Al-Tabari, Tarikh al-Rusul wa'l-Muluk, The History of al-Tabari, Bibliotheca Persica translation series

Al-Tabari's Tarikh al-Rusul wa'l-Muluk (History of the Prophets and Kings), compiled in the early tenth century from earlier oral and written reports, is the most extensive connected narrative history of early Islam to survive, and the State University of New York Press's Bibliotheca Persica series, published in volumes from 1985 to 2007, makes it available in full scholarly English. Its strength is that it preserves multiple, sometimes conflicting, earlier accounts rather than smoothing them into one story, so a reader can see the sources behind the narrative. Its limit is that al-Tabari himself wrote nearly three centuries after the events of the early caliphate, drawing on chains of transmission of uneven reliability.