A NEW PERIODIZATION | 77touching on many of the religious currents in the sixth- century Near East,
and sketching portraits of sensitive souls like Salmān, who either simply
waited or wandered from place to place looking for clues as to where the
longed- for messenger might appear.^72 Such individuals were few, and Mu-
hammad’s coming was undoubtedly a revolution; but still Ibn Ishāq’s empha-
sis is on this expectancy and on the chain of prophecy, not on the break be-
tween an old world and a new one coming to birth.
This generous historical contextualization of Islam, making Muhammad
“the pivot of world history,”^73 can be related to other roughly contemporary
statements, either positive or negative, such as the fresco of the six kings at
the late Umayyad bath house of Qusayr ʿAmra in Jordan, which implies a
wide political and cultural context for the Caliphate by portraying the rulers
of Rome, Iran, Aksum, and Visigothic Spain,^74 or John of Damascus’s treat-
ment of Islam as the hundredth of the Christian heresies. Indeed, Ibn Ishāq
himself made the transition from prophetic to subsequent caliphal history,
and hence a better embedding of Islam in the flow of history, by compiling
toward the end of his life a History of the caliphs. This work proved much less
popular than the Life; only a few fragments survive.^75 Its significance for us,
though, is that, like Eusebius, Ibn Ishāq did not confine himself to the initial
revelatory and prophetic events in the history of his religion, but saw virtue
in pursuing the story almost down to his own time. He could have restricted
himself to the first four, “rightly guided” caliphs, the rashidūn as they came
to be called; yet he dared to embark on the controversial and divisive Umayy-
ads. He got at least as far as the first Umayyad caliph, Muʿāwiya (661–80),
and in the light of his suspected Shiite leanings one wonders whether he
broached the reign of Muʿāwiya’s son yazīd and the brutal slaying of Muham-
mad’s grandson and ʿAlī’s son Husayn at Karbala in 681, a crisis of political
and religious legitimacy at the root of the eventual Sunni- Shiite schism. In
any event, Ibn Ishāq was aware of the significance of the community’s post-
Prophetic and indeed postscriptural development, in the same way Eusebius
was committed to writing the history of the Church. Both stories were in-
definitely extendable.
But if the ecclesiastical historians gave up writing sequels to Eusebius once
a more or less triumphalist narrative became unsustainable, the universalist
(in both time and space) tradition in Arabic historiography—the progeny in
other words of Ibn Ishāq—suffered from a more insidious weakness: it came
72 Ibn Ishāq, Life [3:65] 115–17, 130, 133–49.
73 W. Raven, “Sīra,” EIs^2 9.661a.
74 Fowden, Qusayr Amraʿ [1:32] 197–226; id., “The Umayyad horizon,” Journal of Roman archaeo-
log y 25 (2012) 980–82.
75 Taʾrīkh al- khulafāʾ: N. Abbott, Studies in Arabic literary papyri (Chicago 1957–72) 1.80–99; F.
Sezgin, Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums (Leiden 1967–) 1.289–90. Ibn Ishāq probably also wrote a
history of the Arab conquests.