1 Mediaeval and Early Modern Times

In contrast to Ibn Aʿtham's biography, which, as we have seen in the previous chapter, stood at the forefront of interest in previous scholarship, the reception history of his Kitāb al-futūḥ has never been systematically scrutinised. The single notable exception is Qays al-ʿAṭṭār, who, in the introduction to his partial edition of the Kitāb al-futūḥ, discussed more than twenty authors who quoted Ibn Aʿtham's book. However, the main objective of al-ʿAṭṭār's survey was to explore Ibn Aʿtham's religious denomination to cross-check Yāqūt's famous characterisation of Ibn Aʿtham as a Shīʿī. In line with this focus, rather marginal attention was paid to other matters, which will be thus explored in detail in the present chapter.

Since very little information on Ibn Aʿtham was available to previous researchers, and what is known comes from a limited number of sources (mostly from al-Sahmī and Yāqūt), some of which have been discovered for the field only quite recently, one could easily get the impression that Ibn Aʿtham was hardly a well-known historiographer. Another factor led to the same effect: given that, as we shall see in section 2.3, the discovery of the Kitāb al-futūḥ's Arabic manuscripts was a slow and gradual process, which did not result in the emergence of a large number of manuscripts, Ibn Aʿtham's mediaeval and early modern importance was by no means suggested by an unmistakable proliferation of interest in his book. The overall image of the author and his book was thus that his oeuvre exercised merely a marginal influence on later sources, and he was hardly counted among the betterknown and frequently consulted Muslim historiographers.

The present chapter sets out to collect and briefly describe those Arabic and Persian writings which make mention or use of Ibn Aʿtham and his Kitāb al-futūḥ in order to qualify this image. My search resulted in the identification of almost thirty works by more than twenty authors covering the timespan from the mid- 4th/10th to the 19th century. During the compilation of this list, I did not strive for completeness, but I hope that this dataset is large enough to draw some solid conclusions from it. In view of the fact that a sizeable portion of the works consulted for my survey has only been published relatively recently, we have good reason to expect the discovery of further references in sources already published and those waiting for publication in manuscript form.