Stories between Christianity and Islam: Saints, Memory, and Cultural Exchange in Late Antiquity and Beyond 9780520386471

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STORIES BETWEEN CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM

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STORIES BETWEEN CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM saints, memory, and cultural exchange in late antiquity and beyond

Reyhan Durmaz

university of california press

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University of California Press Oakland, California © 2022 by Reyhan Durmaz Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Durmaz, Reyhan, author. Title: Stories between Christianity and Islam : saints, memory,  and cultural exchange in late antiquity and beyond / Reyhan Durmaz. Description: Oakland, California : University of California  Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2021062921 (print) | lccn 2021062922  (ebook) | isbn 9780520386464 (cloth) | isbn 9780520386471 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Christianity and other religions—Islam—  History—To 1500. | Islam—Relations—Christianity— History—To 1500. | Muslim saints—History—To 1500— Comparative studies. | Christian saints—History—To 1500—Comparative studies. | Qurʼan—Christian interpretations. | Bible New Testament—Islamic interpretations. Classification: lcc bp172 .d845 2022 (print) | lcc BP172  (ebook) | ddc 261.2/7—dc23/eng/20220202 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021062921 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021062922 Manufactured in the United States of America 28  27  26  25  24  23  22 10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Note on Translation, Transliteration, and References Introduction Narrating Stories

vii xi 1 2

Sorting Stories

5

Remembering Stories

7

1. Storytelling in Late Antique Christianity Hagiography and Orality

15 16

A World of Storytelling

21

Storytellers in Late Antique Christianity

26

Hagiographic Interviews and Audience Participation

28

2. “How Is Muhammad a Better Storyteller Than I?”

33

Who Is Narrating?

35

Storytelling in the Quran

37

The Broader Late Antique Context of Quranic Storytelling

47

Functions of Storytelling in Muhammad’s Preaching

50

Narrating Stories after Muhammad

61

3. “Ask Him about the Youths”: Narrating the Quran with Christian Saints Q18: The Cave

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66 68

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The Companions of the Cave

70

The Rich Man and the Poor Man

77

Moses, the Unnamed Servant of God, and the Two-Horned

4. Christian Saints in Islamic Literature Remembering Saint Antony

80 90 91

South Arabian Historiography and Alexander the Believing King

101

Saint George in Al-T. abarī’s History of the Prophets and Kings Looking at Buildings, Narrating Saint Marūthā

114

5. From Paul and John to Fīmyūn and S.ālih. Transformation of a Story

109 122 122

Ibn Ish.āq on the Authority of Wahb b. Munabbih

132

Fīmyūn and S.ālih. in Context

134

6. Stories between Christianity and Islam Monks, Monasticism, and the Islamic Notion of Sanctity

146 146

Authorship and Transmission of Hagiographic Knowledge

151

Narratives in and of the Family

156

Abbreviations Notes Bibliography Index

163

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165 209 257

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It would not have been possible to pursue this project without the continuous support and guidance of Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Nancy Khalek, and Suleiman Mourad. I am grateful for the model of intellectual generosity and scholarly rigor they set. It is the greatest honor to have been Susan’s student. The core ideas for this project started in one of her seminars in 2013. Since then, the lighthouse of her scholarship and friendship has guided me along the exciting and challenging shores of antiquity. I have learned what it means to be nurturing from Nancy’s mentorship throughout the many years of this project. Her seminars, the conversations in her office, and our meetings over coffee deeply shaped and reshaped my thinking. I also had the privilege of working with Suleiman from the early days of this project through its completion. Every page of this book benefited from his directions, careful reading, and candid critique. I learned how to approach history, religion, and ancient texts in seminars, reading groups, and interdepartmental colloquia at Brown University, where I benefited immensely from courses and conversations with Jonathan Conant, Ross Kraemer, Stratis Papaioannou, Michael Satlow, Sarah Insley Say, among others. At Brown I also explored the challenges and joys of reading Syriac with Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Rebecca Falcasantos, Michael Payne, Daniel Picus, and Noah Tetenbaum. Beyond Brown, I am indebted to Niels Gaul for helping me develop my ideas at an early stage of this project and for supporting me at every phase thereafter. I also thank Volker Menze, who has always been a great mentor and friend. And I extend my heartfelt gratitude to Sidney

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viii     Acknowledgments

Griffith and Stephanos Efthymiadis for their supportive, insightful, and delightful conversations, which challenged my ideas in transformative ways. During my time as a Dumbarton Oaks Junior Fellow in 2018–2019, I had the opportunity to think about, write, and discuss many parts of this book. I am thankful to Thomas Arentzen, Alberto Bardi, Daniel Caner, Anna Kelley, Michael McCormick, John Mulhall, Mark Pawlowski, Christos Simelidis, Erin Walsh, and other Fellows for their generous engagement with my work and for the delightful meals at Dumbarton Oaks, full of laughter. My thanks also go to Jan Ziolkowski, Anna Stavrokopoulou, Eden Slone, Emily Jacobs, Joshua Robinson, and Alyson Williams for their care and hospitality at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington, DC. This project was also generously supported by a Charlotte W. Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship provided by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. My academic home for the last several years, the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Religious Studies, has provided the most nurturing environment for the completion of this book. I cannot overstate my gratitude to my department colleagues Anthea Butler, Jamal Elias, Justin McDaniel, Megan Robb, Donovan Schaefer, Jolyon Thomas, and Steven Weitzman for their careful reading of chapters, sharing of ideas over coffee or cocktails, and for their unwavering support. At UPenn, I was also fortunate to be able to workshop an earlier version of the manuscript thanks to the Hershey Manuscript Grant for Assistant Professors provided by the Wolf Humanities Center. The discussion and debate that day reverberate in many pages of this book. Kevin Van Bladel was the main respondent, and his comments led me to think about various chapters of the book in new ways. I am indebted to the director of the Wolf Humanities Center, Karen Redrobe, organizers Dru Baker and Sarah Varney, and the workshop participants, Kim Bowes, Anthea Butler, Mary Caldwell, Paul Cobb, Rita Copeland, Jamal Elias, Cam Grey, Joseph Lowry, Justin McDaniel, Megan Robb, Sarah Bowen Savant, Donovan Schaefer, Jolyon Thomas, Steven Weitzman, and Brannon Wheeler, for their invaluable comments and questions, during and after the meeting. The debate that day, about Late Antiquity, literacy, book titles, and other interesting topics was a precious moment of collegiality and generosity that I learned a lot from. A village of people were there when I needed a critical pair of eyes on these pages. At various points I sent draft chapters, sometimes with very little notice,

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Acknowledgments      ix

to Kim Bowes, Simcha Gross, Jae Hee Han, Joseph Lowry, Ivan Marić, John Penniman, Megan Robb, Donovan Schaefer, and Daniel Wodak. Thank you for your time, brilliant ideas, and support! I extend my thanks to the Syriac Studies community, especially to Adam Becker, Maria Doerfler, Emanuel Fiano, Philip Forness, Jeanne-Nicole Mellon Saint-Laurent, Sergey Minov, Josh Mugler, Kyle Smith, Salam Rassi, Alberto Rigolio, Flavia Ruani, Erin Walsh, Jamey Walters, and John Zaleski. Thanks to this community, I left every conference and workshop with new ideas, new friends, and new projects to look forward to. I had the opportunity to present one of the chapters of this book at the “Memory and Forgetting” workshop organized by Annette Yoshiko Reed and Simcha Gross at NYU in 2019, another chapter with Emily Steiner and her graduate students in a doctoral seminar at UPenn in 2021, and yet another chapter at the “Retracing Connections” seminar in March 2022 with a warm invitation from Stratis Papaioannou. I am grateful for these and other opportunities to speak about this project and receive invaluable feedback. It has been a pleasure to work with the University of California Press in preparing my manuscript for publication. My special thanks go to Eric Schmidt, who has been a great advocate for the project from the beginning; LeKeisha Hughes, whose attention to the various stages of the publication process has been indispensable; and the anonymous Academic Committee reader, whose comments and words of encouragement were most welcome. The two anonymous reviewers turned out to be Jack Tannous and Arietta Papaconstantinou, and I could not be more honored to have received their careful reading, constructive critique, and generous support. I am also grateful to Kali Handelman, who read the manuscript in great detail and offered invaluable editorial comments, and to Marian Rogers for skillfully editing the book at the latest stage. All the mistakes and imperfections of the book are of course mine. I would have been less and done less without the love, support, adventures, movie recommendations, coffee, and laughter my friends shared with me over the years that I was busy with this project. In addition to the many I mentioned above, thank you, Dora Ivanišević, Anlam Filiz, Ramzi Kanazi, Irene Malfatto, Ivan Marić, Lynn Meskell, Michael Payne, Behice Pehlivan, John Penniman, Megan Robb, Ayşe Şirin, Donovan Schaefer, Fatemeh Shams, and Noah Tetenbaum! The last phase of writing and revising the book was a different kind of challenge, punctuated by moments of overworking and overthinking. My biggest thanks to Daniel Wodak and Nala for accompanying

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x     Acknowledgments

me in this process. Daniel reminded me to breathe, eat, go for a walk, travel, sleep, and raise a toast for every milestone, big and small. It is those moments that complete a project, and I owe him so much for that. I made a big family while writing this book and found new homes in many cities. Yet over that time the dent in my heart in being away from my mother and brother, Hatice and Ibrahim, and my aunt “Cicila,” only grew bigger. My nephew Asaf was born when I started writing the earliest chapters of the book. By the time I finished writing this book, he was four years old, learning to read and talking about how much he likes his teachers. This book is dedicated to Asaf.

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NOTE ON TRANSLATION, TRANSLITERATION, AND REFERENCES

Translations in this book are my own, unless noted otherwise. For several of the primary sources I have worked with, there are standard scholarly translations available, and I have cited them, occasionally modifying the translation. While I have tried to streamline the chapters by using English translations of the primary sources, when the original word or phrase is important to point out, I use the full transliterations of Greek, Syriac, and Arabic terms following the conventions of the Society of Biblical Literature and the International Journal of Middle East Studies. I give short references to primary sources, in transliterated form, in the text. But in some cases I provide the original text in the notes, if the particular phrasing used in the primary source is important for my argument. I use the technical terms in their original languages, if they are familiar in Western scholarship, such as enkomion (Gr. praise literature), mēmrā (Syr. verse homily), h.adīth (Ar. report), tafsīr (Ar. exegesis). Instead of Qurʾān and Muh.ammad, I have opted to use the increasingly more common spellings, Quran and Muhammad. The above conventions also apply to the references. I give the titles of the primary sources in English translation in the main text, unless they are wellknown works in Western scholarship, such as the Sīra (the Prophet Muhammad’s biography) by Ibn Ish.āq/Ibn Hishām. In the notes, however, I give either the standard Latin abbreviations (such as “Eusebius, HE” for “Eusebius of Caesarea, Ecclesiastical History”), or a shortened version of the name of the author and the title of the work (such as “al-T.abarī, Tafsīr”), especially for Arabic and Syriac works for which there is no standard short form. The reader will find these abbreviations in the bibliography. And finally, all dates in this book refer to the Common Era. xi

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The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Ahmanson Foundation Endowment Fund in Humanities.

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Introduction

Muhammad was once speaking to a group of people in Mecca. He was narrating the stories of peoples of the past who vanished because of their disobedience to God. When Muhammad sat down after his speech, a man from the audience, al-Nad. r, stood up and shouted, “I can tell you a better story than he!” Al-Nad. r narrated the story of Rustam and Isfandiyār from the Persian tradition to the same crowd and asked, “How is Muhammad a better storyteller than I?”1 The Islamic tradition thus remembers a moment in which Muhammad’s knowledge of admonishing stories was challenged and contextualized in the world of storytelling in Late Antiquity. This book investigates that world through the lens of narrators of stories, their audiences, and the multigenerational memories that stories carry. It participates in three scholarly conversations, namely, performative hagiography, early Islam as a late antique religion, and narrative transmission in the context of Christian-Muslim relations. At the intersection of all these conversations stands the phenomenon of saints’ lives and the narratives they present. Interweaving these three strands of scholarship, I demonstrate the ways in which narratives gave conceptual texture to interpersonal and intercultural relations in the premodern Near East. The chapters of this book show, at different scales, that the knowledge of saints’ stories often effectively destabilized the imperial and institutional structures of power, creating alternative sources of authority, memory, and identity across confessional boundaries.2 While moving across expansive geographies and chronologies, the book examines the religious, historical, and literary aspects of the story. 1

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2     Introduction

As the contention between Muhammad and Al-Nad. r above exemplifies, late antique hagiographic literature—writings about the lives, miracles, pious deeds, and exhortative sayings of holy men and women—is replete with storytellers and audiences who contested and were amazed by the stories of prophets, saints, heroes, and villains. Many of these episodes would ultimately be relegated to the sidelines of historical reconstruction because of their deployment of stock tropes.3 The complex relationship between myth, narrativity, and sociality in fact renders late antique hagiography a precarious source of historical information.4 Yet, nothing in ancient literature should be disposed of as merely rhetorical, since, scholars have shown, rhetoric governs both text and context; it shapes and is shaped by practice, ideas, and ideals in a society.5 The richness of tropes about storytelling in hagiographic texts testifies that narrating saints’ stories in antiquity was understood as a performed and pietistic practice by the authors and consumers of these texts.

narrating stories What can late antique hagiography tell us about how people orally narrated those stories in Late Antiquity?6 In the scholarship on Christian hagiography, oral performances of saints’ stories have often been conceptualized as pretextualization phases of written texts. These studies have focused on two contexts to seek the oral origins of saints’ stories: narrating saints’ and martyrs’ stories during liturgy,7 and the folklore of the Egyptian desert.8 It has been suggested that saints’ stories, in their initial phases of composition, were orally narrated in these contexts before they were textualized and somewhat stabilized in the hands of hagiographers. This line of argument, in its theoretical scaffolding, follows the studies on ancient folklore and the Bible in affirming a binary between the oral phase of a narration and the canonized text.9 As the possible oral origins of saints’ stories are explored in scholarship, a growing number of works tackle the question of continued oral performances of those stories. Claudia Rapp, Stephanos Efthymiadis, and others have demonstrated that oral narrations were important aspects of saint veneration and hagiographic production after stories were put in writing.10 According to this line of scholarship on the performative aspects of saints’ stories, reading stories out loud was among the most common methods of orally disseminating stories in antiquity,11 with liturgical recitations as the other prominent method.12 Such scholarship that destabilizes the oral-written

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Introduction      3

binary in hagiography has greatly expanded our understanding of oral circulation and aural consumption of saints’ stories. Yet, it has two crucial limitations. Firstly, the studies focus mostly on Byzantine and European hagiography, and much remains to be done on various other hagiographic traditions. The voluminous corpus of Syriac hagiography, for example, is understudied regarding its literary features and oral aspects.13 Secondly, the practice of orally narrating a story, in the absence of a written text, outside liturgical contexts, remains underexplored. Paying attention to this form of storytelling allows us to ask the following questions: Who narrated saints’ stories in Late Antiquity, where, and when? What were the external factors shaping the experiences of hearing a story? And how does our understanding of such performances complicate the concepts of literacy, authorship, and memory? This book begins by reconstructing storytelling as a pietistic and performed practice in late antique Christianity in light of Greek, Latin, and Syriac hagiographic literature. The practice of narrating saints’ stories, like the practice of writing them, needs its own analytical terminology. To this end, I have coined the term hagiodiegesis as a counterpart to hagiography—orally narrating saints’ stories as an alternative to writing them. Similar to the term hagiography, which has provided us with a theoretical frame to speak about writings about saints as a distinct practice, hagiodiegesis, in my vision, provides a frame to analyze the practice of orally narrating saints’ stories. Hagiodiegesis is not simply the oral equivalent of hagiography. One of the differences between the two is that while one can speak about real or imagined audiences for hagiography, in the case of hagiodiegesis the audience is always real. Therefore, although a hagiographic text may have never in fact reached an audience, one must always consider the presence and participation of an audience when we imagine a session of hagiodiegesis.14 Another difference between these two notions is that the dynamics of composition and authorship in hagiography do not overlap with those of hagiodiegesis. Despite the differences, however, oral narrations of stories were often in conversation with literary traditions, and such compositions in performance were rarely fully improvisational.15 Narratives were flexible; the details of a story could change from one narration to another. Yet, this all took place within the boundaries of a familiar dossier. Each episode of hagiodiegesis presents and reinforces a part of the collective archival knowledge of the community within which the story is narrated.16 In modern scholarship, the practice of narrating saints’ stories is often mentioned as a form of “storytelling” or “spiritual instruction.”17 Hagiodiegesis

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4     Introduction

is indeed a form of storytelling, an act of composing and presenting a narrative with the purpose of conveying knowledge to an audience. Every session of hagiodiegesis, like other forms of storytelling, is a new narration that reduces a story to an object—a group of textual symbols that partially encapsulate a historical moment, real or imagined. Still, the practice of narrating saints’ stories merits a neologism, and should be studied as a distinct category of storytelling, for it was a pious practice that mediated the circulation and expansion of saints’ dossiers, facilitating cultural transmission across vast geographies, time periods, and confessional boundaries. This oral and embodied practice in antiquity can only be rendered visible through written texts. In the first chapter of this book, I reconstruct the narrators and audiences of saints’ stories with the rich treasury of formal and contextual information that Christian hagiography reveals, and I point at potential analytical tools for the study of hagiodiegesis. For example, a close analysis of the language pertaining to listening, hearing, and speaking, as I will demonstrate, gestures toward useful possibilities for understanding this oral-aural phenomenon through its literary descriptions. Focusing on performative storytelling also complicates our understanding of how literacy worked in antiquity.18 Narrative literacy—the ability to refer to, expand on, and interpret sacred narratives, that is, being “literate” in narratives—was a significant form of cultural capital in antiquity.19 Mike Chin refers to the skill set of parsing out and citing literature as “literary knowledge”; yet since the knowledge of stories could be acquired in various degrees of simplicity and sophistication, and, with the many symbols it encompasses, it was utilized to create further meaning, I prefer to construe it as a form of literacy.20 Individuals who were knowledgeable in narratives of the divine past cultivated the social capital that accrued from this form of knowledge, and used it to navigate within and around the formal structures of religious authority. By developing this concept across the chapters of this book, I contribute to the destabilization of social binaries like literate and illiterate, and by extension, learned and simple believers.21 I posit that between the sophistication of the theologically educated and the simplicity of the everyday believer stood the authority and charisma of the “narrative literate.” The importance of knowledge of biblical and extrabiblical stories in antiquity is, of course, highlighted in scholarship, and this book participates in that conversation by providing examples of how narrative literacy was utilized by individuals from

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Introduction      5

different communities, especially in cross-cultural spaces, in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. In this book, after describing the practice of hagiodiegesis in late antique Christianity, I focus on a particular confessional boundary across which numerous stories traveled, namely, the boundary between Christian and Muslim communities in the late antique and medieval Near East. Scholars are increasingly attentive to shared stories between Christianity and Islam. The stories of biblical prophets, for example, are well studied in how they are reiterated in the Quran and other Islamic literature.22 A growing corpus of robust scholarship revisits the previously popular “sources of the Quran” arguments and, developing analytical tools for studying the Quran on its own terms, studies the literary features that reflect its orality.23 For example, Sidney Griffith, Aziz al-Azmeh, and Angelika Neuwirth, among others, have pointed out that the broader oral milieu of Late Antiquity, rather than particular source texts, was behind much of the Quran’s content.24 This turn in scholarship, from searching for the literary sources of quranic narratives to exploring the early Islamic milieu as a participant in Late Antiquity, has opened exciting venues of inquiry. This book adds to the conversation by framing Muhammad as a late antique storyteller who narrated and interpreted biblical and hagiographic stories. The “illiterate” Muhammad’s narrative literacy is an epitome of how stories traveled in Late Antiquity.25

sorting stories I analyze the early Islamic community as a religious community participating in and, in important ways, shaping the late antique world of storytelling.26 While I study Muhammad as a storyteller through an analysis of the Quran, most examples I use are stories of biblical prophets. This method allows an exploration of the category of hagiography. It is now well accepted that hagiography is not so much a genre as it is a set of coordinates from which any number of different genres can be born.27 It can be construed as a way of communication, which, through the example of saintly individuals and communities, exhorts, admonishes, sets examples for pietistic behavior, and creates memories of particular places and times. The definition of hagiography as a discourse not only complicates the use of the term, but also blurs the boundaries between the categories of “biblical” and “hagiographic” stories. I use both terms in this book, often interchangeably.

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6     Introduction

Scholars refer to biblical stories or prophets in the Quran, which implies the category of the nonbiblical. Some prophets mentioned in the Quran and other early Islamic literature are in fact labeled as “Arabian,” “local,” and “nonbiblical,” as opposed to “biblical.” This categorization creates a certain hierarchy resulting in an understanding of Christian and Jewish superiority.28 It also leads to a misconstrual of communal memory, since a sacred past was often not divided into biblical and nonbiblical components for communities in antiquity. Stories of piety, perseverance, and other exemplary behavior were not sifted according to canonicity, as biblical and nonbiblical, by the majority of their narrators and listeners. Scholars of Judaism and Christianity have demonstrated the fluidity of such literary categories, and how thinking in terms of biblical canonicity ties to articulations of power structures, networks of authority, often with supersessionist undertones.29 The reception and interpretation of biblical stories, expressed verbally and pictorially, created a lively scriptural universe in Late Antiquity.30 Compartmentalization of this world into biblical, apocryphal, noncanonical, hagiographic, and other types of stories undermines the complex and subversive history of religious knowledge and authority. Furthermore, with Muslim communities’ engagement with Jewish and Christian material, this scriptural universe was reshaped significantly. Before Muhammad, late antique stories of prophets, saints, and heroes were known in the Hijaz.31 With and after Muhammad’s prophetic career, even more stories from Jewish and Christian lore were transmitted into Islam, further complicating the boundaries of the collective knowledge of the divine past and its retellings. In addition to the misleading nature of the superimposed categories of biblical and hagiographic, stories themselves present a challenging matrix of labels. The earliest examples of Christian hagiography appeared in texts titled passio (spiritual struggle), acta/praxeis (acts), vita/bios (life story), diegesis (narrative), historia (historical account), apophthegmata (sayings), and enkomion (praise), among other designations, in Greek and Latin.32 In early Syriac hagiography, there is a similar abundance in terminology used to refer to the stories of sanctified persons—tašʿītā (narrative), nes.h.ānā (heroic deed), hūpākā (manner of life), dūmyā (example), to cite a few.33 In Arabic, as well, h.adīth (report/anecdote), khabar (report), sīra (biography), tadhkīra (remembrance), and manāqib (wondrous feats) are only some of the genres in which stories of prophets, saints, and heroes circulated.34 These and other genres made Christian and Islamic hagiography sort stories according to length, form, and

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Introduction      7

content, creating implied hierarchies of historicity, sanctity, and exhortative value. And this variety complicates our understanding of the reception of the divine past beyond the biblical-hagiographic axioms. Moreover, the comparability and translatability of these genres across religious traditions are highly debated.35 Therefore, in this book I focus on the meanings stories create, rather than the literary conventions they fulfill. Stories from the rich corpus of Christian hagiographic lore were reinterpreted for a variety of purposes by Muslims, arguably the most prominent of which is the elucidation of quranic passages.36 Starting roughly in the eleventh century, scholars of the Quran reorganized this body of knowledge of stories into categories of literature such as isrāʾīliyyāt (narratives of cosmogony and biblical prophets from the Jewish and Christian traditions) and qis.as. al-anbiyāʾ (stories of prophets and saints), arguing that some of these narratives were historically unreliable or theologically unorthodox.37 As a result of this canonization process, while many stories stayed within the realm of quranic exegesis (tafsīr), “unauthorized” stories of prophets and saints were peripheralized in categories like isrāʾīliyyāt and qis.as. al-anbiyāʾ; and their transmitters deemed untrustworthy according to the later standards of quranic interpretation. Despite such reassessments, Christian hagiography, broadly construed, continued to be a rich source Muslims often tapped into, debated with, and interpreted anew. Thus, while studying Muhammad and the early Islamic community, I highlight the fluidity between the categories of biblical, quranic, apocryphal, and hagiographic, and approach literature with flexibility and ambivalence toward canonicity.

remembering stories Muhammad’s communication with his audiences has been partially preserved in a late antique text—the Quran. Building upon the reconstruction of late antique storytelling, I discuss Muhammad as a storyteller through a narratological reading of the Quran. The narratives in the Quran and their possible connections to late antique literary and oral traditions have a long history of scholarship, as mentioned above. An important turn in scholarship has been to focus on how the Quran and other Islamic literature recontextualize narratives for new audiences and for new semiotic purposes. Neuwirth, for example, argues against source-critical analyses and states that the quranic narratives instead should be assessed in their new theological context.38 And

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8     Introduction

this is an exciting starting point, for theological refashioning of biblical narratives was only one aspect of Muhammad’s communication with his community. Here, revisiting the resonances of “preaching” in the assessment of Muhammad’s fit within the community he anchored, I present the multifaceted nature and functions of Muhammad’s storytelling, from exhortation to mythmaking. Moreover, Muhammad was not the only preacher in the early Islamic community; ascetics, slaves, early converts, and Muhammad’s Companions were among the public narrators of stories.39 Highlighting this multivocality in early Islam is crucial for developing a nuanced understanding of how saints’ stories, religious concepts, and broader cultural expressions were transmitted between different religious communities in Late Antiquity. This approach also sheds new light on religious authority, redefining it as stemming from the contested, persuasive, and subversive power of narrative, a type of power that Muhammad shared with others in his community. This reconstruction is based on my reading of various works from medieval Islamic literature that remember Muhammad and his community—works including but not limited to historiography, exegesis, biography, and others. In this, while I find helpful the historical-critical method of the revisionist school of Islamic studies, I acknowledge that Islamic material should be approached on its own terms.40 Thus I approach Islamic sources with a balance of criticism and trust in order to gain a glimpse of the community around Muhammad. How did the transmissions of prophets’ and saints’ stories between Christianity and Islam continue after Muhammad? Why were particular saints’ stories transmitted into Islam, while many others were not? There is a growing, rigorous body of scholarship dedicated to answering these questions. As mentioned above, the early Islamic community often turned to Jewish and Christian literature in order to elucidate the quranic passages that speak about prophets and saints. Scholars have identified other contexts and dynamics for transmission of stories as well, from theological polemics to ritual practice, spiritual formation to entertainment.41 Such encounters in literature and orature, however, are often construed as onetime exchanges between Christianity and Islam. Although it is now well known that Christian saints’ stories were transmitted to Islam, the life of a story after interreligious transmission is rarely considered within the frame of the ongoing Christian-Muslim interaction. Muslims continued to engage with the broader literary and oral traditions of the Near East in the Middle Ages, negotiating the meaning and

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Introduction      9

authority of the stories they shared with non-Muslims. This continuity in hagiographic transmissions, and the changing dynamics of remembering and forgetting of the divine past, are among the highlights of this book. Diachronic articulations of memories inevitably retain, add, and drop different details of stories.42 I am interested in how such changes in stories create new meanings, and for that, I problematize the very definition of “narrative transmission” itself, as well as its various forms. In a world in which stories traveled in oral and written forms, how can one define transmission of narratives between Christianity and Islam? Narrative transmission can be conceptualized as a tool for creating new memories of a sacred past through the medium of the story. With the many literary, oral, and nonverbal articulations of saints’ stories, remembrances of a divine past were perpetuated, while new meanings of that past were woven into Christian and Muslim communities’ historical moments. How do memories differ in shared cultural milieus? Islam emerged in the context of the late antique Near East, where Christian monasticism and asceticism were deeply woven into the texture of society.43 Therefore, early Islamic literature and orature, themselves participants and products of Late Antiquity, partook in a shared vocabulary of symbols to present Islam’s own foundation stories and holy personas.44 Several Companions of Muhammad, for example, were represented in Islamic literature through the extensive use of tropes familiar from Byzantine hagiography.45 Where themes and topoi are thus shared among multiple religious communities, one can expect many stories to sound similar, even in the absence of any direct intertextuality.46 Like the myriad combinations in a kaleidoscope, the possibilities around narrating a saint’s story were virtually limitless, given the numerous tropes that were combined into different narrations. So, when tropes are shared between various traditions, we can only speak about a loose transmission of literary expressions facilitated by the everyday economy of cultural encounters. While this book does not specifically study shared tropes, it contextualizes saints’ stories within this broader world of common expressions. If generic tropes are at the one end of the transmission spectrum, narrative sits at the other end. We have a number of instances where a story written in the Christian tradition was transmitted into Islam with a few changes. For example, the Syriac story of Paul and John analyzed in chapter 5 was transmitted into Islam in a recognizable form. Diachronically analyzing the authors, contexts, and audiences of the various reiterations of such stories greatly

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10     Introduction

contributes to our understanding of how narrative transmission worked in antiquity to reorient memory. What changed, what is left out, and what is added in such renarrations of a story tell much about the various semiotic horizons toward which the story was turned, and about new articulations of sanctity the story enabled. Most hagiographic transmissions taking place between Christianity and Islam happened between the two poles (the trope and the narrative), at the level of persona. When a hagiographic persona is transmitted from Christianity to Islam, the hero’s name, either as a transliteration or as a translation, is recognizable. The hero’s hagiographic representation as well is recognizable in broad strokes. The story that is narrated anew in Islamic literature, however, has significantly different details in its new context. For example, I analyze an Islamic representation of Antony of Egypt (d. 356) in chapter 4. Antony is recognizable in the Islamic text for anybody who has heard the basic hagiographic attributes of Saint Antony of Egypt. Yet, the holy man has a whole new story in the Islamic context. In these cases, searching for a mediating text that presumably acts as a bridge between the known Christian version of a story and the Islamic version is sometimes misguiding. Such a source-critical approach often falsely presumes that there was a hitherto unknown mediating text that enabled direct textual transmission, which can account for the differences between the two known versions of the story. Alternatively, source-critical analysis concludes that the later, new version of the story was a misattribution, and thus a “foreign” addition to the dossier of the saint, a defiance of the authoritative Christian text. However, transmission of a persona is a mode of transmission that entails the writing of a story of a hero, whose previously known story is used in broad strokes for framing the new narrative. In hagiography, where it is misleading to speak about canonicity, this form of writing is a significant contributing component to the development of saints’ broader dossiers. Through such writing, Muslim authors became hagiographers of Christian saints albeit narrating the stories for their Muslim audiences. And they, like Christian hagiographers, became vicarious disciples of saints. In presenting the recontextualizations of Christian saints’ stories, I converse with a flourishing field in which the new contexts of stories are highlighted instead of their origins.47 My analysis will show that stories were often not labeled as Jewish, Christian, or Islamic while crossing these porous confessional boundaries. They were translated, altered, interpreted, and muted, but not

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Introduction      11

rigidly labeled in the everyday economy of storytelling. This is an often neglected dynamic in the study of narrative transmission in antiquity. Surely, the modern categorization of a story under the rubric of a religious tradition is helpful in reconstructing the trajectories of transmission. Describing a story as “a Jewish or Christian story placed in Islamic literature” gives the modern scholar a useful discursive frame. Yet, these labels, like the generic labels discussed above, risk projecting a rigid grid upon the fluid world of storytelling in antiquity. Moreover, such expressions of interreligious transmission, often used in studies on shared stories, build a discourse of influence, neglecting the creativity involved in transmission processes. Although the authors of texts often acknowledged the religious backgrounds of their sources, they did not present the material they transmitted in those terms. A story of a saint was a continuum that manifested in different times and languages. This cross-confessional continuum complicates what we mean by authority and authorship. The concept of authorship is, of course, well studied especially in the context of European literary history.48 Thinking with this rich body of scholarship, I explore the relationship between authorship and entwined histories of hagiographic transmissions in the early medieval Near East. The concept of storytelling often comes with the connotation of fictionality.49 Although this binary of fictional versus nonfictional has been challenged,50 various other aspects of authorship in the context of writing and narrating saints’ stories remain underexplored. This book shows that variations in a saint’s dossier, within and across linguistic boundaries, complicate our understanding of authorship in relation to translation, interpretation, and intertextuality. In this, I follow Derek Krueger in conceptualizing authorship as a technology of self-formation.51 Muslim authors, by reshaping Christian saints’ stories, joined the collective authorship of those stories and fashioned themselves as devout subjects of the sacred past. Such reassessments of authorship help us see the dynamics of literary and cultural transmission beyond establishing authority, pointing out the intricate negotiations between the producers of texts, their sources, and later narrators.52 With the above questions in mind, Stories between Christianity and Islam presents oral and literary narrations of saints’ stories in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Chapter 1 reconstructs the practice of storytelling in late antique Christianity through an analysis of Greek, Latin, and Syriac hagiography. Examining the literary forms and content of saints’ lives, I lay out the

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12     Introduction

contours of the practice of orally narrating saints’ stories beyond monastic and liturgical contexts. This chapter reconstructs hagiodiegesis (orally narrating saints’ stories, as theorized above) and situates this neologism within the broader conversation about the oral aspects of Christian hagiography and storytelling. Among the several contexts of pietistic storytelling, the chapter highlights local and long-distance pilgrimage, as well as the household, as prominent contexts in which laypeople, clerics, and monks shared stories. In chapter 2, I bring the early Islamic community into the reconstruction of late antique storytelling and analyze Muhammad as a narrator of prophets’ and saints’ stories. With a narratological reading of the Quran, and interweaving it with later literary representations of Muhammad, I study the different aspects of Muhammad’s storytelling: its content, form, functions in the community, and the reactions to his narrations. I conclude the chapter by pointing to the other storytellers in the early Islamic community, contextualizing Muhammad’s preaching within this multivocal environment. With chapter 3, the book transitions from the investigation of oral performative storytelling in Christianity and early Islam to narrative transmission in the Middle Ages between Christianity and Islam. This shift in focus highlights the multifaceted afterlives of Christian saints’ stories in Islamic literature and orature. Focusing on one Quran chapter, Q18 the Cave, I first demonstrate how a group of hagiographic stories appear in the Quran; then I turn to the ways later generations of Muslims interpreted them. This in-depth analysis enables us to zoom in on the intricacies of late antique storytelling, narrative transmission, and its medieval afterlives In Q18, there are four narratives: the first one is the story of the Companions of the Cave, an abbreviated version of the late antique story known as the Youths (Seven Sleepers) of Ephesus; the second is a parable of a rich man and a poor man, which might be an allusion to the biblical story of the Rich Man and Lazarus; then, the story of Moses and his servant; and finally, the story of the Two-Horned (Dhū al-Qarnayn), who is identified as Alexander the Great in medieval and modern scholarship. I revisit the voluminous literature dedicated to the study of these stories and demonstrate the Quran’s engagement with the broader late antique hagiographic lore. As I analyze these quranic narratives, I demonstrate Islamic communities’ uses of Christian hagiography for the interpretation of these passages. With chapter 3, I show how the incremental knowledge of Christian hagiography in Islam changed

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Introduction      13

the memories of not only the divine past but also Muhammad’s place in the late antique world. The exegesis of the Quran might have been the largest literary corpus in which biblical-hagiographic stories were transmitted from Christianity to Islam. But exegesis was by no means the only context for hagiographic transmission. In chapter 4, I discuss the four other major functions of Christian saints’ stories in Islamic literature beyond exegesis. Christian saints and their stories were utilized in Islamic literature: (1) for encomiastic purposes, to vaunt the excellency of towns and regions; (2) as etiologies for Islamic practice and material culture; (3) for didactic purposes, as examples of universal piety and wisdom; and (4) to confirm saints as members of the eternal Muslim community. Christian saints’ stories were thus used for a variety of meanings, or, to follow Elizabeth Clark, socioreligious logics, in Islamic texts.53 These categories are, of course, not mutually exclusive; in fact, they mostly overlap. A story of a Christian saint could both comment on a quranic event and praise the sanctity of a specific place. Moreover, this is not meant to be an exhaustive list. The use of saints’ stories for polemical purposes in interreligious dialogue, for example, is not treated in this chapter. Nevertheless, my categorization demonstrates the complex relationships between hagiographic traditions of Christianity and Islam and underlines the multiplicity in authorships and audiences (perceived or real) of stories. While chapter 4 presents the complexities of transmission through four different examples, chapter 5 focuses on one story. It presents the transmission of the fifth-century Syriac story of Paul of Qent.os and John of Edessa into the Islamic tradition and the diachronic reinterpretations of this story across multiple time periods, geographies, and genres of Islamic literature. I trace the reception history of the story from the fifth until the thirteenth century, demonstrating the ways in which it was reinterpreted by Muslim authors. Such a comprehensive analysis enables us to take the discussion on transmission out of a binary model (as exchanges between two traditions at a point of contact) and shows the ongoing conversations between religious communities even after a story was transmitted into Islam. With a broad array of stories, chapters 4 and 5 raise a number of important theoretical questions regarding narrative transmission in antiquity, and I summarize these discussions in chapter 6 as a way of conclusion. I bring together the examples analyzed in the previous chapters around three discussions central to the book: the role of Christian saints in the formation of the

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14     Introduction

Islamic notion of sanctity; authorship and its relation to storytelling across confessional boundaries; and the role of the household in the preservation and transmission of saints’ stories. Al-Nad. r used the story of Rustam and Isfandiyār to challenge Muhammad’s authority and skill to narrate about the divine past. Later Muslim authors reiterated the story of Rustam and Isfandiyār, orienting it toward new meanings for new audiences.54 Following the cross-cultural trajectories of such stories, this book investigates the memories of a sacred past shared between Christians and Muslims. The increasing knowledge of Christian saints in Islam became a form of cultural capital through which Muslim communities formed their local identities, and a tool for formulating their own religious concepts. Stories between Christianity and Islam is a study of this ecumenical economy of narrative and the dynamics that shaped these exchanges in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages.

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chapter 1

Storytelling in Late Antique Christianity

I do not venture to dismiss in silence those narratives about the saint which I received from my fathers, for I fear lest the Lord should justly torture me in His great and terrible day for not having given into the bank the talent, through His will entrusted to me for the edification and profit of the many. Being thus fortified by your prayers I will put down truthfully everything I heard from the men who were the saint’s disciples before me, and I will also truly relate all the things I saw with my own eyes. For it is certain that the Lord “will surely destroy them that speak lies.” I therefore beseech you lovers of learning to cast aside all thoughts of this present life and grant me your favorable hearing.

This passage comes from the opening of the Life and Works of Daniel the Stylite, the renowned fifth-century pillar saint in Constantinople.1 One can easily imagine someone delivering these exact sentences to an audience gathered at the column of the holy man. The language pertaining to speaking and hearing is prominent in this passage, and the narrator offers glimpses into the oral contexts of his hagiographic process. He requests the favorable hearing of the audience for the stories he received from his fathers, the saint’s disciples, and from his personal encounters with the holy man. The story is for the edification and profit of the many, he says; therefore, he does not dare to lie. Perhaps the above words were never actually uttered before the column of Daniel the Stylite. Yet, the narrator still wanted to establish his authority as a live witness of the holy man’s pious deeds for his fifth-century readers who were familiar with listening to stories of saints. This familiarity renders the above passage a glimpse into the late antique world of public storytelling.

15

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16     Storytelling in Late Antique Christianity

Saints’ stories were, in many contexts, transmitted orally in antiquity. Narrating stories of holy men and women was often a pietistic practice, as was listening to them. To narrate, in a religious context, is an action-generating verb, since it exhorts the audience to imitate an example or reflect on a lesson.2 In this devotional space, with the mobilization of narrators’ and listeners’ common knowledge of narratives, stories of exemplary figures of the past functioned as conveyors of religious concepts, ritualistic instructions, and future aspirations, among other forms of knowledge. In this chapter, I aim to reconstruct the practice of orally narrating saints’ stories, that is, hagiodiegesis, by building on examples from Greek, Latin, and Syriac hagiographies from the fourth to the seventh century. After briefly revisiting the vivid conversation about the relationship between hagiography and orality, I analyze the contexts, agents, and methods of oral narrations of saints’ stories.

hagiography and orality A story of a saint lies within a discursive, oral continuum punctuated by instances of written texts. It cannot be fixed by writing or depicting.3 When we read hagiography, we capture a moment in the life of a living, changing story, one that has mostly stayed in the sensorial space of speech and hearing through its life in antiquity and beyond. For late antique stories, that oral-aural space can only be partially captured by written and pictorial texts.4 Despite this ephemerality, written texts that preserve saints’ stories still offer valuable gateways into the birth, circulation, and transformation of those stories in antiquity. Going back to the opening example, the narrator of the Life of Daniel the Stylite writes that he does not want to pass in silence the narratives about the saint that he heard from the latter’s disciples (or things he witnessed himself), and that he will narrate them truly, asking for the readers’ favorable hearing. The author is certainly complying with the conventions of late antique hagiography. These conventions include, based on biblical models, the use of oral language to create an imagined, oral phase of a story, as a way to claim authenticity. So, we may not presume that the above vocabulary is a relic from an oral narration of the story. The question of how separate the language of speech was from the language of text, however, presents a false ontological binary that assumes a stark distinction between the oral and written forms of a story.5 Ancient texts both captured and mimicked speech, since the latter is not an

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Storytelling in Late Antique Christianity      17

out-of-text experience; it is a form of writing.6 “Residual orality,” in Walter Ong’s words, “can envelop even a highly developed textuality,” even in contexts where writing was at the service of orality.7 That is to say, in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, which can be characterized as non-text-based time periods within the history of literacy,8 the language of texts was often inseparable from the language of speech. Here, I am not interested in discovering the oral origins of stories, nor in exploring the rhetorical formulas that oral tradition provided for hagiography in antiquity. Rather, I seek to understand the ongoing relationship between oral performances of saints’ stories and hagiography. Although many illocutionary, paralinguistic, and prosodic elements are lost when a story is put in writing, hagiography is replete with linguistic features that indicate that the written stories were performed “experiences reduced to objects.”9 These experiences, one must emphasize, did not cease after the stories were put in writing.10 Stories about saints continued to be narrated orally even after they were written down and “authored.” Conversely, oral traditions about saints were often reintegrated into texts. That is, hagiographic texts were embellished transcripts of oral narrations, which in turn were informed by those embellished records. This interlaced relationship between text and orality left its imprint on other media as well, such as ritual practice, epigraphy, iconography, and architecture.11 In this continuous and intertwined relationship, I reconstruct oral narrations by analyzing the written story. Hagiography provides two types of information relevant to the question of orality. The first type is the “oral residue” embedded within the rhetoric of texts.12 Scholars have discussed the following four categories to trace the “tradition of oral performance having been encoded in rhetorical formulae” in Christian hagiography: the use of simple language, titles of texts such as “narration,” use of verbs indicating speech within the text, and address to an audience together with discourse pertaining to hearing and listening.13 Other features can also be added to this list, such as questions posed to the audience, extensive use of direct speech and dialogues between characters, and fabulous and fantastic elements described with vivid details. One can also consider repetitive, parallel, or appositional phraseology (creating emphasis and euphony), poetry, and prayers among the oral features of hagiographic discourse.14 These literary features make texts sound like transcripts of oral performance.

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18     Storytelling in Late Antique Christianity

Although the oral features of texts have often been studied as literary conventions,15 they can also be approached as guidelines for performance. Since hagiography was usually consumed aurally in antiquity, narratological features of these texts, one may assume, point at the language and style used during oral performances. This is not to argue that the exact wording of hagiography was used each time a story was orally narrated, nor that there was no distinction between the oral and the written language. Yet, the vocabulary pertaining to speech, hearing, and listening found in hagiographic texts shaped the language and style of oral performances, if in varying degrees. Let us look at some examples to reconstruct how oral narrations of saints’ stories might have been formulated in antiquity. Narrators likely used phrases that describe their speech in the manner in which authors wrote while telling stories of saints. In the fourth-century Life of the Man of God, for example, the author laments that “the story of such a person is beyond us and is inadequately told by us.”16 The hagiographers of the Syriac Life of Simeon the Stylite (d. 459) ask, “What mouth or tongue could possibly relate anything without awe and fear about a man who, while clothed in the body, showed among humans works and deeds of spiritual beings?”17 The rhetoric of weak, simple speech is of course a well-known trope in early Christian writings, biblical passages being the earliest precedents, and hagiographic texts extensively use this language.18 Yet, in light of these phrases, one can imagine that during oral performances narrators commented on how their speech falls short in narrating the grandeur of the heroes of their stories. Written rhetoric of the simplicity of the author most likely impacted the way storytellers spoke about their skill and ability to narrate. Addressing listeners, we may safely assume, was also common in oral performances. Dramatic addresses, such as “o brethren,” “o beloved ones,” “o believers,” found in hagiographic texts likely were parts of public performances.19 These addresses are among the more straightforward indicators that stories were aimed for public audiences, and narrators possibly took such literary public addresses as guidelines in addressing their listeners in similar ways. Other phrases found in written works also give clues as to how oral narrations might have been enhanced. In the Greek Life of Simeon the Stylite by Antonius, for example, separate episodes of miracles are connected with phrases like “hear another mystery” and “another mystery, if you want to hear.”20 If a narrator wanted to extend the story, they could add another miraculous episode to the loose structure of the narrative and invite the

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Storytelling in Late Antique Christianity      19

audience to hear one more mystery. Such formulaic repetitions, signposting nonsequential episodes in stories, throw certain images into high relief and fix the hero in the memories of the audiences.21 In oral narrations, storytellers, similarly, could add many episodes to the stories they narrated before their audiences. This likely reminded their listeners that the story was a growing, boundless source of knowledge, the limits of which were in the hands of the storyteller.22 This flexibility, in written works and by implication in oral narrations, points in the direction of curious possibilities: Were there mechanisms for audiences to check the authority or the authenticity of the narrations, or to control the length of the storytelling session? We will turn to such forms of audience participation below. Narrators asked questions of their audiences, similar to the hagiographers of the Life of the Man of God asking, “How could they recognize him in a man clothed in shameful rags and begging?”23 “What had happened to the senator’s son?”24 Such questions, when asked during oral narrations enabled the narrator to engage with listeners within an interactive storytelling session. Moreover, lengthy quotations from heroes and prayers for the audience, which are common narratological features in hagiographic texts,25 contributed to the liveliness of narrations. Again, such usages were engrained features of ancient biography that found reverberations in early Christian literature.26 Still, it is safe to assume that such direct quotations from heroes were common during oral narrations. When we consider these direct quotations in an oral performative context, we can imagine the occasional conflation of the narrator and the hero. Swift changes between pronouns (the narrator’s first person and the hero’s first person in direct speech) and shifts between different temporalities in the story (the narrator’s present and the hero’s past) likely blurred the distinctions between the narrator and the hero in some oral narration sessions. The quiet text on parchment thus gives us linguistic and narratological clues of lively, dramatic moments in which stories came to life before audiences. The second category of information for orality in hagiographic texts comes from representations of oral narrations. We have numerous literary descriptions of instances where a story of a holy man or woman is narrated to an individual or group, examples of which we will see shortly. Of course, these individual texts do not necessarily describe real-life events. A comparative reading of a group of texts from a certain geography and time period, however, can highlight general social norms, practices, and values of that place and time.

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20     Storytelling in Late Antique Christianity

In Sebastian Brock and Susan Ashbrook Harvey’s words, “[Hagiographic stories] had to be true to the thought world of their time, as well as to the ordinary manner of people’s lives, their way of doing things and seeing things. So, these stories reveal not the individuals of their day but something of the world in which they lived and moved. From this view these stories offer us a rich harvest of historical depth.”27 According to this understanding of hagiography, with a certain balance of trust for and critical distance from textual representations, one can catch glimpses of who were expected to narrate saints’ stories in antiquity, how, and in which contexts. There were three different modes of oral performance through which saints’ stories circulated in late antique Christianity: public reading, encomiastic (homiletic) preaching within the context of the liturgy, and orally narrating stories of saints outside liturgical contexts. As discussed in the introduction, I refer to the last practice as hagiodiegesis. It is through this particular form of storytelling that many, especially lay, Christians in Late Antiquity acquired some of their knowledge of the events and persons that made the divine past. These interactive oral narrations of saints’ stories reshaped communal memories, establishing and destabilizing religious authority. Hagiographic literature is replete with examples of hagiodiegesis, where a solitary ascetic, monk, cleric, or a layperson narrates stories of saints for the spiritual instruction and edification of the listener in a variety of contexts. The listener could be a fellow monk, a cleric, or a layperson. The following example comes from the Lives of the Eastern Saints of John of Ephesus (d. 586), specifically the chapter on the lives of Thomas and Stephen: But he used to go down into that pit and come up again, that he might not put force upon his body all at once and faint and be overcome, while the blessed men who were the occasion of his going out to that place supplied his necessary requirements. And so in that pit he laid great and grievous labors upon himself, and was, without ceasing, continuously occupied in weeping and sorrow and mourning for his sins, and these blessed men (since these also were very perfect in their manner of life) used to relate to me, “Whenever we see the blessed Thomas, we find him beating his face, and saying, ‘Woe to me, my brethren, since I have consumed my days in vanity [ . . . ].’ As often as he saw us” (these blessed men used to say to me), “by reason of the sound of his sobs and his weeping and mourning for his soul he would make us also weep [ . . . ].”28

In the above passage, a group of men describe to John of Ephesus (the author of the text) the pit where the holy man Thomas lived, and his ascetic practices.

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Storytelling in Late Antique Christianity      21

Although this is John’s literary representation of a narration, the passage points to various dynamics of hagiodiegesis in antiquity: local pilgrims as narrators, a solitary ascetic as the subject, a bishop as a listener to (and recorder of) the story. Such representations offer invaluable pieces of information to place under the rubrics of pietistic storytelling, namely, its contexts, narrators, and audiences, and to these I now turn.

a world of storytelling Late antique pilgrimage to the Egyptian desert, to the Holy Land, and to other sacred landscapes of the Near East was often a journey full of storytelling for the traveler.29 The diary of the fourth-century pilgrim Egeria, for example, highlights pilgrimage as an important context for the narration of stories of prophets and saints in antiquity. When her guide in Charra spoke to her about the deeds of holy monks and ascetics, dead and alive, Egeria observed that monks’ conversations were always about either God’s Scriptures or the deeds of the great monks.30 In fact, her diary is replete with notes about bishops and monks narrating biblical and hagiographic stories while guiding her during her long travels to the Holy Land, the Egyptian desert, and many cities and towns of the eastern Mediterranean.31 Written slightly after Egeria’s travel journey, the Syriac Life of Simeon the Stylite also presents pilgrimage as a context for storytelling. For example, Antiochus, prefect of Damascus, publicly narrates a story about Naʿman, the king of the Arabs, at the holy man’s shrine.32 In this episode, Naʿman states during a feast that the “reports of the saint reached them, and some Arabs began to go up to him.” 33 He first ferociously forbade venerating the saint, but then had a vision in which he was chastised for prohibiting believers from going up to Simeon. The authors of the Life say that whoever heard Antiochus relating the story of Naʿman gave praise to God.34 Around the same time, Palladius (d. 430), the bishop of Helenopolis in Bithynia, traveled to the Egyptian desert and collected anecdotes of ascetics in an account known as the Lausiac History.35 His work can be categorized as historiography or collective biography embedded within the frame of a travel account, and thus its historicity is critically assessed in scholarship.36 Still, this and similar works of Christian travelers to monks and ascetics likely reflected what one could expect from pilgrimage: hearing stories of holy men and women, past and present. To give another example, the abovementioned

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22     Storytelling in Late Antique Christianity

John of Ephesus, in his chapter on Mary (who travels to Jerusalem and lives an ascetic life at Golgotha), says the ascetic practices of the holy woman became a story for pilgrims in the Holy Land, while the woman herself became a spectacle. Those who saw her, John says, “told many about the perfect manner of life of the blessed woman from her childhood to her old age.”37 Pilgrims narrated the stories they heard and the spectacles they saw after returning from their journeys to the holy. Abba Arsenius in the Egyptian desert knew this well, when he shouted at his visitor, a noble woman from Rome, “Is it so that on returning to Rome you can say to other women: I have seen Arsenius?” “Spiritual tourism,” in Peter Turner’s words, “by such figures as Palladius and Egeria can only have bolstered these traditions by disseminating these stories about monks not only beyond but also further within and around the desert world.”38 Stories traveled far and wide with pilgrims. Late antique pilgrimage did not always entail long journeys. In John of Ephesus’s account, a group of men visit Sergius, an ascetic living near the Mesopotamian city of Amida. During this visit, Sergius speaks to his visitors about the holiness of another recluse, named Simeon: “But what, my sons, do I for my part really know? and wherefore did you come to my wretched self? If you are from the north of Amida, wherefore did you not go to the pillar of light which stands in the northern country, who today has been serving God in his saints for forty years, and has not grown tired or weary, nor is yet satiated with so doing? Wherefore, my sons, did you not go to this man, who has refreshed God in the persons of the weary, who has also caused the savior of his practices and of his purpose that is good and acceptable at all times to reach to the heavens of heavens?” But these men on hearing these things from the saint fell on their faces and continued entreating him and saying: “Who, sir, is he of whom you have said these things to us?”39

The above passage shows that visitors to local pilgrimage centers did not learn only about the holy man or woman they visited, but also about other saints. This phenomenon created broader networks of stories and sacred space that connected constellations of holy men and women. As depicted by John of Ephesus, the holy man Sergius, through his narration, connects the visitors’ experience at his cell to another recluse far away. Pilgrimage often included healings and exorcisms, and visitors and disciples of saints narrated stories of such miracles. Literary episodes about such narrations of miracles highlight how often laypeople became storytellers. Simeon the Stylite’s hagiographers give an extensive and lively account in which a

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Storytelling in Late Antique Christianity      23

group of people from Lebanon come to Simeon asking for help against wild beasts and demons that cause terror in their village.40 Simeon, upon receiving their promise to become Christians, gives them blessed earth (mixed with oil, Syr. h.nānā), and tells them to mark the borders of their village and keep vigils for three days. After the beasts were defeated, the authors say, some of the people came back, stayed at the saint’s shrine for a week, and related before everybody how their village was saved by the holy man. Similarly, in a few separate passages, the authors write about sailors who saw Simeon in open sea and were saved from difficult maritime circumstances through his prayers. The authors say that these sailors came to the saint’s shrine and related their visions before public audiences.41 Another prominent testimony of this practice comes from Constantinople: at numerous healing shrines visitors narrated miraculous healing stories, which were then incorporated back into saints’ hagiographic dossiers.42 Regardless of whether these particular public narrations took place in real life or not, these types of hagiographic episodes indicate that narrating miracle stories at saints’ shrines was a common practice. And through this practice many laypeople became storytellers. Depictions of disciples and visitors as narrators of saints’ stories are attested in other places as well. The author of the Life of the Man of God, for instance, says that the narrative about the Man of God was publicly proclaimed by the custodian, the friend of the holy man.43 The anonymous author of the Lives of the Desert Fathers tells his readers that they learned about the marvelous monks in Abba Isidore’s community from the gatekeeper of the monastery.44 The redactor of the Life of Hypatius (fifth-century abbot in Constantinople) notes that he heard the story from a disciple of the holy man in a diegesis.45 Leontios of Neapolis (d. 668), the hagiographer of Saint John the Almsgiver/ Merciful (d. 610), wrote down the holy man’s life during a narration of Menas, the treasurer of the church in the time of John the Almsgiver.46 These literary tropes were used in order to show the transmission of knowledge, and thus to affirm the historicity (as opposed to the fictitious character) of the accounts.47 Although we cannot affirm the veracity of the accounts themselves, that the authors heard the stories from their heroes’ disciples probably carries a kernel of truth: disciples, like visitors of ascetics, often narrated their stories to public audiences. Such narrations of personal experiences with holy men and women brought the narrators status, fame, and a degree of authority. Monasteries, shrines, and ascetics’ cells, although the most prominent, were not the only contexts for hagiodiegesis. The household, which played a

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significant role in shaping Christian doctrine, piety, and religious authority in Late Antiquity,48 was a place where saints’ stories were narrated, recorded, and transmitted across generations. For example, we know that Melania the Elder (d. 410), who continuously instructed her family members in Scripture, “pierced” her granddaughter Melania with stories she narrated.49 She was also likely one of the main sources for Palladius’s Lausiac History, narrating to him both her own life and the lives of desert ascetics she was familiar with.50 Her veneration of Perpetua and Felicitas, not to mention the fashioning of her own piety based on the story of these two martyrs, clearly manifests the intricate relationship between household piety and hagiography.51 Some texts speak about the household more explicitly. I will mention three of them here. Macrina (fl. fourth c.), who was a spiritual instructor in her own household, represents a prominent case of hagiodiegesis at home.52 Elizabeth of Heracleia (fl. fifth c.), abbess in Constantinople, according to her hagiographer, was also instructed on the lives of saints in her childhood by her father.53 Lastly, John of Ephesus writes about Euphemia, who instructs her daughter in the psalms and the Scriptures in their home.54 These accounts, scholars emphasize, prescribed a household model of asceticism and learning for urban Christian communities, especially for regulating women’s piety and asceticism.55 Therefore, these literary examples tell more about the agendas of their male authors than about women’s piety. Nevertheless, this does not negate the fact that the household was understood to be an important context for the practice of narrating saints’ stories in late antique Christianity. Such examples of household learning suggest that it is safe to situate hagiodiegesis within this context, and I will return to the household as a key context for hagiographic transmission in chapter 6. Hagiographic literature points to yet other contexts for narrating saints’ stories. The prison, for example, should be construed as a place for spiritual instruction and hearing saints’ stories. It is methodologically a more difficult context to study. There are no texts, to my knowledge, that explicitly mention that reading or narrating saints’ lives was a common practice in the late antique prison. Moreover, because of the voluminous martyrs’ acts written in early Christianity and beyond, prison became an important liminal space between persecution and martyrdom in Christian memory.56 Therefore, hagiographic depictions of imprisoned Christians are highly rhetorical literary episodes replete with tropes.57 Nevertheless, such tropes most likely influenced and to a degree were shaped by a variety of religious practices in prisons. For

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Storytelling in Late Antique Christianity      25

example, in the Life of Zbinā, a late antique text from the East Syriac tradition,  we read that some believing men went to the prison in a city where Christians were being persecuted, and they “instructed them from the books [Scriptures] and strengthened them.”58 Spiritual instruction, including narrations of saints’ stories, appears to have been an aspect of imprisoned life,59 considering especially that punishment was often approached as education, and monasteries and bishops’ residences were among the spaces for incarceration.60 Thus, storytelling could have been imposed as a penitentiary practice, adapted as an option of moral support from fellow Christians, or practiced as a way of evangelizing the incarcerated non-Christians. Regardless of the precise structure and dynamics, the prison was likely a place to narrate and listen to stories about pious, brave, relentless, or repentant holy men and women. Funerals of saints also appear to have been a context in which laypeople and saints’ disciples narrated stories about them. “Lamentation and remembrance,” Ellen Muehlberger has observed, “are opportunities to refigure and reaffirm, even if only within a small group; speakers may not ever encounter an audience as engaged as the one gathered to mark, however it may, a beloved’s death.” 61 We find an interesting account in the Life of Basil attributed to Amphilochius of Iconium (d. 394), in which a penitent woman narrates to the public, during Basil of Caesarea’s (d. 379) funeral, how she asked Basil to erase her sins, but because he sent her away to another holy man who could not help her, and in the meantime Basil died, not all of her sins were erased.62 This story not only emphasizes funerals as a storytelling context, but also indicates that people occasionally narrated their sins, penitence, and, more interestingly, how the holy man or woman was not able to help them. The above is not an exhaustive list of contexts for hagiodiegesis. Saints’ stories were narrated in numerous other places for different purposes, ranging from spiritual formation to moral instruction, from healing at hospitals to self-promotion in elite circles of the literati.63 One must also emphasize the entertainment value of storytelling. In any context mentioned up to this point, the audience might have listened to a saint’s story merely for entertainment purposes.64 Hagiographic performances were not autotelic events, and religious authorities were weary of this. Jacob of Sarug (d. 521), for example, warns against the dangers of people’s conflation of theatrical entertainment and listening to biblical stories, arguing in his homilies on theatrical spectacles that biblical stories were more beneficial and marvelous than Greek mythological

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26     Storytelling in Late Antique Christianity

tales.65 Although it is beyond the scope of this chapter, taking theater into consideration only highlights further the breadth and complexity of the practice of narrating saints’ stories especially in relation to context. In the rest of this chapter I focus on two significant aspects of hagiodiegesis, namely, narrators and the participation of audiences.

storytellers in late antique christianity In the examples cited above, most of the narrators of stories appear to be men, but we also know of ascetic women who narrated saints’ stories to their disciples and visitors.66 John of Ephesus, for example, says that he learned about the holy woman Susan’s pious deeds from the other blessed women who had lived with her.67 Women living a monastic or protomonastic life in towns and suburbs in late antique Egypt most probably read and narrated saints’ lives.68 The desert ascetic Syncletica of Palestine might have narrated her story (as it is presented in her Life) to Silas, the monk who visited her, for example.69 In the Spiritual Meadow we read about Maria, who narrated the story of another pious woman from Nisibis to the author John Moschus (d. 619), which is a perfect example of hagiodiegesis in written form.70 These literary representations demonstrate that women, if less frequently than men, narrated saints’ stories in monastic as well as urban contexts. Were more female saints’ stories narrated if the audience was mixed, or consisted of only women? Claudia Rapp demonstrates, based on Greek works, that female saints’ stories were not necessarily composed for the devotional life of women only; nevertheless, male authors, when addressing an audience of women, often narrated stories about other women.71 I have not encountered an example in Syriac hagiography that complies with this argument. However, since the purpose of hagiographic storytelling was generally setting examples for the listener, we may presume that narrators often chose their subjects based on the demographics of their audiences. Did the gender or deeds of the hero change based on the gender of the narrator? In monastic communities of men, for instance on Mt. Athos, female saints’ lives were read, although we do not know how this quantitatively compared to male saints’ lives.72 Men certainly narrated female saints’ stories, whereas women were generally depicted as narrating exclusively female saints’ stories, regardless of their audience, as seen in the examples of Syncletica of Palestine and Maria in the Spiritual Meadow. There were some exceptions to

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Storytelling in Late Antique Christianity      27

this. One of the few examples of female narrators of saintly men to a mixed audience comes from the Syriac Life of Simeon the Stylite, where a young girl in Persia, after being saved by Simeon from drowning, is depicted as narrating the entire miracle anecdote and her vision of Simeon to her fellow villagers— implied to be a mixed audience.73 Perhaps more important than gender divisions, one should consider transformative events that authorized individuals to become narrators. As mentioned above, pilgrims, young and old, men and women, who visited saints’ shrines, often became storytellers, narrating their experiences to their family members or fellow villagers. Another group of itinerant storytellers appears to be merchants. In the Life of Theodotos of Amida (fl. eighth c.) we read that a certain distinguished man from the region of Antioch went to visit the holy man after hearing about him from merchants.74 The knowledge of saints’ stories was a valuable commodity that traveled across trade and pilgrimage routes. And participating in such modes of itinerancy gave one the authority to narrate. The narrator and the subject of the stories are separated in the examples cited to this point. In some cases, however, holy men and women spoke about their own holiness. This is not surprising considering that autobiographical stories were well known in late antique Christian literature.75 Several desert fathers and clerics were depicted as being compelled to narrate their own experiences to audiences, as we will see shortly. Speaking about oneself (periautologia) was generally held in low esteem in monastic literature, except in circumstances in which it brings a benefit to the listener, it is about revealing a truth, or it serves some other higher purpose. Hagiographic literature indicates that in certain cases holy men and women spoke about their own sanctity, their deeds, and certain events they experienced, for the benefit of the audience. For example, the author of the Syriac Life of Simeon the Stylite states: Now about the visions and revelations which were shown to the pious and holy Mar Simeon by God through the Holy Spirit, no one can describe or narrate them. He was very circumspect and was afraid to recount them before men lest either someone would think he spoke boastfully and so suffer loss, or someone might strongly give credence to them and think him more than what he was. For this reason, he restrained himself from recounting visions and revelations. To those who served him, however, he sometimes spoke openly and informed them. But he commanded them that they were not to divulge or tell anyone while he lived, lest it were to be thought that the only ones who praised him were those who served him. Furthermore, he did not tell everyone who served him but only those whom he loved and trusted.76

