Byzantium and Egypt During the first Arab Civil War

Abstract

Internal troubles afflicted the Islamic State for the first time in the late 650s and early 660s. Known in Islamic tradition as the firstfitnah, the troubles were described by early Western historians of Islam as what may be termed the 'standard account' of the first Arab civil war. Their account is founded upon the Islamic historical-biographical written tradition, whose corpus of records on the firstfitnah is preserved in the early comprehensive collections of aI-Tabarī (d.923) and al-Mas' ūdī (d.956). But these writers depended on earlier written compilations of oral accounts of the civil war (akhbār), whose authors are listed in al-Nadīm's Fihrist, compiled about 987. They include Abū Mikhnaf (d. 774), Sayf ibn 'Umar (d. 796), ibn al-Muthannā (d.823-6), al-Wāqidī (d. 823), al-Minqārī (d.827), al-Madā'inī (d.839), ibn Abī Shayba (d.849), and ibn Shabba (d.877). The compilations of all these authors were grouped around the selected themes of 'Uthmān's murder, the battle of the Camel, and the battle of Siffīn with the subsequent arbitration process. Four of the compilations survive.