Rethinking Tabari's Narration of Zangian Movement: Narratology of the Battle of Sahib al-Zanj and al-Muwaffaq Billah Abbasi

The constructive role of historical narratives in shaping the identity of Muslims has urged historians to the ideological emplotment of the events of Islamic history. The Zangian movement is one of those events that not only became the subject of ideological narration by Muslim historians, but also was discarded as an abnormal part from the discoursal order of the Islamic world. Considering the damage that this narrative rejection has in our understanding of the nature of Islamic historiography and by using narratology and recognizing the discoursal order of the third century, the author tried to rethink Tabari's account of the Zangian movement and investigated the role Tabari's theological perspectives played in shaping his narrative of the battle of Sahib al-Zanj and Al-Muwaffaq Billah Abbasi. The application of this method led us to the conclusion that the weakness of the Abbasid caliphate, Turkish domination of power relations, religious and social conflicts, and the formation of independent governments were the most important components of the discoursal order that forced Tabari to introduce the Abbasid caliph as the foundation of Muslim unity and the return to its golden past. Thus, Tabari's traditionalist perspective and the application of techniques such as intervening narrator, elimination of Zangian's achievements, highlighting Al-Muwaffaq Billah's achievements, direct and value-judgmental description of Sahib al-Zanj's personality, and indirect and positive characterization of Al-Muwaffaq provided the ground for the consideration of Zangian movement as an abnormal event in the discoursal order of the Islamic world.