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The author here is creating a hierarchy in the transmission of information about Simeon’s pious deeds, claiming legitimacy, veracity, and value for his own account. The passage gives us a glimpse into the place of narrating the self in the late antique world of Syriac asceticism: holy men and women recounted their visions to their disciples and other audiences, and sometimes this was perceived as self-aggrandizement.77 Some holy men, however, were less conscious about appearing to be boastful. For example, Simeon of Bēth Aršām (d. 540) speaks to the audience in the parish church about the divine mercy he received: And so also he even delivered an exposition in the chancel in the churches of all the peoples to whom he went; and on this account he would declare and say to us with tears, “In this matter I recognized clearly that God had visited me and strengthened me, and that he had not withheld his grace and his mercy from me.”78

Later hagiographic literature also informs us about holy men and women narrating their own stories and sanctity, such as Theodore of Sykeon (d. 641) in his Life.79 From the Egyptian desert, the ascetics Or, Copres, and others narrate miracle stories of their masters and of themselves.80 Some of these autobiographical narratives have been preserved in writing. Nicholas of Sinai (fl. ninth c.), for example, while rewriting the Life of Onouphrios, kept the first-person narrative of the holy man. So did the author of the Life of Nikon the Metanoeite (d. 998), who was narrating his life story on his deathbed.81 As mentioned previously, the first-person narrative was a rhetorical choice of authors to give historicity to their accounts. Nevertheless, it is likely that some ascetics, upon request or on their own initiative, narrated their own stories, and explained their own sanctity. Such “requests” made of holy men and women to speak about their lives and pious deeds were a part of audience participation in storytelling and merit further attention.

hagiographic interviews and audience participation Hagiographic interviews constitute an important subcategory of hagiodiegesis. Hagiographers frequently mention visiting holy men/women, or their disciples, to gather information about the life and spiritual deeds of their subjects.82 “Interviewing” monks and ascetics for the purpose of hagiographic writing

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Storytelling in Late Antique Christianity      29

was a significant practice that gave impetus to both hagiodiegesis and hagiography. Athanasius of Alexandria (d. 373) possibly interviewed Abba Serapion and other monks at his palace to gather information about his hagiographic subject, Saint Antony, whose Life became the paradigm of Christian hagiography in Late Antiquity.83 The author of the Historia Monachorum informs his readers that he took a tour in the Egyptian desert and talked to the fathers at their cells or monasteries.84 Palladius interviewed his subjects in Egypt in the process of writing the Lausiac History, like Paul, who went up to Jerusalem to inquire about Cephas.85 Cyril of Scythopolis (d. 559) interviewed monks for the biographies he authored.86 John of Ephesus, too, emphasizes numerous times that he interrogated, sometimes begged, holy men and women to inform him of their life and conduct. In the absence of the saints themselves, he spoke to their disciples.87 Such interviews, texts indicate, sometimes took more time, in the intimacy of a master-disciple relationship, as often disciples themselves put great effort into gathering information about holy men and women’s lives and deeds. As mentioned above, in the Life of the Man of God the hagiographer reports: “Now this narrative about the Man of God was publicly proclaimed by that custodian who was the friend of the blessed one. It was also written down by him for a record. For he took care and interrogated the saint with oaths and curses and [the saint] made known to him all of his former exalted life and his later abased life and did not conceal anything from him.” 88 These and similar statements, even though some might be fictional encounters, point to the practice of actively gathering information about saints and ascetics, and interrogating them about their lives and deeds. Hagiographic interviews should be distinguished from hagiodiegesis. Although from the perspective of narrators such interviews might have constituted regular narrative sessions, they were probably different than regular storytelling sessions in multiple ways. Conclusions about the format, language, length, and content of these sessions can only be speculative. Yet, one can assume that in such interview sessions the narration of the story might have taken longer than usual; the auditor possibly asked certain questions (and therefore the plotline might be altered), used mnemonic devices for taking notes, and modified the narrative before putting it down in writing.89 Thus, hagiographic interviews point to the coauthorship of the narrator and the recorder. The latter often becomes our hagiographer, while the former’s authorship is generally neglected.90 Moreover, hagiographic interviews often

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30     Storytelling in Late Antique Christianity

involved pilgrimage or other kinds of traveling, which adds another dimension of movement and relocation to the process of authorship.91 Although the interviews were held for the purpose of writing and narrating the stories of saints to physically or temporally remote audiences, they are inseparable from the spiritual journeys of the interviewers themselves.92 In this aspect, the interview sessions can be contextualized within the broader discourse of dialogue, debate, and truth-seeking in late antique Christianity.93 Prominent examples of questioning holy men come from the Egyptian monastic literature, where disciples or visitors of holy men search “for meaning unfolding within the context of oral discourse.”94 In these representations, monks sometimes prefer to tell stories instead of “engaging in discursive reflection on complex theological questions,” which underlines the intricate interplay between questioning, interviewing, and storytelling.95 Outside of the Egyptian monastic literature, Christian hagiographies recount many episodes in which people question holy men and women, or their disciples, and seek further information about or interpretation of events, practices of piety, dreams, or Scriptures. Egeria, for example, was very inquisitive during her pilgrimages, as her guides narrated biblical stories to her. During her visit to the Jordan Valley, she says: “I asked what there was about this valley to make this holy monk build his cell there. I knew there must be some special reason, and this is what I was told by the holy men with us who knew the district well.”96 In another place, in Charra, she asks the bishop about a detail in the story of Abraham in the book of Genesis.97 Curiosity, awe, local memories of saints, and her own narrative knowledge were interwoven during her visits at holy sites. In the Syriac Life of Simeon the Stylite, two disciples throw themselves down before the saint, and beseech him to explain a miracle he had performed and the prayers he had recited during it.98 Sometimes the holy man himself was the interrogator. Simeon the Stylite, his hagiographers say, questioned learned men to interpret his prophetic dreams: He was always quizzing experts in the scriptures to learn from them about the lifestyles of these two powerful athletes, Moses and Elijah. Now one said by humility, another by love, another zeal for God—everyone had his own opinion. So, he asked everyone in order to learn from everyone; it was not demeaning to that importance and that spiritual wisdom that it humble itself and ask even the least what manner of life was suitable to the service of his master. When he learned all these things from everybody and he had been instructed in the holy scriptures which were read before him, the saint began to fix them all in his own self.99

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The mention of interviews and questions in hagiography indicates the inquisitive nature of listening to hagiographic stories. Some audiences seem to have shown considerable curiosity for details of stories and thus have participated in and shaped oral performances. And sometimes they expressed hesitation and criticism through such questioning sessions. For example, in the Syriac Life of Simeon the Stylite, the author says, “Perhaps someone will say, ‘what made it necessary or required that he mount on a pillar? Could he not please our Lord on the ground or at most in that corner?’ ”100 The audiences of stories were expected to question, hesitate, and debate. The inquisitive and dialogic nature of public performances brings to mind the genre of question and answer (erotapokriseis). This genre’s function in scriptural exegesis and the formation of canon law has been well studied.101 For Christian hagiography, it is difficult to say whether a question-and-answer session preceded the prose version of a story. The preserved dialogues were often used as pedagogical tools, and they do not reflect actual verbal exchanges. But at least in one case it is likely that an actual conversation was preserved, if partially: the questions directed at Anastasius of Sinai (eighth c.) were recorded by his disciples.102 Furthermore, hagiographers’ emphases on their interrogations while collecting information about their subjects indicate that in some cases they might have had a questioning session with saints or their disciples, which got lost in the process of composing the published version of the story. Dialogue constituted a significant tool in late antique Christian discourse, serving polemics, apologetics, public exegesis, and spiritual instruction.103 Hagiodiegesis was a part of this broader world of dialogue, and it highlights that questioning, dialogue, and debates not only facilitated conversation between theologically opposing parties, but also helped nonopposing coreligionists seek truth and information for personal spiritual development. We should put this observation in conversation with Jack Tannous’s argument that the majority of the Christian population in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages was not theologically literate enough to participate in intricate theological debates.104 Analysis of hagiography demonstrates that even though “simple believers”105 were not always equipped to debate about Christology, they constantly and actively engaged with biblical and postbiblical history through their knowledge of stories. Details of such stories mattered, and people inquired about them. This shows that between the simplicity of illiteracy and the sophistication of theological literacy there was another special

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32     Storytelling in Late Antique Christianity

register of literacy in Late Antiquity, namely, narrative literacy. Many individuals, regardless of their degree of formal education, learned about and interpreted stories, and with this cultural capital, the above examples show, they demonstrated their voice, authority, and prestige in their communities and beyond. The analysis of a limited corpus of Greek, Latin, and Syriac hagiographic texts demonstrates the various narrators, audiences, and contexts of the practice of hagiodiegesis. Saints’ stories were orally narrated by monks, ascetics, pilgrims, men and women, in monastic and urban contexts. These performative-auditory experiences were mostly unstructured, with some significant exceptions. Despite our only partial reconstruction of it, the importance of the practice of pietistic storytelling is visible. It decentered religious authority, and greatly impacted cultural and literary transmission across geographical, temporal, and confessional boundaries. The study of this practice also shows that we can speak about a particular type of literacy, narrative literacy, which narrators and listeners of stories relied on in order to interpret and contextualize stories. In the next chapter, I will focus on a particular narrator in Late Antiquity, Muhammad, who was among the transmitters of Christian saints’ stories into the community of pagans, Jews, and Christians from which Islam was born.

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chapter 2

“How Is Muhammad a Better Storyteller Than I?”

In his biography of the Prophet Muhammad, Ibn Ish.āq (d. 768) gives the following account, which we saw in the introduction to this book: Now al-Nad. r b. al-Hārith was one of the satans of Quraysh; he used to insult the apostle [Muhammad] and show him enmity. He had been to al-Hira and learned there the tales of the kings of Persia, the tales of Rustum and Isbandiyār. When the prophet held a meeting in which he reminded them of God and warned his people of what had happened to bygone generations by God’s vengeance, al-Nad. r got up when he sat down, and said, “I am a better storyteller than he, o people of Quraysh, come here, I am telling you a better story than his!” Then he began to tell them about the kings of Persia, and Rustum and Isbandiyār, and then he would say, “In what respect is Muhammad a better storyteller than I?”1

Islamic literature preserves this episode as a part of the discourse on the opposition to Muhammad in Mecca. The anecdote is also used for the exegesis of the quranic verses in which disbelievers are portrayed as referring to Muhammad’s quranic recitations as “fables of those of old” (asāt. īr al-awwalīn), a term repeated nine times in the Quran.2 Despite primarily fulfilling these literary functions, this anecdote possibly carries a kernel of truth: that Muhammad’s quranic proclamations at times sounded like storytelling to his audience, and that the material he narrated was comparable to the hagiographic, biblical, epic, and other traditions that people were familiar with in Late Antiquity. Muhammad has been described as a social reformer,3 a moral reformer,4 an eschatological prophet,5 and a late antique holy man,6 among other roles. 33

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34      “How Is Muhammad a Better Storyteller Than I?”

Identifying an overarching quality that defines his career, however, obscures the changing perceptions of his audiences based on the multifaceted nature of his public speech. In this chapter, I analyze Muhammad as a narrator of stories, emphasizing the importance of storytelling in the development of quranic prophetology and in the formation of the early Islamic community. Muhammad was knowledgeable in hagiographic stories, and he relied on his community’s knowledge of stories to contextualize his message. Understanding this aspect of the early Islamic community sheds invaluable light on the role of narrating stories in community building in Late Antiquity, and scholars have paid increasing attention to this feature of Muhammad’s preaching.7 I join this conversation with a broad question: What can the example of Muhammad tell us about the practice of hagiodiegesis in Late Antiquity? Following on our exploration of the various contexts, narrators, and audiences of public storytelling in Late Antiquity in the previous chapter, Muhammad’s example allows us a glimpse of how this practice might have looked on the ground. The analysis of Muhammad’s narrations also elucidates the dynamics of narrative transmission across communal boundaries. According to the Islamic tradition, Muhammad publicly addressed the communities around him for approximately twenty years.8 The Quran is a record of a part of this communication.9 In its codified form, the Quran includes various literary forms: homilies, legal rulings, prayers, and narratives, to cite a few.10 Since it is an axial text for its historical environment,11 and most probably preserves Muhammad’s recitation accurately to an acceptable degree,12 one can harvest important information regarding the language, content, discursive features, and stylistic forms of Muhammad’s public speech from the content of the Quran. Although traditionally the quranic recitation has not been understood as Muhammad’s own speech, it was still a mode of public address at least in the memory of his followers, and Muhammad, in this mode of speaking, narrated numerous stories. The quranic proclamation was not the only context for Muhammad’s communication with communities around him. Islamic literature preserves other modes of Muhammad’s speech, as represented in the sīra (biography), h.adīth (anecdotes about Muhammad’s sayings and deeds), and asbāb al-nuzūl (occasions of quranic revelation), among other genres.13 These are, of course, later literary representations that cannot readily be taken as historical witnesses to Muhammad’s life.14 In addition to the chronological gap between such literature and the Quran, these literary representations record and interpret

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“How Is Muhammad a Better Storyteller Than I?”      35

specific life events of Muhammad in their own generic conventions, symbols, and styles. Thus, we see a different voice, content, form, and organizing principle in each of these literatures, depending on what aspect of Muhammad’s life and prophecy is represented and for which purposes.15 Despite the methodological restrictions, there is value in considering such extraquranic literature in reconstructing Muhammad’s preaching, since those representations reveal additional ways in which the early Islamic community remembered Muhammad and his storytelling.

who is narrating? Any analysis of Muhammad’s public speech must face the complex question of the speaker in the Quran. According to the Islamic tradition God’s divine speech is preserved intact in the Quran. Muhammad was only a messenger, a vessel between God and the earthly community. In connection to this doctrine, Islamic literature emphasizes the distinctions between the Quran and other writings in which Muhammad’s speech is preserved. For example, some reports describe Muhammad as having miraculous, extraordinary experiences when he recited the Quran.16 True as this may be, such accounts are embellished with well-known hagiographic tropes. Christian literature in fact abounds in depictions in which a reciter of a unique proclamation, prayer, or story appears in a trancelike state.17 The embellished nature of these reports might make their historicity questionable, but still this alleged distinction is important in highlighting the different modes of storytelling in antiquity, and I will return to this point shortly. Linguistic and social analyses, on the other hand, indicate that Muhammad’s quranic and nonquranic speech were not always clearly distinguished. The possible conflation of Muhammad’s everyday speech and the Quran’s divine speech is attested, for example, by the Quran’s featuring of complex uses of pronouns with prominent changes in grammatical person, number, and tense.18 One of the salient consequences of the Quran’s oral character,19 such grammatical inconsistencies in the Quran indicate that God as the narrator was sometimes conflated with Muhammad as the narrator from the perspective of the audiences of Muhammad.20 Moreover, there was a historical shift in Muhammad’s representation in the Quran from “a messenger from God” to “the messenger of God.”21 This discursive shift was likely parallel to the solidification of Muhammad’s political power in the early Islamic

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36      “How Is Muhammad a Better Storyteller Than I?”

community,22 which must have had an impact on the transformation of Muhammad’s speech to be perceived increasingly more related to God’s. The Quran also directly mentions the responses of Muhammad’s audiences, which sheds further light on the relationship between divine inspiration and mundane storytelling.23 Muhammad’s adversaries, according to the Quran, accused him of being merely a poet, a soothsayer, or possessed.24 Divine revelation and inspiration by jinn (the source of knowledge for soothsayers and poets)25 were probably not clearly distinguished by Muhammad’s contemporaries, since the two forms of speech were perceived to be similar to each other.26 Furthermore, the audiences in the Quran sometimes take the proclamation lightly.27 They question Muhammad’s authority.28 They inquire about the details of the quranic stories, exhortations, and admonitions. They accuse him (and other prophets) of lying.29 And they speculate about Muhammad’s sources of knowledge.30 Thus, the Quran itself is revealing in that Muhammad’s speech and God’s speech as separate phenomena were not always clear to Muhammad’s audiences. The latter used their knowledge of narratives to assess and contextualize Muhammad’s. Islamic communal memory preserved confusions about Muhammad’s and God’s speech also in extraquranic literature. One prominent example is the category of h.adīth qudsī, the reports in which Muhammad is quoted as saying, “God said [ . . . ],” which were not included in the codified Quran.31 These reports testify to debates about which parts of Muhammad’s speech were divinely inspired. In some reports, the confusion is explicitly stated when Muhammad gives his opinion on a matter, and his audience asks him whether it is God speaking through him, or he is giving them ordinary human opinion.32 These and similar reports preserved in Islamic literature were related to the later theological debates about the nature of the Quran and of prophecy. But considered together, they also testify that Muhammad’s speech and God’s speech were not clearly separated in the early Islamic community. I find it important to distinguish between the modes of storytelling in the Quran and in other Islamic literary contexts. This is not to affirm the claims to historicity and the theological underpinnings of different reports about Muhammad’s preaching, but because these distinctions enhance our understanding of the multiple modes of storytelling in antiquity. The storyteller’s emotional state while narrating, the nature and authority of their source, the content of their story all created different narrations.

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“How Is Muhammad a Better Storyteller Than I?”      37

Later reports about Muhammad’s storytelling also inform us about the conversations between Islam and Christianity, since Muhammad is portrayed narrating stories about prophets and saints not mentioned in the Quran. And these reports indicate the increasing knowledge of Christian hagiography in Islam. In what follows, I will analyze the types of storytelling Muhammad performed, through both the Quran and the nonquranic literature, to examine the applications of the transmission, circulation, and utilization of saints’ stories in early Islamic communities.

storytelling in the quran According to his biographical tradition, Muhammad began his quranic proclamation in Mecca when he received the first revelation around the year 610.33 The rest of the Quran was incrementally revealed in the following some twenty years. Per Theodor Nöldeke’s ordering, he preached about ninety chapters (sūras) in Mecca until his emigration (hijra) in 622, and an additional twentyfour were revealed in Yathrib (later called Medina).34 Nöldeke’s assumptions and methodologies underlying his assessment of the chronology of the Quran have been extensively revised,35 yet his suggestion that the quranic chapters become longer and more prosaic in the Medinan period remains the scholarly consensus.36 To be clear, Muhammad did not proclaim all of the quranic chapters as complete units. In fact, many of them were expanded and abrogated during his lifetime and beyond.37 Nevertheless, roughly coherent preaching units emerged during and shortly after Muhammad’s life, and these units, namely, the sūras, constitute the structural frame of the book. A significant component of many quranic chapters is narrative, varying in length, style, and content. Quranic narratives are mostly about prophets and saints, though there are important exceptions. In some narratives the characters are anonymous, while their stories are “biblical.” Some of the narratives are strikingly similar to each other, although they speak about different heroes. In yet other cases, there are multiple stories about the same hero. Moreover, in certain quranic passages, the hero of the story is God.38 Despite these and other narratological complexities, the recitation of quranic narratives was central to Muhammad’s communication with the community around him, and it served various purposes in his prophetic career. By analyzing quranic narratives, together with other literature in which Muhammad is portrayed

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as narrating stories, one can glean important information about the practice of storytelling in Late Antiquity. The quranic event was a continuous performance of hagiodiegesis, for Muhammad’s quranic recitation included storytelling from its earliest phase.39 The brief narrative of Moses and Pharaoh in Q79, one of the early chapters in the order of revelation, is the first prominent storytelling session in the Quran: Has the story (h. adīth) of Moses reached you, when his Lord called to him in the holy valley, T.uwa, “Go to Pharaoh, for he has truly transgressed. And say, ‘Have you [any wish] to purify yourself, and I should guide you to your Lord so that you will be in awe?’ ”? Then he [Moses] showed him the great sign, but he denied and disobeyed, then turned his back in haste. Then he [Pharaoh] summoned [his people] and proclaimed, saying, “I am your lord, the Most High!” So, God seized him, making him an example in the next world and for this. In this there is surely a lesson for those who fear. (Q79:15–26)

Another brief narrative, about the prophet Abraham and his divine guests, is found in Q51: Has the story (h. adīth) of Abraham’s honored guests reached you? When they came to him and greeted him, “Peace,” he said, “Peace, strangers.” Then he went aside to his family and brought a fat calf. And he placed it before them, saying, “Will you not eat?” Then he grew fearful of them. They said, “Do not be afraid,” and they gave him the good news of a wise son. Then his wife came forward clamoring, and she smote her face and said, “A barren, old woman!” They said, “Such has your Lord decreed. He is truly the All-Wise, All-Knowing.” He [Abraham] asked, “What is your mission, o messengers?” They said, “We have actually been sent to a sinful people, to send upon them stones of clay, marked by your Lord for the transgressors.” (Q51:24–34)40

The above passages, although short, indicate that stories appear to have already been an important part of Muhammad’s speech in Mecca. There are many allusions to events and persons in these early chapters, and the accusations that the stories he told were “fables of those of old” appear twice.41 Muhammad reminded his audience of the Companion of the Fish (dhū al-nūn, Jonah),42 the destruction of the peoples of ʿĀd and Thamūd (to which the Arabian prophets Hūd and S.ālih. were sent, respectively),43 and the People of the Trench (arguably the Martyrs of Najran—a Christian community that was persecuted under Jewish kings of Yemen in the early sixth century), among other stories, in his early career.44

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“How Is Muhammad a Better Storyteller Than I?”      39

More lengthy stories start to appear in Muhammad’s preaching soon after the abovementioned early chapters. The prophet Noah’s story in verses Q71:1–78 appears to be the first full narrative that Muhammad recited.45 In this story, God orders Noah to warn his people. Noah’s warning is presented in the form of direct speech, after which he turns to God, and relates to Him what happened between him and his people. In verses 24–25, the direct speech ends, and we hear Muhammad the reciter: “Many indeed have they [disbelievers] led astray; and it increases the wrongdoers in nothing but error. Because of their iniquities they were drowned, then made to enter a fire. And then they found no helpers for themselves apart from God.” After this, Noah’s prayer to God is given at the end of the chapter, again in direct speech.46 Nicolai Sinai attributes some of these commentaries and other incoherence within quranic narratives to post-Muhammad redaction processes.47 Yet, when we consider the Quran not as a premeditated text but as a manifestation of the fluid nature of storytelling in antiquity, such commentaries within narratives do not appear as incoherent (on which, see below). Stories of Noah and other prominent prophets, such as Moses and Abraham, were narrated with increasing frequency toward the end of the Meccan period.48 In fact, in this period before Muhammad’s emigration to Yathrib, his quranic proclamation consisted, to a large extent, of storytelling, with twenty-nine of the forty-two chapters he recited either alluding to prophetic stories or including narratives of varying length and style. The narratives in these chapters generally appear in groups. In Q10, for instance, stories of Noah and Moses are narrated; in Q26, stories of Moses, Abraham, and other prophets; in Q19, one of the multiple quranic representations of Mary, as well as stories of Abraham, Moses, Ishmael, and Enoch. Most of these narratives are formulaic, repeating similar themes, literary structures, and refrains.49 Like many similar Meccan chapters, these chapters are rhetorically dramatic, with vivid descriptions of the endeavors of the prophets, blessings awaiting the pious, and torments awaiting the deniers.50 Despite their formulaic nature, however, the contents of these passages render such proclamations storytelling, with vivid descriptions of characters, events correlated to each other in a chronological frame, and dialogues between characters, all of which help the audience visualize a story. In Q7, for example, Muhammad first narrates Adam’s fall. Then, the audience hears about Noah, Hūd, S.ālih., Lot, Shuʿayb, and Moses’s stories. The first one among these, the story of Noah, is narrated as follows:

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40      “How Is Muhammad a Better Storyteller Than I?”

We sent Noah to his people. He said, “O my people, serve God. You have no other god other than Him. I truly fear for you the torment of a tremendous day.” The notables of his people said, “We surely see you in clear error.” He said, “O my people, there is no error in me, and I am a messenger from the Lord of all worlds. I convey to you the messages of my Lord and give you advice; and I know from God what you do not know. Do you find astonishing that a reminder from your Lord has come to you through a man from among you, that he may warn you and that you may protect yourselves and that you may be given mercy?” But they rejected him; so, we saved him and those with him in the ship, and we drowned those who denied our signs. They were a blind people. (Q7:59–64)

The above narrative and others in Q7, which some scholars identify as the “stories of punishment,” vary in detail, but they mostly consist of dialogues between a prophet and the people he is sent to, ending in the destruction of the people upon their denial of the prophetic message.51 After the first narrative (the story of Adam), the quranic voice exhorts the audience of the recently recited story: “O Children of Adam! Let not Satan tempt you, as he caused your parents to go forth from the garden.”52 And the narrator connects this story to the forthcoming stories of the prophets with the following phrase: “O Children of Adam! Should there come unto you messengers from among yourselves, recounting my signs unto you, then whoever is reverent and makes amends, no fear shall come upon them, nor shall they grieve.”53 Thus Muhammad steps in and out of the narrative time as the audience hears the stories of the prophets. Let us look at another example. In Q29, during the recitation of the story of Abraham warning his people against idolatry, again a prominent shift in time marks a commentary on the story.54 In this passage, first Abraham addresses his people and invites them to the worship of the One God. Then a commentary on the story begins: “Have they not seen how God originates creation and then resurrects it? That is easy for God. Say, ‘Journey in the land and see how He originated creation. Then God will bring it into being one more time. God has power over everything. He punishes those whom he wishes, and He has mercy on those whom He wishes. To Him you will be returned. You cannot escape [Him] on earth or in heaven; nor have you any protector or helper apart from Him.’ And those who disbelieve in God’s signs and in the meeting with Him, those have despaired of my [sic] mercy; those will have a painful torment. The only answer of his [Abraham’s] folk was to say, ‘Kill him or burn him.’ Then God delivered him from the fire. In that there are signs for people who believe.” (Q29:19–25)

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“How Is Muhammad a Better Storyteller Than I?”      41

After this commentary, the story of Abraham resumes with the prophet continuing to address his people and warn them against idolatry. Through such narration and commentary, biblical characters are reinterpreted for a new audience. Muhammad did not only recite prophets’ and saints’ stories; the Islamic character of Satan (Iblīs) also began to develop in this period.55 Iblīs first briefly appears in Q20, as the one who did not prostrate before Adam, deceiving him and his companion in heaven.56 In Q15, a chapter Muhammad recited around the same time, a more developed narrative is found in the form of a dialogue between God and Satan: We have created man from clay, from moulded mud; we created the jinn earlier from the smokeless fire. [Note the change of the narrator.] And when your Lord said to the angels, “I am creating man from clay, from moulded mud; so, when I have formed him and breathed into him some of my spirit, fall down in prostration to him,” all the angels prostrated together, except Iblīs. He refused to be with those who prostrated. He said, “O Iblīs, why is it that you are not amongst those who prostrate themselves?” He said, “I am not one to prostrate myself to a mortal whom you have created from clay, from moulded mud.” He said, “Leave it. You are accursed. The curse will be upon you till the Day of Judgement.” He said, “My Lord, because you have led me astray, I shall make things seem beautiful for them in the land and I shall lead them astray, all [of them] except for your devoted servants amongst them.” (Q15:26–40)

Muhammad recited about Satan in three more chapters in Mecca, each of which contributes to the development of Satan’s character and his attributes.57 In Q14, Satan’s defense against people’s accusations is among the latest additions to this character’s quranic representation: They will all go forth to their Lord; and the lowly will say to the arrogant, “We were your followers. Can you avail us in any way against the punishment of God?” They will reply, “Had God guided us, we would have guided you. It is all one for us whether we are fretful, or we endure patiently. We have no place of refuge.” And Satan will say, when the matter is decided, “God has made you a true promise; but I promised you and then I failed you. I had no authority over you, except that I called you and you answered me. So do not blame me but blame yourselves. I cannot come to your aid, nor you to mine. I did not believe in that with which you associated me before. The wrong-doers will have a painful punishment.” (Q14:21–22)

As the passages cited heretofore demonstrate, the content of Muhammad’s quranic recitation included extensive storytelling sessions displaying

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many aspects of late antique hagiodiegesis—such as dramatic addresses of the audience, direct quotations from the heroes of the stories, commentaries, questions posed to the audience, and so on. The breadth of the terminology that marks stories in the Quran further indicates the liveliness of these narrations.

Quranic Terminology regarding Storytelling A common term that refers to a story in the Quran is the noun h.adīth (report).58 In fact, both of the earliest narratives, of Moses and Abraham as quoted above,59 are referred to with this term in the Quran. The verb qas..sa begins to be used in the middle and late Meccan periods, during which the majority of narrative-intense chapters were recited.60 The verb qas..sa is often used in Arabic literature to refer to storytelling, although it also means “to exhort, to admonish, to preach.” 61 In Q7, after the stories of five prophets, Muhammad recites, “These towns, we narrate to you,” after which follows a story of Moses.62 Later, the quranic voice commands Muhammad to “narrate the stories,” using the same verb that defines Muhammad’s speech.63 In Q18, again the audience is addressed with “We narrate their story in truth.” 64 Similarly, at the beginning of Q12, Muhammad recites, “We narrate unto you the most beautiful of stories.” 65 The rest of the chapter is a complete narrative about the life and exploits of the prophet Joseph, rich in dialogue and imagery,66 “artfully crafted in terms of sub-plots, psychological ambivalence, a transition from warning to brooding, in an almost novelistic spirit.” 67 Another verb that demarcates the act of narrating a story is talā.68 Q28 begins with “We will relate to you about Moses and Pharaoh in truth.” 69 In the rest of the chapter, there are two stories about Moses. First, Moses’s growing up at the house of the Pharaoh, his marriage, and the episode of the Burning Bush are narrated.70 After this storytelling session there are about thirty verses in which disbelievers are described; then, the story of Moses resumes. In the rest of the narrative the audience hears about Korah, who rejected God as the provider of his treasures and was severely punished for his corruption.71 In Q10 and Q26, using the same verb, the quranic voice commands, “Recite to them the story of Noah/Abraham.”72 In Q3, the stories of Mary’s and Jesus’s births, and the punishment of those who disbelieve Jesus’s message, are narrated.73 The story is framed with “This we recite to you of the signs.”74 One last word to bring into the discussion is dhikr, translated as “remembrance,”75 and often used to demarcate stories in the Quran. For example, in Q14:5 God’s

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“How Is Muhammad a Better Storyteller Than I?”      43

mercy to Zachariah, and in Q19:2 Moses’s warning to his people against the Day of Judgment, are narrated following the word dhikr. The variation in terminology highlights that storytelling sessions were labeled with different verbs possibly creating different connotations regarding the nature and function of the story. Did it make a difference for the narrator or the audience if a narration was referred to as a h.adīth, qas.as., or dhikr in late antique Arabia? In the Quran, the content, length, or language of the stories does not seem to change based on the terminology used for storytelling. Any further conclusion is difficult to make without a critical exploration of the history of these words. Still, given that these terms were all used for different modes of hagiographic writing in Islamic literature later, it is probable that stories Muhammad narrated were received in different ways by his audience depending on how those narrations were identified. The receptions of the stories by Muhammad’s audiences likely also depended on the incremental discourse about prophets and saints in the early Islamic community. Preaching in two cities in the Hijaz over the course of more than twenty years,76 Muhammad retold, expanded, and reinterpreted stories. For example, in Q2, one of the Medinan chapters, he narrated the story of Adam;77 then, he transitioned to telling about Moses with brief allusions to the outlines of Exodus 3–40, such as the parting of the Red Sea, manna and quail, the event of the Golden Calf, and the revelation of the tablets, together with lengthy dialogues between Moses and his people.78 Then, in other Medinan chapters, he mentioned other motifs from the biblical story of Moses, such as the motif of forty years of wandering in the desert,79 and the drowning of the people of Pharaoh.80 Muhammad narrated and reinterpreted the story of Moses in its biblical contours over the course of multiple sessions of recitation. Angelika Neuwirth attributes the fragments of the story of Moses appearing in different quranic chapters to the developmental process of the Quran as an ongoing communication between Muhammad and his audience.81 Even though every reiteration of a story was a historically contingent event, some of these cases point to the continuous process of storytelling, composed of multiple sessions. To illustrate, Neuwirth notes that the exclusion of the Israelites, “an essential part of the Moses paradigm,” from the Moses story in Q28 is striking.82 These omissions are not problematic, however, if we do not take every storytelling instance as an isolated event. A detail missing in one storytelling session might have been included in another narration of the same

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story. We see, for example, different versions of the stories of Noah, Mary, Abraham, and of God and Satan’s dialogue, in a number of quranic chapters, with varying details. The changing details between multiple reiterations of a story points to an open format of storytelling that is worth further elaboration.

Open Storytelling In Q19, Muhammad narrates a dramatic dialogue between Abraham and his disbelieving father: And mention Abraham in the book. He was surely a man of truth, a prophet. When he said to his father, “O my father, why do you worship what cannot see nor hear nor benefit you in anything? O my father, some knowledge has come to me that has not come to you. Follow me and I will guide you along a straight path. O my father, do not serve Satan. Satan is a rebel against the Most Compassionate. O my father, I truly fear that some punishment from the Most Compassionate will touch you, and that you will become an ally of Satan.” He said, “O Abraham, are you turning away from my gods? If you do not desist, I shall surely stone you. Leave me for a long time!” He [Abraham] said, “Peace be upon you. I will pray my Lord to forgive you. He has surely been Most Gracious to me.” (Q19:41–47)

In Q14, also a Meccan chapter and possibly later than Q19, Muhammad narrates Abraham’s prayer to God. The audience by now knows the disbelief of the prophet’s father.83 In another Meccan chapter we see the name of Abraham’s disbelieving father, Azar; and this time Muhammad recites a more detailed dialogue between him and Abraham.84 In a Medinan chapter, Muhammad recites more stories about Abraham’s father, while exhorting the audience on family relations.85 With these separate narrations, the story of Abraham is completed over a long time.86 Other characters’ stories were also developed across several narratives in the Quran. The accounts of the creation of Adam were repeated, expanded, and altered in several narrations in Mecca and Medina.87 As Muhammad addressed and interacted with different communities, he appears to have reiterated narratives, bringing to the fore new details and plots of stories. In this economy of storytelling, some details were left out in some narrations, while others were added. This is not surprising, and does not indicate a lack of knowledge on the part of the narrator, but that the audience knows the background. A preacher’s storytelling was an ongoing process. In this continuous process, the audiences slowly become acquainted with the overarching story,

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“How Is Muhammad a Better Storyteller Than I?”      45

adding up the details given in different narrative sessions. As Sinai points out, the quranic audience, with such intratextuality, must have been able to recognize the allusions to the various versions of a narrative in different chapters.88 Although we cannot be sure that Muhammad’s audiences had a clear understanding of the boundaries and separations of the quranic chapters during Muhammad’s lifetime, the stories he narrated must have been incrementally understood. The concept of open storytelling highlights the longterm engagement of the audiences with Muhammad’s preaching. The open format is also observed on a smaller scale, when a story is narrated in one session but with various interruptions. To illustrate, according to some reports, Muhammad’s Companions in Medina asked him to narrate a beneficial story (qas.as.), and Muhammad recited Q55.89 This Quran chapter creates a rich narrative depicting a vivid image of God’s creation, his endowment of knowledge to humankind, the Day of Judgment, and heaven and hell, as well as the future life of believers and disbelievers there. Thirty-one of the seventy-eight verses repeat the formulaic question “So which of your Lord’s boons do you two deny?”90 If one removes the refrain, the rest of the verses build incrementally into a narrative: The Merciful has taught the Recitation, created man, taught him exposition. The sun and moon are in a reckoning. The stars and the trees bow down. He has raised up the Heaven, and He has set the balance, that you may not transgress in the balance. Perform weighing with justice and do not skimp in the balance. He has put down the earth for all the creatures; in it there are fruit and palm-trees bearing blossoms, husked grain and fragrant herbs. He created man from clay like potter’s clay, and He created the jinn from smokeless fire. Lord of the two easts and two wests. He has released the two seas [that] meet together, between them a barrier which they do not transgress. From which come pearls and coral. To Him belong the [ships] that run, raised up in the sea like way-marks. Everyone on it perishes, but the face of your Lord, which is full of glory and honor, endures. Those in the heavens and on earth ask Him [for favors]; every day He is engaged in some labor. (Q55:1–29, without the refrain)91

At the beginning of Q55, the hero of the narrative is God, and the audience is given a vivid description of his creation. In the rest of the chapter, the audience is led to imagine believers in heaven, and disbelievers in hell, again through detailed depictions. The refrain, repeated after almost every verse after its first recital in verse 13, certainly elevates the dramatic, poetic, and performative nature of the recitation. Moreover, as Neuwirth emphasizes, these refrains

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46      “How Is Muhammad a Better Storyteller Than I?”

create a rhythmical structure and rhymed composition that render these chapters liturgical and psalmodic.92 Neuwirth argues elsewhere that parable (mathal) was a homiletic tool that the Quran utilized,93 of which, according to this argument, Q55 is an example. Reading linguistic features as an aspect of the Quran’s ostensibly overarching liturgical character, however, diminishes the multifaceted nature of Muhammad’s public speech. Some of the features that scholars identify as liturgical, such as rhyming verses, refrains, and metric composition, might in fact have been products of the redaction process.94 Moreover, refrains and repeated phrases are known to have been included in storytelling sessions in antiquity, as seen above in chapter 1. Therefore, it is important to approach the storytelling of the Quran in its own right, and not only as an auxiliary feature to its liturgical function. To return to Q55, despite the continuous interference of the refrain, the audience completes the narrative journey from the creation, to the Day of Judgment, through heaven and hell. This is also a feature of the open mode of storytelling, in which a narrative is elongated with refrains or other oratorical tools like poetry and prayers.95 Such features are sometimes seen as intrusions in quranic narratives by scholars.96 But this is a restrictive understanding of ancient storytelling. Examples from Christianity and Islam show that storytelling sessions rarely consisted of rigid narratives, but were often punctuated by poetry, performative and prosodic elements, interpretations, and conversations with the audience, and sometimes continued over multiple sessions.97 These features were not “intrusions” upon storytelling but were organic parts of it. Thus, quranic narratives, products of Muhammad’s ongoing communication with his audiences,98 should be analyzed neither in isolation nor based on the final forms in which they appear in the quranic codex. It is more helpful to conceptualize the Quran’s narrativescape as consisting of constellations of interrelated and incremental narratives. Were there any differences in narratives when Muhammad recited a verse/ chapter on multiple occasions? Addition to or abrogation of quranic verses is well known in the Islamic tradition and extensively studied in modern scholarship.99 Moreover, the h.adīth literature includes reports in which we see Meccan chapters recited in Medina. For example, Q53 (Meccan) was recited by Muhammad’s Companion Zayd b. Thābit in Medina.100 Yet, I am not aware of any reports in which Muhammad himself is described as re-reciting previously proclaimed verses/chapters. It is difficult to imagine, however, that he recited quranic verses only once. In fact, Sinai demonstrates how some Medi-

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“How Is Muhammad a Better Storyteller Than I?”      47

nan chapters might have had Meccan origins.101 Therefore, it remains an interesting question whether a narrative in any chapter was not only expanded, but also revised in multiple recitations, which would be another important aspect of open storytelling. Analyzing the Quran, we see that Muhammad’s storytelling was a prime example of late antique hagiodiegesis. Dramatic addresses of listeners, questions directed at audiences, poetic interpolations, commentaries on the narratives, to cite a few features, place the quranic narratives in the storytelling world of Late Antiquity. We will now turn to the content of these narratives in order to contextualize Muhammad’s public speech within the broader biblical and hagiographic traditions.

the broader late antique context of quranic storytelling Several quranic narratives recited in Mecca and Medina are allusions to or reinterpretations of biblical-hagiographic tales familiar to the communities around Muhammad.102 A well-known example is Q3:33–43, the narration of Mary’s childhood at the temple and of the Nativity, closely paralleling the narrative in the Protoevangelium of James (1–9). In the same chapter, verse Q3:49, in which Jesus says to the Israelites that he will make a bird out of clay, is reminiscent of a famous story in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas (2:3), as scholars have pointed out.103 Another oft-cited example of the Quran echoing Christian traditions is Q18, a chapter that includes four distinct stories with close parallels in Christian homiletic and hagiographic tradition (to which we will return in chapter 3). One can cite several other examples of quranic narratives that display important linguistic and thematic similarities to late antique stories known from Jewish and Christian traditions. The broad popularity of the apocryphal gospels and hagiographic stories in the late antique Near East makes it plausible that these and similar stories were known, if only in generic outlines, to Muhammad and his audiences.104 This familiarity highlights the role of Muhammad’s audiences in the shaping of his prophetic career. The recitation of stories reminiscent of, or alluding to, such popular late antique narratives was contextualized by Muhammad’s audiences within the broader literatures and oratures in Late Antiquity. We, of course, know little about the Quran’s audience. Some quranic passages, for instance, speak about the learned among the children of Israel recognizing

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Muhammad’s message,105 and these passages “may mean no more than that they [Jews] recognize the stories about various biblical characters which he told in his preaching.”106 But mere “recognition” is an underestimation of the level of audience engagement in ancient storytelling. Muhammad’s audiences, like those of other storytellers, were active participants in the late antique scriptural universe. Many men and women in these audiences, we must remember, were narrative-literate; they recognized, affirmed, contested, and debated the stories they heard. Aziz al-Azmeh argues that the quranic biblicisms “need to be seen in terms of compositional, situational and communicative purposes and procedures of redaction, rather than being constitutive of the Quran’s textual architectonic.”107 Al-Azmeh states this in support of his argument for not seeing the Quran as a mosaic of biblical textual quotations, believing it to be misguiding and not useful to seek direct intertextualities, literary relations, and dependence between the biblical literature and the Quran.108 I agree with al-Azmeh and other scholars that one should study the Quran on its own terms, but approaching these biblicisms as completely new products of the early Islamic community, without any traceable connection to the broader biblical milieu, neglects the historical contingency of Muhammad’s quranic recitation, a significant content of which was biblical and other hagiographic narratives. Muhammad relied on the audiences’ knowledge of these stories. What was the source of this knowledge? The presence of Christian communities in and around Arabia in Late Antiquity is extensively discussed in scholarship.109 Christianity in regions such as North-West or South Arabia was manifested as durable and institutionally established; in others it most likely had more fluid contours, and was recognizable as a form of veneration of Jesus and the Cross.110 Regardless of the form of Christianity, however, these communities produced, developed, and elaborated on a prophetic folklore consisting of stories of biblical prophets and extrabiblical saints.111 Stories of ancient Arab prophets and heroes were also integral parts of this lore, which found expression through different oral and written means.112 That there is no strong evidence for the existence of an Arabic version of any gospels before the ninth century does not necessarily mean that Muhammad (or any other preacher in Arabia) did not know the biblical narratives.113 It is argued that there were at least partial lectionary books and private biblical writings in Arabic before Islam.114 More frequently, however, the biblical-hagiographic

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“How Is Muhammad a Better Storyteller Than I?”      49

stories circulated orally, in liturgical and other contexts, and Muhammad’s quranic recitation often included these oral versions of stories. Muhammad and the early Islamic community were familiar with biblical and hagiographic stories also through pictorial representations. For example, when Muhammad reconquered Mecca and destroyed the idols in the Kaʿba, as narrated in the Sīra, he encountered two icons of Jesus and one of Mary inside the temple.115 According to some reports, he covered the icons with his hands to make sure they were not destroyed, while other reports say that he chastised the pagan Meccans for venerating them. The main literary function of these reports is to glorify monotheism against idolatry. Thus, they do not reveal much about the ways these icons were perceived by the early Islamic community. Nevertheless, Muhammad and others among his followers surely knew about these icons before the destruction of idols in the Kaʿba. Therefore, this event should not be construed as a onetime encounter in isolation from the history of icons in and outside of the Hijaz. In fact, an Arab woman, according to some reports, joined Muslim pilgrims to Mecca to venerate Mary in the Kaʿba and said, “My father and my mother be your ransom! You are surely an Arab woman!”116 Iconographic representations were of course not only encountered in temples and shrines but were part of everyday life in early Islam. A significant group of reports mention pictorial depictions of prophets and saints on curtains, tapestries, cushions, and other artifacts in early Islamic households, including Muhammad’s.117 Such reports witness a milieu in which icons of Mary, Jesus, and other prophets bridged Christianity and Islam through public veneration and interpretations of pictorial representations. Such representations were contested and negotiated by Muslims, adding to the collective knowledge about and interpretation of stories. The presence of biblical and apocryphal material in the Quran is not explained by the mere availability of this material in late antique Arabia; it should be glossed by what this material did for the Quran.118 Similarly, pointing out the richness and wide circulation of narratives in late antique orature is not sufficient to explain why Muhammad narrated these stories. It is crucial for our understanding of Muhammad’s storytelling to recognize how he employed the broader biblical and hagiographic lore for the various orientations of the early Islamic community. For this, I now turn to the ways in which Muhammad used storytelling in his prophetic career. His example will highlight the different purposes for which hagiodiegesis was practiced in Late Antiquity.

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functions of storytelling in muhammad’s preaching What functions did Muhammad’s storytelling serve? This question is epistemologically no different from the question “What are the functions of narratives in the Quran?” In the case of both questions, one would begin with a literary analysis of the Quran. In theoretical framing, however, these questions are separate. To understand the functions of Muhammad’s storytelling, it is important to consider the quranic narratives beyond their static places in the Quran, and approach them as instances of a continuous public performance. The shift of focus from text as a complete object to narrative as a textualized performance enhances our understanding of Muhammad’s prophetic career, as well as of mechanisms of storytelling in antiquity in broader terms. Moreover, bringing in h.adīth and other nonquranic literature in which Muhammad is represented as a narrator of stories is a crucial component of this analysis, since the relationship between Muhammad and the Quran is not clear from the Quran itself. Muhammad’s storytelling played a critical role in (1) exhortation, (2) legislation, (3) mythmaking (mythopoiesis) through the creation of typologies, self-relating, development of etiologies, and reinterpretation, and (4) quranic-biblical exegesis. Let us look at these four goals of Muhammad’s storytelling separately.

Exhortation The Quran develops a prophetology according to which messengers of God narrate God’s signs as examples and instructions to people,119 a prophetology very much continuous with the biblical conceptualization of prophecy.120 In the Quran, Muhammad and other prophets are depicted as narrators and interpreters of stories. In Q40:23–46, for example, Moses relates the story of Noah, Joseph, and other prophets to the crowd before Pharaoh, who plots to throw Moses into fire.121 This and similar representations emphasize the understanding of storytelling as a pietistic practice in Islam, as it is in late antique Christianity. The quranic message is that prophets of old told beneficial stories, as does Muhammad now. Narrating stories of saintly figures, according to this model, made the narrator not only a performer but also an interpreter and exhorter, requiring the attention, imitation, and participation of the audience. Characters in the quranic stories of ancient prophets and saints were “moral paradigms, emblem-

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atic of all who are good and evil.”122 The Quran attests to this exemplary role of stories with verses such as “and we have certainly presented to the people in this Quran from every example.”123 Muhammad was a storyteller partly in this sense of the term: a narrator of biblical-hagiographic stories, exhorting and admonishing his listeners for their spiritual formation with examples of ancient prophets’ and saints’ piety and perseverance, as his biblical predecessors had done. Muhammad exhorted and admonished, with vivid descriptions of the punishment of those who disbelieved in the divine message. Prolepses of the postapocalyptic future, with stories depicting heaven and hell, as well as the dramatic dialogues between dwellers of heaven and those of hell,124 were important components of the narrativescape of the Quran and by implication of Muhammad’s storytelling. He is in fact called a nadhīr (the one who warns) numerous times in the Quran.125 The last fourteen verses of Q54, for example, openly warn Muhammad’s audience “that those who reject his message could suffer the same fate as the peoples of the punishment-stories.”126 Scholars argue, based on this and similar statements, for the eschatological character of Muhammad’s quranic proclamation, although the degree to which eschatology is emphasized in the Quran is a matter of debate.127 For our purposes, it is sufficient and significant to point out that hagiographic storytelling was as much a mirror for the future as it was a narrative of the past. In Muhammad’s quranic proclamations, in the eyes of Muslims, God exhorts and admonishes through Muhammad. Nevertheless, the h.adīth tradition emphasizes that Muhammad was an exhorter and an admonisher also in his nonquranic public performances. For example, in the variants of one report from the Mus.annaf (topically arranged h.adīth collection) of Ibn Abī Shayba (d. 849), one of the earliest collectors of h.adīth, Muhammad is referred to as a storyteller (qās..s) and a public admonisher (mudhakkir).128 In another report from the same collection, a Companion of Muhammad, Aws b. H . udhayfa al-Thaqafī (d. 678), says, “We sat with the Messenger of God, and he told us stories and admonished us.”129 Of course, the choice of terminology in referring to somebody as a storyteller (as opposed to preacher, for example) was shaped by the controversies between storytellers, scholars of h.adīth, and exegetes on the correct sources of historical and theological knowledge.130 The above reports use the verb qas..sa to denote storytelling, but in some other reports the verb is used for exegesis.131 For Muhammad’s context, however, before the formation of the h.adīth and exegesis proper, it would be misleading

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to separate storytelling from quranic interpretation, and the latter from exhortation and admonition. According to the following report, Muhammad narrates about the prophet Abraham on the Day of Resurrection, a postapocalyptic story that is not in the Quran. The narrative details in this story complete the many quranic narratives of Abraham, pointing at the continuous and intertwined nature of Muhammad’s quranic recitation and other public addresses: Narrated Abū Hurayra: The Prophet said, “On the Day of Resurrection Abraham will meet his father Āzar whose face will be dark and covered with dust. Abraham will say (to him): ‘Did not I tell you not to disobey me?’ His father will reply: ‘Today I will not disobey you.’ Abraham will say: ‘O Lord! You promised me not to disgrace me on the Day of Resurrection; and what will be more disgraceful to me than cursing and dishonoring my father?’ Then Allah will say (to him): ‘I have forbidden paradise for the disbelievers.’ Then he will be addressed, ‘O Abraham! Look! What is underneath your feet?’ He will look and there will see a wolf bloodstained, which will be caught by the legs and thrown in the Fire.”132

These and similar reports show that later communities remembered Muhammad as a storyteller and a warner, who expanded the quranic narratives with extraquranic exhortations. Whether or not it carries a kernel of historicity, for the purposes of the current analysis this report’s importance lies in the fact that the Islamic community reckoned it plausible for Muhammad to tell exhortative-exegetical stories about quranic characters expanding their stories. Muhammad is also remembered to have narrated exhortative and admonishing stories unrelated to the Quran. To illustrate, in variants of a report transmitted on the authority of the abovementioned Abū Hurayra, Muhammad narrates the story of the holy man Jurayj (George).133 The story has no resonance with any quranic narrative. According to the tradition, Jurayj was an ascetic, living in solitude in a cell, refusing his mother’s calls to visit her. His mother gets angry at him and sends a prostitute to seduce him. The woman is unable to interrupt Jurayj’s asceticism and goes to a shepherd in order to become pregnant with a child. She claims the child is Jurayj’s son, but the infant speaks and declares that he is the shepherd’s son. The narrative in this h.adīth involves familiar tropes from late antique hagiography, such as withdrawal from society at the expense of family ties, resisting seduction, revealing of truth via miracle. The parallelisms between the Islamic Jurayj story and a passage in the Life of Gregory Thaumaturgus have indeed been pointed out.134 Despite the onomastic similarity (George—Jurayj), the plots of these two

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stories are considerably different. George, not moved by the woman, accepts that her false monetary claims before God reveals the truth. In contrast, the woman in the story of Jurayj accuses him of fornication before the infant miraculously reveals the truth. There is no clear Vorlage for the Islamic story of Jurayj. Still, the example indicates that Muhammad was remembered to have broad knowledge of Christian hagiography and used it for exhorting his community.

Ritual Practice and Legislation Muhammad’s storytelling often prescribed, described, and circumscribed ritual practice and other legal regulations.135 One example is the prescription of pilgrimage through the story of Abraham in Q22:25–36.136 Another one is the story of the sacrifice of a red heifer, narrated in Q2:67–73;137 as Joseph Lowry demonstrates, this passage could be read in legal terms in relation to the preceding verses, which rephrase the Decalogue.138 There are also reports in which Muhammad narrates stories of prophets to describe other pietistic and moral practices. In an interesting example, Muhammad, with a story about Moses bathing naked, prescribes covering the body parts while bathing.139 As Lowry points out, it is unclear how the quranic passages identified as “legal” by scholars were originally received.140 Therefore, I do not suggest an easy distinction between exhortative and legally binding passages of the Quran or h.adīth. Nevertheless, some narratives might have been interpreted as legalistic by Muhammad’s audiences, especially when they are framed by legal discourse during public preaching. The intertwined relationship between storytelling and legal discourse in antiquity thus finds a direct reverberation in the early Islamic community.141

Mythopoiesis The prophetic and hagiographic stories Muhammad narrated were also tools for Islamic mythopoiesis (mythmaking). With stories, Muhammad’s image developed as a prophet, typologically complying with the ancient prophets whose stories, images, and personas were expanded through continuous quranic proclamation. Scholars have demonstrated how prophetic narratives in the Quran constituted, if loosely, tropes of prophethood which Muhammad exemplified and of which he represented the culmination.142 The “quranic accounts of prior messengers and prophets,” in Michael Zwettler’s words, “are expressly intended to be understood as typological prefigurements and representations of

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which the person of Muhammad, Prophet and Messenger of God, provide the corresponding recapitulation and fulfillment—the antitype.”143 Repetition of these typologies through storytelling, under various names of biblical and nonbiblical prophets, elucidated the Islamic notion of prophethood, embodied by Muhammad, for his audiences. Creating and reinforcing typologies can be construed as the first step of the quranic mythopoiesis, after which came self-relating. Muhammad’s recitation of stories of ancient prophets appear to have functioned as tools for contextualizing and clarifying his personal experiences.144 As Neuwirth puts it, “What happens in the real world of the community mirrors what already happened in the biblical world.”145 For example, Muhammad’s recital of the Moses story in Q79:15–26, narrating the prophet’s call to mission, his confrontation with Pharaoh, and the punishment of the latter by God, was an interpretive process for contextualizing his own rejection in Mecca, especially the challenge by the cult of the three deities, Manāt, al-Lāt, and al-ʿUzza, attested in Q53.146 Muhammad became a second Moses through his quranic recitation of the biblical prophet.147 Similarly, in the Medinan Q66, Muhammad’s recitation of the stories of believing and disbelieving women from biblical lore appears to have been an interpretation of one of his own family situations. Q66:3 says: “When the Prophet confided a certain matter to one of his wives, but she divulged it, and God showed it to him, he made known part of it and held back part of it. When he informed her of it, she said, ‘Who informed you of this?’ He replied, ‘The Knower, the Aware informed me.’ ” After thus referring to a personal anecdote, Muhammad’s recitation exhorts the audience on repentance, through the stories of Noah’s and Lot’s wives, two women who could not live up to prophetic standards, and the stories of the believing wife of Pharaoh, as well as Mary, are brought to the fore as comparisons: God has made an example for the disbelievers: the wife of Noah and the wife of Lot. They were married to two of our righteous servants, but they betrayed them. So [their husbands] were of no benefit to them against God. They were told, “Enter the Fire, along with others!” And God has made an example for the believers: the wife of Pharaoh, who prayed, “My Lord, build for me a house near you in Paradise and deliver me from Pharaoh and his work, and save me from the people who do wrong.” And Mary, the daughter of Amram, who guarded her chastity; and we breathed into it [her womb] from our spirit. And she testified to the words of her Lord and His Scriptures, and was one of the obedient. (Q66:10–12)

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The fuller stories of Noah’s and Lot’s people, as disbelievers and betrayers, were already narrated and developed in the Meccan period.148 In the abovequoted Medinan chapter, we see that the images of these disbelieving family members, whose eternal punishment Muhammad’s audience was now well familiar with, were recited to contextualize Muhammad’s family affairs. The exegetical tradition provides diverse accounts with regard to what the secret was, which wife revealed it, and to whom it was revealed.149 Despite the unclarity of the details, such intratextual reading of the Quran points to the function of storytelling in the second level of quranic mythopoiesis, namely, relating Muhammad’s experiences to the prophetic typologies with which his audience was assumed to be familiar. The third step of the mythopoiesis process was replacing the biblical myth. Muhammad’s recitation of the stories of prophets and saints served as an exegesis that resulted in the creation of new memories and etiologies through reinterpretation and recontextualization of the prophetic, saintly, and heroic personas.150 The knowledge of biblical prophets and heroes was possibly limited to general outlines of their stories in Arabia, as pointed out above. Muhammad’s public speech brought to the fore the names of Abraham, Moses, Noah, Joseph, Mary, and others and attributed to them new stories,151 often merging them into a collective persona,152 or into his own prophetic experience. As Muhammad became the culmination of the prophetic archetype, he also became the face and sound of the biblical names,153 their preIslamic stories, if known at all, becoming more ambiguous. H . adīth reports in which Muhammad likens himself and some of his prominent companions to ancient prophets indicate the continuation of this process. For instance, in the S. ah.īh. of Bukhārī (d. 870), one of the major h.adīth collections, there are a number of reports in which Muhammad physically likens himself to Abraham, in one of them directly saying, “If you want to see Abraham, then look at [me].”154 In the Sahīfa of Hammām b. Munabbih (d. 719), who was one of the early traditionists from South Arabia, Muhammad is likewise reported to emphasize the similarity and proximity between Jesus and himself.155 In a variant report, Muhammad says, “I saw Jesus, Son of Mary, and I saw nearest in resemblance with him was ʿUrwa b. Masʿūd [a Companion of Muhammad].”156 The broader context of many of these reports is Muhammad’s miraculous night journey to Jerusalem, after which, reports emphasize, Muhammad narrated to his community all of the prophets he saw as he ascended to the presence of God.157 The reports are relevant, nevertheless,

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in that they participate in the process of reimagining ancient prophets in early Islam that began with Muhammad’s quranic proclamation and his storytelling. This practice, namely, emphasizing physical similarities between living holy men and biblical prophets, is well known from late antique hagiography.158 Just as ascetics of the Egyptian desert became the embodiments of biblical prophets and even biblical “monuments” in the landscape through such attributions,159 Muhammad became an embodiment of the biblical past.

