The Suspicions of the Narrators Regarding the Falsification of Military Reality An Analytical Study of the Reasons Means and Intentions”A Historical Study of Methods Means and Objectives” (11-132AH)/(632-750AD)

The early Islamic era, following the death of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), witnessed a remarkable development in historical narrative writing. A group of narrators and writers, known as the early Akhbari narrators belonging to the Shi’a Akhbari school, addressed the events of that period. Their accounts revealed biases and interpretations linked to sectarian and political objectives, which influenced the framing of historical events. These biases often distorted historical truth, as seen in the events of Saqifa Bani Sa’ida, the Wars of Apostasy, and other incidents that will be discussed later in this research. Furthermore, most historical studies that critically examined these narratives failed to address the various methods and techniques employed by these Akhbaris. These methods often concealed political and sectarian motives, aiming to persuade readers, researchers, and writers of their own agendas through fabrication, misrepresentation, and the insertion of extraneous material. This manipulation of events was intended to falsify and distort certain narratives. Their use of scare tactics and misinterpretations of events to serve their purposes, along with their adoption of various methods to reinforce this—such as nitpicking the mistakes of the Companions and Followers at times and leveling accusations at others—as well as the contributions of their poets in crafting poems and their writers in producing forged books and letters intended to support historical events that suited their purposes, and their keenness to exploit the similarity in names of prominent historians, such as Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari, the leading scholar of Sunni Islam, and Muhammad ibn Jarir ibn Rustam Abu Ja’far al-Tabari, a leading figure among Shi’a scholars, to mislead the reader into believing in a single source, thus contributing to the creation of narratives and their attribution to others. From all of this, we can conclude the extent of the diversity and multiplicity of methods and approaches employed by these narrators in conveying historical accounts, and the degree of similarity and accuracy in their methods, a matter that should concern modern historians when studying historical narratives.