Jews, Christians, and the Abode of Islam: Modern Scholarship, Medieval Realities 9780226471099

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Jews, Christians, and the Abode of Islam

jews, christians, and the ab ode of isl a m Modern Scholarship, Medieval Realities Jacob Lassner

The University of Chicago Press Chicago & London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2012 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2012. Paperback edition 2014 Printed in the United States of America 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14

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isbn-13: 978-0-226-47107-5 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-14318-7 (paper) isbn-13: 978-0-226-47109-9 (ebook) 10.7208/chicago/9780226471099.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lassner, Jacob. Jews, Christians, and the abode of Islam : modern scholarship, medieval realities / Jacob Lassner. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978-0-226-47107-5 (cloth : alkaline paper) isbn-10: 0-226-47107-1 (cloth : alkaline paper) 1. Islamic Empire—Ethnic relations—Religious aspects. 2. Jews—Islamic Empire—History. 3. Islam—Relations—Judaism. 4. Judaism— Relations—Islam. 5. Islam—Relations—Christianity. 6. Christianity and other religions— Islam. 7. Civilization, Medieval—Religious aspects. 8. Orientalism—History. 9. Islamic learning and scholarship—History. 10. East and West. I. Title. BP171.L37 2012 297.2⬘820902—dc23 2011032939 o This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Preface vii Acknowledgments xv A Preliminary Note xvii

pa rt one encountering the “other” Western Scholarship and the Foundations of Islamic Civilization 1 orientalists The Modern Quest for Muhammad and the Origins of Islamic Civilization / 3 2 rethinking isl amic origins / 26 3 “o ccidentalists” Engaging the Western “Other,” Medieval Perceptions, and Modern Realities / 61 4 the o c cidentalist resp onse to modern western schol arship / 86

pa rt t wo jews and christians The Reality of Being the “Other” in the Medieval Islamic World 5 the first encounter Muhammad and the Jews of Arabia / 131 6 perceiving the “other” Jews and Muslims in the Abode of Islam / 155 7 accommodating “others” Tolerance and Coercion in Medieval Islam / 175 8 medieval jewry in the orbit of isl am / 194 9 early muslim- christian encounters The Islamization of Christian Space / 217 10 muslims and christians Perceptions, Polemics, and Apologetics / 236 11 christians, muslims, and jews Cross-pollinations in Medieval Philosophy and Science / 258

Selected Bibliography 287 Index 301

Preface

This book examines the triangular relationship that defined and continues to define political and cultural interaction among the so-called Abrahamic faiths. As such, the story told in the pages that follow reflects both medieval realities and a modern scholarship, which shapes our understanding of the medieval milieu. At issue is how Jews, Christians, and Muslims perceived and accommodated one another’s society and culture as Islamic civilization took shape, beginning in the seventh century CE, and how the intellectual encounter between the modern West and traditional Muslims has led to divergent and often highly contentious understandings of a shared monotheist past. Hence, the subtitle: Modern Scholarship and Medieval Realities. The audience for this book includes specialists in Near Eastern history; other Islamicists; scholars of Medieval Europe; and colleagues in various disciplines of the humanities and social sciences. Above all, this work was written for intellectually curious readers outside the academy, the kinds of individuals who, given the current state of world affairs, desire to know more of the Islamic Near East without being exposed to polemics and overly tendentious analysis. With this broad readership in mind, I have embarked on a project that will meet the scholarly standards of experts in Near Eastern studies while at the same time being accessible to more general readers. As always, economic constraints dictate the size of a book. After much soul searching, I decided to forego compiling the hundreds of dense footnotes or endnotes that a number of specialists would have desired but that a broader reading public would find largely superfluous. I trust that readers familiar with my previous publications will have faith in my ability to navigate through the secondary literature and the difficult primary sources that serve as the scaffolding for the extended narrative that follows.

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One could say that, in many respects, this book is modestly conceived. It is not meant to be a comprehensive account of how interfaith relations in the medieval Near East were defined by law and social convention. Nor does it attempt to portray in full detail the actual condition of Jews and Christians living under Islamic rule. No single work on either of these two far-reaching subjects, let alone both combined, is actually doable, not by a solitary scholar, and probably not by several scholars working in tandem. The enormous learning required for examining the triangular relationship among the Abrahamic faiths and, more particularly, the lack of proper textual and material evidence for large periods and many regions of the medieval Islamic world can lead, at best, to an unbalanced picture. Put somewhat differently, modern historians attempting to recover the interrelated world of Jews, Christians, and Muslims may be seduced into regarding particular moments and historical venues as indicative of a universal condition. The preference here is for cautious claims and tentative conclusions. In the chapters below, readers are alerted, again and again, to the highly fragile evidence at our disposal and the manner in which it is used to interpret events of different times and historic sites. Seeking a proper format that avoids the pitfalls of history writ large, I have chosen a series of closely linked and reflective essays. Read together, these essays are designed to draw attention to interactions between medieval Jews, Christians, and Muslims, monotheists who embraced a common sacred history that broadly reflects what may be described for lack of a better term as the “biblical” milieu. As accounts of biblical persons and themes were marked by conflicting narratives in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions, they became the subject of contested interpretation. Mutual appreciation gave way to expressions of mutual antagonism, and the closely linked Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions encouraged feelings of suspicion and defensiveness. From the very outset of Islam, the embrace of similar and yet different monotheist concepts and religious practices, and the interlocking patterns of settlement that brought the descendants of Abraham into close daily contact, created competition among them for sacred space. That competition was perceived as a real and present danger for believers seeking to preserve their traditional way of life. Situated in the same watan or homeland, medieval Jews, Christians, and Muslims were well aware of the need to guard against external religious influences that might weaken their resolve and/or cause them to stray, if only inadvertently, from paths outlined by the official guardians of their faiths. In the worst scenario, there was the danger of apostasy, a worry more common among the formerly dominant Christians

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than the politically impotent Jews. Although forced conversion to Islam was rare, the psychic and economic advantages of embracing a Muslim faith not so dissimilar from one’s own were self-evident. For many Christians, the vast and rapid Muslim conquest was a sign that God had transferred his favor to Muhammad’s community. For Jews, the strict monotheism of the Muslims and the similarities between Jewish and Muslim practices might have served as an inducement for the faint hearted or opportunistic to opt in favor of conversion. Muslims were not so troubled by conversion to the older monotheistic faiths—an offense punishable by death. But diluting an authentic Islam by allowing the faithful to adopt seductive Jewish and Christian beliefs and practices was seen as a challenge by the more dour religious authorities. Each of the monotheist communities had to address problems presented by the very presence of the others. When examined closely, the medieval literature contra Islam is largely defensive, more reflective of apologia than formal polemics against the Muslims and their faith. Christian apologetic tracts are often written in Syriac; Jews wrote in Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic, languages unfamiliar to virtually all Muslims and written in scripts that Arab Muslims could not decipher. Moreover, these writings are sprinkled with skillfully crafted and deliberately vague allusions to ancient Jewish and Christian sources. The use of this circumspect—and, to Muslims, highly elusive if not inaccessible—language was intentional. Its purpose was to prevent defection within the Jewish and Christian communities to whom these texts were addressed without risking antagonistic responses from the ruling Muslim authorities. While the Muslim literature about Jews and Christians employs many of the same rhetorical strategies and linguistic flourishes, it tends as a rule to reflect a greater degree of self-confidence, as one might expect from a religious community that enjoyed the full backing of the state and, until modern times, withstood the challenge of all external forces. In sum, Muslim writings about Jews and Christians tend to be less apologetic and more forcefully polemical in nature. It is reasonable to assume that the intended audience for these polemical missives consisted not only of Muslims but also of learned Jews and Christians, as well as recent converts from those faiths. As many Jews and Christians were familiar with literary Arabic, they would have had little if any difficulty ferreting out the Muslim arguments on behalf of Muhammad and Islam. Needless to say, Jews and Christians remaining loyal to their faiths would have been inclined to resist Muslim claims and respond accordingly. Hence, the cycle of polemics and apologetics was ongoing while, in daily life, the Abrahamic peoples found ways to accommodate each other’s presence.

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The overriding question is: how in a climate of religious competition, and at times even hostility, did the three monotheist faiths perceive and relate to each other? The question is more easily formulated than answered, as there can be a huge disparity between perceptions of the “other” obtained from a wide variety of medieval literary and legal sources and the actual conduct of daily relations, which, as we noted, varied in different places and in different eras. One has always to pay careful attention to the social and political status of Jews and Christians in the Abode of Islam, but, whenever possible, one should balance the literary and legal materials with sources describing life as it was actually lived. We now have at our disposal an extensive cache of revealing documents and private letters, thousands of texts and fragments of texts that portray daily life in the Mediterranean region and over several centuries, with particular emphasis on the eleventh through thirteenth. A meticulous examination of this material continues to produce echoes of a real history that is fixed in time and place. Currently, a number of dedicated scholars are piecing together the fragments, deciphering the scripts, and analyzing the language in which these texts are written. These sources, collectively known as the Cairo Geniza, after a synagogue storeroom (geniza) in which they were discovered, reflect Jewish communities throughout the Mediterranean region and beyond, but they bear dramatic witness as well to the contemporaneous worlds of Christians and Muslims. With the aid of the Geniza, we are able to draw, as never before, a reasonably detailed picture of interfaith relations that covers many centuries and encompasses an extremely broad geographical landscape. The stakes in drawing this picture of a multicultural society extend beyond antiquarian interests. Current events call for a reexamination of what medieval Muslims meant when they spoke of “tolerance” and of how that abstract concept played out in the real world of Muslims, Christians, and Jews. Above all, we are obliged to ask what a more informed picture of the relationships among the Abrahamic religions in the medieval Islamic world might mean for the highly contentious global environment of today. The current revival of Islam demands a more historically rooted and nuanced response from both its critics and sympathizers in the West, particularly those with access to the media that so profoundly shape public opinion. In similar fashion, truly informed self-reflection might help contemporary Muslims better understand the foreign cultures they feel threaten the foundations of their traditional institutions, beliefs, and practices. These essays also speak to noteworthy issues of decidedly less political importance. I refer to the transfer and absorption of cultural artifacts among

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Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the medieval Near East and to the remarkable crosspollination of ideas that characterized intellectual life in the heyday of Islamic civilization. This too is a subject that gives rise to questions that are easily formulated but that often elude any semblance of an informed answer. The rules that govern cultural borrowing, particularly among closely linked communities like those of the Abrahamic faiths, are rarely if ever clearly articulated by medieval witnesses, and therefore have to be intuited from the very difficult sources currently at our disposal. Based on these texts, we can say with assurance that Muslims took a great interest in the other monotheist faiths just as they did in the science and philosophy of the so-called “ancients.” Indeed, medieval Muslims not only echoed various elements of Jewish and Christian writings, they knowingly or unknowingly borrowed from their institutional structures and even embraced certain ritual practices of their fellow monotheists, at times to the discomfort of the more conservative Muslim religious authorities. While much of what was borrowed was, so to speak, Islamicized, elements of the Muslim religious establishment looked with great disfavor upon Islam’s engagement with Jewish and Christian culture. There was, in fact, an ongoing debate among medieval Muslims as to the advantages and disadvantages of studying with or even about the monotheist minorities. The reverse was also true of Christians, and especially Jews who borrowed from Muslims and then put their own particular stamp on what had been a Muslim cultural artifact. In certain instances, what Muslims borrowed from Jews and adapted for their own purposes made its way back into Jewish tradition by way of a commonly shared folklore and/or religious practice. To be sure, all this makes the larger question of cultural borrowing in the Islamic Middle Ages exceedingly complex and, as a result, all the more interesting for modern scholars in a wide range of disciplines. The process of cultural borrowing among the Abrahamic faiths has become a rather dicey business of late. The current Western academy is given to considerable soul searching about interrogating other cultures. In the past, Jewish and Christian scholars, known as orientalists, often carried with them the cultural and intellectual baggage of their upbringing. Learned men of the Western academy exposed to the sacred texts of their respective religious traditions thus sought to trace the roots of typical Islamic institutions, religious practices, and intellectual pursuits back to the communities of their Jewish and Christian ancestors. In premodern times, some Christian clerics portrayed Islam as a perversion of Christianity or, in the case of Jewish scholars, the invention of wayward Jewish converts. Following the European Enlight-

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enment, others, more charitably but no less critically, declared Islam to be a highly derivative and less sublime version of a true monotheist faith. Despite such apparent condescension, modern orientalists increasingly found much to admire in Islamic civilization. This was particularly true of Jewish scholars reacting to historic Christian anti-Jewish attitudes, even as they experienced the exhilaration of budding political and social emancipation under liberal regimes of the West. For the better part of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Jewish scholars tended to express a more enlightened view than did most Christians of Islam and Muslim achievements. Over time, the European discovery of Islam, and particularly of medieval Islam, became a subject of “scientific” rather than polemical enquiry. The new focus represented a sea change in attitude. And yet, the manner in which Jews and Christians, educated in the orientalist tradition and its later manifestations, viewed Islam and the Muslims has given rise to spirited debate in both the West and the Islamic world. At issue is the right of nonbelievers to set a scholarly agenda that might prove offensive to various elements of a religious community that now numbers over a billion souls. Questions have been raised about Western scholarship and the manner in which it was said to shape the political agendas of imperialist and colonial powers. There have even been accusations that the Western academy has robbed Muslims of the ability to define themselves and their own civilization by insisting that the scholarly norms of the West transcend those of traditional Muslims. These charges are not limited to Muslims taking umbrage at the West and its presumed arrogance. A good deal of the antiorientalist criticism is lodged by non-Muslims, including individuals who do not stem from the Arab or larger Islamic world. Because it has found a secure niche in current scholarly discourse, that challenge to Western scholarship is not an issue that can be easily ignored, if at all. As a result, I have chosen to present readers with two sets of interrelated essays: the first deals with the modern encounter of Jewish and Christian scholars with the formation of the Islamic world. The second is concerned with the direct encounter of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the medieval environment. The initial series of essays, labeled “Encountering the ‘Other’: Western Scholarship and the Foundations of Islamic Civilization,” consists of four chapters. The first begins by briefly traveling over familiar ground; namely, the interest of the Latin West in seeking knowledge of the Islamic East for both polemical and practical purposes. Following a fleeting survey of the premodern period, the chapter turns to less familiar concerns and in greater detail. Here, the focus is on the development of a modern orientalist

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scholarship that jettisoned much of its polemical baggage in interrogating the origins of Islam and Islamic civilization, an endeavor led in large part by nineteenth-century Jewish scholars who had gained entry into the European academy. A second chapter, titled “Rethinking Islamic Origins,” deals with subsequent research and scholarship that has widened our understanding of Islamic origins and has presented responsible scholars with new conceptual tools to revisit old problems. Finally, there are two chapters that deal with the contributions of orientalists to recovering an Islamic past that had for centuries been ignored by Muslims, and the critical response of Muslims and their sympathizers to what they regard as the distortions of orientalist scholarship and the manner in which it has been employed to further the political aims of the Western powers and their surrogates. The second part of the book deals with the medieval encounter among Jews, Christians, and Muslims in a series of seven studies under the rubric “The Reality of Being the ‘Other’ in the Medieval Islamic World.” Among the various subjects is a reexamination of the encounter between the Prophet Muhammad and the Jewish tribes of Arabia, the formative moment in Jewish-Muslim relations, which resonates powerfully even today. Readers are then urged to reflect on the manner in which Jews and Muslims perceived one another; the much misunderstood concept of “tolerance” in discussing medieval Islam; and medieval Jewry in the orbit of Islam, with particular reference to legal status and social and cultural interaction. As for Christians and Muslims, there is a discussion of the Islamization of Christian space, especially in sites regarded as holy by both Muslims and Christians; and an analysis of the polemics and apologetics that shaped how both Christian and Muslim religious communities perceived one another. The book concludes with the role of all three monotheist communities in the lively intellectual life of the Middle Ages, a remarkable scholarly engagement that gave rise to crosspollinations in philosophy and science that were to have a profound effect in the Latin West as well as in the Islamic world.

Acknowledgments

Authors of scholarly books often feel obliged to produce an extended list of individuals to whom they owe a considerable intellectual debt. Although this broad-ranging book engages generations of scholarship, including conversations with numerous colleagues past and present, I have chosen, with some reluctance, to forego formulating such a list as it would have been exceedingly long, and paring it would have been a disservice to unmentioned friends and associates. That said, I must confess I could not have written the chapter on Islamic philosophy and science without the help of David Reisman, even though we agreed to disagree on questions of medieval patronage. In the same fashion, informed readers will recognize my great debt to Sidney Griffith in the chapter on Christian-Muslim polemics. Last but not least, I am compelled to call attention to those individuals who in one way or another profoundly shaped my embrace of Near Eastern history: my Doktorvater Franz Rosenthal, S. D. Goitein, David Ayalon, Bernard Lewis, and M. J. Kister, all of whom served as models of scholarly integrity. I feel exceedingly humbled by the immense shadow cast by these prodigiously learned individuals and ever so grateful to have been the recipient of their intellectual generosity. Although all of these mentors save one are now conducting their seminars in the celestial academy, I still feel their immediate presence, and as with the last of the group, I find myself constantly measuring my words against what I imagine to be their high expectations. With all due respect to rabbotei and morei, I can truthfully say no single person has had a more profound influence on my writing than my most objective reader and critic, my wife Phyllis, a distinguished scholar in her own right, who has always managed to make my projects a lengthier process than I thought necessary. She has an uncanny knack of asking the most pene-

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trating questions and filtering my historical interests and insights through her searching literary lens. I eagerly anticipate the day when my grandchildren, aged ten, eight, and five, will discover that their “Zeide” is not necessarily the font of all wisdom, and will in turn expand the ranks of the family critics and advisors.

A Preliminary Note

Readers will observe references in this book to the “Orient,” and more frequently to “Oriental studies” and “orientalists.” Although these venerable labels have fallen into disuse over the last half century or so—particularly in the United States—any study that attempts to trace the development of modern Western interest in the Islamic world and the Muslim reaction to that interest must of necessity refer to these shopworn terms. The Orient for several centuries denoted the geographic land mass that contained the world of the Arabs, Ottoman Turks, Persians, peoples of Central Asia, and the subcontinent of India, as well as those of Southeast Asia and the Far East. Oriental studies referred to an engagement with the languages and civilizations of these regions. Orientalists in turn were specialists who, having mastered these languages and acquired knowledge of these civilizations, were ordinarily given teaching or research positions in schools, departments, or institutes of Oriental Studies. The rapid growth of scholarly societies devoted to specific disciplines, which accelerated in the nineteenth century, led to organizations such as the American Oriental Society and its European counterparts, bodies of learned individuals with more or less common interests drawn from national universities and beyond. A plethora of scholarly journals bearing some variation of the word Oriental or Orient has been published on a regular basis beginning in the eighteenth century; an international congress of orientalists was founded in 1873. Like the Olympic Games, the international conclave has been scheduled to meet at regular intervals, although at given times circumstances have made travel and interaction between the representatives of different nations impossible. The explosion of knowledge and the rapid expansion of interest in the non-Western world following World War II, especially in the United States,

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led to the creation of more narrowly defined disciplines and with that the splintering of traditional departments. As the term Oriental was also said to carry a pejorative meaning reflecting the inferiority of a despotic and timebound “Orient” to an enlightened and dynamic “West” (at least that was and continues to be a widespread perception among critics of Oriental studies in the United States), it was only a matter of time until university departments of Oriental studies in America were subdivided into those of Indic studies; Near or Middle Eastern studies; as well as Far Eastern or East Asian studies. Similarly, the international Orientalist congress took on a new and lengthy name so vague as to seemingly defy explanation. With increased specialization, the methods by which the academic world broached what had been collectively known as the Orient changed dramatically. As regards the Islamic Near East, the changes have often yielded impressive results, but the reverse has also been true as meandering theoretical discussions and novel techniques for collecting, sorting, and analyzing data have at times displaced painstaking analysis based on close readings of original sources. Certainly, the growing interest in the Islamic Near East has changed the way we look at the formation of Islamic civilization, and, linked to that, it has altered our assessment of Muslims, Jews, and Christians interacting with one another during the heyday of Islam. This triangular relationship among the so-called Abrahamic faiths in the Islamic Middle Ages is the primary focus of the pages that follow, along with the manner in which modern Jewish and Christian views of Islam occasion reactions from Muslims who have become the objects of Western scholarly curiosity and, not the least, Western political concerns. I have chosen to transliterate Arabic and Hebrew terms as simply as possible; that is, without various diacritical marks, as that would have greatly added to the labor of the editor and the cost of the book. I have also retained the standard westernized spelling of various Islamic names because that is how these names often appear in print and in library catalogues.

part one

e n c ou n te rin g the “ oth e r” Western Scholarship and the Foundations of Islamic Civilization

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Orientalists The Modern Quest for Muhammad and the Origins of Islamic Civilization

By all accounts, the origins of Islam can be traced to the seventh century CE when Muhammad ibn ‘Abdallah (d. 632), an Arab of Meccan origins, declared himself to be the messenger of God. To be more precise, the Qurayshite tribesman, from the Hijaz region of West Arabia, claimed he was the last of a long chain of monotheist prophets, most of them figures well known from biblical tradition. As Muslim scripture puts it, he was “the Seal of the Prophets” (khatam al-nabiyin). Later Muslim commentary expanded that descriptive label to include sayyid al-anbiya’ “the Lord [that is most noble] of the Prophets.” In such fashion, Muslims claimed for Muhammad a status that transcended that of Moses as well as Jesus. Despite his dramatic claim to religious preeminence, Muhammad was initially rejected, along with his message, by the overwhelming majority of his idol-worshipping kinsmen. In order to pursue his calling, the self-declared prophet was compelled to abandon his native Mecca for a more compatible environment, ultimately relocating with a group of followers at a nearby oasis called Yathrib, but more commonly known to all as Medina, “the administrative center [of the Prophet].” There, together with a group of diverse adherents, he overcame opposition among the local converts to Islam; exiled the resident Jewish tribes who refused to accept his religious calling and who took up arms against him; exterminated those Jews who allegedly colluded with his foes; and established the foundations of a religious/political community broadly linked by belief, practice, and shared history to Judaism and Christianity. In theory, this community, known in Arabic as the ummah, made no distinctions as to tribal, ethnic, or linguistic affiliation. By the simple act of embracing the one and only God of Heaven and testifying to the legitimacy of Muhammad’s status as Messenger of that God, any individual or societal 3

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group was given equal standing within the community of the faithful. Religion had, in effect, replaced ties of tribal kinship as the cement that would bind the nascent and all-inclusive Islamic polity. This view of the ummah may have been more idealized than real, but it was—and continues to be until this very day—a powerful, if not indeed the most powerful, unifying force among diverse groups of Muslims, especially in relation to the nonMuslim world. The community founded by Muhammad eventually spread its political influence well beyond the Hijaz as the Prophet established relations with tribal leaders in various regions of the peninsula. By the year of his death, he was able to defeat the last of his Jewish adversaries; arrange a triumphant return to Mecca; and undertake diplomatic initiatives in all of Arabia. After the Prophet’s death, his successor Abu Bakr dispatched armies throughout the so-called “Island of the Arabs,” forcing its varied inhabitants to recognize the hegemony of the Muslim authorities situated in Medina. Soon after most Arabia was united in faith, large numbers of Muslim Arab tribesmen crossed the frontiers separating Arabia from the adjoining lands, initiating thereby the conquest that would eventually make Islam the dominant religion of a vast territorial expanse in the Near East and beyond. By the first quarter of the eighth century, Muslim dynasts ruled territories ranging from eastern Iran to the Iberian Peninsula. By the end of the century, Muslim influence extended beyond the Oxus River into Central Asia. The geographical terrain of Islamic rule and the political influence of those who governed on behalf of the new faith had come to rival that of the earlier Roman Empire, and, like the rise of imperial Rome, the expansion and growth of Islam was a dramatic achievement that changed the course of history. Vast areas of the Christian world along the southern rim of the Mediterranean and in the Fertile Crescent, that arc of territory from the borders of Egypt to the lands of ancient Mesopotamia, succumbed first to the initial Muslim invasion. Then in the 670s a Muslim fleet sailed to the juncture of Europe and Asia Minor to attack Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. Although unsuccessful, this naval assault on the center of Byzantine rule was a remarkable feat. At the outset of the Muslim conquest four decades earlier, the Muslim fighting forces consisted entirely of mounted desert warriors, their tactics best suited for small units of light cavalry fighting in open terrain. The creation of a naval capability, which allowed Muslims to launch a fully coordinated offensive against the largest and best fortified city in all of Eastern Christianity, was a harbinger of future developments. Less than a half century later, a Muslim army, which had been fer-

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ried across the Straits of Gibraltar, began subduing the Iberian Peninsula, threatening thereby the eventual expansion of Muslim rule into what is today southern France. Christians managed to retain control of the Gallic lands beyond Iberia as well as most of the Byzantine heartland in Asia Minor, but the Islamic threat to Christianity was far from over. In the Latin West, Iberia was contested until the fall of Granada, the last Muslim stronghold, in 1492. In the East, the Arab expansion, which initiated an intense rivalry between Muslims and Eastern Christians, waxed and waned over decades and then centuries until the Ottoman Turks destroyed the last formal vestiges of Byzantine rule in 1453. The victorious Turks then began their assault on Christian Europe, marching westward through Greece and the Balkans until reaching the gates of Vienna not once but twice. Their advance was finally halted in the seventeenth century, and Europeans began the incipient rollback of Ottoman rule, a process that took two hundred years and more to complete. a brief sketch of christian europe’s initial engagement with the world of isl am It seems odd that the rapid Arab conquests of the Near East and North Africa, and especially the imposition of Muslim rule in the Iberian Peninsula, events of the seventh and eight centuries, did not stimulate greater intellectual curiosity about Islamic culture in the Latin West. It was not until the Crusades brought Latin Christianity to the Muslim heartland at the end of the eleventh century, and a resurgence of Christian power in Spain challenged Islam’s toehold on the continent of Europe, that Europeans felt a compelling need to better acquaint themselves with the civilization of their powerful Muslim rivals. Be that as it may, interest in Islam was not sudden, or as the Arabs say “like the crack of dawn.” Largely fanciful stories of the Muslims told by pilgrims returning from the Holy Land had long circulated in the Latin West, along with various materials obtained by way of Christians from the Byzantine Empire. Among the latter were popular apocalyptic accounts, Latin versions of polemical, or more correctly apologetic texts, originally written in Greek. Moreover, there was a serious engagement with various branches of Islamic scholarship even before the Crusaders firmly planted themselves in the heartland of Islam. The translation of Arabic philosophical and scientific works was already well developed in the multi-cultural environment of Islamic Spain, where local Christians had long been in contact with learned Muslims and Jews, as well as with their coreligionists to the north. The impetus to produce translations from Arabic beyond Spain received

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formal support from Peter the Venerable, the twelft h-century Abbot of Cluny, one of the foremost churchmen on the European continent. However, for Peter and others sharing his views, the point of these translations was not to make the legacy of the ancient Hellenistic world, the so-called “Greek” or “foreign sciences” as the Arabs called them, accessible to Christian scholars of the Latin West. Peter’s interest was not in the Islamic world’s discovery and preservation of Greek philosophy, medicine, astronomy, and the like, subjects that whetted the intellectual appetites of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Spain, as it had earlier the learned scholars of all three faiths in the Islamic lands to the east, particularly Syria and Iraq. The great European churchman was driven not by intellectual curiosity but rather a more practical concern—that of combating the powerful religion that had become ascendant in former lands of the Christian world. At Peter’s request, the Qur’an was first rendered into Latin in 1143 by Robert of Ketton. Other texts were soon to follow. Peter himself wrote a refutation of Islam, which he described as an abominable heresy. Not surprisingly, he supported the conquest of Spain and beyond that the effort of the Crusaders to establish Christian rule in the Holy Land. In similar fashion, the anti-Muslim tracts of Eastern Christians, written originally in Arabic or Syriac, the scholarly language of many Eastern communities, were translated for defenders of the faith in the West. Over time, Muhammad was portrayed as a charlatan, a magician who beguiled the gullible and ignorant Arabs, and, ironically enough, as an idolater and a source of veneration by idolaters—all of which was intended to denigrate Islam and fortify Christian resolve. Nevertheless, not every churchman was convinced Christians should preoccupy themselves with Muslim writings and beliefs, even for the sake of refuting the unbelievers. Bernard of Clairvaux, a contemporary of Peter and a cleric of wide prominence, warned that those who studied and translated Muslim tomes ran the risk of having their faith undermined. Despite Peter’s narrow agenda, which linked translation to anti-Muslim polemics, and Bernard’s broad warning against any translations whatsoever, the effort to acquire the knowledge of the Muslims and the ancient heritage they preserved continued unabated over centuries, spreading beyond the Iberian Peninsula well into the Latin Christian heartland, a process that will be described more fully below (in part 2, chapter 11, on Islamic philosophy and science). Throughout the Middle Ages, the interest in Islamic texts was confined to residual traces of much-valued Greek scholarship; Arabic advances in philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy; Muslim scripture; traditions about

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Muhammad; and polemical and apologetic tracts of Christians writing in the Islamic world. For hundreds of years, there was no particular interest in the vast Arabic literature devoted to the core of what Muslims called the “Islamic sciences”: Qur’an commentary (tafsir); the complex hermeneutics linked to the traditions of the Prophet (hadith): Islamic substantive law (shari‘ah) and jurisprudence ( fiqh); and speculative theology (kalam). With very few exceptions, the Christians accompanying the Crusader warriors made little if any effort to understand the religious moorings of their Muslim adversaries, even as they sought to rule their domains and convert them to the true faith. Among Christians in Western Europe, only Ramon Lull (d. 1315 or 1316) took the effort to interrogate Islamic texts, having studied Arabic for many years with a Muslim slave in Majorca, the Spanish island that served as a cultural crossroads as did much of Christian Spain. Not that Lull, a free-spirited character turned pious Christian, was ever sympathetic to Islam. When the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem was destroyed by a Muslim army in 1291, he urged the use of force to recapture the initiative. In Lull’s judgment, such a military campaign would require the Christians to learn the language of their adversaries; this eminently sensible suggestion went unheeded by and large. He was also a strong advocate of converting the infidels by using their own tradition to dispute their claims. Although actively seeking to convert Muslims was declared by the latter an offense punishable by death, Lull was not dissuaded and journeyed into the Abode of Islam to spread the true faith. He was reportedly stoned by a Muslim mob in North Africa, the last of several quixotic forays of his into the lands of the infidels. Learned churchmen were not the only consumers of Islamic cultural artifacts. The portrayal of Muslims in the popular European literature of the Middle Ages contains occasional echoes of entertaining Arabic tales that found their way into the Latin West, but, broadly speaking, these portraits bear little if any resemblance to the contemporaneous Muslim world, a place of material splendor and great intellectual sophistication. Rather, the Islamic lands were often presented in Western literature as places of fantastical objects and beings, all of which excited the imagination of Europeans, the overwhelming majority of whom did not venture far beyond their domains. Islam and the Muslims would also serve as a literary trope for declaring the newest of monotheist religions a dangerous Christian heresy. With that opinion of Islam, Christians denied altogether that Muhammad considered himself to be divinely inspired; rather, he inspired a conscious deviation from the true faith, namely Christianity. Were that not sufficient to malign Muham-

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mad and the Muslims, the worst features of their false religion were then said to have been imitated by insincere Christians misusing power in their own world. Such sentiments, born of a malice that had become endemic to Christian Europe following the Reformation, did not require a detailed knowledge of Islam and the Muslims. The mere claim of links to the infidels and their beliefs was sufficient to discredit the enemies of pure Christian faith. On the other hand, in the sixteenth century and especially in the seventeenth, European scholars who would later be known as orientalists began to study Arabic in earnest and with objectives that extended beyond polemics and the acquisition of ancient scientific knowledge. When the Ottoman Turks captured the Byzantine capital, terminating eleven hundred years of Christian imperial rule, and then overran the Balkans, penetrated central Europe, and laid siege to Vienna, there was a perceived need for individuals learned in the ways of the Muslims and skilled in Islamic languages. How else could Europeans transact the business of war, diplomacy, and commerce? The result was an expanded interest in all aspects of Islamic civilization. Ramon Lull may have been an adventurer guided by Christian zeal, but he certainly foresaw Europe’s need to engage Islam and the Muslims through knowledge of their language and, by implication, their rich and complex culture. There was yet another reason to occasion interest in Near Eastern languages. Protestant reformers, seeking to clarify the meaning of the Old Testament, strongly emphasized the original Hebrew text over the Latin Vulgate, which had been for countless generations the standard translation serving Christians in the West. Understanding the literal meaning of the Old Testament allowed for more accurate translations into the vernacular languages of an expanded readership, especially after the introduction of printing and the widespread distribution of books. Bible scholars well trained in Greek and Latin thus turned their attention to Hebrew and sought to learn languages related to it, such as Aramaic, Syriac, and Arabic. Some scholars also mastered Ethiopic, as well as Turkish and Persian. The primary purpose of learning Arabic, along with several other languages, was not to defame Islam but to clarify the meaning of the biblical text as a guide to true Christian belief and behavior. Because of its similarity to Hebrew, it was believed Arabic could unlock many passages of the Old Testament that were obscure or had given rise to interpretive flights of fancy by overly imaginative and/or doctrinaire Latin scholars and commentators. The learned Europeans sought what Jewish scholars described as the p’shat or literal meaning of the text as opposed to its d’rash or exegetical accretions.

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The Protestants were not alone in taking up Arabic; Catholics were also intent on learning Hebrew and the cognate languages that ordinarily accompanied the study of Hebrew. The Catholic effort at learning cognate languages was assisted by learned Maronites, Lebanese Christian Arabs linked to Rome who had the advantage of being well versed in both Arabic and Syriac. The Maronites who visited Rome were given the task of missionary activity in the Near East—but not among the Muslims, a risky venture to say the least. Rather, the Maronites were given a mandate to convert the Eastern Christians to the mother Church. In any case, all this activity, be it Protestant or Catholic, gave rise to a heightened interest in teaching Arabic in a rigorous fashion. Arabic grammars were written in Latin and an Arabic-Latin dictionary also made its appearance. Above all, professorships in Arabic were endowed at leading European universities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, giving the subject hitherto unknown scholarly cachet in places like Oxford and Cambridge, in addition to providing scholars with adequate financial resources to carry on their work without risking penury. Given full academic stature, the study of Arabic, Hebrew, and an expanding number of other related languages gave birth to the beginning of comparative religious studies, as Christians increasingly looked beyond their own world. Establishing Arabic as part of the formal curriculum, however, did not imply European savants embraced a more sympathetic attitude toward Muhammad and the Muslims. The endowed professors who took to collecting a wider range of Arabic (and also some important Syriac) texts on Islam were not entirely free of the usual Christian prejudices toward Muhammad and the early Muslim community. The publication of material on Islam and the Muslims was accompanied by the requisite anti-Islamic polemics, often juxtaposed with anti-Jewish sentiments, a carryover from earlier times. Only well into the eighteenth century and more particularly the nineteenth did the study of Arabic and Islam branch out on its own and shed some but not all of its polemical baggage. For the first time, materials were assembled that could lead to a broader understanding of early and later Islamic history. There was also a heightened interest in Arabic literary texts, for example the Thousand and One Nights, a collection of entertaining tales that presented European readers with a lighter, more picaresque picture of Islamic civilization. Elements of the work were known to Europeans in the Middle Ages, but the first, full-length translation, that into French by Antoine Galland (d. 1715), only began appearing in the early eighteenth century, with the last volume published posthumously in 1717.

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the beginnings of modern schol arship on isl a m The enlightened mood of late eighteenth century Europe brought great advances in the professional study of Islam. The slow decline of Ottoman power and the opening of the Orient and the southern Mediterranean to extensive European travel and commerce, together with increased curiosity of things exotic and far removed from European eyes, stimulated further interest in the Islamic world. Continuing a trend that had begun in the previous century, a spate of serious books appeared in the languages of different countries, including broad-ranging histories and translations of Muslim scripture with explanatory notes. The widespread distribution of printed books made possible the circulation of large numbers of tomes to general readers. By the first quarter of the eighteenth century, curious individuals literate in their native tongue could join the fraternity of scholars learned in Latin and Oriental languages in looking at the world of the Muslims. A major turning point in the study of Islam, and particularly of Islamic origins, was the founding in Paris (1795) of the École spéciale des langues orientales vivantes, a school devoted exclusively to the study of Oriental languages. Its second director, Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy (1758–1838), might rightfully be considered the father of modern Islamic studies. Under his leadership, the school established the first systematic curriculum for the teaching of Islamic languages and civilization. Silvestre de Sacy, a learned Frenchman who was largely self-taught, understood the need for proper educational aids. The earlier Arabic grammars, written in Latin and based on Latin grammar, were replaced by his Grammaire Arabe, a highly original work organized according to logical principles that were said to apply to all languages and by models specifically used by Arab grammarians of the Middle Ages. To acquaint students with a wide variety of different genres of Arabic writing, he composed a chrestomathy or reader that served as an introduction to texts in the original language. His own scholarship was meticulous and grounded in a profound knowledge of classical Arabic. His students, who came from various parts of Europe and then accepted teaching assignments in their native countries, took those methods with them, thereby duplicating Islamic studies as it had been reconceived by the master. Silvestre de Sacy’s love of Arabic—he also knew all the other then-known Semitic languages as well as Persian and Turkish—did not at all imply a favorable view of Islam or its founder, nor a particularly nuanced view of Islamic history. On the whole, his condemnation of what he did not favor seems in retrospect rather excessive; quite the opposite of his cautious approach

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to the Arabic language and his precise reading of individual Arabic texts. When a scholarly work was published giving Muhammad high marks for religious sincerity, Silvestre de Sacy wrote, in what was an otherwise favorable review, that the author failed to say that Islam’s founder was a skilled and morally compromised imposter. Silvestre de Sacy did not wish to imply by this comment that the prophet of the Arabs was in fact a Christian heretic—the accepted view of an earlier age. He merely wished to emphasize that Muhammad consciously played dirty pool in the complex political games of his Arabian milieu. And yet, it was Silvestre de Sacy himself who set into motion a new and somewhat more tolerant way of looking at Muhammad and his career, a view that was to take root in the Western academy. Silvestre de Sacy suggested to his former pupil Georg Freytag, who was then teaching at the University of Bonn, that he establish a prize competition for a study dealing with the influence of Judaism on the origins of Islam and its Prophet through an examination of Muslim scripture (“Inquirator in fontes Alcorani seu legis Mohammedicae eas qui ex Judaismo derivandi sunt”). The prize, won by a young Jewish scholar named Abraham Geiger, whose 1833 essay, published in German as Was hat Mohammed aus den Judenthume aufgenommen? (“What Did Muhammad Borrow from Judaism?”), elevated European study of Muhammad beyond crude polemics and transformed all subsequent studies on the man and his faith. To be sure, some Europeans who were affected by the Enlightenment and/or had contributed to it had previously found reason to give the Muslim Prophet high marks for his leadership; some, as did Geiger, considered the Muslim a man of genuine if illformed religious beliefs. Their arguments were, however, of a broad philosophical nature as befitted their interests; their more favorable assessment of Muhammad was not rooted in a careful analysis of the relevant Arabic texts. In that respect, Geiger’s work marked a turning point in European scholarship toward Muslims and the origins of Islam. It also marked a break with how Jews were prepared to discuss the life and times of Muhammad, the subsequent history of Islam, and the formation and shaping of Islamic civilization. abraham geiger and the beginnings of modern jewish schol arship on isl a m Although medieval Jewish thinkers in the lands of Islam were often deeply steeped in the intellectual climate of the larger world in which they lived, which included of necessity a vibrant Islamic culture, they were most reluc-

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tant to openly discuss the history of Jewish-Muslim relations. Muhammad’s acrimonious dealings with the Jews of his time and the subsequent history of Islam and Jewish-Muslim relations of later times receive scant if any mention from the oldest monotheists. Jews of towering intellect and great learning could easily have turned their attention to writing history as they did in engaging Muslim philosophy, science, grammatical theory, and a host of other subjects of broad interest. But, as we shall see in our later discussion of Jewish life in the medieval Islamic world, Jews, as a rule, preferred not to create any literature that might enflame Muslim passions or stimulate Jewish messianic yearnings that might endanger the present or future well-being of their communities. For a thousand years and more, Jewish writers in the Islamic world tended to be circumspect in mentioning Muhammad and the rise of Islam even when writing in Hebrew, a language Muslims very rarely if ever acquired. It was only after Islamic studies emerged as a scientific discipline in modern Europe that Jewish scholars trained in Western universities devoted their full attention to events that had taken place a millennium and more earlier, a path of enquiry ably paved by young Geiger. A child prodigy who was already well versed in classical Jewish sources at the age of five, Geiger was home-educated in Jewish texts by his father and then stepbrother. Being orthodox rabbis of the old school, they denied him the formal education that would have allowed him entry into the world of the German university. But as they did not deny him self-study of profane subjects, Geiger acquired in a desultory fashion the requisite knowledge of Greek and Latin to enroll at the University of Heidelberg; he later transferred to Bonn. Like Geiger, many Jewish students of the time were well versed in Hebrew and Aramaic from youth, and therefore opted to concentrate on Oriental languages. Geiger defined his university interests more broadly. In addition to Arabic, he focused on speculative theology, general philosophy, cultural history, and the usual curriculum in Classics. All that served as background to his ultimate interest in reforming Judaism by embracing Wissenschaft des Judenthums, a movement spawned by the Jewish Enlightenment that portrayed Judaism as a constantly evolving religion; that is, a religion shaped and reshaped by historic events that could be tracked to particular times and places. With such information, a modern Judaism could adjust to contemporary contingencies without losing sight of its historic roots. It would appear that this historically oriented approach to studying change in the development of Judaism and acting on the lessons obtained thereof also informed Geiger’s truly path-breaking essay on the origins of Islam. No less than Silvestre de Sacy himself wrote that Geiger’s work rendered

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almost superfluous all previous discussion of the subject, discussion that the founder of modern Islamic studies regarded as superficial, by which he no doubt meant without methodological rigor and ungrounded in compelling textual evidence. What indeed did Geiger do to merit such acclaim, and from the doyen of Islamic studies no less? Looking back at this scholarly project undertaken some 175 years ago, one is astounded at how Geiger’s method for tracing cultural influence and exploring the origins of Islam via a study of the Qur’an was so brilliantly conceived. Although, as we shall see, some of his assumptions are naïve by current standards, and some of his conclusions force the evidence he cites to reveal more than it possibly can, his dissertation remains until this very day an interesting if not indeed valuable contribution to Jewish-Muslim studies. The author begins with an observation that scholars often grasp intuitively what they later discover to be true. However, it was one thing to intuit that Muhammad borrowed from Judaism in his Qur’anic pronouncements. No doubt, many suspected that was the case—why else hold a prize competition to demonstrate the extent of cultural borrowing? It was another matter to prove what and how the Muslim Prophet borrowed from the older monotheist faith. And so, Geiger turns to the Qur’anic text in order to establish probable cause for Muhammad’s borrowing from Judaism and the means by which that borrowing could be accomplished. Seeking a convenient point of entry by which to build a credible argument for Jewish influence, he turns to the life and times of Muhammad. The implicit assumption is that one cannot truly understand a text without proper access to the circumstances in which it was created. This was, of course, the same conceptual framework by which Geiger and other participants in Wissenschaft des Judenthums attempted to recover Jewish states of the past, and which general historians would use to discover the histories of different peoples and cultures in Europe. In that sense at least, Geiger walked the same wide path as his younger and more traditional contemporary Heinrich Graetz, the Jewish historian who spent some twenty years publishing his monumental Geschichte der Juden von den ältesten Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart. In that multivolume history of the Jews, Graetz explored every possible setting in which Jews lived from the biblical age to modern times. Geiger, barely into his twenties, also anticipated the views of Leopold von Ranke, the great nineteenth-century historian of Europe, who believed that by accumulating all the historical data from a given time and place one could rediscover “the past as it actually was,” thus promoting a modern historiography that was deeply rooted in archival research.

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Unfortunately, no such archives had been discovered for the life and times of the Muslim Prophet. Moreover, we must take into consideration the limited number of Arabic texts that were available to Geiger, especially in reliable editions. Retracing Jewish influence on the origins of Islam was, therefore, no simple task. Ever cautious, Geiger sought ways to narrow the odds of erring in search of that influence. Wary of teleological explanations and historical back projections, he inveighed against using Jewish sources later than the Qur’an at the start of his study. His initial search for Jewish influence was therefore confined to material from the Hebrew Bible and Talmud, sources widely distributed and read by Jews well before Muhammad’s mission and the rise of Islam. Geiger also included legendary Jewish texts not found in the Talmud, but only those accounts he thought predated Muslim scripture. He was similarly disinclined to use later Islamic materials that were then available—at least he did not look to them at the outset of his project. Only when he had finished his initial investigation did he allow himself to peruse the original passages of the Qur’an through the eyes of later Muslim authorities. Just as many reform-minded Jews sought to privilege Hebrew scripture over what they considered the fanciful and restrictive accretions of later rabbinic works, Geiger privileged the most sacred of all Muslim writing. However, when the later Muslim sources “confirmed” his original insights about specific passages, he gave credence to them. There is little question that Geiger was confident of his ability to intuit the truth; one could perhaps argue, too confident. Nevertheless, given the paucity and nature of the sources available to him, what Geiger ultimately accomplished is impressive. Most impressive is the design of his research. The might-have-been orthodox rabbi of the old school begins his substantive analysis of Jewish influence on Muhammad and the origins of Islam with a series of interrelated queries, broad questions that still vex thoughtful scholars today: Assuming that Muhammad saw some clear advantage in borrowing from Judaism, did he have the actual means to borrow from Jewish tradition, oral, written, or practiced? Assuming that Muhammad had some access to information about Jews and Judaism, was he limited in his ability to interrogate Jewish sources? These are highly pertinent questions because, as Geiger notes, a comparison of materials from Muslim scripture with similar subject matter from the Hebrew Bible and later Jewish tradition reveals considerable variation between the verses of the Qur’an and the historical narratives and laws of the Jews. How, he asks, are we to explain these disparities? Are they caused by the Muslim Prophet’s total ignorance of specific Jewish texts and/or practices, or a lack of knowledge occasioned by a mere smattering of learning he

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may have obtained from personal observations and/or from contemporaneous Jewish informants? Continuing this line of enquiry, Geiger asks whether the Qur’anic materials that “distort” the Jewish past and Jewish practices may represent a deliberate attempt to break with genuine Jewish narratives and traditions with which Muhammad could have been familiar. In other words, if Muhammad had the means and broad incentive to borrow from Judaism, did certain historic circumstances compel him to break with well-known Jewish tradition? More specifically, did Muhammad feel a need to Islamize Jewish tradition in order to validate his own credentials vis-à-vis the Jews who denied his prophetic calling? Unlike many scholars of the time and several generations thereafter, Geiger was aware that the existence of parallel themes and even practices in the Qur’an and Jewish sources was no proof of cultural borrowing—certainly not of direct borrowing. Rather, he recognized that many religious ideas of a general nature found common expression in the environment that gave rise to Islam; the ideas were in the air, so to speak. What titillates Geiger, however, is not any broad monotheist sentiment that captured the imagination of Muhammad’s contemporaries in west Arabia and beyond, but the possible transfer of specific material from identifiable sources of Jewish provenance, or from oral traditions presumably originating from Jewish texts, rather than Christian or local Arabian traditions. In Geiger’s eyes, Judaism was the more sublime and mature monotheist tradition and therefore a more likely source than Christianity for formulating complex Muslim doctrines and legal rules. He cites many parallels between Muslim and Jewish practices, some with telling effect. His suggestion that Muhammad adapted certain rituals—for example, that various dietary laws and the orientation of prayer to Jerusalem were directly influenced by a desire to convert the Jews—remains conventional wisdom among Western scholars. Some of his suggestions of Jewish influence on Muslim practice, however, seem forced, to say the least. Despite his broad concern with the development of religious ideas and practices, Geiger, like his orientalist colleagues, never strayed far from philology. Geiger thus extended his hunt for Jewish influence to tracking the vocabulary of Muslim scripture. He reads the Qur’an with an eye to isolating words freighted with religious significance, words that are not Arabic in origin but derived from Hebrew and Jewish Aramaic, thus revealing an obvious Jewish influence, or so Geiger thought. This method of determining direct cultural borrowing and the specific evidence cited did not overly impress Silvestre de Sacy or a number of scholars to follow. Others, usually Christians, would stress that the Qur’an contains a considerable vocabulary

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derived from Syriac (a version of Aramaic used by the Eastern Christians). Given the attention Muslim scripture devotes to Christians and Christianity, they argued for emphasizing the Christian influence on the Prophet as being at least of equal if not greater importance to the formation of his world view. Geiger certainly did not deny Christian influence; indeed he recognized that Muslim scripture is rich in references to Christians and Christianity, but it was not his task to investigate what Muhammad borrowed from the latter. In any case, Geiger is convinced the Muslim Prophet borrowed more from a profound monotheism unburdened by the concept of the Trinity, a concept rejected as false in the Qur’an. According to Geiger, Muhammad’s familiarity with Judaism was obtained from Jewish informants familiar with some form of an obscure local Jewish tradition that could be linked to what has come to be described as normative Judaism. The suggestion is certainly plausible, indeed even probable; but in stating these views, Geiger no doubt underestimated what may have been the eclectic nature of Jewish beliefs and practices in contemporaneous west Arabia, the birthplace of Islam. In later writings, he admitted how little we know of ancient Arabian Jewry, whose faith and observance were likely mediated through local customs, also little known. Sadly, the same may still be said of our knowledge today. Not surprisingly, Geiger, with his reverence for the Hebrew Bible, overestimated the value of Muslim scripture as a source for discovering the life and times of the Muslim Prophet and, with that, the setting in which Muhammad could have borrowed from Judaism. As I have noted in other publications, the Qur’an offers no extensive historical framework, nor does it contain material that can be traced directly to conventional forms of historical writing, as do, for example, various books of the Bible. Muslim and Jewish scriptures share a common concern; both emphasize a moral vision of the world, one that is rooted in strict monotheist belief. But on reading the Qur’an, one gets little if any sense of the tight narrative structures that are part and parcel of biblical historiography. The Qur’an reminds us less of the storied books of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles, or, for that matter, the Gospels portraying the life of Jesus, than of Hebrew prophetic literature, with its explosive linguistic cadences and ambiguous historical and literary referents. After all, the Qur’an represents the public utterances of a prophet; from the perspective of Muslims, the quintessential Prophet of God. That is not to say Muslim scripture is completely devoid of historical content, but whatever references to events and contemporary persons there are do not allow us the liberty to describe the broad history of the times, let alone the fuller meaning of all sorts of difficult passages. No doubt, Muhammad’s audience and

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perhaps the next generation of his followers could piece together a coherent story of sorts from scattered fragments of narratives, but in the end much was left to the creative imagination of later Muslim commentary. Muhammad’s public utterances are not history, if by history we mean tales that explain human experience as related to events progressing in time—a story told in an orderly fashion and then informed by an overarching perspective that gives it literary/intellectual as well as moral coherence. Such as it is, history, or, if you prefer, echoes of historical events, are often spliced together in the Qur’an with references to legislation or moral pleadings and admonitions, usually without a defined or definable historical context. When examined individually and as a whole, the discrete divisions and verses of Muslim scripture often appear disjointed, with little if any evidence of sustained and unified composition, let alone a larger picture of Muhammad and his times. Of the 114 surahs or segments of the Qur’an, only the twelfth, which tells the story of the biblical Joseph, represents a consistent narrative. That is to say, it has a beginning, a middle, and end, all framed within a single tale. But this tale, retold from a more ancient past that reflected an earlier monotheist tradition, does little if anything to inform us of the circumstances facing Muhammad or, for that matter, the precise manner in which he may have acquired knowledge of some form of the biblical Joseph story. In the end, we are always faced with a classic conundrum: scholars interested in the life of the Muslim Prophet and the means by which he may have become acquainted with Jewish (and also Christian) traditions require a broad historical context with which to elaborate on Muslim scripture. But no body of contemporaneous literature with which to establish that context exists, only a highly tendentious Muslim tradition of later times. Simply put, without a reliable historical text or series of texts, there is no sure historical context to inform our reading of the Qur’an let alone allow us to use the scripture as a comfortable point of entry for examining the life of Muhammad and the origins of Islam. Contra Geiger, the Qur’an alone cannot serve as the scaffolding required for building a detailed, let alone comprehensive, analysis of Jewish influence on Muhammad and, more generally, on Islamic origins. Indeed, were it not for the biographical/historical materials of later Muslim writers and the vast commentary to which the very ambiguities of the Qur’anic text gave rise (mostly works unknown to scholars of Geiger’s time), we would be hard pressed to hazard even a guess as to what broadly transpired at the birth hour of Islam over 1,300 years ago, let alone speak in detail about Muhammad’s life or what he may have borrowed from Judaism. There are, however, two areas where there is enough evidence from the

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Qur’an to actually speak of Jewish influence, be it direct or indirect: one is Qur’anic legislation that bears some relation to Jewish law. Here, Geiger, who was thoroughly at home in classical Jewish legal sources, had much of interest to say. But sometimes vast knowledge can force one to see through walls that do not exist, a syndrome not unknown to rabbinic discourse throughout the ages. Most authorities believe he seemed to stretch his case when it came to crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s of certain conclusions. The second area, where one has a safer point of entry into discussing Jewish influence on Islam, is the various narratives linked to the Israelites mentioned in the Hebrew Bible and post-biblical tradition. Here our author is on firmer ground. His great contribution was to track down Jewish parallels to the “biblical,” or as some prefer, “biblicist,” tales of the Qur’an, not merely the stories of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament—that would have been apparent to many readers given the Bible’s wide readership at the time among Christians and Jews. Rather, Geiger brought to bear his vast knowledge of postbiblical Jewish texts, that is, the rabbinic permutations of biblical narratives that made their way into Muslim scripture. It is a pity he had no access to the vast array of rabbinic literature that was to be uncovered in the years following his work. Perhaps he would have continued to mine the Qur’an for echoes of Jewish influence. As it is, his work and its conceptual framework remained important for generations to follow. It can still be read with profit. Perhaps the greater pity is that young Geiger never returned to Islamic studies but instead devoted his career to writing brilliantly on Jewish matters and in establishing an honored place for Reform Judaism in modern life. the continuing jewish discovery of isl am in modern times Unlike Geiger, many Jews drawn to the great universities of Europe, in particular the German universities, made Islamic studies a lifelong project. This was true even for individuals who were unable to secure positions within the university system because of continuing prejudices toward Jews. Nor were Jews who made careers as orientalists totally absorbed, as was Geiger, with the Jewish influence on Muhammad and hence the origins of Islam. Straddling Jewish and Islamic studies, many Jews learned in their own tradition reversed Geiger’s query and sought to uncover the profound influence of medieval Muslim civilization on the efflorescence of Judaism, particularly as regards philosophy, science, Hebrew grammar, poetry, belles lettres, the

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interpretation of scripture, and the like. Lest we forget: it was in the world of Islam, with its own rich religious and scholarly traditions, that much of what became the cultural heritage of Near Eastern and then European Jewry evolved. The Eurocentric outlook of Jewish studies in the current American academy, together with the politics that has poisoned the atmosphere of Near or Middle Eastern studies, as the broadly reconstituted orientalist enterprise is now labeled, has weakened the powerful bond that once secured Jewish interest and participation in Islamic studies throughout Europe and later in the United States. Looking back at the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, one can hardly exaggerate the Jewish contribution to our understanding of the world of Islam. Beginning with Geiger, the list of scholars is long and their role in advancing our knowledge of Islam and the Muslims was substantial if not indeed central to the larger orientalist project. Jewish contributions shaped the very course of Islamic studies; in some instances, like Geiger’s work, for several generations, while in other instances we are still sustained by their seminal breakthroughs. One might go so far as to argue that not only were individual Jews prominent in the field, but collectively they also represented a highly visible if not dominant faction, much as did Jews who took to physics, mathematics, and various fields of the social sciences during the twentieth century. A contemporary of Geiger’s, Gustav Weil, a would-be rabbinical student, studied Arabic, became a journalist in North Africa and the Middle East, and eventually laid claim to a professorship in Arabic at Heidelberg. Utilizing a wide variety of historical texts, Weil published the first extended biography of Muhammad that did not resort to traditional European prejudices. As did Geiger, Weil was prepared to accept the Muslim Prophet as a person of genuine religious beliefs and his followers as a people of sincere piety. Like Geiger, Weil published a work on Judaism and Islam, in his case a general survey of Muslim accounts utilizing biblical themes. On a more serious level, he translated a major Arabic biography of the Prophet into German; wrote an introduction to the Qur’an; and became in effect the first truly modern historian of the early Islamic world when he penned a five-volume history of the caliphs. To be sure, Weil lacked Geiger’s analytical brilliance—the latter would have been a hard act to follow under any circumstances. As a result, Weil’s works have long been thought of as intellectual curios of a past age, while Geiger’s design for comparative research still retains (or should retain) considerable relevance. Other Jews learned in their own traditions had an enormous impact on the highly specialized areas that began to mark the sub-

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fields of Islamic studies in the Western academy, areas that came increasingly into focus with the discovery and editing of numerous manuscripts written in Arabic and other Islamic languages. The abundance of this new material allowed orientalists to focus on narrowly defined areas within an increasingly broadened field of Islamic studies. Thus Jewish scholars turned to Arabic philology and grammar (Hermann Reckendorf, another would-be rabbi); Islamic philosophy (Solomon Munk); and Islamic science (an area pioneered by a number of Jewish scholars). Others, like Wilhelm Bacher (a former yeshiva student), turned to Persian and Turkish studies, and Arminius Vambery (born Hermann Vamberger), a self-educated tailor’s apprentice, abandoned his orthodox Jewish upbringing for conversions to Christianity and Islam. The first of these conversions earned him a paid teaching post at the university in Budapest; the second, a position as advisor to the Ottoman sultan. These orientalists represent a small sample of a large coterie of Jewish scholars who were at the center of modern Islamic studies as it evolved in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. None, however, had a more profound effect than Ignaz Goldziher (1850–1921), yet another child prodigy of orthodox Jewish upbringing. Like Geiger, Goldziher read the Hebrew Bible in its original language at an early age and spent his early years immersing himself in classical Jewish sources. He turned to Talmudic studies at eight, and read the great medieval Jewish philosophers of the Islamic world at twelve, the same tender age in which he published an article on synagogue liturgy. When he was fifteen, the precocious Goldziher, originally from a provincial Hungarian town, was admitted as a special university student in Budapest. He chose to study Oriental languages with Vambery, whose conversion to Christianity paved the way for a professorship. If Silvestre de Sacy was the father of modern Islamic studies, and Geiger the first to soften the harsh views of Muhammad that persisted since the Middle Ages, it was Goldziher who swept aside the conceptual barriers that blocked European scholars from a better understanding of Islamic tradition and culture. Because of Goldziher’s meticulous researches, scholars were able to acquire the requisite tools to interrogate the Prophetic traditions (hadith), with their links to Islamic law, jurisprudence, and a tendentiously driven Arabic historical literature, which included, as a matter of course, extensive accounts of the Prophet and his times. Goldziher was the first to fully understand that the thousands and thousands of pithy statements of the Prophet’s words and deeds portrayed, by and large, a world that should have been, rather than one that was or might have been. Medieval Muslim scholars were themselves wary of spurious traditions and took measures to vali-

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date the authenticity of the orally transmitted statements. Those traditions that passed their test were then collected and enshrined in several canonical works. Goldziher maintained that even these authenticated statements were creations of the eighth and ninth centuries and not the seventh, which gave birth to Islam. As such, the traditions reflected doctrinal, political, and legal issues of that later period. Like rabbinic legends that gave new meaning to the biblical text they explicated, the hadith was a back projection reflecting the sensibilities and circumstances of a later age. Given his familiarity with an all-embracing system of Jewish law, Goldziher was well situated to realize the limitations of using Islamic tradition as biographical material to reconstruct the life of the Prophet and the history of the earliest Islamic community. As such, he seemingly followed in the footsteps of Geiger, who was initially disinclined to use later Islamic materials to explain Muhammad’s revelations for fear that the later materials could be back projections. It is, however, one thing to intuitively suspect that later texts might be used to describe a past that never was; it is another to prove this by citing chapter and verse. In effect, Goldziher’s counterintuitive project turned our understanding of early Islamic history and institutions on its head. It is no small wonder that he was recognized far and wide as the very greatest Islamicist of his generation. Indeed, in so many respects, we still live in Goldziher’s shadow some 125 years or after he first made his mark with such depth of learning, stunning analytic brilliance, and profound insight, an insight undoubtedly due in some way to his traditional Jewish education and upbringing. All the subfields of modern scholarship on the development of early Islam and its religious institutions owe a most profound debt to the scholar referred to by his eminent colleagues as “The Great Goldziher.” We might pause to ask why so many Jews opted to study Islam at European universities. For Jews well acquainted with Hebrew and Aramaic from childhood, there was an understandable interest in Arabic and other Near Eastern languages. The study of related cultures allowed for greater insight into the world that shaped the experiences of their own people. In so many ways, the foundations of Jewish religious life in modern times were fashioned by Jews living in the milieu of medieval Islam. Moreover, the education of their formative years gave Jewish university students an initial advantage over their Christian colleagues, particularly their familiarity with the various rabbinic elaborations of biblical narratives, Jewish ritual law, and Jewish jurisprudence—all of which had parallels in the world of traditional Islam. There is, however, a larger story to be told, one that suggests a more complex Jewish attraction to the Islamic world.

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Enlightenment and emancipation, having opened the doors for Jews to more fully participate in the intellectual and commercial life of nineteenthcentury Europe, particularly in what was to become modern Germany, also led to assimilation and a rise in conversion. In this new world of expanded opportunity and religious challenge, reflective and highly educated Jews sought models from their own past that might allow them to integrate into the life of an increasingly cosmopolitan Christian Europe, albeit without abandoning the essence of their faith. They found such a model in the experiences of Jews who had lived in the lands of Islam, particularly the glorious period in Muslim Spain, which they idealized and declared a golden age. The mystique of Spanish Jewry, with its refined aesthetic and intellectual tastes and its alleged sense of public decorum, served as an inspiration for European Jews who embraced the Enlightenment. Reform Jewish rabbis, garbed in robes comparable to that of Protestant ministers, sermonized in elegant German from pulpits of synagogues whose architecture was inspired by elaborate Moorish design and decoration. This new model of rabbi was determined to conduct a dignified service free of the usual din and clamor of the chaotic and familiar orthodox worship, as if the Jews of Islamic Spain and the Protestants of central Europe shared more in common than did traditional European Jewry with their Near Eastern and Mediterranean forebears. A pronounced sentiment favoring Sepharad (Spain) to Ashkenaz (Jewish Western Europe) appears already at the end of the eighteenth century and gains momentum as Jews acclimated to the modern age and the opportunities it presented. Geiger, taking part in a dispute on synagogue liturgy, strongly favored Spanish religious poetry because of its grammatical, literary, and philosophical superiority to the Ashkenazi liturgical hymns (piyyutim) heard regularly in European houses of worship. Where Hebrew was to be read aloud, the reformers preferred the more ‘authentic’ Sephardic pronunciation; no doubt, there was a perceived need that the holy tongue be cleansed along with the heavily inflected German Jewish dialect, which earned the ridicule of German Christians. There was, however, another side to Jewry’s engagement with modernity. Increased opportunities and the desire to blend in comfortably with the hegemonic Christian culture could not and did not erase the stain of being Jewish or, in the case of first-generation converts, of one’s Jewish origins. With the emergence of racial science, traditional anti-Judaism of the past gave way to modern anti-Semitism. The stigma of being or having been Jewish remained; social prejudices continued to be the order of the day, a forerunner of sorts to the ultimate catastrophe that was to befall European Jewry

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in the century to follow. These residual anti-Jewish sentiments and vivid recollections of Jewish suffering at the hands of the Christians in times gone by were in stark contrast to an idyllic state of Jewish communal life under the Muslims, a happy and fruitful existence that European Jewish scholars presumed to be the norm in the Abode of Islam. The reality of an earlier Jewish life in Islamic lands might now be considered decidedly more problematic, but it is the perception of Jews entering modernity that is of concern here. The phantasmagoria of Islamic Spain became a meta-truth insofar as it was to serve as template for an enlightened Jewish outlook in the nineteenth century and beyond. It is no wonder, then, that, on the whole, Jewish orientalists spoke more sympathetically of Islam and the Muslims than did their Christian colleagues. Some Jews favored Islam to Christianity, none with greater fervor than Goldziher. Relaxed rules of travel and the introduction of the steamship brought nineteenth-century scholars to the Near East where they witnessed at hand a world that had previously excited their intellectual interest via books and manuscripts in university libraries. One of these visitors, the twenty-three year old Ignaz Goldziher, recollected the events of his travels (1873–74) in a journal he committed to writing more than a decade later. His Oriental Diary, penned in 1890, remained unknown to the scholarly world until 1955 and thereafter remained unpublished for twenty years and more. In his notes, young Goldziher, reared in a strictly orthodox Jewish home, records his experiences among the Muslims. Most telling are the stories of how he threw himself into the milieu of traditional Islamic studies in Damascus and then was accepted as the only non-Muslim student at Cairo’s al-Azhar, the most prestigious theological institution in the Arab-Islamic world. While in Damascus—so he reports later—he became convinced he was a Muslim at heart and it was his ideal to elevate Judaism (which he knew so well) to a level of rationality similar to Islam. He then recalls that when in Cairo he demonstrated knowledge of Islamic sources equal to if not greater than that of the great Muslim authorities who served as his hosts. Modesty was hardly the greatest of the prickly Goldziher’s virtues, but the Muslim sheikhs were no doubt duly impressed by the young foreigner. Perhaps the most telling recollection of all is his stated reaction to praying with Muslims in a Cairo mosque. Raised to be an observant Jew, he found Muslim prayer more satisfying spiritually than Jewish worship in his native Hungary. As for Christianity, he writes of it as an abominable religion, filled with insolence toward true monotheists. In the end, the youthful infatuation with Islam did not lead to young

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Goldziher’s conversion, but it supplied him with critical distance from Judaism, the religion in which he was reared, and reinforced his negative feelings toward Christians, at whose hands he was to suffer professionally. Although he was universally acclaimed the greatest Islamicist of his age, he was denied an appropriate academic appointment in his native Hungary until he was past fifty. For decades, his being Jewish prevented him from rising to the position that should have been his. He had a choice of professorships at leading universities, and no doubt could have secured a respected place in the Hungarian academy through conversion—Vambery’s suggestion— but as a Hungarian nationalist and identified Jew, he preferred to remain in Budapest, embittered by his treatment at the university, and perhaps even more so by having to earn his keep as an unappreciated functionary of the Jewish reformist movement in Hungary. Goldziher’s professional history, although exceptional in many ways, is not entirely unique. Many Jewish orientalists and other Jews who suffered social and professional discrimination expressed sympathies for an idealized world of Islam. Such sympathies did not go unnoticed among various Christians sequestered in the realms of academia and also of government. The Jews were seen by some political figures in Britain as natural allies of the Ottoman Turks. The recent suggestion that Jewish scholars wrote favorably of Islam so that Christians might be more accepting of Islam, and hence of European Jewry, seems lame. If true, it certainly proved a futile gesture. Moving from conjecture to speculation, one can perhaps find still another reason for Jewish attraction to Islamic studies. By the mid to the late nineteenth century, new and dramatic developments had taken root in the orientalist project, among them the development of the documentary hypothesis that challenged the literary unity of the five books of Moses. Rigorous philological examination exposed the Pentateuch to be a text cobbled together from diverse literary strands of different chronological periods and not the product of a single revelation at Sinai as the ancient rabbis and their successors claimed. The uniqueness of the biblical text was further compromised by the discovery and decipherment of parallel pagan sources from a more ancient Near East. Because the Hebrew Bible was for Christians the Old Testament and thus a mere prologue to be superseded by the New Testament, Jews were as a rule more uncomfortable with these advances in biblical studies than their Christian colleagues. Moreover, the teaching of the Old Testament in German universities was part and parcel of the state-run theological curriculum and thus found its place in the faculties of Christian theology. The academic institutions designed to produce Christian clergymen were

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hardly a place even for recently emancipated and enlightened Jews. The formal label given to the new biblical studies was “higher criticism,” to which some Jews mockingly referred as “higher anti-Semitism.” For Jews willing to expand their intellectual horizons, the scholarly underpinnings of higher criticism were not easily, if at all, dismissed. However compromised Jews might have felt about trends in biblical studies, the critical insights developed by Christian Old Testament scholars could assuredly be applied without any feelings of discomfort to the analysis of Islamic texts. Can it be, then, that various Jewish scholars with residual sympathies to Jewish tradition preferred to exercise their critical intellect on safer grounds? Geiger, although willing to confront core Islamic beliefs and even rabbinic Judaism, does not seem to have abandoned his resolute faith in the historicity and textual integrity of the revelation at Mount Sinai. That some Jews turned to Islamic studies rather than question openly their own long-cherished beliefs is to be sure mere speculation, but it is a question that ought to be considered and weighed in light of whatever evidence can be mustered. In due time, Jews embraced modern biblical studies along with Assyriology, the orientalist subdiscipline devoted to recovering an ancient Near Eastern past other than that of the Bible. Here, too, they excelled. The Jewish interest in Islamic studies did not however flag, nor did the Jewish interest in the origins of Islam and its connection to Jews and Judaism. In the introduction to his history of the Qur’an, published in 1860, Theodore Nöldeke, the greatest philologist among the orientalists, praised Geiger’s work as still being useful and then wondered where all the rabbis had gone. He seems to have been disappointed that Jews learned in their own tradition, as was Geiger, did not follow the latter in quest of Islamic origins, a subject they were the most qualified to explore. Instead they branched out into other fields that had taken root in the Orientalistik seminars of Europe’s universities. Had Nöldeke reappraised Islamic studies at the time of his death seventy years later, he might have withdrawn his query. For over the ensuing decades, any number of Jewish scholars followed the path blazed by Geiger; in fact, they along with Christian colleagues continue to pursue his quest today, but with different analytical tools and a wealth of new sources.

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Rethinking Islamic Origins

Following Geiger’s reflective essay, both the uniqueness of Muhammad’s message and the originality of Muslim beliefs and observances became a continuing source of curiosity and informed scholarly debate among Christians as well as Jews. Having found in Muslim beliefs, practices, and religious institutions much that was familiar from having studied Jewish and Christian traditions, orientalist scholars began the serious comparison of an Islam that may have seemed, at first glance, exotic and remote, with its venerable and well-traveled monotheist forebears. Among many, mostly Jewish, scholars, the modern quest for Islamic origins became a search for probable paths of influence, leading back, directly or indirectly, to rabbinic Judaism and, beyond that, to the Hebrew Bible. The last of the Abrahamic religions, that is, the last religion to claim its monotheist roots from the biblical patriarch Abraham, Islam was portrayed in light of the original and by implication more authentic Jewish ancestor. This was particularly true of Muslim scripture, which was richly sprinkled with all sorts of references to biblical tales and their embellished post-biblical versions. At first glance, this effort to recover the Jewish roots of Muhammad’s message may strike current readers as insensitive, if not condescending, toward the Muslims and their faith. The very notion that various themes of the Qur’an were inspired by Judaism was a denial of Muslim claims that the book is literally the word of God and therefore unique. Denying a fundamental tenet of Muslim belief caused no concern, let alone reaction, among the orientalists of the time; it certainly had no effect on Geiger. The German title of Geiger’s published work implies even more strongly than the Latin assignment of the Bonn faculty that Muhammad’s prophetic utterances were the Prophet’s own invention, the product of a fertile human mind exposed 26

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to Jewish influence, rather than an Arab tongue moved by divine revelation. Geiger is willing to grant that the Muslim prophet was no charlatan, meaning he did indeed consider himself the recipient of genuine religious inspiration, a view also expressed by leading Jewish thinkers of the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, on examining the Qur’an for evidence of Jewish influence, Geiger refers to “his [i.e., Muhammad’s] book,” a phrase that speaks volumes as to the authorship of Muslim scripture. Some later scholars, all Christians raised on the New Testament and early Christian lore, made the case for an Islam more directly inspired by Eastern Christianity, or even by Christian influence via Abyssinia—the Abyssinians had penetrated the Arabian Peninsula on the eve of Islam, reaching as far as Mecca in the year the Prophet was allegedly born. Regarding the preponderance of stories and events from the Hebrew Bible, they noted the Old Testament figures and “historical” circumstances mentioned in the Qur’an were part of Christianity’s religious heritage as well as that of the Jews. They also pointed out what was quite obvious: there are numerous references in Muslim scripture to figures from the New Testament and more generally to Christian beliefs. Moreover, Christian orientalists were much impressed by the number of Qur’anic loan words from Syriac. A version of Aramaic originally found in northwest Mesopotamia, Syriac spread far beyond the region of its origins and became the dominant literary language of various Eastern Christians. With the translation of the Old Testament into Syriac, the tales of the ancient Israelites became accessible to those who could not read the Hebrew original or any other ancient translation. The existence of a Syriac vocabulary in the Qur’an was taken to mean that Muhammad’s message, including materials relating to the history of the Israelites, could have been derived in large part from the world of his more numerous monotheist neighbors, i.e., the Christians. That Aramaic was a language also spoken and written by Jews at the time—possibly even in regions of Arabia—was apparently not a datum of sufficient importance to blunt the argument for Christian origins. Among those arguing for a primary Christian influence on Muslim scripture was Richard Bell. His book, The Origin of Islam in Its Christian Environment (1925), the outgrowth of lectures prepared some twelve years earlier, found a receptive audience among like-minded scholars. Bell, an ordained churchman and a highly respected scholar of Arabic who taught at Edinburgh University, also translated the Qur’an. In doing so, he not only attempted to render the text into English, but, by using an imaginative graphic design, he also sought to reposition the verses of individual segments into what he

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believed was the original order of Muhammad’s revelation. In a sense, Bell’s Qur’an was similar to the polychrome Hebrew Bible, in which a team of modern scholars utilized pastel-colored markers to sort out Hebrew passages and fragments of passages according to supposed chronological and literary strata. Like the polychrome bible, Bell’s reconstructed Qur’an was a triumph of graphic design that failed to completely convince all readers. More important for our discussion, Bell also wanted to supply his translation with extensive notes, but given the financial cost that full annotation would have entailed, he was forced to settle for severely truncated footnotes sprinkled about the text. What is striking in the Qur’anic segments that deal—if at times very loosely—most directly with Old Testament themes is that Bell’s citations invariably go back to the biblical account and occasional rabbinic material. He rarely, if ever, cites Christian exegetical sources on the ancient Israelites. That is not surprising. As opposed to the personal and place names that are more closely linked to Syriac/Aramaic than Hebrew, the extended narratives seemingly derived from the Hebrew Bible invariably go back to ancient Jewish sources when we can trace their origins with some assurance. Like Geiger, who championed the importance of Jewish influence on Muhammad but nevertheless recognized that Christian themes were ubiquitous in the Qur’an, Bell seeks priority for Christian influence but is well aware of Jewish literary and legal memorabilia that are strewn about the text. As noted, an essential case for Christian origins rests with the Syriac (and also Greek) versions of biblical names preserved in the Arabic of the Qur’an: Ilyas for Elijah (Heb. Eliyahu); Musa for Moses (Heb. Moshe); Sulayman for Solomon (Heb. Shelomo); ‘Isa for Jesus (Heb. Yeshu), and the like. Bell also calls attention to Muhammad’s apocalyptic vision, arguing that the Qur’an’s preoccupation with the end of days and the circumstances surrounding the Day of Judgment were mirrored in Christianity; he believes this was not so among Jews, for whom the apocalyptic impulse had been practically dropped after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. The argument that Jews all but abandoned visions of the messianic age after the Roman conquest of their holy city is rather startling in light of numerous traditions to the contrary. Be that as it may, the contention that Islam was created in a Christian environment, more specifically a Syriac environment, has continued to be a topic of extremely lively discussion. Some thirty-five years ago, Günter Lüling in Über den Ur-Qur’an (1974) wrote of a proto-Qur’an (not our edited version) in which there were said to be traces of Christian hymns, which he proposed were written in an as yet undiscovered pre-Islamic vulgar Christian Arabic. In other words, the Mus-

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lim text in our possession is derived from an older koine language text utilized by Christians and reflecting Christian cultural artifacts of a liturgical nature. Well before Lüling, scholars recognized that the word Qur’an itself is likely based on Syriac qeryana, meaning a (Christian) text designed for communal or private recitation. However, this etymology did not necessarily imply that Muslim scripture itself evolved directly from a Christian lectionary. Nor did it presuppose the existence of a pre-Islamic Christian Arabic in the Hijaz, the birthplace of Islam. Most scholars believed (and perhaps still do) that the original language of the Qur’an was either a classical Arabic language allegedly used in pagan Mecca, or the Arabic dialect of Mecca, which was then made to conform to an evolving classical language, a process that was completed around the eighth century. Building on Lüling’s contention, a scholar wishing to throw caution to the wind might well claim that, contra Geiger and his followers who spoke of a Jewish influence in forming the Qur’an, and those who hold that the language of the Qur’an is classical Arabic or evolved into classical Arabic from a pagan Arab past, the origins of Muslim scripture were linguistically—and culturally—Christian. In 2000, the Swiss scholar Christoph Luxenberg published his Die syroaramäische Lesart des Koran: Ein Beitrag zur Entschlüsselung der Koransprache, a work subsequently enlarged with new evidence in 2004 and 2007, with a promise of further additions to come. An English translation of the first German edition with material added from the second appeared in 2007 as The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran: A Contribution to the Decoding of the Language of the Koran. As one may glean from the title, Luxenberg is of the opinion that the key to understanding the difficult language of Muslim scripture is in recognizing that in the world of the pre-Islamic Near East (at least in the Fertile Crescent) the dominant language of written culture was Aramaic (among Christians, the Syriac dialect). It then follows, according to the Luxenberg, that the subsequent development of literary Arabic—what the Arabs call ‘arabiyah and we know as classical Arabic—and in particular the language of the Qur’an, was forged in an environment that was linguistically Aramaic and heavily infused with Christian culture. This holds true not only for those Arabs who had, over centuries, migrated into the Aramaicspeaking areas of the Fertile Crescent beyond Arabia, but also to those whose origins were in the Hijaz, and particularly in Mecca. As opposed to Lüling, who presupposes the existence of an early Christian Arabic (presumably widespread in the Hijaz region of west Arabia), Luxenberg maintains that the local Meccans utilized a hybrid form of Syro-Aramaic, essentially Syriac fused with a local dialect of Arabic. Furthermore, Luxenberg claims that the

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Qur’an was originally conceived in this language. But because this hybrid language combining elements of Syriac and Arabic was soon forgotten—no oral tradition remained—it was confused with an evolving literary Arabic, thus giving rise to numerous misread words and passages in Muslim scripture. Future generations of commentators thinking that the Qur’an had been written in classical Arabic then compounded the confusion of the earliest Muslim exegetes when they supplied their readers with a wide range of lexical notes based on classical Arabic to clarify the numerous ambiguities of the text. Though not explicitly stated, Luxenberg’s Mecca, like that of Lüling’s, was most likely thought to be an active Christian settlement of sorts. As Luxenberg’s argument is based almost entirely on linguistic criteria, the proof and pudding of his bold assertions rest with the accuracy of his philological observations. The response to his thesis has been mixed at best, with the most severe criticism coming from those most expert in comparative Semitic languages, Syriac, and Christian Arabic texts, the very disciplines required to effect proper judgment of his views. Ordinarily, the controversy occasioned by Luxenberg would have been confined to a rather small group of historians and philologists. His work consists largely of extensive and highly technical notes fathomable only to super-specialists in comparative Semitic languages, particularly Arabists with a significant command of Syriac and other Aramaic dialects, as well as an informed interest in Qur’anic commentary and exegesis. Nevertheless, Luxenberg managed to make the pages of many leading newspapers and periodicals throughout the world. At the time, Muslim suicide bombers were blowing themselves up in anticipation of enjoying the pleasures of paradise, which includes, among other things, being coupled to beautiful companions with gorgeous dark eyes (hur‘in rendered in English as Houris). But that vision of a heavenly future for the righteous prescribed in Qur’an 44:54 and 52:20 is based, according to Luxenberg, on a complete misreading of the extremely ambiguous expression hur‘in. What countless generations of Muslims have understood to be desirable doe-eyed virgins is a false reading. Based on a Syriac hymn attributed to St. Ephraem the Syrian, Luxenberg declares hur‘in to signify “crystal clear white grapes.” One can hardly imagine that even a bowl of the most delectable fruit would be a proper reward for someone who knowingly gives up his life for God and Islam. Be that as it may, and leaving all attempts at whimsy aside, Luxenberg’s translation and his understanding of St. Ephraem’s hymn was subjected to withering criticism by Sidney Griffith, ordinarily a gentle critic, who is a leading authority on Christian Arabic literature and a Syriac scholar

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of world renown. As of now, Griffith’s devastating critique of Luxenberg’s celestial grapes that was presented before the American Oriental Society in 2009 still awaits publication. Perhaps the most damning statement of Luxenberg’s method and conclusions is Simon Hopkins’s review of his work in 2002 in the journal Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam. I spare readers the details of Hopkins’s exceedingly sharp criticism, which is highly technical. (Although written in English, it employs five different typesets—Syriac, Arabic, Hebrew/Aramaic, and Greek—and cites Luxenberg’s German.) I turn instead to the last paragraph, which sums up the reviewer’s disapproval. In it, Hopkins refers to “wayward philology and exegetical caprice,” and then cuts to the heart of the matter when he observes that Luxenberg makes no attempt to place his findings in any plausible historical context. Hopkins asks the critical questions that, no doubt, have occurred to many of Luxenberg’s readers: who, indeed, were the presumed Christian inhabitants of preIslamic Mecca? and how did they settle there? and precisely what Syriac writings informed the alleged hybrid text of the Qur’an? Hopkins goes on to ask how Luxenberg’s theory accounts for the extensive post-biblical Jewish elements in Muslim scripture. One could add that these Jewish elements are not always limited to single loan words (or assumed loan words) but are found in extended narratives, such as the story of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Solomon’s name in Arabic (“Sulayman”) may suggest a Syriac origin, but the extended story seems based in large part on a legendary Jewish tale that we know in Jewish Aramaic. One would be hard pressed, then, to think of the Solomon saga directly emanating from a Christian Syriac source. Above all, every scholar probing the highly elusive origins of Islam will want to know how it was that Muslims adopted this Christian Qur’an to serve them as their holy book when, lacking the linguistic competence to comprehend the original, they must have been so mystified as to what the text actually meant. Not every Christian scholar has been inclined to look to his own faith for Islamic origins. C. C. Torrey, while recognizing the place of Christianity in Muslim scripture, was convinced of Islam’s overwhelming debt to the oldest of the Abrahamic faiths when he wrote The Jewish Foundation of Islam (1933). But Torrey, despite his significant learning, was a rather eccentric individual whose views often ran against the grain of his colleagues. Torrey’s arguments may seem specious even to those scholars who, like Geiger, have been strongly committed to exploring the Jewish foundations of Islamic beliefs and practices. A common assumption linked both Jewish and Christian scholars. As did Geiger and the Jewish orientalists, those who argued for Christian influences unhesitatingly saw Islamic faith and belief as

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being highly derivative of its monotheist forebears. The most tenuous and even improbable links between Judaism and/or Christianity and Islam were asserted, at times with considerably more conviction than they deserved. This tendency to examine Islamic origins in light of traditional Judaism or Eastern Christianity characterized the work of orientalists well into the twentieth century. Even scholars who felt the deepest respect for Islamic civilization mixed praise with condescension in tracing the roots of Muhammad’s faith and that of his followers to the monotheist religions of old. Given what we now know of the transmission of culture, there is much in that orientalist quest to uncover the origins of Islam that strikes us as naive and judgmental. The vaguest similarities between Jewish and Muslim or Christian and Muslim traditions were often considered proof of direct cultural borrowing; differences were often ascribed to textual distortion or even perversion by Muslims. In effect, the learned orientalists evaluated Muhammad and his followers as if they were shoddy students in a seminar at the great German universities of Heidelberg or Bonn. Muhammad and his followers were held accountable for failing to quote accurately or footnote adequately the Jewish or Christian traditions that were said to inform Muslim texts. The charge of distorting the monotheist past, whether directly stated or merely implied, rests on two assumptions: first, that the transmission of older literary themes and religious beliefs and practices was consciously initiated and carefully programmed by medieval Muslims; and, related to that, that these cultural artifacts were as discernible to those Muslims as they seemed to be to modern Europeans who read, in addition to Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Greek, and a host of other languages that Muhammad and most of his immediate coterie had not known—let alone mastered. Neither assumption does justice to the complex and exceedingly subtle process by which closely linked cultures interact with one another. Readers should not be misled by this critical assessment of the early orientalists and those who followed in their path. The search for Jewish and Christian origins in Islamic sources and practices was not a frivolous enterprise, nor was it intended to offend the Muslims. Orientalists had too much integrity, too much scholarly acumen, and certainly too wide a learning for that. Rather, they were, as so many of us are wont to be, consumers of contemporary intellectual fashion. While attempting to portray the rise of Islam in the context of a remote age and place, they were trapped in scholarly conceits of their own making. Fueled by the intellectual outlook of Europe in the nineteenth century, an earlier generation of scholars went about the task of stripping literary sources bare in order to expose, and then analyze, the textual and ideological strata.