Biblical-Quranic Exegesis Reciting, narrating, and reinterpreting stories of prophets and saints, Muhammad was also a public exegete, contributing to the expansive world of biblical interpretation.160 Scholars have pointed out the public exegetical narratives that filtered through confessional boundaries and possibly found their way into the Quran and its hermeneutics.161 Yet, one should conceptualize Muhammad’s public speech not only as utilizing these folk interpretations, but also as generating, expanding, and conversing with them.162 This is externally attested in the presumably seventh-century Armenian Chronicle of Sebeos, in which Muhammad is reported to have been well acquainted with the story of Moses.163 The voluminous corpus of reports from the Islamic tradition, which represents Muhammad as telling extraquranic stories of prophets and saints, also affirms Muhammad’s biblical-exegetical storytelling. The literary expressions of Muhammad’s extraquranic speech about biblical events and persons are often different from the ways those stories were narrated in the Quran. This difference is partly because of the generic differences between the two forms of writing—the Quran and h.adīth. The difference is also there because the Quran is a recitation of a particular memory and interpretation of biblical events and persons, whereas the h.adīth interpreted quranic as well as extraquranic stories of prophets and saints.164 Taking into account both modes of expression shows the breadth of Muhammad’s public exegesis, of the Bible and the Quran. For example, Muhammad is reported to have narrated the following story, a dialogue between Adam and Moses: Narrated Abū Hurayra: Allah’s Messenger said, “Adam and Moses argued with each other. Moses said to Adam, ‘You are Adam whose mistake expelled you from paradise.’ Adam said to him, ‘You are Moses whom Allah selected as His Messenger and as the one to whom He spoke directly; yet you blame me for a thing which had already been preordained for me by Allah before my creation?’ Allah’s Messenger said twice, ‘So Adam overpowered Moses.’ ”165

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There is no dialogue between Adam and Moses in the Quran, but this brief h.adīth gives us a broader narrative context for the quranic passages where the stories of Adam and Moses are narrated immediately following each other.166 A particular variant of this dialogue is interesting in that it depicts Moses as having the knowledge of everything;167 whereas, in the Quran, in Q2:31–33, Adam receives such all-encompassing knowledge. The variations in the tradition notwithstanding, the possible alignment of this h.adīth with the quranic discourse is interesting. Although the intricate relationship between the development of exegesis and of h.adīth is beyond the scope of this chapter, I find it useful to briefly turn to the Quran here. In Q2:40–74, while still in paradise, Adam is given the knowledge of everything. Briefly after this episode, the People of Israel are addressed, and the story of Moses is narrated, with the frequent use of the second-person plural pronoun.168 The above h.adīth, assuming that Muhammad indeed narrated a similar story, participates in the interpretations of these two quranic-biblical characters. The report, considered together with the passages about Adam and Moses, indicates that Muhammad preached to the Jews in his audience about the legitimacy of Moses and the claims about Moses’s superiority over other prophets. Given the other h.adīth reports about Moses in the same book of the S. ah.īh. that contest the role of Moses,169 we can point to a new context for the narration of these stories. With Muhammad’s storytelling, Moses’s all-encompassing knowledge is questioned and contested before Muhammad’s Jewish audiences. This reorientation is visible if we consider, for example, Philo of Alexandria’s (first-century CE) portrayal of Moses and Adam.170 In this text, while Moses appears as the narrator of the divine history, Adam’s naming of animals is told to be God’s testing human ability to reason. This superiority of Moses and vulnerability of Adam are flipped in the narration of Muhammad. As mentioned above, according to some h.adīth reports, Muhammad narrated stories that he did not recite as a part of the quranic proclamation. For example, in the following report he participates in the public exegetical tradition of the story of the Judgment of Solomon,171 with an abbreviated yet close version of the story: Narrated Abū Hurayra: “Allah’s Apostle said: ‘There were two women, each of whom had a child with her. A wolf came and took away the child of one of them, whereupon the other said, “It has taken your child.” The first said, “But it has taken your child.” So, they both carried the case before David who judged that the living

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child be given to the elder lady. So, both of them went to Solomon the son of David and informed him (of the case). He said, “Bring me a knife so as to cut the child into two pieces and distribute it between them.” The younger lady said, “May Allah be merciful to you! Don’t do that, for it is her (i.e. the other lady’s) child.” So, he gave the child to the younger lady.’ ”172

Solomon’s character is developed as a wise and just king in the Quran.173 In Q21:78–79, for example, Solomon and David judge concerning the fields of two men, and in Q27:7–44, he is again portrayed as a just king with esoteric knowledge and wisdom. The story of the two women that Muhammad narrates, however, is not found in the Quran, although it is a well-known episode in the biblical tradition.174 Muhammad’s version of the story closely parallels the biblical version, except for minor variations in detail. For example, the women are not called prostitutes in his version; and the baby is snatched by a wolf. Because of the lack of a context, it is difficult to reconstruct the occasion on which Muhammad narrated this extraquranic story. But this narrative, closely echoing the biblical version, is in line with the quranic representation of Solomon as a wise and just king. Reports in which Muhammad uses phrases and proverbs known from the biblical realm are well known.175 The above h.adīth, which contains the full narrative of King Solomon, points at narrative transmission, and not at “borrowing” of phraseology. Of course, this and such reports might be falsely attributed to Muhammad or the transmitter Abū Hurayra at a later time.176 Nevertheless, their preservation in the tradition shows that Muhammad was remembered to have participated in the broader biblical milieu not only with his quranic preaching, but also with his extraquranic speech and storytelling. As the knowledge of biblical and hagiographic stories grew in Islam, the image of Muhammad as a storyteller also grew. What can one say about the polemical nature of Muhammad’s storytelling? The polemical discourse of the Quran, which corrects and de-mythifies the biblical narratives, thereby contributing to a reinterpretation and reorientation of stories, should always be considered against the backdrop of ancient storytelling.177 Not every omission in plot or alteration in vocabulary was intentional. Neuwirth, for example, argues that the verse “[Mary] withdrew from her people to an eastern place”178 “corrects” the biblical theology by muting the fact that in Christian theology Mary’s womb typologically corresponds to the eastern gate of the temple, which is not seen in the quranic narrative.179 Similarly, Sinai argues that the quranic narratives are silent about Adam being

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created in God’s image, and this silence was an intentional omission to emphasize the quranic theology of God being essentially different from humans.180 This sort of comparison, and the subsequent argumentum ex silentio, neglect the dynamics of storytelling in antiquity, and overemphasize the agency of Muhammad in altering biblical narratives. Surely, the Quran developed prominent theological concepts, and Muhammad’s quranic recitation and storytelling accordingly offered new exegetical possibilities to biblical narratives, replacing some of the older ones. Yet, exegetical storytelling was a common practice in Late Antiquity, which resulted in many stories being conflated, changed, and silenced already before Muhammad’s quranic proclamation began.181 He was not a novelty in but a participant of this multivocal realm of interpretation. The emphasis on the pre-Muhammad and post-Muhammad chronology, a product of Islamic historiography, and the implied theological interference of the Quran, portray pre-Islamic Late Antiquity as a theologically stable time and undermine the early Islamic community’s embeddedness in that milieu. The early Islamic reiteration of biblical narratives did not constitute an overarching, monotypic discourse toward Christian (and Jewish) communities in the Hijaz. Muhammad and the early Islamic community around him had multifaceted approaches to Christians and Christianity around them. For example, the quranic attitude toward Jesus and those who believe in his message is generally positive.182 In the mentions of Jesus’s disciples in three Medinan chapters, they are portrayed as true believers, rightly guided by God.183 Similarly, monks and ascetics are portrayed in a positive light in the Quran, a rhetorical distinction on which scholars have commented.184 I will discuss the issue of Islamic perception of Christians further in the forthcoming chapters. Suffice it to say here that the Islamic approach toward monasticism/ asceticism, visible in the positive representations in the Quran, differed from the Islamic approach and reaction to institutional Christianity. Muhammad’s storytelling about Christians past and present, therefore, cannot be simply qualified as polemical. As discussed above, the Quran offers insights into the spectrum of oppositional reactions of Muhammad’s listeners to his preaching. Such audience responses, according to the quranic discourse, were indications of impiety and irreverence. Those who questioned Muhammad’s divine revelation were admonished and reprimanded for these acts in the Quran. This, too, can be read as polemical language. These passages, on the other hand, highlight

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inquisition, questioning, assessment, emotion, and other types of audience responses, which, as we have seen for Christianity, were common in ancient storytelling sessions.185 In one report, for example, Muhammad says, “You will not cease putting question after question, until one of you would even say: ‘It is God who created the creation, but who has created God?’ ”186 The representations of audiences in the Quran and in later Islamic literature point to a multivocal community around Muhammad. This multivocality involved the response of the audiences not only to Muhammad’s preaching, but also to other narrators of stories, as observed in the following verse: They will say, “Three, and their dog was the fourth of them.” They will say, “Five, and their dog the sixth of them,” guessing at the invisible. They will say, “Seven, and their dog the eighth of them.” Say, “My Lord is well aware of their number. Only a few know them.” So, dispute concerning them only on a clear issue; and do not ask any of them for an opinion about them. (Q18:22)

This quranic verse refers to the story of the Companions of the Cave, and mentions people narrating different versions of the story, a few among whom knew the truth.187 The passage points to the various narrators of saints’ stories in the community around Muhammad, and it emphasizes the inquisitive nature of their audiences—exactly how many people fell asleep in the cave? Similarly, the Quran warns the audience against disputing the story about Abraham, which is yet another acknowledgment of public narrators with varying degrees of narrative literacy.188 These representations point to a widespread knowledge about stories of prophets and saints, which, in various reiterations, were circulated, debated, and transmitted within and beyond Muhammad’s community with different levels of authority. The social boundaries and distinctions among the various types of public narrators were probably not always well defined for Muhammad’s audiences. He was one of the preachers in his community, one among many who received divine revelation,189 who perhaps gradually became the most charismatic. Despite the multiplicity of preachers and storytellers in the community in which Muhammad preached, the early community of believers, during and after his lifetime, took an active role in spreading Muhammad’s message. As Muhammad’s quranic preaching found new audiences in and outside of the Hijaz, it was further put in conversation with biblical concepts and stories. These conversations increased transmissions of stories from Christianity into

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Islam. In the final section of this chapter, I will explore the storytellers in the early Islamic community and their role in contextualizing Muhammad and the Quran within the broader world of Late Antiquity.

narrating stories after muhammad Quranic preaching precedes the Quran. Muhammad’s message and narrations, Islamic literature emphasizes, reached the communities outside of the Hijaz before the codification of the Quran.190 A group of Companions emigrated to Abyssinia.191 Another group was given estates in Ascalon in Palestine.192 Abū al-Dardā (d. 652) is reported to have gone to Damascus to “teach the people the Book of their Lord and the Sunnah of the Prophet and pray with them.”193 Qatāda b. Diʿāma, a Successor, is remembered to have argued on Islamic topics based on teachings of the Torah in Basra.194 Likewise, Kurdūs b. al-ʿAbbās “used to read the pre-Islamic Scriptures and speak about the Gospel and the Torah” in Kufa.195 Numerous reports thus claim that there was a continuous movement from the Hijaz toward the new frontiers of the Islamic state that enabled Muhammad’s preaching to appear side by side with Christian and Jewish preaching. The literary representations perhaps cannot be taken to show the exact details of the movement of people and ideas. Still, these reports are important in two ways: First, they most probably carry a kernel of truth: the narratives in the Quran and those about Muhammad reached broad audiences with the expansion of the Islamic state, before the codification of the Quran. Second, Muslims seem to have remembered the spread of Muhammad’s message on par with the apostles’ preaching Jesus’s message. Who were the public speakers and narrators of stories in the early Islamic community? Roberto Tottoli identifies storytellers and converts as two “channels through which a growing mass of stories and legends on the creation of the world and the biblical prophets started to circulate among Muslims” from the time of Muhammad’s death.196 Andrew Bannister also argues for the extensive impact of storytellers in the shaping and circulation of the memory of Muhammad, as well as biblical stories, in the early Islamic community.197 The argument is helpful in highlighting the popularity of storytellers and their narrations of biblical stories in early Islam. This approach, however, creates two misconceptualized dichotomies. It separates Muhammad’s lifetime from the post-Muhammad transmissions, whereas biblical knowledge and stories

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had already been transmitted and circulated among Muhammad’s Muslim and non-Muslim audiences. Moreover, Tottoli’s presentation of storytellers and converts as two distinct categories is misleading, for these two groups often overlapped during and after Muhammad’s lifetime.198 To name a few of the prominent storytellers in the early Islamic community, the first caliph Abū Bakr (d. 634) is reported to be a storyteller, both narrating anecdotes about Muhammad and drawing material from pre-Islamic Arabian lore.199 The semilegendary Tamīm al-Dārī (d. 661), who was a Christian ascetic prior to his conversion to Islam, is also remembered to have narrated stories of Muhammad, as well as Jewish and Christian ones,200 as did the Companion Abū al-Dardā (d. 652).201 Ibn ʿAbbās (d. 687), one of the earliest Quran scholars, named “the father of tafsīr,” was among the best-known transmitters of reports.202 For example, according to the variants of one report, people say that a storyteller in Kufa was narrating stories about Moses and his companion mentioned in Q18,203 and they asked Ibn ʿAbbās about the correct version of the story, after which Ibn ʿAbbās narrated the whole story on the authority of Muhammad.204 Caliph ʿUmar b. al-Khat.t.āb (d. 644), according to reports, met Kaʿb al-Ah.bār (a Jewish convert to Islam) in Jerusalem.205 He returned to Medina with this new convert and ordered Kaʿb to relate to the people of Medina what he read in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. Kaʿb is in fact known for transmitting voluminous biblical material to Islam, thoroughly cited in exegetical and historiographical works.206 Ibn ʿAbbās and Kaʿb alAh.bār, like Muhammad, are thus epitomes of narrative literacy in Late Antiquity. ʿĀʾisha bt. Abū Bakr (d. 678) and Umm Salama (d. 683), two of Muhammad’s wives, as well as other women in Muhammad’s family, are also often depicted as telling stories about Muhammad, the circumstances under which he received revelation, and his interpretations of various quranic verses.207 Certainly their biographical sketches were reservoirs for a certain set of information about Muhammad’s life, and the direct speech given to them in later reports is a highly embellished literary construct. Still, allowing space for their agency and voice is essential for understanding early Islamic communities. As in the Jewish and Christian tradition,208 women in the early Islamic community likely played a role in the shaping and transmission of knowledge. Another narrator, we are told, was Salmān al-Fārisī, who had been allegedly instructed by a number of monks during his pre-Islamic religious experiences, and narrated his own story in the community around Muhammad.209 The

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“How Is Muhammad a Better Storyteller Than I?”      63

trope of pre-Islamic monotheists often fulfilled the semiotic role of confirming Muhammad’s message and prophethood, to which we will return in chapter 5.210 Their memory, on the other hand, was also a significant tool presenting religious and cultural values of the time in which their hagiographic images were developed. Salmān’s story, fashioned as his own narration in the Sīra, emphasizes the practice of ascetics preaching stories to their audiences as a valuable symbol for the Islamic religious koinē as late as the eighth century and beyond. Judges were also portrayed as public storytellers. Abū Idrīs al-Khawlānī (d. ca. 700), for example, a judge and preacher in Damascus under the patronage of the caliph ʿAbd al-Malik (d. 705), is reported to have narrated the ascetic practices of John the Baptist.211 The early Islamic community was bustling with stories, debate, and biblical interpretation in and outside of the Hijaz. As the above examples show, the Companions of Muhammad and the Successors sat at the intersection of piety and storytelling, shaping and preserving memories of Muhammad.212 They transmitted anecdotes about Muhammad’s life events, practices, and speeches, as well as about the interpretation of quranic verses.213 As a result, the persona of Muhammad was aligned with the broader biblical knowledge in the early Islamic community. This process of interpreting Muhammad’s experiences in light of the stories of prophets and saints continued in two ways. Firstly, early generations of Muslims expanded Muhammad’s narrations about biblical persons and events. For example, in one report Ibn ʿAbbās narrates the story of Abraham and Hagar in a rather lengthy narrative.214 Within his narrative, there are two brief direct quotations from Muhammad. In one of them Muhammad says, “If she [Hagar] had left the water, it would have been flowing on the surface of the earth.” In the second quotation, Muhammad says, “Because of Abraham’s invocation there are blessings (in Mecca).” Thus, Ibn ʿAbbās narrates the story of Abraham by interweaving sayings from Muhammad into his own knowledge of the narrative. Alternatively, of course, exegetes of the Quran (or collectors of their reports) might have attributed the stories to Muhammad. We mentioned above two reports, by Abū Hurayra and Ibn ʿAbbās, who supposedly narrated the stories of the Judgment of Solomon and the Companions of the Cave, respectively, on the authority of Muhammad. It is possible that Muhammad knew and narrated these extraquranic stories to his audiences. But it is also likely that some such reports are later attributions to Muhammad.215 In either case,

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there seems to be an expansion of knowledge about prophets and saints, mentioned in the Quran or not. And by using Muhammad’s public speech as a reservoir of traditions, Muslims created space to preserve and interpret stories of the divine past. Secondly, as the knowledge about prophets and saints gradually increased in early Islamic communities, Muslims used late antique literary tropes to describe and narrate stories about Muhammad.216 Biblical and hagiographic stories were interwoven into the Islamic timeframe, while Muhammad was integrated into the broader scriptural universe. To illustrate, some early exegetes and transmitters narrated the story of Muhammad receiving inspiration from Satan and mistaking it for divine speech, the well-known incident of the Satanic Verses.217 As Uri Rubin and Shahab Ahmed point out, the narration of this story indicates the early Islamic community’s participation in the broader scriptural universe through their representation of Muhammad with familiar hagiographic tropes, such as satanic temptation, fallibility of prophets and holy men, correction of mistakes, and repentance.218 Similarly, it has been pointed out that the Sīra of Ibn Ish.āq reads like a late antique saint’s life, with reports about Muhammad’s miraculous conception, birth, and childhood, the early signs of his prophethood, and his intermittent seclusion and prayer away from everyday society.219 The reports Ibn Ish.āq collected, despite the later editorial processes, testify to early transmitters’ narrations being shaped by hagiographic tropes, terms, and expressions from the late antique milieu of piety and asceticism.220 While Muhammad was remembered to interpret stories of prophets and saints, his persona became similar to them in Islamic imagination. A prominent manifestation of this process was the circulation of the reports in which people from Mecca go to the court of the Byzantines (or of the king of China in some variations) and identify the pictorial representations of biblical prophets, including Muhammad.221 In some versions of the story, the Muslims recognize all of the prophets with the help of their attributes: Noah with the ark, Moses with a rod, Jesus on a donkey. The reports highlight that the knowledge of iconographic vocabulary and narrative literacy were concerns for Muslims, as was negotiating the place of Muhammad within the biblical tradition. Muhammad lived, sounded, and looked like the prophets and saints he narrated about. Muhammad’s prophetic career marks a significant period during which a group of stories of prophets, saints, and heroes was preached to a community over the course of approximately two decades. Although most of the stories,

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as well as the practice of storytelling, were familiar to his audiences, his public speech constitutes a foundation for the perennial biblical-hagiographic transmissions from Christianity (and from other religious traditions) to the early Islamic community, setting the precedents of novel Islamic discurses. With storytelling, Muhammad exhorted and admonished his audiences, described ritual practice, placed himself in the lineage of biblical prophets, altered memories attributed to them, and participated in broader exegetical conversations. He established his and his Companions’ sanctity through the recitation and reinterpretation of the already circulating knowledge about ancient prophets and holy men and women. While he thus took his place in the scriptural universe of Late Antiquity, the quranic discourse and Muhammad’s life themselves extended this universe through the narrations of storytellers during and after his lifetime. Members of the early Islamic community referred to the broader biblical and hagiographic material to elucidate quranic narratives, and as a result of this increasing knowledge, memories of Muhammad and the community around him were reshaped in later Islamic tradition. The next chapter analyzes these encounters and engagements through the example of a Quran chapter, Q18, and its interpretive tradition.

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chapter 3

“Ask Him about the Youths” Narrating the Quran with Christian Saints

A few years after Muhammad started preaching in Mecca, his opponents wanted to put him to test to challenge the authenticity of his prophecy. They consulted Jewish rabbis in Medina about the most effective way to interrogate him. The rabbis suggested that they ask Muhammad the story of the Youths, the Traveler, and the Spirit. Muhammad took fifteen days to respond, but in the end, he passed the test. He recited the stories that eventually made the quranic chapter of the Cave (Q18). With the display of his knowledge of stories, Muhammad’s prophecy was affirmed.1 Similar reports preserved in Islamic texts commemorate this moment of a storytelling challenge in seventh-century Arabia. The scriptural knowledge of Jews (and Christians in some versions) is presented as a standard against which Muhammad’s narrative literacy is measured. Muhammad’s knowledge and interpretation of stories was on par with Jewish and Christian knowledge, so the Islamic tradition reassured with these reports about the occasions of revelation of the Quran chapter known as the Cave. The above summary is the earliest iteration of the story of Muhammad’s hagiographic knowledge being put to challenge, which is found in the Sīra and another early biography of Muhammad.2 A slightly later version uses the quranic terminology for the identification of these stories and says that Muhammad was asked to narrate the story of the Companions of the Cave, the Two-Horned, and the Spirit.3 A still later (tenth-century) exegete gives a different version and reports that pagan Meccans went to Najran in South Arabia and consulted Jews and Christians there on how to interrogate 66

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Muhammad; they told the Meccans to ask him about the Youths, Moses and his servant, and the Two-Horned, as well as the Hour.4 Thus, in a group of reports, Q18 is framed as an interrogation and proof of Muhammad’s knowledge.5 In earlier versions of these reports, the Jews being consulted are placed in the Hijaz, while in later ones Jews and Christians are consulted together, and they are placed in Najran. This reorientation indicates that between the eighth and the tenth centuries, Muslims debated about where on the map to locate the source of information about stories about the divine past. By focusing on Q18, this chapter demonstrates that continued engagement with and increasing knowledge of Christian hagiography in Islam resulted in such reorientations of Islamic memories of Muhammad’s storytelling. Muhammad’s quranic recitation and other public speech, as shown in the previous chapter, at times echoed prophets’ and saints’ stories known from late antique Christian lore. As early as Muhammad’s lifetime, his audiences contextualized, discussed, and contested these stories. This engagement continued after the codification of the Quran. Numerous Companions, Successors, and scholars of the Quran in the following generations consulted Christian (and Jewish) traditions in order to interpret Muhammad’s quranic preaching. How were Muhammad’s narrations of saints’ stories related to later exegetes’ use of hagiographic material to elucidate quranic passages? In what follows, I analyze the conversation between the Christian biblicalhagiographic realm and Q18, the Cave, and its exegesis. Q18 is composed of 110 verses, some forming brief narratives, some addressing Muhammad, others exhorting and admonishing the audience. Like most Quran chapters that include narratives, Q18 does not form a unified, clear narrative; it rather has multiple narrative units, the separation of which has been a matter of debate.6 In Q18 Muhammad narrated four stories: the Companions of the Cave (Q18:9–26), the Rich Man and the Poor Man (Q18:32–44), Moses and the Servant of God (Q18:60–82), and the Two-Horned (Q18:83–100). Although the exact separation of these narratives is debated, the abovementioned passages can all be identified as distinct narrative units, with an unfolding of a sequence of events and a certain degree of character development.7 These quranic narratives resonate with certain biblical, homiletic, and hagiographic traditions in Late Antiquity, and the first part of this chapter will examine these cross-confessional echoes. Situating them within the context of Muhammad’s prophetic career greatly enhances our understanding of the early Islamic community’s participation in the late antique world of storytelling.

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In the second half of this chapter, I analyze the exegetical traditions of the stories in Q18 with a focus on Muslim scholars’ ongoing engagement with Christian biblical-hagiographic material. For this, I will mostly focus on the Tafsīr of al-T.abarī, the tenth-century compendium of traditions epitomizing the classical expression of quranic exegesis.8 I will also include other early works, such as the Tafsīr of Muqātil b. Sulaymān (d. 767),9 an early traditionist who relied heavily on information from the “People of the Book,” and whose work is not included in al-T.abarī’s compilation;10 and the Tafsīr of al-Qummī,11 a tenth-century shīʿī exegete.12 I will also occasionally refer to works that comment on quranic events and persons, such as the Sīra, although technically they are not categorized as exegeses. The analysis of the formation and interpretation of Q18 demonstrates how stories in the Quran were diachronically reinterpreted in the Islamic tradition against the backdrop of continued transmissions of Christian hagiography into Islam, and how these articulations reshaped the memories of the pre-Islamic time and the early Islamic community around Muhammad.

q18: the cave Q18 opens with these verses: Praise to God, who has sent down the book to his servant, allowing no crookedness in it—straight, to warn of a severe torment from Him, and to bring good news to the believers who do righteous deeds that they will have a fair reward, in which they will stay forever; and to warn those who say, “God has offspring.” They have no knowledge of it, nor did their forefathers. It is a terrible claim that comes from their mouths. They speak nothing but lie. (Q18:1–5)

After this dramatic, arguably anti-Christian opening,13 the following verses address Muhammad and say that God tests people to identify those who believe: Perhaps you will grieve yourself to death over their denial, if they disbelieve in this message. We indeed have made all that is on the earth an adornment for it, to test which of them is best in deed. And we will certainly reduce whatever is on it to barren dust. (Q18:6–8)

Immediately after the verses in which God says he tests (linabluwahum) people to distinguish those with the best deeds, Q18 narrates the story of the Companions of the Cave (as.h.āb al-kahf) (Q18:9–26), with an emphasis on

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God’s oneness, his interrogation of people’s belief and knowledge, and the punishment of those who take deities besides Him—themes that are in direct continuation with the opening of Q18.14 The following five verses (Q18:27–31) describe the punishment of the deniers and reward of the believers. With verse 32, Q18 begins another narrative, the parable of two men (mathalan rajulayni) (Q18:32–44), the overarching theme of which is, again, God’s omnipotence and oneness. Then, in another parable, the life of this world is compared to fleeting rain, and the Day of Judgment is described (Q18:45–49). After this, comes a mention of Satan’s turning away from God, and the Quran admonishes against taking him and his descendants (dhurriyyatahu) as allies of God. In verses 51–59 the Quran reminds the audience of messengers, books, and guidance sent to peoples, and of God’s punishment upon their denial. After the end of the parable of the Rich Man and the Poor Man in verse 44, the next identifiable narrative begins with verse 60, the story of an unnamed servant of God who instructs Moses (Q18:60–82). Immediately after this comes the story of the Two-Horned (Q18:83–100). The closing ten verses (Q18:101–10), which seem to address Muhammad, return to the recurring theme of the punishment awaiting those who ridicule God’s prophet and message, and those who take allies and equals of Him. The four narratives that support the overarching themes are fragmentary and “belong to the timeless storehouse of contemporary world literature.”15 They are timeless but not generic, for they closely echo stories known particularly from late antique Christian hagiography and homiletics. An individual in Late Antiquity with an adequate degree of narrative knowledge would remember certain stories upon hearing these quranic passages. Some exegetes interpreting these quranic narratives appear to have realized these close resonances and turned to Christian traditions to interpret the stories in Q18. As shown above, interpreters proposed that Muhammad, through the interrogation of pagans, was in fact responding to Jewish and Christian knowledge by reciting these well-known stories. Surely, the Quran is a discourse in itself, reshaping and reorienting what appear to be Christianisms, or more broadly, biblicisms, embedded within its structure. Nevertheless, Muslims’ attempt to understand and contextualize these quranic narratives in light of Christian orature and literature attests to the increasing knowledge of Christian hagiography in Islam after Muhammad. This incremental knowledge used for quranic exegesis, as the following pages will show,

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both aligned the Quran with the broader scriptural world of Late Antiquity and reshaped the memories of Muhammad’s community as a participant of that world.

the companions of the cave The story of the Companions of the Cave begins with a question: “Do you think that the Companions of the Cave and of the inscription were wonders of our signs?” (Q18:9).16 The story of the youths who fell asleep in a cave then unfolds in the next twenty-five verses, intertwined with occasional commentary. A group of believers, according to the narrative, refuse to associate with God, take refuge from their polytheist community in a cave in which they fall asleep (while a dog stretches out his legs at the entrance of the cave) (Q18:10– 18). They are defined as “rightly guided by God,” and their miraculous sleep is narrated as a terrifying wonder in these verses. God wakens them after “a number of years,” and the youths discuss what happened to them and how long they had been sleeping (Q18:19–20). After the discussion, one of them goes to the city to buy food. With verse 21, the commentary on the story begins, which appears to be an interpretive rehearsal of the same story.17 In this latter part (Q18:21–26), the quranic voice mentions the circulation of different versions of the story, and warns against any unsubstantiated speculation about the details, such as the number of the Companions and the duration of their sleep.18 The story of the Companions of the Cave is clearly an allusion to the Christian legend of the Youths of Ephesus, although the Quran does not explicitly identify the youths as Christians or followers of Jesus.19 Despite widely circulating in many languages of the eastern Mediterranean in Late Antiquity and beyond, the earliest extant recensions of the story of the Youths of Ephesus were written in Syriac, circulating strictly in the Miaphysite tradition.20 There are several versions of the story, varying in detail. The following, however, is the most common story line: there were seven young men,21 who, during the persecution of Decius in the mid-third century in Ephesus, refused to renounce their faith in Christ, and retreated to a cave where they miraculously fell asleep. They woke up after a long stretch of time, generally attributed to the reign of Theodosius II (r. 408–50), when Christianity was the official religion of the Roman Empire. After they woke up, they understood what had happened to them only when one of them went to the city to search for food.

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The miracle was thus disclosed, and a church was built upon the cave they had fallen asleep in. Sidney Griffith demonstrates how particular terminology in these quranic verses, such as the term al-raqīm, and the dog as the guardian of the holy men, can be explained within the context of the Syriac literary and cultural milieu in Late Antiquity.22 His detailed comparison of the quranic narrative with Jacob of Sarug’s (d. 521)23 verse homily on the Youths of Ephesus is illuminating in showing the close parallels between the quranic Companions of the Cave and the Syriac tradition of the Youths of Ephesus.24 The Quran’s inclusion of stories that are similar to some of those in the Syriac tradition is incontestable, yet what still remains to be analyzed in detail are the ways in which the Quran reorients those stories. What role did the recitation of this story play in Muhammad’s communication with his audience? Both the framing comments in the Quran and the dialogues within the story emphasize the punishments awaiting those who contend that God has allies, equals, and companions. For example, in verses 14–15 the youths say: “Our Lord is the Lord of the heavens and the earth. Never will we invoke besides Him any god. We would have certainly spoken, then, an excessive transgression. These, our people, have taken besides Him gods. Why do they not bring for them a clear authority? And who is more unjust than one who invents about God a lie?” Thus, the Quran appears to turn a Christian story into a polemical tool against the Christian doctrine of Jesus being the Son of God, especially if considered together with the abovementioned verses, which warn against those who say God has taken an offspring.25 Moreover, the theme of the seeming death and the subsequent awakening of the bodies of the youths by the will of God might be read as an anti-Christian discourse, countering the doctrine of Jesus’s death and resurrection.26 The verses, of course, could also be read as anti-pagan, for in pre-Islamic Arabia deities were believed to have sons, daughters, and siblings.27 It is not necessary to single out a community toward which the verses are directed. The passage was likely oriented toward multiple communities and doctrines in the time of Muhammad. The narrative not only speaks to Christians and pagans in Muhammad’s audience. It is also an “edifying” story, in Rudi Paret’s words,28 although Paret does not clarify what it edifies the audience about. In the story of the Companions of the Cave, as well as in the following stories in Q18, the repeating theme is God’s omnipotence, wonderous signs of which he sends; these signs sometimes appear counterintuitive, but belief in God prevails over human

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senses and futile human knowledge. This message is highlighted, for example, in verses Q18:18–19: “If you had looked at them, you would have turned from them in flight and been filled by them with terror. And similarly, We awakened them that they might question one another. Said a speaker from among them, ‘How long have you remained [here]?’ They said, ‘We have remained a day or part of a day.’ They said, ‘Your Lord is most knowing of how long you remained.’ ” Despite the prominence of these themes, the Islamic community later remembered Muhammad’s recitation of this story in a variety of polemical and theological ways, not only as an exhortation on these themes.

Interpreting the Companions of the Cave The exegetes of the Quran appear to have engaged with Christian hagiographic traditions to fill in the gaps of information in the quranic narrative of the Companions of the Cave. There are multiple strands of exegesis related to this passage, interpreting it in polemical, admonishing, or exhortative terms. In some of the reports provided in al-T.abarī’s Tafsīr, for example, the story is taken to be a reminder of God’s omnipotence and the veracity of the Hour, two recurring themes throughout Q18 and the Quran in general.29 By some other exegetes the narrative is interpreted as anti-Christian polemic.30 Scholars have analyzed the various exegetical traditions related to the Companions of the Cave, dwelling mostly on the Islamic interpretation of themes and notions raised in this narrative (such as the need to take refuge because of one’s belief, the divine sleep, the type of dog the youths had, and God’s omnipotence).31 Exegetes’ access to and engagement with the Christian hagiographic material for the interpretation of the narrative, however, remains underexplored. Exegetes of the Quran often gave further narrative details about the story, such as the names of the Companions, the king who persecuted them, and how long they stayed in the cave. Some scholars argue that the majority of this additional information had little exegetical value, and only some parts of it mattered for the formation and solidification of Islamic theological concepts.32 For instance, although the color of the guarding dog might have been trivial information for Muslims, the fact that it was identified as a hunting dog in the exegetical tradition was important, for dogs according to Islamic law were unclean, except for hunting dogs.33 Regardless of how worthy later exegetes deemed these details to be, however, the fact that these pieces of information were used in quranic interpretation is important, for they indicate

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Muslims’ engagement with Christian hagiographic material. I will give a few examples from the early exegetical traditions. In the exegesis attributed to Muqātil b. Sulaymān the latter states that two men used to live in the palace of the tyrant king Decius (Daqyūs al-Jabbār), Mātūs and Ast.ūs (Yustus?), hiding their belief in one God.34 They preserved the story of the youths by writing it down on al-raqīm. These two men are not mentioned in the quranic verses, and al-raqīm, as mentioned before, is an obscure term, not necessarily referring to an inscription. Therefore, Muqātil’s exegetical narrative shows the use of an external source, and this source seems to be Christian hagiography. In Jacob of Sarug’s Homily on the Youths of Ephesus, for example, these two men are referred to as “two sophists, sons of princes,” who wrote on tablets the names and the story of the youths.35 This detail, an important part of the dossier on the Youths of Ephesus in the Christian tradition, was likely transmitted by early Muslim storytellers who mediated between homilies like those of Jacob and exegetes like Muqātil.36 Preserved in Muqātil’s account, we have an Islamic version of the story of the Youths of Ephesus, likely informed by some knowledge of the Christian homiletic tradition. Al-T.abarī provides numerous reports about these verses with further details.37 Some of the reports extensively describe Decius as an idol worshipper who persecuted Christians.38 In one report, the names of the Companions of the Cave are given, on the authority of Ibn ʿAbbās: Maksilmīnā (the oldest), Mah.sīmīlnīnā, Yamlīkhā, Mart.ūs, Kashūt.ūsh, Bīrūnis, Dīnmūs, and Yat.ūnis Qālūs.39 There were various traditions with regard to the names of the Youths of Ephesus in Late Antiquity, and the names given in al-T.abarī’s account are similar to the ones given in some of the Christian versions.40 The report al-T.abarī cites is probably following a certain Syriac recension of the story, since it resonates less with the list of names given in the Greek, Latin, Armenian, and Ethiopic traditions.41 As Griffith argues, the Quran’s source for these verses was possibly an oral tradition of the story circulating within the Miaphysite Christian communities around Arabia, likely informed by Jacob of Sarug’s Homily on the Youths of Ephesus.42 Similarly, the exegetes appear to have used these orally circulating stories to reintegrate the parts of the story that the Quran left out. Al-T.abarī’s report goes back to Ibn ʿAbbās, who, as we saw in the previous chapter, quickly became a mythical character to whom many reports of quranic interpretation were attributed.43 A significant portion of these reports show

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a consensus of exegetes on particular interpretations, and Ibn ʿAbbās merely was used as a symbolic source, rather than a historical authority.44 The names of the Companions of the Cave, listed in this exegetical report, as well as other details of the story, therefore, could be widely circulating information attributed to a mythical Ibn ʿAbbās. Alternatively, Ibn ʿAbbās might have had access to Christian sources about this legend, and al-T.abarī simply cited him.45 In the Tafsīr attributed to Ibn ʿAbbās, the latter placed the events during the reign of Decius the Disbeliever (Daqyānūs al-Kāfir).46 He identified the Companions’ dog as “Qat. mīr,” and the oldest of the Companions as Maksilmina, who, in the story, sent one of his companions, Tamlīkhā (Yamlīkhā), to the city of Ephesus to buy food. After they wake up, in this Ibn ʿAbbās account, those who see them suggest building a church (kanīsa) above the cave, not a “structure” (bunyānan) or a prayer house (masjid) as in the Quran. All of these details (repeated both in the collection of al-T.abarī and in the Tafsīr of Ibn ʿAbbās) closely follow the Syriac plot of the story. Regardless of the authenticity of the reports, they demonstrate that the Islamic knowledge of the Christian versions of the story of the Youths of Ephesus was preserved and curated under the broad narrative knowledge of Ibn ʿAbbās. How did early transmitters access the story of the youths? Muqātil did not provide a source for his exegetical narrative. Nevertheless, he was known in Islamic circles as an exegete who used material from Christian and Jewish lore, and was criticized by some later authorities for being an unreliable transmitter, and for excessive interpretation in exegesis.47 It is likely that for details in certain narratives he sought information from Christian hagiography through the oral and homiletic tradition in late antique Arabia, Syria, or Palestine; he was known to have traveled to all of these places. The exegetical tradition also points at more specific contexts. For example, al-Qummī, likely aware of the Christian resonances of the quranic story, placed the Jews who question Muhammad in the city of Najran, a location that merits further attention in the context of the exegesis of Q18.48 In the Tafsīr attributed to Ibn ʿAbbās it is indicated that he gathered information from the Christians of Najran. Ibn ʿAbbās, in this work, comments on the verse Q18:22, which reads as “They will say there were three, the fourth of them being their dog; and they will say there were five, the sixth of them being their dog—guessing at the unseen; and they will say there were seven, and the eighth of them was their dog. Say, ‘My Lord is most knowing of their number. None knows them except a few. So do not argue about them except

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with an obvious argument and do not inquire about them among [the speculators] from anyone.’ ” Ibn ʿAbbās states that among the Christians in Najran, the Nestorians (al-Nast.ūriyya) say the Companions are three, the fourth one being their dog, Qat.mīr; Jacobites (al-Mār Yaʿqūbiyya) say they are five; and Melkites (al-Malkāniyya) say they are six.49 These three Christian groups could have coexisted in Najran by Ibn ʿAbbās’s time, the eighth century, given the long history of Christianity in South Arabia, a location of great economic and political importance for the Roman and Persian empires before Islam.50 Important episodes of immigration from West Syrian (Jacobite), East Syrian (Nestorian), and Greek (Melkite) Christian communities to South Arabia took place in antiquity, which makes it probable that this was a region where alternative versions of biblical and hagiographic stories circulated. Even the homilies of Jacob of Sarug, although initially products of the eastern Mediterranean context, likely found their way to South Arabian liturgical contexts.51 We know of at least one letter Jacob sent to the Christian communities in South Arabia, in which he addressed the sufferings of the Christian community at that place and included christological teachings in his letter.52 Through such literary and other forms of exchange, Near Eastern homiletic literature was known in South Arabia, a legacy that could have directly informed Ibn ʿAbbās and other Muslims who collected information from Christians there. Alternatively, Muslims might have projected their general knowledge of Christian groups on Najran, imagining and portraying a diverse Christianity in that city. As Reynolds argues, this tripartite representation of Christians might have been a literary strategy of Muslim authors to emphasize confusions and controversies within Christianity.53 Whether this exegetical information and knowledge about Christianity in Najran was based on the reality of Christianity there in the eighth century, or was an informed guess, this report is significant for pointing to the multiple Christian traditions about the Youths of Ephesus, and Ibn ʿAbbās’s attempt to display his knowledge of these different traditions. Thus, we see a strand of cultural memory that places the occasion of the revelation of the quranic verses and their exegetical tradition in the city of Najran, which epitomizes a location where information about Christianity came from. There were in fact other, later reports that underlined Christian communities in Najran and their connections to the early Islamic community,54 and we will return to the Christian and Islamic memories of Najran in chapter 5.

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A brief overview of the extraquranic reiterations and representations of the story of the Companions of the Cave shows the deep and continuous imprint this story left in Islamic cultural production, artistic expressions, and even possibly ritual practice. The legend is reiterated in numerous texts, accompanied by a rich corpus of iconography. One of the betterknown visual representations of the legend is found, for example, in a twelfthcentury work, al-Nishāburī’s Tales of the Prophets, depicting the youths in a cave with the dog (white and spotted), a detail extensively discussed by exegetes.55 The story and its exegesis also appear to have had an impact on ritual practice. Ibn ʿArabī (d. 1240), a renowned Sufi master to whom we will return in chapter 5, mentions a certain group of Seven Persons in one of his hagiographic works.56 He says: I met them at Mecca, may God benefit all Muslims by them. I sat with them at a spot between the wall of the Hanbalites and at the bench of zamzam. They were indeed the elect of God. So overwhelmed were they by holy tranquility and awe that they did not blink their eyes. When I met them, they were in a state of contemplation. No word passed between me and them on any matter, but I saw in them an almost unimaginable calm.

The sight of the seven holy men who are in an inconceivable calm and tranquility to the awe of their beholders reminds us of the story of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus. The Sufi practice of silence and tranquility developed, of course, from ascetic, particularly hesychastic, practices long known in the Near East, and cannot be genealogically tied to any particular tradition.57 Nevertheless, in this instance the number seven, and the sleeplike transcendent state these divinely chosen holy men were in, closely resonate with the story of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus. It is likely that this Sufi practice was interpreted and developed further in light of the legend widely circulating in Islamic literature and orature. The sites that are identified as the cave of the Youths and venerated by Jews, Christians, and Muslims already highlight the material ramifications of hagiographic transmission.58 Ibn ʿArabī’s description of the seven holy men further indicates that narratives did not only create shared spaces, but also shape embodied ritual practice. Hagiographic transmissions between Christianity and Islam governed text, landscape, and body. Let us now turn to the other narratives in Q18 to build on the mechanisms of transmission of stories between Christianity and Islam.

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the rich man and the poor man The thirty-four verses following the story of the Companions of the Cave elaborate on divine providence and retribution, both on earth and in the afterlife. In this section, there is a brief narrative of two men whose fates are reversed. The rich man boasts about his earthly wealth and family, and he is exhorted by a poor man who reminds him of the ephemerality of these things (Q18:32–44). The story is then connected to the calamities that will fall upon those who associate others with God, the theme that the story of the Companions of the Cave in the previous section of Q18 also boldly underlines. The trope of a rich man and a poor man, and the subsequent reversal of fortunes, is a common didactic theme in late antique literature. Since the quranic narrative is generic, lacking any proper names, it is difficult to point to a specific pre-Islamic tradition that this narrative alludes to. Among the well-known stories of two men whose fortunes are reversed in the afterlife is the story of the Rich Man and Lazarus in the Gospel of Luke (16:19–31).59 I am not suggesting that the quranic and biblical stories are similar in the way that the story of the Companions of the Cave is similar to the story of the Youths of Ephesus. I still find it useful to think about this biblical passage on the Rich Man and Lazarus here, since some in Muhammad’s audience likely recalled this famous parable upon his narration of the Rich Man and the Poor Man. Despite the significant differences in the plot and details, the overall narrative sequence of the two stories is similar. In the biblical story, the rich man, who received good things in his lifetime, is tormented in hell, while Lazarus, who received bad things in the earthly life, is comforted in heaven. In the quranic story the rich man boasts about his earthly wealth and family, does not believe in the Hour, and says that even in the afterlife his tidings will be good (Q18:34–36), while the poor man reminds him that God is the only one that gives and takes (Q18:37–41). Eventually all the wealth of the rich man is destroyed, and he repents having associated other deities with God (although in the former part of the narrative there is no discourse about him associating other deities with God; he was only being boastful). His helplessness is emphasized at the end of the story (Q18:42–43). In addition to the reversal narrative, the rich man’s remorse in hell in the Bible and his helplessness find close parallels in the rich man’s remorse upon the destruction of his wealth and his despair in the Quran (Q18:42). The

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biblical narrative continues with a discourse of resurrection. Similarly, in the Quran, the verses after Q18:44 emphasize the Day of Judgment, the resurrection of souls and their presentation before God in rows (Q18:48), and the deniers’ repentance—like the rich man in the biblical story. The eschatological reversal of fate was certainly a common theme in ancient and late antique mythology,60 including the Palestinian Talmud where we find a similar tale about a rich tax collector and a poor Torah scholar whose fates are reversed after their deaths.61 As summarized above, the quranic version is relatively close to the Lucan story in its plot, for which we find a long and rich homiletic tradition. Basil of Caesarea (d. 379), Gregory of Nyssa (d. 394), Gregory of Nazianzus (d. 390), Jerome (d. 420), and Jacob of Sarug (d. 521), among others, have homilies on the Rich Man and Lazarus.62 Moreover, the Quran displays considerable knowledge of the Lucan passage 16:19– 31,63 as well as other parts of the Gospel of Luke.64 It is likely that this knowledge was also reflected in Q18. It is worth noting that again in the Gospel of Luke there is one more story in which the fates of a rich man and a poor man are reversed (18:9–14), and just like the story of the Rich Man and Lazarus, this passage was interpreted in the homiletic tradition.65 Given these connections, an interpretation of Lucan story(ies) might underlie Muhammad’s recitation of the story of the Rich Man and the Poor Man. The biblical narrative of the Rich Man and Lazarus thematically fits within the overarching themes of Q18 with its emphasis on divine reward and punishment through antithetical examples, but the Quran, if it alludes to this story, reorients it for its own purposes. The biblical focus on Abraham’s bosom in heaven becomes a tangential detail for the Quran, which emphasizes that God is the only one who can know and change one’s fate. Furthermore, the fact that the reversal of fate and the ultimate remorse in the quranic narrative take place in this world—not after death—adds to this quranic reorientation. In Muhammad’s recital of the story, divine reward and punishment concern and regulate this world as much as they do after the Hour. The Quran thus adds to the rich treasure of stories about reversed fates in Late Antiquity by reinterpreting a well-known biblical parable. How did later generations of Muslims perceive this quranic story?

Exegesis of the Rich Man and the Poor Man Interestingly, the exegetical tradition does not make a direct connection to the Christian tradition for the hermeneutics of this passage. Muqātil identi-

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fies the poor man as Yamlīkhā and the rich man as Fat.rus (Peter?), as two brothers from the Israelites.66 In Muqātil’s narrative, the two men both inherited their father’s wealth, but while one gave it all away to the poor and the needy, the disbeliever kept it. Identification of the rich man as Fat.rus is puzzling, since this character, if ever identified, is named Dives, Nives, or Phineas in the Christian tradition.67 Another possibility is that this name is a transliteration of “Pharisee,” and that Muqātil made a connection between this passage and the Lucan parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector.68 The poor man is generally named Lazarus (Laʿazar in the Peshitta) in the Christian tradition. Thus, it is not clear what Muqātil’s source for the name Yamlīkhā was. He might have named the character randomly for storytelling purposes, as Muqātil was known to have practiced tasmiyya frequently,69 and Yamlīkhā, as seen in the example of the Companions of the Cave, was known as the name of a believer and denier of idols in Islamic literature.70 Parallel to the identification of the two men as Israelites in Muqātil’s account, in the Tafsīr of Ibn ʿAbbās the poor man is said to be a believer named Yahūdha, and the rich man is a kāfir (disbeliever) named Abū Fat.rūs.71 In the Palestinian Talmud version of the story, the rich man is called Bar Ma’yan (or Baya), and the poor man is not named.72 The reports in Islamic literature identify the characters as Jews, but there does not appear to be a clearly identified text underlying the information provided in Islamic literature for the story of the Rich Man and the Poor Man. Al-T.abarī is intriguingly silent about any details of the story. The exegetical reports he gives are mostly paraphrastic and philological.73 He likens the poor man in this story to Muslim ascetics Salmān (al-Fārisī), S.uhayb, and Khabbāb.74 The latter were two poor Companions of Muhammad, and here they are portrayed as ascetics like Salmān.75 Al-Wāh.idī also makes connections with Q18 and the pious poor, as mentioned previously.76 This seems to be a later interpretation of Q18 as an exhortation on asceticism, which is not directly evident from the quranic narrative itself. Still, this interpretation is interesting, because the portrayals of Muhammad’s Companions like Christian ascetics (especially by grouping them together with Salmān who converted from Christianity) indicate that some exegetes, even if they did not turn to Christian hagiography for their interpretations, represented the early Islamic community on par with Christianity in asceticism and piety. The parable of the Rich Man and the Poor Man did not receive much attention from exegetes, except for minor details, such as the names of the

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protagonists. Still, the story complements Q18’s overarching exhortations on God’s oneness, omnipotence, and the veracity of the Hour. As such, the story contributes to the thematic coherence of Q18 and connects the reader/listener to the two stories that follow, namely, the story of Moses and of the TwoHorned.

moses, the unnamed servant of god, and the two-horned After the parable of the Rich Man and the Poor Man, Muhammad reminds the audience of the past peoples who disbelieved and were subsequently destroyed, and he continues with another story: Moses and his young servant (fatā) reach a place where two seas meet, and realize they left behind the fish they had caught (Q18:60–63). When they return to retrieve their catch, they encounter “one of [God’s] servants” whom God taught certain knowledge. Moses wants to follow him, while the servant of God, unnamed throughout these verses,77 warns him to be patient and advises him not to ask any questions (Q18:64–70). Then, this unnamed character engages in three inexplicable acts, all of which surprise Moses (Q18:71–77). In the end the unnamed character explains why he did the things that appeared counterintuitive (Q18:78–82). Every act, he says, was done to protect believers from a certain danger, of which he had the foreknowledge. Immediately after this comes the story of the Two-Horned (Dhū al-Qarnayn), a king in the service of God, extending through verses 83–98. He travels from where the sun sets to where it rises, with the God-given power to punish the wrongdoers and benefit the believers (Q18:83–92). When he reaches a mountain pass, people living there make supplication to the king to build a wall between them and the Gog and Magog, “corruptors in the land” (Q18:93–94). The Two-Horned builds an iron dam through which Gog and Magog cannot pass (Q18:95–97). The narrative ends on an apocalyptic note, with the king reminding the audience that on the Day of Judgment the wall will be leveled by God (Q18:98). It is a point of debate whether this is one whole narrative or two separate narratives. In the Quran itself there are indications to support both arguments, as we will see shortly. Yet, here I take them as two separate narratives, since both the Moses story and the Dhū al-Qarnayn story start with the phrase “and when” (wa-idh), arguably marking the beginning of separate parables. Exegetes of the Quran also generally treat these verses as two separate narratives and

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present them as allusions to the story of the prophet Moses and his encounter with al-Khid. r (the Green One), and to the Alexander Legend, respectively.78 I will analyze the formation and interpretation of these verses in three parts, since there are important changes in the plot at two points.

Formation of Q18:60–98 In Q18:60–65, Moses says to his servant, “I shall continue until I reach the confluence of the two seas, or else I shall go on for ages.” When the two reach this place, they forget the fish they caught, which escapes back into the water. As they look for the fish, they find an old servant of God, “to whom we had given a mercy from us and taught him knowledge from us.” These verses share significant tropes known from various versions of the Alexander Legend, such as Moses’s interaction with his servant, their arrival at “the confluence of the two seas,” and the escape of the fish.79 For example, in a homily of Jacob of Sarug, Alexander orders his cook to wash a salted fish in every fountain until he finds the fountain of the Water of Life: The king said to his cook, “Take a dry fish, And where you see a fountain of water, wash it. And if the fish comes to life in your hand when you wash it, Reveal it to me and show me which is the fountain when you have found it.” [. . .] Finally, he came to a fountain in which was the water of life, And he drew near to wash the fish in the water, and it came to life and escaped. [. . .] And he leaped down into the water to catch it, but he was not able.80

In the homily, the cook returns to Alexander to announce that he found the fountain of the Water of Life but cannot locate it again. In some of the later Greek recensions of the Alexander Legend, there are similar but shorter episodes, in which a salted fish comes to life and jumps into the water while Alexander’s cook was washing it.81 In Jacob’s homily, the cook deliberately searches for the Water of Life, by washing the fish at every fountain. In the Greek versions, he finds the Water of Life by accident. Despite the minute differences in the plot, the trope of searching for the Water of Life and/or the fish is well known from the Alexander dossier, and the episode of Moses and his servant in the Quran closely resonates with it. As Brannon Wheeler emphasizes, it is difficult to establish a direct textual connection with the quranic verses and these abovementioned texts.82

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However, his assessment of intertextualities is based on word-to-word literary comparisons between the quranic narrative and the other texts. In fact, there are cases where Wheeler deems a direct relation between the two texts is unlikely based on the fact that certain expressions are not repeated verbatim between them.83 For example, he hesitates to identify the fish story in Q18:61– 63 as the fish stories in versions of the Alexander Legend, because in the Quran the fish is forgotten and slips back into the water, and in versions of the Alexander Legend the fish was dead and comes back to life when it touches the Water of Life.84 Wheeler states that thematic parallels could be considered as Muslim exegetes’ appropriation of motifs known from extraquranic sources, instead of understanding them as “confused versions of stories borrowed from earlier Jewish and Christian sources.” 85 Wheeler’s reservations are helpful in assessing possible intertextualities and their absence. However, this strict literary approach has three shortcomings. Firstly, it fails to consider the factor of oral transmission of stories in antiquity. There were probably different versions of these stories circulating in the late antique orature, to which we do not have access, but Muhammad and early exegetes of the Quran did.86 Secondly, Wheeler’s approach assigns a high degree of agency to the Quran for transmission and adaptation of stories, and does not account for hagiographic conflations that happened before and separately from the Quran.87 And finally, his approach underestimates the deep interconnectedness between various religious traditions in antiquity. Muslim exegetes were certainly using common hagiographic motifs and tropes in their writings, sometimes in the absence of a precedent text. Yet, categorizing every narrative exegesis as an isolated literary exercise in a vacuum undermines transmissions of knowledge between multiple traditions. While searching for particular textual sources for quranic passages has its disadvantages, pointing in the direction of possible conversations between different literary and oral traditions is helpful in the study of the Quran and its interpretation. Based on the dates alone, Jacob of Sarug’s homily might be the source behind verses Q18:60–65,88 especially since the wording and plot of the quranic passage is significantly close to Jacob’s version of the Alexander Legend. Considering that the narrative of the Companions of the Cave earlier in Q18 was likely in conversation with the Syriac homiletic tradition, it is probable that another narrative in the same quranic chapter participates in a similar hagiographic conversation. As mentioned above, this connection was most probably indirect. Jacob of Sarug’s homilies reflected the broader oral-biblical milieu

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of the eastern Mediterranean,89 and the quranic discourse was informed and shaped by this same milieu. One detail that remains puzzling in the quranic passage is Moses himself in Q18:60. This Moses is generally identified by medieval and modern scholars as the prophet Moses son of Amram, and his young servant who makes a brief appearance in this quranic narrative as Joshua son of Nun, the biblical prophet Joshua, Moses’s companion and successor.90 On the other hand, based on the parallels between this part of the quranic narrative and the Alexander Legend, some scholars have suggested that Moses in Q18:60 should be identified as Alexander the Great himself.91 The parallels between this quranic Moses and Alexander are certainly thematic resemblances, and there are no verbatim parallels between these verses and pre-Islamic texts. There is, however, more to say about the possibility of identification of Moses with Alexander in Q18:60. The quranic narrative, with the verse Q18:82 and thereafter, shows significant parallels with the Alexander Legend (to which we will turn shortly), and it is possible that the legend was alluded to in the earlier verses of Q18 as well. Moreover, in the Christian Syriac Alexander Legend there is a mountain called Mūsās (in Jacob’s homily the mountain is called Māsīs).92 Alexander and his soldiers eat bread on this mountain; note that Moses and his servant in Q18 were about to eat their morning meal before the fish leaped into the water miraculously. In an oral recension of the Syriac Alexander Legend, the name of this mountain might have been confused with the name of the prophet Moses, which the quranic passage likely preserved. More than a possibility of a name confusion, there are literary traditions indicating that the images of Moses and Alexander could be conflated in Late Antiquity, prior to Muhammad. Alexander is often referred to as having horns in the Hellenistic, Jewish, and Christian traditions.93 In the Syriac Alexander Legend, for example, he is referred to as being granted iron horns by God.94 Visual representations of Alexander also reflect this image, as seen on Ptolemaic coins, as well as in later representations.95 Moses, too, was depicted as having horns in some piyyut (liturgical poetry) in the Jewish tradition.96 Moreover, when Jerome (d. 420) translated the Hebrew Bible, he translated the “rays of light” in Exodus 34:29 as “horns” (cornuta).97 Although these literary representations were not reflected in art until the eleventh century, they most probably circulated in the oral tradition, considering particularly that horned deities were common in multiple mythological traditions in the eastern Mediterranean in antiquity.98

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Horns, a symbol of power, authority, divinity, and indestructability, among others, are not the only attribute Moses and Alexander share. As Wheeler points out, in a broader perspective, they are both prophet-kings who bring God’s message to their people, lead their people, and search for knowledge and wisdom.99 The two heroes’ hagiographic traditions (both of Egyptian origin) share many other tropes.100 A brief comparison between the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria’s (d. ca. 50) On the Life of Moses, Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Moses, and versions of the Alexander Legend reveals numerous thematic similarities. For example, both Moses and Alexander are born at the palace as special, strong, healthy infants.101 They both gain wisdom when they are still infants, exhorted by philosophers and God.102 Moses and his brother/ companion’s relationship is reminiscent of Alexander and his cook.103Both are depicted as skillful commanders. Beasts and plagues overcome, and sorcery and magic (particularly through water), are other repeated themes between the Moses and Alexander traditions.104 Note that Constantine I (d. 337) was depicted as the new Moses in the Life of Constantine by his biographer Eusebius of Caesarea (d. 339).105 After rebuilding the Hagia Sophia, Justinian (d. 565) was praised as Moses’s architect, his building surpassing Solomon’s temple.106 Like these examples, Moses’s image as a divine king and commander might have had an influence on the development of the Alexander dossier, which is also known to have found echoes in Christian hagiographic narratives in Late Antiquity.107 He was, furthermore, occasionally depicted as a Roman emperor.108 Since there was continuous interaction between the Alexander dossier and the surrounding biblical and hagiographic traditions, it is likely that the images of Moses and Alexander were conflated in some stories before the seventh century, and the quranic verses Q18:60–65 might testify to this Moses-Alexander conflation, not necessarily causing it. Griffith rejects the possibility of Moses-Alexander conflation in the Quran, based on the fact that the Quran refers to the biblical patriarch Moses numerous times, and there is no reason to doubt the identity of Moses in Q18:60 even if the story cannot be traced back to an earlier text.109 While Griffith’s emphasis on the late antique oral traditions that the Quran possibly reflects is critical for understanding of the Quran, the rejection of the possible MosesAlexander conflation does not leave room for the hagiographic conflations in that same late antique oral milieu. As Griffith entertains the possibility of a hitherto unknown Moses tradition (where the prophet travels with his com-

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panion, as he does in this quranic chapter), we may entertain the possibility that prior to Islam, there was a Moses-Alexander tradition. It might also have been the case that there were multiple saintly heroes with the name of Moses. As we will see in the next chapter, Muslim traditionists in fact reported on different Moses characters for these quranic verses. Let us turn to the interactions between Moses and the unnamed sage in the rest of the quranic story (Q18:65–82). The unnamed sage that Moses (or Alexander?) encounters in Q18:65 is an obscure character who instructs Moses through counterintuitive acts of wisdom (note that it is not clear what happens to Moses’s servant mentioned in the preceding verses). During his travels with Moses, he sinks a ship, kills a young boy, and restores a wall in a town where the local people refuse to give food to him and Moses. All of these acts surprise Moses, and in each instance, he is reminded to be patient about judging the situation. Moses’s unnamed companion explains why he did the things that appeared counterintuitive at first; every act was done to protect believers.110 His instructing Moses through adversity is certainly a narrative built upon a common hagiographic trope in Near Eastern folklore, as seen in the story of Elijah and Rabbi Joshua ben Levi from the Jewish tradition, and in the Christian story of the Angel and the Hermit.111 The prophet Moses, to my knowledge, is not depicted as being instructed by adverse acts of wisdom in the earlier Jewish or Christian traditions of the eastern Mediterranean. If we take Moses in these verses as Alexander, the possibility of which I have demonstrated above, this unnamed quranic character becomes relatively easier to identify. In almost all the versions of the Alexander Legend the king seeks wisdom by questioning sages or receiving exhortation from them without having inquired. In the Syriac translation of Ps.-Callisthenes’s History of Alexander, for example, Alexander sees an immortal king in a cave who showed Alexander the “maker of all natures.”112 In the homily of Jacob of Sarug, Alexander speaks to an “old, grey-headed man, who knew the way and was experienced in the mysteries of the country.”113 It is this old man who advises Alexander to command his cook to wash salted fish in every fountain until he finds the Water of Life. These motifs in the Syriac tradition might explain the quranic narrative about Moses and the unnamed sage. The generic nature of the story still leaves significant narratological space for details in the exegetical tradition, to which we will return shortly. Immediately after the story of Moses and the unnamed servant of God comes the story of the two-horned king, extending from verse 83 to 98 in Q18.

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In this narrative, the king is given the entire world and the might to punish the disbelievers and to treat believers justly. He encounters a people who make supplication to him to build a dam between them and the dangerous Gog and Magog. The Two-Horned builds the dam, and at the end of the narrative reminds the people that protection and providence are provided by his omnipotent Lord. Kevin van Bladel, following Nöldeke, demonstrates that the story of the Two-Horned/Dhū al-Qarnayn in the Quran is closely related to the Christian Syriac Alexander Legend.114 One of the prominent indications of this is that, as mentioned previously, Alexander the Great in the Syriac tradition was granted iron horns by God.115 In addition to this attribution, the Two-Horned says he will punish the wrongdoers in the Quran; similarly, Alexander in the Syriac legend punishes the evildoers by using them to test poisonous sea waters.116 In both the Quran and the Syriac legend, Alexander travels from where the sun sets toward where it rises. The quranic Gog and Magog, the king’s building a wall of iron and brass between two mountains, and the apocalyptic prophecy at the end all find an explicit and detailed counterpart in the Syriac Alexander Legend.117 Yet, the quranic discourse reorients the legend toward its overarching messages. The rest of Q18, continuing for another twelve verses (Q18:99–110), reminds the audience about the Day of Judgment, the reward of the believers and the punishment of disbelievers, and God’s oneness. Thus, the Quran connects the well-known Alexander story to the overarching exhortation and warning of Q18, displayed through all of the four narratives analyzed heretofore. How did Muhammad’s audience and the generations of Muslim communities after them hear and perceive verses Q18:60–98? To answer this question, we turn to the exegetical tradition once again.

Exegesis of Q18:60–98 and Christian Hagiography The Alexander Legend (particularly the Christian Syriac recensions) provides important parallels for both of the quranic narratives, namely, that of Moses and his servant (Q18:60–82) and that of the Two-Horned (Q18:83–98). The exegetical tradition, however, appears to have generally treated these two narratives as separate. Moses in Q18:60 is rarely doubted to be any character other than the prophet Moses.118 His first unnamed companion in Q18:60–65 is generally identified as the biblical prophet Joshua.119 The second unnamed character that Moses and his servant encounter is unanimously identified as al-Khid. r (the Green One) in the Islamic exegetical tradition. Al-Khid. r is a

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complex figure, a manifestation of an archetypal character in Near Eastern mythology, symbolizing health, nature, healing, seafaring, safety, and wisdom.120 He is often conflated with the Jewish prophet Elijah, as in the Tafsīr of Muqātil.121 He was also associated with Saint George of Lydda from the Christian tradition.122 Although I have not seen a direct reference to Saint George in the exegetical tradition of the quranic al-Khid. r, in the Middle Ages some sanctuaries dedicated to Saint George were converted to those of al-Khid. r, which shows the overlap between the two characters.123 Al-T.abarī gives a few reports that say the reason Moses encountered this unnamed character is because he inquired whether there was anybody wiser than himself, and God wanted to teach him through this wiser servant of God, who is identified as al-Khid. r.124 None of the reports al-T.abari cites gives further information about the character of al-Khid. r. In his History, however, al-T.abarī states that al-Khid. r led the vanguard of “Dhū al-Qarnayn the Elder,” accompanying the latter in his travels.125 Thus, despite the scarcity of reports, we see glimpses of a possible association between the quranic Moses story and the Alexander Legend in the exegetical tradition. The legend and figure of al-Khid. r might have been integrated into some versions of the Alexander Legend at a later stage.126 There might indeed be a pre-Islamic version of the story of Alexander that includes al-Khid. r as a companion of Alexander, which could be reflected in the plot of the quranic narrative and its exegetical tradition. As shown above, in the homily of Jacob of Sarug, in the Syriac translation of Ps.-Callisthenes’s History of Alexander, which Nöldeke dated to the seventh century, and in the apocalyptic Syriac Alexander Legend, based on the former two texts, the king does not have a companion named al-Khid. r. But he often has a servant, or a wise sage instructing him. In a later Ethiopic translation of the Alexander Legend, al-Khid. r is mentioned as one of the generals of Alexander.127 It is likely that this character was integrated into the Alexander Legend as a result of the Islamic interpretive tradition of verses Q18:60–82.128 The Ethiopic Alexander Legend is generally accepted to be a translation based on the Arabic translation of the legend, which dates to the ninth century.129 Since there are Islamic exegetical reports about al-Khid. r predating the ninth century, it is highly probable that the Ethiopic tradition incorporated this character from Islamic literature. The narrative of the Two-Horned, extending through verses Q18:83–98, was unanimously interpreted as a reiteration of the Alexander Legend in quranic exegesis. The relation of these verses to the Syriac-Christian legend

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was likely known, and further brought to the fore by exegetes of the Quran. Muqātil, for example, identified the king as the King Alexander (al-Iskandar Qaysar).130 Al-T.abarī’s exegesis of these verses consists of 104 reports of varying length. The lengthiest of these reports are on the authority of the eighthcentury Yemeni historian Wahb b. Munabbih, to whom we will frequently return in the following pages.131 In this report, the Two-Horned is identified as a man from Byzantium, and his name was Iskandar. The latter’s placement in Byzantium associates him with the memory of the Christian empire at the very beginning of the narrative, and we should dwell further on this story here. Almost one-third of Wahb’s account consists of Alexander’s conversation and pact with God, who gives him the entire world in every direction, and the might to rule the various peoples, the jinn, and Gog and Magog on Earth. Then, Alexander, with the help of his soldiers, gathers the people in the East and invites them to the worship of God, as he does in the Christian Syriac Alexander Legend.132 People make supplications to him to protect them from another tribe. At this point Wahb (or al-T.abarī) inserts the quranic narrative of the building of a wall by the Two-Horned, explicitly situating the narrative as quranic exegesis.133 After this, the king travels to the West, and learns about the customs of people living there, which is reminiscent of the episode in the Christian Syriac Alexander Legend in which Alexander questions the people he encounters and their customs as he marches through the lands with his army.134 The water of immortality and the travels with his servant are not mentioned in this report of South Arabian origin. Despite the differences, Wahb’s version has close parallels with the Syriac Alexander Legend, and therefore, his version should be considered in light of the Christian tradition, as a reiteration of it, reused in Islam for quranic exegesis. A detailed analysis of Q18 demonstrates that Christian homiletic literature served as an important reservoir of religious concepts, tropes, ideas, and expressions for parts of Muhammad’s quranic recitation. In particular, works like those of Jacob of Sarug shed great light on the extent to which the Quran reflected the late antique homiletic milieu and reoriented it toward its own semiotic horizons. The narratives in Q18, namely, the Companions of the Cave, the Rich Man and the Poor Man, Moses and his servant, and the Two-Horned, present considerable knowledge of late antique biblical and hagiographic traditions. Muhammad recited these narratives in order to exhort his audience on God’s oneness, omnipotence, and the Day of Judgment, the signs of which at times were counterintuitive. This reorientation notwithstanding, these

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stories are important in showing the extent of Muhammad’s knowledge of late antique narratives. The exegetes of the Quran, aware of this participation, appear to have turned to the Christian milieu to elucidate the quranic discourse. Early exegetes, quoted in the Tafsīr of al-T.abarī or in their individual works, like those of Muqātil and al-Qummī, provide significant details, which show their engagement with Christian hagiography. For example, the lists of names of the Companions of the Cave in reports provided by al-T.abarī, and the names of those who wrote down the story in Muqātil’s account, indicate the early community’s knowledge of Christian hagiography, especially in forms dispersed through homiletic use. These reports also shed light on the dynamics with which and contexts where these exchanges likely took place. South Arabia, for instance, is one of the emphasized locales—a region where the rich history of Christianity became a part of Islamic collective memory. Q18 does not provide clear answers to questions regarding the transmission of Christian hagiographic knowledge to Islam, but raises more questions. For example, in the processes of collection and organization of knowledge, transmitters like Ibn ʿAbbās, Muqātil, and Wahb b. Munabbih became epitomes of catalysts of cultural transmission. Their biographical traditions point to particular contexts for their knowledge, such as Muqātil’s familiarity with South Arabian lore and Wahb’s access to monastic libraries, but we know very little about the dynamics of exchange in these contexts. Another question to raise here is how to theoretically distinguish between cultural participation and transmission, and define authority and authorship, when we talk about shared cultural items. Last but not the least, the exegetical stories bring to the fore the question of representations of prophets and saints in nonexegetical literature. In order to address these questions, we must turn to other, nonquranic uses of Christian hagiography in Islamic literature, and develop a broader frame for uses and reorientations of Christian saints’ stories.

