A decade has passed since Entre mémoire et pouvoir was first published in 2011. I am delighted that the contribution of the book has been deemed significant enough to warrant an English translation and its inclusion into Brill’s prestigious Handbook of Oriental Studies (HdO) series. I am deeply thankful to several people who made this possible. Kathy van Vliet first investigated the possibility of commissioning an English translation, a project brought to fruition thanks to Abdurraouf Oueslati’s unparalleled stamina. I am also grateful to Maribel Fierro, M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, D. Fairchild Ruggles, and Florian Schwarz for their support and their enthusiasm in accepting the book into the HdO series.
The translation itself was magisterially prepared by Anna Bailey Galietti, translator extraordinaire. Anna was an ideal choice as a formidable Francophile and a fellow scholar of early Islam. Working with her on the translation was a pleasure at every step of the way even if we both admittedly underestimated the amount of work it would entail.
Being translated is a profoundly enriching experience. It is sometimes also a paradoxical one, as it is quite clear that I would have written the book somewhat differently had I planned it in English from its inception. To overcome that challenge, Anna and I were lucky to be able to workshop an early draft of the translated introduction with Alison Vacca, Sarah Savant, and Matthew Gordon and to benefit from their input to find the right balance between being faithful to the French text and producing an idiomatic translation.
The translated text that follows is the original text, save for a few typos and minor corrections caught by Anna’s merciless eye. No effort has been made to update the text or the footnotes as this would have required writing a new book. The only exception was a (quasi) systematic effort to cite books in their English editions when available instead of French originals or translations, already a massive endeavour in itself.
Looking back at Entre mémoire et pouvoir ten years later – and sometimes almost rediscovering it in the course of the translation process – proved enjoyable for the most part. Still, some pages obviously did not age as well as others and a few comments are thus in order. First, however, let me briefly reflect on some of the book’s contributions and highlight some new developments in the intervening decade.
At the time of the publication of Entre mémoire et pouvoir, the formidable boom of memory studies had been largely ignored by Islamicists and there was virtually no scholarship focusing on memory in the field of “medieval Islam”.1 In a way, this wasn’t much of a surprise since medieval Islam remains a theory-poor field. The immediate consequence was that if Entre mémoire et pouvoir was quite well received, its theoretical framework was at first basically ignored. Things have obviously changed, however, thanks in particular to the important contributions of Sarah Savant and Alison Vacca who both embraced a history of memory approach in their respective work.2 I have myself pursued this line of inquiry on different occasions, for instance focusing on Karbalāʾ as an early Islamic site of memory and shedding light on the redemption of Alid memory more broadly, to complement the limited comments offered below in chapter four.3 Moreover, it has been encouraging to see an increased demand for memory studies in the field broadly conceived over the last few years, in terms of both workshops and conferences.4
There is still much to be done in light of recent developments, though. It is impossible to do justice here to the last decade of memory studies, but the field is now equipped with handbooks and introductory material that make it more accessible than it once was.5 In the last few years, some of the most stimulating scholarship on memory – at least from my own perspective – has been produced by Ann Rigney.6 She notably insisted on the fact that we need to understand cultural memory “in performative terms, as a way of recollecting the past and shaping its image using a whole range of media, rather than merely in preservative terms, as a way of transmitting unchanged something inherited from an earlier age.”7 Rigney’s many insights would certainly allow for substantial developments if I was to “do over” Entre mémoire et pouvoir today. For anyone eager to engage with memory studies, a good starting point is offered by Marek Tamm’s thoughtful essay, even though it was published almost ten years ago.8 Still, Tamm’s historiographical survey remains particularly useful, as well as his effort to define concepts that have been sometimes used quite uncritically as memory approaches were trending. Tamm’s discussion of “cultural memory” – a central notion in the following pages, indebted as I am to the work of Jan Assmann9 – is perhaps most helpful to articulate the tension between history and memory:
