Historical Writing and Historians in Yemen

The importance of this book lies in the fact that it presents a systematic, scrutinizing, and foundational view of the reality of historical writing and the roles of its historians in Yemen during the Islamic era, especially during the Rasulid era. This view defines its characteristics, methods, styles, and forms, as well as the determinants that governed the structure of historical writing and the characteristics that distinguished the Yemeni school during that era from its counterparts in the Islamic world, in addition to the shortcomings it encountered. It then presents intellectual approaches to these details through studying examples of historians who carried the sword and the pen, reflecting these approaches. It also provides a research introduction to the relationship of the ruler with historical writing and with the historians of that era, and the problem of attributing books written to the ruler. The importance of this book also lies in the author’s attempt to classify the historians of that era into ranks and degrees of authorship according to the life, authorship, and functional style of each historian, in addition to clarifying the efforts of each historian in historical writing, and then presenting a detailed analytical view of the most prominent historians in the Rasulid era, namely Al-Baha’ Al-Jundi and Ali bin Al-Hasan Al-Khazraji. This view also includes the expressive and artistic structures of their most prominent works.