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chapter 4

Christian Saints in Islamic Literature

We can obtain a complete picture of Christian-Muslim hagiographic exchanges in the Middle Ages only if we decentralize the Quran and the Bible. Certainly, the Quran provided a prominent context for the transmission of biblicalhagiographic narratives between Christianity and Islam. As the previous chapters demonstrate, Muslim storytellers and authors tapped into the Bible, homiletics, and hagiography in order to interpret the Quran. But not every hagiographic exchange between Christianity and Islam was a means toward the Quran. The current chapter presents a panorama of the multiple semiotic functions of Christian hagiographic knowledge in Islamic literary contexts in the Middle Ages. It analyzes how saints’ stories and personas, having undergone long histories of transmission, were reoriented in Islamic texts for purposes other than quranic interpretation. With this analysis, I broaden the study of the transmission of saints’ stories beyond Late Antiquity and beyond Muhammad and the Quran, with an eye to developing an analytical frame for the diverse dynamics of narrative transmission between Christianity and Islam. While analyzing Islamic literary engagements with stories of Christian saints, I aim to also destabilize Christian hagiography by expanding its conceptual boundaries and highlighting its cross-confessional relevance. Christian saints and their stories were used in Islamic literature (1) for didactic purposes, as symbols of universal wisdom and piety; (2) for encomiastic purposes, as excellences of cities and regions; (3) as members of the eternal Muslim community (umma); and (4) as etiologies for Islamic beliefs and practices. These four functions sometimes overlap and are certainly not mutually exclusive. 90

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This fluidity notwithstanding, developing a nuanced understanding of the multiple functions Christian saints’ stories and personas served in Islamic literature helps illuminate the concepts of collective memory, authorship, and sanctity. In what follows, I will analyze four Arabic texts, written between the ninth and the twelfth centuries, with a focus on their varying modes of presentation of Christian hagiographic knowledge. These texts are the story of Saint Antony of Egypt in Ibn Abī al-Dunyā’s Fear of God; the story of the Syriac Alexander Legend in Ibn Hishām’s Book of Crowns; the story of Saint George in al-T.abarī’s History; and the story of Saint Marūthā of Maipherqat in Ibn al-Azraq’s History of Mayyāfāriqīn. When I compare the narratives in the Islamic texts with their Christian versions, I do not claim a direct intertextuality between them, but approach the comparanda as reference points on a continuum of creation, expansion, and transmission of a story. Except for the first text I analyze, there is voluminous scholarship on these literary works and the pre-Islamic stories embedded in them. My aim is not to reconstruct those textual analyses to prove that Christian hagiography was used in Islamic literature. Rather, I ask further questions: How was Christian hagiography reinterpreted in different Islamic literary contexts? How did Muslim authors access, and through what kinds of literary tools did they engage with, Christian material? To what degree and in what aspects were Christian stories and personas Islamicized?

remembering saint antony At the beginning of his Fear of God and Confidence in Deed, Ibn Abī al-Dunyā (d. 894),1 a prolific scholar, moralist, and tutor in ninth-century Baghdad, gives six reports from six prominent Companions and Successors.2 The reports all exhort the reader to do their best deeds in this world in order to avoid remorse in the next world. The first two of these exhortations follow: Muslim bin Yasār:  “He who hopes for something looks for it, and he who fears something flees from it. I do not know what good it does to a man to hope if he does not bravely suffer misfortunes that happen to him, and I do not know what good it does to a man to be afraid if he cannot leave alone desires that come to him.” al-H . asan (al-Bas.rī):  “There are people who are diverted by wishful thoughts of forgiveness until they leave this world without having a good deed to their credit. Such a person might say, ‘I have a good opinion of my Lord.’ That, however, is a lie, for if he had had a good opinion of his Lord, he would have done good deeds.”3

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After the opening reports, the author writes: “Abū Bakr Ibn Abī al-Dunyā said: Now, among the works of the ancients dealing with wise sayings and parables, we have found a book of wise sayings and parables that will make a sensible person want to abandon the fleeting life of this world and inspire him to working with confidence for the other world. This is a book ascribed to Antony, the wandering ascetic (Ant. ūnus al-sāʾih.).” 4 After this introduction, he gives a framing story about the king At. nāws, who, on his deathbed, advises his dignitaries to select a new religious leader. In this selection process, a group of men, appointed by the king’s dignitaries, consult Saint Antony. The rest of Ibn Abī al-Dunyā’s book consists of a dialogue between these men (who are in the process of choosing a new leader) and Antony. The men ask for his counsel on how to choose a king, to which Antony replies with parables (amthāl).5 In the early part of the dialogue, Antony preaches about the frailty of this world. Because you do not know how long you will live, he says to the men, you should learn from the punishments of the past generations and act to secure happiness in the afterlife.6 Then, the visitors ask him how to take action for the afterlife while their souls love this world so much. Upon this inquiry, Antony says he is amazed how people say they believe in prophets and their message, but still act ignorantly. The men ask him how he gained wisdom in human affairs, and Antony speaks to them about the benefits of reflection. He says that he reflects on the four sources of pleasure, namely, the four doors on the body (three in the head, and one in the belly), meaning eyes, nostrils, mouth, and penis.7 And he says: “I looked for a way to ease the trouble caused me by these doors through which misfortune enters the world.” 8 After explaining the forms of his asceticism, Antony continues his exhortation with nine tales. The parables attributed to Antony in the Fear of God are generic, lacking any specific information such as proper names. They are titled The Owner9 of the Snake, the Owner of the Vineyard, the Owner of the Ship, the Owner of the Fish, the Jewish and the Christian Men, the Man of the Monastery, the Blind Man, the Man of the Dry Riverbed, and the Man of Affarūliyya (a toponym). All of these parables narrate secular life events. For example, in the first parable, a man insists on protecting and trusting a snake while everybody else warns him against the dangers of the animal. In another parable, a Jew and a Christian almost starve in the desert after not bringing enough water, before a Muslim saves them. And in yet another parable, a man impresses,

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fools, and corrupts a community of monks with his grandiose beard, and is punished with death according to monastic rules for having sexual intercourse. All of these simple, sometimes comical stories emphasize that people ought not risk eternal punishment, and not take forgiveness for granted, since they have been clearly warned about the consequences (rewards and punishments) of their deeds in this world. After the parables, the narrative concludes: When the six men praised Antony for his fine remarks and his eloquent exhortation, he replied: “My sweet exhortation does not go any farther than your ears. Do you not know that the Law brought by Moses, the Psalter brought by David, the Gospel brought by the Messiah, and the books of all the prophets contain the following statement: ‘You will be rewarded according to what you have done.’10 He who labors will be rewarded in accordance with his work. The hired man ought to know where he stands with regard to the master who pays his wages. Look at your works and then judge yourselves, and you will realize what is due to you and what you owe. Leave me and be guided aright!”11 They left him, and by lot chose and accepted one of their number as ruler.12

Antony in the Fear of God Several narrative features of this story indicate that the Antony mentioned in this text is the renowned Saint Antony of Egypt (d. 356).13 The Antony in the Fear of God has withdrawn from the world, and is living in a cave on a nearby mountain. When men come to consult him, he complains about the impossibility of a complete withdrawal from people. He is portrayed as an ascetic who “shut the bodily doors of pleasure,” abstaining from sweet smells, luxurious food, sight of pleasant things, and sexual intercourse.14 He defines the causes of earthly pleasures as property, children, spouses, and political power.15 These are, of course, generic tropes of ascetic literature in Late Antiquity. But they also bring to mind themes from the hagiographic dossier of Saint Antony. His withdrawal to the inner and the outer mountain,16 his ministry and guidance of lay and monastic people,17 as well as his ascetic portrait as a stern denier of bodily pleasures and needs, and his constant human effort to overcome them, are emphasized in the Life of Antony.18 We have two other important pieces of information for identifying the story as a story of Antony of Egypt. The date “320 years after Christ,” given at the beginning of the narrative by Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, roughly corresponds to Saint Antony’s lifetime. The other important information is embedded in the framing story of the king’s request to select a religious leader, which Franz

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Rosenthal identifies as “complicated and . . . needlessly confused.”19 The king’s name, At.nāws, is likely derived from that of the bishop Athanasius of Alexandria (d. 373), the biographer of Saint Antony.20 It is likely that Athanasius was presented as a king in medieval literature. Alexandria was traditionally governed by a prefect appointed by the emperor in the Roman era.21 The bishopric and the later patriarchate of Alexandria was the imperially recognized church in the city, among other Christian groups.22 A man of Athanasius’s renown and influence, with an ecclesiastical career deeply interwoven with imperial politics, might have easily been depicted as a regal figure in the later collective memory of the region.23 It is worth noting that in the Coptic tradition Athanasius is represented as participating in theological debates before the emperor Constantius II (d. 361) (an encounter absent in the Greek historiographical tradition),24 and is portrayed as the founder and the great pastoral leader of the Coptic Church.25 Thus, Ibn Abī al-Dunyā is certainly creating a memory of Saint Antony of Egypt in his text, using the hagiographic knowledge established by the Life of Antony written by the bishop Athanasius, and the latter’s legacy in the Christian tradition. The nine parables Antony narrates in the Fear of God revolve around a common lesson: one must find the balance between fearing God and being confident in his/her pious acts.26 In all of the stories, there is a person who brings death, bodily harm, or monetary loss upon himself, despite having been warned by other people before. After each parable, Antony comments on the story by saying how amazed he is at the fact that ostensibly intelligent people are not able to prepare for the hereafter, although they are warned. Ibn Abī al-Dunyā repeatedly uses the same formula, “I marvel at . . . ,” where Antony comments on the story. For example, he writes, “I marvel at those intelligent people who know the lesson to be derived from such parables but do not use their knowledge,”27 and “I marvel at the man who amasses property to his own detriment and prefers others to himself,”28 and “I marvel at such preoccupation with hope and greed which deceives intelligent and foolish people the same until they perish together.”29 It is intriguing that Antony, through the pen of Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, connects these parables not to piety but to intelligence. Rosenthal states that this work reads as a “pamphlet against the concept of predetermination and in favor of the necessity, independence, and freedom of human action.”30 As accurate as this definition is, the emphasis on the clear and constant warning in each parable also adds another layer of meaning. One is certainly free in his actions according to these parables, but

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it is incomprehensible and unintelligent not to prepare for the world to come and not to see the clear warnings of God. There are no direct literary connections between these parables and the hagiographic dossier of Saint Antony as we know it, except for minor parallels. For example, the tale of the Jew and the Christian who argue about perishing in the desert because of lack of water vaguely resonates with an episode in the Life of Antony in which two men run out of water in the desert and one of them dies.31 There are also vague resemblances to these parables in the broader biblical, hagiographic, epic, and folkloric traditions of the eastern Mediterranean.32 For example, the second parable, about the two workers in a vineyard, one of whom is punished for not taking the commands of the owner seriously, echoes the biblical passage Matthew 20:1–16, where a landlord hires workers for his vineyard, and pays them as he sees fit. We will return to the possible connections of the Fear of God to the Christian tradition shortly. The depiction of Antony in the Fear of God, as a wise sage narrating stories of wisdom, certainly reflects some of the information provided in the Life of Antony. But more prominently, the Fear of God is a continuation and expansion of Antony’s image in the Apophthegmata tradition.33 In the latter, different from the Life and from his letters, Antony is portrayed as a teacher (didaskalos) often uttering a wisdom saying (rhema), making an instructional remark (chreia), or narrating a short, spiritually beneficial anecdote (diegesis) to his visitors and fellow monks.34 His representation in the Fear of God lacks any Christian religious discourse; in fact, he is portrayed as quoting from the Quran. Nevertheless, the mode of depicting him in the Fear of God very much reflects the Antony of the Apophthegmata. These didactic collections of sayings and anecdotes of mostly Egyptian monks and ascetics were an important subcategory of the broader gnomologia (anthologies of wisdom sayings of philosophers and sages).35 They were put in writing in the fifth century approximately, reaching readers and audiences among monastic and lay communities across the eastern Mediterranean already in the early sixth century.36 Arabic translations of apophthegmata are attested by the eighth century.37 The agglomeration of monastic-ascetic wisdom, a prominent cultural heritage of the medieval eastern Mediterranean, seems to have found a reverberation in Ibn Abī al-Dunyā’s work. The Fear of God is practically an extended chreia of Antony. And, it thematically elaborates on the six shorter chreiai of the Companions and Successors given at the very beginning of the work.38 Christians and Muslims, in this text, exhort the audience together.

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Fear of God: An Islamic or Christian Text? Ibn Abī al-Dunyā possibly authored the Fear of God based on his broad knowledge of the ascetic literature in his time.39 One might, at the same time, entertain his claim to have relied on a prior text. It is worth noting that Ibn al-Nadīm (d. 990) mentions a book entitled Antony the Holy Man and the Roman King among the “Books of the Romans” in his bibliographical collection.40 Ibn al-Nadīm’s knowledge of this text might be based on the note in Ibn Abī al-Dunyā’s text. But this is unlikely, since in his account on Ibn Abī al-Dunyā’s works Ibn al-Nadīm does not mention this “Roman” text. Thus, there is an external attestation to a text about the holy man Antony and the Roman king, which might have been the text Ibn Abī al-Dunyā says he is using. There are no direct literary connections between the late antique hagiography of Saint Antony and Ibn Abī al-Dunyā’s text, as mentioned above. Still, the Life of Antony’s popularity, esteem, and impact in the eastern Mediterranean and beyond barely need to be stated.41 Shortly after it was composed in Greek (and it might have had a prior Coptic origin), it was transmitted east and west, translated into numerous languages, expanded, and reworked. “Antony the Egyptian hermit was the inspiration for much ancient literature, not only biographies, but also sayings traditions.” 42 He was depicted as a spiritual patron, a teacher of wisdom, and the founder of eremitical monasticism in a wide array of writings in antiquity.43 Different portrayals of him highlighted different characteristics, sayings, or writings attributed to him. For example, in the Lausiac History, Palladius (d. 430) weaves stories from the Life of Antony into his account of Egyptian ascetics.44 Jerome’s (d. 420) Life of Paul of Thebes was similarly inspired by the Life of Antony and was a literary response to the latter.45 The Syriac Life of Antony, probably an expansion of the Greek Life, was transmitted widely between the sixth and nineteenth centuries.46 The Life of Antony thus circulated widely across multiple linguistic traditions, and was quoted, shortened, and expanded in the hands of hagiographers. In addition to the expansions and abbreviations of Athanasius’s work, there were also novel Antony traditions in the medieval Christian world. We know of Western hagiographic traditions and monastic treatises attributed to Saint Antony in the Middle Ages, partly informed by Athanasius’s work.47 In ninthcentury Rome, Saint Antony was venerated as a protector of animals.48 Moreover, there is a long tradition of writings on Antony in Christian Arabic

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literature, including multiple iterations of his life, teachings, and letters.49 Thus, although I have not encountered a text that could be the Vorlage of the Fear of God in the Christian tradition, it is probable that there were similar novel Antony traditions in the eastern Mediterranean by the ninth century. Ibn Abī al-Dunyā’s Antony, a conflation of the Antony of the Apophthegmata and the Antony of Athanasius’s work, was familiar to the medieval world. Following the traditions of the Egyptian desert, monastic-didactic pseudepigrapha circulated widely in Christian literature in the Middle Ages. For example, in a Syriac text from roughly the tenth century, the apostle Peter is depicted as exhorting his monastic audience on self-imposed exile and virginity, through a parable of a good and a bad servant (vaguely echoing the second parable in the Fear of God, about the two vineyard workers).50 Similarly, in a work of the bishop Severus b. al-Muqaffaʿ (tenth c.), entitled Affliction’s Physic and the Cure of Sorrow, the author narrates stories of various prophets (including Jesus, Mani, Job, Abraham, and Moses) and quotes saints and philosophers (such as Basil the Great, John Chrysostom, Antony, Macarius, and Pachomius) on the disease of sorrow and its cures.51 The circulation of these texts points to a literary market in which a similar didactic text, attributed to Saint Antony, might have also circulated in Arabic or Syriac, a copy of which Ibn Abī al-Dunyā had access to. Note that Ibn Abī al-Dunyā says in the introduction that he found a work dealing with “wise sayings and parables,” and there is no reason to discredit this assertion, contrary to the argument of Rosenthal that the Fear of God was pseudepigraphy, authored in fact by Ibn Abī al-Dunyā. In the Christian tradition such pseudepigraphic texts are generally aimed at spiritual formation of monastic audiences.52 In the Islamic context, however, similar texts are oriented toward a courtly audience, which brings us to the social context of Ibn Abī al-Dunyā. If such a text existed in the Christian tradition, how could Ibn Abī al-Dunyā have accessed it? Despite being remembered as a prolific teacher, little is known about Ibn Abī al-Dunyā’s scholarly endeavors outside Baghdad and the court.53 Still, this context offers some important insights into his possible access to Christian hagiography. After the grand translation projects at the court of Baghdad and other locations, patronized particularly by the caliph al-Maʾmūn (d. 833), numerous texts were translated from Syriac, Greek, and other languages to Arabic.54 If there was an earlier version of the story of Antony in the Fear of God circulating in Christian communities, it could have been

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transmitted across linguistic and confessional boundaries during these translation projects. The so-called translation movement was not the only point of encounter between Islamic and Christian literature at the court, either. We are informed of Christians who served as viziers and secretaries at the court, and produced books.55 A story of Saint Antony might have been produced by Christians at the Abbasid court before being reshaped by Ibn Abī al-Dunyā. We must also decentralize the written texts and remember the oral narrations of stories— hagiodiegesis. Christian tradition in fact preserves memories of bishops and monks participating in religious debates at the Abbasid court.56 Those treatises mostly functioned as catechism for Christians living under Islam, using the trope of the caliph and his majlis (sessions of religious debate) as framing tropes.57 Nevertheless, as Griffith states, the narratives might have preserved a historical reality—that is, monks and clerics often were invited to the Abbasid court for debate.58 Such occasions of conversation might also have facilitated the transmission of stories, like that of Saint Antony. Ibn Abī al-Dunyā is known for having significantly altered and rarely cited the source materials he used when he represented Christians and Christianity in his works.59 Yet, a close reading of the Fear of God demonstrates that he participated in a “heteroglossia of the marketplace,” an “open-market cultural economy” of poetry and prose that authors freely used in their own writings, with flexible interpretations of intertextuality.60 He might have composed the Fear of God with his broad knowledge of tropes and expressions, or of specific texts circulating in this market. With the extant material, we will not know which one of these processes underlies the production of the Fear of God. In either case, his production of this text renders him a hagiographer of a renowned Christian saint, Antony. My study of Ibn Abī al-Dunyā’s authorship of this text highlights two things: the broad literary horizon of Muslim authors beyond Islamic material, and the extent of medieval Christian literature preserved in Islamic literature.

The Fear of God in Broader Islamic Literature The Fear of God is a didactic text, an example of the voluminous adab literature.61 Adab, in its most basic definition, can be described as “suitable things to know and act upon.” 62 Although it is generally translated as “literature,” “belles lettres,” or “humanities,” it encompasses more than these modern concepts, broadly corresponding to writings that aim at ethical formation,

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communicating transmitted knowledge (like ancestral customs), and occasionally entertainment. Adab works were composed in a wide array of genres, including thematically collected anthologies. Especially after the ninth century, didactic anthologies consisting of proverbs, quranic passages, and historical and semihistorical anecdotes became a powerful form of expression of one’s erudition and social competence among the educated elites in the Abbasid caliphate.63 Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, a court scholar himself, produced adab works, building his credentials among other prolific and well-known Muslim literati such as al-Jāh.iz. (d. 868) and Ibn Qutayba (d. 889), who were also active in the courtly circles of Baghdad.64 The didactic function of the Fear of God is further highlighted by its Sitz im Leben. Ibn Abī al-Dunyā tutored Abbasid princes al-Muʿtad. id (d. 902) and al-Muqtafī (d. 908) in Baghdad. The Fear of God partly functions as a mirror for princes (a branch of the professional adab),65 examples of which are abundant in antiquity and the Middle Ages.66 Through the Fear of God, especially at the beginning of the dialogue between Antony and the visitors from the king’s court, Ibn Abī al-Dunyā exhorts his royal students on the perils of love of earthly life and pleasures, temporality of power, health, and wealth, just as Antony of Egypt exhorted Constantine’s sons.67 “Do you know how long you might live and be king?” Ibn Abī al-Dunyā asks through Antony; and again, through Antony’s parables he answers this fundamental question. Parables do frequently appear in the genre of mirror for princes, as seen in the extensive use of “Indian” tales in the tenth-century author al-Māwardī’s Exhortations of Kings.68 The fact that in the Fear of God a renowned Christian saint offers advice in the selection of a king underlines the extent to which the spiritual authority of Saint Antony was esteemed in the ninth-century Islamic world. His hagiographic dossier might have been known only in broad strokes. Still, his memory as a wise ascetic exhorting people on piety and morality was very much alive. Moreover, adab works often focused on intelligence as a fundamental component of piety.69 In the Fear of God, Antony connects the parables he narrates to human intellect. Saint Antony of Egypt, who was remembered to have debated with Greek philosophers of his time,70 was thus a suitable subject in fulfilling the conventions of the adab literature of Ibn Abī al-Dunyā’s time. Using a Christian figure was not unusual for adab works. In the Fear of God and other works, Christian saints are placed among Muslim saints and sages for the exhortative value of their deeds and sayings. In such

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compositions, the Christian background of the literary characters is overshadowed by their representations as epitomes of piety, virtue, and morality. Ibn Abī al-Dunyā’s presentation of Antony in the Fear of God underlines the hagiographic value of anecdotes of Christian saints qua Christian saints for the Muslim authors and their audiences. Of course, in the Fear of God Antony is embedded within an Islamic discourse. Yet, he is also explicitly portrayed as the pre-Islamic Saint Antony of Egypt. To have a better grasp of this semiotic detail, we should contextualize the Fear of God within Ibn Abī al-Dunyā’s broader corpus of more than a hundred works on piety and asceticism, only about twenty of which have survived.71 In the Fear of God, aphorisms of six Muslim ascetics are presented as a prologue to a Christian saint’s wisdom and guidance. In his other works, the prophet Muhammad, Muslim saints, and biblical prophets are placed together as exemplars of wisdom, morality, and piety. For example, in the Book of Certainty,72 Ibn Abī al-Dunyā gives reports about Muhammad, ʿAlī, Jesus, and the prophet Luqmān, among others, on the concept of “certainty in faith.”73 In the Book of Joy after Sorrow, he brings together Jonah, Joseph, Jacob, various Companions, and the caliph ʿUmar II (r. 717–20).74 With the Fear of God and his other works, Ibn Abī al-Dunyā places Islamic teachings within the broader ecumenical pietism and asceticism of the eastern Mediterranean. In Ibn Abī al-Dunyā’s works, stories of pre-Islamic prophets and saints serve the overarching purpose of exemplifying Islamic asceticism and piety. In this collectivity, the literary characters’ individual traits blend into a hypericon, as in collective biographies.75 So, on the one hand, Patricia Cox Miller’s theorization of the collective biography is applicable on a larger scale to the corpus of the writings of an author. In late antique Christian collective biographies, such as the Vita Patrum of Gregory of Tours (d. 594) and the anonymous Historia Monachorum, “the subjectivity of holiness is the focus of the biographer, for whom the ‘diversity’ of the particularities of their existence is only important insofar as it serves the ideal of sameness.”76 Similarly, the differences between prophets and saints in the works of Ibn Abī al-Dunyā fade when the sameness of the stories is emphasized.77 On the other hand, the hyper-icon, Islamic piety in our context, is also shaped by the differences between the individual subjects. Antony, a pre-Islamic Christian saint, because of this very difference in his religious background, is placed among Muslim saints, and this juxtaposition renders Islamic asceticism timeless and ecumenical.

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south arabian historiography and alexander the believing king Ibn Hishām (d. 833), primarily known as the editor of Ibn Ish.āq’s Sīra, is also the author of a local history of South Arabia, the Book of Crowns.78 In the majority of the book Ibn Hishām quotes from the aforementioned Yemeni transmitter Wahb b. Munabbih, and in fact the Book of Crowns is argued to have partially preserved a lost book of Wahb.79 The Book of Crowns documents South Arabian antiquities through a royal genealogical history, weaving peripheral pre-Islamic narratives into an Islamic time frame. The example I will focus on here is the South Arabian king identified as the Two-Horned/ Dhū al-Qarnayn, and the relation between this character and the Alexander Legend. As seen previously, the Two-Horned mentioned in the Quran is often identified as Alexander the Great in the Islamic tradition. In the Book of Crowns, however, the Two-Horned is said to be a king of South Arabia, and his depiction seems to have been based on the Christian Syriac Alexander Legend. This case study builds on the analysis of the quranic Dhū al-Qarnayn and revisits the intricate relationship between transmission of stories and of tropes across religious traditions. I will show how the Christian legend and the quranic representation together played a role in the shaping of a local historiographical tradition. In the Book of Crowns, following an account of the creation and the prophetic genealogy, Ibn Hishām gives the succession of Himyarite kings as descendants of the prophet Hud, descendant of Shem, son of Noah. The first Himyarite king, he says, was the mythical Wa’il b. Himyar. And he concludes his account with the time of Sayf b. Dhī Yazan (d. 578), who ended Axumite (Ethiopian) rule over South Arabia with the help of the Sassanid king Chosroes I (d. 579).80 Ibn Hishām provides a number of hagiographic narratives in the Book of Crowns within this genealogy. One, for example, is the “story of the fire which the Himyarites worshipped before they converted to Judaism.” 81 It is a short narrative about two rabbis having an ordeal by walking into a fire, which the people of Yemen used to worship. The rabbis are not burned, since they hang holy writings around their necks. Upon this miracle, the people of Yemen are converted to Judaism, which is presented in the text as the precursor monotheism, before the beginning of Christianity in the region. A few accounts later Ibn Hishām tells the story of Dhū Nuwās, whom he identifies as “the Companion of the Trench, whom God mentions in the Quran.” 82 But

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Ibn Hishām only reports the Axumite intervention in South Arabia, and does not comment on the rest of the quranic verses (Q85:4–7), nor does he narrate the persecution of Christians, to which these verses appear to be alluding.83 Thus, Ibn Hishām makes selective and limited use of hagiographic stories in the Book of Crowns, his overarching purpose in the book being praise of the history of South Arabia. According to the genealogy given in the book, the tenth king of Himyar was al-Saʿab Dhū al-Qarnayn.84 Ibn Hishām begins his account of the reign of the Two-Horned with the latter’s genealogy, descending from the prophet Noah. After this, he gives a brief report from Wahb b. Munabbih. In this report, Muhammad’s cousin and the fourth caliph, ʿAlī b. Abī T.ālib, praises reports of Himyarite origin for providing valuable admonitions.85 Following the report, again based on the account of Wahb, Ibn Hishām begins the narrative about the Two-Horned. He first narrates the king’s divinely inspired dreams, and then gives a relatively lengthy account of his reign and travels. While all other rulers of Himyar are narrated in six pages at the most, the Two-Horned gets forty-five pages. In this extensive account, the king has dreams on four subsequent nights, each dream becoming more vivid and powerful. The first night he dreams that he holds great mountains in his hand; the second night he sees the sun in his right hand and the moon in his left hand; the third night he sees that he eats the mountains and drinks the seas of the world; and on the fourth night in his dream humans and the jinn, beasts and birds, all the creatures, sit between his two hands. The king then convenes the religious leaders in the community to ask them about the meaning of his dreams.86 One of his confidants tells him that with the providence of God he will rule over the entire world, bringing justice to it, but that the one who can really explain the dreams is a prophet in Jerusalem (bayt al-maqdis), born of Isaac son of Abraham.87 Upon his conversation with this man, the king convenes a great army of soldiers and leaves for Jerusalem. Before reaching Jerusalem, he visits Mecca. The king walks in the sacred place on foot and circumambulates the Kaʿba.88 After his pilgrimage, he goes to Jerusalem and meets the prophet, who introduces himself as Mūsā al-Khid. r b. Khid. rūn b. ʿUmūm b. Yahūdhā b. Yaʿqūb b. Ish.āq b. Ibrāhīm al-Khalīl.89 When the king narrates his dreams to this prophet, the latter affirms the interpretation of his dreams, that he will rule the entire earth with God’s providence. The prophet Mūsā al-Khid. r continues to exhort the Two-Horned on how he will conquer the world from east to

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west, from Jazira to Andalus, with the sword of God, inviting people to the religion of Abraham.90 The narrative describes the king’s travels to Persia, Armenia, and other places, and his encounters with their people, their wondrous buildings and creatures, including the barbaric and unsightly Gog and Magog.91 At this point in the text, Ibn Hishām himself narrates the building of the wall between Gog and Magog and the people, without citing any transmitter as a source.92 Then, he says, the Two-Horned died in Iraq, after which al-Khid.r disappeared, never having appeared to anybody other than the prophet Moses before.93 The account regarding the Two-Horned ends with an elegy for the king.94 The meeting of the Two-Horned with the prophet Mūsā al-Khid.r reminds the reader of the Two-Horned in the Quran and his encounter with the unnamed sage, who is later identified as al-Khid.r, as we saw in the previous chapter. We will begin our analysis with this quranic passage to examine the relationship between the quranic Dhū al-Qarnayn and Ibn Hishām’s Believing King.

The Book of Crowns and the Quran The two-horned king is never referred to as Alexander in this text, but the narrative uses numerous tropes from the Alexander dossier.95 The dialogue between the king and the prophet in Jerusalem is reminiscent of Alexander’s consulting the wise sage about the future in the Alexander Legend.96 Finding the Water of Life, the prophecy about Alexander’s defeat of Gog and Magog and building the wall, and his reign over the entire earth from east to west are among the prominent tropes from the Alexander Legend repeated in the Book of Crowns.97 The Two-Horned’s visit to Jerusalem, too, echoes a passage in the Christian Syriac Alexander Legend, in which Alexander makes a supplication to God that he will place his throne in Jerusalem, so that “when the Messiah comes from heaven, He may sit upon the kingly throne, for His kingdom lasts forever.”98 The two-horned king is not referred to as Christian or Muslim in the Book of Crowns, but he is portrayed as fighting for “the religion of Abraham.” Despite this muting of his religion, the representation of the king in this text seems to have been informed by the Syriac Alexander Legend. One of the interesting details in Ibn Hishām’s account is the name of this enigmatic prophet: Mūsā al-Khid. r. The Moses mentioned here is a descendant of Abraham, but not the prophet Moses son of Amram. The conflation of Moses and al-Khid. r in the Book of Crowns reminds us of the story in Q18:60– 82, where Moses, the unnamed servant of God (identified as al-Khid. r in the

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exegetical tradition), and the Two-Horned are mentioned together. Possibly aware of this quranic conflation, the Book of Crowns introduces another prophet Moses who was al-Khid. r, and not Moses son of Amram, and this other Moses lived in the time of the two-horned king.99 This presentation is confusing vis-à-vis the biblical prophet Moses, yet the confusion is resolved at the end of the story in the Book of Crowns: the prophet Moses son of Amram and al-Khid. r are differentiated, for Moses al-Khid. r is reported to have appeared to the prophet Moses—thus, the two characters were not the same.100 The Book of Crowns claims that the quranic Two-Horned/Dhū al-Qarnayn was a South Arabian king, not Alexander the Great. This representation appears to be a result of the redaction process after Wahb b. Munabbih, since in many exegetical reports transmitted on his authority, Wahb is quoted as giving information about the possible connections of Dhū al-Qarnayn traditions and Alexander the Great.101 In the Book of Crowns, his account is intriguingly silent about Alexander. Moreover, Ibn Hishām himself, in the Sīra, notes that the Dhū al-Qarnayn mentioned in the Quran was Alexander, that he built Alexandria, and the latter was named after him.102 Thus, lack of any mention of Alexander in this lengthy narrative in the Book of Crowns appears to be an intentional omission. As a result of this silencing, the South Arabian king Dhū al-Qarnayn is depicted through the hagiographic tropes of the Christian Alexander Legend, while the persona of Alexander the Great is erased from the memory associated with the epithet Two-Horned. This example brings a new understanding to the use of tropes in ancient literature. In certain cases, the hero of a story was erased in the transmission process, while reorienting the story toward a new meaning. And what is left of the story can be (mis)identified as a floating literary trope pulled out of a shared reservoir of symbols by the modern historian. To understand this distinction between the transmission of tropes and the transmission of stories more fully, let us take a closer look at Ibn Hishām and his text.

Ibn Hishām and the Alexander Material Ibn Hishām was born in Egypt and spent the majority of his life there.103 His master, Asad b. Mūsā (d. 827), from whom he transmitted many reports, was also possibly an Egyptian of Umayyad descent;104 he might be the transmitter of the material in the Book of Crowns between Wahb b. Munabbih and Ibn Hishām,105 although there are no textual traces of such transmission in that work. Ibn Hishām’s family was from Basra, and traditionally known to be of

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Yemeni descent. His connection to Iraq was not only familial, as he himself traveled to Iraq, where he learned about the Sīra, which he later edited.106 Thus, the authorship of the Book of Crowns places Ibn Hishām in the genealogies of both Egyptian and Basran scholars with an interest in South Arabian antiquities. Why would scholars in Iraq have been interested in South Arabia? Following the Persian-Byzantine wars in the sixth century, many Christian (mostly East Syrian) families from Iraq were resettled in South Arabia. This was, however, not a onetime and one-direction demographic movement. Families from Iraq continued to resettle in South Arabia in the following centuries, while South Arabian families, like that of Ibn Hishām, moved to Iraq.107 These demographic shifts constituted the background of a branch of Islamic historiography that connects South Arabian and Iraqi traditions. Among the forerunners of South Arabian historiography is Wahb b. Munabbih, and it is worth spending some time on this figure here, for Ibn Hishām extensively quotes Wahb in the Book of Crowns. Wahb was a renowned Yemeni transmitter and jurist of Persian descent in the early eighth century.108 He was a first-generation Muslim. According to the biographical information preserved in the Islamic tradition, his father, Munabbih, was sent to Yemen from Khurasan during the reign of Chosroes I (r. 531–79) and converted to Islam. Wahb served as a judge and had access to courtly libraries, particularly in South Arabia and Egypt. He is also reported to have had access to monastic libraries, where he possibly gathered a great deal of his knowledge on pre-Islamic religions and traditions.109 The vast number of books that he read is an essential aspect of his hagiographic representation.110 He is also remembered as having written many books on the history of South Arabia, although his works are preserved only as quotations in later works. It is not clear whether he himself penned the “books” or mostly narrated the material.111 Regardless of his authorship of books, Wahb represents the starting point of a long-standing Yemeni historiography dedicated to the elucidation of Yemeni heritage, sanctity, particularity, and importance. Although he was criticized and even dismissed by some later scholars for transmitting unreliable Christian and Jewish material, his authority on the antiquities of South Arabia was rivaled by few. By extensively quoting from him, Ibn Hishām placed himself in the genealogy of South Arabian scholarship.112 Ibn Hishām’s Yemeni descent could explain his investment in a text about the antiquities of South Arabia. Still, his allegiance to that place needs further

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elaboration. For Ibn Hishām, South Arabia was not simply an ancestral homeland to be nostalgically praised. He was also carving a scholarly identity for himself, and his studies connected him to the circles in Egypt and Iraq. Praising South Arabian history and sanctity in these regions had political connotations. In Iraq in particular, where there was a deep-rooted tradition of h.adīth criticism, writing about the sanctity of South Arabia likely directly contributed to competition between scholarly traditions (on which, more below). Through the example of Ibn Hishām, a prominent author/editor with familial and scholarly connections to multiple regions, we see how complicated the discussions of allegiances and loyalties can be. Zayde Antrim discusses how the concept of homeland (wat. an) denoted religious and political attachment to territory in medieval Islamic literature, in place of the more basic connotations of the term, such as ancestral home, birthplace, or residence.113 The Book of Crowns is a reification of such an understanding of belonging. Going back to the story, Finbarr Barry Flood’s conceptualization of centerperiphery, and the exchange of material between the two as a form of negotiation for power and authority, are useful in our discussion of the story of the two-horned king of South Arabia.114 Flood points out the networks (instead of territories) of exchange through which objects were transferred, which catalyzed conversation between locations and enabled transculturation. Mimi Hanaoka, following Flood, emphasizes the role of humans in this dynamic, multidirectional relationship.115 My analysis, along the same lines, points out that legendary personas and stories were also important exchange objects in these networks, as catalysts of conversations on identity, authority, and power.

Saints as Excellences The Book of Crowns presents pre-Islamic rulers of Yemen in saintly terms, as excellences of the region. As Hanaoka points out for Persian historiography, on the one hand, medieval historians elucidated the particular features of local saints to establish specificity; on the other hand, they connected these local histories and stories to the administrative centers and to the overarching literary and theological currencies of their time. By connecting South Arabian history to a quranic time frame, Ibn Hishām made his intention explicit: the Two-Horned, the one mentioned in the Quran, was a God-chosen believing king of South Arabia. It is worth noting that Ibn Hishām’s note in the Sīra about caliph ʿUmar b. Khat.t.āb’s veneration of the tomb of the martyrs in

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South Arabia is also a perfect example of this strategy.116 Veneration of a Yemeni saint by a Qurayshi figure is a bold claim about the locale of sanctity. Writing about the saintly past of Yemen, and embedding it in a quranic framework, can be construed as a conversation with the Abbasid capital, Baghdad. At a time when the descendants of Muhammad’s uncle ʿAbbās were solidifying their power in the administrative center of the Islamic empire, the Book of Crowns, a peripheral historiography, claimed the centrality of its subject’s (South Arabia’s) participation in quranic chronology and the biblical landscape.117 In the form of a regal chronicle, the Book of Crowns explained to its audiences how the current sociopolitical and religious character of South Arabia took shape. In the process, Alexander, as a monotheistic and missionary king, was presented as a merit of South Arabia. The Book of Crowns is a praise of South Arabia, in the long genealogy of praise literature. The Greek literary genres of panegyric, enkomion, and ekphrasis, and the oratorical practice of praise, continued through Christianity.118 Hagiography was also often used to promote local bishoprics and cities, since a saintly past and apostolic succession were highly valued social currencies in Late Antiquity.119 The apostolic legacy of Christianity in a particular place was a major source of local pride and legitimacy, and this contributed to hagiographic production in certain locations. For example, late antique stories of the Edessan martyrs,120 the Teaching of Addai (with the story of a painting of Jesus by the scribe Hannan),121 and the Acts of Mari122 reveal Edessan Christian elites’ attempt to promote the city by emphasizing its place in the apostolic succession. In addition to such articulations of the Christian past in a certain location, pre-Christian history was also interwoven into historiography for praise purposes. Theodoret of Cyrrhus (d. 457), in his account of the holy man Publius from the town of Zeugma in the History of the Monks of Syria, uses ancient Persian history to praise the town.123 Celebrated Xerxes, he says, passed through Zeugma on his march to Greece, and gave the town its name; the pre-Christian and Christian pasts of Zeugma are thus interlaced to reinforce its prestige. The Islamic literature of fad. āʾil (excellences, merits), particularly the works dedicated to the merits of cities and provinces, can be construed as a continuation of this ancient tradition. Fad. āʾil literature presents the excellences and merits of people, communities, cities, and other things “for the purposes of a laudatio.”124 Although praising tribes and glorious deeds of heroes was a pre-Islamic tradition in

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Arabia, fad. āʾil literature, technically speaking, originated with the excellences of the Quran, of Muhammad, his Companions, and the Successors. As the genre developed, it thematically came to include tribes, religious practices, and towns and cities. Local historical writings that emphasize the sanctity and other merits of cities and regions are abundant, and often saints from the pre-Islamic period as well as the Islamic era are presented as part of the rich heritage of a town or region in these works.125 Fad. āʾil literature often includes descriptions of popular belief through hagiographic anecdotes.126 Especially for non-Arab communities, the portrayal of a sacred past and its importance for and relevance to current Islamic politics and culture was an important literary tool for establishing new Muslim identities. Hanaoka argues that in the formation processes of these new identities, peripheral histories engaged with the center with claims to authority and legitimacy.127 For this, some places were associated with Muhammad (appearing in someone’s dream, for instance), some had a role in eschatology, and others were associated with a certain Companion who taught h.adīth there.128 Such hagiographic anecdotes helped establish a place’s sanctity visà-vis the more powerful administrative centers. The sanctity of a place was also claimed through its pre-Islamic past. Saints were often considered among the fad. āʾil of a place, for they ensured the presence of “a form of Islam” before Islam in that region.129 Paul Cobb and Nancy Khalek present how the biblical past was interwoven into the discourses praising the sanctity of Syria, for example.130 Hanaoka also shows how the local pre-Islamic Iranian past was woven into its Islamic present in Iranian historiography, by compressing, overlaying, and rearranging chronologies and identities.131 Through such discursive strategies, communities established their sanctity, venerability, and legitimacy. The Book of Crowns exemplifies this phenomenon by integrating the TwoHorned (Alexander) into the historiography of South Arabia. The king is hagiographically depicted like the Christian Alexander the Great. Yet, in this book he rules South Arabia, and he is embedded in the Islamic time frame, since he is said to be mentioned in the Quran and presented as making a pilgrimage to Mecca. Technically, the Book of Crowns is not a fad. āʾil work. Nevertheless, its presentations of the pre-Islamic past of South Arabia and the sanctity of its rulers is very much a part of the genealogy of praise literature. The use of Christian hagiographic knowledge for this purpose exemplifies the encomiastic reorientation of Christian hagiographic knowledge in Islam. In

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this usage, the sanctity of the hero is emphasized, and his/her religious background as a Christian is not muted. The story is embedded in an Islamic time frame, but the hero does not become a Muslim. This literary strategy stands in contrast to the practice in Islamic literature of referring to Christian saints as Muslims—a different use of Christian hagiographic knowledge to which we now turn.

saint george in al-t.abarī’s history of THE prophets and kings The representation of Saint George in al-T.abarī’s (d. 923) History of the Prophets and Kings is a prime example of a prominent function of Christian hagiography in Islamic literature: the portrayal of saints as pre-Muhammad Muslims.132 According to al-T.abarī’s account, transmitted on the authority of Wahb b. Munabbih and “other learned men,” Jirjīs (George) “was a righteous servant of God among the people of Palestine.”133 He belonged to the remnants of the Companions of Jesus, during the days of Dadhāna, the king of Syria.134 In this story George is a trader who has gained much wealth and given it all to charity. Like many other believers of his time, he conceals his faith because of severe persecutions. The king forces everybody to worship Afalūn (Apollo), and whoever does not comply is tortured.135 Seeing this, George is disturbed greatly and gets into a dispute with the king.136 Enraged by his answers, the king starts torturing George, but is not able to kill him.137 George is put in prison, where an angel comforts him, informing him that he will be killed four times in the coming years, and only after the last death will God accept his soul. Indeed, the king tortures him severely, seemingly killing him each time, and each time George comes back to life. The fourth time, however, God grants him martyrdom, and annihilates the city with fire.138 This story line closely follows some Christian versions of the story of Saint George.139 In fact, there are significant parallels in plot and vocabulary between al-T.abarī’s text and the Syriac recension of the story. For example, the king’s name, which appears as Dadyanā in the Syriac version,140 is Dadhāna in the Arabic version. Both traditions emphasize that the king’s tortures awaited those who did not worship Apollo. George’s dispute with the king is longer in the Syriac text, but the outlines of the conversation are similar; in both dialogues, George contrasts a vain pagan symbol with the truthful God. In al-T.abarī’s text he first speaks to the king in the following manner:

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“Know, that you are a slave owned by a master, and that you yourself own nothing directly or indirectly, and that above you is a Lord Who owns you and others. This Lord created and sustained you; he makes you live and die; he harms you and benefits you; and yet you propose to imitate what is created by Him? God said unto man ‘Be.’ And he was. Deaf, dumb, speechless and sightless, [an idol] can nether hurt nor benefit. It cannot help you at all to dispense with God. You decorate it with gold and silver and make it a temptation unto man. You worship it, not God, and you force humans to worship it. You call it the Lord.”141

In the Syriac text, George’s first speech to the king is shorter, and emphasizes Christian doctrine more than the omnipotence of God: “I am a Christian; but your threats, king, are idle, and name not those who are not gods; but let gods who did not make heaven and earth perish from the earth. For I worship one true God, with his Son and his Holy Spirit, one Trinity and one Godhead without division.”142

Despite their differences, both passages underline the king’s pettiness, the impotence of idols, and the greatness of the one God. The king’s tortures are also narrated with similar tropes in the Syriac and the Arabic versions: tying George to a piece of wood and skinning him (putting vinegar and mustard on his flesh in the Arabic);143 piercing his body with knives and nails (piercing his head in the Arabic);144 and putting him in an unused pit (putting him in a hot copper cauldron in the Arabic).145 God’s promise to resurrect George three times is a significant miraculous vision in both versions, although in the Syriac text each of the deaths is narrated in more extensive detail. George’s prayer to accept his intercession for believers that were to come after him is shorter in the Arabic version than in the Syriac, but similar in content.146 The Syriac prayer gives a long list of the situations and contexts in which George’s name and his bones can help believers, which is a prescription of liturgical remembrance and relic veneration; whereas in the Arabic-Islamic version of the prayer George’s suffering and intercession on behalf of believers are reiterated in broader terms, without indicating any ritual practice. God’s wrath and destruction of the city after George’s prayer are also parallel in the two versions. The Arabic text reads: Then God granted him the fourth death, as promised. When the city and all within it was burnt down and turned to ashes, God carried it from the face of the earth. He overturned it, and for a long time thereafter malodorous smoke issued from under it. Anybody who inhaled it fell gravely ill. It resulted in a variety of diseases, each unlike the other.147

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The Syriac text: And the same hour lightning came down from heaven like fire, and devoured the seventy kings, and not one of them escaped. [ . . . ] And in that same great contest many perished, men and women without number from the terror of lightning; and everyone believed in the living God.148

At the very end of the Arabic text, al-T.abarī says that together with George many other people were also martyred, and they “numbered 34,000, including the king’s wife.”149 This seems to be a summary of the episode in the Syriac version, in which Queen Alexandra’s conversion to Christianity and the subsequent martyrdom are narrated.150 The similarities between the Christian and the Islamic versions of the story are numerous. However, in al-T.abarī’s text George is given an Islamic character; for instance, George is defined as a “righteous servant of God,” and his only affiliation with Christianity is that he is a member of the “remnants of Jesus’ followers.”151 The people persecuted by Decius are also called “believers,” not “Christians.” In fact, the only time Christianity is mentioned in the rest of the story is during George’s first dialogue with Decius, when he asks the king: “Tell me, how would you compare Magnentius, a dignitary of your people, with Christ, the son of Mary? For God chose him and his mother above the men of the world, and made him a sign for the believers. [ . . . ] How would you compare the mother of this good spirit, whom God has chosen as His word, cleansing her body for His spirit, and making her the head of His women servants? To whom would you compare her and the divine favor she was granted? To Jezebel?”152

To compare, in the Syriac version, George says to the king: “Tell me the names of your gods since you said to me that Apollo stretched out the heaven, and Heracles planted the earth firmly, and Athena diffused the sunlight; but they made none of the things that are seen. Know therefore that it is not the gods who made creation, but they are futile images. [ . . . ] Tell me, king: which seems to you worthier by comparison, Simon the chief of the apostles, or Poseidon the chief of brigands? Samuel the chosen prophet, or Actaeon the madman? [ . . . ] Mary who gave birth to God in our manhood, or Jezebel the slayer of God’s prophets?”153

In the Islamic version, Mary is referred to as mother of Jesus, God’s word and spirit. Her virginity and Jesus’s divine nature are silenced, although Mary’s virginity is known and praised in the Islamic tradition as early as the Quran.154 Moreover, in the same dialogue in al-T.abarī’s account, George speaks in the

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following way: “God said unto man ‘be’ and he was. Deaf, dumb and speechless and sightless, [an idol] can neither hurt nor benefit.”155 Although in the Syriac version the idols are also called futile and deaf, the lines in the Islamic text are clear allusions to quranic verses. The first, “he said ‘be’ and he was,” is an expression that recurs in multiple Quran chapters.156 The latter sentence similarly has quranic undertones, since many verses define idols as “what can neither harm nor benefit.”157 The major difference between the dramatic finales of the Arabic and the Syriac versions is that in the former the destruction of the city and the people is narrated very vividly; whereas in the Syriac version the destruction led to many people’s awe and conversion to the Christian faith. Thus, George’s story in al-T.abarī’s account ended like those of quranic prophets. In fact, in the History, the story of George is placed in a genealogy of prophets, after the story of Samson.158 Through these literary strategies, George is presented in the History as a pre-Islamic Muslim holy man, a true believer of Jesus, and not as a Christian.

Representing Christians as Muslims This representation exemplifies a well-known Islamic historiographical practice, namely, articulating pre-Islamic Christians as Muslims predating Muhammad.159 In this practice, the hero is portrayed as a believer and defender of the one God. Christian discourse is minimized, while the story is embellished with quranic discourse. The hagiographic plot of the Christian story remains recognizable, but George is now a member of the Muslim community, whose faith, status as a martyr (and the complete destruction of the disbelievers afterward), and his intercessory power are emphasized and tied into the quranic salvation history. The representation of biblical prophets as precursors of Muhammad, to articulate a primordial Islamic past that extended back to the creation, is a well-documented phenomenon, observed both in the Quran and in later Islamic literature.160 Al-T.abarī participated in this tradition, his universal history functioning as a demonstration of Islamic salvation history.161 Underlying his major works, like those of many historians before him, was the assumption that pre-Islamic prophets were prototypes of Muhammad, and these surfaced as he treated “the prediction and annunciation of Muhammad.”162 In developing this argument, Jane McAuliffe focuses on the representations in al-T.abarī’s work of prominent prophets, such as Jesus, Abraham, and Moses. However, as the example of George indicates, Christian saints took

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a role in the “Islamization” of pre-Islamic monotheists alongside major biblical prophets. Through this practice, saints as well as prophets became Muslims. In Griffith’s words, “Muslim commentators neatly assign[ed] Jesus’ true disciples, and therefore the real Christians, to the nascent Muslim community.”163 These Christians belonged to the Muslim community that began with Adam, and extending across generations through prophets and holy men and women, reached Muhammad and beyond.164 As a part of the “hermeneutic process whereby the early Muslim community sought to interpret bits and pieces of its recalled primordial past,” many Christian saints were Islamicized.165 They were depicted as pious, ascetic believers of an almost amorphous monotheist religion that appears as proto-Islam.166 Julia Bray refers to Christian holy men in such literary contexts as “partners of Muslims” in history, a necessary part of God’s plan.167 Beyond being mere partners, however, these Christians were depicted as members of the ever-existing Muslim community. They were described and likely perceived by Muslim communities as primordial Muslim holy men, servants of God prior to Muhammad. Representing Christians as Muslims was a deep-rooted historiographical practice in Islam. Since al-T.abarī was a collector and editor of the reports cited in his works, it is difficult to tell whether representing George as a Muslim was his own choice or merely his repetition of older reports. He transmits the story on the authority of Wahb b. Munabbih and “other learned men.”168 Ibn al-Nadīm reports that al-T.abarī learned “from the sons of the brother of Wahb.”169 But this is a vague statement, and not helpful in reconstructing a possible trajectory between Wahb and al-T.abarī for the story of Saint George. Al-T.abarī used a wide variety of sources especially for the pre-Islamic sections of his History, the majority of which are unknown to modern historians.170 For example, the Persian regal chronicle Khwadāynāmag had gone through a complex history of transmission by the time it reached al-T.abarī.171 It is easy, therefore, to imagine that similarly complex trajectories underlie his access to his other sources, through which stories like that of Saint George found reiteration at his pen. Other Islamic narrations of the story of George in fact point to multiple levels of expansion of the story within Islamic literature. For example, in the Meadows of Gold, al- Masʿūdī (d. 956) gave a summary of the story of George, with details differing from the account of al-T.abarī. In this retelling, George lived during the lifetime of some of the disciples of Jesus; he was sent to the king of Mosul, who burned him and threw his ashes into the Tigris, after

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George died and was resurrected twice.172 Given such different contemporaneous versions of the story of George in Islamic literature, it is difficult to assess the extent to which al-T.abarī changed Wahb’s narrative, and expanded it through the information he gathered from the “other learned men.” Still, the increasing Muslim character of George is well-attested in literary and material culture. An Islamic shrine in Iraq was dedicated to Saint George, and he is referred to as a prophet (nabī) in literature a couple of centuries after al-T.abarī.173 Such later representations testify that in the Islamicization process of George, Muslims’ knowledge of the Christian hagiographic tradition was further reshaped and muted according to the changing Islamic notions of ritual practice, saint veneration, and prophethood.

looking at buildings, narrating saint marūthā We move once again from universal to local historiography for the last function of Christian hagiography in Islamic literature, that is, Christian saints’ stories as local etiologies. We will focus on Ibn al-Azraq’s (d. 1176) use in his History of Mayyāfāriqīn of the Syriac Life of Marūthā, bishop of Maypherqat (Martyropolis/Mayyāfāriqīn in Asia Minor) ca. 399–410.174 The extant section of Ibn al-Azraq’s work narrates the history of the Jazira in annalistic form to the twelfth century. After giving an account of the Islamic conquest of Syria and the Jazira, and the eventual fall of the city of Maypherqat during the caliphate of ʿUmar b. al-Khat.t.āb (d. 644), Ibn al-Azraq introduces his work and starts narrating the foundation of the city. It is in this section that he places a summary of the Life of Marūthā.175 He transmits what is “mentioned in the saint’s Life [al-tashʿīth; transliteration of Syr. tašʿītā] found in the Melkite Church in Mayyāfāriqīn,” a book in which, he says, the building of the city and the church is narrated.176 He says he summoned the priest who lived at the church, asked him about the document, but the latter mentioned irrelevant things.177 Ibn al-Azraq then took the said book from the priest and brought it to a Christian man, who read the book in Syriac and translated it into Arabic. According to this book, Ibn al-Azraq says, the church that was on the outskirts of the city in his time had been entrusted by Christ.178 After connecting a building in his city to the biblical time frame, Ibn al-Azraq narrates the life of Marūthā and the Christian history of Maypherqat. According to Ibn al-Azraq’s narrative, the governor of the whole region was a man named Liyūt.ā, who was revered by the Roman king and was under his

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protection.179 He married Maryam, the daughter of the chief of a nearby mountain, and had three children, the youngest of whom was Marūthā.180 The Roman king at this time, Ibn al-Azraq says, was Theodosius the Younger the Greek (possibly referring to Theodosius II, r. 401–50).181 Marūthā busied himself with gaining knowledge and wisdom, and when his father, Liyūt.ā, died, all the territory he had governed was subject to Marūthā’s rule; “God granted him knowledge, asceticism, and piety.”182 He used to live in the church that is on the outskirts of the city, Ibn al-Azraq says, connecting once again the landscape of his time to a pre-Islamic persona and his story. Returning to Marūthā’s lifetime, he says Marūthā’s city and the whole territory he used to govern were in between the Roman and the Persian kingdoms, and the king on the Persian throne was Shapur son of Ardashir, who slaughtered Christian monks and ascetics.183 The king Theodosius, Ibn al-Azraq continues, married Helena, the daughter of a man who was among the royal descendants of the Edessan kings.184 Theodosius and Helena had a son, Qust.antīn, who founded and built up the city of Constantinople, which had previously been called “bizantiya.”185 After introducing Constantine, Ibn al-Azraq returns to Marūthā, who built numerous buildings in the city of Maypherqat. Ibn al-Azraq mentions the oral tradition about Marūthā, according to which every old monastery in the region was built by him. King Shapur requested that Marūthā heal his daughter, and with the support of the Roman king, the holy man traveled to Persia, and healed Shapur’s daughter.186 As a result of this miracle, the king Shapur asked him for a wish, and Marūthā requested a peace treaty between him and Constantine. He also asked for the bones of the Persian martyrs, brought them back to his land, and buried them in the city. Constantine granted Marūthā patronage to build churches, then dispatched envoys to inspect whether his name was inscribed on the great church and the fortress. The envoys wrote back to the king affirmatively. Following this, Ibn al-Azraq gives two reports about the building processes, beginning “It is said in the oral tradition.”187 It is not clear whether these reports are paraphrases from the translation of the Life, the translator’s notes, or Ibn al-Azraq’s own additions from his external oral sources. The additions are important, however, as they emphasize Marūthā’s connection to and patronage under Roman and Persian kings in the process of building his city. Ibn al-Azraq also notes an enormous painting of the Cross in the middle of the great church Marūthā built, the first church built in the city. Thus the Muslim historian combines text, oral tradition, and material culture to give a full account of the pre-Islamic buildings in the city of Maypherqat.

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In the next section of the History, we are informed that three ministers of Constantine also built fortresses, churches, and baths in the city, the remains of which were visible at the time of Ibn al-Azraq.188 In one of these churches the builders had placed some great walls, and Ibn al-Azraq says that people from the community in his time noticed the church’s walls, much of which was destroyed.189 In fact, as he narrates the buildings erected under the patronage of Constantine, he explains their positions with reference to the main gates of the city, giving information about the buildings’ later histories. Thus, he presents the Islamic history of the city as a continuation of its RomanChristian past. Then, Ibn al-Azraq returns to Marūthā again, and says he brought from Constantinople a glass basin filled with the blood of Joshua son of Nun.190 He also built a monastery in the name of the apostles Paul and Peter, placing a baptismal font in it. Ibn al-Azraq says this monastery still stands in the Jewish street, close to the synagogue.191 As a final note from the Life, Ibn al-Azraq says that the burial of Marūthā is in the same church where his Life is kept.192 He continues, however, to narrate the time of Constantine, and says when the city was conquered, they found a tablet above one of the gates, which read, in Greek: “This fortress was built in the days of the king Constantine and his mother Helena, and in the days of Ant.ūs and al-Dakūs, and the names of the three builders are Basīl, and Naqīt.ā and Qust.ant.īn.”193 Ibn al-Azraq says that after the time of Marūthā many monks, ascetics, and laypeople inhabited the buildings of the city, and he continues with the pre-Islamic history of the city including the Persian conquest of the eastern Mediterranean under Kisrā (possibly referring to Chosroes II, r. 591–628).194 He gives the chronology of Muhammad’s birth and emigration with reference to Chosroes’s reign, and thus the pre-Islamic history of the city is aligned with the Islamic time frame. Then, he returns to the Islamic history of the city and the conquest of the region under ʿUmar b. al- Khat.t.āb during the time of the Byzantine king Heraclius (r. 610–41).195 He says immediately before this the Persians defeated the Byzantines, and God sent the following verses (the first three of Q30): “Alif, lām, mīm. The Byzantines have been defeated in the nearby land, but they, after their defeat, will overcome.” Then, Ibn al-Azraq says that the Quraysh encountered the Byzantines, and they said: “We are without a book; the Persians are without a book, but the Byzantines are People of the Book, and Muhammad is the owner of the Book.”196 Thus, Ibn al-Azraq emphasizes the special place the Byzantines had in the unfolding of quranic salvation history as a People of the Book, above the “book-less” peoples

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like the Persians and the pagan Arabs. In a final note at the end of this section Ibn al-Azraq says he will narrate how the Byzantines returned victorious, as mentioned in the quranic verses, in the second chapter of his book.

Christian Hagiography in Islamic Local Historiography Harry Munt argues that since Ibn al-Azraq muted the Christian features of his source and emphasized the triumph of Islam in a previously Christian city, one should categorize the transmission of this saint’s Life as cultural appropriation, rather than syncretism.197 The figure of Marūthā as a Christian and his sanctity, Munt emphasizes, were insignificant for the Muslim historian. According to the conventions of Muslim historiography, to present a mythical, glorious pre-Islamic past of cities, Munt argues, the author needed a source for the pre-Islamic past of his city in order to “fill the space” and contextualize the landscape of his time; and the Life of Marūthā was at his disposal.198 Since he did not have a significant Christian audience, Munt further argues, it is unlikely that the use of a Christian text carried a particular meaning in and of itself; he was writing for a Muslim audience to highlight the Islamization of a previously Christian city.199 Ibn al-Azraq’s paraphrase of the Life, however, gives significant information about the hero’s Christian background. It is true that Marūthā is not explicitly referred to as a bishop. Nevertheless, his building of churches and monasteries, his struggle to collect martyrs’ bones, his personal connection to and protection by the Christian king, are emphasized in Ibn al-Azraq’s work. These were significant cultural legacies for Maypherqat and its buildings. The representation leaves no doubt that the author is depicting a Christian hero founding a magnificent Christian city. His commentary on the buildings of the city in his time, through the detailed information provided by the saint’s Life, demonstrates his use of the story as an etiology. In his textual tour of the city, Ibn al-Azraq both builds the cityscape by giving descriptions of the buildings and embeds that landscape within a historical moment, the time of the bishop Marūthā. Elucidating Maypherqat’s origins through extensive use of the Life indicates the level of esteem the Roman-Christian past provided for the city. One should not underestimate the symbolic value of the Roman-Christian past for Muslim audiences.200 Ibn al-Azraq’s use of the Life of Marūthā was not merely a utilitarian act. Although the Life might have been the only textual source that was available to him, his engagement with that source is

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an interesting case of hagiographic transmission. Ibn al-Azraq did not simply have the text translated; he informs his readers that he changed translators when the first translator gave him irrelevant information. He provided detailed descriptions of Marūthā’s background, pious deeds, and especially his building projects. Moreover, he appears to have included oral tradition in his narrative. Although it is not clear whether these are oral sources he collected himself or what his translator told him, it is important for us to see that his version of the story is not a paraphrase but an amalgamation of textual and oral sources about the Christian saintly hero who founded his city. Certainly, the Islamization of the city is narrated and glorified in his work, but this was not done at the expense of the Christian past. Byzantine-Christian history was a source of pride and esteem, and Ibn al-Azraq makes this explicit in the way he uses and expands his sources.