In terms of cultural memory, history is a cultural form exactly like, for instance, religion, literature, art or myth, all of which contribute to the production of cultural memory. And the writing of history should be treated as one of the many media of cultural memory, such as novels, films, rituals or architecture. The reduction of history writing to a mere medium of cultural history through which a certain social group shapes its relations with the past does not mean that history writing should give up its scientific pretensions or the epistemological attitudes and disciplinary techniques it has evolved over the past couple of centuries. History writing is simply a very specific medium of cultural memory with its own rules and traditions – one of the most important for as comprehensive an understanding of the past as possible, but certainly not the only or necessarily the most influential one.10
As the following chapters demonstrate, I found such an approach particularly fruitful when combined with a history of meanings (Sinngeschichte).11
Beyond Assmann’s scholarship, Patrick Geary’s Phantoms of Remembrance also proved particularly influential to me.12 He recently published a reflective essay on his magisterial book more than twenty years after its publication, offering a perceptive discussion of the evolution of the field and of his own thinking on remembrance and oblivion in western medieval contexts.13 One of Geary’s heroes, Arnold of Regensburg, a Bavarian monk writing around 1030 (whom we will meet again below in chapter 1), claimed that it was perfectly legitimate for the old past to “be entirely thrown away” or to “be buried with reverence.” And yet, as Geary pointed out, this past often somehow refused to stay “buried” and “was not to be forgotten altogether but rather transformed, both memorialized and commemorated.”14 Listening to those “murmurs” to reclaim “alternative pasts”15 very much became a guiding principle of Entre mémoire et pouvoir. Reflecting on what he would do differently if he was to “do over” his Phantoms of Remembrance, Geary concluded that he would focus more on oblivion than on remembrance and that he “would concentrate in attempting to recover not so much the new past that was thereby created, but the old past that was, with only partial success, discarded or buried, but which nevertheless continued to haunt the present as phantoms.”16 I hope that the effort in the following pages to retrieve fragments of forgotten Umayyad and early Abbasid historiographical layers – and their “futures past” (or “former future(s)”, vergangene Zukunft), to say it with Reinhardt Koselleck17 – resonates with Geary’s insights. In that vein – and building on Koselleck’s work – I have tried to push the discussion further to shed light on alternative periodisations used prior to the Abbasid-era construct that still prevails today as the agreed-upon chronology of early Islam.18
Moreover, as the following pages demonstrate, a memory approach is not simply a modern theoretical framework applied to ancient texts, but is firmly grounded in the narrative sources themselves that deliberately frame much of Umayyad and Abbasid history in terms of remembrance and oblivion. Here again, I was indebted to Geary, who emphasised anew in his reflective essay that one of his main interests had been to study “the complex processes of rethinking the past on the part of ordinary clerics and lay persons, less when they were reflecting on memory than when one could observe them in the act of remembering.”19
I should add that early Islamic memory – and singularly Umayyad realms of memory – remains much disputed to this day, as exemplified by the desecration of the (alleged) tomb of ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz (ʿUmar II) by the so-called Islamic State (ISIL) in 2020 in Syria, near Maʿarrat al-Nuʿmān.20
Another methodological intervention of the book was to challenge the way scholars of early Islam have approached non-Muslim sources, usually in a logic of opposition with Muslim texts.21 Indebted to both Alfred-Louis de Prémare and Lawrence Conrad, I made the case that we should move away from such a dichotomy and take full advantage of the asynchronous rhythms of transmission across the various near eastern historiographies, in particular to trace and, when possible, to date the circulation of historical information.
