132 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 19:1 

Classical Arabic Biography: The Heirs of the 

Prophets in the Age of al-Ma'mun 

Michael Cooperson. 
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press� 2000. 196 pages. 

This outstanding study discusses the origins, development, and function of 

pre-modern Arabic biography through an examination of the biographies 
of four figures of the late second and early third Islamic centuries whose 
life stories have been contested in interesting ways: the Abbasid caliph al­

Ma 'mun (r. 198-218 AH/813-833 AC). [Chapter 2]; the Shi'ite imam · Ali 

al-Rid a ( d. 203 AH/818 AC) [Chapter 3, and an appendix on the circum­
stances of his death]; the renowned scholar of Hadith, Ahmad ibn Hanbal 
(d. 241 AH/855 AC).[Chapter 4]; and the ascetic Bishr al-Hafi (d.227 AHi 

842 A C). [Chapter 5]. These figures were chosen because they lived during 
the same period and their careers intertwined and overlapped, thus bring­

ing to the fore the contests over religious authority between the societal 
groups they represented. Although the caliph al-Ma'mun is famous for 

having appointed 'Ali al-Rida, his heir apparent, a move which has puz­
zled many historians, since he is also accused of murdering the Shi'ite 

imam. 

Ahmad ibn Hanbal's fame rests on his resistance to the Abbasid/ 

Mu· tazili Inquisition which al-Ma'mun inaugurated: despite imprisonment 
and flogging, he upheld the opinion that the Qur'an is eternal and not cre­

ated. Bishr al-Hafi, the famous barefoot ascetic, was trained as a Hadith 

specialist in his youth but gave it up for what he saw as a more moral life. 

The association of Bishr al-Hafi with lbn Hanbal, equally renowned for his 
religious scrupulousness, provides fertile ground for comments on the rel­

ative merits of the groups and religious approaches that they represent. 
Chapter 1, "The Development of the Genre," addressing the history of 

the biographical genre, argues, following Tarif Khalidi and against the tra­

ditionally accepted view, that biography did not originate as a by-product 

of the Hadith scholars' obsession with isnad criticism. Rather, it originated 
in the work of akhbaris or "collectors of reports," in essence the first histo­
rians of the Islamic period, who drew on pre-Islamic oral models, combin­

ing genealogies and name-lists with narrative material. Biographies, in 

Cooperson's view, are fundamentally intertextual: the reader naturally com­
pares the accounts in one biography with alternative versions presented in 
other texts. Each serves to mold and comment on the interpretation of oth-







Book Reviews 135 

graphical texts that have so often been used naively as unproblematic raw 
material for the writing of Islamic history. 

Devin Stewart, Chair 

Department of Middle Eastern Studies 
Emory Uoiversity 

Atlanta Georgia