From ǧihād to diwān in two providential histories of Hispania/al-Andalus

From ǧihād to diwān in two providential histories of Hispania/al-Andalus
This paper examines two of the earliest histories of the conquest, one written in Latin and the other in Arabic, which offer variant perspectives. The author of the so-called Mozarabic Chronicle of 754 was writing for an audience who remembered the second wave of Muslim settlement in the 740s. The chronicler’s viewpoint is Christian, but it is not parochial, and locates his history of Hispania within the wider Mediterranean world. The brief account of the conquest in Ibn Ḥabīb’s universal History, written a century later, looks less promising, being mainly a collection of stories about the Table of Solomon and other wonders that the conquerors are said to have found in al-Andalus. Yet Ibn Ḥabīb was also a legal scholar who left judgements on ǧihād that help us to understand his perspective on the transition to Islamic rule.