Like many mediaeval Muslim historiographers before and after him, Ibn Aʿtham widely used a number of well-distinguishable narratological features for shaping his Kitāb al-futūḥ. Broadly speaking, they can be ascribed to two larger groups. The first and, from a historical point of view, theoretically more interesting, is made up of shorter or longer textual units used to designate sources the author employs. In short, we may label them isnāds, although, as we shall see below, the four categories gathered under this umbrella term do not in all instances fit the requirements of isnāds in the stricter sense of the term. The second, by and large, covers what has been labelled as literary forms in Albrecht Noth's ground-breaking study, including letters, speeches, and lists.

In this chapter, I will concentrate on the first category. The principal aim of the following investigation is to get a clearer picture of Ibn Aʿtham's use of his sources. At the first stage of this research, the critical text of the Kitāb al-futūḥ's first collective isnād (henceforth Isn 1), which introduces the book's first part comprising the ridda narrative, will be presented. This will be accompanied by an in-depth analysis of the isnād. Given the very intimate connection between the coverages of this and the other three collective isnāds (henceforth Isn 2, Isn 3, and Isn 4), it is also necessary to study the latter three properly as well. Therefore, a separate chapter (Chapter 7) is dedicated to Isn 2, Isn 3 and 4 in which, in addition to their critical editions, translations and commentaries, some general conclusions are formulated regarding the Kitāb al-futūḥ's possible sources.

Since this analysis revealed several problematic points in Isn 1, at the second stage, it seems prudent to double-check whether a comparative analysis of the text itself confirms the author's claim of using traditions harking back to the authorities named in Isn 1. To this end, the best-known and most often narrated ridda episode of the Kitāb al-futūḥ, namely Mālik b. Nuwayra's conflict with Khālid b. al-Walīd, was chosen for more in-depth scrutiny. Needless to say, I am fully aware that these small steps will not be sufficient to clarify the range of traditions to which Ibn Aʿtham might have had access and chose to include in his work.

Mónika Schönléber is a postdoctoral researcher at the Avicenna Institute of Middle Eastern Studies in Hungary. She studied History and Arabic and Islamic Studies at Pázmány Péter Catholic University (Budapest) and Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. She earned her PhD in Arabic and Islamic Studies from Georg- August-Universität Göttingen. Her primary research interests include early and classical Muslim historiography, the history of the late antique Middle East, and Arabic manuscript studies. She contributed to a Hungarian research project that published the library catalogue of Sultan Bayazit II, for which she edited and analysed the chapter on historical books (with A. Barati). Her professional experience also includes teaching Classical Arabic at Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest) and Pázmány Péter Catholic University.

Historically speaking, the turbulent events of the year after the death of Prophet Muḥammad turned out to be quite decisive in Islamic history. The political unity forged by Muḥammad under the aegis of the new religion he proclaimed was seriously challenged by the undetermined order of succession and the struggle of the tribes on the Arab Peninsula to cut their bonds of political allegiance created during the Prophet's lifetime (ridda). It is thus hardly surprising that later generations remembered these events, and with the rise of Arabic history writing, a series of historiographical compositions were dedicated to this topic. Although none of the original texts are known to have survived, the information they contained was presumably integrated into later, more comprehensive depictions of Muslim history. The Kitāb al-futūḥ is a good example of this principle.

As I will try to demonstrate in the second part of the present chapter as well as in section 6.4, Ibn Aʿtham's ridda narrative was treated by its author as a fairly independent unit within his book. Unfortunately, but typical for him, he did not reveal his sources on the events of the ridda wars to his readers in a straightforward manner, so in Chapter 5 we set out to explore them more systematically. But before doing so, in Chapter 4 we establish the broader context by recapitulating what we know of the lost topical monographs (section 4.1), some of which might have been available to him as well, and the parallel accounts on the same events known to us in slightly earlier, contemporaneous, and later comprehensive histories (section 4.2).

