Its length and detail are part and parcel of his method.
He visits the same events again and again, almost
obsessively, as different people tell their versions, and the
diʃering versions overlap and diverge in what now
seems astonishingly postmodern fashion. Al-Tabari
understood that human truth is always ɻawed—that
realities are multiple and that everyone has some degree
of bias. The closest one might come to objectivity would
be in the aggregate, which is why he so often concludes
a disputed episode with that time-honored phrase “Only
God knows for sure.”
Reading these voices from the seventh century, you
feel as though you are sitting in the middle of a vast
desert grapevine, a dense network of intimate knowledge
defying the limitations of space and time. As they relate
what they saw and what they heard, what this one said
and how that one replied, their language is sometimes
shocking in its pithiness— not at all what one expects
from conventional history. It has the smack of vitality,
of real people living in earthshaking times, and it is true
to the culture, one in which the language of curse was as
rich and developed as the language of blessing. Indeed,
both curse and blessing ɹgure prominently in what is to
come.
The necklace was lost just one day’s journey outside
Medina, toward the end of one of Muhammad’s