Looking through the Lens of Hagiography Other examples of the use of pre-Islamic saints and heroes in local historiographies are found in antiquarian collections of marvels and curiosities, into which the folkloric lore and oral tradition of places were often integrated. Ibn Isfandiyār, for instance, uses legends about biblical prophets, caliphs, and old practices, and stories of dragons and other folklore, in his History of Tabaristan.201 According to Hanaoka, such pre-Islamic heritage of the region was placed within an Islamic narrative frame partly to explain the social practices and the religious landscape of Ibn Isfandiyār’s time. Examples are also found in travel and pilgrimage literature. For example, al-Harawī’s Book of Signs, a survey of pilgrimage sites in the eastern Mediterranean, includes many details about shrines and monasteries that seem to have been based on hagiographic stories circulating in orature and literature. Al-Harawī writes about a village near Aleppo: Rūh.īn, a village in one of the districts of Aleppo, contains the tomb of Quss ibn Sāʿida al-Iyādī, and his two companions, whom he mourned in verse. [ . . . ] It is said that the two are Shamʿūn al-S.afā and Shamʿān. The truth is that Shamʿūn al-S.afā is [buried] in the great city of the Byzantines in its main church in a chest of silver suspended by chains from the ceiling of the sanctuary. God knows best.202

Quss b. Sāʿida al-Iyādī was a pre-Islamic poet and orator who was often portrayed as an ascetic.203 The two comrades mentioned here are likely the apostle Peter (Simon Cephas) and Simeon the Stylite, respectively.204 Although

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the historicity of Quss and the writings attributed to him are widely debated,205 al-Harawī’s account is sound testimony to the phenomenon of hagiographic conflation. We see in this example a specific location venerated as the tomb of a semilegendary Arab orator, whose sanctity was legitimized through his personal connections to two Christian figures, Peter the Apostle and Simeon the Stylite, albeit with an anachronistic juxtaposition. At one location, the pre-Islamic Arab past, biblical history, a highly venerated late antique saint, and the venerability of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople are woven together. Yet another prominent example of using Christian hagiographic knowledge to explain the past as well as the present landscape of a place is found in the Egyptian historian al-Maqrīzī’s (d. 1442) Remembrance of Districts and Traditions.206 In his work on the history of Egypt, al-Maqrīzī uses the memory of Saint Antony, other monastic fathers of the Egyptian desert, and RomanChristian kings to contextualize the religious landscape of his time. Based on Ibn al-Azraq’s text and the other examples cited above, we can build a theoretical frame according to which the fulfillment of the following three criteria renders Christian hagiography a source of etiological information: (1) the story is integrated into a pre-Islamic chronological time frame; (2) the Muslim author provides a minimal commentary on the sanctity of the Christian hero of the story (despite giving details about his life and pious deeds); (3) the information given is historically contextualized to explain a contemporary phenomenon, such as a building, a belief, or a religious practice. This is similar to the previously presented category of Christian saints as excellences (fad. āʾil) of cities and regions, and we do not need to draw a sharp distinction between these two categories. But, in the current category, the Christian hagiographic story is connected to a local practice or landscape, whereas in the other one its connection to the broader quranic sanctity and time frame is more prominent. We have covered five roles Christian hagiographic narratives and personas fulfilled in Islamic literature. The previous chapter demonstrated the most prominent of these roles: hagiographic knowledge was an important tool for elucidating numerous quranic verses, which often vaguely allude to events, persons, and places. The examples from Islamic literature analyzed in the current chapter show that Christian hagiography also played a significant role in exhorting the audiences on universal modes of piety and wisdom; presenting the merits and excellences of towns and regions; defining the members of the eternal Muslim community; and presenting the origins of Islamic landscapes

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and practices. All these categories, albeit often overlapping, manifest different styles of presentation and reinterpretation of Christian holy men and women in Islamic literature. The example of Saint Antony of Egypt, through the pen of an Abbasid court moralist, demonstrates the adaptation of a Christian saint and his hagiographic dossier for the purposes of exhorting the reader on confidence and perseverance in faith. In local historiography of South Arabia, we find a monotheist king of Himyar, whose conquests, travels, and spiritual search are interwoven into the quranic time frame and are portrayed with tropes from the Christian hagiographic dossier of Alexander the Great. The two-horned king, a literary shadow image of Alexander the Great, is presented as an embodiment of the sanctity of South Arabia. In al-T.abarī’s portrayal, Saint George becomes a Muslim prior to Muhammad in universal historiography. Compared to the previous examples, the Christian features and discourse of this hagiographic narrative are significantly muted, and the saint’s participation in the quranic salvation history is emphasized. And finally, in the example of St. Marūthā, we capture the memory of a Christian saint that connects the landscape of a medieval Islamic city in Asia Minor to a long-gone Christian Roman Empire. Some of these cases of transmission display a certain level of deChristianization of the story and the hero: Ibn al-Azraq’s Marūthā stayed strictly Christian, for example, while al-T.abarī’s George is referred to as a Muslim follower of Jesus. Similarly, they all show the various extents to which the new version of the narrative is Islamized. Ibn Abī al-Dunyā’s Antony, who is presented as a Christian ascetic, is given mostly a universal monotheistic discourse, while George quotes from the Quran. These distinctions are not genre-specific. The level of Islamization of a Christian saint’s story, the above analysis underlines, depended on the role that story fulfilled in Islamic literature. These examples underline the complexity of transmission processes, which could occur at the level of persona, broad knowledge of a saint’s dossier, or a specific narrative. Muslim authors in some instances transmitted the name and the hagiographic image of a holy man, attributing a new story to him, as in the case of Ibn Abī al-Dunyā’s Antony. In other instances, their version of a saint’s story so closely parallels a Christian version of the story that it is possible to argue for a more direct textual transmission, as in the case of Ibn al-Azraq’s Marūthā. The examples also point at the multivocality of traditions

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prior to Islam. Hagiographic conflations, confusions, changes, and expansions were frequently observed in saints’ stories in the Christian milieu. Such mechanisms thus distribute hagiographic agency between Muslim and preIslamic authors and transmitters. With the awareness of this shared agency, we no longer analyze Islamic literature against a stable, fixed Christian tradition, but take the two traditions together as a continuum of unfixed narrations of sanctity. With the insights into hagiographic transmission and authorship the examples have provided, let us turn to an in-depth analysis of the transmission and reception history of a fifth-century Syriac hagiographic narrative across Islamic literature from the eighth to the thirteenth century. Focusing on one text significantly strengthens the analysis of the functions of Christian hagiography in Islamic literature, since it clarifies the multiple roles Christian saints’ stories played in Islam by keeping the story as a constant, and highlighting the diachronic contexts in which it is embedded.

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chapter 5

From Paul and John to Fīmyūn and S.ālih.

The story of Paul of Qent.os and John of Edessa offers interesting insights into the complexities of transmission and reorientation of narratives.1 The History of the Great Deeds of Bishop Paul of Qent. os and Priest John of Edessa is a Syriac text written in the late fifth century in Edessa (modern Şanlıurfa, in southern Turkey).2 Abridged as a result of an extended transmission history, the story of Paul and John (renamed Fīmyūn and S.ālih. in Arabic) appears in various Islamic texts from the eighth to the fourteenth century. The earliest surviving Islamic version is found in the Sīra of Muhammad.3 In that text, the story is used to present the pre-Islamic history of South Arabia and to interpret certain quranic passages. The story was then reiterated in later Islamic texts, interpreted anew. This chapter first examines the transformation of the story of Paul (Fīmyūn) and John (S.ālih.), comparing the Arabic version in the Sīra to the Syriac narrative. It then analyzes the transmission, adaptation, and interpretation of the story in four later Islamic texts: al-T.abarī’s (d. 923) His5 6 tory,4 Yāqūt al-H . amawī’s (d. 1229) Dictionary, Ibn ʿArabī’s (d. 1240) Lectures, and Ibn Kathīr’s (d. 1373) Universal History.7

transformation of a story Paul and John in Syriac The story of Paul and John narrates the piety, exploits, and pilgrimages of two ascetics in the setting of the fifth-century eastern Mediterranean (at points extending to Italy and South Arabia). The earliest manuscripts that include 122

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the story date to the sixth century, although the story itself was probably written in the fifth.8 Whether it was originally written in Greek or Syriac is uncertain; it is likely that the story circulated in both languages.9 There are twelve Syriac and two Greek (much later) manuscript witnesses to the story of Paul and John in the Christian tradition.10 The story appears to have been mostly transmitted together with other, often Miaphysite, hagiographic literature, such as the Life of the Man of God, the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, the Life of Abraham of Qidun, the Life of Julian Saba, and the Martyrs of Najran, to cite a few. The story of Paul and John can be divided into roughly four thematic sections. In the first section, Paul, a bishop in Italy (or Pontus, per the Greek tradition), leaves his city and arrives at Edessa during the episcopacy of the bishop Rabbula (411–35). While working in Edessa as a day laborer he meets the priest John, who becomes his companion and disciple. In the second section, Paul and John go on a pilgrimage, during which they are kidnapped by Arabs and taken to the “land of the Himyarites,” that is, South Arabia.11 With the help of prayers and miracles they convert the tree-worshipping Himyarites to Christianity. During their return to Syria, in the third section, they encounter a dendrite (tree-dwelling ascetic) who claims to have been waiting for them. Following his demise, Paul and John bury him and proceed to Jerusalem, finally returning to Edessa. Paul goes on another journey alone in the fourth section, and John searches for him until he discovers in a dream that Paul had passed away in Nisibis in northern Mesopotamia. The story might have been initially written by the priest John, Paul’s disciple and companion, for the narrator in the text uses the first-person plural, and occasionally singular, especially in the second half of the story. A few notes on the broader literary context of the story of Paul and John. In terms of plot and tropes, the story closely resembles another fifth-century hagiographic text that is associated with the episcopacy of the bishop Rabbula: the aforementioned Life of the Man of God. Anonymous in the Syriac tradition, the Man of God was a holy man in Italy who left his hometown and went to Edessa, like Paul. His relationship to his servant (who allegedly wrote the story of the Man of God) closely resembles that between Paul and John.12 In addition to such resemblances, there are verbatim references in the story of Paul and John to that of the Man of God.13 Moreover, within the Syriac manuscript tradition, in all of the surviving seven manuscripts, dating between the sixth and thirteenth centuries, the story of the Man of God

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124     From Paul and John to Fīmyūn and S.ālih.

immediately precedes the story of Paul and John.14 The two stories clearly belong to the same hagiographic tradition: a fifth-/sixth-century, Syriac, Edessan tradition, which originated in association with the persona of Rabbula.15 And, as we will see shortly, it is probable that in some later written or oral tradition the two stories, that of Paul and John and that of the Man of God, were conflated. For our purposes here the important part of the story of Paul and John is the episode about the conversion of Himyarites to Christianity, since it is this section that was emphasized in the Islamic versions of the story. Paul and John, according to the story, evangelize the tree-worshipping Himyarites by uprooting the most prominent cultic tree of the community. This motif, despite being one of the highlights of the Syriac version of the story, is rather rare in the historiography of South Arabia. Ancient and modern scholarship focus primarily on the region’s role in religious, economic, and military encounters between Byzantium, Persia, and the Kingdom of Axum (Ethiopia/ Eritrea), as well as on the oppression and persecution of Christians under “Jewish kings” in the sixth century.16 By way of a brief overview: Eusebius of Caesarea (d. 340) says that Pantaenus the Philosopher was “the herald of the Gospel of Christ in India” (i.e., South Arabia).17 John Malalas (d. 578) mentions the wars between Axumites and Homerites, and that a paramonarios (custodian) from Alexandria, named John, was the first bishop of Homerites.18 In the story of the Martyrs of Najran (a Christian community persecuted under Jewish kings of Yemen in the early sixth century) Paul (interestingly a namesake of the hero of our story) is mentioned as the first bishop of Najran, having come from Alexandria.19 To my knowledge, there is no abbreviated version of the story of Paul and John among these various Christian traditions. Perhaps a relatively close parallel is found in Sozomen’s (d. ca. 450) Ecclesiastical History, where two ascetics from Tyre, Frumentius and Edesius, are captured and taken to “India,” where they are raised at the king’s palace and convert the masses to Christianity.20 Later on, according to this tradition, Frumentius is appointed as the first bishop of the Indians by Athanasius of Alexandria. Among the various accounts of the conversion of South Arabia to Christianity, some speak about two ascetics evangelizing the region, and the story of Paul and John follows this pattern. The oft-repeated connection of this conversion to the bishopric of Alexandria, however, is not found in our text, since Paul and John are from Edessa. Thus, the story of Paul and John joins

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the broader Christian discourse regarding the evangelization of South Arabia, albeit by incorporating significant novelties (such as tree worship) and reorientations (Edessa in place of Alexandria).

Fīmyūn and S.ālih. in Arabic The earliest surviving text that includes an abbreviated version of the story of Paul and John in Islamic literature is the Sīra of Ibn Ish.āq.21 In this version, two ascetics, Fīmyūn and S.ālih., convert South Arabia to Christianity. Ibn Ish.āq relates, on the authority of Wahb b. Munabbih, that a pious and ascetic man named Fīmyūn used to live in Syria, where he met his companion S.ālih.. The two men left their village in Syria, and on the way, they encountered a tree-dweller, who was waiting for them. After the dendrite passed away, Fīmyūn and S.ālih. were kidnapped by Arabs and taken to Najran. By uprooting a cultic tree Fīmyūn converted the tree-worshipping pagans of Najran to the religion (dīn) of Jesus son of Mary. This story in the Sīra has been studied, and scholars have pointed to various traditions for its origin. Gordon Newby claims that the story was derived from the Apophthegmata Patrum.22 Numerous themes and topoi in the Apophthegmata are indeed quite similar to the ones in the story of Fīmyūn and S.ālih., such as humility, the power to heal, and being taken captive. However, these motifs are common tropes in hagiography, and they cannot be taken as indications of intertextuality. Harry Norris argues that the Yemeni historiography most possibly arose in connection with the Persian occupation of the region in the sixth century.23 Axel Moberg points in the same direction and argues for a Persian origin for the story.24 Jürgen Tubach suggests that the Life of the Man of God is the origin of the story.25 As we will see in the next section, however, the story of Fīmyūn and S.ālih. is most probably a redaction of the Syriac story of Paul and John.

The Transformation of Paul and John We have a fifth-century Syriac hagiographic text, which, in the eighth century, appears in Islamic literature in a shortened form. There is a period of two centuries between the Syriac story of Paul and John and the edition of Ibn Ish.āq’s account of the conversion of Najran. Different versions of the story likely appeared in both Christian and Islamic oral and written traditions during this interval.26 Although this intermediate stage is impossible to reconstruct, to get a glimpse of the transmission process it is still useful to

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conduct a close comparative analysis between the Christian (Syriac) version and the earliest known Islamic (Arabic) version. The story in the Sīra begins: Al-Mughīra b. Abū Lābīd, a freedman of al-Akhnas, on the authority of Wahb b. Munabbih the Yamani told me that the origin of Christianity in Najran was due to a man named Fīmyūn, who was a righteous, earnest, ascetic man whose prayers were answered.

Let us begin the analysis with the replacement of the name Paul with Fīmyūn/ Faymiyūn in the Arabic version. Newby suggests that the name may be a transliteration of Apa Poimen, one of the most prominent monastic figures of Egypt in the fifth century, to whom many texts and stories were attributed.27 Irfan Shahid has similarly stated that this name might have come from the Greek word poimēn (meaning “shepherd, lord, master”), or a corruption of the name Pantaenus in the Arabic script.28 Tubach argues that Faymiyūn was the Arabicized version of the Greek name Euphemion/Phemion/Euphemianos and that the story was connected to the story of the Man of God.29 This parallel is worth elaborating. Although the Man of God is anonymous, or identified as Alexius in later tradition, his father’s name is Euphemianus,30 and this name might have found its way into the story of Paul and John through a confusion in transmission. Considering that the two hagiographic stories are similar to each other in plot and were almost always placed right after one another in manuscripts, the stories of the Man of God and of Paul and John might have converged at a later time.31 Despite this possible connection to the story of the Man of God, the section about the conversion of Najran and other details demonstrate that the story of Fīmyūn and S.ālih. was derived from that of Paul and John, not from the story of the Man of God. The Syriac story initially locates Paul in Italy (the Greek tradition in Pontus, which might be a misspelling of Qent.os). The bishop Paul then travels to Edessa, where he meets his disciple, John. None of the Arabic versions mentions a provenance in Italy, nor do they allude to the Edessan bishop Rabbula. The Islamic tradition was interested primarily in a particular episode: the coming of Christianity to South Arabia. Muslim authors make this intention clear by stating up front that they are giving an account of the Christianization of idol-worshippers of Najran. However, the Syriac story refers to the location of this conversion as the “land of Himyarites,” which can be anywhere in South Arabia.32

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Himyar was a well-known location in Greco-Roman topography. Procopius, for example, refers to the “Homeritae” as allies of the Roman Empire together with the Kingdom of Axum, known for their palm groves.33 Najran, on the other hand, is an oasis in South Arabia, known for its Christian communities in antiquity.34 In some versions of the letters of the sixth-century bishop Simeon of Bēth Aršām, the episode known as the Martyrs of Najran (on which more below), the story is titled “the Martyrs of Himyarites.”35 Thus, there seems to have been some overlap between Najran and Himyar in late antique literature. Still, the replacement of the toponym in the Syriac story, Himyar, with Najran in the Islamic version is an important change in the geographical focus of the story. As seen in the second and the third chapters, Najran became an important locus of memory for Muslims for its Christian past (and as a source of knowledge about Christianity). And the story of Fīmyūn and S.ālih. in the Sīra participated in the reinforcement of this memory by situating the story of Paul and John not in Himyar but specifically in Najran. A few words about the introduction of the characters: Fīmyūn is simply described as a “righteous, earnest, and ascetic man” in Ibn Ish.āq’s version. In the Syriac version Paul is described more extensively, emphasizing his ecclesiastic title as a bishop, “a shepherd of souls.” Paul prays to God and asks Jesus Christ to shine forth from his cross and show him the right way. In his dream God answers him, saying that if he wants to become like a pillar of fire, he should serve the priesthood.36 In the Islamic version, this section with its strong biblical imagery is omitted, and is summarized as “whose prayers were answered.” This constitutes a clear example of the common practice of silencing scriptural elements during the transmission of texts from Christian to Islamic literature.37 The story of Fīmyūn and S.ālih. then continues: He used to wander between towns: as soon as he became known in one town, he moved to another, eating only what he earned, for he was a builder by trade using mud bricks. He used to keep Sunday as a day of rest and would not work then. He used to go into a desert place and pray there until evening.

At the beginning of the Syriac story Paul came to Edessa and “worked as a day laborer.”38 The Syriac story says he does not work on the holy days of Friday and Sunday, when he goes to the desert to find Christ and help the poor and ascetics living in the desert. According to the Arabic version, similarly, he goes to the desert to pray on Sunday.39 The charitable acts of the holy

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man and other Christian discourse are again omitted in the Islamic paraphrase of this section. After this comes the episode in which Fīmyūn meets S.ālih.: While he was following his trade in a Syrian village, withdrawing himself from men, one of the people there, called S.ālih., perceived what manner of man he was and felt a vehement affection for him, so that, unperceived by Fīmyūn, he used to follow him from place to place, until one Sunday he went, as his wont was, out into the desert followed by S.ālih.. S.ālih. chose a hiding-place and sat down where he could see him, not wanting him to know where he was.

The story of Paul and John briefly describes John, Paul’s companion, as a priest with a desire for monastic life.40 He meets Paul when he hires him as a workman. John one day secretly follows Paul and watches him praying on a mountain. He is overwhelmed by his awe and affection for Paul, and this affectionate love of John for Paul finds a direct echo in the Islamic version. The onomastic change is also worth elaborating, as S.ālih. does not appear to be an Arabicized version of a foreign word.41 It is an Arabic name, with connotations of “good, righteous, pious, God-fearing.” 42 It is also the name of a quranic prophet sent to the Arab people of Thamūd.43 If the name S.ālih. was chosen to replace John at a certain point in the history of transmission of the story, it is difficult to ascertain why and when. Alternatively, S.ālih. might be a direct translation for “man of God,” considering that the story of Paul and John might have converged with that of the Man of God. In either case, this name choice clearly fits within the attempt to give the story an Arab-Islamic character. As Fīmyūn stood to pray, a tinnīn, a seven-horned snake, came towards him and when Fīmyūn saw it he cursed it and it died. Seeing the snake but not knowing what had happened to it and fearing for Fīmyūn’s safety, S.ālih. could not contain himself and cried out: “Fīmyūn, a tinnīn is upon you!” He took no notice and went on with his prayers until he had ended them. Night had come and he departed. He knew that he had been recognized and S.ālih. knew that he had seen him. So S.ālih. said: “Fīmyūn, you know that I have never loved anything as I love you; I want to be always with you and go wherever you go.” He replied: “As you will. You know how I live and if you feel that, you can bear the life well and good.”

The serpent story in the Syriac version is longer, adorned with a speech Paul delivers to John, emphasizing the power given by Christ to the disciples to overcome adversaries.44 They also recite ten sections of the Psalms together. The dialogue that takes place between them in this scene is heavily laden with

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allusions to scriptural passages. Thereafter they become comrades on the path of Christ and decide to leave Edessa together, with the approval of the bishop Rabbula. Although this episode in the Syriac story is heavily edited and significantly shortened in the Islamic version, the serpent, and its role in manifesting John’s affection for Paul and the establishment of their companionship, are kept. So S.ālih. remained with him, and the people of the village were on the point of discovering his secret. For when a man suffering from a disease came in his way by chance Fīmyūn prayed for him and he would be cured; but if Fīmyūn was summoned to a sick man he would not go. Now one of the villagers had a son who was blind, and he asked about Fīmyūn and was told that he never came when he was sent for, but that he was a man who built houses for people for a wage. Thereupon the man took his son and put him in his room and threw a garment over him and went to Fīmyūn saying that he wanted him to do some work for him in his house and would he come and look at it, and they would agree on a price. Arrived at the house Fīmyūn asked what he wanted done, and after giving the details the man suddenly whisked off the covering from the boy and said, “O Fīmyūn, one of God’s creatures is in the state you see. So, pray for him.” Fīmyūn did so and the boy got up entirely healed.

This episode of tricking Fīmyūn into healing a blind child is not found in the Syriac version.45 The closest parallel we have is the healing of a bedridden woman toward the end of the Syriac story. The woman’s husband invites Paul to his house for a job, in exchange for a wage.46 When Paul goes to the house of the man, the latter discloses the work: healing the demon-possessed wife. Then Paul exorcises the demon and heals the woman. In both the Syriac and the Arabic versions, the layperson requests a job from Paul as a day laborer, then reveals his real intention at the house. In the Arabic version, the demonpossessed wife becomes a blind son, and the man covers and uncovers the one who needs healing, increasing the dramatic impact of the story. We should also note that this healing episode in the Syriac story takes place in Edessa, toward the end of the narrative (when they return to Edessa from South Arabia). Despite the changes in the sequence and the plot, however, the motif of “holy man being tricked into healing a bedridden person” appears to have been retained between the Christian and the Islamic versions of the story. After this comes the episode of the dendrite: Knowing that he had been recognized he left the village followed by S.ālih., and while they were walking through Syria they passed by a great tree and a man called

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from it, saying, “I’ve been expecting you and saying, ‘When is he coming?’ until I heard your voice and knew it was you. Don’t go until you have prayed over my grave for I am about to die.” He did die and Fīmyūn prayed over him until they buried him.

Although the episode with the dendrite takes place much later in the original story, the Islamic version closely follows the Syriac version in its plot. On their way back from South Arabia (note that Fīmyūn and S.ālih. in the Sīra have not gone there yet), Paul and John reach a mountain, on top of which was a man dwelling in a tree. Paul and John and the dendrite are all glad upon learning that they are all disciples of Christ, and they converse with each other, telling their life stories. The dendrite asks Paul and John to stay with him for three days, for he anticipates his imminent death and asks them to bury him.47 Similarly, the Islamic version depicts the dendrite as waiting for Fīmyūn. The two men climb up the tree, bring the dendrite down, and prepare a proper burial for him. The appearance of the brief dendrite episode thus signals the connection of the Arabic story of Fīmyūn and S.ālih. to the Syriac story of Paul and John. After this, Paul and John continue their adventures in Syria and northern Mesopotamia, whereas the Islamic version of the story inserts the Najran episode here. Then he left followed by S.ālih. until they reached the land of the Arabs who attacked them, and a caravan carried them off and sold them in Najran. At this time, the people of Najran followed the religion of the Arabs worshipping a great palm-tree there. Every year they had a festival when they hung on the tree any fine garment they could find and women’s jewels. Then they sallied out and devoted the day to it. Fīmyūn was sold to one noble and S.ālih. to another.

In the Syriac version, too, Paul and John are attacked, taken captive, and 48 brought to the “land of the H . imyarites” by Arabs (t. ayyāyē). They are bound up and put in a tent to be sacrificed for a cultic ritual. The Arabs living in the land of the Himyarites are depicted as tree-worshippers, which, according to the story, included human sacrifice (in the Islamic version human sacrifice is omitted, and tree worship is referred to as dīn al-ʿarab—the religion of preIslamic Arabs). Before seeing the cultic tree, Paul performs numerous healings, all of which are also omitted in the Islamic version. Not surprisingly, the omitted sections are heavily interwoven with biblical imagery and an explicitly Christian discourse. For example, Paul, prior to baptizing a possessed young girl, says the following: “Our Lord Jesus Christ, you came to humanity, my

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Lord, in order to free the children of Adam from the sin that bound them and from the curse that the earth received when Adam transgressed the commandment and when the evil one planted thorns and tares on it.” 49 This healing and the holy men’s popularity among people are not found in the Islamic version. But the uprooting of the cultic tree is retained and rephrased in the following way: Now it happened that when Fīmyūn was praying earnestly at night in a house which his master had assigned to him the whole house was filled with light so that it shone as it were without a lamp. His master was amazed at the sight and asked him about his religion. Fīmyūn told him and said that they were in error; as for the palm-tree it could neither help nor hurt; and if he were to curse the tree in the name of God He would destroy it, for He was God Alone without companion. “Then do so,” said his master, “for if you do that we shall embrace your religion and abandon our present faith.” After purifying himself and performing two rakʿas, he invoked God against the tree and God sent a wind against it which tore it from its roots and cast it on the ground. Then the people of Najran adopted his religion and he instructed them in the law of Jesus son of Mary. Afterwards they suffered the misfortunes which befell their co-religionists in every land. This was the origin of Christianity in Najran in the land of the Arabs. Such is the report of Wahb b. Munabbih on the authority of the people of Najran.

While Fīmyūn and S.ālih. impress the master with their piety, the conversion episode in the Syriac story of Paul and John begins with a conflict with the king of the Himyarites. After Paul heals a young girl, many people convert to Christianity, and Paul baptizes them. The news of this and other miracles reaches the king, who is enraged and sends warriors to seize the holy men and those who believe them, “both men and women, seventy souls in all.”50 They bring Paul and John to the palm grove. About to be killed, John learns that the tall and lush palm was the god of the camp, and he challenges the king to an ordeal; the king agrees. John waves his hand, calls upon Jesus Christ (note that Fīmyūn calls for the help of “God alone without companion”), and uproots the tree. The king converts to Christianity and builds a church for the holy men. Paul and John baptize people, ordain bishops and deacons, and leave for the “mountain of God” (where they would meet the dendrite).51 A significant detail in this episode is that Fīmyūn purifies himself and performs two prostrations (rakʿas) before uprooting the cultic tree. In the Syriac story, Paul and John do not perform any ritual before they destroy the tree, but, in the very next section when they go to the mountain of God, they kneel there for five days and five nights. The Arabic version says that Fīmyūn

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performs two prostrations, another interpolation in the story to provide an Islamic resonance for the audience of the Sīra.52 In fact, with this detail, in addition to the changes in their names (especially S.ālih. being a name that is rare in pre-Islamic usage), and explicitly referring to the holy men as Muslims and their disciples as imāms,53 the story was given an Islamic resonance. At the very end Ibn Ish.āq reiterates that he is relating the story on the authority of Wahb b. Munabbih. The chain of transmission in fact sheds light on the transmission of the story from Christianity to Islam, on which we should dwell further.

ibn ish.āq on the authority of wahb b. munabbih Ibn Ish.āq was born in Medina at the beginning of the eighth century. His grandfather, formerly a Christian, was a manumitted slave, who became a client (mawlā) during the early Islamic conquests in Iraq. His sons, one of whom was Ish.āq (Ibn Ish.āq’s father), were transmitters of reports (akhbār).54 Ibn Ish.āq is known in Islamic historiography to have collected reports mostly on the authority of transmitters in Egypt and Iraq, a great majority of whom were converts, mawlās, and manumitted slaves.55 Montgomery Watt, in his analysis of the literary and oral sources used by Ibn Ish.āq in the Sīra, does not have much information on the biographical backgrounds of people on whose authority Ibn Ish.āq narrated stories.56 Such brief prosopographical analysis, however, is essential to understanding the transmission of information, especially Christian hagiographic material. In the Sīra, Ibn Ish.āq reports the story of Fīmyūn and S.ālih. “on the authority of al-Mughīra b. Abū Labīd, a freedman of al-Akhnas.” Al-Mughīra transmitted h.adīth from Ibn Sīrīn, a renowned Basran h.adīth scholar whose father was a manumitted slave of Anas b. Mālik (d. 709), an eminent Companion of Muhammad and a traditionist.57 In addition to his personal connections to converts like al-Mughīra as sources of historical information, Ibn Ish.āq was a student of al- Zuhrī (d. 742), another significant h.adīth scholar of the Medinan school.58 Thus, Ibn Ish.āq’s access to the story can be contextualized within the wider circles of report transmitters and traditionists of the early eighth century, a number of whom were previously Christian converts and servants, or descendants of these groups. Christian hagiographic traditions, among other cultural material, were possibly transmitted through these channels, and found new meaning and interpretation.

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In the chain of transmission of the story of Fīmyūn and S.ālih., Wahb b. Munabbih is cited as the origin of the story.59 As mentioned in the previous chapter, Wahb is known to have had access to numerous monasteries, where, in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, voluminous manuscript production, translation, teaching, and transmission took place.60 It is worth noting that the three earliest (sixth c.) Syriac manuscripts that included the story of Paul and John, and the later ones, like the twelfth-/thirteenth-century copy at the Syrian Orthodox Patriarchate of Damascus, are large manuscripts that also include the story of the Martyrs of Najran, and the Life of the Man of God.61 Wahb might have had access to one of these manuscripts. He was of course not an exception to Muslim access to monasteries. Muslims are known to have frequently visited Christian monasteries for religious, scholarly, or entertainment purposes. This active interest in monastic culture yielded, among other works, the tenth-century Book of Monasteries by al-Shābushtī.62 Did Wahb read his sources in Arabic, or did he translate them from other languages? Abd al-Aziz Duri, following Raif Khoury, suggests that Wahb probably knew Hebrew and Syriac.63 Thus, he might have had access to the Syriac story. This, however, does not eliminate the possibility that the story of Paul and John had been translated into Arabic before Wahb had access to it. Christians in the Near East used the Arabic language in literary production and liturgy starting in the late seventh century, as Sidney Griffith convincingly argues.64 A great corpus of biblical material was translated and circulating in Arabic in written or oral form by that time, and monastic libraries housed works written in Arabic.65 In the monasteries in Palestine, for instance, some saints’ lives were written in Arabic in the eighth century.66 Therefore, it is possible that the story of Paul and John was also translated into Arabic before Wahb, although the extant manuscripts do not include an Arabic version of the story. Instead of merely searching for an urtext of the story in Arabic literature, one should also take into consideration the widespread practice of storytelling in the late antique eastern Mediterranean. It is possible that Wahb heard a short version of the story, and both wrote it down and narrated it to others. At the end of Ibn Ish.āq’s account, it is said that Wahb transmitted the story “from the people of Najran” (ʿan ahl najrān), which may point at an oral tradition. Whether Wahb encountered the shortened version of the story of Paul and John in Arabic in a written or oral Christian source, or translated it from Syriac and shortened it himself, is difficult to ascertain because of the dearth

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of Wahb’s extant writings. Moreover, we do not know to what extent Wahb wrote the texts that are attributed to him in later Islamic scholarship. He might have mostly recited his “books,” as opposed to writing them down. And the fact that many of his writings were transmitted by his family members further complicates any discussion of authorship.67 Nevertheless, regarding his agency one might comfortably assume that even if there was already a shortened version of the story in Christian sources, Wahb (or his immediate successors in transmitting the story) gave the story an Islamic character. Thus, Wahb’s authority and authorship lie not in preserving the story, but in making it an Islamic story. After this cross-confessional transformation, the story served various roles in Islamic literary contexts.

fīmyūn and S.ālih. in context

As the Precursors of the Quranic People of the Trench Ibn Ish.āq’s version of the story of Fīmyūn and S.ālih. ends with the note that the people of Najran thus were converted to the “religion of Jesus, son of Mary.” 68 The very last sentence of the story reads as follows: “Afterwards they suffered the misfortunes (ah.dāth) which befell their co-religionists in every land.” 69 The word ah.dāth here could be translated as “innovations” rather than “misfortunes, events, happenings.”70 This would mean that their religion was corrupted as in other Christian communities; perhaps this is what Ibn Ish.āq means by “remaining from the people of the religion of Jesus” at the beginning of the story.71 Accordingly, Fīmyūn and S.ālih. were rare members of the uncorrupted Christianity. The phrase “religion of Jesus,” however, does not necessarily mean “an uncorrupted Christianity.”72 If the word ah.dāth in the above sentence means “events, happenings” here, the statement could also be a reference to the Martyrs of Najran. Most exegetes of the Quran seem to have in fact interpreted the story this way. The story of Fīmyūn and S.ālih., and the story of Fīmyūn’s “Muslim” disciple ʿAbdallāh b. al-Thāmir (also known as “the story of a king, sorcerer, monk and a youth”), have been incorporated into the exegetical tradition of the quranic verses Q85:4–8, which mention a group of people named the People of the Trench (as.h.āb al-ukhdūd).73 David Cook, like others, argues that the two stories were used as “enveloping stories,” to give background information about the event that is alluded to in the Quran. This observation is based on Ibn Ish.āq’s quotation of these quranic verses after the story of ʿAbdallāh b.

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al-Thāmir (Fīmyūn’s disciple), reminding readers of the events that befell the believing Christians in South Arabia, and connecting those events to the quranic People of the Trench. Ibn Ish.āq interprets the story of Fīmyūn and S.ālih. in light of the Quran, and the Quran in light of the story. The hagiographic narrative is thus connected to the quranic time frame, elaborating an otherwise vague allusion. Let us take a closer look at the quranic episode and its conversations with the broader traditions of Late Antiquity. Cursed are the companions of the trench, the fire filled with fuel, when they were sitting near it, and watching what they had done to the believers, whom they resented for no reason other than that they believed in God, the Almighty, the Praiseworthy, to Whom belongs the dominion of the heavens and the earth. And God is Witness over all things. Indeed, those who torture the believing men and believing women and then do not repent will have the punishment of Hell, and the torment of burning. (Q85:4–10)

These seven verses mention two groups of people: those who persecute believers by throwing them into fire (or merely sitting by the fire watching the believers tortured), and those who were thrown into a fire pit because of their unwavering faith in God. The People of the Trench mentioned in the fourth verse are generally interpreted by medieval and modern scholars to be the makers of the trench (the persecutors). But the initial verb “cursed” (qutila) could also be translated as “slain.”74 Therefore, the term “People of the Trench” could be referring to the ones thrown into the fire pit, as Cook points out.75 Thus, the only information the Quran gives is these two groups of people, and a fire pit. The rest of the quranic chapter does not reveal any further information regarding the place or time frame for the People of the Trench. Considering only these seven verses, it is difficult to tell whether a specific story is being alluded to in the episode of the People of the Trench in the Quran. Believers persecuted by fire is a common hagiographic theme found in both biblical and extrabiblical literature. The three youths thrown into the fiery furnace in the book of Daniel,76 the martyrdom of Polycarp of Smyrna 78 (d. ca. 160),77 of Gūryā, Šmūnā, and H . abīb in Edessa, multiple stories in 79 Eusebius’s Martyrs of Palestine, the Martyrs of Najran,80 are among the better-known stories in which believers are thrown into fire because of their belief in God. The quranic People of the Trench does not prominently echo any of these narratives from the Jewish and Christian traditions.

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Christian hagiography, however, appears to have provided further material for exegetes for the interpretation and contextualization of these verses and the People of the Trench. The Tafsīr of Ibn ʿAbbās states that these verses are about the slaughter of “believers” in Najran by the king Dhū al-Nuwās.81 Ibn ʿAbbās says that people in Najran tortured and killed the believers in fire, having forced them into their religion. Their king was named Yūsuf who was referred to as Dhū al-Nuwās. The believers refused to denounce their faith and accepted their torments. Despite the briefness of the account, Ibn ʿAbbās’s association of the episode of the People of the Trench with the Martyrs of Najran is explicit. Other exegetes adopted a different, longer narrative exegesis for these verses. As mentioned earlier, the story of Fīmyūn’s “Muslim” disciple ʿAbdallāh b. al-Thāmir was often incorporated into the exegetical tradition of the quranic People of the Trench. This story is about a young boy who is sent to a magician by his parents to learn sorcery. He encounters a monk on his way (Ibn Hishām, in his edition of the Sīra, says that this monk was Fīmyūn), and instead of going to the magician, he frequents the monk, hiding his visits from his family. ʿAbdallāh performs miracles and starts converting people to Christianity. Enraged by this, the king tries to kill the child. None of the methods he tries works, however. Finally, the king superficially converts to Christianity, and only then can he kill the child. This story became the main narrative framework for the exegesis of the quranic People of the Trench, although there are alternative exegetical traditions.82 The king’s extensive torture of the believing child, and the eventual persecution of other Christians in the story, resulted in the association of this story with the Christian story of the Martyrs of Najran, although no direct literary connection between the two narratives can be established. In Christian texts, the story of the Martyrs of Najran has been preserved in three closely related sources: the Letter of Simeon of Bēth Aršām,83 the Martyrdom/Acts of Arethas (Hārith),84 and the Book of the Himyarites.85 The bishop Simeon’s (sixth c.) letter addresses his namesake Bishop Simeon of Gabbula. It starts with the narrative of Simeon’s travel to the camp of the Ghassanid king Mundhīr (r. 569–81). He informs his reader that while they were at the camp, Mundhīr received a letter from the Jewish king (possibly Joseph—Dhū Nuwās) in South Arabia about how he persecuted Christians who refused to deny Christ. The letter of the “Jewish king,” which Simeon quotes at length, includes an account of the exhumation of the deceased bishop Paul’s bones, a

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speech of the Christian noblewoman Rhumi, and the report of how she and her daughters were martyred. Simeon’s letter quotes from another informant from South Arabia about the martyrdom of King Arethas, Rhumi’s husband, and many other members of the Christian community in Najran. The letter at the end gives an account of a Christian child, who, despite the king’s attempt to convert him to Judaism, chooses to die. The child’s mother is beheaded, but the child’s fate is unclear in the letter. Simeon’s letter has been copied by many ancient historians. For example, John of Ephesus (d. 586) quotes the letter in full, as preserved in the Chronicle of Zuqnin, by Ps.-Dionysius of Tell Mahre (eighth c.); it is also found in the Ecclesiastical History of Ps.-Zachariah of Mytilene (sixth c.).86 As Irfan Shahid demonstrates, the document in fact has a complex transmission history with multiple recesions.87 The Acts of Arethas is a narrative of the Martyrs of Najran with a focus on the martyrdom of King Arethas. Moberg states that it was based on the Book of the Himyarites, disagreeing with Theodor Nöldeke and Ignazio Guidi, who identify its source as the Letter of Simeon.88 Shahid, along similar lines, claims that it was written by the same Simeon of Bēth Aršām. The Book of the Himyarites is the most extensive of the three sources, and possibly a source for the previous two.89 It is preserved in a tenth-century manuscript, although it was originally written much earlier, possibly shortly after the second Abyssinian expedition into Yemen in 525, relying mostly on the oral narratives of eyewitnesses. The index of the book is preserved, although the majority of the sections are fragmented. It begins with ethnographical information about South Arabia, and the Jewish and Christian religious communities there. It narrates the first Abyssinian intervention in South Arabia, and the king Dhū Nuwās’s persecution of Christians in Zafar, Najran, and other towns. After a long account of individual martyrs and other persecutions under Dhū Nuwās, the Book of the Himyarites narrates the second Abyssinian expedition to Himyar under the Christian king Kaleb, his appointment of a Christian king for Himyar, and his return to Abyssinia. No section of the Book of the Himyarites, as far as one can gather from the preserved parts, narrates a story similar to the Islamic story of ʿAbdallāh b. al-Thāmir. There is a story about the son of an aristocrat, ʿAbdallāh b. Afʿū;90 however, in spite of being a namesake, he does not do any of the things ʿAbdallāh b. al-Thāmir does, nor is he martyred at the end. ʿAbdallāh in the Book of the Himyarites is mostly concerned about identification of the graves

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of the martyred Christians in Najran. Despite the lack of a direct narrative connection, some important details surrounding the story in the Islamic tradition are similar to the information given in the Book of the Himyarites.91 Dhū Nuwās’s conversion to Judaism, his persecution of Christians in a fire pit and crucifixion of some of them, and his leap into the sea upon his defeat are among the motifs that put the Book of the Himyarites in closer connection to the Islamic tradition, as many of them are not found in the Letter or the Acts. Multiple versions of the story of ʿAbdallāh b. al- Thāmir circulated in Islamic literature, as an enveloping story for the quranic People of the Trench. It appears in exegetical works, such as those of Muqātil b. Sulaymān (d. 767) and al-T.abarī (d. 923), as well as in other texts, the Sīra of Ibn Ish.āq (d. 768), Maghāzi (expeditions of Muhammad) of Maʿmar b. Rāshid (d. 770), Mus.annaf (h.adīth collection) and Tafsīr of ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Sanʿānī (d. 826), S. ah.īh. (h.adīth collection) of Muslim (d. 875), and Al-Bidāya waʾl-nihāya (universal history) of Ibn Kathīr (d. 1373), to name a few.92 Despite the long transmission history of the story in Islamic literature, and some arbitrary connections of it to the Christian story of the Martyrs of Najran, there are no clear indications that the persecution of ʿAbdallāh b. al-Thāmir was an allusion to the Martyrs of Najran. In fact, the story is argued to be connected to Indian legends or the Binding of Isaac in Genesis 22:1–13.93 In Ibn ʿAbbās’s Tafsīr, it is said that the People of the Trench might be from Mosul.94 And in a Persian version of the story in the Cambridge Anonymous Tafsīr, Dhū Nuwās is said to be either in Iraq or in Najran.95 Despite the ambiguity of the place in which the events happened, however, many exegetes who had knowledge of the Christian story of the Martyrs of Najran made the connection between the Christian tradition and the quranic episode. Some later Islamic versions of the story of ʿAbdallāh in fact appear to be modified in light of Christian hagiography. In the ninth century, the Iranian polymath Abū H . anīfa al-Dīnawarī (d. 895), for instance, presented ʿAbdallāh b. al-Tāmir as the king of Najran.96 This is reminiscent of Arethas being the king in the Christian story. In al-Dīnawarī’s version he is beheaded, like Arethas, while other Christians are burned in ditches. This work embeds Islamic history in an Iranian-centered chronology,97 and the story of ʿAbdallāh is placed within the military history of South Arabia, within a genealogy of Persian kings, as part of the account of Dhū Nuwās’s reign and defeat. Technically, this is not an exegetical work, but the story is given exegetical character, since al-Dīnawarī explicitly connects

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this narrative to the Quran with the note “And they are the People of the Trench whom God, great is His name, mentioned in the Quran.”98 Al-Thaʿlabī (d. 1036), similarly, has a shorter version of the story in his Lives of the Prophets,99 in which a mother and three of her children are thrown into fire, like Rhumi and her daughters in the Syriac tradition.100 The crucifixion of the youth (ʿAbdallāh b. al-Thāmir) at the end of the Islamic story also reminds the audience of the Martyrs of Najran, many of whom were crucified according to the story.101 Thus, although in early Islamic literature the exegetical value of the story was not obvious, later Muslim historians and exegetes attempted to clarify the connection between the quranic People of the Trench and ʿAbdallāh b. al-Thāmir with the help of Christian hagiography. Exegetical traditions of quranic verses were lengthy processes, within which narrative frames for verses were often altered.102 In the case of the quranic People of the Trench, this clarification was partly achieved through the adaptation of motifs from the Christian stories of the Martyrs of Najran. Fīmyūn and S.ālih. in the context of the Sīra are associated with the quranic People of the Trench, as the latter’s precursors. The story of their disciple ʿAbdallāh b. al-Thāmir often accompanied the story of Fīmyūn and S.ālih., and was expanded to include motifs from Christian hagiography, toward developing a broader, more historical context for the quranic People of the Trench, whom some exegetes argued to be the Martyrs of Najran. In many other literary contexts the story of Fīmyūn and S.ālih., however, was not used for quranic interpretation, and it is to these contexts that we now turn.

Fīmyūn and S.ālih. in Al-T. abarī’s History Al-T.abarī is one of the transmitters of the story of Fīmyūn and S.ālih. in Islamic literature. In his voluminous History, he gives the story in the volume “Holders of Power after Ardashīr b. Bābak.” In the section on the history of Yemen, al-T. abarī gives an account of the kings of the Himyarites until the Abyssinian and Persian invasion of the region in the sixth century. As he narrates the reign of the last king, Dhū Nuwās, who had converted to Judaism, al-T.abarī inserts the story of Fīmyūn and S.ālih., somewhat interfering with the historical sequence. The story appears to be background information for more important events, according to al-T.abarī, namely, the conquest of South Arabia by Abyssinians and rule of Himyar by a Jewish king, who persecuted Christians. Al-T.abarī narrates Ibn Ish.āq’s version of the story, with minor differences in wording.103 Like Ibn Ish.āq, he also gives the story of ʿAbdallāh b. al-Thāmir

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after the story of Fīmyūn and S.ālih.. And after this, he reminds his readers that it was Dhū Nuwās who dug a trench to persecute ʿAbdallāh and his people (before the Abyssinian invasion). He gives multiple accounts and interpretations of this persecution, and in only one of these explicitly connects the narrative to the exegesis of the quranic verses Q85:4–8. Although al-T.abarī repeats multiple times that Dhū Nuwās dug a trench and burned some of the Christians in it, he only makes one brief reference to the said verses. Therefore, the story of Fīmyūn and S.ālih. does not appear as an exegetical episode in his representation. It is used for its historical value, to provide a more extensive account of the history of South Arabia. Al-T.abarī’s emphasis on the story for its historiographical value is apparent once we look at his other works. In his exegesis of the People of the Trench, al-T.abarī includes the story of ʿAbdallāh b. al-Thāmir and the latter’s community being persecuted in a pit of fire, but omits the story of Fīmyūn and S.ālih.. Therefore, it is likely that al-T.abarī did not directly associate the story of Fīmyūn and S.ālih. with the exegetical tradition of the quranic People of the Trench. Thus, Fīmyūn and S.ālih. should be treated separately from their disciple ʿAbdallāh b. al-Thāmir for their respective semiotic values. The former certainly had a wider perception history, whereas the latter appears to have stayed strictly within the boundaries of quranic exegesis. This distinction was sustained by later historians and exegetes. Ibn Kathīr, a celebrated fourteenth-century h.adīth scholar and historian in Syria, for example, also uses the story in his voluminous Universal History.104 This is a work that narrates the creation of the world, the history of pre-Islamic Arabia, Muhammad’s lifetime, and the caliphate through the Mamluk period (the author’s time period), ending with the final judgment. Despite this broad content, it is also a significant pro-Syrian, hagiographic local history of Damascus, where Ibn Kathīr studied and served the local government as a member of the scholarly community. It is his most significant work, created in an era in which much Islamic scholarship and intellectual output was imprinted by dynastic rivalries, sunnī-shīʿī controversies, and external threats like the Crusaders and the Mongols.105 Ibn Kathīr has a strong pro-sunnī agenda for the Islamic section of his work.106 His account of the pre-Islamic events is, as a result, less politically motivated. And even though he used al-T.abarī’s History with caution, adapting it to his own methodology and agenda, he seems to have fully quoted the story of Fīmyūn and S.ālih..

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The chapters of the Universal History are titled qis..sa (story), khabar (report), and the like, and vary in length and form. The story of Fīmyūn and S.ālih. is found in the chapter in which Ibn Kathīr gives an account of the conflicts between the Himyarite and Axumite kingdoms.107 The chapter is entitled “Lakhnīʿa, the Earring-Wearer, Usurping Rule over Yemen.” The very next section is about the king of Yemen marching into Ethiopia and Sudan. The story of the Christianization of South Arabia is inserted within these two martial episodes, to provide further historical information. Ibn Kathīr does not comment on the historicity of the account. Nevertheless, at the beginning of the Universal History Ibn Kathīr says he carefully avoided sources like qis.as. al-anbiyāʾ and isrāʾīliyyāt, if any source was suspected to have been corrupted. Therefore, he must have deemed the story of Fīmyūn and S.ālih. among those historically reliable. It is worth noting that Ibn Kathīr has another chapter in this volume dedicated to the People of the Trench, where he gives the abovementioned story of ʿAbdallāh b. al-Thāmir.108 This is another manifestation of the semiotic separation of the story of Fīmyūn and S.ālih. from the exegesis of the People of the Trench. In his exegesis of the People of the Trench, like al-T.abarī, Ibn Kathīr does not mention the story of Fīmyūn. He only gives the story of the king, the sorcerer, and the young boy—ʿAbdallāh b. al-Thāmir. Thus, for Muslim scholars, the story of Fīmyūn and S.ālih. was not merely “tafsīr material.” In universal historiographical works, the two holy men were presented as pre-Islamic Muslim holy men, not necessarily with a connection to the quranic People of the Trench. They were members of the eternal Muslim community.

Fīmyūn and S.ālih. as Fad. āʾil of Najran in Yāqūt’s Dictionary Yāqūt al-H . amawī, a manumitted slave and renowned scholar in the thirteenth century, included the story of Fīmyūn and S.ālih. in his geographical-lexicographical work, Dictionary. The work is comprised of entries on towns, cities, and regions, and Yāqūt gives information about the history, literature, important individuals, and other characteristics of each place. He completed the dictionary in the year 1228 for the library of his patron Ibn al-Qift.ī, head of the office of finances in Aleppo, a prolific scholar himself.109 Although he likely conceptualized the Dictionary before meeting Ibn al-Qift.ī, the latter’s patronage made the finalization of the work possible.

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Yāqūt gives the story of Fīmyūn and S.ālih. in his entry for “Najran,” and narrates the full account of Ibn Ish.āq.110 He may have never gone to South Arabia.111 The libraries he visited during his scholarly career, however, likely enabled him to fill in the gaps in information he had not had the chance to gather during his travels. Ibn al-Qift.ī’s own writings on the history of Yemen must also have been among his sources. Despite the difficulty in identifying Yāqūt’s source for Ibn Ish.āq’s version of the story, the latter sufficed as information on Najran for him. Yāqūt’s antiquarianism, however, is not sufficient for contextualizing the story in the Dictionary. He used the story of Fīmyūn and S.ālih. for encomiastic purposes, to praise Najran, presenting the two Christian holy men as wonders and excellences particular to that region. As shown in the previous chapter, many hagiographic stories of pre-Islamic saints were incorporated into Islamic literature as praises of particular towns and regions, as merits and part of the religious cultural heritage of those places. Although Yāqūt did not explicitly title his work as fad. āʾil, he presented Fīmyūn and S.ālih. as the excellent qualities of the region of Najran in the Dictionary. Thus, our author participates in a tradition of praising South Arabian antiquities that began in the milieu of Wahb b. Munabbih, the first known transmitter of the story of Fīmyūn and S.ālih.. Personal or communal interests in such a representation might have shifted over time, but the mode of representation remained. In the absence of Wahb’s works it is difficult to tell how his presentation of this story compares to those of other authors. Nevertheless, in the Sīra one sees that it was a highly valued story about the pious and virtuous past of South Arabia. Considering that both Ibn Ish.āq and the editor of his work, Ibn Hishām, have personal connections to South Arabia, it is natural that, besides the other roles the story fulfilled in the Sīra (like exegesis), it also was a source of local pride for multiple generations of authors. Neither Yāqūt nor Ibn al- Qift.ī, however, had ancestral roots in South Arabia or the Hijaz. Thus, theirs appears to be a scholarly interest in the heritage of the Islamic world in general, and in preserving an inventory of its history, culture, and literature. By the twelfth century, the story seems to have been taken out of the context of early Islamic dynastic rivalries. Its value as one of the fad. āʾil attributed to South Arabia, however, was unquestionably ongoing. Medieval geography was often a scholarly practice of collecting knowledge about the created world and nature, as a means of supporting the knowledge about divine things and Scripture (the divine past).112 Yāqūt’s

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endeavor fits in this frame and understanding of geography: a study of place and time as a tool for gaining knowledge about the creation and the divine past. In this, the two Christian holy men become seminal landmarks in South Arabia, reflecting the sacred history of the place in an Islamic framework.

Fīmyūn and S.ālih. for Didactic Exhortation in Ibn ʿArabī’s Lectures Ibn ʿArabī’s (d. 1240) Lectures, a Sufi collection of biographical notes and stories of prophets and saints, includes the story of Fīmyūn and S.ālih..113 The story of the two holy men is taken out of its historical context, and reoriented toward a didactic purpose, namely, exhorting the reader on piety and perseverance. Ibn ʿArabī was among the most prominent Sufi scholars in the Middle Ages.114 He started his education and career in Spain and North Africa, and traveled throughout Arabia, Syria, and Asia Minor, among other places. He had scholarly and family connections to significant philosophers, scholars, and religious leaders of his time. He was a prolific writer, to whom some four hundred works have been attributed. The Lectures is one of Ibn ʿArabī’s numerous works on the tenets of Sufism, albeit being among the least cited.115 It is a two-volume collection of anecdotes and wisdom sayings from prophets and sages. In this sequence of anecdotes, he gives the story of Fīmyūn and S.ālih., under the title “Story (khabar) of Faymiyun and His Acts of Devotion and What Happened to Him.” Ibn ʿArabī narrates from Ibn Ish.āq, providing a verbatim copy of the version of the story in the Sīra, with a few minor variations. After the story, Ibn ʿArabī has two brief explanatory notes.116 First, he explains a verb. He says that fa-jaʿ fathā, what the wind that God sent did to the cultic tree in the story (the feminine ending of the verb indicating the tree), meant fa-qalaʿathā, that is, “uprooted it.” Secondly, he explains the term ʿila ʿawla, used to describe S.ālih.’s reaction when he saw a snake coming upon Fīmyūn, that is, he could not hold himself.117 Through a couplet from the renowned eighth-century poet al-Farazdaq,118 Ibn ʿArabī notes: “So, the meaning of the term is someone who is overwhelmed, and his steadfastness and patience were conquered.”119 Ibn ʿArabī used the story of Fīmyūn and S.ālih. for its exhortative value. In this representation, the two holy men are not only two members of the preMuhammad believers, but are also placed in a community of Sufis. They exhort Ibn ʿArabī’s readers on universal religious concepts such as piety and perseverance. This reorientation is accomplished through two strategies. First, the author took the story out of its historical context, deemphasizing its con-

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nection to South Arabia, and the history of Christianity and paganism. Second, with the note he provided, he emphasized the semiotic value of the story. The section ends with a poetic statement on perseverance and strength, even under the circumstances of defeat. Thus, in this representation, Fīmyūn, a Christian holy man, became an embodiment of these virtues. We have seen earlier examples of such didactic representations of Christians in Islamic literature, with the example of Jesus being represented as an ascetic in a multitude of Islamic works, and Saint Antony in Ibn Abī al-Dunyā’s Fear of God.120 The current example shows the continuation of that practice in the thirteenth century in Sufi literature. In these and similar examples, Christian saints, like Antony, Fīmyūn, and S.ālih., as well as more prominent figures like Jesus, despite remaining Christians, were integrated into a community of true believers as instructors on the concepts of piety, sanctity, and asceticism. Their religious affiliations are not erased; they stay Christian. Yet, this aspect of their persona is not elaborated on, and thus becomes tangential. The representation of Fīmyūn and S.ālih. in the Lectures thus participates in a long tradition in Islamic literature of representing Christian saints as instructors on asceticism. As for Ibn ʿArabī’s access to the story, at the beginning of the work he says: “We relate from the account (h.adīth) of Ibn Ish.āq.”121 The latter was one of the forty-five sources of Ibn ʿArabī, according to the list of sources and chains of transmission he provides.122 Since the story of Fīmyūn and S.ālih. is reported here on the authority of Ibn Ish.āq, it is possible to argue that Ibn ʿArabī used a copy of the Sīra. He says he accessed Ibn Ish.āq’s narration through Muhammad b. Mūsā al-Qurt.ubī. It is not clear who this scholar was. He is not mentioned in the list of the Sufis Ibn ʿArabī studied with in the aforementioned Spirit of Holiness. Nevertheless, Ibn ʿArabī’s extensive travels, and participation in many scholarly, mystical, and political circles, make it possible that he worked with a Cordoban scholar who transmitted Ibn Ish.āq’s Sīra. In R. W. Austin’s words, Ibn ʿArabī “gave expression to the teachings and insights of the generations of Sufis who preceded him, recording for the first time, systematically and in detail, the vast fund of Sufi experience and oral tradition, by drawing on a treasury of technical terms and symbols greatly enriched by centuries of intercourse between the Muslim and Neo-Hellenistic worlds.”123 The Lectures and his other works reveal the bits of knowledge and memory of Christian saints circulating in Islamic mystical circles. Ibn ʿArabī parsed out the material in the Sīra and reorganized it for his own purposes; he did not copy the Sīra in full. He organized the initial part

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of his work according to the following topics: Muhammad’s life, Umayyad caliphs’ reigns, Abbasid caliphs’ reigns, history of humanity from Adam to Muhammad’s hijra, some h.adīth of Muhammad, reports about the first four caliphs. After this section, the chapters become less topical, less historical, and more conceptual; they cover didactic narratives, treatises about Sufi concepts, and poetry, and so on. The story of Fīmyūn and S.ālih. is placed within this latter part, as a didactic story on Sufism and piety in general. The story of Paul and John (Fīmyūn and S.ālih.) took us from Edessan Syriac hagiography to early Islamic historiography, universal historiography, quranic exegesis, and Sufi literature. In all of these contexts, we have seen the same story with a different context and orientation. The texts within which the story of Fīmyūn and S.ālih. is placed show that the narrative was repurposed not through any major rephrasing, but through glosses, commentary, and placement, among other textual and paratextual strategies. The varied textual repositioning of this story across a millennium demonstrates how a narrative functioned as a tool for meaning making between Christianity and Islam. The life and travels of this story further highlight how Christian holy men transition into Islam as venerable ascetics while the explicitly Christian features of their stories are dropped in the process. The story of Paul and John thus sheds light on the Islamic notions of sanctity and how the latter is construed vis-àvis Christian hagiographic knowledge. Last but not the least, the transmission history of the story of Paul of John highlights the complex structures of authorship, since many Muslim tradents, compilers, and authors contributed to the development of this hagiographic dossier that bridged the Christian and Islamic divine past.

