Wa-bi-Rādhān mā bi-Rādhān...: The landed property of ʿAbdallāh ibn Masʿūd

What is it about?

Digitized text repositories (such as al-Jāmiʿ al-Kabīr, al-Maktaba al-Shāmila and Maktabat Ahl al-Bayt) open new horizons in the study of early Islamic history. By employing them it was found that ʿAbdallāh ibn Masʿūd had at least four courts, two in Kūfa and two in Medina, and at least two estates cultivated by share-croppers, one in Rādhān near Kūfa and another in Saylaḥīn near Qādisiyya. His situation is comparable to that of a member of the pre-Islamic Sassanian landed aristocracy of absentee landlords. He also had three households in three different places. The desire for control and worldly assets is human, and those who lack it never make it to the highest echelons of power. Put differently, hagiography should not be mistaken for historiography. Whether or not Ibn Masʿūd’s Rādhān should be linked with the Rādhānite Jewish merchants remains an open question.

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