Open Question
The Battle of Siffin and the Battle of the Camel are both remembered with specific traditional casualty figures, commonly around seventy thousand combined at Siffin alone, but those figures trace only to medieval chronicle compilations, chiefly al-Tabari drawing on Abu Mikhnaf, written under later dynasties with their own interest in the outcome. No modern historian has produced an independent whole-conflict synthesis to check them against.
What would resolve this A modern historian's critical, source-by-source reassessment of the casualty claims in al-Tabari and the other early narrative sources, of the kind Bar Kokhba and the Sikh-Mughal Wars have each already received on this atlas, weighing the chronicles' reliability rather than repeating their totals.
OpenEarly Islamic history; source criticism of the classical Arabic chronicle traditionWilferd Madelung, The Succession to Muhammad: A Study of the Early Caliphate
Cross-Tradition Connections
Question On
Madelung's standard modern account of the First Fitna narrates the Camel and Siffin without adopting a casualty total of his own.
Sources
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