JOURNAL OF ARABIC AND ISLAMIC STUDIES

JAIS
ONLINE
Pavel Pavlovitch
to decide whether a deletion of kuriba li-dhālika has ever taken place at
the hands of Yazīd b. Hārūn. The closed eyes may have been an element
of fictionalization that Yazīd added to an early variant of the preamble
that did not include the description of grief. Al-Ṭabarānī’s matn in the
Qatāda cluster bears witness to the existence of such variant.
This leads us to the second scenario. Yazīd b. Hārūn’s tradition may
be an intermediate stage in the development of the revelation preamble.
Judging by clause 1a 1 , Yazīd may have had before his eyes a tradition
which only mentioned that when the Prophet received a revelation, the
companions around him would recognize this. Muʿādh b. Hishām’s
tradition on the authority of Qatāda b. Diʿāma indicates that such
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wording is not mere conjecture. It will be recalled that Muʿādh relates a
preamble according to which, when the Prophet received a revelation,
the Companions would bend down their heads. This variant does not
mention the symptoms of revelation experienced by the Prophet. It
stands to reason that Yazīd b. Hārūn, who was Muʿādh’s contemporary,
was acquainted with a version of the preamble that did not mention any
specific symptoms of revelation. To make the early narrative more
persuasive, Yazīd fictionalized it by borrowing the pallid face from
elsewhere and adding to it the Prophet’s closed eyes and the
Companions’ falling silent. These additions would have been Yazīd’s
contribution to the expanding description of the symptoms of revelation.
At the same time, Yazīd chose to preserve the clause according to which
the symptoms would be recognized by the Companions. By so doing he
did introrduce an obvious narrative instability in his matn.
After removing the elements of fictionalization, we may tentatively
reconstruct the core narrative upon which Yazīd b. Hārūn’s based his
preamble:
*(1a) Kāna rasūl u l-lāh i , ṣalʿam, idhā unzila ʿalay-hi [l-waḥy u ] ʿarafnā
dhālika fī-hi (1b) Qāla [?]: Fa-nazala/nuzzila ʿalay-hi fa-lammā surriya
ʿan-hu qāla.
One should note immediately the interjectory quotation mark qāla [?].
It is difficult to identify the referent of the verbal subject, but, more
importantly, the quotation mark signals an addition to the original
narrative which in this case would have been confined to clause 1a. Even
though clause 1a may seem to correspond to Qatāda’s reconstructed
preamble (anna l-nabiyy a , ṣalʿam, unzila ʿalay-hi[l-waḥy u ]/ ūḥiya ilā lnabī,
ṣalʿam), such similarity could be deceptive. The use of the
conditional/temporal particle idhā sets Yazīd’s tradition apart from that
of Qatāda as represented in the traditions of Muʿādh b. Hishām and ʿAbd