Arab Conquests and Early Islamic Historiography

The Futuh al-Buldan of al-Baladhuri

Ryan J. Lynch

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781838604400
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

Winner of the 2021 Southeast Regional Middle East and Islamic Studies Society Book Prize Of the available sources for Islamic history between the seventh and eighth centuries CE, few are of greater importance than al-Baladhuri's Kitab Futuh al-buldan ( The Book of the Conquest of Lands ). Written in Arabic by a ninth-century Muslim scholar working at the court of the 'Abbasid caliphs, the Futuh 's content covers many important matters at the beginning of Islamic history. It informs its audience of the major events of the early Islamic conquests, the settlement of Muslims in the conquered territories and their experiences therein, and the origins and development of the early Islamic state. Questions over the text's construction, purpose, and reception, however, have largely been ignored in current scholarship. This is despite both the text's important historical material and its crucial early date of creation. It has become commonplace for researchers to turn to the Futuh for information on a specific location or topic, but to ignore the grander – and, in many ways, more straightforward – questions over the text's creation and limitations. This book looks to correct these gaps in knowledge by investigating the context, form, construction, content, and early reception history of al-Baladhuri's text.

1

The text of Futūḥ al-buldān

To begin a discussion of al-Balādhurī and his Futūḥ al-buldān, there are some essential comments that should be made on the current critical editions presently available to readers, as well as on the manuscripts used in their creation. Futūḥ al-buldān was one of the first texts to have a critical Arabic edition created by E. J. Brill publishers in the middle of the eighteenth century, and it has had many subsequent editions produced in the 150 years since. This chapter will begin by focusing on the two primary scholarly editions of the text, those of M. J. de Goeje and Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Munajjid, before moving on to discuss the history of the manuscripts, which have survived to the present day. As will be shown, for such a familiar work as the Futūḥ, the manuscript tradition of the text has remained understudied, with only al-Munajjid publishing any in-depth analysis of this material previously. Furthermore, there is an additional manuscript that was not utilized in the creation of either modern critical edition. It has remained unpublished until now, and provides significant insight in demonstrating the stability of the Futūḥ even in the early medieval period while providing important opportunity for future research.

The modern scholarly editions

The original edition of the Futūḥ was published by M. J. de Goeje in 1866, and given the title Liber Expugnationis Regionum.¹ De Goeje would go on to have one of the most important careers of any Arabist in the modern period, creating the standard edition of a huge number of early Arabic historical works. The creation of his edition of the Futūḥ was actually among the first texts he set out to edit, predating his monumental efforts in the editing of al-Ṭabarī’s Ta’rīkh and his series of early geographies, which he titled the Bibliotheca Geographorum Arabicorum, and unsurprisingly, his experience with editing the Futūḥ pre-publication played a major role in developing his own understanding of history in his Mémoire sur la conquête de la Syrie.² For many, de Goeje’s edition remains the standard version used by students and researchers of the text, and it remains a competent version that has been fairly accessible in its 150+ years since publication. De Geoje provides a useful index, as well as footnotes, which usually indicate when he is transliterating an Arabic word which originally lacked diacritics or when he is providing alternate renderings for words. The use of Latin in the preface and in the references, however, limits its usefulness to many researchers, and its early date of conception means that not only had there been little modern research on al-Balādhurī which could be integrated in some way into his text, but de Goeje himself also did not yet have the experience (and expertise) of editing the many other historical and geographical texts that he would engage with in the future. Thus, the references are useful, but there are few noted connections between the Futūḥ and other early texts that his later works take advantage of, and there is little to no commentary.

More recently, Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Munajjid created an edition in 1956–7, which has several drawbacks, but remains the preferred version of the text that has been relied on for references throughout the present research.³ Al-Munajjid, himself very experienced in the creation of critical editions for classical Arabic texts from the original manuscripts, benefitted from integrating de Goeje’s and others’ previous scholarship in the completion of his publication. Among this edition’s most positive features is that al-Munajjid was able to reintegrate de Goeje’s list of errata and those corrections into the core of the text; he has provided a wealth of basic information about the text, its previous publications, and background on the author and his sources in his introductory sections; and he parcelled out individual traditions introduced with phrases such as ‘they said’ (qālū) or introduced with a full chain of transmission (isnād). This allows the reader of his version greater clarity in identifying the different pieces and processes which al-Balādhurī brought together in making the Futūḥ. Among this version’s drawbacks, however, are its complete lack of footnotes (although concordance with other early Arabic texts are occasionally noted in the text in a fairly vague manner) or in-text commentary, and, quite importantly, its lack of availability outside of modern research libraries. With all of this said, however, although al-Munajjid had access to almost another century’s worth of scholarship on al-Balādhurī and his oeuvre when he set about to plan a new edition, he relied on the same two manuscripts de Goeje used for his edition, and hence passed over what would have been his greatest contribution in this process: the use of a previously unknown and unstudied manuscript of the Futūḥ which was discovered between de Goeje’s and al-Munajjid’s work.

