Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Ankara Universitesi Ilahiyat Fakultesi Dergisi, cilt.66, sa.2, ss.657-690, 2025 (Scopus, TRDizin)
al-Masʿūdī (d. 345/956) is a scholar whose extant works secured him substantial renown owing to both the richness of their content and the distinctive character of his methodological approach. His historiographical practice—marked by the inclusion of anecdotes pertaining to geography, climate, and the histories and social conditions of diverse peoples, as well as by his tendency to articulate in the introductory sections of his works the rationale, aims, and procedures underlying his project, and to engage in occasional analytical discussions—renders him an especially noteworthy figure. These features have elicited considerable attention within contemporary scholarship and earned him the approbation of modern researchers. At precisely this juncture, however, certain difficulties become apparent. When his entries in biographical dictionaries and the broader literary reception of his works are taken into account, al-Masʿūdī appears to have been neither widely recognized nor particularly influential. His relative invisibility among contemporaries and immediate successors gives rise to several questions and invites the possibility that the contemporary fascination with his oeuvre constitutes a divergence from the position he in fact occupied within the classical Islamic scholarly tradition. This study examines al-Masʿūdī’s presentation of the Umayyads in Murūj al-Ḏahab, taking into consideration the assumptions conventionally ascribed to the author. The analysis indicates that the methodological distinctiveness often presumed to lend originality to the work manifests itself only in a limited manner in the relevant section, whereas al-Masʿūdī’s selection of themes and subjects clearly differentiates him from other historiographical compositions. When the implications of this finding are subjected to scrutiny, it becomes evident that situating the work within the conceptual and literary framework of the adab tradition possesses the potential to resolve many of the attendant interpretive challenges. For adab—conceived not as a pursuit of exhaustive and deeply layered knowledge encompassing all dimensions of a given matter, but rather as an approach oriented toward the acquisition of instructive and entertaining information across a broad spectrum of topics—renders intelligible the prominence accorded in the Umayyad narrative of Murūj al-Ḏahab to curious incidents, pithy maxims, and concise dialogues, despite the conspicuous absence of extensive political, military, or administrative detail. Furthermore, identifying such an intellectual milieu introduces possibilities such as the likelihood that a mode of writing modern scholars regard as innovative may not have appeared particularly novel to its earliest audience, or that the work may have circulated primarily among literate readers outside the emerging class of formally trained scholars. Accordingly, this study considers the interpretive value of acknowledging al-Masʿūdī’s identity as an adīb—an overarching intellectual disposition that shaped the character of his historiography and geography—in order to more accurately assess his place within, and his contributions to, the broader Islamic scholarly tradition.