Hisham ibn al-Kalbi

Abu al-Mundhir Hisham ibn Muhammad ibn al-Sa'ib ibn Bishr al-Kalbi, more commonly known as Hishām ibn al-Kalbī and as Ibn al-Kalbi, was an early 8th-century Arab Muslim historian. Born in Kufa, he spent much of his life in Baghdad. Like his father, he collected information about the genealogies and history of the ancient Arabs. His genealogies are well-cited among Arabs, but Sunni scholars considered his hadith to be unreliable since he was Shia. Much of his work was preserved by al-Tabari.
Ibn al-Kalbi's most famous work is the Book of Idols (Kitab al-Asnam), which aims to document the veneration of idols and pagan sanctuaries in different regions and among different tribes in pre-Islamic Arabia. In this work, Hisham posited a genealogical link between Ishmael and the Islamic prophet Muhammad, and put forth the idea that all Arabs were descended from Ishmael. He relied heavily on the ancient oral traditions of the Arabs, but also quoted writers who had access to Biblical and Palmyrene sources. Hisham is also famous for preserving Abu Mikhnaf's work Maqtal al-Husayn which detailed the events of the Battle of Karbala in 680 based on eyewitness accounts, and was in turn preserved by al-Tabari. According to the of Ibn al-Nadim, he wrote 140 works. His account of the genealogies of the Arabs is continually quoted in the. He also wrote the Strain of Horses, which tries to document the history of the Arabian horse from 3000 BC to his own time.

Scholarship

In 1966, Werner Caskel compiled a two volume study of Ibn al-Kalbi's entitled Das genealogische Werk des Hisam Ibn Muhammad al Kalbi. It contains a prosopographic register of every individual mentioned in the genealogy in addition to more than three hundred genealogical tables based on the contents of the text.

Works

The Book of Idols
The Abundance of Genealogy/Kinship
The Strain of Horses