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The purpose of this project was the recovery of earlier sources and kernels of ideas that had become deeply embedded in a new literary and social environment, in this case Jewish and Christian themes and observances in early Muslim texts and practices. A kind of literary archeology, this method of determining paths of influence was favored in a number of scholarly disciplines; it informed research on diverse topics including the historical-literary development of the Hebrew Bible. Similar source-critical techniques were used in the search for the historic Jesus. In each case, the object was to discover (or rediscover) an ancient culture rather than deliberately inscribe contemporary Western values on it. To claim, as some have, that the early orientalists and their later successors engaged in a cultural conspiracy to rob Muslims of their intellectual heritage is patently mischievous, intellectually uninformed, and, at times, politically driven. Whatever reservations we may have about the old orientalists, and however justified our reservations, their contribution to the discussion of Islamic civilization has to be seen as substantive, more driven by intellectual than political or anti-Muslim passions. Indeed, Geiger and his followers were instrumental in disengaging the study of Islamic origins from religiously motivated anti-Muslim polemics that had been circulating since the Middle Ages. For over a thousand years, Islam had been denigrated by learned and not so learned Christian clerics as a deviant offshoot of Christianity, a religion concocted by a wayward monk, or, if you prefer another version among many anti-Muslim accounts, by Jewish conspirators seeking to undermine Christianity. In certain Jewish sources, the blame for the rise and spread of Islam falls upon Jewish converts seeking to undermine their former faith. Such views changed in the wake of Geiger and his successors. One might argue that in many respects Geiger anticipated the future study of comparative religion. orientalist debates in the west Acutely aware of Muslim sensibilities, today’s Western scholars are much less judgmental than their orientalist predecessors when writing about Muhammad and Islamic beliefs and institutions. There are also marked changes in the way recent inheritors of the orientalist tradition study the Islamic past. The professors of the Western academy have learned that recovering the origins of Islam is not as simple as eating away at a piece of fruit to expose its core. As were the orientalists, today’s scholars are sensitive to the trends of the times. Advances in the social sciences and literary studies provide for

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a more broadly based cultural vision than that of our scholarly predecessors, especially in the United States, where interdisciplinary efforts find great favor and area studies are still seen as important to the national interest. New approaches to anthropology, literary criticism, and the use of computers to amass and sort data have all encouraged calls for a deeper and more complex analysis of how Islamic civilization was forged in the Middle Ages. The emergence of cultural studies as a discourse that devours highly specialized branches of scholarship and refashions them to suit the needs of its practitioners has further complicated the attempt to engage the Islamic past. Paradoxically, newly heightened perspectives have tended to limit the recovery of the past, even in its broadest outlines. Many scholars feel constrained by an outlook that urges greater caution in reconstructing history or extracting meaning from literary texts. Where earlier orientalists were willing to state bold views based on a limited range of primary sources, some modern researchers, literally inundated with a wealth of new materials that throw light on the foundations of Islam and subsequent developments in the Middle Ages, approach their subject as if they were being forced to run backwards and barefoot through uncharted scholarly minefields. There is a seeming chasm between the overly confident scholarship of nineteenth-century orientalists and the ubiquitous self-doubt of Near East historians in the early years of the third millennium CE. Placing trust in their mastery of languages and confident of their ability to get to the heart of ancient and medieval sources, the orientalists of old firmly believed they could fully understand and describe a mysterious world far removed from their own in time and place. In contrast, many of today’s historians have jettisoned philology and critical readings of sources, the basic tools required in previous generations to make erudite judgments of Islamic civilization. Close and learned readings of Arabic texts, once the central focus of all Near East scholars, no longer titillate some historians’ imaginations. Stung by accusations that they lack analytical sophistication, a new breed of historians party with literary critics and social and political theorists or seek statistical methods that obviate the need to interrogate individual texts. All that partying may have made these new historians of the Islamic world a bit giddy, but it has not made them more secure—at least not the more responsible of them. Many face a crisis of confidence in describing actual events, or, better put, events as they might have unfolded. They also remain insecure as regards the development of various religious ideas and institutions. In truth, historians of Islam ought to be cautious in making claims on

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the past. Much of the new source material that has come to light is fragile and therefore highly problematic. For those historians still bold enough to tackle the origins of Islam and the formation of medieval Islamic civilization, there are no surviving Arabic archives or large caches of Muslim documents and letters to illuminate the daily life of the common people, or what transpired among the notables, be it those individuals in public life or the world of the learned. Nevertheless, the current crisis of confidence seems in many instances too hastily, too easily, and, ironically enough, even too confidently proclaimed, whether because of philosophical issues about interpreting texts and the nature of historical truth, or a declining linguistic competence, which would have allowed some current scholars to dig more deeply into problematic sources, and then dig some more. In any case, different eras and sites of scholarly investigation generally occasion different approaches to acquiring and interpreting knowledge. Despite the shifting orientation of Islamic studies, questions of cultural borrowing first raised in systematic fashion by Geiger continue to attract learned and imaginative Western scholars. Issues ranging from Jewish and possible Christian influence on Islam to the evolution of the early Islamic polity remain coin of the realm. There is also a continuing interest in the formation of early Islamic religious texts and institutions, albeit from a broadened perspective. We have seen that when investigating Islamic origins, orientalists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries turned as a matter of course to the older monotheist faiths they knew so well. Their understanding of Judaism and Christianity was confined, however, to normative beliefs and practices that evolved in the Fertile Crescent. Doubtless, had Geiger and his successors the sources presently available, they would have expanded their search for Islamic origins beyond the so-called “cradle of civilization” and explored more deeply the multifaceted Arabian context that gave birth to the earliest Islamic community. Arabia was never a single geographical environment cut off from all neighboring civilizations. Its different landscapes gave rise to diverse patterns of settlement and varied forms of social organization. Over time, the different regions and peoples of the peninsula were linked by a common interest, a lucrative international trade route. That route extended from the lands of the Fertile Crescent through the oases regions of western Arabia, then to Yemen in the south, and from there across the Red Sea into East Africa. By the early decades of the sixth century CE, the south had been subjected to extensive foreign stimuli, political, economic, and cultural. Abyssinians from the Horn of Africa settled in the Yemen, the southwest region

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of the Arabian Peninsula, bringing with them Christianity and the potential to promote the Christian interests of the rulers from whose lands they came. Similarly, the north of Arabia was subject to Christian influence from the neighboring Byzantine Empire. Jews were also part of the local landscape, although the structure of their communities and the nature of their beliefs and observances are largely unknown. For a brief period in the sixth century CE, the ruler of Yemen embraced Judaism. Put more cautiously, in one way or another, he embraced religious beliefs and practices that might have resembled local forms of Judaism, whatever they may have been. How many of his subjects also embraced Judaism cannot be ascertained. In any case, monotheist beliefs, however understood, and religious practices, however observed, had become part of the Arabian landscape on the eve of Islam. To be fair, early orientalists, even as early as Geiger, did not deny the potential importance of local developments in forming Muhammad’s worldview and in shaping the future course of Islam. What they lacked, however, were the sources currently available in print and in manuscript and with that the capacity to extend their vision into the uncharted scholarly deserts of Arabian history. the jerusalem scho ol Over the last several decades, a small but energetic group of learned Arabists have gathered regularly from various points of the globe to exchange views and debate openly about Arabia and the rise of Islam. The venue is the “Jahiliyah to Islam” seminar at the Institute for Advanced Studies of the Hebrew University (Jahiliyah is the Arabic term to signify the world of Arabia before the emergence of Muhammad and his religious community). Covering a wide range of historical and literary issues, the presenters at these seminars tend to question the supremely confident conclusions of nineteenthand early twentieth-century scholars. But, as did their intellectual elders, and unlike some modern historians, the Jerusalem circle continues to embrace the rigorous study of texts and textual traditions. In that sense, the Hebrew University’s programs in Arabic and Islamic studies are a living link to European scholarship of the past. That comes as no great surprise, for the first generation of Jerusalem’s Arabists was trained in German-speaking universities; a large number, perhaps the majority of its prewar students received their secondary school education on the Continent. In so many respects, the university’s intellectual debt to Europe and to the orientalist enterprise is self-evident. Its current curriculum in Islamic studies is broadly based on a

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model suggested to the founding faculty in 1925 by Josef Horovitz, the great German scholar who was their mentor and first director. In Jerusalem, the intense study of medieval Islamic sources continues to be the fulcrum of scholarly inquiry; the ability to master the language of these texts and to read them critically is considered the ultimate scholarly achievement and the highest mark of academic distinction. On the whole, the participants in the Jerusalem seminars have done much to enliven the debate about Islamic origins, much as their colleagues in other areas of Islamic studies have made Jerusalem a major center for the study of Islamic civilization. Summing up the contribution of the Jerusalem “school,” one could say that, unlike those orientalists who confined their study of Islamic origins to normative Jewish and Christian influences, the Jerusalemites explore the complex and little known Arabian environment in which Islam was spawned. Armed with newly uncovered texts and fresh readings of old sources, scholars situated at the Hebrew University, as well as those who regularly gather there, have created a broad, if somewhat unfocused, picture of the Arabian Peninsula on the eve of Islam and shortly thereafter. In particular, we now have a much better feel for the manner in which formal religious practices, polytheist and Muslim alike, became intertwined with the formation of increasingly more complex tribal associations and politics. The details of such developments are summed up in a number of studies, including a recent one written by myself and Michael Bonner titled Islam in the Middle Ages (2010). Suffice it to say, the rise of that community led by the Prophet Muhammad can now be seen against the background of significant changes in tribal life and society brought about by interrelated political and economic forces. Among them: the alleged breakdown of centralized authority in South Arabia; largescale migration of tribal populations; contested living space both within and external to tribal groups; struggles for the control of lucrative trade routes; the formation of increasingly larger tribal configurations linked to religion and commerce; and a northern frontier made increasingly porous by a debilitating and indecisive conflict between the Byzantine and Sasanian (Persian) empires. Seen from this Arabian-centered perspective, and contrary to the thrust of earlier orientalist researches, the recovery of Islamic origins has become a complex process that calls for much more than tracing probable paths of influence via Jewish and Christian written sources reaching Arabia from the Fertile Crescent and possibly Abyssinia. However important the new focus on Arabia is to learned Western scholars, the concern with the changing fabric of tribal societies has been of limited interest to believing Muslims. Their views on the origins of Islam will be

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examined later. All that need be said here is that from a medieval perspective, or even a modern Muslim one, the aforementioned developments in Arabia are not central to scholarly discussions on the development of Muslim religious ideals or the evolution of Muslim religious practice. For the most part, Muslim traditions describe Muhammad’s mission and the advent of Islam in uniquely religious terms, the final and most glorious religious achievement of monotheism, an achievement ordained, as are all events, by the will of God. A causality that invokes the Almighty might satisfy believing Muslims, modern and medieval, but for current Western scholars, the sprouting of Islamic religious beliefs and practices, linked however loosely to Judaism and Christianity, is not so easily explained. For most Western scholars, the rise of Islam in seventh-century Arabia was not a singular moment or unique monument to religious stirrings in the peninsula. They are now inclined to view Arabian society of the sixth and seventh centuries CE as having been receptive to all sorts of religious developments and conditioned by all means of religious stimuli. Indeed, there seems to have been at least one other attempt to establish a new monotheist community in Arabia concurrent with Islam, the aborted movement of the Muslims’ adversary, the false prophet, Musaylimah. Nor should we rule out the possibility of other aborted movements striving to establish new, perhaps eclectic monotheist communities, connected in some fashion with regional and even local versions of Jewish and Christian culture. Some fifty years ago, the immensely learned Meir Bravmann suggested, albeit on the most questionable evidence, that there are references to an Arabian religion called Islam that predates the Prophet. In his writings on idolatry and the emergence of Islam, G. R. Hawting goes so far as to claim that the Qur’anic invective against polytheism is, in reality, a polemic against a (debased) form of monotheism. In any case, the advent of Islam is now seen as the sum of exceedingly complex historical forces gripping the region. Even Muslim historiography, with its more narrowly defined religious focus, describes Muhammad and the early Muslims as formulating a political agenda in order to react to the tribal politics of the moment, although that political agenda is explicable for Muslims only in light of genuine religious sensibilities. Ironically, the larger Arabian-centered narrative of the Jerusalem circle, that detailed, meticulously researched, and richly colored account describing the background of an emerging Islam, is largely based on the residual and for the most part monochrome Muslim view of the past. Aside from preIslamic poetry, a few scattered inscriptions, and some brief references to the history of Islam in highly problematic non-Muslim sources, there is virtu-

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ally nothing available to modern scholars attempting to recover the origins of Islam. There are no contemporaneous Arabic prose texts, let alone archival materials, or even incidental repositories of documents. The interpretation of material culture, always a useful tool in the absence of the written word, has been impeded by Muslim authorities reluctant to sanction extensive archeological digs. The excavation of strategic sites combined with theoretical models of social organization could very well add to our knowledge of the beginnings of Islam and its subsequent development. Time and circumstance will tell if that is to be the case. Given the current state of possible research, the picture of Islamic origins painted by the Jerusalem circle is, of necessity, less than comprehensive; there are many surfaces left blank. But the surfaces that are painted are richly textured miniatures marked by exceedingly fine brushwork. Perhaps the greatest contribution of the Jerusalemites is the meticulous manner in which they have built on earlier orientalist paradigms to reveal, in a fashion more clear than ever, the tendentious nature of medieval Muslim narratives, texts that promote an idealized view of the past in order to legitimate the politics and religious observances of later times. In all, the Jerusalem contribution to understanding the origins of Islam is a very significant and ongoing achievement. The Jerusalem debates on Jahiliyah to Islam now attract three generations of well-trained and highly capable scholars; the results of their deliberations are published regularly in the Hebrew University’s Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam, a journal that consistently adheres to the most rigorous standards of scholarship based on close readings of texts. the revisionists and the reaction to their views Not all historians with rigorous philological training are optimistic about recovering even the broadest outlines of an obscure Islamic past. There is a very active revisionist circle that was originally situated at the University of London’s famed School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). These revisionist scholars of early Islam view Muslim foundational myths with extreme skepticism. Accordingly, they are less focused on ways to salvage the past from medieval Arabic writings, the declared objective of the Jerusalem school and more generally of traditional Western historiography, than on undermining the sum and substance of the religiously based Muslim historical tradition. Rejecting the notion that somehow Muslim historical and more narrowly defined religious writings can be massaged to reveal significant, if any, echoes of a real past, they describe the Islamic record on the

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origins of Islam as a fabricated salvation history (Heilsgeschichte) comparable to the narratives of Israelite origins in the Hebrew Bible, that is, the story concocted by later generations of Israelites to validate the theological and territorial politics of the moment. In short, the traditional narrative of Islamic origins is an ideologically satisfying account of the world as it should have been and not at all as it was or might have been. This view is most forcefully presented by John Wansbrough in two immensely learned and densely scripted works that lay the foundation of revisionist scholarship: Quranic Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation (1977) and The Sectarian Milieu: Content and Composition of Islamic Salvation History (1978). The intellectual energy compelling revisionist theories, regardless of discipline, is often linked to highly individualized personalities. That being the case, it comes as no surprise that the feisty and intellectually curious revisionists of early Islam are hardly of a single mind. There is, however, a broad consensus among them, namely, that all early Arabic historiography and religious tradition, including Muslim scripture in its present form, is a back projection that reflects intellectual and political developments some two centuries removed from the alleged beginnings of Islam. As we shall see, all serious scholars in the West have come to recognize the tendentious nature of Islamic tradition, especially the historical accounts describing Muhammad and the rise and expansion of the Muslim community. However, the revisionists go a step further, declaring that the Muslim foundational narrative contains no residual truths about the origins of the Prophet and his faith. Many even deny that Arabia had a profound effect if any on the formation of early Islamic politics, beliefs, and institutions, or that the Arab tribesmen who initially conquered the lands beyond the peninsula could be described as embracing a normative Islam. Seen from this last perspective, what we now recognize as Islam only crystallized at some point in the eighth century and in the conquered regions of the Near East beyond Arabia. Despite the forceful nature of their arguments, the revisionists have failed to stimulate wholesale conversion to all their challenging views, no doubt happily for those scholars who enjoy the exhilaration of swimming against the tide. Indeed, the failure of the revisionists to capture more ground than they have some thirty years after they entered the debate on Islamic origins may well be due not only to the controversy of their initial claims but also to the pugnacious manner in which some of them chose to unfold their complex brief. At times, the receptivity of Islamic revisionism seems inversely proportionate to the bold conviction with which the revisionists argue their case. That has been especially true for one of the earliest and most chal-

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lenging works of the revisionist corpus: Michael Cook and Patricia Crone’s Hagarism (1977), an intellectual tour de force that directly challenges the conventional wisdom of the orientalist fraternity. Having rejected all traditional Muslim views of Muhammad and the rise of Islam, Cook and Crone posit an imaginative reconstruction of their own. Based on a few scattered and highly problematic non-Muslim sources as well as what appears to some more stolid scholars a surfeit of historical imagination, they contend that Islam derives from an obscure ancient civilization with roots in the Fertile Crescent beyond Arabia. Hitherto unknown to scholars, that civilization was produced by a broadly based and highly eclectic sectarian movement given to monotheist impulses borrowed in part from reworked Jewish ideas, including an appealing form of Jewish messianism. This calque of a civilization, conjured up by Cook and Crone and called “Hagarism” (sometimes “Judeo-Hagarism,” both names suggested by references to the Muslims as Hagarites in Christian sources of the times), was allegedly embraced by Arab tribesmen who had crossed the frontier separating the Arabian Peninsula from the settled territories beyond, a gradually unfolding migration that gathered steam toward the mid-seventh century CE. A century and more later, the descendants of these tribesmen, seeking to legitimize themselves and their faith vis-à-vis the normative Christian and Jewish communities, reshaped the original Hagarism beyond recognition, inventing for themselves, almost from scratch, an Arabian monotheist past that bears little if any resemblance to historical realities. That fictive version of events invented by the Arab Hagarites is the well-known Islamic historical tradition, on which most Western scholarship is based today. Briefly put, that is the thesis advanced by Cook and Crone in their brilliant and highly imaginative work. Cook and Crone understood from the outset that their contribution to the debate on Islamic origins was likely to prove offensive to entrenched scholarly views and academic habits. They fully expected that Hagarism would raise the eyebrows of Western specialists while, at the same time, it would be rejected totally, not only by believing Muslims, but also by those Muslims who had lost their faith. As they put it rather pungently at the outset: “This is a book written by infidels for infidels . . . any Muslim whose faith is as a grain of mustard seed should have no difficulty in rejecting [it].” They do seem to suggest that perhaps lapsed Muslims could be more understanding of revisionist views once they fully digested the evidence mounted by the coauthors, but as the thrust of Hagarism boldly compromises the uniqueness claimed for early Islam in Muslim tradition, even the most skeptical Muslims

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were likely to be offended, if not on religious grounds then because they felt their cultural heritage had been demeaned. Cook and Crone were right on at least one count: the Western academic establishment digested their views, more or less politely, but remained largely unconvinced. The same applied to other revisionists who composed variations on the themes first presented by the learned circle at SOAS. To mainstream scholars, it seemed highly improbable that the Qur’an and virtually all of early Muslim historical tradition, as well as the centrality of Arabia in the formation of Islam, should have been a literary hoax concocted long after the Arabs traversed the frontier. The energy that would have been required to weave such a richly textured tradition, essentially out of whole cloth, boggled the imagination of more conventionally inclined Arabists. What is perhaps more surprising is that neither the coauthors of Hagarism nor their revisionist colleagues seem to have elicited critical comment, or indeed much comment at all, from Muslim scholars, including those Muslim scholars who have absolutely no qualms about attacking the regnant paradigms of Western scholarship. Much to their credit, and reflective of their scholarly integrity, the revisionists have never proclaimed themselves victims of an academic conspiracy or a more broadly based political cabal that denied and continues to deny them a more honored place in the larger debate on Islamic origins. It is rather the critical imagination of their deniers that they find lacking. The revisionists are now somewhat dispersed, having settled in a number of academic sites, but with no great increase in the number of partisans. Some of the early revisionists moved on to entirely new projects. Nevertheless, the impulse for revising traditional views on the rise of Islam has not disappeared, particularly as regards the formation of the Qur’anic text and its message. Building on early revisionist efforts, the current practitioners within the revisionist camp view Muslim scripture as a heavily redacted series of discrete texts, brought together many decades after the Prophet, at times from materials with which neither he nor his contemporaries were, or could have been, familiar. Even classical Arabic, the language of the current Qur’an and early Arabic tradition, has been declared by some revisionists as the creation of a non-Arabian environment. In contrast, most scholars still hold that the Qur’an in its present form reflects the actual utterances of a historic seventhcentury Muhammad, although in a text and format that was shaped by later editing, as was the vast Arabic historiography devoted to the Prophet’s career and the formation of his community. Medieval Muslims themselves admit that their scripture went through several stages of redaction after the death

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of the Prophet, but they maintain that somehow, almost miraculously, the pious editors managed to preserve the integrity of the entire text, so that the individual surahs, or segments, represent coherent messages, rather than disjointed passages run together without any principle of organization, or at least none that is discernible in all instances to non-Muslim specialists in Qur’an studies. Despite its critics, revisionist scholarship remains part of the larger Western project on Islamic origins. Their work appears in scholarly publications produced by the most prestigious presses; is presented at lectures and seminars; and is the subject of deliberations at the meetings of learned societies. Aside from their views regarding the late composition of the Qur’an and the insistence that Islam and the early Islamic community first took definitive shape in the eighth century and in a non-Arabian milieu, there is much in the revisionist approach that would meet the approval of current critics were some not put off by what they consider the excessive claims of early revisionism and, not the least, the condescending tone of its feistiest advocates. However controversial it may seem at first glance, the revisionist project reflects, in its skepticism, the critical impulses of mainstream scholarship. Ever since Goldziher’s Muhammedanische Studien first appeared in the latter part of the nineteenth century, Western scholars have widely shared a belief that Islamic literary traditions, religious and historical, and many Muslim institutions and practices, administrative and legal, are indeed retrospective creations of a later period. As noted earlier, Goldziher was able to intuit how Muslim religious texts purportedly retaining the Prophet’s dicta and describing his behavior were fitted retroactively to conform to idealized visions of an earlier age. In such fashion, these inventive renderings of the past legitimized later religious and legal practices, and, in the case of Islamic government, informed later Muslim politics and political institutions. Goldziher’s critical analysis of hadith literature was applied in the following century to the development of Islamic law by Joseph Schacht. Born to a Christian family in Germany, Schacht is said to have a developed an early interest in Semitic languages when he sat in on Hebrew classes attended by Jewish school chums. His interest piqued by that early encounter, Schacht prepared himself for a career in Arabic studies that led to posts at Oxford and Columbia and his pathbreaking The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence (1953). Put succinctly, Schacht argued that neither the law nor the principles by which Islamic law was interpreted stemmed from the Prophet’s lifetime and as such could throw no light on his life and times nor that of the first generation of Muslims to follow.

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the origins of isl amic legal institu tions and substantive l aw As with Goldziher’s study of hadith, Schacht’s researches on the formation of Islamic law were counterintuitive. He argued that the celebrated schools of Islamic law were a later development, the outgrowth of early informal institutions that took root in the wake of the Islamic conquest when a small Muslim Arab minority had to govern vast territories with well-established pre-Islamic legal institutions and practices. Schacht willingly concedes some Muslim legal activity was initiated by the newly established rulers in Syria, the political hub of the Islamic polity from 661 to 750. He also accepts that “regional” schools of law sprouted in Basrah and Kufah, the newly founded Muslim garrison towns of Iraq, and understandably in the Prophet’s city Medina, the original political and religious center of the Islamic realm. These regional centers of legal activity, described by Schacht as the “ancient schools of [Islamic] law,” acted more or less independently of one another and are not to be confused with the formal schools (madhab, pl. madhahib) of later centuries that had broad-reaching legal authority. Moreover, through a meticulous examination of texts, Schacht was able to demonstrate that early Islamic jurists/judges derived their substantive law from a number of sources linked not directly if at all to Muslim scripture or the hadith, which he regarded (following Goldziher) as a later invention projected back into the lifetime of the Prophet. According to Schacht, the ancient schools of law absorbed and legitimized elements of the customary law of pre-Islamic Arabia and all sorts of foreign legal accretions: elements of Roman law, Jewish law, and the like, which were part of the diverse legal landscape encountered by the Muslim conquerors. In addition, the nascent schools took into consideration the innovative decisions of Muslim judges appointed by the Islamic state. Only a century and more later was this legal material systematized and committed to writing in authoritative Muslim law codes. With all these diverse legal strands in play during the first Islamic century, there was the potential for considerable chaos as early Islamic law began to develop. Recognizing the need for judicial consistency, the jurists associated with the earliest schools of law concocted chains of tradition in which they transmitted statements (hadith) attributed to the Prophet. In such fashion, they could establish precedents based on the “way” (sunnah) of Muhammad, the last individual who received and would receive prophetic calling. That direct link to the “Lord and Seal of the Prophets” legitimized the pragmatic rulings of Muslim judges and the aforementioned non-Islamic elements of

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an evolving Islamic law. According to Schacht, the earliest legal hadith dated from no earlier than the eighth century. The systemization of Islamic legal principles occurred only in the following century. As did the oral law of the rabbis for Jews, the invented statements attributed directly to the Prophet or recording his purported actions served as precedents for moving religious law into hitherto uncharted directions so as to meet changing contingencies. Prophecy, having ended for Jews with the destruction of the Temple and for Muslims with the death of Muhammad, was no longer a vehicle by which either Jews or mainstream Muslims could receive commandments directly from God. With that, the need for a second body of law commanding legal authority along with scripture was self-evident, for, taken literally, neither the legal precepts of the Hebrew Bible nor those of the Qur’an were sufficient to serve the needs of Jews and Muslims encountering circumstances far different from those of their forebears. Both Jewish and Muslim tradition are richly seasoned with telling, often humorous accounts that make it abundantly clear that rabbis and Muslim jurists were fully aware of how they invented and shaped a past to suit the contours of conditions in changing times and changed places. Broadly speaking, the manner in which Goldziher and Schacht treated an Islamic past, both invented and real, remains the reigning paradigm of Western scholarship even today. Subsequent scholars have nevertheless refined this paradigm, particularly in the areas of early Islamic jurisprudence and substantive law. These refinements have given rise to elaborate theories that call for modifying Western skepticism toward Muslim oral tradition, the body of literature that Goldziher and Schacht regarded unreliable for recovering the life and times of the Prophet. There is now a growing tendency to accept that various traditions may reflect a genuine past, particularly those statements that pertain to Muslim family law and religious practice. If one accepts the Arabian origins of Islam, as indeed the overwhelming majority of scholars do, there had to have been some legal and institutional framework that guided the lives of the earliest Arab Muslim community and defined its religious ritual. As regards early Islamic family law, no doubt a good deal represents a melding of the customary law of the Arabs with certain Islamic innovations. Schacht acknowledged that residual elements of that customary law were invoked by the early Muslim schools. In matters of ritual observance, there would have been a great need to innovate at the very outset, as prayer and other practices had to account for newly developed monotheist sensibilities. The removal of idols from the Meccan sanctuary is the most obvious illustration of such change.

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But monotheist innovations need not have resulted in jettisoning all pagan ritual. Even after Islam was firmly established by the Prophet in his native Mecca, the pilgrimage, initiated in pagan times, not only continued but also became one of the “pillars” of Islam, an act obligatory on all Muslims. However, it was now fully Islamized, much as the popular Roman Saturnalia festival was reinvented by Christians to celebrate the birth of their savior. In similar fashion, agricultural and other festivals of the ancient Near East were refashioned by the biblical Israelites and the rabbis, who shaped a later Judaism, to emphasize the historical narrative of the “chosen people.” One is hardly surprised that the early Muslims retained elements of a familiar pagan environment, or that they had and would continue to borrow from Jews and Christians among them. Revolutionary moments in the history of religion— the rise of Islam was just such an occasion—are not ordinarily marked by a total eradication of the past. Religious innovators often integrate what is deeply rooted in their societies, and hence too popular to jettison, within new frameworks of belief and practice. For Muslims who think their scripture, faith, and practices uniquely evolved according to a more tradition-bound outlook, that is, a holy scripture, traditions literature, and law untainted by foreign elements and reflecting the values and age of God’s last messenger, the orientalist project of modern times was a falsification of a self-evident truth. Muslim scholars who actually read orientalist literature and had become broadly acquainted with its critical outlook came to view Western skepticism with great suspicion and even fear. There was also the danger of situating Islamic studies within the mainstream of comparative religion as taught in the Western academy. All this had the potential of undermining the very foundations of traditional Islam and diminishing the uniqueness of the Prophet and his message. There has been, in consequence, a Muslim backlash against Goldziher, Schacht, and like-minded Western scholars. But that assault on the jugular vein of the orientalist enterprise, mostly by traditional Muslims trained and situated in the West, has at best punctured a few capillaries; no serious bloodletting, just some staining here and there. That said, serious challenges to the orientalist paradigm, as it was originally conceived and elaborated, have been mounted in recent years, interestingly enough largely by Christian and Jewish scholars. We already noted how heirs to Goldziher tried to argue for accepting that various Islamic traditions might indeed describe certain aspects of family law and religious ritual. A number of Western Islamicists working with new materials and new methods with which to analyze chains of authority now argue, contra Schacht, for an

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earlier date as regards the origins of Islamic jurisprudence. All this effort has given rise to serious debate, and more can be expected in the future. But as they attempt to refine our understanding of early Islamic practices and institutions, many Western critics of Goldziher, Schacht, and the like acknowledge their debt to the masters of the past. Because many critics resist throwing out the baby with the bathwater, the foundations of modern Western scholarship on Islamic origins remain firmly in place although subject to serious modifications. Goldziher and Schacht nevertheless retain their status as revered intellectual forebears; their views are still our points of departure. After all has been said and the complex arguments leave us intellectually exhausted, various Western approaches to the early Islamic community and its beliefs and practices tell us more about what that community and its faith could not have been, than what it was. We are left with more questions than answers, particularly as regards cultural borrowing. That is not only true for the life and times of the Prophet, but also for circumstances after the rise of Islam and the initial Arab conquest, events which heralded what might be described as the classical age of Islamic civilization. I refer here to the history of the late seventh to tenth centuries, a period in which many if not indeed most of the major religious movements and institutions of the medieval Islamic world were fashioned, and major and long-lasting political trends linked to religious developments took root. The political history of the classical, or, if you prefer, formative age, particularly the life and times of the Prophet, has been treated elsewhere and in detail, albeit by historians employing approaches somewhat different from scholars of Islamic religion and law. Our interest now turns to the various approaches used by modern Western scholars to interpret what may be described broadly as the evolution of the nascent Islamic state, which begins with the community of the Prophet. muslim chroniclers and western historical writings on isl amic origins The prophetic rather than historical nature of Muslim scripture and the proposed spuriousness of the vast legal traditions relating to the life and times of the Prophet force us to consider the last major body of medieval Muslim texts about the rise of Islam: historical accounts that fall under the rubric of prophetic biography (sirah) and battle-day narratives (maghazi). With regard to Muhammad’s life and the growth of the ummah as a religious and political organism, these two genres often cover the same ground. Unlike modern his-

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torians who study the hadith literature, those who interrogate these sources do not find themselves constrained by a myriad of short and pithy statements, but have for their perusal more extensive and detailed reports (akhbar), ranging from the equivalent of a paragraph or two to several pages of continuous historical narrative. Collectively, the “historical” accounts frame a larger, more detailed, and infinitely more cohesive picture of the past than any other sources available to us. At first glance, the medieval Arabic historiography relating the politics of the Prophet’s time is both vast and compelling, as it is for all the formative periods of Islamic civilization. That is particularly true of the massive universal histories. But for all the richness and detail, there is something disquieting about the description of politics and political institutions, and for reasons similar to those that plagued scholars who relied on hadith of dubious historicity to chart the growth of Muslim beliefs, practices, and religious institutions. As told by medieval chroniclers, the story of the evolving Muslim polity is a history that has been discovered, embellished, and, when necessary, invented, in this case to enhance Muhammad’s prophetic credentials by linking him and his ummah to the authentic monotheist prophets and communities of old. In similar fashion, the chroniclers validated the claims of generous patrons who supported their research and writing. Such patrons were usually individual rulers or political factions whose credentials to rule were at the time suspiciously lacking, or their opponents whose credentials to rule were trumpeted by enthusiastic followers but who rarely managed to actually take power. In either case, the hired pens sought to legitimate their patrons, linking them and their following to the Prophet and his community, and then, going a step further, by linking them on occasion to an even earlier monotheist history, that of the ancient Israelites. A good deal, if not indeed most, of this historiography was occasioned by the ubiquitous dispute between the ‘Abbasids/Sunnites (whose caliphate lasted five hundred years despite shaky initial claims to rule) and the ‘Alids/Shi‘ites (blessed with impeccable bloodlines, but most often denied political and religious leadership). And so, like the accounts describing the actions or sayings of the Prophet and the precedents established by him, which served as a basis for an evolving Islamic law and jurisprudence, the Muslim record of the political past has also given rise to skepticism on the part of Western scholars. Of late, a number of learned and thoughtful individuals have set about trying to find keys with which to unlock a history from the rise of the Prophet through the reigns of the early Abbasid caliphs, some four centuries that might be described as the forma-

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tive period of Islam. Among the most recent works are Chase F. Robinson’s Islamic Historiography (2003); Jacob Lassner’s The Middle East Remembered (2000); and especially The Early Arabic Historical Tradition: A Source-Critical Study, a work originally published in German by Albrecht Noth (1973) and subsequently reworked in an expanded second English edition with the collaboration of Lawrence Conrad (1994). Despite these important efforts, historians of the West still await the likes of a Goldziher or a Schacht to provide a conceptual framework within which to accept or reject individual historical accounts with a greater degree of confidence. The early generation of orientalists was more prone to trust the chroniclers. When Gustav Weil wrote his history of the caliphs in the nineteenth century, he merely had to paraphrase the historians of old and add some additional insights of his own to reconstruct what he considered actual states of the past. However, when scholars began to recognize that Arabic historiography of the classical age was deliberately shaped to reflect later political developments and views, they faced a quandary. They needed a reliable text to supply them with the necessary context to write history, but they also needed a reliable context with which to explain the text. There was all too often no obvious point of entry with which to engage the description of historical events, especially the life and times of the Prophet. And yet, more often than not, the historians of the West applied what can be described as the “hunt and peck” method. As did Geiger, they relied on intuition to form a conceptual framework; they then scoured the primary sources to find tidbits of information that might support that framework. In such fashion, they could dismiss the larger medieval enterprise as being subject to literary invention, but individual comments were retained, sometimes uncritically, as the building blocks with which to reconstruct the Islamic past, particularly the elusive rise of Islam. Perhaps the leading exponent of this method is W. Montgomery Watt, the most important Western biographer of the Prophet Muhammad (see part 2, chapter 5). Some Western scholars, recognizing the methodological trap into which they could easily fall, have chosen to neglect altogether the foundational history of the Islamic community and the changing shape of its political contours in the centuries to follow. Quite understandably, they prefer to write of later periods where available archival sources and other documents place them on safer ground. Others have bravely tried their hand at reconstructing the past by comparing several variants of the same account, interrogating each source until finding the point that gives the account coherence by revealing what they consider the broad outlines of the author’s coded mes-

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sage. Or to put it somewhat differently, they search for the echo of an historical truth that causes the author to be so uneasy that he needs to massage the past in a way that will be acceptable to both his patron and intended audience. Historians of good conscience are not likely to think they can tease much more out these texts, certainly not anything that might resemble actual states of a distant past. But, acting on the assumption that the author, his patron, and his audience are reacting to events in real time, today’s historians can at least speak of the contemporaneous moment. In that sense, an eighthcentury rapporteur writing about the earliest Muslim community may be reflecting upon the events of his time and the conduct of his political patron. At the very least, that back projection gives us a window to examine events of the eighth century. On the other hand, the same eighth-century rapporteur may have actually searched the past for precedents in order to invent or shape a more recent history in which his patrons would appear as linked to the Prophet and the ethos of the latter’s idealized age. There is then reason to try and hold a middle ground between the uncritical acceptance of medieval historiography, or parts of it, and abandoning completely any effort to obtain the broad outlines of an obscure but all so important past. It is of course more difficult to hold this ground as one slips further and further into the more remote periods of Islamic experience. As regards the rise of Islam, the initial quandary of trying to simultaneously find a balance between text and context leaves modern scholars trying to recover elements of the Prophet’s age with all too unsatisfying options. Unlike those Muslims who are prepared to endorse all of Islamic tradition and those historians of the modern West who choose to abandon any attempt at reconstructing the early history of the Islamic world, we must in good conscience, and with considerable humility and circumspection, speculate about Islamic origins and the politics of the formative age. There should be no shame in informed speculation. To do less not only subverts intellectual curiosity and diminishes our ability to understand how Muslims resonated and continue to resonate to all important episodes of their history, be they idealized or real. For Muslims, the past, even when imagined or invented out of whole cloth, has served and continues to serve as a model that reaffirms faith, guides belief, and stirs individuals and groups to action. This is particularly true of the inspiration Muslims have always drawn from the life and times of God’s quintessential messenger. That being the case, however difficult it is for modern scholars to think of the past based on sources so suspect, they are obliged to press on in the search for Islamic origins, recognizing at all times the fragility of their endeavor.

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Despite the hesitancy of many current historians to tackle the origins of Islam, the search for the historic Muhammad and his community not only continues; it has attracted, as of late, renewed attention. In addition to the broad methodological studies of Robinson, Lassner, and Noth and Conrad, Fred Donner’s critical review of the regnant interpretive paradigms at the onset of Islam in his Narratives of Islamic Origins (1998) makes a strong case for accepting elements of the early Islamic historical tradition. Two years after Donner, Harald Motzki edited a series of illuminating essays titled The Biography of the Prophet: The Issue of the Sources. Then, in 2008, Tilman Nagel produced two massive and densely annotated volumes, Mohammed Leben und Legend, a study of early Arabic historiography, and Allahs Liebling: Ursprung und Erscheinungsformen das Mohammedglauben, an account of how an imagined Muhammad and his community came to serve as a template for Muslim belief and behavior. These most recent efforts to uncover the origins of the early Muslim community, however conceptually bold and meticulously researched, still leave us with the problem of unpacking highly problematic individual accounts. Any attempt at cracking the code of early Arabic historiography is thus likely to leave more than a few scholars dissatisfied, if not with the larger conceptual framework then with the reading of individual traditions. Like the quest for the Holy Grail, the search for Islamic origins is unending, but it is also undeniably seductive. p o st- orientalist musings on isl amic origins and jewish and christian influence As we have now entered into second decade of the twenty-first century, scholars interested in cultural borrowing still find elusive the paradigm shift from paganism to monotheism among the Arabs and, related to that, the process by which ancient Jewish and Christian elements may have become linked to a nascent Muslim civilization and culture. More than 175 years after Geiger’s pioneering study and the series of challenging queries that he placed before us, we are still left with more questions than answers about Islamic origins, especially as regards Judaism and Islam. But, if nothing else, probing questions can take on a life of their own. And so, moving beyond Geiger, who remains as ever an extremely useful point of departure, I would like to add some questions and observations in the hope of stimulating further discussion. Because little is known about the Arabian Peninsula and its Christians in late antiquity, and less yet of its Jews, there is much to tease the historian’s

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imagination. The early orientalists and we as well speak broadly of a Jewish and/or Christian influence on Islam, but what sort of monotheist culture is likely to have influenced Islam at its formative stages in the seventh century? What do we really know about Abyssinian Christianity as it took root in the south and how it might have percolated with the trade routes to western Arabia, the birthplace of Islam? What might Arab tribesman accompanying caravans to Syria-Palestine have learned from Christians and Jews situated in their terminals of destination? We are told in detail about Jewish tribes in Medina, but can we be sure that the literary and even legal traditions of rabbinic Judaism remained essentially unchanged, as they diffused from the center to the periphery of Jewish settlement? Or did the distance between Arabia and the Jewish heartland in the Land of Israel and Babylonia allow for, if not actually stimulate, the development of a regional and more exotic Jewish culture in the Arabian Peninsula, the kind of non-normative, or not quite normative, Jewish culture that existed, as certain scholars have imagined, among Jewish communities in the more remote regions of the GraecoRoman world? Related to that, might there have been significant conversion to Judaism among the indigenous Arabs during the political and economic upheavals of the sixth and seventh centuries, and, if so, how might the reception of Jewish beliefs and practices have been affected by indigenous Arab traditions of the time in west Arabia, more particularly during the period directly leading up to Muhammad and the rise of Islam? What role might local Christians have played in the interpretation and transmission of a Jewish past that they too had appropriated, albeit at an earlier stage of history and cultural borrowing? And, finally: how might a Judeo-Christian version, if we may use that descriptive label, enter a nascent Arab-Muslim culture, both in and beyond the Arabian Peninsula? Given the current state of our knowledge, it is unlikely that these questions will elicit satisfactory answers, or, in any case, answers that will satisfy scholars given to a modicum of skepticism and some methodological restraint. The same would of course hold true for scholars claiming Christian influence on the origins of Islam. One might think that scholars interested in cultural borrowing would be on safer ground following the Arab conquest of the seventh century CE. With Islamic rule ensconced in the Fertile Crescent, the fulcrum of rabbinic Judaism and the spawning ground for various forms of Christian beliefs and practices, detailed knowledge of other monotheists would have become more directly accessible to Muslims. We know a good deal about the leading rabbinical authorities and

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the prestigious schools of learning in the Land of Israel and Babylonia, the great centers of Jewish life. Indeed, the world of the rabbis has been the central focus of Jewish scholarship for some two thousand years. Still, even for that better known time of history, so much remains obscure about JewishMuslim contacts and the actual process of cultural borrowing. Again, we are forced to consider tantalizing questions for which there are no satisfactory, let alone definitive, answers. Muslims may have come into direct contact with learned Jews and Jewish communities given to normative practices, but what might Muslims have actually known of the various compendia of Jewish law and rabbinic exegesis, that voluminous corpus of legal and legendaryhistorical literature forged over centuries? In particular, how might Muslims have been affected by rabbinic views of the biblical past, a past whose events and persons Muslims also revered in their own extended narratives? Muslim scripture and the vast literature of exegesis and commentary to which it gave rise are sprinkled with allusions to Jewish themes and practices. Given what we actually know of cultural transference among Jews and Muslims—which is little indeed—these sorts of wide-ranging questions also remain largely unanswered, if not unanswerable. Moreover, there is also the possibility that Muslims borrowed Jewish cultural artifacts from other monotheist communities. In certain instances, one is hard pressed to determine whether the so-called “biblical,” or, if you prefer the more neutral term invoked by some scholars, “biblicist” stories of the Qur’an and later Muslim writings—accounts which in Arabic are known as Isra’iliyat or “Israelitica”—are in fact directly attributable to Jewish sources and not to Christian discussions of events and persons mentioned in the Old Testament, a possibility Geiger was wont to admit but not discuss. In addition to translations of the Hebrew Bible, numerous texts of Jewish origins were accessible in varying degrees to learned Christians of the East. Another possible avenue of cultural borrowing, not much discussed, if at all, is a conduit via learned Jews who converted first to Christianity and then to Islam. All sorts of claims have been pressed by modern scholars searching for Muhammad’s prophetic roots and the religious foundations of the Islamic community. Traditionally, scholars raised on rabbinic sources have opted for some sort of Jewish influence by way of the Hebrew Bible and post-biblical sources; others trained in Christian texts have made the case for the traditions of Eastern Christianity as well as the Old and New Testaments. As there has also been the suggestion of Christian influence from Abyssinia, there is the possibility that this alleged Christian Abyssinian influence might have been medi-

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ated by a local Jewish tradition in the Yemen, if not in Abyssinia itself. With so little hard information, it is perhaps no wonder that scholars have spoken of an Islam influenced by ill-defined groups of Eastern Christians, including those speaking a hybrid language fusing Arabic with Aramaic; by a hypothetical Arabian Jewish circle of pietists residing in seventh-century Medina; by Judeo-Hagarites, the messianic movement conjured up by revisionists; by a Hijazi-based syncretistic monotheist religion (din Ibrahim) that revered the biblical patriarch Abraham; and other similar lines of influence that, at best, serve to explain the obscure by the infinitely more obscure. We have always to consider that more than one monotheist religion could have provided the early Muslims with themes, if not whole tales, based on the Hebrew Bible and its exegesis. But, of all the traditions that could have influenced Muslim renderings of the biblical past as well as Muslim religious practices, including ubiquitous accounts based on the New Testament, it seems to me the Jewish tradition is the more pervasive when there is presumptive evidence of cultural borrowing; that is, when there are actual rather than hypothetical texts to compare, as in the case of Jewish and Muslim materials relating to the Queen of Sheba’s visit to Solomon’s court. Admittedly, my understanding may reflect the intellectual conceit of yet another Arabist instructed in classical Jewish texts by Orthodox rabbis to whom he was entrusted at a tender age. However, assuming that in certain cases it is correct to speak of linkage between Jewish and Muslim sources, one is obliged to ask how the older material penetrated Muslim writings. Were the ideas and themes simply in the air, so to speak, or were they absorbed via sustained contact between Jews and Muslims, or between Muslims and intermediaries who were both familiar with Jewish lore, and of equal importance, capable of transmitting it without altering it beyond recognition? What role might Jewish converts have played in bringing elements of their heritage to their new faith? Muslim tradition itself names a number of converts as having been influential in educating the faithful. Later Jewish and Christian traditions do likewise, often mentioning the same informants, but in those later traditions the links to Muslim sources may derive from the apologetic and/or polemical concerns of the Jews and Christians. That is to say, the discrediting of Muhammad’s alleged Jewish informants, and also of Christian informants by later Jews and Christians, both served to discredit the information received by Muhammad from these informants, thus undermining Muslim claims to the Prophet’s legitimacy. Jews and Christians who remained steadfast in their beliefs could thus maintain that Islam was, in essence, the hollow echo of a more genuine monotheist faith, namely, their own.

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At a scholarly conference held in 1992, Haggai Ben Shammai, a leading authority on Jewish-Muslim relations, suggested, although without any evidence and not without considerable circumspection, that Jewish traditions were actually written down in the Arabic language by Arabic-speaking Jews— this even before the advent of Islam, an argument reminiscent of claims for a contemporaneous Christian Arabic. If true, this would imply that Muhammad and his contemporaries could have had direct access to written Jewish sources in a language that they could read, assuming of course that there was widespread literacy among Muhammad’s early followers. Were all that indeed the case, these Jewish materials could have been integrated into early Muslim writings, including the Qur’an, in order to validate Muhammad’s claims of prophecy directly linked to an Israelite past. Because not a single line of this hypothetical literature has been recovered—nor, for that matter, have any prose texts contemporaneous with the Prophet—the dramatic suggestion of a Jewish literature written in Arabic and accessible to pre-Islamic Arabs has to be taken for what it is: rank conjecture. In sum, we have no safe point of entry into the larger argument that derives from this suggestion. A more likely scenario is that Jewish materials infiltrated the Islamic community by way of an oral tradition among Arabic-speaking Jews, a tradition based originally on written texts in Hebrew and Aramaic. Among the early community of the Muslim faithful, there is ample evidence of orally transmitted accounts; no one would dispute that. Let us assume, then, that much of the biblical or biblicist material was made available to the early Muslims through folkloric tales. These tales, based originally on written sources in Hebrew and Aramaic, but transmitted orally in the local or regional Arabic dialect by Jews, would then have been transcribed at a later time, eventually becoming part of the Muslim literary tradition. Were that the case, the process of transmitting and absorbing Jewish cultural artifacts is likely to have been circuitous and, therefore, difficult to reconstruct. By its very nature, oral prose tradition is susceptible to the mediating influence of multiple transmitters, each of whom is likely to employ his or her own rhetorical strategy and inscribe his or her own political agenda on the tale. In this case, Jewish themes might have been suffused with the indigenous folklore of the region. One may liken this process of transmission to a well-known game played by schoolchildren in a wide variety of cultures and cultural settings, including the Middle East, where it is called “Arab telephone.” An anecdote is whispered into the ear of a student who is then obliged to relate it in the same fashion to a second child. The chain of transmission continues until all the assembled children have finished relating the story. The last recipi-

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ent is finally called upon to reveal the anecdote, which is then compared to the original version. Despite various controls that might be built into the game, for example, meaningful awards for accuracy, two very dissimilar stories always seem to emerge. Where there is a likeness of detail between the first and last versions, it is invariably marked by some confusion. Keep in mind that this is a game played by a limited group of children, all of the same age and sharing common experiences and values. Imagine the changes in the story once it travels to other groups and regions, say an oral tradition formulated in the Yemen and then brought along the trade routes to western Arabia, the cradle of Islam. As regards the origins of Islam, the complex dissemination of a proposed Jewish-Arabic oral literature would explain only in part why Muslim versions of the biblical past diverge substantially from those of Jewish tradition (note there are also substantive changes in relating New Testament tales). By its very nature, cultural borrowing requires the careful adaptation of received traditions so as to render these traditions consistent with the needs of the borrower. One may suppose that this reworking of tradition is all the more necessary when two cultures openly contest the same sacred heritage, as did Judaism and Islam (and also Christianity and Islam). Whether or not they acknowledged or were able to acknowledge received Jewish themes and practices, Muslim scholars altered them in creating a monotheist history of their own. That Muslim version of history then served as a bone of contention between the two faiths, as well as a basis of mutual respect and a source for common understanding. Quite naturally, early Muslim accounts of monotheist history were related in Arabic, the language of Muslim scripture and that of the nascent community. But the very content of Jewish texts could be as problematic, if not more so, as the languages in which they were first written, namely, Hebrew and Aramaic; for example, references to Jewish ritual practices and allusions to biblical and especially post-biblical accounts, for which there were no Arabic translations. The same would of course be true for Christian materials in Greek, Coptic, or Syriac. Muslims encountering foreign traditions, even by way of folkloric tales rendered in the local Arabic dialect, were likely to find in them unfamiliar if not jarring cultural perspectives, and views or practices that could not go unchallenged. Scholars interested in Islamic origins are then obliged to ask if there is a pattern to the way in which Muslims sifted through Jewish and Christian materials, however they may have acquired these materials, and then produced out of the residue a distinctively Arab and Islamic narrative.

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As regards the Jews and Judaism, a close analysis of the Qur’an and the diverse literature that serves as its far-ranging commentary yields discernible, however general, rules governing Muslim uses of the Jewish past. Generally speaking, the transfer and absorption of cultural artifacts is smoothest when the Jewish materials are culturally neutral and therefore without need of revision and commentary—for example, charming folkloric tales of universal provenance and appeal. However, where a Jewish source clearly conflicts with Muslim custom or religious practice, or might be thought of as diminishing the sanctity of the Arabian Peninsula, considered by Muslims the cradle of monotheism, the substance of that account must be altered to make it consistent with Muslim sensibilities. Where the detail of a Jewish source is not in and of itself offensive to believing Muslims, but simply cannot be understood because it is linked to unfamiliar social practices or opaque literary allusions that only learned Jews would have recognized, it is likely to be recast in an Islamic mold or omitted entirely. The same of course would be true for any borrowing from Christianity. And so seeking to retrieve possible paths of cultural differentiation, Western scholars have had to consider how medieval Muslims looked to the older monotheist traditions they encountered during the lifetime of the Prophet, and even more so when the Arab expansion brought the faithful into direct and sustained contact with the rich civilization of Jews and Christians in lands beyond Arabia. addendum: medieval muslim at titudes towa rd ancient jewish and christian tradition Only too aware that earlier monotheist scripture and lore penetrated their own tradition, the authorities guiding the Muslim faithful engaged in sharp discussions as to the potential impact of cultural borrowing. One school of thought stressed the inherent danger of excessive interest in the Jews and Judaism, and by extension Christians and Christianity. An intensive study of the biblical past might confuse the faithful and lead to the acceptance of views embraced by contemporary Jews and Christians, monotheists who contested, for whatever reason and by whatever means, the Muslim version of the Israelite heritage. In that respect, the Muslim naysayers were the mirror image of Bernard of Clairvaux, the medieval Christian cleric who warned that the study of Islam and the translation of Islamic texts might undermine faith among the true believers. Muslim authorities concerned about religious leakage warned that even the Torah, an earlier version of God’s revealed word, was not to be cited because it had been inaccurately transmitted or

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deliberated falsified to deny the legitimacy of Muhammad’s future mission, proof of which was imbedded in the original Hebrew text. The Qur’an declares that Jewish sources contain irrefutable proof of the Prophet’s future mission and of the triumph of Islam, but such proofs were either hidden from Jews reading a corrupt text or denied by recalcitrant rabbis even though in their hearts they knew these proofs to be true. Muslims said the same of Christians and Christian writings. This self-conscious denial of Islam applied not only to learned monks and priests, the first to come to mind. Even the more common elements of Christian society rejected the legitimacy of God’s quintessential messenger despite all the evidence in their own tradition that Muhammad was indeed God’s chosen prophet. On the other hand, there were Muslim religious authorities who attached a positive value the study of the monotheist past. As the “authentic” Bible read by men of good faith revealed the Prophet’s expected role, there was no compelling reason to exclude references to an uncorrupted biblical scripture from Muslim writings. To the contrary, the benefits of citing this scripture were thought considerable. In addition to foretelling Muhammad’s mission and calling for obedience to him, the Torah was said to include the Godgiven signs by which his prophetic vocation could be recognized. The Psalms of David (Zabur), considered by Muslims to be revealed texts comparable to the Torah, were also said to address the future mission of the Prophet. Similarly, the Gospels were invoked to valorize Muhammad. The transmission of non-scriptural Israelitica, also a subject of considerable discussion among Muslims, was generally looked upon with even greater favor by the more lenient authorities. Traced back to at least the second Islamic century, the discussion of postbiblical texts revolved around a statement that had been attributed to the Prophet himself: “Narrate traditions about the Israelites. There is nothing objectionable in that.” It is clear from the extended commentary on this proof-text that it was considered permissible to transmit certain narratives about the ancient Israelites (perhaps even stories obtained directly from Christians and Jews), provided that the Muslim faithful would not be led astray; because, properly understood, the non-scriptural traditions of the old monotheists were said to predict the coming of the Prophet, as does the Bible. Post-biblical texts were also said to foretell events of a later Islamic history, thus providing moral and political instruction for Muslims in subsequent generations. The learned Jew or Christian was often portrayed in Muslim literature as a sage character interpreting what are said to be mysterious

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apocalyptic texts of his own tradition and then predicting with remarkable accuracy future happenings in the world of Islam. Such accounts (based on imagined works) were interpreted and then put to good use by rulers and would-be rulers to declare themselves and their regimes preordained successors to Muhammad and the original ummah. To narrate traditions about the Israelites was, therefore, desirable in addition to being licit. In the end, the more stringent view prevailed and an intense focus on the monotheist past (and, to be sure, the present) was discouraged. Nevertheless, narratives about the ancient Israelites and early Christians were continuously read and discussed as part of Qur’an commentary and exegesis, and, beyond that, they filtered down to the public through oral traditions and folklore. As a result, Muslims cited old traditions whether or not they actually read them, and Israelite themes appear in Muslim writings without indication that Muslims knew them to be Jewish or, in certain cases, Christian. What Muslims may have known of the monotheist past at any given moment or place remains unanswered, if not indeed unanswerable. What is clear is that learned Jewish and Christian converts to Islam brought to the new faith all sorts of cultural baggage that could be borne by evolving Islamic religious thought and institutional practice. But what of the Muslims who were not directly exposed to things Jewish? Given the limited range of their learning, what could they have made of these artifacts, if anything at all? There were eventually Arabic translations of the Hebrew Bible, but the vast sea of post-biblical literature was available to them only indirectly, and few if any Muslims who were not converts commanded the languages of Jewish sources. Muslim scholars rarely discuss, knowingly and in detail, identifiable Jewish materials that penetrated Islamic tradition, even when that material gave meaning to texts that were otherwise inexplicable, or, at the least, difficult for Muslims to understand. In effect, the postbiblical substratum informing Islamic texts was beyond retrieval for most Muslims. Perhaps that was a blessing in disguise for the monotheist minorities living under Muslim rule. Had medieval Muslims, charmed by accounts of biblical personalities and events, been able to fathom the extent to which all manner of things Jewish (and also Christian) actually penetrated their culture, they might have used that knowledge for polemical purposes against the protected minorities, or, at least, they might have been even more defensive about assimilating the cultural artifacts of others. Perhaps, they might have been as alarmed and aggressively defensive as some modern Muslim revivalists. At best, these modern Muslims regard the Isra’iliyat as stories

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and legends without substance. At worst, they see the non-Qur’anic versions of the biblical past as having been a deliberate attempt by Jewish converts to contaminate a genuine Islam and undermine the nascent Muslim polity. The activities of these Jews at the outset of Islam can be and have been understood as foreshadowing the challenge of Zionism and, more generally, as heralding the cultural and political threat of the West.

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“Occidentalists” Engaging the Western “Other,” Medieval Perceptions, and Modern Realities

Our discussion thus far has focused largely on how scholars of the West, learned in Islamic languages and texts, formed and continue to form impressions of the Prophet Muhammad and the rise of early Muslim civilization. The question can of course be reversed. We could and should ask how medieval Muslims knew and perceived of Europe and, beyond that, how they envisioned their own religious civilization in relation to that of nonbelievers beyond the Mediterranean. Moving to more modern times, we are obliged to ask how orientalist and post-orientalist literature on Islamic origins resonated among Muslims, especially after Western colonialism altered the relation between the Abode of Islam and Europe from one of dominance to that of insecurity if not subservience. The sum and substance of these questions can be put somewhat differently: how did the Islamic Near East, which had been for centuries relatively ignorant of, largely indifferent to, and thoroughly condescending toward a remote world beyond the Mediterranean, find itself forced into an intense cultural war with the modern West and its values? After a century and more of looking to Europe and then America in order to modernize their societies, many tradition-bound Muslims are repulsed by the corrosive side effects of Westernization. Most have no qualms about embracing Western scientific and technological developments. These are generally value neutral and thus do not challenge Muslim beliefs or practices. More jarring to traditional Muslims is the manner in which Westernization, including Western forms of governance, has introduced to the Islamic Near East all sorts of godless and immoral behavior. Offended Muslims insist on charting an Islamic course for an Islamic future based on a return to the eternal values of an Islamic past. Hence, they abhor frequent and gratuitous advice about improving Islamic society based on Western models. Above all, 61

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they seek, together with more secularly inclined Muslims, an end of political meddling by foreigners in the affairs of the region. In the Islamist brief, the tensions between the world of Islam and the West are entirely the fault of the latter and of those Arab leaders who are Muslims by birth but have deviated from the true path to serve the West against the interests of their own religion and society. The only true course for Muslims is to return to the halcyon days of the Prophet Muhammad and seek inspiration from an idealized early Islamic community that was generally free of corruption. As noted in the previous chapters, Western scholars are inclined to look more critically at Muhammad’s activities and the conduct of the early ummah. Defending traditional Islamic narratives, apologists for Islam, including nonMuslims, have made orientalist and post-orientalist scholarship part and parcel of a heated if not indeed acrimonious academic discussion. A number of scholars—mostly Americans not trained in Islamic studies—go so far as to lay considerable blame for the state of relations between East and West on the orientalists and their successors. They maintain that orientalists and those who followed in their path painted and continue to paint the Islamic world in a way that is highly demeaning of its cultural achievements and traditional values. Allegedly suffering from distorted vision caused by viewing the world through Western spectacles, the great universities of Europe and America have been accused of promoting a discourse that favors a dominant Occident vis-à-vis a subjugated Orient. In effect, orientalists are viewed as complicit in colonizing foreign territory and time-honored cultures. They are reprimanded for donning the garb of scholarly neutrality while walking hand-in-hand with politicians and administrators who subjugated the peoples of the so-called Orient, and, when given license and opportunity, continue to do so. Not surprisingly, the targets of this criticism, erudite and often apolitical professors, tend to find this blanket criticism misplaced. Having become deeply immersed in the study of Islamic culture and civilization, they understand the current and highly disputatious atmosphere between Islam and the West to be part of a long-developing phenomenon that is much more complex than their anti-orientalist colleagues imagine. The overwhelming majority of scholars who have mastered classical Islamic sources see their critics skating shakily along the margins of issues they lack the technical skills to fully comprehend. Because these critics of conventional Western scholarship are unable to enter the vast treasure house of Islamic memory, they have no firm ground on which to stand and evaluate their orientalist colleagues, let alone offer an alternative view of the Islamic world. Even pro-

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fessional Islamicists who are shamed by the West’s political legacy in the Near East and who are truly sensitive to the feelings and aspirations of traditional Muslims are highly dismissive of ill-informed professors who demean, often in shrill tones, the historic efforts of Western academics to understand the world of Islam. However, this does not alter the fact that many traditional Muslims are highly suspicious of the substance of Western scholarship and, more particularly, of the broad motives of Western Islamicists. This last comment brings us to occidentalists and Occidentalism (see part 1, chapter 4). the o c cidentalists Some readers who open this book to the table of contents may be bemused by the term “occidentalist” in the title of the current chapter; most are more likely to be puzzled by its intended meaning. Truth be told, the term is neither my invention, nor do I used it here as did the philosopher Avishai Margalit, or Ian Buruma, an individual of many interests and talents who might be best described by the elastic label “public intellectual.” In an extended and highly stimulating essay titled Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (2002), Margalit and Buruma tell us they do not wish to describe a neatly defined clash of civilizations in which a spiritually driven authoritarian East (read Orient in the broadest sense) wages conflict against an enlightened rational West and its values (read Occident), a notion which has been broadly applied in recent years to Islam’s troubled relationship with the Western world. Despite the dramatic title, theirs is not an outright condemnation of anti-Western sentiment, but a decidedly more nuanced tale. They tell a story of cultural cross-contamination in which enlightened Western values are compromised as Europe and America respond to challenges arising from a direct confrontation with an aggressive and at times uncompromising “other.” The most recent and egregious example of that kind of challenge and response was President Bush’s reaction to Islamic terrorist activity, both real and imagined. It goes without saying, were a second edition of Margalit and Buruma’s book to appear, their case for the contamination of traditional American ideals of justice would in all likelihood be more strongly stated. No doubt they would have reacted as many like-minded individuals did to the incarceration and treatment of prisoners, which elicited claims that the Bush administration skirted, if not subverted, the American legal system. One should not conclude, however, that Occidentalism is a book concerned primarily with highly charged events of recent years. This is not a diatribe against the excessive hubris of the world’s most powerful nation and

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its confrontation with hostile elements of the Islamic world. Margalit and Buruma are far too reflective and learned for so narrow a brief. Given the coauthors’ competencies and interests, it is not surprising that they identify among the occidentalists: Slavic nativists (a descriptive term some Slavicists consider excessively vague) and pre-World War II Japanese militarists, both groups that rejected the West and its outlook as overly rational and without true soul. The coauthors also focus on those Europeans who, embracing the Teutonic mythology of a much earlier age, spurned the values of the European Enlightenment in favor of a totalitarian regime of indescribable brutality. In each of these cases, the rejection of Enlightenment ideals led to devastation that continues to haunt the conscience of civilized people. The events of more recent times have forced our coauthors beyond what is most familiar to them, and so they have woven the world of Islam into Occidentalism’s intricate fabric of different civilizations and cultural settings. To be more precise, they have turned to the world of Islam as they understand it. There is much to be said for including Muslim revivalists among the occidentalists described by Margalit and Buruma. It is, however, not my purpose to comment on the Islamic world in that context, or on how successfully Margalit and Buruma have managed to integrate Islam and the Muslims into their larger narrative. As employed here, the term occidentalist completely sidesteps the juxtaposition of liberal Western rationality and an Eastern soul prone to authoritarian gestures. The focus is on a narrower landscape than that painted by Margalit and Buruma. Occidentalist refers to Muslims and Muslims alone. Nor does it refer specifically to modern Muslim revivalists, the so-called Islamists who spurn the West and its values, let alone the likes of al-Qaeda who resort to militant action against Western individuals and institutions. Rather, the Muslim occidentalist is contrasted with the Christian and Jewish orientalist, scholars of the West who embarked on a study of Muslim civilization and culture. As defined here, the occidentalist enterprise begins not in response to an external challenge to Muslim sensibilities, one that has seriously undermined the confidence of the faithful, as happened when the European powers penetrated the Near East—that will come later—but with a few curious Muslims who, during the Middle Ages, exhibited a casual interest in the culture and society of a little-known Christian world beyond the northern shores of the Mediterranean, a world which they thought had little to contribute to their own save an opportunity to obtain slaves and engage in occasional trade. Unlike today, when the Islamic world of the Near East is unsettled and deeply troubled about the future of state and society,

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medieval Muslims exhibited a general sense of confidence in the near and distant future. They could not have foreseen how badly their world would be shaken by the invasive politics and alien culture of an emergent West. self- confidence and early muslim pe rceptions of europe For a millennium and more, the great Muslim conquests and the establishment of vast imperial domains set a trend for Muslim self-confidence visà-vis the world beyond. There were, to be sure, moments of uncertainty: time and again, the Byzantines penetrated the Syrian frontier, especially in the tenth and eleventh centuries, but they could not penetrate deeply into the Muslim heartland. The Crusaders established their kingdom in Jerusalem and controlled a large swath of territory in the Holy Land and beyond, but they never became an integral part of the landscape and were eventually forced from the areas they had conquered, becoming thereby a symbol of what would await all those alien polities seeking to impose themselves on the lands of Islam. The Mongols did, of course, take Baghdad in 1258, putting an end to the Abbasid caliphate, an event that certain Muslims anticipated would bring cataclysmic natural disasters to the Abode of Islam. But somehow the fall of a caliphate, which had endured for more than half a millennium, did not cause the rain to cease falling, or prevent the crops from growing, and the sun, contrary to the most dire expectations, continued to shine as before. In short order, the Mongols saw the light (no pun intended) and not only converted to the true faith but also became great patrons of Islamic culture while ruling vast domains in the name of Islam. The Ottoman Turks, in turn, delivered the death blow to the Byzantine Empire in Asia Minor, conquering Constantinople, the Rome of the Eastern Christians, in 1453. Turkish armies then marched through the Balkans until reaching the very gates of Vienna in the sixteenth century. The battle for Vienna was a stalemate and at roughly the same time a Muslim fleet was crushed at Lepanto, but the Turks recovered from their losses and returned to Vienna in 1683. A Muslim trooper overlooking the city at the time would have had every reason to feel a sense of impending victory, not only in Vienna but perhaps in all of the Christian lands of Western Europe that would lay open after the capture of the city. For, taken as a whole, the experience of the Muslims against their external enemies was one of fairly continuous triumphs beginning with the Islamic conquest of the seventh century. As fate may have it, Vienna did not fall and Europe began to roll back Muslim power, forcing the Ottoman sul-

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tans to assess more directly the powerful enemy they faced, thus occasioning what has been called the Muslim discovery of Europe. It can hardly be said that Muslims were not aware of Europe’s existence before the ascendance of the West. But outside of multicultural Iberia and Sicily, where an exotic and highly eclectic Islamic culture took root, the medieval encounter of Islam with the world of Latin Christianity, let alone Slavic Eastern Orthodoxy, was, to say the least, limited. It is not that the Mediterranean Sea represented a forbidding obstacle to travel throughout the Middle Ages. Some Muslims visited Europe; Jews of Islamic lands were in close contact with their brethren in the Latin West and conducted extensive trade there, as is evidenced from numerous letters and documents that were uncovered in the storeroom of a Cairo synagogue. General references to trade with medieval Europe are also found in Arabic geographical literature going back to the ninth century. Arabic sources mention peoples who lived in Europe and various countries and places within those countries. One also finds tidbits of information concerning such odd things as the whaling industry in Ireland—all told with a distant sense of fascination. Muslims knew of the Pope and regional rulers, but exhibit no extensive knowledge of historical developments taking place far beyond Islamic Spain. Europe was a land of some curiosity rather than the home of civilizations to be studied for profit. The Muslim attitude toward unfolding events in the continent on the other side of the Mediterranean and the world beyond remained for the most part insular. Even as Europe embarked on its Age of Exploration, the era which opened the New World and its enormous riches to the world of Christendom, the Muslims saw no value in exploring lands far beyond the familiar waters they sailed. The fleets of the powerful Ottoman Empire were largely confined to the Mediterranean Sea. Nor did Muslims make any attempt at all to understand intellectual developments in European lands beyond the Abode of Islam. Clearly, Muslims felt they had little to learn from the European Christians; at best, they treated them as objects of curiosity and condescension, if they showed any interest in Europe at all. At least, the friars who looked to the world of Islam appreciated some cultural achievements of the heretics, namely, their preservation of Greek philosophy and science. There is no evidence, however, that Muslims found anything edifying about European culture or indeed other cultures with which they had various contacts. This antipathy for the other was part and parcel of a broad outlook articulated by some Muslim writers of the Middle Ages. As did the ancient Greeks, medieval Muslim geographers divided the

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world into inhabited climes and assigned the peoples of each clime characteristic features, both physical and cultural. Climate was considered indicative of how peoples would look and act. Muslims were said to inhabit the central climes and thus enjoyed the advantages of a temperate climate, which gave rise in turn to an even-handed disposition. Such was the benefit of living in the so-called “navel of the universe.” In contrast, the blacks of Africa, exposed to extreme heat, were therefore volatile and oversexed. Europeans living to the north well beyond the Iberian Peninsula were said to come from cold climates and thus reflected the harshness of the landscape by being dullwitted and by exhibiting barbaric behavior, which got worse as one traveled into still colder regions. One of the more interesting descriptions of Europe is that of the Muslim geographer Idrisi (ca. twelfth century) who settled in Palermo at the invitation of its Christian king, Roger II. As noted, Sicily was then a truly multicultural society. Idrisi was commissioned to compose a magisterial work of world geography that came to be known as the Book of Roger. A particularly interesting feature of this geographical treatise is its description of Europe, which included the British Isles. Unlike the Arabic geographers in the Muslim heartland, Idrisi was able to make extensive use of Christian informants familiar with Europe. But access to this information does not seem to have stimulated his desire for further enquiry as to the behavior of the Europeans based on extensive travel of his own. There is an arcane afterlife to Idrisi’s mention of the English coast, a rather amusing footnote so to speak. A number of years ago, the chair of the English department at the University of Baghdad turned his attention, as so many scholars of English literature had done in the past, to the origins of England’s great bard, William Shakespeare. The Baghdadi scholar assumed that Idrisi’s description meant seafaring Arabs had in fact reached the British Isles. Because the natives of Cornwall struck our professor as being swarthier than the average native Englishmen, he opined that the name Shakespeare was originally Sheikh Zubayr, and that the bard had been of Muslim descent, an opinion he derived also from the themes of Shakespeare’s histories, which the Iraqi saw as a mirror of the turbulent political life in the medieval Islamic world. The early Muslim discovery of Europe and especially the later encounter of the Ottomans are described with great learning and elegance of style by Bernard Lewis in The Muslim Discovery of Europe (1982). What concerns us here, however, is not how the Ottomans sought to learn practical matters from the West in order to compete with the ascendant European powers (modern military strategy and engineering, new weaponry, governmental

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institutions, and not least the use of the modern clock to measure time), but the response of modern Muslims, particularly in Arabic-speaking lands, to the challenge of Western scholarship on Muhammad, the rise of Islam, and the formation of Islamic religious institutions, a subject that demands more informed attention than it has received to date. Muslim scholars currently trained in the traditional theological schools of the Near East find the Western quest for Islamic origins off-putting, particularly as most have had little if any experience with the Western academy and its representatives. They see the notion that certain Islamic traditions can be best understood in light of earlier Jewish and Christian sources as compromising the unique nature of Islam. Oddly enough, this view disparages the extent of Islam’s links to Judaism and Christianity and is at odds with views held within the early community of the faithful. As we have observed in the previous chapter, many early Muslims hardly felt compromised by the mere presence of ancient themes surfacing in the Qur’an, or by references to Jews and Judaism that were liberally sprinkled throughout subsequent Muslim religious and belletristic literature. The same was no doubt true regarding Christians and Christianity. To the contrary, recognizing the importance of such themes to their religious foundations, the early Muslims pursued an active interest in all sorts of biblical memorabilia, at times through contacts with informed Jewish and Christian converts. In any case, there is mention of such interest and contact, particularly at the formative stages of Islamic civilization. Even when medieval Muslim scholars suffered from a hardening of the religious arteries and took a decidedly more negative view of the biblical tradition in Islam, there was no flagging of interest in Muslim tales of the ancient Israelites. What, then, accounts for their current antipathy toward a Western scholarship that emphasizes the formation of Islamic civilization in light of Muslim encounters with a more ancient monotheist, and in the realm of science and philosophy, pagan past? One might wish to argue that such negative attitudes toward modern Western scholarship are occasioned by a crisis of confidence within the Muslim world, a crisis precipitated by the incursion of the West and its godless values. oriental studies comes to the orient : the challenge and resp onse Was there a particular moment that gave rise to an accelerated loss of confidence among Muslims, and, concurrent with that, an increasingly defensive posture by more traditional elements of Muslim society—that is, a spir-

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ited defense of Muslim scholarship and religious mores? In 1798, a French army commanded by General (later Emperor Napoleon) Bonaparte invaded Egypt. The aftermath of that dramatic event would lead to political realignments in the Near East and a fundamental change in the relationship between the region’s Muslims and the West. For the first time since the Crusades, a European force penetrated deeply into the Arabic-speaking world and did so with relative ease. The Ottoman-appointed rulers of the country could not blunt the initial French assault, and the British, alarmed by the toehold their European rivals obtained along the southern rim of the Mediterranean, responded to the French intervention and sent Admiral Nelson and an expeditionary force of their own. Nelson bombarded the French fleet into submission at the Bay of Abu Kabir. The badly depleted French land forces later surrendered to General Abercrombie, signifying an end to Bonaparte’s illfated adventure. One could hardly describe the British triumph as having had a salutary effect on the native Muslims, nor did it by any means put an end to French designs on the Arab world. Instead, it initiated the beginning of large-scale European involvement in the Near Orient, as the region was then sometimes called. Even before the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire following the Great War of 1914–18, Europeans established de facto control over a large swath of Arab-Muslim territory. The French recovered from their defeat in Egypt and conquered Algeria in 1830, which subsequently received settlers from France. In time, the French extended their rule to most of North Africa and, following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, controlled areas in the Levant that are today the nation states of Syria and Lebanon. Having received a mandate from the League of Nations to administer these territories until the native populations were ready for independence, they remained in the Levant until the 1940s. The British, who had established outposts in South Arabia and the Persian Gulf, and maintained a military presence in Egypt to bolster that nation’s ruling monarchy and protect their vital lifeline to India, were also granted mandates by the League. With these mandates, Great Britain controlled areas that presently comprise the State of Israel, Iraq, and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The system of mandates, which took effect in the 1920s, continued into World War II and beyond. As a result, much of the Arab Islamic heartland was subjected to direct European influence. The European penetration of the Near East, which challenged the old order, was marked early on by rather strange if not bizarre twists. For strategic and economic reasons, the British returned to Egypt in the 1860s, not with an army to engage a foreign power, but to influence affairs of state in

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an ancient land whose rulers had bankrupted the country and were forced to submit to the “advice” of their foreign creditors. To complicate matters, Egypt was ruled by sovereigns of Albanian origin who owed the Ottoman sultan formal allegiance although they enjoyed de facto independence from the authorities in Istanbul. The French, less given to such diplomatic dances among themselves, the native population, and the sultan, simply annexed Algeria, also nominally part of the Ottoman Empire. Then, against all historical logic, they declared it to be an extension of metropolitan France. The Egyptian rulers, being more observant of political etiquette in the Near East, officially recognized the Ottoman sultan’s position as successor to the caliphs, which, in theory at least, made him supreme ruler of the universal Muslim community. Nevertheless, the Egyptians more or less could do as they pleased, except when it displeased the British. When a military revolt threatened the regime of Egypt’s compliant ruler, a British force crushed the rebels and established, for all intents and purposes, a veiled protectorate over a once proud country. By the 1880s, the old order was clearly crumbling and the Europeans were becoming ascendant in the Arab world, much to the displeasure of the Muslims. Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt that set this process in motion may thus be considered a watershed in the history of the region, a convenient marker for the onset of modern Near Eastern history, and for those who are inclined to embrace the concept, a harbinger of the present “clash of civilizations.” orientalists in the orient Given their sense of refinement and way with language, the French preferred to declare their invasion of Egypt an expedition. There is a certain truth to that label, for at the center of the forty-thousand-man French force was a group of scientists and scholars. They had come to observe the flora and fauna, measure the great monuments of a land rich in history, and study first-hand its time-honored civilization. Their previous acquaintance with the region had been derived largely from reading books and manuscripts that made their way into the libraries of Europe. A proclamation written in Arabic by the invading army declared the objectives of the campaign. The incursion into Egypt would liberate the native Egyptians from the yoke of foreign elements, the most recent of which were recruited largely from Ottoman-controlled territories in Europe. These were converts to Islam who ruled the once proud country at the behest of the Ottoman sultan (but not always in accord with his desires). With a few strokes of the pen, the French,

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who embraced the notion of “liberty,” declared that they would intervene on behalf of the Egyptians and their theoretical suzerain, the sultan. Not coincidentally, the proclamation also made it known that Napoleon was acting for the French merchants in Egypt who had been mistreated by the country’s foreign overseers. The document, composed by a French Arabist, begins with the traditional Muslim formula for all proclamations and official notices, the Arabic basmalah, “In the name of God (Allah), the Merciful the Compassionate.” It continues with the opening of the traditional declaration of Muslim faith La ilaha illa Allah, “There is no [true] God but God (Lord of the Heavens),” and then goes on to espouse the strict monotheism of the Muslims by rejecting the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. Were that not sufficient to disarm the local Muslims and win their neutrality in the campaign against Egypt’s de facto rulers, Bonaparte indicates that he more than the Muslim foreign oppressors serves Allah and reveres his Prophet Muhammad and the Qur’an. One almost has the impression that in this case the French general and future emperor wished to present himself as a Muslim manqué. While duly impressed with the skill of the French army and the elegance of their uniforms, the Egyptians were decidedly less taken with the Arabic skills of the translator who formulated the document. An Egyptian historian who chronicled these events mocked the French declaration, declaring it incoherent, written primitively, and filled with numerous and embarrassing grammatical errors that he goes on to cite in full. While lacking details, we may assume the native Egyptians would have reacted with great amusement to any Frenchman attempting to communicate with the majority of the population, as whatever knowledge the Europeans had of Arabic was largely derived from the language of classical texts and not the local dialect used in daily discourse. One can only imagine how a Parisian shopkeeper of the time might have responded to exotic foreigners trying to communicate in the poetic prose of Molière or, worse yet, the archaic French of Rabelais. In contrast, the British were all business when it came to war. They were less inclined to view their response to the French intervention in Egypt as an opportunity to study an exotic foreign culture, although following the French defeat they initially insisted that Napoleon’s scholars turn over the scientific data they had assembled. While they ultimately deferred to the French in this matter, the victors eventually took possession of the famed Rosetta Stone, an obelisk with a trilingual inscription in Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and demotic that had been used as recycled building material in constructing a Muslim fort. The priceless object, recovered from the ruins of the fort,

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enabled orientalists to decipher the language of the ancient Egyptians, thus providing the essential key to unlocking a great civilization that had endured for thousands of years but had been neglected by the Muslim conquerors of Egypt for well over a millennium. There is no indication that when confronting Napoleon in Egypt the British had given serious thought, if any at all, to civilizing the Egyptians, let alone seeking liberty and equality for them. They had come to expel the French for their own political purposes, not on behalf of a native population that had for centuries been subjected to the rule of Muslim foreigners. This sense of indifference to the native culture was, however, bound to change. British agents and diplomats had already become directly acquainted with the Islamic world on the subcontinent of India and at the Ottoman court in Istanbul. It was only a matter of time before British scholars and adventurers, as well as those from the continent, would make their way to the Arabic-speaking provinces of the Near East and become directly exposed to its Islamic as well as pre-Islamic culture. Foremost among the early British travelers to the region was William Lane, a trained metal engraver who arrived in Egypt after a harrowing sea voyage in which he was forced to take the helm of a mutinous ship when the captain, to put it delicately, became indisposed. Arriving in 1825, Lane mastered Arabic and then began work on his great ethnographic study: The Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians. Although published in the 1830s for a general audience, Lane’s detailed observations became, over time, required reading for generations of anthropologists. It continued to draw attention well into the last quarter of the twentieth century until many anthropologists jettisoned traditional ethnography. Instead they took to confessing the sins of their profession, arguing that their fieldwork might misrepresent or worse yet demean the cultures of others; or, as some have put it, “colonize” native cultures just as the politicians of the West colonized the peoples of the region. Lane also embraced the study of the Arabic language with great passion and energy, undertaking two major projects: an English translation of the Thousand and One Nights and a massive Arabic-English dictionary. For more than thirty years, Lane consulted learned Arabs and searched the great Arabic lexicons, extracting from these lengthy works meanings of words and expressions both common and rare, an effort that won him the respect of Near Easterners and Europeans alike. Lane died in 1876, but his eight-volume dictionary, although unfinished, remains indispensible even today. Scholars who know Arabic well enough to know when they are having problems translating or interpreting particular passages always keep Lane’s dictionary

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within easy reach, as it still is, so to speak, the first line of defense against misreading difficult texts. With travel easier to negotiate, thanks to improvements in seafaring vessels and safer local conditions, made possible through the intervention of an increasing number of European consuls, more and more foreigners and from different countries made their way to the Arab world in the nineteenth century. Some were university-trained scholars; others were adventurers like Richard Burton (d. 1890), a free spirit who had served in the India army and then roamed about the Near East and Africa. Supremely confident of his remarkable linguistic abilities—he too translated the Thousand and One Nights into English—Burton disguised himself as a Muslim while undertaking a pilgrimage to the holy cities of Arabia, where if discovered a Christian he would have been put to death. The reasons that brought most learned visitors to the region, whether university scholars or individuals seeking adventure in an exotic cultural setting, varied with each person. It is safe to say that most visitors to the region did not mask their identities, let alone risk death as did Burton. Nor did they go to the effort of mastering Arabic (or Turkish or Persian) merely to chatter like native magpies, or for the sole purpose of serving the needs of one European empire or another. Filled with a sense of adventure, Europeans drawn to the Near East wished to observe first hand a foreign world that genuinely titillated their imagination and sparked their already abundant intellectual curiosity. Because of the steamship and travel agencies like that of Thomas Cook, the region soon attracted artists, writers, and wealthy foreigners on the grand tour of exotic places far removed from home. A number of these foreign visitors left their impressions of the Near East in pictorial representations and in literary texts that fall under the broad rubric of travel literature. The picture of the Islamic Near East that emerges from their paintings, photographs, and writings is often a simplified and romanticized distortion of complex and time-honored cultures. We should not confuse these travelers and their cultural output with scholars of serious purpose, such as Lane and the professors of Oriental studies who journeyed to the Near East from places like Paris, Heidelberg, and Budapest, cities where great European universities and burgeoning centers of Islamic studies were situated. European scholars traveling about the Arab world during the first half of the nineteenth century and beyond encountered a system of higher education far different from their own. Advanced education in the Arabicspeaking provinces of the Ottoman Empire was restricted largely to institutions of Islamic learning with a curriculum that had become increasingly

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but not completely frozen over centuries. The mainstays of this education were the heart of what Muslims labeled the religious sciences, with the heaviest emphasis on Qur’an, and Qur’an commentary, Islamic law, and Islamic jurisprudence. In the imperial centers of the Islamic world, scholarship was more broadly defined. The intellectual interests of Ottoman scholars ranged far afield even before the encroachment of the West. This is evident from the wide range of subjects covered in the universal encyclopedia of Katib Çelebi, the seventeenth-century public servant and polymath otherwise known as Hajji Khalifah. The Iranians, who had carved out an empire independent of the Ottoman sultans, also fostered intellectual pursuits that surpassed those of the Arabs; they continued long-standing Islamic traditions in philosophy, science, and the arts. We are thus obliged to ask if intellectual pursuits beyond the religious sciences required, as a rule, the patronage of powerful individuals linked to an imperial court, a situation that did not obtain in the Arabic-speaking provinces of the Ottoman Empire. For their part, orientalists promoted a much-expanded Islamic agenda, and, most importantly, they embraced a very different scholarly outlook from that of contemporaneous Muslims. Western scholarship on the Muslim world was shaped by the curriculum of modern universities that dotted the European landscape, particularly by the German model of instruction in the humanities, which sharply reduced the preeminence of theology, moral philosophy, and the Greek and Roman classics. The modern university favored the creation of many distinct faculties offering instruction in the numerous sub-branches of scholarship that were rapidly evolving. Hence the European interest in an Islamic cultural heritage that had been long neglected, or dismissed by the Arabic-speaking world as being of lesser importance to the needs of learned Muslims and the Muslim community at large. A wide range of subjects, studied at one time by Muslim scholars, was seen by the religious authorities as reflecting the temporal world rather than the more strictly spiritual milieu of the faithful. Through their efforts, orientalists revived interest in a hitherto respected branch of scholarship that medieval Muslims had labeled the Greek or foreign sciences because many of its disciplines were initially borrowed, if indirectly, from the ancient Greeks and their Graeco-Roman disciples (see part 2, chapter 11). These subjects included the likes of mathematics (also borrowed from India), and logic, physics, politics, economics, and ethics, all of which were conceived to be part of the study of philosophy. One could add to these subjects an interest in Greek and Indian medicine and its Islamic permutations, although the practical need for medical education and medical proce-

