Title: highly entertaining history
Product review: in reply to the claim that Tabari is almost as blasphemous as Rushdie, Professor Mohja Kahf drily remarked that its no surprise, since both are writers of fiction! Any historian who writes a couple of hundred years after the event and reports dialogue, witticisms and even facial expressions is obviously writing a lot of fiction, but fiction or not, its high drama, presented in vivid detail. one of these days, someone should do a translation without the long lists of "who reported to whom" (the isnad) because they do take away from the flow of the book. Tabari also makes no attempt at social analysis and has little to say about what the "common people" might have been doing and why, but his history is one of the prime sources for all the famous stories of islamic history and one can see why. well worth a read....
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