EXEGETICAL CULTURES 2 | 195tive, and editorial comment, as well as the core saying. Prophetic biography
was a natural development. Ibn Ishāq, encountered in chapter 3, devoted im-
mense energ y not to collecting hadīth for their own sake, but to using them
to contextualize each passage of the Qurʾān as part of a historical narrative.
His book became a resource for exegetes. When in the ninth century histori-
cal writing took root, some works (like Ibn ʿAbd al- Hakam’s Conquests of
Eg ypt) stayed dependent on the distinctively Arabic atomized style of com-
position imposed by hadīth,^146 while others (e.g., Wāqidī, d. 822; yaʿqūbī, d.
c. 905) felt free to write in a more secular- political, less theological manner,
and with less of that preoccupation with transmission implied by the isnād.
Preference for the hadīth style did not stop the greatest Arabic historian,
Tabarī, from constructing a narrative on a massive scale from creation to 915.
Indeed, there are signs that he broke up more continuous earlier narratives in
order to accommodate them to his traditionistic format.^147 But incorporat-
ing hadīth in a Qurʾanic commentary meant to argue that the meaning of
each verse was evident proved to be simpler than in the History, where there
were multiple versions of each event and no criterion for sorting them. As he
nears his own day, or strays beyond Arab history into Iranian, Tabarī’s dedi-
cation to hadīth and isnād wanes, and he offers his own interpretative narra-
tive in the more literary (adab) style already favored by some of his
forerunners.
In Tabarī’s oeuvre we see hadīth scholarship flowering into an impressive
statement of the fullness of mature Arabic thought. But of still wider concern
to the umma than these intellectual and scholarly maturations so typical of
the tenth century^148 were on the one hand the emergence of an overwhelm-
ing Muslim majority in the population by the tenth/eleventh century, and
on the other hand the schism between Sunnis and Shiites. This originated
with the murder of the third caliph, ʿUthmān, in 656; opposition to his suc-
cessor ʿAlī, the Prophet’s nephew and son- in- law; and particularly the slaying
of ʿAlī’s son Husayn at Karbalāʾ in 681. The Shiites were those who backed
the claims of the Prophet’s family, and indeed on the authority of a distinc-
tive exegesis of numerous passages in the Qurʾān. The Arabic historical tradi-
tion was not only alert to the significance of these events, it also viewed them
in the broader context of First Millennium prophetic history. Already, Sayf
ibn ʿUmar (d. 796) linked them to a fantastical but to this day influential ac-
count of how the nascent early Christian community had been expelled
from its homeland by the wicked Jewish King (!) Paul. Paul feigned repen-
tance, gained the Christians’ trust, and contrived to corrupt their pristine
faith. But a minority rejected Paul and fled, to live as ascetics in the Syrian
146 Donner, Narratives [3:87] 255–58.
147 Donner, Narratives [3:87] 258–59.
148 Borrut, Entre mémoire et pouvoir [3:79] 107.