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dures gave Islamic medicine a long shelf-life, lasting into modern times and the introduction of Western medicine into the Islamic Near East. Before interrogating all manner of things Islamic, Christian and Jewish scholars from modern Europe had to make sure they possessed reliable sources. For that, it was necessary to search the Near East for manuscripts of all sorts and then produce critical editions of texts. In this endeavor, the Europeans brought impressive cards to the table; philology was their strong suit. As schoolboys they honed their linguistic skills on Greek and Latin. Then at university they mastered Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, as well as various Semitic languages related to Arabic. Jewish scholars had the added advantage of having been immersed in Hebrew and Aramaic writings since childhood. As such, they could more easily identify significant Jewish parallels with Islamic texts written in Arabic, and as they had read the classical sources of their own tradition daily, they developed what Germans call Sprachgefühl, an almost intuitive feeling for the language of a text. This expertise for reading texts was particularly important for mastering Arabic sources, because, like Jewish texts, they are highly allusive and often reflect an economy of language that requires several readings before one is able to ferret out the author’s message. Moreover, the intellectual milieu of Islam embraced and hence was closely linked to ancient Jewish traditions, which Jewish orientalists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries absorbed with their mothers’ milk and, of course, their rabbis’ instruction. All orientalists, whether Christian or Jewish, combined their acquired prowess in Islamic languages with textual skills inherited from their Renaissance forebears, namely the means to collate and then edit different manuscript versions. With manuscripts in tow, they turned their attention not only to the religious sciences but also to disciplines of a distinctly Islamic character that had become undervalued by their Arab Muslim contemporaries, for example, Arabic historical writing. Among the many historical texts published by the Europeans was a scientific edition of Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari’s universal history, the Kitab al-rusul wa-l-muluk, a massive tenth-century work requiring a joint undertaking by a team of European scholars working for many years. In the end, they produced sixteen printed volumes including an index of place and proper names—there were no indices in Islamic books before Muslims took note of Western publications. Even today, books produced in the Arab world most often lack the kind of comprehensive, let alone analytical, index that is standard fare for scholarly tomes printed in the West. There were also no footnotes or endnotes in traditional Arabic sources, although comments in the margins and glosses within the

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text itself occasionally served, more or less, the same function as a footnote. European editors working in tandem also provided readers with corrigenda; an extensive glossary of technical terms; and a scholarly apparatus in Latin that drew attention to variant readings and Qur’anic citations. The Leiden edition of the Kitab al-rusul wa-l-muluk, known also by its Latin title the Annales, was in every respect the quintessential model of how a text should be edited for scholarly purposes, and it remains so to this day. Among the noteworthy Western projects dealing with Arabic historiography was an edition and two translations (one with remarkably dense annotation) of the Muqaddimah, the introduction to Ibn Khaldun’s multivolume Kitab al-‘Ibar, arguably the most sophisticated historical writing produced in the premodern Near East. As a result, Ibn Khaldun (d. 1382) has come to enjoy a special status among medieval Arabic chroniclers in the Western world. By and large, medieval Islamic historians were content to narrate the events of the past as they had acquired them from various sources oral and written. There is scant evidence, if any, of their imposing an analytical framework on received historical traditions. Some orientalists have suggested that Muslim historians arranged disparate narratives of a particular moment in such a fashion as to lead the reader to the author’s views of the event. But no modern scholars who believe that such a system was indeed in place have managed to formulate how it actually worked on a grand scale and then put to use in portraying history writ large. There are, nevertheless, certain overarching views that permeate Arabic historical writing in premodern times. God’s intervention aside, Muslim authors emphasized a past (and also present) that was governed by the behavior of individuals and beyond that more inclusive groups. In each and every case, historical outcomes were inevitably linked to strength of character or moral failings. Like many other historians, Ibn Khaldun also subscribed to a view of history that rewarded the virtuous and punished the blameworthy, but he placed this outlook within a broad interpretive framework in which objective realities transcended the foibles or larger failings of rulers and rebels. Where other Islamic historians portrayed history as events that repeated themselves constantly and with little if any variation, Ibn Khaldun saw particular moments in time as the sum of long developing cyclical trends, what in the parlance of contemporary historians might be described as l’histoire de longue durée. As he also recognized that social structure was ever so relevant to understanding human activity, some modern historians of the West saw him as anticipating Auguste Comte, the father of modern sociology. That last claim may raise a few eyebrows, but, in any case, scholars of Arabic historiography are obliged to con-

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cede that this fourteenth-century man was sui generis among premodern Muslim historians. There is, however, a peculiar side to Ibn Khaldun’s achievements: namely, the manner in which his Muslim contemporaries defined his reputation in the Islamic world. He was best known as a highly visible public servant and a legal authority whose lectures dazzled audiences of students and fellow scholars. But there is little if any mention of him as a great historian. His prominent teaching position in Cairo, the equivalent of an endowed professorship at the most prestigious of Western universities, called for training students in the religious sciences, although it cannot be ruled out that he shared his interest in history with some of them. Indeed, a number of his students and their students in turn produced historical works of their own but without displaying his unusual historical insight. By no means could he be considered the founder of a historical school. By the end of the fifteenth century, Ibn Khaldun, the foremost historian of his time, became somewhat of an intellectual curio among Muslims writing in Arabic. On the other hand, Turkish scholars beginning in the sixteenth century and particularly in the seventeenth showed considerable appreciation for Ibn Khaldun’s intellectual achievement and avidly pursued obtaining copies of his historical writing. The neglect of Ibn Khaldun as a historical thinker among the Arabs is not all that difficult to explain. To speak of professional historians in the Islamic Middle Ages would imply the existence of a distinct and highly respected field of historical scholarship. That was hardly the case. To be sure, there are in printed works and as yet unedited manuscripts literally tens of thousands of pages that describe the record of the past, but history (what is labeled in Arabic ‘ilm al-akhbar or ‘ilm al-ta’rikhat) never achieved a highly valued or truly independent status within the larger realm of Islamic scholarship. According to one medieval Islamic classification of learning, history occupied a lowly place between the art of spitting on knots to foretell the future and animal husbandry, that is, between fortune telling and puttering about the cow chips. Historians like Tabari and Ibn Khaldun were highly valued in intellectual circles, but that is because they were first and foremost something other than historians, even by their own definition. We have already noted the basis of Ibn Khaldun’s reputation; Tabari, clearly the greatest of the early chroniclers, was best known for his comprehensive Qur’an commentary and his legal scholarship, that is, for his place within the religious sciences. It is not even clear what defined historical writing, as there was no single accepted format for recording events of the past. In addition to the great multivolume chron-

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icles, both Muslim and Western scholars count as Islamic historical writing a wide range of belletristic works that represent entertaining bowdlerized versions of the past, the kinds of books that make the bestseller lists and grace the tables of commercial bookstores in the West today. Other well-educated Muslims were conveniently placed at court and not only made history but also wrote about events they witnessed first hand, often with an eye to flattering their patrons in order to promote their own careers. In sum, by no stretch of the imagination were there practitioners of an independent, well-defined, and well-respected discipline known as the science of history. Rather, Muslim scholars embraced the study of the past as one of many diverse competing interests, most of them linked to the traditional religious sciences and/or local and state administration. In either case, these interests were held in higher esteem than ‘ilm al-akhbar or ‘ilm al-ta’rikhat. That should not come as a revelation. Even in Europe, it was not until the sixteenth century that scholars gave serious thought to the craft of interpreting the past, and not until the nineteenth that history’s ties to political patronage and moral philosophy were irrevocably cut, allowing for the creation of university departments of history and associations of professional historians. The evolution of historical studies in the modern European university also called for new analytical techniques and a rigorous search for primary materials and archival documents with which to understand the past. There was an underlying assumption that sufficient source data would enable scholars to reconstruct the past as it actually was. While narratives dictated by chronology remained the essential form of communicating events that had taken place in space and time, the increasing use of footnotes by modern historians of the West guided the reader to the means by which the author constructed his argument and thus enabled the former to question the latter’s assumptions, conclusions, and general approach to interpreting the past. All this was foreign to the manner in which history was recorded and understood in the Islamic world. However, influenced by trends in Europe, sophisticated and learned Arabs fascinated by a world beyond their own began to take an interest in orientalist views of the Islamic past, and then accepted and emulated Western methods, becoming professional historians in their own right. This was especially true in the twentieth century when a number of universities, structured more or less like those of the West, were introduced into Arabic-speaking lands, and when, concurrent with that, Muslim scholars, Arab and non-Arab alike, were actually educated in places like Oxford and Paris. In effect, the orientalists resuscitated the study of Islamic history for outward-looking modern Muslims and gave it a dis-

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tinct and valued place within the larger framework of their education. The Ottoman Turks, to their credit, continuously encouraged the writing of history on a grand scale. Since the creation of the secular Turkish Republic, historical research and writing has closely paralleled that of the West and has won high praise among the orientalists and their disciples. The same is true for Turkish scholarship in other subfields of Islamic studies, all of which attracted early on the interests and admiration of the Western academy. Another area of medieval Islamic scholarship that had been increasingly neglected in the Arabic-speaking world was scientific and descriptive geography. As they had done with Islamic history, orientalists compelled new interest in a vast corpus of Arabic (and also Persian) geographical texts. The same European firm, E. J. Brill in Leiden, that printed Tabari’s history brought to light the Bibliotheca Geographorum Arabicorum (BGA), seven thick volumes of major geographical writings (an eighth volume in the series is actually a belletristic work written in the form of a historical narrative). The meticulous editing that characterized the Leiden edition of the Annales is evident throughout each and every geographical text—no surprise there, as both projects shared the same general editor. As with the Annales, such high standards dictated a long period of gestation; the first volume of the BGA appeared in 1873, the last in 1906. Also noteworthy is the edition of Yaqut al-Hamawi’s geographical dictionary, the Mu‘jam al-Buldan (ca. thirteenth century), a heroic effort begun in the 1860s by a single editor named Ferdinand Wüstenfeld. When finished in 1871, Wüstenfeld’s work comprised six enormous tomes, four of text, a fifth volume with 512 pages of notes, and lastly an index that ran to no less than 781 pages. Yaqut’s dictionary is without question one of the great monuments of medieval scholarship, regardless of place or time. Scouring a vast range of writings that represented the interests of learned Muslims, the author culled information to record thousands of geographical entries, which he arranged in alphabetical order, giving for each entry the precise location and, whenever possible, important topographical and historical information. As Yaqut also penned a major biographical dictionary, he added for the reader’s benefit the names of the leading religious scholars associated with a particular place. Were that not enough, he introduced the work with a description of the earth’s physical features; measurements of its land surface; its division into seven inhabited climes; and a discussion of certain forms of land distribution in Islamic law. No scholar working today in any number of fields of Islamic studies can make do without consulting this work. Just as orientalists stoked Muslim interest in the Islamic past by editing

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the great historians of the Islamic Middle Ages and then writing about them, the European edition of the Mu‘jam kindled interest in scientific and descriptive geography among Near Easterners. In 1906–7, an edition of the Mu‘jam was printed in Cairo (albeit without a scientific apparatus) and reprinted thereafter. Interestingly enough, its ten volumes contained supplementary entries on various places throughout the globe including the non-Muslim world, still another indication of how the encroachment of the West affected the intellectual tastes of cultivated Muslims and Christians living in the Abode of Islam. Perhaps no single work had a more pronounced effect on outward-looking Muslim scholars than the Encyclopedia of Islam, a collaborative venture of Western and non-Western contributors who penned entries on all aspects of Islamic civilization. Published by E. J. Brill in Leiden, the original edition (1913–36) contained four massive volumes followed by a supplement (1938); the second edition (1954–2002) ran to eleven plus four additional tomes containing glossaries of technical terms and comprehensive indices. A third edition is currently under way and will no doubt exceed the other two in size and content. Muslims, taking note of the modern Western encyclopedia, have employed a similar format to produce encyclopedic works in Islamic languages, thereby allowing readers much greater access than before to the Islamic past and present and to the larger world beyond the Abode of Islam. One could also draw attention to numerous literary, philosophical, and scientific texts edited and commented upon by Western scholars, thus making their subject matter part of a reinvigorated and broadened intellectual discourse in the Islamic heartland. Modern Arab and non-Arab Muslim scholars produce scientific editions of wide-ranging literary texts, their efforts bolstered by a determined effort to recover and catalogue all available Arabic manuscripts in Near Eastern libraries and private collections. This last effort at recovering the literary legacy of the Islamic past has been of incalculable value to scholars of the West. We might add to the contributions of the orientalists already listed an interest in collecting and analyzing all sorts of Islamic memorabilia. Unlike traditional Muslims, Western scholars took an active interest in cataloging and studying Islamic painting, pottery, metalwork, carpets, and the like, not simply as collectable objects of treasure but as significant markers of Islamic cultural production. They introduced Muslims to the modern museum for displaying artifacts and for developing techniques to restore and preserve precious objects that are the living testimony to the splendor of the Islamic past. As regards that living testimony, perhaps the greatest contribution of

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Western scholars has been excavating Islamic sites and measuring and studying extant monuments in situ, which, taken together with the relevant literary sources, have allowed archeologists and architectural historians to create broad pictures of local and regional settlement. European scholars also began a magisterial project to recover and decipher Arabic inscriptions of historic Palestine and its environs. That ongoing and herculean project, now situated at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, includes not only formal inscriptions of buildings and monuments but also graffiti scratched onto rocks situated in remote places. Closely examined, these inscriptions represent a mine of useful information with which to reconstruct networks of patronage and write social commentary. In addition to epigraphy, a few skilled Western and Western-trained Arab scholars have made a dent in examining the rich storehouse of Arabic papyri, a neglected trove of more than 100,000 items that, in the end, may well prove essential to reconstructing the fabric of economic and social life to which other Arabic literary sources pay inadequate attention. Indeed, one could say that, far from colonizing Islamic scholarship, orientalists and their successors liberated it for the benefit of worldly Arab Muslims and Christians. Although considerable attention has been devoted to the manner in which modern Europeans have shaken political sensibilities in the Islamic world, there has been to my knowledge no comprehensive study of how Islam’s religious leadership reacted to the unfolding orientalist enterprise, only references to a few individual and/or incidental responses—we know far more of Muslims directly exposed to Western education in recent decades. How did the sheikhs of the theological schools, particularly in the Arabic-speaking lands that interest us, react at first to Jews and Christians from Europe turning their attention to the heritage of the Muslim faithful? Could Muslims of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have seen any value in Europe’s newfound and less polemical interest in Islamic civilization? Might they have imagined somehow that orientalists, given more direct exposure to the true faith, would see the light and even consider conversion? We have only to recall how Ignaz Goldziher, a young Jew from Budapest, astounded the sheikhs in Cairo and Damascus with his profound knowledge of Islamic sources. More to the point was the manner in which he enthused about Islam and its sense of spirituality and rationality, which he thought superior to the Judaism of his community. Perhaps a Jew, who went so far as to pray with the Muslims, and with great fervor, would have moved them to consider the possibility of his submitting to Islam. Or did they simply experience this learned foreigner with a heightened sense of curiosity, as did the Mus-

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lim who visited a class conducted by an already established Goldziher in his native Hungary. The Muslim thought it strange if not bizarre that a Jew was instructing Christians about Islam. Certainly no Muslim student studying at a theological college like al-Azhar in Cairo could have attended a seminar on Islam led by an unbeliever, nor would the great Muslim scholars who taught there have been inclined to study with Jews and Christians in order to better understand the other monotheist faiths. It was one thing to be curious about orientalists and perhaps even appreciative of their early efforts—there was surely no harm in that. It was another matter altogether to expose traditional Muslims to any strange ideas that Europeans might harbor about Islam or the study of religion in general. We can only surmise that at first and for some time thereafter the gatekeepers of Islamic higher education saw little if anything threatening in projects like Lane’s dictionary; indeed, Lane had eager collaborators and admirers among learned Muslims. Nor would the sheikhs have looked askance at the various efforts of European scholars to produce scientific editions of Islamic texts that were not ordinarily part of the curriculum in Islamic higher education. Such highly technical undertakings did not compromise the veritable truths that underlie Muslim belief. Even today, many Muslim critics of orientalists recognize the philological skills of the old masters and value their efforts at producing critical editions of Muslim texts. However, had the Muslim authorities in Damascus and Cairo discussed Islam with Goldziher after he wrote his study denying the historicity of the hadith, thereby kicking aside one of the major props supporting Muslim belief and behavior, they no doubt would have been less receptive to him. Views such as those of Goldziher could only have made learned Muslims more suspicious of Westerners who displayed deep knowledge of Muslim culture and religion. The orientalists did not satisfy themselves with producing editions of texts or merely paraphrasing Islamic sources to account for the history of Islamic peoples and their developing religious institutions. In addition to the learned men of the Renaissance from whom they inherited textual methods, modern orientalists counted among their intellectual ancestors the leading figures of the European Enlightenment. Absorbing the atmosphere of the Enlightenment, orientalists developed a taste for skepticism that would lead them to doubt privileged myths of the past, not only those of the Islamic world but also those of their Jewish or Christian upbringing. Unlike rabbis of East European yeshivas and the fundamentalist churchmen of the Christian world, orientalists with inquiring minds understood and, more impor-

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tant yet, were willing to discuss how the ancients forged myths that served to buttress beliefs and behavior for generations upon generations of believers. Stimulated by the mood of the times, the men of the great Western universities had become accustomed to suspending long-cherished beliefs and were willing to create new paradigms with which to guide scholarly outlooks and negotiate private and communal lives. Moreover, their willingness to interrogate long-accepted views led them to realize that their ancient forebears also displayed a similar skeptical attitude and wrote of the hallowed traditions they created with considerable and at times mocking humor. What was true of the ancient rabbis and possibly the church fathers was also true of the early Muslim religious authorities. Men of great faith, living long before the modern age, seemingly understood the tendentious nature of their intellectual creations; but they also understood the need to balance scholarly truth with preserving their community. That required an intellectual adroitness that transcended the mere facts of any given situation. Seeking flexible responses to changing conditions, early Muslims created from scratch a body of traditions known as mawdu‘at, loosely translated as “forgeries mothered by necessity.” The need for invented statements to guide Muslims where no precedent existed was justified ever so clearly by words attributed to the Prophet himself. Muhammad is pictured as being approached by a troubled Muslim from a community some distance from the holy cities of Mecca and Medina (and hence out of touch with the Prophet’s day-to-day rulings). The visitor reveals that among his people there is disagreement as to what the Prophet had actually said. He has come therefore to ask Muhammad for guidance. The Prophet instructs the Muslim to have his community consult the Qur’an. If the statement in question is there, then it surely was uttered by the Prophet of God. If words attributed to him are not revealed in scripture, the Muslims are to determine whether the disputed statements advance the welfare of their community; if they do, the words attributed to the Prophet are to be considered his whether or not he actually spoke them. It is clear from this and similar accounts that Islamic tradition was consciously shaped to accommodate the challenges of the moment, and that early Muslim religious authorities fully understood that and, more important yet, were prepared to accept pious forgeries. Indeed, the mawdu‘at are not to be considered forgeries as we understand that word in the West, but metatruths that transcend the bare realities of any given situation, as belief in them was considered essential to developing concepts and institutions that preserved the welfare of an expanding ummah. The early Islamic com-

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munity was not unyieldingly static, if we mean by that a state of cultural and political equilibrium incapable of producing new forms of expression and of developing new institutions. That said, later generations of medieval Muslims were increasingly alarmed at any attempt to reexamine conventional truths, including pious forgeries. Nor did they countenance altering venerated religious institutions, especially when the self-confidence of the faithful had been buffeted by external challenges or the dynamics of internal rifts. By the fourth Islamic century, state authorities had given scholars of Islamic law and jurisprudence great license to dictate the spiritual needs of the community. Among Sunnites, there was a loose arrangement wherein affairs of state were entirely in the hands of the government while legal scholars framed what was acceptable thought and religious behavior. When forced to, Shi‘ite Muslims grudgingly recognized the reality of Sunnite rule, but reserved for their imams the absolute right to dictate doctrine and religious practice. Muslims searching for new truths could still be highly innovative, but not at the risk of denying the divine origins of Muslim scripture, compromising the traditional picture of the Prophet and his times, denying the universality of the Islamic ummah, or of anything at all that might lead to truly substantive changes in accepted religious practice. Entering the modern age, traditional Muslims, despite doctrinal and political differences, all continued to share a common perspective: belief that the Qur’an was divinely revealed; that the uniqueness of the Prophet as God’s last messenger and his unblemished character were sacrosanct; and that his actions, properly understood, provided a necessary example for all Muslims at all times and in all places. The learned Arab sheikhs who have administered the spiritual needs of Muslims in modern times have operated and continue to operate within that time-tested framework. By and large, they remain the official guardians of morality while less spiritual governments attend to affairs of state. Only in revolutionary Iran have the religious authorities arrogated the right to govern directly. In the wake of the Enlightenment, Europeans worshipped at the altar of progress and change. Muslim religious authorities entering ever more deeply into the modern age experienced no such comparable moment. Quite the opposite, many of the more strident upholders of the faith were inclined to caution against tampering with the received and familiar. As in the past, Muslims did not study history to interrogate and reshape their understanding and expectations of human action, but to reaffirm the tried and true. Battered by the West politically, and observing how traditional Muslim behavior was increasingly undermined by what they considered corrupt Western values,

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the sheikhs, rather than rely on the kinds of flexible responses that characterized the formative centuries of Islam or change their mode of understanding the past, dug in their heels. This is not to say that some sheikhs seeking to restore the primacy of the Arabic-speaking peoples did not welcome calls for reform in late Ottoman times, or consider reviving an Arab caliphate when the Ottoman Empire unraveled. But all these discussions relied on restoring the past as they understood it, not breaking with it. That past, which they sought to restore, was rooted in traditional views of Muhammad, the rise of the Islamic community, and the formation of its political and religious institutions. Therein lay the challenge of the orientalist enterprise to traditional Muslims. Western scholars muddied the waters by casting doubt on essential Muslim narratives and, by implication, Muslim religious doctrine and law.

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The Occidentalist Response to Modern Western Scholarship

Arab scholars who received a traditional Muslim education and/or were responsible for educating other Muslims in similar fashion did not ordinarily bother to acquaint themselves with the minutiae of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Western scholarship. But with Britain and France leaving their political imprint and culture on most of the Arab world, particularly after World War I, a number of Arab Muslim intellectuals, whether trained in Islamic religious texts or not, took an interest in the orientalists and their later disciples. Many expressed great antipathy toward scholars of the West, as they felt they misrepresented Islam and demeaned the capacity of Muslims for cultural advancement. Some concluded that Europeans were simply incapable of understanding Islam and, to the extent they did, that they put their knowledge to use for sinister motives that aimed to advance foreign political interests. In the second half of the twentieth century, many critiques of Western scholarship were written in European as well as Islamic languages. The authors included Christian Arabs who took pride in Islamic civilization as the work of Arabs and not merely as Muslim achievements. Some of the criticisms against Western scholarship, which also extend beyond the Arabic-speaking world, were unabashedly defensive. The earliest truly modern English-language encyclopedia of Islam was Thomas Hughes’s A Dictionary of Islam (1885). Hughes, a longtime resident of British India who learned Arabic and Persian, attempted to compile in tabular form “a concise account of the doctrines, rites, and customs, together with the technical and theological terms, of the Muhammadan religion.” While admitting to having been a Christian missionary for twenty years, Hughes declared that his Dictionary was not “intended to be a controversial attack on the religious system of Muhammad, but rather an exposition of its principles and teach86

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ings.” The intended audience: “The government official called to administer justice to Muslim peoples [free of ignorance and prejudice] . . . the Oriental traveler seeking hospitality amongst Muslim peoples [and therefore in need of a guide to proper understanding and behavior]; the student of comparative religion anxious to learn the true teachings of Islam [and not the prejudicial statements of uninformed Christians . . . and finally] to all, indeed, who care to know what are those leading principles of thought which move and guide one hundred and seventy-five millions of the great human family [the sum of Muslims then thought to inhabit the world].” These words, written in the Dictionary’s preface, are for the most part borne out by the more than seven hundred pages that follow. Indeed, there is much to commend using this book even today. As a shorter reference encyclopedia, many entries, although obviously outdated as one might expect, are still helpful to readers seeking to understand certain aspects of Muslim beliefs and practices. And yet, this fairly innocuous reference work intended for Europeans was regarded by Muslims as badly in need of revision; not because in any number of instances the material had been superseded by more recent research, but because some comments were considered offensive to Muslim sensibilities. When the Dictionary was reprinted in 1964, readers had to make do with an expurgated version. While acknowledging that Hughes’s work was an outstanding contribution to Islamic literature, the publisher indicated that he had meticulously gone through the pages and expunged those remarks derogatory to the Muslim faith—hence the blanks that appear in various entries. Moreover, the publisher invited his Muslim readers to call to his attention such expressions that strike them as perhaps not being consonant with the basic principles of Islam. Presumably, any future photo offset edition of the same Lahore publisher would likely include further blanks reflecting the response of offended Muslim readers. Some criticisms of orientalists resort to extremely shrill, even crude language. A Libyan scholar, writing in Arabic, drew up a list of the leading Western authorities on Islam and offered highly derogative thumbnail sketches of them and their efforts. For example, he dismissed S. D. Goitein (d. 1985), who wrote a magisterial multivolume study of Mediterranean society, as having made a reputation rummaging about a rubbish heap. Were the comment meant to be ironic or playfully amusing, it would have revealed a self-evident truth. Goitein pored over a unique treasure trove of more than ten thousand documents and fragments of documents discovered in the storeroom of an old Egyptian synagogue and its adjoining cemetery. The data gleaned from this material has truly expanded, if not indeed revolu-

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tionized, our knowledge of daily life in the medieval Islamic world (see part 2, chapter 8). Be that as it may, the reference to rummaging about a rubbish heap was hardly intended as a compliment to a great scholar’s meticulous detective work. Not all critics of orientalists were—or are—situated in the Islamic world. Many of them found a home in Europe and the United States and express their views in the language of their host countries. Perhaps the most caustic opponent of Western scholarship was A. L. Tibawi (d. 1981), a devout Palestinian Muslim who settled in England, where he was affiliated with the Institute for Education at the University of London. In several highly acerbic pieces written over several years, Tibawi took on the entire Englishspeaking orientalist establishment, which included, as it were, the British, their American cousins, and, with an oblique reference, unnamed Arab Muslims who had been trained at British universities. The hyperbole of Tibawi’s prose and the ad hominem nature of his attacks against orientalists may have scored points among like-minded Muslims and Arab nationalists, but they would seem to have made little inroads among Westerners who were the objects of his invective. Nor did Tibawi’s comments seem to stir Muslim scholars teaching in the United Kingdom and in North America. His articles have been described as no less than a thesaurus of academic abuse in which various English-speaking orientalists are accused of faulty Arabic and deficient scholarship, and of preventing Muslims better qualified than Christians and Jews from obtaining high-ranking academic positions (less so in America than in Britain). The orientalists were also accused of partisan and unscientific bias in an insidious campaign to adulterate Islamic history and denigrate Islam, an indication that Western scholars (with notable exceptions) cannot entirely free themselves from the legacy of medieval Christian prejudices. Were that wide-ranging brief not sufficient to discredit orientalists, there is the charge in certain cases of Zionist leanings or, at the least, widespread indifference to the plight of the Palestinians. This charge of Zionist leanings no doubt came as a great surprise to Zionists, who long regarded most British Arabists as favoring the cause of Arab nationalism in Palestine. To explore the full range of Tibawi’s diatribe might very well tax the reader’s patience. And so, what follows is essentially limited to that which particularly exacerbates him and, so he claims, other believing Muslims: to wit, the orientalist approach to Muhammad, the rise of Islam, and the formation of Muslim religious institutions. Like many devout Muslims, Tibawi appreciates the strictly philological contributions of the orientalist guild, particularly the editing of classic texts. He also recognizes the substantive learning

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of past orientalist giants as contrasted with the “pygmies” that have inherited their positions in the more current academy. But editing Islamic texts is for the most part a religiously neutral project. Orientalists interpreting texts, particularly texts regarded as sacred by Muslims, is quite another matter. Innate or acquired prejudices on the part of orientalists can lead to false understandings that are offensive to Muslims and their faith. As an example, Tibawi cites the orientalist mantra that the Qur’an is Muhammad’s creation and not God’s revealed word. He also cites orientalists’ comparative methods in seeking to link Islamic origins to earlier Jewish and Christian ideas and practices. The orientalists can acknowledge an organic relationship between Judaism and Christianity, and rightfully so, but as far as Tibawi is concerned there is no scientific proof for such a relationship between either of the other monotheist religions and Islam. By seeking to understand the origins of Islam in light of assumed Jewish and Christian influence, the scholars of the West, says Tibawi, have consciously or otherwise indulged in rank speculation. With that, they compromise themselves as objective scholars while taking license to denigrate Islam and the Muslims. And so he asks if it would not be more conducive to genuine scholarship and human understanding if the Westerners writing about Islam would leave matters of faith alone, and turn to pursuits in other, more neutral areas of Islamic scholarship, such as literature, art, and the sciences. Barring that, Tibawi is willing to grant orientalists their ostensibly neutral views on Islamic origins, but only if these views are juxtaposed—at all times and in all instances—with those of traditional Muslims, so that readers might ferret out the essential and eternal truths of Islam from the false and ephemeral scholarship of Orientalism. In effect, the Christian or Jewish orientalist who cannot comprehend the unique religious experience of a true believer is enjoined to enter into a debate with an imagined Muslim interlocutor. Ironically, this is exactly what medieval Jewish and Christian apologists did in the lands of Islam, but fearing reprisals, these dialogues were not intended for disclosure among Muslims. Does Tibawi protest too much? Even a cursory review of the scholarly literature produced in the Western academy over the last fifty years and more demonstrates that truly competent scholars probing the life of Muhammad and origins of Muslim beliefs and institutions refer to traditional Muslim perspectives as a matter of course. Moreover, they have often done so with great circumspection and learning. Seen from a Western perspective, a fraternal mea culpa for investigating the origins of Islam in the manner in which orientalists trace the origins of the ancient Israelites or seek to recover the

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historical Jesus is neither necessary nor desirable. By way of contrast, Jewish and Christian Bible scholars seek no limits for Japanese scholars, who, having mastered the requisite languages, have taken to studying the Old and New Testaments. Western biblicists who are thoroughly trained in ancient Near Eastern texts are not bothered by a person’s background: all that matters is sound scholarship. Tibawi is perhaps on safer ground citing many books on Islam written by rank amateurs or by individual scholars and teams of scholars addressing a broad reading public. He could argue that the Western world receives its primary education about Islam in the public sphere and not at elite universities like Oxford and Cambridge. The failure to fully and accurately explain traditional Muslim perspectives in popular publications (today one could add the broadcast media) produces a disturbing situation. While conceding that academic Arabists have moved beyond the religiously motivated polemics of the past, Tibawi underscores that, in the broadest sense, they can and do inform the activities of diplomats, missionaries, and businessmen. The latter directly impact influential circles, be they of government or finance. Reading the works of orientalists without being properly informed of traditional Islamic views and practices (an assumption implicit in Tibawi’s remarks) will lead sooner or later to confusion that will compromise Muslim beliefs and behavior. In effect, the stage is set for misrepresenting Muslim culture and, beyond that, imposing Western domination on the economics and politics of the Islamic landscape. There is also a harsh patronizing tone directed by Tibawi against Muslim Arabs who occupy a place in the wide tent of oriental studies, an accusation shared by other critics of Muslim orientalists who see Western scholarship as an attempt to incite Muslim youth to revolt against their faith and scorn as obsolete the entire legacy of Islamic history and culture. Such a blanket condemnation ought to offend any number of Muslims trained in the West, especially those teaching in Western universities, who were labeled by Tibawi as nothing less than “denationalized” and “deculturalized.” Many if not most Muslim scholars teaching in the West remain sympathetic to the national aspirations of their peoples and, from all outward appearances, respectful of the faith into which they were born. To be sure, there are Muslims as well as Arab Christians situated in the Near East and in the cosmopolitan centers of the West who are more measured in their criticism of the orientalist endeavor. The carefully modulated views of these critics have led to a more acceptable criticism of Western scholarship than that of Tibawi and his like. Many of these critics were in

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fact trained in Western universities or in Near Eastern institutions that followed the curriculum of the Western academy. A typical example is Abdallah Laroui, whose work, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual (1976), an extended essay first published in French, created a stir among European and native scholars. The book pays particular attention to the views of Gustave von Grunebaum (d. 1972), a leading orientalist who, because of his broad intellectual interests, had been highly influential in promoting the study of the Near East in the United States. Until the 1950s, American universities demonstrated little academic interest in Islamic civilization. That changed with the emergence of centers of Middle or Near Eastern studies, the largest of which was directed by von Grunebaum at the University of California, Los Angeles, and with the formation of the Middle East Studies Association, which he helped found and then served as its first president. Rather than denigrate wholesale the work of von Grunebaum, Laroui, a trained social scientist, objects to the manner in which von Grunebaum made use of anthropology to describe Islamic culture. Laroui does not accuse von Grunebaum of maliciously undermining Islam; rather, he faults him with establishing broad if not universal paradigms to explain Islamic culture as distinct from the culture of the West. Having made that telling objection to von Grunebaum’s use of anthropology, Laroui graciously acknowledges the latter’s vast learning— which is all too self-evident—and his skill in reading Islamic sources. Ironically, some Arab critics of orientalists who, like Laroui, were exposed to a European intellectual environment, lacked direct familiarity with the heart of their own cultural tradition. That is, they were not specifically trained in interrogating classical Islamic texts and were therefore without the requisite skills to closely scrutinize the more erudite works of the orientalists and their successors. In debating the shortcomings of Western scholarship, these critics tend to be more at home with the ideas of Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault than those of the great Muslim authors writing in the heyday of Islamic cultural achievement, or with the philologically grounded technical studies of Western scholars based on classical Islamic sources. Following the neo-Marxists and the Foucauldians, some Arab intellectuals and their non-Arab camp followers characterize Western curiosity about the world of Islam as an effort by the hegemonic ruling class (read the West) to manipulate the production of knowledge about Islam to gain and sustain power over the Islamic world, an accusation that could hardly apply to the Czechs, Austrians, Hungarians, Scandinavians, and especially the German scholars who played a dominant role in the modern orientalist enterprise. None of these peoples had a colonial presence in the Arab Near East, be it direct or indi-

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rect, although the Germans would have been only too happy to have one, if circumstances had proved otherwise. Rather than condemn a scholarly discourse and its varied disciples as being part and parcel of a deliberate attempt to subjugate a helpless other, one could easily argue it was the innate curiosity of the modern West that whetted the appetite for its engagement with Islam and other foreign cultures, a curiosity not fully reciprocated by Arab Muslims when they held sway on the other side of the Mediterranean. In any case, the criticism by Westernized Muslim and Christian Arabs was highly selective. Attacking the leading orientalists, they preferred, for the most part, to focus upon works that were intended for general audiences and not upon weighty scholarly tomes that were more difficult and timeconsuming for them to assess. The late Edward Said, the most prominent of the anti-orientalists, actually began his extended broadside against an entire field of scholarship with a screed against several journalistic potboilers; a multi-authored survey written by serious scholars but intended for a broad audience; and two illustrated coffee table books—in the latter case hardly the kinds of works that were intended for highly trained specialists in the field, or illustrative of their meticulous research. Said’s piece, which appeared on October 31, 1976 in the New York Times Sunday Book Review—not ordinarily a venue for critical scholarly appraisal—accused orientalists, or, to be more precise, the discourse of Orientalism (a rather slippery term used by Said to embrace all Western representations of the Orient), of dogmatically asserting “the absolute and systematic differences between the West (which is [in the opinion of orientalists] rational, developed, humane, superior) and the Orient (which [they consider] aberrant, underdeveloped, inferior).” Said goes on to accuse orientalists of resorting to demeaning clichés “about how Muslims (or Mohammedans as they are still insultingly called by some Orientalists) behave.” Admittedly, the descriptive label Mohammedan for Muslim, and by extension Mohammedanism for Islam, misrepresents the beliefs of over a billion of the world’s population, as these terms suggest an analogy to Christ/Christian/Christianity. From the beginning of the Prophet Muhammad’s mission, the Muslim faithful have rejected any hint of a human being assuming godlike qualities, including, of course, the Prophet himself. The Christian doctrines relating to Christ’s divinity and the Trinity have always been flashpoints in Muslim polemics against the older monotheist faith. Even Napoleon Bonaparte, an ambitious empire-builder in his own time, was cognizant of that in addressing the Muslims of Egypt. That said, one would have been hard pressed to find professional Islamicists speaking of Mohammedans and Mohammedanism when Said wrote as he did in 1976. In

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all likelihood, Said was referring to H.A.R. Gibb’s slim book Mohammedanism (1940), an introduction to Islam whose title was forced upon the author by his editors, as the book was a newer version of a popular survey written by D. S. Margoliouth in 1910. Nor did Gibb meekly acquiesce to the demands of the press; his objection to the unfortunate and highly misleading title is strongly noted in the preface and opening pages of the first chapter—a fact that could easily have been checked by any scholar who bothered to read the book with care. Said’s review in the New York Times anticipates his influential polemic Orientalism, which was to appear two years later in 1978. In Orientalism, a book marked by considerable intellectual panache but curiously erratic scholarship, Said invokes the sins of Western authors going back to the ancient Greeks, as if there were a continuum that united the Occident and Orient in conflict for no less than some 2,500 years. One has to admire the scope of Said’s argument, but one cannot help but note that he fails to give detailed consideration to the most influential of the many specialized monographs and articles produced by so-called orientalists, even in his own lifetime. Particularly jarring is Said’s failure to deal seriously if at all with the massive German-language scholarship on the Near East, a serious shortcoming noted by several reviewers, but brushed aside by him in the Afterword to a later edition in 1995. The learned scholars of the Near East also delighted in pointing out the numerous errors sprinkled about the pages of his book, not the kind of superficial mistakes that all scholars are prone to make from time to time, but veritable howlers. They also noted Said’s selective use of quotes that exceed the bounds of normal tendentious argument. Despite trenchant rejoinders from Western Islamicists, some of whom, it must be said, were deeply sympathetic to Said’s politics, particularly his embrace of the Palestinian cause, and despite the withering criticism by highly reflective Arab scholars who were in league with his secularist leanings but put off by what they considered his radical chic and unwillingness to see the structural flaws in Muslim Arab society and culture (see below), Orientalism has retained its iconic status as the quintessential anti-orientalist tract. To be sure, Said was not the first to link orientalists with Western cultural and political hegemony. Some fifteen years earlier, Egyptian born Marxist sociologist Anouar Abdel-Malek published his brief manifesto titled “Orientalism in Crisis” (1963) in the journal Diogenes, roughly the same time that Tibawi produced his first critique of English-speaking orientalists titled “English-Speaking Orientalists: A Critique to Their Approaches to Islam and Arab Nationalism” in another journal, Muslim World (1963). Fran-

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cesco Gabrielli, the eminent Italian scholar whose interests ranged from the ancient to the modern Near East, agreed with various criticisms leveled against his European confreres, but, in answering Abdel-Malek, he concluded that orientalists were driven, as a rule, by genuine intellectual curiosity and the search for scholarly truths. In similar fashion, Albert Hourani, an English scholar of Lebanese ancestry, defended the then-current state of Oriental studies after recognizing some excesses of the past in his article “Islam and the Philosophers of History” (1967) in the journal Middle East Studies. When Orientalism appeared a decade later, Hourani, the anchor of modern Middle East studies at Oxford, expressed serious reservations about the author’s anti-orientalist brief, although he appears to have been sympathetic to Said as an individual. In any case, the early debate between orientalists and their critics was carried on within house, so to speak. At the time, neither Abdel-Malek nor Tibawi, the first a Christian, the latter a Muslim, occasioned much response beyond the professional guild whose motives and authority they challenged. In contrast, the commotion later occasioned by Said’s Orientalism reached far beyond the narrow confines of a highly specialized discipline. A professor of Western literature, Said found a receptive and for the most part enthusiastic audience among literary critics and cultural anthropologists, much more so than among philologically grounded specialists in Near Eastern history and religious institutions. As a rule, when the latter mentioned Said it was in passing; even those attracted to his views went about their work as they had before, that is, in a manner similar to that of their orientalist colleagues. Time has occasioned a change in the reception of Said’s views. While recognizing his profound influence on cultural studies writ large, in particular his central role on what has come to be known as postcolonial theory, literary scholars and social scientists in a wide variety of fields have moved beyond Said to embrace newer and more enticing conceptual frameworks. Indeed, a general critique of his work has emerged in recent years among intellectuals, many of whom have little or no overriding interest in the Near East. The most exhaustive treatment of these views and those of Said’s Islamicist and Arab critics is that of Daniel Martin Varisco, an anthropologist with the full range of learning to critique the theoretical foundations of Said’s intellectual meanderings, and also to speak with some knowledge of orientalists and their labors. Varisco, unlike Said, is an accomplished Arabist, who has a delightful sense of humor and the capacity for a well-turned phrase, as can be gleaned from the title of his book Reading Orientalism: Said and Unsaid (2007). It is clear, however, that none of this criticism has managed to dim Said’s presence

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in the ongoing debate on Western scholarship and Islam. Note also Zachary Lockman’s Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism, a rather contentious book that fully embraces Said’s views and targets the same academicians as did Said, but with fewer of the bold rhetorical flourishes that earned for Said a measure of acclaim among his admirers. Bernard Lewis, the current doyen of Near Eastern historians, and the aforementioned Gustave von Grunebaum, a specialist in Arabic literature, were singled out for particular criticism by Said and then by the other antiorientalists, some of it highly abusive. Even the famed H.A.R. Gibb (d. 1969), who trained several generations of orientalists at the universities of London, Oxford, and then Harvard, and whose students included many scholars from the Near East, was subjected to criticism in certain quarters. The criticism of Gibb seems an odd turn, as he was known in his time as a sensitive and sympathetic interpreter of Islam. He was also open to social science research that might inform the close reading of Islamic texts that served as the basis of his own work. One could of course quibble with any number of Gibb’s observations, especially the broad pronouncements he often produced with such great conviction as to make any other view seem superfluous, if not an arrogant denial of a self- evident truth. Be that as it may, Gibb had a remarkable grasp of many aspects of Islamic civilization, and, as regards the orientalist debate, was a great admirer of the Arabs and their cultural achievements. Moreover, Gibb abhorred the excesses of imperialism and championed the cause of Arab nationalism. The case of Lewis, Said’s most visible target, is also a bit puzzling, as the initial criticism appeared before most of his more recent popular writings, the extended essays in which Lewis raised serious questions about militant Islamic revival and its potential dangers, not only to the West but also to the peoples of the Islamic Near East. It was in fact Lewis who popularized the phrase “clash of civilizations” as regards the Islamic world’s clash with the West. His earlier thoughts on this matter, which appeared shortly before the Said New York Times review, were revisited by him and published in a reflective tract bearing the title The Crisis of Islam (2003), a work reviewed in numerous publications and consumed by the broad reading public. The most controversial and talked-about of his recent books, What Went Wrong? (2002), is a far-ranging discussion of how a once vibrant Islamic world has been overtaken, overshadowed, and to an increasing extent dominated by the West. Over the course of several years, many of Lewis’s pronouncements have turned out to be prophetic, most notably his assessment of the strength and appeal of Islamic revival and his prediction of direct Soviet intervention in

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the Arab world, a notion derided at the time by many so-called experts who could not foresee that common interests might bind communist atheists who suppress Islam within their own empire and Muslim autocrats who give formal expression to their own religious traditions. An extraordinarily skillful writer who can present the most complicated ideas in language accessible to the general reader, Lewis’s books tend to be widely read by those seeking an introduction to various aspects of Near Eastern history and civilization. He has also appeared regularly on the broadcast media, an articulate and witty subject to interview. That very popularity has made him an inviting target by those who oppose his views. Given Lewis’s ability to attract a large audience, one can well imagine how he might have offended the sensibilities of Muslims conscious of their public image among peoples of the West, especially after 9/11. In discussing “what went wrong,” Lewis points to what he perceives as structural flaws in Muslim societies of the Near East, rather than attributing their weaknesses entirely to the encroachment of the imperialists and their surrogates. In the current climate of academic discourse, such a view, however stated, seems to some sensitive readers uncharitable at best and condescending at worst. In truth, the assault on Lewis’s reputation began when one had to look far and wide for any hint, real or imagined, of his being unfairly or excessively critical of Muslims and the world of Islam. A careful reading of Lewis’s enormous output, including his many books and articles intended for a general reading public, indicates a great appreciation for the historic accomplishments of Muslims. Many of Lewis’s books have been translated into Islamic languages, and he retains in his nineties warm relationships with highly appreciative Muslim scholars and political figures, many of whom had been his students in London at SOAS. Like Lewis, von Grunebaum’s great sin was in publishing several books that were intended for a reading audience extending well beyond scholars rooted in the traditional orientalist outlook in which he himself was reared. By the author’s admission, he was seeking to engage reflective intellectuals interested in the formation of cultural consciousness and problems of cultural transmission and absorption, that is, of cultural self-definition and influence. Put somewhat differently, he sought to understand how Muslims conceive of themselves and their own culture in relation to non-Muslims and their cultures. Simply looking at Islam through the lenses of an anthropologist manqué would not have created the negative response that his works received well after their publication from Muslim and Christian Arab scholars, especially from those who, like von Grunebaum himself, were well

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acquainted with the social sciences. Rather, these critics were put off because von Grunebaum dared to ask the same questions Lewis later addressed in What Went Wrong? Von Grunebaum perceived the great cultural accomplishments of medieval Muslims to be an ephemeral moment (albeit one that lasted for several centuries). He believed that as Islamic culture evolved, there was something in its very nature that limited the extent to which Muslims who remained entirely faithful to their religious tradition could adapt to innovative concepts. According to von Grunebaum, they had, in effect, become prisoners to narratives of a historic past that governed Muslim selfconsciousness. Gibb put it somewhat differently. He intimated that, despite rare exceptions (for example, Arab philosophical enquiry), “the Arab mind” was incapable of subordinating the concrete to abstract reasoning. I assume that were Gibb still among us he might prefer a more felicitous expression than “the Arab mind” and a more circumspect term than “incapable” when referring to the so-called Arab mind’s ability to absorb abstract reasoning. There is, in any case, nothing mean-spirited or intentionally demeaning about these views of a cultural decline afflicting what had been an Islamic civilization of great intellectual curiosity. Nor can one convincingly deny that a decline in cultural achievement took place, as some scholars, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, have attempted to argue (see part 2, chapter 7). Still, one can readily understand why Muslim (and some Christian Arab) intellectuals thoroughly familiar with modern European thought should have taken umbrage at what seemed to them an arbitrary description of their own culture. Unlike Lewis, who suggested that Muslims could make a significant adjustment to the challenges of modern times by reordering their house within a liberalized Muslim framework, von Grunebaum thought the only solution to the problems that plagued Muslims was a complete makeover, an entirely new attitude that borrowed from the West not only applied science and technology but also an inquisitiveness about things foreign and a capacity to fully embrace the methods of Western scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. As he once put in a casual conversation, he was waiting for the day when scholars at Arab universities in the Near East would take an active interest in the medieval West comparable to the orientalists’ interest in the world of medieval Islam. At the risk of overstating his view, it strikes me that von Grunebaum invites Muslims to throw off the shackles of the past and forge for themselves the equivalent of the European Enlightenment. Understandably, Muslims and Arab Christians who were well versed in contemporary Western culture looked at these views with defensiveness, declaring them intellectually complacent and thoroughly misleading. Ironi-

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cally, some of the same Arab critics, those who are given to secular impulses, express misgivings of an ascending Islamic revival that is both rigid in outlook and antithetical to Western thought. As often as not, the criticisms of orientalists, past and present, were and continue to be expressed orally, having found a prominent place in papers presented at scholarly associations, various symposia, departmental colloquia, and public lectures. Among the major complaints lodged against Lewis and von Grunebaum (along with other orientalists) is their alleged embrace of an antiquarian bias that leads them to essentialize Islamic culture, as if all Muslims subscribed to the same practices and beliefs at all times and in all places. In reality, the Islamic ummah, which now numbers well over a billion souls and is found in all the inhabited regions of the world, represents a patchwork quilt of very different communities, cultures, and outlooks. There is, as Said is wont to remind us, no such thing as the so-called “Arab” or “Islamic mind,” not that one can recall either Lewis or von Grunebaum using either of these unfortunate catchwords. Gibb, as we indicated earlier, does invoke that expression, but neither he nor his fellow scholars suggested that the Islamic world lacked diversity. Quite the opposite; in an influential essay titled “An Interpretation of Islamic History,” published originally in the Journal of World History (1953), Gibb stated: “In different periods and epochs [Islam] has presented differing features under the impact of and in response to local geographical, social and political forces.” One would be hard pressed to find a more clear and concise statement about diversity in the Islamic world. Some two years later, von Grunebaum hosted an international conference at the University of Chicago on the theme “Unity and Diversity in Islam,” where the diverse nature of Islamic societies was acknowledged and subjected to lively discussions that were recorded and then appended to the formal presentations published in the form of collected essays. One of Lewis’s more recent books, in my opinion the very best of his late oeuvre, is a monograph titled The Multiple Identities of the Middle East (1998), a work that stresses in learned and elegant fashion the complexity of societal organization in the Islamic heartland. It is true that Gibb, Lewis, and von Grunebaum, as well as most orientalists of old and their successors, tend to focus on an Islamic world that stretches from the Iberian Peninsula to eastern Iran and Asia Minor, with allowances for Ottomanists who focus also on Muslim advances into Europe. But even research limited to that vast territorial expanse requires mastering any number of languages and the histories of many highly diverse regional and local cultures. It behooves us to insist that scholars do more than their considerable learning allows and attempt

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a global view of the Islamic world. There is, indeed, something refreshingly quaint these days about individuals who confine their writing to subjects they actually control. In any case, many if not most of the formal religious institutions and virtually the entire canon of the so-called Islamic sciences was produced in the Near East and North Africa, largely during the formative period of Islamic civilization, a time frame that encompasses at most half a millennium beginning with the appearance of the Prophet. The Islam that emerged then and there had and continues to have a marked effect on Muslim societies situated at the periphery of the Muslim heartland, Islamic communities that took shape well after the initial development of classical Islamic institutions. Such communities include those of the subcontinent of India, southeast Asia, and Africa. It would appear the same residual influence of traditional Islamic culture will apply, in a manner of speaking, for many Muslims who have recently migrated to the West. Be that as it may, whatever differences distinguish Muslim societies from one another—one cannot deny there are many differences indeed—there is also a core of commonly held beliefs that serves to shape the larger identity of the universal ummah and to give it whatever sense of unity it can command. To quote Gibb once again, this time from the preface to his collected essays, Studies on the Civilization of Islam (1962): “There has been a tendency (entirely justified in itself) . . . to stress the degree of variety concealed beneath the outward uniformities [of the medieval Islamic world]. It is true that a civilization spread . . . over so vast an area necessarily included many ‘little societies’ with their own traditions, social customs and intellectual attitudes. Yet the most convinced defenders of the ‘little societies’ must admit, however reluctantly, that the steady pressure of ideas, practices and values of the [greater and universal Islamic community] gradually ate into them so that they survived, if at all, as communities within the multicolored and tolerant complex of Islamic society.” The beliefs held by all Islamic societies have already been cited, namely: the belief in the One and Only God; the legitimacy of the Prophet and his mission; and that all Muslims must strive to emulate the unblemished behavior of the Prophet and his pristine community. The models for such behavior are found in the traditional narratives of the Islamic past and in various Muslim codes of law and their commentaries. Ordinarily, traditional Muslims allow for variations in the classical law codes based on local customs and practices. The same is true for various forms of popular religion that always seem to irritate the more dour Muslim authorities. Needless to say, these variations are most pronounced on the periphery

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of the Islamic world, where residual cultural artifacts of pre-Islamic times have been grafted onto a more normative Islam. Contrary to the claims of the anti-essentialists, I cannot think of a single serious Western scholar of Islam who would deny the heterogeneity of Islamic civilization. Paradoxically, some who condemn the old orientalists and their heirs of essentializing the world of Islam are themselves guilty of essentializing oriental studies, which has always been a highly diverse and at times highly contentious academic battleground. Another favorite criticism of the orientalists is their alleged propensity to use the past in order to explain the present and predict the future of the Islamic Near East. From this perspective, falsely assigned the orientalists, one has only to study the Islamic Middle Ages or, worse yet, merely read the Qur’an, to understand modern developments in the Arab/Islamic world. Scholars like Lewis, von Grunebaum, and at times Gibb thus stand accused of embracing the discredited notion of the “timeless orient,” a concept which is a Western literary trope without roots in real history. Who could argue that any scholar who overlooks the modalities of modern times and seeks to understand the present merely on the basis of events and writings written a thousand years ago and more forsakes all intellectual integrity? This criticism is, however, more of a characterization of Western media representation at its worst rather than of well-trained Western scholars at their best. Linking the timeless Orient to recent scholarship, is, to say the least, a caricature of what truly learned Western Islamicists believe. One has only to note Gibb’s comments in the published version of the Haskell Lectures he presented at the University of Chicago, later published by that same university as Modern Trends in Islam in 1947. After acknowledging the profound effects of the first six Islamic centuries on the development of Islam and Islamic civilization, Gibb writes: “After the thirteenth century or so, it is assumed that, from a religious angle, Islam stayed put—that is it remained fixed in the molds created for it by scholars, jurists, doctors, and mystics of the formative centuries and, if anything, decayed rather than progressed.” While acknowledging there is some truth to this view, a view that he points out is embraced by a number of modern Muslim scholars themselves, he goes on to say: “Yet, in fact, the inner structure of Muslim religious life was being profoundly readjusted . . . and generated an expansive energy. . . .” He then asks his readers to consider the establishment of the Ottoman and Mughal empires, the revival of Shi‘ism in Persia, and the expansion of Islam into regions far removed from the Muslim heartland, all indications that the Muslim faith did not become “a mere dry husk of belief and practice.”

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Nevertheless, were he alive, Gibb would be the first to suggest that current historians of the Near East would be well served to consider the power of ages past when looking to explain recent developments. Those who accuse so-called orientalists for falsely invoking history tend to underestimate the powerful magnetism of an idealized past that has been engrained in the consciousness of all Muslims. As I have had cause to remark all too often, Muslims have always employed historical narratives of distant times to construct contemporaneous identities and shape political behavior. Even a cursory glance at the modern Islamist literature reveals a deep indebtedness to such narratives. In particular, the period of Muhammad and the rise of Islam serves as an eternal touchstone for Muslim beliefs, communal activities, politics within the contemporary ummah, and also for relations with non-Muslims. Even the jarring impact of Western culture and historicist traditions have failed to shake Muslim reliance on the received and familiar. The past alone cannot explain the Islamic present, but the present cannot be explained, nor can the future be anticipated, without rigorously engaging the Islamic past. Therein lays the very substantial contributions made by the likes of Gibb, Lewis, and von Grunebaum, scholars who venture far afield with remarkable erudition. As for the accusation that Western scholarship has colonized Arab culture, no orientalist has ever insisted on denying a Muslim or Christian Arab a right to self-definition or to articulate a vision of his or her own history. No alien culture has or can successfully dictate how Islamic subjects are to be taught in Muslim educational institutions of the Near East. To believe otherwise is to indulge in intellectual fantasy. Moreover, it is highly insulting to Arab Muslims, for it not only denies them any capacity at independent thought; it deprives them of all sense of agency. It is no wonder that some secular-leaning Arab intellectuals learned in the ways of the West have found cause to criticize Said as they have. As the bulk of this criticism along with more general Muslim reflections on the orientalists and their craft is written in Arabic, it is, by and large, unavailable to most of Said’s readers. A very brief review of his Arab critics has been made available, however, by Emmanuel Sivan in “Edward Said and His Arab Reviewers,” an essay published in In Interpretations of Islam, Past and Present (1985) that features four intellectuals: the Egyptian Hasan Hanafi, the Iraqi Muhammad Husayn ‘Ali al-Saghir, the Lebanese Nadim al-Bitar, and the Syrian-born and often-exiled Sadiq al-Azm. Perhaps the sharpest attack on Said is that of al-Azm, who accuses him of practicing “Orientalism in reverse” (what I prefer to label “Occidentalism”). For al-Azm, Said’s defen-

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sive reaction to Western scholarship makes it difficult for modern Muslims to criticize what they perceive as the inherent defects of their own culture. As a result, it stifles the ability of Muslims to counteract the fahlawi mentality, a wildly imaginative way of encountering reality that allows often sophisticated and worldly individuals to retreat into a macho fantasy of their own creation. Should we wish to discount al-Azm, who earned a doctorate at Yale University in Continental philosophy, as speaking only for secularists like himself, we can point to Fazlur Rahman (d. 1988), a highly traditional Muslim, who was also critical in many respects of orientalist scholarship. Rahman contended that the decline of Islamic societies did not begin with the modern encroachment of Europe. Rather, it was rooted in the intellectual legacy of an overly scholastic medieval Islam that left Muslims with insufficient options for social and legal innovation. Whenever critical of his Western peers, Rahman, Oxford-trained in Islamic philosophy, always expressed himself in a highly respectful tone. He understood only too well that if one wishes to be part of the West’s fraternity of scholars, there are rules of scholarly evidence and procedure that have to be observed. Most assuredly, these rules have changed often with the intellectual fashions of the times, but, as regards Islamic studies, the basic infrastructure of scholarly enquiry, which is held together by rigorous philology and the meticulous examination of relevant texts, has had a prolonged life within the orientalist community. Therein lies the rub. Many Muslims educated in the West to teach and do research in Islamic studies, especially those who remain to teach at Western universities, face a delicate problem. They can hardly dismiss altogether the conceptual framework of Western scholarship—at least not on intellectual grounds—but they also have to consider their own religious sensitivities and, as of late, their standing among fellow Muslims. Most recently, they have been confronted by Muslim students raised in the secular West and virtually devoid of any knowledge of their own religious heritage. Many of these students seek to return to what they consider their authentic faith and so they elect various courses on Islam to fill in the gaps of their education. This is particularly true in the United States, where higher education encourages sampling a wide variety of electives. Based on anecdotal evidence, it would appear that quite a number of these students find the outlook of Western scholarship disturbing if not even threatening to their newfound faith, particularly discussions of Muhammad’s political maneuvering, questions of religious tolerance as reflected in relations among Muslims and Christians and Jews—which were often less than idyllic—and

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the historical veracity of Islamic traditions literature. In truth, all these subjects also challenged the sensibilities of Muslims during the formative period of Islam a thousand years and more before the emergence of modern orientalists A close reading of early Muslim tradition reveals that contemporaneous Muslims were well aware that the idealized community they trumpeted was not without its moral and political shortcomings and that some received prophetic traditions were highly questionable. For Muslim students seeking a window on their faith, such a point of view can make for awkward confrontations, even with professors who are themselves Muslims and highly sympathetic to their students’ paths of self-discovery. It cannot be easy for any number of Muslim scholars situated in the West to contend in our times with this heightened sensitivity. Faced with the intellectual world in which they live and the intellectual world of an Islamic past that still makes claims upon them, these scholars, citizens of good standing in the Western academy, accept the basic framework of Western scholarship but reserve the right to challenge various assumptions, particularly those which they regard as chipping away at the foundations of Muslim belief. Even Muslims who question their faith have felt they have a stake in defending their heritage. For those whose faith has never wavered, the aforementioned theories of Goldziher and Schacht questioning the historicity of Islamic tradition can be seen as potentially undermining the foundations of current Islamic belief and practice. And so, a number of Muslim medievalists who teach in the West are inclined to research less controversial subjects than the life of Muhammad and the origins of Islam and Islamic institutions. They opt instead for the later history of the Islamic world, Arabic language and literature, Islamic philosophy and science, and the like. A number of these Muslim scholars are at the very forefront of their chosen fields; their work is greatly admired and much valued by their Western colleagues. Conservative Muslims trained only by traditional Near Eastern sheikhs have been less troubled intellectually by modern Western scholarship. By and large, they and their teachers at Muslim theological schools lack first-hand knowledge of the scholarship produced in the West, especially the content of scholarly journals and monographs. As a result, they can be dismissive of the Orientalist enterprise without actually engaging its sum and substance. Why then do they find the Western quest for Islamic origins off-putting if not, indeed, insulting? It may well be that for Muslim sheikhs the real danger is not the beliefs held by Western scholars but the possibility that such beliefs will move beyond the Western academy and take root in their own world. A century ago and more, Orthodox rabbis who headed rabbinical schools in

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Eastern Europe showed little interest in a modern biblical scholarship that claimed the Pentateuch was not the product of a single revelation but a composite of different literary traditions that could be dated to different periods of time and place. From the rabbis’ perspective, what could the gentiles know of the Hebrew Bible or, beyond that, anything of classical Jewish texts? What concerned these rabbis was the not the attitude of the gentiles, or the documentary hypothesis that was the bedrock of higher biblical criticism, but the inroads made by that emergent Christian scholarship on those Jews who compromised long-held Jewish beliefs and observances under the labels of Reform, Conservative, and Modern Orthodox Judaism. Unlike the aforementioned rabbis, modern Muslim reformer and polemicist Rashid Rida (d. 1935) was acquainted with the broad outlines of Western biblical scholarship. He also had some knowledge of the Islamist tradition associated with Oriental studies. In both cases, he acquired his knowledge in a desultory fashion. Commanding no Western languages, Rida was restricted to translations, or to summaries of learned works provided by various associates in his circle (see, for example, Umar Ryad’s Islamic Reformism and Christianity, 2009). Lest we be misled, Rida did not look to modern biblical criticism as a model for the investigation of the Qur’an and other Muslim sources. Rather, he saw higher biblical criticism as confirming the traditional Muslim claim that the Torah embraced by the older monotheists was not the original revelation, but a distortion of the true text that when properly read foretold the coming of the Prophet Muhammad and his designated mission to all humankind. In that sense, Rida’s broad embrace of modern biblical studies was directly linked to an ongoing project in which he sought to stem the advances of Christianity in the heartland of Islam. Rida’s attitude toward Western scholarship on Islam was marked by ambivalence and then antagonism. Like any number of Muslim scholars, he valued the contributions of orientalists that enhanced Islamic learning, provided that such studies did not disturb Muslim sensibilities. For example, he was, at first, an admirer of the massive Encyclopedia of Islam, first published in Leiden in the years 1913 through 1936. But when he later read in Arabic translation the article on Abraham (Ibrahim) that challenged the traditional Muslim views, he turned against the article’s author, the formidable Dutch scholar, A. J. Wensinck. Wensinck’s article, considered highly offensive to Islam and Muslims, quickly evolved into a cause célèbre in which broad suspicions were raised about orientalists’ motives and labors. One might say that in approaching Western scholarship on Islam with mixed feelings, Rida and other Muslim traditionalists knowingly, or, what is mostly likely, unknow-

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ingly, followed the words of the Prophet himself. I refer to a dictum attributed to the Prophet in Islamic tradition: “Narrate traditions about [or on the authority of] the Israelites—provided that it does no harm [that is, it does not undermine Muslim belief and behavior].” Be that is it may, the circle that surrounded Rida found a good deal to admire in the West: its freedom of thought and politics, and, as regards our concerns, the manner in which Europeans established modern professional and scientific associations. An appreciation of Western science and technology has taken root, even among the most traditional of Muslims. As a rule, the sheikhs of al-Azhar and other forward-looking luminaries have had no problem in diversifying the curriculum of their time-honored institutions to include various branches of the applied sciences and similar subjects. But, as did Rida and his followers, some Muslims feared and continue to fear that, if closely studied, the scholarship—and even science—of the godless West is likely to subvert their efforts to preserve authentic Muslim beliefs and practices, with all that that implies for the further encroachment of alien Western values. isl amic studies and the broader intellectual challenge of western schol arship The response of devout Muslims to Western views in general and Islamicist scholarship in particular has to be framed within a broad perspective, as it is part of a larger issue that concerns all Muslims, not just Arabs and the sheikhs of theological seminaries. That larger concern is the aims and objectives of a proper Islamic education. In 1977, about the same time Edward Said was promoting his views on Orientalism, Muslim scholars from all over the world gathered in Mecca to participate in the First World Conference specifically devoted to the subject. Their mandate was to study it, analyze basic problems, state the aims and objectives of Islamic education, and recommend methods for implementing those goals. Their findings were summed up in a volume of reflective essays produced by several of the participants and edited by S.M.N. al-Attas. The book appeared under the title Aims and Objectives of Islamic Education (1979). The declared aim of Islamic education is stated forthrightly and without hesitation in the book’s foreword, written by Ahmad Salah Jamjoon, Chairman of the Follow-up Committee. It is “the creation of the ‘good and righteous man’ who worships Allah in the true sense of the term, builds up the structure of his earthly life according to [traditional Islamic law] and employs it to [serve] his faith.” Jamjoon concludes

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in the foreword: “We cannot have a philosophy or educational policy which is based on a concept not identical with [Islam]. Despite this, Muslims apply British, French, American or Russian policies of education even though these policies, in the long run, will conflict with and contradict what is a proper Islamic education”; that is, an education consonant with Islamic values. In the book’s introduction, al-Attas reinforces Jamjoon’s views, complaining that the West has unduly influenced secular scholars and Muslim intellectuals including the modernist reformers and their followers, the majority of whom lack a proper background in traditional Islamic studies. He goes on to say that the Western conception of knowledge, which is based (solely) on (human) experiences and consciousness (as opposed to divine inspiration), invariably leads to the secularization of philosophy and science. In at-Attas’s view, there can be no doubt that if secular Muslim scholars and intellectuals are allowed to confuse Muslim youth, the result will be the continuing “deIslamization” of the Muslim mind. Ironically, al-Attas, a traditional Muslim, speaks of “the Muslim Mind,” the very expression that so exercises Said, a secular Christian. Indeed, according to al-Attas, the present problem of “deIslamization” will not only continue, it will intensify because many Muslim educators and students do not fully understand the (spiritually debased) nature of Western culture and civilization from which they draw inspiration and before which they stand in “reverential awe and servile humility.” The dangerous path to “deIslamization” is also the direct responsibility of Western colonialists, a point taken up by several Muslim educators. In penetrating the Islamic world, they suggest, colonizers established a system of secular education that instilled Western models and values. Linguistics and anthropology were introduced as methodological tools for the study of language and culture, and orientalist scholarship and philology for the study of (Islamic) literature and history. Muslims inadequately learned regarding their own culture are thus unable to draw distinctions between Islam and its “world view” and that of other world views. Influenced by the West, Muslims robbed of their genuine Islamic heritage tend “to reduce Islam to the level of other religions as if [Islam] were the proper ‘subject’ of the philosophy and sociology of religion, and as if it were an evolved and developed expression of primitive religion” and not a quintessential gift from God. Muslim secularists, who view the world without accounting for God’s agency, are described as the vanguard of Western cultural imperialism, the so-called enemy within. With oriental studies and other Western disciplines penetrating the Islamic world, an external menace has morphed into a grave internal problem. These themes recur throughout the collected essays that comprise the

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volume, at times with pungent observations. Muhammad Qutb, writing on the role of religion in Islamic education, enjoins Muslim educators to exercise caution in teaching the theory of evolution, an atheistic idea propagated by “international Judaism,” or to be wary of the sociological theories of Durkheim “the Jew” that cancel all stable (read religious) values in human life; or to be wary of teaching psychology according to Freudian views on sex as well as other theories of human psychology that refuse to recognize religion is an indivisible part of human behavior. Anthropology as taught in the West is similarly disparaged, as it is no more than an extension of Darwinian concepts. Can one really believe as do those who embrace Darwin that “the environment [alone] molds man’s life, his habits, traditions, feelings, thoughts, and modes of behavior. . . . No scientific evidence to that effect is available.” The West has polluted the minds of Muslims by arguing that “the history of mankind is one of progression and growth” and that human progress can be measured in terms of material development. Unfortunately, Muslims have come to admire and praise the “heathen” civilizations of ancient Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria, Greece, and Rome. The present generation of Muslims (corrupted by Western materialism) thinks more highly of itself than it does of Muslims in the time of the Prophet and his companions (a community unsullied by avarice). Generally speaking “the moral and spiritual downfall of man in this present age is such as has never occurred in history before.” We are led to believe much of this is the fault of the West and those in the Muslim world who, searching for knowledge, beg humbly at the doors of the Western academy. What of the sciences? Qutb concedes modern science is highly valued and has a proper place in the Islamic curriculum, but it cannot be isolated from divine knowledge. Muslims make a serious mistake when, following the West, they teach that nature has created the universe and directs and governs it instead of God. The Europeans (read Christians) have given up their ecclesiastical God in whose name their church enslaved and oppressed them. They have invented a churchless God, with no commitments, and call it Nature with a capital N. For Muslims, borrowing uncritically from the West, all this has resulted in a school curriculum badly in need of revision. Qutb further suggests that all subjects, whether those of the humanities, social sciences, or physical and biological sciences, be fully integrated with a type of religious instruction that gives full weight to Islamic sensibilities and God’s pivotal role in the cosmos and human affairs. What sort of scholar can promote such views? In the 1970s, when these words were written, Muhammad Qutb was professor of Islamics and com-

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parative religion at King Abdulaziz University in Saudi Arabia. A follower of the Muslim Brethren in Egypt, he had been imprisoned for seven years by the Nasser regime. There is no indication that this prolific writer of Arabic books in defense of Islam and what constitutes a proper Islamic education had any truly significant exposure to serious Western scholarship, let alone the rigorous researches of orientalists and their successors. Given his formal education and the circumstances of his life, Qutb’s pugnacious attitude and the polemical edge to his prose is perhaps understandable. That is, however, not entirely the case with all the fellow essayists contributing to this volume. Some of the contributors are intimately familiar with the Western academy. Al-Attas, a specialist in Islamic mysticism with particular reference to Malaysia, received his doctorate from the University of London’s SOAS. Similarly, Hadi Sharifi, who promoted a distinctively Islamic philosophy of education as opposed to that of the West, earned his Ph.D. from Heidelberg. S. M. Hossein, an Arabist trained at Oxford in the classic orientalist tradition, pleads for a modern Islamic university that could bridge the worlds of religion and science, as did Muslim educational institutions in the Middle Ages. He goes on to claim Muslim institutions were the archetype of the great universities of Europe. How then can Hossein explain the decline in intellectual creativity that afflicted the Muslim Near East (particularly the Arab world) while Europe was able to become increasingly ascendant? Hossein invokes the long-received wisdom that an external force penetrating much of the Islamic Near East set that decline in motion. As he puts it: “the [Mongol] hordes of Ghenghiz Khan destroyed the most important universities and massacred the learned. This havoc dealt a severe blow to Islamic learning which, although it no doubt continued to survive, paralyzed the pristine Islamic spirit of liberal study and investigation.” Medieval Muslim historians likened the Mongol conquest of the thirteenth century and the reported sack of Baghdad to the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar, a catastrophic event that terminated the Davidic dynasty of the ancient Israelites. And yet, Arabic sources seem to indicate that the rhythm of daily life in Baghdad was disturbed only for a short period of time, if that. The Mongols, although Buddhists of sorts, tolerated all religions before their conversion to Islam, and in fact became great patrons of advanced learning after having embraced the true faith. Even if one were to believe the Mongols were barbarians who were responsible for a decline in Islamic learning, their march westward was halted in Syria, so that much of the Fertile Crescent, Egypt, and the entire Islamic West would have been unaffected by their presence. One really has to look elsewhere to explain the intellectual stagnation

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that beset the Islamic Near East and North Africa, however “stagnation” is to be understood. As regards the effects of that decline, there is the essay by M. A. Zaki Badawi, an Egyptian who received a Muslim education in the traditional religious school system and at al-Azhar. He then went abroad and obtained a B.A. and Ph.D. in psychology at the University of London. Returning to Egypt, he taught at al-Azhar before undertaking a scholarly odyssey that led him to various universities in Asia and Africa, and ultimately back to London to assume the directorship of the Islamic Culture Centre. If not a Muslim for all seasons, Badawi was certainly a Muslim for all continents. He is no less a staunch Muslim than the other essayists, but, as regards the state of Islamic education, his views appear more critically conceived than those of some of his collaborators. His remarks are largely but not exclusively devoted to the actual and potential impact of modern Western science on the Islamic world. Like the others, Badawi calls for an Islamic curriculum that can assimilate what is useful in Western learning within a Muslim framework, a task that will require the active collaboration of scholars with what were then and still remain different perspectives. From his vantage point, “[the] task of re-examining the basic assumptions of science cannot fall exclusively on the shoulders of [Muslim] scientists.” Scholars of Islam must acquaint themselves fully with the principles of science and the methods of research employed by the scientists. “Only then will they be able to look into science in terms of our faith. . . . ” Conversely, Islamic education must produce scientists who absorb religion along with their scientific instruction. Regretfully, Islamic religious education has been restricted, by and large, to a traditional curriculum without meaningful reference to modern disciplines and especially to modern science. On the other hand, Muslim scientists taught in secular or Western-type schools are deprived of any meaningful appreciation of their religion. What is taught them regarding Islam is superficial, inadequate, and completely out of place. A true Islamic education, says Badawi, should reflect “a total harmony between the various aspects of knowledge and between knowledge and [proper Muslim] behavior.” Unlike Muhammad Qutb and others, Badawi does not envision trying to find correspondences between facets of science and Muslim scripture and/ or prophetic traditions—as we shall see (part 2, chapter 11), a perceived need for this kind of correspondence beset a number of medieval Muslim philosophers and scientists as they sought legitimacy for their endeavors in a wider religious environment that was, at times, suspicious of their bold intellectual forays. To the contrary, Badawi finds “pointless and harmful” conscious

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attempts at discovering the praiseworthy aims of modern scientific research in ancient Muslim religious texts. Instead, he seemingly argues, albeit rather cagily, that the heuristic underpinnings of Western learning should be respected and given honored space within the Islamic curriculum. Western scientific learning so acquired can then be informed by an overarching moral vision derived from traditional Muslim sources. He writes of the necessity to “guard against the misuse of religion to hamper the innovative spirit of man or to allow [the advocates of religion] to brandish it as a weapon to stifle any new idea or to cripple scientific enquiry.” A particular paragraph on page 114 of the Aims and Objectives volume, noted above, sums up Badawi’s views succinctly and elegantly: “It has been observed that despite the long connection between the Muslim world and the West in the area of scientific studies, the Muslims have so far produced experts but not scientists, technicians but not inventors. This strange and disheartening phenomenon can be explained by the fact that the contradiction between the basis of Western science and the principles of [contemporary Islamic] culture raises a serious conflict which draws [Muslim] scientists away from [the] full assimilation [of] and participation [in modern science, as conceived and practiced in the West].” If I read Badawi correctly, he is calling for a kind of open-minded enquiry that will enable Muslims to break with conventional wisdom and push into new realms of thought, as do the scholars and scientists of the West. But once having discovered these new truths and having become real scientists and not mere practitioners always making use of someone else’s discoveries, or inventors and not mere technicians who employ the inventions of others, Muslims will be obliged to put this new knowledge in the service of Islamic beliefs and practices. As he puts it a couple of pages earlier: “Our religion is . . . not against science, but is against the misuse of science and the misapplication of technology.” Badawi envisions a new Islamic society “not dissimilar to the Golden Age of Islamic civilization [an idealized moment of history], when all disciplines were thoroughly and fruitfully pursued and where discussion[s] on all aspects of knowledge were freely conducted.” That was a time, so he claims, when scholars were able to develop their ideas and argue their differences motivated by their love of knowledge. There is, however, a caveat to Badawi’s promotion of Western science. He notes that in the so-called Golden Age love of knowledge was accompanied by a deep sense of piety. Whatever its virtues, the scientific method of the West is flawed by its rejection of metaphysics and its assumption that religious values are meaningless. In short, Western thinking looks upon religion as irrational and treats it with benign contempt. Without a sense of reverence

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for religion, science cannot be properly assimilated by the Muslim faithful. We have already noted how for the Islamists religion must inform not only science and technology but also the humanities and social sciences. Needless to say, any anxieties traditional Muslims may have about Western science and scholarship pale in comparison to their reaction to orientalists and their efforts to describe Islamic civilization and culture. But there is hope of stemming that defamation of Islam. For Hossein, the battle against the encroachment of Western scholarship on Islam and Islamic scholarship is going well. Unlike Edward Said and his followers, Hossein seems to think it has already been won—“the orientalists and their like are no longer a threat to us.” He also notes in his essay that in circles where Muslims have received a proper Islamic education, “you need only describe a new opinion as emanating from an orientalist source to have it condemned. . . . Their [the orientalists’] open attack on us can be perceived, examined and countered.” There may be a certain sense of wish-fulfillment in these last remarks. Hossein’s optimistic views of blunting the negative effects of Western scholarship on Islam are not shared by all traditional Muslims, not when he wrote in 1979 and certainly not now. Muslims without training in Western scholarship and deeply rooted in their native societies and cultures have always been wary of Christians and Jews who attempt to explain the origins and development of the true faith by substituting false and demeaning versions of the Islamic past for time-tested Islamic narratives. In that respect, contemporary unbelievers follow in the path of their medieval predecessors who rejected the legitimacy of the Prophet’s mission against the clear and abundant evidence of their own scripture and sacred writings. Is there any hope that the sheikhs and professors at traditional Islamic institutions will find something to admire in Oriental studies and its more recent permutations? One supposes that it all depends on their willingness to seriously engage broader issues of scholarship emanating from Western universities. In that regard, readers will find particularly interesting the essay of Muhammad Ansari, the last of the contributors on Islamic education to the Aims and Objectives volume. Ansari, a professor of Arabic, Persian, and more generally Islamic studies in West Bengal, received his M.A. at Harvard in 1972, a decade after having obtained his Ph.D. from Aligarh Muslim University in India. Of all the essayists, he is the best informed about orientalists and their writings; his own publications on Islamic philosophy fit within the classic mold of Western scholarship on Islam. Not surprisingly, Ansari has a more nuanced view of the challenge facing traditional Muslims and, beyond that, some seemingly radical suggestions. Generally speaking, he finds that

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traditional Muslims understand only superficially the mind of their Westerneducated ruling classes (and by extension the West itself). There is thus a gap of perception between those Muslims seeking to bring about an Islamic revolution and the Western-oriented ruling classes that serve to block that revolution. Muslims who encounter Western writings on Islam are often offended by “a ruthless application of historical method and dismiss it by attributing it to the religious bias of the author.” Ansari accepts that most of the earlier orientalist works on Islam were produced under a strong religious bias, but many of the recent works are largely inspired by a new and sophisticated Western approach to history, stressing that “nothing is absolute in history, everything is relative and subject to change and transformation.” That outlook toward human experience is exactly what troubles the other contributors and, more generally, traditional Muslims for whom radical swings in thought carry the dangers of introducing heresy into the traditional world of Islam, or, worse yet, the complete abandonment of belief. On the other hand, as Ansari observes, such uncertainty does not seem to bother the Christians (and presumably Jews) of the West who apply a historicist outlook to their own sacred writings and traditions, as well as to those of other religions, be they primitive, classical, or modern (including Islam). One can infer from this remark that present-day orientalists have not trained their critical eye on traditional Islamic narratives for malicious reasons but are simply examining the Islamic world within a larger discourse of their own making. Thus Jewish and Christian writers treat the word of God in the Qur’an as they treat the word of God in the Bible. In studying the content of Muslim scripture and its historical background, orientalists have tried to ascertain that almost all the important Qur’anic ideas are derived from Christian and Jewish sources and the rest from the pre-Islamic society of pagan Arabia (just as orientalists look to ancient Mesopotamia for biblical origins). Ansari notes that such views (and the methods upon which they are based) are widely accepted in the world at large and exercise considerable influence on Western-educated Muslims, even though most traditional Muslims look down on orientalist literature with contempt and refuse to take note of it. Ansari finds this dismissive approach to Western scholarship counterproductive; rather than condemn Western writings on Islam out of hand and ignoring them altogether, he enjoins the Muslim faithful to subject orientalist literature to a thorough criticism and thus begin the process of establishing a new Muslim scholarship on the Qur’an, one that takes into consideration all the relevant modern research on the development of the Arabic language and script and replaces the old Islamic literature on the

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immutability of the Qur’an and its divine authorship with a new Islamic view of God-given scripture. To do that, Muslims must take into account the historical method of the West and the critical orientalist literature on the Qur’an and the Bible (in the latter case, presumably, a reference that includes aspects of the documentary hypotheses). Ansari does not suggest this course of action because he is interested in knowledge for its own sake. All his thoughts are linked to establishing a modern Islamic view of the history of religion without abandoning the message first articulated in the Qur’an, where God is shown to be guiding the destinies of peoples known to the Arabs. According to Ansari, the success of Islamic revival in the current age will be determined to a considerable extent by the Qur’anic perspective on God’s agency, which includes peoples not directly mentioned in holy scripture. In sum: the Islamic view of history in general, and of the history of religion in particular, is to be based, as before, on understanding the divine scheme for the guidance of all humankind. That knowledge will then be used to develop a modern system of ethics of a distinctively Islamic nature, as it will be based on the Qur’an and other traditional sources properly understood. The result of factoring Western scholarship into a reading of traditional Islamic sources will be a fresh Islamic perspective, a comprehensive of statement delineating Muslim values for the modern age. As Ansari puts it, “We need to know what is absolute and what is relative in the Islamic values.” Over the three decades that have transpired since the conference on Islamic education, the complaints against Western civilization and the deleterious effects it is said to have had on Muslim thought and behavior have become cruder and more boisterous. This is particularly true of scholars educated in the Abode of Islam, the juridical entity in which Muslims and their culture predominate. On the other hand, the more reflective comments like that of Ansari have become even more reflective and framed within highly sophisticated language, especially among Muslim academics who live in the West or who have spent many years studying in the universities of Europe and North America. I have no idea of how Ansari’s views on engaging Western scholarship were received by conservative Muslims at the time of the aforementioned conference. Nor do I know how and if they are being considered today by the sheikhs and imams who vouchsafe traditional practices and zealously protect what they conceive to be authentic Islamic values. I imagine their reaction to Ansari would be at best extremely guarded. In contrast, Muslim reformers living in the West and intimately familiar with Western thought would have found and would still find much to admire in

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what Ansari wrote some thirty years ago. As he did, they seek the means by which they and their fellow Muslims, particularly those in the West, can live in harmony with their faith amid the challenges of modern life. A reform-minded and highly educated Muslim who seemingly marches in step with Ansari is Mohamed Talbi (b. 1921), a Tunisian whose intellectual outlook was shaped by years studying Islamic history in Paris after World War II. Talbi is best known and admired by Western colleagues as a preeminent historian of Islamic North Africa who turned to the challenges facing Muslims in the modern world when he was well into his seventies. Of all those Muslims who champion the call for Islamic revival, Talbi best combines a thorough knowledge of Islamic history with a profound grasp of Western scholarship, especially the influential French tradition of Oriental studies. After receiving a Muslim education in his native Tunisia, he studied with the leading French scholars abroad, foremost among them the historian Claude Cahen, whose outlook was thoroughly secular. Politically, Cahen gravitated to the left, having been at one time a sympathizer of the Communist Party. It was Cahen, the acknowledged maître of medieval Islamic history and a towering figure in the French academic establishment, who had the most profound effect on Talbi’s maturation as an Islamicist cut from the Western mold. It was largely through Cahen that Talbi absorbed the outlook of the Annales School, which promoted historical investigations that focused less on high culture and canonical texts, the staples of traditional Muslim scholarship, and more on documenting the kinds of problems facing Muslims as they went about their daily lives. Talbi’s foreign education was not confined to history; nor was his interest limited to the history of the Near East. While in Paris, he became acquainted with the broad intellectual trends then dominating the European scene, a world of ideas that he saw not as threatening his Muslim identity but rather informing his traditional outlook. Speaking of Talbi in glowing terms, Cahen once remarked (to me, at least) that his pupil had become a complete Francophile, that is to say, thoroughly Europeanized, a comment that perhaps overlooked the extent to which Talbi, who eventually returned to his native North Africa, did, in fact, live in two worlds: a world of Western scholarship and ideas beginning with his training as an orientalist, and a world of Muslim religious sensibilities and behavior absorbed from earliest childhood. Talbi did not regard being a citizen of two disparate civilizations a hardship. Nor did that dual citizenship present him and others like him with an intractable conflict of allegiance. Cahen’s Francophile disciple did not embrace the religion of French laïcité,

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that peculiar brand of intense secularism, for himself or his fellow Muslims. As a true believer, he continued to regard the Qur’an as God’s revealed word and hence the one truly indispensible guide to Muslim belief and behavior. But as a scholar who fully adopted a Western historicist outlook, he looked to God’s message as being rooted in the conditions of a particular place and time. Taken seriously, this position presents believing Muslims with a problem of no small significance, as for them true revelation ended with the Prophet Muhammad. As venues and times change, the Qur’an must be interrogated to reveal a quintessential truth that transcends the specific circumstances of seventh-century West Arabia. Medieval Muslim authorities were thus compelled to exercise interpretive license in reading and interpreting scripture and, more generally, in legitimizing contemporaneous Muslim practices. Referring to this interpretive enterprise, Talbi cites in particular the use of analogical reasoning (qiyas), although he is well aware that many Muslim legal scholars reject that heuristic tool. Islamic orthodoxy had become more rigid, and the jurists ultimately opted for dogmatic closure of more innovative methods of legal interpretation. Even if qiyas were still widely practiced, Talbi does not consider it sufficiently effective in confronting an ever evolving history. For him, as for all believing Muslims, there is the need for an unassailable sacred anchor to give authority to the kind of dramatic innovation necessary for the modern age. A seeming leap of faith is called for in fleshing out the message implanted in God’s final revelation, a way of getting beyond the written words of the text to determine broad authorial intention. Talbi’s contemporary, Oxford-educated Fazlur Rahman, described this message as the “ethico-legal content of the Qur’an,” meaning, a broad guide for humankind that goes beyond the literal meaning of the edited text and the meanings derived from it by traditional Qur’an commentators and orthodox legal scholars of the Middle Ages. Lest one imagine that Talbi and other Muslims exposed to Western intellectual trends have to answer to literary critics who deride the very possibility of discovering authorial intention, or indeed question if authors themselves can truly know their own mind, one can point out that for believing Muslims the author of sacred scripture is no less than God. Unlike human writings that give rise to unstable texts with multiple meanings, each of which can be privileged by individual readers, the Almighty’s intentions are implicitly if not explicitly stated in the Qur’an, a work of perfection that He Himself labeled clear (mubin). Despite this proclaimed clarity, the meaning of specific words and passages and the relationship of specific verses to given moments and particular events in history have proved elusive to generations of com-

