The two Arabic words most commonly associated with ‘history’, taʾrῑkh and khabar (pl. akhbār), reveal conflicting ideas regarding writing about the past. Derived from ancient Near Eastern roots, taʾrῑkh conveys a sense of dating, whereas khabar, meaning ‘story, anecdote’, bears no notion of fixation of time at all. Earlier historical reports were known as akhbār, whereas taʾrῑkh came later to acquire a wider definition of ‘history’ and ‘historical interpretation’. By the end of the second/eighth century most of the works written on history bore the title taʾrῑkh. It was later uniformly adopted into other Islamic languages: Persian, Turkish and Urdu. A massive corpus under the rubric of taʾrῑkh – chronicle, biographical dictionary, administrative geography – was produced over the period in question. Of these, only chronicles will be surveyed here.

The ‘classical’ period (c. 710–1150 CE)

The beginning: ḥadῑth scholars and akhbārῑs

In many ways Islamic history writing began with a ‘clean slate’. While pre-Islamic Arabian inscriptions, poetry and the ayyām al-ʿarab folklore reflect a nostalgic curiosity about the past, the rise of Arabic-Islamic historiography stemmed from a more practical and immediate motivation. Its genesis lay in the early akhbār-reports, which were mostly short and introduced by an isnād, similar to that of the ḥadῑth.