Here again, things are now changing and such an approach has been gaining some traction. Robert Hoyland’s intellectual trajectory offers a good example: although he started from the premise of a logic of opposition between corpora while writing his Seeing Islam,22 he eventually concluded: “I have become convinced in recent years that this approach is not really valid, since the two bodies of material are much more intertwined than had previously been thought.”23
Moreover, scholars such as Alison Vacca have done much to properly position Armenian sources in this rich historiographical landscape. This view will be reinforced by her forthcoming book, together with Sergio La Porta, firmly situating Łewond’s History (fl. late 2nd/8th c.) as Abbasid historiography even though it was composed by a Christian scholar writing in Armenian.24 Likewise, Philip Wood has recently situated Dionysius of Tel-Maḥre in his proper Abbasid context.25 It seems to me that this is a much-needed step to rethink our approach to early Islam, one that has been exclusively envisioned in Arabic for too long. Manuela Ceballos, Alison Vacca, and I have endeavoured to complicate the picture in an edited volume aiming to foster a multilingual approach to the early caliphate, very much in line with what scholars of Late Antiquity have been doing for a while now.26
I should add that several of the non-Muslim sources and/or authors abundantly cited in the following pages have been the object of dedicated studies since the publication of Entre mémoire et pouvoir,27 while Muriel Debié’s tome now offers the most substantial discussion on Syriac historiography.28
Beyond these broad historiographical comments, a few smaller observations are in order. An obvious starting point is the shadowy figure of Theophilus of Edessa (d. 785), who notably served as court astrologer to the Abbasid caliph al-Mahdī (r. 158–69/775–85), and will be abundantly mentioned in the following pages. Theophilus was famously identified as the Syriac Common Source by Conrad, a view subsequently adopted by most scholars.29 Much has been debated with regard to what should actually be attributed to Theophilus, and Muriel Debié depicted him as the “ghost of Syrian Orthodox historiography.”30 The important work of Maria Conterno should now be added to the discussion as the most systematic challenge to the identification of Theophilus as the “more likely candidate” as once posited by Conrad.31 I concur with Debié and Conterno that modern scholarship has had a tendency to attribute too much to Theophilus, a trend reinforced by Hoyland’s “reconstruction” of Theophilus’ lost history, and some such “maximalist” approaches are simply untenable.32 On the other hand, it seems to me that we are still on reasonably firm ground when it comes to the final decades of Umayyad rule, especially in light of a passage in Agapius’s Kitāb al-Taʾrīkh (wr. ca. 942) clearly identifying Theophilus as his main source for the period.33 From this vantage point, there is still much in support of Conrad’s identification of Theophilus as (one element of) the Syriac Common Source (now increasingly referred to as the Eastern Source) for a specific period of early Islamic history, i.e. late Umayyad times.
Perhaps a broader issue has to do with our modern tendency to always try to identify single individual authors. In that sense Debié is correct in saying that some sources, including part of what has been ascribed to Theophilus of Edessa, have been created by the Quellenforschung.34 Instead we might more profitably approach sources such as the Syriac Common Source as literature in excerpts,35 thinking in terms of text re-use36 and multi-layered texts with likely multiple authors. A similar trend can be observed in recent scholarship dedicated to the History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria, for instance.37
So, even though I would now frame my discussion of Theophilus differently, I still believe that we do have access to a late Umayyad/early Abbasid historiographical layer with the sections of the Syriac Common Source dealing with late Umayyad history. In light of the above discussion with regard to the status of non-Muslim sources, it should be added that Theophilus offers quite a paradigmatic example. Regardless of how much one wishes to attribute to him, Theophilus can hardly be regarded as external to Abbasid historiography and, indeed, to the Abbasid state. As a quick aside, our problem with categories goes even beyond the deceptive dichotomy between Muslim and non-Muslim sources since we still have to reconcile Theophilus’s two personae, the astrologer and the historian.38
A debate of a different nature now sheds a fresh light on Ibn Aʿtham al-Kūfī, whose death date has generated a fair amount of scholarly discussion. In the following pages, like many other scholars, I adopted the conclusions of Conrad’s magisterial study to posit an early third/ninth century date for Ibn Aʿtham, rather than the more traditional option of 314/926–7 that had been rejected as “an Orientalist error” by Conrad.39 Ilkka Lindstedt and recently Andrew McLaren have, however, produced significant evidence to argue that Ibn Aʿtham flourished in the late third/ninth–early fourth/tenth century.40 The implications are arguably limited for my discussion below, but it seems to me that the content of Ibn Aʿtham’s work strongly suggests an earlier historiographical layer than other Abbasid-era sources of the turn of the third/ninth and fourth/tenth century. Whether this has to do with Ibn Aʿtham’s sources or with his specific mode of history writing, remains to be investigated.
The death date of al-Yaʿqūbī, often given as 284/897 in modern scholarship, has been amended by Sean Anthony who convincingly argued for pushing it to after 295/908.41 To avoid confusion, this more correct date has been adopted in the following pages (in one of the few instances where the original text was deliberately updated). My discussion of al-Yaʿqūbī should now be complemented by Anthony’s study and by the introductory chapters of the new English translation of al-Yaʿqūbī’s works.42 References to this new translation were not added, given the number of times al-Yaʿqūbī is being cited in the following pages, but this formidable collaborative effort clearly supersedes preexisting translations and should thus be consulted.
