Few people have been considered worth a monograph in Classical Arabic studies. Usually these have been major figures of politics, religion, science, or literature.
This is with good reason. Not only are major figures often more interesting than minor ones, but they are also better documented, especially when it comes to the Umayyad period. To write a book-length study on, e.g., the rajaz poet Dukayn al-Rājiz (d. 105/723) would be difficult. The poet is of some interest, but the little that is known about him can be easily put into a brief journal article (cf. Hämeen-Anttila 2013a).
However, there is a crucial difference between central and more marginal characters of early Islamic history and culture. The images of the former have undergone conscious modification when they have been filtered through successive layers of writings and rewritings and are, thus, wrought with source critical problems. In order to understand the life and roles of al-Ḥusayn, al-Ḥajjāj, or the Caliph ʿAbd al-Malik, we have to dig through layers of Shiite, ʿAbbāsid, and later histories that have consciously modified and reinterpreted Umayyad history. This has led to misrepresentations that aim at relating the events in a way that fits later ideological frameworks and partisan views.
Stories about minor characters are less prone to conscious manipulation. They have, obviously, also undergone changes during transmission but there is no strong hidden agenda behind these changes. Rather, they follow general patterns of change in oral and literary transmission. Thus, they can be used as case studies for the change and development of historical and literary material in Arabic literature from the late Umayyad period until the ninth and tenth centuries, when much of the material had been codified, and later. Many stories are attested in a great number of sources, and the individual sources show differences ranging from minor changes in vocabulary to a complete restructuring of the whole story. In such cases, later versions can be compared with earlier ones, which offers us a possibility to study the development of Arabic historical and literary material relatively undisturbed by partisan biases and to analyse the mechanisms of “natural” change that they reveal. These may then be used in more controversial cases to discern between natural changes in the transmission process and ideologically motivated, conscious changes.
There is also a manageable amount of material related to minor figures, so as to allow a survey of the whole corpus, taking into account every single story about them and every bit of evidence for their life and activities, enabling us to draw a full picture of how they were seen by later writers in all the various genres of literature and history.
Franz Rosenthal’s monograph Humor in Early Islam (1956) is a rather solitary exception to the trend of concentrating on major figures, taking as its subject a rather unimportant comic figure from mid-eight century Medina, Ashʿab, reported to have been alive until at least 154/771, about whose historical life we know little and who is occasionally used as a literary character in later adab literature. Although Rosenthal’s collection is far from a complete survey of all available Ashʿab stories, it took an important step towards comprehensive analysis of material around one character.
It was Rosenthal’s book that originally, many years ago, inspired me to start collecting materials on another rather evasive, yet this time indisputably historical figure, Khālid ibn Ṣafwān (d. 135/752), who later became a literary character and whose encounter with Umm Salama, the Caliph al-Saffāḥ’s wife, had already caught my attention in the late 1980s. Khālid’s uncertain position in historiography is well symbolised by al-Ṭabarī and al-Balādhurī. While the former does not even mention him in his Taʾrīkh, the latter dedicates a long chapter to him in his Ansāb.
But who was this Khālid ibn Ṣafwān, whom I assume many of my readers will not remember having ever come across? In his own time, Khālid ibn Ṣafwān was an orator of some importance and a wit, whose sayings were remembered and transmitted. He was also part of the late Umayyad Basran tribal nobility, who was on close terms with the high and the mighty and even met at least one Umayyad and one ʿAbbāsid Caliph, although his encounters with them and other notables were later exaggerated.
In later literature, the historical Khālid is buried under various strata of literary embellishment. Stories about him tend to become anecdotes. In some early sources Khālid is said to have been a miser, and late sources contain many anecdotes about him to illustrate this. His eloquence was unanimously admired, and in literary sources we find him improvising bon mots in various situations – often, though, the same saying may be found attributed to others, too. Khālid is also reported to have been a misogynist, although a more detailed analysis shows this to be a probable misunderstanding based on his ascetic sayings, many of which are misogynistic for modern sensibilities, but in their own context exhibit a general distrust of wordly life rather than of women in particular. In any case, his comments became favourite material for literature on women.
In this process, we see Khālid becoming a centre of crystallisation for various kinds of anecdotes. It is well known that figures famous for a feature tend to absorb stories originally told of other, less well-known characters. A story about a wine-drinking poet will soon be found featuring Abū Nuwās, and an Umayyad witticism becomes easily attributed to Khālid.
While Khālid is represented as a character in many anecdotes, in others we find his own sayings, or at least sayings claimed to be transcripts of what he had said. Here the question of authenticity is extremely acute, but even though the texts cannot, as such, be taken as specimens of Umayyad style they may well contain traces of early rhetorics.
The present monograph is an attempt to unravel the development of Khālid’s figure from a historical person into a literary character. The primary aim is not so much to get to know the real, historical Khālid – there is little that can be known about him – but to understand the mechanisms of change in early Arabic historical and literary texts.
