Ibn al-Kalbī

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Ibn al-Kalbī , short for Hischām ibn Muhammad ibn as-Sā'ib al-Kalbī ( Arabic هشام بن محمد بن السائب الكلبي Hischām ibn Muhammad ibn as-Sā'ib al-Kalbī , DMG Hišām bin Muḥammad bin as-Sāʾib al-Kalbī * around 737; † 819 or 821 in Kufa ), was an Arab (Iraqi) Islamic historian and genealogist .

His erudition

He mainly dealt with Arab antiquity, the history and customs of the Arab tribes in the pre-Islamic period . Little is known about his life. He acquired his knowledge from his father Muhammad ibn as-Sāʾib al-Kalbī († 763) in his hometown of Kufa; later, during the caliphate of al-Mahdi , he moved to Baghdad , what was then the center of Islamic learning, where he developed his teaching activities. As Shiites, the Sunnis were hostile to him; Ahmad ibn Hanbal († 855) judged him with the following words: “Who is passing on Hishām? He's only a writer of night conversations and genealogies. I do not think that anyone would narrate from him. ”In the vicinity of the caliph al-Mahdi he again found general recognition; According to a report by al-Waqidi († 823), which is received from at-Tabari († 923), he had extraordinary knowledge in the field of mathālib , "the suggestive stories that the Arab tribes told of each other," which he made gained prestige and wealth with the caliph.

His contemporaries and scholarly successors accused him, like his father, of lying. He is even said to have admitted that he was untruthful in genealogies. “The first time I lied in genealogy was when Chālid ibn ʿAbd Allah al-Qasrī asked me about (the parentage) of his grandmother, Umm Kuraiz. I said to him: she is Zainab bint ʿArʿara ibn Ǧazīma .... He was happy about it and gave me a lot of presents. ”In reality she was a prostitute in the north Arab tribe of the Asad, a servant (ama) with the name Zainab.

Works

Ibn an-Nadim compiles the titles of his writings -  monographic treatises on the Arab tribes, their leading personalities, poets and "battle days" - on three printed pages in his Fihrist . Only a few of these works have survived today either in fragments of manuscripts or in print.

  • Jamharat an-nasab جمهرة النسب / Ǧamharat an-nasab  / 'Summary of Genealogy' is the best-known genealogical work on the Arab tribes in Islamic literature, but it is not completely preserved. Al-Baladhuri evaluated it for the most part in his Ansāb al-ašrāf . Ibn al-Kalbī, who also processes his father's work in this work, is considered to be the founder of the science of the relationships between the ancient Arabs. The work has been edited and commented on by the German orientalist Werner Caskel . This edition of the work does not contain an Arabic text, but rather 334 genealogical tables as family trees with around 35,000 names.
Sheet from the “Götzenbuch” with marginal glosses
  • In the Kitāb al-Aṣnām كتاب الأصنام / kitābu ʾl-aṣnām  / 'The Book of Idols ', Ibn al-Kalbī describes the ancient Arabic deities and the customs associated with them, predominantly according to oral traditions of his time. Several Muslim historians evaluated and quoted this work well into the 13th century and provided marginal glosses in the manuscript available to us today. Excerpts from it - even if only paraphrased  - are also preserved in subsequent literature from the 12th and 13th centuries. The geographer and literary historian Yaqut († 1229) transferred most of Ibn al-Kalbī's "Book of Idols" into his geographical dictionary, divided into the individual names of the gods in the alphabetical order of his work.

In his work, Remains of Arab Paganism, which is still relevant today, the German orientalist Julius Wellhausen evaluated the information on pre-Islamic idol worship quoted by Yaqut after Ibn al-Kalbī and thus presented for the first time a valuable monograph on the ancient Arab deities of the pre-Islamic period.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the Egyptian researcher Ahmed Zeki Pacha succeeded أحمد زكي باشا / Aḥmad Zakī Bāšā to identify the manuscript of Ibn al-Kalbī's "Book of Idols" , which was classified as a unique specimen at the time, in the private collection of an Algerian scholar and to acquire it by purchase. He presented the hitherto unknown manuscript to the public for the first time at the World Congress of Orientalists in Athens in 1912. In 1914 the first edition appeared in a careful edition: Ibn el Kalbi: Le livre des idoles ( Kitab el Asnam ) . In the appendix to the edition (pp. 107–111) the editor lists 49 other idols that are not mentioned in Ibn al-Kalbī.

The book of idols is a valuable source in the history of religion . In the historically significant epoch of the transition from Jahiliya to Islam in the 7th century, it "has a very important say in the problem of religious change". The representations are accompanied by numerous poems about the deities, whose origins, according to the current state of research, go back well into the pre-Islamic period. The poems handed down by the author offer a very good insight into the primitive "customs of pagan Arabia, which pass on many old, characteristic forms of this religious level".

