IN TRACING the intellectual biography of al-Ṭabarī, one feels as if one is intruding upon the privacy of a very private person, an overwhelmingly bookish scholar who would not have welcomed an inquisitiveness regarding his personal life or intimate thoughts. It would probably have been a bit difficult to persuade him to look up, even briefly, from his reputed regimen of writing forty folios a day for forty years. But he did travel quite extensively in his early life; and, from where I am writing these lines, he must have passed within a few feet from me, on his way from Damascus to Beirut, sometime in the 860s. He is described to us as having been tall, thin, with very large eyes, hair that did not turn grey with age and beautiful recitative voice; and he was most probably unmarried. But in an age when scholars were increasingly autobiographical and willing to reveal more and more of their egos, al-Ṭabarī would probably have insisted that he was his scholarship, that his words are all there is.

Throughout the vast and cavernous corpus of his writings, I have been able to locate only one fragment that can remotely be considered of autobiographical interest: a single sentence in his Tafsīr on the re- ward of the virtuous in this life. And what is the true reward of the virtuous in this our present life? Al-Ṭabarī's answer is: contentment. And he adds: “For we have seen that most human beings who lead lives of virtue are not granted much worldly wealth; indeed, most are found to be living in straitened circumstances rather than in ease.”

Contentment as the solace of virtue: that is almost all that al- Ṭabari is willing to reveal of his innermost feelings and experience. And perhaps we too should be content with this single glimpse into his private thoughts and turn our attention to his scholarship. To introduce the works of al-Tabarī, I have set myself a task severely limited by time, space and competence.