The discussion in chapter eight about Quṣayr ʿAmra now needs to be revised in light of epigraphic evidence studied by Frédéric Imbert.43 And I have had the opportunity to return to the topics of patrimonialism and “itinerant kingship,” developed in that same chapter, in a dedicated study.44 Finally, it goes without saying that much scholarship has been produced on Umayyad and Abbasid history or with regard to Islamic historiography since the publication of Entre mémoire et pouvoir. It is impossible to offer a comprehensive overview here.45
Entre mémoire et pouvoir came out slightly over a decade ago, before Syria was struck by horror. I was incredibly fortunate to spend four wonderful years in Damascus, at the French Institute of the Near East, where I did much of the doctoral work that led to this book. During those years, I had the privilege to get to know and love the country, from the packed streets of the old city of Damascus to those of the souk of Aleppo, from the slopes of Mount Qasioun to the shores of the Euphrates, and from the basaltic landscapes of the Lajā and the Ḥawrān to the vestiges and oasis of Palmyra. While exploring a region filled with Umayyad and Abbasid memories, I unsurprisingly became a historian of memory. As an inadequate gesture, I dedicate this book to my dear Syrian friends and to the courageous people of Syria.
See the discussion in chapter 4 below.
Sarah Bowen Savant, The New Muslims of Post-Conquest Iran: Tradition, Memory, and Conversion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). See the thoughtful review essay of Elizabeth Urban, “Remembering and Forgetting the Persian Past,” Marginalia Review of Books, August 19, 2014 (https://themarginaliareview.com/remembering-forgetting-persian-past/). See also Savant, “Forgetting Ctesiphon: Iran’s Pre-Islamic Past, c. 800–1100,” in Philip Wood (ed.), History and Identity in the Late Antique Near East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 169–86. Alison Vacca, Non-Muslim Provinces under Early Islam: Islamic Rule and Iranian Legitimacy in Armenia and Caucasian Albania (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
Antoine Borrut, “Remembering Karbalāʾ: The Construction of an Early Islamic Site of Memory,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 42 (2015), 249–82.
I am thinking for instance about the 4th Annual Edinburgh International Graduate Byzantine Conference, held in November 2020, that offered a rich array of papers on the theme of “catastrophes and memory (500–1500 CE)”. I am indebted to the organisers for giving me the opportunity to reflect in a keynote address on “Remembering and Forgetting the Past in Early Islam” (available online: https://youtu.be/u-wRi88mX8A?t=36880).
See for instance Anna Lisa Tota and Trever Hagen (eds.), Routledge International Handbook of Memory Studies (London and New York: Routledge, 2016). The best introduction to cultural memory is offered by Astrid Erll, Memory in Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
See in particular her magisterial The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); “Cultural Memory Studies: Mediation, Narrative, and the Aesthetic,” in Tota and Hagen (eds.), Routledge International Handbook of Memory Studies, 65–76; “Remembrance as Remaking: Memories of the Nation Revisited,” Nations and Nationalism 24/2 (2018), 240–57.
Rigney, The Afterlives, 17–8.
Marek Tamm, “Beyond History and Memory: New Perspectives in Memory Studies,” History Compass 11/6 (2013), 458–73.
It is worth pointing out that Jan Assmann’s seminal Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (Munich: Beck, 1997), was translated into English shortly after Entre mémoire et pouvoir was first published as Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
Tamm, “Beyond History and Memory,” 463 (my italics).
Here again, I was primarily indebted to Jan Assmann’s work, especially his Ägypten. Eine Sinngeschichte (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1996), translated as The Mind of Egypt: History and Meaning in the Time of the Pharaohs (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002).
Patrick J. Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
Patrick J. Geary, “Remembering and Forgetting Phantoms of Remembrance: Social Memory and Oblivion in Medieval History after Twenty Years,” in Sebastian Scholz and Gerald Schwedler (eds.), Creative Selection between Emending and Forming Medieval Memory (Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter, 2022), 15–26. I am grateful to Patrick Geary for sharing with me a draft of his thoughtful piece prior to publication and for our many conversations on memory-related topics during my stay at the Institute for Advanced Study in 2016–2017.
Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance, 8, and below, chapter 4.
Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance, 21, 177.
Geary, “Remembering and Forgetting,” 26.
