ABSTRACT
How did such a high degree of similarity between the two books come about? Mashkour maintains, without giving specific reasons for this opinion, that al-Nawbakhti's work was known to Sa'd ibn 'AbdAllah when he was writing his book, and that he then supplemented it from other sources that al-Nawbakhti did not use.6 Indeed, the word-for-word similarity between the two works appears even in passages where al-Nawbakhti reports about contemporary circumstances, and most likely first hand. One encounters this, for instance, in the [38] section concerning the Qarma~Is, 7
also in part in the description of Imami doctrines after the death of the Imam al-~asan al-'AskarT. Thus we can assume that Sa'd ibn 'Abd Allah actually had access to al-Nawbakhti's book itself, not just to some of his sources. One reason for assuming that Sa'd's work is the later of the two is that it is unlikely that al-Nawbakhti would have published his work as an independent book if it could also have appeared as a shorter version, with only minor alterations, of his contemporary's work. The main reason is, however, contained in the detailed information both books offer on the contemporary situation of the Qarmatis. While al-Nawbakhti's book must, by reason of his own statements, be presumed to have been written before the year 286/899,8 Sa'd ibn 'AbdAllah's supplementary statements9
indicate that he wrote after this year. Where al-Nawbakhti says that the QarmatTs had "neither courage nor strength", Sa'd declares that this was so in the past. Now many Arabs had converted to their cause; they had thus become stronger and had "made their cause visible". He mentions their presence not only in the Sawad of al-Kiifa and in Yemen, but also in the "regions of the sea" (nawab-i l-bab-r), presumably al-Bal:trayn, al-Qatn, Oman, and in al-Yamama and the surrounding region. Thus we can assume that at least Abu Sa'Td al-Jannabi's conquest of al-A~sa in 286/899 preceded the composition of the book. It is unlikely that Abu Sa'id conquered al-Yam am a before 290/903.10 On the other hand, the fact that the book makes no mention of the Qarmati activities in Syria might suggest that the book was written before the rebellions broke out in that country, i.e. before 292/905.