The orientalist Rosa Klinke-Rosenberger obtained a faithful new edition as a reprint of the edition by Ahmed Zeki Pacha with a German translation and a rich commentary.

The English translation of the work was provided by N. A. Faris (Princeton 1952) with scientific comments. W. Atallah translated the book into French and commented: Les Idoles de Hicham Ibn al-Kalbi , Paris 1969.

literature

  • Werner Caskel: From the early days of Islam . In: Wilhelm Hoenerbach (Hrsg.): The Orient in Research . Festschrift for Otto Spies on April 5, 1966. Wiesbaden 1967, pp. 9-17. Two reports from the genealogical work of Ibn al-Kalbī.
  • Fuat Sezgin : History of Arabic Literature . Brill, Leiden 1967, Vol. 1, pp. 268-271.
  • Rose Klinke-Rosenberger: The book of idols. Kitāb al-Aṣnām of Ibn al-Kalbī. Leipzig 1941
  • MJ Kister and M. Plessner: Notes on Caskel's Ǧamharat an-nasab . In: Oriens . Vol. 25-26, pp. 48-68
  • Julius Wellhausen : Remains of Arab paganism . 2nd Edition. Berlin and Leipzig 1927
  • The Encyclopaedia of Islam . New Edition. Brill, Leiden, Vol. 4, p. 494, No. II.

Web links

Wikisource: The Book of Idols (Arabic)

References and comments

  1. ↑ adh-Dhahabī : Siyar aʿlām an-nubalāʾ , Vol. 10, p. 101; Rosa Klinke-Rosenberger (1941), p. 18
  2. ^ The Encyclopaedia of Islam . New Edition. Brill, suffering. Vol. 6, p. 828
  3. ↑ Julius Wellhausen (1927), p. 12; Rosa Klinke-Rosenberger (1941), p. 19
  4. ^ The Encyclopaedia of Islam . New Edition. Brill, suffering. Vol. 1, p. 683
  5. ↑ Ahmed Zeki Pacha (ed.): Le livre des Idoles . 2nd Edition. Cairo 1924. Introduction, p. 17 from the Kitāb al-Aghānī by Abu l -Faraj al-Isfahani († 967): Fuat Sezgin (1967), pp. 378–382
  6. ↑ pp. 108-111. Ed. Riḍā Taǧaddud. Tehran 1971
  7. ↑ MJ Kister and M. Plessner, pp. 48-49
  8. ↑ Ǧamharat an-nasab. The genealogical work of Hišām ibn Muḥammad al-Kalbī . Volume I: Introduction by Werner Caskel; the tablets by Gert Strenziok. Volume II: Explanations of the panels by Werner Caskel; The register, started by Gert Strenziok, completed by Werner Caskel. Brill, Leiden 1966. F. Wüstenfelds Genealogical Tables of Arab Tribes and Families. This was the first time that Göttingen (1852) was significantly expanded.
  9. ↑ Ibn Al-Kalbi's statement in the English language Wikipedia that Werner Caskel translated the work into German is incorrect.
  10. ↑ For another manuscript fragment of the work, see: Otto Spies: Die Bibliothek des Hijas . In: Journal of the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft (ZDMG), 90 (1936), pp. 119-120
  11. ↑ See the foreword to the 1st edition, pp. 35–36
  12. ↑ In the 2nd edition (Cairo 1924) the foreword and introduction to the no longer existing 1st edition from January 4, 1914 are printed
  13. ↑ See: Friedrich Stummer : Comments on Ibn al-Kalbī's book of idols. In: Journal of the German Oriental Society (ZDMG), 98 (1944), pp. 377–394
  14. ↑ H. S. Nyberg: Comments on the book of idols . In: Le Monde Oriental. Year 1939. p. 366; Rosa Klinke-Rosenberger (1941), pp. 26–27 (Introduction)
  15. ↑ Rosa Klinke-Rosenberger, p. 26 (introduction)
  16. ↑ The Book of Idols. Kitāb al-aṣnām of Ibn al-Kalbī . On the book of Ibn al-Kalbī, including reviews of the edition, see: Fuat Sezgin: History of Arabic literature. Brill, Leiden 1967, vol. 1, p. 270.
  17. ↑ Hisham Ibn Al-Kalbi: The Book of Idols (Kitab Al-Asnam) .
personal data
SURNAME Ibn al-Kalbī
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hishām ibn Muḥammad b. as-Sāʾib al-Kalbī
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Muslim historian and genealogist
DATE OF BIRTH at 737
DATE OF DEATH 819 or 821
Place of death Kufa