Before and After Muhammad: The First Millennium Refocused - Hardcover

Fowden, Garth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691158533 ISBN 13: 9780691158532

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2013

Synopsis

Islam emerged amid flourishing Christian and Jewish cultures, yet students of Antiquity and the Middle Ages mostly ignore it. Despite intensive study of late Antiquity over the last fifty years, even generous definitions of this period have reached only the eighth century, whereas Islam did not mature sufficiently to compare with Christianity or rabbinic Judaism until the tenth century. Before and After Muhammad suggests a new way of thinking about the historical relationship between the scriptural monotheisms, integrating Islam into European and West Asian history. Garth Fowden identifies the whole of the First Millennium--from Augustus and Christ to the formation of a recognizably Islamic worldview by the time of the philosopher Avicenna--as the proper chronological unit of analysis for understanding the emergence and maturation of the three monotheistic faiths across Eurasia. Fowden proposes not just a chronological expansion of late Antiquity but also an eastward shift in the geographical frame to embrace Iran. In Before and After Muhammad, Fowden looks at Judaism, Christianity, and Islam alongside other important developments in Greek philosophy and Roman law, to reveal how the First Millennium was bound together by diverse exegetical traditions that nurtured communities and often stimulated each other.

About this title

About the Author

Garth Fowden is Research Director at the Institute of Historical Research, National Research Foundation, Athens, and Sultan Qaboos Professor of Abrahamic Faiths at the University of Cambridge. His books include The Egyptian Hermes: A Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind and Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity (both Princeton).

From the Back Cover

"Before and After Muhammad refocuses the chronological and geographical lenses through which historians view developments during the seminal period between ancient and medieval history in the West. Fowden writes clearly and convincingly. His research is thorough and his thesis is compelling."--Sidney H. Griffith, Catholic University of America

"Fowden presents a powerful and compelling new model for an integrated view of late antique and early medieval Christian, Jewish, and Muslim history that replaces traditional distinctions between East and West. Before and After Muhammad is an ambitious book, one that has the potential to shift fundamental paradigms."--Anthony Kaldellis, Ohio State University

From the Inside Flap

"Before and After Muhammad refocuses the chronological and geographical lenses through which historians view developments during the seminal period between ancient and medieval history in the West. Fowden writes clearly and convincingly. His research is thorough and his thesis is compelling."--Sidney H. Griffith, Catholic University of America

"Fowden presents a powerful and compelling new model for an integrated view of late antique and early medieval Christian, Jewish, and Muslim history that replaces traditional distinctions between East and West.Before and After Muhammad is an ambitious book, one that has the potential to shift fundamental paradigms."--Anthony Kaldellis, Ohio State University

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

BEFORE AND AFTER MUHAMMAD

THE FIRST MILLENNIUM REFOCUSED

By Garth Fowden

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2014 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-15853-2

Contents

PREFATORY NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.........................................
ix
ABBREVIATIONS..............................................................
xi
Chapter 1. INCLUDING ISLAM.................................................
1
Chapter 2. TIME: BEYOND LATE ANTIQUITY.....................................
18
Chapter 3. A NEW PERIODIZATION: THE FIRST MILLENNIUM.......................
49
Chapter 4. SPACE: AN EASTWARD SHIFT........................................
92
Chapter 5. EXEGETICAL CULTURES 1: ARISTOTELIANISM..........................
127
Chapter 6. EXEGETICAL CULTURES 2: LAW AND RELIGION.........................
164
Chapter 7. VIEWPOINTS AROUND 1000: TUS, BASRA, BAGHDAD, PISA...............
198
PROSPECTS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH.............................................
219
MAP: THE EURASIAN HINGE, WITH CIRCUM-ARABIAN TRADE ROUTES..................
106
INDEX......................................................................
225

CHAPTER 1

INCLUDING ISLAM

Although the divide between Islam and Europe will always be deeper than thatbetween the different European peoples, there are two reasons why we simplycannot do without Islam in the construction of European cultural history:namely the unique opportunity to compare its assimilation of the same [antique]heritage, and on account of the abundance of [the two sides'] historicalinteractions.

—C. H. Becker, Islamstudien (1924–32) 1.39 (lecture delivered in 1921)

THE WEST AND THE REST

In this brief programmatic book, I contribute a new angle to the debateabout "the West and the Rest." One party is eager to explain how Europe andeventually North America—the North Atlantic world—left the rest in thedust from about 1500. The other side argues that Asia—China, Japan, andthe Islamic trio of Mughals, Safavids, and Ottomans—remained largely freeof European encroachment until the mid-1700s, but then either collapsedfor internal reasons, or else were gradually undermined by colonial powers'superior technological, economic, and military clout. Europe is relativizedand its supposedly exceptional destiny undermined; but it still wins in theend, along with its North American offshoot.

