Inevitable End? Al-Amīn’s Death Narrated by al-Ṭabarī

Abstract

The violent end of a human life, especially when it is an end brought about by other human beings, can have an enormous effect on the remembering of events leading up to it as well as on the perception of the aftermath. The socalled War between Brothers is a well-known passage in al-Ṭabarī’s (d. 310/923) Annales that relates the conflict between the half-brothers al-Amīn (d. 198/813) and al-Ma ʾmūn (d. 218/833) over who would succeed their father, the caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd (d. 193/809), resulting in the assassination of then-caliph al‑Amīn in Baghdad in the year 198/813 by al-Ma ʾmūn’s troops. While the reader of this account already knows the outcome, it will be of interest to look closely at the various narrative elements, strategies, and dynamics employed to describe and analyze the last moments of al-Amīn’s life. The focus of this paper is to show how the unfolding of decision-making shapes the composition of this passage and how the end of the story, as well as of al-Amīn’s life, is presented as the result of earlier decisions.