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The Late Antique World of Early Islam

Author: Robert G. Hoyland

Publisher:

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9783959941280

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

The Late Antique World of Early Islam

Author: Robert G. Hoyland

Publisher: Darwin Books

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780878502103

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

Late Antiquity on the Eve of Islam

Author: Averil Cameron

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-05-15

Total Pages: 556

ISBN-13: 1351923145

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

Violence and Belief in Late Antiquity

Author: Thomas Sizgorich

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2012-03-19

Total Pages: 407

ISBN-13: 0812207440

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In Violence and Belief in Late Antiquity, Thomas Sizgorich seeks to understand why and how violent expressions of religious devotion became central to the self-understandings of both Christian and Muslim communities between the fourth and ninth centuries. Sizgorich argues that the cultivation of violent martyrdom as a path to holiness was in no way particular to Islam; rather, it emerged from a matrix put into place by the Christians of late antiquity. Paying close attention to the role of memory and narrative in the formation of individual and communal selves, Sizgorich identifies a common pool of late ancient narrative forms upon which both Christian and Muslim communities drew. In the process of recollecting the past, Sizgorich explains, Christian and Muslim communities alike elaborated iterations of Christianity or Islam that demanded of each believer a willingness to endure or inflict violence on God's behalf and thereby created militant local pieties that claimed to represent the one "real" Christianity or the only "pure" form of Islam. These militant communities used a shared system of signs, symbols, and stories, stories in which the faithful manifested their purity in conflict with the imperial powers of the world.

In God's Path

Author: Robert G. Hoyland

Publisher: Ancient Warfare and Civilizati

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0199916365

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In just over a hundred years--from the death of Muhammad in 632 to the beginning of the Abbasid Caliphate in 750--the followers of the Prophet swept across the whole of the Middle East, North Africa, and Spain. Their armies threatened states as far afield as the Franks in Western Europe and the Tang Empire in China. The conquered territory was larger than the Roman Empire at its greatest expansion, and it was claimed for the Arabs in roughly half the time. How this collection of Arabian tribes was able to engulf so many empires, states, and armies in such a short period of time is a question that has perplexed historians for centuries. Most recent popular accounts have been based almost solely on the early Muslim sources, which were composed centuries later for the purpose of demonstrating that God had chosen the Arabs as his vehicle for spreading Islam throughout the world. In this ground-breaking new history, distinguished Middle East expert Robert G. Hoyland assimilates not only the rich biographical and geographical information of the early Muslim sources but also the many non-Arabic sources, contemporaneous or near-contemporaneous with the conquests. The story of the conquests traditionally begins with the revelation of Islam to Muhammad. In God's Path, however, begins with a broad picture of the Late Antique world prior to the Prophet's arrival, a world dominated by the two superpowers of Byzantium and Sasanian Persia, "the two eyes of the world." In between these empires, in western (Saudi) Arabia, emerged a distinct Arab identity, which helped weld its members into a formidable fighting force. The Arabs are the principal actors in this drama yet, as Hoyland shows, the peoples along the edges of Byzantium and Persia--the Khazars, Bulgars, Avars, and Turks--also played important roles in the remaking of the old world order. The new faith propagated by Muhammad and his successors made it possible for many of the conquered peoples to join the Arabs in creating the first Islamic Empire. Well-paced and accessible, In God's Path presents a pioneering new narrative of one the great transformational periods in all of history.

