Introduction

In Part I, we attempted to trace certain concepts of central importance to the early community of Believers, starting with the Qur'ān and working forward chronologically. We concluded Part I with the proposition that narratives of Islamic origins- historical writing- first emerged in the Islamic community in the final third of the first century AH as an exercise in legitimation. In Part II, we will approach the problem of the origins narratives from the other direction; working backward from the extant narrative sources of the second/eighth and especially the third/ninth and fourth/tenth centuries- which constitute the bulk of the classical phase of Islamic historiography-we shall try to isolate and to ident ify more exactly the issues that induced Muslims first to write the history of Islamic origins. These narrative sources, dating from the second, third, and fourth centuries AH, are mostly compilations based on material derived from earlier collections (which may themselves have been assemblages of yet older materials). The cont ent of these collections was unquestionably shaped in significant measure by the historiographical, polemical, and perhaps even the aesthetic goals of their compilers in the second-fourth centuries AH. In pursuit of these goals, the compilers favored certain kinds of material in making their selections from the accounts available to them, and sometimes edited their material to make it fit more closely into the interpretive framework they wished to project. To some extent, therefore, the effort to discover what motivated the early generations of Muslims to compile their narratives of Islamic origins will inevitably be hampered by the interpretive goals of the later compilers who preserve the early accounts for us. We cannot, as several authors have pointed out, treat the later compilations as historiographically neutral repositories of “objective” information from which nuggets of early fact can simply be mined, without any understanding of the compilations themselves and the purposes behind them. Most glaring is the paucity of serious studies of al-Tabarī's Annals; some other works, such as those by al-Mas'ūdī, have received somewhat more attention, but many remain virtually unexamined. Careful study of these later compilations as literary and narrative creations should be an important goal of the current and future generations of scholars.