Page:William Muir, Thomas Hunter Weir - The Caliphate; Its Rise, Decline, and Fall (1915).djvu/12

Rh "I have not been very strict, and possibly not always consistent, in the rendering of proper names. Received forms have ordinarily been adhered to."

The Third Edition, published in 1899, was a reprint of the Second, with occasional emendations throughout.

In the present edition, the system of transliteration which has been followed is that of the Royal Asiatic Society, with some modification, which has been adopted in the new Edition of Sir William Muir's Life of Moḥammad. A number of minute errors have been corrected, and it is hoped that few have escaped detection. The closer study of The Caliphate as well as of the Life leaves one with a strong impression of the Author's extreme accuracy in reproducing the statements of his authorities, as well as of the soundness of his judgment in weighing the evidence in support of two or more divergent accounts.

The Caliphate is based, as far as the Eastern side of the history goes, upon the Annals of Ibn al-Athīr, who lived and wrote at Mosul in the early part of the thirteenth century Sir William Muir read the work through and added a summary translation on the margin of his copy. Ibn al-Athīr's work is an epitome and continuation of that of the much older historian Ṭabari (d. 923 ), of which the publication has only been completed in recent years. The value of Ṭabari's work, again, lies in the fact that it consists almost wholly of citations from much older sources, some of which are nearly contemporary with the events recorded. All of these lived under the ʿAbbāsid dynasty, yet this fact does not appear to have prejudiced their results so much as one might expect. The Umeiyads are not, upon the whole, painted in much blacker colours than the ʿAbbāsids, nor are the defects of the latter suppressed. The worst feature of all, from our point of view, their inhuman cruelty and disregard of life, is common to both. It is generally upon theological grounds that the Caliphs are acquitted ‘or condemned; and the pictures of them which have come down to us are free from caricature and apparently true and fair.

Arabic history tends to be almost entirely anecdotal in character, and this no doubt helps one to picture to oneself the figures on the screen and the times in which