Historical Sources of the Islamic World

The Arabic word ta’rikh derives from the root ’-r-kh which literally denotes ‘to date’ and figuratively implies ‘record the events and their dates.’ The latter sense was intended in entitling history books as Ta’rikh from the early second/eighth centuries which included the records of events and their dates. The term khabar had been formerly applied to such collections, though it was later applied to monographs, e.g. Hisham al-Kalbi’s Akhbar al-‘Abbas, and the term ta’rikh referred to recording the accounts of general events and their dates.

This volume includes the articles devoted to the historical sources, selected from the 16 hitherto published volumes of the Encyclopaedia of the World of Islam (EWI) which was originally compiled in Persian. Other entries from this encyclopaedia which are available in English include History and Historiography, Historians of the Isamic World, The Pahlavi Dynasty, Periodicals of the Muslim World, and Hawza-yi ‘Ilmiyya.