As of late there's been a mounting challenge to the reliability of the Islamic sources that describe the first Islamic century. For example, Lawrence Conrad's 1992 paper "The Conquest of Arwād" demonstrates that at least one episode in the history of aṭ-Ṭabarī, among the most reliable early Muslim historians, is hopelessly confused with respect to basic dates and locations. Similarly, some researchers suggest that the Muslim victory over the Persians in the Battle of Buwayb may never have happened at all.

The issue is that the first generation of Muslims appear not to have had much concern for writing down the amazing conquests they were doing. Fred Donner calls the Rāshidūn conquerors' outlook "markedly ahistorical," perhaps because they believed the Day of Judgment was imminent anyways.^1 So the early Muslim historians had to thread together disparate and disorganized accounts into a coherent narrative, inevitably unsuccessfully at times.

So it helps to look at non-Muslim histories from the period. First, let's look at the Maronite Chronicle, a late seventh-century year-by-year chronicle by Lebanese Christians, and what it has to say about the fourth caliph Ali.

ʻAlī also threatened to rise up against Muʻāwiya again. They struck him while he was praying at Ḥīra and killed him. Muʻāwiya went down to Ḥīra, the entire Arab army there gave him allegiance, and he went back to Damascus.

In the year 970 [659 c.e.]...

Since the discussion of events in 659 immediately follows the death of Ali, this work implies that the caliph was assassinated in 658 CE.

Meanwhile, the Armenian History Attributed to Sebeos, another seventh-century work, seems to imply that the Umayyads crushed Ali's loyalists and killed the caliph himself in the Battle of Siffin, which Islamic sources remember as a stalemate:

That prince who was in the region of Asorestan [Syria], their prince called Muawiya, was the second after their king [Uthman]. When he saw what had occurred [i.e. Uthman's assassination], he brought together his troops, went himself as well into the desert, slew that other king [Ali] whom they had installed, waged war with the army in the region of the Arabs [Iraq], and inflicted great slaughter on them. He returned very victoriously to Asorestan.

So what these two sources, far earlier than any Islamic one, suggest is that Ali may have died in 657 or 658. The First Fitna may not have ended with the death of Ali and Ḥasan's surrender shortly afterwards. Instead, Ḥasan—or Ḥusayn, who was already in his thirties—might have kept on the resistance for longer.

With that in mind, consider the most extensive Christian source. This is Theophilus of Edessa's History, a Syriac world history from the mid-eighth century which no longer survives in original form but has been quoted extensively by later Greek and Syriac chroniclers.

The Syriac historian Dionysius I Telmaharoyo transmits Theophilus's account thus:

On Ali’s death he was succeeded by his son al-Ḥasan, who was poisoned shortly afterwards and was succeeded in turn by al-Ḥusayn. These two sons of Ali were born of Fāṭimah, the daughter of Muhammad, the prophet of the Arabs.

Still the civil war was not over. Muʻāwiya did battle with al-Ḥusayn in the east and al-Ḥusayn's side lost. Most of the army and al-Ḥusayn himself were killed at a place called Karbala. Al-Ḥusayn was killed by Shamir, an Arab; but first he was tortured by thirst. The victors slaughtered most of the tribe and kin of Ali. They took their wives and children and tormented them beyond the limit of endurance. After this the only survivor in power was Muʻāwiya.

And the Greek source De Administrando Imperio, which is thought to preserve Theophilus better than Dionysius (who wrote in an Islamic milieu and probably mixed in Islamic sources with Syriac ones), also says:

On the death of Outhman, then, this Mauias succeeded to the rule of the Arabs. And he ruled over the holy city [of Christianity, i.e. Jerusalem] and the regions of Palestine, over Damascus and Antioch and all the cities of Egypt. But Alim, who was son-in-law of Mouameth, having married his daughter called Fatime, ruled over Ethribos [Yathrib, i.e. Medina] and all of Arabia Tracheia.

Now, in these days, Alim and Mauias were roused up to war against one another... [A description of the arbitration at the Battle of Siffin follows, in which De Administrando claims Ali effectively surrendered to Muʻāwiya.]

And so Alim took his army and departed to the region of Ethribos with all his kin, and there ended his life. After the death of Alim, his sons, regarding their father's counsel [i.e. decision to surrender] as nonsense, rebelled against Mauias, and joined fierce battle with Mauias, and being worsted, fled from before his face, and Mauias sent after and put them all to death. And thereafter the rule over all the Arabs came into the hands of Mauias.

So there's a good deal of early evidence that the Battle of Karbala occurred in around 660 CE, as part of the First Fitna between Ali and Muʻāwiya, and not in 680 as Muslim historians would remember. This also provides a neater explanation of some elements of the standard Islamic narrative, such as:

• Why was Ḥusayn so much on the sidelines during the peace treaty between Ḥasan and Muʻāwiya?

• Why did Ḥusayn have to make the risky desert journey from Mecca to Kūfa? If Ḥusayn had simply succeeded Ali in around 660, things work out better. His capital would have been at Kūfa anyways, and the siting of the battle at Karbala makes sense.

• Does the heat and thirst that so afflicted Ḥusayn and his loyal followers make more sense in October (Āshūrāʾ for AH 61) or May/June (Āshūrāʾ for AH 40)?

Historian James Howard-Johnston suggests that the most reasonable explanation is that Ḥasan did make peace with Muʻāwiya, as Muslim sources claim. But Ḥusayn refused his brother's surrender to an unjust ruler. (A memory of this may be echoed in aṭ-Ṭabarī's claim that Ḥusayn opposed the Ḥasan-Muʻāwiya peace treaty.) Ḥusayn continued the resistance with a small loyal following and was subsequently martyred at Karbala by Muʻāwiya's men, twenty years earlier than the Islamic sources claim.

Howard-Johnston says that both sides had motivations to move the dates of Ali's assassination and the massacre at Karbala:

It had the effect of connecting Muʻāwiya's final victory and reunification of the caliphate with the death of Ali. Ali dies and resistance collapses. This was a message which suited both sides. For the Alids, it established the vital link between the Prophet’s kin and the successful conduct of policy, thus strengthening their claims to rule. For Muʻāwiya, it helped to obliterate memories, individual and collective, of a long, hard-fought war to impose his authority on the caliphate.

The Christian sources are far from impeccable, of course. But there's still enough ground to question how true the standard Islamic narrative may be.

^1 If you read the Qurʼān, especially the earlier Meccan suwar, you'll note that there's a strong millenarian attitude.

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Primary sources in translation

• Maronite Chronicle: When Christians First Met Muslims A Sourcebook of the Earliest Syriac Writings on Islam (Penn 2015), pp. 54—61

• Pseudo-Sebeos: The Armenian History attributed to Sebeos (Thomson 1999)

• Dionysius: The Seventh Century in the West-Syrian Chronicles (Palmer 1993), pp. 111—221

• De Administrando Imperio: De Administrando Imperio (Jenkins 1967), pp. 92—97

Secondary sources

• Witnesses to a World Crisis: Historians and Histories of the Middle East in the Seventh Century (Howard-Johnston, 2010)