The Emergence of Islam in Late Antiquity

Author: Aziz Al-Azmeh

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2014-03-06

Total Pages: 672

ISBN-13: 110772936X

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

The Apocalypse of Empire

Author: Stephen J. Shoemaker

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2018-11-02

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0812250400

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In The Apocalypse of Empire, Stephen J. Shoemaker argues that earliest Islam was a movement driven by urgent eschatological belief that focused on the conquest, or liberation, of the biblical Holy Land and situates this belief within a broader cultural environment of apocalyptic anticipation. Shoemaker looks to the Qur'an's fervent representation of the imminent end of the world and the importance Muhammad and his earliest followers placed on imperial expansion. Offering important contemporary context for the imperial eschatology that seems to have fueled the rise of Islam, he surveys the political eschatologies of early Byzantine Christianity, Judaism, and Sasanian Zoroastrianism at the advent of Islam and argues that they often relate imperial ambition to beliefs about the end of the world. Moreover, he contends, formative Islam's embrace of this broader religious trend of Mediterranean late antiquity provides invaluable evidence for understanding the beginnings of the religion at a time when sources are generally scarce and often highly problematic. Scholarship on apocalyptic literature in early Judaism and Christianity frequently maintains that the genre is decidedly anti-imperial in its very nature. While it may be that early Jewish apocalyptic literature frequently displays this tendency, Shoemaker demonstrates that this quality is not characteristic of apocalypticism at all times and in all places. In the late antique Mediterranean as in the European Middle Ages, apocalypticism was regularly associated with ideas of imperial expansion and triumph, which expected the culmination of history to arrive through the universal dominion of a divinely chosen world empire. This imperial apocalypticism not only affords an invaluable backdrop for understanding the rise of Islam but also reveals an important transition within the history of Western doctrine during late antiquity.

Late Antique Responses to the Arab Conquests

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-12-13

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 9004500642

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

Damascus after the Muslim Conquest

Author: Nancy Khalek

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2011-09-09

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 0199876193

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Before it fell to Muslim armies in AD 635-6 Damascus had a long and prestigious history as a center of Christianity. How did this city, which became the capitol of the Islamic Empire and its people, negotiate the transition from a late antique or early Byzantine world to an Islamic culture? In Damascus after the Muslim Conquest, Nancy Khalek demonstrates that the changes that took place in Syria during this formative period of Islamic life were not simply a matter of the replacement of one civilization by another as a result of military conquest, but rather of shifting relationships and practices in a multifaceted social and cultural setting. Even as late antique forms of religion and culture persisted, the formation of Islamic identity was affected by the people who constructed, lived in, and narrated the history of their city. Khalek draws on the evidence of architecture and the testimony of pilgrims, biographers, geographers, and historians to shed light on this process of identity formation. Offering a fresh approach to the early Islamic period, she moves the study of Islamic origins beyond a focus on issues of authenticity and textual criticism, and initiates an interdisciplinary discourse on narrative, storytelling, and the interpretations of material culture.

The Qur'an and Late Antiquity

Author: Angelika Neuwirth

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-02-19

Total Pages: 848

ISBN-13: 0199928967

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In this book, Angelika Neuwirth provides a new approach to understanding the founding text of Islam. Typical exegesis of the Qur'an treats the text teleologically, as a fait accompli finished text, or as a replica or summary of the Bible in Arabic. Instead Neuwirth approaches the Qur'an as the product of a specific community in the Late Antique Arabian peninsula, one which was exposed to the wider worlds of the Byzantine and Sasanian empires, and to the rich intellectual traditions of rabbinic Judaism, early Christianity, and Gnosticism. A central goal of the book is to eliminate the notion of the Qur'an as being a-historical. She argues that it is, in fact, highly aware of its place in late antiquity and is capable of yielding valuable historical information. By emphasizing the liturgical function of the Qur'an, Neuwirth allows readers to see the text as an evolving oral tradition within the community before it became collected and codified as a book. This analysis sheds much needed light on the development of the Qur'an's historical, theological, and political outlook. The book's final chapters analyze the relationship of the Qur'an to the Bible, to Arabic poetic traditions, and, more generally, to late antique culture and rhetorical forms. By providing a new introduction to the Qur'an, one that uniquely challenges current ideas about its emergence and development, The Qur'an and Late Antiquity bridges the gap between Eastern and Western approaches to this sacred text.