'Abd al-Rahman b. 'Amr al-Awza'i

THE SOURCES

For historians of any period, finding adequate, reliable sources is a priority, and often a problem. In this regard, the early Islamic period is not exceptional, although the difficulties presented by early Islamic sources are particularly serious and raise doubts about how accurately the early Islamic past can be described. Before embarking on an attempt to reconstruct the life and thought of al-Awza‘i and the milieu in which he lived and worked, it is important to consider the state of the sources and what they can and cannot reveal about the Umayyad and early Abbasid period and about al-Awza‘i and other religious scholars of that era.

Studies of the history of any aspect of early Islam cannot rely on contemporaneous sources, because they are largely nonexistent. Archival material, a favorite for most historians, has not survived from the first/seventh- and second/eighth-century Middle East. For the earliest period, this is not surprising. The chaos of rapid expansion, along with an approach to government that was largely ad hoc, relying on loose tribal organization, was not conducive to record keeping in any comprehensive way.

By al-Awza‘i’s time, however, the Umayyads had developed more sophisticated, bureaucratic forms of government, drawing on the examples of the defeated but bureaucratically competent Byzantines and Sassanians. Surely they had come to accept the benefits (and perhaps annoyances) of record keeping. Later sources offer evidence that the Umayyads, and perhaps even the Rashidun before them, did indeed document their activities and finances. Some early histories mention caliphal scribes and occasionally even identify them by name. The maintenance of official registers (diwans) attracts some attention in later sources, and individuals are sometimes noted to have been listed in the diwan, which entitled them to a pension. Later historical sources mention correspondence between caliphs and regional officials, sometimes even reproducing these early letters. At the very least, the authors of these later sources worked under the assumption that the Umayyads wrote letters, kept records, and employed bureaucrats to perform these functions.

Unfortunately, the products of these early scribes and accountants do not survive in their original form. If the Umayyads archived such records, those archival collections have not survived. Some early Islamic papyri have been found, including a fair number whose content is administrative in nature. While these discoveries confirm that Umayyad-era officials did keep written records, they remain too few and fragmentary to draw broad conclusions about Umayyad administration. In recent years, these documents have attracted increased attention. Additional discoveries, along with further study, compilation, and authentication of these artifacts may provide at least a fragmentary archive from the Umayyad period at some point in the future.

Unless and until such an archive of contemporary material is collected, scholars researching the early Islamic period must rely primarily on later narrative sources and grapple with the problems these retellings of history present. In this regard, early Islamic history is not unique. If contemporary, datable, authenticated archival material were a prerequisite for writing history, much of pre-modern and especially ancient history would be relegated to the realm of myth and legend. Scholars should be no more or less skeptical about narratives of the Islamic past than they are about stories of any society’s