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Abu Ja'far Muhammad bin Jarir al-Tabari

Introduction

Abu Ja'far Muhammad bin Jarir al-Tabari was born in Amul was the capital of Tabaristan in 839 AD. His life was divided between his travels to collect historical and prophetic traditions and teaching and writing of their works.

Life's Work

Al-Tabari's career spanned many fields of study, including history and Quranic commentary, poetry, lexicography, grammar, ethics, mathematics, and medicine. He was an unparalleled collector of Hadith, devoting most of his early years to gathering and copying material wherever he went. His commentary on the Quran was the first to bring together sufficient material from different regions of Islam to make it a standard work, on which later generations of commentators could draw. Even for modern scholars, al-Tabari is an important source of information on Quranic tradition. Although he was concerned with the structure and syntax of oral traditions, al-Tabari seldom introduced his own conclusions or opinions on religious or historical questions.

The most important surviving work of al-Tabari is his world history, Tarikh al-rusul wa al-muluk (Popovkin, Rowson, pp. 52-57). It is an enormous work; a late nineteenth century edition fills thirteen volumes, and numerous authorities assert that in its final form Tarikh al-rusul wa al-muluk was ten times that long. (Some scholars, however, doubt this claim, noting that the language of the work does not lead one to suspect large amounts of missing material or any sort of abridgment, and that, in any case, a work of such dimensions would have been beyond the capacity of a single person in the ninth century.)

The History of al-Tabari is more than simply a history of Islam. By al-Tabari's time, Islam was a vast aggregation of civilizations and cultures, and the work considers the pre-Islamic history of many of them. It begins with a history of the patriarchs, prophets, and rulers from early Semitic cultures, followed by a history of Persia and Iraq during the Sasanid period (third to seventh centuries). Then comes the era of Muh?ammad and the first four caliphs (570-661), the Umayyad Dynasty in Damascus (661-750), and, finally, the ?Abbasid period in Baghdad. The coverage stops in 915 (Al Tabari, Fields, Lassner, pp. 56-61).

The style of the annals changes from a somewhat disconnected narrative for pre-Islamic times to a yearly chronology of events for the Muslim era. The source material came from both oral traditions and written accounts. Throughout The History of al-Tabari, a connected ...