This is all just the latest phase in other long-standing debates about America'sdestiny and Europe's identity, the latter a focus of particular concernnow given the impetus toward European integration—or disintegration—providedby the economic crisis that broke out in 2007. North Atlantic hegemonyis no longer a given—it is more and more shadowed by two great Asianpowers, China and India. It appears that the dominance of the West is on theway to becoming one more historical period, and that future historians willbe as much concerned to explain its loss as its rise.

If Asian economic competition is one cloud on the North Atlantic world'shorizon, another is Islam—both the religion that goes under that name eventhough it has many branches sometimes bitterly hostile to each other, andthe cultural region created by it, the "Islamic world," which has in mostphases of its history included large non-Muslim populations. Asiatic economiccompetition can be faced with some equanimity or at least resignationby societies that have benefited (as well as suffered) for decades nowfrom a deluge of cheap consumer goods. The Islamic world, by contrast, representsnot an economic challenge but something more insidious, a moraland spiritual competitor offering different norms of conduct and a variantvision of man and God unnervingly close—yet at the same time a challenge,as the Qur'an makes explicit—to the values espoused by "Judeo-Christian"civilization. (The ideal reader will forgive essentializing references to "Judaism,""Christianity," and "Islam" for ease of general exposition, be aware thatall three emerged gradually not ready-made as distinct identities, and takedue account of allusions, especially in my later chapters, to "orthodox" and"heretics," Latin, Greek, Syriac, and Armenian strands in Christianity, andSunnis, Shiites, and different traditions of law in Islam.)

My purpose here is not to join this debate directly, but to overhaul itsfoundations, especially as regards the role of Islam and the Islamic world. Indoing this, I hope to contribute to a sounder and more generous understandingof Islam's historical and intellectual contribution. I do not believe thiscan be attained by compiling a balance sheet of what the North Atlantic andIslamic worlds have achieved, or done to each other, since 1500. The sumtotal of what these civilizations are—and may come to be—cannot begrasped only in terms of the last half millennium. Instead we have to go backto the First Millennium, during which Christianity was born and matured,roughly in the middle of which the Prophet Muhammad received or conceivedthe Qur'an, and by the end of which Islam had matured sufficiently tobe compared with patristic Christianity.

In the first place we need to reformulate the history of the First Millenniumin order to fit Islam into it, for the Arabian doctrine is excluded fromthe conventional narrative by historians eager to draw a direct line from lateAntiquity, through the European Middle Ages, to the Renaissance and Modernity.Next we need to ask this: what was the nature of this new Islamicreligion whose features, however debatably fast or slow to emerge, were quitediscernible by 1000 CE? How did it relate to other contemporary civilizations,and those of Antiquity? Viewed from our present-day vantage point,does it make sense that Islam's "classical" moment is excluded from NorthAtlantic educational curricula, while the European Middle Ages, eventhough less taught than they were a generation or so ago, still constitute theindispensable conceptual and historical link between us and the foundationsof a European culture conceived of as Greek, Roman, Jewish, and Christian—butnothing much to do with Islam? After all, the European Unionnow has a Muslim population that some put at twenty million, around twicethe size of a middling member country such as Portugal or Greece.

As with China and India, an already visible future in which Islam will beincreasingly prominent has to be brought into play if historians are to formulatequestions that elucidate our ongoing quandaries rather than reinforcingEurocentric stereotypes about the past and present. History is engagementwith the past not just as it was then but as it confronts and molds us now.And beyond the historian's contribution to the public debate with its mainlysocial and political parameters, there are intellectual and spiritual benefits tobe had from a contextualized approach to early Islam. It may, for example,uncover fertile dimensions of the tradition forgotten or misapprehendedeven by Muslims themselves, for they too write history selectively. Arabicphilosophy, to take just one example, turns out to have been far from exclusivelyMuslim: there were also Christians and Jews and Mazdeans/Zoroastrianswho philosophized in Arabic. Philosophy both contextualizes and providesfresh approaches to a tradition that, if entered through the austerities ofQur'anic scholarship and theology, may seem alien and impenetrable to thenon-Muslim. Muslims too may benefit from reading their orthodoxiesagainst the grain, which the philosophical tradition tends to encourage. Themore rational and therefore philosophical strains of Muslim theology,"Mu'tazilism" or "Neo-Mu'tazilism," are under attack from fundamentalistsin the contemporary Islamic world, as part of general pressure for social andpolitical purification. But understanding of these controversies is hard toachieve without the historian's perspective and context.