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chapter 6

Stories between Christianity and Islam

The preceding chapters have presented a broad array of Islamic texts in which knowledge of Christian hagiography is found in the form of tropes, personas, or stories. The stories of the Youths of Ephesus, Alexander the Great, Antony of Egypt, Saint George, Marūthā of Maypherqat, Bishop Paul and Priest John of Edessa, and the Martyrs of Najran, among others, were oriented toward various new meanings in Islamic literature. They were interpreted to elucidate quranic passages, to praise a region, to give historical information, or to define the Muslim community and Islamic religious practice. All the examples I have analyzed brought to the fore significant questions with regard to the mechanisms of transmission. This final chapter revisits some of the recurring concepts and issues that help build a nuanced understanding of transmission of hagiographic knowledge between Christianity and Islam. In light of the examples above, I will discuss the three topics to which the analyses in this book contribute with new examples or theoretical frames: the Islamic perception of Christian ascetics, monks, and monasticism; authority and authorship in the context of hagiographic transmissions; and the role of the household in the shaping of the contexts and routes of transmission.

monks, monasticism, and the islamic notion of sanctity Nomenclature is often a helpful compass in analyzing the nature of hagiographic transmissions. The saints in Islam whose stories were transmitted 146

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from the Christian tradition are generally referred to as pious men/women, or by their secular titles. Saint Antony is an anchorite, or a wandering ascetic (sāʾih.) in Islam; Saint George a righteous servant of God; Saint Marūthā a governor (raʾis) of the region. Similarly, Bishop Paul and Priest John became ascetic men in the Islamic version of their story. Pre-Islamic holy men’s religious titles in the Christian tradition, as a monk, bishop, priest, and so on, were generally muted in the Islamic reiterations of their stories. Islamic representations of “monks,” on the other hand, were often distinguished from those of Islamicized Christian saints. This distinction is important because it highlights the different perceptions of monks and ascetics in Islamic literature, a difference that itself points at the distinction between institutional Christianity and universal ascetic values in Islam. There are numerous representations of Christian monks in pre-Islamic and Islamic Arabic literature. The Quran, where one can begin exploring, mostly presents monks in a favorable light.1 In Q5:82, for example, it is mentioned that priests and monks are not arrogant, and are among those Christians who are closest to true believers.2 Islamic literature after the Quran, as Sidney Griffith and others highlight, also often emphasized Christian monks’ venerability.3 The monk Bah.īrā, who, according to the Islamic tradition, confirmed Muhammad’s prophethood before he himself knew it, is among the betterknown, and we will consider him briefly.4 In Ibn Ish.āq’s presentation, the monk Bah.īrā is one of the people who saw the signs of prophethood in Muhammad while the latter was still a child. According to the biographical tradition, before this monk, other Christians who studied the Scriptures, Jews, and sorcerers had also seen these signs.5 Note that Ibn Ish.āq devotes a separate section to all of these different groups, treating soothsayers, Jewish rabbis, and Christian monks together as those who saw the signs of prophethood. The monk was not singled out as a possessor of divine knowledge, but belonged to the broader category of “those who saw the signs of prophethood in Muhammad.” 6 The account of the monk Bah.īrā is certainly lengthier than the other accounts of identification of the early signs of Muhammad’s prophethood. However, this might be because by Ibn Ish.āq’s time (eighth c.) knowledge about monks in Arabia was more extensive than knowledge about sorcerers, possibly because of close encounters with ascetics and monastic communities in the Hijaz and neighboring regions. The details in the narrative, about Bah.īrā’s cell, his books, his hosting of visitors, are all well-known aspects of late antique asceticism. After Bah.īrā, other

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monks also saw the signs of prophethood in Muhammad or heralded his imminent prophecy.7 The accounts in the Sīra affirm that the “monk” was a literary trope, symbolizing asceticism, wisdom, and clairvoyance.8 Note that this trope is reinforced also in h.adīth literature. In the S. ah.īh. of al-Bukhārī, for example, there is a report in which a monk is mentioned as a source of knowledge and clairvoyance for someone who wanted to know whether his/her repentance would be accepted.9 Thus, by the ninth century the monk was a well-established trope in Islamic literature, symbolizing knowledge and wisdom. Elizabeth Key Fowden defines the process of adaptation of “good monks before Muhammad” into the Islamic tradition as “absorption,” as opposed to “rejection,” of holy men.10 I do not find the reject-or-absorb model to be accurately applicable to what was happening in these processes of transmission. There were no “good” and “bad” monk categories in the early Islamic perception. A clearer distinction appears to have existed between the solitary monk/ ascetic and the community of monks, that is, the monastery. The former, as mentioned above, was a well-known literary trope with mostly positive and often romantic connotations of piety, asceticism, wisdom, and clairvoyance.11 As Fowden emphasizes, what “caught the Arabs’ imagination, to judge from early evocations of monks in Arabic poetry and prose, as well as the Quran, was not so much the panoply of Christian parishes, dioceses, Councils and Fathers, but a single evocative sight—the ascetic in his cell, with his book and his lamp, already a beloved theme in pre-Islamic poetry.”12 The negative representations of monks in Islamic literature, on the other hand, comment mostly on their monastic communities and on aspects of monastic life. For example, in one of the tales in Ibn Abī al-Dunyā’s Fear of God, a monastic community is mocked for the monks’ unquestioning veneration of a person who poses as a monk, merely because of his big beard. Fowden discusses the ways in which monks were “rejected” in the Islamic tradition, as consumers of people’s goods, or perverters of Jesus’s teachings.13 Yet, these representations are commentaries on monastic communities, which engaged with commerce, built “pretentious” buildings, and ostensibly strayed from the Scriptures with their interpretations and invented practices. Islamic perception and such representations of monasticism were shaped by the Islamic understanding of and approaches to institutional Christianity, a significant part of which was monasticism. It is worth noting that in the eastern Mediterranean, before the emergence of Islam, monasteries, local patrons,

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and bishoprics often opposed one another, competing for ecclesiastical patronage and authority.14 Thus, opposition to and negative images of monasticism were part of a well-developed discourse already in the pre-Islamic era, and the Islamic form of anti-monastic sentiment should be contextualized against this broader skepticism. Representations of solitary monks and ascetics had different histories than monastic communities in Islam. In the Quran, particularly in Q57:27, monasticism is presented as a Christian invention;15 although monks are portrayed in a positive light. Similarly, the oft-cited h.adīth reports in which Muhammad asserts that there is no monasticism in Islam prescribe Islamic practices in opposition to monasticism, but do not contest the veneration of solitary monks and ascetics. To illustrate, in one of these reports, a woman complains that her husband spends the night awake and fasts during the day.16 Upon hearing this, Muhammad chastises the husband that monkery (rahbaniyya) is not prescribed for the Muslim community. In some reports, however, Muhammad says that every people is given a form of monasticism, and the monasticism of the Muslim community is jihad.17 Thus, the report appears to highlight the boundaries of the acceptable forms of asceticism (zuhd) in Islam, and not comment on Muslims’ engagement with ascetics.18 The above statements attributed to Muhammad are not refutations of the venerability of Christian ascetics and monks, but conceptualizations of Islamic practices through a discourse of monasticism. In short, monasticism was generally criticized, while solitary monks and ascetics were venerated in Islamic literature. Yet, despite the positive depictions of monks and ascetics, Islamic literature rarely presented them as members of the Muslim community.19 The monk trope was often used as a tool for legitimization, Islamic identity formation, or exhortation.20 Stories of monks qua monks mostly originated in the Islamic milieu, never following a preIslamic hagiographic narrative attributed to that monk, as observed in the case of Bah.īrā.21 Stories of monks and ascetics originating in the Christian tradition, however, went through drastic changes in the process of making the heroes of these stories Muslims or Muslim-like. Fowden analyzes the story of Fīmyūn in the biography of Muhammad as an example of a “good monk” that the Islamic tradition “absorbed.”22 Yet, this holy man is not referred to as a monk in the narration of Ibn Ish.āq; he is a believing, ascetic man, a true follower of Jesus, as we saw in the previous chapter. Therefore, Fīmyūn’s portrayal in the Sīra is not an example of the “absorption of a good monk,” but of

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the transformation of a Christian monk (in fact, a bishop) into a believer, a member of the Muslim community. The distinction between holy men of Islam and Christian monks appears to have been established by the time the notion of “friends of God” (awliyāʾ) developed as an Islamic hagiological category.23 As this and other Islamic categories of sanctity developed, extreme asceticism and renunciation of the world (practices associated with Christian asceticism) were positioned against Islamic forms of piety, through various statements attributed to Muhammad.24 The discourse of asceticism became a polemical tool, and the monk became more of an outsider to the Islamic community. In the Memorial of the Saints of Farīd al-Dīn ʿAt.t.ār (d. 1221), for instance, Christian monks either convert to Islam or are falsely entitled monks (in reality being cryptoMuslims).25 They are not members of the community of the friends of God. To nuance our understanding of the transmission of hagiographic stories into Islam, I emphasized the distinction between the Islamic perception of solitary monks and that of institutional monastic communities, but the latter were not completely rejected. Despite the theological refutations and occasional mockery of Christian monastic institutions, there were numerous depictions of monasteries in a positive light, as peaceful oases, sources of knowledge, places of worship and piety, especially in poetry and travel literature.26 The aforementioned al- Shābushtī, for example, describes the Syrian monastery of Dayr Zakka as a residence of many caliphs.27 Literary evidence further indicates that while, on the one hand, the monastery became a romanticized literary trope,28 some Muslims were praised for being monk-like in their piety and religious practice. The literary depictions of caliphs incorporated a significant degree of ascetic and pro-monastic discourse.29 The Umayyad caliph ʿUmar II (d. 720), for example, “walked like a monk,” “separated himself from his wives,” owned only one shirt, and visited monasteries, among other attributes showing his piety and asceticism.30 Beyond such individual cases, the social and spiritual connections between caliphs and ascetics as their protégés, counselors, and critics are also frequently emphasized in literature.31 On some occasions, the intercessory power of the ascetic, through prayer, was even passed on to caliphs, leading to the latter’s sanctification.32 In sum, Christian hagiography proved to be an important tool with which the notion of sanctity in Islam was defined and circumscribed, while the representations of monks and ascetics were used to outline Islamic communal

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boundaries. Christian monks and ascetics were praised, respected, and venerated in Islamic literature, but they needed to convert to Islam in order to become members of the Muslim umma.

authorship and transmission of hagiographic knowledge In the complex trajectories of narrative transmission, where should one look for the author? Hagiography of a saint is often an incremental dossier, composed of different articulations of the saint’s story in various linguistic and religious contexts, as we have seen in multiple examples in the previous chapters. Islamic versions of Christian saints’ stories certainly spoke to different audiences, operating in new semiotic systems, but so did many narratives among various Christian communities. Thus, the extent of a saint’s dossier is demarcated not by confessional boundaries, but by the continuation of remembrances of that saint. The examples analyzed heretofore point to the active authorship of Muslim scholars, who consulted texts, received help from translators, built stories upon the broad hagiographic knowledge available about their subjects, and incorporated oral tradition into their narratives. These strategies were significant components of processes of authority building and authorship in antiquity, as numerous case studies in adjacent fields highlight.33 Medieval Islamic literature’s conversations with Christian hagiography add important points to this ongoing scholarly discussion. Modern scholarship on authorship in Islamic literature has often focused on historiography to build theories of authorship.34 Since Islamic literature in its early phase prominently adopted a report-based transmission system, scholars tend to operate on a binary model, assuming for Islamic historiography that either the majority of the reports faithfully preserve original accounts, or reports were freely refashioned as literary artifacts rather than historical facts.35 Thus, analyses of historiography and assessments of historicity have shaped the study of authorship in Islamic literature. The study of hagiographic transmissions, since it involves texts from various genres, shifts the focus from genre-specific to content-specific dynamics of authorship. One can use various models for transmission and its relation to authorship. For example, Stefan Leder and Hilary Kilpatrick develop a frame for authorship in early Islamic prose literature based on the presence of the author.36 They argue that prose works were either compilations or compositions, and the

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latter could be fictional and nonfictional, albeit acknowledging that such categorization was not always straightforward.37 Similarly, In his analysis of medieval historians’ use of Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s (eighth c.) Khwadāynāma in their historiographical works, Mohsen Zakeri distinguishes between translation, translation-compilation, and redaction as the three modes of authorship, based on the extent to which an author leaves a literary source intact in his work.38 All of the Islamic texts I analyzed in the previous chapters consist of compilations of reports, with different degrees of the visibility of “the writer’s guiding hand,”39 which does not correlate with the originality of the text. The example that is potentially closest to an “original work” is Ibn Abī al-Dunyā’s Fear of God, and even that text had conversations with multiple literary traditions. In compilations, on the other hand, contrary to what Leder and Kilpatrick argue, the author does not always “entirely conceal himself.” 40 In the Book of Crowns, for example, Ibn Hishām alternates between his own narrations and direct quotations from Wahb b. Munabbih. Thus, the compilation-composition dichotomy proves to have a restricted use in the discussions of authorship. Another model was suggested by Robert Hoyland, who argues for a distinction between the authorship practices of historians, h.adīth scholars, and belletrists based on authors’ attention to chains of transmission and their alterations of the reports.41 Hoyland emphasizes that although these groups of authors rely on the same material, their approaches to the authenticity of the material yield different modes of authorship. Hoyland’s theorization is similar to this book’s in emphasizing the role of the narrative and its context in the formation of authorship. Yet, it still uses genre to determine the context of the narrative. Authorship in historiographical works, Hoyland argues, is different than in h.adīth and in belles lettres according to this conceptualization. Hoyland further develops this theory of authorship by pointing to narratological devices and their utilization toward authors’ goals as determining the modes of authorship.42 It is a helpful model, but it fails to account for the later developments of generic conventions. Definitions and boundaries of literary genres developed later than the earlier specimens of writing in those literary corpora. Therefore, authorship defined through literary genre may lead to false assessments regarding how authorship is practiced in any particular genre. My analysis brings to the fore an alternative model of authorship based on the five functions of Christian hagiography in Islamic literature as indicators of different modes of authorship. As explored in the preceding chapters, these

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functions entail exegetical, didactic, encomiastic, historical/etiological, or communal reorientation of a narrative. And each of these reorientations roughly corresponds to a certain extent of character development in Islamic (versus Christian) hagiological terms, connection to the quranic time frame, integration of Islamic-quranic discourse, and integration of external oral or textual material. In Averil Cameron’s words, “The relation of author to text is the one in which the author transmits a meaning that is guaranteed by reference to an independent absolute.” 43 While in hagiographic transmissions the independent absolute was the authority of the sacred past, Muslim authors created various meanings of Christian saints for their readers. This model is based on the (re)uses of Christian hagiography in Islamic literature, and it may not apply to other material that is embedded in Islamic literature. For example, one might develop a different frame for authorship practices based on various modes of scriptural quotations and allusions in Islamic literature. Furthermore, although the model is based on functions of hagiography, it does not have a functionalist claim. In other words, with this model, I do not argue that every time a Christian hagiography is used in Islamic literature for a particular purpose, it results in similar outcomes in terms of the transformation of the narrative and the literary strategies of the author. Despite such restrictions, the model prompts us to think about authorship in narratological terms, since it points at different literary practices based on different orientations of narratives, and authorship as a collective activity. The model thus shifts focus from individual authors to stories and their incremental trajectories. Of course, one cannot exclusively focus on the narrative at the expense of the author. The analyses in the previous chapters, adopting a new historicist approach, demonstrated how the social context of authors and compilers might have contributed to the ways in which stories were reoriented. Still, authorship as a diachronic and collective practice transferred from one individual to the other is an integral outcome of stories’ transmissions across linguistic and confessional boundaries.44 In all the examples, we read reports on the authority of transmitters who lived generations before the authors/compilers of the texts that we have access to. Through the example of the most prominent of these, namely, the Yemeni historian Wahb b. Munabbih, let us raise further questions regarding collective authorship. Wahb is cited as the source of Ibn Hishām’s story of South Arabian Dhū al-Qarnayn, al-T.abarī’s exegesis of the quranic Dhū al-Qarnayn, al-T.abarī’s story of Saint George, Ibn Ish.āq’s story of the conversion of Najran

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to Christianity, and the story of Paul and John, among numerous other stories of prophets and saints in Islamic literature. He is also cited for brief anecdotes and aphorisms, for instance, in a report at the beginning of Ibn Abī al-Dunyā’s Fear of God, in which he says: “Luqmān said to his son, ‘Son, hope for God in a manner which will not embolden you to disobey Him, and fear God in a manner which will not make you despair of his mercy.’ ” 45 Since Wahb became an extensively cited authority on biblical and hagiographic knowledge in Islamic literature, understanding his authorship and authority greatly enhances the discussion. The memory of Wahb as a prolific collector and transmitter raises two important notions: assigned authorship and the authorship of the family. The former, the disposition in a literary tradition to attribute a certain type of content to a particular (real or imagined) author in order to contain, ascribe, and control that material, is a well-known concept in the Western tradition, especially in the context of the Homeric epic and its authorship.46 We could think of this as typecasting the author. As Suleiman Mourad and others argue, misattributing traditions to Muhammad, his Companions, and other authorities was a common practice in Islamic literature.47 In Wahb’s case, we see that a great number of traditions about the biblical past were attributed to him, as a result of which Wahb’s name became a container for biblical stories in Islam. Much material, one might imagine, was assigned to his authorship after it was transmitted to Islam through other reporters, storytellers, and transmitters. This practice gave authority to the transmitted material, by attributing it to a source already known for his vast biblical knowledge. Such assignment also enabled the control of the material, for the majority of the material attributed to Wahb was placed in literary genres that had relatively less-binding theological connotations than genres such as tafsīr or h.adīth. Thus, we can also conceptualize this as a “confined” form of authorship. Wahb’s example also sheds light on the authorship of the family. The majority of the material attributed to Wahb was transmitted by his family members, who were active listeners, recorders, and transmitters of Wahb’s knowledge of Jewish and Christian traditions. For example, we know of a history book, titled Mubtadaʾ (Beginning), attributed to Wahb’s greatgrandson, a descendant of his daughter.48 As the title indicates, this book probably includes the story of the creation and of biblical prophets, the types of stories Wahb is renowned for. Instead of isolating Wahb as the sole author, we see a highlighting of his family members enjoining the authorship and

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preservation of this work. Wahb’s family, in addition to transmitting traditions from him, also narrated stories about him. For example, Wahb’s brother Maʿqil’s son ʿAbdussamad reports: “I heard somebody in Mecca asking my uncle Wahb to tell him about [the prophet] David, and he agreed [to narrate about him].” 49 Thus, Munabbih, his children, and their descendants played an active role in both preserving the material Wahb transmitted, and solidifying his memory as a pious, ascetic, and knowledgeable man. Nancy Khalek discusses the importance of “family notes” in establishing family piety and preserving the family memory in early Islam through the example of the Ghassanid family in Syria, and their collection of anecdotes that are partly preserved in the tenth-century Reports and Stories, to which we will briefly return.50 Wahb’s family similarly preserved and transmitted the information he acquired, presenting a prime example of family-based scholarship. In the context of the household, where scholarship is framed by the family, and literary production partly functions as a cultural asset for the image and identity of the family, the notion of authorship appears as a collective practice. Complicating the notion of the transfer of authorship is the problem of invisible authors. We have access to the writings of scholars with skilled literacy (a product of grammatical and rhetorical training) who relied heavily on the compositions of semiliterate transmitters, such as storytellers. The latter’s involvement in the process of composition and transmission into Islam is often neglected in modern scholarship.51 Storytellers are not considered authors, according to rather restricted or conventional definitions of authorship. Chase Robinson, for example, states that Muhammad’s life was written before there were authors in the Islamic community.52 However, literary sources reveal (and sometimes explicitly describe) that oral narrators of stories were important authorities in the composition of saints’ stories in antiquity, as the discussion on hagiodiegesis in chapters 1 and 2 demonstrated. Moreover, Islamic versions of stories, in the hands of storytellers, travelers, pilgrims, and merchants, were often reintegrated into the dossiers of Christian saints. Ibn Abī al-Dunyā’s Antony, for example, possibly having circulated in the Abbasid court before Muslim and Christian audiences, contributed to the image and perception of the eminent Egyptian desert father in the Middle Ages for both Muslims and Christians. Hagiodiegesis, the pietistic practice of storytelling, enabled narrators to establish authority through nonwritten media such as performative narrations, preaching, debates, and remembrance, in both Christianity and Islam.

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narratives in and of the family Saints’ stories were narrated and listened to in many contexts in late antique Christianity, including local and Holy Land pilgrimage, saints’ shrines, liturgy, imperial court, hospitals, prison, household, and theater. These contexts are also emphasized in Islamic literature as points of contact between individuals and communities to exchange stories. It would be impossible to give an account of the roles of all of these contexts in the circulation of saints’ stories in antiquity. We will look at a major yet underexplored component and context of narrative transmission here: the household. In Late Antiquity, family-based piety and asceticism were prominent contexts in which saints’ stories were generated, preserved, and circulated. The production of the literary depiction of Macrina, the sister of the fourthcentury Cappadocian Fathers Gregory of Nyssa and Basil of Caesarea, is a well-known example of the centrality of hagiographic production to family piety and prestige.53 Around the same time, according to her biographical tradition, Melania the Elder, by narrating stories of prophets and saints, biblical and extrabiblical, both instructed her family members and established the intellectual-pietistic prestige of the family.54 These and similar examples underline that production and transmission of scriptural and hagiographic knowledge were higher forms of asceticism, and tools to build, define, and demonstrate family piety in Late Antiquity.55 The practice continued after these fourth-century epitomes of household asceticism.56 In the sixth century, saint veneration and hagiographic production became venues through which elite families in Rome competed with one another, in addition to other venues of pietistic competition.57 For example, the Life of Sabina was authored and expanded under the patronage of the Caecinae family, as the wealthy patron Sabina slowly transformed to a saint herself. The family also brought the relics and stories of “foreign” saints from the eastern provinces of the empire to Rome, building shrines for them on their family estates. Stories, alongside relics, were highly valuable commodities, the transmission of which was among the axiomatic practices related to household piety. In other words, cultivation of a pietistic image for the family necessitated a display of knowledge of saints, a demonstrable level of narrative literacy, in Late Antiquity. How did this change with the coming of Islam? We know of Christian families with deep-rooted, cross-generational traditions of family scholarship that continued their practices into the early Islamic

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era. The Edessan family of the Gumaye, as Muriel Debié demonstrates, was a noble family that served the Umayyad court in the early eighth century, while continuing their historiographical endeavors within the family.58 This “dynasty of historians” preserved and transmitted traditions related to their family, as well as other noble Syrian Orthodox families.59 Similarly, Griffith shows the intricate relationship between the Mansur family in Damascus and the Umayyad dynasty.60 Members of this family, renowned for their scholarly qualifications, served the Roman and Umayyad courts as bureaucrats, the best-known member of the family being the theologian John of Damascus (d. 749).61 These examples clearly demonstrate the continuation of family-based scholarship in Christian families as a tool to build prestige under Islam. What about the families that converted to Islam? With many families’ gradual conversion to Islam beginning in the seventh century, some forms of pietistic competition ceased. For example, building projects of tribal churches and monasteries, a widespread practice in the late antique eastern Mediterranean and beyond,62 ceased to be a prominent venue for displaying piety for recently converted families. Yet, other forms of competition, such as family scholarship, especially the transmission of knowledge of the biblical past and hagiographic stories as a manifestation of family piety and prestige, continued into the new religious tradition. We still know little about the medieval Muslim family, since beyond the scholarly elites and ruling dynasties, the social, cultural, religious, and economic aspects of the medieval Muslim household remain underexplored.63 My analyses bring to the fore a significant aspect of the sociology of the Muslim family: knowledge about pre-Islamic prophets and saints, that is, narrative literacy, was a significant cultural currency in the early Islamic milieu, as it was for Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. And this currency was often used in the protection and economy of the family. The examples of the family of Muhammad, of Wahb b. Munabbih, of Ibn Hishām, and others demonstrate that this knowledge was collected, organized, and utilized toward building authority and prestige by many families, both high aristocratic and those with limited access to the topmost echelons of scholarly and political authority. Scholarship in the early Islamic milieu was “a family affair, where one family could produce several scholars who preserved traditions in a generational pattern.” 64 This was witnessed by Ibn al-Nadīm, who, in his account of the history of Islamic scholarship, sometimes refers to families as collective producers of scholarship, instead of to individual authors.65 One important aspect

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of family scholarship was that Muslim families, through their collections of scriptural and hagiographic anecdotes and “books,” established their own sanctity and intellectual prestige.66 In such identity-building processes, the knowledge of Christian Scripture and hagiography was an important building block. Liz Clark describes Christians’ use of their knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures to elaborate on Christian ascetic practices as follows: “Christians from early times not only had retained the Jewish Scriptures as part of their sacred literature, but also had claimed them as their own exclusive possession, they, too, were faced with making meaning of passages that had for them no direct ritual applicability. By imparting new meaning to these texts, Christians, like Jews, could speak inspiringly to later generations of devotees.” 67 Clark’s observation is directly applicable to early Muslim families’ use of their knowledge of Christianity and Christian writings to define the Islamic notions of sanctity. Khalek shows this through her analysis of the aforementioned Reports and Stories by Muhammad b. al-Fayd. al-Ghassānī (mid-tenth c.).68 The work is a collection of 106 proverbs, anecdotes, scriptural quotations, and poems on piety, asceticism, and exemplary behavior. Some reports in this collection do not have an exhortative value; they are snippets of historical information, such as important people’s death dates. Muhammad transmits these reports on the authority of his family members. It is worth noting that all of the reports about biblical prophets are transmitted within the family—on the authority of Ibrahīm, his father Hishām, and his grandfather Yah.yā b. Yah.yā al-Ghassānī (mid-eighth c.);69 whereas the reports on generic concepts or early Islamic personas and events are reported from other authorities, outside the family. Thus, in this work, the family knowledge of the biblical past was emphasized through chains of transmission that consisted only of the family members’ names. The household of the South Arabian Munabbih and his sons is yet another example of family as a space for intergenerational transmission of biblicalhagiographic knowledge. As mentioned before, the works of the brothers Wahb, Maʿqil, and Hammām b. Munabbih were preserved by their family members and descendants. The family in this case played a crucial role in establishing these transmitters’ scholarly prestige as authorities in scriptural knowledge, biblical historiography, and folklore, as well as traditions of Muhammad.70 In early Islam, in Paul Cobb’s words, “a scholar’s older relatives were natural sources of information about previous generations, so that fatherson pairs, and even more extended families, often shared in the transmission

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of traditions.”71 We see this practice in the works of members of Munabbih’s family, as well as the Ghassani family. To recall Pierre Bourdieu’s theorization of ritual, these families attempted to create difference among other elite families through the practice of knowledge transmission.72 We see one of the finest examples of such identity building in the shīʿī tradition, where h.adīths about Muhammad were transmitted by his descendants and relatives.73 The privileged position of Muhammad’s family in economic, political, and religious matters began during the lifetime of Muhammad,74 and it is beyond the scope of this book to give an account of the development of the shīʿī movement.75 Suffice it to say that roughly in the mideighth century (the same time when the abovementioned families were active in scholarship) shīʿī doctrine and law began to take shape. Numerous traditions of Muhammad were collected and transmitted by the relatives and descendants of Muhammad in this time period. The imāms, the spiritual leaders of the community, were portrayed as receiving esoteric, divine knowledge. On the one hand, the imāms (all descendants of Muhammad) were protectors and embodiments of Muhammad’s traditions; on the other hand, their sayings and practices themselves were among the sources of religious law, alongside those of Muhammad, for the shīʿī communities.76 The shīʿī tradition thus is the most prominent example of the development of family piety and prestige through knowledge, scholarship, and transmission of tradition. Yet, the above examples demonstrate that the competition in building family prestige through knowledge of the sacred past had other powerful participants. Family scholarship and competition for prestige were not confined to the physical boundaries of the household, either. The intellectual prestige of families attracted scholars and the pious to famous households in pursuit of knowledge. As discussed in chapter 2, many members of Muhammad’s family and his Companions narrated stories about Muhammad, the occasions of his quranic revelation, and his exhortations to visitors who sought knowledge. For example, al-Zuhrī, the famous eighth-century h.adīth scholar, is reported to have interviewed servants in Medinan households for their knowledge and memory of Muhammad.77 Such household interviews, as also observed in the Christian tradition, resulted in the emergence, expansion, and dispersal of hagiographic stories. At first sight one might have the impression that in Islam these traditions, as far as one can deduct from the reports, were mostly about Muhammad. Yet, they were also about pre-Islamic prophets and saints, either in the form of knowledge about the pre-Islamic past, or in the form of quotations from

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160     Stories between Christianity and Islam

Muhammad, who narrated biblical and extrabiblical stories. Either way, many families were narrative-literate, building their authority as the sources of biblical and hagiographic knowledge. The discussion of household knowledge and its dissemination underlines that local knowledge was not a fixed phenomenon.78 Examples of narrative transmission often bring to the fore the mobility of traditions, and their travel far and wide. The context repeatedly emphasized for this mobility that catalyzed cultural transmission is scholarly travels, an extensive topic beyond the scope of this book.79 Nevertheless, we must highlight medieval Muslim authors’ emphasis on traveling in search of knowledge. The sources our authors cited, the master-disciple networks they belonged to, the patronages under which they wrote all point to a massive map of medieval travel, stretching from the Iberian peninsula to India, from Asia Minor to South Arabia and Ethiopia. Analysis of specific, local examples of hagiographic transmission has emphasized an immense degree of nonlocality and the ecumenicism of the knowledge of saints. As a final note on the contexts of transmission, let us consider agencies and intentions. Based on the abovementioned mechanisms that facilitated the transmission of saints’ stories into Islam, and especially based on the audiences of stories, we can speak about two modes of transmission: casual and intentional. Casual transmission takes place as a result of everyday interactions, the primary purpose of which is not always a conscious project or agenda of interreligious transmission. Interreligious transmissions in antiquity were largely of this sort, occurring as people moved through their daily lives, practices, routines, and interactions. Stories circulating in contexts like liturgy, preaching, and debate were transmitted between persons and communities in unpremeditated ways most of the time. Intentional transmissions, on the other hand, involved an active search for a story. Examples of this mode of transmission include Wahb b. Munabbih going to Christian monasteries and translating books, and al-Zuhrī interviewing households in Medina to collect prophetic reports. These two modes can also be described as interactive and transactional, respectively. Transmissions resulting from daily interactions between peoples and communities are examples of the former, while transmissions functioning as cultural transactions, with a degree of demand, expectation, and investment, are examples of the latter. Not every interaction is a transaction, and this difference separates unpremeditated transmissions from intentional ones. These different modes of agency and intention highlight the

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complex economy of storytelling and the circulation of narrative knowledge in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Storytelling and transmission of saints’ stories between Christianity and Islam: a topic of this scale can only be triangulated from a limited selection of angles. I have analyzed a group of texts, their authors, and their contexts in order to reconstruct the dynamics underlying transmissions of saints’ stories. The preceding chapters have demonstrated that a growing knowledge of Christian hagiography in Islam, gradually built upon an already-existent knowledge in the earliest Islamic community, created space for exchange, conversation, debate, and differentiation between Christianity and Islam in the Middle Ages. Christians and Muslims remembered different versions of the same past. These remembrances, carried through the powerful vessel of narrative, were significant tools for prescribing communal identity, defining orthopraxy, establishing historical knowledge, and claiming religious authority. While in their specific contexts stories served such functions, in the long term, continual remembrance and retelling of saints’ stories added to an evergrowing, incremental memory and legacy of saints and friends of God across centuries, and beyond specific confessional communities. In this shared space, the building blocks of which were saints and their stories, Christian and Muslim communities rubbed shoulders while looking out of different windows at different horizons of the same ecumene.

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ABBREVIATIONS

AG

Anecdota Graeca

AMS

Acta Martyrum et Sanctorum

An.Boll.

Analecta Bollandiana

ARCBH

Stephanos Efthymiadis, ed., Ashgate Research Companion to Byzantine Hagiography, 2 vols. (2011–14)

BHG

Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca

BHO

Bibliotheca Hagiographica Orientalis

BO

Bibliotheca Orientalis

BSOAS

Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies

CCSL

Corpus Christianorum: Series Latina

CFHB

Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae

CHRC

Church History and Religious Culture

CSCO

Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium

DOP

Dumbarton Oaks Papers

EI2

P. Bearman et al., eds., Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed. (online, 2002)

EI3

Kate Fleet et al., eds., Encyclopaedia of Islam, 3rd ed. (online, 2007)

EQ

Jane Dammen McAuliffe, ed., Encyclopaedia of the Quran (2005)

GCS

Die griechischen christlischen Schriftsteller der ersten drei Jahrhunderte

GRBS

Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies

IJMES

International Journal of Middle East Studies

JAAR

Journal of the American Academy of Religion 163

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164     Abbreviations

JAOS

Journal of the American Oriental Society

JBL

Journal of Biblical Literature

JECS

Journal of Early Christian Studies

JIQSA

Journal of the International Qur’anic Studies Association

JNES

Journal of Near Eastern Studies

JÖB

Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik

JRS

Journal of Roman Studies

JSAI

Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam

JSS

Journal of Semitic Studies

ODB

Alexander Kazhdan, ed., Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium (2005)

PG

Patrologia Graeca

PL

Patrologia Latina

PO

Patrologia Orientalis

REI

Revue des études islamiques

RHR

Revue de l’histoire des religions

ROC

Revue de l’orient chrétienne

SCh

Sources chrétiennes

WBCQ

Andrew Rippin and Jawid Mojaddedi, eds., The Wiley Blackwell Companion to the Qurʾān (2006)

ZDMG

Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft

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NOTES

introduction 1. Ibn Hishām, Sīra, 191: ‫احسحديثا ًمنّي‬ ‫ بما ذا مح ّمد ن‬. . . ‫من حديثه‬ ‫ثكم احسن‬ ‫انا أح ّد‬. For the story of Rustam and Isfandiyār, see Firdawsī, Shahnāma (trans. Levy), 194–218; Khwadāynāma (trans. Hämeen-Anttila), 174–99. 2. An important aspect of this conversation is the formation and circumscription of “knowledge” in Late Antiquity, and for this, I have greatly benefited from the following works: Chin and Vidas, Late Ancient Knowing; Chin, Grammar and Christianity; Stefaniw, “Knowledge in Late Antiquity.” And for my conceptualization of (religious) authority the following have been immensely helpful: Brown, Power and Persuasion; Brown, Authority and the Sacred; Cain, Letters of Jerome; Sessa, Formation of Papal Authority; Stroumsa, “New Self”; Berkovitz and Letteney, Rethinking “Authority.” Also see the articles in the recent special volume of Studies in Late Antiquity (vol. 6, no. 1 (2022)] on authority. 3. Historicity and fictionality in hagiography are critically questioned, for example, in Kazhdan, History of Byzantine Literature, 152–53; Turner, Truthfulness, 25–74; Papaconstantinou, Writing “True Stories”; Messis, “Fiction and/or Novelisation,” 313–41. 4. For useful theorizations of narrativity and historical representation, see, for example, de Certeau, La fable mystique; Frye, Religion; Propp, Theory and History; White, Content of the Form; Campbell, Transformations of Myth. 5. The text-context binary has been problematized by Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and other theorists. Clark, History, Theory, Text, 117–18, 127–29, 130–55; Stock, Listening for the Text, 12–15 and passim. The standard study of Christian rhetoric in Late Antiquity is Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of the Empire. In this book, following Cameron, I use “rhetoric” not in its technical sense, but broadly to refer to “characteristic means and ways of expression.” Cameron, 16, 20, 82. 165

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166     Notes to Pages 2–3

6. The bibliography on the relationship between hagiography and orality/aurality in the context of medieval Europe is extensive. For some examples, see Birge Vitz, Freeman Regalado, Lawrence, Performing Medieval Narrative; Coleman, “Aurality,” 68–85; Saucier, “Singing the Lives,” 161–91; Caldwell, Devotional Refrains. 7. Delehaye, Legends of the Saints, 12–27; Frankfurter, “Hagiography and the Reconstruction of Local Religion,” 16, 18; Detoraki, “Greek Passions of the Martyrs,” 62; Brock, “Saints in Syriac,” 185. 8. Hezser, “Apophthegmata Patrum,” 453–64; Burton-Christie, “Listening, Reading, Praying,” 197–222; Rapp, “Author, Audience, Text, and Saint,” 113–14. 9. For a recent examination of the Homeric epic, see Minchin, “Poet, Audience, Time, and Text,” 267–88. The scholarship on orality and the Bible, an important topic outside the scope of this book, is helpfully reviewed in Botha, Orality and Literacy; Evans, “Creating a New ‘Great Divide’ ”; Vayntrub, Beyond Orality. 10. Rapp, “Figures of Female Sanctity,” 313–44; Rapp, “Storytelling,” 431–48; Rapp, “Origins of Hagiography,” 124; Efthymiadis, “Byzantine Hagiographer,” 60–80; Kalogeras, “Role of the Audience,” 149–59; Efthymiadis and Kalogeras, “Audience, Language, and Patronage,” 247–84; Renard, Crossing Confessional Boundaries, 169–71. See note 6 for those works that seek to answer this question in the context of medieval western Europe. 11. Gamble, Books and Readers, 82–143; Dickie, “Narrative Patterns,” 98; Morris, “Political Saint of the Eleventh Century,” 45; van Minnen, “Saving History?,” 71; Stroumsa, “New Self,” 1–18; Rapp, “Figures of Female Sanctity,” 313–44; Efthymiadis, “Byzantine Hagiographer,” 60–80; Efthymiadis and Kalogeras, “Audience, Language, and Patronage,” 256, 261–63. For public reading of saints’ lives in the western European context, see Tudor, “Preaching, Storytelling,” 141–54; Caldwell, Devotional Refrains, 65–147. 12. Halbwachs, Collective Memory, 88; Taft, “Liturgy of the Great Church,” 45–75; Taft, Liturgy in Byzantium; Norris, “Your Honor, My Reputation,” 140–59; Taylor, “Hagiographie et liturgie syriaque,” 77–112; Giannouli, “Byzantine Hagiography and Hymnography,” 285–312; Forness, Preaching Christology, 22–55; Wickes, “Between Liturgy and School,” 25–51; Tannous, Medieval Middle East, 15–22, 35–39; Krueger, Liturgical Subjects, 44–59, 76, 123, 207; Ashbrook Harvey, “Stylite’s Liturgy,” 523–39; Ashbrook Harvey, “Performance as Exegesis,” 47–64; Holmsgaard Eriksen, “Dramatic Narratives,” 91–110; Betancourt, Performing the Gospels, 168–91. 13. The following are excellent places to start for a general overview of Syriac hagiographic prose and poetry: Brock, “Saints in Syriac,” 181–96; Brock, “Syriac Hagiography,” 259–83; Brock, “Later Syriac Poetry,” 327–38; Possekel, “Emergence of Syriac Literature,” 309–26; Mellon Saint-Laurent,” Syriac Hagiographic Literature,” 339–54. Some of the recent analyses of literary features of Syriac prose hagiography are Mellon Saint-Laurent, “Prologues as Narthexes,” 17–55; Durmaz, “Hearing Sanctity,” 56–88; Ruani, “Objects as Narrative Devices,” 89–109. 14. For the distinction between physical and implied audiences of public address, see Ede and Lunsford, “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked,” 155–71. Also see Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, 55–59.

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Notes to pages 3–5      167

15. Lord, “Oral Composition,” 9. 16. Halbwachs, Collective Memory, 84–119; Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, 41–49. 17. Efthymiadis and Kalogeras, “Audience, Language, and Patronage,” 261; Rapp, “Spiritual Communication,” 432, 437, 441. 18. The complex relationship between orality and literacy in antiquity has been examined in numerous scholarly works, among which are Ong, Orality and Literacy; Ong, “Text as Interpretation,” 7–26; Stock, Implications of Literacy, 12–87; Stock, Listening for the Text, 6, 30–51, 140–48; Harris, Ancient Literacy; Kaster, Guardians of Language; Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire, 97; Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, 10–11, 45, 97; Bowman and Woolf, Literacy and Power; Gamble, Books and Readers, 2–10, 223; Chin, Grammar and Christianity, 155–64; Vayntrub, Beyond Orality; Leatherbury, Inscribing Faith, 14–18. 19. For the conceptualization of cultural capital I follow Bourdieu, Distinction; revisited in Bourdieu, “Forms of Capital,” 280–91. 20. Chin, Grammar and Christianity, 17–19. Narrative literacy is similar to “visual literacy” or “theological literacy” proposed for Late Antiquity. Leatherbury, Inscribing Faith, 15; Dijkstra, Apostles, 43–66, 294ff.; Goldhill, “Forms of Attention,” 88–114; Stefaniw, “Knowledge in Late Antiquity,” 271; Schott, “Language,” 58–79; Tannous, Medieval Middle East, 46–81. Another useful comparison is the concept of “religious literacy” articulated, for example, in https://www.aarweb.org/AARMBR/Publications-andNews-/Guides-and-Best-Practices-/Teaching-and-Learning-/AAR-Religious-LiteracyGuidelines. 21. Tannous, Medieval Middle East, 46ff. 22. Some of the recent works on biblical figures in the Quran are Rubin, “Prophets and Prophethood,” 234–47; Wheeler, Prophets in the Quran; Tottoli, Biblical Prophets in the Qurʾān; Mourad, “From Hellenism to Christianity and Islam,” 206–16; Abboud, Mary in the Qurʾan; Gregg, Shared Stories, Rival Tellings; Segovia, Quranic Noah; Segovia, Quranic Jesus; Sinai, Qurʾan, 138–57; Neuwirth, Qurʾan and Late Antiquity, 347–418; Griffith, “Syriacisms in the Arabic Qurʾān,” 83–110; Griffith, “Narratives,” 137–66. 23. The studies that orient the Quran toward and seek the connections to the biblical traditions are numerous. See, for example, Weil, The Bible, the Koran, and the Talmud; Nöldeke, Geschichte des Qorâns/History of the Qur’an; Andrae, Der Ursprung der Islams und das Christentum; Horovitz, Koranische Untersuchungen; Jeffery, Materials for the History of the Text of the Qurʾān; Jeffery, Foreign Vocabulary of the Qurʾān; Speyer, Die biblischen Erzählungen im Qoran; Lüling, Über den Ur-Qurʾān; al-Haddad, Al-Injīl fī-l-Qurʾān; Griffith, “Syriacisms in the Arabic Qurʾān,” 83–110; King, “A Christian Qurʾān?,” 44–71; Reynolds, Qurʾān and Its Biblical Subtext; Elbadawi, Qurʾān and the Aramaic Gospel Traditions; Zellentin, Qurʾān’s Legal Culture; Witztum, “Syriac Milieu of the Quran.” The scholarship on the informants of Muhammad is summarized and discussed by Claude Gilliot in a number of works including Gilliot, “Muhammad, le Coran et les

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168     Notes to Pages 5–6

‘contraintes de l’histoire’,” 3–26; Gilliot, “Les ‘informateurs’,” 84–126; Gilliot, “Informants of the prophet,” 153–87. 24. Al-Azmeh, Emergence of Islam, 144–46, 252–44; Griffith, Bible in Arabic, 62–96; Neuwirth, Quran and Late Antiquity, 1–25; Sinai, Qur’an, 59–77. 25. In Islamic literature, Muhammad is often referred to as ummī, which is usually translated as “illiterate,” although the term may also mean “gentile.” Geoffroy, “ummī”; Goldfeld, “Illiterate Prophet,” 58–67. 26. The concept of religion in the premodern world, and Islam’s fit both to the category of religion and to the periodization of Late Antiquity, have been problematized by numerous scholars. For example, see Asad, Genealogies of Religion; Nongbri, Before Religion; Masuzawa, Invention of World Religions; Ahmed, What Is Islam?; Hoyland, “Early Islam”; Fowden, Before and After. I use the terms “religion,” “religious,” “pietistic,” and the like not in a way to reinforce the modern, personal faith-based definition of religion, but as conventional categories that designate a certain mode of practice, subjectivity, and creativity displayed by the individual/community, informed by an articulation of a sacred past, and motivated by the commemoration of that past. According to this understanding, early Islamic community being a “religious community” means that an understanding of the sacred past (and how Arabs of the Hijaz fit into that past) was in the process of developing, facilitated by Muhammad’s quranic preaching. 27. Lifshitz, “Beyond Positivism and Genre,” 95–114; Hollander, “Hagiography Unbound,” 72–102; Rapp, “Author, Audience, Text, and Saint,” 114; Gemeinhardt, “Christian Hagiography and Narratology,” 21–41; Hinterberger, “Byzantine Hagiography,” 25–60; Trompf, Early Christian Historiography, 109–42. In contrast, Peter Turner argues that at least saints’ lives constituted a genre. Turner, Truthfulness, 30. 28. For an argument for this hierarchy, see Crone and Cook, Hagarism, 17. This distinction is also seen in the chapter organization in Tottoli, Biblical Prophets, 17–50, and Griffith, “ ‘Sunna of Our Messengers’,” 211, 214–15. 29. For a useful analysis of these categories, see Reed, “Afterlives,” 401–25. Also see Schröter, “Formation of the New Testament,” 167–84. For the instability of canon because of expanding interpretations, see, for example, Bori, L’interpretazione infinita; Stroumsa, Scriptural Universe, 29–39 and passim; Dijkstra, Apostles; Fowden, Before and After, 164–97; Masuzawa, “Reader as Producer,” 326–39. 30. Stroumsa, Scriptural Universe, 2. 31. For the presence of Christians and the knowledge of Christianity in the pre-Islamic Hijaz, see, among other works, Lammens, Les sanctuaires préislamites; Nau, Les arabes chrétiens; Charles, Le christianisme des arabes nomads; Trimingham, Christianity among the Arabs; Shahid, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century; Shahid, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fifth Century; Shahid, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century; Tardy, Najrân; Fowden, Barbarian Plain, 130–73; Hainthaler, Christliche Araber vor dem Islam; Griffith, Bible in Arabic, 7ff.; Griffith, “Christian Lore,” 109–37; Toral-Niehoff, “ʿĪbād of al-H . īra,” 323–48; Wood, “Christianity and the Arabs,” 353–68; Robin, “Arabia and Ethiopia,” 302–4; al-Azmeh, Emergence of Islam, 252–64 and passim. 32. Hinterberger, “Byzantine Hagiography,” 27–36.

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Notes to pages 6–9      169

33. Mellon Saint-Laurent, “Prologues as Nartexes,” 37–38; Durmaz, “Hearing Sanctity,” 63. 34. Renard, Crossing Confessional Boundaries, 11–12, 100–101. 35. Renard, 95–119, 251–55; Zimbalist, “Comparative Hagiology.” 36. For narrative exegesis of the Quran and the use of pre-Islamic Jewish and Christian narratives for this purpose, see Rippin, “Tafsīr”; Rippin, “Studying Early Tafsīr Texts,” 311–16; Wansbrough, Quranic Studies, 119–23; Gilliot, “Exegesis of the Qurʾān,” 164–69; Gilliot, “Beginnings of Quranic Exegesis,” 1:336–37; Reynolds, Qurʾān in Its Biblical Subtext, 200–219; Saleh, Formation of the Classical Tafsīr Tradition, 161–66; Robinson, “History and Heilsgeschichte,” 141–44; Leemhuis, “Origins,” 201; Rubin, Eye of the Beholder, 45; Tottoli, Biblical Prophets, 97–109; Pregill, “Isrāʾīliyyāt, Myth, and Pseudoepigraphy,” 229–30; Ahmed, Before Orthodoxy, 280–81. Cf. the use of parables for hermeneutics of midrash in the rabbinic Jewish tradition. Stern, Midrash and Theory, 39–50. 37. Some of the essential works on these two genres are Tottoli, “Origin and Use,” 193–210; Pregill, “Isrāʾīliyyāt, Myth, and Pseudoepigraphy”; Duri, “Beginnings of Historical Folklore,” 122–35; Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought, 7; Goldfeld, “Muqātil b. Sulaymān,” 13–30; Mazuz, “Possible Midrashic Sources,” 497–505; Berg, “Ibn ʿAbbās in Abbasid-Era Tafsīr,” 493–508; McAuliffe, “Assessing the Isrāʾīliyyāt,” 349–61; Whitby, “Al-T.abarī,” 13, 16, 17; Rippin, “Tafsīr Ibn ʿAbbās,” 38–83; Pregill, “Methodologies,” 393–454; Khoury, “Wahb b. Munabbih”; Nagel, “K.is.as. al-Anbiyāʾ.” 38. Neuwirth, Qurʾan and Late Antiquity, 350–417. 39. For the categories of Companions and Successors, see Nawas, “Companions”; Spectorsky, “Tābiʿūn.” 40. For a recent review of the traditionalist and revisionist schools of Islamic studies, see Sirry, Controversies over Islamic Origins. 41. On saints’ stories and saint veneration shared between Christianity and Islam outside the context of the Quran, some of the foundational works are Fowden, Barbarian Plain, 174–91; Papaconstantinou, Le culte des saints en Egypte; Roggema, Poorthius, and Valkenberg, Three Rings; Roggema, Legend of Sergius Bah. īrā; Cuffel and Jaspert, Entangled Hagiographies; Savant, New Muslims; Gregg, Shared Stories. Also see these useful explorations: Hathaway, “Introduction,” xv–xxiii; Frankel et al., “Introduction,” 1–22. 42. Within the broad corpus of scholarship on social, cultural, and other forms of collective memory, the following works have been influential in my understanding of and engagement with the concept of memory: Halbwachs, Collective Memory; Kirk, “Social and Cultural Memory,” 1–24; Confino, “Memory,” 77–84; Geoffrey, History and Memory; Assmann, “Canon and Archive,” 97–107; Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, 47–49 and passim; Savant, New Muslims; George and Marsham, Power, Patronage, and Memory. 43. This has been pointed out in numerous scholarly analyses of early Islam. For some examples, see Bell, Origin of Islam, 33–63; Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins, 64ff.; Khalek, Damascus after the Muslim Conquest, 159ff.; Hoyland, “Early Islam as a Late Antique Religion,” 1053–77; Griffith, Bible in Arabic, 11–15; Fowden and Fowden, Studies, 149–92; Tannous, Medieval Middle East, 225ff.

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170     Notes to Pages 9–17

44. Sizgorich, “Narrative and Community,” 22–25; Khalek, Damascus after the Muslim Conquest, 5–6, 15, 54ff. 45. Khalek, “He Was Tall and Slender,” 105–23. 46. Juvan, History and Poetics of Intertextuality, 20–23. 47. For a recent, illuminating example of such diachronic analysis of the reiterations of a story within Christianity, see Cobb, Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas. 48. Recent scholarship on authorship in the Greco-Roman and European traditions includes Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship; Cheney and de Armas, European Literary Careers; Marmodoro and Hill, Author’s Voice; Ceulemans and de Liemans, On Good Authority; Berkovitz and Letteney, Rethinking “Authority.” 49. Leder, Story-Telling; Cupane and Krönung, Fictional Storytelling. 50. Clark, History, Theory, Text, 94–95, 166–70; Kaldellis, “Emergence of Literary Fiction,” 115–29; Hägg, “Fiction and Factography,” 31–40. For fictitious narrative and historiography in Islam, see Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins; Sizgorich, “Narrative and Community,” 9–42; Mourad, Early Islam in Myth and History, 6–15; Khalek, Damascus after the Muslim Conquest, 17–23, 39–84. 51. Krueger, Writing and Holiness, 65–67. Also see Rapp, “Author, Audience, Text, and Saint,” 123–25; Clark, History, Theory, Text, 133–34, 139, 170. 52. Berkovitz and Letteney, “Authority in Contemporary Hagiography,” 15–39. 53. Clark, History, Theory, Text, 178–81. 54. Savant, New Muslims, 154–55.

chapter 1. storytelling in late antique christianity 1. v.Dan.Styl., §1 (trans. Dawes and Baynes, 7): ἀλλ᾿ οὐ διακρίνομαι ἃς δια τῶν ἐμῶν πατέρων ἐξηγήσεις ἐδεξάμην περὶ τοῦ ὁσίου σιωπῇ παραπέμψαι μήπως ἐλθὼν ὁ Κύριός μου ἐν τῇ φοβερᾷ καὶ φρικτῇ αὐτοῦ ἡμέρᾳ βασανίσῃ με δικαίως ὅτι τὸ πιστευθέν μοι διὰ τοῦ θελήματος αὐτοῦ τάλαντον οὐ κατέβαλον ἐν τραπέζαις πρὸς οἰκοδομὴν καὶ εὐεργεσίαν τῶν πολλῶν. Ταῖς οὖν ὑμετέραις εὐχαῖς τειχιζόμενος ἅπαντα λέξω μετὰ ἀληθείας ἁπερ παρὰ τῶν πρὸ ἐμοῦ μαθητευσάντων τῷ ἁγίῳ ἤκουσα καί ὅσα αὐταῖς ὄψεσιν ἐθεασάμην ἀψευδῶς διηγήσομαι. Ὄντως γάρ ἀπολεῖ Κύριος πάντας τοὺς λαλοῦντας τὸ ψεῦδος, δῆλον. Παρακαλῶ οὖν τὴν ὑμετέραν φιλομάθειαν πᾶν τὸ βιωτικὸν ἀπορρίψαντας χαρίσασθαί μοι τὰς εὐμενεῖς ὑμῶν ἀκοάς. 2. For narration as piety, see Krueger, Writing and Holiness, 65–67; Rapp, “SafeConducts to Heaven,” 187–204. 3. Ong, “Text as Interpretation,” 9. 4. For useful theorizations of “text,” see Clark, History, Theory, Text, 130–55. 5. Stock, Listening for the Text, 35–36, 45–46. For the critiques of text-context dichotomy, see Clark, History, Theory, Text, 57–59, 130–55. 6. Bradley, Derrida’s “Of Grammatology,” 49–55. 7. Ong, “Text as Interpretation,” 19. 8. As argued, for example, in Stock, Listening for the Text, 23, 33–37, 43–45.

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Notes to pages 17–21      171

9. Lord, “Oral Composition,” 9, 14. 10. Burton-Christie, “Listening,” 207–8. 11. For the relationship between material culture and biblical, hagiographic, and mythological stories in Late Antiquity, see Kitzinger, “Cult of Images,” 83–150; Brown, “Images as Substitutes for Writing,” 15–34; Castelli, “Asterius of Amasea,” 464–68; Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire, 141–51; Cameron, “Art and the Early Christian Imagination,” 1–8; Bowersock, Mosaics as History, 31–64; Al. Cameron, “Young Achilles,” 1–22. 12. Burton-Christie, “Listening,” 207; Ong, “Text as Interpretation,” 14, 15, 19. 13. Efthymiadis and Kalogeras, “Audience, Language, and Patronage,” 248–53. 14. For a detailed analysis of these literary features in Syriac hagiography, see Durmaz, “Hearing Sanctity,” 56–88, esp. 63–67. 15. Kazhdan, History of Byzantine Literature, 152–53; Turner, Truthfulness, 25–74. 16. v.Hom.De. (Syr.), 4: ‫ ܘܒܨܝܪܐܝܬ ܗܘ ܡܢܢ ܡܬܡܠܐܠ‬.‫ܬܫܥܝܬܗ ܡܢܢ ܪܒܐ ܗܝ‬ 17. Simeon bar Apollon and Bar H . at.ar, v.Sym.Styl. (Syr.), 302 (trans. Doran, 129 §45): ܿ ‫ܐܘ ܠܫܢܐ ܢܫܬܥܐ ܕܐܠ ܕܚܠܬܐ‬ ܿ ‫ܐܝܟܐ ܓܝܪ ܦܘܡܐ‬ ‫ܐܘ ܕܐܠ ܣܘܪܕܐ ܥܠ ܓܒܪܐ ܕܟܕ ܦܓܪܐ‬ ̈ ‫ܠܒܝܫ ܗܘܐ ̈ܥܒܕܐ ܘܣܘܥ̈ܪܢܐ ܕ̈ܪܘܚܢܐ ܚܘܝ ܒܝܬ ܒܢܝܢܫܐ‬ 18. Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire, 33–35, 206; Turner, Truthfulness, 28–29. 19. For example: John of Ephesus, v.SS.Or., 220. For such addresses, see Kazhdan, History of Byzantine Literature, 152–53; Efthymiadis and Kalogeras, “Audience, Language, and Patronage,” 249; Durmaz, “Hearing Sanctity,” 65. The audiences were not always praised and addressed with words of encouragement, for we know of sermons and homilies in which the author/preacher warns the audience against growing weary, bored, or inattentive. For example, Jacob of Sarug, hom.Ephrem, vv. 126–69. 20. Antonius, v.Sym.Styl., §§21–24: Ἄλλο θαῦμα φοβερὸν καὶ ἒνδοξον ἀκούσατε. [. . .] Ἕτερον δὲ μυστήριον ἀκούσατε. [. . .] Ἄλλο δὲ μυστήριον ἐὰν ἀκούσῃς. 21. Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, 53–54. 22. Cf. John 20:30 and 21:25. 23. v.Hom.De. (Syr.), 9. 24. v.Hom.De. (Gr.), 509. 25. For example, Athanasius, v.Ant., §§73–8. 26. Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire, 90–100. For similarities and differences between Greek biography and early Christian hagiography, see Cox, Biography in Late Antiquity, 45–65. 27. Brock and Harvey, Holy Women of the Syrian Orient, 3. Similarly, see Turner, Truthfulness, 3ff. 28. John of Ephesus, v.SS.Or., 193 (trans. Brooks). 29. The standard works on late antique pilgrimage as a context for storytelling are Frank, Memory of the Eyes; Vivian, Journeying into God; Bitton-Ashkelony, Encountering the Sacred.

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.

172     Notes to Pages 21–24

30. Egeria, Itin., 20.13: Et cetera plura referre dignatus est, sicut et ceteri sancti episcopi uel sancti monachi facere dignabantur, omnia tamen de Scripturis Dei uel sanctis uiris gesta, id est monachis, siue qui iam recesserant, quae mirabilia fecerint, siue etiam qui adhuc in corpore sunt, quae cotidie faciant, hi tamen qui sunt ascites. Nam nolo estimet affection uestra monachorum aliquando alias fabulas esse nisi aut de Scripturis Dei aut gesta monachorum maiorum. 31. Egeria, Itin., 3.1–7.1, 13.3–16.7, 19.8–18. On pilgrimage and women travelers in Late Antiquity, see Stephens Falcasantos, “Wandering Wombs,” 89–117. 32. Simeon bar Apollon and Bar H . at.ar, v.Sym.Styl. (Syr.), 327 (trans. Doran, 146–47 §67). It is not clear which Ghassanid king the text is referring to, but al-Nuʿmān III (d. 418), al-Nuʿmān IV (d. 455), and al-Nuʿmān V (d. 453) were roughly contemporaries of Simeon the Stylite the Elder. For this encounter, see Fisher et al., “Arabs and Christianity,” 276–372, esp. 299–300. 33. Simeon bar Apollon and Bar H . at.ar, v.Sym.Styl. (Syr.), 327: ̈ ‫ܟܕ ܐܫܬܡܥ ܛܐܒܗ ܠܘܬܢ ܕܝܠܗ ܕܛܘܒܢܐ ܘܫܪܝܘ‬ ‫ܛܝܝܐ ܡܢ ܕܝܠܢ ܢܣܩܘܢ ܠܘܬܗ‬ 34. Simeon bar Apollon and Bar H . at.ar, v.Sym.Styl. (Syr.), 328–29. 35. Palladius, HL. 36. Frank, Memory of the Eyes, 38– 49, 61–69. 37. John of Ephesus, v.SS.Or., 169: ܿ ܿ ܿ ̈ ‫ܠܣܝܒܘܬܗ‬ ‫ܛܠܝܘܬܗ ܘܥܕܡܐ‬ ‫ܕܘܒܪܗ ܕܛܘܒܢܝܬܐ ܕܡܢ‬ ‫ܠܣܓܝܐܐ ܥܠ ܓܡܝܪܘܬ‬ ‫ܒܕܩܘ‬ For holy men and women as spectacles for pilgrims, see Frank, Memory of the Eyes, 134ff. 38. Turner, Truthfulness, 86. 39. John of Ephesus, v.SS.Or., 109–10 (trans. Brooks). 40. Simeon bar Apollon and Bar H . at.ar, v.Sym.Styl. (Syr.), 321–22. 41. Simeon bar Apollon and Bar H . at.ar, v.Sym.Styl. (Syr.), 332–36. 42. Efthymiadis, “Collections of Miracles,” 103–42. 43. v.Hom.De. (Syr.), ‫ ܐܬܟܪܙܬ‬... ‫ ܡܢ ܦܪܡܘܢܪܐ‬.. ‫ܬܫܥܝܬܐ‬. 44. HM, 17.3: ἔλεγεν δὲ ήμῖν ὁ τῷ πυλῶνι προσκαρτερῶν πρεσβύτερος τοιούτους εἶναι τοὺς ἔνδον ἁγίους. 45. Rapp, “Spiritual Communication,” 437. 46. Leontius of Neapolis, v.Jo.Eleem., 6–7. 47. Hägg and Rousseau, “Introduction,” 13; Rapp, “Spiritual Communication,” 432, 439. 48. The making of the late ancient Christian household is analyzed, for example, in Bowes, Private Worship, Public Values. I do not intend to overemphasize a separation between households from the monastic realm in Late Antiquity. Monks often instructed lay communities outside of monasteries. For example, see John of Ephesus, v.SS.Or., 89. For the Egyptian context, see Rubenson, Letters of St. Antony, 106. For the pedagogical role of Christian teaching, see Marrou, History of Education in Antiquity, 314–15; Becker, Fear of God, 22ff. Also see Larsen, “Monastic Paideia.” 49. Young, “Life in Letters,” 161–66; Marquis, “Namesake and Inheritance,” 38. 50. Marquis, 36.

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Notes to pages 24–27      173

51. Cobb, “Memories of the Martyrs,” 118–19, 123–24. For the story of Perpetua and Felicitas, see Gonzales, Fate of the Dead; Cobb, Passion. 52. Gregory of Nyssa, v.Macr., 960–1000 (trans. Woods Callahan, 159–92). Also see Burrus, “Gender, Eros, and Pedagogy,” 167–81. 53. Halkin, “Sainte Élisabeth d’Héraclée,” 256. 54. John of Ephesus, v.SS.Or., 171. 55. Vasileiou, “At a Still Point,” 459–61; Brock and Harvey, Holy Women of the Syrian Orient, 10, 19–26; Bowes, Private Worship, Public Values, 202–12; Kattan Gribetz, “Consuming Texts,” 178–206. 56. For example, see Acts 5.17–27, 12.3–8, 16.22–28; a.PTh., cpt. 4, cpt. 5; a.Per.Fel., 1.2–3, 2.2–3, 3.1–2. 57. For a recent study of the representations of prisons in Byzantine hagiography, see Papavarnavas, “Gefängnis als Schwellenraum.” ̈ 58. v.Zb. 40: ‫ܟܬܒܐ ܘܡܚܝܠܝܢ ܠܗܘܢ‬ ‫ܕܪܫܝܢ ܠܗܘܢ ܡܢ‬ 59. It was an important aspect of religious exile in Late Antiquity, as explored in Barry, Bishops in Flight. It is worth noting that the Life of Antony, one of the epitomes of Christian hagiography, was a story written in exile by the bishop Athanasius of Alexandria (d. 373). 60. For punishment as education, see Hillner, Prison, Punishment, and Penance, 28ff. For monasteries and bishops’ residences as prison, see Hillner, 283 and passim. 61. Muehlberger, Moment of Reckoning, 3. 62. Amphilochius, v.Bas., 219–20. 63. Efthymiadis and Kalogeras, “Audience, Language, and Patronage,” 269–72; Rapp, “Figures of Female Sanctity,” 313–44. 64. Tudor, “Preaching,” 143, 148–50. 65. Moss, “Jacob of Serugh’s Homilies on the Spectacles,” 48–112. Among the earliest arguments of Christians against the theatrical spectacles is the third-century Didaskalia Apostolorum, cpt. 13 (pp. 113–18). For biblical and extrabiblical stories performed at the theatre, see Webb, Demons and Dancers, 25ff., 35–43, 202–16; Roueché, “World Full of Stories,” 177–85; Scobie, “Storytellers,” 229–59. 66. For the representations of holy women in Syriac hagiography, see Brock and Harvey, Holy Women of the Syrian Orient; Mellon Saint-Laurent, “Images de femmes,” 201–24. 67. John of Ephesus, v.SS.Or., 545 [343]. 68. Vivian, Journeying into God, 38. 69. Vivian, 40, 48–52. For desert mothers, see Elm, Virgins of God, 253–82. 70. John Moschus, Prat., §85. 71. Rapp, “Female Sanctity,” 321, 329–31. 72. Rapp, 321–22. 73. Simeon bar Apollon and Bar H . at.ar, v.Sym.Styl., (Syr.), 336–37. 74. v.Theod.Amd., §§31, 60. I am immensely thankful to Jack Tannous for generously sharing his copy of the Garshuni version of the Life with me. 75. Hinterberger, “Autobiography and Hagiography,” 148; Efthymiadis, “Two Gregories and Three Genres,” 246–56. For an extensive discussion of the first-person

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174     Notes to Pages 27–31

narratives in ancient spiritual literature, including Christian hagiography, see Turner, Truthfulness, 111–45. For the “rhetorical presence” of the author, see Frank, “Miracles, Monks, and Monuments,” 494–96. 76. Simeon bar Apollon and Bar H . at.ar, v.Sym.Styl., (Syr.), 207 (trans. Doran 125 §40). Note that the author also says that Simeon commanded his disciples not to speak or relate his toil and afflictions to strangers. Simeon bar Apollon and Bar H . at.ar, v.Sym. Styl., (Syr.), 303–4, 309–10. For reticence to talk to visitors in the context of Egyptian monasticism, see Burton-Christie, “Listening,” 207, 217. 77. Krueger, Liturgical Subjects, 36–41, 202–3. 78. John of Ephesus, v.SS.Or., 155 (trans. Brooks). 79. v.Theod.Syk., 381–82 §22. 80. HM, 2.9–10, 10.2–12.16. 81. Hinterberger, “Autobiography and Hagiography,” 148–49. 82. For a general overview, see Binggeli, “Collections of Edifying Stories,” 143–59. 83. Wortley, “Genre of the Spiritually Beneficial Tale,” 74. 84. HM, Prol. §§1–13. 85. Palladius, HL, Prol. §6. 86. Cyril Scythopolis, v.Jo.Hesych., §§18–19; Kalogeras, “Role of the Audience,” 154, 158; Turner, Truthfulness, 115–19, 85–86. 87. John of Ephesus, v.SS.Or., 6, 542 [340], 545 [343]. 88. v.Hom.De. (Syr.), 13–14 (trans. Doran, 25). 89. These dynamics in the context of the Oral Torah is usefully summarized in Gerhardsson, Memory and Manuscript, 122–70. 90. For the authorship of the saint, see Turner, Truthfulness, 111–45. 91. Frank, “Miracles, Monks, and Monuments,” 487–88. 92. Turner, Truthfulness, 117–20. 93. Cameron, Dialoguing in Late Antiquity, 14, 23–38. 94. Burton-Christie, “Listening,” 199, 213–19. Also see Hezser, “Apophthegmata Patrum,” 458–60. 95. Burton-Christie, “Listening,” 203. 96. Egeria, Itin., 16.3 (trans. Wilkinson, 128). 97. Egeria, Itin., 20.9–10. 98. Simeon bar Apollon and Bar H . at.ar, v.Sym.Styl. (Syr.), 343. 99. Simeon bar Apollon and Bar H . at.ar, v.Sym.Styl. (Syr.), 301 (trans. Doran, 128 §44). 100. Simeon bar Apollon and Bar H . at.ar, v.Sym.Styl. (Syr.), 374 (trans. Doran, 179 §111). For questioning saint’s stories, see Dal Santo, Debating; Brewer, Wonder and Skepticism; Kaldellis, “Doubt and Skepticism.” 101. Ter Haar Romeny, “Question-and-Answer Collections,” 145–63; Teule, “Jacob of Edessa and Canon Law,” 83–100; Dagron, “Saint, Scholar, and Astrologer,” 347–60. 102. Efthymiadis, “Questions and Answers,” 51–52. 103. Cameron, Dialoguing in Late Antiquity, 9–11, 18–19, 23–27, 35, 36, and passim; Efthymiadis, “Questions and Answers,” 47–62; Rigolio, Christians in Conversation,

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Notes to pages 31–35      175

12–19; Papadogiannakis, “Use of Question-and-Answer Method,” 397–414. Also see Cameron and Gaul, Dialogues and Debates. 104. Tannous, Medieval Middle East, 15–45, and passim. 105. For this term, see Tannous, Medieval Middle East, 46ff.

chapter 2. “how is muhammad a better storyteller than i?” 1. Ibn Hishām, Sīra, 191: ‫وينصب لهالعداوة وكان‬ ‫شياطينقرىش وم ّمن كانيؤذيرسولهللاصلعم‬ ‫النضربنالحارث من‬ ‫قام‬ ْ ‫س‬ ْ ‫ستموا‬ ْ ‫الفرْ سواحاديثر‬ ‫نديارفكان اذاجلسرسولهللا عممجلسًا‬ ‫ب‬ ‫وتعلّمبهااحاديثملوك‬ ‫قدقدمالحيرة‬ ‫خلفهفيمجلسه اذاقامثمقالاناوهللايا‬ ‫قبلهم من األمم مننقمةهللا‬ ‫باهلل وحذرقيمه مااصاب من‬ ‫فيه‬ ‫فذكر‬ ْ ‫س‬ ْ ‫ستموا‬ ْ ‫حديثهثميح ّدثهم عنملوكفارسور‬ ‫نديار‬ ‫ب‬ ‫ثكماحسن من‬ ‫حديثًا منهفهل ّمانا أُح ّد‬ ‫معشرقريشاحسن‬ ‫احسن حديثاً منّي‬ ‫ثم يقول بما ذا دمح ّم‬ Raven, “Sīra”; Jones, “Ibn Ish.āk. .” For the story of Rustum and Isfandiyār, see Firdawsī, Shahnāma (trans. Levy), 194–218; Khwadāynāma (trans. Hämeen-Anttila), 174–99. 2. Q6:25, 8:31, 16:24, 23:83, 25:5, 27:68, 46:17, 68:15, 83:13. For the term asāt. īr al-awwalīn, see Dundes, Fables of the Ancients?; Tottoli, Biblical Prophets, 12–13; Schoeler, Genesis of Literature in Islam, 26. 3. Margoliouth, Mohammed, 72–82; Crone, Meccan Trade, 236. 4. Birkeland, Lord Guideth, 5; Watt, Muhammad at Mecca, 72–85; Jandora, Latent Trace of Islamic Origins. 5. Crone and Cook, Hagarism, 1–10. 6. Brown, Society and the Holy, 103–4, 148ff.; Robinson, “Prophecy and Holy Men,” 241–62. 7. See the introduction, notes 22, 23, and 24. 8. Ibn Hishām, Sīra, 150ff.; Buhl et al. “Muh.ammad.” The duration of his prophetic career in Mecca is debated. See Nöldeke, History of the Qurʾān, 57–58. 9. Sonn, “Introducing,” 3–6; Neuwirth, “Structure,” 140–48; Neuwirth, “Qurʾānic Studies,” 183; Sinai, “Qurʾān as Process,” 407–39; Sinai, Qurʾan, 51. 10. Paret, Pearson, Welch, “al-K.urʾān”; Paret, “Qurʾān—I,” 186–227; Mir, “Language,” 96. 11. Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought, 1, 7–8. 12. Neuwirth, “Structure,” 141. 13. For a review of different representations of Muhammad, see Khalidi, Images of Muhammad; Schimmel, And Muhammad Is His Messenger. 14. Goldziher, Muslim Studies, 2:19; Schacht, Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence, 4, 80, 138–39, 149; Juynboll, Muslim Tradition, 71. For a summary of the scholarship against and in support of the historicity of h. adīth reports, see Motzki, “Introduction,” xvii–xxix. 15. Ahmed, Before Orthodoxy, 11–40, 265–301. 16. Ibn Hishām, Sīra, 161, 171, 190–91, 252; Bannister, Oral-Formulaic Study, 19–21.