Reinhardt Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979), translated by Keith Tribe as Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
Antoine Borrut, “Vanishing Syria: Periodization and Power in Early Islam,” Der Islam 91/1 (2014), 37–68.
Geary, “Remembering and Forgetting,” 15 (my italics).
See Omar Ahmed, “Was the ‘desecration of Caliph Umar II’s tomb’ fake news?,” Middle East Monitor, June 8, 2020 [https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20200608-was-the-desecration-of-caliph-umar-iis-tomb-fake-news/].
Muriel Debié has also pointed out the tendency of Islamicists to regard non-Muslim sources as external, L’écriture de l’histoire en syriaque. Transmissions interculturelles et constructions identitaires entre hellénisme et islam (Leuven: Peeters, 2015), xix.
Robert G. Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It: A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1997).
Robert Hoyland, “Reflections on the Identity of the Arabian Conquerors of the Seventh-Century Middle East,” Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 25 (2017), 113–40, at 77–78. Hoyland brought this point home in a separate book: “I do not want to champion non-Muslim sources over Muslim sources; indeed, it is my argument that the division is a false one. Muslims and non-Muslims inhabited the same world, interacted with one another and even read one another’s writings. In this book the distinction I make is simply between earlier and later sources, and I favour the former over the latter irrespective of the religious affiliation of their author,” In God’s Path: The Arab Conquests and the First Islamic Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 2–3. The proximity between Muslims and non-Muslims and the blurred boundaries between religious communities has also been emphasised in several studies, including Antoine Borrut and Fred M. Donner (eds.), Christians and Others in the Umayyad State (Chicago: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 2016); Jack Tannous, The Making of the Medieval Middle East: Religion, Society, and Simple Believers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018); Richard E. Payne, A State of Mixture: Christians, Zoroastrians, and Iranian Political Culture in Late Antiquity (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015); Michael P. Penn, Envisioning Islam: Syriac Christians and the Early Muslim World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). Not all of these studies implied revising our historiographical categories though, see for instance my review of Penn’s book in Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 9/3 (2021), 371–75.
Sergio La Porta and Alison Vacca, An Armenian Futūḥ Narrative: Łewond’s Eighth-Century History of the Caliphate (Chicago: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, forthcoming).
Philip Wood, The Imam of the Christians: The World of Dionysius of Tel-Mahre, c. 750–850 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021).
Antoine Borrut, Manuela Ceballos, and Alison Vacca (eds.), Navigating Language in the Early Islamic World: Multilingualism and Language Change in the First Centuries of Islam (Turnhout: Brepols, forthcoming). The flip side of this conversation, however, is that much remains to be done to properly integrate Arabic sources into the late antique library. The same comment applies to Middle Persian, Hebrew, or Geʿez texts, a point made by Mira Balberg, “Late Ancient Judaism: Beyond Border Lines,” Marginalia, Late Antiquity and the New Humanities: An Open Forum (2015). (Available online: https://themarginaliareview.com/late-ancient-judaism-beyond-border-lines-by-mira-balberg/).
I am thinking in particular about Wood, The Imam of the Christians; Marek Jankowiak and Federico Montinaro (eds.), Studies in Theophanes (Paris: Association des Amis du Centre d’Histoire et Civilisation de Byzance, 2015); Andy Hilkens, The Anonymous Syriac Chronicle of 1234 and its Sources (Leuven: Peeters, 2018); as well as the recent English translation of Dorothea Weltecke’s important book, The “Description of the Times” by Mōr Michael the Great (1126–1199): A Study on its Historical and its Historiographical Context (Leuven: Peeters, 2021).
Debié, L’écriture de l’histoire en syriaque. On the significance of her contribution, see Peter Brown’s generous review in Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 26 (2018), 225–31.
Lawrence I. Conrad, “Theophanes and the Arabic Historical Tradition: Some Indications of Intercultural Transmission,” Byzantinische Forschungen 15 (1988), 1–44. For more details on this identification, see below, chapter 3; Debié, L’écriture de l’histoire en syriaque, 27–31, 139–43, 556–59, and passim.
Muriel Debié, “Christians in the Service of the Caliph: Through the Looking Glass of Communal Identities,” in Antoine Borrut and Fred M. Donner (eds.), Christians and Others in the Umayyad State (Chicago: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 2016), 53–71, at 66; and L’écriture de l’histoire en syriaque, 139.
