Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations and note on the dates
- Genealogical table: the line of the early ʿAbbāsid caliphs
- Chapter 1 Historical background and introduction
- Chapter 2 Hārūn al-Rashīd: where it all started or ended
- Chapter 3 Al-Amīn: the challenge of regicide in Islamic memory
- Chapter 4 Al-Maʾmūn: the heretic Caliph
- Chapter 5 The structure of civil war narratives
- Chapter 6 Al-Mutawakkil: an encore of the family tragedy
- Conclusion
- Select bibliography
- Index
Chapter 2 - Hārūn al-Rashīd: where it all started or ended
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 June 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations and note on the dates
- Genealogical table: the line of the early ʿAbbāsid caliphs
- Chapter 1 Historical background and introduction
- Chapter 2 Hārūn al-Rashīd: where it all started or ended
- Chapter 3 Al-Amīn: the challenge of regicide in Islamic memory
- Chapter 4 Al-Maʾmūn: the heretic Caliph
- Chapter 5 The structure of civil war narratives
- Chapter 6 Al-Mutawakkil: an encore of the family tragedy
- Conclusion
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
Few figures in world history have left as durable an impression on modern society as the caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd. Whereas the names of famous figures are usually associated with a specific achievement, era, or event, Hārūn's name is familiar enough without reference to either a chronological frame or an actual physical setting. His reign, as one publisher in the Victorian age wrote in trying to promote a biography of the caliph, “belongs to all time and no time,” an era idealized in later imagination to symbolize an age of fabulous prosperity, a resplendent court, and an Islamic empire whose realm stretched as far as the caliph desired. The name of the caliph has been so synonymous with the concept of a golden age of medieval Islamic civilization that his biographies have generally provided occasions for describing the origin of Islam, the spread of the Arab conquests under the Umayyads, and the sophistication of cultural life in Damascus and Baghdad, as well as in Cordoba.
Trying to sketch the line between myth and fact in the portrait of the caliph has long been a shadowy exercise, and generations of the caliph's admirers have generally, and probably intentionally, been content to let the ambiguity remain.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Reinterpreting Islamic HistoriographyHarun al-Rashid and the Narrative of the Abbasid Caliphate, pp. 17 - 58Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999