History Writing as an Inter-confessional Enterprise

Pre-modern history writing in Arabic is a remarkable genre not only for the sheer amount of works which have been preserved, but also for their sustained circulation among different religious communities. In spite of this, it remains under-researched in terms of critical editions, channels of transmission, centers of learning and scholarly networks. This issue of Quaderni di Studi Arabi sets out to address this gap by adopting a fresh perspective, focusing on inter-confessional and inter-cultural processes of circulation, reception, appropriation, adaptation and change. While history is often perceived as—and sometimes actually is—a divisive matter, especially in modern Middle East, this issue shows that it also operated as a common ground, a way to make sense of our shared experience as “beings-in-time.”