Khalifa ibn Khayyat was born in the southern Iraqi city of Basra in
the 770s AD and in his lifetime Iraq grew into a thriving centre of
culture and trade and one of the most populous and prosperous
regions of the world. He was one of a generation of scholars who
gave concrete form to Islamic religion and culture and bequeathed
to us the first books that can be said to be distinctively Islamic.
Khalifa's History is the earliest extant work of Muslim
historiography and this alone makes it deserving of greater
recognition. It carefully records the key events in the life of the
Muslim community from the prophet Muhammad to Khalifa's own day.
The section on the Umayyad dynasty (660-750), which occupies about
half of the work, is noteworthy because it gives a more positive
assessment of the Umayyad caliphs than later narratives. Over time
they were increasingly censured for having corrupted the purity of
early Islamic society, and yet it was they who had overseen the
conquest of cities as far afield as Seville and Samarkand and
established Muslim rule over all the lands inbetween. They built
the magnificent mosques of Medina and Damascus that still stand
today and the palaces that litter the desert margins of modern
Jordan and Syria. Khalifa's History helps us to better evaluate the
achievements of this dynasty and also to analyze the beginnings of
the discipline of Arabic historical writing in the framework of
Islamic civilization. This study and translation was originally
submitted by Carl Wurtzel as a doctoral thesis at Yale University
in 1977 under the supervision of Franz Rosenthal, one of the
greatest Orientalists of modern times. It has now been prepared for
publication, with a Foreword and updated bibliography, by Robert
Hoyland, professor of Islamic History at Oxford University.
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