LESS THAN fifty years after the death of Abū Jaʿfar Muḥammad ibn Jarīr al-Ṭabari in 310/923, the Sāmānid amīr Abū Ṣāliḥ Manṣūr ibn Nūḥ commanded that both of his great works, the chronicle known as the Taʾrikh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk and the commentary on the Qurʾan entitled Jāmicʿ al-bayān an taʾwil ay al-qurʾan, be translated from Arabic into Persian. Although these translations became extremely popular through- out the Turko-Persian world, in many ways supplanting the Arabicoriginals, and have long been familiar to Orientalists, they have also been surrounded by a great deal of confusion. One finds, for example, opinions that they were or were not really “translations” of al-Ṭabarī; that the Sāmānid vizier Abū ʿAlī al-Balʿami translated one of them, both of them, or neither of them; that the texts we now have of the translations are authentic or that they are much later redactions; and that they are or are not of much historical value. Moreover, there is as yet no real insight at all into such basic questions as why the Samanids would have wanted to commission such translations, why they would pick al-Ṭabarī and these two works in particular to be translated, why the translations would appear in the peculiar form they have, why the manuscript tradition for these texts is in such utter disarray, or what the larger significance of this use of al-Ṭabarī's work may have been. This brief article cannot attempt to address such questions as fully as they deserve; it will seek simply to provide an outline of the main problems raised by the Persian al-Ṭabarī translations, to indicate a few of their important implications, and to offer some possible explanations for their most peculiar features.

Overview of the Persian al-Ṭabarī Translations

The Persian translations of al-Ṭabarī 's history and commentary on the Qurʾan both contain prefaces that provide essential information about the reasons why they were commissioned and the methodologies that were used in preparing them. These prefaces provide the most convenient starting point for a consideration of these issues and related problems.