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mentators, traditional Muslims and learned orientalists alike. Talbi admits that in seeking to uncover broad principles of Islam’s holy book he speaks not as a classically trained Muslim jurist but as a historian (rooted in the orientalist enterprise) and driven as it were by the religious impulses and societal needs of contemporary Muslims. However familiar the field he has chosen, there are those who can argue that he appears to be standing on a slippery and not altogether defensible slope. For how can he or, for that matter, any Muslim historian extrapolate the timeless message embedded in divinely revealed scripture based on historic moments that are often indeterminate and passages that are themselves elusive? For the sake of argument, let us assume that Talbi has found a sure path to the broader principles that Muslims can apply throughout the long march of time. What is the quintessential message that God wishes to convey and to which Muslims encountering the modern world must pay heed? For Talbi, that message is the need to enter into dialogue (hiwar) that fosters a religious and intellectual freedom (huriyyah) and advances pluralism. Note that Talbi speaks of pluralism and mutual respect (ihtiram mutabadal) in seemingly Western terms, and not the classical Muslim understanding of tolerance (denoted by Arabic ihtimal, etc.); meaning, the ability to carry or absorb, that is, to suffer the burden of someone’s noxious behavior or beliefs (see part 2, chapter 6). By using expressions that have entered modern Arabic, Talbi leads his discerning reader to concepts linked to Western thought and experience, to wit, freedom, meaning, the absence of coercive force that limits human choice (provided of course that such choice does not lead to transgressive behavior), and dialogue, implying an open exchange in which the views of the participants are treated by each other with mutual respect. But how does he derive these concepts from Muslim scripture? At first glance, Talbi’s conception of dialogue, mutual respect, pluralism, and freedom seem better fitted and more easily traced to the stated values of the European Enlightenment, with its emphasis on the universal rights of man, than on any passages of the Qur’an. Those who hold that Talbi’s outlook is indeed progressive and a moral compass for Muslims wishing to be integrated with the modern world will surely not begrudge him or others like him invoking the authority of Muslim scripture to give full weight to views that recall the expressed sentiments of the European Enlightenment. What better means to bridge the gap between East and West and address the present concerns of Muslims? However, Talbi’s admirers and his conservative critics will both have a hard time situating his views in the Qur’an. The Arabic words used by Talbi to indicate freedom, dia-

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logue, and mutual respect have a rather different semantic field when they actually appear in Muslim scripture and more generally in classical Arabic. Hurriyah, meaning “freedom,” is limited to the social status of those who are not chattel, that is, to free men or women as opposed to slaves. As regards dialogue (hiwar), the Qur’an mentions the verb hawara, from which the verbal noun hiwar is formed on but one occasion. The reference is in a parable in Surah 18:32– 44. The verses make reference to two gardens separated by a body of water (nahr). The owner of one of the gardens lorded it over the other, haughtily arguing with him (yuhawiruhu) that he had “more wealth and a larger number of offspring (a‘azzu nafarin).” The second man debated him (yuhawiruhu) and, contesting his point, invoked the God of Creation and then foretold how his haughty debate partner would eventually experience ruin for not believing in the One True God, a prediction which, needless to say, came to pass. Even a cursory reading of these passages reveals that hiwar is not intended to mean a dialogue leading to mutual acceptance and pluralism. This segment of the surah is presumably an allusion to the power of the polytheists vis-à-vis the Muslims at the early stages of the Prophet’s career, together with a prediction of a future reversal of fortunes. A second reference (this time to the verb tahawara with a verbal noun tahawur, the equivalent of hiwar) occurs in a segment of the Qur’an dealing with women’s rights (58:1). Here, God is described as listening to the pleadings of women, for He always hears the disputes (tahawur) between husbands and wives. One may assume that had the dispute between them been addressed in a dialogue of true mutual acceptance, there would have been no need to take the issues separating the two parties to God’s Prophet Muhammad for adjudication. Similarly, the expression ihtiram mutabadal, which translates in Talbi’s modern Arabic as “mutual respect,” that is, the “honoring of [intellectual] exchange,” does not appear in the Qur’an, nor do the words ihtiram or mutabadal individually. In classical Arabic, the verb tabadala and the passive participle mutabadal (derived from the root b-d-l) generally signify the exchange of something, usually a reciprocal exchange of goods or physical objects. In the Qur’an, one encounters tabaddala and baddala (also derived from b-d-l) with the added meaning “to change or substitute,” as in Surah 2:108/102: “Do you wish to question [the authority of] your Messenger (rasul) as Moses was questioned in an earlier time? Whoever substitutes (tabaddala) unbelief for belief has strayed from the [true] path.” Baddala (verbal noun tabdil) is found in many verses that castigate the Jews for having altered the text and hence the true meaning of their own scripture the Torah, a body of sacred

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writing that according to Muslims foretells the future coming of Muhammad. Needless to say, Jews who remained loyal to their faith found no such evidence in their sacred scripture. The wider context of all of these verses is, of course, a sharp polemic against the recalcitrant monotheists of old who deliberately refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Prophet’s mission, a view which hardly speaks to mutual respect for one another’s ideas, if by others one wishes to include non-Muslims, as I believe Talbi does. Muslims and non-Muslims alike who share Talbi’s liberal outlook can only admire his herculean effort to make scripture validate his progressive views—and in Tunisia no less. His task is not made easy by the specific meaning of various Qur’anic passages. For example, Talbi, who is a great champion of Muslim women’s rights, is hard pressed to balance verses that discriminate against women with the conditions of modern life that call for respecting them as partners in all forms of human endeavor. Nor can Talbi sidestep the fact that Muslim scripture (and subsequent Islamic tradition) sanctions slavery. To validate the Qur’an as the indispensible guide for Muslims embracing a truly pluralistic outlook—one which Talbi seems to identify with European Enlightenment values—he is forced into an intellectual dance of sorts. Taking a long-range historical perspective, a wise almighty God understood that humankind can only absorb change in incremental steps. The Qur’an enjoins all sorts of behavior that is not congruent with modern life, but a close reading opens the door for contemporary change. While at first glance the Qur’anic pronouncements may not conform to the needs of modern Muslim women, there is no question the Prophet, speaking with divine inspiration, created a more favorable climate for women in his native environment. That being the case, Talbi maintains one can extrapolate from specific statements of Muslim scripture the general principle of equality for women that God ultimately intended for all humankind. The same holds true for matters that are of concern to forward-looking Muslims anxious to meet other needs of modern times without compromising their faith. In effect, Talbi embraces Rahman’s notion of a timeless ethico-legal content embedded in the text of the Qur’an. There is, however, another way to grasp the meaning of God’s revealed word, a way that has broad appeal to Muslim revivalists not trained in the orientalist tradition, not given to historicist explanations originating with Western scholars, and not enticed by Enlightenment thought. For them, there is only the immutable text of the Qur’an, its inimitable language, and the long tradition of Orthodox Islamic scholarship that has been so severely questioned by the likes of Goldziher, Schacht, and their successors in the

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universities and academic institutes of the West. At present, the conservative Islamists who shield themselves and their followers from the encroachment of Western values seemingly command the field; the influence of Muslim intellectuals like Talbi tends to be circumscribed. This is especially true of Western-trained reformers who, like Talbi, fault the Muslim religious establishment, past and present, for not being sufficiently innovative in interpreting God’s word. Despite their considerable intellectual talents, these Muslims trained in places such as Oxford and Paris still have not found a wide and openly receptive audience in the Arab world. Even the likes of Mohammed Arkoun and Fazlur Rahman, who can be openly critical of the orientalist project, have failed to attract a broad following among today’s Muslims in the Near East. However much they are admired in Western circles and within their own club of reflective Muslim intellectuals, the Muslim reformers steeped in and respectful of Western culture have decidedly less impact on the Arabic-speaking Islamic heartland than Muslim militants and the conservative sheikhs and imams. Writing in European languages and expressing their ideas through philosophical concepts that are not easy to grasp, Arkoun and Rahman at best skirt the edges of what commands the immediate attention of the broad Muslim public today. One is tempted to say that traditional Muslims seek a return to a familiar, and for them well-defined, past, rather than an uncertain future. Straightforward appeals at recreating the pristine community of the Prophet’s time and practical advice offered Muslims perplexed by the dilemmas of everyday modern life have greater appeal for traditionalists than abstract philosophical meanderings written in elegant English or French. Lest we forget, the Islamic world also extends well beyond the original and highly traditional Arab Abode of Islam. Muslim reactions to the challenge of the West and more generally of modern life in an increasingly global age can be and are often quite different on the periphery of the Islamic world, regions where religious outlook and practices are mediated by vestiges of local and regional culture. Reformers in places like Turkey, Iran, Indonesia, and the subcontinent of India have perspectives that tend to reflect very distinct local conditions. The same is even truer for sub-Saharan Africa, where Islam has made enormous inroads against local forms of Christianity and indigenous pagan religions. The Muslim faithful are also found in growing numbers in lands of the unbelievers. The increasing migration of Muslims to the West has presented both the host countries and Muslim immigrants with a pressing problem. For Muslims in the West, it is the challenge of functioning within a permis-

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sive, if not alien, society, while at the same time not compromising Islamic values or abandoning venerable practices. More often than not, the immigrant communities turn to the ever-burgeoning Islamic media for information about the world and guidance on how to conduct a meaningful Muslim life in a problematic environment. There is now a voluminous Muslim literature circulating in print and on the internet. The views expressed by radio and television imams who interact directly with viewers and listeners, as well as those Muslim religious authorities who offer advice in the blogosphere, tend to address pragmatic rather than deep philosophical concerns. In this discourse, there is nary a mention of orientalist scholarship, past or present. This is hardly a surprise since the most influential of these media preachers have only a passing acquaintance with Western thought, if that. Perhaps the best known among them is the Egyptian born Yusuf al-Qaradawi (b. 1926). A devotee of the Muslim Brothers since his early teens and classically trained in Islamic theology at al-Azhar, Qaradawi has achieved worldwide fame among perplexed Muslims, including those situated in the European Diaspora. Qaradawi has managed to acquire this attention beyond the Islamic heartland, even though he has no formal education as regards the Western world and apparently speaks no European language. Much of his success can no doubt be attributed to the manner in which he stresses his humble origins, a feature of life shared with many Muslims worldwide; his well-known activism on behalf of Muslim causes; his staunch defense of Islam against its Western critics; and, above all, his ability to identify and address the everyday problems of perplexed Muslims simply and directly. His appeal is most immense among audiences not given to wax philosophical. In his preaching and some two hundred published tracts, Qaradawi offers a clear and unambiguous path for the average Muslim who needs instruction in order to face the wide variety of issues that are encountered daily. Above all, Qaradawi is seen by the faithful as representing an authentic and authoritative Muslim voice. In his world and that of his audience, there is no need to engage the orientalist project, or, for that matter, the philosophical concerns of the Western world. Addressing American Muslims, Sheikh Taha Jabir al-Alwani, also a graduate of al-Azhar, and currently presiding over an Islamic educational institution in the United States, calls for Muslims to absorb the best of American society. As does Qaradawi, the sheikh embraces an Islamic legal theory, which he and Qaradawi formulated, to address the specific concerns of the wide-spread Muslim minorities in the West. That theory, known in Arabic

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as fiqh al-aqaliyat, has in turn informed the decisions of many sheikhs and imams of the Muslim Diaspora who, in similar fashion, are sensitive to the problems of traditional Muslims as they go about their daily lives faced by the challenges of a changing world. There is also a literature addressed to far more worldly readers, nonMuslim as well as Muslim. These works are penned by Muslim scholars who are not classically trained imams. Nor do they seem to possess knowledge of the full range of Western scholarship on Islam. But they are well acquainted with Western philosophy and/or law. Their technical writings are graced, as it were, with great erudition that engages a number of academic disciplines within the Western academy, enabling them to command wide attention. I refer to the likes of Khaled Abou el-Fadl and Abdallahi an-Naim, both distinguished professors of law at leading American institutions of higher learning, and Shabbir Akhtar, a former Muslim community activist in the United Kingdom who now teaches philosophy at Old Dominion University in the United States. The reaction of American Muslims to what is written of them and said of their faith is particularly interesting, for until recent years the majority of them have been able to transition into the local culture without excessive difficulty. That is perhaps not surprising, as America, for the most part, has accepted successive waves of immigrants from all the corners of the globe. What is more important is that each of these immigrant groups has managed sooner or later to become part of the American mainstream and share many values with the larger populace in whose midst they dwell. That said, following 9/11, a number of thoughtful American Muslims and concerned non-Muslims met to organize a strategy for combating an emerging hostility toward people of the Muslim faith. Their declared aim: to lay plans for creating a more favorable climate in which Muslims recently arrived in the United States could adjust to the realities of modern American life. At one of the sessions, a Muslim participant suggested that his brethren look to Jewish experience as a model for integration, and then called for Muslims to establish a theological seminary of their own with a curriculum geared to the specific needs of modern Muslims wishing to assimilate to American ways but who yearn, at the same time, to fully identify with their Islamic heritage. Imams fully grounded in the Western world and trained at this proposed seminary world would then replace conservative Muslim clerics currently imported from the Abode of Islam. This participant noted that some of the imams brought from abroad to administer the needs of Muslim congregants

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lacked proper English let alone a deep familiarity with American culture. Worse yet, some held radical ideas that were at variance with long-accepted American notions of religious pluralism. Most startling was the participant’s suggestion that Muslims strive to produce a distinctively American Islam along the lines of Conservative and Reform Judaism, movements that had broken away from traditional Jewish Orthodoxy in the nineteenth century. In doing so, both the Conservative and Reform movements drew inspiration from contemporaneous European thought, in particular from a broadly defined orientalist project. Many rabbis teaching at Conservative and Reform seminaries were and continue to be active members of learned orientalist societies; their teaching reflects the latest advances in studies of Near Eastern languages and cultures. Whether our Muslim participant was fully aware of this and of the long-range implications of his proposal or whether he seriously considered if it would be practicable given the heightened sensitivities of Muslims these days is anything but clear. In any case, his suggestion, however well received by some attending the session, was treated with considerable skepticism as a project that could have traction within the larger Muslim community. To my knowledge, no such daring scheme has taken root among the Muslims of Europe, although the need for imams and spokesmen for Islam who can effectively engage not only their Muslim brethren but the non-Muslim world has been a noted priority for some time. To that end, there have been efforts to provide European-born and/or raised Muslims with a proper theological education, mostly in the Islamic heartland. Similarly, various schools and institutes have been established in the Diaspora to further traditional Islamic education at various levels and for Muslims of all backgrounds and ages. An interlocutor who bridges the world of traditional Islam and that of Europe is the controversial Tariq Ramadan (b. 1962), grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna, who was raised and educated in Europe where he studied and taught philosophy and Islamic civilization. More recently, Ramadan was invited to join the faculty at Notre Dame, one of the leading Catholic universities in the United States—an appointment that the Bush administration vetoed by refusing to grant him a visa. Ramadan’s more technical writings are no doubt well beyond the average Muslim immigrant. Nevertheless, he has managed somehow to become a celebrity of sorts among Muslims and particularly non-Muslims. Arguably, he is the best-known Muslim public intellectual addressing the secular environment in which Muslim immigrants in the West see themselves as a distinct and embattled minority. He has not been shy in making himself available to

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Western media or in writing for a broad reading public. In that respect, he has been able to capture ground among Muslims and represent their concerns where Western-trained Islamicist reformers of an older generation have not. Regardless of training or outlook, there is something that binds together all Muslim reformers, be they advocates of accommodation with the West or jihadists embracing militant action. Whether situated in the West or in the heart of the Islamic world, all who trumpet the cause of Islamic revival call for the creation of a distinctly Islamic perspective rooted ultimately in Muslim experience and based on time-honored Islamic traditions. As the interpretation of sacred texts is considered the essential key to understanding God’s greater design, some contemporary Muslims have pondered if there is anything to learn from the philologically grounded orientalists and their successors. Unlike Muslims intimately familiar with Western scholarship on Islam, those furthest removed from direct contact with Western universities regard the legacy of orientalists as, at best, irrelevant. As we have noted, many traditional Muslims with only the vaguest notion of how Western scholars engage the Islamic world consider their efforts an affront to Muslim beliefs and an insult to Muslim sensibilities. Most Muslim revivalists continue to maintain that orientalist perspectives should not play a significant role, if any, in how God-fearing Muslims adjust to the vicissitudes of the current age or anticipate times to come. There is no call among the dour sheikhs and imams—particularly those situated in the Islamic heartland—for an Islamic equivalent of Wissenschaft des Judenthums, the nineteenth-century movement that allowed Jews to remain steadfastly Jewish while acculturating to Western society and assimilating its intellectual outlook. At that time, Jews employing the methods of modern European historiography came to see themselves and their culture not as ossified relics of a scholastic past but as an evolving phenomenon rooted in different places and times and conditioned by ever-changing challenges and responses. Meeting the challenge of the modern age, forwardlooking Jews of the nineteenth century still looked to the past for instruction. But they did so in a manner inspired by an ever-probing European historiography and not by foundational narratives and religious practices deemed beyond critical enquiry. The exponents of the “Science of Judaism” thus called for a reexamination of older values and observances based on visualizing the Jewish world through foreign lenses. Moreover, they created religious institutions to put their views into practice. For many traditional rabbis without exposure to modern education, that reexamination of Jewish experience could and did compromise a scholastic outlook that evolved over

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some two thousand years. As that reexamination also led to separate religious institutions that forsook the authority of traditional Orthodox rabbis, the new ideas emanating from the practitioners of Jewish Science and the lax religious behavior to which they led were regarded by the more conservative guardians of the faith as an inherent danger to the Jewish people and their continued survival. In similar fashion, most vociferous Muslim traditionalists have maintained that the challenges of modern life must be solved by invoking venerable Islamic traditions, but without the mediating influence of a Western historical outlook, because the Western way of looking at the past promotes a sense of relativism and shifting values. Seen from the perspective of the conservative sheikhs, basic Muslim values are God-given and are therefore absolute and eternal. Unlike some religious practices created by historical contingencies elucidated in Islamic tradition, essential Muslim values cannot be considered as framed in place and time. Therein lies the challenge presented by orientalists and their historicist methods to Muslim self-understanding and behavior. Be that as it may, it is my impression—I stress it is only an impression— that the battle with Western scholarship on Islam has become somewhat muted even among some of the conservative religious authorities. Muslims, particularly in the Islamic heartland, have seemingly come to peace with what they consider the excesses of orientalist scholarship. Perhaps I should say they are not quite as exercised by nonbelievers pronouncing judgments about Islamic civilization. This is not because of a growing acceptance of the orientalist enterprise or an increased sense of curiosity about Western scholars and their labors. Rather, it is the manner in which the West has come to understand Islamic civilization, or as these Muslims would have it, misunderstand Islamic civilization, that seems to have become increasingly irrelevant to Muslim thinkers and religious leaders. Over time, they have become more confident of their ability to insulate the believers from the depraved views of the Western academy and its intellectual camp followers. Rather than rail at orientalists, conservative Muslim reformers have become more and more preoccupied with practical concerns that directly affect the daily lives of the faithful. Even Tariq Ramadan, who has the requisite learning to wander far and wide over a broad intellectual landscape, shows little if any interest in the challenge of orientalist scholarship. In his technical and popular writings, he calls for the creation of an independent Western Islam, anchored in the cul-

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tural reality of the West but thoroughly grounded in Islamic values obtained through thoughtful and innovative readings of traditional sources. He anticipates that reading these sources against the grain of realities in the Diaspora will provide guidance for Muslims being faithful to their true religious principles as they participate fully—and hence are fully accepted—in the civic life of secular Western societies. Although rooted in the European academy, Ramadan does not draw upon the vast body of Western scholarship that examines traditional Islamic texts and the principles and values contained in those texts as discrete creations of place and time. Nor does he seek out Muslim scholars of Islam who generally embrace the conceptual underpinnings of the orientalist enterprise, derived as they are from a sense of skepticism promulgated during the European Enlightenment. When writing of Islam and the modern world, Ramadan even eschews a serious engagement with trends in Western philosophy, although for many years he taught philosophy at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. There is, however, much in his writings that calls attention, if indirectly, to the time he spent as an independent student at al-Azhar, the center of traditional Islamic studies in the Arab world. Unlike orientalists and their successors, Ramadan regards the sacred texts of Islam as vessels containing God-given truths that transcend specific moments and locations. He is willing to concede, however, the critical importance of studying lessons drawn from the historical events of the seventh century that filled the Prophet’s life and helped shape his outlook. Or, as he put it in the preface to The Messenger (2007), his biography of the Prophet: “Studying [Muhammad’s] actions in this particular historical and geographical setting should enable us to throw light on a number of principles [currently applicable] about the relation of faith to human beings, brotherhood, love, adversity, community life, justice, laws, and war.” How are contemporary Muslims to understand these principles at a time and place far removed from the Hijazi homeland of God’s Messenger? Not through the insights of the orientalists. The sources for Ramadan’s biography of the Prophet contain not a single reference to any work of Western scholarship, nor, oddly enough, is Ramadan heavily invested in the vast sea of traditional Muslim historiography familiar to students at al-Azhar. Rather, his historical narrative of the Prophet’s life is derived almost entirely from an uncritical reading of the redacted Sirah of Ibn Ishaq, a work which is highly tendentious, and occasional references to even more tendentious statements culled from the canonical collections of hadith texts (see part 1, chapters 2 and 3). The

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problematic sources invoked by Ramadan, then, serve as a platform to promote his own didactic views about the Prophet’s behavior, comments that are seamlessly woven into a running narrative of an idealized past. In Ramadan’s biography, a peerless and morally unblemished Muhammad emerges not only larger than life—that could have been assumed in any tract that attempts to bridge traditional Islam and the modern world—but so much larger indeed than in any of the medieval Muslim accounts of the Prophet’s career. Some of the Prophet’s political maneuvers, particularly as regards the Jewish tribes of Medina and Khaybar, forced an early generation of Muslim chroniclers to massage their description of events in order to absolve God’s Messenger of any responsibility for behavior that might be regarded as suspect (see part 2, chapter 6). Although these efforts by the medieval chroniclers seem transparent enough to searching orientalist eyes (and indeed must have been for discerning Muslim readers of medieval times), Ramadan writes as if he were blithely unaware of the hagiographical nature of the Sirah and the conscious efforts of medieval Muslim writers to prevent any sullying of Muhammad’s reputation. He treats the traditional accounts as if they were trustworthy down to the last detail and so describes the actions of the Jewish tribes as entirely conceived in bad faith and, beyond that, as treasonous, even though at times early Muslim scholars went to great lengths to conceal their doubts about specific incidents. The same outlook is applied to the relationship with non-Muslims beyond Arabia. Citing a clearly spurious Islamic tradition, Ramadan tells us that the Muslims initiated their conquest of the Near East and North Africa because one of the Prophet’s emissaries seeking the peaceful conversion of Christians had been murdered by a representative of the Byzantine Emperor, and, in a similar vein, because the Persian Khusraw tore up the Qur’an sent to him by Muhammad and commanded his forces to bring the Prophet before him (as a humiliated prisoner). For Ramadan, the Muslims regarded these actions as a declaration of war. What is the message: if only the titular heads of the Christian and Zoroastrian empires would have had the wisdom to accept an offer presented in peace they could have spared their loyalists considerable bloodshed? Ramadan is quick to argue that, in most cases, the message of Islam was spread peacefully. Indeed, from the outset the Prophet never wanted to exercise, let alone seize, political power; his purpose was to employ verbal persuasion in getting people to accept Islam. He only decided to take up arms because his opponents were given to murder, treachery, and injustice. This would seemingly apply not only to the Byzantines and Persians but also to his opponents in Mecca and Medina: the oligarchs of Quraysh; the

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Jews; and the so-called hypocrites, pagan converts to Islam who nevertheless attempted to undermine the Prophet’s authority (see part 2, chapters 5 and 6). Because Islam’s enemies beyond Arabia remained intractable, later Muslim jurists were forced to draw a distinction between the Abode of Islam, the world ruled by Muslims, and the Abode of War (al-harb) or Unbelief (kufr), the world that did not embrace Muslim rule and therefore had to be subdued at some unspecified future time. Ramadan’s reading of Muhammad’s relations with his enemies and the ummah’s subsequent dealings with the empires beyond Arabia may strike scholars trained in the orientalist tradition as completely ahistorical, but it produces a measure of needed clarity for believing Muslims conscious of negative attitudes toward them and their faith. For Westerners who prefer to emphasize the highly aggressive nature of Islam toward the “other,” Muslims can retort that their religion has always been one of accommodation and peace (a message that also resonates strongly among non-Muslims seeking to reduce tensions between the Islamic world and the West). The original concept of the Abode of War (or Unbelief) can thus be redefined or replaced to signify a place of accommodation between Muslims dwelling in non-Muslim lands and the local government, provided that the Western world and Muslims alike recognize the peaceful intentions rooted in the Prophet’s overtures to the nonbelievers. Following the example of the Prophet, true Muslims, left to their devices, will forever be unsullied by untoward political ambitions or lust for economic gain at the expense of others. Like many contemporary Muslims, Muhammad led an extremely modest life; his ambition was confined to spreading the word of God. He was kind, compassionate, and also flexible in addressing the needs of the faithful. Readers are thus led to believe that the West and the likes of al-Qaeda tend to misunderstand the Prophet and the real nature of genuine Islam. No wonder the spiritual quality of Ramadan’s popular writings and the sermonic tone of his mellifluous prose are more easily digestible and hence more compelling for his audience of Diaspora Muslims and sympathetic non-Muslims than the ranting of extreme Muslim militants and the pleadings of reformers like Talbi, who, influenced by orientalist scholarship on Islam, grapple with historical evidence and the manner in which to use Islamic sources. Writing more than thirty years ago, S. M. Hossein might well have anticipated the outlook of Muslims like Ramadan when he declared that the orientalist challenge, such as it is, no longer troubles the Muslim faithful as it once did.

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Surprisingly, no Western scholar has attempted to produce a thoroughly annotated monograph on the traditional Muslim reaction to orientalist scholarship, particularly the literature that has appeared in the Near East and in Arabic (or, for that matter, Persian). As regards the current situation, the revolution in electronic information has created a veritable torrent of available commentary about living a Muslim life and defending Islam against the encroachment of the godless West and its uninformed and jaundiced views of the true faith. There is, then, an opportunity to probe deeply into recent Muslim thought as regards the orientalist pillars of the Western academy and their conceptions of Islamic civilization. Readers will note the ground covered by this book is almost entirely confined to the Arab world and the Muslim Diaspora in the West. However, some of the most interesting reactions of Muslims to Oriental studies and the challenges of modern culture are taking place beyond the original Abode of Islam and the immigrant communities among the unbelievers, places like southeast Asia; the secular Republic of Turkey; and, above all, in revolutionary Iran. These too are worthy of investigation, but by someone with more knowledge of these settings than I can muster.

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The First Encounter Muhammad and the Jews of Arabia

If Mecca was a hub of international trade in the Prophet’s lifetime, as most scholars believe, the inhabitants of the Hijazi town might very well have been subjected to foreign religious stimuli. Were that so, one supposes Muhammad, a native Meccan, could have become acquainted in some manner or other with Jewish and Christian beliefs and customs even before the onset of his prophetic mission, a historic event dated by modern authorities to the first decade or so of the seventh century CE. Similarly, if there is any truth at all to the highly tendentious Arabic traditions that as a lad or young man Muhammad accompanied caravans from Mecca to Syria-Palestine, there is the additional possibility that he could have been able to observe not only Christians, as reported, but also Jews in their native surroundings. Could Muhammad have been exposed to a normative rabbinic Judaism unmediated by any customs and traditions of Arab life in western Arabia? Possibilities of cultural interaction are presented here rather cautiously and in language that is deliberately circumspect, for the truth of the matter is we know precious little if indeed anything substantive of Muhammad’s involvement with Jews and Judaism before he left Mecca in 622 CE. What seems clear is that the first sustained encounter between Jews and Muslims occurred when the Prophet abandoned his place of birth and together with a number of his Meccan followers relocated at an oasis called Yathrib. Situated three days distance from Mecca, Yathrib was home to several Jewish tribes, the most prominent among them being the Qaynuqa‘, Nadir, and Qurayzah. We might begin by asking what is known of Yathrib, which was renamed Medina (seat of authority) when it became the administrative center of the Prophet’s community. Unlike Mecca, a shrine center 131

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with a water supply but no significant agriculture, Medina consisted of a series of date plantations that stretched like a ribbon over some twenty miles, with water and vegetation appearing, disappearing, and reappearing as one traveled the route of the settlement. The pre-Islamic history of Medina is vague to say the least. Early orientalists had no sources other than later Arab chroniclers and geographers to guide them and so found themselves at a disadvantage in tracing the early history of the oasis. But in the 1950s, D. S. Rice, the noted Islamic art historian and archeologist, wrote of a paving stone he uncovered in the Hauran region of Syria, an area that was in ancient times part of an extensive trade network. On the reverse side of the paving stone was cuneiform writing from the time of the last Babylonian Empire, which dated to one thousand years before the rise of Islam. When deciphered, the text seemed to suggest a trade route, which included among various locations a place called Yathrib. There is no compelling reason to doubt the inscription refers to Medina, as there is more than ample evidence in ancient sources of Babylonian incursions into the Arabian Peninsula at the time of King Nebuchadnezzar (605–562 BCE). Rice’s discovery revived interest in an old theory that Jews came to Arabia after being exiled from the Land of Israel by the Babylonian monarch (ca. 586 BCE). What the Jewish tribesmen of Yathrib/Medina might have known or practiced of rabbinic Judaism cannot be answered accurately, especially as we are unable to ascertain when the different Jewish units originally settled at the oasis. Nor can we establish what their contacts might have been with other Jewish communities in the Arabian Peninsula or with Jews embracing rabbinic Judaism throughout the Fertile Crescent. From descriptions of Medinese Jews in the Qur’an, we can assume they shared various historical narratives and ritual practices with their brethren in the lands of major Jewish settlement beyond Arabia. Some of these narratives and practices became a point of contention between the oldest and newest monotheist communities, hence the references to them in Muslim scripture and the extensive commentaries on the Qur’an that followed in subsequent generations (see part 2, chapter 6). In time, the Jews of Medina were joined by migrating pagan tribesmen from the south of Arabia. A decline of living space in the south had occasioned the steady migration of tribes northward, and so the Aws and Khazraj, subgroups of the Banu Qaylah, moved into the unoccupied lands of the oasis, originally as the clients of the Jews. But in time—probably mid- sixth century CE—the clients became powerful, more powerful indeed than their original patrons. Roles were now reversed as the major Jewish tribes became in effect

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the clients of their Arab neighbors. This long-held view has recently become a point of contention, the argument being that the major Jewish tribes were more powerful than modern historians have thought and were, in effect, the allies rather than the mere clients of the Aws and Khazraj. The evidence, such as it is, seems to support the traditional view. In any case, as regards the Jews and the Aws and Khazraj, I cannot see that any distinction between client and ally is of major significance in explaining the events that were to take place. Lesser Jewish and pagan Arab tribal units were also situated at Yathrib, but they do not play a major role in the unfolding story of Muhammad and the Jews, at least not the story told by Muslim chroniclers. The Aws and Khazraj, who frequently feuded (perhaps because the once ample oasis was now overcrowded), engaged one another in open combat, drawing into the conflict the Jews linked to their clans. With that, pagan Arabs and those Jews who were clients (or, if you prefer, allies) of one or the other Arab tribe became involved in an ongoing conflict that threatened the stability of the oasis. A halt in fighting, occasioned by inconclusive combat, did not end with a formal declaration of peace and a return to normalcy. Neither party was apparently willing to concede anything of substance. The situation of no war—but also no formal peace—seemingly drove the tribesmen into their protective forts and kept them there, causing neglect of the agricultural economy. In such circumstances, there would have been the likely need of an outside arbitrator, thus explaining why individuals of the Aws and Khazraj approached Muhammad. Unable to resolve the dispute themselves, they sought the man with claims to prophecy, but, more importantly, a man of well-known moral virtue. At least, that is how some Western scholars have explained Muhammad’s invitation to move to Medina with a considerable number of his followers. There is, however, no solid evidence on which to base this explanation. Muhammad did in fact become a sort of arbitrator it would seem, shortly after arriving in Medina, but in describing the negotiations leading up to his emigration (in Arabic the Hijrah), the major Muslim sources do not mention arbitration, at least not explicitly. As a rule, medieval writers seeking to explain history favored religion over politics and the dramatic over the mundane. To be more precise, they tended to give political phenomena a religious gloss. In this case, religious sensibilities were depicted as the ultimate magnet that attracted the Medinese to Muhammad and his message. The Prophet’s well-planned and orderly emigration was in turn described as a sudden flight to escape ten well-chosen assassins, whose plan to murder him was endorsed by the Devil and ultimately thwarted by the angel Gabriel. When examined

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carefully, our sources paint a somewhat more complex picture of the events surrounding the Hijrah. Arab chroniclers would have us believe that some Medinese, members of the Khazraj, met with the Prophet during the yearly pilgrimage to Mecca and embraced him and his message. Although pagans, they knew something of monotheism as they were linked to Jewish tribesmen in what is described as an uneasy situation. Faced with occasional humiliation, their erstwhile Jewish allies had boasted, so the later Arabic sources maintain, that a prophet was soon to appear and that they (the Jews) would rally to this prophet and, with his assistance, would turn against the pagans who had displaced them from prominence and compromised their honor. Having heard Muhammad speak, it was clear to these pagans that he was indeed the prophet of whom the Jews had spoken and that it would be wise to preempt the Jewish plan by accepting Muhammad and his message before the Jews rallied to him and enlisted him on their side. There is in this description of events a melding of political and religious motives. Satisfied that Muhammad was indeed the prophet (whom Jews recognized because he was mentioned in Jewish scripture), the pagan visitors, anxious to continue their domination of the Jews, became Muslims. They pledged to seek possible converts from among their own and hoped that acceptance of Muhammad and Islam could lead to unity among their warring clans (perhaps a hint of arbitration here?) and the defeat of any potential action taken by the Jews, emboldened as the latter were by expectations of a new prophet and change of fortunes. Muhammad’s fame subsequently spread throughout the habitations of the Khazraj and presumably the Aws. This tradition has a familiar ring; it conjures up various polemical texts encountered in the narrative of Muhammad’s life. As in the case of Muhammad’s birth (an event marked by cosmic signs foreshadowing his prophetic calling); his trips to Syria (where he was recognized by a Christian monk as the future Prophet who then warned that the Jews planned him harm); and the events surrounding his first revelation (still more cosmic signs of Muhammad’s prophetic vocation, again reaffirmed by someone with deep knowledge of Judaism and Christianity); we are informed the older monotheists knew of the Prophet’s imminent arrival, for they had read predictions of his coming in their sacred writings and absorbed such wisdom in oral traditions that were handed down from generation to generation. We are then left to ask why the Jews of the oasis rejected him and, beyond that, why subsequent generations of equally learned Jews and Christians also failed to embrace Islam. The description of Muhammad’s negotiations with the

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Medinese also anticipates, albeit with the help of a gloss inserted by a later redactor of the original text, the Prophet’s assault against Medina’s Jews, a brazen policy that raised concerns among later Arab chroniclers who had to explain what seemed to them in retrospect an unwarranted policy of aggression leading to the expulsion of the Qaynuqa’ and Nadir, and the still unexplained extermination of the Qurayzah—but more about the Jews and contemporaneous politics later. Despite the polemical thrust directed by later authors against the Jews of Medina, can we say the accounts of the negotiations preserve some echo of the Prophet’s past history? To be sure, there is no specific mention of arbitration in the narrative of Muhammad’s negotiations with the Medinese at Mecca, let alone the circumstances under which that arbitration would be conducted once the Prophet relocated at Medina. However, the visiting Medinese speak of uniting their warring factions through acceptance of Muhammad and Islam, and that acceptance, however conceived, assuredly took place following the Prophet’s arrival. Moreover, the Prophet, once settled in his new surroundings, clearly acted as the central figure to which disputes were brought for adjudication. Can we then assume that matters pertaining to arbitration were the core element of Muhammad’s discussions with the Medinese, but that the oblique comments about potential difficulties with the Jewish allies of the Aws and Khazraj are a later accretion reflecting Jewish-Muslim relations in times to follow? The move to Medina, however conceived, negotiated, and carried out, proved to be the major watershed in the Prophet’s career, so dramatic a turn that when Muslims established their annual calendar, they reckoned time from the Hijrah. At Mecca, Muhammad was the leader of a relatively small group of followers who defined their identity not only by their belief in him and his prophetic mission but also by powerfully felt ties to the families and clans that embraced and protected them. Religion was an expression of one’s belief; one’s public face was determined by all-important blood lines, the essential markers that accorded individuals and more inclusive groups their identity and status within a larger Arab tribal society. At Medina, Muhammad became the head of an increasingly powerful religious community, the ummah. The constituents of that community owed their primary allegiance to the Prophet and the community as a whole. That being the case, in many respects the ummah took on the characteristics of a familiar tribal polity, except that in theory ties of religion replaced those of blood. As did powerful tribes, the Prophet’s newly formed community had an army, conducted war and “foreign policy,” exacted tribute, levied taxes, and adjudicated disputes

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among tribesmen who fell within its political sphere. The critical actor in this unfolding drama was the Prophet himself. At Mecca, Muhammad was a religious leader with moral authority over relatively few persons, who, out of religious conviction, were inclined to recognize his prophetic vocation. After settling in Medina, Muhammad became as well a political leader over those who found it in their interest to accept Islamic authority, be it out of a newfound religious awareness, economic circumstance, military pressure, or all of the above. In time, Muhammad challenged his kinsmen, the oligarchs of Mecca, and the Islamic ummah became the dominant political force in all of Arabia. This course of events could hardly have been predicted by the Aws and Khazraj who paved the way for the Prophet’s arrival in Medina. As for Muhammad, there was so much to be done in order to solidify his situation and that of his fellow emigrants from Mecca. Let us assume for a moment that Muhammad was indeed invited to serve as an arbitrator. For self-reliant Arab tribesman who jealously guarded their autonomy, arbitration was a last resort. And once the dispute was settled, the arbitrator’s task was done and he would ordinarily return from whence he came. This, however, is not the sequence of events we encounter in our sources. Muhammad did not come alone nor did his hosts anticipate that he would leave. Several hundred Muslims are said to have taken up residence with him, settling initially amidst the lands of those who invited them, a situation that would later affect the Prophet’s policy toward the Jews whose settlements would be turned over to the Muslims following their expulsion. The Medinese who sought his intervention are reported as wishing him to stay once he achieved his objective in ending the internecine conflict that had plagued the oasis-dwelling pagans and the Jews. Above all, there is an assumption that the Ansar or “supporters,” as the Aws and Khazraj were to be called, would abandon paganism and convert to his faith; there is no indication the same would be formally expected of the Jews. With that, Muhammad is described as more than a mere arbitrator; he is seen as a prophet with powers that transcend even those of a tribal sheikh, for in theory the believers in his mission must accept not only his religious guidance but also his political authority. This would have to have been considered a radical departure from the political organization of the Arab tribes, so radical indeed that some Medinese accepted Muhammad and his authority grudgingly and then spoke openly against some of his policies, particularly Muhammad’s eventual decision to challenge Mecca and its powerful allies. That challenge to the Meccan leadership began in 623 with a number of raids against caravans that had

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to travel along routes in the general vicinity of Medina. According to our sources, the first of these raids was carried out on unsuspecting and lightly escorted caravans by a relatively small number of Muslim warriors (eight to twelve), all drawn from the ranks of the emigrants, who had allegedly been given secret instructions, to be opened only after they left Medina—a seeming indication that the Prophet was reluctant to involve the recent Medinese converts and the local Jews in what had to be seen as an extraordinarily risky venture. The Meccans were at the center of a grand alliance that could muster a fighting force so large that it served as deterrent against any group or groups that entertained thoughts of challenging their supremacy. In view of their later behavior, some of the Medinese leaders would have been extremely worried about antagonizing the greatest military power in western Arabia, especially since the most notable of the raids was carried out during the holy month of Rajab when the Arabs of the peninsula abstained from all fighting. At the least, this was an unacceptable breach of tribal etiquette. Later assaults involved larger numbers of raiders, and, in March 624, the Meccans heavily reinforced a major caravan headed for Syria. The Muslims in turn assembled a force that reportedly consisted of some three hundred fighting men, including a significant number of Medinese converts who, given Muhammad’s initial successes, were now willing to risk taking the battle to the Meccans for the ample spoils of victory. The circumstances surrounding the event, the so-called Battle of Badr, are difficult to sort out. It is not our intention to do so here. What can be said is that the Battle of Badr was by all Muslim accounts a stirring victory for the believers, thereby enhancing the Prophet’s position among his hardcore emigrant followers and the Medinese converts. But it also raised fears among certain leaders of the Aws and Khazraj about Meccan reprisals against their lands—fears that could not be dismissed were the Prophet to further solidify his position among them. Somehow, the Prophet had to undermine their honor, and with that limit and then eliminate their capacity to affect policy in Medina. As we shall attempt to prove, the circumstances that befell the Jews were part and parcel of Muhammad’s grand strategy to marginalize the political opposition to him among the leadership of the Ansar, and thus complete the process of solidifying his personal position and that of his Muslim followers. Our best source for how he and the Muslims functioned among the Medinese is a document that has become known as the “Constitution of Medina.” Many modern scholars specializing in the early Islamic period tend to accept the document as an authentic statement of the times. They base this on both

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the style and content of the Arabic text. There is, however, considerable disagreement as to whether the constitution in our possession is a unified document agreed upon at a particular moment by all the parties settled in Medina, including the Jewish tribes, or whether it is cobbled together from a number of sources reflecting different moments, albeit all moments in the early history of Muhammad and his companions. There is also the problem of assigning the document a more precise date. What moment of Muhammad’s mission in Medina is reflected here? Most modern Arabists believe the text reflects an early stage in the history of the ummah, as there are references to the Jews, whose major tribes were expelled between 625 and 627. Others maintain that as the Nadir, Qaynuqa‘, and Qurayzah, the major Jewish tribes, are not explicitly mentioned, the Jews of our document may be some minor tribal groups that were allowed to remain. Were that so, the document would most likely have been composed after the expulsions. Written in what can be described as clipped Arabic, the text is difficult to fathom and so there is disagreement among the learned Arabists as to the meaning of specific phrases. Nevertheless, a general consensus emerges among scholars who accept the historicity of the document; and with that the new arrangements by which the Medinese managed their disputes become abundantly clear. If we assume for the sake of argument that these arrangements do reflect an early stage of Muhammad’s activities at Medina, the agreement, which was binding on all the major parties mentioned, would have provided for the following situations: (1) Should there be problems between the parties, they would be brought to Muhammad for adjudication. In such fashion, the possibilities for renewed conflict would be seriously reduced. (2) No party to the agreement is permitted to enter into external alliances without the Prophet’s explicit permission, thus preventing uncontrollable shifts of influence that could upset the newly established balance of power. (3) Disputes within families and extended blood relations are to be settled in traditional fashion, that is, by the leading members of the families and clans, without having to come before Muhammad. Were all this an accurate reflection of conditions in Medina, the agreement would have made the Prophet the leader of a large community with powers theoretically greater than that of any tribal leader. And yet, the agreement also recognizes the force of tribal sensitivities insofar as internal disputes were to be resolved as before. But establishing control of Medina was far from simple. The ummah had to function in a world of tribal realities. The carefully crafted community was held together by the requisite needs of its different constituencies, but

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these needs were born of the necessities of the moment. There was no guarantee that once the chaotic world of the Medinese became more settled, the less committed among the Aws and Khazraj and the more independently minded Jews, who remained separate from the ummah, would not subvert or even reject Muhammad’s hard won authority. After all, about what manner of community are we speaking? The conglomeration of various groups that comprised the larger population of the oasis, particularly the most powerful of these units, the Aws and Khazraj, could at any given moment stress their loyalty to tribe over any allegiance to a religious leader unrelated to them by blood. That would have been particularly true if, in challenging the Meccans, Muhammad would have raised fears among his new associates that the Meccans would seek retaliation against all the inhabitants of Medina. However small scale, and carried out by emigrants, the early raids against the Meccan caravans beginning in 623 must have had a disquieting effect on certain leaders of Muhammad’s hosts, especially one Ibn Ubayy, who is depicted in our sources as being particularly concerned. How then did the Prophet solidify his control over the oasis that had become his new home and the center of his religious mission? solidifying control Any assessment of power based on the available sources reveals that Muhammad began his mission at Medina with clear if transitory assets. For one, he held the trump card of arbitrator, a position the Medinese were willing to grant him, given their dispirited circumstances of the moment. This position gave the Prophet considerable room to maneuver. He also had unquestioning supporters, the Meccan emigrants who had been with him in difficult times and who had resisted various types of pressures to abandon him. To the contrary, rather than leave the Prophet, they abandoned their larger families and their places of origin to join Muhammad in “exile” in Medina. As in the past, they were likely to follow him in trying circumstances. Indeed, they found the ummah in Medina to be a parallel community to that of their kinsmen in Mecca. While kin remained of great importance, for them religious ties had transcended ties to blood relatives—at least they were as important. But the emigrants who were not sufficiently powerful to prevent the collapse of the Prophet’s mission in Mecca were also not powerful enough to allow him to carry on without concern in Medina. Their support alone hardly guaranteed success. An additional prop would have to be found to support Muhammad’s political activities, thus allowing his moral and religious authority to grow,

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now that it had taken root, albeit in an alien environment. Who would be his initial allies? At first glance, one might think he should have won over the Jewish tribes who shared with the Prophet a monotheist vision and a sacred history based on the world of the Hebrew Bible, albeit in somewhat different narratives. If Muhammad thought the Jews would accept him fully, he was sorely mistaken. The Jews, with a highly developed sense of their own history and religious practices (however these might have been mediated by local culture), would not bend—at least that is what the Muslim sources, including the Qur’an, indicate. For Jews—that is, for those Jews who paid heed to the dictates of rabbinic Judaism—prophecy ended with the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and was thereafter left to fools, mutes, and small children. Muhammad was the most eloquent of men and was surely no child when he undertook his mission. Moreover, the differences between Muslim religious practices and those of the Jews must have been a source of great tension, particularly as it affected matters as basic as sharing meals. Assuming that the Jews of Medina followed the highly restrictive dietary laws of the Talmud, they would have found difficulty eating in Muslim houses. That might very well have been the case, as the Qur’an states that the overly complicated Jewish dietary laws were no less than a punishment inflicted by God on the Jews for their transgressions. Whereas Muhammad initially accepted Jewish practices, it would seem in an effort to win them over to his side, he soon adopted the distinctly Muslim observances that continue until this very day. And so the fast of Ashura’, the equivalent of the Jewish fast day of Yom Kippur, an event observed one day a year from sundown to sundown, was relegated to lesser importance. Instead, Muslims favored the Fast of Ramadan, which takes place over an entire month from sunrise to sunset with feasting in the evening. Similarly, the number of prayers during the day that might originally have been three, as prescribed by Jewish law, was increased to five; and the orientation of prayer that was at first in the direction of Jerusalem, as among the Jews, was later redirected to Mecca. Moses, the great Hebrew lawgiver, is the dominant figure of Muhammad’s early preaching, but he is overtaken by the patriarch Abraham in subsequent revelations. Abraham, judged by Muslims an early monotheist (hanif), was correctly seen as a precursor of the Israelites. But, because he was the father of Ishmael as well as Isaac, he was also the progenitor of the Northern Arabs, whom Islamic tradition linked to Ishmael, the alleged ancestor of the Prophet’s tribe, the Quraysh, Muhammad’s kinsmen, the clan of Hashim, and the Prophet himself. The Muslim embrace of Abraham and his progeny through Ishmael rather than

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the descendents of Ishmael’s half brother Isaac enabled Muslims to claim a genuine monotheism that skirted the Jewish notion of the chosen people and rooted monotheism in the Arabian Peninsula instead of the Fertile Crescent, the version found in the biblical narrative (see chapter 6). While all these moves reflect the changing attitude of the Prophet toward his fellow monotheists, they do not seem to portend the physical attacks on the Jews that followed later. There is nothing in the unfolding story of the Muslim chroniclers to suggest that what befell the Jews was from the outset part of a carefully designed policy. What then occasioned the initial break with the Jews? Was it merely their outright rejection of Muhammad and his claims of being a legitimate prophet, as were Moses and the prophets of Israel in earlier times? Would that have been sufficient to war against the Jews of Medina, confiscate their possessions, and force them into exile, the fate that was to befall the Qaynuqa‘ and the Nadir, two of the leading Jewish tribes? It surely would not explain the later decision to exterminate the adult males of the Qurayzah, a cruel and extraordinarily unusual act of collective punishment that still defies explanation. It could very well be that the fate of the Jews in Arabia was conditioned by more than one factor. Certainly, there was animosity generated by their denial of the Prophet’s mission, but the Jews might also have suffered because of a larger game of political power that was unfolding within Medina and beyond. Not only had the Jews rejected Muhammad, some were clients of Muhammad’s detractors among the so-called hypocrites (munafiqun), important Medinese tribal figures who, like the aforementioned Ibn Ubayy of the Khazraj, grudgingly accepted Islam out of convenience, but, given lingering tribal sentiments and loyalties, were prone to oppose the Prophet’s policies from time to time, especially when Muhammad initiated action against the Meccans, a course that would have appeared to some Medinese foolhardy if not indeed most dangerous. In the long run, the hypocrites could represent a more potent challenge to the Prophet’s authority than their Jewish clients, especially if figures like Ibn Ubayy could count on the military support of their Jewish clients. Cut adrift from their patrons, the Jews would be hard pressed to hold their own against a formidable adversary; aligned with their patrons, they could not be trifled with; and with Jewish assistance, the Aws and/or Khazraj could, if so moved, stand up to Muhammad’s growing supporters. Muhammad surely perceived that he needed the full backing of the formerly pagan Ansar. Without the continuous and full support of the most powerful Medinese tribes that had displaced the Jews as the leading political force in the oasis, Muhammad had little expectation of solidifying the ummah, let alone engaging the Quraysh

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and spreading Islam beyond the limited geographical area of Medina’s influence. Can it be that the Prophet’s relations with the Jews are a reflection of his need to shore up his somewhat tenuous hold on the Ansar and prevent any shift of alliances that could undermine his future plans elsewhere? Muhammad’s turn against the leading Jewish tribes may have been occasioned by these larger political issues as well as by his antipathy toward those who rejected his prophetic vocation. In any case, the physical attack on the Jews, which reflected the evolving needs of the Muslim community, was not sudden but part of a gradual breakdown of relations between the Jews and the Prophet. These needs may be defined as follows: (1) Consolidating as much control over the disparate tribal elements at Medina as tribal sensitivities would allow, particularly among the Aws and Khazraj, the most powerful political actors. (2) Insuring adequate living space and the means to satisfy the economic needs of the emigrants from Mecca. This was a complicated problem as the transplanted Meccans were not agriculturists who could work the date plantations that dotted the oasis, even if such plantations fell into their hands. (3) In similar fashion, the Prophet would later have to secure dwellings for new converts making their way to the oasis. By converting to Islam, it was theoretically possible for small family units and even individuals to gain full acceptance within the ummah, as it was the tie of religion and not blood that constituted the basis of membership in the community of the faithful. Ordinarily, tribes would seek alliances with units that provide significant numbers of warriors. As a result, individuals and small societal units seeking safety could never negotiate an advantageous or even attractive position within the tribal system. Muhammad, in search of fighters to augment the ranks of his forces, was less discriminating and brought those disadvantaged by the tribal system fully into the fold. Because their standing was determined entirely by their position within the ummah, these new converts turned out to be fierce advocates of the Prophet and his cause. Where do the Jews fit into this picture? With the increasingly strained relations between Muslims and Jews, the Prophet might have contemplated an oasis without the major Jewish tribes. The Jews possessed the choicest agricultural lands, many strongholds, and, in the case of the Qaynuqa‘, they were prosperous merchants and artisans whose market was situated adjacent the one acquired by the Muslims. The Qaynuqa‘s place in the economy of Medina was one the Meccan immigrants would certainly have coveted. Indeed, the first attack on the Jews, an event which took place in 624 after the

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Muslim victory at Badr, is directed against those Jews who supplied the oasis’ non-agricultural needs. The confrontation with the Jews, which resulted in their expulsion and the loss of their lands, weapons, and tools, is, to say the least, puzzling. There is nothing in the description of the events leading up to the armed conflict that gives a proper explanation to the turn of events. The Muslim tradition itself is at great pains to offer a meaningful explanation. Arabic sources would have us believe the break with the Jews all began because of an incident that took place in the market of the Qaynuqa‘, a prank which compromised the modesty of a Muslim woman. Upon witnessing the event, an outraged Muslim struck the Jew dead and the Jews retaliated by taking the Muslim’s life in turn. The incident, as described, has an understandable logic in a world of tribal sensibilities. Compromising the modesty of a woman, even if only lifting her skirt to expose her, was a grave insult. The Muslim’s response to this outrage was then perfectly understandable, as was the subsequent reaction of the Jews to the death of one of their own. Situations of this sort could easily lead to blood feuds and ultimately the destabilization of the community’s carefully brokered truce, which had been arranged by Muhammad himself. The so-called constitution of Medina was specifically designed to ameliorate the bad blood occasioned by incidents such as that which took place in the market of the Qaynuqa‘. Given what we have been led to believe about that document, there is something jarring about the response of the Muslims to the events in the marketplace of the Jews; namely, taking up arms against them and ultimately expelling them from their lands. How is it that the initial spilling of blood did not result in Muhammad’s intervention and settling the dispute by payment of blood money, however that payment might have been arranged given the complexity of the case. Both parties would seem to have shared some of the responsibility, although clearly the Jews initiated the event by acting in so insulting a fashion to a Muslim woman. Surprisingly enough, there is no call for arbitration whatsoever. The Jews, fearing the worst in such tense conditions, withdrew to their strongholds and Muhammad himself rallied the Muslims to besiege them. After two weeks, the Qaynuqa‘ were forced to surrender and go into exile, leaving behind their arms and some tools, although, as if trying to avoid complications with those Medinese who were allied with the Jews, Muhammad allowed the Jews to collect the debts owed them before they exited their lands. All told, the events that followed on the heels of the incident in the marketplace of the Qaynuqa‘ have to be considered a significant victory for the Prophet and the Muslims. It is said, the Qaynuqa‘ could muster some seven hundred fighting men and

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possessed four hundred suits of armor. Perhaps equally important, whatever tools were left behind could be used by the Muslims who would replace them as the primary artisans and shopkeepers of the oasis, thus making the original emigrants less of a burden to those who invited them. Some scholars have argued the Jews’ safe exit with their wealth—negotiated by their patron Ibn Ubayy—is a sign of the latter’s great prestige. One can, however, give a rather different interpretation to the unfolding event. There was hardly any provocation that merited a physical reprisal once the Jews showed they would surrender. The siege itself did not lead to the wholesale spilling of blood that might have made for calls of revenge. Any steps beyond expulsion would have been inconsistent with tribal norms, given the circumstances of the dispute between the Muslims and the Jews. In any case, what is important here is not the weakness of the Jews in defending their strongholds or the strength of the Muslims in pressing the issue, but the failure of Ibn Ubayy as patron of the Jews to come directly to their defense with his associates. Already weakened by the defection of his fellow tribesman Ubadah ibn Samit, who abandoned the Qaynuqa‘ in favor of Muhammad and the Muslims, Ibn Ubayy no doubt read the situation and assessed that any blow occasioned by his failure to directly assist his clients in battle would have been easier to sustain than an armed confrontation in which he and his fellow hypocrites might have fared badly. Is this understanding of events mere conjecture or might it contain some grain of a historical truth? Consider for a moment the broader implications of Muhammad’s initial actions against the Qaynuqa‘ and the subsequent decision to expel them. Taking some measure of historical license, we could well understand the assault on the Jews in light of Muhammad’s policy to harass the caravan’s of the Quraysh and Ibn Ubayy’s warning that such a policy could bring disaster to all the inhabitants of Medina. In reacting to Muhammad’s raids, particularly after Badr, the most provocative act against the Meccans to date, Ibn Ubayy was expressing a real concern shared by more than a few influential figures in the oasis. The Meccans who played the central role in creating a grand Arab alliance were perceived by many Medinese and indeed by all Arabs as the most powerful force in western Arabia. Nor did the Medinese who warned against the possible consequences of Muhammad’s aggressive stance express their opposition with words alone; given the opportunity to participate in the raid at Badr, they allowed prudence to dictate their action and declined to join the attacking party. Ibn Ubayy and the others clearly foresaw the likely reaction of the Meccans. As it were, the incident at Badr cost the Meccans dearly in both men

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and material. A number of notables had fallen in battle, losses that would have to be avenged to preserve the honor of their families as well as maintain the widely held impression that Mecca and its many allies were capable of brushing aside any challenge to Meccan supremacy when the situation demanded it. And so the Meccans responded to the gauntlet thrown down. They invoked their alliances and assembled a large fighting force of some three thousand men with which to put an end to the upstart Muhammad and his followers. As with all the battlefield accounts, there is much confusion in the Arabic sources, all written well after the event in question, and given to a kind of storytelling that glorifies the bravery and martial skill of the Muslim fighters at the expense of others. Nevertheless, by all accounts, the fighting, known as the Battle of Uhud, was a stinging defeat for Muhammad and his followers. After the setback at Uhud, the Medinese opposition to the Prophet grew more vocal, and this was particularly true of Ibn Ubayy and some other notables of the Ansar. They had their doubts about confronting Mecca from the outset, but when attacked by the Meccans they felt compelled to defend their lands against the invaders. Though they succeeded in keeping the Meccans at bay, the results of Uhud could only have confirmed their fears of the Prophet’s recklessness. Muhammad suffered other setbacks later that year as Muslim raiding forces sustained losses against groups other than the Meccans, and in regions further removed from the friendly confines of Medina, an indication that Muhammad may have been reaching beyond his capacity to play a prominent and direct role in the larger game of tribal politics. Faced with changing fortunes, particularly the aftermath of Uhud, the Prophet had to fully reestablish his authority among the Medinese. A few individuals from families sniping at the Prophet were assassinated without reprisal, a sign that the opposition was incapable of, or, perhaps better put, unwilling to mount a direct challenge, despite the blow to their personal prestige and that of their kinfolk. Assassination as a method of dealing with political adversaries would have been considered counterproductive if not unthinkable in the Prophet’s first two years at Medina, as it would have aroused passions leading to blood feud and the destabilization of the newly established ummah. In time, it became a weapon in Muhammad’s political arsenal. Ka‘b al-Ashraf, a poet linked loosely to the Jewish tribe of the Nadir, defected to the Quraysh and ridiculed the Prophet in his verses. For that, he was reportedly killed amid highly unlikely circumstances. Escorted by some armed Muslims, Ka‘b walked with the assistance of a long stick that inadvertently touched one of them. Thinking that the stick was a sword, the Muslim

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warrior instinctively drew his weapon and killed the poet on the spot, or so our sources relate. Islamic tradition thus found a way to excuse the murder of a defenseless individual, of whom it could be said: his most effective weapon was his tongue. Even more improbable is the description of what was to befall the Jewish tribe that had sheltered the poet, namely the expulsion of the Banu Nadir, not coincidentally a tribal unit also allied to Ibn Ubayy and the hypocrites, as were the exiled Qaynuqa‘. Six months after Uhud, the Prophet reportedly went to the Nadir to receive blood money with which to settle a dispute. The Nadir are described as having been prepared to resolve the issue amicably; they thus invited Muhammad to partake of a meal with them, at which point he and his companions sat with their backs to a wall. Before the meal was served and the business concluded, the Prophet slipped away, to be followed later by his companions. According to Muslim sources, the angel Gabriel appeared before the Prophet and alerted him to an assassination planned by the Nadir. The wall where Muhammad sat was to be collapsed over his head and elements of the structure were to fall upon him resulting in his death. Forewarned by divine intervention, the Prophet sought safety by exiting quickly lest the plotters carry out their scheme. One may wish to believe this story in all its particulars—no doubt many of the Muslim faithful did and most still do—but in relating this tale as it does, the Islamic tradition seems at great pains to explain the ensuing events in which the Muslims went to war with the Nadir and then expelled them from Medina as they had the Qaynuqa‘ after the Battle of Badr. Whatever gloss Muslims gave to this story, the expulsion of the Nadir troubles modern Western historians, as indeed it troubled their Muslim counterparts in the Middle Ages who explained the event as follows. Having determined through divine intervention that the Jews were about to kill him through a seemingly ingenious scheme (although no attack had actually taken place and therefore no blood was spent), the Prophet reportedly demanded that the Jews leave Medina within a narrowly prescribed period of time or face death. Should they choose to leave peacefully, they would retain ownership of their palm trees and receive part of the produce (meaning perhaps receipts from the sale of the dates). This is all very strange but perhaps not altogether unfathomable to readers acquainted with tribal conventions as they were perceived by our medieval authors. The chroniclers are apparently hard pressed to explain why the Prophet acted as he did against the Jews when there did not seem to be any demonstrable provocation on their part (other than their continued recal-

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citrance at accepting the legitimacy of the Prophet’s mission). Hence, the report of the bizarre plot in which the Prophet would have been killed without the assassins shedding his blood directly (let alone with a sharp instrument that would have made the act a homicide worthy of exacting blood revenge). That being the case, the Prophet could insist only that the Jews abandon their lands (the equivalent of paying blood money, though, as noted, in this instance no blood was actually shed). The Jews refused, however. Rather than capitulate to the Prophet’s demands—what had they done to merit this brazen threat that sullied their honor?—they withdrew to their strongholds; the Muslims in turn set about destroying their rich plantations. Most importantly, all this took place as Ibn Ubayy, the patron of the Jews, offered them little in the way of assistance, just as he did little if anything to defend his other Jewish clients, the Qaynuqa‘. Faced with an insurmountable situation, we are told the Nadir capitulated and prepared to accept the original conditions offered them. But Muhammad, sensing their weakness, and given Ibn Ubayy’s response or rather lack thereof, changed the rules of the game. The Nadir would abandon their lands, leaving their weapons behind, and would receive nothing from the sale of their dates. Their lands would be occupied by Muslim emigrants, their weapons made part of Muhammad’s arsenal. The event shamed Ibn Ubayy and the hypocrites; their status among their kinsmen was greatly diminished, and a new leadership for the Aws and Khazraj, long cultivated by the Prophet, prepared to fill the gap. In a brilliant display of tribal politics, combined no doubt with sincere religious conviction, Muhammad humbled his most outspoken rivals at Medina, expelled another major Jewish tribe that denied his legitimacy as a monotheist prophet; and secured additional living space for his loyal followers who came with him as strangers to the oasis and previously lived as guests on the lands of others. The Nadir, humbled by the circumstances, made for their estates in the Jewish oasis of Khaybar. At Khaybar, they intrigued against the Prophet until he conquered the oasis in 628. All this political maneuvering did not end Muhammad’s concerns. In 627, the Meccans, realizing the gravity of the situation, summoned the entire confederacy of tribal units that fell within their commercial and political orbit. An army of some ten thousand warriors, including tribal units recruited from outside the grand alliance, descended on Medina in an attempt to crush the Muslim challenge once and for all. In this venture, the Meccans were supported, at least politically and financially, by the expelled Jews of Medina and their co-religionists at the wealthy oasis of Khaybar. The attacking army would seem to have outnumbered all the potential fighters among

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the Medinese, which included individuals from the Aws and Khazraj who were quite naturally still reluctant to engage so powerful an enemy in battle. Some reportedly held discussions with the Meccans and were therefore asked to leave the oasis before the battle commenced—a puzzling description of events to say the least. Why allow the faint-hearted neutrals the possibility of assisting or even joining forces with the Meccans, if only on an individual basis? We should note that by then the political capital of the hypocrites, whose heart was not in conflict with the Quraysh, was diminished, if not largely spent. Under any circumstances, individuals who hesitated to follow the Prophet could be dealt with more easily; only one group might have been considered a problem by Muhammad if they chose to defect. The last of the major Jewish tribes, the Qurayzah, represented a significant fighting force, and in the end they did refuse to band with the defenders of Medina, declaring neutrality instead. At face value, the Meccans and their allies had a significant advantage, but in the end they were denied success. The account of what happened is, if nothing else, murky. We are told that a Persian convert to Islam named Salman advised Muhammad to dig a trench (khandaq) around the oasis, a defensive stratagem, well known among the Persians but unknown to the Arabs of Arabia. Faced with the obstacle before them, the opposing cavalry was befuddled and unsure of how to proceed and so they merely besieged the oasis rather than attempt an all-out assault. Our sources also tell us that at some point of the siege, the Meccans held talks with the Qurayzah in an attempt to gain some advantage against the Medinese defenders, but, as reported, the effort came to naught. The Qurayzah refrained from joining the battle (or, it seems, agreeing to any arrangements that would have compromised their Medinese neighbors). Finally, the large attacking force withdrew in frustration without engaging Muhammad and his allies in extended combat. A closer look at the sources suggests a somewhat more complex picture of what might have transpired. The large Meccan force consisted of many disparate elements, not all committed allies within the grand alliance, but bought off, some reportedly with Jewish wealth from Khaybar, to do battle and share in the glory and the spoils of war. The failure to initiate this kind of combat, which would reflect the chivalry of desert warriors and earn the lucrative booty of a victorious campaign, had to have had a highly negative effect on the invading force. Under the circumstances, significant elements of the attacking army broke off from the main body and returned to their tribal lands. The so-called Battle of the Trench was in effect not much of a military engagement. But it demonstrated that the grand alliance served as no deter-

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rent to an ambitious and crafty enemy. Even after the Meccans mustered all their possible allies to form a single army, that force was, because of tribal considerations, too unwieldy to serve as a highly motivated fighting unit. The Meccans hardly lost the battle, but not having decisively won any battle, as no real battle took place, they squandered their perceived advantages. Their reputation for invincibility sullied, they became increasingly vulnerable to the Muslims who grew bolder as their strength in warfare and diplomacy became more and more apparent. The first outcome of the Meccan failure was the extermination of the male adults of the Banu Qurayzah, a cruel punishment that had no precedent and was very much at odds with tribal codes of chivalry. As a rule, tribes sought to avoid shedding excessive blood, even against their most bitter of enemies; for such actions could give rise over time to violent retaliation by groups linked either by blood or treaty to tribesmen who had been put to the sword indiscriminately. Full-scale fighting was a last resort; even when large forces were assembled, it was at times deemed preferable to have individual fighters engage in ritual combat (mubarazah). What then explains the seemingly unusual fate that befell the Qurayzah following a battle that was not even bitterly contested, and in which it could not be said the Jews took a fighting role? Surely, something had to explain why Muhammad acted as he did. Julian Wellhausen, the famed Bible scholar who turned to Islamic studies later in his career, was of the opinion that the very possibility the Qurayzah might turn against the Prophet caused him so much dread he reacted with uncalled for and truly unusual brutality. Many Western scholars, Wellhausen being but one, were quick to blame the Prophet as being cruel and vindictive to the Jews once he repelled the threat of his pagan adversaries. Trying to imagine why the Prophet acted in so capricious a manner, they saw the extermination of the Qurayzah through the lens of Islamic tradition. And so they envisioned Muslims interpreting the Jewish rejection of Muhammad, an individual who shared broadly the Jews’ monotheist sensibilities, as an act of betrayal, not only of the Prophet but of the Jews’ own tradition, which reportedly foretold of his coming. Other scholars saw the elimination of the adult males of the Qurayzah as a carefully calculated act undertaken for political advantage, although what advantage could be gained by killing the Jews rather than expelling them as had been the policy with the Qaynuqa‘ and the Nadir is anything but clear. One could, of course, argue that having taken refuge in Khaybar, the Jews previously exiled from Medina were in league with the enemy and that the Prophet was unwilling to allow a strengthening of the Jewish opposition to him. The answer as to why

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Muhammad went so far as to have the men of Qurayzah exterminated and the women and children enslaved remains, in any case, a riddle without adequate explanation. Even the Muslims were puzzled by this unusual turn of events. Like modern scholars of the West, Islamic tradition is hard pressed to find a reason that explains the unprecedented severity unleashed upon the Jews. There are reports that the Prophet had a special pact of mutual assistance with the Qurayzah that they renounced unilaterally, tearing up the document on the advice of Huyyay ibn Akhtab, a well-known opponent of the Prophet from the Nadir. It is hard to imagine why the Prophet would have singled out the Qurayzah for a special pact, let alone how the Qurayzah could have entered into such an agreement while at the same time they were the clients of the Aws, patrons who guaranteed their protection. And why should they have been influenced to renounce the alleged agreement on the advice of a well-known opponent of the Prophet whose own tribe was exiled from Medina in disgrace? These traditions surely explain why the Prophet might have wished to exterminate the Qurayzah, but they hardly seem credible nor do they reflect the dominant thrust of the Islamic narrative, which, unlike that of Western scholars, attempts to distance the Prophet from the actual decision, precisely because it seems so damning to his character. Some modern Muslim writers, apologetic about the event, argue, albeit with little if indeed any evidence, that not all the males of the Qurayzah were put to death. One thing appears certain: the Prophet, in allowing for the mass killing, did not do so to eliminate the last vestiges of Jews in the oasis, as smallish Jewish family units not linked to the major tribes remained scattered about Medina. Hence, the failure of the Jews to convert to Islam could hardly have been the overriding reason to effectively annihilate a leading Jewish tribe. Nor do our sources describe the decision as easy to implement. The chroniclers make it clear that the action taken against the Qurayzah was not only without precedent but also required an elaborate strategy based on tribal patterns of behavior. As were the Qaynuqa‘ and Nadir, the Qurayzah were formally allied with one of the tribes of the Ansar—in this case they were clients of the Aws. That presented the Prophet with no small problem. Leading figures from the Aws, compelled to look after the Qurayzah by tribal codes of honor, intervened on behalf of the Jews, who, after all, had remained neutral during the celebrated siege of Medina. As our Muslim authors understand the unfolding events, Muhammad could not under any circumstances initiate a plan of action that would have so compromised the Ansar whose support he required. We are not speaking of expulsion, the fate of the Qaynuqa‘ and Nadir, but of mass

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killing. Clearly, the tribal honor of the Aws demanded that they and they alone shoulder the responsibility for the extermination of their adult male clients and the enslavement of the women and children. But the Jews did not actually intervene on behalf of the invading force. If there were even the slightest hint that they took up arms for the grand alliance, or in any other way directly assisted the Meccans and their allies, the chroniclers would have not only described such actions in detail, they would have magnified them to enhance the accusations against the Jews and justify the Prophet’s actions. According to our sources, the Prophet, realizing he could not compel the Aws into giving up their clients to be killed and enslaved, left the decision to their leaders, but for that decision he chose Sa‘d ibn Mu‘adh of the Aws, who lay near death from wounds he had suffered during the battle. This was the very same man of the Aws who Muhammad had been promoting to replace Ibn Ubayy as leader of the Ansar, thus ridding himself of that ambitious Medinese figure who from the outset attempted to limit the Prophet’s power and curtail his ability to engage the Meccans and their allies. There is a logic to this turn of events, at least as portrayed by the chroniclers who present us with the only narrative at our disposal. In this scenario, we are seemingly led to believe that Sa‘d, the noble warrior, lying on his deathbed from having participated in a battle without the assistance of his erstwhile clients and allies, the Jews, was bitter that the Qurayzah chose to remain neutral and thus sought revenge for his own impending death. In such circumstances, his decision to exterminate the males of the Qurayzah would be understandable to his kinsmen who, following the Prophet’s suggestion, allowed the mortally wounded Sa‘d to decide for all of them, albeit without fully realizing that Sa‘d might go as far as he did. In such fashion, Islamic tradition makes it clear that the Prophet had no direct hand in the action and was therefore not directly responsible for this seemingly incongruous act of brutality. Nor for that matter were the Aws collectively responsible. If anyone were to be held accountable it was Sa‘d, but his decision was guided by revenge driven by tribal sentiments one could readily understand. The chroniclers may have absolved the Prophet of any questionable behavior regarding the extermination of the Qurayzah, but we are still left seeking a plausible reason for this drastic act of collective punishment. Be that as it may, the failed siege of Mecca, the elimination of the Qurayzah, and the seeming collapse of the last vestiges of internal opposition within Medina all allowed the Prophet to devote his energies to breaking the Meccan hold on western Arabia. It was, however, one thing to keep the Meccans at bay—no small triumph at that—and quite another to produce the military and political strength to successfully replace the Quraysh and their allies

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as the political linchpins of the region, let alone convert the pagans among them to the new faith. The failure of the Meccans to deal decisively with Muhammad changed the political calculus in the region. In 628, Muhammad felt sufficiently bold to undertake an expedition to Mecca accompanied by some fourteen hundred men. But sometime before reaching his destination, the Prophet had second thoughts of confronting an enemy who had sent an advanced party of two hundred cavalry to block his path. The situation was now reversed. The failure of the grand alliance to decisively put an end to he Muslim threat had greatly undermined their prestige and room to maneuver. An offensive against the Mecca that produced no less than the capitulation of its inhabitants would have had a similar effect on the Islamic ummah. By any yardstick of measurement, the Quraysh remained a most formidable opponent. Moreover, as did the Muslims in Medina, the Meccans would be fighting in defense of their own lands and the sanctity of their shrine; they could thus be expected to offer maximum resistance. Any perception of failure in engaging the enemy would be a major setback for the Prophet and his mission, as it would lower his prestige and make it difficult for him to hold together what had become his much expanded but still loosely knit alliance. It would appear the Prophet was not alone in his doubts; various Bedouin tribes in the vicinity of Mecca refused to join in the venture. The failure to rally others to attack Mecca may have been what convinced the Prophet to reconsider a full-scale assault. Rather than confront the Meccans, given the uncertainty of the moment, Muhammad agreed to a ten-year truce known as the Truce of Hudaybiyah, so-called perhaps after a place of that name situated near Mecca where the pact was concluded. According to the chroniclers, the original plan to take Mecca by force was to be aborted and the Muslim force would withdraw. Instead Muslims would be allowed to undertake a minor pilgrimage (‘umrah) to the holy city unimpeded; fighting between the opposing parties would cease; any Qurayshites that had become part of the ummah without the permission of their patrons or masters (presumably slaves, women, and children) would be sent back to those patrons and masters; both the Muslims and the Meccans were free to build their own network of alliances, but Muhammad could not actively recruit followers from among his tribe the Quraysh. When the treaty was finally concluded, the Muslims undertook ritual sacrifices to the God in heaven. The Truce of Hudaybiyah was a setback for Muhammad and completely unanticipated. The Prophet, ordinarily so brilliant in seizing the moment, was apparently guilty of hubris. Not only had he not forced the capitulation of the

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Meccans, he had mobilized a fighting force that no doubt anticipated the glory of battle, to say nothing of the booty following a Meccan defeat. Our sources report that once the negotiations were under way, Muhammad was compelled to exact a pledge from those who accompanied him, so as to hold them in line and bind them to any decision he was about to make. Muhammad understood he had to regain the initiative. Within six weeks, a Muslim force set out to attack Khaybar, the rich Jewish oasis a hundred miles to the east of Mecca, a settlement which sheltered many of his former enemies and which helped fund the siege of Medina, though the Jews of Khaybar supplied no fighting forces of their own. One may suppose that with that history, and with Muhammad’s general antagonism toward the Jews, unaccepting as they were of him and his message, sooner or later the Prophet would have moved against Khaybar. In this case, one suspects the timing of the attack was linked directly to the aborted expedition against Mecca and, related to that, the need to satisfy an Arab army ready and anxious to do combat and to enjoy the spoils of war. One positive result of the Truce of Hudaybiyah was that the agreement with the Meccans severed a pledge that reportedly bound the Quraysh to the Jews of Khaybar, namely in the event one of the two was attacked by the Medinese, the other would in turn attack Medina. In such circumstances, Muhammad would be forced to break off the attack to defend his own territory. The Jews were apparently caught by surprise. The truce should have made for a more relaxed atmosphere in the region. Moreover, Khaybar was nearly one hundred miles distant from Mecca. Any foray against the oasis was bound to take considerable planning and, one would have expected, time to execute. The rapid deployment of the Muslim attacking force seems to have been unexpected. As the Muslim army arrived, the Jews of Khaybar took to their forts and initially the Muslims made no headway. After some six weeks of skirmishes—there do not seem to have been any large-scale engagements—the Jews were forced to capitulate. According to an agreement between the warring parties, the Jews retained their lands but were compelled to assign half the produce from their farms to the Muslims. Our sources also report that the other Jewish settlements along the route to SyriaPalestine were soon brought under Muslim control. Seeing what had happened at Khaybar, the Jews of the Wadi al-Qura and Tayma made similar agreements with the Prophet, sharing the revenue of their date harvest with the Muslims. Tradition has it that the caliph ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab (634–44) ended these arrangements when he evicted all the Jews from the Hijaz. That tradition, which became the accepted narrative of what befell the Jews of the region, is contradicted, however, by correspondence from the Jews of the

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Wadi al-Qura preserved in the Cairo Geniza, a repository of Jewish writings dated several centuries after ‘Umar’s alleged ethnic cleansing of the Hijaz. If there is any truth to the reports of ‘Umar’s expelling the Jews, it applied in all likelihood to only part of the Hijaz, particularly the holy cities Mecca and Medina and their environs. In any case, the victory over the Jews of Khaybar marked the end of Jewish political influence in western Arabia; nor did the Jews who lay in the path of the later Muslim conquest take up arms against the advancing Muslims and established Muslim authority. According to some seemingly apocryphal reports, the victory at Khaybar did not come cheaply. A Jewish woman from the oasis—a refugee whose male relatives of the Qurayzah had been exterminated—poisoned the Prophet as the Muslims were celebrating their hard-won triumph with a victory feast. While the other Muslims ate donkey meat, she offered the Prophet his favorite dish, shoulder of lamb (donkey meat was ritually unclean according to Jewish dietary laws). Tradition has it that the morsel was delicately seasoned with a deadly potion. One could readily understand, given tribal sensibilities, why she would have chosen to avenge her murdered kinfolk. However, in this case, the meat would appear more seasoned with irony than any deadly substance. So delicate was the poison applied, the Prophet only succumbed to eating the tainted meat some four years later. For those Muslims who were inclined to believe the Jews actually killed Muhammad, or, to be more accurate, set his eventual death into motion, a more convincing account was required. Four years is, after all, a rather long time for a man to linger after having been administered a deadly potion. A second tradition thus maintained that another woman, this time from the exiled Nadir, administered the tainted morsel to the Prophet. The Prophet sensing something was wrong with the first bite spit it out. As the would-be assassin later explained her plan, she was merely testing to see if Muhammad was indeed a legitimate Prophet. If that were in fact so, he would have detected the poison as he did. And so the woman, now convinced of Muhammad’s legitimacy, married the Prophet of God and converted to Islam. Still other accounts report variations on this theme. The historicity of all these accounts is, needless to say, dubious; clearly even the Muslims had their doubts. They are well-known tropes that attempt to link the Jews to treacherous behavior, thus explaining what befell the Jews of Arabia. Be that as it may, the descriptions of Medina’s Jews and their relatives at Khaybar became firmly etched into the historical consciousness of future generations of Muslims and served to define for them the conventional wisdom of Jews and Judaism at all times and in all places where Muslims established political and cultural hegemony.

