Reading Silence: Omission, ʻIbra, and Islamic Philosophy of History

The word ‘History’ conveys two meanings: an event that occurred in the past, and an account of that event and how it is represented in the works of historians.

Scholars often reserve the term historiography for the latter, namely, the writing of history and the assumptions that shape it. Much like these two meanings contained within a single term, the philosophical ideas surrounding history can also be broadly divided into two categories, particularly in modern historiographical traditions. One branch is termed either speculative or substantive philosophy of history. It focuses on past events and seeks to draw meaning from humanity’s collective endeavours. Moreover, it proposes patterns or universals within the flow of history and, at times, it attempts to offer teleological readings based on the same principle of universality. A second branch, critical philosophy of history, focuses on the concepts and methods of historical enquiry. It concerns itself with historiography, examining what historians write, how they justify their claims, and how historical narratives relate to the broader body of knowledge.¹ These categories have been formulated and debated most clearly within the modern Eurocentric and Anglophone discussions about the nature of history and historical knowledge.² At the same time, they raise an important question: can an Islamic philosophy of history be identified, and how does it operate in historical writing, particularly in medieval Islamic chronicles? Framing the issue in terms of ‘philosophy’ may seem anachronistic when applied to premodern Islamic sources. Yet the idea remains productive, because it draws attention to the aims and moral horizons that governed medieval Islamic histories and historiographies.

The present article suggests that these horizons are most visible not in what was recorded, but in what appears missing and left unsaid. It proposes that omissions and deliberate silences, which are frequent in Medieval Islamic chronicles, were not products of archival negligence, nor do they exemplify poor historical writing; rather, they were deliberate strategies of composition employed for moral, didactic, and practical reasons.

Islamic Historiography and Modern Conceptions

In his influential study on Islamic historiography, Chase F. Robinson notes that Islamic historiographic consciousness was created through what early Muslims in the eighth and ninth centuries chose to remember.³ Such selection became a defining element of their collective identity. Initially, this historical awareness, much like the ḥadīth tradition from which it originated, focused solely on the events following the Prophet Muhammad’s call to Prophethood at the age of forty. Those events became the starting point of the Islamic narrative, with an emphasis on the Medinan period. Over time, however, new challenges compelled Muslims to tell a fuller account of the past and to ‘tell the whole story’.⁴ As historical writing developed, this previously unremembered past was filled with legends, myths, conjectures, and other such fabrications. Robinson draws a parallel with the Christian Gospels, particularly the infancy narratives of Jesus, and suggests that theological aims shaped their composition.⁴ Despite the potentially absurd notion, by modern historical standards, that one can create history, Robinson argues that the process was not inherently cynical. Pedagogical purpose, rather than archival completeness, defined the enterprise. Historical events, according to the episteme of that age, were understood as instructive. Historiography served as the medium through which such lessons were conveyed. As Cicero put it, historia magistra vitae, history is life’s teacher.

While the veracity of Robinson’s claim about the inventive nature of Islamic historical tradition is debatable, his assertion that history, or collective memory, was written primarily to instruct and inspire is difficult to dismiss. Pedagogy, in other words, was not incidental to historical writing but central to its purpose. However, recognising this didactic function requires us to look beyond political motives as the only interpretation for silence. A historian may exclude or omit material for political or sectarian reasons, but such motives rarely exhaust the range of possible explanations. In fact, beyond pedagogy and ethical judgments, religious commitments and pragmatic reasons also shaped Muslim historians’ compositional choices. Frequently, the imperative to ‘teach’ compelled historians to omit reports not because they were politically ill-suited, but because they were morally irrelevant. They simply discarded events that failed to align with their broader worldview through which they interpreted the past and historical knowledge.

An example from modern historiographical debate helps clarify the assumptions that often underpin contemporary claims to historical knowledge. It also sharpens the contrast with medieval Muslim conceptions of history discussed below. G. R. Elton, a twentieth-century empiricist, is often taken as a representative voice within a dominant, objectivist strain of historical method, before the idealist and postmodern turns. For Elton and his peers, history was to be reconstructed and recovered from sources through the careful ordering of particulars drawn from documents. Later debates, particularly in the wake of the postmodern turn in historiography, have rendered this confidence in the transparency of archival documents and other sources increasingly contested. Yet the idea of a recoverable past, and the historian’s duty to transmit it accurately, still carries the weight of common sense. Elton captures the mood in a memorable formulation: “I may well be taken to believe that facts about the past are simple, discrete, knowable entities which need only be collected in order that a structure called history may emerge.”⁵ History, in his view, is absolute in principle and, to some extent, retrievable through sources.

