Lecturer: Hasan Hüseyin Güneş, Visiting Scholar at CMES, Harvard Unv./Associate professor at Bartın Unv. (affiliation at the date recorded)

Duration: 2 Hours 54 Minutes

Date Recorded: April 2024

Subject: The term “maqtal” originates from Arabic and denotes the place or time of a person’s killing. Initially used in early Arabic sources to record deaths resulting from battles or political turmoil, it later became a specialized term for compilations narrating incidents of killings. Since the era of the Prophet Muhammad, struggles related to Islam and assassinations arising from disagreements over the issue of the caliphate have been referred to as “maqtal” in reports (akhbār), history (tārīkh), and genealogy books (ansāb). Over time, this led to the writing of independent works under the name “maqtal” or its plural “maqātil.” The most significant example of this genre is Maqtal al-Hussain (d. 680 CE). The objective of this study is to conduct a historical investigation into the famous scholar and hadith compiler (muḥaddith) Abū Qāsim Sulaymān al-Ṭabarānī’s (d. 971) Maqtal of Imam Hussain, which falls within the tradition of the maqtal genre. This research will analyze the relationship between the narrators and the work, the historical context in which the author lived, and the transmissions concerning the Karbala incident during the Umayyad and Abbasid periods. The study aims to explore why al-Tabarānī chose not to include historical reports about the murder of Imam Hussain, despite the work being titled Maqtal of Hussain.