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Perceiving the “Other” Jews and Muslims in the Abode Of Islam

As did other peoples with revealed texts, the Jews of an expanding Islamic realm were most often free to observe their faith and conduct their communal affairs. Be that as it may, Islam attracted converts of all sorts in wake of the Arab conquest, many of them anxious to enjoy the economic and social benefits of being Muslim. Over the ensuing centuries, peoples subjected to Islamic rule slowly but surely accepted the new religion and became constituents of the ummah, the all-embracing Islamic polity. And yet, the impressive triumph of the Muslims was not complete, not even after they had become an absolute majority in the lands they ruled. Generations after the conquest, there were still significant minorities in the medieval Islamic world that clung tenaciously to their religious beliefs and practices. These included various denominations of Christians, often at odds among themselves over doctrinal and other issues, and docile Jews, relatively small in number but distributed widely throughout the Abode of Islam. The Jews, with their patented, one might even say obsessive, sense of selfcriticism, have long described themselves as “stiff-necked,” that is, as a stubborn people. The expression refers to a reluctance to bend to God’s will. But with a sense of irony, it also came to be understood as unwillingness to bend to foreign or illegitimate authority. Muslims in turn describe the Jews as having “uncircumcised hearts” (Qur’an 2:88; 5:155), a concept borrowed from the Hebrew Bible where the obdurate Israelites are enjoined to “excise the foreskin (‘orlah) which envelops [their] hearts; and stiffen [their] necks no more” (Deut. 10:16). That is to say, the thickened tissue surrounding the heart renders the seat of human consciousness impenetrable to God’s commands, thus giving rise to stubbornness and wicked acts that occasion the Almighty’s fiery wrath (Jer. 4:4). 155

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From the perspective of the Qur’an, Medina’s hard-hearted Jews stubbornly refused to accept the legitimacy of the Prophet’s claim, this despite his trumpeting of monotheism, his reverence for the Israelite prophets, and his initial acceptance of various forms of Jewish ritual behavior. Nor did the Jews of Arabia, who privileged the values of Arab tribalism, submit quietly to Muslim pressure. Having been provoked by the Muslims, the Jews of Medina, with the honor of their tribes at stake, took up arms and retreated to their strongholds. In the end they were greeted by exile, and in the mysterious case of the Qurayzah, all the Jewish males of age were executed. That two-pronged resistance by the Jews, the first an insolent denial of the Prophet’s message, which bore so much in common with their own faith and belief, the second, their decision to take up arms against the Muslims, left an indelible mark on the historic consciousness of the Prophet’s followers. This picture of Jewish enmity toward the Prophet and his ummah held true not only in Muhammad’s generation but also in generations to follow, the passivity of the Jews in the conquered territories notwithstanding. Regardless of time and place, the triumphant Muslims viewed Jewish hearts as largely impenetrable to God’s word. Among the Jews of the enlarged Abode of Islam, there was little if any expectation of triumphs like those enjoyed by the Muslims, whose conquests, beginning in the seventh century, led quickly to dominion over vast territories. On the whole, Jews in the former Byzantine and Sasanian lands did not see themselves taking up arms as did their co-religionists in Arabia. There were no worlds the size of the Roman Empire to be conquered by resurgent Jewish armies; no heartland of nonbelievers to be claimed by the true faith; not even a realistic hope of achieving some measure of Jewish sovereignty over the land promised them by their God in the Bible, at least not in this world. Looking back through centuries of Muslim, Byzantine, Sasanian, and Roman rule, medieval Jewry had no political successes to record. Indeed, Jews had all too few triumphs to savor when they were a sovereign people on their own sacred soil, as in the time of the biblical monarchs of Judah and Israel. As a result, the so-called chosen people developed a rather idiosyncratic sensibility to the burdens that history had imposed upon them. Beginning with the chroniclers and prophetic writers of the Hebrew Bible, they recorded and interpreted their experiences according to carefully delineated patterns of belief and observance. The trials and tribulations of individual Jews and of Jewish communities were cited as a consequence of moral failings, the rarer successes were seen as rewards for steadfast observance of custom and law. Even the most reflective Jews respected the interpretive lim-

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its imposed by these rigid theological paradigms. Before embracing modernity, they made no significant effort to create wider, or, if you wish, more analytical models of historical explanation. Unlike Napoleon, they may not have held that God is always on the side of the big battalions, but reality, as Jews experienced it, seemed to confirm that unpleasant fact time and again. By any measure, the Jews were, in the best of times, only minor players in the larger games of power, whatever their faith in divine providence and their adherence to the ways of their God. Contrasted with the Muslim sense of unbridled triumph are the everpresent Jewish themes of suffering and guilt; even well-intended Jews never saw themselves as measuring up to the high standards expected of them. This explained why they were called upon to suffer at the hands of foreign invaders or the dominant society in whose midst they dwelt. The greatest Jewish role models appear—and in canonical works no less—as flawed protagonists, the victims of their own moral failings at specific moments and places in time. Leaders tarnished by history include Moses, the great lawgiver; David, the king from whose seed the Messiah will come forth; and Solomon, the world’s wisest man whose wisdom could not save him from indulging in acts that ran counter to the expectations of his Lord. Even Noah, the quintessential righteous man, was understood by biblical commentary to be but the best of a corrupt and hence condemned generation. There is something truly extraordinary in this Jewish capacity for self-criticism. It certainly has no parallel in the ancient or Islamic Near East. No declared Muslim would have openly criticized or otherwise defamed the Prophet Muhammad. On the other hand, Jews, reflecting on their experiences and emphasizing the tragic side of their long history, seemed ever so inclined to invoke a mea culpa for themselves and for their community as a whole. One need not embrace a lachrymose view of Jewish history to appreciate that the broad canvas of Jewish experience has been highlighted by frequent hardship and periodic cataclysms. A tragic view of the past was thus engraved on the psyche of generations of Jews living under Islamic rule. From such a perspective, Jews looked to their personal behavior and found consolation in unswerving faith and religious observance. Thus, for the Jews of Islamic lands, as indeed for Jews everywhere, personal piety was the first step toward personal redemption, and, following that, the redemption of the long-suffering people paradoxically labeled God’s chosen. Ironically, there was a convergence between an Islamic triumphalism born of frequent and far-flung conquests and the tear-stained Jewish view of history. Looking at the past, Muslims who had created an imperial polity

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stretching from the Iberian Peninsula to eastern Iran reaffirmed their present political and religious hegemony; while, for Jews, a long history of failed expectations confirmed that Islamic rule was merely the latest episode in a familiar story that had repeated itself time and again. In light of political realities, the redemption of Israel, longed for by every generation of Jews, was no longer an event anticipated in real time, as in biblical prophecy. Redemption became instead a theme better suited to the eschatological yearnings that penetrated the historical imagination of Jews. The vindication of Israel was left to some eagerly sought but undisclosed moment in the future occasioned by the advent of the Messiah. In the meantime, Jews of Islamic lands followed what they perceived to be the only path available to them; namely, the path of accommodation to Muslim authority. Taking stock of reality, they pursued a low profile, preferring stability to dangerous political activism. Given a long history of failed rebellions, especially the disastrous Roman wars in which Jews lost all semblance of sovereignty over their sacred land, and the perception of trying times under so many regimes that had ruled over God’s chosen people in eras past, stability was not a condition to be taken for granted, nor was it treated lightly. Quite the opposite, stability, even with certain drawbacks, was regarded as preferable to the dangers implicit in challenging established authority. As did rabbis of an earlier time, the Jews of Islamic lands privileged those learned figures who kept the community intact rather than the rebels who foolishly put it at risk. The religious and political strife that characterized Muslim relations with the Jewish tribes of Arabia was no harbinger of Muslim relations with the older and more docile Jewish communities along the path of Islamic expansion. That generally held true whether one speaks of the Jews of the Land of Israel (Syria-Palestine), Babylonia, Egypt, or wherever Muslims declared their sovereignty. As long as Jews played the game with Muslims according to clearly defined and mutually accepted rules, there were no conceivable circumstances in which individual Jewish communities or the Jewish community in unison could have been considered serious threats or indeed any threat at all to Muslim society and its political foundations. Conversely, there would have been no need for the Muslims to tamper with the protective status of their Jewish subjects, a status that derived from binding Muslim legislation that allowed Jews to retain their religion, their property, and control of their own community. There was, in short, a marriage of convenience between Muslim triumphalism and Jewish accommodation. Responsible for the well-being of the Jewish community, the Jewish leadership was vigilant about protecting the politics and culture of accommodation to Mus-

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lim rule. However demeaning that may have seemed, it was by far preferable to an open confrontation that would have gravely endangered existing Jewish communities, as in Muhammad’s time and the pre-Islamic past. There was, however, always the danger that dissident groups beyond the influence of the Jewish authorities, the leadership with a vested interest in stability, would become intoxicated with messianic speculation and display defiant gestures toward their Muslim rulers. The apocalyptical imagination that served Jews as a safety valve for frustration and anguish might lead to demands for instant gratification in historical time rather than delayed gratification at the end of time, as Jews described the messianic age. And so, the political redemption of the Jews, which was reserved for some unknown and mysterious future moment, and therefore not likely to be a destabilizing influence, might be invoked by irresponsible militants to contest Muslim power here and now. At the least, any messianic activity publicly exhibited by Jews would likely be regarded as grossly insulting to Muslim sensibilities, with all that that implied for the well-being of the larger Jewish community. In point of fact, none of the extremely rare confrontations with Islamic authority altered the essential paradigm that governed Jewish-Muslim relations. Perhaps the most noteworthy challenge to Muslim rule was the rebellion of Abu ‘Isa al-Isfahani (ca. 750), an event best described in a Jewish source written a century and more after the purported uprising. As Abu ‘Isa’s challenge draws no attention from any of the great Muslim chroniclers, one might consider it to have been at best a relatively minor if not insignificant affair; the only mentions of Abu ‘Isa in Islamic sources are scattered references, all dating at the earliest to the eleventh century. In sum, there is no contemporaneous testimony as to what occurred. As best we can ascertain from all these later sources and the meager information contained therein, Abu ‘Isa, an ignorant Persian Jew and tailor by profession, gathered followers in his native land, either at the end of Umayyad rule (750 CE) or shortly after the Abbasid caliphs displaced them from power. The rebellion broke out at a time rife with messianic expectations and along with that the appearance of various sects holding bizarre views regarding society and religion. In declaring himself a prophetic figure and forerunner of the Messiah, Abu ‘Isa conveyed an image well suited to the mood of the times. Together with his followers, Abu ‘Isa opposed the local Muslim authorities and was killed in battle—or so it seems. Scholars would be wise to question the historicity of this Jewish revolt, at least as it is reported. The description of events is strikingly reminiscent

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of accounts of Muslim sectarian disturbances, so much so as to suggest the possibility of a well-worn literary artifice. On the other hand, such seeming artifices can take on a reality of their own when they serve as models for actual behavior. It is entirely conceivable that a “historic” Abu ‘Isa emulated the purported activity of other revolutionaries of the times. A theme common in many accounts of these sects is the report of miraculous occurrences, none more miraculous than when a leader who had been executed or killed in battle, as was Abu ‘Isa, was then said to be alive; and his death, although it may have seemed real enough, then declared by his followers an ophthalmic illusion, a deception of a miraculous nature. Hidden from view, Abu ‘Isa, like certain of his Muslim counterparts, was expected to return and make his presence felt at some undisclosed moment. The most ubiquitous manifestation of this doctrine, known in Arabic as raj‘ah, was the later Shi‘ite concept of the hidden imam, an individual descended from the Prophet’s first cousin and son-in-law ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib, who would return from a state of occultation and usher in a new age in which the world would be set on its right path once again. Not to be outdone by Muslim rebels of the time, Abu ‘Isa’s followers claimed he had safely made his way to a secret mountain retreat unknown to all but a handful of close associates. Similarly, as did various Muslim sectarians, Abu ‘Isa’s adherents (the ‘Isawiyah) promoted syncretistic religious views and strange practices, which for them included endorsing the prophetic missions of Jesus and Muhammad (as did the Muslims); changing the Jewish daily prayer periods from three to seven; denying themselves meat and wine (a mark of asceticism, perhaps linked to the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem); and prohibiting divorce (but not marriage). Were the followers of Abu ‘Isa as numerous as legend has it (several thousand warriors), and were the revolts to have broken out in areas heavily populated by Jews responsive to the dictates of the rabbinical authorities, the rebels might have elicited considerable concern within the Jewish community. Not only were their views at variance with traditional Judaism, they revolted at a time when syncretistic religious movements were subject to harsh reprisals. Muslim historians speak of how the Islamic authorities dealt severely with sectarian groups that combined Islam with what traditionally minded Muslims deemed inappropriate beliefs and behavior. A clear example of the danger messianic stirrings presented to wellestablished Jewish communities is reflected in an epistle directed by the great Jewish scholar Moses Maimonides (1138–1204) to the Jewish community of Yemen. At issue is the appearance of an individual who claimed to be the

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long-awaited Messiah destined to redeem God’s chosen people. Maimonides advises the local community to restrain the ignorant and mentally-ill messianic pretender, as his public declarations, should they become known, would be seen as a challenge to Muslim authority. In the course of expounding his view, the great Jewish scholar recalls the false messiahs of the past (including Abu ‘Isa) and points out that even calculating the expected onset of the messianic age can prove dangerous, as it could give rise to uncontrolled messianic fervor. After dismissing the credentials of the would-be messiah—no ignoramus could possibly fulfill the role of the one destined to redeem the chosen people—Maimonides warns of the inevitable repression that will ensue from confronting Muslim hegemony. In a later letter to French Jews, we learn from Maimonides of the tragic consequences of this episode: the execution of the false messiah and recriminations against the local Jewish community. No wonder the rabbinic authorities were vigilant in keeping messianic claimants in check and Jewish-Muslim relations in balance. In the end, Muslims had no fear of uprisings from the docile and small Jewish communities. muslim at titudes toward jews and judaism Although they experienced no meaningful challenge to their political dominance, Muslim authorities dealing with their Jewish subjects embraced timehonored and highly negative views of the Jews and their faith. Such an unfavorable assessment of Jews and Judaism represented a collective wisdom shared by all Muslims orally and in written texts that are both diverse and extensive. In addition to the Qur’an and the enormous body of commentary to which Muslim scripture has given rise, there are pejorative references to Jews and Judaism in a wide variety of historical and literary works. These include folklore drawn from Muslim storytellers; works by popular preachers; works by learned polemicists such as the Andalusi polymath Ibn Hazm (d. 1064), who offers a lengthy critique of Jewish scripture and beliefs; and legal tracts and treatises on political theory that discus the juridical status of the Jews in the Abode of Islam. The polemical edge of this writing has already been noted in the discussion of Isra’iliyat, the body of biblical and post-biblical Jewish (and also Christian) material found in the Qur’an and subsequent Islamic tradition (see part 1, chapter 2). Why are the Jews singled out for such criticism; what is the sum and substance of all these negative views; and, above all, how did deeply rooted Muslim attitudes toward Jews and Judaism affect relations between the two communities over the course of the Islamic Middle Ages? Scholars seeking

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answers to these questions are obliged to consider three sets of intersecting phenomena that appear to have shaped, in one way or another, the quality of Jewish life in Islamic lands. First, in the previous chapter, we referred to Muhammad’s acrimonious conflicts with the Jews of Medina and his later dealings with their co-religionists at the oasis of Khaybar. As the portrayal of these episodes became firmly etched in the historical consciousness of all Muslims, they quickly became the foundation for ongoing attitudes toward all Jews regardless of place or time. One is then tempted to argue that these vivid and highly negative impressions of Muhammad’s Jews were likely to have influenced the actual conduct of Muslim-Jewish relations long after the Prophet’s death. This view is, to be sure, a supposition that needs the support of reliable data drawn from history itself. Second, there was also an evolving law and legal tradition that defined for Muslims both the meaning and the limits of tolerance and coercion as regards the protected minorities. A word of caution is in order. Law codes are usually prescriptive, but, as regards the Jews, the specific laws governing their behavior were not always applied. Even when applied, the statutes were not always prosecuted with vigor. That being the case, the third phenomenon we are forced to look at is beyond Islamic law. Evidence of daily life is required in order to determine, whenever possible, the realities of interfaith relations, as these could easily have varied at different moments and in different environments. Only when studied in tandem and viewed against the history of given times and places are the anti-Jewish polemics and the laws that governed the protected minorities (ahl al-dhimmah) likely to yield a broad understanding of how Muslims treated Jews (and also Christians), and how the Jews interacted with the Muslims in whose midst they dwelt. The underlying assumptions and rules of engagement that defined for Muslims their relationship with Jews are first elucidated in various verses of the Qur’an, especially 9:29, an enigmatic verse that seemingly calls for humbling the Jews, or so it was understood by later generations of Muslims. In any case, Muslim scripture uses three terms to signify “Jew,” two derived from Hebrew. The first, Yahud, refers to the Jews collectively, the singular being Yahudi (as in Hebrew Yehudi). Among Muslims, Yahud is generally applied with pejorative connotations, and so a generic label to signify a community became a term that called to attention the wicked behavior of an entire people. The Yahud are called blasphemers and the most hostile of men to the [true] believers (Qur’an 5:64, 5:82 [85]). Neither they (nor

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the Christians) will ever be satisfied unless the Muslims follow their religion (millah) instead of that preached by the Prophet Muhammad (Qur’an 2:120). The blameworthy character of those specified Yahud became an omnipresent theme in Qur’an commentary and exegesis, and beyond that in a wide a wide variety of Muslim literary output. A second term with which Muslim scripture signifies Jews is Banu Isra’il, “the Children of Israel” or “Israelites,” a borrowing from Hebrew B’nei Yisrael. The Qur’anic reference is to the households formed by the progeny of the biblical patriarch Jacob, whose name was changed to Israel (Yisrael) after wrestling (yisra) with a heavenly being (el) (Gen. 32:25–33). The ancient Israelites are thus identified as having been the ancestors of those Jews who denied the legitimacy of the Prophet Muhammad’s mission. For Muslims, there is a lesson in that historic linkage. At times, the biblical Israelites are mentioned favorably, as when they follow the dictates of prophets sent to them by God. But the label “Israelite” also refers to those ancient Jews who turned against these prophets, particularly against the great lawgiver Moses, thereby establishing a pattern of negative behavior that was embraced by their Arabian descendants, the Qaynuqa‘, Nadir, and Qurayzah, as well as the Jews of Khaybar. The Qur’an (2:85) reminds us that God does not give His followers license to choose which of His prophets to heed, nor can they pick their way through the holy book given them and choose certain of God’s words while ignoring others. Referring to the Jewish tribes of Medina and their blameworthy acts, the Prophet not only recalls the transgressions of their biblical ancestors but notes these acts of defiance are amply documented in the Jews’ own scripture, and hence proof of a continuing inclination to defy God’s wishes. The saving grace for those Jews who deny Muhammad’s prophetic vocation is their belief in the one and only Lord of heaven. That clear affirmation of monotheism allows them a possibility of salvation at the Day of Judgment. However, Muslim scripture also maintains that only those few Jews who have fully accepted Islam are to be considered true believers and thus guaranteed an honored place in God’s schema. At times, Banu Isra’il also refers to Christians, as they too are the descendants of Israel’s household. The same is true for the label “People of the Book,” most often a reference to Jews and Christians as recipients of a God-given scripture and also applied later to others, such as Sabaeans and Zoroastrians living under Muslim rule. Criticism of the Jews based on the narratives of the Hebrew Bible is augmented in the Qur’an and subsequent commentary by seeming allusions to passages originating in the New Testament. The Jews are thus accused of having persecuted and even killed their own prophets (because these prophets

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correctly foretold the coming of Jesus; see Matt. 5:12, 23:30– 31; Luke 11:47; Acts 7:52). According to Muslim tradition, these blameworthy actions foreshadowed the Jews’ later response to Muhammad’s mission. As with their denial of Jesus, the Jews in denying Muhammad rejected the very scripture revealed to them. This is not surprising because Jews are given to subverting their holiest book, the Torah (tawrat), either by substituting for God’s word (tabdil) or by deliberately falsifying its clear meaning (tahrif ) (Qur’an 2:75, 174; 4:46 [47]; 5:13 [16], 5:41 [45]). Having gone so far as to kill their own prophets in most ancient times (Qur’an 3:181 [183]), the Jews later plotted the death of Jesus and the persecution of his apostles (as related in John 7:1, 18:12; Acts 9:29, 13:50; 14:2; 20:3, 26:2). We have already noted (in the previous chapter) how, in recounting the life of Muhammad, Muslims accused the Jews of Nadir of scheming to assassinate the Prophet as he sat for a meal prepared by them in their Medinian enclave, a treacherous act that if carried out would have been the ultimate violation of tribal hospitality. Similarly, there are the aforementioned accounts of a vengeful Jewess offering the prophet a dish laced with deadly poison as he celebrated the conquest of Khaybar, the largest and most powerful Jewish oasis in western Arabia. One cannot rule out that these fantastical plots to kill the Prophet represent a literary motif ultimately derived via direct, or, what is perhaps more likely, indirect, knowledge of the New Testament. Or, that more generally, the vast literature of Christian anti-Jewish polemics was a near bottomless trough from which Muslims often drank, presumably with the assistance of Christian converts to Islam. The Qur’an itself refers directly to the polemical encounter between the older monotheistic faiths and chides both Jews and Christians for their antipathy for one another. A particular Jewish claim provoked Christians and Muslims alike: the Jewish concept of the chosen people. Neither could accept that the descendants of Abraham (via Isaac and Jacob) arrogated for themselves an exclusive relationship with God. The quintessential “otherness” of Jews rested then, as now, with their claim to having been selected by God, a theme first articulated in the Abraham story of Genesis and repeated thereafter in the Hebrew Bible and in post-biblical literature. The offspring of Abraham, the first Jew, were thus destined to be as numerous as the stars in Heaven and granted the land of Canaan to settle and possess. The inheritors of Abraham’s patrimony, specified as the line running through his younger son Isaac, and then through Isaac’s younger son Jacob, or, as he was later known, Israel, were bound to God by an everlasting and exclusive covenant. This assertion of God favoring the line of Abraham and his beloved Sarah rankled others.

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The notion the descendants of Israel and their households enjoyed a special relationship with the Almighty was seen by non-Israelites as an expression of false pride, especially as they so often held sway over the docile and politically impotent Jews, a historic development that seemed, for obvious reasons, at odds with the Jews’ claiming of God’s beneficence. No wonder then that the Jews, who label themselves a “blessing upon all nations,” frequently stand accused of inappropriate clannishness, especially by those who are most closely linked to them in belief. To claim that God’s greatest gift was their exclusive inheritance offended Christians and, later, Muslims. Muslims in particular were put off by the arrogance of the oldest monotheist community, especially as Muhammad had reached out to the Jews in good faith, only to be rejected by them, at times scornfully. The Qur’an and later Islamic literature thus respond rather sharply to Jewish representations of exclusivity. Muslim scripture asks that if the Jews were indeed chosen by God, how is it they continuously suffer misfortune. It goes without saying that in their darker moments Jews also pondered why God had forsaken them. Ironically, they explained their plight as did their Muslim antagonists. Jews, ridden with guilt, saw themselves as unworthy of God’s favor because they were insubordinate and lacked belief. Responding to Jewish claims of having been chosen God’s favorite, Christians would seem to have had less room to maneuver. After all, they too embraced the biblical story of Abraham and the transfer of his patrimony to Isaac, a story that continued with Isaac transferring his inheritance to Jacob, the progenitor of the nation called Israel. For Christians as for Jews, the narratives of the Hebrew Bible were sacrosanct, whether in the original language or in some translation. But from an evolving Christian perspective, that holy text and the stories contained therein were merely to prepare monotheists for a second revelation, a gift from God that would supersede the Hebrew Bible and foreshadow a new faith community originating with Jews descended from the ancient Israelites. The Hebrew Bible thus became the Old Testament and the Gospels and associated writings, the New Testament. The differences between the two monotheist communities rested on the Jews’ rejection of Jesus’ sacred status, of the New Testament as sacred text, and of Christian interpretations of the older text, which was said to predict the coming of Jesus and his mission. Muslims, although generally embracing the Israelite past, were not committed to the actual text of the Bible, whether in the Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, or Syriac versions that would have been accessible to Jewish and/or Christian converts to Islam and ultimately made available in some form to all

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interested Muslims. Whatever their biblical learning and however acquired, Muslims, beginning in Muhammad’s time, transmuted ancient Jewish tales into Arabic narratives of their own. At times, the new narrative is created with what seems full knowledge of the original source; on other occasions, it appears the Muslim tale could have been linked to a Jewish text only by someone learned in Jewish sources, presumably a Jewish convert or a Christian turned Muslim who had some knowledge of the Old Testament and post-biblical Jewish writings. There is also the possibility, indeed probability, that Muslims had access to variants of biblical stories that were part and parcel of an oral tradition (see part 1, chapter 2). However, as regards Jewish boasts of being uniquely chosen by God, there can be no doubt the Muslim response was carefully crafted with full knowledge of the Genesis story. Aware of Jewish claims attached to Abraham’s patrimony, the Qur’an declares explicitly that the biblical patriarch was a hanif, meaning a protoMuslim who was neither Jew nor Christian (Qur’an 3:67 [60]). The point of this assertion was to cast doubt on the biblical version, a story presumably well known and discussed among the Muslim faithful beginning with Muhammad’s negative encounter with the Jewish tribes of Medina. Indeed, the story of Abraham is central to the polemical discourse against the Jews. Citing the People of the Book, the Muslim historian and Qur’an exegete Ibn Kathir (d. 1373) reproduces the account of Genesis in an Arabic paraphrase that is remarkably close to the Hebrew original, so much so that we may suppose it is based directly or indirectly on an Arabic translation. Our author then offers a commentary as regards the larger message of the events in question. His tale of Genesis does not revolve around Abraham’s relationship with his younger son Isaac, the offspring of Sarah, but around his eldest son Ishmael, born to the patriarch’s Egyptian concubine. As told in the Hebrew Bible (Gen. 16), the barren Sarah offered Abraham her maidservant Hagar so that he might have the benefit of an heir. Once Ishmael was conceived, Hagar was disrespectful to her childless mistress, causing Sarah to respond harshly, at which point the servant ran off to a spring in the wilderness. An angel sent by God instructs Hagar to return to Abraham’s household. As God has heard of her suffering, she will bear a child with a great future called Ishmael (in Hebrew, Yishmael: “The Lord heeds [your plight]”). Hagar then gave birth to Abraham’s first son. In the Genesis version, the unexpected birth of Isaac when Sarah is ninety years old gives Abraham cause to rejoice, and so he asks God’s blessing for both his sons (Gen. 17). Isaac (although younger) will receive his father’s patrimony and his offspring will give rise to God’s chosen people, the Israelites.

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But Ishmael is also blessed. Though denied his father’s patrimony and the honor of siring the chosen people, he is destined to give rise to exceedingly numerous offspring, among them twelve chieftains (who are later identified in Islamic sources with Muslim rulers of note). The Qur’an offers a gloss to this powerful tale of the Hebrew Bible, in effect telling a new tale that alters the clearly intended meaning of Genesis 17. Going well beyond the biblical text, which portrays Ishmael as a “wild ass of a man at odds with all other [men],” Muslim scripture declares him a prophet the likes of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (the forefathers of the Jewish people). He is also linked with Moses, Aaron, Elisha, and Jonah, as well as David, Solomon, and Job (whom the Muslims count among the prophets of Israel). Unlike post-biblical accounts that are dismissive of Ishmael, who is seen as taking advantage of his aged father’s kindness (and, in one tradition, even plotting the death of Isaac), Muslim sources describe the siblings as equal in all matters but one. Ishmael is destined to be the progenitor of the (northern) Arabs who will become the most favored of God’s people (and not the Israelites and their descendants the Jews). For counted among Ishmael’s Arab offspring are the Qurayshites, the most noble of the (northern) Arab tribesmen; the Hashimites, considered the most virtuous of the Quraysh’s clans; and, most importantly, Muhammad, the greatest Hashimite of all, a prophet without peer among all God’s messengers. Interpreting the biblical account of Ishmael’s blessing with what may be described an act of intellectual dexterity, Muslim polemicists argued that in this instance Jewish scripture also foretold the later mission of Muhammad, the only prophet sent by God with a universal message, that is, a message intended not for prophet’s people alone but for all of humankind (which implied, as a matter of course, Jews and Christians). Utilizing an interpretive artifice common to Jews, Muslim polemicists (perhaps Jewish converts) focused on the Hebrew text of Genesis 17 and in particular the expression bim’od mi’od (17:19), which translates as “exceedingly numerous,” clearly a reference to the fertile nature of Ishmael’s progeny. For Muslim polemicists, “exceedingly numerous” revealed only the surface meaning of the text. With the Hebrew text before them, they ascertained the numerical value of the consonants in bim’od mi’od (BM’D M’D), finding them to be 92 in total. They then pointed out that this number is identical with the numerical value of the consonants in the name Muhammad. Bim’od adds up to 47: B(et) = 2; M(em) = 40; ’A(lef) = 1; and D(alet) = 4. Similalrly, mi’od adds up to 45, for a grand total of 92. As regards Muhammad (MHMD), M(im) = 40; H(a’) = 8; again M(im) = 40; and D(al) = 4, for a total of 92. The legitimacy of Muhammad

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and his mission is thus demonstrated by a mathematically correct, if somewhat esoteric, reading of Jewish scripture. What explains the rather strident tone of Islam’s response to Jews and Judaism, a response of much sharper criticism than that reserved for Christians in Islamic lands? Something seems askew here. After all, Christians were far more numerous than Jews and had potential allies in the form of the neighboring Byzantine state that engaged the Muslims in periodic warfare, particularly along the frontier that separated the Abode of Islam from the heartland of the unbelievers. Why is it that Jews, the most impotent of all the minorities enjoying the protective status of Islam, were singled out for such disparaging comments? What could the Jews have done that merited the rebuke meted out to them by the Muslims in whose midst they dwelled? One would think that the initial anti-Jewish sentiments that were rooted in the tribal politics of Arabia should have disappeared after the Muslims encountered the passive Jews of the conquered lands. In these cases, Jews easily accommodated themselves to Muslim authority. With the passing of decades and then centuries, the early traditions born of Jewish resistance to the Prophet in Arabia should have lost much if not most of their emotive force, particularly in the regions beyond the peninsula that spawned both Islam and the Arabs. As these early anti-Jewish sentiments continued, it is clear the historical memory of the initial encounter between the Prophet and the Jews of Arabia was too firmly fixed among Muslims to lose any of its polemical thrust, even in vastly changed historical circumstances and venues. It was as though the Muslim writers describing Jews and their religion collapsed time and rejected the notion that the Jews they now encountered were different. Wherever they might be, Jews continued to be blamed for rejecting the Prophet’s mission as did their earlier co-religionists, the Jewish tribes of Arabia. In such fashion, the Jews of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, the North African Maghreb, and the like had to bear responsibility for those Medinese Jews who were accused of aligning themselves with Muhammad’s enemies, be it directly or indirectly. How does one explain this curious and, for the Jews, very unwelcome, melding of different places and times, and, linked to that, what was there in the content and transmission of the anti-Jewish polemic that made Muslims living everywhere and in different historical circumstances receptive to it? The answer lies in how the dominant narrative of Jewish perfidy was transmitted. The broadly developed case against the Jews was not confined to obscure documents written by and fully intelligible only to learned Muslim authors. Because the sharp anti-Jewish polemic was already embedded in

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Muslim scripture, Muslim accusations against Jews were destined to be timeless and in constant view, like the sacred text itself. A religious culture with a sacred book that has been revealed at a specific place and time requires the text be subjected to continuous interpretation. How else could God’s word be applied to ever changing conditions and new environments? Every generation of Muslims read and/or recited the Qur’an, combining past and contemporary commentary and thus elaborating on the acknowledged wisdom of previous Muslim readers. As a result, old anti-Jewish sentiments were constantly reviewed and made part of more recent scholarly discussions. These sentiments also made their way into a broad range of Muslim writings that were, technically speaking, not part of the religious canon: histories and anecdotal accounts subsumed by the rubric adab, an Arabic term roughly translated as belles lettres. Moreover, scholars were not the only consumers of anti-Jewish sentiments. The constant exposition of Muslim scripture became an integral part of popular preaching and folklore that filtered down in less technical language to the general populace. As a result, the earliest anti-Jewish sentiments born of political conflict and the religious rejection of God‘s quintessential messenger, events of a seventh-century Arabian environment, became indelibly etched in the historical imagination of all Muslims regardless of time and place. When worthy of mention, Jews were always described as earlier Muslim writers and preachers made them out to be. Throughout the Islamic Middle Ages and beyond, they have been pictured as falsifiers of their own scripture and unreliable partners in commercial or political agreements, just as they had been in the lifetime of Muhammad and before that in the times of Moses and the other Israelite prophets that preceded God’s last messenger. Muhammad’s rupture with the Jews of Medina thus set the tone for all future Muslim attitudes toward Jews. From the very outset of the Prophet’s campaigns in Arabia, the Islamic world had a well-stocked repertoire of antiJewish impressions, some of which stood out in full relief. the jewish resp onse One has to appreciate that at the heart of Muhammad’s encounter with the Jews and indeed of all subsequent encounters between Muslims and Jews was the battle for ownership of a biblical past embraced by both religious communities. Relying on the Qur’an, in which many historic events and persons are shaped by narratives similar to but often at variance with the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic lore, Muslims insisted on reworking Jewish (and also Christian)

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traditions while declaring them part of their own history and worldview. Muslim challenges to core narratives that demanded the allegiance of all Jews had the potential, in given times and places, to occasion a Jewish response, which, if expressed publicly, might possibly have upset the equilibrium of Jewish-Muslim relations. Any formal defense of the Jewish versions of the biblical past and of Jewish custom and practice derived from specifically Jewish understandings of that past could have led to serious repercussions by an offended Muslim officialdom. No wonder, then, that Jews were enjoined by their leadership to tread carefully. Such as it was, the Jewish response to Muslims co-opting the Jewish past tended to be mute and, when stated, always indirect. There were no public disputations between Muslims and Jews as there would be between Christians and Jews in the medieval West; open debates of that sort would have been insulting to Muslims and their religion, especially had the Jews defended themselves and their beliefs vigorously. It goes without saying that the Muslim view of monotheist history and the lessons Muslims derived from such views made Jews living in Islamic lands more than a little nervous. At the least, the Muslim exposition of biblical events and persons compromised the Jews’ own cherished account of the past, a version of history that declared Israel God’s chosen people. As noted, Muslim scripture and subsequent Islamic writings constantly invoked a self-critical Jewish tradition that spoke of the ancient Israelites as “stiff necked” or, as the Muslims put it, “thick hearted,” a testimony to their rebelliousness in biblical times. It then followed ever so naturally that both the Jews who rejected Muhammad and Islam at the time of the Prophet and, as it were, all subsequent Jews in all ages, were made analogues of the ancient Israelites who defied Moses and the other prophets sent by the Almighty to guide them. Because defaming Islam, however broadly interpreted, was a punishable offense, Jewish reaction to Muslim polemics was restricted to apologetic tracts: that is, the defense of the faith for internal Jewish consumption only. As the boundary between polemic and apology is often hazy, a word of explanation is in order. As a rule, polemicists aggressively rally the faithful and pressure a recalcitrant “other.” They expect believers and unbelievers alike to recognize the power of the dominant society and the extended impact of its belief system. As a rule, apologists for the “other” affirm belief when threatened by ideologies and circumstances powerful enough to cause defection to the dominant society in whose midst they dwell—in this case, Jews living in the Abode of Islam. The Jewish response to the Muslims, which was almost always intended

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for Jewish eyes alone, represents a much smaller and more chronologically diffuse literature than the broadly circulated criticism of Jews and Judaism in Islamic tradition. In other words, compared to the veritable ocean of Muslim polemics, we have relatively few apologetic texts written by Jews, and what we do have does not represent Jewish communities everywhere and at all times. We would have to assume that Jews were somewhat reluctant to address openly disparaging remarks directed toward them. In any case, given the ever-present danger of offending Muslim sensibilities, both the subject matter and language of the Jewish responses that we do possess tends to be circumspect. Jewish apologetics are usually written in Hebrew or in JudeoArabic, and are filled with many veiled allusions to biblical and post-biblical texts. As a result, this literature was fully intelligible only to those having knowledge of Jewish languages and steeped in traditional Jewish sources, a kind of encoded writing that prevented most, if not virtually all, Muslims from having access to the innermost Jewish thoughts on Islam. As regards content, the encoded Jewish texts were generally restricted to combating Muslim claims of Muhammad’s prophetic calling and, by implication, the legitimacy of his mission to the Jews. At best, Muhammad is portrayed as a well-intentioned religious zealot; at worst, he is a charlatan claiming divine inspiration. But under no circumstances is he considered a true messenger of God. At all times, the Jewish response to the Muslims is argued deftly and in language that is disguised and deliberately circumspect. In choosing language with which to defend their faith, Jewish apologists intertwined fragments and/or paraphrases of biblical verses, a narrative technique quite common among Jewish authors composing a wide variety of medieval works, both poetry and prose. Generally speaking, a familiar biblical text or close paraphrase thereof provided authors working on all sorts of literary projects with the vocabulary and language to create images and tell extended stories. In many instances, the use of biblical phrases is restricted to literary concerns. But there were also occasions when Jewish authors given the task of defending their faith employed highly allusive references to scripture as part of a complex rhetorical strategy. Caution dictates against overinterpreting sources, as not every passage rich in biblical allusions suggests elaborate explication. On the other hand, we would be mistaken to underestimate or ignore completely the extent to which biblical passages and fragments of passages were subtly employed by clever apologists who stimulated the interpretive skills of Jewish audiences that had been programmed for intricate readings through constant study of the holy text, its exegetical accretions, and the numerous commentaries to which it gave rise.

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The defenders of Judaism could always assume that their learned readers would recognize the fragmented passages, even when they were subtly disguised. Not only would readers be familiar with the complete verse in which the fragments were originally embedded, they would also be thoroughly acquainted with the preceding and succeeding verses and their commentaries. As a result, the apologists could draw reference, albeit indirectly, to a wider body of material. Moreover, texts so created out of fragments of scripture could resonate to still more distant literary echoes, because the final redactors of Hebrew scripture shaped a document that can be and indeed was pored over by traditional readers as the sum of its parts. Religiously inspired readings of passages in what came to be known as the Hebrew Bible often juxtapose distinct segments of the larger text—a work composed by different authors at different times and for different purposes—to discover the meaning of a particular line or two, or, put more correctly, what religiously inspired readers perceived to be the intended meaning. At times, this mode of analysis can yield significant insights, because the Hebrew Bible does indeed comment about itself in a manner that is both deliberate and skillful. Later biblical authors, familiar with earlier holy texts, alluded to them with a certain measure of frequency, creating thereby a type of commentary currently labeled “inner biblical exegesis” or “inner biblical allusion.” In such fashion, texts and fragments of texts, created in specific places and times and commenting about specific situations, were re-used by ambitious authors wishing to impart a different message. And so, scripture was reinterpreted for didactic purposes to suit every generation of readers. In our case, apologists, wary of offending Muslim sensibilities, but also aware that they needed to defend Judaism against Islamic polemics and the dangers of conversion, stretched biblical texts and fragments of texts beyond their original meanings. By alluding to familiar passages, they produced, and with considerable economy of language, a narrative that spoke volumes to the literate Jews of their community, for the latter represented a receptive readership that had been trained to squeeze every drop of nuance from what might have seemed, at first glance, straightforward writing. Such highly coded missives served as a reminder that theirs was the community of the true faith. By referring to mere fragments of biblical passages, Jewish apologists could trigger the imagination of their readers, including potential Jewish converts to Islam. Needless to say, this indirect kind of discourse to combat Muslim claims was a most useful rhetorical device for a small and impotent minority defending itself against a proud and sensitive ruling majority. There would

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have been little if any Muslim reaction to such Jewish pleadings, because only Jews had access to the inner meaning of the apologists’ prose. An exception to this circumspect kind of engagement with Muslim beliefs is Sa‘d ibn Mansur ibn Kammunah’s Tanqih al-abhath li-l-milal al-thalath a treatise that explores beliefs among the three monotheist faiths. Ibn Kammunah, a physician, philosopher, and a pillar of his community in thirteenthcentury Baghdad, was certainly not the first learned Jew to pen a work on comparative religion—note Judah Halevy’s celebrated twelfth-century Kuzari, which, like Ibn Kammunah’s Tanqih, compared Judaism and its fundamental beliefs to Christianity and Islam. But, unlike Halevy’s work— which is penned in Judeo-Arabic, the Arabic language of the Jews, and was later translated into Hebrew for Jews unable to read Arabic even in Hebrew characters—Ibn Kammunah’s treatise was also written in Arabic script and known to Muslim religious authorities who were familiar with at least the broad outlines of the author’s message, if not the complex details of his argument. The Muslim masses were also aware of the work, undoubtedly through hearsay rather than direct contact. One is tempted to speculate that the work would not have appeared in Arabic script were it not for the Mongol conquest of Baghdad and the concurrent end to an Islamic caliphate of some five hundred years. The Mongols, then Buddhists who had not yet converted to Islam, were apparently quite tolerant of Jews and especially Christians, creating thereby a climate for openly expressing thoughts that might otherwise have been couched in somewhat more guarded language. In any case, Ibn Kammunah was not particularly critical of Islamic beliefs, a subject to which he devoted fully half of his text. Quite the opposite, he is always respectful when he speaks of Islam, the Prophet Muhammad, or even of Christians. Nevertheless, citing the Qur’an and referring to learned Muslim tomes and authors, he rejects completely Muslim accusations that the Jews falsify their own religious tradition in order to delegitimize Muhammad, whose future mission is foretold— or so the Muslims claim—in Jewish scripture and sacred writings. The very discussion of Islam by a non-Muslim in a language Muslims could read was sufficient to occasion disturbances among the Muslim rabble. The mobs demanded that the Jew be put to death. Because he was reluctant to be a party to such drastic action, the local Muslim judicial authority was unable to take his proper place in the mosque. Seeing the mood of his Muslim constituents, the Mongol administrator of Baghdad declared that Ibn Kammunah would be silenced with death by fire, but reportedly arranged for him to

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flee the city in a clandestine fashion, whereupon he took up residence with his son, who served the Mongols in the Iraqi town of al-Hillah. With that, Ibn Kammunah disappears from public view. In the wake of the Mongol “sack” of Baghdad and the effective end of a caliphate that had persisted despite many misfortunes for some five hundred years, it is easy to understand why the mob might have been outraged by what they regarded as a challenge to their traditional beliefs.

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Accommodating “Others” Tolerance and Coercion in Medieval Islam

Sharply worded as they are, the negative comments employed by Muslims toward Jews and Judaism carry less theological baggage than anti-Jewish polemics in medieval Europe. Unlike Christian tradition, which held the Jews accountable for the death of Jesus, there were no Islamic accounts that linked the Jews in so dramatic a fashion to Muhammad’s death. Nor were there any Islamic rituals comparable to those of the Christians reenacting the events surrounding the crucifixion. While there are, as we have noted, Muslim traditions alleging that the Jews plotted the death of Muhammad or fed him a poisoned meal that caused him to expire, albeit four years later, Muslim authors are, on the whole, skeptical of the historicity of these accounts. In any case, the alleged killing of the Prophet is not commemorated by Muslims and has been of relatively little if any importance to the actual conduct of Jewish-Muslim relations. When an American statesman declared the modern animus between Israel and the Arab states stemmed from the Jews having killed Muhammad, he may have been informed in some manner of the aforementioned Muslim sources, but in declaring Jews were held culpable for the death of the Prophet, he was more likely relying on memories of his own Christian upbringing. To be sure, Jewish-Christian relations in the medieval West varied from time to time and from region to region, reflecting only too often local economic and social conditions, and the complicated relation between church and crown. The history of medieval European Jewry is not a tale of unrelieved suffering and constant threat of extinction everywhere and at all times. Still, there is a discernable difference between the general condition of the Jews in Islamic lands and the condition of Jews where Christians reigned supreme. Medieval Muslim authorities correctly recognized the Jews as having had a 175

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long and venerable history in territories that comprised the Abode of Islam. The descendants of the ancient Israelites were not thought of as interlopers, as they were often considered in the Latin West. Nor was their survival in the Islamic world dependent on being made a living symbol of continuous humiliation as long as they rejected the true faith. Rather, they shared the same watan or “homeland” with their Muslim neighbors. Medieval Muslims did not consider Jews living among them to be demonic creatures, as they were described in the lands of Christendom; they did not accuse the Jews of killing non-Jewish children so that they may use their innocent blood in baking the unleavened bread consumed by Jews during their Passover festival; nor, for that matter, did they accuse the Jews of poisoning the local wells, or otherwise bearing responsibility for the death of Christians, charges heard in the Latin West. The more recent Muslim representations of demonic Jews that mirror the anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic canards of the Christian world, medieval as well as modern, are just that: oral, written, and artistic representations borrowed from Christians, beginning in the nineteenth century. Aside from their early experiences in Arabia during Muhammad’s ascent to power, there was little in the Jewish experience under medieval Islamic rule to compare with the likes of the periodic Jewish persecution in Europe; with the massive conversions to Christianity in Spain in 1391, and then again in 1492, following the expulsion of its Jewish (and also Muslim) inhabitants; with the riot against and subsequent mass-suicide of the Jews of York in 1190; or with the horrible fate that befell Jewish communities as the Crusaders marched across Europe en route to the Holy Land. Can we then say, on the whole, that Muslims treated Jews with a greater sense of tolerance than did Christians in the Middle Ages, and, related to that, what did medieval Muslims mean when they spoke of “tolerance” as opposed to our notions of the same? As of late, those who live in the liberal democracies of the Western world— as it were a world in which religious belief has been buffeted by secularism if not an outright denial of religious faith—the meaning of “tolerance,” originally indicating “the bearing of a burden” or “the capacity to endure a dangerous substance,” has been expanded to include putting up with actions, beliefs, or peoples one does not like or approve of, or even those one vehemently opposes. One may tolerate heretics even when intolerant of the heresies they espouse. Put somewhat differently, tolerance has come to imply over time the recognition that others are fully entitled to the free expression of their own views and the right to practice their faith and/or politics in accordance with their beliefs, provided that such views and practices do

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not compromise the codes of behavior that are declared the moral bedrock of our own liberal society. More recently, those who claim liberal values have extended the meaning of tolerance still further. They now equate tolerance with an attempt to avoid being judgmental of other cultures. Liberals of this sort are inclined to eschew moral condescension, except regarding the most egregious displays of uncivilized behavior. For example, as a matter of principle, one can accept various practices of courtship and marriage among different elements of our larger and all-embracing liberal culture, but one can hardly be expected to “tolerate” honor killings accepted as normative in other societies and brought to liberal democracies by immigrants from abroad. Or, to choose a more pertinent example, in societies such as ours, one tolerates, indeed at times one even encourages, protest and demonstrations against established authority, but not behavior that imperils the civilities required to maintain proper law and order. This “liberal” ideal of tolerance is the mark of a society that has more or less embraced a live-and-let-live attitude, a view based most recently on a progressive vision of history in which different cultures seek to accommodate one another in an ever-shrinking world— as if the moral guidelines of this emerging world will be in harmony with its economic forces as a matter of course. From this perspective, the highly diverse world of the past will give way to an idealized “global village” in which peoples of varied backgrounds who are spread near and far will be obliged to dwell as if they comprised a single community bound by mutual interests leading to a more secure and better life for all. Whether our world is currently moving in that direction is at best a contested point. Suffice it to say, medieval Muslims considering the “others” in their midst viewed the world through a rather different set of lenses. Responsible scholars attuned to differences that are caused by time and place are likely to note that current definitions of tolerance broaden considerably the semantic field of those Arabic words employed by medieval Muslims when they speak of tolerance. It may seem quaint that some scholars are still concerned with understanding medieval Arabic, especially the technical vocabulary of the times, but if one wishes to truly understand how different cultures perceive the world and one another at any given moment, it is best to determine what words used in common actually convey in the languages of these respective cultures. In classical (as well as modern) Arabic, tolerance is usually expressed by ihtimal, the preferred usage, and/or samhah, samahah and tasamuh. As in English (and other European languages), ihtimal = tolerance is “the act of being able to bear a burden.” For medieval Arabic lexicographers, this included a capacity to absorb annoyance with someone’s insult-

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ing or presumptuous behavior and, by extension, “patience” or “forbearance” with someone or something. By no means does ihtimal imply, as it does to modern Arabic speakers, embracing Western notions of tolerance, treating those with whom one profoundly disagrees or the views they hold (especially unbelievers and their beliefs) with proper respect—that is, without resorting to moral pronouncements about the parties concerned while avoiding, as a matter of good faith, any condescending, insulting, or hurtful language. On the contrary, medieval Muslims had absolute license, if not an obligation, to point out the errors of the unbelievers and did so with predictable regularity. Samhah, tasamuh, and samahah take a rather different route before becoming synonymous with Western notions of tolerance. Based on an Arabic root that conveys “generosity,” the semantic field of these medieval Arabic words was extended to mean “lightening the load (of a legal obligation)” and “acting in an easy and gentle manner” (tasamuh). From there we come to modern Arabic “forbearance” and beyond that to a sense of “tolerance” more closely linked to the Western sense of the word. Hence, the expression “Islam is the tolerant religion (al-hanifiyah al-samahah).” But as Yohanan Friedmann has recently shown in his erudite study, Tolerance and Coercion in Islam (2003), samahah conveyed to medieval readers an altogether different concept. When medieval scholars referred to Islam as al-hanifiyah al-samahah, they meant Islam is the “lenient (or, if you prefer, flexible) religion (din yusr)”; that is, a religion that does not impose excessively arduous practices upon the believers (perhaps as distinct to the stringent demands placed on Jews by their religious authorities, a theme expressed in the Qur’an). As regards leniency or flexibility in Islamic law, one may turn, for example, to the various rules concerning ritual washing, an act required of Muslims before they say their five daily prayers. When Muslims travel in barren regions (as Bedouins often did), sand may be used to replace water. Similarly, when beset by sickness or difficult travel conditions, Muslims are allowed to postpone to the following month the month-long fast of Ramadan, in which they are enjoined to abstain from eating and drinking between sunrise and sunset. One could multiply these examples many times over. The point is: when describing Islam as a religion of samahah, the interpretive fingers of medieval and modern hands are not of equal length. As understood by medieval Muslims, samahah did not signify the toleration of other religions, let alone sympathetic consideration of the beliefs of others, as if all communities were meant to thrive in a free marketplace of ideas. To be sure, there are limitations to any analysis of interfaith relations rooted largely, if not exclusively, in texts written and read mostly by learned

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scholars. Seeking to recover the views of medieval Muslims, Friedmann, like many philologically grounded Islamicists, tends to focus on materials in the Qur’an and its commentaries, legal traditions, and early works of Islamic jurisprudence. He openly admits he is much less concerned with texts that describe how Muslims actually reacted to others who dwelt in their midst. No doubt, some will argue that this treatment of tolerance and coercion, in which he often points to the limits of Islamic tolerance and the loopholes that allow for different forms of coercion, reflects the theoretical concerns of religious scholars rather than the actual conduct of daily relations among the different faith communities. In limiting himself to the sources he has chosen, Friedmann may in fact mislead us into believing that in medieval times— certainly during the formative period of Islamic civilization—the climate toward religious minorities in Islamic lands was less accommodating than it really was or might have been. Doubtless, this meticulously researched and judiciously written book may ruffle a few feathers, if not be considered by some staunch defenders of Islam as demeaning of their faith. They should be cautious in their criticism. Admittedly, Friedmann’s medieval Muslim authorities wrote for an audience of truly learned scholars, but the sum and substance of these medieval discussions, which often express negative attitudes toward faiths other than Islam, was reproduced in more accessible literary texts and filtered down into the general populace through an omnipresent oral tradition and folklore. As previously noted, that latter tradition and folklore seemingly formed the conventional wisdom of the times toward Jews and Judaism. There is then much we can learn about interfaith relations from Tolerance and Coercion in Islam, provided that we pose the kinds of questions that open rather than close scholarly debate. Above all, we are obliged to ask: what does the anti-Jewish bias, so well defined and so ubiquitous among Muslims, reveal about daily contacts and patterns of interfaith behavior in medieval times? Put somewhat differently, did the anti-Jewish bias expressed in literary texts and oral traditions adversely affect relations between Jews and Muslims, and, if so, how was this adverse relationship perceived by both parties? For example, can we really speak of Muslim authorities coercing Jews to compromise their beliefs and time-honored practices? Put most dramatically, did Jews feel any significant pressure to abandon their faith, even though early on Islamic law offered them (and also Christians) the status of protected minorities? Broadly speaking, the Qur’an was understood to prohibit pressuring other faiths to convert when it states: “There is no coercion in religion (la ikraha fi-l-din)” (2:26), an injunction that remains binding on Muslims until

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this very day. As forced conversion was, in fact, extremely rare, it never was in the Middle Ages nor is it now an overriding and continuous concern for Jews in the abode of the believers. Interestingly enough, the Qur’anic pronouncement “There no coercion in religion” was intended at first for Muhammad’s polytheist opponents and at a time when the newly declared Prophet was in no position to impose his faith on his idolatrous Meccan kinsmen. It was, in effect, a concession to the political realities of the moment. However, the revealed statement was subsequently applied to monotheists who refused to accept the legitimacy of the Prophet’s mission, namely Jews and Christians. Other verses quoted by modern Muslim scholars to stress the inherent toleration of Islam, especially by Muslims addressing a Western world fearing militant Islamic revival, are Qur’an 109:1–6, the surah titled “The Unbelievers (al-kafirun).” The text reads: “O Ye unbelievers: (1) I do not worship what you worship. (2) Nor do you worship what I worship. (3) Nor do I worship what you worshiped in the past. (4) Nor do you worship what I worship. (5) You have your religion (din) and I have mine.” (6)

These verses are currently cited to exemplify a live-and-let-live attitude that Islam allegedly has always called for with regard to other religions. Certainly, taken at face value, a modern reader could easily conclude that Muslim scripture, at least in this surah, speaks to a kind of tolerance trumpeted by liberal forces in the democratic societies of the West. The surah was in fact cited by a leading Muslim spokesman shortly after the events of 9/11 in an attempt to promote Islam as a tolerant religion and so defuse the highly negative backlash against Americans of the Islamic faith. But these verses have a medieval context and also an extensive medieval commentary that offers a rather different gloss on what Qur’an 109:1– 6 meant at an earlier time and in a different world. Muslim and Western scholars are agreed that these verses were originally uttered at a very early stage of the Prophet’s career, at a time when he felt it necessary to establish a safe space for himself in an environment that was anything but sympathetic to his religious views; namely, the beginning of his mission in polytheist Mecca. Some medieval commentators link the surah with the so-called “Satanic Verses,” an understanding of Qur’anic passages in which the Prophet extols the virtues of pagan goddesses (like 109:1–6, an

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apparent attempt to establish a less hostile environment for himself and his followers at the earliest the stage of his mission). Needless to say, all these verses, particularly the seemingly favorable references to the goddesses, troubled Muslim commentators, as they understood only too clearly that in these instances divine revelation seemed to compromise belief in the one and only God. Because the verses were in fact spoken by Muhammad and were thus God’s word revealed to his Prophet, they could hardly be removed from the holy text; but they could be subjected to inventive interpretation. The references to the goddesses were indeed uttered by Muhammad but only because Satan had clouded his mind, hence the designation “Satanic Verses.” All Muslims reading these seemingly incongruous lines were thus able to perceive that the glowing reference to the goddesses did not accurately reflect Allah’s true message delivered through his Prophet, but rather that of the meddling Satan. “The Unbelievers,” also a problematic revelation, was treated in a different fashion by Muslim authorities. As with the “Satanic Verses,” they recognized the conciliatory thrust of the Muhammad’s pronouncement, but, as surah 109 did not actually extol the virtues of idols, they chose a rather different tack to negate its evident meaning. They argued this conciliatory statement was contradicted by virtually all other subsequent revelations, and so they regarded it as an authentic revelation, but one that was abrogated (mansukh) by the Prophet’s later utterances, a reference to any number of verses that directly or indirectly enjoin Muslims to turn and give battle against the unbelieving polytheists. The hermeneutic principle in which the message of later surahs abrogated earlier revelations (nasikh mansukh) was an accepted technique of medieval Qur’an commentary. In such fashion, the early prohibition against praying while intoxicated was later extended to a total prohibition against imbibing stimulants. How might applying the principle of abrogation to “The Unbelievers,” particularly the verse “You have your religion and I have mine,” have affected, if at all, subsequent Muslim attitudes and behavior toward Jews? Jews may have denied the Prophet’s legitimacy and rejected his mission, but, as did the Muslims, they believed in the one true God. In that sense, the original verses of “The Unbelievers” could hardly have referred to them in the same way that it spoke of the idol-worshiping Meccans. Once again, Muslim commentators showed their interpretive dexterity. While originally signifying polytheists who would not accept monotheism, the unbelievers were later understood to include those blameworthy Jews of ancient times who had rejected their own prophets and indeed killed them. It referred as well to their descendants, the Jews who rejected Muhammad

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and his mission. However current exegetes wish to interpret “You have your religion and I have mine,” the verse hardly signified to medieval Muslims a blanket acceptance of others and their religious views and behavior, including monotheists who deliberately turned against their own tradition as in the past and deliberately rejected Muhammad and his message. medieval isl amic governance and the jews Like the concept and praxis of tolerance, the structures of governance in the medieval Islamic world should not be confused with that of modern times. Above all, we must be completely aware that the forms of government all too familiar to us and, related to that, the modern notion of citizenship (which theoretically might include non-Muslims) did not apply to the Islamic Near East before the encroachment of Western ideas and political influence in the nineteenth century. Today, whether in Europe or the Near East, the structure governing all regimes is the nation-state. In the Arab world, such states are usually expressed by ummah, the word originally understood by medieval Muslims as meaning religious community, with particular reference to the community first created by the Prophet. The term watan, which today broadly refers to “nation,” is a borrowing from classical Arabic, where the word generally denotes “native abode,” usually in a geographically restricted sense, such as a tribal area to be defended in battle or the neighborhood of a city or town. There is also dawlah, the modern word for “state,” which at first meant “a turn of fortune” and, by extension, “turn at rule.” Only later in the Middle Ages (ca. tenth century CE) did it signify a “ruling authority,” but that understanding of dawlah is a far cry from the concept of the modern nation-state. The very notion of a political state defined by geographical borders and a citizenry united by national identity and thus given to generally common purpose has no roots in the premodern Near East. More important yet, it has no foundation in traditional Islamic culture. In fact, there was no word in Arabic to denote the very concept of “state” until some two hundred fifty years after the rise of Islam. Still, for all intents and purposes, the polities that ruled the Abode of Islam for those two hundred fifty years functioned in many respects as does a state. Early on, the Muslim ruling authority had the official recognition of its constituents and its enemies; it controlled large swathes of territory; it administered justice through an appointed judiciary; it collected taxes; and it protected shifting borders with professional armies aligned in one way or another with the caliphs ruling the ummah—all this

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before Muslims even articulated the very notion of the state. To the extent that one referred to a ruling authority, it was to a dynastic line or a tribal configuration rather than a polity with a sense of “patria.” At no point in the Middle Ages, or indeed before the nineteenth century, could a Muslim ruling authority be defined as a country with an identifiable citizenry, as one speaks today of France and the French, or of Germany and the Germans. Indeed, the term in Arabic for citizen (muwatin) is a creation of the twentieth century. There are medieval words in Arabic to denote association in groups, but none convey the sense of rights and responsibilities that go along with citizenship in modern democratic nation-states. As we noted earlier, the ideological cement that held medieval Islamic societies together was loyalty compelled by the Islamic religion, or, to be more precise, a loyalty to embrace Muslim ideas and practices. In that theoretical sense, all Muslims belonged to the sum of all Muslim societies, the ummah or community of Islam. If there was no nation-state or concept of citizenship in medieval Islamic times, how did the ruling authorities accommodate the “other”; what was the status of Jews and other non-Muslims who dwelled in Islamic lands? Keep in mind that the native population in the vast territories conquered by Muslim armies initially outnumbered the Muslim conquerors many times over. It may have been centuries after the onset of Islamic rule before there was a decisive tilt in favor of the new faith. If one includes the massive communities of Christians who still held to their faith in the early Middle Ages, we are not speaking of a small non-Muslim minority as we do today, when the Muslims of the Arab states, Turkey, and Iran represent well over 90 percent of the total population of the Near East and North Africa. It took centuries before the ongoing process of conversion decisively shifted the demographic balance in favor of the Muslims, those of the faithful who emerged from the Arabian peninsula together with the early converts who joined the Arabian Muslims in the burgeoning Islamic ummah. As most of the conquered peoples did not initially convert to the new faith en masse—be they Jew, Christian, Zoroastrian, and the like—Muslims needed a formula to govern the indigenous population that capitulated to Islamic rule. Muslims declared that those among the conquered peoples who had a revealed scripture to be ahl al-dhimmah , or “dhimmis,” that is, a protected minority. In return for obeying the Muslim authorities, Jews and Christians alike were permitted to retain their property, to control the internal affairs of their own communities, and were allowed to hold basic religious beliefs as they wished, while at the same time they were protected from physical harm. Most important, there was to be no danger of being coerced

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into converting to Islam. For Jews, this last provision was a welcome relief from the dangers they experienced under Christian Byzantine rule and at times in the Latin West. Ordinarily, their status did not rest with the whims or needs of any local rulers as in Christian Europe; their protection was guaranteed by universally recognized Islamic law. There was, however, a reverse side to this seeming expression of tolerance. Jews as did Christians were slated to suffer from discriminatory Muslim legislation that imposed heavy taxes upon them, especially the debilitating poll tax ( jizyah) that often sent Jewish communities scurrying about to raise the necessary funds. They were denied the opportunity to serve in the Muslim military; they were forced to wear distinctive clothing that marked them as Jews (and in the case of Christians as believers in Christ); they could not call attention to their religious services in public; they could not erect new synagogues (nor could Christians build new churches); and, more generally, they had to be conscious of not offending Muslim sensibilities in any way. These regulations were subsumed in what has come to be known as the “Covenant of ‘Umar,” so named because it was allegedly the caliph ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab (d. 644) who formulated the legislation. In truth, the history of these legislative ordinances is more extended and complex. The anti-Jewish edicts, which were actually vestiges of earlier anti-Jewish Byzantine and Sasanian legislation, were rarely invoked; and when invoked, they were seldom applied with rigor. To be sure, there were individual occasions when medieval Jewish communities in the lands of Islam felt the burden of oppression under Muslim rule, as in the periods of the Mamluks (thirteenth to sixteenth centuries) in Egypt and Syria; the Almoravids (eleventh to twelfth centuries) and Almohads (twelfth to thirteenth centuries) in Islamic Spain; or, for a briefer moment, under the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim (eleventh century). But these were, by and large, unusual circumstances. the problem of conversion to isl am Given the dictates of Islamic law that allowed Jews, as a protected minority, to observe their faith and maintain their communal leadership, organized large-scale attempts at forced conversion were rare in the Middle Ages. And yet, there was always concern that widespread anti-Jewish attitudes, repressive measures, the burden of taxation heavier than that of the Muslims, and, not least, admiration of Muslim triumphs might induce some of the chosen people to abandon their faith. We have no evidence of significant conversion, let alone persistent declarations of alarm at the potential for the kind

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of massive defections that Jews would suffer in Christian Spain during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Nevertheless, Jews embraced Islam even at times when the ruling authorities displayed a relatively tolerant attitude toward them. Although we know little about the circumstances of unforced conversion, particularly during the first Islamic centuries, we can imagine various reasons why some Jews might have abandoned their faith in favor of Islam. At first glance, the economic advantages of conversion would have been selfevident. By accepting Islam, Jews would be relieved of paying the burdensome jizyah and the occasional extra taxes imposed on the protected minorities when Muslim rulers found themselves strapped for funds. In addition, the similarities between Islam and Judaism were far greater than the differences that separated Jews from their Christian neighbors. Unlike the Christians, who believed in the divinity of Christ, Muslims were regarded by Jews as genuine monotheists. Moreover, Muslim practices as regards prayer, fasting, ritual cleanliness, and dietary restrictions were not strange to Jewish converts. Above all, Muslims embraced the biblical past and revered the ancient prophets and kings of the Israelites as part of their own history and as proper models for behavior. Some converts might have argued that by submitting to Islam they were merely continuing to maintain long-held beliefs and practices of their own, albeit with modifications, some of which were less stringent than those demanded of Jews. By acknowledging Muhammad as the Messenger of the One and Only God, they were simply adding still another prophet to the long list of prophets they revered. In effect, the early converts could have seen themselves not as antagonistic to the faith they abandoned but as taking the final step now that their faith had reached its most sublime manifestation in the form of Islam. This impression might have been enforced by the apparent ease with which Muslim conquerors acquired territories during the formative centuries of their rule, an act of providence that could be interpreted as confirmation of the truth Muslims proclaimed. The social dynamics of conversion are more difficult to gauge. Here we are virtually without hard or even suggestive evidence. One thing is certain: the process of conversion would have been much different for the Jews of Islam than it was in the liberal Western world in modern times. With the emancipation of European Jewry, beginning at the end of the eighteenth century, individual Jews in Great Britain and the Continent slowly began to change traditional names, undergo baptism when necessary, register themselves as Christians, join established churches, take gentile spouses, and assume for

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themselves and their families the dress, customs, and mores of the dominant Christian culture. With advances in plastic surgery, Jews were also able to alter what was considered a prominent feature of Jewish physiognomy. Similarly, hair straightener and peroxide have completed the process of changing unwanted physical appearances. With full command of the native language and speaking without any traces of what may be considered an inflected Jewish dialect, former Jews and more so their descendants could now move about the gentile world with relative ease, if not always total acceptance. That process of becoming Christian in the enlightened countries of the West was without precedent in the world of medieval Islam because in the latter milieu one did not live as an individual, whether Jewish, Muslim, or Christian, but as part of a series of extended communities. Social organization began with immediate blood relatives and then extended to more inclusive family groups, and occupational and neighborhood associations (often the two were one and the same), each somewhat self-contained and demanding allegiance from its constituents. The conversion of entire Jewish communities would have been another matter, as it would have maintained the social and economic equilibrium required of an easy transition to the new faith. There is no evidence, however, that such mass conversions were the norm among the Jews of Islam. Conversion was, for the most part, a matter of individual choice. Individuals wishing to become Muslims had an easier time of it in the earliest Muslim community, the ummah founded by the Prophet Muhammad. Small in numbers, and facing stiff opposition, the ummah, seeking desperately to increase its strength, accepted individual converts and gave them standing equal (or near equal) to that of many established members. A number of Jews from Medina and parts of the Arabian Peninsula were said to have been among the new Muslims, both before and shortly after the Prophet’s death. The early Jewish converts are regarded by medieval and modern authors as having been conduits of information on Jewish beliefs and practices for Muhammad and the Muslims, a not unreasonable assumption, although, as we have seen, the extent of the converts’ Jewish learning and the precise nature of their observance of Jewish ritual remains open to conjecture. We know little of the personal lives of these converts; most are garbed with legendary credentials, others may in fact be largely inventions by later Muslim writers seeking to legitimize or delegitimize Jewish cultural artifacts absorbed by Muslim tradition. Casting doubt on the Jewish transmitters was sufficient to discredit the substance of the Jewish materials they transmitted.

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Arguably, the most ubiquitous of these freshly minted Muslims was Ka‘b al-Ahbar, said to have been a Jew of Yemenite origins who converted to Islam in Medina and who then served the caliph ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab, whom he advised on all matters Jewish. What better source to validate the legitimacy of the Prophet and of Islam than a learned Jewish rabbi who acquired the truth of Muhammad’s coming by studying Jewish sacred writings? Even then, there were those who were suspicious of Ka‘b’s Muslim credentials and the authenticity of the biblical accounts attributed to him. In one well-quoted story, he was reprimanded by ‘Umar for favoring Jewish tradition when he advised the caliph to build his mosque at a particular location on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. Ka‘b stood accused of suggesting that the mosque be built below a rock made famous in numerous Jewish legends. This was the very place where Abraham was to have sacrificed Isaac and where the Jewish temples stood. By erecting the mosque there, Muslims praying in the mosque would have oriented their prayer to the site of the destroyed Jewish temples as well as toward Mecca, thereby calling to attention the sacred status of the Temple Mount for Jews. To avoid any confusion, the caliph chose instead to build his mosque at a place beyond the rock. The account, like many others of this sort, is likely a later invention to discredit ‘Umar’s Jewish advisor, but it speaks more broadly to Muslim sensitivity about accepting elements of Jewish tradition and the sincerity of Jewish converts to Islam. A reliable convert for Muslims was reportedly ‘Abdallah ibn Salam, who had been a member of the Banu Qaynuqa‘, one of the Jewish tribes that had taken up arms against the Prophet. Like Ka‘b, he reportedly recognized the legitimacy of the Prophet as foretold in Jewish tradition, and so ‘Abdallah tested Muhammad to confirm that he was indeed the Messenger chosen by God mentioned in Jewish sources. The story as told may very well contain a kernel of historical truth, but readers should be advised that it represents a variation of a well-known narrative about all sorts of individuals probing and then recognizing the signs of Muhammad’s prophetic credentials, including a number of Christian monks. As did learned Jews, Christians were also said to have recognized the validity of Muhammad’s calling. Like the Jews, they did so through continuous and informed readings of their own texts, ancient sources that contained the signs of the Prophet’s predicted arrival. Having verified the truth of Muhammad’s prophetic vocation, ‘Abdallah ibn Salam sought to protect God’s messenger from the scheming of his former co-religionists. As a result, Muslim tradition has it that Muhammad guaranteed ‘Abdallah a place in Paradise. But even so stalwart a convert to Islam who had been fully accepted within the early Islamic community could

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not escape the stigma of his Jewish origins when his career was viewed by later Muslim authors. That negative attitude to Jewish converts is reflected in a pithy Muslim saying that maintains it takes forty years, that is, a full generation, before a Jewish convert can be a fully trustworthy member of the all-embracing Islamic community. One notes in this respect that the Almohads, an Islamic dynasty that called for the forced conversion of the Jews, were suspicious that many of these converts were in fact crypto-Jews. And so, Muslim authorities briefly prohibited Jewish converts from marrying outside their own community, and, despite formally submitting to Islam, the former Jews and their women folk were subjected to degrading regulations. Such suspicions of Jewish converts in Islamic Spain would find a parallel in the same region two hundred years and more afterward, during the Christian ascendancy in the Iberian peninsula. During the late-fourteenth through mid-sixteenth centuries, massive numbers of Jews, known as “conversos” or “marranos,” accepted Christianity in Spain and Portugal. But they were soon subjected to an inquisition led by churchmen who feared the “new Christians” remained secretly Jewish (true in certain instances as in the Islamic world) and/or that the converts would undermine the genuine Christian faith and pollute the blood of the true believers. Despite being well situated in Spanish and Portuguese society, or perhaps because they had prospered and risen to positions of prominence, many converts fell victim to the intolerance of the moment. Even in the best of circumstances, rapid vertical mobility, as in the current Western world, or even in Iberia before the inquisition, was rarely if ever smooth for Jewish converts in the Near East and North Africa—less so, to be sure, for those who retained their faith. Once the Islamic conquest was well advanced, Muslim acceptance of the individual stranger on equal footing within society, however widely or narrowly that society was defined, tended to be a long and drawn out process. The exceptions were individuals serving in the military or government service, or those who had become Muslim scholars and were looked after by the learned establishment. Jews were denied by law the right to take up arms in defense of Islam, and there is little in their background that would have made Jewish converts—who, by submitting to the true faith, became technically eligible to serve—proper material for the Muslim armed forces. Unlike early Christian converts who experienced combat in the employ of the Byzantines, or Persian contingents who originally served their Sasanian masters, or fierce Turks and Iranians brought as slaves from the distant east, the Jews of Islamic lands had been the docile subjects of whomsoever ruled them and for centuries. But what of

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government service; was this path an avenue for rapid advancement? Individual Jewish and Christian converts are indeed found in the governing bodies of the Islamic state. There was a particular logic to employing former Jews and Christians, and at certain times even those monotheists who retained their Jewish and Christian affiliation. As individuals with no political constituencies to back them, the converts were totally dependent on those whom they served and thus were deemed by their Muslim patrons as suitably loyal clients. For former Jews with proper administrative skills, the government bureaucracy was an avenue for advancement and success. But as with all such positions, the individual office holder was at the mercy of his patron and the political vicissitudes of the moment. A notable case is that of Ya‘qub ibn Killis (d. 991). Born in tenth-century Baghdad, he lived for some time in Syria-Palestine. After some major business misfortune, he took up residence in Egypt where he became economic and political consultant to the head of state, the former public executioner, a black of slave origins named Kafur. Some time later, Ibn Killis was made head of the financial administration. With his career in ascendancy, he converted to Islam, a prerequisite for holding the highest position in the government, that of vizier. However, the current vizier, the crafty Ibn al-Furat, would not give way. Following the death of Ibn Killis’s patron, the vizier had the ambitious Jewish convert and potential rival imprisoned. The ever-resourceful Ibn Killis then escaped to Tunisia, where he placed himself at the service of the newly established Fatimid rulers, assuming the important responsibility for collecting taxes and reforming the financial administration. Thanks to his efforts, the Fatimid state prospered and Ibn Killis became a valued advisor to the ruler al-Mu‘izz and his successor al-‘Aziz. With the expansion of the Fatimid rule eastward, a move encouraged and reportedly planned by Ibn Killis, he was appointed vizier. But that exalted position only made Ibn Killis more vulnerable to court intrigue. He was dismissed, imprisoned, and reinstated, all within a short period of time. He continued in his post as vizier until his death eight years later. There are other instances of Jewish converts serving in the administration of the state, but the extent of this phenomenon cannot be gauged. Nor do we have any idea of whether it was usual for Jews who did not convert to serve at the lower echelons of the administration, as did Ibn Killis. It is well known that the Muslim state apparatus made extensive use of non-Muslim administrators. In the first decades following the initial Muslim conquest, the government bureaucracies were staffed almost entirely by Christians and Zoroastrians who had been in the employ of the Byzantine and Sasanian monarchs; it

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was only with the reforms the caliph ‘Abd al-Malik (ca. 685) some fifty years after the original Arab incursions that Arabic became the official language of administration. But that did not dissuade the bureaucrats. After reportedly urinating in the caliph’s inkwells to show their displeasure, they mastered Arabic and continued to toil in the administration of the state. Over the centuries, many who served their Muslim masters no doubt converted to Islam; they could not help but notice that major offices were invariably held by Muslims. Multicultural Spain may be considered, however, somewhat of an exception. The quintessential example of a Jew gaining high office there was the career trajectory of the gifted Isma‘il ibn Yusuf ibn Naghrela, better known among his co-religionists as Samuel Ha-Nagid (993–1055). A Cordoban learned in Arabic and the Qur’an as well as a leading authority on Jewish law, and a poet of considerable merit, Samuel was a prominent figure in the Jewish community. Because of his skill in composing Arabic, he received an appointment from Granada’s Muslim ruler, whom he served as tax collector, assistant to the vizier, and, ultimately as vizier, the person closest to the head of state. More remarkable yet, Samuel reportedly became commander of the Muslim army at a time of continuous fighting, a source of great pride to the local Jewish community; the many victories credited to him were regarded by the Jews of Granada as triumphs of their people as well as those of Granada’s rulers. What is not clear is whether Samuel actually planned and oversaw the military aspects of these campaigns, was merely the political “commissar” of the armed forces, and/or the beneficiary of self-promotion. His poetry serves as the pivotal source for his military exploits. Readers can draw their own conclusions as to whether in this case these poems should be treated as trustworthy historical evidence. In any case, the ability of a widely acclaimed Jewish luminary to reach such high rank within a Muslim government has to be regarded as unusual. Equally noteworthy was Samuel’s boldness in allegedly penning a treatise (the authorship is disputed) against the anti-Jewish and anti-Christian polemics of his Muslim contemporary, Ibn Hazm. The latter, a disgraced government functionary and rather contentious individual, who, having turned to a life of scholarship and letters, was outraged at the prominent unbeliever’s affront to the true faith. Although unable to obtain a copy of Samuel’s work, he learned of its arguments indirectly, and responded with a treatise of his own to refute its claims. At the same time, he inveighed against fellow Muslims who showed reverence for Jewish scripture. The epilogue of Ibn Hazm’s polemic threatens Spain’s Muslim rulers with divine punishment for having compromised the hegemony of Islam by allowing nonbelievers a status

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comparable to that of the true believers. No doubt he had the influential Ibn Naghrela in mind. There was also the possibility of individual converts finding a place within the religious establishment that welcomed and, perhaps more to the point, sustained students and scholars from all walks of life with what amounted to an endless subvention. A career in religious scholarship required as a matter of course substantive learning in what Muslims called the religious sciences: the Qur’an and its varied commentaries; law; jurisprudence; traditions literature, theology, and the like (see part 2, chapter 11). One may assume individuals of this sort embraced Islam out of conviction and not convenience, but unfortunately we know of few such converts and the paths by which they became Muslims. It may well be that there were not many Jews who traveled this route. What is clear is that some illustrative figures of this sort not only rejected their former faith but penned polemical treatises against Judaism, none more biting than that of Samaw‘al al-Maghribi. Born in twelfth-century Baghdad as Samuel Ben Judah, he converted to Islam around the age of forty, a dozen years or so before his death. A man of outstanding intellect with knowledge of mathematics and medicine—like many Jewish doctors, he served as a physician to leading Muslim dignitaries—he claimed to have discovered the true faith through rational arguments after having first experienced visions of his namesake, the famous biblical prophet, and of Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam. His notoriety stems from having penned a biting treatise against his former religion. The Ifham al-Yahud (“Silencing the Jews”) appears in two versions, one the original, the second an expanded text to counter a Jewish critic whose veiled tongue-in-cheek response to the original Ifham was fully noted by the learned Jewish convert. In both versions of the Ifham, al-Maghribi endorses the entire litany of anti-Jewish polemics that were long common to Muslims beginning with the Qur’an itself. The Jews thus stand accused of embracing a falsely transmitted scripture and of falsifying whatever genuine original fragments were preserved. Post-biblical innovations of the rabbis (the Oral Law), a source of friction between Muhammad and the Jews of Medina, are regarded by the author as distorting the true laws of Moses (the Written Law), statutes revealed through a genuine revelation and therefore binding in its time. Jewish institutions and practices linked to rabbinic Judaism and observed by the Jews of the Islamic world are declared by al-Maghribi as inventions of the human mind and not divinely inspired. One can speculate that the author, who was learned in Jewish matters, was probably familiar with the many self-critical and even self-mocking rabbinic

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traditions that speak to the tendentiousness of their Oral Law but which nevertheless maintain that the rabbis’ rulings were needed to preserve the community and its faith. Whatever the case, al-Maghribi, displaying the same skepticism as the rabbis, draws a rather different conclusion; he denies the efficacy of all contemporaneous Jewish law and tradition. Ironically, a similar form of skepticism was applied by Muslim scholars to their own oral tradition, and, as did the rabbis, they set such doubts aside in favor of the community’s welfare. Needless to say, the author makes no mention of any such reservations concerning Islamic tradition. Other Jewish converts who had become part of the Islamic religious establishment also wrote disparagingly of their former faith. In such fashion, they resemble some learned Jews who converted to Christianity in medieval Europe and served the interests of the church. For Jews converting to Islam who were not figures at court or positioned within the religious establishment, there were questions of social space. Although highly interactive with the rest of Islamic society, Jews tended to congregate in circumscribed areas. As religious law prohibited travel on the Sabbath, the religious festivals, and the high holy days, the entire community had to be settled within walking distance of their synagogue, which also served as a place of learning, the seat of a communal court, an office housing communal services, and not the least a place for social gathering. Unlike the modern nation-state, medieval Islamic polities made no effort to provide the fullest range of social and charitable services. Among urban Muslims, charity was largely an individual act; among tribesmen, it was the responsibility of blood kin. In contrast, the Jewish community carefully regulated all aspects of social services, taking into full account the plight of the hungry, the ill clothed, widows, orphans, and the like. Individual Jews who did not enjoy the patronage of non-Jews and who voluntarily removed themselves from the community by converting to Islam ran the risk of social isolation, and in some circumstances even economic misfortune. Needless to say, the question of such risks would have been rendered mute if entire Jewish communities converted to Islam en masse, as was the case among certain Christians. But as we pointed out, there is no evidence of that happening. How then could an ordinary Jewish convert to Islam go on with life? According to Jewish tradition, the act of conversion signals an end to all connection with the Jewish community. The relatives of the convert are enjoined to observe the traditional period of mourning that is reserved for the loss of a loved one in the immediate family, as if the convert were in fact dead and all living links to the survivors had been severed. Are we to imagine that this

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really happened? Mourning for a close relative that had abandoned the faith is one thing; cutting off all contact is another. How would the individual convert react to changed circumstances, especially given fairly regimented patterns of settlement, the intricate network of social and occupational contacts, and, above all, the need for honored space within a recognized local community? Participation in the transcendent Islamic ummah, the community that in theory embraced all Muslims, was not sufficient to serve the convert’s needs for social space. It is not likely that the convert without court connections or a place in the religious establishment could find that space in a typical Muslim urban quarter or rural village in which most of the inhabitants were linked to one another by ties of kinship, occupation, or commonly shared history. Even in modern Europe, many Jewish converts seeking social space originally traveled in circles with other converts, an environment they found mutually comforting. Moreover, it is hard to believe Jewish converts in Islamic lands who wished to remain in contact with their kin were summarily or completely cut off from them in all cases. For example, what would have happened to lucrative business arrangements when one or more of the parties abandoned the faith of his forefathers? In all likelihood, the process of individual conversion was extremely complex among the Jews of Islamic lands. One can imagine there were converted Jews who still felt close ties to their brethren, even a sense of ideological connection, for as we previously suggested Islam might have seemed to them an extension of their former religion and the most sublime form of monotheism. Unfortunately, we know so little of Jews converting to Islam. Even the Cairo Geniza, a treasure trove of direct testimony from the medieval Jewish community, more than three centuries of letters and documents from communities throughout the Mediterranean region and beyond, sheds all too little light on these matters. One might then wish to draw three highly tentative conclusions. First, in discussing quotidian life, Jews did not, as a rule, wish to hang their dirty linen in public, and no linen was more soiled than signifying that a loved one was lost to the faith. Second, as a rule, Jews managed to resist the impulse to convert. Third, the benefits of individual conversion for those Jews who did not traffic in government circles or the world of Islamic scholarship were not all that enticing, as ordinarily Jewish life in the Islamic Middle Ages was predictably safe if not always secure—that is, as long as Jews recognized their place.

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Medieval Jewry in the Orbit of Islam

How the cumulative weight of anti-Jewish attitudes and legislation affected day-to-day relations between Jews and Muslims is a question that cannot be answered with absolute certainty because there is little material from the Muslim side that directly addresses that question. We do know Muslim authorities were more often than not lax in invoking anti-Jewish legislation. But even in those periods when Muslim authorities were most benign in their treatment of Jews, the weight of Muslim tradition, with its anti-Jewish thrust, must have had a subliminal effect on Muslim sentiments. The continuous retelling of extremely popular stories that placed Jews in an unfavorable light would have created a mental set that could produce rigid postures if and when the self-confidence of a normally triumphant Muslim society was shaken. That would have been particularly true at those rare times when Muslims were forced to contend with outside forces that were seen as threatening, if not actually disturbing, the equilibrium of traditional Islamic society—forces such as the medieval Crusaders, the Mongols, and more recently the imperialist West and the Jewish state of Israel. In such disturbing circumstances, there was bound to be a hardening of religious attitudes and, with that, a rejection of tolerance and respect for the “other.” The periodic revival of a stringent and thus more “authentic” form of Islam is often linked to what revivalists perceive as egregious Muslim failures. Allowing self-aggrandizing political regimes at the expense of a unified ummah and the inability of Muslims to maintain traditional standards of religious belief and observance have always been seen as hindering Muslim polities when they attempt to stanch unbelief from within and the penetration of unbelievers from beyond. The expression of a hardened form of Islamic revival with its emphasis on religious insularity was not typical, however, of Islam’s rela194

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tions with the other faith communities throughout the Middle Ages, the Jews included. There were many times in the long history of Islam when Muslims brimming with confidence were fruitfully engaged with the minorities living among them and also with the world beyond the Abode of Islam. This engagement covered all aspects of daily life, cultural, economic, and scientific. Needless to say, the circumstances in which medieval Jews found themselves varied from place to place and time to time. Leaving Islamic tradition aside, what do we really know about the long history of Jews living in Islamic lands? Jews as a living people are at best shadowy figures in the pages of Muslim chronicles, geographical writings, and a broad range of literary sources that defy classification by genre. Aside from Muhammad’s early and sustained conflict with the Jewish tribes of Arabia—as we have seen an elaborate story that Muslim authors relate in considerable detail and with much animosity—there is little mention of contemporaneous Jews or patterns of Jewish life. From the Muslim side, we know almost nothing of Jewish communities situated beyond Arabia, whether in rural areas and small towns, or, as increasingly became the case, as part of the diverse urban environments to which Jews migrated in great numbers around the ninth century CE. We would hardly know, based on Muslim sources alone, that there was in fact a Jewish community of any consequence, let alone vitality, in the greatest Muslim cities and in many other locations in the lands of Islam. Nor do Muslim sources speak in detail about daily contacts among Jews and Muslims, or of the more formal relations between representatives of the Jewish minority and the Muslim authorities. Based on Muslim sources alone, we would have no idea of the extent to which the authorities, for their own narrowly defined purposes, intervened in the actual conduct of Jewish communities, or to what extent they were invited to do so when fractiousness among Jewish communal leaders demanded an imposed solution to internal Jewish conflicts. Muslim sources briefly relate occasions when Jews were subjected to discriminatory regulation, but they have absolutely nothing to say about the cumulative effects of more limited hardships imposed on the Jewish communities, namely, the burdensome taxation reserved for the protected minorities. Docile Jews, small in number and, unlike the Christians, without co-religionists to threaten Muslims from beyond the Abode of Islam, were doubtless too insignificant to warrant any special attention. But that alone does not explain the virtual absence of contemporaneous Jews from Muslim chronicles that run into hundreds, indeed thousands, of pages. The failure of Muslim historiography to paint any picture at all of Jewish life does not startle

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scholars who plumb the Arabic sources for evidence of the past. By and large, Arabic historical writing in the Middle Ages and even beyond is largely a history of elites written by the hired pens of the elite and/or members of the religious establishment. From the Muslim side, there is a virtual absence of documentary evidence for the first eight Islamic centuries or thereabout. That is true whether we narrow our focus to Jewish-Muslim relations or seek to explore the Islamic world as a whole. There are, assuredly, Arabic coins, inscriptions, and administrative and literary papyri for the earlier periods. But the stories told by the numismatic and epigraphic material are extremely sketchy, and the papyri, however valuable, are fragmented and confined to a single region, Egypt, where the arid climate allowed for their preservation. Moreover, there are only a handful of scholars with the requisite skills to analyze and read these badly fragmented texts. When a large private collection of Arabic papyri was put up for sale in the 1970s, no antiquarian bookseller was willing to broker the lot because no experts were available to prepare even a preliminary catalogue. The collection, the largest private holding of its kind, remains at last notice locked away in a bank vault and unexamined by scholars. Admittedly, there are numerous references in medieval Muslim chronicles and literary works to exacting methods of keeping records, be it private accounts or those of state and regional bureaucracies. There are even handbooks for scribes employed in government service. However, few of the documents have been recovered or even quoted at length; and those sources that have been recovered remain largely unread. One can scarcely imagine how many individual items the early state and regional archives might have contained, let alone private records and correspondence. It is only with materials from the fourteenth century that Near Eastern historians begin to have access to detailed and wide-ranging records, and it is only with the Ottoman sultans (sixteenth to twentieth centuries) that there is an overwhelming abundance of documents. Nor were Jewish sources as revealing as scholars would have hoped. As recently as fifty years ago, what was known of the Jews in Islamic lands before the Ottomans was derived largely from incidental references in a wide variety of Jewish literary sources: religious texts, descriptions of travelers, and a revived Jewish historiography in which earlier events, historical legends, and hagiography are intermingled with some knowledge of the Islamic past to form a continuous narrative, mostly of Jews in Spain. The documentary history of pre-Ottoman Jewry was confined almost exclusively to responsa, opinions handed down by rabbis to Jews seeking authoritative answers to

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legal questions affecting virtually every aspect of private and communal life. Then, toward the end of the nineteenth century, a cache of written materials was uncovered in the storeroom of the Ben Ezra synagogue, a Jewish house of worship in Fustat, the older section of what is today Cairo. Of the roughly two hundred thousand fragments found in the building and later in its nearby cemetery, seventeen thousand were in the form of documents and letters, mostly written in Judeo-Arabic. The discovery of these items has opened the door to a close investigation of Jewish communities in the lands of Islam, particularly the widespread communities of the eleventh through thirteenth centuries, the period most directly covered by the cache, otherwise known as the Cairo Geniza. (A geniza is a chamber where sacred and other discarded writings bearing Hebrew script are stored before being buried in accordance with Jewish custom.) Although the letters and documents were first acquired for scholars in 1896, it was not until the 1950s that researchers of the Geniza devoted their full attention to reconstructing Jewish communal life. Like the Arabic papyri from Egypt, the Geniza materials are found in but a single region, indeed in only one place. We should not be misled, however, by the uniqueness of the find. The Geniza texts document an extraordinary range of activities involving Jewish communities widely dispersed from the subcontinent of India, where Near Eastern Jews had gone to establish trading companies, to Islamic Spain in the West, and Christian Rouen, the French city to the north. There is even correspondence with the Jews of Kiev. The letters and documents thus cover all the general areas of medieval Jewish settlement in the Near East, North Africa, and Spain, as well communities outside the Abode of Islam. From these extensive texts, we are able to reconstruct the broad outlines of Jewish life all along the route of the Arab conquest and well beyond—at least for the several centuries covered. Learned individuals, such as Judah Halevy (d. 1141) and Moses Maimonides (d. 1204), two of the most celebrated Jewish figures of the Middle Ages, emerge from the shadows of hagiography. Previously known to modern scholars only by their formal writings and from legendary tales, they, along with many other notables, can now be seen in full view, subjected to and reflecting about their daily lives, including relations with the dominant Muslim society. A word of caution: when speaking of Jews in Islamic lands, it is one thing to refer to dignitaries that moved freely in important Muslim circles as honored guests, be it guests of government officials or intellectual luminaries; it is quite another to describe the general condition of the Jews throughout the different levels of Jewish society.