In contrast, Islamic historiography operates on different premises. The Islamic historian-author engages with history as an interpreter, shaping the representation of the past not only through what he collects and records, but also through the arrangement and presentation of the material. The author also influences and guides the reader’s judgment. Omissions, selections, and narrative sequencing, therefore, function as constitutive strategies of historical writing. An illuminating example is provided by the renowned Ḥanbalī Baghdādī historian Ibn al-Jawzī and his universal chronicle, al-Muntazam fi ta’rikh al-mulük wa’l-umam (‘The Ordered History of Kings and Nations’). The title itself suggests arrangement as an authorial intervention, a point that becomes exceedingly clear when considering how this organisation can entail selection and omission.⁶

Ibn al-Jawzī and the Conceptual Omission

In his introduction, Ibn al-Jawzī outlines his methodology for chronicling history. He begins with a brief reflection on the value of historical knowledge. Human beings, he observes, seek to know their own beginnings and the origins of the world more broadly. Curiosity about the lives of kings and sages likewise draws readers to the past, and lends history much of its appeal. He then sketches the scope of his chronicle, from the origins of creation to his own day, and signals a form that combines biography with chronological arrangement. Within that frame, he states that he will include only unobjectionable and significant narrations, and those that do not offend when transmitted. He further asserts that he would exclude unprofitable reports that lack authenticity or practical benefit, and do not merit entry into the record.⁷

He then charges his fellow historians with blatantly and openly recording what should have been omitted. Ibn al-Jawzī complains that later historians have filled their volumes with reports that were best left unrecorded, including material that lacks authentication or remains too doubtful to warrant transmission. There are, he argues, stories that people of intellect may find objectionable, such as certain origin tales. He continues by pointing out that historians sometimes narrate accounts that have no merit or benefit. At times, they recount the conduct of rulers and kings who drink wine, commit adultery, and engage in other prohibited acts, making it difficult to redress or reproach them. Such reports, he warns, have damaging consequences whether accurate or fabricated. Furthermore, Ibn al-Jawzī writes with a clear expectation of his reader, which he articulates explicitly. Tales of vice, he suggests, breed compliance when people see rulers committing such acts.⁸ Historical narration, therefore, carries an implicit logic of emulation. His moral imperative does not allow him to record depravity that might become an excuse for moral abasement in the larger society.

The contrast between G.R. Elton and Ibn al-Jawzī appears clearest on this point. For Ibn al-Jawzī, the purpose of history outweighs simple archival accumulation and narrative reconstruction, however carefully such accumulation may be pursued. Ibn al-Jawzī’s remarks are explicit that reports may be excluded when they obstruct, rather than serve, the didactic ends of history. History, in this conception, is not an end in itself as some modern ideas about the discipline can sometimes imply. Rather, it is a means of cultivating moral discernment and, by extension, a properly ordered society. Omission, therefore, is not a failure of method, but one of the defining instruments.

Similarly, his caution about reports concerning a ruler’s moral failings is particularly revealing. If such reports are true, their circulation risks normalising vice, and if they are false, their circulation becomes a grave moral injury in its own right. Ibn al-Jawzī’s language resonates with the Qurʼānic condemnation of ishāʿat al–fawāḥish (إشاعة الفواحش), the spread of indecency, as articulated in Sūrat al-Nūr (Q 24:19). The verse explicitly enjoins, ‘Indeed those who love to see indecency spread among the believers will suffer a painful punishment in this life and the Hereafter.’ Conversely, if the allegations are unfounded, he aligns them with qadhf (قذف), the false accusation of adultery, which carries a prescribed punishment of eighty lashes in Qurʼānic law (Q 24:4). Moreover, Ibn al-Jawzī’s appeal to qadhf and ishāʿat al-fawāḥish is not merely rhetorical; it reflects the norms of Islamic law, in which speech itself can constitute a punishable moral act. In this frame, history is not treated as an autonomous discipline, but as a mode of writing whose parameters are constrained and, at points, dictated by legal and ethical obligations. Such reasoning situates omission within a distinct moral understanding. The pedagogical purpose remains central, but ethical constraint becomes equally decisive. Reports are not omitted only for political or sectarian expediency; they may also be excluded out of moral responsibility for what historical narration authorises, normalises, or harms.

