Saif ibn ʿUmar

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Saif ibn ʿUmar ( Arabic سيف بن عمر, DMG Saif ibn ʿUmar ) was a Muslim historian of the early Abbasid period and one of the most important authorities in the Arab accounts of the early days of Islam . Apart from the fact that he lived in Kufa and belonged to the Arab tribe of the Tamīm, no biographical data are known about him.

Saif ibn ʿUmar gained importance through his book Kitāb al-Futūḥ al-kabīr wa-r-ridda , in which he brought together reports on the Ridda Wars and the campaigns of conquest . This book, which has not been handed down independently, later formed one of the main sources of reports about this time in the world chronicle of at-Tabarī . The Syrian historian Ibn ʿAsākir also used it in his "History of the City of Damascus".

The reliability of Saif's reports has always been in dispute. Muslim scholars of tradition have already accused him of having put reports into the mouths of sources whom he cited. Julius Wellhausen dismissed all of the Saif reports as pro-tamemic tendency literature. A "rehabilitation" of Saif only took place in 1990 by Ella Landau-Tasseron. It showed that his reports by no means only aimed at raising the fame of their own tribe, but also addressed the achievements of other Arab tribes. She also showed that Saif himself had resorted to other Arabic sources that were already available in writing at the time.

literature

  • Ella Landau-Tasseron: "Sayf Ibn ʿUmar in Medieval and Modern Scholarship" in Der Islam 67 (1990) 1-26.
  • Linda D. Lau, "Sayf b. 'Umar and the Battle of the Camel" in Islam Quarterly 23 (1979), pp. 103-111.
  • FM Donner: Art. "Sayf Ibn ʿUmar" in Encyclopaedia of Islam . Second edition. Vol. IX, pp. 102-103.
  • Julius Wellhausen: Prolegomena to the oldest history of Islam . Berlin 1899 (= sketches and preparatory work 6). P. 3–7 Available online: http://archive.org/stream/skizzenundvorar01unkngoog#page/n14/mode/2up