al-Taʼṣīl al-Akhlāqī ladá al-Muʼarrikh al-ʻUmānī: al-Imām al-Sālimī Unmūdhajan - Rashīdī, ʻĀdil ibn Ḥamad ibn Saʻīd; al-Muʼtamar al-Duwalī al-Tāsiʻ bi-Mālīziyā: al-Dawr al-ʻUmānī fī Taʻzīz al-Akhlāq bayna al-Tanẓīr wa-al-Taṭbīq (2025) (Kuwālā Lumbūr) (Kuwālā Lumbūr : Markaz Dhākirat ʻUmān, 2025)
Imam al-Sālimī is among the most celebrated Omani historians and is best known for Tuḥfat al-Aʿyān fī Sīrat Ahl ʿUmān, a work he composed with care according to a particular method confined to Oman and its people without treating Oman's relations with others. Given the singularity of this book, Imam al-Sālimī held to an elevated ethical manner in which he drew the ethical pattern proper to the historian in treating historical events: standing as critic and counsellor in presenting narrations or historical difficulties, while maintaining neutrality in exposition and critical practice. A reader of Tuḥfat al-Aʿyān finds that al-Sālimī's method in accepting narrations, whether written or oral, moves between successive accumulation and then sifting — that is, criticism of those narrations with preference given to the soundest according to the standard he adopted and held to. The paper raises the ethical question of the historian's assumption of moral judgements concerning the fit between a historical event and ethical foundations, and the tension this creates with historical fidelity and detached transmission.
Permanent citation identifier: MHF-AKHLAQ2025-012.
Conference theme (in Arabic): المحور الثالث: الأخلاق النظرية.
Text in Arabic; title also romanized (ALA-LC); abstract and keywords in English.
Keywords: Nūr al-Dīn al-Sālimī; Omani historiography; Ethics of history; Tuḥfat al-Aʿyān; Historical criticism