Conrad, “Theophanes and the Arabic Historical Tradition,” 43. Maria Conterno, La “descrizione dei tempi” all’alba dell’espansione islamica. Un’indagine sulla storiografia greca, siriaca e araba fra VII e VIII secolo (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2014); “Theophilos, ‘the more Likely Candidate’? Towards a Reappraisal of the Question on Theophanes’ ‘Oriental Sources’,” in M. Jankowiak and F. Montinaro (eds.), Studies in Theophanes, 383–400.
Robert G. Hoyland, Theophilus of Edessa’s Chronicle and the Circulation of Historical Knowledge in Late Antiquity and Early Islam (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011). See my discussion in Antoine Borrut, “Court Astrologers and Historical Writing in Early ʿAbbāsid Baghdād: An Appraisal,” in J. Scheiner and D. Janos (eds.), The Place to Go: Contexts of Learning in Baghdad, 750–1000 CE (Princeton, NJ: The Darwin Press, 2014), 455–501, at 477–81.
See below, chapter 3. Agapius’s book is isually known as the Kitāb al-ʿUnwān in modern scholarship but Michel Breydy has shown that this was a mistake, see his “Richtigstellungen über Agapius von Manbiǧ und sein historisches Werk”, Oriens Christianus, 73 (1987), p. 90–97.
Debié, L’écriture de l’histoire en syriaque, 27–31. The problem is not restricted to Theophilus of Edessa if one considers, for instance, the many scholarly debates generated by the Khwadāynāmag. See now the important study by Jaakko Hämeen-Antilla, Khwadāynāmag: The Middle Persian Book of Kings (Leiden: Brill, 2018). See also Robert G. Hoyland, The “History of the Kings of the Persians” in Three Arabic Chronicles. The Transmission of the Iranian Past from Late Antiquity to Early Islam (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018); and the useful review essay of Sebastian Bitsch, “The Story of a Lost Book: Two Recent Studies on the Khwadāynāmag,” Iran and the Caucasus 24 (2020), 92–105.
See for instance Sébastien Morlet (ed.), Lire en extraits. Lecture et production des textes de l’Antiquité à la fin du Moyen Age (Paris: PUPS, 2015).
As best exemplified by the work of Sarah Savant in the framework of her ERC project “Knowledge, Information Technology, & the Arabic Book” (KITAB): http://kitab-project.org/.
See in particular several studies by Perrine Pilette: “La recension primitive de l’Histoire des Patriarches d’Alexandrie: Problématique et prospectives,” Acta Orientalia Belgica 23 (2010), 141–55; “L’Histoire des Patriarches d’Alexandrie: une nouvelle évaluation de la configuration du texte en recensions,” Le Muséon 126 (2013), 419–50; “Transmission et diffusion de l’historiographie copto-arabe : nouvelles remarques sur les recensions primitive et vulgate de l’Histoire des Patriarches d’Alexandrie,” in Juan Pedro Monferrer-Sala and Sofía Torallas Tovar (eds.), Cultures in Contact: Transfer of Knowledge in the Mediterranean World (Cordoba and Beirut: Oriens Academic, 2013), 103–140.
A point emphasised in my “Court Astrologers,” 479–81. See also Debié, L’écriture de l’histoire en syriaque, 139–43 and 426–36.
Conrad’s study was first presented in 1992 and subsequently circulated among colleagues. For various reasons, however, it never appeared in print until Professor Conrad gave Matthew Gordon and I permission to publish his piece in Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā: The Journal of Middle East Medievalists a few years ago. See now Lawrence I. Conrad, “Ibn Aʿtham and His History,” Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 23 (2015), 87–125.