It may be objected that philosophy was and remains a minority pursuit.But more general study of early Islam can improve our appreciation of its interactionwith the imaginative worlds of Biblical and rabbinic Judaism andEastern, especially Syriac, Christianity. Note particularly the Corpus Coranicumproject at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, which aims,by "realigning the Qur'an into Late Antiquity" and tracking Jewish and Christianparallels to the Qur'anic text, to present it as part of the European heritageand illuminate the range of possible relationships between these monotheisticbelief systems, not just then but now too. Through the Qur'anicJesus, for instance, we grow to appreciate the shared prophetic heritage of allthree religions, obscured by Christian insistence on the uniqueness of God'sson. By studying the debates between Muslims and Christians in the AbbasidCaliphate, Christians may be helped to see their teachings in ways that bringout their essential compatibility with Islam's strict monotheism. If one startsfrom what both religions—and Judaism—affirm, namely the unity of God,then what Muslims see as Christianity's two stumbling blocks, namely theTrinity and Incarnation, may be understood as means of communicating thatunity to humans. Although the modern study of comparative religion originatedin Christian European scholars' investigations of Judaism and theGreco-Roman tradition, Islam offers a still better vantage point, as was alreadyapparent in the work of, for example, the Eastern Iranian polymath andhistorian of—among much else—religion, Biruni (d. 1048).

Going back to the First Millennium makes sense, then, in terms of definingand securing the foundations of the contemporary debate with and aboutIslam. Non-Muslim scholarship on Islam has rightly been criticized for obsessionwith origins, and neglect of the living tradition with its distinctive viewof the foundational phase. But it is also true that failure to look behind laterorthodoxies and rigidified dogmatic formulations (especially fundamentalistones, which tend to simplify a diverse, un-self-consciously polyvalent, "ambiguous"tradition in response to criticism contained in universalizing, hegemonialWestern discourse) can suggest Islam is by its very nature inflexibleand closed to the world around it. No student of Islamic origins, at least in themanner of the Corpus Coranicum project, will easily fall into this trap. Norwill any sociologist of religion aware of the fluidity of ordinary Christian andMuslim identities, and the hybridity of both religions outside the compartmentalizedminds of intellectuals. Going back to the First Millennium alsoprovides a logical and helpful frame for studying the last phases of Antiquityin conjunction with the "Byzantine" Greek, Latin, and Arabic civilizations asthey emerged from it. Although the Islamic world plays a prominent role inthe argument of this book, it is by no means my only focus of attention. Islam'scoming served still further to diversify—as well as harmonize—the alreadyexisting pre-Islamic polyphony of Judaism, Christianity, Greek philosophy(to which I attach special importance), Mazdaism, Manicheism, and so on.

Greco-Roman Antiquity, symbolized by the Parthenon and Colosseum,and the Middle Ages and Renaissance—Chartres and Florence—still dominateour view of premodern history. But in recent decades another, morethan merely intermediate or transitional vista has opened up, that of the"long" late Antiquity from 200 to 800 CE, which I here further expand intothe First Millennium from Augustus to Biruni's contemporary and correspondent,Ibn Sina (Avicenna). Our world, even if we define it in the narrowestNorth Atlantic terms, is now and will increasingly be indebted to all thevarious and entangled cultural strands that place the Eurasian First Millenniumat the crossroads of history, and the career of the Prophet Muhammadat the heart of the First Millennium. I propose the First Millennium not asan alternative to the traditional tripartite periodization of history into ancient,medieval, and modern, but as a new focus within the existing framework.If taken seriously, this will have consequences for how we look at thetwo traditional periods it overlaps, namely Antiquity and the Middle Ages (aquestion I address in the closing pages of my last chapter). But the concern ofthe present book is to argue the intrinsic merits of the First Millennium.

