Reflecting on the Recommendation of Ibrahim Abbasi to Abu Muslim Khurasani in the Eve of the Abbasid Movement

As the advocates of the Abbasid movement prepared themselves in Khurasan for an overt struggle against umayyade government, Ibrahim Abbasi gave Abu Muslim his final recommendations, and urgently requested him to exert them in the chaotic political climate of his mission zone in order to change everything in favor of Abbasid dynasty. It is obvious that every text can make sense in a particular context and may also bear a particular purpose but what looks prominent in the recommendations of Abbasid Imam to Abu Muslim at first glance is the overt contradictions between some propositions as well as lack of logical and semantic coherence between them. This explicit contradiction, on the one hand, makes Abu Muslim treat Yemeni tribes leniently and approach them in a friendly manner, and dictates him, on the other hand, to eradicate any Arab-speaking person in Khurasan. The central question that motivated this paper is: How this contradiction evolved through time and how it can be fixed or eliminated? The findings of the current study, which are based on the content analysis of the Abbasid Imam’s recommendations, indicate that this contradiction could be the result of “spoonerism” in the syntactic structure of “insānan muriban”, which might have happened during the duplication process. It is worth mentioning that this structure is currently seen as “lisānan Arabiyyan” in the historical texts. It is worthy nothing that the correction and restoration of this contradiction to its original state can help eliminate this problem to a great extant. This will also give logical as well as semantic consistency to the propositions written in the Imam’s recommendations.