Do such principles make Ibn al-Jawzī a bad historian, or render his information less reliable? A more plausible reading is that omission registers a worldview, even as it limits the narrative and occludes certain details. Robinson argues, in this context, that Muslim historians have often been subjected to intemperate and unwarranted censure.⁹ According to him, an awareness of the pitfalls of historical writing is evident throughout the tradition, including the unreliability of reports, exaggeration, and partisan bias. Moreover, conventions emerged to mark uncertainty and limit overclaiming. Formulae such as ‘as far as I can tell’, ‘according to what I have been told’, or ‘such is what is related, and God knows best’ are ubiquitous within the tradition.¹⁰

Such cautions and qualifying formulae do not weaken the idea that Muslim historians remained committed to a monotheistic horizon of meaning. Robinson’s broader implication is that many Muslim conventions of history were organised principally for illustrating the workings of the Divine Will rather than for causal explanation, as modern historiography often prioritises.¹¹ Ibn al-Jawzī’s agenda of omission, therefore, becomes intelligible not merely as a stylistic preference but as an epistemological stance. In the modern mindset, the accumulation of data is often viewed as a virtue; the more ‘history’ preserved, the better. However, the premodern Islamic worldview frequently prioritised the quality of knowledge over its sheer quantity. Within this framework, information is not neutral; it is judged by its utility for a person’s moral and spiritual life. Consequently, Ibn al-Jawzī did not view the past as a vacuum to be filled with every available fact, but as a space to be curated and organised. He judged certain episodes to be mere acts in time, lacking instructive import or ‘beneficial knowledge’, and thus failing to qualify as ‘history’ in his sense. For him, the past was recorded strictly for edification; any segment that failed to convey this result was simply not worth preserving. In this light, his silence represents not a subtraction of content, but an addition of meaning; by stripping away the distraction of triviality, he imbues the narrative with a moral clarity that raw data alone could never achieve.

Al-Muntaẓam fī taʾrīkh is presented as a universal history. Ibn al-Jawzī suggests that it should serve as a mirror for those who wish to view the world, yet he also insists that what did not occur has no place within the record. He states that he has selected only the best and purest akhbār and avoided what remains superfluous, trivial, or belittling. Omission, in other words, is justified as methodologically legitimate in his view and even necessary when reports fail to meet these standards. Such claims offer a window onto the implicit theory of history at work in premodern Islamic writing, where historiographical technique reveals what counts as the past worth knowing.¹²

The chronicle itself begins by providing proofs for God’s existence and an account of creation, including the earth, rivers, and mountains. It also treats the creation of metaphysical realities such as the heavens, hell, and angels, before turning to the lives of the prophets and other exemplary figures. Such an opening is neither novel nor unique to Islamic historiography. It reflects a view of history as the unfolding of God’s will and providential order, culminating in the advent of the Prophet Muhammad, Islam, and the Qurʼānic dispensation. After the Prophet’s birth, the narrative shifts from primarily biographical material to an annalistic mode, which Ibn al-Jawzī terminates in 574 A.H. Yet even a cursory glance suggests that the chronicle remains centred on Baghdād, the city in which Ibn al-Jawzī lived, taught, and died. In practice, therefore, the work functions less as a universal history than as a history of Baghdād presented in universal form.

Qurʼānic Orientation and Islamic Philosophy of History

Altogether, three commitments appear to organise and guide Ibn al-Jawzī’s historiographical practice and omission, and more broadly, Muslim historiography: a pedagogical ethic, a moral imperative, and a monotheistic worldview. The question then follows: where do these components originate, and how do they cohere into an Islamic philosophy of history? Zayd Aḥmad proposes that any account of an Islamic philosophy of history must be traced to the Qurʼān, the foundational source of knowledge and Islam’s governing episteme.¹³ Qurʼānic discourse is saturated with narratives and exempla, and their purpose is not merely to recount but to instruct. The concept of ʻibra (عبرة), plural ʿibar (عبر), denotes the lesson or admonition to be drawn from events. The term ʻibra appears in the Qurʼān six times as a noun, and at least once in the imperative form, iʿtabirū (اعتبروا). Qurʼānic exhortation directs readers to take ʻibra both from what is heard, such as transmitted accounts of the past, and from what is seen, such as the alternation of night and day and living creation, including al-anʿām, the cattle.