Chapter 1 introduced the seven manuscripts of the Kitāb al-futūḥ currently known and available to us for analysis and demonstrated that the editors of the Kitāb alfutūḥ’ s standard edition had excluded three of them: MSs Ankara, Milan, and Patna. Other problems emerge from the lacunae in the Arabic text, which the Ḥaydarābād editors filled with Mustawfī's Persian text. In general, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that despite important previous studies of the Kitāb al-futūḥ and more than one attempt to publish its text in parts or in full, the understanding of the process of its textual transmission remains insufficient. To be sure, the present work alone cannot fill this major gap by itself, not least because its focus is restricted to a selected part of the book. Although the present analysis is written with an eye on the entire work and thus attempts to consider parallel phenomena scattered throughout the book while studying certain features, detailed scrutiny of them remains a desideratum for further research. In any case, my main aim is to contribute to a better understanding of the issues selected for study in the first place and, thusly, the lessons to be learned from the remaining five manuscripts (that is, MSs Milan, Istanbul, Dublin, Birmingham, and Ankara) will be explored primarily to strengthen my conclusions and avoid misinterpretation as far as possible.

Although the book's main focus is the study of the ridda narrative preserved in two Arabic manuscripts, examining the remaining five copies is inevitable for more than one reason. First, the place of MSs Patna and Gotha within the Kitāb al-futūḥ's textual tradition cannot be ascertained without seeing its other components. Critical issues, such as the handling of poems in MSs Patna and Gotha, cannot be resolved without knowing the practices of the scribes who produced the other manuscripts. As we shall see, in this case, relying solely on MSs Patna and Gotha could lead to misjudgment, for which the conclusions can only be valid if they are based on the entire known corpus. Secondly, the study of the manuscript material can also give further pieces of information on the reception history of the text, which can hardly be explored solely on the basis of other, in this case, secondary sources.

Despite the fragmentary and contradictory nature of the available evidence, the events of the ridda have been recurrently scrutinised in modern historiography due to the centrality of the topic for the earliest Islamic history. Already the earliest historical representations of early Islamic history written in a positivistic manner in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries paid due attention to the topic and tried to establish the course of events, thereby fulfilling the Rankeian maxim of reconstructing the past ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen [ist]’. Yet the first single study of this theme dealing with it in a monograph was authored by Elias S. Shoufani (1932–2013) in the late 1960s and published in 1972. Shoufani's book was also conceived in the positivist spirit and, therefore, attempted to reconstruct the events based on the then-known Arabic sources and choose between their data by establishing their respective source value. Another detailed analysis of the ridda was conducted by Fred M. Donner for his fundamental evaluation of the early Islamic conquest. Besides Shoufani and Donner's volumes, the topic was mainly covered in studies devoted to single tribes and persons involved in the ridda, including Dale F. Eickelman's paper on Musaylima, Meir Jacob Kister's (1914–2010) studies on Musaylima and select aspects of the poetry related to the ridda, Ella Landau- Tasseron's studies on the Ṭayyiʾ and Tamīm, and Michael Lecker's articles on the Kinda. A common approach of the latter investigations was to make attempts at understanding the single conflicts through the motivations of the given leader(s) and tribal group(s) instead of focusing on the reconstruction of the actual events.

Another major step taken towards moving the scope of the analyses from historical reconstructions to the study of the texts in question as literary products was made by Albrecht Noth's influential Quellenkritische Studien (published in 1973). Among the primary themes (ursprüngliche Themen) established in his book, a prominent place was given to the theme of the ridda, the traditions of which were among the earliest of Muslim historical memory. Perhaps more importantly, Noth also placed a great emphasis on the formal elements, topoi, and schemata abundantly present in the historiographical compositions of early and classical Muslim history writing, including the ones providing ridda narratives.

The Athenian experience may help us to sharpen several decisive questions of our time: In what form do the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion that run through a group build a true society that is more than the sum of its disparate networks? Conversely, by what processes does a society come to tear itself apart, or even disintegrate? How do heterogeneous social arenas and temporalities coexist within it? Under what conditions should the fervor of exceptional situations be maintained without sinking into totalitarian unity? All these questions unfold with clarity in one quite singular moment of the history of Athens: the civil war of 404/3 BC.

