[6] The collecting of yet other hadiths that heaped praise on these ten early Muslims, known by now as al-ʿashara al-mubashsharūn, developed into an independent Sunni genre by the 12th–13th century.
[9] Although the term al-ʿashara al-mubashsharūn (sometimes also al-mubashshara,[1] both meaning 'the ten to whom glad tidings were given') itself dates from a period after the 9th century,[10] the list of ten as such already appears on an inscription made upon a plaster table which is thought to have belonged to the palace of Khalid al-Qasri, an Umayyad official who served as the governor of Iraq under Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik (r. 724–743).
[26] In this sense, the list of the ten mubashsharūn (which in its early versions also included Mu'awiya) may likewise have originated as a pro-Qurayshi or pro-Umayyad (the Ummayads also belonging to the Quraysh) tradition.
[2] The canonical list as recorded by these early Sunni authors only omitted the name of Mu'awiya, which was replaced either by the prophet Muhammad himself or by Abu Ubayda ibn al-Jarrah.
[27] Apart from that, the developing Sunni tradition represented by these 9th-century authors was happy to endorse a list of companions which did not only include the four Rashidun caliphs (the legitimacy of whose caliphate it supported against the Shi'is),[28] but also the names of all the major warring parties at the First Fitna (Uthman, Ali, Talha, Zubayr), who could thus be seen as absolved from the sins of civil war by Muhammad's promise of Paradise.
[29] In this literature, the concept of the ten mubashsharūn developed as a special form of praise for the closest of Muhammad's companions, the emulation of whom had always been a defining element of Sunnism.