The pairing is significant. Lessons are to be derived from audition and perception alike. This places the narrated past and the observed present within a shared epistemic register. Historical knowledge, although mediated through report, is therefore not treated as epistemically inferior to the present. On the contrary, it can carry comparable weight as a source of instruction, which helps explain why history is so closely bound to pedagogy and moral evaluation in the Islamic tradition.

One Qurʼānic verse makes the relationship between history and the divine particularly explicit. In Sūrat Ṭā Hā (Q 20:99), in the wake of the account of the Prophet Mūsā, his people, and al-Sāmirī, the Qurʼān states: ‘Thus We relate to you, O Prophet, some of the stories of the past, and We have certainly granted you from Us a Reminder.’ The narrating agency here is divine. God-centredness is therefore not a later interpretive move, but is built into the Qurʼān’s own presentation of the past. When Allah is the teller of the story, the past is framed as the disclosure of divine will and judgement, and reception is directed towards remembrance and moral reflection, in the idiom of ʻibra and iʻtibār. Such a providential framing of history is not exclusive to premodern Islamic writing. In the contemporaneous Christian world, divine agency likewise served as the ultimate explanatory horizon for the past and for the moral order it was taken to disclose.

Ibn al-Athīr: the Methodological and Practical Omission

Beyond the theoretical grounds discussed, premodern Islamic historians also omitted material for practical reasons. Ibn al-Athīr, the Iraqi historian, remarks in his universal history, al-Kāmil fī al-ta’rikh (The Complete History) that some chroniclers burden their folios with details best left unrecorded, such as an increase of a raṭl (a unit of weight) in market prices, or the appointment of one person to an honour and the dismissal of another.¹⁴ Such examples, according to him, point to poor editorial judgement: not every occurrence warrants preservation simply because it occurred. Ibn al-Athīr writes within an Islamic frame; his is a ‘history from above’. He treats matters such as fluctuations in market value, or the fortunes of a single individual, as insufficient to bear explanatory weight or register as historical change.¹⁴ Writing within that frame does not imply automatic reliance on providence or an indifference to human agency. It reflects, rather, a judgement about scale. Factors that modern history might treat as constitutive of change, including what is sometimes termed ‘history from below’, are not granted priority, because they are not assumed to shape the wider moral and political order decisively. A sharper contrast, therefore, emerges between premodern Islamic and modern philosophies of history, particularly in their preferred scale of explanation. Premodern Islamic historiography often privileges general patterns, exemplary meaning, and morally legible outcomes within a monotheistic horizon, where Allāh’s governance furnishes the ultimate frame of intelligibility. Modern historiography, by contrast, more readily grants causal weight to the particular and the specific, and often locates historical change in local or individual variables.

Another practical reason for omission appears in Ibn al-Athīr’s remarks on the limits of historical compilation. He cautions that no chronicler can plausibly claim to encompass the entirety of the past, since it is not practicable for a scholar to remain in one place, such as al-Mosul, and still acquire reliable knowledge of what has occurred across the farthest reaches of the Mashriq and the Maghrib.¹⁵ He nevertheless adds that he has sought to assemble in his chronicle material not previously gathered, and especially not brought together within a single book. Constraints of time, travel, and access, therefore, become reasons for omission. However, such a methodological claim does not remove the problem of selection. No chronicle can record everything, but the admission of limits still leaves open the question of why certain reports were deemed worth recording while others were set aside. The immediate point, however, is narrower. Even where selection reflects judgement and bias, omission may also arise from practical constraints, including the temporal and logistical limits that shape what a historian can reasonably know.

Omission and Power

Does conceptual or methodological omission equate to accuracy or reliability? Certainly not. Not all Islamic histories offer faithful accounts of the past, and several traditions conflict with one another. Yet such tensions do not negate their value as sources. No historical product can be understood apart from the conditions of its production and reception. The Islamic past was largely written by Muslims and, in turn, read by Muslim audiences who sought moral instruction and the cultivation of a virtuous social order. The roots of this approach find deep resonance in a duʿāʾ recited daily by the Prophet Muhammadﷺ: 

اللَّهمَّ إنِّي أسأَلُكَ عِلمًا نافعًا، ورِزْقًا طيِّبًا، وعمَلًا مُتقَبَّلًا

 ‘O Allāh, I ask You for beneficial knowledge, unblemished provision, and deeds that are accepted.’