This chapter takes as a starting point one of the great figures of the Athenian civil war: Archinus, a resistance fighter against the Thirty from the outset and the main architect of the reconciliation in 403. By a strange turn of events, Archinus endeavored to recast Athenian law and to mark the permanence of the community beyond the vicissitudes of the civil war. Archinus, a tireless promoter of a reunified city, managed to gather two groups around his project, which each presented symmetrical evolutions: on the one hand, all the democrats who, having fought against the Thirty, did not want to open the civic body to new entrants, even deserving ones; and on the other hand, all ‘those from the town’ who were ready to cooperate with the restored democracy, such as Rhinon, a fascinating political ‘weather vane’ who appears, in many respects, to have been Archinus’ alter ego in the oligarch camp. After violently opposing each other during the civil war, these men agreed to merge into a single chorus, dancing in step within a seemingly pacified city. However, this irenic vision must be put into perspective in view of the violent upheavals experienced during the reconciliation process. Far from being a foregone conclusion, reconciliation actually went hand in hand with the maintenance of a strong political conflict, as illustrated by an astonishing profusion of trials between 403 and 399, attested to both by numerous law court speeches and by extraordinary epigraphic sources (i.e. curses [katadesmoi] engraved on lead tablets and buried in the ground). These clashes clearly worked to the advantage of the ‘moderates’ on both sides, who succeeded, at the time, in winning before the Assembly and in the courts and, subsequently, in imposing their version of history in the city.

A speech by Isaeus allows us to observe in detail a family chorus caught up in the turmoil of the Athenian civil war. It is at its heart that the heroine of this chapter, Hegeso, lived for most of her life. “Hegeso (daughter) of Proxenus”: her name is engraved on a beautiful funerary monument located in the Kerameikos Cemetery. A woman alone, whose portrait is on display in a public space, without any male presence: It’s a rare enough occurrence that we may be tempted to think this stele is an exceptional document testifying to a particular form of recognition not of womankind, but of an individualized woman. However, this would be wrong. For the very name of Hegeso can only be established through interaction with the other funerary monuments nearby, and this tends to erase the singularity of her presence by confining her to the role of the model wife. Above all, Hegeso finds herself at the crossroads of a family feud between two branches of the family of Proxenus, her father, caught up in the events of 404/3. Far from constituting a zone of withdrawal and intimacy, families were rife with political conflicts. The memorial of Hegeso nevertheless exhibits the harmony of the family sphere in the form of two half-choruses singing in tune: the regulated game of exchanges from which marriage proceeds, as well as the regulated gender divisions within it. Celebrating the fixity and the permanence of family lineage, this portrayal masks, or staves off, political turbulence by presenting the oikos as existing in an unchanging temporal space: that of its cyclic reproduction from one generation to the next.

Around Nicomachus, the alleged son of a public slave, who became the collector and transcriber of the city’s laws, a group of men in the service of Athenian institutions takes shape. Radically distinct from that of the magistrates, their activity was well and truly outside the political field, as described in Plato’s Statesman. It brought together slaves and free men, whether they played the role of assistant to the archons or of undersecretaries to certain magistrates. Reading the prytany inscriptions suggests that, within it, the distinction between free men and slaves prevented the formation of a collective identity based on a specific skill and professional dignity. The chorus of bureaucrats that surrounds Nicomachus, in short, is only a mirage. Trapped by the city’s self-representation, such a reading would, however, be erroneous. It undoubtedly underestimates the existence of an administrative culture of which these men, whether they were free or slaves, could be the guardians, and about which our sources are admittedly tenuous. Above all, it ignores the opportunities public slaves were given to accede, if not during their lifetime, then possibly via the intermediary of descent, to the society of free men. Nicomachus, after all, was perhaps the son of a dēmosios, and, if this was the case, it allows us to suggest, on the one hand, that service to the city could lead some of these slaves to see their descendants acquire citizenship and, on the other hand, that citizenship could be acquired through the transmission of professional skills from father to son, which were put to service for the common good. Therefore, it is perhaps through the transmission, over several generations, of a skill used in the service of Athens that the chorus of the bureaucrats of the city came into being, which transcended the distinction between free men and slaves.