The Khalifa ibn Khayyat's History on the Umayyad Dynasty (660-750) (Translated Texts for Historians): 63

This book is Robert Hoyland "preparing for publication" a PhD thesis by Carl Wurtzel from two Arabic editions each based on a single manuscript of al-Baqi's edition of Khalifa bin Khayyat's lecture-notes. By my count this chain, assigning Khalifa to Link One, at minimum is a six-link isnad. I have seen transmissions of scholarly work fail. This book succeeds.[Note to Amazon: the primary author for this book should be Dr Wurtzel, *not* Dr Hoyland. Hoyland was barely even an editor, as we shall see.]To review this in full must start with a summary of each stage of the transmission. So:6. Hoyland 2013ish-15. He ran a primitive OCR app on the 1970s-era typed thesis, which app dropped most of the thesis's Arabic diacritics. Hoyland seems to have restored these for the Arabic phrases and names of texts, but left them out for the names of Arabic authors. (A man after Paul Casanova's own heart...) Otherwise Hoyland did not touch the base text much, despite opportunity. For a start Wurtzel's own "The Coinage of the Revolutionaries in the Late Umayyad Period" is now, I am reliably informed, "published by the ANS (Museum Notes #23) in 1978", which I think that author should have liked to have appeared here.5. Wurtzel 1977. He translated the Arabic text of Ibn Khayyat over the Umayyad era, starting after 'Uthman and the civil-war era of Mu'awiya, and also stopping before the afterclap of Umayyad revolts in Egypt and Spain. He then brings all the cross-references of which he knows from Dhahabi, Ibn Sa'd, and so on. Wurtzel introduces this with a fifty-page set of summaries: of Khalifa's life and use of sources, of those Khalifa sources, and of those who used Khalifa himself as a source. This much is best approached as an ultra-rijal section like those we find in the two Tadhdibs by al-Mizzi and Ibn Hajar (although Wurtzel did not use Mizzi himself, so nor did Hoyland).4. Zakkar and 'Umari both 1967; the former from Damascus, the latter from Najaf formerly known as al-Kufa. (Interesting juxtaposition, given their subject...) For these efforts Wurtzel delivers his review at pp. 47-8. They each had edited and published Arabic editions based on a MS "#199q" at Rabat's library. On occasion the two corrected it: Zakkar seems to have been clearer about when he made a fix, 'Umari more diligent at footnoting. Wurtzel generally approves of the work which his forebears did, based on what he had, which didn't include a complete direct copy of #199q.3. #199q, claiming a 1085ish date in Spain but maybe recopied 1300ish in the Maghreb. This bottleneck appears to have been prone to errors, but it is the most complete witness of Khalifa we own. 'Umari and, following him, Wurtzel correct #199q's errors based on the aforementioned Dhahabi and Ibn Sa'd and c.2. Baqi, 880ish. This tarikh is mainly Ibn Khayyat's work, as can be seen from the other witnesses, but sometimes Baqi could not resist the urge to add research from elsewhere, and to abridge what Ibn Khayyat did.1. Ibn Khayyat, alias Shabab al-'Usfuri. Collector of traditions from Ibn al-Kalbi (Tabari thought he'd got his own stuff from Abu Mikhnaf), al-Mada'ini, and others whose accounts, usually in more complete form, also appear in other (later) Islamic historians.It is a near-miracle that this work - in any recension - has survived to Zakkar and 'Umari. Historians of the Umayyads have long used Khalifa's accounts (and Baqi's) to triangulate earlier historians' claimed use of their shared predecessors. As for Anglophone historians, they have often used one or the other Arabic edition; but for those of us who are not full-time Arabists, checking up on their use of Ibn Khayyat is, well, hard. We have long needed something in English.And, to Hoyland's credit, we have needed something ACCESSIBLE in English. It is good that he has done this.Wurtzel did not catch all the relevant scholarship at the time; the most important missing work might be the venerable Joseph Schacht's "The Kitāb al-Taʾrīḫ of Ḫalīfa b. Khayyāt", Arabica (1969), 79-81.Since this is a thesis and from the 1970s, one cannot ding Wurtzel for all of its omissions: like of Mizzi (published in the 1990s; now, Ibn Hajar's Tadhdib should only be used where Mizzi's Kamal fails us), or of the contemporary tarikh by Khwarizmi excerpted by Elias of Nisibis. Usually theses are converted into books, and fixed up with the help of nitpicking jerks like myself, and only *then* published. But Wurtzel exited academe before anyone thought to do that on his behalf; so what we got, four decades later, is Hoyland's "preparation for publication". Obviously Hoyland knows all about Mizzi and Elias. None of Hoyland's scholarship has entered here.Between them, though, I do have to complain about the incomplete index. At least one was serious: ar-Rukhkhaj. The index points only to its instances in the Asha'itha era of the early 80s (AH) where the reader might not know what that means. But there's a nonindexed earlier instance, at page 57 in Mu'awiya's reign... which is where Wurtzel's footnote defines it: classical Arachosia. If you're buying this book in text form, especially used, you won't have the PDF. Good index references are important!For followup articles, I first recommend Isabel Toral-Niehoff, "History in Adab Context" (2015), where it touches Ibn 'Abd Rabbih's use of the Baqi recension. This expands upon the paragraph 41#3, so we learn about the reception of Baqi in the Maghreb whence MS #199q.So I would have preferred that Hoyland been more involved in this book's true Second Edition. Besides that, this thesis even in its First Edition is a tour de force. You need this book.