Ali ibn al-Athir

Abu al-Hasan Ali ibn Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Jazari, known to history as Ali ibn al-Athir and given the honorific Izz al-Din, was one of the greatest historians of the medieval Islamic world. He was born in the year 555 of the Hijra, corresponding to 1160 of the common era, in the town of Jazirat ibn Umar, an island town set upon the Tigris in the upper reaches of Mesopotamia, in a region known as the Jazira. Into this Kurdish and Arab borderland, where the cultures of Iraq, Syria, and Anatolia met and mingled, he was born to a family of standing and learning that would produce three brothers each celebrated in his own field.

The family of al-Athir is one of the rare instances in which a single household gave the Islamic sciences three eminent men in one generation. The eldest brother, Majd al-Din ibn al-Athir, became a renowned scholar of hadith and of the rare and difficult words of the Prophetic traditions, and compiled an influential dictionary of such terms. The youngest brother, Diya al-Din ibn al-Athir, rose to fame as a master of Arabic rhetoric and secretarial prose, a stylist whose works on the art of composition were studied for centuries. Between them stood Izz al-Din, the historian, whose name would in time eclipse even his brothers' in the memory of later generations. Their father served the local administration, and the household enjoyed both means and the leisure that learning requires.

Ali's early education followed the pattern of his age and class. He memorized the Qur'an, studied the Arabic language with its grammar and poetry, and devoted himself to the science of hadith, traveling to the great centers of learning to hear traditions from their masters and to collect chains of transmission. He spent much of his life in Mosul, which under the Zangid and then the local Atabeg dynasties had become a flourishing seat of scholarship and a bulwark on the northern frontier. He also journeyed to Baghdad, the venerable seat of the caliphate, where he heard from the leading authorities, and he visited Syria and the Hijaz in the course of pilgrimage and study. Unlike many men of letters, he never made a career in the chanceries or the courts as a salaried official, though he was on familiar terms with rulers and ministers; he preferred the independence of the scholar, dwelling among his books and giving his days to research and writing.

The age in which Ibn al-Athir lived was one of extraordinary turbulence and consequence. He witnessed the high tide of the Crusades and the counter-effort of the Muslims to recover the lands of Syria and Palestine. He lived through the rise of Salah al-Din, known to the West as Saladin, the recapture of Jerusalem in 583 of the Hijra (1187), and the long struggles that followed. He saw the fragmentation of Muslim political authority into a patchwork of competing principalities, and in his last years he beheld the first terrible irruption of the Mongols out of the eastern steppe, an event that filled him with a grief and foreboding he did not conceal in his writing. He died in Mosul in the year 630 of the Hijra, corresponding to 1233, a few years before the catastrophe of the sack of Baghdad that he had, in a sense, already foreseen in the devastation he chronicled.

The crowning achievement of his life, and the work upon which his fame chiefly rests, is the great chronicle known as al-Kamil fi al-Tarikh, which may be rendered The Complete History or The Perfect Work of History. It is a universal history, a chronicle of the world from the creation, as understood in the traditions of the time, down to his own days in the early thirteenth century. He arranged the events year by year in the annalistic manner long favored by Muslim historians, recording under each year the deaths of notable men, the accessions and falls of dynasties, the wars, the natural disasters, and the affairs of religion and learning. The scope of the work is immense, embracing the histories of the Arabs before Islam, the life of the Prophet, the conquests, the caliphates of the Umayyads and the Abbasids, the dynasties of the East and the West, the Saljuq Turks, the Crusaders whom he calls the Franks, and the Mongols.

What distinguishes al-Kamil from the mass of medieval chronicles is not merely its comprehensiveness but the quality of its author's judgment and craftsmanship. For the early centuries he drew heavily upon the monumental history of al-Tabari, the great chronicler of the ninth and tenth centuries, but he did not merely copy. He digested his sources, smoothed their often tangled and repetitive narratives, weighed conflicting reports, and recast the whole into a flowing, readable, and proportioned account. Where al-Tabari piled up variant traditions one upon another with their full chains of authorities, Ibn al-Athir sifted and selected, producing a single coherent narrative while preserving the substance. For the period nearer his own time, and especially for the affairs of the Jazira, Syria, and Iraq in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, he becomes an original and indispensable authority, often an eyewitness or the close contemporary of the events he records, drawing on his own observation and on the testimony of men who had taken part.

His method reveals a historian of conscience. He was concerned with accuracy and with the assessment of his sources, applying to historical reports something of the critical instinct that the scholars of hadith had developed for the verification of traditions. He took care to distinguish what he knew from reliable testimony from what was rumor or conjecture, and he was willing to express his own reasoned opinion on disputed matters. He had, too, a feeling for the larger movement of events and for the moral and religious lessons that the rise and fall of states might teach. His account of the coming of the Mongols is justly famous, a passage of restrained yet profound lamentation in which he confesses that for years he hesitated even to set down so dreadful a calamity, declaring that he wished his mother had never borne him rather than that he should be the one to record so great a disaster to Islam and the Muslims. The famous and oft-quoted line in which he describes the catastrophe as the like of which had not been seen since God created Adam reflects both the magnitude of the event and the depth of his sorrow.

Ibn al-Athir composed other significant works besides his great chronicle. He wrote a substantial biographical dictionary devoted to the Companions of the Prophet, titled Usd al-Ghaba fi Marifat al-Sahaba, The Lions of the Thicket Concerning the Knowledge of the Companions, in which he gathered and harmonized the biographical notices of earlier compilers into one extensive and carefully organized reference, a work that remains a standard source for the lives of the first generation of Muslims. He also composed a history devoted to the dynasty of the Atabegs of Mosul, the rulers whom he served and admired, titled al-Tarikh al-Bahir fi al-Dawla al-Atabakiyya, a work valuable for the regional history of his homeland though written with evident sympathy for his patrons. In addition he produced an abridgment and reworking of an earlier dictionary of the genealogies and tribal affiliations of the Arabs, contributing to the science by which men traced their lineages and ascriptions.

The legacy of Ali ibn al-Athir has only grown with the passage of time. For later Muslim historians al-Kamil became a primary quarry, a work to be excerpted, continued, and relied upon; few who wrote universal histories after him could ignore it. In the modern age, when European and then global scholarship turned to the study of the Islamic Middle Ages, the Crusades, and the Mongol conquests, al-Kamil emerged as one of the single most important narrative sources for those great encounters. Historians of the Crusades depend upon his account for the Muslim perspective on the wars for the Holy Land, and historians of Central Asia and the Mongols treasure his contemporary testimony to the first onslaught. His biographical dictionary of the Companions remains in active scholarly and devotional use to this day.

What endures beyond the particular facts he preserved is the example of the man himself: a scholar who labored without seeking high office, who valued truth above flattery even when writing of the patrons he loved, who possessed the breadth of mind to attempt the history of the whole world and the discipline to bring it to completion, and who felt the sufferings of his people so keenly that he could scarcely bring himself to record them. In his careful sifting of testimony, his honesty about the limits of his knowledge, and his sense that history carries lessons for the living, Ibn al-Athir stands as a model of what the historian's vocation can be, a faithful steward of the memory of a civilization at one of its most testing hours.