss Fraehn (1.1.3) as a starting point of the subsequent discourse to keep the logic of events. In order to show how long a shadow Fraehn's assumption actually cast, I trace this long development in a continuous discussion up to the present instead of dispersing the coherent pieces of information to different units for keeping a strict chronological order (1.1.4).

It is followed by the discussion of the only date (204/819), which challenged Fraehn's widespread 926 (1.1.5 and 1.1.6). I will present that the early 3rd/9thcentury date has been known in scholarly literature as early as the 1920s. The chapter terminates with a review of an early 5th/11th-century source concerning Ibn Aʿtham which has given a new direction to studying Ibn Aʿtham's biography during the last few years (1.1.8).

The present chapter is dedicated to one of the most exciting and characteristic features of Ibn Aʿtham's text: his extensive inclusion of poems. Their detailed study is especially fascinating, at least for two reasons. Firstly, because, as the manuscript tradition shows, later readers did not always consider these poetic compositions to be essential components of the text, and sometimes even not important enough to have made the effort to copy them as completely as possible. On the one hand, this attitude is not all too difficult to understand since poems were the most trying to copy and comprehend. On the other hand, we can justifiably claim that their incorporation was not solely motivated by the tastes of the author and his readership; poems could also contribute to shaping the intended message. This leads us to the second point.

Due to the almost complete disappearance of early ridda works, known to us mainly from later mentions and occasional quotations (cf. section 4.1), we are notoriously poorly informed about the actual appearance of these compositions. To be sure, it would be unfounded to argue that Ibn Aʿtham's ridda narrative preserves one of those lost narrations as a whole. The stylistic unity of the text does not leave the slightest doubt that this part of the Kitāb al-futūḥ was authored by the same person who composed the majority or the entirety of the work. Yet, as described in the previous chapters, the comparison of Ibn Aʿtham's reconstruction with the other existing longer ridda narrations shows the author of the Kitāb alfutūḥ choosing to report the events in a strikingly unique way. His broad coverage of poems, a large amount of which is strongly related to the topic of the ridda, could have, in all probability, derived from earlier traditions related to the theme. It can be justifiably claimed that in the early 4th/10th century the majority of these poems came down to Ibn Aʿtham through written sources. However, because of the lack of the once-existing thematic works on the ridda, we can only speculate whether those books served as the primary sources for the author of the Kitāb al-futūḥ or whether he became acquainted with his ridda poems from other collections.

Like many mediaeval Muslim historiographers before and after him, Ibn Aʿtham widely used a number of well-distinguishable narratological features for shaping his Kitāb al-futūḥ. Broadly speaking, they can be ascribed to two larger groups. The first and, from a historical point of view, theoretically more interesting, is made up of shorter or longer textual units used to designate sources the author employs. In short, we may label them isnāds, although, as we shall see below, the four categories gathered under this umbrella term do not in all instances fit the requirements of isnāds in the stricter sense of the term. The second, by and large, covers what has been labelled as literary forms in Albrecht Noth's ground-breaking study, including letters, speeches, and lists.

In this chapter, I will concentrate on the first category. The principal aim of the following investigation is to get a clearer picture of Ibn Aʿtham's use of his sources. At the first stage of this research, the critical text of the Kitāb al-futūḥ's first collective isnād (henceforth Isn 1), which introduces the book's first part comprising the ridda narrative, will be presented. This will be accompanied by an in-depth analysis of the isnād. Given the very intimate connection between the coverages of this and the other three collective isnāds (henceforth Isn 2, Isn 3, and Isn 4), it is also necessary to study the latter three properly as well. Therefore, a separate chapter (Chapter 7) is dedicated to Isn 2, Isn 3 and 4 in which, in addition to their critical editions, translations and commentaries, some general conclusions are formulated regarding the Kitāb al-futūḥ's possible sources.

Since this analysis revealed several problematic points in Isn 1, at the second stage, it seems prudent to double-check whether a comparative analysis of the text itself confirms the author's claim of using traditions harking back to the authorities named in Isn 1. To this end, the best-known and most often narrated ridda episode of the Kitāb al-futūḥ, namely Mālik b. Nuwayra's conflict with Khālid b. al-Walīd, was chosen for more in-depth scrutiny. Needless to say, I am fully aware that these small steps will not be sufficient to clarify the range of traditions to which Ibn Aʿtham might have had access and chose to include in his work.

Mónika Schönléber is a postdoctoral researcher at the Avicenna Institute of Middle Eastern Studies in Hungary. She studied History and Arabic and Islamic Studies at Pázmány Péter Catholic University (Budapest) and Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. She earned her PhD in Arabic and Islamic Studies from Georg- August-Universität Göttingen. Her primary research interests include early and classical Muslim historiography, the history of the late antique Middle East, and Arabic manuscript studies. She contributed to a Hungarian research project that published the library catalogue of Sultan Bayazit II, for which she edited and analysed the chapter on historical books (with A. Barati). Her professional experience also includes teaching Classical Arabic at Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest) and Pázmány Péter Catholic University.