MUHAMMAD IBN Jarir al-Ṭabarī's History of the Prophets and Kings is our major source for early Islamic history from the time of Muḥammad until the beginning of the fourth century AH. The chronicle ends in 302 while he himself died in 310. Al-Ṭabarī's treatment of the early years of Islam, the great Muslim conquests and the Rāshidūn caliphs has been studied by a number of modern scholars with a view to elucidating the sources of al-Ṭabarī's information and the use he makes of it. In the main his material comes from the accounts of late second and early third-century compilers like Abū Mikhnāf (d. 157) and al-Madā'inī (d. 225) who, half a century or more before his own time, had collected the numerous, varied and sometimes contradictory accounts that tradition had preserved, and attempted to edit them and arrange them as a comprehensible narrative. It is characteristic of this material that it is presented as a series of anecdotes, often very detailed and explicit and incorporating long sections of direct speech. These anecdotes, called khabar, pl. akhbār, usually deal with individual incidents and rarely attempt to give the overall background or chronological framework; this was the task of the compilers.

This classic Islamic historiography uses a highly developed critical apparatus. In order to guarantee the accuracy and authenticity of the akhbar, the compilers introduced them by a chain of transmitters who are held to have passed the information down from the original eye witness to the compiler who committed it to writing. It is a characteristic of the early third-century compliers and, a fortiori of al-Ṭabarī himself, that they include different accounts of the same episode that often contradict each other, without attempting to reconcile them or express any opinion as to their veracity.

This classic form of historical presentation continues in al-Ṭabarī's work through the Umayyad period and down to the death of the caliph al-Saffah in 136. The accounts of the Abbasid movement and revolution belong in the main to this genre, reflecting the concern of authors in the Abbasid period to show the movement as a revival of traditional Islamic patterns. Thereafter the presentation begins to change in ways that will be discussed below. There is one further example, however, of the use of the classic style, and that is in Umar ibn Shabba's account of the rebellion of the ‘Alid Muḥammad the Pure Soul and his brother Ibrāhīm in 145.