The surviving manuscript tradition of the Futūḥ

The remarkable achievements of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century orientalists such as de Goeje who worked from the original manuscripts to create such valued editions of many Arabic texts should not be downplayed. Their selection of texts has had an extraordinarily long-lasting effect on the field of Arabic and Islamic studies, as the availability of these texts in critical editions has heavily predisposed modern scholars working on various aspects of the medieval Islamic world to look first to these texts before – if ever – turning their attentions to the huge amount of unedited and uncatalogued Arabic manuscripts which reside in collections around the world. It has also had a decidedly negative effect, however, on the researchers who have come to rely on these well-known texts – especially the earliest available Arabic sources – seeking opportunities to view the original manuscripts themselves. With regards to the skeleton of the texts themselves, they are often very well edited, but many factors led to the interpretation of these texts by their editors during the editorial process, whether conscious or otherwise. Especially concerning manuscripts of the early Arabic tradition, often the surviving copies will be unpointed or only partially pointed, leaving the editor to rely on his own knowledge and judgement when selecting the word which appears in the edition. Whether that interpretation is correct or not is an entirely different matter, but the readers of the edition will often be blindly led to that interpretation without ever seeing for themselves an unspoken dispute, unless they choose to seek out the manuscript tradition of the text itself.⁴ Often, these important early editions of texts such as the Futūḥ will include little if any comment on the manuscript tradition involved in the text’s transmission or its use in the creation of a printed edition, which further muddies a sea whose depths already leave the reader largely unaware.

Additionally, new manuscripts are sometimes found which can augment our understanding of a text and its transmission, and the methodological approaches to working with manuscripts as documentary sources have evolved a great deal since many of these texts were codified.⁵ While these early editors of Arabic texts have done an admirable job in bringing to a larger audience the main content of the text, detailed attention to marginalia and so-called ‘reading certificates’ (samā‘āt) which can provide targeted and extremely valuable insight into who actually owned and/or engaged with a text were often passed over. For the benefit of the reader of the Futūḥ, it is worth attempting a definitive discussion of the surviving manuscript tradition.

For such a well-known text as al-Balādhurī’s, there has not existed a full discussion of the surviving manuscript tradition of Futūḥ al-buldān. Fuat Sezgin’s important Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums has often proved to be the most definitive depository of catalogued Arabic manuscripts around the world outside of the handlists of individual manuscript collections,⁶ but it proves far less useful on its own for al-Balādhurī’s work, as will be noted below. In the Latin introduction of his Liber Expugnationis Regionum, de Goeje notes that he used two manuscripts of the Futūḥ in the creation of his edition: a manuscript held at the University of Leiden, which he labelled ‘A’ and serves as his base for the creation of his edition, and a second manuscript held previously in the collection of the British Museum, which he has labelled ‘B’. De Goeje discusses the quality of these two manuscripts only momentarily during his preface, and includes a mention of an even earlier opinion on the quality of the Leiden MS by H. A. Hamaker, which he was correcting.⁷

Manuscript A, held in the Oriental collection of the University of Leiden, was used by de Goeje as the basis for his edition. While previously bearing the shelfmark MS Warn 430, today it bears the shelfmark MS Or 430, and it remains in Leiden.⁸ That de Goeje used it as his primary manuscript was more due to its availability rather than the greater quality of this manuscript over the other, as de Goeje – living and working from Leiden for the majority of his life – only had access to facsimiles of Manuscript B while he had ready access to A. There is a certain amount of confusion over this manuscript, as al-Munajjid misunderstands the Latin of de Goeje’s preface and incorrectly believed that there were two manuscripts held in Leiden that were used in the creation of the Brill edition, separate from the British Museum manuscript that de Goeje actually labelled B. Al-Munajjid also mentions that in the creation of his updated edition of the Futūḥ, he had written to the keeper of the Oriental collection in Leiden at the time, Petrus Voorhoeve, ‘asking him about these two manuscripts’, but Voorhoeve could only s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on primary source citation, translation, and transliteration
• List of illustrations
• Introduction
• 1 The text of Futūḥ al-buldān
• 2 The author and the context
• 3 The sources of Futūḥ al-buldān
• 4 The content and themes of the text
• 5 The matter of genre and the classification of Futūḥ al-buldān
• 6 The medieval reception and reuse of the Futūḥ
• Conclusion: A portrait of authority
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright