Having collaborated happily and fruitfully with others for many years—with Gregor Schoeler and the editors of the Library of Arabic Literature on Abū l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī’s Risālat al-ghufran (The Epistle of Forgiveness), with Emily Selove on Abū l-Muṭahhar al-Azdī’s Ḥikāyat Abī l-Qāsim al-Baghdādī (The Portrait of Abū l-Qāsim al-Baghdādī), with Emilie Savage-Smith and some six others on Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿah’s ʿUyūn al-anbāʾ (A Literary History of Medicine)—I deemed the time had come to work on some other text wholly, or almost wholly, by myself. This has obvious advantages and equally obvious disadvantages that need not be spelled out. Where some scholars (notably American ones) profusely thank scores of individuals (including extended family and sometimes pets) by name in their prefaces, forewords, and acknowledgements (once I counted 99 persons), I name only a handful. My wife, Sheila Ottway, read and corrected my English; Anna Livia Beelaert (Leiden), very helpfully tried to make sense of an obscure, garbled verse in some kind of Persian. During a brief visiting professorship at Leiden University I had the privilege and pleasure to contribute to a course for MA students designed and taught by Peter Webb, whose work on brigand poets (ṣaʿālīk, futtāk) naturally overlapped with mine on murderers and their victims.
It should not be necessary to justify the choice of Muḥammad ibn Ḥabīb’s book, written at some time in the middle of the ninth century. Murder is a perpetually fascinating subject. Ibn Ḥabīb’s entertaining book, although occasionally used by historians, is not very well known, even though it is among the earliest Arabic sources, and it has never been translated. It is full of interesting, often lively stories, replete with incident, oddities, pithy sayings, and poetry. Unencumbered by long, scholarly chains of authority, free of over-ornate language or tedious and tendentious moralising, it is a work of literature as well as of history.
I thank Kathy van Vliet-Leigh (Brill) for her encouragement since the moment I told her about my work on the book; Abdurraouf Oueslati (Brill) for pleasant and effective email contact; an anonymous reader for some useful suggestions; and Cas Van den Hof (TAT Zetwerk) for his expert and meticulous typesetting.
Geert Jan van Gelder
Haren, the Netherlands, December 2020
