THE PRECEDING PAGES have attempted to show that classical Islamic historiography was the product of specific needs that arose during the growth of the community of Believers-particularly the need to define itself as a community of Muslims distinct from other monotheisms, the need to justify its claim to religious and temporal superiority, and the need to adjudicate internal disputes over political and religious leadership within the community.

The classical “salvation history” or “story line” continued to be preserved, but ceased to be actively worked and reworked after about the fourth century AH (eleventh century CE), because 1) to the extent that the issues that had generated the historiographical themes that dominate early Islamic history remained relevant, a suitable position was already present in existing works, such as al-Ṭabarī's compilation; and 2) because to a large extent the community outgrew, through natural historical change and evolution, the issues that were enshrined in the classical historiographical tradition.

The result was two-fold. On the one hand, the classical “story line” was maintained, and retold, but in summarized form. (This process is analogous to the development of the sciences of ḥadīth and fiqh in the same period [fourth-sixth centuries AH]: the old preoccupation with the elaboration and analysis of ḥadīth itself, which had been the battleground on which social and political and religious issues had been worked out in the community, slowly fades as “set” answers to many issues were established and hardened into dogma; and in its place, one increasingly finds merely summaries of the decisions reached by earlier scholars on the basis of ḥadīth analysis.) Many later texts-e.g. Ibn al- Athīr's Al-Kāmil fī I-ta ‘rīkh or Mamluk-period universal histories-are content to begin with a longer or shorter summary of what al-Tabar!, for example, provides in his history.

On the other hand, the new needs faced by the community in areas of political and religious legitimation led to the creation of new canons of historical writing, since the classical historical tradition did not address the new concerns. The decisive dissolution of a unified caliphate and proliferation of completely autonomous Islamic political entities, for example, or the vexed relationship between those claiming religious authority and those actually holding political power, contributed to a new, more locally defined, more secular, and less universal approach to historical writing.