depth, as well as its style. Al-Tabari—his full name was
Abu Jafar Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari, but he was
known simply as al-Tabari after his birthplace in
Tabaristan, on the southern shore of the Caspian Sea—
was a Sunni scholar living and writing in the Abbasid
capital of Baghdad. His work is so inclusive as to make
extremist Sunnis suspicious that he may have had “Shia
sympathies.” He made extensive use of oral history,
traveling throughout the empire to record interviews
and documenting them in detail so that the chain of
communication was clear, always leading back to an
eyewitness to the events in question. The Tarikh thus has
an immediacy that Westerners tend not to associate with
classic histories. Voices from the seventh century—not
only those of the people being interviewed but also those
of the people they are talking about, whom they often
quote verbatim—seem to speak directly to the reader.
The result is so vivid that you can almost hear the
inɻections in their voices and see their gestures as they
speak. All other early Islamic histories seem somewhat
dry by comparison.
Al-Tabari combined these oral accounts with earlier
written histories, fully acknowledging his debt at every
step. He did this so faithfully and skillfully that his own
work soon superseded some of his written sources,
which were no longer copied or saved. His detailed
account of what happened at Karbala in the year 680,
for instance, is based in large part on Kitab Maqtal al-