First edition of Ockley’s ground-breaking history of the first three Rashidun Caliphs: Abu Bakr (r.632-34), Umar (r.634-44) and Uthman (r.644-56). It was the first English work on early Islamic history to make extensive use of texts by Muslim authors, and did much to transmit their learning to the reading public.
Ockley began his research on the Arab conquests at Cambridge, working from late texts by Christian authors. The foundation for the present work, however, was laid at the Bodleian, where he spent two six week spells of intense study in August 1701 and April/May 1706. It was there, among the Islamic manuscripts, that he discovered earlier histories detailing periods sketchily covered in European sources.
Later scholarship has proved some of the contributing manuscripts were not as early as Ockley had hoped, such as a copy of the Futuh al-Sham attributed to al-Waqidi (747-823), which, despite being dated 863, was actually copied around the time of the Crusades. Such mistakes were inevitable given the pioneering nature of Ockley’s work and the Futuh al-Sham remained a significant find, providing an Arab perspective on the conquests of Syria and Persia.
Ockley later wrote a second volume, published in 1718, continuing his account from the fourth Caliph, Ali (r.656-61), to the fifth Umayyad Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik (r.685-705). Though he was in a debtors’ prison at the time of its publication and passed away in 1720, the two volumes were highly influential. They helped to supersede the Medieval Christian view of Islamic history (and Islam more generally), and informed the work of historians such as Edward Gibbon, who recognised Ockley as “an original in every sense” (E. Gibbon, Autobiography, World’s Classics, n.d., p.32, quoted in the ODNB).
