vivid and intimate detail.
For the ɹrst hundred years of Islam, these stories lived
not on the page but on the tongues of those who told
them and in the ears and hearts of those who heard
them and remembered them to tell again, the details
gathering impact as the years unfolded. This was the
raw material of the early Islamic historians, who would
travel throughout the Middle East to gather these
memories, taking great care to record the source of each
one by detailing the chain of communication. The isnad,
they called it—the provenance of each memory—given
up front by prefacing each speaker’s account in the
manner of “I was told this by C, who was told it by B,
who was told it by A, who was there when it happened.”
This was the method used by Ibn Ishaq in his
biography of Muhammad; by Abu Jafar al-Tabari in his
magisterial history of early Islam, which comes to thirty-
nine volumes in English translation; by Ibn Saad in his
sometimes deliciously gossipy collections of anecdotes;
and by al-Baladhuri in his “Lineage of the Nobles.” It is
an extraordinarily open process, one that allows direct
insight into how history is communicated and
established, and is deeply respectful of the fact that,
Rashomon style, if there were six people there, they
would have six similar but subtly different accounts.
Al-Tabari was Sunni, but his vast history is
acknowledged as authoritative by Sunni and Shia alike.