The basis of the book is formed by a translation of all material that can be found about Khālid, mainly from Arabic sources, but in a few cases also from Persian ones, where he is occasionally mentioned. Our main source is al-Balādhurī’s Ansāb VII/1: 55–88, which contains 115 items on Khālid, mainly anecdotes about, and sayings and parts of speeches by, him. This can be supplemented by some 200 other stories about him, made up partly of variant versions of the stories found in the Ansāb, partly of completely new ones, scattered all around Arabic literature, from lexicographical works and commentaries on poetry to humorous collections of nawādir. Counting together all the versions and attestations of Khālid stories they run into thousands.
The first Part of the book, Chapters 1 and 2, contains a study of this material. Chapter 1, “Khālid ibn Ṣafwān as a Historical Character,” introduces the reader to the historical context Khālid lived in, discusses the main sources on him, both lost and extant, and analyses what little we can know about his life before literary embellishment started creating new versions of him. This chapter also gives an overview of his family line from the eponymous father of the Ahtamites, al-Ahtam, until the generation following Khālid, after which we gradually loose sight of Khālid’s relatives, who sink into insignificance after the family having enjoyed some fame for more than six generations. The first chapter ends with a glance at the later fame of Khālid himself.
Chapter 2, “Khālid ibn Ṣafwān and Early Arabic Prose,” first outlines the Umayyad literary context and then proceeds to study Khālid as a character, before discussing the various genres his sayings and stories about him belong to, with special attention paid to the mechanics of the anecdote. This chapter also discusses some sample cases of anecdotes in more detail, focusing on their gradual growth and on how the longer anecdotes work.
Some of the anecdotes about Khālid are among the most developed pieces of Classical Arabic prose literature and a careful analysis of all the extant variants in some cases shows us clearly how an anecdote has been built by successive generations of mainly anonymous authors. A major aim of this book is to contribute to our understanding of early Classical Arabic prose literature and its development.
Chapters 3–5 form the second Part of the book, containing all Khālid stories in translation, giving first the stories in al-Balādhurī, Ansāb VII/1: 55–88 (numbered B1–B115) in Chapter 3. The rest of the stories are translated in Chapter 4 (numbered A1–A108), and a handful of stories that I consider clearly misattributed, but still worth being translated for the reader to see, come in Chapter 5 (numbered C1–C3). The chapters contain an annotated translation of the stories with necessary commentaries, given partly in notes and partly in a separate section coming after the translations of all the variant versions of a story and full lists of attestations. When a variant differs considerably from the main version, it has been translated separately after the main version and marked by a, b, c, etc. (e.g., B7, B7a, B7b). Minor differences have been selectively noted. All the translations are mine, even when an existing translation is mentioned for reference.
The source of the translated version in Chapters 4 and 5 (A and C stories), as well as of the variant versions of B stories in Chapter 3, is given immediately after the story in brackets. In Chapter 3 (B stories) the source of all the main versions is al-Balādhurī, Ansāb VII/1: 55–88. Here I have not referred to the pagination of al-Balādhurī’s work, but the stories should be relatively easy to find from the edition of the Arabic text. To facilitate this even further, I have added Source References on p. 265, which help locate the stories in the Ansāb. Other attestations of the story in all three chapters are given after the main source.
In Chapter 3, the stories are given in the order of the original source, al-Balādhurī’s Ansāb. In Chapter 4, they are collected under nine different headings, to give similar stories as a bunch. The classification could have been done in several different ways, as many stories share features of several groups.
When possible, people mentioned in the stories have been identified either in the notes, commentary, or the study, except for those mentioned in the isnād, who have only sparingly been identified. In cases where the last link of the isnād also takes part in the story itself or is an eyewitness to the event, he (never she) is identified.
I have usually given dates in both Hijrī and AD calendars (Hijrī/AD), but in referring to centuries and decades I have usually only given the AD date to avoid unnecessarily complicated dates (thus, e.g., “early eighth century,” instead of “late first/early eighth century”). When the same date is repeated soon after, I have only given the Hijrī date, as the reader should have no difficulties in finding the AD date a few lines earlier. Within the stories, I have added the AD date to the few cases which give the Hijrī date.
I have discussed parts of the material of this book in earlier articles and book chapters (Hämeen-Anttila 1993a, 1994, 2009, 2013b, and 2017).
I wish to thank Dr Maria Pakkala (Helsinki) for her help with some of the stories in Chapter 3, which we read together in Helsinki in 2015, as well as for helping me to acquire some less easily available sources. I also wish to thank Mr Sam Mills, MA (Edinburgh), for proofreading the manuscript and polishing my English, as well as helping me with the genealogical diagrams in Chapter 1.4. Finally, I wish to thank Sukaina Husain, MSc (Edinburgh), and Mithra K, MVA (Baroda), for designing and executing the lovely cover image.
Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila
Edinburgh, 28 February, 2020