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176     Notes to Pages 35–37

17. Aune, Prophecy in Early Christianity, 20–21, 31–34, 42, 221, 348; Quiroga Puertas, “Preaching and Mesmerizing,” 150–64. The trope is seen, for example, in Athanasius, v.Ant., §82. Cf. Rev. 1:17–20. 18. Watt, Bells’ Introduction to the Qurʾān, 65–85; Robinson, Discovering the Qurʾān, 245ff.; Hoffman, Poetic Qurʾān; Ward Gwynne, “Patterns of Address,” 73–87; Sells, “Casting,” 126. 19. Mir, “Language,” 94–96. 20. Graham, Divine Word and Prophetic Word, 9–24; Nöldeke, History of the Qurʾān, 189–208. For audience-response, see Petrey, Speech Acts and Literary Theory, 42ff.; Duranti, “Audience of Co-Author,” 239–47. 21. Khalidi, Images of Muhammad, 27. 22. Al-Azmeh, Emergence of Islam, 382, 446. 23. Neuwirth, “Structure,” 145ff.; Neuwirth, Scripture, 308–9n5. 24. For example, Q21:5, 36:69, 37:15–36, 52:29–30, 68:51, 69:41–42, 81:22, 83:13. Cf. Ibn Hishām, Sīra, 171. Khalidi, Images of Muhammad, 27–31. For soothsayers in Islamic culture, see Fahd, “Kāhin.” 25. Intelligent bodies composed of vapor or flame, imperceptible to human senses, yet able to affect humans; can be translated as “demons.” MacDonald et al., “D ––jinn.” 26. Zwettler, “Mantic Manifesto,” 81. Also see Jeffery, Qurʾān as Scripture, 55–63; Sprenger, Leben und die Lehre, 1:207–68. 27. Q6:10, 9:64–65, 21:41, 53:60, 70:42. Q86:13–14: “Surely it is a decisive speech, ْ ‫فصل وما‬ ْ ‫بٱل‬ and it is not for amusement.” / ‫هزل‬ ‫إنّ هلقوْ ل‬For episodes of Muhammad being mocked, see Ibn Hishām, Sīra, 204, 262, 271–72. 28. For example, Q77:48, “When they are told to bow, they do not bow.” Some other verses emphasizing the quranic authority are Q28:48, 53:1–11, 69:38–52; cf. Matt. 7:28–29. Also see the examples in Ibn Hishām, Sīra, 187–202, 262–63. 29. The verb kadhdhaba, “to accuse someone of lying,” in Q3:184, 6:34, 7:64, 7:92, 10:39, 10:73, 22:42, 23:26, 23:39, 29:18, 34:45, 35:4, 35:25, 54:9, 54:23, 78:28, 83:17, 91:11, et al. 30. Q16:103 and 25:4–5; Ibn Hishām, Sīra, 260; Gilliot, “Informants of the Prophet.” For Muhammad being accused of adapting Jewish scriptures, see Lecker, “Zayd b. T – h–ābit”; Lecker, “A Jew with Two Sidelocks,” 259–73. 31. Robson, “H . adīt–h– K.udsī;” Graham, Divine Word and Prophetic Word. 32. Khalidi, Images of Muhammad, 8. For reports about people debating whether the content of a preaching is from the Quran or not, see Ibn al-Nadīm, Fihrist, 3:1:284–85. 33. Ibn Hishām, Sīra, 150; Görke, “Prospects and Limits,” 137–51; Sinai, Qurʾan, 40–58. 34. Nöldeke, History of the Qurʾān, 55ff.; Bowering, “Chronology and the Qurʾān”; Bauer, “Relevance of Early Arabic Poetry,” 699–732; Neuwirth, “Structure,” 153–54. Also see the chronology in https://corpuscoranicum.de/en/commentary. 35. Neuwirth, “sūra”; Jones, “Qurʾān—II,” 228–35; Sirry, “Qurʾan and Its Polemical Context,” 115–32; Sinai, Qurʾan, 111–37; Stefanidis, “Qurʾan Made Linear,” 1–22.

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.

Notes to pages 37–42      177

36. Sinai, Qurʾan, 122–30. 37. Nöldeke, History of the Qurʾān, 24; Sinai, Qurʾan, 52–54, 87–104. Mustansir Mir argues that treating a Quran chapter as a unity is a modern exegetical practice, but it was already debated in the Middle Ages. Mir, “Sūra as a Unity,” 211–24. 38. For the representations of God in the Quran, see Reynolds, Allah. 39. Neuwirth, “Structure,” 145–55. 40. Cf. Gen. 18. 41. Q68:15, 83:13, “Whenever our signs are recited to him, he says, ‘fables of those of old!’ ” 42. Q68:48. 43. Q51:41–45, 53:50–52, 69:4–10, 85:17–18, 89:6–13, 91:11–15. 44. Q85:4–10. The essential bibliography for this story and an analysis of its relation to the Quran can be found in chapter 5. 45. Neuwirth, Scripture, 396–98. 46. Q71:26–28. Cf. Gen. 7–8. 47. Sinai, Qurʾan, 52–54. 48. Neuwirth, Scripture, 396–98. 49. Crone and Cook refer to quranic narratives as “simple and evasive,” and argue that this made the quranic message attractive. Crone and Cook, Hagarism, 17. 50. Nöldeke, History of the Qurʾān, 59; Zwettler, “Mantic Manifesto,” 91; Welch, “Formulaic Features,” 77. 51. Watt, Bell’s Introduction to the Qurʾān, 127–35; Welch, “Formulaic Features,” 77–116; Tottoli, Biblical Prophets, 4–13. 52. Q7:27. 53. Q7:35. 54. Q29:16–27. 55. Neuwirth, Scripture, 401–3; Bodman, Poetics of Iblis; Bannister, Oral-Formulaic Study, 1–18. 56. Q20:115–23. 57. Q7:10–27, 14:21–22, 17:61–65, 38:71–85. 58. Q12:111, 18:6, 23:44, 34:19, 51:24, 79:15, 88:1. Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought, 17–18; Tottoli, Biblical Prophets, 11–13; Goldziher, Muslim Studies, 2:17–19. 59. Q79:15–26, 51:24–34. 60. Leder, “Conventions of Fictional Narration,” 39. The root is used in numerous other verses: Q3:62, 4:164, 6:57, 6:130, 7:7, 7:35, 7:101, 7:176, 11:100, 11:120, 12:3, 12:5, 12:111, 16:118, 18:13, 20:99, 27:76, 28:25, 40:78. For this word against asāt. īr, see Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought, 8–9. 61. Pellat, “K.ās.s..” Qus.s.ās. (storytellers) fulfilled various social roles in early Islam, as discussed in Pedersen, “Islamic Preacher,” 226–51; Pellat, Le milieu Bas.rien, 82, 89, 94–99, 101, 108–16, 145; Wansbrough, Qurʾānic Studies; 122ff.; Crone, Meccan Trade, 213–16; Berkey, Popular Preaching; Berkey, “Audience and Authority,” 107–8; Goldziher, Schools of Koranic Commentators, 36–38; Armstrong, Qus.s.ās.. For qas.as. as “religious

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178     Notes to Pages 42–46

narration,” see Ibn al-Jawzī, k.Qus.s.ās., §2. For the methodological difficulty in focusing on this word, see Armstrong, Qus.s.ās., 9–10. ٰ 62. Q7:101: ‫القرىنقصّعاليك‬ ‫تلك‬ 63. Q7:176: ‫فاقصص القصص لعلهم‬ ّ ‫نحننقصّعليكنبأهمبالح‬See chapter 3 for an extensive analysis of this 64. Q18:13: ‫ق‬ Quran chapter. ّ‫نحن نقص‬ 65. Q12:3: ‫عليك أحسن القصص‬ 66. For the quranic story of Joseph, see Mir, “Irony in the Qurʾān,” 173–87. For a similar use of qas.s.a, see Q4:164 “And messengers whom we have told you about before, and messengers whom we have not told you about; and God spoke to Moses directly.” Note the change in the narrator’s voice. 67. Al-Azmeh, Emergence of Islam, 495. 68. Q3:58, 5:27, 10:71, 13:30, 26:69, 28:3. ّ ‫وفرعون بٱلح‬ 69. Q28:3: ‫ق‬ ‫موسى‬ ‫نتلوا عليك من نبإ‬ ٰ 70. Q28:3–44. Cf. Ex. 19. 71. Q28:76–82. Cf. Num. 16. ٰ ‫وٱتل (عليهم نبأ‬ 72. Q10:71 (‫إبرهيم‬ 26:69 ,)‫) عليهم نبأ نوح‬.‫وٱتل‬ 73. Q3:33–57. Cf. Protoevangelium of James. ٰ ‫نتلوه عليك من ٱأل‬ 74. Q3:58 ‫يت‬ ‫لك ٰذ‬ 75. Brodersen, “Remembrance.” 76. For quranic chapters revealed in Medina, see Nöldeke, History of the Qurʾān, 154–57. 77. Q2:29–40. 78. For Moses in the Quran, see Neuwirth, Scripture, 277–305; Wheeler, Moses in the Qurʾan. 79. Deut. 2. 80. Q5:20–27, 8:54. 81. Neuwirth, Scripture, 277–305. 82. Neuwirth, 298–99. 83. Q14:35–41. 84. Q6:74–83. 85. Q60:4–5. 86. The practice of tailoring retellings of stories to different contexts in oral literature is well known in ethnographic studies, recently discussed in Reynolds, Heroic Poets, Poetic Heroes, 102–36. 87. Sinai, Qurʾan, 143–50. Also see Witztum, “Variant Traditions,” 1–50. 88. Sinai, Qurʾan, 150–53. 89. Al-Bukhārī, Tārīkh, 6:374; al-T.abarī, Tafsīr, 12:150. 90. The same question is also asked in Q53:55. 91. For other examples of quranic refrain, see Q54 and Q77. 92. Neuwirth, Scripture, 40; Neuwirth, Studien, 209–10; Reynolds, Qurʾān and Its Biblical Subtext, 245–53.

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Notes to pages 36–48      179

93. Neuwirth, Koran, 498–509. Also see Neuwirth, “Qurʾānic Studies and Philology,” 184ff. The Quran often introduces parabolic narratives with this term. For parables as symbols and teaching methods in the Bible, see Jeremias, Parables of Jesus; Bailey, Poet and Peasant; Kissinger, Parables of Jesus. 94. For the arguments against the overarching liturgical character of the Quran, see al-Azmeh, Emergence of Islam, 441–4; Bannister, Oral-Formulaic Study, 31. 95. Bannister refers to this feature of quranic narratives as “fluidity.” Bannister, Oral-Formulaic Study, 12. 96. Jaroslav Stetkevych, for example, says: “Rarely do we sense in the Quran a selfsufficient and self-justifying joy of storytelling; indeed, rarely, if at all, does the Qurʾān allow for the formation of ‘themes’ in the literary terminological understanding, that is, of descriptive (or imagist) units that possess their own formal and thematic circumscription and ‘sufficiency’ and are not intruded upon by a stylistically disruptive rhetoric.” Stetkevych, Muh. ammad and the Golden Bough, 11. 97. See chapter 1 for examples from late antique Christianity. 98. Neuwirth, “Qurʾānic Studies and Philology,” 183; Sinai, Qurʾan, 150–53. 99. Burton, “Nask–h–.” 100. Al-Bukhārī, S. ah. īh. 2.19 §§178–79. For Zayd, see Lecker, “Zayd b. T – h–ābit”; Lecker, “A Jew with Two Sidelocks,” 259–73. 101. Sinai, Qurʾan, 126–30. 102. For the knowledge of Judaism, Christianity, and biblical stories in Arabia, see Zwettler, “Mantic Manifesto,” 87; Griffith, “Script, Text, and the Bible in Arabic,” 221–22; Sells, “Casting,” 129; al-Azmeh, Emergence of Islam, 267; Sinai, Qurʾan, 59–80, 138–57; Robin, “Arabia and Ethiopia,” 302. 103. For the quranic stories of Mary and Jesus, see Mourad, “Qurʾānic Stories about Mary and Jesus,” 13–24; Mourad, “From Hellenism to Christianity and Islam,” 206–16; Neuwirth, “House of Abraham and the House of Amram,” 499–531; Horn, “Tracing the Reception of the Protevangelium of James,” 123–46; Gregg, Shared Stories, 554–57; Segovia, Quranic Jesus, 29–36. 104. Watt, Bell’s Introduction to the Qurʾān, 133; Neuwirth, Scripture, 391; al-Azmeh, Emergence of Islam, 270; Calder, “From Midrash to Scripture,” 81–108. 105. Q6:114, 13:36, 26:197, 28:52–53, 29:46–47. 106. Jeffery, Qurʾān as Scripture, 84. 107. Al-Azmeh, Emergence of Islam, 491. 108. Al-Azmeh, 491–97. Also see Griffith, “Christian Lore and the Arabic Quran,” 109–37. 109. Lammens, Les sanctuaires préislamites; Nau, Les arabes chrétiens; Charles, Le christianisme des arabes nomads; Trimingham, Christianity among the Arabs; Shahid, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century; Shahid, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fifth Century; Shahid, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century; Tardy, Najrân; Fowden, Barbarian Plain, 130–73; Hainthaler, Christliche Araber vor dem Islam; Griffith, Bible in Arabic, 7ff.; Toral-Niehoff, “ʿĪbād of al-H . īra,” 323–48; Wood, “Christianity

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180     Notes to Pages 48–51

and the Arabs,” 353–68; Robin, “Arabia and Ethiopia,” 302–4. For pre-Islamic Arabic poetry referring to Christian myths, see al-Azmeh, Emergence of Islam, 257; Goldziher, Muslim Studies, 1:169. 110. Al-Azmeh, Emergence of Islam, 259–64; Tannous, Medieval Middle East, 252 and passim. 111. Al-Azmeh, Emergence of Islam, 252–54. 112. Al-Azmeh, 144–46, 252–54. 113. Graf, Geschichte, 1:36ff.; Griffith, Bible in Arabic; al-Azmeh, Emergence of Islam, 492; Abbott, Papyri, 47ff. 114. Baumstark, “Das Problem eines vorislamischen christich-arabischen Schrifttums,” 562ff.; Schoeler, Genesis of Literature in Islam, 24–27; Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought, 6; Kashouh, Arabic Versions of the Gospels, 78–79, 143–44, and passim. Note the extensive quotation from the Palestinian Syriac lectionary in the Sīra. Ibn Hishām, Sīra, 149–50. 115. Ibn Hishām, Sīra, 820–21. Also see al-Bukhārī, S. ah. īh. , 4.55 §§570, 571. 116. Ibn Hishām, Sīra, 821 (trans. Guillaume, 552). 117. Elias, Aisha’s Cushion, 1–2, 9–13. 118. This is in line with al-Azmeh’s observation that “it is not the availability of biblical and similar material that accounts for their quranic presence, but the requirements of the new scripture in the process of composition which led to appropriation.” Al-Azmeh, Emergence of Islam, 493–94. 119. Jeffery, Qurʾān as Scripture, 24; Griffith, “Sunna of Our Messengers,” 207ff.; Armstrong, Qus.s.ās., 33ff. 120. Wansbrough, Quranic Studies, 53–84; Neuwirth, Koran, 498–501; cf. Matt. 13:10–17. Also see Aune, Prophecy in Early Christianity, 92–102, 153–88, and passim. 121. Also see Q7:35. 122. Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins, 84; Cragg, Event of the Qurʾān, 158. 123. Q30:58. 124. Zwettler, “Mantic Manifesto,” 104–5. For example, Q5:19, 7:184, 11:2, 15:89, 25:1 and 56, 26:115, 34:28 and 44, 35:23–24, 38:70, 41:4, 48:8, 53:56, 67:26, 71:2, 79:45. 125. Q54; Welch, “Formulaic Features,” 82. 126. Cook, Studies in Muslim Apocalyptic; Cook, “Beginnings of Islam”; Neuwirth, Scripture, 76ff.; Watt, Muhammad at Mecca, 66; Donner, Muhammad and the Believers, 79–80. 127. Some of the examples are found in Q7, 14, 16, 40, 35, 55, 56, 75, 76, 80, 81, 82, 83, 88. For a recent analysis of the quranic representations of heaven and hell, see Reynolds, Allah, 66–88. 128. Robson, “H . adīth”; Pellat, “Ibn Abī Sh–ayba”; Ibn Abī Shayba, Mus.annaf, 5:289. 129. Quoted in Armstrong, Qus.s.ās., 193. These and similar reports: Armstrong, 191–92, 235. 130. Armstrong, Qus.s.ās., 5–6, 112–20, 194; Berkey, “Audience and Authority,” 108–10. For h. adīth collectors and scholars, the essential groundworks are Robson, “H . adīth”; Schacht, Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence; Goldziher, Introduction to

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Notes to pages 51–55      181

Islamic Theology and Law; Berg, Development of Exegesis; Brown, Hadith; Motzki, Analyzing Muslim Traditions; Motzki, Origin of Islamic Jurisprudence; Melchert, Hadith, Piety, and Law. 131. Armstrong, Qus.s.ās., 191–92, 235. 132. Al-Bukhārī, S. ah. īh. , 4.55 §569 (trans. Khan); cf. Q6:74–83, 9:114, 14:35–41, 19:41–50, 29:16–27, 60:4–5. Robson, “Abū Hurayra.” 133. Anthony, “Jurayj.” The report, among others, is in ʿAbd al-Razzāq Sanʿānī, Mus.annaf, 11:135. 134. Anthony, “Jurayj”; BHO, 355–56; v.Greg.Th. (trans. Slusser), 47–48. For the Syriac version, see AMS 6 (1896): 83–106. Forcing one’s son into marriage is also a well-known trope in Christian hagiography, seen in, among others, the aforementioned v.Hom.De., 6. 135. For two recent examples, see Lowry, “Law, Structure, and Meaning,” 111–48; Cole, “Muhammad and Justinian,” 183–96. 136. Crone and Cook, Hagarism, 12. 137. Cf. Num. 19:2–10. 138. Lowry, “Law, Structure, and Meaning,” 120–22. 139. Hammām b. Munabbih, S. ah. īfa, §60. 140. Lowry, “Law, Structure, and Meaning,” 118. 141. A recent sketch of the Quran’s legal background as it relates to late antique Christianity is Zellentin, Qurʾān’s Legal Culture. For a study of the role of the narrative in legal context, see Doerfler, “Glimpses from the Margins,” 107–22. 142. Jeffery, Qurʾān as Scripture, 36ff.; Paret, Mohammed und der Koran, 89–91; Zwettler, “Mantic Manifesto,” 96–115; Busse, “Herrschertypen im Koran,” 56–80; Neuwirth, Scripture, 292, 394–95; Neuwirth, “Locating the Qurʾan,” 165–85; Neuwirth, “Qurʾānic Studies and Philology,” 191ff.; Khalidi, Images of Muhammad, 25–26; Rubin, Eye of the Beholder, 45; Robinson, Islamic Historiography, 129, 135. For pre-Islamic monotheism as a precursor of Islam, see Robinson, Islamic Historiography, 129, 135; Donner, Islamic Origins, 111–22. 143. Zwettler, “Mantic Manifesto,” 97. Note that al-Azmeh finds this to be an anachronistic ascription. Al-Azmeh, Emergence of Islam, 494n381. 144. Watt, Bell’s Introduction to the Qurʾān, 133–34; Zwettler, “Mantic Manifesto,” 98. The self-relating is also witnessed by, for example, Ibn Hishām, Sīra, 106. 145. Neuwirth, “Qurʾānic Studies and Philology,” 192. 146. Neuwirth, Scripture, 283–85. Muhammad is called the brother of Moses, “following his religion, being sent with the same mission” by a Jew in the Sīra. Ibn Hishām, Sīra, 353, 377. 147. Neuwirth, Koran, 653–71; Nöldeke, History of the Qurʾān, 98; al-Azmeh, Emergence of Islam, 494; Lowin, “Prophet like Moses.” This is similar to the Hebrew Bible prophets presented as prefigurements of Jesus in early Christian literature. For Jesus being likened to Moses in the New Testament, see Allison, New Moses. 148. Stowasser, Women in the Qurʾan, 40–43. 149. Stowasser, 96, 99–100.

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182     Notes to Pages 55–57

150. For modes of cultural forgetting, see Varner, Mutilation and Transformation; Flower, Art of Forgetting. 151. The oft-cited example is the verses that mention Abraham’s building the temple in Mecca, in Q3:95–97, and more extensively in Q2:127–50. For a recent analysis, see Witztum, “Foundations of the House.” 152. This is a common function of Christian hagiography observed in collective saints’ lives. Cox Miller, “Strategies of Representation,” 209–54. A clear manifestation of the collective persona of the ancient prophets is seen in Q14:9–15, where the prophets are referred to as “they” and one generic story is narrated for “their peoples.” Also, there is an anonymous prophet with a generic story in Q23:32–41 and in 36:13–29. 153. Similar to desert ascetics embodying biblical prophets, as analyzed in Frank, Memory of the Eyes. For “face” as a performative unit, see Shepherd, Cambridge Introduction to Performance Theory, 4ff. 154. Al-Bukhārī, S. ah. īh. , 4.55 §574 (trans. Khan). Also see Muslim, S. ah. īh. , kitāb al-īmān, §§322, 328. Cf. John 14:9. 155. Hammām b. Munabbih, S. ah. īfa, §132; a variant in al-Bukhārī, S. ah. īh. , 4.55 §651. Also see Ghédira, “S.ah.īfa.” For Hammām’s connection to later transmitters and collectors of h. adīth, see Speight, “Variant Readings,” 169–79. 156. Muslim, S. ah. īh. , kitāb al-īmān, §§321, 328; Bosworth, “ʿUrwa b. Masʿūd.” 157. Schrieke et al., “Miʿrād– j.” Ibn Hishām, Sīra, 268–71; Tottoli, Biblical Prophets, – 114–17. Note that there are two versions of the story of Muhammad’s night journey to Jerusalem, with and without the ascension to heaven. 158. Frank, “Miracles, Monks, and Monuments,” 485, 498, 501; Frank, Memory of the Eyes. Cf. John 14:9. 159. Frank, “Miracles, Monks, and Monuments,” 503–4. For anecdotes about biblical memories interwoven into the pilgrimage routes, see HM, 8.1, 18.3; Egeria, Itin., passim. 160. Neuwirth, “Qurʾānic Studies and Philology,” 189, 195–96; Neuwirth, Scripture, 322–24; Newby, “Drowned Son,” 19–32. For the Quran as interpreted Bible, see Griffith, Bible in Arabic, 95ff. 161. Al-Azmeh, Emergence of Islam, 270; Ahmed, Before Orthodoxy, 283; Rubin, “ ‘Become You Apes, Repelled!’,” 25–40; Witztum, “Pharaoh and His Council,” 945–52. Some exegetes later pejoratively referred to these interpretations as “popular” exegesis (tafsīr al-nās), as opposed to “scholarly.” Leemhuis, “Origins,” 201. Note that the Quran mentions people who know the Book through hearsay, in Q2:78. For public exegesis in Late Antiquity, see Cameron, Dialoguing in Late Antiquity, 29; Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire, 43. 162. Neuwirth, Scripture, 322–24. 163. Sebeos, Chron., §135 (trans. Thomson, 95). 164. Berg, Development of Exegesis in Early Islam, 65–92. 165. Al-Bukhārī, S. ah. īh. , 4.55 §621 (trans. Khan); also in Ibn Mājah, Sunan, 1.10 §80. 166. Q2:29–38 (Adam), Q2:49–74 (Moses), Q5:27–32 (Adam), Q5:20–26 (Moses), Q17:61–65 (Adam), Q17:101–6 (Moses), Q20:115–23 (Adam), Q20:9–98 (Moses).

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Notes to pages 57–61      183

167. Hammām b. Munabbih, S. ah. īfa, §45. 168. For a narratological analysis of Q2, see, Lowry, “Law, Structure, and Meaning.” 169. For example, al-Bukhārī, S. ah. īh. , 5:58 §227 and 229; 5.59 §288 et al. 170. Philo, Op.Mund., 149 (trans. Colson and Whitaker, 119). “So Moses says that God brought all the animals to Adam, wishing to see what appellations he would assign to them severally. Not that he was in any doubt—for to God nothing is unknown—but because He knew that He had formed in mortal man the natural ability to reason of his own motion, that so He Himself might have no share in faulty action.” 171. 1 Kings 3:16–28. 172. Al-Bukhārī, S. ah. īh. , 4.55 §637 (trans. Khan). 173. Wheeler, Prophets in the Quran, 266–79; Tottoli, Biblical Prophets, 35–38. 174. Bird, “Harlot as Heroine,” 119–39; Beuken, “No Wise King,” 1–10; Cogan, 1 Kings, 193–97. 175. Goldziher, Muslim Studies, 2:346–62. 176. For transfer of authorship in early Islamic literature, see Mourad, Early Islam, 7–9, 11, 16, 80–85, 88, 90. For reports falsely attributed to Muhammad, see Goldziher, Muslim Studies, 2:56–59, 145–63. 177. Sirry, “Qurʾan and Its Polemical Context,” 125–31; Bannister, Oral-formulaic Study, 29–33. Also see Azaiez, Le contre-discours coranique. 178. Q19:16. 179. Neuwirth, “Qurʾānic Studies and Philology,” 192. 180. Sinai, Qurʾan, 147. 181. Kugel, Ladder of Jacob, 1–9; Rosenthal, “Influence of the Biblical Tradition,” 39–40. 182. Dammen McAuliffe, Qurʾānic Christians, 6–7. 183. At the final verse of Q61, Muhammad recites: “O believers! Be God’s helpers, just as Jesus, son of Mary, said to his disciples: ‘Who are my helpers towards God?’ The disciples said, ‘We are God’s helpers.’ And a party of the Children of Israel believed, and another party did not believe. So we strengthened those who believed, and they prevailed.” The disciples are also mentioned in 5:110–19 and 3:52–53. Discussed in McAuliffe, Qurʾānic Christians, 129–60, 261–62, 276, and passim. 184. McAuliffe, Qurʾānic Christians, 260–84. 185. Cameron, Dialoguing in Late Antiquity, 14, 23–38. 186. Hammām b. Munabbih, S. ah. īfa, §93 (trans. Hamidullah, 136). 187. Ostensibly a reiteration of the story known as the Youths/Seven Sleepers of Ephesus in the eastern Mediterranean in Late Antiquity. More on this narrative in chapter 3. 188. Q3:65–70. 189. Al-Azmeh, Emergence of Islam, 447–48; Robin, “Arabia and Ethiopia,” 303; Watt, “Musaylima”; Landau-Tasseron, “T.ulayh.a.” 190. For the debates about the codification of the Quran, see Paret, Pearson, and Welch, “al-K.urʾān.” 191. Ibn Hishām, Sīra, 144.

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184     Notes to Pages 61–63

192. Schick, Christian Communities in Palestine, 253. 193. Armstrong, Qus.s.ās., 77. 194. Armstrong, 93–94. For Qatāda, also see Pellat, “K.atāda b. Diʿāma.” 195. Armstrong, Qus.s.ās., 109, 156. 196. Tottoli, Biblical Prophets, 86. 197. Bannister, Oral-Formulaic Study, 45–48. Also see Norris, “Fables and Legends,” 137–38; Watt, “Materials Used by Ibn Ish.āq,” 25–26. 198. Robinson, “History and Heilsgeschichte, 131–32. 199. Ibn Qutayba, k.Maʿārif, 1:61. On Abu Bakr’s connection to pre-Islamic historiographical material, see Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought, 5. 200. Armstrong, Qus.s.ās., 289; Norris, “Fables and Legends,” 139–41. For storytellers’ association with ascetics, see Norris, 146. 201. Jeffery, “Abu ’l-Dardāʾ”; Ibn al-Jawzī, k.Qus.s.ās., §16. 202. Veccia Vaglieri, “ʿAbd Allāh b. al-ʿAbbās.” 203. Q18:70–80. 204. Armstrong, Qus.s.ās., 95; al-Bukhārī, S. ah. īh. , 6.60 §250. He is also reported to have narrated stories about the creation and the succession of biblical events to explain the origins of idol worship. Ibn al-Kalbī, k.As.nām, §§45–47 (trans. Faris, 44–46). 205. Al-Wāqidī, Futūh. al-shām, 1.137–38 (trans. al-Kindi, 401–6); Perlmann, “Legendary Story,” 85–99; Armstrong, Qus.s.ās., 287; Schmitz, “Kaʿb al-Ah.bār”; Wolfensohn, Kaʿb al-Ah. bār und seine Stellung. For Kaʿb and other Jewish converts to Islam, see Stroumsa, “Jewish Intellectuals,” 179–98. 206. Tottoli, Biblical Prophets, 89–96. 207. For some examples, see Ibn Hishām, Sīra, 102–7, 151, 154; al-Bukhārī, S. ah. īh. , 1.1 §2, 3.34 §414, 3.44 §674, 4.51 §25. For Aisha and other female Companions as exegetes and transmitters, see Schoeler, Genesis of Literature in Islam, 41–44; Sayeed, Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge; Geissinger, Gender and Muslim Construction of Exegetical Authority. For female Companions’ representations in medieval Islamic biographical dictionaries, see Sprenger, Leben und die Lehre, 3:61–87; Asfaruddin, “Reconstituting Women’s Lives,” 461–80. 208. Kattan Gribetz, “Consuming Texts.” Also see chapters 1 and 6. 209. Ibn Hishām, Sīra, 137–43; Levi Della Vida, “Salmān al-Fārisī”; Hoyland, “History, Fiction, and Authorship,” 28; Ibn al-Jawzī, k.Qus.s.ās., §85; Pietruschka, “Monk as a Storyteller,” 167–70. 210. For the historicity of such monotheistic ascetics in the Islamic tradition, see Sizgorich, “Monks and Their Daughters,” 193–216; Sizgorich, “Narrative and Community,” 11–12, 27ff. 211. Ibn Abī Shayba, Mus.annaf, 7:74; Juynboll, “al-K – h–awlānī”; Armstrong, Qus.s.ās., 37. 212. Out of the 109 storytellers Armstrong identifies until the year 750, 12 were Companions of Muhammad. Also see El Calamawy, “Narrative Elements,” 308–16. 213. For the entwined relationship between storytelling and exegesis, also discussed in the introduction, see Armstrong, Qus.s.ās., 3–4, 80–111, 198–99; Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought, 14, 17ff.; Mourad, Early Islam, 64, 80–82.

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Notes to pages 63–68      185

214. Al-Bukhārī, S. ah. īh. , 4.55 §584. 215. For pseudepigraphy in Islam, see Cook, Early Muslim Dogma. Also see Mourad, Early Islam, 73–91. 216. Brown, Society and the Holy, 103–4, 148ff. 217. Ahmed, Before Orthodoxy, 41–264. 218. Rubin, Eye of the Beholder, 3–4, 162; Ahmed, Before Orthodoxy, 272. 219. Ibn Hishām, Sīra, 102–7, 151. 220. For an overview of Ibn Ish.āq’s sources for the Sīra, see Watt, “Materials Used by Ibn Ish.āq,” 23–34. 221. Elias, Aisha’s Cushion, 92–99; Grabar, “Story of Portraits,” 19–38.

chapter 3. “ask him about the youths” I am very grateful to Sidney Griffith for extensively discussing this Quran chapter with me, for giving invaluable suggestions, and for generously sharing his unpublished work. ْ‫سلوه عن فية‬ 1. Ibn Hishām, Sīra, 192: ‫ وسلوه عن الروح‬. . . ‫اف‬ ‫ وسلوه عن رجل ط ّو‬. . . ‫ت‬ For an overview of the different versions of the report, see Reynolds, Qurʾān and Its Biblical Subtext, 203–4. Some of the verses of Q18 are argued to be Medinan. Nöldeke, History of the Qurʾān, 114–16. 2. Maʿmar b. Rāshīd, Maghāzī (trans. Anthony), 167–72. 3. Muqātil, Tafsīr, 2:575; Reynolds, Qurʾān and Its Biblical Subtext, 170. 4. Al-Qummī, Tafsīr, 2:31–32; Reynolds, Qurʾān and Its Biblical Subtext, 171. 5. Note that some exegetes did not situate Q18 within a polemical frame. In al-Wāh.idī’s (d. 1075) Asbāb al-nuzūl, for example, the occasions for the revelation of Q18 are given as piety of the poor despised by the rich in Muhammad’s community (Q18:28), Jews questioning Muhammad on his knowledge (Q18:83, 109), and believers who enjoy their piety and strive to be visible and exalted for it (Q18:110). Al-Wāh.idī, Asbāb al-Nuzūl, 224–26 (trans. Guezzu, 152–53). Also see Sellheim, “al-Wāh.idī.” On the genre of “occasions of revelation,” see Rippin, “Exegetical Genre ‘Asbāb al-Nuzūl’,” 1–15; Rippin, “Function of ‘Asbāb al-Nuzūl’,” 1–20. 6. Bell, Commentary on the Qurʾān, 1:481–99; Klar, “Re-examining Textual Boundaries,” 215–38, esp. 216–22; Paret, “Qurʾān—I,” 209–10; Koloska, Offenbarung, Ästhetik und Korenexegese, 21–51; Archer, A Place between Two Places, 107–92; Griffith, “Narratives,” 137–66; Bajwa, “Divine Story-Telling.” 7. Klar, “Re-examining Textual Boundaries,” 220; Bajwa, “Divine Story-Telling,” 31–68. 8. Rippin, “Tafsīr”; Gilliot, Exégèse, langue et théologie en Islam; Gilliot, “Mythe, récit, histoire du salut,” 237–79; Khalidi, “Al-T.abarī,” 1–10. 9. Muqātil, Tafsīr, 2:572–607. 10. Plessner and Rippin, “Muk. ātil b. Sulaymān.” 11. Al-Qummī, Tafsīr, 2:30–47. 12. Rippin, “Tafsīr.”

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186     Notes to Pages 68–71

13. The phrase “God having offspring” (‫ ا)تّخذهللا ولدا‬might refer to the Christian Trinity, as well as the polytheist belief that deities had children; it is not necessarily anti-Christian rhetoric. Nevertheless, considering the Christian communities around Mecca in Late Antiquity, it is presumable that Muhammad’s proclamations in Q18 included anti-Christian polemical discourse. Griffith, “Christian Lore,” 117–18. Al-Qummī notes that the phrase “God taking an offspring” was referring to the Meccan pagans’ belief that angels were daughters of God, Jews’ belief that Ezra was the son of God, and Christians’ belief that Jesus was the son of God. Al-Qummī, Tafsīr, 2:30–31. 14. Fudge, “Men of the Cave,” 73–74. 15. Nöldeke, History of the Qurʾān, 116. 16. What is translated as “inscription” here, al- raqīm, is discussed in both medieval exegesis and modern scholarship. It could refer to the inscription mentioning the names of the Companions of the Cave and/or narrating their story, the village or the valley where the cave was, or the name of the Companions’ leader or the guard. Griffith, “Christian Lore,” 125–26; Reynolds, Qurʾān and Its Biblical Subtext, 171–76; Shaddel, “Studia onomastica coranica,” 303–18. 17. Griffith, “Christian Lore,” 118. 18. Note that the last two verses appear to contradict each other, one giving exact number of years (Q18:25), and the other contesting it (Q18:26). This might indicate that different narrations of the story are preserved in the Quran. 19. The Quran rarely frames proper believers as Christians or Jews; therefore, the representation of the Companions of the Cave as believers rather than Christians is not exceptional or surprising in the quranic context. The major works on this legend are BHO, 1012–14; AMS 1:301–25, 528–35; Guidi, Testi orientali inedita; Huber, Wanderlegende von den Siebenschläfern; Peeters, “Le texte original,” 369–85; Leclercq, “Sept dormants d’Éphèse,” 1251–62; Massignon, “Sept Dormants,” 245–60; Massignon, “Le culte liturgique et populaire,” 109–80; Massignon, “Les septs dormants d’Éphèse,” 59–112; Honigmann, “Stephen of Ephesus and the Seven Sleepers,” 125–68; Jourdan, La tradition des sept dormants; Vogt, “Die Siebenschläfern,” 223–47; Brock, “Jacob of Serugh’s Poem,” 13–30; Whitters, “Qurʾānic Story of the Companions of the Cave,” 167–88. For the trope of miraculous sleepers in Greek, Jewish, and Christian literature, see van der Horst, “Pious Long-Sleepers,” 93–111. 20. Brock, “Jacob of Serugh’s Poem,” 14–15; Griffith, “Christian Lore,” 120–21; Fudge, “Men of the Cave,” 68–69. 21. There are different numbers given in the Christian tradition. Brock, “Jacob of Serugh’s Poem,” 14–15; Griffith, “Christian Lore,” 129. 22. Griffith, “Christian Lore.” Also see Reynolds, Qurʾān and Its Biblical Subtext, 181–85. 23. Also frequently spelled as Serugh. 24. For an analysis of Jacob of Sarug’s homiletic preaching in the eastern Mediterranean in Late Antiquity, see Forness, Preaching Christology. On Jacob of Sarug’s homilies and the quranic story of H . abīb al-Najjār (Q36:13–30), see van Esbroeke,

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Notes to pages 71–75      187

“Pierre, Jean et Paul à Antioche,” 64–85; de Giorgi and Eger, Antioch, 235, 246–47, 255, 274; Bedjan and Brock, Peter, Paul, and John at Antioch, 270–96. 25. There are other verses in the Quran that are more explicitly anti-Christian; see, for example, Q4:171: “O People of the Book, do not go beyond the bounds in your religion. Do not say anything but the truth about God. The Messiah, Jesus, the son of Mary, is truly God’s messenger, and His word, which He cast into Mary, and a spirit from Him. So believe in God and His messengers and do not say, ‘Three’. Desist, [that is] better for you. God is one God. Glory be to Him—that He should have a son. To Him belongs all that is in the heavens and on earth. God is sufficient trustee.” On this verse, see Wilde, Approaches to the Qurʾān, 105–53. 26. For the doctrine of docetism, see Verheyden et al., Docetism in the Early Church. 27. Ibn al-Kalbī, k.As.nām, §§16, 18. 28. Paret, “As.h.āb al-Kahf.” Also see Fudge, “Men of the Cave,” 72. 29. Al-T.abarī, Tafsīr, 8:179–80 (§§22775–22890); Fudge, “Men of the Cave,” 78. 30. ʿAbd al-Razzāq Sanʿānī, Tafsīr, 2:323 (§1649). 31. Fudge, “Men of the Cave”; Reynolds, Qurʾān and Its Biblical Subtext, 170–85. 32. Fudge, “Men of the Cave,” 79; Reynolds, Qurʾān and Its Biblical Subtext, 204. 33. Fudge, “Men of the Cave,” 78–79. 34. Muqātil, Tafsīr, 2:574. ̈ 35. ‫ܬܪܝܢ ܣܘܦܣܛܐ ܒܢܝ̈ ̈ܪܝܫܢܐ‬. Jacob of Sarug, hom.Y.Eph., 20, lines 5–6 (ed. Guidi). 36. Plessner and Rippin, “Muk. ātil b. Sulaymān.” 37. Al-T.abarī, Tafsīr, 8:183–212. 38. Al-T.abarī, Tafsīr, 8:183 (§22907). 39. Al-T.abarī, Tafsīr, 8:183 (§22908). 40. Brock, “Jacob of Serugh’s Poem,” 16; Peeters, “Passion des Sept Dormants,” 373–74; Huber, Siebenschläfern, 91–96. 41. Brock, “Jacob of Serugh’s Poem,” 16. 42. Griffith, “Christian Lore,” 121–23. 43. Vaglieri, “ʿAbd Allāh b. al-ʿAbbās”; Berg, “Ibn ʿAbbās,” 493–508. 44. Berg, “Ibn ʿAbbās,” 495–96. 45. Berg, “Ibn ʿAbbās,” 499–501. 46. Ibn ʿAbbās, Tafsīr, 243–46. 47. Plessner and Rippin, “Muk. ātil b. Sulaymān”; Koç, “References to Muqātil b. Sulaymān,” 70–71, 76–77. 48. Al-Qummī, Tafsīr, 31; Reynolds, Qurʾān and Its Biblical Subtext, 204. 49. Ibn ʿAbbās, Tafsīr, 245. 50. For Christianity in South Arabia in Late Antiquity, see Finster, “Arabia in Late Antiquity,” 61–114; Monferrer-Sala, Redefining History on Pre-Islamic Accounts, 15–22; Trimingham, Christianity among the Arabs, 287–307; Shahid, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fifth Century, 360–81; Tardy, Najrân. For useful overviews of the history of the Axumite (Ethiopian) kingdom, see Piovanelli, “Reconstructing the Social and Cultural History,” 331–52; Grasso, “Late Antique Kingdom’s Conversion.” For the PersianByzantine wars and their impact on Christian communities, see Bonner, “Eastern

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188     Notes to Pages 75–79

Sources,” 42–56; Wood, “Collaborators and Dissidents,” 57–70; Fisher, “From Mavia to al-Mundhir,” 165–218; Robin, “Arabia and Ethiopia,” 247–332; Debié, “Les controverses miaphysites,” 137–56. 51. For the circulation of homiletic literature in Late Antiquity, see Tannous, Medieval Middle East, 36–37, 244–46. Among the fundamental works on Jacob of Sarug’s reception in later Christian Arabic literature are the following: Samir, “Un exemple des contacts culturels,” 213–45; Suciu, “Sahidic Version,” 49–83; Butts, “Christian Arabic Transmission,” 39–59; Butts, “Diversity in the Christian Arabic Reception,” 1–30; Forness, Preaching Christology, 6n27. 52. Forness, Preaching Christology, 115–31. 53. Reynolds, “Medieval Islamic Polemic,” 222. 54. Mazuz, “Quranic Christians,” 43–47. 55. Al-Nishāburī, Qis.as. al-anbiyāʾ, copied in 1577, Berlin State Library, MS Diez A, fol. 186. Digitized image available in the World Digital Library with open access at http//www.wdl.org/en/item/7494. 56. Ibn ʿArabī, Rūh. al-quds, 84 (trans. Austin, 141–42). 57. Bitton-Ashkelony, “Perfection, Imperfection and Stillness,” 227–34. For hesychastic practice in Sufism, see Rossi, “Presence, Participation, Performance,” 64–111; Cutsinger, “Hesychia,” 225–51. 58. Massignon, “Culte liturgique et populaire,” 109–80; Massignon, “Septs dormants d’Éphèse,” 59–112; Jourdan, Sept dormants. 59. The story is also in the Diatessaron 29:17–26. Gressmann, Vom reichen Mann und armen Lazarus; Hock, “Lazarus and Micyllus,” 447–63; Hock, “Lazarus and Dives,” 266–67; Bauckham, “Rich Man and Lazarus,” 225–46; Regalado, “Jewish Background,” 341–49; Lehtipuu, Afterlife Imagery of Luke’s Story; Szukalski, Tormented in Hades; Bovon, Luke, 470–88. 60. For example, see Hock, “Lazarus and Micyllus”; Bauckham, “Rich Man and Lazarus.” 61. For the parallels between the Palestinian Talmud and the Gospel of Luke, see Bauckham, “Rich Man and Lazarus,” 227–29. 62. Jerome, hom.Lazar.; Gregory of Nazianzus, Or.14; John Chrysostom, hom. Lazar.; Jacob of Sarug, hom.Lazar. 63. Q26:96–102, Q67–6–11, Q7:50, et al.; Elbadawi, Qurʾān and the Aramaic Gospel Traditions, 200–202. 64. Mourad, “Qurʾānic Stories about Mary and Jesus,” 15–17. 65. Jacob of Sarug, hom.Phar. 66. Muqātil, Tafsīr, 2:584–85. 67. Green, Gospel of Luke, 606n338; Marshall, Gospel of Luke, 634–35; Bovon, Luke, 479. 68. Luke 18:9–14. 69. Tasmiyya in this context refers to the practice of naming characters for storytelling purposes, although it has broader connotations and applications, such as pronouncing the divine names of God. Carra de Vaux and Gardet, “Basmala.”

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Notes to pages 79–83      189

70. Reynolds, Qurʾān and Its Biblical Subtext, 201. 71. Ibn ʿAbbās, Tafsīr, 247. 72. Bauckham, “Rich Man and Lazarus,” 227; Gaster, Exempla of the Rabbis, 119. 73. Al-T.abarī, Tafsīr, 8:222–27 (§§23054–23076) 74. Al-T.abarī, Tafsīr, 8:225 (§23066). 75. Kister, “K – h–abbāb b. al-Aratt.” 76. Al-Wāh.idī, Asbāb al-nuzūl, 224–26. 77. This seems to be a third character introduced in the story, and it is not clear what happens to Moses’s servant mentioned at the beginning of the narrative. 78. The scholarship on the Alexander Legend is voluminous. Among the foundational editions, translations, and groundwork are Budge, History of Alexander the Great; Budge, Life and Exploits of Alexander the Great; Nöldeke, Geschichte des Alexanderromans; Kübler, Alexandri Polemi; Ausfeld, Griechische Alexanderroman; Kroll, Historia Alexandri Magni; Reichmann, Byzantinische Alexandergedicht; Bergson, Griechische Alexanderroman; Merkelbach, Quellen des griechischen Alexanderromans. For the Armenian version, see Romance of Alexander the Great by Pseudo-Callisthenes (trans. Wolohojian). On Christian-Arabic works on Alexander, see Graf, Geschichte, 1:545–46. For Alexander in the Talmud, see Epstein, Babylonian Talmud, Tamid, 26–29. The history of scholarship is usefully summarized in some of recent works with a global approach: for example, Doufikar-Aerts, Alexander Magnus Arabicus; Stoneman, Erickson, and Netton, Alexander Romance in Persia and the East; Zuwiyya, Companion to Alexander Literature; Ng, Alexander the Great. 79. Doufikar-Aerts, Alexander Magnus Arabicus, 171–72. 80. Jacob of Sarug, hom.Alex., 370–71 (trans. Budge, 173–74). 81. Bergson, Griechische Alexanderroman, 131–34. 82. Wheeler, “Moses or Alexander?,” 191–98; Wheeler, Moses in the Quran, 10–14. 83. Wheeler, Moses in the Quran, 13. 84. Wheeler, 13. 85. Wheeler, 10. 86. Rosenthal, “Influence of the Biblical Tradition,” 41–44. 87. Hagiographic conflation is an important phenomenon that often impacted the emergence, development, and circulation of saints’ dossiers. Some well-known examples are John Calybites and the Man of God; Saint Gerasimos and Saint Jerome; Saint Thecla and Mary (hence the naming of the shrine of Thecla as “Maryamlik” in Asia Minor). The phenomenon is generally explained with intertextuality and confluence (as observed in Greek and Egyptian gods). Multiple examples are given, albeit without a significant theoretical discussion, in Maskarinec, City of Saints, 8–26. 88. Wheeler, Moses in the Quran, 12. See the notes on the dating of the Syriac legends in Doufikar-Aerts, Alexander Magnus Arabicus, 146–47. 89. Forness, Preaching Christology, 186–224. 90. Recently, for example, Griffith, “Narratives,” 161–64. For Joshua in Islam, see Heller and Rippin, “Yūsh–aʿ b. Nūn”; cf. Ex. 17:8–16; Josh. 1:1–9.

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190     Notes to Pages 83–86

91. For a summary of the scholarship, see Wheeler, “Moses or Alexander?,” 192–93. 92. l.Alexander (Syr.), 260; Jacob of Sarug, hom.Alex., line 365. 93. Nöldeke, History of the Qurʾān, 115n137; Tonsing, “From Prince to Demi-God,” 93–94; Doufikar-Aerts, Alexander Magnus Arabicus, 145–50. 94. l.Alexander (Syr.), 257, 272. 95. Bernouilli, Alexanders des Grossen, pl. viii, fig. 4; Stewart, “Alexander in Greek and Roman Art,” figs. 8–11. 96. Kasher, “Mythological Figure of Moses,” 20–28. 97. Koosed, “Moses,” 417; Ex. 34:29 “When Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the two tablets of the covenant law in his hands, he was not aware that his face was radiant because he had spoken with the Lord.” 98. Koosed, “Moses,” 417–19; Mellinkoff, Horned Moses, 1–2. 99. Wheeler, “Moses or Alexander?,” 213. 100. On the Egyptian origin of the Alexander Legend, see Budge, History of Alexander, xxxv–li. 101. Philo, v.Mos., 4:1–4; Gregory of Nyssa, v.Mos., 16–17; hist.Alexander (Syr.), 1.1–14. 102. Philo, v.Mos., 14; Gregory of Nyssa, v.Mos., 18; hist.Alexander (Syr.), 1.13, 1.17. 103. Philo, v.Mos., 15; Gregory of Nyssa, v.Mos., 22–24; Jacob of Sarug, hom.Alex., lines 370–71. 104. Philo, v.Mos., 17–18; Gregory of Nyssa, v.Mos., 68; hist.Alexander (Syr.), 1.1–13; Jacob of Sarug, hom.Alex., lines 370–71, 375–76. 105. Eusebius, v.Const., 1.12, 1.20, 1.38, 1.39; Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire, 54–56; Rapp, Holy Bishops in Late Antiquity, 130; Damgaard, “Propaganda against Propaganda,” 115–32. Also see Rapp, “Old Testament Models,” 175–98. 106. Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire, 204. 107. For example, in the Life of Makarios. Roilos, “Phantasia and the Ethics of Fictionality in Byzantium,” 21–22. 108. Kalavrezou, “Marvelous Flight of Alexander,” 103–14. 109. Griffith, “Narratives,” 161–62. 110. Cf. Gen. 50:20; 2 Samuel 12. 111. Nissīm b. Jacob b. Shāhīn, H . ibbur Yafeh me-hay-Yeshu’ah; Gesta Romanorum, 45–47. 112. hist.Alexander (Syr.), 3.13. 113. Jacob of Sarug, hom.Alex., line 368 (trans. Budge, 171). 114. Van Bladel, “Alexander Legend,” 175–203; Doufikar-Aerts, Alexander Magnus Arabicus, 145–50. For objections to identifying Dhū al-Qarnayn as Alexander, see Doufikar-Aerts, 135–38. 115. l.Alexander (Syr.), 257, 272; Van Bladel, “Alexander Legend,” 180. 116. l.Alexander (Syr.), 258–59; Van Bladel, “Alexander Legend,” 181. 117. l.Alexander (Syr.), 263–68; Van Bladel, “Alexander Legend,” 181. 118. There are exceptions to this identification, as we will see in the next chapter. 119. Heller, “Yūsh–aʿ b. Nūn.”

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Notes to pages 87–92      191

120. Wensinck, “al-K – h–ad. ir (al-K – h–id. r)”; Friedlaender, Chadhirlegende und der Alexanderroman; Omar, “Khid. r in the Islamic Tradition,” 279–94. 121. Wensinck and Vajda, “Ilyās”; Muqātil, Tafsīr, 2:594. 122. Ng and Hodges, “Saint George, Islam, and the Regional Audiences,” 264. We will return to Saint George in the next chapter. 123. Ayoub, “Cult and Culture,” 109–10; Wolper, “Khid. r, Elwan Celebi, and the Conversion of Sacred Sanctuaries,” 309–22; Fowden, “Sharing Holy Places,” 124–46; Hasluck and Hasluck, Christianity and Islam, 1:326–27, 320–36. 124. Al-T.abarī, Tafsīr, 8:250–56. On Moses and his servant, also see al-Bukhārī, S. ah. īh. , 1.3 §§74, 78, 123, 124; 3.36 §467; 3.50 §888; 4.55 §§612, 613. 125. Al-T.abarī, Taʾrīkh, 3:1–5. In the anonymous twelfth/fourteenth-century Alexander Legend in the Persian tradition, the Iskandarnama, al-Khid. r accompanies Alexander in his search for the Water of Life. Iskandarnāmah (trans. Southgate), 55–58, 198; Halman, Where the Two Seas Meet, 8, 250–51; Dārābnāmah (trans. Gaillard), 382–400. 126. Friedlaender, Chadhirlegende und der Alexanderroman, 56–61, 63, 109, 116. 127. l.Alexander (Eth.) (trans. Budge), 263–71. 128. Wheeler, “Moses or Alexander?,” 203. 129. Doufikar-Aerts, Alexander Magnus Arabicus, 13–16. For the multiple layers of authorship of the Ethiopic text, with a possible Babylonian/midrashic source, see Doufikar-Aerts, 14–15. 130. Muqātil, Tafsīr, 2:599. 131. Al-T.abari, Tafsīr, 8:280–83 (§23330). For Wahb on Alexander, see DoufikarAerts, Alexander Magnus Arabicus, 139–41; Iskandarnāmah (trans. Southgate), 196–201. 132. l.Alexander (Syr.), 260ff. 133. Q18:94–95. 134. l.Alexander (Syr.), 260–63; cf. Jacob of Sarug, hom.Alex., lines 374–75.

chapter 4. christian saints in islamic literature 1. Dietrich, “Ibn Abī ’l-Dunyā”; Librande, “Ibn Abī l-Dunyā”; Ibn al-Nadīm, Fihrist, 5:5:661. 2. Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, Wajal, 25–30. 3. Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, Wajal, 26–30 (trans. Rosenthal, 43). Chains of transmission omitted. 4. Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, Wajal, 31: ً ‫كتابا‬ ‫تحذو ذااللب‬،‫فيهحكموأمثال‬ ‫وضربوا منأمثالهم‬،‫فيماوضعاألولون من حكمهم‬ ‫ثمإنّاوجدنا‬ ‫ينسبإلىأنطونس‬ ‫الكتابالذي‬ ‫ وهو‬،‫بالوثيقةفيالعمللآلجلة‬ ‫وتحثهعلى األخذ‬ ،‫علىرفضالعاجلة‬ ‫السائح‬ 5. Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, Wajal, 34. 6. Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, Wajal, 34–35. 7. Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, Wajal, 36. 8. Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, Wajal, 36.

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192     Notes to Pages 92–95

9. Can also be translated as “companion”; Heinrichs, “S.āh.ib.” 10. Verbatim quotation from the Quran: Q45:28, 52:16, 66:7. It is not clear in the text where the quotation from “books of all the prophets” ends. Rosenthal, “Tale of Anthony,” 60. 11. Cf. Matt. 20:9–16. 12. Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, Wajal, 54–55 (trans. Rosenthal, 60). 13. For the other saints with the name Antony, see Rosenthal, “Tale of Anthony,” 35–37. 14. Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, Wajal, 36–37. 15. Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, Wajal, 36–37. Cf. Q18:46. 16. Athanasius, v.Ant., §§50–91. 17. Athanasius, v.Ant., §§81–87. 18. Marx, “Incessant prayer,” 113–16. On Antony’s renunciation of sex, food, and wealth, see Brakke, Athanasius, 226–38; cf. The Paradise of the Holy Fathers, §46 (trans. Budge, 2:13): Abba Anthony said: “He who lives in the desert is free from three kinds of spiritual attacks, that is to say, those which arise through the ears, speech, sight; he has only one kind to fight, namely, that of the heart.” 19. Rosenthal, “Tale of Anthony,” 35. 20. Gregg, “Introduction,” 1–2; Brakke, Athanasius, 201–65. For the debates about the authorship of the Life of Antony, see Gregg, “Introduction,” 1n1; Brakke, “Greek and Syriac Versions,” 29–53. Note that in the History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria, authored by Severus b. al-Muqaffaʿ (tenth c.), bishop of Ashmunein in Egypt, Athanasius’s name is spelled Atnāsyūs. Severus b. al-Muqaffaʿ, HPA, 1:64. 21. Anatolios, Athanasius, 1. 22. Brakke, Athanasius, 3. 23. For Athanasius’s legacy in multiple church traditions, see Gwynn, Athanasius of Alexandria, 159–94. For an overview of his works and biography, see Dragas, Saint Athanasius of Alexandria. Note that the apostle Paul was also occasionally represented as a king in early Islamic historiography. Anthony, “Composition of Sayf b. ʿUmar’s Account of King Paul,” 164–202. 24. Gwynn, Athanasius of Alexandria, 188–89. 25. Gwynn, 192–93. 26. The balance between fear of God’s punishment and trust in God’s mercy is highlighted frequently in the Egyptian monastic literature. For example, HM, 1.29–36. 27. Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, Wajal, 41. Cf. HM, 1.21. 28. Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, Wajal, 46. 29. Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, Wajal, 52. 30. Rosenthal, “Tale of Anthony,” 36. 31. Athanasius, v.Ant., §59. 32. Rosenthal, “Tale of Anthony,” 38–41. Although the Jewish tradition is beyond the scope of this book, it is worth noting that there was a strong pre-Christian Jewish tradition of wisdom sayings, such as are found in Ecclesiastes and the book of

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.

Notes to pages 95–97      193

Proverbs, that provide significant comparisons to the Fear of God and similar wisdom literature. 33. APGS, 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, 3.1, 3.2, 4.1, 4.44, 5.1, 6.1, 7.1, 7.14, 8.1–2, 10.1–5, 11.1–3, 15.1–4, 16.1, 17.1–5; APGA, cols. 76–88 (§§10–44); Smith, Philosopher-Monks, 126–37. 34. For these classical literary forms’ function in the emergence of Christian hagiography, especially the apophthegmata, in Late Antiquity, see Rapp, “Origins of Hagiography,” 19–30; Mack, Anecdotes and Arguments; McVey, “Chreia in the Desert,” 245–55; Arzhanov, Syriac Sayings. For the classical form of the chreia in general, see Hock and O’Neil, Chreia and Ancient Rhetoric; Hock, “Chreia in Primary and Secondary Education,” 11–36; Asgeirsson, “Chreia as Principle and Source,” 37–58. 35. The history and content of these anthologies in late antique Christianity, with a focus on transmissions into Syriac literature, are extensively studied in Arzhanov, Syriac Sayings. 36. Harmless, Desert Christians, 165–273. 37. Pietruschka, “Monk as Storyteller,” 167, 177. 38. The presentation of the exhortation of seven holy men, Antony and the six companions, resonates with the “seven sages” traditions from Greek and Syriac literature. Arzhanov, Syriac Sayings, 71–72. For apophthegmata as nucleus of longer narrations, see Hinterberger, “Byzantine Hagiography,” 33. 39. Rosenthal, “Tale of Anthony,” 35–44. 40. Ibn al-Nadīm, Fihrist, 8:1:327. 41. Rapp, “Origins of Hagiography,” 119; Gregg, “Introduction,” 13–17. 42. Brakke, Athanasius, 204. For Antony as a paradigm of not only a holy man but also a philosopher, see Watts, City and School, 177–81. 43. Brakke, Athanasius, 204–16. 44. Palladius, HL, §§7.6, 8.6, 21.1–17. 45. Jerome, v.Paul; also see Rapp, “Origins of Hagiography,” 119. 46. Brakke, “Greek and Syriac Versions,” esp. 42–53. 47. Rosenthal, “Tale of Anthony,” 36–37; Leclercq, “Saint Antoine,” 241. 48. Maskarinec, City of Saints, 9. 49. Graf, Geschichte, 1:456–59. The list provided by Graf does not include a text that appears to be an earlier version of the Fear of God. 50. Minov, “Exhortation of the Apostle Peter,” 167–81. Such pseudepigraphy in the Christian tradition often follows biblical models, such as Jesus’s parables in Matthew 13. 51. Severus b. al-Muqaffaʿ, T. ibb al-ghamm. 52. Wortley, “Genre of the Spiritually Beneficial Tale,” 71; Binggeli, “Collections of Edifying Stories,” 143. 53. Dietrich, “Ibn Abī ’l-Dunyā.” 54. For a useful introduction to and overview of the so-called translation movement, see Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture. Also see Gutas et al., “Tard– jama”; D’Ancona, – Endress, and Bozzi, “Greek into Arabic,” 155–61; Van Bladel, “Arabic Reception of Late Antique Literature,” 569–82. For the caliph al-Maʾmūn as a patron of translation

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194     Notes to Pages 98–101

projects, see Kennedy, Court of the Caliphs, 244, 253–54; Cooperson, Al-Ma’mun, 84–88. 55. Ibn al-Nadīm, Fihrist, 3:2:357ff. 56. Griffith, “Monk in the Emir’s majlis,” 13–65. Also see Bertaina, Christian and Muslim Dialogues. 57. Griffith, “Monk in the Emir’s majlis,” 13–16. 58. Griffith, 63. 59. Cook, “Christians and Christianity,” 77–78; Librande, “Ibn Abī al-Dunyā,” 12–13; Bellamy, “Sources,” 3–19. 60. Al-Musawi, Medieval Islamic Republic of Letter, 186–89. 61. Hämeen-Anttila, “Adab”; Gabrieli, “adab”; Bonebakker, “Adab and the Concept of Belles-Lettres,” 16–30; al-Musawi, Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters, 175–204. 62. Hämeen-Anttila, “adab.” 63. Gabrieli, “adab”; Librande, “Certainty and Morality,” 7–8; Antrim, “Wat.an and Wat.aniyya,” 174. 64. Pellat, “al-D ––jāh.iz.”; Pellat, “Al-Jāh.iz.,” 78–95; Lecomte, “Ibn K.utayba”; Kennedy, Court of the Caliphs, 251–52. 65. Hämeen-Anttila, “adab”; Pellat, “Al-Jāh.iz.,” 89. 66. For a recent review of the scholarship on the topic, see Forster and Yavari, Global Medieval; Gray, Xenophon’s Mirror of Princes. 67. Athanasius, v.Ant., §81. 68. Al-Māwardī, Nas.īh. at al-mulūk; Marlow, “Among Kings and Sages,” 1–57. For another example of Arabic mirrors for princes, see Bray, “Al-Thaʿālibī’s Adab al-muluk,” 32–46. 69. Rosenbaul, “A Certain Laugh,” 97–130, esp. 113–21. Also see Kennedy, Court of the Caliphs, 250–51. Note that intellect (ʿaql) as an essential component of piety was also articulated in Christian-Arabic literature in this time period. Varsányi, “Concept of ʿaql,” 109–34. 70. Athanasius, v.Ant., §72–80; Smith, Philosopher-Monks, 211. 71. Dietrich, “Ibn Abī ’l-Dunyā”; Brockelmann, Arabic Written Tradition, 1:2:1:160. Bellamy argues that about forty works of Ibn Abī al-Dunyā survived. Bellamy, “Sources,” 4. 72. Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, k.Yaqīn. 73. Librande, “Certainty and Morality,” 12ff. 74. Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, k.Faraj. 75. Cox Miller, “Strategies of Representation,” 209–54. 76. Cox Miller, 221. 77. Cox Miller, 228–30. 78. Ibn Hishām, Tījān; partial translation in Nagel, Alexander der Grosse, 9–27; Watt, “Ibn Hish–ām”; Doufikar-Aerts, Alexander Magnus Arabicus, 5–7, 141–42. For an edition of and commentary on a variant codex (London Or. 2424), see Lidzbarski, “Zu den arabischen Alexandergeschichten,” 263–312.