EDWARD GIBBON

In writing Before and after Muhammad I have come to a better appreciationof Edward Gibbon. He is renowned for his account of Rome's decline fromher Antonine Golden Age to her sack in 410 by Alaric's Goths, thirty-oneout of seventy-one chapters. Indeed, some whose researches get no furtherthan the title-page believe that The history of the decline and fall of the RomanEmpire concerns only the Roman Mediterranean and excludes both AsiaticChristianity and Islam. Gibbon's undeniable conviction that the Europeancivilization of his day was the pinnacle of human achievement makes him aclear-cut Eurocentrist too. yet reading the whole work, one sees him settingan agenda that today seems more valid than ever. Gibbon was obliged to retainthe attention of a classically educated audience, while conveying his ownresponse (evolving as he wrote) to the story of an already more than millennialRome renewed on the Bosphorus, and compelled to face victorious Arabarmies in the seventh century and the encroachments of the Turks from theeleventh. Present-day historians, at least in Europe and North America, haveto deal with a comparable tension between a public informed only about thehistory of the North Atlantic world, and their own appreciation of the consequencesglobalization must have for the formulation of meaningful historicalquestions.

An exit from both dead ends—fixation with Rome Old and New, Latinand Greek, or with the North Atlantic world—is offered by the study ofIslamic history. To justify neglecting Rome on the Tiber for alien, GreekRome on the Bosphorus, Gibbon argued in chapter 48 (1788) that "the fateof the Byzantine monarchy is passively connected with the most splendid andimportant revolutions which have changed the state of the world." By this hemeant especially the rise of Islam and the empires of the Arabs and then theTurks—of whom he observed that "like Romulus, the founder of that martialpeople was suckled by a she-wolf." Gibbon reassured his readers that,while "the excursive line may embrace the wilds of Arabia and Tartary," still"the circle [of the Decline and fall] will be ultimately reduced to the decreasinglimit of the Roman monarchy." Hence, the great work's coda offers aprospect of the ruins of Old Rome at the dawn of the Renaissance, and it caneven be argued that Rome's "firm edifice" has been present throughout theexcursus, an "absent centre" implicitly contrasted to "the transient dynastiesof Asia." Nevertheless, the space and extended narrative Gibbon devotes tothe Islamic world, in a book whose declared subject is Rome and Europe, canonly impress. This was a historian who could praise, repeatedly, the rationalityof the Muslim Prophet and his Qur'an, and devote long chapters to theArab, Turkish, and Mongol Empires, on his way to Mehmed II's capture ofConstantinople, which offered the formal excuse for these accounts.

After the last volume was published in 1788, Gibbon went back to thefirst page of volume 1, where he had defined his purpose as "to deduce themost important circumstances of its [Rome's] decline and fall; a revolutionwhich will ever be remembered, and is still felt by the nations of the earth."He took out his pen and, in the margin of his copy, rephrased his objective as"to prosecute the decline and fall of the Empire of Rome: of whose language,Religion and laws the impression will be long preserved in our own, and theneighbouring countries of Europe." And having in this way shifted his emphasisaway from "wars, and the administration of public affairs, ... the principalsubjects of history," toward the durability of culture, and from thewhole world to Europe alone as the field of Rome's influence, he added an"NB" to himself: "Have Asia and Africa, from Japan to Morocco, any feelingor memory of the Roman Empire?" Without underestimating the extent towhich Decline and fall already enlarges European into Eurasian history, oneappreciates that in this note Gibbon is moving on, not denying Rome butcertainly relativizing it.

Succumbing to that perspective would have made a quite different book;but even reading the account Gibbon did give us, of the inexorable rise andtitanic conquests of the Arabs, Turks, and Mongols, one is struck by what aPandora's box his attempt to explain the East Roman Emperor Heraclius'sdefeats in the 630s turned out to be. Still more remarkable is the realizationthat in writing it, Gibbon was harking very far back indeed, to his "blind andboyish taste for the pursuit of exotic history" in such as Simon Ockley andthe Universal history (1736–68), among whose contributors was George Salethe translator of the Qur'an—Gibbon held both these early English Orientalistsin lasting esteem. In the decades during which The history of the declineand fall of the Roman Empire gestated, both Arabic and Persian studieswere expanding in several parts of Europe; but then as now the dominanthistorical narrative ran from Rome, through medieval Christendom and especiallythe relations of Papacy and empire, to the reemergence of civil societyand the modern European system of nation-states variously enlightened.Gibbon was leading his public into ill-charted territory, and for reasons thathe does not fully explain or perhaps even understand. European economic,political, and military encroachment on Asia was entering its crucial phase,though, as Gibbon wrote. He knew the broader issues through both his readingsand his grandfather's disastrous involvement in the 1720 South SeaBubble. Arguably, the implication of his book was that these vast new horizons,especially the Islamic empires of the Mughals, Safavids, and Ottomans,could be reframed as a part, however excursively, of Europe's foundationalRoman history. But did he actually intend this, or his readers grasp it? Gibbonand Islam remains a blind spot in scholarship.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691158533
• ISBN 13: 9780691158532
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 248