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Fortunately, in painting a picture of Jewish life, the Geniza does not discriminate among the chosen people. Documents and letters are not restricted to the grandees of the Jewish community. The entire cross-section of Jewish society is represented: its religious and civic functionaries; its merchants and artisans; even vivid portraits of women of all kinds, that element of the population whose world was previously known to us largely through legal materials and a popular literature that tended to distort reality. There is also the world of the underclass: orphans and widows, the destitute, the abandoned. More than anything else, the Geniza allows us to reconstruct the pattern of private lives, at times over many years, and down to the smallest details. Thanks to the Geniza, we also have a more detailed picture of the Jewish encounter with the larger Islamic community in whose midst Jews lived. We are able to glance at how Jews dealt with Muslims, not only as subjects of a Muslim authority but as business associates and neighbors going about their daily lives. According to our documents, nowhere was the encounter between Jews and Muslims more pronounced than in the economic sphere. The subfield of medieval Islamic history most enriched by the Geniza is the history of the Mediterranean economy. One could claim, and with considerable justification, that no general economic history of the times can be produced for a discriminating audience of scholars without direct access to the Jewish sources. During the age of the Geniza, Jews played a vital role in the overall economy, particularly international trade, where they had the advantage of co-religionists, if not actual relatives, situated at various commercial centers and portsof-call, both in the lands of Islam and beyond. Because of the Geniza, we can also reconstruct the manner in which Jews and Muslims worked together to their mutual advantage, not only in long-distance trade but in regional and local commerce. All this came as a revelation to modern historians of the Islamic world unfamiliar with its Jews. Even those who had long taken an interest in the Jews of Islamic lands were startled by the richness of the Geniza texts and what they revealed of Jewish life and of life in general in the macrocosm of Islamic society. Researching the topography of medieval Baghdad, I conducted a twentyyear search for all the relevant Islamic materials, both in published texts and manuscripts, but was only able to identify some thirty professional occupations. At best, I could establish the general location of their workshops and/or retail establishments. There was a grave paucity of information as to how the ateliers and merchants conducted their specific businesses and were otherwise part of the general economy. Let us not forget: greater Baghdad

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was populated by perhaps a million inhabitants; it is a city that is probably the best described of all medieval Muslim urban centers. In contrast to what the Islamic sources reveal, the Geniza yields references to more than four hundred fifty occupations. These references are not mere labels for different kinds of merchants and artisans. The Geniza letters and documents allow us to reconstruct in detail complex aspects of production and marketing and, beyond that, the economic infrastructure that regulated, however informally, vocational training and the conduct of commerce and trade. No doubt, certain professions were typical only of Jews, for example, the various vocations that were subsumed by the Jewish educational establishment and religious hierarchy: rabbis, ritual slaughterers, sextons, teachers of Hebrew, experts in Jewish law, and the like. But in so many other professions, what is described for the Jewish community must have had its parallels among Muslims. Indeed, there are many Jewish texts that bear testimony to business relations with non-Jews involving special hiring, partnerships, and transactions. The Mediterranean trade portrayed in the Geniza materials was, in every sense, a multiparty undertaking involving all segments of the commercial community working cooperatively with one another and informally with the state authorities and their representatives. The intricacies of these relationships involving Jews and Muslims are at best hinted at in Islamic sources, which, because of their limitations, have to be scanned for mere snippets of information, tidbits so small or indigestible that they often escape our notice. When we do manage to ferret out this information, it often frustrates our capacity for analysis. In contrast, the Geniza paints a broad and richly detailed picture of a highly complex world. The Geniza documents are particularly useful in assessing the relationship between the Muslim ruling authorities and their Jewish subjects, at least for the times covered by the materials at hand. It is largely through the Geniza that we can gain real insight into what made the Fatimid caliphate of the tenth through twelfth centuries cohere as a relatively tolerant polity, both at the outset of their rule and for sometime thereafter. From the Jewish sources, we can show in detail how a Fatimid regime encouraged economic expansion and was marked by many elements of what may be described as a fledgling civil society, albeit without any of the formal institutions that characterized the later civil societies of Europe. Similarly, the continuous record of the Jewish sources allows historians of the Near East to more accurately describe the incipient collapse of that tolerance, as the Fatimids succumbed to internal and external pressures. It was as though the condition of the Jews served as a barometer of the general condition of the Muslim body politic.

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Before congratulating ourselves for all that we have learned of JewishMuslim relations, we should point out that the information that can be obtained from the Cairo documents is far from exhausted. However important they may be to reconstructing the climate of the times, the Geniza collection remains shamefully underutilized. That is certainly not the fault of the scholars who maintain the collection. The team at the University of Cambridge library, where the largest repository of materials is housed, is particularly helpful to any and all serious researchers. How then is it that the Geniza remains so underutilized by scholars of the medieval Islamic world? Presently, most historians of the Islamic Near East have at best a passing acquaintance with Geniza studies, although it has been a vibrant field of enquiry ever since it was put on a proper footing some fifty-five years ago by the Israeli Arabist S. D. Goitein. Many scholars of the Islamic world may have glanced at Goitein’s magisterial A Mediterranean Society (1967–93), far and away the most comprehensive account of Jews in the age of the Geniza, and arguably the most important work on medieval Near Eastern society in the last fifty years. But few have read the five massive volumes cover to cover, and only the rare individual has plumbed the text for all that it has to offer. The same is no doubt true, even more so, for the specialized monographs and articles by Goitein, his colleagues, and his students. Oddly enough, Judaica specialists have not shown much enthusiasm for the Geniza. In the main, they have been slow to appreciate the cornucopia represented by the letters and documents—materials that bear directly on the social and economic condition of Jews in Islamic lands, their religious practices, and their place within a dominant Muslim society. Outside of Israel and the University of Cambridge, the story of the Jews in Islamic lands remains a much neglected area of study among Hebraists. In the U.S., scholars writing the history of Jews in the medieval Near East remain a rare breed scattered about far-flung universities rather than concentrated in large centers of Jewish learning. If by some happenstance we could instantaneously produce the critical mass of researchers required to publish all the letters and documents found in Cairo and, following that, write comprehensive histories of the Jewish community and its relationship to the larger Muslim world, we would still be left with enormous gaps in our knowledge of Jewish-Muslim relations. The earliest materials from the Geniza date from the ninth century, and the last large lot from a half millennium or so later. That is, at first glance, a significant chronological range. A repository or archive that yields some five hundred years of material is enough to make the mouth of any medieval-

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ist water, regardless of his or her field. But the bulk of the material, that is, the sources that allow us to indulge in thick description, date from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries. Missing is material from the origins of Islam to the ninth century, a time span that may be described as the formative period of Jewish-Muslim relations. For the early centuries of Islam, we have no Geniza documents to tell us of Jewish-Muslim relations; our best sources are rabbinic responsa. And so, we have to be exceedingly cautious lest the descriptions of particular places and times serve as a template for Jewish-Muslim relations throughout the long history of Jews in Islamic lands. Still, it is no small benefit to have the materials at our disposal and no small accomplishment to list what we safely know of the encounter between medieval Jews and Muslims. Along the route of the initial Arab conquest were the venerable Jewish communities of Babylonia (Iraq), the Land of Israel (historic Palestine), the Levant, and Egypt, as well as many smaller settlements, about which a good deal less is known. In the wake of Arab expansion, the vast majority of world Jewry found itself living under Muslim rule in the Near East, North Africa, and Spain. The demographic and cultural ascendance of Western Jewry, which is taken as the norm by many Jews and non-Jews alike, was still a thousand years or so into the future. So, for all intents and purposes, the vital center of Jewish life, both spiritual and material, was in the Abode of Islam and remained there for many generations to come. In recent years, scholars have debated long and hard whether life under Muslim rule represents a high point of Jewish existence in the Diaspora, a time of refuge when Jews prospered economically and when Jewish culture underwent a period of extraordinary efflorescence, a sort of “Golden Age,” or whether the Abode of Islam was, in effect, a more difficult place for Jews to be. That is, would it be more accurate to describe Jews living in the world of Islam as a tolerated minority, guaranteed their property and physical survival, but held in disdain by their Muslim neighbors and periodically subjected to harsh treatment, comparable, in certain respects, to the way Jews were abused in the Christian lands of the Latin West? Among the various Jewish communities of Islamic lands, none elicited greater attention and admiration from modern Europeans than that of Islamic Spain (in Arabic al-Andalus). Indeed, the Jewish experience in the Iberian peninsula was often cited as typical of Jewish experiences everywhere in the medieval Muslim world, although serious scholars who focus more narrowly on Islamic history have always appreciated how al-Andalus, the

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western periphery of the Islamic realm, was very different in so many ways from the other regions. There is, nevertheless, a general consensus regarding the achievements of Andalusian Jewry. Measured by any yardstick, they were exemplary. Nowhere in the contemporaneous Islamic world did Jews find themselves more welcome in the best of times. Nowhere else among Muslims did Jews produce greater literature, greater philosophical and scientific works, or more impressive cultural artifacts that reflected an ability to assimilate the best of a dominant Muslim culture. Islamic Spain thus provided a model of cultural adaptation that could inspire European Jewry crossing the divide separating their unwelcome past from a bright modern future. Modern Jewish scholars, trained in European universities, valued the political influence and intellectual achievements of Spanish Jewry, which at the time were far better known than its social condition. This tended to leave modern Jews with a rather skewed picture, for, contrary to what they believed, all was not benign in the long history of Iberian Jewry. In truth, the experiences of the Jews in Islamic Spain add up to a complex picture of noteworthy political and cultural advances marred by periods of great uncertainty and danger. The volatile nature of politics and society in al-Andalus that opened doors for Jews to an extent never seen before in Islamic lands could, in times of extraordinary stress, lead to unprecedented attacks on them. That was particularly true when the dominant Muslim society found itself in the unusual position of being on the defensive against external forces. Incessant Christian pressure in the northern regions of the peninsula undermined Muslim confidence and occasioned intolerant Muslim regimes in the south. The mandate of these new, petty dynasties was to resuscitate the flagging fortunes of the faithful by any means. Tolerant attitudes that reflected the unusual heterogeneity of Islamic Spain thus gave in to sharp religious sensibilities. In short, there was a growing polarization between the threatened Muslims and their subjects, the Jews. The Almohads, a Muslim Berber dynasty that established itself in Spain (1148–1212), carried out a systematic persecution of minorities to an extent never quite seen in the Muslim world. Jews were forbidden to practice their religion openly; synagogues and academies of learning were closed; many Jews were even compelled to embrace Islam, a compulsion that was expressly forbidden by Islamic law. The unusual tolerance of this distant Muslim land was overwhelmed by an even more unusual intolerance. Flourishing Jewish communities in al-Andalus were decimated. Faced with the persecution of the Almohads, many Jews fled northward to the Christian enclaves of Aragon and Castile. Others, like

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Moses Maimonides, migrated to North Africa and then to Egypt. Still others remained behind, converted to Islam, but secretly retained their Jewish faith while waiting for the unusually harsh climate to pass. We are obliged to point out once again that in the medieval Islamic world Jews were generally allowed to build and administer their own communal organization without external interference. For the most part, their safety was guaranteed and their property was secure. While Jews preferred to congregate among themselves, there were no ghettos as in Europe, that is, living quarters restricted to Jews, from which their movement to the outside world and back was carefully regulated. The Jews who deposited their documents in the Cairo Geniza could settle anywhere but lived, quite naturally, in selfcontained Jewish areas because they required access to special Jewish services as mandated by Jewish law. On the other hand, the tightly wound Jewish neighborhoods, to the extent that we know of them, were not inhabited exclusively by Jews. There are even records of Muslims renting rooms from Jewish landlords. In the world of the Geniza, the two societies mixed freely, much as Jews do today in the liberal democracies of the West. No doubt, the best of times under Muslim rule made Jews reasonably confident of their current lot and their anticipated future. The self-reflection that surfaces in letters discovered in Cairo does not speak, as a rule, to a troubled relationship between Jews and Muslims. There is no great sense of foreboding of disasters about to occur. There are references to particular hardships at given moments in time, but there is no sense that Jews would not have a future in the world of Muslims, if not in their current environs than surely someplace else in the Islamic world. When pressed by circumstances, be it the rise of intolerant regimes in Spain, or the decline of the Abbasid caliphate in Iraq, or the coming of the Crusaders to the Land of Israel, Jews migrated to other regions of the Islamic realm where they well received by their co-religionists. Reading the materials now at our disposal, we have the feeling that the Jewish world in the time of the Geniza reflected the kind of transcendent unity that Muslims wanted for their ummah. Jewish travelers, and there were many, were welcomed and felt at home among other Jews regardless of their place of refuge or port of destination. Language was not an insurmountable barrier. Even when traveling beyond the Arabic-speaking world, learned Jews could always communicate in Hebrew if not in the local languages. Above all, despite some variance in local and regional customs, Jews could always follow the dictates of their religion regardless of where they visited or took up residence. On the whole, Jews appear to have been more tolerant of one another than they are today—at least at certain times and places.

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Even the “sectarian” Karaites, a diffuse group or series of groups who denied the efficacy of rabbinic law and at the outset flirted with various sentiments common among Muslim sectarians, ultimately found their place in the larger community of God’s chosen people. At least they did in Egypt and Syria, where efforts to ban them from the larger community did not succeed. When the various Karaite factions abandoned their syncretistic baggage and coalesced to form communities that more closely resembled those of normative Jews, compromises were possible, even as regards Jewish law and observance. The Karaites had been designated “eaters of milk with meat,” a label that called attention to their theoretical objection to rabbinic dietary laws that went well beyond the biblical injunction against eating a kid boiled in the milk of its mother. The early rabbis, who wished to protect the essence of biblical legislation, were given to building a “fence” (s’yag) around the original law. In this case, they excluded eating all milk products with meat, and, beyond that, required separate pots, dishes, and utensils in the preparation and serving of dairy and meat dishes. For the Karaites, biblical law was sacrosanct; the oral law of the rabbis was negotiable. Although in theory the Karaites honored biblical law over that of the rabbis, they did not insist that Jews observe only the laws stipulated in the Hebrew Bible, but established a legal framework of their own that went well beyond the 613 commandments of scripture. Karaites felt free to invoke traditional rabbinic Judaism but did not regard its regulations as necessarily binding. In certain instances, the Karaites called for observances that were even more stringent than those of the Rabbinites, as the more normative Jewish authorities were called. On the other hand, certain less restrictive Karaite practices such as those concerning the laws of ritual purity had an appeal to Rabbinite Jews, in this case women who were denied the full company of their husbands as they experienced their menstrual cycle and then for a period of time had to observe themselves for residual discharges of blood. All told, the Karaites could be less stringent than the Rabbinites in whose midst they dwelled. They were, however, neither arbitrary nor lax in the way they approached Jewish law as they defined it. Despite their views, the Karaites exhibited considerable flexibility in trying to remain within the House of Israel, or at the least to prevent it from splintering. There is evidence of mixed marriages between Karaite and Rabbinite families complete with marriage contracts that accounted for different religious sensitivities. But, most important, because Karaite courtiers had influence with the Fatimid authorities, they were able to remain for all intents and purposes at least on the margins of the larger Jewish community

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until the twelfth century. Elsewhere and at other times, the situation varied. In Islamic Spain, where the Karaites had no leverage with the Muslim government, their Rabbinite opponents, such as the vizier Samuel Ha-Nagid, could act harshly with them, including the use of physical violence. Politics and religion could make for a volatile mix; the chosen people were, as always, a quarrelsome lot beset by internecine disputes regarding questions of leadership, not only Karaites versus Rabbinites, but among mainstream Jewish authorities as well. The history of the Karaites in the Islamic Middle Ages and the structure and leadership of all the Jewish communities in Islamic lands fall outside the scope of this study. In any case, both subjects have been described with great learning and nuanced understanding. As regards the structure and leadership of the Jewish communities, readers are referred to the S. D. Goitein’s study of the Geniza world, especially volume 2 titled The Community. As regards the Karaites, one should turn to Marina Rustow’s learned and thought provoking Heresy and the Politics of Community (2008). One cannot speak of the Karaites even in passing without referring briefly to their immense contribution to Jewish intellectual life of the times. Suffice it to say, the early attraction of the Karaites to intellectual developments in the Islamic world occasioned a more general interest among Jews in various disciplines that evolved from an emerging Muslim interest in the philosophy and science of the ancients (see part 2, chapter 11). By the tenth century CE, Karaite scholars, writing in Arabic, were deeply immersed in philosophy, theology, and, most importantly, Hebrew grammar and lexicography, which were seen as keys to writing commentaries on biblical books. As regards content and form, the Jewish commentaries shared much with Muslim commentaries of the Qur’an. As did the more enlightened traditional rabbis of modern times when confronted by Wissenschaft des Judentums (see part 1, chapter 1), the Rabbinites of the medieval Islamic milieu broadly embraced the intellectual outlook championed by the Muslims and Karaites and adopted it to their own purposes. A distinctively Islamic Jewish culture evolved, one that was to set the pattern for Jewish life for generations to follow. cultural symbiosis and economic co operation past and fu ture The great historian of Near Eastern Jewry, S. D. Goitein, used the term “symbiosis” to describe the fruitful interchange of culture between Jews and Muslims. He meant by that two dissimilar organisms living together in intimate

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association to the mutual advantage of the other. As regards cultural borrowing, we have already noted possible Jewish influence on the formation of early Islamic belief and religious institutions. In similar fashion, Jews were intrigued by Islam and Islamic writings. Learned Jewish scholars were familiar with the Qur’an and a wide range of other Muslim religious texts. They also had access to what might loosely be called with considerable reservation the “secular” branches of Arabic scholarship (‘ilm), disciplines, mostly Greek in origin, that were inherited by Muslims from the pre-Islamic world and then reshaped and redefined: namely, philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and the like. In addition, tidbits of Muslim history and popular tales found their way into Jewish texts and oral traditions through a shared folklore. The acquisition and absorption of Muslim culture by Jews was made easier by the existence of a common language: Arabic. Aside from scattered Jewish communities that retained the local Aramaic dialect, the Jews of Islamic lands fully adopted the language of their conquerors. The Hebrew Bible was translated into Arabic, just as it had been translated earlier into Greek and Aramaic—all efforts to make scripture more accessible to Jews no longer able to study the text in the original. A dialect of Arabic, written in Hebrew characters, was the main vehicle alongside Hebrew for religious and scholarly discourse among learned Jews. As it was also the language of social relations and business, Judeo-Arabic was commonly used to record transactions in daily life. Moreover, the vernacular of the Jews was closely linked to the spoken language of the Muslims, more so than the leading Jewish vernaculars (e.g., Yiddish/Judeo-German and Ladino/Judeo-Spanish) are to the languages of their host countries today. As a result, there was no linguistic impediment to social intercourse between Jews and Muslims at any level of society. Jews understood only too well that Arabic was the key to Muslim civilization and culture. Jews learned in Arabic were genuinely stimulated by developments in Muslim scholarly and literary circles; some were eager and active participants in those circles. A wide range of medieval Muslim writings thus influenced the Jewish intellectual agenda, be it the growth of Jewish philosophy and mysticism, the creation of a distinctive Hebrew poetry, the study of the natural and physical sciences, and, not least, the development of Hebrew grammar and philology. In short, there was widespread and persistent encroachment of Muslim influence on the world of Jewish letters. The culture of these Jews was in so many ways inextricably linked to the world of Islam. It is worth noting how Arabic-speaking Jews, living in an Islamic milieu,

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formed so much of the Jewish civilization that Western Jewry recognizes as its own. It was during the heyday of Islam that the Babylonian Talmud, that vast compendium of Jewish law, gradually became the constitutional foundation of Diaspora Judaism and that the prayer book and synagogue service took on its familiar form. Jewish theology was, more or less, systematized, and Jewish law was recodified in lucid Hebrew, making it accessible to Jews who were not extraordinarily learned Talmudists. The scientific study of the Hebrew language, so critical to our present understanding of the biblical text, also has its roots in the Islamic milieu. Arabic philology and grammar, disciplines developed by Muslim scholars, attracted wide attention in Jewish circles. Using models borrowed from Arab grammarians, Jews plunged into the rigorous study of the Hebrew language. Given that learned Jews knew three Semitic languages—Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic—the range of their philological insights was vast. As did their Muslim colleagues, they produced lexical aids and grammatical tomes that proved to be models of linguistic enquiry. The entire point of the exercise was to give more certain readings to difficult passages in traditional Hebrew sources. The pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary of biblical and post-biblical Hebrew came under serious examination, an enterprise leading to the so-called Masoretic Text, a fully vocalized Hebrew Bible, complete with orthographic observations and notes for chanting it aloud. That Bible remains the standard Hebrew text used by Jews throughout the world. The systematic study of Hebrew permitted major breakthroughs in understanding not only the language of the Hebrew Bible but also the meaning of obscure and hitherto misunderstood passages. The exegesis of Talmudic times, which at times had little or no bearing on the original meaning of the text, was supplemented by highly sophisticated commentaries that stripped numerous biblical passages of fantastic interpretations and made them reflect events more realistically situated in place and time. With its many literary insights, and its propensity for analyzing scripture verse by verse—unlike rabbinic exegesis that skipped lightly over many passages—the new explications of the biblical text emulated Muslim commentaries on the Qur’an. Written in Judeo-Arabic and Hebrew, many of these commentaries are still avidly read. The Hebrew commentaries produced by Jews in Islamic lands, along with that of Rashi (1140–1205) and his successors in the Latin West, remain the core of traditional bible scholarship today. The fascination with language found its highest expression in the development of Hebrew poetry, not only for liturgical and other religious needs but for worldly purposes as well. To be sure, Hebrew religious poetry was well

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established long before the rise of Islam and had an honored place in the Jewish prayer book. Secular poetry also reportedly existed in pre-Islamic times, but nothing of that compares with the brilliance of the Jewish poetry written in Islamic lands during the Middle Ages. With Arabic models of form and rhyming schemes, Jewish poets turned to the biblical text for vocabulary and produced a meticulous and disciplined literary oeuvre on a wide variety of themes. At first, Hebrew poetry tended to be derivative of the Arabic, but the eleventh-century Jewish poets in Spain broke free and experimented, developing a flair and style of their own. Breaking free of the Muslims did not simply represent a process by which latent creative energies were allowed full expression. This was no revolt by Jews against their literary fathers. There was no anxiety of influence such as that described by literary critics in American universities of the twentieth century. The revival of Hebrew was part and parcel of a feeling among Jews that they too had been reborn in more or less favorable circumstances. A long-debased community had been made confident by what seemed, more or less, solid moorings in a reasonably tolerant environment. No discussion of Jewish culture in the medieval Abode of Islam would be complete without at least passing reference to the complex involvement of Jewish scholars in the philosophical and scientific enterprise of the times. Philosophy and science were indeed linked disciplines that occasioned scholarly interaction among learned Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the Islamic Middle Ages (see part 2, chapter 11). Referring to the philosophical discourse of the times, Len Goodman, a leading scholar of medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophy, speaks of a cross-pollination of ideas among the monotheist faith communities. For learned Jews and Muslims there was a general consensus as to what represented the most pressing philosophical issues of the times, and Jewish and Muslim scholars focused on these matters with acute intellectual concern. Whether or not Jews and Muslims actually read each other’s work in the original—Jews were more likely to read philosophical Arabic than Muslims to read scholarly works in Judeo-Arabic— both were clearly familiar with the intricacies of contemporaneous philosophical argumentation building on the foundations of Greek science and thought. As with Muslims, it was not the purpose of Jewish philosophers to study Greek authors just to preserve the legacy of the ancient world; rather, they sought to advance the frontiers of ancient learning and, when they perceived it necessary, to reconcile the challenging concepts of philosophical thought with the world of traditional Judaism. In this they had a delicate task. The survival of the Jewish community was rooted in a system of beliefs

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and practices that had been recognized as axiomatic to Jewish existence but that could easily be compromised by the infusion of new and abstract ideas. Whatever doubts might be raised by philosophy were best discussed among philosophers themselves and in a language that was not likely to be understood by the uninitiated. However much they took Jewish thought into previously unchartered realms, the philosophers of the Middle Ages were not about to undermine traditional Jewish observance. On the whole, philosophers succeeded in keeping their discourse within the mainstream of Jewish thought and, in so doing, developed new approaches to the larger questions of Judaism and Jewish life. Their writings, later translated from Arabic to Hebrew for the benefit of Jews in the Latin West, found an eager audience among non-Jews as well. The latter read these philosophical works in Latin translations of the Hebrew. There was an enormous variety of ways in which individual Jewish philosophers reconciled Greek-Muslim thought, on the one hand, and the world of traditional Judaism, on the other. The philosophical enterprise of the Jews in Islamic lands is yet another indication of the resourcefulness with which Jewry in the orbit of Islam managed to conduct its activities. The same could be said for other disciplines of the Greek or philosophical sciences, such as astronomy, mathematics, and medicine. Given the nature of these subjects and their pragmatic value, they were considered less threatening to the religious sensibilities of those Jews who were afraid that the study of philosophy might compromise long-held, essential religious beliefs. The Islamic influence on Jewish popular culture is more difficult to measure, given the presumed orality of that culture and the distance that separates us from both medieval Judaism and Islam. Islamic fables committed to writing, some of Indian origins, are found in Jewish tales as well. These are stories of universal interest and meaning that could easily have been adapted to any culture without loss of meaning and without challenging traditional sensibilities. But the evidence, such as it is, suggests that even distinctively Muslim cultural artifacts became part and parcel of Jewish folklore, with some revisions to accommodate Jewish sensibilities. It would appear that the stuff of The Thousand and One Nights was relished by Jewish audiences receptive to the delight of it all, just as Muslims resonated to Jewish accounts of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba and a host of other biblical tales seen through the prism of Jewish legendary literature. The waning of the Middle Ages and the concurrent breakdown of order in the world of Islam fundamentally changed the vibrant intellectual life of Jewry in Islamic lands, as indeed it marked a watershed in Jewish-Muslim

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relations. Slowly but perceptibly, the condition of Jewry in the Abode of Islam began to change for the worse from the twelfth century onward. There were occasional peaks to go with the increasing number of troughs, but a process had begun that was irreversible. That process was conditioned by an apparent, if temporary, decline in self-confidence among Muslims themselves. The invasions of the Crusaders and the subsequent establishment of Christian enclaves in the Abode of Islam; the relentless and ultimately successful Christian offensive in Spain; the dissolution of a tolerant Fatimid caliphate, beset by internal disorder; and the progressive weakening of the Abbasid caliphate, one of the longest-lasting family dynasties in the history of the region—all these created tensions that disturbed the equilibrium of Muslim society and caused its usual self-confidence to weaken. There were further blows. Military dynasties replaced civilian regimes in Egypt and Syria; a wide variety of Iranian and Turkic groups established petty dynasties in the east; and the Mongols, in effect, put an end to the caliphs of the Prophet’s line when they sacked Baghdad, the capital of the realm, and murdered the last Abbasid caliph, an event Muslims likened to the destruction of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. The cumulative effect of these events on a once-tolerant and intellectually curious society was devastating. To be sure, self-confidence was restored as the various challengers to traditional Muslim governance were either absorbed, as in the case of the Mongols and various Muslim military dynasties, or expunged, as in the case of the Christian Crusaders. But the price for restoring confidence to the Muslim world was very steep. The stiffening of Muslim resolve was accompanied both by a decline of tolerance toward non-Muslims and also a decline in tolerance for Muslims suspected of religious backsliding. In that respect, the medieval condition bears some similarity to the most recent revival of Islam, a movement intent on returning to the authentic roots of the true faith, while at the same time rejecting a Western culture that it sees as godless and depraved. The secular and humanistic tendencies of Hellenism, which until the period of decline had been the predominant cultural forces in Islamic history, began to wane at the same time that the Islamic religious element in its most rigid form began to wax even stronger. The changed climate also affected Jewish scholarship and letters, as there were less opportunities for interaction with Muslim scholars and the regnant paradigms of a narrowed Muslim learning provided much less food for thought. Concurrently, the economy, which had brought great prosperity to Jews and Muslims alike, suffered shocks induced by political instability, as well as by debased currency,

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repressive regulation, and mismanagement of land and water resources that encouraged immediate relief at the expense of long-term progress. There are also more cosmic factors to consider. The slow process of Islamization had run its course. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Muslims had become the dominant majority in regions that once had sizable communities of Jews, and, more particularly, a preponderance of Christians. Local dynasts relied heavily on Muslim religious authorities to produce a quiescent populace, and so they gave these authorities greater license to legislate and enforce morality and religious orthodoxy. The Muslim populace, when frustrated and uneasy, was increasingly susceptible to pleadings to turn against the protected minorities. More generally, there was greater reliance on discriminatory legislation that had rarely been invoked in the past, Spain under Almohads being the most noteworthy example. Even when Jews managed to prosper economically, they suffered great indignities. The mood of Jewish society in the Muslim lands became more and more troubled. the end of the medieval saga With the establishment of the Ottoman Empire in 1517, diverse regions of the Islamic world were united once again. The Ottomans, ethnically Turks and linguistically speakers of a Turkic language, fall outside the immediate scope of our enquiry, which is limited to Jews and Muslims in medieval times and in what are today Arab lands. But as the Ottomans ruled over greater Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and North Africa, territories in which most of Islamic Jewry were concentrated, a few words are certainly in order. For the Jews, the coming of the Ottoman Turks marked a turn for the better. As a powerless minority, they were much sought after for positions of trust by the local Turkish rulers. Exiles from the Spanish Diaspora, fluent in several languages and wise to the ways of the world, were encouraged to find new homes in the Ottoman domains. Because they retained their widespread international contacts with other Jewish communities, the Jews could be and were indeed immensely useful to the Ottomans in banking and commerce. In short order, they secured a prominent place for themselves in Levantine trade. Ironically, political weakness was the very strength of the Jews. They had no meaningful links to the Christian powers, and, given their small numbers, they were at all times susceptible to the pressure of their patrons, so that they could be regarded as extraordinarily trustworthy and loyal. Don Joseph Nasi, a prominent Jew of the sixteenth century, was made ruler of Naxos and other

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Cyclades Islands and was given various concessions in the Holy Land, where he stimulated Jewish immigration and otherwise became a great patron of the local Jewish community. In similar fashion, his contemporary, Don Solomon ibn Yaish, became Duke of Myteline. Other Jews were entrusted with handling the finances of leading Ottomans, with delicate diplomatic missions, and with tax farming. By the late eighteenth century, various Jews served as intermediaries between the Ottoman Empire and various Christian states in Europe. Never before and certainly never thereafter did Jews enjoy such prominence in Muslim governing circles, except perhaps the brightest moments during their so-called Golden Age in Spain. There is also much evidence of the vital role played by the Jews in the broader economic life of the Empire. They were particularly active in all aspects of textile production and the manufacture of clothing. Whereas the Ottomans had previously turned to imports for these items, they could now turn to the great textile centers of Safed in historic Palestine and Salonika in what is now Greece. Jews were also involved in the leather trade, exporting raw hides to Europe and producing leather for local use. Trades, for which Jews were always well known in the Near East, were practiced as before, particularly the skilled crafts. Jews were especially famed as goldsmiths, silversmiths, and dealers in precious gems. One of the more interesting Jewish occupations was the processing of cheese. Given the nature of Muslim dietary laws, which in certain respects are similar to those of the Jews, the latter supplied Muslims with cheese that was free of rennet, thus distinguishing it from the prohibited food of the Christians. In time, however, the Jews faced fierce competition from other minorities, principally Armenians and Greeks. By the end of the Ottoman Empire, the commercial role of the Jews had declined greatly, as did their political participation in the affairs of state. Challenges to the central authority tended to create difficulties for local Jewry, most of all for those Jews who were placed in positions of trust by the authorities and were therefore identified with them. As in the past, the fate of Jews was linked to the general condition of the ruling polity. Any perceived breakdown in traditional Muslim society has always been strongly felt by its most vulnerable subjects. Thus, the failure of the Ottoman regime to control its various regions had dire consequences for local Jewish communities. When the Ottoman Empire became the “sick man” of the nineteenth century, the Jews were subjected to a wide variety of pressures, including anti-Jewish sentiments that had been implanted in the Near East by Christian missionaries from abroad. The Arab nation-states that emerged in the wake of the Ottoman collapse and later, following the retreat

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of the colonial powers, did not improve conditions for the Jews of Arab lands. Certain nations may have adopted European forms of governance with their emphasis on citizenship, universal suffrage, and representative assembly, but, as always, the Jews, even as citizens, seemed to prefer anonymity and the lowest political profile. In Egypt, a large percentage of the Jews remained stateless residents, along with other minorities, such as Greeks and Armenians. As a result, they were extremely vulnerable when xenophobic sentiments were most pronounced, as in the period after the disastrous intervention in Palestine in 1948 and during the 1950s when Egypt tried to rid itself of the last vestiges of British influence. In Algeria, the conquering French made the local Jews citizens of France. That was legally possible because the French declared Algeria part of the mother country and populated it with Frenchmen from Europe, the so-called pieds noirs. By the time Algeria won its independence in the early 1960s, the last Jewish communities had disappeared, having been forced by circumstances to emigrate along with most of the settler families who had thought of Algeria as their French home. More than anything else, the creation of Israel in 1948 altered, perhaps irrevocably, the condition of Jews in Arab lands. The unexpected Israeli triumph in 1948– 49, a decisive military victory that ensured the continuity of the Jewish state, reinforced self-doubt in a proud and at one time self-confident Muslim culture, already badly shaken by Western colonialism. Israel’s victory over five regular Arab armies seemed incongruous to the Muslims, many of whom remembered the Jews as a minority of no political consequence whatsoever, small and docile communities that lived under Muslim rule at the behest of Ottoman and then Arab authorities. The backlash against Israel and, more generally, against the West, put the Jews of Islamic lands at risk. There was no discernible threat to their physical survival as a community, but Jews were made to feel exceedingly uneasy by the ugly mood that prevailed throughout the Arab world. Ironically, immigrating to the Jewish state was seen as a solution by many Near Eastern Jews who had previously shown no great interest in becoming direct participants in the Zionist project. Following the establishment of the Jewish state, an enormous exodus of Jews from Islamic lands took place. In the more than fifty years that the state of Israel has existed, entire countries in the Arab domain have become denuded of their ancient Jewish populations. The once-great Jewish centers of Egypt and the Yemen no longer contain viable communities; Syria and Lebanon have but a smattering of Jews left. North African Jewry holds on in Morocco, protected by its enlightened kings, but in vastly diminished numbers, a few thousand when there once were over two hundred thousand. The

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picturesque Jewish community of Djerba, an island off the coast of Tunisia, is also diminished, and, after many centuries of relative isolation, its Jews, once frozen in time, have become subjected to the assimilatory trends of modernity. Perhaps the saddest postscript to the history of Near Eastern Jewry is a story that emerged after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime. In the chaos that ensued, a flight was sent to Iraq from Israel to rescue the last remnants of what had been over generations one of the greatest Jewish communities ever, the Jews of Babylonia. At the outbreak of the 1948 war, there were more than one hundred thousand Jews in Iraq. After the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the Israelis located thirty-four elderly Jews living in Baghdad, a city of five million. Barely more than a handful of these Jews decided to go to Israel, including a ninety-nine-year-old man. The others, mostly aged, remained behind, resigned to living out their lives in an environment from which they could not free themselves. In Basra, a single woman of eighty-seven years was found and brought to Israel, where she was reunited with her eighty-threeyear-old sister. Most Jews old enough to have remembered their experiences in Arab lands do not wax poetic over life among Muslims. Admittedly, some Levantine Jews of cosmopolitan outlook, having settled permanently in the likes of Paris, London, New York, and even Israel, retain fond memories of their wellto-do French-speaking childhoods in cities like Alexandria, Algiers, and Beirut, and the Arabic environments of Baghdad and Basra. That is not the case, however, for the vast majority of Near Eastern Jewry, especially refugees from Arab lands who came to settle in Israel. Despite some bitter feelings about their absorption into the Jewish state, Israelis with roots in Arab lands tend to harbor more negative feelings about Arabs than do Jews of European origins. Some Arabs remembering their Jewish neighbors some fifty years ago also speak with nostalgia about lost relationships. To be sure, a political point is often wedged into that idyllic memory of a Near Eastern past, a time before Zionism created, so it is alleged, an artificial rift between Arabs and Jews. And that is: were Jews only to return to that pre-Zionist era, or, in any case, to accept the good intentions of Arabs, as they did in earlier times, the complex and debilitating circumstances of the present might be swept aside. A typical recollection of this world gone by is found in the late Edward Said’s memoir Out of Place (1999), a moving account by a Christian Arab that contains inter alia a vivid and touching description of his boyhood in Egypt and Palestine. Born in 1935 to a Palestinian father who became a naturalized American citizen in 1918, Said grew up in the cosmopolitan circles that sent their children to international schools run by Western educators. Among his

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classmates at Victoria College in Egypt and for a brief while at St. Georges, the famous Anglican school in Jerusalem, there were a number of Jewish school chums who Said remembers with respect and fondness, as he had shared with them a common sense of being different as well as broad intellectual interests. One has the impression that these Jewish schoolboys were, so to speak, part of the larger crowd of ethnic Greeks, Armenians, and Christians of varied backgrounds, with some upper class Muslims represented as well. Such schools were, however, not a microcosm of the larger world of Jews and Arabs, or indeed Muslims and Christians. Similarly, on a recent visit to the U.S., a veteran Arab diplomat close to Egypt’s political leadership remembered an earlier age when Jews and Muslims were capable of mutual toleration and respect. He argued at great length and with much passion for a return to that kind of relationship, which had been ever so soured by the corrosive politics of the Arab-Israel dispute. The target audience of his remarks was the Jewish communal leadership. His declared mission was to promote a groundswell of support among American Jews for the so-called Road Map, the core of a newly invigorated peace initiative to solve the dispute between Israel and the Palestinians and following that the more inclusive Arab-Israel problem. Those listening to the diplomat suspected that his real object was to drive a wedge between the “sensible” leaders of the Jewish community and those who constantly lobbied the American government to support each and every position of the authorities in Jerusalem, sometimes demanding even more than the Israeli government itself. A hasty poll of those present showed a tendency to respect his remarks and to accept his view of the past as being a genuine reflection of feelings truly felt, however misleading they seemed to most of the audience. As did Said, the speaker drew on experiences of his own life. While attending law school in Egypt, he had a classmate who was Jewish. The Muslim and the Jew became fast friends, visited at each other’s homes and became, in effect, members of each other’s families, the kind of tolerance that characterized a more civilized time in Jewish-Muslim relations. On a personal level, that has often been true of Jews and Arabs, particularly among the elites. There is a kind of graciousness to social intercourse in the Arab world, especially among the sophisticated and worldly who combine the best of hospitality with a wonderful sense of humor and the ability to speak knowingly on a wide range of subjects. One should, however, not confuse the ubiquitous good manners that are displayed in people’s homes or on formal public occasions with deeply felt attitudes. Our Egyptian diplomat revealed that he was forced to rally to his Jewish classmate and friend as other Arab students

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sought to ostracize him during a tense moment when Egyptian nationalist sentiments were being fervently stoked. Any number of similar instances could be cited for almost any other Arab country. However genuinely felt by individual Arabs, their idealized memories distort the reality of Jews and Arabs living in the past, a reality that still grips Jews fifty years and more after many left the Abode of Islam. One of the ironic consequences of the Arab decision to make war in 1948 rather than seek an accommodation with the fledgling Jewish state was that it unleashed a massive immigration of Near Eastern and North African Jewry to Israel. In recent years, these Jews and their descendants, who now represent the largest single element of Israeli society, have expressed renewed pride in their Near Eastern heritage. At the same time, they remain suspicious of Arab motives and behavior. There is an unfortunate but understandable irony in this as well. As a group, Jews originating from Arab lands know the Arabs much more intimately than do any other elements of Israel’s Jewish population. And yet, by all accounts, these Jews would, at best, accept any proposed accommodation with the Arabs with great reluctance. Given their memories of the past, stories much different from that of the Arab-American literary critic and the Egyptian diplomat, Jews who lived among Arabs, or whose parents or grandparents did, have never shown any great enthusiasm for a dramatic rapprochement with their former neighbors, peoples with whom they shared a history for so long a time.

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Early Muslim-Christian Encounters The Islamization of Christian Space

Although Christian communities in Islamic lands were subject to the same legal discrimination as that of Jews, their reaction to their new and humbling status was markedly different. Shortly before the Islamic conquest that changed irrevocably the political landscape of the Near East, the Jews, who suffered intermittently under the Byzantine Christian authorities, looked to the Iranians for relief. As did their ancestors during the Babylonian exile, they expected salvation from the emperor of the Persians, and with that the restoration of God’s kingdom in their ancient homeland as in the time of Ezra and Nehemiah. Whatever solace Jews may have found in the Sasanian conquest of the Holy Land was short lived. The hopes springing from that brief episode in the second decade of the seventh century were dashed by a Byzantine counteroffensive some ten years later. And so, in the following decade, some Jews, whose communities lay in the path of the advancing Muslim armies, looked to the sons of Ishmael for salvation; indeed there are fragments of Hebrew texts that describe the Islamic conquest as initiating the messianic age, thereby raising expectations for the final redemption of the chosen people. Paradoxically, some Christians might have felt a similar sense of relief with the appearance of the Arabs, at least in the very earliest stages of the conquest. Relations between widely divergent Eastern Christians in the Fertile Crescent and the official state church in Byzantium had become strained. Flushed with the reconquest of the Holy Land and holy city in 626, the Byzantine emperor sought to press his religious doctrine and sensibility on all the other branches of Eastern Christianity, including the various faith communities situated in Syria-Palestine and surrounding regions. One may there217

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fore speculate—speculate is a word advisedly chosen—that, as did the Jews, various Christian groups might have viewed the Islamic ascendance in the 630s as a more than welcome respite from unwanted pressure. In any case, once established, the political hegemony of Islam quickly elicited a negative reaction from the large Christian populace of the conquered regions. For unlike the Jews, the followers of Christ living in Christian domains had no long history of accommodation to the political authority of other faiths. For the better part of three centuries, Christianity had been the dominant religion in Asia Minor and in most of the Near East and North Africa. Jews, fully conscious of their political impotence and, as usual, without an external political ally to take up their cause, understood all too well the value of adapting to the latest political upheavals, while hoping for the best. On the other hand, the Christians whose lands were conquered in the initial Arab onslaught of the 630s were well aware that the Byzantine Empire remained a formidable force despite the loss of Egypt, Iraq, and SyriaPalestine (by the first decade of the eighth century Byzantine North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula also fell to the Muslims). The Christians who were subjects of their new Muslim rulers were well aware that the Byzantines retained a large navy with which to threaten the Syro-Palestinian coast and sufficient land forces to mount expeditions all along the frontier. In time, the ongoing conflict, which began as a series of raids by Arab tribesmen for lucre, evolved into a dramatic if slow-paced religious struggle. The frontier that separated the warring armies attracted groups of Muslim zealots, steadfast if unpaid irregulars drawn from various parts of the Islamic world. Still, neither the Muslims nor the Byzantines could establish a decisive advantage. Until the balance tipped decisively against the Byzantines centuries later, it must have become increasingly clear to Christians and Muslims alike that neither had the wherewithal to fully displace the other. After the early intensive fighting of the seventh century, the war along the frontier lingered on, a symbolic conflict with real, albeit manageable casualties. The summer expeditions, conducted year in and year out, represented a form of ritual combat writ large, a kind of confrontation that displaced the need for commitment to a really decisive campaign. In these circumstances, the Christians of the conquered lands were only too willing to defend their faith in extensive apologetics that were intended to stem any tide of conversion to Islam. This important and extraordinarily interesting literary enterprise, which will be discussed in the following chapter, was in all likelihood a reaction—at least in part—to the Islamization of what had been the holiest land and city of Eastern Christianity, a city whose

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liberation from the Sasanians in 626 virtually bankrupted the existing Byzantine regime, whose declared objective was to restore Jerusalem to the rule of the true faith. Lest we forget, the foreign occupation of the holy city and the Holy Land became a matter of utmost concern for the warring progeny of Abraham. Unlike the Sasanians, who merely occupied historic Palestine, and for a relatively brief period at that, the Muslims declared it sacred space of their own and for all time. from terra sancta to muslim holy l and We are obliged to return to an old question that surfaces on occasion, and ask, once again, how and when did Arab al-Sham, the old Roman province of Syria-Palestine, acquire a reputation of being sacred to Muslims in the same way it was Terra Sancta to Christians (and of course the promised land of the Jews)? Related to that, how did Jerusalem, that city long venerated by the older monotheist partners of the Abrahamic faith, become an object of veneration for the Muslim faithful? We might also ask how this process of Islamization affected Muslim and Christian perceptions of one another, and finally what influence it had on the actual conduct of relations between the Christians, who remained the majority in the lands of Islam, and the Muslims to whom they were politically subservient, keeping in mind that the other Christians, the Byzantines, resisted the Muslim onslaught and held on to their domains in Asia Minor for another eight hundred years? Determining the religious and political significance that early Muslims attached to the Holy Land and its holiest city and how these perceptions reflected Muslim and Christian attitudes and behavior is no easy matter. The sources at our disposal all stem from a later period of time and, as with so much of Arabic historiography, there is a tendency to view the distant past in light of the more immediate present. Some of the back projections concerning Jerusalem and its environs, called in Arabic fada’il al-Quds or fada’il Bayt al-Maqdis, “words of praise for the holy city and/or land,” are attributed to the Prophet and his companions, an effort to give the Holy Land of Jews and Christians, and especially Jerusalem, a revered place among the Muslims from almost the very outset of Muhammad’s mission. How the Prophet and his contemporaries actually conceived of the Holy Land and its most sacred place is at best a matter of conjecture. The one source to look for the earliest Muslim perceptions of Syria-Palestine would be the Qur’an, the public utterances of the Prophet. But of all the places conquered by the armies of Islam, Muslim scripture mentions only Egypt (Misr) by name, and then only in ver-

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sions of tales well known from the Hebrew Bible, their echoes in Christian literature, and in various post-biblical commentaries. The Qur’an does speak of al-ard al-muqaddasah, literally the “land made holy” or “the holy land.” But once again, the reference (5:21–22) is linked to the Hebrew Bible, more specifically to the Israelite conquest of Canaan. Muslim scripture reads: O ye people who enter the holy land which God has ordained for you. Do not turn back in flight. For then you will revert to being losers. (21) They [the Israelites] said unto Moses: In it there are a people of great strength [qawm jabbarin]. We shall never enter it [the land] until they leave. If they leave it, we shall indeed enter. (22)

In this verse, the Qur’an apparently refers to the biblical ‘anaqim, understood by the early Jewish authorities to be giant-like warriors who awaited the Israelites on the other side of the Jordan as the latter anticipated entering the Holy Land, a story told in Deuteronomy 9:1–3. The Qur’an continues: Two men who feared God and to whom God delivered His grace said: Assault them at the gate. When you enter it, you will indeed be conquerors. If you are believers, put your faith in God. (23)

Here again there is the discernible echo of a biblical text, more specifically the two Israelite spies sent into Jericho in order to take stock of the city’s powerful fortifications, a famous account originally cited in the second chapter of the book of Joshua. These Qur’anic allusions to the biblical text would have been self-evident to Jews and Christians who were even mildly familiar with their own scripture, either through reading or from oral accounts. For Jews and Christians there would have been no question that the land that lay before the Israelites after their long forty-year trek in the desert was Canaan, the so-called “land of milk and honey,” the very land promised by God to Abraham and his seed in the book of Genesis. But how did the Muslims identify the “holy land” mentioned in their scripture? On that matter there is clearly no consensus among the faithful. Classical commentaries of the Qur’an offer highly divergent explanations of al-ard al-muqaddasah. Some authorities claim it refers

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to the entire province of al-Sham, that is, greater Syria; others indicate it signifies only a sub-district (jund) of the larger province, namely Filastin, the Arab-Muslim equivalent of Graeco-Roman Palaestina Prima or “First Palestine,” which included Jerusalem and its environs. Still others, as if they recognized the biblical allusions in Qur’an 5:23, claim that it refers specifically to Jericho (Ariha), the place initially conquered by the invading Israelites. There is also mention of areas east of the river (what is today the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan), places from which the Israelites launched other campaigns of conquest and in which several Israelite tribes came to settle. There are even claims for Mount Sinai (Tur), an interpretation favored by a number of scholars who identify the “holy land” in Qur’an 5:21 as the place where the Ten Commandments were revealed and not as the text would have suggested ever so clearly to Jews and Christians, the land of Canaan. In any case, Muslim scripture nowhere refers to al-Sham or indeed any region or sub-region contained therein. There is not even mention of the holy city Jerusalem, at least not by any of its known names. There are none of the Arabic equivalents of the Hebrew Yerushalayim; there is no mention of Iliya’, the Arabicized Aelia Capitolina of Roman times (the name given to Jerusalem by the Romans in an attempt to sever all its ties with the Jewish past); nor is there any reference to Bayt al-Maqdis (derived from Hebrew beit ha-miqdash, meaning the “holy temple”) or al-Quds (presumably based on Hebrew ‘ir ha-qodesh “the holy city”), names later preferred by Muslims when speaking of Jerusalem, and in the case of Bayt al-Maqdis, sometimes all of the Holy Land. There is, to be sure, Qur’an 38:21–25, which relates, however loosely, a post-biblical Jewish tale of King David holding court in his mihrab, generally understood by Muslims as meaning the sanctuary (in David’s capital). More important is Qur’an 17:1, which refers to the Prophet Muhammad’s mystical nocturnal journey (isra’) to Jerusalem and his ascent from it to Heaven (the mi‘raj), or so the Muslims gathered when they read that “God took his servant [Muhammad] . . . one night from the sacred place of worship [al-masjid al-haram; i.e. the mosque of Mecca] to the furthest place of worship (al-masjid al-aqsa), [a place] whose surroundings God blessed so as to show him [Muhammad] some [of His] manifest signs. . . . ” By the second Islamic century, Muslims interpreted the “the furthest place of worship” as referring to the ancient mount on which the magnificent temples of Solomon and Herod were built surmounting the sakhrah, a primeval rock (known originally from Jewish tradition). They also embellished the vague Qur’anic account with detailed and compelling narratives that involved Gabriel, seen as Muhammad’s guide,

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and described as well the muster of the other angels and prophets of old, all arrayed at various stages of his heavenly ascent. In such fashion, Muslim commentators took an ambiguous account of a mystical journey to a mystical place at the foot of Heaven, situated the event in Jerusalem, and represented the Prophet not only as a worthy successor to God’s other messengers who dutifully awaited his presence, but, as the Qur’an indicates elsewhere, as the quintessential monotheist prophet, greater even than Moses or Jesus. Reading this interpretation of Qur’an 17:1 uncritically, we would have to assume that Muhammad and the Holy Land, and thus Islam and the Holy Land, were inextricably linked from the outset of the new faith. Indeed, a recent study by Uri Rubin, a learned scholar of early Islamic tradition, claims that Qur’an 17:1 actually refers to geographical Jerusalem at the time of the Prophet. However, it remains to be seen whether his intricate argument will sway the more conventional view of modern scholars—at this writing, I am not convinced. But if one accepts Rubin’s point of view, which in sum validates what has become the traditional Muslim reading of the verse, we would conclude that the initial Muslim conquerors of the Holy Land may have seen themselves as supplanting the Christians as guardians of contested sacred space—a dramatic claim indeed. If nothing else, we have learned to be cautious when reading Islamic traditions as true reflections of historical circumstances. Contra Rubin and Islamic tradition, most Western scholars are of the opinion that the sum and substance of the accounts linking the Temple Mount with Muhammad’s nocturnal journey were probably unknown to the Prophet and his contemporaries. In interpreting the Qur’anic verse as they did, subsequent Muslim authorities were no doubt influenced by older non-Muslim lore of Jerusalem and certainly by the later Islamization of the city and of the Temple Mount under the Umayyad caliphs, beginning in the second half of the seventh century. In this connection, one may note the great lengths to which Shi‘ite Qur’an commentators denied Qur’an 17:1 actually refers to the physical city. With that, they indirectly accused the Umayyad usurpers they loathed of using a geographical locus sacred to Jews and then Christians as a counterweight to Mecca and Medina, the holy cities of Arabia and the birthplace of Islam. One thing is clear. The place of the ancient temples revered by Jews and Christians was renamed by the faithful al-haram al-sharif, “the Noble Sanctuary,” and Jerusalem, originally called by the Arabs Iliya’ after the Roman Aelia Capitolina, became al-Quds and Bayt al-Maqdis (the latter also referred to the specific area of the Temple Mount, a logical association). These later developments do not mean that Muhammad and his contem-

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poraries, the first generation of Muslims in Arabia, had no knowledge of the land to the north, or of Jerusalem. If Muslim trade with Syria-Palestine was as extensive as our medieval sources suggest and as most scholars now believe, there can be little doubt that the Arabs of Mecca and Medina were well aware of events taking place beyond the frontier. There is in fact a veiled reference in the Qur’an to the war between the Byzantines and Sasanians (30:1–2), a conflict which saw the Persians conquer Jerusalem in 614 only to lose it to a Byzantine counteroffensive on the eve of Islam’s triumph in Arabia. With Arabs moving across the frontier for commercial purposes, there is no reason to rule out that some of the first generation of Muslims might even have visited Jerusalem while Muhammad preached in Mecca and Medina. Given the wide number of references in Muslim scripture to Jewish and Christian materials, there is every reason to believe the Prophet himself might have been exposed to ancient monotheist lore about the city as he had been about the Holy Land in which it was situated and more generally about Jewish and Christian beliefs. But aside from the Muslim versions of Bible stories, there are few if any specific echoes of Jerusalem lore in the Qur’an, at least few if any echoes that learned Jews and Christians, let alone Muslims, can detect. It would seem that Jerusalem fully enters the Muslim imagination only after the siege and capture of the city in 638, some six years after the Prophet died and four years after the full-scale invasion of the Arab tribes from Arabia. Muslim historians inform us, albeit more than two centuries after the fact, that the caliph ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab (634– 44) went to Jerusalem to accept the surrender of the city from the Bishop Sophronius. Were these accounts an accurate reflection of the past, ‘Umar’s journey in 638 would seem to suggest that Jerusalem was of special importance to Muslims even at this early date. For until that moment, no other city or territory surrendering to a victorious Muslim army called for the presence of a caliph to present the actual terms of capitulation. Indeed, ‘Umar was reportedly the first Muslim ruler to cross the border of Arabia in pursuing state policy. The terms supposedly arranged by ‘Umar were addressed to the people of Iliya’, a seeming indication that that the old pagan name, adopted by the Arabs and used initially by them to designate the city, was also used by Christian inhabitants at the time of the conquest, even though Byzantine sources commonly refer to the holy city as Jerusalem. What is of interest to us is a tradition that Ka‘b al-Ahbar, described in our sources as a learned Jewish convert to Islam and close acquaintance of ‘Umar, a person who is associated with many Muslim traditions about the city, instructed a Muslim(?) not to speak of Iliya’ (here I would add the gloss:

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as do the local Christians), but to refer instead to Bayt al-Maqdis. Might this account lead us to believe the transition to Islamic Jerusalem and the reaction it might have occasioned among the Christians already began in ‘Umar’s reign? If there is any truth at all to this tradition, ‘Umar would have to have been broadly aware of the city’s sacred status for Christians in the present (and presumably Jews in the past), and that by renaming the city with an Arabic place name that designated holiness, Jerusalem acquired sacred credentials for Muslims that made it a special city for the new faith and that placed the Muslims in direct competition with Jerusalem’s monotheists of old. Considering the role assigned to converts and learned Christians and Jews in Muslim polemics, modern scholars have learned to be wary of any accounts reported by way of Ka‘b al-Ahbar and his like. Christians and Jews, or former Christians and Jews, were frequently cited by Muslim authorities as recognizing the transcendence of the new monotheist faith based on a learned reading of their own Jewish and Christian sources. Who better than a rabbi or priest to validate the legitimacy of Muhammad and Islam? Ka‘b aside, there is reason to suspect the larger story of ‘Umar’s role in the capitulation of the city, a tale riddled with contradictions in its many versions. Current historians perusing the medieval Arab sources are well aware there are many imaginative tales of ‘Umar’s reign. Such stories allowed later Muslim chroniclers to give the caliph a role larger than life; his already substantial reputation was thus enhanced, and policies put into effect by others were given the legitimacy that comes with historic precedents established by one of the Prophet’s most illustrious and faithful companions. Despite these reservations, one can still argue that the Holy Land and holy city of the Christians and Jews were regarded as a special place by the Muslims early in the first Islamic century, though not necessarily in ‘Umar’s lifetime. Two decades after the fall of Jerusalem, the Umayyad ruler Mu‘awiyah ibn Abi Sufyan, then governor of al-Sham, declared himself caliph in Jerusalem. At the time, he was entering the final phase of his rebellion against the established commander of the faithful, ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib, a conflict that was described and rightfully so as the first great civil war in Islam. As did all the previous caliphs, ‘Ali chose to establish his capital at Medina, the Prophet’s city in the Hijaz region of Arabia. Then as now, the Prophet’s birthplace Mecca, also in the Hijaz, served as the spiritual center of the Muslims. The cities are known collectively as the haramayn, “the two sacred precincts.” One can then understand Mu‘awiyah’s dilemma as he was about to declare himself temporal and spiritual ruler of the Islamic ummah. He was on a path to supplant the previous regime, but the Muslim aristocrats of Arabia denied

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him the legitimacy of being elected the Prophet’s successor in the Prophet’s city, as were all the caliphs before him. It appears that as a counterweight to the holy cities of Arabia, Mu‘awiyah decided to be acclaimed in Jerusalem, a place with a long and distinguished religious history of its own. That ancient history was certainly known to the Jewish and numerous Christian inhabitants of the province he ruled, as well as to their former co-religionists now embracing the Muslim faith. Jerusalem’s special religious status also might have appealed to elements of Mu‘awiyah’s army, Arab tribal levies that had been initially recruited by the Byzantines and as a result converted to some form of Christianity before accepting Islam. The lore of Jerusalem might even have spoken to the evolving religious sensibilities of recent arrivals to the Holy Land, Muslim Arab tribesmen who crossed the frontier and settled in various sub-districts of al-Sham. Interacting with the indigenous inhabitants and previous Arab settlers, the newcomers presumably assimilated elements of local Christian (and Jewish) culture, including a popular religion that celebrated the sanctity of Jerusalem and its environment. Be that as it may, Mu‘awiyah’s decision to be proclaimed caliph in Jerusalem was occasioned by political developments within the Muslim world and not because the Umayyad felt a need to impress or embarrass his Christian subjects by proclaiming himself lord of their holy city. This interpretation of Mu‘awiyah’s investiture is supported by a fascinating account preserved by Ibn al-Faqih, a tenth-century Arabic author, who devotes a major section of his descriptive geography to the Holy Land and to the monuments and lore of Jerusalem. To be sure, some three hundred years elapsed between the Umayyad caliph and Ibn al-Faqih, but the account has an air of authenticity. In any case, one could not have invented a better tradition to illustrate how Jerusalem came to play a role in the inter-Muslim politics of the mid-seventh century. We are informed that a sullen delegation of ‘Ali’s former supporters met with Mu‘awiyah after the debilitating five-year civil war had come to an end. The meeting, apparently an attempt to heal the wounds of the conflict and pacify ‘Ali’s partisans, is consistent with many traditions that speak to the new caliph’s diplomatic skills and his ability to disarm former adversaries. As in most accounts, the commander of the faithful greeted his old enemies with words of praise; then after describing himself as “the best caliph,” he went on to say: “You have come to the ‘holy land’ [al-ard al-muqaddasah]; the land in which the dead will be gathered and resurrected [at the end of days]; the land in which are found the graves of the prophets.” These words, attributed here to the caliph Mu‘awiyah, are stock expressions found in the extensive Muslim literature in praise of Jerusalem and

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the Holy Land, a literature that can be traced back, interestingly enough, to the Umayyad period, thus reinforcing the notion that the shift from Christian Terra Sancta to Muslim Holy Land was occasioned at that time. What is interesting about this particular account is that these words of praise are attributed to the caliph himself. We are thus led to believe—at least that is the author’s intention—that Mu‘awiyah considered his legitimacy as being linked to the holy city and the Holy Land. Note Mu‘awiyah’s self-serving reference as “the best caliph” before describing the merits of the province from which he ruled. The group of former ‘Alid supporters meeting with Mu‘awiyah were not about to be taken in. The leader of the delegation, Sa‘sa‘ah ibn Suhan al-‘Abdi, well known as an ally of ‘Ali, issues skilful rejoinders to the usurper’s claims. He sows doubts about the caliph’s legitimacy and then denigrates the sanctity of the Holy Land and Jerusalem, claiming more pharaohs are buried there than prophets, and that proximity to the Holy Land is of no consequence as regards the ingathering of the dead and the Day of Resurrection, which according to many traditions favoring Jerusalem was to take place in the holy city (a tradition also linked to and probably derived from non-Islamic sources). But the most telling criticism of the caliph is embedded in al-‘Abdi’s comment about the holiness of Syria-Palestine, the province which served as the fulcrum of Umayyad rule. The ‘Alid partisan goes on to say: “The land does not make people holy; rather it is the people of the land who declare it holy.” Or, to put it differently: Who is Mu‘awiyah to claim an authority that God has not approved for him in a city and land that he has sanctified in so cynical a fashion for his own narrowly defined political purposes? Al-‘Abdi, the former partisan of ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib, thus maintains the original Muslim sanctification of the Christian Holy Land was entirely the result of political developments within the community of the faithful. Some modern scholars are of the opinion that Mu‘awiyah actually contemplated making Jerusalem his capital, but, in truth, there is no evidence whatsoever he sought move the seat of his rule to the city. In fact, Jerusalem was never even the administrative center of the sub-district in which it was situated. That honor went to Lydda and then nearby Ramle. Over the course of the next 1,300 years, the only time Jerusalem achieved the status of a capital city was under foreign rule: first the Crusaders, then the British, and finally the Israelis. There was, however, a dramatic change in the topography of the city under the Umayyads, a change that signified the unmistakable Islamization of Jerusalem; but that change took place well after Mu‘awiyah and some seventy years after the Prophet began preaching. Some three decades after Mu‘awiyah’s investiture in the holy city of the

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Christians and Jews, the caliph ‘Abd al-Malik began an ambitious building program on the Temple Mount, a vast project that was completed by his son al-Walid, who oversaw the final construction of the great Aqsa Mosque. What purpose was there to this major undertaking and the other truly significant changes of the time? The highly innovative ‘Abd al-Malik (685–705) appears to have made a conscious decision to cloak the Umayyad regime in imperial symbols of a decidedly Islamic character. The government bureaucracy, whose business had been conducted in Greek by former functionaries of the Byzantine regime, was fully Arabicized. Similarly, Byzantine coinage, prevalent throughout the realm, was replaced, however briefly, by newly minted items displaying the visage of the Umayyad caliph and following that by aniconic coins decorated with the name of the commander of the faithful and various Qur’anic verses. As regards Jerusalem, ‘Abd al-Malik built the celebrated Dome of the Rock, a structure so magnificent, that building it was said to have cost the equivalent of seven years tax revenues from the province of Egypt, presumably a sum of staggering proportions. One of the most eloquent examples of all Islamic architecture, the Dome of the Rock has since become the quintessential symbol of the holy city, and beyond that, the entire Holy Land. The building surmounts the legendary primeval rock, hence giving rise to its name. Various authorities report that ‘Abd al-Malik also built the Aqsa Mosque situated nearby, but opinions are divided on this. One encounters medieval authorities who date the mosque to the reign of the caliph’s son al-Walid, a view shared by many modern historians and archeologists. The original mosque, built in the time of ‘Umar, was a rather modest structure at the site of Herod’s stoa, or so we are informed by the Christian pilgrim Arculf, who visited the site in the 640s. The new mosque built nearby to the south of ‘Abd al-Malik’s Dome of the Rock was called al-Masjid al-Aqsa, “the furthest mosque,” a designation that might have caused some confusion with the masjid al-aqsa of the Prophet’s mystical journey to heaven described in the Qur’an. The circumstances that gave rise to the Islamization of Jerusalem, particularly the major changes in the landscape of the Temple Mount, have long been debated by scholars. An earlier generation of orientalists noted that ‘Abd al-Malik was challenged by a new coalition led by the old aristocrats of Mecca and Medina, thus igniting the second great civil war in Islam. Once again, an Umayyad ruler had been denied access to the holy cities of Arabia, the political center of the counter-caliphate of the Zubayrids, a leading Meccan family linked by marriage to the Prophet’s clan. In reaction to this revolt, which engulfed the Islamic world, ‘Abd al-Malik was said to have redi-

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rected the pilgrimage from Arabia, forcing his subjects to go to Jerusalem instead. Admittedly, there is textual evidence to support this view, but over the years many scholars have been forced to reexamine this contention. And while some historians still cling to the notion that ‘Abd al-Malik had in effect attempted to make Jerusalem a new Mecca, if not Medina, a reexamination of all the sources and the evidence paints a rather different picture. There is even an account that a temporary truce had been declared and observed by all the warring factions of the multiparty dispute, so as to allow all Muslims regardless of their political affiliations to participate in the sacred rites of the hajj in Arabia—so much for making Jerusalem the new Mecca. As regards comparing Jerusalem to Medina, there is no indication whatsoever that the Umayyads ever intended to move their administrative capital from Damascus, the seat of their rule. Regardless of how one explains the Islamization of Jerusalem under the Umayyads, Muslim scholars, beginning in the Umayyad period, created a vast literature in praise of the city, comparing it favorably to Mecca and Medina and, in some instances, even declaring it superior to the haramayn of Arabia. Not surprisingly, the merits of Jerusalem became a highly contentious issue. Some medieval authorities took the fada’il texts and stood them on their heads, constructing similar traditions to declare the holy city of al-Sham inferior to the cities that gave rise to the Prophet and Islam. There are also legal discussions as to whether it is permissible for Muslims to fulfill the rites of pilgrimage in Jerusalem (when the journey to Mecca might have been too arduous), or pray there after having vowed to God to do so, or even stop off in the city to offer special prayers at the time of pilgrimage, lest that act be misunderstood as fulfilling the sacred rite in Jerusalem rather than Mecca or Medina. One scholar went so far as to declare sanctifying Jerusalem by performing these and other acts is tantamount to a renunciation of Islam, a transgression that calls for a formal act of repentance lest the transgressor face punishment by death. As the debate about Jerusalem continued for centuries, it surely speaks to a major issue that went far beyond any Umayyad attempt to establish a counterweight to the religious primacy of Arabia. That is to say, the Islamization of the city under the Umayyads addressed problems that concerned more than the internal politics of the ummah. Jerusalem did not become a holy city for Muslims merely to address the immediate political needs of the Umayyads. Were that the case, there would have been a change in the sacred status of the city after the fall of the regime, or maybe even after the defeat of the Zubayrid rebels, which was accomplished long before the great Aqsa Mosque was built. In fact, Jerusalem became, over the

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centuries, a favored place for Muslim pietists and ascetics, just as it had been and continued to be for Christians (and later Jews). How then we to explain the Umayyad policy of magnifying the religious importance of the city? the isl amiz ation of the holy cit y and l and: another view Upon closer examination, the development of Islamic structures on the Temple Mount, the jettisoning of Greek in favor of Arabic as the language of administration, and the issuing of a distinctively Islamic coinage are all to be understood as newly minted symbols of Islamic authority which addressed, not the internal squabbles of the Muslims, but the relationship between the Muslims and the older monotheists they ruled, as well as the Byzantine Christian enemy they had not yet defeated. We ought to be aware that, although governed by the Muslims, the Christians were at the time the majority in the Holy Land. That land had long had a well-defined religious landscape for the local Christians, whose sacred monuments and ceremonies with their impressive iconography and aesthetic splendor might have been considered a danger to the more dour Islamic authorities of the time. The authorities had reason to fear Muslims exposed to the Christians on a daily basis might have been tempted to imitate the more seductive elements of elaborate Christian rituals, even though many Muslims did not think imitating Christian practices compromised their own Muslim faith. Moreover, converts to Islam from among former Christians (and also Jews) were not likely to abandon old allegiances to specific places and ceremonies associated with places deemed sacred. So many studies of the veneration of saints in the Near East, modern as well as medieval, suggest the Muslims had much to be concerned about. Forged in a more aesthetically austere Arabian environment, Islam, or to be more precise, the Islam preached by the Prophet, attempted to create a discernible distance between the new religion and the narratives and rituals of the earlier monotheists. The Arabization of monotheism was central to Islam’s debate with the descendants of the ancient Israelites. Christians and Jews, the descendants of Abraham’s progeny by way of Sarah’s son Isaac, had a history that ran through the land of Israel and not Arabia; they venerated the temples built in Jerusalem and not the Ka‘bah of Mecca. Muslims were well aware of the broad outline of the Judeo-Christian narrative with its emphasis on the land promised Abraham’s Israelite offspring. But for the Muslims, the more important connection is that of Abraham to the Ka‘bah and that of his son

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Ishmael’s progeny to the subsequent history of Mecca and Medina, most particularly to Muhammad and the rise of Islam. Given these declared links to Arabia, there would seem to be something subversive about Muslims who stress the sanctity of Jerusalem and the Holy Land in which it was situated. If this was indeed the response of the more stringent Muslim authorities, and all the evidence seems to point in this direction, we can now offer an explanation for why it was that ‘Abd al-Malik and later his son al-Walid undertook the ambitious building program they did. It was not to glorify Jerusalem at the expense of the holy cities of Arabia, as some thought, but to offer a visual demonstration to the Christians who were the majority in the city and province, and also those Christian converts to Islam who clung to certain old ways, that despite elaborate Christian ceremonials and religious pageantry, Islam was superior in every respect to Christianity. Readers may well argue that this view of the Islamization of Jerusalem and by extension the entire Holy Land is largely conjecture. Skeptics will want more tangible evidence before entertaining, let alone embracing, such an explanation. They will surely ask if there is even a single text that gives credence to the explanation proffered here. Indeed, there is. Another tenthcentury geographer, al-Maqdisi (or al-Muqaddasi), whose very name indicates a link to the holy city, speaks of having complained to his uncle of the Umayyad caliph al-Walid’s extravagance in building the Great Mosque of Damascus (a Christian church that was reconfigured and converted into a Muslim place of worship). As al-Maqdisi put it, the vast sums of money converting the former church into a splendid mosque would have been better spent restoring the roads and fortresses along the Byzantine frontier, an area that came under constant Christian attack throughout the author’s lifetime. The author’s uncle responded sharply, pointing out that the Umayyads saw al-Sham remaining a Christian land (balad al-nasarah, that is, a land where the Christians were the majority and Christian influence could be seen everywhere). The uncle pointed out that the splendors of the magnificent Christian architecture were widely noted by the Muslim faithful and seduced them (thus compromising their steadfast devotion to the authentic Islam). These impressive Christian edifices included the likes of the Church of the Resurrection—that is, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, which is situated a short distance from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. To distract the Muslims from the powerful religious imagery of the Christians, al-Walid built a mosque that was one of the wonders of the world. The uncle then adds: in similar fashion al-Walid’s father ‘Abd al-Malik built the Dome of the Rock, lest the grandeur of the dome of the Church of

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the Holy Sepulcher and the general appearance of that spectacular Christian structure dazzle the Muslims. The account does not relate what impression these words might have made on al-Maqdisi, but elsewhere in his book he repeats this reason for building the Dome of the Rock, and as if to reinforce this point, he reminds us that the Muslims refer to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher not as the Church of Resurrection (in Arabic al-Qiyamah), but as al-Qumamah, “The Garbage Heap.” He then adds that the magnificent Aqsa Mosque, erected by al-Walid in Jerusalem, was similarly built to counter the powerful religious imagery of the Christians. Once again, we are dealing with a tenth-century author. There is then the danger that he is interjecting the sensibilities of his own time, a period when the Byzantines were aggressively waging war with the Muslims all along a porous frontier that separated the Muslim and Christian domains, a time when it was necessary to raise the flag, so to speak, in order to rally the Muslim faithful in difficult circumstances. But here too one grasps a sense of authenticity to the tradition before us. The most convincing evidence comes from the Dome of the Rock itself, an architectural gem built on the site of the ancient Jewish temple and seemingly inspired by local Byzantine monuments, but unlike the Christian prototypes, the Muslim domed structure was covered with abstract floral decoration rather than pictorial representations of real life. Under no circumstances was the Dome of the Rock ever a mosque; that is clear from its limited size, the shape of the structure, and the layout of the interior, which does not allow for ordinary Muslim worship. It was rather a religious shrine, which, like the Ka‘bah in Mecca, surmounted a rock that was assigned great religious significance. A ninth-century Muslim historian, al-Ya‘qubi, thus thought of the building as an effort by the caliph ‘Abd al-Malik to replicate the Ka‘bah and redirect the pilgrimage to Jerusalem during the second great civil war, when the holy shrines of Arabia were in the hands of the caliph’s enemies, a theory we have addressed earlier. Other Muslim traditions declared the site of the building as the very place from which the Prophet ascended to heaven, the aforementioned mystical journey to the masjid al-aqsa described in Qur’an 17:1, a tradition that may well have been inspired by al-Walid’s Aqsa Mosque which lent its name to the entire Noble Sanctuary that included the Dome of the Rock. The best explanation for the Dome of the Rock is found in its upper register, which contains a series of inscriptions. These can now be read clearly as a result of restoration work initiated by the Jordanian authorities in the late 1950s and early 60s. The inscriptions, all from the Qur’an, preserve slight variants from those of the standard Muslim versions of scripture. As the final

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version of the Qur’anic text was only fixed sometime in the reign of ‘Abd al-Malik, it is not altogether surprising that variants might be found adorning the building he himself built. In effect, they testify that the inscriptions date before the text of the Qur’an was given its final form and were thus part and parcel of the original structure built in 691. That being so, they may tell us what the Umayyad caliph had in mind when he conceived of building the Dome of the Rock. The uncovered inscriptions, which have been examined, are all part of a general theme; taken together they represent a polemic against the Christians, accusing them, among other things, of betraying the true monotheism because of their Christological doctrines. And so we have a Muslim edifice, built on the sacred ground of the Temple, and thus a symbol of Islam having supplanted Judaism and Christianity; a building devoid of pictorial representation, an accusation that the Christians, despite their monotheist claims, indulge in producing graven images; and, above all, a building whose inscriptions accuse Christians of compromising their monotheism by believing in the divinity of Christ. There is every reason to believe that the power of Christian religious symbolism remained difficult for the Muslim authorities to counter, especially the rich pictorial imagery. We have already noted that after a brief flirtation with pictorial representation of their own—be it on official coinage, or mosaics of their private residences—the Umayyads withdrew from all iconic competition with the Christians. They prohibited the displays of graven public images, preferring instead highly stylized decorative motifs and inscriptions that often featured Qur’anic verses. The commanders of the faithful had found a means of visual representation that suited their own religious aesthetic. The Dome of the Rock, perhaps the first great Muslim monument outside Arabia, is the living proof of how Muslims competed with their Christian adversaries, much to the relief of al-Maqdisi’s uncle. That still left the potent influence of popular religion derived from the practices of the older monotheists. Such behavior by the Muslims, new and old, could not have been easy to monitor, and given how widespread it must have been, difficult to counteract. For some Muslim authorities, there was the obvious danger that the Islam linked to Muhammad and Arabia would be compromised by strange and foreign elements. The rather severe Muslim jurist Ibn Taymiyah, whose legal handbook on Jerusalem called for the harshest measures against Muslims venerating the city, also condemns extravagant ceremonies held at the tombs of the biblical prophets, especially those sites that are also visited by pious unbelievers. He sees a clear danger in visiting such places when non-Muslims

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are present performing their religious rites. He recognizes that visiting such sacred sites is not absolutely prohibited by Islamic law, except when graven images are displayed, an obvious reference to Christians bearing icons. As Ibn Taymiyah is a fourteenth-century figure, there can little doubt that the detractors of the holy city and Holy Land were much concerned and over a very long period of time with the residual power of the Holy Land’s sacred history. As a matter of course, the greatest danger to a new faith comes not from adversaries holding strange and unfamiliar beliefs. These can be dismissed summarily; rather, it comes from an attraction that is both shared and familiar but not quite the same, hence a source of potential confusion. The defenders of the Islamic faith had to be on guard against any sort of religious leakage, especially where a monotheist popular religion spoke to Muslim sensibilities and might thus have lead the faithful astray, while at the same time undercutting the religious authority of the more conservative Muslim scholars. There has always been a tension between the guardians of the law and those who practice religion less formally. The Muslim sanctification of historic Palestine and its holiest city may well have occasioned the tense relationship that shows up in our medieval sources. Nevertheless, the sanctity of the land took hold for Muslims. The Holy Land became a favorite place of Muslim ascetics and pietists, as it was for Christians (and Jews) given to intense devotional behavior. Iliya’ or Jerusalem had become al-Quds, and the Terra Sancta of the dominant Christian majority had become the Bayt al-Maqdis of its Muslim masters (using Bayt al-Maqdis in its broadest sense to include all of the Holy Land). But that process was slow and, for Muslims, at times difficult. The aforementioned geographer al-Maqdisi, speaking of his native Jerusalem, tells us the Jews were predominant in the city (or whatever ghalaba ‘alayha might have meant to him and his readers), while the Christians are everywhere and behave arrogantly in public (behavior prohibited by the Islamic laws concerning dhimmis). Whether it is true or not, the report demonstrates a decided Muslim concern with the residual influence of the monotheist minorities. The Christians, because of their numbers, their powerful co-religionists at the borders of the Islamic heartland, and the impressive visual aspects of their religious culture, seem to have represented the more serious challenge to Muslim feelings of dominance than the placid Jews. The medieval Muslim response to this challenge in deed rather than writing is more ambiguous than we might think at first. Erecting Muslim monumental architecture in Christian holy space was, to be sure, a response that needed no explanation,

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as its meaning was self-evident. The new and distinctive Muslim character of the Temple Mount and the remodeling of a grand church in Damascus so that it might serve as the principal mosque of the city and the symbol of Muslim authority in the capital of the Umayyad realm are cases in point. How Muslims might have tampered, if at all, with a myriad of less noticeable Christian holy places and the display of Christian religious paraphernalia is another matter, one that is decidedly more difficult to ascertain from the historical record, such as it is for the period covered by this book. We are informed by our medieval sources that the caliph Yazid II (720–24) issued an edict in 721 commanding that Christian icons not only banned from public display but destroyed. Muslims fully understood the objects were freighted with doctrinal meaning running counter to the pure monotheism of Islam. Not even icons that were already part of Church decoration were to be spared. We now have archeological evidence that in the late Umayyad period churches in al-Sham had mosaic floors in which representations of living creatures were effaced. That might suggest, at first, the caliph’s reported policy had in fact been carried out. But the archeological findings are not unambiguous. The monotheist prohibition against representing living objects is derived from the Hebrew Bible and is later reiterated in the Qur’an. In both cases it is associated with the practice of idolatry, a violation of fundamental principle. But all three monotheist faiths display complex attitudes towards a more broadly defined visual representation. Ancient Jewish synagogues had mosaic floors, one at Bet Alpha in Galilee with representations of the signs of the Zodiac. A certain rabbi’s bathroom had a ceiling decorated with the planetary spheres. Still another rabbi was admonished by a pagan for entering a bathhouse decorated with a statue of Aphrodite. Similarly, ‘A’ishah, the child bride of Muhammad, reportedly had a curtain with representations of animals that hung over a niche in her chambers. At the Prophet’s command, the curtain was removed, but it was not destroyed; it was instead sewn into pillow covers, presumably with the representations of the living creatures intact. At the so-called Umayyad summer palace at Khirbet al-Mafjar near the Dead Sea, one can clearly make out representations of dancing women in situations that would have offended austere Muslim authorities the likes of Ibn Taymiyah. There is a principle inherent in the license taken to produce the synagogue floors, the bathhouse mosaics of the Umayyad summer palace, and the aforementioned stories, whether true or merely literary inventions. In each and every case, there could be no confusing artistic rendition with the adoration of pagan divinities and/or the worship of heavenly bodies. One does not revere a divinity

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by walking on its representation or taking a leisurely bath for pleasure. Nor does one relieve oneself while gazing at stars that are the objects of worship. Having been challenged by the pagan when he entered a bathhouse at which there was a statue of Aphrodite, the rabbi countered that the statue was there to adorn the baths; he was there to merely take a bath and not express adoration for Aphrodite. Rabbinic sources make it clear it would have been another matter for a Jew to erect a statue visible from his or her apartment in a city wall, as that might be confused with the Tyche, or patron divinity of the city. Hence, it was strictly forbidden by the rabbis. Because ‘A’ishah’s curtain originally covered a niche, one might have thought the space housed an idol, as was the case in pagan temples. But it was permissible for her to recline on pillows fashioned from the fabric, for one hardly would sit on the representation of a god or godlike figure. Even the Christians had ambivalent thoughts about iconic representations of human forms. At the same time that the mosaics of churches were defaced, there was a raging controversy within Eastern Christianity about the permissibility of representing human figures. An iconoclastic debate within learned Christian circles continued until those who favored human representation finally triumphed over their opponents. One notes that sometime after the faces on the church mosaics had been defaced, they were delicately repaired. There are two possible explanations: first, that the original desecration of the churches was a Muslim undertaking, but Christians eventually felt secure enough to restore the mosaics to their former condition; and second, that the defacement was undertaken by Christians who supported a ban on iconography, but once those who favored human representation prevailed, the mosaics were restored. In any case, the Christians of Islamic lands continued with the visual expression of their faith, including the open display and veneration of icons and relics. These actions drew the disapproval of stern Muslim authorities, especially in sacred sites shared by the two faiths.

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Muslims and Christians Perceptions, Polemics, and Apologetics

As noted earlier, Muslim scripture is literally sprinkled with tales of persons and events originating in the Hebrew Bible and traditional Jewish lore. In contrast, the Qur’an draws less attention to the figures that make up the narratives of the New Testament, the holy book known to Muslims as the injil or Gospels. As one would expect, the Qur’an specifically mentions Jesus and Mary, and there is also reference to John the Baptist and his father Zacharias, but most of the Apostles are not cited by name; their activities are at best hinted at in oblique references. This is not to say the early Muslims were not aware of many stories from the collective body of writings that comprise the New Testament, only that for whatever reason the Qur’an gives somewhat greater weight to the narratives of the Hebrew Bible, a text Christians embrace as sacred but interpret in ways that diverge from Jewish tradition. Still, there are numerous occasions when Muslim scripture refers to Christians, their views, and the behavior of their diverse religious communities, in the latter case indirectly. Mention of the Christians is often juxtaposed with the outlook and actions of the Jews, their partners as ahl-kitab, the possessors of a revealed book. All told, there are fourteen passages in the Qur’an which specifically refer to the followers of Christ as Christians, in Arabic Nasara. That term gave rise to speculation among medieval Muslim exegetes and Qur’an commentators. Many if not most medieval Muslim philologists understood Nasara as derived from the Arabic verb meaning to assist or support (n-s-r). In that sense, the Christians were linked to Jesus, the penultimate prophet, as were the Ansar of Medina to God’s final and most perfect prophet. Muslim tradition lists the initial leaders of the Ansar as being twelve in number. It is safe to say this is no mere coincidence; these early converts to Islam who reportedly led the native Medinese in support of Muhammad 236

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were no doubt linked by Muslim scholars to the twelve Apostles of the Christians and perhaps also to the twelve tribes of the ancient Israelites. However, with all due respect to the learned Muslim scholars of the Middle Ages, the term Nasara is most likely derived not from n-s-r “to assist” but from Nazarine; in Hebrew, the Christians are known as notzrim, based on the Hebrew word for Nazareth (Natzeret). The references to Jesus and Mary are entirely favorable; those to the Christians as a group are decidedly less so. At times, there is faint praise for the Christians, and more often they are castigated for their rejection of Muhammad and their faulty theology, although on the whole the Qur’an paints a kinder picture of them than the Jews, who unlike the Christians were provoked into taking up arms against the Prophet in the formative and critical stages of his career. This preference for the Christians over the Jews is at first glance explicitly stated in Surah 5, the segment of the Qur’an labeled “The Table” (al-ma’idah) in which there are many statements concerning Christians, pairing them at times with other People of the Book. Our attention is drawn to verse 82 [83] in which the Jews (al-Yahud) and idolaters are cited as bearing the strongest enmity towards the true believers, that is, the Muslims. The text goes on to say, in contrast, the closest to the Muslims are those who declare themselves Christians (Nasara), “because among them are priests and monks who are not arrogant.” Lest one simply believe that Muslim scripture is drawing reference to meek priests and monks as opposed to the militant Jewish tribes of Medina and Khaybar who opposed the Prophet in battle, the following verse makes it clear that, in referring to the priests and monks of the Nasara, the text speaks of learned Christians who see the truth of Muhammad’s mission and are willing to bear witness accordingly. In effect, what the Qur’an wishes to convey is that the Christians closest to the Muslims are those who turn their back on Christianity in favor of Islam. That, in any case, is how the verse was understood by many early Muslim commentators. Giving meaning to 5:83 [84], they maintain the Christians referred to are immigrants from Abyssinia, where the Muslims had established a mission. And so they came to Medina, according to some authorities, seven priests and five monks, twelve in all (mirroring, to be sure, the twelve apostles of Jesus). When they heard Muhammad’s revelation, their eyes were filled with tears at what they recognized was the truth and they said: “Our Lord! We believe; register us as witnesses” (meaning to the truth of Muhammad and his mission). Having become believers, they returned to the emperor of the Christian kingdom, who apparently was so moved by their story he too set off to see Muhammad

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(presumably in order to convert to Islam) but unfortunately died in route. There is the implication that had the emperor lived, Abyssinia and its Christians would have all converted to the final manifestation of monotheism, unlike so many of the Christians who found themselves in the path of ArabMuslim expansion. The latter, like the Jews, willfully denied the Prophet and Islam even though they knew better from having read their own scriptures and sacred writings as well as from having absorbed their oral traditions, all of which foretold Muhammad’s mission. In their hearts Jews and Christians knew the authenticity of Muhammad’s calling and the legitimacy of his message. As did the Jews, the Christians established a covenant with God (in which they professed belief in the future coming of Muhammad and the truth of his mission); but like the Jews, they too forgot their agreement and are thus destined to pay for this indiscretion until the Day of Resurrection (Qur’an 3:72 [75]; and especially 5:14). As the Qur’an does not accuse the Christians of bearing arms against the Prophet at the initial stages of his career, there is no litany of the more perfidious behavior that fills the brief compiled against the Jews. But the great problem with the Christians, other than their failure to accept Islam as demanded by their own sacred traditions, were fundamental Christian beliefs that were declared by the Muslims as incompatible with true monotheism. Jesus was properly respected, but as a man and prophet, as was Muhammad. He was not a manifestation of God, nor was he resurrected after his apparent death. Similarly, Mary was a virtuous woman, much like the virtuous women of Islam, to whom she is compared; she did not give birth to the son of God, for as the Qur’an says with regard to Allah: He “does not beget nor was he begotten” (112:3). In claiming otherwise the Christians “are truly liars” (37:152). There could be no room for compromise as regards the unicity of the one true Lord of heaven and earth. In attacking both older monotheist religious communities, the Qur’an points out the antagonism they showed to one another. The reference to the Jews as “killers of their prophets” was, among other things, a gloss on their alleged role in the crucifixion of Jesus. The failure of the Jews and Christians to agree on fundamental matters was an indication that they consciously or inadvertently distorted God’s message, which had been sent to both communities through prophets past. No wonder then that they did not heed God’s will and denied Muhammad and Islam. Some Muslim scholars read Surah 5:14, “so we have stirred up enmity and hatred among them,” as indicating Christians bickered among themselves, a reflection of the rancorous doctrinal disputes between the different branches of Eastern Christianity. Others

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commentators read these words, we think more correctly, as referring to Jewish-Christian relations—a better fit with the surrounding verses of the surah. In any case, later Islamic Qur’an commentary and polemical literature filled in the gaps of Muslim scripture to give more precise meaning and greater weight to the theological errors of the Christians and their stubborn ways. The Christians were thus presented with a challenge they felt had to be met, not for the sake of combating the Muslims directly—that would have been a dangerous course—but for shoring up the beliefs and spirit of those Christians who remained loyal to their faith as others converted to Islam. Like the Jews, the Christians formulated an apologetic literature defending their faith. Unlike the Jews, they leave us with a relatively early and extensive record of their response. This endeavor of the Christians is treated with great sensitivity in Sidney Griffith’s learned and thought-provoking The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque (2008). christian ap olo getics and conversion to isl am It is noteworthy that this literature is written not only in Syriac, the learned language of Eastern Christians, but also in Arabic and in Arabic script. With the widespread introduction of Arabic during the Umayyad period, even Christian monks began writing in that language, although their Arabic is somewhat distinctive from the classical language of contemporaneous Muslim writers. The earliest apologetics, beginning in the late seventh or eighth century CE, already show the triangularity of religious discourse that persisted throughout the Middle Ages. All three Abrahamic faiths were drawn into debates of a polemical and apologetic nature. At the outset, monks living in their remote retreats in greater Syria and the monastery of the Mother of God in Sinai justified Christian doctrine and practice against the accusations of the Muslims, but often Christian apologists also used the occasion to attack Jews, as did the Muslims when the latter attacked Christians. The Jews, who always sought a low profile, would respond in kind by linking the Christians and Muslims, most often in Hebrew or Judeo-Arabic which, being written in Hebrew characters, made these texts less accessible to non-Jews. History taught Jews to be decidedly less bold than their Christian neighbors in the lands of Islam. Christian responses to Islamic hegemony included works that glorified the lives of sainted individuals like ‘Abd al-Massih al-Najrani who were reportedly martyred for having adhered to their faith. The model for such writing was the well-known acts of the martyrs of early Christian times, those who

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reportedly suffered at the hands of the Roman authorities. Vivid images of martyrdom were clearly intended to provide examples for Christians who wavered in their faith because of external pressures and/or the temptations of seeking acceptance among the ruling society. One would be right to suspect there is more hagiography than history in these Christian responses to the Muslims and Islam. Still, one can readily see why Christians felt threatened at the time and found it necessary to bolster their various communities. The territorial expansion of Islam into Christian lands during the previous century was still fresh in their memories. If the loss of Jerusalem and the Holy Land were not sufficient to cause them agitation and grief, there was the knowledge that Egypt and all of North Africa had fallen to the infidels, and that the Muslims had come close to conquering Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire. Everywhere along the borders with the Abode of Islam, the Christians were on the defensive, all the more so within the lands controlled by the caliphs. As noted in the previous chapter, the caliph ‘Abd al-Malik, having already mandated Arabic as the official language of the realm, began Islamizing Jerusalem in 691. The building of the Dome of the Rock on the ancient temple platform, and following that the great Aqsa mosque, built or completed by his son al-Walid, gave visual expression to Muslim dominance of what had been the holy city of the Christians. We may assume that by the latter part of the eighth century Islam had made serious inroads against Christianity and that the number of converts to the new faith had grown as the reality of Muslim rule took on a sense of permanence. Losses were likely to have been most severe among the Christian public servants, who for years had served and continued to serve as functionaries within the Muslim bureaucracy, and among prosperous Christians seeking to enjoy the social and economic advantages of being Muslim, particularly when it came to paying lighter taxes. Indeed, the process of conversion actually created difficulties for the early Islamic state, as the new Muslims were eventually relieved of having to pay the poll tax required of all the tolerated minorities, a major source of revenue for the expanding ummah. Greater numbers of converts meant less revenue for the state. An anonymous Syriac chronicler of the times speaks of groups of tens and even hundreds of Christians submitting to Islam in the presence of government officials and without being compelled to do so, a rather disturbing development for a faith community noted for its martyrdom in the face of persecution. One can hardly deny the possibility, indeed the probability, of conversion on a noteworthy scale at this early juncture of Christian-Muslim relations, but there is no hard evidence Christians were submitting to Islam en masse.