Ilkka Lindstedt, “Al-Madāʾinī’s Kitāb al-Dawla and the Death of Ibrāhīm al-Imām,” in Ilkka Lindstedt, Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila, Raija Mattila, and Robert Rollinger (eds.), Case Studies in Transmission (Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2014), 103–30, esp. 118–123, and “Sources for the Biography of the Historian Ibn Aʿtham al-Kūfī,” in Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila, Petteri Koskikallio, and Ilkka Lindstedt (eds.), Contacts and Interaction: Proceedings of the 27th Congress of the Union Européenne des Arabisants et Islamisants, Helsinki 2014 (Leuven: Peeters, 2017), 299–309; Andrew McLaren, “Dating Ibn Aʿtham’s History: Of Persian Manuscripts, Obscure Biographies, and Incomplete Isnāds,” Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 30 (2022), 183–234. On the many challenges of Ibn Aʿtham’s manuscript tradition, see Mónika Schönléber, “Notes on the Textual Tradition of Ibn Aʿtham’s Kitāb al-Futūḥ,” in Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila, Petteri Koskikallio, and Ilkka Lindstedt (eds.), Proceedings of Union Européenne des Arabisants et Islamisants 27, Helsinki, June 2nd–6th, 2014 (Leuven: Peeters, 2017), 427–38, and her review of Qays al-ʿAṭṭār’s recent (2017) partial edition of the Kitāb al-futūḥ in Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 28 (2020), 273–81.
Sean W. Anthony, “Was Ibn Wāḍiḥ al-Yaʿqūbī a Shiʿite Historian? The State of the Question,” Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 24 (2016), 15–41.
Matthew S. Gordon, Chase F. Robinson, Everett K. Rowson, and Michael Fishbein (eds.), The Works of Ibn Wāḍiḥ al-Yaʿqūbī: An English Translation, 3 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2018).
Frédéric Imbert, “Le prince al-Walīd et son bain: Itinéraires épigraphiques à Quṣayr ʿAmra,” Bulletin d’études orientales 64 (2016), 321–63; “Califes, princes et compagnons dans les graffiti du début de l’islam,” Romano-Arabica XV (2015), 59–78.
Antoine Borrut, “Pouvoir mobile et construction de l’espace dans les premiers siècles de l’islam,” in Sylvain Destephen, Josiane Barbier, and François Chausson (eds.), Le gouvernement en déplacement. Pouvoir et mobilité de l’Antiquité à nos jours (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2019), 243–67. See also the relevant contributions in Alain Delattre, Marie Legendre, and Petra Sijpesteijn (eds.), Authority and Control in the Countryside: From Antiquity to Islam in the Mediterranean and Near East (6th–10th Century) (Leiden: Brill, 2019).
The most substantial synthesis on the first dynasty of Islam is now Andrew Marsham (ed.), The Umayyad World (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2021). See also the contributions in Alain George and Andrew Marsham (eds.), Power, Patronage, and Memory in Early Islam: Perspectives on Umayyad Elites (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Alain George, The Umayyad Mosque of Damascus: Art, Faith and Empire in Early Islam (London: Gingko, 2021); and Steven C. Judd, Religious Scholars and the Umayyads: Piety-Minded Supporters of the Marwānid Caliphate (London and New York: Routledge, 2014). On the “Abbasid Revolution,” see in particular Yury Karev, Samarqand et le Sughd à l’époque ʿAbbāsside. Histoire politique et sociale (Paris: Association pour l’avancement des études iraniennes, 2015); and Étienne de la Vaissière, “The ʿAbbāsid Revolution in Marw: New Data,” Der Islam 95/1 (2018), 110–46. Recent studies on early Islamic historiography include Najam Haider, The Rebel and the Imām in Early Islam: Explorations in Muslim Historiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Tobias Andersson, Early Sunnī Historiography: A Study of the Tārīkh of Khalīfa b. Khayyāṭ, (Leiden: Brill, 2018); Ryan J. Lynch, Arab Conquests and Early Islamic Historiography: The Futuh al-Buldan of al-Baladhuri (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2019). Edward Zychowicz-Coghill, The First Arabic Annals: Fragments of Umayyad History (Berlin-Boston: De Gruyter, 2021). Several studies dedicated to Ibn ʿAsākir are also directly relevant: Nancy Khalek, “Early Islamic History Reimagined: The Biography of ʿUmar ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz in Ibn ʿAsākir’s Tārīkh madīnat Dimashq,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 134/3 (2014), 431–51; Steven C. Judd and Jens Scheiner (eds.), New Perspectives on Ibn ʿAsākir in Islamic Historiography (Leiden: Brill, 2017); Paula Caroline Manstetten, “Ibn ʿAsākir’s History of Damascus and the Institutionalisation of Education in the Medieval Islamic World,” PhD. thesis, Department of the Languages and Cultures of the Near and Middle East, SOAS, University of London (2018).