The Arabs And Islam In Late Antiquity

This study is a critique of Arabic textual sources for the history of the Arabs in late antique times, during the centuries immediately preceding Muhammad and up to and including the Umayyad period. Its purpose is to consider the value and relevance of these sources for the reconstruction of the social, political, cultural and religious history of the Arabs as they were still pagans, and to reconstruct the emergence of Muhammadan and immediately post-Muhammadan religion and polity. For this religion (including the composition and canonisation of the Qur'an), the label Paleo-Islam has been coined, in order to lend historical specificity to this particular period, distinguishing it from what came before and what was to come later, all the while indicating continuities that do not, in themselves, belie the specificity attributed to this period of very rapid change. This is argued further in Aziz Al-Azmeh's The Emergence of Islam in Late Antiquity: Allah and His People (Cambridge University Press, 2014), to which this book is both a companion and a technical preface. Al-Azmeh illustrates his arguments through examination of orality and literacy, transmission, ancient Arabic poetry, the corpus of Arab heroic lore (ayyam), the early narrative, the Qur'an, and other literary sources. The work includes a very extensive bibliography of the works cited. This is the first book in the Gerlach Press series Theories and Paradigms of Islamic Studies.

This book offers a number of innovative studies on the three main communities of the East Mediterranean lands--Muslims, Jews and Christians--in the aftermath of the seventh-century Arab conquests. It focuses principally on how the Christian majority were affected by and adapted to their loss of political power in such arenas as language use, identity construction, church building, pilgrimage, and the role of women. Attention is also paid to how the Muslim community defined itself, administered justice, and regulated relations with non-Muslims. This book will be important for anyone interested in the ways in which the cultures and traditions of the late antique Mediterranean world were transformed in the course of the seventh to tenth centuries by the establishment of the new Muslim political elite and the gradual emergence of an Islamic Empire.

"Based on a critical review of the relevant scholarship, and with the use of epigraphic and other material evidence as well as more traditional sources, this book presents a comprehensive and innovative reconstruction of the rise of Islam as a religion and imperial polity. It reassesses the development of the imperial monotheism of the New Rome, and the history of the Arabs as an integral part of Late Antiquity, including their ethnogenesis, and the emergence in this context of what was to become Muslim monotheism, which is compared with the emergence of other monotheisms from polytheistic systems. Topics discussed include the emergence and development of the Muhammadan polity and its new cultic deity, its associated ritual, the constitution of the Muslim canon, and the development of early Islam as an imperial religion. Intended principally for scholars of late antiquity, Islamic studies and the history of religions, the book opens up many novel directions for future research"--

Late Antique Responses to the Arab Conquests is a showcase of new discoveries in an exciting and rapidly developing field: the study of the transition from Late Antiquity to Early Islam. The Arab conquests are shown to have changed both the Arabian conquerors and the conquered.

In Between Empires Greg Fisher tackles the problem of pre-Islamic Arab identity by examining the relationship between the Roman Empire and the Empire of Sasanian Iran, and a selection of their Arab allies and neighbours, the Jafnids, Nasrids, and Hujrids. Fisher focuses on the last century before the emergence of Islam and stresses the importance of a Near East dominated by Rome and Iran for the formation of early concepts of Arab identity. In particular, he examines cultural and religious integration, political activities, and the role played by Arabic as factors in this process. He concludes that interface with the Roman Empire, in particular, played a key role in helping to lay the foundation for later concepts of Arab identity, and that the world of Late Antiquity is, as a result, of enduring interest in our understanding of what we now call the Middle East.

This collection brings together scholars from various disciplines and fields to consider Islamic revelation, with particular focus on the Qur'an. It provides a wide-ranging survey of the development and current state of Qur'anic studies in the Western academy, and shows how interest in the field has recently grown, how the ways in which it is cultivated have changed, how it has ramified, and how difficult it now is for any one scholar to keep abreast of it.

This book delves into the political and cultural developments of pre-Islamic Arabia, focusing on the religious attitudes of the inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula and its northern extension into the Syrian desert. Between the third and the seventh century, Arabia was on the edge of three great empires (Iran, Rome and Aksūm) and at the centre of a lucrative network of trade routes. Valentina Grasso offers an interpretative framework which contextualizes the choice of Arabian elites to become Jewish sympathisers and/or convert to Christianity and Islam by probing the mobilization of faith in the shaping of Arabian identities. For the first time the Arabians of the period are granted autonomy from marginalizing (mostly Western) narratives framing them as 'barbarians' inhabiting the fringes of Rome and Iran and/or deterministic analyses in which they are depicted retrospectively as exemplified by the Muslims' definition of the period as Jāhilīyah, 'ignorance'.

This volume reflects the huge upsurge of interest in the Near East and early Islam currently taking place among historians of late antiquity. At the same time, Islamicists and Qur'anic scholars are also increasingly seeking to place the life of Muhammad and the Qur'an in a late antique background. Averil Cameron, herself one of the leading scholars of late antiquity and Byzantium, has chosen eleven key articles that together give a rounded picture of the most important trends in late antique scholarship over the last decades, and provide a coherent context for the emergence of the new religion. A substantial introduction, with a detailed bibliography, surveys the present state of the field, as well as discussing some recent themes in Qur'anic and early Islamic scholarship from the point of view of a late antique historian. The volume also provides an invaluable introduction to recent scholarship, making clear the ferment of religious change that was taking place across the Near East before, during and after the lifetime of Muhammad. It will be essential reading for Islamicists and late antique students and scholars alike.