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Doubtless they did so as individuals or perhaps even extended families, but, as with the Jews, we have no reason to believe they did so as entire communities. The losses may have been even more pronounced in the ninth century as the Islamic authorities exercised their control over a vast swath of formerly Christian territory, but all attempts at weighing the scale of conversion and tying it to specific moments in history have thus far have proved highly speculative, if not indeed most problematic. In any case, any losses massive or otherwise would have demanded a response from the guardians of the Christian faith, hence the burgeoning output of Christian apologia. Having acknowledged that need to defend the faith, we are left to search for a nuanced analysis of increased apologetic activity in the ninth century as regards both cause and response. While undoubtedly reflecting the dangers of conversion, real and anticipated, the apologia need not be linked, of necessity, to a catastrophic rise in the rate of conversion. Nor is it necessary to explain the apparent increase to heightened Muslim pressure on the tolerated minorities of the realm, although at first glance this would seem to be a plausible explanation for defending the faith. And so, we are left to wonder: If not a hardened attitude and discriminatory policy towards the dhimmis, what would have caused the ‘massive’ conversion to Islam that some modern scholars suggest? If there was in fact no massive increase in conversion, that is, had the conversion rate remained more or less the same, or, what is more likely, had it grown incrementally, why the perceived need to generate more works to defend and hence bolster Christian faith in the ninth century? Taking a rather different tack, one may wish to consider whether the increased production of apologetic literature in the ninth century might have been occasioned not simply by losses to conversion, catastrophic or otherwise, or by increased pressure by the ruling Muslim authorities, but by the opposite, a more relaxed attitude on the part of the Muslim rulers to their Christian subjects. That is, whatever conversion took place in the ninth century was not necessarily the result of the maltreatment of dhimmis, as reported by the Arabic chroniclers describing the reign of the caliph al-Mutawakkil (847–61)—that caliph’s policy was a highly unusual and brought hardship to Muslims as well. Conversion and, related to that, apologetic discourse might have been occasioned by a general mood of tolerance and intellectual curiosity that crossed confessional lines, circumstances that made it safer to explore and respond with interest to the Islamic milieu that had taken root in former Christian soil. As the pace of the campaign against the Byzantines settled into a more predictable routine, and as the newly emergent Abbasid empire showed

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greater tolerance for its broad constituency of non-Muslims as well as nonArab Muslims, those Christians who held steadfast might have believed that they had sufficient license to defend their faith for Christian audiences and even enter into polite intellectual discussions with Muslims. Lest readers be carried away by this last suggestion, a caveat is in order. Whatever intellectual discussions might have taken place between Christians and Muslims or Jews and Muslims were not medieval versions of a public modern interfaith dialogue, a forum whose aim it is to find common ground among different religious communities. The famous Christian text of a religious disputation between the learned Abbasid caliph al-Ma’mun (813–33) and even more learned monks is, despite all the charm and interest of the narrative, the detailed account of an event that, from the perspective of the Christians, should have been, and not one that actually took place. Be that as it may, Sidney Griffith, the leading authority on these matters, has argued in different scholarly forums that interfaith discussions did take place and thus paved the way for the translation activity of the ninth century, a monumental project described in the next chapter, on Islamic philosophy and science. However tolerant the early Abbasids might have been to the People of the Book, save of course for the reign of al-Mutawakkil, the advantages of conversion were considerable, more so perhaps for Christians than Jews. Jews lived in tightly knit communities and in a relatively circumscribed environment. Conversion to Islam might very well have left individual Jewish converts feeling somewhat isolated and hence uncomfortable as they lacked broader tribal or local affiliations that could sustain them socially or when in need of economic assistance. The numbers of the respective monotheist communities told a revealing story. In contrast to the diminished Jewish communities that survived centuries of Roman and Byzantine rule, the Christians were ubiquitous throughout the former lands of the Eastern Roman Empire. Even before the advent of Islam there were Arab Christian tribes who had settled in Iraq and greater Syria. Linked by the powerful ties of blood, these tribes might have served as some sort of social and economic umbrella for individual converts to Islam. Non-Arab Christian converts might have experienced conversion rather differently, but that is largely conjecture. As in the case of the Jews, we simply do not know enough about the dynamics of conversion to Islam in the early centuries of Muslim ascendance. What is clear is that the widespread use of Arabic brought Christians and Muslims closer together, and with familiarity there was always the danger of accommodating to the values and even beliefs of the more powerful element of society. It is then not surprising that the monks and priests responded with a literature

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intended to help communities withstand any religious leakage or worse yet their general erosion. Many apologetic texts were written in Arabic and were thus more accessible to Christians who were less skilled in Greek, Coptic, and Syriac, the languages of the learned. The task of defending Christianity was complicated by the internal fissures within Eastern Christianity, a point Muslim polemicists were only too eager to exploit. How could a religion with so many diverse viewpoints be a true faith? Muslims of course had their own internal divisions, but these were not regarding basic matters of a theological nature; for Muslims such divisions more often stemmed from disagreements about legitimacy of rule and related to that the power of the state. There was in sum a lack of doctrinal clarity to the positions of the Christians. The Christian apologists also faced a new phenomenon: the learned convert to Islam who then turned on his former co-religionists and did so with considerable learning. Above all, conversion brought greater social acceptance and, with exemption from the poll tax ( jizyah) imposed on Christians and Jews, a lessening of the new Muslims’ financial burdens. Still, the Christians hung on as a significant element of the population, if not an absolute majority, in certain regions for generations to come. It is not at all unlikely that the attrition of the Christian population in the Near East, particularly in towns and cities, was gradual and not sudden. When Muslims became the absolute majority is still a matter of conjecture that is not likely to be resolved. the uses of history and pseud o- history in ap olo getic discourse As a rule, in the Middle Ages the apologists for the older Abrahamic faiths had two concerns. The first was the assimilation of foreign beliefs and ways that could chip away at tradition and lead in the worst-case scenario to actual conversion, and hence the withering of the community; the second was how to absorb the triumph of the unbelievers, and given the power of the Islamic state, to speculate about the redemption of those whom God had seemingly abandoned. As a result, Christian apologias were intended not only to reinforce fundamental Christian beliefs and practices but to give the communities dwelling in the Abode of Islam hope that the triumph of the Muslims was not God’s final verdict but only preparation for a coming apocalypse, after which the world will revert to its proper order. Christianity would be triumphant once again and for all time. Needless to say, this second concern was not the main staple of Christian writers when the Byzantine Empire

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held sway throughout much of the Near East and North Africa or perhaps even at the outset of the Islamic conquest. Although a serious threat to the image of Eastern Christianity’s rulers, the earliest Muslim victories could be dismissed as a temporary setback, much like the loss to the Sasanians of Jerusalem, which was recaptured for the true faith within slightly more than a decade. Surely, it was only a matter of time before the emperor would marshal his forces and repel the ragged tribesmen from Arabia. Such was not destined to happen, not in the seventh nor in the eighth nor in the ninth centuries. Clearly, there had to be an end to this continuing and demoralizing affront to Christianity. At some point God would intervene and initiate cataclysmic events that would overturn the present political order and usher in a messianic age. The apologists writing in early Islamic times did not invent their apocalyptic/messianic visions out of new cloth; the world of early Christianity and late Judaism was permeated with accounts of the “end of times” and the onset of a sublime messianic age. The proof texts for the coming event were most often derived from revered sacred writings and/or mysterious unknown texts that only learned initiates were said to fathom. A Jewish apologist thus gives meaning to the rise of Islam based on passages from the biblical prophet Isaiah. The author of the Hidden Visions (nistarot) of Rabbi Simeon Ben Yochai turns to chapter 21:6–7: “For thus spoke to me my Lord: Go set up a lookout. Let him announce whatever he sees. (6) He will see mounted men; pairs of horsemen; riders of donkeys; riders on camels; and he will pay the most careful attention” (7). This Hebrew apocalypse, which went through many permutations over the centuries, is attributed to no less than the legendary Simeon ben Yochai, a rabbi who reportedly spent years isolated in a cave hiding from the Romans, where in his ample spare time he learned all the hidden secrets of the Torah. How could one ask for anyone better suited for predicting the future based on texts past? Armed with such powers of interpretation, and some help from the angel Metatron, the rabbi elucidated the cryptic verses of the prophet. The “mounted men” refers to the Babylonians (who destroyed God’s house and exiled His people); the “pairs” to the Medes (Persians who destroyed the kingdom of Babylon and returned the exiles to the Promised Land); the “horsemen” refers in turn to the Greeks (who displaced the Persians); the “riders of donkeys” to the Edomites (meaning Romans/Byzantines who inherited the kingdom of the Hellenistic Greeks); and the camel riders to the kingdom of the Ishmaelites (that is, to the Arab Muslims who will triumph over the Byzantines). The rabbi had previously been concerned when the Almighty pre-

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sented him with a vision of the future in which the sons of Ishmael replaced the Edomites. He cried out: “Haven’t we had enough as a result of what the evil kingdom of Edom has done to us? Now [we have to endure] the kingdom of Ishmael?” Ben Yochai is then reassured because the victory of the Ishmaelites predicted by Isaiah will be a watershed in the history of Israel and the world at large, as it will then set into motion a series of earth-shaking events that will terminate in the redemption of God’s chosen people. History will have run full course; the great kingdoms of the past that ruled over Israel will at best be memories in the world to come. To be sure, the Christians had a rather different view of how events would unfold in the end of days. The earliest version of the Christian response to Islam is a Syriac work attributed to a certain Methodius, a martyred bishop, whose reported authorship was designed to give the tract legitimacy. Modern scholars, following their custom of labeling anonymous works assigned to specific authors, refer to the apocalyptical text as Pseudo-Methodius. The original apocalypse has been dated to the period of ‘Abd al-Malik; its seeming purpose to guard against the temptation of conversion to Islam, which would have appeared more attractive to wavering Christians in light of the caliph’s aforementioned policies. To stem the tide of apostasy, Methodius, or, if you prefer, Pseudo-Methodius, sought to reassure the Christian faithful that the triumph of the Muslims, which had clearly taken hold of the imagination of Christians, was only temporary. In God’s grand design, the Byzantines would triumph in the end, as they are the last of the earthly kingdoms predicted in the visions of the biblical book of Daniel, chapter 7, the quintessential apocalypse shared by Christians and Jews alike, with different interpretations to be sure. It is noteworthy that the text of Pseudo-Methodius has given rise to many later permutations, including truncated versions that spread far and wide and in different languages. Collectively that material is known as the “Visions of Daniel”; there are also Jewish apocalyptical texts of that name (Hazon Daniel). Moreover, the Daniel texts of the Christians are also referred to by the Muslims, who developed an apocalyptical literature of their own, the so-called Malahim Daniyal, first during late Umayyad times. For the most part the Islamic sources and their subsequent imitations addressed internal Muslim concerns, that is, who was to rule the ummah and by what claim. Be that as it may, the existence of different versions of the Daniel tradition and/or references to it in all three faith communities is once again an indication of the triangular nature of their apologetic and polemical encounters. The early Syriac version of Pseudo-Methodius begins with the bishop ask-

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ing God for a history of the succession of kings and what will transpire at the end of times. And so, God sends one of the heavenly hosts to instruct Methodius concerning all generations past and to come. The angel begins his lengthy and rambling tale with Adam and Eve until finally he reaches the rise of Islam, a catastrophe visited upon the Christians because of the error of their ways. They had clearly strayed from the righteous path of their Christian ancestors. But in the end, God will have compassion upon them and undo the history of the recent past. The last of the earthly kingdoms predicted originally in the book of Daniel will be restored. Christianity will triumph over Islam and all other rivals. A Christian apologist would hope such visions of the future would have a consoling effect on beleaguered communities. But as Muslim dominance not only continued but grew, the learned Christians turned as well to defending the faith with invented dialogues between Christian notables and Muslim interrogators who were intent on exploring, if not demeaning, the Christian faith. The earliest extant text of this sort dates from 874 CE, although there is every reason to believe such accounts were well in evidence during the previous century. Some reported disputes are described as having taken place even earlier, shortly after the Muslim conquest, an attempt to demonstrate that God’s favored were forced to defend their faith from the very outset of Muslim rule. The most notable of the dispute texts is the alleged exchange between the Abbasid caliph al-Ma’mun and some learned Christians, a figment of a lively apologist’s imagination mentioned previously. It goes without saying that in this genre of literature the Christians had ready and convincing responses to each and every challenge concerning the basic doctrines and practices of their faith. These depictions of conversations, originally written in Syriac, and hence we would assume for Christian eyes only, were seemingly intended for audiences who could not only follow sophisticated arguments in the learned language of the church but would be able to grasp fine technical details concerning doctrinal matters. The stakes are reported as being high, which heightens the dramatic mood of the texts; the Muslim-Christian disputes are not represented as friendly discussions about matters of faith in which parties demonstrating an interest in comparative religion agree to disagree. According to the rules of some debates set forth by the ruling authorities, were the Christians unable to counter the Muslim arguments with convincing evidence derived from the Gospels, they would have to confess defeat and submit to the dictates of Islam. In short, they would have to convert to the faith of their rulers. The Muslims are not portrayed as easy adversaries by the apologists. In one instance a Muslim

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being treated in a monastery for sickness is described as learned not only in his own scripture but also in that of the Christians. The monk in turn is reported to be fully conversant in Arabic. At first the monk refuses to be drawn into any discussion of religion, preferring silence as befits a person of his religious calling. But the truth has to prevail and indeed it does; the monk engages the visiting Muslim and with evident success because the latter is forced to confess that if politics played no role at all in these disputes and it was simply a matter of recognizing religious truth, many Muslims would turn to Christianity. Not all Christians could follow the arguments of the dispute literature, and so there were more accessible defenses of the faith dealing with a wide range of issues including practices that were integral to Christian doctrine and worship and visual markers of Christian identity, such as the sacrament of Baptism, the celebration of the Eucharist, and the public veneration of crosses, icons, and the relics of martyrs. Muslims were not only opposed to these ceremonies and symbols because they were linked to doctrinal issues concerning the trinity, crucifixion, and resurrection; they feared the pomp and circumstance of the Christians and their popular religion would seduce the faithful and compromise their total commitment to what they maintained was unadulterated and therefore true monotheism. The response of the Muslim authorities to this perceived threat has been treated in the previous chapter on the competition for sacred space. Suffice it to say that response did not go unnoticed by the Christians. It is difficult to gauge the religious “leakage” within Christian communities caused by the rise of Islam, the failure of a meaningful Byzantine counteroffensive to roll back the Muslim advances of the seventh and eighth centuries, and the advantages, financial and otherwise, that induced Christians to convert to Islam, or to accept or rather to accommodate to certain Muslim beliefs as compatible with their own Christian religious outlook. One might consider in this regard the early JudeoChristian communities that thought of Christianity not as a full break with Mosaic religion but as an extension of it. The historical literature is a blank as regards these matters, but Christian apologists in the ninth century drew reference to the possibilities if not actuality of their brethren not only converting to Islam but recognizing there was at least some truth in the faith claims of their adversaries. These wayward Christians were regarded as hypocrites and the equivalent of nonbelievers, or so we may gather from the apologist’s use of Arabic terminology from the Qur’an. He calls these so-called Christians munafiqun and kafirun. How widespread were these sentiments against the alleged backsliders within the varied Christian communities in

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the lands of Islam, and was there real cause for concern that some Christians had become eclectic in their religious tastes? The Christians, now conversant in Arabic, were certainly aware of the apparent simplicity of Muslim doctrine and the highly regulated and carefully articulated daily observances Islamic law required of the Muslim faithful. Ironically, Muslim authorities thought what was most seductive about Christianity was its pomp and circumstance; on the other hand, a major Christian apologist expressed concern over what might he maintained was the clarity of Islamic doctrine and belief, expressed, moreover, in a language that was easily digestible, exactly the kind of religion that could sway the uninformed. Taking license to be whimsical, we could only wish that doctrine and language were as clear to modern scholars attempting to fathom the mysteries of the medieval Islamic world. ap olo gia as p olemical discourse Scholars who indulge their intellectual appetites by gorging on apologetic texts are only too well aware that the line between apologia and polemics can be very fine at times. As the long-awaited messianic age never came, the defenders of the Christian (and also Jewish) faith had to give their embattled constituencies more than a defensive posture against the increasingly dominant Muslim state. At the root of this spirited defense was the fear of apostasy, particularly among the Christians. As always, it was deemed necessary to gird Christian belief and practice, but there was also a perceived need to go on the offensive and undermine the authenticity of Muhammad’s claims to prophecy. With that, the internal structure that supported the legitimacy of the Islamic state and gave credence to Muslim beliefs and actions was declared suspect. The monotheist minorities did not broadcast these views too loudly, lest the repercussions come back to haunt them. One might engage the Muslims in all sorts of learned discourse of mutual interest, but not at the risk of openly insulting their faith. As the Muslims had no similar reservations, the Christians and Jews had no recourse but to respond. Perhaps the most notable tradition of this triangular polemic is that of Bahira the Monk, a tale told in many versions and languages, and over an extended period of time. The earliest version, presumably that of the Muslims, has already been briefly mentioned in our discussion of Muhammad’s mission. Among Muslim polemicists, Bahira is identified as a pious Christian, the inhabitant of a monastery, who recognizes Muhammad’s prophetic vocation based on a series of miracles and an informed reading of his own religious tradition, in this case a book containing signs of the Prophet’s future coming, as well as a

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detailed list of the bodily signs by which the long-awaited Prophet could be identified. The tradition, in its various forms, is consistent with a wide variety of accounts in which Christians learned in their own faith are described as more than well aware that their sacred writings contain references to the onset of Islam. The same held true for the rabbis who, like the Christians, defied their own tradition and the covenant of their prophets past, an agreement reached with God no less, in which all the prophets of old promised to relay the message of Muhammad’s future arrival. In doing so, they would pave the way for his acceptance among the peoples of the book. The Qur’an suggests that Christians were also bound by this covenant. This being the case, why have the older monotheists refused to recognize the truths of their own sacred writings and oral traditions? As Jewish reaction to the Bahira legend is explored in my book, The Middle East Remembered: Forged Identities, Competing Narratives, Contested Spaces (2000), a brief note will do here. We have only to say the Jews refer to Bahira as a great astrologer (a way of diminishing the veracity of his statements because portending the future by reading the stars was expressly forbidden by biblical law). Were that not sufficient to attack the monk’s credibility, he is described as a man of “uncircumcised body and heart,” that is, an obdurate Christian. Like the Christians, Jews were concerned with losses by way of conversion, and so for them the Bahira story takes another turn to emphasize the explicit dangers of leaving the chosen people. Muhammad was under the spell not only of the monk but of various Jewish converts to Islam. These reportedly included virtually all the leading Muslims of the time, including such figures as Abu Bakr, ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib, and ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab, each a future caliph. In effect, virtually the entire inner Qurayshite circle that surrounded Muhammad from the outset of his mission and who were to play a dominant role in the expansion of Islam after his death were made out to be of Jewish origins. In the end the Jews led by Abu Bakr plotted successfully to have the monk killed, others came to recognize the falseness of Muhammad’s preaching, but the damage to Judaism was already set into motion. Exiled by the Prophet for his part in the conspiracy to do away Bahira, Abu Bakr began the conquest of the lands beyond Arabia, thus opening a path for the subjugation of the Jewish communities situated therein. As with the Jews, the battle lines over the monk were clearly drawn for Near Eastern Christians. Writing initially in Arabic and Syriac, they turned to the defense of their faith, not only by undermining the integrity of Bahira, whom they declared a misguided monk, but by demeaning the person of Muhammad. The Muslim Prophet is portrayed as an Arab primitive who

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falsely declares himself to be God’s Messenger under the monk’s tutelage. The accounts are all highly repetitive and uneven, the seeming result of cobbling together several similar accounts to form a single disjointed tradition. As the composite Christian tale unfolds, we learn that the monk had a series of visions on Mount Sinai where he foresaw the coming of the Ishmaelites, that is, the onset of the Arab-Muslim conquest of the seventh century, and of various Muslim regimes replacing one another until onset of the messianic age and the second coming of Jesus Christ. The Messiah’s return to the region of his origins is seen as redeeming the beleaguered Eastern Christians from the yoke of oppressive Muslim rule, thus vindicating the steadfast faith of those Christians who would continue to profess their religious claims and refuse conversion to Islam. If there is a sense of déjà vu to this framing of messianic expectations, it should come as no surprise. The vision of successive kingdoms leading up to a final redemption is a staple of many apocalyptical texts, most forged from templates modeled after the story of Daniel, the prototype of this genre. This is explicitly confirmed by Bahira in his extended description of a history about to take place; one that will run its course over the centuries to come. The apocalyptical visions contained in both the Arabic and Syriac versions are clearly linked to common sources. Despite minor variations, the predictions of the future are essentially the same. Having received this disturbing vision, Bahira sets off for the Byzantine emperor (and the Sasanian Khusraw as well). Like Moses, who went to off to see the pharaoh of Egypt, he delivers his message to rulers in language and dramatic gestures that are coded but easily decipherable, especially by the Christian emperor of the Byzantines. Both he and the Khusraw of the Persians are pictured as resigned to their fate. After all, this was a prophecy revealed on Mount Sinai and, as we shall see, foretold in holy writ; what chance had they against what God had ordained? Bahira then settles among the Arabs of Yathrib (later known as Medina, the city of the Prophet), a rather uncivilized lot, and also engages their prophetto-be, whom he recognizes based on his own intimate knowledge of prophetic signs. He tells the ignorant Arabs of their links to the biblical Ishmael and of God’s blessing to Abraham’s eldest son, the future progenitor of the mighty Arab kingdoms (an event mentioned in Genesis 17, and often cited by Muslim polemicists as evidence of their triumphal destiny). He also links that blessing to his own vision at Mount Sinai, a seeming confirmation that it was indeed a true vision of a glorious Muslim future. The Arabs, who have come to accept his presence, are certainly happy to hear these glad tidings,

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which portend their later conquest of a vast world beyond the confines of Arabia. At this point, contemporaneous Christians might have begun to wonder where all this was leading. A naïve reader might have concluded that learned Christian authors embraced what seems at first glance a Muslim vision, if not political agenda. The story of the inevitable Islamic conquest and prolonged Muslim rule can hardly have been looked upon with favor by those who labored under the yoke of the Ishmaelites. Surely, the interlocutor of the authors, the learned monk Bahira, had no intention of declaring Muhammad a true prophet; the descendant of Ishmael could not have been anything more than an agent in a larger design conceived by God to prepare the Christian world for the second coming of Christ. But if one accepts that Muhammad was doing God’s work, as Bahira clearly states, why reject the claim that the Muslim Prophet actually revealed the word of God, as the Qur’an proclaims? If both Christian and Muslim tradition refer to the story of Ishmael’s blessing in the Bible, why not privilege all Muslim claims derived from their interpretations of the Old and New Testaments, texts revered by the Christians as divine scripture? Needless to say, that is not what Christians had in mind when they skillfully crafted their version of the Bahira legend. They could hardly have been less critical of Muslim claims than were the Jews who countered the Muslim account of Bahira. Like the Jews, the Christian polemicists were not about to affirm the beliefs of the unbelievers, but to contest in a most clever manner the claims of a well-known Muslim narrative. Indeed, a careful reading of the Christian texts reveals a rejection of Muslim claims that their Prophet was sent by God to all peoples (read in this case Christians and Jews). In the Syriac version, a young Muhammad wants to know more of Bahira’s astounding vision. Where did he receive it; who revealed it; what were the specific contents? The monk replies he received it on Mount Sinai (as did Moses who received the Tablets of the Law, an indication that his prediction of the Ishmaelite future was surely authentic). Moreover, the vision came directly from God, who took the trouble of explaining Himself so there would be absolutely no misunderstanding (as He did for Moses’ revelation according to rabbinic tradition). No doubt, this last comment was intended to affirm Bahira’s experience, thus lending veracity to his prediction of the future Arab conquest and its ramifications. But it is in Bahira’s account of Muhammad’s future mission that the real Christian agenda begins to unfold. Readers or listeners must have understood how this Christian version of

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events actually undermines Muslim claims. The monk reveals that Muhammad has been enjoined by the Almighty to turn “your people away from the worship of graven images.” The understood emphasis is on your people. Unlike the explicit claims found in Muslim sources, there is no inkling here that Muhammad’s mission is universal; that he has been sent by God as a messenger for all of humankind. One cannot imagine from anything said by Bahira that he or his fellow Christians had any religious need of Muhammad or that the descendant of Ishmael would have anything to say to them that was directly relevant to their faith and religious practice. The Christians already believed in the God of Heaven; the uncouth and unlearned Arabs are Muhammad’s concern, just as other peoples were the concern of prophets before him. In the beginning, humans worshiped idols, much like the Arabs, but God sent them His law and His prophets, righteous and holy men to instruct them. Now it was Muhammad’s turn to take up the cause of monotheism and bring the polytheists in line. Let us be clear as to what the Christian polemicists are saying through the monk Bahira. There is recognition here, and also in the Arabic version, that Muhammad was indeed designated to be a genuine prophet. At first reading, this is a highly tolerant view compared to other Christian attitudes in the Near East and the Latin West, particularly the negative views that developed as the centuries passed. But, rest assured, Muhammad of the Bahira legend is not the quintessential prophet; the Lord and Seal of the Prophets; the one sent to all humankind with a message that supersedes all others previously conveyed in different languages and revelations. Like his fellow Arabs, the prophet-to-be lacks knowledge, and so he seeks instruction from the learned monk who has settled among the primitive Ishmaelites. Bahira obliges with a succinct but thorough lecture about Christology. The monk assumes that these orthodox Christian views would form the basis of Muhammad’s preaching to his ignorant brethren, a desirable outcome from the perspective of the polemicists who shaped the Bahira legend. Nor is that Christian education given gratuitously; in return for the monk’s instruction, Muhammad is asked to intervene on behalf of all the monks situated in the vast domains soon to be conquered by victorious Arab armies. The reference is to those meek and unworldly Christians who will be no threat, and who should not be of any concern to the Muslim authorities of the future. If Muhammad would intercede on behalf of those Christians, God will preserve him and all his progeny. His domain of and that of his followers will increase everywhere and all those kingdoms that oppose them will be vanquished. Bahira conveniently omitted that the triumphant Arab

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kingdoms to come would give way in the end of days to the ultimate Kingdom of God. The Arabic version of the legend is even more explicit about Bahira’s intercession with the future prophet of the Ishmaelites. In response to his mentor’s request, Muhammad asserts that the monks will be honored and their needs attended to. Were that not a sufficient show of Muhammad’s good faith, the designated Prophet of the Arabs will command all his followers to respect the religious observances of the Christians; their churches will be preserved; their leaders ennobled; and those who abuse them will be encountered by the Prophet himself on the Day of Resurrection. When viewed as a whole, the Christian story of Bahira reaffirms unabashedly the fundamental tenets of Eastern Christianity while pleading a special case for religious tolerance at the hands of the Muslims until the messianic age will bring the rule of the Ishmaelites to an end. For readers of the Bahira legend, the question remains: What went wrong? How is it that the Muslims turned their backs on Christian doctrine and practice? Why is it that the meek monks are so disparaged? Why is it that the Christians as a group, though a tolerated minority, are nevertheless subjected to disfavor and periodic persecution? The Syriac text accounts for some of these seeming anomalies. It portrays Muhammad as skeptical of being accepted by his own people because he himself is without learning and cannot even read—the Prophet’s illiteracy is a theme developed in Muslim tradition as well. Nor is the Arab assuaged when Bahira offers to teach him all he needs to know to carry on with his mission. Quite the opposite, Muhammad fears that both he and his mentor will be declared liars and will fall into harm’s way, also a theme of Muslim tradition, as for example in the warning given Muhammad by the learned Christian Waraqah ibn Nawfal when he like Bahira confirmed the Prophet’s calling. The monk nevertheless prevails. The two will initiate an imaginative if somewhat devious plan of action. Bahira will instruct Muhammad at night away from the eyes of the preying Ishmaelites, and the following day the prophet of the Arabs will repeat what he has learned to receptive audiences. Should the Ishmaelites question the source of his visions, he is to say the angel Gabriel came and spoke to him and he was now relaying to them all what he had learned from a heavenly being. Again, the Christian legend alludes to Muslim claims of how Muhammad received his initial revelation and negates them deftly without being explicit. Muhammad, anticipating various queries from his Arab kinsmen, brings would-be questions to his secret Christian mentor, who then supplies answers that even the ignorant and illiterate Arabs are likely to think satisfactory. For

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example, when Muhammad questions the capacity of his fellow Ishmaelites to control their appetites, be it for food or sex (no monkish habits for them), Bahira allows the Arab prophet to lighten their obligations on earth while heightening their expectations of splendorous things in Paradise. The seeds of Muslim deviation were thus planted by a well-intentioned monk whose only wish was that the ignorant and hesitant Ishmaelite succeeded with his God-ordained mission. Muhammad, in collusion with Bahira, relayed to the Arabs what were to become Muslim beliefs and observances, even though they varied with what would have been and should been the monk’s authentic Christian teaching. Still, Muhammad worried. His fellow Arabs might demand some tangible proof of his mission. It was not enough to relate stories of visits from Gabriel that could not be confirmed by any witnesses, as they occurred during moments of the alleged prophet’s solitude and sleep. Rising to the challenge, the monk offers to write a book for the prophet, and as Muhammad was unlettered, instruct him as to its contents. A dramatic ruse is then concocted to give that book the status of a heavenly revelation. The text written by the Christian will be placed on the horn of a cow. The animal will then be led to the Friday prayers, the day set aside by Muhammad for communal assembly. In that setting, the Muslim prophet will declare that the Lord will send the Ishmaelites a great book from heaven, a work which contains the laws and statutes that will guide them all their lives. When the cow then appears, Muhammad is to rise from his seat and make for it in full view of the assembled throng. Taking Bahira’s text from the horn, Muhammad would then declare that, as the earthly people are not worthy of receiving such a book directly, God miraculously made it appear on the horn of a cow. In such fashion, Christian polemicists explained how the Qur’an was accepted by the gullible Arabs and suggested, however indirectly, why the second and largest surah of Muslim scripture, a segment most concerned with things Jewish and Christian, came to be called al-Baqarah, “The Cow.” However devious and in the end ill advised, all these ruses were certainly not intended as an affront to the monk’s Christianity, nor is Muhammad portrayed as a complete charlatan. He may have been a poseur, but the Christian writers suggest, at least in these texts, that Muhammad could have been chosen to deliver God’s message, as had a long line of prophets before him. He was capable of receiving heavenly messages, albeit to promote Christian doctrine and for the Arabs alone. But, contrary to Muslim claims, he had not yet received any such message. So he and Bahira, fearing for their enterprise to bring Christianity to the Arabs, jump-started Islam by giving in to

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lax behavior and concocting an outrageous but absolutely ingenious hoax. The polemical thrust of the Christian story is, therefore, all too clear. To be accepted as a true prophet, Muhammad needed a divinely revealed text; but contrary to later Muslim claims, there was no such text, only a human artifice fashioned by a well-meaning monk who was overly anxious to succeed in promoting the Christian faith. Another question then arises. How is it that a book written by a Christian monk to deceive the ignorant Arabs into accepting Christianity could be so negative in so many verses to the Christians and their doctrinal beliefs? One would hardly expect that a monk chosen by God to receive a vision, and on Mount Sinai no less, would subvert his own faith even when taking broad license to carry out his Christian mission. Assuredly, the original book composed for the Muslim prophet had to be replete with statements that promote genuine Christian doctrine. In a clever rhetorical ploy, the Arabic version of the Bahira legend cites a number of passages from Muslim scripture and provides them with a thoroughly Christian reading. We are thus led to believe Muslim scripture as transmitted by the monk to Muhammad was a genuine Christian document. However much Bahira arrogated for himself what is rightfully the domain of Gabriel and God, the message he imparted contained no fundamental heresy. In doctrinal terms, it was entirely consistent with his views and that of his fellow monks. If Bahira had any cause for repentance, it is for giving so unlearned a prophet from so ignorant a people a book whose intended meaning was so badly subverted. Could ignorance alone have caused Muslims to misunderstand the Christian message of the Qur’an, or was their understanding of its message a conscious distortion (the kind of insidious explication for which Muslims readily blamed Jews and Christians reading the Bible, sacred scripture which when properly read foretold of Muhammad’s future coming and certified the legitimacy of his mission)? The monks might have accused the Arab prophet of deliberately turning against his learned Christian mentor, but there is not a shred of evidence in the Bahira legend that supports such a view. To be sure, Muhammad was ignorant and skittish about how he would be received by his fellow Ishmaelites, ignorant Arabs already set in their ways. There is, however, no indication in our sources that he did not embrace Bahira’s views on Christian doctrine. If neither Bahira nor his Arab student was responsible for the subsequent text of the Qur’an and its interpretation, or the disastrous turn that befell the Christian communities in the path of the Islamic conquest, who was? To make their case against the Muslims and their interpretations of the

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Qur’an, the Christians cast their stones against an older, more hateful, and intractable, if politically impotent enemy, namely the Jews. The authors of the Bahira legend make it clear that Islam, as it finally evolved with its antiChristian bias, was, of all things, a Jewish contrivance, resulting from a conspiracy hatched by Jewish converts to Islam after Muhammad’s death. Bahira had warned the Arab that he would be accepted as a true prophet bearing an authentic revelation by all except the accursed Jews, those who bear enmity to any people in whose midst they happen to dwell. The Jews, who boasted of crucifying Jesus, now deny his second coming. As they rejected Christ, whose mission was foretold in their scripture, Jews will deny the legitimacy of God’s most recent emissary. Muhammad’s reaction was to have Bahira tell him more of the Jews, and the monk, obliging in predicable fashion, goes on to cite Qur’an 5:82 [3], the aforementioned verse in which the Jews and polytheists are linked as the greatest enemies of Islam and in contrast the Christians are said to be closest to the Muslims because among them are priests and monks who are not arrogant. Speaking of the book he wrote for Muhammad, Bahira indicates that he tried to get the Arab to believe in the truth; to recognize the coming of Christ; and to condemn the Jews for what they have said about “our Lord, the true messiah.” In the end, Bahira’s efforts came to naught. Jewish converts to Islam subverted the monk’s message, and the Qur’an, originally a Christian text, became what it is. Islam, originally a variant of Christianity geared by the well-meaning monk to the sensibilities of the ignorant Arabs, became a new and different faith with observances that ran counter to traditional Christian beliefs and practices. Among other things, the Jewish converts to Islam introduced the practice of circumcision to Muhammad’s followers. It was common knowledge that the Jews remove the foreskin of males to mark communal identity; and because Jews maintain that circumcision is nothing less than a sign of their exclusive covenant with God, it is also considered by Christian polemicists the physical manifestation of a false and arrogant Jewish claim, a declaration of being God’s chosen that places the crucifiers of Jesus above all others. Nor could it be said all the Jewish converts were convinced of the Arab’s claims to authentic prophecy. Some realized that, just as Muhammad had preached a religion that strayed from orthodox Christianity, he took license with strongly held Jewish observances. But the die had been cast; although the Jews perceived Muhammad a false prophet, they felt powerless to turn away from Islam. These Jewish scoundrels, bearing a longstanding animus towards the followers of Jesus, remained at the ignorant Muhammad’s side and instructed him to take stands against Christianity

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and Christian belief. So it came to pass that the Islam of Bahira/Muhammad, originally intended as a reaffirmation of Christianity and a message of tolerance for the Christians, became, through the intervention of unscrupulous Jews, a debased form of the true faith and the basis of longstanding Muslim animosity against the Christians. Whatever consolation medieval Christians might have drawn from their apologetic and polemical texts could not and did not stem the increasing tide of conversion to Islam or the diminishing prospects for vibrant Christian communities in the lands originally conquered by Muslim warriors from Arabia. At last notice, the total Christian population of the Arab world was less than 10 percent of the whole, including Lebanon, where the Christians despite their declining numbers are still to be reckoned with. It is no wonder then that Arab Christians were quick to embrace the concept of the modern nation state, beginning in the nineteenth century. By opting for citizenship rather than identifying as a religious minority within a hegemonic Muslim polity, they sought common ground and equal standing with their dominant Muslim neighbors. However, the attitudes toward Christians established during the formative centuries of Islam remained and continue to remain powerful in the imagination of contemporary Muslims and, as a result, help define their reactions to the older monotheists dwelling in their midst. The Jewish communities of the Arab lands have to all intents and purposes disappeared, the victim of the challenge of the modern state of Israel and the traditional religious animosities it unleashed. The Christians, suffering from the modern encroachment of Western political and military intervention as well as the unwelcome invasiveness of corrupting un-Godlike Western values, hang on. But declining birthrates relative to the Muslims; increased emigration of Christians from the lands of their birth; and the Islamist revival of recent years renders the long if not short term prospects of the Christians problematic. It would indeed be a tragedy if the fate of the Jewish communities of the Arab world was to befall the remaining Christians. For in the best of times during the formative period of medieval Islam, the three monotheist faiths interacting with each other produced a vibrant civilization to which the entire world remains deeply indebted until this very day.

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Christians, Muslims, and Jews Cross-pollinations in Medieval Philosophy and Science

The competition for sacred space among the Abrahamic faiths did not prevent the sharing of common intellectual ground. Perhaps no sphere of intellectual activity in the Islamic Middle Ages occasioned more interaction among Jews, Christians, and Muslims than their collective embrace of the philosophy and science of the “ancients” (al-qudama’), the much valued cultural residue from the civilizations of Iran, India, and especially that of the Greeks. Learned individuals of all three monotheist faiths, drawing upon a common conceptual framework, participated in discussions both directly and indirectly first to recover the intellectual legacy of the past and then adapt it to their own concerns. In such fashion they acquired the astrology and medicine of Iran and India and a wide range of disciplines that represented the heritage of Greek culture. As did the Hellenes of more ancient times, but in a somewhat different fashion, Muslims listed the various branches of learning in a number of treatises that might be loosely described as encyclopedic works. The division of learning discussed in these sources tends to be twofold. There were the practical sciences which represented the type of curriculum reminiscent of the typical American community college. For example, the Epistles [rasa’il] of the Brethren of Purity classifies among the practical sciences (alsana’i‘ al-‘amaliyah) such subjects as commercial accounting, agriculture, animal husbandry, and, perhaps strange to the modern Western academy, the science of alchemy and methods of divining the future, such as spitting on knots. The more prestigious branches of learning were the theoretical sciences (al-sana’i‘ al-‘ilmiyah) and its various divisions and sub-divisions, which were broadly divided along literary, religious, and philosophical 258

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lines. The literary sciences (al-adabiyah) covered a wide range of subjects related to literary production and its interpretation; the religious sciences (alnawamis) included the study of the Qur’an and its commentaries, the reception and validation of Islamic tradition, Islamic law and jurisprudence, and theology. The Brethren, who were strongly influenced by Greek philosophy, sometimes referred to the highly valued philosophical sciences (al-falsafah al-haqiqiyah) as the “Greek” or “foreign” sciences. These included Aristotelian logic, natural science, mathematics, metaphysics, scientific geography (as opposed to mere travel literature), mechanics and engineering (considered by the Greeks practical sciences), and the more technical sub-divisions of the medical arts. Learned Jews, borrowing from their Muslim neighbors, also drew on the ancient Greeks, using similar categories in classifying and pursuing all of human knowledge. Following the precedent of an earlier Hellenistic scholarship, medieval Muslims, Jews, and also Christians were inclined to emphasize what they perceived as the common link between philosophical enquiry and scientific theory. We are obliged to ask how scholars of the Islamic Middle Ages appropriated the learning of their ancient predecessors. There is a common misconception that Muslim and Jewish intellectuals deliberately transformed all of ancient learning into something distinctively their own. While the process of “Islamizing” foreign cultural artifacts or making them Jewish is perceivable in many other areas of cultural borrowing, there is no evidence to suggest that the Muslim, Jewish, and for that matter Christian scholars who embraced philosophy and science were simply digesting foreign intellectual contributions and regurgitating them as if they were part and parcel of their inherited faith and worldview. Rather, many medieval philosophers and scientists were well aware how their thinking might affect religious sensibilities. Similarly, Muslim theologians versed in philosophy felt compelled to shape philosophical discourse for their own religious purposes. They had to demonstrate that a philosophy inherited from the pre-Islamic pagan world need not be in fundamental conflict with monotheism, the very core of Muslim belief, a problem faced as well by Jewish thinkers as they embraced the study of Greek philosophy in the Islamic milieu. Christians also pursued ancient Greek knowledge in addressing their ongoing theological concerns. The Christian endeavor to study the ancients for their own purposes began well before the rise of Islam and continued uninterrupted throughout the formative centuries of Muslim rule. The tension between philosophy and religion in Islamic times will be dis-

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cussed below. All that need be emphasized here is that scholars who engaged in philosophical and scientific enquiry conceived of their work as a direct continuation of their intellectual forebears. The operative word is continuation. The ancient scientists and philosophers, who were held in high regard by Muslims, Jews, Christians, and also non-monotheists of the times, were not thought of as representing the end of a lengthy process of learning. Rather, when medieval scholars saw ancient theory and practice in need of improvement, they found no conceptual obstacles to redesigning and rearticulating the received wisdom of their pagan ancestors, or to contributing new ideas to the established discourse of philosophy and to the theory and practice of science, including noteworthy advances in mathematics. The Islamic world—non-Muslims included—saw itself as both the heir to a much revered past tradition as well as an active participant in the search for new philosophical and scientific truths. To sum up: the intellectual circles of the Islamic Middle Ages were not mere storehouses of received wisdom from a distant past. The philosophers and scientists of the Islamic world fully appreciated the potential inherent in the wisdom that they acquired and would later pass on to the Latin West. Christians, Jews, and Muslims thus saw themselves cultivating and expanding time-honored disciplines for the purpose of achieving new human truths. We should be clear that, contrary to some currently held views about how stifling the intellectual climate of the medieval Islamic world could be, philosophers and scientists did not lack, at all times and in all places, the conceptual imagination and the basic institutional support to produce highly innovative work. Rather than immediately compare the Islamic world to the modern West, and ponder for example why the scientific revolution occurred in Europe and not the Near East when all the theoretical tools for major technological breakthroughs were available to Muslims and others (a subject certainly worth serious consideration), one ought to begin by examining the medieval Islamic world on its own merits. For, as with all its intellectual endeavors, the contributions of the medieval Islamic world to science and philosophy cannot be isolated from the larger context of Islamic culture. To neglect or even undervalue the effects of religion, politics, and society would undermine our ability to develop a nuanced view of medieval philosophy and science. With that in mind, the following discussion attempts to examine the history of these disciplines within a broad historical and intellectual framework of the times, a history that involved in addition to Muslims, learned pagans, Christians, and Jews.

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transl ation activities The beginnings of both philosophy and science in the medieval Islamic world can be traced to the introduction of Arabic as a language with which to study the intellectual achievements of the ancients. Over the course of the eighth through tenth centuries, the widespread use of Arabic gave rise to vigorous translation efforts in which scholarly texts, originally composed in Greek and other ancient languages, were rendered into the language of the Muslim rulers. As the efforts of the translators laid the foundations for all subsequent research in science and philosophy, we are obliged to understand precisely what it is that Muslims who actively promoted translations of the received wisdom of the ancients, particularly in the ninth century, wished to achieve and did, in fact, accomplish. One cannot assume that the process begun by the translators in the Islamic realm merely satisfied antiquarian interests, the kind of project that grabs the attention of modern university professors who gravitate to arcane subjects of limited if any interest to their colleagues, let alone the general public. Rather, the translation movement, which lasted from the eighth to tenth centuries CE, made itself felt in many aspects of medieval life and should be understood as part of a continuing and broadly received tradition of scholarship indigenous to the Near East, a tradition that began in the Hellenistic period, extended through late antiquity among Greek and Persian scholars, and ultimately found an honored place in the culture of Islamic times. The translators also worked with material that had migrated from the subcontinent of India so that Greek, Middle Iranian (Pahlavi), and Sanskrit texts were all revered objects in the continuous pursuit of knowledge. Not surprisingly, the early translators and commentators of the Islamic realm were often Christians who were part of a longstanding intellectual engagement with ancient thought going back to pre-Islamic times. It is misleading to suggest as some do that that the Christian translators in the employ of their Muslim sovereigns were drawn to their vocation by the lucrative patronage of the Muslim rulers. Like scholars at all times, the Christians were no doubt thankful at the opportunity to have their intellectual pursuits rewarded. But, given an interest in ancient knowledge that preceded their encounter with Islam, it is difficult to imagine they would not have persisted in these pursuits even without official support. In any event, Christian efforts to recover the intellectual achievements of the ancients had, by all accounts, a long and honored history. In medicine, the translation of the Hippocratic

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and Galenic medical corpus of the ancient Greeks into Syriac, the scholarly language of the Eastern Christians, stretches from the pre-Islamic Sergius of Resh-‘Ayna (ca. sixth century CE) to Jacob of Edessa (d. 708), who lived in the time of the Umayyads, Islam’s first dynasty (661–750), and finally to Hunayn ibn Ishaq and his pupils who lived under the Abbasids (750–1258). The latter Muslim caliphs institutionalized the translation movement when they established and sustained the Baghdad center of learning known as the Bayt al-Hikmah, “The House of Wisdom.” Nor was medicine, which had an obvious practical application, the only ancient discipline that caught the attention of learned non-Muslims. Among the many works translated over the centuries leading up to the Islamic period were original works on astronomy, the physical sciences, and nearly all the philosophical topics and compendia later translated into Arabic for Muslim use. The Iranian town of Gondeshapur, famous in pre-Islamic times for preserving the Greek medical tradition, also contained learned men who translated astrological and astronomical works. Before their empire collapsed under the weight of Muslim pressure in the seventh century, the Sasanids, inheritors of a Persian empire that extended back the better part of a millennium, displayed an interest in the science and scholarship of the subcontinent of India. This interest stimulated translations of medical tracts such as the Caraka Samhita and the Sushruta Samhita, works that later became known to Arab physicians, though the Indian and Zoroastrian traditions were clearly of lesser importance to the formation of Islamic medical theory and practice than that of the Greeks. As regards cultural borrowing we might also mention astrology, perhaps not so respectable a branch of learning among some of the more traditional Muslims, but a discipline of no small importance to the political culture of the times. The theory and practice of astrology, which was intimately associated with the legitimization of political power in Sasanid Iran, was important to leading figures in Islamic times. The preponderance of Iranian astrologers at the early Abbasid court, such as Masha’allah ibn Sariyat and Nawbakht al-Munajjim and his relatives, suggests that a longstanding tradition of work in astrology in Middle Iranian that drew upon Greek and Sanskrit texts made its way into official Muslim circles even before the translation of ancient works became a prominent feature of intellectual life in the Islamic world. To be sure, the Arabs of the desert were well aware of the need for divination and had their own techniques for predicting the future, but the casting of horoscopes by accomplished astrologers of the Abbasid court added weapons to the arsenal of political figures who sought the opportune moment to

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initiate action, and more particularly when they searched for evidence to legitimate actions already planned or carried out. In that regard, we might mention that the Abbasid caliph Abu Ja‘far al-Mansur (r. 754– 75) reportedly built his magnificent capital at Baghdad after his astrologer Nawbakht assured him that, as Jupiter was in the constellation of Sagittarius, the signs in the stars were most favorable. As told, the story of Nawbakht’s prediction of good things to come, including allusions to future events in the history of the Abbasid caliphate, is an indication that the story is a back projection to justify the caliph’s decision and with that establish the legitimacy of his capital and his regime. But the story is built on an obvious truth, namely that astrology was an important subject in the Islamic Middle Ages even though comforting predictions in real time could be undermined by unwelcome realities of the future. As distinct from astrology, which caused some concern for rigid monotheists—note the Hebrew Bible’s explicit rejection of all sorts of soothsaying—astronomy was a highly respected discipline that relied on precise mathematical formulations. Although, as with astrology, astronomic and mathematical investigations were inherited from the ancient pagan world, they became important to the performance of sacred duties among the monotheist religions. Astronomical handbooks allowed Muslims and Jews to calibrate their religious calendars, so that they might determine the proper month and time for festivals, set the shifting times of daily worship in different geographical locations, and establish the precise orientation of prayer—for Muslims in the direction of Mecca, and for Jews towards Jerusalem. One should be aware, however, that the astronomers and mathematicians did not take an interest in their craft merely to serve the interests of the religious establishment, but as a result of their innate curiosity about the physical world in which they lived. Three early figures are worthy of attention in viewing the development of astronomical studies in the Islamic world: the great mathematician Thabit ibn Qurrah (d. 901), who, before moving to Abbasid Baghdad, was a disciple of the famous Banu Musa family in Harran, a great center of pagan learning in northern Mesopotamia (what is today southern Turkey); another mathematician, al-Khwarizmi (ca. 800–47), who as his name suggests came from the eastern provinces of Iran; and a third mathematician, the Christian Habash al-Hasib (ca. 850), who was a native of Marw, the gateway to Central Asia. All three were already engaged in astronomical work when the Arabic translation movement was first institutionalized in Baghdad. It is thus clear that a vibrant and creative scientific enterprise flourished in conjunc-

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tion with, but not strictly as a result of, the scholarly project promoted by the Abbasid caliphs of the time. Be that as it may, the translation project served as a necessary platform for original work by curious Arab scholars, individuals whose linguistic skills were limited to Arabic and who had neither the inclination nor the intention of mastering the range of languages which were necessary for understanding the scientific and philosophical traditions of the ancients. The interest of the translators was not limited to producing texts with which Muslim scholars familiar only with Arabic could discover the world of the ancients and utilize the wisdom acquired thereby as if it were engraved in stone. Both Muslim and non-Muslim scholars assimilated the wisdom contained within these translated works and improved upon it, moving in new directions. One cannot emphasize too strongly that these advances, which stemmed from acquiring the learned traditions of the ancient world, would not have happened without texts made accessible by non-Arab and non-Muslim intermediaries learned in Greek, Syriac, Middle Iranian, and Sanskrit, as well as Arabic. Who were these intermediaries and where were they situated? In the Islamic world, the study of science and philosophy was promoted initially by translators drawn from the Hellenized Christian and pagan communities of the pre-Islamic Near East. Major centers of learning included the Nestorian Christian monastery at Dayr Qunna in Iraq; al-Hirah, the ancient capital of the Lakhmids, Christian Arab tribesmen who settled in Iraq before the Muslim conquest; Harran, the previously mentioned pagan center of the Sabi’ans; Marw, where Hellenized Nestorian Christians encountered Zoroastrianism; and Alexandria, where commentaries on the works of Aristotle and Galen constituted the traditional syllabus of advanced learning. Alexandrian Aristotelianism, rooted in antiquity, was carried forward by Nestorian and Syrian Orthodox Christians. The Nestorian Paul the Persian reportedly wrote introductions and commentaries on Aristotelian logic for the Sasanian emperor Anushirvan (r. 531–78); another Christian, Severus of Nisibis (d. 666 or 667), knew Persian, Greek, and Syriac and was an expert on logic and astronomy. His student Jacob of Edessa, also a Christian, wrote on cosmology, geography, and natural history, basing himself in part on the great Hellenistic thinker Ptolemy. In like fashion, Syrian Orthodox Christians produced commentaries on Aristotelian writings for use in advanced theological study and for establishing principles for elucidating biblical texts. That being the case, scholarly effort at recovering the philosophical and scientific legacy of the Greek past was already underway and at far flung places as the early Muslims consolidated their political hold over an increasingly wide area.

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However, it was not until the Abbasid caliphs laid the foundations of a cosmopolitan empire that an Islamic state formally and fully supported the embrace of ancient learning, wove it into the broad intellectual fabric of the times, and made it part of the political and social trends of the new and universal Islamic polity. The desire for cultural continuity with pre-Islamic Near Eastern scholarship and the search for solutions to philosophical, theological, and scientific questions raised earlier by the ancients is a key factor in explaining why the Abbasid Arabic translation movement took root and flourished as it did. The question before us is why Arabic-speaking Muslims within the empire were so inclined to support this effort. What explains the widespread patronage and pursuit of ancient learning that we find in the Abbasid period? As a movement and not simply a set of isolated scholarly activities, the translation of an ancient heritage, particularly the Greek heritage, required political, social, economic, and religious contexts to produce the cultural infrastructure necessary to sustain it. What was there about the Abbasids, a family of Muslim dynasts with Arabian origins, that stimulated such protracted interest in the intellectual achievements of the past? the contexts for the development of science and philosophy Some modern scholars maintain the Arabic translation movement developed because the rulers of the Abbasid dynasty abandoned the Arabian-centered outlook of their predecessors and projected themselves as successors to the emperors of the Iranian Sasanid realm. Leading scholars of Graeco-Arabic philosophy led by Dimitri Gutas have argued, with great conviction, that, as did the Sasanid emperors, the Abbasid caliph Abu Ja‘far al-Mansur and his successors represented themselves as patron-kings of philosophy and science (see Gutas’s Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, 1998). That conception of the caliph as a patron of intellectual endeavors is considered by these modern scholars as part of a wider ideological program consciously linking the early Abbasid sovereigns to Iranian rulers of the pre-Islamic past, albeit under the political banner of Islam. In such fashion, the Abbasids, though of Arab lineage, would have had wide appeal to the enormously large indigenous population of the former Iranian empire, the very people, so these modern scholars claim, that brought the Abbasid regime to power. Extending this argument, some scholars have suggested the Abbasid caliphs might also have seen themselves as competing with the rival Christian Byzantine emperors as patrons of high culture.

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Arguing that the early leaders of the Banu Abbas consciously represented themselves in the image of the Sasanian monarchs is, however, a difficult if not impossible position to defend. Still, let us consider for the sake of argument whether al-Mansur, who built his magnificent capital at Baghdad and established the template of Abbasid dynastic rule, might have represented himself as a patron of culture, whether or not he had the Sasanian emperor as his model. Where does one find a solid historical foundation for this bold assertion? With all due respect to the learned scholars of Islamic philosophy, historians familiar with the most recent research on the formation of Abbasid rule will argue there is no substantive evidence that al-Mansur consciously imitated the ruling style of the Sasanids, let alone that the caliph was a patron of ancient science and learning. The Abbasid administration was not Sasanid rule garbed in Islamic attire, as orientalists believed in the nineteenth century and as some learned students of philosophy still believe. Moreover, it is now abundantly clear, again contra nineteenth-century views, that the Banu Abbas were brought to power by well-trained Arab armies and not on the backs of a populace venerating an Iranian past and hence demanding an Arab caliph who, at least in style of rule, resembled the Sasanian rulers of old. Even less supportable is the view of al-Mansur as philosopher-king and patron of learning and cultural endeavors. If anything, the caliph is pictured as a dour individual, overly contemptuous of refined arts and courtly amusement. He was, moreover, a notorious skinflint, as his nickname reveals. The Abbasid caliph, so responsible for establishing the political foundations of the Abbasid state, was known as Abu al-Dawaniq “The Father of the Daniqs,” that is to say he was called the equivalent of “Father Pennypincher” (the daniq being a money of account smaller than the smallest currency, something like the English mill which is used to set taxes). To be sure, his immediate successors, al-Mahdi (r. 775–85) and al-Hadi (r. 785–86), cultivated a taste for the grand courtly life, but that was generally limited to exercising sexual license, enjoying the company of boon companions and professional women entertainers, commissioning poets to recite their compositions in the caliph’s presence, and similar forms of amusement. Philosophy and science were another matter altogether. There does not appear to be any evidence that philosophy and/or the theory of science elicited the overt passion of these early Abbasid caliphs, let alone played any role in how they conceived of themselves as rulers, although, to be fair, there is a report that al-Mahdi commissioned the Christian Patriarch Timothy I (d. 823) to translate Aristotle’s Topics and that the Christian prelate conversed with an Aristotelian philosopher at the caliph’s court.

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Al-Hadi’s successor, the fabled Harun al-Rashid (r. 786–809), was more inclined to be a patron of the arts and was involved with setting up a library in Baghdad, where some translation work might have begun under the patronage of the Barmakids, influential and cultured clients of the Abbasids who were of Buddhist origins. The caliph also established a hospital in which medical practice was based on Greek scientific models. But there is no solid evidence he occasioned this activity out of personal intellectual interest, let alone because he was keen to represent himself as inheriting the aura of the rulers of a defunct Sasanian dynasty which had, at the time, no great political resonance among most Muslims. Harun’s attention was directed to the Byzantine frontier and constant campaigns against the Christians. At the time of his unexpected death, he had already moved his capital, if unofficially, from Baghdad to Raqqah-Rafiqah in Syria, and was preparing a major military installation at Tuwana so that he might be closer to a major offensive he was about to unleash against the unbelievers all along the border dividing them from the Muslim faithful. With his death, that plan was abandoned. The caliph never imagined himself as a successor to the ruler from the Banu Sasan or that the Abbasid polity he ruled represented anything at all like the empire of the Iranians at the dawn of Islam. Nor did he or any of the Abbasids wish to cloak themselves in garments of rule equivalent to the Byzantine emperor’s, whose territories in Asia Minor remained unconquered. One has to wait until al-Mansur’s great-grandson al-Ma’mun (r. 813–33) to find a caliph truly dedicated to the intellectual enterprise we have described. It was al-Ma’mun who founded the Bayt al-Hikmah or “House of Wisdom” at Baghdad, an academy of learning which D. Sourdel boldly claims was “undoubtedly an imitation of the ancient academy of learning at [Gondeshapur]” (Encyclopedia of Islam, 2d ed., s.v. Bayt al-Hikma). At the Bayt al-Hikmah, the caliph assembled a team of learned non-Arab scholars to translate the texts of the ancients into Arabic. Some of the manuscripts were reportedly brought from Bilad al-Rum, the province that bordered the Byzantine Empire and hence a likely source from which to obtain them; other sources had already found their way into the Khizanat al-Hikmah, “The Treasure Trove” or library founded by al-Ma’mun’s father al-Rashid. Al-Ma’mun also established astronomical observatories in Damascus and Baghdad. As with the case of his father, there is no indication whatsoever that he did all this in an attempt to present himself as the heir to the Banu Sasan or as a rival to the Byzantine emperor. The caliph’s interest in philosophy and science would seem to have stemmed from an unusual sense of intellectual curiosity and truly substantive learning that elevated him above the other rulers of the

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Abbasid house, past and future. He not only embraced the “rationalist” views of the Mu‘tazilites, highly sophisticated Muslim theologians who grappled with the question of predestination versus free will; he also understood them. To be sure, individual caliphs, less learned than al-Ma’mun, were interested in promoting practical scientific projects, for example astronomical observatories, which fixed the all-important times of daily Muslim prayer, and medical centers, whose benefits were all too obvious. On the other hand, there were rulers who were inclined to oppose the intellectual pursuits that served as the theoretical building blocks for such pragmatic uses of ancient knowledge. Ja‘far al-Mutawakkil (r. 847–61), who virtually bankrupted the regime with unparalleled building projects and an extravagant court, took a more conservative view when it came to being a patron of philosophy and science. He withdrew official support for the Bayt al-Hikmah. As we noted earlier (part 2, chapter 6), he also imposed harsh measures on the Christians and Jews of the realm. Nevertheless, the legacy of ancient learning lived on, particularly the more practical aspects that found favor with rulers and important notables. The translation movement was thus preceded by, paralleled by, and succeeded by an infrastructure of learning that included libraries, observatories, and hospitals that were used to advance the science of astronomy of the ancients as well as teach and practice their medical arts. Before the creation of an Islamic polity that unified territories extending from Central Asia through North Africa, philosophical and scientific study had taken place in relative isolation in locations separated by the political boundaries of the Byzantine and Iranian Empires and, in the territories of the former, by the social and religious divides between Orthodox Christians allied to the state and their opponents. Given its geographical unity and the widespread use of Arabic among non-Arabs, the universal and cosmopolitan Islamic empire of the Abbasids made for hitherto unknown possibilities of communication and cooperation across religious, ethnic, and linguistic lines. Under the Abbasids, the interconfessional pursuit of learning proceeded in the social context of daytime study sessions and evening salons, endorsed and often allegedly attended by the rulers, prominent figures of the bureaucracy, and wealthy notables seeking notoriety for their generous patronage. With its universal outlook, the dynasty of the Banu Abbas offered a great sense of equality to learned converts from various ethnic and religious groups, Arab and non-Arab alike. In contrast, their predecessors, the Umayyads, offered converts conditional social acceptance and subjected them to economic discrimination. By Abbasid times, all the converts given to broad intellectual interests

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shared a common scholarly language: Arabic. The institutionalization of Arabic as the language of administration and daily life may have been a process begun under the Umayyads, but, as noted, Arabic translations of learned Greek, Syriac, Middle Iranian, and Sanskrit texts for scholarly purposes were not energetically pursued until their successors ruled the Islamic world. The same was true for many Christian religious texts that were translated from Greek, Syriac, and Coptic, a parallel translation effort for the benefit of Christians who were increasingly more at home with Arabic than their traditional scholarly and liturgical languages. Using Arabic as the new language of science and philosophy was undoubtedly the major contributing factor to the unification of scholarly pursuits beyond the religious sciences. Disseminating knowledge, whether in the realm of science, philosophy, or religion, was also made easier by advances in book production, particularly the introduction of paper technology from China, which tended to displace the more expensive vellum or papyrus, particularly in areas like Iraq where growing papyrus was likely to have been impractical and the damp climate made for difficulty in preserving any texts written on that surface. There is a brief mention of papyrus farms along the Tigris shore at Samarra, the second Abbasid capital which was situated some sixty miles upriver from Baghdad. But there is no indication that it became a successful cash crop. The Abbasid sovereigns were not alone in stimulating an interest in the ancient world. The new urban and multicultural environment of Baghdad produced an intellectual climate that supported the exchange of ideas, techniques of learning, and technological advances, a commonplace pursuit among a wealthy upper class that had the desire and means to acquire knowledge and the social status which pursuing knowledge conveyed to others. Following the example of various caliphs, the notables of Abbasid society presented themselves as fulfilling the ideal of cultivated men who supported poets, litterateurs, singers, and of course scientists and philosophers. The list of wealthy patrons of the Christian translator Hunayn ibn Ishaq and his group at the Bayt al-Hikmah included the likes of Abu al-Hasan ‘Ali (d. 888), the commander of the Muslim forces along the Byzantine frontier and secretary to the caliph Ja‘far al-Mutawakkil (who himself declined to support that institution of learning). At first glance, one would hardly imagine Abu al-Hasan was the kind of figure to have had a library so magnificent that it is said to have diverted the famous astronomer Abu Ma‘shar from his pilgrimage to Mecca in order to peruse its treasures. Another example is Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Malik, vizier to the caliph al-Mu‘tasim (r. 833– 42), who

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reportedly spent two thousand dinars a month, a veritable fortune, for translations of Galen by Hunayn and his colleagues. Similarly, the Banu Musa, a well-to-do family of mathematicians and natural scientists in their own right, expended enormous sums of their own wealth procuring Greek manuscripts from the former Byzantine provinces and directing the intellectual careers of protégées like the astronomer-mathematician Thabit ibn Qurrah. Such examples can be multiplied many times over and in diverse regions. the changing fo cus of scientific and philosophical interest Insofar as we reconstruct the path of the extended translation movement, we can detect an abrupt shift in the content and characteristics of works translated from the middle to the end of the ninth century from those translated at the end of the eighth. It has often been said that the early translations of scientific texts were driven by the immediate and practical concerns of the emergent Islamic state: medicine to cure the ill, mathematics with which to construct all means of buildings and mechanical devices, and astrology to legitimize authority and determine policy decisions. In contrast, the translations of the ninth century reflect a concern for the development of an allencompassing theoretical framework in which scientific advances new and old could be explained and systematized. To express this in modern terms, scientists turned from applied to theoretical science and more generally to abstract philosophical thought. This shift in orientation was partly the result of an evolving system which made being a patron of ancient learning a social ideal for those with sufficient power and wealth to embrace learned clients. And so with greater patronage more scholars translated and discussed more texts. But increased patronage alone does not explain the change in scholarly projects, which increasingly turned to Greek philosophy. What we also see in the mid-ninth century is a natural progression in the sophistication of the scientists as they pursued their research and thirsted for more comprehensive theories of explanation. This new outlook required a concomitant shift in the quality and nature of the translations from the earlier Graeco-Syriac translators. The earlier translators, largely indigenous Christians of Syria and Mesopotamia, lacked a scientific and philosophical vocabulary in Syriac and thus were often satisfied with mere transliterations of technical terms from the original Greek texts. The later scholars of the ninth century attempted careful and philologically sound translations from Greek and Syriac into Arabic, taking great pride in rendering the precise

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meaning of the original Greek, rather than transliterating difficult terms or producing a word by word translation that left the meaning of texts ambiguous if not indeed obscure. Credit for the new translation techniques goes to Hunayn ibn Ishaq (809– 77) and his “school” of translators at the Bayt al-Hikmah, which included his son Ishaq (d. 910), his nephew Hubaysh, and many others actively pursuing knowledge of the sciences and philosophy. The activity of this group also attracted a number of Muslim scholars, who, unlike the multilingual Christians, lacked proper knowledge of Greek and Syriac but were able to take advantage of the new translations into Arabic, the language they knew so well. Having acquired general learning in science and philosophy via the translation projects, they were able by dint of the power of their intellect and their profound knowledge of Arabic to refine the technical vocabulary and stylistic presentation of the original ancient texts, as they now understood the underlying concepts and could indeed expand upon them, creating thereby a new frontier of scientific and philosophical investigation. As regards the larger Islamic community, the most important of these circles of scientists and philosophers was unquestionably the so-called Kindi Circle. Al-Kindi (d. 866), who as his name reveals was born into the great Arabian tribe of the Kindah, was the son of a high ranking Abbasid administrator and enjoyed the official patronage of al-Ma’mun and his successors, the caliphs al-Mu‘tasim and al-Wathiq. The “Philosopher of the Arabs,” a polymath who wrote on astrology, astronomy, arithmetic, geometry, medicine, and philosophy, relied on the fruits of the learned translators of the time. Learning is a virtue in itself, but al-Kindi also had the good fortune to be situated in Abbasid courtly circles before falling out of favor with al-Mutawakkil, who broke with the Mu‘tazilites and, taking a dim view of scientific and philosophical activity, temporarily deprived al-Kindi of access to his own library. The latter’s actions towards al-Kindi and more generally the team of scholars at the Bayt al-Hikmah did not, however, diminish their importance for future scholars. In the course of the ninth century, al-Kindi’s circle produced translations of many Greek philosophical tracts that had made up the curriculum of the ancient Alexandrian Academy. In such fashion, the intellectual treasures of the ancient world translated into Arabic and the methods the Greeks employed to study them found a place of honor among learned Muslims, Christians, and Jews. The curriculum and the method of instruction utilized by al-Kindi and his associates seem to have drawn the careful attention of curious Muslim theologians from the religious sciences. As did the philosophers, these theo-

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logians did not see the study of the ancients as an end in itself. Like al-Kindi, they wished to put philosophy to use as a tool in constructing a Muslim natural theology for which Aristotelian philosophy was seen as a potential building block. Indeed, the study of Aristotle’s Physics by theologians may have been prompted by a perceived need to combat the dualist heresies that surfaced from time to time in the eastern provinces of the Abbasid state, particularly in the ninth century. These heresies, which resonated to a preIslamic Iranian past in which the forces of good and evil were seen as coterminous, clearly compromised Muslim belief that the one and only God was responsible for human behavior. For al-Kindi and his circle, the union of Aristotelian natural philosophy with a decidedly monotheist reworking of the Neo-Platonic creation of the universe conformed to Muslim religious sensibilities and should have promoted an appreciation of their philosophical and scientific enterprise among the theologians. However, there were aspects of al-Kindi’s naturalist Aristotelian philosophy that seemed unpalatable to Muslim theologians and embarrassing in some ways to later Muslim philosophers. The most damaging aspect of al-Kindi’s view of the cosmos was the belief that the heavenly bodies were rational entities endowed with will and thus influenced the course of events on earth. They were seen by al-Kindi as participating independently of God’s direction of the universe, a concept which seemingly undermined monotheist beliefs that were the very basis of Islam. This understanding of the stars’ role was far different than the simple casting of horoscopes to predict the future, an act that did not compromise God’s grand design; it simply supplied a means of reading His will. For traditional Muslims, God alone gives order to the universe and accounts for all natural phenomena. While parts of al-Kindi’s theory would play a major role in subsequent articulations of Islamic philosophy, its cosmological views would meet with increasing disdain from philosophers, astronomers, and theologians unwilling to compromise the strict monotheism of their faith. Another strand of the Graeco-Arabic translation movement, one that would produce different emphases in Islamic philosophy, was drawn from Aristotelian logic as it was studied in the Christian monasteries of Syria and Mesopotamia and the ancient academy of Alexandria, still another indication of the multicultural and multireligious nature of philosophical and scientific enquiry in the Islamic Middle Ages. The father of the Arabic study of Aristotle’s logic at Baghdad was Abu Bishr Matta ibn Yunus (d. 940), a Christian contemporary of the great Muslim philosopher al-Farabi (d. 950). Al-Farabi, a scholar of enormously wide interests, produced a large and diverse corpus

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of writing that represented the first attempt to truly systematize Arabic philosophical thought. Perhaps his greatest contribution to medieval Islamic philosophy was formulating a curriculum of Arabic logic based on extensive use of Greek commentaries translated into Arabic. Unlike al-Kindi and his followers, al-Farabi had little interest in and showed little appreciation for the opinions of Islamic theologians. He believed that human reason was superior to simple religious faith and that logic represents a universal truth, whereas revealed religions such as Islam express truths through symbols that vary from one religious community to another. However, al-Farabi did not at all question Muslim belief in Muhammad’s prophetic calling; in effect he declared Muhammad a philosopherprophet. That is to say, al-Farabi’s vision managed to disentangle philosophy from theology and any substantive link with the religious sciences without compromising the view of traditional Muslims, a task the philosopher managed with considerable intellectual dexterity. As did other Islamic scholars, al-Farabi consciously associated his program of philosophical instruction with a line of pre-Islamic teachers and teaching methods that stretched back to ancient Alexandria. His detailed presentations seem intent on explaining Greek logic in lucid Arabic that is faithful to the meaning of the original language of the ancients. In doing so, he disengaged Greek philosophy from its Christian Syriac transmitters and also liberated it from medicine and the philosophical study of astrology. In addition, he drew a line between philosophical and theological enquiry. According to al-Farabi, medicine is not a science with demonstrative principles; astrology is merely a study of human understandings obtained from reading the position of the stars (as distinct from the highly valued mathematical astronomy); and Islamic theology is at best only a defense of prescriptive religion. Contrary to the Kindi Circle’s view of the cosmos, al-Farabi’s system displays no concern with reconciling the natural theology of the ancients with the monotheist requirements of an Islamic theology that saw the workings of the universe as the artifact of a single creator. Al-Farabi’s disdain—if that is the proper word—for Islamic theology and its monotheist moorings presented future Muslim philosophers with a quandary, that of making philosophy consistent with the core of Muslim belief. Al-Farabi may have put the study of Islamic philosophy on the fi rm foundation of Aristotelian logic, but that still allowed for highly innovative advances in philosophical discourse by Ibn Sina (d. 1037), who like al-Farabi was born in eastern Iran. Ibn Sina or Avicenna as he became known in the Latin West was essentially an autodidact who continued the course set by

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al-Farabi. But to view Ibn Sina as a merely following in al-Farabi’s footsteps would underestimate seriously Ibn Sina’s genius as an original thinker. His encyclopedic production presented to posterity a meticulous and cohesive philosophical and scientific system which was taught, discussed, argued over, and refined for centuries. His Qanun, “Canon,” would form the basis of the medical curriculum in the East and West well into the seventeenth century in much the same way that his philosophical encyclopedia al-Shifa‘, “The Cure,” defined the departure point for philosophy, theology, and even mysticism in Islamic lands. While Ibn Sina clearly constructed his philosophic system on the foundations laid by his two ancestors, the pagan Aristotle and the Muslim al-Farabi, he introduced enough substantive modifications that to study philosophy in his and subsequent times was to study Ibn Sina and with that return to Muslim religious concerns. Sparing the reader of the more technical aspects of Ibn Sina’s thinking and how it both related to and departed from that of al-Farabi, we turn to the former’s views of Islamic theology. Whereas al-Farabi treated the connection between philosophy and theology in general terms at best, to a certain extent Ibn Sina integrated the religion of Islam into his philosophical system. This presented Muslim theologians familiar with philosophical argument with substantive problems. Ibn Sina claimed that arguments for the existence of God are based on concepts immediately apprehensible to man’s intellect and can be constructed on the basis of demonstrative principles of logic. Such arguments might be seen, however, as running counter to the received wisdom of theologians; namely that proof for the existence of the one and only God is based on wonders wrought by the Almighty—that is signs of Him visibly manifest in what humans perceive. Even then, Ibn Sina’s abandoning the conventionally accepted proof for the existence of God might not have seemed so disturbing to the theologians. More disturbing to them was his denial that corporeal resurrection was the equivalent to the immortal life of the rational soul. The strongly held philosophical belief flew in the face of traditional Muslim views of the Resurrection of the Dead following the Day of Judgment. Islamic theologians thus found themselves presented by Ibn Sina with a serious challenge to the primacy of their intellectual and religious views, especially the role played by concepts of the Resurrection of the Dead and the Day of Judgment and in determining normative behavior among the Muslim faithful. A generation or so later, another great Muslim philosopher, the Cordoban Ibn Rushd (Averroes, d. 1198), attempted to purify the study of Aristotle of what he saw as Ibn Sina’s accretions. However, his endeavor was more repre-

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sentative of cultural and intellectual trends in the Islamic west, particularly Islamic Spain where figures such as Ibn Bajjah (d. 1139) and Maimonides (d. 1204) held views sharply different from their counterparts to the east. In the east Ibn Sina remained the center of an Islamic discourse that would be the fulcrum of continuing philosophical investigation. The thin trickle of Ibn Sina’s immediate students would grow there into large numbers of scholars who created a virtual torrent of philosophical and theological study, an enormous accomplishment that continued until the nineteenth century. isl amic spain For centuries, philosophy and science in the Islamic east went unappreciated in Europe. It was the intellectual activity of the western part of the Islamic world that first penetrated the Medieval Latin world, a movement of ideas made possible via translations from the Iberian Peninsula, including the controversial works of Ibn Sina on medicine. As a result, orientalists writing about the transmission of philosophy and science from the Islamic world to Europe tend to emphasize the intellectual bridge that connected Islamic Spain and the Christian world beyond. Given the multicultural landscape of the Iberian Peninsula, the translation of Arabic texts there was, like the Graeco-Arabic translation movement of earlier centuries, an endeavor that crossed religious boundaries. But unlike the situation to the east, it also crossed territorial limits. The porous borders between Muslim Andalusia and the Christian north of Spain made the transfer of scientific and philosophical corpora to the Christian world beyond the Iberian Peninsula easier to manage. In this endeavor Jews played a prominent role. Well situated as they were in the culture and language they shared with their Muslim neighbors, learned Jewish luminaries both in the Muslim south and in the Christian north brought the learning of the ancients filtered through Jewish and Islamic lenses to Christian Europe. Jews studying the works of the ancients in Arabic and writing philosophical and scientific works of their own in that language were translated by their co-religionists into Hebrew for the benefit of Jews living beyond the Abode of Islam. Some of these Islamic cultural artifacts were then translated from Hebrew into Latin and made available to Christian scholars on the other side of the divide, creating thereby what has been labeled the “Jewish Factor” in transmitting the legacy of the ancient Greeks and its Islamic permutations. The Jews were not alone in this effort. There were, to be sure, Christians learned in Arabic also active in translation activity.

