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Islamic Studies
Scholars who work on Islam's origins have long recognized that the reliability of the Islamic narrative sources for the history of early Islam represents a major problem. Tayeb El-Hibri has now written a detailed and important new contribution to this debate as it relates to the history of the so-called rashidun caliphs: Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, and Ali--with a kind of epilogue dealing briefly with Muawiya. Parable and Politics argues, for the most part convincingly, that the extensive reports about the rashidun caliphs found in the Islamic historiographical tradition are largely shaped by later--in particular, Abbasid period--narrators who succeeded in creating a coherent, unified story that frequently included allegories and other kinds of parallels. These parallels established associations (often implicit) between various individuals of the rashidun era and other people, including Muhammad and earlier prophets such as Abraham and Moses. As the author notes, "The story preserved in the early Islamic narratives was neither real in its details nor intended to be factual. Rather, it played with classical biblical imagery to communicate a parable on the folly of religious zealotry . . . the folly of political Puritanism . . . and the detrimental role that pride and heroism play in shaping certain religious conflictsâ[euro] (pp. 237-38).
El-Hibri describes the literary image of each of the rashidun by means of a very close reading of many individual reports, in which he elucidates both the political and religious axes that are being ground, and the specific parallels between various figures and their actions. Some of these close readings struck me as very revealing, and one comes away from the book with a much greater appreciation of the difficulty of using the narrative sources to understand "what actually...