Maslama b. Muḥārib: Umayyad Historian

The article analyses the literary remains of the Umayyad historian, Maslama b. Muḥārib, a great-grandson of Ziyād, the bastard brother of the caliph Muʿāwiya and early Umayyad governor. Counted as members of the Umayyad house, the Banū Ziyād were potentially subject to persecution by the new regime. During the later Marwānid caliphate, however, the family had no longer been involved in government and evidently took no active part in the resistance to the ʿAbbāsid government. Maslama, who must have been a leading member of the family at the time of the ʿAbbāsid conquest, became a collector of historical reports and a major informant of the Baṣran historians ʿAlī b. Muḥammad al-Madāʾinī and Abū ʿUbayda Maʿmar b. al-Muṯannā. Mainly interested in the history of his own family and of the Sufyānid branch of the Umayyad dynasty, he confined himself to aḫbār and did not collect or transmit ḥadīṯ.