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The new translation movement, which first burst forth in the eleventh century and then continued sporadically throughout the twelfth until well into the period of the European Renaissance, had a longer life than its eastern predecessor and included many participants, not only in the Abode of Islam but also in Christian-controlled Spain, Portugal, France, and Italy. The best known of the Latinists were the Christians Constantinus Africanus, in the last half of the eleventh century, and Petrus Alfonsi, Adelard of Bath, Gerard of Cremona, and Gundissalinus in the latter half of the twelfth century. At first, the translation activity was concentrated on astrological, mathematical, and medical texts. Thus, in its beginnings, we can compare it to the GraecoArabic translation movement of the Islamic heartland, which also concentrated the energies of its participants towards learning that could be applied in a practical manner. As did the translators in the east centuries before, Christians, in this case educated in Latin, esteemed their ancient forebears; they also appreciated refined and superior knowledge of their Arab precursors for what it was and for how it facilitated the recovery of the wisdom of the ancient classical world. Transmitted via Spain, that wisdom was to have a profound effect on intellectual developments in the Latin West. If one has to posit a criticism of the magnificent multicultural achievement that originated in the Iberian Peninsula, it would be that the ArabicHebrew-Latin translation project valorized specific texts representing the interests of Jewish and Muslim thinkers in Islamic Spain over that of scholars in the Islamic east. As a result, a broad knowledge of the philosophical and scientific achievements in the Islamic east would reach the Christian world only with the rise of modern European scholarship and its emphasis on Islamic studies for its own sake. As principal movers of the texts selected, Jewish scholars of the Middle Ages chose what was to be translated, often in light of what they found important in the scheme of their own cultural matrix, including a keen interest in science, while leaving aside such philosophical discussion of eastern origins that held less interest for them. Similarly, Christian scholars appropriated the translated texts and reshaped their meaning for their own purposes. Be that as it may, for the first time in the Latin regions of the inhabited world, Christians, under the tutelage of their Jewish neighbors, thought it sufficiently important and also desirable to learn from and to understand the intellectual, literary, and cultural legacy of the Muslims, a process that would be repeated, albeit with an entirely different outlook, when Jews played a major if not dominant role in the Islamic scholarship generated by the European academy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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Some scholars have argued, and no doubt with considerable justification, that, because of its narrower focus, the Arabic-Hebrew-Latin translation project of the Islamic west was of less significance in preserving the heritage of the ancients than the Graeco-Arabic translation movement that emerged centuries before in Iraq and Syria. Nevertheless, the smaller-scale translations of the eleventh and twelfth centuries in Spain had transformative effects that were almost global, as can be seen, for example, in the influence of the western Islamic intellectual enterprise on such major Christian figures as Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas. As regards more practical matters, the translations of Greek medical works as well as some medical manuals produced in the Islamic world had a rather long afterlife in Christian Europe. Maimonides’s treatise on poisons was, in fact, a standard European text well into early modern times. the practice of medicine A number of the most prominent philosophers not only took interest in medicine as a theoretical concern but were also practicing physicians, often as house doctors to important figures at ruling courts. In addition to Jewish luminaries such as Maimonides and Judah Halevy, there were, among others, the aforementioned Muslim philosopher-physicians Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd, the former situated in the Islamic east, the latter in the west. We would be grossly mistaken to believe, however, that the practice of medicine was uniform throughout the medieval Islamic world. To be sure, much of Islamic medical practice was based on models borrowed from the ancient Greeks (and to a much lesser extent the subcontinent of India). As we have seen, this knowledge was improved upon by scientists and medical practitioners in the lands of Islam. But there was also a popular medicine, folk practices that survived from less scientifically developed environments, and, related to that, a medical art that catered to specific Muslim sensibilities. This sense of medical pluralism allowed pre-Islamic traditional and magical practices to coexist with those found in the manuals of Galen, Hippocrates, and the medieval advocates of the ancients who expanded on the works of the Hellenistic world. To be sure, we know a good deal less about these popular practices, but even today, a visit to a Bedouin encampment or a village herbalist can demonstrate the residual power that traditional remedies hold for individuals in the Near East. Although the evidence for the practice of medicine among the Arabs shortly after their initial conquest of Byzantine and Sasanian lands is sparse,

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there is reason to believe that traditional folkways were followed, especially among those tribesmen who were slow to assimilate to their changing environment. There are, to be sure, texts that speak of sophisticated medical practices within the earliest Islamic community, the Prophet’s ummah, but these are evidently back projections to justify adapting to the highly developed practice of medicine in the more recently acquired lands of Islam. Presumably there was a need to valorize a discipline that was dominated for so long a time by non-Muslims. We know for sure that the caliphs of the realm, certainly from the time of the Umayyads (661–750), made use of the most talented physicians available, usually Christians who were skilled in the arts of ancient Greek medical science. Similarly, some eight generations of Nestorian Christians, the famous Bukhtishu‘ family, served as doctors in the Abbasid court. As regards the Ayyubids in Egypt (twelfth-thirteenth centuries CE), we hear of Maimonides, by then an immigrant via Andalusia and North Africa, riding on a regular basis from his home in Fustat (Old Cairo) to the ruling palace complex in al-Qahirah (New Cairo) in order to minister to the needs of the ruler. As we have seen, Maimonides was but one of many Jewish doctors who were employed in the service of Muslim rulers. The great number, if not indeed preponderance, of non-Muslims in the medical profession, and the nature of the healing arts they practiced, based as it was on the learning of the pagan ancients, caused a reaction in the more pious of Muslim circles and perhaps jealousy among Muslim physicians. Already in the ninth century, when the translation movement focused on ancient medical texts, Muslims created an alternative system of practice called “prophetic medicine” (al-tibb al-nabawi). The proponents of this system, who were religious authorities rather than scientifically trained physicians, advocated the traditional medicine of the Arabian Peninsula and particularly that of the Prophet insofar as one could actually glean how that medicine was practiced from a few references in Muslim scripture and the enormous body of emerging traditions associated with the life of Muhammad and his milieu. In various authoritative collections, traditions relating to the Prophet and healing the human body formed discrete chapters. Despite its claim of Arabian origins, the literature on prophetic medicine, such as it is, tends to be eclectic. The blending of traditional practices with those of the ancient manuals is an indication of how widespread Greek medical practice had become within the larger Islamic community. That should come as no surprise, as the Arab Muslims were a distinct minority within the general population of the Abode of Islam for at least several centuries. Moreover, the advantages of being healed by Greek medical practices might have been

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self-evident to those whose ancestors came from the Arabian Peninsula. In any case, many scholars who came to embrace prophetic medicine were well acquainted with Islamic manuals of Hippocrates and Galen. Their task was less the denial of ancient Greek practices and more the affirmation that the medical advice of the Prophet was sufficient unto itself to cater to the needs of the faithful. Some early ascetics took this notion to the extreme, and, citing selected verses from scripture along with various prophetic traditions, they maintained that any form of medication interfered with God’s purpose—a view akin to that of modern Christian Scientists who trust their well-being to God and practitioners who pray on their behalf. It would appear that the vast majority of Muslims were prepared to allow God to assist medically trained healing specialists in carrying out His will. Nor was there a single system of medical theory and practice among those scholars who revered the ancients; hence, the need for medical encyclopedias which systematized all knowledge of the healing arts, both theoretical and practical. Unfortunately, not all these encyclopedias are available for modern scholars to scrutinize. Perhaps the most famous of these works was the Canon of the philosopher-scientist Ibn Sina, a massive compendium of medical knowledge that consisted of five parts: general principles of medicine; materia medica; diseases related to particular parts of the body; systemic diseases; and pharmaceutical chemistry, that is, the mixing of compound drugs. However, as with modern medicine, there were disputes among the learned. The Andalusians, who were critical of Ibn Sina’s philosophy, also found his Canon wanting. Some modern scholars have even argued Ibn Sina’s medical works did not achieve prominence in Syria, Iraq, and Egypt, central territories within the Abode of Islam, until the twelfth century and that his initial influence, a century earlier, was confined to the more eastern provinces of the Islamic realm. The point in all this is that the theory and practice of medicine gave rise to lively debate in the Middle Ages, much as it does today. What of actual medical practice and the formal education of physicians? The treatment at hospitals no doubt varied depending on whether the institution was situated in an imperial capital such as Baghdad or whether it had been established in a provincial town. The biographical literature on physicians is filled with tidbits on hospitals and medical education, but in many respects our best source of information on the medical arts are the records of the Cairo Geniza, the unique cache of letters and documents describing the daily life of Jewish communities in the Mediterranean world. While most of the documents come from the eleventh through thirteenth centuries, we

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might venture to say the practice of medicine described in these texts can be projected both backwards and forwards. And as the evidence is of a documentary nature, it complements if not exceeds the anecdotal accounts of the Muslim sources. The numbers of Jews and Christians in the medical profession was not only a concern for those Muslims who embraced prophetic medicine but also for Muslim physicians who favored Greek theory and practices. An Arabic handbook for the market police complains that the medical profession is in the hands of the minorities and that in many a town there is nary a Muslim doctor to be found. How much truth should be ascribed to such a statement is moot, but the larger question of why so many physicians were Jews and Christians certainly deserves more attention than it has received. One thing is certain. Medicine seems to have been a family occupation. Whether one speaks of Jews, Christians, or Muslims, generation after generation of physicians were produced within the same households. Among the Jews, physicians had broad general learning in both traditional Jewish sources and the Greek sciences. In the documents of the Geniza, we often find physicians serving as judges and heads of the community, the most famous case being that of Maimonides. The same status as communal leaders did not generally accrue to their Muslim counterparts. Physicians, who were licensed, and judges, who were as a rule directly appointed by the political authorities, tended to represent very different spheres of service in Muslim society. Medical education was probably uniform for all who practiced regardless of their faith community. We have previously referred to the pre-Islamic medical center at Gondeshapur, where ancient medical texts were translated into Middle Iranian and Syriac; but, despite the claims of earlier historians of Islamic medicine, there is no hard evidence of a hospital there for training physicians. As a rule, hospitals did not serve as training facilities for doctors in Islamic lands. We are informed of a hospital that was established at Baghdad by the caliph al-Rashid, and eventually of many hospitals throughout the medieval Near East. It would appear that the hospitals of the time were centers where less well-to-do individuals received treatment and recovered from accident or illness. They also served as homes for aged indigents and as places of confinement for the mentally unstable. The Geniza makes little mention of Jews going to hospitals, an indication perhaps that the Jewish community tended to look after its own in these matters. There was of course the question of Jewish dietary laws, which severely restricted their food intake with

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regard to both the types of food and the utensils in which the food was prepared and with which it was consumed, all of which had to be kosher, that, is ritually pure. One imagines, however, that Jews might have been allowed to bring prepared food and dishes and utensils to hospitals so as to circumvent this problem. In any case, the feeding of patients in the public hospitals of the time is still another subject worthy of further study. Our sources tell us that a license was necessary to practice medicine and that these licenses were obtained from the authorities at the recommendation of established physicians with whom aspiring practitioners apprenticed. There does not appear to have been formal instruction in medicine. Ordinarily, there were no large lecture halls filled with medical students taking notes from well-established physicians, as in the modern medical curriculum of the West and Near East, although in certain exceptional cases a physician of extraordinary prominence might attract a gathering of those who practiced medicine under him and with him. Nor do groups of students seem to have gone through hospital rounds with practicing doctors as part of their initial medical education. As a rule, aspiring practitioners were tutored privately, either on an individual basis or in a small group. For students, the theoretical instruction and the actual practice of the healing arts might be divided among different physicians. Then as now, there seems to have been intense competition to apprentice under the most famous physicians; a good letter of recommendation from a prestigious figure could open doors of opportunity for young men entering the field of medicine. It was not uncommon for students to change mentors in midstream. In the end, it was the apprentice’s responsibility to seize the opportunity and acquire the basic knowledge required to practice his craft. Students had to master the standard curriculum by poring over the vast scientific literature represented in the medical corpus. As a rule doctors were recipients of a broad education; the more famous were learned in other sciences and philosophy. Some had cultivated literary tastes. Inventories of doctor’s libraries found in the Geniza records give us an accurate picture of the works consulted by the average physician. As medicine tended to be a family profession, libraries could be handed down from generation to generation. We also read of library sales. Among Jewish doctors, the books tended to be written in both Hebrew and Arabic, and so when Jewish medical libraries were put up for auction, they attracted two groups of prospective buyers: Jews who would purchase books in both languages and non-Jews who were attracted only to the Arabic tomes. As we might have suspected, the invento-

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ries indicate a profound interest in works of the ancients but also in those of medieval physicians who plied their craft. The final stage of medical education was the practical experience of working in a hospital, the equivalent of today’s residency. Obtaining a residency required letters of recommendation that would speak to the apprentice’s competence and good character; the latter was provided by the police authorities for all who practiced medicine. A Geniza fragment indicates that at least in one case such letters required appropriate connections, if not a gift with which to make sure that matters moved swiftly and smoothly. The great physicians had private practices; the greatest worked at the court of the rulers, but there is ample evidence that the Jewish doctors at least worked long hours in the hospitals. One may presume the same might have been true for Christians and perhaps Muslims as well. It is not entirely clear how the patient areas were organized, but there is some evidence that they were organized in wards according to different types of maladies and treatments; like today, there were many sub-specialties in the medical arts. Patients who did not go to hospitals but were treated privately paid fees directly to their physicians, although needy persons seeking immediate attention could be treated on a pro bono basis. The private doctor practiced in his office, usually a stall in the marketplace identified by a sign of his profession and the usual paraphernalia utilized in medical treatment. Wellto-do patients were more likely to be ministered to in their homes. Pharmacists, who made up a subgroup of the medical arts, filled prescriptions on a regular basis. We know a great deal about pharmaceuticals from the various manuals that have been preserved, some of them brilliantly illustrated, but the Geniza takes us a step further by providing the actual prescriptions. It is abundantly clear that those who practiced the medical arts in the Middle Ages were familiar with thousands of plants and their properties as well as with the effects of compound drugs. Another subgroup of the medical profession, though not themselves physicians, were the individuals who specialized in drawing blood. Like the pharmacists they had to acquire a broad knowledge of the healing arts. In that respect, medieval phlebotomists were very different from the medical technicians assigned to drawing blood in present-day hospitals and clinics. As we have observed previously, the great physicians were polymaths, and, given that many of these leading practitioners enjoyed the patronage of the wealthy and famous, they were handsomely rewarded, and rightfully so. What is important is that the encouragement shown to the extraordinary philosophers and scientists of the Islamic Middle Ages left an indelible mark well beyond the Near East.

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some l ast musings By modern times, Europe had fully assimilated the Islamic world’s gift to them and advanced well beyond the legacy of the ancients. The Europeans eventually jettisoned the Aristotelian natural philosophy they initially rediscovered via the Islamic world, and, using mathematics, exact measurement, and precise observations, they paved the way for the scientific revolution that enabled the West to dominate the Abode of Islam and transform the face of the entire planet. Could the Islamic world have preempted the Europeans in promoting such a revolution? As early as the late tenth century, the Muslim scholar al-Kuhi argued that true philosophical knowledge was obtained not through opinion, dogma, and likelihood, as in Aristotelian natural philosophy, but from mathematical truth arrived at through exact arguments built on solid premises. By the following century, the battle lines between the advocates of Aristotelian natural philosophy and empirical observation were sharply drawn. And yet, unlike the learned men of the West, medieval Muslim thinkers would not be able to go the final step and develop a theory of natural causality that completely supplanted the ancient authorities. Was there in fact a decline, or if you prefer stagnation, of scientific thought in Islam, or perhaps better put, a lack of intellectual nerve which prevented Near Eastern thinkers from innovating a scientific breakthrough that could have led to the equivalent of Europe’s conceptual paradigm shifts and technological advances? A historian of Islamic mathematics has argued that developments in number theory led the Muslim al-Yazdi (ca. 1630) to the same findings as Descartes and Fermat, the great mathematicians of the West. Similarly others have discovered an Islamic school of astronomy, which flourished in the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries and which reportedly arrived at all the necessary mathematical models to replace the Ptolemaic universe, a stupendous achievement credited to Copernicus (d. 1541) in the Latin world. Moreover, the institutions in which the aforementioned discoveries were made are in some cases quintessentially Muslim religious institutions. The fourteenth-century astronomer Ibn al-Shatir was, for example, the timekeeper of the old Umayyad mosque in Damascus. We are thus encouraged to believe that just as Ibn Sina’s philosophy continued to flourish among Muslims into modern times, there was no significant decline or even stagnation in the development of scientific thought. That goes against the grain of what most Islamicists and European historians of science have led us to believe. I leave these matters for others more learned than I to decide, but if such conceptual breakthroughs in science did take place among the Mus-

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lims, why is it they were incapable of building on them as did the Europeans? Even today, with full exposure to the most advanced science developed globally and with enormous sums of money available for investment in scientific institutions, the Arab world (well over 90 percent Muslim) cannot boast of a single truly world class university or scientific research center. Other civilizations more recently introduced to modern science and technology, for example China, India, and Korea, now give rise to cutting edge research and development. The failure of the Muslims to capitalize on the knowledge available to them as Europe became ascendant is a subject for another discussion. That discussion has already begun in earnest among Muslims learned in the ways of the West, witness a recent conference held on the theory of evolution in Cairo. For our purposes, it is sufficient to point out this failure of the Muslims also coincided with a decided decline in philosophical and scientific innovation within the Jewish and Christian communities of the Near East. Clearly, the latter depended on the intellectual vitality provided by the Muslim society in whose midst they dwelt and from which they had previously drawn inspiration. Contrast that with the experiences of Jews living in the Christian West. Once the great universities of Europe opened their doors to Jewish students and instructors, the latter excelled in any number of disciplines, none more heralded than the various branches of the theoretical and experimental sciences. The number of Jewish Nobel Prize laureates in relation to the total awards granted staggers the imagination. The same is true for the Fields Medal awarded for extraordinary contributions in mathematics. A trivial percentage of the world’s population and, measured by numbers alone, a truly insignificant percentage of the Western world, the Jews of Europe and America were heavily represented at the forefront of scientific achievement in the twentieth century; the trend continues in the twenty-first. In contrast, the Jewish communities living among Muslims in the Arab world could not replicate the great scientists and philosophers of what Jewish historians called the “Golden Age.” For some seven hundred years and more, Near Eastern Jewry could not produce the likes of Maimonides and the other Jewish luminaries who stood at the forefront of Jewish creativity and who were, with their Muslim and Christian neighbors, partners in a truly remarkable intellectual endeavor. For Jews of the Near East, the local intellectual climate changed dramatically only with the emergence of political Zionism, a movement that brought European Jewish settlers to Palestine with the aim of reconstituting the Jewish people on their ancient homeland. Jewish scientific creativity, which had found its expression once again in Europe as a result of

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enlightenment and emancipation, now made its way to the Near East. There is something striking about the sea change brought to the region by Jewish settlers. The modern Zionist project, originally a European conception, albeit one based on traditional Jewish yearning for Zion, led to the formation of the modern Jewish state of Israel, a polity occupying a geographical landscape the size of New Jersey with a Jewish population of some six million. With a population less than 2 percent of that of the Arab-Muslims inhabiting the Near East and North Africa, Israel became a world leader in the development of current science and technology. Any number of reasons might be advanced to explain this, but when push comes to shove it is because Israel draws its intellectual inspiration from contemporary currents in Europe, America, and those non-Western countries that have accepted the conceptual framework of scientific advancement in the West as well the methods to study and apply it. The present challenge to the Islamic Near East is to draw similar inspiration from the world beyond, just as they had from the ancients in a previous era. Were Muslims capable of managing a marriage between the Western propensity for innovation in scientific theory and method and normative Islamic beliefs and practices, the common intellectual interest that bound Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the region might flourish as it did in the Islamic Middle Ages. Only time will tell if the creative symbiosis of that age long gone can be resurrected, as was the legacy of the ancient world, to the mutual benefit of medieval Jews, Christians, and Muslims. In their more reflective moments, some early Zionist and current Israeli visionaries saw and continue to see the Jews as playing a central role in the transfer of valued knowledge. In this idealized vision, the intellectual traffic will flow once more over a Jewish bridge that connects the Muslim East and the Christian West. But the direction of the traffic will be reversed as ideas and methods will move not from East to West as in the Middle Ages but from West to East. Like Europeans of an earlier time, the Muslim peoples of the Near East might use the intellectual legacy of others to develop major scientific advances of their own. To achieve such an intellectual symbiosis will require major changes in Islamic society and culture. The recent Islamic revival has created internal issues still to be settled within the Abode of Islam, the license to innovate being one among many. Beyond that, there is the necessity of a political and, equally important, cultural rapprochement with the West and with the Jews and Christians of the Near East.

Selected Bibliography

To list all the books and articles in European and Near Eastern languages that have shaped this extended essay would have entailed a lengthy and rather unnecessary appendage to a tome that is already overly long. I have attempted therefore to be extremely selective. Some choices were obvious; others were arrived at after much soul searching and more than a little self- doubt about useful books and articles that were omitted. As I wrote this book for a general as well as a scholarly reading audience, I have limited the bibliographical entries in foreign languages. There is also a decided preference for less technical studies except where deemed absolutely necessary. As a result, there are only occasional references to articles and books in French and German, virtually none to sources in Near Eastern languages. Readers seeking additional material are invited to consult the extensive bibliographies in the works listed here as well as basic research tools such as the Encyclopedia of Islam (third edition now underway); the Encyclopedia of the Qur’an; the Encyclopedia Judaica; and the Index Islamicus, an ongoing project that lists all the articles published in European languages on Islamic subjects from the year 1900. As is always the case, some important books only appeared after it was too late to consider them in the text and include them in the bibliography. c ha p t e r 1 Conrad, Lawrence. “The Dervish’s Disciple: On the Personality and Milieu of Young Ignaz Goldziher.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1990): 225– 66. ———. “Ignaz Goldziher on Ernest Renan: From Orientalist Philology to the Study of Islam.” In M. Kramer, ed., The Jewish Discovery of Islam, 137– 80. Tel Aviv: The Moshe Dayan Center, 1999. ———. “The Near East Study Tour Diary of Ignaz Goldziher.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1990): 105– 26. Daniel, Norman. The Arabs and Medieval Europe. London: Longmans, 1975. ———. Islam, Europe and Empire. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966. ———. Islam and the West: The Making of an Image. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1960. 287

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Dunlop, D. M. “Some Remarks on Weil’s History of the Caliphs.” In B. Lewis and P. M. Holt, eds., Historians of the Middle East, 315– 29. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962. Geiger, Abraham. Was hat Mohammed aus den Judenthume aufgenommen? Bonn, 1833. Translated by F. M. Young as Judaism in Islam. Madras, 1898. Translation reprinted with prolegomenon by M. Pearlman (Perlmann). New York: KTAV, 1970. Goldziher, Ignaz. Muhammedanische Studien. 2 vols. Halle, 1889– 90. Translated into English and annotated by C. R. Barber and S. Stern as Muslim Studies. 2 vols. London: Allen and Unwin, 1967– 71. ———. Ignaz Goldziher and His Oriental Diary. Edited and translated by R. Patai. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987. ———. Tagebuch. Edited by A. Scheiber. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1978. ———. Vorlesungen über den Islam. Translated and annotated by A. Hamori and R. Hamori as Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. Graetz, Heinrich. The Structure of Jewish History and Other Essays. Translated by I. Schorsch. New York: KTAV, 1975. Holt, P. M. “The Treatment of Arab History by Prideaux, Ockley, and Sale.” In B. Lewis and P. M. Holt, eds., Historians of the Middle East, 290– 302. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962. Irwin, Robert. The Lust for Knowledge: The Orientalists and Their Enemies. London: Penguin, 2006. Kedar, Benjamin. Crusade and Mission: European Approaches Toward the Muslims. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1984. Kramer, Martin, ed. The Jewish Discovery of Islam. Tel Aviv: The Moshe Dayan Center, 1999. Landau, Jacob. “Arminius Vambery: Identities in Conflict.” In M. Kramer, ed., The Jewish Discovery of Islam, 95– 102. Tel Aviv: The Moshe Dayan Center, 1999. Lassner, Jacob. “Abraham Geiger: A Nineteenth-Century Jewish Reformer on the Origins of Islam.” In M. Kramer, ed., The Jewish Discovery of Islam, 103– 35. Tel Aviv: The Moshe Dayan Center, 1999. Lewis, Bernard. History—Remembered, Recovered, Invented. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975. ———. Islam in History. Chicago: Open Court, 1993. ———. “The Pro-Islamic Jews.” In Islam in History, 123– 37. Chicago: Open Court, 1993. Lewis, Bernard, and P. M. Holt, eds., Historians of the Middle East. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962. Maalouf, Amin. The Crusades Through Arab Eyes. London: Al Saqi Books, 1984. Meyer, Michael. Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Simon, R. Ignac Goldziher. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1986. Southern, R. W. Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962. Yerushalmi, Yosef. Zakhor. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982.

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c ha p t e r s 2 a n d 3 Azami, Mohammad. Studies in Early Hadith Literature. Indianapolis: American Publications Center, 1978. ———. Studies in Hadith Methodology and Literature. Indianapolis: American Publications Center, 1977. Al-Azmeh, Ahmad. Ibn Khaldun. London: Routledge, 1990. ———. Ibn Khaldun in Modern Scholarship: A Study in Modern Orientalism. London: Third World Centre, 1981. Baneth, David H. “What Did Muhammad Mean When He Called His Religion Islam? The Original Meaning of Aslama and its Derivatives.” Israel Oriental Studies 1 (1971): 183– 90. Bell, Richard. The Origin of Islam in Its Christian Environment. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1925. Berg, Herbert, ed. Method and Theory in the Study of Islamic Origins. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2003. Bravmann, Meir. The Spiritual Background of Early Islam. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1972. Brockopp, Jonathan, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Muhammad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Burton, John. The Collection of the Qur’an. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. ———. An Introduction to the Hadith. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994. Conrad, Lawrence. The Rise of Historical Writing Among the Arabs [Bahth fi nash’at ‘ilm al-ta’rikh ‘ind al-‘arab]. Translated from the Arabic with an annotated and expanded bibliography by ‘A. ‘A. Duri. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. ———, ed. History and Historiography in Early Islamic Times: Studies and Perspectives. Princeton: Darwin Press, 1994. Crone, Patricia. Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Crone, Patricia, and Michael Cook. Hagarism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Donner, Fred. The Earliest Muslims. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. ———. Narratives of Islamic Origins: The Beginnings of Arabic Historical Writing. Princeton: Darwin Press, 1998. Firestone, Reuven. Journeys in Holy Lands. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990. Goitein, Shelomo D. “Mi hayyu rabbotav ha- muvhakim shel Muhammad?” (“Who Were Muhammad’s Illustrious Teachers?”) Tarbiz 23 (1953): 146– 59. Hallaq, Wael. The Origins and Evolution of Islamic Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Hawting, Gerald R. The Idea of Idolatry and the Emergence of Islam: From Polemic to History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Horovitz, Josef. “Jewish Proper Names and their Derivatives in the Qur’an.” Hebrew Union College Annual 2 (1925): 145– 227. Reprinted as a separate monograph with cross- pagination, Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1964. Ibn Khaldun, Wali al-Din. Muqaddimah. Translated from Arabic and annotated by

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F. Rosenthal as Ibn Khaldun: The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History. New York: Pantheon, 1958. Ibn Warraq [pseud.], ed. The Origins of the Qur’an. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1998. ———. The Quest for the Historical Muhammad. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2000. ———. What the Koran Really Says. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2002. Jeffrey, Arthur. The Foreign Vocabulary of the Qur’an. Broda: Oriental Institute, 1938. ———, ed. Materials for the History of the Text of the Qur’an. Leiden: E. J. Brill 1937. Index published separately, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1951. Juynboll, G.H.A. The Authenticity of the Tradition Literature. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1969. Lassner, Jacob. The Middle East Remembered. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Lassner, Jacob, and Michael Bonner. Islam in the Middle Ages: The Origins and Shaping of Classical Islamic Civilization. New York: Praeger, 2010. Lewis, Bernard. The Muslim Discovery of Europe. New York: W. W. Norton, 1982. Lüling, Günter. Über den Ur-Qur’an: Ansätze zur Rekonstruktion vorislamischer christliche Strophenlieder im Qur’an. Erlangen: Self- published, 1974. Luxenberg, Christoph. Die syro-aramäische Lesart des Koran: Ein Beitrag zur Entschlüsselung der Koransprache. Berlin: Verlag Hans Schiller, 2000. English translation, The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran: A Contribution to the Decoding of the Language of the Koran. Berlin: Verlag Hans Schiller, 2007. Mahdi, Muhsin. Ibn Khaldun’s Philosophy of History. London: Allen and Unwin, 1957. McAuliffe, Jane, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Qur’an. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. ———, ed. Encyclopedia of the Qur’an. 5 vols. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2001–. Margalit, Avishai, and Ian Buruma. Occidentalism. New York: Penguin, 2002. Miquel, Andre. La Géographie humaine du monde musulman. Paris and the Hague: Mouton, 1967. Motzki, Harald. The Origins of Islamic Jurisprudence. Translated from the German by M. Katz. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2002. ———, ed. The Biography of the Prophet. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2000. Nagel, Tilman. Allahs Liebling: Ursprung und Erscheinungsformen das Mohammedglauben. Munich: Oldenbourg, 2008. ———. Mohammed: Leben und Legend. Munich: Oldenbourg, 2008. Noth, Martin. The Early Arabic Historical Tradition. 2d ed. rev. in collaboration with L. Conrad and translated from the German by M. Bonner. Princeton: Darwin Press, 1994. Obermann, Julian. “Islamic Origins: A Study in the Background and Foundation.” In N. A. Faris, ed., The Arab Heritage, 58– 120. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944. Peters, Francis, ed. The Arabs and Arabia on the Eve of Islam. London: Ashgate/Variorum, 1999. Rabin, Chaim. Ancient West Arabian. London: Taylor’s International Publications, 1951. Rippin, Andrew, ed. The Blackwell Companion to the Qur’an. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006.

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Robinson, Chase. Islamic Historiography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Rosenthal, Franz. A History of Muslim Historiography. 2d ed. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1968. Schacht, Joseph. The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953. Shoshan, Boaz. Poetics of Islamic History. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2004. Thompson, Jason. Edward William Lane, 1801–1876: The Life of a Pioneering Egyptologist and Orientalist. Cairo: AUC Press, 2009. Torrey, C. C. The Jewish Foundation of Islam. New York: KTAV, 1933. Rpt. 1967. Wansbrough, John. Quranic Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. ———. The Sectarian Milieu: Content and Composition of Islamic Salvation History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978. Watt, William M. Bell’s Introduction to the Qur’an: Completely Revised and Enlarged. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1970. c ha p t e r 4 Abdel-Malek, Anouar. “Orientalism in Crisis.” Diogenes 44 (1963): 104– 12. Abou el-Fadl, Khalid. Speaking in God’s Name: Islamic Law, Authority, and Women. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Akhtar, Shabbir. The Qur’an and the Secular Mind. New York: Routledge, 2008. Al-Attas, S.M.N., ed. Aims and Objectives of Islamic Education. Jeddah: King Abdulaziz University Press, 1979. Al-Azm, Sadiq. “Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse.” In A. Macfie, ed., Orientalism: A Reader, 217– 38. New York: New York University Press, 2000. Partial translation of original Arabic text of al-Azm. Beirut, 1981. Djait, Hichem. Europe and Islam. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985. Gibb, H.A.R. Mohammedanism: A Historical Survey. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940. ———. Studies on the Civilization of Islam. Boston: Beacon Press, 1962. Graef, Bettina, and Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen. Global Mufti. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Helfant, Samuel. Yusuf al-Qaradawi: Islam and Modernity. Tel Aviv: The Moshe Dayan Center, 2009. Hourani, Albert. “Islam and the Philosophers of History.” Middle East Studies 3 (1967): 206– 68. Hughes, Thomas. A Dictionary of Islam. London: W. H. Allen and Co., 1895. Expurgated version, Lahore, 1964. Kerr, Malcolm, ed. Islamic Studies and the Future of Islam. Malibu, Calif.: Undena Publishers, 1980. Laroui, Abdallah. The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976. Lewis, Bernard. The Crisis of Islam. New York: Modern Library, 2003. ———. Cultures in Conflict. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

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———. Islam and the West. New York: Oxford University Press 1993. ———. The Multiple Identities of the Middle East. New York: Schocken/Random House, 1998. ———. What Went Wrong? Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Lockman, Zachary. Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Macfie, Alexander, ed. Orientalism: A Reader. New York: New York University Press, 2000. Nettler, Ronald. “Mohammed Talbi: ‘For Dialogue Between All Religions.’ ” In R. Nettler and S. Taji-Farouki, eds., Muslim-Jewish Encounters, 171– 99. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1998. ———. “Mohammed Talbi on Understanding the Qur’an.” In S. Taji-Faruqi, ed., Modern Muslim Intellectuals and the Qur’an, 225– 40. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. ———. “Mohammed Talbi’s Commentary on Qur’an IV:34: A ‘Historical Reading’ of a Verse Concerning the Disciplining of Women.” The Maghrib Review 24 (1999): 19– 34. Nielsen, Joergen, and S. Khasawnih, eds. Arabs and the West: Mutual Images. Amman: University of Jordan Press, 1998. Rahimieh, Nasrin. Oriental Responses to the West. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990. Rahman, Fazlur. Islam and Modernity: Transformation of an Intellectual Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Ramadan, Tariq. The Messenger: The Meanings of the Life of Muhammad. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. ———. Radical Reform: Islamic Ethics and Liberation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. ———. Western Muslims and the Future of Islam. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. ———. What I Believe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Roy, Olivier. Globalized Islam. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Ryad, Umar. Islamic Reformation and Christianity. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2009. Saeed, Abdullah. “Fazlur Rahman: A Framework for the Interpretation of the EthicoLegal Content of the Qur’an.” In S. Taji-Farouki, ed., Modern Intellectuals and the Qur’an, 37– 66. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. Rpt. New York: Penguin, 1995. Sivan, Emmanuel. Interpretations of Islam Past and Present. Princeton: Darwin Press, 1985. Taji-Farouki, Suha, ed. Modern Muslim Intellectuals and the Qur’an. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Tibawi, A. L. “English-Speaking Orientalists: A Critique to Their Approaches to Islam and Arab Nationalism.” Muslim World 53 (1963): 183– 203, 298– 313. ———. The Islamic Pious Foundations in Jerusalem: Origins, History, and Usurpation by Israel. London: Islamic Cultural Centre, 1978. Varisco, Daniel Martin. Reading Orientalism: Said and Unsaid. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007. Waardenburg, Jacques. “Reflections on the West.” In S. Taji-Faruki and B. Nafi, eds.,

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Islamic Thought in the Twentieth Century, 260– 95. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2004. c ha p t e r 5 Andrae, Tor. Mohammad: The Man and His Faith. New York: Harper and Row, 1960. Baneth, David H. “What Did Muhammad Mean When He Called his Religion Islam? The Original Meaning of Aslama and its Derivatives.” Israel Oriental Studies 1 (1971): 183– 90. Gil, Moshe. “The Origins of the Jews of Yathrib.” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 4 (1984): 203– 24. Guillaume, Alfred. The Life of Muhammad. A translation of Ibn Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955. Kister, Meir. “ ‘An yadin (Qur’an IX/29): An Attempt at an Interpretation.” Arabica 2 (1964): 272– 78. ———. “The Massacre of the Banu Qurayza: A Reexamination of a Tradition.” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 8 (1986): 61– 96. Lecker, Michael. “The Hudaybiyya Treaty and the Expedition Against Khaybar.” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 5 (1984): 1– 11. ———. “Hudhayfa b. al-Yaman and ‘Ammar b. Yasir, Jewish Converts to Islam.” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 56 (1997): 259– 73. ———. “Idol Worship in pre-Islamic Medina (Yathrib).”Le Museon 106 (1993): 331– 46. ———. Jews and Arabs in Pre- and Early Islamic Arabia. London: Ashgate, 1998. ———. Muslims, Jews, and Pagans. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995. ———. “A Note on Marriage Links Between Qurashis and Jewish Women.” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 10 (1987): 17– 39. ———.“Waqidi’s Account on the Status of the Jews of Medina: A Study of a Combined Report.” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 54 (1995): 15– 32. Newby, Gordon. A History of the Jews of Arabia. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988. Rahman, Fazlur. “Pre-Foundations of the Muslim Community in Mecca.” Studia Islamica 43 (1974): 44– 66. Ringgren, Helmut. Islam, Aslama, and Muslim. Lund, Sweden: Gleerup, 1949. Rodinson, Maxime. Muhammad. New York: Pantheon, 1971. Watt, William M. Muhammad at Mecca. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953. ———. Muhammad at Medina. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956. ———. Muhammad: Prophet and Statesman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961. Wellhausen, Julius. See A. Wensinck. Wensinck, Arent. Muhammad and the Jews of Medina. With an excursus “Muhammad’s Constitution of Medina,” by Julius Wellhausen. 2d. ed. Berlin: Georg Olm, 1982. c ha p t e r 6 Adang, Camilla. Muslim Writers on Judaism and the Hebrew Bible. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996.

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Baron, Salo. “The Historical Outlook of Maimonides.” Proceedings of the American Academy of Jewish Research 6 (1935): 5– 113. Brann, Ross. Power in the Portrayal. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. ———. “Textualizing Ambivalence in Islamic Spain: Arabic Representations of Isma‘il Ibn Naghhrilah.” In R. Brann, ed., Languages of Power in Islamic Spain, 107– 35. Bethesda, Md.: CDL Press, 1997. Cohen, Mark. “Islam and the Jews: Myth, Counter-Myth, History.” Jerusalem Quarterly 38 (1986): 125– 37. ———. Under Crescent and Cross. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Firestone, Reuven. Journeys in Holy Lands. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990. Fishbein, Michael. Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. ———. “Revelation and Tradition: Aspects of Inner Biblical Exegesis.” Journal of Biblical Literature 99 (1980): 343– 61. Friedlander, Israel. “Jewish-Arabic Studies.” Jewish Quarterly Review n.s. 1 (1910– 11): 183– 215; 2 (1911– 12): 481– 516; 3 (1912– 13): 235– 300. Gallego, Maria, H. Bleaney, and P. Suarez, eds. Bibliography of Jews in the Islamic World. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2010. Goitein, Shelomo D. “Messianic Troubles in Baghdad.” In M. Sapperstein, ed., Essential Papers on Messianic Movements and Personalities in Jewish History, 189– 201. New York: New York University Press, 1992. ———, ed. Religion in a Religious Age. Cambridge: Association for Jewish Studies, 1974. Hary, Benjamin, J. Hayes, and F. Astren, eds. Judaism and Islam: Essays in Honor of William M. Brinner. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2000. Ibn Kammuna. Examination of the Three Faiths. Translated by Moshe Perlmann. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971. ———. “The Medieval Polemics between Islam and Judaism.” In S. D. Goitein, ed., Religion in a Religious Age. Cambridge: Association for Jewish Studies, 1974. Lassner, Jacob. “The Origins of Muslim Attitudes Towards the Jews and Judaism.” Judaism 39 (1990): 498– 507. Lazarus-Yafeh, Hava. Intertwined Worlds. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Lewis, Bernard. “An Anti-Jewish Ode.” In Islam in History, new ed. Chicago: Open Court, 1993. ———. “An Apocalyptic Vision of Islamic History.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 13 (1950): 308– 38. Lopatin, Asher. “The Uncircumcised Jewish Heart in Sayyid Qutb’s Tafsir: Qur’anic Parallels for Jewish Conceptions.” Studies in Muslim Jewish Relations 1 (1993): 75– 84. Perlmann, Moshe. “Eleventh-Century Andalusian Authors on the Jews of Granada.” Proceedings of the American Academy of Jewish Research 18 (1948– 49): 269– 90. Waardenburg, Jacques, ed. Muslim Perceptions of Other Religions. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Wasserstrom, Steven. Between Muslim and Jew. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.

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c ha p t e r 7 Ashtor, Eliyahu. The Jews of Muslim Spain. 3 vols. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1979. Bulliet, Richard. Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971. Cohen, Mark. Jewish Self-Government in Egypt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. ———. Poverty and Charity in the Jewish Community of Medieval Egypt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. Fischel, Walter. Jews in the Economic and Political Life of Mediaeval Islam. New York: KTAV, 1969. Friedmann, Yohanan. Tolerance and Coercion in Islam: Interfaith Relations in the Muslim Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Gil, Moshe. A History of Palestine, 634– 1099. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. ———. Jews in Islamic Countries in the Middle Ages. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2004. Goitein, Shelomo D. “The Documents of the Cairo Geniza as a Source for Islamic Social History.” In Studies in Islamic History and Institutions, 279– 94. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1966. ———. Jews and Arabs. New York: Schocken Books, 1955. ———. Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973. ———. A Mediterranean Society. 6 vols. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967– 93. The cumulative indices in vol. 6 were prepared by P. Sanders following Goitein’s death. Abridged and revised version in one volume by J. Lassner. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999. ———. Studies in Islamic History and Institutions. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1966. ———. “The Unity of the Mediterranean World in the ‘Middle’ Middle Ages.” Studia Islamica 3 (1955): 29– 42. Lassner, Jacob. The Middle East Remembered, 267– 340. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Levtzion, Nehemia, ed. Conversion to Islam. London: Holmes and Meier, 1979. Lewis, Bernard. The Jews of Islam. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. ———. Semites and Antisemites. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. Perlmann, Moshe. “ ‘Abd al-Hakk al-Islami: A Jewish Convert.” Jewish Quarterly Review 31 (1940): 171– 91. ———. “Another Ka‘b al-Ahbar Story.” Jewish Quarterly Review 45 (1954): 48– 51. ———. “A Legendary Story of Ka‘b al-Ahbar’s Conversion to Islam.” In The Joshua Starr Memorial Volume, 85– 89. New York: KTAV, 1953. Pulcini, Theodore. Exegesis as Political Discourse. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998. Reiff, Stefan. A Jewish Archive from Old Cairo. Surrey: Curzon Press, 2000. Rubin, Milka. “Shurut ‘Umar and its Alternatives: The Legal Debate on the Status of the Dhimmis.” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 30 (2005): 170– 206. Rubin, Uri. Between the Bible and Qur’an. Princeton: Darwin Press, 1999. Stillman, Norman. The Jews of Arab Lands. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1979.

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Stroumsa, Sarah. “On Jewish Intellectuals Who Converted in the Early Middle Ages.” In D. Frank, ed., The Jews of Medieval Islam, 179– 98. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995. Tritton, Arthur. The Caliphs and Their Non-Muslim Subjects. London: Frank Cass, 1970. c ha p t e r 8 Bernstein, Marc. Stories of Joseph: Narrative Migrations between Judaism and Islam. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006. Brann, Ross. The Compunctious Poet: Cultural Ambiguity and Hebrew Poetry in Muslim Spain. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. Brinner, William, and D. Ricks, eds. Studies in Islamic and Judaic Traditions. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986. Frank, Daniel, ed. The Jews of Medieval Islam. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995. Goitein, Shelomo D. A Mediterranean Society. 6 vols. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967– 93. Guttman, Julius. Philosophies of Judaism. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1964. Halkin, Abraham. “A Karaite Creed.” In S. Brunswick, ed., Studies in Judaica, Karaitica, and Islamica, 49– 76. Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 1982. Husik, Isaac. Medieval Jewish Philosophy. 6th impression. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1948. Kellner, Menachem. Maimonides on Judaism and the Jewish People. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991. Kraemer, Joel. Maimonides: The Life and Works of One of Civilization’s Great Minds. New York: Doubleday, 2008. ———, ed. Perspectives on Maimonides. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Lassner, Jacob. Demonizing the Queen of Sheba. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Libson, Gideon. Jewish and Islamic Law. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003. Lowin, Shari. The Making of the Forefather: Abraham in Islamic and Jewish Exegetical Narratives. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2006. Malter, Henry. Life and Works of Saadia Gaon. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1942. Menocal, Maria Rosa, R. Scheindlin, and M. Sells, eds. The Literature of al-Andalus. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Nemoy, Leon. Karaite Anthology. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952. Polliack, Meira. The Karaite Tradition of Arabic Bible Translation. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997. Rustow, Marina. Heresy and the Politics of Community. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. Said, Edward. Out of Place: A Memoir. New York: Knopf, 1999. Scheindlin, Raymond. The Gazelle: Medieval Hebrew Poems on God, Israel, and the Soul. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1991. ———. The Song of the Distant Dove: Judah Halevi’s Pilgrimage. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2008. ———. Wine, Women, Death: Medieval Hebrew Poetry on the Good Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

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Schwarzbaum, Haim. Jewish Folklore Between East and West. Beersheba: Ben Gurion University of the Negev Press, 1989. Saenz-Badillos, Angel. “Philologians and Poets in Search of the Hebrew Language.” In R. Brann, ed., Languages of Power in Islamic Spain. Bethesda, Md.: CDL Press, 1997. Sklare, David. Samuel ben Hofni Gaon and his Cultural World. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996. Tene, David. “The Earliest Comparisons of Hebrew with Aramaic and Arabic.” Studies in the History of Linguistics 20 (1982): 355– 77. c ha p t e r 9 Asali, Kamil, ed. Jerusalem in History. Rev. ed. London: Keegan Paul, 1997. Ashtor, Eliyahu. “Muslim and Christian Literature Praising Jerusalem.” Jerusalem Cathedra 1 (1981): 187– 89. Busse, Heribert. “The Sanctity of Jerusalem in Islam.” Judaism 17 (1968): 441– 68. ———. “ ‘Umar b. al-Khattab in Jerusalem.” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 5 (1984): 73– 119. ———. “ ‘Umar’s Image as the Conqueror of Jerusalem.” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 8 (1986): 149– 68. Creswell, Kermit. Early Muslim Architecture. Vols. 1 and 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969. Elad, Amikam. Medieval Jerusalem and Islamic Worship. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995. ———. “Why Did ‘Abd al-Malik Build the Dome of the Rock? A Reexamination of the Muslim Sources.” Oxford Studies in Islamic Art 9, no. 1 (1992): 33– 58. Gil, Moshe. “The Jewish Quarters of Jerusalem During Early Muslim Rule.” Shalem Studies in the History of the Jews in Eretz-Israel 2 (1976): 19– 40. ———. Related Worlds: Studies in Jewish and Arab Ancient and Early Medieval History. London: Ashgate/Variorum, 2004. Goitein, Shelomo D. “The Sanctity of Jerusalem and Palestine in Early Islam.” In his Studies in Islamic History and Institutions, 135– 48. E. J. Brill. Leiden, 1966. Grabar, Oleg. Jerusalem. London: Ashgate/Variorum, 2005. ———. The Shape of the Holy: Early Islamic Jerusalem. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Hamilton, Richard. The Structural History of the Aqsa Mosque. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949. Hasson, Isaac. “Muslim Literature in Praise of Jerusalem: Fada’il Bayt al-Maqdis.” Jerusalem Cathedra 1 (1981): 168– 84. Hawting, G. R. The First Dynasty of Islam: The Umayyad Caliphate, AD 661–750. New York: Routledge, 2000. Johns, Jeremy, and J. Raby, eds. Bayt al-Maqdis, pt. 1: ‘Abd al-Malik’s Jerusalem. Oxford Studies in Islamic Art, 9. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Johns, Jeremy. Bayt al-Maqdis, pt. 2: Jerusalem and Early Islam. Oxford Studies in Islamic Art, 9. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Kessler, Christel. “ ‘Abd al-Malik’s Inscription in the Dome of the Rock: A Reconsideration.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1970): 2– 14. Kister, Meir. “A Commentary on the Antiquity of Traditions Praising Jerusalem.” Jerusalem Cathedra 1 (1981): 185– 86.

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Lassner, Jacob. The Middle East Remembered: Forged Identities, Competing Narratives, Contested Spaces. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. McAuliffe, Jane. Qur’anic Christians: An Analysis of Classical and Modern Exegesis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Thomas, David. Anti-Christian Polemic in Early Islam. University of Cambridge Oriental Publications 45. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. ———. Early Muslim Polemic Against Christianity. University of Cambridge Oriental Publications 59. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. c ha p t e r 1 1 Brock, Sebastian. “From Antagonism to Assimilation: Syriac Attitudes to Greek Learning.” In N. Garsoian, T. Mathews, and R Thomson, eds., East of Byzantium, 17– 34. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks/Center for Byzantine Studies, 1980. Endress, Gernard. “The Circle of al-Kindi: Early Arabic Translations from the Greek and the Rise of Islamic Philosophy.” In G. Endress and R. Kruk, eds., The Ancient Tradition in Christian and Islamic Hellenism, 43– 76. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997. Fakhry, Majid. Islamic Philosophy. Oxford: One World, 2009. Gohlman, William. The Life of Ibn Sina. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1974. Goodman, Len. Jewish and Islamic Philosophy: Crosspollinations in the Classical Age. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999. ———. “The Translation of Greek Materials into Arabic.” In M.J.L. Young et al., eds., Arabic Religion, Learning and Science in the Abbasid Period, 477– 97. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Gutas, Dimitri. Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition. E. J. Brill. Leiden, 1988. ———. Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ‘Abbasid Society. Routledge: London, 1998. ———.“Paul the Persian on the Classification of the arts of Aristotle’s Philosophy: A Milestone Between Alexandria and Baghdad.” Der Islam 60 (1983): 231– 67. ———.“What Was There in Arabic for the Latins to Receive? Remarks on the Modalities of the Twelfth-Century Translation Movement in Spain.” Miscellanea Mediaevalia 33 (2006): 3– 21. Hogendijk, Jan, and A. I. Sabra, eds. The Enterprise of Science in Islam. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003. Lassner, Jacob, and M. Bonner. Islam in the Middle Ages. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger, 2010. Meyerhoff, Max. “New Light on Hunayn ibn Ishaq and His School.” Isis 8 (1926): 685– 724. McGuiness, John, and D. Reisman, eds. Classical Arabic Philosophy. Indianapolis: American Trust Publications, 2007. Peters, Francis. Aristotle and the Arabs. New York: New York University Press, 1968. Pingree, David. “Astrology.” In M.J.L. Young et al., eds., Arabic Religion, Learning and Science in the Abbasid Period, 290– 300. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

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Rosenthal, Franz. The Classical Heritage in Islam. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975. Saliba, George. A History of Arabic Astronomy. New York: New York University Press, 1994. Ullmann, Manfred. Islamic Medicine. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1978. Wolfson, Harry. “The Classification of Sciences in Medieval Jewish Philosophy.” Hebrew Union College Jubilee Volume, 262–315. Cincinnati, 1925.

Index

Note that al-, the definite article in Arabic, is not considered in alphabetization in the index. For example, al-Hadi is listed with entries beginning with H. Aaron, 167 Abbasid period, 159, 265; and Bayt al-Hikmah, “The House of Wisdom,” 262; decline of, 203, 210; end of, 65; historiographical dispute with ‘Alids/Shi‘ites, 48; and pursuit of learning under, 268–69; tolerance for nonMuslims and non-Arabs, 241–42 ‘Abdallah ibn Salam, 187–88 ‘Abd al-Malik, 190, 245; building program on Temple Mount, 227–28, 230, 231, 232; Islamization of Jerusalem, 240 ‘Abd al-Massih al-Najrani, 239 al-‘Abdi, Sa‘sa‘h ibn Suhan, 226 Abdel-Malek, Anouar: “Orientalism in Crisis,” 93–94 Abelard of Bath, 276 Abode of Islam: defined, 127. See also Jews in Abode of Islam Abode of War (al-harb) or Unbelief (kufr), 127 Abraham, 140, 164, 165, 167, 229 Abrahamic faiths, 15–16; competition among, viii, x, 258; cross-pollinations in medieval philosophy and science, xi, 208, 258–82; relationships among in medieval Islamic world, vii–viii, x, xviii Abu al-Dawaniq, “The Father of the Daniqs.” See al-Mansur, Abu Ja‘far. Abu al-Hasan ‘Ali, 269 Abu Bakr, 4, 249

Abu Bishr Matta ibn Yunus, 272 Abu ‘Isa al-Isfahani, rebellion, 159–60, 161 Abu Ja‘far al-Mansur. See al-Mansur, Abu Ja‘far Abu Kabir, Bay of, 69 Abu Ma‘shar, 269 Abyssinians, 27, 35–36, 52 Aims and Objectives of Islamic Education (al-Attas, ed.), 105, 110 ‘A’ishah, 234, 235 Alexandrian Aristotelianism, 264 Algeria, Jews in, 213 ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib, 224, 225, 226, 249 Almohads, 184, 188, 202, 211 Almoravids, 184 Al-Alwani, Sheikh Taha Jabir, 120 American Muslims, efforts to combat emerging hostility toward, 121–22 American Oriental Society, xvii, 31 American universities, and Near Eastern studies, 91 analogical reasoning (qiyas), 115 ‘anaqim, 220 aniconic coins, 227 Annales School, 76, 79, 114 Ansari, Muhammad, 111–13 Ansar of Medina, 136, 141, 145, 236 anthropology, 107 anti-Semitism, modern, 22–23 Anushirvan, 264 Aqsa Mosque, 227, 228, 231, 240

301

302

✴

Arab Christians, and concept of modern nation state, 257 Arabian peninsula: diverse patterns of settlement and social organization, 35; international trade route in region, 35; system of higher education in nineteenth century and beyond, 73–74 Arabic: classical, 29; as language of administration and daily life, 269; as language with which to study scholarship of ancients, 261; translation activities, 261–65 Arabic literary texts, heightened interest in, 9 Arabic logic, 273 Arabic papyri, 196 Arabic philology and grammar, 207 Arabic secular scholarship, interest in, 206 Arabic-speaking Jews, and cultural borrowing, 55 Arab-Israeli dispute, 215 ‘arabiyah, 29 “Arab telephone,” 55–56 Aragon, 202 Aramaic, 16, 27, 29, 56, 206, 207 Arculf, 227 al-ard al-muqaddasah, 220–21 Aristotle, 264; natural philosophy, 283; Physics, 272 Arkoun, Mohammed, 119 Armenians, 213 Ashkenaz Jewry, 22 Ashura’, fast of, 140 Assyriology, 25 astrology, 262–63 astronomical observatories, 268 astronomy, 263–64; astronomical observatories, 268; importance to monotheist religions, 263; Islamic school of, 283 al-Attas, S.M.N., 105, 106, 108 Avicenna. See Ibn Sina Aws, 132–33, 134, 135, 136, 137, 139, 141, 142, 147, 148, 150 Ayyubids, 278 al-Azhar, Cairo, 23, 82, 105, 109, 125 al-‘Aziz, 189 al-Azm, Sadiq, 101–2 Babylonia, Jews of, 201, 214 Babylonian Empire, incursions into Arabian Peninsula, 132 Babylonian Talmud, 207 Bacher, Wilhelm, 20 Badawi, M. A. Zaki, 109–11

index Badr, Battle of, 137, 143, 144–45, 146 Baghdad: medieval, 198–99; Mongol conquest of, 108, 173–74, 210; urban and multicultural environment, 269 Baghdad, sack of, 210 Bahira the Monk legend, 248–57; apocalyptical visions in Arabic and Syriac versions of, 250; Arabic version, 253, 255; Syriac version, 251–53 al-Banna, Hasan, 122 Banu Abbas, 266 Banu Isra’il (“the Children of Israel”), 163 Banu Musa family, Harran, 263, 270 Banu Nadir. See Nadir Banu Qaylah, 132 Banu Qurayzah. See Qurayzah Banu Sasan, 267 Barmakids, 267 Basrah, regional school of law, 44 battle-day narratives (maghazi), 47 Battle of Badr, 137, 143, 144–45, 146 Battle of the Trench, 148–49 Battle of Uhud, 145 Bayt al-Hikmah, “The House of Wisdom,” 262, 267, 268, 271 Bayt al-Maqdis, 219, 221, 224, 233 Bedouin tribes, 152, 178 Bell, Richard: The Origin of Islam in Its Christian Environment, 27–28 Ben Ezra synagogue, 197 Ben Yochai, Simeon, 244–45 Bernard of Clairvaux, 6, 57 Bet Alpha, Galilee, 234 Bibliotheca Geographorum Arabicorum (BGA), 79 Bilad al-Rum, 267 al-Bitar, Nadim, 101 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 69, 70, 71, 92 Bonner, Michael, 37 Book of Roger, 67 book production, 269 Bravmann, Meir, 38 Britain: outposts in South Arabia and Persian Gulf, 69; response to French intervention into Egypt, 71; return to Egypt in 1860s, 69– 70; travelers to Egypt, 72 Burton, Richard, translation of Thousand and One Nights into English, 73 Buruma, Ian, 63 Bush, George W., 63, 122 Byzantine Empire, 5, 65, 168, 243–44; conflict with Sasanian (Persian) empire, 37; loss

Index of lands to Muslims, 218; relations with Eastern Christians, 217; resistance to Muslim onslaught, 219 Cahen, Claude, 114 Cairo Geniza, x, 154, 193, 197–201; information on medical arts, 279–80; inventories of doctor’s libraries, 281–82; records of crosssection of Jewish society, 198; underutilized by Judaica specialists, 200; underutilized by scholars of medieval Islam, 200 Caraka Samhita, 262 Castile, 202 Catholic scholars, study of Hebrew, 9 cheese, processing of, 212 chrestomathy, 10 Christian apologetics: attacks on Jews, 239; dispute texts, 246–47; and fear of conversion to Islam, 218, 239–43, 248; imagery of martyrs, 239–40; as polemical discourse, 248–57; sentiments against Christian “backsliders,” 247–48; uses of history and pseudo-history in, 243–48; written in Syriac and Arabic, 239 Christian orientalists, search for Eastern Christianity or Abyssinian influence on origins of Islam, 27 Christians, 236–37; anti-Muslim tracts, 6; Arab Christian tribes in Iraq and greater Syria, 242–43; and Bahira legend, 249–50; controversy over representation of human figures, 235; conversion to Islam, 240–42, 247, 257; doctrines relating to divinity of Christ and Trinity, 92; enclaves in Abode of Islam, 210; and end of days, 245; held Jews accountable for death of Jesus, 175; initial engagement with the world of Islam, 5–9; Islamization of space, 217–35; provoked by Jewish concept of chosen people, 164–65; references to in Qur’an, 236–39; relations with state church in Byzantium, 217; Syrian Orthodox, 264. See also Nestorian Christians Christian scholars: medieval pursuit of ancient Greek knowledge, 259; of Old Testament, 24–25; translators, 261–62 Christian Scientists, 279 Church of the Holy Sepulcher, 230–31; reference to by Muslims as al-Qumamah (“The Garbage Heap”), 231 circumcision, 256 climate, as indicative of how peoples look and act, 67 Cluny, Abbot of, 6

✴ 303 comparative religious studies, 9 Comte, Auguste, 76 Conrad, Lawrence, 49, 51 Constantinople, 240 Constantinus Africanus, 276 Constitution of Medina, 137–38, 143 conversion to Islam, Christians, 240–42, 247, 257 conversion to Islam, early Jewish converts, 184– 93; in governing bodies of Islamic state, 189–91; negative attitude toward, 188; and questions of social space, 185–86, 192–93; within the religious establishment, 191 conversos. See crypto-Jews Cook, Michael, 41–42 Cook, Thomas, Travel Company, 73 Copernicus, 283 Covenant of ‘Umar, 184 Crone, Patricia, 41–42 Crusaders, 65, 176, 203, 210 crypto-Jews, 188 cultural borrowing: among Abrahamic faiths, xi, 53; Christian influence on Islam, 53–54; Jewish influence on Islam, 206; requires adaptation of received traditions consistent with needs of borrower, 56 cultural studies, 34 Cyclades Islands, 212 Daniel, story of, 245, 250 Darwin, Charles, 107 David, 157, 167, 221 dawlah, 182 Day of Judgment, 274 Day of Resurrection, 226 Dayr Qunna, Iraq, 264 “deIslamization,” 106 dhimmis, 183, 241 Diogenes (journal), 93 dispute texts, 246–47 Djerba, 214 Dome of the Rock, 227, 230–32, 232, 240 Donner, Fred: Narratives of Islamic Origins, 51 Duns Scotus, 277 Durkheim, Émile, 107 E. J. Brill, 79 The Early Arabic Historical Tradition: A SourceCritical Study (Noth and Conrad), 49 École spéciale des langues orientales vivantes, 10 Edomites, 244 Egypt, Jews of, 201, 213

304

✴

Elisha, 167 Encyclopedia of Islam, 104 “end of times,” 244 European Age of Exploration, 66 European Enlightenment, xi–xii, 64, 82, 84, 125 Europeans: involvement in Arab world, 69–70, 73; scholarly interest in teaching Arabic and Hebrew, 8–9; simplified and romanticized version of Muslim world, 73 European universities: evolution of historical studies in, 78; Orientalistik seminars, 25 evolution, theory of, 107 fada’il al-Quds, 219 el-Fadl, Khaled Abou, 121 fahlawi, 102 al-Farabi, 272-74 Fatimid caliphate, 189, 199, 204, 210 Fertile Crescent, 4, 29, 35 Fields Medal, 284 Filastin (“First Palestine”), 221 fiqh al-aqalliyat, 120–21 folk medicine, 277, 278 footnotes, 78 Foucault, Michel, 91 France: annexation of Algeria, 69, 70; incursion into Egypt, 70–71 Freud, Sigmund, 107 Freytag, Georg, 11 Friedmann, Yohanan: Tolerance and Coercion in Islam, 178, 179 Fustat (Old Cairo), 278 Gabrielli, Francesco, 93–94 Galen, 264, 277, 279 Galland, Antoine, 9 Geiger, Abraham, 19, 22, 25, 26, 49; design of research, 14–15; exploration of origins of Islam via study of Qur’an, 13; interest in reforming Judaism through Wissenschaft des Judenthums, 12; and modern Jewish scholarship on Islam, 11–18; overestimation of Qur’an as source for life of Prophet Muhammad, 16; Was hat Mohammed aus den Judenthume aufgenommen? (“What Did Muhammad Borrow from Judaism?”), 11 Gerard of Cremora, 276 Gibb, H. A. R., 95, 98, 100, 101; Haskell Lectures, 100; “An Interpretation of Islamic History,” 98; Mohammedanism, 93; Studies on the Civilization of Islam, 99 global village, 177

index Goitein, S. D., 87–88; A Mediterranean Society, 200; study of Geniza, 205; and “symbiosis” between Jews and Muslims, 205–6 Goldziher, Ignaz, 20–21, 81–82, 103, 118; critical analysis of hadith literature, 42; favored Islam over Christianity, 23; Muslim backlash against, 46; Oriental Diary, 23–24, 42; reigning paradigm of Western scholarship, 45 Gondeshapur, 262, 280 Goodman, Len, 208 Graeco-Arabic philosophy, 265 Graetz, Heinrich: Geschichte der Juden von den ältesten Zeiten bid auf die Gegenwart, 13 Grammaire Arabe, 10 Gramsci, Antonio, 91 Grand Arab Alliance, 137, 144, 147, 148, 151–52 Great Mosque of Damascus, 230, 234 Great War of 1914–1918, 69 Greeks, 213, 244 Griffith, Sidney, 30–31, 242; The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque, 238–39 Gundissalinus, 276 Gutas, Dimitri: Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, 265 Habash al-Hasib, 263 al-Hadi, 266 hadith, 7, 20–21, 44 Hagar, 166 Hagarism (Cook and Crone), 41–42 Hajji Khalifah, 74 al-Hakim, 184 Halevy, Judah, 197, 277; Kuzari, 173 Hanafi, Hasan, 101 al-haram al-sharif, 222 haramayn, 224 Harran, 264 Harun al-Rashid. See al-Rashid, Harun Hashim, clan of, 140, 167 Hawting, Rex: The First Dynasty of Islam, 38 Hazon Daniel, 245 Hebrew Bible, 155, 165; chroniclers and prophetic writers of, 156; Masoretic Text, 207; translation into Arabic, 206 Hebrew language, scientific study of, 207 Hebrew University, 81; “Jahiliyah to Islam” seminar, Institute for Advanced Studies, 36 Hellenism, 210 hidden imam, 160 Hidden Visions (nistarot) of Rabbi Simeon Ben Yochai, 244 “higher criticism,” 25, 104

Index al-Hillah, 174 Hijaz, 3, 29, 224; ethnic cleansing of, 153–54 al-Hirah, 264 Hippocrates, 277, 279 hiwar (dialogue), 116, 117 Holy Land, Islamization of, 219–29; fada’il al-Quds or Bayt al-Maqdis, 219; as favorite place of Muslim ascetics and pietists, 233; issuing of Islamic coinage, 227, 229; replacement of Greek with Arabic as language of administration, 227, 229; by time of Umayyad period, 226 Hopkins, Simon, 31 Horovitz, Josef, 37 hospitals, 280 Hossein, S. M., 108, 111, 127 Hourani, Albert: “Islam and the Philosophers of History,” 94 Hubaysh, 271 Hughes, Thomas: A Dictionary of Islam, 86–87 Hunayn ibn Ishaq, 269, 271 hurriyah, 116, 117 Huyyay ibn Akhtab, 150 hypocrites (munafiqun), 141, 147, 148 Ibn Bajjah, 275 Ibn al-Faqih, 225 Ibn al-Furat, 189 Ibn Hazm, 161, 190–91 Ibn Ishaq, 125 Ibn Kammunah, Sa‘d ibn Mansur: Tanqih al-abhath li-l-milal al-thalath, 173–74 Ibn Kathir, 166 Ibn Khaldun: Kitab al-‘Ibar, 76–77; neglect of as historical scholar among Arabs, 77 Ibn Rushd, 274–75, 277 Ibn Naghrela, Yusuf ibn Isma‘il. See Samuel Ha-Nagid Ibn al-Shatir, 283 Ibn Sina (Avicenna), 273–74, 277, 283; al-Shifa‘, “The Cure,” 274; Canon, 279; Qanun, “Canon,” 274 Ibn Taymiyah, 232–33, 234 Ibn Ubayy, 139, 141, 144, 145, 147 Ibn Yaish, Don Solomon, 212 idolatry, 234 Idrisi, 67 ihtimal, 177–78 ihtiram mutabadal, 116, 117–18 Iliya’, 223 India, 99, 119, 197, 258, 261, 262, 277 Indonesia, 119

✴ 305 injil (Gospels) to Muslims, 236 “inner biblical exegesis,” 172 Iran, 183; astrology studies, 262–63; intellectual pursuits, 74, 258; Muslim reformers, 119; revolutionary, 84, 128 Iraq, 6 Isaac, 140, 141, 164, 166, 167, 229 Isaiah, 244, 245 Ishaq, 271 Ishmael, 140, 141, 166, 167, 230, 250 Ishmaelites, 244 Islamic civilization: beginnings of modern Jewish scholarship on, 11–18; beginnings of modern scholarship on, 10–11; beliefs held by all, 99; classical age of, 47; communities at periphery of Abode of Islam, 99; continuing Jewish discovery of in modern times, 18–25; expansion of into far regions, 100; Golden Age of, 110; link to Holy Land from beginnings of, 222; origins of by all accounts, 3; and protected minorities, 183– 84; tolerance and coercion of “others,” 175– 82, 203. See also under Muslim Islamic Culture Centre, London, 109 Islamic historiography, 38; medieval, 48; orientalist projects, 76; Western methods of, 49 Islamic law: daily prayers, 140, 178, 263; dietary, 212; Fast of Ramadan, 178; leniency or flexibility in, 178; origins of, 44–47; ritual washing, 178; substantive law (shari‘ah), 7 Islamic literature, indebtedness to historical narratives, 101 Islamic media, 120 Islamic medical practice, 277–82; “prophetic medicine” (al-tibb al-nabawi), 278–79 Islamic revival, 64, 98, 113, 114, 118, 123, 194, 285 “Islamic sciences,” 7 Islamic Spain (al-Andalus), 23; Arabic-HebrewLatin translation project, 275–77; Jewish communities in, 197; Jewish experience in, 201–3; mystique of, 22; translation of Arabic philosophical and scientific works, 5, 275–77 Islamic studies, 102, 105–28 Islam in the Middle Ages (Lassner and Bonner), 37 Israel, state of: and exodus of Jews from Islamic lands, 213–14, 216; as a world leader in science and technology, 285 Isra’iliyat, 53, 161 Jacob, 163, 164, 167 Jacob of Edessa, 262, 264

306

✴

Ja‘far al-Mutawakkil. See al-Mutawakkil, Ja‘far “Jahiliyah to Islam’’ seminar, Institute for Advanced Studies of the Hebrew University, 36, 39 Jamjoon, Ahmad Salah, 105–6 Japanese militarists, 64 Jericho (Ariha), 220, 221 Jerusalem: al-Quds and Bayt al-Maqdis to Muslims, 222; Christian Kingdom of, 7; destruction of by Nebuchadnezzar, 108; Islamization under Umayyads, 224–29; siege and capture of by Muslims in 638, 223 Jerusalem School, Hebrew University, 36–39 Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam, 31, 39 Jewish dietary laws, 140, 280–81 Jewish emancipation, 22 Jewish Enlightenment, 22 Jewish Nobel Prize laureates, 284 Jewish orientalists, sympathies for idealized Islamic world, 24 Jewish role models, as flawed protagonists, 157 Jewish scholarship: beginnings of modern, on Islam, 11–18, 20; medieval categories of all human knowledge, 259; reluctance of scholars to discuss history of Jewish-Muslim relations, 12; study of scholars at European universities, 21–25 Jewish studies, Eurocentric outlook of in American academy, 19 Jews, Western, demographic and cultural ascendance, 201 Jews in Abode of Islam, 155–61, 195–205; accommodation to Muslim authority, 158–59, 168; acquisition and absorption of Muslim culture, 206; apologetic tracts for internal Jewish consumption, 170–74; apologetic tracts intertwining fragments and paraphrases of biblical verses as indirect responses to Muslim claims, 171–73; cultural symbiosis and economic cooperation, 205–11; development of Hebrew poetry, 207–8; encounter with Muslims in economic sphere, 198–99; end of influence in western Arabia, 154; eviction from Hijaz, 153–54; in former Byzantine and Sasanian lands, 156; “inner biblical exegesis,” 172; involvement of scholars in philosophical and scientific affairs, 208–9; laxity of Muslim religious authorities in invoking anti-Jewish legislation, 194; little publicly exhibited messianic activity, 159–61; Muslim description of as having “uncir-

index cumcised hearts,” 155; Muslim influence on Jewish letters and popular culture, 206–8; no linguistic barrier to social intercourse, 206; pre-Ottoman history of confined to response, 196–97; and refusal of Medina Jews to accept legitimacy of Muhammad, 156, 168; relationship with ruling authorities, 199; relations with Muslims, 131–54; response to Muslim polemics, 169–74; selfdescription as “stiff-necked,” 155; themes of suffering and guilt, 157; tragic view of past, 157; worsening condition from twelfth century onward, 210–11 Jews of Babylonia, 158 Jews of Egypt, 158 Jews of Khaybar, 126, 153, 163 Jews of Kiev, 197 Jews of Land of Israel (Syria-Palestine), 158 Jews of Medina, 126, 140, 163; breakdown of relations with Muslims, 142–54; and pagan Arabian tribesmen, 132–34; taking up of arms against Muslims, 156. See also Muhammad and Jews of Medina; Nadir; Qaynuqa‘; Qurayzah Jews of North Africa, 213, 216 Jews of the Tayma, 153–54 Jews of the Wadi al-Qura, 153–54 Jews of York, mass-suicide of, 176 jizyah, 185 Job, 167 Jonah, 167 Jordan, 221 Judaism: Conservative and Reform, 122; normative, 16; Oral Law, 191, 192; rabbinic, 140, 191; Written Law, 191 Judeo-Arabic, ix, 173, 197, 206 Judeo-Christian communities, 247 Judeo-Hagarites, 54 jurisprudence (fiqh), 7 Ka‘bah of Mecca, 229, 231 Ka‘b al-Ahbar, 187, 223–24 Ka‘b al-Ashraf, 145–46 kafirun, 247 Kafur, 189 Karaites, 204–5 Katib Çelebi, 74 Khaybar, 147, 149, 153, 164 Khazraj, 132–33, 134, 135, 136, 137, 139, 142, 147, 148 Khirbet al-Mafjar, 234 Khizanat al-Hikmah, 267

Index al-Kindi (“Philosopher of the Arabs”), 272 Kindi Circle, 271, 273 Kufah, regional school of law, 44 al-Kuhi, 283 al-Kwarizmi, 263 Lakhmids, 264 Land of Israel (historic Palestine), 201 Lane, William: Arabic-English dictionary, 72– 73, 82; English translation of Thousand and One Nights, 72; The Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, 72 Laroui, Abdallah: The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, 91 Lassner, Jacob: Islam in the Middle Ages: The Origins and Shaping of Classical Islamic Civilization (with Bonner), 37; The Middle East Remembered: Forged Identities, Competing Narratives, Contested Spaces, 49, 51, 249 League of Nations, 69 leather trade, 212 Lebanon, 69, 213 Lepanto, Muslim fleet at, 65 Levant, Jews of, 201 Lewis, Bernard, 100, 101; The Crisis of Islam, 95; criticized for antiquarian bias and essentialization of Islam, 98; The Multiple Identities of the Middle East, 98; The Muslim Discovery of Europe, 67, 95; Said’s criticism of, 95; What Went Wrong?, 95–96 literary sciences (al-adabiyah), 259 Lockman, Zachary: Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism, 94 Lüling, Günter: Über den Ur-Qur’an, 28–29 Luxenberg, Christoph: The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran: A Contribution to the Decoding of the Language of the Koran, 29–31 Lydda, 226 madhahib, 44 al-Maghribi, Samaw‘al: Ifham al-Yahud (“Silencing the Jews”), 191-92 al-Mahdi, 266 Maimonides, 203, 275, 277, 278, 280, 284; in Cairo Geniza, 197; epistle to Jewish community of Yemen, 160–61 Malahim Daniyal, 245 Mamluks, 184 al-Ma’mun, 242, 246, 267-68, 271

✴ 307 al-Mansur, Abu Ja‘far, 263, 265-66, 288 al-Maqdisi (or al-Muqaddisi), 230, 231, 233 Margalit, Avishai, 63 Margoliouth, D. S., 93 Maronites, 9 Marw, 263, 264 Masha’allah ibn Sariyat, 262 Masoretic Text, 207 Mawdu‘at (“forgeries mothered by necessity”), 83 Mecca, 3, 29, 131, 222, 224 Meccans: effort to crush Muslim challenge at Medina, 147–49; failure to deal decisively with Muhammad, 152; and Truce of Hudaybiyah, 152–53 Medes, 244 medical centers, 268 medical education, 279–80, 280–82 medical encyclopedias, 279 medical libraries, 281–82 medical licenses, 281 medical practice, 277–82, 279–80; phlebotomists, 282; private doctors, 282 medical residencies, 282 medieval Europe: anti-Jewish polemics, 175; portrayal of Muslims in literature, 7 Medina, 3, 131–32, 222, 224, 250; Ansar of, 136, 141, 145, 236; Constitution of Medina, 137– 38, 143; expulsion of Nadir from, 135, 146– 47; expulsion of Qaynuqa‘ from, 135, 143–44; importance of Qaynuqa‘ in economy of, 142; Meccan effort to crush Muslim challenge at, 147–49; opposition to Muhammad after Battle of Uhud, 145; regional school of law, 44. See also Jews of Medina Mediterranean trade, 198, 199 Mesopotamia, 4, 263 messianic age, 244 Metatron, 244 Middle Eastern studies, 19 Middle East Studies (journal), 94 Middle East Studies Association, 91 mihrab, 221 Modern Trends in Islam, 100 Mongol conquest, 108, 210 Mongols, 65 monotheism, Arabization of, 229–35 Morocco, 213 Moses, 140, 141, 157, 163 Motski, Harald: The Biography of the Prophet: The Issue of the Sources, 51 Mount Sinai (Tur), 221, 250 Mu‘awiyah ibn Abi Sufyan, 224–26

308 ✴ i n d e x Mughal empire, 100 Muhammad ibn ‘Abdallah: assassination as method of dealing with political adversaries, 145; and Battle of Uhud, 145; birth of, 134; breaking of Meccan hold on western Arabia, 136–37, 151–54; Constitution of Medina, 137–38; embrace of Abraham and his progeny, 140–41; emigration to Medina (Hijrah), 133–36; first revelation, 134; illiteracy, 253; and Jews of Arabia, 3–4, 12, 131–54; mystical journey to Jerusalem and accent from it to heaven, 221–22; and need for inventions to guide Muslims where no precedents existed, 83; political maneuvering, 126; search for historic, 51; solidification of control over Medina ummah, 139–54; strategy of marginalizing political opposition among the Ansar leadership, 137; trips to Syria, 134; and Truce of Hudaybiyah, 152– 53; and Jews of Medina, 135–36, 162; attack on Khaybar, 153, 162; exile of Qaynuqa‘ and Nadir Jewish tribes, 141, 143–44; extermination of adult males of Qurayzah, 141, 149–51; first sustained encounter with Jews, 131–32; gradual breakdown of relations, 142–54 Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Malik, 269–70 al-Mu‘izz, 189 Mu‘jam al-Buldan, 79, 80 munafiqun, 247 Munk, Solomon, 20 Muqaddimah, 76 Musaylimah, 38 Muslim Brothers, 120 Muslim-Christian relations, medieval, 236–57 Muslim chroniclers: absence of contemporaneous Jews from records, 195–96; historical writings on Islamic origins, 47–51; validation of claims of patrons who supported them, 48 Muslim Conquests, ix, 4–5, 65–66, 155, 156, 188, 217 Muslim education: declared aim of, 105–6; First World Conference on, 105; higher education and religious sciences, 74; and modern science, 107, 109–11 Muslim faithful: challenges of life to be solved by Islamic traditions, 124; common perspective on Qur’an and Prophet, 84; lack in interest in changing tribal societies, 37–38; offended by Westernization of Islamic Near East, 61–62, 113; rejection of a human being assuming godlike qualities, 92

Muslim immigrant communities, 119–23; schools and institutes of Islamic education, 122 Muslim-Jewish relations. See Jews in Abode of Islam Muslims, modern, migration of to West, 119–23 Muslim scholars, modern: antipathy toward Western scholars, 86; little interest in Muslim history, 77–78; response to modern Western scholarship, 46, 68, 86–105; and science and technology, 283–84; scientific editions of literary texts, 80; in the West, 103, 119 Muslim scholars and religious authorities, medieval, 65–68; admission that scripture underwent stages of redaction, 42–43; and Arabic historiography, 48; attempts to counter Christian religious symbolism in Holy Land, 232–35; attitudes toward ancient Jewish and Christian tradition, 57–60; attitudes toward Jews and Judaism, 161–69; branches of learning, 258–59; criticism of Jews based on narrative of Hebrew Bible, 163–64; division of world into climes by geographers, 66–67; efforts to preserve reputation of Prophet, 126; fear of attempts to examine convention truths or alter religious institutions, 84; interest in and borrowing from other monotheistic faiths, xi; interest in biblical memorabilia, 68; invocation of Jewish self-description as “stiff-necked,” 155, 170; invocation of Torah and Gospels to valorize Muhammad, 58; legal tradition and limits of tolerance toward protected minorities, 162; limited contact with Latin Christian world and Slavic East Orthodoxy, 66; and merits of Jerusalem, 228; narratives about ancient Israelites and post-biblical texts as foretelling of events in Islamic history, 58– 59, 173; perceived little to learn from European Christians, 66; possible exposure to Jewish folkloric tales, 55–56; provoked by Jewish concept of chosen people, 164–65; recognition of long history of Jews in Abode of Islam, 175–76; reworking of Jewish and Christian traditions into own history, 169– 70; scientific and descriptive geography, 79; self-confidence and perceptions of Europe, 65–68; sense of triumph, 157; transmutation of Jewish tales into Arabic narratives, 166; understanding of need to balance scholarly truth with preservation of community, 83,

Index 115; words employed to speak of “tolerance,” 177–78 Muslim secularists, 106 Muslim sheikhs, 84, 103 Muslim state, extensive use of non-Muslim administrators, 189–90 Muslim suicide bombers, 30 Muslim World (journal), 93 al-Mu‘tasim, 269-70, 271 al-Mutawakkil, Ja‘far, 268, 269 Nadir, 131, 138, 145, 163, 164; expulsion from Medina, 135, 146–47 Nagel, Tilman: Allahs Liebling: Ursprung und Erscheinungsformen das Mohammedglauben, 51; Mohammed Leben und Legend, 51 en-Naim, Abdallahi, 121 Nasara (Christian), 236–37 Nasi, Don Joseph, 211–12 nation-state, 182 “navel of the universe,” 67 Nawbakht al-Munajjim, 262, 263 Naxos, 211 Nebuchadnezzar, 108, 132 Nelson, Admiral Horatio, 69 Nestorian Christians: as doctors in Abbasid court, 278; monastery at Dayr Qunna, Iraq, 264 New Testament, 165, 236; injil (Gospels) to Muslims, 236 9/11, 96 Noah, 157 Nöldeke, Theodore, 25 North African Jewry, 213, 216 Noth, Albrecht, 49, 51 number theory, 283 Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (Margalit and Buruma), 63–65 occidentalists, 63–65 Old Testament, 165; teaching of in German universities, 24; translation into Syriac, 27 orientalists, xi–xii; call for modification of skepticism toward Muslim oral tradition, 45; collection and analysis of Islamic memorabilia, 80; criticized for colonizing Arab culture, 101; criticized for use of past to explain present and predict future of Islamic Near East, 100; critics of in West, 88–105; debates in the West, 33–36; examination of Islamic origins in terms of traditional Judaism or

✴ 309 Eastern Christianity, 26–33, 52; and interest in Arabic and Persian geographical texts, 79; knowledge of Islamic languages and textual skills, 75; in the Muslim world, 70–85; projects on Arab historiography, 76; promotion of expanded Islamic agenda, 74–75; search for paths of influence of Judaism on Islamic origins, 26–27 Oriental studies, xvii Orthodox rabbis, 103–4 Ottoman Empire, 66, 69, 100; assault on Christian Europe, 5; capture of Byzantine capital, 8; conquering of Constantinople, 65; failure of, 212; role of Jews in economic life of, 211– 12; scholarship, 74; and writing of history, 79 paper technology, 269 papyrus, 269 Paul the Persian, 264 Pentateuch, challenge to literary unity of, 24 People of the Book, 163, 166 Peter the Venerable, 6 Petrus Alfonsi, 276 pharmacists, 282 philosophical sciences (al-falsafah alhaqiqiyah), 259 phlebotomists, 282 pieds noirs, 213 pilgrimage (‘umrah), 46, 152 piyyutim, 22 poll tax (jizyah), 184, 243 polychrome Hebrew Bible, 28 postcolonial theory, 94 post-orientalism, on Islamic origins and Jewish and Christian influence, 51–57 practical sciences (al-sana’i‘ al-‘amaliyah), 258 prophetic biography (sirah), 47 prophetic medicine (al-tibb al-nabawi), 278–79 protected minorities (ahl al-dhimmah), 162, 183–84, 211 Protestant reformers, 8–9 proto-Qur’an, 28–29 Pseudo-Methodius, 245–46 Ptolemy, 264 al-Qaeda, 64, 127 al-Qahirah (New Cairo), 278 al-Qaradawi, Yusuf, 120 Qaynuqa‘, 131, 138, 147, 163, 187; expulsion from Medina, 135, 143–44; importance in the economy of Medina, 142 al-Qumamah (“The Garbage Heap”), 231

310

✴

Qur’an, 179–80; Abraham as hanif (protoMuslim), 166; al-Baqarah, “The Cow,” 253; on antagonism between Christians and Jews, 238–39; “Biblicist” stories of, 53; declaration of Jewish sources as proof of Prophet’s future mission and triumph of Islam, 58; first Latin rendering, 6; greater weight given to Hebrew Bible than to New Testament, 236; and Jewish representations of exclusivity, 165; lack of extensive historical framework, 16–17; Muhammad’s mystical journey to Jerusalem and ascent from it to heaven, 221–22, 230; no mention of Jerusalem, 221; principle of abrogation, 181; prohibition against pressuring other faiths to convert, 179–80; references to Christians, 236–39; references to Jews, 162–64; reference to al-ard al-muqaddasah, 220–21; rejection of concept of Trinity, 16; “Satanic Verses,” 180– 81; and story of Ishmael, 167; surah, 17; Syriac and Greek versions of biblical names, 28; “The Table” (al-ma’idah), 237; “The Unbelievers” (al-kafirun), 180, 181–82; vocabulary derived from Syriac, 15–16 Qur’an commentary (tafsir), 7 Qur’anic legislation, 18 Quraysh, 140, 141, 145, 152, 167 Qurayzah, 131, 138, 163; clients of the Aws, 150– 51; extermination of male adults, 135, 149– 51, 156 Qutb, Muhammad, 107–8 rabbinic Judaism, 140, 191 rabbinic responsa, 196–97, 201 Rahman, Fazlur, 102, 115, 118, 119 Rajab, 137 Raj‘ah, 160 Ramadan, Fast of, 140, 178 Ramadan, Tariq, 122–23; call for creation of independent Western Islam, 124–25; The Messenger, 125–27 Ramle, 226 Ramon Lull, 7, 8 Raqqah-Rafiqah, 267 Rashi, 207 al-Rashid, Harun, 267, 280 Reckendorf, Hermann, 20 Reformation, 8 Reform Jewish rabbis, 22 religious calendars, 263 religious sciences (al-nawamis), 191, 259 rennet, 212

index Resurrection of the Dead, 274 revisionists: reactions to views of, 39–43; undermining of religiously based Muslim historical tradition, 39–43; view of Muslim scripture and classical Arabic, 42; view of origins of Islam as fabricated salvation history (Heilsgeschichte), 40 Rice, D. S., 132 Rida, Rashid, 104–5 Road Map, 215 Robert of Ketton, 6 Robinson, Chase F.: Islamic Historiography, 49, 51 Rosetta Stone, 71–72 Rouen, Jewish communities in, 197 Rubin, Uri, 222 Rustow, Marina: Heresy and the Politics of Community, 205 Ryad, Umar: Islamic Reformism and Christianity, 104 Sabaeans, 163, 264 Saddam Hussein, 214 Sa‘d ibn Mu‘adh, 151 Safed, 212 al-Saghir, Muhammad Husayn ‘Ali, 101 Said, Edward, 92–94, 98, 105, 106; Orientalism, 92–93, 94–95; Out of Place, 214–15 sakhrah, 221 Salman, 148 Salonika, 212 salvation history (Heilsgeschichte), 40 samahah, 178 Samarra, 269 Samhah, 178 Samuel Ha-Nagid, 190–91, 205 Sarah, 164, 166, 229 Sasanians, 265; anti-Jewish legislation, 184; conflict with Byzantines, 37, 223; conquest of Holy Land, 217, 244; interest in science and scholarship of India, 262 Schacht, Joseph, 45, 46, 103, 118; The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence, 43, 44–45 science and technology, contexts for development of, 265–70 “Science of Judaism,” 123, 124 scientific and philosophical interest, changing focus of, 270–75 scientific revolution, 283 Sepharad Jewry, 22 Sergius of Resh-‘Ayna, 262 Severus of Nisibis, 264

Index Shakespeare, William, 67 al-Sham, 210, 221 Shammai, Haggai Ben, 55 Sharifi, Hadi, 108 Shi‘ism, revival of in Persia, 100 Shi‘ite Muslims, 48, 84, 222 Sicily, as multicultural society, 67 Silvestre de Sacy, Antoine-Isaac, 10–11; on Geiger’s work, 12–13, 15; view of Muhammad, 11 Sirah, 125 Sivan, Emmanuel: “Edward Said and His Arab Reviewers,” 101 Slavic nativists, 64 Solomon, 31, 54, 157, 167; and Queen of Sheba, 209 Sophronius, Bishop, 223 source-critical techniques, 33 Sourdel, D., 267 South Arabia, breakdown of centralized authority in, 37 Spain: Christian offensive in, 210; expulsion of Jewish and Muslim inhabitants, 176; suspicions of Jewish converts, 188 Spanish Diaspora, 211 speculative theology (kalam), 7 Sprachgefühl, 75 steamship travel, 23 St. Ephraem the Syrian, 30 sub-Saharan Africa, 119 sunnah, 44 Sunnites, 48, 84 surah, 43 Sushruta Samhita, 262 Syria, 6, 69; decimated Jewish population, 213; military dynasty, 210, 220 Syriac, ix, 27 Syrian Orthodox Christians, 264 Syria-Palestine. See Holy Land, Islamization of al-Tabari, Muhammad ibn Jarir, 75-76, 77, 79 Talbi, Mohamed, 114–18, 119, 127 Talmud, 140 tasamuh, 178 Temple Mount, 222; development of Islamic structures on, 229; Muslim building program on, 227 Thabit ibn Qurrah, 263, 270 theoretical sciences (al-sana’i‘ al-‘ilmiyah), 258–59 Thomas Aquinas, 277 The Thousand and One Nights, 9, 72, 209 Tibawi, A. L., 88–90; “English-Speaking Orien-

✴

311

talists: A Critique to Their Approaches to Islam and Arab Nationalism,” 93 Timothy I, 266 tolerance: concept of, xiii; “liberal” ideal of, 177–78 Torah, 58, 164 Torrey, C. C.: The Jewish Foundation of Islam, 31 trade, Mediterranean, 198, 199 trade routes, 35, 52 translation movement, Graeco-Arabic, 261–65, 277; Christian translators, 261–62; from eighth to tenth centuries, 261; Hippocratic and Galenic medical corpus of Greeks into Syriac, 261–62; translators from Hellenized Christian and pagan communities of preIslamic Near East, 264 travel literature, 73 Trench, Battle of, 148–49 Truce of Hudaybiyah, 152–53 Tunisia, 214 Turkey, 183, 263 Turkish Republic, 79, 119 Tuwana, 267 Ubadah ibn Samit, 144 Uhud, Battle of, 145 ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab, 153–54, 184, 187, 223–24, 249 Umayyad period, 159, 222, 226, 232 ummah, 3–4, 47, 98, 138–39, 155, 182 University of Cambridge library, 200 University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), 39, 42 Vambery, Arminius (born Hermann Vamberger), 20, 24 Varisco, Daniel Martin: Reading Orientalism: Said and Unsaid, 94 “Visions of Daniel,” 245 Von Grunebaum, Gustave, 91, 95, 96–98, 98, 100, 101 Von Ranke, Leopold, 13 al-Walid, 227, 230, 240 Wansbrough, John: Quranic Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation, 40; The Sectarian Milieu: Content and Composition of Islamic Salvation History, 40 Waraqah ibn Nawfal, 253 watan, viii, 182 al-Wathiq, 271 Watt, W. Montgomery, 49

312

✴

Weil, Gustav, 19, 49 Wellhausen, Julian, 149 Wensinck, A. J., 104 Western colonialism, and “deIslamization,” 106 Western Jewry, demographic and cultural ascendance, 201 Western scholarship: crisis of confidence, 34–35; debates on orientalism, 33–36; and EastWest relations, 62–63; editing and commentary on literary, philosophical, and scientific texts, 35, 80; examination of Arabic papyri, 81; excavation of Islamic sites and study of monuments, 81; historical writings on Islamic origins, 33–36, 38, 47–51; “hunt and peck” method of Islamic historiography, 49; and philology, 75; project to recover and decipher Arabic inscriptions of historic Palestine and environs, 81; and questions of

index cultural borrowing, 35; reigning paradigm of, 45; and shaping of study of Muslim world, 74; skepticism, 82–83 Wissenschaft des Judenthums, 13, 123–24, 205 Wüstenfeld, Ferdinand, 79 Yahud, 162 al-Ya‘qubi, 231 Yaqut al-Hamawi: biographical dictionary (Mu‘jam al-Buldan), 79 Yathrib. See Medina Yazid II, 234 al-Yazdi, 283 Yemen, decimated Jewish population, 213 Yom Kippur, 140 Zionism, 214, 284–85 Zoroastrians, 163, 189, 264 Zubayrids, 227, 228