Studies in the History and Culture of the Middle East are published as supplement to Der Islam founded in 1910 by Carl Heinrich Becker, an early practitioner of the modern study of Islam. The mission of the series is the study of past societies of the Middle East, their belief systems, and their underlying social and economic relations in their aim to cover the entire spectrum of the historically oriented humanities and social sciences.

Medieval Arab historiography is essentially a matter of compilation. Using the representative corpus of reports on the Zang uprising, Franz examines the compilation of chronicles in its three aspects: compiling (as a process of selecting, ordering and textualising material), compilation (the resultant individual text) and the process of compilations (as the succession of various stages in transmission). He develops comprehensive evaluative criteria and with them creates a basis for clear recognition of the significance of authorship, individuality of texts, and disciplinarity for the long neglected compilatory chronicle tradition. His emphasis on the tension between the kernel of the historic event and the intertextual redefinition of the subsequent records opens up a new perspective for the literary and historical investigation of the primary sources.

Autorentext

Kurt Franz ist Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter am Institut für Orientalistik der Universität Halle-Wittenberg.