ISLAMIC & WESTERN HISTORIOGRAPHY

4 22 ISLAMIC STUDIES, 25:4 (1986)
dogma. Although the oriental Christians were the usual intermediaries between
the Greeks and the Arabs in 3rd/9th and 4th/lOth centuries, they were certainly
not interested in translating into Syriac contemporary Greek chronicles.
which they considered heretical, and then rendering them into Arabic. As for
the Greek chronicles dating from before the schisms (and. therefore, dogmatically
uiiobjectionable from the view point of Jacobite or Nestorian religious
history)12 these, if available at all, went so far back into the past that they
were rcgarded as 'obsolete' even if older Syriac translations existed, and they
had no attraction for translators. When the Christians wrote for their Muslim
contemporaries in Arabic, their narratives were either colourless, as in the
Arabic Chronicle of Gregorius ~ar-~abraeus['I (623685/1226-1286) or were
even coloured by Islamic values, as in the work of the Copt Mufaddal bin Abi'l-
~ada'il[~] written in 758-760/1357-1359.
While the doctrinal conflicts of the Christians prevented any transmission
of the contemporary Greek Chronicles to the Arabs, the Arabic historians for
their part had no reason to include contemporary Syriac original works within
their purview. What they found in them lay (as in the case of the Greek chro-
nicles) beyond the range of the Muslinls as God's chosen ccmmunity. When
then should they had read and informed their readers about such material?
Only through being read and used could these Greek and Syriac clironicles have
affected the style of the Arabs and influenced their view of history. In the
Islanlic state. the life of the Christian and the Jewish (and also the Zoroastrian)
communities, who in accordance with Islamic law enjoyed complete internal
adniinistrative autonomy, was almost completely cut off from Islamic life.
In the same way, we find no information in the medieval Christian Chroni-
clesiR] about the everyday communal and spiritual life of the Jews during the
Middle Ages and nothing of any importance about the Christians in the medie-
val Jewish Chronicles.'
At this point we may virtually conclude the discussion of the basic
principles of Islamic historiography, because all that follows is concerned with
essentially intra-Islamic development which no longer made any difference to
its Islamariented outlook. In defining this outlook we have stated what is the
main feature of Islamic historical literature as far as our present purpose is
concerned: namely that it is completely Islamic not only in its origin but also
in its contents. It looks at the world only as far as the world is shaped by the
~uslims.[~] It reports on the non-Muslims in its domain only when Christians
and Jews or other autonomous religious communities came into direct contact
with the Islamic world e.g. during anti-government riots by the Copts in Egypt
or the Christians in Mesopotamia. It offers, of course, detailed accounts of the
wars of the Muslims against the Christians of Spain and against the crusaders.14