Abstract

122 BOOK REVIEWS of letters or epistles authored by the purported earliest leaders of the Ibādī community centred in Bas ra. As the editors themselves point out, however, “No early manuscripts of any of these texts are extant, and all the manuscripts on which the editors had to rely contain considerable corruption requiring emendation” (p. 1). This deserves note since these texts are assumed to date to the second/eighth century and yet all composite manuscripts from which these texts have been edited date from the late-eleventh/seventeenth century forward. The earliest date cited is 1102/1690 (p. 9) and the latest is 1299/1881 (p. 10). Leaving aside whether the texts themselves indeed date to the second/eighth century (and there is little reason to doubt that they do), this is a remarkable gap in time and it deserves consideration. First of all, it serves as evidence for the long-term preservation of Ibādī textual traditions and their tremendous value to the study of early Islamic history more generally. For example, the letters attributed to the early (and eponymous) Ibād  ī figure named ʿAbd Allāhb. Ibād  addressed to the Umayyad caliph ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Marwān (r.66/685-86/705), previously studied by M. Cook, J.