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Notes to pages 101–104      195

79. Kitāb al-mulūk al-mutawwaja min H . imyar wa-akhbārihim wa-qis. as. ihim wa-qubūrihim wa-ashʿārihim [The Book of the Crowned Kings of Himyar and Stories and Legends about Them and Their Tombs and Their Poetry]. Khoury, Wahb, 1:205–6, 286–30; Khoury, “Wahb b. Munabbih”; Doufikar-Aerts, Alexander Magnus Arabicus, 140–41. 80. Hoyland, Arabia and the Arabs, 56–57; Robin, “Arabia and Ethiopia,” 297–300. 81. Ibn Hishām, Tījān, 296. 82. Ibn Hishām, Tījān, 301. 83. Paret, “As.h.āb al-Uk–h–dūd.” I will analyze the quranic Companions of the Trench in chapter 5. 84. Ibn Hishām, Tījān, 81ff. 85. Ibn Hishām, Tījān, 82. 86. Ibn Hishām, Tījān, 81–84. 87. Ibn Hishām, Tījān, 84–85. 88. Ibn Hishām, Tījān, 85. 89. Ibn Hishām, Tījān, 85. 90. Ibn Hishām, Tījān, 92. 91. Ibn Hishām, Tījān, 100. 92. Ibn Hishām, Tījān, 102–3. 93. Ibn Hishām, Tījān, 108–9: ‫النبي‬ ‫ينظهراحد بعده اال الى موسى بن عمران‬ ‫فلم الى‬ 94. Lamentation at Alexander’s grave is a common trope in Greek, Syriac, and Arabic Alexander traditions. Comparison of the passages at the end of the Tījān is beyond the scope of this chapter, and the possible exciting connections of the text to these broader traditions remain to be explored. Brock, “Laments of the Philosophers,” 205–18; Arzhanov, Syriac Sayings, 113–14. 95. Tropes from the Alexander Romance were used in numerous texts in Arabic literature, often to describe the exploits of other heroes, such as Muhammad’s Companions. Norris, “Fables and Legends,” 138–39. 96. hist.Alexander (Syr.), 3.14; cf. Jacob of Sarug, hom.Alex., 368. 97. Doufikar-Aerts, Alexander Magnus Arabicus, 141, 150–88, and passim. 98. l.Alexander (Syr.), 258. Note that the king’s journey from Mecca to Jerusalem and meeting the prophet remind one of Muhammad’s night journey to Jerusalem and seeing the prophets, the instances known as the isrā and miʿrāj in the Islamic tradition. Ibn Hishām, Sīra, 263–71. 99. Q18:59–100. 100. Ibn Hishām, Tījān, 108–9. 101. Nagel, Alexander der Grosse, 28; Iskandarnāmah (trans. Southgate), 196–201. 102. Guillaume, Life of Muhammad, 719n186. 103. Watt, “Ibn Hish–ām.” 104. Khoury, “Asad b. Mūsā b. Ibrāhīm”; Asad b. Mūsā, k.Zuhd, 21–38. For scholarly connections between South Arabia and Egypt, see Nagel, Alexander der Grosse, 77–91.

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196     Notes to Pages 104–108

105. Khoury, “Asad b. Mūsā b. Ibrāhīm.” 106. Watt, “Ibn Hish–ām.” 107. For the connections between South Arabia and the Sassanid kingdom, see Robin, “Arabia and Ethiopia,” 273, 282, 293–99. 108. Khoury, “Wahb b. Munabbih”; Khoury, Wahb; Duri, “Beginnings of Historical Folklore,” 122–35. 109. Griffith, Bible in Arabic, 177. 110. Duri, “Beginnings of Historical Folklore,” 124. 111. For the concept of the “book” in the development of Islamic literature, see Schoeler, Genesis of Literature in Islam, 2–27. 112. For an overview of South Arabian scholarship and literature, see El Shami and Serjeant, “Regional Scholarship,” 442–68, esp. 452–54. 113. Antrim, “Wat.an and Wat.aniyya,” 173–74. 114. Flood, Objects of Translation, 9–11, 17–26. 115. Hanaoka, Authority and Identity, 32. 116. Ibn Hishām, Sīra, 25. 117. For the rivalry between the north and the south, emblematic of the rivalry between the emigrants from Mecca and the helpers in Medina, see Watt, “Materials Used by Ibn Ish.āq,” 26. For Abbasid propaganda against anti-Abbasid eschatological discourse, see Zaman, “Routinization of Revolutionary Charisma,” 251–75. For antiYemeni rhetoric in the Abbasid period, see Zaman, 259. 118. Among the foundational scholarly works on praise literature and its relation to hagiography are the following: Burgess, Epideictic Literature; Brown, Power and Persuasion; Brakke, Athanasius; Brennan and Pettit, Economy of Esteem; Rapp, Holy Bishops; Basu, “Praise and Social Constructions of Identity,” 81–105; Limberis, Architects of Piety; Elm, Sons of Hellenism, Fathers of the Church. 119. For hagiography as praise of saints, see Efthymiadis and Deroche, “Greek Hagiography,” 36–40; Khalek, Damascus, 135–40. 120. a.GSH. 121. doctr.Addai. On the Mandylion, the piece of cloth supposedly retaining an image of Jesus’s face, see Cameron, “History of the Image of Edessa,” 80–94. 122. a.Mari. 123. Theodoret, HR, 5.1. 124. Sellheim, “Fad. īla.” The term is often used together and/or interchangeably with manāqib (glorious exploits) and mah. āsin (excellences) in Islamic hagiographic literature. 125. See, for example, the elaboration of Syria’s sanctity in Cobb, “Virtual Sanctity,” 35–55. 126. Anabsi, “Popular Beliefs,” 59–70. 127. Hanaoka, Authority and Identity, 4. On various literary strategies to authorize the sanctity of a place, also see Cobb, “Virtual Sacrality.” For the same phenomenon in Latin Christianity, see Mortensen, Making of Christian Myths. 128. Hanaoka, Authority and Identity, 5–6.

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Notes to pages 108–112      197

129. For Islamic perspective on monotheism before Islam, see Watt, “H . anīf.” 130. Cobb, “Virtual Sacrality,” 44–51; Khalek, Damascus, 87, 139, 154ff. 131. Hanaoka, Authority and Identity, 64–65. 132. Al-Tabarī, Taʾrīkh, 2:24–36; Carra de Vaux, “D ––jird––jīs”; Cheikho, “Athar jadīd,” 414–20. 133. Al-T.abarī, Taʾrīkh, 2:24. 134. Possibly referring to the emperor Decius (r. 249–51), but the identification of the king is debated. 135. Al-T.abarī, Taʾrīkh, 2:24–25. 136. Al-T.abarī, Taʾrīkh, 2:25–26. 137. Al-T.abarī, Taʾrīkh, 2:26–32. 138. Al-T.abarī, Taʾrīkh, 2:35–36. 139. The most updated bibliography on Saint George can be found in Hollander, “Multimediation of Holiness.” For an overview of the scholarship on Saint George in the Western Christian tradition, see Riches, A Saint for All; Riches, Hero, Martyr, and Myth; also see Brotton, “St. George between East and West,” 50–65. For an analysis of the Greek text, see Casson and Hettich, Excavations at Nessana, 2:123–42. For the Syriac, see Brooks, “Acts of Saint George,” 73–96. For the Latin, see Cumont, “La plus ancienne légende de St. Georges,” 5–51. For the Coptic and Ethiopic, see Saint George of Cappadocia; St. George of Lydda. 140. a.Geor., 96. 141. Al-T.abarī, Taʾrīkh, 2:25 (trans. Perlmann, 4:174–75). 142. a.Geor., 75 (trans. Brooks, 98–99). 143. a.Geor., 76–77. 144. a.Geor., 76, 79. 145. a.Geor., 77. For a comparison of motifs between various Western Christian traditions of George, see Riches, Hero, Martyr, and Myth, 219. 146. Al-T.abarī, Taʾrīkh, 2:35–36; a.Geor., 94–95. 147. Al-T.abarī, Taʾrīkh, 2:36 (trans. Perlmann, 4:186). 148. a.Geor., 95 (trans. Brooks, 114–15). 149. Al-T.abarī, Taʾrīkh, 2:36. Also see Nawas, “Quest for Historical Reliability,” 209–17. 150. a.Geor., 91–92. 151. Al-T.abarī, Taʾrīkh, 2:24. 152. Al-T.abarī, Taʾrīkh, 2:26 (trans. Perlmann, 4:175); cf. 1 Kings 21; 2 Kings 9:21–37. 153. a.Geor., 80–81 (trans. Brooks, 102–3). 154. Mary’s virgin birth and placement above all other women are mentioned in Q19:16–33 and Q3:35–42. For Mary in the Islamic tradition, see chapter 2. 155. Al-T.abarī, Taʾrīkh, 2:25 (trans. Perlmann, 4:174). 156. Q2:117, 3:47, 3:59, 6:73, 16:40, 19:35, 36:82, 40:68. 157. Q10:106, 22:12, 25:55. For an ignorant being “deaf, dumb and blind,” see the verses Q2:18, 2:171. 158. Al-T.abarī, Taʾrīkh, 2:22.

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198     Notes to Pages 112–115

159. For use of Christian hagiography in Islamic historiography, see Sizgorich, Narrative and Community, 11; Robinson, Islamic Historiography, 46–49; Rosenthal, “Influence of the Biblical Tradition,” 40–44; Griffith, Bible in Arabic, 182–98. For al-T.abarī’s weaving of pre-Christian history into the Islamic historical frame, see Whitby, “Period before Jesus,” 20–22. 160. Cubitt, History and Memory, 214ff. 161. Gilliot, Exégèse, langue et théologie en Islam; Gilliot, “Récit, mythe et historie,” 277–89; Gilliot, “al-T.abarī,” 131–40. 162. McAuliffe, “Al-T.abarī’s Prelude to the Prophet,” 113. 163. Griffith, Bible in Arabic, 30. See also Mourad, “Christians and Christianity,” 70–71. 164. The oft-cited quranic verse in this context is Q22:78 “It is He who has named you Muslims, both before and in this (Revelation)”; Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought, 8–11. 165. Sizgorich, “Become Infidels,” 126. 166. Sizgorich, Narrative and Community, 18. 167. Bray, “Christian King, Muslim Apostate,” 201. 168. On Muslim authors’ reluctance to cite Jewish and Christian (especially scriptural) sources, see Lecker, “Death of the Prophet Muh.ammad’s Father,” 9–27; Rubin, Eye of the Beholder, 32; McAuliffe, “Prelude to the Prophet,” 127–29. 169. Ibn al-Nadīm, Fihrist, 6:7:118. 170. Zakeri, “Al-T.abarī on Sasanian History,” 27. For criticisms raised against al-T.abarī and other “traditionist” historians in the Middle Ages, see Mahdi, Ibn Khaldun’s Philosophy of History, 134–38. 171. Khwadāynāmag (trans. Hämeen Anttila), 8, 57–58, 114–15, and passim. 172. Al-Masʿūdī, Murūj, 127. 173. Al-Harawī (d. 1215), k.Ishārāt, 69 (trans. Meri, 178). For the previous Christian church that had been on this site, see Fiey, Mossoul chrétienne, 118–20. 174. Ibn al-Azraq, Tārīkh mayyāfāriqīn, 103–14; Amedroz, “Three Arabic Mss.,” 785–812; Tisserant, “Marouta de Maypherqat,” 148–49; Fiey, “Mārūtā de Martyropolis,” 35–45; Hillenbrand, “History of the Jazīra”; Robinson, “Ibn al-Azraq,” 7–27; Munt, “Ibn al-Azraq,” 149–74. 175. In the Christian tradition, there are Greek and Armenian Lives of Marūthā, possibly based on a now-lost Syriac version. For an overview of scholarship, see Munt, “Ibn al-Azraq,” 154–55. 176. Ibn al-Azraq, Tārīkh mayyāfāriqīn, 103: ‫الملكية‬ ‫بيعة‬ ‫بلغني من جماعة من أهل‬ ‫بميافارقينوذلك أنه‬ ‫الملكية‬ ‫بيعة‬ ‫اشعيثالذيفي‬ ‫الت‬ ‫ما ذكرفي‬ ‫وسألته‬ ‫بقس كانمقيمابها‬ ‫فاجتمعت‬ ‫والبيعة‬ ‫المدينة‬ ‫ابتداء عمارة هذه‬ ‫فيه‬ ‫التشعيثيذكر‬ ‫كتابايسمي‬ ‫أنبها‬ ‫عن ذلك فذكر لي شيئا غير المقصود فأخذت منه الكتاب المذكور وأحصرت رجال من النصارى‬ 177. Ibn al-Azraq, Tārīkh mayyāfāriqīn, 103. 178. Ibn al-Azraq, Tārīkh mayyāfāriqīn, 103. 179. Ibn al-Azraq, Tārīkh mayyāfāriqīn, 103. 180. Ibn al-Azraq, Tārīkh mayyāfāriqīn, 104; Minorsky, History of Sharvān, 172.

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Notes to pages 115–122      199

181. Ibn al-Azraq, Tārīkh mayyāfāriqīn, 103. For this and the other anachronisms in Ibn al-Azraq’s account, see Munt, “Ibn al-Azraq,” 154–56. 182. Ibn al-Azraq, Tārīkh mayyāfāriqīn, 104. 183. Ibn al-Azraq, Tārīkh mayyāfāriqīn, 104. 184. Ibn al-Azraq, Tārīkh mayyāfāriqīn, 104. For Helena’s descent from Edessa, also see Wood, “Constantine in the Chronicle of Seert,” 159; Pohlsander, Helena, 11. This could be a confusion with Queen Helena of Adiabene. Eusebius, HE, 2:12. 185. Ibn al-Azraq, Tārīkh mayyāfāriqīn, 105. 186. Ibn al-Azraq, Tārīkh mayyāfāriqīn, 105–6. According to the Armenian and Greek Lives this king was Yazdgerd I (r. 399–420); Munt, “Ibn al-Azraq,” 156. 187. Ibn al-Azraq, Tārīkh mayyāfāriqīn, 107–8: ‫قيل في رواية‬ 188. Ibn al-Azraq, Tārīkh mayyāfāriqīn, 108. 189. Ibn al-Azraq, Tārīkh mayyāfāriqīn, 108. 190. Ibn al-Azraq, Tārīkh mayyāfāriqīn, 110–11. 191. Ibn al-Azraq, Tārīkh mayyāfāriqīn, 111. 192. Ibn al-Azraq, Tārīkh mayyāfāriqīn, 111. 193. Ibn al-Azraq, Tārīkh mayyāfāriqīn, 111. It is not clear who Ant.ūs and al-Dakūs are, nor the three builders, whom the author introduces as “viziers” of Constantine. For the inaccurate spelling of proper nouns in general in this work, see Munt, “Ibn al-Azraq,” 154. 194. Ibn al-Azraq, Tārīkh mayyāfāriqīn, 113. 195. Ibn al-Azraq, Tārīkh mayyāfāriqīn, 114. 196. Ibn al-Azraq, Tārīkh mayyāfāriqīn, 114. 197. Munt, “Ibn al-Azraq,” 173–74. 198. Munt, 159–64. 199. Munt, 164. 200. For the symbolic value of the Christian empire for Muslims, see Sizgorich, “Sanctified Violence,” 898–906; El Cheikh, “Muhammad and Heraclius.” For the representations of the emperor Constantine I in Islamic historiography, see Stutz, Constantinus Arabicus. 201. Hanaoka, Authority and Identity, 215–17. 202. Al-Harawī, k.Ishārāt (trans. Meri), 12–15. 203. Pellat, “K.uss b. Sāʿida.” 204. Al-Harawī, k.Ishārāt (trans. Meri), 47–48. Also see De Giorgi and Eger, Antioch, 246, 251, 255. 205. Pellat, “K.uss b. Sāʿida.” 206. Rosenthal, “al-Mak. rīzī”; al-Maqrīzī, al-Mawāʿiz..

chapter 5. from paul and john to fīmyūn and s.ālih. 1. An earlier version of this chapter appeared in the volume Syriac Christian Culture: Durmaz, “Saints, Stories, and Sanctity,” 174–97. 2. v.P.Jo., 28–81 (§§1–45); summarized in Nau, “Hagiographie syriaque,” 56–60.

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200     Notes to Pages 122–126

3. Ibn Hishām, Sīra, 21–22 (trans. Guillaume, 14–16). 4. Al-T.abarī, Taʾrīkh, 2:119–21. He reports on the authority of Ibn Ish.āq, which shows that the story was a part of Ibn Ish.āq’s composition and not added by Ibn Hishām to the Sīra. 5. Yāqūt al-H . amawī, Muʿjam, 5:266. 6. Ibn ʿArabī, Muh. ād. arat, 249–52. 7. Ibn Kathīr, Bidaya, 2:168. 8. Arneson et al., “Introduction,” 19. 9. Arneson et al., “Introduction,” 19–21. 10. Mellon Saint-Laurent et al., “Paul the Bishop and John the Priest (Text).” The translation I use here is based on the four earliest manuscripts at the British Library, three dating to the sixth and one to the tenth century. Arneson et al., “Introduction,” 20. 11. Arneson et al., “Introduction,” 7. For similar tropes about the dangers of the desert in Christian imagination, see Caner, “Introduction,” 39–50, esp. 48. 12. Arneson et al., “Introduction,” 16–17. 13. v.P.Jo., §44. 14. Arneson et al., “Introduction,” 20–21. 15. Arneson et al., “Introduction,” 16ff. 16. Eusebius, HE, 5.10; Procopius, DeBell., 1.17.43–48, 1.19.1–7; Philostorgus, HE, 3.4; chr.Zuqnin, 56ff.; John Malalas, Chron., 18:15–16; John of Nikiu, Chron. (trans. Charles), 69; Brooks, “Hymn of John Psaltes,” 613–14; Shahid, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century; Trimingham, Christianity among the Arabs; Tardy, Najrān; Griffith, Bible in Arabic, 9ff; Christides, “Himyarite-Ethiopian War.” For Jews in South Arabia, see Grasso, “Late Antique Kingdom’s Conversion.” 17. Eusebius, HE, 5:10. 18. John Malalas, Chron., 18.15–16. 19. Shahid, Martyrs of Najran, 46. According to the Acts of Gregentius, the first bishop of South Arabia after the massacre of Christians in Najran was Gregentius, who was appointed by the patriarch of Alexandria; Christides, “Himyarite-Ethiopian War,” 115. 20. Sozomen, HE, 2:24. 21. Ibn Hishām, Sīra, 21–22. 22. Newby, “Coptic Literary Influence,” 22–28. 23. Norris, “Fables and Legends,” 383. 24. Quoted in Ryckmans, Christianisme en Arabie du Sud, 441–42. 25. Tubach, “Anfänge des Christentums,“ 101–11. 26. For early Islamic historiography’s reliance on oral tradition, see, for example, Robinson, Islamic Historiography, 25ff.; Schoeler, Genesis of Literature in Islam. 27. Newby, “Coptic Literary Influence,” 27. 28. Shahid, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, 87n47. Note that Paul is referred to as a “shepherd of souls” in the Syriac story. 29. Tubach, “Christliche Legende,” 108.

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.

Notes to pages 126–130      201

30. v.Hom.De. (expanded Syr.), 22 (‫)ܐܘܦܝܡܝܢܘܣ‬. For the story of Saint Alexis and his father, Eufemien, in the Old French tradition, see Uitti, Story, Myth, and Celebration, 3–64. 31. The story of Saint Alexios is noted to have also been conflated with that of Saint John the Calybite, who lived in Constantinople, left his parents for his ascetic endeavors, and returned home in disguise, like the Man of God. Uitti, Story, Myth, and Celebration, 31; v.Jo.Kal., 640–41; BHG 121. 32. Arneson et al., “Introduction,” 7. 33. Procopius, DeBell., 1:19.7–16. 34. On these toponyms and their relation to the history of Arabia, see Robin, “Arabia and Ethiopia.” ̈ 35. Simeon, a.Him., 372: ‫ܕܣܗܕܐ ܚܝܡܝ̈ܪܝܐ‬ ‫ܬܫܥܝܬܐ‬ 36. Cf. Ex. 13:21: “By day the Lord went ahead of them in a pillar of cloud to guide them on their way and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light, so that they could travel by day or night.” 37. Swanson, “Arabic Hagiography,” 351; Munt, “Ibn al-Azraq,” 159; Kister, “Sīrah Literature,” 354–57. 38. v.P.Jo., §6. Cf. Acts 18. 39. Becker, “History of Muslim Worship,” 49–74. The shift from praying on Fridays and Sundays in the Syriac story to only Sundays in the Arabic story might have been an alteration to de-emphasize the Jewish and Christian holy day of Friday. Alternatively, this change, of course, might have happened in the Christian milieu, before the story reached Muslim transmitters, although such a shift is not observed in the later manuscript witnesses of the Syriac story. I am thankful to Christine Luckritz Marquiz for pointing out this possibility. 40. v.P.Jo., §8: ܿ ‫ܐܝܬ ܗܘܐ ܕܝܢ‬ ‫ܒܗ ܕܡܕܝܢܬܐ ܓܒܪܐ ܚܕ ܕܡܫܡܗ ܗܘܐ ܗܢܐ ܒܕܘܒ̈ܪܐ ܕܙܕܝܩܘܬܐ܆ ܕܐܝܬܘܗܝ‬ ̈ ̈ ‫ ܘܗܐ ܙܒܢܝܢ ܣܓܝܐܢ ܨܒܐ ܕܢܫܢܐ ܡܢ‬.‫ ܘܫܡܗ ܗܘܐ ܝܘܚܢܢ‬.‫ܗܘܐ ܩܫܝܫܐ ܒܥܕܬܐ ܕܐܠܗܐ‬ ‫ܡܕܝܢܬܐ܇ ܘܢܣܝܡ ܥܠܘܗܝ ܡܘܒܐܠ ܩܠܝܠܬܐ ܕܕܝܪܝܘܬܐ‬ 41. Bosworth, History of al-T. abarī, 5:196n492. 42. Newby, “Coptic Literary Influence,” 25. 43. Rippin, “S.ālih..” 44. v.P.Jo, §12. Cf. Mark 16:18; Acts 28:3–6. 45. Neither is there a similar episode in the Life of the Man of God. 46. v.P.Jo, §38. 47. v.P.Jo., §31–32. For an analysis of the story of the dendrite, see Smith, “Dendrites and Other Standers,” 117–34. The dendrite’s request to be buried by these two holy men is phrased as ̈ ̈ ‫ܒܚܝܝܟܘܢ‬ ̈ Syr.: ‫ܝܘܡܝܢ܆‬ ‫ܐܚܝ ܡܛܠ ܚܘܒܗ ܕܡܪܢ܆ ܟܬܪܘ ܠܘܬܝ ܐܦ ܐܢܬܘܢ ܛܠܛܐ‬ ‫ܐܐܠ‬ ‫ܘܬܚܙܘܢ ܬܕܡܘܪܬܐ‬ ّ‫فان‬ ْ‫ال تبْرح‬ Ar.: ‫ي ميت اآلن‬ ‫ي‬ َّ ‫حتي تقوم عل‬ 48. v.P.Jo., §23.

Durmaz-Stories between Christianity and Islam.indd 201

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202     Notes to Pages 131–134

49. v.P.Jo., §25 (trans. Arneson et al.). 50. v.P.Jo., §26. 51. v.P.Jo., §28. 52. Bowing, kneeling, and prostration were common prayer rituals in the Christian communities in Late Antiquity, which continued in the Islamic tradition. In the latter, a rakʿa can refer to prostration (sajda) during ritual prayer (s.alāt), or, more comprehensively, it can refer to the entire cycle that comprises standing, bowing, kneeling, and prostration. That Fīmyūn performs two rakʿas does not seem to be coincidental, however. S. alāt in the Islamic tradition originally consisted of two rakʿas, and this number was retained for journeys and other informal prayers. Therefore, even though rakʿa might have simply been a translation of the Syriac burkā, the prayer of Fīmyūn in this part of the story still probably sounded Islamic to the audience. See Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins, 73; Monnot, “s.alāt.” 53. In fact, immediately after this story, Fīmyūn is referred to as a Muslim instructing people in the ways of Islam, and his young disciple as an imām. 54. Jones, “Ibn Ish.āk. ”; Newby, Making of the Last Prophet, 5–8. For mawlās in early Islam, see Pipes, “Mawlas,” 277–322; Urban, Conquered Populations. 55. Jones, “Ibn Ish.āk. .” He was sometimes reviled by later Muslims scholars for transmitting material from descendants of Jews and Christians. Watt, “Materials Used by Ibn Ish.āq,” 31–34. 56. Watt, “Materials Used by Ibn Ish.āq,” 23–34. 57. Al-Bukhārī, Tārīkh, “mughīra” 1400; Fahd, “Ibn Sīrīn.” 58. Schoeler, Genesis of Literature in Islam, 47–50; Judd, Religious Scholars and the Umayyads, 52–61; note that Maʿmar b. Rāshid (d. 770), the author of another eighthcentury biography of Muhammad, was also a client and pupil of al-Zuhrī; Maghāzi (trans. Anthony), xix. 59. Ibn Hishām, Sīra, 20; Khoury, “Wahb b. Munabbih.” 60. Tannous, Medieval Middle East, 215–18. 61. Arneson et al., “Introduction,” 19–21; Brock et al., “Catalogue des manuscrits,” 612. 62. Al-Shābushtī, k.Diyārāt. 63. Duri, “Historic Folklore,” 125; Khoury, Wahb, 1:215ff. 64. Griffith, Bible in Arabic, 90, 111, 127, 129. 65. Griffith, 110; Griffith, “Anthony David of Baghdad,” 7–19. 66. Griffith, “Monks of Palestine,” 6, 15; Swanson, “Arabic Hagiography,” 345. 67. Family notes were important vessels of transmission, to which we will return in the next chapter. 68. Anawati, “ʿĪsā”; Q3:40, 4:169, 19:35. ْ 69. Ibn Hishām, Sīra, 22: ‫التي دخلت علي اهل دينهم بك ّل ارض‬ ‫حداثاال‬ ‫عليهم‬ ‫دخلت‬ ‫ثم‬ 70. Al-T.abarī, Taʾrīkh, 2:121 (trans. Bosworth, 5:199n499). 71. Ibn Hishām, Sīra, 20: ‫من بقايا اهل عيسي بن مريم‬ 72. Guillaume, Life of Muhammad, 14n3. 73. Paret, “As.h.āb al-Ukhdūd”; Cook, “As.h.āb al-Ukhdūd,” 125–48; Sizgorich, “ ‘Become Infidels,” 136ff.

Durmaz-Stories between Christianity and Islam.indd 202

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Notes to pages 135–139      203

74. Q85:4. For the quranic passive voice, see Mir, “Passives in the Qurʾān,” 169–79. 75. Cook, “As.h.āb al-Ukhdūd,” 128. 76. Dan. 3:1–30. Cf. Hebrews 11:32–34. For the possible connection between the Companions of the Trench and the story of Daniel, see Silverstein, “Who Are the As.h.āb al-Ukhdūd?,” 288–91. 77. a.Pol. 78. a.G.S.H. 79. Eusebius, Mart., 2, 3, 4, 8, 11, 13. 80. An extensive list of sources and studies on this story is given below. 81. Ibn ʿAbbās, Tafsīr, 507. 82. Some medieval historians, like al-T.abarī, showed ambivalence toward the account, stating that ʿAbdallāh was the founder of the religion in Najran and Dhū Nuwās came after him (another king had killed ʿAbdallāh before him), and Dhū Nuwās persecuted Christians after the time of ʿAbdallāh. Cook, “As.h.āb al-Ukhdūd,” 129. 83. BO 1:364–79; AMS 1:372–97; Italian-Syriac: Guidi, “La lettera di Simeone,” 471–514; English translation in Jeffery, “Three Documents,” 195–205. 84. BHO, 99–106 (pp. 24–26); Greek: AG 5:1–62; Latin: “Martyrium Sancti Arethae,” Acta Sanctorum: Octobris 10:721–62; Arabic: Bausi and Gori, Tradizioni orientali del “Martirio di Areta,” 30–88, 31–89. There are also Ethiopic, Armenian, and Georgian versions. General works on this martyrdom episode: Shahid, Martyrs of Najran; Ryckmans, “Main Hagiographic Accounts,” 113–33; Shahid, “Martyrs of Najran,” 151–53; Detoraki, Le martyre de Saint Aréthas; Taylor, “Stylistic Comparison,” 143–76. 85. B.Him. (trans. Moberg); Shahid, “Book of the Himyarites,” 349–62. 86. chr.Zuqnin, 57ff.; Ps.-Zachariah Rhetor, Chron., 8.3. 87. Shahid, Martyrs of Najran, 17–30. 88. B.Him. (trans. Moberg), xxvi–xxxvi. 89. B.Him. (trans. Moberg), lxiv. 90. He was also one of the informants of the author; B.Him. (trans. Moberg), cxv–cxvii. 91. B.Him. (trans. Moberg), xliii–xliv. 92. For other examples of the exegesis of the People of the Trench that involves the story of ʿAbdallāh b. al-Thāmir, see al-D . ah.h.āk (eighth c.), Tafsīr, 2:950; Ibn Wahb (tenth c.), Tafsīr, 2:488. 93. Cook, “As.h.āb al-Ukhdūd,” 144; Caspi and Cohen, Binding, 54–94. 94. Ibn ʿAbbās, Tafsīr, 407: ‫نجران ويقال من أهلالموصل‬ ‫قوما من‬. 95. Cook, “As.h.āb al-Ukhdūd,” 137. 96. Al-Dīnawarī, Akhbār, 109–10. 97. Lewin, “al-Dīnawarī.” 98. Al-Dīnawarī, Akhbār, 110. 99. Al-Thaʿlabī, Qis.as. al-anbiyāʾ, 246–48. 100. In some Persian versions the story was connected to that of Daniel and his companions in the fiery furnace; Cook, “As.h.āb al-Ukhdūd,” 137; cf. Dan. 3. 101. B.Him. (trans. Moberg), cix.

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204     Notes to Pages 139–148

102. Cook, “As.h.āb al-Ukhdūd”; Cook, “Prophet Muh.ammad,” 323–45. 103. Al-T.abarī, Taʾrīkh, 2:119. 104. Laoust, “Ibn Kathīr.” 105. Hagler, “Sapping the Narrative,” 303. 106. Hagler, 305–6. 107. Ibn Kathīr, Bidāya, 2:168. 108. Ibn Kathīr, Bidāya, 2:129. 109. Gilliot, “Yāqūt al-Rūmī”; Dietrich, “Ibn al-K.ift.ī.” 110. Yāqūt, Muʿjam, 5:266. 111. Sellheim, “Neue Materialen,” 16–34. 112. Lozovsky, Earth Is Our Book, 9ff. 113. Ibn ʿArabī, Muh. ād. arat, 249–52. 114. Ateş, “Ibn al-ʿArabī.” 115. Ateş, “Ibn al-ʿArabī.” 116. Ibn ʿArabī, Muh. ād. arat, 252. 117. Ibn ʿArabī, Muh. ād. arat, 250. 118. Blachère, “al-Farazdak. .” 119. In the story the term is used to refer to how S.ālih. could not contain himself and cried out loudly when he saw that Fīmyūn was in danger. 120. See chapter 4. 121. Ibn ʿArabī, Muh. ād. arat, 18. 122. Ibn ʿArabī, Muh. ād. arat, 18–32. 123. Austin, Sufis of Andalusia, 48.

chapter 6. stories between christianity and islam 1. For example, Q5:82, Q9:31, Q9:34, Q16:87. For representation of monks in the Quran, see Griffith, “Monasticism and Monks”; Sahner, “Birth of Monasticism.” ّ ‫منهم ق‬ 2. Q5:82: ‫يسين ورهباناهم وأالنّيستكبرون‬ ‫س‬ 3. Griffith, Bible in Arabic, 30–31. For Muslims venerating contemporary Christian holy men, see Tannous, Medieval Middle East, 364ff.; Bowman, Christian Monastic Life, 34–40 and passim. 4. Ibn Hishām, Sīra, 115–19; Roggema, Legend of Sergius Bah. īrā; Szilagyi, “Muhammad and the Monk,” 169–214. 5. Ibn Hishām, Sīra, 102–15, 120–21. 6. Ibn Hishām, Sīra, 130ff. 7. Ibn Hishām, Sīra, 120, 149. 8. Another well-known example of a knowledgeable Christian who saw the signs of prophethood in Muhammad was Waraqa b. Nawfal, a cousin of Muhammad’s first wife, Khadīja. Ibn Hishām, Sīra, 102, 143, 154; Robinson, “Warak. a b. Nawfal.” Monks’ clairvoyance is also mentioned in the Kitāb al-Rāhīb, attributed to the eighth-century chemist and philosopher Jābir b. H . ayyān. In this text, a monk teaches Jābir about the

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.

Notes to pages 148–149      205

philosophers’ stone. Rosenthal, Classical Heritage in Islam, 248–50; Kraus and Plessner, “D . ayyān.” ––jābir b. H 9. Al-Bukhārī, S. ah. īh. , 4.56 §676. 10. Fowden, “Lamp and the Wine Flask,” 8–10. Also see Fowden and Fowden, Studies, 149–75, esp. 173–74. 11. Fowden, “Lamp and the Wine Flask,” 4–6. 12. Fowden, 5. Fowden uses monks and monasticism interchangeably in her article as she discusses Islamic approaches toward them. Note the distinction between the hagiographic “holy man” and the “real” monk, an active participant in social and economic life in Christianity, developed in Ashkenazi, “Holy Man versus Monk,” 745–65. 13. Fowden,” “Lamp and the Wine Flask,” 6–7. 14. Wood, “Christians in Umayyad Iraq,” 255–74, esp. 266. 15. Q57:27: ‫ورهبانةيّٱبتدعوها‬ 16. Ah.mad b. H . anbal, Musnad, 6.226. 17. ʿAbdallāh b. Mubārak, k.Jihād, §16: ‫ ورهبانية هذه األمة الجهاد في سبيل هللا‬،‫قال إن لكل أمة رهبانية‬ The term can be translated as “holy war,” or, more generically, “struggling for pietistic purposes.” Since in some versions of the report Muhammad says that the monasticism of Islam is pilgrimage (h. ajj), for this report “struggling for pietistic purposes” is a better translation for jihād. Goldziher, Muslim Studies, 2:357; Bosworth, “An Early Persian S.ūfī,” 79; Sahner, “Monasticism of My Community Is Jihad.” The latter part of the saying might be a later addition, as discussed in Goldziher, Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law, 128. For jihād as “pietistic struggle” in the context of Late Antiquity, see Sizgorich, “Sanctified Violence,” 906–14. 18. Goldziher, Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law, 123–24; Griffith, “Monasticism and Monks.” The fundamental discussions on asceticism and mysticism in Islam and their similarities to Christian asceticism are Gobillot, “Zuhd”; Massignon et al., “Tas.awwuf”; Melchert, “Asceticism”; Guillaume, Traditions of Islam, 142–43; Goldziher, Muslim Studies, 2:357–60; Goldziher, Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law, 123, 134–66; Andrae, “Zuhd und Mönchtum”; Nicholson, Mystics of Islam; Livne-Kafri, “Early Muslim Ascetics”; Sizgorich, “Sanctified Violence,” 906–14; Chittick, Sufism; Chittick, In Search of the Lost Heart; Smith, Muslim Women Mystics; Cutsinger, Paths to the Heart; Loosley, “Brothers and Brotherhoods”; Tamcke, Gotteserlebnis und Gotteslehre. 19. For the development of the theory of sanctity in Islam, see Sizgorich, Narrative and Community, 185; Donner, Islamic Origins, 92; Khalek, Damascus after the Muslim Conquest, 85, 117; Renard, Friends of God, 260ff.; Renard, Crossing Confessional Boundaries, 95–174. 20. Sizgorich, Narrative and Community, 11–12, 27ff.; Mourad, “Christian Monks in Islamic Literature,” 2–18. 21. Roggema, Legend of Sergius Bah. īrā, 3–5. 22. Fowden, “Lamp and the Wine Flask,” 8–10.

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206     Notes to Pages 150–153

23. Radtke et al., “Walī.” 24. Goldziher, Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law, 116–29. 25. Arberry, Muslim Saints and Mystics, 372, 374. For monks as converts to the early community, also see Bertaina, Christian and Muslim Dialogues, 94–99. 26. Fowden, “Lamp and the Wine Flask,” 12–18. For Muslims visiting Christian monasteries, see Chrysostomides, “’There Is No Harm in It’,” 2, 20, and passim. 27. Al-Shābushtī, k.Diyārāt, 218–27. 28. Fowden, “Lamp and the Wine Flask,” 15–18. Sizgorich, “Christian Exotic,” 18–25. 29. For the Islamic theorization of caliphal authority, see Crone and Hinds, God’s Caliph; Marsham, “ ‘God’s Caliph’ Revisited,” 3–38, esp. 26–27. Note that in the Christian tradition, too, there was what Peter Brown calls a “transfer of sanctity” from Jerusalem to the Royal City, the center of political power, in the early Middle Ages; Brown, World of Late Antiquity, 141. 30. Cobb, “ʿUmar (II) b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz”; Livne-Kafri, “Early Muslim Ascetics,” 108, 110, 111; Borrut, “Future of the Past,” 287–88; Khalek, “Early Islamic History Reimagined,” 431–51, esp. 435, 438–39, 450. For ʿUmar II’s hagiographic representation, also see Kilpatrick, “ʿUmar ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz,” 67–70. 31. Livne-Kafri, “Early Muslim Ascetics,” 126–28. 32. Livne-Kafri, 128. 33. For authorship in the Greco-Roman and European traditions, see the introduction, note 48. 34. Khalidi, Islamic Historiography; Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought; Leder, “Authorship and Transmission,” 67–81; Leder and Kilpatrick, “Classical Arabic Prose Literature,” 2–26; Al-Hibri, Reinterpreting Islamic Historiography; Leder, Story-Telling; Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins; Robinson, Islamic Historiography; Hirschler, Medieval Arabic Historiography; Hoyland, “History, Fiction, and Authorship,” 16–46; Schoeler, Genesis of Literature in Islam. 35. Hirschler, Authors as Actors, 2–3; Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins, 1–31, 255–71. 36. Leder and Kilpatrick, “Classical Arabic Prose Literature,” 2–26. 37. Leder and Kilpatrick, 16. 38. Zakeri, “Al-T.abarī on Sasanian History,” 28–29n4. 39. Leder and Kilpatrick, “Classical Arabic Prose Literature,” 16. 40. Leder and Kilpatrick, 16–17. 41. Hoyland, “History, Fiction, and Authorship,” 19–22. Also see Khalidi’s discussion on authors approaching their material from the confines of specific disciplines; Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought, 24, 34–39, and passim. 42. Hoyland, “History, Fiction, and Authorship,” 26–32. 43. Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire, 47. 44. For the concept of transfer of authorship in Islam, see Mourad, Early Islam between Myth and History, 7–9, 80–91; Schoeler, Genesis of Literature in Islam, 40ff.; Leder, “Authorship and Transmission,” 67–81.

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Notes to pages 154–159      207

45. Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, Wajal, 31 (trans. Rosenthal, 44). 46. Najman, “Reading beyond Authority,” 17–30. 47. See note 44 above. 48. Ibn al-Nadīm, Fihrist, 3:1:295. 49. Khoury, Wahb, 1:259. 50. Muhammad b. al-Fayd. al-Ghassānī, Akhbār wa-h. ikayāt; Khalek, Damascus, 11–12, 42–43, 52, 150ff. 51. Storytellers’ contribution to authorship is briefly discussed in Leder and Kilpatrick, “Classical Arabic Prose Literature,” 14–15. Also see Leder, “Authorship and Transmission,” 67–81. 52. Robinson, “History and Heilsgeschichte,” 133. 53. Clark, Reading Renunciation; 34–35; Bowes, Private Worship, Public Values, 202–13. 54. For families and the continual lines of priesthood in the Syriac Church in Late Antiquity, see Tannous, Medieval Middle East, 204–5. 55. Clark, Reading Renunciation, 56–57. 56. Maskarinec, City of Saints, esp. chap. 5. 57. For renunciation and monastic patronage, see Clark, Reading Renunciation, 37–38. For the patronage of production of texts, Clark, 50. 58. Debié, “Christians in the Service of the Caliph,” 53–71. 59. Debié, 55. 60. Griffith, “Mans.ūr Family and Saint John of Damascus,” 29–51. 61. The essential works in the vast bibliography on John of Damascus are summarized in Griffith, “Mans.ūr Family and Saint John of Damascus,” 45–51. 62. For pre-Islamic tribal church and monastic establishments, see Fowden, “Lamp and the Wine Flask,” 4–5. For the continuity and discontinuity in church building under Umayyad rule, see Debié, “Christians in the Service of the Caliph,” 57–60; Guidetti, “Sacred Topography,” 343–57. 63. Bray, “Family in the Medieval Islamic World,” 731–42. 64. Khalek, Damascus after the Muslim Conquest, 42–43. 65. For example, Ibn al-Nadīm, Fihrist, 3:2:401, 3:3:435–40, 3:3:446, 3:3:454. 66. Kennedy, Court of Caliphs, 254–57, 260. 67. Clark, Reading Renunciation, 208. 68. Khalek, Damascus after the Muslim Conquest, 45–52 and passim. 69. Muhammad b. al-Fayd. al-Ghassānī, Akhbār wa-h. ikayāt, §§6, 7, 8, 12, 13, 18. 70. Khoury, Wahb, 1:189, 222ff.; Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought, 7. 71. Cobb, “Scholars and Society,” 421. For scholarship and transmission in the family, also see Mirza, “Peoples’ Hadith,” 37–39, 43, 47–48; Schoeler, Genesis of Literature in Islam, 19–20; Pavlovitch, “Manda Family.” 72. Bourdieu, Distinction. 73. Madelung, “Sh–īʿa.” 74. Madelung, “Sh–īʿa”; Goldziher, Van Arendonk, and Tritton, “Ahl al-Bayt.”

Durmaz-Stories between Christianity and Islam.indd 207

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208     Notes to Pages 159–160

75. Madelung, “Sh–īʿa”; Kohlberg, “From Imāmiyya to Ithnā-ʿashariyya,” 521–34; Newman, Formative Period of Twelver Shīʿism; Takim, Heirs of the Prophet, 24–30 and passim. 76. Brown, Hadith, 123–49. 77. Judd, Religious Scholars, 57. 78. For the notion of nonfixity of local knowledge, see Purcell, “Fixity,” 73–84, esp. 77. 79. For a recent review and treatment of the topic, see Voll, “Scholars in Networks,” 333–51.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

primary sources: texts and translations ʿAbd al-Razzāq b. Hammām al-S.anʿānī. Tafsīr. Ed.: Mah.mūd Muh.ammadʿAbduh. Beirut: Dār al-kutub al-ʿilmiyya, n.d. . Mus.annaf. Ed.: H . abīb al-Rah.mān al-Aʿz.amī. 12 vols. Beirut, 1983. ʿAbdallāh b. Mubārak. Kitāb al-Jihād. Ed.: Beirut: Al-maktaba al-ʿas.riyya, 1988. Acts of George. [a.Geor.] Ed. Syriac: E. W. Brooks. Le Muséon 38 (1925, repr. Gorgias Press, 2006): 73–96. Ed. Latin: F. Cumont. “La plus ancienne légende de St. Georges.” RHR 114 (1936): 5–51. Trans.: E. W. Brooks. Le Muséon 38 (1925, repr. Gorgias Press, 2006): 67–115. Trans. Eth.: W. Budge. St. George of Lydda, The Patron Saint of England: A Study of the Cultus of St. George in Ethiopia. London: Luzac, 1930. Ed. and trans. Coptic: W. Budge. The Martyrdom and Miracles of Saint George of Cappadocia. London, 1888. Acts of Gūryā, Šmūnā, and H . abīb [a.G.S.H.] Trans.: Francis Crawford Burkitt. Acts of the Edessan Martyrs Guria and Shmona, and Habib and the Story of Their Deliverance of Euphemia. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2007. Acts of Māri. [a.Mari] Trans.: Amir Harrak. Acts of Mār Māri the Apostle. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2005. Acts of Paul and Thecla. [a.P.Th.] Ed.: Richard Lipsius and Max Bonnet. Acta Apostolorum Apocrypha, 1:235–72. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1990. Ah.mad b. H . anbal. Musnad. Ed.: 6 vols. Beirut, 1969. 209

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Index

ʿĀʾisha bt. Abū Bakr, 62 ʿAbd al-Malik, 63 ʿAlī b. Abī T.aˉlib, 100, 102, ʿUmar b. al-Kat.t.āb, 62, 106, 114, 116 ʿUmar II, 100, 150 Abraham, prophet, 30, 38–41, 42, 44, 52–53, 55, 60, 63, 78, 97, 102–3, 112; Azar, father of, 44 Abū Bakr, 62 Abū Hurayra, 52, 56–58, 63, Ahmed, Shahab, 64 Al-Azmeh, Aziz, 5, 48, 179n94, 180n118 Alexander the Great, 12, 81–88, 101–8, 120, 146 Amphilochius of Iconium, 25 Angelika Neuwirth, 5, 7, 43, 45–46, 54, 58 animals, 57, 96; bird, 47, 102; beasts, 23, 84, 102; dog, 60, 70–76; donkey, 64; fish, 38, 80–85, 92; snake, 92, 128, 143 Antioch, 27 Antony of Egypt, 10, 29, 91–100, 119, 120, 144, 146–47, 155 Antrim, Zayde, 106 apocryphal literature, 6–7, 47, 49 Apophthegmata Patrum (Sayings of the Desert Fathers), 6, 95–97, 125 asceticism, 9, 24, 28, 52, 59, 64, 79, 92, 100, 115, 144, 147–50, 156, 158. See also zuhd Athanasius of Alexandria, 29, 94, 96–97, 124 authority, 1, 4, 6, 8–9, 11, 15, 19, 20, 23–24, 27, 32, 36, 41, 52, 60, 71, 74, 84, 89, 99, 105–6, 132–34, 146, 149, 15–55, 157, 160

authorship, 3, 11, 13, 14, 29–30, 89, 91, 98, 105, 121, 134, 146, 151–55 awliyāʾ (friends of God), 150 Axum, 101–2, 124, 127, 141. See also Ethiopia Baghdad, 91, 97, 99, 107 Bah.īrā, 147, 149 Basil of Caesarea, 25, 78, 97 Book of the Himyarites, 136–38 Brock, Sebastian, 20 Bukhārī, al-, 55, 148 burial, 116, 130 Byzantium, 88, 124. See also Roman Empire Cameron, Averil, 153, 165n5 Chin, Mike, 4 Chosroes I, 105 Chosroes II, 116 Chronicle of Sebeos, 56 Chronicle of Zuqnin, 137 Clark, Elizabeth, 13, 158 Cobb, Paul, 108, 158 church: building, 71, 74, 114–16, 131; narrating stories at, 28; priests / treasurers of, 23, 114–15; tribal, 157 Clark, Elizabeth, 13, 158 Cobb, Paul, 108, 158 Companions of the Cave, 66–76, 79, 82, 89. See also Youths / Seven Sleepers of Ephesus Constantine I, 84, 99, 115–16 Constantinople, 15, 23, 24, 115–16, 119

257

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.

258      index court: Abbasid, 97–99; Byzantine, 64, 156; Umayyad, 157 Cox Miller, Patricia, 100 Crone, Patricia, 168n28, 177n49 Daniel the Stylite, 15–16 demons, 23, 129 dendrites, 123–25, 129–30 diegesis, 6, 23, 95. See also hagiodiegesis Edessa, 107, 115, 122–27, 129, 135, 145, 146, 157 Efthymiadis, Stephanos, 2 Egeria, 21–22, 30 Egypt, 2, 21–22, 26, 28–30, 56, 84, 95, 96–97, 104–6, 119, 126, 132, 155 enkomion / encomiastic, 6, 13, 20, 90, 107, 108, 142, 153. See also fad. āʾil entertainment, 8, 25, 99, 133 Ethiopia, 101, 124, 141. See also Axum Eusebius of Caesarea, 84, 124, 135 fad. āʾil (excellences), 90, 106–8, 119, 142 family: of Muhammad, 44, 54–55, 62, 159; prestige of, 77, 156–59; renunciation of, 52; scholarship and, 104–5, 134, 143, 154–55; storytelling in, 24, 27, 62, 156–60 fire ordeal, 101 folklore, 2, 85, 118, 158 Fowden, Elizabeth Key, 148–49 funerals, 25. See also burial

Himyar, 101–2, 120, 123–24, 126–27, 130–31 Historia Monachorum (Lives of the Desert Fathers), 23, 29, 100 homilies / homiletic literature, 20, 25, 34, 46, 47, 67, 69, 71, 73–75, 78, 81–83, 85, 87–90 Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, 91–100, 120, 144, 148, 152, 154–55 Ibn al-Azraq, 114–20 Ibn Hishām, 101–6, 153 Ibn Ish.āq, 33, 64, 125, 127, 132–35, 138–39, 142–44, 147, 149 Ibn Kathīr, 122, 138, 140–41 Ibn ʿAbbās, 62–63, 73–75, 79, 89, 136, 138; Tafsīr attributed to, 63, 74–75, 79, 136, 138 Ibn ʿArabī, 76, 122, 143–44 icons / iconography, 17, 49, 64, 76 India, 99, 124, 138, 160 Infancy Gospel of Thomas, 47 Iraq, 103, 105–6, 114, 132, 138 isrāʾīliyyāt and qis. as. al-anbiyāʾ (genres), 7, 141

genre, 5–7, 13, 31, 34, 99, 107–8, 120, 151–52, 154 George Megalomartyros, 87, 91, 109–14, 147, 153. See also Jirjīs Gospel of Luke, 77–78 Gregory of Nazianzus, 78 Gregory of Nyssa, 78, 156 Gregory of Tours, 100 Gregory Thaumaturgus, 52–53. See also Jurayj Griffith, Sidney, 5, 71–73, 84, 98, 113, 133, 147, 157

Jacob of Sarug, 25, 71–73, 75, 78, 81–83, 85, 87, 88 Jacobites (West Syrian / Miaphysite Church), 73; hagiographical traditions of, 70, 123; Islamic representation of, 75 Jerome, 78, 83, 96 Jerusalem, 22, 29, 62, 123; Alexander’s visit to, 102–3; Muhammad’s night journey to, 55 Jesus, 42, 47–49, 55, 59, 61, 64, 70–71, 97, 100, 107, 109, 111–13, 120, 125, 127, 130–31, 134, 144, 148–49 Jirjīs, 109–44 John Malalas, 124 John Moschus, 26 John of Ephesus, 20, 22, 24, 26, 29, 137 John the Baptist, 63 Joseph, prophet, 42, 50, 55, 100 Judgment of Solomon, 57–58, 63 Jurayj, 52–53 Justinian I, 84

Hagia Sophia, 84, 119 hagiodiegesis, 3–5, 12, 16, 20–21, 23–29, 31, 32, 34, 38, 42, 47, 49, 98, 155. See also diegesis Hammām b. Munabbih, 55, 158 Hanaoka, Mimi, 106, 108, 118 Harvey, Susan Ashbrook, 20 Helena, 115–16

Kaʿba, 49, 102 Kaʿb al-Ah.bār, 62 Khalek, Nancy, 108, 155, 158 Khid. r, al-, 81, 86–87, 102–4 king(s): Edessan, 115; Himyarite, 101, 139; Jewish, 38, 124; Persian, 33, 115, 138; prophet-king, 84; Roman, 115, 119

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index      259 Kitāb al-Diyārāt (Book of Monasteries), 133 Kitāb al-Tījān (Book of Crowns), 91, 101–8, 152 Krueger, Derek, 11 law: canon law, 31; dīn as, 93, 131; Islamic law, 34, 53, 72, 159; Mosaic law, 93 Lausiac History, 21–22, 24, 29, 96 Life of Antony, 29, 94–96 Life of Constantine, 84 Life of Macrina, 24, 156 Life of the Man of God, 18–19, 23, 29, 123–26, 128 Life of Zbinā, 25 literacy, 3–4, 17, 31–32, 167n20 Lives of the Eastern Saints, 20, 22, 24, 26, 29 magic, 84, 136. See also sorcery Mani, prophet, 97 manuscripts, 122–23, 126, 133, 137, Martyrdom of Arethas, 136–38 Martyrs of Najran, 38, 123–24, 127, 133–39, 146, Marūthā of Maypherqat, 114–20, 147. See also Maypherqat Mary, Mother of Jesus, 39, 42, 44, 47, 49, 54–55, 58, 111, 125, 131, 134, Masʿūdī, al-, 113 Maypherqat / Mayyafāriqīn, 114–20 Maʾmūn, al-, 97 Melania the Elder, 24, 156 Melkite Christians, 114; Islamic representations of, 75 memory, 3, 6, 10, 34, 36, 56, 61, 63, 75, 88, 89, 91, 94, 99, 104, 119, 120, 127, 144, 154–55, 159, 161 merchants, 27, 155 monasteries: Arabic used at, 133; building, 115–16, 157; vs. monks in Islam, 148; Muslims visiting, 118, 133, 150, 160; rivalries between, 148; storytelling at, 23, 25, 29 monasticism, 9, 59, 96, 146–9 monks: vs. monasticism in Islam, 146–51; portrayed as corrupt, 93; portrayed positively in Islam, 59, 62, 115–16, 134, 136; as storytellers, 20–23, 28–32, 95, 98 Moses, prophet, 12, 30, 38–39, 42–43, 50, 54–57, 62, 64, 67, 69, 80–89, 93, 97, 103–4, 112; conflation with Alexander, 83–85; conflation with al-Khid. r, 103–4 Mosul, 113, 138 Mourad, Suleiman, 154

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Muhammad: audiences of, 1, 33–38, 43–47; exhortation on asceticism, 149; in the genealogy of biblical prophets, 53–55; likens his Companions to prophets, 55; looks like Abraham, 55; his narrative knowledge challenged, 66; night journey of, 55, 195n98; as the “owner of the Book,” 116; signs of the prophecy of, 147–48; as a storyteller, 33–61; visions of, 108 Munt, Harry, 117 Muqātil b. Sulaymān, 68, 73–74, 78–79, 87–89, 138 Najran, 66–67, 74–75, 124–27, 130–31, 133–34, 136–39, 141–42, 153. See also Martyrs of Najran narrative literacy, 4, 32, 60, 62, 64, 66, 156–7. See also literacy narratology, 18–19, 37, 85, 153 Nestorians (East Syrian Church), 105; hagiographic traditions of, 25; Islamic representations of, 75 Neuwirth, Angelika, 5, 7, 43, 45–46, 54, 58 Nisibis, 26, 123 Noah, prophet, 39–40, 42, 44, 50, 54–55, 64, 101–2 Ong, Walter, 17 open storytelling, 44–47 orality, 2–5, 9, 11–12, 15–20, 31, 35, 49, 98; oral residue in texts, 17–18; oral tradition, 7–8, 49, 73–74, 82–84, 115, 118, 125, 133, 137, 144, 151 pagans / paganism, 32, 49, 66, 69, 71, 109, 117, 125, 144; dīn al-ʿarab, 130; idols / idolworship, 40, 41, 49, 73, 79, 110, 112, 126; tree-worship, 123–25, 130–31, 143 Palestinian Talmud, 78–79 Palladius, 21–22, 24, 29, 96 Paret, Rudi, 71 performance: of miracles, 30, 130, 136; of religious ritual, 131–2; of storytelling, 1–4, 17–20, 25, 31–32, 37–38, 45–46, 50–51, 155 Persia, 27, 33, 75, 103, 105–7, 113, 115–17, 124–25, 138–39 Philo of Alexandria, 57, 84 philosophers, 84, 95, 97, 99, 143 pilgrims / pilgrimage, 12, 21–22, 27, 30, 49, 53, 108, 122, 155, 156; of Alexander to Mecca, 102, 108. See also Egeria

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260      index poetry, 17, 46, 98, 145, 148, 150; piyyut, 83 Pratum Spirituale (Spiritual Meadow), 26 prison, 24–25 prophets: biblical vs. Arabian, 6; in Islamic literature, 7–8, 66–145; as Muhammad’s precursors, 53–56, 112; in the Quran, 5-6, 33–65; wives of, 54, 62 Protoevangelium of James, 47 Ps.-Zachariah of Mytilene, 137 Qummī, al-, 68, 74, 89 Quran: audiences of Muhammad in, 33, 36; codification of, 34, 36, 61, 67; God’s speech in, 34–36; God’s speech outside of, 36; interpretations of, 7–8, 56–61, 72–76, 78–80, 86–89, 103–4, 134–39; narratives in, 5–7, 33–34, 37–61, 66–72, 77–78, 80–86; prophets in, 6, 38–49, 53–61; terms for storytelling in, 42–44 qus. s. ās. . See storytellers rabbis, 66, 101, 147 Rabbula of Edessa, 123–24, 126, 129 rahbaniyya, 149 Rapp, Claudia, 2, 26 relics, 110, 116, 156 Reynolds, Gabriel, 75 Rich Man and Lazarus, 77–79 Roman emperor, 84, 94. See also king Roman Empire, 70, 75, 120, 127. See also Byzantium Rome, 22, 96, 156 Rosenthal, Franz, 94, 97 Rubin, Uri, 64 Rustam and Isfandiyār, 1, 14, 33 s. ah. āba and tābiʿūn (Companions and Successors of Muhammad), 8–9, 45, 55, 61, 63, 65, 67, 79, 91, 100, 108, 154, 159 S.ālih., prophet, 38, 39, 128 sailors, 23 Salmān al-Fārisī, 62–63, 79 Satan, 33, 40, 41, 69; Satanic Verses, 44. See also demons Shahid, Irfan, 126, 137 Shapur, 115 shrine: building, 156; dedicated to Saint George, 114; icons at, 49; literary descriptions of, 118; narrating stories at, 21, 23, 27, 156

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Sidney Griffith, 5, 71–73, 84, 98, 113, 133, 147, 157 Simeon of Bēth Aršām, 28, 119, 127, 136–37 Simeon the Stylite, 18, 21–23, 28–31, 118–19 Simon Peter, 111, 118 Sīra al-nabawiyya, al-, 33, 49, 63, 64, 66, 68, 101, 104–6, 122, 125–32, 136, 138, 142–44, 148–49 sorcery, 84, 134, 136, 141, 147. See also magic South Arabia, 48, 55, 66, 75, 88–89, 101–8, 120, 122–27, 129–30, 135–44, 153, 158, 160. See also Najran; Himyar storyteller(s), 18, 26–28, 48, 73, 154; authorship of, 155; as exegetes, 51, 56–61, 90; female, 24–27, 62; lay people as, 22–23, 27, 61–64; Muhammad as a, 5, 7, 33–61 Sufism, 76, 143–45 Syria, 74, 108, 109, 114, 123, 125, 128–30, 140, 143, 150, 155 T.abarī, al-: Tafsīr, 68, 72–74, 79, 87–89; Taʾrīkh al-Rusul waʾl-Mulūk, 91, 109–14 tafsīr (exegesis) 7–8, 13, 31, 33, 50–52, 55–59, 62–68, 72–76, 78–80, 82, 86–89, 104, 134, 136–41, 145, 153 Tannous, Jack, 31 Theodoret of Cyrrhus, 107 Theodosius II, 70, 115 Tigris, 113 Tottoli, Roberto, 61–62 translation, 10–11, 83, 87, 95–98, 114–15, 118, 133, 152, 160 transmission, 8–11, 23, 28, 34, 37, 58, 60–62, 65, 68, 76, 82, 89, 90, 98, 101, 104, 113, 117–18, 120, 122, 125–28, 132–33, 137, 146, 148, 150–61; casual vs. intentional, 160 trees: in the Quran, 45; worship of, 123–25, 130–31, 143. See also dendrites Turner, Peter, 22, 168n27 van Bladel, Kevin, 86 Wahb b. Munabbih, 88–89, 101–5, 109, 113–14, 125–26, 131–34, 142, 152–55, 157–58, 160; access to libraries, 89, 105, 133; books of, 101, 105, 134; family members of, 105, 134, 154–55, 157–58

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index      261 Water of Life, 81, 85, 103 Wheeler, Brannon, 81–82, 84 women: disbelievers, 54; exemplars of piety and virtue, 26, 49, 54, 137; healed/saved by miracles, 27, 129; martyrs, 24, 111, 131, 135, 137; pilgrims, 21–22, 30, 49; prostitutes, 52–53, 58; questioning holy men, 30, 149; regulating the piety of, 24; storytellers, 24–27, 62

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Yāqūt al-H . amawī, 122, 141–43 Youths / Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, 12, 70–76, 123, 146. See also Companions of the Cave Zayd b. Thābit, 46 zuhd, 149. See also asceticism Zuhrī, al-, 132, 159–60 Zwettler, Michael, 53

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