This invocation establishes a hierarchy of value in which knowledge is not pursued as an abstract accumulation of facts, but is weighed by its utility. ʿIlm nāfiʿ thus functions as a decisive epistemic criterion; it determines which historical reports are deemed worthy of preservation and which are discarded as distractions. Such dynamics are not unique to Islamic historiography, nor are they inherently deviant. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, in his work Silencing the Past, shows that silence operates even within secular frameworks and across multiple media of historical production. In his account, silences and omissions are shaped by power. Power enters the historical record not only at the level of explicit interpretation. It operates earlier, by shaping what can become a ‘historical fact’ in the first place, then what is preserved, what is later retrieved, and what eventually receives significance.¹⁶ Trouillot captures the point succinctly: ‘History is the fruit of Power, but power itself is never so transparent.’¹⁷ Power often obscures itself through what it leaves unsaid. Omission is one of its most effective instruments. Read in that light, omissions in Islamic historiography appear less dubious. The question shifts to the norms that authorise particular silences, whether they arise from constraint, power, bias, or a governing worldview.

Conclusion

Some contemporary views have treated Ibn Khaldūn’s Muqaddimah as the definitive statement of an Islamic philosophy of history, which is deserving of merit in its own right because it explicitly theorises method, errors in historiography, and the idea of historical change.¹⁸ Yet some sources examined here suggest that a philosophy of history was already operative before Ibn Khaldūn, even when it was not formalised as a ‘theory’. It becomes visible in the prefaces and compositional decisions of historians such as Ibn al-Jawzī and Ibn al-Athīr, where what counts as proper history is filtered through didactic aims, moral evaluation, monotheistic intelligibility, and also the practical temporal constraints. Silence is one of the primary sites where an Islamic philosophy of history can be reconstructed, because it discloses the criteria by which the past becomes worth knowing, worth transmitting, and worth using.

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Works Cited:

1. William H. Dray, Philosophy of History (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964), 1. [↩]
2. Jonas Ahlskog, “The Idea of a Philosophy of History,” Rethinking History 22, no. 1 (2018): 87, https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2017.1422305. [↩]
3. Chase F. Robinson, Islamic Historiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 11. [↩]
4. Chase F. Robinson, Islamic Historiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 12. [↩] [↩]
5. G. R. Elton, The Practice of History (New York: Thomas Y. Crowe of the material Company, 1967), 58. [↩]
6. For a discussion of how title wording in Islamic historiography signals historiographical intent and significance, see Konrad Hirschler’s study of medieval Arabic historical writing: Konrad Hirschler, Medieval Arabic Historiography: Authors as Actors (London: Routledge, 2006), 66–72. [↩]
7. Ibn al-Jawzī, al-Muntaẓam fī taʾrīkh al-mulūk wa’l-umam, vol. 1, ed. Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Qādir ʿAṭā (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyyah, 1992), 115-116. [↩]
8. Ibn al-Jawzī, al-Muntaẓam fī taʾrīkh al-mulūk wa’l-umam, vol. 1, ed. Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Qādir ʿAṭā (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyyah, 1992), 117a. [↩]
9. Chase F. Robinson, Islamic Historiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 143. [↩]
10. Chase F. Robinson, Islamic Historiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 144. [↩]
11. Chase F. Robinson, Islamic Historiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 149. [↩]
12. Ibn al-Jawzī, al-Muntaẓam, 118. [↩]
13. Zayd Aḥmad, “Muslim Philosophy of History,” in A Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography, ed. Aviezer Tucker (Wst Sussex, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2009), 438. [↩]
14. Ibn al-Athīr, al-Kāmil fī al-taʾrīkh, vol. 1, ed. Abū Fidāʾ ʿAbd Allāh al-Qāḍī (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1987.), 5. [↩] [↩]
15. Ibn al-Athīr, al-Kāmil fī al-taʾrīkh, vol. 1, ed. Abū Fidāʾ ʿAbd Allāh al-Qāḍī (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1987.), 6. [↩]
16. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 26. [↩]
17. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), xxiii. [↩]
18. Ibn Khaldun, An Arab Philosophy of History: Selections from the Prolegomena of History, trans. and arranged by Charles Issawi (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 1992), 19. [↩]