Arab Conquests and Early Islamic Historiography by Ryan J. Lynch;

Author:Ryan J. Lynch;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781838604400
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

5

The matter of genre and the classification of Futūḥ al-buldān

I have noticed that historians follow different purposes. Some restrict themselves to the commemoration (dhikr) of the beginning [of Creation]. Others restrict themselves to the recollection of kings and caliphs. Ḥadīth scholars prefer the recollection of [religious] scholars. Ascetics (zuhhād) love the recollection of pious men. Litterateurs (arbāb al-adab) are inclined toward experts in the Arabic language and lore, as well as poets. It is known that everything is worth studying, and rejected [historical information] still remains desirable.1

The above quotation, attributed to Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 1201 CE/AH 597) in the work of al-Sakhāwī (d. 1497 CE/AH 902), is primarily aimed at listing the value various types of historical information can have within different genres, even if authors and critics of other genres may reject that material as unfit for the purpose. At the same time, however, it demonstrates that by the later medieval period, authors of Arabic historical works were aware of the contours of literary categories and how, at the least, their selection of content for inclusion in works helped to define the boundaries of those pre-existing categories. The recognition of their contributions to these established categories is found through their very collection of acceptable information fit to share with their reader; this comment is, at its core, about authorial intention and genre through the choice of that suitable content.

As Justin Lake has written in reference to the medieval west, ‘The question of why medieval historians wrote, and what they were hoping to accomplish, cannot be divorced from the subject of genre, since the form that a historical work took is an obvious and important clue to the intentions of the author.’2 To know more about al-Balādhurī and his Futūḥ al-buldān, we must understand not just the milieu in which he was writing, but the landscape to which he was contributing. Both the form and content of a text are key considerations when discussing the genre of a literary work. However, the matter of al-Balādhurī’s intended versus actual audience – a key issue at the centre of this entire study – should also be considered as a major factor in a text’s classification. Importantly, all of these characteristics of a work are entwined, and therefore influence a modern assessment of how a medieval text and wider literary genres should be defined.

The field of early Arabic historiography and early Islamic tradition continues to lag behind scholarship on the medieval west when it comes to genre theory, and there are still only few studies concerning the classification and issues of genre. This is despite the regular reliance on narrative texts and comparisons between those works identified as similar. Regarding medieval western texts and their authorship, there have been substantial offerings on their form and classification,3 and individual studies on the genres of romance,4 lyric,5 pilgrimage plays,6 and even more abstract types such as children’s literature.7 Many of these studies have fruitfully married the techniques of historical analysis to those of literary criticism in an attempt to more fully address authorial intention within a variety of works.

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